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P;
Copyright, 1876.
by james russell lowell.
twentieth edition.
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TO
R. W. EMERSOK.
A love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened,
though priceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one
capable of inspiring them. Yet I cannot deny myself the pleas-
ure of so far intruding on your reserve as at least to make public
acknowledgment of the debt I can never repay.
CO:^TENTS.
Page
Dante 1
Spenser 125
Wordsworth . . . , . . . .201
Milton 252
Keats 303
DANTE.
Ox the banks of a little river so shrunken by the
suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a tra-
dition, but swollen by the autumnal rains with an
Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge
shudders under the impatient heap of waters behind it,
stands a city which, in its period of bloom not so large
as Boston, may well rank next to Athens in the history
which teaches come I uom s' eterna.
Originally only a convenient spot in the valley where
the fairs of the neighboring Etruscan city of Fiesole
were held, it gradually grew from a huddle of booths to
a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its ancestral
neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters,
the science, and the commerce f of modern Europe.
* Tlie Shadow of Dante, being an Essay towards studying Himself,
his World, and his Pilgrimage. By Maria Francesca Rossetti.
" Se Dio te lasci, letter prender frutto
Di tua lezione."
Boston : Roberts Brothers. 1872. 8vo. pp. 296.
t The Florentines should seem to have invented or re-invented
banks, book-keeping by double-entrj', and bills of exchange. The
last, by endowing Value with the gift of fern-seed and enabling it
to walk invisible, turned the flank of the baronial tariff-system and
made the roads safe for the great liberalizer Commerce. This made
Money omnipresent, and prepared the way for its present onmipo-
tence. Fortunately it cannot usurp the third attribute of Deity, —
omniscience. But whatever the consequences, this Florentine inven-
1 A
2 DANTE.
For her Cimabue wrought, who infused Byzantine for-
malism with a suggestion of nature and feeling ; for her
the Pisaui, who divined at least, if they could not con-
jure with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculp-
ture ; for her the marvellous boy Ghiberti proved that
unity of composition and grace of figure and drapery
were never beyond the reach of genius ; * for her Bru-
nelleschi curved the dome which Michel Angelo hung in
air on St. Peter's ; for her Giotto reared the bell-tower
graceful as an Horatian ode in marble ; and the great tri-
umvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and culture called
her mother. There is no modern city about which
cluster so many elevating associations, none in which
the past is so contemporary with us in unchanged build-
ings and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante
is still shown ; children still receive baptism at the font
{il mio hel San Giovanni) where he was christened before
the acorn dropped that was to grow into a keel for Co-
lumbus ; and an inscribed stone marks the spot where
he used to sit and watch the slow blocks swing vip to
complete the master-thought of Arnolfo. In the con-
vent of St. Mark hard by lived and labored Beato An-
gelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo,
who taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls
Savonarola went forth to his triumphs, short-lived al-
most as the crackle of his martyrdom. The plain little
chamber of Michel Angelo seems still to expect his
return ; his last sketches lie upon the table, his staff
tion was at first nothing but admirable, securing to brain its legiti-
mate influence over brawn. The latter has begun its revolt, but
vvliether it will succeed better in its attempt to restore mediaeval
methods than the barons in maintaining tliem remains to be seen.
* Ghilterti's designs have been criticised by a too systematic sesthet-
icism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and painting. But is
not the rilievo precisely the bridge by which the one art passes over
into the territory of the other ?
DANTE. 3
leans in the comer, and his slippers wait before the
empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills, just with-
out the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs
that Milton climbed to visit Galileo. To an American
there is something supremely impressive in this cumu-
lative influence of the past full of inspiration and re-
buke, something saddening in this repeated proof that
moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments
and not ruins behind it. Time, who with us obliterates
the labor and often the names of yesterday, seems here
to have spared almost the prints of the care piante that
shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor.
Around the courtyard of the great Museum of Flor-
ence stand statues of her illustrious dead, her poets,
painters, sculptors, architects, inventors, and statesmen ;
and as the traveller feels the ennobling lift of such
society, and reads the names or recognizes the features
familiar to him as his own threshold, he is startled to
find Fame as commonplace here as Notoriety every-
where else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the
privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men
her sons, whose claim to pre-eminence the whole world
would concede. Among them is one figure before which
every scholar, every man who has been touched by the
tragedy of life, lingers with reverential pity. The hag-
gard cheeks, the lips clamped together in unfaltering
resolve, the scars of lifelong battle, and the brow whose
sharp outline seems the monument of final victory, — •
this, at least, is a face that needs no name beneath it.
This is he who among literary fames finds only two
that for growth and immutability can parallel his own.
The suffrages of highest authority would now place him
second in that company where he with proud humility
took the sixth place.*
• Infemo, IV. 102.
4 DANTE.
Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli Ali-
ghieri was born at Florence in 1265, probably during
the month of May.* This is the date given by Boc-
caccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a
blunder in saying, sedendo Urhano quaHo nella cattedra
di San Pietro, for Urban died in October, 1264. Some,
misled by an error in a few of the early manuscript
copies of the Divina Conimedia, would have him born
five years earlier, in 1260, According to Arrivabene,t
Sansovino was the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement
by the authority of the poet himself, basing his argu-
ment on the first verse of the Inferno, —
" Nel mezzo del ^amr^in di nostra vita" ;
the average age of man having been declared by the
Psalmist to be seventy years, and the period of the poet's
supposed vision being uneqinvocally fixed at 1-300. %
Leonardo Aretino and Manett" add their testimony to
that of Boccaccio, and 1265 is now universally assumed
as the true date. Voltaire, § nevertheless, places the
poet's birth in 1260, and jauntily forgives Bayle (who,
he says, ecrivait d, Rotterdam currente calamo pour son
lihraire) for having been right, declaring that he esteems
him neither more nor less for having reade a mistake of
five years. Oddly enough, Voltaire adopts this alleged
blunder of five years on the next pagS; in saying that
Dante died at the age of 56, though he still more oddly
* The Nouvelle Biograpliie Generale gives May 8 rs his birthday.
Tliis is a mere assumption, for Boccaccio only sayc i^onerally May.
The indication which Dante himself gives that he was bo"n when the
sun was in Gemini would give a range from about the mia He of May
to about the middle of June, so that the 8th is certainly too early.
t Secolo di Dante, Udine edition of 1828, Vol. III. Part I. p. 578.
{ Arrivabene, however, is wrong. Boccaccio makes precisely the
same reckoning in the first note of his Commentary (Bocc. Comeuto,
etc., Firenze, 1844, Vol. I. pp. 32, 33).
§ Diet. Phil., art. Dante.
DANTE. 5
omits the undisputed date of his death (1321), which
would have shown Bayle to be right. The poet's de-
scent is said to have been derived from a younger son
of the great Roman family of the Frangipani, classed
by the popular rhyme with the Orsini and Colonna : —
*' Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani,
Prendono oggi e pagano clonianL"
That his ancestors had been long established in Florence
is an inference from some expressions of the poet, and
from their dwelling having been situated in the more
ancient part of the city. The most important fact of
the poet's genealogy is, that he was of mixed race, the
Aligiiieri being of Teutonic origin. Dante was born,
as he himself tells us,* when the sun was in the constel-
lation Gemini, and it has been absurdly inferred, from
a passage in the Inferno,\ that his lioroscope was drawn
and a great destiny predicted for him by his teacher,
Brunetto Latini. The Ottimo Comento tells lis that the
Twins are the house of Mercury, who induces in men
the faculty of writing, science, and of acquiring knowl-
edge. This is worth mentioning as characteristic of
the age and of Dante himself, with whom the influence
of the stars took the place of the old notion of destiny. %
It is supposed, from a passage in Boccaccio's life of
Dante, that Alighiero the father was still living when
the poet was nine years old. If so, he must have died
soon after, for Leonardo Aretino, who wrote with origi-
nal documents before him, tells us that Dante lost his
father while yet a child. This circumstance may have
been not without influence in muscularizing his nature
to that character of self-reliance which shows itself so
constantly and sharply during his after-life. His tutor
was Brunetto Latini, a very superior man (for that age),
says Aretino parenthetically. Like Alexander Gill, he
* Paradiso, XXIL f Canto XV. X Purgatorio, XVL
6 DANTE.
is now remembered only as the schoolmaster of a great
poet, and that he did his duty well may be inferred
from Dante's speaking of him gratefully as one who by
times "taught him how man eternizes himself" This,
and what Villani says of his refining the Tuscan idiom
(for so we understand his far It scorti in bene parlare*),
are to be noted as of probable influence on the career
of his pupil. Of the order of Dante's studies nothing
can be certainly affirmed. His biographers send him to
Bologna, Padua, Paris, Naples, and even Oxford. All
are doubtful, Paris and Oxford most of all, and the
dates utterly undeterminable. Yet all are possible,
nay, perhaps probable. Bologna and Padua we should
be inclined to place before his exile ; Paris and Oxford,
if at all, after it. If no argument in favor of Paris is
to be drawn from his Fape Satanf and the correspond-
ing paix, paix, Sathan, in the autobiography of Cellini,
nor from the very definite allusion to Doctor Siger,;};
we may yet infer from some passages in the Coinmedia
that his wanderings had extended even farther ;§ for
it would not be hard to show that his comparisons and
illustrations from outward things are almost invariably
drawn from actual eyesight. As to the nature of his
studies, there can be no doubt that he went through
the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the qua-
drivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of
the then ordinary university course. To these he after-
ward added painting (or at least drawing, — designavo
un angelo sopra certe tavoletteH), theology, and medicine.
* Thongh he himself preferred French, and wrote his Tresor in that
language for two reasons, " T una perche noi siamo in Franeia, «
V altra perche la parlatura francesca e jjiu dilettevolee piit eomuns eke
tutti li altri linguaggi.'''' {Proemio, sul Jine.)
t Inferno, Canto VII. | Paradiso, Canto X.
§ See especially Inferno, IX. 112 et seq.; XII. 120 ; XV. 4 et seq.;
XXXII. 25-30.
II Vit. Nuov. p. 61, ed. Pesaro, 182&.
DANTE. 7
He is said to have been the pupil of Cimabue, and was
certainly the friend of Giotto, the designs for some of
■whose frescos at Assisi and elsewhere have been wrongly
attributed to him, though we may safely believe in his
helpful comment and suggestion. To prove his love of
music, the episode of Casella were enough, even without
Boccaccio's testimony. The range of Dante's study and
acquirement would be encyclopedic in any age, but at
that time it was literally possible to master the omne
scibile, and he seems to have accomplished it. How lofty
his theory of science was, is plain from this passage in
the Convito : " He is not to be called a true lover of
wisdom (jilosofo) who loves it for the sake of gain, as do
lawyers, physicians, and almost all churchmen (li reli-
ffiosi), who study, not in order to know, but to acquire
riches or advancement, and who would not persevere in
study should you give them what they desire to gain by
it And it may be said that (as true friendship
between men consists in each wholly loving the other)
the true philosopher loves ever}^ part of wisdom, and
wisdom every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she
draws all to herself, and allows no one of his thoughts
to wander to other things."* The Contdto gives us a
glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle (whom
he calls the philosopher, the master) cited seventy-
six times ; Cicero, eighteen ; Albertus Magnus, seven ;
Boethius, six ; Plato (at second-hand), four ; Aquinas,
Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, Lucan, and Ovid, three
each ; Virgil, Juvenal, Statins, Seneca, and Horace,
twice each ; and Algazzali, Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy,
Orosius, and Homer (at second-hand), once. Of Greelc
he seems to have understood little ; of Hebrew and
Arabic, a few words. But it was not only in the closet
and from books that Dante received his education. He
• Tratt. III. Cap. XI.
8 DANTE.
acquired, perhaps, the better part of it in the streets
of Florence, and later, in those homeless wanderings
which led him (as he says) wherever the Italian
tongue was spoken. His were the only open eyes of
that century, and, as nothing escaped them, so there
is nothing that was not photographed upon his sen- !
sitive brain, to be afterward fixed forever in the Corn-
media. What Florence was during his youth and man- |
hood, with its Guelphs and Ghibellines, its nobles and \
trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its kaleidoscopic revolu- :
tions, " all parties loving liberty and doing their best to I
destroy her," as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our I
province to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as
events are when we look back on them across so many
ages, only the upheavals of party conflict catching the
eye, while the spaces of peace between sink out of the
view of history, a whole century seems like a mere wild
chaos. Yet during a couple of such centuries the ca-
thedrals of Florence, Pisa, and Siena got built ; Cimabue,
Giotto, Arnolfo, the Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti
gave the impulse to modern art, or brought it in some
of its branches to its culminating point ; modern litera-
ture took its rise ; commerce became a science, and the
middle class came into being. It was a time of fierce
passions and sudden tragedies, of picturesque transitions
and contrasts. It found Dante, shaped him by every
experience that life is capable of, — rank, ease, love, study,
affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger, dependence, de-
spair,— until he became endowed with a sense of the
nothingness of this world's goods possible only to the
rich, and a knowledge of man possible only to the poor.
The few well-ascertained facts of Dante's life may be
briefly stated. In 1274 occurred what we may call his
spiritual birth, the awakening in him of the imaginative
faculty, and of that profounder and more intense con-
DANTE.
sciousness which springs from the recognition of beauty
through the antithesis of sex. It was in that year that
he first saw Beatrice Portinari. In 1289 he was present
at the battle of Campaldino, fighting on the side of the
Guelphs, who there utterly routed the Ghibellines, and
where, he says characteristically enough, " I was present,
not a boy in arms, and where I felt much fear, but in
the end the greatest pleasure, from the various changes
of the fight." * In the same year he assisted at the
siege and capture of Caprona.t In 1290 died Beatrice,
married to Simone dei Bardi, precissly when is uncer-
tain, but before 1287, as appears by a mention of her in
her father's will, bearing date January 15 of that year.
Dante's own marriage is assigned to various years,
ranging from 1291 to 129-1; but the earlier date seems
the more probable, as he was the father of seven children
(the youngest, a daughter, named Beatrice) in 1301.
His wife was Gemma dei Donati, and through her Dante,
whose family, though noble, was of the lesser nobility,
became nearly connected with Corso Donati, the head of
a powerful clan of the grandi, or greater nobles. In
1293 occurred what is called the revolution of Gian
Delia Bella, in which the priors of the trades took the
power into their own hands, and made nobiUty a dis-
qualification for office. A noble was defined to ba any
one who counted a knight among his ancestors, and thus
the descendant of Cacciaguida was excluded.
Delia Bella was exiled in 1295, but the nobles did
not regain their power. On the contrary, the citizens,
having all their own way, proceeded to quarrel among
themselves, and subdivided into the popolani grossi and
'popolani minuti, or gi'eater and lesser trades, — a dis-
tinction of gentility somewhat like that between whole-
* Letter of Dante, now lost, cited by Aretino.
t Inferno, XXI. 94.
I*
10 DANTE.
sale and retail tradesmen. The grandi continuing tur-
bulent, many of the lesser nobility, among them Dante,
drew over to the side of the citizens, and between 1297
and 1300 there is found inscribed in the book of the
physicians and apothecaries, Dante d' Aldighiero, degli
Aldiglderi, poeta Fiorentino* Professor de Vericourf
thinks it necessary to apologize for this lapse on the
part of the poet, and gravely bids us take courage, nor
think that Dante was ever an apothecary. In 1300 M'e
find him elected one of the priors of the city. In order
to a perfect misunderstanding of everything connected
with the Florentine politics of this period, one has only
to study the various histories. The result is a spectrum
on the mind's eye, which looks definite and brilliant,
but really hinders all accurate vision, as if from too
steady inspection of a Catharine-wheel in full whirl. A
few words, however, are necessary, if only to make the
confusion palpable. The rival German families of Welfs
and Weiblingens had given their names, softened into
Guelfi and Ghibellini, — from which Gabriel Harvey J
ingeniously, but mistakenly, derives elves and goblins, —
to two parties in Northern Italy, representing respec-
tively the adherents of the pope and of the emperor,
but serving very well as rallying-points in all manner of
intercalary and subsidiary quarrels. The nobles, espe-
cially the greater ones, — perhaps from instinct, per-
haps in part from hereditary tradition, as being more or
less Teutonic by descent, — were commonly Ghibellines,
or Imperialists ; the bourgeoisie were very commonly
Guelphs, or supporters of the pope, partly from natui'al
antipathy to the nobles, and partly, perhaps, because they
believed themselves to be espousing the more purely
* Balbo, Vita di Dante, Firenze, 1853, p. 117.
t Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 80.
X Notes to Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar."
DANTE. 11
Italian side. Sometimes, however, the pai'ty relation of
nobles and burghers to each other was reversed, but the
names of Guelphand Ghibelline always substantially rep-
resented the same things. The family of Dante had been
Guelphic, and we have seen him already as a young
man serving two campaigns against the other party.
But no immediate question as between pope and em-
peror seems then to have been pending ; and while there
is no evidence that he was ever a mere partisan, the
reverse would be the inference from his habits and char-
acter. Just before his assumption of the priorate, how-
ever, a new complication had arisen. A family feud,
beginning at the neighboring city of Pistoja, between
the Cancellieri Neri and Cancellieri Bianchi,* had ex-
tended to Florence, where the Guelphs took the part
of the Neri and the Ghibellines of the Bianchi.f The
city was instantly in a ferment of street brawls, as act-
ors in one of which some of the Medici are incidentally
named, — the first appearance of that family in history.
Both parties appealed at different times to the pope,
who sent two ambassadors, first a bishop and then a
cardinal. Both pacificators soon flung out again in a
rage, after adding the new element of excommunication
to the causes of confusion. It was in the midst of these
things that Dante became -one of the six priors (June,
1300), — an office which the Florentines had made bimes-
trial in its tenure, in order apparently to secure at least
six constitutional chances of revolution in the year. He
advised that the leaders of both parties should be ban-
ished to the frontiers, which was forthwith done ; the
ostracism including his relative Corso Donati among
* See the story at length in Balbo, Vita di Dante, Cap. X.
t Tims Foscolo. Perhaps it would be move accurate to say that at
first the blacks were the extreme Guelphs, and the whites those mod-
erate Guelphs inclined to make tenns with the Ghibellines. The mat-
ter is obsciire, and Balbo contradicts himself about it.
12 DANTE.
the Neri, and his most intimate friend the poet Guido
Cavalcanti among the Bianchi. They were all permitted
to return before long (but after Dante's term of office
was over), and came accordingly, bringing at least the
Scriptural allowance of " seven other " motives of mis-
chief with them. Affairs getting worse (1301), the
Neri, with the connivance of the pope (Bonifixce VIII.),
entered into an arrangement with Charles of Valois, who
was preparing an expedition to Italy. Dante was mean-
while sent on an embassy to Rome (September, 1301,
according to Arrivabene,* but probably earlier) by the
Bianchi, who still retained all the offices at Florence. It
is the tradition that he said in setting forth : " If I go,
who remains 1 and if I stay, who goes 1 " Whether true
or not, the story implies what was certainly true, that
the council and influence of Dante were of great weight
with the more moderate of both parties. On October
31, 1301, Charles took possession of Florence in the
interest of the Neri. Dante being still at Rome (Janu-
ary 27, 1302), sentence of ejfile was pronounced against
him and others, with a heavy fine to be paid within two
months ; if not paid, the entire confiscation of goods,
and, whether paid or no, exile ; the charge against him
being pecuniary malversation in office. The fine not
paid (as it could not be without admitting the justice
of the charges, which Dante scorned even to deny), in
less than two months (March 10, 1302) a second sen-
tence was registered, by which he with others was con-
demned to be burned alive if taken within the boun-
daries of the republic.t From this time the life of
* Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He would seem to have been in Rome
during the Jubilee of 1300. See Infemo, XVIII. 28 - 33.
t That Dante was not of the grandi, or great nobles (what we call
grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, is plain
from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list and with
no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen domini. Bayle, however, is
equally wrong in supposing his family to have been obscure.
DANTE. 13
Dante becomes semi-mythical, and for nearly every date
yve are reduced to the " as they say " of Herodotus. He
became now necessarily identified with his fellow-exiles
(fragments of all parties united by common wrongs in a
practical, if not theoretic, Ghibellinism), and shared in
their attempts to reinstate themselves by force of arras.
He was one of their council of twelve, but Avithdi-ew
from it on account of the unwisdom of their measures.
Whether he was present at their futile assault on Flor-
ence (July 22, 1304) is doubtful, but probably he was
not. From the Ottimo Coviento, written at least in
j^art* by a contemporary as early as 1333, we learn that
Dante soon separated himself from his companions in
misfortune with mutual discontents and recriminations.f
During the nineteen years of Dante's exile, it would be
hard to say where he was not. In certain districts of
Northern Italy there is scarce a village that has not its
tradition of him, its sedla, r-occa, spalonca, or to7're di
Dante ; and what between the patriotic complaisance of
some biographers overwilling to gratify as many provin-
cial vanities as possible, and the pettishness of others
anxious only to snub them, the confusiou becomes hope-
less.:|: After his banishment we find some definite trace
of him first at Arezzo with Uguccione della Faggiuola ;
then at Siena ; then at Verona with the Scaligeri. He
* See Witte, " Quaudo e da clii sia comj^osto 1' Ottimo Couieuto,"
etc (Lcipsic, 1847).
t O'-t. Com. Parad. XVII.
X The loos3 way in wliicli many Italian scholars write history is as
amazing as it is perplexing. For example. : Comit Balbo's " Lite of
Dante " was published originally at Turin, in 1339. In a note (Lib. I.
Cap. X.)he expresses a doubt whether the date of Dante's banishnient
should not be 1303, and inclines to think it should be. Meanwhile,
it saenjs never to have occurred to him to employ some one to look
at the oiiginal decree, still exi.SLing in the archives. Stranger still,
Le JMonnier, reprinting the work at Florence in 1853, within a stone's-
throw of the document itself, and with full permission from Balbo to
make corrections, leaves the mattej just where it was.
14 DANTE.
himself says : " Throxigh almost all parts where this
language [Italian] is spoken, a wanderer, wellnigh a
beggar, I have gone, showing against my will the wound
of fortune. Truly I have been a vessel without sail
or rudder, driven to diverse ports, estuaries, and shores
by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty ; and
I have shown myself to the eyes of many who perhaps,
through some fame of me, had imagined me in quite
other guise, in whose view not only was my person
debased, but every woi"k of mine, whether done or yet
to do, became of less account." * By the election of
the emperor Henry VII. (of Luxemburg, November,
1308), and the news of his proposed expedition into
Italy, the hopes of Dante were raised to the highest
pitch. Henry entered Italy, October, 1310, and received
the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan, on the day of
Epiphany, 1311. His movements being slow, and his
policy undecided, Dante addressed him that fomous let-
ter, urging him to crush first the "Hydra and ]Myrrha"
Florence, as the root of all the evils of Italy (April
16, 1311). To this year we must probably assign the
new decree by which the seignior}' of Florence recalled a
portion of the exiles, excepting Dante, however, among
others, by name.f The undertaking of Henry, after an
ill-dii'ected dawdling of two years, at last ended in his
death at Buonconvento (August 24, 1313; Carlyle says
wrongly September) ; poisoned, it was said, in the sacra-
mental bread, l)y a Dominican friar, bribed thereto by
Florence.:}: The story is doubtful, the more as Dante
* Convito, Tratt. I. Cap. III.
t Macchiavelli is tlie authority for this, and is carelessly cited in
the preface to the Udiue edition of tlie "Codex Bartoliuianus " as
placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such thing, but expressly im-
plies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch, Op. ed. Baretti,
London, 1772, Vol. I. p. 60.)
I See Carlyle's " Frederic," Vol. I. p. 147.
DANTE. 15
nowhere alludes to it, as he certainly would have done
had he heard of it. According to Balbo, Dante spent
the time from August, 1313, to November, 1314, in Pisa
and Lucca, and then took refuge at Verona, with Can
Grande dell a Scala (whom Voltaire calls, drolly enough,
le grand-can de Verone, as if he had been a Tartar),
whei'e he remained till 1318. Foscolo with equal posi-
tiveness sends him, immediately after the death of
Henry, to Guido da Polenta * at Ravenna, and makes
him join Can Grande only after the latter became cap-
tain of the Ghibelline league in December, 1318. In
1316 the government of Florence set forth a new decree
allowing the exiles to return on conditions of fine and
penance. Dante rejected the offer (by accepting which
his guilt would have been admitted), in a letter still
hot, after these five centuries, with indignant scorn.
" Is this then the glorious return of Dante Alighieri to
his country after nearly three lustres of suffering and
exile ? Did an innocence, patent to all, merit this 1 —
this, the perpetual sweat and toil of study ? Far from
a man, the housemate of philosophy, be so rash and
earthen-hearted a humility as to allow himself to be
offered up bound like a school-boy or a criminal ! Far
from a man, the preacher of justice, to pay those who
have done him wrong as for a favor ! This is not the
way of returning to my country ; but if another can be
found that shall not derogate from the fame and honor
of Dante, that 1 will enter on with no lagging steps.
For if by none such Florence may be entered, by me
then never ! Can I not everywhere behold the mirrors
of the sun and stars 1 speculate on sweetest truths
* A mistake, for Guiilo did not become lord of Ravenna till several
years later. But Boccaccio also assigns 1313 as the date of Dante's
withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may have been one of
the other Polentani to whom GuiJo (surnamed Novello, or the Younger ;
his grandfather having borne the same narne) succeeded,
16 DANTE.
under any sky without first giving myself up inglorious,
nay, ignominious, to the populace and city of Florence 1
Nor shall I want for bread." Dionisi puts the date of
this letter in 1315.* He is certainly wrong, for the de-
cree is dated December 11, 1316. Foscolo places it in
1316, Troya early in 1317, and both may be right, as
the year began March 25. Whatever the date of Dante's
visit to Voltaire's great Khan t of Verona, or the length
of his stay with him, may have been, it is certain that
he was in Ravenna in 1320, and that, on his return
thither from an embassy to Venice (concerning which a
curious letter, forged probably by Doni, is extant), he
died on September 14, 1321 (13th, according to others).
He was buried at Ravenna under a monument built b}"-
his friend, Gv;ido Novello.;}: Dante is said to have dic-
* Under tliis date (1315) a 4th condemnatio against Dante is men-
tioned facta in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Riinerivm, D.
Zackario de Urbereteri, oUin et tunc vicanum rerjium cicitcitls Florcn-
tioB, etc. It is found recited in tlie decree under whicli in 1342 Jacojio
di Dante redeemed a portion of liis fatlier's propertj', to wit : Una
possesdone cum vinea tt cum domihus svper ea, combustis et non combus-
iis, posita in populo S. Miniaiis de Parjnlao. In the domibus combuftis
we see tlie blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by marriage, Corso
Donati, who plundered and burnt the horses of the exiled Bianchi,
during the occupation of the city by Charles of Valois. (See " De Eo-
manis," notes on Tiraboschi's Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of
1830, Vol. V. p. 119.)
t Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by
Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the JliddleAges,
Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each oilier,
and adds : II n'y n done pas imp a s'ctonner des noms bizarres dc
Mastino tt de Cane donnes 0, ces Delia Scah. (Dante, heretique, revo-
lutiomiaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.)
J If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted by
Balbo (Vita, I. Lib. IF. Cap. XVII. ), whom De Vericour cojiies without
question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation of the original
epitaph replaced by Cardinal Bembo when he built the new tomb in
1483. Bembo's own inscription implies an already existing monument,
and, if in disparaging terms, yet epitaphial Latin verses are not to l)e
taken too literally, considering the exigencies of that branch of literary
Ingenuity. The doggerel Latin has been thought by some unworthy of.
DANTE. 17
tated the following inscription for it on his death-
bed:—
JVRA MONARCHI.E SVPEROS PHLEGETHONTA LACVSQVE
LVSTRAXDO CECINI VOLVERVNT FaTA QVOVSQVE
Sed qvia pars CESSIT MELIORIBVS HOSPITA CASTRIS
AVCTOREMQVE SVVJI PETIIT FELICIOR ASTRIS
Hic CLAVDOR Dantes patriis extorris ab oris
QVEM GENVIT PARVI FLORENTIA MATER AMOKIS.
Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a transla-
tion : —
The riglits of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire, the Pit,
In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed lit;
But since my soul, an alien here, hatli llown to nobler wars.
And, liappier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars.
Here am I Dante shiit, exiled from the ancestral shore.
Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.*
If these be not tlie words of Dante, what is internal
evidence worth ] The indomitably self-reliant man, loyal
first of all to his most unpopular convictions (his very
host, Guide, being a Guelph), puts his Ghibellinism
{jura monarchitje) in the front. The man whose whole
Dante, as Shakespeare's doggerel English epitaph has been thought un-
worthy of him. In both cases the rudeness of tlie verses seems to us a
proof of authenticity. An enlightened fiosterity witli unlimited super-
latives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, would
have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It is certain, at
least in Dante's case, that Cardinal Bembo would never have insarted
in the very first words an allusion to the De Monarchia, a book long
before condemned as heretical.
* We have translated lactisque by "the Pit," as being the nearest
English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the several circles
of his Hell, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the centre. As a curi-
ous specimen of English we subjoin Professor de Vericour's transla-
tion : '■ I have sang the rights of jnonarchy ; I have sang, in exi^loriug
them, the abode of God, the Phlegethon and the impure lakes, as long
as destinies have permitted. But as the part of myself, which was
only passing, returns to better fields, and happier, returned to his
Maker, I, Dante, exiled fropi the regions of fatherland, I am laid here,
I, to whom Florence gave birth, a mother who experienced but a feeblo
love." (The Life and Times of Dante, Loudon, 1858, p. 208.)
B
18 DANTE.
life, like that of selected souls always, had been a war-
fare, calls heaven another camp, — a better one, thank
God ! The wanderer of so many years speaks of his soul
as a guest, — glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile,
•whose sharpest reproaches of Florence are always tliose
of an outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his uncon-
scious bones should lie in alien soil.
Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a con-
temporar}^ thus sketches him ; " This man was a great
scholar in almost every science, though a layman ; was
a most excellent poet, philosopher, and rhetorician ; per-
fect, as well in composing and versifying as in harang-
uing ; a most noble speaker This Dante, on ac-
count of his learning, was a little haughty, and sh}^ and
disdainful, and like a philosopher almost ungracious,
knew not well how to deal with unlettered folk." Ben-
venuto da Imola tells us that he was very abstracted, as
we may well believe of a man who carried the Commedia
in his brain. Boccaccio paints him in this wise : " Our
poet v/as of middle height ; his face was long, his nose
aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip protruding
somewhat beyond the. upper ; a little stooping in the
shoulders ; his e3'es rather large than small ; darlc of
complexion; his hair and beard thick, crisp, and black;
and his countenance always sad and thoughtful. His
garments were always dignified ; the style such as suited
ripeness of years; his gait was grave and gentlemanlike;
and his bearing, whether public or private, wonderfully
composed and polished. In meat and drink he was
most temperate, nor was ever any more zealous in study
or whatever other pursuit. Seldom spake he, save
W'hen spoken to, though a most eloquent person. In
his youth he delighted especially in music and sing-
ing, and was intimate with almost all the singers and
musicians of his day. He was much inclined to soli-
DANTE. 19
tude, and familiar with few, and most assiduons in study
as far as he could find time for it. Dante was also of
marvellous capacity and the most tenacious memory."
Various anecdotes of him are related by Boccaccio,
Sacchetti, and others, none of them verisimilar, and
some of them at least fifteen centuries old when re-
vamped. Most of them are neither veri nor hen trovati.
One clear glimpse we get of him from the Ottimo Co-
mento, the author of which saj's : * "I, the writer, heard
Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other
than he would, but that many a time and oft {inolte e
spesse volte) he had made words say for him what they
were not wont to express for other poets." That is the
only sincere glimpse we get of the living, breathing,
word-compelling Dante.
Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to have
been an utter and disastrous failure. What its inward
satisfivctions must have been, we, with the Faradiso open
before us, can form some faint conception. To him,
longing with an intensity which only the word J)an-
tesque will express to realize an ideal upon earth, and
continually baffled and mistuiderstood, the far greater
part of his mature life must have been labor and sor-
row. We can see how essential all that sad experience
was to him, can understand why all the fairy stories
hide the luck in the ugly black casket ; but to him,
then and there, how seemed it 1
Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee,
Beloved most dearly ; this tliat arrow is
Shot from the bow of exile first of all ;
And thou shalt prove linw salt a savor hath
llie bread of others, and how hard a path
To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs !*
Come sa di sale ! Who never wet his bread with tears,
* Inferno, X. 85.
+ Paradiso, XVII.
•20 DANTE.
says Goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly powers ! Our
nineteenth century made an idol of the noble lord who
broke his lieart in verse once every six months, but the
fourteenth was lucky enough to produce and not to make
an idol of that rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of
genius who could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty
years, and would not let himself die till he had done
his task. At the end of the Vita Ntiova, his first work,
Dante wrote down that remarkable aspiration that God
would take him to himself after he had written of Bea-
trice such things as were never yet Avritten of woman.
It was literally fulfilled when the Commedia was finished
twenty-five 3'ears later. Scarce was Dante at rest in his
grave when Italy felt instinctively that this was her
great man. Boccaccio tells us that in 1329 * Cardinal
Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise De Monarchid
to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed furtlier
to dig up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna,
as having been a heretic ; but so much opposition was
roused that he thought better of it. Yet this was dur-
ing the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the
reproof of whoso simony Dante puts in the mouth of
St. Peter, who declares his seat vaeant,-|- whose damna-
tion the poet himself seems to prophesy ,|. and against
whose election he had endeavored to persuade the car-
dinals, in a vehement letter. In 1350 the republic of
Florence voted the sum of ten golden florins to be paid
by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to Dante's
daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara
at Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and
begged in vain for the metaphorical ashes of the man
* He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany, which
took place in tliat year. The De Monarchia was afterward condemned
by the Council of Trent.
Paradiso, XXVII.
X Lafemo, XI.
DANTK 21
of whom she had threatened to make literal cinders if
she coiild catch him alive. In 1429 * she begged again,
but Ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead
poet. In 1519 Michel Angelo would have built the
monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the sacred dust
to be removed. Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight
years after the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph
fairly built in Santa Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even
the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on it,
Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and Poesy
on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built originally in
1483, by Cardinal Bembo, was restored by Cardinal
Corsi in 1692, and finally rebuilt in its present form by
Cardinal Gonzaga, in 1780, ail three of whom com-
memorated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a
little shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb
of a Mohammedan saint, and is now the chief magnet
which draws foreigners and their gold to Ravenna. The
valet de place says that Dante is not buried under it, but
beneath the pavement of the street in front of it, where
also, he says, he saw my Lord Byron kneel and weep.
Like everything in Ravenna, it is dirty and neglected.
In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair of
the Divina Commedia, and Boccaccio was named first
professor. He accordingly began his lectures on Sun-
day, October 3, following, but his comment was broken
off abruptly at the 17th verse of the 17th canto of the
Inferno by the illness which ended in his death, Decem-
ber 21, 1375. Among his successors were Filippo Villani
and Filelfo. Bologna was the first to follow the exam-
ple of Florence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his
lectures, according to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375.
Chairs were established also at Pisa, Venice, Pia-
cenza, and Milan before the close of the century. The
• See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedito d' artisti. Vol. I. p. 123.
22 DANTE.
lectures were delivered in the churches and on feast-
days, which shows their popular character. Balbo
reckons (but this is guess-work) that the MS. copies
of the Divina Commedia made during the fourteenth
century, and now existing in the libraries of Europe, are
more numerous than those of all other works, ancient
and modern, made during the same period. Between
the invention of printing and the year 1500 more than
twenty editions were published in Italy, the earliest in
1472. During the sixteenth century there were forty
editions ; during the seventeenth, — a period, for Italy,
of sceptical dilettanteism, — only three ; during the eigh-
teenth, thirty-four ; and already, during the first half of
the nineteenth, at least eighty. The first translation was
into Spanish, in 1428.* M. St. Rene Taillandier says
that the Commedia was condemned by the inquisition in
Spain ; but this seems too general a statement, for, accord-
ing to Foscolo,f it was tlie commentary of Landino and
Vellutello, and a few verses in the Inftrno and Paradiso,
which were condemned. Tlie first French translation
was that of Grangier, 159G, but the study of Dante
struck no root there till the present century. Rivarol,
who translated the Inferno in 1783, was the first French-
man who divined the wonderful force and vitality of the
Commedia: % The expressions of Voltaire represent very
well the average opinion of cultivated persons in re-
spect of Dante in the middle of the eighteenth century.
He says : " The Italians call him divine ; but it is a
hidden divinity ; few people understand his oracles.
He has conmientators, which, perhaps, is another reason
for his not being understood. His reputation will go on
* St. Rene Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, December 1,
1856.
t Dante, Vol. TV. 'p. 116.
J Ste. Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, Tome XI. p. 169.
DANTE. 23
increasing, because scarce anybody reads him." * To
Father Bettinelli he writes : " I estimate higlily the
courage with which you have dared to say that Dante
was a madman and his work a monster." But he adds,
wliat shows that Dante had his admirers even in that
flippant century : " There are found among us, and in
the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire
imaginations so stupidly extravagant and barbarous." f
Elsewhere he says that the Commedia was " an odd poem,
but gleaming with natural beauties, a work in which the
author rose in parts above the bad taste of his age and
his subject, and full of passages written as purely as if
they had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso." % It
is curious to see this antipathetic fascination which
Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own.
At the beginning of this century Chateaubriand
speaks of Dante with vague commendation, evidently
from a very superficial acquaintance, and that only
with the Inferno, probably from Rivarol's version. §
Since then there have been four or five French versions
in prose or verse, including one by Lamennais. But
the austerity of Dante will not condescend to the con-
ventional elegance which makes the charm of French,
and the most virile of poets cannot be adequately ren-
dered in the most feminine of languages. Yet in the
works of Fauriel, Ozanam, Ampere, and Villemain,
France has given a greater impulse to the study of
Dante than any other country except Germany. Into
Germany the Commedia penetrated later. How utterly
Dante was unknown there in the sixteenth century is
plain from a passage in the " Vanity of the Arts and
* Diet. Phil., art. Dante.
t Corresp. giin., CEuvres, Tome LVII. pp. 80, 81.
X Essai sur les moeurs, CEuvres, Tome XVII . pp. 371, 372.
§ Genie du Christianisme, Cap. IV.
24 DANTE.
Sciences " of Cornelius Agrippa, where he is spoken of
among the authors of lascivious stories : " There have
been many of these historical pandars, of which some
of obscure fame, as ^neas Sylvius, Dantes, and Pe-
trarch, Boccace, Pontanus," etc.* The first German
translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809). Versions
by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (late king) of
Saxony followed. Goethe seems never to have given
that attention to Dante which his ever-alert intelligence
might have been expected to bestow on so imposing a
moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the conclusion
of the second part of " Faust " be an inspiration of the
Paradiso, we remember no adequate word from him on
this theme. His remarks on one of the German trans-
lations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which
comes only of thorough knowledge and sympathy. But
German scholarship and constructive criticism, through
Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been
of pre-eminent service in deepening the understanding
and facilitating the study of the poet. In England the
first recognition of Dante is by Chaucer in the " Hugeliu
of Pisa" of the "Menkes Tale," f and an imitation of
the opening verses of the third canto of the Inferno
("Assembly of Foules "). In 1417 Giovanni da Serra-
valle, bishop of Fermo, completed a Latin prose trans-
lation of the Commedia, a copy of which, as he made it
at the request of two English bishops whom he met at
the council of Constance, was doubtless sent to England.
Later we find Dante now and then mentioned, but evi-
* Ed. Lond. 1684, p. 199.
t It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical judgment, tliat
he calls Dante "the great poet of Itaille," while in the "Clerke's
Tale " he speaks of Petrarch as a " worthy clerk," as " the laureat
poete" (alluding to the somewhat sentimental ceremony at Rome),
and says that his
" Rhetorike sweete
Enlumined all Itaille of poetry."
DANTE. 25
d:ntly from hearsay only,* till the time of Spenser, who,
like ]\Iilton fifty years later, shows that he had read his
works closely. Thenceforward for more than a century
Dante became a mere name, used without meaning by
literary sciolists. Lord Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, and
Dr. Drake in his "Literary Hours "f could speak of
Darwin's " Botanic Garden " as showing the " wild and
terrible sublimity of Dante " I The first complete Eng-
lish translation was by Boyd, — of the Inferno in 1 785,
of the whole poem in 1802. There have been eight
other complete translations, beginning with Gary's iiT
1814, six since 1850, beside several of the Inferno singly.
Of these that of Longfellow is the best. It is only with-
in the last twenty years, however, that the study of
Dante, in any true sense, became at all general. Even
Coleridge seems to have been familiar only with the In-
ferno. In America Professor Ticknor was the first to
devote a special course of illustrative lectures to Dante ;
he was followed by Longfellow, whose lectures, illus-
trated by admirable translations, are remembered with
grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn
the full significance of the great Christian poet. A trans-
lation of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons
ranks with the best for spirit, faithfulness, and elegance.
In Denmark and Russia translations of the Inferno have
been published, beside separate volumes of comment and
illustration. We have thus sketched the steady growth
of Dante's fame and influence to a universality unparal-
leled except in the case of Shakespeare, perhaps more
remarkable if we consider the abstruse and mystical na-
ture of his poetry. It is to be noted as characteristic
* It is possible that Sackville may have read the Inferno, and it is
certain that Sir John Harrington had. See the preface to his transla-
tion of the Orlando Furioso.
t Second edition, 1800.
2
26 DANTE.
that the veneration of Dantophilists for their master is
that of disciples for their saint. Perhaps no other man
could have called forth such an expression as that of
Ruskin, that " the central man of all the world, as rep-
resenting in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and
intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante."
The first remark to be made upon the writings of
Dante is that they are all (with the possible exception
of the treatise De Vulgari Eloquio) autobiographic, and
that all of them, including that, are parts of a mutually
related system, of which the central point is the individ-
uality and experience of the poet. In the Vita Nnova
he recounts the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari,
showing how his grief for her loss turned his thoughts
first inward upon his own consciousness, and, failing all
help there, gradually upward through philosophy to re-
ligion, and so from a world of shadows to one of eternal
substances. It traces with exquisite unconsciousness the
gradual but certain steps by which memory and imag-
ination transubstantiated the woman of flesh and blood
into a holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol
of sorrow and hope that faith which is the instinctive
refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of God which
higher natures leai'n to find in the trial which passeth
all understanding, and that perfect womanhood, the
dream of youth and the memory of maturity, which
beckons toward the forever unattainable. As a con-
tribution to the physiology of genius, no other book is
to be compared with the Vita Nuova. It is more im-
portant to the understanding of Dante as a poet than
any other of his works. It shows him (and that in the
midst of affairs demanding practical ability and pres-
ence of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative
abstraction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed
the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some
DANTE. 27
sort to see how, from being the slave of his imagina-
tive facnlh', he rose by self-culture and force of will to
that mastery of it which is art. We comprehend the
Commedia better when we know that Dante could be
an active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the
same time. Various dates have been assigned to the
composition of the Vita Nuova. Tl)e earliest limit is
fixed by the death of Beatrice in 1290 (though some of
the poems are of even earlier date), and the book is
commonly assumed to have been finished by 129-5;
P^oscolo says 1294. But Professor Karl Witte, a high
authority, extends the term as far as 1300.* The title
of the book also, Vita Nuova, has been diversely inter-
preted. Mr. GaiTow, who published an English version
of it at Florence in 1846, entitles it the " Early Life of
Dante." Balbo understands it in the same way.f But
we are strongly of the opinion that " New Life " is the
interpretation sustained by the entire significance of the
book itself
His next work in order of date is the treatise Di Jlfo-
narchid. It has been generally taken for granted that
Dante was a Guelph in politics up to the time of his
banishment, and that out of resentment he then became
a violent Ghibelline. Not to speak of the consideration
that there is no author whose life and works present so
remarkable a unity and logical sequence as those of
Dante, Professor Witte has drawn attention to a fact
which alone is enough to demonstrate that the De Mo-
narchid was written before 1300. That and the Vita
Nuova are the only works of Dante in which no allusion
whatever is made to his exile. That bitter thought was
continually present to him. In the Convito it betrays
* Dante Aligliieri's Ij'rische Gedichte, Leipzig, 18i2, Theil II. pp.
4-9.
t Vila, p. 97.
28 DANTE.
itself often, and with touching unexpectedness. Even in
the treatise De Vulgari Eloquro, he takes as one of his
examples of style : " I have most pity for those, whoso-
ever they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their
country only in di-eams." We have seen that the one
decisive act of Dante's priorate was to expel from Flor-
ence the chiefs of l)oth parties as the sowers of strife, and
he tells us (Paradiso, XVII.) that he had formed a party
by himself The king of Saxony has well defined his
political theory as being "an ideal Ghibellinism " *
and he has been accused of want of patriotism only by
those short-sighted persons who cannot see beyond their
own parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of
the same kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus had
done before) to confound license with liberty. The ar-
gument of the De Monarckid is briefly this : As the ob-
ject of the individual man is the highest development
of his faculties, so is it also with men united in societies.
But the individual can only attain the highest develop-
ment when all his powers are in absolute subjection to
the intellect, and society only when it subjects its indi-
vidual caprices to an intelligent head. This is the order
of nature, as in families, and men have followed it in the
organization of villages, towns, cities. Again, since God
made man in his own image, men and societies most
nearly resemble him in proportion as they approach
unit3\ But as in all societies qtiestions must arise, so
there is need of a monarch for supreme arbiter. And
only a luiiversal monarch can be impartial enough for
this, since kings of limited territories would always be
liable to the temptation of private ends. With (he in-
ternal policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and king-
doms, the monarch would have nothing to do, only inter-
fering when there was danger of an infraction of'th'^
* Comment on Paradiso, VI.
DANTE. 29
general peace. This is the doctrine of the first book, cn-
foix-ed sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with
great fertility of illustration. It is an enlargement of
some of the obiter dicta of the Convito. The earnestness
with which peace is insisted on as a necessary postulate
of civic well-being shows what the experience had been
out of which Dante had constructed his theory. It is
to be looked on as a purely scholastic demonstration of
a speculative thesis, in which the manifold exceptions
and modifications essential in practical application are
necessarily left aside. Dante almost forestalls the fo-
mous proposition of Calvin, " that it is possible to con-
ceive a people without a prince, but not a prince with-
out a people," when he says, Non enim gens projJter
ref/em, sed e converso rex propter gentem* And in his
letter to the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming
of Henry VII., he bids them "obey their prince, but so
as freemen preserving their own constitutional forms."
He says also expressly : Animadvertendum sane, quod
cum dicitur hnmanurn genus potest regi per xinuvi sujyre-
vium princijjem, non sic intelligendum est id ah illo uno
prodire 2'>ossint municipia et leges municipales. llahent
namque nationes, regna, et civitates inter se 2^'>'oprietates
quas legibus differentibus regidari oportet. Schlosser
the historian compares Dante's system with that of the
United States.t It in some respects resembled more
the constitution of the Netherlands under the supreme
stadtholder, but parallels between ideal and actual in-
stitutions are always unsatisfactory. |
* Jean de Meuiig had already said, —
" Ge n'en met hors rois no prelas
Qu'il sunt tui serf aa menu pueple."
— Romau de la Rose (ed. Meoii), V. ii. pp. 78, TCX
t Dante, Studien, etc., 1855, p. 144.
I Compare also Spinoza, Tractat. polit., Cap. VI.
30 DANTE.
The second book is very curious. In it Dante en-
deavors to demonstrate the divine riglit of the Roman
Empire to universal sovereignty. One of his arguments
is, that Christ consented to be born under the reign of
Augustus ; anotlier, that he assented to the imperial
jurisdiction in allowing himself to be crucified under a
decree of one of its courts. The atonement could not
have been accomplished unless Christ suflFcred luider
sentence of a court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his
condemnation would have been an injustice and not a
penalty. Moreover, since all mankind was typified in
the person of Christ, the court must have been one
having jurisdiction over all mankind ; and since he was
delivered to Pihite, an officer of Tiberius, it must follow
that the jurisdiction of Tiberius was universal. He
di'aws an argument also from the wager of battle to
prove that the Roman Empire was divinely permitted,
at least, if not instituted. For since it is admitted that
God gives the victory, and since the Romans alwaj's won
it, therefore it was God's will that the Romans should
attain universal empire. In the third book he endeavors
to prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and not
by permission of the pope. He assigns supi'emacy to
the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals.
This was a delicate subject, and though the king of
Saxony (a Catholic) says that Dante did not overstep
the limits of orthodox}', it was on account of this part
of the book that it was condemned as heretical.*
Next follows the treatise De Vulgari Eloquio. Though
we have doubts whether we possess this book as Dante
wrote it, inclining rather to think that it is a copy in
* It is instnictive to compare Dante's political treatise with those
of Aristotle avid Siinoza. We thus see more clearly the liiuitatioiis
of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to a broader
view of him as poet.
DANTE. 31
some parts textually exact, in others an abstract, there
can be no question either of its great glossological vahie
or that it conveys the opinions of Dante. We put it
next in ordei', though written later than the Convito,
only because, like the De Monarchic, it is written in
Latin. It is a proof of the national instinct of Dante,
and of his confidence in his genius, that he should have
chosen to write all his greatest woi'ks in what was'
deemed by scholars a putou, but which he more than
any other man made a classic language. Had he in-
tended the De Moiiarchid for a political pamphlet, he
would certainly not have composed it in the dialect
of the few. The De Vulgari Eloquio was to have been
in four books. Whether it was ever finished or not
it is impossible to say ; but only two books have come
down to us. It treats of poetizing in the vulgar tongue,
and of the different dialects of Italy. From the particu-
larity with which it treats of the dialect of Bologna, it
has been supposed to have been written in that city, or
at least to furnish an argument in favor of Dante's hav-
ing at some time studied there. In Lib. II. Cap. II., is
a remarkable passage in which, defining the various sub-
jects of song and what had been treated in the vulgar
tongue by different poets, he says that his own theme
had been righteousness.
The Convito is also imperfect. It was to have con-
sisted of fourteen treatises, but, as we have it, contains
only four. In the first he justifies the use of the vul-
gar idiom in preference to the Latin. In the other
three he comments on three of his own Canzoni. It
will be impossible to give an adequate analysis of this
work in the limits allowed us.* It is an epitome of the
learning of that age, philosophical, theological, and sci-
* A very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the Molini
edition of Dante, pp. 391-433.
32 DANTE.
entific. As affording illustration of the Commedia, and
of Dante's st.N'le of thought, it is invahiable. It is
reckoned by his countrymen the first piece of Itahiin
prose, and there are parts of it which still stand un-
matched for eloquence and pathos. The Italians (even
such a man as Cantii among the rest) find in it and a
few passages of the Commedia the proof that Dante, as a
natural philosopher was wholly in advance of his age, —
that he had, among other thing-s, anticipated NeAvton in
the theory of gravitation. But this is as idle as the
claim that Shakespeare had discovered the circulation
of the blood before Harvey,* and one might as well
attempt to dethrone Newton because (Jhaucer speaks
of the love which draws the apple to the earth. The
truth is, tliat it was only as a poet that Dante was great
and original (glory enough, surely, to have not more
than two competitors), and in matters of science, as did
nil his contemporaries, sought the guiding hand of Aris-
totle like a child. Dante is assumed by many to have
been a Platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense
of the word. Like all men of great imagination, he
■was an idealist, and so far a Platonist, as Shakespeare
might be proved to have been by his sonnets. But
Dante's direct acquaintance with Plato may be reckoned
at zero, and we consider it as having strongly influenced
his artistic development for the better, that transcenden-
talist as he was by nature, so much so as to be in dan-
ger of lapsing into an Oriental mysticistn, his habits of
thought should have been made pi-ecise and his genius
disciplined by a mind so severely logical as that of Aris-
totle. This does not conflict with what we believe to
be equally true, that the Platonizing commentaries on
his poem, like that of Landino, are the most satisfac-
tory. Beside the prose already mentioned, we have
* See Field's " Theory of Colors."
DANTE. 33
a small collection of Dante's letters, the recovery of the
larger number of which we owe to Professor Witte.
They are all interesting, some of thera especially so, as
illustrating the prophetic character with which Dante
invested himself. The longest is one addressed to Can
Grande della Scalla, explaining the intention of the
Commedla and the method to be employed in its intei*-
pretation. The authenticity of this letter has been
doubted, but is now generally admitted.
We shall barely allude to the minor poems, full of
grace and depth of mystic sentiment, and vvhich would
have given Dante a high place in the history of Italian
literature, even had he written nothing else. They are
so abstract, however, that without the extrinsic inter-
est of having been written by the author of the Corn-
media, they would probably find few readers. All that
is certainly known in regard to the Commedia is tliat
it was composed during the nineteen years which inter-
vened between Dante's banishment and death. At-
tempts have been made to fix precisely the dates of the
different parts, but without success, and the differences
of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has constructed an
ingenious and forcible argument to show that no part
of the poem was published before the author's death.
The question depends somewhat on the meaning we at-
tach to the word " published." In an age of manuscript
the wide dispersion of a poem so long even as a single
one of the three divisions of the Commedia would be
accomplished very slowly. But it is difficult to ac-
count for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during
the latter years of his life, unless we suppose that parts,
at least, of his greatest work had been read or heard by
a large number of persons. This need not, however,
imply publication ; and Witte, whose opinion is entitled
to great consideration, supposes even the Inferno not to
2* 0
34 ^ANTE.
have been fiiiished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter
■where certainty would be impossible, it is of little con-
sequence to I'eproduce conjectural dates. In the letter
to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante himself has
stated the theme of his song. He says that " the Hteral
subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after
death simply considered. But if the work be taken
allegorically, tho subject is man, as by merit or demerit,
tbi'ough freedom of the will, he renders himself liable
to the reward or punishment of justice." He tells us
that the work is to be interpreted in a literal, allegori-
cal, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly
employed with the Seriptui'es,* and of which he gives
the following example : " To make which mode of treat-
ment more clear, it may be applied in the following
verses : In exitu Israel de Mgfpto, domus Jacob de po-
pulo harharo, facta est Judaea sanctificatio ejus, Israel
potesias ejus.f For if we look only at the literal sense,
it signifies the going out of the children of Israel from
Egypt in the time of Moses ; if at the allegorical, it
signifies our redemption through Christ ; if at the moral,
it signifies the conversion of the soul from the grief and
miser}- of sin to a state of grace ; and if at the ana-
gogical, it signifies the passage of the blessed soul from
the bondage of this corruption to the freedom of eternal
glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old com-
mentators, puts the matter compactly together for us : —
" Litera gesta refert ; qiiid credas allegoria ;
Moralis quid agas ; quid speres anagogia."
Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because
it has a fortunate ending, and gives its title thus :
" Here begins the comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Floren-
• As by Dante himself iu the Convito.
t Psalm cxiv. 1, 3.
DANTE. do
tine by birth, but not in morals." * The poem consists
of thi-ee parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each
part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to
the years of the Saviour's life ; for though the Hell con-
tains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory.
In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an
emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the
threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Sym-
bolic meanings reveal themselves, or make themselves
suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture of the
Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem would be out
of place here, but we must say a few words of Dante's
position as respects modern literature. If we except
Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is the first Christian poet,
the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose
whole system of thought is colored in every finest fibre
by a purely Christian theology. Lapse through sin, me-
diation, and redemption, these are the subjects of the
three parts of the poem : or, otherwise stated, intellec-
tual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil
(symbol also of that imperialism whose origin he sang) ;
moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, ^JP'"
Red in Beatrice ; reconciliation with God, and actual
blinding vision of him, — " The pure in heart shall see
God." Here are general truths which any Christian
may accept and find comfort in. But the poem comes
nearer to us than this. It is the real history of a
brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last trium-
phant human soul ; it teaches the benign ministry of
sorrow, and that the ladder of that faith by which
man climbs to the actual fruition of things not seen
ex quovis Ugno non. Jit, but only of the cross manfull}'
borne. The poem is also, in a very intimate sense,
* He commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase as exul
immeritus.
36 DANTE.
an apotheosis of woman. Indeed, as INIarvell's drop of
dew mirrored the whole firmament, so we find in the
ComnieJia the image of the Middle Ages, and the sen-
timental gjniolatry of chivalry, which was at best bnt
skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an ideal and uni-
versal plane. It is the same with Catholicism, with
imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy ; and noth-
ing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and
assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself
the world that then was, and reproduce it with such
cosmopolitan truth to human nature and to his own
individuality, p.s to reduce all contemporary history to
a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore,
against the parochial criticism which would degrade
Dante to a mere partisan, which sees in him a Luther
before his time, and would clap the hoiiuet rouge upon
his heavenly muse.
Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially
conservative, and, arriving precisely in that period of
transition when Church and Empire were enteiing upon
the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve
both by presenting the theory of both in a pristine and
ideal perfection. The whole nature of Dante was one
of intense belief There is proof upon proof that he
believed himself invested with a divine mission. Like
the Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole
soul was indiued, it was back to the old worship and
the God of the fathers that he called his people; and
not Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor,
that sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in
the composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, learn-
ing had something of a sacred character ; the line was
hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor
of supernatural powers ; it was with the next genera-
tion, with the elegant Petrarch, even more truly than
DANTE. 37
with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely literary life,
and tliat dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of scep-
ticism, began. As a merely literary figure, the position
of Dante is remarkable. Not only as respects thought,
but as respects {Esthetics also, his great poem stands as
a monument on the boundary line between the ancient
and modern. He not only marks, but is in himself,
the transition. Arma virumque cano, that is the motto
of classic song ; the things of this world and great
men. Dante says, suhjectum e^t homo, not fi'r; my
theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic
and drama was in tliis world, and its catastrophe here ;
Dante lays his scene in the human soul, and his fifth
act in the other world. He makes himself the pi'otago-
nist of his own drama. In the CommeJia for the first
time Christianity wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes
its seminal principle. But sesthetically also, as well as
morally, Dante stands between the old and the new,
and reconciles them. The theme of his poem is purely
subjective, modern, w'hat is called romantic ; but its
treatment is objective (almost to realism, here and
there), and it is limited by a form of classic severity.
In the same way he sums up in himself the two schools
of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while
essentially lyrical in his subject, is epic in the hand-
ling of it. So also he combines the deeper and moi'e
abstract religious sentiment of the Teutonic races with
the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the
Romanic. In one respect Dante stands alone. AVhile
we can in some sort account for sucli representative
men as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even Shakespeare) by
the intellectual and moral fermentation of the age in
which they lived, Dante seems morally isolated and to
have drawn his inspiration almost wholly from his own
internal reserves. Of his mastery in style we need say
38 DANTE.
little here. Of his mere language, nothing could he
better than the expression of Rivarol : " His vei'sc holds
itself erect by the mere force of the substantive and
verb, without the help of a single epithet." We will
only add a word on what seems to us an extraordinary
misapprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante by
comparing his Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He seems
to have forgotten that the precise measurements of
Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by
the nature of his poem. He is describing an actual
journey, and his exactness makes a part of the verisim-
ilitude. We read the "Paradise Lost" as a poem, the
Commedia as a record of fact ; and no one can read
Dante without believing his story, for it is plain that
he believed it himself It is false aesthetics to confound
the grandiose with the imaginative. Milton's angels are
not to be compared with Dante's, at once real and super-
natural ; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus,
while nothing in all poetry approaches the imaginative
grandeur of Dante's vision of God at the conclusion of
the Paradiso. In all literary history there is no such
figure as Dante, no sucli homogeneousness of life and
works, such loj-alty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition
of the unessential ; and there is no moral more touching
than that the contemporar}' recognition of such a nature,
so endowed and so faithful to its endowment, should be
summed up in the sentence of Florence : Igne conibura-
tur sic quod moi'iatur.*
The range of Dante's influence is not less remarkable
than its intensity. Minds, the antipodes of each other
* In order to fix more precisely in tlie mind the place of Cante in
relation to the history of thought, literature, and events, we suhjoin
a few dates : Dante horn, 1265 ; end of Crnsades, death of St. Louis,
1270 ; Aquinas died, 1274 ; Bonaventura dieil, 1274 ; Giotto horn,
1276 ; Albertus Magnus died, 1280 ; Sicilian vespers, 12S2 ; death of
Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282 ; death of Beatrice, 1290 ;
DANTE. 39
in temper and endowment, alike feel the force of his at-
traction, the pervasive comfort of his light and wai-mth.
Boccaccio and Lamennais are touched with the same
reverential enthusiasm. The imaginative Ruskin is
rapt by him, as we have seen, perhaps beyond the
limit where critical appreciation merges in enthusiasm ;
and the matter-of-fact Schlosser tells ns that " he, who
was wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an
earthly light, has made use of Dante, Landino, and
Vellutello in his solitude to bring a heavenly light into
his inward life." Almost all other poets have their
seasons, but Dante penetrates to the moral core of
those who once fairly come within his sphere, and pos-
sesses them wholly. His readers turn students, his
students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a
religion. The homeless exile finds a home in thou-
sands of grateful hearts. E veiine da esilio in que-fta
pace !
Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be,
and has been, made to the Divina Commedia, especially
by critics who have but a superficial acquaintance with
it, or rather with the Inferno, which is as fir as most
English critics go. Coleridge himself, who had a way
of divining what was in books, may be justly suspected
of not going further, though with Carey to help him.
^Ir. Carlyle, who has said admirable things of Dante the
man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or
he would never have put Sordello in hell and the meet-
ing with Beatrice in paradise. In France it was not much
better (though Rivarol has said the best thing hitherto
Roger Bacon died, 1292 ; death of Cimahiie, 1302 ; Dante's banish-
ment, 1302 ; Petrarch born, 1304 ; Fra Dolcino burned, 1307 ; Pope
Clement V. at Avignon, 1309 ; Templars suppressed, 1312 ; Boc-
caccio born, 1313 ; Dante died, 1321 ; Wycliffe born, 1324 ; Chau-
cer bom, 1328.
40 DANTE.
of Dante's parsimony of epithet *) before Ozanam, who,
if with decided ultramontane leanings, has written ex-
cellently well of our poet, and after careful study. Vol-
taire, though not without relentings toward a poet who
had put popes heels upward in hell, regards him on the
whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was no
better in Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who affirms
that " neither Pelli nor others deservedly more cele-
brated than he ever read attentively the poem of Dante,
perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the
last."t Accordingly we have heard that the Commedia
was a sermon, a political pamphlet, the revengeful satire
of a disappointed Ghibelliiie, nay, worse, of a tui'ncoat
Guelph. It is narrow, it is bigoted, it is savage, it is
theological, it is mediseval, it is heretical, it is scholastic,
it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of la
Crusca, its ideas are not those of an enlightened eighteenth
century, it is everj'thing, in short, that a poem should not
be ; and yet, singularly enough, the circle of its charm
has widened in proportion as men have receded from
the theories of Church and State which are supposed to
be its foundation, and as the modes of thought of its
author have become more alien to those of his readers.
In spite of all objections, some of which are well founded,
the Commedia remains one of the three or four universal
books that have ever been written.
We may admit, with proper limitations, the modern
* Rivavol characterized only a single quality of Dante's style, who
knew how to spend as well as spare. Even the Inferno, on which he
based his remark, might have put him on his guard. Dante under-
stood very well the iise of ornament in its fitting place. Est eniin
exornatlo nlicujiis convenientis additio, he tells us in his De Vulgari
Eloquio (Lib. 11. C. II.). His simile of the doves (Inferno, V. 82 et
seq. ), perhaps the most exquisite in all poetry, quite over.steps Rivarol's
narrow limit of " substantive and verb."
t Discorso sul testo, ec, § XVIII.
DANTE. 41
distinction between the Artist and the Moralist. With
the one Form is all in all, with the other Tendency.
The aim of the one is to delight, of the other to con-
vince. The one is master of his purpose, the other
mastered by it. The whole range of perception and
thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to
imagination, to the other only as it is available for argu-
ment. With the moralist use is beauty, good only as
it serves an ulterior purpose ; with the artist beauty is
use, good in and for itself. In the fine arts the vehicle
makes part of the thought, coalesces with it. The liv-
ing conception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or
modulated sound, and henceforth the two are inseparable.
The results of the moralist pass into the intellectual
atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode
of conveyance. But where, as in Dante, the religious
sentiment and the imagiuation are both organic, some-
thing interfused with the whole being of the man, so
that they work in kindly sympathy, the moral will in-
sensibly suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light.
Then that fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the
assonance between facts seemingly remote and unrelated,
between the outwai'd and inward worlds, though con-
vinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be
persuaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but
imply a substance somewhere, and will love to set forth
the beauty of the visible image because it suggests the
ineffably higher charm of the unseen original. Dante's
ideal of life, the enlightening and strengthening of
that native instinct of the soul which leads it to strive
backward toward its divine source, may sublimate the
senses till each becomes a window for the light of truth
and the splendor of God to shine through. In him as
in Caldcron the perpetual presence of imagination not
only glorifies the philosophy of life and the science of
42 DANTE.
theology, but idealizes both in symbols of material
beauty. Though Dante's conception of the highest end
of man was that he should climb through every phase
of human experience to that transcendental and super-
sensual i-egion where the true, the good, and the beauti-
ful blend in the white light of God, yet the prism of his
imagination forever resolved the ray into color again,
and he loved to show it also where, entangled and ob-
structed in matter, it became beautiful once more to the
eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the use, with-
out any mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). And
this part cannot in this life have its perfect use, which
is to behold God (who is the highest object of the intel-
lect), except inasmuch as the intellect considers and
beholds him in his efiFects.* Underlying Dante the
metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was always
Dante the poet,t irradiating and vivifying, gleaming
through in a picturesque phrase, or touching things
unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and
subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern out-
line of his system wavers and melts away before the
eye of the reader in a mii'age of imagination that lifts
from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in serener
air images of infinite suggestion pi-ojected from worlds
not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspira-
tion. Beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in the
* Convito, B. IV. C. XXII.
t It is remarkable that Avhen Dante, in 1297, as a preliminary con-
dition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of physicians
and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the title poeta. The arms
of the Alighieri (curiously suitable to him who sovra (jli nltri come
aquila vola) were a wing of gold in a field of azure. His vivid sense of
beauty even hovers sometimes like a corposant over the somewhat
stiff lines of his Latin prose. For example, in his letter to the kings
and princes of Italy on the coming of Henry VII.: "A new day
brightens, revealing the dawn which already scatters the shades of long
calamity ; already the breezes of morning gather ; tfie lips of heaven
art r«ddtning ! "
DANTE. 43
passionless splendor of the empyrean, the city of our
God, the Rome whereof Christ is a Roman,* the citadel
of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow
and self denial, transhumanizedt to the divine abstrac-
tion of pure contemplation. "And it is called Empyr-
ean," he says in his letter to Can Grande, " which is
the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not
because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a
spiritual one, which is blessed love or charity." But
this splendor he bodies forth, if sometimes quaintl^'^, yet
always vividly and most often in types of winning grace,
Dante was a mystic with a very pi-actical turn of
mind. A Platonist by nature, an Aristotelian by train-
ing, his feet keep closely to the narrow path of dialectics,
because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are fixed
on the stars and his brain is busy with things not de-
monstrable, save by that grace of God which passeth
all understanding, nor capable of being told unless by
far-off hints and adumbrations. Though he himself has
directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger
meaning of his greatest work,;}: though he has indirectly
pointed out the way to its interpretation in the Convito,
and though everything he wrote is but an explanatory
comment on his own character and opinions, unmistaka-
bly clear and precise, yet both man and poem continue
not only to be misunderstood popularly, but also by
such as should know better.§ That those who confined
their studies to the Commedia should have interpreted
it variously is not wonderful, for out of the first or lit-
eral meaning others open, one out of another, each of
wider circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own
* Purgatorio, XXXII. 100.
t Paradiso, I. 70.
X In a letter to Can Grande (XI. of the Epistolse).
§ Witte, Wegele, and Ruth iii German, and Ozanam in French, have
rendered ignorance of Dante inexcusable among men of culture.
44 DANTE.
heavens, giving and receiving light.* Indeed, Dante
himself is partly to blame for this. " The form or mode
of treatment," he says, " is poetic, fictive, descriptive,
digressive, transumptive, and withal definitive, divisive,
pi-obative, improbative, and positive of examples." Here
are conundrums enough, to be sure ! To Italians at
home, for whom the great arenas of political and religious
speculation were closed, the temptation to find a subtler
meaning than the real one was irresistible. Italians in
exile, on the other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse
from behind which they could take a long shot at Church
and State, or at obscurer foes.t Infinitely touching and
sacred to us is the instinct of intense sympathy which
drawst hese latter toward their great forerunner, exul
immeritus like themselves. | But they have too often
wrung a meaning from Dante which is injurious to the
man and out of keeping with the ideas of his age. The
aim in expounding a great poem should be, not to dis-
cover an endless variety of meanings often contradictory,
* Inferno, VII. 75. " Nay, his style," s.ays Miss Rossetti, " is
more than concise : it is elHptical, it is recondite. A first thought
often lies coiled up and hidden under a second ; the words wliich state
the conclusion involve the premises and develop the subject." (p. 3.)
t A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be selected
from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nannucci's excellent
tract " Intorno alle voci usate da Dante," Corfu, ISiO. Even Foscolo
could not always refrahi. Dante shouhl have taught them to shun
such vulgarities. See Inferno, XXX. 1.31-148.
X " My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee too much I
have lost thee, and, perhaps, .... ah, may God avert the nmen !
But more proud than sorrowful, for an evil endured for thee alone, I
continue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone An exile full of
anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more in tliy Aligliieri that
lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy smiling sky ; and an exile
equally wenrisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to sharpen my
small genius so that it may penetrate into what he left written for
thy instruction and for his glory." (Rossetti, Disamina, ec, p. 405.)
Rossetti is himself a proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by
misfortune. His "Comment" (unhappilj' incomplete) is one of the
most valuable and suggestive.
DANTE. 45
but whatever it has of great and perennial significance ;
for such it must have, or it would long ago have ceased
to he living and operative, would long ago have taken
refuge in the Chartreuse of great libraries, dumb thence-
forth to all mankind. We do not mean to say that this
minute exegesis is useless or unpraiseworthy, but only
that it should be subsidiary to the larger way. It serves
to bring out moi-e clearly what is very wonderful in
Dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory through-
out the work, so that its intimate coherence does not
exist in spite of the reconditeness and complexity of
allusion, but is woven out of them. The poem has
many senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of
it ; but it has also, and this alone will account for its
fascination, a living soul behind them all and informing
all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of doctrine
simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use
his owu phrase, the bread of angels.
Nor is this unity characteristic only of the Divina
Commedia. All the works of Dante, with the possible
exception of the De vulgari Eloqido (which is unfin-
ished), are component parts of a Whole Duty of Man
mutually completing and interpreting one anothei*. They
are also, as truly as Wordsworth's " Prelude," a history
of the growth of a poet's mind. Like the English poet
he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt
after Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. Sempre
il magnanimo si magnifica in suo cuore ; e cost lo pusil-
lanimo per contrario semjyre si tiene meno die noii e.*
As in the prose of Milton, whose striking likeness to
Dante in certain prominent features of character has
been remarked by Foscolo, there are in Dante's minor
* The great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart, and
in like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he is. (Con-
vito, Tr. I. c. 11.)
46 DANTE.
works continual allusions to himself of great value aa
material for his biographer. Those who read atten-
tively will discover that the tenderness he siiows toward
Francesca and her lover did not spring from any friend-
ship for her family, but was a constant quality of his
nature, and that what is called his revengeful ferocity
is truly the implacable resentment of a lofty mind and
a lover of good against evil, whether showing itself in
private or public life ; perhaps hating the former mani-
festation of it the most because he believed it to be
the root of the latter, — a faith which those who have
watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he
had, will be inclined to share. His gentleness is all
the more striking by contrast, like that silken compen-
sation which blooms out of the thorny stem of the
cactus. His moroseness,* his party spirit, and his
personal vindictiveness ai'e all predicated upon the
Jnftrno, and upon a misapprehension or careless read-
ing even of that. Dante's zeal was not of that senti-
mental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched,
that hovers on the surface of shallow minds,
" Even as tlie flame of iinctuons things is wont
To move upon the outer surface only " ; f
it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the
whole character of the man through and through, like
the minarets of his own city of Dis.| He was, as
seems distinctive in some degree of the Latinized races,
an unflinching a priori logician, not unwilling to " syllo-
* Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has any
one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he in the
Convito. She is "sweeter than tlie lids of Juno's eyes," and he
dwells on the delights of her love with a rapture which kindles and
purifies. So far from making her an inquisitor, he says expressly that
she "should be gladsome and not sullen in all her works." (Convito,
Tr. I, c. 8.) "Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose" !
t Inferno, XIX. 28, 29. J Inferno, VIII. 70-75.
DANTE. 47
gize invidious verities," * wherever they might lead him,
like Sigier, whom he has put in paradise, though more
than suspected of heterodoxy. But at the same time,
as we shall see, he had something of the practical good
sense of that Teutonic stock whence he drew a part
of his blood, which prefers a malleable syllogism that
can yield without breaking to the inevitable, but incal-
culable pressure of human nature and the stifFer logic
of events. His theory of Church and State was not
merely a fantastic one, but intended for the use and
benefit of men as they were ; and he allowed accord-
ingly for aberrations, to which even the law of gravi-
tation is forced to give place ; how much more, then,
any scheme whose very starting-point is the freedom
of'the will!
We are thankful for a commentator at last who
passes dry-shod over the turhide onde of inappreciative
criticism, and, quietly waving aside the thick atmos-
phere which has gathered about the character of Dante
both as man and poet, opens for us his City of Doom
with the divining-rod of reverential study. Miss Ros-
setti comes commended to our interest, not only as one
of a family which seems to hold genius by the tenure
of gavelkind, but as having a special claim by inherit-
ance to a love and understanding of Dante. She writes
English with a purity that has in it something of femi-
nine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. Her
lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace through
the metaphysical and other intricacies of her subject.
She brings to her work the refined enthusiasm of a
cultivated woman and the penetration of sympathy.
She has chosen the better way (in which Germany took
the lead) of interpreting Dante out of himself, the
pure spring from which, and from which alone, he drew
» Paradiso, X, 138.
48 DANTE.
his inspiration, and not from muddy Fra Alberico or
Abbate Giovacchino, from stiipid visions of Saint Paul
or voyages of Saint Brandan. She has written by far
the best comment that has appeared in English, and
"we should say the best that has been done in England,
were it not for her father's Comenio analitico, for ex-
cepting which her filial piety Avill thank us. Students
of Dante in the original will be grateful to her for many
suggestive hints, and those who read him in English
will find in her volume a travelling map in which the
principal points and their connections are clearly set
down. In what we shall say of Dante we shall en-
deavor only to supplement her interpretation with such
side-lights as may have been furnished us by twenty
years of assiduous study. Dante's thought is multi-
form, and, like certain street signs, once common, pre-
sents a different image according to the point of view.
Let us consider briefly what was the plan of the Divina
Commedia and Dante's aim in writing it, which, if not
to justify, was at least to illustrate, for warning and
example, the ways of God to man. The higher inten-
tion of the poem was to set forth the results of sin,
or unwisdom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and
consequently in the life to come, which is but the
continuation and fulfilment of this. The scene accord-
ingly is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly
denizens now as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the
human soul in its journey upwards from error through
repentance to atonement with God. To make it appre-
hensible by those whom it was meant to teach, nay,
from its very nature as a poem, and not a treatise of
abstract morality, it must set forth everything by means
of sensible types and images.
"To speak thus is adapted to your mind.
Since only from the sensible it learns
DANTE. 49
What makes it worthy of intellect thereafter.
On this account the Scripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands
To God attributes, and means sometliing else."*
Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its
branches need not be told that Dante's age was one
that demanded very palpable and even revolting types.
As in the old legend, a drop of scalding sweat from the
damned soul must shrivel the very skin of those for
whom he wrote, to make them wince if not to turn
them away from evil-doing. To consider his hell a
place of physical torture is to take (>irce's herd for
real swine. Its mouth yawns not only under Florence,
but before the feet of every man evei'ywhere who goeth
about to do evil. His hell is a condition of the soul,
and he could not find images loathsome enough to
express the moral deformity which is wrought by sin
on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. Its inmates
meet you in the street every day.
" Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place ; for where we are is liell,
And where hell is there we must ever be." +
It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the appear-
ance of good, and out of a crooked hag makes a be-
witching siren. The reason enlightened by the grace
of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench and corrup-
tion.J It is this office of reason which Dante mider-
takes to perform, by divine commission, in the Inferno.
There can be no doubt that he looked upon himself as
invested with the prophetic function, and the Hebrew
forerunners, in whose society his soul sought consola-
* Paradiso, IV. 40-45 (Longfellow's version).
t Marlowe's " Faustus." " Which way I fly is hell ; myself am
hell." (Paradise Lost, IV. 75.) In the same way, ogni dove in citlo
e Paradiso. (Paradiso, III. 88, 89.)
i Purgatorio, XIX. 7 - 33.
3 D
50 DANTE.
tion and sustainment, certainly set him no example of
observing the conventions of good society in dealing
with the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of good
society were not altogether those of this world in any
generation. He would have defined it as meaning
"the peers" of Philosophy, "souls free from wretched
and vile delights and from vulgar habits, endowed witli
genius and memor3\" * Dante himself had pi'ecisely
this endowment, and in a very surprising degree. His
genius enabled him to see and to show what he saw to
others ; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. Very
hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have
been the modern theory which deals with sin as invol-
untary erroi", and by shifting off the fault to the shoul-
ders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for pur-
poses of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again
from the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of
personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect
and the safeguard of character. Dante indeed saw
clearly enough that the Divine justice did at length
overtake Society in the ruin of states caused by the
corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals ; but
a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied
with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. " It
is Thou," he says sternly, " who hast done this thing,
and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it ; nay,
damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This
is not my judgment, but that of universal Nature t
from before the beginning of the world." t Accordingly
the highest reason, typified in his guide Virgil, rebukes
him for bringing compassion to the judgments of God, §
* Convito, Tr. II. c. 16.
t La nnturn universale, cio'e Iddio. (Convito, Tr. III. c. 4.)
J Inferno, Til. 7, 8.
§ Inferno, XX. 30. Mr. 'Y. M. Rossetti strangely enough renders
DANTE. 51
and again embraces him and calls the mother that bore
him blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone
among tlie other dogs.* This latter case shocks our
modern feelings the more rudely for the simple pathos
with which Dante makes Argenti answer when asked
who he was, " Thou seest I am one that weeps." It is
also the one that makes most strongly for the theory
of Dante's personal vindictiveness,t and it may count
for what it is worth. We are not greatly concerned to
defend him on that score, for he believed in the righ-
teous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate
quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the
political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day
merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty
of an upright and thoroughly trained citizen to speak
out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly,
almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a con-
ception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that
whatever and whoever hindered or jostled it, whether
wilfully or blindly it mattei'ed not, was to be got out
this verse "Who hath a passion for God's judgeship." Compassion
porta, is the reading of the best texts, and Witte adopts it. Bnti's
comment is " cioe porta pena e dolore di colui che giuMamente e con-
dannato da Din che e sempre fliiisto," Tliere is an analogous passage
in "The Revelation of the Apostle Paul," printed in the "Proceed-
ings of the American Oriental Society" (Vol. VIII. pp. 213, 214) :
"And the angel answered and said, 'Wherefore dost thou weep?
Why ! art thou more merciful than God ? ' And I said, ' God forbid,
0 my lord ; for God is good and long-suffering unto the sons of men,
and he leaves every one of them to his own will, and he walks as he
pleases.' " This is precisely Dante's view.
* Inferno, VIII 40.
t " I following her (Moral Philosophy) in the work as well as the
passion, so far as I could, abominated and disparaged the errors of
men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, but of the errors."
(Convito, Tr. IV. c. 1.) "Wherefore in my judgment as he who
defames a worthy man ought to be avoided by people and not listened
to, so a vile man descended of worthy ancestors ought to be huuted
out by all." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 29.)
52 DANTE.
of the way at all hazards ; because obedience to God's
law, and not making things generally comfortable, was
the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way
to true felicity. It has been commonly assumed that
Dante was a man soured by undeserved misfortune,
that he took up a wholly new outfit of political opinions
with his fallen fortunes, and that his theory of life and
of man's relations to it was altogether reshaped for
him by the bitter musings of his exile. This would be
singular, to say the least, in a mau who tells us that he
"felt himself indeed four-square against the strokes of
chance," and whose convictions were so intimate that
they were not merely intellectual conclusions, but parts
of his moral being. Fortunately we are called on to
believe nothing of the kind. Dante himself has sup-
plied us with hints and dates which enable us to watch
the germination and trace the growth of his double
theory of government, applicable to man as he is a
citizen of this world, and as he hopes to become here-
after a freeman of the celestial city. It would be of
little consequence to show in which of two equally self-
ish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six
hundred years ago, but it is worth something to know
that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions,
aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a
level of principle so far above them all. Dante's opin-
ions have life in them still, because they were drawn
from living sources of reflection and experience, because
they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of his-
tory and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched
in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour.
Swiftly the politic goes : is it dark ? he borrows a lantern ;
Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars.
It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of
DANTE. 53
Dante's thought. When his ancestor Cacciaguida proph-
esies to him the life which is to be his after 1300,* he
says, speaking of his exile : —
" And that which most shall weigh wpon thy shoulders
Will be the bad and foolish company
With which into this valley thou shalt fall ;
Of their bestiality their own proceedings
• Shall furnish proof ; so U ic'dl be well fur thee
Apariy to have made thee by thyself."
Here both context and grammatical construction (infal-
lible guides in a writer so scrupulous and exact) imply
irresistibly that Dante had become a party by himself
before his exile. The measure adopted by the Priors
of Florence while he was one of them (with his asseiit
and probably by his counsel),, of sending to the frontier
the leading men of both factions, confirms this implica-
tion. Among the persons thus removed from the
opportunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend
Guido Cavalcanti, to whom he had not long before
addressed the Vita Xuova. + Dante evidently looked
back with satisfaction on his conduct at this time, and
thought it both honest and patriotic, as it certainly
was disinterested. " AVe whose country is the world,
as the ocean to the fish," he tells us, " though we
drank of the Arno in infancy, and love Florence so
much that, because we loved her, toe suffer exile nnjustly,
support the shoulders of our judgment rather upon
reason than the senses." X And again, speaking of old
* Paradise, XVII. 61-60.
litis worlli mcntiouing that the sufferers ia his Infcmo are in lilce
manner pretty exactly divided botween the two parties. Tl'.is is
answer enough to the charge of partiality. He even puts persons
there for Avhom he felt afTectioa (as Brunette Latini) and respect (as
Farinata de;;;li Uberti and Fredei'ick II.). Till the Frcnc'i looked up
their JI33., it vi-as taken for granted that thj bccccjodi Paritji (?ur-
gatorio, XX. 51) was a drop of Dante's gall. "C3 fu Huez C.ipez c' on
apelle bouchier." Tlugues Capet, p. 1.
t De Vulgar! Eloquio, Lib. I. Cap. VI. Cf. Infemo, XV. 61 - 61
54 DANTE.
age, he says : " And the noble soul at this age blesses
also the times past, and v.ell may bless them, because,
revolving them in memory, she recalls her righteous
conduct, without which she could not enter the port to
which she draws nigh, with so much riches and so great
gain." This language is not that of a man who regrets
some former action as mistaken, still less of one who
repented it for any disastrous consequences to himself. •
So, in justifying a man for speaking of himself, he
alleges two examples, — that of Boethius, who did so
to " clear himself of the perpetual inflimy of his exile " ;
and that of Augustine, " for, by the process of his life,
which was from bad to good, from good to better, and
from better to l)est, he gave us example and teach-
ing." * After middle life, at least, Dante had that
wisdom " whose use brings with it marvellous beauties,
that is, contentment with every condition of time, and
contempt of those things which others make their mas-
ters, "t If Dante, moreover, wrote his treatise De
Monarchid before 1302, and we think Witte's infer-
ence,;{: from its stjde and from the fact that he nowhere
alludes to his banishment in it, conclusive on this
point, then he was already a Ghibelline in the same
larger and unpartisan sense which ever after distin-
guished him from his Italian contemporaries.
" Let, let the Ghibellines ply tlieir handicraft
Beneath some other standard ; for this ever
111 follows he who it and justice parts,"
he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Roman eagle. §
His Ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the result of
what he had seen of Italian misgovex-nnient, embraced
* Convito, Tr. IV. c. 23. lb. Tr. I. c. 2.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 13.
I 0pp. Min., ed. Fraticelli, Vol. II. pp. 281 and 283. Witte is in-
clined to put it even earlier tlian 1300, and we believe he is right.
§ Paradiso, VI. 103 - 105.
DANTE. 55
in its theoretical application the civilized -u-orld. His
political system was one which his reason adopted, not
for any temporary expediency, but because it conduced
to justice, peace, and civilization, — the three conditions
on whicli alone freedom was possible in any sense which
made it worth liaving. Dante was intensely Italian,
nay, intensely Florentine, but on all great questions he
was, by the logical structure of his mind and its philo-
sophic impartiality, incapable of intellectual provincial-
ism.* If the circle of his affections, as with persistent
natures commonly, was narrow, his thought swept a
broad horizon from that tower of absolute self which he
had reai'ed for its speculation. Even iipon the principles
of poetry, mechanical and other, f he had reflected more
profoundly than most of those who criticise his work,
and it was not by chance that he discovered the secret
of that magical word too few, which not only distin-
guishes his verse from all other, but so strikingly from
his own prose. He never took the bit of art J be-
* Some Florentines have amusingly enongh doubted the genuine-
ness of the De vulgari Eloquio, because Daute therein denies the pre-
eminence of the Tuscan dialect.
t See particularly the second book of the De vulgari Eloquio.
t Purgatorio, XXXIII. 141. "That thing one calls beautiful
whose parts answer to each other, because pleasure results from their
harmony." (Convito, Tr. I. c. 5.) Carlyle says that " he knew too,
partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man could do." He
knew it fully. Telling us how Giotto's fame as a painter had eclipsed
that of C'iniabue, he takes an example froni poetry also, and selecting
two Italian poets, — one the most famous of his predecessors, the other
of his contemporaries, — calmly sets himself above them both (Purga-
torio, XI. 97-99), and gives the reason for his supremacy (Purgatorio,
XXIV. 49-62). It is to be remembered that Amore in the latter pas-
sage does not mean love in the ordinary sense, but in that transcenden-
tal one set forth in the Convito, — that state of the .soul which opens
it for the descent of God's spirit, to make it over into liis own image.
" Therefore it is manifest that in this love the Divine virtue descends
into men in the guise of an angel, .... and it is to be noted that the
descending of the virtue of one thing into another is nothing else than
reducing it to its own likeness." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 14.)
56 DANTE.
tween his teeth where only poetry, and not doctrine,
was concerned.
If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was practical,
a guide for the conduct of life, it was, on the other, a
much more transcendent thing, whose body was wisdom,
her soul love, and her efficient cause truth. It is a
practice of wisdom from the mere love of it, for so we
must interpret his amoroso uso di sapienzia, when we re-
member how he has said before * that " the love of wis-
dom for its delight or profit is not true love of wisdom."
And this love must embrace knowledge in all its
branches, for Dante is content with nothing less than a
pancratic training, and has a scorn of dilettanti, special-
ists, and quacks. " Wherefore none ought to be called
a true philosopher who for any delight loves any part
of knowledge, as there are many who delight in com-
posing Canzoiii, and delight to be studious in them, and
who delight to be studious in rhetoric and in music, and
flee and abandon the other sciences which are all mem-
bers of wisdom." t " Many love better to be held mas-
ters than to be so." With him wisdom is the general-
ization from many several knowledges of small account
by themselves ; it results therefore from breadth of cul-
ture, and would be impossible without it. Philosophy
is a noble lady (donna gentil %), partaking of the divine
* Convito, Tr. III. c. 11. lb. Tr. I. c. 11.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 12-15.
X Inferno, II. 94. The donna gentil is Lucia, the prevenient Grace,
the light of God which shows tlie right path and giudes the feet in it.
With Dante God is always the sun, " whicli leadeth others right by
every road." (Inferno, I. 18.) "The spiritual and unintelligible Sun,
which is God." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.) His light " enlighteneth
every man that cometh into the world," but his dwelling is in the
heavens. He wlio wilfully deprives himself of this light is spiritually
dead in sin. So when in Mars he beholds the glorified spirits of the
martyrs he exclaims, " 0 Elios, who so arrayest them ! " (Paradiso,
XIV. 96.) Blanc (Vocabolario, svb voce) rejects this interpretation.
But Dante, entering the abode of the Blessed, invokes the "good
DANTE. 57
essence by a kind of eternal marriage, while with other
intelligences she is united in a less measnre " as a mis-
tress of whom no lover takes complete joy." * The eyes
of this lady are her demonstrations, and her smile is her
persnasion. " The eyes of wisdom are her demonstra-
tions by which trnth is beheld most certainly ; and her
smile is her persuasions in which the interior light of
wisdom is shown under a certain veil, and in these two
is felt that highest pleasure of beatitude which is the
greatest good in paradise." t " It is to be known that
the beholding this lady was so largely ordained for us,
not merely to look upon the face which she shows us,
but that we may desire to attain the things which she
keeps concealed. And as through her much thereof is
seen by reason, so by her we believe that every miracle
may have its reason in a higher intellect, and conse-
quently may be. Whence our good faith has its origin,
whence comes the hope of those unseen things which we
desire, and through that the operation of charity, by
the which three virtues we rise to philosophize in that
celestial Athens where the Stoics, Peripatetics, and
Epicureans through the art of eternal truth accordingly
concur in one will." X
Apollo," anfl shortly after calls him divina virtu. We shall have more
to say of this hereafter.
* Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 15. Recalling how the eyes of Beatrice lift
her servant through the heavenly spheres, and that smile of hers so
often dwelt on with rapture, we see how Dante was in the habit of
commenting and illustrating his own works. We must renieniber
always that with him the allegorical exposition is the true one (Con-
vito, Tr. IV. c. 1), the allegory being a truth which is hidden under a
beautiful falsehood (Convito, Tr. II. c. 1), and that Dante thouglit his
poems without this exposition " under some shade of obscurity, so
that to many their beauty was more grateful than their goodness "
(Convito, Tr. I. c. 1), "because the goodness is in the meaning, and
the beauty in the ornament of the words " *^Couvito, Tr. II. c. 12).
X Couvito, Tr. III. c. 14.
3*
68 DANTE,
As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy we will
cite a passage from the Convito, all the more to our par-
pose as it will illustrate his own method of allegorizing.
" Verily the use of our mind is double, that is, practical
and speculative, the one and the other most delightful,
although that of contemplation be the more so. That
of the practical is for us to act virtuously, that is, hon-
orably, with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and jus-
tice. [These are the four stars seen by Dante, Purgato-
rio, I. 22 - 27.] That of the speculative is not to act for
ourselves, but to consider the works of God and nature.
.... Verily of these uses one is more full of beatitude
than the other, as it is the speculative, which without
any admixture is the use of our noblest part
And this part in this life cannot have its use perfectly,
which is to see God, except inasmuch as the intellect
considers him and beholds him through his effects. And
that we should seek this beatitude as the highest, and
not the other, the Gospel of Mark teaches us if we will
look well. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary the
mother of James, and Mary Salome went to find the
Saviour at the tomb and found him not, but found a
youth clad in white who said to them, ' Ye seek the
Saviour, and I say unto you that he is not here ; and
yet fear ye not, but go and say unto his disciples and
Peter that he will go before them into Galilee, and there
ye shall see him even as he told you.' By these three
women may be understood the three sects of the active
life, that is, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peri-
patetics, who go to the tomb, that is, to the present
life, which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek
the Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not, but
they find a youth in white raiment, who, according to
the testimony of Matthew and the rest, was an angel of
God. This angel is that nobleness of ours which comes
DANTE. 59
from God, as hath been said, which speaks in our reason
and says to each of these sects, that is, to whoever goes
seeking beatitude in this life, that it is not here, but go
and say to the disciples and to Peter, that is, to those
who go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like
Peter who had denied), that it will go before them into
Galilee, that is, into speculation. Galilee is as much
as to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a body full of coi*-
poreal light more than any other, and so contemplation
is fuller of spiritual light than anything else here below.
And he says, ' it will go before,' and does not say, ' it
will be with you,' to give us to understand that God
always goes before our contemplation, nor can we ever
overtake here Him who is our supreme beatitude. And
it is said, ' There je shall see him as he told you,' that
is, here ye shall have of his sweetness, that is, felicity,
as is promised you here, that is, as it is ordained that
ye can have. And thus it appears that we find our
beatitude, this felicity of which we are speaking, first
imperfect in the active life, that is, in the operations of
the moral virtues, and afterwards wellnigh perfect in
the operation of the intellectual ones, the which two
operations are speedy and most direct ways to lead to
the supreme beatitude, the which cannot be had here,
as appears by what has been said." *
At first sight there may seem to be some want of
agreement in what Dante says here of the soul's incapa-
city of the vision of God in this life with the triumphant
conclusion of his own poem. But here as elsewhere Dante
must be completed and explained by himself. "We must
know that everything most greatly desires its own per-
fection, and in that its every desire is appeased, and by
that everything is desired. [That is, the one is drawn
• Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22,
60 DANTE,
toward, the other draws.] And this is that desire which
makes every delight maimed, for no delight is so great
in this life that it can take away from the soul this
thirst so that desire remain not in the thought." *
" And since it is most natural to wish to be in God, the
human soul naturally wills it with all longing. And
since its being depends on God and is preserved thereby,
it naturally desires and wills to be imited with God in
order to fortify its being. And since in the goodnesses
of human nature is shown some reason for those of the
Divine, it follows that the human soul unites itself in a
spiritual way with those so much the more strongly and
quickly as they appear more perfect, and this appearance
happens according as the knowledge of the soul is clear
or impeded. And this union is what we call Love,
whereby may be known what is within the soul, seeing
those it outwardly loves And the human soul
which is ennobled with the ultimate potency, that is,
reason, participates in the Divine nature after the man-
ner of an eternal Intelligence, because the soul is so
ennobled and denuded of matter in that sovran potency
that the Divine light shines in it as in an angel." + This
mi ion with God may therefore take place before the
warfare of life is over, but is only possible for souls
iperfettamente naturati, perfectly endowed by nature. %
This depends on the virtue of the generating soul and
the concordant influence of the planets. " And if it
happen that through the pin-ity of the recipient soul,
* Convito, Tr. ITT. c. 6.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 2. By potenzia and poienza Dunte means the
faculty of receiving influences or impressions. (Paradise, XIII. 61 ;
XXIX. 34. ) Reason is the " sovran potency " because it makes us
capable of God.
J " O thou well-born, unto whom Grace concedes
To see the thrones of the Eternal triumph,
Or ever yet the warfare be abandoned. " — Paradiso, V. 115 - 118.
DANTE. 61
the intellectual virtue be well abstracted and absolved
from every corporeal shadow, the Divine bounty is mul-
tiplied in it as in a thing sufficient to receive the
same." * " And there are some who believe that if all
the aforesaid virtues [powers] should unite for the pro-
duction of a soul in their best disposition, so much of
the Deity would descend into it that it would be almost
another incarnate God." f Did Dante believe himself
to be one of these 1 He certainly gives us reason to
think so. He was born under fortunate stars, as he
twice tells us,:}: and he puts the middle of his own life
at the thirty-fifth year, which is the period he assigns
for it in the diviner sort of men. §
The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral growth
may, we think, be reckoned with some approach to
exactness from data supplied by himself In the poems
of the Vita Nuova, Beatrice, until her death, was to
him simply a poetical ideal, a type of abstract beauty,
chosen according to the fashion of the day after the
manner of the Provencal poets, but in a less carnal
sense than theirs. " And by the fourth nature of ani-
mals, that is, the sensitive, man has another love where-
by he loves according to sensible appearance, even as a
beast And by the fifth and final nature, that is,
the truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is,
rational, man has a love for truth and virtue
Wherefore, since this nature is called mind, I said that
love discoursed in my mind to make it understood that
this love was that which is born in the noblest of na-
tures, that is, [the love] of truth and virtue, and to shut
out every false opinion hy which it viight he suspected that
* Convito, Tr. IV. c. 21.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 7.
X Inferno, X. 55, 56 ; Paradiso, XXII. 112-117.
§ Convito, Tr. I. c. 23 (cf. Inferno, I. IV).
62 DANTE.
my love tvas for the delvjht of sense." * This is a very
weighty aifirmation, made, as it is, so deliberately by a
man of Dante's veracity, who would and did speak truth
at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and forever all
the idle tales of Dante's amours, of la Montanina, Gen-
tucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and the rest, to that outer darkness
of impure thoughts la onde la stoltezza dipartllle.f We
think Miss Rossetti a little hasty in allowing that in the
years which immediately followed Beatrice's death Dante
gave himself up " more or less to sensual gratification
and earthly aim." The earthly aim we in a certain
sense admit ; the sensual gratification we reject as ut-
terly inconsistent, not only with Dante's principles, but
with his character and indefatigable industry. Miss
* Convito, Tr. III. c. 3 ; Paradiso, XVIII. 108-130.
t See an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter by Witte,
who so highly deserves the gratitude of all students of Dante, in Dante
Alighieri's Lyrische Gedichte, Theil II. pp. 48-57. It was kindly old
Boccaccio, who, without thinking any harm, first set this nonsense
agoing. His " Life of Dante " is mainly a rhetorical exercise. After
making Dante's marriage an excuse for revamping all the old islanders
against matrimony, he adds gravely, " Certainly I do not affirm these
things to have happened to Dante, for I do not know it, though it be
true that (whetlier things like these or others were the cause of it),
once parted from her, he would never come where she was nor sufler
her to come where he was, for all that she was the mother of several
children by him." That he did not come to her is not wonderful, for
he would have been burned alive if he had. Dante could not send for
her because he was a homeless wanderer. She remained in Florence
with her children because she had powerful relations and perhaps prop-
erty there. It is pl.ain, also, that what Boccaccio says of Dante's lus-
siiria had no better foundation. It gave him a chance to turn a period.
He gives no particulars, and his general statement is simply incredible.
Lionardo Bruni and Vellutello long ago pointed out tlie trifling and
fictitious character of this "Life." Those familiar with Dante's alle-
gorical diction will not lay much stress on the literal meaning of par-
goletta in Purgatorio, XXXI. 59. Gentucca, of course, was a real
person, one of those who had shown hospitality to the exile. Dante
remembers them all somewhere, for gratitude (which is quite as rare
as genius) was one of the virtues of his unforgetting nature. Boccac-
cio's "Comment" is later and fai' more valuable than the "Life."
DANTE. 63
Rossetti illustrates her position by a subtle remark on
"the lulling spell of an intellectual and sensitive delight
in good running parallel with a voluntary and actual
indulgence in evil." The dead Beatrice beckoned him
toward the life of contemplation, and it was precisely
during this period that he attempted to find happiness
in the life of action. " Verily it is to be known that
we may in this life have two felicities, following two
ways, good and best, which lead us thither. The one
is the active, the other the contemplative life, the which
(though by the active we may attain, as has been said,
unto good felicity) leads us to the best felicity and
blessedness."* "The life of my heart, that is, of my
inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought which went
many times to the feet of God, that is to say, in thought
I contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed. And I tell
the final cause why I mounted thither in thought when
I say, ' Where it [the sweet thought] beheld a lady in
glory,' that I might make it understood that I was and
am certain, by her gracious revelatioji, that she toas in
heaven, [not on earth, as I had vainly imagined,] whither
I went in thought, so often as was possible to me, as it
were rapt." t This passage exactly answers to another
in Furgatorio, XXX. 115 - 138 : —
" Not only by the work of those great wheels
That destine every seed unto some end,
According as the stars are in conjunction,
But by the largess of celestial graces,
Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentiall}', that every righteous habit
Would have made admirable proof in him ;
Some time I did sustain him with my look (volto) ;
Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,
» Convito, Tr. IV. c. 17 ; Purgatorio, XXVII. 100 - 108.
t Convito, Tr. II. c. 8, .
64 DANTE.
I led him with me turned in the right way.
As soon as ever of my second age
I was iipon the threshold and changed life,
Himself from nie he took and gave to others.
When from the flesh to spirit I ascended,
And beauty and virtue were in me increased,
I was to him less dear and less delightful.
And into ways untnae lie turned his steps,
Pui-suing the false images of good
That never any promises fulfil *
Nor praj'er for inspiration me availed, f
By means of which in dreams and otherwise
I called him bach, so little did he heed them.
So low he fell, that all appliances
For his salvation were already short
Save showing him the peojale of perdition."
Now Dante himself, we think, gives us the clew, by fol-
lowing which we may reconcile the contradiction, what
Miss Rossetti calls " the astounding discrepancy," be-
tween the Lady of the Vita Nuova who made him
unfaithful to Beatrice, and the same Lady in the Con-
vito, who in attributes is identical with Beatrice herself.
We must remember that the prose part of the Convlto,
which is a comment on the Canzoni, was written after
the Canzoni themselves. How long after we cannot
say with certainty, but it was plainly composed at
intervals, a part of it probably after Dante had entered
upon old age (which began, as he tells us, with the
forty-fifth year), consequentl}^ after 1310. Dante had
then written a considerable part of the Divina Comme-
dia, in which Beatrice was to go through her final and
most ethereal transformation in his mind and memory.
We say in his memory, for such idealizations have a
* That is, wholly fulfil, rendono intera.
t We should prefer here,
" Nor inspirations won by prayer availed,"
as better expressing iVe I' impetrare spirazion. Mr. Longfellow's trans-
lation is so admirable for its exactness as well as its beauty that it
may be thankful for the minutest criticism, such only being possible.
DA.NTE. 65
very subtle retrospective action, and the new condition
of feeling or thought is uneasy till it has half uncon-
sciously brought into harmony whatever is inconsistent
with it in the past. The inward life unwillingly admits
any break in its continuity, and nothing is more com-
mon than to hear a man, in venting an opinion taken
up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, " I have
always thought so and so." Whatever belief occupies
the whole mind soon produces the impression on us of
having long had possession of it, and one mode of con-
sciousness blends so insensibly with another that it is
impossible to mark by an exact line where one begins
and the other ends. Dante in his exposition of the
Canzoni must have been subject to this subtlest and
most deceitful of influences. He would try to reconcile so
far as he conscientiously could his present with his past.
This he could do by means of the allegorical interpreta-
tion. " For it would be a great shame to him," he says
in the Vita Nuova, " who should poetize sometlxing im-
der the vesture of some figure or rhetorical color, and
afterwards, when asked, could not strip his words of that
vesture in such wise that they should have a true mean-
ing." Now in the literal exposition of the Canzone be-
ginning, " Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete," *
he tells us that the grandezza of the Donna Gentil was
" temporal greatness " (one certainly of the felicities
attainable by way of the vita attiva), and immediately
^ after gives us a hint by which we may comprehend why
a proud t man might covet it. " How much wisdom
and how great a persistence in virtue (abito virtuoso) are
hidden for want of this lustre 1 " % When Dante reaches
» Which he cites in the Paradise, VIII. 37.
t Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as ap-
pears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition, in Purgato-
rio, XIII. 136, 137.
I Convito, Tr. II. c. 11.
B
66 DANTE.
the Terrestrial Paradise* which is the highest fehcity
of this woi'ld, and therefore the consumnuitioii of the
Active Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its
symbol,
" Who went along
Singing and culling floweret after floweret."
and warming herself in the rays of Love, or " actual
speculation," that is, " where love makes its peace
felt."t That she was the symbol of this is evident
from the previous dream of Dante, ^ in which he sees
Leah, the universally accejDted type of it,
" Walking in a meadow,
Gathering flowers ; and singing she was saying,
'Know whosoever may my name demand
That I am Leah, who go moving round
My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,' "
that is to say, of good works. She, having " washed
him thoroughly from sin," §
"All dripping brought
Into the dance of the four beautiful," 1|
who are the intellectual vii'tues Prudence, Justice, Tem-
perance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the
Practical Life, which he had seen when he came out
of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin, and
arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That
these wei'e the special virtues of practical goodness
Dante had already told us in a passage before quoted
* Purgatorio, XXVIII.
t Purgatorio, XXVIII. 40-44 ; Convito, Tr. III. c. 13.
t Purgatorio, XXVII. 94-105.
§ Psalm li. 2. " And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's]
beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous
appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the which
appetite removes us from the natural as well as other vices." (Con-
vito, Tr. III. c. 15.)
11 Purgatorio, XXXI. 103, 104.
DANTE. 67
from the Convito* That this was Dante's meaning is
confirmed by what Beatrice says to him,+
" Short while slialt thou be here a forester (silvano)
And thou shalt be with me forevermore
A citizen of tliat Rome where Christ is Roman " ;
for by a " forest " he always means the world of life and
action. J At the time when Dante was writing the
Canzoni on which the Convito was a comment, he be-
lieved science to be the " ultimate perfection itself, and
not the way to it," § but before the Convito was com-
posed he had become aware of a higher and purer light,
an inward light, in that Beatrice, already clarified well-
nigh to a mere image of the mind, " who lives in
heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul.'' ||
So spiritually does Dante always present Beatrice to
us, even where most corporeal, as in the Vita Nuova,
that many, like Biscione and Rossetti, have doubted
her real existence. But surely we must consent to
believe that she who speaks of
" The fair limbs wherein
I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth,"
was once a creature of flesh and blood, —
" A creature not too briglit and good
For human nature's daily food."
When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance,
filled her room up with something fairer than the
reality had ever been. There is no idealizer like una-
vailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy
as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo
* Tr. IV. e. 22.
t Purgatorio, 100-102.
% Such is the selva oscurn (Inferno, I. 2), such the selva erronea di
questarita (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24).
§ Convito, Tr. I. c. 13.
II Convito, Tr. II. c. 2.
68 DANTE,
that change into something rich and strange in the
sea* of his mind Avhich so completely supernatnralized
her at last. It is not impossible, we think, to follow
the process of transformation. During the peiiod of
the Convito Canzoni, when he had so given himself to
study that to his weakened eyes " the stars were shad-
owed with a white blur," t this star of his imagination
was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had
never been of the senses (which is bestial :}:), so his
sorrow was all the moi'e ready to be irradiated with
celestial light, and to assume her to be the transmitter
of it who had first awakened, in him the nobler impulses
of his nature, —
(" Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentially,")
and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the
highest good. With that turn for double meaning and
abstraction which was so strong in him, her very name
helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed
(beat), and thence the step was a short one to personify
in her that Theosophy which enables man to see God
and to be mystically united with him even in the flesh.
Already, in the Vita Nuova,§ she appears to him as
afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that
color of flame which belongs to the seraphim who con-
template God in himself, simply, and not in his relation
to the Son or the Holy Spirit. || When misfortune
came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity
failed, and science was helpless to console, as it had
* Mar di tiifto il senno, he calls Virgil (Inferno, VIII. 7). Those
familiar with his own works will think the phrase singularly appli-
cable to himself.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 9.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 3.
§ Vita Nuova, XL
II Vita Nuova, Tr. II. c 6,
DANTE. 69
never been able wholly to satisfy, she already rose
before him as the lost ideal of his youth, reproaching
him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is,
pei'haps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her
death with such minute precision on the 9th June,
1390, most probably his own twenty -fifth birthday, on
which he passed the boundary of adolescence.*
That there should seem to be a discrepancy between
the Lady of the Vita Nuova and her of the Convito,
Dante himself was already aware when writing the for-
mer and commenting it. Explaining the sonnet begin-
ning Gentil pe7isier, he says, " In this sonnet I make
two parts of myself according as my thoughts were
divided in two. The one part I call Iieart, that is,
the appetite, the other soul, that is, reason It
is true that in the preceding sonnet I take side with
the heart against the eyes [which were weeping for the
lost Beatrice], and that appears contrary to what I say
in the pi-esent one ; and therefore I say that in that
sonnet also I mean by my heart the appetite, because
my desire to remember me of my most gentle Lady
was still greater than to behold this one, albeit I had
already some appetite for her, but slight as should
seem : whence it appears that the one saying is not
contrary to the other." t When, therefore, Dante speaks
of the love of this Lady as the " adversary of Reason''
he uses the word in its highest sense, not as understand-
ing [Intellectus), but as synonymous with soul. Already,
* Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24. The date of Dante's birth is uncertain,
but the period he assigns for it (Paradise, XXII. 112-117) extends
from the middle of May to the middle of June. If we understand
Buti's astrological comment, the day should fall in June rather than
May.
t Vita Nuova, XXXIX. Compare for a different view, " The New
Life of Dante, ?io Essay with Translations," by C. E. Norton, pp. 92
et se(j.
70 DANTE.
when the latter part of the Vita JVuova, nay, perhaps
the whole of the explanatory portion of it, was written,
the plan of the Commedia was complete, a poem the
higher aim of which was to keep the sovil alive both in
this world and for the next. As Dante tells us, the
contradiction in his mind was, though he did not be-
come aware of it till afterwards, more apparent than
real. He sought consolation in study, and, failing to
find it in Learning [scienza), he was led to seek it in
Wisdom (scqjienza), which is the love of God and the
knowledge of him.* He had sought happiness through
the understanding; he was to find it through intuition.
The lady Philosophy (according as she is moral or in-
tellectual) includes both. Her gradual transfiguration is
exemplified in passages ah-eady quoted. The active life
leads indirectly by a knowledge of its failures and sins
* Tliere is a passage in the Convito (Tr. III. c. 15) in which Dante
seems clearly to make the distinction asserted above, "And therefore
the desire of man is limited in this life to that knowledge (scienzia)
wliich may here be had, and passes not save by error that point which
is beyond our natural understanding. And so is limited and meas-
ured in the angelic nature the amoimt of that wisdom wliich the
nature of each is capable of receiving." Man is, according to Dante,
superior to the angels in this, that he is capable both of reason and
contemplation, while they are confined to the latter. That Beatrice's
reproaches refer to no human pargoletta, the context shows, where
Dante asks,
" But wherefore so beyond my power of sight
Soars your desirable discourse that aye
The more I strive, so mucli the more I lose it 1
That thou mayst recognize, she said, the school
Which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far
Its doctrine follows after my discourse.
And mayst behold your path from the divine
Distant as far as separated is
From earth the heaven that highest hastens on."
Purgatorio, XXXIII. 82-90.
The pargoletta in its ordinary sense was necessary to the literal and
human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with that non-natural
interpretation which, according to Dante's repeated statement, lays
open the true and divine meaning.
DANTE. 71
[Inferno), or directly by a righteous employment of it
{Purgatorio), to the same end. The use of the sciences
is to induce in us the ultimate perfection, that of spec-
ulating upon truth ; the use of the highest of them,
theology, the contemplation of God.* To this they all
lead up. In one of those curious chapters of the Goii-
vito,^ where he points out the analogy between the
sciences and the heavens, Dante tells us that he com-
pares moral philosophy with the crystalline heaven or
Primiim Mobile, because it communicates life and gives
motion to all the others below it. But what gives mo-
tion to the crystalline heaven (moral philosophy) itself?
" The most fervent appetite which it has in each of its
parts to be conjoined with each part of that most divine
quiet heaven " (Theology). ;{; Theology, the divine sci-
ence, corresponds with the Empyrean, " because of its
peace, the which, through the most excellent certainty
of its subject, which is God, suffers no strife of opinions
or sophistic arguments." § No one of the heavens is
at rest but this, and in none of the inferior sciences
can we find repose, though he likens ph3'sics to the
heaven of the fixed stars, in whose name is a suggestion
of the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable.
Dante had this comparison in mind, it may be inferred,
when he said,
" Well I perceive that never sated is
Our Intellect unless the Truth illume it
Beyond which nothing true|| expands itself.
It rests therein as wild beast in his lair ;
* " So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye
are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God
dwell in you." Romans viii. 8, 9.
t Convito, Tr. II. c. 14, 15.
X Convito, Tr. II. c. 4. Compare Paradiso, I. 76, 77.
§ " Vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called."
1 Tim. vi. 20.
II That is, no partial truth.
72 DANTE.
When it attains it, and it can attain it ;
If not, then each desire would frustrate be.
Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot,
Doubt at tlie foot of truth ; and this is nature
Which to the top from height to height impels ns."*
The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself into
an essential, easily apprehensible, if mystical, unity,
Dante at first gave himself to the study of the sciences
(after he had lost the simple, unquestioning faith of
youth) as the means of arriving at certainty. From the
root of every truth to which he attained sprang this
sucker (rampollo) of doubt, drawing out of it the very
sap of its life. In this way was Philosophy truly an
adversary of his soul, and the reason of his remorse for
fruitless studies which drew him away from the one that
alone was and could be fruitful is obvious enough. But
by and by out of the very doubt came the sweetness t
of a higher and truer insight. He became aware that
there were " things in heaven and earth undreamt of in
your philosophy," as another doubter said, who had just
finished his studies, but could not find his way out of
the scepticism they engendered as Dante did.
" Insane is he wlio hopeth that our reason
Can traverse the illimitable way
Which the one Substance in three Persons follows !
Mortals, remain contented at the Quia ;
For, if ye had been able to see all,
No need there were [had been] for Mary to bring forth.
And ye have seen desiring without fruit,
Those whose desire would have been quieted
Which evermore is given them for a grief.
I speak of Aristotle and of Plato
And many others." J
* Paradiso, IV. 124-132.
t " Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came
forth sweetness."— Judges xiv. 14.
X Purgatorio, III. 34-44. The allusions in this passage are all to
sayings of Saint Paul, of whom Dante was plainly a loving reader.
"Remain contented at the Quia,'" that is, be satisfied with knowing
DANTE. 73
Whether at the time when the poems of the Vita Nuova
were written the Lady who withdrew him for a while
from Beatrice was (which we doubt) a person of flesh
and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose
narrative was composed. Any one familiar with Dante's
double meanings will hardly question that by putting
her at a window, which is a place to look out of, he in-
tended to imply that she personified Speculation, a
word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, some-
times as looking for, sometimes as seeing (like Shake-
speare's
" There is no speculation in those eyes "),
sometimes as intuition, or the beholding all things in
God, who is the cause of all. This is so obvious, and
the image in this sense so familiar, that we are sur-
prised it should have been hitherto unremarked. It is
plain that, even when the Vita Nuova was written, the
that tilings are, witliout inquiring too nicely how or why. " Being
justified by i'aith we have peace with God" (Rom. v. 1). Jnfinita via:
" 0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God !
How unsearchable are liis judgments, .and his ways past finding out! "
(Rom. xi. 33. ) Aristoile and Plato: " For the wrath of God is revealed
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who
hold the truth in unrighteousness For the invisible things of
him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood
by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so
that they are withotit excuse. Because that when they knew God, they
glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in
their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened" (Rom. i.
18-21) He refers to the Greeks. The Epistle to the Romans, by
the way, would naturally be Dante's favorite. As Saint Paul made
the Law, so he would make Science, " our schoolmaster to bring us
unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith " (Gal. iii. 24). He
puts Aristotle and Plato in his Inferno, because they did not " adore God
duly " (Inferno, IV. 38), that is, they "held the truth in unrighteous-
ness." Yet he calls Aristotle ''the master and guide of human rea-
son" (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 6), and Plato "a most excellent man"
\Convito, Tr. II. c. 5). Plato and Aristotle, like all Dante's figures,
are types. We must disengage our thought from the individual, and
fix it on the genus.
4
74 DANTE,
Lady was already Philosophy, but philosophy applied to
a lower range of thought, not yet ascended from ilesh to
spirit. The Lady who seduced him was the science
which looks for truth in second causes, or even in effects,
instead of seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the
First Cause ; she was the Philosophy which looks for
happiness in the visible world (of shadows), and not in
the spiritual {and therefore substantial) world. The
guerdon of his search was doubt. But Dante, as we
have seen, made his very doubts help him upward
toward certainty ; each became a round in the ladder
by whicli he climbed to clearer and clearer vision till
the end.* Philosophy had made him forget Beatrice ;
it was Philosophy who was to bring him back to her
again, washed clean in that very stream of forgetfulness
that had made an impassable barrier between them.t
Dante had known how to find in her the gift of Achilles's
lance,
* It is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing
when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by
clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards again
a riveder le stelle. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at the
point
" To which things heavy draw from every side " ;
as God is Light and Warmth, so is he " cold obstruction " ; the very
effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his wings begets the
chilly blast that freezes him more immovably in his place of doom.
The danger of all science save the higliest (theology) was that it led
to materialism. There appears to have been a great deal of it in
Florence in the time of Dante. Its followers called themselves Epi-
cureans, and burn in living tombs (Inferno, X.). Dante held them in
special horror. " Of all bestialities that is the most foolish and vile
and hurtful which believes there is no other life after this." " And I
so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that we pass to another better
life after this " (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9). It is a fine divination of
Carlyle from the Non lian speranza di morte that "one day it had
risen sternly benign in the scathed heart of Dante that he, wretched,
never resting, worn as he was, would [should] full surely dii."
t Purgatorio, XXXI. 103.
DANTE. 75
" Which used to be the' cause
First of a sad and then a gracious boon."*
There is another possible, and even probable, theory
which would reconcile the Beatrice of the Purgatorio
with her of the Vita Nuova. Suppose that even iu the
latter she signified Theology, or at least some influence
that turned his thoughts to God % Pietro di Dante,
commenting the j^C'^O'^^^^^'^ passage in the Purr/atorio,
says expressly that the poet had at one time given
himself to the study of theology and deserted it for
poesy and other mundane sciences. This must refer to
a period beginning before 1290. Again there is an early
tradition that Dante in his youth had been a novice in
a Franciscan convent, but never took the vows. Buti
affirms this expressly in his comment on Inferno, XVT.
106-123. It is perhaps slightly confirmed by what
Dante says in the Convito,f that " one cannot only
turn to Religion by making himself like in habit and
life to St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St.
Dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true
religion in a state of matrimony, for God wills no relig-
ion in us but of the heart." If he had ever thought
of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut
short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed
the real Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed, might
not this be the time when his thoughts took that direc-
tion 1 If so, the impulse came indirectly, at least,
from her.
We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari was a real
creatiu"e,
" Col sangiie suo e con le sue giunture " ;
but how real she was, and whether as real to the
poet's memory as to his imagination, may fairly be
» Inferno, XXXI. 5, 6.
t Tr. IV. c. 28.
76 DANTE.
qiiestioned. She shifts, as the controlling emotion or
the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a woman
loved and lost to a gracious exhalation of all that is
fiiirest in womanhood or most divine in the soul of man,
and ere the eye has defined the new image it has become
the old one again, or another mingled of both.
" Nor one nor otlier seemed now what it was,
E'en as proceedetli on before the flame
Upward along the paper a brown color,
Which is not black as yet, and the white dies."*
As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice (her demon-
strations), so she in his own,
" Now with the one, now with the other nature ;
Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled
When I beheld the thing itself stand still
And in its image it transl'ormed itself." f
At the xery moment when she had imdergone her most
sublimated allegorical evaporation, his instinct as poet,
which never failed him, realized her into woman ngain
in those scenes of almost unapproached pathos which
make the climax of his Purgatorio. The verses tremble
with feeling and shine with tears. | Beatrice recalls her
* Inferno, XXV. 64-67. t Purgatorio, XXXI. 123-126.
\ Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platouizing side, and who was
probably the first English poet since Chaucer that had read the Com-
niedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the " Faerie
Queene " (B. VI. c. 10). He has turned it into a compliment, and a
very beautiful one, to a living mistress. It is instructive to compare
the effect of his purely sensuous verses with that of Dante's, whicli
have such a wonderful reach behind them. They are singularly pleas-
ing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model had done by
him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a " sage and serious poet" ;
lie would be the last to take offence if we draw from him a moral not
without its use now that Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose
and drapery will make him as good as Urania. Better far the naked
Hastiness ; the more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor
old god of gardens ! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply dis-
gusting as an ideal of art. In the last century, they set him up in
DANTE. 77
own beauty with a pride as natural as that of Fair Annie
in the old ballad, and compai-es herself as advanta-
geously with the " brown, brown bride " who had sup-
planted her. If this be a ghost, we do not need be told
that she is a woman still.* We must remember, how-
ever, that Beatrice had to be real that she might be in-
teresting, to be beautiful that her goodness might be
persuasive, nay, to be beautiful at any rate, because
beauty has also something in it of divine. Dante has
told, in a passage already quoted, that he would rather
his readers should find his doctrine sweet than his ver-
ses, but he had his relentings from this Stoicism.
Germany and in France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light
of which came too manifestly from the -wrong quarter to be long en-
durable.
* This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim humor
for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be in that
passage (Inferno, XV. 119) where Brunetto Latini lingers under
the burning shower to recommend liis Tesoro to his former pupil.
There is a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his
little work, not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but his own damnation.
We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary fliclcer of a
smile across those serious eyes of Dante's. There is something like
humor in the opening verses of the XVI. Paradiso, where Dante tells us
how even in lieaven he could not help glorying in being gently born, —
he who luul devoted a Canzone and a book of the Convito to proving
that nobility consisted wholly in virtue. But there is, after all, some-
thing touchingly natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly robbed of
his property, and with it of the independence so dear to him, seeing
" Needy nothings trimmed in jollity.
And captive Good attending Captain III,"
■would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could neither
buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the Convito which shows
how bitterly he resented his undeserved poverty. He tells us that
buried treasure commonly revealed itself to the l)ad rather than the
good. " Verily I saw the place on the flanks of a mountain in Tus-
cany called Falterona, where tlie basest peasant of the whole country-
side digging found there more than a bushel of pieces of the finest
silver, which perliaps had awaited him more tlian a thousand years."
(Tr. IV. c. 11.) One can see the grimness of his face as he looked and
thought, " how salt a savor hath the bread of others ! "
78 DANTE.
" ' Canzone, I believe those will be rare
Who of tliiiie inner sense can master all,
Snch toil it costs thy native tongue to learn ;
Wherefore, if ever it percliance befall
That thou in presence of such men slionldst fare
As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern,
I pray tliee then thy grief to comfort turn,
Saying to them, 0 thou my new delight,
' Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.' " *
We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been as
purely imaginary as the Dulcinea of Don Quixote, useful
only as motives, but a I'eal Beatrice is as essential to the
human sympathies of the Divina Commedia as her glori-
fied Idea to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante un-
derstood perfectly well.f Take her out of the poem,
and the hesirt of it goes with her ; take out her ideal,
and it is emptied of its soul. She is the menstruum in
which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into unity.
Those who doubt her existence must find Dante's grace-
ful sonnet % to Guido Cavalcante as provoking as San-
cho's story of his having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat
was to his master, " so alien is it from all that which
eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved for
other exercises and entertvxinments, do and ought to
do."§ But we should always remember in reading
Dante that with him the allegorical interpretation is
the true one (verace sposizione), and that he represents
himself (and that at a time when he was known to the
world only by his minor poems) as having made right-
eousness {rettitudine, in other words, moral philosophy)
* L'Envoi of Canzone XIV. of the Canzoniere, I. of the Convito.
Dante cites the first verse of this Canzone, Paradiso, VIII. 37.
t How Dante himself could allegorize even liistorical personages
may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito (Tr. IV. c. 28), where,
commenting on a passage of Lucan, he treats Martia and Cato as mere
(igures of speech.
J II. of the Canzoniere. See Fraticelli's preface.
§ Don Quixote, P. II. c. VIII.
DANTE. 79
the subject of his verse* Love with him seems first
to have meant the love of truth and the search after it
(speculazione), and afterwards the contemplation of it in
its infinite source {speculazione in its higher and mysti-
cal sense). This is the divine love " which where it
shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all other
loves." t Wisdom is the object of it, and the end of
* De vulgari Eloquio, L. II. c. 2. He says the same of Giraud de
Borneil, many of whose poems are moral aud even devotional. See,
particularly, "Al honor Dieu torn en mon chan " (Eayuouard, Lex
Rom. I. 388), "Ben es dregz pes en aital port "(lb. 393), " Jois sia
comensamens" (lb. 395), and "Be veg e conosc e say " (lb. 398).
Another of his poems (" Ar ai grant joy," Raynouard, Choix, III.
304:) may possibly be a mystical profession of love for tlie Blessed
Virgin, for whom, as Dante tells us, Beatrice had a si)ecial devotion.
t Convito, Tr. III. c. 14. In the same chapter is perhaps an expla-
nation of the two rather difficult verses which follow that iu which the
verace speijlioii^ spoken of (Paradiso, XXVI. 107, 108).
"Che fa di se pareglie 1' altre cose
E nulla face lui di se pareglio."
Buti's comment is, " that is, makes of itself a receptacle to other
things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen in it." Dante
says ( ubi supra), " Tlie descending of the virtue of one thing into another
is a reducing tliat other into a likeness of itself. .... Vv'hence we see
that the sun sending his ray down hitherward reduces things to a like-
ness with his light in so far as they are able by their disposition to
receive light from his power. So I say that God reduces this love to
a likeness with himself as much as it is possible for it to be like him."
In Provencal pareilh means like, and Dante may have formed his word
from it. But the four earliest printed texts read : —
" Che fa di se pareglio all' altre cose."
Accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should be
corrected thus : —
" E nulla face a lui di se pareglio."
We would form jiarcglio from parere (a something in which things
appear), as miraglio from mirare (a something in which they are
see7i). God contains all things in himself, but nothing can wholly
contain him. The blessed behold all things in him as if reflected, but
not one of the things so reflected is capable of his image in its com-
pleteness. This interpretation is confirmed by Paradiso, XIX. 49-51.
" E quiiici appar ch' ogni minor natura
E corto recettacolo a quel beyie
Che non ha fine, e se con se misura."
80 DANTK
wisdom to contemplate God the true mirror [verace speg-
io, speculimi), wherein all things are seen as they truly
are. Nay, she herself " is the brightness of the eternal
light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."*
There are two beautiful passages in the Convito, which
we shall quote, both because they have, as we believe,
a close application to Dante's own experience, and be-
cause they are good specimens of his style as a writer
of prose. In the manly simplicity which comes of an
earnest purpose, and in the eloquence of deep conviction,
this is as far beyond that of any of his contemporaries
as his verse ; nay, more, has hardly been matched by any
Italian from that day to tliis. Illustrating the position
that "the highest desire of everything and the first
given us by nature is to return to its first cause," he
says: "And since God is the beginning of our souls
and the maker of them like unto himself, according as
was written, ' Let us make man in our image and like-
* " Wisdom of Solomon," VII. 26, quoted liy Dante (Convito, Tr.
III. c. 15). There are other passages in the "Wisdom of Solomon"
besides that just cited which we may well believe Dante to have had in
his mind when writing the Canzone beginning, —
" Amor ohe nella mente mi ragiona,"
and the commentary upon it, and some to wliich his experience of life
must have given an intenser meaning. The writer of that book also
personifies Wisdom as the mistress of his soul : " I loved her and
sought her out from my youth, I desired to make her my spouse, and
I was a lover of her beauty." He says of Wisdom that she was "pres-
ent when thou (God) madest the world," and Dante in the same way
identities her with the divine Logos, citing as authority the "beginning
of the Gospel of John." He tells us, " I perceived that I could not
otherwise obtain her except God gave her me," and Dante came at last
to the same conclusion. Again, " For the very true beginning of her
is the desire of disci] iline ; and the care of discipline is love. And
love is the keeping of her laws ; and the giving heed unto her laws is
the assurance of incorruption." But who can doubt that he read with
a bitter exultation, and applied to himself passages like these which
follow? "When the Y\g\\Wovi^ fled from his brother's wrath, she
guided him in right paths s/wwed Mm i/ie kingdom of God, and gave
DANTE. 81
iiess,' this soul most greatly desires to return to him.
And as a pilgrim who goes by a way he has never
travelled, who believes every house he sees afar off to
bs his inn, and not finding it to be so directs his belief
to another, and so from house to house till he come to
the inn, so our soul foi-thwith on entering upon the new
and never-travelled road of this life directs its eyes to
the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes
whatever thing it sees that seems to have in it any good
to be that. And because its first knowledge is imperfect
by reason of not being experienced nor indoctrinated,
small goods seem to it great. Wherefore we see children
desire most greatly an apple, and then proceeding fur-
ther on desire a bird, and then further yet desire fine
raiment, and then a horse, and then a woman, and then
riches not great, and then greater and greater. And
this befalls because in none of these things it finds that
which it goes seeking, and thinks to find it further on.
him knowledge of holy things. She defended liim from his enemies
and kept him safe from those that lay in wait, .... that lis niiglit
know that godliness is stronger than all She forsook him not,
but delivered him from sin ; slie went down with him into the pit, and
left him not in bonds till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom,
.... and gave him perpetual glory." It was, perhaps, from this
book that Dante got the hint of making his punishments and penances
typical of the sins that earned them. '• Wherefore, whereas men lived
dissolutely and unrighteously, thou hast tormented them with their
own abominations." Dante was intimate with the Scriptures. They
do even a scholar no harm. M. Victor Le Clerc, in his " Histoire Lit-
teraire de la France au quatorzieme siecle" (Tom. II. p. 72), thinks it
"not impossible " that a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah,
paraphrased by Dante, may have been suggested to him by Rutebeuf
or Tristan, rather than by the prophet himself ! Dante Avould hardly
have found himself so much at home in the company of jongleurs as
in that of prophets. Yet he was familiar with French and Proven9al
poetry. Beside the evidence of the Vulgari Eloqaio, there are fre-
quent and broad traces in the Commedia of the Bonuiu de la Hose,
slighter ones of the Chevalier de la Charette, Guillaume d'Oranye,
and a direct imitation of Bernard de Veutadour.
4* »
82 DANTE.
By which it may be seen that one desirable stands
before another in the eyes of our soul in a fashion as
it were pyramidal, for the smallest at first covers the
whole of them, and is as it were the apex of the highest
desirable, which is God, as it were the base of all ; so
that the further we go from the apex toward the base
the desirables appear greater ; and this is the reason
why human desires become wider one after the other.
Verily this way is lost through error as the roads of
earth are ; for as from one city to another there is of
necessity one best and straightest way, and one that
always leads farther from it, that is, the one which goes
elsewhere, and many others, some less roundabout and
some less direct, so in human life are divers roads where-
of one is the truest and another the most deceitful, and
certain ones less deceitful, and certain less true. And
as we see that that whicli goes most directly to the city
fulfils desire and gives repose after weariness, and that
which goes the other way never fulfils it and never can
give repose, so it falls out in our life. The good trav-
eller arrives at the goal and repose, the erroneous never
arrives thither, but with much weariness of mind, always
with greedy eyes looks before him." * If we may apply
Dante's own method of exposition to this passage, we
find him telling us that he first sought felicity in knowl-
edge,
" That apple sweet wliicli through ao many branches
The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of," f
then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we follow, t
* Convlto, Tr. I. c. 12.
t Purgatorio, XXII. 115, 116,
+ That Dante loved fame we need not be told. He several times
co:2fe3S3s it, especially in the De Vulgari Eloquio, I. 17. " How
glorious she [the Vulgar Tongue] makes her intimates [faniiUcires,
those of her houseliold], we ourselves have known, who in the sweet-
ness of this glory put our exile behind our backs."
DANTE. 83
then in being esteemed of men ("to be clothed in
purple, .... to sit next to Darius, .... and be called
Darius his cousin "), then in power,* then in the riches
of the Holy Spirit in larger and larger measure, t He,
too, had found that there was but one straight road,
whether to the Terrestrial Paradise or the Celestial
City, and may come to question by and by whether
they be not parallel one with the other, or even parts
of the same road, by which only repose is to be reached
at last. Then, when in old age " the noble soul returns
to God as to that port whence she set forth on the sea
of this life, .... just as to him who comes from a long
journey, before he enters into the gate of his city, the
citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so the citizens of
the eternal life go to meet her, and do so because of her
good deeds and contemplations, who, having already
betaken herself to God, seems to see those whom she
believes to be nigh unto God.";}: This also was to be
the experience of Dante, for w-ho can doubt that the
Paradiso was something very unlike a poetical exercise
to him W'ho appeals to the visions even of sleep as proof
of the soul's immortality %
AVhen did his soul catch a glimpse of that certainty
in which " the mind that museth upon many things "
* Dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image of rule.
See especially Purgatorio, VI. 99, and Convito, Tr. IV. c. 11.
t " 0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowl-
edge of God! " Dante quotes this in speaking of the influence of the
stars, which, interpreting it presentlj- "by the theological way," he
compares to that of the Holy Spirit. "And thy counsel who liath
known, except thou give wisdom and send thy Holy Spirit from
above r' (Wisdom of Solomon, ix. 17.) The last words of the
Convito are,, "her [Philosophy] whose proper dwelling is in the
depths of the Divine mind." The ordinary reading is raifimie
(reason), but it seems to us an obvious blunder for mugioue (uuui-
bIou, dwelling).
J Convito, Tr. IV. c. 28.
84 DANTE.
can find assured rest 1 We have already said that we
believe Dante's political opinions to have taken their
final shape and the De Monarchid to have been written
before 1300.* That the revision of the Vita Nuova was
completed in that year seems probable from the last
sonnet but one, which is addressed to pilgrims on their
way to the Santa Veronica at Rome.t In this sonnet
he still laments Beatrice as dead ; he would make the
pilgrims share his grief It is the very folly of despair-
ing sorrow, that calls on the first comer, stranger
though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully
give, and he least of all. But in the next sonnet, the
last in the book, there is a surprising change of tone.
The transfiguration of Beatrice has begun, and we see
completing itself that natural gradation of grief which
will erelong bring the mourner to call on the departed
saint to console him for her own loss. The sonnet is
remarkable in more senses than one, first for irs psy-
chological truth, and then still more for the light it
throws on Dante's inward history as poet and thinker.
* He refers to a cliange in his own opinions (Lib. II. § 1), where he
says, "When I knew the nations to liave murmured .igainst the pre-
eminence of the Roman people, and saw the people imagining vain
tilings as I mys':!/ was wont.'''' He v/as a Guelijh by iiiheritance. he
became a Ghiljelline by conviction.
t It should seem from Dante's words ("at the time when much
people went to see the blessed image," and " ye seem to come from a
far-off people") that this was some extraordinary occasion, and wliat
so likely as the jubilee of 1300 ? (Compare Paradiso, XXXI. 103-
108.) Dante's comparisons are so constantly drawn from actual eye-
sight, that his allusion (Inferno, XIII. 28-33) to a device of Boni-
face VIII. for passing the crowds quietly across the bridge of Saint
Angelo, renders it not unlikely that he was in Rome at that time, and
P'irhaps conceiveil his poem there as Giovanni Villani his clironicle.
That Rome would deeply stir his mind and heart is beyond question.
"And certes I am of a firm opinion tliat the stones that st'.nd in her
walls are worthy of reverence, and the soil wljere slie .sit.i wortliy
beyond what is preached and admitted of men." (Convito, Tr- IV.
c. 5.)
DANTE. 85
Hitherto he had celebrated beauty and goodness in the
creature ; henceforth he was to celebrate them in the
Creator whose praise they were.* We give an extem-
pore translation of this sonnet, in which the meaning is
preserved so far as is possible where the grace is left
out. We remember with some compunction as we do
it, that Dante has said, " know every one that nothing
harmonized by a musical band can be transmuted from
its own speech to another without breaking all its
sweetness and harmony," f and Cervantes was of the
same mind : :{: —
"Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre
Passeth the sigh § that leaves my heart below ;
A new intelligence doth love bestow
On it with tears that ever draws it higher;
When it wins thither where is its desire,
A Lady it beholds who honor so
And light receives, that, throngh her splendid glow,
* Beatrice, loda di Bio vera, Inferno, II. 103. "Snrely vain are
all men by nature who are ignorant of God, and coidd not out of the
good things that are seen know him that is, neither by considering
tlie works did they acknowledge the work-master For, being
conversant in his works, they search diligently and believe their sight,
because the things are beautiful that are seen. Howheit, neither are
they to be pardoned." (Wisdom of Solomon, XIII. 1, 7, 8.) Non
adornr debitamente Dio. " For the invisible things of him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things
that are made, even his eternal power and godhead ; so that they are
without excuse." It was these "invisible things" whereof Dante
was beginning to get a glimpse.
+ Convito, Tr. 1 c. 7.
+ "And here we would have forgiven Mr. Captain if he had not
betrayed him (traldo, traduitore traditore) to Spain and inade him a
Castilian, for he took away much of his native worth, and so will all
those do who shall undertake to turn a poem into another tongue ;
for with all the care they take and ability they show, they will never
reach the height of its original conception," says the Curate, speak-
ing of a translation of Ariosto. (Don Quixote, P. I. c. 6.)
§ In his own comment Dante says, " I tell whither goes my thought,
calling it by the name of one of its effects. "
86 DANTE.
The pilgrim spirit * sees her as in fire ;
It sees her such, that, telling me again
I understand it not, it speaks so low
Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell j
Its spp.ecli is of that noble One I know,
For ' Beatrice ' I often hear full plain.
So that, dear ladies, I conceivi it well."
No one can read this in its connection with what goes
before and what follows without feeling that a new con-
ception of Beatrice had dawned upon the mind of Dante,
dim as yet, or purposely made to seem so, and yet the
authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising as the
light of his day and the guide of his feet, the divine
wisdom whose glory pales all meaner stars. The con-
ception of a poem in which Dante's creed in politics and
morals should be picturesquely and attractively embodied,
and of the high place which Beatrice should take in it,
had begun vaguely to shape itself in his thought. As
he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself clearly.
" Soon after this sonnet there appeared to me a marvel-
lous vision t wherein I saw things which made me pro-
pose not to say more of that blessed one until I could
treat of her more worthily. And to arrive at that I
study all I can, as she verily knows. So that, if it be
the pleasure of Him through whom all things live, that
my life hold out yet a few years, 1 hope to say that of
her which was never yet said of any (woman). And
then may it please Him who is the Lord of Courtesy
that my soul may go to see the glory of her Lady, that
is, of that blessed Beatrice who gloriously beholds the
face of Him qui est per OTnnia scecula benedictiis." It was
the method of presentation that became clear to Dante
* Spirito means in Italian both breath (spirto ed acqua fessi, Purga-
torio, XXX. 98) and spirit.
+ By visione Dante means something seen waking by the inner eye.
He believed also that dreams were sometimes divinely inspired, and
argues from such the immortality of the soul. (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9.)
DANTE. 87
at this time, — the plan of the great poem for whose
completion the experience of earth and the inspiration of
heaven were to combine, and which was to make him
lean for many years.* The doctrinal scope of it was
already determined. Man, he tells us, is the only crea-
ture who partakes at once of the corruptible and in-
corruptible nature; "and since every nature is ordained
to some ultimate end, it follows that the end of man is
double. And as aniong all beings he alone partakes of
the corruptible and incorruptible, so alone among all
beings he is ordained to a double end, whereof the one
is his end as corruptible, the other as incorruptible.
That unspeakable Providence therefore foreordered two
ends to be pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this
life, which consists in the operation of our own virtue,
and is figured by the Terrestrial Paradise, and the beati-
tude of life eternal, which consists in a fruition of the
divine countenance, whereto our own virtue cannot
ascend unless aided by divine light, which is understood
by the Celestial Paradise." The one we attain by
practice of the moral and intellectual virtues as they
are taught by philosophers, the other by spiritual teach-
ings transcending human reason, and the practice of the
theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. For
one, Reason suffices (" which was wholly made known
to us by philosophers "), for the other we need the light
of supernatural truth revealed by the Holy Spirit and
"needful for us." Men led astray by cupidity turn
their backs on both, and in their bestiality need bit and
rein to keep them in the way. " Wherefore to man
was a double guidance needful according to the double
end," the Supreme Pontiff in spiritual, the Emperor in
temporal things.f
* Paradiso, XXV. 1-3.
+ De Monarchia, Lib. III. § ult. See the whole passage in Miss Ros-
88 DANTE.
But how to put this theory of his into a poetic form
which might charm while it was teaching 1 He would
typify Reason in Virgil (who would serve also as a
symbol of political wisdom as having celebrated the
founding of the Empire), and the grace of God in that
Beatrice whom he had already supernaturalized into
something which passeth all understanding. In choos-
ing Virgil he was sure of that interest and sympathy
which his instinct led him to seek in the predisposition
of his readers, for the popular imagination of the Middle
Ages had busied itself particularly with the Mantuan
poet. The Church had given him a quasi-orthodox3r by
interpreting his jam redit et virgo as a prophecy of the
birth of Chi-ist. At Naples he had become a kind of
patron saint, and his bones were exhibited as relics.
Dante himself may have heard at Mantua the hymn
sung on the annivei-sary of St. Paul, in which the apostle
to the Gentiles is represented as weeping at the tomb
of the greatest of poets. Above all, Virgil had described
the descent of yEneas to the under-world. Dante's
choice of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made
for him. But the mere Reason * of man without the
setti, p. 39. It is noticeable that Dante says that the Pope is to had
(by example), the Emperor to direct (by the enforcing of justice). The
duty, we are to observe, was a double but not a divided one. To ex-
emplify this unity was indeed one object of the Conimedia.
* " What Reason seeth here
Myself [Virgil] can tell thee ; beyond that await
For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of Faith." — Purgatorio, XVIII. 46 -4S.
Beatrice here evidently impersonates Theology. It would be inter-
esting to know what was the precise date of Dante's theological studies.
The earlier commentators all make him go to Paris, the great foun-
tain of such learning, after his banishment. Boccaccio indeed says
that he did not return to Italy till 1311. Wegele (Dante's " Leben und
Werke," p. 85) puts the date of Ins journey between 1292 and 1297.
Ozanam, with a pathos comically touchingto the academic soul, laments
that poverty compelled him to leave the university without the degree
he had so justly earned. He consoles himself with the thought that
DANTE. 89
illumination of divine Grace cannot be trusted, and
accordingly the intervention of Beatrice was needed, —
of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably well expresses
it, " already transfigured, potent not only now to charm
and soothe, potent to rule ; to the Intellect a light, to
the Affections a compass and a balance, a sceptre over
the Will."
The wood obscure in which Dante finds himself is the
world.* The three beasts who dispute his way are the
sins that most easily beset us, Pride, the Lusts of the
Flesh, and Greed. We are surprised that Miss Rossetti
should so localize and confine Dante's meaning as to
explain them by Florence, France, and Rome. Had he
written in so narrow a sense as this, it would indeed be
hard to account for the persistent power of his poem.
But it was no political pamphlet that Dante was writing.
Snbjectum est Homo, and it only takes the form of a
diary by Dante Alighieri because of the intense realism
of his imagination, a realism as striking in the Paradiso
as the Inferno, though it takes a different shape. Every-
thing, the most supersensual, presented itself to his
mind, not as abstract idea, but as visible type. As
men could once embody a quality of good in a saint and
see it, as they even now in moments of heightened fan-
tasy or enthusiasm can personify their country and
" there remained to him an incontestable erudition and the love of
serious studies." (Dante et la philosophie catholique, p. 112.) It is sad
that we cannot write Dantes Alighierius, S. T. D.l Dante seems to
imply that he began to devote himself to Philosophy and Theology
shortly after Beatrice's death. (Convito, Tr. II. c. 13.) He compares
himself to one who, " seeking silver, should, without meaning it, find
gold, which an occult cause presents to him, not perhaps without the
divine command." Here again apparently is an allusion to his having
found Wisdom while he sought Learning. He had thoiight to find
God in the beauty of his works, he learned to seek all things in God.
* In a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses, no
doubt with a recollection of Aristotle's \i\r).
90 DANTE.
speak of England, France, or America, as if they were
real beings, so did Dante habitually.* He saw all his
thoughts as distinctly as the hypochondriac sees his
black dog, and, as in that, their form and color were
but the outward form of an inward and spiritual con-
dition. Whatever subsidiary interpretations the poem
is capable of, its great and primary value is as the auto-
biography of a human soul, of yours and mine, it may
be, as well as Dante's. In that lie its profound mean-
ing and its permanent force. That an exile, a proud
man forced to be dependent, shoiild have found some
consolation in brooding over the justice of God, weighed
in such different scales from those of man, in contrast-
ing the outward prosperity of the sinner with the awful
spiritual ruin within, is not wonderful, nay, we can con-
ceive of his sometimes finding the wrath of God sweeter
than his mercy. But it is wonderful that out of the
very wreck of his own life he should have built this
three-arched bridge, still firm against the wash and
wear of ages, stretching from the Pit to the Empyrean,
by which men may pass from a doubt of God's provi-
dence to a certainty of his long-suffering and loving-
kindness.
" The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms
That it receives whatever turns to it." +
A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of them. J
It cannot be too often repeated that Dante's Other
World is not in its first conception a place of departed
spirits. It is the Spiritual World, whereof we become
denizens by birth and citizens by adoption. It is true
that for artistic purposes he makes it conform so far as
* As we have seen, even a sigh becomes He. This makes one of the
difficulties of translating his minor poems. The modern mind is
incapable of this subtlety.
+ Purgatorio, III. 122, 123.
X Purgatorio, V. 107.
DANTE. 91
possible with vulgar preconceptions, but he himself has
told us again and again what his real meaning was.
Virgil tells Dante, —
" Tliou shalt behold the people dolorous
Who liave foregone the good of intellect." *
The "good of the intellect," Dante tells us after Aris-
totle, is Truth. t He says that Virgil has led hira
"through the deep night of the truly dead."^ Who
are they 1 Dante had in mind the saying of the Apostle,
" to be carnally minded is death." He says : " In man
to live is to use reason. Then if living is the being
of man, to depart from that use is to depart from being,
and so to be dead. And doth not he depart from the
use of reason who doth not reason out the object of his
life 1" "1 say that so vile a person is dead, seeming to
be alive. For we must know that the ivicked man may
he called truly dead." " He is dead who follows not the
teacher. And of such a one some might say, how is he
dead and yet goes about 1 I answer that the man is
dead and the beast remains." § Accordingly he has put
living persons in the Inferno, like Frate Alberigo and
Branca d' Oria, of whom he says with bitter sarcasm
that he still " eats and drinks and puts on clothes," as
if that were his highest ideal of the true ends of life. ||
There is a passage in the first canto of the InfernoVi
which has been variously interpreted : —
" The ancient spirits disconsolate
Who cry out each one for the second death.'"
Miss Rossetti cites it as an example of what she felici-
tously calls " an ambiguity, not hazy, but prismatic, and
* Inferno, Til. 17, 18 {hnnno perduto = thrown away).
+ Convito, Tr. IT. c. 14.
} Purgatorio, XXIII. 121, 122.
§ Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7.
11 Inferno, XXXIII. 118, et seq. • _ .
U Inferno, I. 116, 117. L
92 DANTE.
therefore not really perplexing." She gives us accord-
ingly our choice of two interpretations, " ' each cries
out on accovint of the second death which he is suffer-
ing,' and ' each cries out for death to come a second
time and ease him of his sufferings.' " * Buti says :
*.' Here one doubts what the author meant by the second
death, and as for me I think he meant the last damna-
tion, which shall be at the da^^ of judgment, because
they would wish through envy that it had already come,
that they might have niore companions, since the first
death is the first damnation, when the soul parted from
the body is condemned to the pains of hell for its sins.
The second is when, resuscitated at the judgment day,
they shall be finally condemned, soul and body together.
.... It may otherwise be understood as annihilation."
Imola saj'S, " Each woidd wish to die again, if he could,
to put an end to his pain. Do not hold with some who
think that Dante calls the second death the day of
judgment,"and then quotes a passage from St. Augustine
which favors that view. Pietro di Dante gives us four
interpretations among which to choose, the first being
that, " allegorically, depraved and viciovis men are in a
certain sense dead in reputation, and this is the first
death ; the second is that of the body." This we believe
to be the true meaning. Dante himself, in a letter to
the " most rascally (scelestissimis) dwellers in Florence,"
gives us the key : " but you, transgressors of the laws
of God and man, whom the direful maw of cupidity hath
enticed not unwilling to every crime, does not the ter-
ror of the second death torment you 1 " Their first death
was in their sins, the second is what they may expect
from the just vengeance of the Emperor Henry VII.
The world Dante leads us through is that of his own
* Mr. Longfellow's ybr, like the Italian /?er, gives lis the same privi-
l»ge of election. We " freeze for cold," we "hunger for food."
DANTE. 93
thought, and it need not surprise us therefore if we
meet in it purely imaginary beings like Tristrem * and
Renoard of the club.t His personality is so strongly
marked that it is nothing more than natural that his
poem should be interpreted as if only he and his opin-
ions, prejudices, or passions were concerned. He would
not have been the great poet he was if he had not felt
intensely and humanly, but he coidd never have won
the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how
to generalize his special experience into something me-
diatorial for all of us. Pietro di Dante in his comment
on the thirty-first canto of the Purgatorio says that
"unless you understand him and his figures allegori-
cally, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that
our author made his pilgrimage as the representative of
the rest (iVi persoria ceterorum).% To give his vision
reality, he has adapted it to the A'^ulgar mytholog}^, but
to understand it as the author meant, it must be taken
in the larger sense. To confine it to Florence or to
Italy is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind.
It was not from the campanile of the Badia that Dante
got his views of life and man.
* Inferno, V. 67.
+ Parartiso, XVIII. 46. Eenoard is one of the heroes {a rudely
huniorous one) in " La Bataille d'Alischans," an episode of the nieas-
iireless " Guillaun)e d'Orange." It was from the graves of those sup-
posed to have been killed in this battle that Dante draws a comparison.
Inferno, IX. Boccaccio's comment on this passage might have been
read to advantage by the French editors of "Alischans."
X We cite this comment under its received name, though it is \incer-
tain if Pietro was the author of it. Indeed, we strongly doubt it.
It is at least one of tlie earliest, for it appears, by the eorament on
Paradiso, XXVI., that the greater part of it was written before 13-11.
It is remarkable for the strictness with which it holds to the spiritual
interpretation of the poem, ami deserves much more to be called
Ottimo, than the comment which goes by that name. Its publication
is due to the zeal and liberality of tlie late Lord Vernon, to whom
students of Dante are also indebted for the parallel-text reprint of the
four earliest editions of the Commedia.
94 DANTE.
The relation of Dante to literature is monumental,
and marks the era at which the modern begins. He is
not only the first great poet, but the first great prose
writer who used a language not yet subdued to litera-
ture, who used it moreover for scientific and metaphys-
ical discussion, thus giving an incalculable impulse to
the culture of his countrymen by making the laity free
of what had hitherto been the exclusive guild of clerks.*
Whatever poetry had preceded him, whether in the
Romance or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for
its simplicity without forethought, or, as in the Nihe-
lungen, for a kind of savage grandeur that rouses the
sympathy of whatever of the natural man is dormant
in us. But it shows no trace of the creative faculty
either in unity of purpose or style, the proper charac-
teristics of literature. If it have the charm of wanting
artifice, it has not the higher charm of art. We are in
the realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with phosphor-
escent gleams here and there, star-stuff", but uncondensed
in stars. The Nihdiingen is not without far-reaching
liints and forebodings of something finer than we find
in it, but they are a glamour from the vague dark-
ness which encircles it, like the whisper of the sea
upon an unknown shore at night, powerful only over
the more vulgar side of the imagination, and leaving no
thought, scarce even any image (at least of beauty) be-
hind them. Such jwems are the amours, not the last-
ing friendships and possessions of the mind. They
thrill and cannot satisfy.
* See Wegele, vhi supra, p. 174, et seq. The best, analysis of Dante's
oiJinions we have ever met with is Eniil Ruth's "Studien ilber Dante
Alighieri," Tubingen, 1853. Unhapjiily it wants an index, and accord-
ingly loses a great part of its usefulness for those not already familiar
with the subject. Nor are its references sufficiently exact. We always
respect Dr. Ruth's opinions, if we do not wholly accept them, for
they are all the results of original and assiduous study.
DANTE. 95
But Dante is not merely the founder of modern liter-
ature. He would have been that if he had never writ-
ten anything more than his Canzoni, which for elegance,
variety of rhythm, and fervor of sentiment were some-
thing altogether new. They are of a higher mood than
any other poems of the same style in their own lan-
guage, or indeed in any other. In beauty of phrase and
subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the
Greek tragic choruses. We are constantly moved in
them by a nobleness of tone, whose absence in many
admired lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by con-
ceits. So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material,
that in compositions, as he himself has shown, so artifi-
cial,* the form seems rather organic than mechanical,
which cannot be said of the best of the Provenqal poets
who led the way in this kind. Dante's sonnets also
have a grace and tenderness which have been seldom
matched. His lyrical excellence would have got him
into the Collections, and he would have made hei-e and
there an enthusiast as Donne does in English, but his
great claim to remembrance is not merely Italian. It
is that he was the first Christian poet, in any proper
sense of the word, the first who so subdued dogma to
the uses of plastic imagination as to make something
that is still poetry of the highest order after it has suf-
fered the disenchantment inevitable in the most perfect
translation. Verses of the kind usually called sacred
* See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloqnio. The only other
Italian poet who reminds us of Dante in sustained dignity is Guido
Guiuicelli. Dante esteemed him higlily, calls him maximus in the De
Vulgari Eloquio, and " the father of me and of my betters," in the
XXVI. Purgatorio- See some excellent specimens of him in Mr. D. G.
Rossetti's remarkable volume of translations from the early Italian
poets. Mr. Rossetti would do a real and lasting service to literature
by employing his singular gift in putting Dante's minor poems into
English.
96 DANTE.
(reminding one of the adjective's double meaning) had
been written before his time in the vulgar tongue, —
such verses as remain inviolably sacred in the volumes
of specimens, looked at with distant reverence by the
pious, and with far other feelings by the profane reader.
There were cycles of poems in which the physical con-
flict between Christianity and Paganism* furnished the
subject, but in which the theological views of the au-
thors, whether doctrinal or historical, could hardly be
reconciled with any system of religion ancient or mod-
ern. There were Church legends of saints and martyrs
versified, fit certainly to make any other form of mar-
tyrdom seem amiable to those who heard them, and to
suggest palliative thoughts about Diocletian. Finally,
there were the romances of Arthur and his knights,
which later, by means of allegor)', contrived to be both
entertaining and edifying ; every one who listened to
them paying the minstrel his money, and having his
choice whether he would take them as song or sermon.
In the heroes of some of these certain Christian virtues
were typified, and around a few of them, as the Holy
Grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered piety and with-
drawal. Wolfram von Eschenbach, indeed, has divided
his Parzival into three books, of Simplicit}', Doubt, and
Healing, which has led Gervinus to trace a not alto-
gether fanciful analogy between that poem and the
Divina Commedia. The doughty old poet, who says of
himself, —
" Of song I hare some slight control.
But deem her of a feeble soul
That doth not love my naked sword
Above my sweetest lyric word,"
tells us that his subject is the choice between good and
evil;
* The old French poems confound all unbelievers together as pa-
gans and worshippers of idols.
DANTE. ' 97
*' Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride
And sets himself on Evil's side,
Chooses the Black, and sure it is
His path leads down to the abyss ;
But he wlio doth his nature feed
With steadfastness and loyal deed
Lies open to the heavenly light
And talces his portion with the Wliite."
But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows good
feeling rather than settled conviction. Above all it is
wandering (as he himself confesses), and altogether
wants any controlling purpose. But to whatever extent
Christianity had insinuated itself into and colored Eu-
ropean literature, it was mainly as mythology. The
Christian idea had never yet incorporated itself. It
was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully
what he accomplished we must form some conception of
what is meant by the Christian idea. To bring it into
fuller relief, let us contrast it with the Greek idea as it
appears in poetry ; for we are not dealing with a ques-
tion of theology so much as with one of sesthetics.
Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the most
perfect that we know. But its circle of motives was
essentially limited ; and the Greek drama in its passion,
its pathos, and its humor is primarily Greek, and secon-
darily human. Its tragedy chooses its actors from cer-
tain heroic families, and finds its springs of pity and
terror in physical suffering and worldly misfortune. Its
best examples, like the Antigone, illustrate a single duty,
or, like the Hippolytus, a single passion, on which, as on
a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in its
details, revolves as pieces of sculptxire are sometimes
made to do, displaying its different sides in one invaria-
ble light. The general impression left on the mind (and
this is apt to be a truer one than any di'awn from single
examples) is that the duty is one which is owed to cus-
5 o
98 DANTE.
torn, that the passion leads to a breach of some conven-
tion settled by common consent,* and accordingly it is
an outraged society whose figure looms in the hack-
ground, rather than an offended God. At most it was
one god of many, and meanwhile another might be
friendly. In the Greek epic, the gods are partisans,
they hold caucuses, they lobby and log-roll for their can-
didates. The tacit admission of a revealed code of mor-
als wrought a great change. The complexity and range
of passion is vastly increased when the offence is at once
both crime and sin, a wrong done against order and
against conscience at the same time. The relation of
the Greek Tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly an-
tagonistic, struggle against an implacable destiny, sub-
lime struggle, and of heroes, but sure of defeat at last.
And that defeat is final. Grand figures are those it ex-
hibits to us, in some respects unequalled, and in their
severe simplicity they compare with modern poetry as
sculpture with painting. Considered merely as works
of art, these products of the Greek imagination satisfy
our highest conception of form. They suggest inevi-
tably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and
independence, of something rounded and finished in
itself. The secret of those old shapers died with them ;
their wand is broken, their book sunk deeper than ever
plummet sounded. The type of their work is the Greek
Temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity and
perfection of design, in harmony and subordination of
parts, and in entireness of impression. But in this
aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly and
complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there
with it.
- Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the dif-
ference is that with him society is sometliitig divinely ordained. He
follows Aristotle pretty closely, but on his own theory crime and sin
are identical.
DANTE. 99
Now the Christian idea has to do with the human
soul, which Christianity may be almost said to have iu'
vented. While all Paganism represents a few pre-emi-
nent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of
races, as of kin with the gods, Christianity makes every
pedigree end in Deity, makes monarch and slave the
children of one God. Its heroes struggle not against,
but upward and onward toward, the higher powers who
are always on their side. Its highest conception of
beauty is not aesthetic, but moral. With it prosperity
and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds ene-
mies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pagan and
even Hebrew literature saw the highest l)lessing, and in-
vincible allies in sorrow, poverty, humbleness of station,
where the former world i-ecognized only implacable foes.
While it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or
country and made mankind unitary, its hero is always
the individual man whoever and wherever he may be.
Above all, an entirely new conception of the Infinite
and of man's relation to it came in with Christianity.
That, and not the finite, is always the background, con-
sciously or not. It changed the scene of the last act of
every drama to the next world. Endless aspiration of
all the faculties became thus the ideal of Christian life,
and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal of
essentially Christian art. It was this which the jNIiddle
Ages instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral, —
no accidental growth, but the visible symbol of an in-
ward faith, — which soars forever upward, and yearns
toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly tiu'ned to
stone.
It is not without significance that Goethe, who, like
Dante, also absorbed and represented the tendency and
spirit of his age, should, during his youth and while
Europe was alive with the moral and intellectual longing
100 DANTE.
which preUided the French Revohition, have loved the
Gothic architecture. It is no less significant that in
the period of reaction toward more positive thought
which followed, he should have preferred the Greek.
His greatest poem, conceived during the former era, is
Gothic. Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to lit-
erary tradition, began to write the Divina Commedia in
Latin, and had elaborated several cantos of it in that
dead and intractable material. But that poetic instinct,
which is never the instinct of an individual, but of his
age, could not so be satisfied, and leaving the classic
structure he had begun to stand as a monument of
failure, he completed his work in Italian. Instead of
endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what
was foreign and artificial, he let the poem make itself
out of him. The epic which he wished to write in the
universal language of scholars, and which might have
had its ten lines in the history of literature, would sing
itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out to be written
in the universal dialect of mankind. Thus all great
poets have been in a certain sense provincial, — Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the " Heart
of Midlothian " and "Bride of Lammermoor," — because
the office of the poet is always vicarious, because noth-
ing that has not been living experience can become liv-
ing expression, because the collective thought, the faith,
the desire of a nation or a race, is the cumulative result
of many ages, is something organic, and is wiser and
stronger than any single person, and will make a great
statesman or a great poet out of any man who can en-
tirely surrender himself to it.
As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the
Christian idea, so is it also of Dante's poem. And as
that in its artistic unity is but the completed thought
of a single architect, which yet could never have been
DANTE. 101
realized except out of the faith and by the contributions
of an entire people, whose beliefs and superstitions,
whose imagination and fancy, find expression in its
statues and its carvings, its calm saints and martyrs
now at rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied
niches, and its wanton grotesques thrusting themselves
forth from every pinnacle and gargoyle, so in Dante's
poem, while it is as personal and peculiar as if it were
his private journal and autobiography, we can yet read
the diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth cen-
tury and of the Italian people. Complete and harmoni-
ous in design as his work is, it is yet no Pagan temple
enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph
of corporeal beaiity ; it is not a private chapel housing
a single saint and dedicate to one chosen bloom of
Christian piety or devotion ; it is truly a cathedral, over
whose high altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the
Divine made human to teach the beauty of adversity,
the eternal presence of the spiritual, not overhanging
and threatening, but informing and sustaining the ma-
terial. In this cathedral of Dante's there are side-chap-
els as is fit, with altars to all Christian virtues and per-
fections ; but the great impression of its leading thought
is that of aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three
divisions of the poem we may trace something more than
a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica. There is
first the ethnic forecourt, then the purgatorial middle-
space, and last the holy of holies dedicated to the eter-
nal presence of the mediatorial God.
But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to the
title of the first Christian poem is not merely its doc-
trinal truth or its Christian mythology, but the fact
that the scene of it is laid, not in this world, but in the
soul of man ; that it is the allegory of a human life,
and therefore universal in its significance and its appli-
102 DANTE.
cation. The genius of Dante has given to it such a
self-subsistent reality, that one almost gets to feel as
if the chief value of contemporary Italian history had
been to furnish it with explanatory foot-notes, and the
age in which it was written assumes towards it the
place of a satellite. For Italy, Dante is the thirteenth
century.
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried
sealed orders which they were not to open till they
were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had made up his
mind as to the true purpose and meaning of our exist-
ence in this world, shortly after he had passed his
twenty-fifth year. He had already conceived the sys-
tem about which as a connecting thread the whole
experience of his life, the whole result of his studies,
was to cluster in imperishable crystals. The corner-
stone of his system was the Freedom of the Will (in
other words, the right of private judgment with the
condition of accountability), which Beatrice calls the
" noble virtue." * As to every man is offered his choice
between good and evil, and as, even upon the root of
a nature originally evil a habit of virtue may be en-
grafted,t no man is excused. "All hope abandon ye
who enter in," for they have thrown away reason which
is the good of the intellect, " and it seems to me no
less a marvel to bring back to reason him in whom
it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him who
* Purgatorio, XVIII. 73. He defines it in theDe Monarclna(Lib. I.
§ 14). Among other things he calls it " the first beginning of our
liberty." Paradiso, V. 19, 20, he calls it " the greatest gift that in his
largess God creating made." "Dice quod judicium medium est ap-
preheusionis et appetitus." (De Monarchia, uhi supra.)
" Riglit and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides."
Troilus and Cressida.
+ Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22.
DANTE. 103
has been four days in the tomb."* As a guide of
the will in civil affairs the Emperor ; in spiritual, the
Pope.f Dante is not one of those reformers who would
assume the office of God to "make all things new."
He knew the power of tradition and habit, and wished
to utilize it for his purpose. He found the Empire and
the Papacy already existing, but both needing reforma
tion that they might serve the ends of their original
institution. Bad leadership was to blame; men •fit to
gird on the sword had been turned into priests, and
good preachers spoiled to make bad kings. | The spirit-
ual had usurped to itself the prerogatives of the tem-
poral power.
" Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was
Two suns to have which one road and the other.
Of God and of the world, made manifest.
One has the other quenched, and to the crosier
The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it,
Because, heing joined one feareth not the other." §
Both powers held their authority directly from God,
" not so, however, that the Roman Prince is not in
some things subject to the Roman Pontiff, since that
human felicity [to be attained only by peace, justice,
and good government, possible only under a single
_ruler] is in some sort ordained to the end of immortal
felicity. Let Caesar use that reverence toward Peter
which a first-born son ought to use toward a father ;
that, shone upon by the light of paternal grace, he may
* Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7. " Qui descenderit ad inferos, non ascen-
det." Job vii. 9.
+ But it may be infeiTed that he put the interests of mankind above
both. "For citizens," he says, "exist not for the sake of consuls,
nor the people for the sake of the king, but, on the contrary, consuls
for the sake of citizens, and the king for the sake of the people."
+ Paradiso, VIII. 145, 146.
§ Purgatorio, XVI. 106-112.
104 DANTE.
more powerfully illumine the orb of earth over which
he is set by him alone who is the ruler of all things
spiritual and temporal." * As to the fatal gift of Con-
stantine, Dante demonstrates that an Emperor could not
alienate what he held only in trust ; but if he made the
gift, the Pope should hold it as a feudatory of the
Empire, for the benefit, however, of Christ's poor.t
Dante is always careful to distinguish between the
Papaey and the Pope. He prophesies for Boniface
VIII. a place in hell,| but acknowledges him as the
Vicar of Christ, goes so far even as to denounce the out-
rage of Guillaume de Nogaret at Anagni as done to the
Saviour himself § But in the Spiritual World Dante
acknowledges no such supremacy, and, when he would
have fallen on his knees before Adrian V., is rebuked by
him in a quotation from the Apocalypse : —
" Err not, fellow-servant am I
With thee and with the others to one powei'." 1|
So impartial was this man whose great work is so often
represented as a kind of bag in which he secreted the
gall of personal prejudice, so truly Catholic is he, that
both parties find their arsenal in him. The Romanist
proves his soundness in doctrine, the anti-Romanist
claims him as the first Protestant ; the Mazzinist and
* De Monarchia, § ult.
+ De Monarchia, Lib. III. § 10. " Poterat tamen Imperator in patro-
cinium Ecclesise patriinoniiim et alia deputare inimoto semper superi-
ori dominio ciijus nnitas divisio non patitur. Poterat et Vicarins Dei
recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed tanqnam frnctuum pro Ecclesia
proque Christi pauperibus dispensator." He tells ns tliat St. Dominic
did not ask for the tithes which belong to the poor of God. (Paradiso,
XII. 93, 94.) "Let them return whence they came," lie says (De Mo-
narchia, Lib. II. § 10) ; "they came well, let them return ill, for they
Were well given and ill held."
+ Inferno, XIX. 53 ; Paradiso, XXX. 145-148.
§ Purgatorio, XX. 86-92.
B Purgatorio, XIX. 134, 135.
DANTR 105
the Imperialist can alike quote him for their purpose,
Dante's ardent conviction would not let him see that
both Church and Enipii-e were on the wane. If an
iigly suspicion of this would force itself upon him,
perhaps he only clung to both the more tenaciously ;
but he was no blind theorist. He would reform the
Church through the Church, and is less anxious for
Italian independence than for Italian good government
under an Emperor from Germany rather than from
Utopia.
The Papacy was a necessary part of Dante's system,
as a supplement to the Empire, which we strongly in-
cline to believe was always foremost in his mind. In a
passage already quoted, he says that "the soil where
Home sits is worthy beyond what men preach and
admit," that is, as the birthplace of the Empire. Both
in the Convito and the De Mmiarchia he affirms that
the course of Roman history was providentially guided
from the first. Rome was founded in the same year
that brought into the world David, ancestor of the
Redeemer after the flesh. St. Augustine said that "God
showed in the most opulent and illustrious Empire of
the Romans how much the civil virtues might avail
even without true religion, that it might be understood
how, this added, men became citizens of another city
whose king is truth, whose law chai'ity, and whose
measure eternity." Dante goes further than this. He
makes the Romans as well as the Jews a chosen people,
the one as founders of civil society, the other as de-
positaries of the true faith.* One side of Dante's mind
* This results from the whole course of his argument in the second
book of De Monarchia, and in the VI. Paradiso he calls the Ro-
man eagle "the bird of God " and " the scutcheon of God." We must
remember that with Dante God is always the "Emperor of Heaven,"
the barons of whose court are the Apostles. (Paradiso, XXTV. 115;
lb., XXV. 17.)
5 *
106 DANTE.
was so practical and positive, and his pride in the
Romans so intense,* that he sometimes seems to regard
their mission as the higher of the two. Without peace,
which only good government could give, mankind could
not arrive at the highest virtue, whether of ttie active
or contemplative life. "And since what is true of the
part is true of the whole, and it happens in the par-
ticular man that by sitting quietly he is perfected in
prudence and wisdom, it is clear that the human race
in the quiet or tranquillity of peace is most freely and
easily disposed for its proper work which is almost di-
vine, as it is written, ' Thou hast made him a little lower
than the angels.' f Whence it is manifest that univer-
sal peace is the best of those things wliich are ordained
for our beatitude. Hence it is that not riches, not
pleasures, not honors, not length of life, not health, not
strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shepherds from
on high, but peace." :|; It was Dante's experience of the
confusion of Italy, where
" One doth gnaw the other
Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in/' §
that suggested the thought of a universal umpire, for
that, after all, was to be the chief function of his Em-
peror. He was too wise to insist on a uniformity of
political institutions a priori, \\ for he seems to have
* Dante seems to imply (though his name be German) that he was
of Roman descent. He makes the original inhabitants of Florence
(Inferno, XV. 77, 78) of Roman seed ; and Cacciaguida, when asked
by him about liis ancestry, makes no more definite answer than that
their dwelling was in the most ancient part of the city. (Paradiso,
XVI. 40.)
*t* Man was created, according to Dante (Convito, Tr. II. c. 6), to
supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a sense superior to the
angels, inasmuch as he has rea.son, which they do uot need.
+ De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 5.
§ Purgatorio, VI. 83, 84.
H De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 16.
DANTE.
107
divined that the surest stay of order, as of practical wis-
dom, is habit, which is a growth, and cannot be made off-
hand. He believed with Aristotle that vigorous minds
were intended by nature to rule,* and that certain races,
like certain men, are born to leadership.t He calls de-
mocracies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms {tyrannides)
" oblique policies which drive the human race to slavery,
as is patent in all of them to one who reasons." J He
has nothing but pity for mankind when it has become a
many-headed beast, "despising the higher intellect ir-
refragable in reason, the lower which hath the face of
experience." § He had no faith in a turbulent equality
asserting the divine right of I'm as good as you. He
thought it fatal to all discipline : " The confounding of
persons hath ever been the beginning of sickness in the
state." II It is the same thought which Shakespeare
puts in the mouth of Ulysses : —
" Degree being vizardecl,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask,
When degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick." 1[
Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he had
a high sense of the worth of freedom, whether in thought
or government. He represents, indeed, the very object
of his journey through the triple realm of shades as a
search after liberty.** But it must not be that scram-
ble after ixndefined and indefinable rights which ends
always in despotism, equally degrading whether crowned
with a red cap or an imperial diadem. His theory of
* De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 5. X Dr Monarchia, Lib. I. § 14.
+ De Monarchia, Lib. II. § 7. § De Monarchia, Lib. I. § 13.
I! Purgatorio, XVI. 67, 68.
f "Troilus and Cressida," Act I. s. 3. The whole speech is very
remarkable both in thought and phrase,
** Purgatorio, I. 71,
108 DANTE.
liberty has for its corner-stone the Freedom of the Will,
and the will is free only when the judgment wholly con-
trols the appetite.* On such a base even a democracy
may rest secure, and on such alone.
Rome was always the central point of Dante's specu-
lation. A shadow of her old sovereignty was still left
her in the primacy of the Church, to which unity of faith
was essential. He accordingly has no sympathy with
heretics of whatever kind. He puts the ex-troubadour
Bishop of Marseilles, chief instigator of the horrors of
Provence, in paradise. t The Church is infallible in
spiritual matters, but this is an affair of outward dis-
cipline merely, and means the Church as a form of pol-
ity. Unity was Dante's leading doctrine, and therefore
he puts Mahomet among the schismatics, not because he
divided the Church, but the faith. J Dante's Church was
of this world, but he surely believed in another and
spiritual one. It has been questioned whether he was
orthodox or not. There can be no doubt of it so far
as outward assent and conformity are concerned, which
he would practice himself and enforce upon others as
the first postulate of order, the prerequisite for all hap-
piness in this life. In regard to the Visible Church he
was a reformer, but no revolutionist ; it is sheer igno-
rance to speak of him as if there were anything new or
exceptional in his denunciation of the corruptions of
the clergy. They were the commonplaces of the age,
nor were they confined to laymen. § To the absolute
authority of the Church Dante admitted some excep-
tions. He denies that the supreme Pontiff" has the un-
* De Monarcliia, Lib. I. § 14. f Paradiso, IX.
+ Inferno, XXXVIII. ; Purgatorio, XXXII.
§ See the poems of Walter Mapes (who was Archdeacon of Oxford);
the "Bible Guiot," and the "Bible au seignor de Berze," Barbazau
and Mdon, II.
DANTE. 109
limited power of binding and loosing claimed for him,
" Otherwise he might absolve me impenitent, which God
himself could not do." *
" By malison of theirs is not so lost
Eternal Love that it cannot return." +
Nor does the sacredness of the office extend to him who
chances to hold it. Philip the Fair himself could hard-
ly treat Boniface VIII. worse than he. With wonder-
ful audacity, he declares the Papal throne vacant by
the mouth of Saint Peter himself J Even if his theory
of a dual government were not in question, Dante must
have been very cautious in meddling with the Church.
It was not an age that stood much upon ceremony. He
himself tells us he had seen men burned alive, and the
author of the Ottimo Comento says : " I the writer saw
followers of his [Fra Dolcino] burned at Padua to the
number of twenty-two together."§ Clearly, in such a
time as this, one must not make "the veil of the mys-
terious verse" too thin. ||
In the affairs of this life Dante was, as we have said,
supremely practical, and he makes prudence the chief
of the cardinal virtues. U He has made up his mind to
take things as they come, and to do at Rome as the
Romans do.
" Ah, savage company ! but in the Church
With saints, and in the tavern virith the gluttons ! " **
In the world of thought it was otherwise, and here
Dante's doctrine, if not precisely esoteric, was certainly
not that of his day, and must be gathered from hints
* De Monarchia, Lib. IIL § 8.
t Purgatorio, IIL 133, 134.
+ Paradise, XXVII. 22.
§ Purgatorio, XXVII. 18 ; Ottimo, Inferno, XXVIII. 55.
II Inferno, IX. 63 ; Purgatorio, VIII. 20.
IT Purgatorio, XXIX. 131, 132.
«* Inferno, XXII. 13, 14.
110 DANTE.
rather than direct statements. The general notion of
God was still (perhaps is largely even now) of a provin-
cial, one might almost say a denominational, Deity.
The popular poets always represent Macon, Apolin, Ter-
vagant, and the rest as quasi-deities unable to resist
the superior strength of the Christian God. The Pay-
nim answers the arguments of his would-be converters
with the taunt that he would never worship a divinity
who could not save himself from being done ignomin-
iously to death. Dante evidently was not satisfied with
the narrow conception which limits the interest of the
Deity to the affairs of Jews and Christians. That say-
ing of Saint Paul, " Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly wor-
ship, him declare I unto you," had perhaps influenced
him, but his belief in the divine mission of the Roman
people probably was conclusive. " The Roman Empire
had the help of miracles in perfecting itself," he says,
and then enumerates some of them. The first is that
" under Numa Pompilius, the second king of the Romans,
when he was sacrificing according to the rite of the Gen-
tiles, a shield fell from heaven into the city chosen of
God."* In the Convito we find "Virgil speaking in
the person of God," and ^Eacus " wisely having recourse
to God," the god being Jupiter. + Ephialtes is punished
in hell for rebellion against "the Supreme Jove,"| and,
that there may be no misunderstanding, Dante elsewhere
invokes the
" Jove Supreme,
Who upon earth for us wast crucified. " §
It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident design,
* De Monarchia, Lib. II. § 4.
t Convito, Tr. IV. c. 4 ; lb., c. 27 ; ^neid, I. 178, 179 ; Ovid's
Met., VII.
t Inferno, XXXI. 92.
§ Purgatorio, VI. 118, 119. Pulci, not understanding, has parodied
this. ("Morgante," Canto II. st. 1.)
DANTE. Ill
constantly alternates examples drawn from Christian and
Pagan tradition or mythology.* He had conceived a
unity in the human race, all of whose branches had
worshipped the same God under divers names and as-
pects, had arrived at the same truth by different roads.
We cannot understand a passage in the twenty-sixth
Paradiso, where Dante inquires of Adam concerning the
names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen People
had done in this thing even as the Gentiles did.f It
is true that he puts all Pagans in Limbo, " where with-
out hope they live in longing," and that he makes bap-
tism essential to salvation. J But it is noticeable that
his Limbo is the Elysium of Virgil, and that he particu-
larizes Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and others
as prisoners there with the rest till the descent of Christ
into hell. § But were they altogether without hope 1
and did baptism mean an immersion of the body or a
purification of the soul ? The state of the heathen after
death had evidently been to Dante one of those doubts
that spring up at the foot of every truth. In the Be
Monarchia he says: "There are some judgments of
God to which, though human reason cannot attain by
its own strength, yet is it lifted to them by the help of
faith and of those things which are said to us in Holy
Writ, — as to this, that no one, however perfect in the
* See, for example, Purgatorio, XX. 100-117.
+ We believe that Dante, though he did not understand Greek,
knew something of Hebrew. He would have been likely to study it as
the sacred language, and opportunities of profiting by the help of
learned Jews could not have been wanting to hirn in his wanderings.
In the above-cited passage some of the best texts read Is' appellava,
and others Vn s' appellnva. God was called I (the Je in Jehovah) or
One, and afterwards £1, — the strong, —an epithet given to many
gods. Whichever reading we adopt, the meaning and the inference
from it are the same.
J Inferno, IV.
§ Dante's " Limbo," of course, is the older "Limbus Patrum."
112 DANTE.
moral and intellectual virtues both as a habit [of the
mind] and in practice, can be saved without faith, it be-
ing granted that be shall never have heard anything
concerning Christ ; for the unaided reason of man can-
not look upon this as just ; nevertheless, with the help
of faith, it can."* But faith, it should seem, was long
in lifting Dante to this height ; for in the nineteenth
canto of the Paradiso, which must have been written
many years after the passage just cited, the doubt recurs
again, and we are told that it Avas "a cavern," concern-
ing which he had "made frequent questioning." The
answer is given here : —
" Truly to him who with me subtilizes,
If so the Scripture were not over you,
For doubting there were marvellous occasion."
But W'hat Scripture 1 Dante seems cautious, tells us
that the eternal judgments are above our comprehen-
sion, postpones the answer, and when it comes, puts an
orthodox prophylactic before it : —
" Unto this kingdom never
Ascended one who liad not faith in Christ
Before or since he to the tree was nailed.
But look thou, many cryinij are, ^Christ, Christ.' '
Who at the judgment shall be far less near
To him than some shall be who knew not Christ."
There is, then, some hope for the man born on the
bank of Indus who has never heard of Christ 1 Dante
is still cautious, but answers the question indirectly in
the next canto by putting the Trojan Ripheus among
the blessed : —
" Who would believe, down in the errant world.
That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in tliis round
Could be the fifth one of these holy lights ?
Now knoweth he enough of what the world
Has not the power to see of grace divine,
Although his sight may not discern the bottom."
• De Monarchia, Lib. II. § 8.
DANTE. 113
Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the Church
legend of Trajan brought back to life by the prayers of
Gregory tho Great that he might be converted ; and
after an inteivctl of fifty Hnes tells us how Ripheus was
saved : —
"The other one, through grace that from so deep
A fountain wells that never hath the eye
Of any crbdture reached its primal wave,
Set all his love below on righteousness ;
Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose
His eye to our redemption yet to be,
Whence he believed therein, and suffered not
From that day forth the stench of Paganism,
And he reproved therel'or the folk perverse.
Those maidens three, whom at the right-hand wheel *
Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism
More than a thousand years before baptizing."
If the reader recall a passage already quoted from the
ConvitOjf he will perhaps think with us that the gate
of Dante's Limbo is left ajar even for the ancient phi-
losophers to slip out. The divine judgments are still
inscrutable, and the ways of God past finding out, but
faith would seem to have led Dante at last to a more
merciful solution of his doubt than he had reached
when he wrote the De Monarchia. It is always human-
izing to see how the most rigid creed is made to bend
before the kindlier instincts of the heart. The stern
Dante thinks none beyond hope save those who are dead
in sin, and have made evil their good. But we are by
no means sure that he is not right in insisting rather on
the implacable severity of the law than on the possible
relenting of the judge. Exact justice is commonly
more merciful in the long run than pity, for it tends to
* Faith, Hope, and Charity. (Purgatorio, XXIX. 121.) Mr. Long-
fellow has translated the last verse literally. The meaning is,
" More than a thousand years ere baptism was."
+ In which the cdettial Athetu is mentioned.
H
114 DANTE.
foster in men those stronger qualities which make them
good citizens, an object second only with the Roman-
minded Dante to that of making them spiritually re-
generate, nay, perhaps even more important as a neces-
sary preliminai'y to it. The inscription over the gate
of hell tells us that the terms on which we receive the
trust of life were fixed by the Divine Power (which
can what it wnlls), and are therefore unchangeable ; by
the Highest Wisdom, and therefore for our truest good ;
by the Primal Love, and therefore the kindest. These
are the three atti'ibutes of that justice which moved
the maker of them. Dante is no harsher than experi-
ence, which always' exacts the uttermost farthing ; no
more inexorable than conscience, which never forgives
nor forgets. No teaching is truer or more continually
needful than that the stains of the soul are ineffaceable,
and that though their growth may be arrested, their
n.ature is to spread insidiously till they have brought all
to their own color. Evil is a far more cunning and per-
severing propagandist than Good, for it has no inward
strength, and is driven to seek countenance and sympa-
thy. It must have company, for it cannot bear to be
alone in the dark, while
" Virtue can see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light."
There is one other point which we will dwell on for a
moment as bearing on the question of Dante's ortho-
doxy. His nature was one in which, as in Swedenborg's,
a clear practical understanding was continually streamed
over by the northern lights of mysticism, through which
the familiar stars shine with a softened and more spirit-
ual lustre. Nothing is more interesting than the way
in which the two qualities of his mind alternate, and
indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact
sometimes with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes
DANTE. 115
giving an almost geometrical precision to his most mys-
tical visions. * In his letter to Can Grande he says : " It
behooves not those to whom it is given to know what is
best in ns to follow the footprints of the herd ; mnch
rather are they bound to oppose its wanderings. For
the vigorous in intellect and reason, endowed with a
certain divine libert}", are constrained by no customs.
Nor is it wonderful, since they are not governed by the
laws, but much more govern the laws themselves." It
is not impossible that Dante, whose love of knowledge
was all-embracing, may have got some hint of the doc-
trine of the Oriental Sufis. With them the first and
lowest of the steps that lead npward to perfection is the
Law, a strict observance of which is all that is expected
of the ordinary man whose mind is not open to the
conception of a higher virtue and holiness. But the
Sufi puts himself under the guidance of some holy man
[Virgil in the Inferno], whose teaching he receives im-
plicitly, and so arrives at the second step, which is the
Path \_Purgatorio\ by which he reaches a point where he
is freed from all outward ceremonials and observances,
and has risen from an outward to a spiritual worship.
The third step is Knowledge [Paradiso], endowed by
which with supernatural insight, he becomes like the
angels about the throne, and has but one farther step
to take before he reaches the goal and becomes one with
God. The analogies of this system with Dante's are
obvious and striking. They become still more so when
Virgil takes leave of him at the entrance of the Teires-
trial Paradise with the words : —
" Expect no more a word or sign from me ;
Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,
And error were it not to do its bidiling ;
Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre,"*
* Purgatorio, XXVII. 139-142.
116 DANTE.
that is, " I make thee king and bishop over thyself; the
inward light is to be thy law in things both temporal
and spiritual." The originality of Dante consists in his
not allowing any divorce between the intellect and the
soul in its highest sense, in his making reason and in-
tuition work together to the same end of spiritiial per-
fection. The unsatisfactoriness of science leads Faust
to seek repose in worldly pleasure ; it led Dante to
find it in faith, of whose efficacy the short-coming of all
logical substitutes for it was the most convincing argu-
ment. That we cannot know, is to him a proof that
there is some higher plane on which we can believe and
see. Dante had discovered the incalculable worth of a
single idea as compared with the largest heap of facts
ever gathered. To a man more interested in the soul
of things than in the body of them, the little finger of
Plato is thicker than the loins of Aristotle.
We cannot but think that there is something like a
fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of man-
kind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not
in that of morals. No doubt the laws of morals existed
from the beginning, but so also did those of science,
and it is by the application, not the mere recognition,
of both that the race is benefited. No one questions
how mvich science has done for our physical comfort
and convenience, and with the mass of men these per-
haps must of necessity precede the quickening of their
moral instincts ; but such material gains are illusory,
miless they go hand in hand with a corresponding eth-
ical advance. The man who gives his life for a prin-
ciple has done more for his kind than he who discov-
ers a new metal or names a new gas, for the great mo-
tors of the race are moral, not intellectual, and their
force lies ready to the use of the poorest and weakest
of us all. We accept a truth of science so soon as it is
DANTE. 117
demonstrated, are perfectly willing to take it on author-
ity, can appropriate whatever use there may be in it
without the least understanding of its processes, as men
send messages by tlie electric telegrapii, but every truth
of morals must be redemonstrated in the experience of
the individual man before he is capable of utilizing it
as a constituent of character or a guide in action. A
man does not receive the statements that "two and two
make four," and that " the pure in heart shall see
God," on the same terms. The one can be proved to
him with foiu' grains of corn ; he can never arrive at a
belief in the other till he realize it in the intimate per-
suasion of his whole being. This is typified in tlie
mystery of the incai'nation. The divine reason must
forever manifest itself anew in the lives of men, and
that as individuals. This atonement with God, this
identification of the man with the truth,* so that right
action shall not result from the lower reason of utility,
but from the higher of a will so purified of self as to
sympathize by instinct with the eternal laws,t is not
something that can be done once for all, that can be-
come histoi'ic and traditional, a dead flower pressed
between the leaves of the family Bible, but must be
renewed in every generation, and in the soul of every
man, that it may be valid. Certain sects show their
recognition of this in what are called revivals, a gross
and carnal attempt to apply truth, as it were, mechan-
ically, and to accomplish by the etherization of excite-
ment and the magnetism of crowds what is possible
* "I conceived myself to be now," says Milton, "not as mine own
person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was
persuaded."
•I* " But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love that moves the sun and other stars."
Paradise, XXXIII., closing verses of the Divina Commedia.
118 DANTE.
only in the solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the
high moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a
Christian basilica ; and as in that so there is here also,
painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness
the artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of
the holy place. We may linger to enjoy these if we will,
but if we follow the central thought that runs like the
nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an image of the
divine made human, to teach us how the human might
also make itself divine. Dante beholds at last an image
of that Power, Love, and Wisdom, one in essence, but
trine in manifestation, to answer the needs of our triple
nature and satisfy the senses, the heart, and the mind.
" Within the deep and luminous siibsistence
Of the High Light appeared to me three circles
Of threefold color and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As iris is by iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally by both is breathed.
Within itself, of its own very color,
Seemed to me painted with our effigy.
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein."
He had reached the high altar where the miracle of
transubstantiation is wrought, itself also a type of the
great conversion that may be accomplished in our own
nature (the lower thing assuming the qualities of the
higher), not by any process of reason, but by the very
fire of the divine love.
" Then there smote my mind
A flash of lightning wherein came its wish." *
* Dante seems to allude directly to this article of the Catholic faith
when he says, on entering the Celestial Paradise, "to signify trans-
humanizing by words could not be done," and questions whether he
was there in the renewed spirit only or in the flesh also : —
" If I was merely what of me tho%i newly
Createdst, Love who governest the heavens.
Thou knowest who didst lift me with thy light."
Paradise, I. 70-75.
DANTE. 119
Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was tlie
first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of
himself, but, rightly looked at, it implies a wonderful
self-reliance and originality in his genius. His is the
first keel that ever ventui'ed into the silent sea of hu-
man consciousness to find a new world of poetry.
"L' acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse." *
He discovered that not only the story of some heroic
person, but that of any man might be epical ; that the
way to heaven was not outside the world, but through
it. Living at a time when the end of the world was
still looked for as imminent, t he believed that the sec-
ond coming of the Lord was to take place on no more
conspicuous stage than the soul of man ; that his king-
dom would be established in the surrendered will. A
poem, the precious distillation of such a chai'acter and
such a life as his through all those soiTowing but iin-
despondent years, must have a meaning in it which few
men have meaning enough in themselves wholly to pen-
etrate. That its allegorical form belongs to a past fash-
ion, with which the modern mind has little sympathy,
we should no more think of denying than of whitewash-
ing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we may
natui-e, which is also full of double meanings, either as
picture or as parable, either for the simple delight of its
beauty or as a shadow of the spiritual world. We may
take it as we may history, either for its picturesqueness
or its moral, either for the variety of its figures, or as a
witness to that perpetual presence of God in his crea-
tion of which Dante was so profoundly sensible. He
had seen and suffei'ed much, but it is only to the man
* Paradiso, II. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast : —
" Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo."
t Convito, Tr. IV. c. 15.
120 DANTE.
who is himself of value that experience is valuable. He
had not looked on man and nature as most of us do,
with less interest than into the columns of our daily
newspapei-. He saw in them the latest authentic news
of the God who made them, for he carried everywhere
that vision washed clear with tears which detects the
meaning under the mask, and, beneath the casual and
transitory, the eternal keeping its sleepless watch. The
secret of Dante's power is not far to seek. Whoever
can express himself with the full force of unconscious
sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal
and universal. Dante intended a didactic poem, but
the most picturesqvie of poets could not escape his
genius, and his sermon sings and glows and charms in
a manner that surprises more at the fiftieth reading
than the first, such variety of freshness is in imagina-
tion.
There are no doubt in the Divina Commedia (regarded
merely as poetry) sandy spaces enough both of physics
and metaphysics, but with every deduction Dante re-
mains the first of descriptive as well as moral poets.
His verse is as various as the feeling it conveys ; now it
has the terseness and edge of steel, and now palpitates
with iridescent softness like the breast of a dove. In
vividness he is without a rival. He drags back by its
tangled locks the unwilling head of some petty traitor
of an Italian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the
sullen face for a moment, and it sears itself into the
memory forever. He shows us an angel glowing with
that love of God which makes him a star even amid the
glory of heaven, and the holy shape keeps lifelong watch
in our fantasy constant as a sentinel. He has the skill
of conveying impressions indirectly. In the gloom of
hell his bodily presence is revealed by his stirring some-
thing, on the mount of expiation by casting a shadow.
DANTE. 121
Would he have us feel the brightness of an angel 1 He
makes him whiten afar through the smoke like a dawn,*
or, walking straight toward the setting sun, he finds his
eyes suddenly unable to withstand a greater splendor
against which his hand is unavailing to shield him.
Even its reflected light, then, is brighter than the direct
ray of the sun.t And how much more keenly do we
feel the parched lips of Master Adam for those rivulets
of the Casentino which run down into the Arno, " mak-
ing their channels cool and soft " ! His comparisons are
as fresh, as simple, and as directly from nature as those
of Homer. | Sometimes they show a more subtle ob-
servation, as where he compares the stooping of Antseus
over him to the leaning tower of Garisenda, to which
the clouds, flying in an opposite direction to its inclina-
tion, give away their motion. § His suggestions of in-
dividuality, too, from attitude or speech, as in Farinata,
Sordello, or Pia, || give in a hint what is worth acres of
so-called character-painting. In straightforward pathos,
the single and sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no
competitor. He is too sternly touched to be eff"usive
and tearful :
" lo uon piangeva, si dentro impietrai." ^
* Purgatorio, XVI. 142. Here is Milton's "Far off his comiDg
shone."
+ Purgatorio, XV. 7, et seq.
t See, for example, Inferno, XVII. 127-132; lb. XXIV. 7-12;
Purgatorio, II. 124-129; lb., III. 79-84; lb., XXVII. 76-81;
Paradiso, XIX. 91-93; lb. XXI. 34-39 ; lb. XXIII. 1-9.
§ Inferno, XXXI. 1.36-138.
"And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars.
That give away their motion to the stars."
Coleridge, "Dejection, an Ode."
See also tlie comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around him
in Paradise to "a pearl on a white forehead." (Paradiso, III. 14.)
II Inferno, X. 35-41 ; Purgatorio, VI. 61-66 ; lb., X. 133.
11 For example, Cavalcanti's Come dicesti eyli ebbei (Inferno, X. 67,
68.) kustlmMccio's Tu giturdi si, padre, che hail (Inferno, XXXIII.
51.)
6
122 DANTE.
His is always the true coin of speech,
" Si lucida e si touda
Che nel sno coiiio nulla ci s' inforsa,"
and never the highly ornamented promise to pay, token
of insolvency.
No doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities that
a poet must be judged, for it is by these, if by anything,
that he is to maintain his place in literature. And he
must be judged by them absolutely, with reference, that
is, to the highest standard, and not relatively to the
fashions and opportunities of the age in which he lived.
Yet tliese considerations must fairly enter into our
decision of another side of the question, and one that
has much to do with the true quality of the man, with
his character as distinguished from his talent, and there-
fore with how much he will influence men as well as
delight them. We may reckon up pretty exactly a
man's advantages and defects as an artist ; these he has
in common with others, and they are to be measured
by a recognized standard ; but there is something in his
genius that is incalculable. It would be hard to define
the causes of the difference of impression made upon
us respectively by two such men as ^schylus and
Euripides, but we feel profoundly that the latter, though
in some respects a better dramatist, was an infinitely
lighter weight. ^Eschylus stirs something in us far
deeper than the sources of mere pleasurable excitement.
The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse
itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and
most sacred in us, though we cannot always explain it,
is none the less real and lasting. Some men always
seem to remain outside their work ; others make their
individuality felt in every part of it ; their very life
vibrates in every verse, and we do not wonder that it
has " made them lean for many years." The virtue
DANTE. 123
that has gone out of them abides in what they do.
The book such a man makes is indeed, as Milton called
it, "the precious lifeblocd of a master spirit." Theirs
is a true immortality, for it is their soul, and not their
talent, that survives in their work. Dante's concise forth-
rightness of phrase, which to that of most other poets
is as a stab * to a blow with a cudgel, the vigor of his
thought, the beauty of his images, the refinement of his
conception of spiritual things, are marvellous if we com-
pare him with his age and its best achievement. But
it is for his power of inspiring and sustaining, it is
because they find in him a spur to noble aims, a secure
refuge in that defeat which the present always seems,
that they prize Dante who know and love him best.
He is not merely a great poet, but an influence, part of
the soul's resoin"ces in time of trouble. From him she
learns that, " married to the truth, she is a mistress,
but otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty." f
All great poets have their message to deliver us, from
something higher than they. We venture on no un-
worthy comparison between him who reveals to us the
beauty of this woi'ld's love and the grandeur of this
world's passion and him who shows that love of God is
the fruit whereof all other loves ai'e but the beautiful
and fleeting blossom, that the passions are yet sublimer
objects of contemplation, when, subdued by the will,
they become patience in suffering and perseverance in
the upwai'd path. But we cannot help thinking that
if Shakespeare be the most comprehensive intellect, so
Dante is the highest spiritual nature that has expressed
itself in rhythmical form. Had he merely made us feel
* To the " bestiality" of certain arguments Dante says, "one would
■wish to reply, not with v/ords, but with a knife." (Convito, Tr. IV.
c. 14.)
+ Convito, Tr. IV. c. 2.
124 DANTE.
how petty the ambitions, sorrows, and vexations of
earth appear when loolced down on from the heights of
our own character and the sechision of our own genius,
or from the region where we commune with God, he
had done much :
" I witli my sight returned throngli one and all
The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe
Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance." *
But he has done far more ; he has shown us the way by
which that country far beyond the stars may be reached,
may become the habitual dwelhng-place and fortress of
our nature, instead of being the object of its vague
aspiration in moments of indolence. At the Round
Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat
empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of
the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat because
of the dangers he must encounter who would win it.
In the company of the epic poets there was a place left
for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a tri-
umphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious,
who should make us partakers of that cup of sorrow in
which all are communicants with Christ. He who
should do this would indeed achieve the perilous seat,
for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cun-
ning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other
its severity, — and Dante has done it. As he takes
possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself
heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great
singers,
" All honor to the loftiest of poets ! "
* Paradiso, XXII. 132-135 ; lb., XXVII. 110.
SPENSEE
Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty
years ere England had secreted choice material enough
for the making of another great poet. The nature of
men living together in societies, as of the individual
man, seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its
oscillations between the ideal and the matter-of-fact, so
that the doubtful boundary line of shore between them
is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only
with such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss
here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those
lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and
that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches
and holds the sunshine.
From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the
xridefatigable Ritson in his Bibliographia Poetica has
made us a catalogue of some six hundred English poets,
or, more properly, verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hxni-
dred of them are mere names, most of them no more
than shadows of names, some of them mere initials.
Nor can it be said of them that their works have per-
ished because they were written in an obsolete dialect ;
for it is the poem that keeps the language alive, and
not the language that buoys up the poem. The revival
of letters, as it is called, was at first the revival of
ancient letters, which, while it made men pedants, could
126 SPENSER.
do very little toward making them poets, much less
toward making them original writers. There was noth-
ing left of the freshness, vivacity, invention, and cai'eless
faith in the present which make many of the productions
of the Norman Trouveres delightful reading even now.
The whole of Europe during the fifteenth century pro-
duced no book which has continued readable, or has
become in any sense of the word a classic. I do not
mean that that century has left us no illustrious names,
that it was not enriched with some august intellects
who kept alive the apostolic succession of thought and
speculation, who passed along the still unextinguished
torch of intelligence, the lampada vitce, to those who
came after them. But a classic is joroperly a book which
maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of
matter and style, that innate and ex(juisite sympathy
between the thought that gives life and the form that
consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can
be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being
distant, and which is something neither ancient nor
modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It
is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor
can Berangei's French prevent his becoming so. No
hedge of language however thorny, no dragon-coil of
centuries, will keep men away from these true apples
of the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or
scent of them. If poems die, it is because there was
never true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality
which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sin-
cerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but whicli
leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty the
imagination. Take Aristotle's ethics, the scholastic
philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic
system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial
city of the Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman,
SPENSER. 127
and Christian mythology, and tell me what chance there
is to make an immortal poem of such an incongruous
mixture. Can these dry bones livel Yes, Dante can
create such a soul imder these ribs of death that one
hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called
for in these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth
century since his death. Accordingly I am apt to be-
lieve that the complaints one sometimes hears of the
neglect of our older literature are the regrets of archae-
ologists rather than of critics. One does not need to
advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could
any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their
teeth on a hollow nut.
On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth
V century has more meat in it than the English, but this
is to say very little. Where it is meant to be serious
and lofty it falls into the same vices of unreality and
allegory which were the fashion of the day, and which
I there are some patriots so fearfully and wonderfully
1 made as to relish. Stripped of the archaisms (that turn
every y to a meaningless z, spell which quliilk, shake
schaik, bugle howgill, powder puldir, and will not let us
simply whistle till we have puckered our mouths to
quJdssill) in which the Scottish antiquaries love to keep
it disguised, — as if it were nearer to poetry tlie further
it got from all human recognition and sympathy, —
stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it from
the contemporary verse-mongering south of the Tweed.
Their compositions are generally as stiff and artificial
as a trellis, in striking contrast with the popular ballad-
poetry of Scotland (some of which possibly falls within
this period, though most of it is later), which clambers,
lawlessly if you w'ill, but at least freely and simply,
twining the bare stem of old tradition with gracefid
sentiment and lively natural sympathies. I find a few
128 SPENSER.
sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar's "Merle and Night-
ingale," — indeed one whole stanza that has always
seemed exquisite to me. It is this : —
"Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man
Than made this merry, gentle nightingale.
Her sound went with the river as it ran
Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale ;
0 merle, quoth she, 0 fool, leave off thy tale,
For in thy song good teaching there is none.
For both are lost, — the time and the travail
Of every love but upon God alone."
But except this lucky poem, I find little else in tlie
serious verses of Dunbar that does not seem to me
tedious and pedantic. I dare say a few more lines might
be found scattered here and there, but I hold it a sheer
waste of time to hunt after these thin needles of wit
buried in unwieldjr haystacks of verse. If that be
genius, the less we have of it the better. His " Dance
of the Seven Deadly Sins," over which the excellent
Lord Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in every-
thing but coarseness ; and if his invention dance at all,
it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. It
would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed
such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What
he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity ; his
satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, failing,
becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a
great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald,
in his "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly
preserved more than enough of it, and seems to find a
sort of national savor therein, such as delights his coun-
trymen in a haggis, or the German in his saver-hrmt.
The uninitiated foreigner puts his handkerchief to his
nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as soon as he
civilly can. Barbour's " Brus," if not precisely a poem,
has passages whose simple tenderness raises them to
SPENSER. 129
that level. That on Freedom is familiar.* But its
highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of'
manly courage in it, the easy and familiar way in which
Barbour always takes chivalrous conduct as a matter
of course, as if heroism were the least you could ask of
any man. I modernize a few verses to show what I
mean. When the King of England turns to fly from
the battle of Bannockburn (and Barbour with his usual
generosity tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de
Valence led him away by the bridle-rein against his
will), Sir Giles d'Argente
•' Saw the king thus and his menie
Shape them to iiee so speedily,.
He came right to the king in hy [liastily]
And said, ' Sir, since that is so
That ye thus gate your gate will go.
Have ye good-day, for back will I :
Yet never fled I certainly,
And I choose here to bide and die
Thau to live shamefully and fly.' "
The " Brus " is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle
ever written. It is national in a high and generous way,
but I confess I have little faith in that quality in liter-
ature which is commonly called nationality, — a kind
of praise seldom given where there is anything better
to be said. Literature that loses its meaning, or the
best part of it, when it gets beyond sight of the parish
steeple, is not what I understand by literature. To
tell you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is
because it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the
book. To say it of a poem is even worse, for it is to
say that what should be true of the whole compass of
* Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the
word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but which
could not without an impossible anachronism have been present to his
mind. He meant merely freedom from prison.
6* I
130 SPENSER.
human nature is true only to some north-and-by-east-
half-east point of it. I can understand the nationality
of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former glories
of his country, he tells us that "the nightingale still
sings old Persian " ; I can understand the nationality
of Burns when he turns his plough aside to spare the
rough burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or
two for dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of national-
ity belongs to a country of which we are all citizens, —
that country of the heai't which has no boundaries laid
down on the map. All great poetry must smack of the
soil, for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and sub-
stance from it, but it must do so with the aspiring in-
stinct of the pine that climbs forever toward diviner
air, and not in the grovelling fashion of the potato.
Any verse that makes you and me foreigners is not only
not great poetry, but no poetry at all. Dunbar's works
were disinterred and edited some thirty years ago by
Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles
may browse there to his heart's content. I am inclined
for other pasture, having long ago satisfied myself by a
good deal of dogged reading that every generation is
siu'e of its own share of bores without borrowing from
the past.
A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation
of the .^neid is linguistically valuable, and whose intro-
ductions to the seventh and twelfth books — the one
describing winter and the other May — have been safely
praised, they are so hard to read. There is certainly
some poetic feeling in them, and the welcome to the
sun comes as near enthusiasm as is possible for a plough-
man, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays over
one furrow of verse, and then turns about to ki}^ the
next as cleverly alongside it as he can. But it is a
wrong done to good taste to hold up this item kind of
SPENSER. 131
description any longer as deserving any other credit
than that of a good memory. It is a mere bill of par-
cels, a post-mortem inventory of nature, where imagina-
tion is not merely not called for, but would be out of
place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book is as much
like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true ^
word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head
does not give us everything, but only the hest of every- '''
thing. He selects, he combines, or else gives what is
characteristic only ; while the false style of which I have
been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of
impertinences on its shoulders as Christian in the
Pilgrim's Progress was to be rid of his. One strong
verse that can hold itself upright (as the French critic
Rivarol said of Dante) w^ith the bare help of the sub-
stantive and verb, is worth acres of this dead cord-wood
piled stick on stick, a boundless continuity of drj-ness.
I would rather have written that half-stanza of Long-
fellow's, in the "Wreck of the Hesperus," of the "billow
that swept her crew like icicles from her deck,'' than all
Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological
phenomena put together. A real landscape is never
tiresome ; it never presents itself to us as a disjoiuted
succession of isolated particulars; we take it in with
one sweep of the eye, — its light, its shadow, its melt-
ing gradations of distance : we do not say it is this, it
is that, and the other ; and we may be siire that if
a description in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous
mistake somewhere. All the pictorial adjectives in the
dictionary will not bring it a hair's-breadth nearer to
truth and nature. The fact is that what we see is in
the mind to a greater degree than we are conmionly
aware. As Coleridge says, —
" 0 lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live ! "
132 SPENSER.
I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a
diatribe on the subject of descriptive poetry, because I
find that this old ghost is not laid yet, but comes back
like a vampire to suck the life out of a true enjoyment
of poetry, — and the medicine by which vampires were
cured w^as to unbury them, drive a stake through them,
and get them under ground again with all despatch.
The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful, and it is
an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong
by a kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the
critics of something to which our judgment will not con-
sent, and from which our taste revolts. A collection of
poets is commonly made up, nine parts in ten, of this
perfunctory verse-making, and I never look at one with-
out regretting that we have lost that excellent Latin
phrase, Corpus podarum. In fancy I always read it on
the backs of the volumes, — a body of poets, indeed, with
scarce one soul to a hundred of them.
One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of
the sixteenth century, — John Skelton. He had vivacity,
fancy, humor, and originality. Gleams of the truest poet-
ical sensibility alternate in him with an almost brutal
coarseness. He was truly Kabelaisian before Rabelais.
But there is a freedom and hilarity in much of his
writing that gives it a singular attraction. A breath of
cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his verse,
under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and
casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by
clear western winds.
But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn.
A long and dreary winter follows. Surrey, who brought
back with him from Italy the blank-verse not long before
introduced by Trissino, is to some extent another excep-
tion. He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed
feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance
SPENSER. 133
of diction. We have Gascoyne, Surrey, W3^att, stiff, pe-
dantic, artificial, systematic as a country cemetery, and,
worst of all, the whole time desperately in love. Every
verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their
poems are nothing more than bnndles of such tied trimly
together. They are said to have refined our language.
Let us devoutly hope they did, for it would be pleasant
to be grateful to them for something. But I fear it
was not so, for only genius can do that ; and Sternhold
and Hopkins are inspired men in comparison with them.
For Sternhold was at least the author of two noble
stanzas : —
" The Lord descended from above
And bowed the Iieavens high,
And underneath liis feet he cast
The darkness of the sky ;
On cherubs and on cherubims
Full royally fie rode,
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad."
But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put
the worst school of Italian love poetry into an awkward
English dress. The Italian pi'overb says, " Inglese f
italianizzato, Diavolo incarnato," that an Englishman
Italianized is the very devil incarnate, and one feels the
truth of it here. The very titles of their poems set one
yawning, and their wit is the cause of the dulness that
is in other men. " The lover, deceived by his love, re-
penteth him of the true love he bare her." As thus : —
" Where I sought heaven there found I hap ;
From danger unto death,
Much like the mouse that treads the trap
In hope to find her food,
And bites the bread that stops her breath, —
So in like case I stood."
" The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness,
proposeth to live in liberty." He says : —
134 SPENSER.
" But I am like the beaten fowl
That from the net escaped,
And thou art like the ravening owl
That all the night hath waked."
And yet at the very time these men were writing
there were simple ballad-writers who could have set
them an example of simplicity, force, and grandeur.
Compare the futile efforts of these poetasters to kindle
themselves by a painted flame, and to be pathetic over
the lay figure of a mistress, with the wild vigor and
almost fierce sincerity of the " Twa Corbies": —
" As I was walking all alone
I heard twa corbies making a moan.
The one unto the other did say,
Where shall we gang dine to-day ?
In beyond that old turf dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight ;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.
His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home.
His lady has ta'en another mate,
So we may make our dinner sweet.
O'er his white bones as they lie bare
The wind shall blow forevermair."
There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends,
could they have understood it. But they were as much
afraid of an attack of nature as of the plague.
Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction
into which Spenser was born, and which he did more
than any one else to redeem from the leaden gripe of
vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born
the year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and
a taste earlier emancipated than his own, would have
been, had he lived longer, perhaps even more directly
influential in educating the taste and refining the vocab-
ulaiy of his contemporaries and immediate successors.
The better of his pastoral poems in the " Arcadia " are,
SPENSER. 135
in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above all,
more pathetic than those of Spenser, who sometimes
strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would bet-
ter suit the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to
feel that it was unsophisticated sentiment rather than
rusticity of phrase that befitted such themes.* He rec-
ogiiized the distinction between simplicity and vulgarity,
which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems
to have divined the fact that there is but one land of
English that is always appropriate and never obsolete,
namely, the very best.t With the single exception of
Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting classical
metres to English verse are more successful than those
of his contemporaries. Some of his elegiacs are not un-
grateful to the ear, and it can hardly be doubted that
Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of Strephon and
Klaius the pleasing movement of his own CatuUian
Hendecasyllabics. Spenser, perhaps out of deference to
Sidney, also tried his hand at English hexameters, the
introduction of which was claimed by his friend Gabriel
Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an immortality
of grateful remembrance. But the result was a series
of jolts and jars, proving that the language had rim off
the track. He seems to have been half conscious of it
himself, and there is a gleam of mischief in Avhat he
writes to Harvey : " I like your late English hexameter
so exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometime
in that kind, which I find indeed, as I have often heard
* In his " Defence of Poesy" he condemns the archaisms and pro-
vincialisms of the "Shepherd's Calendar."
t " Tliere is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a lan-
guage of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chaucer's
time, and is spoken in ours; equally understood then and now; and
of which the Bible is the written and permanent standard, as it has
undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it." (Southey's Life
and Correspondence, III. 193, 194.)
136 SPENSER.
you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh but
that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue.
For the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, is in
the accent, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were,
yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of that it should,
and sometime exceeding the measure of the number, as
in Carpenter ; the middle syllable being used short in
speech, when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth
like a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her ; and
Heaven being used short as one syllable, when it is in
verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog
that holds up one leg." * It is almost inconceivable
that Spenser's hexameters should have been written by
the man who was so soon to teach his native language
how to soar and sing, and to give a fuller sail to Eng-
lish verse.
One of the most striking facts in our literary history
is the pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously
conceded to Spenser by his contemporaries. At first,
it is true, he had not many rivals. Before the " Faery
Queen " two long poems were printed and popular, —
the "Mirror for Magistrates" and Warner's "Albion's
England," — and not long after it came the " Polyol-
bion" of Drayton and the "Civil Wars" of Daniel.
This was the period of the saurians in English poetry,
interminable poems, book after book and canto after
canto, like far-stretching vertebrce, that at first sight
would seem to have rendered earth unfit for the habi-
* Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the Eng-
lish Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's hexame-
ters in prose, "that drnnken, staggering kind of verse, which is all
up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfield,
and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter,
now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It
was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted way) prose written
in the form of verse.
SPENSER. 137
tation of man. They most of them sleep well now, as
once they made their readers sleep, and their huge re-
mains lie embedded in the deep morasses of Chambers
and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face and
general atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the
men of that generation, but it is no marvel when
even their relaxations were such downright hard work.
Fathers when their day on earth was up must have
folded down the leaf and left the task to be finished by
their sons, — a dreary inheritance. Yet both Drayton
and Daniel are fine poets, though both of them in their
most elaborate woi'ks made shipwreck of their genius
on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of thera could
make poetry coalesce with gazetteering or chronicle-
making. It was like trying to put a declaration of
love iuto the forms of a declaration in ti-over. The
" Polyolbion " is nothing less than a versified gazetteer
of England and Wales, — fortunately Scotland was not
yet annexed, or the poem would have been even longer,
and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains,
rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate his-
torical episodes, or to give us geographical lectures.
There are two fine verses in the seventh book, where,
speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he
says, —
" Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand,
As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand ";
and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth
book that comes near being fine ; but the far greater
part is mere joiner-work. Consider the life of man,
that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a
post, and then think whether we can afford to honor
such a draft upon our time as is implied in these thirty
books all in alexandrines ! Even the laborious Selden,
who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertain-
138 SPENSER.
ing than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth
book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agree-
able lightsomeness of fancy, as his "Nymphidia" proves.
His poem " To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp " is
full of vigor ; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like
swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge.
Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He
did indeed refine our tongue, and desei'ved the praise
his contemporaries concur in giving him of being "well-
languaged."* Writing two hundred and fifty years ago,
he stands innio need of a glossary, and I have noted
scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of phrase, in
his works, that have become obsolete. This certainly
indicates both remarkable taste and equally remarkable
judgment. There is an equable dignity in his thought
and sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems
always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is
so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we
are standing. I think his " Musophilus " the best poem
of its kind in the language. The reflections are natural,
the expression condensed, the thought weighty, and the
language worthy of it. But he also wasted himself on
an historical poem, in which the characters were inca-
pable of that remoteness from ordinary associations
which is essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape
into the ideal by merely emigrating into the past or the
tmfamiliar. As in the German legend the little black
Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat
* Edmund Bolton in his Hypercritica says, "The works of Sam
Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and
copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, and Jitter
perhaps for prose than measure." I have italicized his second thought,
which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves in the niiml.
(See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, Vol. II.) Wordsworth, an
excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to the Countess of
Cumberland.
SFENSER. 139
himself on the first load of furniture when we under-
take our flitting, if the magician be not there to exorcise
him. No man can jump off his own shadow, nor, for
that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that
Daniel had only the thinking and langnaging parts of
a poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which
alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and
with an interest which transcends the parish limits of
his generation. In the prologue to his " Masque at
Court" he has unconsciously defined his own poetry: —
"Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport,
But tender passions, motions soft and grave.
The still spectator must expect to have."
And indeed his verse does not snatch you away from
ordinary associations and hurry you along with it as is
the wont of the higher kinds of poetry, but leaves you,
as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current
and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His
best-known poem, blunderingly misprinted in all the
collections, is that addressed to the Countess of Cum-
berland. It is an amplification of Horace's Integer Vitce,
and when we compare it with the original we miss the
point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone
of the original. It is very fine English, but it is the
English of diplomacy somehow, and is never downright
this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so.
with sentiments of the highest consideration. Yet the
praise of well-king naff ed, since it implies that good writ-
ing then as now demanded choice and forethought, is
not without interest for those who would classify the
elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors
well. His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evi-
dences of muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give
proof of training and endurance. His " Defence of
Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than
140 SPENSER.
verse), has a passionate eloquence that remhids one of
Burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the
prose of Milton fifty years later. For us Occidentals he
has a kindly prophetic word : —
" And who in time knows wliitliev we may vent
The treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores
The gain of our best glory may be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ?
Wliat worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours ? "
During the period when Spenser was getting his
artistic training a great ciiange was going on in our
mother-tongue, and the language of literature was dis-
engaging itself more and more from that of ordinary
talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to
rain influence and to modify and refine not only style
but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds in
more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expec-
tation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn
from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same
demand for a national literature that we have heard in
America. This demand was nobly answered in the next
generation. But no man contributed so much to the
transformation of style and language as Spenser ; for not
only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the
charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse,
his ideal method of treatment, and the splendor of his
fancy, he made the new manner popular and fruitful.
"We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of
his taste through experiment and failure to that assured
self-confidence which indicates that he had at length
found out the true bent of his genius, — that happiest
of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which
puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own indi-
viduahty. Before his time the boundary between poetry
and prose had not been clearly defined. His great merit
SPENSER. 141
lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glo-
rified common things and gilded them with a ray of
enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view
which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at first
sought for that remoteness, which is implied in an es-
cape from the realism of daily life, in the pastoral, —
a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original
intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of
human as opposed to heroic sentiments, had degenerated
into the most artificial of abstractions. But he was soon
convinced of his error, and was not long in choosing
between an unreality which pretended to be real and
those everlasting realities of the mind which seem un-
real only because they lie beyond the horizon of the
every-day woi'ld and become visible only when the
mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an
ideal atmosphere. As in the old foiry-tales, the task
which the age imposes on its poet is to weave its straw
into a golden tissue ; and when every device has failed,
in comes the witch Imagination, and with a touch the
miracle is achieved, simple as mii-acles always are after
they are wrought.
Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 155.3.*
Nothing is known of his parents, except that the name
of his mother was Elizabeth ; but he was of gentle birth,
as he more than once informs us, with the natural sat-
isfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the
business talent of the middle class was opening to it the
door of prosperous preferment. In 15G9 he was entered
* Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the
Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on tha
strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. But it is not established
that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet is
not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round number forty,
which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one,
which might have been truer to the measure of his days.
142 SPENSER.
as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in due
coui'se took Ills bachelor's degree in 1573, and his mas-
ter's in 1576. He is supposed, on insufficient grounds,
as it appears to me, to have met with some disgust or
disappointment during his residence at the University.*
Between 1576 and 1578 Spenser seems to have been
with some of his kinsfolk " in the North." It was dur-
ing this interval that he conceived his fruitless passion
for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another shep-
herd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily
bemoaned in his pastorals.t Before the pul)lication of
his "Shepherd's Calendar" in 1579, he had made the
acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and was domiciled
with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or
literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he
is in the household of the Earl of Leicester. In July,
* This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel Harvej''s
letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the many-
allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was his own
wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption would take it
for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in all his grudges.
Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of classical
studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow
one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose gravity
of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction remind
us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity exjilain
and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of emjihasis
witli which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash had called
him an ass, probably gave Shakespeai'e the hint for one of the most
comic touches in the character of Dogberry.
f The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay, makes
it extremely probable that Rosalinde is the anagram of Rose Daniel,
sister of the poet, and married to John Florio. He leaves little doubt,
also, that the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto unknown) was Eliza-
beth Nagle. (See "Atlantic Monthly," Vol. II. 674, November, 1858. )
Mr. Halpine informed me that he found the substance of his essay
among the papers of his father, the late Rev. N. J. Halpine, of Dub-
lin. Tlie latter published in the series of the Shakespeare Society a
sprightly little tract entitled " Oberon," which, if not quite convin-
cing, is well worth reading for its ingenuity and research.
SPENSER. 143
1580, he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland
as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of
his life, with occasional flying visits to England to pub-
lish poems or in search of preferment. His residence
in that country has been compared to that of Ovid in
Pontus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward
points of likeness. The Irishry by w^hom he was sur-
rounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, and as
tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the Scythians*
who made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the
earlier English settlers had degenerated as much as the
Mix-Hellenes who disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser
himself looked on his life in Ireland as a banishment.
In his " Colin Clout 's come Home again " he tells us
that Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 1589, and
heard what was then finished of the "Faery Queen," —
" 'Gan to cast great liking to my lore
And great disliking to my luckless lot.
That banisht had myself, like wight forlore,
Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me,
Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful,
And wend with him his Cynthia to see.
Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful."
But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle
(which, with 3,028 acres of land from the forfeited es-
tates of the Earl of Desmond, was confirmed to him by
grant two years later), amid sceneiy at once placid and
noble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. He could
not complain, with Ovid, —
" Non liber hie uUus, non qui mihi commodet aurem,"
for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which
gave him the stimulus of hearty admiration both as
poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a se-
* In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some memory
of Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the Scythians.
144 SPENSER.
elusion that prompted study and deepened meditation,
while it enabled him to converse with his genius disen-
gaged from those worldly influences which would have
disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did
not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this seques-
tered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those
ethereal visions of the " Faery Queen " and to giving his
" soul a loose " than
"The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome,
And all the busy pageantry
That wise men scorn and fools adore."
Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness
of Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Parisian sun, yet
enough to make him joyfully accompany Raleigh thither
H in the early winter of 15^9, carrying with him the first
! three books of the great poem begun ten years before.
Horace's nonmn previutur in ammm had been more than
complied with, and the success was answerable to the
well'Seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness of
the work. But Spenser did not stay long in London to
enjoy his fame. Seen close at hand, with its jealousies,
intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the court had lost tlie
enchantment lent by the distance of Kilcolman. A na-
ture so prone to ideal contemplation as Spenser's would
be profoundly shocked by seeing too closely the igno-
ble springs of contemporaneous policy, and learning by
what paltry personal motives the noble opportunities
of the world are at any given moment endangered. It
is a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by
ignoble men.
"Vide questo globo
Tal eh'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante."
\\\ his "Cohn Clout," written just after his return to
Ireland, he speaks of the Court in a tone of contempt-
uous bitterness, in which, as it seems to me, there is
SPENSER. 145
more of the sorrow of disillusion than of the gall of
personal disappointment. He speaks, so he tells iis, —
" To warn young shepherds' wandering wit
Wliich, through report of that life's painted bliss.
Abandon quiet home to seek for it
And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss ;
For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life
For shepherd fit to live in that same place,
Where each one seeks with malice and with strife
To thrust down other into foul disgrace
Himself to raise; and he doth soonest rise
That best can handle his deceitful wit
In subtle shifts ....
To which him needs a guileful hollow heart
Masked with fair dissembling courtesy,
A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art,
No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery.
For arts of school have there small countenance.
Counted but toys to busy iiUe brains,
And there professors find small maintenance,
But to be instruments of others' gains.
Nor is there place for any gentle wit
Unless to please it can itself apply.
Even such is all their vaunted vanity,
Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away.
So they themselves for praise of fools do sell,
And all their wealth for painting on a wall.
Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty
Do wander up and down despised of all." *
And again in his " Mother Hubberd's Tale," in the most
pithy and masculine verses he ever wrote : —
" Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate
Hath brought to Court to sue for Ilad-I-wist
That few have found and many one hath mist !
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in si;ing long to bide ;
To lose good days that might be better spent.
To waste long nights in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
* Compare Shakespeare's LXVI. Sonnet.
7
146 SPENSER.
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,
To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers',
To have thy asking yet wait many years,
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares,
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs.
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run.
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.
Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate
In safe assurance, without strife or hate,
Finds all things needful for contentment meek,
And will to court for shadows vain to seek.
That curse God send unto mine enemy ! " *
When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure
retreat and serene comi^anionship of his great poem,
with what profound and pathetic exultation must he
have recalled the verses of Dante ! —
" Chi dietro a ju||^ e chi ad aforismi
Sen giva, e chi ^Ijuendo sacerdozio,
E clii regnar per forS^j^er sofismi,
E chi rubare, e chi civir!5i5gozio,
Chi nei diletti della carne involto
S' aff'aticava, e chi si dava all' ozio,
Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto.
Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo
C'otanto gloriosamente accolto.""!"
What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to
learning and literature is the more remarkable because
he himself was by no means an unsuccessful suitor.
* This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his dedica-
tion, " long sithens^omposed in the raw conceit of my youth." But
he had evidently retouclied it. The verses quoted show a firmer hand
than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that tliey
were added after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson epigrammatized
Spenser's indictment into
"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail.
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,"
but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point.
•{•Parailiso, XI. 4-12. Spenser was familiar with the " Divina
Commcdia," though I do not remember that his commentators have
pointed out his chief obligations to it.
SPENSER. 147
Queen Elizcabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty
pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands
already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Bur-
leigh in some way hindered the advancement of the
poet, who moi'e than once directly alludes to him either
in reproach or remonstrance. In " The Ruins of Time,"
after speaking of the death of Walsingham,
" Since whose decease learning lies unregarded.
And men of armes-do wander unrewarded,"
he gives the following reason for their neglect : —
'•' For lie that now wields all things at his will,
Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill.
0 grief of griefs ! 0 gall of all good hearts,
To see tliat virtue should despised be
Of him tliat first was raised for virtuous parts,
And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be :
0 let the man of whom the Muse is scorned
Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned! "
And in the introduction to the fourth book of the
" Faery Queen," he says again : —
"The rugged forehead that with grave foresight
Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,
My looser rliymes, I wot, dotli sharply wite
For praising Love, as 1 have done of late, —
By wliich frail youth is oft to folly led
Through false allurement of that pleasing bait,
That better were in virtues discipled
Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed.
" Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love
Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame ;
Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,
Ne natural affection faultless blame
For fault of few that have abused the same :
For it of honor and all virtue is
The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame
That crowji true lovers with immortal bliss.
The meed of them that love and do not live amiss. "
148 SPENSER.
If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of night-
ingales' tongues as the " Faery Queen," he is very much
more to be pitied than Spensei*. The sensitive purity
of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem
in which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large"
of " the ethick part of Moral Philosophy " * could be so
misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks in the same strain
and without any other than a general application in his
" Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes
the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. But
undervalued by whom"? By the only persons about whom
he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now
call Society and who were then called the Court. The
inference I would draw is that, among the causes which
contributed to the marvellous efflorescence of genius in
the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the influence
of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at
almost nothing.t Then, as when the same phenomenon
has happened elsewhere, there must have been a sym-
pathetic public. Literature, properly so called, draws
its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common
and evei'lasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of
* His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryslcett. (Todd's
Spenser, I. Ix.) The wliole passage is very interesting as giving us
the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with
his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see him,
surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett
tells us that he was "perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very
well read in philosophy both moral and natural." He encouraged
Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help him in it. Com'
paring the last verse of the above citation of the " Faery Queen " with
other passages in Spenser, I cannot help thinking that he wrote, " do
not love amiss."
t "And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know.
That 't is not in the power of kings to raise
A spirit for verse that is not born thereto;
Nor are they born in every pi-ince's days."
Daniel's Dedic. Trag. of '^ Philotas."
SPENSER. 149
countless generations (otr] irep (j)vWa>u 7 €1/617), and not from
any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface
at some master's bidding.* England had long been
growing more truly insular in language and political
ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her na-
tional consciousness by secluding her moi-e completely
from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Eng-
lishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating for-
eigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were
proud or not as the case might be, but there was no
England as a separate entity from the sovereign who
embodied it for the time being.t But now an English
people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having
got a religion to themselves must have intensified them
much as the having a god of their own did the Jews.
The exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anx-
iety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like
the hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance
of a provincial deity, must also have been like sunshine
to bring into flower all that there was of imaginative or
sentimental in the English nature, already just in the
first flush of its spring.
("The yonge sonue
Had in tlie Bull half of his course yroniie.")
And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze
* Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to
have created Frencli literature. He may more truly be said to have
petrified it so far as his infiuence went. The French renaissance in
tlie preceding century was produced by causes similar in essentials to
those which brought about that in England not long after. The grand
siecle grew by natural processes of development out of that which had
preceded it, and which, to the impartial foreigner at least, has more
flavor, and more French flavor too, than the Gallo-Roman usurper
that ])ushed it from its stool. The best modern French poetry has
been forced to temper its verses in the colder natural springs of tlie
ante-classic period.
•\- In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France"
are constantly used to signify the kings of those countries.
150 SPENSER.
was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and
Italy. If Keats could say, when he first opened Cliap-
man's Homer, —
" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,"
if Keats could say this, whose mind had been imcon-
sciously fed with the results of this culture, — results
that permeated all thought, all literature, and all talk,
— fancy what must have been the awakening shock and
impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation
of this new world of thought and fancy, an unveiling
gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ, which
discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in
the soul of man with its epic and lyric st(^ps, its deep
thunders of tragedy, and its passionate vox Imviana !
It might almost seem as if Shakespeare had typified all
this in Miranda, when she cries out at first sight of the
king and his courtiers,
" 0, wonder !
How many goodly creatures are there here !
How beauteous mankind is ! 0, brave new world
That hath such people in 't ! "
The civil wai's of the Roses had been a barren period in
I English literature, because they had been merely dynas-
tic squabbles, in which no great principles were involved
which could shake all minds with controversy and heat
them to intense conviction. A conflict of opposing am-
bitions wears out the moral no less than the material
forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and
convictions may realize resources of character which
before were only potential, may transform a merely gre-
garious multitude into a nation proud in its strength,
sensible of the dignity and duty which strength involves,
SPENSER. 151
and groping after a common ideal. Some such trans-
formation had been wrought or was going on in England.
For the first time a distinct image of her was disengaging
itself from the tangled blur of tradition and association
in the minds of her children, and it was now only that
her great poet could speak exultingly to an audience
that would understand him with a passionate sympathy,
of
" This happy breed of men, this little worlcl,
This precious stone set in a silver sea.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
England, bound in with the triumphant sea ! "
Such a period can hardly recur again, but something
like it, something pointing back to similar producing
causes, is obsen'able in the revival of English imagina-
tive literature at the close of the last and in the early
years of the present century. Again, after long fermen-
tation, there was a war of principles, again the national
consciousness was heightened and stung by a danger to
the national existence, and again there Avas a crop of
great poets and heroic men.
Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him
three more books of the "Faery Queen," in 1595. He
is supposed to have remained there during the two fol-
lowing years.* In 1594 he had been married to the
lady celebrated in his somewhat artificial amoretti. By
her he had four children. He was now at the height
of his felicity ; by universal acclaim the first poet of
his age, and the one obstacle to his material advance-
ment (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way
* I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and
Peregrine, indicate that they were bom in Ireland, and that Spenser
continued to regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile.
The two other children are added on the authority of a pedigree
drawn up by Sir W. Betham and cited in Mr. Hales's Life of Spenser
prefixed to the Globe edition.
152 SPENSER.
by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the
next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen
Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But
alas for Polycrates ! In October the wild kerns and
gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of
Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from
which he with his wife and children barely escaped.*
He sought shelter in London and died there on the 16th
January, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster.
He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to Chaucer,
at the cost of the Earl of Essex, poets bearing his pall
and casting verses into his grave. He died poor, but
not in want. On the whole, his life may be I'eckoned
a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets
must have commonly been. If they feel more passion-
ately the pang of the moment, so also the compensations
are incalculable, and not the least of them this very
* Ben Jonson told Driimmond that one child perished in the flames.
Btit he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of
course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeed-
ing poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his
tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public.
Giles Fletcher in his " Purple Island " (a poem wliich reminds us of
the " Faery Queen " by the supreme tediousness of its allegory, but
in nothing else) set the example in the best verse he ever wrote : —
"Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died."
Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as authentic
history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by comparison.
The whole story of his later days has a strong savor of legend. He
must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebellion, and would prob-
ably have sent away his wife and children to Cork, if lie did not go
thitlier himself. I am inclined to think that he did, carrying his
papers with him, and among them the two cantos of Mutability, first
published in 1611. These, it is most likely, were the only ones he
ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was evidently a labo-
rious finisher. When we remember that ten years were given to the
elaboration of the first three books, and that five more elapsed before
the next three were ready, we shall waste no vain regrets on the six
concluding books supposed to have been lost by the carelessness of an
imaginary servant on their way from Ireland.
SPENSER. 153
capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortune
is to be measured, not by more or less of outward pros-
perity, but by the opportunity given for the development
and free play of the genius. It should be remembered
that the power of expression which exaggerates their
griefs is also no inconsiderable consolation for them.
We should measure what Spenser says of his worldly
disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing
tears he shed for Rosalind. A careful analysis of
these leaves no perceptible residuvun of salt, and we
are tempted to believe that the passion itself was not
much more real than the pastoral accessories of pipe
and crook. I very much doubt whether Spenser ever
felt more than one profound passion in his life, and that
luckily was for his " Faery Queen." He was fortunate
iu the friendship of the best men and women of his
time, in the seclusion which made him free of the still
better society of the past, in tlie loving recognition of
his countrymen. All that we know of him is amiable
and of good report. He was foitliful to the friendships
of his youth, pui*e in his loves, unspotted in his life.
Above all, the ideal with him was not a thing apart
and unattainable, but the sweetener and ennobler of tlie
street and the fireside.
There are two waj'S of measuring a poet, either by an
absolute sesthetic standard, or relatively to his position
in the literary history of his country and the conditions
of his generation. Both should be borne in mind as
coefficients in a perfectly fair judgment. If his positive
merit is to be settled irrevocably by the formei", yet an
intelligent criticism will find its advantage not only in
considering what he was, but what, under the given cir-
cumstances, it was possible for him to be.
The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired
by the Orlando of Ariosto, and written in avowed emu-
7*
154 SPENSER.
lation of it, and that the poet almost always needs to
have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some predeces-
sor, must not lead us to ovei-look his manifest claim to
originality. It is not what a poet takes, but what he
makes out of what he has taken, that shows what native
force is in him. Above all, did his mind dwell compla-
cently in those forms and fashions which in their very
birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively
drawn to those qualities which are permanent in lan-
guage and whatever is wrought in it 1 There is much
in Spenser that is contemporary and evanescent ; but
the substance of him is durable, and his work was the
deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample cul-
ture. The publication of his "Shepherd's Calendar"
in 1579 (though the poem itself be of little interest) is
one of the epochs in our literature. Spenser had at
least the originality to see clearly and to feel keenly
that it was essential to bring poetry back again to some
kind of understanding with nature. His immediate
predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind
of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between
heaven and earth, with no very well defined relation
to either. It is true that the nearest approach they
were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock,
winged with a bright plume or so from Italy, but, after
all, nothing but cork and feathers, which they bandied
hack and forth from one stanza to another, wuth the
useful ambition of keeping it up as long as they could.
To my mind the old comedy of " Gammer Gurton's
Needle " is worth the whole of them. It may be coarse,
earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at least a
man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs.
The form of Spenser's " Shephei'd's Calendar," it is
true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it merely
from tlie outside, — not, perhaps, the wisest way to
SPENSER. 155
look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the
" Congressional Globe," — but the spirit of it is fresh
and original. We have at last got over the superstition
that shepherds and shepherdesses are any wiser or sim-
pler than other people. We know that wisdom can be
won only by wide commerce with men and books, and
that simplicity, whether of manners or style, is the
crowning result of the highest culture. But the pas-
torals of Spenser were very different things, different
both in the moving spirit and the resultant form from
the later ones of Browne or the " Piscatory Eclogues "
of Phinehas Fletcher. And why 1 Browne and Fletcher
wrote because Spenser had written, but Spenser wi'ote
from a strong inward impulse — an instinct it might be
called — to escape at all risks into the fresh air from
that horrible atmosphere into which rhymer after rhymer
had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with the full force
of his lungs, and in which all sincerity was on the edge
of suffocation. His longing for something truer and
better was as honest as that which led Tacitus so long
before to idealize the Germans, and Rousseau so long
after to make an angel of the savage.
Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm
between himself and Chaucer, as Dante between him-
~^self and Virgil. He called Chaucer mastei-, as Milton
was afterwai'ds to call him. And, even while he chose
-)j the most artificial of all forms, his aim — that of getting
back to nature and life — was conscious, I have no doubt,
to himself, and must be obvious to whoever reads with
anything but the ends of his fingers. It is true that
Sanuazzai'o had brought the pastoral into fashion again,
and that two of Spenser's are little more than transla-
tions from Marot ; but for manner he instinctively turned
back to Chaucer, the first and then only great English
poet. He has given common instead of classic names
156 SPENSER.
to his personages, for characters they can hardly be
called. Above all, he has gone to the provincial dialects
for words wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical
vocabulary.* I look upon the "Shepherd's Calendar"
as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt at
reform than Thomson's " Seasons " were in the topics,
and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" in the language
of poetry. But the great merit of these pastorals was
not so much in their matter as their manner. They
show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto dis-
played by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had
brought back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as
it is contained in decorum. But here was a new lan-
guage, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety,
elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears
of men. If not passion, there was fervor, which was per-
haps as near it as the somewhat stately movement of
Spenser's mind would allow him to come. Sidney had
tried many experiments in versification, which are curi-
ous and interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize
the sliding rhymes of Sannazzaro in English. But there
is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice hand. Spen-
ser shows himself already a master, at least in verse, and
we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater master,
* Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. "That same framing
of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither
Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian did
affect it." ("Defence of Poesy.") Ben Jonson, on the other hand.
said that Guarini "kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as
well as himself could." (" Conversations with Drummond.") I tiiiuk
Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia is a purely ideal world, and
should be treated accordingly. But whoever looks into the glossary
appended to the "Calendar" by E. K., will be satisfied that Spenser's
object was to find unhackneyed and poetical words rather than such
as .should seem more on a level with the speakers. See also the
"Epistle Dedicatory." I cannot help thinking that E. K. was Spen-
ser himself, with occasional interjections of Harvey. Who else could
have written such English aa many passages in this Epistle ?
SPENSEE. 157
in the " Shepherd's Calendar " as well as in the " Faery
Queen." We have seen that Spenser, under the mis-
leading influence of Sidney * and Harvey, tried his hand
at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he
taught his own language to sing and move to measures
harmonious and noble. Chaucer had done much to vo-
calize it, as I have tried to show elsewhere,t but Spenser
was to prove
" That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heirecl
For verse, and that sweet music to the ear
Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."
The " Shepherd's Calendar " contains perhaps the most
picturesquely imaginative verse which Spenser has writ-
ten. It is in the eclogue for February, where he tells
us of the
" Faded oak
Whose body is sere, whose branches broke,
Wliose naked arms stretch xmto tlie fire."
It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have
liked in secret, that Dr. Johnson would have proved to
be untranslatable into reasonable prose, and which the
imagination welcomes at once without caring whether it
be exactly conformable to Barbara or celarent. Another
pretty verse in the same eclogue,
" But gently took that ungently came,"
pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his
own. But in general it is not so much the sentiments
and images that are new as the modulation of the verses
in which they float. The cold obstruction of two centu-
ries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose,
seeks out its old windings, or overflows musically in un-
* It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has come
do^vll to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of Sidney's
are pleasing.
t See " My Study Windows," 264 seqq.
158 SPENSER.
practised channels. The service which Spenser did to
our literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is in-
calculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous disso-
nance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish
of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from
the cast-iron stiffness of " Ferrex and Porrex " to the
Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was
he that
"Taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly :
That added leathers to the learned's wing,
And gave to grace a double majesty."
I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he
had already achieved that transmutation of language and
metre by which he was afterwards to endow English
verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in
which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the
first time to a feeling of the poetry that was in him,
was to wonder, like M. Jourdain, that he had been talk-
ing prose all his life, — but already he gave clear indi-
cations of the tendency and premonitions of the power
which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection.
A harmony and alacrity of language like this were un-
exampled in English verse : —
" Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook
Do bathe your breast,
Forsake your watery bowers and hither look
At my request
And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell,
Whence lioweth Helicon, the learned well,
Help me to blaze
Her worthy praise.
Which in her sex doth all excel."
Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat
formal and slow, as befits an invocation ; and now mark
how the same feet shall be made to quicken their pace
at the bidding of the tune : —
SPENSER. 159
"Bring here the pink and purple columbine,
With gilliflowers ;
Bring coronations and sops in wine,
Worne of paramours ;
Strow me the ground wth daflfadowndillies, ■
And cowslips and kingcups and loved lilies ;
The pretty paimce
And the chevisance
Shall match with the fair flowerdelice." *
The argument prefixed by E. K. to the tenth Eclogue
has a special interest for us as showing how high a con-
ception Spenser had of poetry and the poet's office. By
Cuddy he evidently means himself, though choosing out
of modesty another name instead of the familiar Colin.
" In Cuddy is set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet,
which, finding no maintenance of his state and studies,
complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the causes
thereof, specially having been in all ages, and even
amongst the most barbarous, always of singular account
* Of course diUies and lilies must be read with a slight accentua-
tion of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to chime with cle-
lice. In the first line I have put here instead of hether, which (like
other words where th comes between two vowels) was then very often
a monosyllable, in order to throw the accent back more strongly on
bring, where it belongs. Spensei-'s innovation lies in making his verses
by ear instead of on the finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than
any of the single verses that compose it. This is the secret of his easy
superiority to all others in the stanza which he composed, and which
bears his name. Milton (who got more of his schooling in these mat-
ters from Spenser than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater
range, and applied it with more various mastery. I have little doubt
that the tune of the last stanza cited above was clinging in Shake-
speare's ear when he wrote those exquisite verses in " Midsummer
Night's Dream" (" I know a bank"), where our grave pentameter is
in like manner surprised into a lyrical movement. See also the pretty
song in the eclogue for Augiist. Ben Jonson, too, evidently caught
some cadences from Spenser for his lyrics. I need hardly say that in
those eclogues (May, for example) where Spenser thought he was im-
itating what wiseacres used to call the ridinr/-rhtjme of Chaucer, he
fails most lamentably. He had evidently learned to scan his master's
verses better when he wrote his " Mother Hubberd's Tale."
160 - SPENSEK.
and honor, and being indeed so worthy and commendahle
an art, or rather no art, hut a divine gift and heaven! // in-
stinct not to be gotten bg labor and learning, hut adorned
with both, and x>oured into the wit by a certain Enihou-
siasmos and celestial inspiration, as the aiithor hereof
elsewhere at large discourseth in his book called The
English Poet, which book being lately come into my
hands, I mind also by God's grace, upon further advise-
ment, to publish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried
out his intention, and the book is no doubt lost ; a loss
to be borne with less equanimity than that of Cicero's
treatise De Gloria, once possessed by Petrarch. The
passage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and
reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton.
Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, "he [Ben Jonson]
hath by heart some verses of Spenser's ' Calendar.' about
wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and Piers).*
These verses are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting
both as having the approval of dear old Ben, the best
* Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memorj'. takes
Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's "Lycidas" there are reminiscences
of this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the, Diore
evident, but I think that Spenser's
"Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,"
suggested Milton's
" But not the praise,
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears."
Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare
" But, ah, Mecasnas is yclad in clay.
And great Augu.stus long ago is dead.
And all the wortliies liggeu wrapt in lead,"
with
" King Pandion, he is dead ;
All thy friends are lapt in lead."
It is odd that Shakespeare, in his " Zapt in Zead," is more Spenserian
than Spenser himself, from whom he caught this "hunting of tli*»
letter."
SPENSER. 161
critic of the day, and because they are a good sample of
Spenser's earlier verse : —
" Thou keiist not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage ;
0, if my temples were clistained with wine,
And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine,
How I could rear the Muse on stately stage
And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine
With quaint Bellona in her equipage ! "
In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style
which was to distinguish him, and which, like his own
Fame,
" With golden wings aloft doth ily
Above the reach of ruinous decay.
And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky,
Admired of base-born men from far away." *
He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and fore-
boding the "Faery Queen" : —
" Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust
To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts
And helms \mbruised waxen daily brown :
There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing,
And stretch herself at large from East to West."
Verses like these, especially the last (which Dryden
would have liked), were such as English ears had not
yet heard, and curiously j^rophetic of tlie maturer man.
The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an
ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets
who can so hardly help being poetical.
It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm
that forthwith won for Spenser his never-disputed rank
as the chief English poet of that age, and gave him a
popularity which, during his life and in the following
generation, was, in its select quality, without a competi-
* "Ruins of Time." It is perhaps not considering too nicely to
remark how often this image of wings recurred to Spenser's mind.
A certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings of his
style.
K
162 SPENSER.
tor. It may be thought that I lay too much stress on
this single attribute of diction. But apart from its
importance in his case as showing their way to the poets
who were just then learning the accidence of their art,
and leaving them a material to work in already mellowed
to their hands, it should be remembered that it is subtle
perfection of phrase and that happy coalescence of music
and meaning, where each reinforces the other, that define
a man as poet and make all ears converts and partisans.
Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved " seld-
seen costly " words perhaps too well, and did not always
distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty
which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm
of seeming association. He had not the concentrated
power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the
little room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather
for dilatation than compression.* But he was, with the
exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned
of our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern
literature was easy and intimate, and as he perfected
himself in his art, he caught the grand manner and
high-bred ways of the society he frequented. But even
to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity
of phrase that was habitual with the generation that
preceded him. In the fifth book of the " Faery Queen,"
where he is describing the passion of Britomart at the
supposed infidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-
* Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the " sea-shouldering
•whales," B. II. 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolongations.
For example, he makes such words as glorious, gratious, joyeous,
havior, chapelet dactyles, and that, not at the end of verses, where it'
would not have been unusual, but in the first half of them. Milton
contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it were) in the uniformity of his
verse by a practice exactly the opposite of this. He also shuns a
hiatus which does not seem to have been generally dipleasing to
Spenser's ear, though perhaps in the compound epithet bees-alluring
he intentionally avoids it by the plural form.
SPENSER. 163
like realism,* — he whose verses generally remind us of
the dancing Hours of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse
of the real earth and that far away beneath. But his
habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and refined "^
luxury.
He first shows his mature hand in the " MuiojDotmos,"
the most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for deli-
cate conception and treatment, whose breezy verse seems
to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imper-
ishable sunshine. No other English poet has found the
variety and compass which enlivened the octave stanza
under his sensitive touch. It can hardly be doubted
that in Clarion the butterfly he has symbolized himself,
and surely never was the poetic temperament so pictur-
esquely exemplified : —
"Over tlie fields, in his frank lustiness.
And all the champain o'er, he soared light,
And all the country wide he did possess.
Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,
That none gainsaid and none did him envy.
"The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,
With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,
♦ " Like as a waj-^vard child, whose sounder sleep
Is broken with some fearful dream's affright.
With froward will doth set himself to weep
Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might,
But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight,
Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing.
Now seeking darkness and now seeking light.
Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing."
He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example
of Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the
Hliad, So also in the " Epithalamion " it grates our nerves to hear,
" Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful.
Pour out to all that wull."
Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's aurum
potabile the language needed.
1 64 SPENSER.
Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,
Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried ;
But none of these, however sweet they been,
Mote please liis fancy, or him cause to abide;
His choiceful sense with every change doth flit ;
No common things may please a wavering wit.
" To the gay gardens his unstaid desire
Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;
Tliere lavish Nature, in her best attire,
Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights,
And Art, with her contending doth aspire,
To excel the natural with made delights ;
And all that fair or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excess doth there abound.
" There he arriving, round about doth flie.
From bed to bed, from one to the other border.
And takes survey with curious busy eye.
Of every flower and herb there set in order,
Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,
Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace.
But pastures on the pleasures of each place.
" And evermore with most variety
And change of sweetness (for all change is sweety
He casts his glutton sense to satisfy.
Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,
Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie.
Now in the same bathing his tender feet ;
And then he percheth on some branch thereby
To weather him and his moist wings to dry.
"And then again he turneth to his play,
To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise ;
The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray,
Rank-smelling rue, and cumnnn good for eyes,
The roses reigning in the pride of May,
Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies
Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme.
Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime,
" Cool violets, and orpine growing still,
Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale,
SPENSER. 165
Fresh costmary and breathful camomill,
Dull poppy and drink-quickening set,uale,
Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill,
Sound savory, and basil hearty-hale,
Fat coleworts and comforting perseline,
Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemariue.*
"And whatso else of virtue good or ill.
Grew in this garden, fetched from far away,
Of every one he takes and tastes at will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ;
Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill.
In the warm sun he doth himself embay,
And there him rests in riotous suffisance
Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.
" What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight witli liberty,
And to be lord of all the works of nature ?
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky.
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature.
To take whatever thing doth please the eye ?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness,
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness. "
The "Muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it
vibrates in us a string of classical association by adding
an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne. " Talking the
other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante,
he observed that whenever so great a poet told us any-
thing in addition or continuation of an ancient stor}^, he
had a right to be regarded as classical authority. For
instance, said he, when he tells us of that characteristic
death of Ulysses, .... we ought to receive the informa-
tion as authentic, and be glad that we have more news
of Ulysses than we looked for." f We can hardly doubt
* I could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden,
though it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence of
his master Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser himself.
He could not help planting a flower or two among his serviceable
plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied, but begins the
next stanza with " And whatso else."
t Leigh Hunt's Indicator, XVII.
166 SPENSER.
that Ovid would have been glad to admit this exquisitely
fantastic illumination into his margin.
No German analyzer of aesthetics has given us so con-
vincing a definition of the artistic nature as these radiant
verses. "To reign in the air" was certainly Spenser's
function. And yet the commentators, who seem never
willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple,
though, had he not been so, they would have lost their
only hold upon life, try to make out from his " Mother
Hul)berd's Tale " that he might have been a very sensi-
ble matter-of-fact man if he would. For my own part,
I am quite willing to confess that I like him none the
worse for being wrepractical, and that my reading has
convinced me that being too poetical is the rarest fault
of poets. Practical men are not so scarce, one would
think, and I am not sure that the tree was a gainer
when the hamadryad flitted and left it nothing but ship-
timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent into the
world to be part of its motive power. The blind old
engine would not know the difference though we got up
its steam with attar of roses, nor make one revolution
more to the minute for it. What practical man ever left
such an heirloom to his countrymen as the " Faery
Queen " ^
Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in the
highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls
him "our sage and serious poet, whom I dare be known
to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." And
good Dr. Henry More was of the same mind. I fear he
makes his vices so beautifid now and then that we should
not be very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet
them ; for he could not escape from his genius, which,
if it led him as philosopher to the abstract contempla-
tion of the beautiful, left him as poet open to every
impression of sensuous delight. When he wrote the
SPENSER. 167
" Shepherd's Calendar " he was certainly a Puritan, and
probably so by conviction rather than from any social
influences or thought of personal interests. There is a
verse, it is true, in the second of the two detached can-
tos of " Mutability,"
"Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"
which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists,
and from which it has been inferred that he drew away
from them as he grew older. It is very likely that
years and widened experience of men may have pro-
duced in him their natural result of tolerant wisdom
which revolts at the hasty destructiveness of inconsid-
erate zeal. But with the more generous side of Puritan-
ism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of
clerical worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe
a one as any is in " Mother Hubberd's Tale," published
in 1591.* There is an iconoclastic relish in his account
of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that
makes us think he would not have regretted the plun-
dered abbeys as perhaps Shakespeare did when he
speaks of the winter woods as " bare ruined choirs where
late the sweet birds sang " : —
" But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave
Guj'on broke down with rigor pitiless,
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness,
But that their bliss he turned to balefulness :
* Ben Jonson told Drummoud " that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh
had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the
Puritans were understood." But this is certainly wrong. There
were very different shades of Puritanism, according to individual tem-
perament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a mellowness of
which Endicott and Standish were incapable. The gradual change of
Milton's opinions was similar to that which I suppose in Spenser.
The passage in Mother Hubberd may have been aimed at the Prot-
estant clergy of Ireland (for he says much the same thing in his " View
of the State of Ireland "), but it is general in its terms.
168 SPENSER.
Tlieir groves he felled, their gardens did deface,
Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress,
Their ban(iuet-houses burn, their buildings rase,
And of the fairest late now made the foulest place."
But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opin-
ions (which do not nearly concern ns here), the bent of
his mind was toward a Platonic mysticism, a supramun-
dane sphere where it could shape universal forms out of
the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to
put up with their fortuitous combinations in the unwill-
ing material of mortal clay. He who, when his singing
robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to the real
world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory,
expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether : —
" Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden jjlunies up to the purest sky."
Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such con-
tinuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously
stately, though rising to an enthusiasm which reaches
intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as in his
Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter. There
is an exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed
from its cage. I shall make no extracts from it, for it
is one of those intimately coherent and transcendentally
logical poems that "moveth altogether if it move at all,"
the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it
as it would a perfect group of crystals. Whatever there
is of sentiment and passion is for the most part pui'ely
disembodied and without sex, like that of angels, — a
kind of poetry wdiich has of late gone out of fashion,
whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps
one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are
those that stand in least need of stimulation. Spenser's
notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those of
our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not
SPENSER. 169
to disqualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy
Grail, and accordingly it is not uninstructive to remem-
ber that he had drunk, among others, at French sources
not yet deboshed with absinthe* Yet, with a purity like
that of thrice-bolted snow, he had none of its coldness.
He is, of all our poets, the most truly sensuous, using
the word as Milton probably meant it when he said that
poetry should be " simple, sensuous, and passionate." A
poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates
and illumines his senses ; when they, on the other hand,
muddy the mind, he becomes sensual. Every one of
Spenser's senses was as exquisitely^ alive to the impres-
sions of matei-ial, as every organ of his soul was to those
of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if he painted the
weeds of sensuality at all, he could not help making
them " of glorious featui'e." It was this, it may be sus-
pected, rather than his " praising love," that made Loi'd
Burleigh shake his " rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut,
indeed, is a wide one, ranging from a pui'ely corporeal
delight in " precious odors fetched from far away " up-
ward to such refinement as
" Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even brows,"
where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He
is court-painter in ordinary to each of the senses in
turn, and idealizes these frail favorites of his majesty
King Lusty Juventus, till they half believe themselves
* Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his earli-
est kno\\'n verses are translations from Bellay, a poet Avho was charm-
ing whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad school.
We must not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the demi-
monde will give us all the elements of the French character. It has
been both grave and profound ; nay, it has even contrived to be wise
and lively at the same time, a combination so incomprehensible by
the Teutonic races that they have labelled it levity. It puts them out
as Nature did Fuseli.
8
170 SPENSEE.
the innocent shepherdesses into which he travesties
them. *
^ In his great poem he had two objects in view : first,
the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that
of recommending himself to the permanent approval of
his own and following ages as a poet, and especially as
a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the
scene of his poem in contemporary England, and brings
in all the leading personages of the day under the thin
disguise of his knights and their squires and lady-
loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the
second book : —
" Of Faery Land yet if he more inquire,
By certain signs, here set in sundry place,
He may it find ; . . . .
And thou, 0 fairest princess under sky.
In this fair miiTor riiayst behold thy face
And thine own realms in land of Faery."
Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of
them were once as easily recognizable as those of Madem-
oiselle de Scudery. This, no doubt, added greatly to the
immediate piquancy of the allusions. The interest they
would excite may be inferred from the fact that King
James, in 1596, wished to have the author prosecuted
and punished for his indecent handling of his mother,
Mary Queen of Scots, under the name of Duessa.t To
* Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little
eating and drinking there is in the "Faery Queen." The only time
he fairly sets a table is in the house of Malbecco, where it is necessary
to the conduct of the story. Yet taste is not wholly forgotten : —
" In her left hand a cup of gold she held,
And with her right the rijier fruit did reaoli.
Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld,
Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach
Of her fine fingers without foul impeach.
That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet."
B. II. c. xii. 56.
Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment !
+ Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his
SPENSER. 171
suit the wider application of his plan's other and more
important half, Spenser made all his characters double
their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersona-
tions of absti-act moral qualities. When the cardinal
and theological virtues tell Dante,
" Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,"
the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight
gulp, to swallow without solution the problem of being
in two places at the same time. But there is something
fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that of Prince Arthur
and the Earl of Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and
Belphcebe and Elizabeth.
" In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall."
The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already
hard enough to manage. But Spenser had fortunately
almost as little sense of humor as Wordsworth,* or he
could never have carried his poem on with enthusiastic
good faith so far as he did. It is evident that to him
the Land of Faery was an unreal world of picture and
illusion,
" The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil,"
friend Raleigh's saying, that " whosoever in writing modem history
shall follow truth too near the heels, it may ha])ly strike out his
teeth." The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the
" Faery Queen." Spenser was copying Ariosto ; but tlie Italian poet,
with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. Spenser
goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. He did this,
no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival; and this gives us
a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary manners. It be-
comes only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his genius
could have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and
sweetness which are its own peculiar properties.
* There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of " Mother
Hubberd's Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they sliouM
disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more
successfully, says, —
" Be you the soldier, for you likest are
For manly semblance and small skill in war."
172 SPENSER.
in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with
its shortcomings and failures.
"The ways through which rny weary steps I guide
In this ilelightlul land of Faery
Are so exceeding spacious and wide,
And sprinkled with such sweet variety
Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye,
That I, nigli ravisht with rare thoughts' delight,
My tedious travail do forget thereby,
And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might,
It strength to me supplies, and cheers luy dulled spright."
Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness ; but
the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his
invention fails a little, we do not shj^-e his feeling nor
suspect it, charmed as we are by the%ariety and sweep
pf his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the
inusical felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility
bf his pictures. In this last quality Ariosto, whose em-
ulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice in the com-
parison. That, when the personal allusions have lost
their meaning and the allegory has become a burden,
the book should continue to be read with delight, is
proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life and
light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be.
As a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that
kind of writing is capable. The characters are vague,
and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so
often and remain out of it so long, that we have forgot-
ten who they are when we meet them again ; the episodes
hinder the advance of the action instead of relieving it
with variety of incident or novelty of situation ; the
plot, if plot it may be called,
" That shape has none
Distinguishable in meralier, joint, or limb,"
recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Ro-
mance ; while the fighting, which, in those old poems,
was tediously sincere, is between shadow and shadow,
SPENSER. 173
•where we know that neither can harm the other, though
we are tempted to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not
mind the allegory, and says that it won't bite us nor
meddle with us if we do not meddle with it. But how
if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question 1 The
truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our
will, as people were formerly driven to church till they
began to look on a day of rest as a penal institution,
and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of de-
fective inspiration which was awakened in them by the
preaching. The true type of the allegory is the Odys-
sey, which we read without suspicion as pure poem, and
then find a new pleasure in divining its double mean-
ing, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author
than he meant to give us. But this complex feeling
must not be so exacting as to prevent our lapsing into
the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest again.
The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when
in some mediaeval church we cast down our e3'es to
muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the
transitoriness of life by the mortuaiy tablets under our
feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies
in the feet that we help make his allegory out of our
own experience. Instead of striving to embody abstract
passions and temptations, he has given us his own in all
their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his own
prose-epic. This is the secret of his power and his
charm, that, while the representation of what mai/ hap-
pen to all men comes home to none of us in jiarticular,
the story of any one man's real experience finds its start-
ling parallel in that of every one of us. The very home-
liness of Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his
scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we soon find
ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical beings
as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream. In-
174 SPENSER.
deed, he has prepared us for siich incongruities l\v telling
us at setting out that the story was of a dream. The
long nights of Bedford jail had so intensitied his imagi-
nation, and made the figures with which it peopled his
solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind
become things, as clear to the memory as if we had seen
them. But Spenser's are too often mere names, with
no bodies to back them, entered on the Muses' muster-
roll by the specious trick of personification. There is,
likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicitj^ and taking-
for-granted which win our confidence. His Giant De-
spair,* for example, is by no means the Ossianic figure
into which artists who mistake the vague for the sublime
have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales,
with his malicious wife ; and he comes forth to us from
those regions of early faith and wonder as sometliing
beforehand accepted by the imagination. These figures
of Lunyan's arc already familiar inmates of the mind,
and, if there be any suV^limity in him, it is the daring
frankness of his verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are
those of the later romances, except that grand figure
with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the
most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant,
but a pui'e eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan rises not
seldom to a natui'al poetry, so Spenser sinks now and
then, through the fault of his topics, to unmistakable
prose. Take his description of the House of Alma,t for
instance : —
" The mastei" cook was cald Concoction,
A careful man, and full of comely guise ;
The kitclien-clerk, that hight Digestion,
Did order all the achates in seemly wise."
*BuHyaii probably took the hint of the Giant's suicidal offer of
"kuife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's "swords, ropes, poison,"
Jn Faery Queen, B. I. c, ix. 1.
t Book II. c. 9.
SPENSER. 175
And so on through all the organs of the body. The
author of Ecclesiastes understood these matters better
in that last pathetic chapter of his, blunderingly trans-
lated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst
failure of Spenser in this kind ; though, even here, when
he gets oti to the organs of the mind, the enchantments
of his fancy and style come to the rescue and put us in
good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed
knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking
with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefast-
ness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my
partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in
the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles
us, as of children who play that everything is something
else, and are quite satisfied with the transformation.
The problem for Spenser was a dovible one : how to
commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it
effeminate trifling,* and how he. Master Edmund Spen-
ser, of imagination all compact, could commend his
poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of man-
kind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a
passion of religious anxiety about his soul. Omne tulit
punctum qui miscuit utile dulci was not only an irrefra-
gable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it
exactly met the case in point. He would convince the
scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and
show Master Bull his new way of making fine words
butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory,
as then practised, was imagination adapted for begin-
ners, in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts,
and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial pur-
pose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he
proceeded to put forth ; but he so bordered it with
* See Sidney's "Defence," and Puttenhx,ja's "Art of English Po-
esy," Book I. c. 8.
176 SPENSER.
bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole pages
and crowded the text hard in others with the gay frolics
of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani missal, the holy
function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its
adornment. Worse than all, does not his brush linger
more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens than
on the modest wimples of the Wise Virgins ] " The
general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication
to Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of
noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." But a
little further on he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks
how generously he had interpreted his promise of cuts :
" To some I know this method will seem displeasant,
which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly
in way of precepts or sermoned at large,* as tliey use,
than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices."
Lord Burleigh w^as of this way of thinking, iindoubt-
edly, but how could poor Clarion help iti Has he not
8aid,
" And whatso else, of virtue good or ill,
Grew in that garden, fetcht from far away.
Of every one he takes and tastes at will,
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey " ?
One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the
pure sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end
that he might interpret it to our duller perceptions.
So exquisite was his sensibility,t that with him sensa-
tion and intellection seem identical, and we " can almost
say his body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense
with spirit it is that gives his poetry a crystalline purity
*We can fancy how he wonld have done this by Jeremy Taylor,
who was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.
+ Of this he himself gives a striking hint, where speaking in his owb
person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate cry,
"Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled."
Faery Queen, B. I. c x. 48.
SPENSER. 177
without lack of warmth. He is full of feeling, and yet
of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere intel-
lectual perception of what is fair and good, nor jet asso-
ciate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call
sensibility by the physical name of heart. ^__,
Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spen-
ser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly
leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he
adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion,
and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was
becoming, but because it was the only wear. The true
use of him is as a gallery of pictui-es which we visit as
the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two
at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not
so long as to cloy them. He makes one think always
of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian,* but as
the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned
convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And
again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian
Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him,
where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his
* Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example ?
" Arachiie figured how Jove did .abuse
Europa like a bull, and on his back
Her through the sea did bear : . . . .
She seemed still back unto the land to look.
And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear
The dashing of the waves, that up she took
Her dainty feet, and garn)ents gathered near. ....
Before the bull she pictured winged Love,
With his young brother Sport
And many nymphs about them flocking round.
And many Tritons which their horns did sound."
Muiopotmos, 281-296.
Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the " Common-
wealth and Government of Venice" (1599) with this beautiful verse,
"Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight."
Perhaps we should read " lost " ?
8* 1.
178 SPENSER.
measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats
you lullingly along from picture to picture.
" If all the pens that ever poet held
Had fed tlie feeling of their master's thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts
Their minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy.
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness ;
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best.
Which into words no virtue can digest."*
Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this
unattainable something as any other poet. He is so
purely poet that with him the meaning does not so
/often modulate the music of the verse as the music
makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought
along its pleasant paths. No poet is so splendidly
superfluous as he ; none knows so well that in poetry
enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a beg-
garly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless
abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal
youth.
" Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco
Si puo quivi albergare in alcun ciiore;
Non antra quivi disagio ne inopia,
Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pieu la Copia.'' -j-
This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of
Spenser appear in the very structure of his verse. He
found the ottava rima too monotonously iterative ; so,
by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the
* Marlowe's " Tamburlaine," Part I. Act V. 2.
+ Grayheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may
Take up its lodging here in any heart;
Unease nor Lack can enter at this door ;
But here dwells full-homed Plenty evermore.
Orl. Fur., c. vi. 73.
SPENSER. 179
couplet from the end of the stave, where it always
seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle,
where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge ; he
found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into an-
other line, and then ran that added line over into an
alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems
forever longing and feeling forward after that which js
to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more
than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows
wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one
sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and
carried forward by the next. In all this there is sooth-
ingness indeed, but no_slumberous monotony ; for Spen-
ser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the
variety of his pauses — now at the close of the first or
second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth
— he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose ten-
dency it certainly is to become languorous. He knew
how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in such
verses as,
" But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
How does he find in cruel heart to hate
Her that him loved and ever most adored
As the God of my life ? Why hath he me abhorred 1 " *
or this,
" Come hither, come hither, 0, come hastily ! " f
Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its
" constraint led him into many absurdities." Of these
he instances three, of which I shall notice only one,
since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for
words and rhymes) will hai'dly seem valid to any one
* B. I. c. iii. 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympathetic of crit-
ics, has remarked the passionate change from the third to the first
person in the last two verses.
t B. II. c. viii. 3.
180 SPENSER.
who knows the poet. It is that it "obliged him to
dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant,
with trifling and tedious circumlocutions, namely. Faery
Queen, II. ii. 44 : —
' Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face
Thrice seen the shadows of tliis nether world,
Sith last I left that honorable place,
In which her royal presence is enrolled.'
That is, it is three months since I left her palace." *
But Dr. Warton should have remembered (what he too
often forgets in his own verses) that, in spite of Dr.
Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that verse
only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its
province, t Verse itself is au absurdity except as an
expression of some higher movement of the mind, or as
an expedient to lift other minds to the same ideal level.
It is the cothurnus which gives language an heroic stat-
ure. I have said that one leading characteristic of
, Spenser's style was its spaciousness, that he habitually
dilates rather than compresses. But his way of meas-
uring time was perfectly natural in an age when everv-
body did not carry a dial in his poke as now. He is the
* Observations on Faerj' Queen, Vol. I. pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes
also objects to Spenser's measure, that it is " closed always by a full-
stop, in the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were a
distinct paragraph." (Todd's Spenser, II. xli.) But he could hardly
have read the poem attentively, for there are numerous instances to
the contrary. Spenser was a consummate master of versification, and
not only did Marlowe and Shakespeare learn of him, but I have little
doubt that, but for the " Faery Queen," we should never have had
the varied majesty of Milton's blank-verse.
t As where Dr. Warton himself says : —
" How nearly had my spirit past,
Till stopt by Metoalf's skilful hand,
To death's dark regions wide and waste
And the black river's mournful strand,
Or to," etc.,
to the end of the next stanza. That is, I had died but for Dr. Met-
calf's boluses.
SPENSER. 181
last of the poets, who went (without affectation) by the
great clock of the firmament. Dante, the miser of words,
who goes by the same timepiece, is full of these round-
about ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to
do with Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry
to lose these stately revolutions of the superne mote.
Time itself becomes more noble when so measured ; we
never knew before of how precious a commodity we had
the wasting. Who would prefer the plain time of day
to this ]
" Now when Aldebaran was nioiuited high
Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair '' ;
or this %
"By this the northern wagoner had set
His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star
That was in ocean's waves yet never wet.
But firm is fixt and sendetli liglit from far
To all that in the wide deep wandering are " ;
or this %
" At last the golden oriental gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fair,
And Phrebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,
Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair
And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air."
The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more
or less as of no account, is in keeping with that sense
of endless leisures which it is one chief merit of the
poem to suggest. But Spenser's dilatation extends to
thoughts as w^ell as to phrases and images. He does
not love the concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere
distension, but the expansion of natural growth in the
rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick of a
verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of
his, suggested by Homer : * —
* Iliad, XVII. 55 seqq. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery
Queen, B. I. c. vii. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off with
an alexandrine has Homer's n-voiai iravToiiMv avefnuiv expanded ! Chap-
man unfortunately has slurred this passage in his version, and Pope
182 SPENSER.
" Upon the top of all his lofty crest
A bunch of hairs discolored diversly,
With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest,
Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity;
Like to an almond-tree ymounted high
On top of green Selinus all alone
"With blossoms brave bedecked daintily,
Whose tender locks do tremble every one
At every little breath that under heaven is blown."
And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant
verses of Dante : —
" Seggendo in piume
In fama non si vien, ne, sotto coltre,
Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma,
Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia
Qual fumo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma. " *
" Whoso in pomp of proiul estate, quoth she,
Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss,
Does waste his days in dark obscurity
And in oblivion ever buried is;
Where ease abounds it 's eath to do amiss :
But who his limbs with labors and his mind
Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.
Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind.
Who seeks with paiuful toil shall Honor soonest find,
" In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell.
And will be found with peril and witli pain,
Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell
Unto her happy mansion attain ;
tittivated it more than usual in his. I have no other translation at
hand. Marlowe was so taken by this passage in Spenser that he put
it bodily into his Tamburlaine.
* Inferno, XXIV. 46 - 52.
" For sitting upon down,
Or under quilt, one cometli not to fame,
Withouten which whoso his life consumeth
Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth
As smoke in air or in the water foam."
Longfellow.
It shows how little Dante was read during the last century tliat none
of the commentators on Spenser notice his most important obligations
to the great Tuscan.
SPENSER. 183
Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain.
And wakeful watches ever to abide ;
But easy is the way and passage plain
To jjleasure's palace ; it may soon be spied,
And day and night her doors to all stand open wide."*
Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room.
His thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a
stately and sonorous proclamation, as if under the open
sky, that seems to me very noble. For example, —
" The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought
And is with child of glorious-great intent
Can never rest until it forth have brought
The eternal brood of glory excellent." +
One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse.
And here is a passage which Milton had read and re-
membered : —
" And is there care in Heaven ? and is there love
In heavenly spirits to these creatures base,
That may compassion of their evils move ?
There is : else much more wretched were the case
Of men than beasts : but 0, the exceeding grace
Of highest God, that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace,
That blessed angels he sends to and fro.
To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe !
" How oft do they their silver bowers leave.
To come to succor us that succor want !
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant.
Against foul fiends to aid us militant !
They for us fight, they watch and duly ward,
And their bright squadrons round about us plant ;
And all for love and nothing for reward ;
0, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ? " J
His natural tendency is to shunjshatever is sharp and
abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in
* Faery Queen, B. II. c. iii. 40, 41.
+ Ibid., B. I. c. V. 1.
t Ibid., B. II. c. viii. 1, 2.
-l
184 SPENSEK.
his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup
of a lily. So entirely are beauty and delight in it the
native element of Spenser, that, whenever in the " Faery
(Queen " you come suddenly on the moral, it gives you
;a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when
one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of straw-
berries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets.
Sensation passing through emotion into revery is a prime
quality of his manner. And to read him puts one m
the condition of revery, a state of mind in which our
thoughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish
do in a gentle stream, with just enough vibration of
their fins to keep themselves from going down with the
current, while their bodies yield indolently to all its
soothing curves. He chooses his language for its rich
canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. To
characterize his style in a single word, I should call it
costly. None but the daintiest and nicest phrases will
serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with
such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses
of verse, that never any word seems more eminent than
the rest, nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but
you must go on to the end before you have time to stop
and muse over the wealth that has been lavished on you.
But he has characterized and exemplified his own style
better than any description could do : —
" For round about the walls yclothed were
With goodly arras of great majesty,
Woven with gold and silk so close and near
That the rich metal lurked privily
As faining to be hid from envious eye ;
Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares
It showed itself and shone unwillingly
Like to a discolored snake whose hidden snares
Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back declares." *
* B. III. c. xi. 28.
SPENSEE. 185
And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a
sample : —
" And, more to lull him in his slumber soft,
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down
And ever drizzling rain upon the loft,
Mixt witli the murmuring wind much like the soun
Of swarming bee^ did cast him in a swoon.
No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries,
As still are wont to annoy the walled town.
Might there be heard : but careless quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies."*
In the world into which Spenser carries us there is ^
neither time nor space, or rather it is outside of and in-
dependent of them both, and so is purely ideal, or, more
truly, imaginary ; yet it is full of form, color, and all
earthly luxury, and so far, if not real, yet apprehensible
by the senses. There are no men and women in it, yet
it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that have the
likeness of men and women, and hint at some kind of
foregone reality. Now this place, somewhere between
mind and matter, between soul and sense, between the
actual and the possible, is precisely the region which
Spenser assigns (if I have rightly divined him) to the
poetic susceptibility of impression, —
" To reign in the air from the earth to highest sky."
Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul and
spirit of it, dormant till they are magnetized by some
powerful emotion. Then whatever is imperishable in us
recognizes for an instant and claims kindred with some-
thing outside and distinct from it, yet in some incon-
ceivable way a part of it, that flashes back on it an ideal
beauty which impoverishes all other companionship.
This exaltation with which love sometimes subtilizes the
nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the
thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the joy
• B. I. c. i. 41.
186 SPENSER.
of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in it, would ap-
pear to have been the normal condition of Spenser.
I While the senses of most men live in the cellar, his
' " were laid in a large upper chamber which opened
toward the sunrising."
" His birth was of the womb of morning dew,
.And his conception of the joyous prime."
The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more
than one of them 1) have a way, I admit, of getting
within our inmost conscioiisness and in a manner be-
traying us to ourselves. There is in Spenser a remote-
ness very different from this, but it is also a seclusion,
and quite as agreeable, perhaps quite as wholesome in
certain moods when we are glad to get away from our-
selves and those impoi-tunate trifles which we gravely
call the realities of life. In the warm Mediterranean of
his mind everything
" Suffers a sea-change '^ ^
Into something rich and strange."
He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an
ideal distance where no mortal, I had almost said hu-
man, fleck is visible. Instead of the ordinary bridal
gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epithalamion fit for a
conscious goddess, and the " savage soil " * of Ireland
becomes a turf of Arcady under her feet, where the
merchants' daughters of the town are no more at home
than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan mythology
whom they meet there. He seems to have had a com-
mon-sense side to him, and could look at things (if we
may judge by his tract on Irish aff"airs) in a practical
* This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of Ormond
and in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series preHxed to the
" Faery Queen." These sonnets are of a much stronger build than
the " Amoretti," and some of them (especially that to Sir John Nor-
ris) recall the firm tread of Milton's, though differing in structure.
SPENSER. 187
and even hard way ; but the moment he turned toward
poetry he fulfilled the condition which his teacher Plato
imposes on poets, and had not a particle of prosaic un-
derstanding left. His fancy, habitually moving about in [
worlds not realized, unrealizes everything at a touch.
The critics blame him because in his Prothalamion the
subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave it
at Temple Gardens as noble damsels ; but to those who
are grown familiar with his imaginary world such a
transformation seems as natural as in the old legend of
the Knight of the Swan.
" Come now ye damsels, daughters of Delight,
Help quickly her to dight :
But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot
In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, ....
And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen,
The which do still adorn her beauty's pride.
Help to adorn my beautifulest bride.
Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal.
And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine,
And let the Graces dance unto the rest, —
For they can do it best.
The whiles the maidens do their carols sing,
To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring."
The whole Epithalamion is very noble, with an organ-
like roll and majesty of numbers, while it is instinct
with the same joyousness which must have been the
familiar mood of Spenser. It is no superficial and tire-
some merriment, but a profoimd delight in the beauty
of the universe and in that delicately surfaced nature
of his which was its mirror and counterpart. Sadness
"'was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be sure, a
decorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic
a temperament ; but his condolences are graduated to
the unimpassioned scale of social requirement. Even
for Sir Philip Sidney his sighs are regulated by the offi-
188 SPENSER.
cial standard. It was in an inireal world that liis affec-
tions found their true object and vent, and it is in an
elegy of a ladj^ whom he had never known that he
puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has evapo-
rated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic
verses he ever penned : —
" I hate the day because it lendeth light
To see all things, but not my love to see." *
In the Epithalamion there is an epithet which has been
much admired for its felicitous tenderness : —
"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands.
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes
And blesseth her with his two hapinj hands."
But the purely impersonal passion of the artist had
already guided him to this lucky phrase. It is addressed
by Holiness — a dame surely as far abstracted from the
enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of — to
Una, who, like the visionary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has
every charm of womanhood, except that of being alive
as Juliet and Beatrice are.
" 0 happy earth,
Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread ! " f
Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would
be as soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its mates already
fallen, — can we conceive of her treading anything so
sordid % No ; it is only on some unsubstantial floor of
dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. And
it is only when Spenser has escaped thither, only when
this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is
grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination as
the other ideal images with which he converses, that his
feeling becomes as nearly passionate — as nearly human,
I was on the point of saying — as with him is possible.
* Daphnaida, 407, 408.
t Faery Queen, B. I. c. x. 9.
SPENSER. 189
I am so far from blaming this idealizing property of his
mind, that I find it admirable in him. It is his quality,
not his defect. Without some touch of it life would be
unendurable prose. If I have called the world to which
he transports us a world of unreality, I have wronged
him. It is only a world of um-ealism. It is from pots
and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inch-long poli-
tics that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that
to-morrow, always coming and never come, where ideas
shall reign supreme.* But I am keeping my readers
from the sweetest idealization that love ever wrought : —
" Unto this place whenas the elfin knight
Approached, him seemed that the merry sound
Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on lieight,
And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground.
That through the woods their echo did rebound ;
He nigher drew to wit what it mote be.
There he a troop of ladies dancing found
Full merrily and making gladful glee ;
Aud in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.
" He durst not enter into the open green
For dread of them unwares to be descried.
For breakhig of their dance, if he were seen ;
But in the covert of the wood did bide
Beholding all, yet of them unespied ;
There he did see that pleased so much his sight
That even he himself his eyes envied,
A hundred naked maidens lily-white,
All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight.
" All they without were ranged in a ring.
And danced round ; but in the midst of them
Three other ladies did both dance and sing.
The while the rest them round about did hem,
And like a garland did in compass stem.
* Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not much more imaginary
than that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He who
is familiar with niedioeval epics will be extremely cautious in drawing
inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He evidently
archaizes like the rest.
190 SPENSER.
And in the midst of these same three was placed
Another damsel, as a precious gem
Amidst a ring most richly well enchased,
That witli her goodly presence all the rest much graced.
" Look how the crown which Ariadne wove
Upon her ivory forehead that same day,
That Theseus her unto his bridal bore,
(When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray,
With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay)
Being now placed in the firmament,
Through the bright heaven doth her beams display,
And is unto the stars an ornament,
Which round about her move in order excellent ;
" Such was the beauty of this goodly band,
Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell,
But she that in the midst of them did stand.
Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel.
Crowned with a rosy garland that right well
Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew
About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell.
And fragrant odors they upon her threw ;
But most W all those three did her with gifts endue.
" Those were the graces. Daughters of Delight,
Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt
Upon this hill and dance there, day and night ;
Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant
And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt
Is borrowed of tliem ; but that fair one
That in the midst was i)laced paravant.
Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone,
That made him pipe so merrily, as never non"..
" She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass
Which piped there unto that merry rout ;
That jolly shepherd that there piped was
Poor Colin Clout ; (who knows not Colin Clout?)
He piped apace while they him danced about ;
Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace.
Unto thy love that marie thee low to lout ;
Thy love is present there with thee in place.
Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace."*
* Faery Queen, B. VI. c. x. 10-16.
SPENSER. 191
Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and
sparkles with simple delight as this 1 It is a sky of
Italian April full of sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of
larks. And we like it all the more that it reminds us
of that passage in his friend Sidney's Arcadia, where
the shepherd-boy pipes " as if he would never be old."
If we compare it with the mystical scene in Dante,* of
which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit
of real life ; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned
in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset
cloud. The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to come
from as far away as Thessaly when Apollo was keeping
sheep thei'e. Sorrow, the great idealizer, had had the
portrait of Beatrice on her easel for years, and every
touch of her pencil transfigured the woman more and
moi-e into the glorified saint. But Elizabeth Nagle was
a solid thing of flesh and blood, who would sit down at
meat with the poet on the very day when he had thus
beatified her. As Dante was drawn upward from heaven
to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser lifted
away from the actual by those of that ideal Beauty
whereof his mind had conceived the lineaments in its
solitary musings over Plato, but of whose haunting pres-
ence the delicacy of his senses had already premonished
him. The intrusion of the real world upon this super-
sensual mood of his wrought an instant disenchant-
ment •• —
" Much wondered Calidore at this strange sight
Whose like before his eye had never seen,
And, standing long astonished in sprite
And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween,
Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen,
Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show
With which his eyes might have deluded been,
Therefore resolving what it was to know,
Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go.
* Purgatorio, XXIX,, XXX.
192 SPENSEK.
" But soon as he appeared to their view
They vanished all away out of his sight
And clean were gone, wliich way he never knervr.
All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite
Of that displeasure, hroke liis hagpipe quite."
Ben Jonson said that " he had consumed a whole
night looking to his great toe, about which he had seen
Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in
his imagination " ; and Coleridge has told us how his
" eyes made pictures when they were shut." This is
not uncommon, but I fancy that Spenser was more habit-
ually possessed by his imagination than is usual even
with poets. His visions must have accompanied him
" in glory and in joy " along the common thoroughfares
of life and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more
real than the men and women he met there. His " most
fine spirit of sense " would have tended to keep him in
this exalted mood. I must give an example of the sen-
suousness of which I have spoken : —
" And in the midst of all a fountain stood
Of richest sul>stance that on earth might be,,
So pure and shiny that the crystal flood
Tlirough every channel running one might see ;
Most goodly it with curious imagery
Was overwrought, and shapes of naked hoys.
Of which some seemed with lively jollity
To fly about, playing their >yanton toys,
Whilst others did theiaselves embay in liquid joys.
" And over all, of purest gold was spread
A trail of ivy in his native hue ;
For the rich metal was so colored
That he who did not well avised it view
Would surely deem it to be ivy true ;
Low his lascivious arms adown did creep
That themselves dipping in the silver dew
Tlieir fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep.
Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep.
" Infinite streams conthiually did well
Out of tills fountain, sweet and fair to see.
SPENSER. 193
The which into an ample laver fell,
And shortly grew to so great quantity
That like a little lake it seemed to be
Whose depth exceeded not three cubits' height,
That through the waves one might the bottom see
All paved beneath with jasper shining bright,
Tliat seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright.
" And all the margent round about was set
With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend
The sunny beams which on the billows bet.
And tliose which therein bathed mote offend.
As Guyon happened by tlie same to wend
Two naked Damsels he therein espied,
Which therein bathing seemed to contend
And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide
Their dainty parts from view of any which them eyed.
" Sometimes the one Avould lift the other quite
Above the waters, and then down again
Her plunge, as overmastered by might,
Where both awhile would covered remain.
And each the other from to rise restrain ;
The wliiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil.
So tlirough the crystal waves appeared plain :
Then suddenly both would themselves unhele,
And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal.
" As that fair star, the messenger of mom,
His dewy face out of the sea doth rear ;
Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born
Of the ocean's fruitful frotli, did iirst appear ;
Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear
Crystalline humor dropped down apace.
Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him near.
And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace ;
His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace.
" The wanton Maidens him espying, stood
Gazing awhile at his unwonted guise ;
Then the one herself low ducked in the flood,
Abashed that her a stranger did avise ;
But the other rather higher did arise,
And her tw-o lily paps aloft displayed.
And all that might his melting heart entice
To her delights, slie unto him bewrayed ;
The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made.
9
194 SPENSER.
" With that the other likewise up arose,
And her fair locks, which formerly were bound
Up in one knot, she low arlown did loose,
Which flowing long and thick her clothed around,
And the ivory in golden mantle gowned :
So that fair spectacle from him was reft.
Yet that which reft it no less fair was found ;
So hid in locks and waves from lookers' theft.
Naught but her lovely face she for his looking left.
" Withal she laughed, and she blushed withal.
That blushing to her laughter gave more grace.
And laughter to her blushing, as did fall.
Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound.
Of all that mote delight a dainty ear,
Such as at once might not on living ground,
Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere :
Eight hard it was for wight which did it hear
To I'ead what manner music that mote be ;
For all that pleasing is to living ear
Was there consorted in one harmony ;
Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree.
"The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade.
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet ;
The angelical soft trembling voices made
To the instruments divine respondence mete ;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur ot the water's fall ;
The water's fall with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."
Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, bad said,
" Why, a God's name, may not we, as else the Greeks,
have the kingdom of our own language 1 " This is in the
tone of Bellay, as is also a great deal of what is said in
the epistle prefixed to the " Shepherd's Calendar." He
would have been wiser had he followed more closely Bel-
lay's advice about the introduction of novel words :
" Fear not, then, to innovate somewhat, particularly in
a long poem, with modesty, however, with analogy, and
SPENSER. 195
judgment of ear ; and ti'oiible not thyself as to who
may think it good or bad, hoping that posterity will ap-
prove it, — she who gives faith to doubtful, light to ob-
scure, novelty to antique, usage to unaccustomed, and
sweetness to harsh and rude things." Spenser's innova-
tions were by no means always happy, as not always
according with the genius of the language, and they
have therefore not prevailed. He forms English words
1^ out of French or Italian ones, sometimes, I think, on a
': misapprehension of their true meaning ; nay, he some-
times makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion of
Romance on a Teutonic root. His theory, caught from
Bellay, of rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted
oblivion, was excellent ; not so his practice of being
archaic for the mere sake of escaping from the common
and familial-. A permissible archaism is a word or
phrase that has been supplanted by something less apt,
but has not become unintelligible ; and Spenser's often
needed a glossary, even in his own day.* But he never
endangers his finest passages by any experiments of this
kind. There his language is living, if ever any, and of
one substance with the splendor of his fancy. Like all
masters of speech, he is fond of toying with and teasing
it a little ; and it may readily be granted that he some-
times " hunted the letter," as it was called, out of all
cry. But even where his alliteration is tempted to an
excess, its prolonged echoes caress the ear like the fad-
ing and gathering reverberations of an Alpine horn, and
one can find in his heart to forgive even such a debauch
of initial assonances as
" Eftsoones lier shallow ship away did slide,
More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky."
* I find a goodly number of Yankeeisms in him, such as idee (not
as a rhyme) ; but the oddest is his twice spelling dew deow, which is
jiist as one woixld spell it who wished to phonetize its sound in rural
New England.
196 SPENSER.
Generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, remind-
ing us of the arrangement of voices in an ancient catch,
where one voice takes up the phrase another has dropped,
and thus seems to give the web of harmony a firmer and
more continuous texture.
Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, mir-
rors that differ very widely in the truth and beauty of
the images they reflect; but Spenser's is a magic glass
in which we see few shadows cast back from actual
life, but visionary shapes conjured up by the wizard's
jart from some confusedly remembered past or some im-
possible future ; it is like one of those still pools of
mediaeval legend which covers some simken city of the
antique world ; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem
to have been gathered. As we float upon it, we see that
it pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds that
drift over it, the trees that grow about its margin, but
in the midst of these shadowy echoes of actuality we
catch faint tones of bells that seem blown to us from
beyond the horizon of time, and looking down into the
clear depths, catch glimpses of towers and far-shining
knights and peerless dames that waver and are gone.
Is it a world that ever was, or shall be, or can be, or
but a delusion 1 Spenser's world, real to him, is real
enough for us to take a holiday in, and we may well be
content with it when the earth we dwell on is so often
too real to allow of such vacations. It is the same
kind of world that Petrarca's Laura has walked in for
five centuries with all ears listening for the music of her
footfall.
The land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but it is
also the land of Rest. To read him is like dreaming
awake, without even the trouble of doing it yourself,
but letting it be done for you by the finest dreamer that
ever lived, who knows how to color his dreams like life
SPENSER. 197
and make them move before you in music. They seem
singing to you as the sirens to Guyon, and we linger
like him : —
" 0, thou fair sou of gentle Faery
That art in mighty arms most magnified
Above all knights that ever battle tried,
0, turn thy rudder hitherward awhile,
Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride,
This is the port of rest from troublous toil,
The world's sweet inn from paiu and wearisome turmoil.*
"With that the rolling sea, resounding swift
In his big bass, them fitly answered.
And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft,
A solemn mean unto them measured.
The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled
His treble, a strange kind of liarmony
Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled
That he the boatman bade row easily
And let him hear some part of their rare melody."
Despite Spenser's instinctive tendency to idealize, and
his habit of distilling out of the actual an ethereal
essence in which very little of the possible seems left,
yet his mind, as is generally true of great poets, was
founded on a solid basis of good-sense. I do not know
where to look for a more cogent and at the same time
picturesque confutation of Socialism than in the Second
Canto of the Fifth Book. If I apprehend rightly his
words and images, there is not only subtile but profound
thinking here. The French Revolution is prefigured in
the well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rousseau's
* This song recalls that in Dante's Purgatorio {XIX. 19-24), in
which the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements. Browne's
beautiful verses ("Turn, hither turn your winged pines") were sug-
gested by these of Spenser. It might almost seem as if Spenser had
here, in his usual way, expanded the sweet old verses : —
" Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely
When Knut king rew thereby ;
' Roweth knightes near the lend,
That I may hear these monkes song.' "
198 SPENSER,
fallacies exposed two centuries in advance. Spenser
was a conscious Englishman to his inmost fibre, and did
not lack the sound judgment in politics which belongs
to his race. He was the more English for living in
Ireland, and there is something that moves us deeply
in the exile's passionate cry : —
" Dear Country ! 0 how dearly dear
Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band
Be to thy foster-child that from thy hand
Did common breath and nouriture receive !
How brutish is it not to understand
How much to her we owe that all us gave,
That gave unto us all whatever good we have ! "
His race shows itself also where he tells us that
" chiefly skill to ride seems a science
Proper to gentle blood,"
which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's saying
that the finest sight God looked down on was a fine man
on a fine horse.
Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells
us that the " Faery Queen " "faded before" Sylvester's
translation of Du Bartas. But Wordsworth held a
brief for himself in this case, and is no exception to the
proverb about men who are their own attorneys. His
statement is wholly unfounded. Both poems, no doubt,
so far as popularity is concerned, yielded to the graver
interests of the Civil War. But there is an appreciation
much weightier than any that is implied in mere popu-
larity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured by
the kind as well as the amount of influence it exerts.
Spenser has coached more poets and more eminent ones
than any other writer of English verse. I need say
nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples like Browne,
the two Fletchers, and More. Cowley tells us that he
became " irrecoverably a poet " by reading the " Faery
Queen " when a boy. Dry den, whose case is particularly
SPENSER, 199,
in point because he confesses having been seduced by
Du Bartas, tells us that Spenser had been his master in
English. He regrets, indeed, comically enough, that
Spenser could not have read the rules of Bossu, but
adds that " no man was ever born with a greater genius
or more knowledge to support it." Pope says, " There
is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in
one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the Faery
Queen when I was about twelve with a vast deal of
delight ; and I think it gave me as much when I read
it over about a year or two ago." Thomson wrote the
most delightful of his poems in the measure of Spenser ;
Collins, Gray, and Akenside show traces of him ; and in
our own day his influence reappears in Wordsworth, By-
ron, Shelley, and Keats. Landor is, I believe, the only
poet who ever found him tedious. Spenser's mere man-
ner has not had so many imitators as Milton's, but no
other of our poets has given an impulse, and in the right
direction also, to so many and so diverse minds ; above
all, no other has given to so many young souls a con-
sciousness of their wings and a delight in the use of
them. He is a standing protest against the tyranny of
Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a noble discontent
with prosaic views of life and the dull uses to which it
may be put.
Three of Spenser's own verses best characterize the
feeling his poetry gives us : —
" Among wide waves set like a little nest,"
"Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies,"
" The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil."
We are wont to apologize for the grossness of our favor-
ite authors sometimes by saying that their age was to
blame and not they ; and the excuse is a good one, for
often it is the frank word that shocks us while we toler-
200 SPENSER.
ate the thing. Spenser needs no such extenuations.
No man can read the " Faery Queen " and be anything
but the better for it. Through that rude age, when Maids
of Honor drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet could say
a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely abstracted
and high, the Don Quixote of poets. Whoever can en-
dure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and
painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid
of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be
silent for a time, let him read in the " Faery Queen."
There is the land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or
sorrow of spirit can enter-
WORDSWOETH
A GENERATION has now passed away since Wordsworth
was laid with the family in the churchyard at Grasmere.*
Perhaps it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impar-
tial measure of his value as a poet. To do this is espe-
cially hard for those who are old enough to remember
the last shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that
long war of critics which began when he published his
manifesto as Pretender, and which came to a pause
rather than end when they flung wp their caps with the
rest at his final coronation. Something of the intensity
of the odium theologicum (if indeed the cestketicum be
not in these days the more bitter of the two) entered
into the conflict. The Wordsworthians were a sect,
who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little
of the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are
liable. The verses of the master had for them the
virtue of religious canticles stimulant of zeal and not
amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criticism.
Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters,
they were songs of battle no less than of worship, and
* " I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at Gras-
mere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Craljb
Eobinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine pathos, thirteen
years after his master's death. Wordsworth was always considerate
and kind with his servants, Robinson tells us.
9*
202 WOKDSWOETH.
the combined ardors of conviction and conflict lent them
a fire that was not naturally their own. As we read
them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of
them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us
a slight shock of disenchantment. It is something like
the diflfereuce between the Marseillaise sung by armed
propagandists on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in
the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the
closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Therese.
It was natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career
to dwell most fondly on those profounder qualities to
appreciate which settled in some sort the measure of a
man's right to judge of poetry at all. But now we must
admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no
less essential elements in forming a sound judgment as
to whether the seer and artist were so united in him as
to justify the claim first put in by himself and after-
wards maintained by his sect to a place beside the few
great poets wdio exalt men's minds, and give a right
direction and safe outlet to their passions through the
imagination, while insensibly helping them toward bal-
ance of character and serenity of judgment by stimulat-
ing their sense of proportion, form, and the nice adjust-
ment of means to ends. In none of our poets has the
I constant propulsion of an unbending will, and the con-
centration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat
narrow, sympathies done so much to make the original
endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly
does the biography throw so much light on the works,
nor enter so largely into their composition as an element
whether of power or of weakness. Wordsworth never!
r saw, and I think never wished to see, beyond the limits
of his own consciousness and experience. He early con- '
ceived himself to be, and through life was confirmed by
circumstances in the faith that he was, a " dedicated
WORDSWORTH. 203
spirit," * a state of mind likely to further an intense but
at the same time one-sided development of the intellec-
tual powers. The solitude in which the greater part of
his mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered
to the passionate intensity of his musings upon man and
nature, was, it may be suspected, harmful to him as an
artist, by depriving him of any standard of proportion
outside himself by which to test the comparative value
of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
incapable of that urbanity of mind which could he
gained only by commerce with men more nearly on his
own level, and which gives tone without lessening indi-
viduality. Wordsworth never quite saw the distinction
between the eccentric and the original. For what we
call originality seems not so much anything peculiar,
much less anything odd, but that quality in a man
which touches human nature at most points of its cir-
cumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our
own powers by recalling and confirming our own un-
valued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to
our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance
to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The
poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the
wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but
singing amid the throng of men and lifting their com-
mon aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed
to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer ether
and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we would,
read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry ; at every
* In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise seen
(during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some village
festival where he had danced all night : —
"My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit."— B. IV.
204 WORDSWORTH.
other page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of
sesthetics. The world-old question of matter and furm,
of whether nectar is of precisely the same flavor when
served to us from a Grecian chalice or from any jug of
ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The Teu-
tonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of
the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any
shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of sense.
Wordsworth never lets us long forget the deeply rooted
stock from which he sprang, — vien ben da lui.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in
Cumberland on the 7th of April, 1770, the second of
five children. His father was John Wordsworth, an
attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther, after-
wards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne
Cookson, the daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His
paternal ancestors had been settled immemorially at
Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather had
emigrated to Westmoreland. His mother, a woman of
piety and wisdom, died in March, 1778, being then in
her thirty-second year. His father, who never entirely
cast off" the depression occasioned by her death, survived
her but five years, dying in December, 1783, when Wil-
liam was not quite fourteen years old.
The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cock-
ermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at
Penrith. His first teacher appears to have been Mrs.
Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who
practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them
chiefly by rote, and not endeavoring to cultivate their
reasoning faculties, a process by which children are apt
to be converted from natural logicians into impertinent
sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutch-
inson, who afterwards became his wife.
"WORDSWORTH. 205
In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin
Sandys, Archbishop of York, in the year 1585, at
Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small mar-
ket-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a
mile northwest of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed
nine years, among a people of simple habits and scenery
of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His earliest intimacies
were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native
district, and the associations with which his mind was
stored during its most impressible period were noble and
pure. The boys were boarded among the dames of the
village, thus enjoying a freedom from scholastic restraints,
which could be nothing but beneficial in a place where
the temptations were only to sports that hai'dened the
body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit
and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth's
oi-dinary amusements here were hunting and fishing,
rowing, skating, and long walks around the lake and
among the hills, with an occasional scamper on horse-
back.* His life as a school-boy was favorable also to his
poetic development, in being identified with that of the
people among whom he lived. Among men of simple
habits, and where there are small diversities of condition,
the feelings and passions are displayed with less restraint,
and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal
human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foot-
hold, and to which he ever afterward cleared his way
through all the overlying drift of conventionalism. The
dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race who kept alive
the traditions and often the habits of a more picturesque
time. A common level of interests and social standing
fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and
friendly human sympathies. Solitude induced reflection,
a reliance of the mind on its own resources, and individ-
* Prelude, Book II.
206 WORDSWORTH.
uality of character. Where everybody knew everybody,
and everybody's father had known everybody's father,
the intei-est of man in naan was not Hkely to become a
matter of cold hearsay and distant report. When death
knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an echo
from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its white
flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in
the chnrchyard but had its story ; not a crag or glen or
aged tree vmtouchcd with some ideal hue of legend. It
was here that Wordsworth learned that homely human-
ity which gives such depth and sincerity to his poems.
Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the
deep trace of that early training which enables him to
speak directly to the primitive instincts of man. He was
apprenticed early to the difficult art of being himself.
At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects im-
posed by the master, and also some voluntaries of his
own, equally vmdistinguished by any peculiar merit.
But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in
his fourteenth year to become a poet.* " It is record-
ed," says his biographer vaguely, " that the poet's father
set him very early to learn portions of the best English
poets by heart, so that at an early age he could repeat
large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser." t
The great event of Wordsworth's school-days was the
death of his father, who left what may be called a hypo-
thetical estate, consisting chiefly of claims upon the first
Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of which, though their
justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in
* " I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures."
Idiot Boy (1798).
t I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the influ-
ence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith was evi-
dently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Evening Walk.
I speak of them as originally printed.
WORDSWORTH. 207
some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In
October, 1787, he left school for St. John's College,
Cambridge. He was already, we are told, a fair Latin
scholar, and had made some progress in mathematics.
The earliest books we hear of his reading -were Don
Quixote, Gil Bias, Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of
a Tub ; but at school he had also become familiar with
the w^orks of some English poets, particularly Goldsmith
and Gray, of whose poems he had learned many by
heart. What is more to the purpose, he had become,
without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods,
and the same mental necessities of a solitary life which
compel men to an interest in the transitory phenomena
of scenery, had made him also studious of the move-
ments of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and
dependence of the external and internal univei"se.
Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its
effect in confirming a character naturally impatient of
conti'ol, and his mind, left to itself, clothed itself with
an indigenous growth, which grew fairly and freely, un-
stinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has
become a truism, that remai'kable persons have remark-
able mothers ; but perhaps this is chiefly true of siich as
have made themselves distinguished by their industry,
and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in them-
selves of only an average quality. It is rather to be
noted how little is known of the parentage of men of
the first magnitude, how often they seem in some sort
foundlings, and how early an apparently adverse destiny
begins the culture of those who are to encounter and
master great intellectual or spiritual experiences.
Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that
little is characteristic. He himself tells us that he was
"stiff, moody, and of violent temper." His mother said
of him that hs was the only one of her children about
208 WORDSWORTH.
whom she felt any anxiety, — for she was sure that he
would be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resent-
ment at some fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself,
but his heart failed him. I suspect that few boys of
passionate temperament have escaped these momentary
suggestions of despairing helplessness. " On another
occasion," he says, "while I was at my grandfathers
house at Penrith, along with my eldest brother Richard,
we were whipping tops together in the long drawing-
room, on which the carpet was only laid down on par-
ticular occasions. The walls were hung round with
family pictures, and I said to my brother, 'Dare you
strike your whip through that old lady's petticoat 1 '
He replied, ' No, I won't.' ' Then,' said I, ' here goes,'
and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for
which, no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was prop-
erly punished. But, possibly from some want of judg-
ment in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse
and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud
of it than otherwise," This last anecdote is as happily
typical as a bit of Greek mythology which always pre-
figured the lives of heroes in the stories of their child-
hood. Just so do we find him afterward striking his
defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of the artifi-
cial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the pun-
ishment of the Reviewers.
Of his college life the chief record is to be found in
" The Prelude." He did not distinguish himself as a
scholar, and if his life had any incidents, they were of
■that interior kind which rarely appear in biography,
though they may be of conti'olling influence upon the
life. He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Mil-
ton while at Cambridge,* but no reflection from them
* Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge ; his
teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It
WORDSWORTH. 209
is visible in liis earliest published poems. The greater
part of his vacations was spent in his native Lake-coun-
try, where his onl}^ sister, Dorothy, was the companion
of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural en-
dowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much
to do with the formation and tendency of the poet's
mind. It was she who called forth the shyer sensibili-
ties of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and
austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and
feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns.
She was his first public, and belonged to that class of
prophetically appreciative temperaments whose apparent
office it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds
with messages from the future. Through the greater
part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical
conscience to him.
Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot
journey upon the Continent (1790). In January, 1791,
he took his degree of B. A., and left Cambridge. Dur-
ing the summer of this year he visited Wales, and, after
declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that
he was not of age for ordination, went over to France in
November, and remained diu'ing the winter at Orleans.
Here he became intimate with the republican General
Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he ardently
sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois,
and returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted
in October for Paris. He remained here as long as he
could with safety, and at the close of the year went back
to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the fate which soon
after overtook his friends the Brissotins.
may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic
stiidy of English poetry was due to the copy of Anderson's British
Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on setting out for his
last voyage in 1805.
N
210 WOEDSWOETH.
As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a
fortunate one, not less so in the training and expansion
of his foculties was this period of his stay in France.
Born and reared in a country where the homely and
fomiliar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and
sublime forms of nature, he had experienced whatever
impulses the creative faculty can receive from mountain
and cloud and the voices of winds and waters, but he
had known man only as an actor in fireside histories and
tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage.
In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's
heart ; he was a spectator at one of those dramas where
the terrible footfall of the Eumenides is heard nearer
and nearer in the pauses of the action ; and he saw man
such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the or-
gasm of a national emotion. He sympathized with the
hopes of France and of mankind deeply, as was fitting
in a young man and a poet ; and if his faith in the gre-
garious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he
. only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual,
and his reverence for the human as something quite
apart from the popular and above it. Wordsworth has
been unwisely blamed, as if he had been recreant to the
liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable that
a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which
always compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by
an involuntary leaning toward external respectability,
should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and de-
structive in politics, and above all in religion. He reads
the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who
does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in
man and the grandeur of his destiny, founded always
upon that personal dignity and virtue, the capacity for
whose attainment alone makes universal liberty possible
and assures its permanence. He was to make men bet-
WOKDSWORTH. 211
ter by opening to them the sources of an inalterable
well-being ; to make them free, in a sense higher than
political, by showing them that these sources are within
them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently
emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His
politics were always those of a poet, cii'cling in the
larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the
transitory oscillation of events.
The change in his point of view (if change there was)
certainly was complete soon after his return from
France, and was perhaps due in part to the influence of
Burke.
" While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen riilicule ; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time ;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Eniieared by custom ; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart theory, insists
Ui30n the allegiance to which men are born.
Could a youth, and one
In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired ? " *
He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly
busy in tearing up whatever had roots in the past,
replacing the venerable trunks of tradition and orderly
growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly to piece
together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce
artificially that sense of permanence and continuity
which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-conscious-
ness in a nation. He became a Tory through intellectual
conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain
* Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a still
earlier date. " Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat
under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." (Southey to
Miss Barker, May, 1806.)
212 WORDSWORTH.
radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells
us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and
Wilkie, " Wordsworth may perhaps walk in ; if he do, I
caution you both against his terrific democratic notions";
and it must have been many years later that Words-
worth himself told Crabb Robinson, " I have no respect
whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the
Chartist in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland,
he travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the
week.* He afterwards became a theoretical church-
goer. "Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church estab-
lishment. He even said he would shed his blood for it.
Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised against him
on account of his having confessed that he knew not
when he had been in a church in his own country. 'All
our ministers are so vile,' said he. The mischief of al-
lowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the multi-
tude he thought more than outweighed all the evils of
an establishment." f
In December, 1792, Wordsworth had retiu-ned to
England, and in the following year published " Descrip-
tive Sketches " and the "Evening Walli." He did this,
as he says in one of his letters, to show that, although
he had gained no honors at the University, he coidd do
something. They met with no great success, and he
afterward corrected them so much as to destroy all their
interest as juvenile productions, without communicating
to them any of the merits of maturitj'. In commenting,
sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these
poems, —
" And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines," —
* This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss
Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for publiea-
tion as early as 1805.
t Crabb Robinson, I. 250, Am. Ed.
WOKDSWORTH. 213
he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but
I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck
tne The moment was important in my poetical
history ; for I date from it my consciousness of the infi-
nite variety of natural appearances which had been un-
noticed by the poets of any age or country, so ftir as I
was acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to
supply in some degree the deficiency."
It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing
him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it may almost
be called) of consistency which leads men first to desire
that their lives should have been without break or seam,
and then to believe that they have been such. The
more distant' ranges of perspective are apt to run to-
gether in retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at
fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of all ages
and countries, — he who to his dying day could not en-
dure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon 1 It
seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable
in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it
is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already
begun that his first volume of "Descriptive Sketches"
(1793) was put forth by Johnson, who was Cowper's
publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is
seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his
expression. But whatever their ultimate effect upon
his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were
clothed in the conventional habit of the eighteenth
century. " The first verses from which he remembered
to have received great pleasure were Miss Carter's
' Poem on Spring,' a poem in the six-line stanza which
he was particularly fond of and had composed much
in, — for example, ' Ruth.' " This is noteworthy, for
Wordsworth's lyric range, especially so far as tune is
concerned, was always narrow. His sense of melody was
214
WORDSWORTH.
painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he
would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting
in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern
poet the thrush-lilie improvisation, the impulsively be-
witching cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan
drama and whose last warble died with Herrick ; but
Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning liavc shown that the
simple pathos of th-eir music was not irrecoverable, even
if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond
recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more
keenly if we compare such verses as
" Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill,"
with Goethe's exquisite Ueher alien Gvpfeln ist Euh,
in which the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary
breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one after another like
blossoms upon turf
"The Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches" show
plainly the pi^evailing influence of Goldsmith, both in
the turn of thought and the mechanism of the verse.
They lack altogether the temperance of tone and judg-
ment in selection which have made the " Traveller " and
the " Deserted Village," perhaps, the most truly classical
poems in the language. They bear here and there,
however, the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Words-
worth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the
intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this real-
ism, from which Wordsworth never wholly freed him-
self, the following verses may suffice as a specimen.
After describing the fixte of a chamois-hunter killed by
falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved
wife and son : —
" Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days.
WORDSWORTH. 215
Start at the reliques of that verj' thigh
On which so oft he prattled when a l)oj'."
In these poems there is plenty of that " poetic diction "
against which Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine
years later.
" To wet the peak's impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
Lapped bjr the panting tongue of thirsty skies. "
Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised
edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motive-
Jessjiespiiir which Byron made fashionable not long after.
Nor are there wanting touches of flcshliness which strike
us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.*
" Farewell ! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the ' sultry ray ' of young Desire ;
Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow ;
Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
Aiid rising by the moon of passion swayed."
The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as
where he changes "despot courts" into "tyranny." One
of the alterations is interesting. In the " Evening
Walk " he had originally written
" And bids her soldier come her wars to share
Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar."
An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second
verse, thus : —
"Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar."t
* Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery.
The late Mr. Clougli told me that he heard him at Dr. Arnold's table
denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn as indecent,
and Haydon records that when he saw the group of Cupid and Psyche
he exclaimed, " The dev-ils! "
t The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The original,
a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately Charles Lamb's
copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor C. E. Norton.
216 WORDSWORTH.
Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making
the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself done so in the
" Evening Walk," and corrects his epithets to suit his
later judgment, putting "gladsome" for "boding," and
replacing
"The tremulous sob of the complaining owl "
by
" The sportive outcry of the mocking owl."
Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much
changed in the revision as to make the dates appended
to them a misleading anachronism. But there is one
truly Wordsworthian passage which already gives us a
glimpse of that passion with which he was the first to
irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a
level with Turner.
" 'T is storm ; and hid in mist from hour to hour
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour :
The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight ;
Dark is the region as with coming night ;
But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form ;
Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline ;
Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold ;
Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
The West that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a nnghty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire."
Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses,
and that for the worse, by substituting "glorious"
(which was already implied in "glances" and " iire-
clad ") for " wheeling." In later life he would have
found it hard to forgive the man who should have made
cliffs recline over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us
as most prophetic in these poems is their want of conti-
nuity, and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture
WORDSWORTH. 217
of unmistakable prose ; perhaps we might add the in-
congruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial
robes of poesy. ^
During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not
publish, a political tract, in which he avowed himself
opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary principle,
and desirous of a republic, if it could be had without
a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life
in favor of that ideal republic " which never was on
land or sea," but fortunately he gave up politics that
he might devote himself to his own nobler calling, to
which politics are subordinate, and for which he found
freedom enough in England as it was.* Dr. Wordsworth
admits that his uncle's opinions were democratical so
late as 1802. I suspect that they remained so in an eso-
teric way to the end of his days. He had himself suf-
fered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great landholder,
and he was born and bred in a pai't of England where
there is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The
look and manner of the Cumberland people especially
* Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never shaiing, so
far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and
Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them shortly
after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with Wordsworth began.
But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer. There is a passage
in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but apparently written in
the spring of 1798) which would imply that Wordsworth had been ac-
cused of some kind of social heresy. '' Wordsworth has been caballed
against so long and so loudly that he has found it impossible to pre-
vail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate to let him the house after
their first agreement is expired." Perhaps, after all, it v/as Words-
worth's insulation of character and habitual want of sympathy with
anything but the moods of his own mind that rendered him incapable
of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have regarded even
his sister Dora (whom he certainly loved as much as it was possible for
him to love anything but his own poems) as a kind of tributary de-
pendency of his genius, much as a mountain might look down on one
of its ancillary spurs.
10
218 WOKDSWORTH.
are such as recall very vividly to a New-Englander the
associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from New
England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile,
Want, which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or
Republican, was pressing upon him. The debt due to
his father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth
was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first
duty of a friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his
neighbor. He at first proposed establishing a periodical
journal to be called "The Philanthropist," but luckily
went no further with it, for the receipts from an organ
of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the
same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or
defunct republicans, would have been necessarily scanty.
There being no appearance of any demand, present or
prospective, for philanthropists, he tried to get employ-
ment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also it
was impossible that he should succeed ; he was too
great to be merged in the editorial We, and had too
well defined a private opinion on all subjects to be able
to express that average of public opinion which consti-
tutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet
in the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on
the wing with food from heaven; and while Words-
worth's relatives wei-e getting impatient at what they
considered his waste of time, while one thought he had
gifts enough to make a good parson, and another la-
mented the rare attorney that was lost in him,* the
* Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, " that, after he
had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what his
future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough
for the Church ; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for
that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his
impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the
Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the
higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history with
WORDSWORTH. 219
prescient muse guided the hand of Raisley Calvert
while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a legacy
of £ 900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely
help came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his
life, and made it honest for him to write poems that will
never die, instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as
play-hills, or leaders that led only to oblivion.
In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister
took up their abode at Racedown Lodge, near Crew-
kerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years were
passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth
to some extent recovered from the fierce disappointment
of his political dreams, and regained that equable tenor
of mind whjch alone is consistent with a healthy pro-
ductiveness. Here Coleridge, who had contrived to see
something more in the " Descriptive Sketches " than the
public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance.
The sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Cole-
ridge's supplied him with that external motive to activ-
ity which is the chief use of popularity, and justified to
him his opinion of his own powers. It was now that the
tragedy of " The Borderers " was for the most part writ-
ten, and that plan of the "Lyrical Ballads" suggested
which gave Wordsworth a clew to lead him out of the
great interest, and the strategy of war ; and he always fancied that he
had talents for command ; and he at one time thought of a military
life, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if he were or-
dered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him from the
yellow-fever, and he gave that \\p." (Memoirs, IT. 466.) It is curious
to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness between
him and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each other
in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in a Icind of
precise uprightness which made tlieir personal cliaracter somewhat
uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety in
Wordsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point
of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make Wel-
lington a great commander.
220 WOEDSWOETH.
metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled. It
was agreed between the two young friends, that Words-
worth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good for-
tune uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already
consented to the arrangement. In July, 1797, the two
Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that
they might be near Coleridge, who in the mean while had
married and settled himself at Nether-Stowey. In No-
vember " The Borderers " was finished, and Wordsworth
went up to London with his sister to offer it for the
stage. The good Genius of the poet again interposing,
the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went
back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-
comedy so common to' young authors.
The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as Jane
Eyre. It shares with many of Wordsworth's narrative
poems the defect of being written to illustrate an ab-
stract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis is
continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied
to the drama, such predestination makes all the person-
ages puppets and disenables them for being characters.
Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he published
"The Borderers" in 1842, and says in a note that it was
" at first written .... without any view to its exhibition
upon the stage." But he was mistaken. The contempo-
raneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he was
long in giving up the hope of getting it accepted by
some theatrical manager.
He now applied himself to the preparation of the first
volume of the "Lyrical Ballads" for the press, and it
was published toward the close of 1798. The book,
which contained also " The Ancient Mariner " of Cole-
ridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part con-
temptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly
after sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the
WORDSWORTH. 221
" Lj'rical Ballads " was reckoned at zero, and it was at last
given \ip to tlie authors. A few persons were not want-
ing, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new
day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought
to extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold
water.*
Lord Bj'ron describes himself as waking one morning
and finding himself famous, and it is quite an ordinaiy
fact, that a blaze may be made with a little saltpetre
that will be stai-ed at by thousands who would have
thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his
biogi'apher, Wordsworth might have said that he awoke
and found himself in-famous, for the publication of the
''Lyrical Ballads" undoubtedly raised him to the distinc-
tion of being the least popular poet in England. Par-
nassus has, two peaks ; the one where improvising poets
cluster ; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits
alone, — a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morn-
ing of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of
kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sun-
set, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable
stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust which in the man
of genius is sublime, and in the man of talent insuffera-
ble. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers
had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence
* Cottle says, " Tlie sale was so slow and the severity of most of the
reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be certain."
But the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then the niost
influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, especially to Wordsworth's
share in the volume. The Monthly says, " So much g:enius and origi-
nality are discovered in this publication that we wish to see another
from the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in the whole
range of English poetry we scai'cely recollect anything su])erior to a
passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey," sums up thus : "Yet
every piece discovers genius ; and ill as the author has frequently
employed his talents, they certainly rank him with the best of living
poets." Such treatment cannot surely be called discouraging.
222 WORDSWORTH.
behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write
more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth
of his own mind, at a time when there were only two
men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who were aware
that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from
those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily,
side by side, in the great pin-paper of society.
In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with
Klopstock, and after dinner they had a conversation,
of which Wordsworth took notes. The respectable old
poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the
chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respecta-
ble Muse, seems to have been rather bewildered by the
apparition of a living genius. The record is of value
now chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth's
mind. Among other things he said, " that it was the
province of a great poet to raise people up to his own
level, not to descend to theirs," — memorable words, the
more memorable that a literary life of sixty years was in
keeping with them.
It would be instructive to know what were Words-
worth's studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quin-
cey's statement is mere conjecture. It may be guessed
fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the
German language by the easy path of the ballad, a
course likely to confirm him in his theories as to the
language of poetry. The Spinosism with which he has
been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any
German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the
"Lines composed at Tintern Abbey" in July, 1798. It
\s more likely to have been derived from his talks with
Coleridge in 1797.* When Emerson visited him in 1833,
* A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia Litera-
ria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion of trea-
sonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant references
WORDSWORTH. 223
he spoke with loathing of " Wilhelm Meister," a part of
which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently.
There was some affectation in this, it should seem, for
he had read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly
concluded that the help of Germany in the development
of his genius may be reckoned as very small, though
there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form
and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and
those of Goethe. His poem of the "Thorn," though
vastly more imaginative, may have been suggested by
Biirger's Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain. The little
grave drei Spaimen lang, in its conscientious measure-
ment, certainly recalls a famous couplet in the English
poem.
After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and
his sister returned to England in the spring of 1799, and
settled at Grasmere in Westmoreland. In 1800, the first
edition of the " Lyrical Ballads " being exhausted, it was
republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.
Longman paying £ 100 for the copyright of two edi-
tions. The book passed to a second edition in 1802,
and to a thii'd in 1805.* Wordsworth sent a copy of it,
with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommend-
ing to his attention the poems " Michael " and " The
Brothers," as displaying the strength and permanence
among a simple and rural population of those domestic
affections which were certain to decay gradually under
to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show how
they pronounced tlie name, which was exactly in accordance with the
usage of the last generation in New England.
* Wordsworth found (as other original nunds have since done) a
hearing in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys,
a Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient list of sub-
scribers to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The second
English edition, however, having been published before he had wholly
completed his repiinting, was substantially followed in the first Amer-
ican, which was published in 1802.
224 WOKDSWOKTIL
the influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr.
Fox wrote a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favor-
ites among the poems were " Hany Gill," " We are Sev-
en," "The Mad Mother," and "The Idiot," but that he
was prepossessed against the use of blank-verse for sim-
ple subjects. Any political significance in the poems he
was apparently unable to see. To this second edition
Wordsworth prefixed an argumentative Preface, in which
he nailed to the door of the cathedral of English song
the critical theses which he was to maintain against all
comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing
for an author to undertake to show the goodness of
his verses by the logic and learning of his prose; but
Wordsworth carried to the reform of poetry all that
fervor and faith which had lost their political object, and
it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his
mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their con-
comitant, that he could do so calmly what was sure to
seem ludicrous to the greater number of his readers.
Fifty years have since demonstrated that the true judg-
ment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false
judgment, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a
man only by a well-founded faith in himself. To this
Defensio Wordsworth afterward added a supplement,
and the two form a treatise of permanent value for phil-
osophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill
effect has been, that they have encoviraged mai:iy other-
wise deserving young men to set a Sibylline value on
their verses in proportion as they were unsalable. The
sti'ength of an argument for self-reliance drawn from the
example of a great man depends wholly on the great-
ness of him who uses it; such arguments being like
coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong
against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffo-
cate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of
oblivion.
WORDS WORTH. 225
An advertisement prefixed to the " Lyrical Ballads,"
as originally published in one volume, warned the
reader that " they were written chiefly with a view to
ascertain how far the language of conversation in the
middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the
purposes of poetic pleasure." In his preface to the
second edition, in two volumes, Wordsworth already
found himself forced to shift his ground a little (per-
haps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of
Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that
" it was published as an experiment which, I hoped,
might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting
to metrical arrangement, a selection of the real language
of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleas-
ure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted
which a poet may rationally endeavor to impart."*
Here is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position,
though Wordsworth seems to have remained uncon-
vinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obsti-
nately to the passages of bald prose into which his origi-
nal theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his opinions
had undergone a still further change, and an assiduous
study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own
poetic method (the two subjects in which alone he was
ever a thorough scholar) had convinced him that jjoetry
was in no sense that appeal to the xmderstanding which
is implied by the words " rationally endeavor to im-
part." In the preface of that year he says, " The
observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes
which was published many years ago under the title of
' Lyrical Ballads ' have so little of special application to
the greater part of the present enlarged and diversified
collection, that they could not wdth propriety stand as
* Some of the weightiest passages in tliis Preface, as it is now
printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815.
10* o
226 WORDSWORTH.
an introduction to it." It is a pity that he could not
have become an earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy
definition, that " prose was words in their best order,
and poetry the best words in the best ordei\" But ideal-
ization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to
learn painfully. It did not come to him naturally as
to Spenser and Shelley and to Coleridge in his higher
f moods. Moreover, it was in the too frequent choice of
subjects incapable of being idealized without a manifest
jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's
great mistake lay. For example, in " The Blind High-
land Boy " he had originally the following stanzas : —
" Strong is the current, but be mild,
Ye waves, and sjjare tlie helpless child !
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A bee-hive would be ship as safe
As that in which he sails.
" But say, what was it ? Thought of fear !
Well may ye tremble when ye hear !
— A household tub like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
This carried the blind boy."
In endeavoring to get rid of the downright vulgarity
of phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth invents an
impossible tortoise-shell, and thus robs his story of the
reality which alone gave it a living interest. Any ex-
temporized raft would have floated the boy down to
immortality. But Wordsworth never quite learned the
distinction between Fact, which suffocates the Muse, and
Truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils. Study
and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite
satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake.
He yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain
points, and gave up, for example, the ludicrous exact-
ness of
" I 've measured it from side to side,
'T is three feet long and two feet wide."
WORDSWORTH. 227
But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his
dying day he could never quite shake off that habit of
over-minute detail which renders the narratives of un-
cultivated people so tedious, and sometimes so distaste-
ful.* " Simon Lee," after his latest revision, still contains
verses like these : —
" And lie is lean and he is sick ;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests iipon ankles swollen and thick ;
His legs are thin and dry ;
Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell.
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell," —
which are not only prose, but had prose, and more-
over guilty of the same fault for which Wordsworth
condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on the bal-
lad-style,— that their ^'matter is contemptible." The
sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth some-
times gives utterance to commonplaces of thought and
trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous effect on the
profane and even on the faithful in unguarded moments.
We are reminded of a passage in the " Excursion " : —
" List ! I heard
From yon huge breast of rock a solemn bleat,
Sent forth as if it ivere the mountain's voice."
In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb
began, and was thenceforward never interrupted. He
* "On my alluding to the line,
' Three feet long and two feet wide, '
and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in companj', he said,
'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His
ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to ap-
preciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity to judge
of poetry at all.
228 WORDSWORTH.
continued to live at Grasmere, conscientiously diligent
in the composition of poems, secure of finding the ma-
terials of glory within and around him ; for his genius
taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign
shore, and that no adventurer ever found it, though he
wandered as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the appre-
ciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the purest
hearts gradually centred more and more towards hiin.
In 1802 he made a short visit to France, in company
with Miss Wordsworth, and soon after his return to
England was married to Maiy Hutchinson, on the 4th
of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of
this marriage no other proof is needed than the purity
and serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought
nowhere else.
On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John was
born, and on the 14th of August of the same year he set
out with his sister on a foot journey into Scotland. Cole-
ridge was their companion during a part of this excur-
sion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In
Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited
to him a part of the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," then
in manuscript. The travellers returned to Grasmere on
the 25th of September. It was during this year that
Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George
Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur paintei'
of considerable merit, and his friendship was undoubt-
edly of service to Wordsworth in making him familial'
with the laws of a sister art and thus contributing ty
enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency of
which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George
Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not forego his regard foi'
the poet, but contrived to hold his afiFection in mortmai»
b}^ the legacy of an annuity of £ 100, to defray the
charges of a yearly journey.
WORDSWORTH. 229
In March, 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life
by the shipwreck of the Abergavenny East-lndiaman, of
which he was captain. He was a man of great purity
and integrity, and sacrificed himself to his sense of duty
by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible to
save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and
felt such grief at his death as only solitary natures like
his are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the
heroism which was the cause of it. The need of mental
activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may
account for the great productiveness of this and the fol-
lowing year. He now completed " The Prelude," wrote
*' The Wagoner," and increased the number of his smaller
poems enough to fill two volumes, which were published
in 1807.
This collection, which contained some of the most
beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among others the in-
comparable Odes to Duty and on Immortality, did not
reach a second edition till 1815. The reviewers had an-
other laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they scoffed,
particularly Byron, among whose verses a bit of Words-
worth showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on
the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an abbey.*
There was a general combination to put him down, but
on the other hand there was a powerful party in his
favor, consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only
continued in good heart himself, but, reversing the or-
der usual on such occasions, kept up the spirits of his
friends.t
* Byron, then in his twentieth year, -wrote a review of these voUimes
not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as saying that
Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack on
Hours of Idleness. "The young man will do something if he goes
on," he said.
t The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his
uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness
230 WORDSWORTH.
Woidsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house
of Sir George Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire,
the cottage at Grasmere having become too small for his
increased family. On his return to the Vale of Gras-
mere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived
three years. During this period he appears to have
written very little poetry, for which his biographer as-
signs as a primary reason the smokiness of the Allan
Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the fail-
ure of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth com-
posed chiefly in the open air. It did not prevent him
from writing a pamphlet upon the Convention of Cintra,
which was published too late to attract much attention,
though Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that
which one of Milton's tracts might have had iipon a con-
are only matched by the Rev. Mark Nohle's " History of the Protec-
torate House of Cromwell." It is a misfortune that his materials were
not piit into the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American
edition are among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are
the clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of
Wordsworth ; and those relating to this part of his life should be read
by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the prin-
ciples which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a let-
ter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, " Trouble not yourself
upon their present reception ; of what moment is that compared with
what I trust is their destiny ! — to console the afflicted, to add sun-
shine to daylight by making the hap2:)y happier ; to teach the young
and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore
to become more actively and securely virtuous ; this is their office,
which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all
that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves To conclude,
my ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism], and my
flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings ; and, after what I have
paid, I am sure yours will be the same. I doubt not that you will
share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among
them these little poems) will co-operate with tlie benign tendencies in
human nature and society wherever found ; and that they will in their
degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." Here
is an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular poet
and his little public of admirers ; it is he who keeps up their spirits,
and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaustible cistern.
WORDSWORTH. 231
temporary.* It was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dic-
tated " The Friend," and Wordsworth contributed to it
two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes f (Pro-
fessor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished
in the Notes to " The Excursion." Here also he wrote
his "Description of the Scenery of the Lakes." Perhaps
a truer explanation of the compai'ative silence of Words-
worth's Muse during these years is to be found in the
intense intei-est which he took in current events, whose
variety, picturesqueness, and historical significance were
enough to absorb all the energies of his imagination.
In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the
Parsonage at Grasmere. Here he remained two years,
and here he had his second intimate experience of sor-
row in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and
Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st
December, 181 2.+ Early in 1813 he bought Eydal
Mount, and, having removed thither, changed his abode
no more during the rest of his life. In Mar(;h of this
year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the
county of Westmoreland, an office whose receipts ren-
dered him independent, and whose business he was able
to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure for
nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment
as an instance of the remarkable good luck which waited
* " Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect,
because the sentences are long and involved ; and his frieud De
Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure
by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30tli Jiily,
1809. ) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.
t The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.
J Wordsworth's children were, —
John, boi'n 18th June, 1803 ; still living ; a clergyman.
Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804 ; died 9th July, 1847.
Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1808 ; died 4th June, 1812.
William, born 12th May, 1810 ; succeeded his father as Stamp-
Distributor.
232 WORDSWORTH.
upon Wordsworth through his whole life. In our view
it is only another illustration of that scripture which
describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good luck
is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic charac-
ter, and conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth
owed his nomination to the friendly exertions of the
Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone as far as might
be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who respected
the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the
originality of the poet.* The Collectorship at White-
haven (a more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to
Wordsworth, and declined. He had enough for inde-
pendence, and wished nothing more. Still later, on the
death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part
of that district was annexed to Westraorelaud, and
Wordsworth's income was raised to something more than
£ 1,000 a year.
In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting
Yarrow in company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During
this year "the Excursion " was published, in an edition
of five hundred copies, which supplied the demand for
six years. Another edition of the same number of cop-
ies was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834.
In 1816 "The White Doe of Rylstone" appeared, and
in 1816 "A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in which
Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be ob-
served by the biographers of literary men. It contains
many valuable suggestions, but allows hardly scope
enough for personal details, to which he was constitu-
* Good luck (ill the sense of Chance) seems properly to be the oc-
currence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows
how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's
Bermudan appointment is an instance of it. Wordsworth had a sound
common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to
fill his oihce as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man
could not have been found in Westmoreland.
WORDSWOKTH. 233
tionally indifferent.* Nearly the same date may be as-
cribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books
of the ^neid, a specimen of which was printed in the
Cambridge "Philological Museum" (1832). In 1819
" Peter Bell," written twenty years before, was published,
and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of the re-
viewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his previous
volumes. " The Wagoner." printed in the same year,
was less successful. His next publication was the vol-
ume of Sonnets on the river Duddon, with some miscel-
laneous poems, 1820. A tour on the Continent in 1820
furnished the subjects for another collection, published
in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the
volume of "Ecclesiastical Sketches." His subsequent
publications were "Yarrow Revisited," 1835, and the
tragedy of "The Borderers," 1842.
During all these years his fame was increasing slowly
but steadily, and his age gathered to itself the reverence
and the troops of friends which his poems and the nobly
simple life reflected in them deserved. Public honors
followed private appreciation. In 1838 the University
of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of D. C. L. In
1839 Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet
(now in his seventieth yeai') at the University w-as en-
thusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp-Dis-
tributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of putting
him upon the civil list for a pension of £ 300. In 1843
he was appointed Laureate, with the express understand-
ing that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties
except such as might be self-imposed. His only official
production was an Ode for the installation of Prince
Albert as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should
* " I am not one who much or oft delight
In personal talk."
234 WOEDSWOETH.
seem, that he might receive that honor which he had
truly conquered for himself by the unflinching bravery
of a literary life of half a century, unparalleled for the
scorn with which its labors were received, and the vic-
torious acknowledgment which at last crowned them.
Surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever
any man had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a
sort his own posthumous renown, for the hardy slow-
ness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its durability.
He died on the 23d of April, 1850, the anniversary of
the death of Shakespeare.
We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,
— a life uneventful even for a man of letters ; a life like
that of an oak, of quiet self-development, throwing out
stronger roots toward the side whence the prevailing
storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in proportion to
the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The life
and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped
it, are to be looked for, even more than is the case with
most poets, in his works, for he deliberately recorded
them there.
Of his personal characteristics little is related. He
was somewhat above the middle height, but, according
to De Quincey, of indifferent figure, the shoulders being
narrow and drooping. His finest feature was the eye,
which was gray and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt
says : " I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so
supernatural. They were like fires, half burning, half
smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One
might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes."
Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness
of him, in De Quincey's judgment, is the portrait of
Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes on Paradise Lost.
He was active in his habits, composing in the open air,
WORDSWORTH. 235
and generally dictating his poems. His daily life was
regular, simple, and frugal ; his manners were dignified
and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversa-
tions it is remarkable how little that was personal
entered into his judgment of contemporaries.
The true I'ank of Wordsworth among poets is, per-
haps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, so hard is it
to escape into the quiet hall of judgment uninflamed by
the tumult of partisanship which besets the doors.
Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet,
at a time when the artificial school of poetry was en-
throned with all the authority of long succession and
undisputed legitimacy, it was almost inevitable that
Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgment was a
rebel against the existing oi'der, should become a parti-
san. Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan
of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its represent-
ative. Right in general principle, he thus necessarily
became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that
greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying
its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his
instincts too much to a system, mistook his own resent-
ments for the promptings of his natural genius, and, com-
pelling principle to the measure of his own temperament
or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell
sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself
artificial. If a poet resolve to be original, it will end
commonly in his being merely peculiar.
Wordsworth himself departed more and more in prac-
tice, as he grew older, from the theories which he had
laid down in his prefaces ; * but those theories undoubt-
* How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influ-
ence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested
so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the lan-
guage of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if
236 WORDSWORTH.
edly had a great effect in retarding the growth of his
fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of specta-
cles through which his earlier poems were to be studied,
and the public insisted on looking through them at his
mature works, and were consequently unable to see
fairly what required a different focus. He forced his
readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount
of conscious preparation, and thus gave them before-
hand the impression of something like mechanical arti-
fice, and deprived them of the contented repose of
implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a
living creature ; but Wordsworth would not let his
readers be children, and did injustice to himself by
giving them an uneasy doubt whether creations which
really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius,
and were alive with nature's life of life, were not con-
trivances of wheels and springs. A naturalness which
we are told to expect has lost the crowning grace of
nature. The men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa's
visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable
emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally
one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some
later copyist of Pope : —
"While the tiibed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."
And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd " we find
a thermometer or barometer called
" Tlie well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime. "
Btill worse in the " Eclipse of the Sun," 1821 : —
" High ou her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening."
Bo in "The Excui-sion,"
" The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions."
WORDSWORTH. 237
shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they had hit upon
the secret of the thanmaturgj ; but to a tree that has
grown as God willed we come without a theory and with
no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thank-
fully ; or the Imagination recreates for us its past
summers and winters, the birds that have nested and
sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its shade,
the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that
have drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined
it in winter. The Imagination is a faculty that flouts
at foreordination, and Wordsworth seemed to do all he
could to cheat his readers of her company by laying out
paths with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel! at
the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every
conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to tell each
when and where it must be caught.
But if these things stood in the way of immediate
appreciation, he had another theory which interferes
more seriously with the total and permanent effect of
his poems. He was theoretically determined not only
to be a philosophic poet, but to be a great philosophic
poet, and to this end he must produce an epic. Leav-
ing aside the question whether the epic be obsolete or
not, it may be doubted whether the history of a single
man's mind is universal enough in its interest to fur-
nish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it
may be more than doubted whether a poet's philosophy
be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and
section. It is rather something which is more ener-
getic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
unclose themselves instinctively at its simple Open
sesame ! while they would stand firm against the read-
ing of the whole body of philosophy. In point of fact,
the one element of greatness which " The Excursion "
possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the epi-
238 WORDSWORTH.
sodes that are universally read, and the effect of these
is diluted by the connecting and accompanying lectures
on metaphysics. Wordsworth had his epic mould to
fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus,
was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal,
lest it should run short. Separated from the rest, the
episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and without
example in the language.
Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds,
was a good critic of the substance of poetry, but some-
what niggardly in the allowance he made for those sub-
sidiary qualities which make it the charmer of leisure
and the employment of minds without definite object.
It may be doubted, indeed, whether he set much stoi'e
b}'- any contemporai-y writing but his own, and whether
he did not look upon poetry too exclusively as an exer-
cise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
imagination.* He says of himself, speaking of his
youth : —
" In fine,
J was a better judge of thouglits tlian words,
Misled in estimating words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by tlie trade in classic niceties,
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages that want the living voice
. To carry meaning to the natural heart;
To tell us what is jjassion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense." t
Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was
always true of him, and his thought seems often to lean
upon a word too weak to bear its weight. No reader
of adeq\iate insight can help regretting that he did not
earlier give himself to " the trade of classic niceties."
* According toLandor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be "not
worth five shillings."
t Prelude, Book VI.
WORDSWORTH. 239
It was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of
Lander the severe dignity and reserved force which
alone among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and
to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, Words-
worth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder)
is always essentially that of Cowper. They were alike
also in their love of outward natm-e and of simple things.
The main difference between them is one of scenery
rather than of sentiment, between the life-long familiar
of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.
It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very
highest powers of the poetic mind wei'e associated with
a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It
is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the great
golden veins of his imagination are imbedded.* He
wrote too much to write always well ; for it is not a
great Xerxes-army of words, but a compact Greek ten
thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He set
tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as
trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking
hen. Throughout " The Prelude " and " The Excur-
sion " he seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination
with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have
forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the
particles cohere. There is an ax'enaceous quality in the
style which makes progress wearisome. Yet with what
splendors as of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded !
what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching
* This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss Martineau
said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's conversa-
tion : "Sometimes he is annoying fi'om the pertinacity with which he
dwells on trifles ; at otlier times lie flows on in the utmost grandeur,
leaving a strong impression of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he
read "Resolution" and "Independence" to a lady who was affected
by it even to tears, and then said, " I have not heard anything for
years that so much delighted me ; but, after all, it is not poetry."
240 WORDSWORTH.
heavenward with augels ascending and descending !
what haunting harmonies hover around us deep and
eternal hke the undying barytone of the sea ! and if
we are compelled to fare through sands and desert
wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that
syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to
our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration,
such as we wait for in vain in any other poet !
Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism
cannot but allow, and what is left will show how truly
f great he was. He had no humor, no dramatic power,
I and his temperament was of that dry and jniceless
quality, that in all his published correspondence you
shall not find a letter, but only essays. If we consider
carefully where he "was most successful, we shall find
that it was not so much in description of natural
scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expres-
sion of the effect produced by external objects and
events upon his own mind, and of the shape and hue
(perhaps momentary) which they in turn took from his
mood or temperament. His finest passages are always
monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and
there are parts of his poems which remind us of local
histories in the vmdue relative importance given to
trivial matters. He was the historian of Wordsworth-
shire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly
a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and
greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth,
and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment.
It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That
sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his
fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-
denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary
and meditative temper, and it w^as thei'e that Lamb (an
admirable judge of what was permanent in literatui-e)
WORDSWORTH. 241
liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces
from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault
of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion.
He excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tem-
pers monologue with mercy. In " The Excursion" we are
driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenu-
ating cii'cumstances. His mind had not that reach and
elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-
wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately
fleets from every quarter ; some deep with silks and
spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their
battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their
destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every
inch of canvas strained by the xxnifying breath of their
common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton
mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the
trumpet's ardors or the slim delicacy of the flute, and
sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his
prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of
his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to
his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his
appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is
not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that w4xich
Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,
— that which Pan endowed with every melody of the
visible universe, — the same in which the soul of the
despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual
nature, — so that ever and anon, amid the notes of hu-
man joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and
almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of
a forgotten divinity.
Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it no
doubt confirmed his self-confidence by making him in-
sensible both to the comical incongruity into which he
was often led by his earlier theory concerning the lan-
11
242 WORDSWORTH.
guage of poetry and to the not vmnatural ridicule called
forth b}' it, seems to have been indicative of a certain
dulness of perception in other directions.* We cannot
help feeling that the material of his nature was essen-
tially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the
* Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than
when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of Kir-
connel, — a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness
of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering com-
pression is masterly. Compare
" Curst be the heart that thought the thought.
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succor me !
O, thiulc ye not my heart was sair
Wlieu my love dropt down and spake na mair ? "
compare this with, —
" Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling.
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin :
Fair Ellen saw it when it came.
And, stepping forth to meet the same.
Did with her body cover
The Youth, lier chosen lover.
And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon) sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
Against the Moorish Crescent."
These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk " penning a
stanza when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth
here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by
substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had
he written, —
" And Gordon never gave a hint.
But, having somewhat picked his flint,
Let fly the fatal bullet
That killed that lovely pullet,"
it would hai'dly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He
shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in
the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: "The poem of my friend
has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no dis-
tinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a human
WORDSWORTH. 243
power of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspira-
tion failed or was factitious, remained obstinately leaden.
The normal condition of many poets would seem to
approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind
could be raised only by the white heat of profoundly
inward passion. And in proportion to the intensity
needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the
very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather
the productions of nature than of man, and have the
lastingness of such, delighting our age with the same
startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth.
Is it his thought "? It has the shifting inward lustre of
diamond. Is it his feeling 1 It is as delicate as the
impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught
and fixed forever in immutable grace the most evanes-
cent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-
marks on the remotest shores of being. But this
intensity of mood which insures high quality is by
its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Words-
worth, in endeavoring it, falls more below himself, and
is, more even than many poets his inferiors in imagina-
tive quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot
help having the feeling sometimes that the poem is
there for the sake of these passages, rather than that
these are the natural jets and elations of a mind ener-
gized by the rapidity of its own motion. In other words,
the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring
from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole,
being who, having been long under the control of supernatural impres-
sions, might be supposed himself to partake of something sujier-
natural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted
upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection, do
not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat
laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, and
drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. One
would think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original
poems lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
244 WOEDSWOETH.
but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of
the poet in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt
mood, has patiently built up around it a setting of
verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material
"whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless
quality of the gem it encumbers.* During the most
happily productive period of his life, Wordsworth was
impatient of what may be called the mechanical portion
of his art. His wife and sister seem from the fii'st to
have been his scribes. In later years, he had learned
and often insisted on the truth that poetry was an art
no less than a gift, and corrected his poems in cold
blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he certainly
had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and
was always a little numb on the side of form and
proportion. Perhaps his best poem in these respects
is the " Laodamia," and it is not uninstructive to learn
from his own lips that " it cost him more ti'ouble than
almost anything of equal length he had ever written."
His longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more inti-
mate bond of union than their more or less immediate
relation to his own personality. Of character other
than his own he had but a faint conception, and all
the personages of " The Excursion " that are not Words-
worth are the merest shadows of himself upon mist, for
his self-concentrated nature was incapable of projecting
itself into the consciousness of other men and seeing
the springs of action at their source in the recesses of
individual charactei*. The best parts of these longer
poems ai'e bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his
* " A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely Image in the song rose up.
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea."
Prelude, Book IV.
WORDSWORTH. 245
fingers were always clumsy at the callida junctura.
The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by times
with pleasing reflections {yiridesque placido oequore syl-
vas) ; we are forced to do our own rowing, and only
when the current is tiemnied in by some narrow gorge
of the poet's personal consciousness do we feel ourselves
snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of
unmistaliable inspiration. The fact that what is pre-
cious in Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even
than with some greater poets than he) a gift rather
than an achievement should always be borne in mind
in taking the measure of his power. I know not
whether to call it height or depth, this peculiarity of
his, but it certainly endows those parts of his work
which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian with an
unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such
as we feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems
to have been half conscious of this, and recited his own
poems to all comers with an enthusiasm of wondering
admiration that would have been profoundly comic*
but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William
Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person,
and the William Wordsworth whom he so heartily rev-
erenced quite another. We recognize two voices in him,
as Stephano did in Caliban. Thei^e are Jeremiah and
his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating,
the amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in
jotting down some anecdotes of his master, how he one
day went out and saw an old woman, and the next day
did not, and so came home and dictated some verses on
* Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and
Mr. Ellis Yariiall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, " Tliese
quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed
me ; it seemed almost as if he were auied by the greatness of his oicn
power, tlie gifts with which he had been endowed." (The italics are
mine.)
246 WORDSWORTH.
this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw
a cow. These marginal annotations have been carelessly
taken up into the text, have been religiously held by the
pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dexterous exege-
sis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and
speaks as one divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher
and invisible power. Wordsworth's better utterances
have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from
time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong
to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not
more his own than ours and every man's, the word of
the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally
very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly
by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to
the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish
foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal
sensibility.* He did not grow as those poets do in whom
the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most
delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer,
is the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn
by a highly idealizing hand, does his best afterwards
to look like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems
* His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate
influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is
evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of " those
who have been so well pleased that I should, year alter year, flow
with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream." (Letters,
Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C, Vol. I. pp. 5-6.) "Words-
worth found fault with the repetition of the concluding .sound of tlie
participles in Shakespeare's line about bees :
' The singuig masons building roofs of gold. '
This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written.
Keats thought, on tlie other hand, that the rejietition was in harmony
with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's Autobiogra-
phy.) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1S37, "My ear is
susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot
help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.
WORDSWORTH. 247
seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his
former self. They would never, as Sir John Harrington
says of poetry, " keep a child from play and an old man
from the chimney-corner." *
Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a
junior counsel who was arguing certain obvious points
of law at needless length, by saying, " Brother Jones,
there are some things which a Supreme Court of the
United States sitting in equity may be presumed to
know." Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and
restating obvious points till the reader feels as if his
own intelligence were somewhat underrated. He is
over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and once
profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he
knows not when to stop. If he feel himself flagging,
he has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it were, by
asking himself a series of questions sometimes not need-
ing, and often incapable of answer. There are three
stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of "Peter
Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead
body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending
with one which reaches the height of comicality : —
" Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering ?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ?"
The same w^ant of humor which made him insensible to
incongruity may perhaps account also for the singular
unconsciousness of disproportion which so often strikes
us in his poetry. For example, a little farther on in
" Peter Bell " we find : —
" Noio — like a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
* In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.
248 WORDSWORTH.
And in a moment to tlie verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge —
Full suddenly tlie Ass doth rise ! "
And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the
huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they
are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty for the service
to which they are put.*
The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow
and his mood to^meditative for narrative poetry. He
values his own thoughts and reflections too much to
sacrifice the least of them to the interests of his story.
Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the
subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. " The Wag-
oner " involuntarily suggests a comparison with " Tam
O'Shanter " infinitely to its own disadvantage. " Peter
Bell," full though it be of profound touches and subtle
analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was
forced to confess that he did not like it. " The White
Doe," the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best
meaning of the epithet, is also only the more truly so
for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in Words-
worth and will charm forever is the
"Happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone."
A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words
to the tune of our own feelings and fancies, in the charm
of their manner, indefinable as the sympathetic grace of
woman, are everything to us without our being able to
say that they are much in themselves. They rather
narcotize than fortif\^ Wordsworth must subject our
mood to his own before he admits us to his intimacy ;
but, once admitted, it is for life, and we find ourselves
iu his debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours
* In " Resolution " and "Independence."
WORDSWORTH. 249
of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a re-
inforcement of faltermg purpose and personal indepen-
dence of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first
professed by Dr. Jean Jaques and continued by Cowper,
certainly breaks down as a whole. The Solitary of " The
Excursion," who has not been cui'ed of his scepticism by
living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we
can see, equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and
Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt> that this would
be so, and accordingly never saw his way clear to finish-
ing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea
or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates
abstinence, exercise, and imcontaminate air. I am not
sure, indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend
to foster in constitutions less vigorous than Words-
worth's what Milton would call a fugitive and clois-
tered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities.
I The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual
megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more
out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and
passion and by grappling with the facts of this world,
rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble
problems of another. If they had not discovered the
picturesque, as we understand it, they found surprisingly
fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have seen
something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle
of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron
of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his
finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence.
But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made
all those qualifications and deductions against which
even the greatest poet may not plead his privilege,
what is left to Wordsworth is enough to justify his
fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds,
the unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles
250 WORDSWORTH. ■
through, flashing out unexpected vistas, and illuminat-
ing the humdrum pathway of our daily thought with
a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like
a revelation. If it be the most delightful function of
the poet to set our lives to music, yet perhaps he wdll
be even more sure of our matiu'er gratitude if he do
his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and
enlighten ; if he define and encourage our vacillating
perceptions of duty ; if he piece together our fragmen-
tary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life
■whose uiiconscious instruments we are, making of the
jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a co-
herent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite
sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes lilve
gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element
in which it floats, but which is rooted on the solid rock
of our common sympathies. Wordsworth shows less of
this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two
of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley ;
V but he was a masculine thinker, and in his more charac-
teristic poems there is always a kernel of firm conclu-
sion from far-reaching principles that stimulates thought
and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark pas-
sages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were
a wall that gives us our bearings and enables us to find
an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that he lacks
that serene impartiality of mind which results from
breadth of culture ; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost
provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who
gather brightness by revolving on their own axis. But
through this very limitation of range he gains perhaps
in intensity and the impressiveness which results from
eagerness of personal conviction. If we read Words-
worth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves
changing our mind about him at every other page, so
WORDS WOETH. 251
uneven is he. If we read our favorite poems or pas-
sages only, he will seem uniformly great. And even
as regards " The Excursion " we should remember how
few long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my
part I know of but one, — the Odyssey.
None of our great poets can be called popular in any
exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals
with thoughts and emotions which inhabit, like rarest
sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that shore between
our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,
rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid
bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional moments
of entire calm and clearness. Of no other poet except j
Shakespeare have so many phrases become household '
words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made cuiTent
more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth be-
longs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and
given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague
suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle ministry
with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life
scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won
for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition
which makes only the best minds at their best hoiu's
worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and
by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches
the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude
for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, and
we who speak it, for having emboldened us to take de-
light in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own
instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid
" Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie
A little nearer Spenser " ;
for there is no fear of crowding in that little society
with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the succession
of the great English Poets,
MILTON.* ^/^----
If the biograpMes of literary men are to assume the
bulk which Mr. M asson is giving to that of Milton, their
authors should s;end a phial of elixir vitce with the first
volume, that a p urchaser might have some valid assui--
ance of survivir.g to see the last. Mr. Masson has al-
ready occupied thirteen hundred and seventy-eight pages
in getting Milt^on to his thirty-fifth year, and an interval
of eleven years stretches between the dates of the first
and second instalments of his published labors. As
Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, with
the " Ode o n the Nativity," and as by far the more im-
portant par t of it lies between the year at which we are
arrived an;d his death at the age of sixty-six, we might
seem to liave the terms given us by which to make a
rough reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land.
But wheiii we recollect the baffling character of the winds
and curv'ents we have already encountered, and the eddies
* The.iLife of John Milton : narrated in Connection with the Politi-
cal, Ece/esiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David Mas-
son, M . D. , LL. D. , Professor of Khetoric and English Literature in
the Ui^.iversity of Edinburgh. Vols. L, IL 1638-1643. Loudon and
New /"York : Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. pp. xii, 608.
Tl^.e Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction,
Not/es, and au Essay on Milton's English, by David Masson, M. A.,
LLr. D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University
of/ Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co, 1874.
MILTON. 253
that may at any time slip us back to the reformation
in Scotland or the settlement of New England ; when
we consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped the
grand siecle of French literature, with its irresistible
temptations to digression and homily for a man of Mr.
Masson's temperament, we may be pardoned if a sigh
of doubt and discouragement escape us. We envy the
secular leisures of Methusaleh, and are thankfid that
his biography at least (if written in the same longeval
proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject
would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spa-
cious predilections ! Even if he himself can count on
patriarchal prorogations of existence, let him hang a
print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to re-
mind him of the ambushes which Fate lays for the
toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared to climb
a cherry-tree since I began to read his work. Even
with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I
feel by no means sure of living to see Mary Powell back
in her husband's house ; for it is just at this crisis that
Mr. Masson, with the diabolical art of a practised serial
writer, leaves us while he goes into an exhaustive ac-
count of the Westminster Assembly and the political and
religious notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One
could not help thinking, after having got Milton fairly
through college, that he was never more mistaken in his
life than when he wrote,
" How soon hath Time, that siilotle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! "
Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's wheels?
It is plain from the Preface to the second volume that
Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that
something is wrong, and that Milton ou^ht somehow to
be more than a mere incident o£ his own biography.
- /
254 MILTON.
He tells us that, " whatever may be thought by a hasty
person looking in on the subject from the outside, no
one can study the life of Milton as it ought to be studied
without being obliged to study extensively and intimately
the contemporary history of England, and even incident-
ally of Scotland and Ireland too Thus on the
very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the biogra-
phy, a history grew on my hands. It was not in human
nature to confine the historical inquiries, once they were
in progress, within the precise limits of their demon-
strable bearing on the biography, even had it been pos-
sible to determine these limits beforehand ; and so the
history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me, was
pursued often for its own sake, and became, though al-
ways with a sense of organic relation to the biography,
continuous in itself." If a " hasty person " be one who
thinks eleven years rather long to have his button held
by a biographer ere he begin his next sentence, I take
to myself the sting of Mr. Masson's covert sarcasm. I
confess with shame a pusillanimity that is apt to flag if
a " to be continued " do not redeem its promise before
the lapse of a quinquennium. I could scarce await the
" Autocrat " himself so long. The heroic age of litera-
ture is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove
too heavy (olov vvv fiporot) for the descendants of men
to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does Mr.
Masson mean by "continuous" 1 To me it seems rather
as if his somewhat rambling history of the seventeenth
century were interrupted now and then by an unexpected
apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in
and hopes he does not intnide, to tell us what he has
been doing in the mean while. The reader, immersed
in Scottish politics or the schemes of Archbishop Laud,
is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on bein^
reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protag-
onist of the drama. Pars minima est ipsa puella sui.
MILTON. 255
If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a
citizen of his age as well as of his country, there can be
no doubt that in order to understand the motives and
conduct of the man we must first make ourselves inti-
mate with the time in which he lived. We have there-
fore no fault to find with the thoroughness of Mr. Mas-
son's "historical inquiries." The more thorough the
better, so far as they were essential to the satisfiictory
performance of his task. But it is only such contem-
porary events, opinions, or persons as were really opera-
tive on the character of the man we are studying that
are of consequence, and we are to familiarize ourselves
with them, not so much for the sake of explaining them
as of understanding him. The biographer, especially
of a literary man, need only mark the main currents
of tendency, without being officious to trace out to its
marshy source every runlet that has cast in its tiny
pitcherful with the rest. Much less should he attempt
an analysis of the stream and to classify every compo-
nent by itself, as if each were ever effectual singly and
not in combination. Human motives cannot be thus
chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any true
knowledge of character by such minute subdivision of
its ingredients. Nothing is so essential to a biographer
as an eye that can distinguish at a glance between real
events that are the levers of thought and action, and
what Donne calls " unconcerning things, matters of
fact," — between substantial personages, whose contact
or even neighborhood is inflixential, and the supernume-
raries that serve first to fill up a stage and afterwards
the interstices of a biographical dictionary,
" Time hath a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion."
Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred
256 MILTON.
and merciful deposit, and not renew for us the bores of
a former generation as if we had not enough of our own.
But if he cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness, we
may fairly complain when -he insists on taking us along
with him in the processes of his investigation, instead
of giving us the sifted results in their bearing on the
life and character of his subject, whether for help or
hindrance. We are blinded with the dust of old papers
ransacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no
relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise if he
had kept constantly in view what Milton himself says
of those who gathered up personal traditions concerning
the Apostles : " With less fervency was studied what
Saint Paul or Saint John had written than was listened
to one that could say, ' Here he taught, here he stood,
this was his stature, and thus he went habited ; and 0,
happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone
whereon he rested, this village where he wrought such
a miracle.' .... Thus while all their thoughts were
poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after
such men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ....
by this means they lost their time and truanted on the
fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was seen
shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so poured
out his mind upon circumstances, that his work reminds
us of Allston's picture of Elijah in the Wilderness, where
a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the
prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape
where the very ravens could scarce have found him out,
except by divine commission. The figure of Milton be-
comes but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with
the scenery through which he may by any possibility be
conjectured to have passed. I will cite a single example
of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is reduced in
order to hitch Milton on to hia own biography. He de-
MILTON. 257
votes the first chapter of his Second Book to the meeting
of the Long Parhament. " Already," he tells us, " in the
earlier part of the day, the Commons had gone through
the ceremony of hearing the writ for the Parliament read,
and the names of the members that had been returned
called over by Thomas Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the
Crown in Chancery. His deputy, Agar, Milton's hrother-
in-law, may have been in attendance on such an occasion.
During the preceding month or two, at all events, Agar
and his subordinates in the Crown Office had been un-
usually busy with the issue of the writs and with the
other work connected with the opening of Parliament."
(Vol. II. p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute " at all events "
is very amusing. Meanwhile
"The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."
Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, if
to him we owe the modern fashion of writing history
picturesquely. At least his method leads to most un-
happy results when essayed by men to whom nature has
denied a sense of what the picturesque really is. The
historical picturesque does not consist, in truth of cos-
tume and similar accessaries, but in the grouping, atti-
tude, and expression of the figures, caught when they
are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. The
moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a
man of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the
hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that imagination
is something to be squeezed out of color-tubes, the past
becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets, and
flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre,
as if the light had been scenical and illusorj^, the world
an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights. It
is the power of catching the actors in great events at
unawares that makes the glimpses given us by contem-
Q
258 MILTON.
poraries so vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the
great masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret
of his art when he tells lis how, in that wonderful scene
of the death of Monseigneur, he saw " du premier coup
dtoeil vivement parte, tout ce qui leur echap})oit et tout
ce qui les accableroit." It is the gift of producing this
reality that almost makes us blush, as if we had been
caught peeping through a keyhole, and had surprised
secrets to which we had no right, — it is this only that
can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Car-
lyle has this power of contemporizing himself with by-
gone times, he cheats us to
" Play with our fancies and believe we see " ;
but we find the tableaicx vivants of the apprentices who
" deal in his command without his power," and who
compel us to woi'k very hard indeed with our fancies,
rather wearisome. The effort of weaker arms to shoot
with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent litera-
ture with more than enough fruitless twanging.
Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intol-
erably awkward when he strives to make up for the
want of St. Simon's premier coup cCoell by impertinent
details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind.
For example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton
from the University to a " suburb sink " of London %
Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to himself,
" A suburb sink ! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to
walk all the way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the
entry where I live, and so have an exact notion of my
whereabouts % There has been plague in the neighbor-
hood certainly ; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep
tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall's in-
nuendo that he was courting the gi'aces of a rich widow,
tell us that he would rather " choose a virgin of mean
MILTON. 259
fortunes Lonestly bred " 1 Mr. Masson forthwith breaks
forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be pic^
turesqueness in this wise : " What have we here 1 Surely
nothing less, if we choose so to construe it, than a mar-
riage advertisement ! Ho, all ye virgins of England
(widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such
as seldom occurs : a bachelor, unattached ; age, thirty-
three years and three or four months ; height [Milton,
by the way, would have said hight]i\ middle or a little
less ; personal appearance unusiuilly handsome, with fair
complexion and light auburn hair_; circumstances in-
dependent ; tastes intellectual and decidedly musical ;
principles Root-and-Branch ! Was there already any
young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertise-
ment come in her way, it would have raised a conscious
flutter 1 If so, did she live near Oxford 1 " If there is
anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to
write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies
he is being facetious. He tramples oat the last spark
of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of a hippo-
potamus.
I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of his-
tory, when it means, as it too often does, that dulness
has a right of sanctuary in gravity. Too well do I
recall the sorrows of my youth, when I was shipped
in search of knowledge on the long Johnsonian swell of
the last century, favorable to anything but the calm
digestion of historic truth. I had even then an un-
easy suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that
thoughts were never draped in long skirts like babies, if
they were strong enough to go alone. But surely there
shoidd be such a thing as g-ood taste, above all a sense
of self-respect, m the historian himself that should not
allow him to play any tricks with the dignity of his
subject. AWIfW2f_Sfl.P.rprlnpsg Tiaa hithprf,^ jnvpstprl t^q^
260 MILTON.
figure of Milton, and our image of him has dwelt se-
curely in ideal remoteness from the vulgarities of life.
No diaries, no private letters, remain to give the idle
curiosity of after-times the right to force itself on the
hallowed seclusion of his reserve. That a man whose
familiar epistles were written in the language of Cicero,
Avhose sense of personal dignity was so great that, when
called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he always
does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose
self-respect even in youth was so profound that it resem-
bles the reverence paid by other nien to a far-off and
idealized character, — that he should be treated in this.
pffhqnrl familior f-Taliinn hy h\<i hingraph<?J— saiama to
u,s a kiud of desecration, a violation of good manners
no less than of the laws of biographic art. Milton is
the last man in the world to be slapped on the back
with impunity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson
than such presumptuous friendship as this. Let the
seventeenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the
insupportable foot of the interviewer !
But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idioma-
tic, can do something worse than what has been hitherto
quoted. He can be even vulg^ir. Discussing the motives
of Milton's first marriage, he says, "Did he come seeking
his £500, and did Mrs. Powell heave a daughter at him V
We have heard of a woman throwing herself at a man's
head, and the image is a somewhat violent one ; but
what is this to Mr. Masson's improvement on it % It has
been sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image
may be tested by trying whether a picture could be
made of it or not. Mr. Masson has certainly offered
a new and striking subject to the historical school
of British art. A little further on, speaking of Mary
Powell, he says, " We have no portrait of her, nor any
account of her appearance ; but on the usual rule of the
MILTON. 261
elective affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, ive will
vote her to have been dark-haired." 1 need say noth-
ing of the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity
is heightened by the fact that Mr. Masson himself had
left us in doubt whether the match was one of con-
venience or inclination. I know not how it may be
with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to
/resent this hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty
r^we will vote." In some cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums
fin respect of style may possibly be accounted for as at-
/ tempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of
I its ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the
effect, the pensive element of the compoimd enters in too
large an excess over the hilarious. Whether I have hit
upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie not
rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and
vivid, I shall leave the reader to jxidge by an example
or two. In the manuscript copy of Milton's sonnet in
which he claims for his own house the immunity which
the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other
walls, the title had originally been, " On his Door when
the City expected an Assault." Milton has drawn a line
through this and substituted " When the Assault was in-
tended to the City." Mr. Masson fancies " a mood of jest
or semi-jest in the whole affiiir " ; but we think rather
that Milton's quiet assumption of equality with two
such fiimous poets was as seriously characteristic as
Dante's ranking himself sesto tra cotanto senno. Mr.
Masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to
imagine one of Prince Rupert's troopers entering the
poet's study and finding some of his " Anti-Episcopal
pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently.
' Oho ! ' the Cavalier Captain might then have said,
* Pindar and Euripides are all very well, by C — ! I 've
been at college myself; and when I meet a gentleman
262 MILTON.
and scholar, I hope I know how to treat him ; but neither
Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the
Church of England, by G— ! It won't do, Mr. Milton ! ' "
This, it may be supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being
funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is
shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the
Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles I., at Edin-
burgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641, fills the vacant
English sees, we are told, " It was more than an insult ;
it was a sarcasm ! It was as if the King, while giving
Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his
royal eye over that reverend Presbyter's back ! " Now
one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took the
Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father un-
der any circumstances. He may have been, and I be-
lieve he was, a bad king, but surely we may take Mar-
veil's word for it, that
" He nothing common did or mean," C^yutoJ/"-
upon any of the " memorable scenes " of his life. The
image is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and
vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand historical
tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous
actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse than this. Speak-
ing of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, who wrote in defence
of the Independents against Thomas Edwards, he says,
" People wondered who this she-Brownist, Katherine
Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in
her when they found that she was an oldish woman, and
a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in Lon-
don. Indeed, she pvt her nails into Mr. Edwards with
some effect^ Why did he not say at once, after the good
old fashion, that she " set her ten commandments in his
face " 1 In another place he speaks of " Satan standing
with his staff around him." Mr. Masson's style, a little
MILTON. 263
Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse when forced
to condescend to every-day matters. He can no more
dismount and walk tlian the man in armor on a Lord
Mayor's day. " It [Aldersgate Street] stretches away
northwards a full fourth of a mile as one continuous
thoroughfare, until, crossed by Long Lane and the Bar-
bican, it parts with the name of Aldersgate Street, and,
under the new names of Goswell Street and Goswell
Road, completes its tendency toivards the suburbs and fields
about Islington." What a noble work might not the
Directory be if composed on this scale ! The imagina-
tion even of an alderman might well be lost in that
full quarter of a mile of continuous thoroughfare. Mr.
Masson is very great in these passages of civic grandeur ;
but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an
image to deal with. Speaking of Milton's "two-handed
engine" in Lycidas, he says : "May not Milton, wdiat-
ever else he meant, have meant a coming English Par-
liament with its two Houses 1 Whatever he meant, his
prophecy had come true. As he sat among his books
in Aldersgate Street, the two-handed engine at the door
of the English Church was on the swing. Once, twice,
thrice, it had swept its arcs to gather energy ; now it
was on the backmost poise, and the blow was to de-
scend." One cannot help wishing that Mr. Masson
would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast in
Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel.
There is something so consoling to a prophet in being
told that, no matter what he meant, his prophecy had
come true, and that he might mean " whatever else " he
pleased, so long as he may have meant what we choose
to think he did, reasoning backward from the assumed
fulfilment ! But perhaps there may be detected in Mr.
Masson's " swept its arcs " a little of that prophetic hedg-
ing-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a lati-
264 MILTON.
tilde. How if the " two-handed engine," after all, were a
broom (or besom, to be more dignified),
" Sweeping — vehemently sweeping,
No pavise admitted, no design avowed,"
like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the
Syracusan saw 1 I make the suggestion modestly,
though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Masson's system
of exegesis, which reminds one of the casuists' doctrine
of probables, in virtue of which a man may be pi'oba-
hiliter obligatus and prohahiliter deohligatus at the same
time. But perhaps the most remarkable instance of
Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are told that
the king might have established a bona fide government
" by giving public ascendency to the popular or Parlia-
mentary element in his Council, and inducing the old
leaven in it either to accept the new policy, or to withdraw
and become inactive.''^ There is something consoling in
the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral
suasion. It is really too bad that bread should ever be
heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral sense as
should " induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr.
Masson's unhappy infection with the vivid style an in-
stance or two shall be given in justification of what has
been alleged against him in that particular. He says of
Loudon that " he was committed to the Tower, where
for more than two months he lay, with as near a pros-
pect as ever prisoner had of a chop with the execution-
er's axe on a scaff'old on Tower Hill." I may be over-
fastidious, but the word "chop" off'ends my ears with
its coarseness, or if that be too strong, has certainly the
unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old
Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that " he gurt kings
ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good example
of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe and the block,
and giving one of those dreadful hints to the imagina-
MILTON. 205
tion which are more powerful than any amount of de-
tail, and whose skilful use is the only magic employed
by the masters of truly picturesque writing. The sen-
tence just quoted will serve also as an example of that
tendency to surplusage which adds to the bulk of Mr.
Masson's sentences at the cost of their effectiveness.
If he had said simply " chop on Tower Hill " (if chop
there must be), it had been quite enough, for we all
know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are
implied in it. Once more, and I have done with the
least agreeable part of my business. Mr. Masson, after
telling over again the story of Strafford with needless
length of detail, ends thus : "On Wednesday, the 12th
of May, that proud curly head, the casket of that brain
of power, rolled on the scaffold of Tower Hill." Why
curly 1 Surely it is here a ludicrous impertinence. This
careful thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning
particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a pic-
ture which genius only has the art to do, is becoming
a weariness in modei'n descriptive writing. It reminds
one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of dressing the waxen
effigies of murderers in the very clothes they wore when
they did the deed, or with the real halter round their
necks wherewith they expiated it. It is probably very
effective with the torpid sensibilities of the class who
look upon wax figures as works of art. True imagina-
tive power works with other material. Lady Macbeth
striving to wash away from her hands the damned spot
that is all the more there to the mind of the spectator
because it is not there at all, is a type of the methods it
employs and the intensity of their action.
Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. Masson's
faults of manner, which I should not have dwelt on so
long had they not greatly marred a real enjoyment in the
reading, and were they not the ear-mark of a school which
12
266 MILTON.
has become unhappily numerous, I turn to a consider-
ation of his work as a whole. I think he made a mis-
take in his very plan, or else was guilty of a misnomer
in his title. His book is not so much a life of Milton
as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader
may sift the main facts of the poet's biography. His
passion for minute detail is only to be equalled by his
diffuseness on points mainly if not altogether irrelevant.
He gives us a Survey of British Literature, occupying
one hundred and twenty-eight pages of his first volume,
written in the main with good judgment, and giving the
average critical opinion upon nearly every writer, great
and small, who was in any sense a contemporary of Mil-
ton. I have no doubt all this would be serviceable and
interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edinburgh Univer-
sity, and they may well be congratulated on having so
competent a teacher ; but what it has to do with Milton,
unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to
have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not
clearly see. Most readers of a life of Milton may be pre-
sumed to have some knowledge of the general literary
history of the time, or at any rate to have the means of
acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style was his own)
was very little affected by any of the English poets, with
the single exception, in his earlier poems, of George
Wither. Mr. Masson also has something to say about
everybody, from Wentworth to the obscurest Brownist
fanatic who was so much as heard of in England during
Milton's lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's duty
should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see "A Life
of Thackeray, or who was who in England, France, and
Germany during the first Half of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury." These digressions of Mr. Masson's from what
should have been his main topic (he always seems some-
how to be "completing his tendency towards the sub-
MILTON. 267
urbs " of his subject), give him an uneasy feeling that he
must get Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it
were only to remind the reader that he has a certain
connection with tVie book. He is eager even to discuss
a mere hj-pothesis, though an untenable one, if it will
only increase the number of pages devoted specially to
]\lilton, and thus lessen the apparent disproportion be-
tween the historical and the biographical matter. Mil-
ton tells us that his morning wont had been "to read
good authors, or cause them to be read, till the atten-
tion be weary, or memory have his full fraught ; then
with useful and generous labors preserving the body's
health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and
not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of
religion and our country's liberty when it shall require
firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their
stations rather than see the ruin of our Protestant-
ism and the enforcement of a slavish life." Mr. Mas-
son snatches at the hint : " This is interesting," he
says ; " Milton, it seems, has for some time been practis-
ing drill ! The City Artillery Ground was near
Did Milton among others make a habit of going there of
mornings '? Of this more hereafter." When Mr. Masson
returns to the subject he speaks of Milton's " all but
positive statement .... that in the spring of 1642, or
a few months before the breaking out of the Civil War,
he was in the habit of spending a pai't of each day in
military exercise somewhere not far from his house in
Aldersgate Street. ^^ What he puts by way of query on
page 402 has become downright certainty seventy-nine
pages further on. The passage from Milton's tract makes
no " statement " of the kind it pleases Mr. Masson to
assume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saj'ing that he
took regular exercise, because he believed that moral no
less than physical courage demanded a sound body. And
268 MILTON.
what proof does Mr. Masson bring to confirm his theory ]
Nothing more nor less than two or three passages in
"Paradise Lost," of which I shall quote only so much as
is essential to his argument : —
" And now
Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front
Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise
Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield,
Awaiting what command their mighty chief
Had to impose." *
Mr. Masson assures us that " there are touches in this
description (as, for example, the ordering of arms at
the moment of halt, and without word of command) too
exact and technical to have occurred to a mere civilian.
Again, at the same review ....
' He now prepared
To speak ; whereat their do^ibled ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his peers ; attention held them mute.' t
To the present day this is the very process, or one of
the processes, when a commander wishes to address his
men. They wheel inward and stand at ' attention.' "
But his main argument is the phrase '' ]Mrted spears,"
in Book Fourth, on which he has an interesting and
valuable comment. He argues the matter through a
dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that Milton must
have had some practical experience of military drill. I
confess a very grave doubt whether " attention " and
" ordered " in the passages cited have any other than
their ordinary meaning, and Milton could never have
looked on at the pike-exercise without learning what
''ported" meant. But, be this as it may, I will ven-
ture to assert that there was not a boy in New England,
forty years ago, who did not know more of the manual
than is implied in Milton's use of these terms. Mr.
* Book I. 562-567. t Ibid., 615- 618.
MILTON. 269
Masson's object in proving Milton to have been a profi-
cient in these martial exercises is to increase our wonder
at his not entering the army. " If there was any man
in England of whom one might surely have expected
that he would be in arms among the Parliamentarians,"
he says, " that man was Milton." Milton may have had
many an impulse to turn soldier, as all men must in such
times, but I do not believe that he ever seriously in-
tended it. Nor is it any matter of reproach that he did
not. It is plain, from his works, that he believed him-
self very early set apart and consecrated for tasks of
a very different kind, for services demanding as much
self-sacrifice and of more enduring result. I have no
manner of doubt that he, like Dante, believed himself
divinely inspired with what he had to utter, and, if so,
why not also divinely guided in what he should do or
leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he loved a
weapon far more eff'ective than a sword.
It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method, that
a great deal of space is devoted to what might have
befallen his hero and what he might have seen. This
leaves a broad margin indeed for the insertion of purely
hypothetical incidents. Nay, so desperately addicted is
he to what he deems the vivid style of writing, that he
even goes out of his way to imagine what might have
happened to anybody living at the same time with Mil-
ton. Having told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on
his last visit to London, perhaps saw Milton " a fair
child of six playing at his father's door," he must needs
conjure up an imaginary supper at the Mermaid. " Ah!
what an evening .... was that ; and how Ben and
Shakespeare he-tongued each other, while the others
listened and wondered ; and how, when the company
dispersed, the sleeping street heard their departing foot-
steps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs." Car-
270 MILTON.
tainly, if we may believe the old song, the stars " had
nothing else to do," though their chance of shining in
the middle of a London November may perhaps be reck-
oned very doubtful. An author should consider how
largely the art of writing consists in knowing what to
leave in the inkstand.
Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal of very val-
uable matter, whatever one may think of its bearing upon
the life of Milton. The chapters devoted to Scottish affairs
are particularly interesting to a student of the Great
Rebellion, its causes and concomitants. His analyses of
the two armies, of the Parliament, and the Westminster
Assembly, are sensible additions to our knowledge. A
too painful thorouphupsSj iurlpprl, is the criticism we
should make on his work as n, ]->ir>o-rnp1iy, Even as a his-
tory, the reader might complain that it confuses by the
multiplicity of its details, while it wearies by want of con-
tinuity. Mr. Masson lacks the skill of an accomplished
story-teller. A fact is to him a fact, never mind how
unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his
devotion to accuracy. The very order of his title-page,
"The Life of Milton, narrated in Connection with the Po-
litical, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time,"
shows, it should seem, a misconception of the true na-
ture of his subject. Milton's chief importance, it might
be fairly said his only importance, is a literary one.
His place is fixed as the^jnost^„classjcal of ouL^jts.
Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did
Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of
his time or in the history of ophiion. In both these lines
of his activity circumstances forced upon him the posi-
tion of a controvei'sialist whose aims and results are
by the necessity of the case desultory and ephemeral.
Hooker before him and Hobbes after him had a far firmer
grasp of fundamental principles than he. His studies in
MILTON. 271
these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and his
opinions wei'e heated to the temper of the times and
shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum, sometimes
to his own convenience at the moment, instead of being
the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened
by intellectual and above all historical sympathy with
his subject. His interest was rather in the occasion
than the matter of the controversy. No aphorisms of
political science are to be gleaned from his writings
as from those of Burke. His intense personality could
never so far dissociate itself from the question at issue
as to see it in its larger scope and more universal rela-
tions. He was essentially a doctrinaire, ready to sacri-
fice everything to what at the moment seemed the
abstract truth, and with no regard to historical ante-
cedents and consequences, pi'ovided those of scholastic
logic were carefully observed. He has no I'espect for
usage or tradition except when they count in his favor,
and sees no virtue in that power of the past over the
minds and conduct of men which alone insures the con-
tinuity of national growth and is the great safeguard
of order and progress. The life of a nation was of less
importance to him than that it should be conformed to
certain principles of belief and conduct. Burke could
distil political wisdom out of history because he had a
profound consciousness of the soul that underlies and
outlives events, and of the national character that gives
them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his words
are still living and operative, while Milton's pamphlets
are strictly occasional and no longer interesting except
as they illustrate him. In the Latin ones especially
there is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public
orator. His training, so far as it was thorough, so far,
indeed, as it may be called optional, was purely poetical
and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made boot on every
lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.
272 MILTON.
Miltoi5, indeed, could hardly have been a match for
some of his antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical
learning. But he brought into the contest a white heat
of personal conviction that counted for much. His self-
consciousness, always active, identified him with the
cause he undertook. " I conceived myself to be now
not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate
into that truth whei-eof I was persuaded and whei'eof
I had declared myself openly to be the partaker." *
Accordingly it does not so much seem that he is the
advocate of Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or the
People of England, as that all these are he, and that he
is speaking for himself. He was not nice in the choice
of his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump from
the dunghill of Luther ; but now and then the gnarled
sticks of controversy turn to golden arrows of Phosbus
in his trembling hands, singing as they fly and carrying
their messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his
prose as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the
early gods, and there is that in him which tramples all
learning under his victorious feet. From the first he
looked upon himself as a man dedicated and set apart.
He had that sublime persuasion of a divine mission which
sometimes lifts his speech from personal to cosmopoli-
tan significance ; his genius unmistakably asserts itself
from time to time, calling down fire from heaven to kin-
dle the sacrifice of irksome pi'ivate duty, and turning tlio
hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the wor-
ship of mankind. Plainly enough here was a man who
had received something other than Episco])al ordination.
Mysterious and awful powers had laid their unimagina-
ble hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler
service. Yet it must be confessed that, with the single
exception of the " Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are
* Apology for Smectymnuus.
MILTON. 273
wearisome reading, and going through them is hke a
long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compen-
sated for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence
heaping before you in a drift of star-sown snow, coiling
away behind in winking disks of silver, as if the con-
scious element were giving out all the moonlight it
had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed
upon its pallid regent. Which, being interpreted,
means that his prose is of value because it is Milton's,
because it sometimes exhibits in an inferior degree
the qualities of his verse, and not for its power of
thought, of reasoning, or of statement. It is valuable,
where it is best, for its inspiring quality, like the ferven-
cies of a Hebrew prophet. The English translation of
the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized, not the
English mind, but the Puritan temper. Those fierce en-
thusiasts could more easily find elbow-room for their
consciences in an ideal Israel than in a practical Eng-
land. It was convenient to see Amalek or Philistia in
the men who met them in the field, and one unintelligi-
ble horn or other of the Beast in tlieir theological oppo-
nents. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race
found something congenial in the English mind. Their
national egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was
especially sympathetic with the personal egotism of Mil-
ton. It was only as an inspired and irresponsible person
that he could live on decent terms with his own self-
confident individuality. There is an intolerant egotism
which identifies itself with omnipotence,* and whose
sublimity is its apology ; there is an intolerable egotism
which subordinates the sun to the watch in its own fob.
Milton's was of the former kind, and accordingly the
* " For liim I was not sent, nor yet to free
That people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal."— P. R. IV. 131-133.
12* R
274 MILTON.
finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in his
verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking
that they are often unconsciously so. Those fallen an-
gels in utter ruin and combustion hurled, are also cav-
aliers fighting against the Good Old Cause ; Philistia
is the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Milton
would have done if he could.
The " Areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that
also is a plea rather than an argument, and his interest
in the question is not one of abstract principle, but of
personal relation to himself. He was far more rheto-
rician than thinker. The sonorous amplitude of his
style was better fitted to persuade the feelings than
to convince the reason. The only passages from his
prose that may be said to have survived are emotional,
not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of
their figurative beauty, not their weight of thought.
Milton's power lay in dilation. Touched by him, the
simplest image, the most obvious thought,
" Dilated stood
Like Teneriffe or Atlas ....
.... nor wanted in his grasp
Wliat seemed both spear and shield."
But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective
weapon than these fantastic arms of his. He had not
the secret of compression that properly belongs to the
political thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of himself,
" nothing but abstract ideas makes any impression."
Almost every aphoristic phrase that he has made current
is borrowed from some one of the classics, like his famous
" License they mean when they cry liberty,"
from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his
true function, that of poet, is concerned. It is his pe-
culiar glory that literature was with him so much an
MILTON. 275
art, an end and not a means. Of his political work he
has himself told us, "I should not choose this maimer
of writing, wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself
(led by the genial power of nature to another task), I
have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand."
Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis of these
writings, selecting with great judgment the salient pas-
sages, which have an air of blank-verse thinly disguised
as prose, like some of the corrupted passages of Sliake-
speare. We are particularly thankful to him for his ex-
tracts from the pamphlets written against Milton, espe-
cially for such as contain criticisms on his style. It is
not a little iutei'esting to see the most stately of poets
reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low words. We
seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his "choiceful
sense" to that nicety which could not be content till it
had made his native tongue "search all her coffers round."
One cannot help thinking also that his practice in prose, (
especially in the long hi volutions of Latin periods, helped
him to give that variety of pause and that majestic har-
mony to his blank-verse which have made it so unap-
proachably his own. Landor, who, like Milton, seems to
have thought in Latin, has caught somewhat more than
others of the dignity of his gait, but without his length
of stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps ap-
proached it, but with how long an interval ! Bryant has
not seldom attained to its serene equanimity, but never
emulates its pomp. Keats has caught something of its
large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous sever-
ity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved with such
graceful ease in slippers) becomes stiff when (in his
translation of Homer) she buckles on her feet the cothur-
nus of Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he as-
says the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to
get any glimpse of the slow processes by which Milton
276 MILTON.
arrived at that classicism which sets him apart from, if
not above, all our other poets.
In gathering up the impressions made upon us by
Mr. Masson's work as a whole, we are inclined rather to
regret his copiousness for his own sake than for ours.
The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable,
his research has been conscientious, and he has given
us better means of understanding Milton's time than we
possessed before. But how is it about Milton himself?
Here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of por-
trait-painting. There is hardly a more stately figure
in literary history than Milton's, no life in some of its
aspects more tragical, except Dante's. In both these
great poets, more than in any others, the character of
the men makes part of the singular impressiveness of
what they wrote and of its vitality with after times.
In them the man somehow overtops the author. The
works of both are full of autobiographical confidences.
Like Dante, Milton was forced to become a party by
himself. He stands out in marked and solitary indi-
viduality, apart from the great movement of the Civil
War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restora-
tion, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting
man. Very much alive he certainly was in his day.
Has Mr. Masson made him alive to ;as again ] I fear
not. At the same time, while we cannot praise either
the style or the method of Mr. Masson's work, we can-
not refuse to be grateful for it. It is not so much a
book for the ordinary reader of biography as for the
student, and will be more likely to find its place on the
library-shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any
sense belong to light literature, but demands all the
muscle of the trained and vigorous reader. " Truly, in
respect of itself, it is a good life ; but in respect that it
is Miltoii's life it is naught."
MILTON. 277
Mr, Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates of
Milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in some respects
to undertake an edition of the poetical works. His edi-
tion, accordingly, has distinguished merits. The intro-
ductions to the several poems are excellent and leave
scarcely anything to be desired. The general Introduc-
tion, on the other hand, contains a great deal that might
well have been omitted, and not a little that is posi-
tively erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's
English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to whom
English is in some sort a foreign tongue. It is almost
wholly inconclusive, because confined to the Miltonic
verse, while the basis of any altogether satisfactory study
should surely be the Miltonic prose ; nay, should include
all the poetry and prose of his own age and of that im-
mediately preceding it. The uses to w'hich Mr. Massou
has put the concordance to Milton's poems tempt one
sometimes to class him with those whom the poet him-
self taxed with being " the mousehunts and feiTets of an
index." For example, what profits a discussion of Mil-
ton's airai A.eyo/xeva, a matter in which accident is far
more influential than choice 1 * What sensible addition
is made to our stock of knowledge by learning that " the
word ivoman does not occur in any form in Milton's
poetry before * Paradise Lost,'" and that it is "exactly
so with the word female" 1 Is it any way remarkable
that such words as Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Paradise,
Sin, Satan, and Serpent should occur " very frequently "
iu " Paradise Lost " % Would it not rather have been
surprising that they should not % Such trifles at best
come under the head of what old Warner would have
called cumber-minds. It is time to protest against this
* If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty infer-
ences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's ijivariably printing
djrof Xe'iOji.f.va, !
278 MILTON.
minute style of editing and commenting gi-eat po'sts.
Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair sluns of th3
Brobdignagian maids of honor " a mole here and there
as broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup of
the purest Hippocrene after the critic's solar microscope
has betrayed to us the grammatical, syntactical, and,
above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every
drop of it. When a poet has been so much edited as
Milton, the temptation of whosoever undertakes a new
edition to see what is not to be seen becomes great in
proportion as he finds how little there is that has not
been seen before.
Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernize
the spelling of Milton, for surely the reading of our
classics should be made as little difficult as possible, and
he is right also in making an exception of such abnormal
forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen
for melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the
spelling of the original editions seems, however, to be
the less called-for as he himself appears to admit that the
compositor, not the author, was supreme in these mat-
ters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to
the thousand Milton had no sj^stem, but spelt by imme-
diate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages
with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to
demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as
men's ears differ, he tells us that the short a sound is
the same in man and Darby, the short o sound in God
and does, and what he calls the long o sound in broad
and wrath. Speaking of the apostrophe, Mr. Masson
tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a posses-
sive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark : hero's for
heroes, viyrtWs for myrtles, Gorgons and Hydra s, etc."
Now, in books printed about the time of Milton's the
apostrophe was put in almost at random, and in all the
MILTON. 279
cases cited is a misprint, except in the first, where it
serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not heroes
as it had formerly been.* In the " possessive singular
of nouns already ending in s " Mr. Masson tells us, " Mil-
ton's general practice is not to double the s ; thus, i\We7is
wrinkled look, Glancus sjjell. The necessities of metre
would naturally consti-ain to such forms. In a possessive
followed by the w^ord sake or the word side, dislike to
[of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the
inflection. In addition to '/or righteousness sake ' such
phrases as 'for thy name sake ' and '/or mercy sake,' are
allowed to pass ; bedside is normal and riverside nearly
so." The necessities of metre need not be taken into
account with a poet like Milton, who never was fairly
in his element till he got off the soundings of prose and
felt the long swell of his verse under him like a steed
that knows his rider. But does the dislike of the double
sibilant account for the dropping of the s in these cases 1
Is it not far rather the presence of the s already in the
sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slov-
enliness in the pronunciation of double consonants 1 It
was this which led to such forms as conscience sake and
on justice side, and which beguiled Ben Jonson and
Dryden into thinking, the one that noise and the other
that corps was a plural. t What does Mr. Masson say
* "That you may tell heroes, when you come
To banquet with yoxir wife."
Chapman's Odyssey, VIII. 336, 337.
In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find
" Thy firm uiishak'n vertue ever brings,"
M'hich shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.
t Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from Drum-
mond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an authority in
English, —
" Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest."
The survival of Horse for horses is another example. So by a reverse
process pult and shay have been vulgarly deduced from the supposed
plurals j3('^se and chaise.
280 MILTON.
to hillside, Banhside, seaside, Cheapside, spindleslde,
spearside, gospelside (of a church), nightside, countryside,
wayside, hrookside, and I know not how many more 1 Is
the first half of these words a possessive % Or is it not
rather a noun impressed into the service as an adjective]
How do such words differ from hilltop, townend, candle-
light, rushlight, cityman, and the like, where no double
s can be made the scapegoat 1 Certainly Milton would
not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote
"And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert ■wildernesses,"
"So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"
" And seat of Salmanasser whose success,"
verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and who
was, I think, fonder of the sound than any other of our
poets. Indeed, in compounds of the kind we always
make a distinction wholly independent of the doubled s.
Nobody would boggle at mountainside; no one would
dream of saying on the father side or motherside.
Mr. Masson speaks of "the Miltonic forms vanquisht,
markt, lookt, etc." Surely he does not mean to imply
that these are peculiar to Milton 1 Chapman used them
before Milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in
nah't and saft for naked and saved. He often prefers
the contracted form in his prose also, showing that the
full form of the past participle in ed was passing out of
fashion, though available in verse.* Indeed, I venture
* CliaiJman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked
after his printed texts. I have two copies of his "Byron's Conspir-
acy," both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than the other,
for it shows corrections. The more solemn ending in ed was probably
kept alive by the reading of the Bible in churches. Though now
dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right hearing of the more
metrical passages in the Old Testament, which are finer and more sci-
entific than anything in the language, vinlessit be some parts of "Sam-
son Agonistes. " I remember an old gentleman who always used the
MILTON. 281
to affirm that there is not a single variety of speUing
or accent to be found in Milton which is without exam-
ple in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even highth,
which is thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in
Hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in New
England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason for Milton's
preference of it " as indicating more correctly the for-
mation of the word by the addition of the suffix th to
the adjective highJ" Is an adjective, then, at the base
of growth, earth, birth, truth, and other words of this
kind % Home Tooke made a better guess than this.
If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar
meaning is implied in the spelling hearth (Paradise Lost,
IX. 624), which he interprets as " collective produce,"
though in the only other instance where it occurs it is
neither more nor less than hirth, it should seem that Mil-
ton had hit upon Home Tooke's etj'mology. But it is
really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of
the original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. ]\Ias-
son has honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton had
nothing to do with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On
the word voutsafe he hangs nearly a page of dissertation
on the nicety of Milton's ear. Mr. Masson thinks that
Milton " must have had a reason for it," * and finds that
reason in '• his dislike to [of] the sound ck, or to [of] that
sound combined with s His fine ear taught him
contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always gave it
back its embezzled syllable in reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to
have preferred the more solenm form. At any rate he has the spelling
empuzzeled in prose.
* He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though
they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's " Faiistus" two
consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words " Cursed be he
that struck." In a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the old
editions (there were three) have stroke a,nd strooke in the first instance,
and all agree on strucke in the second. No inference can be drawn
from such casualties.
282 MILTON.
not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at
large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to
avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, ex-
cept when there might be a musical reason for harshness
or difficulty. In the management of the letter s, the
frequency of which in English is one of the faults of the
speech, he will be fovmd, I believe, most careful and
skilful. More rarely, I think, than in Shakespeare will
one word ending in s be found followed immediately in
Milton by another word beginning with the same letter ;
or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as MoaUs
sons, it will be difficult to find in him, I believe, such
a harsher example as earth's substance, of which many
writers would think nothing. [With the index to back
him Mr. Masson could safely say this.] The same deli-
cacy of ear is even more apparent in his management of
the sh sound. He has it often, of course ; but it may
be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can.
He writes Basan for Bashan, Sittim for Shittim, Silo for
Shiloh, Asdod for Ashdod. Still more, however, does he
seem to have been wary of the compound sound ch as in
church. Of his sensitiveness to this sound in excess
there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet entitled
' An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest
Completion, etc.,' where, having occasion to quote these
lines from one of the Satires * of his opponent, Bishop
Hall,
* Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,
Wearying echo with one changeless word,'
he adds, ironically, ' And so he well might, and all his
auditory besides, with his teach each ! ' " Generalizations
* The lines are woi "from one of the Satires," and Milton made
them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to grove.
Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious.
He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms of the
preface to Paradise Lost.
MILTON. 283
are always risky, but when extemporized from a single
hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed no great
sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of
teach each. Did Milton reject the h from Bashan and the
rest because he dislilied the sound of sh, or because he
had found it already rejected by the Vnlgate and by
some of the earlier translators of the Bible into English 1
Oddly enough, Milton uses words beginning with sh
seven hundred and fifty-four times in his poetry, not to
speak of others in which the sound occurs, as, for in-
stance, those ending in tioi. Hall, had he lived long
enough, might have retorted on Milton his own
or his
" Manliest, resolntes^, hveast,
As the magnetick hardest iron draws,"
" What moves thy inquisition ?
Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall.
And my promotion thy destruction ? "
With the playful conti'oversial wit of the day he would
have hinted that too much est-est is as fatal to a blank-
verse as to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred
by those who too eagerly shunned it. Nay, he might
even have found an echo almost tallying with his own
in
" To begirt the almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging,"
a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might hav3
twitted him with " a sequent king who seeks." As for the
sh sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious
to his ear who wrote,
" Gnas/iing for anguis/i and despite and s/(ame,
or agam,
"Then bursting forth
Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round
Tliat rest or intermission none I find.
Before mine eyes in Q^p'position sits
Grim Death, my son."
284 MILTON.
And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave his ears
unnecessary pain by verses such as these, —
"Straight couc/ies close ; then, rising, c/ianges oft
His coucAant wa^cA, as one wlro c/iose his ground " ;
still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless
chief." *
The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than
a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melo-
dies (like the " Sabrina Fair ") among his earlier poems,
as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which pro-
duced or trained the authors of our best English glees,
as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the songs of
our dramatists, but he also showed from the first that
larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction.
The strain hesxd in the "Nativity Ode," in the " Solemn
Music," and in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards
metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled
the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of
him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till
he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our
various language, that have never since felt the strain
of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger move-
ments of metre that Milton was great and original. I
have spoken elsewhere of Spensei''s fondness for dila-
* Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton may
have committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of slej/st, "for ease of
sound," Yet the poet could bear boasVst and — one stares and gasps
at it — doafdst. There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which
the ch sound predominates, not without a touch of sh, in a single
couplet : —
" Can any mortal mvxture. of earth's mould
Breathe suc/i divine enc/ianting ravis/iment ? "
So
"Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss,"
and perhaps
" I see his tents
Pitched about Sechem "
might be added.
MILTON. 285
tation as respects thoughts and images. In Milton it
extends to the language also, and often to the single
words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases
of towering poi't, in which every member dilated stands
like TenerifFo or Atlas. In those poems and passages
that stamp him great, the verses do not dance inter-
weaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with
resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is
true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scattering
them that they tell in his orchestra without being
obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-
voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and
yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them),
that he is an artist and a master. He even sometimes
introduces rhyme with misleading intervals between
and unobviously in his blank-verse : —
"There rest, if any rest can harbour there ;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope.
If not, what resolution from Ae&pair." *
There is one almost perfect quatrain, —
" Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest. This pause between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know" ;
and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an asso-
nance, —
" If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft
* I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the neaniess of
enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the
comma after If not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the
sense, and certainly to keep not a little farther apart from what,
("teach each " !j
286 MILTON.
In worst extremes and on the perilous edge
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."
There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first
passage cited were intentional, and perhaps they were so
in the others ; but Milton's ear has tolerated not a few
perfectly rhyming couplets, and others in which the as-
sonance almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blank-
verse : —
" From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these),
From India and the Golden Chersonese " ;
" That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired
What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired " ;
" And will alike be punished, whether thou
Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow " ;
" Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy.
Save what is in destroying, other joy" ;
" Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days " ;
" This my long sufferance and my day of grace
They who neglect and scorn shall never taste" ;
" So far remote with diminution seen,
First in his East the glorious lamj) was seen." *
These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to
show that Milton's ear was too busy about the larger
interests of his measures to be always careful of the
lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant
in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of
putting great masses through the most complicated
evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not
curious that every foot should be at the same angle. lu
reading " Paradise Lost " one has a feeling of vastness.
You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sun-
shine or hung with constellations ; the abysses of space
* "First in his East," is not soothing to the ear.
MILTON, 287
are about you ; you hear the cadenced surges of an un-
seen ocean ; thunders mutter round the horizon ; and if
the scene change, it is with an elemental movement like
the shifting of mighty winds. His imagination seldom
£ondenses, like Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash of a
single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness
his descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle
bathing in the blue streams of air, controlling with his
eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and rarely
fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser expression.
He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather
say the indefinite, where more is meant than meets the
ear, than any other of our poets. He loved epithets
(like old and fm-) that suggest great reaches, whether
of space or time. This bias shows itself already in his
earlier poems, as where he hears
" Tlie far off curfew sound
Over some widewatered shore,"
or where he fancies the shores * and sounding seas
washing Lycidas far away ; but it reaches its climax
in the " Paradise Lost." He produces his effects by
dilating our imaginations with an imjDalpable hint
rather than by concentrating them upon too precise
particulars. Thas in a famous comparison of his, the
fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly
toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He
genei-alizes always instead of specifying, — the true
secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without
peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never
turgid. Tasso begins finely with
"Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba ;
Treman le spaziose atre ca\erne,
E r aer cieco a quel ruiri^r jjinbomba,"
* Tliere seems to be something wrong ^a this word shores. Did
Milton write shoals i
288 MILTON.
but soon spoils all by condescending to definite com-
parisons with thunder and intestinal convulsions of the
earth ; in other words, he is unwary enough to give
I us a standard of measurement, and the moment you
1 furnish Imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in
i favor of her statistical poor-relation Commonplace. Mil-
ton, with this passage in his memory, is too wise to
hamper himself with any statement for which he can be
brought to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming
indefiniteness ;
" He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of hell resounded,"
thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual
method of prolonged evolution. No caverns, however
spacious, will serve his turn, because they have limits.
He could practise this self-denial when his artistic sense
found it needful, whether for variety of verse or for the
greater intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness.
His more elaborate passages have the multitudinous roll
of thunder, dying away to gather a sullen force again
from its own reverberations, but he knew that the atten-
tion is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short
without echo and leave us listening. There are no such
vistas and avenues of \erse as his. In reading the
" Paradise Lost " one has a feeling of spaciousness such
as no other poet gives. Milton's respect for himself and
for his own mind and its movements rises wellnigh to
veneration. He prepares the way for his thought and
spreads on the ground before the sacred feet of his verse
tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and ro-
mance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his.
Observe at what a reverent distance he begins when he
is about to speak of himself, as at the beginning of the
Third Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength is
especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always to
MILTON. 289
start full-sail ; the wind and tide always serve ; there is
never any fluttering of the canvas. In this he offers a
striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has to go through
with a great deal of yo-heave-ohing before he gets under
way. And though, in the didactic parts of " Paradise
Lost," the wind dies away sometimes, there is a long
swell that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon
some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer
peers heaped with stormy memories. And the poem
never becomes incoherent ; we feel all through it, as in
the symphonies of Beethoven, a great controlling reason
in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly.
Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, it
seems to me, for the most part unsatisfactory. He occu-
pies some ten pages, for exam|:)le, with a history of the
genitival form its, which adds nothing to our previous
knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to
Milton except for its bearing on the authorship of some
verses attributed to him against the most overwhelm-
ing internal evidence to the contrary. Mr. Masson is
altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls
oddly enough " recollectiveness of Latin constructions "
in Milton, and scents them sometimes in what would
seem to the uninstructed reader very idiomatic English.
More than once, at least, he has fancied them by mis-
understanding the passage in which they seem to occur.
Thus, in "Paradise Lost," XL 520, 521,
" Therefore so atject is their punishment,
Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own,"
has no analogy with eoruvi deformantium, for the context
shows that it is the punishment which disfigures. Indeed,
Mr. Masson so often finds constructions -aifficult, ellipses
strange, and words needing annotation that are common
to all poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his
13 s
290 MILTON.
notes seem not seldom to have been written by a for-
eigner. On this passage in " Comus," —
" I do not tliink my sister so to seek
Or so unprincipled in virtue's book
And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever
As that the single want of light and noise
(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,"
Mr. Masson tells us, that "in very strict construction,
not being would cling to vmnt as its substantive ; but
the phrase passes for the Latin ablative absolute."
So on the words forestalling night, " i. e. anticipating.
Forestall is literally to anticipate the market by pur-
chasing goods before they are brought to the stall."
In the verse
"Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good,"
he explains that " while here has the sense of so long
as." But Mr. Masson's notes on the language are his
weakest. He is careful to tell us, for examj^le, " that
thero are instances of the use of shine as a substantive
in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other poets." It is but
another way of spelliiig sheen, and if Mr. Masson never
heard a shoeblack in the street say, " Shall I give you
a shine, sirl" his experience has been singular.* His
* But his etymological notes are worse. For example, "recreant,
renouncing the faith, from the old French recroire, which again is from
the mediaeval Latin recredere, to ' believe back,' or apostatize." This
is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in either language.
He derives serenate from sera, and says that ^jar^c means treaty, nego-
tiation, though it is the same word trn parley, had the same meanings,
and was commonly pronounced like it, as in Marlowe's
"What, shall we parlii with this Christian?"
It certainly never meant treaty, though it may have meant negotia-
tion. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the principals.
On the verses
"And some flowers and some bays
For thy hearse to strew the ways,"
MILTON. 291
notes in general are very good (though too long). Those
on the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I
think he is sometimes a little too scornful of parallel pas-
sages,* for if there is one thing more striking than another
in this poet, it is that his great and original imagination
was almost wholly nourished by books, perhaps I should
rather say set in motion by them. It is wonderful how,
from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in
his reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation ;
how from the most battered old lamp caught in that
huge drag-net with which he swept tlie waters of learn-
ing, he covild conjure a tall genius to build his palaces.
Whatever he touches swells and towers. That wonder-
ful passage in Comus of the airy tongues, perhaps the
most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was con-
jured out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco
Polo. Such examples help us to understand the poet.
When I find that _Sir Thomas Browne had said before
IVIiltnn, that Adam "was the ivisest of all men since," I
am glad to find this link betw£.en tlie most profound
and the most stately imagination of that .nge. Such par-
allels sometimes give a hint also of the historical devel-
opment of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so
to speak. Every one has noticed IMilton's fondness of
sonoi'ous proper names, which have not only an acquired
imaginative value by association, and so serve to awaken
ovu' poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a merely musical
he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken " in our sense
of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or frame-
work over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to strew the
ways for thy hearse." How coiild one do that for a tomb or the
framework over it ?
* A passage from Dante (Inferno, XL 96-105), with its reference
to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of " Nature taught
art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier
commentators would also have been of great service in the astronomi-
cal notes.
292 MILTON.
significance. This he probably caught from Marlowe,
traces of whom are frequent in him. There is certainly
something of what afterwards came to be called Mil-
tonic in more than one passage of " Tambu7-laine," a
play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the
block, as in Michel Angelo's Dawn.
Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of Milton
are, in the main, judicious, but when he ventures on par-
ticulars, one cannot always agree with him. He seems
to understand that our prosody is accentual merely, and
yet, when he comes to what he calls variations, he talks
of the " substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the
Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapa3st,
the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is
always misleading. The shift of the accent in what
Mr. Masson calls "dissyllabic variatioiis" is common to
all pentameter verse, and, in the other case, most of
the words cited as trisyllables either were not so in
Milton's day,* or were so or not at choice of the poet,
according to their place in the verse. There is not an
elision of Milton's without precedent in the dramatists
from whom he learned to write blank-verse. Milton was
a greater metrist than any of them, except Marlowe and
Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur)
oftener than they to give a faint undulation or retarda-
tion to his verse, only because his epic form demanded
it more for variety's sake. How Milton would have read
them, is another question. He certainly often marked
them by an apostrophe in his manuscripts. He doubt-
less composed according to quantity, so far as that is
possible in English, and as Cowper somewhat extrava-
* Almost every combination of two vowels might in those daj's be
a diphthong or not, at viiW. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed
and sometimes (pevhaiis) modified by his study of the Italians, with
whose usage in this respect he closely conforms.
MILTON. 293
gantly says, " gives almost as many proofs of it in his
' Paradise Lost ' as there are lines in the poem." * But
when Mr. Masson tells us that
" Self-fed and self-consumed : if this fail,"
and
"Dwells in all Heaven cliarity so rare,"
are " only nine syllables," and that in
" Created liugest that swim the ocean-stream,"
" either the third foot must be read as an anapcest or the
word hugest must be pronounced as one syllable, Imc/st,''
I think Milton would have invoked the soul of Sir John
Cheek. Of course Milton read it
" Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream,"
just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's facsimile)
" Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,"
a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely
as in the Italian poets, f " Gest that swim" would be
rather a knotty anajxest, an insupportable foot indeed !
And why is even kngst worse than Shakespeare's
" Young' st follower of thy drum " ?
In the same way he says of
" For we have also our evening and our morn,"
that " the metre of this line is irregular," and of the
rapidly fine
" Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,"
that it is " a line of unusual metre." Wh}^ more unusual
than
" As being the contrary to his high will " ?
What would Mr. Masson say to these three verses from
Dekkar % —
* Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.
t So Dante : —
" Ma sapienza e amore e virtuta"
So Donne : —
"Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."
294 MILTON.
" And knoioing so miich, I muse thou art so poor " ;
" I fan away the d-ast flying in mine eyes " ;
*'Floioing o'er with court news only of you and them."
All such participles (where no consonant divided the
vowels) were normally of one sjdlable, permissibly of
two.* If Mr. Masson had studied the poets who pre-
ceded Milton as he has studied him, he would never
have said that the verse
" Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills,"
was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of over-
measure." He retains Milton's spelling of hunderd
without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that
d, t, p, b, &G., followed by I or r, might be either of two
or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find it both ways
in two consecutive verses : —
"A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse,
Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms. " f
Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one
or more unaccented syllables, and even argues in his
Introduction that some of them might be reckoned
Alexandrines. He cites some lines of Spenser as con-
firming his theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes
the conditions of the case by throwing the accent (ap-
preciably even now, but more emphatically in Spenser's
day) on the last syllable.
" A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"
* Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the
versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, hut seems
to have learned something from Abbott's " Shakespearian Grammar "
in the interval between writing his notes and his Introduction. Walk-
er's "Shakespeare's Versification " would have been a great help to
him in default of original knowledge.
t Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from the word
sister by its preceding a vowel : —
" Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near ! "
This would have been impossible before a consonant.
MILTON. 295
he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of
twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely Milton's ear
would never have tolerated a dissyllabic " spirit " in such
a position. The word was then more commonly of one
syllable, though it might be two, and Avas accordingly
spelt spreet (still surviving in sprite), sprit, and even
spirt, as Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's
facsimiles.* Shakespeare, in the verse
" Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"
uses the word admirably well in a position where it can-
not have a metrical value of more than one syllable,
while it gives a dancing movement to the verse in keep-
ing with the sense. Our old metrists were careful of
elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in
proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity
under the benumbing fingers of pedants.
This discussion of the value of syllables is not so
trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense has been
written about imperfect measures in Shakespeare, and
of the admirable dramatic eftect pi'oduced by filling up
the gaps of missing sjdlables witli pauses or prolonga-
tions of the voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and pas-
sionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages of con-
tinuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I do
not believe that any of our old dramatists has know-
ingly left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a
haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their plays
have mostly reached us, we should attribute such faults
(as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than
to the deliberate design of the poets. Marlowe and
Shakespeare, the two best metrists among them, have
given us a standard by which to measure what licenses
they took in versification, — the one in his translations,
* So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old Frencli.
296 MILTON.
the other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in
Milton are very few, and all of them occur in works
printed after his blindness had lessened the chances of
supervision and increased those of error. There are
only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible
as they stand. These are,
" Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"
and
" With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."
This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped
out or had been stricken out by some proof-reader
who limited the number of syllables in a pentameter
verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices
only the first of these lines, and says that to make it
regular by accenting the word bottomless on the second
syllable would be "too horrible." Certainly not, if
Milton so accented it, any more than hlasphemons and
twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However
that may be, Milton could not have intended to close
not only a period, but a paragraph also, with an un-
musical verse, and in the only other passage where the
word occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable :
" With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."
As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom, may
be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstan-
ces, I am persuaded that the last passage quoted (and
all three refer to the same event) gives us the word
wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or
meant to write, —
"Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"
which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple
that Milton liked best.*
* Milton, however, would not have balked at th' bottmnless any
MILTON. 297
Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduc-
tion of the way in which the verses of Milton should be
read is judicious enough, though some of the examples
he gives, of the " comicality " which would ensue from
compressing every verse into an exact measure of ten
syllables, are based on a surprising ignorance of the laws
which guided our poets just before and during Milton's
time in the structure of their verses. Thus he seems to
think that a strict scansion would require us in the verses
" So he with difficulty and labor hard,"
and
" Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,"
to pronounce difikty and purj). Though Mr. Masson
talks of " slurs and elisions," his ear would seem some-
what insensible to their exact nature or office. His
dlffihty supposes a hiatus where none is intended, and
his making p^irple of one syllable wrecks the whole
verse, the real slur in the latter case being on azure
or* When he asks whether Milton required " these
pronunciations in his verse," no positive answer can be
given, but I very much doubt whether he would have
thought that some of the lines Mr. Masson cites " re-
main perfectly good Blank Verse even with the most
leisurely natural enunciation of the spare syllable," and
I am sui'e he would have stared if told that " the num-
ber of accents " in a pentameter verse was " variable."
It may be doubted whether elisions and compressions
which would be thought in bad taste or even vulgar
now were more abhorrent to the ears of Milton's gen-
more than Drayton at th' rejected or Donne at tK sea. Mr. Mas-
son does not seem to \inderstand this elision, for he corrects i' th'
midst to € the midst, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He
miglit better have restored the n in i', wliere it is no contraction, but
merely indicates the pronunciation, as o' for of a.n<X on.
* Exactly analogous to that in treasurer \vhen it is shortened to
two syllables.
13*
298 MILTON,
eration than to a cultivated Italian would be the heai'-
ing Dante read as prose. After all, what Mr. Masson
says may be reduced to the infallible axiom that poetry
should be read as poetry.
Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main principles,
but the examples he quotes make one doubt whether
he knows what a verse is. For example, he thinks it
would be a " horror," if in the vei'se
" That invincible Samson far renowned "
we should lay the stress on the first syllable of invin-
cible. It is hard to see why this should be worse than
conventicle or remonstrance or successor or incompatible,
(the three latter used by the correct Daniel) or why Mr.
Masson should clap an accent on surface merely be-
cause it comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to
invincible. If one read the verse just cited with thoso
that go with it, he will find that the accent must
come on the first syllable of invincible or else the whole
passage becomes chaos.* Should we refuse to say
obleeged with Pope becaiise the fashion has changed ]
From its apparently greater freedom in skilful hands,
blank-verse gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing and
dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter couplet, but it
is safe to say that no verse is good in the one that would
not be good in the other when handled bj^ a master like
Dryden. Milton, like other great poets, wrote some bad
verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so than to
conjure up some unimaginable reason why the reader
should accept them as the better for their badness.
Such a bad verse is
* Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him guilty
of a verse like
" Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"
while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that
he loved.
MILTON. 299
" Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dtns and shapes of death,"
which might be cited to illustrate Pope's
"And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."
Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality
for low words. He rather loved them tall, as the Prus-
sian King loved men to be six feet high in their stock-
ings, and fit to go into the grenadiers. He loved them
as much for their music as for their meaning, — perhaps
more. His style, therefore, when it has to deal with
commoner things, is apt to grow a little cumbrous and
unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl
would boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a
hole. Shakespeare would have understood this. Mil-
ton would have made him talk like an eagle. His
influence is not to be left out of account as partially
contributing to that decline toward poetic diction which
was already beginning ere he died. If it would not
be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may be
called in the highest sense the most scientific of our
poets. If to Spenser younger poets have gone to be
sung-to, they have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught.
Our language has no finer poem than " Samson Agonis-
tes," if any so fine in the quality of austere dignity or
in the skill with which the poet's jDersonal experience is
generalized into a classic tragedy.
Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem to
show him, he had in him by nature, or bred into him
by fate, something of the haioghty and defiapt self-asser-
tion of Dante and Michel Angelo. In no other English
author is the man so large a part of his works. Milton's
haughty conception of himself enters into all he says
and does. Always the necessity of this one man became
that of the whole human race for the moment. There
were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when
300 MILTON.
he wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. Did
Mary Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode
of a roundhead schoolmaster incompatible and leave it,
forthwith the cry of the universe was for an easier dis-
solution of the marriage covenant. If he is blind, it is
with excess of light, it is a divine partiality, an over-
shadowing with angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias
are admitted among the prophets because they, too, had
lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of more
account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he
was past fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it
at once becomes " the invention of a barbarous age to
set off wretched matter and lame metre." If the struc-
ture of his mind be undramatic, why, then, the English
drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare,
and the rest notwithstanding, and he will compose a
tragedy on a Greek model with the blinded Samson for
its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme. Plainly
he belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays
are in no Avay responsible for their to-morrows. And
this makes him perennially interesting even to those
who hate his politics, despise his Socinianism, and find
his greatest poem a bore. A new edition of his poems
is always welcome, for, as he is really great, he pi-esents
a fresh side to each new student, and Mr. Masson, in his
three handsome volumes, has given us, with much that
is superfluous and even erroneous, nmch moi"e that is
a solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge.
It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Mil-
ton into the fortress of his absolute personality that no
great poet is so uniformly self-conscious as he. We
should say of Shakespeare that he had the power of
transforming himself into everything ; of Milton, that
he had that of transforming everything into himself.
Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and he,
MILTON. 301
the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at
the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sun-
shine. But Milton never let himself go for a moment.
As other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he
se//-possessed, his great theme being John Milton, and
his great duty that of interpreter between him and the
world. I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy
translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the version is
made. Pope says he makes God the Father reason " like
a school-divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate.
He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology,
and had the poem been written a few years later, the
Almighty would have become more heterodox. Since
Dante, no one had stood on these visiting terms with/
heaven.
Now i_t is precisFily this nndgf-jty of self-reliance, I sus-
pect, which goes far toward making the sublime, and
which, falling_by_a hair's-breadlh short thereof, makes
the ridiculous. Puritanism showed both the strength
and weakness of its prophetic nurture ; enough of the
latter to be scoffed out of England by the very men it
had conquered in the field, enough of the former to in-
trench itself in three or four immortal memories. It
has left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its
great monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the
verse of Milton. It is a high inspiration to be the neigh-
bor of great events ; to have been a partaker in them and
to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence
become the very means of ignoble ends, if it do not
wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret deepen-
ing the song which dares not tell the reason of its
sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter
years, while it makes him the most impressive figure
in our literary history, is reflected also in his maturer
poems by a sublime independence of human sympathy
302 MILTON.
like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us.
But it is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habitual
companions of whose mind were the Past and Future. I
always seem to see him leaning in his blindness a hand
on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will guard
the song which the other had inspired.
KEATS.
There are few poets whose works contain slighter hints
of their personal history than those of Keats ; yet there
are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the
conditions upon which they lived, are more cleai-ly trace-
able in what they have written. To write the life of a
man was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing
and placing of circumstances, of those things which stood
about the life and were more or less related to it, but
were not the life itself But Biography from day to day
holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so
far as its outward events are concerned, may be made
for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or
that, of finer or coarser material ; but the gait and ges-
ture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves
characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man
himself It is those essential facts which xmderlie the
life and make the individual man that are of importance,
and it is the cropping out of these upon the surface that
gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature
hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and
the figure he cuts will depend very much upon the shape
of that, — upon the knots and twists which existed in it
from the beginning. We were .designed in the cradle,
perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and
shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely.
304 KEATS.
It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are
not that has strewn history with so many broken pur-
poses and lives left in the rough.
Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-
outlined character, for that results commonly from the
resistance made by temperament to the many influences
by which the world, as it may happen then to be, en-
deavors to mould every one in its own image. What his
temperament was we can see clearly, and also that it sub-
ordinated itself more and more to the discipline of art.
John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer
and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike them, he was
certainly not of gentle blood. Lord Houghton, who
seems to have had a kindly wish to create him gentleman
by brevet, says that he was " born in the upper ranks of
the middle class." This shows a commendable tender-
ness for the nerves of English society, and reminds one
of Noi'thcote's story of the violin-player who, wishing to
compliment his pupil, George III., divided all tiddlers
into three classes, — those who could not play at all,
those who played very badly, and those who played very
well, — assuinng his Majesty that he had made such com-
mendable progress as to have already reached the second
rank. We shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing
that the father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had told
us in an earlier biography) "was employed in the estab-
lishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of large livery-
stables on the Pavenaent in Moorfields, nearly opposite
the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So that, after all,
it was not so bad ; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a propri-
etor; second, he was the proprietor of an establishment ;
third, he was the proprietor of a large establishment ;
and fourth, this large establishment was nearly opposite
Finsbury Circus, — a name which vaguely dilates the
KEATS. 305
imagination with all sorts of potential grandeurs. It
is true Leigh Hunt asserts that Keats " was a little too
sensitive on the score of his origin,"* but we can find no
trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or in such of
his letters as have been printed. We suspect the fact
to have been that he resented with becoming pride the
vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which meas-
ui'ed genius by genealogies. It is enough that his poeti-
cal pedigree is of the best, ti-acing through Spenser to
Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery even
in the largest establishments in Moorfields.
As well as we can make out, then, the fixther of Keats
was a groom in the service of Mr. Jennings, and married
the daughter of his master. Thus, on the mother's side,
at least, we find a grandfather ; on the father's there is
no hint of such an ancestor, and we must charitably take
him for granted. It is of more importance that the elder
Keats was a man of sense and energy, and that his wife
was a " lively and intelligent woman, who hastened
the birth of the poet by her passionate love of amuse-
ment," bi'inging him into the world, a seven-months' child,
on the 29th October, 1795, instead of the 29th of De-
cember, as would have been conventionally proper. Lord
Houghton describes her as " tall, with a large oval face,
and a somewhat saturnine demeanour." This last cir-
cumstance does not agree very well with what he had
just before told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us
by adding that " she succeeded, lioivever, in inspiring her
children with the profoundest affection." This was par-
ticularly true of John, who once, when between four and
five years old, mounted guard at her chamber door with
an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor had or-
dered her not to be disturbed. t
* Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed. ), Vol. II. p. 36.
t Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Houghton's
version the best.
306 KEATS.
In 1804, Keats being in his ninth j'ear, his father was
killed by a fall from his horse. His mother seems to
have been ambitious for her children, and there was
some talk of sending John to Harrow. Fortunately this
plan was thought too expensive, and he was sent instead
to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield with his brothers.
A maternal uncle, who had distinguished himself by his
courage under Duncan at Camperdown, was the hero of
his nephews, and they went to school resolved to main-
tain the family reputation for courage. John was always
fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school-fellows
as a strange compound of pluck and sensibility. He
attacked an usher who had boxed his brother's ears ; and
when his mother died, in 1810, was moodily inconsolable,
hiding himself for several days in a nook under the
master's desk, and refusing all comfort from teacher or
friend.
He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are,
and impressed his companions with a sense of his power.
They thought he would one da}^ be a famous soldier.
This may have been owing to the stories he told them
of the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were
properly famoused by the boy Homer, and whom they
probably took for an admiral at the least, as it would
have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had
been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great
man, which is the main thing, for the public opinion of
the playground is truer and more discerning than that
of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we
will tell you what the man longs to be, however he
may be repressed by necessity or fear of the police
reports.
Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else
especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats.
He translated the twelve books of the ^Eneid, read Rob-
KEATS. 307
inson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into
Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little Latin
and no Greek, but he had studied Spence's Polyme-
tis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's Dictionary, and
knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good
company perhaps for him as aorists and aspirates. It
is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable
writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive
under their pens with all that the young poet saw in
them.*
On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to
a surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Ham-
mond, "of some eminence" in his profession, as Lord
Houghton takes care to assure us. The place was of
more importance than the master, for its neighborhood
to Enfield enabled him to keep up his intimacy with the
family of his former teacher, Mr. Clarke, and to borrow
books of them. In 1812, when he was in his seventeenth
year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the " Faerie
Queene." Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Amj)hion
* There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of acces-
sary after the fact in any success ; always an old woman or two, ready
to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood of
persons who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a certain " Mrs.
Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury," assures Mr. George Keats, when
he tells her that John is determined to be a poet, "that this was very
odd, because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions
put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people
said, and then laugh." The early histories of heroes, like those of
:iations, are always more or less mythical, and I give the story for
what it is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of intelligence in it, for
the old lady pronounces it odd that any one should determine to be a
poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the matter was determined
earlier and by a higher disposing power. There are few children who
do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and perhaps fewer who can
resist making fun of the Mrs. Graftys, of Craven Street, Finsbury,
when they have the chance. See Haydon's Autobiography, Vol. I.
p. 361.
308 KEATS.
is more wonderful than this miracle of Spenser's, trans-
forming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet. Keats
learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward
his indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond.
Thus could the Muse defend her son. It is the old story,
— the lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what is
gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us "that he used
sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should
never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy
himself." This was perhaps a half-conscious reminis-
cence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had
an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward forebod-
ing of the shortness of his own career.*
Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then
Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But Chapman's
translations had a more abiding influence on his style
both for good and evil. That he read wisely, his
comments on the "Paradise Lost" are enough to prove.
He now also commenced poet himself, but does not
appear to have neglected the study of his profession.
He was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he
no doubt penned many a stanza when he should have
been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals accompanied
by the early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable
examination in 1817. In the spring of this year, also,
he prepared to take his first degree as poet, and accord-
ingly published a small volume containing a selection of
his earlier essays in verse. It atti'acted little attention,
and the rest of this year seems to have been occupied
with a journey on foot in Scotland, and the composition
of "Endymion," which was published in 1818. Milton's
* " I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read some lines
from (I think) the 'Bristowe Tragedy' vvitli an enthusiasm of admi-
ration such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true poetry only
could have excited." — J. H. C, in Notes & Queries, 4th a. x. 157.
KEATS. 309
"Tetrachordon" was not better abused ; but Milton's as-
sailants were unorganized, and were obliged each to print
and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the
natural laws of demand and supply to furnish him Wxth
readers. Keats was arraigned by the constituted author-
ities of literary justice. They might be, nay, they were
Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the sentence was published,
and the penalty inflicted before all England. The differ-
ence between his fortune and Milton's was that between
being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and being
set in the pillory. In the first case, the annoyance
brushes off mostly with the mud ; in the last, there is
no solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great
cause. This solace, to a certain extent, Keats had ; for
his ambition was noble, and he hoped not to make a
great reputation, but to be a great poet. Haydon says
that Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he had
ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty purpose.
It is curious that men should resent more fiercely
what they suspect to be good verses, than what they
know to be bad morals. Is it because they feel them-
selves incapable of the one and not of the other"?
Probably a certain amount of honest loyalty to old
idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken into
account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism
is due to want of thought as to deliberate injustice.
However it be, the best poetry has been the most sav-
agely attacked, and men who scrupvilously practised the
Ten Commandments as if there were never a not in any
of them, felt every sentiment of their better nature out-
raged by the " Lyrical Ballads." It is idle to attempt
to show that Keats did not suffer keenly from the vul-
garities of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered
in pi'oportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious
of falling below it. In England, especially, it is not
310 KEATS.
pleasant to be ridiculous, even if you are a lord ; but
to be ridiculous and an apothecary at the same time is
almost as bad as it was formerly to be excommunicated.
A priori, there was something absurd in poetry written
by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables of Mr.
Jennings, even though they were an establishment, and
a lai'ge establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury
Circus. Mr. GifFord, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the
Quarterly, and Mr. Terry, the actor,* thought so even
more distinctly in Blackwood, bidding the 3^oung apothe-
cary " back to his gallipots ! " It is not pleasant to be
talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to have
the advantage of position, nor to be drenched with ditch-
water, though you know it to be thrown by a scullion in
a garret.
Keats, as his was a temj)erament in which sensibility
was excessive, could not but be galled by this treatment.
He was galled the more that he was also a man of
strong sense, and capable of understanding clearly how
hard it is to make men acknowledge solid value in
a person whom they have once heartily laughed at.
Eeputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of waver-
ing and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is
the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve
it. To his friend Taylor he writes, " There is but one
way for me. The road lies through study, application,
and thought." Thrilling with the electric touch of sacred
leaves, he saw in vision, like Dante, that small procession
of the elder poets to which only elect centuries can add
another laurelled head. Might he, too, deserve from
posterity the love and reverence which he paid to those
antique glories 1 It was no unworthy ambition, but
* Haydon (Autobiography, Vol. I. p. 379) says that he "strongly
suspects" Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood.
KEATS. 311
everything was against him, — birth, health, even friends,
since it was partly on their account that he was sneered
at. His very name stood in his way, for Fame loves best
such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue,
like Spenserian, Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there
is a great deal in names, and when the fairies come with
their gifts to the cradle of the selected child, let one,
wiser than the rest, choose a name for him from which
well-sounding derivatives can be made, and, best of all,
v.ath a termination in on. Men judge the current coin
of opinion by the ring, and are readier to take without
question whatever is Platonic, Baconian, Newtonian,
Johnsonian, Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic,
and all the rest. You cannot make a good adjective
out of Keats, — the more pity, — and to say a thing is
Keatsy is to contemn it. Fortune likes fine names.
Haydon tells us that Keats was very much depressed
by the fortunes of his book. This was natural enough,
but he took it all in a manly way, and determined to
revenge himself by writing better poetry. He knew
that activity, and not despondency, is the true counter-
poise to misfortune. Haydon is sure of the change in
his spirits, because he would come to the painting-room
and sit silent for hours. But we rather think that the
conversation, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled that in
a young author's first play, where the other interlocutors
are only brought in as convenient points for the hero
to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon.
Besides, Keats had been continuing his education this
year, by a course of Elgin marbles and pictures l)y the
great Italians, and might very naturally have found
little to say about Mr. Haydon's extensive works, that
he would have cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the
other hand, in his eagerness to prove that Keats was not
killed by the article in the Quarterly, is carried too far
312 KEATS,
toward the opposite extreme, and more than hints that
he was not even hurt by it. This would have been true
of Wordsworth, who, by a constant companionship with
mountains, had acquired something of their manners,
but was simply impossible to a man of Keats's tem-
perament.
On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect Keats tlie
less for having been gifted with sensibility, and may
even say what we believe to be true, that his health
was injured by the fiiilure of his book. A man cannot
have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the
same time, and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous,
he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his im-
agination. It is perfectly true that what we call the
world, in these affairs, . is nothing more than a mere
Brocken spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves ;
but as long as we do not know it, it is a very passable
giant. We are not without experience of natures so
purely intellectual that their bodies had no more con-
cern in their mental doings and sufferings than a
house has with the good or ill fortune of its occupant.
But poets are not built on this plan, and especially jjoets
like Keats, in whom tlie moral seems to have so perfectly
interfused the physical man, that j-ou miglit almost say
he could feel sorrow with his hands, so truly did his
body, like that of Donne's Mistress Boulstred, think and
remember and forebode. The healthiest poet of whom
our civilization has been capable says that when he
beholds
" desert a beggar born,
And strength by limping sway disabled.
And art made tongue-tied by authority,"
alluding, plainly enough, to the Gifiords of his day,
" And simple truth miscalled simplicity,"
KEATS. 313
as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case,
" And captive Good attending Captain 111,"
that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life
seems to have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of
enjoyment, " tired of all these," had nothing for it but
to cry for " restful Death."
Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill fortune cour-
ageously. He certainly did not overestimate " Eudym-
ion," and perhaps a sense of humor which was not
wanting in him may have served as a buffer against the
too importunate shock of disappointment. " He made
Ritchie pi'oraise," says Haydon, "he would carry his
* Endymion ' to the great desert of Sahara and fling it in
the midst." On the 9th October, 1818, he writes to his
publisher, Mr. Hessey, " I cannot but feel indebted to
those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the
rest, I begin to get acquainted with my ovra strength
and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary
effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract
makes him a severe critic of his own works. My own
domestic criticism has given me pain without compari-
son beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could
inflict ; and also, when I feel I am right, no external
praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary
reperception and ratification of what is fine. J. S. is
perfectly right in regard to ' the slipshod Endymion.'
That it is so is no fault of mine. No ! though it may
sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power
to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its
being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice
and trembled over every page, it would not have been
written ; for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will
write independently. I have written independently
tvithout Judgment. I may write independently and toith
314 KEATS.
judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work
out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured
by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness
in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In
' Endymion ' I leaped headlong into the sea, and there-
by have become better acquainted with the soundings,
the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon
the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and
comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure ; for
I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest."
This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the
side which a large-minded person w^ould display to
a friend. This is what he thought, but whether it
was what he felt, I think doubtful. I look upon it
rather as one of the phenomena of that multanimous
nature of the poet, which makes him for the moment
that of which he has an intellectual perception. Else-
where he says something which seems to hint at the
true state of the case. " I must think that difficulties
nerve the spirit of a man : they mcike our j^rwie objects a
refuge as ivell as a passion." One cannot help contrast-
ing Keats with Wordsworth, — the one altogether poet ;
the other essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic
faculty added, — the one shifting from form to form, and
from style to style, and pouring his hot throbbing life
into every mould ; the other remaining always the indi-
vidual, producing works, and not so much living in his
poems as memorially recording his life in them. When
Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his
writings, he speaks serenely and generously of Words-
worth the poet, as if he were an unbiassed third person,
who takes up the argument merely in the interest of
literature. He towers into a bald egotism which is
quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy was his
employment ; it was Keats's very existence, and he felt
KEATS. 315
the rough treatment of his verses as if it had been the
wounding of a limb. To "Wordsworth, composing was
a healthy exercise ; his slow jtulse and imperturbable
self-trust gave him assurance of a life so long that he
could wait ; and when we read his poems we should
never suspect the existence in him of any sense but
that of observation, as if Wordsworth the poet were
a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by Mr. Woi'ds-
worth the distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper.
But every one of Keats's poems was a sacrifice of vital-
ity ; a virtue went away from him into every one of
them ; even yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to
warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine
senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we
do not wonder he felt that what he did was to be done
swiftly.
In the mean time his younger brother languished
and died, his elder seems to have been in some way
unfortunate and had gone to America, and Keats him-
self showed symptoms of the hereditary disease which
caused his death at last. It is in October, 1818, that
we find the first allusion to a passion which was, ere-
long, to consume him. It is plain enough beforehand,
that those were not moral or mental graces that should
atti'act a man like Keats. His intellect was satisfied
and absorbed by his art, his books, and his friends. He
could have companionship and appreciation from men ;
what he craved of woman was only repose. That lux-
urious nature, which would have tossed uneasily on a
crumpled rose-leaf, must have something softer to rest
upon than intellect, something less ethereal than cul-
ture. It was his body that needed to have its equilib-
rium restored, the waste of his nervous energy that
must be repaired by deep draughts of the overflowing
life and drowsy tropical force of an abundant and
316 KEATS.
healthily poised womanhood. Writing to his sister-in-
law, he says of this nameless person : " She is not a
Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian ; she has a rich
Eastern look ; she has fine eyes and fine manners.
When she comes into a room she makes the same im-
pression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine
and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who
may address her. From habit, she thinks that nothing
particular. I always find myself at ease with such a
woman ; the picture before me always gives me a life
and animation which I cannot possibly feel with any-
thing inferior. I am at such times too much occupied
in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. I forget
myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this
time think I am in love with her, so, before I go any
farthei", I will tell you that I am not. She kept me
awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than
which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with
an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose life is
to me a banquet I like her and her like, because
one has no sensation ; what we both are is taken for
granted She walks across a room in such a man-
ner that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic jDower.
.... I believe, though, she has faults, the same as a
Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had. Yet she is a
fine thing, speaking in a worldly way ; for there are two
distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,
— the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical ; and the
unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bona-
parte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian hold the first
place in our minds ; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop
Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear
sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the
world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an eternal
KEATS. 317
being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to
ruin me, and I should like you to save me."
It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head with
such pains, while his whole body is so clearly visible, as
in this extract. This lady, it seems, is not a Cleopatra,
only a Charmian ; but presently we find that she is im-
perial. He does not love her, but he would just like to
be ruined by her, nothing more. This glimpse of hei',
with her leopardess beauty, crossing the room and draw-
ing men after her magnetically, is all we have. She
seems to have been still living in 1848, and as Lord
Houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred.
" She is an East-Lidian," Keats says, " and ought to be
her grandftither's heir." Her name we do not know.
It appears from Dilke's " Papers of a Critic " that they
were betrothed : " It is quite a settled thing between
John Keats and Miss . God help them. It is a
bad thing for them. The mother says she cannot pre-
vent it, and that her only hope is that it will go off.
He don't like any one to look at her or to speak to her."
Alas, the tropical warmth became a consuming fire !
" His passion cruel grown took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous."
Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems
to have worked assiduously. Of course, worldly success
w'as of more importance than ever. He began " Hyperion,"
but had given it up in September, 1819, because, as he
said, "there w^ere too many Miltonic inversions in it."
He wrote "Lamia" after an attentive study of Dryden's
versification. This period also produced the "Eve of St.
Agnes," "Isabella," and the odes to the "Nightingale " and
to the " Grecian L^rn." He studied Italian, read Ariosto,
and wrote part of a humorous poem, "The Cap and Bells."
He tried his hand at tragedy, and Loi'd Houghton has
318 KEATS.
published among his "Remains," " Otho the Great," and
all that was ever written of " King Stephen." We think
he did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon
to show how ill his hiographee could do anything.
In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on the
top of. a stage-coach, and came home in a state of fever-
ish excitement. He was persuaded to go to bed, and in
getting between the cold sheets, coughed slightly. " That
is blood in my mouth," he said ; " Bring me the candle ;
let me see this blood." It w^as of a brilliant red, and his
medical knowledge enabled him to interj^ret the augury.
Those narcotic odors that seem to breathe seaward, and
steep in repose the senses of the voyager who is drifting
toward the shore of the mysterious Other World, appear-
ed to envelop him, and, looking up with sudden calm-
ness, he said, " I know the color of that blood ; it is
arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that color. That
drop is my death-warrant ; I must die."
There was a slight rally during the summer of that
year, but townrd autumn he grew worse again, and it
■was decided that he should go to Italy. He was accom-
panied thither by his friend, Mr. Severn, an artist. After
embarking, he wrote to his friend, Mr. Brown. W^e give
a part of this letter, which is so deeply tragic that the
sentences we take almost seem to break away from the
rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches of Dante's
lamentable wood.
" I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me
much. There is one I must mention and have done
with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this
would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live
most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot
help it. Who can help it "? Were I in health it would
make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state 1 I dare
say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harp-
KEATS. 319
ing, — you know what was my greatest pain during the
first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death
every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and
then I wish death away, for death would destroy even
those pains, which are better than nothing. Land and
sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but
Death is the great divorcer forever. When the pang
of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say
the bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you,
that you might flatter me with the best. I think, with-
out my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be a friend
to Miss when I am dead. You think she has many
faults, but for my sake think she has not one. If there
is anything you can do for her by w^oi'd or deed I know
you will do it. I am in a state at present in which
woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over
me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my
sensations with respect to Miss and my sister is
amazing, — the one seems to absorb the other to a degree
incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sibter in
America ; the thought of leaving Miss • is beyond
everything horrible, — the sense of darkness coming over
me, — I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing; some
of the phrases she was in the habit of using during ray
last nursing at Weutworth Place ring in my ears. Is
there another life 1 Shall I awake and find all this a
dream 1 There must be ; we cannot be created for this
sort of suffering."
To the same friend he writes again from Naples, 1st
November, 1820: —
" The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill
me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was
in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear
to die, — I cannot bear to leave her. 0 God ! God !
God ! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds
320 KEATS.
me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining
she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head. My im-
agination is horribly vivid about her, — I see her, I hear
her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest
to divert me from her a moment. This was the case
when I was in England; I cannot recollect, without
shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's,
and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day.
Then there was a good hope of seeing her again, — now !
— 0 that I could be buried near where she lives ! I am
afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her, — to
see her handwriting would break my heart. Even to
hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be
more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to
do 1 Where can I look for consolation or ease '? If I had
any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me.
Indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your
house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never ceased
wearing me out."
The two friends went almost immediately from Naples
to Rome, where Keats was treated with great kindness
by the distinguished physician. Dr. (afterward Sir James)
Clark.* But there was no hope from the first. His
disease was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond
comfort. The very fact that life might be happy deep-
ened his despair. He might not have sunk so soon,
but the waves in which ho was struggling looked only
the blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-
torch that promised safety and love and rest.
It is good to know that one of Keats's last pleasures
* The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first
house on the right liand in going np the Scalinata. Mr. Se\'ern's
Studio is said to have been in tlie C'ancello over the garden gate of the
Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Roman
home of their countryman Crawford.
KEA.TS. 321
was in hearing Severn read aloud from a volume of
Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to Rome, he had bought
a copy of Alfieri, but, finding on the second page these
lines,
" Misera me ! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che il pianto, ed il pianto e delitto,"
he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the
14th February, 1821, Severn speaks of a change that
had taken place in him toward gi-eater quietness and
peace. He talked much, and fell at last into a sweet
sleep, in which he seemed to have happy dreams. Per-
haps he heard the soft footfall of the angel of Death,
pacing to and fro under his window, to be his Valentine.
That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon
his gi'avestone, —
" HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."
On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling asleep.
His last words were, " I am dying ; I shall die easy; don't
be frightened, be firm and thank God it has come ! "
He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at
Rome, in that part of it which is now disused and se-
cluded from the rest. A short time before his death he
told Severn that he thought his intensest pleasure in
life had been to watch the growth of flowers ; and once,
after lying peacefully awhile, he said, " I feel the flowers
growing over me." His grave is marked by a little
headstone on which are carved somewhat rudely his
name and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself No
tree or shrub has been planted near it, but the daisies,
faithful to their buried lover, crowd his small mound
with a galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous
than those under which he lived.*
* Written in 1856. 0 irony of Time ! Ten j-ears after the poet's
death the -woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr. Dilke, that
822 KEATS.
In person, Keats was below the middle height, with a
head small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders.
His hair was brown and fine, falling in natural ringlets
about a face in which energy and sensibility were re-
markably mixed. Every feature was delicately cut ;
the chin was bold ; and about the mouth something of a
pugnacious expression. His eyes were mellow and glow-
ing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble
action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with
tears, and his mouth trenobled.* Haydon says that his
eyes had an inward Delphian look that was perfectly
divine.
The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but
it should be remembered that he died at twenty-five,
and that he offends by superabundance and not poverty.
That he was overlanguaged at first there can be no
doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling
back to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the
rich that the costly plainness, which at once satisfies
the taste and the imagination, is attainable.
Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it
useful to discuss until it has been settled what original-
ity is. Lord Houghton tells us that this merit (whatever
it is) has been denied to Keats, because his poems take
the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the
time he wrote them. But men have their intellectual
ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is for-
ever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a de-
scendant, it may be after a gap of several generations.
In the parliament of the present every man represents
"the kindest act would be to let liini rest forever in the obscurity to
which cironmstances had condennied him " ! (Papers of a Critic, I.
11.) 0 Time the atoner ! In 1874 I found the grave jDlanted with
shrubs and flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most
eminent American sculptor.
* Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, II. 43.
KEATS. 323
a constituency of the past. It is true that Keats has
the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak,
but this is to make originality a mere question of ex-
ternals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary
might bring an action of trover against every author
■who used his words. It is the man behind the words
that gives them value, and if Shakespeare help himself
to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned
of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one,
and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other
weighty with meaning. Enough that we recognize in
Keats that indefinable newness and unexpectedness
which we call genius. The sunset is original every even-
ing, though for thousands of years it has built out of
the same light and vapor its visionary cities with domes
and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night
shall utterly abase and destroy.
Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other, —
Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, — were the great means
of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts
of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inhei'it-
ance of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. Of these,
Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer, and his
hostility to the existing formalism injured his earlier
poems by tingeing them with something of iconoclastic
extravagance. .He was the deepest thinker, Keats the
most essentially a poet, and Byron the most keenly
intellectual of the three. Keats had the broadest mind,
or at least his mind was open on more sides, and he was
able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron, equally
conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses
of the one and the many littlenesses of the other, while
Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic
character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous
instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of Words-
324 KEATS.
worth, as he was the most individual, accordingly reflect
the moods of his own nature ; those of Keats, from sen-
sitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste
and feeling; and those of Byron, who was impressible
chiefly through the understanding, the intellectual and
moral wants of the time in which he lived. Words-
worth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding
poets ; Keats, their forms ; and Byron, interesting to
men of imagination less for his writings than for what
his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but
presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague de-
sires not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with
motives by the duties of life.
Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sym-
pathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that
imagination which identifies itself with the momentary
object of its contemplation, than any man of these later
days. It is not merely that he has studied the Eliza-
bethans and caught their turn of thought, but that he
really sees things with their sovereign eye, and feels
them with their electrified senses. His imagination was
his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he " hops about
the gravel with the sparrows " ; was he morbid, he
" Avould reject a Petrarcal coronation, — on account of
my dying day, and because women have cancers." So
impressible was he as to say that he " had no nature,"
meaning character. But he knew what the faculty was
worth, and says finely, " The imagination may be com-
pared to Adam's dream : he awoke and found it truth."
He had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things,
and for him they had no other use. We are apt to talk
of the classic renaissance as of a phenomenon long past,
nor ever to be renewed, and to think the Greeks and
Romans alone had the mighty magic to work such a
miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of
KEATS. 325
Keats is that in him we have an example of the renais-
sance going on almost under our own eyes, and that the
intellectual ferment was in him kindled by a purely
English leaven. He had properly no scholarship, any
more than Shakespeare had, but like him he assimilated
at a touch whatever could serve his purpose. His deli-
cate senses absorbed culture at every pore. Of the self-
denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in one
so young) the second draft of Hyperion as compared
with the first is a conclusive proof. And far indeed is
his " Lamia " from the lavish indiscrimination of " En-
dymion." In his Odes he showed a sense of form and
proportion which we seek vainly in almost any other
English poet, and some of his sonnets (taking all quali-
ties into consideration) are the most perfect in our lan-
guage. No doubt there is something tropical and of
strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it ivas
maturity nevertheless. Happy the young poet who has
the saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the shap-
ing faculty that sooner or later will amend it !
As every young person goes through all the world-old
experiences, fancying them something peculiar and per-
sonal to himself, so it is with every new generation,
whose youth always finds its representatives in its poets.
Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay en-
chanted in the dictionary. Wordsworth revolted at the
poetic diction which he found in vogue, but his own
language rarely rises above it, except when it is upborne
by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words,
which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had
more of the power of poetic expression than any modern
English poet. And by poetic expression I do not mean
merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling
which heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem
to the proper tone, and gives entireness to the effect.
826 KEATS.
There is a great deal more than is commonly supposed
in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions
are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new
phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought or
feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last
who utters it best. This power of language is veiled in
the old legends which make the invisible powers the
servants of some word. As soon as we have discovered
the word for our joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs,
but its lords. We reward the discoverer of an ances-
thetic for the body and make him member of all the
societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we
elect into the small academy of the immortals.
The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry ;
for, however often we may find traces of it in others, in
them found its most unconscious expression that reaction
against the barrel-organ style which had been reigning by
a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The
lowest point was indicated when there was such an utter
confounding of the common and the uncommon sense that
Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke prose. The most
profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good
poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as
if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight
was that tallow-candles could be made of it. We find
Keats at first going to the other extreme, and endeavor-
ing to exti-act green cucumbers from the rays of tallow ;
but we see also incontestable proof of the greatness and
purity of his poetic gift in the constant return toward
equilibrium and repose in his later poems. And it is a
repose always lofty and clear aired, like that of the
eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In him a
vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure
with the divine faculty ; thought emancipated itself
from expression without becoming its tyrant ; and music
KEATS. 327
and meaning floated together, accordant as swan and
shadow, on the smooth element of his verse. Without
losing its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and
grew more inward, and the sensational was elevated
into the typical by the control of that finer sense which
underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.
THE ENB.
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
PS Lowell, James Russell
^^±o Among my books
1890