Aspects and impressions

ASPECTS AND IMPRESSIONS

Aspects and
Impressions

By

Edmund Gosse, G.B.

D.Litt. of Cambridge University;
LL.D. of St. Andrews

Cassell and Company, Ltd

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1922

My Friend
JOHN C. SQUIRE

Poet, Editor, and Critic

498062

These Essays are mainly reprinted from The Edinburgh
Revieii', The Loudon Mercury, The Modern Languages Review,
and The Fortnightly Review. " Malherbe and the Classical
Reaction " was the Taylorian Lecture at Oxford for 1920,
and is included here by the courtesy of the authorities
of the University.

Contents

George Eliot

Henry James

Samuel Butler

A Note on Congreve ....

The First Draft of Swinburne's " Anactoria

The H6tel de Rambouillet .

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

The Foundation of the French Academy

Rousseau in England in the Nineteenth
Century .....

The Centenary of Leconte de Li^le

Two French Critics : Emile Faguet — Remy
de Gourmont ....

The Writings of M. Clemenceau .

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen .

Fairyland and a Belglan ariosto

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

Index

I
55

n

87

97
123

145

169
193

203
225
247
261

273
291

Aspects and Impressions

GEORGE ELIOT

IN and after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking
from the north-west of London towards Whitehall, I
met several times, driven slowly homewards, a victoria
which contained a strange pair in whose appearance I took
a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was
hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and
right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion
was a large, thickset sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose
massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile,
were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height
of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly in-
cluded an immense ostrich feather ; this was George Eliot.
The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the
frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and
provincial about it.

All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have,
as a purely external impression, since I never had the
honour of speaking to the lady or to Lewes. We had, my
wife and I, common friends in the gifted family of Simcox
— Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly
under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate
in the household at the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was
vaguely invited, by word of mouth, to make my appear-
ance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some pages
of mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should
probably have obeyed the summons but for an event which
nobody foresaw. On the i8th of December, 1880, I was
present at a concert given, I think, in the Langham Hall,
where 1 sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then

I

Aspects and Impressions

bc'come." ' It \vas chilly in the concert-room, and I watched
George Eliot, in manifest discomfort, drawing up and
tightening round her shoulders a white wool shawl. Four
days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I had never
made my bow to her.

Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled
the wide and flourishing province of English prose fiction
for ten years, since the death of Dickens. Though she
had a vast company of competitors, she did not suffer
through that period from the rivalry of one writer of her
own, class. If the Brontes had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell,
the case might have been different, for George Eliot had
neither the passion of Jajie Eyre nor the perfection of
Cranford, but they were gone before we lost Dickens,
and so was Thackeray, who died while Romola was ap-
pearing. Charles Kingsley, whose Westward Hot had
just preceded her first appearance, had unluckily turned
into other and less congenial paths. Charles Reade,
whose It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) had been her
harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival.
Anthony Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained
persistently and sensibly at a lower intellectual level.
Hence the field was free for George Eliot, who, without
haste or hesitation, built up slowly such a reputation as
no one in her own time could approach.

The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten
what a solemn, what a portentous thing was the con-
temporary fame of George Eliot. It was supported by
the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who despised
mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to
philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when
I sat in company with Herbert Spencer on the committee
of the London Library he expressed a strong objection
to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London
Library no novels should be bought, "except, of course,
those of George Eliot." While she lived, critics com-
pared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the
sage of Weimar. People who started controversies about
evolutionism, a favourite Victorian pastime, bowed low at

2

George Eliot

the mention of her name, and her own strong good sense
alone prevented her from being made the object of a sort
of priggish idohitry. A big-wig of that day remarked
that "in problems of life and thought which baffled Shake-
speare her touch was unfailing." For Lord Acton at her
death "the sun had gone out," and that exceedingly
dogmatic historian observed, ex cathedra, that no writer
had "ever lived who had anything like her power of
manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If
Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our
culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George
Eliot might have had a rival." It is very dangerous to
write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the
case of this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but
so ridiculously overpraised by her friends, it came with
remarkable celerity.

The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, rever-
berating upon a dazzled and genuinely interested public,
was not, however, even in its palmiest days, quite unani-
mous. There were other strains of thought and feeling-
making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert
Browning, though an optimist, and too polite a man to
oppose George Eliot publicly, was impatient of her oracular
manner. There was a struggle, not much perceived on
the surface of the reviews, between her faithful worshippers
and the new school of writers vaguely called pre-Raphaelite.
She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so
much else, she was wiser and more clairvoyant than most
of the people who surrounded her, but Arnold preserved
an attitude of reserve with regard to her later novels. She
found nothing to praise or to attract her interest in the
books of George Meredith ; on the other hand, Coventry
Patmore, with his customary amusing violence, voted her
novels "sensational and improper." To D. G. Rossetti
they were "vulgarity personified," and his brother defined
them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swin-
burne repudiated Romola with vigour as "absolutely
false." I dare say that from several of these her great
contemporaries less harsh estimates of her work might be
3

Aspects and Impressions

culled, but I quote these to show that even at the height of
her fame she was not quite unchallenged.

She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible
for a good deal of the tarnish which spread over the gold
of her reputation. Her early imaginative writings — in
particular Janet's Repentance, Adam Bede, the first two-
thirds of The Mill on the Floss, and much of Silas Marner
— had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if she could
have kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all
effects of contemporary want of sympathy. When we
analyse the charm of the stories just mentioned, we find
that it consists very largely in their felicity of expressed
reminiscence. There is little evidence in them of the in-
ventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive.
Now, we have to remember that contemporaries are quite
in the dark as to matters about which, after the publication
of memoirs and correspondence and recollections, later
readers are exactly informed. We may now know that Sir
Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the features of a
real Sir Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs.
Samuel Evans photographed, but readers of i860 did not
know that, and were at liberty to conceive the unknown
magician in the act of calling up a noble English gentle-
man and a saintly Methodist preacher from the depths of
her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not
would not matter to anyone, if George Eliot could have
continued the act of pictorial reproduction without flag-
ging. The world would have long gazed with pleasure
into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she reeled off
one dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not
contented with her success, and she aimed at things beyond
her reach.

Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate),
the partial and accidental failure of a great genius, began
when she turned from passive acts of memory to a
strenuous exercise of intellect. If I had time and space,
it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's
attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed
caryatid of romantic literature, who had by a few years
4

George Eliot

preceded her. When George Eliot was at the outset of
her own hterary career, which as we know was much
belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled
and scandalized Europe for a generation. The impact of
the Frenchwoman's mind on that of her English contem-
porary produced sparks or flashes of starry enthusiasm.
George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George Sand
in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested
in her," and her praise of the French peasant-idyls was
unbounded. But when she herself began to write novels
she grew to be less and less in sympathy with the French
romantic school. A French critic of her own day laid
down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se
rapproche de la poesie ou de la science." George Sand
had thrown herself unreservedly into the poetic camp.
She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eut poussee vers les
abimes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good sense
which carried her genius over so many marshy places,
that her temperament had often driven her, "au mepris de
la raison ou de la verile morale," into pure romantic
extravagance.

But George Eliot, whatever may have been iier pie-
liminary enthusiasms, was radically and permanently
anti-romantic. This was the source of her strength and
of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains the
soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George
Sand, she kept to the facts; she found that all her power
quitted her at once if she dealt with imaginary events and
the clash of ideal passions. She had been drawn in her
youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and Lelias of
her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that
in the humdrum years at Coventry, when the surround-
ings of her own life were arduous and dusty, she felt
a longing to spread her wings and fly up and out to some
dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which were utterly
vague to her. The romantic method of Dumas, for in-
stance, and even of Walter Scott, appealed to her as a
mode of escaping to dreamland from the flatness and vul-
garity of life under the "miserable reign of Mammon."
B 5

Aspects and Impressions

But she could not achieve such flights; her literary char-
acter was of a totally difi"erent formation. What was
fabulous, what was artificial, did not so much strike her
with disgust as render her paralysed. Her only escape
from mediocrity, she found, was to give a philosophical
interest to common themes. In consequence, as she ad-
vanced in life, and came more under the influence of
George Henry Lewes, she became less and less well dis-
posed towards the French fiction of her day, rejecting even
Balzac, to whom she seems, strangely enough, to have
preferred Lessing. That Lessing and Balzac should be
names pronounced in relation itself throws a light on the
temper of the speaker.

Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost
as early as musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The
child keeps other children awake, after nurse has gone
about her business, by reeling off inventions in the dark.
But George Eliot showed, so far as records inform us,
no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The
history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study.
It appears that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that
she, "in a dreamy mood," fancied herself writing a story.
This was, I gather, immediately on her return from Ger-
many, where she had been touring about with Lewes, with
whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said
to her, "You have wit, description, and philosophy — those
go a good way towards the production of a novel," and
he encouraged her to write about the virtues and vices of
the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and at
Coventry. Amos Barton was the immediate result, and
the stately line of stories which was to close in Daniel
Deronda twenty years later was started on its brilliant
career. But what of the author ? She was a storm-tried
matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the West-
minster Review, who had spent years in translating
Strauss's Life of Jesus and had sunk exhausted in a still
more strenuous wrestling with the Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus of Spinoza, who had worked with Delarive at
Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had censured,
6

George Eliot

as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of WheweU's
Moral Philosophy. This heavily-built Miss Marian
Evans, now dubiously known as Mrs. Lewes, whose
features at that time are familiar to us by the admirable
paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in
training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an
apostle of the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological
professor, anything in the world rather than a writer of
idle tales.

But the tales proved to be a hundredfold more attrac-
tive to the general public than articles upon taxation or
translations from German sceptics. We all must allow
that at last, however tardily and surprisingly, George Eliot
had discovered her true vocation. Let us consider in what
capacity she entered this field of fiction. She entered it
as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous
perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also
with a store of emotional experience and with a richness
of moral sensibility which were almost as unique. She
had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth of recollected
examples by which she could justify them. Her memory
was accurate, minute, and well arranged, and she had
always enjoyed retrospection and encouraged herself in
the cultivation of it. She was very sympathetic, very
tolerant, and although she had lived in the very Temple
of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her
Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected.
Rather sad, one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy,
burdened with an excess of purely intellectual preoccupa-
tion, wandering over Europe consumed by a constant, but
unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming back
to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the
Arno. Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes
over her a desire to build up again the homes of her child-
hood, to forget all about Rousseau and experimental
physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses "
of the Arbury of twenty-five years before.

If we wish to see what it was which this mature
philosopher and earnest critic of behaviour had to pro-
7

Aspects and Impressions

duce for the surprise of her readers, we may examine the
description of the farm at Donnithorne in Adam Bede.
The solemn lad}^, who might seem such a terror to ill-
doers, had yet a packet of the most delicious fondants in
the pocket of her bombazine gown. The names of these
sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a texture delicious
to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome or
the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwick-
shire factory at Griff, and they were all manufactured with
the sugar and spice of memory. So long as George Eliot
lived in the past, and extracted her honey from those
wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages with
their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of
her intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere,
or interfered in a negligible way, with the power and
intensity of the entertainment she offered. We could wish
for nothing better. English literature has, of their own
class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of Adam
Bede or than the beginning of The Mill on the Floss.

But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and in-
quisitively, there was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's
rich attire. This moth was pedantry, the result, doubtless,
of too much erudition encouraging a natural tendency in
her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive rather
than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that
after her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned
to Germany and became, in measure, like so many power-
ful minds of her generation, Teutonized. This fostered
the very tendencies which it was desirable to eradicate.
One can but speculate what would have been the result on
her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin.
Her most successful immediate rival in France was Octave
Feuillet; the Scenes of Clerical Life answer in time to
Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Paiivre, and Monsieur de
Camors to Felix Holt. There could not be a stronger or
more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-
land of the one and the robust realism of the other. But
our admirable pastoral writer, whose inward eye was
stored with the harmonies and humours of Shakespeare's

8

George Eliot

country, was not content with her mastery of the past.
wShe looked forward to a literature of the future. She
trusted to her brain rather than to those tired servants,
her senses, and more and more her soul was invaded by
the ambition to invent a new thing, the scientific novel,
dealing with the growth of institutions and the analysis
of individual character.

The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had
done this, and that she had founded the psychological
novel. There was much to be said in favour of such an
opinion. In the later books it is an undeniable fact that
George Eliot displays a certain sense of the inevitable
progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical
to see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George
Moore in Middlemarch, but there is much to be said for
the view that George Eliot was the direct forerunner of
those naturalistic novelists. Like them, she sees life as
an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot in
her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a
traveller, who is provided with a map. No Norman church
or ivied ruin takes her by surprise, because she has seen
that it was bound to come, and recognizes it when it does
come. Death, the final railway station, is ever in her
mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property
around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This
psychological clairvoyance gives her a great power when
she does not abuse it, but unfortunately from the very first
there was in her a tendency, partly consequent on her
mental training, but also not a little on her natural con-
stitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it.
She was not content to please, she must explain and teach
as well.

Her comparative failure to please made its definite ap-
pearance first in the laboured and overcharged romance of
Romola. But a careful reader will detect it in her earliest
writings. Quite early in Amos Barton, for instance, when
Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers that they "passed
their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking,
like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils
9

Aspects and Impressions

this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster,
that Mrs. Hackit was "speaking, we may presume, in a
remotely analogical sense." The laughter dies upon our
lips. Useless pedantry of this kind spoils many a happy
touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having
wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to
accuse George Eliot, at all events until near the end of
her life, of intellectual pride. She was, on the contrary,
of a very humble spirit, timorous and susceptible of dis-
couragement. But her humility made her work all the
harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It
would have been far better for her if she had possessed
less of the tenacity of Herbert Spencer and more of the
recklessness of George Sand. An amusing but painful
example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone
uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own
account of the way she "crammed up " for the composition
of Romola. She tells us of the wasting toil with which
she worked up innumerable facts about Florence, and in
particular how she laboured long over the terrible question
whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year
1492. On this. Sir Leslie Stephen — one of her best critics,
and one of the most indulgent — aptly queries, "What
would have become of Ivanhoe if Scott had bothered him-
self about the possible retardation of Easter ? The answer,
indeed, is obvious, that Ivanhoe would not have been
written."

The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was
what must always occur when an intellect which is purely
acquisitive and distributive insists on doing work that is
appropriate only to imagination. If we read very carefully
the scene preceding Savonarola's sermon to the Domini-
cans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built up almost
in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch
by touch, out of books. The author does not see what
she describes in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she
dresses up in language of her own what she has carefull)-
read in Burlamacchi or in Villari. The most conscientious
labour, expended by the most powerful brain, is incapable

George Eliot

of producing an illusion of life by these means. George
Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for
she speaks again and again, not of writing with ecstasy
of tears and laughter, as Dickens did, but of falling into
"a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to concen-
trate my thoughts on the construction of my novel " that
nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will
carried her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling
with incongruous elements she wore out her strength and
her joy, and it is heart-rending to watch so noble a genius
and so lofty a character as hers wasted in the whirlpool.
One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to her tor-
tures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography
in the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (in Felix Holt), of
whom we are told that "her knowledge and accomplish-
ments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco
ornaments, of which the substance was never worth any-
thing, while the form is no longer to the taste of any
living mortal."

The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of
all the laudation showered upon her, consciously in want
of some element essential for her success is supported by
the very curious fact that from 1864 to 1869, that is to
say through nearly one-quarter of her whole literary career,
she devoted herself entirely to various experiments in verse.
She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing
unlikely in the supposition that she realized what was her
chief want as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims,
and she will always be justified in claiming, a place in the
splendid roll of prominent English writers. But she holds
it in spite of a certain drawback which forbids her from
ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer. Her
prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and
persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit,
it never sings. The masters of the finest English are those
who have received the admonition Cantate Domino! They
sing a new song unto the Lord. Among George Eliot's
prose contemporaries there were several who obeyed this
command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian

Aspects and Impressions

prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the pecu-
liar gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant
as Hazlitt : "Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to
listen to a poet, as he passed ! " That is the chanting
faculty in prose, which all the greatest men possess; but
George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes, faintly,
in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not
question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this
which, subconsciously, led her to make a profound study
of the art of verse.

She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself
into poetry by dint of sheer labour and will-power. She
read the great masters, and she analysed them in the light
of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told Tennyson that
Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been
useful to her." Tennyson replied, *'I can't understand
that," and no wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathe-
matician who undertook to teach the art of poetry in so
many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away at
Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him
"useful," and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him,
like bees in pursuit of a bee-master, expressing a gruff
good-natured scepticism — what a picture it raises ! But
George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness of
application which she had, and she produced quite a large
body of various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy.
The Spanish Gypsy, of which I must speak softly, since,
omnivorous as I am, I have never been able to swallow it.
But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets and
dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to
read. She actually printed privately for her friends two
little garlands, Agatha (1868) and Brother and Sister
(1869), which are the onlv "rare issues" of hers sought
after bv collectors, for she was not given to bibliographical
curiositv. These verses and many others she polished and
re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published
a substantial volume of them. I have been reading them
over again, in the intense wish to be pleased with them,
but it is impossible — the root of the matter is not in them.
12

George Eliot

There is an Arion, which is stately in the manner of Mar-
vell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive, but there
is the radical absence of song. George Eliot admired
Wordsworth very much : occasionally she reproduces very
closely the duller parts of The Excursion. In the long
piece of blank verse called A College Breakfast Party,
which she wrote in 1874, almost all Tennyson's faults are
reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor who care-
fully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy.
There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called
Self and Life, stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey
is stuffed with chestnuts.

And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does
so much credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I
have come to the conclusion that the following sonnet,
from Brother and Sister, is the best piece of sustained
poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the
pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her
and her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of The Mill
on the Floss:

His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy

Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame ;
My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy

Had any reason when my brother came.
I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling,

Cut the ringed stem and made the apple drop,
Or watched him winding close the spiral string

That looped the orbits of the humming-top.
Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought

Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil ;
My aery-picturing fantasy was taught

Subjection to the harder, truer skill
That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line.
And by "What is" "What will be" to define.

How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles
away !

At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could
never hope, with all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered
13

Aspects and Impressions

music which God lavishes on the idle linnet and the
frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own strenuous
business of building up the psychological novel. She
wrote Middlemarch, which appeared periodically through-
out 1872 and as a book early the following year. It was
received with great enthusiasm, as marking the return of
a popular favourite who had been absent for several years.
Middlemarch is the history of three parallel lives of women,
who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to
shape their thought and deed in noble agreement,"
although "to common eyes their struggles seemed mere
inconsistency and formlessness." The three ineffectual
St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were
Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the
thought and deed " of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred
Vincy. Middleriiarch is constructed with unfailing power,
and the picture of commonplace English country life which
it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the
charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left
behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The
novel is a very remarkable instance of elaborate mental
resources misapplied, and genius revolving, with tremend-
ous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water
is flowing underneath it.

When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I
for one can find not a word to say in favour of Daniel
Deronda, her next and last novel, which came out, with
popularity at first more wonderful than ever, in 1876. But
her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask one
another uneasily whether her method was not now too
calculated, her effects too plainly premeditated. The inten-
sity of her early works was gone. Readers began to
resent her pedantry, her elaboration of allusions, her loss
of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes and the
flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious
pages of Adam Bede and The Mill like the lemon-yellow
pansies and potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. They re-
gretted the ease of the conversation in her early books,
where it had always been natural, livel}', and brief ; it was
14

George Eliot

now heavy and doctrinaire. Tennyson rebelled against
the pompousness, and said, in his blunt way, that Jane
Austen knew her business better, a courageous thing to say
in Victorian circles fifty years ago. Then came Theo-
phrastus Such, a collection of cumbrous and didactic
essays which defy perusal ; and finally, soon after her
death, her Correspondence, a terrible disappointment to all
her admirers, and a blow from which even the worship
of Lord Acton never recovered. Of George Eliot might
have been repeated Swift's epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh :

Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.

It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so
elevated, so disinterested, that for the last ten years of her
brief literary life she did practically nothing but lay heavy
loads on literature.

On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place
v.hich George Eliot holds in English literature as so pro-
minent a one as was rather rashly awarded her by her
infatuated contemporaries. It is the inevitable result of
"tall talk" about likeness to Dante and Goethe that the
figure so unduly magnified fails to support such compari-
sons when the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is
unduly neglected now, but it is the revenge of time on her
for the praise expended on her works in her lifetime.
Another matter which militates against her fame to-day is
her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who
knelt at the footsteps of her throne said that she was "the
emblem of a generation distracted between the intense
need of believing and the difficulty of belief." Well, we
happen to live, fortunately or unfortunately for ourselves,
in a generation which is "distracted" by quite other
problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot
and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and
didactic ethical influence. Perhaps another generation
will follow us which will be more patient, and students
yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never forget,
15

Aspects and Impressions

however, that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of
perfect honesty, that she brought a vast intelligence to
the service of literature, and that she aimed from first to
last at the loftiest goal of intellectual ambition. Where
she failed, it was principally from an inborn lack of charm,
not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental dis-
position. After all, to have added to the slender body of
English fiction seven novels the names of which are known
to every cultivated person is not to have failed, but to have
signally, if only relatively, succeeded.

^6

HENRY JAMES

VOLUMINOUS as had been the writings of Henry
James since 1875, it was not until he approached the
end of his career that he began to throw any light on
the practical events and social adventures of his own career.
He had occasionally shown that he could turn from the
psychology of imaginary characters to the record of real
lives without losing any part of his delicate penetration or
his charm of portraiture. He had, in particular, written
the Life of Hawthorne in 1879, between Daisy Miller and
An Inlcrnalional Episode ; and again in 1903, at the height
of his latest period, he had produced a specimen of that
period in his elusive and parenthetical but very beautiful
so-called Life of W . W , Story. But these biographies
threw no more light upon his own adventures than did his
successive volumes of critical and topographical essays, in
which the reader may seek long before he detects the
sparkle of a crumb of personal fact. Henry James, at the
age of seventy, had not begun to reveal himself behind
the mask which spoke in the tones of a world of imaginary
characters.

So saying, I do not forget that in the general edition
of his collected, or rather selected, novels and tales, pub-
lished from 1908 onwards, Henry James prefixed to each
volume an introduction which assumed to be wholly bio-
graphical. He yielded, he said, "to the pleasure of placing
on record the circumstances" in which each successive
tale was written. I well recollect the terms in which he
spoke of these pjefaces before he began to write them.
They were to be full and confidential, they were to throw
to the winds all restraints of conventional reticence, they
17

Aspects and Impressions

were to "take us, with eyes unbandaged, into the inmost
sanctum of his soul. They appeared at last, in small
print, and they were extremely extensive, but truth obliges
me to say that I found them highly disappointing. Con-
stitutionally fitted to take pleasure in the accent of almost
everything that Henry James ever wrote, I have to confess
that these prefaces constantly baffle my eagerness. Not
for a moment would I deny that they throw interesting
light on the technical craft of a self-respecting novelist,
but they are dry, remote, and impersonal to a strange
degree. It is as though the author felt a burning desire
to confide in the reader, whom he positively button-holes
in the endeavour, but that the experience itself evades him,
fails to find expression, and falls stillborn, while other
matters, less personal and less important, press in and take
their place against the author's wish. Henry James pro-
posed, in each instance, to disclose "the contributive value
of the accessory facts in a given artistic case." This is,
indeed, what we require in the history or the autobiography
of an artist, whether painter or musician or man of letters.
But this includes the production of anecdotes, of salient
facts, of direct historical statements, which Henry James
seemed in 1908 to be completely incapacitated from giving,
so that really, in the introductions to some of these novels
in the Collected Edition, it is difficult to know what the
beloved novelist is endeavouring to divulge. He becomes
almost chimaera bombinating in a vacuum.

Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest
of these prefaces — that prefixed to The Golden Bowl, in
which the effort to reveal something which is not revealed
amounts almost to an agony — it would have been impos-
sible to reconstruct the life of Henry James by the closest
examination of his published writings. Ingenious com-
mentators would have pieced together conjectures from
such tales as The Altar of the Dead and The Lesson of the
Master, and have insisted, more or less plausibly, on their
accordance with what the author must have thought or
done, endured or attempted. But, after all, these would
have been "conjectures," not more definitely based than
18

Henry James

what bold spirits use when they construct Hves of Shake-
speare, or, for that matter, of Homer. Fortunately, in
1913, the desire to place some particulars of the career of
his marvellous brother William in the setting of his
"immediate native and domestic air," led Henry James to
contemplate, with minuteness, the fading memories of his
own childhood. Starting with a biographical study of
William James, he found it impossible to treat the family
development at all adequately without extending the survey
to his own growth as well, and thus, at the age of seventy,
Henry became for the first time, and almost unconsciously,
an autobiographer.

He had completed two large volumes of Memories, and
was deep in a third, when death took him from us. A
Small Boy and Others deals with such extreme discursive-
ness as is suitable in a collection of the fleeting impressions
of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his all but fatal attack
of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps) 1857.
I say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort
of help in the way of dates is characteristic of the narrative,
as it would be of childish memories. The next instalment
was Notes of a Son and Brother, which opens in i860, a
doubtful period of three years being leaped over lightly,
and closes — as I guess from an allusion to George Eliot's
Spanish Gypsy — in 1868. The third instalment, dictated
in the autumn of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the
posthumous The Middle Years, faultlessly edited by the
piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in 1917. Here the tale is
taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much attempt at
chronological order, with memories of two years in London.
As Henry James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read,
these pages, we are free to form our conclusion as to
whether he would or would not have vouchsafed to put
their disjected parts into some more anatomical order.

Probably he would not have done so. The tendency of
his genius had never been, and at the end was less than
ever, in the direction of concinnity. He repudiated
arrangement, he wilfully neglected the precise adjustment
of parts. The three autobiographical volumes will always
19

Aspects and Impressions

be documents precious in the eyes of his admirers. They
are full of beauty and nobility, they exhibit with delicacy,
and sometimes even with splendour, the qualities of his
character. But it would be absurd to speak of them as
easy to read, or as fulfilling what is demanded from an
ordinary biographer. They have the tone of Veronese,
but nothing of his definition. A broad canvas is spread
before us. containing many figures in social conjuncture.
But the plot, the single "story " which is being told, is
drowned in misty radiance. Out of this chiaroscuro there
leap suddenly to our vision a sumptuous head and throat,
a handful of roses, the glitter of a satin sleeve, but it is
only when we shut our eyes and think over what we have
looked at that any coherent plan is revealed to us, or that
we detect any species of composition. It is a case which
calls for editorial help, and I hope that when the three
fragments of autobiography are reprinted as a single
composition, no prudery of hesitation to touch the sacred
ark will prevent the editor from prefixing a skeleton
chronicle of actual dates and facts. It will take nothing
from the dignity of the luminous reveries in their original
shape.

Such a skeleton will tell us that Henry James was born
at 2 Washington Place, New York, on April 15th, 1843,
and that he was the second child of his parents, the elder
by one year being William, who grew up to be the most
(eminent philosopher whom America has produced. Their
father, Henry James the elder, was himself a philosopher,
whose ideas, which the younger Henry frankly admitted
to be beyond his grasp, were expounded by William James
in 1884, in a preface to their father's posthumous papers.
Henry was only one year old when the family paid a long
visit to Paris, but his earliest recollections were of Albany,
whence the Jameses migrated to New York until 1855.
They then transferred their home to Europe for three years,
during which time the child Henry imbibed what he after-
wards called "the European virus." In 1855 he was sent
to Geneva for purposes of education, which were soon
abandoned, and the whole family began an aimless wander-
20

Henry James

ing through London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Newport,
Geneva, and America again, nothing but the Civil War
sufficing to root this fugitive household in one abiding
home.

Henry James's health forced him to be a spectator of
the war, in which his younger brothers fought. He went
to Harvard in 1862 to study law, but was now beginning
to feel a more and more irresistible call to take up letters
as a profession, and the Harvard Law School left little
or no direct impression upon him. He farmed a close and
valuable friendship with William Dean Howells, seven
years his senior, and the pages of the Atlantic Monthly,
of which Howells was then assistant editor, were open to
him from 1865. He lived for the next four years in very
poor health, and with no great encouragement from him-
self or others, always excepting Howells, at Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Early in 1869 he ventured to return to
Europe, where he spent fifteen months in elegant but
fruitful vagabondage. There was much literary work
done, most of which he carefully suppressed in later life.
The reader will, however, discover, tucked away in the
thirteenth volume of the Collected Edition, a single waif
from this rejected epoch, the tale called A Passionate
Pilgrim, written on his return to America in 1870. This
visit to Europe absolutely determined his situation; his
arrival in New York stimulated and tortured his nostalgia
for the old world, and in May, 1872, he flew back here
once more to the European enchantment.

Here, practically, the biographical information respect-
ing Henry James which has hitherto been given to the
world ceases, for the fragment of The Middle Years, so
far as can be gathered, contains few recollections which
can be dated later than his thirtieth year. It was said of
Marivaux that he cultivated no faculty but that de ne vivre
que pour voir et -pour entendre. In a similar spirit Henry
James took up his dwelling in fashionable London lodgings
in March, 1869. He had come from America with the
settled design of making a profound study of English
manners, and there were two aspects of the subject which

C 21

Aspects and Impressions

stood out for him above all others. One of these was the
rural beauty of ancient country places, the other was the
magnitude — "the inconceivable immensity," as he put it
— of London. He told his sister, "The place sits on you,
broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad
bipeds and quadrupeds." From his lodgings in Half Moon
Street, quiet enough in themselves, he had the turmoil of
the West End at his elbow, Piccadilly, Park Lane, St.
James's Street, all within the range of a five minutes' stroll.
He plunged into the vortex with incredible gusto, "knock-
ing about in a quiet way and deeply enjoying my little
adventures." This was his first mature experience of
London, of which he remained until the end of his life
perhaps the most infatuated student, the most "passionate
pilgrim," that America has ever sent us.

But his health was still poor, and for his constitution's
sake he went in the summer of 1869 to Great Malvern.
He went alone, and it is to be remarked of him that, social
as he was, and inclined to a deep indulgence in the com-
pany of his friends, his habit of life was always in the
main a solitary one. He had no constant associates, and
he did not shrink from long periods of isolation, which
he spent in reading and writing, but also in a concentrated
contemplation of the passing scene, whatever it might be.
It was alone that he now made a tour of the principal
English cathedral and university towns, expatiating to
himself on the perfection of the weather — "the dozen ex-
quisite days of the English year, days stamped with a
purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap."
It was alone that he made acquaintance with Oxford, of
which city he became at once the impassioned lover which
he continued to be to the end, raving from Boston in 1870
of the supreme gratifications of Oxford as "the most
dignified and most educated " of the cradles of our race.
It was alone that during these enchanting weeks he made
himself acquainted with the unimagined loveliness of Eng-
lish hamlets buried in immemorial leafage and whispered
to by meandering rivulets in the warm recesses of antiquity.
These, too, found in Henry James a worshipper more
23

Henry James

ardent, it may almost be averred, than any other who had
crossed the Atlantic to their shrine.

Having formed his basis for the main construction of
his English studies, Henry James passed over to the Con-
tinent, and conducted a similar pilgrimage of entranced
obsession through Switzerland and Italy. His wanderings,
"rapturous and solitary," were, as in England, hampered
by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of,"
he wrote, "or for that matter to speak to." He returned
to America in April, 1870, at the close of a year which
proved critical in his career, and which laid its stamp on
the whole of his future work. He had been kindly received
in artistic and literary circles in London ; he had conversed
with Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de Vere,
but it is plain that while he observed the peculiarities of
these eminent men with the closest avidity, he made no
impression whatever upon them. The time for Henry
James to "make an impression " on others was not come
yet; he was simply the well-bred, rather shy, young
American invalid, with excellent introductions, who
crossed the path of English activities, almost without
casting a shadow. He had published no book; he had
no distinct calling; he was a deprecating and punctilious
young stranger from somewhere in Massachusetts, im-
mature-looking for all his seven-and-twenty years.

Some further uneventful seasons, mainly spent in
America but diversified by tours in Germany and Italy,
bring us to 1875, when Henry James came over from
Cambridge with the definite project, at last, of staying in
Europe "for good." He took rooms in Paris, at 29 Rue
de Luxembourg, and he penetrated easily into the very
exclusive literary society which at that time revolved
around Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. This year
in Paris was another highly critical period in Henry
James's intellectual history. He was still, at the mature
age of thirty-two, almost an amateur in literature, having
been content, up to that time, to produce scarcely anything
which his mature taste did not afterwards repudiate. The
Passionate Pilgrim (1870), of which I have spoken above,
23

Aspects and Impressions

is the only waif and stray of the pre-1873 years which he
has permitted to survive. The first edition of this short
story is now not easy of reference, and 1 have not seen it ;
the reprint of 1908 is obviously, and is doubtless vigor-
ously, re-handled. Enough, however, remains of what
must be original to show that, in a rather crude, and
indeed almost hysterical form, the qualities of Henry
James's genius were, in 1869, what they continued to be
in 1909. He has conquered, however, in A Passionate
Pilgrim, no command yet over his enthusiasm, his delicate
sense of beauty, his apprehension of the exquisite colour
of antiquity.

From the French associates of this time he derived
practical help in his profession, though without their being
aware of what they gave him. He was warmly attracted
,to Gustave Flaubert, who had just published La Tentation
de St. Antoine, a dazzled admiration of which was the
excuse which threw the young American at the feet of the
Rouen giant. This particular admiration dwindled with
the passage of time, but Henry James continued faithful
to the author of Madame Bovary. It was Turgenev who
introduced him to Flaubert, from whom he passed to Guy
de Maupa^ssant, then an athlete of four-and-twenty, and
still scintillating in that blaze of juvenile virility which
always fascinated Henry James. In the train of Edmond
de Goncourt came Zola, vociferous over his late tribulation
of having L'Assommoir stopped in its serial issue;
Alphonse Daudet, whose recent Jack was exercising over
tens of thousands of readers the tyranny of tears; and
Fran9ois Coppee, the almost exact coeval of Henry James,
and now author of a Luthier de Cremone, which had
placed him high among French poets. That the young
American, with no apparent claim to attention except the
laborious perfection of his French speech, was welcomed
and ultimately received on terms of intimacy in this the
most exclusive of European intellectual circles is curious.
Henry James was accustomed to deprecate the notion that
these Frenchmen took the least interest in him : "they
have never read a line of me, they have never even per-
24

Henry James

suaded themselves that there was a line of me which any-
one could read," he once said to me. How should they,
poor charming creatures, in their self-sufficing Latin inten-
sity, know what or whether some barbarian had remotely
"written"? But this does not end the marvel, because,
read or not read, there was Henry James among them,
aflfectionatel)' welcomed, talked to familiarly about "tech-
nique," and even about "sales," like a fellow-craftsman.
There must evidently have developed by this time some-
thing modestly "impressive" about him, and I cannot
doubt that these Parisian masters of language more or less
dimly divined that he too was, in some medium not by
them to be penetrated, a master.

After this fruitful year in Paris, the first result of which
was the publication in London of his earliest surviving
novel, Roderick Hudson, and the completion of The
American, Henry James left his "glittering, charming,
civilized Paris" and settled in London. He submitted
himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878, "with-
out reserve to that Londonizing process of which the effect
is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if
need be, abjure civilization and bury yourself in the coun-
try, but may not, in pursuit of civilization, live in any
smaller town." He plunged deeply into the study of
London, externally and socially, and into the production
of literature, in which he was now as steadily active as he
was elegantly proficient. These novels of his earliest
period have neither the profundity nor the originality of
those of his middle and final periods, but they have an
exquisite freshness of their own, and a workmanship the
lucidity and logic of which he owed in no small measure
to his conversations with Daudet and Maupassant, and to
his, at that time almost exclusive, reading of the finest
French fiction. He published The American in 1877, The
FAiropeans and Daisy Miller in 1878, and An International
Episode in 1879. He might advance in stature and
breadth; he might come to disdain the exiguous beauty of
these comparatively juvenile books, but now at all events
were clearly revealed all the qualities which were to

Aspects and Impressions

develop later, and to make Henry James unique among
writers of Anglo-Saxon race.

His welcome into English society was remarkable if
we reflect that he seemed to have little to give in return for
what it offered except his social adaptability, his pleasant
and still formal amenity, and his admirable capacity for
listening. It cannot be repeated too clearly that the Henry
James of those early days had very little of the impressive-
ness of his later manner. He went everywhere, sedately,
watchfully, graciousl}^ but never prominently. In the
winter of 1878-79 it is recorded that he dined out in London
107 times, but it is highly questionable whether this amaz-
ing assiduity at the best dinner-tables will be found to
have impressed itself on any Greville or Crabb Robinson
who was taking notes at the time. He was strenuously
living up to his standard, "my charming little standard
of wit, of grace, of good manners, of vivacity, of urbanity,
of intelligence, of what makes an easy and natural style
of intercourse." He was watching the rather gross and
unironic, but honest and vigorous, English upper-middle-
class of that day with mingled feelings, in which curiosity
and a sort of remote sympathy took a main part. At 107
London dinners he observed the ever-shifting pieces of the
general kaleidoscope with tremendous acuteness, and
although he thought their reds and yellows would have
been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine
harmony, on the whole he was never weary of watching
their evolutions. In this way the years slipped by, while
he made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen durable
friendships. It is a matter of pride and happiness to me
that I am able to touch on one of the latter.

It is often curiously difficult for intimate friends, who
have the impression in later years that they must always
have known one another, to recall the occasion and the
place where they first met. That was the case with Henry
James and me. Several times we languidly tried to recover
those particulars, but without success. I think, however,
that it was at some dinner-party that we first met, and as
the incident is dubiously connected with the publication
26

Henry James

of the Hawthorne in 1879, ^^^ with Mr. (now Lord)
Morley, whom we both frequently saw at that epoch, I am
pretty sure that the event took place early in 1880. The
acquaintance, however, did not "ripen," as people say,
until the summer of 1882, when in connexion with an
article on the drawings of George Du Maurier, which I
was anxious Henry James should write — having heard
him express himself with high enthusiasm regarding these
works of art — he invited me to go to see him and to talk
over the project. I found him, one sunshiny afternoon,
in his lodgings on the first floor of No. 3 Bolton Street,
at the Piccadilly end of the street, where the houses look
askew into Green Park. Here he had been living ever
since he came over from France in 1876, and the situation
was eminently characteristic of the impassioned student of
London life and haunter of London society which he had
naw become.

Stretched on the sofa and apologizing for not rising to
greet me, his appearance gave me a little shock, for I had
not thought of him as an invalid. He hurriedly and rather
evasively declared that he was not that, but that a muscular
weakness of his spine obliged him, as he said, "to assume
the horizontal posture " during some hours of every day
in order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening
engagements. I think that this weakness gradually passed
away, but certainly for many years it handicapped his
activity. I recall his appearance, seen then for the first
time by daylight; there was something shadowy about it,
the face framed in dark brown hair cut siiort in the Paris
fashion, and in equally dark beard, rather loose and
"fluflfy." He was in deep mourning, his mother having
died five or six months earlier, and he himself having but
recently returned from a melancholy visit to America,
where he had unwillingly left his father, who seemed far
from well. His manner was grave, extremely courteous,
but a little formal and frightened, which seemed strange
in a man living in constant communication with the world.
Our business regarding Du Maurier was soon concluded,
and James talked with increasing ease, but always with a
27

Aspects and Impressions

punctilious hesitancy, about Paris, where he seemed, to
my dazzlement, to know even a larger number of persons
of distinction than he did in London.

He promised, before I left, to return my visit, but news
of the alarming illness of his father called him suddenly
to America. He wrote to me from Boston in April, 1883,
but he did not return to London until the autumn of that
year. Our intercourse w^as then resumed, and, immedi-
ately, on the familiar footing which it preserved, without
an hour's abatement, until the sad moment of his fatal
illness. When he returned to Bolton Street — this was in
August, 1883 — he had broken all the ties which held him
to residence in America, a country which, as it turned
out, he was not destined to revisit for more than twenty
years. By this means Henry James became a homeless
man in a peculiar sense, for he continued to be looked
upon as a foreigner in London, while he seemed to have
lost citizenship in the United States. It was a little later
than this that that somewhat acidulated patriot. Colonel
Higginson, in reply to someone who said that Henry
James was a cosmopolitan, remarked, ** Hardly! for a
cosmopolitan is at home even in his own country ! " This
condition made James, although superficially gregarious,
essentially isolated, and though his books were numerous
and were greatly admired, they were tacitly ignored alike
in summaries of English and of American current litera-
ture. There was no escape from this dilemma. Henry
James was equally determined not to lay down his
American birthright and not to reside in America. Every
year of his exile, therefore, emphasized the fact of his
separation from all other Anglo-Saxons, and he endured,
in the world of letters, the singular fate of being a man
without a country.

The collection of his private letters, therefore, which has
just been published under the sympathetic editorship of Mr.
Percy Lubbock, reveals the adventures of an author who,
long excluded from two literatures, is now eagerly claimed
by both of them, and it displays those movements of a char-
acter of great energy and singular originality which cir-
28

Henry James

cumstances have hitherto concealed from curiosity. There
was very little on the surface of his existence to bear
evidence to the passionate intensity of the stream beneath.
This those who have had the privilege of seeing his letters
know is man^ellously revealed in his private correspond-
ence. A certain change in his life was brought about by
the arrival in 1S85 of his sister Alice, vfho, in now con-
firmed ill-health, was persuaded to make Bournemouth
and afterwards Leamington her home. He could not
share her life, but at all events he could assiduously
diversify it by his visits, and Bournemouth had a second
attraction for him in the presence of Robert Louis Steven-
son, with whom he had by this time formed one of the
closest of his friendships. Stevenson's side of the corre-
spondence has long been known, and it is one of the main
attractions which Mr. Lubbock held out to his readers
that Henry James's letters to Stevenson are now published.
No episode of the literary history of the time is more
fascinating than the interchange of feeling between these
two great artists. The death of Stevenson, nine years
later than their first meeting, though long anticipated,
fell upon Henry James with a shock which he found at
first scarcely endurable. For a long time afterwards he
could not bring himself to mention the name of R. L. S.
without a distressing agitation.

In i886'the publication of The Bostonians, a novel
which showed an advance in direct or, as it was then
styled, "realistic" painting of modern society, increased
the cleft which now divided him from his native country,
for The Bostojiians was angrily regarded as satirizing
not merely certain types, but certain recognizable figures
in Massachusetts, and that with a suggestive daring which
was unusual. Henry James, intent upon making a vivid
picture, and already perhaps a little out of touch with
American sentiment, was indignant at the reception of this
book, which he ultimately, to my great disappointment,
omitted from his Collected Edition, for reasons which he
gave in a long letter to myself. Hence, as his works now
appear, The Princess Casamassima, of 1886, an essentially
29

Aspects and Impressions

London adventure story, takes its place as the earliest of
the novels of his second period, although preceded by
admirable short tales in that manner, the most character-
istic of which is doubtless The Author of Beltraffio (1885).
This exemplifies the custom he had now adopted of seizing
an incident reported to him, often a very slight and bald
affair, and weaving round it a thick and glittering web of
silken fancy, just as the worm winds round the unsightly
chrysalis its graceful robe of gold. I speak of The Author
of Beltraffio, and after thirty-five years I may confess that
this extraordinarily vivid story was woven around a dark
incident in the private life of an eminent author known
to us both, which I, having told Henry James in a moment
of levity, was presently horrified and even sensibly alarmed
to see thus pinnacled in the broad light of day.

After exhausting at last the not very shining amenities
of his lodgings in Bolton Street, where all was old and
dingy, he went westward in 1886 into Kensington, and
settled in a flat which was both new and bright, at 34 De
Vere Gardens, Kensington, where he began a novel called
The Tragic Miise, on which he expended an immense
amount of pains. He was greatly wearied by the effort,
and not entirely satisfied with the result. He determined,
as he said, "to do nothing but short lengths" for the
future, and he devoted himself to the execution of contes.
But even the art of the short story presently yielded to a
new and, it must be confessed, a deleterious fascination,
that of the stage. He was disappointed — he made no
secret to his friends of his disillusion — in the commercial
success of his novels, which was inadequate to his needs.
1 believe that he greatly over-estimated these needs, and
that at no time he was really pressed by the want of money.
But he thought that he was, and in his anxiety he turned
to the theatre as a market in which to earn a fortune. Little
has hitherto been revealed with regard to this "sawdust
and orange-peel phase " (as he called it) in Henry James's
career, but it cannot be ignored any longer. The memories
of his intimate friends are stored with its incidents, his
letters will be found to be full of it.
so

Henry James

Henry James wrote, between 1889 and 1894, seven or
eight plays, on each of which he expended an infinitude
of pains and mental distress. At the end of this period,
unwillingly persuaded at last that all his agony was in
vain, and that he could never secure fame and fortune,
or even a patient hearing from the theatre-going public
by his dramatic work, he abandoned the hopeless struggle.
He was by temperament little fitted to endure the disap-
pointments and delays which must always attend the course
of a dramatist who has not conquered a position which
enables him to browbeat the tyrants behind the stage.
Henry James was punctilious, ceremonious, and precise;
it is not to be denied that he was apt to be hasty in taking
oflfence, and not very ready to overlook an impertinence.
The whole existence of the actor is lax and casual; the
manager is the capricious leader of an irresponsible band
of egotists. Henry James lost no occasion of dwelling,
in private conversation, on this aspect of an amiable and
entertaining profession. He was not prepared to accept
young actresses at their own valuation, and the happy-go-
lucky democracy of the "mimes," as he bracketed both
sexes, irritated him to the verge of frenzy.

It was, however, with a determination to curb his im-
patience, and with a conviction that he could submit his
idiosyncrasies to what he called the "passionate economy "
of play-writing, that he began, in 1889, to dedicate himself
to the drama, excluding for the time being all other con-
siderations. He went over to Paris in the winter of that
year, largely to talk over the stage with Alphonse Daudet
and Edmond de Goncourt, and he returned to put the
finishing touches on The American, a dramatic version
of one of his earliest novels. He finished this play at the
Palazzo Barbaro, the beautiful home of his friends, the
Daniel Curtises, in Venice, in June, 1890, thereupon
taking a long holiday, one of the latest of his extended
Italian tours, through Venetia and Tuscany. Edward
Compton had by this time accepted The American, being
attracted by his own chances in the part of Christopher
Newman. When Henry James reappeared in London,
31

Aspects and Impressions

and particularly when the rehearsals began, we all noticed
how deeply the theatrical virus had penetrated his nature.
His excitement swelled until the evening of January 3rd,
1891, when The American was* acted at Southport by
Compton's company in anticipation of its appearance in
London. Henry James was kind enough to wish me to
go down on this occasion with him to Southport, but it
was not possible. On the afternoon of the ordeal he wrote
to me from the local hotel : "After eleven o'clock to-night
I may be the world's — you know — and I may be the under-
taker's. I count upon you and your wife both to spend
this evening in fasting, silence, and supplication. I will
send you a word in the morning, a wire if I can." He
was "so nervous that I miswrite and misspell."

The result, in the provinces, of this first experiment was
not decisive. It is true that he told Robert Louis Steven-
son that he was enjoying a success which made him blush.
But the final result in London, where The American w^s
not played until September, 1891, w^is only partly en-
couraging. Henry James was now cast down as unreason-
ably as he had been uplifted. He told me that "the strain,
the anxiety, the peculiar form and colour of the ordeal
(not to be divined in the least in advance) " had "sickened
him to death." He used language of the most picturesque
extravagance about the "purgatory " of the performances,
which ran at the Opera Comique for two months. There
was nothing in the mediocre fortunes of this play to decide
the questions whether Henry James was or was not justified
in abandoning all other forms of art for the drama. We
endeavoured to persuade him that, on the whole, he was
not justified, but he swept our arguments aside, and he
devoted himself wholly to the infatuation of his sterile
task.

The American had been dramatized from a published
novel. Henry James now thought that he should do better
with original plots, and he wrote two comedies, the one
named Tenants and the other Disengaged, of each of
which he formed high expectations. But, although they
were submitted to several managers, who gave them their
32

Henry James

customary loitering and fluctuating attention, they were
in every case ultimately refused. Each refusal plunged
the dramatist into the lowest pit of furious depression,
from which he presently emerged with freshly-kindled
hopes. Like the moralist, he never was but always to be
blest. The Album and The Reprobate — there is a melan-
choly satisfaction in giving life to the mere names of these
stillborn children of his brain — started with wild hopes
and suffered from the same complete failure to satisfy the
caprice of the managers. At the close of 1893, after one
of these "sordid developments," he made up his mind to
abandon the struggle. But George Alexander promised
that, if he would but persevere, he really and truly would
produce him infallibly at no distant date, and poor Henry
James could not but persevere. "I mean to wage this war
ferociously for one year more," and he composed, with
infinite agony and deliberation, the comedy of Guy
Domvile.

The night of January 5th, 1895, was the most tragical
in Henry James's career. His hopes and fears had been
strung up to the most excruciating point, and I think that
I have never witnessed such agonies of parturition. Guy
Domvile — which has never been printed — was a delicate
and picturesque play, of which the only disadvantage that
I could discover was that instead of hdving a last scene
which tied up all the threads in a neat conclusion, it left
all those threads loose as they would be in life. George
Alexander was sanguine of success, and to do Henry James
honour such a galaxy of artistic, literary, and scientific
celebrity gathered in the stalls of the St. James's Theatre
as perhaps were never seen in a London playhouse before
or since. Henry James was positively storm-ridden with
emotion before the fatal night, and full of fantastic plans. I
recall that one was that he should hide in the bar of a little
public-house down an alley close to the theatre, whither I
should slip forth at the end of the second act and report
"how it was going." This was not carried out, and for-
tunately Henry James resisted the temptation of being
present in the theatre during the performance. All seemed
33

Aspects and Impressions

to be going fairly well until the close, when Henry James
appeared and was called before the curtain — only to be
subjected — to our unspeakable horror and shame — to a
storm of hoots and jeers and catcalls from the gallery,
answered by loud and sustained applause from the stalls,
the whole producing an effect of hell broke loose, in the
midst of which the author, as white as chalk, bowed and
spread forth deprecating hands and finally vanished. It
was said at the time, and confirmed later, that this
horrible performance was not intended to humiliate Henry
James, but was the result of a cabal against George
Alexander.

Early next morning I called at 34 De Vere Gardens,
hardly daring to press the bell for fear of the worst of
news, so shattered with excitement had the playwright
been on the previous evening. I was astonished to find
him perfectly calm ; he had slept well and was breakfasting
with appetite. The theatrical bubble in which he had
lived a tormented existence for five years was wholly and
finally broken, and he returned, even in that earliest con-
versation, to the discussion of the work which he had so
long and so sadly neglected, the art of direct prose narra-
tive. And now a remarkable thing happened. The dis-
cipline of toiling for the caprices of the theatre had
amounted, for so redundant an imaginative writer, to the
putting on of a mental strait-jacket. He saw now that he
need stoop no longer to what he called "a meek and lowly
review of the right ways to keep on the right side of a body
of people who have paid money to be amused at a particular
hour and place." Henry James was not released from
this system of vigorous renunciation without a very
singular result. To write for the theatre the qualities of
brevity and directness, of an elaborate plainness, had been
perceived by him to be absolutely necessary, and he had
tried to cultivate them with dogged patience for five years.
But when he broke with the theatre, the rebound was ex-
cessive. I recall his saying to me, after the fiasco of
Guy Domvile, "At all events, I have escaped for ever
from the foul fiend Excision ! " He vibrated with the
34

Henry James

sense of release, and he began to enjoy, physically and
intellectually, a freedom which had hitherto been foreign
to his nature.

II

The abrupt change in Henry James's outlook on life,
which was the result of his violent disillusion with regard
to theatrical hopes and ambitions, took the form of a dis-
taste for London and a determination, vague enough at
first, to breathe for the future in a home of his own by the
sea. He thought of Bournemouth, more definitely of
Torquay, but finally his fate was sealed by his being
offered, for the early summer months of 1896, a small
house on the cliff at Point Hill, Playden, whence he could
look down, as from an "eagle's nest," on the exquisite
little red-roofed town of Rye and over the wide floor of
the marsh of Sussex. When the time came for his being
turned out of this retreat, he positively could not face the
problem of returning to the breathless heat of London in
August, and he secured the Vicarage in the heart of Rye
itself for two months more. Here, as earlier at Point Hill,
I was his guest, and it was wonderful to observe how his
whole moral and intellectual nature seemed to burgeon
and expand in the new and delicious liberty of country
life. We were incessantly in the open air, on the terrace
(for the Vicarage, though musty and dim, possessed, like
the fresher Point Hill, a sea-looking terrace), sauntering
round the little town, or roving for miles and miles over
the illimitable flats, to Winchelsea, to Lydd, to the recesses
of Walland Marsh — even, on one peerless occasion, so far
afield as to Midley Chapel and the Romneys.

Never had I known Henry James so radiant, so cheerful
or so self-assured. During the earlier London years there
had hung over him a sort of canopy, a mixture of reserve
and deprecation, faintly darkening the fullness of com-
munion with his character; there always had seemed to
be something indefinably non-conductive between him and
those in whom he had most confidence. While the play-
writing fit was on him this had deepened almost into
35

Aspects and Impressions

fretfulness; the complete freedom of intercourse which is
the charm of friendship had been made more and more
difficult by an excess of sensibility. Henry James had
become almost what the French call a bidsson d'ipines.
It was therefore surprising" and highly delightful to find
that this cloud had ceased to brood over him, and had
floated away, leaving behind it a laughing azure in which
quite a new and charming Henry James stood revealed.
The summer of 1896, when by a succession of happy
chances I was much alone with him at Rye, rests in my
recollection as made exquisite by his serene and even play-
ful uniformity of temper, by the removal of everything
which had made intercourse occasionally difficult, and by
the addition of forms of amenity that had scarcely been
foreshadowed. On reflection, however, I find that I am
mixing up memories of June at Point Hill and of
September at the Vicarage with the final Rye adventure,
which must now be chronicled. When he was obliged
to turn out of his second refuge, he returned to London,
but with an ever-deepening nostalgia for the little Sussex
town where he had been happy. In the following summer
the voice of Venice called him so loudly that he stayed
in London longer than usual, meaning to spend the
autumn and winter in Italy. He thought meanwhile of
Bournemouth and of Saxmundham. He went on his
bicycle round the desolate ghost of Dunwich, but his
heart was whispering "Rye" to him all the while.
Nothing then seemed available, however, when suddenly
the unexpected vacancy of the most eligible residence con-
ceivable settled, in the course of a couple of days, the
whole future earthly pilgrimage of Henry James. The
huge fact was immediately announced in a letter of
September 25th, 1897 :

I am just drawing a long- breath from having signed — a few
moments since — a most portentous parchment : the lease of a
smallish, charming, cheap old house in the countr}' — down at
Rye — for 21 years. (It was built about 1705.) It is exactly
what I want and secretly and hopelessly coveted (since knowing
36

Henry James

it) without dreaming- it would ever fall. But it has fallen — and
has a beautiful room for you (the King's Room — Georg^e II's
— who slept there) ; together with every promise of yielding me
an indispensable retreat from May to October (every year).
I hope you are not more sorry to take up the load of life that
awaits, these days, the hunch of one's shoulders than I am.
Vou'U ask me what I mean by "life." Come down to Lamb
House and I'll tell you.

There were the most delightful possibilities in the
property, which included a small garden and lawn, the
whole hemmed in by a peaceful old red wall, plentifully
tapestried with espaliers. The noble tower of Rye church
looked down into it, and Henry James felt that the chimes
sounded sweetly to him as he faced his garden in monastic
quiet, the little market-town packed tightly about him, yet
wholly out of sight.

Meanwhile the intellectual release had been none the
less marked than the physical. The earliest result of his
final escape from the lures of the Vivian of the stage had
been the composition of a novel. The Spoils of Poynton,
in a manner entirely different from that of his earlier long
romances. This was published in 1897, ^^^d iri the mean-
time he had set to work on a longer and more ambitious
romance. What Maisie Knew. In these he began the
exercise of what has been called his "later manner," which
it would be out of proportion to attempt to define in a study
which purports to be biographical rather than critical. It
is enough to remind the reader familiar with Henry James's
writings that in abandoning the more popular and conven-
tional method of composition he aimed at nothing less than
a revolution in the art of the novelist. While thus actively
engaged in a new scheme of life, he found it more and
more difficult to break "the spell of immobility" which
enveloped him. He who had been so ready to start on
any call of impulse in any direction found it impossible to
bring himself to respond, at Christmas, 1897, to the appeal
of Madame Alphonse Daudet to come over to Paris to grace
the obsequies of her illustrious husband. The friends —
D 37

Aspects and Impressions

and the author of Jack was the most intimate of James's
Parisian acquaintances — had not met after 1895, when
Daudet had spent a month in London mainly under the
charge of Henry James, since which time the French
novelist's life had been sapped and drained from him by
a disease the symptoms of which were beginning to be
painfully manifest when he was with us in London. The
old French friends were now disappearing. Their places
m Henry James's affection were partly filled by Paul
Bourget and by Maurice Barres, whose remarkable and
rather "gruesome " book, Les Deracines, now supplied
James with an endless subject of talk and reflection.

The first novel actually completed at Lamb House was
The Awkward Age, which was ready for the printers early
in 1898. The ecstasy with which he settled down to ap-
preciate his new surroundings is reflected in that novel,
where the abode of Mr. Longdon is neither more nor less
than a .picture of Lamb House. It was a wonderful
summer and autumn, and, as Henry James said: "The
air of the place thrilled all the while with the bliss of
birds, the hum of little lives unseen, and the flicker of
white butterflies." The MS. of The Awkward Age was no
sooner finished than he took up the germ of an incident
dimly related to him years before at Addington, by Arch-
bishop Benson, and wove it into The Turn of the Screw,
a sort of moral (or immoral) ghost story which not a few
readers consider to be the most powerful of all his writings,
and which others again peculiarly detest. I admit myself
to be a hanger-on of the former group, and I have very
vivid recollections of the period when The Turn of the
Screw was being composed. The author discussed it with
a freedom not usual with him. I remember that when he
had finished it he said to me one day : "I had to correct
the proofs of my ghost story last night, and when I had
finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid to go
upstairs to bed ! "

By the close of 1898 he had got rid of the flat in De
Vere Gardens, which had become a mere burden to him,
and had taken what he called an "invaluable south-looking,
.•^8

Henry James

Carlton-Gardens-sweeping bedroom " at the Reform Club
in Pall Mall, which served his brief and sudden pilgrim-
ages to town for many seasons. Lamb House, in the
course of this year, became his almost exclusive residence,
and it is to be noted that at the same time a remarkable
change came over the nature of his correspondence. He
had been a meticulous but not very inspired letter-writer
in early youth; his capacity for epistolary composition
and his appetite for it had developed remarkably in the
middle years (1882-1890). During the hectic period of his
theatrical ambition it had dwindled again. But when he
settled finally at Rye, spreading himself in luxurious con-
tentment within the protection of his old brick garden-wall,
the pink and purple surface of which stood in his fancy
as a sort of bodyguard of security passed down for that
particular purpose through mild ages of restfulness, as
soon as he sat, with his household gods about him, in
the almost cotton-woolly hush of Lamb House, he began
to blossom out into a correspondent of a new and splendid
cirss. The finest and most characteristic letters of Henry
James start with his fifty-fifth year, and they continue to
expand in volume, in richness and in self-revelation almost
to the close of his life. On this subject Mr. Percy Lub-
bock, than whom no one has known better the idiosyn-
crasies of Henry James, has described his method of
correspondence in a passage which could not be bettered :

The rich apologies for silence and backwardness that
preface so many of his letters must be interpreted in the light,
partly indeed of his natural luxuriance of phraseology, but
much more of his generous conception of the humblest corre-
spondent's claim on him for response. He could not answer a
brief note of friendliness but with pages of abounding elo-
quence. He never dealt in the mere small change of
intercourse ; the postcard and the half-sheet did not exist for
him ; a few lines of enquiry would bring from him a bulging
packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its disproportion. No
wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a letter ho
often groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself
of it, in general, very late at night; the morning's work left
39

Aspects and Impressions

him too much exhausted for more composition until then. At
midnight he would sit down to his letter-writing and cover
sheet after sheet, sometimes for hours, with his dashing and
not very readable script. Occasionally he would give up a
day to the working off of arrears by dictation, seldom omitting
to excuse himself to each correspondent in turn for the infliction
of the "fierce legibility " of type.

This amplitude of correspondence was the outcome of
an affectionate solicitude for his friends, which led him in
another direction, namely, in that of exercising a hos-
pitality towards them for which he had never found an
opportunity before. He did not, however, choose to
collect anything which might remotely be called "a
party " ; what he really preferred was the presence of a
single friend at a time, of a companion who would look
after himself in the morning, and be prepared for a stroll
with his host in the afternoon, and for a banquet of
untrammelled conversation under the lamp or on the
expanse of the lawn after the comfortable descent of
nightfall.

His practice in regard to such a visitor was always to
descend to the railway station below the town to welcome
the guest, who w^ould instantly recognize his remarkable
figure hurrying along the platform. Under the large soft
hat would be visible the large pale face, anxiously scan-
ning the carriage-windows and breaking into smiles of
sunshine when the new-comer was discovered. Welcome
was signified by both hands waved aloft, lifting the skirts
of the customary cloak, like wings. Then, luggage at-
tended to, and the arm of the guest securely seized, as
though even now there might be an attempt at escape, a
slow ascent on foot would begin up the steep streets, the
last and steepest of all leading to a discreet door which
admitted directly to the broad hall of Lamb House. Within
were, to right and left, the pleasant old rooms, with low
windows opening straight into the garden, which was so
sheltered and economized as to seem actually spacious.
Further to the left was a lofty detached room, full of books
40

Henry James

and lights, where in summer Henry James usually wrote,
secluded from all possible disturbance. The ascent of
arrival from the railway grew to be more and more interest-
ing as time went on, and as the novelist became more and
more a familiar and respected citizen, it was much inter-
rupted at last by bows from ladies and salaams from shop-
keepers; many little boys and girls, the latter having often
curtsied, had to be greeted and sometimes patted on the
head. These social movements used to inspire in me the
inquiry : "Well, how soon are you to be the Mayor-Elect
of Rye?" a pleasantry which was always well received.
So obviously did Henry James, in the process of years,
become the leading inhabitant that it grew to seem no im-
possibility. Stranger things had happened ! No civic
authority would have been more conscientious and few less
efficient.

His outward appearance developed in accordance with
his moral and intellectual expansion. I have said that in
oarly life Henry James was not "impressive"; as time
went on his appearance became, on the contrary, exces-
sively noticeable and arresting". He removed the beard
which had long disguised his face, and so revealed the
strong lines of mouth and chin, which responded to the
majesty of the skull. In the breadth and smoothness of
the head — Henry James became almost wholly bald early
in life — there was at length something sacerdotal. As
time went on, he grew less and less Anglo-Saxon in
appearance and more Latin. I remember once seeing a
Canon preaching in the Cathedral of Toulouse who was
the picture of Henry James in his unction, his gravity, and
his vehemence. Sometimes there could be noted — what
Henry would have hated to think existing — a theatrical
look which struck the eye, as though he might be some
retired jeiine premier of the Fran^ais, jeune no longer;
and often the prelatical expression faded into a fleeting
likeness to one or other celebrated Frenchman of letters
(never to any Englishman or American), somewhat of
Lacordaire in the intolerable scrutiny of the eyes, some-
what of Sainte-Beuve, too, in all except the mouth, which,
41

Aspects and Impressions

though mobile and elastic, gave the impression in rest of
being small. All these comparisons and suggestions,
however, must be taken as the barest hints, intended to
mark the tendency of Henry James's radically powerful
and unique outer appearance. The beautiful modelling of
the brows, waxing and waning under the stress of excite-
ment, is a point which singularly dwells in the memory.

It is very difficult to give an impression of his manner,
which was complex in the extreme, now restrained with a
deep reserve, now suddenly expanding, so as to leave the
auditor breathless, into a flood of exuberance. He had
the habit of keeping his friends apart from one another;
his intimacies were contained in many watertight com-
partments. He disliked to think that he was the subject
of an interchange of impressions, and though he who
discussed everybody and everything with the most pene-
trating and analysing curiosity must have known perfectly
well that he also, in his turn, was the theme of endless
discussion, he liked to ignore it and to feign to be a
bodiless spectator. Accordingly, he was not apt to pay
for the revelations, confidences, guesses and what not
which he so eagerly demanded and enjoyed by any coin
of a similar species. He begged the human /ace to plunge
into experiences, but he proposed to take no plunge
himself, or at least to have no audience when he plunged.

So discreet was he, and so like a fountain sealed, that
many of those who were well acquainted with him have
supposed that he was mainly a creature of observation and
fancy, and that life stirred his intellect while leaving his
senses untouched. But every now and then he disclosed
to a friend, or rather admitted such a friend to a flash
or glimpse of deeper things. The glimpse was never pro-
longed or illuminated, it was like peering down for a
moment through some chasm in the rocks dimmed by the
vapour of a clash of waves. One such flash will always
leave my memory dazzled. I was staying alone with
Henry James at Rye one summer, and as twilight deepened
we walked together in the garden. I forget by what
meanders we approached the subject, but I suddenly found
42

Henry James

that in profuse and enigmatic language he was recounting
to me an experience, something that had happened, not
something repeated or imagined. He spoke of standing
on the pavement of a city, in the dusk, and of gazing
upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for
the hghting of a lamp in a window on the third storey.
And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he
strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable
face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain,
brushed by the phantom hurrying figures of the scene, and
never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible
the face. The mysterious and poignant revelation closed,
and one could make no comment, ask no question, being
throttled oneself by an overpowering emotion. And for
a long time Henry James shuffled beside me in the dark-
ness, shaking the dew off the laurels, and still there was
no sound at all in the garden but what our heels made
crunching the gravel, nor was the silence broken when
suddenly we entered the house and he disappeared for an
hour.

But the gossamer thread of narrative must be picked
up once more, slight as it is. Into so cloistered a life the
news of the ^udden loss of Edward Burne-Jones in June,
1898, fell with a sensation; he had "seen the dear man,
to my great joy, only a few hours before his death." In
the early spring of the next year Henry James actually
summoned resolution to go abroad again, visiting at
Hyeres Paul Bourget and the \'icomte Melchior de Vogiie
(of whose Le Roman Russe and other essays he was a
sturdy admirer), and proceeding to Rome, whence he was
"whirled by irresistible Marion Crawford off to Sorrento,
Capri, Naples," some of these now seen for the first time.
He came back to England and to Lamb House at the end
of June, to find that his novel of The Awkward Age, which
was just published, was being received with a little more
intelligence and sympathetic comprehension than had been
the habit of greeting his productions, what he haughtily,
but quite justly, called "the lurid asininity " of the Press
in his regard now beginning to be sensibly affected by
43

Aspects and Impressions

the loyalty of tlie little clan of those who saw what he was
"driving at " in the new romances, and who valued it as a
pearl of price. Nevertheless, there was still enough thick-
witted denunciation of his novels to fill his own "clan"
with anger, while some even of those who loved him best
admitted themselves bewildered by The Awkward Age.
Nothing is more steadily cleared away by time than the
impression of obscurity that hangs over a really fine work
of imagination when it is new. Twenty years have now
passed, and no candid reader any longer pretends to find
this admirable story "bewildering."

The passing of old friends was partly healed by the
coming of new friends, and it was about this time that
Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Mr. W. E.
Norris began to be visited and corresponded with. In
1900 and 1901 Henry James was slowly engaged, with
luxurious throes of prolonged composition, in dictating
The Ambassadors, which he "tackled and, for various
reasons, laid aside," only to attack it again "with intensity
and on the basis of a simplification that made it easier" until
he brought it successfully through its voluminous career.
In the summer of 1902 Mrs. Wharton, who had dedicated
to him, as a stranger, her novel of The Valley of Decision,
became a personal acquaintance, and soon, and till the
end, one of the most valued and intimate of his friends.
This event synchronized with the publication of his own
great book, The Wings of a Dove. It was followed by
The Golden Bowl. He now turned from such huge
schemes as this — which in his fatigue he described as "too
inordinately drawn out and too inordinately rubbed in "
— to the composition of short stories, in which he found
both rest and refreshment.

On this subject, the capabilities of the conte as a form of
peculiarly polished and finished literature, he regaled me
— and doubtless other friends — at this time with priceless
observations. I recall a radiant August afternoon when
we sallied from his high abode and descended to the mud
of the winding waters of the Brede, where, on the shaky
bridge across the river, leaning perilously above the flood,
44

Henry James

Henry James held forth on the extraordinary skill of Guy
de Maupassant, whose posthumous collection, Le Col-
porteur, had just reached him, and on the importance of
securing, as that inimitable artist so constantly secured,
one straight, intelligible action which must be the source
of all vitality in what, without it, became a mere wandering
anecdote, more or less vaguely ornamented. Henry James
was at this time, I think, himself engaged upon the series
of short stories which ultimately appeared under the title
of The Better Sort, each one, as he said, being the exhibi-
tion of a case of experience or conduct. He collected and
published in these years several such volumes of short
compositions, in which he endeavoured, and admirably
effected his endeavour, to combine neatness of handling
with that beauty of conception which became more and
more the object of his passionate desire. The reader
naturally recalls such perfect specimens of his craft as
The Real Right Thing and The Beast in the Jungle.

For many years he had let his fancy toy with the idea
of returning, on a visit only, to America. In 1904 this
project really took shape, and the long-debated journey
actually took place. He terminated another extended
romance. The Golden Bowl, and in August set sail for
New York, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a book of
American impressions. The volume called The American
Scene, published in 1906, gives his account of the adven-
ture, or rather of certain parts of it. He lived through
the first autumn with his family in the mountains of New
Hampshire, and, after a sojourn in Cambridge, spent
Christmas in New York. He then went south in search
of warmth, which he found at last in Florida. By way
of Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis he reached Cali-
fornia in April, 1905. He delivered in various American
Colleges two lectures, specially written for the purpose,
which came out as a little volume in the United States,
but have not yet appeared in England. His impressions
of America, in the volume which he published after his
return, stop with Florida, and give therefore no record of
the extreme pleasure which he experienced in California,
45

Aspects and Impressions

of which his private letters were full. He declared, writ-
ing on April 5th, 1905, from Coronado Beach, that "Cali-
fornia has completely bowled me over. . . . The flowers,
the wild flowers, just now in particular, which fairly rage
with radiance over the land, are worthy of some purer
planet than this. ... It breaks my heart to have so stinted
myself here " ; but return eastward was imperative, and
in August, 1905, he was back again safe in the silence of
Lamb House.

Throughout the following autumn and winter he was,
as he said, "sc{ueezing out" his American impressions,
which did not flow so easily as he had hoped they would.
Many other enterprises hung temptingly before him, and
distracted his thoughts from that particular occupation.
Moreover, just before his plan for visiting the United
States had taken shape, he had promised to write for a
leading firm of English publishers "a romantical-psycho-
logical-pictorial-social " book about London, and in
November, 1905, he returned to this project with vivacity.
There is a peculiar interest about works that great writers
mean to compose and never succeed in producing, and
this scheme of a great picturesque book about London is
like a ghost among the realities of Henry James's inven-
tion. He spoke about it more often and more freely than
he did about his solid creations; I feel as though I had
handled and almost as though I had read it. Westminster
was to have been the core of the matter, which was to circle
out concentrically to the City and the suburbs. Henry
James put me under gratified contribution by coming
frequently to the House of Lords in quest of "local colour,"
and I took him through the corridors and up into garrets
of the Palace where never foreign foot had stepped before.
There was not, to make a clean breast of it, much "local
colour " to be wrung out, but Henry James was indefatig-
able in curiosity. What really did thrill him was to stand
looking down from one of the windows of the Library on
the Terrace, crowded with its motley afternoon crew of
Members of both Houses and their guests of both sexes.
He liked that better than to mingle with the throng itself,
46

Henry James

and he should have written a superb page on the scene,
with its background of shining river and misty towers.
Alas ! it will not be read until we know what songs the
Sirens sang.

All through the quiet autumn and winter of 1906 he
was busy preparing the collective and definite, but far
from complete, edition of his novels and tales which began
to appear some twelve months later. This involved a
labour which some of his friends ventured to disapprove
of, since it included a re-writing into his latest style of
the early stories which possessed a charm in their un-
affected immaturity. Henry James was conscious, I
think, of the arguments which might be brought against
this reckless revision, but he rejected them with violence.
I was spending a day or two with him at Lamb House
when Roderick Hudson was undergoing, or rather had
just undergone, the terrible trial; so the revised copy,
darkened and swelled with MS. alterations, was put into
my hands. I thought — I dare say I was quite mistaken
— that the vvhole perspective of Henry James's work, the
evidence of his development and evolution, his historical
growth, were confused and belied by this wholesale
tampering with the original text. Accordingly I ex-
claimed against such dribbling of new wine into the old
bottles. This was after dinner, as we sat alone in the
garden-room. x^Il that Henry James — though I confess,
with a darkened countenance — said at the time was, "The
only alternative would have been to put the vile thing" —
that is to say the graceful tale of Roderick Hudson —
"behind the fire and have done with it! " Then we
passed to other subjects, and at length we parted for the
night in unruffled cheerfulness. But what was my dis-
may, on reaching the breakfast-table next morning, to
see my host sombre and taciturn, with gloom thrown
across his frowning features like a veil. I inquired rather
anxiously whether he had slept well. "Slept!" he
answered with dreary emphasis. "Was I likely to sleep
when my brain was tortured with all the cruel and — to
put it plainly to you — monstrous insinuations which you
47

Aspects and Impressions

had brought forward against my proper, rny necessary,
my absolutely inevitable corrections of the disgraceful and
disreputable style of Roderick Hudson? " I withered,
like a guilty thing ashamed, before the eyes that glared
at me over the coffee-pot, and I inly resolved that not one
word of question should ever escape my lips on this subject
again.

Early in 1907 he was tempted once more, after so long
absence, to revisit France. While in America he had
acquired the habit of motoring, which he learned to enjoy
so much that it became the greatest physical pleasure of
his life, and one which seemed definitely to benefit his
health. He motored through a great part of France, and
then proceeded to his beloved Italy, where he spent some
radiant summer days under the pines near Vallombrosa,
and later some more with his lifelong friend Mrs. Curtis
in her wonderful Palazzo Barbaro in Venice. Ten weeks
in Paris must be added to the foreign record of this
year, almost the last of those which Henry James was
able to dedicate to the Latin world that he loved so
well and comprehended so acutely. The "nightmare,"
as he called it, of his Collected Edition kept him closely
engaged for months after his return — it ultimately ran
into a range of twenty-four volumes — but he was also
sketching a novel. The Ivory Tower, which was to embody
some of his American recollections; this was never
finished. He met new friends of the younger generation,
such as Hugh Walpole and Rupert Brooke, and they gave
him great happiness.

He seemed to be approaching old age in placidity and
satisfaction when, towards the end of 1909, he was seized
by a mysterious group of illnesses which "deprived him
of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffer-
ing of mind." Unfortunately his beloved brother William
was also failing in health, and had come to Europe in
the vain search for recovery; their conditions painfully
interacted. The whole year 1910 was one of almost un-
mitigated distress. Henry accompanied Mr. and Mrs.
William back to their home in New Hampshire, where in
48

Henry James

the autumn not only the eminent philosopher, but a third
brother, Robertson James, died, leaving Henry solitary
indeed, and weighed upon by a cloud of melancholy which
forbade him to write or almost to speak. Out of this he
passed in the spring of 191 1, and returned to Lamb House,
where he had another sharp attack of illness in the autumn
of 191 2. It was now felt that the long pale winters over
the marsh at Rye were impossible for him, and the bed-
room at the Reform Club insufficient. He therefore rented
a small flat high up over the Thames in Cheyne Walk,
where he was henceforth to spend half of each year and
die. He sat, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, to
Mr. Sargent for the picture which is now one of the
treasures of the National Portrait Gallery ; this was sur-
prisingly mutilated, while being exhibited at the Royal
Academy, by a "militant suffragette "; Henry James was
extraordinarily exhilarated by having been thus "impaired
by the tomahawk of the savage," and displayed himself
as "breasting a wondrous high-tide of postal condolence
in this doubly-damaged state." This was his latest ex-
citement before the war wHth Germany drowned every
other consideration.

The record of the last months of Henry James's life
is told in the wonderful letters that he wrote between the
beginning of August, 1914, and the close of November,
1915. He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he
found it absolutely impossible to stay there without daily
communication with friends in person, and, contrary to
his lifelong habit, he came posting up to London in the
midst of the burning August weather. He was trans-
figured by the events of those early weeks, overpowered,
and yet, in his vast and generous excitement, himself
overpowering. He threw off all the languor and melan-
choly of the recent years, and he appeared actually grown
in size as he stalked the streets, amazingly moved by the
unexpected nightmare, "the huge horror of blackness"
which he saw before him. "The plunge of civilization
into the abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat
of these two infamous autocrats" made him suddenly
49

Aspects and Impressions

realize that the quiet years of prosperity which had pre-
ceded 191 4 had been really, as he put it, "treacherous,"
and that their perfidy had left us unprotected against the
tragic terrors which now faced our world. It was astonish-
ing how great Henry James suddenly seemed to become;
he positively loomed above us in his splendid and dis-
interested faith. His first instinct had been horror at the
prospect; his second anger and indignation against the
criminals ; but to these succeeded a passion of love and
sympathy for England and France, and an unyielding but
anxious and straining confidence in their ultimate success.
Nothing could express this better than the language of a
friend who saw him constantly and studied his moods
with penetrating sympathy. Mr. Percy Lubbock says :

To all who listened to him in those days it must have
seemed that he gave us what we lacked — a voice ; there was
a trumpet note in it that was heard nowhere else and that
alone rose to the height of the truth.

The impression Henry James gave in these first months
of the war could not be reproduced in better terms. To
be in his company was to be encouraged, stimulated and
yet filled with a sense of the almost intolerable gravit}^
of the situation; it was to be moved with that "trumpet
note " in his voice, as the men fighting in the dark defiles
of Roncevaux were moved by the sound of the oliphant
of Roland. He drew a long breath of relief in the thought
that England had not failed in her manifest duty to
France, nor "shirked any one of the implications of the
Entente." When, as at the end of the first month, things
were far from exhilarating for the Allies, Henry James
did not give way to despair, but he went back to Rye,
possessing his soul in waiting patience, "bracing himself
unutterably," as he put it, "and holding on somehow
(though to God knows what !) in presence of the per-
petrations so gratuitously and infamously hideous as the
destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments."

At Lamb House he sat through that gorgeous tawny
50

Henry James

September, listening to the German guns thundering just
across the Channel, while the advance of the enemy
through those beautiful lands which he knew and loved
so well filled him with anguish. He used to sally forth
and stand on the bastions of his little town, gazing over
the dim marsh that became sand-dunes, and then sea, and
then a mirage of the white cliffs of French Flanders that
were actually visible when the atmosphere grew trans-
parent. The anguish of his execration became almost the
howl of some animal, of a lion of the forest with the arrow
in his flank, when the Germans wrecked Reims Cathedral.
He gazed and gazed over the sea south-east, and
fancied that he saw the flicker of the flames. He ate and
drank, he talked and walked and thought, he slept and
waked and lived and breathed only the War. His friends
grew anxious, the tension was beyond what his natural
powers, transfigured as they were, could be expected to
endure, and he was persuaded to come back to Chelsea,
although a semblance of summer still made Rye
attractive.

During this time his attitude towards America was
marked by a peculiar delicacy. His letters expressed no
upbraiding, but a yearning, restrained impatience that
took the form of a constant celebration of the attitude of
England, which he found in those early months con-
sistently admirable. In his abundant and eloquent letters
to America he dealt incessantly on the shining light which
events were throwing on "England's moral position and
attitude, her predominantly incurable good-nature, the
sublimity or the egregious folly, one scarcely knows which
to call it, of her innocence in face of the most prodigiously
massed and worked-out intentions of aggression." He
admitted, with every gesture of courtesy, that America's
absence from the feast of allied friendship on an occasion
so unexampled, so infinitely momentous, was a bitter
grief to him, but he was ready to believe it a necessity.
For his own part, almost immediately on his return to
London in October, 1914, Henry James began to relieve
the rncntal high pressure by some kinds of practical work
51

Aspects and Impressions

for which nothing in his previous life had fitted him, but
into which he now threw himself with even exhausting
ardour. He had always shrunk from physical contact
with miscellaneous strangers, but now nothing seemed
unwelcome save aloofness which would have divided him
from the sufferings of others. The sad fate of Belgium
particularly moved him, and he found close to his flat in
Cheyne Walk a centre for the relief of Belgian refugees,
and he was active in service there. A little later on he
ardently espoused the work of the American Volunteer
Motor Ambulance Corps. His practical experiences and
his anxiety to take part in the great English movement for
relief of the Belgians and the French are reflected in the
essays which were collected in 19 19 under the title of
Within the Rim.

We were, however, made anxious by the effect of all
this upon his nerves. The magnificent exaltation of spirit
which made him a trumpeter in the sacred progress of the
Allies was of a nature to alarm us as much as it inspirited
and rejoiced us. When we thought of what he had been
in 191 1, how sadly he had aged in 191 2, it was not
credible that in 191 5 he could endure to be filled to over-
flowing by this tide of febrile enthusiasm. Some of us,
in the hope of diverting his thoughts a little from the
obsession of the war, urged him to return to his proper
work ; and he responded in part to our observations, while
not abandoning his charitable service. He w^as at work
on The Ivory Tower when the war began, but he could
not recover the note of placidity which it demanded, and
he abandoned it in favour of a novel begun in 1900 and
then laid aside, The Sense of the Past. He continued,
at the same time, his reminiscences, and was w-riting the
fragment published since his death as The Middle Years.
But all this w^ork was forced from him with an effort, very
slowly; the old sprightly running of composition was at an
end, the fact being that his thoughts w^ere now incessantly
distracted by considerations of a far more serious order.

The hesitations of Mr. Wilson, and Henry James's
conviction that in the spring of 1915 the United States
52

Henry James

government was "sitting down in meekness and silence
under the German repudiation of every engagement she
solemnly took with " America, led to his taking a step
which he felt to be in many respects painful, but abso-
lutely inevitable. His heart was so passionately united
with England in her colossal effort, and he was so dismally
discouraged by the unending hesitation of America, that
he determined to do what he had always strenuously
refused to do before, namely, apply for British naturaliza-
tion. Mr. Asquith (then Prime Minister), Sir George
Prothero (the Editor of the Quarterly Review), and I had
the honour and the gratification of being chosen his
sponsors. In the case of so illustrious a claimant the
usual formalities were passed over, and on July 26th, 191 5,
Henry James became a British subject. Unhappily he
did not live to see America join the Allies, and so missed
the joy for which he longed-above all others.

But his radiant enthusiasm was burning him out. In
August he had a slight- breakdown, and his autumn was
made iniserable by an affection of the heart. He felt, he
said, twenty years older, but "still, I cultivate, I at least
attempt, a brazen front." He still got about, and I saw
him at Westminster on the evening of November 29th.
This was, I believe, the last time he went out, and two
days later, on the night between the ist and the 2nd of
December, he had a stroke. He partly rallied and was
able to receive comfort from the presence of his sister-in-
law, Mrs. William James, who hurried across the Atlantic
to nurse him. At the New Year he was awarded the
highest honour which the King can confer on a British
man of letters, the Order of Merit, the insignia of which
were brought to his bedside by Lord Bryce. On
February 28th, 1916, he died, within two months of his
73rd birthday. His body was cremated, and the funeral
service held at that "altar of the dead " which he had loved
so much, Chelsea Old Church, a few yards from his own
door.

1920.

E 53

SAMUEL BUTLER

LET it be said at once that Mr. Henry Festing Jones's
Life of Samuel Butler tells the history of a very
remarkable man with a vividness which leaves
nothing to be desired. This is not a vain compliment;
it is a tribute which common justice demands on an
unusual occasion. There were ninety-nine chances in a
hundred that Butler's life would never be adequately, or
even intelligently, recorded. Nature and circumstance
had done their best to make him obscure and incompre-
hensible. The situation has been saved by two facts :
the first, that Butler was excessively interested in himself;
the second, that Mr. Jones was always — not merely since
Butler's death, but always — excessively interested in
Butler. These are not conditions which are essential to
the success of biography in every case, especially when
the general unanimity of admiration has made all the
contemporaries of a great man in some sort his bio-
graphers, but they are absolutely required to preserve for
us the features of an eccentric and isolated person who
failed almost all through his life to attract admiration, and
who laid himself out to be completely misunderstood when
the tide should at last turn in his favour. We are pre-
served from such a loss by the meticulous attention which
Samuel Butler paid to himself, and by the infatuated zeal
with which Mr. Jones adopted, continued, and developed
thac attention. Butler lives twice over, or rather has never
ceased to live, in the mind and humour of Mr. Henry
Testing Jones.

We move in an age which prides itself more and more
on being able to see the mote in the eye of its immediate
predecessor. But Samuel Butler was the precursor of this
55

Aspects and Impressions

rebellion, and is historically notable as the earliest anti-
Victorian. He was born at a moment which was to prove
less rich than almost any other of the remarkable nine-
teenth century, in producing men who were to be eminent
for intellectual talent. It almost looks as though Nature,
which had been so profuse, and was presently to become
so liberal again, paused for a few years, while she prepared
to let the Victorian Age proper wear itself out. The
immediate contemporaries of Butler were Shorthouse,
whose John Inglesant started a new sentimentality, and
William Morris, who combined a fresh aspect of romance
with an investigation of the bases of society which was
essentially revolutionary; with these were T. H. Green,
who introduced a new Hegelian spirit into philosophical
speculation, and John Richard Green, who re-examined
the foundations of our history. But none of these men
displayed any real parallelism with Butler, by whose work
they were none of them at any time affected, and of whom
perhaps none of them ever heard. The only other name
which can be quoted in this connexion is that of Lecky,
who may indeed be regarded as the exact opposite of
Butler in almost every respect — successful from earliest
youth, at peace with the world, reverently acceptive of
every Victorian formula, and blandly unconscious that
everything was not permanently for the best in the best
of all possible worlds.

Butler is a curious example of a man of something very
like genius, who passed through a long life in the midst of
intelligent fellow-men, not rebuffing their attentions, but
encouraging them ; not escaping by a mordid modesty
from criticism, but doing everything in his power to
exasperate it; and yet failing to be observed. The strange
thing about his case is that he lived, mostly in London,
for sixty-six years, and that until nearly the close of that
time scarcely anyone felt more than the most tepid and
casual curiosity about him. The only similar case that
occurs to the memory in the history of nineteenth-century
literature is Borrow, who in like manner, but not with a
like desolating completeness, simply was unable to catch
56

Samuel Butler

the eye of criticism. Wlien each of these writers died, it
seemed impossible that either of them would ever occupy
half a page in any history of literature. It now seems
equally difficult to suppose that any such history, if pos-
sessing the least pretension to completeness, will in future
omit either of them. This is quite apart from any question
which may present itself as to the probability of a decline
in the present "fashion" for them both. It merely ex-
presses the fact that while Borrow and Butler alike walked
all through their lives invisible, for the rest of time they
must both be patent, whether liked or disliked.

Borrow affected a certain disdain for the laudation
which would not come his w^ay, and in later life seemed
to have relinquished any desire to move in the mouths
of men. But Butler never ceased to long for fame, and
probably to expect it. Towards the close of his life, when-
ever he was asked what new work might be expected from
his ingenious pen, he used to look demure and answer,
"I am editing my remains; I wish ' to leave everything
in order for my executors.' " This was looked upon as
a joke, but it turns out to have been strictly true. No
one ever laboured more to appear at his best — in strict
accordance with truth, but still, at his best — to the world
after his decease. His assiduities were like those of the
dying Narcissa —

And Betty, g-ive those cheeks a little red,

One wouldn't, sure, look horrid when one's dead !

He recovered as many of his own letters as he could and
annotated them; he arranged the letters of his friends; he
copied, edited, indexed, and dated all this mass of corres-
pondence, and he prepared those "Notes" which have
since his death provided his admirers with their
choicest repast. In doing all this he displayed an equal
naivete and enthusiasm. Mr. Festing Jones, to whom all
this industry has of course been invaluable, puts the matter
in a nutshell when he says that Butler "was not contem-
plating publication, but neither was he contemplating
57

Aspects and Impressions

oblivion." He was simply putting the rouge-pot within
Betty's reach.

Here is Butler's own account of the matter, and it
throws a strong light upon his character :

People sometimes give me to understand that it is a piece
of ridiculous conceit on my part to jot down so many notes
about myself, since it implies a confidence that I shall one
day be regarded as an interesting person. I answer that
neither I nor they can form any idea as to whether I shall be
wanted when I am gone or no. The chances are that I shall
not.

But he was not inclined to take any risks. He was
the residuary of his own temperament, and if by chance
posterity were to w-ake up and take a violent interest in
him, he personally w^ould be to blame, and would incur
a very serious responsibility, if there were no documents
forthcoming to satisfy the curiosity of the new generation.
It is to his frank response to this instinct of self-preserva-
tion that we owe the very exhaustive and faithful
n-arrative of Mr. Festing Jones, as we did the precious
"Note-books" of 191 2.

In consideration of the eagerness and sympathy with
which Butler is followed by an active group of admirers
among the young writers of to-day, it may be doubtful
whether the extraordinary minuteness of Butler's observa-
tion, continued as it is with an equally extraordinary
fullness by his biographer, may not have an evil effect in
encouraging a taste for excessive discursiveness in author-
ship of this class. There have been very distinguished
examples lately of abandonment to an unchecked notation
of detail. It is scarcely necessary to refer to the texture
of the later novels of Henry James, or to the amazing
Cote de chez Sivann of M. Marcel Proust, which latter
is one of the most characteristic successes of the moment.
jThis widespread tendency to consider every slight observa-
kion, whether phenomenal or emotional, worthy of the
''gravest and tenderest analysis, develops at an epoch w'hen
' 58

Samuel Butler

the world is becoming congested with printed matter, and
when one might imagine that conciseness and selection \
would be the qualities naturally in fashion. Neither
Samuel Butler nor his biographer conceives it possible
that anything can be negligible; to them the meanest
flower that blows by the wayside of experience gives
thoughts that cannot be brought to lie within one or even
within ten pages. The complacency with which Butler
annotates his own childish letters to his mother is equalled
only by the gravity with which Mr. Jones examines those
very annotations.

Not without a qualm, however, do I note this re-
dundancy, since it is a source of pleasure to all but the
hasty reader, who, indeed, should be advised not to
approach Butler at all. The charm of his mind lies in its
divagations, its inconsistencies, its puerile and lovable
self-revelations, and all these are encouraged by the wan-
dering style common to the author and to his biographer.
One of the most clear-sighted of his friends, trying to
sum up his character at his death, said that "he was too
versatile a genius ever to be in the front rank of one
particular line, and he had too much fun in him to be
really serious when he ought to have been." But why
ought he to have been "really serious," and why should
he have sought "front rank" in one particular line?
This is the inevitable way in which a man of ingenious
originality is misjudged by those who have loved him
most and who think they understood him best. Butler
was not remarkable, and does not now deserve the repu-
tation which his name enjoys, on account of the subjects
about which he chose to write, nor on account of the
measure of decorum with which he approached those
themes, but in consequence of the sinuous charm, the
irregular and arresting originality of his approach itself,
his fame having been indeed rather delayed, and the
purgatory of his obscurity prolonged, by the want of
harmony between most of the subjects he selected and the
manner in which it was native to himself to treat those
subjects. In other words, what makes Butler a difficult
5Q

Aspects and Impressions

theme for analysis is that, unHke most authors, his genius
is not illuminated, but positively obscured for a student
of to-day, by the majority of his controversial writings.
He was not a prophet; he was an inspired "crank." He
is most characteristic, not when he is discussing Evolution,
or Christianity, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare, or the
Trapanese Origin of the "Odyssey," but when he is
meandering along, endlessly, paradoxically, in the act of
written conversation about everything at large and nothing
in particular, with himself as the central theme.

The most valuable of Butler's imaginative writings,
and indeed the most important from almost every point
of view, are the two romances which stand respectively at
the opening and at the close of his career, like two golden
pillars supporting the roof of his reputation. His earliest
publication (for the slight and brief budget of letters from
New Zealand was not published by himself) was Erewhon
— or *' Nowhere " — a fantastic Utopia of the class started
a century and a half ago by Paltock in his fascinating
adventures of Peter Wilkins. Like Wilkins, the hero of
Erewhon flies from civilization, and discovers in the
Antarctic world a race of semi-human beings, who obey
a strict code of morals consistent in itself, but in complete
divergence from ours on many important points. I dis-
cover no evidence that Butler ever saw Paltock's romance,
and he would probably have been scornful of the Glums
and Cowries, and of the gentle winged people wrapped
in throbbing robes of their own substance. But I think
some dim report of an undiscovered country where ethics
were all turned topsy-turvy may have started him on
Erewhon. The other novel, that which closes Butler's
career as a writer, is The Way of All Flesh, without a
careful consideration of which, by the light of information
now supplied by Mr. Festing Jones, no sketch of Butler's
career can, for the future, be attempted.

As early as 1873, Butler confided to Miss Savage — of

whose place in his life and influence upon his genius I

shall presently have to speak — that he was contemplating

the composition of an autobiographical novel. She read

60

Samuel Butler

the opening, and wrote, "as far as it goes it is perfect,
and if you go on as you have begun, it will be a beautiful
book." In case he got tired of it, what he had already
written might make "a very nice finished sketch for a
magazine." Evidently Miss Savage, who had an almost
uncanny penetration into Butler's nature, had little con-
fidence in his perseverance in the conduct of so large a
design. She urged him on, however, and it very early
occurred to her that the value of the story would consist
in its complete veracity as an autobiography. She faced
Butler with the charge that he was not being faithful to
himself in this matter, and she said, "Is the narrator
of the story to be an impartial historian or a special
pleader?" Butler wriggled under her strictures, but
failed to escape from them. Finally she faced him with
a direct question :

You have chosen the disguise of an old man of seventy-three
[exactly double Butler's real age at that time], and must speak
and act as such. An old man of seventy-three would scarcely
talk as you do, unless he was constantly in your company, and
was a very docile old man indeed — and I don't think the old
man who is telling the story is at all docile.

Young or old, Butler was never "docile," and he was
not inclined to give up his idealism without a struggle.
But Miss Savage was indomitable. She continued to
undermine w'hat she called "the special pleader," on the
ground that "I prefer an advocate in fiesh and blood."
Under this pressure, and stimulated by Miss Savage's
ingenuous annotations, Butler adopted more and more
a realistic tone, and kept the story more and more closely
on autobiographic lines. It was progressing steadily
when Butler had to go to Canada on thfe business expe-
dition which cost him so many months of his life, and
when he returned to London he did not resume the novel.
He took it up again in 1878, and disliked it; it needed
Miss Savage's energy to start him again with proper
gusto. Mr. Festing Jones was by this time upon the spot,
61

Aspects and Impressions

and though he does not say so, he probably supported
Miss Savage. They were the Aaron and Hur who held
up the arms of this incorrigible "special pleader," and
insisted that he should stick to the truth, and not embroider
it. In 1884 I'he Way of All Flesh was finished; in 1885
it underwent some revision, and after that was not touched
again.

So long as Butler was alive, the uncompromising
revelations of his family life, and the bitterness of the
censure of living persons, which the novel contained,
made it impossible to dream of issuing it. To do so would
have been to break a nest of hornets over Butler's pate.
But the moment he was dead, his executor, the late Mr.
R. A. Streatfeild, acting upon the author's known wishes,
published The Way of All Flesh. This was in 1903,
and the publication synchronized with the surprising
burst of critical appreciation which the announcement of
Butler's death had awakened in the Press. In almost all
unprejudiced quarters the value of The Way of All Flesh
as a sincere and masterly contribution to imaginative
literature, was acknowledged, although it took five years
more for a second edition of the book to be called for.
Butler, however, was recognized at last as an author of
distinguished merit, and there was a reverberation of
curiosity concerning so remarkable a man who had walked
about among us for nearly seventy years without attract-
ing any particular attention. This curiosity, it was
indicated by his admirers, could now be assuaged by a
study of The Way of All Flesh, which was a faithful
portrait of the writer, and of all the persons who had
checked his growth or encouraged his development. So
the legend was started that no real Life of Samuel Butler
was required, because in The Way of All Flesh we already
possessed a complete one.

Apart from the fact that the best of autobiographies
can never be the "real life," because it can never depict
the man quite as others saw him, it now transpires — and
this is perhaps the most important feature of Mr. Festing
Jones's admirable volumes — that the novel cannot be
62

Samuel Butler

accepted as an autobiography sound at all points. In
spite of the warnings of Miss Savage, and, oddly enough,
most of all in the person of Miss Savage herself, Butler
was incapable of confronting the incidents of his own
life without colouring them, and without giving way to
prejudice in the statement of plain facts. He disliked
excessively the atmosphere of middle-class Evangelicism
in which he had been brought up, and we must dislike
it too, but we need not dislike the persons involved so
bitterly as Butler did. It was narrow, sterile and cruel,
and it deserved no doubt the irony which Butler expended
upon it. So long as we regard The Way of All Flesh
as a story, invented with the help of recollections which
the novelist was at liberty to modify in any way he thought
desirable, there is no quarrel to be picked with any part
of it. But when we are led, as we have been, to take it
as a full and true record of Butler's own life, with nothing
changed but the names of the persons, we see by the light
of Mr. Testing Jones that this is an absolutely untenable
position. The Way of All Flesh is not an autobiography,
but a romance founded on recollection.

The author of Erewhon, who was christened Samuel,
not in honour of the author of Hudibras, but in memory
of his own grandfather, the Bishop of Lichfield and
Coventry, was the son of Canon Thomas Butler, in-
cumbent of Langor-with-Branston, in Nottinghamshire,
where the younger Samuel was born on the 4th of De-
cem.ber, 1835. Readers of The Way of All Flesh may
recognize the Butler family at Langor in the very un-
flattering picture of the Pontifexes in that novel. The
Bishop's grandson disliked him very much indeed —
"bullying, irritable, stupid old turkey-cock " — until 1887,
when he got hold of the Bishop's letters and papers, "and
fell over head and ears in love with him." He excused
his earlier sarcasms by saying — "When I wrote harshly
describing him, I knew nothing about my grandfather
except that he had been a great schoolmaster — and I do
not like schoolmasters; and then a bishop — and I do
not like bishops; and that he was supposed to be like my
63

Aspects and Impressions

father." For the latter, who is Theobald Pontifex in The
Way of All Flesh, he never expressed any leniency what-
ever, yet it is impossible to avoid hoping that if he had
studied his father, as at the age of fifty he studied his
grandfather, he might have relented a little in that
instance also.

Ernest Pontifex says, in The Way of All Flesh, that
he could remember no feeling towards his parents during
his childhood except fear and shrinking. To Butler,
fathers in general, as a class, were "capable de tout,"
like the prophet Habakkuk. Mr. Festing Jones prints a
very explicit paper he has found on this subject, the least
distressing paragraph in which is the last, where Butler
says, "An unkind fate never threw two men together who
were more naturally uncongenial than my father and
myself." Canon Butler was an evangelical clergyman
of the Simeonite type, which flourished so intensely be-
fore and during the development of the High Church
revival. He believed in bringing up children rigidly,
from their infancy, in the strict practice of external re-
ligion. If they were recalcitrant, the love of God must
be driven into them by their being whipped or shut up in
a cupboard, or docked of some little puerile pleasure.
Samuel Buder secretly rebelled, from babyhood, against
this stern evangelical discipline, and the Canon, who had
no imagination, simply redoubled his severities. It is
an amusing touch, in this record of a dismal childhood,
to learn that Samuel was excessively pleased, at the age
of eight, by hearing an Italian lady in Naples say that a
dear young friend of hers — poor unfortunate fellow,
povero disgrasiato! — had been obliged to murder his
uncle and his aunt. Probably the pleasure the litde boy
felt in hearing of this "misfortune" was the earliest ex-
pression of that rebellious and fantastic dislike of con-
ventionality which was to run through the w'hole series
of the man's works.

In the letters from Butler to his family, written at
school and at college, there is, however, no trace of the
violent antagonism which he afterwards believed that he
64

Samuel Butler

had always felt. It is true that a boy who writes to his
father and mother, and indeed in similar circumstances
a man too, is constrained to resign himself to a certain inno-
cent hypocrisy. Very few children are able to send to their
parents, and very few parents are able to endure from
their children, a perfectly sincere description of their crude
sentiments during adolescence. But if Samuel Butler
was really tormented at home, as Ernest Pontifex was,
it is odd that some note of hostility should not have crept,
into his juvenile correspondence. However, Mr. Festing
Jones, who is as judicious as a Lord of Appeal, seems to
entertain no doubt that Canon Butler was a holy horror,
so that we must bow to his opinion.

The earliest overt evidence of a falling out between
father and son is delayed until, in Mr. Jones's unfaltering
narrative, we reach the son's twenty-third year. He does
not seem, at first, to have combated his father's obstinate
demand that he should take orders in the Church of
England. That Canon Butler, a clergyman of clergymen,
should have desired to see his Samuel take this step,
ought not to seem unreasonable, though it certainly
proved unlucky. In the novel, it will be remembered,
Ernest Pontifex actually was ordained, but to this length
Samuel Butler never proceeded. He went to a parish in
the east of London to w'ork with a parson who had been
one of his grandfather's pupils at Shrewsbury. There
his faith in the efficacy of infant baptism was shaken, and
presently falling, brought down about his ears the whole
fabric of Simeonite Christianity in which he had so
assiduously been trained. He suddenly, and no doubt
abruptly, wrote to the Canon and said that he "declined
to be ordained." From a carnal as well as a spiritual point
of view this must have been a nasty shock for his parents,
and Mr. Festing Jones tells us "there was a long and
painful correspondence." This he mercifully spares us,
but refers us to The Way of All Flesh, where Butler made
dauntless use of it.

The financial situation was difficult. Canon Butler
was fairly well-to-do, but he had other children to provide
65

Aspects and Impressions

for, and Samuel, who refused to be a clergyman, went
on refusing, as it must have seemed to his father, to be
anything at all. Like the poet Cowley, he

neither great at Court nor in the War,
Nor at the Exchange would be, nor at the wranghng Bar.

All professions were suggested, and each in vain. At
last it was decided that Samuel should emigrate to New
Zealand, and become a sheep farmer. Only nine years
earlier, a Church of England colony had been founded
at Canterbury, in the South Island, and the town of
Christchurch had been founded. It had enjoyed a great
success, and by the year 1859, when Butler landed, almost
all the sheep lands had been already taken up. At last
he found an unoccupied run at the "back of beyond,"
and built a little homestead for himself, whicii he called
Mesopotamia. It is needless to dwell on this episode of
Butler's life, further than to point out that it proved him
capable of sustained physical industry and of considerable
financial adroitness. The remainder of his career hardly
suggests the possession of either. The New Zealand
episode is sufficiently dealt with in Butler's own book,
A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which, by the
way, shows no trace of the author's subsequent merit as
a writer. In June, 1864, he sailed homeward from the
port of Lyttelton, but not alone, and we now approach
the strangest incident of his life.

It was to be expected that the ^4,400 which Butler
had received from his father in 1859 would by this time
have dwindled to zero. Not at all ; it had swelled to
;^8,ooo. But just before he left New Zealand a young
man, called Charles Pauli, whom he had known but very
slightly as a journalist in Christchurch, and who had no
claim upon Butler of any sort or species, came to him and
asked him to pay for his passage back to England, and
to advance him ;^200 a year for three years. "To me,"
wrote Butler in 1897, "in those days this seemed perfectly
easv; and Pauli, I have not the smallest doubt, intended
66

Samuel Butler

and fully believed — for his temperament was always san-
guine— that he should be able to repay me." Butler had
very little insight into the "temperament" of Pauli, and
the whole of the extraordinary story increases our
conviction that this sardonic and sarcastic analyst of
imaginary life was as powerless as a child in face of
reality. The dreadful Pauli adventure, told for the first
time by Mr. Testing Jones, in his deliberate, unimpas-
sioned way, is the most amazing revelation of simplicity
traded upon by fraud that it is possible to imagine.

There soon proved to be a complete absence of harmony
•n the tastes of Butler and Pauli, who had re.ally nothing
in common. Yet they settled together, when they arrived
in London, in rooms in Clifford's Inn, Fleet Street.
There Butler lived for all the rest of his life, thirty-eight
years; but presently Pauli went elsewhere. Then the
relations of the two became incomprehensible. Pauli w-as
very irritable, and constantly found fault with Butler.
He refused to let Butler know his address, and yet was
continually sponging upon him. He said that he could
get no help from his own parents, and that Butler stood
between him and starvation. For three years Pauli did
not attempt to work. At last, in 1867, he was called to
the Bar. He lunched with Butler three times a week,
when he always said that he was earning nothing.
Butler's own statement, written in 1898, the year after
Pauli's death, is as follows :

I have no means of ascertaining how much Pauli had from
me between the years 1864 and 1881 (but it exceeded ;^3,5oo).
I kept no accounts ; I took no receipts from him ; the under-
standing was that he would repay me when he came into his
reversion. ... In 1879 I only admitted to my father having
helped Pauli from time to time ; the fact was, I had done every-
thing. ... I had more than shared every penny I had with
him, but I believed myself to be doing it out of income, and to
have a right to do it.

Throughout the long periods in which Butler was hard
pressed for sufficient money to exist — times in which
67

Aspects and Impressions

there were painful and unseemly squabbles about an
allowance between his father and himself — he was support-
ing Pauli, whose means of subsistence he took no pains
to investigate, and who, in full cognition of Butler's
attenuated sources of income, punctually took half for
himself. Mr. Festing Jones's statement is amazing :

Pauli was called to the Bar in 1867, and took chambers in
Lincoln's Inn for his work. He told Butler where they were,
so that he could write if he had any communication to make
to him that would not wait till they met ; hut Butler was not to
go there. Of course, he could have gone, but he did not. He
could have found out in a hundred ways where Pauli lived if
he had set about it; but, knowing that Pauli did not wish it,
he did nothing.

At last, in 1897, ^fter having shared his poverty with
this strange friend for thirty-three years, Butler read in
The Times that Pauli was dead. Then, at last, he made
inquiries, and found that for a great many years past
Pauli's income from the law had exceeded ;(^7oo a year,
and for nearly twenty had been over ;^ 1,000. Pauli left
;^9,ooo, not a penny of it to Butler, whose parasite he had
been for the greater part of his life, when every five-pound
note was of consequence to Butler. One knows not which
to be more astounded at — heartless greediness on the one
side, or fatuous simplicity on the other. When all the
evidence came out at last beyond all further concealment,
Butler wrote : " I understand now why Pauli preserved
such an iron silence when I implored him to deal with me
somewhat after the fashion in which I had dealt with
him." [That is to say, in telling him precisely what
Butler's exact financial position was.] "The iniquity of the
whole thing, as it first struck me in full force, upset me."

This "squalid and miserable story" is told with in-
exorable fullness by Mr. Festing Jones. What is very
remarkable about it is the evidence it gives of Buder's
irregular penetration into character. He could be ex-
tremely acute in one direction and absolutely obtuse in
68

Samuel Butler

another. The incredible indulgence which permitted him
to be the dupe and victim of a scoundrel like Pauli for
more than thirty years seems incompatible with the in-
tense and suspicious analysis which he expended on the
motives of his father. After all, when the worst of Canon
Butler is admitted, he was a Christian and a gentleman by
the side of the appalling Pauli. Yet Butler would sacri-
fice his father, and actually tell falsehoods, for the purpose
of screening and enriching Pauli (see Vol. I., p. 114),
of whose villainy he could at any moment have assured
himself, and with whom he practically admits that he had
nothing in common.

The Pauli episode is valuable in supplying light on
certain defects in Butler's intellectual composition. In
measure, it tends to explain the inconsistencies, the irregu-
larities of his mental life, and of his action as a scholar.
He was the opposite of those who see life steadily, and see
it whole. He had no wide horizons, but he investigated
a corner or a section of a subject wuth a burning glass
which left- all other parts of the surface in darkn"ess. There
were Paulis on his mental horizon ; there were in almost
everything he approached passages where his want of
appreciation, his want (let us boldly say) of elementary
insight, produced the oddest effect of imperfection. His
literary judgments were saugrenu to the last extreme.
What are we to think of a man who lays it down that
"Blake was no good because he learnt Italian to study
Dante, and Dante was no good because he was so fond
of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran
him; and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without
saying " ? There is no critical meaning in such outbursts ;
they would be almost imbecile in their aimless petulance
if we did not understand that Virgil and Dante and Blake
lay in the dark segment of Butler's vision, and that he had
not so much formed an adverse opinion of their merits as
no opinion at all. If, as surprisingly he did on every
occasion, he heaped contempt on Virgil, it was simply
because he wanted to get Virgil well out of the way of
Homer, on whom his enthusiasm was concentrated.
F 69

Aspects and Impressions

It was so in all things. Butler despised the great
Venetian painters, not because he had devoted attention
to their faults, but because they stood in the way of
Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, to whom he had dedicated
a frenzied cult. "Titian, Leonardo, Raffaelle and Michel
Angelo, well, to speak quite plainly, I like none of them,"
he wrote in the last year of his life. In music it was just
the same. Butler attached himself, from early youth to
the grave, to Handel in an almost maniacal infatuation.
In order to clear a space, as it were, round this solitary
object of his worship, he covered Beethoven and Bach
with contempt ; and if anyone forced him to listen to the
"Requiem " of Mozart, he stopped his ears and hummed
"Loathsome urns, disclose your treasure," to drown the
hideous Austrian discord. For Butler, "Bach wriggles;
Wagner writhes." All the masterpieces of the world of
music he sweeps together in a universal disapproval as
"heartless failures," whereas of Handel's least remarkable
passages he calls out, "Can human genius do more?"
The result is that Butler is interesting and sometimes
valuable when he praises ; when he blames, he is some-
times amusing, but more often impertinent and tiresome.
What is the point of calling Plato one of the "Seven
Humbugs of Christendom," or of talking of "that damned
Republic " ? To pretend to admire these peevish out-
bursts, however much we may be stimulated by the better
sides of Butler's intelligence, is abject.

No section of Mr. Festing Jones's biography is more
interesting than that in which, in the patient, judicious
manner in which he so eminently excels, he depicts the
relation of Butler to Miss Savage. Readers of The Way
of All Flesh are familiar with the figure of Alethea Ponti-
fex, who occupies the position of heroine in that novel.
It has long been known that this was the portrait of a
friend whom Butler had studied, confided in, and deeply
valued. In what degree it was an accurate portrait has
not hitherto been known. I have no hesitation in saying
that the chapters which deal with this situation — and they
are executed with as much delicacy as realism — form the
70

Samuel Butler

most unhackneyed and the most exciting section of Mr.
Jones's volumes. They illuminate in portions, and they
leave darker than ever in other parts, the rugged surface
of Butler's extraordinary character; and I regret that
exigencies of space do not permit me to do justice to
documents so remarkable. But yet, something I must say.

The Alethea of the novel was so far from being an
exact portrait that the sitter, after studying every line and
touch of it, is supposed, was supposed by Butler himself,
not to have perceived that it was intended for her. This,
however, w^e must regard as hardly possible in the case
of one so passionately clear-sighted, but there were many
reasons why she should adopt such an attitude. Eliza
Mary Ann Savage was a governess, whom Butler met
about 1870, when he and she were art students together
at Heatherley's. They were nearly of the same age,
which at that time would be thirty-four. They were
immediately drawn together by a singular parallelism in
temper and sympathy. Miss Savage read the MS. of
Ereivhon, and minutely criticized it. From this time,
1871 to 1885, when she died, Butler submitted to her
everything he wrote, and, obstinate as he was in the face
of all other censures, invariably remodelled his work in
accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. She
supported him in all his enthusiasms, and shared all his
prejudices. She was a very well-read woman, and was
able to follow Butler into the remotest recesses of his
studies. She responded to his lightest touch like a deli-
cate musical instrument, and yet was rigid in opposing
any divergence from what she conceived to be the normal
line his talent ought to take. She was as stringently
hostile to Christianity, as contemptuous of Darwin and
Huxley, as infatuated about Handel, as haughtily an
enfant terrible of the intelligence as he was, and the degree
to which the admirers of Butler's books are indebted to
her can never be definitely known, but is certainly very
great.

Alethea Pontifex, in The Way of All Flesh, is tall,
handsome, with fine blue eyes. Miss Savage was short,
71

Aspects and Impressions

insignificant, and plain, with brown eyes; she suffered
from hip disease; physically, she was quite unattractive.
This introduces into the real history an element of pathos
and of pain which raises it to a far higher level of human
interest than the novel has to offer us. To Miss Savage,
in her isolated state, Butler was the whole world; and
it is perfectly evident — Mr. Festing Jones need not hesi-
tate so conscientiously in admitting it — that she was
absorbingly, unalterably in love with Butler. She lived,
quite unupbraiding, in the intermittent light of his
countenance. For nearly twenty years they were, men-
tally, like a devoted husband and wife, yet the anomaly
of their relations never struck Butler, to whom Miss
Savage was a comrade of perfect sympathy, and no more.
He did not observe, until Miss Savage was dead, that
she had felt towards him otherwise than he felt towards
her. He wrote, "I valued her, but she perfectly under-
stood that I could do no more." Did she? Mr. Festing
Jones prints a sonnet of Butler's, written in 1901, which
seems to me to be one of the most amazing pieces of
self-revelation that I know :

And now, though twenty years are come and gone.

That little lame lady's face is with me still ;
Never a day but what, on every one,

She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.
She said she wished I knew not wrong from right;

It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen
Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite,

Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.
'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man

Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
A man will yield for pity if he can,

But if the flesh rebels, what can he do?

I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.

Such fragments of Miss Savage's letters as Mr. Festing
Jones prints show that she was an admirable correspondent.
Butler put her letters together in a separate collection,
1^

Samuel Butler

edited, annotated, and ready for the Press. This is to
be published some day in a volume by itself, and will
have a pathetic value. But I confess to a certain feeling
of regret that the inner being of this obscure, pathetic,
and self-sacrificing woman should be immolated any
further on the altar of Butler's egotism. My own instinct
would be to say : Let poor Miss Savage, out of whose
painful and imperfect existence so much "copy " has
already been made, sleep on undisturbed under her
mouldering headstone at Finchley. But Mr. Festing
Jones knows best.

The most agreeable parts of this biography, at all
events those which give us the most genial impression
of Butler as a companion, deal with his repeated visits to
Italy. These tours inspired, or were used to produce
material for, a very pleasant section of his literary work.
If we distinguish between the wit and picturesqueness of
the ornament in Butler's controversial writings, and the
actual basal texture of those writings, I do not see how
a reasonable criticism can any longer pretend to set high
value on his angry denunciations of the whole Darwinian
theory of evolution, or on his diatribes about Unconscious
Memory. There is a terrible work of his, published in
1887, called Ltick or Cufining as the Main Means of
Organic Modification; there is another, of 1882, called
Evolutioji, Old and New. They are unreadable. His
religious polemic was even more disagreeable than his
scientific, and the lumbering sarcasm of the attack on
Christianity, called The Fair Haven, is an epitome of all
that is most unpleasing in the attitude of Butler.
Unctuous sarcasm so sustained as to deceive the very
elect, and "affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy,"
have a tendency to grow rancid in the passage of years,
and to become exceedingly unappetizing. Samuel Butler,
whose rashness was astounding, had the courage to call
his homonym of the Analogy a "poor creature " ! What
would Joseph Butler, revisiting the glimpses of the moon,
think of the author of The Fair Haven?

There is nothing of this incongruity in the books which
73

Aspects and Impressions

are founded on memories of Italian travel. Here the
charm of Butler's style is expended, with a thousand
oddities and playfulnesses, on subjects which blossom
in its atmosphere. It is very strange that Alps and
Sanctuaries (1882), and Ex Voto (1888), should share the
neglect which was so unbrokenly the fate of Butler's
publications, for these were charming and original to a
high degree, and they illustrate, without any disadvantage,
the whimsical penetration of his mind and the playful
melody of his style at its best. The Authoress of the
Odyssey (1897), which Hellenists found it impossible to
take as a serious contribution to scholarship, was another
of these by-products of travel in Sicily, and contained
very numerous pages, which, whether convincing or no,
were exceedingly picturesque and entertaining. No cul-
tivated man or woman will, in the future, visit Trapani or
ascend to the platforms of Mount Eryx without remem-
bering how Butler was taken to the grotto where Ulysses
hid his treasure, or how the Sicilian descendants of the
Cyclopes treated him as a royal personage.

Not much new light is thrown on the purely literary
characteristics of Butler by Mr. Festing Jones's biography.
He has not dwelt at length on the individual works, nor
at all on the general position of their author among his
contemporaries. He left himself no space to go into such
questions, being fully occupied with the task of inter-
preting and illuminating the personal characteristics of
his subject. He is an unflinching portraitist, and in a
painting of Oliver Cromwell from the life would be sure
to do full justice to the wen. The rugged surface of
Samuel Butler lends itself to such realism — and I will not
say that Mr. Jones does not approach the confines of the
superfluous in the excessive minuteness of his notes. We
are assured that Butler took eight handkerchiefs and three
pairs of socks with him when he went abroad, and that
he very wisely carried diarrhoea pills in the handle half
of his Gladstone bag. When Butler bought himself a
new wash-hand basin, in 1887, the fact is duly recorded.
We are told that once, in 1886, he swept every corner of
74

Samuel Butler

every room of his lodgings with tea-leaves, and that it
made him perspire freely. That there will be readers
who do not care how many times Butler brushed his hair
every day, nor on what occasion he wore "the high hat
which appears in the corner of the picture in his room,"
I am not inclined to deny, but I am not of them. These
little things, recounted with Mr. Festing Jones's humorous
serenity, are my delight. If some contemporary had re-
corded the fact that Shakespeare habitually soaked the
crust of his manchet in his last mouthful of sack, or that
he wore out his left shoe faster than his right, how grateful
we should be for the information. Only, there must come
into our consideration : Are Butler and Shakespeare
figures of equal significance, apart from their shoes and
their hair-brushes?

There is less room for divergence of judgment on the
question of the way in which Mr. Jones has revealed the
moral and social characteristics of his hero. Here he could
hardly be excessive. The amiability, the ruggedness, the
nervous instability, the obstinacy as of a rock, the tender-
ness and the sardonic bitterness which made up so strange
an amalgam, are all frankly revealed. It is for us to
arrange them, if we can, into a consistent portrait of a
most inconsistent figure. Here is, taken at random, an
entry of Butler's own, which gives a good example of
several of his characteristics :

17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a
young Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog — an English
terrier. We were alone in the carriage the greater part of
the time, and I suppose the poor dog was bored ; at any rate,
after a while, he made up to me. He licked me all over my
face, and then began to pretend that my coat pocket had got
a rat in it which he must catch. I was so flattered at being
made up to by anyone or anything who seemed to tell me I
was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for rats all
over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful English,
and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish
Legation, and was very clever and nice.

Aspects and Impressions

The incident could hardly be more trifling, but it is

inimitably told; and it reveals not merely a mastery of

minute description, but the self-tormenting temperament

\of a man of extraordinary talent who, for some unfathom-

/able reason, though love was in his heart, was for ever

f out of harmony with the world, and suspicious of those

whom he would fain have ingratiated. Those are the main

lineaments which Mr. Festing Jones's biography reveals,

and they are those of a miniaturist touching his ivory

with a fastidious brush, and of a "born orphan " who

could not find a home in the wilderness of jarring

humanity.

76

A NOTE ON CONGREVE

CONGREVE'S principal Continental critic has re-
marked that literary history has behaved towards
him in a very stepmotherly fashion (sehr stiej-
miitterlich). There is no other English poet of equal
rank of the last two centuries and a half whose biography
has been so persistently neglected. When, in 1888, I
wrote my Life of Congreve I had had no predecessor since
John Oldmixon, masquerading under the pseudonym of
"Charles Wilson," published that farrago of lies and non-
sense which he called Memoirs of The Life, Writings and
Amours of William Congreve, Esq., in 1730. In this
kingdom of the blind, however one-eyed, I continue to
be king, since in the thirty-three years succeeding the issue
of my biography no one has essayed to do better what I
did as well as I could. The only exception is the William
Congreve, seiji Leben und seine Lustspiele, published in
1897 by Dr. D. Schmid, who was, I believe, and perhaps
still is, a professor in the University of Graz in Austria.
I darted, full of anticipation, to the perusal of Dr.
Schmid's volume, but was completely disappointed. He
reposes upon me with a touching uniformity; he quotes
me incessantly and with courteous acknowledgment ; but
I am unable to discover in his whole monograph one graip
of fact, or correction of fact, not known to me in 1888.

In spite of this, I have always believed that someone
with more patience and skill than I possess would be able
to add much to our knowledge of a man who lived with
the Pope and Swift and Addison of whom we know so
much. The late George A. Aitken, w^ho seemed to carry
about with him a set of Rontgen rays which he applied
to the members of the Age of Anne, would have been the
77

Aspects and Impressions

man to do it. Not very long before his lamented death
I urged the task upon Aitken; but his mind was set on
other things, on Prior in particular. I do not know why
it is that Congreve, one of the great dramatists of the
world, perhaps our greatest social playwright, seems to
lack personal attractiveness. It is a scandal that he has
1 never been edited. His plays are frequently, but always
imperfectly, reprinted, and without any editorial care. I
was rejoiced to see that Mr. Montague Summers, than
whom no one living is more competent to carry out such a
labour, proposed to edit Congreve's plays. But even he
did not intend to include the poems, the novel, or the
letters; and I have heard no more of his project. To the
book collector the folio publications of Congreve in verse
are precious and amusing, but they have never attracted
the notice of a bibliographer. Scholarship has, indeed,
been siiefmutterlich towards Congreve, as the Austrian
critic said.

My excuse for recalling this subject is the fact that I
am able, through the kindness of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, to
announce the existence of a work by Congreve hitherto
unknown and unsuspected in its original form. In the
matchless library of Mr. Wise there lurks an anonymous
quarto of which the complete title is: "An Impossible
Thing. A Tale. London : Printed : And Sold by J.
Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXX." This was shown
by Mr. Wise to several of our best authorities, who com-
bined in the conjecture that it must be a hitherto unknown
work by Prior. Yet since the poet's death — and this
shows how little anybody reads Congreve — the contents
of Mr. Wise's quarto have appeared in each successive
edition of the Poems. But before this was perceived
the truth had dawned upon Mr. Wise, who, turning over
the Historical Account of the English Poets, a publication
by Curll in 1720, found that the following entry occurs in
the "Corrigenda " :

Mr. Congreve. This Gentleman has lately oblig'd us with
two Tales from Fontaine, entitled,
78

A Note on Congreve

I. The Impossible Thing.

II. The Man That lost his Heifer.

These form his pamphlet of the same year, 1720. When
Mr. Wise was kind enough to point this out to me it
was only left for me to add that the anonymous Historical
Account was the work of Giles Jacob, the friend whose
notes on Congreve's life form the nucleus of all we know
about him. Thus the authorship of the two poems was
proved. And it was only after that proof that I turned
to the index of the old editions and found there the two
poems, lurking unsuspected. I blush to recall the painful
incident.

However, the separate publication of the two poems
in a quarto of 1720 is a wholly unrecorded fact, and
important to bibliographers. The Peasant in Search of
his Heifer is added apparently as an after-thought, to fill
up the sheet. An Impossible Thing opens with these
lines :

To thee, Dear Dick, this Tale I send,

Both as a Critick and a Friend.

I tell it with some Variation

(Not altogether a Translation)

From La Fontaine; an Author, Dick,

Whose Muse would touch thee to the quick.

The Subject is of that same kind

To which thy Heart seems most inclin'd.

How Verse may alter it, God knows ;

Thou lov'st it well, I'm sure, in Prose.

So without Preface, or Pretence,

To hold thee longer in Suspense,

I shall proceed, as I am able,

To the Recital of my Fable.

He does proceed, not without considerable indelicacy, but
in excellent running verse. The *'Dick " who was to
enjoy it I conjecture — and in this Mr. Austin Dobson
confirmed me — to have been Richard Shelton, who is con-
nected with Prior's Alma and A Case Stated. Prior and
Congreve have so much in common that it is tantalizing
79

Aspects and Impressions

not to be able to p^ersuade them to throw Hght upon one
another j they were haunting the same coffee-houses when
Swift was writing to Stella in 1710.

The discovery, after 200 years, of a unique copy of an
unsuspected separate publication by Congreve confirms
a suspicion of mine that other such pamphlets may exist.
The earliest attempt at a bibliography was made by Giles
Jacob, evidently under the poet's own eye, in 1720. Jacob
gives a list of poems, with which "the ingenious Mr.
Congreve, besides his excellent Dramatick Works, has
oblig'd the Publick," but he adds no dates. Of these
poems the first is An Epistle to the Right Honourable
Charles Lord Halifax, and the six next are odes of each of
which we possess the text in folio form. But of the Epistle
to Halifax no separate edition is known, and it appears
first in the octavo of 17 10. But I cannot help suspecting
that Giles Jacob possessed, or could refer to, a folio sheet
of (probably) 1694, the year in which Halifax, to reward
Congreve for the dedication of The Double Dealer, is
supposed to have appointed him a Commissioner for
licensing hackney coaches. But I have shown how con-
fused is all the evidence with regard to Congreve's offices,
which roused Thackeray to such superfluous indignation.
Perhaps the shilly-shallying of Charles Montague had
something to do with the suppression of an original folio
of the Epistle, if it ever existed. In any case, a single
sheet with, or more likely without, the signature of Mr.
Congreve is worth looking out for.

As thirty-three years have passed since my Life of
Congreve was published I venture to take occasion to men-
tion here one or two slight matters which I should like
any possessors of that volume to interpolate. If I had
the opportunity to issue a new edition I should further
enlarge on a matter which I did make prominent, the very
leading part which the veteran Dryden took in advancing
the fortunes of his young and hitherto unknown rival.
The episode is a charming one, and I have now some in-
stances of it which escaped me in 1888. As is known,
Congreve came up from the country some time in 1692.
80

A Note on Congreve

He was introduced by Southerne to Dryden, who took a
great fancy to him at once. Dryden was preparing a
composite translation of Juvenal, and he gave the young
man the Eleventh Satire to turn. Next came Dryden's
Per$iu$, to which Congreve prefixed a splendid poem of
compliment : the triumph of The Old Bachelor followed
in January. All this, and more, I worked out; but one
very interesting evidence of Dryden's assiduous kindness
escaped me. In 1705 was published as a folio pamphlet
the Ode on Mrs, Arabella Hunt singing, and I supposed
that this was the original appearance of this pindaric,
which is one of Congreve's best. But my attention has
been arrested by observing that 1705 was the year in
which Arabella Hunt died, and also that so early as 1693
Dryden published this ode in his Third Miscellany. The
Arabella Hunt ode therefore belongs to the beginning,
and not, as I supposed, to the close, of Congreve's brief
poetic career. It is a beautiful thing :

Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease ;
Be every loud tempestuous thought at peace ;
And every ruder gasp of breath
Be calm, as in the arms of Death,

and ends with a Keats-like couplet ;

Wishing forever in that state to lie,
For ever to be dying so, yet never die.

It is now plain that this ode was published as a book
at the death of the singer, but had been composed at least
twelve years earlier. Another instance of Dryden's con-
nexion with Congreve, which I observed too late to record
it, is the fact that the latter contributed a song to the Love
Triumphant of the former in 1694. ^^ the dedication of
that play Dryden speaks of "my most ingenious friend,
Mr. Congreve," who has observed "the mechanic unities "
of time and space strictly. Love Triumphant was Dry-
den's last play, and its failure was complete. A spiteful
81

Aspects and Impressions

letter-writer of the time gloats over its damnation because
it will "vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness."
All this confirms the idea that the elder poet's com-
plaisance in the younger was matter of general knowledge,
and Dryden 's withdrawal from the ungrateful theatre must
have been a blow to Congreve, who, however, practically
stepped at once into Dryden's shoes.

Another biographical crumb. Charles Hopkins, one
of the poet-sons of Ezekiel Hopkins, the once-famous
Bishop of Derry, was a protege of Dryden, and in 1697
brought out his second play, Boadicea, which he dedicated
to Congreve in a lon^ poem, from which we learn that
Hopkins was an intimate friend and disciple of the author
of The Double Dealer.

You taught me first my Genius and my Power,
Taught me to know my own, but gave me more.

He praises Congreve's verses, and then goes on to say,
in lines of conspicuous warmth and sincerity :

Nor does your Verse alone our Passions move ;

Beyond the Poet, we the Person love. v

In you, and almost only you, we find

Sublimity of Wit and Candour of the Mind.

Both have their Charms, and both give that delight.

'Tis pity that you should, or should not write.

He proceeds, enthusiastically, in this strain, and closes at
last in words which still carry a melodious echo :

Here should I, not to tire your patience, end,
But who can part so soon, with such a Friend?
You know my Soul, like yours, without design.
You know me yours, and I too know you mine.
I owe you all I am, and needs must mourn
My want of Power to make you some return.
Since you gave all, do not a part refuse.
But take this slender Offering of the Muse.
Friendship, from servile Interest free, secures
My Love, sincerely, and entirely yours.
82

A Note on Congreve

This is by no means the only occasion on which
Charles Hopkins proclaimed his gratitude and affection.
As early as 1694 he paid a tribute of friendship to Con-
greve, -who wrote a prologue to Hopkins's first tragedy,
Pyrrhus King of Epirus (1695). I think we may presume
that it was owing to the greater poet's influence that
Pyrrhus was put on the stage, for Congreve wrote a pro-
logue, in which he warmly recommended it, saying :

'Tis the first Flight of a just-feather'd Muse,

adding, to the audience :

Then spare the Youth ; or if you'll damn the Play,
Let him but first have his, then take your Day,

words which Congreve would hardly have used unless he
had been responsible for the production.

It is odd that Hopkins should speak so humbly and
Congreve dwell on his friend's inexperience, since Hop-
kins was at least six years older than Congreve, who was
now twenty-seven and pretended to be only twenty-five.
He enjoyed no further advantage from the devoted attach-
ment of Charles Hopkins, who retired immediately to his
father's home in Londonderry. Already he felt the decay
of "a weak and sickly tenement," and his last play,
pathetically entitled Friendship Improv'd (1697), was sent
to London from Londonderry with a preface that bewailed
his broken health. According to Giles Jacob, he was "a
martyr to the cause of hard drinking, and a too Passionate
fondness for the fair Sex." The same authority says that
Hopkins "was always more ready to serve others than
mindful of his own Affairs," and we can well believe it.
An hour before his death, which took place in 1700,
Charles Hopkins, "when in great pain," wrote a last copy
of verses, which have been preserved. And so Congreve
lost this most faithful henchman at the very moment when
his own last and perhaps greatest play. The Way of the
World, failed on the stage, and when he was most in need
of sympathy.

83

Aspects and Impressions

Now for a white sheet to wrap both Congreve and
myself. In 1888 I took credit, and not unjustly, for
having discovered that Congreve prefixed verses to the
first edition of a little rare book called Reliquce
Gethiniance, which were never reprinted until I restored
them, and that these were entirely different from those
he prefixed to the third edition of the same book in 1703,
the latter alone having been always since reprinted among
Congreve's verses. Both poems are conceived in a
Donne-like spirit of hyperbole. Grace, Lady Gethin,
about whom I have found out more since my Life of
Congreve was published, was a young Irish lady. Miss
Norton, who married an Irish baronet, Sir Richard
Gethin, and died at the age of twenty-one in 1697. She
secured a wide reputation for learning and piety, and she
was actually buried in Westminster Abbey. Her essays
— with mortuary folding-plates, again in the spirit of
Donne — were posthumously published and produced a
favourable sensation. But to my great confusion Leslie
Stephen, who had (marvellously) studied Lady Gethin,
pointed out to me, when he read my biography, that she
was a fraud, conscious or unconscious. Her so-called
works were cribbed out of several seventeenth-century
writers of morality, but particularly out of Bacon. She
had copied them into her commonplace book, doubtless
without guile. My dear friend and master grimly re-
marked, "I wonder neither you nor Congreve spotted
' reading makes a full man ' ! " But he never said a word
in print about our negligence, which deepens my remorse.
I suspect that Congreve, like myself, did not read the
ReliquicB very carefully, but it is strange that no other
of Lady Gethin's numerous contemporary admirers dis-
covered the mare's-nest.

In 1888 I was not able to describe Congreve's ode on
the Taking of Namur in its original form, but since then
I have secured a copy of the first edition of 1695. The
title is A Pindarique Ode, Humhly Offer'd to the King,
On His Taking Namure. By Mr. Congreve. There are
many differences of text, showing that the poet subjected
84

A Note on Congreve

the poem to careful revision. In this first form, the King,
afterwards spoken of as "William," is described and
addressed as "Nassaw"; perhaps the poet was advised
that His Majesty did not care to be incessantly reminded
of his Dutch origin. Here is a cancelled passage,
describing the horrors of the attack :

Cataracts of Fire Precipitate are driv'n

On their Adventurous Heads, as Ruin rain'd from Heaven . . .

Echoes each scalding step resound,
And horrid Flames, bellowing to be unbound,
Tumble with hollow rage in Cavern'd Ground.

Perhaps Congreve thought this was too boisterous. In
the Namur ode there are curious reminiscences of the battle
of the angels in Paradise Lost. There was no half-title to
this folio, let collectors take notice.

The complete neglect which has overtaken the minor
writings of Congreve is regrettable. His odes and pas-
torals are deformed by a too-conscious rhetoric, and his
imagery is apt to be what is called "artificial," that is
to say, no longer in fashion. But they bear evidence of
high cultivation and an elevated sense of style. When
Dr. Johnson said that The Mourning Muse of Alexis
(1695) was "a despicable effusion" he fell into the sin
of over-statement. I admit that this agony of regret for
the death of good Queen Mary H may not have been very
sincere, and that the imagery is often vapid. Yet the
poem is an interesting and a skilful exercise in a species
of art which has its place in the evolution of our literature.
It is not so good as INIarvell would have made it earlier
or as Collins later. But in 1695 I know not who could
have done it better except Dry den, and even he, if more
vigorous, was not commonly so melodious. That Con-
greve could not write a tolerable song I frankly admit.
To book-collectors, however, the separate minor publica-
tions of our poet seem to offer a field which is still un-
harvested. With Mr. Wise's new discovery, and with
the posthumous Letter to Viscount Cobham, there are
G 85

Aspects and Impressions

some nine or ten separate publications, besides the four
(or five, with The Judgment of Paris of 1701) quarto plays.
When to these we add the controversial pamphlets and
Squire Trelooby, in its two forms of 1704 and 1734, we
have quite an interesting little body of first editions for
the bibliophile to expend his energy in collecting.

Lovers of pleasure will think small beer of these
desultory annotations. But in the case of a great
dramatist like Congreve, whose career is very imperfectly
known to us, I hold that all information is welcome, even
though the separate details of it seem to be trivial. I
present these glimmerings in the hope that they may not
be useless to the future editor and biographer, whoever
he may be, whose lamp will throw my taper into the shade.

86

THE FIRST DRAFT OF SWINBURNE'S
ANACTORIA

NO modern poet offers a more interesting field for
critical examination in his MSS. than Swinburne
does, and in perhaps no other can the movement
of mind, under changes of mood, be so accurately followed.
Mis prose MSS. have a somewhat heavy uniformity, from
whicli litde is to be gathered, but the aspect of his written
verse is so diverse as to be almost bewildering in its
changes of form, not merely from one group of years to
another, but even in the effusions of a single day. After
long consideration, and a study of a multitude of MSS.
\\ritten between 1857 and 1909, I have come to the conclu-
sion that the critical value of Swinburne's drafts depends
very much upon the spirit in which he happened to compose
his poems. There were evidently three methods in his use.
Some time ago there turned up a large number of dramatic
and lyrical exercises, written by Swinburne as an under-
graduate. These have greatly modified our conception of
his early work, and they reveal in the apparently idle youth
an amazing persistence m self-apprenticeship to the craft
of verse. I hope to find leisure on a future occasion to
describe these interesting and voluminous papers : in the
meantime I only mention them here, in order to point out
that they are written, with curious uniformity, and with
very few corrections, in a hard, angular handwriting which
Swinburne presently abandoned, but which resembles the
formal script in which his later Putney poems appear to be
composed.

I say "appear to be," because I am convinced, and my
conviction is supported by the evidence of those who lived
with him, that he adopted in later life the practice of com-
87

Aspects and Impressions

posing and practically finishing his poems in his head
before he put anything down on paper. He used to be
heard walking up and down his room at The Pines, and
then pausing awhile, evidently to write down what he had
polished in his head. This accounts for the "clean " look
of most of his later MSS., which appear to be first drafts,
and yet have few corrections. What we now discover from
the undergraduate MSS. of which I have spoken above is
that, apparently, he adopted in early youth the plan to
which he was to revert in old age. But of this plan there
might be two varieties; Swinburne might work up his
stanzas to perfection in his brain before writing anything,
or he might be inspired with such a flow of language that
the finished poem would slip smoothly from his brain.
Doubtless there Avas something of both these in his
practice, but I incline to think the former by far the most
frequent. From neither can we obtain much impression of
the mechanism of his invention.

But there was a third method, of which I am about to
describe a peculiarly interesting example, which the poet
adopted in the hey-dey of his poetical career. Soon after
he left Oxford, perhaps in i860, his handwriting changed
its character; it became less boyish, but more crabbed and
careless. I think that the weakness of his wrist may have
been the cause of this alteration. It is particularly marked
in the period from 1862 to 1870. His later writing was
emphatic in its stiff inelegance, but usually legible ; the
script of his middle period was, at its best, lax and
straggling, at its worst almost indecipherable. But it
varied extravagantly, so much so that it is often difTficult to
believe that the same pen, and still more that the same
hour, could have produced such violently diverse exhibi-
tions. It has gradually dawned upon me, while helping
Mr. Wise to disentangle an accumulation of rough copies
and fragments, that the cause of this diversity lay in the
degree of excitement which Swinburne put into the act of
composition. He was always paroxysmal, always the
victim of excruciating intellectual excitement which
descended upon him like the beak of the Promethean

The First Draft of Swinburne's Anactoria

vulture. To discover tlie points .it which, in a particular
composition, this fury of inspiration fell upon him, is to
get a little closer to the secret of Swinburne's astonish-
ing virtuosity, and is my excuse for the following
observations.

So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved,
principally in the newspaper bundles which he so oddly
carried with him, without ever examining, through all his
peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it is particu-
larly vexatious that those which we could least afford to
spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868,
are very exiguously represented. No scrap of The Queen
Mother has turned up, nor of the published form of
Rosamond (an undergraduate sketch of this play remains).
The original MS. of Chastelard exists only in a few frag-
ments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean
copy for the press. According to the evidence of George
Meredith, the first draft of Laiis Veneris was written in red
ink; the existing version, though containing corrections
and cancelled passages, is written in black ink, and shows
no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a
transcript. Of Poems and Ballads no general MS. exists,
but portions of the "copy" sent to the printers are in
various collections. Most of these are transcripts, and
show no sign of emotion or excitement. Several first
drafts of Poems and Ballads, however, have been pre-
served, and of these the most remarkable that I have
examined is that of Anactoria, of which I will now give
some account.

Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions
which collectors of autographs commonly desiderate.
They are never signed and rarely headed. That of the
long poem afterwards called Anactoria has neither a title
nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or
rather wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue
foolscap, the water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless
the date of the composition of the poem. These sheets
were thrown away, and came into our hands in a great
disorder of papers, mostlv worthless, which left The Pines
89

Aspects and Impressions

after Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in
the welter of manuscript, my eye caught the line

Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air,

and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the
bundle, five sheets were identified, but unfortunately one
sheet was missing. By a happy chance, this also turned
up in another parcel three years later, and the first draft is
now, I believe, complete, although one passage in the
published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent.

The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no
peculiarity in the opening eight lines, which, with the
slight exception of "Sting " instead of "Blind " in line 2,
are identical with the published version of 1866. The
handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 6o's,
crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort
of frenzy takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper,
in lines that slope more and more rapidly downwards, and
in such a stumbling and trembling hand that they are with
great difficulty to be spelt out, are interpolated the lines :

Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,

And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.

I feel thy blood against my blood ; my pain

Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

Then, in very small clear script, opposite this outburst, is
written, by itself, like a solo on a flute :

Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,
Breast kindle breast and either burn one hour.

To this immediately follows:
In her high place in Paphos,

which is the opening of line 64 in the published version.
But the first draft stops here, leaving that half-line un-
cancelled, and proceeds quietly, in a large hand.

Saw love, a burning flame from crown to feet,
90

The First Draft of Swinburne's Anactoria

and so on for six lines which are now to be found in the
middle of the poem. Thereupon follows a breathless inter-
lude of six couplets, scribbled with extreme violence and
so curiously interwoven that the only way to explain their
relation is to quote them :

I would my love could slay thee; I am satiated

With seeing- thee live, and fain would have thee dead,

Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake

Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;

Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill.

Intolerable interludes, and inlinite ill;

I would earth had thy body as fruit to cat.

And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,

Intense device, and superflux of pain,

Relapse and reluctation of the breath,

Dumb tunes and shuddering- semitones of death.

If this passage be compared with the published text, it
will be observed that firstly, there are, with the single
alteration of "kill" for "slay," no verbal modifications
whatever : and that secondly the couplets are shifted about
like counters in a game, or as if they were solid objects
which might be put here, there, or anywhere in a liquid
setting. The first draft of A Song of Italy, now in the
possession of ]\Ir. Thos. J. Wise, presents the same
characteristics, though in a less degree.

We are still on the opening sheet of the draft of
Anactoria, and it now presents to us, quietly and con-
scientiously written in the middle of the page :

For I beheld in sleep the light that is
In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
Of body and soul that mix with eager tears,
And laughter stinging thro' the eyes and ears,

a sort of tessera evidently left there to be fitted in whenever

a favourable blank presented itself; we find it, without

the smallest change of language, fixed in the middle of the

91

Aspects and Impressions

poem. It is noticeable that the fragment "In her high
place in Paphos" is now utilized.

A storm of excitement presently ruffles the poet, and he
turns the sheet in such agitation that he holds it upside-
down. Without leading up to it in any way, he starts a
passage

She came and touched me, saying "Who doth thee wrong,
Sappho? "

which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited
because they contain several of the very rare instances in
which the draft slightly differs verbally from the text of
1866:

Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" she said:
"For she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
For she shall give thee gifts that will not take,
Shall kiss that will not kiss thee " {yea, kiss me)
"When / would not, etc."

We presently come across the only couplet in the whole
poem which was cancelled in the first draft, and yet re-
appears in the published text. This is :

Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods.
The young men and the maidens and the gods,

now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in
the first draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the
pen, so that it looks as if a dust-storm involved it. Written
with frenzied violence, almost perpendicularly, the draft
then presents a couplet :

Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine
The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,

for which a place is now found immediately before the

"Bound with her myrdes " couplet. The ecstasy of the

poet seems to have suddenly flagged here, and there follows

92

The First Draft of Swinburne's Anadoria

immediately, in sedate script, uitli even lines, the
passage

Alas, that neither moon nor sun nor dew

Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,

Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,

Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease.

Till time wax faint in all his periods,

which now takes its place near the very close of the poem.
The actual closing lines are, in like fashion, appended to
the third page of the draft. They read as follows :

Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,
And lay to slake the unqiienchahle desire
Lethean lotus on a lip of fire,
And pour around and over and under me
The wake of the insuperable sea.

There was evidently on the poet's part no original inten-
tion of utilizing these lines as a conclusion to the poem.
I give them here because they present the solitary instance
of important verbal alteration to be found in the whole text
of 1866.

It would baffle the most meticulous investigation to
restore the innumerable false starts, broken lines, and
rejected readings which underlie the text of the Draft.
There is no question here of Swinburne's creatingor polish-
ing anything in his mind, the whole work of composition
proceeds on the paper itself, and what is very curious is the
fact that nothing of any merit or technical beauty seems,
so far as it is possible to decipher the cancelled verses, to
be lost. As soon as ever the expression became adequate
the line was left, and was never modified ; as long as it was
inadequate, it was pitilessly rejected, and the verse not
passed till it satisfied the ear and imagination of the poet.
What is interesting is that this work was carried out with
the pen, and not, as was the practice in Swinburne's later
years, with the mind ; and nothing could be more opposed
to the popular notion of Swinburne as the inspired im-
93

Aspects and Impressions

provisatore than all this evidence of intense laborious
application to his creative task. In fact the more the
original MSS. of Swinburne are examined, the more
clearly is he revealed to us as an artist equally sedulous
and sensitive, working by fits and starts, in gusts of over-
whelming emotion, but always sufficiently master of him-
self to recognize, with finality, when the exact form of
expression had been reached. Having recognized it, he
did not, like Tenn)'Son, Landor and other poets, fidget any
further with it, but left it verbally permanent.

On the other hand, the draft of Anactoria proves, what
we might have suspected, that if Swinburne completed his
verbal text in his first movement of laboured inspiration,
he made no effort then to build up his poem. It may be
observed that Dolores is a rosary of stanza-beads on an
invisible string; in other words, that the string might be
broken, the beads shaken together, and the stanzas
arranged in an entirely new sequence, without any injury
to the effect of the poem. In other cases, and these some
of Swinburne's finest lyrics, the same want of progression
is to be noted. But we have not been able to witness the
process before, nor w^ere we prepared to find it working in
a poem which is so elegiacal as Anactoria. Yet the evi-
dence of the First Draft is positive. It is now clear that
Swinburne forged his brilliant Dryden-like couplets as
though each one were a stanza, and practically treated
them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a
scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized
him.

We seem, therefore, to be in the presence of a curious
phenomenon. Whereas in the case of most poets the
general outline of the work precedes the execution of it in
detail, Swinburne offers us the paradox of an execution
carried to the utmost finish before the act of evolution
begins. He takes a bag-ful of couplets, all polished to the
finest point, and — on some subsequent occasion — he builds
these up into a poem which has the aspect of inevitable
growth. The First Draft of Anactoria, which I have
attempted to describe, is totally unintelligible, a chaos of
94

The First Draft of Swinburne's Anadoria

Rodin-likc fragments, unless we accept this theory of the
poet's method.

One point remains to be stated. Tlie published text of
Anactoria contains 304 lines. Of these I have found,
scattered over the tract of delirious manuscript, 270. It is
curious that not a single verse should have been added by
the poet when he came to distribute and arrange his cluster
of couplets, the solitary accession to the text being the solid
passage of 34 lines in the middle of the poem, beginning

Or say what God above all gods and years
With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears.

Of this, not a single trace is to be found in the Draft.
My first supposition was that the sheet containing these
lines was lost, as might well be when we consider the
accidental and fortuitous way in which the rest was
retrieved. But I have come to the conclusion that this is
not the case. The text in the Draft stops at the line

The mystery of the cruelty of things

without any sign that the idea of the impassive harshness
of Fate was to be expanded. The 34 lines which now
follow have, moreover, a character that distinguishes them
from the rest of Anactoria, with which they are not quite
In keeping. They leave the individual passion of Sappho
entirely out of sight, and they are instinct with an order
of theological ideas which occupied Swinburne in 1864
and 1865, when he was writing Atalanta in Calydon and
the earliest of Songs before Sunrise. They are on a
higher philosophical plane than the melodious ravings of
the love-sick poetess, and the more we read them, the more
may we be persuaded that they are an after-thought.

95

THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET

THE fashion of the moment, whether in Hlerature or
in art, whether in England or in France, favours
what is rough, vivid and undisciplined. A new-
generation of readers welcomes the lyrical effusions of the
cowboy, the lumberman, the tramp, and even the apache.
It accepts Bubu de Montparnasse as a hero and does not
shrink from overhearing the confidences of a burglar.
There is no reason why we should exercise our sarcasm
over these naivetes of taste, while indeed, as social beings,
we are even entitled to rejoice at them, since, in the
language of practical £EStheticism, a positive always in-
volves a negative. If this age dotes on the dirtiness of
tramps, it is because every one of us is obliged to be
occupied and clean; and if the apache is the object of our
poetry, it is because, in our, extremely settled, confident
and comfortable lives, we miss the excitement of being in
personal danger. But let the delicate social balance of
our existence be again disturbed, let us become practically
accustomed to starvation and outrage and murder, and
not another strophe would our poets address to the drunken
navvy or the grimy bathchair-man. If London or Paris
were to burn, if only for a fortnight, literature and art
would hurry back to the study of princesses and to the
language of the Golden Age.*

No more striking instance of this oscillation is to be
found in history than is afforded by France at the open-
ing of the seventeenth century, in the creation of what is
called the vie de salon. This movement, the most civiliz-
ing, the most refining in the intellectual life of France,

1 I leave these airy words of prophecy as they stood in 1912 before
the cataclysm I (1922.)

97

Aspects and Impressions

was the direct outcome of the convulsion of the civil wars
It was the ugliness, the wickedness, the brutality of the
reigns of the later Valois which made the best minds of
Paris determine to be gentle, beautiful and delicate under
Louis XIII. Forty years of savage rapine had laid a
severe embargo upon civilization, and no picture of France
in 1625 can be complete without a glance at the back-
ground of 1575. In that half-century of administrative
disorder, in the bitter and distracted state of country life,
the population had lost confidence in virtue, and had be-
come rude and dishonest. One of the Venetian ambas-
sadors, travelling through France, declared of the French-
men w'hom he met, that "the sight of blood had made
them cunning, coarse and wild." If such was the con-
dition of the countryside, the towns were even worse.
There resulted from the misery after the siege of Paris a
universal weariness, a longing for tolerance in man to
man, a yearning for refinement in private life, for
security, for cultivation, for repose of mind and body
and estate.

That Henri IV was a Protestant has led, perhaps, to
some injustice being done to his memory in a Catholic
country. But he deserved w-ell of France in this critical
moment. Every necessity of life had become extrava-
gantly dear, every branch of industry depressed, if not
extinct, when he came to the throne. He set himself to
be the guardian of trade, and of the arts. He rebuilt
cities, and a contemporary reported of him that "no sooner
was he master of Paris, than the streets were swarming
with masons." The shrewdness of Henri IV broke down
the old superstition, of which Sully made himself the
obstinate spokesman, that agriculture was the only source
of wealth for France. The King persisted in encouraging
the manufactures of silk and linen ; in widening the circle
of commercial interests; in teaching Frenchmen to achieve
wealth and honour as architects, painters, sculptors and
cabinet-makers. The prestige of the military nobles grew
less and less, that of the bourgeoisie grew more and more,
while between them a new class, refined, intelligent, a
q8

The Hotel de Rambouillet

little tiitiid and supple in their professional adroitness,
that nouvellc aristocralie de robe, of which M. Lavisse has
spoken, came to the front and gave its tone to the surface
of life.

The general trend of the best thought, at tiie beginning
of the seventeenth century, was towards the polishing of
society, left roughened and rusty by the long wars of
religion. But the court of Henri IV was too coarse, and
too little in sympathy with the mental aspirations of the
age, to carry out this design, which needed other influences
than those which could emanate from Marie de M^dicis.
Meanwhile, the great importance of the provincial centres
had rapidly declined, and it was Paris that gave the tone
to France. This then was the moment when a peculiarly
Parisian centre was needed, independent of the court, yet
in political sympathy with it, a centre of imagination and
intelligence not too austere in its morals, not too pedantic
in its judgments, to include the characteristic minds of
the age, whatever their limitation or peculiarity; and yet
definitely, unflinchingly and for a sufficient length of time,
radiating politeness and authority. Such a Parisian
centre must be aristocratic, yet liberal and intelligent; it
must lay dow^n rules of conduct, and contrive to get them
obeyed; it must be recognized and haunted by the first
men and women of the century; it must be actuated in
equal proportions by the genius of discipline, and by
that of easy grace and accomplished gallantry. In short,
it must be what Providence astonishingly provided for
French society at that moment of its sorest need, the un-
paralleled Hotel de Rambouillet, with, as its prophetess
and chatelaine, one of the most charming women who have
ever occupied the pen of the memoir-maker.

In observing the history of the famous Chambre Bleue,
it cannot but strike an English critic how^ far more
articulate French opinion was than English in the seven-
teenth century. Although, as we shall presently see,
documents have been slow in forthcoming, they existed,
and still exist, in profusion. But while we can now study,
almost from day to day, the intrigues, the amusements and
99

Aspects and Impressions

the enthusiasms of the group in the Rue Saint-Thomas,
the record of a similar salon open in England at the same
epoch is still shrouded in a darkness which is likely never
to be penetrated. So far as we can venture to judge there
must have been many points of likeness between the
Marquise de Rambouillet and Lucy Countess of Bedford.
The circle of the friends of each was illustrious. Donne
was a greater poet-divine than Cospeau or Godeau ; our
national vanity may fairly set Daniel and Drayton against
Voiture and Chapelain, while even Corneille is not shamed
by being balanced by Ben Jonson. The coterie of the
Countess of Bedford may probably have been less
wealthy, less sparkling, more provincial than that of
Madame de Rambouillet, but the melancholy thing is
that we lack the opportunity of comparing them. Save
for vague allusions in the poets, and for a dim tradition
of politeness, we form no detailed impression of the feasts
of wit at Twickenham, whereas about those in the Rue
Saint-Thomas we know almost as much as heart can wish.
In the communication of social impressions England
stood much farther behind France in the seventeenth cen-
tury than the individual genius of her writers accounts
for. We have, however, one possible recompense : the
.field of irresponsible conjecture is infinitely wider in our
island chronicle. In France, even the craziest of faddists
could not hope for a hearing if he suggested that the
tragedies of Pierre Corneille were secretly written by
Richelieu in his lighter moments.

On the history of the Hotel de Rambouillet the docu-
ments which survive are very numerous, and probably
have not yet been exhaustively examined. The seven-
teenth century in France was awake to the importance of
its own immortality, and set down the records of its social
and literary glory with complacency. The memorials of
the Hotel de Rambouillet to be found scattered over the
works of such contemporaries as Segrais, Pellisson and
Conrart have long been known. The poems and corre-
spondence of Voiture, of course, form a mine of treasure,
which was first competently worked by Ubicini in his

lOO

The Hotel de Rambo'uitlet

edition of Voiture's works. It is now sifted to its last crumb
of gold by M. Emile Magne in the eloquent and learned
volumes which he has just published. There is also, and
most important of all, Tallemant des R^aux, of whom I
shall presentl}' speak at greater length. M. Magne and M.
Collas, with Voiture and Chapelain respectively in their
particular thoughts, have turned over the priceless wealth
of AISS. in the Archives nationales. It is probable that
we now possess, thanks to the researches of these scholars,
as full an account of the Hotel de Rambouillet as we are
likely to obtain. It may be pointed out that these exact
records, founded upon positive documents, show the
danger of such hypotheses as not a few previous
historians have rashly taken up. In the light of present
knowledge, it is necessary to use not merely Roederer
(1835), but even the more accurate Livet (1870), with
caution.

The Hotel existed, as a centre of light and civility,
for nearly seventy years, and involved the whole careers
of two generations. Its history, which was developed by
( ircumstances, and somewhat modified in its course by
changes of taste, found no chronicler until it had existed
some twenty years. That preliminary period, from the
death of Henri IV to the arrival of Tallemant and Voiture,
is precisely the time about which we should like to know
most, and about which we are doomed to know least.
The violent close of the reign, in a last wild crime, had,
as we see from every species of evidence, brought with
it a longing for serenity and repose. The keynote of the
best society became a cultivation of simplicity, refinement,
and delicacy. This growth of a new spirit was identified
with the Marquis and Marquise of Rambouillet, but
exactly how at first we are at a loss to tell, and even
M. Magne is silent. A careful setting side by side of
scattered impressions may enable us, however, while
avoiding these hypotheses of which we have given warn-
ing, to form some idea of the foundation of the Hotel and
its prestige.

Charles d'Angenncs, Marquis of Rambouillet and
H loi

Aspects and Impressions

Pisani, who has given its title to the celebrated union of
hearts, must not long detain us, for the excellent reason
that not much is recorded about him. He was probably
born about 1577, and he died in Paris in 1652, having
become blind about twelve years earlier. His eyesight
was very peculiar; perhaps he was colour-blind. On this
subject he was sensitive, and tried to conceal his con-
dition. On one occasion, when the Due de Montausier,
who was known to have recently ordered a gorgeous scarlet
costume, appeared at the Hotel de Rambouillet, his host
called out "Ah! Monsieur, la belle escarlate ! " — which
was unlucky, because the Due had happened to call in a
black suit. Tallemant says that the Marquis "avait
terriblement d'esprit, mais un peu frondeur." In this he
doubtless resembled most of the wits of that age, who
liked to let their antagonists feel that there were claws
under the fur. In wit his wife, with her sweet considera-
tion and delicate humorous tact, was immeasurably his
superior; it was she, and not he, who gave the Hotel its
famous amenity. We must not measure this in all things
by our standards. About 1625 there was quite an inun-
dation of spiteful, and sometimes obscene, verse in France,
and this has to be taken into consideration in dealing with
the salons. The Hotel de Rambouillet kept this in some
check, but was amply aware of the entertainment to be got
by clothing satire — what Agrippa d'Aubigne called la
malplaisante verite — in smooth and well-turned verse.
The Marquis was himself a versifier, and he shared to the
full his wife's respect for letters.

There is nothing, however, to show that this agree-
able man would have been able, by his unaided talents,
to make a mark upon the age he lived in. He was the
satellite of an infinitely more refulgent luminary, his
extraordinary wife. If there is such a thing as social
genius, on the same lines as literary or artistic genius,
this was undoubtedly possessed, in a very high degree,
by Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. She
was born at Rome in 1588; half an Italian, her mother was
a Roman princess, Julia Savella; and when, long after-

I03

The Hotel de Rambouillet

wards, the Marquise had become not merely French, but
almost the culture of France incarnate, she loved to dwell
on her Italian parentage. Tallemant tells us that she
always thought the Savelli the best family in the world;
it was her faith. At the age of six, she became a
naturalized French citizen, and in January, 1600, being in
her twelfth year, she was married to Charles d'Angennes,
who, his father being still alive, was then Vidame du
Mans. Her own sober and stately father, the Marquis
de Pisani, was just dead. He had left Catherine a con-
spicuous heiress. In later years, she spoke with charac-
teristic humour of the way in which she was intimidated,
poor child of twelve, by her husband's years, since he
was twenty-three, and she said that she had never become
quite used to feeling grown-up in his presence. But this
was her whimsical way of talking, for there really existed
between them the closest and most intimate affection.
The Marquis and the Marquise were always in love with
one another, throughout their extended married life of
more than half a century; and in that age of light loves
and cynical relationships, even baseless ill-nature never
found any serious charge of frivolity to bring against this
gracious lady.

It is true that it could not be difficult to show com-
plaisance to Catherine de Rambouillet. She was never
dull, never inattentive, never indiscreet. We hear that
sfie had an extraordinary native gift for being present
when she was wanted, and occupied elsewhere when her
company would have been inconvenient. As years grew
upon her, it seems as though this instinct for pleasing
became a little too emphatic. Almost the only fault which
any chronicler brings against her is that, towards the end,
she was not critical enough, that she liked too many
people, that her individuality melted into a general indul-
gence. But she was surrounded by petulant poets and
snarling courtiers, and that this mild censure of her should
be insinuated is, probably, but another tribute to her tact.
She was like Milton's Lady; not indeed "chained up in
alabaster," but serene, open-eyed and gay in the midst
103

Aspects and Impressions

of a monstrous rout of ambitions and vanities which often
resembled "stabled wolves or tigers at their prey." One
of her most striking characteristics obviously was her
power of ruling a society from its centre without making
her rule oppressive. All the anecdotes of her discipline
in her salon show the coolness of her judgment and the
velvet strength of her hand. She was capable of strong
dislike, yet with an Italian faculty for concealing it. She
hated Louis XIII to the inmost fibre of her being, for
what seemed to her his despicable qualities, yet he never
discovered it.

Those who regard Catherine de Rambouillet as one of
the most engaging figures of Europe in the seventeenth
century, must regret that, from an age where portrait-
painting was so largely cultivated, no picture of her has
come down to us. All we know is that she was beautiful
and tall; the poets compared her to a pine tree. It was
supposed that she never consented to sit to a painter, but
M. Magne has discovered that there were portraits.
Scudery, he believes, possessed engravings from paintings
by Van Mol and by du Cayer. The earlier of these,
painted in 1645, represented her gazing at the dead body
of her father. These works of art appear to be hopelessly
lost. We are thrown back on the written "portraits," in
the alembicated style of the middle of the century, which
adorn a host of novels and poems. Of these the fullest
is that introduced by Madeleine de Scud6ry into the
seventh volume of her huge romance, Le Grand Cyrus.
M. Emile Magne, confronted with the "precious" terms
of this description, and the vagueness of it, loses his
temper with poor Mile, de Scudery, whom he calls cette
pecore. It is true that the physical details which would
interest us are omitted, but it is hardly true to say, that
"il est impossible de rien demeler au griffonage [de Mile,
de Scudery], sinon que Mme. de Rambouillet etait belle."
This is not quite just, and to avenge the great Madeleine
for being called a pecore, I will quote, what M. Magne
surprisingly omits, part of the character of Cl^omire, the
pseudonym of Mme. de Rambouillet in Cyrus:

The Hotel de Rambouillet

She is tall and graceful. The delicacy of her complexion
is beyond expression. The eyes of Cl^omire are so admirably
beautiful that no painter has ever been able to do justice to
them. All her passions arc in subjection to her good sense.

This might be more precise, but the touch about the eyes
is helpful. Chapelain celebrated (in 1666, just after her
death)

Cet air, cette douceur, cette grdce, ce port,
Ce chef d'oeuvre admir(^ du Midi jusqu'au Nord;

And Tallemant, always the best reporter, speaks of the
permanent beauty of her complexion, which she would
never consent to touch artificially. The only concession
to fashion which she made in old age was to rouge her
lips, which had turned blue. Tallemant wished she would
not do even this. When she was very old, her head
shook with a sort of palsy; this was attributed to her
having indulged too much in the eating of pounded
ambergris, but perhaps a more obvious reason could be
found for so natural an infirmity.

In an age so troubled and so turbulent as that of
Henri IV, public attention was concentrated in wonder-
ment on the serene beatitude of the Rambouillets. "So
rest, for ever rest, O princely pair I " the admiring court
might be conceived as saying to a couple so dignified, so
calm and so unaffected in their attachment. "Tout le
monde admire la magnifique entente, a travers leur vie
limpide, du Marquis et de la Marquise." Their limpid
life — that was the just description of a mode of conduct
so rare in that age, and at that social elevation, as to be
relatively unique. What existences the reverse of limpid,
lives tortured and turbid and mud-stained, do memoir-
writers of that time, the Segrais and the Tallemants, reveal
on all sides of them 1 Both were gifted, and each was
persuaded of the excellence of learning and literature,
although in talents the wife considerably surpassed the
husband. Madame de Rambouillet was versed in several
literatures. She spoke Italian and Spanish, the two
105

Aspects and Impressions

fashionable languages of the time, to perfection. She
loved all beautiful objects, and not one of the fine arts
failed to find eager appreciation from her. In order to
enjoy the sources of poetic distinction, she taught herself
Latin, that she might read Virgil in the original. But she
soon relaxed these studies, which might easily have landed
her in pedantry. She became the mother of seven
children, to whose bringing-up she gave strict attention.
She found that her health, although her constitution was
good, needed care. Perhaps she gave way, a little, to an
amiable Italian indolence ; at all events, the strenuousness
which her early years had threatened subsided into a
watchful, hospitable, humorous and memorable hospi-
tality. If there could be rank maintained in such matters,
Madame de Rambouillet would probably take place as
the most admirable hostess in history.

But, to entertain, a house was needed. The old
Marquis de Pisani had bought, in 1599, a ramshackle
dwelling, close to the Louvre, in the Rue Saint-Thomas,
which became, at his death, the property of his daughter.
In 1604 when, it is to be noted, she was only sixteen years
of age, she pulled it down and built the famous H6tel on
the site.

Young as she was, it is certain that the Marquise was
herself the architect of the Hotel de Rambouillet. A
professional architect had been called in to rebuild the
house, but when he submitted his designs to her they
dissatisfied her by their conventionality. Tallemant
describes them — a saloon on one side, a bedroom on the
other, a staircase in the middle, nothing could be more
poor. Moreover, the courtyard was pinched in extent and
irregular in shape. One evening, after she had been
dreaming over the drawings, the young Marquise called
out "Quick! some paper! I have thought of what I
want ! " She had been trained to use a pencil, and she
immediately drew out an elevation, which the builders
followed point by point. Her design was so bold, so
original, and so handsome, that the house made a sen-
'iation in Paris. The Queen-Mother, when she built the
106

The Hotel de Rambouillet

Luxembourg, sent her architects to study the Hdtel de
Rambouillet before they started their plans.

In all this matter of the foundation of the Hotel and
the opening of the famous salon, M. Magne has made
considerable discoveries, which should be distinguished
from much in his charming books in which he has had
no choice but to follow earlier published authorities. He
has made excellent use of the Inventaires of 1652, 1666
and 167 1, to which attention had, however, already been
drawn by M. Charles Sauze. But a ground plan of the
Hotel de Rambouillet, from a contemporary map of Paris
by Gomboust, is less known, and a reproduction of this is
a singular aid to the reader of M. Magne's Voiture. We
see that it stood actually next door to the famous Hotel
de Chevreuse, in comparison with which, in its sparkling
newness, in its slated turrets and its charming combina-
tions of pale stone and salmon-coloured brick, it seemed
an expression of the new age in a triumphant defiance of
the old. From both houses could be seen, just across the
quiet Rue Saint-Thomas, and over a strip of waste ground,
the massive contour of the Louvre; a great garden, on the
west side, stretched away behind the house, down to the
corner of the Rue de Richelieu.

M. Magne has discovered that M. and Mme. de
Rambouillet took up their abode in their new house
early in 1607; this fixes what has hitherto been
quite vague, the commencement of the H6tel de Ram-
bouillet. But the Marquise was still only nineteen years
of age, and it would be a mistake to suppose that,
precocious as people were in those days, she began
at once to exercise her celebrated hospitality, or to fill
the rooms with tapestry, statues and men of wit. This
came on gradually and naturally, without any violence of
forethought. It has been suggested that the Marquise
founded her salon, or, less pompously, began to gather
congenial friends about her, in 1613. It is difficult to say
on what documents this exact date is based. Her known
aversion from Louis XUI, and her growing preference for
receiving her friends at home over appearing in a crowd
107

Aspects and Impressions

at court — both of them, doubtless, symptoms of her
personal delicacy, which shrank from the suspicion of
roughness — were probably emphasized after the murder
of Concini in 1617, when the great nobles, who had defied
the w-eak regency of Marie de Medicis, boldly swept back
into Paris. Doubtless this was the time when Madame de
Rambouillet began to practise a more cloistered virtue
among the splendour and fragility of her treasures, and
first intimated to noble and elegant friends, who were
scandalized by the rowdiness of the Louvre, that here
was an asylum where they might discuss poetry for
hours on the velvet of her incrusted couches, or walk, in
solemn ranks, among the parterres of her exquisite walled
garden.

The character of pedantry and preciosity which the
Hotel afterwards incurred, is not to be traced in any of
its original features. In its early years there was no
atmosphere of "intellectual beatitude " about it. But that
a certain intellectual standard was set up from the very
first it is impossible to question. From the compliments
of the earliest inmates of the Hotel to the eulogistic epi-
taphs which were scattered on the hearse of the Marquise,
all her devotees agree in celebrating her passionate love
of literature. Clumsy phrases, rude expressions, the
coarseness of a language still in process of purification,
w^ere a positive distress to her; and Tallemant has a droll
anecdote about the agitation into which she was thrown
by the use of so vulgar a word as "scurvy," teigneux, in
an epigram which was being read to her. With these
tendencies, she was peculiarly fitted to welcome to her
intimacy the man who of all others was at that time most
occupied with the task of correcting and clarifying the
French language. An inevitable attraction must have
drawn Malherbe to the doors of the Hotel de
Rambouillet.

It would be of interest, and even of some importance,
if we could discover the date at which Malherbe began to
frequent the Hotel de Rambouillet, since there can be little
doubt that it was to him that it owed its intellectual

108
/

The Hotel de Rambouillet

direction. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do. The
poet Racan, whose invaluable notes and anecdotes were
adopted by Tallemant to form the body of the historiette
on Malherbe, did not anticipate how grateful posterity
would be for a few dates sprinkled here and there over his
narrative. But the fact that Tallemant here took the line,
so very unusual with him, of adopting somebody else's life
of one of his heroes, can only be accounted for by the
double supposition that Malherbe could not be omitted
from his gallery, and yet had quitted the scene too early for
Tallemant to know much about him at first hand. He
must indeed have arrived at the Hotel very soon after its
formation, since he was sixty-two years of age when we
suppose it to have begun, and in 1628 he died. The Due
de Broglie was probably right when he conjectured that
Malherbe was practically the first, and as long as he lived
the foremost, of the literary clan which met in the Chambre
Bleue. Racan, who accompanied and may have intro-
duced the elder poet to the Hotel de Rambouillet, says that
it was "sur les vieux jours de Malherbe" that the latter
had the curious conversation about the proper heroic
name, or poetic pseudonym, which ought to fix all future
references to the Marquise, a conversation which led to his
writing an eclogue in which he calls himself M^lib^e and
his disciple Arcan. I quote Tallemant, who is quoting
Racan :

"The very day that he sketched out this eclogue, fearing-
that the name Arth^nice [Cntherine] if it were used of two
persons [for Racan had addressed Catherine Chabot as
Arth^nice, in a pastoral] would make a confusion between
those two persons, Malherbe passed the whole afternoon with
Racan turning the name about. All they could make of it
was Arth^nice, Eracinte and Carint^e. The first of those they
considered the prettiest, but as Racan was using this also in
a pastoral, Malherbe conckided by choosing Rodante."

Unfortunately Madame de Rambouillet, who had plenty

of humour, declined the name of Rodante, which would

better have adorned a mouse than a great lady, and

109

Aspects and Impressions

Malherbe threw his consideration for Racan to the winds.
Madame de Rambouillet became for him and remained

Celle pour qui je fis le beau nom d'Arthenice,
and he called her

Cette jeune berg^re k qui les destinies
Sembloient avoir donn^ mes derni^res ann^es.

We gather that the sound judgment and the exquisite
charm of Madame de Rambouillet attracted Malherbe away
from the other salons which he affected, particularly from
those of the Vicomtesse d'Aulchy and of Madame des
Loges. It was the latter lady whose ears the grim poet
soundly boxed in her own house on a celebrated occasion.
He was a formidable guest as well as a tyrant in literature.

But the relations of Malherbe with Madame de Ram-
bouillet during the last ten years of his life were kept on
a level of unrufHed dignity on the one side and on the
other. It is evident that the Marquise was predisposed to
accept la Doctrine which Malherbe, with so splendid a
force and pride, was about to impose upon his countrymen.
No man of letters has lived, in any country, who was more
possessed than he by the necessity of watching over the
purity of language, of cultivating in prose and verse a
simple, lucid, and logical style, of removing from the
surface of literature, by an arrogant discipline, all traces of
obscurity, pomposity and looseness. He held the honour
of the French language above all other obligations, and
the stories of his sacrificing questions of personal interest,
and even affection, to his passion for correct diction, for a
noble manner of writing and speaking, are eloquent of the
austere and dry genius of this masterful rather than
charming poet, who, nevertheless, had so profound and so
lasting an influence on French letters. Such a man as
this, fanatically possessed by an abstract ambition, needs
the sympathy of a wise and beneficent woman, and the
old Aialherbe, in the twilight of his days, found such an
Egeria in Catherine de Rambouillet. It was in the Hotel
no

The Hotel de Rambouillet

that the famous discussions on the value, selection, and
meaning of words, on nobility in eloquence, on purity
and force in versification, first took place, and the heat
from them radiated through France. The new era of
style found its cradle in the Chambre Bleue.

But what was tliis Blue Room, this mysterious and
azure grot in which the genius of French classic poetry
went through its transformation ? There was not much
mystery about it. It was a room, deep in the magnificence
of the Hotel, where the Marquise was in the habit of
receiving the familiar visits of her best friends. The
novelty of it was its colour; all other salons in Paris being
at that time painted red or drab. Out of the Blue Room
there opened a more secret retreat, her cabinet or alcove,
where she could withdraw from all companionship, and
spend her time in reading or meditating. The furniture
of the whole Hotel de Rambouillet was on a scale of
opulent splendour, but the rarity of the objects brought
together was concentrated in the cabinet, which was, as
M. Magne puts it, a sort of altar which the Marquise raised
to herself. Every object in it was fragile, brilliant, and
precious. In the days when Malherbe frecjuented the
Hotel, it is probable that no inner room existed. Talle-
mant gives us the very odd history of what led to its
formation. The Marquise in her youth was active and
ready to expose herself to the weather, but about 1623 she
began to be threatened by an incommodite, which made her
unable to bear exposure to heat. She had been in the habit
of taking long walks in Paris, but one summer's day, when
the sun suddenly came out while she was strolling at La
Cour-la-Reine, on the Champs Elyst^es, she nearly fainted,
and was threatened with erysipelas. The following
winter, the first time that she drew up her chair to read by
the fire, the same phenomenon came on. She was now
divided between perishing with cold or suffering miseries
of heat, and she therefore invented, taking the idea from
the Spanish " alcove," a little supplementary room, where
she could sit close to her friends, while they gathered
round the hearth, and vet not be smitten by the flames. In
1 1 1

Aspects and Impressions

1656, in the great winter, we hear of her, now an elderly
woman, lying on her bed, heaped over with furs, but not
daring to have a fire in sight.

Her energy did not leave her because of this disability.
The letter-writers of the period describe her extraordinary
activity. She had a great love of pretty and elaborate
practical jokes which were in the taste of the time. Hers,
however, were distinguished by the fact that they were
never indecent and never ill-natured. But when an idea
occurred to Madame de Rambouillet, she rested not until
the wild scheme was accomplished. Voiture and Talle-
mant are full of instances of her fertility. One instance
out of many was the passion which she expended in
making a cascade in the park at Rambouillet, to startle a
party of guests. The water had to be brought up from the
little tarn of Montorgueil, and the Marquise superintended
every spade and every pipe. Carried on by her enthu-
siastic presence, a team of workmen laboured night and
day to complete the prodigious plaything, conducting their
ingenious hydraulics by the flare of torches. I could fill
pages with the proofs of her gaiety, her ingenuity, the
amazing freshness and vivacity of her mind, but the reader
can turn to the original sources for them. It may be
suggested that, while the various independent authorities
really confirm the legend in its oudine, when they tell the
same story, it will generally be found that Tallemant tells
it more naturally and more exactly than Segrais or Voiture.
It is also to be remembered that it was Tallemant who
observed longest and most closely, and brought least
suspicion of vanity to bear on his relation. There is a
phrase buried somewhere in the vast tissue of the
Historiettes which deserves to be better known. Speak-
ing incidentally of the Marquise de Rambouillet, Talle-
mant betrays that she was really the source of all his
inspiration : "c'est d'elle que je tiens la plus grande et la
meilleure partie de ce que j'ai escrit et que j'escriray dans
ce livre." This gives his statements their peculiar
authority with regard to that Blue Room, which he else-
where calls "le rendez-vous de ce qu'il y avait de plus

The Hotel de Rambouillet

galant a la Cour, et de plus joly parmy les beaux-esprits
du si6cle." He quite frequently introduces an anecdote
with the words "J'ay ouy dire a Mme. de Rambouillet."

It would therefore be ungrateful to speak of the Hotel
de Rambouillet without paying a tribute to the strange
quality of Tallemant des Reaux. French criticism, in
applauding his industry, has hardly done justice to the
talent, almost the genius, of this extraordinary man. With
an unrivalled gift of observation, he combined that clear
objective sense of the value of little things, which is so
valuable in a memoir-writer, and he is the very prince of
those biographers to whom nothing regarding the subjects
of their art seems common or unclean. He has the keen
eye for detail of his English contemporary, John Aubrey,
and his Historiettes are really, in the sense of Aubrey,
Minutes of Lives. But Tallemant has much more design
in his work, and a broader sense of the relation of moral
and intellectual values. Saint-Simon, who was a child
when Tallemant died, has more passion, a more impetuous
and broader sweep of style, and a more intelligent appre-
ciation of the scene of life. It was not for Tallemant des
R^aux to paint "des grands fresques historiques." He is
as trivial and as picturesque as Boswell, as crude as Pepys,
and, like them both, he is completely indifferent to what
other people may find scandalous. He moved in the best
society, and he was of it; but in his lifetime no one seems
to have paid him much attention. Voiture was often in the
centre of the stage at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and what
answered in those days to limelight followed him whenever
he made one of his brilliant appearances; Tallemant was a
shadowy super, hanging about in the wings, but he was
always there.

He had the best right in the world to be there.
Ged^on Tallemant was a close kinsman of the Marquis,
whose sister, Marie de Rambouillet, had married the bio-
grapher's father, a Huguenot banker of Bordeaux, head of
one of the best provincial families of the day. Gideon was
born at La Rochelle in 1619, and was therefore thirty years
Younger than his cousin's wife, the famous chatelaine of
i'3

Aspects and Impressions

the Hotel de Rambouillet, whom he adored/ When he
rame to Paris, about 1637, her coterie was already at its
height, but he was immediately admitted to it, and no
doubt began no less immediately to ask questions and to
take notes. He had every possible opportunity; his
brother and a cousin were members of the new French
Academy : his father was a Maecenas to Corneille and
others : he himself married (in January, 1646) his cousin
Elizabeth de Rambouillet, a union which made him the
familiar of La Fontaine and La Sabliere. In 1650 he
bought the chateau and estate of Plessis-Rideau, in
Touraine, and by letters-patent changed the name to Les
R6aux, which he then adopted as a surname. Here he
entertained his lifelong friends — the associates of the
Hotel, and other men of high professional rank, Patru,
Ablancourt, the Pere Rapin. He knew absolutely every-
body ; he was adorably indiscreet ; and those who associated
with him perceived in him only a wonderful talker
(Maucroix says that he "racontait aussy bien qu'homme de
France "), and a lover of poetry who started writing an
(Edipe before Corneille. What few of them knew was that
this obliging friend and graceful companion was putting
down in an immense MS. all the anecdotes, all the
intrigues, all the tricks of manner, all the traits of
character, of the multitude of his polite acquaintances. He
has left more than 500 of his little highly finished portraits
of people he knew, and he knew everyone in that age and
place worth knowing.

It is doubtful at what particular time he wrote the
Historietles. He was composing, or perhaps revising, part
of them in 1657, but some must be later, and many may be
earlier in date than that ; it is probable that he ceased
writing in 1665. He has been accused of being a spiteful
chronicler of the vices of the great, and he has been
charged with a love of looseness. But his own description
is more just: "Je pretends dire le bien et le mal, sans
dissimuler la verite." He writes with an air of humorous

* Much fresh light on his career was thrown by M. ifmile Magne
in his Joyeuse Jeunesse de Tallemant des Reaux, 1921.

The Hotel de Rambouillet

malice, pleased to draw the cloak off the limbs of hypocrisy,
but not moved by any strong moral indignation. Like
Pepys, he enjoyed giving a disinterested picture of the
details of ordinary private life, but was rather more
cynically amused by them than scandalized. He wrote, or
at least intended to write, Memoires de la regence d'Annc
d'Aiitrichc, but this has totally disappeared, and we need
not regret it. Gedeon Tallemant is amply immortalized by
the Historiettes, which fill ten closely printed volumes in
the excellent edition of MM. Monmerque and Paulin of
Paris. They are like the work of some brilliant Dutch
painter of sordid interiors. He is not always well inspired.
He says nothing more adequate about Pascal than that he
was "ce gar^on qui inventa une machine admirable pour
I'arithmetique," but Pascal was hardly of his world. In
1685 Tallemant became a Catholic, converted by the Pere
Rapin, and, having outlived all his friends, he died,
probably in November, 1692, leaving a huge MS., the
principal subject of which is an analysis of the society that
met within the Hotel de Rambouillet.

At his death that MS. vanished, "as rare things will."
It turned up again in a library at Monligny-Lencoup in
1803. We may note, as a curious coincidence, that while
the publication of Evelyn's Diary dates from 1818, and
while the deciphering of Pepys began in 1819, it was in
1820, that Chateaugiron set to work at copying out the
Historiettes, which were not published until 1835. Three
of the most important MS. memoirs of the seventeenth
century were thus independently examined for the first
time at practically the same moment of the nineteenth.
Each publication was an event in literary history.

No such concealment, no such late discovery, has
marked the course of Voiture, whose letters and poems
were published by his nephew Pinchesne in 1650, only
two years after the poet's death. In this remarkable
miscellany, which has been incessantly reprinted, and
which forms one of the recognized lesser classics of France,
we find ourselves breathing the very atmosphere of the
Hotel de Rambouillet. It is, indeed, amusing to reflect
i»5

Aspects and Impressions

that, for fifteen years before her death, the Marquise and
all her circle possessed, and shared with a wide public, this
elaborate body of evidence as to their friendships, their
tastes, and their amusements. In the CEuvres of Voiture,
reprinted at least seventeen times during the lifetime of the
Marquise, the world at large was admitted to the conversa-
tions of the Blue Room, and it eagerly responded to the
invitation. There was something about the supple genius
of Voiture, at once daring and discreet, apparently tearing
every veil oflF an intimacy, and yet in fact wrapping it in
an impenetrable gauze of mystery, which made him the
ideal revealer to excite and baffle curiosity, so that though
he tells so much, as he stands at the top of the stairs of
the Hotel and takes the town into his confidence, yet he
leaves plenty of things untold, to be whispered into the ears
of posterity by Tallemant and Conrart.

The father of Voiture was a shopkeeper who sold wine
at the sign of the Chapeau de Roses at Amiens, and there
his son Vincent was born in 1595. The author of
Alcidalis et Zelide, was therefore the contemporary of
Herrick and of George Herbert. If the last-mentioned had
not rejected "the painted pleasures of a Court-life " for the
retirements of a saint, he might have been the English
Voiture, with his charming gifts and ingenious graces.
The year 1626, which saw Herbert adopt the solemn
vocation of a priest, is probably that in which Voiture,
introduced by Chardebonne, took up his station for the
rest of his life, as principal literary oracle and master of
the gaieties in the Hotel de Rambouillet. His father was
honestly supplying wine to the Queen-Mother, Marie de
Medicis, and there was no question in his son's case, as in
that of some others, of doubtful or partial nobility.
Vincent Voiture was frankly and openly a bourgeois,
admitted into that strictly guarded aristocracy because of
his abundant talents, his wit, his pleasantness, his delicious
social qualities, and also because it was part of the scheme
of the Marquise de Rambouillet to break down the boredom
of the exclusive privilege of rank for its own sake.

The main principle of the Hotel was a study of the art
11^

The Hotel de Rambouillet

of how to behave. The rules of la bienseance were strictly
laid down there, after close discussion among persons of
light and leading. There was a strong resistance made to
the roughness of the country noble, to the awkwardness of
the ordinary citizen, to the inky fingers of the pedant, to
the slovenly petticoat, the disordered wig, the bespattered
boot. The attention of both sexes was persistently called
to these matters of behaviour and tenue, which had an
importance at that date which we may easily, in our
twentieth-century intolerance, ridicule and ignore. We
see the comic side of this extreme solicitude about dress
and ceremony, etiquette and behaviour, in such a book as
Fureti^re's amusing Roman Bourgeois (1666), but we may
see the seriousness, the stately value of it, in the tragedies
of Corneille and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The
school of la politesse became that in which every talent
must graduate, however g^rave its after-labours were to be.
Even the solemn Baillet, writing the life of no less dignified
a person than Descartes, mentions that the philosopher
passed, like all other well-bred lads, "aux promenades, au
jeu et aux autres divertissements qui font I'occupation des
personnes de quality et des honnetes gens du si^cle." In
this school, the elegant and supple Voiture, impregnated
with the literature of Amadis de Gaule, and with the
language of Spanish chivalry, intimidated by no hyperbole
of compliment, capable alike of plunging into the deep
waters and of swimming safe to shore, always on the verge
of absurdity, always gliding down the agreeable side of it,
persistent, subtle, entertaining, extravagant — in this school
Voiture was the triumphant, the unmastered master. His
best letters, his best sonnets, show him to have been able,
at his most vibrating moments, to rise out of this element
of billets-doux to better things. He is of all composers of
society verse and prose the lightest and the swiftest, and
we may say to those who sneer at so unique a talent what
Madame de Sevigne said of them in her day : "Tant pis
pour ceux qui ne I'entendent pas I "

If one literary figure is more closely identified with the
Hotel de Rambouillet than \^oiture, it must be Chapelain.
I 117

Aspects and Impressions

It is therefore curious that while M. Magne was preparing
his picturesque volumes on the former, M. Collas should
be independently writing the earliest biography of the
latter. These coincidences are odd, but we are accustomed
to them ; they show that a subject is " in the air." When
Chapelain made his first appearance at the Hotel, perhaps
in 1635, Voiture had long been installed there. They fell
out at first sight, like dog and cat. When the author of
the Preface de I'Adone stumbled over the precious floor,"*
dressed like a scarecrow, in hunting boots and dirty linen,
and made his clownish obeisance to the Marquise, she
shrank a little from him, and Voiture broke into a scream
of elfish laughter. Madame de Rambouillet never learned
to care for Chapelain, and when he made clumsy love to
Mile. Paulet, "the lioness," the Blue Room shook with
mirth. But when Mile. Julie became a great personage,
and especially as soon as the Due de Montausier introduced
the pure cultivation of pedantry into the Hotel, the strong
character of Chapelain asserted itself, while the death of
Voiture left him unquestioned in authority. Grotesque as
Chapelain was, he had a wonderful talent for adapting
himself to circumstances, and his conversation, though
massive and solemn, had charm, which even his enemies
admitted to be extraordinary. Chapelain was never on
those terms of petted intimacy with his host and hostess
which the insinuating Voiture enjoyed, but he conquered
a position of more genuine respect and esteem.

But to follow M. Collas and M. Magne into the later
years of the Hotel, when Mile, de Rambouillet gave to the
Blue Room a peculiar air of her own, would be impossible
for us, with the limited space at our command. We must
not go further than 1641, the year in which was produced
the celebrated Guirlande de Julie. After this point, not
merely does the character of the scene change, and its tone
become less pleasing, or at least less sympathetic, but for
the reviewer the abundance of trees makes the wood itself
almost invisible. Here we may point to an example of the
superabundance of French material, which may almost con-
sole us for the comparative dimness and bareness of the
118

The Hotel de Rambouillet

contemporary English landscape. In dealing with this
crowded age, M. Magne and M. Collas have shown a
learned adroitness and the happy logic to which scholars
of their race are trained. Of the two, M. Magne is the
more vivacious, as befits the biographer of Voiture. M.
Collas has more difficulty in reconciling us with the tedious
and pedantic Chapelain, who, nevertheless, as the founder
of modern criticism and the mainstay of the infant
Academic Fran^aise, deserved to find a biographer at last.
The worst of it is that while Voiture, dancing-master to
the Muses if you will, and petit-maitre in excelsis, is at
least a brisk and highly diverting personality, poor Chape-
lain, the typical academician, the mediocre poet, the spider
at the heart of the wide intellectual web of his time, is not
man enough to awaken our vivid sympathies. Moreover,
to conclude on a note of bathos, M. Collas has neglected
to append an index to his vast compendium of facts.

We must therefore refrain from entering the labyrinths
of the later preciosiU, amusing as they are, and must con-
tinue to concentrate our attention on the clearness, the
sweetness, the purity with which the founder of the Hotel,
the great Madame de Rambouillet, throughout her long
life, created an atmosphere of sympathy and unity around
her. As long as she was paramount ther^, and until the
influence of her daughter and her daughter's husband,
together with her own languor, pushed her a little into
the second line, gaiety was in the ascendant at the famous
Hotel. It is needful to assure ourselves of this, because
in the later days it became purely intellectual, and dry in
its priggishness. M. Magne, it is true, attributes this
change not so much to the pedantic Latinism of the Due
de Montausier, and the hair-splitting of the academicians,
as to the decay produced by gaiety itself. In an ingenious
passage he says :

The taste for badinage perverted in Voiture the taste for
beauty. His genius glittered, quivered, frisked and palpitated,
and the smile he wore was ever melting into irony. To depth
he deliberately preferred an elegant futility. He was impreg-
nated with the quality to which the age had givenj in a noble
119

Aspects and Impressions

sense, the name of gallantry. But, in reacting everywhere
against vulgar roughness, the very excess of his effort landed
him at last in preciosity.

It never had that deplorable effect upon Madame de
Rambouillet herself, on whose charming figure, swaying
like a young pine-tree of the forest, we must fix our atten-
tion, if we would see only what was best in that remarkable
and so vividly French revival of civilization which took
place under Louis XIII. Her purity of conduct was com-
bined with no uncouth prudery. She refrained from judg-
ing others hardly, but she preserved, without a lapse, her
own high standard of behaviour. She had a lively horror
of scandal, and desired that those about her, if they could
not contrive to be virtuous, should at least be discreet. It
was detestable to her to hear the gallants of the court boast-
ing of their conquests. She said, in her amusing way,
that if she herself could ever have been persuaded to leave
the path of propriety, she must have chosen for a paramour
some unctuous and secret prelate, but that she had never
discovered one whom she could trust. It was her tempera-
ment, both of heart and brain, which led her to rejoice in
the new spirit of Malherbe, whose simple, firm and lucid
verses responded, after a revel of romanticism, to her
classic craving for harmony and dignity. In Racan's
pastoral poems, she welcomed a recovered love of country
pleasures, and the graceful convention of a shepherd. She
liked private letters, hitherto so pompous, to be composed
in such terms that one seemed to hear the writer's voice
chatting at the chimney-corner. Richelieu, although M.
Magne denies the legend of his Discours sur V Amour,
used to come to the Blue Room to have a good laugh with
its delightful occupant, and everyone unbent in her sweet
and easy presence. Tallemant has a story of no less digni-
fied a personage than the Cardinal de La Valette romping
with the Rambouillet children, and discovered by the
Marquise hiding from them under a bed.

The close of the life of this marvellous woman was a
sad one. She outlived all her early friends, even outlived
1 20

The Hotel de Rambouillet

the prestige of her own Bkie Room. Six days after her
death, Robinet composed a sort of funeral ode to her
memory, closing with an epitaph, which, as it is little
known, may be given here. It was written in January,
1666:

Ci gist la divine Arthdnice,
Qui fut I'illustre protectrice
Des Arts que les neuf Soeurs inspirent aux humains.
Rome lay donna la naissance ;
Elle vint r^tablir en France
La gloire des anciens Romains.
Sa maison, des vertus le temple,
Sert aux particuliers d'un merveilleux exemple,
Et pourrait bien instruire encor les souverains.

This is not very good poetry, but it would be difficult to
sum up more neatly the services of Madame de Rambouillet
to France and to civilization.

MALHERBE AND THE CLASSICAL
REACTION 1

IN contemplating the chart of literary history we are
confronted by phenomena which more or less closely
resemble those marked on the geographical map. The
surface is not uniform, but diversified by ups and downs,
of the feature that we call taste or fashion. A special
interest attaches to what may be described as the water-
sheds of literature, the periods which display these changes
of direction in thought and language. I propose to bring
before you briefly some characteristics of one of the most
saliently marked of all these points of alteration, that
which led irresistibly and imminently to the classical
school, as it is called, in France, and from France ulti-
mately to the whole of Europe. Before doing so, I must
draw your attention to the fact that while most of us are
led to give special heed to movements which tend, like the
Romantic renaissance of poetry in England two centuries
later, to the emancipation and even the revolution of
literature, that of which I am about to speak was de-
liberately introduced in the interests of law and order, and
was in all its features conservative, and, if you choose to
call it so, retrogressive. It did not aim at enlarging the
field of expression, but at enclosing it within rules, ex-
cluding from it eccentricities and licentious freaks, and
rendering it subservient to a rigorous discipline. In this
University of Oxford, where the practice of poetry is now
conducted with so much ardour and with such audacity of
experiment, you may or may not, as you please, see any
parallel between the condition of France in 1595 and our

1 Delivered before the University of Oxford as the Taylorian Lecture
for 1920.

123

Aspects and Impressions

own condition to-day. My purpose is, with your leave,
to describe the former without criticizing the latter.

The sixteenth century had been a period of great
activity in the literature of France, where the interaction
of two vast forces, the Renaissance and the Reformation,
had introduced wholly new forms of expression into the
language. Prose had started from its mediaeval condi-
tion into full modernity in Calvin, and then in Montaigne.
In poetry, with which we are concerned to-day, there
had existed since 1550 the brilliant and feverish army of
versifiers who accompanied Ronsard, "the Prince of
Poets," and claimed with him to have created out of the
rude elements of the Middle Ages a literary art which
linked modern France directly with ancient Greece.
While England was still languishing under the early
Tudors, and Italy had grown weary of her burst of
chivalrous epic, France gave the world the spectacle of
a society palpitating with literary ambition. Ronsard's
magnificent audacity had conquered for poetry, an art
which had hitherto enjoyed little honour in France, the
foremost position in the world of mental activity. Verse,
which had been treated as a butterfly skipping from
flower to flower, was now celebrated by the Pleiade as
a temple, as a sunrise, as the apotheosis of the intellect.
Immensely flattered by being suddenly lifted to the status
of a priesthood, all the budding versifiers of France, who
a generation earlier would have withered into insignifi-
cance, expanded into affluent and profuse, blossom. By
the year 1560 it was "roses, roses all the way," but the
misfortune was that the flowers were foreign, had been
transplanted from Greece and Rome and Italy, and were
not really native to the soil of France.

During the next generation, under conditions with
which we have no time to occupy us to-day, there was
a steady, indeed an almost precipitous decline in the
quality of French verse. If we turn to our own litera-
ture of half a century later, we see a parallel decline in
the drama dowm from Shakespeare to Shirley and the
later disciples of Ben Jonson. We all know how dis-
124

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

concerting it is to pass from the sheer beauty of the
great EHzabethans to the broken verse and the mixture
of flatness and violence of the lesser poets of the Common-
wealth. But in France the decadence had been still more
striking, because of the extremely high line adopted by
Ronsard and Du Bellay in their prose manifestos. The
doctrine of the Pleiade had been as rigorous and lofty as
a creed in literature could well be, and it rose to an alto-
gether higher plane than was dreamed of by the English
critics half a century later. No dignity, no assurance
of high and pure poetic resolution could surpass the
apparent aim of the manifestos of 1549. Frenchmen, it
seemed, had nothing to do but follow these exalted pre-
cepts and to produce the most wonderful poetry which the
world had seen since the days of Pindar and Sappho. We
cannot to-day enter into the question why these high hopes
were almost immediately shattered, except so far as to
suggest that excellent principles are sometimes insufficient
to produce satisfactory practice. We have to look abruptly
this afternoon into the conditions of French poetry in the
last years of the sixteenth century, and to realize that those
conditions had brought French literature to a point where
reform was useless and revolution was inevitable.

There was no slackening — and I ask your particular
attention to this fact — there was no slackening in the popu-
larity of the poetic art. There existed, in 1595, as great
a crowd of versifiers as had been called forth fifty years
earlier by the splendour of the Pleiade. A feature of
poetic history which is worthy of our notice is that an
extreme abundance of poetical composition is by no means
necessarily connected with the wholesomeness and vigour
of the art at that moment. There was a crowd of poets
in France during the reign of Henri IV, but they were
distinguished more by their exuberance and their eccen-
tricity than by their genius. I shall, in a few moments,
endeavour to give you an idea of their character. In the
meantime, let us be content to remark that the exquisite
ideals of the Pleiade had degenerated into extravagant
conventionality, into which an attempt was made to infuse

Aspects and Impressions

life by a spasmodic display of verbal fireworks. The
charm of sobriety, of simplicity, was wholly disregarded,
and the importance of logic and discipline in literature
ignored and outraged. The earlier theory, a very dan-
gerous one, had been that poetry was the language of the
gods rather than of men, that it was grandiloqueiitia, an
oracular inspiration. Being above mankind in its origin,
it was not for mortal men to question its authority. It
possessed a celestial freedom, it was emancipated from all
rules save what it laid down for itself. Let us see what
was the effect of this arrogance.

The scope of imaginative literature as practised by the
Pleiade had been curiously narrow, so much so that it is
difficult to distinguish the work of different hands except
by the dexterity of the technique. The odes and pas-
torals of the lesser masters are just like those of Ronsard,
except that Ronsard is very much more skilful. But by
the close of the century there was a wide divergence be-
tween the various poets in their themes and their points
of view. Two of them greatly excelled their contem-
poraries in eminence and popularity, and these two were
as unlike each other in substance as it was easy for them
to be. The elder of these two was Salluste du Bartas, a
writer whose quartos are now allowed to gather dust on
the shelves, and who, when he died in 1590, was, with the
exception of Tasso, the most eminent European writer of
verse. His influence on English poetry in the next
generation was immense. Translations of his works by
Joshua Sylvester and others had begun to appear before
his death, and were extremely popular, Du Bartas
possessed qualities of intellect and art which are by no
means to be despised, but his taste was execrable. He
wished to create a national religious poetry on a large
scale, and he has been called the "Milton manqu6 de la
France." Du Bartas is all relinquished to evangelical
and moral exhortation, and his immense Les Semaines,
besides being one of the longest, is the most unblushingly
didactic encyclopaedia of verse that was ever put forth as a
poem. He had a very heavy hand, and he sowed with the
126

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

whole sack. Our own Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich, who
called him "some French angel, girt with bays," described
Du Bartas as —

The glorious Sallust, moral, true, divine,

Who', all inspired with a holy rage.

Makes Heaven his subject, and the earth his stage.

In his own time his myriad admirers preferred him above
"golden Homer and great Maro." His earnestness and
his cleverness — among other things he was the first man
after the Renaissance to see that the obsession of the
heathen gods was ridiculous in a Christian literature — his
abundance and his vehemence, made Du Bartas a very
formidable figure in the path of any possible reform.

As an instance of the violence of fancy and gaudy
extravagance of language which had become prevalent
with the decline of the Pl^iade, I W'ill now present to you
w^hat I select as a favourable, not a ridiculous, example
of the art of Du Bartas. He wishes to paraphrase the
simple statement in Genesis that, on the fourth day, God
set the stars in the firmament of heaven to give light upon
the earth. This is how he does it, as translated by Joshua
Sylvester :

Even as a peacock, prickt with love's desire,
To woo his mistress, strutting stately by her.
Spreads round the rich pride of his pompous vail,
His azure wings and starry-golden tail,
With rattling pinions wheeling still about.
The more to set his beauteous beauty out,- —
The Firmament, as feeling like above,
Displays his pomp, pranceth about his love.
Spreads his blue curtain, mixt with golden marks,
Set with gilt spangles, sown with glistening sparks,
Sprinkled with eyes, speckled with tapers bright,
Powdered with stars streaming with glorious light,
To inflame the Earth the more, with lover's grace
To take the sweet fruit of his kind embrace.

Our first impression of such a passage as this is one of

admiration of its colour and of its ingenuity. It is more

127

Aspects and Impressions

than rich, it is sumptuous; the picture of the wheeling
peacock is original and brilliantly observed. But there
commendation must cease. What could be meaner or
less appropriate than to compare the revolution of the
starry firmament as it proceeded from its Creator's hands
with the strut of a conceited bird in a poultry-yard ? The
works of Du Bartas are stuffed full with these strained
and fantastic similes, his surface sparkles with the glitter
of tinsel and pinchbeck. At every turn something
majestic reminds him of an embroidery, of a false jewel,
of something picturesque and mean. The planets, in
their unison, are like the nails in a cart-wheel ; when
darkness comes on, heaven is playing at blind man's
buff; the retreat of the armies of the King of Assyria
reminds the poet of a gamekeeper drawing his ferret. He
desires the snow to fall that it may "perriwig with wool
the bald-pate woods." All is extravagant and false, all
is offensive to the modesty of nature.

Du Bartas is stationed at the left wing of the army of
poets. The right is held by Philippe Desportes, whose
name has recently been made familiar to us by Sir Sidney
Lee's investigations into the extraordinary way in which
his works were pillaged in his lifetime by our Elizabethan
sonneteers. Even Shakespeare seems to have read, and
possibly imitated, Desportes's Amours de Diane. The
producer in vast quantities of a kind of work which is
exactly in the fashion of the moment is sure of a wide
popular welcome, and the cleverness of Desportes was
to see that after the death of Ronsard French taste went
back on the severity of Du Bellay's classicism, and re-
turned to the daintiness and artificial symmetry of the
Petrarchists. It has been said that to the Italians of the
sixteenth century Petrarch had become what Homer was to
the Greeks and Virgil to the Latins. He was the un-
questioned leader, the unchallenged exemplar. This
infatuation, which spread through Europe, is of im-
portance to us in our inquiry to-day, for Petrarch was
really the worm, the crested and luminous worm, at the
root of sixteenth-century poetry. It was extremely easy
128

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

to imitate the amorous conceits of the Italian imitators
of Petrarch, and of these imitators in France by far the
most abundant, skilful, and unwearying was Philippe
Desportes, to whom Petrarch's ingenious elocution ap-
peared, as it appeared to all the critics of Europe, "pure
beauty itself." By the close of the century it was no
longer the greater Italians, such as Francesco Molza,
who represented at its height the victorious heresy of
Petrarchism, it was a Frenchman, of whom our own great
lyrist. Lodge, in his Margarite of America in 1596, wrote :
"few men are able to second the sweet conceits of
Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily
in everybody's hand." Desportes exercised over the
whole of Europe an authority which surpassed that of
Tennyson over the British Empire at the height of his
reputation.

Here, then, was another and still more formidable
lion couched at the gate of poetry to resist all possible
reform. The career of Desportes had been one of
unbroken prosperity. He had become, without an effort,
the wealthiest and the most influential person of letters
of his time. His courtly elegance had enabled him to
be all things to all men, and although a priest of un-
blemished character, he had attended one Valois king after
another without betraying his inward feelings by a single
moral grimace. He had found no difficulty in celebrating
the virtues of Henri III, and the anecdote about him that
is best known is that he had been rewarded with an abbey
for the homage of a single sonnet. He had exaggerated
all the tricks of his predecessors with a certain sweetness
and brilliance of his own, which had fascinated the polite
world. The best that can be said of Desportes is that he
was an artificer of excellent skill, who manufactured
metrical jewellery by rearranging certain commonplaces,
such as that teeth are pearls, that lips are roses, that
cheeks are lilies, that hair is a golden network. But I
will give you his own statement of his aim, not attempting
to paraphrase his remarkable language. Desportes gives
the following account of his ambition :
129

Aspects and Impressions

I desire to build a temple to my chaste goddess. My eye
shall be the lamp, and the immortal flame which ceaselessly
consumes me shall serve as candle. My body shall be the
altar, and my sighs the vows, and I will intone the service in
thousands and thousands of verses.

What a ridiculous confusion of imagery ! Here we
have a man whose body is an altar, and whose eye — one
of whose eyes — is a lamp, and whose passion is the candle
in that lamp, and whose mouth and throat are detached
from his body, and are performing miracles in the
vicinity. This is to take Desportes at his worst, and it
is only fair to admit that the reader who winnows the
vast floor of his work will find some grains of pure geld
left. But the mass of these sonnets and odes and
madrigals is extraordinarily insipid and cold, the similes
are forced and grotesque, and everywhere pedantry takes
the place of passion. When there is beauty it is artificial
and affected, it is an Alexandrine beauty, it is the colour
of the dying dolphin.

Such was the poetry which occupied the taste of France
at the close of the sixteenth century, and whether its
form was brief and amorous, as in the sonnets of Des-
portes, or long-winded and hortatory, as in the sacred
epics of Du Bartas, it was uniformly exaggerated,
lifeless, and incorrect. In all its expressions it was
characterized by an abuse of language, and indeed, in
the hands of the poets of the late Valois kings, the French
tongue was hurrying down to ruin. One curious vice
consisted in the fabrication of new phrases and freshly
coined composite words. Of these latter, some one has
counted no fewer than 300 in the writings of Du Bartas
alone, and Professor Paul Morillot has observed that the
licence which the poets of that age indulged in has been
the cause of subsequent poverty in that direction, French
having received and rejected such a glut of new and use-
less words as to have lost all appetite for additions of
vocabulary. Another vice of the period was the ceaseless
cultivation, in season and out of season, of a sort of
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Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

antithetical wit. The sincerity of Nature was offended at
every turn by the monstrous cleverness of the writer, who
evidently was thinking far more about himself than about
his subject. Here is an example :

Weep on, mine eyes, weep much, ye have seen much,
And now in water let your penance be.
Since 'twas in fire that you committed sin,

and so on, with wearisome iteration of the hyperbole.
We were to suffer from the same disease fifty years
later, when a great English poet, capable of far nobler
things, was to call the eyes of St. Mary Magdalene

Two walking- baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.

An excellent grammarian, M. Ferdinand Brunot, has
remarked that at the end of the sixteenth century a law-
less individualism — and in this term he sums up all the
component parts of literature, style, grammar, treatment,
and tone — had set in ; that everybody had become a law
to himself; and that the French language was suffering
from the incessant disturbance caused by "the fantastic
individuality of writers" both in prose and verse.

This chaotic state of things, which threatened French
literature with anarchy and French logic with bankruptcy,
was brought to a standstill and successfully confronted
by the energy and determination of a single person. I
recollect no other instance in the history of literature in
which one individual has contrived to stem the whole
flood of national taste. Of course, an instinct of French
lucidity and reasonableness must have been ready to
respond to the doctrine of the new critic, yet it is none
the less certain that through the early years of the
struggle there remains no evidence of his having been
supported by any associate opinion. I dare say you
recollect a famous Japanese print which represents a
young lady standing on the edge of a cliff, and gazing
calmly out to sea while she restrains the action of a
131

Aspects and Impressions

great plunging horse by simply holding one of her feet
down upon the reins. In the same way the runaway
Pegasus of France was held, and was reduced to discipline,
by the almost unparalleled resolution of a solitary man.
This was Francois Malherbe, whose name, but perhaps
very little else, will be familiar to you. I hope to show
you that this poet, by the clearness of his vision and his
rough independence, brought about a revolution in litera-
ture which was unparalleled. He cut a clear stroke, as
with a hatchet, between the sixteenth century and all that
came after it down to the romantic revival at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and he did this by sheer force
of character. Malherbe was not a great poet, but he was
a great man, and he is worthy of our close consideration.

Francois Malherbe was a Norman ; there is a hint of
the family having come from Suffolk, in which case the
name may have been Mallerby, but we need not dwell on
that. His parents were Calvinists, and he was born at
Caen in 1555. This was, you observe, between the births
of Spenser and Shakespeare; and Rabelais was just dead.
Cervantes was eight years old. Lope de Vega was to be
born seven years later. We ought to notice these dates :
they give us a sense of what was preparing in Europe,
and what was passing away ; a great period of transition
was about to expand. Until he was thirty years of age
Malherbe appears to have taken no interest whatever in
poetry ; he was a soldier, a military secretary, a man of
business. Then he went to live in Provence, where he
read the Italian verse fashionable in his day, and began
to imitate it. The kindest and most enthusiastic of his
later disciples told Tallemant that Malherbe's early poems
were "pitiful." We can judge for ourselves, since at the
age of thirty-two he published a paraphrase, or rather
a series of selections from Tansillo's Lagrime di San
Pietro. The bad poets of the age were lachrymose to the
last degree. Nothing but the honour of addressing you
to-day would have induced me to read these "Tears of
St. Peter." I have done so, and have even amused my-
self by paraphrasing some of them, but these I will not
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Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

inflict upon you. It is sufficient to assure you that up
to the age of forty the verses of Malherbe were not merely,
as Racan put it, pitiful, but marred by all the ridiculous
faults of the age. After all, I must give you a single
example. This is translated literally from "The Tears
of St. Peter" :

Aurora, in one hand, forth from her portals led,
Holds out a vase of flowers, all languishing and dead ;
And with the other hand empties a jar of tears ;
While through a shadowy veil, woven of mist and storm,
That hides her golden hair, she shows in mortal form
All that a soul can feel of cruel pains and fears.

At what moment Malherbe observed that this was a
detestable way of writing, and conceived the project of a
great reversal of opinion, we do not know. His early life,
and just that part of it on which we should like light to
be thrown, remains impenetrably obscure. But we do
know that when he arrived in Paris he had formulated
his doctrine and laid out his plan of campaign.
At Aix-en-Provence he had been admitted to the
meetings of a literary society, the chief ornament
of which was the celebrated orator and moralist
Du Vair, who ought perhaps to be considered as in some
directions the master of Malherbe. The ideas of Du Vair
have been traced in some of Malherbe's verses, and the
poet afterwards said, in his dictatorial way, "There is no
better writer in our language than M. Du Vair." It was
probably the dignity of the orator's attitude and the
severity of his taste in rhetoric which encouraged the poet
to adopt a similar lucidity and strenuousness in verse.
The two men, who were almost exactly of the same age,
may perhaps be most safely looked upon as parallel re-
formers, the one of French verse, the other of French
prose.

Few things would be more interesting to us, in our
present mood, than to know how Malherbe, arriving in
Paris at the mature age of fifty, set about his revolution.
J 133

Aspects and Impressions

He found the polite world tired of frigid conceits and
extravagant sentimentality, above all tired of the licence
of the poets and the tricks which they were taking with
the French language. There was undoubtedly a long-
ing for order and regularity, such as invariably follows
a period of revolutionary lawlessness, but ho one was
giving this sentiment a voice. What was wanted after
such a glut of ornament and exuberance was an arbiter
and tyrant of taste who should bring poetry rigidly into
line with decency, plainness, and common sense, qualities
which had long been thought unnecessary to, and even
ridiculously incompatible with, literature of a high order.
All this we may divine, but what is very difficult to under-
stand is the mode in which Malherbe became the recognized
tyrant of taste. It was not by the production, and still less
by the publication, of quantities of verse composed in
accordance with his own new doctrine. Malherbe had
hesitated long in the retirement of the country, waiting
to be summoned to Court. Somehow, although he had
published no book and can scarcely have been known to
more than a handful of persons, he had a few powerful
friends, and among them, strange ro say, three poets whose
work was characteristic of ever}^hing which it was to be
Malherbe's mission to destroy. These were the Cardinal
Du Perron, Bertaut, and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. They
formed the van of the poetical army of the moment, and
it is a very curious thing that these three remarkable
writers, each of whom remained faithful to the tradition of
Ronsard, should have welcomed with open arms the rebel
who was to cover Ronsard with ridicule. With a divine
simplicity, they opened the wicket and let the wolf in
among the sheep. They urged the King to invite Mal-
herbe to Couri, and, when His Majesty delayed, Malherbe
very characteristically did not wait for a summons. He
came to Paris of his own accord in 1605, was presented
to Henri IV, and composed in September of that year the
long ode called a "Prayer for the King on his going to
Limoges." This is the earliest expression of classical verse
in the French language.

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Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

In those days the intelligent favour of the King did
more for a reputation than a dozen glowing reviews in
the chief newspapers will do to-day. We must give credit
to Henri IV for the promptitude with which he perceived
that the cold new poetry, which must have sounded very
strangely on his ears accustomed to the lute of Desportes
and the trumpet of Du Bartas, was exactly what was
wanted in France. He himself had laboured to bring back
to this country, distracted as it had been in its late political
disorders, the virtues of law, logic, and discipline. He
recognized in this grim, middle-aged Norman gentleman
the same desires, but directed to the unity and order of
literature. A recent French historian has pointed out that
"the very nature of Malherbe's talent, its haughty, solemn,
and majestic tone, rendered him peculiarly fitted to become
the official and, as it were, the impersonal singer of the
King's great exploits, and to engrave in letters of brass,
as on a triumphal monument, the expression of public
gratitude and admiration." Malherbe, as has been said,
was appointed "the official poet of the Bourbon dynasty."

The precious correspondence with his Provencal friend
Peiresc, which Malherbe kept up from 1606 till his death
in 1628, a correspondence which was still unknown a
hundred years ago, throws a good deal of light upon the
final years of the poet, and in particular on the favour
with which he was entertained at Court. There are more
than 200 of these letters, which nevertheless, like most such
collections of that age, succeed in concealing from us the
very facts which we are most anxious to hear about. Thus,
while Malherbe expatiates to Peiresc about queens and
princes, he tells us nothing, or next to nothing, about the
literary life in which we know that he made so disconcert-
ing a figure. But that most enchanting of gossips, Talle-
mant des R^aux, has preserved for us an anecdote of a
highly illuminating nature. We have seen that the
supremacy in French poetry had been held for many vears
by Philippe Desportes, who was now approaching the
close of a long life of sumptuous success. It could not be
a matter of indifference to the last and most magnificent of
135

Aspects and Impressions

the Ronsardists that an upstart, till now unheard of, should
suddenly be welcomed at Court. He desired his nephew,
Mathurin R^gnier — himself a man of genius, but not in
our picture to-day — he desired R^gnier to bring this
M. de Malherbe to dinner. They arrived, but were late,
and dinner stood already on the table. The old Desportes
received Malherbe with all the politeness conceivable, and
said that he wished to give him a copy of the new edition
of his Psalms, in which he had made many corrections
and additions. Such a compliment from the acknowledged
head of French poetry was extreme, but Malherbe had
already made up his mind to bring down the reputation
of Desportes with a crash, as Samson destroyed the gates
of Dagon in Gaza. Desportes was starting to go upstairs
to fetch the book, when Malherbe in rough country fashion
(rustiquement) told him he had seen it already, that it was
not worth while to let his soup grow cold, for it was likely
to be better than his Psalms were. Upon this they sat
down to dinner at once, but Malherbe said nothing more,
and when dinner was done he went away, leaving the host
heart-broken and young R^gnier furious. This must have
been very soon after Malherbe's arrival in Paris, for
Desportes died in 1606.

All that has been recorded of the manners and con-
versation of Malherbe tends to explain this story. He
could be courtly and even magnificent, and he had a bluff
kind of concentrated politeness, when he chose to exercise
it, which was much appreciated by the royal family. He
was a tall, handsome man, with keen eyes, authoritative
and even domineering, generally silent in society, but
ready to break in with a brusque contradiction of what
somebody else was saying. He was a scorner of human
frailty, believing himself to be above the reach of all
emotional weakness. The violent force, which burned
arrogantly in his spirit, comes out in everything which is
preserved about him, in his verses, in his letters, in the
anecdotes of friends and enemies. His retorts were like
those of Dr. Samuel Johnson, but without the healing
balsam of Johnson's tenderness. There was nothing
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Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

tender about Malherbe, and we may admit that he could
not have carried out his work if there had been. His in-
tellectual conscience was implacable; he allowed nothing
in the world to come between him and his inexorable
doctrine. When he learned that the Vicomtesse d'Auchy
(Charlotte des Ursins), the "Caliste" of his own verses,
had been encouraging a poet of the old school, he went to
her house, pushed into her bedroom, and slapped her face
as she lay upon her bed.

Tallemant tells us that "meditation and art made a
poet " of Malherbe, non nascitur sed fit. At no time did
he learn to write with ease, and after so many years spent
in the passionate cultivation of the Muse, his poetical
writings are contained in as narrow a compass as those of
Gray, who confessed that his "works " were so small that
they might be mistaken for those of a pismire. Malherbe
had long pauses during which he seemed to do nothing at
all except meditate and lay down the law. Balzac, who
was one of those young men in whose company he
delighted, declares that whenever Malherbe had written a
thousand verses he rested for ten years. All this was part
of a studied frugality. The Ronsardists and their
followers had been lavish in everything ; they had poured
out floods of slack verse, loose in construction, faulty in
grammar. If a slight difficulty presented itself to them,
they evaded it, they leaped over it. Having no reverence
for the French language, they invented hideous and reck-
less words, they stretched or curtailed syllables, in order to
fit the scansion. There is recorded a saying of Malherbe
which is infinitely characteristic. When he was asked
what, in fact, was his object in all he was doing, he replied
that he proposed "to rescue French poetry from the hands
of the little monsters who were dishonouring it." The
glorious Desportes, the sublime Du Bartas, the rest of the
glittering and fashionable Petrarchists of Paris, what were
they in the eyes of this implacable despot of the new in-
tellectual order? They were simply "little monsters " who
were "dishonouring " what he worshipped with a fanatic
zeal, the language of France.
137

Aspects and Impressions

When we turn to his own poetry, we see what there
was in it which fascinated the opening seventeenth century.
After all the tortures and the spasms, the quietude of it was
delicious. If you go to Malherbe now, you must learn
to put aside all your romantic preoccupations. His verse
is very largely concerned with negations : it is not orna-
mented, it is not preposterous, it is not pedantic. It swept
away all the insincere imagery and all the violent oddities
of the earlier school. For example, Bertaut had written,
wishing to explain his tears :

By the hydraulic of mine eyes
The humid vapours of my grief are drawn
Through vacuums of my sighs.

Desportes had talked of a lover who was "intoxicated by
the delectation of the concert of the divine harmony " of
his mistress. All this preciousness, all this affectation of
the use of scientific terms in describing simple emotions,
was the object of Malherbe 's ruthless disdain. Ronsard
had said, "The more words we have in our language, the
more perfect it will be." Malherbe replied, "No, certainly
not, if they are useless and grotesque words, dragged by
the hair of their heads out of Greek and Latin, an outrage
on the purity of French grammar." He advised his
disciples to eject the monstrous creations of the neo-
Hellenes, and to go down to the quays of Paris and listen
to the dock-labourers. They used genuine French words
which ought to be redeemed from vulgar use, and brought
back to literary service.

The existing poems of Malherbe, written at intervals
during the last twenty years of his life, are largely pieces
of circumstance. They are odes on public events, such as
the retaking of Marseilles, the official journeys of the
King, the regency of the Queen Mother, and the alliance
between France and Spain. They are elegies on the
deaths of private persons, a subject on which Malherbe
expatiates with the utmost dignitv and solemnity. They
are sonnets, very unlike the glittering rosy gimcracks of
the preceding generation, but stiff with stately compliment
138

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

and colourless art. There is no exact English analogue
to the poetry of Malherbe, because in the seventeenth
century whenever English verse, except in the hands of
Milton, aimed at an effect of rhetorical majesty, its stream
became clouded. We may observe the case of Cowley,
who, I think, had certainly read Malherbe and was in-
fluenced by him, in spite of the diametrical views they
nourished with regard to the merit of Pindar. Cowley, at
his rare and occasional best, has the same serious m6sic,
the same clear roll of uplifted enthusiasm, the same
absolute assurance as Malherbe. He has the same felicity
in his sudden and effective openings. But there is too
frequently confusion, artifice, and negligence in Cowley.
In Malherbe all is perfectly translucent, nothing turbid is
allowed to confuse the vision, no abuse of wMt is left to
dazzle the attention or trip up steadily advancing progress
of thought. It is not easy to give an impression in English
of the movement of this clear and untrammelled advance.
But here are a couple of stanzas from the 1611 Ode to
the Queen Regent on occasion of the King's Mediterranean
expedition :,

Ah ! may beneath thy son's proud arm down fall

The bastions of the Memphian wall,
And from Marseilles to Tyre itself extend
His empire without end.

My wishes, p'rhaps, are wild ; but — by your leave —

What cannot ardent prayer achieve?
And if the gods reward your service so

They'll pay but what they owe.

By general consent the crown of Malherbe 's poetic
genius is the famous "Consolation to Monsieur Du Perier
on the death of his daughter." It contains the best-known
line of Malherbe —

Et, Rose, elle a v^cu ce que vivent les roses,

about which I would merely say that it is one of those

accidental romantic verses which occur here and there in

139

Aspects and Impressions

all the great classical poets. There are several in Pope,
where they are no more characteristic of his general style
than is this of Malherbe's. So far from being the chief
line in the poem, it is, in spite of its beauty, the least
important to us in our present inquiry. The "Consola-
tion " consists of twenty-one stanzas, written long after the
sad event of the death of the young lady, whose name, by
the way, was not Rose, but Marguerite. The advice which
the poet gives to the stricken father is stoical and Roman.
Weary yourself no more with these useless and prolonged
lamentations; but henceforth be wise, and love a shadow
as a shadow, and extinguish the memory of extinguished
ashes. The instances of Priam and Alcides may seem to
have little in them to cheer Du P^rier, but we must remem-
ber that antiquity was held a more sacred authority three
hundred years ago than it is now. Malherbe, with great
decorum, recalls to Du Perier the fact that he himself has
lost two beloved children. The poor man under his
thatched roof is subject to the laws of death, nor can the
guard on watch at the gates of the Louvre protect our
kings agaiiist it. To complain of the inevitable sacrifice,
and to lose patience with Providence, is to lack
wisdom. The only philosophy which can bring repose
to a heart bereaved is implicit submission to the will
of God.

All this may not seem very original, but it is exquisitely
phrased, and it is sensible, dignified, and wholesome.
There is in it a complete absence of the ornament and
circumstance of death which had taken so preposterous a
place in the abundant elegiac poetry of the sixteenth
century. We are familiar with the grotesque and
sumptuous appeals to the macabre which we meet with in
Raleigh, in Donne, in Quarles, all the dismal trappings
of the tomb and embroideries of the winding-sheet. They
are wholly set aside by Malherbe, whose sonnet on the
death of his son is worthy of special study. This young
man, who was the pride of the poet's life, was killed in a
duel, or, as the father vociferously insisted, murdered by
a treacherous rufifian. Malherbe made the courts ring with
140

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

his appeals, but he also composed a sonnet, which is a
typical example of his work. It is not what we should
call "poetical," but in clearness, in force, in full capacity
to express exactly what the author had in mind to say, it is
perfect. We seem to hear the very cry of the fierce old
man shrieking for revenge on the slayer of his son. The
sonnet was composed some time after the event, for the
whole art of Malherbe was the opposite of improvisation.
One amusing instance of his deliberate method is 'to be
found in the history of his ode to console President Nicolas
de Verdun on the death of his wife. Malherbe composed
his poem so slowly, that while he was writing it the
President widower not merely married a second time, but
died. The poet, with consummate gravity, persisted in his
task, and was able to present the widow with the consola-
tion which her late husband should have received after the
death of her predecessor.

During thirty years of growmg celebrity, Malherbe
fought for his doctrine. He had but slowly become a
convert to his own laws, but when once they were clearly
set out in his brain, he followed them scrupulously, and he
insisted that the world should obey them too. It seems a
strange thing that it was the young men who followed
him first, and with most enthusiasm, until the fashionable
ladies of Paris began to compete with one another in
support of the classical doctrine, and in repudiation of
their old favourite Desportes, whose fame came down
clattering in a single night, like Beckford's tower at Font-
hill. Malherbe brought poetry into line with the Court
and the Church, in a decent formality. Largely, as is
always the case in the history of literature, the question
was one more of language than of substance. Take, for
example, the "Stanzas to Alcandre on the Return of
Oranthe to Fontainebleau," and you will find them as
preposterous in sentiment, as pretentious and affected in
conception, as any sonnet of Desportes, perhaps more so,
but their diction is perfectly simple and graceful, and they
are composed in faultless modern French. Long before
Moli^re was born Malherbe was in the habit of reading his
141

Aspects and Impressions

verses to an old servant, and if there was a single
phrase which gave her difficulty, he would scrupulously
revise it.

He was supported by a sublime conviction of his own
value. It was a commonplace in all the poetical literature
of the sixteenth century to claim immortality. Desportes
had told his mistress that she would live for ever like the
Phoenix, in the flame of his sonnets. We all remember
Shakespeare's boast that "not marble, nor the gilded
monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
But no one was ever more certain of leaving behind him
a lasting monument than Malherbe. He said, addressing
the King :

All pour their praise on you, but not with equal hand,
For while a common work survives one year or two,
What Malherbe writes is stamped with immortality.

The self-gratulation at the close of the noble "He de
R^ " ode is quite disconcerting. In this case, also, he
reminds the King that

The great Amphion, he whose voice was nonpareil,

Amazed the universe by fanes it lifted high ;
Yet he with all his art has builded not so well
As by my verse have I.

His boast, extravagant as it sounds, was partly justified.
Not in his own verse, but in that which his doctrine
encouraged others to write — and not in verse only, but
in prose, and in the very arrangement and attitude of
the French intellect — Malherbe's influence was wide-
spreading, was potent, and will never be wholly super-
seded. He found French, as a literary language, confused,
chaotic, no longer in the stream of sound tradition. He
cleared out the channel, he dredged away the mud and
cut down the weeds; and he brought the pure water back
to its proper course. Let us not suppose that he did this
completely, or that his authority was not challenged. It
142

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction

was, and Malherbe did not live to see the victory of his
ideas. He did not survive long enough to found the
Academic, or to welcome Vaugelas, the great grammarian
who would have been the solace of his old age. There
were still many men of talent, such as P^lisson and
Agrippa d'Aubign6, who resisted his doctrine. But he
had made his great appeal for order and regularity ; he had
wound his slug-horn in the forest. He had poured his
ideas into the fertile brain of Richelieu ; he had started
the momentous discussions of the Hotel Rambouillet. lie
had taught a new generation to describe objects in general
terms, to express natural ideas with simplicity, to S€-lect
with scrupulous care such words as were purely French
and no others, to eschew hiatus and inversion and to
purify rhyme, to read the ancients with sympathetic atten-
tion but not to pillage them. His own limitations were
marked. He seems to have had no sense whatever for
external nature; while he overvalued a mathematical exacti-
tude of balance in versification and a grandiose severity
in rhetoric.

But we are not attempting this afternoon to define the
French Classic School, but merely to comprehend how
and when it came into being. It preceded our own
Classic School by the fifty years which divide Malherbe
from Dry den, who, in like manner, but with far less
originality, freed poetry from distortion, prolixity, and
artifice. When Malherbe died no one could guess how
prodigious would be the effect of his teaching. Indeed,
at that moment, October 6, 1628, there might even seem
to be a certain retrogression to the old methods, a
certain neglect of the new doctrine, which seemed to
have been faintly taken up. But, looking back, we now
see that at the moment of Malherbe's death, Corneille
was on the point of appearing, while there were children
in the nurseries who were to be La Fontaine, Pascal,
Moli^re, Mme. de S^vign^, Bossuet. Boileau and Racine
were not even born, for Malherbe sowed early and the
harvest came late.

The ruling passion accompanied this resolute reformer
143

Aspects and Impressions

to the very close of his career. His faithful disciple,
Racan, his Boswell, has drawn for us the last scene :

One hour before he died, Mr. de Malherbe woke with a
start out of a deep slumber, to rebuke his hostess, who was
also his nurse, for using an expression which he did not
consider to be correct French. When his confessor ventured
to chide him, he replied that he could not help it, and that he
wished to preserve up to the moment of his death the purity of
the French language.

144

THE FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH
ACADEMY

FOR three centuries past there have been frequent
discussions as to the possibiHty of founding an
Academy of Letters in England, but it was not until
June, 1910, that a modest and partial experiment in this
direction was successfully made. After long deliberations
between two accredited bodies, the Royal Society of Litera-
ture and the Society of Authors, thirty-three persons were
nominated to form, within the corporation of the former,
an Academic Committee which should attempt to exercise
something resembling the functions of the Academic
Fran9aise. Lord Morley was elected President, and now,
without claiming any excessive publicity, this Academic
Committee, founded for the protection and encouragement
of a pure English style in prose and verse, has occupied a
position in letters which gives every evidence of persisting
and increasing. It was assailed, as was natural and right,
by satire and by caricature, but it has survived the attacks
which were directed against it, and there can be little doubt
that, with good luck, it may become a prominent feature of
our intellectual and social system. Already, although so
young, it has received that consecration of death which
makes it a part of history. No fewer than eight, that is to
say nearly a quarter, of its original members have passed
away, and among them those delicate humanists Butcher
and Verrall, a poet so philosophical as Alfred Lyall, critics
of such fine temper as Andrew Lang and Edward Dowden.
Like the Academic Fran^alse, the Academic Committee
has its parti des dues, and it mourns the loss of an exquisite
amateur, G€orge Wyndham. These men leave to their
145

Aspects and Impressions

successors the memory of lives devoted to the purest
literature/

This, then, seems a not inappropriate moment for con-
sidering more closely in detail than has comqjonly been
done, the circumstances attending the most successful
experiment that the world has seen to create and sustain
a public body whose duty it should be to guard the purity
of a national language and to insure the permanence of
its best literary forms. It will not be necessary here to
do more than remind our readers that the Academic Fran-
9aise was not the earliest corporation in Europe, or even
in France, which was formed for the purpose of carrying
out these difficult and perilous designs. It was simply the
most successful and the most durable. As early as about
the year 1490, an Academy was founded in Florence in
the deepest piety of the Renaissance. Its motives were
pathetically Greek. The gardens of the Medicis were to
represent Academe; Arno was to be its Cephisus; in the
great Plotinist, Marsiglio Ficino, it was to find its incom-
parable leader, its visible Plato. By the sixteenth century,
Italy was full of imitations; there were the Intronati at
Siena, the Delia Crusca at Florence, the Otiosi at Bologna,
the Humoristi and the Fantastici in Rome. In France
itself, in 1570, the poets of the Pleiade instituted, under
Charles IX, their Academic de Musique et de Po6sie, which
became in due course the Acad^mie du Palais, and died
inglorious during the Civil Wars. Later there was
founded, in Savoy, that Acad6mie Florimontane, which
flourished for a little while under St. Francois de Sales.
It was in imitation of those vague and ephemeral institu-
tions that, supported by the powerful patronage of Riche-
lieu, the great corporation which still exercises so lively
an influence in France came, in the fulness of the seven-
teenth century, into permanent existence. It is too seldom
realized out of what accidental conjunction of circum-
stances it arose, and how humble and unfavourable were
the auspices which attended its birth.

1 Since this was written the Academic Committee has lost Henry
James, Lady Ritchie and Austin Dobson.
146

The Foundation of the French Academy

The French Academy came into the world so silently,
and was long so inconspicuous, that it is difficult to point
to its exact source. But there is no doubt that its inception
was due to the hospitable temper and the intellectual curi-
osity of a young man whose name deserves well of the
world. He was not a great writer, nor even a great scholar,
but he possessed to an extraordinary degree the gift of
literary solidarity. In the year 1629, Valentin Conrart,
who was twenty-six years of age, was living in a convenient
and agreeable house at the corner of the Rue Saint Martin
and the Rue des Vielles-Etuves. About this time his rela-
tive, probably his cousin, Antoine Godeau, two years
younger than Conrart, came up to Paris from Dreux to
seek his fortune. It is thought that he lodged with his
cousin ; at all events Conrart looked after him in his
universally obliging way. Godeau confessed that he wrote
verses, and he showed them to Conrart, who adored poetry,
and who burned to spread an appreciation of it. He
thought his kinsman's verses good, and he invited a few
of his literary friends to come and listen to them. No
doubt he asked them to dinner, for he had a famous cook;
and after dinner the company settled down to listen. The
poet was excessively short and preposterously ugly, but
he. was subtle and agreeable, and he already possessed to
a conspicuous degree the art of pleasing.

When the future bishop of Grasse and Vence had
recited his poems, which were love-pieces and doubtless of
a light description — for he afterwards begged them back
from Conrart and burned them — the conversation became
general, and the evening passed so pleasantly that the
company was unanimous that these instructive and enter-
taining meetings must be repeated. There were eight of
these friends gathered together, all authors or men
intimately occupied with literature. They were agreed in
determining to keep up their discussions, and first of all
it was proposed that they should meet successively in each
other's houses. But no one of them was rich, and Con-
rart's house was far the most comfortably situated; he was
anxious to be the perpetual host, and the rest were glad to
147

Aspects and Impressions

give way to him. They decided to meet once every week
to discuss literature and language in Conrart's house at
the corner of the Rue Saint Martin. The names of the
eight friends are not equally celebrated in the history of
French literature ; most of them, indeed, are not celebrated
at all; but I must record them here, before I proceed,
because of the leading part they took at the inception of
the Academic. They were Chapelain, Conrart, Godeau,
Gombauld, Philippe Habert, Habert de Cerisy, S6risay,
and Malleville. We must try to form some impression of
each of them, though most are but fugitive and phantasmal
figures.

Of Valentin Conrart a tolerably clear image can be
formed by collating what the memoir-writers have recorded
of him. It was much noted that he was no scholar; like
Shakespeare he had little Latin and less Greek; indeed it
was roundly asserted that he had none of either. But he
studied much Italian and Spanish, and he had a fine
library exclusively of modern literature. He wrote a great
deal in prose and verse, but mainly for his private pleasure ;
he kept a prudent silence about his works, which were
understood to be mediocre. He was always an invalid;
already, in his youth, he began to be a sufferer from the
gout, which was to torture him for thirty years. But
pain did not affect his temper, nor his extraordinary
gregariousness. He lived for the small enjoyments of
others. He was the confidant of everybody, the healer of
all quarrels and disputes. As time went on, and Conrart
became absorbed in the duties of perpetual Secretary to
the Academic, his qualities may have become exaggerated.
His enemies began to say that he was too indulgent, too
easy-going with offenders. The super-subtle declared that
he had become infatuated with his own friendliness, and
that he went through Paris murmuring " Ah ! ma belle
amiti^ ! " He was a great depositary of secrets, and liked
nothing so much as to run about — or rather, poor man !
to hobble about — pouring oil upon troubled waters. Talle-
mant des R^aux, who hated him, says that Conrart had
an unpleasant wife, whose face was like a gingerbread nut,
148

The Foundation of the French Academy

but we need not believe all that Tallemant des R(!'aux
says.

Conrart, however, with all his serviceable friendliness,
could not have done much without Chapelain, who was
really the founder of the Acaddmie. Jean Chapelain was
not merely an active man of letters, he was the man of
letters pure and simple. He had, in that age of intellectual
curiosity, a passion for literature not surpassed, if equalled,
by a single contemporary. M. Lanson has shown, what
scarcely needed showing, that Chapelain was no artist, but'
if he was a bad poet, he was intensely interested in the
technique of poetry. He has been called the founder of
French criticism; he had pertinacity, courage, and a
passionate love for the French language. Perhaps he was
the inventor of the law of the Three Unities in drama.
His influence in French thought lasted until the days of
Boileau. In 1629 Chapelain was thirty-five years of age,
old enough and dogmatic enough to impress his will and
his opinions on his younger companions. Because he was
a detestable epic and a ridiculous lyric poet, because we
cannot be drawn by wild horses to read the Pucelle or the
Ode a Richelieu, we must not overlook the fact that Chape-
lain was one of the great intellectual forces of his time,
although when the meetings began he had scarcely printed
anything except the much-discussed Preface de I'Adone
(1623). Ceremonious and yet rough, a courtier and yet a
sort of astute Diogenes, hating all luxury and ruining him-
self to buy rare books, a stormy petrel in every literary
tempest, Chapelain presents to us the shrewd and violent
figure of a captain who steered the youthful Academic
through its vicissitudes into safe anchorage.

Among all these young men, there was one old man,
and he too, like Chapelain, was an authentip man of letters.
This was Jean Ogier, Sieur de Gombauld, who was not
less than sixty years of age already. He had been born
youngest son in the fourth marriage of a redoubtable
Huguenot of Xaintogne, and he came to Paris towards the
end of the reign of Henry IV, with a mass of strange MSS.
He was very poor, very proud, extravagant and eccentric

K 149

Aspects and Impressions

to the last degree. He managed to appear at Court, and
there must have been something striking about him, since
his fortune began by Marie de Medicis noticing him at the
coronation of Louis XIII. It was said that she saw in him
a striking likeness to a man of whom she had been very
fond years before in Florence. After the ceremony, the
Queen-Mother sent for Gombauld, and he was attached to
her Court, where he was called "le Beau T6nebreux," but
he remained very shy and helpless. He nourished a
frenzied passion for her Majesty, yet was incapable of
speech or movement in her presence ; during his brief
splendour at Court, he wrote the most famous of his works,
the romance of Endymion (1624), in which the Queen-
Mother appeared as that leading character, "La Lune."
There are delightful stories of the gaucherie and pathetic
simplicity of this old poet, who was a very fine country
gentleman, always carefully dressed, holding his tall,
spare figure well upright, and with quantities of real hair
pushing out his wig on all sides. Gombauld, in spite of
"La Lune," could never feel at his ease in the presence of
fine ladies, and sighed for a farmer's daughter. After the
death of Richelieu, all the pensions were struck off, and
Gombauld grew very poor and wrinkled. He was touched
with the mania of persecution, and became rather a terror
to his fellow-Academicians, one of whom called him "the
most ceremonious and the most mysterious of men." He
grew to be very unhappy, but like Tithonus could not die,
and he was "a white-haired shadow roaming like a
dream " in the world of Moli^re and Racine. He died,
at the age of ninety-six, in 1666, having been born in
the lifetime of Ronsard, and out-living the birth of
Massillon.

The other four members of the original group have not
left so deep a mark on the history of literature. Jacques
de S^risay was accustomed to literary coteries, for he
had been a constant attendant on Montaigne's adopted
daughter, that enthusiastic and grotesque old maid. Mile.
Marie de Gournay, who loved to collect the wits around
her "shadow " and her cat, Donzelle. S^risay cannot have
150

The Foundation of the French Academy

been a man of letters of much force, since his works, to
the end of time, consisted of half a tragedy, which he could
never finish. Later on he contrived to read this fragment
aloud to Richelieu, who yielded to fatigue before the end
of the exercise. This vague person was known as, "le
d^licat S^risay." Then, there was Claude de Malleville,
who had just come back from attending Bassompierre in
England. He was a man of considerable originality of
character, and afterwards a power in the Acad^mie. He
liked the pleasant informality of the meetings at Conrart's
house, and objected to their being turned into official
sessions. We shall see that he stood alone, a little later,
in stout opposition to the proposals of the Cardinal. Malle-
ville was a little wisp of a man, with black locks and dim
dark eyes. He translated vaguely and amorously from the
Italian, and had a great deal to do with the composition of
the Guirlafide de Julie. Except for some Ovidian Epistles,
which he is said to have published as early as 1620,
Malleville's own poems were posthumous. M. Magne
says that Malleville w^as "un faiseur de bibus " (a term of
contempt almost beyond the range of translation) "qui
fr^tillait autour des jupes " ; but that is because he opposed
Boisrobert. Shadows they were, and shadows they
pursued.

Most shadowy of all are to us now the two
Haberts. Germain Habert, the youngest of the original
Acad6miciens, wrote a very affected poem on the meta-
morphosis of the eyes of Phillis into stars. As he grew
older he neglected Phillis to devote himself to good works.
Menage, who was his friend, says he was "un des plus
beaux esprits de son temps." But where are the evidences
of his wit? His brother, Philippe Habert, is the last of
the original coterie and the faintest phantom of them all.
He was a soldier in the artillery, and he was killed, in
1637, at the siege of Emery, crushed under a wall that had
been accidentally blown up by gunpowder. Just before
this melancholy event, Philippe Habert had prophetically
published his poem called Le Temple de la Mart, which
was very much admired, but is now not easily accessible.

Aspects and Impressions

He was a cold and solemn young man, reserved in manner,
but held to be both brave and friendly.

Such were the eight companions who met, week by
week, all innocent and unconscious, to discuss in familiar
intercourse every species of subject — business, the news
of the day, the movement of letters. If any one of them
had written something, as frequendy happened, he would
read it aloud, and ask for criticism, which w^ould be
frankly given. Often their discussions would end in a
stroll through the streets, or in a meal prepared by Con-
rart's really estimable chef. It was a delightful time, and,
in after years, when the Academic was celebrated and
powerful, the original members looked back wistfully at
this happy period of almost pastoral quietude. Pellisson,
interviewing the survivors in a later generation, says that
"ils parlent encore aujourd'hui de ce premier age de
I'Acad^mie, comme d'un age d'or, durant lequel avec
toute Tinnocence et toute la liberte des premiers si^cles,
sans bruit et sans pompe, et sans autres lois que celles
de I'amitie, ils goutaient ensemble tout ce que la society
des esprits et la vie raisonnable ont de plus doux et de
plus charmant."

It is curious and interesting to find that this "little
clan," as Keats would call it, contrived to preserve its
unity and its privacy for several years. The friends met,
as we have seen, with remarkable frequency, yet they did
not quarrel, nor grow bored, nor break up through the
action of any outward accident. It is, surely, even in
much quieter centuries than ours, unusual that a party of
this kind should continue to exist, suspended as in a
vacuum, not dwindling nor increasing, and unknown to
the world outside. In those Valois times, such a collec-
tion of persons would be in danger of being accused of
political plotting, and so the visitors to Conrart were
pledged to an absolute silence. This pledge was first
broken by Malleville, who told Nicolas Faret, apparently
in 1632. Faret was a young provincial lawyer, lately
an;ived in Paris from the town of Bourg-en-Bresse. He
was still very poor, but ingenious and active ; he was ^
152

The Foundation of the French Academy

disciple of the great grammarian, \'augelas, and later the
intimate of Moli^rc. He was a jolly man, with chestnut
hair and rubicund face; his figure grew massive as the
years went by. Faret was consumed with curiosity, and
when he had once wormed the secret of the meetings out
of Malleville, he gave the latter no peace until he con-
sented to introduce him. Faret had just published a book
of some merit and considerable popularity, L'Honnele
Hcmme, a breviary of how a gentleman should behave,
a sort of courtier's vade mecum; and he brought an early
copy of this with him as a credential. Faret was an
active, boisterous person, boon companion of the more
gifted poet Saint-Amant. He had no sooner secured a
footing in Conrart's house than he made himself very
useful to the body, for he was by far the most business-
like of the group. It was Faret who, in 1634, drew up the
original scheme for the foundation of the Academie. He
did not add much to the glory of the corporation, when
once it Avas formed, for the other members complained that
he did not attend the meetings unless there was some
practical business on hand, and that then he was apt to
be drunk. Faret, who was attached to Henry of Lorraine,
the comte d'Harcourt, and served as his go-between with
Richelieu, was not a very shining Academicien, but he
had his temporary value.

Faret's chief merit was that he brought to the meetings
a man of letters who was destined to take a very prominent
place, for the time being, both in the French Academy
and in literary life — namely, Jean Desmarets de Saint-
Sorlin. He was an indefatigable writer, and a man exactly
suited to be useful to a group of literary persons, because
he had experience of the world, great enthusiasm for the
craft of letters, and a wide and humorous outlook on life.
Chapelain, glancing back many years later, defined
Desmarets as "un des esprits les plus faciles de ce temps,"
and that is just what he was, an inexhaustible and rapid
producer of prose and verse in the spirit and fashion of
the age. He was much valued by Richelieu, who forced
him, against his will, to collaborate in the composition of
153

Aspects and Impressions

tragedies. Desmarets had no dramatic inspiration, but he
was able to satisfy the Cardinal. At the time of which
we are speaking-, probably in 1633, Desmarets was brought
to Conrart's house by Faret and received a courteous
welcome. It was characteristic of him that, instantly
entering into the spirit of the company, he pulled out
of his pocket the proof-sheets of his new prose
romance Ariane, and asked leave to submit them to
discussion.

Desmarets was rich and influential, and he had the
true Academic spirit. He became a prominent public
character, and Controller-General of the King's Army,
but he never lost his close hold upon the Academic, of
which he was elected the first Chancellor. In the moment
of transition, the dark hour before the dawn, he was
eminently useful, for when, in 1633, Conrart married, and
it was no longer convenient to meet in his house,
Desmarets transferred the whole cluster of bees to a new
hive, the sumptuous Hotel Pellev^, which he had just
rebuilt at the corner of the Rue du Roi de Sicile and of
the Rue Tison. Then, and not till then, did they begin
seriously to think of founding an Academy. Desmarets's
numerous writings have stood the test of time very ill.
His epic of Clovis was ridiculed by Boileau, and perhaps
the only work of his which can be read to-day without
boredom is his comedy of Les Visionnaires (1635), ^ merry
piece of literary criticism, in which the various coteries of
that day, and the famous salons, are satirized. Never-
theless, it is not beyond the range of possibility that, in
these days of revival, somebody may be found to resusci-
tate Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin.

In that entertaining volume, Le Plaisant Ahhe de Bois-
rohert, the great rival of Desmarets has already found an
eloquent resuscitator, M. Magne. Fran9ois de Metel de
Boisrobert is an unedifying figure of a scapegrace priest,
whose giggling face is seen peeping round most doors in
the scandalous memoirs of the time. No one was more
contemptuously insulted, no one more bitterly ridiculed,
than Richelieu's supple jackal, the author of Anaxandre
154

The Foundation of the French Academy

et Orazie and of Pyrandrc. These heroic works of faded
imagination are read no longer, nor the Recueil de Lettres
Noiivelles nor Le Sacrifice des Muses. On the other
hand, the sarcasms of the epigrammatists and the scan-
dalous tales of contemporaries continue to invest the
memory of Boisrobert with a nasty odour. M. Magne,
who brings a marvellous erudition to the task, has bravely
endeavoured to redeem a talent and a character so deeply
compromised. We cannot join in the whole of his white-
washing, but we may admit that he has proved the
"plaisant abbe" to be neither the dunce nor the black-
guard that legend had painted him. Moreover, it is quite
certain that he exercised a most useful energy in the
foundation of the French Academy.

When the indiscretion of Faret brought Desmarets to
the literary meetings in Conrart's house, it had the in-
evitable result of exciting the jealous curiosity of Bois-
robert. He was the great rival of Desmarets in the
affection and confidence of Richelieu, and we may be
certain that when "le plaisant abb6 " found out that
Desmarets was attending secret and mysterious assemblies,
he plainly intimated to Faret that he also must be taken
into the secret or else he would report the plot to the
Cardinal. Accordingly, some time in 1633, Boisrobert too
was brought to Conrart's house, and instantly conceived
a great scheme for his own honour and the glory of French
literature. He clung, through every storm, to the robes
of Richelieu, who had originally disliked him, but who
proved in the long run powerless to resist the devotion
and the entertainment which Boisrobert provided. The poet
took no snub; on one occasion when Richelieu had rudely
ignored him, he flung himself on his knees, crying "You
let the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from your table.
Am I not a dog?" The Cardinal admitted that he was,
and thenceforth Boisrobert occupied an intimate place in
Richelieu's household, sometimes as a retriever, more
often as a poodle. It is impossible to deny that Bois-
robert was a poltroon, but in his lifelong devotion to the
Academic he really behaved extremely well. The secret,
155

Aspects and Impressions

no doubt, was that with the minimum of regard for purity
of conduct, the "phiisant abb6 " combined a genuine
solicitude for the purity of language.

It was Boisrobert who first conceived the idea that an
Academy of Letters might be useful to Richelieu and
Richelieu indispensable to an Academy of Letters. For
this scheme he deserves great credit, and we gather that
it was first to the Cardinal and not first to Conrart's friends
that he spoke. It seems probable that the latter had
already begun to suggest among themselves that their
relation might be permanent. There is a letter dated
as early as December, 1632, in which Godeau, writing to
Chapelain, seems to speak of the Academic as already a
recognized thing. If we may suppose that Louis Giry,
the Hellenist, who was not an original member, but whose
name is mentioned as that of one of Conrart's friends,
was already a visitor, the body now consisted of twelve
persons, with all of Avhom I have endeavoured to make
my readers acquainted. It was after one of the meetings
in 1633 that, as Pellisson tells us, having observed what
kind of books had been examined, and that the conversa-
tion had not been a commerce of compliment and flattery,
where each person gave praise that in his turn he might
receive it, but that faults of style, and even very small ones,
had been seized upon boldly and frankly for discussion,
Boisrobert was "fulfilled with joy and admiration." It
crossed his mind that this was the very toy to enliven the
petulant leisure of his Cardinal. When that scheme
occurred to "le plaisant abb6 " the Acad^mie Fran9aise
practically started into being.

No small part of the success of the policy of Richelieu
came from the brilliant intuition which he had of the
importance of regulating intellectual effort. He did not
ignore the Press, as had so stupidly been done before his
day, but he had no idea of leaving it to follow^ its own
devices. In 1626 he had used a very remarkable ex-
pression; he had said "Les faiseurs de livres serviraient
grandement le roi et ceux qui sont aupr^s de lui, s'ils ne
se melaient de parler de leurs actions ni en bien ni en
156

The Foundation of the French Academy

mal." Literature was to be encouraged and protected, on
the understanding that it would attend to its own affairs,
and not disturb the King's government with Hbelles wjiich
were none of its concern. Richelieu's genuine enthusiasm
for scholarship and poetry is not to be questioned, but
with it all he was pre-eminently an ambitious statesman.
Public policy was the business of his life, literature his
enchanting relaxation and entertainment. But he wished
to be master in the temple of the Muses, no less than in
the King's palace, and he would only protect the author-
ship of the day on the terms of being recognized as its
absolute tyrant. He was to be the Miltiades of letters,
but once acknowledge his authority, and he became litera-
ture's "best and truest friend." His lightning intelligence
had perceived, in 163 1, the importance of journalism, and
he had protected the earliest of French newspapers, the
Gazette, on the understanding that it proceeded from his
own official cabinet. It was his scheme to break the
prestige of the nobility, and in carrying out his plans, he
was glad of the support of the intellectual classes. He
was aided, of course, by the development of public feeling
in this direction.

There can be little doubt tliat it was by Boisrobert
rather than by Desmarets that the Cardinal was originally
informed of the literary meetings in the house of Conrart.
His curiosity was vividly awakened. Knots of persons
meeting privately and with regularity were the objects of
his lively suspicion, and there is some reason to suppose
that his first impulse was to break up the company and
forbid the meetings. But Boisrobert, who held his ear,
reassured him.

He did not fail [says our earliest authority] to give a
favourable report of the little assembly in whose deliberations
he had taken a part, and of the persons who composed it; and
the Cardinal, whose temper was naturally attuned to great
designs, and who loved the French language to infatuation,
being himself an excellent writer, after having praised the
scheme, asked M. Boisrobert whether these persons would not
157

Aspects and Impressions

like to become a corporation, and to meet regularly, and under
public authority.

He desired Boisrobert to put this proposition before the
next meeting, as from himself.

It appears that at first the idea was not received with
enthusiasm. The friends were simple men of letters, not
ambitious of power, and timid in the face of such formid-
able patronage. But the Cardinal consulted Chapelain,
and won him over to his views. There can be no doubt
that Desmarets and Faret supported a plan from which
they could reap nothing but personal advantage. When
the ground was ready and the hour was ripe, Boisrobert
came down to a meeting, with a definite proposal from
the Cardinal, who offered to these gentlemen his protection
for their Society, the public compliment of Letters Patent,
and also — this was so like the vehement bonhomie of
Richelieu — a promise of personal affection "en toutes
rencontres" for each of them individually. The friends
were, in fact, to be attached in permanence to his personal
household.

The meeting at which Boisrobert made this startling
announcement was one of which it would be interesting
indeed to have a detailed report. Unfortunately, this is
wanting. But we know that the friends were smitten with
timidity and dismay. Scarcely any one of them but ex-
pressed his vexation, and regretted that the Cardinal had
done them this most unwelcome honour, that he had come
down from his majestic heights to "troubler la douceur
et la familiarity de leurs conferences." We can imagine
the agitation and the anxiety, the babble of voices which
had never before been raised above the tone of scholarly
amenity. Those who were pledged to support the scheme
doubtless held their peace until the storm had subsided, and
until S^risay and Malleville, who were the most intractable
opponents, had done their worst in denunciation of it.
Then the voices of the supporters were heard, and some-
one, doubtless the honey-tongued Boisrobert, suggested
that as S^risay was master of the household to the Due
158

The Foundation of the French Academy

de la Rochefuucauld, and Malleville secretary to the
Marechal de Bassompierre, it would, unjustly but most
inevitably, be believed that they were incited by the
enmity which their respective patrons were supposed (but
how unfairly !) to nourish against the Cardinal. This
impressed the company, and Serisay withdrew his opposi-
tion, but Malleville continued to be intractable. It was
important, however, that the reply of the infant Academy
to the Cardinal should be cordial, and that it should be
unanimous.

Chapelain, who had held his argumentsjn reserve, now
came forward with that mixture of tact and force which
was his great quality. He was certainly the most eminent
man of letters in the assembly, and the others supposed
him to be more independent than he really was. As a
matter of fact, he had succumbed to the fascination of the
Cardinal, who, to put it vulgarly, had Chapelain safe in
his pocket. With a great show of impartiality, the poet
put before his friends the sensible view that, no doubt, it
would have been more agreeable to continue in private
their confidential gatherings, but that it was no longer a
question of what was agreeable. They had — he would not
insist on pointing out how^ — lost all chance of keeping them-
selves to themselves. The secret was out, and they had
attracted the attention of the most formidable of men, one
who was in the habit of being implicitly obeyed, and who
was not accustomed to meet with resistance ; that this all-
powerful statesman would not forgive the insult of their re-
fusing his proffer of protection, and that he would find a way
to chastise each individual member. But certainly, the first
thing he would be sure to do would be to disperse their
assembly and destroy a society which all of them had
already begun to hope would be immortal. Nothing more
was heard of Malleville's "minority report"; the infant
Academy surrendered unanimously. Before the company
dispersed, M. de Boisrobert was desired to convey to
Monsieur le Cardinal the very humble thanks of the
assembly for the honour he designed to show them, and
to assure him that, though none of them had ever dreamed
159

Aspects and Impressions

of such distinction, they were all of them resolved to carry
out the wishes of his Eminence.

Richelieu always responded to this sort of attitude.
He expressed to "le plaisant abbe" his great satisfaction,
and no doubt they laughed together in private over the
oddities of Conrart's guests, for such was their habit, and
such the influence of Boisrobert over his master. A doctor
once facetiously recommended, when the Cardinal was ill,
"two drams of Boisrobert after every meal." But in
public, and in fact, Richelieu took the most lively interest
in the scheme. One is inclined to believe, that, by a
flash of prophetic imagination, this great man saw what
a place the Acad^mie Fran9aise would take in the French
order of things during three coming centuries at least.
He urged the friends to meet without delay, now no longer
at Conrart's, but in Desmarets's palatial h6tel, "et a
penser s^rieusement k I'^tablissement de I'Acad^mie."
All this was early in 1634, probably in February.

The first direction which the Cardinal deigned to give
to the embarrassed and slightly terrified friends was that
they should add to their number, or in his own words that
"ces Messieurs grossirent leur Compagnie de plusieurs
personnes considerables pour leur merite." This appears
to have been begun at the official sitting of March 20, 1634,
and that may be considered as the date of the formation of
the Academic. Existing members sat round the table,
no doubt, and names were suggested and voted for. It
would be a somewhat rough-and-ready choice, and the
critical attitude would not be precisely that which would
meet with approval at the Institut to-day. But the errors
of choice have been abundantly exaggerated by those who
have written loosely on this subject. Before the end of
1634 they had added, it seems, twenty-three names to their
original list of eleven (or twelve), so that the Academie
now consisted of about thirty-five men. Among these,
it is perfectly true that there existed many obscurities and
some obvious nonentities. But, besides those whom we
have already described, the names now appeared of Balzac,
Maynard, Gomberville, Saint-Amant, Racan, Vaugelas,
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The Foundation of the French Academy

and Voiture. All these were writers extremely eminent
in the literature of their own age, and not one of them
but is interesting and distinguished still. Not to have
included them in a French Academy would have been a
grave and obvious errror.

Some of the accusations brought against the infant
Academy are absurd. It has been vilified for omitting
to make Moli^re and Pascal original members; the latter
was eleven years of age at the time and the former twelve !
Descartes was, of course, already one of the intellectual
glories of France, but he w^as a wanderer over the face
of Europe, and still only known as a writer in Latin.
Arnauld d'Antilly was elected, but refused to take his
place. Like Pascal, Brebeuf was still a schoolboy. Pierre
Corneille, who was very little known in 1634, and not a
resident in Paris, was elected later, and so was Lamothe
le Vayer. Charles Sorel, the author of Francion and Le
Berger Extravagant, who was historiographer of France
and a satirist of merit, was not invited to join, it is true;
but his caustic pen had spared no one, and he was
essentially "unclubable." Scarron in 1634 was only a
wild young buck about town. There remains unexplained
— and I confess there seems to me to remain alone — the
strange omission of Rotrou, a tragic poet of high distinc-
tion who never formed part of the French Academy.
Since 1632 he had been the friend of Chapelain, and the
Cardinal was devoted to him. That Rotrou 's duties as a
magistrate forced him to reside at Dreux is the only reason
which I can think of to account for his absence from the
list of 1634. If there was one other representative man of
letters eligible, and yet omitted from that list, my memory
is at fault.

Among those who were invited there was one whose
support was absolutely essential to the youthful society.
It may be said, without exaggeration, that the Academie
Fran9aise could not have survived contemporary ridicule
if it had failed to secure the co-operation of Jean Louis
Guez de Balzac. In 1634 Balzac was thirty-seven years
of age and by far the most prominent man of letters in
161

Aspects and Impressions

France. The first volume of his famous Lettres — which
were not letters in our sense, but chatty and yet elaborate
essays on things in general — had appeared in 1624, and
had created what the Abb6 d'Olivet described as "a general
revolution among persons of culture." Balzac imme-
diately took his place as the official leader and divinity
of what were afterwards known as the Precieuses; but he
was a great deal more than that : he was the enchanting
artist of a new French prose. "Le grand Epistolier de
France " was to French prose all, and more than all, that
Malherbe (who died in 1628) was to French verse.
Brunetiere has dwelt on Balzac's great service to letters,
in the studied cultivation of harmony and lucidity, order
and movement. His Lettres ushered in a new epoch in
the production of prose, far more sudden and obvious
than was brought about half a century later, in English,
by the Essays of Sir William Temple, but similar to that
in character. The most agreeable present any man of
fashion could make to his mistress, says M(inage, was a
copy of Balzac's book, and yet the gravest of scholars
was not too learned to imitate its cadences.

The objects which the infant French Academy set
before itself were the encouragement of grace and nobility
of style in all persons employing the French language, and,
as a corollary to this, the persistent effort to raise that
language, in all particulars, until it should become an in-
strument for expression as delicate, as forcible and as com-
prehensive as Latin and Greek had been m their palmiest
hours. But these were the very objects which Balzac had
first, and most imperiously, impressed upon his readers,
and there was a sense in which it could be said that the
new body was merely emphasizing and extending, giving
legislative authority to, ideas which were the property of
Balzac. It was therefore obvious that whosoever was
made an original member, the "grand Epistolier " should
not be missing. This was obvious to the wise Boisrobert,
of whom Balzac himself amusingly said that he was "cir-
comspectissime " in the smallest actions of his life. As
early as March 13, 1634, ^^^ therefore in all probability
162

The Foundation of the French Academy

before anyone else was approached, Boisrobert took care
that Balzac was invited to join the new Academie.

But it was one thing to whistle to Balzac, and quite
another for him to come at the call. His character was not
an agreeable one; he was excessively proud, painfully shy,
quivering with self-consciousness, ever ready to take
offence. Tallemant des Reaux, putting the universal
opinion into an epigram, said that if ever there was an
ani7nal glories it was Balzac. He was a finished hypo-
chondriac, with his finger ever on his own pulse; before
he was thirty he described himself as more battered than a
ship that has sailed three times to the Indies. He was a
hermit, hating society, and scarcely ever leaving that
garden of amber and musk within the walls of his castle of
Balzac which hung above the mingling waters of the
Charente and the Touvre. But Balzac, whose character
and temperament had many points of likeness to those of
Pope, knew the value of friendship, though he was capable
of amazing disloyalty under the pressure of vanity.
Conrart, Boisrobert, Chapelain, and even perhaps the
magnificent Cardinal himself — for there is talk of a
pension — brought simultaneous pressure to bear, and
Balzac consented to let his name appear in the list of
original members of the Academie. This did not induce
in him much zeal for the works or deeds of his nominal
colleagues, upon whom, from his far-away garden-terraces,
he looked down with great contempt. Still, the Academie
Fran^aise was in existence, for Balzac was of the number.

Among the other original members, Voiture and
Gomberville, the author of Polexandre, have never lost
their little place in the croAvded history of French literature.
Saint-Amant and Maynard, who sank out of sight for a
long time, are now regarded with more honour than ever
before since their death. Honorat de Beuil, Marquis de
Racan, is one of the minor classics of his country. A
dreamy, blundering man, innocent and vague, his whole
outlook upon life was that of a pastoral poet. He had
"no common sense," we are told, but walked in a cloud
conducting an imaginary flock and murmuring his beauti-
163

Aspects and Impressions

ful Virgilian verses. Racan took the Academy more
seriously than any other member; he never missed a
sitting. But he could not be depended on. Once, the
Academy met to listen to an address by the Marquis de
Racan, who entered, holding one torn sheet of paper in his
hand. "Gentlemen," he said, "I was bringing you my
oration, but my great greyhound has chewed it up. Here
it is ! Make what you can of it, for I don't know it by
heart, and I have no copy." The story of how old Mile, de
Gournay was gulled by successive impostors who pre-
tended to be Racan, and then at length spurned the real
poet, as an obvious idiot, is too long to be told here in
detail. At the close of his life, Racan had allowed himself
to retain no friends except his fellow academicians, so
completely had he become absorbed in the Academic.

These illustrious names, however, are not sufficient to
prevent the eye which runs down the list of original
members from being startled by the obscurity of at least
half the names. It must be remembered that in 1635 it
was no envied distinction or disputed honour to form part
of this new and untried corporation. The labours of the
academicians were disinterested, for the Acad^mie was not
yet endowed, and there was little or no reward offered,
besides the favour of the Cardinal, for the zealous labours
of scholarship. Moreover, it was necessary to silence op-
position and disarm ridicule. The general feeling of the
public, as reflected in the action of parliament, was hostile.
Louis XIII himself, although he had passed the Letters
Patent, was far from favourable to his Minister's literary
project, as we learn from a letter of Chapelain. But Riche-
lieu was passionately bent on its success, and we see from
Tallemant that whenever the Academic made a step in
advance, the Cardinal was at no pains to conceal his lively
satisfaction. But there were more seats than eminent men
of letters to fill them, and consequently almost anyone who
would consent or could be inveigled was elected. Scarron
says the only thing that some of the original Immortals
were fit for was to snuff candles or to sweep the floor.
There was a class of academicians who were styled "the
164

The Foundation of the French Academy

children of the pity of Boisrobert," because the "plaisant
abb6," in filling up the fauteuih, was merciful to needy-
men of letters without talent, and fetched them in so that
they might eat a piece of bread. They were buoyed up
with the hope that Richelieu would bring in an age of gold
for scribblers.

But another element must not be forgotten. There was
a great temptation to turn poachers into gamekeepers, and
a certain number of the original members of the Academic
Fran^aise were wits whose bitterness Richelieu himself, or
Chapelain, or Boisrobert, dreaded. Maynard was one of
these, but perhaps the most curious example was a man
called Bautru. He was no writer, for one scurrilous piece
in the Cabinet Satirique represents his complete works.
But he was a savage practical joker, whose tongue was
universally dreaded. His wit seems to have been ready.
He was a "libertine " in the sense of that day, and openly
irreligious. One day, he was caught taking his hat off
to a crucifix as he passed in the street. "Ah ! then," said
his friends, "you are on better terms with God than we
supposed ? " " On bowing terms ; we don't speak," Bautru
replied. In 1642, he called our Charles I "a calf led from
market to market; and presently they will take him to the
shambles," he prophetically added. His was an evil tongue
with a sharp edge to it, which it was safest to have inside
the Acad^mie, and there were others of the same sort
among the false celebrities, les passe-volans or dummies,
whose presence in the original list is at first so discon-
certing.

In order to give dignity and discipline to their assem-
blies, the Academicians now created three offices, those of
Director, Chancellor, and Perpetual Secretary ; these were
held by S^risay, Desmarets, and Conrart respectively.
They appointed the famous printer, Jean Camusat, their
librarian and typographer, meeting sometimes at his house
for easier correction of the press. On the 20th of March,
1634, they settled on their all-important name, and thence-
forth were to the world "I'Acad^mie fran^oise." Two
days later, in a very long letter, they detailed to the
L 165

Aspects and Impressions

Cardinal the objects and functions of their body, not fail-
ing to begin with the request that he would permit them
to publish his own tragedies and pastorals. This docu-
ment is very interesting to-day. In it the new Academy
proposes to cleanse the French language from all the ordure
which it has contracted from vulgar and ignorant usage;
to establish the exact sense of words; seriously to examine
the subject and treatment of prose, the style of the whole,
the harmony of periods, the propriety in the use of words.
Moreover, the Academicians undertook to examine the
books of one another with a meticulous attention to faults
of style and grammar. This "Projet," which was drafted
by Faret, was submitted to Richelieu, and printed in an
edition of thirty copies, in May, 1634.

In this first manifesto, which was kept extremely secret,
nothing was said about the plan of a Dictionary. But
Chapelain's heart had been set upon that from the first,
and he did not forget to bring it forward. He insisted,
in season and out of season, on the necessity of labouring
in unison "for the purity of our language and for its
capacity to develop the loftiest eloquence." On the 27th of
March he brought forward his idea of a Dictionary. Balzac
supported him by letter, Vaugelas offered his invaluable
grammatical services, and at last the Academy so far
accepted the idea as to instruct Chapelain and Vaugelas to
report on the subject. But this was not until 1637, so
that we must realize that the French Academy had existed
three years before it finally settled down to the work with
which its early existence is most popularly identified. But
for the persistency of Chapelain this might never have been
commenced.

On the other hand, the Academicians were very busily
engaged over their statutes, which were drawn up by one
of the latest of the original members, Hay du Chastelet, a
learned lawyer of high repute. They were passed and
accepted by the Cardinal, before the close of 1634. It was,
very properly, Conrart himself who drafted the Letters
Patent, a very long and dignified document, which Louis
XIII signed in Paris on the 29th of January, 1635. ^^^
•166

The Foundation of the French Academy

now came the first difficulty which beset the primrose path
of the young Academic. It was not enough for the King
to sign the Letters Patent; they had to be verifiees by
ParHament; and this was not done until the loth of July,
1637. ^ here has been much discussion as to the cause of
this delay, which was intensely irksome to the Cardinal
and threatened the existence of the infant association. It
was early thought that the Parliament suspected Richelieu
of having a design in creating the Academic which was
much more directly political than appeared on the surface.
If so, the placid and modest demeanour of the Academi-
cians ultimately disarmed hostility, and they obtained their
Letters Patent.

At this point we must draw our inquiry to a close, since
the foundation of the Acad^mie Fran^aise was completed
by this action on the part of the Parliament. It will be
seen that eight years had gone by since the first meetings
of selected men of letters had taken place in Conrart's
house, and that many tedious formalities had to be com-
pleted before the body was in a position even to begin its
work. The humble nature of the origin of the Acad^mie
Fran9aise, the surprising and painful adventures of its
youth, and the glories of its subsequent existence, should
make us indulgent to the slow growth of any similar institu-
tion. Rome is not the only corporation which was not
built in a day.

167

ROUSSEAU IN ENGLAND IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY

BURKE, in his Reflections on the Revolution in
I France (1790), although he called Rousseau an
"eccentric observer of human nature," had not
attempted to deny his penetration. He wrote of him,
already without sympathy, as one who for the sake of
playing upon that love of the marvellous which is inherent
in man, desired extraordinary situations, "giving rise to
new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals."
But he gave the Genevese philosopher credit for nothing
worse than levity; he had raised up political and social para-
doxes in the spirit in which a story-teller, eager to arouse
the attention of an idle audience, evokes giants and fairies
to satisfy the credulity of his hearers. And Burke has the
indulgence to admit that, "I believe, were Rousseau alive,
and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at
the fanatical frenzy of his scholars, who ... are servile
imitators; and even in their incredulity discover an implicit
faith."

But when events had rapidly developed, and Burke
came to write the flaming sentences of his great Letter
to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), the import-
ance of Rousseau's influence in bringing about the events
which Burke so passionately deplored had greatly widened
and deepened. He saw that the very blood of Rousseau
had been transfused into the veins of the National
Assembly of France. "Him they study," he wrote, "him
they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can
spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the
debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy
writ; in his life he is their canon of Polyclitus ; he is their
169

Aspects and Impressions

standard figure of perfection." Burke felt obliged to de-
nounce, with his unparalleled wealth of picturesque elo-
quence, the fatal character of the fascination exercised
by the author of the Lettres de la Montague and the
Confessions.

To Burke, thus brought face to face with what he be-
lieved to be the very Ragnarok of the gods, the ruin of all
which made life in Europe worth living, it now became a
religious duty to expose the malefic character of the charm-
ing, exquisite pleadings of the revolutionary of Geneva.
He declared that the virtue propounded by Rousseau was
not virtue at all, but "a selfish, flattering, seductive, osten-
tatious vice." This was a theory new to Englishmen, a
theory which had, of course, in faltering accents, been
here and there suggested by opponents, but never before
deliberately and logically asserted by a great master of
English oratory. Burke spoke, not merely with the im-
mense prestige of his position, but as one who had been
subjected to the personal charm of Rousseau, and who had
studied him in his lifetime, not merely without prejudice,
but with sympathy and admiration. His grave censure
of the philosopher came with unction from the lips of one
who was known to have been in communication with him,
during his first visit to London, almost from day to day.'
Burke spoke with authority to a large section of the public
when he stated that he had gradually become persuaded
that Rousseau "entertained no principle either to guide
his heart, or to guide his understanding, but vanity." He
did not deny the charm of Rousseau's writing, or pretend
lo depreciate his incomparable talents, but he pronounced
]iim to be deranged and eccentric, and to have gloried in
ihe illumination of the obscure and vulgar vices. He de-
scribed the Confessions, over which the English world had
bowed in transports of emotional adulation, as the record
of "a life that, with wild defiance, he flings in the face of
his Creator." Violence carried Burke so far as to describe

1 By far the best account of Rousseau's visit to England is contained
in Le Sijour de ]. /. Rousseau en Angleterre (1766-1767), published from
original documents by M. Louis J. Courtois (A. Jullian, Geneve, 1911).
170

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

Rousseau as a man, by his own account, without a single
virtue. There can be no question that tiiis diatribe,
prominently brought forward by the first of EngHsh
orators, in a work which was read by every educated
man in Great Britain, sapped the reputation of
Rousseau amongst our countrymen, and led to the
gradual decline of his fame in England all down the
nineteenth century.

The attack on Rousseau, contained in many fulminating
pages of the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,
is extravagant and unjust. We read it now with a certain
indignation, tempered by a mild amusement. It should
have been injured by its absurd denunciation of French-
men and of the French nation, in whom Burke saw little
but a furious congeries of dancing-masters, fiddlers, and
valets-de-chambrc . But there were already in England,
in the reaction of terror brought about by the French
Revolution, many who were delighted to accept this
grotesque perversion of the truth, and Burke, with all his
powers of speech, all his knowledge of his countrymen,
knew how to play upon the alarms and the ignorances of
the English. He had, at all events, the dangerous gift of
unqualified statement, and when he solemnly declared, as
if by reluctant conviction, that "the writings of Rousseau
lead directly to shameful evil " both in theory and practice,
there were thousands only too ready to accept the
warning.

We may observe, too, that Burke was the earliest Eng-
lish critic of weight who suggested that the exquisite
literary art of Rousseau had its limitations. His remarks
are worthy of being quoted at length, since they contain
the germ of the English attitude through the whole of the
nineteenth century : —

I have often wondered how he comes to be so much more
admired and followed on the Continent than he is here. Per-
haps a secret charm in the language may have its share in
this extraordinary difference. We certainly perceive, and to
a degree we feel, in this writer, a style glowing, animated,
enthusiastic; at the same time that we find it lax, diffuse, and
171

Aspects and Impressions

not in the best taste of composition ; all the members of the
piece being pretty equally laboured and expended, without any
due selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too
much on the stretch, and his manner has little variety. We
cannot rest upon any of his works, though they contain
observations which occasionally discover a considerable insight
into human nature.

The attacks of Burke upon their idol were not accepted
tamely by the Whigs, or by the Radical wing of their
party, which included most of the intellectual men of the
time. It was recognized that Burke spoke with excessive
violence, and that his emotion was largely provoked by
political apprehensions which were not shared by the more
enlightened of his countrymen. It was easily pointed out
that the great orator's objection to Rousseau was founded
on a predilection for aristocracy, a dread of innovation,
an abhorrence for abstract politics, rather than on a serious
and philosophical consideration of Rousseau's contribu-
tions to literature. There were many indignant replies to
his denunciation, the most effective being those contained
in Sir James Mackintosh's famous Vindicice Gallicce.
Mackintosh, with less eloquence but far more knowledge,
denied the responsibility of Rousseau for the excesses of
the Revolution, and suggested that Burke had not made
himself acquainted with the Contrat Social. Rousseau was
vindicated as one of the immortal band of sages "who un-
shackled and emancipated the human mind," and he was
assured a place in eternal glory, by the side of Locke and
Franklin.

All that was generous, all that was enthusiastic in Eng-
lish opinion, was still marshalled on the side of Rousseau,
but Burke's measured attack, so universally considered,
was the gradual cause of an ever-increasing defection. For
the time being, however, this was confined to the more
timid and the less intelligent part of the community.
Burke had assailed in Rousseau the politician and the
moralist, but although it was evident that he was out of
sympathy with the imaginative writer, his diatribe did
little at first to weaken the spell of the sentimental and
172

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

literary writings. There was no sign, in 1800, that the
Nouvelle Hdo'ise had lost its magic for English readers,
though it may be doubted whether these were so numerous
as they had been twenty years earlier. The famous
romance had been the direct precursor of the school of
romantic-sentimental novels in England, but it would take
us too far back to consider in any detail its influence on
Holcroft, whose Hugh Trevor dates from 1797; on Bage,
in such romances as Hermsprong (1796); on Mrs. Inch-
bold, in Nature and Art (1796); and on Charlotte Smith.
But it must be remembered that these popular novelists
lived well on into the nineteenth century, and that their
romances were still widely read, and by advanced thinkers
warmly accepted, long after our period begins. Moreover,
in William Godwin {1756-1836), once known as "the im-
mortal Godwin," we have the most pronounced type in
English literature of the novelist started and supported by
a devotion to the principles of Rousseau. Caleb Williams
(1794) is still a minor English classic, and Fleetwood (1804)
is an example of a Rousseau novel actually written within
the confines of our century. But with these names the list
of the novelists directly inspired by the Nouvelle Heloise,
and in a much lesser degree by Emile, practically ceases,
and the advent of Walter Scott gave them their coup de
grace.

The excessive admiration of Englishmen for the
imaginative writings of Rousseau was already on the
wane, or rather it was beginning to be old-fashioned.
That very remarkable work, The Diary of a Lover of
Literature, by Thomas Green (1769-1825), gives us a valu-
able insight into the critical opinions of the opening years
of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1810, but
it reflects the feeling of a slightly earlier time. It repre-
sents the views of an independent and transitional thinker,
remote from all the literary cliques, who read extensively
in his hermitage at Ipswich, and it mirrors the mind of
the average educated Englishman between 1795 and 1805.
We discover that there were persons of cultivation in
England at that time who did not hesitate deliberately to
173

Aspects and Impressions

pronounce that Rousseau was, "without exception, the
greatest genius and the finest writer that ever Hved." This
opinion the judicious Green is by no means able to endorse ;
but he makes a very curious confession which throws a
strong light on the best English opinion in 1800. The
Lover of Literature says that Rousseau is a character "who
has by turns transported me with the most violent and
opposite emotions of delight and disgust, admiration and
contempt, indignation and pity." He points out, with
great acumen, the peculiar conditions of Rousseau's "dis-
tempered sensibility," and says that his wrath against evil-
doing burns "in consuming fire." Green's analysis of
Rousseau's genius is very ingenious and glowing, but
he sees spots in the sun, and thus, at the immediate
opening of the new century, we meet with high critical
commendation, but also with the faint beginnings of
reproof.

It is necessary to note that the earliest objections made
to Rousseau's influence by Englishmen were political.
They were not directed against the Nouvejle Helo'ise, nor
Eviile, nor the Confessions, but against the Contrat Social.
The name of Rousseau was used, in connexion with this
work, to justify the horrors of the French Revolution, the
jacqueries, the September massacres. Serious English
people, whom Burke had originally awakened to suspicion,
became more and more persuaded that it was the doctrine
of Rousseau which had conducted Louis XVI to the scaf-
fold. The book itself was never much read in England,
but it formed part of a tradition. It was understood to
have consecrated the violent acts of the Revolution, and
English people began to shrink from a name so tainted
with blood. This view found a striking exponent in the
opening number of the Edinburgh Review, where Jeffrey,
reviewing Monnier's Influence attribute aux Philosophes,
warned his readers with earnest unction against "the pre-
sumptuous and audacious maxims " of Rousseau, which
had a natural tendency ,to do harm. The arguments of
the Contrat Social were exposed by the Whig critic as
unsettling the foundations of political duty, and as teaching
174

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

the citizens of every established Government that they were
enslaved, and had the power of beings free. Whatever
influence Rousseau still had, and in 1802 it was already
waning, the Edinburgh Review solemnly declared to be
"unquestionably pernicious."

By English politicians of the Tory type, Rousseau was
now regarded with growing suspicion. They looked back
to first causes, and found him at the end of the vista.
They blamed him all the more because they still lay under
the spell of his style and his sentiment. He was beginning
to be regarded with more disapproval than other and more
definitely revolutionary philosophers, than Condorcet, for
instance, as being more presumptuous and less logical,
more "improvident," to use the expression of an early
English critic. There was no considerable desire in Eng-
land for the subversion of monarchy, and it was only in
countries where there was a wish to believe that kings were
toppling from their thrones that the political writings of
the arch-firebrand could expect to find a welcome. All
such speculation had been pleasant enough before the great
revolution set in in France, but England, thrilled for a
moment by Quixotic hopes, had turned into another path,
where Rousseau had not led her, nor could ever be her
companion. He appeared as a demagogue and a disturber
of the public peace, as an apostle of change and crisis and
unrest. In England everyone, or almost everyone, craved
a respite from such ideas, and his prestige began to sink.
Let us note, then, that beyond question the earliest objec-
tion to Rousseau came from the political side.

The personal character of the Genevese philosopher was
still little known. It was revealed, in certain unfavourable
aspects, by several collections of memoirs, which now
began to be published. Those of Marmontel, in 1805,
were widely read in England, and were recommended to
a large circle of readers by Jeffrey in a famous essay. The
anecdotes, so amusing and often so piquant, appeared to
the Scotch critic and to his British audience more dis-
creditable than Marmontel, who belonged to an earlier and
looser generation, had intended them to seem. From 1805
175

Aspects and Impressions

began to arise in England the conception of a Rousseau
full of cruel vanity, implacable, calumnious, ahd wholly
wanting in that frankness and bluff candour upon Which
John Bull delights to pride himself. But the splendour of
his writings was still uncontested. In 1809, the Edinburgh
Review said of the Contrat Social that "it contains some
deep observations, and many brilliant and elevated
thoughts, along with a good deal, we admit, of impractic-
able and very questionable theory." The Confessions was
not much read, but the precise Jeffrey did not hesitate to
recommend it, in 1806, as in some respects the most inter-
esting of books, and in 1807 Capel Lofft declared, "If I
had five millions of years to live upon the earth, I w^ould
read Rousseau daily with increasing delight."

It would take us too far to consider how the sentimental
Pantisocracy of the youthful Lake Poets coincided with
the direct influence of Rousseau. That movement, more-
over, belongs to the eighteenth, not the nineteenth century,
since it was all over by 1794. But so far as it was an out-
come of the teaching of Rousseau, the reaction which fol-
lowed it was not favourable to the prestige of works which
now came to seem almost hateful to the Lake Poets. 5
Wordsworth branched away irrevocably, and his account
of the Saturnian Reign in The Excursion (finished in
1805) would have given little satisfaction to Rousseau.
Southey was early, and permanently, disgusted with him-
self for having supposed that the millennium would be
ushered in from Geneva. But perhaps the best example
of the revulsion of opinion which followed the juvenile
raptures of the Lake Poets is to be found in the pages of
The Friend (1809-10), where Coleridge derides P"

Rousseau, the dreamer of love-sick tales, and the spinner
of speculative cobwebs ; shy of light as the mole, but quick-
eared, too, for every whisper of the public opinion ; the teacher
of stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid vanity
in his feeling-s and conduct.

Yet this was premature, as an expression of general
critical disapprobation. In November, 1809, the high
176

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

Tory organ, the Quarterly Review,^ spoke, without a shade
of disapproval, of "the tremendous fidelity " of the picture
of life in the Confessions. In 1812, the same severe
periodical, then forming the most dreaded tribunal of
British intellectual taste, devoted several pages to an
examination of the moral character of Rousseau, and the
result was by no means unfavourable. The writer was
John Herman Merivale (i 779-1844), who declared that
"Rousseau's system of morality is as little practicable as
would be a system of politics invented by one who had
always lived in a state of savage independence," and sug-
gested, but without bitterness, that portions of the Nouvelle
HSlo'ise betrayed "a certain lack of just moral taste and
feeling." The Confessions are described in faltering terms
which suggest that Merivale had not read them with any
attention. On the whole, we find, up to this point, no
difference between the views of Englishrqen and of
similarly placed Frenchmen. Even Shelley, in his
Proposals for an Association (181 2), blames the tendency
of some of Rousseau's political writings in exactly the
conventional Continental tone.

But a brief and limited, though splendid revival was
now approaching, the last which the reputation of
Rousseau was to enjoy in England. We must note the
sphere within which this esoteric celebration of his genius
was confined; it was not an explosion of national enthu-
siasm, but the defiant glorification of a power which had
already begun to decline; it was not a general expression
of approval, but the effort of a group of revolutionaries.
It was roused, no doubt, by the attitude of the official critics
who were affecting to think that the influence of Rousseau
was exploded. The Quarterly had said in 1813, "As it is
probable that we may not soon be again in the company
of this extraordinary man, we would willingly take leave
of him in good humour," and though it was quite unable
to keep up this attitude of dignified dismissal, and returned

1 The writer, as I am courteously informed by the present editor of
the Quarterly Review, was James Pillans (1778-1864), the Scottish educa-
tional reformer, tlie " paltry Pillans " of Byron's satire in English Bards
and Scottish Reviewers.

177

Aspects and Impressions

to the attack in April, 1814, nevertheless that was the tone
adopted towards Rousseau, as of a man played out, and
rapidly being forgotten.

The publication of the voluminous Correspondence of
Grimm, which was much read in England, led Englishmen
to review the subject of the character and writings of
Rousseau, and in the remarks which contemporaries made
in 1813 and 1814 we may trace a rapid cooling of their
enthusiasm. The scorn of all French habits of thought
and conduct, which immediately succeeded the anxious and
wearisome period of the Napoleonic wars, makes itself
particularly felt in the English attitude towards Rousseau,
who was regarded as the source from which all the revolu-
tionary sorrows of Europe had directly proceeded. The
Quarterly Review for April, 1814, pronounced a judgment
upon Rousseau, of which a portion must be quoted here,
since it may be considered as the original indictment, the
document which served to start the unfavourable opinion
which now became more and more that which sober and
conservative Englishmen were to adopt during the next
fifty years. The opening lines give a new warning, which
was to gain more and more in emphasis, while the end
repeats praise which was conventional in 1814, but was
already fading, and was soon to disappear.

It says: —

A writer who professes to instruct mankind is bound to
deliver precepts of morality. But it is by inflaming the
passions, and by blotting- out the line which separates virtue
from vice, that Rousseau undertakes to teach young ladies to
be chaste, and young men to respect the rights of hospitality.
His heroine, indeed, in conformity to his own example, is
always prating about virtue, even at the time when she de-
viates most essentially from its precepts ; but to dogmatize is
not to be innocent. Yet, widi all its defects, there are
numerous passages in this celebrated work which astonish by
their eloquence. Language, perhaps, never painted the con-
flicts of love in colours more animated and captivating than
in the letter written by St. Preux when wandering among the
rocks of Meillerie.

178

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

Unfortunately, the name of this critic is un-
known.

But the charm was not to be broken without a violent
effort being made to restore to Rousseau his earlier
supremacy. It came from the group of brilliant Radical
writers, who had not accepted the Toryism of the ruling
classes, to whom the discredited principles of the Revolu-
tion were more dear than they had ever been, and who
pinned their attractive and enthusiastic aesthetic reforms
to the voluptuous ecstasy of the NouveUe Helo'ise and the
chimerical sentiment of Emile. Already, in The Round
Table (1814), Hazlitt had recommended the Confessions
as the "most valuable " of all Rousseau's writings; he was
presently in his Liber Amoris (1823) to produce the work
which of all important books of the English nineteenth
century was to reproduce most closely the manner of the
Genevese master. Two years later, having made a very
careful examination of the works, Hazlitt published his
essay On the Character of Rousseau, which was not sur-
passed, or approached, as a study of the great writer until
the appearance of Lord Morley's monograph, nearly sixty
years afterwards.

Hazlitt exposes the baneful effect of Burke's attacks,
while acknowledging that from his own, the Tory point
of view, Burke was justified in taking the line that he did.
It is perfectly true that "the genius of Rousseau levelled
the towers of the Bastille with the dust," but Hazlitt, an
intellectual revolutionary, exults in the admission. Hazlitt
allows, nevertheless that the exaggerated hopes founded
upon such books as the Control Social have been followed
by inevitable disappointment. It was, however, not the
fault of Rousseau, but of his sanguine and absurd
disciples, that Europe, or particularly England, has "lost
confidence in social man." Ecstatic admirers of his in-
spired visions had expected the advent of Rousseau to
bring in a millennium, and in the disappointment founded
on the excesses of the French Revolution they had turned,
with ingratitude, upon the pure and Utopian dreamer who
179

Aspects and Impressions

had drawn things as they should be, not as it was humanly
possible that they ever could be. The writings of
Rousseau, he declares, are looked up to with admiration
by friends and foes alike as possessing "the true revolu-
tionary leaven," but it needs political foresight and a rare
capacity of imagination to perceive that this operates,
through temporary upheaval and distraction, to produce an
ultimate harmony and a beneficent beauty. In the course
of his writings, Hazlitt frequently quotes Rousseau, and
always with admiration. He is the most illuminating
and the most thoughtful of all his early English
critics.

In the summer of 1816 the two young poets of the day
who displayed the most extraordinary genius in England,
or perhaps in Europe, made acquaintance with one another
for the first time, and instantly determined to travel
together. They met in Switzerland, intoxicated with the
unfamiliar beauty around them, and Byron took the Villa
Diodati, close to Geneva, where he and Shelley steeped
themselves in the Nouvelle Helo'ise under the shadow of
Mont Blanc. In June they started together round the lake
on a journey, which turned into a pilgrimage. In Shelley's
Letters may be read the enthusiastic account of the poets'
visit to Meillerie. Shelley refrained from gathering acacia
and roses from Gibbon's garden at Lausanne, "fearing to
outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau, the
contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no
vacancy in his heart for mortal things." As they
sauntered along the shores of the enchanted Leman, the
friends "read Julie all day." They lived, with the
characters of the great romance, in an endless melan-
choly transport. Byron's enthusiasm took the form
of the famous stanzas in "Childe Harold III,"
beginning :

Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.

It is a remarkable instance of the complete decline of
the prestige of Rousseau in England that Byron's editor
180

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

of 1899 is astonished that Byron and Shelley "should not
only worship at the shrine of Rousseau, but take delight
in reverently tracing the footsteps of St. Preux and Julie."
He is so completely disconcerted that he can only exclaim,
"But to each age its own humour! " The age of 1899
was certainly not in the humour for Rousseau, but it was
almost to go beyond the boundaries of reason to de-
nounce, as this editor did, in the face of Byron's raptures,
"the unspeakable philanderings" of Rousseau. Such
was not the poet's judgment when, in a trance of pleasure,
he visited all the scenes of the Nowvelle Helo'ise. To
Byron the long-drawn loves of St. Preux and of Julie
seemed "most passionate, yet not impure," and he
vivaciously proclaimed their creator as the one prophet
of Ideal Beauty. The five or six stanzas mentioned above
are so well-known as to be positively hackneyed. We no
longer set on them any very high poetical value; we see
that none of them are good as verses, and that some of
them are bad. But the whole passage retains its full in-
terest for us. It is a perfectly logical statement of the
author's unbounded admiration for Rousseau, and in par-
ticular for the "burning page, distempered though it
seems," upon which are celebrated the devouring loves of
Julie and St. Preux.

Farther on, in the same poem, Byron rose to far purer
heights of style. The invocation to Clarens, in the texture
of which the result of his recent intercourse with Shelley
may be plainly perceived, is probably the most impassioned
tribute ever paid by one great writer to the literature of
another.

All things are here of him; from the black pines,
Which are his shade on high, and the loud roar

Of torrents, where he listeneth, to the vines

Which slope his green path downward to the shore,
Where the bow'd waters meet him, and adore,

Kissing his feet with murmurs, and the wood,
The covert of old trees, with trunks all hoar,

But light leaves, young as joy, stands where it stood,

Offering to him, and his, a populous solitude.
M 181

Aspects and Impressions

A populous solitude of bees and birds,

And fairy-form'd and many-colour'd things,

Who worship him with thoughts more sweet than words,
And innocently open their glad wings.
Fearless and full of life.

This was a challenge, addressed by the most powerful
poet of the day, and couched in idolatrous language, which
it was not possible that those in England who were opposed
to the influence of Rousseau could fail to take up. Nor
did Byron pause here. Writing from Diodati, July, 1816,
his famous Sonnet to Lake Lenian, Rousseau's was the-
first illustrious name he mentioned in the brief roll of
"Heirs of Immortality." Enthusiasm for the Nouvelle
Hilo'ise led directly to the composition of The Prisoner
of Chillon. Byron discussed and repudiated, with
Stendhal in 18 17, his mother's old dream that he closely
resembled Rousseau. All that prevented his embracing
this notion, and insisting on being considered an avatar of
the philosopher, was his perception of something turbid
in the character of Rousseau, hostile to the fiery ideal of
1 8 16. The English poet preferred to be thought to re-
semble "an alabaster vase lighted up within." But all his
life the memory of Jean Jacques continued to haunt him ;
he recollected the ranz des vaches when he was writing
The Two Foscari (182 1) and la pervenche in the fourteenth
canto of Don Juan (December, 1823). When Byron died
at Missolonghi the latest and the most passionate of
Rousseau's English admirers passed away with him.

The rapture of the sentimental poets was not allowed
to pass unrebuffed. In October, 1816, no less an authority
on romance, no less sane and typical, and yet moderate
and sound exponent of English feeling than Sir Walter
Scott took up his parable against the sentimentality
of the disciples of Rousseau. In reviewing "Childe
Harold III " in the Quarterly, Walter Scott takes Byron
severely to task for his exaggerated praise of Rousseau.
He says of himself that he is "almost ashamed to avow
the truth — he had never been able to feel the interest or
182

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

discover the merit of the Nouvelle Heloise. . . . The
dulness of the story is the last apology for its exquisite
immorality." It is impossible to overestimate the im-
portance of this utterance of Walter Scott, who was at
that very moment bringing forth the amazing series of
his own novels, which were to destroy the taste of his
countrymen for all such works of the imagination as
Rousseau had produced. Scott is no less condemnatory
of the political influence of the philosopher. Deeply
blaming the French Revolution, he styles Rousseau "a
primary apostle" of it. "On the silliness of Rousseau,"
on the subject of political equality, "it is at this time of
day, thank God ! useless to expatiate." This was a
counter-blast, indeed, to the melodious trumpetings of
Byron and Shelley.

To a reputation already much reduced, the publication,
in 1818, of the Memoires et Conversations of Madame
d'Epinay was a serious blow. These were very much
discussed in England, and Jeffrey called the special atten-
tion of his readers to the lady's revelations of Rousseau's
"eccentricity, insanity, and vice." This produced a pain-
ful effect. It was urged by English critics that Jean
Jacques, who had been held up as a portent of almost
divine moral beauty, seemed, on the contrary, to have
claimed, "as the reward of genius and fine writing, an
exemption from all moral duties." Jeffrey called indignant
attention to the "most rooted and disgusting selfishness "
of Rousseau, and quoted with approval the bouiade of
Diderot, "Get homme est un forcene." The publication
of JMadame de Stael's (Euvres InSdites, brought out by
Madame Necker Saussure in 1820, further lowered the
English estimate of the "selfish and ungrateful"
Rousseau. He was still praised for his "warmth of
imagination," but told that he was vastly inferior to
Madame de Stael in style. The Edinburgh Review now
proclaimed, as a painful discovery, that Rousseau's affec-
tion for mankind was entirely theoretical, and "had no
living objects in this world," and blushed at tlie "very
scandalous and improper" facts about his private life
183

Aspects and Impressions

which were now more and more frequently being
revealed.

The pubhcation of Simondi's Voyage en Suisse (1822),
which was widely read in England, continued the work of
denigration. Simondi spoke with contempt and even with
bitterness, of the character of Rousseau. His English
critics pointed out that, although a republican, Simondi
rose above political prejudice. He called the Confessions
the most admirable, but at the same time the most vile
of all the productions of genius. Jeffrey, once again, was
eloquent in the denunciation of Rousseau's personal
character, which there seemed to be no one left in England
to defend. This w-as about the time that special attention
began to be drawn to Rousseau's exposure of his natural
children, which had long been known, but which now
began to excite English disgust. Moreover, the loose
way in which Rousseau treated fact and logic irritated the
newer school of English and Scotch politicians much more
than it had their predecessors, and the invectives of
Burke were revived and confirmed. There were still some
priyate, though few public, admirers of Rousseau in
England. Carlyle was too original not to perceive the
value of the Genevan philosopher's historical attitude,
and not to feel a genuine sympathy for his character.
But v^^e find him quoting (in 1823) the habits of "John
James," as he chose to call him, not adversely but a little
slightingly.

Almost the latest eulogist of Rousseau, before Morley,
was the veteran Republican poet Walter Savage Eandor,
whose admirable Malesherhes and Rousseau appeared,
almost unnoticed, in the third series of the Imaginary
Conversations (1828). This interesting composition was
certainly not written when Landor reviewed his unpub-
lished writings in 1824; we may probably date it 1826.
It was a belated expression of the enthusiasm of a pre-
ceding generation, in full sympathy with th^ attitude of
Hazlitt and Byron. It attracted no attention, for England
was by this time w- holly out of touch with the old prefer-
ence of the impulse of the individual in opposition to the
184

Rousseau In England in the 19th Century

needs of the State. There was in England a growing
cultivation of science, and by its side a growing suspicion
of rhetoric, and both of these discouraged what was super-
ficially lax in the views and in the expression of Rousseau.
The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which had
delighted an earlier generation of English Liberals, was
now re-examined, and was rejected with impatience as
"dangerous moonshine," supported by illogical and even
ridiculous arguments. Moreover, the study of anthro-
pology was advancing out of the state of infancy, and was
occupying serious minds in England, who were ex-
asperated by Rousseau's fantastic theory of the purity of
savage society, and a Golden Age of primal innocence.
Moreover, as Morley long afterwards pointed out, from
about the year 1825, there was a rapid increase in England
of the superficial cultivation of letters, and particularly
of scientific investigation. At the same time, the temper
of the English nation repelled, with anger, the notion that
a Swiss philosopher, of discredited personal character,
could be allowed to denounce the science and literature of
Europe.

Thus from every point of view, the hold which
Rousseau had held on English admiration was giving
way. His influence was like a snow man in the sun; it
melted and dripped from every limb, from all parts of its
structure. But probably what did more than anything
else to exclude Rousseau from English sympathy, and to
drive his works out of popular attention, was the sterner
code of conduct which came in, as a reaction to the swinish
coarseness of the late Georgian period. We must pay
some brief attention to a moral and religious phenomenon
which was probably more than any other fatal to the
prestige of Rousseau.

The great feature of the new Evangelical movement was
an insistence on points of conduct which had, indeed,
always been acknowledged in the English Church as
theoretically important, but which were now exalted into
a lively pre-eminence. There was suddenly seen, through-
out the country, a marvellous increase in religious zeal, in
18s

Aspects and Impressions

the urging of penitence, contrition and unworldliness upon
young minds, in the activity which made practical and
operative what had hitherto been largely nominal.
There was a very Avide awakening of the sense of sin,
and a quickening, even a morbid and excessive quicken-
ing, of the Christian instinct to put off "the old man,
which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and to
put on the new man, which, after God, is created in
righteousness and true holiness." This conviction of sin
and humble acceptance of righteousness was to be accom-
panied by a cultivation of all the contrite and retired and
decent aptitudes of conduct, so that not only should no
wrong be done to the soul of others, but no offence given.
These were the objects which occupied the active and holy
minds of the early Evangelists, and of none of them more
practically, in relation to the studies and the reading of
the young, than of the great leader of the movement,
Charles Simeon (1756-1836).

We have forgotten, to a great extent, the amazing
influence which the preaching and the practice of these
leading Evangelicals exercised in England between 1820
and 1840. It is certain that the young scholars of Cam-
bridge who surrounded Simeon from 1810 onwards were
much more numerous and no less active than those who
surrounded Newman and Pusey at Oxford about 1835;
while in each case the disciples trained in the school of
enthusiasm were soon dispersed, to spread the flame of
zeal throughout the length and breadth of the Three King-
doms. In the preface of his famous Helps to Composition,
a work of epoch-making character, Simeon boldly pro-
posed three tests to be applied to any species of literature.
When confronted by a book, the reader should ask, "Does
it uniformly tend to humble the Sinner, to exalt the
Saviour, to promote holiness?" A work that lost sight
of any one of these three points was to be condemned
without mercy. The simplicity and freshness of the
Evangelicals, their ridicule of what was called "the dignity
of the pulpit," their active, breathless zeal in urging what
they thought a purer faith upon all classes of society, gave
186

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

them a remarkable power over generous and juvenile
natures. They were wealthy, they were powerful, they
stormed the high places of society, and it may without
exaggeration be said that for the time being they changed
the whole character of the surface of English social life.

The work of the Evangelicals, in emphasizing the
strong reaction against the coarseness of the Georgian era,
has been greatly forgotten in England, and on the Con-
tinent has never been in the least understood. It is
responsible, to deal solely with what interests us in our
present inquiry, for the prudery and "hypocrisy " of which
European criticism so universally accuses our Victorian
literature and habits of thought. It is perhaps useless to
contend against a charge so generally brought against
English ideas, and this is not the place to attempt it. But,
so far as Rousseau is concerned, it is necessary to point
out that to a generation which revolted against lascivious-
ness in speech, and which believed that an indecent
looseness in art and literature was a sin against God,
the charm of the Nouvelle Helo'ise and of the Confessions
could not be apparent. It is of no service to talk about
"hypocrisy"; English readers simply disliked books of
that sort, and there must be an end of it.

A single example may serve to show how rapid the
change had been. Sir James Edward Smith (i 759-1828)
was an eminent botanist, who travelled widely and wrote
many letters. In 1832 his Memoirs and Correspondence
were published, a lively work which was much read. But
Smith, living at the close of the eighteenth century, had
been an ardent admirer of Rousseau, and this appeared
glaringly in his letters. Reviewers in 1832 had to find
excuses for his "charitable eye " and to attribute his
partiality to Rousseau's being a botanist. There was quite
a flutter, almost a scandal. One critic plainly said that
Sir J. E. Smith's "character would not have suffered if he
had made some abatement from his extravagant eulogy "
of Rousseau. The Edinburgh Review was very severe,
and regretted that the worthy botanist had not realized
that "religious toleration does not imply the toleration of
187

Aspects and Impressions

immorality," and that "licentiousness of speculation is as
hostile to civil liberty as licentiousness of conduct." A
critic of the same period roundly says that "the vices and
opinions of Rousseau are of so malignant an aspect that
the virtues which accompany them serve only to render
them more loathsome."

Thus Rousseau, who in 1800 was regarded in England,
even by his enemies, as the most enchanting of writers,
had by 1835 sunken to be regarded as despicable, not to be
quoted by decent people, not to be read even in secret. He
was seldom mentioned, save to be reviled. The career of
Rousseau does not come within the scope of Hallam as a
critic, yet that historian was unable, in the second volume
of his Literature of Europe (1838), to resist a sneer at the
Contrat Social, while he describes Rousseau's arguments
as an "insinuation " and a "calumny." We find so grave
and dignified an historian as Burton using his Life of
Hume (1846) as a means of placing Rousseau in the most
odious light possible, and without a word of sympathy.
To the younger Herman Merivale, in 1850, the influence of
Rousseau seemed "simply mischievous," but he rejoiced to
think that his fame was "a by-gone fashion." Having, in
October, 1853, been led to express an ambiguous comment
on the Confessions, Mrs. Jameison, then the leading
English art critic, hastened to excuse herself by explaining
that "of course, we speak without reference to the im-
morality which deforms that work." It would be easy
to multiply such expressions, but difficult, indeed, in the
middle of the century, to find a responsible word published
by an English writer in praise of Rousseau.

After this, till John Morley's monograph, there is very
little to be recorded. Rousseau passed out of sight and out
of mind, and was known only to those few who went to
foreign sources of inspiration in that age of hard British
insularity. But we have lately learned that there were two
great authors who, in the seclusion of their own libraries,
were now subjecting themselves to the fascination of the
Genevan. On February 9th, 1849, George Eliot wrote
thus privately to a friend :

188

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

It would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were
to stun me with proofs that Rousseau's views of life, religion,
and government are miserably erroneous — that he was guilty
of some of the worst bassesses that have degraded civilized
man. I might admit all this : and it would not be the less true
that Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill through
my intellectual and moral frame which has wakened me to new
perceptions. . . . The rushing mighty wind of his imagina-
tion has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to
shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously
dwelt as dim Ahnungeii in my soul; the fire of his genius has
so fused together old thoughts and prejudices, that I have been
ready to make new combinations. —

Even more remarkable is the evidence which Edward
Cook, in his Life of Ruskin{igi i)has produced with regard
to the attitude of that illustrious writer. It was in 1849, just
when George Eliot was finding her spirit quickened by the
inspiration of Rousseau, that John Ruskin, at the age of
thirty, made a pilgrimage to Les Charmettes. The politi-
cal revolt W'hich coloured all his later years was now
beginning to move in him, and for the first time he felt
affinities existing between his own nature and that of
Rousseau. This consciousness increased upon him. In
1862 he wrote, "I know of no man whom I more entirely
resemble than Rousseau. If I were asked whom of all men
of any name in past time I thought myself to be grouped
with, I should answer unhesitatingly — Rousseau. I judge
by the Nouvelle Helo'ise, the Confessions, the writings of
Politics and the life in the He St. Pierre." In 1866 Ruskin
added, "The intense resemblance between me and
Rousseau increases upon my mind more and more."
Finally, in Preterita (1886) he openly acknowledged his
life-long debt to Rousseau. We may therefore set down
the impact of Rousseau upon Ruskin as marking the main
influence of the Genevese writer's genius upon English
literature in the nineteenth century, but this was sympa-
thetic, subterraneous, and, in a sense, secret. Without
Rousseau, indeed, there never would have been Ruskin,
yet we are only now beginning to recognize the fact.
189

Aspects and Impressions

Of the overt cult of Rousseau, even of careful and
detailed examination of his works, there was none until
Mr. (now Viscount) Morley published his brilliant mono-
graph in 1873. This famous book, so remarkable for its
gravity and justice, its tempered enthusiasm, its absence
of prejudice, the harmony and illumination of its parts, is
the one exception to the pubJic neglect of Jean Jacques by
nineteenth-century Englishmen. It removed the reproach
of our insular ignorance ; it rose at once to the highest level
of Continental literature on the subject. The monograph
of Morley has become a classic. Incessantly reprinted,
it has remained the text-book of English students of
Rousseau. It is needless in this place to draw attention to
its eminent qualities, or to the fact that it contained, and
continues to contain, lacuncc which the eminent writer has
not attempted to fill up by the light of later research. In
particular, it is impossible not to regret that Lord Morley
was unacquainted with the documents, so learnedly edited
and lucidly arranged by Mr. L. J. Courtois, on the events
of Rousseau's sojourn in England. But Lord Morley,
immersed in the duties of a statesman, seems long ago to
have lost all interest in the subject which he illuminated so
brilliantly nearly fifty years ago.

The wide publicity given to Morley's book did not,
strangely enough, lead to any great revival of the study of
Rousseau in Great Britain. English readers were content
to accept the statements and the views of Morley without
any special attempt to examine or continue them. There
was no outburst of Rousseau study in England in conse-
quence of the volumes of 1873. English translations of
his works continued to be few and poor, and over the
Nouvelle Helo'ise and the Confessions there still hung a
cloud of reproach. They were held to be immoral, and
dull in their immorality. During the last decade of the
century, however, a certain quickening of interest began to
show itself in a variety of ways. A Rousseauiste, who
excelled all other disciples in the vehemence of her admira-
tion, was revealed in 1895 by the Studies in the France of
Voltaire and Rousseau of Mrs. Frederika Macdonald.
190

Rousseau in England in the 19th Century

These, however, were at first but little noticed, and the
labours of this lady, culminating in her violent and
excessive, but learned and original New Criticism of
J. J. Rousseau (1906) and The Humane Philosophy (igoS)
belong to the twentieth century. It is to be hoped that
the essays of Mrs. Macdonald may stimulate a new body
of workers to remove the stigma which has lain on England
for a hundred years of being dry with cynical neglect of
Rousseau while all the rest of the threshing-floor of Europe
was wet with the dews of vivifying criticism.

191

THE CENTENARY OF LECONTE DE LISLE

MANY English lovers of French poetry would have
been sorry, though none could have l^een surprised,
if public opinion in France had been too much
agitated by the stupendous events of the War to spare a
thought for one of the greatest of modern poets on the
occasion of his hundredth birthday. But it was not so;
on the eighteenth of October, 1918, when the fighting had
approached its culminating point, and when all the for-
tunes of the world seemed hanging in the balance, the
serenity of French criticism found room, between the
bulletins of battle, for a word of reminder that the author
of Poemes Antiques and Poemes Barbares was born a
century before in the tropic island of La Reunion. The
recognition was not very copious, nor was it universally
diffused, but in no circumstances would it have been
either the one or the other. Leconte de Lisle has never
been, and will never be, a "popular" writer. He appeals
to a select group, a limited circle, which neither expands
nor contracts. His fame has never been excessive, and it
will never disappear. It is modest, reserved, and durable.
He was commonly described as a Creole. His father,
an army surgeon — exiled by the service to what used to be
called the He Bourbon — ^was a pure Breton. Charles
Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle, after several excursions to
India, which left strong traces on his poetry, arrived still
young in France, and ultimately settled in Paris. Thus
he lived for half a century, in great simplicity and uni-
formity, surrounded by adoring friends, but little known
to the public. In middle life he became a librarian at the
Luxembourg; as old age was approaching, he found
himself elected to succeed Victor Hugo at the French
193

Aspects and Impressions

Academy. If he was not exactly poor, his means were
strictly moderate; and the most unpleasant event of his
whole life was the discovery, at the fall of the Empire,
that, although his opinions were republican, he had been
receiving a pension from the government of Napoleon III.
Nothing could be more ridiculous than the outcry then
raised against him ; for he was a poet hidden in the light
of thought, and no politician. It was an honour to any
government, and no shame to the austerest poet, that
modest public help should enable a man like Leconte de
Lisle to exist without anxiety. There can hardly be said
to have been any other event in this dignified and blameless
career.

There is a danger — but there is also a fascination — in
the instinct which leads us, when we observe literature
broadly, to find relations or parallelisms between inde-
pendent and diverse personalities. In the most striking
examples, however, where there has been no actual in-
fluence at work, these parallelisms are apt to be very
misleading. Where it is impossible not to observe ele-
ments of likeness, as between Byron and Musset, we may
take them to be actual, and no matters of chance. But
the similarity, in certain aspects, between Alfred de
Vigny and Thomas Hardy, between Andre Ch^nier and
Keats, between Crabbe and Verhaeren, must be accidental,
and is founded on a comparison between very limited
portions of the work of each. Nevertheless, for purposes
of illumination, it is sometimes useful — on what we may
call the Lamarckian system — to see where the orbits of
certain eminent writers of distinctive originalfty approach
nearest to one another.

It is admitted that Leconte de Lisle is pre-eminently
gifted among the poets of France in certain clearly defined
directions. His poems, which are marked by a concinnity
of method which sometimes degenerates into monotony,
are distinguished above all others by their haughty con-
centration of effort, by their purity of outline, and by their
extreme precision in the use of definite imagery. They
aim, with unflinching consistency, at a realization of
194

The Centenary of Leconte de Lisle

beauty so abstract that the forms by which it is interpreted
to the imagination are almost wholly sculpturesque. Is
.there an English poet of whom, at his best, the same
language might be used? There is one, and only one,
and that is Walter Savage Landor. It cannot but be
stimulating to the reader to put side by side, let us say,
the opening lines of The Hamadryad and of Khiron, or
the dialogue of Niobe and that of Thrasymedes and Eunoe,
and to see how closely related is the manner in which the
English and the French poet approach their themes. The
spirit of pagan beauty broods over Hypatie et Cyrille as
it does over the mingled prose and verse of Pericles and
Aspasia, and with the same religious desiderium. We
shall not find another revelation of the cupuscular
magnificence of the farthermost antiquity so striking as
Landor's Gebir, unless we seek it in the Ka'in of Leconte
de Lisle.

But we should not drive this parallel too far. If the
breadth and majesty of vision which draw these two poets
together are notable, not less so are their divergencies.
Landor, who so often appears to be on the point of utter-
ing something magical which never gets past his lips,
is one of the most unequal of writers. He ascends and
descends, with disconcerting abruptness, from an ex-
quisite inspiration to the darkest level of hardness.
Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, is the victim of no
vicissitudes of style : he floats in the empyrean, borne up
apparently without an effort at a uniform height, like his
own Condor :

II dort dans I'air glace, les ailes toutes grandes.

Many readers — particularly those on whom the
romantic heresy has laid its hands with the greatest
violence — resent this Olympian imperturbability ; and the
charge has been frequently brought, and is still occa-
sionally repeated, that Leconte de Lisle is lacking in
sensibility, that he dares to be "impassible" in an age
when every heart is worn, palpitating, on the sleeve of
J9S

Aspects and Impressions

the impulsive lyrist. He was accused, as the idle world
always loves to accuse the visionary, of isolating himself
from his kind with a muttered odi frojanum vulgus et
arceo. Such an opinion is founded on the aspect of re-
serve which his vast legendary pictures suggest, and on
the impersonal and severely objective attitude which he
adopts with regard to history and nature. His poems
breathe a disdain of life and of the resilience of human
appetite (La Mort de Valmiki), a love of solitude [Le
Desert), a determination to gaze on spectacles of horror
without betraying nervous emotion (Le Massacre de
Mono), which seem superhuman and almost inhuman.
He was accused, in his dramas — which were perhaps the
most wilful, the least spontaneous part of his work — of
affecting a Greek frightfulness which outran the early
Greeks themselves. Francisque Sarcey said that Leconte
de Lisle, in his tragedy of Les Erinnyes, scratched the
face of yEschylus, as though he did not find it bloody
enough already.

The subjects which Leconte de Lisle prefers are never
of a sort to promote sentimentality or even sensibility.
He writes of Druids moaning along the edge of hyper-
borean cliffs, of elephants marching in set column across
hot brown stretches of sand, of the black panther
crouched among the scarlet cactus-blossoms, of the polar
bear lamenting among the rocks, of the Syrian sages
whose beards drip with myrrh as they sit in council under
the fig-tree of Naboth. He writes of humming-birds and
of tigers, of Malay pirates and of the sapphire cup of
Bhagavat, of immortal Zeus danced round by the young
Oceanides, and of Brahma seeking the origin of things
in the cascades of the Sacred River. These are not themes
which lend themselves to personal effusion, or on which
the poet can be expected to embroider any confessions of
his egotism. If Leconte de Lisle chooses to be thus remote
from common human interests — that is to say, from the
emotions of our vulgar life to-day — his is the responsi-
bility, and it is one which he has fully recognized. But
that his genius was not wholly marmoreal, nor of an icy
196

The Centenary of Leconte de Lisle

impassibility, the careful study of his works will amply
assure us.

-t is strange that even very careful critics have been
led to overlook the personal note in the poems of Leconte
de Lisle : probably because the wail of self-pity is so
piercing in most modern verse that it deadens the ear to
the discreet murmur of the stoic poet's confession. Hence
even Anatole France has been led to declare that the author
of Poernes Barbares has determined to be as obstinately
absent from his work as God is from creation ; and that
he has never breathed a word about himself, his secret
wishes, or his personal ideals. But what is such a passage
as the following if not a revelation of the soul of the poet
in its innermost veracity ?

O jeunesse sacree, irreparable joie,

Felicite perdue, oil I'dme en plcurs se noie !

O lumiere, 6 fraicheur des motits calmes et bleus,

Des coteaux et des bois feuillages ondideux,

Aubes d'un jour divin, chants des mers fortunees,

Florissante viguetir de mes belles anndes . . .

Vous vivez, vous chantez, vous palpitez encor,

Sainies rdalitds, dans vos horizons d'orl

Mais, 6 nature, 6 del, flots sacrds, monts sublimes,

Bois dont les vents amis font murmurer Ics cimes.

Formes de I'iddal, magnifiques aux yeux,

Vous avez disparu de nion cceur oublieux !

Et void que, lasse de voluptds ameres,

Haletant du desir de mes mille diimires.

Hilars I j'ai desappris les hymnes d'autrefois,

Et que mes dieux trahis n'cntendent plus ma voix.

This is a note more often heard, perhaps, in English
than in French poetry. It is the lament of Wordsworth
for the "visionary gleam" that has fled, for "the glory
and the dream " that fade into the light of common day.

Leconte de Lisle is unsparing with the results of his

erudition, and this probably confirms the popular notion of

his remoteness. Here, however, returning for a moment

to Landor, we may observe that he is never so close-

?i 197

Aspects and Impressions

packed and never so cryptic as the author of Chrysaor and
Gunlaug. What Leconte de Lisle has to tell us about
mysterious Oriental sages and mythical Scandinavian
heroes may be unfamiliar to the reader, but is never
rendered obscure by his mode of narration. Nothing
could be less within our ordinary range of experience
than the adventure of Le Barde de Temrah, v^\\o arrives
at dawn from a palace of the Finns, in a chariot drawn
by two Avhite buffaloes; but Leconte de Lisle recounts it
voluminously, in clear, loud language which leaves no
sense of doubt on the listener's mind as to what exactly
happened.

His Indian studies became less precise in the Poemes
Barbares than they had been in the early Poemes
Antiques; perhaps under the stress of greater knowledge.
But he had been from early youth personally acquainted
with the Indian landscapes which he describes. With the
ancient Sanscrit literature, I suppose he had mainly an
acquaintance through translations, of which those by
Burnouf may have inspired him most. Whether, if he
had lived to read Professor Jacobi's proof that Valmiki
was a historical character, and the author in its original
form of the earliest and greatest epic of India, the
Ramayana, Leconte de Lisle would have been annoyed to
remember that he had treated Valmiki as a mythical
person, symbolically devoured by white ants, it is im-
possible to say. Probably not, for he only chose these
ancient instances to illustrate from the contemplative
serenity of Brahmanism his own calm devotion to the
eternal principle of beauty.

Bhagavat! Bhagavat! Essence des Essences,
Source de Ja heautd, fleuve des Renaissances,
Lumi^re qui fait vivre et niourir a la fois.

Probably no other European poet has interpreted with
so much exactitude, because with so intense a sympathy,
the cosmogony and mythology of the Puranas, with their
mystic genealogies of gods and kings.
198

The Centenary of Leconte de Lisle

The harmony and sonorous fullness of the verse of
Leconte de Lisle were noted from the first, even by those
who had least sympathy with the subjects of it. He
achieved the extreme — we may almost say the excessive
— purity of his language by a tireless study of the Greeks
and of the great French poets of the seventeenth century,
with whom he had a remarkable sympathy at a time w^hen
they were generally in disfavour. His passion for the art
of Racine may be compared with the close attention which
Keats gave to the versification of Dryden. He greatly
venerated the genius of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps
the only contemporary poet of France who exercised any
influence over the style of Leconte de Lisle. It is difficult
to define in what that influence consisted; the two men had
essentially as little resemblance as Reims Cathedral has
to the Parthenon, Victor Hugo being as extravagantly
Gothic as Leconte de Lisle was Attic. But the younger
poet was undoubtedly fascinated by the tumultuous
cadences of his more various, and, we must admit, more
prodigious predecessor. They agreed, moreover, in ap-
pealing to the ear rather than to the eye. Verlaine has
described Leconte de Lisle's insistence on the vocal har-
monies of verse, and he adds : "When he recited his own
poems, a lofty emotion seemed to vibrate through his
w^iole noble figure, and his auditors were drawn to him
by an irresistible sympathy." It must have been a won-
derful experience to hear him, for instance, chant the iron
terce rime of Le Jugemcnt de Konor, or the voluptuous
languor of Nourmahal.

Much has been said about the sculpturesque character
of Leconte de Lisle's poems. But a comparison of them
to friezes of figures carved out of white marble scarcely
does justice to their colour, though it may indicate the
stability of their form. It would be more accurate to
compare them to the shapes covered with thin ivory and
ornamented with gold and jewels, in which the Greeks,
and even Pheidias himself, delighted. The Poemes
Antiques are, in fact, chryselephantine. But Leconte
de Lisle was a painter also, and perhaps the chief difference
199

Aspects and Impressions

to be observed between the early compositions and the
Poemes Barhares consists in the pictorial abundance of
the latter. His descriptions have the character of broadly-
brushed cartoons of scenes which are usually exotic, as
of some Puvis de Chavannes who had made a leisurely
voyage in Orient seas. Leconte de Lisle floods his canvas
with light, and his favourite colours are white and golden
yellow; even his fiercest tragedies are luminous. India
he sees not as prosaic travellers have seen it, but in a
blaze of dazzling splendour :

Tes fleiives sont pareils aiix pythons liimineux

Qui sur les palmier s verts enroident leurs beaux uceuds ;

Us glissent au ddtour de tes belles collines

En guirlandes d'argent, d'aziir, de perles fines.

It is natural that a nature so eminently in harmony with
the visual world, and so pagan in all its instincts, should be
indifferent or even hostile to Christianity. His stoic
genius, solidly based on the faiths of India and of Hellas,
finds the virtues of humility and of tender resignation
contemptible. In the very remarkable dialogue, Hypatie
et Cyrille, Leconte de Lisle defines, with the voice of the
Neoplatonist, his own conception of religious truth. It is
one in which Le vil Galileen has neither part nor lot. We
have to recognize in his temper a complete disdain of all
the consolations of the Christian faith, or rather an
inability to conceive in what they consist, and no
phenomenon in literature is more curious than that, after a
single generation, French poetry should have returned to
the aggressive piety which strikes an English reader as so
incomprehensible in M. Francis Jammes and in M. Paul
Claudel. But poetry has many mansions.

The person of Leconte de Lisle is described to us as
characteristic of his work. He was very handsome, with
a haughty carriage of the head on a neck "as pure and as
solid as a column of marble." A monocle, which never
left his right eye, gave a modern touch to an aspect which
might else have been too rigorously antique. A droll

The Centenary of Leconte de Lisle

little pseudo-anecdote, set by Theodore de Banvillc in his
inimitable amalgam of wit and fancy, illuminates the effect
which Leconte de Lisle produced upon his contemporaries.
I take it from that delicious volume, too little remembered
to-day, the Camees Parisicns, of 1873 :

Leconte de Lisle was walking with ^^schylus one day, in
the ideal fatherland of tragedy, when, while he was conversing
with the old hero of Salamis and of Platea, he suddenly
observed that his companion was so bald that a tortoise might
easily mistake his skull for a polished rock. Not wishing,
therefore, to humiliate the titanic genius, and yet not able
without regret to give up an ornament the indispensable
beauty of which was obvious, he made up his mind to be
totally bald in front, while retaining on the back of his head
the silken and curly wealth of an Apvollonian chevelure.

It was perhaps in the course of these walks with
^schylus that Leconte de Lisle formed the habit of spell-
ing Clytemnestre "Klytaimnestra." The austerities of his
orthography attracted a great deal of attention, and
cannot be said to have succeeded in remoulding French
or spelling. People continue to write "Cain," although
the poet insisted on "Kain," and even, in his sternest
moments, on "Qain." He believed that his text gained
picturesqueness, and even exactitude of impression, by
those curious archaisms. They are, at least, characteristic
of the movement of his mind, and the reader who is
offended by them must have come to the reading with a
determination to be displeased. His vocabulary is more
difficult; and sometimes, it must be confessed, more ques-
tionable. He uses, without explanation or introduction,
the most extraordinary terms. Ancient Roman emperors
are said to have shown their largess by putting real pearls
into the dishes which they set before their guests. This
was generous ; but the guest who broke his tooth upon a
gift must have wished that the pearl had been more con-
ventionally bestowed upon him. So the reader of Leconte
de Lisle may be excused if he resents the sudden appari-
201

Aspects and Impressions

tion of such strange words as "bobres," "bigaylles," and
"pennbaz " in the text of this charming poet.

In spite of these eccentricities, which are in fact quite
superficial, and in spite of a suspicion of pedantry which
occasionally holds the reader's attention at arm's length,
there is no French poet of our day more worthy of the
attention of a serious English student. Leconte de Lisle
cultivated the art of poetry with the most strenuous
dignity and impersonality. He had a great reverence for
the French language, and not a little of the zeal of the
classic writers of the seventeenth century who aimed at
the technical perfection of literature. He is lucid and
direct almost beyond parallel. In England, among those
who approach French literature with more enthusiasm
than judgment, there is a tendency to plunge at once into
what is fashionable for the moment on the Boulevard Saint
Michel. We have seen British girls and boys affecting to
appreciate Verlaine, and even Mallarm^, without having
the smallest acquaintance with Racine or Alfred de Vigny.
It is pure snohisme to pretend to admire Prose pour Des
Esseintes when you are unable to construe Montaigne. For
all such foreign folly, the rigorous versification, the pure
and lucid language, and the luminous fancy of Leconte de
Lisle may be recommended as a medicine.

TWO FRENCH CRITICS

EMILE FAGUET— REMY DE GOURMONT

THE importance of literary criticism in the higher
education of a race has been recognized in no
country in the world except France. Elsewhere
there have arisen critics of less, or more, or even of
extreme merit, but nowhere else has there been a systematic
training in literature which has embraced a whole genera-
tion, and has been intimately combined with ethics. The
line of action which Matthew Arnold vainly and
pathetically urged on the Anglo-Saxon world has been
unobtrusively but most effectively taken by France for
now more than half a century. When the acrid and
ridiculous controversy between the Classical and the
Romantic schools died down, criticism in France became
at once more reasonable and more exact. The fatuous
formula which has infected all races, and is not yet
extirpated in this country — the "I do not like you,
Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell " — passed into
desuetude. It was implicitly recognized that it is your
duty, if you express a view, to be able to "tell " on what
principles it is founded. In fact, if we concentrate our
attention on the progress of French professional criticism,
we see it becoming steadily more philosophical and less
empirical.

But about 1875, after the period of Taine and Renan,
and, in a quite other field, after that of Gautier and Paul
de Saint Victor, we find criticism in Paris rapidly tending
in two important directions, becoming on the one hand
more and more exacf, almost scientific, on the other
daringly personal and impressionist. Ferdinand Brune-
ti^re, who was a man of extraordinary force of character,
203

Aspects and Impressions

gave a colour to the whole scheme of literary instruction
throughout France. He resisted the idea that literature
was merely an entertainment or a pastime. He asserted
that it was the crown and apex of a virile education, and he
declared its aim to be the maintenance and progress of
morality. With Bruneti^re everything was a question of
morals. He was a strong man, and a fighting man ; he
enjoyed disputation and snuffed the breath of battle.
He advanced the impersonality of literature and stamped
on the pride of authors. In the year 1900, an observer
glancing round professorial circles had to admit that the
influence of Bruneti^re had become paramount. His
arbitrary theory of the evolution des genres, founded on
Herbert Spencer and Darwin, and applied to the study
of literature, pervaded the schools.

But the vehement tradition of Bruneti^re was under-
mined from the first by his two greatest rivals, Anatole
France and Jules Lemaitre, whose character was the exact
opposite of his. They were "impressionist" critics,
occupied with their own personal adventures among books,
and not actively concerned with ethics. Their infiuence,
especially that of Lemaitre, since Anatole France retired
from criticism before the close of the century, tempered
what was rigid and insensitive in the too-vehement
dogmatism of Bruneti^re, but they did not form a camp
distinct from his. The sodality of the French Academy
kept them together in a certain happy harmony, in spite
of their contrast of character. Bruneti^re died in 1906,
Lemaitre in 1914; the effect of the one upon education, of
the other upon social culture, had been immense, but it
had not advanced since 1900. With the new century,
new forces had come into prominence, and of the two most
important of these we speak to-day.

It was the fate of France to lose, within a few
months, the two most prominent critics of the period
, succeeding that of which I have just spoken. The death
of Emile Faguet and of Remy de Gourmont marks another
stage in the progress of criticism, and closes another
chapter in its history. That their methods and modes of
204

Two French Critics

life were excessively different; that their efforts, if not
hostile, were persistently opposed; that one was the most
professorial of professors, the other the freest of free
lances; that eacli,4 in a word, desired to be what the other
was not; adds a piquancy to the task of considering them
side by side. The first thing we perceive, in such a
parallel, is the superficial contrast; the second is the innate
similitude, so developed that these spirits in opposition
are found in reality to represent, in a sort of inimical
unison, the whole attitude towards literature of the genera-
tion in which they flourished. Their almost simultaneous
disappearance leaves the field clear for other procedures
under their guidance. In the extremely copious published
writings of these two eminent men the name of each of
them will scarcely be found. They worked, in their
intense and fervid spheres, out of sight of one another.
But, now both are dead, it is interesting to see how close
to each other they were in their essential attitude, and how
typical their activity is of the period between 1895 ^"d

1915-

If anyone should rashly engage to write the life of
Emile Faguet, he would find himself limited to the task
of composing what the critic himself, in speaking of
Montaigne, calls "the memoirs of a man who never had
any occupation but thinking." Through the whole of a
life which approached the term of threescore years and
ten, Faguet was absorbed, more perhaps than any other
man of his time, in the contemplation of the printed page.
He said of himself, "I have never stopped reading, except
to write, nor writing, except to read." In any other
country but France, this preoccupation would have led
to dreariness and pedantry, if not to a permanent and
sterile isolation. But in France purely literary criticism,
the examination and constant re-examination of the classics
of the nation, takes an honoured and a vivid place in the
education of the young. The literary teaching of the
schools is one of the moral and intellectual forces of the
France of to-day, and Faguet, who was the very type, and
almost the exaggeration, of that tendency in teaching,
205

Aspects and Impressions

was preserved from pedantry by the immense sympathy
which surrounded him. His capacity for comprehending
hooks, and for making others comprehend them, found
response from a grateful and thirsty multitude of students.
Emile Faguet was born, on the 17th of December, 1847,
at La Roche-sur-Yon, in Vendee, where his father was
professor at the local lyc^e. M. Victor Faguet, who had
received a prize for a translation of Sophocles into verse,
nourished high academic ambitions for his son. From
the noiseless annals of the future critic's childhood a
single anecdote has been preserved, namely that, when he
was a schoolboy, he solemnly promised his father that he
would become a member of the French Academyv All
his energy was centred towards that aim. He passed
through the regular course which attends young men who
study for the professoriate in France, and at last he be-
came a professor himself at Bordeaux, and then in Paris.
But in that career, as Dr. Johnson sententiously observed,
"Unnumber'd suppliants croud Preferment's Gate," and
at thirty-five Emile Faguet was still quite undistinguished.
He saw his juniors, and in particular Lemaitre and
Bruneti^re, speed far in front of him, but he showed
neither impatience nor ill-temper. Gradually he became a
writer, but it was not until 1885 that his Les Grands Maitres
du XVI' Steele attracted the attention of the public. He
began to be famous at the age of forty, when his Etudes
Litteraires sur le XIX' Siecle, clear, well arranged, amus-
ing and informing, proved to French readers that here was
a provider of substantial literature, always intelligent,
never tiresome, who was exactly to their taste. From that
time forth the remaining thirty years of Faguet's life
extended themselves in a ceaseless cheerful industry of
lecturing, writing, and interpreting, which bore fruit in
a whole library of published books, perhaps surpassing
in bulk what is known as the "output " of any other mortal
man.

Though ever more concerned with ideas than with per-
sons, Faguet did not disdain, in happy, brief, and salient
lines, to sketch the authors who had written the books he
206

Two French Critics

analysed. Let us attempt a portrait of himself as he
appeared in the later years of his life. No one ever less
achieved the conventional type of academician. His per-
son was little known in society, for he scarcely ever dined
out. He had so long been a provincial professor that he
never threw off a country look. In sober fact, Emile
Faguet, with his brusque, stiff movements, his rough
brush of a black moustache, and his conscientious walk,
looked more like a non-commissioned officer in mufti than
an ornament of the Institut. He was active in the streets,
stumping along with an umbrella always pressed under
his arm ; on his round head there posed for ever a kind of
ancient billycock hat. He had a supreme disdain for
dress, and for the newspapers which made jokes about his
clothing. He lived in a little stuffy apartment in the Rue
Monge — on the fifth storey, if I remember right. He was
an old bachelor, and the visitor, cordially welcomed to
his rooms, was struck by the chaos of books — chairs,
tables, the floor itself being covered with volumes, drowned
in printed matter. Just space enough swept out to hold
the author's paper and ink was the only oasis in the desert
of books. I remember that, at the height of his fame and
prosperity, there was no artificial light in his rooms. That
army of his publications was marshalled by the sole aid
of a couple of candles. Everything about him, but
especially the frank dark eyes lifted in his ingenuous face,
breathed an air of unaffected probity and simplicity, and
of a kind of softly hurrying sense that life was so short,
and there were so many books to read and to write, that
there could be no time left for nonsense.

His image will long recur to the inner vision of his
friends, as he went marching to his lecture or to his news-
paper-office, nonchalant and easy, with his hands in his
pockets, his elbow squeezing that enormous umbrella to
his side. In the evening he would go, inelegantly dressed,
in the same loosely martial way, to the theatre, for which
he had an inordinate affection. He was not a "first-
nighter," but dropped in to see a new piece whenever he
wanted copy for his feuilleton. His lectures, it is reported,
207

Aspects and Impressions

were familiar and conversational, with frequent repetition
and copious quotation, the whole poured out as a man
tells a story which he intimately knows, with an inex-
haustible flow of thoughts and facts. Sometimes he was
so vivacious as to be a little paradoxical, and led a laugh
against himself. He stood before his students, formidable
only in his erudition, easy of approach, austere and gay.
His congested rooms in the Rue Monge were open to any
young inquirer, but it was observed that Faguet never
asked what the name of his visitor was, but how old he
was. The younger the student, the less dogmatic was the
professor, but the more familiar, abundant, sympathetic.
It was noticeable in all his relations, with young and old
alike, that Faguet's one aim invariably seemed to be
honestly to make his Interlocutor comprehend the matter in
hand.

Some recollections of the outer presence of Emile
Faguet should not be without value to us in fixing the
character of his inner life, the spirit which pervaded his
profuse and honest labour. No one in the history of
literature has been more distinguished for intellectual
probity ; and no one has cared less for appearances, or for
the glorification of his own character and cleverness. His
value as a critic consists primarily in his capacity for
thoroughly understanding what each author under con-
sideration meant by this or that expression of his art.
Faguet does not allow himself to be stung into eloquence
by the touch of a master-mind, as Lemaitre does, nor does
he fly off from his subject on the wings of an imperative
suggestion, like Anatole France, but he sticks close to the
matter in hand, so close that he reaches comprehension
by becoming absorbed in it. There is no writer on litera-
ture who has ever crept so completely into the skin of each
old author as Faguet has done. He makes the dry bones
live; he resuscitates the dead, and revives in them all that
was essential in their original life, all that was really vital
in them, even if it be ultimately to condemn the taste or
the tendency exhibited. The first object with him is to
vivify; to analyse and dissect come next.
208

Two French Critics

He was open to all impressions, and he was par-
ticularly admirable in his periodical surveys of the four
great centuries of French verse and prose, because of his
unflagging open-mi ndedness. He saw the living thread
of literary history, running, a pulsating stream, from
Rabelais to Flaubert. He had followed it so often, up
and down, this way and that, that no curve of it, no back-
water was unfamiliar to him. Lassitude is as unknown
to Faguet as it was to Shelley's "Skylark." His curiosity
is always awake; no shadow of satiety ever comes near
him. He was a Titan in his way, but never a "weary
Titan "; he never felt "the orb of his fate," though it em-
braced so much, to be "too vast." The more elalDorate or
complex an author was, the more actively and ingeniously
Faguet penetrated his work, smoothing out the com-
plexities, throwing light into every dark corner. But it
is very proper to notice that even where he devotes him-
self with what seems the most absorbing care to the
investigation of a particular mind, he is always essentially
detached from it, always ready to quit one tenement of
genius and adapt himself with alacrity to another, like a
soldier-crab, wdiose tender extremity will fit itself to any
shell-habitation.

In one of his criticisms of Montesquieu — and on no
French classic has he been more constantly felicitous —
Faguet speaks of the faculty possessed by that prince of
intelligence of wandering among souls, and of studying
their spiritual experience "comme un anatomiste ^tudie le
jeu des organes." The author of the Esprit des Lois took
wide views and surveyed a vast expanse of society, but he
was equally apt to map out a square inch of mossy rock
at his feet. "II a du reste beaucoup ecrit, comme en
marge de ses grands livrcs." These words remind us of
a section of Emile Faguet's writings which is peculiarly
stimulating and useful. It is illustrated to great perfec-
tion in what is perhaps the most fascinating specimen of
his vast and various production, the volume called En
lisant les Beaux Vieux Livrcs, which he published so
lately as 1911. This was followed by En lisant Corneille
309

Aspects and Impressions

in 1913 and En lisdnt Moliere in 1914. If the war had
not intervened and if his own heahh had not failed him,
it is probable that Faguet would have extended and
developed this section of his work, which exhibited the
ripest fruit of his subtle and vigorous criticism.

The method which he adopted in these treatises was
to take a portion of a well-known book or a short poem,
and read it with his imaginary audience exactly as though
they, and he, had never met with it before. In En lisant
les Beaux Vieux Lhres he takes a score of such passages,
and analyses them without pedantry, eagerly, curiously,
cordially. He explains what the author meant, shows
how he has succeeded in expressing his meaning, points
out the ingenuities of thought and the felicities of lan-
guage, and in short exhibits the piece of hackneyed prose
or verse as though it had just been discovered. The
process may sound perfunctory and pedagogic, but,
conducted as Faguet conducts them, these little excursions
are not less delightful than original. He takes things that
everybody knows — such as Montaigne on Friendship, or
Bossuet on the Romans, or a couple of La Bruy^re's por-
traits; he takes a long poem, like Alfred de Vigny's La
Maison du Berger, or a short lyric, like Victor Hugo's
Le Semeur; he takes the character of Severe in
Polyeucte or a landscape out of the memoirs of Chateau-
briand, and he illuminates these familiar things until the
reader not merely sees in them what he never saw before,
but has gained a method of reading by which he will in
future extract infinite new pleasures from re-reading old
familiar books.

In this system of analysis by conversation consists the
chief originality of Faguet's criticism. The idea of it was
not entirely new ; so long ago as the seventeenth century
Descartes said that "la lecture est une conversation con-
tinue avec les plus honnetes gens des si^cles passes." But
it had not been planned on a practical basis until Faguet
sketched out these enchanting books of his, in which we
seem to see him seated, smiling, at a table, the volume
open before him, expounding it to an eager circle of in-

310

Two French Critics

telligent young people. In these conversations, Faguct
had not the weight of Bruneti^re or the sparkle of
Lemaitre ; he was simpler than the one and soberer than
the other. He achieved the dream of the teacher when
he discovered how to write books which please and are
useful at the same time. He avoided, by a whole con-
tinent, the vapid dreariness of the usual English manual,
which looks upon the rose of Sharon and the lily of the
valley as fit only to be pressed between sheets of blotting-
paper in a hortus siccus. Faguet is always in earnest,
although he sometimes indulges in immense humour and
vivacity, not of the Parisian variety, but highly exhilarat-
ing. When he suddenly confesses to us that Balzac had
"the temperament of an artist and the soul of a commercial
traveller," or when he sums up an entirely grave summary
of Pindare-Le Brun by telling us that "c'^tait un homme
de beaucoup d'esprit, d'un caract^re tr^s meprisable, et
excellent ouvrier de vers," it is no schoolmaster that speaks
to pupils, but a friend who takes his intimates into his
confidence.

It has been the habit to depreciate the style of Faguet,
which indeed does not set out to be exquisite, and cannot
compare with those of several of his great predecessors.
He has been charged, in his zeal for the matter of litera-
ture, Avith a neglect of its form. It is true that his phrases
are apt to be curt; he gives little attention to the conduct
of a sentence, further than to define in it his precise inten-
tion. But his criticism has a great purity of design, which
is in itself an element of style. It sets forth to accomplish
a certain purpose and it carries out this aim with the utmost
economy of means. No writer less than Faguet, to use a
vulgar expression, "slops about all over the shop." He
has at least this negative beauty of writing, and he adds
to it another, the gift of discussing great authors in a tone
that is in sympathy with their peculiarities. An instance
of this, among a hundred, may be cited from his Dix-
huitihne Siecle; summing up what he has to impress upon
us about Marivaux, he defines that author in these terms :
"C'est un pr^cieux qui est assez rare et qu'on s'interdit d^

311

Aspects and Impressions

condamner an moment meme qu'on le d^sapprouve, parce
qu'on n'est pas sans en jouir dans le moment meme qu'on
en souffre." It would hardly be possible to put more of
critical value into so few words, but moreover it is said
as Marivaux himself might say it.

Faguet had his prejudices, as every honest man may
have. He adored the seventeenth and he loved the nine-
teenth centuries, but he had almost an aversion from the
eighteenth. He put Buff on first among the writers of
that age, and Montesquieu next ; so loyal a spirit as
Faguet's could not but be cordially attracted by Vau-
venargues. But the lack of poetry, and, as he asserted,
the lack of philosophy of the Encyclopaedists annoyed him,
and for their greatest name, for Voltaire, he had a positive
hatred. Faguet found it difficult to be just to Diderot,
and difficult to tolerate Rousseau, but to love Voltaire he
made no effort whatever ; he acknowledged that feat to be
impossible. He did not fear to contradict himself, and
about Rousseau his opinion grew steadily more favour-
able, until, in 1913, he positively published five inde-
pendent volumes on this one writer alone. But Faguet
could never persuade himself to approach Voltaire with
any face but a wry one. Yet, even here, his antipathy is
scarcely to be perceived on the surface. Faguet always
leaves the judgment of his reader independent. He puts
the facts before him ; his own irony marks the line of
thought which he suggests; but he is careful never to
attempt to bully the reader into acceptance. Bruneti^re
is apt to be vociferous in persuasion ; Faguet never raises
his voice.

In 1899, being called upon to sum up the qualities of
the leading French critics from 1850 onwards, Faguet
found himself confronted with his own name and work.
It was characteristic of his candour aiid simplicity that
he did not shrink from the task of describing himself, and
that he undertook it without false modesty or affectation.
When he comes to describe Emile Faguet he is as de-
tached, as calmly analytic, as he is when he speaks of
Th6ophile Gautier or M. Ren^ Doumic. He defines the
919

Two French Critics

qualities, acknowledges the limitations, and hints at the
faults of his subject. I do not know a case in all literary
history where a writer has spoken of himself in terms
more severely judicial, he closes this remarkable little
study with words which we may quote here for their
curious personal interest no less than as an example of
Faguet's style :

Laborieux, du reste, assez m^thodique, consciencieux, en
poussant la conscience jusqu'^ 6tre peu bienveillant, ou en ne
sachant pas pousser le scrupule consciencieux jusqu'^ la
bienveillance, il a pu rendre et il a rendu des services appr^-
ciables aux ^tudiants en litt^rature, qui ^taient le public qu'il
a toujours vis6. Sans abandonner la critique, qu'il est k croire
qu'il aimera toujours, il s'est un peu tourn6 depuis quclques
annees du c6t6 des etudes sociologiques, ou c'est k d'autres
qu'i nous qu'il appartient d'appr^cier ses efforts.

In this connexion a phrase of the great critic may be
recalled. When the war broke out in 1914, someone who
knew Faguet's absorbing love of books sympathized with
him on the blow to literature. He responded, in a tone
of reproof, "L'avenir national est une chose autrement
importante que I'avenir litteraire."

Those sociological interests were steadily emphasized.
Faguet became, not less in love with great books, but
more inclined to turn from their technical to their ethical
value. He became himself a moralist, after having in so
many eloquent volumes analysed the works and the
characters of the politicians and teachers of the nineteenth
century. He possessed a finished faculty for amusing and
pleasing while he instructed, and it was remarkable that
in these treatises of his late middle life he addressed a
much wider public than he had ever reached before. His
Comnieniaire du Discoiirs siir les Passions was a link
between the earlier purely literary treatises and the later
analyses of psychological phenomena, but it was highly
successful. Even more universally popular were the little
books on Friendship and Old Age, which enjoyed a
larger circulation than any other contemporary works of
o 213

Aspects and Impressions

their class. Faguet was pleased at his popularity, and
felt that he was recognized as belonging to that "vieille
race de moralistes exacts et fins " of whom La Roche-
foucauld had been the precursor. Of these moral studies,
the most abundantly discussed was that which dealt with
he Culte de I'lncompetcnce (1910), a book which bears
a very remarkable relation to the state of France when war
broke out.

Towards the end of his life, Faguet became a great
power in France. He exercised, from that book-bewil-
dered room in the Rue Monge, a patriotic, amiable,
fraternal influence which permeated every corner of the
French-speaking world. But his health, which had long
been failing, gave way under the strain of the war. He
had never given himself any rest from perpetual literary
labour, and he had always Siud that he knew^ that before
he was seventy years of age he should be "buried and
forgotten." A third stroke of paralysis carried away the
greatest living friend of literature in France on the 7th of
June, 1916, in his sixty-ninth year. Buried he is at last,
to their sorrow, but his compatriots will not readily forget
him.

It is not easy to find common terms in which to
describe Faguet and his remarkable contemporary, Remy
de Gourmont. Their two circles of influence were far-
reaching, but did not touch. In the very extensive litera-
ture of each the other is perhaps never mentioned. We
may suppose that it would be almost impossible for a
French observer to review them together without allow-
ing the scale to descend in favour of this name or of that.
But here may come in the use of foreign criticism, which
regards the whole field from a great distance, and without
passion. The contrast between these two writers, both
honest, laborious and fruitful, both absorbed in and sub-
merged by literature, both eager to discover truth in all
directions, was yet greater than their similarity. We have
briefly observed in Faguet the university professor, the
great public interpreter of masterpieces. In Remy de
Gourmont, on the other hand, we meet the man who,
214

Two French Critics

scornful of mediocrity and tolerant of nothing but what
is exquisite, stands apart from the crowd, and will scarcely
share his dream with a disciple. Faguet, like a Lord
Chancellor of Letters, is versed in all the legislation of the
mind, and lives in a perpetual elucidation of it. Gour-
mont, standing in the outer court, attracts the young and
the audacious around him by protesting that no laws exist
save those which are founded on an artist's own eclecti-
cism. Together, or rather back to back, they addressed
almost everyone who was intelligent in France between
1895 and 1914.

We have seen in Emile Faguet a typical member of
the middle class. Remy de Gourmont was an aristocrat
both by descent and by temperament. He was born on
the 4th of April, 1858, in the chateau of La Motte, near
Bazoches-en-Houlme, in the Orne; during his childhood
his parents moved to a still more romantic little manor-
house at Mesnil-Villement. These Norman landscapes
are constantly introduced into Gourmont's stories. His
race was of considerable antiquity and distinction ; his
mother traced her descent from the great poet, Malherbe ;
a paternal ancestor was that Gilles de Gourmont who
printed in France the earliest books in Greek and in
Hebrew character. A passion for the Muses, like a fra-
grant atmosphere, surrounded the boy from his cradle.
He arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-five, provincially
instructed, but already of a marvellous erudition. He
was appointed assistant librarian at the Bibliotheque
Nationale, where for eight years he browsed at will on
all the secret and forgotten wonders of the past, indulging
to the full an insatiable literary curiosity. In 1890 he
published a novel, Sixtine, a sort of diary of a very com-
plicated mind which believes itself to be in love, but
cannot be quite sure. It was "cerebral," without action
of any kind, an absurd book, but ingeniously — too in-
geniously—written. The historic interest of Sixtine rests
in the fact that it led the reaction against the naturalism
of Zola and the pyschology of M. Paul Bourget. Gour-
mont now achieved a single English reader, for Sixtine
2J5

Aspects and Impressions

was read by Henry James, but with more curiosity than
approval.

Although hardly a book of permanent value, Sixtine
had a lasting effect on the career of its author. It ex-
pressed with remarkable exactitude the sentiments of the
group of young men who were now coming to the front
in France. Gourmont became the champion of the
"vaporeux, nuanc^ et sublimise " literature which started
about 1890. He accepted "symbolism," and he became
the leader of the symbolist movement, of which his stern
mental training and curious erudition permitted him to be
the brain. He was the prophet of Mallarm^, of Verlaine,
of Maeterlinck, of Huysmans, and at the same time he
welcomed each younger revolutionary. All this, of course,
was not done in a day, but reconciliation with the intel-
lectual conventions was made impossible by a fact which
must not be ignored in any sketch of Remy de Gourmont,
and indeed ought to be faced with resolution. In 1891
he was dismissed from the public service and from the
Library, for an article which he published entitled Le
Joujou Patriotisme, in which he poured contempt upon
the Army, and openly advocated the abandonment of any
idea of the "Revanche." The chastisement was a severe
one, and had an effect on the whole remainder of Gour-
mont's life. About the same time his health gave way,
and excluded him from all society, for he was invaded by
an unsightly growth in the face. His hermitage was
high up in an old house in the Rue des Saints P^res, near
the quay, and there he sat, day in, day out, surrounded
by his books, in solitude, a monk of literature.

For the next eight or nine years, Gourmont, aban-
doning politics, in which he had made so luckless an
adventure, devoted himself exclusively to art and letters.
He joined the staff of the Mercure de France; and under
its director, and his life-long friend, M. Vallette, he took
part in all the symbolist polemics of the hour. He de-
fended each new man of merit with his active partisanship ;
he wrote, ceaselessly; verse, art criticism, humanism,
novels, every species of fantastic and esoteric literature
216

Two French Critics

flowed from his abundant pen. 1 licse books, many of
them preposterous in their shape, "limited editions" pro-
duced in conditions of archicpiscopal splendour of bind-
ing and type, possess, it must be admitted, little positive
value. They are blossoms in the flower-garden of that
heyday of sensuous "symbolism," of Avhich we had a
pale reflection in our London Yellow Books and Savoy
Reviews. The most interesting of the publications of
Remy de Gourmont during these feverish years is the little
volume called L'Idealisme (1893), in which he sought to
restore to the word "id^al " what he called its "aristocratic
value." A passage may be quoted from an essay in this
elegant and ridiculous- treatise, on the beauty of words,
irrespective of their meaning :

. Quclles reallt^s me donneront les saveurs que je r^ve k ce
*fruit de I'lnde et des songes, le myrobolan, — ou les couleurs

royales dont je pare I'omphax, ou ses lointaines gloires?

Quelle musique est comparable k la sonorite pure des mots

obscurs, 6 cyclamor? Et quelle odeur k tes emanations

vierges, 6 sanguisorbe?

Stevenson — the R.L.S. of "Penny plain and Twopence
coloured " — would have delighted in this.

Gourmont became tired of symbolism rather suddenly,
and he buried it in two volumes which were the best he
had yet published : the Livres des Masques of 1896 and
1898. These have a lasting value as documents, and they
mark the beginning of the author's permanent work as a
critic of letters. In them he insisted on the warning not
to let new genius pass ungreetcd because it was eccentric-
ally draped or unfamiliarly featured. These two volumes
are a precious indication of what French independent
literature was at the very close of the nineteenth century,
and it is interesting after tw-enty years of development and
change to note how few mistakes Remy de Gourmont
made in his characterization of types. He took a central
place among these symbolists, grouping around him the
men of genuine talent, repulsing pretenders who were
217

Aspects and Impressions

charlatans and discouraging mere imitators; marshalling,^
in short, a ferocious little army of genius in its attack
upon the conventions and the traditions of the age. Time
rolls its wheel, and it is amusing to notice that several of
these fierce young revolutionaries are now members of the
French Academy.

At the close of the century Remy de Gourmont aban-
doned symbolism, and the world of ideas took possession
of him. He plunged deeper into the study of philosophy,
grammar, and history, and he explored new provinces of
knowledge, particularly in the direction of ethnography
and biology. In the midst of this acquisitive labour he
■was stirred to the composition of one remarkable work
after another, and to this period belong the four successive
publications, which, in the whole of Gourmont's vast pro-
duction, stand out as the most interesting and important
which he has written. His reputation stands four-square
on L'Esthetique de la Langue Frangaise (1899), La Culture
des Idees (1900), Le Chemin de Velours (1902), and Le
Probleme du Style (1902). During the thirteen years
which followed he wrote incessantly, and the widening
circle of his admirers always found much to praise in what
he produced. But now that we see his life-work as a
whole it seems more and more plain that he revealed his
genius freshly and fully in these four books of his prime,
and in a world so crowded as ours the reader who has much
to attract him may be recommended to these as broad and
perhaps sufficient exponents of the character of Gourmont's
teaching.

It has been said by one of his earliest associates, M.
Louis Dumur, that Gourmont was always "le bon chasseur
du mensonge humain." This is a friendly way of describ-
ing his intellectual dogmatism and his restless habit of
analysis. He took nothing for granted, and, whether he
desired to be so or not, he was a destructive force. He
describes himself, in one of his rather rare paragraphs
of self-portraiture, as "un esprit d^sint^ress^ de tout, et
int6ress6 k tout," and this very accurately defines his atti-
tude. He strikes us as ceaselessly hovering over hitherto
218

Two French Critics

uncontested facts in the passionate desire of proving them
to be fallacies. The epithet "paradoxical," which is often
misapplied, appears to be exactly appropriate to the method
of Remy de Gourmont, which starts by denying the truth
of something which everybody has taken for granted, and
then supporting the reversed position by rapid and in-
genious argument. He is unable to accept any convention
until he has resolutely turned it inside out, examined it in
every hostile light, and so dusted and furbished it that it
has ceased to be conventional. He was indefatigable in
these researches, and so ingenious as to be often be-
wildering and occasionally tiresome.

He has left no book more characteristic than Le
Chemin de Velours, which he called a study in the disso-
ciation of ideas. He chose a very illuminating tag from
Pascal as his motto : "ni la contradiction n'est marque de
faussete, ni I'incontradiction n'est marque de v^ritt^."
The whole treatise is a comparison between the Jansenist
and the Jesuit system of morals, as revealed in the
Provincial Letters. Like many Frenchmen of recent
years, Remy de Gourmont liked religion to be cham-
pioned, but never by a believer. Neither Port Royal nor
the Society of Jesus would thank him for his disinterested
support, but he defends them, alternately and destruc-
tively, with an immense fund of vivacity. No one has
defined more luminously the evangelical doctrine of
Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, and for a while the reader
thinks that the balance will descend on the Jansenist side.
But Gourmont is scandalized to see Calvinism banging the
door of salvation in people's faces, while he applauds the
humanity of the Jesuits in holding it wide open, and in
spreading between birth and death a velvet carpet for
delicate souls. He analyses the works of Sarrasa, a
Flemish Jesuit, who in 1618 produced an Ars semper
gaudendi w'hich was, according to Gourmont, neither more
nor less than a treatise on the way to make the best of both
worlds. Gourmont was endlessly amused by the indis-
creet admissions of Father Sarrasa.

Nevertheless, the Jesuit type shocked him more than
219

Aspects and Impressions

the Jansenist. He admired the logical penetration of
Pascal, his rigidity of thought, his unalterable ideal of
duty, more than the easy-going casuistry of his opponents.
He thought that Protestantism, which rests on abstraction,
was a purer type of religion than the mitigated and
humanized Christianity of Catholicism. But he was
irritated by the way in which Port Royal pushed their
spiritual logic to extremes, and he dared to suggest that
Pascal would have been a better and a more useful man
if he had consented to be less holy. Gourmont speculated
ingeniously what would have been the future of philoso-
phical literature if Pascal, instead of retiring to Port
Royal, had joined Descartes in Holland. On the whole
he decides against the Jansenists, because although he sees
that they were noble he suspects them of being inhuman,
and of laying intolerable and needless burdens upon the
spirit of man. Remy de Gourmont considered evangelical
Christianity an Oriental religion, not well fitted for Latin
Europe. In all the schisms and heresies of the churches
he thought he saw the Western mind revolting against a
dogmatism Avhich came from Jerusalem. The Jansenist
is a pessimist; the Jesuit, on the other hand, cultivates
optimism ; he pretends, at all events, that the soul should
be free and joyous, to which end he rolls out his velvet
road towards salvation. Remy de Gourmont concludes
that the final effect of Les Provinciales is to make the
reader love the Jesuits, and when he comes to sum up the
matter he is on the side of the Society, because nothing
wounds a civilized man so deeply as the negation of his
free will. It will be seen that neither party gains much
from his sardonic and fugitive approbation.

After 1902 a further transformation began to be visible
in the genius of Remy de Gourmont. An improvement in
his health permitted him to mingle a little with other
human beings, and to become less exclusively an anchorite
of the intellect. Having pushed his individualist theories
to their extreme, he withdrew from his violent expression
of them, and he took a new and pleasing interest in public
life. He continued to seek consolation for the disappoint-

Two French Critics

merits of art in philosophy and science, and he developed
a positive passion for ideas. He founded the Revue des
Idees, which had a considerable vogue in the intellectual
world. But his chief activity henceforward was as a
publicist. His incessant short essays, mainly published
in the Mercure de France, became an element in the life
of thousands of cultivated readers. They dealt briefly
with questions of the day, concerning all that can arrest
the attention of an educated man or woman. The author
collected them in volumes which present the quintessence
of his later manner, four of Epilogues, three of
Promenades Litteraircs, three of Promenades Philo-
sophiques, and so forth. These dogmatic expressions of
his conception of life were written in a style more fluid,
more buoyant, and less obscure than he had previously
used, and they achieved a great popularity, especially
among women. Meantime, as a critic, he showed less and
less interest in the exceptional and the unwholesome, of
which he had been the fantastic defender, and more in the
great standard authors of France. In 1905 he opened with
an anthology from Gerard de Nerval a series of Les Plus
Belles Pages, which he continued until the war with
admirable judgment.

The war found Remy de Gourmont not totally un-
prepared. He had always unflinchingly avowed himself
an aristocrat and an anarchist; it was his way of expressing
his horror at vulgarity and tyranny. He had chosen to
be disconcerting in his vindictive pursuit of sentimentality
and folly. He had thought it fitting to be a determined
enemy to militarism. It was difficult for a critic with so
fine an ear as his to tolerate patriotic verses which did not
scan. But the ripening years had sobered him, and he
made after 191 1 a much more careful examination of the
destiny of his country. He saw that with all his
scepticism he had been the dupe of Teutonic culture, and
he repudiated the Nietzsche whom he had done so much
to introduce to Parisian readers. From August, 19 14,
Remy de Gourmont put aside all his literary and scientific
work, and devoted himself wholly to a patriotic comment

Aspects and Impressions

on the ^va^. His short articles in La France form an
admirable volume, Pendant I'Orage, by -which all his
petulance in times of peace is more than redeemed. The
anguish of the struggle killed him, as it had killed so many
others. Remy de Gourmont was seated at his writing-
table, with a protest against the outrage upon Reims half-
completed before him, when a stroke of apoplexy put an
instant period to his life. This was on the 29th of
September, 1915.

In one of his best books, Le Probleme du Style (1902),
Remy de Gourmont remarks in his aphoristic way, "II y a
une forme generale de la sensibility qui s'impose a tous les
hommes d'une meme p6riode." This is excessive in its
application, but it is sufficiently true to be a useful guide
to the historian. Between 1890 and 1905 there was ex-
hibited, not merely in France and England, but all over
Europe, a "general form of sensibility" of which Gour-
mont was the ablest, the most vociferous, and the most
ingenious representative. It is important to try to analyse
this condition or fashion of taste, since, although it has
already passed into the region of things gone by and of
"les neiges d'antan," it has not ceased to be memorable.
Our comprehension of it is not helped by ticketing it
"decadent " or "unhealthy," for those are empty adjectives
of prejudice. What was really involved in it was a revolt
against sentimentality and against the tendency to repeat
with complacency the outworn traditions of art. This was
its negative side, worthy of all encouragement. What was
not quite so certainly meritorious was its positive action.
It was a demand for an exclusively personal aesthetic, for
an art severely divorced from all emotions except the
purely intellectual ones, the sensuousness of this school of
writers being essentially cerebral. It descended in
England from Walter Pater, in France from Baudelaire,
and it aimed at a supreme delicacy of execution, an
exquisite avoidance of everything vulgar and second-
hand. The young men who fought for it considered that
the only thing essential was to achieve what they called a
"personal vision " of life. In the pursuit of it they were
222

Two French Critics

willing to be candid at the risk of perversity, while they
obstinately denied that there should be any relation
between art and morals. But Remy de Gourmont, who
had been their leader in aiming at an impossible perfection,
lived long enough to see the whole intellect and con-
science of France pressing along a path to greatness which
he and his disciples had never perceived in all the

1916.

aa3

THE WRITINGS OF M. CLEMENCEAU

IN the year 1893, after a succession of events which are
still remembered Avith emotion, M. Clemenceau fell
from political eminence, not gradually or by transi-
tions of decay, but with theatrical suddenness like that of a
Lucifer "hurled headlong flaming from the ^etherial sky."
His enemies, rewarded beyond their extreme hopes, gazed
down into the abyss and thought that they discerned his
"cadavre politique " lying motionless at the bottom.
They rejoiced to believe that he would trouble them no
more. He had passed the age of fifty years, and all his
hopes were broken, all his ambitions shattered. They
rubbed their hands together, and smiled; "Ave shall hear
no more of him! " But they did not know with what
manner of man they were dealing. What though the field
was lost ? All was not lost :

The unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield ;
And what is else not to be overcome?

So brilliant an array of mingled intelligence, per-
tinacity, vigour, and high spirits have rarely been seen
united, and the possessor of these qualities was not likely
to be silenced by the most formidable junta of intriguers.
As a matter of fact, he turned instantly to a new sphere
of action, and became the man of letters of whom I
propose to speak in these pages. But for his catastrophe
in 1893, ^^ is probable that M. Clemenceau would never
have become an author.

A brief summary of his early life is needed to bring the
series of his published works into due relief. Georges
225

Aspects and Impressions

Clemenceau was the second son of a family of six; he was
born on the 28th of September, 1841, and was therefore a
little younger than Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Morley,
and a litde older than Sir Charles Dilke. His birthplace
was a hamlet close to the old and picturesque town of
Fontenay-le-Comte, in the Vendee, where his father
practised as a doctor. There can be no doubt that Ben-
jamin Clemenceau, an old provincial "bleu," materialist
and Jacobin, exercised a great influence on the mind of
his son, who accepted, with a docility remarkable in so
firm an individual, the traditions of his race and family.
We are told that the elder Clemenceau "communicated to
his son his hatred of injustice, his independence, his
scientific worship of facts, his refusal to bow to anything
less than the verdict of experiment." There was also a
professional tradition to which young Georges Clemen-
ceau assented. For three hundred years, without a break,
his forebears had been doctors. I do not think that any
of his biographers has observed the fact that Fontenay-Ie-
Comte, though so small a place, has always been a centre
of advanced scientific thought. It has produced a line of
eminent physicians, for Pierre Brissot was born there in
the fifteenth century, Sebastian Collin in the sixteenth,
and IMathurin Brisson in the eighteenth. There can be
little doubt that these facts were in the memory of the
elder Clemenceau and were transmitted to his son.

Fontenay-le-Comte is on the western edge of the
Bocage of Poitou, not to be confounded with the delicious
woodland Bocage which lies south and west of Caen. The
Poitou Bocage is a more limited and a more remote dis-
trict, little visited by tourists, a rolling country of heather-
land clustered with trees, and split up by little torrential
chasms. It is often to be recognized in M. Clemenceau 's
sketches of landscapes, and is manifestly the scene of part
of his novel, Lcs Plus Forts. The natural capital of this
Bocage is Nantes, lying full to the north of Fontenay,
and thither the young man went at an early age to study
at the Lyc^e. It was at the hospital at Nantes that his
first introduction to medicine w^as made. Thence he
226

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

finally departed in i860, another deracinc, to fight for his
fortunes in Paris. He brought little with him save a letter
of introduction from his father to Etienne Arago. For
five years he worked indomitably at his medical studies,
refreshing his brain occasionally by brief holidays spent
at his father's rough and ancient manor-house of Aubraie,
in his native Bocage.

He took his degree of M.D. in 1865, and presented a
thesis De la Generation dcs Elements anatomiques, which
was immediately published, and which caused some stir in
professional circles. It is said to contain a vigorous
refutation of some of the doctrines of Auguste Comte, and
in particular to deprecate a growing agnosticism among
men of science. The axiom, "Supprimer les questions,
n'est pas y repondre," is quoted from it, and again the
characteristic statement, "Nous ne sommes pas de ceux
qui admettent avec I'ecole positiviste que la science ne
pent fournir aucun renseignement sur I'enigme des choses."
The thesis dealt, moreover, according to M. Pierre
Quillard, who has had the courage to unearth and to
analyse it, with "lesorganismesrudimentairesdesnepheles,
des hirudinees et glossiphonies," subjects the very
names of which are horrifying to the indolent lay reader.
The young savant, shaking off the burden of his studies,
escaped to London, Avhere he appears to have made the
acquaintance, through Admiral Maxse, of several English-
men who were about to become famous in the world of
politics and letters. But perhaps these friendships are of
later date ; as the memoirs of the mid-Victorians come more
and more to light, the name of ^f. Clemenceau will be
looked for in the record.

He went to the United States in 1866, and took an
engagement as French master in a girls' school at Stam-
ford, in Connecticut, a seaside haunt of tired New Yorkers
in summer. A little later, Verlaine was under-master in a
boys' school at Bournemouth. How little we guess, when
we take our walks abroad, that genius, and foreign genius
too, may be lurking in the educational procession !
M. Clemenceau appears to look back on Stamford with
227

Aspects and Impressions

complacency; he accompanied "dans leurs promenades les
jeunes misses americaines : c'etaient de libres et d^licieuses
chevaucWes, des excursions charmantej au long des routes
ombreuses qui sillonnent ies riants parages " of Long
Island Sound. He declares that the happy and light-
hearted years at Stamford were those in which his tem-
perament "acheva de se fortifier et de s'affiner." It was
in the course of one of the "suaves ^quip^es " that he
ventured to propose to one of the young American
"misses." This was Miss Mary Plummer, whom he
married after a preliminary visit to France.

For the next quarter of a century Clemenceau Avas
exclusively occupied with politics. In 1870 he was settled
in Montmartre, in a circle of workmen and little
employes whose bodily maladies he relieved, and whose
souls he inflamed with his ardent dreams of a humanitarian
paradise when once the hated Empire should fall. Sud-
denly the war broke out, and the Empire was shattered.
The government of defence nominated Dr. Clemenceau
Mayor of Montmartre, the most violent centre of revolu-
tionary emotion, where the excesses of the Commune
presently began. He represented Montmartre at Bor-
deaux in 187 1, and in 1876 Montmartre, which had
remained faithful to its doctor-mayor, sent him again to
the Chamber of Deputies as its representative. This is
not the occasion on which to enter into any detail with
regard to the ceaseless activity which he displayed in a
purely political capacity between 1870 and 1893. It is
enshrined in the history of the Republic, and will occupy
the pens of innumerable commentators of French affairs.
We can only record that in 1889, M. Clemenceau, who had
refused many pressing invitations to leave Paris for
Draguignan, consented to take up his election as deputy
for the Proven9al department.

The career of M. Clemenceau as deputy for the Var
came to an end in 1893, after the explosion of the Panama
scandal. On the 8th of August in that year he pronounced
an apologia over his political life, an address full of
dignity and fire, in which the failure of his ambition yas
228

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

acknowledged. His figure was never more attractive than
it was at that distressing moment, when he found himself
the object of almost universal public disfavour. He had,
perhaps, over-estimated the vigour of his own prestige; he
had browbeaten the political leaders of the day, he had
stormed like a bull the china-shops of the little political
hucksters, he had contemptuously exposed the intrigues of
the baser sort of political politician. He disdained popu-
larity so proudly, that one of his own supporters urged
him to cultivate the hatred of the crowd with a little less
coquettishness. But he was a political Don Quixote, not
to be held nor bound; he could but rush straight upon his
own temporary discomfiture.

The means which his enemies employed to displace him
were contemptible in the extreme, but their malice w^as
easily accounted for. He had excited the deep resentment
of all the supporters of General Boulanger, who accused
him of being the cause of their favourite's fall, and with
having betrayed him in 1888. The fanatics of the Panama
scandal endeavoured to prove that his newspaper. La
Justice, had supported the schemes and accepted the
cheques of the egregious Cornelius Herz. The Anglo-
phobes, who unhappily numbered too many of the less
thinking population of France at that time, accused him of
intriguing with the English Government to the detriment
of the Republic, and they went so far as to produce docu-
ments, forged by the notorious mulatto, Norton, which
they pretended had been stolen from our embassy in Paris.
"Qu'il parle anglais," was one accusation shouted at
Clemenceau in the Chamber on the 4th of June, 1888.
Calamities of every sort, public and private, gathered
round his undaunted head. At last he could ignore these
attacks no longer, and on a fateful day he rose to put
himself right before Parliament. It was too late; his
appearance was greeted by an icy silence, and, as he said
himself, he glanced round to see none but the hungry faces
of men longing for the moment when they could trample
on his corpse. Magnificent as was his defence, it availed
him nothing against such a combination of malignities;
p 229

Aspects and Impressions

even his few friends, losing courage, failed to support hira.
The legislative elections were at hand, and the enemies of
M. Clemenceau very cleverly organized a press propa-
ganda, which presented him to the French public in an
absolutely odious light. He went down to address his
Proven9al constituents, and in the little mountain town of
Salernes he delivered the remarkable speech to which
reference has been made. All in vain : on the 20th of
August, 1893, he was ignominiously rejected by the electors
of the Var in favour of a local nonentity, and his career
as a member of parliament ended. ^

These circumstances, which paralysed for many years
the parliamentary activity of Clemenceau, have to be
borne in mind when we examine his literary record.
Without delay, in that spirit of prompt acceptance of the
inevitable which has never ceased to mark his buoyant,
elastic character, he threw himself into a new employment.
He became, in his fifty-third year, one of the most active
and persistent journalists in France. His fiery indepen-
dence and his audacious vivacity pointed him out at once
to editors who had the wit to cater for the better, that is to
say for the livelie-r, class of readers. M. Clemenceau, a
free lance if ever there w^as one, became the terror and the
delight of Le Figaro, La Justice, and Le journal, while to
La Depeche de Toulouse he contributed articles which pre-
jsupposed a wider horizon and depended less on the passion
of the moment. Future bibliographers, it may be, will
search the files of these and other newspapers of that day
for more and more numerous examples of his fecundity,
since he embraced all subjects in what he called the huge

* A very interesting account of the events which led to the fall of M.
Clemenceau is given in the autobiography of the late Mr. Hyndman, who
had the advantage of enjoying M. Cleme.nceau's friendship from an early
date. He considers that the French statesman might have faced the storm
with success if he would but Jiave consented to make terms with the
Socialists. But he would not do so : he replied to Mr. Hyndman — " It is
as useless to base any practical policy upon Socialist principles as it is
chimerical to repose any confidence in Socialist votes." When Mr.
Hyndman urged that this attitude of hostility to all parties might lose
him his seat in the Var, Clemenceau " laughed at the very idea of such
a defeat." Nor has the conflict between him and the revolutionary
Socialists ever ceased.

230

The Writings of M. Ciemenceau

forest of social existence. An exhibition of pictures, a
new novel, an accident in the suburbs, a definition of God
by M. Jules Simon, a joke by M. Francis Maynard, the
effect of champagne upon labour unrest, the architecture of
Chicago — nothing came amiss to the pen of a man whose
curiosity about life was boundless, and whose facility in
expression was volcanic.

But there was a certain group of subjects which, at this
critical hour in his career, particularly attracted the atten-
tion of M. Ciemenceau, and these give a special colour to
the earliest, and perhaps the most remarkable, collection
of his essays. A student of the temperament of the great
statesman, as he has since then so pre-eminently shown
liimself to be, is bound to give his mind to the volume
called La Melee Sociale which M. Ciemenceau published
in 1895. This was practically his earliest bid for purely
literary distinction, since the juvenile theses on anatomical
subjects, and the translations from John Stuart Mill,
hardly come within the categorv of literature. Between
1876 and 1885 M. Ciemenceau had printed, or had per-
mitted to be circulated, a certain number of his speeches in
the Chamber ; I have traced eight of these in the catalogue
of AI. Le Blond. These formed a very small fraction of
his abundant eloquence in Parliament, and they were not
particularly finished as specimens of lettered oratory. ' But
between 1885 and 1895 we do not find even such slender
evidences as these of the politician's desire to pose as an
author. The publication of La Melee Sociale, therefore,
was, to speak practically, an experiment ; it was the chal-
lenge of a new writer, or at least of a publicist who had
never before competed with the recognized creators of
books.

It is obvious that in making this experiment M.
Ciemenceau exercised a great deal of care and forethought.
The articles reprinted are not presented haphazard, nor
without an evident intention of producing the best effect
possible. They are selected on a peculiar system from
the mass of the journalist's miscellaneous output. The
collection has a central idea, and this is developed in a
231

Aspects and Impressions

very remarkable preface, which remains one of the author's
most philosophical and most elaborate compositions.
This central idea is the tragical one of the great vital
conflict which pervades the world, has always pervaded
it, and must ever remain unaffected by the superficial im-
provements of civilization. All through the universe the
various living organisms are in a condition of ceaseless
contest. Everywhere something conquers something else
which is conquered, and life sustains itself and ensures its
own permanence by spreading death around it. Life, in
fact, depends on death for its sustaining energy, and
the fiercer the passion of vitality the more vehemently
flourishes the instinct of destruction.

The imagination of the author of La Melee Sociale
broods upon the monstrous facts of natural history. If
he traverses a woodland, he is conscious of a silent army
of beasts and birds and insects, and even of trees and
plants, which are waging ceaseless battle against others
of their kind. If he begins to stir the soil of a meadow
with his foot, he refrains with a shudder, since millions
of corpses lie but just below the surface of the fruitful
earth. He peers down into the depths of the sea, only
to recognize that a prodigious and unflagging massacre
of living forms is necessary to keep the ocean habitable for
those who survive. Everywhere, throughout the universe,
he finds carnage triumphant; and eternal warfare is the
symbol of the instinct of self-preservation.

It will be seen that the new author approached litera-
ture definitely from the scientific side, but also that he
placed himself almost exclusively under the direction of
English minds. M. Clemenceau, in that intense and
unceasing contemplation of life which has been his most
remarkable characteristic, has always been inspired by
English models. In his early youth he was deeply im-
pressed with the teaching of J. S. Mill, and in later years
he was manifestly under the successive sway of Sir Charles
Lyell and of Herbert Spencer. But by the time he col-
lected his essays in La MeUe Sociale, he was completely
infatuated by the system of Darwin. He had long been
232

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

familiar with The Origin of Species and The Descent of
Man; the death of Darwin in 1882 had deprived him of a
master and, as it seemed, a friend, while the publication
of the Life and Letters in 1887 had given a coherency and,
we may say, an atmosphere, to his conception of the
illustrious English savant. When, therefore, M. Clemen-
ceau put together the material of La Melee Sociale, he
did so in the quality of an advanced Darwinian, and he
produced his first book almost as a tribute of affection to
the memory of the greatest exponent of the tragedy of
natural selection. But the habit of his mind, and no doubt
the conditions of his own fortunes, led him into a field
more tragical than any haunted by the spirit of the placid
philosopher of Down. Charles Darwin refrained from
pushing his observations to such sinister conclusions as
this :

La mort, partout la mort. Les continents et les mers
gt^missent de I'effroyable offrande de massacre. C'est le cirque,
r immense Collysee de la Terre, oil tout ce qui ne pouvait vivre
que de mort, se pare de lumifere et de vie pour mourir. De
I'herbe k I'c^l^phant, pas d'autre loi que la loi du plus fort.
Au nom de la meme loi, le dernier ne de revolution vivante
confond tout ce qui est de vie dans une prodigicuse hecatombe
offerte a la supreniatie de sa race. Point de pitie. Le pouce
retourne commande la mort. L'ame ingrate repudie I'antique
solidarity des etres enlaces en la chaine des generations trans-
form6es. Le cceur dur est ferm^. Tout ce qui ^chappe au
carnage premedite, voulu, s'entretue pour la gloire du grand
barbare. La splendeur de la floraison de vie s'eteint dans le
sang, pour en renaitre, pour y sombrer encore. Et le cirque,
toujours vid6, s'emplit toujours.

This passage may be taken as characteristic of the
manner of M. Clemenceau in his most reflective mood, in
the "style bref, mais clair et vibrant," w-hich Octave
Mirbeau commended. This way of writing would err on
the side of rhetoric, were it not so concise and rapid, so
full of the gusto of life even in its celebration of death.
For, in the pages of La Melee Sociale, U. Clemenceau
233

Aspects and Impressions

shows himself interpenetrated by the sorrows rather than
sustained by the possibilities of the tormented inhabitants
of earth. Recent events, in his own life and in the
history of the French nation, had impressed on his con-
sciousness the inherent cruelty of human beings to one
another. Like Wordsworth, and with a far sharper per-
sonal pang, he had good reason to lament what man has
made of man. Moreover, the months which had extended
between M. Clemenceau's political fall and the publi-
cation of La Melee Sociale had been marked by violent
unrest and by a succession of political crimes. Anarchism,
hitherto more a theory and a threat than a practical ele-
ment in the existence of the people, had taken startling-
prominence. In quick and formidable succession the
crimes of Vaillant, of Emile Henry, of Caserio and others,
had filled the minds of men with alarm and horror. These
events, and the strikes in various trades with their
attendant sabotage, and the unrest among the miners, and
the earliest germination of that new disease of the State,
syndicalism, — all these and many other evidences of re-
newed bitterness in the struggle for life created in the
mind of M. Clemenceau an obsession which is reflected
in every chapter of La Melee Sociale. As a physician,
no less than as a publicist, he diagnosed the "mis^re
physiologique " of the age, and he railed against those
in power who touched with the tips of their white kid
gloves the maladies which were blackening the surface
and substance of human society. In the memory of the
attempt made last February to assassinate M. Clemenceau,
a special interest attaches to his discussion of this class
of murders, of which he gave a remarkably close and pro-
longed analysis, little conceiving, of course, that he would
live to be himself the object of a crime at which the whole
world would shudder.

The reader who wishes the literary aspect of M.
Clemenceau's mind to be revealed to him in its greatest
amenity may next be recommended to turn to the preface
of the volume entitled Le Grand Pan, which appeared in
1896. The book itself consists of seventy little essays,
234

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

reprinted from the Figaro, the Echo de Paris, and other
newspapers. These have nothing or very little to do with
Pan, but they are eked out and given determination by a
long rhapsody in honour of the goat-foot son of Callista,
treated as the symbol of natural, as opposed to super-
natural science. Everybody knows the famous passage
in Plutarch which describes how Thamous the pilot, siiil-
ing out of the Gulf of Corinth towards the Ionian Sea on
the eve of the crucifixion of Christ, heard a voice announce
that "Great Pan is dead!"

And that dismal cry rose slowly
And sank slowly through the air.
Full of spirit's melancholy
And eternity's despair !
And they heard the words it said —
Pan is dead — Great Pan is dead —
Pan, Pan is dead.

In a passage of rare picturesque beauty M. Clemenceau
reproduces the animated and mysterious scene. He had
himself lately returned from a visit to Greece, which had
deeply stirred the sources of his sensibility. He recalled
how the sun, in a transparency of pale gold, sank behind
the blue mass of Ithaca, tinged with rose-colour the crags
of the Echinades, and bathed the mountains and the sea
in the delicate enchantment of sunset. He was sensitive
to the paroxysm of pleasure such an experience produces,
and he conceived himself standing by the side of the
grammarian, Epitherses, on board the merchant-vessel,
at the very moment w'hen there sounded three times from
the shore the name of Thamous, the Egyptian pilot, who
answered at length, and received the mysterious command,
"When thou art opposite Palodes, announce that the great
Pan is dead ! " The recesses of the mountains, the caves
on the island, the solitude of the drear battle-field of
Actium, took up the hollow cry and reverberated it in a
thousand accents of despair, with groans and shrieks of
sorrow and confused bewailing, while all nature united
235

Aspects and Impressions

in the echoing lamentation, "Pan, great Pan, is
dead ! "

Ih this strange way M. Clemenceau opens an essay in
defence of a purely positivist theory of human existence.
He describes the doctrine of the pagan divinities, under
the tyranny of Christianity, and he predicts their resur-
rection under clearer and calmer auspices. For M.
Clemenceau, Pan is the symbol of life in its harmonious
and composite action, and science is the intelligent worship
of Pan. This despised and fallen god, who seemed for
one dark moment to be dead, survives and will return to
his faithful adorers, has indeed returned already, and
turns the tables on his priestly persecutors. The apparent
death of Pan was but a sleep and a forgetting ; the spirit
of humanity, dominated for a moment by superstition and
ignorance, seemed to be lying bound and mute, but it is
vocal again, and its powers prove to be unshackled. The
Orphic hymn, in dark numbers, had pronounced the sky
and the sea, earth the universal and fire the immortal, to
be the limbs of Pan. Under the early sway of Christianity
the office and meaning of the pagan gods faded into mist ;
they seemed to disappear for ever. Darkness gathered
over the sweet natural influences of the physical world,
and reality was bartered for a feverish dream of heaven
and hell.

But the gods were only preparing in silence for their
ultimate resuscitation. Lactantius said that "Idols and
religion are two incompatible things " ; in his famous De
Origine Erroris, conscious of the necessity of recognizing
a central force of energy in nature, the earliest Christian
philosopher repulsed the notion of polytheism, and in-
sisted that piety can exist only in the worship of the one
God. He, like the Christian Fathers before him, shut up
the spirit of man in a prison from which there
seemed no escape. But the polytheists, thus violendy
Christianized against their will, remained pagan in
essence, and they escaped, as by a miracle, from the
furies of the Gospel and the Koran. The revolt was held
in check through the Middle Ages; in the Renaissance it
236

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

became victorious, and the first activity of man in liberty
was an unconscious but none the less real restitution of
the old liberating deities. The shepherds of Arcadia saw
the blood come back into the marble face and hands of
their dead god. Pan was moving on the earth once more,
for he had triumphed over the sterile forces of dissolution.
Pan, as ancient as social order itself, radiant master of
the beneficent powers of light, has once more become the
supreme deity. This, put briefly, is the thesis of M.
Clemenceau.

The influence of Renan is manifest through the whole
of this rhapsody, which is unique among the writings of
its author. AI. Clemenceau had follow^ed the track of
Pan through the valleys of Arcadia, and up the rocky
pathways that rise abruptly from the stony bed of Alpheus.
An actual visit to Greece, the date of which I have not
verified, appears to have influenced his imagination ; he
says, "je I'ai voulu chercher, moi-meme; au depit de
Thamous, pres des antiques sources dolentes," and he
tells us how an avalanche of falling stones and a clatter
of cloven hoofs overhead often made him fancy the deity
almost within his grasp. In these passages M. Clemen-
ceau reveals himself more plainly than anywhere else as
an imaginative positivist, who permits his fancy to play
with romantic and even fantastic visions, yet who is none
the less essentially emancipated from everything but
reality. He is never the dupe of his own symbol. He
rejects natural religion no less firmly than revealed re-
ligion, and he will not submit his conscience to any
supernatural authority. The reader, if he has the patience
to do so, may follow the close parallelism of the purely
intellectual positivism of the author with the charming,
supple, elusive philosophy of Renan in his L'Avenir de
la Science.

In no other of his writings is M. Clemenceau quite so
emancipated from the prejudice of the moment as he is
in the preface to Le Grand Pan. His central idea is one
of satisfaction in the sur\-ival of the spirits of the dead
gods, to whom, of course, he gives his own formula of
237

Aspects and Impressions

definition. Nothing in history seems to affect him more
painfully than the tragedy of the massacre of the sacred
statues under Theodosius, when, as Gibbon has so elo-
quently described, the most high gods were exposed to
the derision of the crowd, and then melted down. Where
M. Clemenceau's emotion seems to be slightly deficient
in logic is the parallel between these ancient gods who
retain his sympathy, and the strictly impersonal forces of
which he acknowledges them a symbol. He delights in
Apollo, Pan, and Jove, and speaks of them almost as
though they were individuals, yet he admits no senti-
mentality with regard to what they represent. On the
whole, his attitude is not one of benignity. He confesses
that nature reveals nothing but a system of forces inter-
acting upon one another; it is not moral and it is not
beneficent. Here the tone of Le Grand Pan becomes
identical with that of La Melee Sociale. But we demand
a clear definition of the central symbol. What does M.
Clemenceau really mean us to understand by Pan ? We
push him up into a corner; we refuse to let him take
refuge in his Renanesque imaginations, and we extract
an answer at last. Pan is the source of all moral and
intellectual action :

Pan nous commande. II faut agir. L'action est le
principe, Taction est le moyen. Taction est le but. L'action
obstin^e de tout Thomme au profit de tous, Taction ddsin-
t^ress^e, supdrieure aux pueriles glorioles, aux remunerations
des rfeves d'^ternit^, comme aux desespdrances des batailles
perdues ou de Tin^luctable mort. Taction en Evolution d'id^al,
unique force et totale vertu.

The career of M. Clemenceau has been marked
throughout by sudden and spasmodic crises, rather than
by slow evolution of events. If this is true of his political
history, it is repeated in his literary record. We need
not, therefore, affect surprise at finding him, at the age
of fifty-seven, and in the midst of the most bewildering
distractions, produce his one and only novel, a modern
238

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

story deliberately conducted to its close In four hundred
pages. When Les Plus Forts was published, in 1898, its
author \vai extremely out of the fashion, and it passed
almost unobserved from the press. Not a single Parisian
critic, so far as I have discovered, gave it any serious
attention, and it sank at once into an obscurity out of
which the immense recent vogue of M. Clemenceau has
only lately drawn it. Les Plus Forts was issued at the
darkest moment of the statesman's reversal, when he was
repudiated by the great majority of those who adore him
to-day. He had actually gone so far as to speak of his
own as a "vie manquee," when a fresh opportunity of
perilous service to the State fell in his way.

In October, 1897, ^I- Ernest Vaughan, who had laid
by a very considerable sum of money for the purpose of
founding an efficient social and literary newspaper, ap-
proached Clemenceau with the offer of the editorship in
chief. The famous L'Aurore came into existence, and it
set sail at once in the stormy waters of the Dreyfus affair.
Terrific was the clash of passions around the name of the
mysterious Jew, whose exact character and definite pur-
pose will perhaps never be completely elucidated. M.
Clemenceau did not hesitate to throw the weight of his
pen into the unpopular scale. When Esterhazy was
acquitted he almost lost his self-control ; with furious irony
and snarling invectives he lashed the populace into a
frenzy. Then followed (on the 13th of January, 1898)
the famous intervention of Zola, in a manifesto which rang
from one end of the civilized world to the other. This
was J'accuse, the admirably effective title of which, so
M. Maurice Le Blond assures us, was the invention of
Clemenceau. Next month, at the Zola trial, Clemenceau
defended the cause of justice in the teeth of enemies who
did not refrain from threatening his very life, and for
two years L'Aurore, in the midst of the frenzied
Dreyfus hurly-burly, was unflagging in its attacks and
its rejoinders.

At such a moment M. Clemenceau sat down to write
his solitary novel. It would be fulsome to represent Les
239

Aspects and Impressions

Plus Forts as a masterpiece of fiction, thougli in the
present flush of the author's celebrity some have dared so
to describe it. As a matter of fact it owes the interest
which it possesses almost entirely to the light Avhich it
throws on the character of its author. As a mere romance,
Les Plus Forts suffers from the fact that its author, gifted
in so many other directions, is not an effective narrator.
As Dr. Johnson mischievously said of Congreve's one
novel, Incognita, it is easier to praise Les Plus Forts than
to read it. The scene is laid in a village deep in the heart
of Poitou, and commentators have recognized a close
reproduction of Mouilleron-en-Paradis, the hamlet near
Fontenay where M. Clemenceau was born. At the
moment of his fiercest struggle in Paris, his thoughts
turned back to the cool woods and the still waters of his
old home in the west, to the land of hollow valleys, and
to the inexpressive sixteenth-century chateau which the
doctor's child learned to regard as the symbol of rapine
and tyranny in the past.

We are introduced to M. Henri, marquis de Puymau-
fray, a man of over sixty, solitary, a confirmed bachelor,
not so good a shot as he used to be. The lonely old man
comes back, defeated by life, to his chateau in Poitou.
The mise-en-sc^ne is lugubrious in the extreme, punctuated
by the shrieking peacocks at noon and the hooting owls
at night. When this impression has been sketched in,
we turn back to the hero's early history, and follow the
adventures of a young buck of the Second Empire,
brought up to despise science, modern thought, the action
of democracy in every form. He begins as a pontifical
zouave in bondage to Rome; he ends as a sort of anarchist.
The biography of the young and stupid nobleman is thus
made a peg on which to hang dissertations on all the
principal maladies which affected French society a quarter
of a century ago. There is an exaggerated forceful
woman, the Vicomtesse de Fourchamps, who plays a sus-
tained but obscure part in the intrigue. What does she
want? It is difficult to say; she is always "preparing for
the battle" or attempting to "conquer" somebody. "II
240

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

faut conqu^rir," she incessantly repeats; she is a kind of
tigress, and she seems to be, in petticoats, a type of every
social and political movement of which M. Clemenceau
disapproves.

The Parisian scenes in M. Clemenceau 's novel are not
very amusing, and, oddly enough, they are weighed down
by a sort of heavy gorgeousness, somewhat in the mode
of Disraeli not at his best. All the characters preach,
and the reader comes to sympathize with the vicomtesse
when she declares herself "agacee des sermons du mar-
quis." The young girl, Claude Harle, is a somewhat
shadowy heroine. She passes as the daughter of a rich
industrial, but she is in reality the child of Puymaufray,
who was the lover of her mother, since deceased. It is
easy to understand that M. Clemenceau has taken this
pathetic and tremulous figure as representative of what is
chimerical in the society of the day. In her original con-
dition, he puts into her mouth the crude sentiments which
are supposed to be nurtured by the enemies of democracy.
Claude calmly states that "the good God has instituted
two classes of human beings, the rich and the poor, and
it is our duty to maintain our inferiors in the practices of
religion." A good deal of art is required to remove from
such speeches as these the crude appearance of falsity ;
and it may be remarked that the pious characters in Les
Plus Forts are not more like real human beings than are
the atheists in M. Paul Bourget's later romances.

What is of extraordinary interest in Les Plus Forts
is not the story itself, which is thin, nor the conduct of
the adventures, which is stilted, but the temper and
attitude of the writer. If we ask ourselves what is the
principal characteristic of this novel, the answer must be
— the intensity of action of the personages; they seem to
have springs of steel in their insides; they run when other
people walk, and cannot move without leaping in the air.
"II faut aux conqu^rants la pleine s^curite de leur corps.
Oij I'dme conduit, la b^te doit suivre." The book is full
of strange utterances of this order, which reveal the vio-
lence of the author's temperament in flashes of odd light.
«4i

Aspects and Impressions

The episodes, the conversations, are little more than a
series of irregular theses on various aspects of the struggle
for life. The world is regarded as simply "le syndicat des
plus forts," and this idea underlies the title of the book.
We are not allowed to forget it, even when our atten-
tion is being switched away to the discipline of little
Chinese children in a missionary settlement, or to the
importance of encouraging a manufacturer of paper in
Ceylon.

What is perhaps the most characteristic passage of M.
Clemenceau's single novel may be quoted as an example
both of his philosophy and of his style. It occurs in
the course of a long conversation between father and
daughter.

Certes non, I'argent n'est pas tout. II est trop, simplement.
L'arg^ent n'est pas tout, mais il a le genre humain pour
clientele, car 11 est devenu, de force liberatrice, TegoTsme
tangible en rondelles de m^tal. Voilk pourquoi tout c^de a
Tuniverselle attraction qui n'est pas suffisamment contre-
balanc^e par d'autres. L'argent n'est pas tout. Pourtant
autour de lui se rassemblent toutes les autres puissances
sociales, et celles-lk m^me qui s'annoncferent protectrices des
hommes, aussitot installees, par lui se sont agglom^r^es en
tyrannic. II a remplace la force brutale, dit-on ... a la con-
dition de rexprlmer par d'autres signes. Contre I'expression
du monde, il y avait Dieu autrefois, a dit quelqu'un. Peut-etre.
J'ai toujours trouve Dieu du c6t6 des plus forts.

M. Clemenceau did not pause, meanwhile, from his
journalistic labours, and he continued to offer to the public
of Paris successive selections from the mass of his produc-
tions. On each of these occasions a preface, composed
with more than usual care, gave the keynote to the series
of essays, or rather suggested a tone of mmd in which the
reader would do well to study them. In the introduction
to the volume of 1900, called Au Fil des Jours, the author
returned to his favourite theme, the struggle against the
universally destructive forces of Nature. The life of man
is concentrated on resistance to the persistent attacks upon
242

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

it made by an army of inimical forces. The pride of
existence is humbled by the inevitable fatality which
governs the fortunes of the Olympian gods themselves.
And it is useless to appeal, with the sentimental pantheists,
to the beneficence of Nature, for Nature is the most relent-
less, the most indomitable of our enemies. In that extra-
ordinary little tragedy of Victor Hugo, Mangeront-ils,
the vain appeal is made :

Est-ce pas.
Nature, que tu hais les semeurs de tr^pas,
Qui dans I'air frappent I'aigle et sur I'eau la sarcelle,
Et font partout saigner la vie universelle?

With the clairvoyance of the biologist, M. Clemenceau
divines the vanity of these remonstrances, and from the
terrible cruelty of Nature he sees no relief save in vigorous
action. "Toute ame haute veut etre de la melee." The
most troublous epochs are battles for the ideal, even at their
worst moments. The only way to resist the destructive
fatality of Nature is to strive for an amelioration of the lot of
the human race. In all this, the texture of which is occa-
sionally a little stretched when it is made to cover new^s-
paper articles on the lighting of Paris or a show of prize
pigeons, M. Clemenceau displays his eager wish to sub-
ordinate all his writing to a set of philosophical ideas.
He has always held that the general impulses on which
our daily existence depends reach us through the channels
of thought. He is, therefore, a philosopher by determina-
tion, and he bases his own intellectual system on Pasteur
and Spencer, on Darwin and J. S. Mill, on Taine and
Renan. I have already spoken of the immense influence
evidently exercised on Clemenceau by Renan's early and
least ripe work L'Avenir de la Science. No doubt it was
the reading of that remarkable book which led Clemenceau,
already biassed in favour of materialism, to transfer to
science all the passion which an earlier generation, and
since his middle age a later generation, gave to religion.
It must be understood that he does not belong in habit of
243

Aspects and Impressions

mind or intellectual aspiration to the characteristic French
tradition of to-day.

The great merit of M. Clemenceau, in the agitated
years when he wielded a pen that was like a rapier, con-
sisted in his fearless and disdainful audacity. He fought
in literature exactly as he has always fought in politics,
with the air of one who had no wish to conciliate his
opponent, but always to browbeat him, to crush him by the
weight of his argument, and then run him through the
body with his irony. When we turn over the pages of his
books, which suffer an inevitable loss from the fugitive
nature of the themes on which they mainly expatiate, w^e
are astounded at the ceaseless agility of the lucid, rest-
less brain of the man. He is an acrobat, incessantly fling-
ing himself with aerial lightness into some new impossible
position. An article a day for twenty-five years — what an
expenditure of vital force that seems to sum up; and yet
to-day, at the age of seventy-eight, the indefatigable brain
and body seem as elastic as ever ! The fullness of the
material in M. Clemenceau 's articles has always been a
matter of amazement to those who know how much clever
journalism is of the kind Francisque Sarcey described
when he said, "You may turn the tap as much as you
please; if the cistern is empty, nothing but wind comes
out ! " But M. Clemenceau seemed always full, and
copious as was the output, the reader had always the
impression that there was much more behind.

We may regret that while the great politician was
chiefly engaged in writing, namely between 1893 and 1903,
he was obliged by circumstances to expend so much of his
experience and his condition upon occasional issues. In
turning over his pages, we must not forget that he wrote,
not in the calm retirement of a study, but out in the street,
in the midst of die batde and heat of the day. His in-
satiable appetite for action drove him forth into the
madding crowd. There has always been something
encyclopaedic about his passion for knowledge, for prac-
tical acquaintance with the actual practice of life. He has
cultivated a genius for observation, and his feverish career
244

The Writings of M. Clemenceau

has been spent in pursuing knowledge day by day, without
giving himself time to arrange the trophies of his pursuit.
He has published no systematic scheme of his philosophy,
but has left us to gather it as well as we may from his
prefaces, and most of all from Le Grand Pan. As an
author, we may sum him up as the latest, and in some
respects the most vigorous and agile, of the disciples of the
Encyclopaedists. Like them, through a long and breath-
less career, he has ceaselessly striven to struggle upward
into the light of knowledge.

1919.

245

\

A VISIT TO THE FRIENDS OF IBSEN

IN the summer of 1872 I received special leave from the
Principal Librarian of the British Museum to visit
Denmark and Norway for the purpose of reporting on
the state of current literature in those countries. Of my
Danish experiences I have given an account in my book
called Two Visits to Denmark (Smith, Elder & Co., 191 1);
ijut hitherto I have not published any of my Norwegian
adventures. I am led to do so now, in consequence of a
letter which I have just received from Rektor Frederik
Ording, of Holmestrand, who is engaged on a biographical
study of "Henrik Ibsen's Ungdomsvenner," and who tells
me that it has become almost impossible to obtain informa-
tion about the particular group of men of letters whom I
onversed with more than forty-five years ago. They are
all long since dead, and no one survives who recollects
hem in their prime. No one — so it appears — but me!
The fact is a solemnizing one. I feel like the Moses of
the poet :

Je vlvrai done toujours puissant et solitaire?
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terra ;

but before I am allowed by Norway to do that, it seems that
I am called upon to disgorge my recollections. They are,
I am afraid, though founded on a full journal, rather
slight.

Ibsen, as is well known, was at that lime, and had long
been, an exile from his native country, where his plays
were ill received and his character subjected to a great deal
of stupid insult. But there was a small circle of his early
friends who remained true to the devotion which his genius
had inspired in them. When I was in Copenhagen, it
247

Aspects and Impressions

was impressed upon me that these men formed the real
Norway, the fine flower of Norse culture and intelligence,
and it was to them that I took introductions. They were
mainly jurists, archaeologists and historians, whose studies
into the annals of their country had given them a deter-
mination to support existing institutions. They were called'
"Conservatives," and by the radical press were treated as
though their ideas were desperately retrograde. But in
any other country but Norway, fifty years ago, they would
have been called advanced Liberals. They desired to intro-
duce broad and sweeping reforms, and they were particu-
larly desirous to follow the example of England. If I
understand their position aright, they were rather Con-
stitutionalists than Conservatives, for their first idea
always was to bring their views into line with the
Constitution.

A short time before my visit, the barrier which sur-
rounded and isolated the group of men of whom I speak
had been emphasized by the development of the Venstre,
the national radical party, which was urged on and sup-
ported by the Peasants' party. The debates in the Storth-
ing in 187 1 and 1872 had been very bitter, and public
opinion was sharply, but unequally, divided over the
burning question of the admission of ministers to the
national assembly. Without going further into the ob-
scurity of foreign politics, it is enough to say here that the
group into which I was for a short time admitted as an
indulged and attentive guest, had the hope that, with all
its talents and knowledge, it would be called upon to take
over the government of the country. It was thought that
Aschehoug would oust the radical Sverdrup as the next
Prime Minister. The reign of constitutionalism would
begin ; the peasant leaders would be sent back to their
farms; and Norway would open a splendid period of con-
servative re-action. In this, the friends were supported by
the most powerful newspaper of the country, Morgen-
bladet, which like themselves had long been frankly demo-
cratic, but had recently taken a very strong line in
opposition to the Left. Morgenbladet was boisterously
248

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen

attacked by Dagbladet, the rival newspaper, edited by
Samuel BcTtzmann, a bearded and very tall young man,
who was pointed out to me in the street, with execration and
contempt, by Jakob Lokke.

Xhe hope of my friends was not realized. The whole
/tendency of Norwegian life was in the opposite direction,
and a few days after I left Christiania, the death of King
Carl had the effect of still further encouraging the Liberals.
The group I had known were swept out of public life by the
tide of radicalism, and suffered the obscuration which
awaits the unsuccessful politician. Now, as it appears,
when all passion has died down, there is a great curiosity
about men whose talents and accomplishments, as well as
their high patriotism, were an asset in the civilization of
Norway at a critical moment. Hence, when it is almost
too late, and when I am left the only survivor, I am
appealed to for my recollections, pale and slight as they
must be.

Late, then, in the summer of 1872 I arrived in Chris-
tiania, armed with cards and letters of introduction from
friends in Copenhagen, and with a recommendation from
Tennyson to Professor Ludwig Kristensen Daa, who had
been very civil to the poet when he visited Norway. I
arrived in the midst of the excitement caused by the recent
celebration of the 1,000 years' festival, and in particular
we crossed Prince Oskar who was returning to Stockholm
from being present at Haugesund on that occasion, when
he had unveiled a colossal symbolic statue of Harald Fair-
hair. Before my first evening closed in, I hastened to
explore the length of the city right up Carl Johans Gade
to the New Park; and in the Eidsvoldplads, a square
opposite the Storthing House, I received a little shock, for
gazing up at the new bronze statue of Harald Eairhair, I
saw the drapery rise and flutter in the wind. This was not
a replica of the national statue at Haugesund, but an in-
dependent design, put up in lath and plaster to see whether
public opinion approved of it. It occurred to me after-
wards that it was the symbol of the stalwart conservatism
of the group of friends of whom I am about to speak, who
249

Aspects and Impressions

trusted to their heroic attitude to impress pubHc opinion —
and failed.

Early next morning I called on Jakob Lokke (1829-
1881), who was head-master of the Christiania Cathedral
School, and the leading educational authority in Norway.
I had been able to be of some assistance to Lokke in
London during the year 187 1, and his hospitable and genial
acquaintance was now very valuable to me. Close to the
great church of Our Saviour, in the centre of the city, in
the first house on the left-hand side of the Stor Gade, Mr.
and Mrs. Lokke had an apartment on the third storey in
which they received a small, but extremely distinguished,
circle of guests. Lokke was pompous in manner and a
touchy man, but full of warmth and generosity under a
somewhat difficult surface. His hospitality to me, on this
occasion, was untiring, and it was wholly owing to him
that I was admitted to the remarkable group of Norse
Tories who were making so resolute and so vain a struggle
to stem the rising flood of radicalism. Lokke's "tredie
6tage " in Stor Gade was a typical home of lost causes, and
the group of friends were all ardent supporters of Ibsen,
whose satirical temper was then looked upon askance by
the various popular parties.

The first person to whom Lokke presented me was
Emil Stang (born 1834), the son of the then prime
minister of Nonvay, Frederik Stang, and a leading
advocate. He became very cordial when he learned that
I was bent on introducing Ibsen to the English public,
and had begun to do so; and he told me that he held a
brief for the poet at that moment. It will be remembered
that Ibsen then resided in Dresden. Taking advantage
of this exile, a Danish publisher of the baser sort had
produced a pirated edition of the Warriors of Helgeland,
with an announcement that a similar reprint of Madam
Inger at Osterraad would follow. Stang laughed as he
told m.e of Ibsen's gigantic anger at this offence ; he had
immediately put the matter into Stang's hands, and had
desired him to get a full indemnity from the Danish pub-
lisher. But it was the usual case of trying to bleed a
250

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen

stone. The man would not even withdraw his edition,
though no more was said of the projected piracy of Madam
Inger. Mr. Stang told me that the case was still dragging
through the courts; I never learned the result.

Lokke took me to the University Library to see the
Librarian, Ludwig Daae (not to be confounded with Daa),
who was born in 1834 and died in 1910. The visit was
untimely, for Daae had not arrived, and only one single
clerk was on duty. This man was ready to be friendly,
but he was being bullied by the Principal Librarian of
the University of Stralsund, a typical loud-voiced Prus-
sian, to whom I took a violent dislike. The librarian was
acquainted with Lokke and attached himself to us; he
spoke with great contempt of the Library of the British
Museum, which he said he knew very well. We pro-
ceeded to the Record Office, in order to see Mr. Michael
Birkeland (1830-1897), the Master of the Rolls, of whom
I shall have much to relate. The Record Office
(Riksarkivet) was then in the same clump of buildings
as the Storthing House. We did not find Birkeland in,
but we found an even more illustrious person, J. E. W.
Sars (1835-1915), who was already deep in the preparation
of those works which have made him famous as the most
philosophical of Norwegian historians. He was shortly
after my visit appointed Professor of History in the
University of Christiania.

My introduction to Ludwig Daae was only postponed.
The next time I called at Lokke's house, a little shabby
man with a beard, with woefully dishevelled hair and
snuff-coloured old coat, was dancing a sort of lonely
pirouette in the middle of the floor, while he talked. He
stopped at my entrance, and Jakob Lokke, coming for-
ward, presented me to him as to "the Librarian of the
University, Ludwig Daae." "The author of that delight-
ful Gamle Kristiania? " I asked. "Ah, do you know my
book ? " he said, and seemed pleased. I felt very much
drawn to Ludwig Daae from the first, and he spoke
Norwegian so plainly and elegantly that it was particularly
easy for me to follow him. All through the rest of mv
251

Aspects and Impressions

visit to Christiania I had the benefit of his kindhness and
wit, his ingenuousness and his fund of knowledge. His
book, Gamle Krisiiania, a picturesque series of essays on
the history of the city up to 1800, was famihar to me, and
I had written a long review of it in the Spectator for
Richard Holt Hutton, in which I had ventured to say that
it would be impossible for any one in future to attempt a
history of modern Norwegian afifairs without the help of
Mr. Daae's admirable book.

The name of this gentleman offered much difficulty,
because, by a very odd coincidence, there were at that
moment three unrelated persons whose names were in
sound identical. There was Ludwig K. Daa, and there
were two Ludwig Daaes, my friend, and a politician whom
I did not meet. Norwegians themselves found the
identity of the three very confusing. My Ludwig Daae
had begun his literary career wuth an ecclesiastic history of
the diocese of Throndhjem, published in 1863, and had
gradually extended his range from church to general
history, but his gift really lay in the picturesquely bio-
graphical. He had just been made lector in aesthetics in
the Cathedral School when I saw him, but he held this
but a very short time, being soon after my visit appointed
Professor of History at the University.

I had now the honour of being admitted every day to
the company «of Daae and his friends, and it was clearly
explained to me that they formed a compact and still in-
fluential body of resistance to the subversive policy of
Bjornson, Sverdrup and the terrible peasant Jaabaek,
whom they regarded with peculiar apprehension. Hans
Christian Andersen had given me a note of introduction
to Bjornson, and in spite of the objections of my new
friends, I found that I could not resist the temptation to
use it. Accordingly I went to the house in Munke-
damsveien which Bjornson shared with the philosopher
G. V. Lyng (182 7- 1884) whom I had met in Denmark.
They occupied a small house in a long suburban lane on
the edge of the city. I had been told that the poet was
very formidable, and as I waited in the hall, I heard him
252

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen

growling "Saa ! saa? saa ! " over the card and note I had
sent in. I quaked, but I plunged; I was ushered into a
pretty room with trellised windows, where a large and
even burly man (Bjornson was then under forty), who was
sitting astride the end of a narrow sofa, rose vehemently
to receive me. His long limbs, his athletic frame, and
especially his remarkably forcible face, surrounded by a
mane of wavy brown hair, and illuminated by full blue
eyes behind flashing spectacles, gave an instant impres-
sion of physical vigour. He was truculently cordial, and
lifted his ringing tones in civil conversation. Resuming
his singular attitude astride the sofa, he entered affably
into a loud torrent of talk, lolling back, shaking his great
head, suddenly bringing himself up into a sitting posture
to shout out, with a palm pressed upon either knee, some
question or statement.

His full and finely modulated voice, with his clear
enunciation, greatly aided his not a little terrified visitor
in appreciating his remarks, but he spoke at great speed,
and it strained the attention of a foreigner to follow his
somewhat florid volubility. He expressed himself highly
pleased with the reception his romances had received in
England, but seemed surprised that his dramas were not
known. He recommended to me a new^ viking-play,
called Sigurd Jorsalfar, which he had just sent to press,
and which had been refused "though with the loveliest
music by Grieg ever heard out of a dream " by the Royal
Theatre in Copenhagen, a repulse which Bjornson flatly
attributed to the malignity of the manager, Molbech. He
promised to send me to London a copy of Sigurd Jorsalfar
as soon as it was published, and he was so amiable as to
keep his word.

This little adventure in the headquarters of the oppo-
sition was not at all well regarded in Stor Gade. Accord-
ingly I was taken, as a counterbalancing influence, to be
presented at his country parsonage of Vest Aker to the old
poet and folk-lorist Jorgen Moe (1813-1882). Lokke and
Daae were my companions on this visit to the celebrated
collector, in common with Asbjornsen, of the so uni-
253

Aspects and Impressions

versally admired Norse legends and fairy-tales. The
situation of Vest Aker is magnificent ; as we drove past
the little church to the court of the "prasstegaard," the
whole of the head-waters of the Christian ia Fjord wound
and sparkled below us, golden in the blue circle of the
hills. Moe, dressed in clerical black, with the white ruff
round his throat, greeted us delicately. He was a charm-
ing man, with his soft voice and beautiful stag-like eyes;
a perfectly gracious and venerable figure, not incapable,
however, of receiving a mild excitement from the fact that
his poems were presently to be introduced to the English
public. Almost immediately after my visit Jorgen Moe
was appointed Bishop of Christianssand. As we came
back from Vest Aker, my guides showed me the grave of
the biographer and bibliographer, Botten-Hansen
(1824-1869), and the famous grotto of Wergeland, once
in the country, but, already in 1872, touched by the out-
skirts of the city. As we were crossing the streets in the
neighbourhood of the Uranienborg Church, a pale old
face appeared for a moment at an upper window. Daae
said this was the house where Johan Sebastian Welhaven
(1807-1873) was being nursed, and he thought that it was
Welhaven we had seen. Lokke did not think it was, so
that I shall never know Avhether I did, or did not, catch
a glimpse of the illustrious and the dying author of Norges
Doemring. My companions were much amused, and I
think gratified, by my eager interest in all these literary
associations.

I now left the capital for a httle tour by myself in
Ringeriget and Gudbrandsdalen, where I had an invitation
to meet Asbjornsen, with whom I had corresponded from
London. He had been staying at Ringebo, at the par-
sonage of the Dean (Provst) of Gudbrandsdalen, Dr. Neils
Christian Hald (1808-1885). I did not, however, go
thither directly, but at the advice of Daae, posted over the
hills to Drammen, a magnificent drive by a very circuitous
route. Daae had given me letters of introduction ; he had
passed his youth in that town, and was Professor of
History there until he was brought to Christiania. His
254

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen

friends received me with generous hospitality, and among
the merchant princes of Drammen I found a greater
appearance of luxury than I happened to meet with in the
capital. When I finally reached Ringebo, I was dis-
appointed to find that Asbjornsen had been obliged to
leave for Romsdalen, on his duties as Torvmester or
Forester-General. I was equally unlucky in an attempt to
see the poet Kristoffer Jansen (1841-1899) at his school-
house at Fykse-in-Gausdal, for he was spending the
holidays at Tromso, in Finmark. After a most enjoyable
stay in the picturesque parsonage of the kind Maids, I
returned to Christiania.

On the 7th of August I was back in Stor Cade, and was
helping Lokke with the notes to a school-book in English
literature which he was just publishing; afterwards we
called on the Hellenist, Frederik Ludwig Vibe (1803-1881),
who was Librarian of the Cathedral School, and a great
allv of Lokke and Daae. 1 was shown his translation of
^schylus into Norse. Aly acquaintance with the group
of Ibsen's friends was now further extended, for on the
evening of the next day (August 8), Ludw^ig Daae asked
me to supper, and, when I arrived, I found, beside the
host, Michael Birkeland and Dr. Oluf Rygh.

I have already mentioned Birkeland's position at the
Rolls Office, which he had entered in 1852, and now com-
manded. He was not, I think, ambitious of literary fame,
and he had at that time published, of an original kind,
little except pamphlets. His best-known work was his
minutelv executed Reports of the earliest sessions of the
Storthing, but this was only a part of his multifarious
research into the whole political history of the country.
Birkeland was the life and soul of the Norske historiske
Forening (Norwegian Historical Society), which then and
since did so much for the science of history. He was con-
stantly publishing for the government inedited matter
from the very copious archives under his charge. Under-
neath the mask of the archivist he barely concealed a
burning political ambition to be a part of the new con-
stitutional life of Norwav. The Master of the RnlK; w ..;;

Aspects and Impressions

one of the most attractive men I met in Scandinavia. He
was still, in early middle age, very handsome, well set-up,
with a fine head excellently poised above broad shoulders,
and with brilliant, dancing eyes. The fault of Norwegians
in that day was their deadly seriousness, and their excessive
sensitiveness to the slightest indication of criticism. But
Birkeland was superior to this local weakness, and was
genial, without the least pomposity. The fourth member
of our party, Oluf Rygh (1833-1899), was united with
Birkeland in his devotion to archc-eology. He also had at
that time published very little, but I was told that his
investigations were of the highest value, as indeed they
amply proved to be. He was the bosom-friend of Birke-
land, with whom he formed a singular contrast, being as
reserved as the other was effusive, and a small, squat
figure, with a round bald head and a bare face, horny and
spectacled, which reminded my pert fancy of the shell of
a crab.

Daae's house, where we met, was in the country, to the
west of Christiania, on the Drammensvej, and close to the
sea, with a fine view^ across the fjord to the royal palace of
Oskarshal. There was much conversation at supper about
politics, and my companions were emphatic in their con-
viction that the only hope for a healthy development of the
Norwegian nation was a return to conservative methods.
Daae spoke with deep resentment of the "fanatical
measures of the Radical party," and with horror of the
present leader Soren Jaab^ek (born 1814), w^ho had just
become very prominent owing to his being refused Holy
Communion by his parish priest, Pastor Lassen, as a
protest against his republican views. My friends thought
that the incumbent of Lyngdal had behaved with courage
and propriety in "fencing the table " against him. When
the meal was concluded, Birkeland proposed my health,
and, standing up in the Norse fashion, made a little
speech. He said "Englishmen often come to us that they
may climb our mountains or fish in our lakes, but it is
rare indeed for a young man of letters to visit us that he
mav investigate what is most dear to us, our native

2^6

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen

literature, the labour of our hearts and our heads." He
also spoke at length with regard to the i,ooo years'
festival, which appeared to occupy the thoughts of the
whole group.

We all came away together, Uaae accompanying us
to the boundary of the city. At this western end,
Christiania then (1872) consisted of very new and fantastic
villas whose inhabitants, Daae told me, had never got over
the affront which the poet Welhaven had paid them of
calling their suburb Snobopolis : which name still stuck to
it. It was midnight when we reached the heart of the city,
and as the hour boomed forth from the Cathedral, Birke-
land held me there in the great square while he discoursed
on the history of the building, and on the vestiges of
Catholic architecture in Norway.

On the 9th of August, I spent the morning with Lokke
in his study, and then we paid a visit to L. K. Daa
(1809-1877), the ethnographer and arch^ologist. I have
said that even Norwegians were easily confused between
Daae and Daa, and they escaped from the dilemma by
calling the younger "Bibliothekaren " and the elder
"Gr^enskeren," the title of the newspaper he had edited.
Daa, to whom I presented Tennyson's message, was
extremely gracious, and he took me over to the Ethnolo-
gical Museum, of which he was Director, and showed me
some objects recently come to him from Lapland and
Finland. Daa was a man of great eccentricity of appear-
ance, tall and gaunt, with limbs flung wildly about, and
his fine head recklessly bestrewn with disordered hair,
grizzled and reddish. He was very restless and active,
and talked English admirably ; he admitted to me that he
was a full-blown Anglomaniac. Daa was very much
pleased to hear from me that Tennyson recollected their
meeting when the poet visited Norway in 1858; Daa had
served on that occasion as Tennyson's cicerone. He told
me that there was great trouble caused by the English
poet's extreme near-sightedness, which made him unable
to drive himself in the little karjol Avhich was then the only
mode of conveyance in the interior of Norway.
357

Aspects and Impressions

Next day, I went with Lbkke to visit the lexicographer
and inventor of the "landsmaal," Ivar Aasen (1813-1896),
who lived in one little room, containing a bed, two chairs
and a few shelves of linguistic books. He has exercised
an immense influence on the language and literature of
his country. I found Aasen a prematurely shrivelled little
man, with a parchment face, thin, shy and nervous. In
conversation he was dull, until Lokke spoke about philo-
logy, when his eyes began to sparkle and his cheeks to
flush. He talked, then, quite fast, but with a curious
inward manner of speech ; I confess I could not understand
what he was saying.

In the afternoon Lokke and Birkeland took me for a
long drive to Frognersseteren, a cottage high up in the
mountain above Christiania, whence there is a magnificent
view over the whole valley, and even to the Swedish
frontier. The fjord, though seven miles away, seems at our
feet, and is visible as far down as Moss. Up at the sseter \ve
were received by Professor Torkel Aschehoug (1822-1909),
who had been so kind as to wish that I should be presented
to him. Aschehoug was the leading jurist of Norway,
perhaps of Scandinavia, at that time. His great book on
the Laws of Norway, which was appearing in slow instal-
ments, contained in a form never before approached the
history and the essence of the national constitution. He
had been for a quarter of a century professor of civil law
at the University of Christiania; he had taken up, and
pushed much farther, the investigations of J. R. Keyser,
when that eminent jurist died in 1864. But the extra-
ordinary respect with which Aschehoug was regarded in
the group of friends was founded on other qualities than
were included in his scientific reputation. He had been
drawn more and more definitely into practical politics ; for
the last four years he had been the leading member of the
Storthing for Christiania. I was told that he was *'the
coming man," the heaven-born leader of the constitutional
party which was about to reorganize Norway, and drive
back the onset of the horde of radicals and peasants.
I was told to observe Aschehoug, for I should live
2.^8

A Visit to the Friends of Ibsen

to see him the greatest politician in the North of
Europe.

When we found him at the s.ieter, my companions
greeted him with a mixture of warm affection and deep
respect. He reminded me, in the eyes and mouth, and in
his general bearing, of Mr. Gladstone. Aschehoug was
very polite to me, but I found him alarming, and was
glad that he mainly talked politics with Birkeland. In the
evening Birkeland, whose kindness to me was untiring,
took me across to the eastern side of Christiania, to Oslo,
the city Avhich was destroyed to build the new capital. He
showed me what he believed to be the sites of the mediaeval
palace and cathedral ; and, so far as he could judge, the
exact scene of the great battle between Haakon and Skule,
which Ibsen paints in his Kongsemnerne. It was thrilling
to go over the vestiges of the ancient city with so
enthusiastic and so learned a guide as Birkeland. As it
grew late, we supped together at a restaurant, and then
Birkeland, in very high spirits, declared he would show
me " the night-side " of Christiania. However, we saw
nothing very exciting or amusing.

Of the subsequent days of my visit to Christiania,
whence I returned to Hull towards the end of August, I
find nothing particular to relate. My last evening was
spent at the Lokkes', in company with Daae, Birkeland
and a very lively Mr. Thoresen, who was a near relative of
Ibsen and related amusing anecdotes of the poet's
manners. Lokke went down to the quay with me next
morning, and stood waving his hat as the "Scotia"
slipped down the fjord.

359

FAIRYLAND AND A BELGIAN ARIOSTO

IT has often been said — it was said in a well-known
passage by the elder Disraeli — that in order to appre-
ciate the beauty of fairyland we must make ourselves
as little children listening to the wondrous tales of a nurse.
But there seems to be a fallacy contained in this explana-
tion of the spell. It cannot be contrived. No sedate,
crafty, timid old man of the world can make himself as a
little child merely that he may enjoy certain ancient poetry
in a melodious stanza. Nor, on the other hand, is it
obvious that real children, especially children of the
4nodern sort, possess that ductile naivete, that breathless
and delicious credulity, which fairyland demands. I
believe, and I speak not without observation, that
children, as a rule, like stories best which deal with such
themes as dogs that run after ducks, and grown up people
that tumble out of motors. They like their tales to be
realistic, rather hard, entirely within their experience.
Hans Christian Andersen^ in his eventyr — so falsely trans-
lated " fairy-tales " — took advantage of this fact and made
a world-wide success by inventing stories in which play-
things and articles of furniture and animals come to life
and act on the conventional principles of society. That is
what children like. They have been so short a time
among us that the banalities of experience are still fresh
to them, and nothing so amusing as what is pure matter-
of-fact.

We may be quite sure that The Faerie Queene, which
is the main classic of this sort of art in the world's litera-
ture, was not written for children. The ordinary infant
would be unspeakably bewildered and bored by the visit of
Duessa to the Lady of Night, and by the exploits of

Aspects and Impressions

Arthegal and Talus. It might take a faint pleasure in
Una being followed by the Lion, as Mary was by the little
Lamb ; and the fight between St. George and the Dragon
(where Spenser appears almost at his worst) might arrest
wondering attention. But what is incomparable in
Spenser is exactly what would fail to amuse a child. We
may be quite sure that it was no audience from the nursery
which the poet sought to fascinate. Yet it is true that his
poetry appeals only to the child at heart. What we have
to do is to define for ourselves what we mean by a child
at heart, and we shall soon perceive that the object of our
thoughts is not, in the literal sense, a child at all.

Perhaps youth rather than childhood is the image we
require. With the advance out of infancy into adolescence,
the mystery of existence first becomes palpable and visible
to the fingers and the eyes of those who are born to enjoy
it. We fall into an error, however, if we imagine that
it is given to every one who pleases to arrive at this blissful
condition of wonder. The world is very old, and it is
troubled about many things; it is full of tiresome
exigencies and solemn frivolities. The denizens of it are,
as a rule, incapable of seeing or conceiving wonders. If
the Archangel Michael appeared at noonday to an ordinary
member of the House of Commons, the legislator would
mistake his celestial visitant for an omnibus conductor.
He would rejoice at having sufficient common sense and
knowledge of the world to make so intelligent an error.
But those who are privileged to walk within the confines
of fairyland are not 'of this class. They are members of
a little clan who still share the adolescence of the world;
for, as this world is, in the main, dusty, dry, old, and
given to fussing about questions of finance, and yet has
nooks where the air is full of dew and silence, so among
men there are still always a few who bear no mark upon
their foreheads, and move undistinguished in the crowd, in
whom, nevertheless, the fairies still confide.

It will be a surprise to many, and it may be a painful
surprise, to learn that there are fathers of families, persons
"engaged in the City," and holding reputable appoint-

Fairyland and a Belgian Ariosto

ments, who faithfully believe in magical princesses and in
fays that dance by moonlight. These persons form the
audience in whom Spenser — as, in other times and other
climes, such poets as Ariosto and Camoens — seek and find
their devotees. It is a fact that there are people of a later
age who are still what we call "children in heart," whose
hearts are bold, whose judgment is free, whose inner eye
is limpid and bright. These men and women are sensi-
tive still, although the searching, grinding wave of the
world has gone over them. They live, in spite of all
conventional experience, in a state of suspended credulity.
They are ready for any amazement. They nourish, per-
sistently, a desire to wander forth beyond the possibilities
of experience, to enjoy the impossible, and to invade the
inaccessible. Life for them, in spite of the geographers
and the disenchanting encyclopaedias, and that general
suffusion of knowledge (upon all of which we congratulate
ourselves) — life, in spite of all these, is still the vast forest,
mapped out, indeed, but by them and theirs untraced.

Persons of this fortunate temperament store up an end-
less stock of good faith wherewith to face the teller of
wonderful tales. And of all those to whom they listen,
still, after three hundred years, Spenser is the most
irresistible enchanter. It has always been admitted that
his poetry is the most "poetical" that can be met with;
that is to say, that it is the least mingled with elements
which are not of the very essence of poetry. More than all
other writers, Spenser takes us out of our everyday
atmosphere into a state of things which could not be fore-
seen by any cleverness of our own reflection. He is easily
supreme in the cosmogony of his enchantments. He con-
fessed that his verse was no "matter of just memory," and
it is evident that he did not wish it to be. He simply
resigned himself to the exquisite pleasure of being lost in
the mazes of a mysterious and fabulous woodland.

The poets, in successive ages, have delighted in bear-
ing witness to this witchery of The Faerie Oueene. There
is no instance of this more pleasingly expressed, nor more
appropriate to our argument, than that of Cowley, who
263

*^ Aspects and Impressions

says, in his delicious essay Of Myself: "There was wont
to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident,
for she herself never in her life read any book but of
devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's Works.
This I happened to fall upon (before I was twelve years
old), and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the
knights and giants and monsters and brave houses,
which I found everywhere there — though my understand-
ing had little to do with all this — and by degrees with the
tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers." We
may doubt whether the child Cowley had not more of a
man's taste than the man Cowley had of the heart of a
child ; but, at all events, he entered with exactly the proper
spirit into that miraculous country where "birds, voices,
instruments, winds, waters, all agree." And it is in this
spirit that hundreds of the elect have read the marvellous
poem in successive ages, and will continue to read it until
time itself has passed away.

llie Faerie Queene is not "about" any thing. There
is nothing of serious import to be deduced from its line of
argument. The subject wanders hither and thither,
awakening fitful melodies in the brain of its creator, as the
wind does on the strings of an ^olian harp. The music
swells and declines, the harmonies gather to a loud ecstasy
or dwindle to a melancholy murmur, under the caprices of
a spirit that cannot be discerned and that seems to be under
no intellectual control. In saying this, I am not ignorant
of Spenser's protestation of a moral purpose, nor do I
charge him with the smallest insincerity for having written
that apologetic letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, in which he
makes what he calls "a pleasing analysis " of the way in
which the poem illustrates "the twelve private moral
virtues, as Aristotle hath devised." It was necessary that
he should have a skeleton of meaning underneath his
elaborate dream, not merely for the sake of contemporary
decency, lest in that strenuous age he should be cast forth
as one that cumbered the ground, but for the sake of his
art as well, which needed a steady basis of material as
much as a picture needs its canvas or a statue its marble.
364

Fairyland and a Belgian Ariosto

Moreover, The Faerie Qiieene must celebrate Queen
Elizabeth, just as "Orlando Furioso" must praise the
House of Este. It was in feudal societies, under the pro-
tection of princes, that these romantic enterprises had to
be conducted, if they were conducted at all. There was
a pleasant confusion, like that of coloured strands in a
solemn tapestry, between the laudation of the Sovereign
and the celebration of the virtues. Sometimes the monarch
was not so virtuous as the poet could have wished; some-
times his Court was as little like fairyland as was humanly
possible. That only added to the skill of the poet;
that only added rainbow colours to the fabric of the
invention.

Then there was always the allegory, with which, in
fact, anything on earth could be connected, in the course
of which not only could no compliment be excessive, but
no attribution could be so certain that it was not able,
under pressure, to be denied. Positive persons, in our
rash age, do much profane the allegory, whic.!!, never-
theless, is essential to all fairy poetry. Without it, what
would become of The Romaunt of the Rose, or of The
Dream of Poliphile; what, even, of the Divine Comedy?
Hazlitt merrily says that people "are afraid of allegory,
as if it would bite them. ... If they do not meddle with
the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them."
The fact is, persons who hate fairy poetry make the alle-
gory an excuse for their aversion, which is like saying
that you hate the flavour of olives because they have stones
in them.
;^- It is a peculiarity of the romance of fairyland that it
never introduces us to fairies. Nothing is so prosaic as a
fairy, seen in the broad light of Early Victorian illustra-
tion. A little being in short skirts and sandals, standing
on one toe on the tip of a rosebud, with a spangle in her
sleek hair and a wand in her taper fingers — nothing is
more repulsive to the Muses. But the whole secret of the
great fairy poets is that they are engaged in searching for
fairies without ever suffering the disenchantment of find-
ing them. There are none, I ihinlc, in the broad pages
265

Aspects and Impressions

of Spenser; even, by a beautiful pleasantry, the Fairie
Queene herself being entirely absent throughout the poem,
at all events as we now possess it.

The personages in The Faerie Queene, noble and
miraculous as they are, are not of the fairy persuasion at
all. They w^ander through the forests in the hope of
coming upon these supernatural denizens, but they never
succeed in doing so. The Holy Grail appeared far oftener
to the Knights of the Round Table than a real fairy was
perceived by Paradel or Blandamour. These men of
chivalry were much interested in the subject, but, as a
rule, they were poorly instructed. It was in the House
of Temperance that Sir Guyon found the book, that hight
Antiquity of Faeryland, which seems to have been a sort
of Who's Who, or Complete Peerage of the supernatural
world. He flew to the perusal of it, and wherever in it

"he greedily did look,
Offspring of Elves and Fairies there he found,"

but he found no examples on the

" island, waste and void,
That floated in the midst of that great lake,"

(where it is impossible not to believe that Mr. W. B. Yeats
would have been more successful).

A critic has said that nothing is closer to an intensely
lyrical song than a violently burlesque story. The sense
of beauty immediately evoked by the one is suggested,
conversely, or in the way of topsy-turvy, by the other.
This principle had been introduced into literature — or at
least into modern literature, for the Greeks had it illus-
trated in Aristophanes — a hundred years before the time
of Spenser, by the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci, where
Orlando, the pink of romantic chivalry, comes into collision
with certain "immeasurable giants" and other wild ab-
surdities. The atmosphere of that poem is perfectly
heroic :

266

Fairyland and a Belgian Ariosto

Twelve Paladins had Charles in court, of whom
The wisest and most famous was Orlando;

Him traitor Gan conducted to the tomb
In Roncesvalles, as the villain planned to,

While the horn rang- so loud, and knelled the doom
Of their sad rout, though he did all knight can do ;

And Dante in his Comedy has given

To him a happy seat with Charles in heaven.

But, in another turn, we find this splendid Orlando
lifting his sword to give his beautiful lady, Aldabelle, a
smack on the face with the flat of it. This is burlesque,
and Pulci seems to have been the inventor of the genre.
He was followed by Boiardo, who wrote of Orlando in
love, and by Ariosto, who described the madness of
Orlando, and by a multitude of other sixteenth century
poets, who described, in this epic mixture of lyricism and
burlesque, various other episodes in the life of the hero.
It was from them, from these Italian precursors, whom
Spenser had read so carefully, that he borrowed the ugly
and violent elements which he introduces, so much to the
scandal of some critics, into the embroidered texture of
The Faerie Queene.

In all this, however, which is very characteristic of the
romance of fairy poetry, we do wrong to be scandalized.
The ugly things, like the misfortunes of Braggadochio
and his Squire (in The Faerie Queene), and the fantastic
things, like the journey of Alstolfo to the Moon to recover
the wits of Orlando (in Ariosto), are just as necessary to
our pleasure as the description of the Bower of Bliss, or
of Angelica's flight from Rinaldo. They are all part of
that desire to escape from the obvious and the common-
place features of life which inspires this whole class of
poetry. Those who are naturally conscious that life runs
at a dead level desire to heighten it, and whether this is
done in the lyric spirit or in the burlesque, or in both at
once, matters very little. The essential thing is to lift
the spirit and quicken the pulse.

The only consolation which comes to people of this
267

Aspects and Impressions

fatigued and wistful temperament is that which they receive
from a persuasion of the reality of what is marvellous and
incredible. Like the theologians, such readers believe
certain things to be true because it is impossible that they
should be true. They do not ask why, or where, or when,
the incidents happened ; they are satisfied with the vision
and with all its chimerical wonders. In their dreams they
see Belphoebe hurrying through the woodland, her hair
starred as thick as snow by the petals of the wild roses
her tempestuous flight has shaken down upon it, and they
do not ask what she represents, nor whither she hastens,
nor her relation to fact and history :

And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held,
And at her back a bow and quiver gay,

Stuft with steel-headed darts, wherewith she quelled
The savage beasts in her victorious play,
Knit with a golden bauldrick, which forelay

Athwart her snowy breast.

Who needs to ask whither Belphoebe goes, or what she
means ? She is a vision created for the deep contentment
of those in whom the longing for noble images and uplifted
desires and generous, childlike dreams is perennial.

Critics like to assume that the enthusiasm which breeds
this kind of chivalrous poetry is dead and buried in the
classics. They no more expect to see a new Faerie Queene
published than to hear of a new dodo inhabiting the
plantations of the interior of Madagascar. But in litera-
ture it is always unsafe to say that a door is closed for
ever; if we are rash enough to make such an assertion,
it is sure to fly open in our faces. It was a commonplace
of criticism ten years ago that the epic would never re-
appear in literature, and behold Mr. Doughty presents us
with a Dawn in Britain which is as long as the Lusiads
would be if Paradise Lost were tacked on to the tail of it.
Last week I read in a very positive volume that the Pastoral
can never revisit the cold glimpses of a world that has
exchanged its interest in shepherds for a solicitude about
268

Fairyland and a Belgian Ariosto

miners and chauffeurs. My instant reflection on reading
that opinion was to wonder how soon a young poet
would publish a fresh set of Bucolics, with the contest of
Damaetas and Menalcas set forth to a new tune upon the
Pans' pipes.

For this reason I cannot say that I was astonished,
although much interested, to find a young man — and, I
venture to think, a young man of some genius — reviving
the old music of the magic woodland, which had seemed
to be dead, or closed, since the seventeenth century. It
is a wish to make his work a little known to English readers
which has led me to venture on some remarks to-day about
the Romance of Fairyland. M. Albert Mockel is a
Fleming, and if M. Octave Mirbeau, in a celebrated article
in the Paris Figaro, had not called M. Maeterlinck the
Belgian Shakespeare, I should have been tempted to
describe M. Mockel as the Belgian Spenser. I may go
so far as to call him a Belgian Ariosto. M. Mockel has
not enjoyed the same popularity as his eminent country-
man ; perhaps he had no Octave Mirbeau to immortalize
him with a gorgeous paradox. But in 1891 M. Mockel,
who must then have been very youthful, published a
poem, entitled Chantefable, which was enough to inspire
great hopes of his future among not a few judicious
readers. He has done nothing, in my judgment, to
justify those hopes so fully as he now has in the volume
h^as published, called, Contes pour les Enjants d'hier,
with ingenious illustrations by M. Augusta Donnay.
These illustrations are very clever, although they would
never have been drawn had it not been for Aubrey
Beardsley's Morte d' Arthur (1893). M. Donnay is skilful,
and he emulates Beardsley's wonderful, pure line, without
always perfectly attaining to it.

But the book itself is of a more classic cast, and deserves
longer attention. Here, to quite a remarkable extent, we
find the old stateliness of the fabulous society, the old
ceremonial procession of wonderful events and incredible
people. Here, once more, we enter a world as audaciously
designed as Ariosto's, as intricately splendid as Spenser's.
269

Aspects and Impressions

Here, again, is what a critic of The Faerie Queene has
called "the inexhaustible succession of circumstance, fan-
tasy, and incident." The vulgarity of present existence is
buried under sm:h a panoply and magnificence of fable
that the grown-up children, the blessed enjants d'hder, can
forget and ignore it.

It would be tedious to retell briefly, in poor words, the
brilliant stories which owe so much to the solemn and
highly-coloured language in which they are deliberately
narrated. But I cannot refrain from giving an outline
of the last of them. The Island of Rest. In M. Mockel's
gallery there is no more magnificent figure than that of
Jerzual, Prince of Urmonde. We may call him the
Roland of our Belgian Boiardo. All the world is aware
of the mysterious end of Prince Jerzual ; he went away over
the waves of the sea, and nothing was ever heard of him
again. But only M. Mockel knows what happened, and
he has now consented to reveal it.

Jerzual had loved the ineffable Alise, Princess of Avi-
gorre, and to secure her love he had vowed that he would
offer her the suzerainty of the Heights, a mysterious
country surrounded by peaks of silver and crystal. Un-
fortunately, though he searched the habitable globe, the
whereabouts of this marvellous region escaped him. One
day, in despair, as he rode his magic horse, Bellardian,
he came to the edge of a cliff, where the ocean stretched at
his feet. Tired of his vain adventures, Jerzual fiung the
reins on the mane of Bellardian, and spurred him onward.
The obedient steed leaped the cliff, and descended on the
surface of the waters, which undulated gently beneath him,
but bore up both horse and rider. They galloped over
the calm sea for hours and hours, for days and days, until
at last a fairy island appeared on the horizon, and dis-
played, as they approached, a silver zone of pure peaks,
lifted like a tiara high over the ring of green and golden
verdure. This was the land of Jerzual's desire, but neither
the white Bellardian nor his incomparable master succeeded
in landing upon that exquisite shore without prolonged
adventures, which it is not mv business to recount.

Fairyland and a Belgian Ariosto

Suffice to say, that they sank in safety on the sands
at last.

How they were discovered there by Aigueline, the cruel
daughter of the Sea, and sole inhabitant of the island;
how the heart of Jerzual fluctuated in the terrible dilemma
between his present good fortune and his duty to the
Princess; how staunch and uplifted poor Bellardian was,
and how strange and pitiful his fate ; how the enchantments
of Aigueline were broken at last; and how, when the dis-
illusioned Jerzual walked in frenzy upon the sands of the
island shore, he saw the shallop of the Princess of Avigorre
sail by, with banners flying from it which were not his,
but those of his rival, Ellerion, Prince of Argilea; this,
and much more, and all of it equally gorgeous and
convincing, must be read in the delightful pages of M
Mockel's Contes pour les En f ants d'hier.

»7i

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF LORD
WOLSELEY

THERE is at present no record of Lord Wolseley,
who died just too recently to be included in the
latest Supplement of the Dictionary of Natiojial
Biography. His memory loiters in the limbo which
always surrounds the famous dead for a few years after
their decease. Then follow, in due course, the official Life
and the selected correspondence; and so finally the monu-
ment is unveiled for the pigeons of the Press to perch
upon. To my friends, Sir Frederick Maurice and Sir
George Arthur, have been entrusted the duty of arranging
the memoirs of our greatest modern soldier, and their work
will be formidable, for the Great War, of which Wolseley,
in flashes of genius, had prescience, has swept over us,
and has confused the landmarks of our memories. I feel
sure that they will bring judgment and discretion to their
task, which is a noble one. But they will certainly, and
properly, be inclined to concentrate their effort on the
^military aspects of their subject, since Lord Wolseley was
a soldier before everything else, and so completely a
soldier that other aspects must be dwarfed in contempla-
tion of his military glory. These may easily, indeed, be
excluded altogether, and I therefore venture to recall,
before it is too late, certain scenes which I observed during
a prolonged and delighted acquaintanceship, in which the
sword ceased to be "vambrashed," as the Elizabethans
used to say, and in which the great general was simply an
amateur of letters, eager to talk about books and even
ambitious to write them. I shall not fall into the error of
describing him as a great author, but I think that it may
be amusing to preserve some intellectual sketch of a
273

Aspects and Impressions

character essentially imposing in very different sur-
roundings.

Lord Wolseley was not prominent before the world as
a man of letters, and I shall not pretend that he could
claim that particular distinction, though he wrote easily
and well. Of his best books I shall have something
presently to say. But I think it is known to only a very
few survivors that he had a predilection and even a passion
for literature, which he shared, I should think, with no man
of action of his time. He was an insatiate reader, and his
reading covered a surprising range. For a man to whom
life offered excitement and animation in almost every
direction, it was notable how much time he found to spare
for intellectual amusement. He attributed his love of
reading to the influence of his Irish mother. He said once
to me, " I would sooner live upon porridge in a book-
room than upon venison and truffles where books were
not," and this meant much from one who was by no means
indifferent to the truffles and the venison of life. The
curious thing is that this obsession with literature nowhere
peeps out in his published works, and is notably absent in
his autobiography, The Story of a Soldier's Life, where
we should particularly expect to find traces of it. For this
defect in the general portraiture of that book there are
reasons, upon which I may touch later on. It is a useful
chain of military records, but it is a portrait of its author
in full uniform, with cocked hat and sword. It was my
good fortune to see him always in mufti, and if I essay a
snapshot of him I am bound to show him with a book in
his hand.

My acquaintance with Lord Wolseley began in 1888,
and I owed it to a common friend whom I never cease to
deplore, the ever-ingenious Andrew Lang. I have for-
gotten how these two came together, but they had a great
appreciation of each- other's company. Wolseley was now
just fifty-five, but he looked much younger, and he
flashed about as though the spirit of April still laughed at
him. The first thing which struck an observer on meet-
ing him was that he had the gestures of a boy; the elastic
274

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

footstep, the abruptly vivid movements, one would almost
say were those of a happy child. In 1888 Lord and Lady
Wolseley were still inhabiting a small house in Hill Street,
but immediately after I first knew them they moved to the
Ranger's House in Greenwich Park, the scene for me of
delightful memories during the next two years. Wolseley
was at that time Adjutant-General of the Forces, under
Stanhope, and afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland
under Campbell-Bannerman. He worked hard every day
at the War Office, and came down to Greenwich in the
afternoon like any civil servant or bank clerk. His life at
that time was marked by the serene and unaffected
simplicity w^hich always seemed to me the cardinal feature
of his personal character, Much in Wolseley had an
appearance of inconsistency. For instance, it cannot be
questioned that he demanded a great deal from those who
worked under him professionally, nor that he was careful
of his own prestige. But when he was released from his
military work, he became the least assuming of mankind.
Moreover — and this makes the attempt to paint him
particularly difficult — he was not, to the public eye, con-
spicuous, as other great generals have been, through
demeanour or appearance. I used often to be surprised,
when we were walking together in the street, to notice how
few people recognized him, although he was then at the
height of his celebrity.

In September, 1889, when my w^ife and I were going
over to the Continent, we observed a shortish gentleman,
in tourist dress, pacing the deck of the steamer, and we
said to each other: "Does not that man remind you of
somebody?" Presently he stopped before us, smiling,
and it was Wolseley. He was going alone to Metz, from
which point he proposed to make a tour of personal
observation round all the battlefields of 1870, He said
that there were inconsistencies in the published accounts,
and that he had meditated over them till it was impossible
for him to rest until he had settled his difficulties by
independent inspection. He told us not to say we had met
him, and it was an example of that want of conspicuous-
275

Aspects and Impressions

ness, which I have noted, that, although it was broad day-
light, and he then one of the most famous figures in
England, no one else did seem to recognize him. He had
theories about the Franco-German campaign for which he
sought confirmation. I begged him to let me know what
the result might be, and so he wrote to me, from Bruns-
wick, on October 4th :

I postponed writing- to you until my tour round the battle-
fields should have finished, as I could not tell what to write
upon the subject until I had studied the ground. I need
scarcely tell you that I knew the chief episodes of each great
fight very well before I came abroad. The German account
of the events is so full and truthful that no student of war
has any excuse for ignorance. With that book, and maps and
plans, I have carefully studied every phase of every battlefield
from Sedan in the North to Strasburg in the South, and I
find I could not write upon the subject without expressions
of opinion that would be very unpleasant to many men now
alive. The Germans outnumbered the French in nearly all those
battles to a large extent, and though the French allowed them-
selves to be surprised, and their leaders committed every
possible mistake, the errors of the Germans were very glaring
upon many occasions. Almost all their battles were not only
fought in a manner entirely different from what was intended,
but, in nearly every case, they were brought on without, and
on some occasions contrary to, the fKJsitive orders and intentions
of the Generals.

When I saw him at Greenwich soon after his return
he spoke more plainly still. He said that he had found,
to his great surprise, that the Germans, whose luck, he
declared, had been incredible, had been very nearly
defeated more than once or twice. He had been particularly
excited by his inspection of the battlefield of Gravelotte. If
that battle had not, he said, been won by what was really
"a fluke," the day would have closed upon the German
Army in about the most unfortunate position an army
could possibly be placed in. All this struck me, ignorant
of tactics as I am, as so very interesting that I entreated
376

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

him to change his mind and write a complete record of his
observations on the battlefields. But he said that the
praise of German strategy had reached such a pitch of
infatuation in England that he should be "accused of all
sorts of things." Nevertheless, I pressed him to write
down his experience, even if he kept it private. He finally
promised that he would do so that winter, but I never
heard any more about it. His last words were "I dare not
publish my views," and presently he had to go off to
Newcastle on military business, which quite diverted his
thoughts. It must be observed that we trusted in those
days wholly to German historians, and that the French
account, which confirmed Lord Wolseley to the letter, was
not published until ten years later.

It was while I was walking with him in Greenwich
Park one afternoon about this time that I first realized
that he had any literary ambition. He acknowledged a
constant temptation to use his pen. I had thought of him
as a reader, but hardly as a writer, although he had
published his soldiers' Pocket-Book for Field Service some
twenty years before. I learned afterwards, from Andrew
Lang, that Lord Wolseley had produced a novel, under
a feigned name; this I had never seen, and Lang did not
encourage me to hunt for it. But now, with considerable
leisure, he was ready to be encouraged to write on matters
at the fringe of his daily occupation. He did not, however,
see any particular theme lying in wait for him. During
a visit I had lately paid to the United States I had enjoyed
a good deal of conversation with two of the leading
generals of the Civil War, with Philip Henry Sheridan
and with William Tecumseh Sherman. It was Sherman
who made the celebrated march to the sea from Atlanta
to Savannah at the end of 1864; his tenacity and clair-
voyance delighted Wolseley, who was nevertheless inclined
to blame Sherman for an excess of ruthlessness in his
methods. He laughed when I told him that I had heard
Sherman, when teased at a supper-party for destroying
some town, first deny the charge, and then, when it was
daringly repeated, turn round on the railer like an old
s 277

Aspects and Impressions

snow-leopard, and cry: "Next time I'll burn the whole
darned city to the ground."

With Sheridan, Wolseley was in much more complete
sympathy. He set him on the very summit as a fighting
general, and he said that he had contrived a mobility of
cavalry in action w^hich was unprecedented. I think he
had known Sheridan personally in his early days on the
frontier. I remember his saying that, if he himself were
conducting a great battle, he should like nothing better
than to have the victor of Opequam on a camp-stool by
his side. His memory took fire at what I was able to recall
of the conversation of the two great American generals.
His chief hero, however, was Lee, and I remember that he
put the Confederate general by the side of Marlborough
and far above Wellington. I used the occasion to suggest
to him that he should write down his ideas regarding the
strategic careers of these Americans. He liked the notion,
and Mr. Rice, who was then editing the North American
Review, having been communicated with, an invitation
came to Wolseley which he accepted, and wrote, in 1889,
one or perhaps several articles, which have never, I think,
been reprinted. The life at Ranger's House was very
quiet ; the Wolseleys rarely dined in town, and the
General's existence was almost that of a recluse. I
remember we were all very much amused when his valet,
a dashing character, suddenly gave warning, his sole cause
of complaint being that he was losing caste by remaining
in the service of "so very quiet a nobleman, who does not
even go to the races ! "

All this was completely changed in 1890 when Wolseley
was appointed Commander of the Forces in Ireland. He
wrote to announce the fact to me in July, and said that it
was "rather a wrench going," but that he felt he should
like it when he got to Dublin. "A more active, out-of-
door life will be good for me," he opined. It was a great
business moving all the family possessions, for both
husband and wife were ardent collectors of bric-a-brac,
and the treasures went by sea. The gallant couple, whose
nostrils snuffed adventure as wild horses do their pasture,
278

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

thoroughly enjoyed their position at the beautiful Dublin
house, depressingly known as the Royal Hospital.
Wolseley took to getting up at 5.30 every morning, and
no day was long enough for his activities and his hospi-
talities. The political crisis was more severe than usual,
but Wolseley cared very little about politics, and his
buoyant energy and boundless good nature made his
house the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal Dublin.
That, at least, is how it struck me during an enchant-
ing visit I paid to the Royal Hospital in the midst of the
resistance to Lord Rosebery's "predominant partner."
Wolseley gave up any thought of periodical literature;
when I urged it he said he was "always being attacked
for writing." I do not quite know who can have
"attacked" him or why, but he had other things to
attend to.

He was not, however, unoccupied. It was while he
was in Ireland that he composed his Life of the Duke of
Marlborough, of which he finished two volumes in the
spring of 1893 and published them a year later. The notes
for it had occupied him for many years, he said, "on board
ship, in camp, and often at long intervals of time when on
duty abroad and in the field." He made a tour, as I well
remember, to the scenes of Churchill's childhood, before
he left Greenwich in 1890, and his descriptions of Ash
House and the valley of the Axe were jotted down on the
spot. The Life of Marlborough is Wolseley 's principal
contribution to literature. It is characteristically written,
with that buoyancy and freshness jvhich were inherent in
his nature, but which do not appear so vividly in his other
publications. The account of the Battle of Sedgemoor,
which occupies an entire chapter, is almost a masterpiece ;
this is Wolseley, the writer, at his highest level. Unfor-
tunately, this admirable book is, and will remain, a frag-
ment, and posterity has a prejudice against what is
unfinished. The second volume closes in 1702, when
Marlborough's political intrigues had come to an end and
William III. was placing him at the head of the allied
forces in Flanders. This was, of course, the division of
279

Aspects and Impressions

his career, and naturally closed a volume. But the mili-
tary fun was only just going to begin, and what everybody
wanted from Lord Wolseley, of all men in the world, was
an account of the great campaigns.

This, however, was never performed, why, we can only
conjecture. The book was, on the whole, very well
received, but, naturally, everyone noted that it stopped in
the middle of the story. In answer to an anxious inquiry
which I sent off on receiving my copy of the two volumes,
Wolseley wrote :

I hope the book will pay the publisher. If it does, I shall
write the military part of Marlborougfh's life, which, of course,
would be to me a more interesting undertaking- than describing"
my hero through a period already well known from the pag-es
of our greatest historical novelist, Macaulay.

This shows that, in April, 1894, no part of the con-
tinuation was actually written, but I doubt not that he had
made copious notes of some of the 1702-17 10 campaigns.
Indeed, on one occasion much later, when I was trying
to urge him to return to so congenial an enterprise, he told
me that the Battle of Malplaquet was actually finished;
and Mr. Richard Bentley informs me that this MS. was
actually at one time in his father's hands. Wolseley also
is known to have described the march along the Danube
in 1705, but not reaching the Battle of Blenheim. These
fragments must surely exist among Lord Wolseley 's
MSS., and I urge Sir George Arthur to make careful
search for them. They ought to be well worthy of publi-
cation. That, at the age of sixty-one, and in active State
employment. Lord Wolseley did not feel able to pursue
his hero over the innumerable battlefields from Venloo
to Oudenarde is easily comprehensible, but that he should
have stopped just where he did is lamentable. We may
wish that he had been inspired to start, instead of stopping,
at 1702.

A side of Lord Wolseley's mental temperament which
was little known was his sympathy with the imaginative
280

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

literature of the East. He could not, I suppose, be called
a scholar, but he had more acquaintance with Oriental
languages than was generally suspected. In particular,
the poetry of Persia exercised a great fascination over him.
He studied both Persian and Hindustani for a couple of
years, and kept a learned Munshi with him all that time
as a travelling tutor. This man had a passion for the
poets, and, as Wolseley lold me, constantly held him in
conversation on the subject of Persian history and made
him read Persian books. Wolseley learned quotations
from the poets by heart, and afterwards, in speaking with
exalted or highly-educated natives of India, he found
that the apt introduction of such tags from the classics
was greatly appreciated, and was made the subject
of compliment. Wolseley was very amusing about
this.

As I happened to be President of the Omar Khayydm
Club in 1897, I thought that a speech from the Field-
Marshal at the annual banquet would introduce a charm-
ing novelty into that mild orgy of red wine and red roses.
Although very busy, for he had lately been made Com-
mander-in-Chief, he "jumped," as we say, at the invitation,
and made his appearance as the Guest of the Evening. It
was not for me to hint procedure to so illustrious a visitor,
but I confess I dreaded lest the clash of swords might jar
a little on our floral festivity. I need have had no fear.
When the moment came for Lord Wolseley to rise (he had
told me that he felt so shy that his "heart was in his
mouth," but he showed no sign of discomposure) he
assured the company that he had been misrepresented as
a man of blood, but that he was, on the contrary, a lover
of roses and red wine. He confessed that he knew Omar
only in the translation of FitzGerald ; I was aware — but
kept my counsel — that he had only known that since his
invitation to dine. He said that in India he had never
heard the name of Omar pronounced, but he expatiated
largely on those of Hafiz and Firdousi. The rules of the
Club excluded reporters, and I have always been sorrv
that no record survives of this charming little discourse.
281

Aspects and Impressions

What does survive is a delicious poem in Austin Dobson's
best vein, which was handed round to the guests in
privately printed form. This piece described the scene and
those present, beginning with

I note
Our Riistum here, without red coat,

a touch which pleased the Field-Marshal.

Lord Wolseley had taken an active part in the Chinese
War of i860, and I remember his telling me that on his
appointment as deputy to accompany Sir Hugh Grant to
Hong-Kong he ransacked every library and bookshop in
Calcutta for books about China. His account of the cam-
paign, up to the surrender of Pekin in November, i860,
was published in his Narrative of the War ivith China, a
work founded on the letters he sent home by each succes-
sive mail; it can conveniently be read in chapters XXVH.
to XXXI. of The Story of a Soldier's Life. But what is
not told there is that he preserved to the end of his days
a very sympathetic interest in the civic manners of the
Chinese, whom he preferred to any other Oriental race,
having at one time or another tested them all. In his
published writings Lord Wolseley dwells mainly on the
perfidy of the ruling classes in China, and on the ease with
which Lord Elgin allowed himself to be taken in by the
treacherous Chinese Ministers. He expressed horror at
the crime of the escort who beheaded Captain Brabazon at
the Pa-li-cheaou Bridge, an event which had a peculiar
effect on Wolseley, because it was by a mere accident
that Brabazon, at the last moment, had taken Wolseley's
place in his absence on another business. The want of
elementary scruple in the Chinese authorities was shocking
to a straightforward British soldier. But, after all, we
were at war with them.

On the other hand, w^hat Wolseley loved to expatiate
on in private conversation was the sterling virtue of the
ordinary Chinese civilian. I recollect how on one occa-
sion, when Sir Francis de Winton was dining at Ranger's
282

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

House, and expressed some views over-indulg'ent to the
Turks, Lord Wolseley turned upon him, sparkling with
indignation, and swore that no Turk could hold a candle
to a Chinaman, the cleanest, the most temperate, the most
philosophical creature in the world. In vain did De
Winton protest that he meant no dishonour to China.
Wolseley was started on his hobby-horse, and gave us no
peace till he had delivered quite a little oration on the
wonderful merits of the disciples of Confucius. This was
in 1889, and long afterwards the zeal for China was eating
him up at intervals. I find a letter to myself, dated
April 17th, 1901, in which he tells me that he is
reading Professor H. A. Giles's History of Chinese
Literature :

I wonder how deep he has gone in it. The only man I
ever knew who liad more than dipped into that vast subject
was Sir T. Wade, an old friend of mine. I have known
many men who spyoke Chinese well, some even sp>oke it fluently
— Sir Harry Parkes, for instance — but Wade was the only
Englishman I ever met who had probed down deep into the
Chinese classics. He often laughed at the notion of any Fan
qui being well acquainted with them, so great was their volume
and so numerous the works to be studied. Indeed verv- few
Chinamen are thoroughly well read in their own classical
literature. When we moved upon the Summer Palace in i860,
the Emperor fled in haste, leaving upon a little table the book
he had just been reading. I always regretted not having taken
possession of it, instead of letting it be destroyed. It was a
classical work.

On the night of October 12th, 1899, when the Boer
war was declared, my wife and I shared with Lord and
Lady Wolseley a box at the performance of Shakespeare's
King John. Like almost everyone else except Kitchener,
the Commander-in-Chief assured us that the war would
be a short one ; he was radiant and calm on that memorable
evening. There were many verses in the play which
seemed appropriate to the occasion, and wiien King John
declaimed —

283

Aspects and Impressions

Here have we war for war, and blood for blood,
Controlment for controlment.

Wolseley whispered "and Victoria for Mr. Kriiger ! " It
was exhilarating, though as it turned out not wholly
satisfactory, to listen to King John's proud reply to
Chattilion :

For ere thou canst report, I will be there ;
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard —
So hence !

But I must not trespass within the circle of our coming
disenchantment.

A few months later Lord Wolseley handed over the
Command-in-Chief to Lord Roberts, and he presently re-
tired to a farmhouse at Glynde, near Lewes, where he
resided for a number of years, more and more secluded
from the world, but devoted to his garden and his books.
Once more he became a voracious reader of miscellaneous
literature. Here he liked to be informed of what was going
on in the world of letters, and to see as frequently as he
could a few friends who wrote. Among these, I think
there was none whom he valued more than Henry James,
a very old friend, earlier, I think, than Andrew Lang or
myself. It might be supposed that there was little in
common between the active soldier and the exquisite and
meticulous dreamer, but, on the contrary, their mutual
esteem was persistent, and Wolseley delighted in the con-
versation of Henry James, although he sometimes allowed
himself to smile at the novelist's halting and deliberate
utterance. Wolseley, on the other hand, w^as an emphatic,
spontaneous talker, not very particular in selecting the
very best word or in rounding the most harmonious
period. It was amusing to hear them together, the one
so short and sharp, the other so mellifluous and hesi-
tating, yet their admiration, each for the other, was
continuous.

I do not think that Wolseley was ever more happy than
284

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

in the first years of his residence at Glynde, the world
forgetting, by the world forgot. But a certain insidious
melancholy soon began to invade him. He gradually cut
himself off from all his round of London engagements, and
he never once, if I remember right, attended the House of
Lords after his retirement from the War Office. He was
not in the least degree invalided or deprived of nervous
energy, but he felt that in the long, strenuous years of
service he had earned a holiday, and now he took it. He
made, perhaps, few new friends, but he was careful to
cultivate the old ones, and no one was ever more assiduous
in the art of friendship. He clung to old associations and
to old faces — "they can't escape me," I remember his
saying. He liked to see them at Glynde, where they
always received a glowing, almost a boisterous, welcome.
The house lies in a sort of glen between two ranges of the
beautiful Sussex downs, and Wolseley loved to climb these
eminences with a familiar companion. He was particu-
larly apt to take such a friend eastward along the lanes
to Firle and then up to the summit of the beacon above
Alciston. This was one of his favourite afternoon ex-
cursions, and from this vantage he would sweep the coast-
line from Seaford to Pevensey, and dilate on its strategic
capabilities.

Of such excursions as these I have the happiest
memory. The exercise ahvays seemed to stir the General's
brain to especial activity. His rapid, vehement voice rang
out in full sonority in the silence of the great rolling Down,
and his thoughts seemed to move with more ease than usual
in the high, cold air of autumn. His imagination worked
with a vitality which almost persuaded his ignorant com-
panion that he also was a strategical genius, so easy did
the problems of military movement seem when outrolled
by Wolseley 's warm voice and punctuated by the sweep
of his walking-stick. It was impossible not to feel that
"this exceptional combination of mental gifts with untiring
physical power and stern resolution " made our wonderful
friend unique in his class and time. One was amazed to
find one's self entrusted with the professional secrets of
285

Aspects and Impressions

which one was really so unworthy a recipient. But it was
characteristic of Wolseley that, with all his fire and abrupt-
ness, he was incapable of the smallest element of patronage.
He lifted his friends, in a whirl of generous illusion, up
to a level with himself, and insisted on their sharing his
conceptions. No one ever possessed a more fascinating
gift for persuading the person he talked with that the
friend's powers and capacities were equal to his own. The
impression could only be momentary, but it was extremely
grateful while it lasted.

Few things in private conversation are more winning
than lack of discretion. I cannot pretend that Lord
Wolseley was a cautious speaker, and I think his company
would have been much less entertaining than it was if he
had minced his words or hedged his opinions. He had
spent twenty years or more of his life in a prodigious
enterprise, no less than the entire remodelling of the British
Army. He had seen with Napoleonic clearness what
sweeping reforms were needed, and he had not felt the
smallest hesitation in setting about their introduction. But
he had originally been quite alone in this perilous enter-
prise. Hercules had come to the cattle-yard of Augeas
and had found it clogged with the mire of generations.
He set about turning the course of Alpheus and Peneus,
rivers of Whitehall, and he sent their waters rushing
through the stable. With his besom he began to scrub
the refuse out of every corner. But the old-fashioned
stablemen were not pleased to be disturbed, and Augeas,
in consternation, refused to give Hercules his reward.
Thereupon there arose loud and lasting clamours, in the
midst of which the work, frustrated as far as mediocrity
found possible, went forward steadily, but in a wind of
exasperation. There was rage on both sides, recrimina-
tion, injury; and even the monarch of Elis was not dis-
engaged from the struggle. If these things are an alle-
gory, it is a very transparent one, and it need not be
translated. It suffices to say that he would have little
insight into human character who should express surprise
at any vehemence of expression, with regard to those who
286

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

opposed his cleansing activities, which the Nemean hero
might give way to in private conversation. He was tired
with fighting those of his own household and he was
sick from the stupidity of persons clothed with brief
• authority.

If, however. Lord Wolseley expended the treasures of
what could at call be a very lively vocabulary on the men
who had hindered his life's work, nothing could exceed
his loyal memory of the few who had found courage to
support him. Among the latter, Mr. Cardwell and Lord
Northbrook stood pre-eminent, particularly the former,
of whom I remember many tributes of the warmest appre-
ciation. I have often heard Wolseley say that he came
back from the Crimea with a sense of horror at all the
shortcomings of our military system, and that his criti-
cisms met with none but the most languid attention except
from Cardwell.
that these two
England had come to the same conclusions as Wolseley
had in the four quarters of the globe. He was able, as
Secretary for War from 1868 to 1874, to put into practical
shape the ideas which Wolseley had, by his high gift
of imagination, seen in the field itself to be necessary.
Wolseley believed that, but for Cardwell's unflinching
support, his enemies would have contrived to have him
honourably deported to some command at the Antipodes
where his tiresome brain would have ceased to worry the
War Office. The fiercest of the fight gathered about the
year 1872, when "the old school" would hardly believe
that anyone calling himself a gentleman could make him-
self so intolerably objectionable as did this horrible Sir
Garnet Wolseley. At this time Cardwell, in the face of
every species of intrigue and resistance, shielded his
assistant from his opponents. Later on he helped him to
collect around him the ablest soldiers of promise on
whom the army of the future depended. I never heard
Wolseley speak of anyone with so much regret as of
Cardwell, cut off, by failing health, in the midst of his
labours.

287

Aspects and Impressions

It was Lord Northbrook who chiefly aided and abetted
Wolseley in his scheme for sending General Gordon off up
the Nile. When the tragedy was complete, Lord North-
brook inclined to think that their action had been "a
terrible mistake." But Wolseley never would admit that
it had been a mistake. He persisted that it was the only
thing to do, and that the responsibility for failure rested on
Mr. Gladstone and his Government. There was nothing
that Wolseley loved better than to recount the adventure
of his seeing Gordon off to the Soudan on November i8th,
1883, and his dramatic conversation at the London railway
station. Gordon was settled in the train when Wolseley
asked: "By the way, General, I suppose you have plenty
of money?" "Not a penny!" And Wolseley would
recount how he dashed in a hansom to his bank, and
brought back the bank-notes just in time for the perfectly
indifferent Gordon to slip them into his pocket as the train
went off.

Before he left town in 1900 Lord Wolseley had begun,
at the suggestion of some of his friends who regretted that
so much high experience of life should be wasted, to pre-
pare his own autobiography. As I took a special interest
in this project, I was told (December ist, 1900), that he
had "written, at odd moments, many pages for the
Memoirs, but, of course, they have still to be pumice-
stoned down and put into shape." The sudden cessation
from all administrative activity had threatened to be rather
disastrous, but, as I have said, he took his retirement to
Glynde very serenely, and this business of the autobio-
graphy promised to be the best antidote to languor.
When one saw him in the next years, it stood always in
the background; its progress was reported like the growth
of a slow fruit, which stuck on the bough, but was not
swelling as it should. At last, in his seventy-first year, I
received, not without surprise, the announcement that it
was ripe and ready for the market. A little further delay,
and there appeared, in two fat volumes. The Story of a
Soldier's Life. The copy which reached me from the
author generously acknowledged the "valuable advice "
288

Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley

that I had "so often kindly given." But I dare not take
this tribute to my soul, for, as a matter of fact, the book
bears no trace of external advice. It is a very strange
production, and may be succinctly described as an editing
from earlier records by himself of fragments of a story the
details of which the author had forgotten.

There is no question that, as an autobiography, The
Story of a Soldier's Life is disappointing. It was under-
taken too late, and it could never have been written at all,
save for the fact that Wolseley had, in earlier years, kept
copious journals and written long letters when he was
abroad on his various campaigns. These letters and
journals were collected and typed, and a secretary helped
to put them together and give a certain amount of cohesion
to the narrative. The book was strangely edited ; the
preface appears in the second volume, the dedication is
repeated twice, there is no account whatever of the circum-
stances in which the Memoir was compiled. What is more
serious is that the personal and intimate life of the author
is entirely neglected. When he had not before him letters
from the Crimea or the Red River, from China or
Ashantee, he had nothing to go upon but the news-
papers.

The sad cause of all this cannot be concealed.
Although his physical health, and indeed in essentials his
mental health, were unimpaired, he had begun to suffer
from a radical decay of memory. This was already
becoming obvious before he left the War Office, and it
grew rapidly in intensity. It was a very curious infirmity,
for it dealt chiefly w^ith what I may call immediate memory.
For instance, in these later years, if an old friend came to
see him on a carefully prepared visit, he would recognize
him instantly, with the old ardour, but would say : "I'm
delighted to see you, no one told me you were coming ! "
If a little later on the same occasion he was called away
for a few minutes, he would return with a repeated wel-
come : "Oh! how nice to see you — nobody told me you
were coming ! " This painful affliction has to be men-
tioned, if only because it explains the strange construction
289

Aspects and Impressions

of The Story of a Soldier's Life. It grew upon him, until
it wove a curtain which concealed him from all inter-
course with the world. In perfect physical health, but
needing and receiving the most assiduous attention, he lived
on, mainly at Mentone, until he completed his eightieth
year. But his wonderful and beneficent life had really
come to an end ten years earlier.

1921.

290

INDEX

Aasen, Ivar, his influence on Norse
language and literature, 258

Ablancourt, Tallemant des Reaux
and, 114

Academic Committee, an English,
and its functions, 145

Academie Franqaise, and its founda-
tion, 145 et seq.

Acton, Lord, 3, 15

Adam Bede, 4, 8

Agatha, 12

Aitken, George A., 77-78

Album, The, by Henry James, 33

Alcidalis et Zilide, 116

Alexander, George, 33

Allegory, the, as an essential to
fairy poetry, 265

Alma, Prior's, 79

Alps and Sanctuaries, 74

Altar of the Dead, The. 18

Ambassadors, The, 44

American Scene, The, 45

American, The, 25, 31

American Volmiteer Motor Ambu-
lance Corps, Henry J ames and,
52

Amos Barton, 6, 9

Anactoria, Swinburne's first draft
of, 87 et seq.

Analogy oj Religion, Joseph Butler's,

73

Anaxandre et Orazie, 154

Andersen, Hans Cliristian, 261

Angelo, ^lichel (see Michel Angclo)

Angennes, Charles d' (see Ram-
bouillet. Marquis)

Anglican revival, the, its opposite
school, 64

Anglo-Catholic movement, the, 186

Antilly, Arnauld d', 161

Arago, Etieune, Clemenceau's in-
troduction to, 227

Ariane, Desmarets's, 154

Arion, G. Eliot's, 13

Ariosto, 263, 267

Arnold, Matthew, 3, 203

Arthur, Sir George, and the memoirs

of Lord Wolseley, 273
Asbjornsen, Norwegian folk-lorist,

253
Aschehoug, Prof. Torkel. 248, 258
Asquith, Right Hon. H. H., 53
Assommoir, L' , 24
Atalanta in Calydon, 95
Atlantic Monthly, the, Henry James

as contributor to, 21
Aubigne, Agrippa d', and Malherbe,

143
his definition of satire, 102
Aubrey, John, as memoir- writer,

113

Auchy, Vicomtesse d', no. 137
An Fils des Jours, 242
Author of Beltraffio, The, 30
Authoress of the Odyssey, The, 74
Avenir de la Science, L', 237, 243
Awkward Age, The, 38, 43

B

Bach. J. S., Samuel Butler and,

70
Baetzmann, Samuel, editor of Dag-

bladet, 249
Bage, Robert, 173
Balzac, Honore de, 6, 211
Balzac, Jean Louis Guez de, 137,

160-168
Banville, Theodore de, 201
Barde de Tenirah, Le, 198
Barres, INIaurice, 38
Bartas, Salluste du [see Du Bartas)
Baudelaire, 222
Bautru, 165
Beardsley, Aubrey, 269
Beast in the Jungle, The, Henry

James's, 45
Bedford, Countess of. and her salon.

291

Index

Beethoven, Samuel Butler's con-
tempt for music of, 70
Bellay, J. du [see Du Bellay)
Bellini, Gentile, 70
Benson, Archbishop, and Henry

James, 38
Bentley, Mr. Richard, 280

Bergcr Extravagant, I.e. 161

Bertaut, Jean, 134, 138

Better Sort, The, 45

Beuil, Honorat de [see Racan)

Birkeland, Michael, 251-259

Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, 252-3

Blake, William, 69

Boiardo, 267

Boileau, and Desmarets, 154

Boisrobert, Fran9ois de IMetel de,
154-158, 163

Bologna, the Otiosi at, 146

Bostonians, The, 29

Botten-Hansen, Norwegian bio-
grapher, 254

Boulanger, General, Clemenceau
and, 229

Bourget, M. Paul, 38, 43, 215

Brabazon, Captain, execution of,
by a Chinese escort, 282

Brebeuf, 161

Brisson, Mathurin, 226

Brissot, Pierre, 226

Broglie, Due de, and Malherbe's
visits to Hotel de Rambonillet,
109

Brooke, Rupert, Henry James's
friendship with, 48

Brother and Sister, a sonnet from, 13
privately printed by George
Eliot, 12

Browning, Robert, and George
Eliot, 3

Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 162, 203-4

Brunot, M. Ferdinand, 131

Bryce, Lord, conveys insignia of
Order of Merit to bedside of
Henry James, 53

Buflon, 212

Burke, Edmund, 169 et seq.

Burlamacchi, 10

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 43

Burnouf, 198

Burton, John Hill, and Rousseau,
188

Burton, Sir Frederick, his paintings
of George Eliot, 7

Butcher, S. H., 145

Butler, Canon Thomas, 63-65

Butler, Samuel, 60-73

Cabinet Satirique, 165

Caleb Williams, 173

California, Henry James on,. 46

Calvin, Jean, 124

Camies Parisiens, Theodore de

Banville's, 201
Camoens, 263
Camusat, Jean, 165
Canterbury Settlement, A First Year

hi, Butler's, 66
Cardwell, Mr., Lord Wolseley's

tributes to, 287
Carlyle, Thomas, and Rousseau, 184
Case Stated, A, 79
Cayer's portrait of Catherine de

Rambouillet, 104
Cerisy, Habert de, 148
Chabot, Catherine, Racan and, 109
Chantefable, xllbert Mockel's, 269
Chapelain, Jean, 100, 105, 118, 119,

148. 149, 153, 158, 159
Chastelard. Swinburne's original ilS.

of, 8>^
Chastelet, Hay du. 166
Chelsea Old Church, funeral service

of Henry James at, 53
Chenier, Andre, 194
Children and their love of fairy

tales, 261 et seq.
Chinese Literature, History of. Prof.

H. A. GHes's, 283
Chinese War (i860), the, Lord

Wolseley's reminiscences of,

2S2
Chrysaor, 19S
Classical reaction, the, Malherbe

and, 123 et seq.
Claudel, M. Paul, 200
Clemenceau, Benjamin, 226
Clemenceau, Georges, 225-245
" Cleomire," the pseudonym of

Mme. de Rambouillet in Cyrus,

104
Clovis, Desmarets's, 154
Cobham, Viscount, Congreve's post-
humous Letter to, 85
Coleridge on Rousseau, 176
CoUas, M., and the memorials of the

Hotel de Rambonillet, 100
College Breakfast Party, A, i^
Collin, Sebastian, 226
Colporteur, Le, Guy de Maupas

saut's, 45
Commentaire du Dtscours sur les

Passio7is, Faguet's, 213
Compton, Edward, 31

292

Index

Comte, Auguste, 227
Concini, murder of, 108
Confessions, Rousseau's, 170
Congreve, William, 77-85
Conrart, Valentin, 100, 147, 148,

165, 166
Conies pour les En/ants d'hier, 269

et seq.
Contr at Social, Rousseau'^, 172, 174,

176
Cook, Sir Edward, his Life of

Rusk in, 189
Coppee, Fran9ois, and Henry J amevS,

24
Corneille, Pierre, 100, 161
Cospeau, at Hotel de Rambouillet,

100
C6IS de chez Swann, Marcel Proust's,

58
Courtois, M. Louis J., 170 (note),

190
Cowley, Abraham, 139, 263
Crabbe, compared with Verhaeren,

194
Cranford, 2
Crawford. Marion, 43
Cross, Mrs. {see Eliot, George)
Culte de V Incompetence, Le, 214
Culture des Idies, La, 218
Curtis, Daniel, 31, 48

Daa, Prof. Ludwig Kristensen,

252, 257
Daae, Ludwig, 252-256
Daisy Miller, Henry James's, 17, 25
D'Angennes, Charles, Marquis of

Rambouillet and Pisani [see

Rambouillet, Marquis)
Daniel, Samuel, and the Countess

of Bedford's salon, 100
Daniel Deronda, 6, 14
D'Antilly, Amauld {see Antilly)
Darwin, Charles, 73, 233, 234
D'Aubigne, Agrippa (see Aubigne)
Daudet, Alphonse, 24, 31, 37
Dawn in Britain, Mr. Doughty's, 268
D'Epinay, Madame {see Epinay)
Diracin^a, Lea, 38
Descartes, 117, 161, 210,
Disert, Le, a poem by I^conte de

Lisle, 196
Desmarets, Jean, and the French

Academy, 153, 165
Desportes, Philippe. 129-138
De Vere, Aubrey, 23

De Vogiie {see Vogiie)

Diary of a Lover of Literature, The,

173. 174
Dickens, Charles, 2, 11
Diderot, 183

Discours sur I' Amour, 120
Disengaged, a comedy by Henry

James, 32
Disraeli, Isaac, and the beauty of

fairyland, 261
Dix-huitiime Slide, Faguet's, 211
Dobson, Austin, 79, 146 (note),

282
Dolores, 94
Don Juan, 182
Donnay, Auguste, illustrates Contes

pour les Enfants d'hier, 269
Donne, John, 100
Double Dealer, The, dedication of,

80
Doumic, M. Rene, Faguet and, 212
Dowden, Edward, 145
Dream of Poliphile, The, 265
Dreyfus affair, the, 239
Dryden, 80, 81, 199
Du Bartas, Salluste, 126-128
Du Bellay, J., 125
Du Maurier, George, 27
Dumur, M. Louis, 218
Du Perier, M., Malherbe's " Con-
solation " to, 139, 140
Du Perron, Cardinal, Malherbe and,

134
Du Vair, M., Malherbe on, 133

Easter, and the question of its

retardation, 10
Edinburgh Review, 174, 175, 176,

183, 187
Elgin, Lord, and the perfidy of

Chinese rulers, 282
Eliot, George, 1-16
Emile, 173

En lisant Corneille, Faguet's, 209
En lisant les Beaux Vieux Livres,

Faguet's, 209, 210
Endymion, Gombauld's, 150
English Poets, Historical Account oj

the, Giles Jacob's, 78. 79
Epilogues, Remy de Gourmont's,

221
Epinay. Madame d', Mimoires et

Conversations of, 1S3
Epistle to Halifax, Congreve's, 80
Erewhon, Samuel Butler's, 60

293

Inde3

Erinnyes, Les, Leconte de Lisle's

tragedy of, 196
Esprit des Lois, 209
Esthitique de la Langiie Frangaise,

L', publication of, 218
Etudes Littiraires, Faguet's, 206
Europe, Literature of, Hallam's,

188
Europeans, The, 25
Evangelical movement in England,

the, 185 et seq.
Evans, Isaac, the original of Tom

Tulliver, 13
Evans, Marian {see Eliot, George)
Evans, Mrs. Samuel, the original of

Dinah Morris, 4
Evelyn's Diary, publication of,

115
Evolution, Old and New, Butler's,

73
Excursion, The, Wordsworth's, 176

Faerie Queene, The, 261-266

Faguet, Emile, 203-214

Fair Haven, The, Butler's attack on
Christianity in, 73

Fairyland, the spell of, 261 et seq.

Faret, Nicolas, 152-4

Felix Holt, 8, II

Feuillet, Octave, as rival to George
Eliot, 8

Ficino, MarsigHo, and the Florence
Academy, 146

Flaubert, Gustave, 10, 23, 24

Fleetwood, an English example of a
Rousseau novel, 173

Florence, foundation of an Aca-
demy in, 146

Fontenay-le-Comte, 226

France, Anatole, 197, 204

Francion, and its author, 161

French Academy, foundation of,
and its founders, 147 et seq.

French Classic School, when and
how it came into being, 123 et
seq.

French Revolution, Reflections on
the, Burke's, 169

French Revolution, the, Rousseau
and, 174

Friend, The, Coleridge's strictures
on Rousseau in, 176

Friendship Improv'd, Charles Hop-
kins's last play, 83

Fureti^re's Roman Bourgeois, 117

Gamle Kristiania, Ludwig Daae's,
251, 252

Gaskell, Mrs., 2

Gautier, Theophile, Faguet and, 212

Gebir, Candor's, 195

Gethin, Lady, 84

Giles, Prof. H. A., his History of
Chinese Literature, 283

Giry, Louis, and the French
Academy, 156

Godeau, Antoine, 100, 147, 148

Godwin, William, 173

Golden Bowl, The, 18, 44, 45

Gombauld, 148-150

Gomberville, 1 60

Gomboust, 107

Goncourt, Edmond de, 23, 31

Gordon, General, his Nile expedi-
tion, and the result, 288

Gourmont, Gilles de, 221

Gourmont, Remy de, 214-224

Gournay, Mile, de, 150, 164

Grand Cyrus, Le, a description of
Catherine de Rambouillet in,
104

Grand Pan, Le, Clemenceau's, 234

237
Green, John Richard, 56
Green, Thomas, his Diary of a

Lover of Literature, 173, 174
Green, T. H., 56
Grieg, Edvard Hagerup, 253
Grimm's Correspondence, 178
Guirlande de Julie, 118, 151
Gunlaug, 198
Guy Domvile produced at St.

James's Theatre, 33, 34

H

Haberx, Germain, and the French
Academy, 151

Habert, Philippe, and the inception
of the French Academy, 149
151

Hald, Dr. NeUs Christian, 254

Halifax, Charles Lord, rewards
Congreve for dedication of
The Double Dealer, 80

Hall, Bishop Joseph, on Du Bartas,
127

Hallam, on Rousseau, 188

Hamadryad, The, 195

Handel, Samuel Butler's infatua-
tion for music of, 70

294

Index

Hardy, Thomas, compared with

Alfred de Vigny, 194
Hawthorne, publication of Henry

James's, 17, 27
HazUtt, William, 12. 179. 180,

265
Helps to Composition, Smieon s,

186
Henri IV, 98. 99. i34. I35
Herbert, George, 116
Hermsprong, Bage's, i73 .
Higginson, Colonel, his definition of

a cosmopolitan, 28
History of Chinese Literature, Lord

Wolseley and, 283
Holcroft, Thomas, Hugh Trevor of,

173
Homer, Samuel Butler's enthusiasm

for, 69
Honnite Homme, L' , Faret's, 153
Hopkins, Charles. 82, 83
Hopkins, Ezekiel, Bishop of Derry,

82
Hotel de Chevreuse, Pans, 107
Hotel de Rambouillet, the, 97 et seq.
Howells, William Dean, his friend-
ship with Henry James, 21
Hugh Trevor, Holcroft's, 173
Hugo, Victor, I93' I99. 210, 243
Hume, Burton's Life of, 188
Hunt, Mrs. Arabella, Congreve'sO^e

on, 81
Hutton, Richard Holt, editor of the

Spectator, 252
Hydres, Henry James visits Paul

Bourget at, 43
Hyndman, Mr., and Clemenceau,

230 (note)

Ibsen, Henrik, a \asit to the

friends of, 247 et seq.
Imaginary Conversations, W. S.

Landor's, 184
Impossible Thing. An, Mr. Wise's

copy of, 78, 79
Inch bold, Mrs., Rousseau's influ-
ence on, 173
Incognita, Congreve's, 240
International Episode, An. 17, 25
Island of Rest, The, an outline of,

270
It is Never Too Late to Mend. 2
Ivory Toiver. The. an unfinished

novel by Henry James, 48.

52

JAAB.9JK, SOREN, Norwegian poli-
tician, 252, 256

Jack, Alphonse Daudet's success
with, 24

Jacob, GWqs, Historical Account, 79,
80, 83

Jacobi, Professor, his researches in
Sanscrit Hterature. 198

Jameison, ilrs., comments on Rous-
seau's Confessions. 188

James, Henry, 17-53

James. Henry, the elder, 20

James, WiUiam, 19. 20, 48, 49

Jammes, M. Francis, 200

Jane Eyre, 2

Janet's Repentance, 4

Jansen, Kristoffer, Norwegian poet,

255

Jansenists, the, 219, 220

Jeffrey, Francis, 174, 176, 183, 184

Jesuits, the, Gourmont and, 219,
220

Jesus, Strauss's Life of, 6

John Inglesant, Shorthouse's, 56

Johnson, Dr., 85, 240

Jones, Mr. Henry Festing, 77
et seq.

Jonson, Ben, 100

Joujou Patriolisme, Le, Gourmont's
article, and its results, 216

Joyeuse Jeunesse de Tallemant, 114
(note)

Judgment of Paris, The, 86

Jugement de Honor, Le, 199

Juvenal, Dryden's composite trans-
lation of, 81

Kain, Leconte de Lisle's, 195

Keats, 194. 199

Keyser, J. R., death of, 258

Khir6n, 195

Kingsley, Charles, 2

Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, Henry

James and, 44
Kitchener, Lord, and the Boer War,

283
Kongsemnerne, Ibsen s, 259

LACTAXTirs, 236

Lagrime di San Pietro, author's
paraphrase of, 132

295

Index

Lake Poets, the, and Rousseau, 176
Landor, Walter Savage, 184, 195
Lang, Andrew, 145, 274, 284
Lanson, M., on Chapelain, 149
La Rochefoucauld, Maxims of, 117
Lassen, Pastor, and Soren Jaabaek,

256
Laus Veneris, first draft of Swin-
burne's, 89
La\'isse, M., 99
" Lawrenny, H." {see Simcox)
Lecky, W. E. H., 56
Lee, Robert Edward, Confederate
general. Lord Wolseley's
opinion of, 278
Lee, Sir Sidney, and Desportes, 128
Lemaitre, J ides, 204
Leonardo, Samuel Butler on, 70
Les Reaux {see Tallemant)
Lessing, George Eliot and, 6
Lesson of the Master, The, 1 8
Letter to Viscount Cobham, Con-

greve's, 85
Lettres, Balzac's, 162
Lewes, George Henry, i, 6
Liber Amoris, HazHtt's, 179
Life of Congreve, Gosse's, 7/
Life of Marlborough, Wolseley's, 279
Lisle, Leconte de, 193-202
Literature of Europe, Hallam's, 188
Livet, his history of Hotel de Ram-

bouillet, loi
Livres des Masques, Gourmont's, 217
Lodge, Thomas, on Desportes, 129
Lofft, Capel, 176
Loges, Madame de, no
Lokke, Jakob, 249-259
Love Triumphant, Congreve's con-
tribution to, 81
Lubbock, Mr. Percy, 19, 28, 39, 50
Luthier de Cremorne, Coppee's, 24
Luxembourg, the, modelled on the

Hotel de Rambouillet, 107
Lyell, Sir Charles, 232
Lyng, G. V., Norwegian philoso-
pher, 252

Mackintosh, Sir James, 172
Madam Inger at Osterraad, a

threatened pirated edition of,

250
Madame Bovary, 24
Maeterlinck, M., Gourmont and, 216
Octave Mirbeau's description of,

269

Magne, M. Etnile, loi, 104, 107,

184, 151, 154, 155
Maison du Berger, La, Alfred de

Vigny's, 210
Malherbe, Fran9ois, 108-110, 132-

143
Mallarme, S., 216
Malleville, Claude de, 148, 151, 159
Man That lost his Heifer, The, 79
Mangeront-ils, tragedy, by Victor

Hugo, 243
Marie de Medicis, 108, 150
Marivaiix, 21, 211
Marlborough, Duke of. Lord Wolse-
ley's Life of, 279
Marmontel, memoirs of, 175
Mary II, Queen, Congreve's ode on

death of, 85
Maucroix on Tallemant, 114
Maupassant, Guy de, 24, 45
Maurice, Sir Frederick, 273
Maurier, George du {see Du Mau-

rier)
Maxse, Admiral, 227
Maynard, 160, 163
MeUe Sociale, La, 231, 233
Menage, M., 151, 162
Meredith, George, 89
Merivale, Herman, 188
Merivale, John Herman, 177
Michel Angelo, Samuel Butler on, 70
Middle Years, The, 19, 21, 52
Middlemarch, 9, 14
Mill, John Stuart, 7, 231, 243
Mill on the Floss, The, 4, 8, 13
Mirbeau, Octave, 233, 269
Mockel, Albert, 269 et seq.
Moe, Jorgen, appointed Bishop of

Christianssand, 253, 254
Moli^re, 161
Molza, Francesco, and the heresy

of Petrarchism, 129
Monnier's Influence attribute aux

philosophes, 174
Monsieur de Cantors, 8
Montagne, Lettres de la, Rousseau's,

170
Montague, Charles, 80
Montaigne, 124, 150
Montausier, Due de, 103, 118
Montesquieu, Faguet's estimate of,

212
Morgante Maggiore, burlesque of,

266, 267
Morillot, Professor Paul, on French

poetry, 130
Morley, John (Viscount), 27, 145,

179

296

Ind

ex

Morris, William, 23, 56
Morte d' Arthur, Beardsley's, 269
Mourning Muse of Alexis, The, Dr.
Johuson on, 85

N

Namur, Congreve's ode on the

taking of, 84-5
Narrative of the War with China,

Lord Wolseley's, 282
Nature and Art, Mrs. Inchbold's, 173
Nerval, Gerard de, 221
New Criticism of J. J. Rousseau,

191
Newdigate, Sir Roger, the original

of Christopher Cheverel, 4
Nicholas de Verdun, 141
Nietzsche, 221

Norges Doemring, Welhaven's, 254
Norse legends, celebrated collectors

of, 253
Northbrook, Lord, Wolseley and,

287, 288
Norwegian Historical Society, the,

255
Notes of a Son and Brother, 19
Nourmahal, Leconte de Lisle's, 199
Nouvelle Hilolse, 173, 182

Ode 4 Richelieu, 149

CEdipe, Tallemant's, 114

Ogier, Jean, Sieur de Gombauld

[see Gombauld)
Old Bachelor, The, 81
Oldmixon, John, his Life of Con-

greve, 77
Olivet, Abbe d', on Balzac's Lettres,

162
Ording, Rektor Frederik, 247
Origin of Inequality, Discourse on,

185
Oskar, Prince, unveils a statue of

Harald Fairhair, 249

Parkes, Sir Harry, 283
Pascal, 115, 161, 220
Passionate Pilgrim, A, 21, 23
Pasteur, Clemenceau influenced by,

243
Pater, Walter, 222

Patmore, Coventry, 3

Patru, 114

Pauli, Charles, 67. 68

Peiresc, Malherbe's correspondence

with, 135
Pelisson, 100, 143, 152
Pendant I'Orage, de Gourmont's,

222
Pepys's Diary, 115
Pericles and Aspasia, 195
Petrarch and his imitators, 128
Pillans, James, 177 (note)
Piuchesne, 115

Pindare-Le Brim, Faguet on, 211
Pindarique Ode, Congreve's, 84
Pi.sani, Marquis de, 103
Plaisant Abb6 de Boisrobert, Le,

154
Plato, " one of the seven humbugs

of Cliristendom," 70
Plummer, Jliss Mary, marries M.

Clemenceau, 228
Plus Belles Pages, Les, 221
Plus Forts, Les, 226, 239. 240
Pocket-Book for Field Service, Lord

Wolseley's, 277
Podmes Antiques, 193, 198, 199
Poimes Barbares, 193, 197, 198,

200
Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's,

first drafts of, 88
Polexandre, 163
Polyeucte, 210
Priface de I' A done, Chapelain's,

118, 149
Preterita, Ruskin's acknowledgment

to Rousseau in, 189
Princess Casamassima, The, 29
Prior, Matthew, 79
Prisoner of Chilian, The, 182
Problhne du Style, Le, publication

of, 218, 222
Promenades Littdraires, 221
Promenades Philosophiques, 221
Proposals for an A ssociation, Shel-
ley's, 177
Prose pour des Esseintes, 202
Prothero, Sir George, as sponsor

for Henry James, 53
Proust, M. Marcel, his C6t& de chez

Swann, 58
Provincial Letters, 219
Provinciales, Les, 220
Pucelle, 149
Pulci, as inventor of the genre, 266,

267
Pyrandre, 155
Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, 83

297

Index

Quarterly Review, the, and Rousseau,

177, 178, 182
Quillard, M. Pierre, 227

Rabei,ais, 132

Racan, 109, 120, 132, 133, 144,

160, 164
Racine, 199
Raleigh, Sir Walter, Spenser's

analysis of The Faerie Qiieene

and, 264
Ramayana, 198

Rambouillet, EHzabeth de, 114
Rambouillet, Hotel de [see Hotel

de Rambouillet)
Rambouillet, Marquis de, 102
Rambouillet, Marquise de, and her

salon, 100 et seq.
Rapin, Pere, and Tallemant des

Reaux, 114, 115
Reade, Charles, as rival of George

Eliot, 2
Real Right Thing. The, 45
Recueil de Lettres Nouvelles, 155
Reflections on the Revolution in

France, 169
Regnier, Mathurin, 136
Reliquics GethiniancB, 84
Renan, 237, 243
Reprobate, The, refused by stage

managers, 33
Richelieu, 100, 120, 143, 146-164
Richelieu, Ode d, 149
Roberts, Earl, 284
Robinet, 121
Robinson, Crabb, 26
Roderick Hudson, Henry James's,

25. 47
Roman Bourgeois, Fureti^re's, 117
Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre,

Le, 8
Romaunt of the Rose, The, 265
Romola, 10

Ronsard, 124, 137, 138
Rosamond, Swinburne's, 89
Rosebery, Earl of, 279
j Rossetti, D. G., 3

Rotrou, 161

Round Table, Hazlitt's, 179
Rousseau, 1 69-1 91
Royal Society of I/iterature, the,

145
Ruskin, John, 11, 23, 189

Rye, Henry James at, 35 et seq.
Rygh, Dr. Oluf, 255, 256

Sacrifice des Muses, Le, 155
Saint-Amant, 153, 160, 163
Saint-Simon, 113
Saint-Sorlin, Desmarets de {see

Desmarets)
Saint Victor, Paul de, 203
Sales, Fran9ois de. Saint, 146
Sand, George, 5
Sarcey, Francisque, 196, 244
Sargent, Mr. J. S., 49
Sarrasa, Father, 219
Sars, J. E. W., 251
Saussure, Madame Necker, pub-
lishes Madame de Stael's

CEuvres Inidites, 183
Sauze, M. Charles, and the founda-
tion of the Hotel de Ram-

boiiillet, 107
Savage, Miss Eliza Mary Ann, 60

et seq.
Savella, Julia, mother of Catherine

de Vivonne, 102
Savoy, the Academic Florimontane

in, 146
Scarron, 164
Scenes of Clerical Life, 8
Schmid, Dr. D., 77
Scott, Sir Walter, 5, 173, 182, 183
Scudery, 104
Scudery, Madeleine de, her pen-

" portrait " of Catherine de

Rambouillet, 105
Sedgemoor, Battle of, I^ord Wolse-

ley's account of, 279
Segrais, memoirs of, 100
Self and Life, poem by George

Eliot, 13
Semaines, Les, of Du Bartas, 126
Semeur, Le, Victor Hugo's, 210
Sense of the Past, The, an unfinished

novel by Henry James, 52
Serisay, Jacques de, 148, 150, 165
Sevigue, Madame de, 117
Shelley, 177, 180
Shelton, Richard, 79
Sheridan, General Philip Henry,

277, 278
Sherman, General William

Tecumseh, 277
Siena, the Intronati at, 146
Sigurd forsalfar, 253
Silas Marner, 4

J98

Index

Simcox, Edith ('* H. Lawrenny "), i
Simeon, Charles, leader of the

Evangelical movement, i86
Simondi, on the character of Rous-
seau, 184
Six line, 215

Small Boy and Others, A, 19
Smith, Charlotte, 173
Smith, Sir James Edward, 187
Song of Italy, A, first draft of, 91
Songs before Sunrise, 95
Sonnet to Lake Leman, Byron's,

182
Sorel, Charles, author of Francion,

161
Southerne, 81

Southey, and Rousseau, 176
Spanish Gypsy, The, 12
Spencer, Herbert, 2, 232, 243

objects to purchase of fiction, 2
Spenser, Edmund, 262, 263, 267
Spinoza's Tractatus Theologica-

Politicus, 6
Spoils of Poynton, The, 37
Squire Trelooby, 86
Stael, Madame de, her CEuvres

Inidites, 183
Stang, Emil, 250
Stang, Frederik, 250
Stendhal, Byron and, 182
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 10, 84
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 29
Story of a Soldier's Life, 'The, 274,

288
Story. W. W., Life of, 17
Straus's Life of Jesus, George

EHot's translation of, 6
Streatfeild, R. A., 62
Studies in the France of Voltaire and

Rousseau, 190
Summers, Mr. Montague, 78
Sverdrup, Norwegian politician, 252
Swift, Jonathan, 15
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 88

et seq.
Sylvester, Joshua, translates poems

of Du Bartas, 126, 127
Sylvester, Professor, his laws for

verse-making, 12

T

Taine, H., 243

Tallemant, Gedeon (des Reaux),

103, 108-115, 137, 148, 163
TansUlo's Lagrime di San Pietro,

Malherbe's paraphrase of, 132

Taylorian Lecture (1920), the, at

Oxford, 123
Temple de la Mort, Le, by Philippe

Habert, 151
Temple, Sir William, Essays of,

162
Tenants, a comedy by Henry J amts,

32
Tennyson, Lord, 12, 15, 69, 249
Tentation de St. Antoine, Flaubert's,

24
Thackeray, W. M., 2, 80
Theophrastus Such, 15
Thrasyniedes and Eunoe, 195
Titian, Samuel Butler on, 70
Tragic Muse, The, Henry James's,

30
Trollope, Anthony, 2
Turgenev introduces Henry James

to Flaubert, 24
Turn of the Screw, The, Henry

James's ghost story, 38
Two Foscari, The, 182
Two Visits to Denmark, author's,

247

Ubicini's edition of Voiture's works,

100
Ursins, Charlotte des {see Auchy,

Vicomtesse d')

Vallette, M., director of the
Mercure de France, 216

Valmiki, La Mort de, 196

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 15

Van INIol, paints portrait of Cather-
ine de Rambouillet, 104

Vaugelas, 143, 160, 166

Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Jlal-
herbe and, 134

Vauvenargues, 212

Vayer, Lamothe de, 161

Vega, Lope de, 132

Vere, Aubrey de [see Dc Vere)

Verhaereu, Emile, 194

Verlaine, 216, 227

Vibe, Frederik Ludwig, 255

Vigny, Alfred de, 194

VindicicB Gallicw, Sir James Mac-
kintosh's, 172

Visionnaires, Les, Desmarcts's
comedy of, 154

299

Index

Vivonne, Catherine de {see Ram-
bouillet, Marquise de)

Vogiie, Vicomte Melchior de, 43

Voiture, Vincent, 100, 113, 116-
119, 161, 163

Voltaire, 212

Voyage en Suisse, criticism of Rous-
seau in, 184

W

Wade, Sir T., Lord Wolseley on,

283
Wagner, Samuel Butler on, 70
Walpole, Mr. Hugh, 48
Warrioys of Helgeland, a pirated

edition of, 250
Way of All Flesh, The, 60, 62, 63
Way of the World, The, Congreve's,

83
Weihaven, Johan Sebastian, 254,

257
Wells, Mr. H. G., 44
Wergeland, grotto of, 254

Westminster Review, the, George

Eliot as sub-editor of, 6
Westward Ho .', 2
Wharton, Mrs., 44
What Maisie Knew, 37
Whewell's Moral Philosophy, J. S.

MUl's treatment of, censured

by George Eliot, 7
" Wilson, Charles " {see Oldmixon,

John)
Wings of a Dove, The, 44
Winton, Sir Francis de, 282-3
Wise, Mr. Thos. J., 78, 91
Within the Rim, 52
Wolseley, Lady, 275, 278
Wolseley, Viscount, 273-290
Wordsworth, 13, 176

YEATS. Mr. W. B.. 266

Zoi,A, Emii<e, 24, 215, 239

Printed in England by Cassell & Company, Limited, London, E.C.4.
12.5.422

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
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