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STUDIES OF A BOOKLOVER

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Matthew Arnold

STUDIES

OF A

BOOKLO VER

BY

THOMAS MARC PARROTT

Professor of English in Princeton
University

t

NEW YORK

JAMES POn & COMPANY

1904

Copyright, 1901
By The Booklovehs Libraby

Copyright, 1903, 1904
By The Libeabt Pdbushing Co.

Copyright, 1904
By Jambs Pott & Co.

/\ « 2 3 2'| ew

First Impression September, 1904

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass.

'°M

1

TO

JUNIUS SPENCER MORGAN

CLASSMATE COLLEAGUE AND FELLOW BOOKLOVER

THIS TOKEN

OF

OLD AND UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP

Preface

As a form of literary art the elaborate
preface is rapidly becoming extinct.
And in the case of so unpretentious a book as
this little collection of essays there can be
neither need nor wish of its momentary re-
vival. For these studies are merely frag-
mentary records of a booklover's joumeyings
through the pleasantest of lands — the land
of books. They have no theories of literature
to expound, no philosophy of life to express.
There is not, so far at least as I can see, any
one central or dominating idea upon which
as a connecting thread these detached essays
are strung. They are simply random im-
pressions of travel, and nothing more.

I have chosen to call them "studies," be-
cause, it seems to me, they bear the same rela-
tion to finished works that the hasty sketches

Preface

of a painter in some notebook or portfolio of
travel bear to his completed pictures. They
make no pretence to being complete and de-
finitive discussions of their themes. They
attempt only to seize certain aspects, to record
certain impressions, of stopping-places on the
journey. They may at least amuse the casual
reader; at best, perhaps, they may interest the
more thoughtful and lead him back once more
to the great originals.

To the editor of the Handbooks published
by the Booklovers Library I owe my thanks
for his kind permission to reprint the essay on
The Poetry of Matthew Arnold, which originally
appeared in the Handbook of the Greater
Victorian Poets. For its publication in the
present collection this essay has been carefully
revised and corrected. The essays on the
Personality of Johnson and on The Last
Minstrel first appeared in the Booklovers
Magazine, and I am indebted to its editor for
the courtesy which has permitted their in-

Preface

elusion in this volume. Of these the first
now appears in a much longer form, the second
is reprinted with only a few verbal changes.
Were I to thank by name all the friends
who have aided me by encouragement, ad-
vice, criticism, and correction during the
years in which these studies have been put
together, I should overrun the limits of a
preface. But if by chance any one of them
should see this page and recall those instances
of help which I so well remember, I would
ask him to feel the sincerity of my unspoken
thanks and to think of me as not all unmind-
ful, not all ungrateful, for past help and present
friendship. T M P

SUver Bay,

Lake George,
Aiigrist, 1904.

Table of Contents
I

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 1

n

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 56

III

The Autobiography of Milton 98

IV

The Personality of Dr. Johnson 132

V '
"The Frugal Note of Gray" 173

VI

The Charm of Goldsmith 207

VII

The Last Minstrel

VIII

The Vitality of Browning 262

The
Poetry of Matthew Arnold

IT is by his poetry that the place of Matthew
Arnold in English Uterature will in the end
be determined. Such was not, it is true, the
opinion of his immediate contemporaries.
Whether they cheered him as a child of the
Sun God slaying with the shafts of Apollo
the giants of Philistia and the dragons of anti-
quated superstition, or whether they shrank
from him as a faithless and hopeless blas-
phemer of national traditions and the ancient
faith, the men of his own age thought rather
of his prose than of his poetry. One reason
for this no doubt lay in the predominating
quantity of his prose. His poems are con-
[IJ

Studies of a Booklover

tained in one not very bulky volume; his
essays and discourses, his lectures and criti-
cisms — religious, educational, social, and
literary — occupy some nine or ten. His
poetry was for the most part written before
he was forty years old; he remained a promi-
nent figure in the world of prose till his death
at something over sixty-five.

Moreover there was something in the
quaUty of Arnold's poetic work that tended to
prevent an instant popularity. Neither the
sentiment nor the splendor which made
Tennyson the darling of his age were his; he
did not have the quick, keen interest in life,
the broad human sympathies, which so rapidly
recommended Browning to the hearts of think-
ing, feeling, men and women on both sides of
the Atlantic, when once the spell of his strange
new style was broken. Arnold's first volume
of poems attracted hardly any attention; his
second he himself withdrew from the public
before fifty copies were sold. A nobly sym-
[2]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

pathetic review by Swinburne of the New
Poems of 1867 marked the turn of the tide.
This was the first book of Arnold's poems
that met with an appreciative reception from
the general public; and with this book he laid
aside his singing robes. Except for the lofty
elegy on Dean Stanley and two or three grace-
ful and tender poems on the death of some
household pets, he wrote no line of poetry
again.

But to-day, when his theological polemics
are neglected alike by friend and foe, when
his social ideals are, for good or evil, very
rapidly left behind in the tremendous advance
of scientific materialism, when even his literary
judgments are assailed as partial and subjec-
tive, the beauty and the worth of his poetry
are dawning more brightly upon a world that
begins to wonder at its own blindness. A
hush has fallen upon English poetry in the
last decade. The clanging trumpet tones of
Browning ring no longer in our ears; the rich
[3]

Studies of a Booklover

and tender harmonies of Tennyson no longer
overwhelm the other voices. Out of the past
there rises the cool, clear, flute-like note of
Arnold — not broad, not deep, but of a charm
for the lovers of purity and perfection in art
such as is hard to find elsewhere in EngUsh
poetry.

No good biography of Arnold exists, but
after all it does not matter much. The im-
portant facts of his life are known, and his
Letters, pubUshed in 1895, give us a presenta-
tion of his personaUty such as few biographies
afford. He was the oldest son of a father
scarcely less famous than himself. Dr. Thomas
Arnold, the scholar, historian, and preacher.
He received the orthodox classical Enghsh
education, at Winchester, at Rugby under his
father, and at Oxford. As an undergraduate
at the university he did not greatly distinguish
himself, although he won a prize for poetry
and took a fellowship at Oriel College. But
he drank deep of the fountains of classical
[4]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

literature and poetry. In one sense of the
word, at least, he is the most classic of the
Victorian poets. In poetry, as in criticism,
he looked back to the Greeks as his models,
and his love of clearness, of order and restraint,
of firm outline and poUshed phrase, are largely
due to his long and loving study of the ancient
masters.

There were, however, other influences upon
his youth than that of the Greeks. Foremost
of these, perhaps, was the influence of Goethe.
No other English poet reveals in the same de-
gree as Arnold the deep impression left on
modem life and thought by the greatest of all
modem poets since Shakespeare. What ap-
pealed to him especially in Goethe was the
keen insight into the problems of life, the
serene and lofty spirit that rose above the tur-
moil of the world, the mingled strength and
sweetness of the poet's nature. In prose and
verse Arnold is never weary of paying homage
to his master.

[5]

Studies of a Booklover

" He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place.
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!
He look'd on Europe's dying hour
Of fitful dream and feverish power;
His eye plunged down the weltering strife,
The turmoil of expiring life —
He said: The end is everywhere —
Art still has truth, take refuse there I
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow
Of terror, and insane distress.
And headlong fate, be happiness."

Even more important, perhaps, in its in-
fluence on the young Arnold was the poetry
and personality of Wordsworth. Of all the
poets of the revolutionary period, Words-
worth has exercised the greatest power over
his successors in English literature. Indeed,
with the exception of Browning, the most
original and independent of them all, there is
hardly a poet, before the advent of the Pre-
[6]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

raphaelites, who does not show strong traces
of his masterful sway. But no other poet
was so reverent a disciple of Wordsworth as
Matthew Arnold. This was due not merely
to the instinctive worship which boyhood pays
to genius, though the long sojourns of the
Arnolds in the region where every flower, and
rock, and stream was sanctified by Words-
worth's song may have laid the foundations
of his discipleship. It was mainly because
Wordsworth had found the secret which Arnold
sought after in vain — the secret whose mys-
tery wrung from him at times his most lyrical
cry. One word appears again and again in
Arnold's verse — " calm." Throughout his
battle with the crushing influences of the world,
in all his doubts and agonies of spirit, Arnold
looked forward to this goal. It was not triumph ,
or knowledge, or love that Arnold prayed for,
but serene, unshaken repose, attained after
the storms of life by self-mastery of spirit.
And Wordsworth had not only attained this

Studies of a Booklover

calm, but seemed to have the power, in happy
moments, to guide his followers to the same
desired haven.

"He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round;
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Smiles broke from us and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sun-lit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
Our youth return' d; for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead.
Spirits dried up and closely furl'd.
The freshness of the early world."

No account of the forces that went to mold
the character of Matthew Arnold would be
complete which neglected the influence exerted
upon him by his father. In some respects
the two were far apart. Dr. Arnold, with all
his genuine goodness, was something of a
Philistine — so much so, that some mocking
[8]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

critic characterized Matthew, the deadly enemy
of PhiHstia, as "David, the son of Goliath."
He was somewhat hard, somewhat narrow,
not only a sincere believer in orthodox Chris-
tianity, but one of its foremost champions
against the new spirit of doubt. At the first
glance it is the difference, rather than the like-
ness, between father and son that is apparent.
But one need not be a profound student of
Matthew Arnold to recognize the paternal
qualities in his work and character. From
his father came his sincerity, his moral earnest-
ness, his care for conduct — in short, all the
Hebraic elements of his nature. With all his
championship of Hellenism Matthew Arnold
was, one feels, rather a Jew than a Greek, more
at home with Saint Paul than with Socrates.
Something more than mere filial reverence in-
spires the noble memorial verses written by
his father's grave. There is spiritual sym-
pathy as well as profound admiration in the
lines which tell of the strength " zealous, benefi-
[9]

Studies of a Booklover

cent, firm," that marked the elder Arnold's
hold on life. And it was in such servants, or
rather sons, of God as his father that the poet
recognized the predestined leaders of mankind
to whom he addressed the apostrophe which
closes Rugby Chapel.

"In the hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race.
Ye, like angels, appear.
Radiant with ardor divine!
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart.
Weakness is not in your word.
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van ! At your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.

Ye fill up the gaps in our files.
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march.
On, to the bound of the waste.
On, to the City of God."

Such were the influences under which the
young poet brought out in 1849 his first book
of verse. The Strayed Reveller and other Poems.
[10]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

It fell, as has been said, still-born from the
press. The same fate, to be sure, has attended
many first volumes of verse, but few have de-
served it less. Browning and Tennyson are,
no doubt, greater poets than Arnold, but only
a prophet after the event would be able to
discern more of promise in the incoherent
beauties of Pauline, or in the somewhat
thoughtless rhymes and fancies of Poems,
Chiefly lyrical, than in this little volume,
while in actual performance it fairly beats
them out of the field. Setting aside the title
poem, a series of pictures loosely strung to-
gether in the irregular rhymeless metre that
Arnold was so fond of, we have here the splen-
did sonnet to Shakespeare, the strong and finely
finished Mycerinus, the magic melodies of
The New Sirens, and the grave pathos of The
Sick King in Bokhara. And there are even
finer things in the book.

The Forsaken Merman, for example, is a
permanent addition to English literature.
[11]

Studies of a Booklover

How good it is may, perhaps, be best ascer-
tained by a comparison with Tennyson's early
poems, the Merman and the Mermaid. It is
hard to praise with discretion the vivid clear-
ness of its pictures, the haunting music of its
changing rhythms, and, best and rarest of all,
the passionate cry of its wild, immortal, yet
strangely human pathos. One, at least, of
the shorter lyrics in this volume shows Arnold
for a brief space under the influence of Shelley,
and it is to be regretted that he did not yield
oftener to the spell. A Question is so purely
Shelleyan that it might almost be classed with
some of the minor songs of the master lyrist.
But after all Arnold at his best has a style of
his own which is more delightful than any
faint Shelleyan echoes. Of that style we need
not attempt a definition; an example will
serve our purpose better, and the lovely and
gracious words fairly tempt the pen to tran-
scribe them.

[12]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

"Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,

And faint the city gleams ;
Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou !
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known.
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone

Spring the great streams."

Walter Bagehot once wrote an interesting
and suggestive essay on the pure, the ornate,
and the grotesque styles in English poetry.
Tennyson serves him well for the ornate,
some carefully chosen passages of Browning
furnish striking specimens of the grotesque,
and for examples of the pure style he goes
back to Wordsworth and to Milton. But he
need not have gone so far, for here, in the
first work of Arnold, we have, and not for
the last time, a specimen of the pure style
almost at its best. It is as classic as a statue
by Praxiteles. Not a word can be added, not
a word can be altered; the pictorial and musical
qualities blend in perfect harmony, and the
[13]

Studies of a Booklover

grave music of the verse gives fit utterance to
the solemn beauty of the thought.

The last poem of the collection, though by
no means the most perfect, is perhaps the most
remarkable, and in many ways the most
characteristic in the book. Resignation is the
first poem where the distinctive Arnoldian
undertone of grave and thoughtful melancholy
vibrates throughout. Here, too, we have in
quintessence Arnold's whole poetic philoso-
phy: the immutability of nature and of her
laws, the restless longing of the heart of man,
the vanity of this longing and of all struggle
to realize it, the duty of renunciation and en-
durance, the aid which nature offers in the
effort to endure, and the final reward of re-
nunciation in the attainment of "quiet, and a
fearless mind." It is not a very cheerful phil-
osophy for a young man of twenty-seven, but
to Arnold, at all times of his hfe, the world was
not a cheerful, though far from an unlovely,
place.

[14]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

" The mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread.
This stream which falls incessantly.
The strange-scrawl' d rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice.
Seem to bear rather than rejoice."

The characteristic notes and beauties of this
volume appear again and again in Arnold's
later poems; Arnold developed, indeed, and
increased his powers, but he remained essen-
tially the same. There is no such change in
him as we find between the Browning of
Pauline and the Browning of The Ring and
the Book, or between the Tennyson of Lilian
or the Sea-Fairies and the Tennyson of Riz-
pah or Vaslness.

Arnold's second volume, Empedocles on Etna
and other Poems, appeared in 1852, and was
hastily withdrawn from circulation by the
author. The reason for this appears to have
been that he could not bear to contemplate
the title-piece in print. "A situation," he
said, "in which a continuous state of mental
[15]

Studies of a Booklover

distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident,
hope, or resistance, is in actual life painful,
not tragic, and its representation in poetry is
painful also." This is no doubt true, and,
moreover, it must be confessed that Emped-
ocles as a drama, even as a closet drama, is
quite impossible. But the poem may be re-
garded in another light than as a drama, and
all lovers of true poetry owe deep gratitude to
Robert Browning, who persuaded Arnold to
reprint in 1867 this long-suppressed work. It
contains in the long monologue of the hero
" the noblest exposition," to quote SAvinburne's
words, " of the gospel of avrdpKtia, the creed of
self-sufficience, which sees for man no clearer
or deeper duty than that of intellectual self-
reliance, self-dependence, self-respect." Even
those who reject this gospel of self-sufficience
as inadequate may appreciate the dignity of
its ideas and the grave beauty of the words in
which they are presented. Of the lovely
group of songs put into the mouth of Callicles
[16]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

there can be but one opinion — they are flaw-
less gems in the crown of English lyric poetry.
And their beauty is enhanced by the perfect
propriety of their setting. Arnold loved to
finish his longer poems with some specially
fine bit of verse, not always very closely con-
nected with the main subject. The classical
example, of course, is the superb finale of
Sohrab and Rustum; but even that great pas-
sage yields in dramatic propriety to the last
song of Callicles. After the bitterness of
human anguish, after the flame and smoke
of Etna, comes Apollo with his choir, comes

"The night in her silence.
The stars in their calm."

Tristram and Iseult, next to Empedocles the
longest poem of this volume, is by no means
the best. It is Arnold's flrst attempt at narra-
tive poetry, and though he was more success-
ful in narrative than in the drama, he can
hardly be called a master in the art of telling
a story in verse. There are many beautiful
[17]

Studies of a Booklover

passages in this poem, chiefly lyrical or de-
scriptive, but it breaks down at the very climax.
Arnold had a strange deficiency of ear, though
at his best none of his contemporaries was
master of a finer music, and in this poem he
chose to embody the parting words of the ill-
starred lovers in a jingling trochaic metre that
jars on every sense of the fitness of things.

Isevlt.
" Tristram, ah, for love of Heaven, speak kindly !
What, I hear these bitter words from thee ?
Sick with grief I am, and faint with travel —
Take my hand — dear Tristram, look on me!

Tristram.
I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage. — "

The truth is that Arnold, one of the least
passionate of English poets, simply could not
conceive such a situation as this, and his
attempt to portray what he had neither seen
nor felt was fore-doomed to failure. A pas-
sage in the third part of the poem probably
represents his own view of such a love as that
of Tristram and Iseult.
[18]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

"I swear, it angers me to see
How this fool passion gulls men potently;
Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest,
And an unnatural overheat at best."

That is a philosophic and, possibly, a correct
view; but it is hardly capable of poetic treat-
ment. To do Arnold justice he seems to have
reahzed his own deficiencies in this matter.
The passion of love, which plays so large a part
in the poetry of Browning and of Tennyson,
is almost entirely absent from his verse. Its
place is taken sometimes by tender affection,
oftener by hopeless longing. Never after his
failure in Tristram and Iseult did he attempt
to handle a great and passionate love-story.

Two of the most noteworthy poems of this
volume are the Memorial Verses and the
Stanzas in Memxyry of the Author of Obermann.
Both belong, as their titles show, to the group
of elegiac poems which go so far to estabUsh
Arnold's rank as a poet. Something more
must be said of this group in the closing esti-
[19]

Studies of a Booklover

mate of Arnold's work. It is enough for the
present to point out that these two poems, both
for conception and execution, for polished
beauty of word and grave dignity of thought,
stand very high in the group to which they
belong.

Two other poems in this volume deserve
more than a passing mention. A Summer
Night is, perhaps, the very highest poetic ex-
pression of the mingled despair and fortitude,
the disgust with the world and the relief to be
found in the contemplation of nature, which
go to make up the essential undertone of most
of Arnold's verse. And the technical excel-
lences of the poem, as always happens when
Arnold is possessed by his theme, are the per-
fect reflection of the underlying thought. The
lovely moonlit night-piece with which the
poem opens, the contrast which it draws be-
tween the slave of life and the rebel, are equally
fine in thought and word; and it rises to a fit
climax of supreme lyrical utterance in the
[20]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

noble apostrophe to the heavens which forms
its close.

The poem known under the various titles
of To Marguerite — In returning a volume of
Letters, Isolation, and To Marguerite — Con-
tinued, is, I think, the loveliest of Arnold's
poems of love. And it is worth noting that
this poem deals, not with the rapture of posses-
sion, nor with the unutterable sadness of re-
membered kisses after death, but with the
sense of that predestined solitude of the soul
which even love is unable to overcome. The
theme is the same as that of Browning's Two
in the Campagna, and nothing can show more
clearly the difference between the character
and art of the two great poets than a com-
parison of the elder singer's strong and vibrat-
ing emotion, full of the sense of infinite passion
and the pain of finite hearts, with the melan-
choly acceptance by the younger of the solenm
laws under which "we mortal milUons live
alone." From the point of view of pure poetry,
[21]

Studies of a Booklover

at least, the comparison does not turn out to
Arnold's disadvantage; the closing phrase, in
which all the depth, and bitterness, and sad
estranging power of the sea are caught up in
three words, may challenge a place among the
greatest single lines of EngUsh poetry.

How any poet could have the heart to with-
draw such a volume from the public is inex-
phcable except on the theory that he retired
in order to make his entrance more effective
when next he appeared in the Usts. The with-
drawal, at any rate, was short, for in the next
year, 1853, Arnold put forth another volume,
omitting, indeed, Empedocles and some other
poems, but reprinting a fair selection from his
earlier work, and adding several new poems of
great worth and beauty.

The longest and most pretentious of these
is Sohrab and Rustum. This is admittedly
the best of Arnold's narrative poems, and by
some critics it is ranked as the first of all his
works. This, however, is an opinion which
[22]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

seems to be based on theory rather than on
fact. The epic is, perhaps, the highest form
of poetry, and undoubtedly this poem is
Arnold's nearest approach to epic height.
But in art a success, even along lower lines,
outweighs an ambitious but unattaining effort.
And that Sohrab and Rustum, in spite of its
manifold beauties, its stately verse, its noble
imagery, and well-conducted story, does not
quite attain will be clear, it seems to me, to
anyone who compares it with the true epic
tone in ancient or modern verse, with the
wrath and sorrow of Achilles, with the love
and vengeance of Kriemhild, with the passion
of battle and of loyalty that rings through the
last canto of Marmion. The situation is one
of the most pathetic in literature; but where
is the thrill of vital sympathy to make us feel
it ? Where is the divine creative power to put
life into the stately but shadowy figures of
father and son caught in the toils of Fate?
Sohrab and Rustum is a noble poem — one
[23]

Studies of a Booklover

that we can read and re-read with increasing
appreciation. But what we feel is rather
admiration for the chaste and pohshed art of
the poet, than the Uving presence of that
fierce and tragic power which, in the true epic,
grips and carries us whither it will.

At least two of the lyrics of this volume
would suffice to save a poet from complete
f orgetf ulness : Philomela, in which Arnold
catches the passion, as surely as Keats did the
magic, of the nightingale's song, and the
wonderful Requiescat. Of such a poem as this
last it is useless to speak. If a reader cannot
see its flawless perfection; if he cannot feel its
tender beauty and solemn pathos, culminating,
as it does, in one inevitable and unforgetable
Une, he is indeed to be pitied, but not to be
argued with.

The Church of Brou, on the other hand,
shares with Tristram the distinction of being
one of Arnold's few uneven, one might al-
most say unsatisfactory, poems. It was ap-
[24]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

parently written some years before the pub-
lication of the volume, and its eariy date may
account for the triviaHty of its first and the in-
adequacy of its second part. But the close is
in Arnold's best vein. Here, as seldom in his
verse, the tender note of human affection
vibrates through the soft reposeful beauty of
the words. It is quite worth while to read
through the earlier parts for the shock of
pleased surprise that comes with the opening
invocation of the third,

"So rest, for ever rest, O princely Pair!"

And surprise gives way to a reverent thank-
fulness for such a precious gift of song, as we
approach the noble climax and listen with the
buried lovers to the passage of the angel's
wings,

" And on the lichen-crusted leads above
The rustle of the eternal rain of love."

The crowning glory of the whole volume is
The Scholar-Cripsy, but we may defer com-
[25]

Studies of a Boohlover

ment on this poem till we can consider it along
with its companion piece, Thyrsis.

Two years later, in 1855, Arnold published
a second series of selections from his earher
poems, adding to them only one short song of
httle value, and the long narrative of Balder
Dead. This poem has had the good fortune
to be praised by Mr. Henley, no mean judge
of poetry and somewhat sparing of his praise.
But one can hardly agree with him that Balder
Dead was "written in Arnold's most fortunate
hour." Whatever has been said in praise of
Sohrab and Rustum may be repeated of this
poem. But it has, if possible, even less of life
than its predecessor. All the world, runs the
old story, wept for Balder's death; but it is
hard to imagine that any human being was
ever moved to tears by Arnold's version of the
strange, sad tale. Its artificial beauties, " faultily
faultless, icily regular, splendidly null," leave
most of us as cold as the waste of snow that Her-
mod traversed on his way to Hela's realm.
[26]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

The year 1858 saw the appearance of the
one work of Arnold's which must be pro-
nounced a hopeless failure. Merope is an at-
tempt to reproduce in English the old Greek
drama. Imitations are, as a rule, fore-doomed
to failure, and of all imitations that of the
Greek drama in modem English seems the
most hopeless. In the nineteenth century, at
any rate, there has been but one approach to
success in numberless attempts, Swinburne's
AtaJanta in Calydon. It is not worth while
in this place to discuss the reason for such
failure; better to lay Merope aside and pass on
to Arnold's last book of verse.

This was the New Poems published in 1867,
the year in which Arnold laid down his profes-
sorship of poetry at Oxford. The book falls
naturally into three parts — the sonnets, the
lyrics rhymed and rhymeless, and the elegies.
Perhaps no single one of the sonnets quite
equals the great apostrophe to Shakespeare in
the first volume, but the group as a whole out-
[27]

Studies of a Boohlover

ranks its earlier fellows. Several of them are
particularly distinguished by the depth and
sincerity of the religious sentiment which
breathes through them — a sentiment which
shows a better, and essentially a truer, side of
Arnold than the reckless flippancy of many
of his controversial writings.

The lyrics of the collection are, with one
exception, hardly up to the earKer standard.
But that exception is so excellent that it alone
would save the volume; it is Dover Beach.
Here once more we have Arnold at his best,
thought, word, and rhythm blending in the
perfect song. It is hard to know what to
praise most in the poem, the glorious picture of
the moonlight and the floodtide, the " passionate
interpretation of nature" which catches in the
tremulous cadence of the waves the eternal
note of sadness, or the famous simile of the
ebbing sea of faith. And besides all these
there is one supreme touch in this lyric which
gives it a unique place among all Arnold's
[28]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

poems — the human cry with which the last
stanza opens,

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another ! "

Here for once the sad, proud consciousness
of isolation gives way to the sense of human
sympathy and comradeship in all disastrous
fight. For once we note in Arnold the pres-
ence of the idea which the great symbolic
painter of our day has embodied immortally
in "Love and Life."

It is after all, however, the elegies which
give to this volume its distinctive note. Of
these, Heine's Grave, in spite of the fine and
often quoted passage on the weary Titan, is
the least satisfactory. It is written in the
irregular rhymeless verse that had such a
dangerous fascination for Arnold. Rugby
Chapel is in the same metre, but here the poet
is really possessed by his theme, and the result
is a very noble tribute to the dead — notice-
able among all of Arnold's elegies for the ex-
[29]

Studies of a Booklover

plicit testimony it bears to his belief in im-
mortality. The Stanzas from Camac and A
Southern Night are memorials to his brother,
the latter a very beautiful lament, flooded, like
so many of Arnold's poems, with moonUght,
and murmurous with the sound of the sea.
Obermann Once More and the Stanzas from
the Grande Chartreuse are naturally connected
by their theme, the lament for a dead faith.
Obermann is somewhat too long. The shadowy
personage who gives the poem its name dis-
courses through nine pages on the rise and
fall of religion, on present despair and on hope
for the future. The first part of his speech,
indeed, is already a classic; everyone knows
the famous stanzas that tell of the hard Pagan
world, the brooding East, the miraculous con-
quests, and slow, reluctant death of Chris-
tianity. But the remainder of the poem is
somewhat diffuse and contrasts unfavorably
with the terser, stronger close of the Obermann
poem of 1852. The Stanzas from the Grande
[30]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

Chartreuse, however, are not open to the
charge of diffuseness. Indeed, it is hard to
see what charge the lover of pure and thought-
ful poetry could bring against them. We have
in them the highest expression in the elegiac
mood of the theme that Arnold treated with
supreme lyric power in Dover Beach. They are
a revelation of the poet's own divided mind.

" Wandering between two worlds, one dead.
The other powerless to be bom."

But they are something more than that. The
poem, as a whole, is a typical, one might
almost say the typical, utterance of the Middle
Victorian era, a period when rationaUstic
science seemed to be carrying all before it.
The calm assumption that the Christian faith
is only " a dead time's exploded dream" is by
no means pecuUar to Arnold. It marks much
of the thought of his day. What is pecuKar
to Arnold is his sincere regret for the vanished
past, his instinctive repugnance to the hardness
[31]

Studies of a Booklover

and loudness of the new age, even though he
believes that the age is right. This attitude
is disclosed even more plainly in the remark-
able poem, Bacchanalia, which is also included
in this volume.

And now we come to Thyrsis, with its pre-
decessor, The Scholar-Gipsy. Here, it would
seem, if anywhere, we have the noblest work
of Arnold. Serene beauty of thought, tender
melancholy of mood, perfect fitness of expres-
sion, and harmonious rhythm, characterize
both these poems and characterize them
throughout. There are no languors, no de-
pressions, no passages of prose thrown into
metrical form. The famous simile with which
The Scholar-Gipsy closes is far from being
the "purple patch" it has irreverently been
styled. One cannot sew a purple patch upon
a robe of Tyrian dye; and, fine as the closing
stanzas are, they yield in excellence to some
of the earlier pictures of English life and
scenery. Two beauties we may note common
[32]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

to both these poems : Arnold's loving memories
of his Alma Mater; and his deep and almost
sensuous delight in aspects of nature insep-
arably blended with those memories. Arnold
has apostrophized Oxford in a famous prose
passage, but all that he says there is packed
into one Une of Thyrsis,

"That sweet city with her dreaming spires."

The loving sympathy with nature apparent
in almost every hne of these poems it is im-
possible to praise too highly. The picture in
Thyrsis of a rain-drenched English garden
with its storm-vexed trees and fallen chestnut
flowers is a masterpiece of poetic word-paint-
ing. Hardly less delightful is the vision of
the moonlit ferry on the stripling Thames in
The Scholar-Cripsy, or the night-piece in
which the line of festal light in Christ-Church
hall shines through the driving snow-storm on •
the Cumner hills. And for once in Arnold's
work the wonted opposition between the rest-
[33]

Studies of a Booklover

less, turbulent soul of man and the sweet calm
of nature disappears. In these two poems
nature and man blend together in a perfect
harmony.

Poetry like this tempts one to linger over it.
There is much that might be said. It is hard
to pass without mention Arnold's striking
success in adapting the conventions of the
antique pastoral elegy to a lament for a modern
poet. Something, too, one would like to say
on the gleam of hope that lights the close of
Thyrsis, faint, indeed, when compared with
the sun-burst that exalts and glorifies the final
stanzas of Adonais, but not without a tender
beauty of its own. But aU one can do is to
recommend these elegies to every lover of pure
poetry. They will serve as an unfailing test
of a reader's power to appreciate poetry for
its own sake.

Westminster Abbey, the elegy on Arnold's
school friend. Dean Stanley, is a noble poem,
but after Thyrsis it seems a little cold, a little
[34]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

artificial. The group of poems on the house-
hold pets, Geist, Matthias, and Kaiser, de-
serves, at least, a passing mention. Here a
very different Arnold is revealed from the
Arnold of the poems or the essays. It is the
Arnold whom only his intimates knew —
gentle, affectionate, playful, and not without
a trace of kindly humor, the centre of a pleasant
company of cats and canaries, and children
and dachshunds. They are not without true
poetic merit, these little poems; but their chief
value Ues in the revelation which they make of
a new and more genial side of the poet's mind
and life.

Some of the characteristic beauties and
defects of Arnold have been revealed by this
critical examination of his successive volumes.
But a brief summary may serve to gather up
the results so far attained and to fix them in
the reader's mind.

In the first place, it is easy to say what
Arnold was not. He was not a great narrative
[35]

Studies of a BooMover

poet. No need, after all, to compare him
with the great masters of the epic — his own
contemporaries surpassed him again and again.
Matthew Arnold could no more have written
How They Brought the Good News pom Ghent
to Aixov The Revenge than he could have writ-
ten the Iliad or Paradise Lost; and this in spite
of his theory that " the eternal objects of poetry
are actions — human actions." But Arnold,
like his master, Wordsworth, achieves the
best results when he departs from theory and
surrenders himself to instinct and inspiration.
He was not himself a man of action, nor was
he capable of sympathizing with action, except
theoretically. He disliked and distrusted nearly
all the great actors in the social and poUtical
movements of his day. Small wonder, then,
that his narrative poems interest us by their
beauty of form, by their lyrical, descriptive, or
meditative passages — by anything in short,
rather than by the human actions which they
portray.

[36]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

Again Arnold is not a dramatic poet. We
may waive the fact that he never wrote a great
play. No more did Browning or Tennyson.
But Arnold cannot lay claim even to the dra-
matic qualities which Browning and Tennyson
possessed. We have seen that he could not
tell a satisfactory story, but it is even plainer
that he could not create a character. As we
review Arnold's work we realize, with a little
touch of surprise, the almost entire absence
from it of men and women. The unreality
of Sohrab and of Rustum has been already
pointed out; the gods in Balder are even more
remote and lifeless; Obermann is a ghost, the
Scholar-Gipsy a myth, even the poet's nearest
friend becomes the conventional dead shepherd
of pastoral elegy. And the women! Mar-
guerite is a dainty lady who allows herself to
be kissed and abandoned, neither with ex-
treme concern; Fausta and Eugenia are mere
nomina umbrae. The truth is that Arnold is
one of the least objective of English poets.
[37]

Studies of a Booklover

Byron's lack of objectivity is a commonplace
of criticism; but Byron had, at least, the gift of
projecting his own great personality into the
figures of his poems. Harold, Manfred, and
Juan are, it may be, mere embodiments of
various aspects of their creator, but they share
something of his fiery life, and so long as the
personaUty of Byron thrills and fascinates, so
long will these characters endure — and that
will be as long as English poetry is read. But
is there any character of Arnold's poetry which
can be identified with Arnold ?

On the technical side of poetry there are few
faults to be found with Arnold's work, yet even
here the adversary may advance something
against him. He lacked almost entirely the
richness of color, the delight in lovely words
for their own sake and for the sake of their
associations, which makes so many lines of
Tennyson a wonder and a wild delight. He
lacked almost entirely the sense of that " natural
magic," to use his own fine phrase, by which
[38]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

at times Shakespeare seems to transport us in
the twinkling of an eye to fairyland. Worst
of all, he often lacked a true ear for rhyme and
rhythm. This led him to perpetrate such
assonances as "ranging" and "hanging," as
" scorn " and " faun " ; at times to write, under
the delusion that it was metrical, such a pas-
sage as the following, which, printed as prose,

reads:

"Thou standest smiling down on me!
Thy right arm, leaned up against the col-
umn there, props thy soft cheek; thy left
holds, hanging loosely, the deep cup, ivy-
cinctured, I held but now."

It would be an interesting and not unin-
structive exercise for the student of poetry to
attempt the scansion of these lines, or even
their arrangement in metrical form. Arnold
never outgrew this dulness and uncertainty of
ear. Some of his most prosaic and unrhyth-
mical passages occur in his last volume of
verse.

And now, having cleared the field, we may
[39]

Studies of a Booklover

proceed to the more pleasing and gracious
task of defining what Arnold was, and of
pointing out his pecuUar poetic characteristics.
He was, undoubtedly, a great didactic and
critical, a great elegiac and lyric poet. Didac-
tic, not in the old-fashioned sense of Pope and
Johnson, nor even in the often too obtrusive
fashion of Wordsworth. But he had a dis-
tinct philosophy of life, and this philosophy
interpenetrates and informs his poetry. It
does not harm it. Arnold, in poetry at least,
was not one of those preachers who are for-
ever dragging in the moral. He lived in the
world of ideas, as some poets, Mr. Kipling, for
example, live in the world of actions. The
desire to impart ideas roused him to a point
as near that of passionate poetic sympathy as
he ever approached. And, accordingly, some
of his very best poetry appears in these eflForts
to communicate ideas which to him were vital
and salutary truths. We need only turn to the
later sonnets, to Resignation, A Summer Night,
[40]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

and the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse
to realize the truth of this statement.

Arnold is, perhaps, the greatest of our criti-
cal poets. He once defined poetry as being
essentially a criticism of life. If poetry were
this and this alone, Arnold would be the
greatest of English poets. Poetiy, of course,
is infinitely more than this, even if we give
to the definition of criticism Arnold's wide
extension of meaning. But whether we take
criticism in this larger sense as a study of life
with the purpose of distinguishing between
the false and the true, or in the customary
narrower sense, as the effort to ascertain the
predominating ideas and salient character-
istics of a writer, Arnold's critical poetry
stands, I think, unrivaled. For a criticism
of life, for a criticism of Hterature, couched
in grave, yet lovely and harmonious verse,
such as abounds in the monologues of Em-
pedocles, in the memorial verses for Words-
[41]

Studies of a Booklover

worth, and in the Obermann poems, we may
go far afield before we find his fitting mate.

Arnold's elegies alone would assign him a
place among the greater Victorian poets. One
critic, indeed, has gone so far as to call him
the greatest elegiac poet in English literature.
This seems a bold saying, for surely Arnold
has never reached such heights as Milton in
Lyddas, Shelley in Adonais, and Tennyson in
In Memoriam. But quantity counts for some-
thing also in determining a poet's work, pro-
vided always that it is quantity which does
not fall below a certain mark of excellence.
And no other English poet has given us so
many grave and tender elegies as the author
of Thyrsis, the Memorial Verses, A Southern
Night, Rugby Chapel, Heine's Grave, the
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and the
two poems in memory of the author of Ober-
mann. The mere roll-call of these titles is
enough to confirm those who know their
Arnold in the behef that he ranks among the
[42]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

very first of the English poets of sorrow and
melancholy meditation. He was, indeed, well
fitted by nature to be an elegiac poet. A
famous phrase in Resignation speaks of the
poet's "sad lucidity of soul." This quality
was eminently characteristic of Arnold him-
self, and it distinguishes and elevates all his
elegies. Sad an elegy must be by its very
nature; but it must also be lucid. Wild and
wandering cries, however poignant and pathetic
they may be, are out of place in this form of
poetry. Unless a poet can so far master his
sorrow as to look through it and above it, he
will prove as incapable of embodying it in the
somewhat conventional forms of the elegy, as
he will prove incapable of filling these forms
with true and sympathetic poetry if his sorrow
be not genuine and deeply felt. From this point
of view, indeed, it might be maintained, and not
altogether without reason, that Thyrsis is the
most perfect elegy in English. And when to
this trait of sad lucidity we add the beauty of
[43]

Studies of a Booklover

the diction, imbued, as it is, with a richness
of color very rare in Arnold's work, and the
melodious rhythm of the echoing Unes, the
reasons for such a preference seem weighty
indeed. But the ranking of poets or poems
is a dangerous, and, indeed, uncritical per-
formance. It is enough to point out what a
poet has done without attempting to place
him above or below his fellows. And of the
beauty and poetic worth of Arnold's elegies
there can be no doubt in the mind of any
student of English poetry.

It is another matter with his lyrical poems.
Arnold is not, as a rule, reckoned one of the
great singers of our language. Yet I believe
the time will come when critics will not only
recognize in Arnold's lyrics the lovehest
flowers in his garden of verse, but will pro-
nounce any anthology of English lyrics in-
complete which does not contain more than
one or two of these priceless blossoms of pure
poetry. Listen for a moment to the lyrical
[44]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

cry that rings through Requiescat, Dover
Beach, In Utrwmque Paratus, the songs of
CaUicles, and consider whether we have not
here a note as rare as it is beautiful. Tenny-
son alone, it seems to me, among Victorian
poets, can equal these effects, and even Tenny-
son lacks at times the purity, the simpHcity,
and the directness which characterize the best
of Arnold's lyrics. Browning has many pas-
sages and some whole poems instinct with true
lyrical feeling, but as a rule Browning is not
subjective enough in mood or simple enough
in expression to be a great lyric poet. On the
other hand, Arnold's profound subjectivity, his
intense sensibiUty of his own moods, and his
power of rendering them in language so
free from taint or flaw that it seems the direct
utterance of the soul, were natural qualifica-
tions for a place among the master lyrists of
our language higher than has yet been awarded
to him — perhaps higher than he ever in
reality attained.

[45]

Studies of a Booklover

One or two characteristics are yet to be
noticed. It is impossible to do justice to
Arnold without taking into account the uni-
form excellence of his work. How much is
there in some of our greatest poets, Words-
worth, for instance, and Browning, that might,
with no loss to their fame, be omitted alto-
gether from a consideration of their work?
But if we set aside the unfortunate Merope,
and one or two shorter poems, what is there
in Arnold that can be omitted without grave
loss .J" One can understand a meaning be-
neath Arnold's laughing answer, when asked
to make a selection from his poems, " I would
like to choose them all."

Closely connected with this characteristic
is the uniform excellence of the single poems.
Sometimes, but rarely, we find purple patches
upon a mantle of hodden-gray; but, as a rule,
each poem maintains throughout an even ex-
cellence of style. And at its highest how pure
and noble is this style of Arnold's! He said
[46]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

of Wordsworth's style that, at his best, Nature
seemed to take the pen and write for him.
No higher praise could be given to any poet,
and no truer praise to much of Arnold's own
poetry. Doubtless this instinct for chastely
finished work, which preserved him alike from
the too frequent redundancies of Tennyson,
and the too startling eccentricities of Brown-
ing, was due to the influence of his classical
studies; but there has been more than one
classically educated poet who has been notably
deficient in this instinct.

One specially characteristic feature of
Arnold's poetry is his treatment of nature.
Since Cowper's day, all great English poets
have been nature lovers. Even Browning,
whose stress lay upon the incidents in ■ the
development of man's soul, illumines his
dramatic poetry with sudden pictures of the
external world that show him to have been a
penetrating observer and a passionate lover
of nature. The poetry of Tennyson, the great
[47]

Studies of a Booklover

master of the idyllic school, is bathed in a
sensuous enjoyment of nature in all her as-
pects. In Arnold, too, there is this ever-
present love of nature, but with a diflFerence.
He does not, like Browning, turn to nature
to illustrate the life of man, nor dbes he, Uke
Tennyson, steep his senses in nature for sheer
delight in her visible beauty. His relation
to the natural world is like that of Words-
worth, a moral relation. But here, again, we
must distinguish. Wordsworth sought in na-
ture the inspiration without which man's life
was stale, flat, unprofitable. To him the
universe was governed by laws, not only
mighty, but everlastingly righteous. The man
who could penetrate through the superficial
aspects of the visible world to grasp these laws,
and who, having grasped them, could shape
his own life in accordance with them, had
learned, in Wordsworth's judgment, the secret
of life. Arnold, on the other hand, draws a
sharp distinction between man and nature.
[48]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

At times, even, as in the sonnet. In Harmony
with Nature, he contrasts the two as opposing
and almost hostile forces;

"Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore."

This, to be sure, is an unusual Xdew with
Arnold. But it is only an exaggeration of his
constantly maintained distinction between the
world of natural phenomena and the world of
man's life and thought. In one of his most
thoughtful poems. Morality, he represents
nature as admiring and applauding " the divine
strife," "the severe earnest air," of man. As a
rule, however, he conceives of nature as apart
from and indifferent to man :

" The world which was ere I was bom.
The world which lasts when I am dead;

Which never was the friend of one.
Nor promised love it could not give.
But lit for all its generous sun.
And lived itself, and made us live."

Yet Arnold is not indifferent to nature be-
[49]

Studies of a Booklover

cause nature is indifferent to him. On the
contrary he finds in the contemplation of na-
ture the attainment, temporary to be sure, but
still the attainment, of what with all his soul
he most desires — calm. And hence it comes
that he turns again and again to the more
tranquil and soothing aspects of the world
about him, to the peaceful beauty of the Eng-
lish country-side, to the quiet flow of a great
river towards its final home, and, most of all, to

"The night in her silence.
The stars in their calm."

It has been said that Arnold regarded na-
ture as a sedative, an anodyne. Such a state-
ment is one of the half-truths of criticism
which, while not without a basis of fact, are
responsible in the end for a wholly wrong im-
pression. It is true that Arnold turns with a
profound sense of relief from the weariness,
the fever, and the fret of human life to the
calm, untroubled world of nature. But he
by no means used nature as a drug to deaden
[50]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

his senses. The contemplation of nature was
to him rather a bath that at once cleansed
him from the dust and stains of conflict, and
sent him out refreshed and strengthened to
face the world again. It is worth recalling
the fact that Arnold was a hard-working man.
By far the greater part of his poetry was com-
posed during the twenty years that he served
as an inspector of EngUsh schools, hurrying
from town to town, for long years without a
resting-place that he could call his home, con-
stantly engaged in the mind and soul destroy-
ing task of reading examination papers, and
fighting, like Paul at Ephesus, against the wild
beasts of British ignorance, obstinacy, and
PhiUstinism. It is no wonder that he turned
from such a battle to seek the consolations of
nature. The wonderful and laudable thing is
that he always went back to the battle again.
And this brings us to the last and noblest
characteristic of Arnold's poetry; its essentially
manly tone and temper. Arnold has not the
[51]

Studies of a Booklover

strong and happy optimism of Browning nor
the emotional hopefulness of Tennyson. More
a child of his age than either of his great
contemporaries, he reflected, as neither of
them did, the prevailing spirit of his time. It
is for this that superficial critics call him a poet
of doubt and despair. Of doubt he is, in a
sense, a poet, inasmuch as he gives utterance
to the thought of his age, but never of despair.
The vigorous teachers of his youth — Goethe,
Wordsworth, his own father — forbade such
mental cowardice. And Arnold was at heart
a deeply religious nature, not a mystic, not an
enthusiast, but one whose religion was em-
braced in the word, conduct. If he laid aside
much of the armor of faith worn by his an-
cestors, it was only to fight more freely in the
lighter gear.

' ' Hath man no second life ? — Pitch this one high !
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see ? —
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us? Ah I let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!"
[52]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

On the whole, and in spite of occasional
traces of weakness, the dominant note of
Arnold's poetry is one of steadfast, almost
stoical, endurance of present evils, not with-
out gleams of hope in a future deHverance,

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope.
Still clutching the inviolable shade."

Like Tennyson he trusted that somehow
good would be the final goal of ill. But unlike
Tennyson he was not content to rest in a
vague "somehow." The goal, he held, must
be attained by man's own conscious effort; and
to Arnold's mind the task, though attended by
disheartening difficulties, was not impossible.
In hnes which may be regarded as closing his
poetic career, he represents the typical figure
of an age of doubt and despair as prophesying
the coming of a new and better day:

"What though there still need effort, strife?
Though much be still unwon ?
Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life!
Death's frozen hour is done !

[53]

Studies of a Booklover

The world's great order dawns in sheen.
After long darkness rude,
Divineher imaged, clearer seen.
With happier zeal pursued."

Arnold himself found salvation in a gospel
of morality touched by the emotion of poetry,
and he looked forward to a time when all the
world would listen to this gospel and find in it

"One common wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again."

That his creed seems heterodox to many, per-
haps to most, in our day as in his own, does
not alter the fact that he believed in it as a
means of escape from the deadening influences
of the world, and that so beheving he sorrowed
not as one that has no hope. It is not what he
believed, but the fact that he believed, which
constitutes the moral and spiritual value of
Arnold's work.

Enough has been said to justify Matthew
Arnold's claim to a place among the greater
Victorian poets — if hardly the equal of Tenny-
[54]

The Poetry of Matthew Arnold

son or Browning, yet in the same class with
them. Indeed it seems by no means improb-
able that a poet of such grace and purity, of
such high artistic ideals and achievements, of
such moral dignity and manly fortitude, will
come to be recognized more and more clearly
with the years that make impartial judgment
possible as one of the great masters in the
broad and lovely realm of English poetry,

[55]

Old Edinburgh
and Her Poet-Laureate

IN the early decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury the prosperity of Edinburgh was a
thing of the past and her total ruin seemed a
thing of the near future. The Union of the
Crowns in 1707 by abohshing the Parliament
of the northern kingdom had swept fashion
and trade from the wynds and closes of her
ancient capital into the whirlpool of London,
and in so doing had struck an apparently
mortal blow at the welfare of the good town.
Scotch poets and pohticians alike were loud
in lament over the desolation which had fallen
upon her ancient glories. "There is the end
of an auld sang, " cried Lord Chancellor Sea-
field, when the act of Union was signed; and
ten years afterward Allan Ramsay apostro-
[56]

Robert Ferguson

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

phized the once fashionable but then deserted
quarter of the Canongate,

"London and death gar thee look droll.
And hing thy head."

For nearly half a century the cloud of pov-
erty and abandonment hung heavily over the
town. There was no commerce, and little
trade. The nobles and gentry who had been
wont to spend their hohdays and guineas in
Edinburgh flourished in London or pined at
their country seats according as their politics
were Whig or Tory. The University was
housed in a group of shabby buildings where
a handful of students gathered to hear a set
of "useless, needless, headless and defective"
professors prelecting on pseudo-science and
mediaeval metaphysics. Alone of Scottish in-
stitutions there remained unbroken the fierce
and intolerant national church, which, no
longer finding a counterpoise in the power of
Parliament, exercised a rigorous and unchal-
lenged domination over the minds and man-
[57]

Studies of a Booklover

ners of men. Its seizers and compurgators
arrested the godless who appeared upon the
streets "during sermons" on the Sabbath.
Its obedient magistrates closed the doors of
Allan Ramsey's little theatre and pried into
his ^bookshop in search of " villainous, profane,
and obscene books and plays." Not even
the privacies of family life were hidden from
the ever watchful eye of the kirk-session.

From the strict inquisition of the church
"non-professors" fled to the club for refuge,
and the very names of some of the more noted
clubs in Edinburgh were ominous of rebellion
against the rule of the saints. The Sulphur
Club, the Hell-Fire Club, and Pandemonium
rang with the lampoons on the clergy, the
loose stories, and the ribald songs that marked
the reaction in Scottish society against the
severity of church disciphne. Between the
crushing tyranny of the kirk on the one hand,
and the reckless license of the ungodly on the
other, Edinburgh in the first half of the eigh-
[58]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

teenth century must have been as unpleasant
a place of residence as ever thirty thousand
souls were gathered in.

Between the years 1750 and 1760, however,
affairs began to mend. The country at large
was rapidly growing rich and prosperous.
Improved methods of agriculture had redeemed
many a barren heath and doubled the pro-
ductivity of arable land. Rents rose in the
most amazing fashion; and for the first time
in the history of Scotland began to be paid in
money instead of in kind. The laird who
had formerly received an over-supply of skinny
fowls, half-starved sheep, and wretched oats
and barley, now found himself in possession
of an income sufficient to raise the ancestral
mortgage, educate his sons, and marry off
his daughters. In the West a thriving trade
with the American colonies had sprung up,
and Glasgow became a gate through which
a golden stream poured into the country.
Employment was found in England and her
[59]

Studies of a Booklover

colonies for the canny Scot who served his
country and feathered his own nest with equal
diligence. And what he made abroad he
spent at home. Sons of peasants and crofters
returned full-handed to buy the estates on
which their ancestors had toiled, and to erect
beside the ruined keep of the old lord the
stately mansion house of the new proprietor.
With the reviving prosperity of the country
the fortunes of the capital began again to
flourish. From all over Scotland the gentry
and nobility flocked into Edinburgh to find
lodgings permanent or temporary in some
narrow flat in the tall " lands " of the old town.
The deserted Canongate became once more
the center of wealth and fashion. In the dec-
ade or so between 1759 and the opening of
the New Town of Edinburgh it was estimated
that two dukes, sixteen earls, two dowager
countesses, seven lords, seven chief-justices,
and thirteen baronets, not to speak of minor
gentry, made their homes in that now squalid
[60]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

district. Once more the narrow streets of
the gray metropolis were brightened by the
gay dresses and pretty faces of high-bom
ladies and rang far into the night with the songs
and laughter of noble beaux and macaronis.

Even the iron-bound kirk expanded under
the genial influence of the new prosperity.
A strong and gradually increasing party in
her councils sought to relax her rigorous dis-
cipline and to mingle something of humanity
and culture with the sincere but narrow piety
of former days. Loud was the lament of
evangelical elders, crying out with David
Deans, "My bowels — my bowels — I am
pained at the very heart," over what they
termed the "ulcers and the imposthumes and
the sores and the leprosies" of the kirk; but
the new tendency was irresistible, and in spite
of lament and protest the Church of Scotland
became, for the most part, what it has since
continued to be, one of the greatest civilizing
and humanizing agencies of the country.
[61]

Studies of a BooMover

A similar change took place about the same
time in the world of learning and letters.
Robertson, the accomplished leader of the
liberal party in the church, was for thirty
years Principal of Edinburgh University, and
his administration was the most successful
that the old university had ever known. In
1770 the number of students was seven hun-
dred, more than double what it had been at
the time of the Union. The wretched build-
ings, more fit, as Robertson said, for alms-
houses than for a college, were in part swept
away, the corner stone of a new structure was
laid, and though the work was not completed
in Robertson's lifetime, it is to his initiative
that Edinburgh owes the stately edifice whose
dome to-day rises high over the steep incUne
of the South Bridge. Of far greater impor-
tance, however, than the increased number
of students or the reconstruction of the build-
ings was the new spirit which Robertson and
his associates diffused throughout the univer-
[62]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

sity. The crabbed, pedantic temper of the
old days gave place to a polished, liberal, and
broadly human culture. The skepticism of
Hume was attacked and the authenticity of
Ossian defended without a trace of the bitter-
ness which had raged in the theological and
critical writings of the preceding generation.
From the portraits of these old professors
there beams a gentle humor and a kindly
optimism admirably in keeping with their well-
brushed small-clothes, their silk stockings, and
their powdered wigs.

No small part of this kindliness and culture
was due to the eminently social life of the so-
called " Literati " of those days, a body to which
many of the Edinburgh faculty belonged. Its
oldest and most famous member was, of course,
the great philosopher and historian, David
Hume; its profoundest and most original
thinker was Adam Smith. Hume lived in a
flat in the Canongate which he boasted of as
singularly free from vermin; Adam Smith
[63]

Studies of a Booklover

spent the greater part of his life at the little
town of Kirkcaldy in Fife. But the country
scholar made frequent visits to his brother
wise man in the capital, and the suppers at
Hume's lodgings in James' Court were true
caena deorum. Hume was something of an
epicure; he prided himself on his recipe for
soupe a la reine, on his beef and cabbage, on
his mutton and old claret. There seems to
have been some point in the contemporary
sneer which spoke of Hume and his friends as
the "Eaterati," rather than the " Leeterati,"
as, in broadest Scots, they called themselves.
Yet the great attraction of these suppers was
not the food and wine, however excellent, but
the company that Hume gathered around him.
There was John Home, author of the porten-
tous tragedy of "Douglas," firmly believed
by all good Scotchmen to outrank anything
of WuUie Shakespeare's. There was Adam
Ferguson, once the fighting chaplain of the
Black Watch, now Professor of Moral PhU-
[64]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

osophy at the university. Boswell would be
there with brand-new stories of the world of
London letters, and of the great Cham who
ruled that world. Law was represented by
Lord Kanes, cynical, learned, and industrious,
who wrote books faster than his rival. Lord
Monboddo, could read them. Even such
pillars of the church as Robertson, Blair, and
Carlyle of Inveresk, did not disdain to grace
the board of the most dangerous of skeptics.
Hume's personal character, simple, benevo-
lent, marked by an almost childlike blandness
of good humor, was of a sort to make even a
zealous churchman forget his essay on miracles ;
and Adam Smith's verdict that his friend ap-
proached " as nearly to the idea of a perfectly
wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature
of human frailty will permit," thoiagh it seemed
to the jealous orthodoxy of Boswell a " noxious
weed in the moral garden," merely echoed the
universal opinion of the philosopher's inti-
mates.

[65]

Studies of a Booklover

All this new wine of the spirit was poured
into old bottles, so far at least as the dwell-
ing-place and habitation of the Edinburghians
went. For centuries the town which had
grown up along the steep and narrow ridge
rising from the Abbey of Holyrood to the
still more ancient Castle had retained almost
the same dimensions. On the north, the deep
valley with its loch, on the south, the swampy
grounds, seemed to forbid any lateral expansion.
But what the city lacked in breadth it made
up in height. Story upon story its lofty
houses soared up from the gray rock toward
the gray sky. Within them were huddled all
sorts and conditions of men, members of the
proletariat in the cellar, noblemen and judges
in the intermediate stories, with a family or
two of workmen in the garret. There were
no slums in the old town where the highest
and the lowest in the land inhabited the same
building.

Or perhaps it would be better to say that
[66]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

the city was one vast slum. For the manners
and customs of its inhabitants were dirty be-
yond description. There were no drains in
the houses, no sewers beneath the streets. At
ten o'clock each night the accumulated filth
of each flat was poured down from the windows
upon the paveihent to the tune of a wild
chorus of "gardy loo" (gardez I'eau). Its
varied stenches, "the flowers of Edinburgh"
some wicked wit called them, arose to heaven;
and the belated foot-passenger picking his way
through the dimly lighted streets had a dangerous
and malodorous journey homewards. " I smell
you in the dark, " muttered Johnson as he
rolled along the High Street towards Boswell's
lodgings on the night of his arrival at Edin-
burgh. At seven o'clock each morning a
scanty train of scavengers appeared to clean
the streets; except on Sunday, when neither
necessity, charity, nor mercy were deemed to
demand their attendance. The common stairs
within the houses were at least as filthy as the
[67]

Studies of a Booklover

streets without. The very churches were, as
Boswell testifies, shamefully dirty. When
Johnson saw the sign "Clean your feet" at
the door of the Royal Infirmary, he remarked
to Boswell, not altogether without a chuckle
of true English superiority, "There is no
occasion for putting this at the doors of your
churches."

Within the tall "lands," built so close together
that the inhabitants of adjoining houses could
often shake hands across the deep but narrow
chasm that divided them, the inhabitants Uved
in the most confined of quarters. Four, five,
or at most six rooms constituted the apart-
ments of the wealthiest families. Servants
slept outside the house or under the kitchen
table; cots were made up for the nurse and
children in the master's study, turned-up beds
with curtains drawn around them stood in
the drawing room. Naturally the entertain-
ing that could be done in such apartments
was of the smallest. My lady could receive
[68]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

a few friends over a cup of tea in her bedroom,
but when her lord wished to dine or wine his
friends recourse was had of mere necessity to
a tavern.

Taverns, in fact, played almost the same
part in the social life of Edinburgh during the
third quarter of the eighteenth century as
coffee-houses had done in London in Addison's
time. They were the common meeting-places
of a race of men to whom home meant Uttle
more than a place to sleep. Doctors met their
patients, lawyers consulted with their cKents,
over a mug of ale or a tass of brandy in the
httle rooms of a dark tavern half underground.
Here the city magistrates were accustomed to
meet, and here the ministers of the General
Assembly were entertained. Even trades-
people attended to their business as much
within the tavern as within the shop. As a
result, the greater part of the male population
of Edinburgh drank steadily from mom till
eve and far on into the night. At ten o'clock
[69]

Studies of a Booklover

at night the drum of the city guard warned all
God-fearing men to leave the taverns and seek
their homes, in accordance with the provisions
of an ancient law which closed all places of
entertainment at that hour. But the law at
this time was laughed at by the very magis-
trates sworn to enforce it. Scott's picture of
Councillor Pleydell is but a faint sketch of the
accomplished toper of the olden time. Even
to-day the capacity of a well-seasoned Scotch-
man for his native drink is something to appal
the untried foreigner; but if we may believe a
tithe of the stories collected by such a creditable
authority as Dean Ramsay, the Scotch of to-
day are but poor and degenerate scions of a
heroic race.

It was in the nature of things impossible
that the close and confined life of " land," flat,
and tavern should endure. Population grew
denser and wealth increased, while new ideas
of comfort sprang up that were impossible of
reaUzation under the then prevaiUng circum-
[70]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

stances. One by one, and with a certain hesi-
tation, families crept out of their gloomy
wynds and narrow flats to find a home in the
"self-contained" houses built about 1760 in
George Square, a few minutes' walk to the
south of the Old Town. In the opposite
quarter the great North Bridge was built to
span the valley that still separates the Old
Town from the New. Plans were laid for
draining the Nor' Loch where the Princes
Street gardens now he; and little by little
shops and dwelling houses began to push
westward along what is now the finest street
in the British Isles. As early as 1770 David
Hume, who might almost have been called the
presiding genius of the pleasant life of the Old
Town, removed to a house across the bridge
on the comer of a little unnamed lane which
some wag baptized in his honor St. David's
Street. In a couple of decades the movement was
accomplished and the "lands" of the Canon-
gate and High Street, once more deserted by
[71]

Studies of a BooMover

their noble and wealthy occupants, were turned
over to the tenancy of the lower classes. By
1783 the Lord President's old lodgings were
occupied by a " rouping wife " who sold old fur-
niture, a chairman left Lord Drummore's former
apartment because he was not sufficiently ac-
commodated, and troops of dirty children
swarmed and littered on the stairs along which
all the beauty and fashion of Edinburgh had
passed two short decades before. The glory
of the Old Town had departed, and the social
life of the New Town was a new Hfe under
new conditions. But the old did not pass
away without its sacer vates. Just at the height
of the Old Town's prosperity in 1769, Robert
Fergusson returned from a fruitless expedi-
tion to the North to become the laureate of
the city where he had been bom and where he
was so soon to die.

The researches of Fergusson's indefatigable
biographer. Dr. Grosart, have made it pos-
sible for us to form some notion of the poet's
[72]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

early life and training. He was bom, it ap-
pears, in 1750, in a little old house in Cap-and-
Feather Close, a dirty alley opening off the
High Street. His father, a struggling clerk
and copyist, accomplished with some measure
of success the seemingly impossible task of
feeding, clothing, and educating four children
on his meagre salary of £20 a year. Robert's
health was from the beginning delicate; but he
managed, none the less, to secure a first-rate
education at the Edinburgh High School, the
Dundee Grammar School, and the University
of St. Andrews. Like so many poor young
Scotchmen, he was destined by his parents
for the ministry, for which calling a four years'
course at the university was a necessary prepa-
ration. The few anecdotes that remain of
Fergusson's college life, however, show him a
youth of anything but clerical tendencies. He
wrote verses in broad Scots satirizing his mas-
ters and his companions. He was degraded
from the post of precentor in the college chapel
[73]

Studies of a Booklover

for an irreverent jest upon a bibulous fellow-
student, and he was at one time actually dis-
missed from the university, though, as he was
recalled within four days, the ofPence can
hardly have been a weighty one. On the other
hand, he read Virgil and Horace with diligence
and enjoyment, spent a good portion of his
frugal stipend upon handsome editions of
Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, and sedulously
cultivated the friendship of Professor Wilkie,
the farmer philosopher, and author of the
ponderous " Epigoniad." In fact, his character
was well summed up by the college porter as
" a tricky callant, but a fine laddie for a' that."
A few months before his graduation his
father's sudden death put an end to whatever
thought he may have had of pursuing his
studies for the ministry, and after a vain at-
tempt to secure some position through the
favor of a prosperous uncle in Aberdeenshire,
he returned to seek his fortune in his native
town.

[74]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

Soon after his return, Fergusson secured a
position as a transcriber of legal papers in
the Commissary Clerk's office. The pay was
miserably low and he eked it out by copying,
in a fine, clear hand, wills, decrees of divorce,
and anything else that came in his way, at the
not exorbitant rate of a penny farthing a page.
To us, looking back upon those times, the post
seems, perhaps, one degree more wretched
than the gaugership of Bums. But dreary
as was the drudgery of endless transcription,
it brought him enough to support life in those
good old days of cheap living, and while per-
forming the duties of his office with scrupulous
punctuality, he found amusement in plenty in
the sights and sounds of his native town. He
formed an acquaintance with the actors of
the little theater which had succeeded in estab-
lishing itself in Edinburgh, and a seat in the
Shakespeare box was reserved for him at every
performance. He was passionately fond of
music, particularly of his native Scotch airs.
[75]

Studies of a BooMover

His love of company and good cheer soon in-
troduced him to the club life of the taverns.
He became a frequenter of Luckie Middle-
mist's, where gin was sold for five shillings a
gallon, of Robin Gibb's and Indian Peter's
in the precincts of the law courts. He knew
the shades of "Pandemonium," where the
salamanders, as the members called them-
selves, were wont to swill

"The comforts of a burning gill."

In due time his fame as a poet and his talent
as a singer introduced him to the famous Cape
Club, a body which lived in a perpetual high
jinks of the sort described by Scott in Guy
Mannering. Every member — and the mem-
bers embraced all sorts and conditions of men,
from Lancashire, the comic actor, and Rae-
bum, the most famous of Scotch portrait
painters, to Gavin Wilson, the poeticizing shoe-
maker, and Deacon Brodie, the notorious
burglar — was dubbed a Icnight and received
[76]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

a nickname founded upon sojne adventure
which had befallen him. Fergusson received
the title of Sir Precentor, and took his seat
among such worthy peers as Sir Hayloft, Sir
Beefsteaks, and Sir Old Wife. A song of Fer-
gusson's written for the Cape Club, and still
in manuscript among the Laing papers in the
Library of Edinburgh University, celebrates
the feasts of the Cape Elnights upon Welsh
rabbit, Glasgow herring, caller tippeny and
porter, — cheap banquets, certainly, where " six-
pence would purchase a crown's worth of bKss,"
— and inveighs with startling frankness against
the folly of the man who would abandon these
revels for the embraces of the strange woman.
It is, perhaps, deserving more than a pass-
ing notice that woman, strange or otherwise,
played little or no part in Fergusson's life.
He was distinctly a man's man, dehghting in
the social life of the clubs with their songs and
frolics and general good fellowship. The
Amandas and Stellas of his EngUsh poems are
[77]

Studies of a Booklover

evidently mere poetic conventions without
basis of rerflity. In his Scotch poems, vrhere
alone his true character appears, a woman's
name is barely mentioned except with repro-
bation. In fact, Fergusson seems to have
been as resolute an abstainer from female in-
tercourse as his great successor. Bums, was
addicted to it in every shape, from an intrigue
with a serving girl to a platonic correspond-
ence with Clarinda. Stevenson has spoken
of Fergusson as "a poor, drunken, vicious
boy." Drunken he was, no doubt, too often,
and drunkenness, we are told in a characteris-
tic Scotch phrase, leads to vice, but in Fer-
gusson's case the second step was never taken.
It was not until some time after his return
to Edinburgh that Fergusson appeared in
print as a poet, and then his debut was of the
most unpromising sort. The three poems that
formed his first contribution to the columns
of Ruddiman's Weekly were pastorals of the
dullest and most conventional type. Damon,
[78]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

Alexis, and Corydon recline on the slopes of
the Pentlands and warble responsively of
Aurora, Cynthia, and Sol, of the drooping olive
and the trembling zephyr. It is all very poor
stuff, of the pseudo-classic fashion, then prev-
alent in England, without a touch of the true
Scotch fire which glows through all his poems
in the vernacular. The succeeding poems of
this year were all English and all equally
worthless. Nothing can be more pitiful than
the sentimental Complaint on the Decay of
Friendship, except perhaps the mock heroics
of A Saturday's Expedition. But with the be-
ginning of the next year Fergusson found his
true vein. The Daft Days which appeared
in January, 1772, was written in a famous
vernacular stanza which had been handed
down from the courtly poets of the middle
ages by David Lindesay and Allan Ramsay.
The simpUcity, directness, and vividness of the
opening lines show at once that the poet has
emerged into the freedom of his mother-tongue
[79]

Studies of a Booklover

and is no longer painfully attempting to culti-
vate the olives of the south on the heather-
clad hills of his northern land. The faultless
mastery of a somewhat difficult metre is in
admirable contrast to the stilted measures of
his English verse. The hit of the stanza sets
the foot tapping like the music of the famous
reel it celebrates.

"Fiddlers! your pins in temper fix,
And roset well your fiddle sticks,
But banish vile Italian tricks

From out your quorum.

Nor fortes wi' pianos mix —

Gie 's TuUochgorum."

Fergusson's flowering time was brief, but
rich. From January, 1772, to December, 1773,
a series of poems both in Enghsh and Scots
appeared in Ruddiman's. The latter were for
the most part vivid pictures of Edinburgh life,
as Fergusson knew it, such as the King's
Birthday, Caller Oysters, and the Rising of the
Session. There were a few broadly realistic
sketches of the life and amusements of the
[80]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

lower classes, and, by way of contrast, a group of
half -humorous, half -sentimental nature poems,
such as the Ode to the Bee, the Ode to the
Gowdspink (gold-finch), and On Seeing a Butter-
fly in the Street. Perhaps the most striking of
all is The Farmer's Ingle, a charmingly sym-
pathetic picture of a peasant's home, which,
in addition to its own merits, has the peculiar
glory of having inspired the best known and
best loved of Scottish poems, the Cotter's
Saturday Night. It is impossible to compare
the two without seeing whence the later and
greater poet drew his inspiration; and Bums
was honest enough to acknowledge his debt.
"Rhyme," he said in a letter to Dr. Moore,
"I had given up; but meeting with Fergus-
son's Scottish Poems, I strung anew my wildly-
sounding lyre with emulating vigor."

On the Edinburgh Literati Fergusson's poems
made Kttle or no impression. These gentlemen
were indeed an Anglophile and rapidly angliciz-
ing set. In 1773 Dr. Johnson noted that the
[81]

Studies of a Booklover

conversation of the Scotch grew every day less
displeasing to an EngUsh ear. "The great,
the learned, the ambitious, and the vain," he
remarks (and it is probable that few of the
Literati would escape inclusion under one of
these heads), " all cultivate the English phrases
and the EngKsh pronunciation." And if this
were so in daily intercourse, still more was it
the case in the written word. Hume was al-
most childishly eager to avoid a lapse into the
vernacular; and Dr. Beattie, author of the once
famous and now forgotten Minstrel, warned
his precocious son so solemnly against the use
of "Scottish words and other improprieties"
that after he grew up " he would never endure
to read what was written in any of the vulgar
dialects of Scotland." It is not uninstruc-
tive in this matter to note that Fergusson's
longest and most ambitious poem, Auld Reekie,
was dedicated to the future biographer of
Beattie, Sir William Forbes, and was treated
by that worthy and prosy gentleman with the
[82]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

silent scorn that an effusion so full of "Scot-
tish words and other improprieties" deserved.
But the common people, not yet anglicized
out of their national sentiment and their
mother tongue, hailed with delight the advent
of a new poet in the racy Doric of their an-
cestors. A chorus of applause greeted Fer-
gusson as the true successor of Allan Ramsay
in suiting his lines to the folk of the hills and
braes. The circulation of the paper in which
his poems appeared increased beyond expec-
tation, and the poems themselves were copied
and reprinted all over Scotland. Toward the
close of 1772 he felt justified in collecting his
scattered verses into a volume. The little
book contained barely a dozen of the Scotch
poems and was padded out with a mass of
inane EngKsh verse, but it met with a sur-
prising success. Fergusson cleared at least £50
by it, a sum twice as large as that which ac-
crued to Bums for his first volume of verse.
The publication of this volume and the en-
[83]

Studies of a Booklover

suing golden harvest were the last bright spot
in the poet's short career. Early in 1774 his
constitution, at no time robust, showed evi-
dent signs of giving way under the double
strain of desk-work all day and high jinks half
the night. There is a silly story which Steven-
son seems to have beUeved of Fergusson's
having been frightened into madness by a lurid
discourse on Death and Hell pronounced to
him by a grim divine amid the appropriate
surroundings of a churchyard and a ruined
abbey. As a matter of fact the discourse in
question was dehvered two years before Fer-
gusson's outbreak of insanity. But it is true,
and it is by no means surprising, when one
considers his early training and the circum-
stances of his life, that his madness, like
Cowper's, took the form of reUgious mania.
He threw all his manuscripts into the fire,
abandoned his office work, and refusing all
social invitations, sat poring for hours over
the Bible. A paraphrase of Job's tremendous
[84J

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

curse which he composed about this time
shows, sadly enough, the nature of his scrip-
tural studies. At one time, indeed, there
seemed hopes of his recovery; but an unfor-
tunate accident completed his ruin. Return-
ing late at night from a visit to a friend, he
stumbled on the stairs and fell violently to the
bottom. He was picked up senseless, and
when consciousness returned, his reason was
gone. He raved of the work he was destined
to accomplish as a minister of the gospel, and
grew so violent that it took three men to
hold him. It was impossible for him to re-
main in the poor lodging house his mother
kept, and he was accordingly in one of his
quiet and apparently lucid moments conveyed
in a sedan chair under the pretense of visiting
a friend to the Schelles (cells) where pauper
lunatics were confined. The yell which the
poor wretch set up on discovering where he
had been taken still rings in the ears of those
who know the story of his brief, unhappy life.
[85]

Studies of a Boohlover

Confinement in a public lunatic asylum was,
in those days, a species of permitted torture.
The happiest result that could be wished was
a speedy death, and this blessing was soon
accorded to Fergusson. His mother and sister
visited him the night before he died. He was
very weak and broken, but, for the moment,
quite sane. He begged his sister to come
often and sit with him and complained of the
cold he suffered in his fireless cell. When the
keeper called the women out at the closing
hour, the poor boy — he was only twenty-four
— burst into tears and cries. " Do not go yet,
mother," he wailed, " do not leave me, do not go
yet." He died alone and untended that night.
It would be, perhaps, too much to rank
Fergusson among the inheritors of unfulfilled
renown who rose to greet the risen Adonais.
Making every allowance for his brief life and
straitened circumstances, it is hardly possible
to find in his work the promise of great things
cut short by an untimely death. Much has
[86]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

been made of his relation to Bums, and Dr.
Grosart has pointed out how interpenetrating
was Fergusson's influence upon his great dis-
ciple. On the other hand, little has been said
of his indebtedness to Ramsay, from whom
he borrowed most of his metres and many of
his subjects. Fergusson stands, indeed, as a
connecting link between two greater poets,
renewing the fading tradition of the one and
preparing the way for the glorious appearance
of the other. Yet he is not without merits of
his own which raise him above the necessity
of being judged merely by the historic esti-
mate. He possessed a real mastery of his
craft, a true ear for the national metres and
rhymes, an amazing command of the rich
vernacular, a true feeling for nature, a sly and
pawky humor, and a notable gift of realistic
description. His gift for verse was, perhaps,
hardly so much a heaven-bom genius as an
earthly talent, but it was a talent, genuine,
versatile, and well-employed.
[87]

Studies of a Booklovef

Fergusson was above all a national poet.
His muse did not, to quote his own picturesque
phrase, flee away beyond Parnassus and seek
for Helicon, " that heath'nish spring," but was
content with Highland whiskey. The Amo
and the Tiber — which to be sure he never
saw — were to him but " lifeless dowie pools "
compared with bonny Tweed, or Forth. At
times his nationahsm shows itself in amus-
ing, half-hunjorous, half-chauvinistic, outbursts,
as when he falls foul of the professors of St.
Andrews for the "superb treat" they had
hastened to offer that slanderer of Scotland,
Samuel Johnson. The bill of fare which he
declares they were in duty bound to set before
the Doctor reads like the menu of some St.
Andrews club on a Burns anniversary: a hag-
gis, a singed sheep's head, sheep's trotters,
brose, blood puddings, a girdle farl (griddle
cake), and small ale in a wooden quegh. A
St. Andrews dinner to-day would, to be sure,
call for stronger drink than small ale. At
[88]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

times again he re-echoes in all seriousness the
complaints that Allan Ramsay had uttered
half a century before as to Scotland's ruin at
the hands of the " predominant partner," and
he has nothing but hard words for the laird
turned politician who seeks his fortune at the
English court. Fergusson's position as a
national poet is of course by no means unique.
Dunbar, Ramsay, Burns, and Scott are poets
of Scotland, in a broader sense than his most
devoted admirers will claim for Fergusson.
But no Scottish poet, whether greater or less
than he, has been so peculiarly the poet of
Edinburgh and Edinburgh life. Nor does the
fact that so many of his poems betray an in-
timate and loving familiarity with country
sights and sounds detract from his claim to be
regarded especially as a city poet. Stevenson
has told us in his prettiest phrases how pecul-
iarly Edinburgh is linked to the surrounding
country. "Into no city does the sight of the
country enter so far . . . you catch a glimpse
[89]

Studies of a Boohlover

of the far-away trees on your walk; and the
place is full of theater -tricks in the way of
scenery. You peep under an arch, you de-
scend steps that look as if they would lead you
in a cellar, you turn to a back-window of a
grimy tenement in a lane ; — and behold ! you
are face-to-face with distant and bright pros-
pects. You turn a corner, and there is the
sun going down into the Highland hills; you
look down an alley, and see ships tacking for
the Baltic." One lover, at least, of the old
town reckons among his dearest memories the
purple slopes of Arthur's Seat, most mountain-
like of little hills, looming grandly before him
every evening of a happy summer when he
turned a certain comer in the quiet villa-built
suburb where he tarried for a season.

But Fergusson's poems of nature, charming
as they are, would hardly have sufficed to
transmit his name to posterity. It is to his
poems of town life that the lover of the past
turns and turns again with undiminished
[90]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

pleasure, to the Daft Days, and the King's
Birthday, to Caller Oysters, the Rising of the
Session, the Election, and above all to Auld
Reekie. As he reads there rises before him a
panorama of the old town in the merry bustling
years which formed at once the cUmax and the
close of her peculiar prosperity. We can fol-
low the life of the town from the moment

when

"Morn with bonny purpie smiles
Kisses the air-cock of St. Giles "

to the wee sma' hours when the last buck
staggers homeward from his revels in the club.
The barefoot servant lasses cluster on the
turnpike stairs, chattering and complaining of
their mistresses' hard discipHne. The shops
are opening and the "stair-head critics"
gather in the Luckenbooths to gossip over
neighbors and inquire too curiously into the
purposes and antecedents of every stranger
who goes by. Geordie Girdwood, the drunken,
sore-eyed, withered, little sexton of Greyfriars
[91]

Studies of a Booklover

Churchyard is howking up gentle bones in
that dismal burying ground. Sandy Fife, the
bellman of St. Giles, sets the gill bells ringing,
and the burghers leave shop and office for the
traditional meridian. Lawyers gather round
the site of the ancient cross, pulled down some
twenty years before by the over-zealous magis-
trates upon whose heads Sir Walter was to de-
nounce a minstrel's curse. Or perhaps it is a
holiday, the King's Birthday, Hallow-fair, or
the day of the Leith races. On such a day
the shops are shut early, the clinking of the
"tinker billies" in the West Bow is hushed,
and the crowd pours out of doors to see and be
seen. Mons Meg roars a salute from the
castle at noon, and the city guard, " that black
banditti," muster for parade. The rabble of
the streets gather round and assault them with
dirty water and dead cats, the old soldiers
repel attacks with pungent Highland exple-
tives, with fire-locks and Lochaber axes.
Down on the sands near Leith the browster
[92]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

wives are selling bad ale and worse whiskey to
a noisy crowd, while the jockeys in red, yellow,
and tartan liveries gather for the races. As
night falls over the good town the fun and
noise redouble. The feeble gleam of Simon
Eraser's oil lamps is heightened by flaring
torches or horn lanterns in the hands of
liveried servants. Wily caddies run about the
streets and plunge into darksome alleys on
dubious errands. Sedan chairmen, predeces-
sors of our modem night-hawks, stand waiting
for a chance to pick up some drunken " birkie."
The noisy ten-hour drum calls the sober bur-
gher home from his club, but for the wilder
spirits the revel has just begun. From the tall
" lands " the nightly effusions splash down upon
the pavement and the luckless passengers; and
the "flowers of Edinburgh" spread their per-
fume through the narrow ways. Here comes
a bruiser reeling home along the crown of the
causeway, pushing all he meets into the dirty
gutters. At his heels follow a pack of admir-
[93]

Studies of a Booklover

ing macaronis applauding his exploits, but
ready to turn tail and run for it, if lie is seized
by the city guard. And so the night goes on
till a pale gleam across the Forth proclaims
another day. If by chance that day happens
to be the Sabbath, what a sudden change ap-
pears in men and manners ! Save for the ring-
ing of a hundred church bells, among which
that of the Tron Kirk earns a bad pre-emi-
nence by its deafening clamor, all the noises of
the town are hushed. Through the unclean
streets the roisterous citizens of last night stalk
with faces of such portentous piety as if they
would make each neighbor think

"They thirst for goodness as for drink."

Then as now the whole population of the town
poured out on a pleasant Sunday afternoon to
snatch a breath of country air, and one might
catch a gHmpse of pretty faces, haK hidden
by the tantaUzing "bon grace," making for
Comely Garden, or the park, to meet their joes.
[94]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

The "dandering cit" displays his Sunday
braws on Castle hill for " the fool cause of be-
ing seen." The poet himself seeks out the soli-
tudes of Arthur's Seat, or muses amid the ruins
of Holyrood over the vanished glories of Scot-
land. But we may be sure that, if he with-
drew from the crowd, it was only for a short
space, and evening found him back in Auld
Reekie seated at the table of the Cape Club.

There is no monument to Fergusson in his
native town except the tombstone with the
somewhat stilted inscription which the loving
heart of Robert Bums erected over his half-
forgotten grave. Few acts of Burns' life in
Edinburgh are so much to his credit as his
pilgrimage to the dreary little churchyard of
the Canongate. Like the impulsive, generous,
peasant poet he was. Burns threw himself on
his knees and with hot tears in his eyes kissed
the sacred earth that covered the mouldering
body of his predecessor and master. And the
homage of Bums has been supplemented by
[95]

Stvdies of a Booldover

that of the latest poet of Auld Reekie. "I
may tell you," wrote Stevenson from his South
Sea exile, "I may tell you (because your poet
is not dead) something of how I feel. We are
three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre
this last century. Well, one is the world's.
He did it, he came off; he is forever; but I,
and the other, ah ! what bonds we have. Bom
in the same city; both sickly; both vicious:
both pestered — one nearly to madness and
one to the madhouse — with a damnatory
creed; both seeing the stars and the moon, and
wearing shoe-leather on the same ancient
stones, under the same pends; down the same
closes where our common ancestors clashed
in their armour rusty or bright. . . . He died
in his acute, painful youth and left the models
of the great things that were to come; and the
man who came after outlived his green-sick-
ness and faintly tried to parody his finished
work."

After all the true monument of a poet is not
[96]

Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate

a sculptured bronze or marble, but a green and
tender memory in the hearts of men. And if
comparatively few to-day remember the " poor
white-faced boy who raved himself to death
in the Edinburgh mad-house," yet those few
include among their number all who know
the Uterature of the richest of English dialects
and all who love the most romantic of British
cities. Other poets have sung the praises of
Edinburgh, but to her laureateship no other poet
has so true a claim as Robert Fergusson.

[9^

The
Autobiography of Milton

BEFORE the execution of Charles I
Milton had been known to some few
of his countrymen as a poet, to a larger circle
as a vigorous, daring, and somewhat scandalous
pamphleteer. On the Continent, with the
exception of the ItaUan friends who still re-
membered their beautiful, scholarly, and
accompUshed guest of some twelve years be-
fore, it is probable that hardly a handful of
men were acquainted with his name. In
less than three years from the king's death,
however, things had so far changed that
Milton had become the most famous, or, per-
haps, it would be better to say the most no-
torious. Englishman aUve, with the one ex-
ception of his great contemporary Cromwell.
[98]

John Milton

The Autobiography of Milton

And this change was due not to any resump-
tion of his long-neglected powers of poetry,
but solely to the position which he assumed
in those years as the defender with the pen of
that repubUc which the Puritans had estab-
lished with the sword.

Hardly was the king's blood dry before
Milton published the first of his republican
pamphlets: The Tenure of Kings and Magis-
trates: proving that it is Lawfvll, and hath been
held so through all Ages, for any, who have
the Power, to call to account a Tyrant, or
wicked King, and after due conviction to de-
pose, and put him to death. The thorough-
going partisanship of this work was at once
recognized by the new rulers of England, who
promptly conferred upon Milton the Latin
Secretaryship to the Council of State, a posi-
tion which brought him into close connection
with the leaders of the army and the judges
of the late king. In this position Milton be-
came the acknowledged spokesman of the Com-
[99]

Studies of a Booklover

monwealth. As such he was ordered to make
an attempt to check the reaction toward
monarchy which was showing itself in the en-
thusiastic reception of Eikon Basilike, — a
book purporting to proceed from the king
himself and to contain the prayers and pious
meditations of his last days, — by writing
something to destroy the credit of that work.
It was an ungracious task, but Milton per-
formed it. If he did not convince the people
— fifty editions of the Eikon were called for
within the year to one of Milton's Eikono-
clastes, the Image-breaker — he at least satis-
fied his friends in the Council. For Milton's
next task, once more at the request of that
body, was the defence of his country in
the court of European opinion against the
onslaught just dehvered by Salmasius.

Salmasius, a French Protestant, attached
to the Dutch University of Leyden as Pro-
fessor Extraordinary, was by common consent
the most learned man aKve. He had been
[100]

The Autobiography of Milton

engaged by Charles II, then an exile at the
Hague, to issue a manifesto in defence of the
late king, and had performed his task in a
pamphlet of sonorous rhetorical Latin en-
titled Defensio Regia, in which he proclaimed
the divine right of kings, and assailed with
infinite objurgation the "perfidious, wicked,
and parricidal" act of the English who had
slain their heaven-sent ruler. It was in an-
swer to this work that Milton published in
the spring of 1651 his famous Pro PopvJo
Anglicano Defensio. The long toil involved
in the preparation and composition of this
work cost Milton his eyesight. For years
his vision, overstrained by the arduous study
of his youth, had been failing, and when he
began his work on the Defence, he was warned
by his medical advisers that if he persisted
it would be irreparably lost. But he did not
hesitate for a moment. In such a case he
says: "I would not have Kstened to the voice
of ^sculapius himself in preference to the
[101]

Studies of a Booklover

suggestions of the heavenly monitor within
my breast; my resolution was unshaken,
though the alternative was either the loss of
my sight or the desertion of my duty. ... I
resolved, therefore, to make the short inter-
val of sight which was left me as beneficial
as possible to the common weal." About a
year after the appearance of the Defence the
prediction of the doctors was fulfilled and
Milton belonged to the fellowship of blind
Thamyris and blind Mseonides. Terrible as
the affliction of blindness must have been to'
Milton he never regretted the sacrifice that he
had made, but consoled himself to the end
of his life by reflecting that he had lost his
eyes

"In liberty's defence, my noble task
Of which all Europe talks from side to side."

Milton did not flatter himself when he

represented all Europe as talking of his book.

The sensation which it caused was, indeed,

prodigious. An unknown Englishman had

[102]

The Autobiography of Milton

confronted the greatest scholar of the age, ex-
posed his ignorance of history, ridiculed his
minute and pedantical learning, and, in con-
clusion, overwhelmed him with a flood of
personal abuse enriched with all the lively
bilKngsgate of classical latinity. "I had ex-
pected nothing of such quaUty from an Eng-
lishman," writes a Dutch scholar, rejoicing
in the overthrow of the hitherto invincible
Salmasius. Naturally, wherever the divine
right of kings to oppress their subjects was
maintained as an article of belief, Milton's
treatise was received with horror. It was
burnt by the public hangman at Paris and
Toulouse; the Diet of the Holy Roman Em-
pire ordered that all the books of Miltonius
should be sought out and confiscated. In
England, on the other hand, the book was
welcomed with an outburst of applause. All
the foreign envoys and ambassadors in London
congratulated Milton on his triumph over
the enemy of his country; the Council of State
[103]

Studies of a Booklover

formally thanked him on behalf of the Com-
monwealth, and offered him a handsome sum
of money, a gift which, it is needless to say,
Milton at once refused. He was ready to
give his eyes for his country, but he would not
accept a money payment for the sacrifice.
Salmasius himself, on the receipt of Milton's
book, broke out into a storm of rage. He
threatened, says a writer of the time, straight-
way to send Milton, and the ParHament with
him, to perdition. But advancing age, domes-
tic trouble, and possibly also a dread of his
terrible antagonist, stayed his hand, and he
died in the autumn of 1653 with his reply un-
finished. But in the meantime another cham-
pion, nameless indeed, but possessed of no
mean power of invective, had come to his aid.
This was Peter du Moulin, a clergyman who
had been expelled from his Yorkshire parish
by the Puritan reformers. Not daring to
publish his work in England he had sent it
over to Holland, where it was received by a
[104]

The Autobiography of Milton

certain Moir, or Morus, who equipped it
with some abusive prefatory matter, saw it
through the press, and, in consequence, was
generally, in spite of his protestations, re-
garded as the real author. This book, Regii
Sanguinis Clamor ad Caelum adversus Parri-
cidas Anglicanos (The Cry of the King's
Blood to Heaven against the EngUsh Parri-
cides), is from beginning to end one wild tirade
against the principles and the leaders of
the English Commonwealth. CromweU is
denounced as a hypocrite and said to be as
like Mahomet as an egg is like an egg; the
guilt of the Jews in the crucifixion of Christ
is asserted to be as nothing in comparison
with the wickedness of the English who had
slain their king; and France is besought to
take up arms to avenge his shameful murder.
But the choicest epithets of abuse are reserved
for Milton. The scurrile author taunts him
with his bUndness, with his lean, shrivelled,
and bloodless form. He styles him a " hunger-
[105]

Studies of a Booklover

starved little man of grammar willing to lend
his venal pen to the defence of Parricide."
Milton is a " bestial blackguard," " a fiendish
gallows-bird," "a hideous hangman." In
his youth he was expelled from Cambridge
for his profligacy and fled into Italy, where he
plunged into the most disgraceful vice. On
his return he wrote a book on divorce which
was little less than a plea for license in crime;
when the murder of the king was being de-
bated, he sprang forward and shoved the
waverers to the evil side, and finally he had
filled the measure of his iniquities by insult-
ing the sacred memory of King Charles. His
book had been burnt by the hangman and he
himself deserved no better fate.

It was nearly two years before Milton
answered this book. During this time he was
slowly accustoming himself to the misery of
blindness; he had suffered the loss of his wife
and his only son, and he was waiting for the
threatened work of Salmasius. At last, how-
[106]

The Autobiography of Milton

ever, in May, 1654, his answer appeared
under the title of Defensio Secunda. It was,
of course, written in Latin for European cir-
culation, and this fact, combined with the
baldness of the few translations that have
been made, serves to keep it out of the hands
of most English readers of to-day. Yet it is
in many respects one of the most valuable of
Milton's prose works. Its interest to us con-
sists by no means in the savage attack which
he directs against Morus, his supposed an-
tagonist; not even in the lofty tribute of praise,
at once hearty and independent, which he
bestows upon the leaders of his party, Fairfax,
Bradshaw, and Cromwell; but most of all
in the multitude of autobiographical details
which the Uttle book contains. Milton, as
every one knows, had a well-grounded re-
spect for himself, and on this occasion he was
, quicker than ever to resent slanders against
his character. For these slanders were directed,
not against Milton the individual, but against
[107]

Studies of a Booklover

Milton the Englishman, Milton the advo-
cate of his country in the court of Europe.
By a series of Ues his enemy had sought to
render him infamous and so to bring dis-
credit upon the cause he represented. And
it is at once in defence of himself and of his
cause that Milton speaks, addressing him-
self to " the whole body of wise men, cities, and
nations on the Continent." There is, I
think, a pleasant human touch of wounded
vanity in the fact that he begins with an ac-
count of his personal appearance. "I am
not tall, I confess," he says, "yet rather of
middle height than short. Nor am I puny;
on the contrary, in my youth I was wont to
practise fencing daily, and when I wore my
sword, as I often did, I thought myself a
match for a far stronger man. To-day my
spirit and my strength is unchanged, and if
my eyes are otherwise, yet they are still clear
and bright. My complexion is so fresh that
I seem at least ten years younger than I am,
[108]

The Autobiography of Milton

nor is there a wrinkle on my skin. So much
I have been forced to say of my appearance;
would that I could as easily refute what this
inhuman adversary has said of my blindness."
Later on, after acknowledging the goodness
of God shown him even in his bKndness, and
thanking his devoted friends for their ex-
traordinary kindness, Milton goes on to give
that sketch of his life from which all his bi-
ographers have drawn so largely. It may be
of interest to hear it in his own words. "I
was born in London," he says, "of an honour-
able family; my father was a most upright
man, my mother a woman of approved good-
ness, well known for her charities to the poor.
From a child my father destined me to the
study of the humanities, which indeed I pur-
sued so eagerly that from my twelfth year on
I seldom left my books for my bed before
midnight. And this was, in truth, the first
cause of my blindness. In addition to the
weakness of my eyes I suffered from frequent
[109]

Studies of a Booklover

headaches, but none of these things hindered
my pursuit of learning. My father had me
taught not only in the school, but under vari-
ous masters at home, until I was so far
advanced in the study of languages and phil-
osophy that he sent me to Cambridge, one
of our two English universities. Here I
studied for seven years, shunning all vice (it
may be remembered that Milton's college
friends called him the Lady of Christ's) and
approved by all good men until I took the
degree of M. A. cum laude. And then I did
not run away to Italy, but of my own accord
withdrew to my home, to the deep regret of
my friends at college by whom I was not a
little esteemed."

"At my father's country house," he con-
tinues, "whither he had retired to spend his
old age, I passed my time solely in the perusal
of classic authors, yet I sometimes visited
the city to buy books or to learn something
new in mathematics or music, which were then
[110]

The Autobiography of Milton

my chief deKght. Having spent five years in
this manner I became desirous of visiting
foreign parts, especially Italy, and obtain-
ing my father's consent I set out, attended by
a single servant. On my departure the
famous Henry Wotton showed himself my
friend by writing a letter full of good wishes
and of advice most useful to a traveller."
This is the famous letter in which Sir Henry
praised the "Doric delicacy" of Comus and
advised Milton to go through Italy, " pensieri
stretti, visa sdolto," " with thoughts close and
face open."

After speaking of his noble and learned
acquaintances at Paris, Milton goes on to
tell of his travels in Italy. "I stayed two
months at Florence where I constantly attended
the Academies, which a laudable custom of
that city maintains for the promotion of
literature and social intercourse." Here he
pauses for a moment to recall the names of
the Florentine gentlemen who had welcomed
[111]

Studies of a Booklover

him so kindly and praised his Latin poems so
enthusiastically on his first visit; "the day
will never come when I shall lose the pleasant
memory of these men." "From Florence I
went to Siena, and thence to Rome. I spent
two months in exploring the antiquities of
that famous city and was treated with the
greatest kindness by Lucas Holsten and other
men of learning and ability. I went on to
Naples, and here, by the good offices of a hermit
who had been my companion on the journey,
I was introduced to Manso, Marquis of Villa,
a noble and venerable gentleman, to whom
Tasso, the famous poet, had dedicated his
book On Friendship. So long as I remained
in Naples this gentleman treated me as a dear
friend; he showed me about the city, took me
into the, Viceroy's palace, and even visited me
several times at my lodgings. And when I
departed, he gravely excused himself for not
having shown me more attention, which, he
said, my lack of reserve in the matter of re-
[112]

The Autobiography of Milton

ligion had rendered impossible in such a town
as Naples. I was preparing to visit Sicily
and Greece when the sad news of civil war
in England recalled me, for I thought it dis-
graceful to travel at ease abroad while my
fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at
home.

"On my way back to Rome I was warned
that the EngUsh Jesuits were laying snares
for me in case I revisited that city, because
they thought I had spoken too boldly about
reKgion. For I had made it a rule never to
introduce the subject of religion in that coun-
try, but at the same time not to conceal my
own opinions, no matter what the conse-
quences, in case I were questioned as to my
faith. And so I returned to Rome, where
for two months' space, in the very city of the
Pope, I openly defended the true religion, as
I had done before, whenever it was attacked
in my presence; And by God's grace I re-
turned unharmed to Florence, where my
[113]

Studies of a Booklover

friends received me as joyfully as if I had re-
turned to my fatherland."

After a brief account of his travels in
Northern Italy, Milton speaks of his visit to
Geneva on the way home, and the mention
of this city, from which his supposed calum-
niator, Morus, had departed under a cloud
of scandal, leads him to call God to witness
"that in all those cities where vice is so open
I lived pure and untouched by crime or shame,
perpetually reflecting that though I might
escape the eyes of men, I could not that of
God." It is an interesting coincidence that
Milton, on being asked at Geneva for his
autograph, wrote down from memory two
lines of Comus,

"If virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her,"

and added below them, as an attestation of
his behef, " Caelum, non animum, muto, dum
trans mare cwrro": "I change my abode, but
not my opinions, when I cross the sea."
[114]

The Autobiography of Milton

" On my return to England," he continues,
" I rented a house in London large enough for
myself and my books, and betook myself with
joy to my interrupted studies." This is the
time when Milton wrote his last long Latin
poem, the Epitaphium Damonis, in memory
of his lost friend, Diodati, and when he was
planning a great epic in his mother tongue
on the story of Arthur, in the hope, he says,
"that I might perhaps leave something so
written to after times as they should not
willingly let it die."

From this "quiet and still air of delightful
studies" Milton was soon called on to "em-
bark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse
disputes." He enumerates in the Defence
the various pamphlets which he had written,
first in the controversy on church government
which was then raging, and next to promote
the cause of "that true liberty which is to be
sought within, and not without, the mind, not
in battle, but in the right conduct of life." To
[115]

Studies of a BooMover

this end he wrote first his pamphlets on
divorce, "for that man makes a vain boast of
Kberty in the polling place or senate house
who at home endures a slavery most disgrace-
ful to a man, slavery to an inferior." Further,
he discussed briefly the education of children,
"than which nothing does more to train the
mind in virtue, that sole source of true internal
liberty." "Also I wrote the Areopagitica, on
the liberty of the press, to prevent the censor-
ship from remaining longer in the hands of a
few badly educated men who seldom allowed
aught to appear that was above the level of
the vulgar mind."

Finally Milton brings the story of his life
down to the date at which he was writing, by
speaking of the controversy in which he be-
came engaged after the execution of the king.
He denies that he urged on the regicides; his
first book on the subject did not appear till
after the king's death and was written " rather
to compose the minds of men than to de-
[116]

The Autobiography of Milton

cide anything in the case of Charles, which
was not my business, but that of the magis-
trates, and was, moreover, settled already.
I did my work for church and state within my
own four walls: I received no reward for it
except that I was let alone. Other men got
money or office for nothing; but no one ever
saw me canvassing for an office, or using the
influence of friends to secure a favor; no one
ever saw me hanging about the doors of the
House with a beggar's face or spending my
time in the ante-chambers of committee-
rooms. I stayed at home and lived on my
own means. I was, indeed, at work on a
History of England when the Council of State
most unexpectedly demanded my assistance
in foreign affairs. At the request of the Coun-
cil I wrote the Eikonoklast in answer to the
Eikon. I did not insult the dead monarch, as
I am accused of doing, but I verily thought that
Queen Truth was more to be preferred than
Eling Charles. Finally, when Salmasius pub-
[117]

Studies of a Booklover

lished his book, there was no long dispute as to
who should answer it. I was then present in
the Council, and all its members at once and
with one accord named me. So much, Morus,
I have written about myself to stop your
mouth and to expose your falsehoods."

I have translated freely, condensing and
omitting much from this the longest auto-
biographical passage in the works of Milton.
It is, however, only one of many. There is,
for instance, a long introduction to the second
book of Ttie Reason of Church Government, in
which Milton speaks of the causes that have
induced him to lay aside the epic poem that
he was meditating and take part in the church
controversies of the time. Here he praises
the "ceaseless diUgence and care" which his
father had lavished upon his education, and
mentions the fact that he himself had been
from a child destined to the service of the
church: "till coming to some maturity of
years and perceiving what tyranny had in-
[118]

The Autobiography of Milton

vaded the church, that he who would take
orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath
withal, which, unless he took with a con-
science that would retch, he must either
straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought
it better to prefer a blameless silence before
the sacred office of speaking, bought and be-
gun with servitude and forswearing." Such
a passage as this goes far to explain that tor-
rent of wrath which Milton, " church-outed by
the prelates," pours upon the heads of the
corrupted clergy in lyddas.

But this preface is, perhaps, even more re-
markable for its revelation of the conception
of the great poem which was already in 1641
dawning in Milton's mind. He had, it ap-
pears, renounced his first half-formed plan
of writing in Latin, "not caring once to be
named abroad, but content with these British
islands as my world." But there was still
much that remained to be decided, the choice
of a subject, for example, "what king or
[119]

Studies of a Booklover

knight might be chosen in whom to lay the
pattern of a Christian hero." And there was
the question of the form which the poem
should take, "whether that epic whereof the
two poems of Homer are a model," or "those
dramatic constitutions wherein Sophocles and
Euripides reign." Above all there was the
long and arduous preparation necessary be-
fore the poem could even be begun, "indus-
trious and select reading, steady observation,
insight into all seemly and generous arts and
affairs," for the poem, when at last it should
appear, was to be a work " not to be raised
from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine ;
like that which flows at waste from the pen of
some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of
a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by
the invocation of dame Memory and her
siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that
eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utter-
ance and knowledge, and sends out his sera-
phim, with the hallowed fire of his altar,
[1201

The Autobiography of Milton

to touch and purify the lips of whom he
pleases."

An even more interesting autobiographical
passage occurs in the Apology for Smectymnuus,
published in 1642. This pamphlet was written
in answer to a savage attack upon Milton
composed by Bishop Hall, the leader of the
Episcopal party, and his son. In the address
to the reader prefixed to this attack it was
asserted that Milton had spent his youth
"loitering, bezzling, and harlotting," that he
had been "vomited out of the University into
a suburb sink of London," and that, wher-
ever he passed his mornings, he spent his
afternoons " at the playhouses or the bordelK."
No more absurd charge could have been in-
vented against Milton than that of idleness
and vice, and yet we can hardly regret the
recklessness of his adversaries, since it gave
the poet the opportunity for such a magnifi-
cent self-vindication. After thanking his op-
ponent for the "commodious lie" that he was
[121]

Studies of a Booklover

expelled from Cambridge, inasmuch as it
gives him "apt occasion to acknowledge pub-
Ucly with all grateful mind that more than
ordinary favour and respect, which I found
above any of my equals at the hands of those
courteous and learned men, the fellows of
that college wherein I spent some years,"
Milton goes on to speak of his present mode
of life, his studies, and his character.

" My morning haunts are where they should
be, at home," he says, " not sleeping nor con-
cocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but
up and stirring, in winter often ere the sound
of any bell awake men to labor or to devotion ;
in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses,
or not much tardier, to read good authors or
cause them to be read, tiU the attention be
weary, or memory have its full fraught: then
with useful and generous labours preserving
the body's health and hardiness to render
lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience
to the mind, to the cause of religion, and to
[122]

The Autobiography of Milton

our country's liberty, when it shall require
firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and
cover their stations, rather than to see the
ruin of our protestation, and the inforcement
of a slavish life." It would seem from these
last words that Milton was already anticipat-
ing the civil war which broke out shortly after.
Masson, indeed, thinks that the passage shows
that Milton took part in the mihtary exercises
of the London citizens.

Speaking of his studies Milton says that
his first dehght was " the smooth elegiac poets."
Probably the reference is especially to Ovid,
whom we know that Milton, Hke Shakespeare
before him, honored somewhat above his due.
Yet, he continues, "if I found those authors
anywhere speaking unworthy things of them-
selves, or unchaste of those names which be-
fore they had extolled, this effect it wrought
with me, from that time forward their art I
still applauded, but the men I deplored; and
above them all preferred the two famous re-
[ 123 ]

Studies of a Booklover

nowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never
write but honor of them to whom they devote
their verse, displaying sublime and pure
thoughts without transgression. And it was
not long after when I was confirmed in this
opinion that he who would not be frustrate
of his hope to write well hereafter of laudable
things, ought himself to be a true poem; that
is, a composition and pattern of the best and
honourablest things."

"Next I betook me among those lofty
fables and romances " (Milton is thinking here,
perhaps, of his favorite " our sage and serious
poet, Spenser") "which recount in solemn
cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our
victorious kings. There I read it in the oath
of every knight, that he should defend to the
expense of his best blood, or of his hfe, if it so
befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin
or matron; from whence even then I learned
what a noble virtue chastity sure must be,
to the defence of which so many worthies,
[124]

The Autobiography of Milton

by such a dear adventure of themselves, had
sworn. . . . Only this my mind gave me,
that every free and gentle spirit, without that
oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed
to expect the gilt spur, nor the laying of a
sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up, both
by his counsel and his arms, to secure and
protect the weakness of any attempted chastity.
So that even these books, which to many
others have been the fuel of wantoness and
loose Kving . . . proved to me so many in-
citements to the love and steadfast observa-
tion of that virtue which abhors the society
of bordellos."

" Thus from the laureate fraternity of poets,
riper years and the ceaseless round of study
and reading led me to the shady spaces of
philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes
of Plato and his equal Xenophon; where if I
should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and
love, I mean that which is truly so, whose
charming cup is only virtue, which she bears
[125]

Studies of a Booklover

in hea* hand to those who are worthy (the
rest are cheated with a thick, intoxicating
potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser
of love's name, carries about); and how the
first and chiefest oflace of love begins and
ends in the soul, ... it might be worth your
Hstening, readers." And after a reference to
his training in the precepts of Christianity,
where he learnt that unchastity in a man,
"though not commonly thought so, must be
much more deflouring and dishonourable than
in a woman," Milton winds up this apologia
pro vita sua with a proud confidence of vic-
tory over his slanderer: "Thus large have I
purposely been, that if I have been justly
taxed with this crime, it may come upon me
after all this my confession with a ten-fold
shame."

I need not pursue my task further, I think,

of setting Milton to speak for himself and

show us in his own noble words what manner

of man he was. I have selected passages

[126]

The Autobiography of Milton

from two of the least read of his prose works
in English, and from a Latin treatise which,
I fancy, is seldom read at all. But there is
hardly any work of Milton, that most intensely
self-conscious of authors, from which it would
not be possible to leam something about the
man behind the work. The divorce tracts,
for example, at once reveal to us his lofty ideal
of marriage, a subject on which he is the
most generally misunderstood of men, and
explain simply enough the catastrophe of his
own first attempt to realize this ideal. And
the Areopagitica, perhaps the noblest of all
his pamphlets, is on fire with that love of
freedom in thought, speech, and action, which
was the dominating principle of Milton's life.
And as for his poems, from the Sonnet on
being arrived to the age of twenty-three to the
Samson written in his blind old age when
" fallen on evil days and evil tongues," there is,
I believe, hardly one in which we may not
discover some exquisite touch of self-revela-
[127]

Studies of a Booklover

tion. Milton could never, we may be sure,
have been a dramatist of the first order, if
for no other reason than that it was impos-
sible for him to conceal his own personality
behind the characters he created.

I have sometimes thought that it would be
a pleasant and not unprofitable task for a
student of hterature to go through the letters,
essays, and poems of Milton in detail, to pick
out the autobiographical passages, and to
arrange them in such an order that the poet
might himself tell us the story of his inner
and his outer life from boyhood till old age.
Such an autobiography certainly would be
briefer than the enormous encyclopaedia of
Milton and his times by Professor Masson
which serves to-day for the standard life of
the poet. But, unless I am much mistaken,
the ordinary reader would learn more about
Milton's personaUty from such a compilation
than from the six huge volumes in which, if
the truth must be told, the poet too often dis-
[128]

The Autobiography of Milton

appears amid a baffling crowd of contem-
poraries, more or less obscure, as the outline
of some splendid forest tree is often hidden
from the spectator by the lower growths that
cluster round it.

It is not only in Professor Masson's vast
work, however, that the personality of Milton
is obscured. On the contrary, I believe,
there is no English poet, of whose life we
know so much, whose true character, at the
same time, has been so generally misunder-
stood. In his own day the clouds of partisan
warfare hung thick around him; in our own
time he has too often been exalted into a re-
motely superhuman figure. Or if at times a
critic makes the effort to bring Milton back
to earth again and portray him as a man of
Hke passions with ourselves, the reaction
against the ordinary view is too likely to end
in an attempt to belittle the heroic figure.
Here, for example, is Professor Saintesbury's
rough sketch: "Milton's character was not
[129]

Stvdies of a BooMover

an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable.
It is probable that he never in the course of
his whole life did anything that he considered
wrong, but unfortunately examples are not
far to seek of the faciUty with which desire
can be made to confound itself with de-
liberate approval. He was an exacting if not
tyrannical husband and father; he held in the
most exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the
superiority of man to woman; his egotism in
a man who had accompUshed less would be
half ludicrous and half disgusting; his faculty
of appreciation beyond his own immediate
tastes and interests was small; his intolerance
surpassed that of an inquisitor." Such a cari-
cature may, perhaps, have its use as an offset
to the uncritical and boyish idealization of
Macaulay's famous essay; but it can hardly
be accepted as a realistic portrait of Milton.

The golden mean between such extremes
might perhaps be found by some such method
as I have suggested above. Certainly if we
[130]

The Autobiography of Milton

would obtain a true portrait of Milton, "in
his habit as he lived," we might well spend
the time and care which others have devoted
to ransacking dusty archives or to evolving
an ideal figure from the depths of self-con-
sciousness, in the study and sympathetic in-
terpretation of those passages of his works
in which the poet reveals to us his aims and
hopes and beliefs and sympathies, in what
I have ventured to call the autobiography
of Milton.

[131]

The

Personality of Dr. Johnson

IT is almost impossible for us, looking back
over the century and a quarter which
separates us from the death of Dr. Johnson,
to reahze the position which for thirty years
he had held in the world of English letters.
And when at last by an effort of the historic
imagination we attain to some imperfect con-
ception of his place, we ask ourselves with
something like amazement to what this un-
disputed supremacy was due. Johnson was
the last Uterary autocrat of England, the
"great Cham of Uterature," as his contem-
porary, SmoUet, aptly called him. He filled
the throne which had been occupied before
him by Pope, by Dryden, and by Ben Jonson,
each of them, if not a greater man, assuredly
[132]

Samuel Johnson

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

a greater writer. Yet it may well be ques-
tioned whether any of them ever received
such undivided homage as was accorded dur-
ing the last years of his life to Samuel John-
son. It was not on account of the lack of
fellow-workers in the field of polite letters
that Johnson was so honored. His claim to
recognition rested upon his work as a moral
philosopher, a prose writer, and a poet. Now
in depth and originality of thought he was
surpassed by at least three of his contem-
poraries, Hume, Burke, and Adam Smith.
As a master of prose style Johnson is now,
perhaps, too generally undervalued, yet in the
weightier matters, such as invention, humor,
and power of characterization, his work is not
to be compared with that of such masters as
Fielding and Goldsmith. And as for poetry,
it is only by a certain effort of the will that the
modem reader trained in the romantic school
of Tennyson and Keats, and looking back
from them to Milton and Shakespeare, can
[133]

Studies of a Booklover

admit the claim of Johnson's sonorous and
rhetorical couplets to be poetry at all.

The fact seems to be that Johnson's dicta-
torship was due to his personality rather than
to his productions, to his spoken rather than
to his written words. The greatest writers
have lost themselves in their work: Homer is
only a name; Shakespeare's true self is barely
discernible through his plays and poems.
Johnson, on the other hand, has left the im-
press of his strong, acute, yet sharply Kmited
personaUty on every line he wrote. In one
of his outbursts of dogmatic criticism Johnson
says, most unjustly, that no man could have
fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure
had he not known the author. It would be
far less unjust, and probably a close approxi-
mation to the truth, to say that no man to-day
reads the Rambler or Rasselas except as he is at-
tracted to them by the fame of their author, and
with the hope, not always reaUzed, of finding in
them the cause and justification of that fame.
[134J

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

Naturally in our day, when the whole aspect
of the world has been changed by the economic
revolution, the discoveries of science, and the
triumph of democracy, the cause and justi-
fication of Johnson's fame is harder to dis-
cover in his books than it was in his own time.
And even in his own time, as has already been
suggested, it was probably rather to his com-
manding personality than to his works that
his supremacy was due. Fortunately for us
his personaKty still survives, imperishable and
wholly independent of his work. By some
happy fate, as if in compensation for the
hardships and miseries of his youth, he en-
countered in middle life the man who was
to make him immortal. No happier con-
junction of men could be imagined than that
of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.
Johnson loved to talk, Boswell to Hsten;
Johnson was perhaps the most entertaining
and effective talker that ever Uved, Boswell
was indisputably the best reporter of conver-
[135]

Studies of a Booklover

sation; Johnson asserted his right, almost
tyrannically at times, to be the absolute lord
of every society into which he entered, Boswell
was willing either to efface himself, or to
obtrude himself just far enough to catch the
great man's eye and provoke one of those
outbursts which dehghted the hearers at that
time and have delighted thousands of readers
ever since. Johnson was pardonably proud,
and somewhat over quick to take offense,
though always eager to forgive; Boswell, on
the other hand, was almost humiUatingly
wanting in self-respect, incapable of resent-
ment, and only too ready to be forgiven.
Finally, Johnson's ideas, beliefs, and principles
were as firm and immutable as bronze; Bos-
well's mind was wax to receive and marble
to retain; and thus the hero left upon his
worshiper an indelible imprint which has
transmitted his own true form and features
to all posterity. The two men were made
for each other, and if Boswell has achieved
[136]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

immortality in the company of Johnson, he
has obtained no more than his just reward.
It is quite time to have done with Macaulay's
silly paradox that it was only because he was
so great a fool that Boswell wrote so great a
book. Carlyle answered that paradox at the
time. " Falser hypothesis," he says, " never rose
in human soul." Unfortunately the popu-
larity of Macaulay's essay on Boswell's Life
of Johnson stands to Garlyle's work on the
same subject in inverse ratio to the real value
of their respective pictures of hero and bi-
ographer; and it is permissible, therefore, in
view of the gross injustice done to one who
was not only Johnson's biographer, but his
dear friend, to quote the too Uttle known
words of Garlyle's verdict. "Boswell wrote a
good book," so the final judgment runs, "be-
cause he had a heart and an eye to discern wis-
dom, and an utterance to render it forth; be-
cause of his free insight, his lively talent, above
all, of his love and child-like open-minded-
[137]

Studies of a Booklover

ness. . . . Neither James Boswell's good book,
nor any other good thing, in any time, nor in
any place, was, is, or can be performed by any
man in virtue of his badness, but always and
solely in spite thereof."

It must not be forgotten that the picture of
Johnson that Boswell gives us is a picture of
Johnson in his dechning years, his character
formed, his work, for the most part, done.
Johnson was already fifty-two when Boswell
met him, and although he had yet twenty-
three years of life before him these were tran-
quil and idle years compared with the misery
and grinding toil of his earlier life. The
period of his acquaintance with Boswell was
one long Indian summer in which the storm-
beaten hero rested from his labors and en-
joyed, so far as the deep-rooted melancholy
of his nature would allow, the sunshine of
prosperity. The Johnson whom we all know
in the famous biography, the great dictator of
literature, the autocrat of the famous club,
[138]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

the revered philosopher whose grotesque antics
moved his friends to alternate awe and laughter,
the tender-hearted and rough-mannered man
who bullied the strong and bowed humbly
to the weak, was the product of a long life
amid an environment unknown to Boswell
except by report, and of an heredity which,
had he known, he could not have appreciated.
Boswell has furnished us with full materials
for an estimate of Johnson's character; but
before we can be in a position to estimate it
rightly, we must know something of the
process by which that character was evolved.
Samuel Johnson was bom in the cathedral
town of Lichfield in 1709. His father,
Michael, was a book-seller, a bigoted Tory
and a man of learning, but superstitious,
utterly careless of money matters, and afflicted
with the constitutional melancholy which was
characteristic of his famous son. Johnson, it
must be owned, had good grounds for melan-
choly; he inherited the taint of scrofula and
[139]

Studies of a Booklover

in early childhood almost wholly lost his
sight from this disease. In spite of his great
physical strength, he suffered throughout his
life from a variety of ailments, he was attacked
by paralysis in his old age, and finally fell a
victim to a terrible compUcation of gout,
dropsy, kidney trouble, and lung disease.
When we remember the vociferous lamenta-
tions with which Carlyle bewailed his attacks
of dyspepsia and insomnia, or the less noisy
but more terrible misanthropy with which
Swift revenged himself upon a world which,
at least, was innocent of his physical ' suffer-
ings, we find something truly noble in the un-
shaken fortitude with which Johnson faced
his miseries. Their one result upon his mind,
it would seem, was a somewhat scornful treat-
ment of the affected sorrows and sentimental
troubles with which his age was so plenteously
endowed.

The usual tales are told of Johnson's pre-
cocity. In spite of his deficient eyesight he
[140]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

read prodigiously. One of the most charac-
teristic of the anecdotes preserved by Boswell
tells how the boy climbed up a ladder in his
father's shop in search of some apples which
he fancied his brother had hidden behind a
huge folio on the upper shelf. The apples
were undiscoverable, but the book proved to
be a copy of Petrarch whose namie Johnson
had come across somewhere in his voluminous
reading. Hunger was forgotten in the de-
light of a new discovery, and the boy sat upon
the ladder with the folio on his knees, reading
until he had finished a great part of the book.
The story is typical of much of Johnson's
life and, in particular, of his method of study,
accidental, spasmodic, intense and concen-
trated while the fit was on, sluggish and inter-
mittent when the moment passed. If he had
a subject to get up, he invariably neglected it.
When preparing, his edition of Shakespeare,
he declined to avail himself of Garrick's un-
rivalled collection of early editions and con-
[141]

Studies of a Booklover

temporary plays because he thought that Gar-
rick had not pressed him sufficiently to make
use of them. "When he was composing the
Lives of the Poets, he snubbed Boswell for
busying himself to secure materials, and de-
clared that he didn't care to know about Pope.
On the other hand, he probably read more
miscellaneous printed matter than any man
of his century. With all his reading, how-
ever, he was the very opposite of the typical
book-worm. No creature is more universally
despised by normal boys than a young book-
worm, but Johnson even in his school-days
exercised an undisputed sway over his asso-
ciates. He did his friends' tasks for them,
he served as the standard by which every boy's
scholarship was tested, and he rode trium-
phantly to school in the morning mounted
upon a comrade's back, with two others sup-
porting him on either hand.

Johnson was sent up to Oxford on the
promise, never fulfilled, of pecuniary support
[142]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

from certain of his father's friends. The
anecdotes that are told of his college life are
extremely characteristic. On his entrance he
amazed his tutor by quoting Macrobius, he
stayed away from lectures to sUde on the ice
in Christ Church meadows, he neglected the
required exercises in Latin verse, but latinized
a poem of Pope's in such a masterly fashion
as to attract the notice of the whole university.
His old master told Boswell that Johnson at
college was a " gay, frolicsome fellow, caressed
and loved by all about him"; but Johnson
himself told another story: "Oh, sir," he said,
"I was mad and violent. It was bitterness
which they mistook for froKc. I was miser-
ably poor and I thought to fight my way by
my Uterature and by my wit, so I disregarded
all power and all authority." He was gener-
ally seen "lounging at the college gate with a
circle of young students round him, whom
he was entertaining with his wit and keeping
from their studies, if not spiriting up to re-
[143]

Studies of a Booklover

bellion against the college discipline." Yet
when one of these admiring friends put a pair
of shoes at his door to replace the broken pair
through which his feet were showing, Johnson
threw them away in a passion of resentment.
And this although he had already ceased to
attend a highly valued course of lectures be-
cause his shabby dress made him, as he
thqught, an object of contempt to strangers.
Johnson loved learning much, but indepen-
dence more. The youth who threw away the
shoes was the father of the man who wrote
the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield "pro-
claiming to the listening world that Patronage
should be no more."

Johnson added but Uttle to his mental
equipment at Oxford; indeed he said long
afterwards that he knew as much when he
went there at eighteen as he did when he was
fifty; but he acquired something better than
learning. From an early age he had been
something of a free-thinker and a careless
[144]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

talker about religion, probably more to show
his wit than for any other reason. But during
his short stay at Oxford — he was in residence
only a Uttle more than a year — he read that
strangely powerful book, Law's Call to a Seri-
ous Life, and under its influence became
what he continued to his death, not only a
sincere believer, but a stalwart champion of re-
vealed religion. And this is the more remark-
able since, with hardly an exception, the emi-
nent men of his day, BoUngbroke, Pope,
Hume, and Voltaire, were either open infidels
or complacent and self -contented Deists. We
must not forget, of course, the Evangelical move-
ment under the fervent apostleship of Wesley
and Whitfield, but this movement was essen-
tially an appeal from the intellect to the emo-
tional faculties of men, and as such wholly
ahen to the strong sense and self-restrained
nature of Johnson. His prayers were made
in his closet or written in his note-books, not
performed with unction upon the corners of the
[145]

Studies of a Booklover

streets. The traditional forms of the Eng-
Ush church gave full scope for his exercises of
devotion, and he was Tory enough to insist
upon the maintenance in all her privileges of
the national church; but beneath all forms he
recognized, as perhaps no other man did in
his day, the essential unity of rehgion. In
the true spirit of a sincere behever he was
accustomed to reproach himself bitterly for
his failure to live up to the principles of his
creed, but to us, looking back upon his blame-
less life and his thousand silent deeds of
charity, he seems the very embodiment of Saint
James's definition of religion.

Less is known of Johnson during the period
between his departure from Oxford and his
arrival in London than at any other time of
his life. His father's health and business
were faihng together and he died in 1731 on
the verge of bankruptcy. Of his Kttle inheri-
tance of £20, Johnson laid by eleven and
went out into the world to seek his hving. He
[146]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

found it no easy task. He tried to turn his
education to account as a teacher in a little
school, but found it as disagreeable for him
to teach as it was for the boys to learn. He
earned a few guineas by writing and trans-
lating for a provincial bookseller. He fell in
love with and married a widow of nearly
twice his age, a fact which for some reason
has proved a source of inextinguishable mirth
to vulgar minds. It is impossible to be angry
with the born mimic, David Garrick, who in
after years used to convulse. London drawing-
rooms by a caricature of the love-scenes be-
tween Johnson and the widow, which he had
witnessed with a school-boy's apish deUght in
their ludicrous side; but it is not easy to for-
give Macaulay for abusing the woman whom
Johnson loved as "a tawdry painted grand-
mother who accepted his addresses with a
readiness that did her httle honor." Not little,
but greatly to her honor was it that she had
eyes to pierce beneath the rough exterior of
, [147]

Studies of a Booklover

this poor, ugly, and miserable scholar, and to
see the strength and sincerity of his love; nor
less that she had the intelUgence to recognize
in him "the most sensible man she ever saw
in her life."

With the money that his wife brought him
Johnson once more tried his hand at teaching
and opened a school near Lichfield. But his
second attempt was no more successful than
his first. Not more than eight boys ever at-
tended the school, and after a hopeless struggle
of a year or two, Johnson abandoned it and
went up to London to seek his fortune with
two-pence ha'penny in his pocket and an un-
finished drama in his portmanteau.

London was at that time, to a degree which
it has never since been, the intellectual and
hterary center of the EngUsh-speaking world.
Indeed, if we except the brilliant Kterary
coterie which a few years later gathered around
Hume in Edinburgh, London may be said
to have enjoyed throughout the middle of
[148]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

the eighteenth century a practical monopoly
of Englishmen of wit and letters. It offered
the only field in which a man of Johnson's
tastes and abihties might rise to fame and
fortune. Of these two, fame was in that day
far easier of attainment than fortune. Ma-
caulay has drawn a memorable picture of the
depressed state of letters at the time of John-
son's arrival in London, and of the miseries
suffered there by starving authors. As usual
with Macaulay the picture is overdrawn, but
there is no doubt that his main contention is
true. The golden age of patronage had
passed away, the age in which the writer ap-
pealed directly to a large and hberal reading
public had not yet arrived; and in the inter-
regnum, " strugghng between two worlds, one
dead, one powerless to be bom," Johnson and
his fellows had a long and bitter contest with
all the ills that then assailed the scholar's life,

" Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."

But where weaker men succumbed, Johnson's

[149]

Studies of a Booklover

courage, industry, and strong self-command
brought him nobly through the battle.

Johnson's emergence from the sea in which
so many of his fellows sank was, indeed, a
striking example of the survival of the fittest.
Of all the struggling men of letters in his day
no one was so well fitted to make his hands
keep his head. His native independence of
mind kept him from the snares of patronage
in which so brilliant a genius as his friend
Savage perished miserably; his proud self-
confidence prevented him from becoming the
abject slave of the book-sellers. His en-
counter with Osborne, one of the most promi-
nent pubHshers of the day, has become tradi-
tional. He is said to have knocked him
down with a foHo Bible and to have put his
foot upon his neck in sign of triumph, but
Johnson told BosweU the story in a simpler
fashion: "Sir, he was impertinent to me, and
I beat him;" and he added later, "I have beat
many a fellow, but the rest had the wit to hold
[150]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

their tongues." Although by no means con-
temptuous of the good things of life, he could
and often did live on as near nothing a day as
was humanly possible, and the want of a
dinner never lowered the quality or quantity
of his literary product. On the contrary, his
natural indolence seemed to need the spur of
sharp necessity. When free from care he was,
in the fine phrase of his day, "vastly idle";
but he was at need capable of the most ex-
traordinary exertions. He wrote forty-eight
printed pages of the Life of Savage at a
sitting; he began and finished his story of
Rasselas in a single week. And he was as
versatile as he was energetic. For the Gentle-
man's Magazine, with which he became con-
nected soon after his arrival in London, he
wrote verses in Latin, Greek, and English,
translations from French and Itahan, essays,
biographical sketches, prefaces, and addresses
to the subscribers. Perhaps of all his labors
for the magazine that which attracted most
[151]

Studies of a Booklover

attention was his version of the debates in
ParKament. The House of Commons at that
time and for years afterwards strictly pro-
hibited any account of its proceedings; but the
enterprising pubhsher of the Gentleman's
Magazine managed to bribe the doorkeepers
to admit men who reported to him the sub-
jects of discussion, the names of the speakers,
and a few scanty notes of their arguments.
Out of these materials Johnson composed,
under the title of Debates of the Senate of
Lilliput, a series of speeches which, in the
judgment of his contemporaries, surpassed the
eloquence of Demosthenes, and greatly in-
creased the sale of the magazine.

In spite of his poverty, however, as soon as
Johnson discovered that these speeches were
being received as the genuine orations de-
livered in ParUament, he ceased to compose
them, " for," said he, " I would not be accessory
to the propagation of falsehood." As this
fact bears witness to Johnson's tenderness of
[152]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

conscience, another incident is equally en-
lightening as to his political prejudices.
When praised for the impartiality with which
he had distributed reason and eloquence, he
answered: "That is not quite true. I saved
appearances tolerably well; but I took care
that the Whig dogs should not have the best
of it."

It was fortunate for Johnson in more ways
than one that at the crisis of his life he boldly
plunged into the world of London. Had he
remained in the provinces he would have
rotted in obscurity or collapsed under the de-
pressing influence of an environment to which
he was in no way adapted. On the other hand,
had circumstances permitted him to live like
Gray in the dignified seclusion of a college
fellowship, he would probably have done even
less work than Gray and in the end gone
melancholy mad. He had not the slightest
taste for country life, and ridiculed with
boisterous scorn the supposed delights of soli-
[153]

Studies of a Booklover

tude. Possibly on account of his deficient
eyesight he had no appreciation whatever of
the beauties of nature; one prospect, he said,
resembles another very closely, and one blade
of grass is exactly like another. The demon
of melancholy, " a horrible hypochondria, with
perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impa-
tience, with dejection, gloom, and despair
which made existence misery," was not to
be exorcised by solitary walks in country
fields. What Johnson needed was not only
work, but society, close contact with all sorts
and conditions of men, friendships, enmities,
whatever could draw him out of himself and
make him forget. All this he found in Lon-
don. No man of his time knew so well the
great city, and all the varieties of life contained
within its walls. He slept with beggars, or
wandered houseless through the streets at
night with a brother poet; he slanged a
bargeman, laughed and jested with Garrick's
actresses, or talked "with profound respect,
[154]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

but still in a firm, manly manner, with his
sonorous voice," to Majesty itself. "I look
upon a day as lost," he said, " in which I do not
make a new acquaintance." The fact that
he never lost a friend except by death shows
that he was as tenacious of old friendships as
he was eager to acquire new. He had, in fact,
a very genius for friendship, and the circle
that gathered round him in his later years
included not only poets, scholars, and men
of letters, but the most prominent painters,
actors, musicians, doctors, and statesmen in
England.

Johnson's attitude toward the great city
where he suffered so much and gained so
much is not to be judged from his poem,
London. The bitterness of that early satire is
due in part to the tone of the author from whom
it is imitated, in part, perhaps, to the temper of
Savage to whom it was addressed. But even
in this early work it may be noted that while
the abuse of the town is vivid and direct, —
[155]

Studies of a BooJclover

"Here malice, rapine, accident conspire.
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Here falling houses thunder on your head.
And here a female atheist talks you dead, — "

the contrasting praises of the country are
absolutely commonplace and artificial, per-
haps the only insincere lines that Johnson ever
wrote. We can well imagine with what ridi-
cule he would in later years have chastised a
presumptuous friend who urged him to fulfil
the prophecy of Thales and, abandoning the
follies of the town, " fly for refuge to the wilds
of Kent." London was no stony-hearted step-
mother to Johnson, but an Alma Mater dearer
even than his own mother university. He
preferred Fleet Street to the finest prospect in
the Highlands; declared that the full tide of
human existence was realized in all its magni-
tude at Charing Cross, and summed up the
feeling of thousands of lovers of the town be-
fore and since his day in the words, " When a
man is tired of London, he is tired of life."
[156]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

It would take too long to trace the evolution
of Johnson from the unknown correspondent
of the Gentleman's Magazine to the dicta-
torship of letters where Boswell found him;
but a few of the landmarks of his career may
be noted. His London in 1738 brought him
ten guineas and the praise of Pope. His Life
of Savage in 1744 attracted considerable atten-
tion, not only from the interest of its subject,
but from the vividness of its characterization
and the profound gravity of its morality. It
is written in Johnson's heaviest and most poly-
syllabic style; but it is worth reading even
today for its dexterous blending of moral criti-
cism and Christian charity. Indeed, it is at
times almost amusing to see how far John-
son's warm heart leads him to go in defence
of a friend, even when that friend was so
thorough-paced a blackguard as the unfor-
tunate Savage.

By 1747 Johnson had acquired sufficient
reputation to justify a syndicate of booksellers
[157]

Studies of a Booklover

in contracting with him for the production of
an English Dictionary, at that time a great
desideratum in the language. On this work
he spent in all eight years, and its appearance
may be said to have laid the capstone on his
reputation. As a great lexicographer, — the
title by which he was so often known in the
eighteenth century, — Johnson was disquali-
fied first by his profound ignorance of all
other Germanic languages and even of the
earKer stages of his own tongue, and secondly
by his constitutional disinclination toward la-
borious and minute research. On the other
hand, his definitions were for the most part
excellent, although at times, when his partisan-
ship got the better of his judgment and he
defined excise as "a hateful tax levied upon
commodities and adjudged by wretches hired
by those to whom excise is paid," or a pen-
sion as "pay given to a State hirehng for
treason to his country," they were calculated
rather to make the cynic laugh and the judi-
[158]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

cious grieve. Sometimes, indeed, a flash of
Johnson's sturdy good humor and native wit
breaks through the cloud of definitions and
illustrations like a ray of sunshine, as where
he defines Grub Street as a place "much
inhabited by writers of small histories, dic-
tionaries, and temporary poems," or a lexi-
cographer as "a writer of dictionaries, a
harmless drudge."

Johnson received the respectable sum of
nearly $8,000 for his work, equivalent in
purchasing power to perhaps three times the
amount to-day. Out of this, however, he had
to pay all the expenses of preparing the book
for the press, and long before the work was
done he had spent all that he was to receive
for it. His procrastination delayed the book
several years beyond the date for which it was
originally announced and completely exhausted
the pubhshers' patience. "Thank God, I
have done with him," said Miller, the head of
the syndicate, when the last sheets came in.
[159]

Studies of a Booklover

" I am glad," said Johnson, when this was re-
ported to him, "that he thanks God for any-
thing." It is characteristic both of the man
and the times that within a year after the ap-
pearance of his great work Johnson was ar-
rested for debt and had to be bailed out by his
friend, Samuel Richardson.

The composition of the dictionary by no
means engrossed Johnson's attention during
the eight years that he was engaged upon it.
In 1748 he composed his best known poem.
The Vanity of Human Wishes, for which he
received the trifling sum of fifteen guineas.
In the following year, the tragedy of Irene,
which he had brought up to London with him
and which had so far gone the rounds of the
theatres in vain, was produced by his old
pupil, David Garrick, now the manager of
Drury Lane.

The production could hardly be called
successful. The play began amid cat-calls
and whistling, and when the catastrophe was
[160]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

reached and the unfortunate heroine with the
bowstring about her neck opened her lips for
her dying speech, the audience broke into loud
howls of "Murder! Murder!" and drove her
silent from the stage. The friendly influence
of Garrick, however, succeeded in keeping the
stiff and lifeless play upon the stage for nine
nights, and Johnson received the handsome
profit of £300 or thereabouts, from what was,
as a matter of fact, the least valuable of all his
contributions to literature. The truth is that
with all his talents Johnson utterly lacked
dramatic power. His individuality was too
strongly developed for him to put himself in
another man's place. Goldsmith hit the nail
on the head when he remarked to Johnson:
"Why, sir, if you were to write a fable, you
would make all the Uttle fishes talk like whales."
The author's great reputation induced some
friends to read and even to speak well of the
play; one. Pot, went so far as to say that it
was the finest tragedy of modem times; which
[161]

Studies of a Booklover

gem of criticism being reported to Johnson
elicited the frank and crushing verdict, "If
Pot says so, Pot lies."

From 1750 to 1752 Johnson was occupied
with the composition of the Rambler, one of
the countless eighteenth century imitations of
the inimitable Spectator. The style shows
Johnson almost at his worst, and his occasional
attempts at pleasantry remind one painfully
of the gambols of a hippopotamus. But its
stately orthodoxy and its solemn moralizings
on Johnson's favorite theme, the vanity of
human wishes, exactly suited the taste of the
age, and it is not too much to say that his con-
temporary reputation as the greatest of Eng-
hsh moralists dated from the appearance of
the Rambler.

The last number of this periodical had
already been written when Johnson lost his
wife. He was profoundly affected by her
death; "remember me in your prayers," he
wrote to an old friend in the first bitterness
[162]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

of his grief, "for vain is the help of man."
And his sorrow was no transient emotion; to
the end of his Ufe he observed the day on
which his Tetty died as a day of mourning
and of solemn devotion to her memory. The
prayers written down in his diary on these
days wake, even at this distance of time, in
the most careless reader that sense of fellow-
ship in suffering which the old poet knew:
Sunt lacrimce rerum, et mentem mortalia tan-
gunt.

Mrs. Johnson's death would have left her
husband alone in the world had he not already
begun to gather about him a household of
poor, distressed creatures — blind Miss Wil-
liams, old Mrs. Desmoulins and her daughter,
Polly Carmichael, Dr. Levet, whose brutal
manners put even Johnson to the blush, and
the negro servant, Frank, whose office of
valet must, from all we know of his master's
dress and personal appearance, have been an
absolute sinecure. Not one of these had any
[163]

Studies of a Booklover

claim upon Johnson but that of wretchedness
and poverty, yet he turned over his house to
them, Kstened humbly to their quarrels and
reproaches, and plunged himself into debt to
nieet their wants. He even went out himself
to purchase fish and oysters for his favorite
cat, Hodge, lest if he should assign this task
to any of his dependents, the cat might be
disliked as a source of trouble and mistreated
in his absence. It was well said of the rough
old man that he had nothing of the bear about
him but his skin.

In 1756 Johnson began the famous edition
of Shakespeare over which he dawdled for the
next ten years. He received money from
hundreds of subscribers for the projected work,
spent it, and did nothing till stung to action
by a contemporary satire which roundly
charged him with dishonesty. It is rather the
fashion nowadays to sneer at Johnson's criti-
cisms of Shakespeare, but when the proper
allowance is made for Johnson's time and
[164]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

temper, it is hard to find a saner piece of criti-
cism in the English language than the preface
to this edition, or more sensible advice than
that which he gives there to the young student:
"Notes are often necessary, but they are
necessary evils. Let him that is yet unac-
quainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and
who desires to feel the highest pleasure that
the drama can give, read every play from the
first scene to the last, with utter negligence of
all his commentators. When his fancy is
once on the wing, let it not stop at correction
or explanation. When his attention is strongly
engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to
the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him
read on through brightness and obscurity,
through integrity and corruption; let him pre-
serve his comprehension of the dialogue and
his interest in the fable. And when the pleas-
ures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt
exactness and read the commentators."

The Idler, a series of weekly essays, ap-
[165]

Studies of a BooMover

peared in the Universal Chronicle for the years
1758-1760. We find in these essays the hnk
which joins the stiff and somewhat pompous
style of the Rambler to the more famihar and
pleasing tone of the Lives of the Poets. In
some of the papers, at least, we seem to hear
Johnson talking as he might have talked at the
club. The sketch of Dick Minim, the per-
fect type of a neo-classic critic, has several
humorous touches of self -portraiture; and
Johnson's open-mindedness is shown by his
admitting a paper by his friend Langton, con-
taining a kindly, but rather pointed, reproof
of his own growing preference of projects to
performances.

Johnson's mother died in the beginning of
1759. As usual he was in distress for money
and had to borrow six guineas of a printer to
make up a sum which he sent down to her in
her illness. Unable to be with her in her last
moments, he wrote her perhaps the most
tender and touching letter which a son ever
[166]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

sent to his mother, and to provide for her
funeral expenses and pay the little debts she
left behind, he broke the spell which idleness
was weaving around him and wrote in hot
haste his story of Rasselas. This work has
been absurdly criticised as a novel; as a matter
of fact it is nothing of the kind. Johnson's
Abyssinians make no pretence to reaUty; they
are ideal creatures in an imaginary country,
and the purpose of the book is neither to por-
tray manners nor to delineate character, but
to teach a moral lesson, and to denounce the
favorite dogma of the day, that this is the best
of all possible worlds. If there was one thing
of which Johnson was firmly persuaded, it
was that this dogma was a piece of cant, and
cant was the object of his most vigorous de-
nunciations. The note of the book is struck
in the words of Imlac, the wise counselor of
Rasselas: "Human life is everywhere a state
in which much is to be endured, and little to
be enjoyed."

[167]

Studies of a Booklover

In 1762 George III, who had newly come
to the throne, was graciously pleased to grant
Johnson a pension of £300 a year, one of the few
public acts of His Majesty which were fortunate
enough then and afterwards to meet with almost
universal approbation. After some hesitation,
not unnatural in the author of that definition of
a pension already cited, Johnson accepted the
favor. In youth he had been an ardent Jacobite,
and it has even been conjectured, though prob-
ably without a shadow of truth, that he left Lon-
don in 1745 to join Prince Charlie's invasion
of England. But by 1762 the Jacobite cause
was merely the shadow of a name; George III
was, at least, a true-born EngHshman, and
Johnson's strong common sense naturally pre-
ferred so substantial a reality as three hundred
a year to the empty pleasure of cursing the
House of Hanover and drinking King James's
health.

On the receipt of his pension, Johnson
practically struck work. He had yet more
[168]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

than twenty years to live, but with the excep-
tion of the Lives of the Poets, a work which cost
him httle more time than was involved in the
actual labor of composition, it is doubtful
whether he devoted more than a few months
of this period to the practice of Uterature. But
if he wrote little he talked much. In the year
after the receipt of his pension he joined the
famous club which met for weekly suppers at
the Turk's Head Inn. In the same year he
first met Boswell. And here we may well
leave him; the rest of his acts and his words,
are they not written in the book of the prince
of biographers ?

The charm of Boswell's book lies in its
lifelike presentation of Johnson's personality;
from its pages the fascination which Johnson
exercised over his contemporaries rises afresh
to cast its spell over us. In what does the
secret of the charm consist ? Partly, no doubt,
in the strong common sense of the man. We
are all more or less victims to cant; in one
[169]

Studies of a Booklover

form or another we all pay tribute to the or-
ganized hypocrisy of society. But none the
less we love the man who rises superior to the
conventions, exposes their hoUowness, and
laughs at the supposed necessity of their obli-
gations. Again, the quick wit and bluff
heartiness of Johnson are not without their
share in his attraction. His wit was not al-
ways of the most refined. His passages at
arms resemble cudgel play rather than a fen-
cing match. But after all the quarter-staff is
to us of the English-speaking race a kindlier
weapon than the rapier. And Johnson was a
past master in the noble art of giving hard
knocks. " There is no arguing with Johnson,"
said one victim, rubbing, we may imagine,
his broken head, "for if his pistol misses fire,
he knocks you down with the butt." And if
his bluffness was sometimes overpowering to
his contemporaries, it is a source of unfailing
amusement to a later generation. "He hugs
[170]

The Personality of Dr. Johnson

you like a bear," said Burke, "and shakes
laughter out of you."

But if this were all, Johnson would be merely
a comic figure, a sort of literary Sancho Panza.
The secret of his charm lies deeper; there is a
trace in him of Don Quixote as well. Like
that noble and most pathetic figure, Johnson
was the champion of a failing order, of a cause
already lost, although he knew it not. In
Uterature, in politics, and in religion, Johnson
stood on the brink of a revolution, and strove
to save his world from plunging into what
seemed to him a bottomless abyss. So great
was his influence over the English world of his
day that he actually succeeded in delaying
the advent of that revolution. To avert it
was beyond human power, but there is some-
thing irresistibly appealing in the sight of a
brave man fighting a losing battle.

Finally, I think, the fascination of Johnson
is due to that delight which human nature
always experiences in discovering a treasure
[171]

Studies of a Boohlover

hidden beneath a repelling exterior. There
is much about Johnson that is repellant —
not merely the scarred face, the uncouth man-
ners, and the slovenly dress, but the narrow-
ness, the dogmatism, the arrogance, passing
at times almost into brutality. But all this is
on the surface, the hard crust through which we
must break to reach the hidden ore. And the
ore is rich in the noblest qualities of manhood
— courage, courtesy, wisdom, and love.

[172]

"The

Frugal Note of Gray"

THE fame of Gray is a unique phenome-
non in English Uterature; assuredly it
rests upon the narrowest of foundations.
During his lifetime he condescended to pub-
Hsh exactly a dozen poems, and the barrenness
of his productive powers may be measured
by the fact that when to these poems there
are added all that the diUgence of successive
editors has been able to collect, school ex-
ercises, fragments in English and Latin,
trifling satiric skits, and rejected stanzas, the
whole occupies something less than two hun-
dred pages in the most elaborate edition of
his works. This is but a petty harvest for a
life of fifty years of unbroken leisure, and
yet it is no paradox to say that the security
[173]

Stvdies of a Booklover

of Gray's fame is in inverse proportion to
the scantiness of his production. There is
no poem in our language — not Hamlet nor
Paradise Lost — which is surer of wide-
spread and enduring popularity than The
Elegy in a Country Churchyard. The time
may perhaps come when Shakespeare and
Milton will be as little understood or loved
as they were in Gray's youth. But so long
as the English language is spoken or read,
Gray's masterpiece will continue to fill the
place in the minds and hearts of men that it
took upon its first appearance and has held
since then for a century and a half. And this
for the simple reason that there is no one
poem in English, nor perhaps in any modem
language, which is at once so universal in its
appeal, so perfect and yet so simple in its
form. And the immortaUty of the Elegy en-
sures, we may well beheve, a like happy fate
to the handful of lyrics which cluster round it.
The problem of Gray, if we may so call it,
[174]

Thcmias Gray

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

Is to account for this discrepancy between the
quantity and the quality of his work. There
is, of course, no necessary connection between
these two. Yet, as a matter of fact, in Eng-
lish literature, at least, the great poets have
as a rule been prolific poets as well. And
where the contrary has been the case the fact
is generally capable of a very simple explana-
tion; straitened circumstances, the pressure
of other interests and duties, or early death,
has limited or cut short the poet's work. But
none of these explanations are available in
the case of Gray.

Matthew Arnold in a famous essay has
attempted what may be called the objective
explanation. Gray, a bom poet, he says, fell
unhappily upon an age of prose; he was iso-
lated in his century; the want of a genial at-
mosphere, the failure of sympathy in his
contemporaries, prevented him from develop-
ing and flowering as he would have done in
a happier time. " He never spoke out." This
[175]

Studies of a Boohlover

little phrase, caught from a letter of a friend
of Gray's and meaning, in truth, nothing
more than that he had never told his friends
how near his end was, becomes in Arnold's
hands a magic formula by the frequent repeti-
tion of which he calls up a vision of Gray as
an unfortunate being, gifted with all the quali-
ties that go to make a poet, but blasted by
the east wind of a barren and prosaic age.
It need hardly be said that this vision is
wholly the product of the critic's imagination.
In the first place, prosaic as the mid-eighteenth
century was, it had the wit to recognize the
greatness of so rare and lofty a poet as Gray.
The Elegy went through four editions in
two months; the Pindaric Odes were received
with a chorus of wondering applause which
roused the bitter wrath of Samuel Johnson.
Gray was the only true poet of his century
who was honored by the offer of the laureate-
ship. And even had it been otherwise he was
not the man to be struck dumb by the in-
[176]

''The Frugal Note of Gray"'

difference of the public, for he was himself
wholly indifferent to public praise or blame.
His first and last poems alike appeared anony-
mously. He consented to the pubHcation of
the Pindaric Odes to please his friend, Wal-
pole, and only permitted Dodsley to print
the Elegy - — and that without his name upon
the title-page — because he learned that the
manuscript had fallen into the hands of a
pirate printer who was already setting it in
type. He does not seem to have been espe-
cially elated by the popularity of the Elegy,
and he laughed good-naturedly at the charge
of obscurity which was at times brought
against his odes. It would be hard, I think,
to find another Enghsh poet who so serenely
and sincerely disregarded contemporary opinion
as Thomas Gray.

A later and less fanciful student of Gray's

life and work. Professor Phelps, attributes

the poet's limited production to three causes,

his scholarly temper, his bad health, and his

[177]

Stvdies of a Booklover

dignified reserve. This, it seems to me, is
distinctly a more reasonable explanation,
since it seeks the cause not in the character
of the world surrounding the poet, but in the
man himself. And yet I am inclined to doubt
whether any of these causes, or all of them
combined, satisfactorily account for Gray's
sterility. The long disease of Pope's life did
not check his creative power, nor did the
dignified reserve of Tennyson's character
prevent his becoming one of the most produc-
tive of English poets. The later years of
Milton were marked by the presence of all of
these supposed causes of poetic barrenness,
yet these years gave birth to Paradise Lost,
Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
The truth, I believe, hes somewhat deeper.
Professor Phelps, like Matthew Arnold, as-
sumes, perhaps too hastily, the presence in
Gray of rich productive powers which were
checked by certain temperamental and physi-
cal causes. But I am incUned to believe that
[178]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

Gray at once spoke the simple truth and told
the whole story when he said to Walpole: "If
I do not write much, it is because I cannot."
In other words he said little, because he had
but little power of speech.

In his ingenious analysis of the character
of Gray, Matthew Arnold has pointed out
accurately enough his qualities of learning,
penetration, seriousness, sentiment, and hu-
mor. But when the critic goes on to affirm
that these quahties constitute the equipment
and endowment for the office of poet, one de-
clines to follow him. It would not be difficult,
I fancy, to discover the presence of all these
quahties in the character of Gray's contem-
porary, Samuel Johnson. Yet, so far as I
know, no one has yet discovered in the auto-
crat of the Literary Club a great poet bhghted
by an unfavorable environment or Kmited by
scholarly habits and ill health.

The truth is that these qualities are mere
accidents, by no means essential to the mak-
[179]

Studies of a Booklover

ing of a poet. Shakespeare lacked learning,
Wordswortli critical penetration, Chaucer high
seriousness, Dryden sentiment, and Milton
humor. The true essentials of a poet, though
perhaps seldom found united and in their full
power in a single individual, are profound
reflection, vivid emotion, and far-reaching
sympathy, combined with an irresistible ten-
dency to expression and a mastery, inborn or
acquired, of metrical form. Gray was, no
doubt, a master of form. But he lacked al-
most entirely the bom poet's creative im-
pulse. It was not only that he dalKed over
his work — it took him three years to write
the Bard — or laid it aside for other things
as he laid aside the Elegy for seven years; but
as his letters and journals show, he had abun-
dance of sentiment, humor, and satire which
he seldom or never felt the desire to express
in verse.

Perhaps the most str iking instance of this
poetic reticence of Gray appears in his feel-
[180]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

ing for nature. It has been well said that
Gray is the first English writer to exhibit that
love of nature, particularly in her wilder and
more solitary moods, which dominates so
much of modern poetry. In his youth he
was profoundly affected by his first sight of
the Alps. He wrote to his friend West, for
example: "In our little journey up to the
Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to
have gone ten paces without an , exclamation
that there was no restraining. Not a precipice,
not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with
religion and poetry." This is wholly in the
manner of Wordsworth, but the creative poetic
impulse moved Wordsworth to write Tintum
Abbey, whereas the only record of Gray's
feelings, apart from incidental references in
letters, is found in a few Latin verses written
in the album of the Grande Chartreuse. We
must not be too severe upon Gray for his
choice of a dead language; Latin verse was
to him at that time, no doubt, an easier and
[181]

Studies of a Booklover

more natural medium than English. But it
is none the less remarkable that this should
be his sole expression. Later in life he visited
the Scottish Highlands, and discovered the
EngUsh Lake Country, but by this time his
tendency toward expression had become atro-
phied by long disuse. The Journal in the
Lakes is deUghtful reading, but after all it is
prose not poetry; and even the Jowmal would
never have been written, had the friend for
whom it was composed been able to fulfil his
intention of accompanying Gray on the tour.
But even if Gray had been endowed with
the impulse to expression, the question re-
mains whether he did not lack other essential
quahties of the great poet. A capacity for
profound reflection Gray assuredly had not.
His learning is undisputed; but learning ac-
quired in Gray's fashion, merely to occupy the
tedious hours of a life without purpose, learn-
ing that is never employed or put to any prac-
tical use, is apt to hinder rather than to help
[182]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

the habit of reflection. The observations on
Aristotle, Froissart, and Shakespeare which
Arnold cites as evidence of Gray's power to
use his learning are excellent of their kind.
But they are critical dicta and nothing more.
And no one should have known better than
Matthew Arnold the difference between the
critical and the creative faculties. It is not by
framing critical dicta, however sincere, acute,
and well-turned they may be, that a scholar
fits himself for the office of a poet. On the
great problems of human life and destiny.
Gray, if we may trust the double testimony
of his letters and his poems, does not seem to
have thought at all. His religious behef was
sincere, but wholly conventional. He enter-
tained a deep distrust of the destructive skepti-
cism of Voltaire and Hume, but he cherished
an almost equally profound dislike of the
great contemporary champion of orthodoxy,
Dr. Johnson. The former shocked his re-
ligious, the latter his sesthetic sensibiHties.
[183]

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He lived on the verge of the great revolutionary
movement which was to remodel the forms
of society, government, and intellectual life in
the Western world, without in the least realiz-
ing the impending deluge. He read the works
of Rousseau, the great forerunner of that
movement, "heavily, heavily," contrasting
them, no doubt to their disadvantage, with
the elegant romances of Crebillon and Mari-
vaux. And if we would have a striking instance
of the extent to which this absence of the capac-
ity for profound reflection impairs the poetry
of Gray, we have but to place his Hymn to
Adversity, with all its pomp of poetic phrase-
ology, beside that noblest of Wordsworth's
odes which "assigns to the guardianship of
duty or everlasting law the fragrance of the
flowers on earth and the splendor of the stars
in heaven." In form, and to a certain extent
in diction also, Wordsworth's Ode to Duty is
modelled upon Gray's Hymn. But what a
difference in the content of these poems!
[184]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

Duty was the guiding star of Wordsworth's
life; the reconciliation of the inevitable claims
of duty with the natural human desire for
happiness was the goal toward which his
ethical thinking was directed. To Gray, on
the other hand, Adversity was a mere ab-
straction, a literary lay figure on which to
hang a rich, embroidered robe of verse. It is
absurd to suppose that at the time when the
Hymn was written, or indeed at any time in
his quiet cloistered life. Gray had realized by
experience the true meaning of the word.
And as a natural result the thought of the
Hymn, when severed from its form, is a mere
series of commonplaces.

In dealing with Gray's capacity for emotion
we are, I beUeve, on somewhat more uncer-
tain ground. There is, indeed, little evidence
of this capacity in his poems. If these were
all that remained to testify of the character
of Gray, we might believe him, as comparative
strangers in his lifetime believed him, a man
[185]

Studies of a Booklover

of cold, haughty, and fastidious temperament.
But the known facts of his life contradict such
a judgment. We know of Gray's devotion
to his widowed mother, of his affection for his
aunts, — always excepting one "old Harridan,
the Spawn of Cerberus and the Dragon of
Wantley, " — of his tender love for West, the
friend of his youth, of his strong and long-
continued friendship with Walpole, Mason,
and Wharton, of the almost romantic warmth
of his feeUng for Norton Nichols and Bon-
stetten, the young friends whose intimacy
Ughtened the gloom of his advancing years.
It is hardly too much to say that Gray had a
genius for friendship. Certainly those who
penetrated behind the veil of his reserve and
knew the man himseK loved him as few Eng-
lish poets have been loved. And yet, when
all is said, we must still believe that Gray's
emotional life was at least as calm as it was
deep. He had not the capacity for strong,
lively, and passionate feeling that marks the
[186]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

poet of the first order. It seems plain that
he never knew what it was to love a woman.
Certainly his sedate flirtation with Miss Speed
cannot be dignified with the name of love.
It seems equally plain that he never hated any
one with that fiery personal hatred that has
so often spurred a poet on to give utterance to
his feelings in words that still glow with the
intense heat in which they were first conceived.
Gray could neither love like Bums and Shelley,
nor hate like Pope and Byron. Even where
he felt deeply, as in his relations to his friends,
he seems to have laid the ban of a gentle and
dignified reserve upon any expression of his
feelings. His gentle and kindly letters seldom
or never betray the presence of any strong
emotion. Only once in his life did the mingled
passion of love and sorrow, of hopeless long-
ing for the days that are no more, impel him
irresistibly to utterance in verse. And the
one poem that issued from this rare mood
Gray carefully hid away among his papers
[187]

Studies of a Booklover

where it was discovered only after his death.
In the Sonnet on the Death of West we hear
for the sole time in Gray's works the lyrical
cry that marks the presence in the poet of in-
tense and overmastering emotion:

"The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their Uttle loves the birds complain;
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain."

We may say of these hues what Gray's harshest
critic has said of a famous passage in the
Elegy: "Had Gray written often thus, it had
been vain to blame and useless to praise him."
But Gray did not write often thus. On the
contrary, as he advanced in life he more and
more resolutely denied himself the utterance
of his feelings even in the privacy of conversa-
tion with his friends. Bonstetten complained
that although he himself poured out his heart
to the poet and made him the partner of his
hopes, his desires, and his enthusiasms. Gray
never returned the confidence. " His life was
[188]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

a sealed book to me; he never would talk of
himself, never allow me to speak to him of his
poetry. If I quoted lines of his to him, he
kept silence like an obstinate child." That
Gray fully returned the warmth of Bon-
stetten's affection we have abundant proof,
and the poet seems himself to have realized
and regretted the bar to the free communion
of soul which his long habit of reserve and re-
pression imposed upon him. "I know, and
have too often felt," he writes to his young
friend, " the disadvantages I lay myself under,
how much I hurt the little interest I have in
you, by this air of sadness . . . but sure you
will forgive though you cannot sympathize
with me." Gray's capacity for the expression
of his feeUngs in fact had by this time become
as impossible in social intercourse as it had
been long before in poetry. Gray was not an
old man when he died, but his period of pro-
duction had ceased with the completion of the
Bard fourteen years before his death. And as
[189]

Studies of a Booklover

regards the expression of personal feeling, it is
not too much to say that his last utterance is
contained in the closing stanzas of the Elegy
written some seven years before the Bard.
Neither that poem nor its companion piece,
the Progress of Poesy, shows the slightest trace
of the quality of emotion, which is generally
considered essential to the true lyric. And
since it is upon these poems that the fame of
Gray as a lyric poet mainly depends, we seem
to arrive at the perhaps startling conclusion
that he was not in the true sense of the
word a lyric poet. And certainly, unless in
the category of the lyric a place can be found
for the expression of lofty thought in stately
language and harmonious rhythm, regardless
of the quaUty of emotion, Gray's claims as a
lyrist must be denied.

There is no need, I think, of elaborate

argument to show the limited extent of Gray's

sympathies. It has been generally admitted

that his life of the cloister shut him off from

[190]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

all active interest in the affairs of men. It has
not, however, been so generally recognized
that this life was Gray's deliberate choice. At
the age of twenty-six Gray had finished his
education and had made the grand tour; he
was his own master, in possession of a small
but sufficient income, free from any embarrass-
ment of family ties. The world was all be-
fore him where to choose, and he chose Cam-
bridge, that "silly, dirty place" where he had
spent four miserable years as an undergradu-
ate. The intellectual life of the university
was at its lowest ebb; over her ancient walls
brooded the spirit of Laziness, "our sovereign
lady and mistress, president of presidents and
head of heads," as Gray calls her in one of his
humorous and futile outbursts of revolt
against her power. Gray did not return to
Cambridge to study for any profession, nor
did he assume any share in the responsibilities
and duties of academic life. It was not, in-
deed, until a few years before his death that
[191]

Studies of a Booklover

he had any official connection with the uni-
versity. He seems simply to have fled to
Cambridge as to a refuge from a world in
which he had few friends and no interests.
It cannot, I think, be maintained that Gray
gained anything by this flight from the world.
Had he plunged like Johnson into the turmoil
of London life, he would have emerged, per-
haps a sadder, but certainly a wiser man.
Had he lived on at Stoke Pogis in the society
of his mother and his aunts, renewed his
friendship with Walpole, cultivated the ac-
quaintance of such neighbors as Lady Cob-
ham and Miss Speed, and continued to work
the vein of true poetry that had already dis-
closed itself in his mind, he would certainly
have been a happier man. As it was, Gray's
removal to Cambridge marks an abrupt check
in his poetic production; he laid aside the
half-completed Elegy, stammered out a few
lines expressive of his loathing for the aca-
demic atmosphere in the fragmentary Hymn
[192]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

to Ignorance, and then relapsed into silence
for five years, when he emerged just long
enough to write the delightful ode on the
death of Walpole's cat. From the composi-
tion of poetry Gray turned to those studies
classical, archaeological, and aesthetic which
were henceforth to occupy so much of his Ufe.
They were fruitless studies, so far at least as
any direct issue was concerned. No edition
of a Greek classic, no treatise on Gothic archi-
tecture, no history of Enghsh poetry, ever
came from Gray's pen. And in spite of the
various plans for works of this sort that he
formed and abandoned one after the other,
we may well believe that he devoted himself
to study not for the sake of producing anything,
but with the hope of dispelUng the ennui that
hung so heavily about his first years at Cam-
bridge, and, it may be, also of drugging his
mind against too painful reflections on what
might have been.

In time, however. Gray accommodated him-
[193]

Studies of a Booklover

self fairly well to the unbroken monotony of
this life. He removed from Peterhouse, where
he had been disturbed by the rude pranks of
"buckish" undergraduates, to the more con-
genial society of his old college, Pembroke.
He adorned his rooms with old books, fresh
flowers, and Japanese vases. He amused his
leisure by thrumming on the harpsichord,
wandered through the quiet fields about Cam-
bridge, and noted with the eye and ear of a
bom lover of nature the blossoming of the
first flowers and the song of the first return-
ing birds. He indulged himself in vacation
time with "Lilliputian journeys" about Eng-
land, visiting with special delight the noble
cathedrals whose Gothic architecture he was,
perhaps, the first man of his age to appreciate
at its true worth. And he wrote voluminously
to the few friends in whose correspondence he
found that social intercourse which the cir-
cumstances of his life and his own reticence
of speech denied him at first hand. He even
[194]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

accepted a position as Professor of Modem
History and Letters in the university. He de-
livered no lectures, to be sure, but none of his
predecessors had done so since the chair was
founded, and although his conscience troubled
him at times for this comphance with aca-
demic etiquette, he never ventured to violate it.
From beginning to end he remained consistent
in his position as an onlooker rather than a
participant in university life.

Nor was Gray less the onlooker at the
world of pubUc affairs. It is a mistake to
think of his age as dull. It witnessed the last
hopeless attempt to restore the Stuarts to their
old throne, it saw the last struggle in England
between representative institutions and the
monarchy. Abroad it saw the foundation
of the EngUsh empire in India, the final
triumph of England over her old rival for the
mastery of the New World, and the glorious
battle of Frederick the Great single handed
against the power of allied Europe. But for
[195]

Stvdies of a Booklover

all these great events Gray had only the in-
terest of the placid citizen who finds in the
perusal of his daily paper a pleasant distraction
from the monotony of his life. "We talk of
war, famine, and pestilence," he writes, re-
ferring to himself and his Cambridge asso-
ciates, "with no more apprehension than of a
broken head, or of a coach overturned be-
tween York and Edinburgh." And Gray's
interest in personaUties was httle stronger than
his sympathy with great causes. He pitied
the "poor King of Prussia," admired Pitt,
and despised that " fizzling old owl," the Duke
of Newcastle; but had Pitt betrayed his coun-
try or Frederick taken poison, Gray, one be-
lieves, would none the less have sat down
calmly to his nice dinner and drunk his two
glasses of sweet wine before expressing his
feehngs over such untoward events in a well-
tumed phrase of a letter to Mason or Wharton.
Such, surely, is not the stuff of which great
poets are made. It would be absurd, of course,
[196]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

to expect in a retired scholar like Gray the all-
embracing human sympathy of Chaucer or of
Shakespeare; but it is hard to refrain from
comparing Gray's indifference with the love
of Uberty, the hatred of tyranny, the passion
of patriotism which glowed in the hearts of
Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, poets by
nature as Uttle men of the world as Gray
himself.

Such seem to me to be the causes which
underlie and account for the scanty product
of Gray's muse. Under the happiest of cir-
cumstances he might, perhaps, have some-
what increased the quantity of his verse.
Under no imaginable circumstances, being
what he was, could he have altered its quality.
And what was he ? When one subtracts from
Gray those essentials to a great poet which
he seems undoubtedly to have lacked, what
remains ? Enough, at least, to constitute him
one of the finest artists in verse that glorify
our literature. His diction is impeccable. By
[197]

Studies of a Booklover

long and toilsome labor he wrought the fabric
of his verse into something as near perfection
as is permitted to mortals. It is not too much,
I think, to say that in the rare and happy
union of simpUcity and beauty Gray's Elegy
is unmatched in modem times. And his ear
for rhythm was as fine as his sense of language
was true. To match the lofty music of his
odes with their interwoven harmonies, their
pauses and prolongations, one must go back
to Milton, or come down to Coleridge and
Shelley. Finally Gray possessed what is per-
haps a rarer gift than feeUng for language or
ear for rhythm, the constructive power. His
poems are not compositions in which an occa-
sional happy thought or striking image atones
for much that is commonplace or superfluous.
They are organic wholes. They spring up,
run their destined course, and come to their
proper close with something of that inevitable
character that attends the phenomena of na-
ture. Not a stanza, not a line, but has its
[198]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

function, its operant power, in the scheme of
the whole. And this is due to the fact that
Gray was not only a poet, but one of the
severest of critics. What other poet in our
history would have discarded from the Elegy,
for the sole reason that it formed too long a
parenthesis, such an exquisite quatrain as this:

" There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year.
By hands unseen are showers of violets found ;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there.
And little footsteps lightly print the ground."

This artistic merit of Gray's work deserves,
moreover, special recognition in view of the
fact that the age in which he Kved was wholly
dominated by what may be called the mechani-
cal theory of verse. Dryden, to borrow
Lowell's phrase, had "taught the trick of
cadences that made the manufacture of verses
more easy." Pope brought this handicraft
to its highest perfection; and Pope's successors
got the trick by heart. Regularity, uniformity,
precision, and balance became, as Arnold has
[199]

Studies of a Booklover

pointed out, the dominant characteristics of
eighteenth century verse; and the prevailing
form of that verse, the heroic couplet as
written by Dryden and Pope, was exactly the
form which gave fullest expression to these
characteristics and denied expression to the
higher and truer qualities of poetry. Gray,
who began to write before the death of Pope
and who died before the reaction against
Pope's theory and practice was well under
way, was exposed to the full force of this
mechanical system. Yet he was practically
unaffected by it. Two of his poems, indeed.
The Hymn to Ignorance and the Alliance of
Education and Government, may fairly be said
to belong to the school of Pope. But both are
fragments, thrown aside, probably, because
Gray felt that his genius moved heavily in the
harness of this school. And both these frag-
ments can be subtracted from the scanty
total of Gray's work without at all impairing
the measure of his fame. Like the shepherd
[200]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

boy who refused the armor of the king, Gray won
his victories by disregarding the accepted rules.
But Gray was something more than an
artist in verse. He was a true, if not a great
poet. He had what no other writer of his day,
with the one exception of the ill-fated Colhns,
possessed, a real gift of song. In an age when
the would-be poet turned as a matter of course
to satire and didacticism, Gray shook out from
time to time a lyric note as pure and sweet as
that of a song bird. Such a note was not
always at his command. He indulged too
often in stately and sonorous rhetoric. The
admired opening of the Bard, for example, is
splendid declamation rather than song. But
what other poet of his day could have thrown
off such a couplet as that Gray made for
Nichols while walking with him in the spring
fields near Cambridge:

"There pipes the wood lark, and the song-
thrush there
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air."

[201 ]

Studies of a Booklover

Or what other poet could so have caught the
flute-Uke note of the young Milton as Gray did
in the lines he puts into his great predecessor's
mouth in the Installation Ode:

"Ye brown o'er-arching groves.

That contemplation loves.
Where wiUowy Camus lingers with deUght!

Oft at the blush of dawn

I trod your level lawn,
Oft woo'd the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly,
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed

Melancholy."

Gray had, moreover, the true poet's quick
sensitiveness to the appeal of romantic land-
scape, Uterature, and tradition. Classical in
his expression, he became more and more, as he
advanced in life, romantic in his taste. Here,
too, he was at variance with the spirit of his
age. To style a scene, a sentiment, or a story-
romantic was in the eyes of the censors of his
day to condemn it as wild, extravagant, or
improbable. But Gray set his Bard among
the savage mountains of Wales, paraphrased
[202]

''The Frugal Note of Gray"

stirring battle-pieces by the Celtic bards, and
introduced his astonished countrymen to the
grim mythology of Scandinavia. It is hard
to believe that we are listening to a writer of
the mid-eighteenth century when we read the
ringing lines that tell how the Fatal Sisters
plied their ghastly loom, or how Odin rode
down the yawning steep to wake the witch-
wife in her grave :

"Facing to the northern clime.
Thrice he traced the runic rhyme;
Thrice pronounced, in accents dread.
The thriUing verse that wakes the dead;
Till from out the hollow ground
Slowly breath'd a sullen sound."

Would not one say that we were listening to
the voice of Sir Walter? But the mere truth
is that Gray broke the way not only for Scott,
but for all who since his day have turned with
deUght to the wild, enchanted fields of northern
myth and saga.

Finally, the truest poetic quality in Gray
is his gift of tender, quiet pathos. The gentle
[203]

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melancholy that overhung his life, deepening
at times into profound depression, and but
rarely lifting to let his native graceful humor
shine through the clouds, interpenetrates the
greater part of his verse and finds its supreme
expression in the Elegy. There is nothing
poignant, httle that is personal, in Gray's
pathos. We know that the Elegy had its
origin in a mood of melancholy brooding due
to Gray's loss of a relative, and found its long-
deferred completion during a similar mood
due to a like cause. Yet it is siagularly ab-
stract and general in tone. Not once in all
its calm and gentle progress do we catch the
cry of personal lament. That cry, as I have
pointed out, occurs once, and once only, in
Gray. There is nothing here of the stormy
wrath of Lycidas, of the lofty aspiration of
Adonais, of the alternations of hope and doubt
that pass hke April cloud and sunshine over
In Memoriam. Yet who would wish the Elegy
other than it is ? What it lacks in thrill of in-
[204]

"The Frugal Note of Gray"

dividual passion it gains in breath and univer-
sality of emotion. As the poet muses over
the unknown and nameless dead, it is not so
much the voice of Gray that we hear as "the
still, sad music of humanity." And this music,
like that which Wordsworth heard in later
days, is

"Not harsh, nor grating, though of ample
power
To chasten and subdue."

It is one of the fashions of contemporary
criticism to inquire somewhat curiously into
the mission and the message of a poet. I am
by no means sure that this quest is always suc-
cessful. Too often, I think, the critic reads
out of the poet only what he has first read into
him. Gray, we know, wrote to please him-
self, with little care for his effect upon the
world. But the unconscious teacher is often
the best, and if for once we should indulge in
this modern fashion, might it not be true to
say that Gray's mission was to teach the
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dignity and beauty of poetry as an art, and that
his message was to touch an age singularly
hard and coarse with a sense of the pathos of
human destiny. And might one not go further
and find in Gray a special lesson for an age
so loud, so troubled, and so rebelUous as our
own, the lesson of gentleness and resignation.
One stanza, excised from the Elegy by too
severe a hand, seems to me to sum up this
lesson in Gray's own perfect way:

"Hark! how the sacred calm, that broods

around.
Bids every fierce, tumultuous passion cease.
In still, small accents whisp'ring from the

ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace."

[206]

The

Charm of Goldsmith

TO be the best-beloved of English writers,
what a title is that for a man " — so
Thackeray opens his delightful lecture on
Oliver Goldsmith in the English Humourists.
And this title Goldsmith has borne almost with-
out a rival from the day of his death. While he
lived, men too generally underestimated him,
rascals cheated him, blackguards slandered
him; his very friends alternately ridiculed and
reproved him. Yet even then he was loved,
loved in spite of his follies and frailties, by all
who had themselves the heart to recognize the
warm, generous, human heart that beat be-
neath the ugly and ridiculous exterior of the
Uttle Irish doctor. At the news of his death
Burke burst into tears, and Reynolds laid aside
[207]

Studies of a BooMover

his brush and closed his studio — which he had
never done before even in times of deep do-
mestic affliction. But perhaps the most touch-
ing tribute to his memory was the outburst of
lament from the poor women who crowded the
staircase to his chambers; wretched outcasts,
waiting there to hear the last of the kind gentle-
man who had never insulted their misery and
who had often emptied his slender purse to re-
lieve their wants.

"Let not his frailties be remembered,"
wrote Johnson of Goldsmith, some months
after his death. " He was a very great man."
Yet to-day it is not so much Goldsmith's great-
ness as his delightfulness that fills the mind of
the reader who turns once more the well-worn
pages of the Vicar of Wakefield, the Deserted
Village, or She Stoops to Conquer. And so
little can we obey the great moralist's injunc-
tion to forget poor Goldsmith's frailties that we
are perhaps almost too prone to dwell upon
them. Goldsmith's faults were never such as
[208]

Oliver Goldsmith

The Charm of Goldsmith

to startle or repel. In his lifetime they wronged
none but himself. And since his death it
would seem that they have atoned for the in-
jury they did by winning for him the hearts of
all who desire to feel between themselves and
the great men of the past the bond of a common
humanity.

Nowhere, I think, is this bond more readily
perceptible than in the case of Goldsmith.
As we read the story of his life, we feel that in
all but genius he is one of us. We first pity,
and then love him.

Goldsmith's life falls into three uneven parts:
the period of youth and merry idleness, the
period of obscure poverty and drudgery, and
the period, all too brief, of literary and social
distinction. He was bom in 1728, in a " tum-
ble-down, fairy-haunted farm-house," near the
httle Irish village of Pallas. His father,
Charles Goldsmith belonged to an EngKsh
family who had been long enough resident in
Ireland to acquire many of the characteristics
[209]

Studies of a Booklover

of the native Irish, especially their gaiety,
sunny temper, credulity, and careless disregard
of the hard facts of life. He himseK had made
an improvident marriage and at the time of
Oliver's birth was a country parson, eking out
his forty potmds a year. by farming. Shortly
afterwards he was transferred to a parish worth
two hundred pounds per annum, in which he
regarded himself as so passing rich that he
" wound up " his brood of children — Oliver
was one of ten — " to be mere machines of pity,"
and "perfectly instructed them in the art of
giving away thousands before they were taught
the more necessary qualifications for earning a
farthing." These are Goldsmith's own words,
taken from one of the many autobiographical
passages in his works, and they show what,
perhaps, we might have guessed without them,
that the art of profuse expense and somewhat
thoughtless charity in which he was so great a
master was no mere individual characteristic but
an inherited and early- developed family trait.
[210]

The Charm of Goldsmith

As a child Goldsmith is said to have been
stupid, sensitive, hot-tempered, and loving.
His growth was checked and his features deeply
scarred by an attack of small-pox. He passed
through several schools with no particular
credit, and at the age of seventeen was in-
duced, much against his will, to enter the Uni-
versity of Dubhn.

Goldsmith's reluctance was not due to a dis-
Uke of learning, but to his keen perception of
the humiliating terms upon which it was now
offered him. His father's income had been so
reduced by the effort to provide a dowry for
the eldest daughter of the family, who had
secretly married a gentleman above her in
rank and wealth, that he could not afford to
send OUver to college, except as a sizar.
Now a sizar in those days was little better
than a menial. He swept courts, carried
dishes, dined on fragments, and acquired what
learning he could in the intervals. In Gold-
[211]

Studies of a Booklover

smith's words, he was " at once studying free-
dom and practising servitude."

At college Goldsmith passed four undistin-
guished years. It is plain that he was, and felt
himself, wholly out of place within the academic
walls. Once indeed by a burst of energy he
gained a petty prize worth thirty shiUings, and
it is eminently characteristic of the man at aU
times of his life that he promptly spent the
money in an entertainment with music and
dancing in his attic room. His tutor heard
the sound of revelry, burst open the door,
knocked Goldsmith down, and drove the
dancers headlong before him down the stairs.
Poor Goldsmith promptly ran away from col-
lege, starved for a time in the streets of Dublin,
and then set out to tramp across the country
with some vague idea of taking ship for Amer-
ica. He was rescued by his brother, who
brought him back to college and patched up
some sort of a truce with the redoutable
tutor. It is pleasant to learn that this hard-
[212]

The Charm of Goldsmith

hitting personage finally came to a disgrace-
ful end.

A couple of anecdotes are preserved that
show us something of the better side of Gold-
smith at this time. He used, we are told, to
write street-ballads and sell them at five shil-
hngs apiece to eke out his miserable allowance.
At night he would steal out to hear them sung
and peddled off in the DubUn alleys. It was
under such circumstances that the future
author of the Deserted Village made his first
acquaintance with " sweet poetry " :

" Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,
That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st
me so."

Yet poor as he was. Goldsmith was always
ready to give away all he had to wretches poorer
than himself. A friend who came to call on
him one morning had to haul him by main
force out of the ticking of his mattress. Gold-
smith had given the blankets off his bed the
night before to a poor woman with five children,
[213]

Studies of a Booklover

whom he found crying at the college gates, and
to keep warm had burrowed so deeply into his
mattress that he could not get out again with-
out help. The story is ludicrous or pathetic,
as one chooses to look at it. Certainly, it
could not be told of any man of his day but
Oliver Goldsmith.

After leaving college Goldsmith passed three
happy, idle years with his family. He ran er-
rands for his mother, made love to a pretty
cousin, played on the flute, and sang songs at the
village tavern. In vain did his relatives attempt
to get him started in life. They induced him to
apply for sacred orders, — imagination boggles
at Goldsmith in the pulpit, — but he was rejected
by the bishop on the ground, we are told, that
he applied for ordination in a pair of most
unreverend scarlet breeches. They collected
thirty guineas and started him for America to
seek his fortune. He came back in six weeks
with nothing in his pocket, and with an amaz-
ing tale of the heartless sea-captain who had
[214]

The Charm of Goldsmith

stripped him of his money and left him stranded
at Cork. The letter which he wrote on this
occasion to appease his mother's not unnatural
wrath is, I believe, the earliest specimen of his
composition now extant, and it is as delightful
as a chapter of the Vicar of Wakefield, and,
possibly, bears about the same relation to what
actually occurred as that prose idyl does to real
life. Once more he was launched, this time
with London as his goal; but he got no farther
than DubKn, when he fell into the hands of a
gambler who promptly eased him of the fifty
pounds which, we may suppose, were already
beginning to bum his pocket. With one last
despairing effort, his family raised a final purse,
shipped him off to Edinburgh to study medi-
cine, and washed their hands of him. He
never returned to Ireland, though many a time
his heart yearned for his old home, and he
never saw any of his kinsfolk again, except
once or twice when a brother, as poor, as rest-
less, and as simple as Oliver himself, sought
[215]

Studies of a Booklover

him out in his London garret to obtain his aid
in making a fortune.

In Edinburgh, Goldsmith stayed two years,
making a pretence, at least, of study, telling
Irish stories in the students' clubs, and spending
a disproportionate share of his small allow-
ance on rich sky-blue satin and superfine claret-
colored clothes. From Edinburgh he set out
for Leyden, ostensibly to Usten to the lectures
of the learned Albinus and the not less learned
Gaubius. But a year's intercourse with these
worthies sated his thirst for academic knowl-
edge; he borrowed a small sum from a fellow-
countryman, spent the greater part of it in the
purchase of rare tuhp bulbs for an uncle in
Ireland, and set out on his travels with one
guinea in his pocket, one shirt to his back, and
his beloved flute in his hand, a happy, philo-
sophic vagabond.

The year of travel that ensued was probably
the most important event in Goldsmith's life.
It widened his horizon, stored his memory with
[216]

The Charm of Goldsmith

scenes and images, and furnished materials for
some of his best work. He has left us a pic-
turesque account of it in the story of George
Primrose's wanderings, and although this can
hardly be taken as a scrupulously exact piece
of autobiography, we know from other sources
that it contains at least the main incidents of
Goldsmith's tour. He traveled on foot, earned
a night's rest and a breakfast by playing on his
flute, begged a dinner at the door of some con-
vent, earned a few shillings occasionally by
disputing at some university, and borrowed
from every one who would lend to him, until,
as he frankly confessed, there was hardly a
kingdom in Europe in which he was not a
debtor. He passed through Belgium, France,
and Switzerland, visited Italy and Germany,
and in the winter of 1756 returned to England,
"his whole stock of cash amounting to a few
half -pence." His wanderjahre were over, and a
period of hard work and grinding poverty was
now to begin.

[217]

Studies of a Booklover

Goldsmith was at this time, as he says in a
letter, "without friends, recommendations,
money, or impudence, and that in a country
where being bom an Irishman was sufficient
to keep me unemployed. Many in such cir-
cumstances would have had recourse to the
friar's cord or the suicide's halter. But with
all my follies I had principle to resist the one,
and resolution to combat the other."

In truth. Goldsmith was no longer the merry,
lazy boy of earHer days; nor did he longer ex-
pect to live indefinitely upon the bounty of his
relatives. On the contrary, he now set in des-
perately, one might almost say heroically, to
earn a living for himself. But this was no
easy matter. He seems to have worked his
way up to London by joining a troupe of stroll-
ing players, but his first associates in the capital
were the beggars of Axe Lane. He found em-
ployment as a chemist's clerk, rose to be a fee-
less doctor in the slums, acted as press corrector
to the printer and novelist, Richardson, served
[218]

The Charm of Goldsmith

for a time as usher at a boys' school, and finally
hired himself out as hack-writer to a publisher
named Griffiths. Of all his occupations,
school-teaching seems to have been the one he
hated most. "I have been an usher at a
boarding-school," says a character in the Vicar,
speaking no doubt the sentiments of Oliver
Goldsmith, "and may I die by an anodyne
necklace (i. e., a halter), but I had rather be an
under turnkey in Newgate. I was up early
and late; I was browbeat by the master, hated
for my ugly face by the mistress, worried by
the boys within, and never permitted to stir
out to meet civility abroad."

But Goldsmith's first experiences in the
Uterary profession can hardly have been pleas-
anter than school-teaching. He lodged and
boarded at the house of Griffiths, who com-
plained of his idleness because he did not write
every day, and all day, who altered his articles,
and refused him sufficient food. In despair
Goldsmith sought for an appointment as a
[219]

Studies of a Booklover

doctor In the service of the East India Com-
pany, and to obtain the necessary outfit com-
posed his well-known Enquiry into the State of
Polite Learning in Europe. The title, by the
way, is a misnomer; the subject it indicates
was quite beyond Goldsmith's capacity, but,
on the other hand, the Httle book gives a very
vivid picture of the degraded condition of the
profession of literature in England, a subject
on which no man was perhaps better quaUfied
to speak. The East India scheme, however,
fell through, and as a last attempt to escape
from the slavery of hack-writing, he ap-
phed for a position as hospital mate, and
was rejected at the preliminary examination.
It was at this time that Goldsmith touched the
lowest point of misery; he pawned his clothes
to pay his landlady, pledged some books sent
him for review to secure a meal, was threatened
with the jail by the angry bookseller, and posi-
tively entreated as a favor that he might be
sent there. The quarrel was patched up, how-
[220]

The Charm of Goldsmith

ever, and the success of his Enquiry which
appeared about this time tended somewhat to
improve his prospects in the dreary world of
which he had now become a citizen.

Goldsmith was at last fairly launched upon
the sea of letters. He found other and more
generous employers than Griffiths, published
a charming group of essays. The Bee, and a
most entertaining series of letters purporting
to be written by a Chinese philosopher in Eng-
land to his friends in the Middle Kingdom.
He wrote a life of Beau Nash, a child's history
of England, and contributed essays, reviews,
and biographical sketches to the magazines
of the day. Little by little as he rose in the
world he made the acquaintance of distin-
guished men of letters. Percy called at his
lodgings, in "a wretched, dirty room," at the
head of Break-neck Stairs. He entertained
Johnson at a dinner in the politer quarters in
Wine-office Court, to which he soon removed.
Percy, who escorted the great Cham thither,
[221]

Studies of a Booklover

was surprised to find him in a new suit, a new
wig nicely powdered, and everything about
him so perfectly dissimilar from his usual
habits and appearance that he was moved to
ask the cause. " Why, sir," said Johnson, " I
hear that Goldsmith, who is a very great sloven,
justifies his disregard of cleanHness and de-
cency by quoting my practice; and I am de-
sirous this night to show him a better example."
No record remains of the dinner and the good
things that were said over it, but from that
night on Johnson was one of Goldsmith's
closest friends. The great dictator of letters
took the struggling author to his heart, bar-
gained for him with the booksellers, buUied
theatrical managers to get his plays produced,
touched up his poems, and at his death wrote
an epitaph in his most magnificent Latin for
his monument in Westminster Abbey, scorn-
ing, as he said, to disgrace its walls by an Eng-
lish inscription.

In 1763 Goldsmith was enrolled as a charter
[222]

The Charm of Goldsmith

member of the famous club over which John-
son ruled so long. At the close of the follow-
ing year he published his first signed work,
The Traveller, and it is from this time that his
contemporary reputation as a man of letters
may be said to date. When he joined the club
certain members were disposed to look down
upon him as a mere literary hack, unworthy
of the honor of their society, but on the appear-
ance of the Traveller, Johnson's pronuncia-
mento that the poem was superior to anything
since the death of Pope estabhshed his posi-
tion. It is characteristic of Goldsmith that
this poem, his first bold plea for fame, was
dedicated, not to his literary protector, nor to
some noble lord who might have rewarded him
with a handful of guineas, but to his brother
Henry, "a man who, despising fame and for-
tune, has retired early to happiness and ob-
scurity, with an income of forty pounds a year."
With the publication of the Traveller, Gold-
smith entered upon his last period, and from
[223]

Stvdies of a Booklover

this time on he produced an uninterrupted
series of classics. Emboldened by the success
of the Traveller, the publishers ventured to
print a novel of Goldsmith's which had been
lying in their hands for at least three years.
This was none other' than the immortal Vicar
of Wakefield. All the world knows the story
of the way the book came into the publishers'
hands, of Goldsmith's arrest by an irate land-
lady, of Johnson's intervention, of the novel
" ready for the press," which Johnson took out
and sold for sixty pounds, and of the scolding
Goldsmith gave his landlady for having used
him so ill. A recent discovery has shown that
this must have happened soon after Goldsmith
had made Johnson's acquaintance, and, more-
over, that the book was by no means "ready
for the press." Probably, indeed, the long de-
lay in publication was due not only to the hesi-
tation of the pubhshers, but to Goldsmith's
tardiness in completing a work for which he had
already received, and spent, the money. Of
[224]

The Charm of Goldsmith

one thing, at least, we may be sure: Gold-
smith, if left to himself, would never have sold
the Vicar to pay a landlady's bill. It was
work of another sort than this that he earned
his bread and butter by. And it may well be
that the hasty and unsatisfactory conclusion
of the novel is due, in part, to its having been
so unceremoniously taken out of his hands.

Of the book itself, Httle need be said. It is
one of the imdisputed classics of the English
language, one of the few English classics whose
merit has been as fully and continuously recog-
nized upon the continent as in English-speak-
ing lands. Its defects are obvious. They
were obvious even to the author: "there are a
hundred faults in this thing," says Goldsmith
in the preface, "and a hundred things might
be said to prove them beauties. But it is need-
less." Quite needless. The book lives and
will live, not by its plot, or its characters, but by
what Henry James has called the " amenity "
of its author, "the frankness of his sweetness
[225]

Studies of a Booklover

and the beautiful ease of his speech." " There
was," says the critic, "scarce a diflSculty, a
disappointment, an humihation, or a bitterness
of which he had not intimate and repeated
knowledge; and yet the heavy heart that went
through all this overflows in the httle book as
optimism of the purest water — as good humor,
as good taste, and as drollery."

The Vicar was followed in 1768 by Gold-
smith's first play. The Good-natured Man. Al-
though it ran for ten nights and brought Gold-
smith a decent sum of money, the lively comedy
by no means obtained the success it deserved.
It ran counter to the prevailing taste of the
time for the sentimental and lachrymose
drama; elegant judges found its language "un-
commonly low"; in fact, it seems only to have
escaped being damned on the first night by the
comic humor of one of the actors. Goldsmith
was bitterly mortified. At a meeting of the
club, after the play, he managed, indeed, to
conceal his feehngs, laughed, chatted, and sang
[226]

The Charm of Goldsmith

his favorite song; but "all the time," he said,
"I was suffering horrid tortures, and when
all were gone but Johnson, I burst out a-crying,

and even swore by that I would never write

again." "AU which. Doctor," said Johnson,
amazed at the frankness with which Goldsmith
a few weeks afterward related this scene in a
company of comparative strangers, " I thought
had been a secret between you and me; and I
am sure I would not have said anything about
it for the world." Of course he would not;
but a man may be allowed to laugh at his own
tears, though not at those of others; and we
love Goldsmith for his tears and laughter quite
as much as we honor Johnson for his goodness
and self-control.

Two years after the failure of his comedy
Goldsmith achieved an undisputed success by
the publication of the Deserted Village. Of
this poem less need be said, perhaps, than even
of the Vicar of Wakefield. Its place among
the classics of our language, ratified by the ap-
[227]

Studies of a Booklover

plause and tears of generations of readers, is
absolutely secure. What signifies pointing
out, as certain critics of the baser sort have
done, that its economic theories are crude and
its pictures of rural life unreal ? It is not the
business of a poem to teach political economy
or to correspond with minute accuracy to every-
day existence. Its business is to charm the
mind and touch the heart, and the Deserted
Village does both. It is not only the limpid
purity of its diction, the easy flow of its rhythm,
and the old-world grace of its portraits that
have made the poem immortal; but even more
its revelation of the poet, of his wistful affec-
tion for the friends of his youth, of his tender
sympathy for the misery he saw about him.
Gentleness, goodness, and humanity breathe
from every line.

Goldsmith completed his cycle of classics
by producing in 1773 one of the happiest com-
edies of our language. She Stoops to Conqiwr.
Founded upon an incident of his own school
[228]

The Charm of Goldsmith

days the story of the play is purely farcical;
but the wit of the dialogue and the humor of
the characters raise it to the highest plane of
comedy. It is one of the few plays of its cen-
tury that keep the stage to-day, and it is hard
to anticipate a time when the rollicking fun of
Tony Lumpkin and the mischievous grace of
Kate Hardcastle will lose their hold upon
spectators.

And yet it was with the greatest difficulty
that this most delightful of plays found its way
upon the boards. The manuscript lay for
months in the hands of a manager, while Gold-
smith was fretting his heart out with impatience
and struggling against a heavy burden of debt;
and it was at last only by the forceful interven-
tion of Johnson that the manager was induced
to accept it. He did so, however, with the full
conviction that it was foredoomed to failure;
he refused to adorn it with a new scene or a
new dress, and he communicated his doubts
to the actors who one by one threw up their
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Studies of a Booklover

parts. But when at last all obstacles were
overcome and the play appeared, its success
was instant and overwhelming. The club
attended the first night in a body to beat down
the anticipated opposition, but the enemies of
Goldsmith did not dare to show their heads.
As Horace Walpole writes: "All eyes were
upon Johnson, who sat in a front row in a side
box, and when he laughed everybody thought
himself warranted to roar."

The peals of laughter which greeted the ap-
pearance of She Stoops to Conquer, and pro-
claimed Goldsmith's final triumph over pre-
judice and false taste, marked also the close of
his career. He died about a year afterwards
of a fever brought on by overwork and trouble
of mind, leaving a few short poems and the
brilliant fragment. Retaliation, to be published
after his death. He was laid to rest in the
burial ground of the Temple Church; his books
and furniture were sold to pay his debts.

It must not be thought that, during this last
[230]

The Charm of Goldsmith

period when Goldsmith was producing his best
work, he had risen above the necessity of writ-
ing for his daily bread. With the exception
of his two plays he hardly made enough by his
masterpieces to buy butter for his bread. The
Traveller brought him twenty guineas, the
Vicar sixty pounds, the Deserted Village, we
are told, one hundred pounds. He would
indeed have been glad to devote himself wholly
to work of this sort, but no way ever opened
for him. His friends at one time applied for
a pension such as had been granted Johnson,
but it was promptly refused by the government,
probably because Goldsmith had declined to
hire out his pen in their service against the party
of his friend, Burke. The Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland once offered his patronage, but Gold-
smith begged him to transfer it to his brother
Heniy. And so he struggled on, collecting
anthologies, compiling histories of Greece and
Rome, abridging his own compilations, turn-
ing out lives of Pamell and Bolingbroke, and
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finishing the very month before his death an
eight-volume work on Animated Nature. Hard
task-work, but not without intervals of inno-
cent amusement. When Goldsmith had writ-
ten himself to a standstill, he used to in-
dulge in one of the vacations which he called
"a Shoemaker's Holiday." Three or four
friends would meet for breakfast in his rooms,
stroll out along the city road and through the
fields to a country inn, where they dined at
ten-pence a head, play skittles in the afternoon,
and return, as evening fell, for supper in a Lon-
don coffee-house. The whole expense of the
excursion, we are told, never exceeded a crown,
and oftener was from three to four shillLags,
"for which the party obtained good air and
exercise, good living, the example of simple
manners and good conversation."

In the face of such a simple record as this,
handed down to us by a contemporary who
had often been Goldsmith's fellow in a Shoe-
maker's Holiday, it is a httle hard to believe
[232]

The Charm of Goldsmith

the stories of the poet's vanity, profusion, sen-
suahty, and passion for gambling which are
bandied about from one biographer to another.
Yet it is probable that these tales have a cer-
tain foundation of truth. Goldsmith had to
the last the heart of a child. He was child-
ishly eager to attract attention, to shine, to
please. He decked his little body in the most
gorgeous raiment and left a large tailor's bill
unpaid behind him. He entertained sumptu-
ously at his rooms, not to gratify his own ap-
petite, for he is described as drinking hot milk
at these banquets, but to give pleasure to his
friends. From one vice, at least, common
enough in his age. Goldsmith always seems to
have been free; he was not a drinking man.
It is not so easy to acquit him of the charge of
gambling. There is a good deal of contem-
porary testimony to show that he was fond of
play, and quite as much to show that he always
lost. He had a child's love of excitement, a
child's firm conviction that he would finally
[233]

Studies of a Booklover

win, and a child's incapacity to match older
and craftier players. There is a most amusing
picture in his rhymed letter to Mrs. Bunbury
of the way in which she and her sister, the Jes-
samy Bride, lured him on with mocking ad-
vice to lose his shillings at loo. But there is
another story, not so well known as it might
be, which shows how little Goldsmith had of
the true gambler's absorbing passion. He
was playing whist one night with a party of
friends, for money of course, as every one
played at that time. At a critical moment of
the game, when the rubber depended upon a
single point. Goldsmith suddenly threw down
his hand and dashed out of the house into the
street. "Where the deuce have you been?"
said one of the players on his return. "I'll
tell you," he replied. "As I was pondering
over my cards, my attention was attracted by
the voice of a woman in the street, who was
singing and sobbing at the same time; so I flew
down to relieve her distress, for I could not be
[234]

The Charm of Goldsmith

quiet myself till I had quieted her." We can
hardly imagine Charles Fox, Lord March, or
any other of the famous gamblers of the day,
quitting the table to reKeve the sorrows of a
poor street-singer.

Of envy, the basest vice, with which Gold-
smith has been charged, we may unhesitatingly
pronounce him free. He was vain, no doubt,
and his vanity was often hurt by the way in
which men whom he rightly believed to be in-
ferior to himself, Beattie, for example, and
Kelley, were pensioned and applauded, while
he was neglected. And with a child's lack of
self-control, he uttered his feeUngs when wiser
men would have been silent. Often, too, his
supposed outbursts of envy were whimsical
extravagances misunderstood by the solemn
fools to whom they were addressed. Who
can beKeve, for instance, that he was actually
envious when he said to Boswell, expatiating
on the greatness of their common friend: "Do
not talk of Johnson in such terms; it harrows
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Studies of a Booklover

up my very soul." The fact is that Goldsmith
was a simple man in a somewhat sophisticated
society, and its members mistook his occasional
petulance for malice, and his jests for bitter
earnest. Even Johnson seems in this point to
have misunderstood him.

But we may comfort ourselves with a re-
mark of Johnson's, made shortly after Gold-
smith's death, when a roomful of people at
Sir Joshua's were depreciating their dead
friend's work. The loyal old man rose to his
feet, looked the chatterers in the face, and ex-
claimed, "If nobody was suffered to abuse
poor Goldy but those who could write as well,
he would have few censors ! " And to sum up
the whole matter. Goldsmith wrote so well be-
cause he was at bottom so good. If he had the
faults of a child, he had as well a child's vir-
tues. He loved children because, as has been
said, he was always at heart a child. He
was unsuspicious, generous, and confiding;
tender-hearted and easily moved to pity. If
[236]

The Charm of Qoldsmith

he ever took offence, as he was often warranted
in doing, he was always ready to forgive.
Above all he had that simple faith in goodness,
human and divine, which our Lord himself
recognized as not the least of virtues when he
set a little child in the midst of the wrangUng
disciples. And it is this childlikeness, if I may
use the word, appearing as it does both in his
life and in his work, that constitutes for all
who know him the peculiar charm of Oliver
Goldsmith.

[237]

The Last Minstrel

SCOTT was in his time the most popular
of all the great poets of the Romantic
movement, and he remains to-day the best
loved of their number. Whatever may be the
received opinion as to the merit of his verse
when compared with that of his contempo-
raries, it is impossible to feel for the cold auster-
ity of Wordsworth, the passionate egoism of
Byron, or even the sensitive ideality of SheUey,
anything like that sentiment of warm personal
affection which we cherish for the kindly, gen-
erous, and broadly human personahty of Scott.
In part, no doubt, this sentiment is due to the
unbounded reverence of boyhood for the won-
der-working poet who unbarred the gates and
led the way into the enchanted garden of ro-
mance. Nine out of every ten readers of Eng-
lish verse may, I fancy, repeat with all sincerity
[238]

Sir Walter Scott

The Last Minstrel

and truth the closing words of Lang's letter to
Sir Walter: "From you first, as we followed
the deer with King James, or rode with Wil-
liam of Deloraine on his midnight errand, did
we learn what Poetry means and all the happi-
ness that is in the gift of song. This and more
than may be told you gave us, that are not for-
getful, not ungrateful, though our praise be
unequal to our gratitude."

But there is something more in our feeling
for Scott and his work than a mere lingering
of the ingenuous and uncritical admiration of
boyhood. There comes a time, indeed, in
most Kves when Scott's poems are thrown
aside for the work of other poets, graver or
more sensuous, subtler or more passionate.
At such a period, too, his novels suffer under
the onslaughts of the newly awakened critical
sense; one is apt to pronounce them stilted in
diction, clumsy in machinery, and generally
wanting in technic. But this period passes,
like other Uterary maladies, and we come back
[239]

Studies of a Booklover

to Scott with a renewed delight in that brave
spirit of adventure which bewitched our youth,
and with a truer appreciation of the lyric
beauty, the power of sustained narrative, the
vigorous and varied gift of character portrayal
which combine with his epic simplicity and
his romantic charm to insure him a permanent
place, not in his native language only, but
among the great names of the literature of the
world.

It is probable that Scott's popularity rests
to-day, with the generality of readers, rather
upon his novels than his verse. This is due
in part to the almost unchallenged pre-emi-
nence which fiction since Scott's day has ob-
tained over other forms of Kterature, and to
the present almost unbroken preoccupation of
the general reader with novels, and novels
only. And it is due in part also to the undis-
puted fact that many of the best characteristics
of Scott — his shrewd and sunny humor, his
genial sympathy with all sorts of men, and
[240]

The Last Minstrel

his firm grasp on the reaUties of life — are
revealed more clearly in his novels than in his
poetry. Yet it is no less true that the neglect
which his verse suflfered during the greater
part of the last century was undeserved. His
fame was eclipsed by the successive ascensions
of Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Brown-
ing. Each of these poets became famous,
and rightly famous, for quaUties and effects
not to be found in Scott, and as a consequence
Scott's verse was underrated because it lacked
these quaKties and effects. A saner and more
sympathetic criticism estimates a poet by what
he is and does, not by what he could not be
and never dreamed of doing. Toward the close
of the Victorian era poetry tended more and
more to become a thing of the study, and the
appreciation of poetry to become less popular
in the true sense of the word, and more narrowly
Umited to a small, refined, and art-loving class,
in whose eyes the open-air, impetuous, and
often careless verse of Scott was an unpardon-
[241]

Studies of a Booklover

able crime against the canons of true art. The
world-wide vogue of Kipling's verses in the last
decade, however, would seem to indicate that
a strong reaction against the later Victorian
standards has already set in, and it is by no
means improbable that as the critics come to
realize that the last word of poetry was not
spoken by Tennyson, Rossetti, or Swinburne,
they may also come to recognize more gen-
erally the widely diverse merits of the great
predecessor of these poets.

The truth is that Scott, although his poetic
activity falls almost wholly within the nine-
teenth century, was absolutely unmoved by
the great currents of feeUng which swayed
that age. His attitude toward the principles
that precipitated the gigantic convulsion of
the Revolution in France and brought about
the bloodless, but no less important, reform
of the English constitution was from first to
last that of the fighting Tory. In his fiery
youth he headed a band of gentlemen who
[242]

The Last Minstrel

cracked \he heads of Irish Jacobins in the
pit of the Edinburgh theater; in his decrepit
old age he sprang from his carriage to arrest
a radical rowdy at the Selkirk hustings. His
pohtical ideas were summed up in the old
Cavaher motto: "Fear God; honor the king."
His attitude toward George IV, over which
Thackeray makes merry, was not that of a
servile courtier to his sovereign, but that of a
Highland bard toward the chief of his clan.
Scott was the last EngUsh poet to whom the
sentiment of loyalty in its old accepted mean-
ing was something more than an idle phrase.
He was in fact the last minstrel, and his muse

-the Lady of the Mere

Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,"

Scott represents the culmination of the eight-
eenth century's interest in the romantic and
medieval past. In him the tendencies that had
budded in Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy
and ' ' Ossian ' ' McPherson broke out into full and
[243]

Studies of a Booklover

perfect flower. Our knowledge of the Middle
Ages is to-day in many respects more accurate
and well-rounded; our poets and novelists would
shudder at such Hght-hearted anachronisms
as those in which Scott leaps over the centuries
to make his wizard clansman contemporary
with Queen Mary's moss-troopers, or to send
a Danish viking campaigning like a Crusader
"on Carmel's cliflFs and Jordan's strand."
And yet with all our increase of knowledge
and painstaking accuracy of expression it is
doubtful whether any poet since Scott's day
has ever penned a passage so instinct with
medievalism as the weU-known description of
Branksome at the opening of the Lay or the
scarcely less famous Mass in Melrose Abbey
at its close. Here as nowhere else in modem
EngUsh hterature the romantic past is seized
and reaHzed in two of its most dominating fea-
tures, warfare and reUgious devotion.

Of a third great element in medievalism,
romantic love, Scott is said to have had a
[244]

The Last Minstrel

fainter perception; and it is clear that the pas-
sion of love plays but a small part in his verse.
And yet I doubt whether any later poet has
reproduced more accurately the attitude of the
medieval minstrel toward love both in its
lighter and graver aspects as Scott in one
of the least regarded of his poems. The Bridal
of Triermain. , It would be an interesting
study to compare the Arthur of that poem, the
chivahic, adventurous, and amorous king of the
old romances, with the spiritualized and alle-
gorized Arthur of the Idylls of the King. Ten-
nyson's may be the nobler conception, but there
can be no doubt that Scott's is the more truly
medieval; and the perfect close of Sir Roland's
love-quest stands in admirable contrast to
the hopeless muddle of medieval and modem
with which Tennyson winds up his charming
idyll on the love-quest of Sir Gareth. " Scott's
feeUng for romance," says one of the shrewdest
of his later critics, and the depth of his sym-
pathy with all that was heroic and much that
[245]

studies of a Booklover

was merely ancient, enabled him to assume
almost the attitude of the wandering minstrel " ;
and in addition to the passage just noted a
hundred others might be quoted to verify the
truth of this assertion.

Scott's feeling for romance and sympathy
with the heroic past came to him in the most
natural way, through heredity and early en-
vironment. He was, to be sure, the son of a
sedate and practical Edinburgh lawyer, but
he was also the descendant of a famous hard-
riding, hard-fighting clan, the sixth in right
line from Walter of Harden, the hero of many
a Border ballad, and his wife, the Flower of
Yarrow — no bad genealogy, as Scott himself
remarked with conscious pride, for a Border
minstrel. He was bom in what is still the
most romantic of British towns, and his early
years were spent with his grandparents in a
farmhouse overlooking the Tweed, where he
was brought up in an atmosphere of Jacobite
tales and Border legends — an atmosphere
[246]

The Last Minstrel

wonderfully reproduced for us in the auto-
biographic lines prefixed to the third canto
of Marmion. The first poem that he learned
by heart was the ballad of Hardyknut, the first
book that he read aloud was Pope's Iliad.
While still a boy he read both Ossian and
Spenser, and committed to memory long pas-
sages of the Faerie Queene. To a residence
during his twelfth year in Kelso, "the most
beautiful village in Scotland," " Scott himself
traced the awakening of his feeUng for the
beauties of nature, a feeling inextricably in-
tertwined in him with a sense of the historic
or legendary past of which these beauties were
the frame. Scott was no pure nature-wor-
shiper Hke Wordsworth; a landscape meant
Uttle or nothing to him unless it were asso-
ciated with romantic memories. As he put
it, very frankly, he would rather wander over
the field of Bannockburn than survey the scene
from the battlements of Stirling.

One of the most important incidents in
[247]

Studies of a Booklover

Scott's early life was his acquaintance with
Percy's ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry. It was not that the book
opened a new field to the boy, for he had been
familiar since infancy with ballads and legends;
but it showed him that the collection, anno-
tation, and imitation of these old songs was a
pursuit worthy of a scholar and a gentleman.
To Scott's first reading of the Reliques under
a huge plantanus tree in the Kelso garden,
obUvious of the flight of time and the pangs
of hunger, may be traced his own great col-
lection, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border;
and the Minstrelsy laid the foundation for
perhaps the greater portion of his later work.

Scott's schooling was Kmited and irregular.
He decKned to learn Greek, and provoked
the wrath of his teacher by composing an argu-
ment to prove the superiority of Ariosto to
Homer. He neglected the Latin classics to
fasten eagerly upon the monkish chroniclers
of the Middle Ages, and very properly preferred
[248]

The Last Minstrel

the Stabat Mater and the Dies Irce to the neo-
classic poems of the Renaissance. Outside
of school hours he taught himself French and
ItaUan, for the specific purpose of mastering
the romantic treasures of those languages.
He attended but few classes at the university,
and although he studied hard and passed with
credit his examinations for entrance to the
Scottish bar, his heart was never in his pro-
fession. And yet his profession was of the
greatest service to him, for it sent him wan-
dering all over Scotland in pursuit of witnesses
and testimony. He utihzed these excursions
to store his mind with images of romantic
scenery and ruined castles and abbeys, with
snatches of old songs and ballads, with anec-
dotes and legends of Highland chieftains and
Border cattle-thieves. Before long he set
himself diUgently to collect the half-forgotten
ballads of the Border-side, and his annual
raids into Liddesdale not only secured him
the treasures which he went to seek, but
[249]

Stvdies of a Booklover

familiarized him with a mode of life which
had changed but little since the old moss-troop-
ing days. In after years Scott was accustomed
to lament the idleness and irregular studies of
his youth; but it is certain that no formal train-
ing could have fitted him half so well for the
work he was to do, and all true Scott lovers
will readily agree with Ruskin's charming
paradox that the poet enjoyed "the blessing
of a totally neglected education."

Scott's first contribution to literature was
under the auspices of the new romantic school
of Germany. He translated Blirger's ghostly
ballads, Lenore and The Wild Huntsman,
and Goethe's chivalric drama Goetz von
Berlichingen. Proceeding to original composi-
tion he fell in with " Monk " Lewis, the recog-
nized leader of the romantic movement in the
highest circles of English society, and con-
tributed to his Tales of Wonder a group of
ballads, among them Glenfinlas, The Eve of
St. John, and The Fire-King, Here we find
[250]

The Last Minstrel

the first true evidences of Scott's genius. The
vigorous diction, lively rhythm, and picturesque
imagery of these poems stand out in striking
contrast to the tinsel and clap-trap of Lewis's
own productions. And the strong sense of
locality, the poetic use of proper names, and
the mastery of supernatural effects which they
exhibit were all true promises of greater things
to come.

The Minstrelsy, Scott's next work, did not
appear until three years later. The author's
original intention had been to publish a neat
little book, such as might sell for four or five
shiUings. But the work grew on his hands.
In addition to his own stores of legend and
ballad, Scott drew on the resources of such
scholars as Ellis and Ritson, such countryside
collectors and composers as Leyden and Hogg.
The result was a three-volume collection,
which is simply the best ballad-book in the
world. Scott never hesitated to take liberties
with his originals; he combined, altered, and
[251]

Studies of a Booklover

inserted passages at will. He did all this, how-
ever, not to tickle the palate of a too fastidious
public in Bishop Percy's fashion, but to bring
the corrupt and imperfect versions up to his
own standard of taste; and his taste in ballad
literature was nothing short of the highest.
He treated the ballads, in fact, not like a mod-
em editor, but like an old minstrel; and as the
last and greatest of the minstrels he brought
many of them into their final and most perfect
form.

And the prose of the book, the introduction,
the essay on fairies, the voluminous historical
and legendary notes, is only a little less deUght-
ful than the ballads. It contained the ma-
terial for a hundred romances, and was the
storehouse whence Scott drew uncounted
names, scenes, and incidents for his later work.
Years afterwards, when Scottish society was
rent asunder over the authorship of the Waver-
ley novels, Christopher North ridiculed the
folly of those who went far afield to discover
[252]

The Last Minstrel

the writer. " What are they all thinking of ? "
said he; "have they forgotten the prose of the
Minstrelsy? "

Scott began the composition of his first long
poem. The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in the
same year that saw the publication of his Border
Ballads. He derived a hint for the subject
from the young and beautiful wife of the noble-
man who afterwards became Duke of Buc-
cleuch, the famous title of the chief of the Scott
clan. Scott has immortalized her as the Duch-
ess of the introduction to the Lay, where he
himself appears under the thin disguise of the
aged minstrel. It would be impossible to find
in modern times a situation more charmingly
medieval. A young countess commands the
minstrel of her house to sing, and even sets
him a subject; the minstrel obeys, and weaves
into his song the happiest of compKments to
his gracious lady and the most deKcate con-
fession of his devotion and gratitude. And
the song itself is such as a minstrel of the Middle
[253]

Studies of a Booklover

ages might have sung, a metrical romance of
chivaby. Like most of the old romances it
is deficient in construction and overcharged with
episode; but the episodes are too deUghtful to
wish away, and in poems of this sort elaborate
plot-construction is perhaps the last thing that
matters.

The Lay, to quote Lockhart's fine phrase,
is "a vivid panorama of that old Border hfe
of war and tumult and all earnest passions."
Love, war, religion, and magic are woven to-
gether into one imperishable fabric of romance,
while at the same time the poet never wholly
loses touch with the realities of hfe. WiUiam
of Deloraine, Wat Tinlinn, the representatives
of the English yeomanry, are veritable crea-
tures of flesh and blood, and more than suffice
to save the poem from drifting off into the
dreamy land of Otherwhere, in which, for
example, the scene of Coleridge's contem-
porary romance of Christabel is laid.

Marmion, the greatest of Scott's poems,
[254]

The Last Minstrel

appeared some three years after the Lay. It
was composed for the most part in the saddle,
during long rides over the braes or along the
sands in the intervals of drilling with a volun-
teer regiment of cavalry. England was then
in the full tide of her struggle against the gi-
gantic power of Napoleon, and Scott, it is
needless to say, threw himself into the struggle
with all his heart. From it he caught more
than a mere taste of

" That stern joy which warriors feel
In foemen worthy of their steel."

The poem itself breathes full of the mighty
passion of the time. Alone of Scott's tales in
verse it may with some fairness lay claim to
the proud epithet of epic. Had the poet been
fortunate enough at this period to light upon
the theme that he took up later in the decay of
his powers, the wars of Bruce, and had he de-
veloped that theme with the care which he
acknowledges to have bestowed in unrivaled
[255]

Studies of a Boohlover

measure upon Marmicm, we should perhaps
have had what it now seems unpossible that
we shall ever see, a modem national epic poem.
Even as it is, Marmion is many degrees above
the Lay which precedes and The Lady of the
Lake which follows it, in all that pertains to
unity, dignity, and tragic force. The plot,
though somewhat compKcated, is a true plot
and not a mere succession of incidents — it
moves forward step by step; the fortunes of the
principal figures are relieved against a well-
planned background of history, and in the
superb cKmax of the poem the fates of hero,
heroine, and villain are involved in the over-
whelming national catastrophe of Flodden.
Words are too weak to praise the battlepiece
with which the poem ends. It stands, along
with the battles of the Iliad and the slaughter
of the Nibelungs in AtH's Hall, as one of
the three great poetic expressions of the fight-
ing spirit in man, ancient, medieval, and
modern.

[256]

The Last Minstrel

The Lady of the Lake is the most popular of
Scott's poems, a fact due in large part, at least,
to its happy choice of subjects. It is not too
much to say that in this poem Scott opened to
English readers a world entirely new, for the
effusions of the pseudo-Ossian some fifty years
before had been far too vague and intangible
to give any conception of the life behind the
Highland hills. Alien in blood and language
as Scott was, he recognized in the dominating
principle of this life, loyalty to the chief, one of
the strongest of his own convictions; and,
guided by this clue, he reconstructed and por-
trayed the customs and national characteristics
of the Highlanders in a fashion that has been
and will be the delight of generations. It was
an astonishing tour de force, hut, after all, it
was Kttle more. There is a faint flavor of arti-
ficiaKty about the poem; it is as if Scott's grasp
on real life weakened when he deserted the nar-
row hmits of his own pecuKar land between
Edinburgh and the Border. In story and in
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Studies of a Booklover

style The Lady of the Lake is the simplest, most
polished, and most evenly sustained of all his
poems; but if it never sinks so low, it never
rises within striking distance of the loftiest
flights of the Lay and Marmdon, and some of
its best passages are weakened by our sense that
the same thing has been done and better done
before. The Battle of Beal' an Duine is a
long way behind Flodden. And yet when we
hear that a Scotch officer in the Peninsular
War read this battlepiece to his company
lying exposed to the fire of the French guns, and
that the men listened in breathless attention,
only interrrupting with a joyous hurrah as the
shot struck the bank above their heads, we
feel the utter futility of criticism. In poetry,
as in sport or war, blood will tell, and the blood
of generations of fighting men was warm in
Scott's veins.

Space forbids any detailed consideration of
the later poems. Yet, with the exception of
the two deaUng with contemporary events, and
[258]

The Last Minstrel

possibly the careless and ill-conceived romance
Harold the Dauntless, they by no means de-
serve to be dismissed without a word. Some-
thing has already been said of The Bridal of
Triermain. The Lord of the Isles contains at
least one scene equal to the finest passages of
the Lay, and many that are little below the level
of The Lady of the Lake. Rokeby, of all Scott's
poems, seems to me the most undeservedly neg-
lected. Less fortunate in the choice of a sub-
ject than in any other of his romances, Scott
has here laid his main stress upon character-
ization, and the chief figures in Rokeby are
drawn with an attention to detail, and set off
against each other in such effective contrast, as
prepares us for the best work of his novels.
Matilda, drawn from Scott's remembrance of
his first love, is the most real of all the heroines
of his poems; Redmond is by long odds the
strongest of his heroes; and Bertram, the cen-
tral figure of the whole romance, is the most
superb portrait in Scott's collection of heroic
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Studies of a Booklover

villains. But the crowning glory of Rokeby is
the lovely garland of lyrics which is so deftly in-
terwoven with the action of the tale. Long
after we have forgotten the descriptions and
incidents of the poem, the gay lilt of the " Cav-
alier Song" and the tender cadences of "O,
Brignall's banks," and "A weary lot is thine,
fair maid," Hnger in our ears. The last-named
song, indeed, seems to me the very quintessence
of Scott's lyric gift.

It is hard to part from Scott. There is so
much over which one would gladly pause:
the mingled grace and strength of his elegiac
moods, the frank simphcity of his occasional
outbursts of self-revelation, the loving and
minute detail of his bits of landscape-painting.
But the purpose of this essay has been to ex-
plain and illustrate but one aspect of Scott's
poetry, and to portray Scott himself as the last
of the minstrels, the restorer to English liter-
ature of the well-nigh forgotten medieval forms
of the ballad and the metrical romance, the in-
[260]

The Last Minstrel

spired awakener of an undying interest in the
legendary and chivalric past, the golden link
that binds us to the middle ages. And this
purpose it may be hoped has been, in some
measure, already accomplished.

[261]

The
Vitality of Browning

IT was the fashion some time ago to speak
with a certain easy contempt of the late-won
popularity of Browning's verse, to make small
jokes about the labors of the Browning Society,
and to prophesy that the popularity and the
Society alike were a mere fad which would
hardly outlive the poet himself. Browning has
been dead some fifteen years; the Browning
Society soon followed him to the grave; the
fad, if fad it were, of assuming a peculiar posi-
tion in the world of culture by exclusive and
esoteric devotion to his poems, has also passed
away. And yet Browning remains as popular
as ever. Perhaps more so. Not only is his
rank as one of the greater Victorian poets
tacitly admitted, — a fact which was by no
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The Vitality of Browning

means apparent when Mr. Stedman's well-
known review of the poetry of that age ap-
peared in 1887 — but he is constantly quoted
or alluded to in such a way as to show that this
rank is not an empty honor conferred upon the
illustrious dead, but rather the recognition of
his permeating influence upon the present time.
And there are other proofs of Browning's hold
upon the pubKc. Editions of his works are
rapidly multiplying. His earlier poems, in
particular, as they pass out of copyright, are
being reproduced in cheap and attractive forms;
and since the appearance of Mrs. Browning's
Letters in the closing years of the last century
there has been a steady succession of books
about the poet, which has culminated this pres-
ent year in Professor Dowden's thoughtful and
illuminating "biography of the poet's mind,"
perhaps the most valuable contribution to our
knowledge of the man and his work that has
yet been made. Decidedly Browning is not
dead yet.

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" No need that sort of king should ever die,"
says one of the characters in Pippa Passes,
and so may we say of Browning. The quaUty
most characteristic of the man, from his im-
petuous and eager youth to his magnificent old
age, was energy, activity, vitality of body and
mind.

There was discernible in him, indeed, a cer-
tain restless activity. He could not sit long
over a book; he would not spend his time in
the slow labor of the file that brings forth at
last the perfect Une. He needed to the very
end of his life some outlet for his superabun-
dant physical energies. And so he rode for
hours, walked for miles, swam far out into the
sea, bathed in mountain brooks, modeled in
clay; — any occupation was welcome that gave
his powers play. And his mind was as active
as his body. If he did not read long, he read
swiftly and widely, and assimilated instantly
what once he read. If he did not meditate
profoundly, he thought vehemently, springing
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The Vitality of Browning

with lightning bounds over the processes of
reason to the goal of truth. He was insatiable
in his thirst for acquisition and enjoyment.
He tasted all the pleasures of travel, society,
art, and music. He drank deep of the cup of
love. But he was not content with mere en-
joyment. Whatever he touched he sought to
master and understand. Like his own Fra
Lippo, the world meant intensely to him, and
to find its meaning was his meat and drink.
There is no poet in our literature who shows
in so abundant measure the presence of this
element of intellectual curiosity.

And the same vitality that characterized the
man marks his work as well. There are many
faults in Browning, faults of omission and
commission, rough places, ugly spots, offences
to eye and ear. But there is one fault with
which his severest critic cannot charge him.
He is never dull. The wine he pours is not
always sweet, but it is never flat or vapid.
It has always a certain keen smack and pun-
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gent aroma which assures us that the poet's
spirit is still there.

Browning's parents were quiet bourgeois
people, but each of them furnished something
of the matter which, touched by the spark of
genius, broke out into flower in the poet. His
father, denied the artistic and the classical
education for which he had longed in youth,
was a clerk in the Bank of England, a self-
taught scholar, a prodigious reader, and an
indefatigable book hunter. " His brain," said
his son in after years, "was a storehouse of
literary and philosophical antiquities." He
was fond of poetry and art, and himself wrote
verses, and drew, cleverly enough, portraits and
caricatures. He possessed robust health and
a fund of simple, unworldly affection for wife,
children, and friends. The poet's mother,
slight, delicate, and high-strung, was, in Car-
lyle's phrase, "the true type of a Scottish gen-
tlewoman." Her son's affection for her was
deep and lasting. Through all the years of his
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The Vitality of Browning

life as a young bachelor in his parents' house
he never went to bed without going into her
room to kiss her good-night, and at her death,
which happened while he was away at Flor-
ence, his wife wrote: "Robert has loved his
mother as such passionate natures only can
love, and I never saw a man so bowed down
in such extremity of sorrow — never." Both
husband and wife were devout Christians of the
simple, old-fashioned type, members of an
Independent congregation in a London suburb,
evangelical, rather than sacerdotal or ascetic.
Browning's education was peculiar. He left
school in his fourteenth year, and never went to
college, unless a brief attendance on a Greek
class in London University may be reckoned
such. But his home training was excellent.
He cultivated the body, learnt to ride, box,
dance, and fence; devoted much time to music;
and under his father's guidance read omniv-
orously, English, French, Latin, and Greek.
There is little reason to share, I think, his
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official biographer's regret that Browning
missed the conventional English course of
instruction.

Like most poets Browning was a precocious
boy. He read Pope's Homer with keen de-
light at the age of eight, plunged headlong into
Byron at ten, and in his twelfth year produced
a volume of verses of the true Byronic stamp,
in which we are told, "he yearned for wastes
of ocean and illimitable sands, for dark eyes
and burning caresses, for despair that nothing
would quench but the silent grave, and, in
particular, for hollow, mocking laughter." It
is needless to say that no publisher shared the
proud parents' opinion of this early work, and
it is characteristic of Browning that, as soon as
he came to years of discretion, he destroyed the
manuscript.

While Browning was still a boy, however, he
came under a nobler and more permanent in-
fluence than that of Byron. A pretty story is
told of his discovery in a suburban bookstall
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The Vitality of Browning

of a, copy of " Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem,"
Queen Mab; of his mother's sympathy with her
boy's new interest, of her presentation of an
armful of volumes by Mr. Shelley and his
friend Mr. Keats; and of the boy's rapturous
communion through a summer night, while
nightingales sang in the garden, with the souls
of poets dead and gone. To the end of his life
Browning never forgot that night; he often
spoke of it as "his first joy, his first free hap-
piness in outlook." And well might he re-
member it, for the soul of the poet was born in
him that night.

And it was not long before he definitely
decided to devote his life to poetry. With the
full consent of his father, who seems to have
entertained the same well-founded confidence
in his son's genius that Milton's father did.
Browning declined to enter business or prepare
for a profession, and set himself to study life,
and to cultivate his powers for his future work.
His first actual production, it must be owned,
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was somewhat disappointing. Pauline, a long,
monodramatic poem, intended to serve as the
introduction to a series of similar epics, " nar-
ratives of the lives of typical souls," was written
before Browning was twenty-one, and ap-
j)eared anonymously in 1833. It attracted
almost no attention, and in spite of certain
passages of a wild, vague beauty, contained
Uttle of true promise. For its very beauties
were but faint echoes from Shelley. The por-
trait of the nameless hero is shadowy and ob-
scure; that of the lady of the poem is, perhaps,
even less perceptible. Browning himself real-
ized his lack of "good draughtsmanship and
right handling," and in later years acknowl-
edged and retained the piece among his collected
works with extreme reluctance.

It is another matter with Browning's next
work. Paracelsus, published in 1835, is a
creation which any poet might be proud to
own. Coming from the hand of a youth of
twenty-three, it amazes us, not so much by its
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The Vitality of Browning

eloquence and beauty as by its strength of
thought, its grasp on Ufe, its revealed mastery
of poetic conception and execution. The por-
trait of Paracelsus, the first in Browning's long
gallery of heroes who strove and failed and
wrested victory out of defeat, is lifelike and
convincing. Such and no otherwise we must
believe the real man to have been. And the
central theme of the poem reveals with an
intense simphcity seldom matched thereafter in
Browning's work what was to be the cardinal
point of his philosophy of life, — the necessity
of human striving, undismayed by weakness,
ignorance, and failure, sustained and cheered
by love and sympathy, upward toward the
ideal of humanity, which is none other than
God himself.

It is a long step backward from Paracelsus
to Sordello, which closes the first period of
Browning's work. In fact it appeared at one
time as if the publication of this unlucky poem
had forever closed the gates against Browning's
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favor with the EngKsh public. The stories
that are told of its reception by Cariyle, who
declared that his wife had read it through with-
out being able to discover whether Sordello
were the name of a man, a city, or a book; by
Tennyson, who declared that he had under-
stood but two lines, the first and last, and that
both these were lies; and by Douglas Jerrold,
who saw in his utter inability to make sense of
the poem a symptom of incipient idiocy, and
was only rescued from despair by his wife's
frank assertion that it was the poet and not
the reader who was mad; — these stories but
faintly illustrate the dumb amazement with
which the pubUc in general received the book.
And even to-day a not wholly dissimilar eflFect
is produced upon the reader who approaches
the poem for the first time, equipped though
he may be with the whole armory of guides,
hand-books, and commentaries which have
gathered round this portentous work of Brown-
ing's youth. The truth is that Sordello, though
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The Vitality of Browning

by no means so obscure or illegible as tra-
dition gives out, is a work of extreme difficulty.
The style is condensed, abrupt, and allusive to
a degree, — " Greek written in shorthand,"
some one has called it. The main theme,
"incidents in the development of a soul," on
which Browning meant to lay stress, is too
ofteh buried from sight in a multitude of de-
tails fathered from his historical studies and
his recent Italian travels. Only an utter lack
of the critical instinct could have persuaded
Browning into the behef he is said to have
entertained that this unwieldly narrative would
be intelligible, even in its main outlines, to the
average reader. But Browning had at all times
of his life far more of the creative impulse than
of the critical instinct.

Browning's second period of work overlaps
his first,"and coincides with the introduction to
society and the world of letters which the suc-
cess of Paracelsus, limited as this success was,
had won for him. He was at this time a
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tall, dark, handsome youth, something of a
dandy in dress, vivacious and friendly in man-
ner. He was eager to wring from the world
all that it had to oflFer one fresh from so se-
cluded a boyhood, and gladly cultivated the
friendships with poets, actors and men of letters
whom this new-found world revealed to him.
It was at the suggestion of one of these new
friends, the great actor, Macready, that
Browning in 1836 laid aside his half-finished
Sordello and began the first of his series of
plays.

Luckily one need spend Httle time nowa-
days in threshing over the straw of that once
hotly debated question whether or not Brown-
ing was a dramatist. If by the word drama-
tist we mean what the word has meant from
the time of ^schylus to the time of Ibsen, a
writer of plays for the stage. Browning has
small claim to the title. It is quite true that
several of his plays were actually performed
and that none of these positively failed. As
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The Vitality of Browning

to the exact measure of success attained by
Strafford, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, or Co-
lombe's Birthday, we may, I think, remain
wholly and calmly indifferent. Indeed, it may
well be a matter of congratulation to us that
their success was not more decided, and that
Browning escaped a permanent entanglement
with so eflFete and moribund an institution as
the Victorian theater. His failure as a prac-
tical playwright, for failure in view of all the
circumstances it must be called, threw him
back upon his own proper field, that drama
"whose stage," to quote the admirable phrase
of a French critic, "is the soul itself and whose
actors are the passions."

The dramatic quality in Browning consists,
to put it briefly, in his objectivity, in his power
to conceive other characters than his own, in
his ability to make these characters reveal
themselves by thought and word and action.
And this second period of Browning's work,
in sharp distinction to his first, is pre-eminently
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objective. Exclusive of Sordello, a poem be-
gun and in part completed before Browning
began his work for the stage, this period em-
braceshis productions from 1837 to 1846. It in-
cludes Strafford, and the seven plays and two
clusters of dramatic Ijrrics and romances which
go to make up the series of Bells and Pome-
granates. In all these it is hard to find a
single direct and personal utterance of the
poet such as occurs so often in his earliest
work. It is as if Browning had felt the inade-
quacy of the material on which he had hitherto
built up his theory pf life, and now flung him-
self upon the world to gather new facts, create
new characters, invent new tests, and thus
equip himself by experimental knowledge of
human life for the pronunciation of a riper and
juster judgment. And what a wealth of new
material the poet brought back from this raid
upon objective existence. To this period be-
long Pippa and her songs, the superb and
sensual Ottima, the gracious charm of Co-
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The Vitality of Browning

lombe, the innocent guiltiness of Mildred and
Mertoun, the noble faith of Luria.

Apart from the creation of character in his
dramas Browning discovered in this period the
pecuHar form of verse in which his most char-
acteristic work hereafter was to be framed,
the dramatic monologue; and his first employ-
ment of this form. My Last Duchess, shows how
instantly he realized its possibiUties. Humor,
a quality hitherto unknown in Browning, shows
itself in such work as The Pied Piper, Si-
hrandus Schafnaburgensis, and The Flight of
the Duchess. Passion, too, makes its appear-
ance, the passion of friendship in Time's Re-
venges, of hatred in the Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister, of love in Cristina and In a Gondola.

As one glances back over the period as a
whole, one gets somehow the impression of a
genial young giant broken loose upon the world
and venting his glorious strength, not in
destruction, but in reproduction, in imitation,
in caricature, even, of the multiform types of
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humanity that he .encountered there. And as
a whole this period of vigorous objective work,
so packed with vivid portraiture, so alive with
human passion, represents an immeasurable
advance upon the incoherent beauties of Pau-
line, the confused entanglement of Sordello,
or even the eloquent philosophy of Paracelsus.
Yet all this work, fresh, strong, and vital as it
appears to us, was thrown away upon a public
deaf and blind. The Bells and Pomegranates,
published though they were in cheap yellow-
paper-covered booklets, found few readers
and almost no purchasers. One only of the
numbers achieved the grace of a second edition,
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon; and this distinction
was due, one fears, not to any popular appre-
ciation of its merits, but in part to the com-
parative success it had obtained upon the stage,
and in part to the notoriety of the bitter quarrel
between playwright and actor which accom-
panied its production.
Browning had, however, already gained one
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The Vitality of Browning

reader whose praise in after years was to out-
weigh for him the plaudits of a Ustening world.
Elizabeth Barrett, a far more popular poet in
the early forties than Browning, was at the
time of their first acquaintance a hopeless in-
valid, hopeless at least in her own opinion and
in that of those who knew her best. But her
spirit triumphed serenely over her bodily suffer-
ings. Invalid as she was, her life was very
full. She read, wrote, translated, received a few
intiinates in the little room where she spent day
after day upon her sofa, and kept in close touch
with all the movements of the time. Brown-
ing, " the author of Paracelsus and king of the
mystics," as she called him, she had long
known in his works, and she had conceived the
highest opinion of his present worth and his
protnise for the future. The noble compli-
ment which she paid in her Poems of 1844 to
his Bells and Pomegranates brought her a
letter from him full of thanks and enthusiastic
praise of her work. Her reply opened the way
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to an animated and intimate correspondence,
and after some months Browning received per-
mission to visit her. On a former occasion
she had, indeed, declined to receive him.
"There is nothing to see in me," she said,
"nothing to hear in me. I am a weed fit for
the ground and darkness." But Browning
saw in her a flower that needed only the sun-
Kght of love to break out into full bloom, and this
love he brought with him. It is characteristic
of the impetuous vigor of the man that his first
visit to the woman whom he thought, as he
confessed afterwards, to be suffering from some
incurable disease, was promptly followed by a
letter containing an offer of marriage. Miss
Barrett was greatly shocked, and forbade fur-
ther advance upon penalty of forfeiting her
friendship. With a lover's craft Browning
bowed to her decision, obtained the return of
the offending letter, and straightway burned it, —
to the deep grief in after days of his wife, who had
treasured up every other word he ever wrote her.
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The Vitality of Browning

Their intercourse began again, and before
long the poetess, longing with all the strength
of her passionate woman's heart for love, found
herself unable to put away the cup of life
which her poet-lover quietly but with steadfast
devotion held to her lips. The story of their
courtship has recently been given to the world
by the publication of the letters that passed be-
tween them in these months. A great hue and
cry was raised at the time over the publication
of these letters, as if in some way the sanctities
of private Ufe had thereby been profaned. But
as a matter of fact, there is little or nothing in
them except the prose version of what Mrs.
Browning herself, with her husband's consent
and at his desire, had long since given to the
world in the Sonnets from the Portuguese.
These sonnets are in every detail autobiograph-
ical, and quite apart from their extraordinary
worth as pure poetry, they are a contribution
to the psychology of love such as has seldom
been equaled. They form a perfect sequence
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from his first proflFer of love and her refusal
through a trembling symphony of doubts and
fears and hopes to the harmonious closing
chords of her final surrender and avowal:

"I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all this life — and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."

One obstacle alone stood in the way of their
happiness. Mr. Barrett was apparently the
perfect type of that hard-hearted father who,
fortunately for the world, is so much commoner
in fiction than in real hfe. He was by no means
an unkind parent, but his theory of paternal
government seems to have been that he should
oblige his children in small things and they
should obey him in all things. All thought of
marriage, in particular, on the part of any of his
daughters he resisted with an almost insane
violence of speech and gesture. He had no
special dislike to Browning, " the pomegranate
man," as he called him; but when it was
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The Vitality of Browning

hinted to him that his invalid daughter, now
visibly gaining in health and strength, might
some day be looking for a husband, he replied
that she ought to be thinking of another world.
Miss Barrett confessed herself physically un-
able to endure the outbreak that would inevi-
tably follow the announcement of her purpose;
and at her desire the marriage was secret.
Within a week afterwards she left her home
never to return. Her father considered her
action as little short of an unnatural crime; he
never saw her again, left her letters unopened,
and went to his grave unforgiving.

Apart from the passing shadow which her
father's harshness threw upon them, the mar-
ried happiness of the Brownings was unbroken.
They lived for the most part in Florence, mak-
ing occasional excursions to Rome and Paris,
and visiting England at intervals in the summer.
They saw little of society in the ordinary sense
of the word; but Story, Hawthorne, George
Sand, Mazzini, Landor, Rossetti, Carlyle,
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Studies of a Booklover

and Tennyson were among their acquaintances
and friends. Mrs. Browning continued to
improve in health and strength tiU it seemed
that Kttle short of a miracle had been wrought
upon her. All credit for the miracle she
at least gave her husband. "He has done
everjrthing for me," she wrote a friend;
"he loved me for reasons which had helped
to weary me of myself, drew me back to
life and hope when I had done with both.
. . . The intellect is so Kttle in comparison
with all the rest, the womanly tenderness, the
inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble
aspiration of every hour." Browning on his
part regarded her as the inspiration of his life.
"By gift of her," he says, "God best taught
song." She is his "angel," his "moon of
poets," his

"Lyric love, half angel and half bird.
And all a wonder and a wild desire."

It is her face that he expects to see at the last
breaking through the clouds of death; it is she

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The Vitality of Browning

who in the next world will see and make him
see "new depths of the divine."

Their married life was perhaps too happy to
last long upon this earth. Mrs. Browning's
eager and sensitive temperament at last wore
through its tenement of clay. In 1861, sixteen
years after their marriage, she died suddenly
in her husband's arms, "smilingly, happily,
with a face like a girl's." "There was no
lingering nor acute pain nor consciousness of
separation," he wrote a friend, "but God took
her to himself as you would lift a sleeping
child out of a dark, uneasy bed into your arms
and the Hght."

The influence of these happy years of inti-
mate association with a spirit at once so lofty
and so tender as his vidfe's is unmistakable
upon the poet's work. Browning's third
period begins with the. twin-poems of Christ-
mas Eve and Easter Day, published some four
years after his marriage, and closes in 1868
with the late completion of the work which he
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had meditated and perhaps roughly sketched
out before his wife's death, The Ring and
the Book. In a sense this period is a con-
tinuation of the second. It is, in the main, a
period of objective work, of character creation.
And as such it contains Browning's finest work.
Nothing that he did before or after can com-
pare with the figures of Fra Lippo and Andrea
del Sarto, with Bishop Blougram and Mr.
Sludge, with the immortal three of The Ring
and the Boole, Guido, PompiHa, and Giuseppe
Caponsacchi. But the period is by no means
one of pure objectivity. The poet interprets
as well as creates. He creates, indeed, often
for the sake of interpretation. The figures of
Caliban, for example, and of the dying apostle
whom Jesus loved, were drawn not for any
mere aesthetic delight in realizing a poetic
concept, though this, too, no doubt, enters into
the work, but primarily to serve as mouth-
pieces of Browning's ideas on reKgion, what
religion must be when it looks up to an all-
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The Vitality of Browning

powerful but loveless God, what religion may
be when it centres in a God of love. How
immensely Browning's interest in religion in-
creased in this period may readily be ascer-
tained by comparing the unfinished Saul of
the BeUs and Pomegranates with the superb
conclusion added ten years later in Men and
Women.

And when one speaks of religion in connec-
tion with Browning one means neither more
nor less than Christianity. To discuss the ex-
act degree of Browning's orthodoxy, to exam-
ine whether at all times he accepted implicitly
each separate dogma of revealed reUgion, is
of course impossible in such a sketch as this.
It is sufficient for us to know that at this
central period of his life, this period of his
greatest and most enduring creative work, he
held fast to the central doctrine of Christianity,
the revelation of God's love for man in the God-
man, Christ. This doctrine is the theme of
poem after poem, of Saul, of Karshisk, of A
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Death in the Desert; rejected, Browning seems
to teach, it leaves human life as sadly insoluble
a puzzle as it was to Cleon; accepted it trans-
figures human life with the glory which hung
about the death-bed of St. John. And if it be
objected that such poems are dramatic in
nature, that the words of David or Karshish
do not express the beliefs of Browning, the
simple answer is that no one but a believer in
this doctrine would, or could, have treated it
so often with such intense interest and with
such evident sympathy. And if further an-
swer were needed, the first poem of this period,
Christmas Eve, proclaims Browning's personal
belief in the divinity of Christ in the frankest
fashion, and rejects absolutely the modern
notion that the "secret of Jesus" consists in
the "sweet reasonableness" of his moral
teachings. It is only a biased, and, to my
mind, a wilfully blinded criticism which can
see in the speaker of this poem any other than
the poet himself.

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Indeed, this reappearance of the personal,
subjective note might well be called the ele-
ment which distinguishes the work of Brown-
ing's third period from that which immediately
preceded it. It is not on the topic of religion
alone that he speaks out. On art, and its
significance in human life, on love, and its
power in the releasing of the soul, his utterance
is quite as direct. Such personal speech as
appeajs in Old Pictures in Florence, and One
Word More; such sUghtly veiled expression of
his thought as appears in Abt Vogler, and
Evelyn Hope, would have been impossible to
his mood of a few years earlier.

It is hardly to be doubted, I think, that it
was the influence of his wife, whose own genius
was distinctly lyrical and subjective, that led
to this freer expression of his own " hopes and
fears, beliefs and disbeKeving." Early in
their correspondence Miss Barrett had urged
Browning to speak out in his own person; and
he had replied that whereas he had hitherto
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only made men and women utter themselves
on his behalf, he would now try to declare di-
rectly what was in him; ''only," he added, "I
don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the
savage things about Popes and imaginative
rehgions that I must say." That these savage
things were never said, may well be another
tribute to Mrs. Browning's influence.

Browning had neariy thirty years of life
before him when his wife died, and after the
first convulsive agony of grief he set himself to
Kve them resolutely and well. For a time,
indeed, it was a mere chance whether he should
go away to some quiet retreat and be seen no
more. But Browning's vitality was too red-
blooded for any such cloistered seclusion, and
two years after his wife's death he deliberately
entered society again, pronouncing the retired
life he had led since her death morbid and
unworthy. From this time on as long as his
bodily strength perinitted, Browning was, in
the best sense, a man of the world. He ac-
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The Vitality of Browning

cepted every suitable invitation, he was seen
at every public function. He appeared at first
nights in the theater, never missed a Patti or
Joachim concert, a private view or annual ex-
hibition. The magnificent success of The
Ring and the Book finally established his fame
as a poet, and he became a lion of the salons in
London and Paris. Frankly enough he lived
and liked fife's way. But though in the world
he was not of it. Amid a materialistic, pleas-
ure-loving, and skeptical society, he remained
always the same earnest thinker and bold
speaker, a champion of the ideal, an apologist
for the eternal verities. He seemed to his
friends to have the secret of perennial youth,
for he went unwearied through the arduous
London seasons, and in holidays on the Breton
coast or among the Alps swam, rode, and
walked with all the zest and vigor of a youth.
Something of this joyous energy of youth sur-
viving in old age shows itself in his latest
poems. To the last there remains the same
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Studies of a Booklover

keen interest in life, the same desire to gather
objective facts and interpret them. The same
quick sensitiveness to beauty that marks Pau-
line appears in the Parleyings, and the pas-
sionate love-poems scattered through Ferish-
tah's Fancies and Asolando were written by a
white-haired man of almost eighty.

Browning by no means neglected his proper
calling during this busy period of his life in
society. He wrote vigorously and without in-
terruption. Indeed, one may venture the asser-
tion that he wrote too much. Nine volumes in
eight years, which was his record between 1871
and 1878, must be a strain upon the strongest
powers. One has the feeUng in looking over
the work of these years that Browning had
perfected his method, wrote easily and swiftly,
and cared little what he wrote so long as he
was occupied. If this were so, it is not sur-
prising that the quality of his work suffered as
the quantity increased. There is an excess of
intellectual subtlety, of psychological analysis,
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The Vitality of Browning

a deficiency of his former directness of speech and
positive creative power. He neglected almost
entirely his old form of the short dramatic
monologue, and wrote long argumentative or
narrative poems such as Fifine at the Fair or
Red Cotton Night-cap Country. One may read
these poems with interest, but hardly with real
pleasure, and the temptation to return to them
is assuredly not very strong. It is fortunate
for Browning's fame that he passed out of this
period toward the close of the seventies, and
entered upon a St. Martin's summer of pro-
duction which includes some of his most de-
lightful work. It may be that the shock
inflicted upon him in 1877 by the sudden death
of a dear friend led to his abandoning the
practise of intellectual casuistry. In the dark
hours that followed he probed the inmost re-
cesses of his soul to obtain a truthful answer
to the question whether this earthly life were
all that man could hope for. And having
obtained his answer, he ceased to play with the
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Studies of a Boohlpver

false, and again devoted himself to the study
of the true. It may be, too, that the decline
of his bodily powers, imperceptible, indeed, even
to himself, but no less real, indisposed him to
the effort of long and sustained composition.
The fact remains that the quantity of verse
pubhshed by Browning during the last ten
years of his life is less than half of what he
wrote in the preceding decade. And this
verse consists for the most part of brief dra-
matic narratives marked by a strong and im-
pressive realism, of lyrics instinct with strange
and poignant charm, and, in one volume, at
least, of parables in which Browning drapes
his philosophy of life with the cloak of Oriental
wisdom in the mouth of the dervish-teacher,
Ferishtah.

The last months of Browning's life were
spent in Italy, at Asolo, the little hill-town he
had fallen in love with fifty years before, and
in his son's Venetian palace. Old as he was
he still preserved his habit of vigorous action,
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The Vitality of Browning

and his enjoyment of the charm of ItaUan Hfe
and scenery. He walked among the moun-
tains or along the Lido, explored the obscurest
calli of Venice, and feasted his eyes on the
gorgeous pageants of Italian sunrise and sun-
set. "Every morning at six I see the sun
rise," he wrote not .long before his death.
"My bedroom window commands a perfect
view: the still gray lagune, the few sea-gulls
flying, the islet of St. Giorgio in deep shadow,
and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind
which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till
presently all the rims are on fire with gold,
and last of all the orb sends before it a long
column of its own essence apparently: so my
day begins."

But even while he enjoyed the present
and looked forward with happy anticipation
to future work, his strength was waning.
A bronchial attack revealed some hitherto
unsuspected weakness of the heart's action,
and on December 12, 1889, the very day
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Studies of a Booklover

on which his last volume of verse was pub-
lished. Browning passed quietly and painlessly
out of life. He was honored with a magnifi-
cent public funeral in Venice, and his body was
conveyed to England to its final resting-place
in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey,
close by the tomb of Chaucer, and near the
spot where his friend and noble rival in the
race for fame, Alfred Tennyson, was laid away
some three years later. The solemn splendor
of his burial was a fitting tribute from the
nation that had so long denied and so late
accepted his claims as a poet and teacher.

It is as a poet, I think, rather than as a
teacher, that Browning will live. Or, perhaps,
one should rather say that he will Kve as a
teacher because he was, first of all, a poet.
Part of his work, a large part, perhaps, is
destined to the oblivion of the collected edition
and the upper shelf — no unusual fate for
poets who have written so much as he. What
will five is that portion in which, forgetting for
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The Vitality of Browning

the time his desire to teach, he has set himself
to create character and to express emotion.
It is as certain as any hterary prophecy can
be that Fra Lippo and Abt Vogler will be read
long years after La Sasiaz and the Parleyings
are forgotten.

The elements which give to Browning's
poetry this assured vitality may, I think, be
briefly summed up under three heads. There
is, first, his extraordinary grasp upon reality.
Browning is not a poet of dreams and vague
desires and empty aspirations. He deals by
preference with the common aspects of earth
and the common passions of mankind. He
has nothing of Shelley's "desire of the moth
for the star " ; on the contrary he shares to the
full the great movement toward realism in
literature which succeeded the romantic period
of the early nineteenth century. From this
realism springs not only his power of vivid
description, but his humor, and his fondness
for the grotesque. He saw things as they were
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Studies of a Boohlover

and loved them so. And it is this quality, I
think, which gives his v^ork body and fulness.
Closely connected with this quality is another
which we may call his humanity, his wide sym-
pathy with all forms of human life:

"Man's thoughts, and loves, and hates.
Earth is my vineyard, these grew there."

It is by virtue of this sympathy that he was
able to enter into souls so different from his
own and from one another as Guido, Giuseppe,
Cleon, and Johannes Agricola. And having
entered into them and understood them, he
was able to reveal them to the world. Brown-
ing's greatest gift to literature consists in the
men and women that he has created. No
EngUsh poet since Shakespeare has possessed
this creative power to Browning's degree, and
it is just this power which constitutes his essen-
tial claim to the title of poet, or maker, and
which gives his work its warmth and color.

Finally, Browning's vitality is assured by his
buoyant and undaunted optimism. In its strug-
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The Vitality of Browning

gle upward against the powers of evil mankind
cannot afford to reject the aid of so strong and
fearless a fighter as Browning proved himself.
A poet who can hope in the Paris morgue is an
ally not to be despised. It makes little differ-
ence in the last result whether this optimism
was a matter of temperament or based upon
rational principles. As a matter of fact both
temperament and reason combined in Brown-
ing's optimism. His vigorous and happy na-
ture forbade him to succumb to the evil that he
saw and plainly recognized around him. His
keen and powerful intellect compelled him to
find assurance for his instinctive hope of victory.
And he found this assurance in the existence,
amid all the world's evil and misery, of love.

" There is no good in life but love, but love !
What else looks good is some shade flung from

love.
Love gilds it, gives it worth,"

says the hero of In a Balcony, echoing a thought

that recurs repeatedly in Browning's work.

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Studies of a Booklover

And since love is the best thing that the mind
can apprehend in the world, it follows that
God — and Browning was as sure of God as
he was of the world — must be a God of love.
And from the idea of a God of love springs the
faith in immortaUty without which human Ufe
becomes a miserable mystery. And the faith
in immortality once accepted transforms hu-
man life into a period of probation in which
pain and sorrow and evil itself may be cheer-
fully accepted as necessary instruments in the
shaping of the soul for its proper hfe hereafter.
The belief in immortaUty was not so much a
religious dogma as a habit of mind with
Browning; it seemed impossible for him to
view the world except, as it were, sub specie
cetemitatis. This belief inspired much of his
loftiest and strongest verse; and the opti-
mism which sprang from this beKef gives his
work as a whole its strengthening and elevating
power.
The epilogue to Asolando contains the por-
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The Vitality of Browning

trait that Browning drew of himself as he
looked back over the crowded years of his long
life. Eeading the proof of this last poem one
night shortly before his death, he hesitated and
said to the friends who were sitting by him:
" It almost looks like bragging to say this, and
as if I ought to cancel it; but it's the simple
truth; and as it's true, it shall stand." It
might well stand as his epitaph, and it will
serve fitly as a conclusion to this essay. Brown-
ing's work, as I have tried to show, shares
something of the poet's vitality. And Brown-
ing was, and knew himself to be,

" One who never turned his back but marched
breast forward.
Never doubted clouds would break.
Never dreamed, though right were worsted,

wrong would triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.
Sleep to wake."

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