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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE.

EDrVCTJRGH: PRISTED BT SIURR»T AND filBB,

FOR

EDMONSTON AXD DOUGLAS.

LONDON HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO.

CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND CO.

GLASGOW JAMES SLACLEKOSK.

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE

BY

H. A. TAINE,

D.C.L.

TRANSLATED BY H. VAN LAUN.

FOURTH EDITION.

VOL. L

EDINBURGH :

EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS.

187 3.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

The translator has collated almost every passage mentioned by M.
Taine, verified every quotation, and spared no pains to render this
history of English literature worthy of its author and of its subject.
A copious Index will be found at the end of the Second Volume,

H. VAN Laun.

Ociober 1871.
The Academy, Edinbuegh.

AVEETISSEMENT.

L'auteur ds cette traduction ^l^gante et fidele a pense que je devais
indiquer au lecteur I'objet que je me suis propose en ecrivant Fhistoire
de la litterature anglaise ; le voici, en quelques mots.

Une nation vit vingt, trente si^cles et davantage, et un homme ne
vit que soixante ou soixante-dix ans. Cependant une nation ressemble
beaucoup a un homme. Car, dans une carriere si longue et presque
indefinie, elle a aussi son caractere propre, son esprit et son ^me, qui,
visibles des I'enfance, se developpent d'epoque en ^poque et manifestent
le meme fonds primitif depuis les origines jusqu'au declin. Ceci est une
verite d'expei'ience, et quiconque a suivi Thistoire d'un peuple, celle des
Grecs depms Homere jusqu'aux Cesars Byzantins, celle des Allemands
depuis le poeme des Niebelungen jusqu'a Goethe, celle des Fran9ais
depuis les premieres chansons de Geste et les plus anciens fabhaux
jusqu'a Beranger et Alfred de Musset, ne peut s'empecher de recon-
naitre une continuity aussi rigoureuse dans la vie d'un peuple que dans
la vie d'un individu.

Maintenant, supposez un des cinq ou six grands individus qui ont
jou^ le premier role sur la scene du monde, Alexandre, Napoleon,
Newton, Dante ; admettez que par un bonheur extraordinaire, nous
ayons une quantite de peintures authentiques, intactes et fraiches,
aquarelles, dessins, esquisses, grands portraits en pied, qui nous le re-
presentent a tous les dges de sa vie, avec ses divers costumes, impres-
sions et attitudes, avec tous ses alentours, notamment dans les principales
actions qu'il a faites, et dans les plus fortes crises de son d^veloppement
interieur.

Voila justement les docxmients que nous avons aujottrd'hui pour
connaitre ce grand individu qu'on appelle une nation, surtout quand
cette nation poss^de une Litterature originale et complete. En efiet
chacune de ses ceuvres litteraires est une peinture dans laquelle nous
la contemplons. Et cette peinture nous est plus precieuse qu'un por-
trait physique, car elle est un portrait moral ; le poeme de Beowulf et
les Contes de Cantorbdry, le theatre de la Eenaissance et de la Rel'orme,

Vlll AVERTISSEMENT.

les diverses lignees de prosateurs et de poetes qvii se succMent depuis
Shakspeare et Bacon jusqu'a Tennyson, Dickens et Carlyle, nous pre-
sentent toutes les formes litteraires, toutes les figures poetiques, tous les
tours de pens^e, de sentiment et de style dans lesquels s'est complue
r^me de la nation anglaise ; on y suit les variations de ses preferences,
et la persistance de ses instincts ; on y voit une personnc qui subit
Taction des circonstances et qui se transforme en vertu de sa nature,
aussi bien que par I'effet de son pass^ ; mais on y decouvre aussi une
personne qui dure ; I'adulte ne fait qu' acbever I'adolescent ct I'enfant;
la vivante figure contemporaine garde encore les traits essentiels du plus
ancien portrait. Parmi tous ces portraits, j'ai entrepris de recueillir les
plus vifs et les plus exacts, de les ranger selon leur date et leur import-
ance, de les relier et de les expliquer, en les commentant avec admira-
tion et avec sympathie, mais aussi avec liberty et franchise ; car, s'il
faut aimer son sujet, on ne doit flatter personne. Peut-etre valait il
mieux laisser ce soin aux gens de la maison ; ils diront qu'ils connaissent
mieux le personnage, puisqu'ils sont de sa famille. Cela est vrai ;
mais, a force de vivre avec quelqu'un, on ne remarque plus ses parti-
cularit6s. Au contraire un Stranger a cet avantage que I'habitude ne
I'a point emousse ; involontairement il est frappe par les grands traits ;
de cette fa9on il les remarque. C'est Ik toute mon excuse ; je la pr^-
sente au lecteur anglais avec quelque confiance, parce que, si j'examine
raes propres id^es sur la France, j'en trouve plusieurs qui m'ont 6t6
fournies par des etrangers et notamment par des Anglais.

II. A. Taine.
Paris, Octohre 1871.

DEDICATION.

Even at the present day, the historian of Civilisation in Europe and in
France is amongst us, at the head of those historical studies which he
formerly encouraged so much. I myself have experienced his kind-
ness, learned by his conversation, consulted his books, and profited by
that intellectual and impartial breadth, that active and liberal sympathy,
with which he receives the labours and thoughts of others, even when
these ideas are not like his own. I consider it a duty and an honour
to inscribe this work to M. Guizot.

n. A. Taixe.

CONTENTS.

Introductiox.

1

BOOK I.— THE SOUrCE.

Chap. I.— The Saxons,
II. — The Normans, .
III. — The New Tongue,

23

58

105

Chap. I.— The Pagan Renaissance,

141

II. — The Theatre, ....

222

III. — Ben Jonson, ....

267

IV. — Shakspeare, ....

296

v.— The Christian Renaissance, .

352

VI. — Milton, . . . .

401)

BOOK III.— THE CLASSIC AGE.

Chap. I. — The Restoration,

457

IXTEODUCTION'.

The historian might place himself for a certain time, during several centuries or
amongst a certain people, in the midst of the spirit of humanity. He might
study, describe, relate all the events, the changes, the revolutions which took
place in the inner-man ; and when he had reached the end, he would possess
a history of the civilisation of the nation and the period he selected. —
GuizoT, Civilisation in Europe, p. 25.

HISTORY has been revolutionised, witliin a hundred years in
Germany, within sixty years in France, and that by the study
of their literatures.

It was perceived that a work of literature is not a mere play of
imagination, a solitary caprice of a heated brain, but a transcript of
contemporary manners, a type of a certain kind of mind. It was con-
cluded that one might retrace, from the monuments of literature, thy
style of man's feelings and thoughts for centuries back. The attempt
was made, and it succeeded.

Pondering on these modes of feeling and thought, men decided that
in them were embalmed facts of the highest kind. They saw that
these facts bore reference to the most important occurrences, that they
explained and were explained by them, that it was necessary thence-
forth to give thehi a rank, and a most important rank, in history. This
rank they have received, and from that moment history has undergone
a complete change: in its subject-matter, its system, its machinery, the
appreciation of laws and of causes. It is this change, as it has hap-
pened and must still happen, that we shall here endeavour to exhibit.

I.

"Wliat is your first remark on turning over the great, stiff leaves
of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript, — a poem, a code of laws,
a declaration of faith ? This, you say, was not created alone. It is but
a mould, like a fossil shell, an imprint, like one of those shapes em-
bossed in stone by an animal which lived and perished. Under the
shell there was an animal, and behind the document there was a man.
Why do you study the shell, except to represent to yourself the animal?
So do you study the document only in order to know the man. The

2 INTRODUCTION".

shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only as a clue to
the entire and livino; existence. We must reach back to this exis-
tence, endeavour to re-create it. It is a mistake to study the docu-
ment, as if it were isolated. This were to treat things like a simple
pedant, to fall into the error of the bibliomaniac. Behind all, we have
neither mythology nor languages, but only men, who arrange words
and imagery according to the necessities of their organs and the
original bent of their intellects. A dogma is nothing in itself ; look
at the people Avho have made it, — a portrait, for instance, of the
sixteenth century, the stern and energetic face of an English arch-
bishop or martyr. Nothing exists except through some individual
man ; it is this individual Avith whom Ave must become acquainted.
When we have established the parentage of dogmas, or the classifica-
tion of poems, or the progress of constitutions, or the modification of
idioms, we have only cleared the soil : genuine history is brought into
existence only when the historian begins to unravel, across the lapse of
time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs,
Avith his A'oice and features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and
complete as he from Avhom we have just parted in the street. Let us
endeavour, then, to annihilate as far as possible this great interval of
time, which prevents us from seeing man Avith our eyes, with the eyes
of our head. What have AA-^e under the fair glazed pages of a modern
poem? A modern poet, Avho has studied and travelled, a man like
Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or Heine, in a black coat
and gloves, Avelcomed by the ladies, and making every evening his fifty
boAvs and his score of bon-mots in society, reading the papers in the
morning, lodging as a rule on the second floor; not over gay, because
he has nerves, and especially because, in this dense democracy Avhere we
choke one another, the discredit of the disnities of office has exaggerated
his pretensions Avhile increasing his importance, and because the refine-
ment of his feelings in general disposes him someAvhat to believe him-
self a deity. This is Avhat Ave take note of under modern meditations or
sonnets. Even so, under a tragedy of the seventeenth century 'we have
a poet, like Racine for instance, elegant, staid, a courtier, a fine speaker,
Avith a majestic Avig and ribboned shoes, at heart a royalist and a Chris-
tian, ' having received the grace of God not to blush in any company.
Kings nor Gospellers;' clever at entertaining the prince, and rendering
for him into good French the 'old French of Amyot;' very respectful
to the great, always 'knoAving his place;' as assiduous and reserved at
Marly as at Versailles, amidst the regular pleasures of a polished and
fastidious natvire, amidst the salutations, graces, airs, and fopperies of
the braided lords, Avho rose early in the morning to obtain the promise
of being appointed to some office in case of the death of the present
holder, and amongst charming ladies Avho count their genealogies on
their fingers in order to obtain the right of sitting doAvn in the pre-
sence of the King or Queen. On that head consult St. Simon and the

INTRODUCTION. 3

engravings of Perolle, as for the present age you liave consulted Balzac
and the water-colours of Eugene Lami. Similarly, when we read a
Greek tragedy, our first care should be to realise to ourselves the
Greeks, that is, the men who live half naked, in the gymnasia, or in the
public squares, under a glowing sky, face to face Avith the most noble
landscapes, bent on making their bodies nimble and strong, on con-
versing, discussing, voting, carrying on patriotic piracies, but for the
rest lazy and temperate, with three urns for their furniture, two an-
chovies in a jar of oil for their food, waited on by slaves, so as to give
them leisure to cultivate their luiderstanding and exercise their limbs,
with no desire beyond that of having the most beautiful town, the
most beautiful processions, the most beautiful ideas, the most beautiful
men. On this subject, a statue such as the Moleager, or the Theseus of
the Parthenon, or still more, the sight of the ^lediterranean, blue and
lustrous as a silken tunic, and islands arising from it like masses of
marble, and added to these, twenty select phrases from Plato and
Aristophanes, will teach you much more than a multitude of disserta-
tions and commentaries. And so again, in order to understand an
Indian Purana, begin by imagining to yourself the father of a family,
who, ' having seen a son on his son's knees,' retires, according to the
law, into solitude, with an axe and a pitcher, under a banana tree, by
the river-side, talks no more, adds fast to fast, dwells naked between
four fires, and under a fifth, the terrible sun, devouring and renewing
without end all things living; who step by step, for weeks at a time,
fixes his imagination upon the feet of Brahma, next upon his knee, next
upon his thigh, next upon his navel, and so on, until, beneath the strain
of this intense meditation, hallucinations begin to appear, until all the
forms of existence, mingled and transformed the one with the other,
quaver before a sight dazzled and giddy, until the motionless man,
catching in his breath, with fixed g;ize, beholds the universe vanishing
like a smoke beyond the universal and void Being into which he aspires
to be absorbed. To this end a voyage to India would be the best
instructor; or for want of better, the accounts of travellers, books of
geography, botany, ethnology, will serve their turn. In each case the
search must be the same. A language, a legislation, a catechism, is
never more than an abstract thing: the complete thing is the man who
acts, the man corporeal and visible, who eats, walks, fights, labours.
Leave on one side the theory and the mechanism of constitutions,
religions and their systems, and try to see men in their workshops, in
their offices, in their fields, with their sky and earth, their houses, their
dress, cultivations, meals, as you do when, landing in England or Italy,
you remark faces and motions, roads and inns, a citizen taking his
walk, a workman drinking. Our great care should be to supply as
much as possible the want of present, personal, direct, and sensible
observation which we can no longer practise; for it is the only means
of knowing men. Let us make the past present : in order to judge of

4: INTKODUCTION.

a thing, it must be before us; tlierc is no experience in respect of wJiat
is absent. Doubtless this reconstruction is always incomplete ; it can
produce only incomplete judgments ; but to that we must resign our-
selves. It is better to have an imperfect knowledge than a futile or
false one; and there is no other means of acquainting ourselves ap-
proximately with the events of other days, than to see approximately
the men of other days.

This is the first step in history: it vras made in Europe at the new
birth of imagination, toward the close of the last century, by Lessing,
Walter Scott ; a little later in France, by Chateaubriand, Augustin
Thierry, Michelet, and others. And now for the second step.

II.

When you consider with your eyes the visible man, what do you
look for? The man invisible. The words which enter your ears, the
gestures, the motions of his head, the clothes he wears, visible acts and
deeds of every kind, are expressions merely ; somewhat is revealed
beneath them, and that is a soul. An inner man is concealed beneath
the outer man ; the second does but reveal the first. You look at his
house, furniture, dress ; and that in order to discover in them the marks
of his habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement or rusticity, his
extravagance or his economy, his stupidity or his cunning. You listen
to his conversation, and you note the inflexions of his voice, the changes
in his attitudes; and that in order to judge of his intensity, his self-
forgetfulness or his gaiety, his energy or his constraint. You consider
his writings, his artistic productions, his business transactions or politi-
cal ventures ; and that in order to measure the scope and limits of his
intelligence, his inventiveness, his coolness, to find out the order, the
description, the general force of his ideas, the mode in which he thinks
and resolves. All these externals are but avenues converging to a
centre ; you enter them simply in order to reach that centre ; and that
centre is the genuine man, I mean that mass of faculties and feelings
which are produced by the inner man. We have reached a new world,
which is infinite, because every action which we see involves an infinite
association of reasonings, emotions, sensations new and old, which have
served to bring it to light, and which, like great rocks deep-seated in
the ground, find in it their end and their level. This underworld is a
new subject-matter, proper to the historian. If his critical education
suffice, he can lay bare, under every detail of architecture, every stroke
in a picture, every phrase in a Avriting, the special sensation whence
detail, stroke, or phrase had issue ; he is present at the drama which
was enacted in the soul of artist or writer ; the choice of a word, the
brevity or length of a sentence, the natiire of a metaphor, the accent of
a verse, the development of an argument — everything is a symbol to
him ; while his eyes read the text, his soul and mind pursue the con-
tinuous development and the everchangmg succession of the emotions

INTRODUCTION. 5

and conceptions oiit of which the text has sprung : in short, he imveils
a psychology. If you would observe this operation, consider the
originator and model of contemporary culture, Goethe, who, before
writing Ip/iigetiia, employed day after day in designing the most finished
statues, and who at last, his eyes filled with the noble forms of ancient
scenery, his mind penetrated by the harmonious loveliness of antique
life, succeeded in reproducing so exactly in himself the peculiarities of
the Greek imagination, that he gi\'fes us almost the twin sister of the
Antigone of Sophocles, and the goddesses of Phidias. This precise and
proved interpretation of past sensations has given to history, in our
days, a second birth ; hardly anything of the sort was known to the
preceding century. They thought men of every race and century were
all but identical ; the Greek, the barbarian, the Hindoo, the man of the
Kesturation, and the man of the eighteenth century, as if they had been
turned out of a common mould ; and all in conformity to a certain
abstract conception, which served for the whole human race. They
knew man, but not men ; they had not penetrated to the soul ; they
had not seen the infinite diversity and marvellous complexity of souls ;
they did not know that the moral constitution of a people or an age is
as particular and distinct as the physical structure of a family of plants
or an order of animals. Now-a-days, history, like zoology, has found its
anatomy; and whatever the branch of history to which you devote your-
self, philology, linguistic lore, mythology, it is by these means you must
strive to produce new fruit. Amid so many writers who, since the
time of Herder, Ottfried Muller, and Goethe, have continued and still
improve this great method, let the reader consider only two historians
and two works, Carlyle's Cromioell, and Sainte-Beuve's Port-Royal:
he wiU see with what justice, exactness, depth of insight, one may
discover a soul beneath its actions and its works ; how behind the old
general, in plaoe of a vulgar, hypocritical schemer, we recover a man
travailing with the troubling reveries of a melancholic imagination,
but with definite instincts and faculties, English to the core, strange and
incomjjrehensible to one who has not studied the climate and the race ;
how, with about a hundred meagre letters and a score of mutilated
speeches, one may follow him from his farm and team, to the general's
tent and to the Protector's throne, in his transmutation and develop-
ment, in his pricks of conscience and his political conclusions, until the
machinery of his mind and actions becomes visible, and the inner
tragedy, ever changing and renewed, which exercised this great, dark-
ling soul, passes, like one of Shakspeare's, through the soul of the looker
on. He will see (in the other case) how, behind the squabbles of the
monastery, or the contumacies of nuns, one may find a great province
of human psychology ; how about fifty characters, that had been buried
under the uniformity of a circumspect narrative, reappear in the light
of day, each with its own specialty and its countless diversities ; how,
beneath theologic<al disquisitions and monotonous sermons, one can

1

6 INTRODUCTION.

unearth the beathigs of ever-hving hearts, the convulsions and apathies
of monastic life, the vmforeseen reassertions and wavy turmoil of nature,
the inroads of surrounding worldliness, the intermittent victories of
grace, with such a variety of overcloudings, that the most exhaustive
description and the most elastic style can hardly gather the inexhaust-
ible harvest, which the critic has caused to spring up on this abandoned
field. And so it is throughout. Germany, with its genius so pliant,
so liberal, so apt for transformation, so well calculated to reproduce the
most remote and anomalous conditions of human thought ; England,
witli its intellect so precise, so well calculated to grapple closely with
moral questions, to render them exact by figures, weights and measures,
geography, statistics, by quotation and by common sense ; France, with
her Parisian culture, with her draAving-room manners, with her untiring
analysis of characters and actions, her irony so ready to hit upon a
weakness, her finesse so practised in the discrimination of shades of
thotight ; — all have worked the same soil, and one begins to understand
that there is no region of history where it is not imperative to till this
deep level, if one would see a serviceable harvest rise between the
furrows.

This is the second step ; we are in a fair way to its completion. It
is the proper work of the contemporary critic. No one has done it so
justly and grandly as Sainte-Beuve : in this respect we are all his
pupils ; his method renews, in our days, in books, and even in neAvs-
papers, every kind of literary, of philosophical and religious criticism.
From it we must set out in order to begin the further development.
I have more than once endeavoured to indicate this development ; there
is here, in my mind, a new path open to history, and I will try to
describe it more in detail.

IIT.

When you have observed and noted in man one, two, three, then a
multitude of sensations, does this suffice, or does your knowledge appear
complete? Is a book of observations a psychology? It is no psycho-
logy, and here as elsewhere the search for causes must come after the
collection of facts. No matter if the facts be physical or moral, they
all have their causes ; there is a caitse for ambition, for courage, for
truth, as there is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat.
Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar ; and every complex
phenomenon has its springs from other more simple phenomena on
which it hangs. Let us then seek the simple phenomena for moral
qualities, as we seek them for physical qualities ; and let us take the
first fact that presents itself: for example, religious music, that of a
Protestant Church. There is an inner cause which has turned the
spirit of the faithful toward these grave and monotonous melodies, a
cause broader than its effect; I mean the general idea of the true,
external worship which man owes to God. It is this which has

INTRODUCTION. 7

modelled the arcliitecture of the temple, thrown down the statues,
removed the pictures, destroyed the ornaments, curtailed the cere-
monies, shut up the worshippers in high pews, which prevent them
from seeing anything, and regulated the thousand details of decoration,
posture, and the general surroundings. This itself comes from another
more general cause, the idea of human conduct in all its comprehensive-
ness, internal and external, prayers, actions, dispositions of every kind
by which man is kept face to face with God ; it is this which has en-
throned doctrine and grace, lowered the clergy, transformed the saci'a-
ments, suppressed various practices, and changed religion from a
discipline to a morality. This second idea in its turn depends upon a
third still more general, that of moral perfection, such as is met with
in the perfect God, the unerring judge, the stern watcher of souls,
before whom every soul is sinful, worthy of punishment, incapable of
virtue or salvation, except by the crisis of conscience which He pro-
vokes, and the renewal of heart which He produces. That is the master
idea, which consists in erecting duty into an absolute king of human
life, and in prostrating all ideal models before a moral model. Here
we track the root of man ; for to explain this conception it is necessary
to consider race itself, that is, the German, the Northman, the structure
of his character and intelligence, his general processes of thought and
feeling, the sluggishness and coldness of sensation which prevent his
falling easily and headlong under the sway of pleasure, the bluntness of
his taste, the irregularity and revolutions of his conception, which arrest
in him the birth of fair dispositions and harmonious forms, the disdain of
appearances, the desire of truth, the attachment to bare and abstract ideas,
which develop in him conscience, at the expense of all else. There the
search is at an end ; we have arrived at a primitive disposition, at a trait
proper to all sensations, to all the conceptions of a century or a race,
at a particularity inseparable from all the motions of his intellect and
his heart. Here lie the grand causes, for they are the universal and
permanent causes, present at every moment and in every case, every-
where and always acting, indestructible, and in the end infallibly
supreme, since t?ie accidents which thwart them, being limited and
partial, end by yielding to the dull and incessant repetition of their
force ; in such a manner that the general structure of things, and the
grand features of events, are their work ; and religions, philosophies,
poetries, industries, the framework of society and of families, are in fact
only the imprints stamped by their seal.

IV.

There is then a system in human sentiments and ideas ; and this
system has for its motive power certain general traits, certain marks of
the intellect and the heart common to men of one race, age, or country.
As in mineralogy the crystals, however diverse, spring from certain
simple physical forms, so in history, civilisations, however diverse, are

8 INTEODUCTIOIT,

derived from certain simple spiritual forms. The one are explained
by a primitive geometrical element, as the others are by a primitive
psychological element. In order to master the classification of minera-
logical systems, we must first consider a regular and general solid, its
sides and angles, and observe in this the numberless transformations of
which it is capable. So, if you would realise the system of historical
varieties, consider first a human soul generally, with its two or three
fundamental faculties, and in this compendium you will perceive the
principal forms which it can present. After all, this kind of ideal
picture, geometrical as well as psychological, is hardly complex, and one
speedily sees the limits of the outline in which civilisations, like crystals,
are constrained to exist.

What do Ave find, at first sight, in man ? Images or representa-
tions of things, something, that is, which floats within him, exists for a
time, is effaced, and returns again, after he has been looking upon a
tree, an animal, any sensible object. This is the subject-matter, the
development whereof is double, either speculative or practical, accord-
ing as the representations resolve themselves into a general conception
or an active resobition. Here we have the whole of man in an abridg-
ment ; and in this limited circle human diversities meet, sometimes in
the womb of the primordial matter, sometimes in the twofold primordial
development. However minute in their elements, they are enormous
in the aggregate, and the least alteration in the factors produces vast
alteration in the results. According as the representation is clear and
as it were cut out by machinery or confused and faintly defined, accord-
ing as it embraces a great or small number of the marks of the object,
according as it is violent and accompanied by impulses, or quiet and
surrounded by calm, all the operations and processes of the human
machine are transformed. So, again, according as the ulterior develop-
ment of the representation varies, the whole human development varies.
If the general conception in which it results is a mere dry notation (in
Chinese fashion), language becomes a sort of algebra, religion and
poetry dwindle, philosophy is reduced to a kind of moral and practical
common sense, science to a collection of formulas, classifications, iitili-
tarian mnemonics, and the whole intellect takes a positive bent. If, on
the contrary, the general representation in which the conception results
is a poetical and figurative creation, a living symbol, as among the
Aryan races, language becomes a sort of cloudy and coloured word-
stage, in which every word is a person, poetry and religion assume a
magnificent and inextinguishable grandeur, metaphysics are widely and
subtly developed, without regard to positive applications ; the whole
intellect, in spite of the inevitable deviations and shortcomings of its
effort, is smitten with the beautiful and the sublime, and conceives an
ideal capable by its nobleness and its harmony of rallying round it the
tenderness and enthusiasm of the human race. If, again, the general
conception in which the representation results is poetical but not pre-

IXTRODUCTION. 9

cise ; if man arrives at it not by a continuous process, but by a quick
intuition ; if the original operation is not a regular development, but
a violent explosion, — then, as with the Semitic races, metaphysics are
absent, religion conceives God only as a king solitary and devouring,
science cannot grow, the intellect is too rigid and complete to reproduce
the delicate operations of nature, poetry can give birth only to vehement
and grandiose exclamations, lansfuage cannot unfold the web of argu-
ment and of eloquence, man is reduced to a lyric enthusiasm, an un-
checked passion, a fanatical and constrained action. In this interval
between the particular representation and the universal conception are
found the germs of the greatest human differences. Some races, as the
classical, pass from the first to the second by a graduated scale of ideas,
regularly arranged, and general by degrees ; others, as the Germanic,
traverse the same ground by leaps, without uniformity, after vague and
prolonged groping. Some, like the Romans and English, halt at the
first steps ; others, like the Hindoos and Germans, mount to the last.
If, again, after considering the passage from the representation to the
idea, we consider that from the representation to the resolution, we
find elementary differences of the like importance and the like order,
according as the impression is sharp, as in southern climates, or dull,
as in northern ; according as it results in instant action, as among bar-
barians, or slowly, as in civilised nations ; as it is capable or not of
growth, inequality, persistence, and connections. The whole network
of human passions, the chances of peace and public security, the sources
of toil and action, spring from hence. Other primordial differences
there are : their issues embrace an entire civilisation ; and we may com-
pare them to those algebraical formulas which, in a narrow limit, con-
tain in advance the whole curve of which they form the law. Not tliat
this law is always developed to its issue ; there are perturbing forces ;
but when it is so, it is not that the law was false, but that its action was
impeded. New elements become mingled with the old ; great forces
from Avithout counteract the primitive. The race emigrates, like the
Aryan, and the change of climate has altered in its case the whole
economy, intelligence, and organisation of society. The people has
been conquered, like the Saxon nation, and a new political structure
has imposed on it customs, capacities, and inclinations which it had not.
The nation has installed itself in the midst of a conquered people, down-
ti'odden and threatening, like the ancient Spartans ; and the necessity
of living like troops in the field has violently distorted in an unique
direction the whole moral and social constitution. In each case, the
mechanism of human history is the same. One continually finds, as the
original mainspring, some very general disposition of mind and soul,
innate and appended by nature to the race, or acquired and produced
by some circumstance acting upon the race. These mainsprings, once
admitted, produce their effect gradually : I mean that after some cen-
turies they bring the nation into a new condition, religious, literary,

10 INTRODUCTION.

social, economic ; a new condition which, combined with their renewed
effort, produces another condition, sometimes good, sometimes bad,
sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, and so forth ; so that we may
regard the Avhole progress of each distinct civilisation as the effect of a
permanent force which, at every stage, varies its operation by modify-
ing the circumstances of its action.

V.

Three different sources contribute to produce this elementary moral
state — the race, the suirotindings, and the ejjoch. What we call the race
are the innate and hereditary dispositions which man brings with him
to the light, and which, as a rule, are united with the marked differ-
ences in the temperament and structure of the body. They vary with
various peoples. There is a natural variety of men, as of oxen and
horses, some brave and intelligent, some timid and dependent, some
capaole of superior conceptions and creations, some reduced to rudi-
mentary ideas and inventions, some more specially fitted to special
works, and gifted more richly with particular instincts, as Ave meet with
species of dogs better favoured than others, — these for hunting, these for
fighting, these for the chase, these again for house-dogs or shepherds'
dogs. We have here a distinct force, — so distinct, that amidst the vast
deviations which the other two motive forces produce in him, one can
recognise it still; and a race, like the old Aryans, scattered from the
Ganges as far as the Hebrides, settled in every clime, spread over every
grade of civilisation, transformed by thirty centuries of revolutions,
nevertheless manifests in its tongues, religions, literatures, philosophies,
the community of blood and of intellect which to this day binds its off-
shoots together. Different as they are, their parentage is not oblite-
rated ; barbarism, culture and grafting, differences of sky and soil,
fortunes good and bad, have laboured in vain : the great marks of the
original model have remained, and we find again the two or three
principal lineaments of the primitive imprint underneath the secondary
imprints which time has stamped above them. There is nothing aston-
ishing in this extraordinary tenacity. Although the vastness of the
distance lets us but half perceive — and by a doubtful light — the
origin of species,-^ the events of history sufficiently illumine the events
anterior to history, to explain the almost immovable stedfastness
of the primordial marks. When we meet with them, fifteen, twenty,
thirty centuries before our era, in an Aryan, an Egyptian, a Chinese,
they represent the work of several myriads of centuries. For as soon
as an animal begins to exist, it has to reconcile itself with its surround-
ings ; it breathes after a new fashion, renews itself, is differently
affected according to the new changes in air, food, temperature. Dif-
ferent climate and situation bring it various needs, and consequently

^ Darwin, The Origin of Species. Prosper Lucas, de VH6r6dil6.

INTRODUCTION. 11

a different course of actions; and this, again, a different set of habits;
and still again, a diiferent set of aptitudes and instincts. Man, forced to
accommodate himself to circumstances, contracts a temperament and a
character corresponding to them ; and his character, like his tempera-
ment, is so much more stable, as the external impression is made upon
him by more numerous repetitions, and is transmitted to his progeny
by a more ancient descent. So that at any moment we may consider
the character of a people as an abridgment of all its preceding actions
and sensations ; that is, as a quantity and as a weight, not infinite,^
since everything in nature is finite, but disproportioned to the rest, and
almost impossible to lift, since every moment of an almost infinite past
has contributed to increase it, and because, in order to raise the scale,
one must place in the opposite scale a still greater number of actions
and sensations. Such is the first and richest source of these master-
faculties from Avhich historical events take their rise ; and one sees at
the outset, that if it be powerful, it is because this is no simple spring,
but a kind of lake, a deep reservoir wherein other springs have, for a
multitude of centuries, dischai'ged their several streams.

Having thus outlined the interior structure of a race, we must con-
sider the surroundings in which it exists. For man is not alone in the
world ; nature surrounds him, and his fellow-men surround him ; acci-
dental and secondary tendencies come to place themselves on his primi-
tive tendencies, and physical or social circumstances disturb or confirm
the character committed to their charge. In course of time the climate -
has had its effect. Though we can follow but obsciu'ely the Aryan
peoples from their common fatherland to their final countries, we can
yet assert that the profound differences which are manifest between the
German races on the one side, and the Greek and Latin on the other
arise for the most part from the difference between the countries in
which they are settled : some in cold moist lands, deep in black marshy
forests or on the shores of a wild ocean, caged in by melancholy or
violent sensations, prone to drunkenness and gluttony, bent on a fight-
ing, blood-spilling life ; others, again, within a lovely landscape, on
a bright and laughing sea-coast, enticed to navigation and commerce,
exempt from gross cravings of the stomach, inclined from the beginning
to social ways, to a settled organisation of the state, to feelings and dispo-
sitions such as develop the art of oratory, the talent for enjoyment, the
inventions of science, letters, arts. Sometimes the state policy has been -
at Avork, as in the two Italian civilisations : the first wlioUy turned to
action, conquest, government, legislation, by the original site of its city
of refuge, by its border-land emporium, by an armed aristocracy, who,
by inviting and drilling the strangers and the conquered, presently set
face to face two hostile armies, having no escape from its internal dis-
cords and its greedy instincts but in systematic warfare ; the other, shut

^ Spinoza, Ethics, Part iv. axiom.

1 2 INTEODUCTION.

out from unity and any great political ambition by the stability of its
municipal character, the cosmopolitan condition of its pope, and the
military intervention of neighbouring nations, directed the whole of
its magnificent, harmonious bent towards the worship of pleasure and
beauty. Sometimes the social conditions have impressed their mark,
as eighteen centuries ago by Christianity, and twenty-five centuries
ago by Buddhism, when around the Mediterranean, as in Hindoostan,
the extreme results of Aryan conquest and civilisation induced an
intolerable oppression, the subjugation of the individual, utter despair,
a curse upon the world, with the development of metaphysics and
myth, so that man in this dungeon of misery, feeling his heart softened,
begot the idea of abnegation, charity, tender love, gentleness, humility,
brotherly love — there, in a notion of universal nothingness, here under
the Fatherhood of God. I/Ook around you upon the regulating in-
stincts and faculties implanted in a race — in short, the mood of intelli-
gence in which it thinks and acts at the present time : you will discover
most often the work of some one of these prolonged situations, these
surrounding circumstances, persistent and gigantic pressures, brought to
bear upon an aggregate of men who, singly and together, from genera-
tion to generation, are continually moulded and modelled by their
action ; in Spain, an eight-century crusade against the ^lussulraans,
protracted even beyond and until the exhaustion of the nation by the
expulsion of the Moors, the spoliation of the Jews, the establishment of
the Inquisition, the Catholic wars ; in England, a political establishment
of eight centuries, Avhich keeps a man erect and respectful, in indepen-
dence and obedience, and accustoms him to strive unitedly, under the
authority of the law ; in France, a Latin organisation, which, imposed
first upon docile barbarians, then shattered in the universal crash,
is reformed from within imder a lurking conspiracy of the national
instinct, is developed under hereditary kings, ends in a sort of egality-
republic, centralised, administrative, under dynasties exposed to revo-
lution. These are the most efficacious of the visible causes which
mould the primitive man : they are to nations what education, career,
condition, abode, are to individuals; and they seem to comprehend every-
thing, since they comprehend all external powers which shape human
matter, and by which the external acts on the internal.

There is yet a third rank of causes ; for, with the forces within and
without, there is the work which they have already produced together,
and this work itself contributes to produce that which follows. Beside
the permanent impulse and the given surroundings, there is the ac-
quired momentum. When the national character and surroimding
circumstances operate, it is not upon a tabula rasa, but on a ground
on which marks are already impressed. According as one takes the
ground at one moment or another, the imprint is different ; and this is
the cause that the total effect is different. Consider, for instance, tAvo
epochs of a literature or an art, — French tragedy under Corneille and

INTRODUCTION. 1 3

under Voltaire, the Greek drama under ^scliylus and under Euripides,
Italian painting under da Vinci and under Guido. Truly, at either of
these two extreme points the general idea has not changed ; it is always
the same human type which is its subject of representation or painting ;
the mould of verse, the structure of the drama, the form of body has
endured. But among several differences there is this, that the one
artist is the precursor, the other the successor ; the first has no model,
the second has ; the first sees objects face to face, the second sees them
through the first ; that many great branches of art are lost, many
details are perfected, that simplicity and grandeur of impression have
diminished, pleasing and refined forms have increased, — in short, that
the first w^ork has outlived the second. So it is with a people as with
a plant ; the same sap, under the same temperature, and in the same
soil, produces, at different steps of its progressive development, different
formations, buds, flowers, fruits, seed-vessels, in such a manner that the
one which follows has always the first for its condition, and grows from
its death. And if now you consider no longer a brief epoch, as our
own time, but one of those Avide intervals which embrace one or more
centuries, like the middle ages, or our last classic age, the conclusion
will be similar. A certain dominant idea has had sway ; men, for two,
for five hundred years, have taken to themselves a certain ideal model
of man : in the middle ages, the knight and the monk ; in our classic
age, the courtier, the man who speaks well. This creative and universal
idea is displayed over the whole field of action and thought ; and after
covering the world with its works, involuntarily systematic, it has
faded, it has died away, and lo, a new idea springs up, destined to a
like domination, and the like number of creations. And here re-
member that the second depends in part upon the first, and that the
first, uniting its effect with those of national genius and surrounding
circumstances, imposes on each new creation its bent and direction.
The great historical currents are formed after this law — the long domi-
nations of one intellectual pattern, or a master idea, such as the period
of spontaneous creations called the Eenaissance, or the period of ora-
torical models called the Classical Age, or the series of mystical com-
positions called the Alexandrian and Christian eras, or the series of
mythological efflorescences which we meet with in the infancy of the
German people, of the Indian and the Greek. Here as elsewhere we
have but a mechanical problem ; the total effect is a result, depending
entirely on the magnitude and direction of the producing causes. The
only difference which separates these moral problems from physical ones
is, that the magnitude and direction cannot be valued or computed in
the first as in the second. If a need or a faculty is a quantity, capable
of degrees, like a pressure or a weight, this quantity is not measurable
like the pressure or the weight. We cannot define it in an exact or
approximative formula; we cannot have more, or give more, in respect
of it, than a literary impression ; we are limited to marking and quot-

1 4 IXTRODUCTIOIT.

mg the salient points by which it is manifested, and which indicate
approximately and roughly the part of the scale wdiich is its position.
But though the means of notation are not the same in the moral and
physical sciences, yet as in both the matter is the same, equally made
up of forces, magnitudes, and directions, we may say that in both the
final result is produced after the same method. It is great or small, as
the fundamental forces are great or small and act more or less exactly
in the same sense, according as the distinct effects of race, circum-
stance, and epoch combine to add the one to the other, or to annul
one another. Thus are explained the long impotences and the brilliant
triumphs which make their appearance irregularly and without visible
cause in the life of a people ; they are caused by internal concords or con-
trarieties. There was such a concord Avhen in the seventeenth century
the sociable character and the conversational aptitude, innate in France,
encountered the drawing-room manners and the epoch of oratorical ana-
lysis ; when in the nineteenth century the profound and elastic genius of
Germany encountered the age of philosophical compositions and of cos-
mopolitan criticism. There was such a contrariety when in the seven-
teenth century the rude and lonely English genius tried blunderingly to
adopt a novel politeness ; when in the sixteenth century the lucid and
prosaic French spirit tried vainly to cradle a living poetry. That
hidden concord of creative forces produced the finished urbanity and
the noble and regular literature under Louis xiv. and Bossuet, the
grand metaphysics and broad critical sympathy of Hegel and Goethe.
That hidden contrariety of creative forces produced the imperfect
literature, the scandalous comedy, the abortive drama under Dryden
and Wycherley, the vile Greek importations, the groping elaborate
efforts, the scant half-graces under Ronsard and the Pleiad. So much
we can say with confidence, that the unknown creations towards which
the current of the centuries conducts us, will be raised up and regu-
lated altogether by the three primordial forces ; that if these forces
could be measured and computed, one might deduce from them as
from a formula the specialties of future civilisation ; and that if, in spite
of the evident crudeness of our notations, and the fundamental inexact-
ness of our measures, we try now to form some idea of our general
destiny, it is upon an examination of these forces that we must ground
our prophecy. For in enumerating them, we traverse the complete
circle of the agencies; and when we have considered race, circumstance,
and epoch, which are the internal mainsprings, the external pressure,
and the acquired momentum, we have exhausted not only the whole of
the actual causes, but also the whole of the possible causes of jnotion.

VI.

It remains for us to examine how these causes, when applied to a
nation or an age, produce their resvilts. As a rivulet falling from a
height spreads its streams, according to the depth of the descent, stage

INTRODUCTION. 15

after stage, until it reaches the lowest level of the soil, so the disposi-
tion of intellect or soul impressed on a people by race, circumstance, or
epoch, spreads in different proportions and by regular descents, down
the diverse orders of facts Avhich make up its civilisation.^ If we
arrange the map of a country, starting from the watershed, we find
that below this common point the streams are divided into five or six
principal basins, then each of these into several secondary basins, and
so on, until the whole country with its thousand details is included in
the ramifications of this network. So, if we arrange the psychological
map of the events and sensations of a human civilisation, we find first
of all five or six well-defined provinces — religion, art, philosophy, the
state, the family, the industries ; then in each of these provinces natural
departments ; and in each of these, smaller territories, until we arrive
at the numberless details of life such as may be observed within and
around us every day. If now we examine and compare these diverse
groups of facts, we find first of all that they are made up of parts, and
that all have parts in common. Let us take first the three chief works
of human intelligence — religion, art, philosophy. What is a philosophy
bnt a conception of nature and its primordial causes, under the form
of abstractions and formularies ? What is there at the bottom of a
religion or of an art but a conception of this same nature and of these
same causes, under form of symbols more or less concise, and person-
ages more or less marked ; with this difference, that in the first we
believe that they exist, in the second we believe that they do not
exist ? Let the reader consider a few of the great creations of the
intelligence in India, Scandinavia, Persia, Rome, Greece, and he will
see that, throughout, art is a kind of philosophy made sensible, religion
a poem taken for true, philosophy an art and a religion dried up, and
reduced to simple ideas. There is therefore, at the core of each of
these three groups, a common element, the conception of the world and
its principles ; and if they differ among themselves, it is because each
combines with the common, a distinct element : now the power of
abstraction, again the power to personify and to believe, and finally
the power to personify and not believe. Let us now take the two chief
works of human association, the famUy and the state. AVhat forms the
state but a sentiment of obedience, by which the many unite under the
authority of a chief? And what forms the family but the sentiment of
obedience, by which wife and children act under the direction of a father
and husband? The family is a natural state, primitive and restrained,
as the state is an artificial family, ulterior and expanded ; and amongst
the differences arising from the nvimber, origin, and condition of its
members, we discover in the small society as in the great, a like dis-

^ For this scale of co-ordinate effects, consult Eenan, Langues Sdmitiques, cli. i. ;
Jlommsen, Comparison between the Greek and Soman Civilisations, ch. ii. vol. i.
3d ed. ; Tocqueville, Consequences de la De'mocratie en Amdrique, vol. ilL

16 INTPvODUCTIOX

position of the fundamental intelligence wliich assimilates and unites
them. Now suppose that this element receives from circumstance,
race, or epoch certain special marks, it is clear that all the groups into
which it enters, will be modified proportionately. If the sentiment of
obedience is merely fear,^ you will find, as in most Oriental states, a
brutal despotism, exaggerated punishment, oppression of the subject,
servility of manners, insecurity of property, an impoverished produc-
tion, the slavery of women, and the customs of the harem. If the
sentiment of obedience has its root in the instinct of order, sociality,
and honour, you will find, as in France, a perfect military organisation,
a fine administrative hierarchy, a want of public spirit with occasional
jerks of patriotism, ready docility of the subject with a revolutionary
impatience, the cringing courtier with the counter-efforts of the genuine
man, the refined sympathy between conversation and society on the one
hand, and the worry at the fireside and among the family on the other,
the equality of the married with the incompleteness of the married
state, under the necessary constraint of the law. If, again, the senti-
ment of obedience has its root in the instinct of subordination and
the idea of duty, you will find, as among the Germans, security and
happiness in the household, a solid basis of domestic life, a tardy and
incomplete development of society, an innate respect for established
dignities, a superstitious reverence for the past, the keeping up of
social inequalities, natural and habitual regard for the law. So in a
race, according as the aptitude for general ideas varies, religion, art,
and philosophy vary. If man is naturally inclined to the widest uni-
versal conceptions, and apt to disturb them at the same time by the
nervous delicacy of his over-sensitive organisation, you will find, as in
India, an astonishing abundance of gigantic religious creations, a glow-
ing outgrowth of vast and transparent epic poems, a strange tangle of
subtle and imaginative philosophies, all so well interwoven, and so
penetrated with a common essence, as to be instantly recognised, by
their breadth, their colouring, and their want of order, as the products
of the same climate and the same intelligence. If, on the other hand, a
man naturally staid and balanced in mind limits of his own accord the
scope of his ideas, in order the better to define their form, you will
find, as in Greece, a theology of artists and tale-tellers ; distinctive gods,
soon considered distinct from things, and transformed, almost at the
outset, into recognised personages ; the sentiment of universal unity all
but effaced, and barely preserved in the vague notion of Destiny ; a
philosophy rather close and delicate than grand and systematic, con-
fined to a lofty metaphysics,^ but incomparable for logic, sophistry,

•- . I — ■ ■ - - , . , f ^ ,- _■ , . . — . . »-

1 Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, Principes des trois gouveruements.

* The Alexandrian philosophy had its birth from the West. The metaphysical
notions of Aristotle are isolated ; moreover, with him as with Plato, they are but
a sketch. By way of contrast consider the systematic vigour of Plotinus, Proclus,

INTRODUCTION. 1 7

and morals ; poetry and arts superior for clearness, spirit, scope, truth,
and beauty to all that have ever been known. If, once more, man,
reduced to narrow conceptions, and deprived of all speculative refine-
ment, is at the same time altogether absorbed and straitened by
practical occupations, you will find, as in Rome, rudimentary deities,
mere hollow names, sei'ving to designate the trivial details of agri-
culture, generation, household concerns, etiquettes in fact of marriage,
of the farm, producing a mythology, a philosophy, a poetry, either
worth nothing or borrowed. Here, as everywhere, the law of mutual
dependence^ comes into play, A civilisation forms a body, and its
parts are connected with each other like the parts of an organic body.
As in an animal, instincts, teeth, limbs, osseous structure, muscular
envelope, are mutually connected, so tliat a change in one produces a
corresponding change in the rest, and a clever naturalist can by a
I process of reasoning reconstruct out of a few fragments almost the
I whole body ; even so in a civilisation, religion, philosophy, the
organisation of the family, literature, the arts, make up a system
in which every local change induces a general change, so that an
experienced historian, studying some particular part of it, sees in ad-
vance and half predicts the character of the rest. There is nothing
vague in this interdependence. In the living body the regulator
is, first, its tendency to manifest a certain primary type ; then its
necessity for organs whereby to satisfy its wants, and for harmony with
itself in order that it may live. In a civilisation, the regulator is the
presence, in every great human creation, of a productive element,
present also in other surrounding creations, — to wit, some faculty,
aptitude, disposition, effective and discernible, which, being possessed
of its proper character, introduces it into all the operations in which
it assists, and, according to its variations, causes all the works in which
it co-operates to vary also.

TIL

At this point we can obtain a glimpse of the principal features of
human transformations, and begin to search for the general laws which
regulate, not events only, but classes of events, not such and such
religion or literature, but a group of literatures or religions. If, for
instance, it were admitted that a religion is a metaphysical poem, accom-
panied by a belief; and remarking at the same time that there are cer-
tain epochs, races, and circumstances in which belief, the poetical and
metaphysical faculty, are combined with an unwonted vigour; if we
consider that Christianity and Buddhism were produced at periods of

Schelling, and Hegel, or the admirable boldness of brahminical and buddhistic
speculation,

^ I have endeavoured on several occasions to give expression to this law, notably
in the preface to Essais de Critique et d'JIistoire.

B

18 INTEODUCTION.

grand productions, and amid such miseries as raised up the fanatics
of the Cevennes ; if we recognise, on the other hand, that primitive
religions are born at the awakening of human reason, during the richest
blossoming of human imagination, at a time of the fairest artlessness
and the greatest credulity ; if we consider, also, that Mohammedanism
appeared with the dawning of poetic prose, and the conception of national
imity, amongst a people destitute of science, at a period of sudden
development of the intellect, — we might then conclude that a religion
is born, declines, is reformed and transformed according as circum-
stances confirm and combine with more or less exactitude and force its
three generative instincts ; and we should understand why it is endemic
in India, amidst imaginative, philosophic, eminently fanatic brains ; why
it blossomed forth so strangely and grandly in the middle ages, amidst
an oppressive .organisation, new tongues and literatures ; why it was
aroused in the sixteenth century with a new character and heroic enthu-
siasm, amid universal regeneration, and during the awakening of the
German races ; why it breaks out into eccentric sects amid the rude
American democracy, and under the bureaucratic Russian despotism ;
Avhy, in fine, it is spread, at the present day, over Europe in such dif-
ferent dimensions and such various characteristics, according to the
differences of race and civilisation. And so for every kind of human
I production — foi literature, music, the fine arts, philosophy, science,
statecraft, industries, and the rest. Each of these has for its direct
cause a mora) disposition, or a combination of moral dispositions : the
cause given, they appear ; the cause withdrawn, they vanish : the
weakness oi intensity of the cause measures their weakness or intensity.
They are bound up with their causes, as a physical phenomenon with
j's condition, as the dew with the fall of the variable temperature, as
dilatation with heat. There are such dualities in the moral as in the
jihysical world, as rigorously bound together, and as universally ex-
tended in the one as in the other. Whatever in the one case pro-
duces, alters, suppresses the first term, produces, alters, suppresses the
second as a necessary consequence. Whatever lowers the temperature,
deposits the dew. Whatever develops credulity side by side with
poetical thoughts, engenders religion. Thus phenomena have been
produced ; thus they will be produced. As soon as we know the
sufficient and necessary condition of one of these vast occurrences, our
understanding grasps the future as weD as the past. We can say with
confidence in what circumstances it will reappear, foresee Avithout
rashness many portions of its future history, and sketch with care some
features of its ulterior development.

VIII.

History is now upon, or perhaps almost upon this footing, that it
must proceed after such a method of research. The question pro-
pounded now-a-days is of this kind. Given a literature, philosophy,

INTKODUCTION. 19

society, art, group of arts, what is the moral condition which produced
it? what the conditions of race, epoch, circumstance, the most fitted to
produce this moral condition ? There is a distinct moral condition for
each of these formations, and for each of their branches ; one for art in
general, one for each kind of art — for architecture, painting, sculpture,
music, poetry ; each has its special germ in the wide field of human
psychology ; each has its law, and it is by virtue of this law that we
see it raised, by chance, as it seems, wholly alone, amid the miscarriage of
its neighbours, like painting in Flanders and Holland in the seventeenth
century, poetry in England in the sixteenth, music in Germany in the
eighteenth. At this moment, and in these countries, the conditions have
been fulfilled for one art, not for others, and a single branch has budded
in the general barrenness. For these rules of human growth must history
search ; with the special psychology of each special formation it must
occupy itself; the finished picture of these characteristic conditions it
must now labour to compose. No task is more delicate or more diffi-
cult; Montesquieu tried it, but in his time history was too new to
admit of his success ; they had not yet even a suspicion of the road
necessary to be travelled, and hardly now do we begin to catch sight
of it. Just as in its elements astronomy is a mechanical and physiology
a chemical problem, so history in its elements is a psychological
problem. There is a particular inner system of impressions and opera-
tions which makes an artist, a believer, a musician, a painter, a wan-
derer, a man of society; and of each the afiiliation, the depth, the
independence of ideas and emotions, are different : each has its moral
history and its special structure, with some governing disposition and
some dominant feature. To explain each, it would be necessary to
write a chapter of esoteric analysis, and barely yet has such a method
been rudely sketched. One man alone, Stendhal, with a singular bent
of mind and a singular education, has undertaken it, and to this day
the majority of readers find liis books paradoxical and obscure : his
talent and his ideas were premature ; his admirable divinations were
not understood, any more than his profound sayings thrown out cur-
sorily, or the astonishing justness of his perception and of his logic.
It was not perceived that, under the exterior of a conversationaUst and
a man of the world, he explained the most complicated of esoteric
mechanisms ; that he laid his finger on the mainsprings ; that he intro-
duced into the history of the heart scientific processes, the art of nota-
tion, decomposition, deduction ; that he first marked the fundamental
causes of nationality, climate, temperament ; in short, that he treated
of sentiments as they should be treated, — in the manner of the naturalist,
namely, and of the natural philosopher, who constructs classifications
and weighs forces. For this very reason he was considered dry and
eccentric : he remained solitary, writing novels, voyages, notes, for
which he sought and obtained a score of readers. And yet we find in

20 INTRODUCTION.

his books at the present day essays the most suitable to open the path
■which I have endeavoured to describe. No one has better taught us
how to open our eyes and see, to see first the men that surround us and
the life that is present, then the ancient and authentic documents, to
read between the black and white lines of the pages, to recognise under
the old impression, luider the scribbling of a text, the precise sentiment,
the movement of ideas, the state of mind in which they were written.
In his writings, in Sainte-Beuve, in the German critics, the reader will
see all the wealth that may be drawn from a literary work : Avhen the
work is rich, and one knows how to interpret it, we find there the
psychology of a soul, frequently of an age, now and then of a race.
In this light, a great poem, a fine novel, the confessions of a superior
man, are more instructive than a heap of historians with their histories.
I would give fifty volumes of charters and a hundred volumes of state-
papers for the memoirs of Cellini, the epistles of St. Paul, the Table-
talk of Luther, or the comedies of Aristophanes. In this consists the
importance of literary works : they are instructive because they are
beautiful ; their utility grows with their perfection ; and if they furnish
documents, it is because they are monuments. The more a book repre-
sents visible sentiments, the more it is a work of literature ; for the projDer
ofiice of literature is to take note of sentiments. The more a book
represents important sentiments, the higher is its place in literature ;
for it is by representing the mode of being of a whole nation and a
whole age, that a writer rallies round him the sympathies of an entire
age and an entire nation. This is why, amid the writings which set
before our eyes the sentiments of preceding generations, a literature,
and notably a grand literature, is incomparably the best. It resembles
that admirable apparatus of extraordinary sensibility, by which phy-
sicians disentangle and measure the most recondite and delicate changes
of a body. Constitutions, religions, do not approach it in importance ;
the articles of a code and of a catechism only show us the spirit roughly
and without delicacy. If there are any writings in which politics and
dogma are full of life, it is in the eloquent discourses of the pulpit and
the tribune, memoii's, unrestrained confessions ; and all this belongs to
literature : so that, in addition to itself, it has all the advantage of
other works. It is then chiefly by the study of literatures that one
may construct a moral history, and advance toward the knowledge of
psychological laws, from which events spring.

I am about to write the history of a literature, and to seek in it for
the psychology of a people : if I have chosen this one in particular, it
is not without a reason. I had to find a people with a grand and
complete literature, and this is rare : there are few nations who have,
during their whole existence, really thought and written. Among the
ancients, the Latin literature is worth nothing at the outset, then bor-
rowed and imitative. Among the moderns, German literature is almost

INTRODUCTION. 2 1

wanting for two centuries.* Italian literature and Spanisli literatvire
end at tlie middle of the seventeenth century. Only ancient Greece,
modern France and England, offer a complete series of great significant
monuments. I have chosen England, because being yet alive, and
subject to direct examination, it may be better studied than a destroyed
civilisation, of which we retain but the scraps, and because, being
different from France, it has in the eyes of a Frenchman a more distinct
character. Besides, there is a peculiarity in this civilisation, that apart
from its spontaneous development, it presents a forced deviation, it has
suffered the last and most effectual of all conquests, and that the three
grounds whence it has sprung, race, climate, the Norman invasion,
may be observed in its remains with perfect exactness ; so well, that
we may examine in this history the two most powerful moving springs
of human transformation, natural bent and constraining force, and we
may examine them without uncertainty or gap, in a series of authentic
and unmutilated memorials. I have endeavoured to define these
primary springs, to exhibit their gradual effects, to explain how they
have ended by bringing to light great political, religious, and literary
works, and by developing the recondite mechanism whereby the Saxon
barbarian has been transformed into the Encrlishman of to-dav.

1 From 1550 to 1750.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

BOOK I.

THE SOURCE.

CHAPTER I.

The Saxons.

I. The old country — Soil, sea, sky, climate — The new country — A moist land

and a thankless sod — Influence of climate on character.
II. The bodily structure — Food — Manners — Uncultivated instincts, German
and English.

III. Xoble instincts in Germany — The individual — The family — The state —

Eeligion — The Edda — Tragi-heroic conception of the world and of man-
kind.

IV. Koble instincts in England — "Warrior and chieftain — "Wife and hushand —

The poem of Beowulf — Barbarian society and the barbarian hero.
V. Pagan poems — Kind and force of sentiments — Bent of mind and speech —
Force of impression ; harshness of expression.
VI. Christian poems — A^^lerein the Saxons are predisposed to Christianity —
How converted — Their view of Christianity — Hymns of Csedmon —
Funeral hymn— Poem of Judith — Paraphrase of the Bible.

VII. "Why Latia culture took no hold on the Saxons — Reasons drawn from
the Saxon conquest — Bede, Alcuin, Alfred — Translations — Chronicles —
Compilations — Impotence of Latin writers — Reasons drawn from the
Saxon character — Adhelm — Alcuin — Latia verse — Poetic dialogues — Bad
taste of the Latia writers.

VIII. Contrast of German and Latin races — Character of the Saxon race — Its
endurance under the Norman conq^uest.

I.

AS you coast the North Sea from the Scheldt to Jutland, you will
mark in the first place that the characteristic feature is the want
of slope ; marsh, waste, shoal ; the rivers hardly drag themselves along,
swollen and sluggish, with long, black-looking waves ; the flooding
stream oozes over the banks, and appears beyond them in stagnant
pools. In Holland the soil is but a sediment of mud ; here and there
only does the earth cover it with a crust of mire, shallow and brittle,
the mere alluvium of the river, which the river seems ever ready to

24 THE SOURCE. [bOOK I.

destroy. Thick mists hover above, being fed by ceaseless exhalations.
They lazily turn their violet flanks, grow black, suddenly descend in
heavy showers ; the vapour, like a furnace-smoke, crawls for ever on
the horizon. Thus watered, the plants multiply ; in the angle between
Jutland and the continent, in a fat muddy soil, ^ the verdure is as fresh
as that of England.' ^ Immense forests covered the land even after
the eleventh century. The sap of this humid country, thick and
potent, circulates in man as in the plants, and by its respiration, its
nutrition, the sensations and habits which it generates, affects his
faculties and his frame.

The land produced after this fashion has one enemy, to wit, the sea*
Holland maintains its existence only by virtue of its dykes. In 1654
those in Jutland burst, and fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were
swallowed up. One need see the blast of the North swirl down upon
the low level of the soil, wan and ominous : ^ the vast yellow sea dashes
against the narrow belt of coast which seems incapable of a moment's
resistance ; the wind howls and bellows ; the sea-mews cry ; the poor
little ships flee as fast as they can, bending, almost overset, and en-
deavour to find a refuge in the mouth of the river, which seems as
hostile as the sea. A sad and precarious existence, as it were face to
face with a beast of prey. The Frisians, in their ancient laws, speak
already of the league they have made against * the ferocious ocean.'
Even in a calm this sea is unsafe. ' Before the eye spreads a mighty
waste of waters ; above float the clouds, grey and shapeless daughters
of the air, which draw up the water in their mist-buckets from the sea,
carry it along laboriously, and again suffer it to fall into the sea, a sad,
useless, wearisome task.' ^ ' With flat and long extended maw, the
shapeless north wind, like a scolding dotard, babbles with groaning,
mystei'ious voice, and repeats his foolish tales.' Eain, wind, and surge
leave room for naught but gloomy and melancholy thoughts. The very
joy of the billows has in it an inexplicable restlessness and harshness.
From Holland to Jutland, a string of small, deluged islands * bears wit-
ness to their ravages ; the shifting sands which the tide floats up

' Malte-Brun, iv. 898. Denmark means 'low plain.' Not counting bays, gulfs,
and canals, the sixteenth part of the country is covered by water. The dialect
of Jutland bears still a great resemblance to the English.

^ See Piuysdaal's painting in Mr. Baring's collection. Of the three Saxon islands,
North Strandt, Busen, and Heligoland, North Strandt was inundated by the sea
in 1300, 1483, 1532, 1615, and almost destroyed in 1634. Busen is a level plain,
beaten by storms, -which it has been found necessary to surround by a dyke. Heli-
goland was laid waste by the sea in 800, 1300, 1500, 1649, the last time so
violently that only a portion of it survived. Turner, Hist, of Angl. Saxons, 1852,
i. 97.

^ Heine, die Nordsee. Cf. Tacitus, Ann. book 2, for the impressions of the
Romans, ' truculentia cceli. '

* Watten, Platen, Sande, Diineninseln.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 25

obstruct with rocks the banks and entrance of the rivers.^ The first
Eoman fleet, a thousand vessels, perished there ; to this day ships wait
a month or more in sight of port, tossed upon the great white waves,
not daring to risk themselves in the shifting, winding channel, notorious
for its wrecks. In winter a breastplate of ice covers the two streams ;
the sea drives back the frozen masses as they descend ; they pile them-
selves with a crash upon the sandbanks, and sway to and fro ; now and
then you may see a vessel, seized as in a vice, split in two beneath their
violence. Picture, in this foggy clime, amid hoar-frost and storm, in
these marshes and forests, half-naked savages, a kind of wild beasts,
fishers and hunters, even hunters of men ; these are they, Saxons,
Angles, Jutes, Frisians ; ^ later on, Danes, who during the fifth and the
ninth centuries, with their swords and battle-axes, took and kept the
island of Britain.

A rude and foggy land, hke their own, except in the depth of its
sea and the safety of its coasts, which one day will call up real fleets
and mighty vessels ; green England — the word rises to the lips and
expresses all. Here also moisture pervades everything ; even in sum-
mer the mist rises ; even on clear days you perceive it fresh from the
great sea-girdle, or rising from vast but ever slushy moorlands, undu-
lating with hill and dale, intersected with hedges to the limit of the
horizon. Here and there a sunbeam strikes on the higher foliage with
burning flash, and the splendour of the verdure dazzles and almost blinds
you. The overflowing water straightens the flabby stems ; they grow
up, rank, weak, and filled with sap ; a sap ever renewed, for the grey
mists creep over a stratum of motionless vapour, and at distant inter-
vals the rim of heaven is drenched by heavy showers. ' There are yet
commons as at the time of the Conquest, deserted, abandoned,^ wild,
covered with furze and thorny plants, with here and there a horse
grazing in the solitude. Joyless scene, poverty-stricken soil!* What a
labour it has been to humanise it ! What impression it must have
made on the men of the South, the Romans of Ctesar! I thought,
when I saw it, of the ancient Saxons, wanderers from West and North,
who came to settle in this land of marsh and fogs, on the border of these
primeval forests, on the banks of these great muddy streams, which
roll down their slime to meet the waves. ^ They must have lived as
hunters and swineherds ; grow, as before, brawny, fierce, gloomy.
Take civilisation from this soil, and there will remain to the inhabit-

1 Kine or ten miles out, near Heligoland, are tlie nearest soundings of about
fifty fathoms.

^ Palgrave, Saxon Commonwealth, vol. i.

^ Notes of a Journey in England.

* Leonce de Lavergne, De V Agriculture anglaise. ' The soil is much worse
than that of France.'

^ There are at least four rivers in England passing by the name of 'Ouse,'
which is only another form of ' ooze.' — Tiu

26 . THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

ants only war, the chase, gluttony, drunkenness. Smiling love, sweet
poetic dreams, art, refined and nimble thought, are for the happy shores
of the Mediterranean. Here the barbarian, ill housed in his mud-
hovel, who hears the rain rustling whole days in the oak leaves — what
dreams can he have, gazing upon his mud-pools and his sombre sky ? '

IL

Huge white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish
flaxen hair ; ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by
strong drinks ; of a cold temperament, sIoav to love,' home-stayers,
prone to brutal drunkenness : these are to this day the features which
descent and climate preserve in the race, and these are what the Roman
historians discovered in their former country. There is no living, in
these lands, without abundance of solid food ; bad weather keeps people
at home ; strong drinks are necessary to cheer them ; the senses become
blunted, the muscles are braced, the will vigorous. In every country
the body of man is rooted deep into the soil of nature ; and in this
instance still deeper, because, being uncultivated, he is less removed
from nature. In Germany, stormbeaten, in wretched boats of hide,
amid the hardships and dangers of seafaring life, they were pre-eminently
adapted for endurance and enterprise, inured to misfortune, scorners
of danger. Pirates at first : of all kinds of hunting the man-hunt is
most profitable and most noble ; they left the care of the land and
flocks to the women and slaves; seafaring, war, and pillage^ was their
whole idea of a freeman's work. They dashed to sea in their two-
bailed barks, landed anywhere, killed everything; and having sacrificed
in honoui of their gods the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind
them the red light of their burnings, went farther on to begin again.
' Lord,' says a certain litany, ' deliver us from the fury of the Jutes.'
' Of all barbarians^ these are strongest of body and heart, the most
formidable,' — we may add, the most cruelly ferocious. When murder
becomes a trade, it becomes a pleasure. About the eighth century, the
final decay of the great Roman corpse which Charlemagne had tried to
revive, and which was settling down into corruption, called them like
vultures to the prey. Those who had remained in Denmark, with their
brothers of Norway, fanatical pagans, incensed against the Christians,
made a descent on all the surrounding coasts. Their sea-kings,'' 'who

^ Tacitus, De moribus Germanorum, passim: Diem noctemque continuare
potando, nulli proborum. — Sera juvenum Venus. — Totos dies juxta focum atque
iguem agunt. Dargaud, Voyage en Danemark. ' They take six meals per day, the
first at five o'clock in the morning. One should see the faces and meals at Ham-
burg and at Amsterdam.'

= Bede, v. 10. Sidonius, viii. 6. Lingard, Hist, of England, 1854, i. chap. 2.

' Zozimos, iii. 147. Amm. Marcellinus, xxviii. 526.

* Aug. Thierry, Hist. <S'. Edmundi, vL 441. See Ynglingasaga, and especially
the Saga of EgLL

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 27

had never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof, who had never
dramed the ale-horn by an inhabited hearth,' laughed at wind and
storms, and sang : ' The blast of the tempest aids our oars ; the bellow-
ing of heaven, the howling of the thunder, hurt us not ; the hurricane
is our servant, and drives us whither we wish to go.' ' We smote with
our swords,' says a song attributed to Kagnar Lodbrog ; * to me it was
a joy like having my bright bride by me on the couch, . . . He who
has never been wounded lives a weary life.' One of them, at the
monastery of Peterborough, kills with his own hand all the monks, to
the number of eighty-four; others, having taken King /Ella, divided
his ribs from the spine, and drew his lungs through the opening, so as
to represent an eagle. Harold Harefoot, having seized his rival Alfred,
with six hundred men, had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped,
or embowelled.^ Torture and carnage, greed of danger, fury of de-
struction, obstinate and frenzied bravery of an over-strong temperament,
the unchaining of the butcherly instincts, — such traits meet us at every
step in the old Sagas. The daughter of the Danish Jarl, seeing Egil
taking his seat near her, repels him with scorn, reproaching him with
' seldom having provided the wolves with hot meat, with never having
seen for the whole autumn a raven croaking over the carnage.' But
Egil seized her and pacified her by singing : ' I have marched with my
bloody sword, and the raven has followed me. Furiously we fought,
the fire passed over th? dwellings of men ; we slept in the blood of
those who kept the gates.' From such table-talk, and such maid's
fancies, one may judge of the rest.^

Bphold them now in England, more settled and wealthier : do you
look to find them much changed? Changed it may be, but for tlie
worse, like the Franks, like all barbarians who pass from action to en-
joyment. They are more gluttonous, carving their hogs, filling them-
selves with flesh, swallowing down deep draughts of mead, ale, spiced
Avines, all the strong, coarse drinks which they can procure, and so they
are cheered and stimulated. Add to this the pleasure of the fight. Not
easily with such instincts can they attain to culture ; to find a natural
and ready culture, we must look amongst the sober and sprightly popu-
lations of the south. Here the sluggish and heavy ^ temperament re-
mains long buried in a brutal life ; people of the Latin race, never

' Lingard, Hist, of England, i. 164, says, however, * Every tenth man out
of the six hundred received his liberty, and of the rest a few were selected for
slavery. ' — Tr.

* Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Icelanders, are one and the
oame people. Their language, laws, religion, poetry, differ but little. The more
northern continue longest in their primitive manners. Germany in the fourth
and fifth centuries, Denmark and Noi-way in the seventh and eighth, Iceland in
the tenth and eleventh centuries, present the same condition, and the documents
of each country will fill up the gaps that exist in the history of the others.

3 Tacitus, he vwr. Germ. xxiL : Gens nee astuta nee callida.

28 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

at a first glance see in them aught but large gross beasts, clumsy and
ridiculous when not dangerous and enraged. Up to the sixteenth cen-
tury, says an old historian, the greflt body of the nation were little else
than herdsmen, keepers of beasts for flesh and fleece ; up to the end of
the eighteenth drunkenness was the recreation of the higher ranks ; it
is still that of the lower ; and all the refinement and softening influence
of civilisation have not abolished amongst them the use of the rod and
the fist. If the carnivorous, warlike, drinking savage, proof against
the climate, still shows beneath the conventions of our modern society
and the softness of our modern polish, imagine what he must have been
when, landing with ])is band upon a wasted or desert country, and
becoming for the first time a settler, he saw on the horizon the common
pastures of the border country, and the great primitive forests which
furnished stags for the chase and acorns for his pigs. The ancient
histories tell us that they had a great and a coarse appetite.^ Even at
the time of the Conquest the custom of drinking to excess was a common
vice with men of the highest rank, and they passed in this way whole
days and nights without intermission. Henry of Huntingdon, in the
twelfth century, lamenting the ancient hospitality, says that the Norman
kings provided their courtiers with only one meal a day, while the
Saxon kings used to provide four. One day, when Athelstan went
with his nobles to visit his relative Ethelfleda, the provision of mead
was exhausted at the first salutation, owing to the copiousness of the
draughts ; but Saint Dunstan, forecasting the extent of the royal appe-
tite, had furnished the house, so that though the cup-bearers, as is the
custom at royal feasts, were able the wliole day to serve it out in horns
and other vessels, the liquor was not found to be deficient. "When the
guests were satisfied, the harp passed from hand to hand, and the rude
harmony of their deep voices swelled tinder the vaulted roof. The
monasteries themselves in Edgard's time kept up games, songs, and
dances till midnight. To shout, to drink, to caper about, to feel their
veins heated and swollen with wine, to hear and see around them the
riot of the orgy, this was the first need of the Barbarians.^ The heavy
human brute gluts himself with sensations and with noise.

For this appetite there was a stronger grazing-ground, — I mean,
blows and battle. In vain they attached themselves to the soil, be-
came cultivators, in distinct communities and distinct regions, shut up^
in their march with their kindred and comrades, bound together, sepa-

' Craik and ]\IacFaiiane, Pictorial History of England, 1837, i. 337. W. of
JIalmesbury. Henry of Huntingdon, vi. 365.

^ Tacitus, De moribus Germanorum, xxii., xxiii.

3 Kemble, Saxons in England, 1849, 1. 70, ii. 184. ' The Acts of an Anglo-Saxon
parliament are a series of treaties of peace between all the associations which make
up the state ; a continual revision and renewal of the alliances offensive and defensive
of all the free men. They are universally mutual contracts lor the maintenance of
the Irid or peace.'

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 29

rated from the mass, marked round by sacred landmarks, by primeval
oaks on which they cut the figures of birds and beasts, by poles set up
in the midst of the marsh, which whosoever removed was punished witli
merciless tortures. In vain these Marches and Ga's^ were grouped
into states, and finally formed a half-regulated society, with assemblies
and laws, under the lead of a single king ; its very structure indicates
the necessities to suppiv which it was created. They united in order
to maintain peace; treaties of peace occupy their Parliaments; provi-
sions for peace are the matter of their laws. War was waged daily and
everywhere ; the aim of life was, not to be slain, ransomed, mutilated,
pillaged, hung and of course, if it was a woman, violated.^ Every man
was obliged to appear armed, and to be ready, with his burgh or his
township, to repel marauders, who went about in bands ; one such con-
sisted of thirty-five and more. The animal was yet too powerful, too
impetuous, too untamed. Anger and covetousness in the first place
brought him upon his prey. Their history, such as that of the Hept-
archy, is like a history of 'kites and crows.'® They slew the Britons
or reduced them to slaver;^, fpught the remnant of the A\'elsh, Irish, and
Picts, massacred one another, were hewn down and cut to pieces by the
Danes. In a hundred years, out of fourteen kings of Northumbria,
seven were slain and six deposed. Penda of Mercia killed five kings,
and in order to win the town of Bamborough, demolished all the neigh-
bouring villages, heaped their ruins into an immense pile, sufficient to
bm-n all the inhabitants, undertook to exterminate the Northumbrians,
and perished himself by the sword at the age of eighty. Many amongst
them were put to death by the thanes ; one thane was burned alive ;
brothers slew one another treacherously. With us civilisation has in-
terposed, between the desire and its fulfilment, the counteracting and
softening preventive of reflection and calculation ; here, the impulse is
sudden, and murder and every kind of excess spring from it instanta-
neously. King Edwy* having married Elgiva, his relation within the
prohibited degrees, quitted the hall where ha was drinking on the very
day of his coronation, to be with her. The nobles thought themselves
insulted, and immediately Abbot Dunstan went himself to seek the
young man. ' He found the adulteress,' says the monk Osbern, ' her
mother, and the king together on the bed of debauch. He dragged the
king thence violently, and setting the crown upon his head, brought

' A large district ; the word is still existlBg in Geruiau, as IQieiugau, Brcisgau.
— Tr.

2 Turner, Hist, of the Anglo-Sax. ii. 440, Laws of Ina.

' Milton's expression. Lingard's History, i. cliap. 3. This histoiy bears
much resemblance to that of the Franks in GauL See Gregory of Tours. The
Saxons, like the Franks, were somewhat softened, but above all depraved, and
were pillaged and massacred by those of their northern brothers ^vho had remained
in a savage state.

* Vita S. Duustani, Anglia Sacra, n.

30 THE SOURCE. [book L

him back to the nobles.' Afterwards Elgiva sent men to deprive
Dunstan of his eyes, and then, in a revoh, saved herself and the king
by hiding in the country ; but the men of the North having seized her,
' hamstrung her, and then subjected her to the death which she de-
served.'^ Barbarity follows barbarity. At Bristol, at the time of the
Conquest, as we are told by an historian of the time,^ it was the custom
to buy men and women in all parts of England, and to carry them to
Ireland for sale. The buyers usually made the women pregnant, and
took them to market in that condition, in order to ensure a better
price. ' You might have seen with sorrow long files of young people
of both sexes and of the greatest beauty, bound with ropes, and daily
exposed for sale. . . . They sold in this manner as slaves their nearest
relatives, and even their own children.' And the chronicler adds that,
having abandoned this practice, they ' thus set an example to all the
rest of England.' Would you know the manners of the highest ranks,
in the family of the last king?^ At a feast in the king's hall, Harold
was serving Edward the Confessor with wine, when Tostig, his brother,
stimulated by envy at his favour, seized him by the hair. They were
separated. Tostig went to Hereford, where Harold had ordered a great
royal banquet to be prejjared. There he seized his brother's attendants,
and cutting off their heads and limbs, he placed them in the vessels of
wine, ale, mead, and cider, and sent a message to the king : ' If you go
to your farm, you will find there plenty of salt meat, but you will do
well to carry some more with you.' Harold's other brother, Sweyn,
had violated the abbess Elgiva, assassinated Beorn the thane, and being
banished from the country, had turned pirate. When we regard their
deeds of violence, their ferocity, their cannibal jests, we see that they
were not far removed from the sea-kings, or from the followers of Odin,
A\ho ate raw flesh, hung men as victims on the sacred trees of Upsal,
and killed one another to make sure of dying as they had lived, in
blood. A score of times the old ferocious instinct reappears beneath
the thin crust of Christianity. In the eleventh century, Sigeward,* the
great Duke of Northumberland, was afflicted with a dysentery; and feel-
ing his death near, exclaimed, ' What a shame for me not to have been
permitted to die in so many battles, and to end thus by a cow's death ! ,
At least put on my breastplate, gird on my sword, set my helmet on
my head, my shield in my left hand, my golden battle-axe ia my right,

' It is amusing to compare the story of Edwy and Elgiva in Turner, ii. 216,
etc., and tlien in Lingard, i. 132, etc. The first accuses Duustau, the other
defends him. — Til.

2 Life of Bishop Wolstan.

2 Tautse ssevitice erant fratres illi quod, cum alicujus nitidam vILlam conspi-
cerent, domiuatorem de nocte interfici juberent, totamque progeniem illius pos-
sessionemque defuncti obtinerent. Turner, iii. 27. Henry of Huntingdon, vi. 367.

* ' Pene gigas statura,' says the chronicler. H. of Huntingdon, vi. 3C7. Kemble,
L 393. Turner, ii. 318.

CHAP. 1.] TIIE SAXONS. 31

SO that a groat warrior, like myself, may die as a warrior.' They did
as he bade, and thus died he honourably with his arms. They had
made one step, and only one, from barbarism.

III.
Under this native barbarism there were noble dispositions, unknown
to the Roman world, which were destined to produce a better people
cut of the ruins of these. In the first place, 'a certain earnestness,
which leads them out of idle sentiments to noble ones.'^ From their
origin in Germany this is Avhat we find them, severe in manner, with
grave inclinations and a manly dignity. They live solitary, each one
near the spring or the wood which has taken his fancy.^ Even in
villages the cottages were detached ; they must have independence and
free air. They had no taste for voluptuousness ; love was tardy, edu-
cation severe, their food simple ; all the recreation they indulged in
Avas the hunting of the aurochs, and a dance amongst naked swords.
Violent intoxication and perilous wagers were their weakest points ;
they sought in preference not mild pleasures, but strong excitement.
In everything, in rude and masculine instincts, they were men. Each
in his own home, on his own land, and in his own hut, was master of
himself, firm and self-contained, in no wise restrained or shackled. If
the commonweal received anything from him, it was because he gave
it. In all great conferences he gave his vote in arms, passed judg-
ment in the assembly, made alliances and Avars on his own account,
moved from place to place, showed activity and daring.^ The modern
Englishman existed entire in this Saxon. If he bends, it is becai;se he
is quite willing to bend ; he is no less capable of self-denial than of
independence ; sacrifice is not uncommon, a man cares not for his life
and his blood. In Homer the warrior often gives way, and is not blamed
if he flees. In the Sagas, in the Edda, he must be over-brave ; in
Germany the coward is drowned in the mud, under a hxirdle. Through
all outbreaks of primitive brutality gleams obscurely the grand idea of
duty, which is, the self-constraint exercised in view of some noble end.
Marriage Avas pure amongst them, chastity instinctive. Amongst the
Saxons the adulterer Avas punished by death; the adulteress Avas obliged
to hang herself, or Avas stabbed by the knives of her companioas. The
Avives of the Cimbrians, Avhen they could not obtain from !Marius assur-
ance of their chastity, sleAv themselves Avith their OAvn hands. They
thought there Avas something sacred in a Avoman ; they married but one,
and kept faith Avith her. In fifteen centuries the idea of marriage is
unchanged amongst them. The Avife, on entering her husband's home,

* Grimm, Mythology, 53, Preface.

* Tacitus, XX., xxiii., xi., xii., xiii., et passim. "We may still see the traces of
tliis taste iu English dvvelliugs,

* Tacitus, xiii.

33 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

is aware that she gives herself altogether,^ ' that she will have but one
body, one life with him ; that she will have no thought, no desire
beyond ; that she will be the companion of his perils and labours ;
that she will suffer and dare as much as he, both in peace and war.'
And he, like her, knows that he gives himself. Having chosen his
chief, he forgets himself in him, assigns to him his own glory, serves
him to the death. * He is infamous as long as he lives, who returns
from the field of battle without his chief.' ^ It was on this voluntary
subordination that feudal society was based. Man, in this race, can
accept a superior, can be capable of devotion and respect. Thrown
back upon himself by the gloom and severity of his climate, he has
discovered moral beauty, while others discover sensuous beauty. This
kind of naked brute, who lies all day by his fireside, sluggish and dirty,
always eating and drinking,^ whose rusty faculties cannot follow the
clear and fine outlines of poetic forms, catches a glimpse of the sublime
in his troubled dreams. He does not see it, but simply feels it ; his
religion is already within, as it will be in the sixteenth century, when
he will cast off the sensuous worship of Rome, and confirm the faith of
the heart.* His gods are not enclosed in walls ; he has no idols. What
he designates by divine names, is something invisible and grand, which
floats through nature, and is conceived beyond nature,^ a mysterious
infinity which the sense cannot touch, but which ' reverence alone can
appreciate ;' and Avhen, later on, the legends define and alter this vague
divination of natural powers, an idea remains at the bottom of this
chaos of giant-dreams ; that the world is a warfare, and heroism the
greatest excellence.

In the beginning, say the old Icelandic legends,^ there were two
worlds, Niflheim the frozen, and ]\Iuspell the burning. From the fall-
ing snow-flakes was born the giant Ymir. ' There was in times of old,
where Ymir dwelt, nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves ; earth existed
not, nor heaven above ; 'twas a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere.'
There was but Ymir, the horrible frozen Ocean, Avith his children,
sprung from his feet and his armpits ; then their shapeless progeny,
Terrors of the abyss, barren Mountains, Whirlwinds of the North, and

^ Tacitus, xix., viii., xvi. KemLle, i. 232. ^ Tacitus, xiv.

^ * In omni domo, nudi et sordidi. . . • Plus per otium transigimt, dediti somno,
ciboque ; totos dies juxta focum atque igiiem agunt.'

* Grimm, 53, Preface. Tacitus, x.

^ ' Deorum nomiuibiis appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident.'
Later on, at Upsal for instance, they had images (Adam of Bremen, Historia
Ecclesiastica). Wuotan (Odin) signifies etymologically the All-Powerful, liim who
penetrates and circulates through everything (Grimm, Mythol.^.

^ Edda Scemundi, Edda Snorri, ed, Copenhagen, three vols, passim. Mr.
Bergmann has translated several of these poems into French, which Mr. Taine
quotes. The translator has generally made use of the edition of ilr. Thorpe,
London. Triibner, ISOO.

CHAP, l] the SAXONS. 33

other malevolent beings, enemies of the sun and of life ; then the cow
Andhumbla, born also of melting snow, brings to light, whilst licking
the hoar-frost from the rocks, a man Bur, whose grandsons kill the
giant Ymir. 'From his flesh the earth was formed, and from his bones
the hills, the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant, and from
his blood the sea; but of his brains the heavy clouds are all created,'
Then arose war between the monsters of winter and the luminous fer-
tile gods, Odin the founder, Baldur the mild and benevolent, Thor the
summer-thunder, who purifies the air and nourishes the earth with
showers. Long fought the gods against the frozen Jotuns, against the
dark bestial powers, the wolf Fenrir, the great Serpent, whom they
drown in the sea, the treacherous Loki, whom they bind to the rocks,
beneath a viper whose venom drops continually on his face. Long will
the heroes, who by a bloody death deserve to be placed 'in the halls
of Odin, and there wage a combat every day,' assist the gods in their
mighty Avar. A day will, however, arrive when gods and men will be
conquered. Then.

' trembles Yggdrasil's ash yet standiiig ; groans that ancient tree, and the Jbtnn
Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel,^ until the fire of
Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the
mundane snake is coiled in jbtun-rage. The worm beats the water, and the eagle
screams ; the pale of beak tears carcases ; (the ship) Naglfar is loosed. Surt from
the South comes with flickering flame ; sliines from his sword the Val-god's sun.
The stony hills are dashed together, the giantesses totter ; men tread the path
of Hel, and heaven is cloven. The sun darkens, earth in ocean sinks, fall from
heaven the bright stars, fire's breath assails the all-nourishing tree, towering fire
plays against heaven itself.'*

The gods perish, devoured one by one by the monsters ; and the
celestial legend, sad and grand now like the life of man, bears Avit-
ness to the hearts of warriors and heroes.

There is no fear of grief, no care for life ; they count it as dross
when the idea has seized upon them. The trembling of the nerves, the
repugnance of animal instinct which starts back before wounds and
death, are all lost in an irresistible determination. See how in their
epic^ the sublime springs up amid the horrible, like a bright purple
flower amid a pool of blood. Sigurd has plunged his sword into the
dragon Fafnir, and at that very moment they looked on one another ;
and Fafnir asks, as he dies, * Who art thou ? and Avho is thy father ?
and what thy kin, that thou wert so hardy as to bear weapons against

' Hel, the goddess of death, born of Loki and Angi-boda. — Tr.

' Thorpe, TheEdda ofScemund, The Vala's Prophecy, str. 48-56, p. 9 et passim.

3 Fafnismdl Edda. This epic is common to the Northern races, as is the
Iliad to the Greek populations, and is found almost entire in Germany in the
Nibelungen Lied. The translator has also used Magnusson and Moms' poetical
version of the Viilmnrja Saga, and certain songs of the Elder Edda, London,
EUis, 1870.

C

34 THE SOURCE. [BOOK L

me ?' 'A hardy lieart urged me on thereto, and a strong hand and this
sharp sword. . . . Seldom hath hardy eld a faint-heart youth.' After
this triumphant eagle's cry Sigurd cuts out the worm's heart ; but
Eegin, brother of Fafnir, drinks blood from the wound, and falls asleep.
Sigurd, who was roasting the heart, raises his finger thoughtlessly
to his lips. Forthwith he understands the language of the birds. The
eagles scream above him in the branches. They warn him to mis-
trust Re"-ln. Sigurd cuts off the latter's head, eats of Fafnir's heart,
drinks his blood and his brother's. Amongst all these murders their
courage and poetry grow. Sigurd has subdued Brynhild, the untamed
maiden, by passing through the flaming fire; they share one couch
for three nights, his naked sword betwixt them. ' Nor the damsel did
he kiss, nor did the Hunnish king to his arm lift her. He the blooming
maid to Giuki's son delivered,' because, according to his oath, he must
send her to her betrothed Gunnar. She, setting her love upon him,
' Alone she sat -without, at eve of day, began aloud with herself to
speak : " Sigurd must be mine ; I must die, or that blooming youth
clasp in my arms.'" But seeing him married, she brings about his
death. 'Laughed then Brynhild, Budli's daughter, once only, from
her M'hole soul, when in her bed she listened to the loud lament of
Giuki's daughter.' She put on her golden corslet, pierced herself with
the sword's point, and as a last request said :

' Let in the plain be raised a pile so spacious, that for us all like room may
be ; let them burn the Hun (Sigurd) on the one side of me, on the other side my
household slaves, with collars splendid, two at our heads, and two hawks ; let also
lie between us both the keen-edged sword, as when we both one couch ascended ;
also five female thralls, eight male slaves of gentle birth fostered with me. ' *

All were burnt together ; yet Gudrun the widow continued motionless
by the corpse, and could not weep. The wives of the jarls came to
console her, and each of them told her own sorrows, all the calamities
of great devastations and the old life of barbarism.

'Then spoke Giaflang, Giuki's sister: "Lo, up on earth I live most loveless,
who of five mates must see the ending, of daughters twain and three sisters, of
brethren eight, and abide behind lonely." Then spake Herborg, Queen of Hun-
land : " Crueller tale have I to tell of my seven sons, down in the Southlands,
and the eight man, my mate, felled in the death-mead. Father and mother, and
four brothers on the wide sea the winds and death played with ; the billows beat
on the bulwark boards. Alone must I sing o'er them, alone must 1 array them,
alone must my hands deal with their departing ; and all this was in one season's
wearing, and none was left for love or solace. Then was I bound a prey of the
battle when that same season wore to its ending ; as a tiring may must I bind the
shoou ot the duke's high dame, every day at dawning. From her jealous hate gat
1 heavy mocking, cruel lashes she laid upon me.'"^

1 Thorpe, The Edda of Scemund, Third lay of Sigurd Fafnidde, str. 62-64, p. 83.
* Magnusson and Morris, Story of the Volsungs and Nihelungs, Lamentation of
Oudrun, p. 118 ei passim.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 35

All was in vain; no word could draw tears from those dry eyes. They
were obliged to lay the bloody corpse before her, ere her tears would
come. Then a flood of tears ran down over her knees, and ' the geese
withal that were in the home-field, the fair fowls the may owned, fell
a-screaming.' She wishes to die, like Sigurd, on the corpse of him
whom alone she had loved, if they had not deprived her of memory by
a magic potion. Thus affected, she departs in order to marry Atli, king
of the Huns ; and yet she goes against her will, with gloomy forebod-
ings : for murder begets murder ; and her brothers, the murderers of
Sigurd, having been drawn to Atli's court, fall in their turn into a
snare like that which they had themselves laid. Then Gunnar was
bound, and they tried to make him deliver up the treasure. He
answers with a barbarian's laugh ;

' " Hogni's heart in my hand shall lie, ci;t bloody from the breast of the
valiant chief, the king's son, with a dull-edged knife." They the heart cut out
trom Hialli's breast ; on a dish, bleeding, laid it, and it to Gunnar bare. Then
said Gunnar, lord of men: "Here have 1 the heart of the timid Hialli, unlike
the heart of the bold Hogni ; for much it trembles as in the dish it lies ; it
trembled more by half while in his breast it lay." Hogni laughed when to his heart
they cut the living crest-crasher ; no lament uttered he. All bleeding on a dish
they Jaid it, and it to Gunnar bare. Calmly said Gunnar, the warrior Niflung :
'• Here have 1 the heart of the bold Hogni, unlike the heart of the timid Hialli ;
for it httle trembles as in the dish it lies : it trembled less while in his breast it
lay. So far shalt thou, Atli ! be from the eyes of men as thou wilt from the
treasures be. In my power alone is all the hidden Niflung's gold, now that Hiigni
lives not. Ever was I wavering while we both lived ; now am 1 so no longer, as I
alone survive. " ' ^

It was the last insult of the self-confident man, who values neither
his own life nor that of another, so that he can satiate his vengeance.
They cast him into the serpent's den, and there he died, striking his
harp with his foot. But the inextinguishable flame of vengeance
passed from his heart to that of his sister. Corpse after corpse fell
on each other ; a mighty fury hurls them open-eyed to death. She
killed the children she had by Atli, gave him their hearts to eat, served
in honey, one day on his return from the carnage, and laughed coldly
as she told him on what he had fed. ' Uproar was on the benches,
portentous the cry of men, noise beneath the costly hangings. The
children of the Huns wept; all wept save Gudrun, who never wept,
or for her bear-fierce brothers, or for her dear sons, young, simple."
Judge from this heap of ruin and carnage to what excess the mind
could attain. There were men amongst them, Berserkirs,^ who in
battle, seized with a sort of madness, showed a sudden and super-

1 Thorpe, The Edda of Scemund, Lay of Atli, str. 21-27, p. 117.
* Ibid. str. 38, p. 119.

' This word signifies men who fought without a breastplate, perhaps in shirts
only; ScoUice, ' Baresai'ks. '— Tfi.

38 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

human etrength, and ceased to fee] their wounds. This is the concep-
tion of a hero as engendered by this race in its infancy. Is it rot
strange to see them place their happiness in battle, their beauty in
death ? Is there any people, Hindoo, Persian, Greek, or Gallic, which
has formed so tragic a conception of life ? Is there any which has
peopled its infantine mind with such gloomy dreams ? Is there any
which has so entirely banished the sweetness from enjoyment, and the
softness from pleasure ? Energy, tenacious and mournful energy, an
ecstasy of energy — such was their chosen condition. Carlyle said well,
that in the sombre obstinacy of an English labourer still survives the
tacit rage of the Scandinavian warrior. Strife for strife's sake — such is
their pleasure. With what sadness, madness, waste, such a disposition
breaks its bonds, we shall see in Shakspeare and Byron ; with what
completeness, in what duties it can entrench and employ itself under
moral ideas, we shall see in the case of the Puritans.

IV.

They have established themselves in England ; and however disor-
dered the society which binds them together, it is founded, as in Ger-
many, on generous sentiment. War is at every door, 1 am aware, but
warlike virtues are behind every door ; courage chiefly, then fidelity.
Under the brute there is a free man, and a man with a heart. There is
no man amongst them who, at his own risk,^ will not make alliance,
go forth to fight, undertake adventures. There is no group of men
amongst them, who, in their Witenagemote, is not for ever concluding
alliances one with another. Every clan, in its own district, forms a
league of which all the members, ' brothers of the sword,' defend each
other, and demand each other's blood at the price of their own. Every
chief in his hall reckons that he has friends, not mercenaries, in the
faithful ones who drink his beer, and who, having received as marks of
his confidence, bracelets, swords, and suits of armour, will cast them-
selves between him and danger on the day of battle.^ Independence
and bravery smoulder amongst this young nation with violence and
excess ; but these are of themselves noble things ; and no less noble
are the sentiments which serve them for discipline, — to wit, an affec-
tionate devotion, and respect for plighted faith. These appear in their
laws, and break forth in their poetry. Amongst them greatness of
heart gives matter for imagination. Their characters are not selfish
and shifty, like those of Homer. They are brave hearts, simple^ and
strong, faithful to their relatives, to their master in arms, firm and
stedfast to enemies and friends, abounding in courage, and ready for
sacrifice. ' Old as I am,' says one, ' I will not budge hence. I mean

* See the Life of Sweyn, of Hereward, etc., even up to the time of the Conquest.
' Beowulf, passim, Death of Byrhtnoth.
' Tacitus, 'Gens nee callida, nee astuta.*

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 37

to die by my lord's side, near this man I have loved so much. He
kept his word, the word he had given to his chief, to the distributor of
gifts, promising him that they should return to the town, safe and
sound to their homes, or that they would fall both together, in the thick
of the carnage, covered with wounds. He lay by his master's side, like
a faithful servant.' Though awkward in speech, their old poets find
touching words when they have to paint these manly friendships. We
cannot without emotion hear them relate how the old ' king embraced
the best of his thanes, and put his arms about his neck, how the tears
flowed down the cheeks of the greyhaired chief. . . . The valiant man
was so dear to him. He could not stop the flood which mounted from
his breast. In his heart, deep in the cords of his soul, he sighed in secret
after the beloved man.' Few as are the songs which remain to us, they
retvirn to this subject again and again. The wanderer in a reverie
dreams about his lord : ^ It seems to him in his spirit as if he kisses and
embraces him, and lays head and hands upon his knees, as oft before in
the olden time, when he rejoiced in his gifts. Then he Avakes — a man
without friends. He sees before him the desert tracks, the seabirds
dipping in the sea, stretching wide their wings, the frost and the snow,
mingled with falling hail. Then his heart's wounds press more heavily.
The exile says :

'Often and often we two were agreed, that nought should divide us save Death
himself ! Now all is changed, and our friendship is as though it had never been.
I must dwell here, far from my well-beloved friend, in the midst of enmities. I
am forced to live under the forest leaves, under an oak, in this cavern under
ground. Cold is this earth-dwelling ; I am weary of it. Dark are the valleys,
high the mountains, a sad wall of boughs, covered with brambles, a joyless abode.
. . . My friends are in the earth ; the.y whom I loved in life, the tomb holds
them. And I am here before the dawn ; I walk alone under tlie oak, amongst
the earth-caverns. . . . Here often and often the loss of my lord has opi^ressed
ine with heavy grief. '

Amid their perilous mode of life, and the perpetual appeal to arms,
there exists no sentiment more warm than friendship, nor any virtue
stronger than loyalty.

Thus supported by powerful affection and firm fidelity, society is
kept wholesome. Marriage is like the state. We find women asso-
ciating with the men, at their feasts, sober and respected.^ She speaks,
and they listen to her ; no need for concealing or enslaving her, in
order to restrain or retain her. She is a person, and not a thing. The
law demands her consent to marriage, surrounds her with guarantees,
accords her protection. She can inherit, possess, bequeath, appear in
courts of justice, in county assemblies, in the great congress of the elders.
Frequently the name of the queen and of several other ladies is inscribed

^ The Wanderer, the Ex'de^s Song, Codex Exoniensis, published by Tliorpe.
* Tmuier, Hist. Angl. Sax. iii. 63 ; Pictorial History, 1. 340.

38 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

in the proceeclings of the Witenagemote. Law and tradition maintain
her integrity, as if she were a man, and side by side with the man. In
Alfred ^ there is a portrait of the wife, which for purity and elevation
equals all that we can devise with our modern refinement.

' Thy wife now lives for thee— for thee alone. She has enough of all kind of
wealth for this present life, but she scorns them all for thy sake alone. She has
forsaken them all, because she had not thee with them. Thy absence makes her
think that all she possesses is nought. Thus, for love of thee, she is wasted away,
and lies near death for tears and grief

Already, in the legends of the Edda, we have seen the maiden Sigrun
at the tomb of Helgi, ' as glad as the voracious hawks of Odin, when
they of slaughter know, of warm prey,' desiring to sleep still in the
arms of death, and die at last on his grave. Nothing here like the love
we find in the primitive poetry of France, Provence, Spain, and Greece.
There is an absence of gaiety, of delight ; beyond marriage it is only a
ferocious appetite, an outbreak of the instinct of the beast. It appears
nowhere with its charm and its smile ; there is no love song in this
ancient poetry. The reason is, that with them love is not an amuse-
ment and a pleasure, but a promise and a devotion. All is grave, even
sombre, in civil relations as in conjugal society. As in Germany, amid
the sadness of a melancholic temperament and the savagery of a bar-
barous life, the most tragic human faculties, the deep power of love
and the grand power of will, are the only ones that sway and act.

This is why the hero, as in Germany, is truly heroic. Let us speak
of him at length ; we retain one of their poems, that of Beowulf, almost
entire. Here are the stories, which the thanes, seated on their stools,
by the light of their torches, listened to as they drank the ale of their
king: we can glean thence their manners and sentiments, as in the
Iliad and the Odyssey those of the Greeks. Beowulf is a hero, a
knight-errant before the days of chivalry, as the leaders of the German
bands were feudal chiefs before the institution of feudalism.^ He has
* rowed upon the sea, his naked sword hard in his hand, amidst the
fierce waves and coldest of storms, and the rage of winter htu'tled over
the waves of the deep.' The sea-monsters, ' the many-coloured foes,
drew him to the bottom of the sea, and held him fast in their gripe.'
But he reached ' the wretches with his point and with his war-bill.'
'The mighty sea-beast received the war -rush through his hands,' and he
slew nine nickors (sea-monsters). And now behold him, as he comes
across the waves to succour the old King Hrothgar, who with his
vassals sits afflicted in his great mead-hall, high and curved with pin-

^ Alfred borrows his portrait from Boethius, but almost entirely re-writes it.

' Kemble thinks that the origin of this poem is very ancient, perhaps contem-
porary with the invasion of the Angles and Saxons, but that the version we possess
is later than the seventh century. — Kemble 's Beowulf, text and translation, 1833.
The characters are Danish.

CHAP. L] the SAXONS. 39

nacles. For 'a grim stranger, Grendel, a mighty haunter of the
marshes,' had entered his hall during the night, seized thirty of the
thanes who were asleep, and returned in his war-craft with their car-
casses ; for twelve years the dreadful ogre, the beastly and greedy
creature, father of Orks and Jbtuns, devoured men and emptied the
best of houses. Beowulf, the great warrior, oifers to grapple with the
fiend, and foe to foe contend for life, without the bearing of either
sword or ample shield, for he has ' learned also that the wretch for his
cursed hide recketh not of weapons,' asking only that if death takes
him, they will bear forth his bloody corpse and bury it ; mark his fen-
dwelling ; send to Hygelac, his chief, the best of war-shrouds that
guards his breast.

He is lying in the hall, * trusting in his proud strength; and when the
mists of night arose, lo, Grendel comes, tears open the door,' seized a
sleeping warrior : ' he tore him unawares, he bit his body, he drank the
blood from the veins, he swallowed him with continual tearings.' But
Beowulf seized him in turn, and ' raised himself upon his elbow.'

* The lordly hall thundered, the ale was spilled . . . both were enraged ;
savage and strong warders ; the house resounded ; then was it a great wonder that
the wine-hall withstood the beasts of war, that it fell not upon the earth, the
fair palace ; but it was thus fast. . . . The noise arose, new enough ; a fearful
terror fell on the North Danes, on each of those who from the wall heard the out-
cry, God's denier sing his dreadful lay, his song of defeat, lament Ms wound.*
. . . The foul WTetcli awaited the mortal wound ; a mighty gash was evident
upon his shoulder ; the sinews sprung asunder, the junctures of the bones burst ;
success in war was given to Beowulf. Thence must Grendel fly sick unto death,
among the refuges of the fens, to seek his joyless dwelling. He all the better
knew that the end of his life, the number of his days was gone by.'*

For he had left on the land, 'hand, arm, and shoulder;' and 'in the
lake of Nicors, Avhere he was driven, the rough wave was boiling with
blood, the foul spring of waves all mingled, hot with poison ; the dye,
discoloured with death, bubbled with warlike gore.' There remained
a female monster, his mother, who like him ' was doomed to inhabit
the terror of waters, the cold streams,' who came by night, and amidst
drawn swords tore and devoured another man, ^schere, the king's best
friend. A lamentation arose in the palace, and Beowulf offered him-
self again. They went to the den, a hidden land, the refuge of the
wolf, near the windy promontories, where a mountain stream rusheth
downwards under the darkness of the hills, a flood beneath the earth :
the wood fast by its roots overshadoweth the water ; there may one by
night behold a marvel, fire upon the flood : the stepper over the heath,
when wearied out by the hounds, sooner will give up his soul, his hfe
upon the brink, than plunge therein to hide his head. Strange dragons
and serpents swam there ; ' from time to time the horn sang a dirge, a

' Kemble's Beowulf, xi. p. 32. » Ibid. xii. p. 34.

40 THE SOURCE. [BOOK L

terrible song.' Beowulf plunged into the wave, descended, passed mon-
sters who tore his coat of mail, to the ogress, the hateful manslayer, who,
seizing him in her grasp, bore him off to her dwelling. A pale gleam
shone brightly, and there, face to face, the good champion perceived

* the slie-wolf of the abyss, the mighty sea-woman ; lie gave the war-onset with
his battle-bill ; he held not back the swing of the sword, so that on her head the
ling-mail sang aloud a greedy war-song. . . . The beam of war would not bite.
Then he caught tlie Grendel's mother by the shoulder ; twisted the homicide, that
she bent upon the floor. . . . She drew her knife broad, brown-edged, (and tried to
pierce) the twisted breast-net which protected his life. . . . Then saw he among
the weapons a bill fortunate with victory, an old gigantic sword, doughty of
edge, ready for use, a work of giants. He seized the belted hilt ; the warrior of the
Scyldings, fierce and savage whirled the ring-mail ; despairing of life, he struck
furiously, so that it grappled hard with her about her neck ; it broke the bone-
rings, the bill passed through all the doomed body ; she sank upon the floor ; the
sword was blootly, the man rejoiced in his deed ; the beam shone, light stood
within, even as from heaven mildly shines the lamp of the firmament. ' ^

Then he saw Grendel dead in a corner of the hall; and four of his
companions, having with difficulty raised the monstrous head, bore it
by the hair to the palace of the king.

That was his fii-st labour; and the rest of his life was similar. When
lie had reigned fifty years on earth, a dragon, who had been robbed of
las treasure, came from the hill and burned men and houses ' with
■waves of fire.'

* Then did the refuge of earls command to make for him a variegated shield, all
of iron ; he knew that a shield of wood could not help him, lindenwood opposed
to fire. . . . The prince of rings was then too proud to seek the wide flier with
a troop, with a large company ; he feared not for himself that battle, nor did he
make anj' account of the dragon's war, his laboriousness and valour. '

And yet he was sad, and went unwillingly, for he was * fated to abide
the end.' Then

•he was ware of a cavern, a mound under the earth, nigh to the sea-wave,
the dashing of waters, which was full within of embossed ornaments and wires.
. . . Then the king, hard in war, sat upon the promontory, and bade farewell
to his household comrades. ... I, the old guardian of my people, seek a feud.'

He let words proceed from his heart, the dragon came, vomiting fire ;
the blade bit not his body, and the king suffered painfully, involved in
fire. His comrades had turned into the woods, all save Wiglaf, "wno
went through the fatal smoke, knowing well ' that it was not the old
custom ' to abandon relation and prince, ' that he alone shall suffer dis-
tress, shall sink in battle.'

' The worm became furious, the foul insidious stranger, variegated with waves
of fire, . . . hot and warlike fierce, he clutched the whole neck with bitter banes j
he v/as bloodied with hfe-gore, the blood boiled in waves.'*

^ Beowulf, xxii., xxiii., p. 62 et passim.
* Ibid, xxxiih-xxxvi., p. 94 et jpassim.

CHAP. I.] TUE" SAXONS. 41

They, witli their swords, carved the worm in the midst. Yet the
Avound of the king became burning and swelled; he soon discovered
that the poison boiled in his breast within, and sat by the wall upon a
stone; 'he looked upon the work of giants, how the eternal cavern
held within stone arches fast upon pillars.'

Then he said, ' I have held this people fifty years ; there was not any king of
my neighbours who dared to greet me with warriors, to oppress me with terror. . . .
I held mine own well, I sought not treacherous malice, nor swore unjustly many
oaths ; on account of all this, I, sick with mortal woimds, may have joy. . . .
Now do thou go immediately to behold the hoard under the hoary stone, my dear
"Wiglaf. . . . Now, I have purchased with my death a hoard of treasures ; it will be
yet of advantage at the need of my people. ... I give thanks . . . that I might
before my dying day obtain such for my people . . . longer may I not here be.'^

This is thorough and real generosity, not exaggerated and pretended,
as it will be later on in the romantic imaginations of babbling clerics,
mere composers of adventure. Fiction as yet is not far removed from
fact: the man breathes manifest under the hero. Rude as the poetry
is, its hero is grand ; he is so, simply by his deeds. Faithful, first to
his prince, then to his people, he went alone, in a strange land, to ven-
ture himself for the delivery of his fellow-men ; he forgets himself in
death, while thinking only that it profits others. ' Each one of us,' he
says in one place, ' must abide the end of his present life,' Let, there-
fore, each do justice, if he can, before his death. Compare with him
the monsters whom he destroys, the last traditions of the ancient wars
against inferior races, and of the primitive religion ; think of his life of
danger, nights upon the waves, man's efforts against the brute creation,
the indomitable breast crushing the breasts of beasts, pow^erful muscles
which, w^hen exerted, tear the flesh of the monsters: you will see
through the mist of legends, and under the light of poetry, the valiant
men who, amid the furies of war and the raging of their own mood,
began to settle a people and to found a state.

One poem nearly whole and two or three fragments are all that
remain of this lay-poetry of England. The rest of the pagan current,
German and barbarian, was arrested or overwhelmed, first by the influx of
the Christian religion, then by the conquest of the Norman-French. But
the remnant more than suffices to show the strange and powerful poetic
cenius of the race, and to exhibit beforehand the flower in the bud.

If there has ever been anywhere a deep and serious poetic senti-
ment, it is here. They do not speak, they sing, or rather cry out.
Each little verse is an acclamation, which breaks forth like a growl ;
their strong breasts heave with a groan of anger or enthusiasm, and a
vehement phrase or indistinct expression rises suddenly, almost in spite

' Beowulf, xxxvii., xxxviii., p. 110 et passim. I have throughout always used
the very words of Kemble's tianslation. — Tr.

42 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

of them, to their lips. There is no art, no natural talent, for describing
singly and in order the different parts of an object or an event. The
fifty rays of light which every phenomenon emits in succession to a
regular and well-directed intellect, come to them at once in a glowing
and confused beam, disabling them by their force and convergence.
Listen to their genuine war-chants, unchecked and violent, as became
their terrible voices. To this day, at this distance of time, separated as
they are by manners, speech, ten centuries, we seem to hear them still : —

' The army goes forth : the birds sing, the cricket chirps, the war-weapons
sound, the lance clangs against the shield. Now shineth the moon, wandering
under the sky. Kow arise deeds of woe, which the enmity of this people prepares
to do. . . , Then in the court came the tumult of war-carnage. They seized with
their hands the hollow wood of the shield. They smote through the bones of the
head. The roofs of the castle resounded, until Garulf fell in battle, the first of
earth-dwelling men, son of Guthlaf. Around him lay many brave men dying.
The raven whirled about, dark and sombre, like a willow leaf. There was a
sparkling of blades, as if all Finsburg were on fire. Isl^ever have I heard of a more
worthy battle in war. ' ^

This is the song on Athelstan's victory at Brunanburh :

' Here Athelstan king, of earls the lord, the giver of the bracelets of the nobles,
and his brother also, Edmund the setheling, the Elder a lasting glory won by
slaughter in battle, with the edges of swords, at Brunan burh. The wall of shields
they cleaved, they hewed the noble banners : with the rest of the family, the
children of Edward. . . . Pursuing, they destroyed the Scottish people and the
ship-fleet. . . . The field was coloured with the warrior's blood ! After that the
sun on high, . . . the greatest star ! glided over the earth, God's candle bright !
till the noble creature hastened to her setting. There lay soldiers many with darts
struck down, Northern men over their shields shot. So were the Scotch ; weary of
ruddy battle. . . . The screamers of war they left behind ; the raven to enjoy,
the dismal kite, and the black raven with horned beak, and the hoarse toad ; the
eagle, afterwards to feast on the white flesh ; the greedy battle-hawk, and the grey
beast, the wolf in the wood.'^

Here all is image. In their impassioned minds events are not bald,
with the dry propriety of an exact description ; each fits in with its
pomp of sound, shape, colouring ; it is almost a vision which is raised,
complete, with its accompanying emotions, joy, fury, excitement. In
their speech, arrows are ' the serpents of Hel, shot from bows of horn ;'
ships are ' great sea-steeds,' the sea is ' a chalice of waves,' the helmet
is ' the castle of the head : ' they need an extraordinary speech to ex-
press their vehement sensations, so that after a time, in Iceland, when
this kind of poetry is carried on, the earlier inspiration fails, art re-
places nature, the Skalds are reduced to a distorted and obscure jargon.
But Avhatever be the imagery, here as in Iceland, though unique, it is

* ConyhesLves Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 1826, Battle of Finshorough,
p. 175. The complete collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry has been published by M.
Grein.

* Turner, Hist, of the Anglo-Saxons, iii., hook 9, ch. i. p. 245.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 43

too feeble. The poets cannot satisfy the inner emotion by a single
word. Time after time they return to and repeat their idea. ' The
sun on hiah, the G;reat star, God's briUiant candle, the noble creature!'
Four subsequent times they employ the same thought, and each time
under a new aspect. All its different aspects rise simultaneously before
the barbarian's eyes, and each word was like a shock of the semi-
hallucination which excited him. Verily, in such a condition, the
regularity of speech and of ideas is disturbed at every turn. The suc-
cession of thought in the visionary is not the same as in a reasoning
mind. One colour induces another ; from sound he passes to sound ;
his imagination is like a diorama of unexplained pictures. His phrases
reci;r and change ; he emits the word that comes to his lips without
hesitation ; he leaps over wide intervals from idea to idea. The more
his mind is transported, the quicker and wider the intervals traversed.
With one spring he visits the poles of his horizon, and touches in
one moment objects which seemed to have the world between them.
His ideas are entangled ; without notice, abruptly, the poet will re-
turn to the idea he has quitted, and insert it in the thought to which
he is giving expression. It is impossible to translate these incon-
gruous ideas, which quite disconcert our modern style. At times
they are unintelligible. •■• Articles, particles, everything capable of
illuminating thought, of marking the connection of terms, of producing
regularity of ideas, all rational and logical artifices, are neglected.^
Passion bellows forth like a great shapeless beast ; and that is all. It
rises and starts in little abrupt lines ; it is the acme of barbarism.
Homer's happy poetry is copiously developed, in full narrative, with
rich and extended imagery. All the details of a complete picture are
not too much for him ; he loves to look at things, he lingers over them,
rejoices in their beauty, dresses them in splendid words ; he is like the
Greek girls, who thought themselves ugly if they did not bedeck arms
and shoulders with all the gold coins from their purse, and all the trea-
sures from their caskets ; his long verses flow by with their cadences,
and spread out like a purple robe under an Ionian sun. Here the
clumsy-fingered poet mingles and clashes his ideas in a bold measure ;
if measure there be, he barely observes it ; all his ornament is three
words beginning with one letter. His chief care is to abridge, to im-
prison thought in a kind of mutilated cry.* The force of the internal

1 The cleverest Anglo-Saxon scliolars, Turner, Conybeare, Thorpe, recognise
this difficulty.

* Turner, iii. 231, et passim. The translations in French, however literal, do
•injustice to the text ; that Language is too clear, too logical. No Frenchman can
understand this extraordinary phase of intellect, except by taking a dictionary,
and deciphering some pages of Anglo-Saxon for a fortnight.

* Turner remarks that the same idea expressed by King Alfred, in prose and
then in verse, takes in the first case seven words, in the second five. History of
the Anglo-Saxons. iiL 235.

44 THE SOURCE. [book L

impression, Vihich, not knowing how to unfold itself, becomes condensed
by accumulation ; the harshness of the expression, which, subservient
to the energy and shocks of the inner sentiment, seeks only to exhibit
it intact and' original, spite of all order and beauty, — such are the cha-
racteristics of their poetry, and these will be the characteristics of the
poetry which is to follow.

VI.

A race so constituted was predisposed to Christianity, by Its gloom,
its aversion to sensual and reckless hving, its inclination for the serious
and subHme, When their sedentary habits had reconciled their souls
to a long period of ease, and weakened the fury which fed their san-
guinary religion, they readily inclined to a new faith. The vague
adoration of the great powers of nature, which eternally fight for
mutual destruction, and, when destroyed, rise up again to the combat,
had long since disappeared in the far distance. Society, on its for-
mation, introduced ilie idea of peace and the need ibr justice, and the
war-gods faded from the minds of men, with the passions Avhich had
created them. A century and a half after the invasion by the Saxons,^
Roman missionaries, bearing a silver cross with a picture of Christ,
came in procession chanting a litany. Presently the high priest of the
Northumbrians declared in presence of the nobles that the old gods
were powerless, and confessed that formerly ' he knew nothing of that
which he adored;' and he among the first, lance in hand, assisted to de-
molish their ten^.ple. At his side a chief rose in the assembly, and said :

' You remember, it may he, 0 king, that which sometimes happens in winter
when you are seated at table with your earls and thanes. Your fire is hghted,
and your hall warmed, and without is rain and snow and storm. Then comes a
swallow fl3'ing across the hall ; he enters by one door, and leaves by another. The
brief moment while he is within is pleasant to him ; he feels not rain nor cheer-
less winter weather ; but the moment is brief — the bird flies away in the twinkling
of an eye, and he passes from winter to winter. Such, methinks, is the life of man
on earth, compared with the uncertain time beyond. It appears for a while ; but
what is the time which comes after — the time which was before ? "We know not.
If, then, this new doctrine may teach us somewhat of greater certainty, it were
well that we should regard it. '

This restlessness, this feeling of the infinite and dark beyond, this
sober, melancholy eloquence, were the harbingers of spiritual life."
We find nothing like it amongst the nations of the south, naturally
pagan, and preoccupied with the present life. These utter barbarians
embrace Christianity straightway, through sheer force of mood and
clime. To no purpose are they brutal, heavy, shackled by infantine
superstitions, capable, like King Knut, of buying for a hundred golden
talents the arm of Augustine. They possess the idea of God. This

1 596-625. Aug. Thierry, i. 81 ; Bede, xii. 2.
* Jouilroy, Problem oj Human Dcst'uii/.

CHAP. I.] THE S AXONS. 45

grand God of the Bible, omnipotent and uniijue, who disapponrs almost
entirely in the middle ages/ obscured by His court and His famil}^,
endures amongst them in spite of absurd and grotesque legends. They
do not blot Him out under pious romances, by the elevation of the
saints, or under feminine caresses, to benefit the infant Jesus and the
Virgin. Their grandeur and their severity raise them to His high
level ; they are not tempted, like artistic and talkative nations, to
replace religion by a fair and agreeable narrative. More than any
race in Europe, they approach, by the simplicity and energy of their
conceptions, the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm Is their natural condi-
tion ; and their new Deity fills them with admiration, as their ancienn
deities inspired them with fury. They have hymns, genuine odes,
which are but a concrete of exclamations. They have no develop-
ment ; they are incapable of restraining or explaining their passion ;
it bursts forth, in raptures, at the .vision of the Almighty. The
heart alone speaks here — a strong, barbarous heart. Ctedmon, says
Bede, their old poet,^ was a more ignorant man than the others, who
knew no poetry ; so that in the hall, when they handed him the harp,
he was obliged to withdraw, being unable to sing Uke his companions.
Once, keeping night-watch over the stable, he fell asleep. A stranger
appeared to him, and asked him to sing something, and these words
came into his head : ' Now we ought to praise the Lord of heaven, the
power of the Creator, and His skill, the deeds of the Father of glory ;
how He, being eternal God, is the author of all marvels ; who, almighty
guardian of the human race, created first for the sons of men the
heavens as the roof of their dwelling, and then the earth.'* Re-
membering this when he Avoke, he came to the town, and they brought ,,
him before the learned men, before the abbess Hilda, who, when they f
had heard him, thought that he had received a gift from heavsn, and
made him a monk in the abbey. There he spent his life listening to
portions of Holy AYrit, which were explained to him in Saxon, 'rumi-
nating over them like a pure animal, turned them into most sweet verse.'
Thus is true poetry born. These men pray with all the emotion of a |
new soul; they kneel; they adore; the less they know, the more they
think. Some one has said that the first and most sincere hymn is this
one word O I Theirs were hardly longer ; they only repeated time
after time some deep passionate word, with monotonous vehemence.
* In heaven art Thou, our aid and succour, resplendent with happiness !
All things bow before Thee, before the glory of Thy Spirit. With one
voice they call upon Christ ; they all cry : Holy, holy art Thou, King
of the angels of heaven, our Lord ! and Thy judgments are just and
great : they reign for ever and in all places, in the multitude of Thy ji
•works.' We are reminded of the songs of the servants of Odin, ton-

* ilichelet, preface to La Renaissance ; Didron, Histoire de Dieu.

• About 630. See Codex Exoniensis, Thorpe. ^ Bede, iv. 24.

46 THE SOURCE. [book L

sured now, and clad in the garments of monks. Their poetry is the
same ; they think of God, as of Odin, in a string of short, accumulated,
passionate images, like a succession of lightning-flashes ; the Christian
hymns embody the pagan. One of them, Adhelm, stood on a bridge
leading to the town where he lived, and repeated warlike and profane
odes alternately with religious poetry, in order to attract and instruct
the men of his time. He could do it without changing his key. In
one of them, a funeral song, Death speaks. It was one of the last
Saxon compositions, containing a terrible Christianity, which seems at
the same time to have sprung from the blackest depths of the Edda.
The brief metre sounds abruptly, with measured stroke, like the pass-
ing belL It is as if one could hear the dull resounding responses
which roll through the church, while the rain beats on the dim glass,
and the broken clouds sail mournfully in the sky ; and our eyes, glued
to the pale face of a dead man, feel beforehand the horror of the damp
grave into which the living are about to cast him.

' For thee was a house built ere thou wert born ; for thee was a mould shapen
ere thou of thy mother earnest. Its height is not determined, nor its depth
measured ; noi is it closed up (however long it may be) until I thee bring where
thou shalt remain ; until I shall measiire thee and the sod of the earth. Thy
house is not highly built ; it is unhigh and low. "When thou art in it, the heel-
ways are low, the side-ways unhigh. The roof is built thy breast full nigh ; so
thou shalt in earth dwell full cold, dim, and dark. Doorless is that house, and
dark it is within. There thou art fast detained, and Death holds the key. Loathly
is that earth-house, and gi'im to dwell in. There thou shalt dwell, and worms
shall share thee. Thus thou art laid, and leavest thy friends. Thou hast no
friend that will come to thee, who will ever inquire how that house liketh thee,
who shall 6761 open for thee the door, and seek thee, for soon thou becomest
loathly and hateful to look upon. ' ^

Has Jeremy Taylor a more gloomy picture ? The two religious poetries,
Christian and pagan, are so like, that one might make a common cata-
logue of their incongruities, images, and legends. In Beowulf, alto-
gether pagan, the Deity appears as Odin, more mighty and serene, and
differs from the other only as a peaceful Bretwalda^ differs from an
adventurous and heroic bandit-chief. The Scandinavian monsters,
Jbtuns, enemies of the j3i^sir,^ have not vanished ; but they descend
from Cain, and are the giants drowned by the flood.* Their new hell
is nearly the ancient Nastrand,^ ' a dwelling deadly cold, full of bloody

^ Conybeare's Illustrations, p. 271.

* Bretwalda was a species of war-king, or temporary and elective chief of all
tlie Saxons. — TPw.

^ The ^sir (sing. As) are the gods of the Scandinavian nations, of whom Odin
was the chief. — Tr.

* Kemble, i. i. xii. In this chapter he has collected many features which show
the endurance of the ancient mythology.

5 Nastrand is the strand or shore of the dead. — Te.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 47

eagles and pale adders;' and the dreadful last day of judgment, -when
all will crumble into dust, and make way for a purer world, resembles
the final destruction of Edda, that ' twilight of the gods,' which will end
in a victorious regeneration, an everlasting joy ' under a fairer sun.'

By this natural conformity they were able to make their religious
poems indeed poems. Power in spiritual productions arises only from
the sincerity of personal and original sentiment. If they can describe
religious tragedies, it is because their soul was tragic, and in a degree
biblical. They introduce their fierce vehemence into their verses, like
the old prophets of Israel, their murderous hatreds, their fanaticism,
all the shudderings of their flesh and blood. One of them, whose poem
is mutilated, has related the history of Judith — with what inspiration
we shall see. It needed a barbarian to display in such strong light
excesses, tumult, murder, vengeance, and combat.

' Then was Holofernes exhilarated with wine ; in the halls of his guests he
laughed and shouted, he roared and dinned. Then might the children of men
afar otf hear how the stem one stormed and clamoured, animated and elated with
wine. He admonished amply that they should bear it well to those sitting on the
bench. So was the wicked one over all the day, the lord and his men, drunk with
wine, the stern dispenser of wealth ; till that they swimmmg lay over druuk, all
his nobility, as they were death-slain.'*

The night having arrived, he commands them to bring into his tent
'the illustrious virgin;' then, going in to visit her, he falls drunk on
his bed. The moment was come for ' the maid of the Creator, the holy
woman.'

' She took the heathen man fast by his hair ; she drew him by his limbs
towards her disgracefully; and the mischief-ful odious man at her pleasure laid; so
as the wretch she might the easiest well command. She with the twisted locks
struck the hateful enemy, meditating hate, with the red sword, till she had half
cut oir his neck ; so that he lay in a swoon, drunk and mortally wounded. He
was not then dead, not entirely lifeless. She struck then earnest, the woman
illustrious in strength, another time the heathen hound, till that his head rolled
forth upon the floor. The foul one lay without a coffer ; backward his spirit
turned under the abyss, and there was plunged below, with sulphur fastened;
for ever afterwards wounded by worms. Bound in torments, hard imprisoned, in
Jiell he burns. After his course he need not hope, with darkness overwhelmed,
tliat he may escape from that mansion of worms ; but there he shall remain, ever
and ever, without end, henceforth in that cavern -house, void of the joys of hope.'^

Has any one ever heard a sterner accent of satisfied hate ? When
Clovis had listened to the Passion play, he cried, ' Why w^as I not there
with my Franks!' So here the old warrior instinct swelled into flame
over the Hebrew wars. As soon as Judith returned,

' ilen under helms (went out) from the holy city at the dawn itself. They

' Turner, Hist, of Anglo-Saxons, iii. book 9, ch. 3, p. 271.
» Ibid. p. 272.

48 THE SOURCE. [book I.

dinned shields ; men roared loudly. At this rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood,
and the wan raven, the fowl greedy of slaughter, both from the west, that the sons
of men for them should have thought to prepare their fill on corpses. And to
them flew in their paths the active devourer, the eagle, hoary in his feathers.
The willowed kite, with his horned beak, sang the song of Hilda. The noble
warriors proceeded, they in mail, to the battle, furnished with shields, with
swelling banners. . . . They then speedily let fly forth showers of arrows, the
serpents of Hilda, from their horn bows ; the spears on the ground hard stormed.
Loud raged the plunderers of battle ; they sent their darts into the throng of the
chiefs. . . . They that awhile before the reproach of the foreigners, the taunts of
the heathen endured. ' ^

Amongst all these unknown poets' there is one whose name we know,
Caedmon, perhaps the old Casdmon who wrote the first hymn ; like him,
at all events, who, paraphrasing the Bible with a barbarian's vigour and
sublimity, has shown the grandeur and fury of the sentiment with
which the men of these times entered into their new religion. He also
sings when he speaks ; when he mentions the ark, it is with a profusion
of poetic names, ' the floating house, the greatest of floating chambers,
the wooden fortress, the moving house, the cavern, the great sea-chest,'
and many more. Every time he thinks of it, he sees it with his mind,
like a quick luminous vision, and each time under a new aspect, now
undulating on the muddy waves, between two ridges of foam, now
casting over the water its enormous shadoAv, black and high like a
castle, 'now enclosing in its cavernous sides' the endless ferment of the
caged beasts. Like the others, he wrestles with God in his heart ;
triumphs like a warrior in destruction and victory ; and in relating the
death of Pharaoh, can hardly speak from anger, or see, because the blood
mounts to his eyes :

' The folk was affrighted, the flood-dread seized on their sad soids ; ocean wailed
with death, the moTintain heights were with blood besteamed, the sea foamed gore,
ciying was in the waves, the water full of weapons, a death-mist rose ; the Egyp-
tians were turned back ; trembling they fled, they felt fear : would that host gladly
find their homes ; their vauut gi'ew sadder : against them, as a cloud, rose the fell
rolling of the waves ; there came not any of that host to home, but from behind
inclosed them fate with the wave. Where ways ere lay sea raged. Their might
was merged, the streams stood, the storm rose high to heaven ; the loudest army-
cry the hostile uttered ; the air above was thickened with dying voices. . . . Ocean
raged, drew itself up on high, the storms rose, the corpses rolled. ' *

Is the song of the Exodus more abrupt, more vehement, or more
savage ? These men can speak of the creation like the Bible, because
they speak of destruction like the Bible. They have only to look into
their own minds, in order to discover an emotion sufficiently strong to
raise their souls to the height of their Creator. This emotion existed

^ Turner, Hist, of Anglo-Saxons, iii. book 9, ch. 3, p. 274.
' Grein, Blbllothek der AngelscechsiscJien poesie.
* Thorpe, Ccedmon, 1832, xlvii. p. 206.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. ' 49

already in their pagan legends ; and Cajdmon, in order to recount the
origin of things, has only to turn to the ancient dreams, such as have
been preserved in the prophecies of the Edda.

' There had not here as j'et, save cavern-shade, auglit been ; but this wide abyss
stood deep and dim, strange to its Lord, idle and useless ; on wliich looked with
his eyes the King firm of mind, and beheld those places void of joys ; saw the dark
cloud lower in eternal night, swart under heaven, dark and waste, iintil this worldly
creation through the word existed of the Glory-King. . . . The earth as yet was
not green with grass ; ocean cover'd, swart in eternal night, far and wide the dusky
ways.''

In this manner will ^lilton hereafter speak, the descendant of the
Hebrew seers, last of the Scandinavian seers, but assisted in the
development of his thought by aU the resources of Latin culture and
civilisation. And yet he will add nothing to the primitive sentiment.
Religious instinct is not acquired ; it belongs to the blood, and is in-
herited with it. So it is with other instincts ; pride in the first place,
indomitable self-conscious energy, which sets man in opposition to all
domination, and inures him against all grief. Milton's Satan exists
already in C^dmon's, as the picture exists in the sketch ; because both
have their model in the race ; and Csedmon found his originals in the
northern Avai-riors, as Milton did in the Puritans :

' ^Vhy shall I for his favour serve, bend to him in such vassalage ? I may be
a god as he. Stand by me, strong associates, who will not fail me in the strife.
Heroes stern of mood, they have chosen me for chief, renowned warriors ! with
such may one devise counsel, with such capture his adherents ; they are my zealous
friends, faithful m their thoughts ; I may be their chieftain^ sway in this realm ;
thus to me it seemeth not right that I in aught need cringe to God for any good ;
I wiU no longer be his vassal. '*

He is overcome ; shaU he be subdued ? Pie is cast into the * where
torment they suffer, burning heat intense, in midst of hell, fire and
broad flames: so also the bitter seeks smoke and darkness;' wiU he
repent ? ^At first he is astonished, he despairs ; but it is a hero's
despair.

* This narrow place is most unlike that other that we ere knew,^ high in heaven's
kingdom, which my master bestow'd on me. . . . Oh, had I power of my hands,
and might one season be without, be one winter's space, then with this host I —
But around me lie iron bonds, presseth this cord of chain : I am powerless ! me
have so hard the clasps of heU, so firmly grasped ! Here is a vast fire above and
imdemeath, never did I see a loathher landskip ; the flame abateth not, hot over
hell. Me hath the clasping of these rings, this hard-polish'd band, impeded in my

' Thorpe, Ccedmon, ii. p. 7. A likeness exists between this song and corre-
sponding portions of the Edda.

2 Ibid. iv. p. 18.

^ This is Milton's opening also. (See Paradise Lost, Book i. verse 242, etc.)
One would think that he must have had some knowledge of Csedmon from the
translation of Junius.

O

50 THE SOURCE. [BOOK L

course, debarr'd me from my way ; my feet are bound, my hands manacled^ . . .
so that with aught I cannot from these limb-honds escape. '^

As there is nothing to be done against God, it is with His new-
creature, man, that he must busy himself. To him who has lost
everything, vengeance is left ; and if the conquered can enjoy this, he
will find himself happy ; ' he will sleep softly, even under his chains.'

VII.

Here the foreign culture ceased. Beyond Christianity it could not
graft upon this barbarous stock any fruitful or living branch. All the
circumstances which elsewhere softened the wild sap, failed here. The
Saxons found Britain abandoned by the Romans ; they had not yielded,
like their brothers on the continent, to the ascendency of a superior
civilisation ; they had not become mingled with the inhabitants of the
land ; they had always treated them like enemies or slaves, pursuing
like wolves those who escaped to the mountains of the west, oppressing
like beasts of burden those whom they had conquered with the land.
While the Germans of Gaul, Italy, and Spain became Eomans, the
Saxons retained their language, their genius and manners, and created
in Britain a Germany outside of Germany. A hundred and fifty
years after the Saxon invasion, the introduction of Christianity and the
dawn of security attained by a society inclining to peace, gave birth to
a kind of literature ; and we meet with the venerable Bede, and later
on, Alcuin, John Scotvis Erigena, and some others, commentators,
translators, teachers of barbarians, who tried not to originate but to
compile, to pick out and explain from the great Greek and Latin
encyclopedia something which might suit the men of their time. But
the wars with the Danes came and crushed this humble plant, which,
if left to itself, would have come to nothing.^ When Alfred^ the
Deliverer became king, 'there were very few ecclesiastics,' he says,
' on this side of the Humber, who could tmderstand in English their
own Latin prayers, or translate any Latin writing into English. On
the other side of the Humber I think there were scarce any ; there
were so few that, in truth, I cannot remember a single man south of
the Thames, when I took the kingdom, who was capable of it.* He
tried, like Charlemagne, to instruct his people, and turned into Saxon
for their use several works, above all some moral books, as the de Con-
solatione of Boethius ; but this very translation bears witness to the bar-

' Thorpe, Ccedmon, iv. p. 23.

^ They themselves feel their impotence and decrepitude. Bede, dividing the
history of the world into six periods, says that the fifth, which stretches Irom the
return out of Babylon to the birth of Christ, is the senile period ; the sixth is the
present, cetas decrepita, totius morte scbcuU consummanda.

* Died in 901 ; Adhelm died 709, Bede died 735, Alcuin lived under Charle-
magne, Erigena under Charles the Bald (843-877).

CHAP. l1

THE SAXONS.

51

barism of his audience. He adapts the text in oi'der to bring it down to
their intelligence ; the pretty verses of Boethius, somewhat pretentious,
laboured, elegant, crowded -with classical allusions of a refined and
polished style worthy of Seneca, become an artless, long drawn out
and yet abrupt prose, like a nurse's fairy tale, explaining everything,
recommencing and breaking off its phrases, making ten turns about a
single detail ; so low was it necessary to stoop to the level of this
new intelligence, which had never thought or known anything. Here
follows the Latin of Boethius, so affected, so pretty, with the English
translation affixed : —

' Quondam funera conjugis
Vates Threicius gemens,
Postquam flebilibus modis
Silvas currere, mobiles
Amnes stare coegerat,
Junxitque intrepidum latus
Sfevis cerva leonibus,
Nee visum timuit lepus
Jam cantu placidum canem ;
Cum flagrantior intima
Fervor pectoris ureret,
K'ec qui cuncta subegerant
Mulcerent dominum modi ;
Immites superos querens,
Infemas adiit domos.
Illic blanda sonantibus
Chordis carmina temperans,
Quidquid prfecipuis Dese
Matris fontibus hauserat.
Quod luctus dabat impotens.
Quod luctum geminans amor,
Deflet Tartara commovens,
Et didci veniam prece
Umbrarum dominos rogat.
Stupet tergeminus novo
Captus carmine janitor ;
Quae sontes agitant metu
UTtrices scelerum Dese
Jam mcestse lacrjniis madent.
Non Ixionium caput
Velox praecipitat rota,
Et longa site perditus
Spemit flumina Tantahis.
Vultur dum satur est modis
JTon traxit Tityi jecur.
Tandem, vincimur, arbiter
Umbranun miserans ait.
Donemus coniitem viro,
Emptam carmine conjugem.

' It happened formerly that there was a harper
in the country called Thrace, whicli was in
Greece. The harper was inconceivably good.
His name was Orpheus. He had a very excel-
lent wife, called Eurydice. Then began men to
say concerning the harper, that he could harp
so that the wood moved, and the stones stirred
themselves at the sound, and wild beasts would
run thereto, and stand as if they were tame ; so
still, that though men or hounds pursued them,
they shunned them not. Then said they, that
the harper's wife should die, and her soul should
be led to hell. Then should the harper become
so sorrowful that he could not remain among the
men, but frequented the wood, and sat on the
mountains, both day and night, weeping and
harping, so that the woods shook, and the
rivers stood still, and no hart shunned any
lion, nor hare any hound ; nor did cattle know
any hatred, or any fear of others, for the
pleasure of the sound. Then it seemed to the
harper that nothing in this world pleased him.
Then thought he that he would seek the gods
of hell, and endeavour to allure them with his
harp, and pray that they woiild give him back
his wife. When he came thither, then should
there come towards him the dog of hell, whose
name was Cerberus, — he should have three heads,
— and began to wag his tail, and play with hhu
for his harping. Then was there also a very hor-
rible gatekeeper, whose name should be Charon.
He had also three heads, and he was very old.
Then began the harper to beseech him that he
^^■ould protect him while he was there, and bring
him thence again safe. Then did he promise that
to him, because he was desirous of the unaccus-
tomed sound. Then went he further until he
met the fierce goddesses, whom the common
people call Parcae, of whom they say, that they

52 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK I.

Sed lex dona coercetit, know no respect for any man, but punisTi every

Nee, dum Tarfara liquerit, man accordiug to his deeds ; and of whom they
Fas sit lumiua flectere. say, that they control every man's fortune. Then

Quis legem det amantibus ! began he to implore their mercy. Then began
Jlajor lex fit amor sibi. they to weep with him. Then went he farther,

Heu ! noctis prope terminos and all the inhabitants of hell ran towards him,
Orpheus Eurydicem suam and led him to their king ; and all began to speak

Vidit, perdidit, occidit. with him, and to pray that which he prayed.

Vos hsec fabula respicit, And the restless wheel which Ixion, the king of

Quicunque in superum diem the Lapithse, was bound to for his guilt, that
Mentem ducere quseritis. stood still for his harping. And Tantalus the

Nam qui tartareum in specus king, who in this world was immoderately greedy,
Victus lumina flexerit, and whom that same vice of greediness followed

Quidquid praecipiium trahit there, he became quiet. And the vulture should
Perdit, dum videt inferos. ' cease, so that he tore not the liver of Tit jt.is the
Book III. Metre 12, king, which before therewith tormented him.
And all the punishments of the inhabitants of
hell were suspended, whilst he harped before the king. When he long and long
had harped, then spoke the king of the inhabitants of hell, and said. Let us
give the man his ■nife, for he has earned her by his harping. He then com-
manded him that he should well observe that he never looked backwards after
he departed thence ; and said, if he looked backwards, that he should lose the
woman. But men can with great difficulty, if at all, restrain love ! Wellaway !
AVliat ! Orpheus then led his wife with him till he came to the boundary of light
and darkness. Then went his wife after him. When he came forth into the light,
then looked he behind his back towards the woman. Then was she immediately
lost to him. This table teacties every man who desires to fly the darkness of hell,
and to come to the light of the true good, that he look not about him to his old
vices, so that he practise them again as fully as he did before. For whosoever with
full will turns his mind to the vices which he had before forsaken, and practises
them, and they then fully please him, and he never thinks of forsaking them ;
then loses he all his former good unless he again amend it. ' ^

One speaks thus when an indistinct idea has to be impressed upon
the mind. Boethius had for his audience senators, men of culture, who
understood as well as we the sHghtest mythological allusion. Alfred is
obliged to take them up and develop them, like a father or a master,
who draws his little boy between his knees, and relates to him names,
qualities, crimes and their punishments, which the Latin only hints at.
But the ignorance is such that the teacher himself needs correction.
He takes the Parca^ for the Erinyes, and gives Charon three heads Uke
Cerberus. There is no adornment in his version ; no finesse as in the
original. Alfred himself has hard work to be understood. What, for
instance, becomes of the noble Platonic moral, the apt interpretation
after the style of lamblichus and Porphyry ? It is altogether dulled.
He has to call everything by its name, and turn the eyes of his people
to tangible and visible things. It is a sermon suited to his audience of
thanes ; the Danes whom he had converted by the sword needed a clear

' Fox's Alfred's Boethius, chap. 35, § 6, lS6i.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 53

moral. If he had translated for them exactly the fine words of Boethius,
they would have opened wide their big stupid eyes and fallen asleep.

For the whole talent of an uncultivated mind lies in the force and
oneness of its sensations. Beyond that it is powerless. The art of
thinking and reasoning lies above it. These men lost all genius when
they lost their fever-heat. They spun out awkwardly and heavily dry
chronicles, a sort of historical almanacks. You might think them
peasants, who, returning from their toil, came and scribbled with chalk
on a smoky table the date of a year of scarcity, the price of corn, the
changes in the weather, a death. Even so, side by side with the meagre
Bible chronicles, which set down the successions of kings, and of Jewish
massacres, are exhibited the exaltation of the psalms and the transports
of prophecy. The same lyric poet can be at one time a brute and a
genius, because his genius comes and goes like a disease, and instead of
having it he simply is ruled by it.

*A.D. 611. This year Cynegils succeeded to the government in Wessex, and
held it one-and-thirty winters. Cynegils was the son of Ceol, Ceol of Cutha,
Cutha of Cynric.

' 614. This year Cynegils and Cnichelm fought at Bampton, and slew two
thousand and forty-six of the "Welsh.

' 678. This year appeared the comet-star in August, and shone every morning
during three months like a sunbeam. Bishop Wilfrid being driven from his
bishopric by King Everth, two bishops were consecrated in his stead.

' 901. This year died Alfred, the son of Ethelwulf, six nights before the mass
of All Saints. He was king over all the English nation, except that part that was
under the power of the Danes. He held the government one year and a half less
than thirty winters ; and then Edward his son took to the government.

' 902. This year there was the great fight at the Holme, between the men of
Kent and the Danes.

' 1077. This year were reconciled the King of the Franks, and William, King of
England. But it continued only a little while. This year was London burned,
one night before the Assumption of St. Mary, so terribly as it never was before
since it was built. ' ^

It is thus the poor monks speak, with monotonous dryness, who after
Alfred's time gather up and take note of great visible events ; sparsely
scattered we find a few moral reflections, a passionate emotion,
nothing more. In the tenth century Ave see King Edgar give a manor
to a bishop, on condition that he will put into Saxon the monastic
regulation written in Latin by Saint Benedict. Alfred himself was
almost the last man of culture ; he, like Charlemagne, became so only
by dint of determination and patience. In vain the great spirits of this
age endeavour to link themselves to the relics of the old civilisation,
and to raise themselves above the chaotic and muddy ignorance in
which the others wallow. They rise almost alone, and on their death
the rest are again enveloped in the mire. It is the human beast that

* All these extracts are taken from Ingram's Saxon Chronicle, 1823.

54 THE SOURCE. [BOOK L

remains master ; genius cannot find a place amidst revolt and blood-
thirstiness, gluttony and brute force. Even in the little circle where
he moves, his labour comes to nought. The model which he proposed
to himself oppresses and enchains him in a cramping imitation; he
aspires but to be a good copyist ; he produces a gathering of centos
which he calls Latin verses; he applies himself to the discovery of
expressions, sanctioned by good models ; he succeeds only in elaborat-
ing an emphatic, spoUed Latin, bristling with incongruities. In place
of ideas, the most profound amongst them serve up the defunct doc-
trines of defunct authors. They compile religious manuals and philo-
sophical manuals from the Fathers. Erigena, the most learned, goes
to the extent of reproducing the old complicated dreams of Alex-
andrian metaphysics. How far these speculations and reminiscences
soar above the barbarous crowd which howls and bustles in the plain
below, no words can express. There was a certain king of Kent in
the seventh century who could not write. Imagine bachelors of theo-
logy discussing before an audience of waggoners in Paris, not Parisian
waggoners, but such as survive in Auvergne or in the Vosges. Among
these clerks, who think like studious scholars in accordance with their
favourite authors, and are doubly separated from the world as collegians
and monks, Alfred alone, by his position as a layman and a practical
man, descends in his Saxon translations and his Saxon verses to the
common level ; and we have seen that his effort, like that of Charle-
magne, was fruitless. There was an impassable wall between the old
learned literature and the present chaotic barbarism. Incapable, yet
compelled, to fit into the ancient mould, they gave it a twist. Unable
to reproduce ideas, they reproduced a metre. They tried to eclipse
their rivals in versification by the refinement of their composition, and
the prestige of a difiiculty overcome. So, in our o^vn colleges, the
good scholars imitate the clever divisions and symmetries of Claudian
rather than the ease and variety of Virgil. They put their feet in
irons, and showed their smartness by running in shackles ; they
weighted themselves with rules of modern rhyme and rules of ancient
metre ; they added the necessity of beginning each verse with the same
letter that began the last. A few, like Adhelm, wrote square acrostics,
in which the first line, repeated at the end, was foimd also to the left
and right of the piece. Thus made up of the first and last letters of
each verse, it forms a border to the whole piece, and the morsel of
verse is like a morsel of tapestry. Strange literary tricks, which
changed the poet into an artisan! They bear witness to the con-
trariety which then impeded culture and nature, and spoiled at once
the Latin form and the Saxon genius.

Beyond this barrier, which drew an impassable line between civilisa-
tion and barbarism, there was another, no less impassable, between the
Latin and Saxon genius. The strong German imagination, in which
glowing and obscure visions suddenly meet and violently clash, was

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 55

in contrast with the reasoning spirit, in which ideas gather and are
developed in a regular order ; so that if the barbarian, in his classical
essays, retained any part of his primitive instincts, he succeeded only
in producing a grotesque and frightful monster. One of them, this
very Adhelm, a relative of King Ina, who sang on the town-bridge
profane and sacred hymns alternately, too much imbued with Saxon
poesy, simply to imitate the antique models, adorned his Latin prose
and verse with all the 'English magnificence.'^ You might compare
him to a barbarian who seizes a flute from the skilled hands of a player
of Augustus' court, in order to blow on it with inflated lungs, as if it
were the bellowing horn of an aurochs. The sober speech of the
Eoman orators and senators becomes in his hands fuU of exas^serated
and incoherent images ; he heaps up his colours, and gives vent to the
extraordinary and unintelUgible nonsense of the later Skalds, — in short,
he is a latinised Skald, dragging into his new tongue the ornaments of
Scandinavian poetry, such as alliteration, by dint of which he con-
gregates in one of his epistles fifteen consecutive Avords, all beginning
with the same letter ; and in order to make up his fifteen, he introduces
a barbarous Graecism amongst the Latin words.^ Many times amongst
the others, the writers of legends, you will meet with deformation of
Latin, distorted by the outbreak of a too vivid imagination ; it breaks
out even in their scholastic and scientific writing. Alcuin, in the
dialogues which he made for the son of Charlemagne, uses like
formulas the little poetic and trite phrases which abound in the
national poetry. ' What is winter ? the exile of summer. What is
spring ? the painter of earth. What is the year ? the world's chariot.
What is the sun? the splendour of the universe, the beauty of the
firmament, the grace of nature, the glory of the day, the distributor
of hours. What is the sea? the road of the brave, the frontier of
earth, the hostelry of the waves, the source of showers.' More, he
ends his instructions with enigmas, in the spirit of the Skalds, such as
we still find in the old manuscripts with the barbarian songs. It was
the last feature of the national genius, which, when it labours to under-
stand a matter, neglects dry, clear, consecutive deduction, to employ
grotesque, remote, oft-repeated imagery, and replaces analysis by in-
tuition.

VIIL
Such was this race, the last born of the sister races, Saxon, Latin,

1 William of Malmesbxirj^'s expression.

^ Primitus (pantorum procerum praetorumque pio potissimum patemoque prae-
sertim privilegio) panegjTicuni poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promiU-
gantes, stridula vocum sympbonia ac melodise cantile, naeque carmine modulaturi
hj-mnizemus.

56 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK I.

and Greek, who, in the decay of the other two, brings to the world a
new civilisation, with a new character and genius. Inferior to these
in many respects, it surpasses them in not a few. Amidst the woods
and fens and snows, under a sad, inclement sky, gross instincts hare
gained the day. The German has not acquired gay humour, unre-
served facility, the idea of harmonious beauty ; his great phlegmatic
body continues fierce and coarse, greedy and brutal ; his rude and
unphable mind is still inclined to savagery, and restive under culture.
DuJi and congealed, his ideas cannot expand with facility and freedom,
with a natural sequence and an instinctive regularity. But this spirit,
void of the sentiment of the beautiful, is all the more apt for the senti-
ment of the true. The deep and incisive impression which he receives
from contact with objects, and which as yet he can only express by a
cry, will afterwards Hberate him from the Latin rhetoric, and will vent
itself on things rather than on words. Moreover, vmder the constraint
of cHmate and sohtude, by the habit of resistance and effort, his ideal
is changed. Human and moral instincts have gained the empire over
him ; and amongst them, the need of independence, the disposition for
serious and strict manners, the inclination for devotion and veneration,
the worship of heroism. Here are the foundations and the elements of
a civilisation, slower but sounder, less careful of what is agreeable and
elegant, more based on justice and truth.'- Hitherto at least the race
is intact, intact in its primitive rudeness ; the Roman cultivation could
neither develop nor deform it. If Christianity took root, it was owing
to natural affinities, but it produced no change in the native genius.
Xow approaches a new conquest, which is to bring this time men, as
well as ideas. The Saxons, meanwhile, after the wont of German
races, vigorous and fertile, have within the past six centuries multi-
pHed enormously. Tliey were now about two miUions, and the Nor-
man army numbered sixty thousand.^ In vain these Normans become
transformed, galUcised ; by their origin, and substantially in themselves
they are still the relatives of those whom they conquered. In vain
they imported their manners and their poesy, and introduced into the
language a third part of its words ; this language continues altogether

^ In Iceland, the country of the fiercest sea-kings, crimes are unknown ; prisons
have been turned to other uses ; fines are the only punishment.

^ See Pictorial History, i. 249. Following Doomsday Book, Llr. Turner
reckons at three hundred thousand the heads of families mentioned. If each
family consisted of five persons, that would make one million five hundred
thousand people. He adds five hundred thousand for the four northern counties,
for London and several large towns, for the monks and provincial clergy not
enumerated. . . . "We must accept these figures with caution. StiU they agree
"with those of Macintosh, George Chalmers, and several others. Many facts show
that the Saxon population was very numerous, and q^uite out of proportion to the
Iforman population.

CHAP. I.] THE SAXONS. 57

German in element and in substance.^ Though the grammar changed,
it changed integrally, by an internal action, in the same sense as its
continental cognates. At the end of three hundred years the con-
querors themselves were conquered ; their speech became English ;
and owing to frequent intermarriage, the English blood ended by
gaining the predominance over the Norman blood in their veins. The
race finally remains Saxon. If the old poetic genius disappears after
the Conquest, it is as a river disappears, and flows for a while under-
ground. In five centuries it virill emerge once more.

' Warton, History of English Poetry, 1840, 3 vols., preface.

58 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK L

GHAPTEK IL
The Normans.

I. Tlie protection and character of Feudalism.
II. The Norman invasion ; character of the Normans — Contrast with the Saxons
— The Normans are French — How they became so — Their taste and
architecture — Their spirit of inquiry and their literature — Chivalry and
amusements — Their tactics and their success.

III. Bent of the French genius — Two principal characteristics ; clear and con-

secutive ideas — Psychological form of French genius — Prosaic histories ;
lack of colour and passion, ease and discursiveness — Natural logic and
clearness, soberness, grace and delicacy, refinement and cynicism — Order
and charm — The natm'e of the beauty and of the ideas which the French
have introduced.

IV. The Normans in England — Their position and their tyranny — They implant

their literature and language — They forget the same — Learn English by
degrees — Gradually English becomes gaUicised.
V. They translate French works into English — Opinion of Sir John Mandeville
— Layamon, Kobert of Gloucester, Robert de Brunue — They imitate in
English the French literature — Moral manuals, chansons, fabliaux, Gestes
— Brightness, frivolity, and futility of this French literature — Barbarity
and ignorance of the feudal civilisation — Geste of Pachard Cceut de Lion,
and voyages of Sir John Mandeville — Poorness of the literature introduced
and implanted in England — Why it has not endm-ed on the Continent or
in England.
VI. The Saxons in England — Endurance of the Saxon nation, and formation of
the English constitution — Enduran.ce of the Saxon character, and formation
of the English character.
VII.-IX. Comparison of the ideal hero inFrance andEngland — Fabliaux of Eeynard,
and ballads of Robin Hood — How the Saxon character makes way for and
supports political liberty— Comparison of the condition of the Commons
in France and England — Theory of the English constitution, by Sir John
Fortescue — How the Saxon constitution makes way for and supports
political liberty — Situation of the Church, and precursors of the Refor-
mation in England — Piers Plowman and Wycliffe — How the Saxon
character and the situation of the Norman Church make way for religious
reform — Incompleteness and importance of the national literature — Why
it has not endured.

I.

A CENTURY and a half had passed on the Continent since, amid
the universal decay and dissolution, a new society had been
formed, and new men had risen up. Brave men had at length made a

CHAP, n.] THE NORMANS. 59

league against the Norsemen and the robbers. They had planted their
feet in the soil, and the moving chaos of the general subsidence had
become fixed by the effort of their great hearts and of their arms. At
the mouths of the rivers, in the defiles of the mountains, on the margin
of the waste borders, at all perilous passes, they had built their forts,
each for himself, each on his own land, each with his faithful band ; and
they had lived like a scattered but watchful army, camped and con-
federate in their castles, sword in hand, in front of the enemy. Beneath
this disciphne a formidable people had been formed, fierce hearts in
strong bodies, ^ intolerant of restraint, longing for violent deeds, born
for constant Avarfare because steeped in permanent warfare, heroes and
robbers, who, as an escape from their solitude, plunged into adven-
tures, and went, that they might conquer a country or win Paradise, to
Sicily, to Portugal, to Spain, to Livonia, to Palestine, to England.

II.

On the 27th of September 1066, at the mouth of the Somme, there
was a great sight to be seen : four hundred large saUing vessels, more
than a thousand transports, and sixty thousand men were on the point
of embarking.^ The sun shone splendidly after long rain; trumpets
sounded, the cries of this armed multitude rose to heaven ; on the far
horizon, on the shore, in the wide-spreading river, on the sea which
opens out thence broad and shining, masts and sails extended like a
forest; the enormous fleet set out wafted by the south -nind.^ The
people which it carried were said to have come from Norway, and one
might have taken them for kinsmen of the Saxons, with whom they
were to fight ; but there were with them a multitude of adventurers,
crowding from every direction, far and near, from north and south,
from Maine and Anjou, from Poitou and Brittany, from Ile-de-France
and Flanders, from Aquitaine and Burgundy ; * and, in short, the expe-
dition itself was French.

^ See, amidst other delineations of their manners, the first accounts of the first
Crusade. Godfrey clove a Saracen down to his waist. — In Palestine, a widow was
compelled, up to the age of sixty, to marry again, because no fief could remain
without a defender. — A Spanish leader said to his exhausted soldiers after a battle,
* You are too weary and too much wounded, but come and fight with me against
this other band ; the fresh wounds which we shall receive wiU make us forget
those which we have.' At this time, says the General Chronicle of Spain, kings,
counts, and nobles, and all the knights, that they might be ever ready, kept their
horses in the chamber where they slept with their wives.

* For difi"erence in numbers of the fleet and men, see Freeman, Hist, of the
Norm. Conq., 3 vols. 1867, iii. 381, 387.— Tr.

^ For all the details, see Anglo-Norman Chronicles, iii. 4, as quoted by Aug.
Thierry. I have myself seen the locality and the country.

* Of three columns of attack at Hastings, two were composed of auxiliaries.
Moreover, the chroniclers are not at fault upon this critical point ; they agree in
stating that England was conquered by FrenchmeiL

60 THE SOUFtCE. [BOOK L

How comes it that, having kept its name, it had changed its nature?
and what series of renovations had made a Latin out of a German
people ? The reason is, that this people, when they came to Neustria,
were neither a national body, nor a pure race. They were but a band ;
and as such, marrying the women of the country, they introduced
foreign blood into their children. They were a Scandinavian band,
but deteriorated by all the bold knaves and all the wretched despera-
does who wandered about the conquered country;^ and as such they
received the foreign blood into their veins. Moreover, if the nomadic
band was mixed, the settled band was much more so ; and peace by its
transfusions, like war by its recruits, had changed the character of
the primitive blood. When Rollo, having divided the land amongst
his followers, hung the thieves and their abettors, people from every
country gathered to him. Security, good stern justice, were so rare,
that they were enough to re-people a land.^ He invited strangers, say
the old writers, ' and made one people out of so many folk of different
natures.' This assemblage of barbarians, refugees, robbers, immi-
grants, spoke Romance or French so quickly, that the second Duke,
wishing to have his son taught Danish, had to send him to Bayeux,
where it was still spoken. The great masses always form the race in
the end, and generally the genius and language. Thus this people, so
transformed, quickly became polished ; the composite race showed itself
of a ready genius, far more wary than the Saxons across the Channel,
closely resembling their neighbours of Picardy, Champagne, and Ile-
de-France. ' The Saxons,' says an old writer,* ' vied with each other
in their drinking feats, and wasted their goods by day and night in
feasting, whilst they lived in wretched hovels ; the French and Nor-
mans, on the other hand, living inexpensively in their fine large houses,
Avere besides studiously refined in their food and careful in their habits.'
The former, still weighted by the German phlegm, were gluttons and
drunkards, now and then aroused by poetical enthusiasm ; the latter,
made sprightlier by their transplantation and their alloy, felt the cravings
of genius already making themselves manifest. ' You might see amongst
them churches in every village, and monasteries in the cities, towering
on high, and buUt in a style unknown before,' first in Normandy, and
presently in England.* Taste had come to them at once — that is, the

^ It was a Eouen fisherman, a soldier of Rollo, who killed the Duke of France
at the mouth of the Eure. Hastings, the famous sea-king, was a labourer's son
from the neighhoiirhood of Troyes.

2 'Tn the tenth century,' says Stendhal, *a man wished for two things : 1st,
not to be slain ; 2c?, to have a good leather coat.' See Fontenelle's Chronicle.

3 William of Malmesbury.

* Pictorial History, i. 615. Churches in London, Sarum, Norwich, Durham,
Chichester, Peterborough, Rochester, Hereford, Gloucester, Oxford, etc. — William
of Malmesbury.

CHAP. II.] THE N0KMAN3. 61

desire to please the eye, and to express a thought by outward repre-
sentation, which was quite a new idea: the circular arch was raised on
one or on a cluster of columns; elegant mouldings were placed about
the windows; the rose window made its appearance, simple yet, like
the flower which gives it its name; and the Norman style unfolded
itself, original and measured, between the Gothic style, whose richness
it foreshadowed, and the Romance style, whose solidity it recalled.

With taste, just as natiural and just as quickly, was developed the
spirit of inquii-y. Nations are like children ; with some the tongue is
readily loosened, and they comprehend at once; with others it is
loosened with difficulty, and they are slow of comprehension. The
men before us had educated themselves nimbly, as Frenchmen do.
They were the first in France who unravelled the language, fixing it
and writing it so well, that to this day we understand their code and
their poems. In a century and a half they were so far cultivated as to
find the Saxons 'unlettered and rude.'^ That was the excuse they
made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical
posts. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively
hated gross stupidity. Between the Conquest and the death of King
John, they established five hundred and fifty-seven schools in England.
Henry Beauclerk, son of the Conqueror, was trained in the sciences ;
so were Henry ii. and his three sons : Richard, the eldest of these, was
a poet. Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, a subtle
logician, ably argued the Real Presence; Anselm, his successor, the
first thinker of the age, thought he had discovered a new proof of the
existence of God, and tried to make religion philosophical by adopting
as his maxim, ' Crede ut inteUigas.' The notion was doubtless grand,
especially in the eleventh century ; and they could not have gone more
promptly to work. Of course the science I speak of was but scholastic,
and tliese terrible folios slay more understandings than they confirm.
But people must begin as they can ; and syllogism, even in Latin, even
in theology, is yet an exercise of the mind and a proof of the under-
standing. Among the continental priests who settled in England, one
established a hbrary ; another, founder of a school, made the scholars
perform the play of Saint Catherine ; a third wrote in polished Latin,
' epigrams as pointed as those of Martial.' Such were the recreations of
an intelUgent race, eager for ideas, of ready and flexible genius, whose
clear thought was not overshadowed, like that of the Saxon brain, by
drunken conceits, and the vapours of a greedy and well-filled stomach.
They loved conversations, tales of adventure. Side by side \vith their
Latin chroniclers, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, men
of reflection, who could not only relate, but criticise here and there ;
there were rhyming chronicles in the vulgar tongue, as those of GeofFroy
Gaimar, Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Robert Wace. Do not imagine that

^ Ordericus Vitalia.

62 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I,

their verse -writers were sterile of words or lacking in details. They
were talkers, tale-tellers, speakers above all, ready of tongue, and never
stinted in speech. Not singers by any means; they speak — this is
their strong point, in their poems as in their chronicles. One of the
eariiest wrote the Song of Roland; upon this they accumulated a mul-
titude of songs concerning Charlemagne and his knights, concerning
Arthur and Merlin, the Greeks and Romans, King Horn, Guy of
Warwick, every prince and every people. Their minstrels (trouveres),
like their knights, draw in abundance from Gauls, Franks, and Latins,
and descend upon East and West, in the wide field of adventure.
They address themselves to a spirit of inquiry, as the Saxons to enthu-
siasm, and dilute in their long, clear, and flowing narratives the lively
colours of German and Breton traditions; battles, surprises, single
combats, embassies, speeches, processions, ceremonies, huntings, a
variety of amusing events, employ their ready and adventurous imagi-
nations. At first, in the Song of Roland, it is still kept in check ; it
walks with long strides, but only walks. Presently its wings have
grown ; incidents are multiplied ; giants and monsters abound, the
natural disappears, the song of the jongleur grows a poem under the
hands of the trouvere ; he would speak, like Nestor of old, five, even
six years running, and not grow tired or stop. Forty thousand verses
are not too much to satisfy their gabble ; a facile mind, abundant,
curious, descriptive, is the genius of the race. The Gauls, their fathers,
used to delay travellers on the road to make them tell their stories,
and boasted, like these, ' of fighting well and talking with ease.'

With chivalric poetry, they are not wanting in chivalry ; principally,
it may be, because they are strong, and a strong man loves to prove his
strength by knocking down his neighbours ; but also from a desire of
fame, and as a point of honour. By this one word honour the whole
spirit of warfare is changed. Saxon poets painted it as a murderous
fury, as a blind madness which shook flesh and blood, and awakened
the instincts of the beast of prey ; Norman poets describe it as a tourney.
The new passion which they introduce is that of vanity and gallantry ;
Guy of Warwick dismounts all the knights in Europe, in order to deserve
the hand of the prude and scornful Felice. The tourney itself is but
a ceremony, somewhat brutal I admit, since it turns upon the break-
ing of arms and limbs, but yet brilliant and French. To make a show
of cleverness and courage, display the magnificence of dress and armour,
be applauded by and please the ladies, — such feelings indicate men of
greater sociality, more under the influence of public opinion, less the
slaves of their own passions, void both of lyric inspiration and savage
enthusiasm, gifted by a different genius, because inclined to other
pleasures.

Such were the men who at this moment were disembarking in Eng-
land to introduce their new manners and a new spirit, French at bottom,
in character and speech, though with special and provincial features ;

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 63

of all the most determined, with an eye on the main chance, calculating,
having the nerve and the dash of our own soldiers, but with the tricks
and precautions of la'v\7'ers ; heroic undertakers of profitable enterprises ;
having travelled in Sicily, in Naples, and ready to travel to Constanti-
nople or Antioch, so it be to take a country or carry off money ; sharp
politicians, accustomed in Sicily to hire themselves to the highest bidder,
and capable of doing a stroke of business in the heat of the Crusade,
like Bohemond, who, before Antioch, speculated on the dearth of his
Christian allies, and would only open the town to them under condi-
tion of their keeping it for himself ; methodical and persevering con-
querors, expert in administration, and handy at paper-work, like this
very William, who was able to organise such an expedition, and such
an army, and kept a written roll of the same, and who proceeded to
register the whole of England in his Domesday Book. Sixteen days
after the disembarkation, the contrast between the two nations was
manifested at Hastings by its sensible effects.

The Saxons ' ate and drank the whole night. You might have
seen them struggling much, and leaping and singing,' with shouts of
laughter and noisy joy.^ In the morning they crowded behind their
palisades the dense masses of their heavy infantry, and with battle-axe
hung round their neck awaited the attack. The wary Normans weighed
the chances of heaven and hell, and tried to enlist God upon their side.
Robert Wace, their historian and compatriot, is no more troubled by
poetical imagination than they were by warlike inspiration ; and on
the eve of the battle his mind is as prosaic and clear as theirs.^ The
same spirit showed in the battle. They were for the most part bow-
men and horsemen, well-skilled, nimble, and clever. Taillefer, the
jongleur, who asked for the honour of striking the first blow, went
singing, like a true French volunteer, performing tricks all the

1 Eobert "Wace, Roman du Bou.
* Ibid. Et li Normanz et li Franceiz

Tote unit firent oreisons,

Et furent en aflicions.

De lor pecMes confez se firent

As proveires les regehirent,

Et qui n'en out proveires prez,

A son veizin se fist confez,

Pour 90 ke samedi esteit

Ke la bataille estre debveit.

TJnt Normanz a pramis e voe,

Si com li cler I'orent loe,

Ke h, ce jor mez s'il veskeient,

Char ni saunc ne mangereient

Giffrei, eveske de Coustances,

A plusors joint lor penitancea,

Cli re^ut li confessions

Et dona li benei9on3.

64 THE SOUECE. [BOOK T.

wbile.* Having arrived before the English, he cast his lance three times
in the air, then his sword, and caught them again by the handle ; and
Harold's clumsy foot-soldiers, who only knew how to cleave coats of mail
by blows from their battle-axes, 'were astonished, saying to one another
that it was magic' As for William, amongst a score of prudent and
cunning actions, he performed two well-calculated ones, which, in this
sore embarrassment, brought him safe out of his difficulties. He ordered
his archers to shoot into the air; the arrows wounded many of the
Saxons in the face, and one of them pierced Harold in the eye. After
this he simulated flight ; the Saxons, intoxicated with joy and wrath,
quitted their entrenchments, and exposed themselves to the lances of
the knights. During the remainder of the contest they only make a
stand by small companies, fight with fury, and end by being slaugh-
tered. The strong, mettlesome, brutal race threw themselves on the
enemy like a savage bull ; the dexterous Norman hunters wounded
them, subdued, and drove them under the yoke.

in.

What then is this French race, which by arms and letters makes

^ Eobert Wace, Roman du Rou :

Taillefer ki moult bien cantout
Sur un roussin qui tot alout
Devant li dus alont cantant
De Kalermaine e de Eolaut,
E d 'Oliver et des vassals
Ki moururent a Eoncevals.
Quant ils orent clievalcliie tant
K'as Engleis vindrent aprismaut :
' Sires ! dist Taillefer, merci !
Je vos ai languement servi.
Tut mon servise me debvez,
Hui, si vos plaist, me le rendez
Por tout guerredun vos requier,
Et si vos voil torment preier,
Otreiez-mei, ke jo n'i faille,
Li primier colp de la bataUle. '
Et li dus repont : ' Je I'otrei. '
Et TaiUefer point a desrei ;
Devant toz li altres se mist,
Un Englez feri, si I'ocist.
De SOS le pis, parmie la pance,
Li fist passer ultre la lance,
A terre estendu I'abati.
Poiz trait I'espee, altre feri.
Poiz a crie : ' Venez, venez !
Ke fetes-vos ? Ferez, ferez ! '
Done I'unt Englez avirone,
Al secund colp k'il ou done.

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. G5

such a splendid entrance upon the world, and is so manifestly destined
to rule, that in the East, for example, their name of Franks will be
given to all the nations of the West? Wherein consists this new
spirit, this precocious pioneer, this key of all middle-age civilisation?
There is in every mind of the kind a fundamental activity which,
when incessantly repeated, moulds its plan, and gives it its direction ;
in town or country, cultivated or not, in its infancy and its age, it
spends its existence and employs its energy in conceiving an event or an
object. This is its original and perpetual process; and whether it change
its region, return, advance, prolong, or alter its course, its whole motion
is but a series of consecutive steps ; so that the least alteration in the
length, quickness, or precision of its primitive stride transforms and
regulates the whole course, as in a tree the structure of the first shoot
determines the whole fohage, and governs the whole growth.^ When
the Frenchman conceives an event or an object, he conceives quickly
and distinctly ; there is no internal disturbance, no previous fermenta-
tion of confused and violent ideas, which, becoming concentrated and
elaborated, end in a noisy outbreak. The movement of his intelligencfi
is nimble and prompt like that of his limbs ; at once and without effort
he seizes upon his idea. But he seizes that alone : he leaves on one
side all the long entangling offshoots whereby it is entwined and
twisted amongst its neighbouring ideas; he does not embarrass himself
with nor think of them ; he detaches, plucks, touches but slightly, and
that is all. He is deprived, or if you prefer it, he is exempt from those
sudden half-visions which disturb a man, and open up to him instan-
taneously vast deeps and far perspectives. Images are excited by in-
ternal commotion ; he, not being so moved, imagines not. He is only
moved superficially ; he is without large sympathy ; he does not per-
ceive an object as it is, complex and combined, but in parts, with a
discursive and superficial knowledge. That is why no race in Europe is
less poetical. Let us look at their epics ; none are more prosaic. They
are not wanting in number : The Song of Roland^ Garin le Loherain,
Oyier le Banois^ Berthe aux grands Pieds. There is a library of them.
Though their manners are heroic and their spirit fresh, though they
have originality, and deal with grand events, yet, spite of this, the
narrative is as dull as that of the babbling Norman chroniclers. Doubt-
less Homer is precisely like them ; but his magnificent titles of rosy-
fingered Morn, the wide -bosomed Air, the divine and nourishing
Earth, the earth-shaking Ocean, come in every instant and expand
their purple tint over the speeches and battles, and the grand abound-
ing similes which intersperse the narrative tell of a people more inclined
to rejoice in beauty than to proceed straight to fact. But here we
have facts, always facts, nothing but facts : the Frenchman wants to

* The idea of types is applicable throughout all physical and moral nature.
' Danois is a contraction of le d'Ardennois, from the Ardennes. —Te.

E

C8 THE SOUECE. [BOOK L

know If tlie hero will kill the traitor, the lover wed the maiden ; he
must not be delayed by poetry or painting. He advances nimbly to
the end of the story, not lingering for dreams of the heart or wealth of
landscape. There is no splendour, no colour, in his narrative ; his style
is quite bare, and without figures ; you may read ten thousand verses
in these old poems without meeting one. Shall we open the most
ancient, the most original, the most eloquent, at the most moving point,
the Song of Roland, when Roland is dying? The narrator is moved,
and yet his language remains the same, smooth, accentless, so pene-
trated by the prosaic spirit, and so void of the poetic ! He gives an
abstract of motives, a summary of events, a series of causes for grief,
a series of causes for consolation.-"- Nothing more. These men regard
the circumstance or the action by itself, and adhere to this view. Their
idea remains exact, clear, and simple, and does not raise up a similar
image to be confused with itself, to colour or transform itself. It re-
mains dry ; they conceive the divisions of the object one by one,
without ever collecting them, as the Saxons would, in a rude, impas-
sioned, glowing fantasy. Nothing is more opposed to their genius than
the genuine songs and profound hymns, such as the English monks were
singing beneath the low vaults of their churches. They would be
disconcerted by the unevenness and obscurity of such language. They

^ Genin, Chanson de Itoland :

Co sent Rollans que la mort le trespent,

Devers la teste sur le quer li descent ;

Desiiz nn pin i est alet curant,

Sur riierbe verte si est culchet adenz ;

Desuz lui met I'espee et I'olifan ;

Turnat sa teste vers la pai'eue gent ;

Pour CO I'at fait que il voelt veirement

Que Carles diet e trestute sa gent,

Li gentilz quens, qu'il fut mort cunquerant.

Cleimet sa culpe, e meuut e suvent,

Pur ses peccliez en pm-off'rid lo guant.

Li quens PioUans se jut desuz un pin,
Envers Espaigne en ad turnet sun vis,
De plusurs clioses a remembrer le prist.
De tantes terres cume li Lers cunquist,
De dulce France, des liumes de sun lign,
De Carlemagne sun seignor ki I'nurrit.
Ne poet muer n'en plurt et ne susprit.
JIais lui meisme ne volt mettre en ubli.
Cleimet sa culpe, si priet Dieu mercit :
' Veire paterne, ki unques ne mentis,
Seint I>azaron de mort resurrexis,
Et Daniel des lions guaresis,
Guaris de mei I'arome de tuz perilz.
Pur les peccliez que en ma vie Us.'

CHAP. II. j THE NOKMANS. G7

are not capable of such an access of entlmsiasm and such excess of
emotions. They never cry out, they speak, or rather they converse,
and that at moments when the soul, overwhelmed by its trouble, might
be expected to cease thinking and feeling. Thus Amis, in a mystery-
play, being leprous, calmly requires his friend Amille to slay his two
sons, in order that their blood should heal him of his leprosy ; and
Amille replies still more calmly.^ If ever they try to sing, even in
heaven, ' a roundelay high and clear,' they will produce little rhymed
arguments, as dull as the dullest conversations.^ Pursue this litera-
ture to its conclusion ; regard it, hke the Skalds, at the time of
its decadence, when its vices, being exaggerated, display, like the
Skalds, with marked coarseness the kind of mind whicli produced
them. The Skalds fall off into nonsense ; it loses itself into babble
and platitude. The Saxon could not master his craving for exalta-
tion ; the Frenchman could not restrain the volubility of his tongue.
He is too diffuse and too clear ; the Saxon is too obscure and brief
The one Avas excessively agitated and carried away; the other ex-
plains and develops without measure. From the twelfth century the
Gestes degenerate into rhapsodies and psalmodies of thirty or forty
thousand verses. Theology enters into them ; poetry becomes an in-
terminable, intolerable litany, where the ideas, developed and repeated

Sun desire guant k, Den en puroffrit.
Seint Gabriel de sa main I'ad pris.
Desur sun bras teneit le chef enclin,
Juntes ses mains est alet a sa fin.
Deus i tramist sun angle cherubin,
Et seint Michel qu'on cleimet del peril
Ensemble ad els seint Gabriel i vint,
L'anme del cunte portent en pareis.

* Mon tres-chier ami debonnaire,
Vous m'avez une cbose ditte
Qui n'est pas k faire petite
Mais que i'on doit moult resongnier,
Et uonpourquant, sanz eslongnier,
I'uis(|ue garisou autremeut
!Ne povez avoir vraiement,
Pouf vostre amour les oeciray,
Et le sang vous apporteray.

' Vraiz Diex, moult est excellente,
Et de grant charitd plaine,
Vostre bout^ souveraine.
Car vostre grace presente,
A toute persoiine humaine,
Vraix Diex, moult est excellente,
Puisuu elle a cuer et entente,
Et que k ce desir I'amaine
Que de vous servir so paine.

G3 THE SOURCE. [cOOK T.

ad infinitum^ ^v^t^^out an outburst of emotion nor an accent of originality,
flow like a clear and insipid stream, and send off their reader, by dint
of their monotonous rhymes, into a comfortable slumber. What a de-
plorable abundance of distinct and facile ideas ! We meet with it again
in the seventeenth century, in the literary gossip which took place at
the feet of men of distinction ; it is the fault and the talent of the race.
With this involuntary art of conceiving, and isolating instantaneously
and clearly each part of every object, people can speak, even for speak-
ing's sake, and for ever.

Such is the primitive process ; how will it be continued ? Here
appears a new trait in the French genius, the most valuable of all. It
is necessary to comprehension that the second idea shall be continuous
with the first ; otherwise that genius is thrown out of its course and
arrested : it cannot proceed by irregular bounds ; it must walk step
by step, on a straight road ; order is innate in it ; without study, and
at first approach, it disjoints and decomposes the object or event, how-
ever complicated and entangled it may be, and sets the parts one by
one in succession to each other, according to their natural connection.
True, it is still in a state of barbarism ; yet intelligence is a reasoning
faculty, which spreads, though unwittingly. Nothing is more clear than
the style of the old French narrative and of the earliest poems : we do
not perceive that we are following a narrator, so easy is the gait, so even
the road he opens to us, so smoothly and gradually every idea glides
into the next ; and this is why he narrates so well. The chroniclers
Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, the fathers of prose, have an ease
and clearness approached by none, and beyond all, a charm, a grace,
which they had not to go out of their way to find. Grace is a national
possession in France, and springs from the native delicacy which has a
horror of incongruities ; the instinct of Frenchmen avoids violent shocks
in works of taste as well as in works of argument ; they desire that their
sentiments and ideas shall harmonise, and not clash. Throughout they
have this measured spirit, exquisitely refined.^ They take care, on a
sad subject, not to push emotion to 'ts limits ; they avoid big words.
Think how Joinville relates in six lines the death of the poor sick priest
who wished to finish celebrating the mass, and ' never more did sing,
and died.' Open a mystery-play — Tlieophile^ the Queen of Hungary^
for instance : when they are going to burn her and her child, she says
two short lines about ' this gentle dew which is so pure an innocent,'
naught beside. Take a fabliau, even a dramatic one : when the
penitent knight, who has undertaken to fill a barrel with his tears,
dies in the hermit's company, he asks from him only one last gift :
' Do but put thy arms on me, and then I'll die embraced by thee.'
Could a more touching sentiment be expressed in more sober
language ? One has to say of their poetry what is said of certain

' See H. Taine, La Fontaine and his Fables, p. 15.

CHAP. II.] THE NOKMAXS. C9

pictures : This is made out of nothing. Is there in the world any-
thing more deUcately graceful than the verses of Guillaurae de Lon-is?
Allegory clothes his ideas so as to dim their too great brightness ;
ideal figures, half transparent, float about the lover, luminous, yet in a
cloud, and lead him amidst all the sweets of delicate-hued ideas to the
rose, of which 'the gentle odour embalms all the plain.' This refine-
ment goes so far, that in Tliibaut of Champagne and in Charles of
Orleans it turns to affectation and insipidity. In them impressions
grow more slender ; the perfume is so weak, that one often fails to
catch it ; on their knees before their lady they -whisper their waggeries
and conceits ; they love politely and wittily ; they arrange ingeniously
in a bouquet their ' painted words,' all the flowers of ' fresh and
beautiful language ; ' they know how to mark fleeting ideas in their
flight, soft melancholy, uncertain reverie ; they are as elegant as
eloquent, and as charming as the most amiable abbt's of the eighteenth
century. This lightness of touch is proper to the race, and appears as
plainly under the armour and amid the massacres of the middle ages
as amid the salutations and the musk-scented, wadded clothes of the
last court. You will find it in their colouring as in their sentiments.
They are not struck by the magnificence of nature, they see only her
pretty side ; they paint the beauty of a woman by a single featvire,
which is only polite, saying, ' She is more gracious than the rose in
May.' They do not experience the terrible emotion, ravishment,
sudden oppression of heart which is displayed in the poetry of
neighbouring nations ; they say directly, ' She began to smile, which
vastly became her.' They add, when they are in a descriptive
humour, ' that she had a sweet and perfumed breath,' and a body
' white as new-fallen snow on a branch.' They do not aspire higher ;
beauty pleases, but does not transport them. They delight in agreeable
emotions, but are not fitted for deep sensations. The full rejuvenes-
cence of being, the warm air of spring which renews and penetrates
all existence, suggests but a pleasing couplet ; they remark in passing,
' Now is winter gone, the hawthorn blossoms, the rose expands,' and so
pass on about their business. It is a light pleasure, soon gone, like
that which an April landscape affords. For an instant the author
glances at the mist of the streams rising about the willow trees, the
pleasant vapour which imprisons the brightness of the morning ; then,
hummin"- a burden of a song, he returns to his narrative. He seeks
amusement, and herein lies his power.

In life, as in literature, it is pleasure he aims at, not sensual
pleasure or emotion. He is gay, not voluptuous; dainty, not a
glutton. He takes love for a pastime, not for an intoxication. It is
a pretty fruit which he plucks, tastes, and leaves. And we must
remark yet further, that the best of the fruit in his eyes is the fact of
its being forbidden. He says to himself that he is duping a husband,
that ' he deceives a cruel woman, and thinks he ought to obtain

70 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

a pope's indulgence for the deed.' ' He wishes to be merry — it is
the state he prefers, the end and aim of his life ; and especially to
Laugh at another's expense. The short verse of his fabliaux gambols
and leaps like a schoolboy released from school, over all things re-
spected or respectable ; criticising the church, women, the great, the
monks. Scoffers, banterers, our fathers have abundance of the same
expressions and things ; and the thing comes to them so naturally,
that without culture, and surrounded by coarseness, they are as deli-
cate in their raillery as the most refined. They touch upon ridicule
lightly, they mock without emphasis, as it M-ere innocently ; their
style is so harmonious, that at first sight we make a mistake, and do
not see any harm in it. They seem artless ; they look so very de-
mure ; only a word shows the imperceptible smile : it is the ass, for
example, which they call the high priest, by reason of his padded
cassock and his serious air, and who gravely begins * to play the
organ.' At the close of the history, the delicate sense of comicahty
has touched you, though you cannot say how. They do not call
things by their name, especially in love matters ; they let you guess
it ; they suppose you to be as sharp of intellect and as wary as them-
selves.^ Be sure that one might discriminate, embellish at times, even
refine upon them, but that their first traits are incomparable. When
the fox approaches the raven to steal the cheese, he begins as a
hypocrite, piously and cautiously, and as one of the family. He
calls the raven his ' good father Don Robart, who sings so well ; ' he
praises his voice, 'so sweet and fine.' 'You would be the best singer
in the world if you beware of nuts.' Renard is a Scapin, an artist in
the way of invention, not a mere glutton ; he loves roguery for its
own sake ; he rejoices in his superiority, and draws out his mockery.
When Tibert, the cat, by his counsel hung himself at the bell rope,
wishing to ring it, he uses irony, smacks his lips and pretends to
wax impatient against the poor fool whom he has caught, calls him
proud, complains because the other does not answer, and because he
wishes to rise to the clouds and visit the saints. And from be-
ginning to end this long epic is the same ; the raillery never ceases,
and never fails to be agreeable. Renard has so much wit, that he is
pardoned for everything. The necessity for laughter is national — so
indigenous to the French, that a stranger cannot understand, and is
shocked by it. This pleasure does not resemble physical joy in any
respect, which is to be despised for its grossness ; on the contrary, it
sharpens the intelligence, and brings to light many a delicate and sug-
gestive idea. The fabliaux are full of truths about men, and still more
about women, about low conditions, and still more about high ; it is

^ La Fontaine, Contes, Richard Minutolo.
* Paiier lui veut d'une besogne
Ou crois que peu conquerrerois
Si la besogne vous uommois.

[chap. II. THE NOKMAXS. 71

a method of philosoplusing by stealth and boldly, in spite of conven-
tionalism, and in opposition to the powers that be. This taste has
nothing in common either with open satire, which is hideous because
it is cruel ; on tha contrary, it provokes good humour. One soon sees
that the jester is not ill-disposed, that he does not "wish to wound : if
he stings, it is as a bee, without venom ; an instant later he is not
thinking of it ; if need be, he wiU take himself as an object of his
pleasantry ; all he wishes is to keep up in himself and in us sparkling
and pleasing ideas. Do we not see here in advance an abstract of the
whole French literature, the incapacity for great poetry, the quick and
durable perfection of prose, the excellence of all the moods of conversa-
tion and eloquence, the reign and tyranny of taste and method, the art
and theory of development and arrangement, the gift of being measured
clear, amusing, and pungent ? "We have taught Europe how ideas
fall into order, and which ideas are agreeable ; and this is what our
Frenchmen of the eleventh century are about to teach their Saxons
during five or six centuries, first with the lance, nest with the stick,
next with the birch.

IV.

Consider, then, this Frenchman or Norman, this man from Anjou or
Maine, who in his well-closed coat of mail, with sword and lance, came
to seek his fortune in Encjland. He took the manor of some slain Saxon.
and settled himself in it with his soldiers and comrades, gave them land,
houses, the right of levying taxes, on condition of their fighting under him
and for him, as men-at-arms, marshals, standard-bearers ; it was a league
in case of danger. In fact, they were in a hostile and conquered country,
and they have to maintain themselves. Each one hastened to build for
himself a place of refuge, castle or fortress,'^ well fortified, of solid stone,
with narrow windows, strengthened with battlements, garrisoned by
soldiers, pierced with loopholes. Then these men went to Salisbury,
to the number of sixty thousand, all holders of land, having at least
enough to support a complete horse or armour. There, placing their
hands in William's, they promised him fealty and assistance ; and the
king's edict declared that they must be all imited and boimd together
like brothers in arms, to defend and succour each other. They are
an armed colony, and encamped in their dwellings, like the Spartans
amongst the Helots ; and they make laws accordingly. When a French-
man is found dead in any district, the inhabitants are to give up the
murderer, unless they pay forty-seven marks as compensation ; if the
dead man is English, it rests with the people of the place to prove it by
the oath of four near relatives of the deceased. They are to beware of
killing a stag, boar, or fawn ; for an offence against the forest-laws they
will lose their eyes. They have nothing of all their property assured

* At King Stephen's death there were 1115 castles.

72 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

to them except as alms, or on condition of tribute, or by talking the
oath of homage. Here a free Saxon proprietor is made a body-slave
on his own estate.-^ Here a noble and rich Saxon lady feels on her
shoulder the weight of the hand of a Norman valet, who is become by
force her husband or her lover. There were Saxons of one sou, or of
two sous, according to the sum which they brought to their masters ;
they sold them, hired them, w^orked them on joint account, like an ox
or an ass. One Norman abbot has his Saxon predecessors dug up, and
their bones thrown without the gates. Another keeps men-at-arms,
who reduce the recalcitrant monks to reason by blows of their swords.
Imagine, if you can, the pride of these new lords, conquerors, strangers,
masters, nourished by habits of violent activity, and by the savagery,
ignorance, and passions of feudal life. ' They thought they might do
Avhatsoever they pleased,' say the old chroniclers. ' They shed blood
indiscriminately, snatched the morsel of bread from the mouth of the
wretched, and seized upon all the money, the goods, the land.'^ Thus
' all the folk in the low country were at great pains to seem humble
before Ives Taillebois, and only to address him with one knee on the
ground ; but although they made a point of paying him every honour,
and giving him all and more than all Avhich they owed him in the way
of rent and service, he harassed, tormented, tortured, imprisoned them,
set his dogs upon their cattle, . . . broke the legs and backbones of
their beasts of burden, . . . and sent men to attack their servants on
the road with sticks and swords.' The Normans would not and could
not borrow any idea or custom from such boors ;^ they despised them
as coarse and stupid. They stood amongst them, as the Spaniards
amongst the Americans in the sixteenth century, superior in force and
culture, more versed in letters, more expert in the arts of luxury.
They preserved their manners and their speech. England, to all out-
ward appearance — the court of the king, the castles of the nobles, the
palaces of the bishops, the houses of the wealthy — was French ; and the
Scandinavian people, of whom sixty years ago the Saxon kings used to
have poems sung to them, thought that the nation had forgotten its
language, and treated it in their laws as though it were no longer
their sister.

It was then a French literature which was at this time domiciled
across the Channel,* and the conquerors tried to make it purely French,
purged from all Saxon alloy. They made such a point of this, that
the nobles in the reign of Henry ii. sent their sons to France, to pre-

^ A. Thierry, Histoire de la Conquete de V Anrjltterre, ii.

s William of Malmesbury. A. Thierry, ii. 20, 122-203.

3 'In the yeai 652,' says "Warton, 1. 3, 'it was the common practice of the
Anglo-Saxons to send their youth to the monasteries of France for education ; and
not only the language but the manners of the French were esteemed the most polite
accomplishments.'

* Warton, i. 6.

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 73

serve them from barbarisms. 'For two hundred years,' says Iligden,^
* children in scole, agenst tlie usage and manir of all other nations
beeth compelled for to leve hire own langage, and for to construe hir
lessons and hire thynges in Frensche.' The statutes of the universities
obliged the students to converse either in French or Latin. ' Gentil-
men children beeth taught to speke Frensche from the tyme that they
bith rokked in hire cradell ; and uplondissche men will likne himself to
gentylmen, and fondeth with greet besynesse for to speke Frensche.'
Of course the poetry is French. The Norman brought his minstrel
with him; there was Taillefer, the jongleur, who sang the Song of
Roland at the battle of Hastings ; there was Adeline, the jonglense, who
received an estate in the partition which followed the Conquest. The
Norman who ridiculed the Suxon kings, who dug up the Saxon saints,
and cast them without the walls of the church, loved none but French
ideas and verses. It was into French verse that Robert Wace rendered
the legendary history of the England which was conquered, and the
actual history of the Normandy in which he continued to live. Enter
one of the abbeys where the minstrels come to sing, ' where the clerks
after dinner and supper read poems, the chronicles of kingdoms, the
wonders of the world, '^ you will only find Latin or French verses,
Latin or French prose. What becomes of English ? Obscure, de-
spised, we hear it no more, except in the mouths of degraded franklins,
outlaws of the forest, swineherds, peasants, the lowest orders. It is no
longer, or scarcely written ; gradually we find in the Saxon chronicle
that the idiom alters, is extinguished ; the chronicle itself ceases withigi
a century after the Conquest.^ The people who have leisure or
security enough to read or write are French ; for them authors devise
and compose ; literature always adapts itself to the taste of those who
can appreciate and pay for it. Even the English* endeavour to write
in French : thus Robert Grostete, in his allegorical poem on Christ ;
Peter Langtoft, in his Ch-onicle of England, and in his Lfe of Thomas
a Becket ; Hugh de Rotheland, in his poem of Hipponiedon ; John
Hoveden, and many others. Several write the first half of the verse in
English, and the second in French ; a strange sign of the ascendency
which is moulding and oppressing them. Still, in the fifteenth cen-
tury,* many of these poor folk are employed in this task; French is
the language of the court, from it arose all poetry and elegance ; he is

* Trevisa's translation of the Pohjcronycon.

2 Statutes of foundation of Xew College, Oxford. In the abbey of Glastonbury,
in 1247 : Libtr de excidio Trojce, gesia Ricardi regis, gesta Alexandri Magni, etc.
In the abbey of Peterborough : A mys et A mdion, Sir Tristam, Guy de Bourgofjne,
gesta Otuclis, les proph^ties de Merlin, le Charlemagne de Turpin, la destruction
de Troie, etc. Warton, ibidem.

!« In 1154. * "Warton, i. 72-78.

* In 1400. Warton, ii. 243. Gower died in 1403 ; his Frcucii ballads belong
to the end of the fourteenth century.

74 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK T.

but a clodhopper who is inapt at that style. They apply themselves
to it as our old writers did to Latin verses ; they are gallicised as those
were latinised, by constraint, with a sort of fear, knowing well that
they are but scholars and provincials. Gower, one of their best poets,
at the end of his French works, excuses himself humbly for not having
' de Frangais la faconde. Pardonnez moi,' he says, ' que de ce je fors-
voie ; je suis Anglais.'

And yet, after all, neither the race nor the tongue has perished.
It is necessary that the Norman should learn English, in order to com-
mand his serfs ; his Saxon wife speaks it to him, and his sons receive
it from the lips of their nurse ; the contagion is strong, for he is
obliged to send them to France, to preserve them from the jargon
which on his domain threatens to overwhelm and spoil them. From
generation to generation the contagion spreads ; they breathe it in the
air, with the foresters in the chase, the farmers in the field, the sailors
on the ships : for these rough people, shut in by their animal existence,
are not the kind to learn a foreign language ; by the simple Aveight of
their dulness they impose their idiom, at all events such as pertains to
living terms. Scholarly speech, the language of law, abstract and
philosophical expressions, — in short, all words depending on reflection
and culture may be French, since there is nothing to prevent it. This
is just what happens ; these kind of ideas and this kind of speech are
not understood by the commonalty, who, not being able to touch them,
cannot change them. This produces a French, a colonial French,
doubtless perverted, pronounced with closed mouth, with a contortion
of the organs of speech, 'after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow ;' yet it
is still French. On the other hand, as regards the speech employed
about common actions and sensible objects, it is the people, the Saxons,
who fix it ; these living words are too firmly rooted in his experience
to allow of his removing them, and thus the whole substance of the
language comes from him. Here, then, we have the Norman who,
slowly and constrainedly, speaks and understands English, a deformed,
gallicised English, yet English, vigorous and original ; but he has
taken his time about it, for it has required two centuries. It was only
under Henry iii. that the new tongue is complete, with the new con-
stitution, and that, after the like fashion, by alliance and intermixture ;
the burgesses come to take their seats in Parliament with the nobles, at
the same time that Saxon words settle down in the language side by
side with French words.

Y.

So was modern English formed, by compromise, and the necessity
of being understood. But one can well imagine that these nobles, even
Avhile speaking the growing dialect, have their hearts full of French
tastes and ideas ; France remains the land of their genius, and the
Jiterature which now begins, is but translation. Translators, copyists,

CHAP. II.] THE noe:max3. 75

imitators — there is notliiiig else. England is a distant province, -wliich
is to France what tlie United States were, thirty years ago, to Europe :
she exports her wool, and imports her ideas. Open the Voyage and
Travaile of Sir John Ifaundeville,^ the oldest prose-writer, the Viilehar-
douin of the country : his book is but the translation of a translation.^
He writes first in Latin, the language of scholars ; then in French, the
language of society ; finally he reflects, and discovers that the barons,
his compatriots, by governing the rustic Saxons, have ceased to speak
their own Norman, and that the rest of the nation never knew it ; he
translates his book into English, and, in addition, takes care to make
it plain, feeling that he speaks to less expanded understandings. He
saj-s in French ;

'II advint une fois que Mahomet allait dans une chapelle ou il y avait un
saint ermite. II entra en la chapelle oil il y avait une petite huisserle et basse,
et etait bien petite la chapelle ; et alors devint la porte si grande qu'il semblait que
ce fut la porte d'un palais. '

He stops, recollects himself, wishes to explain himself better for his
readers across the Channel, and says in English :

' And at the Desertes of Arabye, he wente in to a Chapelle where a Ererayte
duelte. And whan he entred in to tlip Chapelle that was but a lytille and a low
thing, and had but a lytill Dore and a low, than the Entree began to wexe so grct
and so large, and so highe, as though it had ben of a gret Jlynstre, or the Zate of
a Paleys.'^

ifou perceive that he amplifies, and thinks himself bound to clinch and
drive in three or four times in succession the same idea, in order to get
it into an English brain ; his thought is drawn out, dulled, spoiled in
the process. So that, being all a copy, the new literature is mediocre,
and repeats that which went before, with fewer merits and greater
faults.

Let us see, then, what our Norman baron gets translated for him :
first, the chronicles of Geoffroy Gaimar and Robert Wace, which con-

^ He wrote in 1356, and died in 1372.

^ ' And for als moche as it is longe time passed that ther was no generalle Pas-
sage ne Vyage over the See, and many Men desiren for to here speke of the holy
Lond, and han thereof gret Solace and Comfort, I, John Maundevylle, Knyght, alle
be it I be not worthi, that was born in Englond, in the town of Seynt-Albones,
passed the See in the Zeer of our Lord Jesu-Crist 1322, in the Day of Seynt Michelle,
and hidreto have been longe tyme over the See, and have seyn and gon thorghe
manye dyverse londes, and many Provynces, and Kingdomes, and lies.

'And zee shulle undirstonde that I have put this Boke out of Latyn into
Frensche, and translated it azen out of Frensche into Englyssche, that every JIan
of my Nacioun may undirstonde it.' — Sir John MaundevUk's Votjage and Travadc,
ed. Halliwell, 1866, prologue, p. 4.

3 Ibid. xii. p. 139. It is confessed that the original on which "Wace depended
for his ancient History of England is the Latin compilation of Geotfrey of
Monmouth.

76 THE SOURCE. [cook I.

sist of the fabulous history of England continued up to their day, a
dull-rhymed rhapsody, turned into English in a rhapsody no less dull.
The first Englishman who attempts it is Layamon,^ a monk of Ernely,
still fettered in the old idiom, who sometimes happens to rhyme, some-
times fails, altogether barbarous and childish, unable to develop a con-
tinuous idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases, after the
fashion of the ancient Saxon ; after him a monk, Robert of Gloucester,
and a canon, Robert of Brunne, both as insipid and clear as their
French models, having become gallicised, and adopted the significant
characteristic of the race, namely, the faculty and habit of easy narra-
tion, and seeing moving spectacles without deep emotion, of writing
prosaic poetry, of discoursing and developing, of believing that phrases
ending in the same sounds form real poetry. Our honest English
versifiers, Uke their preceptors in Normandy and Ile-de-France, gar-
nished with rhymes their dissertations and histories, and called them
poems. At this epoch, in fact, on the Continent, the whole learning of
the schools descends into the street ; and Jean de ]\Ieung, in his poem

• Extract from the account of the proceedings at Arthur's coronation given by
Layamon, in his translation of Wace, executed about 1180. Madden's Layamon^
1847, ii. p. 625, et passim :

Tha the king igeten hafde

And al his mon-weorede,

Tha bugen ut of burhge

Theines swithe balde.

AUe tha kinges,

And heore here-thringes.

Alle tha biscopes,

And alle tha cljerckes,

All the eorles,

And alle tha bcorues,

Alle tha theines,

Alle the sweines,

Feire iscrudde,

Helde geond felde.

Summe heo gunnen seruen,

Surame heo gunnen urnen,

Summe heo gunnen lepen,

Summe heo gunnen sceoten,

Summe heo wrsestleden

And wither -gome makeden,

Summe heo on uekle

Pleomvedeu under scelde,

Summe heo driven balles

Wide geond tha feldes.

Monianes kuuues gomeu

Ther heo gimnen driuen.

And wha swa mihte iwinae

Wui'thscipe of his gomene.

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 77

of la Rose, is the most tedious of doctors. So In Enaland, Rohert of
Brunne transposes into verse the Manuel des Pe'ches of Bishop Grostete ;
Adam Davie/ certain Scripture histories; Hampole^ composes the
Pricke of Conscience. The titles alone make one yawn ; wiiat of the
text?

' JIankynde mad ys to do Goddns wylle.

And alle Hys byddyngus to fulfille ;

For of al Hys makyng more and les, *

Man most principal creature es.

Al that He made for man hit was done,

As ye schal here after sone.'-*

There is a poem ! You did not think so ; call it a sermon, if you will
give it its proper name. It goes on, well divided, well prolonged,
flowing and hollow ; the literature which contains and resembles it
bears witness of its origin by its loquacity and its clearness.

It bears witness to it by other and more agreeable features. Here
and there we find divergences more or less awkward into the domain of
genius ; for instance, a ballad fidl of quips against Richard, King of
the Romans, who was taken at the battle of Lewes. Moreover, charm
is not lacking, nor sweetness either. No one has ever spoken so
lively and so well to the ladies as the French of the Continent, and
they have not quite forgotten this talent while settling in England.
You perceive it readily in the manner in which they celebrate the
Virgin. Nothing could be more different from the Saxon sentiment,
which is altogether biblical, than the chivalric adoration of the sovereign
Lady, the fascinating Virgin and Saint, who was the real deity of the
middle ages. It breathes in this pleasing hymn :

Hine me ladde mid songe
At foren than leod kinge ;
And the king, for his gomene,
Gaf him geven gode.
Alle tha quene
The icumen weoren there,
And alle tha lafdies,
Leoneden geond walles,
To bihalden the dugethen,
And that folc plteie.
This ilaeste threo da;ges,
Swulc gomes and swulc plreges,
Tha, at than veorthe daeie
The king gon to spekene
And agaef his goden cnihten
All heore rihten ;
He gef seolver, he goef gold,
He gef hors, he gef lond.
Castles, and cloethes eke ;
His monnen he iquende.
About 1312. » About 1349. » Warton, ii. 38.

78 THE SOURCE. [book I.

* Blessed beo thu, lavedi,
Ful of hovene blisse ;
Swete flur of parais,
Moder of milternisse. . . .
I-blessed beo thu, Lavedi,
So fair and so briht ;
Al min hope is uppon the,
Bi day and bi nicht. . . .
Bricht and scene quen of storre,
So me liht and lere.
In this false fikele world.
So me led and steore. *■

There is but a short and easy step between this tender worship of the
Virgin and the sentiments of the court of love. The English rhymesters
take it ; and Avhen they wish to praise their earthly mistresses, they
borrow, here as elsewhere, our ideas and very form of verse. One
compares his lady to all kinds of precious stones and flowers ; others
sing truly amorous songs, at times sensual :

' Bytuene Mershe and Aueril,
When spray biginneth to springe,
The Intel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge,
Ich libbe in loue longinge
V For semlokest of alle thynge.

He may me blysse bringe,
Icham in hire baundoun.
An hendy hap ich abbe yhent,
Ichot from lieuene it is me sent.
From all wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on Alysoun. ' "^

Another sings :

* Suete lemmon, y preye the, of loue one speche,
AVhil y lyne in -world so wyde other nnlle y seche.
"With thy loue, my suete leof, mi bliss thou mihtes eclie
A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche. ' ^

Is not this the lively and warm imagination of the south ? They speak
of springtime and of love, ' the fine and lovely weather,' like trouveres,
even like troubadours. The dirty, smoke-grimed cottage, the black
feudal castle, where all but the master lie higgledy-piggledy on the
straw in the great stone hall, the cold rain, the muddy earth, make
the return of the sun and the warm air deUcious.

'Sumer is i-cumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu :

* Time of Henry m., Reliquice AnthjiicB, edited by Messrs. Wright and Halli-
well, 1. 102.

2 About 1278. Warton, i. 28. s /jj^. i ^1.

CHAP. II.] THE NOHMAXS. 79

Groweth sed, and blowcth tncd.
And springeth the wde uu.

Sing cuccu, cuccu.
Awe Iileteth after lonib,
Llouth after calue cu,
BuUnc sterteth, bucke vertetli :

Murie sing cuccu,

Cuccu, cuccu.
"Wei singes thu cuccu ;
]Se swik thu nauer utu

Sing, cuccu nu,

Sing, cuccu.*

Here are glowing pictures, such as Guillaume de Lorris was writing at
the same time, even richer and more lively, perhaps because the poet
found here for inspiration that love of country life which in England is
deep and national. Others, more imitative, attempt pleasantries like
those of liutebeuf and the fabliaux, frank quips,^ and even satirical,
loose waggeries. Their true aim and end is to hit out at the monks.
In every French country, or country which imitates France, the most
manifest use of convents is to furnish material for sprightly and scan-
dalous stories. One writes, for instance, of the kind of life they live at
the abbey of Cocagne :

' There is a wel fair ahbei.
Of white monkes and of grei.
Ther beth bowris and halles ;
Al of pasteiis beth the wallis.
Of fleis, of fisse, and rich met,
The likfullist that man may et.
Fhiren cakes both the schingles alle,
Of cherche, cloister, boure, and lialle.
The pinnes beth fat podinges
lUeh. met to princes and kinges. . . .
Though paraais be miri and bright
Cokaifrn is of fairir sight. . . .
Another abbei is ther bi,
Forsoth a gret fair nunnerie. ...
"When the someris dai is hote
The young nuunes takith a bote . . •
And doth ham forth in that river
Both with ores and with stere. . . .
And each monk him takes on,
And sneUiche berrith forth hai' prei
To the mochil grei abbei.
And techith the nunnes an oreisun,
With iamblene up and down. '

^ "Warton, i. 30.

* Poem of the Owl and Nigldingale, who dispute as to whicli has the finest
voice.

80 THE souFtCE. [ecok I.

This is the trinmpli of gluttony and feeding. ^Moreover many things
could be mentioned in the middle ages, Avhich are now unmention-
able.

But it was the poems of chivalry, which represented to him in fair
language his own mode of life, that the baron preferred to have trans-
lated. He desired that his trouvere should set before his eyes the
magnificence which he has spread around him, and the luxury and
enjoyments which he has introduced from France. Life at that time,
i without and even during war, was a great pageant, a brilliant and

tumultuous kind of fete. When Henry ii. travelled, he took with him
a great number of knights, foot-soldiers, baggage-waggons, tents, war-
horses, comedians, courtesans, and their overseers, cooks, confectioners,
posture-makers, dancers, barbers, go-betweens, hangers-on.^ In the
morning when they start, the assemblage begins to shout, sing, hustle
each other, make racket and rout, ' as if hell were let loose.' William
Longchamps, even in time of peace, would not travel without a
thousand horses by way of escort. When Archbishop a Becket came
to France, he entered the town with two hundred knights, a number
of barons and nobles, and an army of servants, all richly armed and
equipped, he himself being provided with four-and-twenty suits ; two
hundred and fifty children walked in front, singing national songs;
then dogs, then carriages, then a dozen war-horses, each ridden by an
ape and a man ; then equerries, with shields and horses ; then more
equerries, falconers, a suite of domestics, knights, priests ; lastly, the
archbishop himself, with his particular friends. Imagine these pro-
cessions, and also these entertainments ; for the Normans, after the
Conquest, ' borrowed from the Saxons the habit of excess in eating and
drinking.'^ At tlie marriage of Eichard Plantagenet, Earl of Corn-
wall, they provided thirty thousand dishes.^ Add to this, that they
still continued to be gallant, and punctiliously performed the great
precept of the love courts ; be assured that in the middle age the
sense of love was no more idle than the others. Mark also that tourneys
were plentiful ; a sort of opera prepared for their own entertainment.
So ran their life, full of adventure and adornment, in the open air and
in the sunlight, with show of cavalcades and arms ; they act a pageant,
and act it with enjoyment. Thi;s the King of Scots, having come to
London with a hundred knights, at the coronation of Edward i., they
all dismounted, and made over their horses and superb caparisons to the
people ; as did also five English lords, emulating their example. In

1 Letter of Peter of Blois. ^ William of Malmesbury.

^ At the installation-feast of George Nevill, Archbishop of York, the brother of
Guy of "Warwick, there were consumed, 104 oxen and 6 wild bulls, 1000 sheep,
304 calves, as many hogs, 2000 swine, 500 stags, bucks, and does, 20-4 kids,
22,802 wild or tame fowl, 300 quarters of corn, 300 tuns of ale, 100 of wine, a
pipe of hypocras, 12 porpoises and seals.

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 81

the midst of war they took their pleasure. Edward iir., in one of
his expeditions against the King of France, took with him tliirty
falconers, and made his campaign alternately hunting and fighting, '^
Another time, says Froissart, the knights who joined the army carried
a plaster over one eye, having vowed not to remove it until they had
performed an exploit worthy of their mistresses. Out of the very exube-
rancy of genius they practised the art of poetry ; out of the buoyancy
of their imagination they made a sport of life. Edward in. built at
Windsor a round hall and a round table ; and in one of his tourneys in
London, sixty ladies, seated on palfreys, led, as in a fairy tale, each her
knight by a golden chain. Was not this the triumph of the gallant
and frivolous French fashions ? His wife Philippa sat as a model to
the artists for their Madonnas, She appeared on the field of battle ;
listened to Froissart, Avho provided her with moral-plays, love-stories,
and ' things fair to listen to.' At once goddess, heroine, and scholar,
and all this so agreeably, was she not a true queen of polite chivalry ?
Now, as in France under Louis of Orleans and the Dukes of Burgundy,
the most elegant flower of this romanesque civilisation appeared, void
of common sense, given up to passion, bent on pleasure, immoral and
brilliant, but, like its neighbours of Italy and Provence, for lack of
serious intention, it could not last.

Of all these marvels the narrators make display in their accounts.
Follow this picture of the vessel which takes the mother of King
Kichard into England : —

o

' Swlk on ne seygh they never non ;
All it was whyt of huel-bon,
And every nayl with gold begrave :
Off pure gold was the stave.
Her mast was of yvory ;
Off samyte the sayl wytterly.
Her ropes wer off tuely sylk,
Al so whyt as ony mylk.
That noble schyp was al withoute,
With clotliys of golde sprede aboute ;
And her loof and her wyndas,
Off assure forsothe it was. ' ^

On such subjects they never run dry. When the King of Hungary
wishes to console his afflicted daughter, he proposes to take her to the
chase in the following style '-"

' To-morrow ye shall in hunting fare ;
And yede, my daughter, in a chair ;

' These prodigalities and refinements giew to excess under his grandson
Richard ii.

* War ton, L 156.

82 THE SOURCE. [eOOK L

It shall be covered with velvet red,

And cloths of fine gold all about your head,

"With damask white and azure blue.

Well diapered with lilies new.

Your pommels shall be ended with gold,

Your chains enamelled many a fold,

Your mantle of rich degree,

Purple pall and ermine free.

Jennets of Spain that ben so light,

Trapped to the ground with velvet bright.

Ye shall have harp, sautry, and song,

And other mirths you among.

Ye shall have Rumney and Malespine,

Both hippocras and Vernage wine ;

Montrese and wine of Greek,

Both Algrade and despice eke,

Antioch and Bastarde,

Pyment also and garnarde ;

"Wine of Greek and Muscadel,

Both clare, pyment, and Piochelle,

The reed j'^our stomach to defy,

And pots of osey set you by.

You shall have venison ybake,

The best wild fowl that may be take ;

A leish of harehound with you to streek,

A.nd hart, and hind, and other like.

Ye shall be set at such a tryst.

That hart and hynd shall come to you fist.

Your disease to drive you fro,

To hear the bugles there yblow.

Homeward thus shall ye ride,

On hawking by the river's side,

"With gosshawk and with gentle falcon,

With bugle-horn and merlion.

When you come home your menie among,

Ye shall have revel, dance, and song ;

Little children, great and small,

Shall sing as does the nightingale.

Then shall ye go to your evensong.

With tenors and trebles among.

Threescore of copes of damask bright.

Full of pearls they shall be pight.

Your censors shall be of gold,

Indent with azure many a fold ;

Your quire nor organ song shall want.

With contre-note and descant.

The other half on organs playing,

AVith young children full fain singing.

Then shall j'e go to your supper.

And sit in tents in green arber.

With cloth of arras pight to the ground.

With sapphires set of diamond.

CnAP. II.J THE NOEMAyS. 83

A huniired knights, truly told,

Shall play with bowls in alleys cold,

Your disease to drive away ;

To see the fishes in pools play.

To a drawbridge then shall ye,

Th' one half of stone, th' other of Lrec ;

A barge shall meet you full right,

AVith twenty-four oars full bright,

"With trumpets and with clarion,

The fresh water to row up and down. . . •

Forty torches burning bright

At your bridge to bring you liffht.

Into your chamber they shall you bring,

"With much mirth and more liking.

Your blankets shall be of fustian,

Your sheets shall be of cloth of Rennes.

Your head sheet shall be of pery pight,

"With diamonds set and rubies bright.

"When you are laid in bed so soft,

A cage of gold shall hang aloft,

AVith long paper fair burning.

And cloves that be sweet smelling.

Frankincense and olibanum.

That when ye sleep the taste may come ;

And if ye no rest can take.

All night minstrels for you shall wake. ' •

Amid such fancies and splendours the poets delight and lose them-
selves; and the result, Hke the embroideries of tlieir canvas, bears the
mark of this love of decoration. They weave it out of adventures, of
extraordinary and surprising events. Now it is the life of King Horn,
Avho, thrown into a vessel when quite young, is driven upon the coast
of England, and, becoming a knight, reconquers the kingdom of his
father. Now it is the history of Sir Guy, who rescues enchanted
knights, cuts down the giant Colbrand, challenges and kills the Sultan
in his tent. It is not for me to recount these poems, which are not
English, but only translations ; still, here as in France, they are multi-
plied, they fill the imaginations of the young society, and they grow by
exaggeration, until, falling to the lowest depth of insipidity and impro-
bability, they are buried for ever by Cervantes. What would you say
of a society which had no literature but the opera with its unrealities ?
Yet it was a literature of this kind which nourished the genius of the
middle ages. They did not ask for truth, but entertainment, and that
vehement and hollow, full of glare and startling events. They asked
for impossible voyages, extravagant challenges, a racket of contests,
a confusion of magnificence and entanglement of chances. For intro-
spective history they had no liking, cared nothing for the adventures
of the heart, devoted their attention to the outside. They lived hke

* Warton, i 176, spelling modernised.

84 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

children, with eyes glued to a series of exaggerated and coloured images,
and, for lack of thinking, did not perceive that they had learnt nothing.
What was there beneath this fanciful dream ? Brutal and evil
hupian passions, unchained at first by religious fury, then delivered to
their own devices, and, beneath a show of external courtesy, as vile as
before. Look at the popular king, Richard Coeur de Lion, and reckon
up his butcheries and murders: 'King Richard,' says a poem, 'is the
best king ever mentioned in song."^ I have no objection; but if he has
the heart of a lion, he has also that brute's appetite. One day, under
the walls of Acre, being convalescent, he had a great desire for some
pork. There was no pork. They killed a young Saracen, fresh and
tender, cooked and salted him, and the king eat him and found, him
very good ; whereupon he desired to see the head of the pig. The
cook brought it in trembling. The king falls a laughing, and, says the
army has nothing to fear from famine, having provisions ready at hand.
He takes the town, and presently Saladin's ambassadors come to sue for
pardon for the prisoners. Richard has thirty of the most noble be-
headed, and bids his cook boil the heads, and serve one to each ambas-
sador, with a ticket bearing the name and family of the dead man.
Meanwhile, in their presence, he eats his own with a relish, bids them
tell Saladin how the Christians make war, and ask him if it is true
that they feared him. Then he orders the sixty thousand prisoners to
be led into the plain :

' They were led into the place full even.
There they heard angels of heaven ;
They said : " Seign cures, tuez, tuez !
Spares hem nought, and beheadeth these ! "
King Richard heard the angels' voice,
And thanked God and the holy cross.'

Thereon they behead them all. When he took a town, it was his wont
to murder every one, even children and women. That was the devotion
of the middle ages, not only in romances, as here, but in history. At
the taking of Jerusalem the whole population, seventy thousand per-
sons, were massacred.

Thus even in chivalrous accounts break out the fierce and unbridled
instincts of the bloodthirsty brute. The authentic narratives show it
equally. Henry ii., irritated against a page, attempted to tear out
his eyes.^ John Lackland let twenty-three hostages die in prison of
hunger. Edward ii. caused at one time twenty-eight nobles to be
hanged and disembowelled, and was himself put to death by the inser-

MVarton, i. 123:

' In Fraunce these rhymes were wroht,
Every Englyshe ne knew it not.'
' See Lingard's History, ii. 55, note 4. — Tr.

CHAP. II.] THE NOEMANS. 85

tion of a red-hot iron into his bowels. Look in Froissart for the de-
baucheries and murders, in France as well as in England, of the Hun-
dred Years' War, and then for the slaughters of the Wars of the Koses.
In both countries feudal independence ended in civil war, and the
middle age founders under its vices. Chivalrous courtesy, which cloaked
the native ferocity, disappears like a garment suddenly consumed by
the breaking out of a tire ; at that time in England they killed nobles
in preference, and prisoners too, even children, with insults, in cold
blood. W^hat, then, did man learn in this civilisation and by this
literature ? How was he humanised ? What precepts of justice, habits
ot reflection, store of true judgments, did this culture interpose between
his desires and his actions, in order to moderate his passion ? He
dreamed, he imagined a sort of elegant ceremonial in order to address
better lords and ladies ; he discovered the gallant code of little Jehan
de Saintre. But where is the true education ? Wherein has Froissart
profited by all his vast experience ? He was a fine specimen of a
babbling child ; what they called his poesy, the poe'sie neiive, is only a
refined gabble, a senile pixerility. Some rhetoricians, like Christine de
Pisan, try to round their periods after an ancient model ; but their
literature amounts to nothing. No one can think. Sir John Maunde-
ville, who travelled all over the world a hundred and fifty years after
Villehardouin, is as contracted in his ideas as Villehardouin himself.
Extraordinary legends and fables, every sort of credulity and ignor-
ance, abound in his book. When he wishes to explain why Palestine
has passed into the hands of various possessors instead of continuing
under one government, he says that it is because God would not that
it should continue longer in the hands of traitors and sinners, whether
Christians or others. He has seen at Jerusalem, on the steps of the
temple, the footmarks of the ass which our Lord rode on Palm Sunday.
He describes the Ethiopians as a people who have only one foot, but so
large that they can make use of it as a parasol. He instances one
island ' where be people as big as gyants, of 28 feet long, and have
no cloathing but beasts' skins ;' then another island, 'where there are
many evil and foul women, but have precious stones in their eyes, and
have such force that if they behold any man with wrath, they slay him
with beholding, as the basilisk doth.' The good man relates ; that is
all : hesitation and good sense scarcely exist in the world he lives in.
He has neither judgment nor personal reflection ; he piles facts one on
top of another, with no further connection ; his book is simply a mirror
which reproduces recollections of his eyes and ears. 'And all those
who will say a Pater and an Ave Maria in my behalf, I give them an
interest and a share in all the holy pilgrimages I ever made in my life.*
That is his farewell, and accords with all the rest. Neither public
morality nor public knowledge has gained anything from these three
centuries of culture. This French culture, copied in vain throughout
Europe, has but superficially adorned mankind, and the varnish with

80 THE SOURCE. [BOOK T.

which it decked them, already fades away or scales off. It was worse
in England, where the thing was more superficial and the application
worse than in France, Avhere strange hands daubed it on, and where it
only half-covered the Saxon crust, which remained coarse and rough.
That is the reason why, during three centuries, throughout the first
feudal age, the literature of the JNormans in England, made up ot imi-
tations, translations, and clumsy copies, ends in notliing.

VI.

Meantime, Avhat has become of the conqiiered people? Has the
old stock on which the brilliant continental flowers were grafted, en-
gendered no shoot of its own speciality ? Did it continue barren
during this time under the Norman axe, which stripped it of all its
shoots? It grew very feebly, but it grew nevertheless. The subju-
gated race is not a dismembered nation, dislocated, uprooted, sluggish,
like the populations of the Continent, which, after the long Roman
oppression, were delivered over to the disorderly invasion of bar-
barians ; it remained united, fixed in its own soil, full of sap : its
members were not displaced ; it was simply lopped in order to receive
on its crown a cluster of foreign branches. True, it had sufiered, but
at last the wound closed, the saps mingled.^ Even the hard, stiff liga-
tures with which the Conqueror bound it, henceforth contributed to its
fixity and vigour. The land was mapped out ; every title verified,
defined in writing ;'^ every right or tenure valued; every man registered
as to his locality, condition, duty, resources, Avorth, so that the whole
nation Avas enveloped in a network of which not a mesh Avould break.
Its future development Avas according to this pattern. Its constitution
Avas settled, and in this determinate and stringent enclosure men were
bound to unfold themselves and to act. Solidarity and strife: these
were the two effects of the great and orderly establishment Avhich
shaped and held together, on one side the aristocracy of the conquerors,
on the other the conquered people ; even as in Kome the systematic
importation of conquered peoples into the plebs, and the constrained
organisation of the patricians in contrast Avith the plebs, enrolled the
several elements in tAVO orders, Avhose opposition and union formed the
state. Thus, here as in Rome, the national character Avas moulded and
completed by the habit of corporate action, the respect for Avritten law,
political and practical aptitude, the development of combative and
patient energy. It was the Domesday Book Avhich, binding this young

^ Pictorial History, i. 666 ; Dialogue on the Exchequer, temp. Henr. ii.

2 Domesday Book. Froude's Hist, of England, 1858, i. 13 : ' Throu£(h all these
arrangements a single aim is visible, that every man in England should have Iiis
ilefinite place and definite duty assigned to him, and that no human being should
be at liberty to lead at his own pleasure an unaccountalile existence. The disci-
pline of an army was transferred to the details of social life.'

CHAP. II.] THE NORJIANS. 87

society in a rigid discipline, made of the Saxon the Englishman we see
in our own day.

Gradually and slowly, through the gloomy complainings of the
chroniclers, we find the new man fashioned by action, like a child who
cries because a steel instrument, though it improves his figure, gives him
pain. However reduced and downtrodden the Saxons were, they did not
all sink into the popidace. Some,^ almost in every county, remained
lords of their estates, if they would do homage for them to tlie king. A
great number became vassals of Norman barons, and remained proprie-
tors on this condition. A greater number became socagers, that is, free
proprietors, burdened with a tax, but possessed of the right of alienat-
ing their property ; and the Saxon villeins found patrons in these, as
the plebs formerly did in the Italian nobles who were transplanted to
Kome. It was an effectual patronage, that of the Saxons who pre-
served their integral position, for they were not isolated : marriages
from the first imited the two races, as it had the patricians and plebeians
of Eome;^ a Norman, brother-in-law to a Saxon, defended himself in
defending him. In those troublesome times, and in an armed com-
munity, relatives and allies were obliged to stand close to one another
for security. After all, it was necessary for the new-comers to consider
their subjects, for these subjects had tlie heart and courage of a man :
the Saxons, like the plebeians at Rome, remembered their native rank
and their original independence. "VVe can recognise it in the com-
plaints and indignation af the chroniclers, in the growling and menaces
of popular revolt, in the long bitterness with which they continually
recalled their ancient liberty, in the favour with which they cherished
the daring and rebellion of the outlaws. There were Saxon families at
the end of the twelfth century, who had bound themselves by a per-
petual vow, to wear long beards from father to son, in memory of the
national custom and of the old country. Such men, even though
fallen to the condition of socagers, even sunk into villeins, had a stiffer
neck than the wretched colonists of the Continent, trodden down and
moulded by four centuries of Roman taxation. By their feelings as
by their condition, they were the broken remains, but also the living
elements, of a free people. They did not suffer the limits of oppression.
They constitute the body of the nation, the laborious, courageous body
which supplied its energy. The great barons felt that they must rely

^ Domesday Book, 'tenants-in-chief.'

' Pict. Hist. i. 666. According to Ailred (temp. Hen. ii.), 'a king, many
Mshops and abbots, many great earls and noble kniglits, descended both from
English aad Xorman blood, constituted a support to the one and an honour to the
other.' ' At present,' says another author of the same period, 'as the English and
Kormans dwell together, and have constantly interman-ied, the two nations are so
completely mingled together, that, at least as regards freemen, one can scarcely
distinguish who is Norman, and who English. . . . The villeins attached to the
soil,' he says again, 'are alone of pure Saxon blood.'

88 THE SOURCE. [bOOK I.

upon them in their resistance to the king. Very soon, in stipulating
for themselves, they stipulated for all freemen/ even for the merchants
and villeins. Thereafter

' No merchant shall be dispossessed of his merchandise, no villein of the instru-
ments of his labour ; no freeman, merchant, or villein shall be taxed imreasonably
for a small crime ; no freeman shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised of his
land, or outlawed, or destroyed in any manner, but by the lawful judgment of his
peers, or by the law of the land.'

The red-bearded Saxon, with his clear complexion and great white
teeth, came and sate by the Norman's side ; these were franklins like
the one whom Chaucer describes :

' A Frankelein was in this compagnie ;
AVhite was his herd, as is the dayesie.
Of his complexion he was sanguin,
AVel loved he by the morwe a sop in win.
To hven in delit was ever his wone.
For he was Epicures owen sone,
That held opinion that plein delit
AVas veraily felicite parfite.
An housliolder, and that a grete was h^
Seint Julian he was in his contree.
His brede, his ale, was alway after on ;
A better envyned man was no wher non.
AVithouten bake mete never was his houa.
Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous.
It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke.
Of all deintees that men coud of thinke ;
After the sondry sesons of the yere,
So changed he his mete and his soupere.
Ful many a fat partrich had he in mewe,
And many a breme, and many a luce in stewe.
AVo was his coke but if his sauce were
Poinant and sharpe, and redy all his gere.
His table, dormant in his halle alway
Stode redy covered alle the longe day.
At sessions ther was he lord and sire.
Ful often time he was knight of the shire.
An anelace and a gipciere all of silk,
Heng at his girdel, white as morwe milk.
A shereve hadde he ben, and a contoiu-.
Was no whei swiche a worthy vavasour. ' ^

With him occasionally in the assembly, oftenest among the audience,
were the yeomen, farmers, foresters, tradesmen, his fellow-countrymen,
muscular and resolute men, noi slow in the defence of their property,
and in the support, with voice, blows, and weapons, of him who would

' JIagna Charta, 1215.

* Chaucer's Works, ed. Sir H. Nicholas, 6 vols., 1845, Prologue to the Canter^
bury Tales, ii. p. 11, v. 333.

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 89

take their cause in hand. Is it likely that the discontent of such men
could be overlooked ?

' The ililler was a stout carl for the nones,
Ful bigge he was of braun, and eke of bones ;
That proved wel, for over all ther he came,
At wrastling he wold here away the ram.
He was short shuldered brode, a thikke gnarre,
Ther n'as no dore, that he n'olde heye of barre.
Or breke it at a renning with his hede.
His berd as any sowe or fox was rede,
And therto brode, as thougli it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A wert, and theron stode a tufte of heres,
Eede as the bristles of a sowes eres :
His nose-thirles blacke were and wide.
A swerd and bokeler bare he by his side.
His mouth as Mide was as a forneis,
He was a jangler and a goliardeis,
And that was most of sinne, and harlotries.
"Wel coude he stelen corne and tollen thries.
And yet he had a thomb of gold parde.
A white cote and a blew hode wered he.
A baggepipe wel coude he blowe and soune,
And therwithall he brought us out of toune.' *

Those are the athletic forms, the square build, the jolly John Bulls
of the period, such as we yet find them, nourished by meat and porter,
sustained by bodily exercise and boxing. These are the men we
must keep before us, if we will understand how political liberty has
been established in the country. Gradually they find the simple
knights, their colleagues in the county court, too poor to assist witli
the great barons at the royal assemblies, coalescing with them. Tliey
become united by commiTuity of interests, by similarity of manners, by
nearness of condition ; they take them for their representatives, tliey
elect them.^ They have now entered upon public life, and the advent
of a new reinforcement, gives them a perpetual standing in their changed
condition. The towns laid waste by the Conquest are gradually re-
peopled. They obtain or exact charters ; the townsmen buy themselves
out of the arbitrary taxes that Avere imposed on them; they get possession
of the land on which their houses are built ; they unite themselves under
mayors and aldermen. Each town now, within the meshes of the great
feudal net, is a power. Leicester, rebelling against the king, summons
two burgesses from each town to Parlhiment,^ to authorise and support
him. Thenceforth the conquered race, both in country and town, has

^ Prologue to the Canterhurif Tales, ii. p. 17, v. 547.

* From 1214, and also in 1225 and 1254. Guizot, Origin of the ReprcsentaCue
System in England, pp. 297-299.

* In 12C4.

90 THE SOURCE. [book I.

risen to political life. If they are taxed, it is with tlieir consent ; they
pay nothing which they do not agree to. Early in the fourteentli cen-
tury tlieir united deputies compose the House of Commons ; and already,
at the close of the preceding century, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
speaking in the name of the king, said to the pope, ' It is the custom of
the kingdom of England, that in all affairs relating to the state of this
khifrdom, the advice of all ^vho are interested in them should be taken.'

VII.

If they have acquired liberties, it is because they have conquered
them ; circumstances have assisted, but character has done more. The
protection of the great barons and the alliance of the plain knights
have strengthened them ; but it was by their native roughness and
energy that they maintained their independence. For, look at the con-
trast they offer at this moment to their neighbours. What occupies
the mind of the French people ? The fabliaux, the naughty tricks of
Renard, the art of deceiving Master Ysengrin, of stealing his wife, of
cheating him out of his dinner, of getting him beaten by a third party
without danger to one's self; in short, the triumph of poverty and
cleverness over power united to folly. The popular hero is already
the artful plebeian, chaffing, light-hearted, who, later on, will ripen into
Panurge and Figaro, not apt to withstand you to your face, too sharp
to care for great victories and habits of strife, inclined by the nimble-
ness of his wit to dodge round an obstacle ; if he but touch a man with
the tip of his finger, that man tumbles into the trap. But here we have
other customs : it is Eobin Hood, a valiant outlaw, living free and bold
in the green forest, waging frank and open war against sheriff and law.'
If ever a man was popular in Lis country, it was he. * It is he,' says an
old historian, whom the common people love so dearly to celebrate in
games and comedies, and whose history, sung by fiddlers, interests them
more than any other.' In the sixteenth century he still had his com-
memoration day, observed by all the people in the small towns and in
the country. Bishop Latimer, making his pastoral tour, announced one
day that he would preach in a certain place. On the morrow, pro-
ceeding to the church, he found the doors closed, and waited more than
an hour before they brought him the key. At last a man came and
said to him, ' Syr, thys ys a busye day with us ; we cannot heare you :
it is Robyn Hoodes Daye. The parishe are gone abrode to gather for
Eobyn Hoode. ... I was fayne there to geve place to Robyn Hoode.' ^
The bishop was obliged to divest himself of his ecclesiastical garments
and proceed on his journey, leaving his place to archers dressed in
green, who plaj^ed on a rustic stage the parts of Robin Hood, Little
John, and their band. In fact, he is the national hero. Saxon in the

' Aug. Thien-y, iv. 56. Eitson's Eohhi Hood, 1832.

2 Latimer's Pennons, ed. Arber, 6th Sermon, 1869, p. 173.

CTIAP. 11. J THE NORMAXS. 01

first place, and \vaging war against the men of law, against hi'^hops and
archbishops, whose sway was so heavy ; generous, moreover, giving- to a
poor ruined knight clothes, horse, and money to buy back the Umd "h?.
had pledged to a rapacious abbot; compassionate too, and kind to the
poor, enjoining his men not to injure yeomen and labourers ; but before
all rash, bold, proud, who would go and draw his bow under the"
sheriff's eyes and to his face ; ready with blows, whether to receive or
to return them. He slew fourteen out of fifteen foresters who came to
arrest him; he slays the sheriff, the judge, the town gatekeeper; he is
ready to slay plenty more ; and all this joyously, jovially, like an
honest fellow who eats well, has a hard skin, lives in the open air, and
revels iu animal life.

' In somer when the shawes be sheyns,

And leves be large and long,
Hit is I'ulle mery in feyre foruste
To nere the fouiys song. '

That is how many ballads begin ; and the fine weather, which makes
the stags and oxen rush headlong with extended horns, inspires tlu'in
with the thought of exchanging blows with sword or stick. Kobin
dreamed that two yeomen were thrashing him, and he wants to go and
find them, angrily repulsing Little John, who offers to go iu advance :

* Ah John, by me tliou settest noe store,

And that I farley finde :
How offt send I my men before.
And tarry myselfe behinde ?

*It is no cunning a knave to ken,

An a man but heare him speake ;
An it were not for bursting of my bowe,
John, I thy head wold breake. ' * . . .

He goes alone, and meets the robust yeoman, Guy of Gisborne;

' He that had neyther beene kythe nor kin,

Might have seen a full fajTe fight,
To see how together these yeomen went
"With blades both browne and bright,

' To see how these yeomen together they fought

Two howres of a summer's day ;
Yrtt neither Kobin Hood nor sir Guy
Tliem fettled to flye away.'^

You see Guy the yeoman is as brave as Robin Hood ; he came to seek
him in the wood, and drew the bow almost as Avell as he. This old
popular poetry is not the praise of a single bandit, but of an entire
class, the yeomanry. ' God haffe mersey on Kobin Hodys solle, and
saffe all god yemanry.' That is how many ballads end. The strong

' Ritson, Hoboi Hood Ballads, i. iv. v. 41-48. « jfj-^i ,,_ 145-152.

92 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

yeoman, inured to blows, a good archer, clever at sword and stick, is
the fovourite. There was also redoubtable, armed townsfolk, accus-
tomed to make use of their arms. Here they are at work :

' " 0 that were a shame," said jolly Rohin,

" We being three, and thou but one."
The pinder' leapt back then thirty good foot,
'Twas thirty good foot and one.

• He leaned his back fast unto a thorn,

And his foot against a stone,
And there he fought a long summer'.s day,
A summer's day so long,

*Till that their swords on their broad bucklers
Were broke fast into their hands. ' ^ . . .

Often even Robin does not get the advantage :

• "I pass not for length," bold Arthur reply'd,

" My staff is of oke so free ;
Eight foot and a half, it will knock down a calf,
And I hope it will knock do'tt'n thee."

*Then Eobin could no longer forbear,
He gave him such a knock,
Quickly and soon the blood came down
Before it was ten a clock.

• Then Arthur he soon recovered himself,

And gave him such a knock on the crown.
That from every side of bold Robin Hood's head
The blood came trickliuff down.

Then Robin raged like a wild boar,

As sooTi as he saw his own blood :
Then Bland was in hast, he laid on so fast.

As though he had been cleaving of wood.

*And about and about and about they went,

Like two wild bores in a chase,
Striving to aim each other to maim,
Leg, arm, or any other place.

*And knock for knock they lustily dealt,

Which held for two hours and more.
Till all the wood rang at every bang.
They ply'd their work so sore.

' " Hold thy hand, hold thy hand," said Robin Hood,

"And let thy quarrel fall ;
For here we may thrash oiu: bones all to mesh,
And get no coyn at all.

' A pinder's task was to pin the sheep in the fold, cattle in the perdokl or
jjound (Richardson). — Tn.
* Ritsou, ii. 3, v. 17-26.

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 93

' ' " And in tlie forrest of mony Sherwood,
Hereafter thou shalt be free."
"God a mercy for nought, my freedom I bought,
I may thank my staff, and uot thee.'"^ . . .

*Who are yon, then ?' says Robin :

' " I am a tanner," bokl Arthur reply "d,
" In Nottingham Ions; I have wrought ;
And if thou'lt come tliere, I vow and swear,
I will tan thy hide for nought."

* " God a mercy, good fellow," said jolly Robin,
" Since thou art so kind and free ;
And if thou wilt tan my hide for nought,
I will do as much for thee. " ' ^

With these generous offers, they embrace ; a free exchange of honest
TdIows always prepares the way for friendship. It was so Kobin
Hood tried Little John, whom he loved all his life after. Little John
was seven feet high, and being on a bridge, would not give way.
Honest Robin would not use his bow against him, but went and cut a
stick seven feet long ; and they agreed amicably to fight on the bridge
until one should fall into the water. They hit and smite to such a
tune that ' their bones did sound.' In the end Robin falls, and he feels
nothing but respect for Little John. Another time, having a sword
with him, he Avas thraslied by a tinker who had only a stick. Full of
admiration, he gives him a hundred pounds. One time it was by a
potter, Avho refused him toll ; another by a shepherd. They fight for
pastime. Even now-a-days boxers give each other a friendly grip before
meeting ; they knock one another about in this country honourably,
without malice, fury, or shame. Broken teeth, black eyes, smashed
ribs, do not call for murderous vengeance ; it would seem that the
bones are more solid and the nerves less sensitive in England than else-
where. Blows once exchanged, they take each other by the hand, and
dance together on the green grass :

* Then Robin took them both by the hands,
And danc'd round about the oke tree.
*' For three merry men, and three merry men,
And three merry men we be. " '

Observe, moreover, that these people, in each parish, practised the
bow every Sunday, and were the best archers in the world, — that from
the close of the fourteenth century the general emancipation of the
villeins multiplied their number enormously, and you may understand
how, amidst all the operations and changes of the great central powers,
the liberty of the subject endured. After all, the only permanent and
unalterable guarantee, in every country and under every constitution,

> Ritson. ii. 6, v. 58-89. ^ lOid. v. 94-101.

04 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK L

i? till? un?]-'oken cleclaraticn in the heart of the mass of the people,
which is well understood on all sides : ' If any one touches my pro-
perty, enters my house, obstructs or molests me, let him beware. I
have patience, but I have also strong arms, good comrades, a good
blade, and, on occasion, a firm resolve, happen what may, to plunge
my blade up to its hilt in his throat.'

viir.

Thus thought Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of England under
Henry vi., exiled in France during the Wars oi the Roses, one of the
oldest prose-writers, and the first who weighed and explained the con-
stitution of his country.^ He says :

' It is cowardise and lack of hartes and corage that kepeth the Frenchmen from
rysyng, and not povertye;^ which corage no Frenche man hath like to the English
man. It hath ben often seen in Englond that iij or iv thefes, for povertie, hath
sett upon vij or viij true men, and robbyd them al. But it hath not ben seen in
Fraunce, that vij or viij thefes have ben hardy to robbe iij or iv true men. Wher-
for it is right seld that Frenchmen be hangyd for robberye, for that they have no
hertys to do so terryble an acte. There be therfor mo men hangj'd in Englond, in
a yere, for robberye and manslaughter, than ther be hangid in Fraunce for such
cause of crime in vij yers. ' *

This throws a sudden and terrible Waht on the violent condition of this
armed community, where blows are an everyday matter, and where
every one, rich and poor, lives with his hand on his sword. There
were great bands of malefactors under Edward i., who infested the
country, and fought with those who came to seize them. The inha-
bitants of the towns were obliged to gather together with those of the
neighbouring towns, with hue and cry, to pursue and capture them.
Under Edward in, there were barons who rode about with armed
escorts and archers, seizing the manors, carrying off ladies and girls of
high degree, mutilating, killing, extorting ransoms from people in their
own houses, as if they were in an enemy's land, and sometimes coming
before the judges at the sessions in such guise and in so great force
that the judges were afraid and dare not administer justice.* Eead

^ The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy — A learned Com-
mendation of the Politic Laws of England (Latin). I frequently quote from the
second work, which is complete.

^ The courage which gives utterance here is coarse ; the English instincts are
combative and independent. The French race, and the Gauls generally, are per-
haps the most reckless of life of any.

^ The Difference, etc., 3d ed. 1724, ch. siii. p. 98. There are now-a-days in
France 42 highway robberies as against 738 in England. In 1843, there were in
England four times as many accusations of crimes and offences as in France, having
regard to the number of inhabitants {Moreau de Jonnas).

* Statute of Winchester, 1285 ; Ordinance of 1378.

CHAP. II.] THE NOR]MAXS. 95"

the letters of the Paston family, under Henry vi. and Edward iv., and
you will see how private war was at every door, how it was necessary
to defend oneself with men and arms, to be alert for the defence of
one's property, to be self-reliant, to depend on one's own strength and
courage. It is this excess of vigour and readiness to fight which, after
their victories in France, set them against one another in England, in the
butcheries of the Wars of the Roses. The strangers who saw them were
astonished at their bodily strength and courage of heart, at the great
pieces of beef ' which feed their muscles, at their military habits, their
fierce obstinacy, as of savage beasts.'^ They are like their bulldogs, an
untameable race, who in their mad courage ' cast themselves with shut
eyes into the den of a Russian bear, and get their head broken like a
rotten apple.' This strange condition of a military community, so full
of danger, and requiring so much effort, does not make them afraid.
King Edward having given orders to send disturbers of the peace to
prison without legal proceedings, and not to liberate them, on bail or
otherwise, the Commons declared the order 'horribly vexatious;' resist
it, refuse to be too much protected. Less peace, but more independence.
They maintain the guarantees of the subject at the expense of public
security, and prefer turbulent liberty to arbitrary order. Better suffer
marauders whom one can fight, than provosts under whom they would
have to bend.

This proud and persistent notion gives rise to, and fashions, For-
tescue's whole work :

' Ther be two kynds of kyngdomys, of the which that one ys a lordship callid
in Latyne Dominium regale, and that other is callid Dominium politicura et regale.'

The first is established in France, and the second in England.

' And they dyversen in that the first may rule his people by such la-nys as he
makyth hymself, and therefor, he may set upon them talys, and other impositions,
such as he wyl hymself, without their assent. The secund may not rule hys people
by other laws than such as they assenten unto ; and therfor he may set upon
them non impositions without their own assent. ' ^

In a state like this, the will of the people is the prime element of life.
Sir John Fortescue says further :

' A king of England cannot at his pleasure make any alterations in the laws
of the land, for the nature of his government is not only regal, hut political."

' In the body politic, the first thing which lives and moves is the intention of
the people, having in it the blood, that is, the prudential care and provision for
the public good, which it transmits and communicates to the head, as to the
principal part, and to all the rest of the members of the said boily politic, whereby
it subsists and is invigorated. The law under which the people is incorporated
maybe compared to the "nerves or sinews of the body natural. . . . And as the

1 Benvenuto Cellini, quoted by Fioude, i. 20, Hist, of England. Shakspeare,
Beniy V. ; conversation of French lords before the battle of AgincourL

2 The Difference, etc., p. i.

9'6 THE SUL^KCE. [BOOK I.

liones and all the other members of the bodj^ preserve their functions find discharge
their several offices by the nerves, so do the members of the community by the
law. And as the head of the body natural cannot change its nerves or sinews,
cannot deny to the several parts their proper energy, their due proportion and ali-
ment of blood, neither can a king who is the head of the body politic change the
laws thereof, nor take from the people what is theirs by right, against their con-
sents. . . . For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their lives, properties,
and laws ; for this very end and purpose he has the delegation of power from the
people. '

Here we have all the ideas of Locke in the fifteenth century ; so
powerful is practice to suggest theory ! so quickly does man discover,
in the enjoyment of liberty, the nature of liberty ! Fortescue goes
further : he contrasts, step by step, the Roman law, that heritage of all
Latin peoples, with the English law, that heritage of aU Teutonic
peoples : one the work of absolute princes, and tending altogether to
the sacrifice of the individual ; the other the work of the common will,
tending altogether to protect the person. He contrasts the maxims of
the imperial jurisconsults, who accord 'force of law to all which is
determined by the prince,' with the statutes of England, which ' are
not enacted by the sole will of the prince, . . . but Avith the concurrent
consent of the whole kingdom, by their representatives in Parliament,
. . . more than three hundred select persons.' He contrasts the arbi-
trary nomination of imperial officers with the election of the sheriff,
and says:

'There is in every county a certain officer, called the king's sheriff, who,
amongst other duties of his office, executes within his county all mandates and
judgments of the king's courts of justice : he is an annual officer ; and it is not
lawful for him, after the expiration of his year, to continue to act in his said office,
neither shall he be taken in again to execute the said office within two years thence
next ensuing. The manner of his election is thus : Every year, on the morrow of
All-Souls, there meet in the King's Court of Exchequer all the king's counsellors,
as well lords spiritual and temporal, as all other the king's justices, all the barons
of the Exchequer, the Master of the KoUs, and certain other officers, when all of
them, by common consent, nominate three of every county knights or esquires,
persons of distinction, and such as they esteem fittest qualified to bear the office of
sherifi' of that county for the year ensuing. The king only makes choice of one out
of the three so nominated and returned, who, in virtue of the king's letters patent,
is constituted High Sheriff of that county.'

He contrasts the Roman procedure, which is satisfied with two wit-
nesses to condemn a man with the jury, the three permitted challenges,
the admirable guarantees of justice with which the uprightness, num-
ber, repute, and condition of the juries surround the sentence. About
the juries he says :

' Twelve good and true men being sworn, as in the manner above related, legally
qualified, that is, having, over and besides their moveables, possessions in land
sufficient, as was said, wherewith to maintain their rank and station ; neither
inspected by, nor at variance with either of the parties ; all of the neighbourhood ,■

CHAP. II.] THE NOKMANS. 97

there shall be read to them, in English, by the Court, the record and nature of the
plea."

Thus protected, the English commons cannot be other than flourishing.
Consider, on the other hand, he says to the young prince Avhom he is
instructing, the condition of the commons in France. By their taxes,
tax on salt, on wine, billeting of soldiers, they are reduced to great
misery. You have seen them on your travels. . . .

' The same Commons be so impoverishid and distroyj'^d, that they may unneth
lyve. Thay diink water, tliay cate apples, with bred right brown made of rye.
They eate no fieshe, but if it be selden, a litill larde, or of the entrails or beds of
bests sclayne for the nobles and merchants of the land. They weryn no wollyn,
but if it be a pore cote under their uttermost garment, made of grete canvass, and
cal it a frok. Their hosj-n be of like canvas, and passen not their knee, wherfor
they be gartrid and their thyghs bare. Tlieir wifs and children gone bare fote. . . .
For sum of them, that was wonte to pay to his lord for his tenement which he
hjTith by the year a scute payth now to the kyng, over that scute, fyve skuts.
Wher thrugh they be artyd by necessite so to watch, labour and grub in the
gi'ound for their sustenance, that their nature is much wasted, and the kynd of
them brought to nowght. Thay gone crokyd and ar feeble, not able to fight nor
to defend the realm ; nor they have wepon, nor monye to buy them wepon withal.
. . . This is the frute first of hjTe Jus regale. . . . But blessed be God, this land
ys rulid under a better lawe, and therfor the people therof be not in such penurye,
nor therby hurt in their persons, but they be wealthie and have all things neces-
sarie to the sustenance of nature. Wherefore they be myghty and able to resyste
the adversaries of the realms that do or will do them wrong. Loo, this is the frut
of Jus politicum et regale, under which we lyve. ' * * Everye inhabiter of the realme
of England useth and enjoyeth at his pleasure aU the fruites that iis land or cattel
beareth, with al the profits and commodities which by his owne travayle, or by the
labour of others, hae gaineth ; not hindered by the iniurie or wrong deteinement of
anye man, but that hee shall bee allowed a reasonable recompence.^ . . . Hereby it
commeth to passe that the men of that lande are riche, havjmg aboundaunce of golde
and silver, and other thinges necessarie for the maintenaunce of man's life. Tliey
drinke no water, unlesse it be so, that some for devotion, and uppon a zeale of
penaunce, doe abstaine from other drinks. They eate plentifully of all kindes of
fieshe and fishe. They weare fine woollen cloth in all their apparel ; they have
also aboundaunce of bed-coveringes in their houses, and of all other woollen stuffe.
They have greate store of all hustlementes and implementes of houseliolde, they are
plentifully furnished with al instruments of husbandry, and all other things that
are requisite to the accomplishment of a quiet and wealthy lyfe, according to their
estates and degrees. Neither are they sued in the lawe, but onely before ordinary
iudges, where by the lawes of the lande they are iustly intreated. Neither are they

^ The original of this very famous treatise, de Laudibus Legum Anglice, was
•WTitten in Latin between 1464 and 1470, liist published in 1537, and translated
into Eno-lish in 1737 by Francis Gregor. i have taken these extracts from the
magnificent edition of Sir John Fortescue's works published in 1869 for private
distribution, and edited by Thomas Fortescue, Lord Clermont. Some of the pieces
quoted, left in the old spelling, are taken from an older edition.— Tr^

" Of an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, 3ded., 1724, ch. iii. p. 15.

^ Commines bears the same testimony.

G

93 THE SOUECB. [book I.

arrested or impleaded for their moreables or possessions, or arraigned of any offence,
bee it never so great and outragious, but after the lawes of the land, and before the
iudges aforesaid.' *

All this arises from the constitution of the country and the distribu-
tion of the land. Whilst in other covin tries we find only a population
of paupers, with here and there a few lords, England is covered and
filled with OAvners of lands and fields ; so that ' therein so small a
thorpe cannot bee founde, wherein dwelleth not a knight, an esquire,
or suche a housholder as is there commonly called a franklayne, en-
ryched with greate possessions. And also other freeholders, and many
yeomen able for their livelodes to make a jurye in fourme afore-men-
tioned. For there bee in that lande divers yeomen, which are able to
dispende by the years above a hundred poundes.'^ Harrison says:^

' This sort of people have more estimation than labourers and the common sort
of artificers, and these commonlie live wealtliilie, keepe good houses, and travell
to get riches. The}"- are for the most part farmers to gentlemen, ' and keep servants
of their own. ' These vrere they that in times past made all France afraid. And
albeit they be not called master, as gentlemen are, or sir, as to knights apper-
teineth, but onelie John and Thomas, etc., yet have they beene found to have
done verie good service ; and the kings of England, in foughten battels, were wont
to reniaine among them (who were their footmen) as the French kings did among
their horssemen : the prince thereby showing where his chiefe strength did consist. '

Such men, says Fortescue, might form a legal jury, and vote, resist, be
associated, do everything wherein a free government consists : for they
were numerous in every district ; they were not down-trodden like the
timid peasants of France ; they had their honour and that of their
family to maintain ; ' they be well provided with arms ; they remember
that they have won battles in France.'* Such is the class, still obscure,

^ De Lmtdibus, etc., eh. xxxvi.

- 'The might of the realme most stondyth upon archers which be not rich
men. ' Compare Hallam, ii. 482. All this takes us back as far as the Conquest,
and farther. 'It is reasonable to suppose that the greater part of those who
appear to have possessed small freeholds or parcels of manors were no other than
the original nation. ... A respectable class of free socagers, having in general
full right of alienating their lands, and holding them probably at a small certain
rent from the lord of the manor, frequently occurs in the Domesday Book. ' At
all events, there were in Domesday Book Saxons ' perfectly exempt from villenage. '
This class is mentioned with respect in the treatises of Glanvil and Bracton. As for
the villeins, they were quickly liberated in the thirteenth or fourteenth century,
either by their own energies or by becoming copyholders. The Wars of the Roses
still further raised the commons ; orders were frequently issued, previous to a
battle, to slay the nobles and spare the commoners.

^ Description of England, 275.

* The following is a portrait of a yeoman, by Latimer, in the first sermon
preached before Edward vi., Sth March 1549 : ' My father was a yeoman, and
had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of £3 or £4 by year at the uttermost,
and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a
bundled sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find

CHAP. II.] THE NORMANS. 99

but more rich and powerful every century, who, founded on the
degraded Saxon aristocracy, and sustained by the surviving Saxon
character, ended, tinder the lead of the inferior Norman nobiUty, and
under the patronage of the superior Norman nobiUty, in estabhshing
and setthng a free constitution, and a nation worthy of liberty.

IX.

When, as here, men are endowed with a serious character, strength-
ened by a resolute spirit, and entrenched in independent habits, they
meddle with their conscience as with their daily business, and end by
laying hands on church as well as state. It is now a long time since
the exactions of the Koman See provoked the resistance of the people,^
and a presuming priesthood became unpopular. Men complained that
the best livings were given by the Pope to non-resident strangers ; that
some Italian, unknown in England, possessed fifty or sixty benefices in
England ; that English money poured into Rome ; and that the clergy,
being judged only by clergy, gave themselves up to their vices, and
abused their state of impunity. In the first years of Henry in. there
were reckoned nearly a hundred murders committed by priests still
ahve. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the ecclesiastical
revenue was twelve times greater than the civil ; about half the soil
was in the hands of the clergy. At the end of the century the
commons declared that the taxes paid to the church were five times
greater than the taxes paid to the crown ; and some years afterwards,^

the king a harness, with himself and his horse ; while he came to the place that
he should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness
when he went unto Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not
been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He married my
sisters with £5 or 20 nobles a-piece, so that he brought them up in godliness and
fear of God ; he kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave
to the poor ; and all this did he of the said farm, "Where he that now hath it
payeth £16 by the year, or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for
himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor.*

This is from the sixth sermon, preached before the young king, 12th April
1549 : ' In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to
learn (me) any other thing ; and so, I think, other men did their children. He
taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with
strength of arms, as other nations do, but with strength of the body, I had my
bows bought me according to my age and strength ; as I increased in them, so my
bows were made bigger and bigger ; for men shall never shoot well except they be
brought up in it. It is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and much
commended in physic'

^ Pict. Hist. i. S02. Inl246, lo/6. Thierry, hi. 79.

* 1404-1409. The commons declared that with these revenues the king would
be able to maintain 15 earls, 1500 knights, 6200 squires, and 100 hospitals : each
earl receiving annually 300 marks ; each knight 100 marks, and the produce of four
ploughed lands ; each squire 40 marks, and the produce of two ploughed lands.
Pkt. Hist. ii. 142.

100 THE SOUECK [BOOK I.

considering tliat tlie wealth of the clergy only served to keep tliem in
idleness and luxury, they proposed to confiscate it for the public
benefit. Already the idea of the Reformation had forced itself upon
them. They remembered how in the ballads Robin Hood ordered his
folk to ' spare the yeomen, labourers, even knights, if they are good
fellows,' but never to pardon abbots or bishops. The prelates grievously
oppressed the people with their laws, tribunals, and tithes ; and sud-
denly, amid the pleasant banter and the monotonous babble of the
Norman versifiers, we hear resound the indignant voice of a Saxon, a
man of the people and a victim.

It is the vision of Piers Ploughman, a carter, written, it is sup-
posed, by a secular priest of Oxford.^ Doubtless the traces of French
taste are perceptible. It could not be otherwise : the people from
below can never quite prevent themselves from imitating the people
above ; and the most unshackled popular poets. Burns and Beranger,
too often preserve an academic style. So here a fashionable machi-
nery, the allegory of the Roman de la Rose, is pressed into service.
We have Do-well, Covetousness, Avarice, Simony, Conscience, and a
whole world of talking abstractions. But in spite of these vain foreign
phantoms, the body of the poem is national, and true to life. The old
language reappears in part ; the old metre altogether ; no more rhymes,
but barbarous alliterations ; no more jesting, but a harsh gravity, a
sustained invective, a grand and sombre imagination, heavy Latin texts,
hammered down as by a Protestant hand. Piers Ploughman went to
sleep on the Malvern hills, and there had a wonderful dream :

* Thanne gan I meten — a merveillous swevene,
That I was in a wildernesse — wiste I nevere where ;
And as I biheeld into the eest, — an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft, — trieliche y-maked,
A deep dale bynethe — a dongeon thereinne
"With depe diches and derke — and dredfuUe of siglite,
A fair feeld ful of folk — fond I ther bitwene,
Of alle manere of men, — the meene and the riche,
Werchynge and waudiynge — as the world asketh.
Some putten hem to the plough, — pleiden ful selde.
In settynge and sowynge — swonken ful harde,
And wonnen that wastours — with glotonye dystruyeth.'^

A gloomy picture of the Avorld, like the frightful dreams which occur
so often in Albert Durer and Luther. The first reformers were per-
suaded that the earth was given over to evil ; that the devil had in it
his empire and his officers ; that Antichrist, seated on the throne of
Rome, spread out ecclesiastical pomps to seduce souls, and cast them
into the fire of hell. So here Antichrist, with raised banner, enters a
convent ; bells are rung ; monks in solemn procession go to meet him,

» About 1362.

2 Fkra Ploughman's Vision and Creed, ed. T. "Wright, 1856, i. p, 2, v. 21-44.

CHAP. II.] THE NOEMAXS. 101

and receive Tvitli congratulations their lord and father.^ "With seven
great giants, the seven deadly sins, he besieges Conscience ; and the
assault is led by Idleness, who brings with her an army of more than
a thousand prelates : for vices reign, more hateful from being in holy
places, and employed in the church of God in the devil's service :

' Ac now is Eeligion a rydere — a romere aboute,
A ledere of love-dayes — and a lond-buggere,
A prikere on a palfrey — fro manere to manere. . . .
And but if liis knave knele — tliat slial his coppe brynge.
He loureth on hym, and asketh hym — wlio tauglite hym curteisie.'*

But this sacrilegious show has its day, and God puts His hand on men
in order to warn them. By order of Conscience, Nature sends up a
host of plagues and diseases :

' Kynde Conscience tho berde, — and cam out of the planetes,
And sente forth bis forreyours — feveres and fluxes,
Coughes and cardiacles, — crampes and tooth-aches,
Eeumes aud radegundes, — and roynous scabbes,
Eiles and boccbes, — and brennjmge agues,
Frenesies and foule yveles, — forageres of kynde. . . .
There was "Harrow ! and Help ! — Here cometh K3mde!
AA'ith Deetb that is dredful — to undo us alle ! "
The lord that lyved after lust — tho aloud cryde. . . .
Deeth cam dry^ynge after, — and al to duste passlied
Kynges and knygbtes, — kaysers and popes, . . .
Manye a lovely lady — and lemmans of knyghtes,
Swowned and swelted for sorwe of hise dyntes. ' ^

Here is a crowd of miseries, like those which IMilton has described
in his vision of human life ; tragic pictures and emotions, such as the
reformers delight to dwell upon. There is a like speech delivered
by John Knox, before the fair ladies of !Mary Stuart, which tears the
veil from the human corpse just as brutally, in order to exhibit
its shame. The conception of the world, proper to the people of tlie
north, all sad and moral, shows itself already. They are never com-
fortable in their country ; they have to strive continually against cold
or rain. They cannot live there carelessly, lying under a lovely sky,
in a sultry and clear atmosphere, their eyes filled with the noble beauty
and happy serenity of the land. They must work to live ; be attentive,
exact, close and repair their houses, wade boldly through the mud
behind their plough, light their lamps in the shops during the day.
Their climate imposes endless inconvenience, and exacts endless en-
durance. Hence arise melancholy and the idea of duty, Man naturally
thinks of life as of a battle, oftener of black death which closes this

^ The Archdeacon of Richmond, on his tour in 1216, came to the priory of
Bridhngton with ninety-seven horses, t.venty-one dogs, and three falcons.
^ Piers Ploughman's Vision, i. p. 191, v. 6217-6228.
2 Ibid, ii Last book, p. 4-30, v. 140S4-14135.

102 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK I.

deadly show, and leads so many plumed and disorderly processions to
the silence and the eternity of the grave. All this visible world is
vain ; there is nothing true but human virtue, — the courageous energy
with which man attains to self-command, the generous energy with
which he employs himself in the service of others. On this view he
fixes his eyes; they pierce through worldly gauds, neglect sensual joys,
to attain this. By such internal action the ideal is displaced ; a new
source of action springs up — the idea of righteousness. What sets
them against ecclesiastical pomp and insolence, is neither the envy of
the poor and low, nor the anger of the oppressed, nor a revolutionary
desire to experimentalise abstract truth, but conscience. They tremble
lest they should not work out their salvation if they continue in a cor-
rupted church ; they fear the menaces of God, and dare not embark on
the great journey with unsafe guides. 'What is righteousness?' asked
Luther anxiously, 'and how shall I obtain it?' With hke anxiety
Piers Ploughman goes to seek Do-well, and asks each one to show him
where he shall find him. ' With us,' say the friars. ' Contra quath
ich, Septies in die cadit Justus, and ho so syngeth certys doth nat wel;'
so he betakes himself to ' study and writing,' like Luther ; the clerks at
table speak much of God and of the Trinity, ' and taken Bernarde to
witnesse, and putteth forth presompcions . . . ac the earful mai crie and
quaken atte gate, bothe a fyngred and a furst, and for defaute spille ys
non so hende to have hym yn. Clerkus and knyghtes carpen of God
ofte, and haveth hym muche in hure mouthe, ac mene men in herte;'
and heart, inner faith, living virtue, are what constitute true re-
ligion. This is what these dull Saxons had begun to discover; the
Teutonic conscience, and English good sense too, had been aroused,
with individual energy, the resolution to judge and to decide alone, by
and for one's self. ' Christ is our hede that sitteth on hie, Heddis ne
ought we have no mo,' says a poem,^ attributed to Chaucer, and which,
with others, claims independence for Christian consciences.

* "We ben his membres bothe also,
Father he taught us call him all,
Maisters to call forbad he tho ;
Al maisters ben wickid and fals.*

No mediator between man and God. In vain the doctors state that they
have authority for their words ; there is a word of greater authority, to
wit, God's. We hear it in the fourteenth century, this grand word. It
quitted the learned schools, the dead languages, the dusty shelves on
which the clergy suffered it to sleep, covered with a confusion of com-
mentaries and Fathers.^ Wiclif appeared and translated it like Luther,

^ Piers Plowman's Crede; the Plowman's Tale, printed in 1550. There were
three editions in one year, it was so manifestly Protestant.

^ Knighton, about 1400, wrote thus of "Wiclif: ' Transtulit de Latino in angli-
cam linguam, non angelicani. Uude per ipsum fit vulgare, et magis apertum

CHAP. II.] THE NOKMANS. 103

and in a spirit similar to Luther's. ' Cristen men and ■wymmen, olde
and yonge, shulden studie fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful
autorite, and opyn to undirstonding of simple men, as to the poyntis
that be moost nedeful to salvacioun.' ^ Eeligion must be secular, in
order to escape from the hands of the clergy, who forestall it ; each
must hear and read for himseK the word of God : he will be sure that
it has not been corrupted in the passage ; he will feel it better, and
more, he will understand it better ; for

* ech place of holy writ, both opyn and dcrk, techitli mekenes and charite ; and
therfore he that kepith mekenes and charite hath the trewe undirstondyng and
perfectioun of al holi writ. . . . Therfore no simple man of wit be aferd un-
mesurabli to studie in the text of holy writ . . . and no clerk be proude of the
veiTey undirstondyng of holy wi'it, for whi undirstonding of hooly writ with outen
charite that kepith Goddis heestis, makith a man depper dampned . . . and pride
and covetise of clerkis is cause of her blindees and eresie, and priveth them fro
verrey undirstondyng of holy writ. ' ^

These are the memorable words that began to circulate in the markets
and in the schools. They read the translated Bible, and commented on
it; they judged the existing Church after it. What judgments these
serious and renovated minds passed upon it, with what readiness they
pushed on to the true religion of their race, we may see from their
petition to Parliament.^ One hundred and thirty years before Luther,
they said that the pope was not established by Christ, that pilgrim-
ages and image-worship were akin to idolatry, that external forms are
of no importance, that priests ought not to possess temporal wealth,
that the doctrine of transubstantiation made a people idolatrous, that
priests have not the power of absolving from sin. In proof of all this
they brought forward texts of Scripture. Fancy these brave spirits,
simple and strong souls, who began to read at night, in their shops,
by candle-light ; for they were shopmen — a tailor, and a furriei', and
a baker — who, with some men of letters, began to read, and then to
believe, and finally got themselves burned.* What a sight for the
fifteenth century, and what a promise ! It seems as though, with
liberty of action, liberty of mind begins to appear ; that these common
folk will think and speak ; that under a conventional literature, intro-
duced from France, a new literature is dawning ; and that England,
genu.ine England, half-mute since the Conquest, will at last find a voice.

She had not found it. King and peers ally themselves to the
Church, pass terrible statutes, destroy lives, burn heretics alive, often

laicis et mulieribus legere scientibus quam solet esse clericis admodum litteratis, et
bene intelligentibus. Et sic evangelica margerita spargitur et a porcis conculcatur
. . . (ita) ut laicis commune seternum quod ante fuerat clericis et ecclesiaj doctori-
bus talentum supernum.'

1 "Wiclif 's Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, 1850, preface to Oxford edition, p. 2.

« lUd. ^ In 1395.

* 1401, "William Sawtre, the first Lollard burned ahve.

104 THE SOUr.CE. [book I.

with refinement of torture, — one in a barrel, another hung by an iron
chain round his waist. The temporal wealth of the clergy had been
attacked, and therewith the whole English constitution ; and the great
estabhshment above crushed out with its whole weight the assailants
from below. Darkly, in silence, while in the Wars of the Roses the
nobles were destroying each other, the commoners went on working
and living, separating themselves from the ofEcial Church, maintaining
their liberties, amassing their wealth,^ but not going beyond. Like a
vast rock Avhich underlies the soil, yet crops up here and there at distant
intervals, they barely exhibit themselves. No great poetical or religious
work displays them to the light. They sang ; but their ballads, first
ignored, then transformed, reach us only in a late edition. They prayed ;
but beyond one or two indifferent poems, their incomplete and repressed
doctrine bore no fruit. One may well see from the verse, tone, and
drift of their ballads, that they are capable of the finest poetic origin-
ality,^ but their poetry is in the hands of yeomen and harpers. We
perceive, by the precocity and energy of their religious protests, that
they are capable of the most severe and impassioned creeds ; but their
faith remains hidden in the shop-parlours of a few obscure sectaries.
Neither their faith nor their poetry has been able to attain its end or
issue. The Renaissance and the Reformation, those two national out-
breaks, are still far off; and the literature of the period retains to the
end, like the highest ranks of English society, almost the perfect stamp
of its French origin and its foreign models.

1 Commines, v. cli. 19 and 20 : 'In my opinion, of all kingdoms of the world of
■which I have any knowledge, where the pubhc weal is best observed, and least
violence is exercised on the people, and where no buildings are overthrown or
demolished in war, England is the best ; and the ruin and misfortune falls on them
who wage the war. . . . The kingdom of England has this advantage beyond other
nations, that the peo];)le and the country are not destroyed or burnt, nor the build-
ings demolished ; and ill-fortune falls on men of war, and especially on the nobles. '

2 See the ballads of Chevy CJiase, The Nat-Brown Maid, etc. ]\Iany of theia
are admhable little dramas.

CHAP. III.J THE NEW TONGUE. 105

CHAPTER III.

The New Tongue.

I. Chaucer— His education— His political and social life— Wherein his talent
was serviceable — He paints the second feudal society.
II. How the middle age degenerated— Decline of the serious element in manners,
books, and works of art — Need of excitement — Analogies of architecture
and literature.

III, Wherein Chaucer belongs to the middle age— Eomantic and ornamental poems

— Le Roman de la Hose — Tro'ilus and Cressida — Canterhunj Tales — Order of
description and' events — The House of Fame — Fantastic dreams and visions
— Love poems — Troilus and Cressida — Exaggerated development of love in
the middle age — Why the mind took this path — Mystic love — The Flower
and the Leaf — Sensual love — Troilus and Cressida.

IV. Wherein Chaucer is French — Satirical and jovial poems — Canterbury Tales —

The Wife of Bath and marriage — The mendicant friar and religion— Buf-
foonery, waggerj', and coarseness in the middle age.
V. Wherein Chaucer was English and original— Idea of character and individual
— Van Eyck and Chaucer contemporary — Prologue to Canterbury Tales —
Portraits of the franklin, monk, miUer, citizen, knight, squire, prioress,
the good clerk — Connection of events and characters — General idea — Im-
portance of the same — Chaucer a precursor of the Reformation — He halts
by the way — Delays and childishness — Causes of this feebleness — His prose,
and scholastic notion — How he is isolated in his age.
VI. Connection of philosophy and poetry — How general notions failed under
the scholastic philosophy — Why poetry failed — Comparison of civilisa-
tion and decadence in the middle age, and in Spain — Extinction of
the English literature — Translators — Rhyming chronicles — Didactic poets
— Compilers of moralities — Gower — Occleve — Lydgate — Analogy of taste
in costumes, buildings, and literature — Sad notion of fate, and human
misery — Hawes — Barclay — Skelton — Elements of the Reformation and of
the Renaissance.

AMID so many barren endeavours, throughout the long impotence
of Norman literature, which was content to copy, and of Saxon
literature, which bore no fruit, a definite language Avas nevertheless
attained, and there was room for a great writer, Geoffrey Chaucer
appeared, a man of mark, inventive though a disciple, original though
a translator, who by his genius, education, and life, was enabled to
know and to depict a whole Avorld, but above all to satisfy the chivalria

106 THE SOURCE.- [BOOK I.

•world and the splendid courts whicli slione upon tlie heights.^ He
belonged to it, though learned and versed in all branches of scholastic
knowledge ; and he took such part in it, that his life from end to end
was that of a man of the world, and a man of action. We find him
alternately in King Edward's army, in the king's train, husband of a
queen's maid of honour, a pensioner, a placeholder, a deputy in Parlia-
ment, a knight, founder of a family Avhich was hereafter to become
allied to royalty. Moreover, he was in the king's council, brother-in-
law of the Duke of Lancaster, employed more than once in open
embassies or secret missions at Florence, Genoa, Milan, Flanders, com-
missioner in France for the marriage of the Prince of Wales, high up
and loAV down in the political ladder, disgraced, restored to place.
This experience of business, travel, war, the court, was not like a book
education. He was at the court of Edward in., the most splendid in
Europe, amidst tourneys, grand entrances, displays ; he took part in
the pomps of France and J\Iilan ; conversed with Petrarch, perhaps with
Boccacio and Froissart; was actor in, and spectator of, the finest and
most tragical of dramas. In these few words, what ceremonies and pro-
cessions are implied ! Avhat pageantry of armour, caparisoned horses,
bedecked ladies ! what display of gallant and lordly manners ! what a
varied and brilliant world, well suited to occupy the mind and eyes of
a poet ! Like Froissart, better than he, Chaucer could depict the
character of the nobles, their mode of life, their amours, even other
things, and please them by his portraiture.

IL

Two notions raised the middle age above the chaos of barbarism :
one religious, which had fashioned the gigantic cathedrals, and swept
the masses from their native soil to hurl them upon the Holy Land ;'
the other secular, which had built feudal fortresses, and set the man of
courage armed, upon his feet, w'ithin his own domain : the one had
produced the adventurous hero, the other the mystical monk ; the one,
to wit, the behef in God, the other the belief in self. Both, running
to excess, had degenerated by expenditui-e of force : the one had
exalted independence into rebellion, the other had changed piety into
enthusiasm : the first made man unfit for civil life, the second drew
him back from natural life : the one, sanctioning disorder, dissolved
society ; the other, enthroning irrationality, perverted intelligence.
Chivalry had need to be repressed before issuing in brigandage ; devo-
tion restrained before inducing slavery. Turbulent feudalism grew
feeble, like oppressive theocracy ; and the two great master passions,
deprived of their sap and lopped of their stem, gave place by their
weakness to the monotony of habit and the taste for worldliness, which
shot forth in their stead and flourished imder their name.

' Born between 132S and 1345, died in 1400.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 107

Insensibly, the serious element declined, in books as in manners, in
works of art as in books. Architecture, instead of being the hand-
maid of faith, became the slave of phantasy. It was exaggerated,
confined to mere decoration, sacrificing general effect to detail, shot
up its steeples to unreasonable heights, festooned its churches with
canopies, pinnacles, trefoiled arches, open -worked galleries. ' Its
whole aim was continually to climb higher, to clothe the sacred edifice
with a gaudy bedizenment, as if it were a bride on the wedding morn-
ing.'-' Before this marvellous lacework, what emotion could one feel
but a pleased astonishment? What becomes of Christian sentiment
before such scenic ornamentations ? In like manner literature sets
itself to play. In the eighteenth century, the second age of absolute
monarchy, we saw on one side garlanded top-knots and cupolas, on
the other pretty vers de societe, courtly and sprightly tales, taking the
place of severe beauty-lines and noble writings. Even so in the four-
teenth century, the second age of feudalism, they had on one side the
stone fretwork and slender efflorescence of aerial forms, and on the
other finical verses and diverting stories, taking the place of the old
grand architecture and the old simple literature. It is no longer the
overflowing of a true sentiment which produces them, but the craving
for excitement. Consider Chaucer, his subjects, and how he selects
them. He goes far and wide to discover them, to Italy, France, to the
popular legends, the ancient classics. His readers need diversity, and
his business is to 'provide fine tales:' it was in those days the poet's
business.^ The lords at table have finished dinner, the minstrels come
and sing, the brightness of the torches falls on the velvet and ermine,
on the fantastic figures, the oddities, the elaborate embroidery of their
long garments ; then the poet arrives, presents his manuscript, * richly
illuminated, bound in crimson violet, embellished with silver clasps
and bosses, roses of gold:' they ask him for his subject, and he
answers ' Love.'

III.

In fact, it is the most agreeable subject, fittest to make the evening
hours flow sweetly, amid the spiced goblets and the burning perfumes-
Chaucer translated first that great storehouse of gallantry, the Roman
de la Rose. There is no pleasanter entertainment. It is about a rose
which the lover wished to pluck : the pictures of the May months, the
groves, the flowery earth, the green hedgerows, abound and display
their bloom. Then come portraits of the smiling ladies, Richesse,
Fraunchise, Gaiety, and by way of contrast, two sad characters,
Daunger and Travail, all crowding, and minutely described, with de-
tail of features, clothing, attitude ; they walk about, as in a piece of

' Eenan, De I'Art au Moyen Age.

* See Froissart, Ms life with the Count of Fois and witli King Tdchard il.

108 THE SOUECE. [BOOK I.

tapestry, amid landscapes, dances, castles, Avith allegorical groups, in
lively sparkling colours, displayed, contrasted, ever renewed and varied
so as to entertain the sight. For an evil has arisen, unknown to
serious ages — ennui: novelty and brilliancy followed by novelty and
brilliancy are necessary to withstand it ; and Chaucer, like Boccacio
and Froissart, enters into the struggle with all his heart. He borrows
from Boccacio his history of Palamon and Arcite, from LoUius his
history of Troilus and Cressida, and re-arranges them. How the two
young Theban knights, Arcite and Palamon, both fall in love with the
beautiful Emily, and how Arcite, victorious in tourney, falls and dies,
bequeathing Emily to his rival ; how the fine Trojan knight Tro'ilus
wins the favours of Cressida, and how Cressida abandons him for
Diomedes — these are still tales in verse, tales of love. A little long;
they may be ; all the writings of this age, French, or imitated from
French, are born of too prodigal minds ; but how they glide along !
A winding stream, which flows smoothly on level sand, and glitters now
and again in the sun, is the only image we can find. The characters
speak too much, but then they speak so well ! Even when they dis-
pute, we like to listen, their anger and oiSences are so wholly based
on a happy overflow of unbroken converse. Remember Froissart, how
slaughters, assassinations, plagues, the butcheries of the Jacquerie, the
whole chaos of human misery, is forgotten in his fine uniform humour,
so that the furious and raving figures seem but ornaments and choice
embroiderings to relieve the train of shaded and coloured silk which
forms the groundwork of his narrative !

But, in particular, a multitude of descriptions spread their gilding
over all. Chaucer leads you among arms, palaces, temples, and halts
before each scene. Here :

' "The statue of Yenus glorious for to see
Was naked fleting in tlie large see,
And fro the navel doim all covered was
"With wawes grene, and bright as any glaa.
A citole in hire right hand hadde she,
And on hire hed, ful semely for to see,
A rose gerlond fressh, and wel smeUing,
Above hire hed hire doves fleckeririir.' ^

Further on, the temple of Mars :

* Fu-st on the wall was peinted a forest.
In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry barrein ti-ees old
Of stubbes and sharp and hidous to behold ;
In which ther ran a romble and a swough.
As though a storme shuld bresten every bough :
And dounward from an hill rmder a bent,
Ther stood the temple of ilars armipotent,

1 Knirjht's Tale, ii. p. 59, v. 1957-1964.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 109

"Wrought all of burned stele, of which th* entree
Was longe and streite, and gastly for to see.
And therout came a rage and swiche a vise.
That it made all the gates for to rise.
The northern light in at the dore shone,
For window on the wall ne was ther none,
Thurgh which men mighten any light discerne.
The dore was all of athamant eterne,
Yclenched overthwart and endelong
With yren tough, and for to make it strong,
Eveiy piler the temple to sustene
Was tonne-gret, of yren bright and shene.' '

Everywhere on the wall were representations of slaughter ; and in the
sanctuary

' The statue of Mars upon a carte stood

Armed, and loked grim as he were wood, . . .

A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete

With eyen red, and of a man he ete.'^

Are not these contrasts well designed to rouse the imagination ? You
will meet in Chaucer a succession of similar pictures. Observe the
train of combatants who came to joust in the tUting field for Arcite
and Palamon :

* With him ther wenten knightes many on.
Som wol ben armed in an habergeon
And in a brestplate, and in a gipon ;
And som wol have a pair of plates large ;
And som wol have a Pruce sheld, or a targe,
Som wol ben armed on his legges wele.
And have an axe, and som a mace of stele. . . .
Ther malst thou se coming with Palamon
Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace :
Blake was his herd, and manly was his face.
The cercles of his eyen in his bed
They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red,
And like a griffon loked he about,
With kemped heres on his browes stout ;
His limmes gi'et, his braunes hard and stronge,
His shouldres brode, his armes round and longe.
And as the guise was in his contree,
Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he,
AVith foure white bollcs in the trais.
Instede of cote-armure on his harnais,
With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold,
He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old.
His longe here was kempt behind his bak.
As any ravenes fether it shone for blake.
A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight.
Upon his hed sate ful of stones bright,

1 Kniyht's Tale, ii. p. 59, v. 1977-1906. » Ibid. p. 61, v. 2043-2050.

110 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK I.

Of fine nibins and of diamants.

About his char ther wenten white alauns,

Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere,

To hunten at the leon or the dere,

And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound,

Colered with gold, and torettes filed round.

An hundi'ed lordes had he in his route.

Armed ful wel, with hertes sterne and stouts.

With Arcita, in stories as men find,

The gret Emetrius the king of Inde,

Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele.

Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,

Came riding like the god of armes Mars.

His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars,

Couched with perles, white, and round and greta.

His sadel was of brent gold new ybete ;

A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging

Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling.

His crispe here like ringes was yronne.

And that was yelwe, and glitered as the sonne.

His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin,

His lippes round, his colour was sanguin . . ,

And as a leon he his loking caste.

Of five and twenty yere his age I caste.

His herd was well begonnen for to spring ;

His vols was as a trompe thondering.

Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene

A gerlond fresshe and lusty for to sene.

Upon his hond he bare for his deduit

An egle tame, as any lily whit.

An hundred lordes had he with him there,

All armed save hir hedes in all hir gere,

Ful richely in alle manere thinges. . . .

About this king ther ran on every part

Ful many a tame leon and leopart.'^

A herald would not describe them better nor more fully. The lords
and ladies of the time would recognise here their tourneys and
masquerades.

There is something more pleasant than a fine narrative, and that is
a collection of fine narratives, especially when the narratives are all of
different colourings. Froissart gives us such under the name of
Chronicles ; Boccacio still better ; after him the lords of the Cent Nou-
velles nouvelles ; and, later still. Marguerite de Navarre. "What more
natural among people who meet, talk, and try to amuse themselves?
The manners of the time suggest them ; for the habits and tastes of
society had begim, and fiction thus conceived only brings into books the
conversations which are heard in the hall and by the wayside. Chaucer
describes a troop of pilgrims, people of every rank, who are going to

I Kiw/ht's Tale, ii. p. 63, v. 2120-2188.

CHAP. III.] THE KEW TONGUE. Ill

Canterbury : a knight, a sergeant of law, an Oxford clerk, a doctor, a
miller, a prioress, a monk, who agree to relate a story all round :

' For trevrcly comfort ne mirthe is noii,
To riden by the way domb as tlie ston. '

They relate accordingly; and on this slender and flexible thread all the
jovialities of the feudal imagination, true and false, come and contribute
their motley figures to the chain ; alternately noble, chivalrous stories :
the miracle of the infant whose throat was cut by Jews, the trials of
patient Griselda, Canace and the marvellous fictions of Oriental fancy,
obscene stories of marriage and monks, allegorical or moral tales, the
fable of the cock and hen, a list of great unfortunate persons : Lucifer,
Adam, Samson, Nebuchadnezzar, Zenobia, Croesus, Ugolin, Peter of
Spain. I leave out some, for I must be brief. Chaucer is like a
jeweller with his hands full : pearls and glass beads, sparkling diamonds
and common agates, black jet and ruby roses, all that history and
imagination had been able to gather and fashion during three centuries
in the East, in France, in Wales, in Provence, in Italy, all that had
rolled his way, clashed together, broken or polished by the stream of
centuries, and by the great jumble of human memory ; he holds in his
hand, arranges it, composes therefrom a long sparkling ornament, with
twenty pendants, a thousand facets, which by its splendour, varieties,
contrasts, may attract and satisfy the eyes of those most greedy for
amusement and novelty.

He does more. The universal outburst of unchecked curiosity de-
mands a more refined enjoyment ; reverie and fantasy alone can satisfy
it ; not profound and thoughtful fantasy as we find it in Shakspeare,
nor impassioned and meditated reverie as we find it in Dante, but the
reverie and fantasy of the eyes, ears, external senses, which in poetry as in
architecture call for singiilarity, wonders, accepted challenges, victories
gained over what is rational and probable, and which are satisfied only
by what is dense and dazzling. When you look at a cathedral of that
time, you feel a sort of fear. Substance is wanting ; the walls are hol-
lowed out to make room for windows, the elaborate Avork of the porches,
the wonderful growth of the slender columns, the thin curvature of
arches — everything seems to totter; support has been withdrawn to
give way to ornament. Without external prop or buttress, and artificial
aid of iron clamp-work, the building would have crumbled to pieces on
the first day : as it is, it imdoes itself ; we have to maintain on the spot a
colony of masons continually to ward off the continual decay. But our
eyes lose themselves in following the wavings and twistings of the end-
less fretwork; the dazzling centre-rose of the portal and the painted glass
throw a diapered light on the carved stalls of the choir, the gold-work of
the altar, the long array of damascened and glittering copes, the crowd
of statues, gradually rising ; and amid this violet light, this quivering
purple, amid these arrows of gold which pierce the gloom, the building

112 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I,

is like tlie tail of a mystical peacock. So most of the poems of the
time are barren of foundation ; at most a trite morality serves them
for mainstay : in short, the poet thought of nothing else than spreading
out before us a glow of colours and a jumble of forms. They are
dreams or visions ; there are five or six in Chaucer, and you will meet
more on your advance to the Eenaissance. Yet the show is splendid.
Chaucer is transported in a dream to a temple of glass,^ Avhere on the
walls are figured in gold all the legends of Ovid and Virgil, an infinite
train of characters and dresses, like that which, on the painted glass in
the churches, still occupies the gaze of the faithful. Suddenly a golden
eagle, which soars near the sun, and glitters like a carbuncle, descends
with the swiftness of lightning, and carries him off in his talons above
the stars, dropping him at last before the House of Fame, splendidly built
of beryl, Avith shining windows and lofty turrets, and situated on a high
rock of almost inaccessible ice. All the southern side was graven with
the names of famous men, but the sun Avas continuously melting them.
On the northern side, the names, better protected, still remained. On
the turrets appeared the minstrels and jongleurs, with Orpheus, Orion,
and the great harp-players, and behind them myriads of musicians,
with horns, flutes, pipes, and reeds, in which they blew, and which
filled the air ; then all the charmers, magicians, and prophets. He
enters, and in a high hall, wainscotted with gold, embossed with pearls,
on a throne of carbuncle, he sees a woman seated, a ' gret and noble
queue,' amidst an infinite number of heralds, Avhose embroidered cloaks
bore the arms of the most famous knights in the Avorld, and heard the
sounds of instruments, and the celestial melody of Calliope and her
sisters. From her throne to the gate stretched a row of pillars, on
which stood the great historians and poets ; Josephus on a pillar of
lead and iron ; Statins on a pillar of iron stained with blood ; Ovid,
' Venus' clerk,' on a pillar of copper ; then, on one higher than the
rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey
of Monmouth, and the other historians of the war of Troy. Must I
go on copying this phantasmagoria, in which confused erudition mars
picturesque invention, and frequent banter shows sign that the vision
is only a planned amusement ? The poet and his reader have imagined
for half an hour decorated halls and bustling crowds ; a slender thread
of common sense has ingeniously crept along the transparent golden mist
Avhich they amuse themselves with following. That suffices ; they are
pleased Avith their fleeting fancies, and ask nothing beyond.

Amid this exuberancy of mind, amid these refined cravings, and
this insatiate exaltation of imagination and sense, there Avas the passion
of love, Avhich, combining all, Avas developed in excess, and displayed in
short the sickly charm, the fundamental and fatal exaggeration, Avhich
are the characteristics of the age, and Avhich, later, the Spanish civilisa-

* The House of Fame.

CHAP, m.] THE NEW TOXGUE. 113

tion exhibits botli in its flower and its decay. Long ago, the courts of
love in Provence had established the theory. * Each one who loves,'
they said, ' grows pale at the sight of her whom he loves ; each action
of the lover ends in the thought of her whom he loves. Love can
refuse nothing to love.'^ This search after excessive sensation had
ended in the ecstasies and transports ot Guide Cavalcanti, and of
Dante ; and in Languedoc a company of enthusiasts had established
themselves, love-penitents, who, in order to prove the violence of their
passion, dressed in summer in furs and heavy garments, and in winter
in light gauze, and walked thus about the country, so that many of
them fell ill and died. Chaucer, in their wake, explained in his verses
the craft of love,^ the ten commandments, the twenty statutes of love ;
and praised his lady, his * daieseye,' his * Margaruite,' his ' vermeil
rose ; ' depicted love in ballads, visions, allegories, didactic poems, in a
hundred guises. This is chivalrous, lofty love, as it was conceived in
the middle age ; above all, tender love. Troilus loves Cressida like a
troubadour ; without Pandarus, her uncle, he would have languished,
and ended by dying in sUence. He will not reveal the name of her he
loves. Pandarus has to tear it from him, perform all the bold actions
himself, plan every kind of stratagem. Troilus, however brave and
strong in battle, can but weep before Cressida, ask her pardon, and
faint. Cressida exhibits every delicacy. When Pandarus brings her
Troilus' first letter, she begins by refusing it, and is ashamed to open
it : she opens it only because she is told the poor knight is about to
die. At the first words * all rosy hewed tho woxe she ; ' and though
the letter is respectful, she will not answer it. She yields at last to
the importunities of her uncle, and answers Tro'ilus that she will feel
for him the affection of a sister. As to Tro'ilus, he trembles all over,
grows pale when he sees the messenger return, doubts his happiness,
and will not beheve the assurance which is given him :

' But right so as tliese Loltes and these hayis
That han in winter dead ben and dry,
Eevesten hem in grene, whan that May is. . . .
Eight in that selfe wise, sooth for to sey,
Woxe suddaiuly his herte full of joy.' ^

Slowly, after many pains, and thanks to the efforts of Pandarus, he
obtains her confession ; and in this confession what a delightful grace !

' And as the newe abashed nightingale,
That stinteth first, whan she beginneth sh:ig,
Whan that she heareth any heerdes tale,
Or in the hedges any wight stearing,
And after siker doeth her voice outring :

' Andre le Chapelain, 1170.

2 Also the Court of Love, and perhaps Tlie Assemble of Ladies and La Bdle
Dame sans Merci.

^ Troilus and Cressida, voL v. bk. 3, p. 12.

H

Hi THE SOUECE. [BOOK I.

Eislit so Creseide, wlian that her drede stent,
Opened her herte, and told him her entent.'*

He, as soon as he perceived a hope from afar,

* In chaunged voice, right for his very tli'ede,
Which voice eke quoke, and thereto his mauere,
Goodly abasht, and now his hewes rede,

Kow pale, unto Cresseide his ladie dere,

"With look doun cast, and humble iyolden chere,

Lo, the alderfirst word that him astart

■\Vas twice : " Mercy, mercy, 0 my sweet herte ! " '^

This ardent love breaks out in impassioned accents, in bursts of happi-
ness. Far from being regarded as a fault, it is the source of all virtue.
Tro'ilus becomes braver, more generous, more upright, through it ; his
speech runs now on love and virtue ; he scorns all viUany ; he honours
those who possess merit, succours those who are in distress ; and Cres-
sida, delighted, repeats aU day, with exceeding tenderness, this song,
which is like the warbling of a nightingale :

* Whom should I thanken but you, god of love.
Of all this blisse, in which to bathe I ginne ?
And thanked be ye, lorde, for that I love,
Tliis is the right life that I am inne.

To flemen all maner vice and srane :

This doeth me so to vertue for to entende

That dale by dale I in my will amende.

And who that saieth that for to love is vice, . . .

He either is envious, or right nice.

Or is immightie for his slireudnesse

To lo-sen. . . .

But I with all mine herte and all my might,

As I have saied, well love unto my last,

Jly owne dere herte, and all mine owne knight.

In whiche mine herte growen is so fast,

And his in me, that it shall ever last.'^

But misfortune comes. Her father Calchas demands her back, and the
Trojans decide that they will give her up in exchange for prisoners.
At this news she swoons, and Tro'ilus is about to slay himself. Their
love at this time seems imperishable ; it sports with death, because it
constitutes the whole of life. Beyond that better and delicious life
which it created, it seems there can be no other :

* But as God would, of swough she abraide.
And gan. to sighe, and Troilus she cride.
And he answerde : *' Lady mine, Creseide,
Live ye yet ? " and let his swerde doun glide :
" Ye herte mine, that thanked be Cupide,"

1 Troilus and Cresslda, vol. v. bk. 3, p. 40. * loid. p. 4.

3 lUd. voL iv. bk. 2, p. 292.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 115

(Quod slie), and tlierewitlial she sore sight,
And he began to glade her as he might.

Took her in amies two and kist her oft,
And her to glad, he did al his entent.
For which her gost, that flikered aie a loft,
Into her wofull herte ayen it went :
But at the last, as that her eye glent
Aside, anon she gan his sworde aspie,
As it lay bare, and gan for feare crie.

And asked him why had he it out draw,

And Troiilus anon the cause her told.

And how himself therwith lie wold have slaic,

For which Creseide upon him gan behold,

And gan him in her armes faste fold.

And said : "0 mercy God, lo which a dede !

Alas, now nigh we weren bothe dede ! " ' ^

At last they are separated, with what words and what tears ! and
Tro'ilus, alone in his chamber, murmurs ;

* " Where is mine owne lady lefe and dere ?
Where is her white brest, where is it, where ?
Where been her armes, and her eyeu cieie
That yesterday this time with me were ? " . . ,
Noi there nas houre in al the day or night,
Whan he was tlier as no man might him here.
That he ne sayd : " 0 lovesome lady bright.
How have ye faren sins that ye were there i
"Welcome ywis mine owne lady dere ! " . . .
Fro thence-forth he rideth up and doune.
And every thing came him to remembraunce.
As he rode forth by the places of the tonne.
In which he whilom had all his pleasaunce :
" Lo, yonder saw I mine owne lady daunce.
And in that temple with her eien clere.
Me caught first my right lady dere.
And yonder have I lierde full lustely
My dere herte laugh, and yonder play
Saw her ones eke ful blisfully.
And yonder ones to me gan she say,
'Now, good sweete, love me well I pray.'
And yonde so goodly gan she me behold.
That to the death mine herte is to her hold.
And at the corner in the yonder house
Herde I mine alderlevest lady dere.
So womanly, %\-ith voice melodiouse,
Singen so wel, so goodly, and so clere.
That in my soule yet me thinketh I here
The blissful sowne, and in that yonder place.
My lady first me toke unto her grace.' "*

» Trollus and Cressida, vol. v. bk. 4, p. 97. ^ /j;^. \y^_ 5, p. 119 et passim.

116 THE SOUECE. [BOOK I.

None has since found more true and tender words. These are the
charming ' poetic branches ' which flourished amid the gross ignorance
and pompous parades. Human intelHgence in the middle age had
blossomed on that side where it perceived the light.

But mere narrative does not suffice to express his felicity and fancy ;
the poet must go where ' shoures sweet of rain descended soft,'

* And every plaine was clothed faire
With naw greene, and maketh small floures
To springen here and there in field and in mede.
So very good and wholsome be the shoures.
That it renueth that was old and dede,
In winter time ; and out of every sede
Springeth the hearbe, so that every wight
Of this season wexeth glad and light. . . .

In which (grove) were okes great, streight as a line,
Under the which the grasse so fresh of hew
Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine
Every tree well fro his fellow grew.'

He must forget himself in the vague felicity of the country, and, like
Dante, lose himself in ideal light and allegory. The dreams of love, to
continue true, must not take a too visible form, nor enter into a too
consecutive history ; they must float in a misty distance ; the soul in
which they hover cannot think of the laws of existence; it inhabits
another world ; it forgets itself in the ravishing emotion which troubles
it, and sees its well-loved visions rise, mingle, come and go, as in
summer we see the bees on a hill-slope flutter in a haze of light, and
circle round and round the flowea's.

One morning,^ a lady sings, I entered at the dawn of day, I entered
an oak-grove

' With branches brode, laden with leves new,
That sprongen out ayen the sunne-sheno,
Some very red, and some a glad light grenc. . . .^'

And I, that all this pleasaunt sight sie.
Thought sodainly I felt so sweet an aire
Of the eglentere, that certainely
There is no hert, I deme, in such dispaire,
IvTe with thoughts froward and contraii'e.
So overlaid, but it should soone have bote,
If it had ones felt this savour sote.

And as I stood, and cast aside mine eie,
I was ware of the fairest medler tree
That ever yet in all my life I sie.
As full of blossomes as it might be ;
Therein a goldfinch leaping pi-etile

' Tlie Flowei' and the Lea/ vi. p. 214, v. 6-S2. 2 Hid. p. 245, v. 33.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 117

Fro bough to bough ; and, as him Kst, he eet
Here and there of buds and floures sweet. . . -

And as I sat, the birds barkening thus,
Jlethought that I heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetest and most delicious
That ever any wight, I trow truly.
Heard in their life, for the ai-mony
And sweet accord was in so good musike,
That the voice to angels most was like.'*

Then she sees arrive * a world of ladies ... in surcotes white of
velvet ... set with emerauds ... as of great pearles round and
orient, and diamonds fine and rubies red.' And all had on their head
' a rich fret of gold . . . full of stately riche stones set,' with * a
chapelet of branches fresh and grene . . . some of laurer, some of
woodbind, some of agnus castus;' and at the same time came a train
of valiant knights in splendid array, with 'harneis' of red gold, shining
in the sun, and noble steeds, with trappings ' of cloth of gold, and
furred with ermine.' These knights and dames were the servants of
the Leaf, and they sate under a great oak, at the feet of their queen.'

From the other side came a bevy of ladies as resplendent as the
first, but crowned with fresh flowers. These were the servants of the
Flower. They alighted, and began to dance in the meadow. But
heavy clouds appeared in the sky, and a storm broke out. They
wished to shelter themselves under the oak, but there was no more
room ; they ensconced themselves as they could in the hedges and
brambles ; the rain came down and spoiled their garlands, stained their
robes, and washed away their ornaments ; when the sun returned, they
went to ask succour from the queen of the Leaf ; she, being merci-
ful, consoled them, repaired the injury of the rain, and restored their
original beauty. Then all disappears as in a dream.

The lady was astonished, when suddenly a fair dame appeared
and instructed her. She learned that the servants of the Leaf had
lived like brave knights, and those of the Flower had loved idleness
and pleasure. She promises to serve the Leaf, and came away.

Is this an allegory ? There is at least a lack of wit. There is no
ingenious enigma ; it is dominated by fancy, and the poet thinks only
of displaying in soft verse the fleeting and brilliant train which had
amused his mind and charmed his eyes.

Chaucer himself, on the first of May, rises and goes out into the
meadows. Love enters his heart with the warm sweet air ; the land-
scape is transfigured, and the birds begin to speak :

' There sate I downe among the faire flours,
And saw the bkds trip out of hir hours,

1 The Flower and the Leaf, vi. p. 2iQ, v. 7S-133.

118 THE SOURCE. [book I.

Tliere as ttey rested hem all tlie niglit,
They were so joyfull of the dayes light.
They began of May for to done honours.

They cond that service all by rote.
There was many a lovely note,
Some song loud as they had plained,
And some in other manner voice yfained
And some all out with the ful throte.

The proyned hem and made hem right gay.
And daunceden, and lepten on the spray,
And evermore two and two in fere,
Eight so as they had chosen hem to yere.
In Feverere upon saint Valentines day.

And the river that I sate upon.
It made such a noise as it ron,
Accordaunt with the birdes armony,
Methought it was the best melody
That might ben yheard of any mou. ' *

This confused harmony of vague noises troubles the sense ; a secret
languor enters the soul. The cuckoo throws his monotonous voice
like a mournful and tender sigh between the Avhite ash-tree boles ; the
nightingale makes his triumphant notes roll and rush above the leafy
canopy ; fancy breaks in unsought, and Chaucer hears them dispute of
Love. They sing alternately an antistrophic song, and the nightingale
weeps for vexation to hear the cuckoo speak in depreciation of Love.
He is consoled, however, by the poet's voice, seeing that he also suffers
with him :

* " For love and it hath doe me much wo."
" Ye, use " (quod she) "this medicine
Every day this ]\Iay or thou dine
Go looke upon the fresh dalsie.
And though thou be for wo in point to die,
That shall full greatly lessen thee of thy pine.

" And looke alway that thou be good and trew.

And I wol sing one of the songes new.

For love of thee, as loud as I may crie : "

And than she began this song fiill hie,

" I shrewe all hem that been of love untrue." '^

To such exquisite delicacies love, as with Petrarch, had carried
poetry ; by refinement even, as with Petrarch, it is lost now and then
in its wit, conceits, clenches. But a marked characteristic at once
separates it from Petrarch. Chaucer, if over-excited, is also graceful,
polished, fuU of light banter, half-mockeries, fine sensual gaiety, some-

' The Cuchow and Nightbigale, vi. p. 121, v. 67-S5.
« Ibid. p. 126, V. 230-241.

CILVr. III.] THE ^'EW TONGUE. 119

what gossipy, as the French always paint love. He follows his true
masters, and is himself an elegant speaker, facile, ever ready to smile,
loving choice pleasures, a disciple of the JRoman de la Rose, and much
less Italian than French.^ The bent of French character makes of love
not a passion, but a gay feast, tastefully arranged, in Avhich the service
is elegant, the food exquisite, the silver brilhant, the two guests in full
dress, in good humour, quick to anticipate and please each other, know-
ing how to keep up the gaiety, and when to part. In Chaucer, without
doubt, this other altogether worldly view runs side by side with the
sentimental element. If Tro'ilus is a weeping lover, his uncle Pandarus
is a lively rascal, who volunteers for a singular service Avith amusing
urgency, frank immorality, and carries it out carefully, gratuitously,
thoroughly. In these pretty attempts Chaucer accompanies him as far
as possible, and is not shocked. On the contrary, he makes fun out of
it. At the critical moment, with transparent hypocrisy, he shelters
himself under his character as author. If you find the particulars free,
he says, it is not my fault ; ' so writen clerks in hir bokes old,' and ' I
mote, aftir min auctour, telle . . .' Not only is he gay, but he jests
from end to end of the tale. He sees clearly through the tricks of
feminine modesty ; he laughs at it maliciously, knowing well what is
behind ; he seems to be saying, finger on lip : ' Hush ! let the grand
words roU on, you wUl be edified presently.' We are, in fact, edified ;
so is he, and in the nick of time he goes away, carrying the light:
' For ought I can aspics, this light nor I ne serven here of nought.'
' Troilus,' says uncle Pandarus, ' if ye be wise, sweveneth not now,
lest more folke arise.' Troilus takes care not to swoon ; and Cres-
sida at last, being alone with him, speaks wittily and with prudent
delicacy ; there is here an exceeding charm, no coarseness. Their
happiness covers all, even voluptuousness, as with profusion and per-
fume of heavenly roses. At most a slight spice of mahce flavours it :
' and gode thrift he had full oft.' Troilus holds his mistress in his
arms : ' with worse hap God let us never mete.' The poet is almost as
well pleased as they : for him, as for the men of his time, the sovereign
good is love, not damped, but satisfied ; they ended even by thinking
such love a merit. The ladies declared in their judgments, that when
one loved, one could refuse nothing to the beloved. Love has the force
of law ; it is inscribed in a code ; they combine it with religion ; and
there is a sacrament of love, in which the birds in their anthems sing
matins.^ Chaucer curses with all his heart the covetous wretches, the
business men, who treat it as a folly :

* As would God, tho wretches that despise
Service of love had eares also long
As had Mida, ful of covetise, . . .

' Stendhal, On Love : the difference of Love-taste and Love-passion.

- The Court of Love, about 1353 et seq. See also the Testament of Love,

120 THE SOURCE. [book L

To teaclien hem, that they been in the vice
And lovers not, although they hold hem nice,
. . . God yeve hem mischaunce,
And every lover in his trouth avaunce. ' ^

He clearly lacks severity, so rare in southern literature. The Italians
in the middle age made joy into a virtue ; and you perceive that the
world of chivalry, as conceived by the French, expanded morality so as
to confound it with pleasure.

IV.

There are other characteristics still more gay. The true Gallic
literature crops up ; obscene tales, practical jokes on one's neighbour,
not shrouded in the Ciceronian style of Boccacio, but related lightly by a
man in good humour;^ above all, active mahce, the trick of laughing at
your neighbour's expense. Chaucer displays it better than Rutebeuf,
and sometimes better than La Fontaine. He does not knock his men
down; he pricks them as he passes, not from deep hatred or indigna-
tion, but through sheer nimbleness of disposition, and quick sense of
the ridiculous ; he throws his jokes at them by handf uls. His man of
law is more a man of business than of the world :

* N"o-wher so hesy a man as he ther n'as,
And yet he semed besier than he was. ' '

His three burgesses :

' Everich, for the wisdom that he can
AVas shapelich for to ben an alderman.
For catel hadden they ynough and rent.
And eke hir wives wolde it wel assent.' *

Of the mendicant Friar he says :

* His wallet lay beforne him in his lappe,
Bret-fui of pardon come from Rome al bote.' ^

The mockery here comes from the heart, in the French manner, with-
out effort, calculation, or vehemence. It is so pleasant and so natural
to banter one's neighbour ! Sometimes the lively vein becomes so abun-
dant, that it furnishes an entire comedy, indelicate certainly, but so free
and easy ! Such a one is the portrait of the Wife of Bath, who has
buried five husbands :

' Bold was hire face, and fayre and rede of hew,
She was a worthy woman all hire live ;
Housbondes at the chirche dore had she had five,
"Withouten other compagnie in youthe. . . .

* Troilus and Cressida, vol. v. iii. pp. 44, 45.

^ The story of the pear-tree (Merchant's Tale), and of the cradle (Reeve's Tale),
for instance, in the Canterhury Tales.

3 Ibid. proL p. 10, v. 323. * Ibid. p. 12, v. 373. « Ibid. p. 21, v. 688.

CHAP, m.] THE NEW TONGUE. 121

In all tlie parish •wif ne was tlier non.
That to the offring before hire shulde gon.
And if ther did, certain so ■nroth was she,
That she was out of alle charitce. ' *

g>

What a tongue she has ! Impertinent, full of vanity, bold, chatterin^,
unbridled, she silences everybody, and holds forth for an hour before
coming to her tale. We hear her grating, high-pitched, loud, clear
voice, wherewith she deafened her husbands. She continually harps
upon the same ideas, repeats her reasons, piles them up and con-
founds them, like a stubborn mule who runs alono; shakins; and rino-ina;
his bells, so that the stunned listeners remain open-mouthed, wondering
that a single tongue can spin out so many words. The subject was
worth the trouble. She proves that she did well to marry five hus-
bands, and she proves it clearly, like a woman used to arguing :

' God bad us for to wex and multiplie ;
That gentil text can I wel understond ;
Eke wel I wot, he sayd, that min husbond
Shuld leve fader and moder, and take to me ;
But of no noumbre mention made he.
Of bigamie or of octogamie ;
Why shuld men than speke of it vilanie ?
Lo here the wise king Dan Solomon,
I trow he hadde wives mo than on,
(As wolde God it leful were to me
To be refreshed half so oft as he, )
Which a gift of God had he for alle his wives ? . . J
Blessed be God that I have wedded five.
Welcome the sixthe whan that ever he shall. . . .
He (Christ) spake to hem that wold live parfitly,
And lordings, (by your leve) that am nat I ;
I wol bestow the flour of aU myn age
In th' actes and the fniit of mariage. . . ,
An husbond wol I have, I wol not lette,
"Which shal be both my dettour and my thrall.
And have his tribulation withall
Upon his flesh, while that I am his wif.'^

Here Chaucer has the freedom of Moliere, and we possess it no
longer. His good ^vife justifies marriage in terms just as technical as
Sganarelle. It behoves us to turn the pages quickly, and follow in the
lump only this Odyssey of marriage. The experienced wife, who has
journeyed through life with five husbands, knows the art of taming
them, and relates how she persecuted them with jealousy, suspicion,
grumbling, quarrels, blows given and received ; how the husband, non-

* Canterbury Tales, ii. prologue, p. 14, v. 460.

* Ibid. ii. Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 168, v. 5610-5739.

122 THE SOUECE. [BOOK I.

plussed by the continuity of the tempest, stooped at last, accepted the
halter, and turned the domestic mill like a conjugal and resigned ass :

' For as an hors, I coude bite and whine ;
I coude plain, and I was in the gilt. . . .
I plained first, so was our werre ystint.
They were ful glad to excusen hem ful blive
Of thing, the which they never agilt hir live. . . .
I swore that all my walking out by night
Was for to espien wenches that he dight. . . .
For though the pope had sitten hem beside,
I wold not spare hem at hir owen bord. ...
But certainly I made folk swiche chere,
That in his owen grese I made him frie
For anger, and for veray jalousie.
By God, in erth I was his purgatorie.
For which I hope his soule be in glorie. ' *'

She saw the fifth first at the burial of the fourth :

• And Jankin oure clerk was on of tho :

As lielpe me God, whan that I saw him go
Aftir the here, me thought he had a paire
Of legges and of feet, so clene and faire,
That all my herte I yave unto his hold.
, He was, I trow, a twenty winter old.

And I was fourty, if I shal say soth. . . .

As helpe me God, I was a lusty on,

And faire, and riclie, and yonge, and well begon. ' ^

What a speech ! Was human delusion ever more happily painted ?
How lifelike is all, and how facile ! It is the satire of marriage. You
will find it twenty times in Chaucer. Nothing more is wanted to ex-
haust the two subjects of French mockery, than to unite with the satire
of marriage the satire of religion.

It is here; and Rabelais is not more bitter. The monk whom
Chaucer paints is a hypocrite, a jolly fellow, who knows good inns and
jovial hosts better than the poor and the houses of charity :

* A Frere there was, a wanton and a mery . . .
Ful wel beloved, and familier was he

With frankeleins over all in his contree.

And eke with worthy wimmen of the toun. . . .

Full swetely herde he confession,

And plesant was his absolution.

He was an esy man to give penance,

Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance :

For unto a poure ordre for to give

Is signe that a man is wel yshrive. . . .

And knew wel the tavernes in every toun,

1 Canterhury Tales, ii. Wife of Bath's Prologue, p. 179, v. 5968-6072.
s Ibid. p. 185, V. 6177-6158.

CHAP. HI.] THE NEW TONGUE. 123

And every hosteler and gay tapstere,
Better than a lazar and a Leggere. . . .
It is not lionest, it may not avance,
As for to delen witli no swich pouraille,
But all with riche and sellers of vitaille. . . .
For many a man so hard is of his herte,
lie may not wepe, although him sore smerte.
Therfore in stede of weping and praieres,
Jlen mote give silver to the poure freres. ' ^

Tliis Kvely irony had an exponent before in Jean de IMcung. But
Chaucer pushes it further, and sets it in action. His monk begs from
house to liouse, holding out his wallet :

* In every hous he gan to pore and prie,

And begged mele and chese, or eUes corn. . . .,

" Yeve us a bushel whete, or malt, or reye,

A Goddes kichel, or a trippe of chese,

Or elles what you list, we may not chese ;

A Goddes halfpeny, or a masse peny ;

Or yeve us of your braun, if ye have any,

A dagon of your blanket, leve dame,

Our suster dere, (lo here I write your name)." . . .

And whan that he was out at dore, anon.

He planed away the names everich on. ' ^

He has kept for the end of his tour, Thomas, one of his most liberal
clients. He finds him in bed, and ill ; here is an excellent fruit to suck
and squeeze :

* ** God wot," quod he, "laboured have I ful sore,
And specially for thy salvation.

Have I sayd many a precious orison. ■ . .

I have this day ben at your chirche at messe . . «

And ther I saw our dame, a, vvher is she i" ' ^

The dame enters :

' This frere ariseth up ful curtisly.
And hire embraceth in his armes narwe,
And kisseth hire swete and chirketh as a sparwe.** . . .

Then, in his sweetest and most caressing voice, he compliments her,
and says :

• " Thanked be God that you yaf soule and lif,

Yet saw I not this day so faire a wif

In all the chirche, God so save me.'"^

Have we not here already Tartuffe and Elmire ? But the monk is with
a farmer, and can go more straight and quick to his task. Compliments

' Canterbury Tales, prologue, ii. p. 7, v. 208 et passim.

2 Ibid. The Sompnoures Tale, ii. p. 220, v. 7319-7340.

3 Ibid. p. 221, V. 736G. * Ibid. p. 221, v. 7384. ' Ibid. p. 222, v. 7389.

124 THE SOUECE. [BOOK I.

ended, he thinks of the substance, and asks the lady to let hun talk
alone ^vith Thomas, He must inquire after the state of his soul :

' " I wol ■with, Thomas speke a litel throw :
Thise curates ben so negligent and slow
To gropen tendrely a conscience. . . .
Now, dame," quod he, "^eo vous die sanz doute,
Have I nat of a capon but the liver.
And of yoiu- white bred nat but a shiver.
And after that a rested pigges hed,
(But I ne wolde for me no beest were ded,)
Than had I with you homly suffisance.
I am a man of litel sustenance.
My spirit hath his fostring in the Bible.
My body is ay so redy and penible
To waken, that my stomak is destroied. " ' *

Poor man, he raises his hands to heaven, and ends with a sigh.

The wife tells him her child died a fortniglit before. Straightway
he composes a miracle ; was he not earning his money ? He had a
revelation of this death in the ' dortour ' of the convent ; he saw the
child carried to paradise ; he rose Avith his brothers, ' with many a tere
trilling on our cheke,' and they sang a Te Deum :

' " For, sire and dame, trusteth me right wel.
Our orisons ben more effectuel.
And more we seen of Cristes secree thinges
Than borel folk, although that they be kinges.
We live in poverte, and in abstinence.
And borel folk in richesse and dispence. . ■ .
Lazar and Dives liveden diversely.
And divers guerdon hadden they therby.'"^

Presently he spurts out a whole sermon, in monkish style, with mani-
fest intention. The sick man, wearied, replies that he has already
given half his fortune to all kinds of monks, and yet he continually
suffers. Listen to the grieved exclamation, the true anger of the
mendicant monk, who sees himself threatened by the meeting mth a
brother to share his client, his revenue, his booty, his food-supplies :

* The frere answered : "0 Thomas, dost thou so ?
"What nedeth you diverse freres to seche ?
"What nedeth. him that hath a parfit leche,
To sechen other leches in the toun ?
Your inconstance is your confusion.
Hold ye than me, or elles our covent,
To pray for you ben insufficient ?
Thomas, that jape n' is not worth a mite,
Your maladie is for we han to lite.'"^

1 Canterbury Tales, ii. The Sompnoures Tale, p. 222, v. 7397-7429.
3 lUd. p, 223, V. 7450-7460. 3 in^^ p. £26, v. 7536-7544.

CHAP, m.] THE NEW TONGUE. 125

Recognise the great orator ; he employs even the grand style to keep
the supplies from being cut off :

• "A, yeve that covent half a quarter otes ;
And yeve that covent four and twenty grotes ;
And yeve that frere a peny, and let him go :
Nay, nay, Thomas, it may no thing he so.
What is a ferthing worth parted on twelve ?
Lo, eche thing that is oned in himselve
Is more strong, than whan it is yscatered . . .
Thou woldest han our lahour al for nought. " ' '

Then he begins again his sermon in a louder tone, shouting at each
word, quoting examples from Seneca and the classics, a terrible fluency,
a trick of his trade, which, diligently appUed, must draw money from
the patient. He asks for gold, * to make our cloistre,'

' . . . " And yet, God wot, uneth the fundament
Parfourmed is, ne of our pavement
N' is not a tile yet within our wones :
By God, we owen fourty pound for stones.
Now help, Thomas, for him that harwed helle.
For elles mote we oure bokes selle,
And if ye lacks oure predication.
Than goth this world all to destruction.
For wlio so fro this world wold us bereve.
So God me save, Thomas, by your leve,
He wold bereve out of this world the sonne.'".^

In the end, Thomas, in a rage, promises him a gift, tells him to put his
hand in the bed and take it, and sends him away duped, mocked, and
defiled.

We have descended now to popular farce : when amusement must
be had at any price, it is sought, as here, in broad jokes, even in
filthiness. We can see how these two coarse and vigorous plants have
blossomed in the dung of the middle age. Planted by the cimning
men of Champagne and Ile-de-France, watered by the trouveres, they
were destined fully to expand, bespattered and ruddy, in the hands of
Eabelais. Meanwhile Chaucer plucks his nosegay from it. Deceived
husbands, tricked innkeepers, accidents in bed, kicks, and robberies, —
these suffice to raise a hearty laugh. Side by side with noble pictures
of chivalry, he gives us a train of Flemish grotesque figures, carpen-
ters, joiners, friars, summoners ; blows abound, fists descend on fleshy
backs; many nudities are shown; they swindle one another out of
their corn, their wives ; they pitch one another out of a window ; they
brawl and quarrel. A bruise, a piece of open filthiness, passes in such
society for a sign of wit. The sxmamoner, being ralhed by the friar,
gives him tit for tat :

^ Canterbury Tales, ii. The Sompnoures Tale, p. 226, v. 7545-7553.
» Ibid. p. 230, V. 7685-7C95.

126 THE SOUECE. [COOK I.

* " This Frere 1)0316111 that he knoweth helle,
And, God it wot, that is but litel wonder,
Freres and fendes ben but litel asonder.
For parde, ye han often time herd telle
How that a Frere ravished was to helle
In spirit ones by a visioun,
And as an angel lad him up and doun, '
To shewen him the peines that ther were. . . .
And unto Sathanas he lad him doun.
(And now hath Sathanas," saith he, " a tayl
Broder tlian of a carrike is the sayl. )
Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas, quod he,

and let the Frere see

■\Vher is the nest of Freres in this place.
And er than half a furlong way of space.
Plight so as bees out swarmen of an hive,
Out of the devils . . . ther gonnen to drive,
A twenty thousand Freres on a route.
And thurghout hell they swarmed al aboute,
And com agen, as fast as they may gon." ' *

Such were the coarse buffooneries of the popular imagination,

V.

It is high time to return to Chaucer himself. Beyond the two
notable characteristics which settle his place in his age and school of
poetry, there are others Avhich take him out of his age and school. If
he was romantic and gay like the rest, it was after a fashion of his own.
He observes characters, notes their differences, studies the coherence of
their parts, endeavours to bring forward living and distinct persons, —
a thing unheard of in his time, but which the renovators in the six-
teenth century, and first amongst them Shakspeare, will do afterwards.
It is the English positive good sense, and aptitude for seeing the inside
of things, beginning to appear. A new spirit, almost manly, pierces
through, in literature as in painting, with Chaucer as with Van Eyck,
with both at the same time ; no longer the childish imitation of
chivalrous life^ or monastic devotion, but the grave spirit of inquiry
and craving for deep truths, whereby art becomes complete. For the
first time, in Chaucer as in Van Eyck, character stands out in relief ;
its parts are held together ; it is no longer an unsubstantial phantom.
You may comprehend its past and see its present action. Its externals
manifest the personal and incommunicable details of its inner nature,
and the infinite complexity of its economy and motion. To this day,
after four centuries, that character is individualised, and typical ; it
remains distinct in our memory, like the creations of Shakspeare and

* Canterbury Tales, ii. The Sompnour's Prologue, p. 217, v. 725i-7279.
2 See in The Canterbury Tales the Rhyme of Sir Topas, a parody on the chival-
ric histories. Each character there seems a precursor of Cervantes.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 127

Rubens. We observe this growth in the very act. Not only does
Chaucer, like Boccacio, bind his tales into a single history ; but in
addition — and this is wanting in Boccacio — he begins with the portrait
of all his narrators, knight, summoner, man of law, monk, bailiff or
reeve, host, about thirty distinct figures, of every sex, condition, age,
each painted with his disposition, face, costume, turns of speech, little
significant actions, habits, antecedents, each maintained in his character
by his talk and subsequent actions, so well, that we can discern here,
before any other nation, the germ of the domestic novel as we write
it to-day. Think of the portraits of the franklin, the miller, the men-
dicant friar, and merchant. There are plenty of others which show the
broad brutalities, the coarse tricks, and the pleasantries of vulgar life, as
well as the gross and plentiful feastings of sensual life. Here and there
honest old soldiers, who double their fists, and tuck up their sleeves ;
or the contented beadles, who, when they have drunk, will speak
nothing but Latin. But by the side of these there are select characters ;
the knight, who went on a crusade to Granada and Prussia, brave and
courteous :

' And though that he was worthy he was wise,

And of his port as make as is a mayde.

He never yet no vilanie ne sayde

In alle his lif, unto no manere wight,

He was a veray parfit gentil knight. ' ^

'With him, ther was his sone, a yonge Squier,
A lover, and a histy bacheler,
With lockes crull as they were laide in preise.
Of twenty yere of age he was I gesse.
Of his stature he was of even lengthe,
And wonderly deliver, and grete of strengths.
And he hadde be somtime in chevachie,
In Flaundres, in Artois, and in Picardie,
And borne him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his ladies grace.

Embrouded was he, as it were a mede •>

Alle ful of fresshe floures, white and rede.
Singing he was, or floyting alle the day,
He was as fresshe, as is the moneth of May.
Short was his goune, with sieves long and wide.
Wel coude he sitte on hors, and fayre ride.
He coude songes make, and wel endite,
Juste and eke dance, and wel pourtraie and write.
So hote he loved, that by nightertale
He slep no more than doth the nightingale.
Curteis he was, lowly and servisable,
And carf befor his fader at the table. '^

There is also a poor and learned clerk of Oxford ; and finer still, and
' Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 3, v. 68-72. * Ibid. p. 3, v. 79-100.

128 THE SOUECE, [BOOK. I.

more worthy of a modern band, the Prioress, ' Madame Eglantine,' who
as a nun, a maiden, a great lady, is ceremonious, and shows sign of
exquisite taste. Would a better be found now-a-days in a German
chapter, amid the most modest and lively bevy of sentimental and
literary canonesses ?

' Ther was also a Noune, a Prioresse,
That of hire smiling was fill simple and coy ;
Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Eloy ;
And she was cleped Madame Eglentine.
Ful wel she sange the service devine,
Entuned in hire nose ful swetely ;
And Frenche she spake ful fayi-e and fetisly.
After the scole of Sti-atford-atte-bowe,
For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe.
At mete was she wel ytaughte withaUe ;
She lette no morsel from hii-e lippes falle,
Ke wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe.
"Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe,
Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest.
In curtesie was sette ful moche hire lest.
Hrr over lippe wiped she so clene,
That in hire cuppe was no ferthing sene
Of grese, whan she dronken hadde hire draught,
Ful semely after hu-e mete she raught.
And sikerly she was of grete disport.
And ful plesant, and amiable of jjort,
And peined hii-e to contrefeten chere
Of court, and ben estateUch of manere,
And to ben holden digne of reverence.''

Are you offended by these provincial affectations ? On the contrary, it
is delightful to behold these nice and pretty ways, these little affecta-
tions, the waggery and prudery, the half-worldly, half-monastic smUe.
We inhale a delicate feminine perfume, preserved and grown old under
the stomacher :

' But for to speken of hire conscience.

She was so charitable and so pitous,

She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous

Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.

Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde

"With rested flesh, and milk, and wastel brede.

But sore wept she if on of hem were dede,

Or if men smote it with a yerde smert :

And all was conscience and tendi'e herte. ' ^

Many elderly ladies throw themselves into such affections as these, for
lack of others. Elderly 1 what an objectionable word have I employed !
She was not elderly :

' Prologue to Canttrhury Tales, ii. p. 4, v, llS-141. ^ Ihid. p. 5, v. 142-150.

CIIAr. III.] THE NEW TONGUE, 129

* Ful semely hire wimple ypinclied was.
Hire nose tretis ; hire eyen grey as glas ;
Hire mouth ful smale, and therto soft and red ;
But sikerly she hadde a fayre forehed.
It was almost a spanne brode I trowe ;
For hardily she was not undergrowe.

Ful fotise was hire cloke, as I was ware.
Of small corall aboute hire arm she bare
A pair of bedes, gauded al with grene ;
And thereon heng a broche of gold ful sliene,
On whiche was first ywriten a crouned A,
And after, Amor vincit omnia.' ^

A pretty ambiguous device for gallantry or devotion; the lady was
both of the world and the cloister : of the world, you may see it in her
dress; of the cloister, you gather it from 'another Nonne also with
hire hadde she, that was hire chapelleine, and Preestes thre ; ' from the
Ave Maria which she sings, the long edifying stories which she relates.
She is like a fresh, sweet, and ruddy cherry, made to ripen in the
sun, but which, preserved in an ecclesiastical jar, is candied and made
insipid in the syrup.

Such is the reflection which begins to dawn, such the high art.
Chaucer studies here, rather than aims at amusement; he ceases to
gossip, and thinks; instead of surrendering himself to the facility of
glowing improvisation, he plans. Each tale is suited to the teller : the
young squire relates a fantastic and Oriental history ; the tipsy miller
a loose and comical story ; the honest clerk the touching legend of
Griselda. All these tales are bound together, and that much better
than by Boccacio, by little veritable incidents, which spring from the
characters of the personages, and such as we light upon in our travels.
The horsemen ride on in good humour in the sunshine, in the open
country ; they converse. The miller has drunk too much ale, and will
speak, * and for no man forbere.' The cook goes to sleep on his beast,
and they play practical jokes on him. The monk and the summoner
get up a dispute about their respective lines of business. The host
restores peace, makes them speak or be silent, like a man who has
long presided in the inn parlour, and who has often had to check
brawlers. They pass judgment on the stories they listen to : declaring
that there are few Griseldas in the world ; laughing at the misadven-
tures of the tricked carpenter ; drawing a lesson from the moral tale.
The poem is no longer, as in contemporary literature, a mere procession,
but a painting in which the contrasts are arranged, the attitudes chosen,
the general effect calculated, so that life is invigorated ; we forget our-
selves at the sight, as in the case of every life-like work ; and we con-
ceive the desire to get on horseback on a fine sunny morning, and

1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, v. 151-162.
I

130 THE SOUECE. [BOOK I,

canter along green mea3o^vs with tlie pilgrims to tlie slirine of tlie good
saint of Canterbury.

Weigli the value of this general effect. Is it a dream or not, in
its maturity or infancy ? The whole future is before us. Savages or
half savages, warriors of the Heptarchy or knights of the middle-age ;
up to this period, no one had reached to this point. They had strange
emotions, tender at times, and they expressed them each according to
the gift of his race, some by short cries, others by continuous babble.
But they did not command or guide their impressions ; they sang or
conversed by impulse, at hazard, according to the bent of their disposi-
tion, leaving their ideas to present themselves, and to take the lead ;
and when they hit upon order, it was ignorantly and involuntarily.
Here for the first time appears a superiority of intellect, which at the
instant of conception suddenly halts, rises above itself, passes judgment,
and says to itself, ' This phrase tells the same thing as the last — remove
it; these two ideas are disjointed — bind them together; this descrip-
tion is feeble — reconsider it.' When a man can speak thus he has an
idea, not learned in the schools, but personal and practical, of the
human mind, its process and needs, and of things also, their composi-
tion and combinations ; he has a style, that is, he is capable of making
everything understood and seen by the human mind. He can extract
from every object, landscape, situation, character, the special and signi-
ficant marks, so as to group and arrange them, to compose an artificial
work which surpasses the natural work in its purity and completeness.
He is capable, as Chaucer was, of seeking out in the old common forest
of the middle-ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil,
and make them seni out new shoots. He has the right and the power,
as Chaucer had, of copying and translating, because by dint of retouch-
ing he impresses on his translations and copies his original mark ; he
recreates Avhat he imitates, because through or by the side of worn-out
fancies and monotonous stories, he can display, as Chaucer did, the
charming ideas of an amiable and elastic mind, the thirty master-forms
of the fourteenth century, the splendid freshness of the moist landscape
and spring-time of England. He is not far from conceiving an idea of
truth and life. He is on the brink of independent thoixght and fertile
discovery. This was Chaucer's position. At the distance of a century
and a half, he has aflSnity Avith the poets of Elizabeth^ by his gallery
of pictures, and with the reformers of the sixteenth century by his
portrait of the good parson.

Affinity merely. He advanced a few steps beyond the threshold of

^ Tennyson, in liis Dream of Fair Women, sings:

' Dan Cliaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still. ' — Tr,

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 131

liis art, but he paused in the vestibule. He half opens the great door
of the temple, but does not take his seat there ; at most, he sat down
at intervals. In Arcite and Palamon, in Tro'ilus and Cressida, he
sketches sentiments, but does not create characters ; he easily and
ingeniously traces the winding course of events and conversations, but
does not mark the precise outline of a striking figure. If occasionally,
as in the description of the temple of Mars, after the Thebaid of Statins,
feeling at his back the glowing breeze of poetry, he draws out his feet,
clogged with the mud of the middle-age, and at a bound stands upon
the poetic plain on which Statins imitated Virgil and equalled Lucan,
he, at other times, again falls back into the childish gossip of the
trouveres, or the stale pedantry of learned clerks — to 'Dan Phebus or
Apollo-Delphicus.' Elsewhere, a commonplace remark on art intrudes
in the midst of an impassioned description. He uses three thousand
verses to conduct Troilus to his first interview. He is like a preco-
cious and poetical child, who mingles in his love-dreams quotations
from his prayer-book and recollections of his alphabet.^ Even in the
Canterbury Tales he repeats himself, unfolds artless developments, for-
gets to concentrate his passion or his idea. He begins a jest, and
scarcely ends it. He dilutes a bright colouring in a monotonous stanza.
His voice is like that of a boy breaking into manhood. At first a
manly and firm accent is maintained, then a shrill sweet sound shows
that his growth is not finished, and that his strength is subject to weak-
ness. Chaucer sets out as if to quit the middle-age ; but in the end he
is there still. To-day he composes the Canterbury Tales ; yesterday he
was translating the Roman de la Rose. To-day he is studying the com-
plicated machinery of the heart, discovering the issues of primitive
education or of the riding disposition, and realising the comedy of
manners ; to-morrow, he will have no pleasure but in curious events,
smooth allegories, amorous discussions, imitated from the French, or
learned moralities from the ancients. Alternately he is an observer
and a trouvere ; instead of the step he ought to have advanced, he has
but made a half-step.

Who has prevented him, and the others who surround him ? We
meet with the obstacle in his tale of Melibeus, of the Parson, in his
Testament of Love; in short, so long as he writes verse, he is at his
ease ; as soon as he takes to prose, a sort of chain winds around his feet
and stops him. His imagination is free, and his reasoning a slave.
The rigid scholastic divisions, the mechanical manner of arguing and

' Speaking of Cressida, iv., book i. p. 236, he says :
' Kight as our first letter is now an a,
111 beautie first so stood she inakeles,
Her goodly looking gladed all the prees,
Kas never seene thing to be praised so derre,
]Nor under cloude blacke so bright a sterre.'

132 THE SOURCE. [BOOK I.

replying, the ergo, the Latin quotations, the authority of Aristotle and
the Fathers, come and weigh do^vn his budding thought. His native
invention disappears under the discipline imposed. The servitude is
so heavy, that even in his Testament of Love, amid the most touching
pL^ints and the most smarting pains, the beautiful ideal lady whom he
has always served, the heavenly mediator who appears to him in a
vision, Love, sets her theses, estabhshes that the cause of a cause is
the cause of the thing caused, and reasons as pedantically as they
would at Oxford. In what can talent, even genius, end, when it loads
itseh' with such shackles ? What succession of original truths and new
doctrines could be found and proved, when in a moral tale, like that
of Melibeus and his wife Prudence, it was thought necessary to estab-
lish a formal controversy, to quote Seneca and Job, to forbid tears, to
bring forward the weeping Christ to authorise tears, to enumerate every
proof, to call in Solomon, Cassiodorus, and Cato ; in short, to write a
book for schools ? The public has only pleasant and lively thoughts ;
not serious and general ideas ; they are retained in the possession of
others. As soon as Chaucer gets into a reflective mood, straightway
Saint Thomas, Peter Lombard, the manual of sins, the treatise on defi-
nition and syllogism, the army of the ancients and of the Fathers,
descend from their glory, enter his brain, speak in his stead ; and the
trouvere's amiable voice becomes, though he has no suspicion of it, the
dogmatic and sleep-inspiring voice of a doctor. In love and satire he
has experience, and he invents; in what regards morality and philosophy
he has learning, and remembers. For an instant, by a solitary leap, he
entered upon the close observation and the genuine study of man; 'he
could not keep his ground, he did not take his seat, he took a poetic
excursion ; and no one followed him. The level of the century is
lower ; he is on it himself for the most part. He is in the company of
narrators like Froissart, of elegant speakers hke Charles of Orleans, of
gossipy and barren verse-writers like Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve.
There is no fruit, but frail and fleeting blossom, many useless branches,
stiU more dying or dead branches ; such is this literature. And why ?
Because it had no longer a root ; after three centuries of effort, a heavy
instrument cut it under ground. This instrument was the Scholastic
Philosophy.

VI.

Beneath every literature there is a philosophy. Beneath every work
of art is an idea of nature and of life ; this idea leads the poet. Whether
the author knows it or not, he writes in order to exhibit it ; and the
characters which he fashions, like the events which he arranges, only
serve to bring to light the dim creative conception which raises and com-
bines them. Underlying Homer appears the noble hfe of heroic pagan-
ism and of happy Greece. Underlying Dante, the sad and violent life of
fanatical Catholicism and of the much-hating Italians. From either we

CHAP. III. J THE NEW TONGUE 13a

might draw a. tlieory of man and of the beautiful. It is so with others;
and this is how, according to the variations, the birth, blossom, death,
or sluggishness of the master-idea, literature varies, is born, flourishes,
degenerates, comes to an end. Whoever plants the one, plants the
other ; whoever undermines the one, undermines the other. Place in
all the minds of any age a new grand idea of nature and life, so that
they feel and produce it with their whole heart and strength, and you
Avill see them, seized with the craving to express it, invent forms of art
and groups of figures. Take away from these minds every grand new
idea of nature and life, and you will see them, deprived of the craving
to express all-important thoughts, copy, sink into silence, or rave.

What has become of these all-important thoughts ? What labour
Avorked them out? What studies nourished them? The labourers
did not lack zeal. In the twelfth century the energy of their minds
was admirable. At Oxford there were thirty thousand scholars. No
building in Paris could contain the crowd of Abelard's disciples ; when
he retired to solitude, they accompanied him in such a multitude, that the
desert became a town. No suffering repulsed them. There is a story
of a young boy, who, though beaten by his master, was wholly bent
on remaining with him, that he might still learn. Wlien the terrible
encyclopedia of Aristotle was introduced, all disfigured and unintelli-
gible, it was devoured. The only question presented to them, that of
universals, so abstract and dry, so embarrassed by Arabic obscurities
and Greek subtilties, during three centuries, was seized upon eagerly.
Heavy and awkward as was the instrument supplied to them, I mean
syllogism, they made themselves masters of it, rendered it still more
heavy, used it upon every object, in every sense. They constructed
monstrous books, by multitudes, cathedrals of syllogism, of unheard of
architecture, of prodigious exactness, heightened in effect by intensity
of intellectual power, which the whole sum of human labour has only
twice been able to match.-"^ These young and valiant minds thought
they had found the temple of truth ; they rushed at it headlong, in
legions, breaking in the doors, clambering over the walls, leaping into
the interior, and so found themselves at the bottom of a moat. Three
centuries of labour at the bottom of this black moat added no single
idea to the human mind.

For consider the questions which they treat of. They seem to be
marching, but are merely iparking time. One would say, to see them
moil and toil, that they will educe from heart and brain some great
original creed ; all belief was imposed upon them from the outset.

' Under Proclus and Hegel. Duns Scotns, at the age of thirty-one, died, leaving
beside Ms sermons and commentaries, twelve folio volumes, in a small close hand-
wi-iting, in a style like Hegel's, on the same subject as Proclus treats of. Similarly
with Saint Thomas and the whole train of schoolmen. No idea can be formed of
such a labour before handling the books themselves.

134 THE SOUKCE. [BOOK 1.

The system was made ; tliey could only arrange and comment upon it.
The conception comes not from them, but from Constantinople. In-
finitely complicated and subtle as it is, the finishing work of Oriental
mysticism and Greek metaphysics, so disproportioued to their young
understanding, they exhaust themselves to reproduce it, and moreover
burden their unpractised hands with the weight of a logical instrument
which Aristotle created foi theory and not for practice, and which ought
to have remained in a cabinet of philosophical curiosities, without being
ever carried into the field of action. ' Whether the divine essence
engendered the Son, or was engendered by the Father ; why the three
persons together are not greater than one alone ; attributes determine
persons, not substance, that is, natui'e; how properties can exist in
the nature of God, and not determine it ; if created spirits are local
and circumscribed ; if God can know more things than He is aware
of;'^ — these are the ideas which they moot: what truth could issue
thence? From hand to hand the chimera grows, and spreads wider its
gloomy wings. ' Can God cause that, the place and body being re-
tained, the body shall have no position, that is, existence in place ? —
Whether the impossibility of being engendered is a constituent property
of the First Person of the Trinity — Whether identity, similitude, and
equality are real relations in God.' ^ Duns Scotus distinguishes three
kinds of matter : matter which is firstly first, secondly first, thirdly first.
According to him, we must clear this triple hedge of thorny abstractions
in order to understand the production of a sphere of brass. Under
such a regimen, imbecility soon makes its appearance. Saint Thomas
himself considers, ' whether the body of Christ arose with its wounds, —
whether this body moves with the motion of the host and the chalice in
consecration, — whether at the first instant of conception Christ had the
use of free judgment, — whether Christ was slain by Himself or by
another ? ' Do you think you are at the limits of human folly ? Listen.
He considers ' whether the dove in which the Holy Spirit appeared was
a real animal, — whether a glorified body can occupy one and the same
place at the same time as another glorified body, — whether in the state
of innocence all children were masculine?' I pass over others as to the
digestion of Christ, and some still more untranslatable.^ This is the
point reached by the most esteemed doctor, the most judicious mind,
the Bossuet of the middle-age. Even in this ring ot inanities the

^ Peter Lombard, Booh of Sentences. It was the classic of the middle-age.

* Duns Scotus, ed. 1639.

^ Utrum angelus diligat se ipsum dileetione naturali vel electiva ? Utrum in
statu innocentiee fuerit generatio per coitum ? Utnim omnes fuissent nati in sexu
masculine? Utrum cognitio angeli posset dici matutina et vespertina? Uti'iim
martyribus aureola debeatur ? Utrum virgo Maria fuerit virgo in concipiendo ?
Utrum remanserit virgo post partum ? The reader would do well to look out in
tlie text the reply to these last two questions. (S. Thomas, Summa Theologka, ed.
1677.)

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 135

answers are laid down. Eoscelin and Abelard were excommunicated,
exiled, imprisoned, because they swerved from it. There is a complete
minute dogma which closes all issues ; there is no means of escaping ;
after a hundred wriggles and a hundred efforts, you must come and
tumble into a formula. If by mysticism you try to fly over their heads,
if by experience you endeavour to creep beneath, powerful talons
await you at your exit. The wise man passes for a magician, the en-
lightened man for a heretic. The Waldenses, the Cathari, the dis-
ciples of John of Parma, were burned ; Koger Bacon died only just in
time, otherwise he might have been burned. Under this constraint
men ceased to think ; for he who speaks of thought, speaks of an effort
at invention, an individual creation, an energetic action. They recite
a lesson, or sing a catechism ; even in paradise, even in ecstasy and the
divinest raptures of love, Dante thinks himself bound to show an exact
memory and a scholastic orthodoxy. How then with the rest ? Some,
like Raymond Lully, set about inventing an instrument of reasoning to
serve in place of the understanding. About the fourteenth century,
under the blows of Occam, this verbal science began to totter ; they
saw that it had no other substance but one of words ; it was discredited.
In 13C7, at Oxford, of thirty thousand students, there remained six thou-
sand ; they still set their Barbara and Felapton, but only in the Avay of
routine. Each one in turn mechanically traversed the petty region of
threadbare cavils, scratched himself in the briars of quibbles, and bur-
dened himself with his bundle of texts ; nothing more. The vast body
of science which was to have formed and vivified the whole thought of
man, was reduced to a text-book.

So, little by little, the conception which fertilised and ruled all
others, dried up ; the deep spring, whence flowed all poetic streams,
was found empty ; science furnished nothing more to the world.
What further works could the world produce ? As Spain, later on,
renewing the middle-age, after having shone splendidly and vainly
by her chivalry and devotion, by Lope de Vega and Calderon, Loyola
and St. Theresa, became enervated through the Inquisition and through
casuistry, and ended by sinking into a brutish silence ; so the middle-
age, outstripping Spain, after displaying the senseless heroism of the
crusades, and the poetical ecstasy of the cloister, after producing
chivalry and saintship, Francis of Assisi, St. Louis, and Dante,
languished under the Inquisition and the scholastic learning, and
became extinguished in idle raving and inanity.

Must we quote all these good people who speak without having
anything to say ? You may find them in Warton ; ^ dozens of trans-
lators, importing the poverties of French literature, and imitating
imitations ; rhyming chroniclers, most commonplace of men, whom
we only read because we must accept history from every quarter,

' Hist, of Ewjlish Poetry, vol. ii.

136 THE SOUECE. [book L

even from imbeciles ; spinners and spinsters of didactic stories, who
pile up verses on the training of falcons, on armour, on chemistry ;
editors of moralities, who invent the same dream over again for the
hundredth time, and get themselves taught universal history by the
goddess Sapience. Like the Avriters of the Latin decadence, these
folk only think of copying, compiling, abridging, constructing text-
book?:, in rhymed memoranda, the encyclopedia of their times.

AVill you hear the most illustrious, the grave Gower — * morall
Gower,' as he was called ? -^ Doubtless here and there he contains a
remnant of brilliancy and grace. He is like an old secretary of a
Court of Love, Andre le Chapelain or any other, who would pass the
day in solemnly registering the sentences of ladies, and in the evening,
partly asleep on his desk, would see in a half-dream their sweet smile
and their beautiful eyes.^ The ingenious but exhausted vein of
Charles of Orleans still flows in his French ballads. He has the same
fine delicacy, almost a little finicky. The poor little poetic spring
flows yet in thin transparent films under the smooth pebbles, and
murmurs with- a babble, pretty, but so weak that at times you cannot
hear it. But dull is the rest ! His great poem, Confessio Amantis, is
a dialogue betAveen a lover and his confessor, imitated chiefly from
Jean de Meung, having for object, like the Roman de la Iiose, to
explain and classify the impediments of love. The superannuated
theme is always reappearing, and beneath it an indigested erudition.
You will find here an exposition of hermetic science, a treatise on the
philosophy of Aristotle, a discourse on politic?, a litany of ancient and
modern legends gleaned from the compilers, marred in the passage by
the pedantry of the schools and the ignorance of the age. It is a cart-
load of scholastic rubbish ; the sewer tumbles upon this feeble spirit,
which of itself was flowing clearly, but now, obstructed by tiles, bricks,
plaster, ruins from all quarters of the globe, drags on darkened and
slackened. Gower, one of the most learned of his time,^ supposed
that Latin was invented by the old prophetess Carmens ; that the
grammarians, Aristarchus, Donatus, and Didymus, regulated its
^syntax, pronunciation, and prosody; that it was adorned by Cicero
with the flowers of eloquence and rhetoric ; then enriched by trans-
lations from the Arabic, Chaldean, and Greek ; and that at last, after
much labour of celebrated writers, it attained its final perfection in
Ovid, the poet of love. Elsewhere he discovers that Ulysses learned
rhetoric from Cicero, magic from Zoroaster, astronomy from Ptolemy,
and philosophy from Plato. And what a style ! so long, so dull,* so

^ Contemporary with Chaucer. The Confessio Amantis dates from 1393.

2 History of Rosiphele. Ballads.

3 Warton, ii. 240.

* See, for instance, his description of the sun's crown, the most poetical passaga
in book vii.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TOXGUE. 137

drawn out by repetitions, the most minute details, garnished -with
references to his text, like a man who, with his eyes glued to his
Aristotle and his Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments, cau do
nothing but copy and string his rhymes together. Scholars even in
old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all wit, is in their
great wood-bound books ; that they have no need to find out and
invent for themselves ; that their whole business is to repeat ; that
this is, in fact, man's business. The scholastic system had enthroned
the dead letter, and peopled the world with dead understandings.

After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate.^ ' My fiither Chaucer
would willingly have taught me,' says Occleve, ' but I was dull, and
learned little or nothing.' He paraphrased in verse a treatise of
Egidius, on government ; these are moralities. There are others, on
compassion, after Augustine, and on the art of dying ; then love-tales ;
a letter from Cupid, dated from his court in the month of ^lay. Love
and moralities,^ that is, abstractions and refinements, were the taste
of the time ; and so, in the time of Lebrun, of Esmenard, at the close
of contemporaneous French literature,^ they produced collections of
didactic poems, and odes to Chloris. As for the monk Lydgate, he
had some talent, some imagination, especially in high-toned descrip-
tions : it was the last flicker of a dying literature ; gold received a
golden coating, precious stones were placed upon diamonds, ornaments
multiplied and made fantastic ; as in their dress and buildings, so
in their style.* Look at the costumes of Henry iv. and Henry v.,
monstrous heart-shaped or horn-shaped head-dresses, long sleeves
covered with ridiculous designs, the plvimes, and again the oratories,
armorial tombs, little gaudy chapels, like conspicuous flowers under
the naves of the Gothic perpendicular. When we can no more speak
to the soul, we try to speak to the eyes. This is Avhat Lydgate does,
nothing more. Pageants or shows are required of him, ' disguisings '
for the Company of goldsmiths ; a mask before the king, a May-enter-
tainment for the sheriffs of London, a drama of the creation for the
festival of Corpus Christi, a masquerade, a Christmas show ; he gives
the plan and furnishes the verses. In this matter he never runs dry ;
two hundred and fifty-one poems are attributed to him. Poetry thus
conceived becomes a manufacture ; it is composed by the yard. Such
was the judgment of the Abbot of St. Albans, who, having got him to
translate a legend in verse, pays a hundred shillings for the whole,
verse, writing, and illuminations, placing the three works on a levei.

» 1420, 1430.

2 This is the title Froissart (1397) gave to his collection when presenting it to
Richard ii.

3 Lehmn, 1729-1807 ; Esmenard, 1770-1812.

* Lydgate, The Destruction of Troy — description of Hector's chapel. Especially
read the Pageants or Solemn Entries.

133 THE SOUECE. [BOOK I.

lu fact, no more thought was required for one than for the others
His three great works, The Fall oj Princes, The Destruction of Troy,
and The Siege of Thebes, are only translations or paraphrases, verbose,
erudite, descriptive, a kind of chivalrous processions, coloured for the
twentieth time, in the same manner, on the same vellum. The only-
point which rises above the average, at least in the first poem, is the
idea of Fortune,^ and the violent vicissitude? of human life. If there
was a philosophy at this time, this was it. They willingly narrated
horrible and tragic histories ; gather them from antiquity down to
their own day ; they were far from the trusting and passionate piety
which felt the hand of God in the government of the world ; they saw
that the world went blundering here and there like a drunken man.
A sad and gloomy world, amused by external pleasures, oppressed
with a dull misery, which suffered and feared without consolation or
hope, isolated between the ancient spirit in Avhich it had no living
hope, and the modern spirit whose active science it ignored. Fortune,
like a black smoke, hovers over all, and shuts out the sight of heaven.
They pictiu'e it as follows : —

' Her face semyng cruel and tenible
And bj' disdayne menacing of loke, . . .
An hundi'ed handes she had, of eche part . . •
Some of her handes \yit up men alofte,
To h3'e estate of vorldlye dignite ;
Another hande griped ful unsofte,
"Which cast another in gi-ete adversite. ' ^

They look upon the great unhappy ones, a captive king, a dethroned
queen, assassinated princes, noble cities destroyed,^ lamentable spec-
tacles as exhibited in Germany and France, and of which there
will be plenty in England ; and they can only regard them with a
harsh resignation. Lydgate ends by reciting a commonplace of
mechanical piety, by way of consolation. Tlie reader makes the sign
of the cross, yawns, and goes away. In fact, poetry and religion
are no longer capable of suggesting a genuine sentiment. Authors
copy, and copy again. Hawes^ copies the House of Fame of Chaucer,
and a sort of allegorical amorous poem, after the Roman de la Rose.
Barclay ^ translates the Mirror of Good Manners and the Ship of Fools.
Continually we meet with dull abstractions, used up and barren ; it is
the scholastic phase of poetry. If anywhere there is an accent of

* See the Vision of Fortune, a gigantic figure. In this painting he shows both
feeling and talent.

2 Lydgate, Fall of Princes. "Warton, ii. 280.

3 The War of the Hussites, The Hundred Years' "War, and The War of the
Eoses.

* About 1506. The Temple of Glass. Passetyme of Pleasure,
6 About 1500.

CHAP. III.] THE NEW TONGUE. 139

greater originality, it is in this Ship of Fools, and in Lydgate's Dance of
Death, bitter buflfooneries, sad gaieties, which, in the hands of artists
and poets, were having their run throughout Europe. They mock at
each other, grotesquely and gloomily ; poor, dull, and vulgar figures,
shut up in a ship, or made to dance on their tomb to the sound of a
fiddle, played by a grinning skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy
talk, and amid the disgust Avhich they have conceived for each other,
a clown, a tavern Triboulet,^ composer of little jeering and macaronic
verses, Skelton^ makes his appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who,
jumbling together French, English, Latin phrases, with slang, and
fashionable words, invented words, intermingled with short rhymes,
fabricates a sort of literary mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey
and the bishops. ' Style, metre, rhyme, language, art of every kind, is
at an end ; beneath the vain parade of official style there is only a heap
of rubbish. Yet, as he says,

' Tliougli my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and gagged,
Eudely rain-beateu,
Rusty, moth-eaten,
Yf ye take welle therewithe,
It hath in it some pithe.'

It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English and popular
instincts ; it lives. It is a coarse life, still elementary, swarming with
ignoble vermin, like that which appears in a great decomposing body.
It is life, nevertheless, with its two great features which it is destined
to display : the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is the
Reformation ; the return to the senses and to natural life, which is the
Renaissance.

^ The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of Le Roi s'amuse. — Te.

2 Died 1529 ; Poet Laureate 1489. His Bonge of Court, his Croivn of Laurel,
his Ele/jy on the Death of the, Earl of Northumberland, are well written, and
belong to official poetry.

BOOK II.

THE RENAISSANCE.

CHAPTER I.
The Pagan Renaissance.-

1. JMa^nees of the Time.

I Idea whish men had formed of the world, since the dissolution of the old
society — How and why human inventiveness reappears — The form of the
spirit of the Renaissance— The representation of objects is imitative, cha-
racteristic, and complete.
II. Why the ideal changes — Improvement of the state of man in Europe— In
England — Peace — Industry — Commerce — Pasturage — Agriculture —
Growth of public wealth — Buildings and furniture — The palace, meals
and habits— Coui't pageantries — Celebrations vmder Elizabeth — Masques
under James i.

III. lilanners of the people— Pageants— Theatres— Village feasts— Pagan develop-

ment.

IV. Models— The ancients — Translation and study of classical authors— Sym-

pathy for the manners and mythology of the ancients — the moderns —
Taste for Italian writings and ideas — Poetry and painting in Italy were
pagan— The ideal is the strong and happy man, limited by the present
world.

2. Poetry.

I. The English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the Saxon genius.
II. The forerunners— The Earl of Surrey— His feudal and chivalrous life— His
English individual character— His serious and melancholy poems— His
conception of intimate love.

III. His style— His masters, Petrarch and Virgil— His progress, power, preco-

cious perfection — Bkth of art — Weaknesses, imitation, research — Art in-
complete.

IV. Growth and completion of art — Euphues and fashion — Style and spirit of the

Renaissance — Copiousness and irregularity — How manners, style, and
spirit correspond — Su- Philip Sydney — His education, life, character — His
learning, gravity, generosity, forcible expression — the Arcadia — Exaggera-
tion and mannerism of sentiments and style — Defence of Poesie — Eloquence
and energj-— His sonnets — Wherein the body and the passions of tbo

142 THE KENAISSAXCE. [BOOK 11.

Eenaissance differ from those of tlie moderns— Sensual love — Mystical
love.
V. Pastoral poetry — The great number of poets — Spirit and force of the poetry
— State of mind which produces it — Love of the country — Eeappearance of
the ancient gods — Enthusiasm for beauty — Picture of ingenuous and happy
love — Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Drayton, Marlowe, "Warner, Breton,
Lodge, Greene — How the transformation of the people transforms art.
VI. Ideal poetry — Spenser — His life — His character — His platonism — His Hymns
of Love and Beauty — Copiousness of his imagination — How far it was suited
for the epic — Wherein it was allied to the 'faerie' — His tentatives — Shep-
herd's Calendar — His short poems — His masterpiece — The Faerie Queene
— His epic is allegorical and yet life-like — It embraces Christian chivalry
and the Pagan Olympia — How it combines these.
VII. The Faerie Queene — Impossible events — How they appear natural — Belplioehe
and Chrysogone — Faiiy and gigantic pictures and landscapes — ^^Vhy they
must be so — The cave of !Mammon, and the gardens of Acrasia— How
Spenser composes — Wherein the art of the Renaissance is complete.

3. Peose.

I. Limit of the poetry — Changes in society and manners — How the return to
nature becomes an appeal to the senses — Corresponding changes in poetry
— How agreeableness replaces energy — How prettiness replaces the beautiful
— Refinements — Carew, Suckling, Herrick — Affectation — Quarles, Herbert,
Babington, Donne, Cowley — Beginning of the classic style, and the draw-
ing-room life.

II. How poetry passed into prose — Connection of science and art — In Italj' — In
England — How the triumph of nature develops the exercise of the natui-al
reason — Scholars, historians, speakers, compilers, politicians, antiquarians,
philosophers, theologians — The abundance of talent, and the rarity of fine
works — Superfluousness, punctiliousness, and pedantry of the style —
Originality, precision, energy, and richness of the style — How, unlike the
classical writers, they represent the individual, not the idea.

III. Robert Burton — His life and character — Vastness and confusion of his re-

quirements— His subject, the Anatomy of Melancholy — Scholastic divisions
— Medley of moral and medical science.

IV. Sir Thomas Browne — His talent — His imagination is that of a North-man —

Hydriotaphia, Eeligio Medici — His ideas, curiosity, and doubts belong to
the age of the Renaissance — Pseudodoxia — Effects of this activity and
this direction of the public mind.
V. Francis Bacon — His talent — His originality — Concentration and brightness
of his style — Comparisons and aphorisms — The Fssays — His style not
argumentative, but intuitive — His practical good sense — Turning-point of
his philosophy — The object of science is the amelioration of the condition
of man — Xew Atlantis — The idea is in accordance with the state of aflairs
and the spirit of the times — It completes the Renaissance — It introduces a
new method — The Organum — Where Bacon stopped — Limits of the spirit
of the age — How the conception of the world, which had been poetic, be-
came mechanical — How the Renaissance ended in the establishment of
positive science.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSAXCE. 143

1. Manners of the Time.

I.

FOR seventeen centuries a deep and sad thought had weighed upon
the spirit of man, first to overwhelm it, then to exalt and to
weaken it, never loosing its liold throughout this long space of time.
It was the idea of the impotence and decadence of man. Greek cor-
ruption, Roman oppression, and the dissolution of the old world, had
given it birth ; it, in its turn, had produced a stoical resignation, an
epicurean indifference, Alexandrian mysticism, and the Christian hope
in the kingdom of God. ' The world is evil and lost, let us escape by
insensibility, amazement, ecstasy.' Thus spoke the philosophers ; and
religion, coming after, announced that the end was near : ' Prepare, for
the kingdom of God is at hand.' For a thousand years universal ruin
incessantly drove still deeper into their hearts this gloomy thought ;
and when man in the feudal state raised himself, by sheer force of
courage and arms, from the depths of final imbecility and general
misery, he discovered his thought and his work fettered by the crush-
ing idea, v/hich, forbidding a life of nature and worldly hopes, erected
into ideals the obedience of the monk and the dreams of fanatics.

It degenerated of itself. For the natural result of such a concep-
tion, as of the miseries which engender it, and the discouragement
which it gives rises to, is to paralyse personal action, and to replace
originality by submission. From the fourth century, gradually the
dead letter was substituted for the living faith. Christians resigned
themselves into the hands of the clergy, they into the hands of the Pope.
Christian opinions were subordinated to theologians, and theologians
to the Fathers. Christian faith was reduced to the accomplishment
of works, and Avorks to the accomplishment of ceremonies. Religion
flowing during the first centuries, had become hardened and crystal-
lised, and the coarse contact of the barbarians placed on it, in addition,
a layer of idolatry : theocracy and the Inquisition manifested themselves,
the monopoly of the clergy and the prohibition of the Scriptures, the
worship of relics and the purchase of indulgences. In place of Chris-
tianity, the church ; in place of free belief, an imposed orthodoxy ; in
place of moral fervour, determined religious practices ; in place of
heart and energetic thought, external and mechanical discipline : these
are the characteristics of the middle-age. Under this constraint a
thinking society had ceased to think ; philosophy was turned into a text-
book, and poetry into raving ; and mankind, slothful and crouching,
made over their conscience and their conduct into the hands of their
priests, and were as puppets, capable only of reciting a catechism and
chanting a hymn.^

1 See, at Bruges, the pictures of Hemling (fifteenth century). No painting
enables us to understand so well the ecclesiastical piety of the middle-age, which
was altogether like that of the Buddliista.

144 THE EENAISSAICCE. [BOOK II.

At last invention makes anotlier start ; and it makes it by the
efforts of the lay society, which rejected theocracy, kept the State free,
and which presently discovered, or re-discovered, one after another, the
industries, sciences, and arts. All was renewed ; America and the
Indies were added to the map ; the shape of the earth was ascertained, the
system of the universe propounded, modern philology was inaugurated,
the experimental sciences set on foot, art and literature shot forth like a
harvest, religion was transformed: there was no province of human intelli-
gence and action which was not refreshed and fertilised by this universal
effort. It was so great, that it passed from the innovators to the laggards,
and reformed Catholicism in the face of Protestantism which it formed.
It seems as though men had suddenly opened their eyes, and seen. In
fact, they attain a new and superior kind of intelligence. It is the
proper feature of this age, that men no longer make themselves masters
of objects by bits, or isolated, or through scholastic or mechanical classi-
fications, but as a whole, in general and complete views, with the eager
grasp of a sympathetic spii'it, which, being placed before a vast object,
penetrates it in all its parts, tries it in all its relations, appropriates and
assimilates it, impresses upon himself its living and potent image, so
life-like and so powerful, that he is fain to translate it into externals
thi'ough a work of art or an action. An extraordinary wai'mth of soul,
a superabundant and splendid imagination, reveries, visions, artists,
believers, founders, creators, — that is what such a form of intellect pro-
duces ; for to create we must have, as had Luther and Loyola, Michael
Angelo and Shakspeare,^ an idea, not abstract, partial, and dry, but well
defined, finished, sensible, — a true creation, which acts iuAvardly, and
struggles to appear to the light. This was Europe's grand age, and the
most notable epoch of human growth. To this day w^e live from its
sap, we only carry on its pressure and efforts.

IL

When human power is manifested so clearly and in such great
Avorks, it is no wonder if the ideal changes, and the old pagan idea
recurs. It recurs, bringing with it the worship of beauty and vigour,
first in Italy ; for this, of all countries in Europe, is the most pagan,
the nearest to the ancient civilisation ; thence in France and Spain, in
Flanders, even in Germany ; and finally in England. How is it pro-
pagated ? What revolution of manners reunited mankind at this time,
in every country, under a sentiment Avhich they had forgotten for
fifteen hundred years ? Merely that their condition had improved, and
they felt it. The idea ever expresses the actual situation, and the
creatures of the imagination, like the conceptions of the spirit, only
manifest the state of society and the degree of its welfare ; there is a

1 Van Orley, Michel Coxie, Franz Floris, the de Vos', the Sadlers, Crispin de
Pass, and the artists of Kuremberg.

CHAP. 1.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 145

fixed connection between what man admires and wliat he is. While
misery overwhehns him, while the decadence is visible, and hope shut
out, he is inclined to curse his life on earth, and seek consolation in
another sphere. As soon as his sufferings are alleviated, his power
made manifest, his perspective enlarged, he begins once more to love
the present life, to be self-confident, to love and praise energy, genius,
all the effective faculties which labour to procure him happiness.
About the twentieth year of Elizabeth's reign, the nobles gave up shield
and two-handed sword for the rapier;^ a little, almost imperceptible
fact, yet vast, for it is like the change which, sixty years ago, made us
give up the sword at court, to leave us with our arms swinging about
in our black coats. In fact, it was the close of feudal life, and the
beginning of court-life, just as to-day court-life is at an end, and the
democratic reign has begun. With the two-handed swords, heavy
coats of mail, feudal dungeons, private warfare, permanent dis-
order, all the scourges of the middle-age retired, and were wiped out
in the past. The English had finished with the Wars of the Roses.
They no longer ran the risk of being pillaged to-morrow for being
rich, and hung the next day for being a traitor ; they have no further
need to furbish up their armour, make alliances with powerful nations,
lay in stores for the winter, gather together men-at-arms, scour the
country, to plunder and hang others.^ The monarchy, in England as
throughout Europe, established peace in the community,^ and with
peace appeared the useful arts. Domestic comfort follows civil security ;
and man, better furnished in his home, better protected in his hamlet,
takes pleasure in his life on earth, which he has changed, and means
to change.

Toward the close of the fifteenth century * the impetus was given ;
commerce and the woollen trade made a svidden advance, and such an
enormous one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, ' whereby
the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and come
into riches and wealthy livings,'^ so that in 1553, 40,000 pieces of
cloth Avere exported in English ships. It was already the England which
we see to-day, a land of meadows, green, intersected by hedgerows,
crowded with cattle, abounding in ships, a manufacturing opulent
land, with a people of beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they

^ The first carriage was in 1564. It caused much astonishment. Some said
that it was ' a great sea-shell brought from China ;' others, ' that it was a temple
in which cannibals worshipped the devil.'

2 For a picture of this state of things, see Fen's Paston Letters.

' Louis XI. in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry vil. in England.
In Italy the feudal regime ended earlier, by the establishment of republics and
principalities.

^ 1488, Act of Parliament on Enclosures.

* A Comptndlous Examination, 1581, by "William Strafford. Act of Parha-
ment, 1541.

146 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

enrich themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent, that
in half a century ^ the produce of an acre was doubled.^ They grew
so rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I. the Commons
represented three times the wealth of the Upper House. The ruin of
Antwerp^ by the Duke of Parma sent to England 'the third part of
the merchants and manufacturers, who made silk, damask, stockings,
taffetas, and serges.' The defeat of the Armada and the decadence of
Spain opened the seas to their merchants.* The toiling hive, who would
dare, attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was about
to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages, buzzing over the
universe.

At the base and on the summit of society, in all ranks of life,
in all grades of human condition, this new welfare became visible. In
1534, considering that the streets of London were ' very noyous and
foul, and in many places thereof very jeopardous to all people passing
and repassing, as well on horseback as on foot,' Henry viii. began
tlie paving of the city.^ New streets covered the open spaces where
the young men used to run and fight. Every year the number of
taverns, theatres, rooms for recreation, places devoted to bear-baiting,
increased. Before the time of Elizabeth the country-houses of gentle-
men were little more than straw-thatched cottages, plastered with the
coarsest clay, lighted only by trellises. ' Howbeit,' says Harrison
(1580), 'such as be latelie builded are commonlie either of bricke
or hard stone, or both ; their roomes large and comelie, and houses
of office further distant from their lodgings,' The old wooden houses
Avere covered with plaster, ' which, beside the delectable whitenesse
of the stuffe itselfe, is laied on so even and smoothlie, as nothing
in my judgment can be done with more exactnesse.'® This open
admiration shows from what hovels they had escaped. Glass was
at last employed for windows, and the bare walls were covered with
tapestries, on which visitors might see, with delight and astonish-
ment, plants, animals, figures. They began to use stoves, and experi-
enced the unwonted pleasure of being warm. Harrison notes three
important changes which had taken place in the farm-houses of his
time : —

' One is, the multitude of chimnies lately erected, whereas in their yoong daiea

1 Plot. History, ii. 902.

2 Between 1377 and 1583 the increase was two millions and a half.
' In 1585 ; Ludovic Guicciardini.

* Henry viii. at the beginning of his reign had hut one ship of war. Elizabeth
sent out one hundred and iifty against the Armada. In 1553 was foimded a com-
pany to trade with Russia. In 1578 Drake circumnavigated the globe. In 1600
the East India Company was founded.

5 Plct. Hist. ii. 781.

6 Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, 1817, i. v. 72 et passim.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. U7

there were not above two cr three, if so mania, in most uplanclishe townes of the
realme. . , , The second is the great amendment of lodging, altliough not generall, for
our fathers, (yea and we ourselves also) have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on
rough mats covered onelie with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain, or hoj)-
harlots, and a good round log under their heads, insteed of a bolster or pillow. If
it were so that the good man of the house, had within seven yeares after his mar-
riage purchased a matteres or flockebed, and thereto a sacke of chaffe to rest his
head upon, he thought himselfe to be as well lodged as the lord of the towne. . . .
PiUowes (said they) were thought meet onelie for women in childbed. . . , The third
thing is the exchange of vessell, as of treene platters into pewter, and wodden
spoones into silver or tin ; for so common was all sorts of treene stuff in old time,
tliat a man should hardlie find four peeces of pewter (of which one was peradventui'e
a salt) in a good farmers house. ' ^

It is not possession, but acquisition, which gives men pleasure and
sense of power ; they observe sooner a small happiness, new to them,
than a great happiness which is old. It is not when all is good, but
when all is better, that they see the bright side of life, and are tempted
to make a holiday of it. This is why at this period they did make a
holiday of it, a splendid show, so like a picture that it fostered paintinnf
in Italy, so like a representation, that it produced the drama in England.
Now that the battle-axe and sword of tlie civil wars had beaten down
the independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of maintenance had
destroyed the petty royalty of each great feudal baron, the lords quitted
their sombre castles, battlemented fortresses, surrounded by stagnant
Avater, pierced with narrow windows, a sort of stone breastplates of no
use but to preserve the life of their masters. They flock into new
palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with fantastic and
manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and vast staircases, with
gardens, fountains, statues, such as were the palaces of Henry viii.
and Elizabeth, half Gothic and half Italian,^ whose convenience, gran-
deur, and beauty announced already habits of society and the taste for
pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old manners ; the
four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity were reduced to
two ; gentlemen soon became refined, placing their glory in the elegance
and singularity of their amusements and their clothes. They dressed
magnificently in splendid materials, with the luxury of men who rustle
silk and make gold sparkle for the first time : doublets of scarlet satin ;
cloaks of sable costing a thousand ducats ; velvet shoes, embroidered
with gold and silver, covered with rosettes and ribbons ; boots Avith
falling tops, from whence hung a cloud of lace, embroidered with figures
of birds, animals, constellations, flowers in silver, gold, or precious
stones; ornamented shirts costing ten pounds. * It is a common thinf
to put a thousand goats and a hundred oxen on a coat, and to carry a

' Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, i. v. 102.

^ This was called the Tudor style. Under James i., in the hands of Inigo
Jones, it became entii-ely Italian, approaching the anti(jue.

o^

143 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II,

whole manor on one's back.' ^ The costumes of the time were like
shrines. When Elizabeth died, they found three thousand dresses in
her wardrobe. Need we speak of the monstrous ruffs of the ladies,
their puffed out dresses, their stomachers stiff with diamonds ? As a
singular sian of the times, the men were more changeable and more
bedecked than they. Harrison says :

' Such is our mutaljilitie, that to daie there is none to the Spanish guise, to
morrow the French toies are most fine and delectahle, yer long no such appareU as
that which is after the high Alman fashion, by and by the Turkish maner is gene-
rallie best hked of, otherwise the Morisco gowns, the Barbarian sleeves . . . and
the short French breeches. . . . And as these fashions are diverse, so Hkewise it
is a world to see the costlinesse and the curiositie ; the excesse and the vanitie ;
tlie pompe and the braverie ; the change and the varietie ; and finallie, the fickle-
nesse and the follie that is in all degrees. ' ^

^o^

Folly, it may have been, but poetry likewise. There was something
more than puppyism in this masquerade of splendid costume. Tlie
overflow of inner sentiment found this issue, as also in drama and poetrv.
It was an artistic spirit which induced it. There was an incredible
outgrowth of living forms from their brains. They acted like their
engravers, who give us in their frontispieces a prodigality of fruits,
flowers, active figures, animals, gods, and pour out and confuse the
whole treasure of nature in every corner of their paper. They must
enjoy the beautiful; they would be happy through their eyes; they
perceive in consequence naturally the reUef and energy of forms. From
the accession of Henry viii. to the death of James i. we find nothing
but tournaments, processions, public entries, masquerades. First come
the royal banquets, coronation displays, large and noisy pleasures of
Henry viii. Wolsey entertains him

' In so gorgeous a sort and costlie maner, that it was an heaven to behold. There
wanted no dames or damosels meet or apt to danse with the maskers, or to garnish
the place for the time : then was there all kind of musike and harmonie, with fine
voices both of men and children. On a time the king came suddenUe thither in a
maske with a dozen maskers all in garments like sheepheards, made of fine cloth of
gold, and crimosin sattin paned, . . . having sixteene torch-bearers. ... In
came a new banket before the king wherein were served two hundred diverse
dishes, of costlie devises and subtilities. Thus passed they foorth the night with
banketting, dansing, and other triumphs, to the great comfort of the king, and
pleasant regard of the nobilitie there assembled. ' ■*

Count, if you can,* the mythological entertainments, the theatrical re-

^ Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 12th ed. 1821. Stubbes, Anaiomie o/
Ahuses, ed. Turnbull, 1836.

^ Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times, ii. 6, 87.

3 Holinshed (1586), 1808, 6 vols. iii. 763 et passim.

* Holinshed, iii., Reign of Henry VIII. Elizabeth and James Progresses, by
Nichols.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN FvENAISSANCE. 149

ceptions, the open-air operas played before Elizabeth, James, and tlieir
great lords. At Kenihvorth the pageants lasted ten days. There was
everything; learned recreations, novelties, popular plays, sanguinary
spectacles, coarse farces, juggling and feats of skill, allegories, mytho-
logies, chivalric exhibitions, rustic and national commemorations. At
the same time, in this universal outburst and sudden expanse, men be-
come interested in themselves, find their life desirable, worthy of being
represented and put on the stage complete ; they play with it, delight
in looking upon it, love its heights and depths, and make of it a work
of art. The queen is received by a sibyl, then by giants of the time of
Arthur, then by the Lady of the Lake, Sylvanus, Pomona, Ceres, and
Bacchus, every divinity in turn presents her with the first fruits of his
empire. Next day, a savage, dressed in moss and ivy, discourses before
her with Echo in her praise. Thirteen bears are set fighting against
dogs. An Italian acrobat performs wonderful feats before the whole
assembly. A rustic marriage takes place before the queen, then a
sort of comic fight amongst the peasants of Coventry, who represent the
defeat of the Danes. As she is returning from the chase, Tiiton,
rising from the lake, prays her, in the name of Neptune, to deliver the
enchanted lady, pursued by ruthless Sir Bruce. Presently the lady
appears, surroimded by nymphs, followed close by Proteus, who is
borne by an enormous dolphin. Concealed in the dolphin, a band of
musicians with a chorus of ocean-deities, sing the praise of the power-
ful, beautiful, chaste queen of England. You perceive that comedy is
not confined to the theatre ; the great of the realm and the queen her-
self become actors. The cravinsrs of the imagination are so keen, that
the court becomes a stage. Under James i., every year, on Twelfth-
day, the queen, the chief ladies and nobles, played a piece called a
^lasque, a sort of allegory combined with dances, heightened in effect
by decorations and costumes of great splendour, of which the mytho-
logical paintings of Rubens can alone give an idea : —

'The attire of the lords was from the antique Greek statues. On their heads
they wore Persic crowns, that were with scrolls of gold plate turned outward, and
wreathed about with a carnation and silver net-lawn. Their bodies were of car-
nation cloth of silver; to express the naked, in manner of the Greek thorax, girt
under the breasts with abroad belt of cloth of gold, fastened with jewels ; the mantles
were of coloured silks ; the first, sky-colour ; the second, pearl-colour ; the third,
flame-colour ; the fourth, tawny. The ladies attire was of white cloth of silver,
wrought with Juno's birds and fruits ; a loose under garment, full gathered, of
carnation, striped with silver, and parted with a golden zone ; beneath that, another
flowing garment, of watchet cloth of silver, laced with gold ; their Lair carelessly
bound under the circle of a rare and rich coronet, adorned with all variety, and
choice of jewels ; from the top of which flowed a transparent veil, down to the
ground. Their shoes were aziu-e and gold, set with rubies and diamonds. ' ^

1 abridge the description, which is like a fairy tale. Fancy that all
* Ben Jonson's works, ed. Gifford, 1S16, 9 vols. Masque of Hymen, voL viL 76.

150 THE KEXAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

these costume?, this glitter of materials, this sparkling of diamonds, this
splendour of nudities, Avas displayed daily at the marriage of the great,
to the bold sounds of a pagan epithalamium. Think of the feasts which
the Earl of Carlisle introduced, where was served first of all a table
loaded with sumptuous viands, as high as a man could reach, in order
to remove it presently, and replace it by another similar table. This
prodigality of magnificence, these costly follies, this unbridling of the
imagination, this intoxication of eye and ear, this comedy played by the
lords of the realm, showed, like the pictures of Rubens, Jordaens, and
their Flemish contemporaries, so open an appeal to the senses, so com-
plete a return to nature, that our chilled and gloomy age is scarcely
able to imagine it.^

III.

To vent the feelings, to satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly
on all the roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this was
the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was ' meny
England,' as they called it then. It was not yet stern and constrained.
It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to find itself so expanded. No
longer at court only was the drama found, but in the village. Strolling
companies betook themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any
deficiencies, when necessary. Shakspeare saw, before he depicted them,
stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners, bellow-menders, play Pyramus and
Thisbe,^ represent the lion roaring as gently as possible, and the wall,
by stretching out their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in which
townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. They were actors
by nature. When the soul is full and fresh, it does not express its
ideas by reasonings ; it plaj'S and figures them ; it mimics them ; that
is the true and original language, the children's tongue, the speech of
artists, of invention, and of joy. It is in this manner they please them-
selves with songs and feasting, on all the symbolic holidays with which
tradition has filled the year.^ On the Sunday after Twelfth-night the
labourers parade the streets, with their shirts over their coats, decked
with ribbons, dragging a plough to the sound of music, and dancing a
sword-dance ; on another day they draw in a cart a figure made of ears
of corn, with songs, flutes, and drums ; on another, Father Christmas
and his company ; or else they enact the history of Robin Hood, the
bold poacher, around the ]\Iay-pole, or the legend of Saint George and
the Dragon. We might occupy half a volume in describing all these
holidays, such as Harvest Home, AU Saints, Martinmas, Sheepshearing,

^ Certain private letters also describe the court of Elizabeth as a place where
there was little piety or practice of rehgion, and where all enormities reigned la.
tlie highest degree.

* Midsummer Kighi's Dream.

* Uathan Drake, Sliahspcare and Lis Times, chap. v. and vi.

CHAP. I] THE PAGAN RENAISSAKCK. 151

above all Christmas, which lasted twelve days, and sometimes six weeks.
They eat and drink, junket, tumble about, kiss the girls, ring the bells,
satiate themselves with noise : coarse drunken revels, in which man is
an unbridled animal, and which are the incarnation of natural life. The
Puritans made no mistake about that. Stubbes says :

' First, all the wilde heades of llie parishe, conventying together, chnse them a
ground capitaine of mischeef, whan they innoble with the title of my Lorde of
Jlisserule, and hym they crown with great solemnitie, and adopt for their kyng.
This kyng anoynted, chnseth for the twentie, fourtie, three score, or a hundred
lustie guttes like to hymself to waite uppon his lordely maiestie. . . . Then have
they their hobbie horses, dragons, and other antiques, together with their baudie
])ipers and thunderyng drommers, to strike up the devilles daunce withall ; then
marche these heathen companie towardes the churche and churche-yarde, their
pipers pipyng, their drommers thonderyng, their stumppes dauncyng, their belles
rj'nglyng, their handkerchefes swyngyng about their heades like madmen, their
hobbie horses and other monsters skirmishyng amongest the throng ; and in this
sorte they goe to the churche (though the minister bee at praier or preachyng),
dauncyng, and swingj^ng their handkercheefes over their heades, in the churche,
like devilles incarnate, with such a confused noise, that no man can heare his owne
voice. Then the foolishe people they looke, they stare, they laugh, they fleere, and
mount upon formes and pewes, to see these goodly pageauntes, solemnized in this sort.
Then after this, aboute the cliurche they goe againe and againe, and so forthe into
the churche-yarde, where they have commonly their sommer haules, their bowers,
arbours, and banquettyng houses set up, wherein they feaste, banquet, and daunce
all that dale, and peradventure all that night too. And thus these terrestrial furies
spend the Sabbaoth dale ! ... An other sorte of fantasticall fooles bringe to these
helhoundes (the Lorde of Misrule and his complices) some bread, some good ale,
some newe cheese, some olde cheese, some custardes, some cakes, some flaunes, some
tartes, some cream e, some meate, some one thing, some an other.'

He continues thus :

* Against Male, every parishe, towne and village assemble themselves together,
bothe men, women, and children, olde and yong, even all indifferently ; they goe
to the woodes where they spende all the night in pleasant pastymes, and in the
mornyng they returne, bringing with them birch, bowes, and branches of trees, to
deck their assemblies withall. But their cheefest ieweU they bringe from thence is
their Male poole, whiche they bring home with great veneration, as thus : They
have twenty or fourtie yoke of oxen, every ox havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers
tyed on the tippe of his homes, and these oxen drawe home this Male poole (this
stinckyng idoll rather) . . . and thus beyng reared up, they strawe the grounde
aboute, binde greene boughes about it, sett up sommer haules, bowers, and arbours
hard by it ; and then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it,
as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles. ... Of a hundred
maides gojTig to the woode over night, there have scarcely the third parte returned
liome againe undefiled. ' '

* On Shrove Tuesday,' says another,^ ' at the sound of a bell, the

' Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, p. 168 et passim.

* Hentzner's Travels in England (Bentley's translation). He thought that the
figure carried about in the Harvest Home represented Ceres.

152 THE RENAISSANCE, [COOK IL

folk become insane, thousands at a time, and forget all decency and
common sense. . . . It is to Satan and the devil that they pay homage
and do sacrifice in these abominable pleasures.' It is in fact to nature,
to the ancient Pan, to Freya, to Hertha, her sisters, to the old Teutonic
deities who survived the middle-age. At this period, in the temporary
decay of Christianity, and the svidden advance of corporal well-being,
man adored himself, and there endured no life within him but that of
paganism.

IV.

To sum up, observe the process of ideas at this time. A few sec-
tarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung gloomily to the
Bible. But the court and the men of the world sought their teachers
and their heroes from pagan Greece and Eome. About 1490 ^ they
began to read the classics ; one after the other they translated them ;
it was soon the fashion to read them in the original. Elizabeth, Jane
Grey, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, many other
ladies, were conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original,
and appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men were
raised to the level of the great and healthy minds who had freely
handled ideas of all kinds fifteen centuries ago. They comprehended
not only their language, but their thought ; they did not repeat lessons
from, but held conversations with them ; they were their equals, and
found in them intellects as manly as their own. For they were not
scholastic cavillers, miserable compilers, repulsive pedants, like the pro-
fessors of jargon whom the middle-age had set over them, like gloomy
Duns Scotus, whose leaves Henry viii.'s Visitors scattered to the
Avinds. They were gentlemen, statesmen, the most polished and best
educated men in the world, who knew how to speak, and drew their
ideas not from books, but from things, living ideas, and which entered
of themselves into living souls. Across the train of hooded schoolmen
and sordid cavillers the two adult and thinking ages were united, and
the moderns, silencing the infantine or snuffling voices of the middle-
age, condescended only to converse with the noble ancients. They
accepted their gods, at least they understand them, and keep them by
their side. In poems, festivals, tapestries, almost all ceremonies, they
appear, not restored by pedantry merely, but kept alive by sympathy,
and glorified by the arts of an age as flourishing and almost as profound
as that of their earliest birth. After the terrible night of the middle-age,
and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a delight to
see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece ; its heroic and beauti-
ful deities once more ravishing the heart of men ; they raised and in-

* Warton, vol. ii. sect. 35. Before 1600 all the great poets were translated
into English, and between 1550 and 1616 all the great historians of Greece and
Eome. Lyly in 1500 first taught Greek in public.

CHAr. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 153

structed this young world by speaking to it the language of passion and
genius ; and the age of strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention,
had only to follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal
promoters of liberty and beauty.

Nearer still was another paganism, that of Italy ; the more seductive
because more modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient
stock ; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present, with
its worship of force and genius, of pleasure and voluptuousness. The
rigorists knew this well, and were shocked at it. Ascham writes :

* These bee the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italic to marre mens
maners in England ; much, by example of ill life, but more by preceptes of fonde
bookes, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in
London. . . . There bee moe of these ungratious bookes set out in Printe wythin
these fewe monethes, than have bene sene in England many score yeares before.
. . . Than they have in more reverence the triumphes of Petrarche : than the
Genesis of Moses : They make more account of Tullies offices, than S. Paules
epistles : of a tale in Bocace than a storie of the Bible. '*

In fact, at that time Italy clearly led in everything, and civilisation was
to be drawn thence, as from its spring. What is this civilisation which
is thus imposed on the whole of Europe, whence every science and
every elegance comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which
Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare sought their models and their
materials ? It was pagan in its elements and its birth ; in its language,
which is but slightly different from Latin ; in its Latin traditions and
recollections, which no gap has come to interrupt ; in its constitution,
whose old municipal life first led and absorbed the feudal life ; in the
genius of its race, in which energy and enjoyment always abounded.
More than a century before other nations, from the time of Petrarch,
Kienzi, Boccacio, the Italians began to recover the lost antiquity, to de-
liver the manuscripts buried in the dungeons of France and Germany,
to restore, interpret, comment upon, study the ancients, to make them-
.selves Latin in heart and mind, to compose in prose and verse with the
polish of Cicero and Virgil, to hold spirited converse and intellectual
pleasures as the ornament and the fairest flower of life.^ They adopt
not merely the externals of the old existence, but the elements, that is,
preoccupation with the present life, forgetfulness of the future, the
appeal to the senses, the renimciation of Christianity. * "We must en-
joy,' sang their first poet, Lorenzo de Medici, in his pastorals and
triumphal songs : ' there is no certainty of to-morrow.' In Pulci the
mocking incredulity breaks out, the bold and sensual gaiety, all the
audacity of the free-thinkers, who kicked aside in disgust the worn-out

^ Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), ed. Arber, 1S70, first book, 78 et passim.

* Ma il vero e principal ornemento dell' animo in ciascuno penso io che siano le
lettere, benche i Franchesi solamente conoscano la nobilita dell'arme . . . et tutti
i litterati tengon per vilissimi huomini. Castiglione, U Co^trgiano, ed. Ijij,
p. 112.

1-j4 the kenaissance. [book II.

monkish frock of tlie middle-age. It was he who, in a jesting poem,
puts at the beginning of each canto a Hosanna, an In principio, or
a sacred text from the mass-book.'^ When he had been inquiring whut
the soul was, and how it entered the body, he compared it to jam
covered up in white bread quite hot. What would become of it in the
other world ? ' Some people think they will there discover fig-peckers,
plucked ortolans, excellent wine, good beds, and therefore they follow
the monks, walking behind them. As for us, dear friend, we shall go
into the black valley, where we shall hear no more Alleluias.' If you
wish for a more serious thinker, listen to the great patriot, the Thucv-
dides of the age, Machiavelli, who, contrasting Christianity and paganisu),
says that the first places ' supreme happiness in humility, abnegation,
contempt for human things, while the other makes the sovereign good
consist in greatness of soul, force of body, and all the qualities which
make men to be feared.' Whereon he boldly concludes that Chris-
tianity teaches man ' to support evils, and not to do great deeds;' he
discovers in that inner weakness the cause of all oppressions ; declares
that ' the wicked saw that they could tyrannise without fear over men,
who, in order to get to paradise, were more disposed to suffer than to
avenge injuries.' From this time, and in spite of his constrained genu-
flexions, you can see which religion he prefers. The ideal to which all
efforts were turning, on which all thoughts depended, and which com-
pletely raised this civilisation, was the strong and happy man, fortified
by all powers to accomplish his wishes, and disposed to use them in
pursuit of his happiness.

If you would see this idea in its grandest operation, you must seek
it in the arts, such as Italy made them and carried throughout Europe,
raising or transforming the national schools with such originality and
vigour, that all art likely to survive is derived from hence, and the
population of living figures with which they have covered our walls,
denotes, like Gothic architecture or French tragedy, a unique epoch of
the human intelligence. The attenuated mediaeval Christ — a miserable,
distorted, and bleeding earth-worm ; the pale and ugly Virgin — a poor
old peasant woman, fainting beside the gibbet of her Son ; ghastly
martyrs, dried up Avith fasts, with entranced eyes ; knotty-fingered,
saints with sunken chests, — all the touchincr or lamentable visions of
the middle-age have vanished : the train of godheads which are now
developed show nothing but flourishing frames, noble, regular features,
and fine easy gestures ; the names, the names only, are Christian. The
new Jesus is a ' crucified Jupiter,' as Pulci called him ; the Virgins which
Eaphael designed naked, before covering them with garments,^ are

^ See Burchard, the Pope's Steward, account of the festival at which Lucretia
Borgia assisted. Letters of Aretinus, Life of Cellini, etc.

* See his sketches at Oxford, and the sketches of Fra Bartolomeo at Florence,
^ee ako the Martyrdom of S. Laurence, by Baccio Bandiuclli.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 155

beautiful girls, quite earthly, relatives of the Fomariun. The saints
which Michael Angelo arranges and contorts in heaven on the judgment-
day are an assembly of athletes, capable of fighting well and daring much.
A martyrdom, like that of Saint Laurentius, is a fine ceremony in which
a beautiful young man, without clothing, lies amidst fifty men dressed
and grouped as in an ancient gymnasium. Is there one of them who
had macerated himself ? Is there one who had thought with anguish and
tears of the judgment of God, who had worn down and subdued his flesli,
wlio had filled his heart with the sadness and sweetness of the gospel ?
They are too vigorous for that, they are in too robust health; their clothes
fit them too closely ; they are too ready for prompt and energetic action.
We might make of them strong soldiers or proud courtesans, admirable
in a pageant or at a ball. So, all that the spectator accords to their
halo of glory, is a bow or a sign of the cross ; after which his eyes find
pleasure in them ; they are there simply for the enjoyment of the eyes.
What the spectator feels at the sight of a Florentine [Madonna, is the
splendid Virgin, whose powei-ful body and fine growth bespeak her
race and her vigour ; the artist did not paint moral expression as nowa-
days, the depth of a soul tortured and refined by three centuries of
culture. They confine themselves to the body, to the extent even of
speaking enthusiastically of the spinal column itself, 'which is magni-
ficent;' of the shoulder-blades, which in the movements of the arm
' produce an admirable effect.' * You will next design the bone which
is situated between the hips. It is very fine, and is called the sacrum.'^
The important point with them is to represent the nude well. Beauty
with them is that of the complete skeleton, sinews Avhich are linked
together and tightened, the thighs which support the trunk, the strong
chest breathing freely, the pliant neck. What a pleasure to be naked !
How good it is in the full light to rejoice in your strong body, your
well-formed muscles, your gay and bold soul ! The splendid goddesses
reappear in their primitive nudity, not dreaming that they are nude ;
you see from the tranquillity of their look, the simplicity of their ex-
pression, that they have always been thus, and that shame has not yet
reached them. The soul's life is not here contrasted, as amongst us, witli
the body's life ; the one is not so lowered and degraded, that we dare
not show its actions and functions ; they do not hide them ; man does
not dream of being all spirit. They rise, as of old, from the luminous
sea, with their rearing steeds tossing up their manes, grinding the bit,
inhaling the briny savoiu-, Avhilst their companions wind the sounding-
shell ; and the spectators,^ accustomed to handle the sword, to combat

' Beuveiiuto Cellini, Principles of the Art of Design.

2' Life of Cellini. Compare also these exercises which Castiglione prescrn->ps
for a well-educated man, in his Corterjiano, ed. 15S5, p. 55: — ' Pero vogho che il
nostro cortegiano sia perfetto cavaliere d'ogni sella. . . . Et perche degli Italian!
e peculiar laude il cavalcare bene alia brida, il maneggiar con raggione mubsima-

156 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II,

naked with the Sagger or double-handled blade, to ride on perilous
roads, sympathise with the proud shape of the bended back, the effort
of the arm about to strike, the long quiver of the muscles which, from
neck to heel, swell out, to brace a man, or to throw him.

2. Poetry.

I.

Transplanted into different races and climates, this paganism
receives from each, distinct features and a distinct character. In
England it becomes English ; the English Renaissance is the Renais-
sance of the Saxon genius. Invention recommences ; and to invent is
to express one's genius. A Latin race can only invent by expressing
Latin ideas ; a Saxon race by expressing Saxon ideas ; and we shall
find in the new civilisation and poetry, descendants of Ca^dmon and
Adhelm, of Piers Plowman, and Robin Hood.

IL

Old Puttenham says :

* In the latter end of the same king (Henry the eisfht) reigne, sprong np a
new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat th' elder and Henry
Earle of Surrey were the two chieftaines, who having travailed into ItaHe, and
there tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poesie, as
novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they
greatly poUished our rude and homely maner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had
bene before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our
Ensclish meetre and stile. ' ^

Not that their style was very original, or openly exhibits the new
spirit : the middle-age is nearly ended, but it was not yet finished. By
their side Andrew Borde, John Bale, John Heywood, Skelton himself,
repeat the jjlatitudes of the old poetry and the coarseness of the old style.
Their manners, half refined, were still half feudal ; on the field, before
Landrecies, the English commander wrote a letter to the French governor
of Terouanne, to ask him 'if he had not some gentlemen disposed to break
a lance in honour of the ladies,' and promised to send six champions to
meet them. Parades, combats, wounds, challenges, love, appeals to the
judgment of God, penances, — all these were found in the life of Surrey
as in a chivalric romance. A great lord, an earl, a relative of the
king, who had figured in processions and ceremonies, had made war,
commanded fortresses, ravaged cormtries, mounted to the assault, fallen

mente cavalli aspri, il corre lance, il giostare, sia in questo de meglior Italiani.
. . . Nel torueare, tener un passo, combattere una sbarra, sia buono tra il miglior
francesi. . . . Nel giocare a canne, correr torri, lanciar haste e dardi, sia tra Spag-
nuoli eccellente. . . . Conveniente h ancor sapere saltare, e correre ; . . . ancor
nobile exercitio il gisco di palla. . . . Kon di minor laude estimo il voltegiar a
cavallo. '

^ Puttenham, T/ie Arte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, 1SC9, booki. ch. 31, p. 74.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 15 7

in the breach, had been saved by his servant, magnificent, sumptuous,
irritable, ambitious, four times imprisoned, finally beheaded. At the
coronation of Ann of Cleves he was one of the challengers of the
tourney. Denounced and placed in durance, he offered to fight un-
armed against an armed adversary. Another time he was put in
prison for having eaten flesh in Lent. No wonder if this prolonga-
tion of chivalric manners brought with it a prolongation of chivalric
poetry ; if in an age which had known Petrarch, poets displayed the
sentiments of Petrarch. Lord Berners, Lord Sheffield, Sir Thomas
Wyatt, and Surrey in the first rank, were, like Petrarch, plaintive
and platonic lovers. It was pure love to which Surrey gave expres-
sion ; for his lady, the beautiful Geraldine, like Beatrice and Laura,
was an ideal personage, and a child of thirteen years.

And yet, amid this languor of mystical tradition, a personal feeling
had sway. In this spirit which imitated, and that badly at times,
which still groped for an outlet, and now and then admitted into its
polished stanzas the old, simple expressions and stale metaphors of
heralds of arms and trouveres, there was already visible the Northern
melancholy, the inner and gloomy emotion. This feature, which
presently, at the finest moment of its richest blossom, in the splendid
expansiveness of natural life, spreads a sombre tint over the poetry of
Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare, already in the first poet separates this
pagan yet Teutonic world from the other, all in all voluptuous, which
in Italy, with lively and refined irony, had no taste, except for art
and pleasure. Surrey translated the Ecclesiastes into verse. Is it not
singular, at this early hour, in this rising dawn, to find such a book in
his hand? A disenchantment, a sad or bitter dreaminess, an innate con-
sciousness of the vanity of human things, are never lacking in this country
and in this race ; the inhabitants support life with difficulty, and know
how to speak of death. Surrey's finest verses bear witness thus soon to
his serious bent, this instinctive and grave philosophy. He records his
griefs, regretting his beloved Wyatt, his friend Clere, his companion the
young Duke of Eichmond, all dead in their prime. Alone, a prisoner at
Windsor, he recalls the happy days they have passed together :

' So cruel prison how could betide, alas,

As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy,
"With a Kinges son, my childish j-ears did pass,
In greater feast than Priam's sou of Troy.

"N^Tiere each sweet place returns a taste full sour,
The large green courts, where we were wont to hove.

With eyes cast up into the ilaideu's tower,
And easy sighs, such as folk draw in love.

The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue.

The dances short, long tales of great delight,
With words and looks, that tigers could but rue ;

Where each of us did plead the other's right.

158 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

Tlie palme-play, where, despoiled for the game,

With dazed eyes oft we by gleams of love
Have miss'd the ball, and got sight of our dame,

To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above. . . ,

The secret thoughts, imparted with such trust ;

Tlie wanton talk, the divers change of play ;
Tlie friendship sworn, each promise kept so just.

Wherewith we past the winter night away.

And with his thought the blood forsakes the face ;

The tears berain my cheeks of deadly hue :
Tlie which, as soon as sobbing sighs, alas !

Up-supped have, thus I my plaint renew :

0 place of bliss ! renewer of my woes !

Give me account, where is my noble fere ?
"Whom in thy walls thou dost each night enclose ;

To other lief ; but unto me most dear.

Echo, alas ! that doth my sorrow rue,

Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint. ' ^

So in love, it is the sinking of a weary soul, to whicli he gives vent :

' For all things having life, sometime hath quiet rest ;
The bearing ass, the di'awing ox, and eveiy other beast ;
The peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays ;
The ship-boy, and the galley-slave, have time to take their ease ;
Save I, alas ! whom care of force doth so constrain,
To wail the day, and wake the night, continually in pain,
From pensiveness to plaint, from plaint to bitter tears.
From tears to painful plaint again ; and thus my life it wears.'*

That which brings joy to others brings him grief:

* The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
A\'ith green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs ;
The hart has hung his old head on the pale ;
The buck in brake his winter coat he slings ;
The fishes flete with new repaired scale ;
The adder all her slough away she slings ;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale ;
The busy bee her honey now she mings ;
"Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus 1 see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs ! ''

' Surrey's Poems, Pickering, 1831, p. 17.

2 Ibid. ' The faithful lover declareth his pains and his uncertain joys, and with
only hope recomforteth his woful heart, ' p. 53.

2 Ibid. ' Description of Spring, wherein every thing renews, save only the
lover,' p. 3.

C:iAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 159

For all that, he will love on to his last sigh.

' Yea, rather die a thousand times, than once to false my faith ;
And if my feeble corpse, throuf^h weight of woful smart
Do fail, or faint, my will it is that still she keep my heart.
And when this carcass here to earth shall be refar'd,
I do bequeath my wearied ghost to serve her afterward. ' *

An infinite love, and pure as Petrarch's ; and she is worthy of it.
In the midst of all these studied or imitated verses, an admirable por-
trait remains distinct, the simplest and truest we can imagine, a work
of the heart now, and not of the memory, which behind the dame of
chivalry shows the English wife, and behind the feudal gallantry do-
iJiestic bliss. Surrey alone, restless, hears within him the firm tones of
a good friend, a sincere counsellor, Hope, who speaks to him thus :

• For I assure thee, even by oath,
And thereon take my hand and troth.
That she is one the worthiest.
The truest, and the faithf ullest ;
The gentlest and the meekest of mind
That here on earth a man may find :
And if that love and truth were gone.
In her it might be found alone.
For in her mind no thought there is,
But how she may be true, I wis ;
And tenders thee and all thy heal,
And wishes both thy health and weal ;
And loves thee even as far forth than
As any woman may a man ;
And is thine own, and so she says ;
And cares for thee ten thousand ways.
Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks ;
"With thee she eats, with thee she drinks ;
"With thee she talks, with thee she moans ;
With thee she sighs, with thee she groans ;
With thee she says " Farewell mine own ! "
AVhen thou, God knows, full far art gone.
And even, to tell thee all aright.
To thee she says full oft " Good night ! "
And names thee oft her own most dear.
Her comfort, weal, and all her cheer ;
And tells her pillow all the tale
How thou hast dune her woe and bale ;
And how she longs, and plains for thee,
And says, " Why art thou so from me ?"
Am I not she that loves thee best ?
Do I not wish thine ease and rest ?
Seek I not how I may thee please ?
Why art thou so from thine ease ?

* Surrey's Poems, p. 56.

ICO THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

If I be slie for whom tliou carest,
For whom in torments so thou farest,
Alas ! thou knowest to find me here,
Where I remain thine own most dear,
Thine own most true, thine own most just,
Thine own that loves thee still, and must ;
Thine own that cares alone for thee,
As thoti, I think, dost care for me ;
And even the woman, she alone.
That is full bent to be thine own.' ^

Certainly it is of his wife^ that he is thinking here, not of any
imaginary Laura. The poetic dream of Petrarch has become the exact
picture of deep and perfect conjugal affection, such as yet survives in
England ; such as all the poets, from the authoress of the Nut-brown
Maid to Dickens,^ have never failed to represent.

III.

An English Petrarch : no juster title could be given to Surrey,
for it expresses his talent as well as his disposition. In fact, like
Petrarch, the oldest of the humanists, and the earliest exact writer
of the modern tongue, Surrey introduces a new style, a manly style,
which marks a great transformation of the mind ; for this new form
of writing is the result of a superior reflection, which, governing the
primitive impulse, calculates and selects with an end in view. At
last the intellect has grown capable of self-criticism, and actually
criticises itself. It corrects its unconsidered works, infantine and in-
coherent, at once incomplete and superabundant ; it strengthens and
binds them together ; it prunes and perfects them ; it takes from them
the master idea, to set it free and in the light of day. This is what
Surrey does, and his education had prepared him for it ; for he had
studied Virgil as well as Petrarch, and translated two books of the
jEneid, almost verse for verse. In such company one cannot but select
one's ideas and arrange one's phrases. After their example, he gauges the
means of striking the attention, assisting the intelligence, avoiding fatigue
and weariness. He looks forward to the last line whilst writing the
first. He keeps the strongest word for the last, and shows the symmetry
of ideas by the symmetry of phrases. Sometimes he guides the intelli-
gence by a continuous series of contrasts to the final image ; a kind of
sparkling casket, in which he means to deposit the idea which he

' Ibid. ' A description of the restless state of the lover when absent from the
mistress of his heart,' p. 78.

2 In another piece. Complaint on the Absence of her Lover being upon the Sea,
he speaks in exact terms of his wife, almost as affectionately.

3 Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Shakspeare, Ford, Otway, Eichard-
son, De Foe, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, etc.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. ICl

carries, and to ■\vlilch Tie directs our attention from tlie first.^ Some-
times he leads his reader to the close of a long flowery description, and
then suddenly checks him with a sorrowful phrase,^ He arranges his
process, and knows how to produce effects ; he uses classical expres-
sions, in which tAvo svibstantives, each supported by its adjective, are
balanced on either side of the verb.'' He collects his phrases in har-
monious periods, and does not neglect the delight of the ears any
more than of the mind. By his inversions he adds force to his ideas,
and weight to his argument. He selects elegant or noble terms, rejects
idle words and redundant phrases. Every epithet contains an idea,
every metaphor a sentiment. There is eloquence in the regular de-
velopment of his thought ; music in the sustained accent of his verse.

Such is the new-born art. Those who have ideas, now possess an
instrument capable of expressing them. Like the Italian painters, who
in fifty years had introduced or discovered all the technical tricks of
the pencil, English writers, in half a century, introduce or discover
all the artifices of language, period, style, heroic verse, stanza, so
effectually, that a little later the most perfect versifiers, Dryden, and
Pope himself, says Dr. Nott, will add scarce anything to the rules,
invented or applied, which were employed in the earliest efforts.* Even
Surrey is too near to these authors, too constrained in his models, not
sufficiently free : he has not yet felt the great current of the age ; we do
not find in him a bold genius, an impassioned writer capable of wide
expansion, but a courtier, a lover of elegance, who, penetrated by the
beauties of two complete literatures, imitates Horace and the chosen
masters of Italy, corrects and polishes little morsels, aims at speaking
perfectly a fine language. Amongst semi-barbarians he wears a dress-
coat becomingly. Yet he does not wear it completely at his ease : he
keeps his eyes too exclusively on his models, and does not venture to
permit himself frank and free gestures. He is- still a scholar, makes
too great use of hot and cold, wounds and martyrdom. Although a
lover, and a genuine one, he thinks too much that he must be so in
Petrarch's manner, that his phrase must be balanced and his image
kept up. I had almost said that, in his sonnets of disappointed love,
he thinks less often of the strength of love than of the beauty of
his writing. He has conceits, ill-chosen words ; he uses trite ex-
pressions ; he relates how Nature, having formed his lady, broke the
mould ; he assigns parts to Cupid and Venus ; he employs the old
machinery of the troubadours and the ancients, like a clever man who
■wishes to pass for a gallant. Scarce any mind dares be at first quite
itself: when a new art arises, the first artist listens not to his heart, but

' Tlie Frailly and Hurtfulncss of Beauty.

" Description of Spring. A Vow to love faithfully.

^ Complaint of the Lover disdained,

* Suirey, ed. Nott.

L

1G2 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK H.

to his masters, and asks himself at every step whether he be setting foof
on solid ground, or whether he is not stumbling.

IV.

Insensibly the growth becomes complete, and at the end of the
century all was changed. A new, strange, overloaded style had been
formed, destined to remain in force until the Restoration, not only in
poetry, but also in prose, even in ceremonial speech and theological
discourse,^ so suitable to the spirit of the age, that we meet with it
throughout Europe, in Eonsard and d'Aubigne, in Calderon, Gongora,
and Marini. In 1580 appeared Enphues^ the Anatomy of TF?Y, by Lyly,
which was its text-book, its masterpiece, its caricature, and was received
with universal admiration.^ ' Our nation,' says Edward Blount, * are in
his debt for a new English which hee taught; them. All our ladies
were then his scollers ; and that beautie in court who could not parley
Euphuesme was as little regarded as shee which now there speakes not
French.' The ladies knew the phrases of Eiq^hues by heart: strange,
studied, and refined phrases, enigmatical ; whose author seems of set
purpose to seek the least natural expressions and the most far-fetched, fuU
of exaggeration and antithesis, in which mythological allusions, illustra-
tions from alchemy, botanical and astronomical figures, all the rubbish and
medley of learning, travels, mannerism, roll in a flood of conceits and
comparisons. Do not judge it by the grotesque picture that Walter Scott
drew of it. Sir Piercie Shafton is but a pedant, a cold and dull copyist ; it
is its warmth and originality which give this style a true force and an
accent of its own. You must conceive it, not as dead and inert, such
as we have it to-day in old books, but springing from the lips of ladies
and young lords in pearl-bedecked doublet, quickened by their vibrat-
ing voices, their laughter, the flash of their eyes, the motion of their
hands as they played with the hilt of their swords or with their satin
cloaks. They were witty, their heads full to overflowing; and they
amused themselves, as our sensitive and eager artists do, at their ease
in the studio. They did not speak to convince or be understood, but
to satisfy their excited imagination, to expend their overflowing wit.®
They played with Avords, twisted, put them out of shape, rejoiced in
sudden views, strong contrasts, which they produced one after another,
ever and anon, in quick succession. They cast flower on flower, tinsel
on tinsel ; everything sparkling delighted them ; they gilded and em-
broidered and plumed their language like their garments. They cared
nothing for clearness, order, common sense ; it was a festival and a

^ The Speaker's address to Charles ii. on his restoration. Compare it with the
speech of M. de Fontanes under the Empire. In each case it was the close of a
literary epoch. Eead for illustration the speech before the University of Oxford,
Athence Oxonienses, i. 193.

* His second work, Eupliues and his England, appeared in 1581.

* See Shakspeare's young men, Mercutio especially.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSAXCE. 1G3

folly; absurdity pleased them. They knew nothing more tempting
than a carnival of splendours and oddities ; all was huddled together :
a coarse gaiety, a tender and sad word, a pastoral, a sounding flourish
of unmeasured boasting, a gambol of a Jack-pudding. Eyes, ears, all
the senses, curious and excited, are satisfied by the jingle of syllables,
the display of fine high-coloured words, the unexpected concurrence of
droll or familiar images, the majestic roll of balanced periods. Every
one had his oaths, his elegances, his style. ' One would say,' remarks
Heylyn, ' that they are ashamed of their mother-tongue, and do not
find it sufficiently varied to express the whims of their mind.* We no
longer imagine this inventiveness, this boldness of fancy, this ceaseless
fertility of a nervous sensibility : there was no genuine prose ; the
poetic flood swallowed it up. A word was not an exact symbol, as
with us ; a document which from cabinet to cabinet carried a precise
thought. It was part of a complete action, a little drama ; when they
read it, they did not take it by itself, but imagined it with the in-
tonation of a hissing and shrill voice, with the puckering of the lips,
the knitting of the brows, and the succession of pictures which crowd
behind it, and which it calls forth in a flash of lightning. Each one
mimics and pronounces it in his own style, and impresses his own
soul upon it. It was a song, which, like the poet's verse, contains a
thousand things besides the literal sense, and manifests the depth,
warmth, and sparkling of the source whence it came. For in that
time, even when the man was feeble, his work lived : there is some
pidse in the least productions of this age ; force and creative fire sig-
nalise it ; they penetrate through bombast and affectation. Lyly him-
self, so fantastic that he seems to write purposely in defiance of common
sense, is at times a genuine poet, a singer, a man capable of rapture,
akin to Spenser and Shakspeare ; one of those introspective dreamers,
who see dancing fairies, the purpled cheeks of goddesses, drunken,
amorous woods, as he says :

'Adorned with the presence of my love,
Tlie woods I fear such secret j^ower shall prove,
As they'll stiut up each path, hide every way,
Because they still would have her go astray. ' *

The reader must assist me, and assist himself. I cannot otherwise give
him to understand what the men of this age had the felicity to experience.
Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of this spirit
and this literature, — features common to all the literatures of the Re-
naissance, but more marked here than elsewhere, because the German
race is not confined, like the Latin, by the taste for harmonious forms,
and prefers strong impression to fine expression. "We must select
amidst this crowd of poets ; and here is one amongst the first, who
will exhibit, by his writings as well as by his life, the greatness and the

* The JIaid her Jletamor/ihobis.

164 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

folly of the prevailing manners and the public taste : Sir Philip Sidney,
nephew of the Earl of Leicester, a great lord and a man of action,
accomplished in every kind of culture ; who, after a good training in
polite literature, travelled in France, Germany, and Italy ; read Plato
and Aristotle, studied astronomy and geometry at Venice ; pondered
over the Greek tragedies, the Italian sonnets, the pastorals of Monte-
mayor, the poems of Ilonsard ; displaying an interest in science, keeping
up an exchange of letters with the learned Hubert Languet ; and -withal
a man of the world, a favourite of Elizabeth, having had enacted in
her honour a flattering and comic pastoral ; a genuine ' jewel of the
Court;' a judge, like d'Urfe, of lofty gallantry and fine language;
above all, chivalrous in heart and deed, who had desired to follow
maritime adventure with Drake, and, to crown all, fated to die an early
and heroic death. He was a cavalry officer, and had saved the Englisli
army at Gravelines. Shortly after, mortally wounded, and dying of
thirst, as some water was brought to him, he saw by his side a soldier
stiU more desperately hurt, who was looking at the water with anguish
in his face : ' Give it to this man,' said he ; * his necessity is yet greater
than mine.' Do not forget the vehemence and impetuosity of the
middle-age ; — one hand ready for action, and kept incessantly on the hilt
of the sword or poniai-d. ' Mr. Molineux,' wrote he to his father's secre-
tary, ' if ever I know you to do as much as read any letter I write to
my father, without his commandment or my consent, I will thrust my
dagger into you. And trust to it, for I speak in earnest.' It was the
same man who said to his uncle's adversaries that they ' lied in their
throat;' and to support his words, promised them a meeting in three
months in any place in Europe. The savage energy of the preceding
age remains intact, and it is for this reason that poetry took so firm a
hold on these virgin souls. The human harvest is never so fine as
when cultivation opens up a new soil. Impassioned to an extreme,
melancholy and solitary, he naturally turned to noble and ardent
fantasy ; and he was so much the poet, as to be so beyond his verses.

Shall I describe his pastoral epic, the Arcadia? It is but a recrea-
tion, a sort of poetical romance, written in the country for the amuse-
ment of his sister ; a work of fashion, which, like Ci/rus and Clelie,^
is not a monument, but a relic. This kind of books shows only the
externals, the current elegance and politeness, the jargon of the world
of culture, — in short, that which should be spoken before ladies ; and
yet we perceive from it the bent of the general spirit. In Clelie.,
oratorical development, fine and collected analysis, the flowing converse
of men seated quietly on elegant arm-chairs; in the Arcadia, fantastic
imagination, excessive sentiments, a medley of events which suited
men scarcely recovered from barbarism. Indeed, in London they still

• Two French novels of the age of Louis xiv., each in ten volumes, and written
by Mademoiselle de Scudery. — Te.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSA^XE. 165

used to fire pistols at each other in the streets ; and under Henry viii
and his children, queens, a Protector, the highest nobles, knelt under the
axe of the executioner. Armed and perilous existence long resisted in
Europe the establishment of peaceful and quiet life. It was necessary
to change society and the soil, in order to transform men of the sword
into citizens. The high roads of Louis xiv. and his regular admini-
stration, and more recently the railroads and the sergents cle villCj came
to relieve the French from habits of violence and a taste for dangerous
adventure. Eemember that at this period men's heads were full of
tragical images. Sidney's Arcadia contains enough of them to su])ply
half-a-dozen epics. ' It is a trifle,' says the author ; ' my young head
must be delivered.' In the first twenty-five pages you meet with a
shipwreck, an account of pirates, a half-drowned prince rescued by
shepherds, a voyage in Arcadia, various disguises, the retreat of a king
withdrawn into solitude with his wife and children, the deliverance of a
young imprisoned lord, a war against the Helots, the conclusion of
peace, and many other things. Go on, and you will find princesses
shut up by a wicked fairy, who beats them, and threatens them with
death if they refuse to marry her son ; a beautiful queen condemned
to perish by fire if certain knights do not come to her succour ; a
treacherous prince tortured for his crimes, then cast from the top of a
pyramid ; fights, surprises, abductions, travels : in short, the whole pro-
gramme of the most romantic tales. That is the serious element : the
agreeable is of a like nature ; the fantastic predominates. Improbable
pastoral serves, as in Shakspeare or Lope de Vega, for an intermezzo to
Improbable tragedy. You are always coming upon dancing shepherds.
They are very courteous, good poets, and subtle metaphysicians. There
are many disguised princes who pay their court to the princesses.
They sing continually, and get up allegorical dances ; two bands ap-
proach, servants of Reason and Passion ; their hats, ribbons, and dress
are described in full. They quarrel in verse, and their hurried retorts,
which follow close on one another, over-refined, keep up a tournament
i)f wit. "Who cared for what was natural or possible in this age ?
There were such festivals at Elizabeth's entries ; and you have only to
look at the engravings of Sadler, Martin de Vos, and Goltzius, to find
this mixture of sensuous beauties and philosophical enigmas. The
Countess of Pembroke and her ladies were delighted to picture this
profusion of costumes and verses, this play beneath the trees. They
had eyes in the sixteenth century, senses which sought satisfaction in
poetry — the same satisfaction as in masquerading and painting. Man
was not yet a pure reasoner ; abstract truth was not enough for him.
Rich stuifs, twisted about and folded ; the sun to shine upon them,
a large meadow full of white daisies ; ladies in brocaded dresses, with
bare arms, crowns on their heads, instruments of music behind the
trees, — this is what the reader expects ; he cares nothing for contrasts ;
Le will readily provide a drawing-room in the midst of the fields.

1G5 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

What are they going to say there ? Here comes out that restless
exaltation, amidst all its folly, which is characteristic of the spirit of the
age ; love rises to the thirty-sixth heaven. Musidorus is the brother of
Celadon ; Pamela is closely related to the severe heroines of Astree;^ all
the Spanish exaggerations abound with all their faults. But in works of
fashion or of the Court, primitive sentiment never retains its sincerity :
wit, the necessity to please, the desire of effect, of speaking better than
others, alter it, force it, confuse the embellishments and refinements, so
tliat nothing is left but twaddle. Musidorus wished to give Pamela a
kiss. She repels him. He would have died on the spot ; but luckily
remembers that his mistress commanded him to leave her, and finds
liimself still able to obey her command. He complains to the trees,
weeps in verse : there are dialogues where Echo, repeating the last
Avord, replies ; double rhymes, balanced stanzas, in which the theory
of love is minutely detailed ; in short, all choice morsels of ornamental
poetry. If they send a letter to their mistress, they speak to it, tell
the ink :

' Therefore moume boldly, my inke ; for while sliee lookes upon ycii, yonr
hlacknesse will shine : cry out boldly my lamentation ; for while shee reades you,
yoiu- cries will be musicke.'*

Again, two young princesses are going to bed :

' They impoverished their clothes to enrich their bed, which for that nigbt
might well scorne the shrine of Y^nus ; and there cherishing one another with
deare, though chaste embracements ; with sweete, though cold kisses ; it might
seeme that love was come to play him there without dart, or that wearie of his
owne fires, he was there to refresh himselfe between their sweete breathing lippes. '•"

In excuse of these follies, remember that they have their parallels
in Shakspeare. Try rather to comprehend them, to imagine them in
their place, with their surroundings, such as they are ; that is, as the
excess of singularity and inventive fire. Even though they mar now
and then the finest ideas, yet a nutui-al freshness pierces through the
disguise. Take another example :

* In the time that the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly
floore against the coming of the sun, the nightingales (striving one with the othei
which could in most dainty varietie recount their wronge-caused sorrow) made
them put off their sleep. '

In Sidney's second work, TJie Defence of Poesie, we meet with genuine
imagination, a sincere and serious tone, a grand, commanding style, all
the passion and elevation which he carries in his heart and puts into his
verse. He is a muser, a Platonist, who is penetrated by the ancient
teaching, who takes things from a high point of view, who places the
excellence of poetry not in pleasing effect, imitation or rhyme, but in

1 C4ladon, a rustic lover in Astrie, a French novel in five volumes, named after
tlje heroine, and written by d'Urfe (d. 1625). — Ti;.

- Arcadia, ed. fol. 1629, p. 117. ^ Il^id. book ii. p. 114.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 167

this creative anci superior conception by which the artist dresses and
embellishes nature. At the same time, he is an ardent man, trusting in
the nobleness of his aspirations and in the -width of his ideas, who scorns
the brawling of the shoppy, narrow, vulgar Puritanism, and glows with
the lofty irony, the proud freedom, of a poet and a lord.

In his eyes, if there is any art or science capable of augmenting
and cultivating our generosity, it is poetry. He draws comparison
after comparison between it and philosophy or histoiy, whose pre-
tensions he laughs at and dismisses.^ He lights for poetry as a knight
for his lady, and in what heroic and splendid style ! Pie says :

' I never heard the old Song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not mj- heart
moved more than with a trumpet : and yet it is surg but by some bliude Crowder,
with no rougher voyce, than rude stile ; whicli bceing so evill apparelled in the
dust and Cobweb of that uncivill age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous
eloc^uence of Pindare V^

The philosopher repels, the poet attracts :

' Nay hee doth as if your journey should lye through a faire vineyard, at the
very first, give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that tast, you may long to
passe further.'^

What description of poetry can displease you ? Pastoral so easy
and genial ?

' Is it the bitter but wholesome lambicke, who rubbes the galled minde, making
shame the Trumpet of villanie, with bold and open crying out against naughti-
nesse ? ' *

At the close he reviews his arguments, and the vibrating martial
accent of his poetical period is like a trump of victory :

' So that since the excellencies of it (poetry) may bee so easily and so justly con-
firmed, and the low-creeping objections so soone trodden downe, it not being an
Art of lyes, but of true doctrine ; not of elfeminatenesse, but of notable stirring of
courage ; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthning man's wit ; not banished,
but honoured by Plato ; let us rather plant more Laurels for to ingarland the Poets
heads than sutfer the ill-savoured breath of such wrong speakers, once to blow upon
the cleare springs of Poesie.'*

From such vehemence and gravity you may anticipate what his
verses will be.

Often, after reading the poets of this age, I have looked for some

' The Defence of Poesie, ed. fol. 1C29, p. 558: 'I dare undertake, that Orlando
Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will never displease a soldier: but the quidditie
of Ens &T[i^ prima materia, will hardly agree with a Corselet.' See also, in these
pages, the very lively and spuited personification of History and Philosophy, re
coutains genuine talent.

2 Ibid. p. 553. ' Ibid. p. 550. * Rid. p. 552.

* Ibid. p. 560. Here and there we find also verse as spirited as this :
' Or Pindar's Apes, flaunt they in phrases fine,
Euam'hug witn pide llowers their thoughts of gold.' — (3d Sonnet.)

1G8 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

time at the contemporary prints, telling myself tliat man, body and
soul, was not then such as we see him to-day. "We also have our
passions, but we are no longer strong enough to bear them. They dis-
tract us ; we are not poets without suffering for it. Alfred de Musset,
Heine, Edgar Poe, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Cowper, how many shall I
instance? Disgust, mental and bodily degradation, disease, impotence,
madness, suicide, at best a permanent hallucination or feverish raving, —
these are now-a-days the ordinary issues of the poetic temperament.
The passion of the brain gnaws our vitals, dries up the blood, eats into
the marrow, shakes us like a tempest, and the skeleton man, to which
civilisation has reduced us, is not substantial enough long to resist it.
They, who have been more roughly trained, who are more inured to the
inclemencies of climate, more hardened by bodily exercise, more firm
against danger, endure and live. Is there a man living who could
withstand the storm of passions and visions which swept over Shak-
speare, and end, like him, as a sensible citizen and landed proprietor in
his small county? The muscles were firmer, the despair less prompt.
The rage of concentrated attention, the half hallucinations, the anguish
and heaving of the heart, the quivering of the limbs stretching involun-
tarily and blindly for action, all the painful impvilses which accompany
large desires, exhausted them less ; this is why they desired longer, and
dared more. D'Aubigne, wounded with many sword-thrusts, conceiv-
ing death at hand, had himself bound on his horse that he might see
his mistress once more, and rode thus several leagues, losing blood, and
arriving in a swoon. Such feelings we glean still in their portraits,
in the straight looks which pierce like a sword; in this strength of
back, bent or twisted ; in the sensuality, energy, enthusiasm, Avhich
breathe from their attitude or look. Such feelings we still discover in
their poetry, in Greene, Lodge, Jonson, Spenser, Shakspeare, in Sidney,
as in all the rest. We quickly forget the faults of taste which accom-
pany it, the affectation, the uncouth jargon. Is it really so uncouth ?
Imagine a man who with closed eyes distinctly sees the adored counte-
nance of his mistress, who keeps it before him all the day ; who is
troubled and shaken as he imagines ever and anon her brow, her lips,
her eyes ; who cannot and would not be separated from his vision ; who
pinks daily deeper in this passionate contemplation ; who is every in-
stant crushed by mortal anxieties, or transported by the raptures of
bliss : he will lose the exact conception of objects. A fixed idea be-
comes a false idea. By dint of regarding an object under all its forms,
turning it over, piercing through it, we at last deform it. When we
cannot think of a thing without dimness and tears, we magnify it, and
give it a nature which it has not. Then strange comparisons, over-
refined ideas, excessive images, become natural. However far Sidney
goes, whatever object he touches, he sees throughout the universe only
the name and features of Stella. All ideas bring him back to her. He is
drawn ever and invincibly by the same thought ; and comparisons which

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSANGE. 1G9

seem far-fetched, only express the unfailing presence and sovereign
power of the besetting image. Stella is ill ; it seems to Sidney that
' Joy, which is inseparate from those eyes, Stella, now learnes (strange
case) to weepe in thee.'^ To us, the expression is absurd. Is it for
Sidney, who for hours together had dwelt on the expression of those
eyes, seeing in them at last all the beauties of heaven and earth, who,
compared to them, finds all light dull and all joy stale ? Consider that
in every extreme passion ordinary laws are reversed, that our logic
cannot pass judgment on it, that we find in it affectation, childishness,
fancifuhiess, crudity, folly, and that to us violent conditions of the ner-
vous machine are like an unknown and marvellous land, where common
sense and good language cannot penetrate. On the return of spring,
when May spreads over the fields her dappled dress of new flowers,
Astrophel and Stella sit in the shade of a retired grove, in the warm
air, full of birds' voices and pleasant exhalations. Heaven smiles, the
wind kisses the trembling leaves, the inclining trees interlace their sappy
branches, amorous earth sighs greedily for the rippling water :

' In a grove most rich of shade,
"Where birds wanton musicke made,
^fay, then yong, his py'd weeds showing,
New perfum'd with flowers fresh growing,

* Astrophel with Stella sweet,
Did for mutuall comfort meet,
Both within themselves oppressed,
But each in the other blessed. . . .

* Their eares hungry of each word, ,
"Which the deere tongue would afford,

l5ut their tongues restrain'd from walking.
Till their hearts had ended talking.

* But when their tongues could not speake,
Love it selfe did silence breake ;

Love did set his lips asunder,

Thus to speake in love and wonder. ...

* This small winds which so sweet is.
See how it the leaves doth kisse,
Each tree in his best attjTing,
Sense of love to love inspiring.'^

On his knees, with beating heart, oppressed, it seems to him that his
mistress is transformed :

' Stella, soveraigne of my joy, . . .
Stella, starre of heavenly fire,
Stella, load-starre of desire,

1 Astrophel and Stella, ed. fok 1629, 101st sonnet, p. 613-

2 Ibid. 8th song, p. 603.

170 THE EENAISSANCE. [cOOK II.

Stella, in whose shining eyes
Are the lights of Cupid's skies. ...
Stella, whose voice when it speakes
Senses all asunder breakes ;
Stella, whose voice when it singeth,
Angels to acquaintance bringeth. ' >

These cries of adoration are like a hymn. Every day he Avrites thoughts
of love which agitate him, and in this long journal of a hundred pages
■we feel the inflamed breath swell each moment. A smile from his
mistress, a curl lifted by the wind, a gesture, — all are events. He
paints her in every attitude; he cannot see her too constantly. He
talks to the birds, plants, winds, all nature. He brings the whole world
to Stella's feet. At the notion of a kiss he swoons :

* Thinke of that most gratefuU time
When tliy leaping heart will climbe,
In my lips to have his biding.

There those roses for to kisse,
Which doe breath a sugred blisse.
Opening rubies, pearles dividing.'^

* 0 joy, too high for my low stile to show :

0 blisse, fit for a nobler state then me :

Envie, put out thine eyes, lest thou do see
What Oceans of delight in me do flow.
My friend, that oft saw through all maskes my wo,

Come, come, and let me powre my selfe on theu ;

Gone is the winter of my miserie.
My spring appeares, 0 see what here doth grow.
For Stella hath with words where faith doth shine,

Of her high heart giv'n me the monarchic :
I, I, 0 I may say that she is mine.'^

There are Oriental splendours in the sparkling sonnet in which he asks
why Stella's cheeks have grown pale :

* Where be those Eoses gone, which sweetned so our eyes ?
Where those red cheekes, which oft with faire encrease doth frame
The height of honour in the kindly badge of shame ?
Who hath the crimson weeds stolne from my morning skies ? ' *

As he says, his ' life melts with too much thinking.' Exhausted by
ecstasy, he pauses ; then he flies from thought to thought, seeking a
cure for his wound, like the Satyr Avhom he describes :

* Prometheus, when first from heaven hie
He brought downe fire, ere then on earth not seene.
Fond of delight, a Satyr standing by,
Gave it a kisse, as it like sweet had beene.

' Astrophel and Stella, 8th song, p. 603. ^ Ihld. 10th song, p. 610.

2 Ibid, sonnet 69, p. 555. * Ihld. sonnet 102, p. 614.

CnAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 171

* Feeling forthwith tlie other burning power,

Wood with the smart with showts and shryking shrill.
He sought his ease in river, field, and bower,
But for the time his griefe went with him still. ' '

At last calm returned ; and whilst this calm lasts, the lively, glowing
spirit plays like a flame on the surface of the deep brooding fire. His
love-songs and word-portraits, delightful pagan and chivalric fancies,
seem to be inspired by Petrarch or Plato. One feels the charm and
liveliness under the seeming affectation ;

' Faire eyes, sweete lips, deare heart, that foolish I
Could hope by Cupids helpe on you to pray ;
Since to himselfe he doth your gifts apply.
As his maine force, choise sport, and easefull stray.

* For when he will see who dare him gainsay,
Then with those eyes he lookes, lo by and by
Each soule doth at Loves feet his weapons lay.
Glad if for her he give them leave to die.

* When he will play, then in her lips he is.

Where blushing red, that Loves selfe them doth love.
With either lip he dotli the other kisse :
But when he will for quiets sake remove
Fron. all the world, her heart is then his rome.
Where well he knowes, do man to him can come. ' '

Eoth heart and sense are captive here. If he finds the eyes of Stella
more beautiful than anything in the world, he finds her soul more
lovely than her body. He is a Platonist when he recounts how Virtue,
wishing to be loved of men, took Stella's form to enchant their eyes,
and make them see the heaven which the inner sense reveals to heroic
souls. We recognise in him that entire submission of heart, love turned
into a religion, perfect passion which asks only to grow, and which, like
the piety of the mystics, finds itself too insignificant when it compares
Itself with the object loved :

' My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes.
My wit doth strive those passions to defend.
Which for reward spoyle it with vaine annoyes,
I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend :
I see and yet no greater sorrow take,
Than that I lose no more for Stella's sake. ' '

At last, like Socrates in the banquet, he turns his eyes to deathless
beauty, heavenly brightness :

^ Astrophel and Sttlla, p. 525 : this sonnet is headed E. D. Wood, in his
Allien. Oxon. 1., says it was written by Sir Edward Dyer, Chancellor of the Most
noble Order of the Garter.— Tr.

=* Ibid, sonnet 43, p. 545. . ^ Hid. sonnet 18, p. 573.

172 , THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

' Leave me, 0 Love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou my minde aspire to higher things :
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust :
"Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings. . . .
O take fast hokl, let that light be thy guide,
In tliis small course which birth drawes out to death.'*

Divine love continues the earthly love ; he was imprisoned in this, and
frees himself. By this nobility, these lofty aspirations, recognise one
of those serious souls of which there are so many in the same climate
and race. Spiritual instincts pierce through the dominant paganism,
and ere they make Christians, make Platonists.

V.

Sidney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude about him,
a multitude of poets. In fifty-two years, beyond the drama, two hundred
and thirty-three are enumerated,^ of whom forty have genius or talent :
Breton, Donne, Drayton, Lodge, Greene, the two Fletchers, Beaumont,
Spenser, Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Wither, Warner, Davison,
Carew, Suckling, Herrick ; — we should grow tired in counting them.
There is a crop of them, and so there is at the same time in Catholic and
heroic Spain ; and as in Spain, it was a sign of the times, the mark of a
public want, the index to an extraordinary and transient condition of
the mind. What is this condition which gives rise to so universal a
taste for poetry ? What is it breathes life into their books ? How
happens it, that amongst the least, in spite of pedantries, awkwardnesses,
in the rhyming chronicles or descriptive cyclopedias, we meet with
brilliant pictures and genuine love-cries ? How happens it, that when
this generation was exhausted, true poetry ended in England, as true
painting in Italy and Flanders ? It was because an epoch of the mind
came and passed away, — that, namely, of instinctive and creative con-
ception. These men had new senses, and no theories in their heads.
Their emotions were not the same as ours. What is the sunrise to an
ordinary man ? A white smudge on the edge of the sky, between bosses
of clouds, amid pieces of land, and bits of road, which he sees not be-
cause he has seen them a hundred times. But for them, all things have a
soul ; I mean that they feel naturally, within themselves, the uprising
and severance of the outlines, the power and contrast of tints, the sad
or delicious sentiment, which breathes from this combination and union
like a harmony or a cry. How sorrowful is the sun, as he rises in a mist
above the sad sea-furrows ; what an air of resignation in the old trees
rustling in the night rain; what a feverish tumult in the mass of waves,

^ Last sonnet, p. 539.

' Nathan Drake, Shakspeare <Md his Times, i. Part 2, ch. 2, 3, 4. Among
these 233 poets the authors of isolated pieces are not reckoned, but only those who
published or gathered theii- works together.

CUAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 173

whose dishevelled locks are twisted for ever on the surface of the abyss !
But the great torch of heaven, the luminous god, emerges and shines; the
tall, soft, pliant herbs, the evergreen meadows, the expanding roof of
lofty oaks, — the whole English landscape, continually renewed and
illumined by the flooding moisture, diffuses an inexhaustible freshness.
These meadows, red and white with flowers, ever moist and ever young,
slip off their veil of golden mist, and appear suddenly, timidly, like
beautiful virgins. Here is the cuckoo-flower, which springs up before
the coming of the swallow. Drayton, in his Poli/olbion, sings :
' Then from her burnisht gate the goodly glittring East
Guilds every lofty top, which late the humorous night
Bespangled had with pearle, to please the Mornings sight :
On which the mirthful! Quires, with their clere open throats.
Unto the joyfull Morne so straine their warbling notes,
That Hills and Valleys ring, and even the ecchoing Ayre
Seemes all compos'd of sounds, about them everywhere. . . .
Thus sing away the Jlorne, untiU the mounting Sunne,
Through thick exhaled fogs, his golden head hath runne,
And through the twisted tops of our close Covert creeps.
To kiss the gentle Shade, this while that sweetly sleeps.'^

A step further, and you will find the old gods reappear. They re-
appear, these living gods — these living gods mingled with things which
you cannot help meeting as soon as you meet nature again. Shak-
speare, in the Tempest, sings :

' Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease ;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep ;
Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns . . .
Hail, many-colour'd messenger (Iris.) . . .
Who with thy saffron wings upon my flowenj
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers.
And with each end of thy blue bow dost crowu
My bosky acres and my unshrubb'd down.'**
In Cymbeline he says :

* As gentle as zephyrs blowing below the violet,
Kot wagging his sweet head.'*

Greene, in Never too Late, says :

' When Flora proud, in pomp of all her flowers,

Sat bright and gay.
And gloried in the dew of Iris' showers.

And did display
Her mantle chequer'd all with gaudy green. ' *

1 M. Drayton's PolyoWion, ed. 1622, 13th song, p. 2H.

2 Act iv. 1. 2 Act iv, 2.

* Greene's Poems, ed. Bell, Eurymachus in Laudem Mirimid'je, p. 73.

174 THE KENAISSANCE. [BCOX II.

In the same piece he speaks :

' How oft have I descending Titan seen,
His burning locks couch in the sea-queen's lap,
And beauteous Thetis his red body wrap
In watery robes, as he her lord had been ! ' '

So Spenser, in his Faerie Queene, sings :

' The ioyous day gan early to appeare ;
And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
Of aged Tithone gan herself to reare
With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red :
Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
About her eares, when Una her did marke
Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke ;
With mery note her lowd salutes the mounting larke. ' ^

All the splendour and sweetness of this well-watered land ; all the
specialties, the opulence of its dissolving tints, of its variable sky, its
luxuriant vegetation, assemble about the gods, who gave them their
beautiful form.

In the life of every man there are moments when, in presence of
objects, he experiences a shock. This mass of ideas, of mangled recol-
lections, of mutilated images, which he hidden in all corners of his
mind, are set in motion, organised, suddenly developed like a flower.
He is enraptured ; he cannot help looking at and admiring the charm-
ing creature which has just appeared; he wishes to see it. still, and
others like it, and dreams of nothing else. There are such moments
in the life of nations, and this is one of them. They are happy in con-
templating beautiful things, and wish only that they should be the
most beautiful possible. They are not preoccupied, as we are, with
theories. They do not labour to express moral or philosophical ideas.
They wish to enjoy through the imagination, through the eyes, like
these Italian nobles, who, at the same time, were so captivated by tine
colours and forms, that they covered with paintings not only their
rooms and their churches, but the lids of their chests and the saddles
of their horses. The rich and green sunny country ; young, gaily-
attired ladies, blooming with health and love; half-draped gods and
goddesses, masterpieces and models of strength and grace, — these are
the most lovely objects which man can contemplate, the most capable
of satisfying his senses and his heart — of giving rise to smiles and to
joy ; and these are the objects which occur in all the poets in a most
wonderful abundance of songs, pastorals, sonnets, little fugitive pieces,
so lively, delicate, easily unfolded, that we have never since had their
equals. What though Venus and Cupid have lost their altars ? Like

' Oreene's Poems, Meliccrtus' description of Ms Mistress, p. 38.

* ijpenser's Works, ed. Todd, 1863, The Faerie Queene, i. c. 11, st. 51.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN KENAISSAXCE. 175

the contemporary painters of Italy, they Avillingly imagine a beautiful
naked child, drawn on a chariot of gold through the limpid air ; or a
•woman, redolent with youth, standing on the waves, which kiss her
snowy feet. Harsh Ben Jonson is ravished with the scene. The
disciplined battalion of his sturdy verses changes into a band of little
graceful strophes, which trip as lightly as Raphael's children. He sees
his lady approach, sitting on the chariot of Love, drawn by swans and
doves. Love leads the car ; she passes calm and smiling, and all
hearts, charmed by her divine looks, wish no other joy than to see and
Serve her for ever.

* See the chariot at hand here of Love,

Wherein my lady rideth !
Each that draws is a swan or a dove,

And well the car Love guideth.
As she goes, all hearts do duty

Unto her beauty ;
And, enamour'd, do wish, so they might

But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run hy her side.
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.
Do but look on her eyes, they do light

All that Love's world compriseth !
Do but look on her hair, it is bright

As Love's star when it riseth ! . . .
Have you seen but a bright lily gi'ow,

Before ruJe hands have touched it ?
Have you marked but the fall o' the snow,

Before the soil hath smutched it ?
Have you felt the wool of beaver ?

Or swan's down ever ?
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier ?

Or the nard in the fire ?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee ?
0 so white ! 0 so soft ! 0 so sweet is she ! ' '

T\'hat more lively, more unlike measured and artificial mythology ?
Like Theocritus and Moschus, they play with their laughing gods, and
their belief becomes a festival. One day, in an alcove of a wood,
Cupid meets a nymph asleep :

* Her golden hair o'erspread her face,
Her careless arms abroad were cast,
Her quiver had her pillow's place,
Her breast lay bare to every blast. ' '

He approaches softly, steals her arrows, and puts his own in their
jilace. She hears a noise at last, raises her reclining head, and sees a

1 Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. E. Bell, Celebration of Charts ; her Triumph, p. 125.
• Cupid's Pastime, unknown author, ab. 1621.

176 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

.shepherd approaching, She flees ; he pursues. She strings her low,
and shoots her arrows at him. He only becomes more ardent, and is
on the point of seizing her. In despair, she takes an arrow, and buries
it in her lovely body. Lol she is changed, she stops, smiles, loves,
draws near him.

' Though mountains meet not, lovers may.

What other lovers do, did they.

The god of Love sat on a tree,

And taught that pleasant sight to see. ' *

A drop of malice falls into the medley of artlessness and voluptuous-
ness ; it was so in Longus, and in all that delicious nosegay called the
Anthology. Not the dry mocking of Voltaire, of folks who possessed only
wit, and always lived in a drawing-room ; but the raillery of artists,
lovers whose brains are full of colour and form, who, when they recount
a bit of roguishness, imagine a stooping neck, lowered eyes, the blushing
of vermilion cheeks. One of these fair ones says the following verses,
simpering, and we can even see now the pouting of her lips :

* Love in my bosom like a bee
Doth suck his sweet.
Now with his wings he plays with mc^
Now with his feet.

Within my eyes he makes his rest.
His bed amid my tender breast,
My kisses are his daily feast.
And yet he robs me of my rest.
Ah ! wanton, will ye ! ' *

"What relieves these sportive pieces is their splendour of imagination.
There are effects and flashes which one hardly dare quote, dazzling
and maddening, as in the Song of Songs:

' Her eyes, fair eyes, like to the purest lights
That animate the sun, or cheer the day,
In whom the shining sunbeams brightly play,
Whiles fancy doth on them divine delights.

Her cheeks like ripened lilies steeped in win^
Or fair pomegranate kernels washed in milk,
Or snow-white threads in nets of crimson silk.
Or gorgeous clouds upon the sun's decline.

Her lips are roses over-washed with dew.
Or like the purple of Narcissus' flower . . ,

Her crystal chin like to the purest mould
Enchased with dainty daisies soft and white.
Where fancy's fair pavilion once is pight,
Whereas embraced his beauties he doth hold.

1 Cupid's Pastime, unknown author, ab. 1621.
* HosaUnd's Madrigal.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EEXAIS3.VXCE. 177

Tier neck like to an ivory shining tower,
"Wliere through with azure veins sweet nectar runs.
Or like the down of swans where Senesse woons.
Or like delight that doth itself devour.

Her paps are like fair apples in the prime,
As round as orient pearls, as soft as down ;
They never vaU their fair through winter's frown.
But from their sweets love sucked his summer time. ' '

• "What need compare, where sweet sxceeds compare ?
Who draws his thoughts of love from senseless things,
Their pomp and greatest glories doth impair,
And mounts love's heaven with overladen wings. "^

I can well believe that things had no mora beauty then than now ;
but I am sure that men found them more beautiful.

When the power of embellishment is so great, it is natural that they
should paint the sentiment which unites all joys, whither all dreams
converge, ideal love, and in particular, artless and happy love. Of all
sentiments, there is none for which we have more sympathy. It is of
all the most simple and sweet. It is the first motion of the heart, and
the first word of nature. It is made up of innocence and self-abandon-
ment. It is clear of reflections and effort. It extricates us from com-
plicated passion, contempt, regret, hate, violent desires. It penetrates
us, and we breathe it as the fresh breath of the morning wind, which
has swept over flowery meads. They inhaled it, and were enraptured,
the knights of this perilous court, and so rested in the contrast from
their actions and their dangers. The most severe and tragic of their
poets turned aside to meet it, Shakspeare among the evergreen oaks of
the forest of Arden,^ Ben Jonson in the woods of Sherwood,* amid
the wide shady glades, the shining leaves and moist flowers, trembling
on the margin of lonely springs. Marlowe himself, the terrible painter
of the agony of Edward ii., the impressive and powerful poet, who
wrote Faustus, Tamerlane, and the Jew of Malta, leaves his sanguinary
dramas, his high-sounding verse, his images of fury, and nothing can
be more musical and sweet than his song. A shepherd, to gain his
lady-love, says to her :

' Come live with me and be my Love,
And we wiU all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

^ Greene's Poems, ed. E. Bell, Menaphon's Eclogue, p. 41.
2 Ibid. Melkertus' Eclogue, p. 43.
^ As you Like it.

<■ The Sad Shepherd. See also Beaumont and Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess

M

1 78 THE EENAISSANCE, [EOOK II.

By shallow rivers, to whose falls
[Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There 1 will make thee teds of roses.
And a thousand fragrant posies ;
A cap of flowers and a kirtle,
Embroider'd aU with leaves of myrtle.
A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull |
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs :
And if these pleasures may thee move.
Come live with me and be my Love. . . .
The shepherd swains shall dance and sing,
For thy delight each May -morning :
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love. ' ^

The unpolished gentlemen of the period, returning from a falcon
hunt, were more than once arrested by such a rustic picture ; such as
they were, that is to say, imaginative and not very citizen-like, they
had dreamed of figuring in them on their own account. But while
entering into, they reconstructed them ; in their parks, prepared for
the queen's entrance, with a profusion of costumes and devices, not
troubling themselves to copy rough nature exactly. Improbability did
not disturb them ; they were not minute imitators, students of manners :
they created ; the country for them was but a setting, and the complete
picture came from their fancies and their hearts. Romantic it may
have been, even impossible, but it was on this account the more charm-
ing. Is there a greater charm than putting on one side this actual
world which fetters or oppresses us, to float vaguely and easily in the
azure and the light, on the summit of the land of fairies and clouds,
to arrange things according to the pleasure of the moment, no longer
feeling the oppressive laws, the harsh and resisting framework of life,
adorning and varying everything after the caprice and the refinements
of fancy ? That is what is done in these little poems. Usually the
events are such as happen nowhere, or happen in the land where kings
turn shepherds and marry shepherdesses. The beautiful Argentile^ is
detained at her uncle's court, who wishes to deprive her of her kingdom,

* This poem was, and still is, frequently attributed to Shakspeare. It appears
as his in Knight's edition, published a few years ago. Isaac Walton, however,
writing about fifty years after Marlowe's death, attributes it to him. In Fal-
grave's Golden Treasury it is also ascribed to the same author. As a confirma-
tion, let us state that Ithamore, in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, says to the courtesan
(Act iv. Sc. 4) : * Thou in those groves, by Dis above,

Shalt live with me, and be my love. ' — Tr.

' Chalmers' English Poets, William Warner, Fourth Booh of Albion's England,
ch. XX. p. 551.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 179

and commands her to mnrry Curan, a beor in his service ; she flees,
and Curan in despair goes and lives two years among the shepherds.
One day he meets a beautiful country-woman, and loves her; while
speaking to her he thinks of Argentile, and weeps ; he describes her
sweet face, her lithe figure, her blue-veined delicate wrists, and
suddenly sees that the peasant girl is weeping. She falls into his
arms, and says, ' I am Argentile.' Now Curan was a king's son, Avho
had disguised himself thus for love of Argentile. He resumes his
armour, and defeats the wicked king. There was never a braver
knight; and they both reigned long in Northumberland. From a
hundred such tales, tales of the spring-time, the reader will perliaps
bear with me while I pick out one more, gay and simple as a May
morning. The Princess Dowsabel came down one morning into her
father's garden : she gathers honeysuckles, primroses, violets, and
daisies ; then, behind a hedge, she heard a shepherd singing, and that
so finely that she loved him at once. He promises to be faithful, and
asks for a kiss. Her cheeks became as crimson as a rose :

' With that she bent her snow-white knee,
Down by the shepherd kneeled she,

And him she sweetly kiss'd.
With that the shepherd whoop'd for joy ;
Quoth he : " There's never shepherd boy

That ever was so blest. " ' ^

Nothing more ; is it not enough ? It is but a moment's fancy ; but
they had such fancies every moment. Think what poetry was likely to
spring from them, how superior to common events, how free from
literal imitation, how smitten with ideal beauty, how capable of creating
a world beyond our sad world. In fact, among all these poems there
is one truly divine, so divine that the reasoners of succeeding ages
have found it wearisome, that even now but few understand it —
Spenser's Faerie Queene.

One day Monsieur Jourdain, having turned Mamamouchi^ and
learned orthography, sent for the most illustrious writers of the age.
He settled himself in his arm-chair, pointed with his finger at several
folding-stools for them to sit down, and said :

* I have read your little productions, gentlemen. They have
afforded me much pleasure. I wish to give you some work to do. I
have given some lately to little LuUi,^ your fellow-labourer. It was
at my command that he introduced the sea-shell at his concerts, — a
melodious instrument, which no one knew of before, and which has
such a pleasing effect. I insist that you will work out my ideas as he

* Ckahners' EngVi-'h Poets, M. Drayton's Fourth Eclogue, iv. p. 436.

* Mons. Jourdain is the hero of Moliere's comedy, Le Bourgeois Qeniininmrne^
the type of a vulgar and successful upstart ; Mamamouchi is a mock dignity. — Tb.

^ Lulli, a celebrated Italian composer of the time of Moliere. — Tr.

180 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

has worked tLem out, and I give you an order for a poem in prose.
What is not prose, you know, is verse ; and what is not verse, is prose.
When I say, " Nicolle, bring me my sHppers and give me my night-
cap," I speak prose. Take this sentence as your model. This style is
much more pleasing than the jargon of unfinished lines which you call
verse. As for the subject, let it be myself. You Avill describe my
flowered dressing-gown which I have put on to receive you in, and
this little green velvet undress which I wear undei-neath, to do my
morning exercise in. You will set down that this chintz costs a louis
an ell. The description, if well worked out, will furnish some very
pretty paragraphs, and will enlighten the public as to the cost of things.
I desire also that you should speak of my mirrors, my carpets, my
hangings. My tradesmen will let you have their bills ; don't fail to
put them in. I shall be glad to read in your works, all fully and
naturally set forth, about my father's shop, who, like a real gentleman,
sold cloth to oblige his friends ; my maid NicoUe's kitchen, the genteel
behaviour of Brusquet, the little dog of my neighbour M. Dimanche.
You might also explain my domestic affairs : there is nothing more
interesting to the public than to hear how a million may be scraped
together. Tell them also that my daughter Lucile has not married
that little rascal Cleonte, but M. Samuel Bernard, who made his fortune
as a feivnier-general, keeps his carriage, and is going to be a minister of
state. For this I will pay you liberally, half a louis for a yard of
writing. Come back in a month, and let me see what my ideas have
suggested to you.'

We are the descendants of JI. Jourdain, and this is how we have
been talking to the men of talent from the beginning of the century,
and the men of talent have listened to us. Hence arise our shoppy
and realistic novels. I pray the reader to forget them, to forget him-
self, to become for a while a poet, a gentleman, a man of the sixteenth
century. Unless Ave bury the M. Jourdain who survives in us, we
shall never understand Spenser.

VI.

Spenser belonged to an ancient family, allied to great houses ; was a
friend of Sidney and Ealeigh, the two most accomplished knights of
the age — a knight himself, at least in heart ; who had found in his
connections, his friendships, his studies, his life, everything calculated
to lead him to ideal poetry. We find him at Cambridge, where he
imbues himself with the noblest ancient philosophies ; in a northern
country, where he passes through a deep and unfortunate passion ; at
Penshurst, in the castle and in the society where the Arcadia was pro-
duced ; with Sidney, in whom survived entire the romantic poetry
and heroic generosity of the feudal spirit ; at court, where all the
splendours of a disciplined and gorgeous chivalry were gathered about
the throne ; finally, at Kilcolmun, on the borders of a beautiful lake.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN KEXAISSAXCE. 181

in a lonely castle, from which the view embraced an amphitheatre
of mountains, and the half of Ireland. Poor on the other hand, not
fit for court, and though favoured by the queen, unable to obtain
from his patrons anything but inferior employment ; in the end, tired
of solicitations, and banished to dangerous Ireland, whence a revolt
expelled him, after his house and child had been burned ; he died
three months later, of misery and a broken heart.i Expectations and
rebuffs, many sorrows and many dreams, some few joys, and a sudden
and frightful calamity, a small fortune and a premature end ; this
indeed was a poet's life. But the heart within was the true poet —
from it all proceeded ; circumstances furnished the subject only ; he
transformed them more than they him ; he received less than he gave.
Philosophy and landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendours
of the country and the court, on all which he painted or thought, he
impressed his inward nobleness. Before all, his was a soul captivated
by sublime and chaste beauty, eminently platonic ; one of these lofty
and refined souls most charming of all, who, born in the lap of nature,
draw thence their mother's milk, but soar above, enter the regions of
mysticism, and mount instinctively in order to open at the confines of
another world. Spenser leads us to Milton, and thence to Puritanism,
as Plato to Virgil, and thence to Christianity. Sensuous beauty is
perfect in both, but their main worship is for moral beauty. He
appeals to the Pluses :

* Pievele to me the sacred noursery
Of vertiie, which with you cloth there remaine,
"Where it in silver bowre does hidden ly
From view of men and wicked worlds disdaine ! *

He encourages his knight when he sees him droop. He is wroth
when he sees him attacked. He rejoices in his justice, temperance,
courtesy. He introduces in the beginning of a song, stanzas in
honour of friendship and justice. He pauses, after relating a lovely
instance of chastity, to exhort women to modesty. He pours out the
wealth of his respect and tenderness at his heroine's feet. If any
coarse man insults them, he calls to their aid nature and the gods.
Never does he bring them on his stage without adorning their name
with splendid eulogy. He has an adoration for beauty worthy of
Dante and Plotinus. And this, because he never considers it a mere
harmony of colour and form, but an emanation of unique, heavenly,
imperishable beauty, which no mortal eye can see, and which is the
prime work of the great Author of the worlds.^ Bodies only render
it sensible ; it does not live in the bodies ; grace and attraction are

^ ' He died for want of hread, in King Street. ' Ben Jonson, quoted by
Drummond.

* Hymns of Love and Beauty ; of heavenly Love and Beauty.

«182 THE EEXAISSANCE. [BOOE II:

not in thing's, but in the deathless idea whicli shines throufrh the
things :

' For that same goodly hew of white and red,
With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
And those sweete rosy leaves, so fairly spred
Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
To that they were, even to corrupted clay :
That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright,
Shall tnrne to dust, and lose their goodly light.
But that fahe lampe, from whose celestiall ray
That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers fire,
Shall never be extinguisht nor decay ;
But, when the vitall spirits doe expyre.
Upon her native planet shall retj're ;
For it is heavenly borne, and cannot die,
Being a parcell of the purest skie. ' ^

In presence of this ideal of beauty, love is transformed :

* For Love is lord of Truth and Loialtie,
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust.
On golden plumes up to the purest skie.
Above the reach of loathly sinful 1 lust,
"WTiose base affect through cowardly distrust
Of his weake wings dare not to heaven fly.
But like a moldwarpe in the earth doth ly. ' ^

Love such as this contains all that is good, and fine, and noble. It
is the prime source of life, and of the eternal soul of things. It is
this love which, pacifying the primitive discord, has created the har-
mony of the spheres, and maintains this glorious universe. It dwells
in God, and is God Himself, descended in bodily form to regenerate
the tottering world and save the human race ; around and within
animated beings, when our eyes can pierce it, we behold it as a
living light, penetrating and embracing every creature. We touch
here the sublime sharp summit where the world of mind and the
world of senses unite ; where man, gathering with both hands the
loveliest flowers of either, feels himself at the same time a pagan and a
Christian.

So much, as a testimony to his heart. But he was also a poet,
that is, pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and that most natu-
rally, instinctively, unceasingly. We might go on for ever describing
this inward condition of all great artists ; there would still remain
much to be^ described. It is a sort of spiritual growth with them ;
at every instant a bud shoots forth, and on this another, and still

^ A Hymne in Honour of Bcautie, v. 92-105.
- A Hymne in Honour of Love, v. 176-lSli.

ClUr. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 1S3

another ; each producing, increasing, blooming of itself, so that in-
stantaneously we find first a plant, then a thicket, then a forest.
A character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then
a succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing,
arranging themselves by instinctive development, as when in a dream
we behold a train of figures which spread out and group themselves
before our eyes. This fount of living and changing forms is in-
exhaustible in Spenser ; he is always imaging ; it is his specialty.
He has but to close his eyes, and apparitions arise ; they abound iu
him, crowd, overflow ; in vain he pours them forth ; they continually
float up, more copious and more danse. INIany times, following the
inexhaustible stream, I have thought of the vapours which rise in-
cessantly from the sea, ascend, sparkle, commingle their gold and
snowy scrolls, while beneath them new mists arise, and others again
beneath, and the splendid procession never grows dim or ceases.

But what distinguishes him from all others is the mode of his
imagination. Generally with a poet his spirit ferments vehemently
and by fits and starts ; his ideas gather, jostle each other, suddenly
appear in masses and heaps, and burst out in sharp, piercing, con-
centrative words ; it seems that they need these sudden accumulations
to imitate the unity and life-like energy of the objects which they
reproduce ; at least almost all the surrounding poets, Shakspeare at
their head, act thus. Spenser remains calm in the fervour of inven-
tion. The visions which would be fever to another, leave him at peace.
They come and spread before him, easily, entire, uninterrupted, with-
out starts. He is epic, that is, a narrator, and not a singer like an
ode-writer, nor a mimic like a play-writer. No modern is more like
Homer. Like Homer and the great epic-writers, he presents consecu-
tive and noble, almost classical images, so nearly ideas, that the mind
seizes them unaided and unawares. Like Homer, he is always simple
and clear : he makes no leap, he omits no argument, he robs no word
of its primitive and ordinary sense, he preserves the natural sequence
of ideas. Like Homer again, he is redundant, ingenuous, even childish.
He says everything, he puts down reflections which we have made
beforehand ; he repeats without limit his ornamental epithets. We
can see that he beholds objects in a beautiful uniform light, with
infinite detail ; that he wishes to show all this detail, never fearing
to see his happy dream change or disappear ; that he traces its outline
with a regular movement, never hvirrying or slackening. He is even
a little prolix, too unmindful of the public, too ready to lose himself
and fall into a dream. His thought expands in vast repeated com-
parisons, like those of the old Ionic poet. If a wounded giant falls, he
finds him

' As an aged tree,
High growing on the top of rocky chft,
Whose hart-strings with keene Steele nigh hewen be.

184 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

The mightie trunck halfe rent with ragged rift,

Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift.

Or as a castle, reared high and round,
By snbtile engins and malitious slight
Is \mdermined from the lowest ground,
And her foundation forst, and feebled quight,
At last downe faUes ; and with her heaped hight
Her hastie ruine does more heavie make,
And yields it selfe unto the victours might :
Such was this Gyaunt's fall, that seemd to shake
The stedfast glohe of earth, as it for feare did quake. ^

He develops all the ideas -which he handles. He stretches all his
phrases into periods. Instead of compressing, he expands. To bear
tliis ample thought and its accompanying train, he requires a long
stanza, ever renewed, long recurring lines, reiterated rhymes, whose
uniformity and fulness recall majestic sounds which undulate eternally-
through the woods and the fields. To expand these epic faculties, and
to expand them in the sublime region where his soul is naturally borne,
he requires an ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of reality,
Avith personages who could hardly exist, and in a world Avhich could
never be.

He made many miscellaneous attempts in sonnets, elegies, pastorals,
hymns of love, little sparkling word pictures;^ they were but essays,
incapable for the most part of svipporting his genius. Yet already his
magnificent imagination appeared in them ; gods, men, landscapes, the
world which he sets in motion is a thousand miles from that in which
we live. His Shepherd's Calendar^ is a pensive and tender pastoral,
full of delicate loves, noble sorrows, lofty ideas, where no voice is heard
but of thinkers and poets. His Visions of Petrarch and Du Bellay are
admirable dreams, in which palaces, temples of gold, splendid land-
scapes, sparkling rivers, marvellous birds, appear alternately as in an
Oriental fairy-tale. If he sings a * Prothalamion,' he sees two beautiful
swans, white as snow, who glide to the songs of nymphs amid vermeil
roses, while the transparent water kisses their silken feathers, and mur-
murs with joy :

* There, in a meadow, by the river's side,

A flocke of Nymphes I chaunced to espy,

All lovely daughters of the Flood thereby,

"With goodly greenish locks, all loose untyde.

As each had bene a bryde ;

And each one had a little wicker basket,

Made of fine twigs, entrayled curiously,

In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket,

^ The Faerie Queene, i. c. 8, st. 22, 23.

2 The Shej^Jierd's Calendar, Amoretti, Sonnets, Prothalamion, Ejnthalamion,
Minopotmos, Virgil's Gnat, The Ruines of 7'ime, The 7'eares of the Muses, etc.

3 Published in 1589 ; dedicated to Philip Sidney.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN KENAISSAXCE. 185

And with fine fingers cropt fall feateously
The tender stalkes on hye.
Of every sort, which in that meadow grew,
They gathered some ; the violet, pallid blew.
The little dazie, that at evening closes.
The virgin lillie, and the primrose trew,
With store of vermeil roses,
To deck their bridegroomes posies
Against the brydale-day, which was not long :
Sweet Themmes ! runne softly, till I end my song.

With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe
Come softly swimming downe along the lee ;
Two fairer birds I yet did never see ;
The snow, which doth the top of Pindus strew.
Did never whiter shew . . .
So purely white they were.

That even the gentle stream, the which them bare,
Seem'd foule to them, and bad his billowes spare
To wet their silken feathers, least they might
Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre.
And marre their beauties bright.
That shone as heavens light,
Against their brydale daj'^, which was not long :
Sweet Themmes ! runne softly, till I end my song !'^

If he bewails the death of Sidney, Sidney becomes a shepherd ; he is
slain like Adonis; around him gather weeping nymphs:

' The gods, which all things see, this same beheld,
And, pittying this paire of lovers trew,
Transformed them there lying on the field,
Into one flowre that is both red and blew :
It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade.
Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made.

And in the midst thereof a star appeares.
As fairly formd as any star in skyes :
Eesembling Stella in her freshest yeares,
Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes ;
And all the day it standeth full of deow,
"Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow. ' '

His most genuine sentiments become thus fairy-hke. !Magic is the
mould of his mind, and impresses its shape on all that he imagines or
thinks. Involuntarily he robs objects of their ordinary form. 11 he
looks at a landscape, after an instant he sees it quite differently. He
carries it, without knowing it, into an enchanted land; the azure
heaven sparkles like a vault of diamonds, meadows are clothed with
flowers, a biped population flutters in the sweet air, palaces of jasper

^ Profhnlamion, V. 19-54. 3 ^slrovhel, v. lSl-192.

186 THE RENAISSANCE. ["BOOK 11.

shine among the trees, radiant ladies appear on carved balconies
above galleries of emerald. This insensible toil of mind is like the slow
crystallisations of nature. A moist twig is cast into the bottom of a
mine, and is brought out again a hoop of diamonds.

At last he finds a subject Avhich suits him, the greatest joy per-
mitted to an artist. He removes his epic from the common ground
which, in the hands of Homer and Dante, gave expression to a living
creed, and depicted national heroes. He leads us to the summit
of fairy -land, on that extreme verge where objects vanish and pure
idealism begins :

* I have imdertaken a work,' he says, ' to represent all the moral vertues, assign-
ing to every vertue a knight to be the patron and defender of the same : in whose
actions and feats of armes and cMvalry the operations of that vertue, whereof he
is the protector, are to he expressed, and the vices and imruly appetites that
oppose themselves against the same, to he heaten downe and overcome. ' ^

In fact, he gives us an allegory as the foundation of his poem, not that
he dreams of becoming a wit, a preacher of moralities, a propounder of
riddles. He does not subordinate image to idea ; he is a seer, not a
philosopher. They are living men and actions which he sets in motion;
only from time to time, enchanted palaces, a whole train of splendid
visions trembles and divides like a mist, enabling us to catch a glimpse
of the thought which raised and arranged it. When in his Garden of
Venus we see the countless forms of aU living thinofs arranged in due
order, in close compass, awaiting life, we conceive with him the birth
of universal love, the ceaseless fertility of the great mother, the mys-
terious swarm of creatures which rise in succession from her far-reach-
ing womb. When we see his Knight of the Cross, combating with a
monstrous woman-serpent in defence of his beloved lady Una, we
dimly remember that, if we search beyond these two figures, we shall
find behind one, Truth, behind the other, Falsehood. We perceive that
his characters dre not flesh and blood, and that all these brilliant phan-
toms are phantoms, and nothing more. We take pleasure in their
brilliancy, without believing in their substantiality ; we are interested
in their acts, Avithout troubling ourselves about their misfortunes. We
know that their tears and cries are not real. Our emotion is purified and
raised. We do not fall into gross illusion ; we have that gentle feeling
of knowing ourselves to be dreaming. We, like him, are a thousand
leagues from actual life, beyond the pangs of painful pity, unmixed
terror, urgent and bitter hatred. We entertain only refined senti-
ments, half defined, arrested at the moment that they were about to
affect us with too sharp a stroke. They slightly touch us, and we find
ourselves happy in being extricated from a belief which was beginning
to be oppressive.

^ Words attributed to him by Lodowick Bryskett, Discourse of Civil Life, ed.
1606, p. 2(j.

CHAP. I.] THE TAGAN EENAISSANCE. 187

VII.

What world could farnish materials to so elevated a fancy ? One
only, that of cliivalry ; for none is so far from the actual. Alone and
independent in his castle, freed from all the ties which society, family,
toil, usually impose on the actions of men, the feudal hero had attempted
every kind of adventure, but yet he had done less than he imagined :
the boldness of his deeds had been exceeded by the madness of his
dreams. For want of useful employment and an accepted rule, his
brain had laboured on an unreasoning and impossible track, and the
urgency of his wearisomeness had increased beyond measure his craving
for excitement. Under this stimulus his poetry had become a world
of imagery. Insensibly strange conceptions had grown and multiphed
in his brains, one over the other, like ivy woven round a tree, and
the original stock had disappeared beneath their rank growth and their
obstruction. The delicate fancies of the old Welsh poetry, the grand
ruins of the German epics, the marvellous splendours of the conquered
East, all the relics which four centuries of adventure had dispersed
among the minds of men, had become gathered into one great dream ;
and giants, dwarfs, monsters, the whole medley of imaginary creatures,
of superhuman exploits and splendid follies, were grouped about a
unique conception, exalted and sublime love, like courtiers prostrated
at the feet of their king. It was an ample and an elastic subject-matter,
from which the great artists of the age, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes,
Rabelais, had hewn their poems. But they belonged too completely to
*heir own time, to admit of their belonging to one which had passed.
They created a chivalry afresh, but it was not genuine. The ingenious
Ariosto, an ironical epicurean, delights his gaze with it, and grows merry
over it, hke a man of pleasure, a sceptic who rejoices doubly in his
pleasure, because it is sweet, and because it is forbidden. By his side
poor Tasso, inspired by a fanatical, revived, factitious Catholicism, amid
the tinsel of an old school of poetry, works on the same subject, in
sickly fashion, with great effort and scant success. Cervantes, himself
a knight, albeit he loves chivalry for its nobleness, perceives its folly,
and crushes it to the ground, with heavy blows, in the mishaps of the
wayside inns.^ More coarsely, more openly, Rabelais, a rude commoner,
drowns it with a burst of laughter in his merriment and nastiness.
Spenser alone takes it seriously and naturally. He is on the level of
so much nobleness, dignity, reverie. He is not yet settled and shut in
by that species of exact common sense which was to found and cramp
the whole modern civilisation. In his heart he inhabits the poetic and
misty land from which men were daily drawing further and further
away. He is enamoured of it, even to its very language ; he retains

' 'Cervantes smik-d Spain's cliivalry away. ' — Byeon's Don Juan, cauto iiii.
?t. xi.— Tr.

183 THE EEXAISSANCE. [bOOK II.

the old words, the expressions of the middle-age, the style of Chaucer,
especially in the ShepltercTs Calendar. He enters straightway upon the
strangest dreams of the old story-tellers, without astonishment, like a
man who has still stranger ones on his own account. Enchanted castles,
monsters and giants, duels in the woods, wandering ladies, all spring
up under his hands, the mediteval fancy with the mediseval generosity ;
and it is just becatise this world is unlifelilie that this world suits his
humour.

Is there in chivalry sufficient to furnish him with matter ? That
is but one world, and he has another. Beyond the valiant men, the
glorified images of moral virtues, he has the gods, finished models of
sensible beauty ; beyond Christian chivalry he has the pagan Olympus ;
beyond the idea of heroic will, which can only be satisfied by adven-
tures and danger, he has the idea of calm energy, which is found in
itself to be in harmony with actual existence. For such a poet there is
not enough in one ideal; beside the beauty of effort he places the
beauty of happiness ; he couples them, not with the preconception of a
pliilosopher, nor the design of a scholar like Goethe, but because they
are both lovely ; and here and there, amid weapons and passages of
arms, he distributes satyrs, nymphs, Diana, Venus, like Greek statues
amid the turrets and lofty trees of an English park. There is nothing
forced in the union ; the ideal epic, like a heaven above them, unites
and harmonises the two worlds ; a beautiful pagan dream carries on a
beautiful dream of chivalry ; the link consists in the fact that they are
both beautiful. At this elevation the poet has ceased to observe the
differences of races and civilisations. He can introduce into his picture
whatever he will; his only reason is, 'That suited;' and there could
be no better. Under the glossy-leaved oaks, by the old trvink so deeply
rooted in the ground, he can see two knights cleaving each other, and
the next instant a company of Fauns who came there to dance. The
beams of light Avhich have poured down upon the velvet moss, the wet
turf of an English forest, can reveal the dishevelled locks and white
shoulders of nymphs. Have you not seen it in Rubens ? And what
signify discrepancies in the happy and sublime illusion of a fancy?
Are there more discrepancies ? Who perceives them, who feels them ?
Who feels not, on the contrary, that to speak truth, there is but one
world, that of Plato and the poets; that actual phenomena are but out-
lines— mutilated, incomplete, and blurred outlines — wretched abortions
scattered here and there on Time's track, like fragments of clay, half
moulded, then cast aside, lying in an artist's studio ; that, after all, in-
visible forces and ideas, which for ever renew the actual existences,
attain their fulfilment only in imaginary existences ; and that the poet,
in order to express nature in its entirety, is obliged to embrace in his
sympathy all the ideal forms by whicli nature has been expressed ? This
is the greatness of his work ; he has succeeded in seizing beauty in its
fulness, because he cared for nothing but beauty.

CILVr. I.] THE PAGAN KEXAISSANCE. 189

The reader will feel that such a poem cannot be recounted. In
fact, there are six poems, each of a dozen cantos, in which the action is
ever diverging and converging again, becoming confused and starting
again; and all the imaginations of antiquity and of the middle-age are,
I believe, combined in it. The knight ' pricks along the plaine,' among
the trees, and at a crossing of the paths meets other knights with whom
he engages in combat ; suddenly from within a cave appears a monster,
half woman and half serpent, surrounded by a hideous offspring ; further
on a giant, with three bodies: then a dragon, great as a hill, with sharp
talons and vast wings. For three days he fights him, and twice over-
thrown, he comes to himself only by aid of ' a gracious ointment.'
After that there are savage tribes to be conquered, castles surrounded
by flames to be captured. IMeanwhile ladies are wandering in the
midst of forests, on Avhite palfreys, exposed to the assaults of miscreants,
now guarded by a lion Avhich follows them, now delivered by a band of
satyrs who adore them. IMagicians work manifold charms ; palaces
display their festivities; tilt-yards furnish tournaments; sea- gods,
nymphs, fairies, kings, mingle feasts, surprises, dangers.

You will say it is a phantasmagoria. What matter, if we see it ?
And we do see it, for Spenser does. His sincerity wins us over. He
is so much at home in this world, that Ave end by finding ourselves at
home in it. He has no appearance of astonishment at astonishing
events ; he comes upon them so naturally, that he makes them natural ;
he defeats the miscreants, as if he had done nothing else all his life.
Yenus, Diana, and the old deities, dwell by his threshold, and enter,
and he takes no notice of them. His serenity becomes ours. We grow
credulous and happy by contagion, and to the same extent as he. How
could it be otherwise ? Is it possible to refuse credence to a man who
paints things for us with so just a detail and in so lively colours ? Here
he describes a forest for you on a sudden; are you not instantly in it with
him ? Beech trees with their silvery stems, ' loftie trees iclad with
sommers pride, did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide;' rays
of Hght tremble on the bark and shine on the ground, on the redden-
ing ferns and low bushes, which, suddenly smitten Avith the luminous
track, glisten and glimmer. Footsteps are scarcely heard on the thick
beds of heaped leaves ; and at distant intervals, on the tall herbage,
drops of dew are sparkling. Yet the sound of a horn reaches us
through the foliage ; how sweetly it falls on the ear, with wdiat unlooked
for cheer in this vast silence ! It resounds more loudly ; the clatter of
a hunt draws near; ' eft through the thicke they heard one rudely rush ;'
a nymph approaches, the most chaste and beautiful in the world.
Spenser sees her ; more, he kneels before her :

* Her face so faire, as flesh it seemed not,
But lievenly pourtraict of bright angels hew,
Cleare as the skye, withouten blame or bloi,
Through goodly mixture of complexions dev/;

190 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

And in her cheekes the vermeill red did shew

Like roses in a bed of lillies shed,

The which ambrosiall odours from them threw.

And gazers sence with double pleasure fed,

Hable to heale the sicke and to revive the ded.

In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame.

Kindled above at th' Heveuly Makers light.

And darted fyrie beames out of the same.

So passing persant, and so wondrous bright.

That quite bereav'd the rash beholders sight :

In them the blinded god his lustfull fyre

To kindle oft assayd, but had no might ;

For, with dredd maiestie and awfull yre.

She broke his wanton darts, and quenched bace desyra.

Her yvorie forhead, full of bountie brave,

Like a broad table did itselfe dispred,

For Love his loftie triumphes to engrave,

And write the battailes of his great godhed :

All good and honour might therein be red ;

For there their dwelling was. And, when she spake,

Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed ;

And 'twixt the perles and rubins softly brake

A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemd to make.

Upon her eyelids many Graces sate,

Under the shadow of her even browes,

Working belgardes and amorous retrate ;

And everie one her with a giace endowes.

And everie one with meekenesse to her bowes :

So glorious mirrhour of celestiall grace.

And soveraine moniment of mortall vowes.

How shall frayle pen descrive her heavenly face,

For feare, through want of skUl, her beauty to disgrace f

So faire, and thousand thousand times more faire.
She seemd, when she presented was to sight ;
And was yclad, for heat of scorching aire,
All in a silken Camus lilly whight,
Purfied upon with many a folded plight,
Which all above besprinckled was throughout
With golden aygulets, that glistred bright.
Like twinckling starres ; and all the skirt about
Was hemd with golden fringe.

Below her ham her weed did somewhat trayne,

And her streight legs most bravely were embayld

In gilden buskins of costly cordwa3Tie,

All bard with golden bendes, which were entayld

AVith curious antickes, and full fayre aumayld :

Before, they fastned were under her knee

In a rich ieweU, and therein entrayld

The ends of all the knots, that none might see

How they within their fouldiugs close enwrapped bcfc.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EEXAISSANCE. 191

Like two faire marWe pillours they were seene,

AVhich doe tlie temple of the gods support,

Whom all the people decke with girlauds greene.

And honour in their festivall resort ;

Those same with stately grace and princely port

She taught to tread, when she herselfe would grace ;

But with the woody nymphes when she did play,

Or when the flying libbard she did chace.

She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace.

And in her hand a sharpe bore-speare she held.

And at her backe a bow and quiver gay,

Stxift with steel-headed dartes wherewith she queld

The salvage beastes in her victorious play.

Knit with a golden bauldricke which forelay

Athwart her snowy brest, and did divide

Her daintie paps ; which, like young fruit in May,

Kow little gan to swell, and being tide

Through her thin weed their places only signifide.

Her yellow lockes, crisped like golden wyre.

About her shoulders weren loosely shed,

And, when the winde emongst them did inspyre,

They waved like a penon wyde dispred,

And low behinde her backe were scattered :

And, whether art it were or heedlesse hap^

As through the flouring forrest rash she fled,

In her rude heares sweet flowres themselves did lap,

And flourishing fresh leaves and blossomes did enwrap. ' *

• The daintie rose, the daughter of her morne.
More deare than life she tendered, whose flowre
The girlond of her honour did adorne :
Xe suffred she the middayes scorching powre,
Xe the sharp northeme wind thereon to showre ;
But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,
Whenso the froward skye began to lowre ;
But, soone as calmed was the cristall ayre.
She did it fayre dispred, and let to florish fayre.**

He is on his knees before her, I repeat, as a child ou Corpus Christi
day, among flowers and perfumes, transported with admiration, so that
he sees a heavenly light in her eyes, and angel's tints on her cheeks,
even impressing into her service Christian angels and pagan graces to
adorn and wait upon her ; it is love which brings such visions before

him:

* Sweet love, that doth his golden wings embay
In blessed nectar and piu-e pleasures well. '

"Whence this perfect beauty, this modest and charming dawn, in
which he assembles aU the brightness, all the sweetness, all the virgin

' The Faerie Qiieene, ii. c. 3, st. 22-30. » Ibid. iii. c. 5, st. 51.

192 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

graces of the full morning ? Wliat mother begat her, what marvellous
birth brought to Hght such a wonder of grace and purity ? One day,
in a fresh, solitary fountain, where the sunbeams shone, Chrysogone
was bathing amid the roses and violets.

• It was Tipon a sommers shinie day,
When Titan faire his beames did display,
In a fresh fountaine, far from all mens vew.
She bath'd her brest the boyling heat t' allay ;
She bath'd with roses red and violets blew,

And all the sweetest flowers that in the forrest gi'ew.
Till faint through yrkesome wearines adowne
Upon the grassy ground herselfe she layd
To sleepe, the whiles a gentle slombring swowne
Upon her fell all naked bare displayd. ' ^

The beams played upon her body, and ' fructified ' her. The months
rolled on. Troubled and ashamed, she went into the ' wildernesse,'
and sat down, ' every sence with sorrow sore opprest.' Meanwhile
Venus, searching for her boy Cupid, who had mutinied and fled from
her, 'wandered in the world.' She had sought him in courts, cities,
cottages, promising 'kisses sweet, and sweeter things, unto the mau
that of him tydings to her brings.'

* Shortly unto the wastefull woods she came,
Whereas she found the goddesse (Diana) with her crew.
After late chace of their embrewed game,

Sitting beside a fountaine in a rew ;

Some of them washing with the liquid dew

From off their dainty limbs the dusty sweat

And soyle, which did deforme their lively hew ;

Others lay shaded from the scorching heat ;

The rest upon her person gave attendance great.

She, having hong upon a bough on high

Her bow and painted quiver, had unlaste

Her silver buskins from her nimble thigh,

And her lanck loynes ungirt, and brests unbraste,

After her heat the breathing cold to taste ;

Her golden lockes, that late in tresses bright

Embreaded were for hindring of her haste,

Now loose about her shoulders hong undight,

And were with sweet Ambrosia all besprinckled light. '^

Diana, surprised thus, repulses Venus, 'and gan to smile, in scorne of her
vaine playnt,' swearing that if she should catch Cupid, she would clip his
wanton Avings. Then she took pity on the afllicted goddess, and set her-
self with her to look for the fugitive. They came to the ' shady covert '
where Chrysogone, in her sleep, had given birth ' unwares' to two lovely
girls, ' as faire as springing day.' Diana took one, and made her

^ The Faerie Queene, iii. c. G, st. 6 and 7. * Ibid, st, 17 and 18

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 193

the purest of all virgins. Venus carried off the other to the garden of
Adonis, * the first seminary of all things, that are borne to live and dye;'
where Psyche, the bride of Love, disports herself ; where Pleasure, their
daughter, wantons with the Graces ; where Adonis, * lapped in flowres
and pretious spycery,' ' liveth in eternal bliss,' and came back to life
through the breath of immortal Love. She brought her up as her
daughter, selected her to be the most faithful of loves, and after long
trials, gave her hand to the good knight Sir Scudamore.

That is the kind of thing we meet with ia the wondrous forest.
Are you sick of it, and do you wish to leave it because it is wondrous ?
At every bend in the alley, at every change of the day, a stanza, a
word, reveals a landscape or an apparition. It is morning, the white
dawn gleams faintly through the trees; the bluish vapours roll like a veil
at the horizon, and vanish in the smiling air ; the springs tremble and
murmur faintly amongst the mosses, and on high the poplar leaves
begin to stir and flutter like the wings of butterflies. A knight alights
from his horse, a valiant knight, who has unhorsed many a Saracen, and
experienced many an adventure. He unlaces his helmet, and on a
sudden you perceive the very cheeks of a young girl :

* Whicli doft, her golden lockes, that were upbound
Still in a knot, unto her heeles downe traced.
And like a silken veile in compasse round
About her backe and all her bodie wound :
Like as the shining skie in summers night,
What time the dayes with scorching heat abound.
Is creasted all with lines of firie light,
That it prodigious seemes in common peoples sight.'*

It is Britomart, a virgin and a heroine, like Clorinda or Marfisa,* but
how much more ideal I The genuine sentiment of nature, sincerity
of fancy, ever-flowing fertility of inspiration, the German gravity, re-
animate classical or chivalrous conceptions, which have the oldest and
most trite appearance. The train of splendours and of scenery never
ends. Desolate promontories, cleft with gaping chasms; thunder-
stricken and blackened masses of rocks, against which the hoarse
breakers dash ; palaces sparkling with gold, wherein ladies, like
angels, reclining carelessly on purple cushions, listen with sweet smiles
to the harmony of music played by unseen hands ; lofty silent walks,
where avenues of oaks spread their motionless shadows over tufts of
virgin violets, and turf which never mortal foot has trod ; — to all these
beauties of art and nature he adds the marvels of mythology, and de-
scribes them with as much of love and of full credence as a painter of

^ The Faerie Queene, iv. c. 1, st. 13.

^ Clorinda, the heroine of the infidel army in Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem De-
livered; Marfisa, an Indian queen, who figures in Ai'iosto's Orlando Furioso, and
also in Boyardo's Orlando Innamorato. — Te.

2i

19 4 THE RENAISSANCE. [cOOK II.

the Renaissance or an ancient poet. Here approach on chariots of
shell, Cymoent and her nymphs :

' A teme of dolphins raunged in aray
Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoent ;
They were all taught by Triton to ohay
To the long raynes at her commaundement :
As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went.
That their brode flaggy finnes no fome did reare,
Ne bubling rowndell they behinde them sent ;
The rest, of other fishes drawen weave ;
Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did sheare.**

Nothing, again, can be sweeter or calmer than the description of the
palace of Morpheus :

' He, making speedy way through spersed ayre,
And through the world of waters wide and deepe.
To Morpheus house doth hastily repaire.
Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe.
And low, where dawning day doth never peepe,
His dwelling is ; there Tethys his wet bed
Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steepe
In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed,
Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred.
And, more to luUe him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,
Jlixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne,
Might there be heard : but careless Quiet lyes.
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes.'*^

Observe also in a corner of this forest, a band of satyrs dancing
under the green leaves. They come leaping like wanton kids, as
gay as birds of joyous spring. The fair Hellenore, whom they have
chosen for 'May-lady,' 'daunst lively' also, laughing, and 'with gir-
londs all bespredd.' The wood re-echoes the sound of their ' merry
pypes,' * Their horned feet the greene gras wore.' ' All day they
daunced ■with great lustyhedd,' with sudden motions and suggestive
looks, while about them their flock feed on ' the bronzes ' at their
pleasure. In every book we see strange processions pass by, allegorical
and picturesque shows, like those which were then displayed at the
courts of princes ; now a masquerade of Cupid, now of the Rivers, now
of the Months, now of the Vices. Imagination was never more prodigal
or inventive. Proud Lucifera advances on a chariot ' adorned all with
gold and girlonds gay,' beaming like the dawn, surrounded by a crowd

• T^i£ Fa&rie Queene, iiL c. 4, st. S3. * Ibid. i. c. 1, st. 39 and 41.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSAXCE. 195

of courtiers whom she dazzles with her glory and splendour : * six un-
equal! beasts' draw her along, and each of these is ridden by a Vice.
One ' upon a slouthfull asse ... in habit blacke . . . like to an holy
nionck,' sick for very idleness, lets his heavy head droop, and holds in
his hand a breviary which he does not read ; another, on ' a filthie
swyne,' crawls by in his deformity, 'his belly. . . upblowne with luxury,
and eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne; and like a crane his necke
■was long and fyne,' drest in vine-leaves, through which one can see his
body eaten by ulcers, and vomiting along the road the wine and flesh
with which he is glutted. Another, seated between * two iron cofiers,'
* upon a camell loaden all with gold,' is handling a heap of coin, with
thread-bare coat, hollow cheeks, and feet stiff with gout ; another
' upon a ravenous wolfe still did chaw between his cankred teeth a
venemous tode, that all the poison ran about his chaw,' and his dis-
coloured garment ' ypainted full of eies,' conceals a snake wound about
his body. The last, covered with a torn and bloody robe, comes riding
on a Uon, brandishing about his head ' a burning brond,' his eyes
sparkling, his face pale as ashes, grasping in his feverish hand the
haft of his dagger. The strange and terrible procession passes on, led
by the solemn harmony of the stanzas ; and the grand music of reite-
rated rhymes sustains the imagination in this fantastic world, which,
with its mingled horrors and splendours, has just been opened to its
flight.

Yet all this is little. However much mythology and chivalry can
supply, they do not suffice for the needs of this poetical fancy. Spenser's
characteristic is the vastness and the overflow of picturesque invention.
Like Rubens, he creates whole scenes, beyond the region of all tradi-
tions, to express distinct ideas. As with Eubens, his allegory swells its
proportions beyond all rule, and withdraws fancy from all law, except
in so far as it is necessary to harmonise forms and colours. For, if
ordinary spirits receive from allegory a certain oppression, lofty imagi-
nations receive wings which carry them aloft. Eescued by it from the
common conditions of life, they can dare all things, beyond imitation,
apart from probabihty, with no other guide but their inborn energy
and their shadowy instincts. For three days Sir Guyon is led by the
cursed spirit, the tempter Mammon, in the subterranean realm, across
wonderful gardens, trees laden with golden fruits, glittering palaces,
and a confusion of all worldly treasures. They have descended into the
bowels of the earth, and pass through caverns, unknown abysses, silent
depths. ' An ugly Feend . . . with monstrous stalke behind him stept,'
without his knowledge, ready to devour him on the least show of
covetousness. The brilliancy of the gold lights up the hideous figures,
and the beaming metal shines with a beauty more seductive iu the
gloom of the infernal prison.

• That Houses forme within was rude and strong
Lyke an huge cave hewne out of rocky clifte,

196 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

From whose roiigli vaut the ragged breaches hong

Embost with massy gold of glorious guifte,

And with rich nietall loaded every rifte,

That heavy ruine they did seeme to threatt ;

And over them Arachne high did lifte

Her cunning web, and spred her subtile nett,

Enwrapped in fowle smoke and clouds more black than iett.

Both roofe, and floore, and walls, were all of gold.

But overgrowne with dust and old decay,

And hid in darknes, that none could behold

The hew thereof ; for vew of cherefuU day

Did never in that House itselfe display,

But a faint shadow of uncertein light ;

Such as a lamp, whose life does fade away ;

Or as the moone, cloathed with clowdy night.

Does shew to him that walkes in feare and sad affright.

In all that rowme was nothing to be seene

But huge great yron chests and coffers strong,

All bard with double bends, that none could weene

Them to enforce by violence or wrong ;

On every side they placed were along.

But all the grownd with sculs was scattered

And dead mens bones, which round about were flong ;

Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there were shed,

And their vile carcases now left unburied. . . .

Thence, forward he him ledd and shortly brought
Unto another rowme, whose dore forthright
To him did open as it had beene taught :
Therein an hundred raunges weren pight.
And hundred fournaces all burning bright ;
By every fournace many Feends did byde.
Deformed creatures, horrible in sight ;
And every Feend his busie paines applyde
To melt the golden metall, ready to be tryde.

One with great bellowes gathered filling ayre,
And with forst wind the feweU did inflame ;
Another did the dying bronds repajrre
"With yron tongs, and sprinckled ofte the same
With liquid waves, fiers Vulcans rage to tame,
Who, maystring them, renewd his former heat :
Some scumd the drosse that from the metall came ;
Some stird the molten owre with ladles great :
And every one did swincke, and every one did sweat .

He brought him, through a darksom narrow strayt.
To a broad gate all built of beaten gold :
The gate was open ; but therein did wayt
A sturdie Villein, stryding stiffe and bold.

I

CHAJ*. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSANCE. 19 T

As if the Highest God defy he would ;

In his right hand an yron club he held.

But he himselfe was all of golden mould.

Yet had both life and sence, and well could weld

That cursed weapon, when his cmeU foes he queld . . •'

He brought him in. The rowme was large and wyde^

As it some gyeld or solemne temple weare ;

Many great golden pillours did upbeare

The massy roofe, and riches huge sustayne ;

And every pUlour decked was full deare

With crownes, and diademes, and titles vaine,

Which mortaU princes wore whiles they on earth did raynei

A route of people there assembled were.

Of every sort and nation under skye,

"Which with great uprore preaced to draw nere

To th' upper part, where was advaunced hye

A stately siege of soveraine maiestye ;

And thereon satt a Woman gorgeous gay,

And richly cladd in robes of royaltye,

That never earthly prince in such aray

His glory did enhaunce, and pompous pryde display , , •

There, as in glistring glory she did sitt,
She held a great gold chaine ylincked well.
Whose upper end to highest heven was knitt,
And lower part did reach to lowest hell. ' ^

No artist's dream matches these visions : the glowing of the furnace
under the vaults of the cavern, the lights flickering over the crowded
figures, the throne, and the strange glitter of the gold shining in every
direction through the darkness. The allegory assumes gigantic propor-
tions. When the object is to show Temperance at issue with tempta-
tions, Spenser deems it necessary to mass all the temptations together.
He is treating of a general virtue ; and as such a virtue is capable of
every sort of resistance, he requires from it every sort of resistance at
one time ; — after the test of gold, that of pleasure. Thus the grandest
and the most exquisite spectacles follow and are contrasted with each
other supernaturally ; the graceful and the terrible side by side, — the
happy gardens side by side with the cursed subterranean cavern.

* No gate, but like one, being goodly dight
With bowes and braunches, which did broad dilate
Their clasping armes in wanton wreathings intricate :

So fashioned a porch with rare device,
Archt over head with an embracing vine.
Whose bounches hanging downe seemd to entice
All passers-by to taste their lushious wine.

* The Faerie Queene, ii. c 7, st. 28-46.

198 THE RENAISSANCE. [EOOK U.

And did themselves into their hands incline.

As freely ofifering to be gathered ;

Some deepe empurpled as the hyacine,

Some as the rubiue laughing sweetely red,

Some like faire emeraudes, not yet weU ripened. . • •

And in the midst of all a fountaine stood,

Of richest substance that on earth might bee,

So pure and shiny that the silver flood

Through every channel! running one might see ;

Most goodly it with curious ymageree

Was over- wrought, and shapes of naked boyes,

Of which some seemd with lively iollitee

To fly about, playing their wanton toyes,

Whylest others did themselves embay in liquid ioyes.

And over all of purest gold was spred

A trayle of yvie in his native hew ;

For the rich metall was so coloured,

That wight, who did not well avis'd it vew.

Would surely deeme it to bee yvie trew :

Low his lascivious armes adown did creepe,

That themselves dipping in the silver dew

Their fleecy flowres they fearfully did steepe,

Which drops of christall seemd for wantones to weepw

Infinit streames continually did well

Out of this fountaine, sweet and faire to see,

The which into an ample laver fell.

And shortly grew to so great quantitie.

That like a little lake it seemd to bee ;

"Whose depth exceeded not three cubits hight.

That through the waves one might the bottom see,

All pav'd beneath with jaspar shining bright.

That seemd the fountaine in that sea did sayle upright. . • •

The ioyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade,

Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet ;

Th' angelicall soft trembling voyces made

To th' instruments divine respondence meet ;

The silver-sounding instruments did meet

With the base murmure of the waters fall ;

The waters fall with difference discreet.

Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ;

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all. . . •

Upon a bed of roses she was layd,

As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin ;

And was arayd, or rather disarayd.

All in a vele of silke and silver thin,

That hid no whit her alabaster skin.

But rather shewd more white, if more might bee:

More subtile web Araehne cannot spin ;

Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see

Of scorched deaw, do not in th' ayre more lightly flea

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN KENAISSAT^'CE. 109

Her snowy brest was bare to ready spoyle

Of hungry eies, which n' ote therewith be fild ;

And yet, through languour of her late sweet toyle.

Few drops, more cleare then nectar, forth distild,

That like pure orient perles adowne it trild ;

And her faire eyes, sweet smyling in delight,

Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild

Fraile harts, yet quenched not ; like starry light.

Which, sparckling on the silent waves, does seeme more bright.' •

Is not this a fairy land ? We find here finished pictures, genuine
and complete, composed with a painter's feeling, witli choice of tints
and lines ; our eyes are delighted by it. This reclining Acrasia has
the pose of a goddess, or of one of Titian's courtesans. An Italian
artist might copy these gardens, flowing waters, sculptured loves,
wreaths of creeping ivy thick with glossy leaves and fleecy flowers.
Just before, in the infernal depths, the lights, with their long streaming
rays, were fine, half-smothered by the darkness ; the lofty tlirone in the
vast hall, between the pillars, in the midst of a swarming multitude,
connected all the forms around it by centring all regards. The poet,
here and throughout, is a colourist and an architect. However fan-
tastic his world may be, it is not factitious ; if it is not, it might have
been ; indeed, it should have been ; it is the fault of circumstances if
they do not dispose themselves so as to bring this to pass; taken by itself,
it possesses that internal harmony by which a real thing, even a still
higher harmony, comes into existence, inasmuch as, amid the differences
of real things, it is altogether, and in its least detail, constructed with
a view to beauty. Art is matured : this is the great characteristic of
the age, which distinguishes this poem from all similar tales heaped up
by the middle-age. Incoherent, mutilated, they lay like rubbish, or
rough-hewn stones, which the weak hands of the trouveres could not
build into a monument. At last the poets and artists are here, and
with them the conception of beauty, to wit, the idea of the general
effect. They understand proportions, relations, contrasts ; they com-
pose. In their hands the misty vague sketch becomes defined, com-
plete, separate ; it assumes colour — is made a picture. Every object
thus conceived and imaged acquires a definite existence as soon as it
acquires a true form ; centuries after, it will be acknowledged and
admired, and men will be touched by it ; and more, they will be
touched by its author ; for, besides the object which he paints, the
poet paints himself. His ruling idea is stamped upon the work which
it produces and controls, Spenser is superior to his subject, compre-
hends it fully, frames it with a view to the end, in order to impress
upon it the proper mark of his soul and his genius. Each story is
modified with respect to another, and all with respect to a certain efl'ect

> TIi£ Faerie Queene, ii. c. 12, st. 53-78.

200 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

which is being worked out. Thus a beauty issues from this harmony,
— the beauty in the poet's heart, — which his whole work strives to
exjiress ; a noble and yet a laughing beauty, made up of moral eleva-
tion and sensuous seductions, English in sentiment, Italian in externals,
chivalric in subject, modern in its perfection, representing a unique and
admirable epoch, the appearance of paganism in a Christian, race, and
the worship of form by an imagination of the North.

3. Prose

Such an epoch can scarcely last, and the poetic vitality expends
itself in a blossom of prose, so that its expansion leads to its decline.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the enfeeblement of
manners and genius grows apparent. Enthusiasm and respect decline.
The minions and sycophants of the court intrigue and pilfer, amid
pedantry, puerility, and show. The court plunders, and the nation
murmurs. The Commons begin to show a stern front, and the king,
scolding them like a schoolmaster, bends before them like a little boy.
This pitiable monarch (James i.) suffers himself to be bullied by his
favourites, writes to them like a gossip, calls himself a Solomon, airs
his literary vanity, and in granting an audience to a courtier, holds up
to him his own reputation as a savant, and expects to be answered in
the same strain. The dignity of the government is weakened, and the
people's loyalty is cooled. Royalty declines, and revolution is fostered.
At the same time, the noble chivalric paganism degenerates into a base
and coarse sensuality. The king, we are told, on one occasion, had got
so drunk with his royal brother Christian of Denmark, that they both
had to be carried to bed. Sir John Harrington says :

' The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll abont in intoxica-
tion. . , , The Lady who did play the Queen's part (in the Masque of the Queen
of Slieba) did carry most precious gifts to both their Majesties ; but, forgetting
the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties
lap, and fell at his feet, tho I rather think it was in his face. Much was the
hurry and confusion ; cloths and napkins were at hand, to make all clean. His
Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba ; but he fell
down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and
laid on a bed of state ; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the
Queen which had been bestowed on his garments ; such as wine, cream, jelly,
beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters. The entertainment and show
went forward, and most of the presenters went backward, or fell down ; wine did
so occupy their upper chambers, Now did appear, in rich dress, Hope, Faith,
and Charity : Hope did assay to speak, but wine rendered her endeavours so feeble
that she withdrew, and hoped the king would excuse her brevity : Faith , . . left
the court in a staggering condition. , , . They were both sick and spewing in the
lower hall. Next came Victory, who . . by a strange medley of versification

CHAP. L] THE PAGAN KENAISSANCE. 201

. . . and after mucli lamentable utterance, was led away like a silly captive, and
laid to sleep in the outer steps of the anti-chamber. As for Peace, she most
rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who did
oppose her coming. I ne'er did see such lack of good order, discretion, and
sobriety in our Queen's days. ' '

Observe that these tipsy women were great ladies. The reason is,
that the grand ideas which introduce an epoch, end, in their exhaus-
tion, by preserving nothing but their vices ; the proud sentiment of
natural life becomes a vulgar appeal to the senses. An entrance, an
arch of triumph under James i., often represented obscenities ; and
later, when the sensual instincts, exaggerated by Puritan tyranny,
begin to raise their heads once more, we shall find under the Restora-
tion, excess revelling in its debauchery, and triumphing in its shame.

Meanwhile the literature undergoes a change ; the powerful breeze
which had guided it, and which, amidst singularity, refinements, exag-
gerations, had made it great, slackened and diminished. With Carew,
Suckling, and Herrick, prettiness takes the place of the beautiful.
That which strikes them is no longer the general features of things ;
that which they try to express is no longer the inner character of
things. They no longer possess that liberal conception, that instinctive
penetration, by which man sympathised with objects, and grew capable
of creating them anew. They no longer boast of that overflow of
emotions, that excess of ideas and images, which compelled a man to
relieve himself by words, to act externally, to represent freely and
boldly the interior drama which made his whole body and heart
tremble. They are rather wits of the court, cavaliers of fashion,
who wish to try their hand at imagination and style. In their hands
love becomes gallantry ; they Avrite songs, fugitive pieces, compli-
ments to the ladies. Do their hearts still prick them ? They turn
eloquent phrases in order to be applauded, and flattering exaggera-
tions in order to please. The divine faces, the serious or profound
looks, the virgin or impassioned expressions which burst forth at every
step in the early poets, have disappeared ; here we see nothing but
agreeable countenances, painted in agreeable verses. Blackguardism
is not far off"; we meet with it as early as in Suckling, and crudity to
boot, and prosaic epicurism ; their sentiment is expressed before long,
in such a phrase as : ' Let us amuse ourselves, and a fig for the rest.'
The only objects they can paint, at last, are little graceful things, a
kiss, a May-day festivity, a dewy primrose, a marriage morning, a
bee.^ Herrick and Suckling especially produce little exquisite poems,
delicate, ever laughing or smiling like those attributed to Anacreon,

1 NugcB AntiqiuB, i. 349 et passim.

* ' Some asked me where the Rubies grew.

And nothing I did say ;
But with my finger pointed to

The lips of Julia.

202 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK n.

or those which abotind in the Anthology. In fact, here, as at the time
alluded to, we are at the decline of paganism ; energy departs, the
reign of the agreeable begins. People do not relinquish the worship
of beauty and pleasure, but dally with them. They deck and fit
them to their taste ; they cease to subdue and bend men, who sport
and amuse themselves with them. It is the last beam of a setting
sun ; the genuine poetic sentiment dies out with Sedley, Waller, and
the rhymesters of the Restoration ; they write prose in verse ; their
heart is on a level with their style, and with an exact language we
find the commencement of a new age and a new art.

Side by side with prettiness comes affectation ; it is the second
mark of the decadence. Instead of writing to say things, they write
to say them well ; they outbid their neighbours, and strain every mode
of speech : tliey push art over on the side to which it had a leaning ;
and as in this age it had a leaning towards vehemence and imagination,

Some ask'd how Pearls did grow, aud where ;

Then spake I to my girle,
To part her lips, and shew me there

The qrarelets of Pearl.
One ask'd me where the roses grew ;

I bade him not go seek ;
But forthwith bade my Julia show

A bud in either cheek. '

Herrick's Ilesprridea, ed. "VValford, 1SS9 ;
The Bock of Rubies, p. 32.

• About the sweet bag of a bee,

Two Cupids fell at odds ;
And whose the pretty prize shu'd be.

They vow'd to ask the Gods.
"Which Venus hearing, thither came,

And for their boldness stript them ;
And taking thence from each his flame.

With rods of mirtle whipt them.
Wliich done, to still their wanton cries.

When quiet grown sh'ad seen them,
She kist and wip'd their dove-like eyes,

And gave the bag between them. '

Herrick, Ib'id.; The Bag of the Bee, p. 41.

•Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

Prithee, why so pale ?
Will, when looking well can't move her,

Looking ill prevail ?

Prithee, why so pale ?
Why so dull and mute, yoimg sinner ?

Prithee, why so mute ?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,

Saying nothing do't ?

Prithee, why so mute ?

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSA^'CE, 203

they pile up their emphasis and colouring. A jargon always springs
out of a style. In ail arts, the first masters, the inventors, discover the
idea, steep themselves in it, and leave it to effect its outward form.
Then come the second class, the imitators, who sedulously repeat this
form, and alter it by exaggeration. Some nevertheless have talent, as
Quarles, Herbert, Babington, Donne in particular, a pungent satirist,
of terrible crudeness,^ a powerful poet, of a precise and intense imagi-
nation, who still preserves something of the energy and thrill of the
original inspiration.^ But he deliberately abuses all these gifts, and

Quit, quit for shame : this will not move,

This cannot take her ;
If of herself she will not love.

Nothing can make her.

The devil take her ! '

Sir John Suckling's Wo7-k$, eJ. A. Suckling, 1S3C, p. 70.

* As when a lady, walking Flora's bower,
Picks here a pink, and there a gilly-flower,
Now plucks a violet from her purple bed,
And then a primrose, the year's maidenhead.
There nips the brier, here the lover's pansy,
Shifting her dainty pleasures with her fancy;
This on her arms, and that she lists to wear
Upon the borders of her curious hair ;
At length a rose-bud (passing all the rest)
She plucks, and bosoms in her lily breast.'

QuAELES, Chambers' Q/c/o^CEdi'a of Engl. Lit. i. ItO.

' See in particular, his satire against the courtiers. The following is against
imitatoi-s :

' But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Other's wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things outspue,
As his owne things ; and they are his owne, 'tis tine,
For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne
The meat was mine, th' excrement is his owne.'

Donne's Satires, 1639. Satire ii. p. 128.

' ' "When I behold a stream, which from the spring
Doth with doubtful melodious murmuring.
Or in a speechless slumber calmly ride
Her wedded channel's bosom, and there chide
And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough
Does but stoop down to kiss her utmost brow ;
Yet if her often gnawing kisses win
The traiterous banks to gape and let her in,
She rusheth violently and doth divorce
Her from her native and her long-kept course.
And roares, and braves it, and in gallant scora
In flatt'ring eddies promising return.
She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is (.?ry.
Then say I : That is she, and this am I.'

204 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

succeeds with great difficulty in concocting a piece of nonsense. For
instance, the impassioned poets had said to their mistress, that if they
lost her, they should hate all other women. Donne, in order to eclipse
them, says :

' 0 do not die, for I shall hate

All women so, when thou art gone.

That thee I shall not celebrate

When I remember thou wast one. ' ^

Twenty times while reading him we rub our brow, and ask with aston-
ishment, how a man could so have tormented and contorted himself,
strained his style, refined on his refinement, hit upon such absurd com-
parisons ? But this was the spirit of the age ; they made an effort to be
ingeniously absurd. A flea had bitten Donne and his mistress. He
says:

' This flea is you and I, and this

Our mariage bed and mariage temple is.

Though Parents grudge, and you, w'are met,

And cloyster'd in these living walls of Jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that selfe-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.'*

The Marquis de Mascarille^ never found anything to equal this. Would
you have believed a writer could invent such absurdities ? She and he
made but one, for both are but one with the flea, and so one could not
be killed without the other. Observe that the wise Malherbe wrote
very similar enormities, in the Tears of St. Peter, and that the sonneteers
of Italy and Spain reach simultaneously the same height of folly, and
you will agree that throughout Europe at that time they were at the
close of a poetical epoch.

On this boundary line of a closing and a dawning literature a poet
appeared, one of the most fanciful and illustrious of his time, Abraham
Cowley,* a precocious child, a reader and a versifier like Pope, having
known passions less than books, busied himself less about things than
about words. Literary exhaustion has seldom been more manifest.
He possesses all the capacity to say whatever pleases him, but he has
just nothing to say. The substance has vanished, leaving in its place a
hollow shadow. In vain he tries the epic, the Pindaric strophe, all
kinds of stanzas, odes, little lines, long lines ; in vain he calls to his
assistance botanical and philosophical similes, all the erudition of the
university, all the reUcs of antiquity, all the ideas of new science : we
yawn as we read him. Except in a few descriptive verses, two or three

^ Poems, 1639 : A Feaver, p. 15. ^ ji^id ,. y^e Flea, p. 1.

^ A valet in Moliere's Les Pr6cieuses Ridicules, who apes and exaggerates hia
master's manners and style, and pretends to be a marquess. He also appears ia
L'Etourdi and Le dipit Amoiireux, by the same author. — Tb.

* 160S-1667. I refer to the eleventh edition of 1710.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 205

graceful tendernesses,' he feels nothing, he speaks only ; he is a pof!t of
the brain. His collection of amorous pieces is but a vehicle for a scien-
tific test, and serves to show that he has read the authors, that he knows
his geography, that he is well versed in anatomy, that he has a dash of
medicine and astronomy, that he has at his service references and
allusions enough to break the head of his readers. He will speak in
this wise :

' Beauty, thou active — passive 111 !
AVMch dy'st thyself as fast as thou dost kill ! '

or will remark that his mistress is to blame for spending three hours
every morning at her toilet, because

' They make that Beauty TjTanny,
That's else a Civil-government. '

After reading two hundred pages, you feel disposed to box his ears.
You have to think, by way of consolation, that every age must draw to
a close, that this one could not do so otherwise, that the old glow of en-
thusiasm, the sudden flood of rapture, images, capricious and audacious
fancies, which once rolled through the mind of men, arrested now and
cooled down, could only exhibit dross, a curdling scum, a multitude of
brilliant and hurtful points. You say to yourself that, after all, Cowley
had perhaps talent ; you find that he had in fact one, a new talent,
unknown to the old masters, the sign of a new culture, which needs
other manners, and announces a new society. Cowley had these
manners, and belongs to this society. He was a well-governed,
reasonable, instructed, polished, well-trained man, who, after twelve
years of service and writing in France, under Queen Henrietta, retires
at last wisely into the country, where he studies natural history, and
prepares a treatise on religion, philosophising on men and life, fertile
in general reflections and ideas, a moralist, bidding his executor ' to let
nothing stand in his writings which might seem the least in the world
to be an offence against religion or good manners.' Such dispositions
and such a life produce and indicate less a poet, that is, a seer, a
creator, than a literar}' man, 1 mean a man who can think and speak,
and who therefore ought to have read much, learnt much, written much,
ought to possess a calm and clear mind, to be accustomed to polished
society, sustained conversation, a sort of raillery. In fact, Cowley is
an author by profession, the oldest of those who in England deserve the
name. His prose is as easy and sensible as his poetry is contorted and
unreasonable. A polished man, writing for polished men, pretty much
as he would speak to them in a drawing-room, — this I take to be the
idea which they had of a good author in the seventeenth century. It
is the idea which Cowley's Essays leave of his character ; it is the kind
of talent which the writers of the coming age take for their model ; and

» The Spring {The Mistress, i. 72).

20 G THE KENAISSANCE. [dOOK IL

he is tlie first of that grave and amiable group which, continued in
Temple, reaches so far as to include Addison.

IL

Having reached this point, the Eenaissance seemed to have attained
its limit, and, like a drooping and faded flower, to be ready to leave
its place for a new bud which began to rise from the ruins. At all
events, a living and unexpected shoot sprang from the old declining
stock. At the moment when art languished, science shot forth ;
the whole labour of the age ended in this. The fruits are not
unlike ; on the contrary, they come from the same sap, and by the
diversity of the shape only manifest two distinct periods of the inner
growth which has produced them. Every art ends in a science, and
every poetry in a philosophy. For science and philosophy do but
translate in precise formulas the original conception which art and
poetry render sensible by imaginary figures : when once the idea of an
epoch is manifested in verse by ideal creations, it naturally comes to be
expressed in prose by positive arguments. That which had struck
men on escaping from ecclesiastical oppression and monkish asceticism
was the pagan idea of a life true to nature, and freely developed. They
had found nature buried behind scholasticism, and they had expressed
it in poems and paintings ; in Italy by superb healthy corporeality, in
England by vehement and unconventional spirituality, with such divina-
tion of its laws, instincts, and forms, that one might extract from their
theatre and their pictures a complete theory both of soul and body.
When enthusiasm is past, curiosity begins. The sentiment of beauty
gives way to the sentiment of truth. The theory embraced in works
of imagination is unfolded. The gaze continues fixed on nature, not
to admire now, but to understand. From painting we pass to anatomy,
from the drama to moral philosophy, from grand poetical divinations
to great scientific views ; the second continue the first, and the same
spirit shows in both ; for what art had represented, and science pro-
ceeds to observe, are living things, with their complex and complete
structure, set in motion by their internal forces, with no supernatural
intervention. Artists and savants, all set out, with no misgiving, from
the master conception, to wit, that nature subsists of herself, that every
existence has in its own womb the source of its action, that the causes
of events are the innate laws of things ; an all-powerful idea, from
which was to issue the modern civilisation, and which, at the time I
write of, produced in England and Italy, as before in Greece, genuine
sciences, side by side with a complete art : after da Vinci and Michael
Angelo, the school of anatomists, mathematicians, naturalists, ending
with Galileo ; after Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Shakspeare, the school
of thinkers who surround Bacon and lead up to Harvey.

We have not far to look for this school. In the interregnum of
Christianity the dominating bent of mind belongs to it. It was paganism

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 207

which reigned in Elizabeth's court, not only in letters, but in doctrine, —
a paganism of the north, always serious, generally sombre, but which
rested, like that of the south, on natural forces. From some, all Chris-
tianity was effaced ; many proceed to atheism from the excess of revulsion
and debauchery, like Marlowe and Greene. With others, like Shak-
speare, the idea of God scarcely makes its appearance ; they see in our
poor short human life only a dream, and beyond it the long sad sleep :
for them, death is the goal of life ; at most a dark gulf, into which man
plunges, uncertain of the issue. If they carry their gaze beyond, they
perceive,^ not the soul welcomed into a purer world, but the corpse
abandoned to the damp earth, or the ghost hovering about the church-
yard. They speak like sceptics or superstitious men, never as genuine
believers. Their heroes have human, not religious virtues ; against
crime they rely on honour and the love for the beautiful, not on piety and
the fear of God. If others, few and far, like Sidney and Spenser, catch
a glimpse of this god, it is as a vague ideal light, a sublime Platonic
phantom, which has no resemblance to a personal God, a strict inquisitor
of the slightest motions of the heart. He appears at the summit of
things, like the splendid crown of the world, but He does not weigh
upon human life ; He leaves it intact and free, only turning it towards
the beautiful. They do not know as yet the sort of narrow prison in
which official cant and respectable creeds were, later on, to confine
action and intelligence. Even the believers, sincere Christians like
Bacon and Browne, discard all oppressive sternness, reduce Christianity
to a sort of moral poetry, and allaw naturalism to subsist beneath re-
ligion. In such a broad and open channel, speculation could spread its
wings. With Lord Herbert appeared a systematic deism ; with Milton
and Algernon Sidney, a philosophical religion ; Clarendon went so far
as to compare Lord Falkland's gardens to the groves of Academe.
Against the rigorism of the Puritans, Chillingworth, Hales, Hooker, the
greatest doctors of the English Church, give a large place to natural
reason, — so large, that never, even to this day, has it made such au
advance.

An astonishing irruption of facts — the discovery of America, the
revival of antiquity, the restoration of philology, the invention of the
arts, the development of industries, the march of human curiosity over
the whole of the past and the whole of the globe — came to furnish sub-
ject-matter, and prose began its reign. Sidney, Wilson, Ascham, and
Puttenham explored the rules of style ; liackluyt and Purchas com-
piled the cyclopaedia of travel and the description of every land ;
Holinshed, Speed, Raleigh, Stowe, Knolles, Daniel, Thomas More,
Lord Herbert, founded history ; Camden, Spelman, Cotton, Usher, and
Selden inaugurate scholarship ; a legion of patient workers, of obscure

* See in Shakspeare, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Hamlet; m Beaumont
and Fletcher, Tliieri-y and Theodoret, Act iv. ; Webster, ^'"■ssim.

208 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

collectors, of literary pioneers, amassed, arranged, and sifted the
documents which Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Thomas Bodley stored up
in their libraries; whilst utopists, moralists, painters of manners —
Thomas More, Joseph Hall, John Earle, Owen Feltham, Burton —
described and passed judgment on the modes of life, continued with
Fuller, Sir Thomas Browne, and Isaac "Walton up to the middle of the
next century, and increase the number of controversialists and politicians
who, with Hooker, Taylor, Chillingworth, Algernon Sidney, Harring-
ton, study religion, society, church and state. A copious and con-
fused fermentation, from which abundance of thoughts proceeded, but
few notable books. Noble prose, such as was heard at the court of
Louis XIV., in PoUio, in the schools at Athens, such as rhetorical and
sociable nations know how to produce, was altogether lacking. These
men had not the spirit of analysis, the art of following step by step the
natural order of ideas, nor the spirit of conversation, the talent never to
weary or shock others. Their imagination is too little regulated, and
their manners too little polished. They who had mixed most in the
world, even Sidney, speak roughly what they think, and as they think
it. Instead of glossing, they exaggerate. They blurt out all, and with-
hold nothing. When they do not employ excessive compliments, they
take to coarse pleasantries. They overlook measured charm, refined
raillery, delicate flattery. They rejoice in gross puns, dirty allusions.
They mistake paradoxical enigmas and grotesque images for wit. Great
lords and ladies, they talk like ill-bred persons, lovers of buffoonery, of
shows and bear-fights. With some, as Overbury or Sir Thomas Browne,
poetry trenches so much upon prose, that it covers its narrative with
images, and hides ideas under its pictures. They load their style with
flowery comparisons, which produce one another as they go along, and
mount one above another, so that sense disappears, and ornament only
is visible. In fine, they are generally pedants, still stiff with the rust
of the school ; they divide and subdivide, propound theses, definitions ;
they argue solidly and heavily, and quote their authors in Latin, and
even in Greek ; they square out their massive periods, and learnedly
knock their adversaries down, and their readers too, by the very re-
bound. They are never on the prose-level, but always above or
below — above by their poetic genius, below by the weight of their edu-
cation and the barbarism of their manners. But they think seriously
and for themselves ; they are deliberate ; they are convinced and
touched by what they say. Even in the compUer we find a force and
loyalty of spirit, which give confidence and cause pleasure. Their
writings are like the powerful and heavy engravings of their contem-
poraries, the maps of Hofnagel for instance, so harsh and so instruc-
tive ; their conception is sharp and clear ; they have the gift of per-
ceiving every object, not under a general aspect, Irke the classical
writers, but specially and individually. It is not man in the abstract,
the citizen as he is everywhere, the countryman as such, that they

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EENAISSAXCE. 209

represent, but James or Thomas, Smith or Brown, of such a parish,
trom such an office, with such and such attitude or dress, distinct from
all others ; in short, they see, not the idea, but the individual. Imagine
the disturbance that such a disposition produces iu a man's head, how
the regular order of things becomes deranged by it; how every object,
with tlie infinite medley of its forms, properties, appendages, will thence-
forth fasten itself by a hundred points of contact. unforeseen to another
object, and bring before the mind a series or a family; what boldness
language will derive from it ; Avhat familar, picturesque, absurd words
Avill break forth in succession ; how the dash, the impromptu, the origin-
ality and inequality of invention, will stand out. Figure, at the same
time, what a hold this form of mind has. on objects, how many facts it
condenses in one conception; what a mass of personal judgments,
foreign authorities, suppositions, guesses, imaginations, it spreads over
every subject ; with what haphazard and creative fecundity it engenders
both truth and conjecture. It is an extraordinary chaos of thoughts
and forms, often abortive, still more often barbarous, sometimes grand.
But from this superfluity something lasting and great is produced,
namely science, and we have only to examine more closely into one or
two of these works, to see the new. creation emerge from the blocks and
the debris.

TIT.

Two writers above all display this state of mind. The first, Robert
Burton, an ecclesiastic and university recluse, who passed his life in
libraries, and dabbled in all the sciences, as learned as Rabelais, of an
inexhaustible and overflowing memory ; unequal,, moreover, gifted with
enthusiasm, and spasmodically gay, but as a rule sad and morose, to the
extent of confessing in his epitaph that mekncholy made up his life and
his death ; in the first place original, enamoured of his ovv^n intelligence,
and one of the earliest models of that singular English mood which,
Avithdrawing man within himself, develops in him, at one time imagina-
tion, at another scrupulousness, at another oddity, and makes of him,
according to circumstances, a poet, an eccentric, a humorist, a madman,
or a puritan. He read on for thirty years, put an encyclopajdia into
his head, and now, to amuse and relieve himself, takes a folio of blank
paper. Twenty lines of a poet, a dozen lines of a treatise on agricul-
ture, a folio column of heialdry, the patience, the record of the fever
fits of hypochondria, the history of , the particle que, a scrap of meta-
physics,— this is what passes through his brain in a quarter of an hour :
it is a carnival of ideas and phrases, Greek, Latin, German, French,
Italian, philosophical, geometrical, medical, poetical, astrological, musical,
pedagogic, heaped one on the other ; an enormous medley, a prodigious
mass of jumbled quotations, jostling thoughts with the vivacity and
the transport of a feast of unreason.^

' See for this feast Walter Scott's Abbot, chs. xiv. and xv. — Te.

O

210 THE RENAISSANCE. [rOOK H.

' This roving Tiumonr (tliongli not with like success) T have ever had, and, like .
a, raging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed
all, saving that which I should, and may jxistly complain, and truly, qui ubique
est, nusquam est, which Gesner did in modesty : that I have read many books, but
to little purpose, for want of good method ; I have confusedly tumbled over divers
authors in our libraries with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely
expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of cosmography.
Saturn was lord of my geniture, culminating, etc., and Mars principal significator
of manners, in partile conjunction with mine ascendant ; both fortunate in their
houses, etc. I am not poor, I am not rich ; nihil est, nihil deest ; I have little, I
want nothing : all my treasure is in ]\Iinerva's tower. Greater preferment as I
could never get, so am I not in debt for it. I have a competency (},aus Deo) from
my noble and munificent patrons. Though I live still a coUegiat student, as
Democritus in his garden, and lead a monastique life, ipse mihi theatrum, sequestred
from those tumults and troubles of the world, et tanquam in specula positus (as he
said), in some high place above you all, like ASfojcets sapiens, omnia scecula proiterita
prcEsentiaque videns, uno velut intuitu, I hear and see what is done abroad, how
others run, ride, turmoil, and macerate themselves in court and countrey. Far
from these wrangling lawsuits, auloe vanitatem, fori amhitionem, videre mecum
soleo : I laugh at all, only secure, lest my suit go amiss, my ships perish, corn and
cattle miscarry, trade decay ; I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide
for ; a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they act
tlieir parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common
theatre or scene. I hear new news every day : and those ordinary rumours of war^
plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets ; spectrums,
prodigies, apparitions ; of to;\Tis taken, cities besieged in France, Germany,
Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such like, M'hich
these tempestuous times aff'ord, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies,
shipwracks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms^
a vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations, complaints, grievances, — are daily brought to our ears : new books
every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts,
new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion,
etc. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments,
jubiles, embassies, tilts ajid tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports,
playes : then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies,
enormous villanies, in all kinds, funerals, burials, death of princes, new discoveries,
expeditions ; now comical, then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new lords
and officers created, to-morrow of some gi-eat men deposed, and then again of
fresh honours conferred : one is let loose, another imprisoned : one purchaseth,
another breaketh : he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt ; now plenty, then,
again dearth and famine ; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, etc.
Thus I daily hear, and such Uke, both private and publick news.'^

* For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and sciences, to
the sweet content and capacity of the reader ? In arithmetick, geometry, perspec-
tive, optick, astronomy, architecture, scidptura, pictura, of which so many and
such elaborate treatises are of late written : in mechanicks and their mysteries,
military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening,

1 Anatomrj of Melancholij, 12th ed. 1S21, 2 vols. : Democritus to the Pieader, 1. 4<

CHAP. I.J THE PAGAN KEN AISSAXCE. 211

o'

planting, great tomes of husbandry, cookery, faulconry, hunting, fishing, fowling,
etc., with exquisite pictures of ail sports, games, and what not. In musick, meta-
pliysicks, natural and moral philosophj'-, philologie, in policy, heraldry, genealogy,
chronology, etc., they afford great tomes, or those studies of antiquity, etc., et quid
subtilius arithmeticis inventionibus? quid jucundiiis musicis rationibus? quid dlvinius
astronomicis ? qxiid rcciius geometricis demonstrationihus ? What so sure, what so
pleasant ? He that sliall but see the geometrical tower of Garezenda at Bologne
in Italy, the steeple and clock at Strasborough, will admire the effects of art, or
that engine of Archimedes to remove the earth itself, if he had but a place to
fasten his instrument. Archimedis cochlea, and rare devises to corrivate waters,
musick instruments, and trisyllable echoes again, again, and again repeated, with
iiiiriades of such. "What vast tomes are extant in law, physick, and divinity, for
proiit, pleasure, practice, speculation, in verse or prose, etc. ! Their names alone are
the subject of whole volumes : we have thousands of autliors of all sorts, many
great libraries, full well furnished, like so many dislies of meat, served out for
several palates, and he is a very block that is affected with none of them. Some
take an infinite delight to study the very languages wherein these books are
written — Hebrew, Greek, Syriack, Chalde, Arabick, etc. Methinks it would
please any man to look upon a geographical map {suavi animum delectatione alii-
cere, ob incredibilem rerurn varietatem et jucunditatem, et ad plenlorem sui cogni-
tionem excitare), chorographical, topographical delineations ; to behold, as it were,
all the remote provinces, towns, cities of the world, and never to go forth of the
limits of his study ; to measure, by the scale and compasse, their extent, distance,
examine their site. Charles the Great (as Platina writes) had three faire silver
tables, in one of which superficies was a large map of Constantinople, in the second
Home neatly engraved, in the third an exquisite description of the whole world ;
and much delight he took in them. What greater pleasure can there now be,
than to view those elaborate maps of Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, etc. ? to peruse
those books of cities put out by Braunus and Hogenbergius ? to read those ex-
quisite descriptions of J\Iaginus, Munster, Herrera, Laet, Merula, Boterus, Leander
Albertus, Camden, Leo Afer, Adricomius, Nic. Gerbelius, etc.? those famous ex-
jieditions of Christopher Columbus, Americus Vespucius, Marcus Polus the Vene-
tian, Lod. Virtomanuus, Aloysius Cadamustus, etc. ? those accurate diaries of
Portugals, Hollanders, of Bartison, Oliver a Nort, etc., Hacluit's Voyages, Pet.
Martyr's Decades, Benzo, Lerius, Linschoten's relations, those Hodoeporicons of
Jod. a Meggea, Brocarde the Monke, Bredenbachius, Jo. Dublinius, Sands, etc.,
to Jerusalem, Egypt, and other remote places of the world ? those pleasant itine-
raries of Paulus Hentzerus, Jodocus Sincerus, Dux Polonus, etc. ? to read Bellonius
observations, P. Gillius his survayes ; those parts of America, set out, and curiously
cut in pictures, by Fratres a Bry ? To see a well cut herbal, hearbs, trees, flowers,
plants, all vegetals, expressed in their proper colours to the life, as that of Mat-
thiolus upon Dioscorides, Delacanipius, Lobel, Bauhiuus, and that last voluminous
and mighty herbal of Besler of Noremberge ; wherein almost every plant is to his
own bignesse. To see birds, beasts, and fishes of the sea, spiders, gnats, serpents,
flies, etc., all creatures set out by the same art, and truly expressed m lively
colours, with an exact description of I heir natures, vertues, qualities, etc., as hath
been accurately perfonned by ^lian, Uesner, Ulysses Aldrovandus, BeUonius,
Kondoletius, Hippolytus Salvianus, etc.''

lie is never-ending ; words, phrases, overflow, are heaped up, re-
^ Anatomy of Mdancliohj, i. part 2, sec. 2, Mem. 4, p. 420 et passim.

213 THE RENAISSANCE, [eOOK II.

peatecl, and flow on, carrying the reader along, deafened, wearied, half-
drowned, unable to touch ground in the deluge. Burton is inexhaust-
ible. There are no ideas which he does not iterate under fifty forms :
when he has expended his own, he pours out upon us other men's — the
classics, the rarest authors, known only by savants — author? rarer still,
known only to the learned; he borrows from all. Underneath these
deep caverns of erudition and science, there is one blacker and more
unknown than all the others, filled with forgotten authors, with crack-
jaw names, Besler of Nuremberg, Adricomiiis, Linschoten, Brocarde,
Bredenbachius. Amidst all these antediluvian monsters, bristliriGr with
Latin terminations, he is at his ease ; he sports with them, laughs, skips
from one to the other, drives them all at once. He is like old Proteus,
the bold runner, who in one hour, with his team of hippopotami, makes
the circuit of the ocean.

"What subject does he take ? Melancholy, his individual mood ,
and he takes it like a schoolman. None of St. Thomas' treatises is
more regularly constructed than his. This torrent of erudition is dis-
tributed in geometrically planned channels, turning off at right angles
without deviating by a line. At the head of every part you will find
a synoptical and analytical table, with hyphens, brackets, each division
begetting its subdivisions, each subdivision its sections, each section its
subsections : of the malady in general, of melancholy in particular, of
its nature, its seat, its varieties, causes, symptoms, its prognosis ; of its
cure by permissible means, by forbidden means, by dietetic means, by
pharmaceutical means. After the scholastic process, he descends from
the general to the particular, and disposes each emotion and idea in its
labelled case. In this framework, supplied by the middle-age, he
heaps up the whole, like a man of the Renaissance, — the literary de-
scription of passions and the medical description of mental alienation,
details of the hospital with a satire on human follies, physiological
treatises side by side with personal confidences, the recipes of the
apothecary with moral counsels, remarks on love with the history of
evacuations. The discrimination of ideas has not yet been effected ;
doctor and poet, man of letters and savant, he is all at once ; for want
of dams, ideas pour like different liquids into the same vat, with strange
spluttering and bubbling, Avith an unsavoury smell and odd effect.
But the vat is full, and from this admixture are produced potent com-
pounds which no preceding age had known.

IV.

For in this mixture there is an efTectual leaven, the poetic senti-
ment, which stirs up and animates the vast erudition, which will not
be confined to dry catalogues ; which, interpreting every fact, every
object, disentangles or divines a mysterious soul within it, and agitates
the whole spirit of man, by representing to him the restless world
within and without him as a grand enigma. Let us conceive a kindred

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN KENAISSAXCE. 213

spirit to Shakspeare's, a scholar and an observer instead of an actor
and a poet, who in place of creating is occupied in comprehending, but
■who, hke Shakspeare, appHes himseli" to Uving things, penetrates their
internal structure, puts himself in communication with their actual
laws, imprints in himself fervently and scrupulously the smallest details
of their tigure ; who at the same time extends his penetrating surmises
beyond the region of observation, discerns behind visible phenomena
ix world obscure yet sublime, and trenibles with a kind of veneration
before the vast, indistinct, but populous abyss on whose surface our
.little universe hangs quivering. Such a one is Sir Thomas Browne,
a naturalist, a philosopher, a scholar, a physician, and a moralist,
almost the last of the generation which produced Jeremy Taylor and
Shakspeare. No thinker bears stronger witness to the wandering and
inventive curiosity of the age. No writer has better displayed the
brilliant and sombre imagination of the North. No one has spoken
with a more eloquent emotion of death, the vast night of forgetfulness,
of the all-devouring pit, of human vanity, which tries to create an
immortality out of ephemeral glory or sculptured stones. No one has
revealed, in more glowing and original expressions, the poetic sap
which Hows through all the minds of the age.

' But the iniquity of oblivion Llindly scatteretli lier poppy, and deals with the
memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. AVho can but pity the
lounder of the pyramids ? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is
almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, con-
founded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of
our good names, since bad have equal duration ; and Thersites is like to live as
long as Agamemnon. "Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether
tliere be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in
tlie known account of time ? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the
first maa had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been liis
only chronicle.

' Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though
tlipy had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of mail.
Twenty-seven names make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded
names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long
exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who
kno\^ s when was the equinox ? Every hour adds unto the current arithnietick which
scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even
Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die ; since our longest sun sets at
right declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long
before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes ; since the brother of
death daily haimts us with dying mementos, and time, that grows old in itself, bids
us hope no long duration ; — diuturnity is a dream, and folly of expectation.

' Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory
a gi'eat part- even of our living beings ; we slightly remember our felicities, and the
smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endure th no
extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are
tables. Afflictions induce callosities ; miseries are slippery, or fall like sncw upon

214 THE EENAISSAXCE. [eOOK II.

us, Avliicli notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To he ignorant of evils to
come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision of nature, whereby we
digest the mixture of our few and evil days ; and our delivered senses not relapsing
into cutting remem.brances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.
. . . All was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Eg5q")tian mummies, whi'^h
Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become mer-
chandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams. . . . Man is a
noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities
and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of
his nature . . . Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain glory,
and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. ' ^

These are almost the words of a poet, and it is just this poet's imagi-
nation which urges him onward into science.^ Amidst the productions
of nature he abounds with conjectures, generalisations; he gropes about,
proposing explanations, making trials, extending his guesses like so
many flexible and vibrating tentacula into the four corners of the globe,
"nto the most distant regions of fancy and truth. As he looks upon the
tree-like and foliated crusts which are formed upon the surface of freez-
ing liquids, he asks himself if this be not a regeneration of vegetable
essences, dissolved in the liquid. At the sight of curdling blood or
milk, he inquires whether there be not something analogous to the
formation of the bird in the eae, or in that coao-ulation of chaos which
gave birth to our world. In presence of that impalpable force whica
makes liquids freeze, he asks if apoplexies and cataracts are not the
effects of a like power, and do not indicate the presence of a congealing
agency. He is in presence of nature as an artist, a literary man, in pre-
sence of a living countenance, marking every feature, every movement
of physiognomy, so as to be able to divine the passions of the inner
disposition, ceaselessly correcting and reversing his interpretations, kept
in agitation by the invisible forces which operate beneath the visible
envelope. The whole of the middle-age and of antiquity, with their
theories and imaginations, Platonism, Cabalism, Christian theology,
Aristotle's substantial forms, the specific forms of the alchemists, — all
human speculations, strangled or transformed one within the other,
meet simultaneously in his brain, so as to open up to him vistas ot this
unknown world. The mass, the pile, the confusion, the inner fermen-
tation and SAvarming, mingled with vapours and flashes, the tumultuous
overloading of his imagination and his mind, oppress and agitate him.
In this expectation and emotion his curiosity is enlisted in everything ;
in reference to the least fact, the most special, the oldest, the most
chimerical, he conceives a chain of complicated investigation, calculat-
ing how the ark could contain all creatures, with their provision of food ;
how Perpenna, in his feast, arranged the invited so as to strike Sertorius,

^ The Worlcs of Sir Thomas Broivne, ed. AVilkin, 1852, 3 vols. Hydrioiaphki,
iiL ch. V. 44 et passim.

* See Milsand, Etude sur Sir Thomas Browne, Bevue des deux Mondes, 1S58.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN RENAISSANCE. 215

his guest ; wTiat trees must have grown on the banks of Acheron, sup-
posing that there were any ; whether quincunx plantations had not their
origin in Eden, and whether the numbers and geometrical figures con-
tained in the lozenge-form are not met with in all the productions of
nature and art. You may recognise here the exuberance and the
strange caprices of an inner development too ample and too strong.
ArchjEology, chemistry, history, nature, there is nothing in which he
is not interested to the extent of a passion, which does not cause his
memory and his ingenuity to overflow, which does not summon up
Avithin him the idea of some force, certainly admirable, possibly infinite.
But what finishes in depicting him, what signalises the advance of
science, is the fact that his imagination provides a counterbalance
against itself. He is as fertile in doubts as he is in explanations. If
he sees the thousand reasons which tend to one view, he sees also the
thousand which tend to the contrary. At the two extremities of the
same fact, he raises up to the clouds, but in equal piles, the scaffolding
of contradictory arguments. Having made a guess, he knows that it
is but a guess ; he pauses, ends with a perhaps, recommends verifica-
tion. His writings consist only of opinions, given as such ; even his
principal work is a refutation of popular errors. After all, he proposes
questions, suggests explanations, suspends his judgments ; nothing more,
but this is enough : Avhen the search is so eager, when the paths in
which it proceeds are so numerous, when it is so scrupulous in making
certain of its basis, the issue of the pursuit is sure ; we are but a few
steps from the truth.

V.

In this band of scholars, dreamers, and enquirers, appears the most
comprehensive, sensible, originative of the minds of the age, Francis
Bacon, a great and luminous intellect, one of the finest of this poetic
progeny, who, like his predecessors, Avas naturally disposed to clothe his
ideas in the most splendid dress : in this age, a thought did not seem
complete until it had assumed a form and colour. But what distin-
guishes him from the others is, that with him an image only serves to
concentrate meditation. He reflected long, stamped on his mind all the
parts and joints of his subject; and then, instead of dissipating his
complete idea in a graduated chain of reasoning, he embodies it in a
comparison so expressive, exact, transparent, that behind the figure we
perceive all the details of the idea, like a liquor in a fair crystal vase.
Judge of his style by a single example :

•For as water, Avhether it* be the dew of Heaven or the springs of the earth,
easily scatters and loses itself in the ground, except it be collected into some
receptacle, where it may by union and consort comfort and sustain itself (and for
that cause, the industry of man has devised aqueducts, cisterns, and pools, and
likewise beautified them Avith various ornaments of magnificence and state, as wed
aS I'ur use and necessity) ; so this excellent liquor of knowledge, whether it descen J

216 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK. IL

from divine inspiration or spring from human sense, wonld soon perish and vanish
into oblivion, if it were not preserved in boolcs, traditions, conferences, and
especially in places appointed for such matters as universities, colleges, and schools,
■where it may have both a fixed habitation, and means and opportunity of increasing
and collecting itself. ' ^

' The greatest error of all the rest, is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or
farthest end of knowledge : for men have entered into a desire of learning and
knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive ai^petite ; sometimes
to entertain their minds with variety and delight ; sometimes for ornament and
reputation ; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction ;
and most times for hicre and profession ; and seldom sincerely to give a true account
of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men : as if there were sought in
knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit ; or a terrace,
for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect ; or a
tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon ; or a fort or commanding
ground, for strife and contention ; or a shop, for profit or sale ; and not a rich
storehouse, for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man's estate.'^

This is his mode of thought, by symbols, not by analysis ; instead
of explaining his idea, he transposes and translates it, — translates it
entire, to the smallest details, enclosing all in the majesty of a grand
period, or in the brevity of a striking sentence. Thence springs a
style of admirable richness, gravity, and vigour, now solemn and
symmetrical, now concise and piercing, always elaborate and full of
colour.^ There is nothing in English prose superior to his diction.

Thence is derived also his manner of conceiving of things. He is
not a dialectician, like Hobbes or Descartes, apt in arranging ideas,
in educing one from another, in leading his reader from the simple to
the complex by an unbroken chain. He is a producer of conceptions
and of sentences. The matter being explored, he says to us : ' Such
it is ; touch it not on that side ; it must be approached from the other.'
Nothing more ; no proof, no effort to convince : he affirms, and does
nothing more ; he has thought in the manner of artists and poets, and
he speaks after the manner of prophets and seers. Cogita et visa, this
title of one of his books might be the title of all. The most admirable,
the Novum Orgaraan, is a string of aphorisms, — a collection, as it were,
of scientific decrees, as of an oracle who foresees the future and reveals
the truth. And to make the resemblance complete, he expresses them
by poetical figures, by enigmatic abbreviations, almost in Sibylline
verses : Idola specus, Idola tribiis, Idola fori, Idola theatri, every one
will recall these strange names, by which he signifies the four kmds of
illusions to which man is subject.* Shakspeare and the seers do not

^ Bacon's WorI:s. Translation oi the De Aiigmeniis Scieniiaru?n, Bookii. ; To
the King.

- Ibid. Book i. The true end of learning mistaken.

2 Especially in the Essays.

* See also Novum Organum, Books i. and ii. ; the twenty-seven kinds of
examples, with their metaphorical names : Instantice crucis, divortii januce,
Jiulantice iimuentcs, pobjchrestce, viagicce, etc.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN PvENxUSSANCE. 2 1 7

contain more vigorous or expressive condensations of thonglit, more
resembling inspiration, and in Bacon they are to be found everywhere.
In short, his process is tliat of the creators ; it is intuition, not reason-
ing. When he has laid up his store of facts, the greatest possible, on
some vast subject, on some entire province of the mind, on the whole
anterior philosophy, on the general condition of the sciences, on the
power and limits of human reason, he casts over all this a comprehen-
sive view, as it were a great net, brings up a universal idea, condenses
his idea into a maxim, and hands it to us with the words, ' Verify and
prolit by it.'

There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode
of thought, when it is not checked by natural and strong good sense.
This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable
equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, like the
needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree. He
has a pre-eminently practical, even an utilitarian mind, such as we
meet with later in Bentham, and such as their business habits were to
impress more and more upon the English. At the age of sixteen,
while at the university, he was dissatisried with Aristotle's philosophy,^
not that he thought meanly of the author, whom, on the contrary, he
calls a great genius ; but because it seemed to him of no practical
utility, * incapable of producing works which might promote the -well-
being of men.' We see that from the outset he struck upon his
dominant idea : all else comes to him from this ; a contempt for
antecedent philosophy, the conception of a different system, the entire
reformation of the sciences by the indication of a new goal, the defini-
tion of a distinct method, the opening up of unsuspected anticipations."
It is never speculation which he relishes, but the practical application
of it. His eyes are turned not to heaven, but to earth, not to things
' abstract and vain,' but to things palpable and solid, not to curious
but to profitable truths. He seeks to better the condition of men, to
labour for the welfare of mankind, to enrich human life with new
discoveries and new resources, to equip mankind Avith new powers and
new instruments of action. His philosophy itself is but an instru-
ment, orr/anum, a sort of machine or lever constructed to enable the
intellect to raise a weight, to break through obstacles, to open up
vistas, to accomplish tasks which had hitherto surpassed its power.
In his eyes, every special science, like science in general, should be an
implement. He invites mathematicians to quit their pure geometry,
to study numbers only with a view to their physical application, to
seek formulas only to calculate real quantities and natural motions.

* The Works of Francis Bacon, London 1824, vol. vii. p. 2. Latin Biograp'ny
by Rawley.

■^ This point is brought out by the review of Lord MacauJay. Critical and
Historical Eam'js, voL iii.

218 THE EENAISSAXCE. [BOOK II.

He recommends moralists to study the mind, the passions, habits,
endeavours, not merely in a speculative way, but Avith a view to the
cure or diminution of vice, and assigns to the science of morals as its
end the amelioration of morals. For him, the object of science is
always the establishment of an art, that is, the production of some-
thing of practical utility ; when he wished to describe the efficacious
nature of his philosophy apparent by a tale, he delineated in the New
Atlantis, with a poet's boldness and the precision of a seer, with
almost literal exactness, modern applications, and the present organisa-
tion of the sciences, academies, observatories, air-balloons, submarine
vessels, the improvement of land, the transmutation of species, rege-
nerations, the discovery of remedies, the preservation of food. ' The
end of our foundation,' says his principal personage, ' is the knowledge
of causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds
of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.' And this
* possible ' is infinite.

How did this grand and just conception originate ? Doubtless
common sense and genivis too Avere necessary to its production ; bu.c
neither common sense nor genius was lacking to men : there had been
more than one who, remarking, like Bacon, the progress of particular
industries, could, like him, have conceived of universal industry,
and from certain limited ameliorations have advanced to unlimited
amelioration. Here we see the power of combined efforts ; men
tliink they do everything by their individual thought, and they can
do nothinpr without the assistance of the thoughts of their neisihbours ;
they fancy that they are following the small voice within them, but
they only hear it because it is swelled by the thousand buzzing and
imperious voices, which, issuing from all surrounding things, far and
near, are confounded with it in an harmonious vibration. Generally
they hear it, as Bacon did, from the first moment of reflection ; biit
it had become inaudible among the opposing sounds from without.
Could this confidence in the infinite enlargement of human power,
this glorious idea of the universal conquest of nature, this firm hope
in the continual increase of well-being and happiness, have germinated,
grown, occupied an intelligence entirely, and thence have struck its
roots, been propagated and spread over neighbouring intelligences, in
a time of discouragement and decay, when men believed the end of
the world at hand, when things were falling into ruin about them,
when Christian mysticism, as in the first centuries, ecclesiastical
tyranny, as in the fourteenth century, were convincing them of their
impotence, by perverting their intellectual efforts and curtailing their
liberty? More than that: such hopes must then have seemed to be
outbursts of pride, or suggestions of the flesh. They did seem so ;
and the last representatives of ancient science, and the first of the new,
were exiled or imprisoned, assassinated or burned. In order to 1 e
developed, an idea must be in harmony with surrounding civilisation ;

CHAP. I.J THE TAG AN KENAISSANCE. 210

before man can expect to attain the dominion over nature, or attempts
to improve his condition, amelioration must have begun on all sides,
industries have increased, knowledge have been accumulated, the arts
expanded, a hundred thousand irrefutable witnesses must have come
to give proof of his power and assurance of his progress. The 'mascu-
line birth of the time ' {temporis partus masculus) is the title which
Bacon applies to his work, and it is a true one. In fact, the whole age
co-operated in it ; by this creation it was finished. The consciousness
of human power and prosperity furnished to the Renaissance its first
energy, its ideal, its poetic materials, its distinguishing features ; and
now it furnished it w"ith its final expression, its scientific doctrine, and
its ultimate object.

We may add also, its method. For, the end of a journey once
fixed, the route is laid down, since the end always determines the
route ; when the point of arrival is changed, the path of approach is
changed, and science, varying its object, varies also its method. So
long as it limited its effort to the satisfying an idle curiosity, open-
ing out speculative vistas, establishing a sort of opera in speculative
minds, it could launch out any moment into metaphysical abstractions
and distinctions : it was enough for it to skim over experience ; it
soon qviitted it, and came all at once upon great words, quiddities, the
principle of individuation, final causes. Half proofs sufl[iced science ;
at bottom it did not care to establish a truth, but to get an opinion ;
and its instrument, the syllogism, was serviceable only for refutations,
not for discoveries : it took general laws for a starting-point instead
of a point of arrival ; instead of going to find them, it fancied
them found. The syllogism was good in the schools, not in nature ;
it made disputants, not discoverers. From the moment that science
had art for an end, and men studied in order to act, all was trans-
formed ; for we cannot act without certain and precise knowledge.
Forces, before they can be employed, must be measured and verified ;
before we can build a house, we must know exactly the resistance of
the beams, or the house will collapse ; before we can cure a sick man,
we must know with certainty the effect of a remedy, or the patient
will die. Practice makes certainty and exactitude a necessity to
science, because practice is impossible when it has nothing to lean
upon but guesses and approximations. Plow can we eliminate guesses
and approximations? We must imitate the cases in which science,
issuing in practice, is shown to be precise and certain, and these cases
are the industries. We must, as in the industries, observe, essay,
attempt, verify, keep our mind fixed ' on sensible and particular
things,' advance to general rules only step by step ; ' not anticipate '
experience, but follow it ; not imagine nature, but ' interpret it.' For
every general efi'ect, such as heat, whiteness, hardness, liquidity, we
must seek a general condition, so that in producing the condition we
may produce the eflfect. And for this it is necessary, ' by fit rejections

220 THE EEXAISSANCE. [bOOK II.

and exclusions,' to extract tlie condition sought from the heap of facts
in Avhich it lies buried, construct the table of cases from which the
effect is absent, the table where it is present, the table where the effect
is shown in various degrees, so as to isolate and bring to light the
condition which produced it.^ Then we shall have, not useless uni-
versal axioms, but ' efficacious mediate axioms,' true laws from which
we can derive works, and which are the sources of power in the same
degree as the sources of light.^ Bacon described and predicted in this
modern science and industry, their correspondence, method, resources,
principle ; and after more than two centuries, it is still to him that "we
go to discover the theory of what we are attempting and doing.

Beyond this great view, he has discovered nothing. Cowley, one
of his admirers, justly said that, like ]\Ioses on Mount Pisgah, he was
the first to announce the promised land ; but he might have added quite
as justly, that, like Moses, he did not enter there. He pointed out
the route, but did not travel it ; he taught men how to discover natural
laws, but discovered none. His definition of heat is extremely imper-
fect. His Natural History is full of chimerical explanations.® Like
the poets, he peoples nature with instincts and desires ; attributes to
bodies an actual voracity, to the atmosphere a thirst for the light,
sounds, odours, vapours, which it drinks in ; to metals a sort of haste
to be incorporated with acids. He explains the duration of the bubbles
of air which float on the surface of liquids, by supposing that air has a
very small or no attraction to high latitudes. He sees in every quality,
weight, ductility, hardness, a distinct essence which has its special
cause ; so that when one knows the cause of every quality of gold, one
Avill be able to put all these causes together, and make gold. In brief,
with the alchemists, Paracelsus and Gilbert, Kepler himself, with all the
men of his time, men of imagination, nourished on Aristotle, he repre-
sents nature as a compound of secret and lively energies, inexplicable
and primordial forces, distinct and indecomposable essences, adapted
each by the will of the Creator to produce a distinct effect. He almost
saw souls endowed with dull repugnances and occult inclinations, which
aspire to or resist certain directions, certain mixtures, and certain
localities. On this account also he confounds everything in his re-
searches in an imdistinguishable mass, vegetative and medicinal pro-
perties, physical and moral, without considering the most complex as
depending on the simplest, but each on the contrary in itself, and taken
apart, as an irreducible and independent existence. Obstinate in this
error, the thinkers of the age mark time without advancing. They see
clearly with Bacon the wide field of discovery, but they cannot advance
into it. They want an idea, and for want of this idea they do not ad-
vance. The disposition of mind which but now was a lever, is become

* Novum Organum, ii. 15 and 16. ^ Novum Organum, i. i. 3.

* JSiatur at History, SOO, 21, etc. Dc Augmcntls, iii. i.

CHAP. I.] THE PAGAN EEXAISSAXCE.

00 1

an obsfncle : it must be chnncorl, that the obstacle may be got rid of.
For ideas, I mean great and efficacious ones, do not come at will nor by
chance, by the effort of an individual, or by a happy accident. Like
literatures and religions, methods and philosophies arise from the spirit
of the age ; and this spirit of the age makes them potent or powerless.
One state of public intelligence excludes a certain kind of literature ;
another, a certain scientific conception. When it happens thus, writers
and thinkers labour in A-ain, the literature is abortive, the conception
does not make its appearance. In vain they turn one w^ay and another,
trying to remove the weight which hinders them ; something stronger
than themselves paralyses their hands and frustrates their endeavours.
The central pivot of the vast wheel on which human affairs move must
be displaced one notch, that all may move with its motion. At this
moment the pivot was moved, and thus a revolution of the great wheel
begins, bringing round a new conception of nature, and in consequence
that part of the method which was lacking. To the diviners, the
creators, the comprehensive and impassioned minds who seized objects
in a lump and in masses, succeeded the discursive thinkers, the sys-
tematic thinkers, the graduated and clear logicians, who, disposing ideas
in continuous series, led the hearer insensibly from the simple to the
most complex by easy and unbroken paths. Descartes superseded
Bacon ; the classical age obliterated the Renaissance ; poetry and lofty
imagination gave way before rhetoric, eloquence, and analysis. In this
transformation of mind, ideas were transformed. Everything was
sobered down and simplified. The universe, like all else, was reduced
to two or three notions ; and the conception of nature, Avhich was
poetical, became mechanical. Instead of souls, living forces, repug-
nances, and attractions, we have pulleys, levers, impelling forces. The
world, which seemed a mass of instinctive powers, is now like a mere
machinery of serrated wheels. Beneath this adventurous supposition
lies a large and certain truth : that there is, namely, a scale of facts,
some at the summit very complex, others at the base very simple ; those
above having their origin in those below, so that the lower ones ex-
plain the higher ; and that we must seek the primary laws of things
in the laws of motion. The search was made, and Galileo found them.
Thenceforth the work of the Renaissance, passing the extreme point to
which Bacon had pushed it, and at which he had left it, was able to
proceed onward by itself, and did so proceedj without limit.

222 THE KEXAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

CHAPTER IL

The Theatre.

I. The public — The stage.
II. Manners of the sixteenth centiirj'- — Violent and complete expansion of nature.

III. English manners — Expansion of the energetic and gloomy character.

IV. The poets — General harmony between the character of a poet and that of his

age — Nash, Decker, Kyd, Peele, Lodge, Greene — Their condition and life
— Marlowe — His life — His works — Tamhurla'me — The Jew of Malta —
Edward II. — Faustus — His conception of man.
V. Formation of this drama — The process and character of this art — Imitative
sympathy, which depicts by expressive specimens — Contrast of classical
and Germanic art — Psychological construction and proper sphere of these
two arts.
VJ. Male characters — Furious passions — Tragical events — Exaggerated characters
— Tlie Duke of Milan by Massinger — Ford's Annahella — Webster's Duchess
of Malfi and Vittoria — Female characters — Germanic idea of love and mar-
riage— Euphrasia, Bianca, Arethusa, Ordella, Aspasia, Amoret, in Beau-
mont and Fletcher — Penthea iu Ford — Agreement of the moral and
physical type.

E must look at this world more closely, and beneath the ideas
which are developed seek for the men wlio live ; it is the
theatre especially which is the original product of the English Eenais-
sance, and it is the theatre especially which will exhibit the men of the
English Renaissance. Forty poets, amongst them ten of superior rank, and
the greatest of all artists who have represented the soul in words; many
hundreds of pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces ; the drama extended
over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy, — expanded so
as to embrace comedy, tragedy, pastoral and fanciful literature — to
represent all degrees of human condition, and all the caprices of human
invention — to express all the sensitive details of actual truth, and all the
philosophic grandeur of general reflection ; the stage disencumbered of
all precept and freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated in
the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and the public intelli-
gence : all this was a vast and manifold work, capable by its flexibility,
its greatness, and its form, of receiving and preserving the exact im-
print of the age and of the nation.^

* Shakspeai'e, ' The very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. '

CHAP. II.] TIIL THEATRE. 223

I.

Let us try, then, to set before our eyes this public, this audience,
and this stage — all connected with one another, as in every natural
and living work; and if ever there was a living and natural work, it is
here. There were already seven theatres in Shakspeare's time, so brisk
and universal was the taste for representations. Great and rude con-
trivances, awkward in their construction, barbarous in their appoint-
ments ; but a fervid imagination readily supplied all that they lacked,
and hardy bodies endured all inconveniences without difficulty. On
a dirty site, on the banks of the Thames, rose thie principal theatre, the
Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy ditch, sur-
mounted by a red flag. The common people could enter as well as the
rich: there Avere sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats; but they could
not see it without money. If it rained, and it often rains in London,
the people in the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices,
receive the streaming rain upon their heads. I suppose they did not
trouble themselves about it ; it was not so long since they began to
pave the streets of London ; and when men, like them, have had ex-
perience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid of catching cold.
AVhile waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after their fashion,
drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruits, howl, and now and then resort to
their fists ; they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn the
theatre upside down. At other times they have gone in disgust to the
tavern to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket; they were
rude jokers, and there was no month when the cry of ' Clubs' did not
call them out of their shops to exercise their brawny arms. "When the
beer took effect, there was a great vipturned barrel in the pit, a peculiar
receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then comes the cry,
'Burn the juniper!' They burn some in a plate on the stage, and the
iieavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled could
scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot have had sensitive noses.
Ill the time of Rabelais there was not much cleanness to speak of.
liemember that they were hardly out of the middle-age, and that in
the middle-age man lived on the dunghill.

Above them, on the stage, were the spectators able to pay a
shilling, the elegant people, the gentlefolk. These were sheltered
from the rain, and if they chose to pay an extra shilling, could have
a stool. To this were reduced the prerogatives of rank and the devices
of comfort : it often happened that stools were lacking ; then they
stretched themselves on the ground: they were not dainty at such
times. They play cards, smoke, insult the pit, who give it them back
without stinting, and throw apples at them into the bargain. As for the
gentlefolk, they gesticulate, swear in Italian, French, English ;^ crack

1 Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour; Ci/nthia's Eevela.

224 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK H.

aloud jolves in dainty, composite, high-coloured words : in short, they
have the energetic, original, gay manners ot artists, the same humour,
the same absence of constraint, and, to complete the resemblance, the
same desire to make themselves singular, the same imaginative cravings,
the same absurd and picturesque devices, beards cut to a point, into
the shape of a fan, a spade, the letter T, gaudy and expensive dresses,
copied from five or six neighbouring nations, embroidered, laced with
gold, motley, continually heightened in effect, or changed for others :
there was, as it Avere, a carnival in their brains as on their backs.

With such spectators illusions could be produced without much
trouble : there were no preparations or perspectives ; few or no move-
able scenes : their imaginations took all this upon them. A scroll in
big letters announced to the public that they were in London or Con-
stantinople ; and that was enough to carry the public to the desired
place. There was no trouble about probability. Sir Philip Sidney
writes :

' You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africke of the other, and so many other
under-kingdomes, that the Plaier when hee comes in, must evei begin with telling
where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now shall you have three
Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage to be a garden.
By and by wee heare newes of ship\^Tacke in the same place, then wee are to blame
if we accept it not for a rocke ; . . . while in the meane time two armies flie in,
represented with foure swordes and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not
receive it for a pitched field ? Now of time they are much more liberall. For
ordinary it is, that two young Princes fall in love, after many traverses, shee is got
with childe, delivered of a faire bo_v, hee is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love,
and is readie to get another childe ; and all this in two lioures space. ' ^

Doubtless these enormities were somewhat reduced under Shakspeare ;
with a few hangings, rude representations of animals, towers, forests,
they assisted somewhat the public imagination. But in fact, in Shaks-
peare's plays as in all others, the public imagination is the great con-
triver ; it must lend itself to all, substitute all, accept for a queen a
young boy whose beard is beginning to grow, endure in one act twelve
changes of place, leap suddenly over twenty years or five hundred
miles,^ take half a dozen supernumeraries for forty thousand men, and
to have represented by the rolling of the drums all the battles of
Caesar, Henry v., Coriolanus, Richard iii. All this, imagination, being
so overflowing and so young, does accept ! Recall your own youth ;
for my part, the deepest emotions I have had at a theatre were given
to me by an ambling bevy of four young girls, playing comedy and
drama on a stage in a coffeehouse ; true, I was eleven years old. So in
this theatre, at this moment, their souls were fresh, as ready to feel
everything as the poet was to dare everything.

1 The Defence of Poesie, ed. 1629, p. 562.
^ Winters Tale; Cymhelint; Julius Cctsar.

CHAP. II.] THE THEATES. 225

IL

These are but externals ; let us try to advance further, to observe
the passions, the bene of mind, the inner man : it is this inner state
which raised and modelled the drama, as everything else ; invisible
inclinations are everywhere the cause of visible works, and the interior
shapes the exterior. TVliat are these townspeople, courtiers, this
public, whose taste fashions the theatre ? what is there particvdar in
the structure and condition of their mind ? The condition must needs
be particular; for the drama flourishes all of a sudden, and for sixty
years together, Avith marvellous luxuriance, and at the end of this time
is arrested so that no effort could revive it. The structure must bo
particular ; for of all theatres, old and new, this is distinct in form, and
displays a style, action, characters, an idea of life, which are not found
in any age or any country beside. This particular feature is the free
and complete expansion of nature.

What we call nature in men is, man such as he was before culture
and civilisation had deformed and re-formed him. Almost always, when
a new generation arrives at manhood and consciotisness, it finds a code
of precepts Avhich it imposes on itself, with all the weight and autho-
rity of antiquity. A hundred kinds of chains, a hundred thousand
kinds of ties, religion, morality, manners, every legislation which
regulates sentiments, morals, manners, fetter and tame the creature of
impulse and passion which breathes and frets within each of us. There
is nothing like that here. It is a regeneration, and the curb of the
past is wanting to the present. Catholicism, reduced to external cere-
mony and clerical chicanery, had just ended ; Protestantism, arrested in
its endeavours, or straying into sects, had not yet gained the mastery ;
the religion of discipline was grown feeble, and the religion of morals
was not yet established ; men ceased to listen to the directions of the
clergy, and had not yet spelt out the law of conscience. The chxirch
was turned into an assembly room, as in Italy ; the young fellows came
to St. Paul's to walk, laiigh, chatter, display their new cloaks ; the
thing had even passed into a custom. They paid for the noise they
made with their spurs, and this tax was a source of income to the
canons;^ pickpockets, the girls of the town, came there by crowds;
these latter struck their bargains while service was going on. Imagine,
in short, that the scruples of conscience and the severity of the Puri-
tans were odious things, and that they ridiculed them on the stage,

^ Strj-pe, iahis Annals of the Eeformation {1571), says: ' Many nowwere wholly
departed from the communion of the church, and came no more to hear divine
service in their parish churches, nor received the holy sacrament, according to the
laws of the realm.' Richard Baxter, in his Life, published in 1696, says: 'We
lived in a country that had but little preaching at all. ... In the village where
I lived the Reader read the Common Prayer briefly ; and the rest of the day, even
till dark night almost, except Eating time, was spent in Dancing under a Maypole

P

226 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

and judge of the difference between this sensual, unbridled England,
and the correct, disciplined, stern England of our own time. Ecclesi-
astical or secular, we find no signs of rule. In the failure of faith,
reason had not gained sway, and opinion is as void of authority as
tradition. The imbecile age, which has just ended, continues buried in
scorn, with its ravings, its verse-makers, and its pedantic text-books ;
and out of the liberal opinions derived from antiquity, from Italy,
France, and Spain, every one could pick as it pleased him, without
stooping to restraint or acknowledging a superiority. There was no
model imposed on them, as nowadays ; instead of affecting imitation,
they affected originality.^ Each strove to be himself, with his own
oaths, fashions, costumes, his specialties of conduct and humour, and
to be unlike every one else. They said not, ' So and so is done,' but
' I do so and so.' Instead of restraining themselves, they expanded.
There was no etiquette of society ; save for an exaggerated jargon of
chivalresque courtesy, they are masters of speech and action on the
impulse of the moment. You will find them free from decorum, as
of all else. In this outbreak and absence of fetters, they resemble
thorough-bred horses let loose in the meadow. Their inborn instincts
have not been tamed, nor muzzled, nor diminished.

On the contrary, they have been preserved intact by bodily and
military training ; and escaping as they were from barbarism, not from
civilisation, they had not been acted upon by the inner softening and
hereditary tempering which are now transmitted with the blood, and
civilise a man from the moment of his birth. This is why man, who
for three centuries has been a domestic animal, was still almost a savage
beast, and the force of his muscles and the strength of his nerves in-
creased the boldness and energy of his passions. Look at these uncul-
tivated men, men of the people, how suddenly the blood warms and
rises to their face ; their fists double, their lips press together, and those
vigorous bodies are hurried at once into action. The courtiers of that
age Avere like our men of the people. They had the same taste for the
exercise of their limbs, the same indifference toward the inclemencies of
the weather, the same coarseness of language, the same undisguised
sensuality. They were carmen in body and gentlemen in sentiment,
with the dress of actors and the tastes of artists. 'At fourtene,' says
John Hardyng, ' a lordes sonnes shalle to felde hunts the dere, and
catch an hardynesse. For dere to hunte and slea, and see them blede,
ane hardyment gyfflth to his courage. ... At sextene yere, to werray
and to wage, to juste and ryde, and castels to assayle . . . and every

and a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the Town did meet
together. And though one of my father's own Tenants was the piper, he could
not restrain him nor break the sport. So that we could not read the Scripture in
our family without the great disturbance of the Taber and Pipe and noise iu
the street. '

' Ben Jonson, Every Man in Ids Humour.

CIIAr. II.] THE THEATRE 227

day his armnre to assay in fete of armes with some of his moyne.'^
When ripened to manhood, be is employed with the bow, in wrestling,
leaping, vaulting. Henry vili.'s court, in its noisy merriment, was
like a village tair. The king, says Holinshed, exercised himself
' dailie in shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the barre,
plaieing at the recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of songs, and
making of ballads. ' He leaps the moats with a pole, and was once
within an ace of being killed. He is so fond of combat, that publicly,
on the field of the Cloth of Gold, he seized Francis i. in his arms
to throw him. This is how a soldier or a bricklayer nowadays tries
a new comrade. In fact, they regarded as amusements, like soldiers
and bricklayers, gross jests and brutal buffooneries. In every great
house there was a fool, ' whose business was to bring out pointed jests,
to make eccentric gestures, horrible faces, to sing licentious songs,'
as one might hear now in a beer-house. They thought malice and
obscenity a joke. They were foul-mouthed, they swallowed Rabelais'
words undiluted, and delighted in conversation which would revolt
us. They had no respect for humanity ; the empire of proprieties and
the habits of good breeding began only under Louis xiv., and by imita-
tion of the French ; at this time they all blurted out the word that fitted
in, and that was most frequently a coarse word. You will see on the
stage, in Shakspeare's Pericles^ the filth of a haunt of vice.^ The
great lords, the well-dressed ladies, spoke Billingsgate slang. "When
Henry v. paid his court to Catherine of France, it was Avith the coarse
bearing of a sailor who might have taken a fancy to a sutler ; and like
the tars who tattoo a heart on their arms to prove their love for the girls
they left behind them, you find men who ' devoured sulphur and drank
urine' ^ to win their mistress by a proof of affection. Humanity is as
much lacking as decency.* Blood, suffering, does not move them. The

1 The Chronicle of John Hardyng (1436), ed. H. Ellis, 1812. Preface.

® Act iv. 2 and 4. See also»the character of Calypso in Massinger ; Putaiia i;i
Ford ; Protalyce in Beamnont and Fletcher.

^ Middleton, Dutch Courtezan.

^ Commission given by Henry viii. to the Earl of Hertford, 1544 : 'You are
there to put all to fire and sword ; to burn Edinburgh town, and to raze and deface
it, when you have sacked it, and gotten wliat you can out of it. . . . Do wluit you
can out of hand, and without long tarrying, to beat doAvn and overthrow the castle,
sack Holyrood-House, and as many towns and villnges about Edinburgh as ye
conveniently can ; sack Leith, and burn and subvert it, and all the rest, putting
man, woman, and child to fire and sword, without exception, when any resistance
.shall be made against you ; and tliis done, pass over to the Fife land, and extend
like extremities and destn;ctions in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach
conveniently, not forgetting amongst all the rest, so to spoil and turn upside down
the cardinal's town of St Andrew's, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one
stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, specially such as
either in friendsliip or blood be allied to the cardinal. Tliis journey shall succeed
most to his majesty's honour.' — Pictorial History of Enyland, ii. 440, note.

22 S THE EENAISSAXCE. [BOOK 11.

court frequents bear and bull baitings, where dogs are ripped up and
chained beasts are sometimes beaten to death, andit was, says an officer
of the palace, ' a charming entertainment.' ^ No wonder they used their
arms like clodhoppers and gossips. Elizabeth used to beat her maids
of honour, < so that these beautiful girls could often be heard crying
and lamenting in a piteous manner.' One day she spat upon Sir
Mathew's fringed coat; at another time, when Essex, whom she was
scolding, turned his back, she gave him a box on the ears. It was then
the practice of great ladies to beat their children and their servants.
Poor Jane Grey was sometimes so Avretchedly ' boxed, struck, pinched,
and ill-treated in other manners which she dare not relate,' that she
used to wish herself dead. Their first idea is to come to words, to
blows, to have satisfaction. As in feudal times, they appeal at once to
arms, and retain the habit of gaining justice for themselves, and without
delay. 'On Thursday laste,' writes Gilbert Talbot to the Earl and
Countess of Shrewsbury, ' as my Lorde Eytche was rydynge in the
streates, there was one Wyndam that stode in a dore, and shotte a dagge
at him, thynkynge to have slayne him. . . . The same daye, also, as Sr
John Conway was goynge in the streetes, ]\F Lodovyke Grevell came
sodenly upon him, and stroke him on the hedd w*^ a sworde. ... I am
forced to trouble yo"^ Honors w'''* thes tryflynge matters, for I know no
greater.' ^ No one, not even the queen, is safe among these violent
dispositions.^ Again, when one man struck another in the precincts of
the court, his hand was cut of5, and the arteries stopped with a red-hot
iron. Only such atrocious imitations of their own crimes, and the pain-
ful image of bleeding and suffering flesh, could tame their vehemence
and restrain the uprising of their instincts. Judge now what matei-ials
they furnish to the theatre, and what characters they look for at the
theatre : to please the public, the stage cannot deal too much in open
lust and the strongest passions ; it must depict man attaining the limit
of his desires, unchecked, almost mad, now trembling and rooted before
the white palpitating flesh which his eyes devour, now haggard and
grinding his teeth before the enemy whom he wishes to tear to pieces,
noAv carried beyond himself and overwhelmed at the sight of the honours
and wealth which he courts, always raging and enveloped in a tempest
of eddying ideas, sometimes shaken by impetuous joy, more often on
the verge of fury and madness, stronger, more ardent, more daringly
let loose beyond the pale of reason and law than he himself ever was.
We hear from the stage as from the history of the time, these fierce
murmurs : the sixteenth century is like a den of lions.

Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature

^ Laneham, A Goodly Belief.

2 13tli February 1587. Nathan Drake, ShaJcspeare and his Times, ii. p. IGj.
See also the same work for all these details.

^- Essex, when struck by the queen, jnit his hand on the hilt of his sword.

CHAP. II, J THE THEATRE. 22D

appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fulness. If nothing
had been softened, nothing had been mutilated. It is the entire man
who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest
aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the
preponderance of any dominant circumstance to cast him altogether in
one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid, as
he will be under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned, as in the Eestora-
tion. After the hollowness and weariness of the fifteenth century, he
rose up by a second birth, as before in Greece man had risen by a first
birth ; and now, as then, the temptations of the outer world came com-
bined to raise his faculties from their sloth and torpor. A «ort of
generous warmth spread over them to ripen and make them flourish.
Peace, prosperity, comfort began ; new industries and increasing
activity suddenly multiplied objects of utility and luxury tenfold.
America and India, by their discovery, caused the treasures and pro-
digies heaped up afar over distant seas to shine before their eyes ;
antiquity re-discovered, sciences mapped out, the Reformation begun,
books multiplied by printing, ideas by books, doubled the means of
enjoyment, imagination, and thought. They wanted to enjoy, to ima-
gine, and to think ; for the desire grows with the attraction, and here
all attractions Avere combined. There were attractions of the senses,
in the chambers which they began to warm, in the beds newly fur-
nished with pillows, in the carriages which they began to use for the
first time. There were attractions for the imagination in the new
palaces, arranged after the Italian manner ; in the variegated hangings
from Flanders ; in the rich garments, gold-embroidered, which, being
continually changed, combined the fancies and the splendours of all
Europe. There were attractions for the mind, in the noble and beau-
tiful Avritings which, spread abroad, translated, explained, brought in
philosophy, eloquence, and poetry, from the restored antiquity, and
from the surrounding Renaissance. Under this appeal all aptitudes
and instincts at once started up ; the low and the lofty, ideal and
sensual love, gross cupidity and pure generosity. Recall what you
yourself experienced, when from being a child you became a man ; what
wishes for happiness, what breadth of anticipation, Avhat intoxication of
heart you indulged in in face of all these joys ; with what impulse your
hands reached involuntarily and all at once every branch of the tree,
and Avould not let a single fruit escape. At sixteen years, like Cherubin,'^
we wish for a servant girl Avhile we adore a Madonna ; Ave are capable
of every species of covetousness, and also of every species of self-
denial ; Ave find virtue more lovely, our meals more enjoyable ; pleasure
has more zest, heroism more Avorth ; there is no allurement Avhich is
not keen ; the SAveetness and novelty of things are too strong ; and in
the hive of passions Avhich buzzes Avithin us, and stings us like the sting

* A page in the Manage de Figaro, a comedy by Beaumarchais. — Ta.

230 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

of a bee, we can do nothing but plunge, one after another, into all sen-
sations. Such were the men of this time, Ealeigh, Essex, Elizabeth,
Henry viii. himself, excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion and
for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with strange weaknesses,
humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with premeditation
like the roysterers of the Restoration, never rigid on principle like the
Puiitans of the Eevolution, capable of weeping like children,-' and of
dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once true knights,
displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only
the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take in every-
thing, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of
shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept
all the characters, prostitutes and virgins, princes and mountebanks,
pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alter-
nately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama
even, in order to imitate and satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must
take all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imageiy, and side
by side with this, vulgar prose : more, it must distort its natural style
and limits ; put songs, poetical devices, in the discourse of cottrtiers
and the speeches of statesmen ; bring on the stage the fairy wo]-ld of
the opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with
their groves and their meadows ; compel the gods to descend upon the
stage, and hell itself to furnish its world of marvels. No othei theatre
is so complicated ; for nowhere else do we find men so complete.

III.

In this free and universal expansion, the passions had their special
bent withal, which was an English one, inasmuch as they were English.
After all, in every age, under every civilisation, g people is always
itself. Whatever be its dress, goat-skin blouse, gold-laced doublet,
black dress-coat, the five or six great instincts which it possessed in its
forests, folloAV it in its palaces and offices. To this day, warlike passions,
a gloomy humour, subsist under the regularity and comfort of modern
manners.^ Their native energy and harshness pierce through the per-
fection of culture and the habits of comfort. Eich ycung men, on
leaving Oxford, go to hunt bears in Canada, the elephant at the Cape
of Good Hope, live under canvas, box, jump hedges on horseback,
sail their clippers on dangerous coasts, delight in solitude and peril.
The ancient Saxon, the old rover of the Scandinavian seas, have not
perished. Even at school the children ill-treat one another, withstand

1 Tlie great Chancellor Buiieip;li often Avept, so liarshly was lie used by
Elizabeth.

^ Compare, to understand this character, the parts assigned to James Harlowe
hy Kichardson, old Osborne by Thackeray, Sir Giles Overreach by Massinger, and
Manly by Wycherle^'.

CITAr. II. J THE THEATKE. 231

one another, figlit like men ; and their character is so indomitable,
that they need the birch and blows to reduce them to the discipline
of law. Judge what they were in the sixteenth century : the English
race passed then for ' the most warlike race ' of Europe, ' the most
redoubtable in battle, the most impatient of anything like slavery.' ^
' English savages ' is what Cellini calls them ; and the ' great
shins of beef with Avhich they fill themselves, nourish the force and
feroeity of their instincts. To harden them thoroughly, institutions
work in the same groove with nature. The nation is armed, every
man is brought up like a soldier, bound to have arms according to his
condition, to exercise himself on Sundays or holidays ; from the yeo-
man to the lord, the old military constitution keeps them enrolled and
ready for action.^ In a state which resembles an army, it is necessary
that punishments, as in an army, shall inspire terror ; and to aggravate
them, the hideous "Wars of the Koses, which on every flaw of the suc-
cession are ready to break out again, are ever present in their recollection.
Such instincts, such a constitution, such a history, raises before them,
with tragic severity, the idea of life : death is at hand, and wounds, the
block, tortures. The fine cloaks of purple which the Renaissance of the
South displayed joyfully in the sun, to wear like a holiday garment, are
here stained with blood, and bordered with black. Throughout,^ a
stern discipline, and the axe ready for every suspicion of treason :
great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king's relatives, queens,
a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood;
one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks ; the
Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard,
the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane
Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, Mary Stuart, the
Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the
highest rank of honours, beauty, youth, and genius : of the bright
procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender
mercies of the executioner. Shall I count the funeral pyres, the hang-
ings, living men cut down from the gibbet, disembowelled, quartered,*
their limbs cast into the fire, their heads exposed on the Avails ? There
is a page in Holinshed which reads like a death register :

* The five and twentith daie of Maie (1535), was in saint Paules church, at London
examined nineteene men and six women born in Holland, whose opinions were
(lieretical). Fourteene of them were condemned, a man and a woman of them were

^ Hentzner's Travels; Benvenuto Cellini. See passim, the costumes printed
in Venice and Germany : Bellicosissimi. Fronde, i. pp. 19, 52.

^ This is not so true of the English now, if it was in the sixteenth century, as
it is of continental nations. The French lyc^es are far more miUtary in character
than English schools. — Te.

"^ Froude's Hist, of England, vols. i. ii. iiL

* ' "WTien his heart was torn out he uttered a deep groan.' — Execution of Parry i
StrA'pe, iii. 251.

232 THE EENAISSAXCE. [BOOK II.

burned in Sniithfield, the other twelve were sent to other townes, there to he hnrnt.
On the nineteenth of June were tliree moonkes of the Charterhouse hanged, drawne,
and quartered at Tibume, and their heads and quarters set up about London, for
denieng the king to be supreme head of the church. Also the one and twentith
of the same moneth, and for the same cause, doctor John Fisher, bishop of
Rochester, was beheaded for denieng of the supremacie, and his head set upon
London bridge, but his bodie buried within Bai-king churchyard. The pope had
elected him a cardinall, and sent his hat as far as Calls, but his head was off before
his hat was on : so that they met not. On the sixt of Julie was Sir Thomas Moore
beheaded for the like crime, that is to wit, for denieng the king to be supreme
head.'i

None of these murders seem extraordinary ; the clironiclers mention
them without growing indignant ; the condemned go quietly to the
block, as if the thing were perfectly natural. Anne Boleyn said
seriously, before giving up her head to the executioner : ' I praie God
save the king, and send him long to reigne over you, for a gentler, nor
a more mercifuU prince was there never.' ^ Society is, as it were, in a
state of siege, so strained that beneath the idea of order every one enter-
tained the idea of the scaffold. They saw it, the terrible machine,
planted on all the highwaj-s of hu.man life ; and the byways as well as
the highways led to it. A sort of martial law, introduced by conquests
into civil affairs, entered thence into ecclesiastical matters,^ and social
economy ended by being enslaved by it. As in a camp,* expenditure,
dress, the food of each class, are fixed and restricted ; no one might stray
out of his district, be idle, live after his own devices. Every stranger
was seized, interrogated ; if he could not give a good account of him-
self, the parish-stocks bruised his Umbs, as in a regiment he passed for
a spy and an enemy. Any person, says the law,^ found living idly or
loiteringly for the space of three days, shall be marked with a hot iron
on his breast, and adjudged as a slave to the man who shall inform
against him. This one ' shall take the same slave, and give him bread,
water, or small drink, and refuse meat, and cause him to work, by
beating, chaining, or otherwise, in such work and labour as he shall
put him to, be it never so vile.' He may sell him, bequ.eath him, let
him out for hire, or trade upon him ' after the like sort as they may do
of any other their moveable goods or chattels,' put a ring of iron about
his neck or leg ; if he runs away and absents himself for fourteen days,
he is branded on the forehead with a hot iron, and remains a slave
for the whole of his life ; if he rvms away a second time, he is put to
death. Sometimes, says More, you might see a score of thieves hung
on the same gibbet. In one year '' forty persons were put to death in
the county of Somerset alone, and in each county there were three or

^ Holinshed, Chronicles of England, iii. p. 793. * Tbld. iii. p. 797.

^ Under Henry iv. and Henry v. * Proude, i. 15.

^ In 1547. Pkt. History, ii. 467.
In 1596. P'lcl. History, ii. 907.

ii

CHAP. II. J THE THEATRE. 2C3

four hundred vagabonds who would gather together and rob in armed
bands of sixty at a time. Follow the whole of this history closely, the
fires of Mary, the pillories of Elizabeth, and it is plain that the moral
tone of the land, like its physical condition, is harsh by comparison
with all its neighbours. They have no relish in their enjoyments, as
iu Italy ; what is called Merry England is England given up to animal
ecstasy, a coarse animation produced by abundant feeding, continued
prosperity, courage, and self-reliance ; voluptuousness does not exist
in this climate and this race. Mingled with the beautiful popular
beliefs, the lugubrious dreams and the cruel nightmare of witchcraft
make their appearance. Bishop Jewell, preaching before the queen,
tells her that witches and sorcerers within these few last years are
marvellously increased. Some ministers assert

* That they have had in their parish at one instant, xvij or xviij witches ;
meaning such as could worke miracles supernaturallie ; that they work spells by
which men pine away even unto death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth,
their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft ; that instructed by the devil,
they make ointments of the bowels and members of childi-en, whereby they
ride in the aire, and accomplish all their desires. AVhen a child is not baptized,
or defended by the sif^n of the cross, then the witches catch them from their
mothers sides in the night . . . kill them ... or after buriall steale them out of
their graves, and seeth them in a caldron, until their flesh be made potable. . . .
It is an infallible rule, that everie fortnight, or at the least everie moneth, each
witch must kill one child at the least for hir part. '

Here was something to make the teeth chatter with friglit. Add
to this revolting and absurd description, Avretched tomfooleries, details
about the infernal cauldron, all the nastinesses Avhich could haunt the
trivial imagination of a hideous and drivelling old woman, and you have
the spectacles, provided by Middleton and Shakspeare, and which suit
the sentiments of the age and the national humour. The fundamental
gloom pierces through the glow and rapture of poetry. iMournful
legends have multiplied ; every churchyard has its ghost ; wherever a
man has been murdered his spirit appears. ^Many dare not leave their
village after sunset. In the evening, before bed- time, people talk of the
coach which is seen drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions
and coachmen, or of imhappy spirits who, compelled to inhabit the
plain, under the sharp north-east wind, pray for the shelter of a hedge
or a valley. They dream terribly of death :

• To die, and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spiiit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribt)ea ice ;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds.
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst

234 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK H.

Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling : 'tis too horrible ! ' '

The greatest speak with a sad resignation of the infinite obscurity
which embraces our poor, short, glimmering Hfe, our life, which is but
a troubled dream ;^ the sad state of humanity, which is but passion,
madness, and sorroAV ; the human being who is himself, perhaps, but a
vain phantom, a grievous sick man's dream. In their eyes we roll
down a fatal slope, where chance dashes us one against the other, and
the destiny Avhich drives us, only shatters after it has bUnded us. And
at the end of all is ' the silent grave, no conversation, no joyful tread
of friends, no voice of lovers, no careful father's counsel ; nothing's
heard, nor nothing is, but all oblivion, dust, and endless darkness.'^
If yet there were nothing, ' to die, to sleep ; to sleep, perchance to
dream.' To dream sadly, to fall into a nightmare like the nightmare
of life, like that in which we are struggling and crying to-day, panting
with hoarse throat ! — this is their idea of man and of existence, the
national idea, which fills the stage with calamities and despair, which
makes a display of tortures and massacres, which abounds in folly and
crime, which holds up death as the issue throughout. A threatening
and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy, like the sun,
only pierces through it, and upon them, strongly and at intervals.
They are different from the Latin race, and in the common Renaissance
they are regenerated otherwise than the Latin races, I'he free and full
development of the pure nature which, in Greece and Italy, ends in the
painting of beauty and happy energy, ends here in the painting of
ferocious energy, agony, and death.

IV.

Thus was this theatre produced ; a theatre unique in history, like
the admirable and fleeting epoch from which it sprang, the w^ork and
the picture of this young world, as natural, as unshackled, and as tragic
as itself When an original and national drama springs up, the poets
Avho establish it, carry in themselves the sentiments which it represents.
They display better than other men the public spirit, because the public
spirit is stronger in them than in other men. The passions which sur-
round them, break forth in their heart with a harsher or a juster cry,
and hence their voices become the voices of all. Chivalric and Catholic
Spain had her interpreters in her enthusiasts and her Don Quixotes :
in Calderon, first a soldier, afterwards a priest ; in Lope de Vega, a
volunteer at fifteen, a passionate lover, a wandering duellist, a soldier

^ Shakspeare, Mean lire for Measure, Act iii. 1. See also The Tempest, Hamlet,
Macbeth.

' ' We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.' — Tempest, iv. 1.
3 Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theodoret, Act iv. 1.

CHAP. II.] THE TIIEATEE. 235

of the Ai-mada, finally, a priest and familiar of the Holy Office ; so
ardent that he fasts till he is exhausted, faints with emotion while
singing mass, and in his flagellations stains the walls of his cell with
blood. Calm and noble Greece had in her principal tragic poet one of
the most accomplished and fortunate of her sons : ^ Sophocles, first in
song and palaestra ; who at fifteen sang, unclad, the p^an before the
trophy of Salamis, and who afterwards, as ambassador, general, ever
loving the gods and impassioned for his state, offered, in his life as in
his works, the spectacle of the incomparable harmony Avhich made the
beauty of the ancient world, and which the modern world will never
more attain to. Eloquent and worldly France, in the age which carried
the art of decency and conversation to its highest pitch, finds, to unite
her oratorical tragedies and to paint her drawing-room passions, the
most able craftsman of words : Racine, a courtier, a man of the world ;
the most capable, by the delicacy of his tact and the adaptation of his
style, of making men of the world and courtiers speak. Equally in
England the poets are in harmony with their works. Almost all are
Bohemians, born of the people,^ yet educated, and for the most part
having studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but poor, so that their educa-
tion contrasts with their condition. Ben Jonson is the step-son of a
bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer ; Marlowe is the son of a shoe-
maker ; Shakspeare of a woollen merchant ; Massinger of a servant.'^
They live as they can, get into debt, write for their bread, go on the
stage. Peele, Lodge, Marlowe, Jonson, Shakspeare, Heywood, are
actors; most of the details Avhich we have of their lives are taken from
the journal of Henslowe, an old pawnbroker, later a money-lender and
manager of a theatre,, who gives them work, advances money to them,
receives their manuscripts or their wardrobes as security. For a play
he gives seven or eight pounds; after the year 1600 prices rise, and
reach as high as twenty or twenty-five pounds. It is clear that, even
after this increase, the trade of author scarcely brings in bread. In
order to earn money, it was necessary, like Shakspeare, to become a
manager, to try to have a share in the property of a theatre ; but the
case is rare, and the life which they lead, a life of comedians and
actors, improvident, full of excess, lost amid debauchery and acts of
violence, amidst Avomen of evil fame, in contact with young profligates,
in provocations and misery, imagination and licence, generally leads

, , . ^iXaS'/fJaiiTaro; ko.) 6i.o(piX'fi;. — SCHOLIAST.

* Excejit Beaumont and Fletcher.

3 Hartley Coleridge, in his Introduction to tlie Dramatic Worlcs of Massinger
and Ford, says of Massinger's father : ' We are not certified in the situation which
he held in the noble household (Earl of Pembroke), hut we may be sure that it
was neither menial nor mean. Service in those days was not derogatory to gentle
birth.'— Tk.

O'?

6 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

them to exhaustion, poverty, and death. Men received enjoyment from
them, and neglected and despised them. One actor, for a poHtical allu-
sion, was sent to prison, and only just escaped losing his ears ; great men,
men in office, abused them like servants. Heywood, who played almost
every day, bound himself, in addition, to write a sheet daily, composes
Avretchedly in the taverns, labours and sweats like a true literary hack,
and dies leaving two hundred and twenty pieces, of which most are
lost. Kyd, one of the first, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last,
at the end of his career, was obliged to become again a schoolmaster.
jNIassinger dies unknown ; and in the parish register we find only this
sad mention of him : ' Philip Massinger, a stranger.' A few months
after the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask alms of the
City, because he had left nothing. Imagination, as Drummond said
of Ben Jonson, oppressed their reason ; it is the common failing of
poets. They wish to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoy-
ments ; their mood, their heart governs them ; in their life, as in their
works, impulses are irresistible ; desire comes suddenly, like a wave,
drowning reason, resistance — often even giving neither reason nor re-
sistance time to show themselves.'^ Many are roysterers, sad roysterers
of the same sort, as Musset and ]\Iurger, who give themselves up to
every passion, and shake off restraint ; capable of the purest and most
poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tenderness, and who
yet can only undermine their health and mar their glory. Such are
Nash, Decker, and Greene ; Nash, a fanciful satirist, who abused his
talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune ; Decker, who
passed three years in the King's Bench prison ; Greene, above all, a
pleasing wit, rich, graceful, who gave himself up to all pleasures,
publicly with tears confessing his vices,^ and the next moment plung-
ing into them again. These are mere androgynes, simple courtesans,
in manners, body, and heart. Quitting Cambridge, ' with good fellows
as free-living as himself,' Greene had travelled over Spain, Italy, ' in
which places he sawe and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to
declare.' You see the poor man is candid, not sparing himself ; he is
natural ; passionate in everything, repentance or otherwise ; eminently
inconstant ; made for self-contradiction, not self-correction. On his re-
turn he became, in London, a supporter of taverns, a haimter of evil
places. In his Groatsivorth of Wit bought with a Million of Jiejjentance
he says:

^ See, amongit others, The Woman Killed loith Kindness, by Heywood. Mrs.
Frankfort, so uj^riglit of heart, accepts WendoU at his first offer. Sir Francis
Acton, at the sight of her whom he wishes to dishonour, and wliom he hates, falls
* into an ecstasy, ' and dreams of nothing save marriage. Compare the sudden trans-
port of Juliet, Romeo, Macbeth, Miranda, etc. ; the counsel of Prospero to Fernando,
when he leaves him alone for a moment with Miranda.

2 Compare La Vie de JBoheme and Les Nuits d'Hiver, by lilurger ; Covfes-
nlon d'un Enfant du Sitcle, by A. de Musset.

CHAP. II.] THE THEATRE. 237

' I was dround in pride, wlioredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with
drunkenness was my onoly delight. . . • After I had wholly betaken me to the
penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise), I was so far from calling
upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and
blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of me than that
1 was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trilling pamphlets I penned
of love and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of living ; and for those my vaine
discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall
companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carows-
ing, and surfeting with me all the day long. ... If I may have my disire while
I live I am satisfied ; let me shift after death as I may. . . . "Hell!" quoth I ;
" what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the
company of better men than myselfe ; I shal also meete with some madde knaves
in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse. ...
If I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God, I
would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make merrie with the
shelles I found in them so long as they would last."'

A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious
lines the regularity and calm of an upright life ; then returns to London,
devours his property and his wife's fortune with ' a sorry ragged
queane,' in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans ; drink-
ing, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and orgies ;
writing for bread sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of his
wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy
of RoUa ; ^ very often disgusted with himself, seized with a fit of weep-
ing between two alehouses, and writing little pieces to accuse him-
self, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn young
people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. By this process
he was soon Avorn out ; six years were enough to exhaust him. An
indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings finished him.
If it had not been for his hostess, Avho succoured him, he ' would have
perished in the streets.' He lasted a little longer, and then his light
went out ; now and then he begged her ' pittifully for a penny pott
of malmesie;' he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and
Avhen his own was ' a washing,' he was obliged to borrow her husband's.
' His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges,' and the
poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding-
sheet, and six and fourpence for the burial. In such low places, on
such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced
its way, and amongst others, that of the first, of the most powerful, of
the true founder of the dramatic school, Christopher Marlowe.

^Marlowe was an ill- regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement
and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic
frenzy ; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In
this universal return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces
which brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas

^ The hero of one of Alfred de ]\Iusset's poems. — Til

238 THE EENAISSAXCE. [BOOK II.

■which give them their Avan:;nt, break forth impetuously. !Marlowe,
like Greene, like Kett/ is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes
the Trinity, declares Moses ' a juggler,' Christ more -worthy of death
than Barabbas, says that ' yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde
undertake both a more excellent and more admirable methode,' and
'almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme.'^
Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of
thought gave rise to in these new minds, who for the first time, after
so many centuries, dared to walk unfettered. From his father's shop,
crowded with children, from the stirrups and awls, he found himself at
Cambridge, probably through the patronage ot a great man, and on his
return to London, in want, amid the licence of the green-room, the
low houses and taverns, his head was in a ferment, and his passions
were heated. He turned actor ; but having broken his leg in a scene
of debauchery, he remained lame, and could no longer appear on the
boards. He openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was begun,
which, if time had not failed, would probably have brought him to
the stake. He made love to a drab, and trying to stab his rival, his
hand was turned, so that his o^\ti blade entered his eye and his brain,
and he died, still cursing and blaspheming. He was only thirty years
old. Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and
occupied in such a manner ! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of
murder, atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy soaked in
blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations
of the English stage, Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo, even
the Pericles of Shakspeare, reach the same height of extravagance,
force, and horror.^ It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall Schiller's
Bobbers, and how modem democracy has recognised for the first time
its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor.* So here the
characters struggle and jostle, stamp on the earth, gnash their teeth,
shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the drums beat,
coats of mail file past, armies clash together, men stab each other, or
themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats or lyrical figures;*

1 Bm-nt in 1589.

2 The translator always refers to Marlowe's Works, ed. Dj-ce, 3 vols., 1S50.
Append, i. vol. 3.

^ See especially Titus Andronicus, attributed to Shakspeare : there are parri-
cides, mothers whom they cause to eat their children, a yoimg girl who appears on
the stage violated, with her tongue and hands cut off.

* The chief character in Schiller's Bobbers, a virtuous brigand and redi'esser
of wrongs. — Tr.

* For in a field, whose superficies
Is cover'dwith a liquid purjile veil,
And sprinkled with the brains of slaughter'd men.
My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd ;
And he that means to place himself tlierein,

CHAP. II.] THE THEATKE. 239

kings die, straining a bass voice ; 'now doth ghastly ileath with greedy
talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my Ute.' Tlie
hero in Tamhurlaine the Great^ is seated on a chariot drawn by chained
kings, burns toAvns, drowns women and children, puts men to the
sword, and finally, seized with an invisible sickness, raves in monstrous
outcries against the 2;ods, whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he
would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless pride,
of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many devasta-
tions, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of savage
and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this
prodigality of carnage, this display of overloaded splendours and
colours, this railing of demoniac passions, this audacity of grand im-
piety. If in the dramas which succeed it. The Massacre at Paris, The
Jeiv of Malta, the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas
the Jew, maddened with hate, is thenceforth no longer human ; he has
been treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a
beast. He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words :

' Hast thou no trade ? then listen to my words,
And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee :
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear ;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thoia pity none,
But to th3-self smile when the Christians moan.
... I \valk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls :
Sometimes I go about and poison wells. . . .
Being young, I stiidied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian ;
There I enrich'd the priests witli burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
"With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells. . . .
I fdl'd the jails with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted liospitals ;
And every moon made some or other mad.
And now and then one hang himself for gi-ief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.'^

JMust armed wade up to the chin in blood. . . .
And I would strive to swim through pools of blood,
Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses,
Wliose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks,
Ere 1 would lose the title of a king. — Tamhurlaine, part ii. i. 3.
> The editor of ^larlowe's Works, Pickering, 1826, says in his Introduction:
'Both the matter and style of Tamhurlaine, however, difler materially from
^.larlowe's other compositions, and doubts have more than once been suggested as
to whether the play was properly assigned to him. "We think that Marlowe did
not write it.' Dyce is of a contrary opinion. — Tr.
2 Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, ii. p. 275 et passim.

2-iO THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK U.

All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles overj like a demon who re-
joices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the very
extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors ; and by
forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she takes
the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his daughter and the whole
convent. Two friars wish to denounce him, then to convert him ; he
strangles the first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by
profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy, and says:

' Pull amain,
'Tis neatly done, sir ; here's no print at all.
So, let him lean upon liis staff ; excellent ! lie stands as if
he were begging of bacon.' ^
* 0 mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottle-
nosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had. '^

The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the murder ;

* Barabas. Heaven bless me ! what, a friar a murderer 1
When shall you see a Jew commit the like ?

Ithamore. Why, a Turk could ha' done no more.

Bar. To-morrow is tlie sessions ; you shall to it —
Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence.

Friar. Villains, I am a sacred person ; touch me not.

Bar. The law shall touch you ; we'll but lead you, we :
'Las, I could weep at your calamity ! ' ^

Add to that two other poisonings, an infernal machine to blow up
the Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the Turkish commander in a well.
Barabas falls into it himself, and dies in the hot cauldron,* howling,
hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he had not done evil
enough. These are the ferocities of the middle-age ; we might find
them to this day among the companions of Ali Pacha, apong the pirates
of the Archipelago ; we retain pictures of them in the paintings of the
fifteenth century, which represent a king with his court, seated calmly
round a living man who is being flayed ; in the midst the flayer on
his knees is working conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the skin.^
All this is rough work, you will say ; these people kill too I'eadily,
and too quickly. It is on this very account that the painting is a true
one. For the specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's cha-
racters, is the abrupt commission of a deed ; they are children, robust
children. As a horse kicks out instead of speaking, so they pull out
their knives instead of an explanation. Nowadays we hardly know
what nature is; we' still keep in its place the benevolent prejudices of
the eighteenth century ; we only see it humanised by two centuries of
culture, and we take its acquired calm for an innate moderation. The
foundation of the natural man are irresistible impulses, passions, desires,

1 The Jew of Malta, iv. p. 311. ^ jjji^^ iii. p. 291. ^ /jj^. jy. p. 313,
'■ Up to this time, in England, poisoners were cast into a boiling caiildronu
" lii tho Museum of Ghent.

CHAP, n.] THE THEATP^E. 241 '

greeds ; all blind. He sees a woman,^ thinks Ker beautiful ; suddenly
he rushes towards her ; people try to restrain him, he kills these people,
gluts his passion, then thinks no more of it, save when at times r vague
picture of a moving lake of blood crosses his brain and makes him
gloomy. Sudden and extreme resolves are confused in his mind with
desire ; barely conceived of, the thing is done ; the wide interval which
a Frenchman places between the idea of an action and the action itself
is not to be found here.^ Barabas conceived murders, and straightway
murders were accomplished ; there is no deliberation, no pricks of con-
science ; that is how he commits a score of them ; his daughter leaves
him, he becomes unnatural, and poisons her ; his confidential servant
betrays him, he disguises himself, and poisons him. Rage seizes these
men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill. Benvenuto Cellini
relates how, being offended, he tried to restrain himself, but was nearly
suffocated ; and that he might not die of the torments, he rushed with
his dagger upon his opponent. So, in Edward II., the nobles immediately
appeal to arms ; all is excessive and unforeseen ; between two replies the
heart is turned upside down, transported to the extremes of hate or
tenderness. Edward, seeing his favourite Gaveston again, pours out
before him his treasure, casts his dignities at his feet, gives him his seal,
himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop of Coventry, suddenly cries :

' Throw oflf his golden mitre, rend his stole.
And in the channel christen him anew. ' ^

Then, when the queen supplicates:

' Fawn not on me, French strumpet !' get thee gone . . .
Speak not unto her : let her droop and pine. ' *

Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in a battle. The Duke
of Lancaster draws his sword on Gaveston to slay him, before the king;
Mortimer wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl ; the
noblemen will not even let a dog approack the prince, and rob them of
their rank. Lancaster says of Gaveston :

' . . . He comes not back.
Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd botly.

Warwick. And to behold so sweet a sight as that,
There's none here but would run his horse to death. ' ^

They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him 'at a bough;' they
refuse to let him speak a single minute Avitk the king. In vain they

1 See in the Jew of Malta the seduction of Ithamore, by Bellamira, a rough,
but truly admirable picture.

^ Nothing could be falser than Schiller's WilUam Tell, his hesitation and argu-
ments ; for a contrast, see Goethe's Goetz von Berllchingen. In 1377, Wiclif pleaded
in St. Paul's before the Bishop of London, and that raised a quarrel. The Duke of
Lancaster, "Wiclif s protector, 'threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the
hair ; ' and next day the furious crowd sacked the duke's palace. Pict. Hist. i. 780.

^ Marlowe, Edward the iSecond, i. p. 173. ■* Jbid. p. 186. ® Ibid. p. 188.

Q

242 THE EENAISSANCE. [cOOK IL

are entreated ; when they do at last consent, they recall their promise ;
it is a prey they want immediately, and Warwick, seizing him by force,
' strake off his head in a trench.' Those are the men of the middle-
age. They have the fierceness, the rage, the pride of big, well-fed,
thorough - bred bull-dogs. It is this sternness and impetuosity of
primitive passions which produced the Wars of tlie Eoses, and for
thirty years drove the nobles on each other's swords and to the block.

What is there beyond all these frenzies and gluttings of blood ?
The idea of crushing necessity and inevitable ruin in which everything
sinks and comes to an end. Mortimer, brought to the block, says with
a smile :

' Base Fortune, now I see, tliat in lliy wheel

There is a point, to which when men aspire,

They tumble lieadlong down : that point I touch'J,

And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,

"Why should I grieve at my declining fall ? —

Farewell, fair queen ; weep not for Jlortimer,

That sconis the world, and, as a traveller.

Goes to discover countries yet unknown.' '

Weigh well these grand words ; they are a cry from the heart, the pro-
found coniession of Marlowe, as also of Byron, and of the old sea-kings.
The northern paganism is fully expressed in this heroic and mournful
sigh ; it is thus they imagine the world so long as they remain on the
outside of Christianity, or as soon as they quit it. So also, when they
see in life but a battle of unchecked passions, and in death but a gloomy
sleep, perhaps filled with mournful dreams, there is no other supreme
good but a day of joy and victory. They glut themselves, shutting
their eyes to the issue, except that they may be swallowed up on the
morrow. That is the master-thought of Doctor Faustus, the greatest of
Marlowe's dramas ; to satisfy his soul, no matter at what price, or with
what results :

' A sound magician is a mighty god. . . .

How I am glutted with conceit of this ! . . .

I'll have them fly to India for gold,

Kansack the ocean for orient pearl. . . .

I'll have them read me strange philosophy.

And tell the secrets of all foreign kings ;

I'll have them wall all Germany witn brass.

And make swift Kliine circle fair Wertenberg. . . .

Like lions shall they guard us when we please ;

Like Almain rutters with their horsemen's staves.

Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides ;

Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,

Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows

Than have the white breasts of the queen of love. ' '

* Edward the Second, last scene, p. 2S8.

* Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, i. p. 9 et ijamm.

CHAP. II.J THE THEATRE. 213'

"What brilliant dreams, what desires, what vast or voluptuous wishes,
wortliy of a Roman Cajsar or an eastern poet, eddy in this teeming
brain! To satiate them, to obtain four-and-twenty years of power,
Faustus gives his soul, without fear, without need of temptation, at
the first outset, voluntarily, so sharp is the prick within:
' Had I as many souls as there be stars,

I'd give them all for Mephistophilis.

By him I'll be great empt-ror of the world,

And make a bridge thorough the moving air. . . .

Why shouldst thou not ? Is not thy soul thy own ? ' *

And with that he gives himself full swing: he wants to know every-
thing, to have everything ; a book in which he can behold all herbs
and trees which grow upon the earth ; another in which shall be drawn
all the constellations and planets ; another which shall bring him gold
v/hen he wills it, and 'the fairest courtezans;' another which summoas
' men in armour' ready to execute his commands, and which holds
' thunder, whirlwinds, thunder and lightning ' chained at his disposah
He is like a child, he stretches out his hands for everything shining;
then grieves to think of hell, then lets himself be diverted by shows :

' Faustus. 0, this feeds my soul !

Lucifer, Tut, faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.

Faustus. Oh, might I see hell, and return again,
How happy were I then ! ' . . . '^

He is conducted, being invisible, over the whole world ; lastly to
Rome, amongst the ceremonies of the Pope's court. Like a schoolboy
during a holiday, he has insatiable eyes, he forgets everything before
a pageant, he amuses himself in playing tricks, in giving the Pope a
box on the ear, in beating the monks, in performing magic tricks
before princes, finally in drinking, feasting, fiUing his belly, deadening
his thoughts. In his transport he becomes an atheist, and says there
is no hell, that those are ' old wives' tales.' Then suddenly the sad
idea knocks at the gates of his brain :

' I will renounce this magic, and repent . . .
Jly heart's so harden'd, I cannot repent :
Scarce can 1 name salvation, faith, or heaven.
But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears,
*' Faustus, thou art damn'd ! " then swords, and knives.
Poison, guns, halters, and envenom'd steel
Are laid before me to despatch myself.
Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.
Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander's love and CEnon's death ?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
AVith ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
JIade music with my MephistopliQis ?
AVhy should I die, then, or basely despair ?

' Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, i. pp. 22, 29. * lOid. o. 43.

244 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

I am Tesolv'd ; Faustus shall ne'er repent. —
Come Mephistopliilis, let us dispute agaiu.
And argue of divine astrology.
Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon ?
Are all celestial bodies but one globe.
As is the substance of this centric earth ?...''
* One thing ... let me crave of thee
To glut the longing of my heart's desire. . . .
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss !
Her lips suck forth my soul : see, where it flies ! —
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena. . . .
0 thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ! ' *

' All, my God, I would weep ! but the devil draws in my tears.
Gush forth blood, instead of tears ! yea, life and soul ! Oh, he stays
my tongue ! I would lift up my hands ; but see, they hold them, they
hold them ; Lucifer and Mephistophilis.' . . . ^

'Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually !
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven.
That time may cease, and midnight never come. . . ,
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
Oh, I'll leap up to my God ! — AYho pulls me down ? —
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament !
One drop would save my soul, half a drop : ah, my Christ,
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ !
Yet will I call on him. . . .

Ah, half the hour is past ! 'twill all be past anon. . . .
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd. ...
It strikes, it strikes. . . .
Oh soul, be chang'd into little water-drops.
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found ! ' *

There is the living, struggling, natural, personal man, not the philo-
sophic type which Goethe has created, but a primitive and genuine
man, hot-headed, fiery, the slave of his passions, the sport of his
dreams, wholly engrossed in the present, moulded by his lusts, con-
tradictions, and follies, who amidst noise and starts, cries of pleasure
and anguish, rolls, knowing it and willing it, down the slope and crags
of his precipice. The whole English drama is here, as a plant in its
seed, and Marlowe is to Shakspeare what Perugino was to Raphael.

1 Marlowe, Doctor Fau^tas, p. 37. ^ Ihid. p. 75. ^ Ibid. p. 78. ■• Ibid. p. SO.

CHAP. II.] THE THEATRE. 245

Insensibly art is being formed ; and toward the close of the century
it is complete. Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, Webster,
]\rassinger. Ford, Middleton, Heywood, appear together, or close upon
tach other, a new and favoured generation, flourishing largely in the
soil fertilised by the efforts of the generation which preceded them.
Thenceforth the scenes are developed and assume consistency ; the
characters cease to move by clockwork, the drama is no longer like a
piece of statuary. The poet who just before knew only how to strike or
kill, introduces now a sequence of situation and a rationale in intrigue.
lie begins to prepare the way for sentiments, to forewarn us of events,
to combine effects, and we find a theatre at last, the most complete,
the most life-like, and also the most strange that ever existed.

We must follow its formation, and regard the drama on the ground
where it was formed, namely, in the mind of its authors. What was
going on in these minds? What sorts of ideas were born there, and
how were they born ? In the first place, they see the event, whatever
it be, and they see it as it is ; I mean that they have it within them-
selves, with its persons and details, beautiful and ugly, even dull and
grotesque. If it is a trial, the judge is there, in their minds, in such
a place, with his physiognomy and his warts ; the pleader in such a
place, with his spectacles and brief-bag ; the accused is opposite,
stooping and remorseful ; each with his friends, cobblers, or lords ;
then the buzzing crowd behind, all with their grinning faces, their
astonished or kindling eyes.^ It is a genuine trial which they imagine,
a trial like those they have seen before the justice, where they cried
or shouted as witnesses or interested parties, with their qi;ibbling terms,
their pros and cons, the scribblings, the sharp voices of the counsel,
the stamping of feet, the crowding, the smell of their fellow-men, and
so forth. The endless myriads of circumstances which accompany
and obscure every event, crowd round that event in their heads, and
nr)t merely the externals, that is, the sensible and picturesque traits,
tlie particular colours and costumes, but also, and chiefly, the in-
ternals, that is, the motions of anger and joy, the secret tumult of
the soul, the ebb and flow of ideas and passions which darken the
face, swell the veins, and make the teeth grind, the fists clench, which
urge or restrain a man. They see all the details, the tides that sway
a man, one from without, another from within, one over another, one
within another, both together without faltering and without ceasing.
And what is this vision but sympathy, an imitative sympathy, which
puts us in another's place, which carries over their agitations to our own
breasts, which makes our life a little world, able to reproduce the great
one in abstract? Like the characters they imagine, poets and spectators

' See the trial of Vittoria Coronibona, of Virginia in Webster, of Coriolanua
and Julias Csesai- in Shakspeare.

24G THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

make gestures, raise tlielr voices, act. No speech or story can show their
inner mood, but it is tlie getting up of the play which can manifest it.
As some men find language for their ideas, so these act and mimic
them ; theatrical and figured representation is their genuine speech : all
other expression, the lyrical song of ^schylus, the reflective symbolism
of Goethe, the oratorical development of liacine, would be impossible
for them. Involuntarily, instantaneously, without forecast, they cut
life into scenes, and carry it in pieces on the boards ; this goes so
far, that often a mere character becomes an actor,^ playing a part
within a part ; the scenic faculty is the natural form of their mind.
Under the effort of this instinct, all the accessory parts of the drama
come before the footlights and expand under our eyes. A battle has
been fought ; instead of relating it, they bring it before the public,
trumpets and drums, mingling crowds, slaushtering combatants. A
shipwreck happens ; straightway the ship is before the spectator, with
the sailors' oaths, the technical orders of the helmsman. Of all the
details of human life,^ tavern-racket and statesmen's councils, scullion
jests and court processions, domestic tenderness and pandering, — none
is too small or too high : these things exist in life — let them exist on
the stage, each in full, in the rough, atrocious, or absurd, just as it is,
no matter how. Neither in Greece, nor Italy, nor Spain, nor France,
has an art been seen which tried so boldly to express the soul, with
the soul's most intimate relations — the truth, and the whole truth.

How did they succeed, and what is this new art which confounds
all ordinary rules? It is an art for all that, since it is natural; a great
art, since it embraces more things, and that more deeply than others
do, like the art of Rembrandt and Rubens ; but like theirs, it is a
Teutonic art, and one whose every step is in contrast with these of
classical art. What the Greeks and Romans, the originators of the
latter, sought in everything, was propriety and order, monuments,
statues and paintings, the theatre, eloquence and poetry : from Sophocles
to Racine, they shaped all their work in the same mould, and attained
beauty by the same method. In the infinite entanglement and com-
plexity of things, they grasped a small number of simple ideas, which
they embraced in a small nimiber of simple representations, so that the
vast confused vegetation of life is presented to the mind from that time
forth, pruned and reduced, and perhaps easily embraced by a single
glance. A square of walls with rows of similar columns ; a symmetrical
group of draped or undraped forms ; a young upright man raising one
arm ; a wounded warrior who will not return to the camp, though they
beseech him : this, in their noblest epoch, was their architecture, their
painting, their sculpture, and their theatre. No poetry but a few senti-
ments slightly complex, always natural, not toned down, intelligible to

^ Falstaff in Shakspeare ; the queen in London, by Greene and Decker ;
Rosalind in Shakspeare.

^ In Webster's Duchess of Malji there is an admirable accouchement scene.

CHAP. II.] THE THEATRE. ' 247

all ; no eloquence but a continuous argument, a limited vocabulary, the
loftiest ideas brought down to their sensible origin, so that children can
understand such eloquence and feel such poetry ; and in this sense they
are classical.^ In the hands of Frenchmen, the last inheritors of the
simple art, these great legacies of antiquity undergo no change. If
poetic genius is less, the structure of mind has not altered. Racine
puts on the stage a unique action, Avhose details he proportions, and
■whose course he regulates ; no incident, nothing unforeseen, no appen-
dices or incongruities ; no secondary intrigue. The subordinate parts
are effaced ; at the most four or five principal characters, the fewest
possible ; the rest, reduced to the condition of confidants, take the tone
of their masters, and merely reply to them. All the scenes are held
together, and flow insensibly one into the other ; and every scene, like
the entire piece, has its order and progress. The tragedy is detached
symmetrically and clear from the midst of human life, like a complete
and solitary temple which limns its regular outline on the luminous azure
of the sky. In England all is different. All that the French call pro-
portion and fitness is wanting ; Englishmen do not trouble themselves
about them, they do not need them. There is no unity ; they leap sud-
denly over twenty years, or five hundred leagues. There are twenty scenes
in an act — we stumble Avithout preparation from one to the other, from
tragedy to buffoonery ; usually it appears as though the action gained no
ground ; the characters waste their time in conversation, dreaming, ex-
panding their parts. We were moved, anxious for the issue, and here
they bring us in quarrelling servants, lovers making poetry. Even the
dialogue and speeches, which one would think ought particularly to be of
a regular and contained flow of engrossing ideas, remain stagnant, or are
scattered in windings and deviations. At first sight we fancy Ave are not
advancing, we do not feel at every phrase that we have made a step.
There are none of those solid pleadings, none of those probing dis-
cussions, which moment by moment add reason to reason, objection to
objection ; one would say that they only kncAv hoAV to scold, to repeat
themselves, and to mark time. And the disorder is as great in general
as in particular things. They heap a Avhole reign, a complete Avar, an
entire novel, into a drama ; they cut up into scenes an English chronicle
or an Italian novel : to this their art is reduced ; the events matter
little ; Avhatever they are, they accept them. They have no idea of pro-
gressive and unique action. Two or three actions connected endwise,
or entangled one Avithin another, two or three incomplete endings badly
contrived, and opened up again ; no machinery but death, scattered right
and left and unioreseen : such is the logic of their metliod. The fact
is, that our logic, the Latin, fails them. Their mind does not march

' This is, in fact, the English view of the French mind, which is doubtless a
refinement, many times refined, of the classical spirit. But M. Taiue has seemingly
not taken into account such products as the Medea on the one hand, and the
works of Aristophanes and the Latin sensuahsts on the other. — Tii.

248 THE REXAISSAXCE. [eOOK H.

bj' the smooth and straightforward paths of rhetoric and eloquence. It
reaches the same end, but by other approaches. It is at once more
comprehensive and less regular than ours. It demands a conception
more complete, but less consecutive. It proceeds, not as with us, by a
line of uniform steps, but by sudden leaps and long pauses. It does
not rest satisfied with a simple idea drawn from a complex fact, but
exacts the complex fact entire, with its numberless particularities, its
interminable ramifications. It would see in man not a general passion —
ambition, anger, or love; not a pure quality — happiness, avarice, folly;
but a character, that is, the imprint, wonderfully complicated, which
inheritance, temperament, education, calling, the age, society, conver-
sation, habits, have stamped on every man ; an incommunicable and
individual imprint, which, once stamped in a man, is not found again
in any other. It would see in the hero not only the hero, but the in-
dividual, with his manner of walking, drinking, swearing, blowing his
nose; with the tone of his voice, whether he is thin or fat;^ and thus
plunges to the bottom of things, with every look, as by a miner's deep
shaft. This sunk, it little cares whether the second shaft be two paces
or a hundred from the first; enough that it reaches the same depth,
and serves equally well to display the inner and invisible layer. Logic
is here from beneath, not from above. It is the unity of a character
which binds the two acts of a person, as the unity of an impression con-
nects the two scenes of a drama. To speak exactly, the spectator is
like a man whom one should lead along a wall pierced at separate in-
tervals with little windows 5 at every window he catches for an instant
a glimpse of a new landscape, with its million details : the walk over, if
he is of Latin race and training, he finds a medley of images jostling in
his head, and asks for a map that he may recollect himself ; if he is of
German race and training, he perceives as a whole, by a natural con-
centration, the wide country of which he has only seen the fragments.
Such a conception, by the multitude of details which it has combined,
and by the length of the vistas which it embraces, is a half-vision which
shakes the soul. "What these works are about to show us is, with what
energy, what disdain of contrivance, what vehemence of truth, it dares
to smite and hammer the human medal ; with what liberty it is able
to reproduce the full prominence of indistinct characters, and the

extreme flights of virgin nature.

VL

Let us consider the different personages which this art, so suited to
depict real manners, and so apt to paint the living soul, goes in search
of amidst the real manners and the living souls of its time and country.
They are of two kinds, as befits nature and the drama : one which pro-

» See Hamlet, Coriolanus, Hotspur. The queen in Hamlet (v. 2) says :
' He (Hamlet) 's fat, and scant of breath.'

CILU'. n.] THE THEATKE. 219

duces terror, the otlier wliicli produces pity; these graceful and feminine,
those manly and violent. All the differences of sex, all the extremes of
lite, all the resources of the stage, are embraced in this contrast ; and if
ever there was a complete contrast, it is here.

The reader must study for himself some of these pieces, or he will
have no idea of the fury into -which the stage is hurled ; force and
transport are driven every instant to the point of atrocity, and further
still, if there is any further. Assassinations, poisonings, tortures, out-
cries of madness and rage ; no passion and no sufYering are too extreme
for their energy or their effort. Anger is with them a madness, ambi-
tion a frenzy, love a delirium. Hippolyto, who has lost his mistress,
says, ' "Were thine eyes clear as mine, thou might'st behold her, watch-
ing upon yon battlements of stars, how I observe them.'^ Aretus, to be
avenged on Valentinian, poisons him after poisoning himself, and with
the death-rattle in his throat, is brought to his enemy's side, to give him
a foretaste of agony. Queen Brunhalt has panders with her on the stage,
and causes her two sons to slay each other. Death everywhere ; at the
close of every play, all the great people wade in blood : with slaughter
and butcheries, the stage becomes a field of battle or a burial-ground.^
Shall I describe a few of these tragedies? In the Duke of Milan, Fran-
cesco, to avenge his sister, who has been seduced, wishes to seduce in
his turn the Duchess Marcelia, wife of Sforza, the seducer; he desires
Ler, he will have her ; he says to her, with cries of love and rage :
' For with, this arm I'll swim through seas of blood.

Or make a bridge, arch'd with the bones of men,

But I will grasp my aims in you, my dearest.

Dearest, and best of women ! ' ^

For he wishes to strike the duke through her, whether she lives or
dies, if not by dishonour, at least by murder ; the first is as good as
the second, nay better, for so he will do a greater injury. He calumni-
ates her, and the duke, who adores her, kills her ; then, being unde-
ceived, becomes a madman, will not believe she is dead, has the body
brought in, kneels before it, rages and weeps. He knows now the name
of the traitor, and at the thought of him he swoons or raves :
' I'll follow him to hell, but I will find him,
And then live a fourth Fury to torment him.
TJien, for this cursed hand and arm that guided
The wicked steel, Fll have them, joint by joint,
AVith burning irons sear'd off, which I will eat,
I being a vulture fit to taste such carrion.''*

Suddenly his speech is stopped, and he falls; Francesco has poisoned

1 Middleton, The Honest Whore, Part i. iv. 1.

^ Beaumont and Fletcher, Valentinian, Thiemj and TTieodoret. See Massinger's
Picture, which resembles ilusset's Barberine. Its crudity, the extraordinary and
repulsive energy, will show the difference of the two ages.

=* ilassinser's AVorks. ed. H. Coleridge, 1S59, Duke o/JIilan, ii. 1. * Ibid. v. i

250 THE EENAI&SANCE. [BOOK II.

him. Tlie duke dies, and the murderer is led to torture. There are
worse scenes than this ; to find sentiments strong enough, they go to
those which change the nature of man. Massinger puts on the stage a
father who judges and condemns his daughter, stabbed by her husband ;
"Webster and Ford, a son who assassinates his mother ; Ford, the in-
cestuous loves of a brother and sister.^ Irresistible love overtakes
them; the ancient love of Pa?iphae and Myrrha, a kind of madness-
like enchantment, and beneath which the will entirely gives way.
Giovanni says :

' Lost ! I am lost ! My fates have doom'd my death f

The more 1 strive, I love ; the more 1 love.

The less I hope : 1 see my ruin certain. . . .

1 have even wearied heaven with pray'rs, dried np

The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd

My veins with daily fasts : what wit or art

Could counsel, 1 have practised ; but, alas !

1 find all these but dreams, and old men's tales.

To fright unsteady youth : I am still the same ;

Or 1 must speak, or burst.'*

What transports follow ! what fierce and bitter joys, and how short
too, how grievous and crossed with anguish, especially for her ! She
is married to another. Read for yourself the admirable and horrible
scene which represents the wedding night. She is pregnant, and
Soranzo, the husband, drags her along the ground, with curses, demand-
ing the name of her lover:

' Come strumpet, famous whore ! . . .

Harlot, rare, notable liarlot,
That with thy brazen face maintain'st thy sin.
Was there no man in Parma to be bawd
To your loose cunning whoredom else but I ?
Must your hot itch and pleurisy of lust,
The heyday of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be pick'd out to be cloak to your close tricks.
Your belly-sports ? — Now I must be tne dad
To all that gallimaufry that is stuff'd
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb ?
Why, must 1 ?

Annabella. Beastly man ! why? — 'tis thy fate.
I sued not to thee. ...

S. Tell me by whom.''

She gets excited, feels and cares for nothing more, refuses to tell the
name of her lover, and praises him in the following words :

^ Massinger, Tlie Fatal Dowry ; Webster and Ford, A late Murther of the Sonne
upon the Mother (a play not extant) ; Ford, 'Tis pity she's a Whore, bee aii,o
Ford's Broken Heart, with its sublime scenes of agony and madness.

2 Ford's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, 'Tis pity she's a Whore, i. 3.

8 Ibid. iv. 3

CIIAr. II.] THE THEATRE. 2J1

* A . Soft, 'twas not in my bargain.

Yet somewhat, sir, to stay your longing stomach
I am content t' acquaint you with: the Wan,
The more than man, that got this sprightly boy, —
(For 'tis a boy, and therefore glory, sir,
Your heir shall be a son. )

S. Damnable monster !

A. Nay, an you will not hear, I'll speak no more.

S. Yes, speak, and speak thy last.

A. A match, a match ! . . .
You, why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneel'd, to hear another name him.

S. What was he call'd i

A. We are not come to that ;
Let it suffice that you shall have the glory
To father what so brave a father got. . . .

S. Dost thou laugh ?
Come, whore, tell me your lover, or by trutli
I'll hew thy tlesh to shreds ; who is't ?' ^

She laughs ; the excess of shame and terror has given her courage ;
she insults him, she sings ; so like a woman !

* A. (Sings.) Che morte piu dolce che morire per amore.
S. Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag

Thy lust be-ieper'd body through the dust. . . .

(Hales her up and duwn.)
A. Be a gallant hangman. . . .

I leave revenge behind, and thou shalt feel it. . . .
{To Vasquez.) Pish, do not beg for me, I prize my life
As nothing ; if the man will needs be mad,
Why, let him take it. '-

In the end all is discovered, and the ivio lovers know they must die.
For the last time, they see each other in Annabella's chamber, listening
to the noise of the feast below which shall serve for their funeral-fea.'^t.
Giovanni, who has made his resolve like a madman, sees Annabella
richly dressed, dazzling. He regards her in silence, and remembers
the past. He weeps, and says :

' These are the funeral tears.
Shed on your grave ; these furrow'd up my cheeks
When first I lov'd and knew not how to woo. . . .
Give me your hand : how sweetly life doth rim
In these well-colour'd veins ! How constantly
These palms do promise health ! . . .
Kiss me again, forgive me. . . . Farewell. ' ^ . . .

He then stabs her, enters the banqueting room, with her heart upon
his dagger :

* 'Tispity sht'a a Whore, iv. 3. ^ i^ui. ^ J Lid. v. i.

252 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

' Soranzo, see this heart, which was thy wife's.
Thus I exchange it royally for thine. ' ^

He kills him, and casting himself on the swords of banditti, dies. It
would seem that tragedy could go no further.

But it did go further ; for if these are melodramas, they are sincere,
composed, not like those of to-day, by Grub Street writers for peaceful
citizens, but by impassioned men, experienced in tragical arts, for a
violent, over-fed, melancholy race. From Shakspeare to Milton, Swift,
Hogarth, no race has been more glutted with crudities and horrors, and
its poets supply them plentifully; Ford less so than Webster ; the latter a
sombre man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be haunting tombs and
charnel-houses. ' Places in court,' he says, ' are but like beds in the
hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and
lower.' ^ Such are his images. No one has equalled Webster in creating
desperate characters, utter wretches, bitter misanthropes,^ in blackening
and blaspheming human life, above all, in depicting the shameless de-
pravity and refined ferocity of Italian manners.* The Duchess of
Malfi has secretly married her steward Antonio, and her brother learns
that she has children ; almost mad^ with rage and wounded pride, he
remains silent, waiting until he knows the name of the father; then he
arrives, means to kill her, but so that she shall taste the lees of death.
She must suffer much, but above all she must not die too quickly !
She must suffer in mind ; these griefs are worse than the body's. He
sends assassins to kill Antonio, and meanwhile comes to her in the
dark, with affectionate words ; pretends to be reconciled, and suddenly
shows her waxen figures, covered with wounds, whom she takes for
her slaughtered husband and children. She staggers under the blow,
and remains in gloom, without crying o-ut. Then she says :

' Good comfortahle fellow,
Persuade a wretch that's broke upon the wheel
To have all his bones new set ; entreat him live
To be executed again. Who must despatch me ? . . .

^ 'Tis pity she's a Whore, v. 6.

2 Webster's Works, ed. Dyce, IS 57, Duchess of Malfi, L 1.

^ The characters of Bosola, Flamiuio.

* See Stendhal CJironides of Italy, The Cenci, The Duchess of Palliano, and all
the biographies of the time ; of the Borgias, of Bianca Capello, of Vittoria Accoram-
boui, etc.

* Ferdinand, one of the brothers, says (ii. 5) :

' I would have their bodies
Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp'd,
That their curs'd snioke might not ascend to heaven ;
Or dip the sheets they lie in in pitch or sulphur,
Wrap them in't, and then light them as a match ;
Or else to boil their bastard to a cullis.
And give't his lecherous father to renew
The sin of hi^ bacL'

CnAP. II.] THE TIIEATnE. 253

Jjosola. Come, be of comfort, I will save your life.

Duchess. Indeed, I have not leisure to tend so small a business.

B. Now, by my life, I pity you.

D. Thou art a fool, then,
To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched
As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers. ' ' . . .

Slow words, spoken in a constrained voice, as in a dream, or as if slie
were speaking of a third person. Her brother sends to her a company
of madmen, who leap and howl and hover around her in mournful wise ;
a pitiful sight, calculated to unseat the reason ; a kind of foretaste df
hell. She says nothing, looking upon them ; her heart is dead, her
eyes fixed :

* CarioJa. "What think you of, madam ?

Duchess. Of nothing :
When I muse thus, I sleep.

C. Like a madman, with your eyes open ?

D. Dost thou think we shall know one another
In th' other world ?

C. Yes, out of question.

D. 0, that it were possible we might

But hold some two days' conference with the dead !

From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure,

I never shall know here. I'll tell thee a miracle ;

I am not mad yet. . . .

The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass.

The earth of flaming sulphur, j'et I am not mad.

I am acquainted with sad misery

As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar. ' * . . .

In this state, the limbs, like those of a condemned, still quiver, but the
sensibility is worn out ; the miserable body only stirs mechanically ; it
has suffered too much. At last the gravedigger comes with executioners,
a coffin, and they sing before her a funeral dirge :

' Duchess. Farewell, Cariola . . .
I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syn;p for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep. — Now, what you please:
What death ?

Bosola. Strangling ; here are your executioners.

D. I forgive them :
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' th' lungs
Would do as miich as they do. . . . My body
Bestow upon my women, will you ? . . .
Go, tell my brothers, Avhen I am laid out.
They then may feed in quiet. ' ^

After the mistress the maid ; the latter cries and struggles :

» Duchess o/Malfi, iv. 1. « j^d^ iy, 2. » JbUl,

204 THE RENAISSANCE. [cOOK II.

• Cariola. 1 will not die ; I must not ; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.

\st Executioner. Here's your wedding-ring.

C. If you kill me now,
I am damn'd. I have not been at confession
This two years.

B. When?»

C. 1 am quick with child. ' '

Tliey strangle her also, and the two children of the duchess. Antonio
is assassinated ; the cardinal and his mistress, the duke and his confidant,
are poisoned or butchered ; and the solemn words of the dying, in the
midst of this butchery, utter, as from funereal trumpets, a general curse
upon existence :

' We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves.
That, ruin'd, yield no echo. Fare you weU. . . .
0, this gloomy world !
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness.
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live !''..,

* In all our quest of greatness.
Like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care,
AVe follow after bubbles blown in the air.
rieasm'e of life, what is't ? only the good hours
Of an ague ; merely a preparative to rest,
To endure vexation. . . .
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust,**

You will find nothing sadder or greater from the Edda to Lord Bvron.
We can well imagine what powerful characters are necessary to
siistain these terrible dramas. All these personages are ready for ex-
treme acts ; their resolves break forth like blows of a sword ; we follow,
meet at every change of scene their glowing eyes, wan lips, the starting
of their muscles, the tension of their whole frame. The unrestraint of
their wills contracts their violent hands, and their accumulated passion
breaks out in thunder, which tears and ravages all around them, and in
their own hearts. We know them, the heroes of this tragic population,
lago, Eichard in.. Lady Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hotspur, full of
genius, courage, desire, generally enraged and criminal, always self-
driven to the tomb. There are as many around Shakspeare as in his
own works. Let me exhibit one more, again in the same man, Webster.
jN'o one, except Shakspeare, has seen further forward into the depths of
diabolical and uncliained nature. The ' White Devil' is the name wliich
he gives to his heroine. His Vittoria Corombona receives as her lover
the Duke of Brachiano, and at the first interview dreams of the issue :

^ 'When,' an exclamation of impatience, equivalent to 'make haste,' very
common among the old English dramatists. — Tu.

2 Duchess of Malfi, iv. 2. ^ Ibid. y. 5. * Hid. v. 4. and 5.

CHAP. II.] THE T1IE.\TKE. 255

• To pass away the time, I'll tell your grace
A dream I had last night.'

It is certainly well related, and still better chosen, of deep meaning and
very clear import. Her brother Flaminio says, aside :

' Excellent de\-il ! she hath taught him iu a dream
To make away his duchess and her husband.' ^

In short, her husband, Camillo, is strangled, the duchess poisoned, and
Vittoria, accused of the two crimes, is brought before the tribunal.
Step by step, like a soldier brought to bay with his back against a
wall, she defends herself, refuting and def}ing advocates and judges,
incapable of blenching or quailing, clear in mind, ready in word, amid
insults and proofs, even menaced with death on the scaffold. The
advocate begins to speak in Latin.

• Vittoria. Pray, my lord, let him speak his usual tongue ;
I'll make no answer else.

Francisco de Mcdkls. Why, you understand Latin.
V. I do, sir ; but amongst this auditory
"Which come to hear my cause, the half or ]nore
]\Iay be ignorant iu't.'

She wants a duel, bare-breasted, in open day, and challenges the advocate:
' I am at the mark, sir : I'll give aim to you,
Aud tell you how near you shoot. '

She mocks his speech, insults him, with biting irony :

' Surely, my lords, this lawyer here hath swallow'd
Some pothecaries' bills, or proclamations ;
And now the hard and undigestible words
Come up, like stones we use give hawks for physic :
AVhy, this is Welsh to Latin.'

Then, to the strongest adjuration of the judges:

' To the point.
Find me guilty, sever head from body,
AVe'U part good friends : I scorn to hold my life
At yours, or any man's entreaty, sir. . . .
These are but feigned shadows of my evils :
Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils ;
I am past such needless palsy. For your names
Of whore and murderess, they proceed from you,
As if a man should spit against the wind ;
The filth retm-ns in's face. '

Argument for argument : she has a parry for every blow : a parry and

a thrust :

' But take you your course : it seems you have beggar'd me first,
And now would fain undo me. I have houses,
Jewels, and a poor remnant of crusadoes:
Would those would make you charitable ! '

' Vittoria CoromOonOf i. 2.

256 THE RENAISSANCE. [dOOK II.

Then, in a harslier voice :

' In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies ;
The sport would be more uoble.'

They condemn her to be shut up in a house of convertitcs :

' V. A house of convertites ! What's that ?

Monticelso. A house of penitent whores.

V. Do the noblemen in Eome
Erect it for their wives, that I am sent
To lodge there 2'

The sarcasm comes home like a sword-thrust ; then another behind it ;
then cries and curses. She will not bend, she will not weep. She
goes off erect, bitter and more haughty than ever :

' I win not weep ;
No, I do scorn to call up one poor tear
To fawn on your injustice : bear me hence
Unto this house of — . what's your mitigating title ?

Mont. Of convertites.

V. It shall not be a house of convertites ;
My mind shall make it honester to me
Than the Pope's palace, and more peaceable
Than thy soul, though thou art a cardinal.'^

A^-ainst her furious lover, Avho accuses her of unfaithfulness, she is as
strong as against her judges ; she copes with him, casts in his teeth the
death of his duchess, forces him to beg pardon, to marry her ; she will
play the comedy to the end, at the pistol's mouth, with the shameless-
ness and courage of a courtesan and an empress;^ snared at last, she
will be just as brave and more insulting at the dagger's point:

* Yes, I shall welcome death
As princes do some great ambassadors ;
I'U meet thy weapon half way. . . . 'Twas a manly blow ;
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant j
And tlien thou wilt be famous. ' ^

When a woman unsexes herself, her actions transcend man's, and there
is nothing which she will not suffer or dare.

VII.

Opposed to this band of tragic figures, with their contorted features,
brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop of sweet and timid figures,
tender before everything, the most graceful and loveworthy, whom it
has been given to man to depict. In Shakspeare you will meet tlaem
in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen ;

1 Viitoria Corombona, iii. 2.

" Compare Mme. Marneffe in Balzac's La Cousine BtiLt,

* Vittoria Corombona, v. last scene.

CHAP. II.] THE THEATr.E. 257

but tliey abound also in the others ; and it is a characteristic of the
race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to liave represented
them. By a singular coincidence, the women are more of women, the
men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go each to
it? extreme : in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resist-
ance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character ; in the other to
sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection,^ — a thing un-
known in distant lands, and in France especially: a woman here gives
herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obe-
dience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing and pretending only to be melted
and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and
for ever chosen.^ It is this, an old German instinct, which these great
painters of instinct diffuse here, one and all : Penthea, Dorothea, in Ford
and Greene ; Isabella and the Duchess of Malfi, in Webster ; Bianca,
Ordella, Arethusa, Juliana, Euphrasia, Amoret, and others, in Beaumont
and Fletcher : there are a score of them who, under the severest tests
and the strongest temptations, display this admirable power of self-
abandonment and devotion.^ The soul, in this race, is at once primitive
and serious. Women keep their candour longer than elsewhere. They
lose respect less quickly ; weigh worth and characters less suddenly :
they are less apt to think evil, and to take the measure of their hus-
bands. To this day, a great lady, accustomed to company, can blush in
the presence of an unknown man, and feel troubled like a little girl:
the blue eyes are dropt, and a child -like shame flies to her rosy cheeks.
English women have not the smartness, the boldness of ideas, the assur-
ance of bearing, the precocity, which with the French make of a young
girl, in six months, a woman of intrigue and the queen of a drawing-
room.'* A narrowed life and obedience are more easy to them. More
pliant and more sedentary, they are at the same time more concentrated
and introspective, more disposed to follow the noble dream called duty,
which is hardly generated in mankind but by silence of the senses.
They are not tempted by the voluptuous sweetness which in southern
countries is breathed out in the climate, in the sky, in the general
spectacle of things ; which dissolves every obstacle, which makes priva-

^ Hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie. In France it is bnt

an association of two comrades, tolerably aUke and tolerably equal, which gives
rise to endless disturbance and bickering.

'^ See the representation of this character throughout English and German
literature. Stendhal, an acute observer, saturated with Italian and French morals
and ideas, is astonished at this phenomenon. He understands nothing of this
kind of devotion, ' this slavery which English husbands have had the wit to
impose on their wives under the name of duty.' These are 'the manners of a
seraglio. ' See also Corinne, by Madame de Statil.

^ A perfect woman already: meek and patient. — Heywood.

* See, by way of contrast, all Moliere's women, so French ; even Agnes and little
Louison.

2jS the EEXAISSAiNCE.

|_DOC]

tion a snare and virtue a theory. They can rest content with dull
sensations, dispense with excitement, endure weariness ; and in this
monotony of a regulated existence, fall back upon themselves, -obey a
pure idea, employ all the force of their hearts in maintaining their
moral dignity. Thus supported by innocence and conscience, they in-
troduce into love a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry,
vanity, and flirtations : they do not lie, they are not affected. "When
they love, they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are binding them-
selves for their Avhole life. Thus understood, love becomes almost a
holy thing ; the spectator no longer wishes to be malicious or to jest ;
women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved
ones ; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion. Euphrasia, relating
her history to Philaster, says :

' ?Iy father oft would speak
Your worth and virtue ; and, as I did grow
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst
To see the man so prais'd ; but yet all this
Was but a maiden longing, to be lost
As soon as found ; till sitting in my window.
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates.
;BIy blood flew out, and back again as fast,
As I had pufFd it forth and suck'd it in
Like breath : Then was I call'd away in haste
To entertain you. Never was a man,
Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I : You left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk,
Far above singuig ! After you were gone,
T grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd
"What stm-'d it so : Alas ! I found it love ;
Yet far from lust ; for could I but have liv'd
In presence of you, I had had my end.' ^

She had disguised herself as a page,^ followed him, was his servant ;
and what greater happiness for a woman than to serve on her knees
the man she loves ? She let him scold her, threaten her with death,
wound her.

' Elest be that hand !
It meant me well. Again, for pity's sake ! ' ^

Do what he wiU, nothing but words of tenderness and adoration can
leave this heart, these wan lips. More, she takes upon herself a crime
of which he is accused, contradicts his assertions, is ready to die in his
place. Still more, she is of use to him with the Princess Arethusa,

^ Beaumant and Fletcher, "VYorks, ed. G. Colman, ."vols., 1811, Pidlaster, v. Z.
' Like Kaled in Byron's Lara. ^ Philaster, iv. 4.

CHAl*. II.] THE TIIEATKE. 259

whom he loves ; she ji;stifles her rival, brings cabout their marriage,
and asks no other thanks but that she may serve them both. And
strange to say, the princess is not jealous.

* Evphrasia. Never, Sir, mil I

Marry ; it is a thing within my vow :
But if I may have leave to serve the princess.
To see the virtues of her lord and her,
I shall have hope to live.

Arefhusa. . . . Come, live with me ;

Live free as I do. She that loves my lord,
Curst be the wife that hates her ! ' *

Wliat notion of love have they in this country? Whence happens
it that all selfishness, all vanity, all rancour, every little feeling, either
personal or base, flees at its approach ? How comes it that the soul
is given up wholly, without hesitation, without reserve, and only
dreams thenceforth of prostrating and annihilating itself, as in the
presence of a God? Biancha, thinking Cesario ruined, offers herself
to him as his wife; and learning that he is not so, gives him up straight-
way, without a murmur :

* Biancha. So dearly I respected both your fame
And quality, that I would first have perish'd
In my sick thoughts, tlian e'er have given consent
To have undone your fortunes, by inviting
A marriage with so mean a one as I am :
I should have died sure, and no creatm-e known
The sickness that had kill'd me. . . . Now since I know
There is no difference 'twixt your birth and mine,
Not much 'twixt our estates (if any be.
The advantage is on my side), I come willingly
To tender you the first-fruits of my heart.
And am content t' accept you for my husband.
Now when you are at lowest . . .

Cesario. Why, Biancha,

Eeport has cozen 'd thee ; I am not fallen
From my expected honours or possessions,
Tlio' from the hope of birth-right.

B. Are you not ?

Then I am lost again ! I have a suit too ;
You'll grant it, if you be a good man. . . .
Pray do not talk of aught what I have said t'ye. . . .

. . . Pity me ;
But never love me more. . . . I'll pray for you.
That you may have a virtuous wife, a fair one ;
And when I'm dead ... C. Fy, fy 1 B. Think on me sometimes
"With mercy for this trespass ! C. Let us kiss
At parting, as at coming. B. This I have

^ P/.lUuter, V. 5.

200 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK TI.

As a free dower to a virgin's grave.
All goodness dwell witli you ! ' ^

The Duchess of Brachiano is betrayed, insulted by her faithless
husband ; to shield him from the vengeance of her family, she takes
upon herself the blame of the rupture, purposely plays the shrew, and
leaving him at peace -with his courtesan, dies embracing his picture.
Arethtisa allows herself to be wounded by Philaster, stays the people
who would hold back the murderer's arm, declares that he has done
nothing, that it is not he, prays for him, loves him in spite of all, even
to the end, as though all his acts were sacred, as if he had power of
life and death over her. Ordella devotes herself, that the king, her
husband, may have children ; ^ she offers herself for a sacrifice, simply,
without grand words, with her whole heart :

* Ordella. Let it be what it may then, what it dare,
I have a mind will hazard it.

Thierry. But hark you ;

What may that woman merit, makes this blessing ?

O. Only her duty, sir. T. 'Tis terrible !

O. 'Tis so much the more noble.

T. 'Tis fuU of fearful shadows ! O. So is sleep, sir,
Or anything that's merely ours, and mortal ;
"We were begotten gods else : but those fears.
Feeling but once the iires of nobler thoughts,
Fly, like the shapes of the clouds we form, to nothing.

T. Suppose it death ! 0. I do. T. And endless pa: ting
"With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness,
With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason
For in the silent grave, no conversation,
No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,
No careful father's counsel, nothing's heard.
Nor nothing is, but all oblivion,
Dust and an endless darkness : and dare you, woman.
Desire this place ? O. 'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest :
Children begin it to us, strong men seek it.
And kings from height of all their painted glories
Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre. . . .

T. Then you can sutler ? 0. As willingly as say it.
T. Martell, a wonder !
Here's a woman that dares die. — ^Yet tell me.
Are you a wife ? 0. I am, sir. T. And have children ? —
She sighs, and weeps ! 0. Oh, none, sir. T. Dare you venture,
For a poor barren praise you ne'er shall hear.
To part with these sweet hopes ? 0. With all but Heaven. ' ^

Is not this grand? Can you understand how one human being can

^ Beaumont and Fletcher, The Fair Maid of the Inn, iv.
- Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theodoret, The Maid's Tragedy, PhU
laster. See also the part of Lucina in Valentinian,
^ Thierry and Theodoret, iv, 1.

CHAP. II.] THE THEATRE. 261

thus be separated from herself, forget and lose herself m another?
They do so lose themselves, as in an abyss. When they love in vain
and without hope, neither reason nor life resist; they languish, grow
mad, die like Ophelia. Aspasia, forlorn,

' Walks discontented, with her watry eyes
Lent on the earth. The unfrequented woods
Are her dehglit ; and when she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she with a sigh will tell
Her servants what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in ; and make her maids
Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse.
She carries with her an infectious grief
That strikes all her beholders ; she will sing
The mournful'st things that ever ear hath heard.
And sigh and sing again ; and when the rest
Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood.
Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room
"With laughter, she will with so sad a look
Bring forth a story of the silent death '
Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief
Will put in such a phrase, that, ere she end,
She'll send them weeping one by one away. ' *

Like a spectre about a tomb, she wanders for ever about the remains
of her slain lover, languishes, grows pale, swoons, ends by causing her-
self to be killed. Sadder still are those who, from duty or submission,
allow themselves to be led to other nuptials. They are not resigned,
do not recover, like Pauline in Polyeucte. They are shattered. Pen-
thea, in the Brolcen Heart, is as upright, but not so strong, as Pauline ;
she is the English wife, not the Roman, stoical and calm.^ She despairs,
sweetly, silently, and pines to death. In her innermost heart she holds
herself married to him to whom she has pledged her soul : it is the
marriage of the heart which in her eyes is alone genuine ; the other is
only disguised adultery. In marrying Bassanes she has sinned against
Orgilus ; moral infidelity is worse than legal infidelity, and thenceforth
she is fallen in her own eyes. She says to her brother :

^ Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid's Tragechj, i. 1.
^ Pauline says, in Corneille's Polyeucte (iii. 2) :

'Avant qu'abandonner mon ame a mes douleurs,
II me faut essay er la force de mes pleurs ;
En quality de femme ou de fille, j'espere
Qu'ils vaincront un epoux, ou flechiront un p^re.
Que si sur I'un et I'autre ils manquent de pouvoir,
Je ne prendrai conseil que de mon desespoir.
Apprends-moi cependant ce qu'ils ont fait au temple.*
"We could not find a more reasonable and reasoning woman. So with Elianta,
Henriette, in Mohere.

232 THE KENAISSAKCH [EOOK 11.

• Pray, kill me. . . .

Kill, me, pray ; nay, will you 1

Jihocles. Hew does thy lord esteem tliee ? P. Such an oiia
As only you have made me ; a faith-breaker,
A spotted whore ; forgive me, 1 am one —
In act, not in desires, the gods must witness. . . ,
For she that's wife to Orgilus, and lives
In known adultery with Bassanes,
Is, at the best, a whore. AVilt kill me now ? . , ,
The handmaid to the wages
Of country toil, drinks the untroubled streams
"With leaping kids, and with the bleating lambs,
And so allays her thirst secure ; whilst I
Quench my hot sighs with fleetings of my tears. ' •

With tragic greatness, from the height of her incurable grief, she
throws her gaze on life :

• My glass of life, sweet princess, hath few minutes
Eemaiuing to run down ; the sands are spent ;
For by an inward messenger 1 feel

The summons of departure short and certain. . . . Glories

Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams,

And shadows soon decaying ; on the stage

Of my mortality, my youth hath acted

Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length

By varied pleasures, sweeten 'd in the mixture,

But tragical in issue. . . . That remedy

Must be a winding-sheet, a fold of lead.

And some untrod-on corner in the earth.' -

There is no revolt, no bitterness ; she affectionately assists her brother
who has caused her unhappiness ; she tries to enable him to win the
woman he loves ; feminine kindness and sweetness overflow in her in
the depths of her despair. Love here is not despotic, passionate, as in
southern climes. It is only deep and sad ; the source of life is dried
up, that is all ; she lives no longer, because she cannot ; all goes by
degrees — health, reason, soul ; in the end she becomes mad, and behold
her dishevelled, with wide staring eyes, with broken words. For ten
days she has not slept, and will not eat again ; and the same fatal
thought continually atilicts her heart, amidst vague dreams of maternal
tenderness and happiness brought to nought, which come and go in her
mind like phantoms:

• Sure, if we were all sirens, we should sing pitifullj'.
And 'twere a comely music, when in parts

One sung another's kuell ; the turtle sighs
When he hath lost his mate ; and yet some say
He must be dead first : 'tis a fine deceit
To pass away in a dream ! indeed, I've slept

* ford's Broken Heart, iii. 2. * Ibid. iii. 5.

Cll-vr. II.] THE THEATRE. 2G3

With mine eyes open, a great while. No falsehood

Equals a broken faith ; thei'e's not a hair

Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet.

It sinks me to the grave : I must creep thither ;

The journey is not long. . . .

Since I was first a wife, I might have been

Mother to many pretty prattling babes ;

They would have smiled when I smiled ; and, for certrau,

I should have cried when they cried : — truly, brotlier.

My father would have pick'd me out a husband.

And then my little ones had been no bastards ;

But 'tis too late for me to marry now,

I am past child-bearing ; 'tis not my fault. . . .

Spare your hand ;
Believe me, I'll not hurt it. . . .
Complain not though I wring it hard : I'll kiss it ;
Oh, 'tis a fine soft palm ! — hark, in thine ear ;
Like whom do I look, prithee ? — nay, no whispering.
Goodness ! we had been happy ; too much happiness
Will make folk proud, they say. ...
There is no peace left for a ravish'd wife,
Widow'd by lawless marriage ; to all memory
Penthea's, poor Penthea's name is strumpeted. . . .
Forgive me ; Oh ! I faint. ' ^

Slie dies, imploring that some gentle voice may sing her a plaintive air,
a farewell ditty, a sweet funeral song. I know nothing in the drama
more pure and touching.

When we find a constitution of soul so new, and capable of such
great effects, it behoves us to look at the bodies. Man's extreme actions
come not from his will, but his nature.^ In order to understand the
great tensions of the whole machine, we must look upon the whole
machine, — I mean man's temperament, the manner in which his blood
flows, his nerves quiver, his muscles are interwoven : the moral
interprets the physical, and human qualities have their root in the
animal species. Consider then the species in this case — the race, that
is ; for the sisters of Shakspeare's Ophelia and Virginia, Goethe's Clara
and Margaret, Otway's Belvidera, Eichardson's Pamela, constitute a
race by themselves, soft and fair, Avith blue eyes, lily Avhiteness,
blushing, of timid delicacy, serious sweetness, framed to yield, bend,
cling. Their poets feel it clearly when they bring them on the
stage; they surround them with the poetry which becomes them, the
murmur of streams, the pendent willow-tresses, the frail and humid
flowers of the country, so like themselves :

' Ford's Broken Heart, iv. 2.

2 Schopenhauer, Metaphysics of Love and Death. Swift also said that, death
and love are the two things in which man is fundamentally irrational. In fact,
it is the species and the instinct which are displayed m them, not the will and
the Individ uaL

2Gi THE EEXAISSAXCE. [COOS II.

• Tlie flower, that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azure harebell, like thy veins ; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, -whom not to slander,
Out-SAveeten'd not thy breath. ' '■

They make them sweet, like the south wind, which with its gentle
breath causes the violets to bend their heads, abashed at the slightest
reproach, already half bowed do^vn by a tender and dreamy melan-
choly.' Philaster, speaking of Euphrasia, whom he takes for a page,
and who has disguised herself in order to be near him, says :

• Hunting the buck,
I found him sitting, by a fountain-side,
Of which he borrow'd some to quench bis thirst.
And paid the nymph again as iuucQ in tears.
A garland lay him by, made by Himself,
Of many several flowers, bred in ttie Day,
Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness
Delighted me : But ever when he tum'd
His tender eyes upon 'em, he would weep.
As if he meant to make 'em grow again.
Seeing such pretty helpless innocence
Dwell in his face, I ask'd him all his story.
He told me, that his parents gentle dy'd.
Leaving him to the mercy of the fields,
"WTiich gave him roots ; and of the crystal springs,
"WTiich did not stop their courses ; and the sun
"Which still, he thank'd him, jielded him his liglit.
Then he took up his garland, and did shew
What every flower, as country people hold,
Did signify ; and how all, order'd thus,
Expressed his grief ; And, to my thoughts, did read
The prettiest lecture of his country art
That could be wish'd. ... I gladly entertained him,
"Who was as glad to follow ; and have got
The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy
That ever master kept.' *

The idyl is self-produced among these human flowers ; the drama
delays before the angelic sweetness of their tenderness and modesty.
Sometimes even the idyl is born complete and pure, and the whole
theatre is occupied by a sentimental and poetical kind of opera.
There are two or three such in Shakspeare ; in rude Jonson, The
Sad Shepherd; in Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess. Eidiculous
titles nowadays, for they remind us of the interminable platitudes of
d'Urfe, or the afi'ected conceits of Florian ; charming titles, if we note
the sincere and overflowing poetry which they contain. Amoret, the
faithful shepherdess, lives in an imaginary country-, full of old gods,

^ C'jmbeUne, iv. 2.

* The death of Ophelia, the obsequies of Imogoa.

* Philaster, i. 1.

CHAP, n.] THE THEATKE. 265

yet English, like the Jewy verdant landscapes in which Rubens sets
his nymphs dancing :

' Thro' yon same bending plain

That flings his arms down to the main,

And thro' these thick woods have I run,

Whose bottom never kiss'd the sun

Since the lusty spring began.' . . .

* For to that holy wood is consecrate
A virtuous well, about whose flow'ry banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds,
By the pale moon-shine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying flesh and dull mortality.' . . .^

*See the dew-drops, how they kiss
Ev'ry little flower that is ;
Hanging on their velvet heads,
Like a rope of christal beads.
See the heavy clouds low falling,
And bright Hesperus down calling
The dead Night from underground.' -

These are the plants and the aspects of the ever fresh English country,
now enveloped in a pale diaphanous mist, now glistening under the
absorbing sun, teeming with plants so full of sap, so delicate, that in
the midst of their most brilliant splendour and their most luxuriant
life, we feel that to-morrow Avill wither them. There, on a summer-
night, the young men and girls, after their custom,^ go to gather flowers
and plight their troth. Amoret and Perigot are together ; Amoret,

' Fairer far
Than the chaste blushing morn, or that fair star
That guides the wand'ring seaman thro' the deep,'

modest like a virgin, and tender as a wife, says to Perigot :
' I do believe thee : 'Tis as hard for me
To think thee false, and harder, than for thee
To bold me foul. '4

Strongly as she is tried, her heart, once given, never draws back.
Perigot, deceived, driven to despair, persuaded that she is unchaste,
strikes her with his sword, and casts her bleeding to the ground.
The sullen Shepherd throws her into a Avell ; but the god lets fall ' a
drop from his watery locks' into the wound : the chaste flesh closes at
tiie touch of the divine water, and the maiden, recovering, goes once
more in search of him she loves :

' Speak if thou be here,
Jly Perigot ! Thy Amoret, thy dear,

1 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, i. 1.

2 Ibid. ii. 1.

^ See tho description in Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Timei.
* Beaiunont and Fletcher. The Faithful Shepherdess, i. 1.

2C6 THE EENMSSANCE. [BOOK II.

Calls on thy loved name. . . . 'Tis tliy friend,

Thy Amoret ; come hither to give end

To these consumings. Look up, gentle boy ;

I have forgot those pains and dear annoy

I suffer'd for thy sake, and am content

To be thy love again. Why hast thou rent

Those curled locks, where I have often hung

Ribbons, and damask roses, and have flun;;

Waters distill'd to make thee fresh and gay.

Sweeter than nosegays on a bridal day ?

Why dost thou cross thine arms, and hang thy face

Down to thy bosom, letting fall apace,

From those two little Heav'ns, upon the ground,

Show'rs of more price, more orient, and more round,

Than those that hang upon the moon's pale brow ?

Cease these complainings, shepherd ! I am now

The same I ever was, as kind and free.

And can forgive before you ask of me :

Indeed, I can and will. ' ^

Who could resist her sweet and sad smile ? Still deceived, Perigot
•wounds her again ; she falls, but without anger.

' So this work hath end !
Farewell, and live ! be constant to thy friend
That loves thee next. ' ^

A nymph cures her, and at last Perigot, disabused, comes and throws
himself on his knees before her. She stretches out her arms ; in spite
of all that he had done, she was not changed :

' I am thy love !
Thy Amoret, for evermore thy love !
Strike once more on my naked breast, I'll prove
As constant still. Oh, cou'dst thou love me yet,
How soon could I my fonner griefs forget ! ' ^

Such are the touching and poetical figures which these poets in-
troduce in their dramas, or in connection with their dramas, amidst
murders, assassinations, the clash of swords, the howl of slaughter, in
contrast with the furious men who adore or woo them, like them car-
ried to excess, transported by their tenderness as the others by their
violence : it is the complete exposition, the perfect opposition of the
feminine instinct led to self-abandoning recklessness, and the masculine
harshness led to murderous rage. Thus built up and thus provided,
the drama of the age was enabled to exhibit the inner depths of
man, and to set in motion the most powerful human emotions ; to
bring upon the stage Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia, the deat?.
of Desdemona and the butcheries of JSIacbeth,

^ The Faithful Shepherdess, iv. - Tbld.

^ Ibid. V. Compare, as an illustration of the contrast of races, the Italian
pastorals, Tasso's Arainta, Guarini's 11 Pastor Jido, etc.

cn.vr. iii.j BEX jOXSON. 237

CHAPTER III.

Ben Jonson.

I. Tlic Tiias'ers of the school, in the school and in their age — Jonson — His mood
— Character — Education — Fii'st ellorts — Struggles — Poverty — Sickness —
Death.
II. His learning — Classical tastes — Didactic characters — Good management of
his plots — Freedom and precision of his style — Vigour of his will and
passion.

III. His di-amas — Catiline and Sejamcs — How he was able to depict the personages

and the passions of the Roman decadence.

IV. His comedies — His reformation and theory of the theatre — His satirical

comedies — Volpone — ^Why these comedies are serious and warlike — How
they depict the passions of the Renaissance — His farces — The Silent Woman
— '\\Tiy these comedies are energetic and rude — How they conform with the
tastes of the Renaissance.
V. Limits of his talent — "Wherein he remains beneath Moliere — Want of higher
philosophy and comic gaiety — His imagination and fancy — Tlie Staple oj
News and Cynthia's Revels — How he treats the comedy of societj'^, and
lyrical comedy — His smaller poems — His masques — Theatrical and pictu-
resque manners of the court — The Sad Sheplierd — How Jonson remains a
poet to his death.
VI. General idea of Shakspeare — The fundamental idea in Shakspeare — Conditions
of human reason — Shakspeares master faculty — Conditions of exact repre-
sentation.

I.

WHEN a new civilisation brings a new art to liglit, there are about
a dozen men of talent who express the general idea, surround-
ing one o? two men of genius who express it thoroughly. Guilheui
de Castro, Peres de Montalvan, Tirso de ^lolina, Ruiz de Alarcon,
Augustin Moreto, surrounding Calderon and Lope de Vega; Grayer,
Van Oost, Romboust, Van Thulden, Van Dyk, Honthorst, surrounding
Rubens : Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, "Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, sur-
rounding Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. The first constitute the chorus,
the others are the leaders. They sing the same piece together, and at
times the chorus is equal to the solo ; but only at times. Thus, in the
dramas which I have just referred to, the poet occasionally reaches the
summit of his art, hits upon a complete character, a burst of sublime
passion ; then he falls back, gropes amid qualified successes, rough
sketches, feeble imitations, and at hist takes refuge in the tricks of his

2CS THE EEXAISSAXCE. [BOOK 11.

trade. It is not in liim, but in great men like Ben Jonson and Shak-
speare, that we must look for the attainment of his idea and the fulness
of his art. ' Numerous were the wit-combats,' says Fuller, ' betwixt
him (Shakspeare) and Ben Jonson, Avhich two I behold like a Spanish
great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the
former) was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow in his perfor-
mances. Shakspeare, Avith the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but
lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advan-
tage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.'^ Such
was Jonson physically and morally, and his portraits do but confirm
this just and lively sketch ; a vigorous, heavy, and uncouth person ; a
wide and long face, early marred by scurvy, a square jaw, enormous
cheeks ; his animal organs as much developed as those of his intellect :
the sour aspect of a man in a passion or on the verge of a passion ; to
which add the body of an athlete, about forty years of age, ' mountain
belly, ungracious gait.' Such was the outside, and the inside is like it.
He was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed, energetic,
combative, proud, often morose, and prone to strange splenetic imagi-
nations. He related to Drummond that for a whole nidit he imagined
' that he saw the Carthaginians and the Romans fighting on his great
toe.'" Not that he is melancholic by nature ; on the contrary, he loves
to escape from himself by a wide and blustering licence of merriment,
by copious and varied converse, assisted by good Canary wdne, with
which he drenches himself, and which ends by becoming a necessity to
him. These great phlegmatic butchers' frames require a generous liquor
to give them a tone, and to supply the place of the sun which they
lack. Expansive moreover, hospitable, even prodigal, with a frank
imprudent heartiness,^ making him forget himself wholly before Drum-
mond, his Scotch host, a vigorous and malicious pedant, who has
marred his ideas and vihfied his character. What we know of his life
is in harmony Avith his person : he suffered much, fought much, dared
much. He was studying at Cambridge, Avhen his father-in-law, a
bricklayer, recalled him, and set him to the trowel. He ran away,
enlisted as a volunteer into the army of the Low Countries, killed and
despoiled a man in single combat, 'in the view of both armies.' You
see he was a man of bodily action, and that he exercised his limbs in
early life.* On his return to England, at the age of nineteen, he went
on the stage for his livelihood, and occupied himself also in touching up
dramas. Having been provoked, he fought, was seriously wounded, but
killed his adversary ; after that, he was cast into prison, and found

' Fuller's WortJdes, ed. Xiittall, 1840, 3 vols., iii. 2S4.

* There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the life of Lord Castlereagh,
who afterwards cut his throat.

^ His character lies between those of Fielding and Samuel Johnson.

* At the age of forty-four he went to Scotland on loot.

ClUr. III.] BEN JOXSON. 269

himself ' nigh the gallows.' A Catholic priest visited and converted
him ; quitting his prison penniless, at twenty years of age, he married.
At last, two years later, he produced his first play. Children came,
he must earn them bread ; and he Avas not of the stuff to follow the
beaten track to the end, being persuaded that a fine philosophy ought
to be introduced into comedy, a special nobleness and dignity, — that it
was necessary to follow the example of the ancients, to imitate their
severity and their accuracy, to be above the theatrical racket and the
rude improbabilities in which the common herd delighted. He openly
proclaimed his intention in his prefaces, roundly railed at his rivals,
proudly set forth on the stage^ his doctrines, his morality, his character.
He thus made bitter enemies, who defamed him outrageously and before
their audiences, whom he exasperated by the violence of his satires,
and against Avhom he struggled without intermission to the end.
More, he constituted himself a judge of the public corruption, rudely
attacked the reigning vices, 'fearing no strumpets drugs, nor ruffians
stab.'" He treated his hearers like schoolboys, and spoke to them always
like a censor and a master. If necessary, he ventured further. His com-
panions, Marston and Chapman, had been put in prison for an irreverent
phrase in one of their pieces ; and the report spreading that their noses
and ears were to be slit, Jonson, Avho had taken part in the piece,
voluntarily made himself a prisoner, and obtained their pardon. On
his return, amid the feasting and rejoicing, his mother showed him a
violent poison which she intended to put into his drink, to save him
from the sentence ; and ' to show that she was not a coward,' adds
Jonson, ' she had resolved to drink first.' We see that in the matter
of vigorous actions he found examples in his own family. Toward
the end of his life, money failed him ; he was liberal, improvident ;
his pockets always had holes in them, as his hand Avas always open ;
though he had Avritten a vast quantity, he Avas obliged to Avrite still in
order to live. Paralysis came on, his scurvy Avas aggravated, dropsy
attacked him. He could not leave his room, nor walk Avithout assist-
ance. His last plays did not succeed. In the epilogue to the New
Ian he says :

* If you expect more than you had to-night,

The maker is sick and sad. . . .

All that his faint and fait 'ring tongue doth crave,

Is, that you not impute it to his brain.

That's yet unhurt, altho' set round with pain,

It cannot long hold out. '

His enemies brutally insulted him :

' Thy Pegasus . . .
He had bequeathed his belly unto thee,
To hold that little learning which is fled
Into thy guts from out thy emptye head. '

' Parts of Crltes and Asmr. ^ Every Man out of his Humour, L

o

70 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

Inigo Jones, his colleague, deprived him of the patronnge of the court.
He was obliged to beg a supply of money from the Lord Treasui'er,
then from the Earl of Newcastle :

• Disease, the enemy, and his engineers,
"Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers,
Have cast a ti'ench about me, now five years. . . .
The muse not peeps out, one of hundred days ;
But lies Mocked up and straitened, narrowed in.
Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win
Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been.'*

His wife and children were dead ; he lived alone, forsaken, served by
an old woman. Thus almost always, sadly and miserably is dragged out
and ends the last act of the human comedy. After so many years, after
so many sustained efforts, amid so much glory and genius, Ave find a
poor shattered body, drivelling and suffering, between a servant and a
priest.

n.

This is the life of a combatant, bravely endured, worthy of the seven-
teenth century by its crosses and its energy; courage and force abounded
throughout. Few Avriters have laboured more, and more conscienti-
ously ; his knowledge was vast, and in this age of great scholars he
was one of the best classics of his time, as deep as he was accurate
and thorough, having studied the minutest details of ancient hfe. It
was not enough for him to have stored himself from the best writers,
to have their whole works continually in his mind, to scatter his pages,
whether he would or no, with recollections of them. He dug into the
orators, critics, scholiasts, grammarians, and compilers of inferior rank ;
he picked up stray fragments ; he took characters, jokes, refinements,
from Athenaeus, Libanius, Philostratus. He had so well entered into
and digested the Greek and Latin ideas, that they were incorporated
with his own. They enter into his speech without discord ; they
spring forth in him as vigorous as at their first birth ; he originates
even Avhen he remembers. On every subject he had this thirst for
knoAvledge, and this gift of mastering knowledge. He knew alchemy
when he wrote the Alchemist. He is familiar with alembics, retorts,
receivers, as if he had passed his life seeking after the philosopher's
stone. He explains incineration, calcination, imbibition, rectification,
reverberation, as well as Agrippa and Paracelsus. If he speaks of cos-
metics,^ he brings out a shopful of them ; one might make out of his
plays a dictionary of the oaths and costumes of courtiers ; he seems to
have a specialty in all branches. A still greater proof of his force is,

^ Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. Bell, An Epistle Mendicant, to Richard, Lord
"Weston, Lord High Treasurer (1631), p. 24i.
* The Devil is mi Ass.

CHAP. III.] TEN JOXSON. 271

that his learning in nowise mars his vigour ; heavy as is the mass with
•which he loads himself, he carries it without stooping. This wonderful
compound of reading and observation suddenly begins to move, and
falls like a mountain on the overwhelmed reader. We must hear Sir
Epicure Jlammon unfold the vision of splendours and debauchery, in
Avhich he means to plunge, when he has learned to make gold. The
refined and unchecked impurities of the Eoman decadence, the splendid
obscenities of Heliogabalus, the gigantic fancies of luxury and lewdness,
tables of gold spread with foreign dainties, draughts of dissolved pearls,
nature devastated to provide a single dish, the crimes committed by
sensuality, against nature, reason, and justice, the delight in defying
and ovitraging law, — all these images pass before the eyesAvith the dash
of a torrent and the force of a great river. Phrase on phrase, event
upon event, ideas and facts crowd into the dialogue to paint a situation,
to give clearness to a character, produced from this deep memory,
directed by this solid logic, launched by this powerful reflection. It is
a pleasure to see him advance under the weight of so many observa-
tions and recollections, loaded with technical details and learned remi-
niscences, without deviation or pause, a genuine literary Leviathan,
like the war elephants which used to bear towers, men, weapons, ma-
chines on their backs, and ran as swiftly under the freight as a nimble
steed.

In the great dash of this heavy advance, he finds a path which suits
him. He has his style. Classical erudition and education made him a
classic, and he writes like his Greek models and his Eoman masters. The
more we study the Latin races and literatures in contrast with the Teu-
tonic, the more fully we become convinced that the proper and distinctive
gift of the first is the art of development, that is, of drawing up ideas
in connected rank, according to the rules of rhetoric and eloquence, by
studied transitions, with regular progress, without shock or discontinuity.
Jonson received from his acquaintance with the ancients the habit of
decomposing ideas, -unfolding them part by part in natural order, mak-
ing himself understood and believed. From the first thounht to the
final conclusion, he conducts the reader by a continuous and uniform
ascent. The track never fails with him, as with Shakspeare. • He does
not advance like the rest by sudden intuitions, but by consecutive
deductions ; we can walk with him without need of bounding, and we
are continually kept upon the straight path : antithesis of words unfolds
antithesis of thoughts ; symmetrical phrases guide the mind through
diflftcult ideas; they are like barriers set on either side of the ioad to
prevent our falling in the ditch. We do not meet on our way extra-
ordinary, sudden, brilliant images, which might dazzle or delay us ; we
travel on, enlightened by moderate and sustained metaphors. Jonson
has all the procedures of Latin art ; even, when he wishes it, especially
on Latin subjects, he has the last and most erudite, the brilliant con-
cision of Seneca and Lucan, the parallel equipoised, filed off antitheses,

272 THE EEXAissAxci:. [cook II.

the most happy and studied artifices of oratorical architecture.^ Other
poets for the most part are visionaries ; Jonson i? all but a logician.

Hence his talent, his successes, and his faults : if he has a better
style and better plots than the others, he is not, like them, a creator
of souls. He is too much of a theorist, too preoccupied by rules. His
argumentative habits spoil him when he seeks to shape and motion com-
plete, and living men. No one is capable of fashioning these unless
he possesses, like Shakspeare, the imagination of a seer. The human
being is so complex, that the logician who perceives his different ele-
ments in succession can hardly study them all, much less gather them
all in one flash, so as to produce the dramatic response or action in
which they are concentrated, and which would manifest them. To dis-
cover such actions and responses, we need a kind of inspiration and
fever. Then the mind Avcrk? as in a dream. The characters move
v.ithin the poet, almost involuntarily : he waits for them to speak,
he remains motionless, hearing their voices, withdrawn into himself, in
order that he may not disturb the drama which they are about to act
in his soul. That i? his artifice : to let them alone. He is altogether
astonished at their discourse ; as he observes them, he forgets that it is
he who invents them. Their mood, character, education, disposition of
mind, situation, attitude, and actions, make up to him so well-connected
a whole, and so readily unite into palpable and solid beings, that he
dares not attribute to his reflection or reasoning a creation so vast and
speedy. Beings are organised in hira as in nature, that is, of themselves,
and by a force which the combinations of his art could not replace.^
Jonson has nothing whereAvith to replace it but these combinations
of art. He chooses a general idea — cunning, folly, severity — and
makes a person out of it. This person is called Crites, Asper, Sordido,
Deliro, Pecunia, Subtil, and the transparent name indicates the logical
process which produced it. The poet took an abstract quality, and
putting together all the acts to which it may give rise, trots it out on
the stage in a man's dress. His characters, like those of la Bruyere
and Theophrastus, were hammered out of solid deductions. Now it is a
vice selected from the catalogue of moral philosophy, sensuality thirst-
ing for gold : this perverse double inclination becomes a personage, Sir
Epicure INIammon ; before the alchemist, before the famulus, before his
friend, before his mistress, in public or alone, all his words denote a
greed of pleasure and of gold, and they express nothing more.^ Now
it is a piece of madness gathered from the old sophists, a babbling
with horror of noise ; this form of mental pathology becomes a per-
sonage. Morose ; the poet has the air of a doctor who has undertaken

^ Sejanus, Catilina, passim,

^ Alfred de Musset, preface to La Coupe et les Levres. Plato : Ion.
^ Compare Sir Epicure Alammon with Baron Hulot from Balzac's Cousine Detie.
Balzac, who is learned like Jonson, creates real beings like Shakspeare.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 273

tlie task of recording exactly all the desires of speech, all the necessities
of silence, and of recording nothing else. Now he picks out a laughable
incident, an affectation, a species of folly, from the manners of the
dandies and the courtiers ; a mode of swearing, an extravagant style,
a habit of gesticulating, or any other oddity contracted by vanity or
fashion. The hero whom he covers with these eccentricities, is overloaded
by them. He disappears beneath his enormous trappings; he drags them
about with him everywhere ; he cannot get rid of them for an instant.
We no longer see the man under the dress; he is Uke a mannikin,
oppressed under a cloak, too heavy for him. Sometimes, doubtless, his
liabits of geometrical construction produce personages almost life-like.
Bobadil, the grave boaster; Captain Tucca, the begging bully, inventive
buffoon, ridiculous talker ; Amorphus the traveller, a pedantic doctor of
good manners, laden with eccentric phrases, create as much illusion as
one can wish ; but it is because they are flitting comicalities and low
characters. It is not necessary for a poet to study such creatures ; it
is enough that he discovers in them three or four leading features ; it
is of httle consequence if they always present themselves in the same
light : they produce laughter, like the Countess d' Escarhagnas or any of
the Fdcheux in Mohere ; we want nothing else of them. On the con-
trary, the others weary and repel us. They are stage-masks, not living
figures. Moulded into a fixed expression, they persist to the end of
the piece in their unvarying grimace or their eternal frown. A man
is not an abstract passion. He stamps the vices and virtues which he
possesses with his individual mark. These vices and virtues receive, on
entering into him, a bent and form which they have not in others. No
one is unmixed sensuality. Take a thousand sensualists, and you will
find a thousand modes of sensuality ; for there are a thousand paths, a
thousand circumstances and degrees, in sensuality. To make Sir Epi-
cure Mammon a real being, we must give him the kind of disposition,
the species of education, the manner of imagination, which produce
sensuality. When we wish to construct a man, we must dig down to
the foundations of mankind ; that is, we must define to ourselves the
structure of his bodily machine, and the primitive gait of his mind.
Jonson has not dug sufficiently deep, and his constructions are incom-
plete ; he has bmlt on the surface, and he has built but a single story.
He was not acquainted with man in his fulness, and he ignored man's
basis ; he put on the stage and gave a representation of moral treatises,
fragments of history, scraps of satire ; he did not stamp new beings on
the imagination of mankind.

He possesses all the other gifts, and in particular the classical ;
first of all, the talent for composition. For the first time we see a con-
cocted plot, a complete intrigue, with its beginning, middle, and end ;
subordinate actions well arranged, well combined ; an interest which
grows and never flags ; a leading truth which all the events combine to
demonstrate; a ruling idea which all the characters combine to illustrate;

S

274 THE RENAISSANCE. [eOOK II,

in short, an art like that which Moliere and Racine were about to apply
and teach. He does not, like Shakspeare, take a novel from Greene, a
chronicle from Holinshed, a life from Plutarch, promiscuously, to cut
them into scenes, irrespective of likelihood, indifferent as to order and
unity, caring only to set up men, at times wandering into poetic reveries,
at need finishing up the piece abruptly with a recognition or a butchery.
He governs himself and his characters ; he wills and he knows all that
they do, and all that he does. But beyond his habits of Latin regularity,
he possesses the great faculty of his age and race, — the sentiment of
nature and existence, the exact knowledge of precise detail, the power
in frankly and boldly handlmg frank passions. This gift is not wanting
in any writer of the time ; they do not fear words that are true, shock-
ing, and striking details of the bedchamber or medical study ; the
prudery of modern England and the refinement of monarchical France
veil not the nudity of their figures, or dim the colouring of their
pictures. They live freely, liberally, amidst living things ; they see
the ins and outs of lust, raging without shame, hypocrisy, or redeeming
softness ; and they exhibit it as they see it, Jonson as boldly as the
rest, occasionally more boldly than the rest, strengthened as he is by
the vigour and roughness of his athletic temperament, by the extraordi-
nary exactness and abundance of his observations and his knowledge.
Add yet his moral loftiness, his sourness, his powerful railing wrath,
exasperated and bitter against vice, his resolution strengthened by pride
and by conscience :

' "With an armed and resolved hand,
I'll strip the ragged follies of the time
Naked as at their birth . . . and with a whip of steel.
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.
I fear no mood stampt in a private brow,
When I am pleas'd t' unmask a public vice.
I fear no strumpets drugs, nor ruffians stab.
Should 1 detect their hateful luxuries ; ' ^

above all, a scorn of base compliance, a disdain for

' Those jaded wits
That run a broken pace for common hire,' — ^

an enthusiasm, or deep love of

* A happy muse,
Born on the wings of her immortal thought,
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,
And heats at heaven gates with her bright hoofs. ' '

Such are the energies which he brought to the drama and to comedy ;
they were great enough to ensure him a high position, and a position
apart.

Every Man out of Ids Humour, Prologue. ^ Poetaster, i. 2. * Ibid.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 275

III.

For whatever Jonson undertakes, whatever be his faults, haughti-
ness, rough-handling, predilection for morality and the past, antiquarian
and censorious instincts, he is never little or commonplace. It signities
nothing that in his Latinised tragedies, Sejaniis, Catiline^ he is fettered
by the worship of the old worn models of the Roman decadence ;
nothing that he plays the scholar, hammers out Ciceronian harangues,
hauls in choruses imitated from Seneca, holds forth in the style of Lucan
and the rhetoricians of the empire: he more than once attains a genuine
accent; through his pedantry, heaviness, literary adoration of the
ancients, nature forces its way; he lights, at his first attempt, on the
crudities, horrors, gigantic lechery, shameless depravity of imperial
Rome ; he takes in hand and sets in motion the lusts and ferocities, the
passions of courtesans and px'incesses, the daring of assassins and of
great men, which produced Messalina, Agrippina, Catiline, Tiberius.^
In the Rome which he places before us we go boldly and straight to
the end ; justice and pity oppose no barriers. Amid victorious anvl
slavish customs, human nature is upset ; corruption and crime are held
as marks of insight and energy. Observe how, in Sejamcs, assassination
is plotted and carried out with marvellous coolness. Livia discusses
with Sejanus the methods of poisoning her husband, in a clear style,
without circumlocution, as if the subject were how to gain a lawsuit
or how to serve up a dinner. There are no equivocations, no hesita-
tion, no remorse in the Rome of Tiberius. Glory and virtue consist in
power ; scruples are for common souls ; the mark of a lofty heart is to
desire all and to dare all. Macro says rightly :

' Men's fortune there is virtue ; reason their will ;
Their licence, law ; and their observance skill.
Occasion is their foil ; conscience, their stain ;
Proiit, their lustre : and what else is vain. ' ^

Sejanus addresses Livia thus:

' Royal lady, ...
Yet, now 1 see your wisdom, judgment, strength.
Quickness, and will, to apprehend the means
To your own good and gi-eatness, I protest
Myself through rarified, and turn'd all flame
In your affection. ' ^

These are the loves of the wolf and his mate ; he praises her for
being so ready to kiU. And observe in one moment the morals of a
prostitute appear behind the manners of the poisoner. Sejanus goes out,
and immediately, like a courtesan, Livia turns to her physician, saying :

* See the second Act of Catiline.

^ Tlie Fall of Sejanus, iii. last Scene. * Ihid. ii.

276 • THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK U.

* How do I look to-day ?

Eudemus. Excellent clear, believe it. Tliis same fucus
"Was well laid on. L. Methinks 'tis here not white.

E. Lend me your scarlet, lady. 'Tis the sun
Hath giv'n some little taint unto the ceruse,
You should have us'd of the white oil I gave you.
Sejanus, for your love ! His very name
Commandeth above Cupid or his shafts. . . .

'Tis now well, lady, you should
TTse of the dentifrice I prescrib'd you too,
To clear your teeth, and the prepar'd pomatum.
To smooth the skin. A lady cannot be
Too curious of her form, that still would hold
The heart of such a person, made her captive.
As you have this : who, to endear him more
In your clear eye, hath put away his wife . . .
Fair Apicata, and made spacious room
To your new pleasures. L. Have we not retum'd
That with our hate to Drusus, and discovery
Of all his counsels ? . . .

E. "Wlien will you take some physick, lady ? L. When
I shall, Eudemus : but let Drusus' drug
Be first prepar'd. E. "Were L5'gdus made, that's done. . . .
I'll send you a perfume, first to resolve
And procure sweat, and then prepare a bath
To cleanse and clear the cutis ; against when
I'll have an excellent new fucus made
Eesistive 'gainst the sun, the rain or wind,
"Which you shall lay on with a breath or oil,
As you best like, and last some fourteen Jiours.
This change came timely, lady, for your Uealth.''

He ends by congratulating her on lier approacliing change of husbands :
Drusus was injuring her complexion ; Sejanus is far preferable ; a
physiological and practical conclusion. The Eoman apothecary had on
the same shelf his medicine-chest, his chest of cosmetics, and his chest
of poisons.^

After this you find one after another all the scenes of Roman life
unfolded, the bargain of murder, the comedy of justice, the shameless-
ness of flattery, the anguish and vacillation of the senate. When
Sejanus wishes to buy a conscience, he questions, jokes, plays round
the oflfer he is about to make, throws it out as if in pleasantry, so as
to be able to withdraw it, if need be ; then, when the intelligent look
of the rascal, whom he is trafficking with, shows that he is understood :

^ The Fall of Sejanus, iL

" See Catiline, Act ii. ; a fine scene, no less frank and lively, on the dissipation
of the highei ranks in Rome.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 277

' Protest not.
Thy looks are vows to me. . . .
Thou art a man, made to make consuls. Go.'*

Elsewhere, the senator Latiaris brings to him his friend Sabinus, storms
before the latter against tyranny, openly expresses a desire for liberty,
provoking him to speak. Then two spies who were hid behind the
door, cast themselves on Sabinus, crying, ' Treason to Caesar 1 ' and
drag him, with his face covered, before the tribunal, thence to * be
thrown upon the Gemonies.' ^ So, when the senate is assembled,
Tiberius has chosen beforehand the accusers of Silius, and their parts
distributed to them. They mumble iu a corner, whilst aloud is heard,
in the emperor's presence :

' Caesar,
Live long and happy, great and royal Caesar ;
The gods preserve thee and thy modesty.
Thy wisdom and thy innocence. . . . Guard
His meekness, Jove, his piety, his care,
His bounty. '3

Then the herald cites the accused ; Varro, the consul, pronounces the
indictment ; Afer hurls upon them his bloodthirsty eloquence : the
senators get excited ; we see laid bare, as in Tacitus and Juvenal, the
depths of Roman serviUty, hypocrisy, insensibility, the venomous craft
of Tiberius. At last, after so many others, the turn of Sejanus comes.
The fathers anxiously assemble in the temple of Apollo ; for some days
past Tiberius has seemed to be trying to contradict himself; he has
removed the friend of his favourite, and next day sets his enemies in
high positions. They mark the face of Sejanus, and know not what
to anticipate ; Sejanus is troubled, then after a moment's cringing is
more arrogant than ever. The plots are confused, the rumours con-
tradictory. Macro alone is in the confidence of Tiberius, and soldiers
are seen, drawn up at the porch of the temple, ready to enter at the
earliest sound. The formula of convocation is read, and the council
marks the names of those who do not respond to the summons ; then
Kegulus addresses them, and announces that Caesar

* Propounds to this grave senate, the bestowing
Upon the man he loves, honour'd Sejanus,
The tribunitial dignity and power :
Here are his letters, signed with his signet.
What pleaseth now the Fathers to be done ! '

* Senators. Eead, read 'em, open, publicly read 'em.

Cotta. Caesar hath honour'd his own greatness much
In thinking of this act. Trio, It was a thought
Happy, and worthy Caesar. Latiaris. And the lord
As worthy it, on whom it is directed !

^ The Fall of Sejanus, i. 2 /^j^. iy, 3 JOd. iii.

278 THE RENAISSANCE, [BOOK IL

ffaterius. Most worthj^ ! Sanqu'mms. Rome did never "boast tlie virtue
That could give envy bounds, but his : Sejanus. —

1st Sen. Honour'd and noble ! 2d Sen. Good and great Sejanus !
Prcecones. Silence ! ' ^

Tiberius' letter is read. First, long obscure and vague phrases,
mingled ^vitll indirect protests and accusations, foreboding something
and revealing nothing. Suddenly comes an insinuation against Se-
janus. The fathers are alarmed, but the next line reassures them.
A word or two further on, the same insinuation is repeated with
greater exactness. ' Some there be that would interpret this his
public severity to be particular ambition ; and that, under a pretext
of service to us, he doth but remove his own lets : alledging the
strengths he hath made to himself, by the prcetorian soldiers, by his
faction in court and senate, by the offices he holds himself, and con-
fers on others, his popularity and dependents, his urging (and almost
driving) us to this our unwilling retirement, and lastly, his aspiring
to be our son-in-law.' The fathers rise : ' This 's strange ! ' Their
eager eyes are fixed on the letter, on Sejanus, who perspires and grows
pale ; their thoughts are busy with conjectures, and the words of the
letter fall one by one, amidst a sepulchral silence, caught as they fall
with a devouring eagerness of attention. The senators anxiously weigh
the value of these varying expressions, fearing to compromise them-
selves Avith the favourite or with the prince, all feeling that they must
understand, if they value their lives.

' " Your wisdoms, Conscript Fathers, are able to examine, and censure these
suggestions. But, were they left to our absolving voice, we dui'st pronounce them,
as we think them, most malicious. " •

Senator. 0, he has restor'd all ; list.

Prceco. ' ' Yet are they offer 'd to be a verr'd, and on the lives of the informers. " ' *

At this word the letter becomes menacing. Those next Sejanus
forsake him. ' Sit farther. ... Let's remove ! ' The heavy Sanquinius
leaps panting over the benches. The soldiers come in ; then Macro.
And now, at last, the letter orders the arrest of Sejanus.

' Eegulus. Take him hence.
And all the gods guard Caesar ! Trio. Take him hence.

Hateriics. Hence. Cotta. To the dungeon with him. San. He deserves it.

Sen. Crown all our doors with bays. San. And let an ox,
"With gilded horns and garlands, straight be led
Unto the Capitol. Hat. And sacrific'd
To Jove, for Caesar's safety. Trio. All our gods
Be present still to Caesar ! . . .

Cotta. Let all the traitor's titles be defac'd.

Trio. His images and statues be pull'd down. . . .

Tlie Fall of Sejaniis, v. ' Ibid.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 279

Sen. Liberty ! liberty ! liberty ! Lead on,
And praise to Macro that hath saved Eome. ' '

It is the baying of a furious pack of hounds, let loose at last on him,
under whose hand they had crouched, and who had for a long time
beaten and bruised them. Jonson discovered in his own energetic soul
the energy of these Roman passions ; and the clearness of his mind,
added to his profound knowledge, unable to construct characters, fur-
nished him with general ideas and striking incidents, which suffice to
depict manners.

IV.

Moreover, it was to this that he turned his talent. Nearly all his
work consists of comedies, not sentimental and fanciful as Shakspeare's,
but imitative and satirical, written to represent and correct follies and
vices. He introduced a new model ; he had a doctrine ; his masters
were Terence and Plautus. He observes the unity of time and place,
almost exactly. He ridicules the authors, who, in the same phiy,

* Make a child now-swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years ; or, with three rusty swords.
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars. . .' .
He rather prays you will be pleas'd to see
One such to-day, as other jilays should be ;
Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please :
Nor nimble squib is seen to make afeared
The gentlewomen. . . .

But deeds, and language, such as men do use. . . .
You, that have so grac'd monsters, may like men. ' "

Men, as we see them in the streets, with their whims and humours—

' When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
In their confluxions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour. ' ^

It is these humours which he exposes to the light, not with the artist's
curiosity, but with the moralist's hate :

' I will scourge those apes.
And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirrour,
As large as is the stage whereon we act ;
Where they shall see the time's deformity
Anatomiz'd in every nerve, and sinew.
With constant courage and contempt of fear. . . .

1 The Fall of Sejamts, v. * Every Man in his Humour, Prologue.

3 Every Man out of his Humour, Prologue.

280 THE RENAISSANCE. [COOK II.

My strict hand
"Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe
Squeeze out the humour of such spongy natures,
As lick up every idle vanity.' ^

Doubtless a determination so strong and decided does violence to the
dramatic spirit. Jonson's comedies are not rarely harsh; his characters
are too grotesque, laboriously constructed, mere automatons ; the poet
thought less of making living beings than of scotching a vice ; the
scenes get arranged mechanically, or are confused together ; w^e see the
process, we feel the satirical intention throughout ; delicate and easy-
flowing imitation is absent, as well as the graceful sprightliness which
abounds in Shakspeare. But if Jonson comes across harsh passions,
visibly evil and vile, he will derive from his energy and wrath the
talent to render them odious and visible, and will produce a Volpone,
a sublime work, the sharpest picture of the manners of the age, in
which is displayed the full brightness of the evil lusts, in which lewd-
ness, cruelty, love of gold, shamelessness of vice, display a sinister yet
splendid poetry, worthy of one of Titian's bacchanalians.^ All this
makes itself apparent in the first scene, when Volpone says :
' Good morning to the day ; and next, my gold :
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint ! '

This saint is his piles of gold, jewels, precious plate :

* Hail the world's soul, and mine ! . . . 0 thou son of Sol,
But brighter than thy father, let me kiss,
"With adoration, thee, and every relick
Of sacred treasm'e in this blessed room ! ' ^

Presently after, the dwarf, the eunuch, and the hermaphrodite of
the house sing a sort of pagan and fantastic interlude ; they chant in
strange verses the metamorphoses of the hermaphrodite, who was first
the soul of Pythagoras. We are at Venice, in the palace of the mag-
nifico Volpone. These deformed creatures, the splendour of gold, this
strange and poetical buffoonery, transport the thought immediately to
the sensual city, queen of vices and of arts.

The rich Volpone lives in the antique style. Childless and Avithout
relatives, playing the invalid, he makes all his flatterers hope to be his
heir, receives their gifts,

' Letting the cherry knock against their lips,
And draw it by their mouths, and back again. ' *

Glad to have their gold, but still more glad to deceive them, artistic in
guile as in avarice, and just as pleased to look at a contortion of suffer-
iog as at the sparkle of a ruby.

* Every Man out of his Humour, Prologue.

^ Compare Volpone with Eegnard's Ligataire ; the end of the sixteenth with
the beginning of the eighteenth century.

* Volpone, i. 1. * Ibid.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 281

The advocate Voltore arrives, bearing a ' huge piece of plate.'
Volpone casts himself on his bed, wraps himself in furs, heaps up
his pillows, and coughs as if at the point of death :

' Volpone. I thank you, signior Voltore,
Where is the plate ? mine eyes are bad. . . . Your love
Hath taste in this, and shall not be unanswer'd ". . .
I cannot now last long. ... I feel me going, —
Uh, uh, uh, uh ! ' '

Pie closes his eyes, as though exhausted :

* Voltore. Am I inscrib'd his heir for certain ?

Mosca ( Volpone's Parasite). Are you ?

I do beseech you, sir, you will vouchsafe
To write me i' j'^our family. All my hopes
Depeud upon your worship. I am lost,
Except the rising sun do shine on me.

Volt. It shall both shine and warm thee, Mosca. HI. Sir,
I am a man, that hath not done your love
All the worst offices : here I wear your keys.
See all your coffers and your caskets lockt.
Keep the poor inventory of your jewels.
Your plate and moneys ; am your steward, sir,
Husband your goods here. Volt. But am I sole heir?

3L Without a partner, sir, confirm'd this morning ;
The wax is warm yet, and the ink scarce dry
Upon the parchment. Volt. Happy, happy, me !
By what good chance, sweet Mosca ? M. Your desert, sir ;
I know no second cause. ' ^

And he details the abundance of the wealth in which Voltore is about
to swim, the gold Avhich is to pour upon him, the opulence which is to
flow in his house as a river :

• When will you have your inventory brought, sir ?
Or see a copy of the will ? '

The imagination is fed with precise words, sensible details. Thus,
one after another, the would-be heirs come like beasts of prey. The
second is an old miser, Corbaccio, deaf, worn out, almost dying, who
nevertheless hopes to survive Volpone. To make more sure of it, he
would fain have Mosca give his master a narcotic. He has it about
him, this excellent opiate ; he has had it prepared under his own eyes,
he suggests it. His joy on finding Volpone more ill than himself is
bitterly humorous :

' C. How does your patron ? . . . ilf . His mouth
Is ever gaping, and his eyelids hang.

C. Good.

M. A freezing numbness stiffens all his joints.
And makes the colour of his flesh like lead.

^ Volpone, i. 3. * Ibid.

2S2 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

C. 'Tisgood.

M. His ])ulse beats slow, and dull. G. Good symptoms stilL

M. And from liis brain. C. I conceive you, good.

M. Flows a cold sweat, with a continual rheum,
Forth the resolved corners of his eyes.

C. Is't possible ? Yet 1 am better, ha !
How does he, with the swimming of his head f

M. 0, sir, 'tis past the scotomy ; he now
Hath lost his feeling, and hath left to snort :
You hardly can perceive him, that he breathes.

G. Excellent, excellent, sure 1 shall outlast him :
This makes me young again, a score of years. ' ^

If you would be his heir, says Mosca, the moment is favourable ; but
you must not let yourself be forestalled. Voitore has been here, and
presented him with this piece of plate :

'C See, Mosca, look,

Here, I have brought a bag of bright cecchiues,
Will quite weigh down his plate. . . .

M. Now, would I counsel you, make home with speed.
There, frame a will ; whereto you shall inscribe
My master your sole heir. ... 6'. This plot
Did I think on before. . . .

M. And you so certain to survive him. C. L

M. Being so lusty a man. C. 'Tis true. ' ^

And the old man hobbles away, not hearing the insults and ridicule
thrown at him, he is so deaf.

When he is gone the merchant Corvino arrives, bringing an orient
pearl and a superb diamond :

' Corvino. Am I his heir ?

Mosca. Sir, I am sworn, I may not shew the will
Till he be dead : but here has been Corbaccio,
Here has been Voitore, here were others too,
I cannot number 'em, they were so many.
All gaping here for legacies ; but I,
Taking the vantage of his naming you,
Signior Corvino, Signior Corvino, took
Paper, and pen, and ink, and there I ask'd him,
Whom he would have his heir ? Corvino. Who
Should be executor ? Corvino. And,
To any question he was silent to,
I still interpreted the nods, he made

(Through weakness) for consent : and sent home th' others,
Nothing bequeath'd them, but to cry and curse.

Cor. 0 my dear Mosca ! . . . Has he children ? M. Bastards,
Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars,
Gypsies and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk. . . .

^ Vol;pone, i. 4. * lUd.

CHAP. III.] BEN JOXSON. 283

Speak out :
You may be louder yet. . . .
Faith, I could stifle him rarely with a pillow.
As well as any woman that should keep him.
C. Do as you will, but I'll begone.' *

Corvino presently departs ; for the passions of the time have all the
beauty of frankness. And Volpone, casting aside his sick man's garb,

cries :

* ;My divine Mosca !

Thou hast to-day out-gone thyself. . . . Prepare

Me musick, dances, banquets, all delights ;

The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasures,

Than will Volpone.'^

On this invitation, Mosca draws a most voluptuous portrait of Corvino's
wife, Celia. Smitten with a sudden desire, Volpone dresses himself
as a mountebank, and goes singing under her windows with all the
sprightliness of a quack ; for he is naturally a comedian, hke a true
Italian, of the same family as Scaramouch, as good an actor in the
public square as in his house. Having once seen Celia, he resolves

to obtain her at any price :

' Mosca, take my keys.
Gold, plate, and jewels, all's at thy devotion ;
Employ them how thou wilt ; nay, coin me too :
So thou, in this, but crown my longings, Mosca.''

Mosca tells Corvino that some quack's oil has cured his master, and
that they are looking for a 'young woman, lusty and full of juice,' to
complete the cure :

' Ha'e you no kinswoman ?
Godso.— Think, think, think, think, think, think, think, sir.
One o' the doctors otier'd there his daughter.
C. How ? M. Yes, signior Lupo, the physician.
C. His daughter ? M. And a virgin, sir. . . . C. Wretch ?
Covetous wretch ! ' ^

Though unreasonably jealous, Corvino is gradually induced to offer
his wife. He has given too much already, and would not lose his
advantage. He is like a half-ruined gamester, who with a shaking
hand throws on the green cloth the remainder of his fortune. He
brings the poor sweet woman, weeping and resisting. Excited by his
own hidden pain, he becomes furious :

* Be damn'd.

(Heart) I will drag thee hence, home by the hair ;

Cry thee a strumpet through the streets ; rip up

Thy mouth unto thine ears ; and slit thy nose ;

Like a raw rotchet— Do not tempt me, come.

Yield, I am loth— (Death !) I will buy some slave

» Volpone, i. 5. ^ jn^i^ s /jj^^. ii 4. 4 ma, ii. tj.

28-i THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II,

■Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive ;

And at my window hang you forth, devising

Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters.

Will eat into thy flesh with aquafortis,

And burning cor'sives, on this stubborn breast.

Now, by the blood thou hast incens'd, I'll do 't !

Celia. Sir, what you please, you may, I am your martyr.
Cor. Be not thus obstinate ; I ha' not deserv'd it :

Think who it is intreats you. Pr'ythee, sweet,

(Good faith), thou shalt have jewels, gowns, attires,

What thou wilt think, and ask. Do but go kiss him.

Or touch him, but. For my sake. At my suit.

This once Ko ? not ? I shall remember this.

Will you disgrace me thus ? Do you thirst my undoing ? * *

Mosca turns, the moment before, to Volpone :

'Sir,

Signior Corvino . . . hearing of the consultation had

So lately, for your health, is come to oSer,

Or rather, sir, to prostitute. — C. Thanks, sweet Mosca.

M. Freely, unask'd, or unintreated. C. Well.

M. As the true fervent instance of his love,
His own most fair and proper wife ; the beauty
Only of price in Venice. C. 'Tis well urg'd. ' ^

Where can we see such blows launched and driven hard, full in the
face, by the violent hand of satire ? Celia is alone with Volpone, who,
throwing off his feigned sickness, comes upon her, ' as fresh, as hot, as
high, and in as jovial plight,' as on the gala-days of the Republic,
when he acted the part of the lovely Antinous. In his transport he
sings a love song ; his voluptuousness culminates in poetry ; for poetry
was then in Italy the blossom of vice. He spreads before her pearls,
diamonds, carbuncles. He is in raptures at the sight of the treasures,
which he causes to roU and sparkle before her eyes :

' Take these.
And wear, and lose 'em : yet remains an earring
To purchase them again, and this whole state.
A gem but worth a private patrimony.
Is nothing : we will eat such at a meal.
The heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales,
The brains of peacocks, and of estiiches
Shall be our food. . . .

Conscience ? 'Tis the beggar's virtue. . . .
Thy baths shall be the juice of July flowers,
Spirit of roses, and of violets.
The milk of unicorns, and panthers' breath

i Volpone, iii. 7. We pray the reader to pardon us for Ben Jonson's broadness.
If I omit it, I cannot depict the sixteenth centiiry. Grant the same indulgence
to the historian as to the anatomist.

* Volpone, iii. 7.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 285

Gatlier'd in bags, and mixt with Cretan WAnes,
Our di-ink shall be prepared gold and amber ;
Wliich we will take, until my roof whirl round
"With the vertigo : and my dwarf shall dance.
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antick,
Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid's tales,
Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine ;
So, of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.'^

We recognise Venice in this splendour of debauchery — Venice, the
throne of Aretinus, the country of Tintoret and Giorgione. Volpone
seizes Celia: 'Yield, or I'll force thee!' But suddenly Bonario, dis-
inherited son of Corbaccio, whom Mosca had concealed there with
another design, enters violently, delivers her, wounds Mosca, and
accuses Volpone before the tribunal, of imposture and rape.

The three rascals who aim at being his heirs, work together to save
Volpone. Corbaccio disavows his son, and accuses him of parricide.
Corvino declares his wife an adulteress, the shameless mistress of
Bonario. Never on the stage was seen such energy of lying, such
open villany. The husband, who knows his wife to be innocent, is
the most eager :

' This woman (please your fatherhoods) is a whore,
01 most hot exercise, more than a partrich.
Upon record, 1st Adv. !^o more. C Neighs like a jennet.

N'otary. Preserve the honour of the court. C. I shall,
And modesty of your most reverend ears.
And yet 1 hope that I may say, these eyes
Have seen tier glew'd unto that piece of cedar,
That fine well-timber'd gallant ; and that here
The letters may be read, thorow the horn,
That make the story perfect. . . .

Zd Adv. His grief hath made him frantic. {Celia swoons.)
C. Kare ! Prettily feign'd ! again ! ' ^

They have Volpone brought in, like a dying man ; manufacture false
' testimony,' to which Voltore gives weight with his advocate's tongue,
with words worth a sequin apiece. They put Ceha and Bonario into
prison, and Volpone is saved. This public imposture is for him only
another comedy, a pleasant pastime, and a masterpiece.

' Mosca. To gull the court. Volpone. And quite divert the torrent
Upon the innocent. . . .
M. You are not taken with it enough, methinks.
V. 0, more than if I had enjoy'd the wench ? '^

To conclude, he writes a will in Mosca's favour, has his death reported,
hides behind a curtain, and enjoys the looks of the would-be heirs.

Volpone, iii. 7. * Iljid. iv. 5. ' Hid.

V.

286 THE EEXAISSAXCE. [BOOK II.

Tliey had just saved liim, which makes the fun all the better ; the
wickedness will be all the greater and more exquisite. ' Torture 'em
rarely,' Volpone says to Mosca. The latter spreads the will on the
table, and reads the inventory aloud. ' Turkey carpets nine. Two
cabinets, one of ebony, the other, mother-of-pearl. A perfum'd box,
made of an onyx.' The heirs are stupefied with disappointment, and
Mosca drives them off with insults. He says to Corvino :

* Why would you stay here ? with what thought, what promise I
Hear you ? do you not know, I know you an ass ?

And that you would most fain have been a wittol.
If fortune would have let you ? That you are
A declar'd cuckold, on good terms ? This pearl,
You'U say, was yours ? Right : this diamond ?
I'll not deny't, but thank you. Much here else ?
It may be so. "Whj-, think that these good works
May help to hide your bad. . . .

Coi~v. I am cozen'd, cheated, by a parasite slave ;
Harlot, th' hast gull'd me. M, Yes, sir. Stop your mouth.
Or I shall draw the only tooth is left.
Are not you he, that filthy covetous wretch,
With the three legs, that here, in hope of prey,
Have any time this three years snulTt aboiit.
With your most grov'ling nose, and would have hir'd
Me to the pois'ning of my patron, sir ?
Are not you he that have to-day in court
Profess'd the disinheriting of your son ?
Perjur'd yourself ? Go home, and die, and stink. ' ^

Volpone goes out disguised, comes to each of them in turn, and suc-
ceeds in wringing their hearts. But Mosca, who has the will, acts with
a high hand, and demands of Volpone half his fortune. The dispute
between the two rascals discovers their impostures, and the master,
the servant, with the three would-be heirs, are sent to the galleys, to
prison, to the pillory — as Corvino says, to

* Have mine eyes beat out with stinking fish,
Bruis'd fruit, and rotten eggs. — 'Tis well. I'm glad,
I shall not see my shame yet. ' ^

No more vengeful comedy has been written, none more persistently
athirst to make vice suffer, to unmask, triumph over, and punish it.

Where can be the gaiety of such a theatre ? In caricature and
farce. There is a rude gaiety, a sort of physical, external laughter
which suits this combative, drinking, blustering mood. It is thus
that this mood relaxes from a war-v.'aeingr and murderous satire ; the
pastime is appropriate to the manners of the time, excellent to attract
men who look upon hanging as a good joke, and laugh to see the
Puritans' ears cut. Put yourself for an instant in their place, and you

1 Volpone, 7. 3. ^ Ibid. v. 12.

CHAP. in. J BEN JONSON. 287

■will think like them, that The Silent Woman is a masterpiece. Morose
is an old monomaniac, who has a horror of noise, but loves to speak.
He inhabits a street so narrow that a carriage cannot enter it. He
drives off with his stick the bear-leaders and sword-players, who venture
to pass under his windows. He has sent away his servant whose shoes
creaked ; and Mute, the new one, wears slippers ' soal'd with wool,' and
only speaks in a whisper through a tube. Morose ends by forbidding
the whisper, and making him reply by signs. For the rest, he is rich,
he is an uncle, and ill-treats his nephew Sir Dauphine Eugenie, a man
of wit, with a lack of money. You see beforehand all the tortures
which poor ^lorose is to suffer. Sir Dauphine finds him a supposed
silent woman, the beautiful Epicoene. Morose, enchanted by her brief
replies and her voice which he can hardly hear, marries her, to play
his nephew a trick. It is his nephew who has played him a trick. As
soon as she is married, Epicoene speaks, scolds, argues as loud and as
long as a dozen women :

' ^Vhy, did you think you had married a statue ? or a motion only ? one of the
French puppets, with the eyes turn'd with a wire ? or some innocent out of the
hospital, that would stand with her hands thus, and a playse mouth, and look upon
you ? ' 1

She orders the valets to speak louder ; she opens the doors wide to
her friends. They arrive in troops, offering their noisy congratulations
to Morose. Five or six women's tongues overwhelm him all at once
with comphments, questions, advice, remonstrances. A friend of Sir
Dauphine comes with a band of music, who play all together, suddenly,
with their whole force. * O, a plot, a plot, a plot, a plot, upon me I
This day I shall be their anvil to work on, they will grate me asunder.
'Tis worse than the noise of a saw.' ^ A procession of servants is seen
coming, with dishes in their hands ; it is the bustle of the tavern which
Sir Dauphine is bringing to his uncle. The guests clash the glasses, cry
out, drink healths ; they have with them a drum and trumpets which
make great noise. ^Morose flees to the top of the house, puts ' a whole
nest of night-caps ' on his head, and stuffs up his ears. Captain Otter
cries, 'Sound, Tritons o' the Thames ! Nunc est bilendum, nuncpede libero.^
' Villains, murderers, sons of the earth and traitors,' cries ^lorose from
above, ' what do you there ? ' The racket increases. Then the captain,
somewhat 'jovial,' maligns his wife, who falls upon him and gives him
a good beating. Blows, cries, music, laughter, resound like thunder.
It is the poetry of uproar. Here is a subject to shake rude nerves,
and raise with inextinguishable laughter the mighty chests of the com-
panions of Drake and Essex. 'Rogues, hell-hounds, Stentors! . . . They
have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen
throats I ' Morose casts himself on the people with his long sword,
breaks the instruments, chases the musicians, disperses the guests amidst

* Epicoene, iii. ■*. * Ihid. iii. 7.

288 THE KENAISSAXCE. [BOOK 11.

an inexpressible uproar, gnashing his teeth, looking dreadfully. After-
wards they pionounce him mad, and discuss his madness before hira.^
' The disease in Greek is called fLa\iia, in Latin insania, furor, vel ecstasis
melancholica, that is, egressio, when a man ex melancholico evadit fanaticus.
. . . But he may be but phreneticus yet, mistress ; and phrenetis is only
delirium, or so.' They talk of the books which he must read aloud to
cure him. They add, by way of consolation, that his wife talks in her
sleep, ' and snores like a porcpisce.' ' O, redeem me, fate ; redeem me,
fate ! ' cries the poor man.2 ' For how many causes may a man be
divorc'd, nephew ? ' Sir Dauphine chooses two knaves, and disguises
them, one as a priest, the other as a lawyer, who launch at his head
Latin terms of civil and canon law, explain to Morose the twelve cases
of nullity, jingle in his ears one after another the most barbarous
words in their obscure vocabulary, wrangle, and make between them as
much noise as a couple of bells in a bell -tower. On their advice he
declares himself impotent. The w^edding-guests propose to toss him in
a blanket; others demand an immediate inquisition. Fall after fall,
shame after shame ; nothing serves him ; his wife declares that she
consents to 'take him with all his faults.' The lawyer proposes another
legal method ; Morose shall obtain a divorce by proving that his wife
is faithless. Two boasting knights, who are present, declare that they
have been her lovers. Morose, in raptures, casts himself at their knees,
and embraces them. Epicoene weeps, and Morose seems to be delivered.
Suddenly the lawyer decides that the plan is of no avail, the infidelity
having been committed before the marriage. ' O, this is worst of all
worst worsts that hell could have devis'd ! marry a whore ! and so
much noise ! ' There is Morose then, declared impotent and a deceived
husband, at his own request, in the eyes of the world, and moreover,
married for ever. Sir Dauphine comes in like a clever rascal, and as a
succouring deity. ' Allow me but five hundred during life, uncle,' and
I free you. Morose signs the deed of gift with alacrity; and his
nephew shows him that Epicoene is a boy in disguise.^ Add to this
enchanting farce the funny parts of the two accomplished and gallant
knights, who, after having boasted of their bravery, receive gratefully,
and before the ladies, flips and kicks.* Never was coarse physical
laughter more adroitly produced. In this broad coarse gaiety, this
excess of noisy transport, you recognise the stout roysterer, the stalwart
drinker who swallowed down torrents of Canary, and made the glass
windows of the Mermaid shake with his bursts of humour.

V.

Jonson did not go beyond this; he was not a philosopher like Moliere,
able to grasp and dramatise the crises of human life, education, marriage,

' See M. de Pourceaugnac in Moliere.

• Epiccene, iv. 4. ^ Ibid. v. 5.

* Polichinelle in Le Malade imaginaire ; Geronte in Les Fourberies de Scapin.

CHAP. III.] BEN JONSON. 239

sickness, the chief characters of his country and century, the courtier,
the tradesman, the hypocrite, the man of the world. ^ He remained on
a lower level, in the comedy of plot,^ the painting of the grotesque,* the
representation of too transient subjects of ridicule,* too general vices.*
If at times, as in the Alchemist, he has succeeded by the perfection of
plot and the vigour of satire, he has miscarried more frequently by the
ponderousness of his work and the lack of comic lightness. The critic
in him mars the artist ; his literary calculations strip him of sponta-
neous mvention ; he is too much of a writer and moralist, not enough of
a mimic and an actor. But he is loftier from another side, for he is a
poet ; almost all writers, prose-authors, preachers even, were so at the
time we speak of. Fancy abounded, as well as the perception of colours
and forms, the need and wont of enjoying through the imagination and
the eyes. Many of Jonson's pieces, the Staple of Neivs, Cynthia's
Jievels, are fanciful and allegorical comedies, like those of Aristophanes.
He there dallies with the real, and beyond the real, with characters who
are but theatrical masks, abstractions personified, buffooneries, decora-
tions, dances, music, pretty laughing whims of a picturesque and senti-
mental imagination. Thus, in Cynthia's Revels, three children come on
'pleading possession of the cloke' of black velvet, which an actor
usually wore when he spoke the prologue. They draw lots for it ; one
of the losers, in revenge, tells the audience beforehand the incidents
of the piece. The others interrupt him at every sentence, put their
hands on his mouth, and taking the cloak one after the other, begin
the criticism of the spectators and authors. This child's play, these
gestures and voices, this little amusing dispute, divert the public from
their serious thoughts, and prepare them for the oddities which they
are to look upon.

We are in Greece, in the valley of Gargaphie, where Diana ® has
proclaimed ' a solemn revels.' ^lercury and Cupid have come down,
and begin by quarrelling ; the latter says :

' My light feather-heel'd couz, what are you ? any more than my uncle Jove's
pandar ? a lacquey that runs on enands for liim, and can whisper a hght message
to a loose wench with some round volubiUty ? . . . One that sweeps the gods'
drinking-room every mornmg, and sets the cushions in order again, which they
threw one at another's head over night ? ' '^

These are the gods of good humour. Ecl;a, awoke by ilercury,
weeps for the beauteous boy Narcissus :

' L'Ecole des Femmes, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois-gent'dhomme,
Le Malade imaginaire, Georges Dandln.
- In the style of the Fourberies de Scapin.

3 In the style of the Fdcheux. * In the style of the Pr^cieuses.

^ In the style of the plays of Destouches.

« ijy Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant. ' Cynthia s Bevels, L L

T

200 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK n.

* Thai trophy of self-love, and spoil of nature,
Who (now transformed into this drooping flower)
Hangs the repentant head, back from the stream. . . .
AVitness thy youth's dear sweets, here spent untasted.
Like a fair taper, with his own flame wasted ! . . .
And with thy water let this curse remain,
(As an inseparate pla.Ejue, ) that who but tastes
A drop thereof, may, with the instant touch.
Grow dotino;ly enamour'd on themselves. ' *

The courtiers and ladies drink thereof, and behold, a sort of review of
the follies of the time, arranged, as in Aristophanes, in an improbable
farce, a brilliant show. A silly spendthrift, Asotus, wishes to become
a man of the court, and of fashionable manners ; he takes for his
master Amorphus, a learned traveller, expert in gallantry, who, to
believe himself, is

' An essence so sublimated ard refined by travel . . . able. . . to speak the mere
extraction of lanpjuage ; one that . . . was your first that ever enrich'd his country
with the true laws of the dueUo ; whose optiques have drunk the spirit of beauty, in
some eight-score and eighteen princes' courts, where I have resided, and been there
fortunate in the amours of three hundred forty and five ladies (all nobly if not
princely descended) ... in all so happy, as even admiration herself doth seem
to fasten her kisses upon me. ' ^

Asotus learns at this good school the language of the court, fortifies
himself like other people with quibbles, learned oaths, and metaphors ;
he fires off in succession supersubtle tirades, and duly imitates the
grimaces and tortuous style of his masters. Then, when he has drunk
the water of the fountain, becoming suddenly pert and rash, he pro-
poses to all comers a tournament of * court compliment.' This odd
tournament is held before the ladies ; it comprises four jousts, and at
each the trumpets sound. The combatants perform in succession ' the
bare accost ; the better regard ; the solemn address ; and the perfect
close.'® In this grave buffoonery the courtiers are beaten. The severe
Crites, the moralist of the play, copies their language, and pierces them
with their own weapons. Already, with grand declamation, he had
rebuked them thus :

' 0 vanity,

How are thy painted beauties doated on,

By light, and empty ideots ! how pursu'd

"With open and extended appetite !

How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,

Eais'd on their toes, to catch thy airy forms.

Still turning giddy, till they reel like drunkards.

That buy the merry madness of one hour,

"With tbe long irksomeness of following time ! ' *

-"o

To complete the overthrow of the vices, appear two symbolical masques,
^ Cynthia's Rfvels, i. 3. - Illd. i. 3. * lUd, iv. 6. * Ibid. i. 5.

CHAP. III.] BEN J0NS0:T. 201

representing the contrary virtues. They pass gravely before the spec-
tators, in splendid array, and the noble verses exchanged by the
goddess and her companions raise the mind to the lofty regions of
serene morality, whither the poet desires to carry us :

' Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in tliy silver chair.
State in wonted manner keep. . . .
Lay thy bow of pearl apart, •

And thy crystal shining quiver ;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever, ' ^

In the end, bidding the dancers to unmask, Cynthia shows that the vices
have disguised themselves as virtues. She condemns them to make fit
reparation, and to bathe themselves in Helicon. Two by two they go
off singing a palinode, whilst the chorus sings the supplication ' Good
Mercury defend us.'* Is it an opera or a comedy ? It is a lyrical comedy;
and if we do not discover in it the airy lightness of Aristophanes, at
least we encounter, as in the Birds and the Frogs, the contrasts and
medleys of poetic invention, which, through caricature and ode, the
real and the impossible, the present and the past, comprehending the
four quarters of the globe, simultaneously unites all kinds of incom-
patibilities, and culls all flowers.

Jonson went further than this, and entered the domain of pure
poetry. He wrote delicate, voluptuous, charming love poems, worthy
of the ancient idyllic muse.^ Above all, he was the great, the inex-
haustible inventor of Masques, a kind of masquerades, ballets, poetic
dances, in which all the magnificence and the imagination of the English
Renaissance is displayed. The Greek gods, and all the ancient Olympus,
the mythic personages whom the artists of the time delineate in their
pictures ; the antique heroes of popular legends ; all worlds, the actual,
the abstract, the divine, the human, the ancient, the modern, are
searched by his hands, brought on the stage to furnish costumes, har-
monious groups, emblems, songs, whatever can excite, intoxicate the
artistic sense. The elite, moreover, of the kingdom is there on the
stage. They are not buffoons figuring in borrowed clothes, clumsily
worn, for which they are still in debt to the tailor ; they are ladies of
the court, great lords, the queen; in all the splendour of their rank
and pride, with real diamonds, bent on displaying their riches, so that
the whole splendour of the national life is concentrated in the opera
which they enact, like jewels in a casket. What array ! what profusion
of splendours ! what medley of strange characters, gipsies, witches,
gods, heroes, pontiffs, gnomes, fantastic beings ! How many meta-

' Cyntliia's Revels, v. 6. * Ibid, v., last scL-ne,

^ Celebration of Charts — Miscellaneous Pocma.

292 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

morphoses, jousts, dances, marriage songs ! What variety of scenery,
architecture, floating isles, triumphal arches, symbolic spheres ! Gold
glitters ; jewels flash ; purple absorbs the lustre-lights in its costly folds ;
streams of brightness play upon the silken pleats ; diamonds twisted,
darting flame, clasp the bare bosoms of w^omen ; necklets of pearl float,
loop after loop, down the silver -sown brocaded dresses ; gold embroidery,
weaving whimsical arabesques, depicts upon their dresses flowers, fruits,
and figures, setting picture wdthin picture. The steps of the throne
beai groups of Cupids, each with a torch in his hand.^ On either side
the fountains cast up plumes of pearls ; the musicians, in purple and
scarlet, laurel-crowned, make harmony in the bowers. The trains of
Hiasques cross, commingling their groups ; ' the one half in orange-
tawny and silver, the other in sea-green and silver. The bodies and
short skirts (were of) white and gold to both,'

Such pageants Jonson ^vrote year after year, almost to the end of his
life, true eye-feasts, like a procession of Titian. Even when he grew
to be old, his imagination, like that of Titian, remained abundant and
fresh. Though forsaken, gasping on his bed, feeling the approach of
death, in his -supreme bitterness he did not lose his tone, but wrote The
Sad Sheijherd, the most graceful and pastoral of his pieces. Consider
that this beautiful dream was dreamed in a sick-chamber, to an accom-
paniment of bottles, physic, doctors, with a nurse at his side, amidst
the anxieties of poverty and the choking-fits of a dropsy ! He is
transported to a green forest, in the days of Eobin Hood, amidst jovial
chace and the great barking greyhounds. There are the malicious
fairies, the Oberon and Titania, Avho lead men aflounder in misfortune.
There are open-souled lovers, the Daphne and Chloe, tasting with awe
the painful sweetness of the first kiss. There lived Earine, whom the
stream has ' suck'd in,' whom her lover, in his madness, will not cease
to lament :

* Earine,
Who had her very being, and her name
With the first knots or buddings ot the spring,
Born with the primrose or the violet,
Or earliest roses blown : when Cupid smil'd.
And Venus led the graces out to dance,
And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap
Leap'd out, and made thcii- solemn conjuration
To last but while she liv'd. ' . . . *
* But she, as chaste as was her name, Earine,
Dy'd undefiower'd : and now her sweet soul hovers
Here in the air above us.' ^

Above the poor old paralytic artist, poetry still hovers like a haze of
light. Yes, he had cumbered himself with science, clogged himself with

^ Itasque of Beauty. • The Sad Shepherd, i. 5. * Ibid, ill 2.

CHAP. 111.] BEN JONSON. 293

theories, constituted himself theatrical critic and social censor, filled his
soul with unrelenting indignation, fostered a combative and morose dis-
position ; but heaven's dreams never deserted him. He is the brother
of Shakspeare.

VI.

So now at last wc are in the presence of one, whom we perceived
before us through all the vistas of the Eenaissance, like some vast oak
to which all the forest ways converge. I will treat of Shakspeare by
himself. In order to take him in completely, we must have a wide and
open space. And yet how shall we comprehend him ? how lay bare
his inner constitution ? Lofty words, eulogies, all is vain by his side ;
he needs no praise, but comprehension merely ; and he can only be
comprehended by the aid of science. As the complicated revolutions
of the heavenly bodies become intelligible only by use of a superior
calculus, as the delicate transformations of vegetation and life need for
their comprehension the intervention of the most difficult chemical
processes, so the great works of art can be interpreted only by the
most advanced psychological systems ; and we need the loftiest of all
these to attain to Shakspeare's level — to the level of his age and his
work, of his genius and of his art.

After all practical experience and accumulated observations of the
soul, we find as the result that wisdom and knowledge are in man only
eff'ects and fortuities. Man has no permanent and distinct force to
secure truth to his intelligence, and common sense to his conduct. On
the contrary, he is naturally unreasonable and deceived. The parts of his
inner mechanism are like the wheels of clockwork, which of themselves
go blindly, carried away by impulse and weight, and which yet some-
times, by virtue of a certain unison, end by indicating the hour. This
final intelligent motion is not natural, but fortuitous ; not spontaneous,
but forced ; not inherent, but acquired. The clock did not always go
regularly ; it had to be regulated little by little, vsdth much difficulty.
Its regularity is not ensured ; it may go wrong in an instant. Its regu-
larity is not complete ; it only approximately marks the time. Tlie
mechanical force of each piece is always present, ready to drag all the
rest from their proper action, and to disarrange the whole agreement.
So ideas, once in the mind, pull each blindly and separately, and their
imperfect agreement threatens confusion every moment. Strictly
speaking, man is idiotic, as the body is sick, by nature ; reason and
health come to us as a momentary success, a lucky accident.^ If we
forget this, it is because we are now regulated, dulled, deadened, and
because our internal motion has become gradually, by friction and

^ This idea may be expanded psychologically : external perception, memory,
are real hallucinations, etc. This is the analytical aspect ; under another aspect
reason and health are the natural goals.

294 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK I^,

tension, half harmonised with the motion of external things. But this
is only a semblance ; and the dangerous primitive forces remain untamed
and independent under the order, which seems to restrain them. Let a
great danger arise, a revolution break out, they will make an eruption
and an explosion, almost as terribly as in the earlier times. For an
idea is not a mere inner mark, employed to designate one aspect of
things, inert, always ready to fall into order with other similar ones, so
as to make an exact whole. However it may be reduced and disci-
plined, it still retains a visible tinge which shows its likeness to an
hallucination ; a degree of individual persistence which shows its like-
ness to a monomania ; a network of particular affinities which shows its
likeness to the ravings of delirium. Being such, it is beyond question
the rudiment of a nightmare, a habit, an absurdity. Let it become
once developed in its entirety, as its tendency leads it,^ and you Avill
find that it is essentially an active and complete image, a vision drawing
along with it a train of dreams and sensations, which increases of itself,
suddenly, by a sort of manifold and absorbing growth, and which ends
by possessing, shaking, exhausting the whole man. After this, another,
perhaps entirely opposite, and so on successively : there is nothing else
in man, no free and distinct power ; he is in himself but the process of
these headlong impulses and swarming imaginations: civilisation has
mutilated, attenuated, but not destroyed them ; fits, shocks, transports,
sometimes at long intervals a sort of transient partial equilibrium : this
is his real life, the life of a lunatic, who now and then simulates reason,
but who is in reality * such stuff as dreams are made on ;' ^ and this is
man, as Shakspeare has conceived him. No writer, not even Moliere,
has penetrated so far beneath the semblance of common sense and logic
in which the human machine is enclosed, in order to crush the brute
powers which constitute its substance and its mainspring.

How did Shakspeare succeed ? and by what extraordinary instinct
did he divine the remote conclusions, the deepest insights of physiology
and psychology ? He had a complete imagination ; his whole genius is
in that single word. A small word, which seems commonplace and
hollow. Let us examine it closer, to understand what it contains.
When we think a thing, we, ordinary men, we only think a part of it ;
we see one side, some isolated mark, sometimes two or three marks
together ; for what is beyond, our sight fails us ; the infinite network
of its infinitely-complicated and multiplied properties escapes us ; we
feel vaguely that there is something beyond our shallow ken, and this
vague suspicion is the only part of our idea which at all reveals to
us the great beyond. We are like tyro-naturalists, quiet people of
limited understanding, who, wishing to represent an animal, recall its
name and ticket, with some indistinct image of its hide and figure; but

' See Spinoza and D. Stewart : Conception in its natural state is belief!
' Tcvijjcst, iv. 1.

CHAP. III.] BEN JOIS'SON. 295

their mind rests there. If it so happens that they wish to complete
their knowledge, they lead their memory, by regular classifications,
over the principal characters of the beast, and slowly, discursively,
gradually, bring at last the bare anatomy before their eyes. To this
their idea is reduced, even when perfected ; to this also most frequently
is our conception reduced, even when elaborated. What a distance
there is between this conception and the object, how imperfectly and
meanly the one represents the other, to what extent this mutilates that;
how the consecutive idea, disjointed in little, regularly arranged and
inert fragments, represents but slightly the complete, organised, living
thing, ever in action, and ever transformed, words cannot explain.
Picture to yourself, instead of this poor dry idea, propped up by a
miserable mechanical linkwork of thought, the complete idea, that is,
an inner representation, so abundant and full, that it exhausts all the
properties and relations of the object, all its inward and outward
aspects ; that it exhausts them instantaneously ; that it conceives of the
animal all at once, its colour, the play of the light upon its skin, its
form, the quivering of its outstretched limbs, the flash of its eyes, and
at the same time its passion of the moment, its excitement, its dash ;
and beyond this its instincts, their composition, their causes, their
history ; so that the hundred thousand characteristics which make up
its condition and its nature find their analogues in the imagination
which concentrates and reflects them : there you have the artist's con-
ception, the poet's — Shakspeare's ; so superior to that of the logician,
of the mere savant or man of the world, the only one capable of pene-
trating to the basis of things, of extricating the inner from beneath the
outer man, of feeling through sympathy, and imitating without effort,
the disorderly roundabout of human imaginations and impressions, of
reproducing life with its infinite fluctuations, its apparent contradictions,
its concealed logic ; in short, to create as nature creates. This is what
is done by the other artists of this age ; they have the same kind of
mind, and the same idea of life : you will find in Shakspeare only the
same faculties, with a still stronger impulse ; the same idea, with a still
more prominent relief.

295 THE RENAISSANCE. [eOOK II.

CHAPTER IV.

Shakspeare.

I. Life and character of Shakspeare — Family — Youtt — Marriage — He becomes
an actor — Adoiiis — Sonnets — Loves — Humour — Conversation — ilelan-
choly — The constitution of the productive and sympathetic character —
Prudence — Fortune — Retirement.
II. Style — Images — Excesses — Incongruities — Copiousness — Difference between
the creative and analytic conception.

III. Manners — FamUiar intercourse — Violent bearing — Harsh language — Con-

versation and action — Agreement of manners and style.

IV. The dramatis personm — All of the same family — Brutes and idiots — Caliban,

Ajax, Cloten, Polonius, the Nurse — How the mechanical imagination can
precede or survive reason.
V. Men of wit — Difference between the wit of reason ers and of artists — Mer-
cutio, Beatrice, Rosalind, Benedict, the clowns— Falstaff.

VI. "Women — Desdemona, Virginia, Juliet, Miranda, Imogen, Cordelia, Ophelia,
Volumnia — How Shakspeare represents love — Why he bases virtue on
instinct or passion.
VII. Vniains — lago, Richard iii. — How excessive lusts and the lack of conscience
are the natural province of the impassioned imagination.
VIII. Principal characters — Excess and disease of the imagination — Lear, Othello,
Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Hamlet — Comparison of Shakspeare's
psychology with that of the French tragic authors.

IX. Fancy — Agreement of imagination with observation in Shakspeare — In-
teresting nature of sentimental and romantic comedy^^s you Like it —
Idea of existence — Midsummer Night's Dream — Idea of love — Harmony
of aU parts of the work — Harmony between the artist and his work.

I AM about to describe an extraordinary species of mind, perplex-
ing to all the French modes of analysis and reasoning, all-power-
ful, excessive, equally master of the sublime and the base ; the most
creative that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual
existence, in the dazzling caprice of fancy, in the profound complica-
tions of superhuman passions ; a nature poetical, immoral, inspired,
superior tc reason by the sudden revelations of his seer's-madness ; so
extreme in joy and pain, so abrupt of gait, so stormy and impetuous
in his transports, that this great age alone could have cradled such a
child.

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSPEARE. 297

I.

Of Shakspeare all came from within — I mean from his soul and his
genius ; external circumstances contributed but slightly to his develop-
ment.^ He was intimately bound up with his age ; that is, he knew
by experience the manners of country, court, and town ; he had visited
the heights, depths, the middle regions of the condition of mankind ;
nothing more. For the rest his life was commonplace; the irregu-
larities, troubles, passions, successes through which he passed, were, on
the whole, such as we meet with everywhere else.^ His father, a glover
and wool stapler, in very easy circumstances, having married a sort of
country heiress, had become high-bailiff and chief alderman in his little
town ; but when Shakspeare reached the age of fourteen he was on
the verge of ruin, mortgaging his wife's property, obliged to resign his
municipal offices, and to remove his son from school to assist him in his
business. The young fellow applied himself to it as well as he could,
not without some scrapes and escapades : if we are to believe tradition,
he was one of the thirsty souls of the place, with a mind to support the
reputation of his little town in its drinking powers. Once, they say,
having been beaten at Bideford in one of these ale-bouts, he returned
staggering from the fight, or rather could not return, and passed the
night with his comrades under an apple-tree by the roadside. Without
doubt he had already begun to write verses, to rove about like a genuine
poet, taking part in the noisy rustic feasts, the gay pastoral plays, the
rich and bold outbreak of pagan and poetical life, as it was then to be
found in an English village. At all events, he was not a pattern of
propriety, and his passions were as precocious as they were reckless.
While not yet nineteen years old, he married the daughter of a sub-
stantial yeoman, about eight years older than himself — and not too soon,
as she was about to become a mother.^ Other of his outbreaks were
no more fortunate. It seems that he was fond of poaching, after the
manner of the time, being ' much given to all unluckinesse in stealing
venison and rabbits,' says the Kev. Richard Davies;* * particularly from

Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and

at last made him fly the country ; . . . but his reveng was so great, that
he is his Justice Clodpate.' Moreover, about this time Shakspeare's
father was in prison, his affairs were desperate, and he himself had
three children, following one close iipon the other ; he must live, and
life was hardly possible for him in his native town. He went to

■ — ■ ' ■■ ■ I - ■ I

J Halliwell's Life of Shakspeare.

3 Born 1564, died 1616. He adapted plays as early as 1591. The first play
entirely from his pen appeared in 1593.— Payne Collier.

3 Mr. Halliwell and other eommentators try to prove that at this time the pre-
liminary trothplight was regarded as the real marriage ; that this trothplight had
taken place, and that there was therefore no irregularity in Shakspeare's conduct,

* HalHwell, 123.

298 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

London, and took to the stage : took the lowest parts, was a ' servant '
in the theatre, that is, an apprentice, or perhaps a supernumeraiy.
They even said that he had begun still lower, and that to earn his
bread he had held gentlemen's horses at the door of the theatre.^ At
all events he tasted misery, and felt, not in imagination but in fact, the
sharp thorn of care, humiliation, disgust, forced labour, public discredit,
the power of the people. He was a comedian, one of ' His ]\Iajesty's
poor players,'^ — a sad trade, degraded in all ages by the contrasts and
the falsehoods inseparable from it ; still more degraded then by the
brutalities of the crowd, who not seldom would stone the actors, and
by the severities of the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn
them to lose their ears. He felt it, and spoke of it with bitterness :

* Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.'^

And again :

* When in disgrace with fortune * and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf lieaven with my bootless cries.

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope.

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed. . . .

With what I most enjoy contented least ;

Yet in those thoughts myself almost despising. ' *

We shall find further on the traces of this long-enduring disgust, in
his melancholy characters, as where he says :

' For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely.
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay.
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
AVhen he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin ? ' ^

But the worst of this degraded position is, that it eats into the soul.
In the company of buffoons we become buffoons : it is vain to wish to
keep clean, if you live in a dirty place ; it cannot be. No matter if a
man braces himself ; necessity drives and soils him. The machinery of
the decorations, the tawdriness and medley of the costumes, the smell of

^ All these anecdotes are traditions, and consequently more or less doubtful ;
but the other facts are authentic.

^ Terms of an extant document. He is named along with Burbadge and Greene.
3 Sonnet 110.

* See Sonnets 91 and 111 ; also Hamlet, iii. 2. Many of Hamlet's words would
come better from the mouth of an actor than a prince. See also the 66th Sonnet,
'Tired with all the-se.'

* Sonnet 2?. « Hamlet, iii. 1.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEARE. 299

the tallow and the candles, in contrast with the parade of refinement and
loftiness, all the cheats and sordidness of the representation, the bitter
alternative of hissing or applause, the keeping of the highest and lowest
company, the habit of sporting with human passions, easily unhinge
the soul, drive it down the slope of excess, tempt it to loose manners,
green-room adventures, the loves of strolling actresses. Shakspeare
escaped them no more than IMoliere, and grieved for it, like Moliere :

' 0, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds. ' '

They used to relate in London, how his comrade Burbadge, who
played Richard ni., having a rendezvous with the wife of a citizen,
Shakspeare went before, was well received, and was pleasantly occupied
when Burbadge arrived, to whom he sent the message, that William
the Conqueror came before Richard iii.^ You may take this as an
example of the tricks and somewhat coarse intrigues which are planned,
and follow in quick succession, on this stage. Outside the theatre he
lived Avith fashionable young nobles, Pembroke, Montgomery, South-
ampton,* and others, whose hot and licentious youth fed his imagi-
nation and senses by the example of Italian pleasures and elegances.
Add to this the rapture and transport of poetical nature, and this afflux,
this boiling over of all the powers and desires which takes place in
brains of this kind, when the world for the first time opens before them,
and you will understand the Venus and Adonis, ' the first heir of his
invention.' In fact, it is a first cry, a cry in which the whole man is
displayed. Never was seen a heart so quivering to the touch of beauty,
of beauty of every kind, so ravished with the freshness and splendour
of things, so eager and so excited in adoration and enjoyment, so vio-
lently and entirely carried to the very limit of voluptuousness. His
Venus is unique ; no painting of Titian's has a more brilliant and de-
licious colouring ; * no strumpet-goddess of Tintoret or Giorgione is more
soft and beautiful :

' With blindfold fury she begins to forage,
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil. . . .
And glutton-like she feeds, yet never fiUeth ;
Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey,
Paying what ransom the insulter willeth ;
"Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high,
That she will draw his lips' rich treasure dry. ' '^

I Sonnet 111.

* Anecdote written in 1602 on the authority of Tooley the actor.

^ The Earl of Southampton was nineteen years old when Shakspeare dedicated
hi3 Adonis to him.

* See Titian's picture, Loves of the Gods, at Blenheim.

* Venus and Adonis, v. 54S-5.53.

300 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK H.

•Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her heak on feathers, flesh and bone.
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste.
Till either gorge be stuflTd or prey be gone ;
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin.
And where she ends she doth anew begin. ' *

All is taken by storm, the senses first, the eyes dazzled by carnal
beauty, but the heart also from whence the poetry overflows ; the
fulness of youth inundates even inanimate things ; the landscape looks
charming amidst the rays of the rising sun, the air, saturated with
brightness, makes a gala-day :

' Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver brcas
The sun ariseth in his majesty ;
"Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hUls seem burnish'd gold. ' ^

An admirable debauch of imagination and rapture, yet disquieting ; for
such a mood will carry one a long way.^ No fair and frail dame in
London was without Adonis on her table.* Perhaps he perceived that
he had transcended the bounds, for the tone of his next poem, the
Eape of Lucrece, is quite different; but as he had already a spirit wide
enough to embrace at the same time, as he did afterwards in his dramas,
the two extremes of things, he continued none the less to follow his
bent. The 'sweet abandonment of love' was the great occupation of his
life ; he was tender-hearted, and he was a poet : nothing more is required
to be smitten, deceived, to suffer, to traverse without pause the circle
of illusions and pains, which whirls and whirls round, and never ends.

He had many loves of this kind, amongst others one for a sort of
Marion Delorme, a miserable blind despotic passion, of which he felt
the oppression and the shame, but from which nevertheless he could
not and would not deliver himself. Nothing can be sadder than his
confessions, or mark better the madness of love, and the sentiment of
human weakness :

' When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies. ' ^

So said Alceste of Celimene ; ® but what a soiled Celimene is the crea-
ture before whom Shakspeare kneels, with as much of scorn as of desire I

' Those lips of thine.
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments

^ Venus and Adonis, v. 55-60. ^ Ibid. v. 853-858.

^ Compare the first pieces of Alfred de Musset, Contes d^ Italic et d'Uspagne.
* Crawley, quoted by Ph. Chasles, Etudes sur Shakspeare. * Sonnet 138.

•^ Two characters in Moiiere's Misanthrope. The scene referred to is Act v.
EC. 7.— Tk.

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSPEARE. 301

And scal'd false bonds of love as oft as mino,
Eobb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov'st those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee. ' •

This is plain-speaking and deep sliamelessness of soul, such as we find
only in the stews ; and these are the intoxications, the outbreaks, the
delirium into which the most refined artists fall, when they resign their
own noble hand to these soft, voluptuous, and clinging ones. They are
higher than princes, and they descend to the lowest depths of passion.
Good and evil then lose their names ; all things are inverted :

* How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name !
0, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclo.se !
That tongue that tells the story of thy day.s.
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise ;
Nammg thy name blesses an ill report. ' *

What are proof, reason, the will, honour itself, when the passion is
so absorbing ? What, think you, can be said further to a man who
answers, ' I know all that you are going to say, and what does it all
amount to ? ' Great loves are inundations, which drown all repugnance
and all delicacy of soul, all preconceived opinions and all accepted
principles. Thenceforth the heart is found dead to all ordinary plea-
sures ; it can only feel and breathe on one side. Shakspeare envies
the keys of the instrument over which his mistress' fingers run. If he
looks at flowers, it is she whom he pictures beyond them ; and the
mad splendours of dazzling poetry flood him repeatedly, as soon as he
thinks of those glowing black eyes :

' From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim.
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.' '

He saw none of it :

' I^or did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose. ' *

All tliis sweetness of spring was but her perfume and her shade ;

' The forward violet thus I did chide :
" Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath ? The purple pride,
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grcssly dyed."

' Sonnet 142. - Sonnet 95.

3 Sonnet 98. « Ibid.

302 THE EENAISSANCE. [bOOK II.

Tlie lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair :
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair :
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath ; . . ,
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stol'n from thee. ' ^

Passionate trifles, delicious affectations, worthy of Heine and the con-
temporaries of Dante, whicli tell ns of long rapturous dreams centred
around one object. Under a domination so imperious and sustained,
wliat sentiment could maintain its ground ? That of family ? He
was married and had children, — a family which he went to see ' once
a year ; ' and it was probably on his return from one of these journeys
that he used the words above quoted. Conscience ? * Love is too
young to know what conscience is.' Jealousy and anger ?

' For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason. ' "

Eepulses ?

' He is contented thy poor drudge to be.
To stand in thy affau'S, fall by thy side. ' ^

He is no longer young; she loves another, a handsome, young, light-
haired fellow, his own dearest friend, whom he has presented to her,
and whom she wishes to seduce :

* Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
"Which like two spirits do suggest me still :
The better angel is a man right fair.
The worser spirit a woman coloiu-'d ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side. ' *

And when she has succeeded in this,^ he dares not confess it to himself,
but suffers all, like Moliere. What wretchedness there is in these
trifles of every-day life ! How man's thoughts instinctively place
by Shakspeare's side the great unhappy French poet (Moliere), also
a philosopher by nature, but more of a professional laugher, a mocker
of passionate old men, a bitter railer at deceived husbands, who, after
having played one of his most approved comedies, said aloud to a
companion, ' My dear friend, I am in despair ; my wife does not love
me ! ' Neither glory, nor work, nor invention satisfy these vehement

i Sonnet 99. * Sonnet 141. 3 Ibid.

* Sonnet 144 ; also the Passionate Pilgrim, 2.

^ This new interpretation of the Sonnets is due to the ingenious and learned
conjectures of M. Ph. Chasles. — For a short history of these Sonnets, see Dyce's
Sliakspeare, i. pp. 96-102. This learned editor says : ' I contend that allusions
scattered through the whole series are not to be hastily referred to the per.sonal
circumstances of Shakspeare.' — Tb,

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEARE. 303

souls ; love alone can fill tliem, because, with their senses and heart,
it contents also their brain ; and all the powers of man, imagination
like the rest, find in it their concentration and their employment,
' Love is my sin,' he said, as did Musset and Heine ; and in the
Sonnets we find traces of yet other passions, equally abandoned ; one
in particular, seemingly for a great lady. The first half of his dramas,
Midsummer Nig/ifs Dream, Eomeo and Juliet, the Two Gentlemen of
Verona, preserve the warm imprint more completely ; and we have
only to consider his latest women's character,^ to see with what ex-
quisite tenderness, what full adoration, he loved them to the end.

In this is all his genius ; his was one of those delicate souls Avhich,
like a perfect instrument of music, vibrate of themselves at the slightest
touch. This fine sensibility was the first thing observed in him. ' My
darling Shakspeare,' ' Sweet Swan of Avon :' these words of Ben Jonson
only confirm what his contemporaries reiterate. He was afiectionate
and kind, ' civil in demeanour, and excellent in the qualitie he pro-
fesses;'^ if he had the transports, he had also the eilusion of true
artists ; he was loved, men were delighted in his company ; nothing is
more sweet or engaging than this charm, this half -feminine abandon-
ment in a man. His wit in conversation was ready, ingenious, nimble ;
his gaiety brilliant ; his imagination easy, and so copious, that, as his
comrades tell us, he never erased what he had written — at least when
he wrote out a scene for the second time : it was the idea which he
would change, not the words, by an after-glow of poetic thought, not
with a painful tinkering of the verse. All these characteristics are
combined in a single one : he had a sympathetic genius ; I mean that
naturally he knew how to forget himself and become transfused into
all the objects which he conceived. Look around you at the great
authors of your time, try to approach them, to become acquainted with

^ Miranda, Desdemona, Viola. The following are the first words of the Duke
in Twelfth Nirjht:—

* !f music be the food of love, play on ;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again ! it had a dying fall :

0, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound.

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour ! Enough ; no more :

*Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

0 spirit of love ! how quick and fresh art thou.

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But faUs into abatement and low price,

Even in a minute : so full of shapes is faucy

That it alone is high-fantastical. '
* IT. Chettle, in repudiating Greene's sarcasm, attributed to hio.

304 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

them, to see them as they think, and you will observe the full force of
this word. By an extraordinary instinct, they put themselves at once
in the position of existences : men, animals, flowers, plants, landscapes,
whatever the objects are, living or not, they feel by intuition the forces
and tendencies which produce the visible external; and their soul,
infinitely complex, becomes by its ceaseless metamorphoses, a sort of
abstract of the universe. This is why they seem to live more than
other men ; they have no need to be taught, they divine. I have seen
such a man, apropos of a piece of armour, a costume, a collection of
furniture, enter into the middle-age more deeply than three savants
together. They reconstruct, as they buUd, naturally, surely, by an
inspiration which is a winged chain of reasoning. Shakspeare had
only an imperfect education, ' small Latin and less Greek,' barely
French and Italian,^ nothing else ; he had not travelled, he had only
read the current literature, he had picked up a few law words in the
court of his little town ; reckon up, if you can, all that he knew of man
and of history. These men see more objects at a time ; they grasp
them more closely than other men, more quickly and thoroughly ;
their mind is full, and runs over. They do not rest in simple reason-
ing ; at every idea their whole being, reflections, images, emotions, are
set aquiver. See them at it ; they gesticulate, mimic their thought,
brim over with comparisons ; even in their talk they are imaginative
and original, with familiarity and boldness of speech, now happily, al-
ways irregularly, according to the whims and starts of the adventurous
improvisation. The sway, the brilliancy of their language is marvel-
lous ; so are their fits, the wide leaps with which they couple widely-
removed ideas, annihilating distance, passing from pathos to humour,
from vehemence to gentleness. This extraordinary rapture is the last
thing to qmt them. If perchance ideas fail, or if their melancholy
is too harsh, they still speak and produce, even if it be buffooneries ;
they become clowns, though at their own expense, and to their own
hurt. I know one who will mutter bad puns when he thinks he is
dying, or has a mind to kill himself; the inner wheel continues to turn,
even upon nothing, that wheel which man must needs see ever turning,
even though it tear him as it turns ; his clown-tricks are an outlet ;
you will find him, this inextinguishable fellow, this ironical puppet, at
Ophelia's tomb, at Cleopatra's death-bed, at Juliet's funeral. High or
low, these men must always be at some extreme. They feel their
good and their ill too deeply ; they expand the state of their soul too
widely, by a sort of involuntary novel. After the scandals and the
disgusts by which they debase themselves beyond measure, they rise
and become exalted in a marvellous fashion, even trembling with pride
and joy. ' Haply,' says Shakspeare, after one of these dull moods :

^ Dyce, Sliahspeare, i. 27 : ' Of French and Italian, I appreliend, he knew but
little.'— Tb.

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSrEARE. 305

• Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.''

Then all fades away, as in a grate where a stronger flame than usual
lias left no substantial fuel behind it.

' That time of year thou mayst in me behold
"VMien yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. ' ^ . , »

* No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell :
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it ; for I love you so.
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.' *

These sudden alternations of joy and sadness, divine transports and deep
melancholies, exquisite tenderness and womanly depressions, depict the
poet, extreme in emotions, ceaselessly troubled with grief or merriment,
sensible of the slightest shock, more strong, more dainty in enjoyment
and suffering than other men, capable of more intense and sweeter
dreams, within whom is stirred an imaginary world of graceful or
terrible beings, all impassioned like their author.

Such as I have described him, however, he found his resting-phice.
Early, at least from an external point, he settled down to an orderly,
sensible, citizen-like existence, engaged in business, provident of the
future. He remained on the stage for at least seventeen years, though
taking secondary parts ; * he sets his wits at the same time to the
touching up of plays with so much activity, that Greene called him ' au
upstart crow beautified with our feathers ; ... an absolute Johannes
factotum, in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey.' ^
At the age of thirty-three he had amassed enough to buy at Stratford
a house with two barns and two gardens, and he went on steadier and
steadier in the same course. A man attains only to easy circumstances
by his own labour; if he gains wealth, it is by making others labour
for him. This is why, to the trades of actor and author, Shakspeare
added those of manager and director of a theatre. He acquired a
partial proprietorship in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres, farmed

1 Sonnet 29. 2 Sonnet 73. ' Sonnet 71.

* The part in which he excelled was that of the ghost in UamUt,

* Greene's A Groatsworth of Wit, etc.

U

306 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IT.

tithes, bought large pieces of land, more houses, gave a dowry to his
daughter Susanna, and finally retired to his native town on his property,
in his own house, hke a good landlord, an honest citizen, who manages
his fortune fitly, and takes his share of municipal work. He had an
income of two or three hundred pounds, which would be equivalent to
about eight or twelve hundred at the present time, and according to
tradition, lived cheerfully and on good terms with his neighbours ; at
all events, it does not seem that he thought much about his literary
glory, for he did not even take the trouble to collect and publish his
works. One of his daughters married a physician, the other a wine
merchant; the last did not even know how to sign her name. He lent
money, and cut a good figure in this little world. Strange close ; one
which at first sight resembles more that of a shopkeeper than of a poet.
Must we attribute it to that English instinct which places happiness in
the life of a country gentleman and a landlord with a good rent-roll,
well connected, surrounded by comforts, who quietly rejoices in his
settled respectability,^ his domestic authority, and his county standing ?
Or rather, was Shakspeare, like Voltaire, a common-sense man, though
of an imaginative brain, keeping a sound judgment under the sparkling
of his genius, prudent from scepticism, economical through lack of
independence, and capable, after going the round of human ideas, of
deciding with Candide,^ that the best thing one can do is ' to cultivate
one's garden ? ' I had rather think, as his full and solid head suggests,*
that by the mere force of his overflowing imagination he escaped, like
Goethe, the perils of an overflowing imagination ; that in depicting
passion, he succeeded, like Goethe, in quelling passion in his own case ;
that the lava did not break out in his conduct, because it found issue in
his poetry ; that his theatre redeemed his life ; and that, having passed,
by sympathy, through every kind of folly and wretchedness that is
incident to human existence, he was able to settle down amidst them
■with a calm and melancholy smile, listening, for distraction, to the aerial
music of the fancies in which he revelled.* I am willing to believe,
lastly, that in frame as in the rest, he belonged to his great generation
and his great age ; that with him, as with Rabelais, Titian, Michael
Angelo, and Rubens, the solidity of his muscles balanced the sensibility
of his nerves ; that in those days the human machine, more severely
tried and more firmly constructed, could withstand the storms of passion
and the fire of inspiration ; that soul and body were still at equilibrium;
that genius was then a blossom, and not, as now, a disease. Of all this
we can but conjecture : if we would see the man more closely, we must
seek him in his works.

' ' He was a respectable man. ' ' A good word ; what does it mean ! ' ' Ha
kept a gig.' — (From Thurtell's trial for the miirder of Weare.)

* The model of an optimist, the hero of one of Voltaire's tales. — Tk.

* See his portraits, and in particular his bust.

* Especially in his later plays : Tempest, Twelfth Night,

CHAP. IV.] SlIAKSPEARE. 307

II.

Let us then look for the man, and in his style. The style explains
the work ; whilst showing the principal features of the genius, it infers
the rest. When we have once grasped the dominant faculty, we see
the whole artist developed like a flower.

Shakspeare imagines with copiousness and excess ; he spreads meta-
phors profusely over all he writes ; every instant abstract ideas are
changed into images; it is a series of paintings which is unfolded in
his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves ; they
crowd within him, covering his arguments ; they dim with their bright-
ness the pure light of logic. He does not labour to explain or prove ;
picture on picture, image on image, he is for ever copying the strange
and splendid visions which are engendered one within another, and are
heaped up within him. Compare to our dull writers this passage, which
I take at hazard from a tranquil dialogue :

' The single and peculiar life is bound,
A\'ith all the strength and ardour of the mind.
To keep itself from noyance ; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone ; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it : it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoiu'd ; which, when it falls.
Each small annexment, petty consequence.
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan. ' '

Here we have three successive images to express the same thought.
It is a whole blossoming ; a bough grows from the trunk, from that an-
other, which is multiplied into numerous fresh branches. Instead of a
smooth road, traced by a regular line of dry and well-fixed stakes, you
enter a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes,
Avhich conceal you and close your path, which delight and dazzle your
eves by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their
bloom. You are astonished at first, modern mind that you are, busi-
ness man, used to the clear dissertations of classical poetry ; you
become cross ; you think the author is joking, and that through self-
esteem and bad taste he is misleading you and himself in his garden
thickets. By no means ; if he speaks thus, it is not from choice, but of
necessity ; metaphor is not his whim, but the form of his thought. In
the height of passion, he imagines still. When Hamlet, in despair,
remembers his father's noble form, he sees the mythological pictures
with which the taste of the age filled the very streets :

* Hamlet, iiL 3.

308 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

* A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.'*

Tliis charming vision, in tlie midst of a bloody invective, proves that
there lurks a painter underneath tlie poet. Involuntarily and out of
season, he tears off the tragic mask which covered his face ; and the
reader discovers, behind the contracted features of tliis terrible mask, a
graceful and inspired smile of which he had not dreamed.

Such an imagination must needs be vehement. Every metaphor is
a convulsion. Whosoever involuntarily and naturally transforms a dry
idea into an image, has his brain on fire : true metaphors are flaming
apparitions, which are like a picture in a flash of lightning. Never, I
think, in any nation of Europe, or in any age of history, has so deep a
passion been seen. Shakspeare's style is a compound of furious expres-
sions. No man has submitted words to such a contortion. Mingled
contrasts, raving exaggerations, apostrophes, exclamations, the whole
fury of the ode, inversion of ideas, accumulation of images, the horrible
and the divine, jumbled into the same line; it seems to my fancy as
though he never writes a word without shouting it. ' What have I
done?' the queen asks Hfunlet. He answers:

' Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty.
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows
As false as dicers' oaths : 0, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words : heaven's face doth glow ;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act. ' ^

It is the style of phrensy. Yet I have not given aU. The metaphors are
all exaggerated, the ideas all verge on the absurd. All is transformed
and disfigured by the whirlwind of passion. The contagion of the crime,
which he denounces, has marred his whole nature. He no longer sees
anything in the world but corruption and lying. To vilify the virtuous
w^ere little ; he vilifies virtue herself. Inanimate things are uucked into
the whirl of grief. The sky's red tint at sunset, the pallid shade spread
by night over the landscape, become the blush and the pallor of shame,
and the wretched man who speaks and weeps sees the whole world totter
with him in the dimness of despair.

Hamlet, it will be said, is half-mad ; this explains his vehemence of
expression. The truth is that Hamlet, here, is Shakspeare. Be the
situation terrible or peaceful, whether he is engaged on an invective or

» Act iii. Sc. 4. * Ihui.

CHAP. lY.] SHAKSPEAr.E. 309

a conversation, the style is excessive throughout. Shakspeare never
sees things tranquilly. All the powers of his mind are concentrated in
the present image or idea. He is buried and absorbed in it. With
such a genius, we are on the brink of an abyss ; the eddying water
dashes in headlong, devouring whatever objects it meets, bringing them
to light again, if at all, transformed and mutilated. We pause stupe-
fied before these convulsive metaphors, which might have been written
by a fevered hand in a night's delirium, which gather a pageful of ideas
and pictures in half a sentence, which scorch the eyes they Avould en-
lighten. Words lose their sense ; constructions are put out of joint ;
paradoxes of style, apparently false expressions, which a man might
occasionally venture upon with diffidence in the transport of his rapture,
become the ordinary language ; he dazzles, he repels, he terrifies, he
disgusts, he oppresses ; his verses are a piercing and sublime song,
pitched in too high a key, above the reach of our organs, which offends
our ears, of which our mind alone can divine the justice and beauty.

Yet this is little; for that singular force of concentration is re-
doubled by the suddenness of the dash which it displays. In Shak-
speare there is no preparation, no adaptation, no development, no care
to make himself understood. Like a too fiery and powerful horse, he
bounds, but cannot run. He bridges in a couple of words an enormous
interval ; is at the two poles in a single instant. The reader vainly
looks for the intermediate track ; confounded by these prodigious leaps,
he wonders by what miracle the poet has entered upon a new idea
the very moment when he quitted the last, seeing perhaps between the
two images a long scale of transitions, -which we pace painfully step by
step, but which he has spanned in a stride. Shakspeare flies, we creep.
Hence comes a style made up of conceits, bold images shattered in an
instant by others still bolder, barely indicated ideas completed by others
far removed, no visible connexion, but a visible incoherence ; at every
step we halt, the track failing ; and there, far above us, lo, stands the
poet, and we find that we have ventured in his footsteps, through a
craggy land, full of precipices, which he threads, as if it were a
straightforward road, but on which our greatest eff'orts barely carry
us along.

What will you think, further, if we observe that these vehement ex-
pressions, so unexpected, instead of following one after the other, slowly
and with effort, are hurled out by hundreds, with an impetuous ease
and abundance, like the bubbling waves from a welling spring, which are
heaped together, rise one above another, and find no place wide enough
to spread themselves and fall ? You may find in Romeo and Juliet a
score of examples of this inexhaustible inspiration. The two lovers
pile up an infinite mass of metaphors, impassioned exaggerations,
clenches, contorted phrases, amorous extravagances. Their language
is like the trill of nightingales. Shakspeare's wits, Mercutio, Beatrice,
llosalind, his clowns, bufibons, sparkle with far-fetched jokes, which

310 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK IT.

rattle out like a musketry-fire. There is none of them but provides
enough play of words to stock a whole theatre. Lear's curses, or Queen
Margaret's, would suffice for all the madmen in an asylum, or all the
oppressed of the earth. The sonnets are a delirium of ideas and images,
turned out with an energy enough to make a man giddy. His first
poem, Venus and Adonis, is the sensual ecstasy of a Correggio, insatiable
and excited. This exuberant fecundity intensifies qualities already in
excess, and multiplies a hundred-fold the luxuriance of metaphor, the
incoherence of style, and the unbridled vehemence of expression.^

All that I have said may be compressed into a feAV words. Objects
were taken into his mind organised and complete ; they pass into ours
disjointed, decomposed, fragmentarily. He thought in the lamp, we
think piecemeal ; hence his style and our style — two languages not
to be reconciled. We, for our part, writers and reasoners, can note
precisely by a word each isolated fraction of an idea, and represent
the due order of its parts by the due order of our expressions. We
advance gradually ; we affiliate, go down to the roots, try and treat our
words as numbers, our sentences as equations ; we employ but general
terms, which every mind can understand, and regular constructions, into
which any mind can enter; we attain justness and clearness, not life.
Shakspeare lets justness and clearness look out for themselves, and attains
life. From amidst his complex conception and his coloured semi-vision
he grasps a fragment, a quivering fibre, and shows it ; it is for you,
from this fragment, to divine the rest. He, behind the word, has a
whole picture, an attitude, a long argument abridged, a mass of swarm-
ing ideas ; you know them, these abbreviative, condensive words : these
are they which we launch out from the furnace of invention, in a fit of
passion — words of slang or of fashion, which appeal to local memory
or individual experience ;2 little concocted and incorrect phrases, which,
by their irregularity, express the suddenness and the breaks of the
inner sensation ; trivial words, exaggerated figures.^ There is a gesture
beneath each, a quick contraction of the brows, a curl of laughing lips,
a clown's trick, an unhinging of the whole machine. None of them
mark ideas ; each is the extremity and issue of a complete mimic action ;
none is the expression and definition of a partial and limited idea.
This is why Shakspeare is strange and powerful, obscure and original,
beyond all the poets of his or any other age ; the most immoderate of
all violators of language, the most marvellous of all creators of souls,

^ This is why, in the eyes of a writer of the seventeenth century, Shakspeare's
style is the most obscure, pretentious, painful, barbarous, and absurd, that couJvl
be imagined.

'^ Shakspeare's vocabulary is the most copious of all. It comprises about 15,00ft
words ; Milton's only 8000.

' See the conversation of Laertes and his sister, and of Laertes and rdoniu?,
in Hamlet. The style is foreign to the situation ; and we see here plainly tlie
natui-al and necessary process of Shakspeare's thought.

CHAP. IV.] STIAKSPEAKE. 311

the farthest removed from regular logic and classical reason, the one
most capable of exciting in us a world of forms, and of placing living
beings before us.

III.

Let us reconstruct this world, so as to find in it the imprint of its
creator. A poet does not copy at random tlie manners which surround
liim ; he selects from this vast material, and involuntarily brings upon
the stage the moods of the heart and the conduct which best suit his
talent. If he is a logician, a moralist, an orator, as, for instance, one
of the French great tragic poets (Racine) of the seventeenth century,
he will only represent noble manners ; he will avoid low characters ; he
will have a horror of valets and the plebs ; he will observe the greatest
decorum in respect of the strongest outbreaks of passion ; he will reject
as scandalous every low or indecent Avord ; he will give us reason,
loftiness, good taste throughout ; he will suppress the familiarity, child-
ishness, artlessness, gay banter of domestic life ; he will blot out precise
details, special traits, and will raise tragedy into a serene and sublime
region, Avhere his abstract personages, unencumbered by time and
space, after an exchange of eloquent harangues and able dissertations,
will kill each other becomingly, and as though they were merely con-
cluding a ceremony. Shakspeare does just the contrary, because his
genius is the exact opposite. His master faculty is an impassioned
imagination, freed from the fetters of reason and morality. He aban-
dons himself to it, and finds in man nothing that he would care to lop
off. He accepts nature, and finds it beautiful in its entirety. He
paints it in its littlenesses, its deformities, its weaknesses, its excesses,
its irregularities, and in its rages ; he exhibits man at his meals, in
bed, at play, drunk, mad, sick ; he adds that which passes behind the
stage to that which passes on the stage. He does not dream of en-
nobling, but of copying human life, and aspires only to make his copy
more energetic and more striking than the original.

Hence the morals of this drama ; and first, the want of dignity.
Dignity arises from self-command. A man selects the most noble of
his acts and attitudes, and allows himself no other. Shakspeare's cha- .
racters select none, but allow themselves all. His kings are men, and
fathers of families. The terrible Leontes, who is about to order the
death of his wife and his friend, plays like a child with his son :
caresses him, gives him all the pretty little pet names which mothers
are wont to employ ; he dares be trivial ; he gabbles like a nurse ; he
Las her language, and fulfils her oflaces :

' Leontes. "WTiat, hast smutch'd thy nose ?
They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, captain,
We must be neat ; not neat, but cleanly, captain : . . •
Come, sir page,
Look on me with your welkin eye : sweet villain !

512 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

Most dear'st ! my coUop . . . Looking on tbe lines
Of my boy's face, methonglits I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd.
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it shoiild bite its master. . . .
How like, methonght, I then was to this kernel.
This squash, this gentleman ! . . . My brother,
Are you so fond of your young prince as we
Dc seem to be of ours ?

PoUxenes. If at home, sir,

He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter.
Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy.
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all :
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood. ' ^

There are a score of such passages in Shakspeare. The great
passions, "with him as in nature, are preceded or followed by trivial
actions, scraps ot talk, commonplace sentiments. Strong emotions are
accidents in our life : to drink, to eat, to talk of indifferent things, to
carry out mechanically an habitual duty, to dream of some stale
pleasure or some ordinary annoyance, that is the business of our lives.
Shakspeare paints us as we are ; his heroes bow, ask people for news,
speak of rain and fine weather, as often and as casually as ourselves, on
the very eve of falling into the extremity of misery, or of plunging into
fatal resolutions. Hamlet asks what's o'clock, finds the wind biting,
talks of feasts and music heard without; and this quiet talk, so little in
harmony with action, so full of slight, insignificant facts, which chance
alone has raised up, lasts until the moment when his father's ghost,
rising in the darkness, reveals the assassination which it is his duty to
avenge.

Reason tells us that our manners should be measured ; this is why
the manners which Shakspeare paints are not so. Pure nature is
violent, passionate ; she admits no excuses, suffers no moderation, takes
nc count of circumstances, wills blindly, breaks out into railing, has the
irrationality, ardour, anger of children. Shakspeare's characters have
hot blood and a ready hand. They cannot restrain themselves, they
abandon themselves at once to their grief, indignation, love, and plunge
fatally down the steep slope, where their passion urges them. How
many need I quote? Timon, Leonato, Cressida, all the young girls, all
the chief characters in the great dramas ; everywhere Shakspeare paints
the unreflecting impetuosity of immediate action. Capulet tells his
daughter Juliet that in three days she is to marry Earl Paris, and bids
her be proud of it ; she answers that she is not proud of it, and yet she
thanks the earl for this proof of love. Compare Capulet's fury with the

1 Winter's Talc. i. 2.

CIIAr. ir.] SlIAKSrEARE. 313

anger of Orgon,' and you may measure the difference of the two poets
and the two civilisations :

'Capttlet. How now, how now, chop-lop;ic ! "VVliat is tliis?
" Proud," and " I thank yon," and " I tliank you not ; "
And yet "not proud," mistress minion, you,
Thank nie no thankings, nor proud me no prouds.
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next,
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's church,
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.
Out, you green sickness carrion ! out, you baggage !
You tallow-face !

Juliet. Good father, I beseech you on my knees,
Hear me with patience but to speak a word.

C. Hang thee, young baggage 1 disobedient wretch !
I tell thee what : get thee to church o' Thursday,
Or never after look me in the face :
Speak not, reply not, do not answer me ;
My fingers itch. . , .

Lady C. You are too hot.

C. God's bread ! it makes me mad :
Day, niglit, hour, tide, time, work, play,
Alone, in company, still my care hath been
To have her match 'd : and having now provided
A gentleman of noble parentage,
Of fair demesnes, youthful, and nobly train'd,
StufFd, as they say, with honourable parts,
Proportion'd as one's thought would wish a man ;
And then to have a wretched puling fool,
A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender,
To answer, " Pll not wed ; I cannot love,
I am too young ; I pray you, pardon me," —
But. an you will not wed, I'll pardon you :
Graze where you will, you shall not house with me:
Look to't, think on't, I do not use to jest.
Thursday is near ; lay hand on heart, advise :
An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend ;
An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee.'^

This method of exhorting one's child to marry is peculiar to
Shakspeare and the sixteenth century. Contradiction to these men
was like a red rag to a bull ; it drove them mad.

We might be sure that in this age, and on this stage, decency was
a thing unknown. It is wearisome, being a check ; men got rid of it,
because it was wearisome. It is a gift of reason and morality ; as in-
decency is produced by nature and passion. Shakspeare's words are
too indecent to be translated. His characters call tilings by their dirty

' One of Moliere's characters in Tartvffe. — Til.

314 THE RENAISS-VNCE. [BOOK II.

names, and compel the thouglits to particular images of physical love.
The talk of gentlemen and ladies is full of coarse allusions ; we should
have to find out an alehouse of the lowest description to hear the like
words nowadays.^

It would be in an alehouse too that we should have to look for the
rude jests and brutal kind of wit which form the staple of these conver-
sations. Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of an advanced reflection ;
it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every-
day discourse ; it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself
in others; it constrains simple nature, which is selfish and gross. This
is why it is absent from the manners of the drama we are considering.
You will see carmen, out of sportiveness and good humour, deal one
another hard blows : so it is pretty well with the conversation of the
lords and ladies who are in a sportive mood ; for instance, Beatrice and
Benedick, very well bred folk as things go,^ with a great name for
wit and politeness, whose smart retorts create amusement for the
bystanders. These 'skirmishes of wit' consist in telling one another
plainly : You are a coward, a glutton, an idiot, a buffoon, a rake, a
brute ! You are a parrot's tongue, a fool, a . . . (the word is there).
Benedick says:

' I will go ... to the Antipodes . . . rather than hold three words' conference
with this harpy. ... I cannot endure my Lady Tongue. . . .
Don Pedro. You have put him down, lady, you have put him down.
Beatrice. So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove
the mother of fools. ' '

We can infer the tone they use when in anger, Emilia, in Othello, says :

' He call'd her whore ; a beggar in his drink
Could not have laid such terms upon his callat. ' *

They have a vocabulary of foul words as complete as that of Rabelais,
and they drain it dry. They catch up handl'uls of mud, and hurl it at
tlieir enemy, not conceiving themselves to be smirched.

Their actions correspond. They go without shame or pity to the
limits of their passion. They kill, poison, violate, burn ; the stage is full
of abominations. Sliakspeare lugs upon the stage all the atrocious deeds
of the civil wars. These are the ways of wolves and hysenas. We must
read of Jack Cade's sedition to gain an idea of this madness and fury.
We might imagine we were seeing infuriated beasts, the murderous
recklessness of a wolf in a sheepfold, the brutality of a hog fouling and
rolling himself in filth and blood. They ruin, kill, butcher each other ;
with their feet in the blood of their victims, they call for food and

» Henry VIII. ii. 3, etc.

" Much Ado about Nothing. See also the manner in which Henry v. pays
court to Katharine of France (v. 2).

'' Much Ado about Nothing, ii. 1. * Act iv. 2.

Cll.Vr. IV.] SIIAKSPEAnE. 315

drink ; they stick heads on pikes and make them kiss one another, and
they laugh.

• Jack Cade. There shall he in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny.
. . . There shall he no money ; all shall eat and drink on my score, and I will
apparel them all in one livery. . . . And here, sitting upon London-stone, I
charge and command that, of the city's cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but
claret wine this first year of our reign. . . . Away, biu'n all the records of the
realm : my mouth shall be the parliament of England. . . . And henceforth all
things shall be in common. . . . What canst thou answer to my majesty for
giving up of Kormandy unto Mounsieur Basimecu, the dauphin qf France ? . . .
The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he
pay me tribute ; there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her
maidenhead ere they have it. [Re-enter rebels with the heads oj Lord Say and his
son-in-law.) F.ut is not this braver ? Let them kiss one another, for they loved
well when they were alive.' ^

Man must not be let loose ; Ave know not what lusts and furies
may brood under a sober guise. Nature was never so hideous, and
this hideousness is tlie truth.

Are these cannibal moods only met with among the scum ? Why,
the princes are worse. The Duke of Cornwall orders the old Earl of
Gloucester to be tied to a chair, because, owing to him. King Lear has
escaped :

' Fellows, hold the chair.
Upon these eyes of thine Fll set my foot.

{Gloucester is held down in the chair, while Cornwall plvxhi
out one of his eyes, and sets his foot on it.)
Gloster. He that will think to live till he be old,
Give me some help ! 0 cruel ! 0 you gods I

Regan. One side will mock another ; the other too.
Cornwall. If you see vengeance, —
Servant. Hold your hand, my lord :

I have served you ever since I was a child ;
YiXit better service have I never done you,
Than now to bid you hold. Reg. How now, you dog!

Serv. If you did wear a beard upon your chin,
I'd shake it on this quan'el. What do you mean ?

Corn. My villain ! {Draws, and runs at him.)

Serv. Nay, then, come on, and take the chance of anger.

{Draivs ; they fght ; Cornwall is wounded.)
Regan. Give me thy sword. A peasant stand up tlius !

{Snatches a sword, comes behind, and stabs him.)
Serv. 0, I am slain ! ily lord, you have one eye left
To see some mischief on him. 0 ! {Dies. )

Corn. Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly !
Where is thy lustre now ?

Gloster. All dark and comfortless. Where's my son ? . . .
Regan. Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell
His way to Dover. '2

' Henry VI. 2d part, iv. 2, 6, 7. * King Lear^ iii. 7.

316 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IT.

Such are the mnnners of that stage. They are unbridled, like those
of the age, and like the poet's imagination. To copy the common
actions of every-day life, the puerilities and feeblenesses to which the
greatest continually sink, the transports which degrade them, the
indecent, harsh, or foul words, the atrocious deeds in which licence
revels, the brutality and ferocity of primitive nature, is the work of a
free and unencumbered imagination. To copy this hideousness and
these excesses with a selection of such familiar, significant, precise de-
tails, that they reveal under every word of every personage the complete
condition of civilisation, is the work of a concentrated and all-powerful
imagination. This species of manners and this energy of description
indicate the same faculty, unique and excessive, which the style had
already indicated.

IV.

On this common background stands out a population of distinct
living figures, illuminated by an intense light, in striking relief. This
creative power is Shakspeare's great gift, and it communicates an extra-
ordinary significance to his words. Every word pronounced by one
of his characters enables us to see, besides the idea which it contains
and the emotion which prompted it, the aggregate of the qualities and
the entire character which produced it — the mood, physical attitude,
bearing, look of the man, all instantaneously, with a clearness and force
approached by no one. The words which strike our ears are not the
thousandth part of those we hear within ; they are like sparks thrown
off at intervals ; the eyes catch rare flashes of flame ; the mind alone
perceives the vast conilagration of which they are the signs and the
effect. He gives us two dramas in one : the first strange, convulsive,
curtailed, visible ; the other consistent, immense, invisible : the one
covers the other so well, that as a rule we do not realise that we are
perusing words : we hear the roll of those terrible voices, we see con-
tracted features, glowing eyes, pallid faces ; we see the rages, the
furious resolutions which mount to the brain with the feverish blood,
and descend to the sharp-strung nerves. This property possessed by
every phrase to exhibit a world of sentiments and forms, comes from
the iact that the phrase is actually caused by a world of emotions and
images. Shakspeare, when he wrote, felt all that we feel, and much
besides. He had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of the
eye a complete character, body, mind, past and present, in every detail
and every depth of his being, with the exact attitude and the expres-
sion of face, which the situation demanded. A word here and there of
Hamlet or Othello would need for its explanation three pages of com-
mentaries ; each of the half-understood thoughts, which the commen-
tator may have discovered, has left its trace in the turn of the phrase,
in the nature of the metaphor, in the order of the words; nowaaays, in
pui'suing these traces, we divine the thoughts. These innumerable

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSPEAKE. 317

traces have been impressed in a second, within the compass of a line.
In the next line there are as many, impressed just as quickly, and
in the same compass. You can gauge the concentration and the
velocity of the imagination -which creates thus.

These characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, gross
or delicate, refined or awkward, Shakspeare gives them all the same
kind of spirit which is his own. He has made of them imaginative
people, void of will and reason, impassioned machines, vehemently
hurled one upon another, who were the representation of whatever is
most natural and most abandoned in human nature. Let us act the
play to ourselves, and see in all its stages this clanship of figures, this
prominence of portraits.

Lowest of all are the stupid folk, babbling or brutish. Imagination
already exists there, where reason is not yet born ; it exists also here,
where reason is dead. The idiot and the brute blindly follow the
phantoms which exist in their benumbed or mechanical brains. No
poet has understood this mechanism like Shakspeare. His Caliban, for
instance, a deformed savage, fed on roots, growls like a beast under the
hand of Prospero, who has subdued him. He howls continually against
his master, though he knows that every curse will be paid back with
' cramps and aches.' He is a chained wolf, trembling and fierce, who tries
to bite when approached, and who crouches when he sees the lash raised
above him. He has a foul sensuality, a loud base laugh, the gluttony
of degraded humanity. He wished to violate Miranda in her sleep. He
cries for his food, and gorges himself when he gets it. A sailor who
had landed in the island, Stephano, gives him wine ; he kisses his feet,
and takes him for a god ; he asks if he has not dropped from heaven,
and adores him. We find in him rebellious and bafiied passions, which
are eager to be avenged and satiated. Stephano had beaten his comrade.
Caliban cries, ' Beat him enough : after a little time I'll beat him too.'
He prays Stephano to come with him and murder Prospero in his sleep ;
he thirsts to lead him there, and sees his master already with his throat
cut, and his brains scattered on the earth :

' Prithee, my king, be quiet. See'st thou here,
This is the mouth o' the cell : no noise, and enter.
Do tliat good mischief which may make this island
Thine own for ever, and I, thy Caliban,
For aye thy foot-licker. ' '

Others, like Ajax and Cloten, are more like men, and yet it is pure
mood that Shakspeare depicts in them, as in Caliban. The clogging
corporeal machine, the mass of muscles, the thick blood coursing in the
veins of these fighting brutes, oppress the intelligence, and leave no life
but for animal passions. Ajax uses his fists, and devours meat; that is

' jf/te Tempest, iv. 1.

313 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK n.

his existence ; if he is jealous of Achilles, it is pretty much as a bull is
jealous of his fellow. He permits himself to be restrained and led by
Ulysses, without looking before him: the grossest flattery decoys him. The
Greeks have urged him to accept Hector's challenge. Behold him puffed
up with pride, scorning to answer any one, not knowing what he says or
does. Thersites cries, ' Good-morrow, Ajax ;' and he replies, ' Thanks,
Agamemnon,' He has no further thought than to contemplate his
enormous frame, and roll majestically his great stupid eyes. When the
day comes, he strikes at Hector as on an anvil. After a good while they
are separated. *I am not warm yet,' says Ajax, ' let us fight again."-
Cloten is less massive than this phlegmatic ox ; but he is just as idiotic,
just as vainglorious, just as coarse. The beautiful Imogen, urged by
his insults and his scullion manners, tells him that his whole body is
not worth as much as Posthumus' garment. He is stung to the quick,
repeats the word ten times; he cannot shake off the idea, and runs at it
again and again with his head down, like an angry ram :

* Cloten. " His garment ?" Now, tlie devil — /mog'ew. To Dorothy my woman
hie thee presently — C. " His garment ?" . . . You have abused me : "His meanest
garment!" . . . I'll be revenged: *' His meanest garment ! " WeU.'^

He gets some of Posthumus' garments, and goes to Milford Haven, ex-
pecting to meet Imogen there. On his way he mutters thus :

' With that suit upon my back, will I ravish her: first kill him, and in her
eyes ; there shall she see my valour, which will then be a torment to her contempt.
He on the ground, my s])eech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when
my lust has dined, — which, as I say, to vex her I will execute in the clothes that
she so praised, — to the court I'll knock her back, foot her home again. '^

Others, again, are but babblers : for example, Polonius, the grave brain-
less counsellor; a great baby, not yet out of his 'swathing clouts;' a
solemn booby, who rains on men a shower of counsels, compliments,
and maxims ; a sort of court speaking-trumpet, useful in grand cere-
monies, with the air of a thinker, but fit only to spout words. But
the most complete of all these characters is that of the nurse in Romeo
and Juliet, a gossip, loose in her talk, a regular kitchen-oracle, smelling
of the stew-pan and old boots, foolish, impudent, immoral, but other-
wise a good creature, and affectionate to her child. ]\Iark this dis-
juinted and never-ending gossip's babble :

* Nurse. 'Faith I can tell her age unto an hour.

Lady Camdet. She's not fourteen. ...

Nurse. Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she — God rest all Christian souls! —
Were of an age : well, Susan is with God ;

' See TroUus and Cressida, ii. 3, the jesting manner in which the generals
drive on this fierce brute.

* Cymbeline, ii. 3. ' HjU. iii. 5.

CHAT. IV.] SIIAKSrEAHE. 319

She was too good for me : but, as I said,

On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;

Tliat shall she, marry ; I remember it well.

'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years ;

And she was wean'd, — I never shall forget it,—

Of all the days of the year, upon that day :

For 1 had then laid wormwood to my dug,

Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall ;

My lord and you were then at Mantua : —

Kay, I do bear a brain: — but, as I said.

When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple

Of mj' dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool.

To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug !

Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow,

To bid me trudge:

And since that time it is eleven years ;

For then she could stand alone ; nay, by the rood.

She could have run and waddled all about ;

For even the day before, she broke her brow. '^

Then she tells an indecent anecdote, which she begins over again four
times. She is silenced: what then? She has her anecdote in her
head, and cannot cease repeating it and laughing to herself. Endless
repetitions are the mind's first step. The vulgar do not pursue the
straight line of reasoning and of the story ; they repeat their steps, as
it were merely marking time : struck with an image, they keep it for
an hour before their eyes, and are never tired of it. If they do ad-
vance, they turn aside to a hundred chance ideas before they get at
the phrase required. They let themselves be diverted by all the
thoughts which come across them. This is what the nurse does ; and
when she brings Juliet news of her lover, she torments and wearies
her, less from a wish to tease than from a habit of wandering from the
point:

' Nurse. Jesn, what haste ? can yon not stay awhile ?
Do you not see that I am out of breath ?

Juliet How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath
To saj"- to me that thou art out of breath ? . . .
Is thy news good, or bad ? answer to that ;
Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance:
Let me be satisfied : is't good or bad ?

N. Well, you have made a simple choice ; you know nut how to choose a man :
Romeo ! no, not he ; though his face be better than any man's, yet his leg excels
all men's ; and for a hand, and a foot, and a body, though they be not to be talked
on, yet they are past compare : he is not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant
him, as gentle as a lamb. Go thy Avays, wench; serve God. What, have you
dined at home ?

J. No, no : but all this did I know before.
What says he of our marriage ? what of that ?

^ liomeo and Juliet, i. 3.

320 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK It

i\^. Lord, how my head aches ! what a head have I !
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.
My back o' t'other side, — 0, my back, my back !
Beshrew your heart for sending me about.
To catch my death with jaunting up and down !

/. r faith, I am sorry that thou art not well.
Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love ?

N. Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and a kind, and
a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous, — Where is your mother ? "

It is never-ending. Her gabble is Avorse when she comes to announce
to Juliet the death of her cousin and the banishment of Romeo. It is
the shrill cry and chatter of an overgrown asthmatic magpie. She
laments, confuses the names, spins roundabout sentences, ends by asking
for aqua-vitce. She curses Romeo, them brings him to Juliet's chamber.
Next day Juliet is ordered to marry Earl Paris ; Juliet throws hersell
into hei nurse's arms, praying for comfort, advice, assistance. The
other finds the true remedy : Marry Paris,

' 0, he's a lovely gentleman !
Eomeo's a dishclout to him : an eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,
I think you are happy in this second match,
For it excels your first. ' ^

This cool immorality, these weather-cock arguments, this fashion of
estimating love like a fishwoman, completes the portrait.

V.

The mechanical imagination produces Shakspeare's fool-characters :
a quick venturesome dazzling, unquiet imagination, produces his men of
wit. Of wit there are many kinds. One, altogether French, which is
but reason, a foe to paradox, scorner of folly, a sort of incisive com-
mon sense, having no occupation but to render truth amusing and
evident, the most effective weapon with an intelligent and vain people :
such was the wit of Voltaire and the drawing-rooms. The other, that
of improvisators and artists, is a mere inventive transport, paradoxical,
unshackled, exuberant, a sort of self- entertainment, a phantasmagoria
of images, quibbles, strange ideas, dazing and intoxicating, like the
movement and illumination of a ball. Such is the wit of Mercutio, of
the clowns, of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Benedick. They laugh, not
from a sense of the ridiculous, but from the desire to laugh. You
must look elsewhere for the campaigns which aggressive reason makes
against human folly. Here folly is in its full bloom. Our folk think
of amusement, and nothing more. They are good-humoured ; they let
their wit ride gaily over the possible and the impossible. They play

* lijmeo and Juliet, ii. 5. * Ibid. iii. 5.

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSPEARE. 321

upon words, contort their sense, draw absurd and laughable inferences,
exchange them alternately, like shuttlecocks, one after another, and
vie with each other in singularity and invention. They dress all their
ideas in strange or sparkling metaphors. The taste of the time was for
masquerades ; their conversation is a masquerade of ideas. They say
nothing in a simple style; they only seek to heap together subtle things,
far-fetched, difficult to invent and to understand ; all their expressions
are over-refined, unexpected, extraordinary ; they strain their thought,
and change it into a caricature. ' Alas, poor Eomeo ! ' says Mercutio,
' he is already dead ; stabbed with a white wench's black eye ; shot
through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft with
the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft.'^ Benedick relates a conversation he
has just held with his mistress : ' O, she misused me past the endurance
of a block ! an oak, but with one green leaf on it would have answered
her ; my very visor began to assume life, and scold with her.' ^ These
gay and perpetual extravagances show the bearing of the interlocutors.
They do not remain quietly seated in their chairs, like the Marquis in
the Misanthrope; they wheel about, leap, paint their faces, gesticulate
boldly their ideas; their wit-rockets end with a song. Young folk,
soldiers and artists, they let off their fireworks of phrases, and gambol
round about. ' There was a star danced, and under that was I born.' *
This expression of Beatrice's aptly describes the kind of poetical,
sparkling, unreasoning, charming wit, more akin to music than to
literature, a sort of outspoken and wide-awake dream, not unlike that
described by Mercutio :

' 0, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife ; and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of httle atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep ;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film.
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Frick'd from the lazy finger of a maid ;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love ;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on lees,

* Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4. ^ Much Ado about Nothing, ii. 1. ^ Ihid.

X

322 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK n.

O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream. ...
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose.
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit ;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams he ot another benefice :
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats.
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades.
Of healths five-fathom deep ; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes.
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs.
Which once untangled much mistortuue bodes. . . .
This is she' * . . .

Romeo interrupts him, or he would never end. Let the reader com-
pare with the dialogue of the French theatre this little poem,

' Child of an idle brain.
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, ' '

introduced without incongruity into a conversation of the sixteenth
century, and he will comprehend the difference between the wit which
devotes itself to reasoning, or to record a subject for laughter, and that
imagination which is self-amused with its own act.

Falstaff has the passions of an animal, and the imagination of a
man of wit. There is no character which better exemplifies the dash
and immorality of Shakspeare. Falstaff is a great supporter of dis-
reputable places, SAvearer, gamester, brawler, wine-bag, as low as he
well can be. He has a big belly, bloodshot eyes, bloated face, shaking
leg ; he spends his life huddled up among the tavern-jugs, or asleep
on the ground behind the arras ; he only wakes to curse, lie, brag,
and steal. He is as big a swindler as Panurge, who had sixty-three
ways of making money, ' of which the honestest was by sly theft.'
And what is worse, he is an old man, a knight, a courtier, and well
bred. Must he not be odious and repulsive ? By no means ; you
cannot help liking him. At bottom, like his brother Panurge, he is
' the best fellow in the world.' He has no malice in his composition ;
no other wish than to laush and be amused. When insulted, he bawls
out louder than his attackers, and pays them back with interest in
coarse words and insults ; but he owes them no grudge for it. The
next minute he is sitting down with them in a tavern, drinking their
health like a brother and comrade. If he has vices, he exposes them
so frankly that we are obliged to forgive him them. He seems to say
to us : ' Well, so I am, what then ? I like drinking : isn't the wine

^ Borneo and Juliet, i. 4. " Hid,

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEAKE. • 323

good? I take to my heels when hard hitting begins: isn't fighting
a nuisance ? I get into debt, and do fools out of their money : isn't
it nice to have money in your pocket ? I brag : isn't it natural to
want to be well thought of?' — 'Dost thou hear, Hal? thou kno west,
in the state of innocency, Adam fell ; and what should poor Jack ■
FalstafF do in the days of villany ? Thou seest I have more flesh
than another man, and therefore more frailty.' ^ Falstaff is %o frankly
immoral, that he ceases to be so. Conscience ends at a certain point ;
nature assumes its place, and the man rushes upon what he desires,
without more thought of being just or unjust than an animal in the
neighbouring wood. FalstafF, engaged in recruiting, has sold exemp-
tions to all the rich people, and only enrolled starved and half-naked
wretches. There's but a shirt and a half in all his company : that does
not trouble him. Bah ! ' they'll find linen enough on every hedge.'
The prince, who has seen them pass muster, says, ' I did never set;
such pitiful rascals.' ' Tut, tut,' answers FalstafF, ' good enough to
toss ; food for powder ; they'll fill a pit as well as better ; tush,
man, mortal men, mortal men.' ^ His second excuse is his unfailing
spirit. If ever there was a man who could talk, it is he. Insults
and oaths, curses, jobations, protests, flow from him as from an open
barrel. He is never at a loss ; he devises a shift for every difficulty.
Lies sprout out of him, fructify, increase, beget one another, like
mushrooms on a rich and rotten bed of earth. He lies still more
from his imagination and nature than from interest and necessity. It
is evident from the manner in which he strains his fictions. He says
he has fought alone against two men. The next moment it is four.
Presently we have seven, then eleven, then fourteen. He is stopped
in time, or he would soon be talking of a whole army. When
unmasked, he does not lose his temper, and is the first to laugh at
his boastings. ' Gallants, lads, boys, hearts of gold. . . . What, shall
we be merry ? shall we have a play extempore ? ' ' He does the
scolding part of King Henry with so much truth, that one might take
him for a king, or an actor. This big pot-bellied fellow, a coward, a
jester, a brawler, a drunkard, a lewd rascal, a pothouse poet, is one
of Shakspeare's favourites. The reason is, that his manners are those
of pure nature, and Shakspeare's mind is congenial with his own.

VL

Nature is shameless and gross amidst this mass of flesh, heavy with
wine and fatness. It is delicate in the delicate body of women, but
as unreasoning and impassioned in Desdemona as in FalstafF. Shak-
speare's women are charming children, who feel in excess and love
with folly. They have unconstrained manners, little rages, pretty words
of friendship, coquettish rebelliousness, a graceful volubility, which

* First Part of King Henri/ IV., iii. 3. » Ibid. iv. 2. ' Ibid. ii. 4.

324 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

recall the warbling and the prettiness of birds. The heroines of the
French stage are almost men ; these are women, and in every sense
of the word. More imprudent than Desdemona a woman could not
be. She is moved with pity for Cassio, and asks a favour for him
passionately, recklessly, be the thing just or no, dangerous or no.
She knows nothing of man's laws, and thinks nothing of them. All
that she sees is, that Cassio is unhappy :

* Be thou assured, good Cassio . . . My lord shall never rest ;
I'D watch him tame and talk him out of patience ;
His hed shall seem a school, his board a shrift ;
I'll intermingle everything he does
With Cassio's suit.' *

She asks her favour :

' Othello. Not now, sweet Desdemona ; some other time.

Des. But shall 't be shortly ? 0. The sooner, sweet, for you.

Des. Shall 't be to-night at supper ? 0. No, not to-night.

Des. To-morrow dinner, then ? 0. J shall not dine at home ;
I meet the captains at the citadel.

Des. Why, then, to-morrow night ; or Tuesday mom ;
On Tuesday noon, or night ; on Wednesday morn :
I prithee, name the time, but let it not
Exceed three days : in faith, he's penitent.'^

She is somewhat astonished to see herself refused ; she scolds him.
Othello yields : who would not yield, seeing the reproach in those
lovely sulking eyes ? O, says she, with a pretty pout :

* This is not a boon ;

'Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm.,
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit
To your own person.'^

A moment after, when he prays her to leave him alone for a while,
mark the innocent gaiety, the ready observance, the playful child's tone :

' Shall I deny you ? no : farewell, my lord. . . .
Emilia, come : Be as yoiu" fancies teach you ;
Whate'er you be, I am obedient. ' ^

This vivacity, this petulance, does not prevent shrinking modesty and
silent timidity : on the contrary, they spring from a common cause,
extreme sensibility. She, who feels much and deeply, has more reserve
and more passion than others ; she breaks out or is silent ; she says
nothing or everything. Such is this Imogen,

' So tender of rebukes that words are strokes,
And strokes death to her. ' ^

» Othello, iii. 3. 2 jj^i^^ 3 J^id.

* Ibid. '•' Cymheline, iii. 5.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEAKE. 325

Such is Virgilia, the sweet wife of Coriolanus : her heart is not a
Roman one ; she is terrified at her husband's victories : when Volumnia
describes him stamping on the field of battle, and wiping his bloody
brow with his hand, she grows pale :

' His bloody brow \ 0 Jupiter, no blood ! . . .
Heavens bless my lord from fell Aulidius ' ' *

She would forget all that she knows of these dangers ; she dare not
think of them. When asked if Coriolanus does not generally return
wounded, she cries, ' 0, no, no, no.' She shuns this cruel idea, and
nurses a secret anguish at the bottom of her heart. She will not leave
the house : ' I'll not over the threshold till my lord return.' ^ She does
not smile, wUl hardly admit a visitor ; she would blame herself, as for
a lack of tenderness, for a moment's forgetfulness or gaiety. When he
does return, she can only blush and weep. This exalted sensibility
must needs end in love. They all love without measure, and nearly
all at first sight. At the first look Juliet casts on Romeo, she says to
the nurse :

* Go, ask bis name : if he be married,
My gi'ave is like to be my As-edding bed. ' '

It is the revelation of their destiny. As Shakspeare has made them,
they cannot but love, and they must love till death. But this first
look is an ecstasy ; and this sudden approach of love is a transport.
Miranda seeing Fernando, fancies that she sees ' a thing divine.' She
halts motionless, in the amazement of this sudden vision, at the sound
of these heavenly harmonies which rise from the depths of her heart.
She weeps, on seeing him drag the heavy logs ; with her tender white
hands she would do the work whilst he reposed. Her compassion and
tenderness carry her away; she is no longer mistress of her words, she
says what she would not, what her father has forbidden her to disclose,
what an instant before she would never have confessed. The too full
heart overflows unwittingly, happy, and ashamed at the current of joy
and new sensations with which an unknown feeling has flooded her :

' Miranda. I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of. . . .

Fernando. Wherefore weep you ?

M. At mine unworthiness that dare not offer
"What I desire to give, and much less take
What I shall die to want. . . .
I am your wife, if you will marry me ;
If not, I'll die your maid.' *

This irresistible invasion of love transforms the whole character. The
shrinking and tender Desdemona, suddenly, in full senate, before her
father, renounces her father ; dreams not for an instant of asking his
pardon, or consoling him. She will leave for Cyprus with Othello,

* Coriolanus, i. 3. * Ibid. ^ Borneo and Juliet, L 5. * The Tempest, iii. 1.

326 THE KENAISSANCE. [bOOK H.

through the enemy's fleet and the tempest. Everything vanishes before
the one and adored image which has taken entire and absolute posses-
sion of her full heart. So, extreme evils, bloody resolves, are only the
natural sequence of such love. Ophelia becomes mad, Juliet commits
suicide ; no one but looks upon such madness and death as necessary.
You will not then discover virtue in these souls, for by virtue is im-
plied a determinate desire to do good, and a rational observance of duty.
They are only pure through delicacy or love. They recoil from vice as
a g»-oss thing, not as an immoral thing. What they feel is not respect
for the marriage vow, but adoration of their husband. ' O sweetest,
fairest lily ! ' So Cymbeline speaks of one of these frail and lovely
flowers which cannot be torn from the tree to which they have grown,
whose least impurity Avould tarnish their whiteness. When Imogen
learns that her husband means to kill her as being faithless, she does
not revolt at the outrage ; she has no pride, but only love. ' False to
his bed I ' She faints at the thought that she is no longer loved
When Cordelia hears her father, an irritable old man, already half
insane, ask her how she loves him, she cannot make tip her mind to say
aloud the flattering protestations which her sisters have been lavishing.
She is ashamed to display her tenderness before the world, and to buy
a dowry by it. He disinherits her, and drives her away ; she holds her
tongue. And when she afterwards finds him abandoned and mad, she
goes on her knees before him, with such a touching emotion, she weeps
over that dear insulted head with so gentle a pity, that you might
fancy it was the tender accent of a desolate but delighted mother,
kissing the pale lips of her child :

' 0 you kind gods,

Cure this great breach in his abused nature !

The untuned and jarring senses, 0, wind up

Of this child-changed father ! . . .

0 my dear father ! Restoration hang

Thy medicine on my lips ; and let this kiss

Eepair those violent harms that my two sisters

Have in thy reverence made ! . . . Was this a face

To be opposed against the warring winds ?

. . . Mine enemy's dog,

Though he had bit me, should have stood that night

Against my fire. . . .

How does my royal lord ? How fares your majesty ? ' *

If, in fact, Shakspeare comes across a heroic character, worthy of
Corneille, a Eoman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain
by passion, what Corneille would have explained by heroism. He will
depict it violent and eager with the violent feelings of glory. She will
not be able to refrain herself. She will break out into accents of
triumph when she sees her son crowned ; into imprecations of vengeance

* King Lear, iv. 7.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSFEAKE. 327

■when she sees him banished. She will descend to the vulgarities of
pride and anger ; she will abandon herself to mad effusions of joy, to
dreams of an ambitious fancy,' and will prove once more that the im-
passioned imagination of Shakspeare has left its trace in all the creatures
whom he has made.

vn.

Nothing is easier to such a poet than to create perfect villains.
Throughout he is handling the unruly passions which make their
character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them ;
but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inani-
mate masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on an identical
pattern, into living and illusory figures. How shall a demon be made
to look as real as a man ? lago is a soldier of fortune who has roved
the world from Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks,
having had close acquaintance with the horrors of the Avars of the
sixteenth century, had drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the
philosophy of a butcher ; principles he has none left. ' O my reputa-
tion, my reputation ! ' cries the dishonoured Cassio, ' As I am an honest
man,' says lago, 'I thought you had received some bodily wound;
there is more sense in that than in reputation.' ^ As for woman's
virtue, he looks upon it like a man who has kept company with slave-
dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he would estimate a mare's :
that sort of thing lasts so long — then . . . And then he airs an
experimental theory, with precise details and nasty expressions, like a
stud doctor. ' It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her
love to the Jloor, nor he his to her. . . . These Moors are changeable
in their Avills ; . . . the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts,
shall be to him shortly as bitter as colonquintida. She must change
for youth : when she is sated with his body, she will find the error
of her choice.'^ Desdemona, on the shore, trying to forget her care,
begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For CA^ery portrait he finds
the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take the case
of a really perfect woman. He replies : ' She was a wight, if ever such

• ' 0 ye 're vrell met : the hoarded plague o' the gods
Requite your love !

If that I could for weeping, you should hear —
Nay, and you shall hear some. . . .

I'll tell thee what ; j'et go :
Nay, but thou shalt stay too : I would my son
"Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him,
His good sword in his hand.' — Coriolamis, iv. 2.
See again, Coriolanus, i. 3, the frank and abandoned triumph of a woman of the
people : ' I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now
in first seeing he had proved himself a man.'

» Othello, ii. 3. » Ihid. i. 3.

328 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

■wight were, ... to suckle fools and chronicle small beer.' ^ He
also says : ' 0 gentle lady, do not put me to't ; for I am nothing, if
not critical.' ^ This is the key to his character. He despises man ; to
him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant word-shaper,
Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped, made to
go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue ; he laughs
at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his convulsions,
he rejoices at this capital result : ' Work on, my medicine, work !
Thus credulous fools are caught.' ' You would take him for one of
the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a dying
dog. He only speaks in sarcasms ; he has them ready for every one,
even for those whom he does not know. W^hen he wakes Brabantio to
inform hma of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter
in coarse terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a
conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands Avhen he hears the culprit
groan under the knife. ' Thou art a villain !' cries Brabantio. * You are
— a. senator!' answers lago. But the feature which really completes
him, and makes him rank with INIephistopheles, is the atrocious truth
and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.*
Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her inier-
cession for him ; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio.
lago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries-

' And what's he then that says I play the villain »
When this advice is free I give and honest,
Probal to thinking and indeed the course
To win the Moor again. '^

To all these features must be added a diabolical energy,® an inexhaus-
tible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a
guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dis-
simulation, coolness and hatred, patience, contracted amid the perils
and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries of long
degradation and frustrated hope ; you will understand how Shakspeare
could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and how
lago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his
character, life, and training.

VHI.

How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius
of Shakspeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight
of the drama ! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the
manifold and exuberant ideas, the unruly passion, rushing upon death

» Othello, ii. 1. « Ihid. ^ Ibid. iv. 1.

* See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard iir. Both begin by slander*
ing human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice prepense.

* Othello, ii. 3.

* See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Ecderigo, Act L

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEAEE. 329

and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium burst-
ing through will and reason : such are the forces and ravings which
engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds
Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates
and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of
desert-dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with life and death,
headstrong, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tem-
pest, whose thought, ever repointed and broken, is like the crackling
of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the concise picture of
physical adultery, cries at every word of lago like a man on the rack ,
who, his nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows
mad and swoons for grief, and Avhose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is dis-
tracted and disorganised in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old
King Lear, violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually
toppled over under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents
the frightful spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, ot
curses, bowlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the
first access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chat-
tering imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides : a marvellous
creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason
which reason could never have conceived? '^ Amid so many portraitures
let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them
all. The critic is lost in Shakspeare, as in an immense town ; he will
describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine
the city.

Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a
general of the army. In Shakspeare's hands he becomes a coarse
soldier, a man of the people as to his language and manners, an
athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet ; whose eyes by contradic-
tion are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in
mood, a lion's soul in the body of a steer. The philosopher Plutarch
told of him a lofty philosophic action, saying that he had been at pains
to save his landlord in the sack of Corioli. Shakspeare's Coriolanus
has indeed the same disposition, for he is really a good fellow ; but
when Lartius asks him the name of this poor Volscian, in order to
secure his liberty, he yawns out :

* By Jupiter ! forgot.
I am weary ; yea, my memory is tired.
Have we no wine here ? ' ^

He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink ; he leaves his
Volscian in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a
porter, with shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are

' See, again, in Trmon, and Hotspur more particularly, a perfect example of a
vehement and unreasoning imagination.
• Coriolanus, i. 9.

330 THE RENAISSANCE. [bOOK IL

heard above the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet.
He has scaled, the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged
with slaughter. Instantly he turns to the other army, and arrives red
with blood, ' as he were flay'd.' ' Come I too late ? ' Cominius begins
to compliment him. ' Come I too late ? ' he repeats. The battle is
not yet finished : he embraces Cominius :

* 0 ! let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done.'*

For the battle is a real holiday to him. Such senses, such a frame, need
the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and wounds. This
haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and destruction.
Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his soldier's bearing,
when he is offered the tenth of the spoils :

' I thank you, general ;
But cannot make my heart consent to take
A bribe to pay my sword. ' ^

The soldiers cry, Marcius ! Marclus ! and the trumpets sound. He gets
into a passion ; rates the brawlers :

' K'o more, I say ! For that I have not wash'd
My nose that bled, or foil'd some debile wi-etch,—
. . . You shout me forth
In acclamations hy])erbolical ;
As if I loved my httle should be dieted
In praises sauced with lies.' ^

They are reduced to loading him with honours: Cominius gives him a
war-horse ; decrees him the cognomen of Coriolanus : the people shout
Caius Marcius Coriolanus ! He replies :

' I will go wash ;
And when my face is fair, you shall perceive
Whether 1 blush or no : howbeit, I thank you.
I mean to stride your steed. ' *

This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment of a man who
can act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will
treat the plebeians. He loads them with insults ; he cannot find abuse
enough for the cobblers, tailors, greedy cowards, down on their knees for
a copper. ' To beg of Hob and Dick !' ' Bid them wash their faces and
keep their teeth clean.' But he must do this, if he would be consul ;
his friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable
of self-restraint, such as Shakspeare knew how to paint, breaks forth
without let. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his teeth,
and getting up his lesson in this style :

^ Coriolanvf., i. 6, * Ibid. i. 9. ^ jm^ •* j^ifi.

CHAP. IV.] eUAKSPEARE. Sol

* What must I say ?
" T pray, sir " — Pla.irue upon't ! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace : — " Look, sir, my wounds!
1 got them in my country's service, when
Some certain of you brethren roar'd and ran
From the noise of our own drums." "

The tribunes have no difficulty in stopping the election of a candidate
■who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full senate, reproach him
with his speech about the corn. He repeats it, with aggravations.
Once roused, neither danger nor prayer restrains him :

' His heart's his mouth:
And, being angry, 'does forget that ever
He heard the name of death. ' *

He rails against the people, the tribunes, street- magistrates, flatterers
of the plebs. * Come, enough,' says his friend Menenius. ' Enough,
-with over-measure,' says Brutus the tribune. He retorts :

' No, take more :
What may be sworn by, both divine and human.
Seal what I end withal ! ... At once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue ; let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison. '^

The tribune cries, Treason ! and bids seize him. He cries :

' Hence, old goat !

Hence, rotten thing ! or I shall shake thy bones
Out of thy garments ! ' *

He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst
Volscians. 'On fair ground I could beat forty of theml' And when
his friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and

' Speak(s) o' the people,
As if you (he) were a god to punish, not a man
Of their infirmity. ' *

Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognised in her a soul as
lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from
his infancy to the ascendency of this pride which he admires. Volumnia
reminds him : ' My praises made thee first a soldier.' Without power
over himself, continually tost on the fire of his too hot blood, he has
always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary
respect, like a soldier before his general, but with what effort 1

' Coriolanus. The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up
The glances of my sight ! a beggar's tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees.

« Coriolanus, ii. 3. =* Jbid. iii. 1. ^ ji^id, * Jbid. * Ilnd.

332 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his
That hath received an alms !~I will not do 't. . . .
Volumnia. ... Do as thou list.

Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me,
But owe thy pride thyself. Cor. Pray, be content :
Mother, I am going to the market-place ;
Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves,
Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved
Of all the ti-ades in Eome.' ^

He goes, and his friends speak for him. Except a few bitter asides, he
appears to be submissive. Then the tribunes pronounce the accusa-
tion, and summon him to answer as a traitor :

' Cor. How ! traitor t Men. Nay, temperately : your promise.

Cor. The iires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people 1
Call me their traitor ! Thou injurious tribune !
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say,
" Thou liest," unto thee with a voice as tree
As I do pray the gods. ' ^

His friends surround him, entreat him : he will not listen ; he foams, he
is like a wouuded lion:

' Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death.
Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger
But with a grain a day, I would not buy
Their mercy at the price of one fair word. ' *

The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the
tribune :

* Cor. You common cry of curs ! whose breath I hate

As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air, I banish you. . . . Despising,

For you, the city, thus I ttrrn my back :

There is a world elsewhere. ' *

Judge of his hatred by these raging words. It goes on increasing by
the expectation of vengeance. We find him next with the Volscian
army before Rome. His friends kneel before him, he lets them kneel.
Old Menenius, who had loved him as a son, only comes now to be
driven away. ' Wife, mother, child, I know not.' ^ It is himself he
knows not. For this power of hating in a noble heart is equal with
the power of loving. He has transports of tenderness as of hating, and
can contain himself no more in joy than in grief. He runs, spite of
his resolution, to his wife's arms ; he bends his knee before his mother.

' Coriolanus, iii. 2. * Ibid, iii, 3. ^ Ibid. * Ibid.

• Ibid. v. 2.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEARE. 333

He had summone'l the Volscian chiefs to make them witnesses of his
refusals; and before them, he grants all, and weeps. On his return to
Corioli, an insulting word from A.ufidius maddens him, and drives him
upon the daggers of the Volscians. Vices and virtues, glory and misery,
greatness and feebleness, th« anbridled passion which composes his
nature, endowed him with all.

If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is
the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy was buried in his
heart, instantaneously, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts
the rest, and transforms the man. He is haunted ; he forgets the
thanes who surround him and ' who stay iipon his leisure ; ' he already
sees in the future an indistinct chaos of images of blood :

... * Why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs ? . . .

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical.

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is .

But what is not. ' '

This is the language of hallucination. ^lacbeth's hallucination becomes
complete when his wife has resolved on the assassination of the king.
He sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, ' in form as palpable, as this
which now I draw.' His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible
phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer would never have
conceived ; the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to
an idea of fate, and capable of remorse :

. . . ' Now o'er the one half world
K'ature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep ; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf.
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. ... {A bell rings. )

I go, and it is done ; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Dimcan ; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell. ' *

He has done the deed, and returns tottering, haggard, like a drunken
man. He is horrified at his bloody hands, ' these hangman's hands.'
Nothing now can cleanse them. The whole ocean might sweep over
them, but they would keep the hue of murder. ' What hands are
here ? ha, they pluck out mine eyes ! ' He is disturbed by a word
which the sleeping chamberlains uttered :

' One cried, " God bless us ! " and "Amen," the other ;
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands

> Macbeth, i. 3. » Rid. ii. 1.

334 THE RENAISSANCE. [DOOK II.

Listening their fear, I could not say "Amen,"

When they did say, " God bless us ! "

. . . But wherefore could not 1 pronounce " Amen ? "

1 had most need of blessing, and " Amen "

Stuck in my throat.' ^

Then comes a strange dream ; a frightful vision of punishment descends
upon him.

Above the beating of his heart, the tingling of the blood which.
boils in his brain, he had heard them cry :

' " Sleep no more !
Macbeth does murder sleep, " the innocent sleep.
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore laboui-'s bath.
Balm of hurt minds, gi-eat nature's second course.
Chief nourisher in life's feast. ' ^

And the voice, like an angel's trumpet, calls him by all his titles :

• Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more ; Macbeth shall sleep no more ! ' ^

This mad idea, incessantly repeated, beats in his brain, with monotonous
and hard-pressing strokes, like the tongue of a bell. Insanity begins ;
aU. the force of his mind is occupied by keeping before him, in spite of
himself, the image of the man w horn he has murdered in his sleep :

*To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. {Knock.)

Wake Duncan with thy knocking ! I would thou couldst ! ' •*

Thenceforth, in the rare intervals in which the fever of his mind is
assuaged, he is like a man worn out by a long malady. It is the sad
prostration of maniacs worn out by their fits of rage :

* Had I but died an hour before this chance,

I had lived a blessed time ; for, from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality :
All is but toys : renown and grace is dead ;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.'^

When rest has restored some force to the human machine, the fixed
idea shakes him again, and drives him onward, like a pitiless horseman,
who has left his panting horse only for a moment, to leap again into
the saddle, and spur him over precipices. The more he has done, the
more he must do :

' I am in blood

Steep'd in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.' ^ . . .

He kills in order to preserve the fruit of his murders. The fatal circlet
of gold attracts him like a magic jewel ; and he beats down, from a

1 Macheth, ii. 2. « Hid. ^ Ibid.

* Ibid. * Ibid. ii. 3. « Ibid. iii. 4.

CHAP. rV.'J SHAKSPEARE. 335

sort of blind instinct, the heads which he sees between the crown and
him:

• But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,

Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly : better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace.

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasj'. Duncan is in his grave ;

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well ;

Treason has done his worst : nor steel, nor poison,

llalice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,

Can touch him further. ' *

Macbeth has Banquo murdered, and in the midst of a great feast
he is informed of the success of his plan. He smiles, and proposes
Banquo's health. Suddenly, conscience-smitten, he sees the ghost of
the murdered man ; for this phantom, which Shakspeare summons, is
not a mere stage-trick : we feel that here the supernatural is unne-
cessary, and that Macbeth would create it, even if hell Avould not send
it. With stiffened muscles, dilated eyes, his mouth half open with
deadly terror, he sees it shake its bloody head, and cries with that
hoarse voice which is only to be heard in maniacs' cells :

• Prithee, see there ! Behold ! look ! lo ! how say you ?
"Why, what care I ? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury, back our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites. . . .
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' th' olden time, . . .
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear : the times have been
That, when the brains were out, the man would die.
And there an end ; but now they rise again,
"NVith twenty mortal murders on their crowns.
And push us from our stools : . . .
Avaunt ! and quit my sight ! let the earth hide thee !
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold ;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with ! ' ^

o*

His body trembling like that of an epileptic, his teeth clenched, foaming
at the mouth, he sinks on the ground, his limbs beat against the floor,
shaken with convulsive quiveriags, whilst a dull sob swells his panting
breast, and dies in his swollen throat. What joy can remain for a man
besieged by such visions? The wide dark country, which he surveys
from his towering castle, is but a field of death, haunted by deadly
apparitions ; Scotland, which he is depopulating, a cemetery,

1 Macbeth, iii. 2. • Ibid. iii. 4.

336 THE RENAISSANCE. 1_B00K IL

' Where . . . the dead man's knell
Is there scarce ask'd for who ; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken. ' ^

His soul is ' full of scorpions.' He has ' supp'd full wth horrors,' and
the faint odour of blood has disgusted him with aU else. He goes
stumbling over the corpses which he has heaped up, with the mechani-
cal and desperate smile of a maniac-murderer. Thenceforth death,
life, all is one to him ; the habit of murder has placed him beyond
humanity. They tell him that his wife is dead :

' Mach. She should have died hereafter ;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his houi* upon the stage.
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. ' ^

There remains for him the hardening of the heart in crime, the fixed
belief in destiny. Hunted down by his enemies, ' bear-like, tied to a
stake,' he fights, troubled only by the prediction of the witches, sure
of being invulnerable so long as the man whom they have pointed
at, does not appear. His thoughts inhabit a supernatural world, and
to the last he walks with his eyes fixed on the dream, which has pos-
sessed him, from the first.

The history of Hamlet, like that of Macbeth, is the story of a moral
poisoning. Hamlet's is a delicate soul, an impassioned imagination,
like that of Shakspeare. He has lived hitherto, occupied in noble
studies, apt in bodily and mental exercises, with a taste for art, loved
by the noblest father, enamoured of the purest and most charming girl,
confiding, generous, not yet having perceived, from the height of the
throne to which he was born, aught but the beauty, happiness, gran-
deur of nature and humanity.^ On this soul, which character and
training make more sensitive than others, misfortune suddenly falls,
extreme, overwhelming, of the very kind to destroy all faith and every
spring of action: with one look he has seen all the vileness of humanity;
and this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact ;
but judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details,
the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not
already one foot on the verge of madness :

1 Macbeth, iv. 3. * Ibid. v. 5. ^ Goethe, Wilhdm Meister.

CHAP. IV. j SHAKSPEARE. 337

' 0 that tliis too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew !
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! O God ! God !
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Srem to me all the uses of this world !
Fie on't ! ah fie ! 'tis an un weeded garden,
That grows to seed ; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this !
But two months dead : nay, not so much, not two :
So excellent a king, ... so loving to my mother,
That he might not heteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth !

. . . And yet, within a month, —
Let me not think on't — Frailty, thy name is woman ! —
A little mouth, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor fether's tody, . . .
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
"With such dexterity to incestuous sheets !
It is not nor it cannot come to good :
But break, my heart ; for I must hold my tongue ! '*■

Here already are contortions of thought, earnests of hallucination,
the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of a conversa-
tion the image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees
him. How then will it be when the 'canonised bones have burst their
cerements,' ' the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,'
and when the ghost comes in the night, upon a high 'platform' of land,
to hint to him of the tortures of his prison of fire, and to tell him of
the fratricide, who has driven him thither ? Hamlet grows faint, but
grief strengthens him, and he has a cause for living :

' Hold, hold, my heart ;
And you my sinews, grow not instant old.
But bear me stiffly up J Eem ember thee !
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. — Remember thee I
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all fwms, all pressures past, . . .
And thy commandment all alone shall live. . . .
0 villain, villain, smiling, damned villaia !
My tables, — meet it is 1 set it down.
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villairt ;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark :
So, uncle, there you are. ' * {writing. )

This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this phrensy of
» Hamlet, i. 2. '-' Ibid, i. 5.

338 THE EjiNAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

intentness, prelude the approach of a monomania. When his friends
come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an idiot. He
is no longer master of his words ; hollow phrases whirl in his brain,
and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him ; he answers by
imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon : ' Hillo, ho, ho,
boy 1 come, bird, come.' Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to
secrecy, the ghost below repeats ' Swear.' Hamlet cries, with a nervous
excitement and a fitful gaiety :

■* Ah ha, boy ! say'st thou so ? art thou there, truepenny ?
Come on — you hear this fellow in the cellai-age, —
■Consent to swear. . . .

Ghost {be,neath). Swear.

Ham. Hie et ubique ? then we"!! shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen. . . . Swear by my sword.

Ohost (beneath). Swear.

Ham. Well said, old mole ! canst work i' the earth so fast ?
A worthy pioner ! ' '

Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter, ' pale as his shirt,
his knees knocking each other.' Intense anguish ends with a burst of
laughter, which is nothing else than a spasm. Thenceforth Hamlet
speaks as though he had a continuous nervous attack. His madness is
feigned, I admit ; but his mind, as a door whose hinges are twisted,
swings and bangs to every wind with a mad precipitance and with a
discordant noise. He has no need to search for the strange ideas,
apparent incoherencies, exaggerations, the deluge of sarcasms which he
accumulates- He finds them within him ; he does himself no violence,
hs simply gives himself up to them. When he has tlie piece played
which is to unmask his uncle, he raises himself, lounges on the floor,
A\ ould lay his head in Ophelia's lap ; he addresses the actors, and com-
ments on the piece to the spectators ; his nerves are strung, his excited
thought is like a waving and crackling flame, and cannot find fuel
enough in the multitude of objects surroimding it, upon all of which it
seizes. When the king rises unmasked and troubled, Hamlet sings, and
says, 'Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers — if the rest of my
fortunes turn Tvirk with me — with two Provincial roses on my razed
shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir ? ' ^ And he laughs
terribly, for he is resolved on murder. It is clear that this state is a
disease, and that the man will not survive it.

In a soul so ardent of thought, and so mighty of feeling, what is left
but disgust and despair ? We tinge all nature with the colour of our
thoughts ; we shape the world according to our own ideas ; when our
soul is sick, we see nothing but sickness in the universe :

* This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging finnament, this majes-

' Hamlet, i. 5. ' Ibid. iii. 2.

CIIAJ'. rV.] SIIAKSPEAEE. 3 3D

tical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than
a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man !
how noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how express
and admirable ! in action how lilce an angel ! in apprehension how like a god !
the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! And yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust ? man delights not me : no, nor woman neither.' ^

Henceforth his thought tarnishes whatever it touches. He rails
bitterly before Ophelia against marriage and love. Beauty I Innocence !
Beauty is but a means of prostituting innocence :

' Get thee to a nunnery : why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners ? . . . What
should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven ? We are aixant
kuaves, all ; believe none of us.' ^

When he has killed Polonius by accident, he hardly repents it ; it
is one fool less. He jeers lugubriously :

' King. Now Hamlet, where 's Polonius t
Hamlet. At supper.
K. At supper 1 where ?

H. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten : a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. ' ^

And he repeats in five or six fashions these gravedigger jests. His
thoughts already inhabit a churchyard : to this hopeless philosophy
your true man is a corpse. Duties, honours, passions, pleasures, pro-
jects, science, all this is but a borrowed mask, which death removes, that
we may see ourselves what we are, an evil-smelling and grinning skull.
It is this sight he goes to see by Ophelia's grave. He counts the
skulls Avhich the gravedigger turns out: this was a lawyer's, that a
courtier's. What salutations, intrigues, pretensions, arrogance I And
here now is a clown knocking it about with his spade, and playing ' at
loggats with 'em.' Ca^sar and Alexander have turned to clay, and make
the earth fat ; the masters of the world have served to ' patch a wall.'
' Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an
inch thick, to this favour she must come ; make her laugh at that.' *
When one has come to this, there is nothing left but to die.

This heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and
his moral poisoning, explains also his conduct. If he hesitates to kill
Ills uncle, it is not from horror of blood or from our modern scruples.
He belongs to the sixteenth century. On board ship he wrote the
order to behead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to do so without
giving them ' shriving-time.' He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's
death, and has no great remorse for it. If for once he spared his uncle,
it was because he found him praying, and was afraid of sending him to
heaven. He thought he was killing him, when he killed Polonius.
What his imagination robs him of, is the coolness and strength to go
quietly and with premeditation to plunge a sword into a breast. He can

» Hamlet, ii. 2. " Jbid. iiL 1. " Ibid. iv. 3. ■* Ibid. v. 1.

340 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

only do the thing on a sudden suggestion ; he must have a momeut of
enthusiasm ; he must think the king is behind the arras, or else, seeing
that he himself is poisoned, he must find his victim under his foil's
point. He is not master of his acts ; occasion dictates them ; he can-
not plan a murder, but must improvise it. A too lively imaginatioa
exhausts energy, by the accumulation of images and by the fury of
intentness which absorbs it. You recognise in him a poet's soul, made
not to act, but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms
of its creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a
part in the real world ; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince,
whom worse chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined
by nature for genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappi-
ness. Hamlet is Shakspeare, and, at the close of this gallery of por-
traits which have all some features of his own, Shakspeare has painted
himself in the most striking of all.

If Kacine oi Corneille had framed a psychology, they would have
said, with Descartes : Man is an incorporeal soul, served by organs,
endowed with reason and will, living in palaces or porticos, made for
conversation and society, whose harmonious and ideal action is de-
veloped by discourse and replies, in a world constructed by logic beyond
the realms of time and space.

If Shakspeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with
Esquirol:^ Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed
to hallucinations, transported by unbridled passions, essentially un-
asoning, a mixture of animal and poet, having no rapture but mind,
no sensibility but virtue, imagination for prompter and guide, and led
at random, by the most determinate and complex circumstances, to
pain, crime, madness, and death.

IX.

Could such a poet always confine himself to the imitation of nature?
Will this poetical world which is going on in his brain, never break
loose from the laws of the world of reality ? Is he not powerful
enough to follow his own ? He is ; and the poetry of Shakspeare
naturally finds an outlet in the fantastical. This is the highest grade
of unreasoning and creative imagination. Despising ordinary logic,
it creates therefrom another ; it unites facts and ideas in a new order,
apparently absurd, at bottom legitimate ; it lays open the land of
dreams, and its dreams deceive us like the truth.

When we enter upon Shakspeare's comedies, and even his half-
dramas,^ it is as though Ave met him on the threshold, like an actor to

^ A French physician (1772-1844), celebrated for ins endeavours to improve the
treatment of the insane. — Tr.

* Twelfth Night, As you Like it. Tempest, Winter's Tale, etc. ; Cymheline,
Merdiant of Venice, etc

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSPEAR3. 341

■\vliom tlie prologue is committed, to prevent misunderstanding on the
part of the public, and to tell them : ' Do not take too seriously what
you are about to hear ; I am joking. My brain, being full of fancies,
desired to make plays of them, and here they are. Palaces, distant
landscapes, transparent mists which blot the morning sky with their
gray clouds, the red and glorious flames into which the evening sun
descends, white cloisters in endless vista through the ambient air,
grottos, cottages, the fantastic pageant of all human passions, the mad
sport of unlooked-for chances, — this is the medley of forms, colours,
sentiments, which I shuffle and mingle before me, a many-tinted skein
of glistening silks, a slender arabesque, whose sinuous curves, crossing
and confused, bewilder the mind by the whimsical variety of their
infinite complications. Don't regard it as a picture. Don't look for a
precise composition, harmonious and increasing interest, the skilful
management of a well-ordered and congruous plot. I have novels
and romances in my mind which I am cutting up into scenes. Never
mind the finis, I am amusing myself on the road. It is not the end of
the journey which pleases me, but the journey itself. Is there any
good in going so straight and quick ? Do you only care to know
whether the poor merchant of Venice will escape Shylock's knife?
Here are two happy lovers, seated under the palace walls on a calm
night ; wouldn't you like to listen to the peaceful reverie which rises
like a perfume from the bottom of their hearts?

" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank !
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears : soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold :
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubms ;
Such harmony is in immortal souls ;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

{Enter musicians.)

Come, ho ! and wake Diana with a hymn :

With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,

And draw her home with music.

Jessica. I am never merry when I hear sweet music. " *

♦ Have I not the right, when I see the big laughing face of a clownish
servant, to stop near him, see him mouth, frolic, gossip, go through
his hundred pranks and his hundred grimaces, and treat myself to the
comedy of his spirit and gaiety ? Two fine gentlemen pass by. I
hear the rolling fire of their metaphors, and I follow their skirmish of

1 Merchant of Venice, v. 1.

342 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

■wit. Here in a corner is tlie artless arch face of a young wench.
Do you forbid me to linger by her, to watch her smiles, her sudden
blushes, the childish pout of her rosy lips, the coquetry of her pretty
motions ? You are in a great hurry if the prattle of this fresh and
musical voice can't stop you. Is it no pleasure to view this succession
of sentiments and figures ? Is your fancy so dull, that you must have
the mighty mechanism of a geometrical plot to shake it ? My sixteenth
century playgoers were easier to move. A sunbeam that had lost its
way on an old wall, a foolish song thrown into the middle of a drama,
occupied their mind as well as the blackest of catastrophes. After the
horrible scene in which Shylock brandished his butcher's knife before
Antonio's bare breast, they saw just as willingly the petty household
wrangle, and the amusing bit of raillery which ends the piece. Like
soft moving water, their soul rose and sank in an instant to the level of
the poet's emotion, and their sentiments readily flowed in the bed he
had prepared for them. They let him go about on his journey, and
did not forbid him to make two voyages at once. They allowed several
plots in one. If but the slightest thread united them, it was sufficient.
Lorenzo eloped with Jessica, Shylock was frustrated in his revenge,
Portia's suitors failed in the test imposed upon them ; Portia, disguised
as a doctor of laws, took from her husband the ring which he had
promised never to part with ; these three or four comedies, disunited,
mingled, were shviffled and unfolded together, like an unknotted skein,
in which threads of a hundred colours are entwined. Together with
diversity, my spectators allowed improbability. Comedy is a slight
winged creature, which flutters from dream to dream, whose wings
you would break if you held it captive in the narrow prison of common
sense. Do not press its fictions too hard ; do not probe their contents.
Let them float before your eyes like a charming swift dream. Let the
fleeting apparition plunge back into the bright misty land from whence
it came. For an instant it deceived you ; let it suffice. It is sweet
to leave the world of realities behind you ; the mind can rest amidst
impossibilities. We are happy when delivered from the rough chains
of logic, when we wander amongst strange adventures, when we live
in sheer romance, and know that we are living there. I do not try to
deceive you, and make you believe in the world where I take you.
One must disbelieve it in order to enjoy it. We must give ourselves
up to illusion, and feel that we are giving ourselves up to it. We must
smile as we listen. We smile in The Winter''s Tale, when Hermione
descends from her pedestal, and when Leontes discovers his wife in the
statue, having believed her to be dead. We smile in Cymheline, when
we see the lone cavern in which the young princes have lived like
savage hunters. Improbability deprives emotions of their sting. The
events interest or touch us without making us suffer. At the very
moment when sympathy is too lively, we remind ourselves that it is
all a fancy. They become like distant objects, whose distance softens

CHAP. IV. J SIIAKSPEARE. 343

their outline, and ■wrnps them in a luminous veil of blue air. Your
true comedy is an opera. We listen to sentiments without thinking
too much of plot. We follow the tender or gay melodies without
reflecting that they interrupt the action. We dream elsewhere on
hearing music ; here I bid you dream on hearing verse.'

So the prologue retires, and then the actors come on.

As you Like it is a caprice.^ Action there is none ; interest barely ;
likelihood still less. And the whole is charming. Two cousins, princes'
daughters, come to a forest with a court clown, Celia disguised as ;i
shepherdess, Rosalind as a boy. They find here the old duke, Rosalind's
father, who, driven out of his duchy, lives with his friends like a philo-
sopher and a hunter. They find amorous shepherds, who with songs
and prayers pursue intractable shepherdesses. They discover or they
meet with lovers who become their husbands. Suddenly it is announced
that the wicked Duke Frederick, who had usurped the crown, has just
retired to a cloister, and restored the throne to the old exiled duke.
Every one gets married, every one dances, everything ends with a
' rustic revelry.' Where is the pleasantness of these puerilities? First,
the fact of its being puerile ; the absence of the serious permits repose.
There are no events, and there is no plot. We peacefully follow the
easy current of graceful or melancholy emotions, which guides and
conducts us without wearying. The place adds to the illusion and
charm. It is an autumn forest, in which the warm rays permeate the
blushing oak leaves, or the half-stript ashes tremble and smile to the
feeble breath of evening. The lovers wander by biooks that ' brawl '
under antique roots. As you listen to them, you see the slim birches,
whose cloak of lace grows glossy under the slant rays of the sun that
gilds them, and the thoughts wander down the mossy vistas in which
their footfall is lost. What better place could be chosen for the comedy
of sentiment and the play of heart-fancies ? Is not this a fit spot in
which to listen to love-talk ? Some one has seen Orlando, Rosalind's
lover, in this glade ; she hears it and blushes. ' Alas the day ! . . .
What did he, when thou sawest him ? What said he ? How looked
he ? Wherein went he ? What makes he here ? Did he ask for
me ? Wliere remains he ? How parted he with thee ? and when
shalt thou see him again ? ' Then, with a lower voice, somewhat
hesitating: 'Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?'
Not yet exhausted : * Do you not know I am a woman ? When I
think, I must speak. Sweet, say on.'^ Question on question, she
closes the mouth of her friend, who is ready to answer. At every
word she jests, but agitated, blushing, with a forced gaiety ; her bosom
heaves, and her heart beats. Nevertheless she is calmer when Orlando

• In English, a word is wanting to express the French /antoiste, used hy M.
Taine, in describing this scene : what in mnsic is called a caprkcio. Tennysca
calls the Princess a medley, but it is ambiguous. — Te.

^ A« you Like it, iii. 2.

344 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

comes; bandios words with him; sheltered under her disguise, she makes
him confess that he loves Rosalind. Then she plagues him, like the
frolic, the wag, the coquette she is. * "W lay, how now, Orlando, where
have you been all this while ? You a lover ? ' Orlando repeats his
love, and she pleases herself by makmg him repeat it more than once.
She sparkles with wit, jests, mischievous pranks; pretty tits of anger,
feigned sulks, bursts of laughter, deafening babble, engaging caprices.
' Come, woo me, woo me ; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like
enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your
very very Rosalind ? ' And every now and then she repeats with an
arch smile, ' And I am your Rosalind ; am I not your Rosalind ? ' ^
Orlando protests that he would die. Die ! Who ever thought of dying
for love ! Leander ? He took one bath too many in the Hellespont ;
so poets have said he died for love. Troilus? A Greek broke his
head with a club ; so poets have said he died for love. Come, come,
Rosalind will be softer. And then she plays at marriage with him, and
makes Celia pronounce the solemn words. She irritates and torments
her pretended husband ; tells him all the whims she means to indulge
in, all the pranks she will play, all the bother he Avill have to endure.
The retorts come one after another like fireworks. At every phrase
we follow the looks of these sparkling eyes, the curves of this laugh-
ing mouth, the quick movements of this supple figure. It is a bird's
petulance and volubility. ' O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that
thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love.' Then she
plays with her cousin Celia, sports with her hair, calls her by every
woman's name. Antitheses without end, words all a-jumble, quibbles,
pretty exaggerations, word-racket ; as you listen, you fancy it is the
warbling of a nightingale. The trill of repeated metaphors, the
melodious roll of the poetical gamut, the summer-symphony rustling
under the foliage, change the piece into a veritable opera. The three
lovers end by chanting a sort of trio. The first throws out a fancy,
the others take it up. Four times this strophe is renewed ; and the
symmetry of ideas, added to the jingle of the rhymes, makes of a
dialogue a concerto of love :

* Phebe. Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love.
Silvim. It is to be all made of sighs and tears ;

And so am I for Phebe.
P. And I for Ganymede.
O. And I for Rosalind.
P. And I for no woman. . . .
S. It is to be all made of fantasy.

All made of passion, and all made of wishes.

All adoration, duty, and observance,

All humbleness, all patience and impatience.

All purity, all trial, all observance ;

And so I am for Phebe.

' As you Like it, iv. 1.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEAEE. 345

P. And so am I for Ganymede.
O. And so am I for Rosalind.
R. And so am I for no woman. ' ^

The necessity of singing is so urgent, that a minute later songs break
out of themselves. The prose and the conversation end in lyric poetry.
We pass straight on into these odes. We do not find ourselves in a
new country. We feel the distraction and foolish gaiety as if it were a
holiday. We see the graceful couple whom the song brings before us
passing in the misty light ' o'er the green corn-field,' amid the hum of
sportive insects, on the finest day of the flowering spring-time. The
unlikelihood grows natural, and we are not astonished when we see
Hymen leading the two brides by the hand to give them to their hus-
bands.

Whilst the young folks sing, the old folk talk. Their life also is a
romance, but a sad one. Shakspeare's delicate soul, bruised by the
shocks of social life, took refuge in contemplations of solitary life. To
forget the strife and annoyances of the world, he must bury himself ia
a wide silent forest, and

' Under the shade of melancholy toughs,
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time. ' *

We may look at the bright images which the sun carves on the white
beech-boles, the shade of trembling leaves flickering on the thick moss,
the long waves of the summit of the trees; the sharp sting of care is
blunted ; we suffer no more, simply remembering that we suffered once ;
we feel nothing but a gentle misanthropy, and being renewed, we are
the better for it. The old duke is happy in his exile. Solitude has
given him rest, delivered him from flattery, reconciled him to nature.
He pities the stags which he is obliged to hunt for food :

* Come, shall we go and kill us venison ?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools.
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Shoiild in their own confines with forked heads
Have their round haunches gored. ' *

Nothing sweeter than this mixtvire of tender compassion, dreamy philo-
sophy, delicate sadness, poetical complaints, and rustic songs. Oue of
the lords sings :

' Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude ;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen.

Although thy breath be rude.

1 As you Like it, v. 2. * Ibid. ii. 7. ^ Ibid. ii. 1.

346 THE KENAISSANXE. [bOOK II

Heigh-ho ! sing, heigh-ho ! unto the green holiy .
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly :

Then, heigh-ho, the holly !

This life is most jolly.' '

Amongst these lords is found a soul that suffers more, Jacques tlie
melancholy, one of Shakspeare's best-loved characters, a transparent
mask behind which we perceive the face of the poet. He is sad because
he is tender; he feels the contact of things too keenly, and what leaves
the rest indifferent, makes him weep.^ He does not scold, he is sad ;
he does not reason, he is moved ; he has not the combative spirit of a
reforming moralist ; his soul is sick and weary of life. Impassioned
imagination leads quickly to disgust. Like opium, it excites and shatters.
It leads man to the loftiest philosophy, then lets him down to the whims
of a child. Jacques leaves the others brusquely, and goes to the quiet
nooks to be alone. He loves his sadness, and would not exchange it
for joy. Meeting Orlando, he says :

* Eosalind is your love's name ?
0. Yes, just.
J. I do not like her name. ' *

He has the fancies of a nervous w^oman. He is scandalised because
Orlando writes sonnets on the forest trees. He is whimsical, and finds
subjects of grief and gaiety, where others would see nothing of the
£ort:

* A fool, a fool ! I met a fool i' the forest,

A raotlej'^ fool ; A miserable world !

As I do live by food, I met a fool ;

Who laid him down and hask'd him in the sun,

And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms,

In good set terms and yet a motley fool. . . .

O noble fool ! A worthy fool ! Motley's the only wear. . . .

0 that I were a fool !

1 am ambitious for a motley coat. ' *

Tlie next minute he returns to his melancholy dissertations, bright
pictures whose vivacity explains his character, and betraj'S Shakspeare,
hiding under his name :

' All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players :

They have their exits and their entrances ;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,

^ As you Like it, ii. 7.

2 Comp:ire Jacques with the Alceste of Moliere. It is the contrast between a
misanthrope through reasoning and one through imagination.

' As you Like it, iii. 2. * Ibid. ii. 7.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEAKB. 347

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier.

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the par<l,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrtl,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice.

In fair round b^lly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut.

Full of wise saws and modern instances ;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His 3'^outhful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank ; and his big manly voice.

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history.

Is second childishness and mere oblivion.

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.'^

As you Like it is a half-dream. Midsummer KiyhVs Dream is a
complete one.

The scene, buried in the far-off mist of fabulous antiquity, carries us
back to Theseus, Duke of Athens, who is preparing his palace for his
marriage with the beautiful queen of the Amazons. The style, loaded
•with contorted images, fills the mind with strange and splendid visions,
and the airy elf-world divert the comedy into the fairy-land from
whence it sprung.

Love is still the theme; of all sentiments, is it not the greatest
fancy-weaver ? But we have not here for language the charming
tittle-tattle of Rosalind ; it is glaring, like the season of the year. It
does not brim over in slight conversations, in supple and skipping
prose ; it breaks forth into long rhyming odes, dressed in magnificent
metaphors, sustained by impassioned accents, such as a warm night,
odorous and star-spangled, inspires in a poet who loves. Lysander and
Hermia agree to meet :

' Lys. To-morrow night, when Phoebe doth behold
Her silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass,
A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal.
Through Athens' gates have we devised to stenl.
Her. And in the wood, where often you and I
Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie. . , .
There my Lysander and myself shall meet.'*

They get lost, and fall asleep, wearied, under the trees. Puck squeezes
in the youth's eyes the juice of a magic flower, and changes his heart

' As you Like it, ii, 7. * Midsummer Nighfs Dream, i. 1.

348 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK. 11.

Presently, ■when he awakes, he will become enamoured of the first
woman he sees. Meanwhile Demetrius, Hermia's rejected lover, wanders
with Helena, whom he rejects, in the solitary wood. The magic flower
change? him in turn : he now loves Helena. The lovers flee and pursue
one another, beneath the lofty trees, in the calm night. We smile at
theii transports, their complaints, their ecstasies, and yet we join in
them. This passion is a dream, and yet it moves us. It is like those
airy webs which we find at morning on the crest of the hedgerows where
the dew has spread them, and whose weft sparkles like a jewel-casket.
Nothing can be more fragile, and nothing more graceful. The poet
sports with emotions; he mingles, confuses, redoubles, interweaves them;
he twines and untwines these loves like the mazes of a dance, and we
see the noble and tender figures pass by the verdant bushes, under the
radiant eyes of the stars, now wet with tears, now bright with rapture.
They have the abandonment of true love, not the grossness of sensual
love. Nothing causes us to fall from the ideal world in which Shak-
speare conducts us. Dazzled by beauty, they adore it, and the spectacle
of their happiness, their emotion, and their tenderness, is a kind of
enchantment.

Above these two couples flutters and hums the swarm of elves and
fairies. They also love. Titania, their queen, has a young boy for her
favourite, son of an Indian king, of whom Oberon, her husband, wishes
tc deprive her. They quarrel, so that the elves creep for fear into the
acorn cups, in the golden primroses. Oberon, by way of vengeance,
touches Titania's sleeping eyes with the magic flower, and thus on
waking the nimblest and most charming of the fairies finds herself
enamoured of a stupid blockhead with an ass' head. She kneels before
him ; she sets on his ' hairy temples a coronet of fresh and fragrant
flowers:'

* And that same dew, which sometime on the Luds
Was wont to swell Hke round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flowerets' eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.''

She calls round her all her fairy attendants :

* Be kind and courteous to this gentleman ;
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes ;
Feed him Avith apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries ;
The honey -bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night -tapers crop their waxen thighs
And Ught them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes.
To have my love to bed and to arise ;

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies

To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. . . .

Come, wait upon him ; lead him to my bower.

* Midsummer Nifjht'b Dream, iv. 1.

CHAP. IV.] SHAKSPEARE. 349

The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye ;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Tie up my love's tongue, bring liim silently.' ^

Tt was necessary, for her love brayed horribly, and to all the olTers
of Titania, replied with a petition for hay. What can be sadder and
sweeter than this irony of Shakspeare ? What raillery against love,
and what tenderness for love I The sentiment is divine : its object un-
worthy. The heart is ravished, the eyes blind. It is a golden butterfly,
fluttering in the mud ; and Shakspeare, whilst painting its misery, pre-
serves all its beauty :

* Come, sit thee down upon this flowery beJ,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy.
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair Inrge ears, my gentle joy. . . .
Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. . . .
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist ; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
0, how I love thee ! how I dote on thee '.'^

At the return of morning, when

' The eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams.
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams,' '

the enchantment ceases, Titania awakes on her couch of wild thyme
and drooping violets. She drives the monster away ; her recollections
of the night are effaced in a vague twilight :

' These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-otr mountains tui'ned into clouds. ' *■

And the fairies

' Go seek some dew drops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.' *

Such is Shakspeare's fantasy, a light tissue of bold inventions, of ardent
passions, melancholy mockery, dazzling poetry, such as one of Titania's
elves would have made. Nothing could be more like the poet's mind
than these nimble genii, children of air and flame, whose flights ' com-
pass the globe' in a second, who glide over the foam of the waves and
skip between the atoms of the winds. Ariel flies, an invisible songster,
around shipwrecked men to console them, discovers the thoughts of

» Midsummer NigMs Dream, iii. 1. • Ihid. iv. 1.

Ibid, iii 2. * Ihid. iv. 1. » Ihid. ii. 1,

350 THE EEXAISSANCK [BOOK H.

traitors, piirsnes tlie savage beast Caliban, spreads gorgeous visions before
lovers, and does all in a lightning-flash :

• Where the bee sucks, there suck I :
In a cowslip's bell I lie. . . .
Jlerrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. . . .
I drink the air before me, and return
Or ere your pulse twice beat. ' '

Shakspeare glides over things on as swift a wing, by leaps as sudden,
with a touch as delicate.

What a soul! what extent of action, and what sovereignty of an
unique faculty ! what diverse creations, and what persistence of the
same impress ! There they all are reunited, and all marked by the
same sign, void of will and reason, governed by mood, imagination, or
pure passion, destitute of the faculties contrary to those of the poet,
dominated by the corporeal type which his painter's eyes have con-
ceived, endowed by the habits of mind and by the vehement sensibility
which he finds in himself.^ Go through the groups, and you will only
discover in them divers forms and divers states of the same power.
Here, the flock of brutes, dotards, and gossips, made up of a mechanical
imagination ; further on, the company of men of wit, animated by a gay
and foolish imagination ; then, the charming swarm of women whom
their delicate imagination raises so high, and their self-forgetting love
carries so far ; elsewhere the band of villains, hardened by unbridled
passions, inspired by the artist's animation ; in the centre the mournful
train of grand characters, whose excited brain is filled with sad or
criminal visions, and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness,
or death. Ascend one stage, and contemplate the whole scene : the
aggregate bears the same mark as the details. The drama reproduces
promiscuously uglinesses, basenesses, horrors, unclean details, profligate
and ferocious manners, the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is
unrestrained by decorum, common sense, reason, and duty. Comedy,
led through a phantasmagoria of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the
unlikely, with no other check but the caprice of an amused imagination,
wantonly disjointed, and romantic, an opera without music, a concerto
of melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the
supernatural world, and brings before our eyes on its fairy-wings the
genius which has created it. Look now. Do you not see the poet
behind the crcrvvd of his creations ? They have heralded his approach ;
they have all shown somewhat of him. Eeady, impetuous, impassioned,
delicate, his genius is pure imagination, touched more vividly and by

' Tempest, v, 1,

^ There is the same law in the organic and in the moral world. It is what
Geoiliey Saint-Hilaire calls unity of composition.

CHAP. IV.] SIIAKSrEARE. 351

slighter things than ours. Hence his style, blooming with exuberant
images, loaded with exaggerated metaphors, whose strangeness is like
incoherence, whose wealth is superabundant, the work of a mind, which
at the least incitement, produces too much and leaps too far. Hence
his implied psychology, and his terrible penetration, which instan-
taneously perceiving all the effects of a situation, and all the details of
a character, concentrates them in every response, and gives his figure a
relief and a colouring which create illusion. Hence our emotion and
tenderness. We say to him, as Desdemona to Othello : ' I love thee
for the battles, sieges, fortunes thou hast passed, and for the dislressfuJ
stroke that thy youth suffered.'

352 THE EE^^A1SSANCE. [BOOK II.

CHAPTER V.
The Christian Renaissance.

T. The vices of the Pagan Renaissance — Decay of the Southern civilisations.

II. The Reformation — Aptitude of the Germanic races, and suitability of Northern
climates — Albert Durer's bodies and souls — His martyrdoms and last judg-
ments— Luther — His conception of justice — Construction of Protestantism
— Crisis of the conscience — Renovation of heart — Suppression of ceremonies
— Transformation of the clergy.

III. The Reformation in England — Tyranny of the ecclesiastical courts — Disorders

of the clergy — Irritation of the people — The interior of a diocese — Persecu-
tions and convulsions — The translation of the Bible— How biblical events
and Hebraic sentiments are in accordance with contemporary manners and
with the English character — The Prayer Book — Moral and manly feeling of
the prayers and offices — Preaching— Latimer — His education — Character —
Familiar and persuasive eloquence — Death — The martyrs under Mary — Eng-
land thenceforth Protestant.

IV. The Anglicans — Close connection between religion and society — How the

religious sentiment penetrates literature— How the sentiment of the beauti-
ful subsists in religion — Hooker — His breadth of mind and the fulness of
his style — Hales and Chillingworth — Praise of reason and tolerance — Jeremy
Taj'lor — His learning, imagination, and poetic feeling.
v. The Puritans — Opposition of religion and the world — Dogmas— Morality —
Scruples — Their triumph and enthusiasm — Their work and practical sense.
VI. Bunyan — His life, spirit, and work — The Prospect of Protestantism in
England.

' T WOULD have my reader fully understand,' says Luthei in the
I preface to his complete works, ' that I have been a monk and a
bigoted Papist, so intoxicated, or rather so swallowed up in papistical
doctrines, that I was quite ready, if I had been able, to kill or procure
the death of those who should have rejected obedience to the Pope
by so much as a syllable. I was not all cold or all ice in the Pope's
defence, like Eckius and his like, who veritably seemed to me to con-
stitute themselves his defenders rather for their belly's sake than
because they looked at the matter seriously. More, to this day they
seem to mock at him, like Epicureans. I for my part proceeded frankly,
like a man who has horribly feared the day of judgment, and who yet

CHAP, v.] THE chkistia:^ renaissakce. S53

hoped to be saved with a shaking of all his bones.' Again, when he
saw Rome for the first lime, he prostrated himself, saying, ' I salute
thee, holy Eome . . . bathed in the blood of so many martyrs.'
Imagine, if you ma)', the effect which the shameless paganism of the
Italian Renaissance had upon such a mind, so loyal, so Christian.
The beauty of art, the charm of a refined and sensuous existence, had
laken no hold upon him ; he judged morals, and he judged them with
liis conscience only. He regarded this southern civilisation with the
eyes of a man of the north, and understood its vices only, like Ascham,
who said he had seen ' in Venice more libertie to sinne in ix dayes
than ever I heard tell of in our noble Citie of London in ix yeare.'^
Like Arnold and Channing in the present day, like all the men of Ger-
manic" race and education, he was horrified at this voluptuous life, now
reckless and now licentious, but always void of moral principles, given
up to passion, rendered light by irony, shut in by the present, destitute
of belief in the infinite, with no other worship than that of visible beauty,
no other object than the search after pleasure, no other religion than
the terrors of the imagination and the idolatry of the eyes.

* I would not,' said Luther afterwards, ' for a hundred thousand
florins have gone without seeing Rome ; I should always have doubted
Avhether I was not doing injustice to the Pope.^ The crimes of Rome
are incredible ; no one will credit so great a perversity who has not
the witness of his eyes, ears, personal knowledge. . . , There reigned
all the villanies and infamies, all the atrocious crimes, in particular
blind greed, contempt of God, perjuries, sodomy. . . . We Germans
swill liquor enough to split us, whilst the Italians are sober. But they
are the most impious of men ; they make a mock of true religion, they
scorn the rest of us Christians, because we believe everything in Scrip-
ture. . . . There is a saying in Italy which they make use of when
they go to church : " Come and let us conform to the popular error."
" If we were obliged," they say again, " to believe in every word of
God, we should be the most wretched of men, and we should never be
able to have a moment's cheerfulness ; we must put a good face on it,
and not believe everything." This is what Leo x. did, who, hearing a
discussion as to the immortality or mortality of the soul, took the latter
side. *' For," said he, " it would be terrible to believe in a future state.
Conscience is an evil beast, who arms man against himself." . . . The
Italians are either epicureans or superstitious. The people fear St.
Anthony and St. Sebastian more than Christ, because of the plagues
they send. This is why, when they want to prevent the Italians from
committing a nuisance anywhere, they paint up St. Anthony with his
fiery lance. Thus do they live in extreme superstition, ignorant of

' Roger Ascham, Tke Scliolcmoiter (1570), ed. Arber, 1&70, first book, p. 83.
^ See, in Corinne, Lord Nevil's judgment on the Italians.
^ Table Talk, passim.

Z

354 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

God's word, not believing the resurrection of the flesh, nor life ever-
lasting, and fearing only temporal evils. Their blasphemy also is
frightful, . . . and the cruelty of their revenge is atrocious. When
they cannot get rid of their enemies in any other way, they lay ambush
for them in the churches, so that one man cleft his enemy's head before
tiie altar. . . . There are often murders at funerals on account of in-
heritances. . . . They celebrate the Carnival with extreme impropriety
and folly for several weeks, and they have made a custom of various
sins and extravagances at it, for they are men without conscience, who
live in open sin, and make light of the marriage tie. . . . We Ger-
mans, and other simple nations, are like a bare clout ; but the Italians
are painted and speckled with all sorts of false opinions, and disposed
still to embrace many worse. . . , Their fasts are more splendid than our
most sumptuous feasts. They dress extravagantly ; where we spend a
florin on our clothes, they put down ten florins to have a silk coat. . . .
When they (the Italians) are chaste, it is sodomy with them. There is
no society amongst them. No one trusts another ; they do not come
together freely, like us Germans ; they do not allow strangers to speak
publicly with their wives : compared with the Germans, they are alto-
gether men of the cloister.' These hard words are weak compared with
the facts.^ Treasons, assassinations, tortures, open debauchery, the
practice of poisoning, the Avorst and most shameless outrages, are un-
blushingly and publicly tolerated in the open light of heaven. In 1490,
the Pope's vicar having forbidden clerics and laics to keep concubines,
the Pope revoked the decree, ' saying that that was not forbidden,
because the life of priests and ecclesiastics was such that hardly one
was to be found who did not keep a concubine, or at least who had
not a courtesan.' Cassar Borgia at the capture of Capua ' chose forty
of the most beautiful women, whom he kept for himself; and a pretty
large number of captives were sold at a low price at Rome.' Under
Alexander vi., ' all ecclesiastics, from the greatest to the least, have
concubines in the place of wives, and that publicly. If God hinder
it not,' adds the historian, ' this corruption will pass to the monks and
religious orders, although, to confess the truth, almost all the monas-
teries of the town have become bawd-houses, without any one to speak
against it.' With respect to Alexander vi., who loved his daughter
Lucretia, the reader may find in Burchard the description of the mar-
vellous orgies in which he joined with Lucretia and Csesar, and the
enumeration of the prizes which he distributed. Let the reader also
read for himself the story of the bestiality of Pietro Luigi Farnese, the
Pope's son, how the young and upright Bishop of Fano died from his out-
rage, and how the Pope, speaking of this crime as ' a youthful levity,'

^ See Corpus hlslorkorum medii oevi, G. Eocaid, vol. ii. ; Joli. Burcliardi, hij;h
chamberlain to Alexander vi., Diariam, p. 2134. Guicciaidiai, DM' i&torla
d'ltalia, p. 211, ed. Pantheon Litteiaire.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 355

gave Lira in tliis secret bull ' the fullest absolution from all the pains
which he might have incurred by human incontinence, in whatever shape
or with whatever cause.' As to civil security, Bentivcglio caused all the
Marescotti to be put to death ; Hippolyto d'Este had his brother's eyes
put out in his presence ; Caesar Borgia killed his brother ; murder is
consonant with their public rrianners, and excites no wonder. A fisher-
man was asked why he had not informed the governor of the town that
he had seen a body thrown into the water ; ' he replied that he had
seen about a hundred bodies thrown into the water during his lifetime
in the same place, and that no one had ever troubled about it.' ' In.
our town,' says an old historian, ' much murder and pillage was done
by day and night, and hardly a day passed but some one was killed.'
Cajsar Borgia one day killed Peroso, the Pope's favourite, between his
arms and under his cloak, so that the blood spurted up to the Pope's
face. He caused his sister's husband to be stabbed and then strangled
in open day, on the steps of the palace ; count, if you can, his assassi-
nations. Certainly he and his father, by their character, morals, open
and systematic wickedness, have presented to Europe the two most suc-
cessful images of the devil. To sum up in a word, it was on the model
of this society, and for this society, that Machiavelli wrote his Prince.
The complete development of all the faculties and all the lusts of man,
the complete destruction of all the restraints and all the shame of man,
are the two distinguishing marks of this grand and perverse culture.
To make man a strong being, .hedged about with genius, audacity, pre-
sence of mind, astute policy, dissimulation, patience, and to turn ail this
power to the acquisition of every kind of pleasure, pleasures of the body,
of luxury, arts, literature, authority ; that is, to foi-m and to set free an
admirable and formidable animal, very greedy and well armed, — such
was his object ; and the effect, after a hundred years, is visible. They
tore one another to pieces like beautiful lions and superb panthers.
In this society, which was turned into a circus, amid so many hatreds,
and when exhaustion was setting in, the foreigner appeared : all bent
beneath his lash ; they were caged, and thus they pine away, in dull
pleasures, Avith low vices,^ bowing their backs. Despotism, the In-
quisition, the Cicisbei, dense ignorance, and open knavery, the shame-
lessness and the smartness of harlequins and rascals, misery and vermin,
— such is the issue of the Italian Renaissance. Like the old civilisations
of Greece and Rome,^ like the modern civilisations of Provence and
Spain, like all southern civilisations, it bears in its bosom an irremedi-
able vice, a bad and false conception of man. The Germans of the six-
teenth century, like the Germans of the fourteenth century, have rightly

^ See, in Casanova's M6moires, the picture of this degradation. See also the
Memorie of Scipione Eossi, on the convents of Tuscany at the close of the eighteenth
ceutuiy.

^ From Homer to Constantine, the ancient city was an association of freeaieo
whose aim wus the conq.uest and destruction of other freemen.

356 THE KENAISSAXCE. [LOOK IT.

judged it ; -with their simple common sense, with their fundamental
honesty, they have put their fingers on the secret pLigue-spot. A
society cannot be founded only on the pursuit of pleasure and power;
a society can only be founded on the respect for liberty and justice.
In order that the great human renovation which in the sixteenth cen-
tury raised the whole of Europe might be perfected and endure, it was
necessary that, meeting with another race, it might develop another
culture, and that from a more wholesome conception of existence it
might educe a better form of civilisation.

IL

Thus, side by side with the Eenaissance, was born the Reformation.
It also was in fact a new birth, one in harmony with the genius of the
Germanic peoples. The distinction between this genius and others is
its moral principles. Grosser and heavier, more given to gluttony and
drunkenness,^ these nations are at the same time more under the
influence of conscience, firmer in the observance of their word, more
disposed to self-denial and sacrifice. Such their climate has made them;
and such they have continued, from Tacitus to Luther, from Knox to
Gustavus Adolphus and Kant. In the course of time, and beneath
the incessant action of the ages, the phlegmatic body, puffed out with
gross food and strong drink, had become rusted, the nerves less ex-
citable, the muscles less strung, the desires les_s seconded by action,
the life more dull and slow, the soul more hardened and indifferent
to the shocks of the body : mud, rain, snow, profusion of unpleasing
and gloomy sights, the want of lively and delicate excitements of the
senses, keep man in a militant attitude. Heroes in the barbarous ages,
workers to-day, they endure weariness now as they courted wounds
then ; now, as then, nobility of soul appeals to them ; thrown back
upon the enjoyments of the soul, they find in these a world, the world
of moral beauty. For them the ideal is displaced ; it is no longer

' iJ&moires de la Margrave de Baireuth. See also Misson, Voyage en Italic,
1700. Compare tlie manners of the students at the present day. 'The Germans
are, as you know, wonderful drinkers : no people in the world are more flattering,
more civil, more officious ; but yet they have terrible customs in the matter of
drinking. With them everything is done drinking ; they drink in doing every-
thing. There was not time during a visit to say three words, before you were
astonished to see the collation arrive, or at least a few jugs of wine, accompanied
by a plate of crusts of bread, dished up with pepper and salt ; a fatal preparative
for bad drinkers. You must be acquainted with the laws which are afterwards
observed, sacred and inviolable laws. You must never drink without drinking to
some one's health ; also, after drinking, you must offer the wine to him whose
health you have drunk. You must never refuse the glass which is offered to you,
and you must naturally drain it to its last drop. Reflect a little, I beseech you,
on these customs, and see how it is possible to cease drinking ; accordingly, they
never cease. In Germany it is a perpetual drinking-bout ; to drink in Germany
i£ to drink for ever. '

CHAP, v.] THE CHRTSTIAX RENAISSANCE. 357

amidst forms, made up of force and joy, but it is transferred to
sentiments, made up of truth, law, attachment to duty, observance of
order. What matters it if the storm rasies and if it snows, if the wind
blusters in the black pine-forests, or on the wan sea-surges where tlie
sea-gulls scream, if a man, stiff and blue with cold, shutting himself up
in his cottage, ha^-e but a dish of sourcrout or a piece of salt beef,
under his smoky light and beside his fire of turf; another kingdom
opens to reward him, the kingdom of inward contentment : his wife
loves him, and is faithful ; his children round his heartli spell out
the old family Bible ; he is the master in his home, the protector,
the benefactor, honoured by others, honoured by himself; and if so
be that he needs assistance, he knows that at the first appeal he will
see his neighbours stand faithfully and bravely by his side. The
reader need only refer to the portraits of the time, those of Italy and
Germany ; he will comprehend at a glance the two races and the two
civilisations, the Renaissance and the Reformation : on one side, a half-
naked condottiere in Roman costume, a cardinal in his robes, amply
draped, in a rich arm-chair, carved and adorned with heads of lions,
leaves, dancing fauns, he himself satirical and voluptuous, with the
easy and dangerous look of a politician and man of the world, craftily
poised and on his guard ; on the other side, some honest doctor, a
theologian, a simple man, with badly combed locks, stiff as a post,
in his simple gown of coarse black serge, with big books of dogma
ponderously clasped, a conscientious worker, an exemplary father of
a family. See now the great artist of the age, a laborious and con-
scientious workman, a follower of Luther's,^ a true Northman — Albert
Durer. He also, like Raphael and Titian, has his ideal of man, an
inexhaustible ideal, whence spring by hundreds living figures and the
representations of manners, but how national and original ! No care
for expansive and happy beauty : to him nude bodies are but bodies
undressed : straight shoulders, prominent stomachs, thin legs, feet
pinched by shoes, his neighbour the carpenter's, or his gossip the
sausage-seller's. The heads stand out in his etchings, remorselessly
scraped and scooped away, savage or commonplace, often wrinkled
by the fatigues of trade, generally sad, anxious, and patient, harshly
and wretchedly transformed by the necessities of life. Where is the
vista out of this minute copy of unsavoury truth ? To what land will
the lofty and melancholy imagination betake itself ? The land of
dreams, strange dreams, swarming Avith deep thoughts, sad contempla-
tion of human destiny, a vague notion of the great enigma, groping
reflection, which in the dimness of the rough woodcuts, amidst obscure
emblems and fantastic figures, tries to seize upon truth and justice.
There was no need to search so far ; Durer had grasped them at the
first effort. If there is any decency in the world, it is in the Madonnas

1 See bis letters, and tiie sympathy expressed for Luther.

358 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

■which are constantly springing to life under his pencil. He was not,
like Raphael, beginning by making them nude ; the most licentious hand
•would not venture to disturb one stiff fold of their robes ; with infant
in arms, they think but of him, and Avill never think beyond him ;
not only are they innocent, but they are virtuous. The good German
housewife, for ever shut up, voluntarily and naturally, within her
domestic duties and contentment, breathes out in all the fundamental
sincerity, the seriousness, the unassailable loyalty of their attitudes and
looks. He has done more ; with this peaceful virtue he has painted
a militant virtue. There at last is the genuine Christ, the man cruci-
fied, lean and fleshless through his agony, whose blood drops minute by
minute in rarer drops, as the feebler and feebler pulsations give warn-
ing of the last throe of a dying life. Not here, as in the Italian masters,
a sight to charm the eyes, a mere flow of drapery, a disposition of
groups. The heart, the very heart, is wounded by this sight : it is the
just man oppressed, who is dying because the world hates justice. The
mighty, the men of the age, are there, indifferent, satirical : a plumed
knight, a big-bellied burgomaster, who, with hands folded behind his
back, looks on, kills an hour. But the rest weep ; above the fainting
Avomen, angels full of anguish catch in their vessels the holy blood as it
trickles down, and the stars of heaven veil their face not to behold
so tremendous an outrage. Other outrages will come after ; tortures
manifold, and the true martyrs beside the true Christ, resigned, silent^
Avith the sweet expression of the earliest believers. They are bound to an
old tree, and the executioner tears them with his iron-pointed lash. A
bishop with clasped hands is praying Avhere they have stretched him,
whilst an auger is being screwed into his eye. Above, amid the inter-
lacing trees and gnarled roots, a band of men and women climb under
the lash the breast of a hill, and from the crest they are hurled at the
lance's point into the abyss ; here and there roll heads, stiffening bodies ;
and by the side of those who are being decapitated, the swollen corpses,
impaled, await the croaking ravens. All these sufferings must be under-
gone for the confession of faith and the establishment of justice. But
above there is a guardian, an avenger, an all-powerful Judge, whose
day shall come. This light will shine, and the piercing rays of the last
sun already play, like a handful of darts, across the darkness of the age.
In the summit of heaven appears the angel in his shining robe, lead-
ing the eager hosts, the flashing sAvords, the inevitable arrows of the
avengers, who are to trample upon and punish the earth ; mankind
falls down beneath their charge, and now the jaw of the infernal monster
grinds the head of the wicked prelates. This is the popular poem of
conscience, and from the days of the apostles, man has not had a more
sublime and complete conception.^

' See a collection of Albct Durer's wood-carvings. Remark the resemblance of
Lis Apocalypse to Luther's familiar Table Talk.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN EENAISSAIS CE. 359

For conscience, like other things, has its poem ; by a natural in-
vasion the all-powerful idea of justice overflows from the soul, covers
heaven, and enthrones there a new deity. A formidable deity, who is
scarcely like the calm intelligence which serves philosophers to explain
the order of things ; nor to that tolerant deity, a kind of constitutional
king, whom Voltaire discovered at the end of a chain of argument,
Avhom Beranger sings of as of a comrade, and Avhom he salutes ' sans
lui dem.ander rien.' It is the just Judge, sinless and stern, who exacts
of man a strict account of his visible actions and of all his invisible
feeUngs, who tolerates no forgetfulness, no dejection, no failing, before
Avhom every approach to weakness or error is an outrage and a treason.
What is our justice before this strict justice ? People lived at peace in
the times of ignorance ; at most, when they felt themselves to blame,
they went for absolution to a priest ; all was ended by their buying a
kindly indulgence ; there was a tariiF, as there still is ; Tetzel the
Dominican declares that all sins are blotted out ' as soon as the money
chinks in the box.' "Whatever be the crime, there is a quittance ;
even ' si Dei matrem violavisset,^ he might go home clean and sure of
heaven. Unfortunately the vendors of pardons did not know that all
was changed, and that the intellect was become manly, no longer gab-
bling words mechanically like a catechism, but sounding them anxiously
like a truth. In the universal Renaissance, and in the mighty growth
of all human ideas, the German idea of duty blooms like the rest.
Now, when we speak of justice, it is no longer a lifeless phrase wnich
we repeat, but a living idea which Ave produce ; man sees the object
which it represents, and feels the emotion which summons it up ; he
no longer receives, but he creates it ; it is his work and his tyrant ; he
makes it, and submits to it. ' These words Justus and justitia Dei,^ says
Luther, ' v.'ere a thunder to my conscience. I shuddered to hear them;
I told myself, if God is just, He will punish me.' ^ For as soon as the
conscience discovers the idea of the perfect model,^ the least feelings
appeared to them to be crimes, and man, condemned by his own
scruples, fell prostrate, and, ' as it were, swallowed up' with horror.
' I, who lived the life of a spotless monk,' says Luther, ' yet felt within
me the troubled conscience of a sinner, without managing to assure
myself as to the satisfaction which I owed to God. . . . Then I said to
myself: Am I then the only one Avho ought to be sad in my spirit? . . .

^ Calvin, the logician of tiie Reformation, well explains the dependence of all
the Protestant ideas in his Institutes of tlie Christian Beligion, i. (1.) The idea
of the perfect God, the stern Judge. (2.) The alarm of conscience. (3.) The
impotence and con-uption of nature. (4.) The advent of free grace. (5.) The
rejection of rites and ceremonies.

^ ' In the measure in which pride is rooted within us, it always appears to us
R.S thouf;h we were just and whole, good and holy ; unless we are convinced hy
manifest arguments of our injustice, uncleanness, folly, and impurity. For we
are no', convinced of it if we turn our eyes to our own persons merely, and

360 THE EENAISSANCE. f^OOK 11.

Oh, what horrible spectres and figures I used to see ! ' Thus alarmed,
conscience believes that the terrible day is at hand. ' The end of the
world is near. . . . Our children will see it ; perchance we ourselves.'
Once in this mood he had terrible dreams for six months at a time.
Like the Christians of the Apocalypse, he fixes the moment : it will
come at Easter, or at the Conversion of Saint Paul. One theologian,
his friend, thought of giving all his goods to the poor ; ' biit would they
receive it?' he said. ' To-morrow night we shall be seated in heaven.'
Under such anguish the body gives way. For fourteen days Luther
was in such a condition, that he could neither drink, eat, nor sleep.
' Day and night,' his eyes fixed on a text of Saint Paul, he saw the
Judge, and His inevitable hands. Such is the tragedy which is enacted
in all Protestant souls — the eternal tragedy of the conscience ; and its
issue is a new religion.

For nature alone and unassisted cannot rise from this abyss by itself.
' It is so corrupted, that it does not feel the desire for heavenly things.
. . . There is in it before God nothing but lust,' Good intentions
cannot spring from it. ' For, terrified by the vision of his sin, man
could not resolve to do good, troubled and anxious as he is ; on the
contrary, abased and crushed by the weight of his sin, he falls into
despair and hatred of God, as it was with Cain, Saul, Judas;' so that,
abandoned to himself, he can find nothing within him but the rage and
the oppression of a despairing wretch or a devil. In vain he might try
to recover himself by good works : our good deeds are not pure ; even
though pure, they do not wipe out the stain of previous sins, and more-
over they do not take away the original corruption of the heart : they
are only boughs and blossoms, the inherited poison is in the sap. Man
must descend to the heart, underneath literal obedience and the reach
of law ; from the kingdom of law he must penetrate into that of grace ;
from exacted righteousness to spontaneous goodness ; beneath his
original nature, which led him to selfishness and earthly things, a
second nature is developed, leading him to sacrifice and heavenly
things. Neither my works, nor my justice, nor the works or justice
of any creature or of all creatures, could work in me this wonderful
change. One alone can do it, the pure God, the Just Victim, the
Saviour, the Redeemer, Jesus, my Christ, by imputing to me His justice,
by pouring upon me His merits, by drowning my sin under His sacrifice.

if we do not think also of God, who is the only rule by which we must shape
and complete this j udgment. . . . And then that which had a fair appearance of
virtue will be found to be nothing but weakness.

' This is the source of that horror and wonder by which the Scriptures tell us
the saints were afiiicted and cast down, when and as often as they felt the presence
of God. For we see those who were as it might be far from God, and who were
confident and went about with a stiff neck, as soon as He displayed His glory to
them, they were shaken and terrified, so much so that they were overwhelmed,
nay swallowed up in the horror of death, and that they fainted away. '

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN EENAISSANCE. 3G1

The world is a 'mass of perdition,'^ predestined to hell. Lord Jesus,
draw me back, select me from this mass. I have no claim to it ; there
is nothing in me not abominable ; this very prayer is inspired and
formed within me by Thee. But I weep, and my breast heaves, and
my heart is broken. Lord, let me feel myself redeemed, pardoned, Thy
elect one. Thy faithful one ; give me grace and give me faith ! ' Then,'
says Luther, 'I felt myself born anew, and it seemed that I was
entering the open gates of heaven.'

What remains to be done after this renovation of the heart?
Nothing : all religion is in that : the rest must be reduced or sup-
pressed ; it is a personal affair, a secret dialogue between man and
God, where there are only two things in question, — the very word of
God as it is transmitted by Scripture, and the emotions of the heart of
man, as the word of God excites and maintains them.^ Let us do away
with the rites that appeal to the senses, wherewith men would replace
this intercourse between the invisible mind and the visible judge, —
mortifications, fasts, corporeal penance, Lent, vows of chastity and
poverty, rosaries, indulgences ; rites serve only to smother living piety
beneath mechanical works. Away with the mediators by which men
have attempted to impede the direct intercoiirse between God and man,
— naniclv, saints, the Virgin, the Pope, the priest ; whosoever adores or
obeys them is an idolater. Neither saints nor Virgin can convert or save
us ; God alone by His Christ can convert and save. Neither Pope nor
priest can fi.K our faith or forgive our sins ; God alone instructs us by
His word, and absolves us by His pardon. No more pilgrimages or relics;
no more traditions or auricular confessions. A new church appears,
and therewith a new worship ; ministers of religion change their tone,
the worship of God its form ; the authority of the clergy is diminished,
and the pomp of services is reduced : they are reduced and diminished
the more, because the primitive idea of the new theology is more absorb-
ing ; so much so, that in certain sects they have disappeared altogether.
The priest descends from the lofty position in which the right of for-
giving sins and of regulating iaith had raised him over the heads of
tlie laity ; he returns to civil society, marries like the rest, begins to
be once more an equal, is merely a more learned and pious man than

• Saint Au.mistine.

* ilelanchthon, preface to Luther 8 Works: 'It is clear that the works of
Thomas, Scotus, and the like, are utterly silent about the element of justification
by faith, and contain many errors concerning the most important questions relat-
\\\" to the church. It is clear that the discourses of the monks in their churches
almost throughout the world were either fables about purgatory and the saints, or
else some kind of dogma of law or discipline, without a word of the gospel con-
cerning Christ, or else were vain trifles about distinctions in the matter of food,
about feasts and other human traditions. . . . The gospel is pure, incorniptible,
and not diluted with Gentile opinions. ' See also Fox, Acts and Monuments, 3 vols.,
ed. Townsend, 1S13, ii. 12.

3G2 THE EEXAISSAXCE. [BOOK II.

others, their elect and their adviser. The church becomes a temple,
empty of images, decorations, ceremonies, sometimes altogether bare ; a
simple meeting-house, where, between whitewashed walls, from a plain
pulpit, a man in a black gown speaks without gesticulations, reads a
passage from the Bible, begins a hymn, which the congregation takes
up. There is another place of prayer, as little adorned and not less
venerated, the domestic hearth, where every night the father of the
family, before his servants and his children, prays aloud and reads the
Scriptures. An austere and free religion, purged from sensualism and
obedience, interior and personal, which, set on foot by the awakening
of the conscience, coidd only be established among races in which each
man found within his nature the persuasion that he alone is responsible
for his actions, and always bound to the observance of his duty.

III.

It must be admitted that the Reformation entered England by a
side door; but it is enough that it came in, whatever the manner: for
great revolutions are not introduced by court intrigues and official
sleight of hand, but by social conditions and popular instincts. When
five millions of men are converted, it is because five millions of men
wish to be converted. Let us therefore leave on one side the intrigues
in high places, the scruples and passions of Henry viii.,^ the pliability
and plausibility of Cranmer, the vacillations and basenesses of the Par-
liament, the oscillation and tardiness of the Reformation, begun, then
arrested, then pushed forward, then with one blow violently pushed back,
then spread over the whole nation, and hedged in by a legal establishment,
a singular establishment, built up from discordant materials, but yet solid
and durable. Every great change has its root in the soul, and we have
only to look close into this deep soil to discover the national inclina-
tions and the secular irritations from which Protestantism has issued.

A hundred and fifty years before, it had been on the point of
bursting forth ; Wycliff had appeared, the Lollards had sprung up,
the Bible had been translated ; the Commons had proposed the con-
fiscation of ecclesiastical property ; then, under the pressure of the
united Church, royalty and aristocracy, the growing Reformation being
crushed, disappeared underground, onlj' to reappear at long intervals
by the sufferings of its martyrs. The bishops liad received the right of
imprisoning without trial laymen suspected of heresy ; they had burned
Lord Cobham alive ; the kings chose their ministers from the bench ;
settled in authority and pride, they had made the nobility and people
bend under the secular sword which had been entrusted to them, and
in their hands the stern network of laAv, Avhich from the Conquest had
compressed the nation in its iron grasp, had become more stringent

' See Froude, History of England, i.-vi. The conduct of Henrj' A'lii. is there
pjesented in a new light.

CHAP. V.j THE CHRISTIAI^ RENAISSANCE. 3G3

and more injurious. Venial acts had been construed into crimes, and
the judicial repression, extended to faults as well as to outrages, had
changed the police into an inquisition. ' " Offences against chastity,''
"heresy," or "matter sovmding thereunto," " witchcraft," "drunken-
ness," "scandal," "defamation," "impatient words," "broken promises,"
" untruth," " absence from church," " speaking evil of saints," " non-
payment of offerings," complaints against the constitutions of the courts
themselves;'^ all these transgressions, imputed or suspected, brought
lolk before the ecclesiastical tribunals, at enormous expense, with long
delays, from great distances, under a captious procedure, resulting
in heavy fines, strict imprisonments, liumiliating abjurations, public
penances, and the menace, often fulfilled, of torture and the stake.
Judge from a single fact : the Earl of Surrey, a relative of the king,
was accused before one of these tribunals of havino; neglected a fast.
Imagine, if you can, the minute and incessant oppressiveness of such a
code ; to what a point the whole of human life, visible actions and
invisible thoughts, was surrounded and held down by it ; how by
enforced accusations it penetrated to every hearth and into every con-
science ; with what shamelessness it was transformed into a vehicle
for extortions ; what secret anger it excited in these townsfolk, these
peasants, obliged sometimes to travel sixty miles and back, to leave in
one or other of the numberless talons of the law^ a part of their savings,
sometimes their whole substance and that of their children. A man
begins to think when he is thus down-trodden ; he asks himself qv^ietly
if it is really by divine dispensation that mitred thieves thus practise
tyranny and pillage ; he looks more closely into their lives ; he wants to
know if they themselves practise the regularity which they impose on
others ; and on a sudden he learns strange things. Cardinal Wolsey
writes to the Pope, that ' both the secular and regular priests were in
the habit of committing atrocious crimes, for which, if not in orders, they
would have been promptly executed ; ' and the laity were scandalised
to see such persons not only not degraded, but escaping with complete
impunity.' A priest convicted of incest with the prioress of Kilbourn
was simply condemned to carry a cross in a procession, and to pay three
shillings and fourpence ; at which rate, I fancy, he would renew the
practice. In the preceding reign (Henry vii.) the gentlemen and farmers
of Carnarvonshire had laid a complaint accusing the clergy of systemati-
cally seducing their wives and daughters. There were brothels in London
for the especial use of priests. As to the abuse of the confessional, read
in the original the familiarities to Avhich it opened the door.* The

' Froude, i. 191. Petition of Commons. This public and authentic protest
shows up all the details of clerical organisation and oppression.

2 Fronde, i. 26 ; ii. 192. 3 In May 1528. Froude, i. 194.

♦ Hale, Criminal Causes. Suppression qf the Monastenes, Camden See. Pub-
lications. Froude, i. 19-1-201.

364 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

bishops gave livings to tlieir children whilst they were still young. The
holy Father Prior of Maiden Bradley hath but six children, and but
one daughter married yet of the goods of the monastery ; trusting
shortly to marry the rest. The monks used to drink after supper
till ten or twelve next morning, and come to matins drunk. They
played cards or dice. Some came to service in the afternoons, and only
then for fear of corporal punishments. The royal visitors found con-
cubines in the secret apartments of the abbots. At the nvmnery of
Sion, the confessors seduced the nuns and absolved them at the same
time. There were convents, Burnet tells us, where all the recluses
were found pregnant. About ' two-thirds ' of the English monks lived
in such sort, that ' when their enormities were first read in the Parlia-
ment House, there was nothing but "Down with them!"'^ What a
spectacle for a nation in whom reason and conscience were awakening !
Long before the great outburst, the public indignation muttered
ominously, and was accumulating for the revolt ; priests were yelled
at in the streets or 'thrown into the kennel;' women would not 're-
ceive the sacrament from hands which they thought polluted.'^ When
the apparitor of the ecclesiastical courts came to serve a process, he
was driven away with insults. ' Go thy way, thou stynkyng knave, ye
are but knaves and brybours everych one of you.' A mercer broke an
apparitor's head with his yard. ' A waiter at the sign of the Cock'
said ' that the sight of a priest did make him sick, and that he would
go sixty miles to indict a priest.' Bishop Fitz-James wrote to Wolsey,
that the juries in London were ' so maliciously set in favorem hcBreticcB
pravitatis, that they will cast and condemn any clerk, though he were
as innocent as Abel.' ^ Wolsey himself spoke to the Pope of the
' dangerous spirit' which was spread abroad among the people, and he
foresaw a Eeformation. When Henry viii. laid the axe to the tree,
and slowly, with mistrust, struck a blow, then a second lopping off the
branches, there were a thousand, nay, a hundred thousand hearts which
approved of it, and Avould themselves have struck the trunk.

Consider the internal state of a diocese, that of Lincoln for instance,*
at this period, about 1521, and judge by this example of the manner
in which the ecclesiastical machinery works throughout the whole of
England, multiplying martyrs, hatreds, and conversions. Bishop
Longland summons the relatives of the accused, brothers, women, and
children, and administers the oath ; as they have already been prose-
cuted and have abjured, they must make oath, or they are relapsed,
and the fagots await them. Then they denounce their kinsman and

" Latimer's Sermons.

^ They called them ' horsyn prestes,' 'horson,' or 'whorson knaves.' Halo, p.
99 ; quoted by Froude, i. 199.
■' Fioude, i. 101 (1514).
•* Fox, Acts and Monamenls, iv. 221.

CHAP, v.] THE CHEISTIAN RENAISSAXCE. 365

themselves. One has taught the other in English the Epistle of Saint
James. This man, having forgotten several words of the Pater and
Credo in Latin, can only repeat them in English. A woman turned
her face from the cross which was carried about on Easter morning.
Several at church, especially at the moment of the elevation, would not
say their prayers, and remained seated ' dumb as beasts.' Three men,
including a carpenter, passed a night together reading a book of the
Scriptures. A pregnant woman went to mass not fasting. A brazier
denied the Real Presence. A brickmaker kept the Apocalypse in his
possession. A thresher said, as he pointed to his work, that he was
going to make God come out of his straw. Others spoke lightly of
pilgrimage, or of the Pope, or of relics, or of confession. And then
fifty of them were condemned the same year to abjure, to promise to
denounce each other, and to do penance all their lives, on pain of being
burnt as relapsed heretics. They were shut up in different ' monas-
teries;' there they were to be maintained by alms, and to work for their
support ; they were to appear with a fagot on their shoulders at market,
and in the procession on Sunday, then in a general procession, then at
the punishment of a heretic ; ' they were to fast on bread and ale only
every Friday during their life, and every Even of Corpus Christy on
bread and water, and carry a visible mark on their cheek.' Beyond
that, six were burnt alive, and the children of one, John Scrivener,
were obliged themselves to set fire to their father's wood pile. Do you
think that a man, burnt or shut up, was altogether done with ? He is
silenced, I admit, or he is hidden ; but long memories and bitter re-
sentments endure under a forced silence. People saw^ their companion,
relation, brother, bound by an iron chain, with clasped hands, praying
amid the smoke, whilst the flame blackened his skin and destroyed his
flesh. Such sights are not forgotten ; the last words uttered on the
fagot, the last appeals to God and Christ, remain in their hearts all-
powerful and ineffaceable. They carry them about with them, and
silently ponder over them in the fields, at their labour, when they think
themselves alone ; and then, darkly, passionately, their brains work.
For, beyond this universal sympathy which gathers mankind about the
oppressed, there is the working of the religious sentiment. The crisis
of conscience has begun which is natural to this race ; they meditate on
salvation, they are alarmed at their condition: terrified at the judgments
of God, they ask themselves whether, living under imposed obedience
and ceremonies, they do not become culpable, and merit damnation.
Can this terror be smothered by prisons and torture ? Fear against fear,
the only question is, which is the strongest ? They will soon know it :
for the peculiarity of these inward anxieties is that they grow beneath

1 See, passim, the prints of Fox. All the details which follow are from bio-
graphies. See those of Cromwell, by Carlyle, of Fox the Quaker, of Bunyan, and
the trials reported at length by Fox.

3G6 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II:

constraint and oppression ; as a welling spring wliich we vainly try to
stamp out under stones, they bubble and leap up and swell, until their
excessive accumvilation bursts out, disjointing or splitting the regular
masonry under Avhich men endeavoured to bury them. In the solitude
of the fields, or during the long winter nights, men dream; soon they
fear, and become gloomy. On Sunday at church, obliged to cross
themselves, to kneel betore the cross, to receive the host, they shudder,
and think it a mortal sin. They cease to talk to their friends, remain
for hours with bowed heads, sorrowful ; at night their wives hear them
sigh ; unable to sleep, they rise from their beds. Picture such a wan
figure, full of anguish, nourishing under his sternness and coolness a
secret ardour : he is still to be found in England in the poor shabby
dissenter, who, Bible in hand, stands up suddenly to preach at a street
corner; in those long-faced men who, after the service, not having had
enough of the prayers, sing a hymn out in the streei. The sombre
imagination has started, like a woman in labour, and its conception
swells day by day, tearing him who contains it. Through the long
muddy winter, the complaint of the wind sighing among the ill-fitting
rafters, the melancholy of the sky, continually flooded with rain or
covered with clouds, add to the gloom of the lugubrious dream.
Thenceforth man has made up his mind ; he will be saved at all costs.
At the peril of his life, he obtains one of the books which teach the
way of salvation, WyclifF's Wicket Gate, The Obedience of a Christian, or
sometimes Luther's Revelation of Antichrist, but above all some portion
of the word of God, which Tyndale had just translated. One hid his
books in a hollow tree; another learned by heart an epistle or a gospel,
so as to be able to ponder it to himself even in the presence of his
accusers. When sure of his friend, he speaks with him in pi'ivate ; and
peasant talking to peasant, labourer to labourer — you know what the
effect would be. It was the yeomen's sons, as Latimer said, who more
than all others maintained the faith of Christ in England ;^ and it was
with the yeomen's sons that Cromwell afterwards reaped his Puritan
victories. When such words are whispered through a nation, all
official voices clamour in vain: the nation has found its poem, it stops
its ears to the troublesome would-be distractors, and presently sings it
out with a full voice and from a full heart.

But the contagion had even reached the men in office, and Henry
viii. at last permitted the English Bible to be pviblished.^ England had
her book. Ever}' one, says Strype, who could buy this book either
read it assiduously, or had it read to him by others, and many well
advanced in years learned to read with the same object. On Sunday
the poor folk gathered at the bottom of the churches to hear it read.

1 Froude, ii. 33 : 'The bishops said in 1529, " In the crime of heresy, thanked
be God, there hath no notable person fallen in our time." '

* In 1538. Strype's Memorials, appendix. Froude, iii. ch. 12.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 3G7

Maldon, a young man, afterwards related that he had clubbed his
savings with an apprentice to buy a New Testament, and that for fear
of his father, they had hidden it in their straw mattress. In vaiii
tlie king in his proclamation had ordered people not to rest too much
upon their own sense, ideas, or opinions; not to reason publicly about
it in the public taverns and alehouses, but to have recourse to learned
and authorised men ; the seed sprouted, and they chose rather to take
God's word in the matter than men's. Maldon declared to his mother
that he would not kneel to the crucifix any longer, and his father in u
rage beat him severely, and was ready to hang him. The preface itself
invited men to independent study, saying that ' the Bishop of Rome
has studied long to keep tlie Bible from the people, and specially from
princes, lest they should find out his tricks and his falsehoods ; . . .
knowing well enough, that if the clear sun of God's word came over
the heat of the day, it would drive av.;iy the foul mist of his devilish
doctrines.' ^ Even on the admission, tlien, of official voices, they had
there the pure and the whole trutli, not merely speculative but moral
truth, without which we cannot live worthily or be saved. Tyndale
the translator says

' The right waye (yea and the onely waye) to understand the Scripture unto
Baivation, is that we ernestlye and above all thynge serclie for the profession of our
baptisme or covenauntes made betwene God and us. As for an example. Christe
sayth, Mat. v., Happy are the mercyfull, for they shall obtayne mercye. Lo, here
God hath made a covenaunt wyth us, to be mercyfull unto us, yf we wyll be mercy-
tull one to another. '

"What an expression ! and with what ardour men pricked by the
ceaseless reproaches of a scrupulous conscience, and the presentiment
of the dark future, would lavish on these pages the whole attention of
eyes and heart !

I have before me one of these old square folios," in black letter, in
which the pages, worn by horny fingers, have been patched together, in
which an old engraving figures forth to the poor folk the deeds and
menaces of the God of Israel, in which the preface and table of contents
point out to simple people the moral which is to be drawn from each
tragic history, and the application which is to be made of each venerable
precept. Hence have sprung much of the English language, and half
of the English manners ; to this day the country is biblical ; ^ it was
these big books which had transformed Shakspeare's England, To
understand this great change, try to picture these yeomen, these shop-
keepers, who in the evening placed this Bible on their table, and bare-
headed, with veneration, heard or read one of its chapters. Think that
they have no other books, that theirs was a virgin mind, that every

' Coverdale. Fioude, iii. 81. - 1540. Tyndale's translation,

^ An expression of Stendhal's ; it was his general impression.

368 THE RENAISSANCE, [eOOK II.

impression would make a furrow, that the monotony of mechanical
existence rendered them entirely open to new emotions, that they
opened this book not for amiisement, but to discover in it their doom
of life and death ; in brief, that the sombre and impassioned imagina-
tion of the race raised them to the leA'el of the grandeurs and terrors
■which were to pass before their eyes. Tyndale, the translator, wrote
with such sentiments, condemned, hunted, in concealment, his spirit
full of the idea of a speedy death, and of the great God for whom at
last he mounted the funeral pyre ; and the spectators who had seen
the remorse of Macbeth ^ and the murders of Shakspeare can listen to
the despair of David, and the massacres accumulated under Judges and
Kings. The short Hebrew verse-style took hold upon them by its
uncultivated severity. They have no need, like the French, to have
the ideas developed, explained in fine clear language, to be modified
and bound together.^ The serious and pulsating tone shakes them at
once ; they understand it with the imagination and the heart ; they are
not, like Frenchmen, enslaved to logical regularity ; and the old text,
so confused, so lofty and terrible, can retain in their language its wild-
ness and its majesty. !More than any people in Europe, by their innate
concentration and rigidity, they realise the Semitic conception of the
solitary and almighty God ; a strange conception, Avhich we, with all
our critical methods, have hardly reconstructed at the present day.
For the Jew, for the powerful minds who wrote the Pentateuch,® for
the prophets and authors of the Psalms, life as we conceive it, was
secluded from living things, plants, animals, firmament, sensible objects,
to be carried and concentrated entirely in the one Being of whom they
are the work and the puppets. Earth is the footstool of this great God,
heaven is His garment. He is in the world, amongst His creatures, as
an Oriental king in his tent, amidst his arms and his carpets. If you
enter this tent, all vanishes before the idea of the master ; you see but
him ; nothing has an individual and independent existence : these arms
are but made for his hands, these carpets for his foot ; you imagine
them only as spread for him and trodden by him. The awe-inspiring
face and the menacing voice of the irresistible lord appear behind his
instruments. So far, the Jew, natuj-e, and men are nothing of them-
selves ; they are for the service of God : they have no other reason for
existence ; no other use : they vanish before the vast and solitary
Being who, spread wide and set high as a mountain before human
thought, occupies and covers in Himself the whole horizon. Vainly
we attempt, we seed of the Aryan race, to figure this devouring God ;

' The time of which M. Taine speaks, and the translation of Tyndale, precede
by at least fifty years the appearance of Macbeth (1606). Shakspeare's audience
read the present authorised translation. — Te.

2 See Lemaistre de Sacy's translation, so slightly biblical.

^ See Ewald, Geschlchte r?e.s Volks Israel, his apostrophe to the third writer jf
tlie Pentateuch, Erhahener Geist, etc.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 369

we always leave some beauty, some interest, some part of free existence
to nature ; we but half attain to the Creator, with difficulty, after a
chain of reasoning, like Voltaire and Kant ; more readily we make Him
into an architect ; we naturally believe in natural laws ; we know that
the order of the world is fixed ; we do not crush things and their
relations under the feet of an arbitrary sovereignty ; we do not grasp
the sublime sentiment of Job, who sees the world trembling and swal-
lowed up at the touch of the strong hand ; we cannot endure the
intense emotion or repeat the marvellous accent of the Psalms, in which,
amid the silence of beings reduced to atoms, nothing remains but the
heart of man speaking to the eternal Lord. These, in the anguish of a
troubled conscience, and the oblivion of sensible nature, renew it in part.
If the strong and fierce cheer of the Arab, which breaks forth like the blast
of a trumpet at the sight of the rising sun and of the naked solitudes,^
if the mental trances, the short visions of a luminous and grand landscape,
if the Semitic colouring are wanting, at least the seriousness and sim-
plicity have remained; and the Hebraic God brought into the modern
conscience, is no less a sovereign in this narrow precinct than in the
deserts and mountains from which He sprang. His image is reduced,
but His authority is entire ; if He is less poetical. He is more moral.
Men read with awe and trembling the history of His works, the tables
of His law, the archives of His vengeance, the proclamation of His
promises and menaces : they are filled with them. Never has a people
been seen so deeply imbued by a foreign book, has let it penetrate
so far into its manners and writings, its imagination and language.
Thenceforth they have found their King, and will follow Him ; no word,
lay or ecclesiastic, shall prevail over His word ; they have submitted
their conduct to Him, they will give body and life for Him; and if need
be, a day will come when, out of fidelity to Him, they will overthrow
the State.

It is not enough to hear this King, they must answer Him ; and
religion is not complete until the prayer of the people is added to the
revelation of God. In 1548, at last, England received her Prayer-book'
from the hands of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, Bernard Ochin, Melanch-
thon ; the chief and most ardent reformers of Europe were invited to
compose a body of doctrines conformable to Scripture, and to express a
body of sentiments conformable to the true Christian life, — an admir-
able book, in which the full spirit of the Reformation breathes out,
where, beside the moving tenderness of the gospel, and the manly
accents of the Bible, throb the profound emotion, the grave eloquence,
the noble-mindedness, the restrained enthusiasm of the heroic and

' See Ps. civ. in Luther's admirable translation and in the English translation.

^ The first Primer of note was in 1545; Froude, v. 141. The Prayer-book
underwent several changes in 1552, others under Elizabeth, and a few, lastly, at
the Ptestoration.

2 A

3'70 THE RENAISSANCE, [BOOK IL

poetic souls who had re-discovered Christianity, and hnd passed near
the fire of martyrdom.

* Almighty and most merciful Father ; We have erred, and strayed from Thy
ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of oixr
own hearts. We have offended against Thy holy laws. We have left undone those
things which we ought to have done ; And we have done those things which we
ought not to have done ; And there is no health in us. But Thou, 0 Lord, have
mercy upon us, miserahle offenders. Spare Thou them, 0 God, which confess their
faults. Restore Thou them that are penitent ; According to Thy promises declared
onto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, 0 most merciful Father, for
His sake ; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober Ufe.'

* Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that Thou hast made, and
dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent ; Create and make in us new and
contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our
wretchedness, may obtain of Thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and
forgiveness. *

The same idea of sin, repentance, and moral renovation continually
recurs: the master-thought is always that of the heart humbled before
invisible justice, and only imploring His grace in order to obtain His
amendment. Such a state of mind ennobles man, and introduces a soit
of impassioned gravity in all the important actions of his life. We
must hear the liturgy of the deathbed, of baptism, of marriage ; the
latter first:

' Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after God's
ordinance, in the holy state of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her.
honour, and keep her in sickness and in health ; and, forsaking all other, keep
thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live ? '

These are genuine words of loyalty and conscience. No mystic
laniruor, here or elsewhere. This relicrion is not made for women who
dream, yearn, and sigh, but for men who examine themselves, act, and
have confidence, confidence in some one more just than themselves.
When a man is sick, and his flesh is weak, the priest comes to him, and
says :

' Dearly beloved, know this, that Almighty God is the Lord of life and death,
and of all things to them pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness,
and sickness. "Wherefore, whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that
it is God's visitation. And for what cause soever this sickness is sent unto you ;
whether it be to try your patience for the example of others, ... or else it be
sent unto you to correct and amend in you whatsoever doth offend the eyes of your
heavenly Father ; know you certainly, that if you tnily repent you of your sins,
and bear your sickness patiently, trusting in God's mercy, . . . submitting your-
self wholly unto His will, it shall turn to yoiur profit, and help you forward in the
right way that leadeth mito everlasting life. '

A great mysterious sentiment, a sort of sublime epic, void of Images
shows darkly amid these probings ot the conscience ; I mean a glimpse

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 371

of the divine regulation and of the invisible vkrorld, the only existences,
the only realities, in spite of bodily appearances and of the brute chance,
•which seems to jumble all things together. Man sees this beyond at
distant intervals, and lifts himself from his mire, as though he had sud-
denly breathed a pure and strengthening atmosphere. Such are the
effects of public prayer restored to the people ; for this had been taken
from the Latin and rendered into the vulgar tongue : there is a revolu-
tion in the word. Doubtless routine, here as with the ancient missal,
will insensibly do its sad work : by repeating the same words, man will
often do nothing but repeat words ; his lips will move whilst his heart
remains sluggish. But in great anguish, in the dumb agitations of a
restless and hollow spirit, at the funerals of his relatives, the strong
words of the book will find him in a mood to feel : for they are living,^
and do not stay in the ears like dead language : they enter the soul ;
and as soon as the soul is moved and worked upon, they take root
there. If you go and hear them in England itself, and if you listen
to the deep and pulsating accent with whicli they are pronounced, you
will see that they constitute there a national poem, always understood
and always efficacious. On Sunday, in the silence of business and
pleasure, between the bare walls of the village church, where no image,
no ex-voto, no accessory Avorship, comes to distract the eyes, the seats
are full ; the powerful Hebraic verses knock like the strokes of a
battering-ram at the door of every soul ; then the liturgy unfolds its
imposing supplications ; and at intervals the song of the congregation,
combined with the organ, comes to sustain the people's devotion. There
is nothing graver and more simple than public singing ; no scales, no
elaborate melody : it is not calculated for the gratification of the ear,
and yet it is free from the sickly sadness, from the gloomy monotony
which the middle-age has left in our chanting ; neither monkish nor
pagan, it rolls like a manly yet sweet melody, neither contrasting with
nor obscuring the words which accompany it : these words are psalms
translated into verse, yet lofty ; diluted, but not embellished. All is in
agreement — place, music, text, ceremony — to set every man, personally
and without a mediator, in presence of a just God, and to form a moral
poetry which shall sustain and develop the moral sense.^

' ' To make use of words in a foreign language, merely with a sentiment of
devotion, the mind taking no fruit, could be neither pleasing to God, nor beneficial
to man. The party that understood not the jiith or effectualness of the talk that
he made with God, might be as a harp or pipe, having a sound, but not under-
standing the noise that itself had made ; a Christian man was more than an
instrument ; and he had therefore provided a determinate form of supplication
in the English tongue, that liis subjects might be able to pray like reasonable
beings in their own language.'— Z/eWer of Henry viii. to Cranmer. Froude,
iv. 486.

^ Bishop John Fisher's i''««eraZ Oration of the Countess of Richmond (ed. 1711)
shows to what practices this religion succeeded. The Countess was the mother of

372 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

One detail is still needed to complete this manly religion — human
reason. The minister ascends the pulpit and speaks : he speaks coldly,
I admit, Avith literary comments and over-long demonstrations ; but
solidly, seriously, like a man who desires to convince, and that by
worthy means, who addresses only the reason, and discourses only of
justice. With Latimer and his contemporaries, preaching, like re-
ligion, changes its object and character ; like religion, it becomes
popular and moral, and appropriate to those who hear it, to recall them
to their duties. Few men have deserved better of their fellows, in life
and word, than he. He was a genuine Englishman, conscientious,
courageous, a man of common sense and good upright practice, sprung
from the labouring and independent class, with whom were the heart
and thews of the nation. His father, a brave yeoman, had a farm of
about four pounds a year, on which he employed half a dozen men, with
thirty cows which his wife milked, himself a good soldier ot the king,

Henry vii., and translated the Myrroure of Golde, and The Forthe Boke of the
Followinge Jesus Chryst : —

' As for fastynge, for age, and feebleness, albeit she were not bound, yet those
days that by the Church were appointed, she kept them diligently and seriously,
and in especial the holy Lent, throughout that she restrained her appetite till one
meal of iish on the day ; besides her other peculiar fasts of devotion, as St. Anthony,
St. Mary Magdalene, St. Catharine, with other ; and throughout all the year the
Friday and Saturday she full truly observed. As to hard clothes wearing, she had
her shirts and girdles of hair, which, when she was in health, every week she failed
not certain days to wear, sometime the one, sometime the other, that full often her
fikin, as I heard say, was pierced therewith.

' In prayer, every day at her uprising, which commonly was not long after five
of the clock, she began certain devotions, and so after them, with one of her
gentlewomen, the matins of our Lady ; which kept her to then, she came into her
closet, where then with her chaplain she said also matins of the day ; and after
that, daily heard four or five masses upon her knees ; so continuing in her prayers
and devotions unto the hour of dinner, which of the eating day was ten of the
clocks, and upon the fasting day eleven. After dinner full truly she would go her
stations to three altars daily ; daily her dirges and commendations she would say,
and her even songs before supper, both of the day and of our Lady, beside many
other prayers and psalters of David throughout the year ; and at night before she
went to bed, she failed not to resort unto her chapel, and there a large quarter of
an hour to occupy her devotions. I'To marvel, though all this long time her kneel-
ing was to her painful, and so painful that many times it caused in her back pain
and disease. And yet nevertheless, daily, when she was in health, she failed not
to say the crown of our Lady, which, after the manner of Pwome, containeth sixty
and three aves, and at every ave, to make a kneeling. As for meditation, she had
divers books in French, wherewith she would occupy herself when she was weary
of prayer. Wherefore divers she did translate out of the French into English.
Her marvellous weeping they can bear witness of, which here before have heard
her confession, which be divers and many, and at many seasons in the year, lightly
every thu-d day. Can also record the same those that were present at any time
wlien she was houshylde, which was full nigh a dozen times every year, what floods
of tears there issued forth of her eyes I '

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN EENAISSAITCE. 373

keeping equipment for himself and his horse so as to join the army if
need were, training his son to use the bow, making him buckle on his
breastplate, and finding a few nobles at the bottom of his purse where-
with to send him to school, and thence to the university.^ Little Latimer
studied eagerly, took his degrees, and continued long a good Catholic,
or, as he says, ' in darckense and in the shadow of death.' At about
thirty, having often heard Bilney the martyr, and having, moreover,
studied the world and thought for himself, he, as he tells us, ' began
from that time forward to smell the word of God, and to forsooke the
Schoole Doctours, and such fooleries ;' presently to preach, and forthwith
to pass for a seditious man, very troublesome to the men in authority,
who Avere indifferent to justice. For this was in the first place the
salient feature of his eloquence : he spoke to people of their duties, in
exact terms. One day, when he preached before the university, the
Bishop of Ely came, curious to hear him. Immediately he changed his
subject, and drew the portrait of a perfect prelate, a portrait which did
not tally well with the bishop's character ; and he was denounced for
the act. When he was made chaplain of Henry viii., awe-inspiring as
the king was, little as he was himself, he dared to write to him freely
to bid him stop the persecution which was set on foot, and to prevent
the interdiction of the Bible ; verily he risked his life. He had done
it before, he did it again ; like Tyndale, Knox, all the leaders of the
Reformation, he lived in almost ceaseless expectation of death, and in
contemplation of the stake. Sick, liable to racking headaches, stomach-
aches, pleurisy, stone, he wrought a vast work, travelling, writing,
preaching, delivering at the age of sixty-seven two sermons every
Sunday, and generally rising at two in the morning, winter and summer,
to study. Nothing can be simpler or more effective than his eloquence ;
and the reason is, that he never speaks for the sake of speaking, but of
doing work. His sermons, amongst others those wMch he preached
before the young king Edward vi., are not, like those of Massillon before
Louis XV., hung in the air, in che calm region of philosophical ampli-
fications : Latimer wishes to correct and he attacks actual vices, vices
which he has seen, which every one can point at with the finger ; he
too points them out, calls things by their name, and people too, telling
facts and details, like a brave heart ; and sparing nobody, sets himself
without hesitation to denounce and reform iniquity. Universal as
his moraUty is, ancient as is his text, he applies it to the time, to his
audience, at times to the judges who are there * in velvet cotes,' who
will not hear the poor, who give but a dog's hearing to such a
woman in a twelvemonth, and who leave another poor woman in the
Fleet, refusing to accept bail ; ^ at times to the king's oflicers, whose

' See note 4, p. 98.

* Latimer's Seven Sermons before Edward vi., ed. Edward Arber, 1 869. Second
Bcrmou, pp. 73 and 74.

374 THE RExXAISSANCa. [BOOK IL

thefts he enumerates, whom he sets between hell and restitution, and
of whom he obtains, nay extorts, pound for pound, the stolen money. ^
Ever from abstract iniquity he proceeds to special abuse ; for it is
abuse which cries out and demands, not a discourser, but a champion.
With him, theology holds but a secondary place ; before all, practice :
the true offence against God in his eyes is a bad deed ; the true service,
the suppression of bad deeds. And see by what paths he reaches this.
No great word, no show of style, no exhibition of dialectics. He re-
lates his life, the lives of otliers, giving dates, numbers, places ; he
abounds in anecdotes, little actual circumstances, fit to enter the ima-
gination and arouse the recollections of each hearer. He is familiar, at
times humorous, and always so precise, so impressed with real events
and particularities of English life, that ^A^e might glean from his ser-
mons an almost complete description of the manners of his age and
country. To reprove the great, who appropriate common lands by their
enclosures, he details the needs of the peasant, without the least care for
conventional proprieties ; he is not working now for conventionalities,
but to produce convictions : —

*A plough -land must have sheep; yea, they must have sheep to dung their
ground for bearing of corn ; for if they have no sheep to help to fat the ground,
they shall have but bare corn and thin. They must have swine for their food, to
make their veneries or bacon of : their bacon is their venison, for they shall now
have hangum tuum, if they get any other venison ; so that bacon is their necessary
meat to feed on, which they may not lack. They must have other cattle : as horses
to draw their plough, and for carriage of things to the markets ; and kine for their
milk and cheese, which they must live upon and ^my their rents. These cattle
must have pasture, which pasture if tliey lack, the rest must needs fail them :
and pastiu'e they cannot have, if the land be taken in, and inclosed from them. ' ^

Another time, to put his hearers on guard against hasty judgments,
he relates that, having entered the gaol at Cambridge to exhort the
prisoners, he found a woman accused of having killed her infant, who
would make no confession : —

' Which denying gave us occasion to search for the matter, and so we did. And
at the length we found that her husband loved her not ; and therefore he sought
means to make her out of the way. The matter was thus : ' a child of hers had
been sick by the space of a year, and so decayed as it were in a consumption. At
the length it died in harvest-time. She weni to her neighbours and other friends
to desire their help, to prepare the child to the bui'ial ; but there was nobody at
home : every man was in the field. The woman, in an heaviness and trouble of
spirit, went, and being herself alone, prepared the child to the burial. Her husband
coming home, not having great love towards her, accused her of the murder ; and so
she was taken and brought to Cambridge. But as far forth as I could learn through
earnest inquisition, I thought in my conscience the woman was not guilty, all the

' Latimer's Sermons. Fifth sermon, ed. Arber, p. 147.

''Latimer's Sermons, ed. Corrie, 1844, 2 vols., Last Sermon 'preached hc/ors
Edward vi., i. 249.

CHAP. V.J THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 375

circumstances well considered. Immediately after this I was called to preacli before
the king, which was my first sermon that I made before his majesty, and it was
done at Windsor ; when his majesty, after the sermon was done, did most familiarly
talk with me in a gallery. Now, when I saw my time, I kneeled down before
his majesty, opening the whole matter ; and afterwards most humbly desired his
majesty to pardon that woman. For I thought in my conscience she was not
guilty ; else I would not for all the world sue for a murderer. The king most
graciously heard my humble request, insomuch that I had a pardon ready for her
at my return homeward. In tlie mean season that same woman was delivered of
a child in the tower at Cambridge, whose godfather I was, and Mistress Cheke was
godmother. But all that time I hid my pardon, and told her nothing of it, only
exhorting her to confess the truth. At the length the time came when she looked
to suffer : I came, as I was wont to do, to instruct her ; she made great moan to
me, and most earnestly required me that I would find the means that she might be
purified before her suflering ; for she thought she should have been damned, if she
should suffer without purification. ... So we travailed with this woman till we
brought her to a good trade ; and at the length shewed her the king's pardon, and
let her go.

' This tale I told you by this occasion, that though some women be very un-
natural, and forget their children, yet when we hear anybody so report, we should
not be too hasty in believing the tale, but rather suspend our judgments till we
know the truth.' '

When a man preaches thus, he is believed : we are sure that he is
not reciting a lesson ; we feel that he has seen, that he draws his moral
not from books, but from facts ; that his counsels come from the solid
basis whence everything ought to come, — I mean from manifold and
personal experience. Many a time I have listened to popular orators,
who address the pocket, and prove their talent by the money they have
collected : it is thus that they hold forth, with circumstantial, recent,
proximate examples, with conversational turns of language, setting
aside great arguments and fine language. Imagine the ascendency of
the Scriptures enlarged upon in such words ; to what strata of the
people it could descend, what a hold it had upon sailors, workmen,
domestics ! Consider, again, how the authority of these words is doubled
by the courage, independence, integrity, unassailable and recognised
virtue of him who utters them. He spoke the truth to the king, un-
masked robbers, incurred all kind of hate, resigned his see rather than
sign anything against his conscience ; and at eighty years, under Mary,
refusing to retract, after two years of prison and waiting — and what
waiting ! — he was led to the stake. His companion, Eidley, slept the
night before as calmly, we are told, as ever he did in his life ; and when
ready to be chained to the post, said aloud, ' O heavenly Father, I give
Thee most hearty thanks, for that Thou hast called me to be a professor
of Thee, even unto death.' Latimer in his turn, when they brought
the lighted faggots, cried, 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and
play the man : we shall this day light such a caudle, by God's grace, in

^ Latimer's Sermons, ed. Corrie, First Sermon on the Lord's Prayer, i. 335.

376 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK H.

England, as I trust shall never be put out.' He then bathed his hands
in the flames, and resigning his soul to God, expired.

He had judged rightly : it is by this supreme proof that a creed
proves its power and gains its adherents ; martyrdoms are a sort of
propaganda as well as a witness, and make converts whilst they make
martyrs. All the writings of the time, and all the commentaries which
may be added to them, are weak beside actions which, one after the
other, shone forth at that time from doctors and from people, down to
the most simple and ignorant. In three years, under Mary, nearly three
hundred persons, men, women, old and young, some all but children,
let themselves be burned alive rather than abjure. The all-powerful
idea of God, and of the fidelity due to Him, made them strong against
all the revulsions of nature, and all the trembling of the flesh. ' No
one will be crowned,' said one of them, ' but they who fight like men ;
and he who endures to the end shall be saved.' Doctor Rogers suffered
first, in presence of his wife and ten children, one at the breast. He
had not been told beforehand, and was sleeping soundly. The wife of
the keeper of Newgate woke him, and told him that he must burn that
day. ' Then,' said he, ' I need not truss my points.' In the midst of
the flames he did not seem to suffer. ' His children stood by consoling
him, in such a way that he looked as if they were conducting him to a
merry marriage.' ^ A young man of nineteen, William Hunter, ap-
prenticed to a silk-weaver, was exhorted by his parents to persevere to
the end : —

•In the mean time William's father and mother came to him, and deshed
heartily of God that he might continue to the end in that good way which he had
begun : and his mother said to him, that she was glad that ever she was so happy
to bear such a child, which could find in his heart to lose his hfe for Christ's
name's sake.

' Then William said to his mother, "For my little pain which I shall suffer,
which is but a short braid, Christ hath promised me, mother (said he), a crown of
joy : may you not be glad of that, mother ? " With that his mother kneeled down
on her knees, saying, " I pray God strengthen thee, my son, to the end ; yea, I
think thee as well-bestowed as any child that ever I bare. "...

' Then William Hunter plucked up his gown, and stepped over the parlour
groundsel, and went forward cheerfully ; the sheriffs servant taking him by one
arm, and I his brother by another. And thus going in the way, he met with his
father according to his dream, and he spake to his son weeping, and saying, "God
be with thee, son William ;" and William said, "God be with you, good father,
and be of good comfort ; for I hope we shall meet again, when we shall be merry."
His father said, "I hope so, William ;" and so departed. So WUliam went to
the place where the stake stood, even according to his dream, where all things
were very unready. Then William took a wet broom-faggot, and kneeled down

' NoaiUes, the French (and Catholic) Ambassador. Pid. Hist. ii. 523. John Fox,
History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church, ed. Townsend, 1843, 8 vols., vi.
012, says : ' His wife and children, being eleven in number, and ten able to go, and
one sucking on her breast, met him bv the way as he went towards Smithfield. ' — Tii.

CHAP, v.] THE CIIKISTIAII KENAISSANCE. 377

thereon, aad read the fifty-first Psalm, till he came to these words, " The sacrifice
of God is a contrite spirit ; a contrite and a broken heart, 0 God, thou wilt not
despise. "...

'Then said the sheriff, "Here is a letter from the queen. If thou wilt recant
thou shalt live ; if not, thou slialt be burned." " No," quoth William, " I will
not recant, God willing." Then William rose and went to the stake, and stood
upright to it. Then came one Richard Ponde, a bailifif, and made fast the chain
about William.

' Then said master Brown, " Here is not wood enough to burn a leg of him."
Then said William, " Good people ! pray for me ; and make speed and despatch
quickly : and pray for me while you see me alive, good people ! and I will pray for
you likewise." "Now?" quoth master Brown, "pray for thee! 1 will pray no
more for thee, than I will pray for a dog." . . .

' Then was there a gentleman which said, " I pray God have mercy upon his
soul." The people said, "Amen, Amen."

'Immediately fire was made. Then William cast his psalter right into his
brother's hand, who said, " William ! think on the holy passion of Christ, and be
not afraid of death." And William answered, " 1 am not afraid." Then lift he
up his hands to heaven, and said, "Lord, Lord, Lord, receive my spirit;" and,
casting down his head again into the smothering smoke, he yielded up his life for
the truth, sealing it with his blood to the praise of God. ' ^

When a passion is able thus to tame the natural affections, it is able
also to tame bodily pain ; all the ferocity of the time laboured in vain
against convictions. Thomas Tomkins, a weaver of Shoreditch, being
asked by Bonner if he could stand the fire well, bade him try it. * Bonner
took Tomkins by the fingers, and held his hand directly over the flame,'
to terrify him. But ' he never shrank, till the veins shrank and the
sinews burst, and the water (blood) did spirt in Mr. Harpsfield's face.' ^
' In the isle of Guernsey, a woman with child being ordered to the fire,
Avas delivered in the flames, and the infant being taken from her, was
ordered by tlie magistrates to be thrown back into the fire.' ^ Bishop
Hooper was burned three times over in a small fire of green wood.
There was too little wood, and the wind turned aside the smoke. He
cried out, ' For God's love, good people, let me have more fire.' His
legs and thighs were roasted ; one of his hands fell oflf before he ex-
pired ; he endured thus three-quarters of an hour ; before liim in a
box was his pardon, on condition that he would retract. Against long
sufferings in poisonous prisons, against everything which miglit unnerve
or seduce, these men were invincible: five died of hunger at Canterbury;
they Avere in irons night and day, with no covering but their clothes,
on rotten straw ; yet there was an understanding amongst them, that the
'cross of persecution ' was a blessing from God, *an inestimable jewel,
a sovereign antidote, well-approved, to cure love of self and earthly
affection.' Before such examples the people were shaken. A woman
wrote to Bishop Bonner, that there was not a child but called him

» Fox, History of the Acts, etc., vi. 727. * Ihid. vi. 719.

» Neal, History of the Puritans, ed. Toulmin, 5 vols., 1793, i. 96.

378 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II

Bonner the hangman, and knew on his finger?, as well as he knew
his Pater, the exact number of those he had hurned at the stake, or
svifFered to die of hunger in prison these nine months. ' You have lost
the hearts of twenty thousand persons Avho were inveterate Papists a
year ago.' The spectators encouraged the martyrs, and cried out to
them that their cause was just. The Catholic envoy Kenard wrote to
Charles v, that it was said that several had desired to take their place
at the stake, by the side of those who were being burned. In vain the
queen had forbidden, on pain of death, all marks of approbation, ' We
know that they are men of God,' cried one of the spectators ; ' that is
why we cannot help saying, God strengthen them.' And all the people
answered, 'Amen, Amen.' What wonder if, at the coming of Elizabeth,
England cast in her lot with Protestantism ? The threats of the Armada
urged her further in advance ; and the Reformation became national
■under the pressure of foreign hostility, as it had become popular through
the triumph of its martyrs.

IV.

Two distinct branches receive the common sap, — one above, the
other beneath : one respected, flourishing, shooting forth in the open
air ; the other despised, half buried in the ground, trodden under foot
by those who would crush it : both living, the Anglican as well as
the Puritan, the one in spite of the effort made to destroy it, the other
in spite of the care taken to develop it.

The court has its religion, like the country — a sincere and winning
religion. Amid the pagan poesies which up to the Revolution always
had the ear of the world, we find gradually piercing through and rising
higher the grave and grand idea Avhich sent its roots to the depth of
the public mind. Many poets, Drayton, Davies, Cowley, Giles Fletcher,
Quarles, Crashaw, wrote sacred histories, pious or moral verses, noble
stanzas on death and the immortality of the soul, on the frailty of
things human, and on the supreme providence in which alone man
finds the support of his weakness and the consolation of his sufferings.
In the greatest prose wrirers. Bacon, Burton, Sir Thomas Browne,
Raleicrh, we see the fruits of veneration, a settled belief in the obscure
beyond ; in short, faith and prayer. Several prayers written by Bacon
are amongst the finest known ; and the courtier Raleigh, whilst writing
of the fall of emjiires, and how the barbarous nations had destroyed
this grand and magnificent Roman Empire, ended his book with the
ideas and tone of a Bossuet.^ Picture Saint Paul's in London, and the

* • 0 eloquent, just, and mightie Death ! whom none could advise, thou hast
persuaded ; what none hath dared, thou hast done ; and wliom all the world hath
nattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised : thou hast drawne
together all the farre stretched gi'eatuesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of
man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hicjacei.'

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 379

fashionable people who used to meet there ; the gentlemen who noisily-
made the rowels of their spurs resound on entering, looked around
and carried on conversation during service, who swore by God's eyes,
God's eyelids, who amongst the columns and chapels showed off their be-
ribboned shoes, their chains, scarves, satin doublets, velvet cloaks, their
braggadocio manners and stage attitudes. All this was very free, very-
loose, very far from our modern decency. But pass over youthful bluster;
take man in his great moments, in prison, in danger, or indeed when
old age arrives, when he has com.e to judge of life ; take him, above all,
in the country, on his estate far from any town, in the church of the
village where he is lord ; or again, when he is alone in the evening, at
his table, listening to the prayer offered up by his chaplain, having no
books but some great folio of dramas, well dog's-eared by his pages, and
his Prayer-book and Bible ; you may then understand how the new re-
ligion tightens its hold on these imaginative and serious minds. It does
not shock them by a narrow rigour; it does not fetter the flight of their
mind ; it does not attempt to extinguish the buoyant flame of their
fancy ; it does not proscribe the beautiful : it preserves more than any-
reformed church the noble pomp of the ancient worship, and rolls
under the domes of its cathedrals, the rich modulations, the majestic
harmonies of its grave, organ-led music. It is its characteristic not to
be in opposition to the world, but, on the other hand, to draw it nearer
to itself, by bringing itself nearer to it. By its secular condition as well
as by its external worship, it is embraced by and it embraces it: its head
is the Queen, it is a part of the Constitution, it sends its dignitaries to
the House of Lords ; it suffers its priests to marry ; its benefices are in
the nomination of the great families ; its chief members are the younger
sons of these same families : by all these channels it imbibes the spirit
of the age. In its hands, too, reformation cannot become hostile to
science, poetry, the large ideas of the Renaissance. Nay, in the nobles
of Elizabeth and James I., as In the cavaliers of Charles i., it tolerates
artistic tastes, philosophical curiosity, the fashions of society, and the
sentiment of the beautiful. The alliance is so strong, that, under Crom-
well, the ecclesiastics in a mass were dismissed for their king's sake,
and the cavaliers died wholesale for the Church. The two societies
mutually touch and are confounded together. If several poets are
pious, several ecclesiastics are poetical, — Bishop Ilall, Bishop Corbet,
Wither a rector, and the preacher Donne. If several laymen rise to re-
ligious contemplations, several theologians, Hookei-, John Hales, Taylor,
Chillingworth, set philosophy and reason by the side of dogma. Ac-
cordingly we find a new literature arising, elevated and original,
eloquent and measured, armed at once against the Puritans, who
sacrifice freedom of intellect to the tyranny of the letter, and against
the Catholics, who sacrifice independence of criticism to the tyranny
of tradition; opposed equally to the servility of literal interpretation
And the servility of a prescribed interpretation. In front of all appears

380 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IT.

the learned and excellent Hooker, one of the sweetest and most con-
ciliatory of men, the most solid and persuasive of logicians, a com-
prehensive mind, who in every question remote from the principles^
introduces into controversy general conceptions, and the knowledge
of human nature ; ^ beyond this, a methodical writer, correct and
always ample, worthy of being regarded not only as one of the fathers
of the English Church, but as one of the founders of English prose.
With a sustained gravity and simplicity, he shows the Puritans that
the laws of nature, reason, and society, like the law of Scripture,
are of divine institution, that all are equally Avorthy of respect and
obedience, that we must not sacrifice the inner word, by which God
reaches our intellect, to the outer word, by which God reaches our
senses ; that thus the civil constitution of the Church, and the visible
ordinance of ceremonies, may be conformable to the Avill of God, even
when they are not justified by a clear text of Scripture; and that
the authority of the magistrates, as well as the reason of man, does not
exceed its rights in establishing certain uniformities and disciplines on
which ScrijJture is silent, in order that reason may decide : —

1 Hooker's "Works, ed. Keble, 1836, 3 vols., Ecclesiastical Polity.

2 Ibid. i. book i. 249, 258, 312 :—

' That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate
the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working,
the same we term a Law. . . .

* Now if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether though it
were hut for awhile, the observation of her own laws ; if tliose principal and
mother elements of the world, whereol all things in this lower world are made,
should lose the qualities which now they have ; if the frame of that heavenly arch
erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should
forget their wonted motions, ... if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now
as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should as it were through a languish-
ing faintness, begin to stand and to rest himself: . . . what would become of
man himself, whom these things now do all serve ? See we not plainly that
obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world ? . . .

' Between men and beasts there is no possibility of sociable communion, because
the well-spring of that comnninion is a natural delight which man hath to trans-
fuse from himself into others, and to receive from others into himself especially
those things wherein the excellency of his kind doth most consist. The chiefest
instnmient of human communion therefore is speecn, because thereby we impart
mutually one to another the conceits of our reasonable understanding. And for
that cause seeing beasts are not hereof capable, forasmuch as with them we can
use no such conference, they being in degi'ee, although above other creatures on
earth to whom nature hath denied sense, yet lower than to be sociable companions
of man to whom nature hath given reason ; it is of Adam said, that amongst the
beasts "he found not for himself any meet companion." Civil society doth more
content the nature of man than any private kind of solitary living, because in
society this good of mutual participation is so much larger than otherwise. Here-
with notwithstanding we are not satisfied, but we covet (if it might be) to have a
kind of society and fellowship even with all mankind. '

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 381

' For if the natural strength of man's wit may by experience and study attain
unto such ripeness in the knowledge of things human, that men in this respect
may presume to build somewhat upon their judgment ; what reason have we to
think but that even in matters divine, the like wits furnished with necessary helps,
exercised in Scripturo with like diligence, and assisted with the grace of Almighty
God, may grow unto so much perfection of knowledge, that men shall have just
cause, when anything pertinent unto faith and religion is doubted of, the more
willingly to incline their minds towards that which the sentence of so grave, wise,
and learned in that faculty shall judge most sound. ' *

This 'natural light' therefore must not be despised, but rather
nourished so as to augment the other,^ as we put torch to torch ;
above all, nourished that we may live in harmony with each other.

' Far more comfort it were for us (so small is the joy we take in these strifes)
to labour under the same yoke, as men that look for the same eternal reward of
their labours, to be conjoined with you in bands of indissoluble love and amity, to
live as if our persons being many, our souls were but one, rather than in such dis-
membered sort to spend our few and wretched days in a tedious prosecuting of
wearisome contentions. '

In fact, it is in such amity that the greatest theologians conclude :
they quit an oppressive practice to grasp a liberal spirit. If by its
political structure the English Church is persecuting, by its doctrinal
structure it is tolerant ; it needs the reason of the laity too much to
refuse it liberty ; it lives in a world too cultivated and thoughtful to
proscribe thought and culture. John Hales, its most eminent doctor,
declared several times that he would renounce the Church of England
to-morrow, if she insisted on the doctrine that other Christians would
be damned; and that men believe other people to be damned only when
they desire them to be so.^ It was he again, a theologian, a prebendary,
who advises men to trust to themselves alone in religious matters ; to
leave nothing for authority, or antiquity, or the majority ; to use their
own reason in believing, as they use ' their own legs in walking;' to act
and be men in mind as well as in the rest ; and to regard as cowardly
and impious the borrowing of doctrine and sloth of thought. So
ChiUingworth, a notably militant and loyal mind, the most exact, the
most penetrating, and the most convincing of controversialists, first
Protestant, then Catholic, then Protestant again and for ever, has the
courage to say that these great changes, wrought in himself and by
himself, through study and research, are, of all his actions, those which
satisfy him most. He maintains that reason applied to Scripture alone
ought to persuade men ; that authority has no claim in it ; ' that

• Ecc. Pol. i. book ii. ch. vii. 4, p. 405.

' See the Dialogues of Galileo. The same idea which is persecuted by the church
at Rome is at the same time defended by the church in England- See also Ecc.
Pol. i. bookiii. 461-481.

* Clarendon's witness. See the same doctrines in Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of
Projjhesying, 1647,

382 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

notliing is more against religion than to force religion ;' tLat the great
principle of the Eeibrmation is liberty of conscience ; and that if the
doctrines of the different Protestant sects are not absolutely true, at
least they are free from all impiety and from all error damnable in
itself, or destructive of salvation. Thus is developed a new school of
polemics, a theology, a solid and rational apologetics, rigorous in its
arguments, capable of expansion, confirmed by science, and which,
authorizing independence of personal judgment at the same time with
the intervention of the natural reason, leaves religion in amity with
the world and the establishments of the past.

A Avriter of genius appears amongst these, a prose-poet, gifted with
imagination like Spenser and Shakspeare, — Jeremy Taylor, who, from
the bent of his mind as well as from circumstances, was destined to pre-
sent the alliance of the Renaissance with the Reformation, and to carry
into the pulpit the ornate style of the court. A preacher at St. Paul's,
appreciated and admired by men of fashion ' for his youthful and fresh
beauty and his graceful bearing,' as also for his splendid diction;
patronised and promoted by Archbishop Laud, he wrote for the king a
defence of episcopacy ; became chaplain to the king's army ; Avas taken,
ruined, twice imprisoned by the Parliamentarians ; married a natural
daughter of Charles i. ; then, after the Restoration, was loaded with
honours ; became bishop, member of the Privy Council, and chancellor
of the Irish university : in every passage of his life, fortunate or other-
wise, private or public, we see that he is an Anglican, a royalist, im-
bued with the spirit of the cavaliers and courtiers, not with their
vices. On the contrary, there was never a better or more upright man,
more zealous in his duties, more tolerant by principle ; so that, preserv-
ing a Christian gravity and purity, he received from the Renaissance
only its rich imagination, its classical erudition, and its liberal spirit.
But he had these gifts entire, as they existed in the most brilliant and
original of the men of the world, in Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Bacon,
Sir Thomas Browne, with the graces, splendours, refinements which
are characteristic of these sensitive and creative geniuses, and yet with
the redundancies, singularities, incongruities inevitable in an age when
excess of transport prevented the soundness of taste. Like all these
Avriters, like ^lontaigne, he was imbued with the classic antiquity ; in
the pulpit he quotes Greek and Latin anecdotes, passages from Seneca,
verses of Lucretius and Euripides, and this side by side with texts
from the Bible, from the Gospels and the Fathers. Cant was not yet
in vogue ; the two great sources of teaching. Christian and Pagan, ran
side by side ; they were collected in the same vessel, without imagining
that the wisdom of reason and nature could mar the wisdom of faith
and revelation. Fancy these strange sermons, in which the two erudi-
tions, Hellenic and Evangelic, flow together with their texts, and each
text in its own language ; in which, to prove that fathers are often un-
fortunate in their children, the author brings forward one after the other,

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 383

Chabrias, Germanicus, ^Marcus Aurellus, Hortensius, Quintus Fabius
Maximus, Scipio Africanus, Moses and Samuel ; where in the form of
comparisons and iUustrations is heaped up the spoil of histories and
authorities on botany, astronomy, zoology, whidi tlie cycloptedias and
scientific fancies at that time spread before the mind. Taylor will
relate to you the history of the bears of Pannonia, which, when wounded,
will press the iron deeper home ; or of the apples of Sodom, which are
beautiful to the gaze, but full within of rottenness and worms ; and
many others of the same kind. For it was a characteristic of men of
this age and school, not to possess a mind swept, levelled, regulated,
laid out in straight paths, like our seventeenth century writers, and
like the gardens at Versailles, but full, and crowded with circum-
stantial facts, complete dramatic scenes, little coloured pictures, pell-
mell and badly dusted ; so that, lost in confusion and dust, the modern
spectator cries out at their pedantry and coarseness. Metaphors
multiply one above the other, jumbled, blocking each other's path, as
in Shakspeare. "We think to follow one, and a second begins, then a
third cutting into the second, and so on, flower after flower, firework
after firework, so that the brightness becomes misty with sparks, and
the sight ends in a haze. On the other hand, and just by virtue of
this same turn of mind, Taylor imagines objects, not vaguely and
feebly, by some indistinct general conception, but precisely, entire, as
they are, with their sensible colour, their proper form, the multitude
of true and particular details which distinguish them in their species.
He is not acquainted with them by hearsay; he has seen them. Better,
he sees them now, and makes them to be seen. Read this piece, and
say if it does not seem to have been copied from a hospital, or from the
field of battle : —

' And what can we complain of the weakness of our strengths, or the pressures
of diseases, when we see a poor soldier stand in a breach almost starved with cold
and hunger, and his cold apt to be relieved only by the heats of anger, a fever, or
a fired musket, and his hunger slacked by a greater pain and a huge fear ? This
man shall stand in his arms and wounds, patiens luviinis atqiie soils, pale and
faint, weary and watchful ; and at night shall have a bullet pulled out of his flesh,
and shivers from his bones, and endure his mouth to be sewed up from a violent
rent to its own dimensions ; and all this for a man whom he never saw, or, if he
did, was not noted by him ; but one that shall condemn him to the gallows if he
runs away from all this misery.' '

This is the advantage of a full imagination over ordinary reason.
It produces in a mass twenty or thirty ideas, and as many images,
exhausting the subject which the other only outlines and sketches.
There are a thousand circumstances and shades in every event ; and
they are all grasped in living words like these :

' Foi so have I seen the little purls of a spring sweat through the bottom of a

^ Jeremy Taylor's Works, ed. Eden, 1840, 10 vols., ffoly Dying, ch. iii. sec. 4,
§ 3, p. 315.

384 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

bank, and intenerate the stubborn pavement, till it hath made it fit for the impres-
sion of a child's foot ; and it was despised, like the descending pearls of a misty
morning, till it had opened its way and made a stream large enough to carry away
the ruins of the undermined strand, and to invade the neighbouring gardens ; but
then the despised drops were gi'own into an artificial river, and an intolerable
mischief. So are the first entrances of sin, stopped with the antidotes of a hearty
prayer, and checked into sobriety by the eye of a reverend man, or the counsels of
a single sermon ; but when such beginnings are neglected, and our religion hath
not in it so much philosophy as to think anything evil as long as we can endure it,
they grow up to ulcers and pestilential evils ; they destroy the soul by their abode,
who at their first entry might have been killed with the pressure of a little finger. ' ^

All extremes meet in that imagination. The cavaliers who heard
him, found, as in Ford, Beaumont, and Fletcher, the crude copy of the
most coarse and unclean truth; and the light music of the most grace-
ful and airy fancies ; the smell and horrors of a dissecting room,^ and
all on a sudden the freshness and cheerfulness of a smiling dawn ; the
hateful detail of a leprosy, its white spots, its inner rottenness ; and
then this lovely picture of a lark, rising amid the early perfumes of
the fields : —

' For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards,
singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds ; but
the poor bird was beaten back mth the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his
motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the
tempest, than it could recover by the vibration and frequent weighing of his wings,
till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was
over ; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had
learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes tlirougli the air,
about his ministries here below. So is the prayer of a good man. ' ^

And he continues with the charm, sometimes with the very words,
of Shakspeare. In the preacher, as well as in the poet, as well as in all
the cavaliers and all the artists of the time, the imagination is so full, that
it reaches the real, even to its filth, and the ideal as far as its heaven.

How could true religious sentiment thus accommodate itself to such
a frank and worldly gait? This, however, is what it has done; and more
— the latter has generated the former. With Taylor, as well as with the
others, a free poetry leads to profound faith. If this alliance astonishes
us to-day, it is because in this respect people have grown pedantic. We
take the precise man for a religious man. We are content to see him
stiff in his black coat, choked in a white cravat, with a prayer-book in
his hand. We confound piety with decency, propriety, permanent and
perfect regularity. We proscribe to a man of faith all candid speech,
all bold gesture, all fire and dash in word or act ; we are shocked by
Luther's rude words, the bursts of laughter which shook his mighty

•* Sermon xvi.. Of Growth in Sin.

* ' We have already opened up this dunghill covered with snow, which was
indeed on the outside white as the spots of leprosy. '

^ Golden Grovt Sermons: V. ' The Return of Prayers.'

CHAP, v.] TirE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 385

paunch, his workaday rages, his plain and free speaking, the auda-
cious familiarity with whicli he treats Christ and the Deity.^ We do
not remember that these freedoms and this recklessness are simply
signs of entire belief, that warm and immoderate conviction is too sure
of itself to be tied down to an irreproachable style, that primitive
religion consists not of punctilios, but of emotions. It is a poem, the
greatest of all, a poem believed in ; this is why these men found it on
the borders of their poesy : the way of looking at the Avorld, adopted
by Shakspeare and all the tragic poets, led to it; another step, and
Jacques, Hamlet, would be there. That vast obscurity, that black un-
explored ocean, ' the unknown country,' which they saw on the verge
of our sad life, who knows whether it is not bounded by another shore ?
The troubled notion of the shadowy beyond is national, and this is why
the national renaissance at this time became Cliristian. When Taylor
speaks of death, he only takes up and works out a thought which
Shakspeare had already sketched : —

' All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light
and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every con-
tingency to every man, and to everj' creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and
calls us to look and see how the old sexton Time throws up the earth, and digs a
grave where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise
again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity.'

For beside this final death, which swallows us whole, there are partial
deaths which devour us piece by piece : —

* Every revolution which the sun makes about the world, divides between life
and death ; and death possesses both those portions by tlie next morrow ; and we
are dead to all those months which we liave already lived, and we shall never live
them over again : and still God makes little periods of our age. First we change
our world, when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of the sun. Then we
sleep and enter into the image of death, in which state we are unconcerned in all
the changes of the world : and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar
destroy our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but during that state
are as disinterest as if our eyes were closed with the clay that wee2)s in the
bowels of the earth. At the end of seven years our teeth fall aud die before us,
representing a formal prologue to the tragedy ; and still every seven years it is
odds but we shall finish the last scene : and when nature, or chance, or vice, takes
our body in pieces, weakening some parts and loosing others, we taste the grave
and the solemnities of our own funerals, first in those parts that ministered to vice,
and next in them that served for ornament, and in a short time even they that
served for necessity become useless, and entangled liivc the wheels of a broken clock.
Baldness is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper ornament of mourning, and
of a person entered very far into the regions and possession of death : and we have

1 Luther's Table Talk, ed. Hazlitt, No. 187, p. 30: When Jesus Christ was born,
he doubtless cried and wept like otlier children, and his mother tended him as other
mothers tend their children. As lie grew up he was submissive to his parents, and
waited on them, and carried his supposed father's dinner to him ; and when he came
back, Mary no doubt often said, ' My dear little Jesus, where hast thou been ? '

2 B

386 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

many more of the same signification,; gray hairs, rotten teeth, dim eyes, trembling
j'oints, short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed appetite.
Every day's necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all
nifht, when we lay in his lap, and slept in his outer chambers. The veiy spirits
of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue
from one death, and lays up for another ; and while we think a thought, we die ;
and the clock strikes, and reckons on our portion of eternity : we form our words
with the breath of our nostrils, we have the less to li%'e upon for every word we
sp eak. ' ^

Beyond all these destructions, other destrnctions are at work; chance
mows us down as well as nature, and we are the prej of accident as of
necessity : —

'Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are the in-
struments of acting it : and God by all the variety of His providence makes us
see death everywhere, in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the
fancies, and the expectation of every single person.^ . . . And how many teeming
mothers have rejoiced over their swelling wombs, and pleased themselves in becom-
ing the channels of blessing to a family, and the midwife hath quickly bound
their heads and feet, and carried them forth to burial ?^ . . . You can go no whither
but you tread upon a dead man's bones. ' *

Thus these powerful words roll on, sublime as an organ motett;
this universal crushing out of human vanities has the funeral grandeur
ot a tragedy ; piety in this instance proceeds from eloquence, and genius
leads to faith. All the powers and all the tenderness of the soul are
moved. It is not a cold rigorist who speaks ; it is a man, a moved
man, with senses and a heart, who has become a Christian not by
mortification, but by the development of his whole being : — ■

' Reckon but from the spright fulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes
of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five-and-
twenty, to the hoUowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a
three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very
strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood,
and at first it was fair as the morning, and fuU with the dew of heaven as a lamb's
fleece ; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled
its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline
to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age ; it bowed tire head, and broke its
stalk, and ut night having lost some of its leaves and aU its beauty, it fell into the
portion of weeds and outworn faces. The same is the portion of eveiy man and
every woman, the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour,
and our beauty so changed, that our acquaintance quickly knew us not ; and tliat
change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak
discoursings, that they who six hours ago tended upon us either with charitable or
ambitious services, cannot without some regret stay in the room alone where the
body lies stripped of its life and honour. I have read of a fair young German
gentleman who hving often refused to be pictured, but put ofi' the importunit}' of
his friends' desire by giving way that after a few days' burial they might send a

^ Jloly Dii'ing, ed. Eden, ch. i. sec. i. p. 207.

* Ibid. 267. 3 Ibid. 263. * Ibid. 2tJ9.

CHAP. V.J THE CHRISTI-VN EENAISS-A-XCE. 387

painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it draw the image of his death unto
the life : they did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone
full of serpents ; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does
the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you as me ; and then what
servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave ? what friends to visit us ?
what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected
upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepe>-s
for our funeral ? ' ^

Brought hither, like Hamlet to the biirying-ground, amid the skulls
which he recognises, and under the oppression of the death which he
touches, man needs but a slight effort to see a new world arise in his
heart. He seeks the remedy of his sadness in the idea of eternal jus-
tice, and implores it with a breadth of words which makes the prayer a
hymn in prose, as beautiful as a work of art : —

* Eternal God, Almighty Father of men and angels, by whose care and provi-
dence I am preserved and blessed, comforted and assisted, I humbly beg of Thee
to pardon the sins and follies of this day, the weakness of my services, and the
strengths of my passions, the rashness of my words, and the vanity and evil of
my actions. 0 just and dear God, how long shall 1 confess my sins, and pray
against them, and yet fall under them ? 0 let it be so no more ; let me never
return to the follies of which I am ashamed, which bring sorrow and death, and
Thy displeasure, worse than death. Give me a command over my inclinations an<l
a perfect hatred of sin, and a love to Thee above all the desires of this world. Be
pleased to bless and preserve me this night from all sin and all violence of chance,
and the malice of the spirits of darkness : watch over me in my sleep ; and whether
I sleep or wake, let me be Thy servant. Be Thou first and last in all my thoughts,
and the guide and continual assistance of all my actions. Preserve my body,
pardon the sin of my soul, and sanctify my spirit. Let me always live holily and
soberly ; and when I die, receive my soul into Thy hands. ' *

This was, however, but an imperfect Keformation, and the official
religion was too closely bound up with the world to undertake to cleanse
it thoroughly : if it repressed the excesses of vice, it did not attack its
source ; and the paganism of the Renaissance, following its bent, already
under James i. issued in the corruption, orgie, mincing, and drunken
habits, appetising and gross sensuality,^ which subsequently under tht;
Restoration stank like a sewer in the sun But underneath the estab-
lished Protestantism was propagated the interdicted Protestantism : the
yeomen were settling their faith like the gentlemen, and already the
Puritans made headway under the Anglicans.

' Holy Dijing, ch. i. sec. ii. p. 270. - Tiie Golden Grove.

^ See in Thierry and Theodoret, by Beaumont and Fletcher, the characters of
Bawder, Prot;xlyce, and Brunhalt. In Tlie Custom of the Country, by the same
authors, several scenes represent the inside of an infamous house, — a frcijuent thing,
by the way, in the dramas of that time ; but here the boarders in tne house ara
men. See also Eule a Wife and have a Wife, by the same authors.

388 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

No culture liere, no philosophy, no sentiment of harmcnious and
pagan beauty. Conscience only spoke, and its restlessness had become
a terror. The son of the shopkeeper, of the farmer, who read the Bible
in the barn or the counting-house, amid the barrels or the wool -bags,
did not take matters as the fine cavalier bred up in the old mythology,
and refined by an elegant Italian education. They took them tragically,
sternly examined themselves, pricked their hearts with their scruples,
filled their imaginations with the vengeance of God and the terrors of
the Bible. A gloomy epic, terrible and grand as the Edda^ was fer-
menting in their melancholy imaginations. They steeped themselves
in texts of Saint Paul, in the thundering menaces of the prophets ;
they burdened their minds with the pitiless doctrines of Calvin ; they
admitted that the majority of men were predestined to eternal dam-
nation : ^ many believed that this multitude were criminal before their
birth ; that God willed, foresaw, provided for their ruin ; that He de-
signed their punishment from all eternity ; that He created them simply
to give them up to it.^ Nothing but grace can save the wretched crea-
ture, free grace, God's sheer favour, which He only gives to a few, and
which He grants not to the struggles and works of men, but after the
arbitrary choice of His single and absolute will. We are ' children of
wrath,' plague-stricken, and condemned from our birth ; and wherever
we look in all the expanse of heaven, we find but thunderbolts to deafen
and destroy us. Fancy, if you can, the effects of such an idea on the
solitary and morose spirits, such as this race and climate generates.
Some would fancy themselves damned, and went groaning about the
streets ; others never slept. They were beside themselves, always
imagining that they felt the hand of God or the claw, of the devil
tipon them. An extraordinary power, immense means of action, were
suddenly opened up in the soul, and there was no barrier in the moral
life, and no establishment in civil society which their efforts could not
Tipset.

At once, private life was transformed. How should ordinary senti-
ments, natural and every-day notions of happiness and pleasure, sub-
sist before such a conception ? Suppose men condemned to death, not
ordinary death, but the rack, torture, an infinitely horrible and infinitely
extended torment, waiting for their sentence, and yet knowing that
they had one chance in a thousand, in a hundred thousand, of pardon ;
could they still go on amusing themselves, taking an interest in the
business or pleasure of the time? The azure heaven shines not for
them, the sun warms them not, the beauty and sweetness of things have
no attraction for them ; they have lost the wont of laughter ; they fasten
inwardly, pale and silent, on their anguish and their expectation ; they
have but one thought : ' Will the judge pardon me ?' They anxiously

' Calvin, quoted by Haag, ii. 216, Htstoire des Dogmes Chrtlkns.
* Tiiese were the Supralapsariaus.

CHAP, v.] THE CHKISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 389

probe the involuntary motions of their heart, which alone can leply,
and the inner revelation, which alone can render them certain of pardon
or ruin. They think that any other condition of mind is unholy, that
recklessness and joy are monstrous, that every worldly distraction or
interest is an act of godlessness, and that the true mark of a Christian is
a terror at the very idea of salvation. Thenceforth rigour and rigidity
mark their manners. The Puritan condemns the stage, the assemblies,
the world's pomps and gatherings, the court's gallantry and elegance,
the poetical and symbolical festivals of the country, the May-days, the
merry feasts, bell-ringings, all the outlets by which sensual or instinc-
tive nature had essayed to relieve itself. He gives them up, abandons
recreations and ornaments, crops his hair, wears a simple sombre-hued
coat, speaks through his nose, walks stiffly, with his eyes in the air, ab-
sorbed, indifferent to visible things. The external and natural man is
abolished ; only the inner and spiritual man survives ; there remains of
the soul only the ideas of God and conscience, — a conscience alarmed
and diseased, but strict in every duty, attentive to the least require-
ments, disdaining the equivocations of worldly morality, inexhaustible
in patience, courage, sacrifice, enthroning purity on the domestic hearth,
truth in the tribunal, probity in the counting-house, labour in the
workshop, above all, a fixed determination to bear all and do all rather
than fail in the least injunction of moral justice and Bible-law. The
stoical energy, a fundamental honesty of the race, were aroused at the
appeal of an enthusiastic imagination; and these unbending character-
istics were displayed in their entirety in conjunction with abnegation
and virtue.

Another step, and this great movement passed from within to with-
out, from individual manners to public institutions. Observe these
people in their reading of the Bible, they apply to themselves the com-
mands imposed on the Jews, and the prologues urge them to it. At the
outset of their Bibles the translator "^ set a table of the principal words in
Scripture, each with its definition and texts to support it. They read
and weigh these Avords : '■Abomination before God are Idoles, Images.
Before whom the people do bow them selfes.' Is this precept observed ?
No doubt the images are taken away, but the queen has still a crucifix
in her chapel, and is it not a remnant of idolatry to kneel down before
the sacrament? ^Ahrogacion, that is to abolyshe, or to make of none
effecte : And so the have of the commanderaentes whiche was in the
decrees and ceremonies, is abolished. The sacrifices, festes, meates,
and al outwarde ceremonies are abrogated, and all the order of priest-
hode is abrogated,' Is this so, and how does it happen that the bishops
still take upon themselves the right of prescribing faith, worship, and
of tyrannising over Christian consciences? And have they not pre-

* The Byhl'', nowe latdy with grpate 'industry and Diligece recofjnUi'd, (by Edm.
Bfcke), Loud., by John Daye aud William Seres, 1549, with Tyudale's Prologue.)!,

390 THE EENATSSANCE. [EOOK II.

served in the organ-music, in the surplice of the priests, in the sign of
the cross, in a hundred other practices, all these visible rites which God
has declared profane? ^Abuses. The abuses that be in the church
ought to be corrected by the prynces. Tlie ministers ought to preache
against abuses. Any maner of mere tradicions of man are abuses.'

What, meanwhile, is their prince doing, and why does he leave abuses
in the church ? The Christian must rise and protest ; we miist purge
the church from the pagan crust with which tradition has covered it.^
Such are the ideas conceived by these uncultivated minds. Fancy the
simple folk, more capable by their simplicity of a sturdy faith, these
freeholders, these big traders, who have sat on juries, voted at elections,
deliberated, discussed in common private and public business, used to
examine the law, the adducing of precedents, all the detail of juridical
and legal procedure ; bringing their lawyer's and pleader's training to
bear upon the interpretation of Scripture, who, having once formed a
conviction, employ for it the cold passion, the intractable obstinacy, the
heroic sternness of the English character. Their precise and combative
minds take the business in hand. Every one holds himself bound to be
ready, strong, and well prepared to answer all such as shall demand
a reason of liis faith. Each one has his difficulty and conscientious
scruple^ about some portion of the liturgy or the official hierarchy ;
about the dignities of canons and archdeacons, or certain passages of
the funeral service ; about the sacramental bread or the reading of
the apocryphal books in church ; about plurality of benefices or the
ecclesiastical square cap. They each oppose some point, all together
the episcopacy and the retention of Eomish ceremonies.^ Then they
are imprisoned, fined, pilloried ; they have their ears cut off ; their
ministers are dismissed, hunted out, prosecuted.* The law declares
that any one above the age of sixteen who for the space of a month
shall refuse to attend the established worship, shall be imprisoned until
such time as he shall submit ; and if he does not submit at the end of
three months, he shall be banished the kingdom ; and if he returns, put
to death. They submit, and show as much firmness in suffering as
scruple in belief; for a tittle, on the reception of the communion sitting
rather than kneeling, or standing rather than sitting, they give up their

^ Examination of Mr Axton : ' I can't consent to wear the surplice, it is against
my ccnscience ; I trust, by the help of God, I shall never put on that sleeve, wliich
is a mark of the beast. ' — Examination of Mr White, ' a substantial citizen of
London' (1572), accused of not going to the parish cliurch : ' The whole Scriptures
are for destroying idolatry, and everything that belongs to it.' — 'Where is the
place where these are forbidden ? ' — ' In Deuteronomy and other places ; . . . and
God by Isaiah commandeth not to pollute ourselves with the garments of the image.'

- One expression continually occurs : ' Tenderness of conscience' — 'a squeamish
stomach' — 'our weaker brethren.'

- The separation of the Anglicans and dissenters may be dated from 15G4.
* 1592.

CHAr. v.] THE CIirxlSTIAN RENAISSANCE. 3[)1

livings, their property, their liberty, their country. One Dr. Leighton
was imprisoned fifteen weeks in a dog's kennel, without fire, roof, bed,
and in irons: his hair and skin fell off; he was set in the pillory during
the November frosts, then whipt, and branded on the forehead ; his ears
were cut off, his nose slit ; he was shut up eight years in the Fleet, and
thence cast into the common prison. Many went cheerfully to the stake,
Keligion with them was a covenant, that is, a treaty made with God,
which must be kept before all, as a written engagement, to the letter,
to the last syllable. An admirable and deplorable stiffness of an over-
scrupulous conscience, which made cavillers at the same time witii
believers, Avhich was to make tyrants after it had made martyrs.

Between the two, it made fighting men. They became wonderfully
enriched and increased in the course of eighty years, as is always the
case with men who labour, live honestly, and pass their lives uprightly,
sustained by a powerful source of action from within. Thenceforth
they are able to resist, and they do resist Avhen driven to extremities ;
they choose to have recourse to arms rather than be driven back to
idolatry and sin. The Long Parliament assembles, defeats the king,
purges religion ; the dam is broken, the Independents are hurled above
the Presbyterians, the fanatics above the merely fervid ; irresistible and
overwhelming faith, enthusiasm, grow into a torrent, swallow up, or at
least disturb the strongest minds, politicians, lawyers, captains. Th^
Commons occupy a day in every week in deliberating on the progress
of religion. As soon as they touch upon doctrines they become furious.
A poor man, Paul Best, being accused of denying the Trinity, they de-
mand the passing of a decree to punish him with death ; James Nayler
having imagined that he was God, the Commons devote themselves to a
trial of eleven days, with a Hebraic animosity and ferocity : ' I think
him worse than possessed v.'ith the devil. Our God is here supplanted.
My ears trembled, my heart shuddered, on hearing this report. I will
speak no more. Let us all stop our ears and stone him.' ^ Before the
House, publicly, the men in authority had ecstasies. After the ex-
pulsion of the Presbyterians the preacher Hugh Peters started up in
the middle of a sermon, and cried out : ' Now I have it by Revelation,
now I shall tell you. This army must root up Monarchy, not only here,
but in France and other kingdoms round about ; this is to bring you
out of Egypt : this Army is that corner-stone cut out of the Mountaine,
which must dash the powers of the earth to pieces. But it is objected, the
way we walk in is without president (sic) ; what think you of the Virgin
Mary ? was there ever any president before, that a "Woman should con-
ceive a Child without the company of a Man ? This is an Age to make
examples and presidents in.' ^ Cromwell found prophecies, counsels in
the Bible for the present time, positive justifications of his policy. ' He

' Burton's Parliamentary Diary, ed. by Putt, 1828, 4 vols., i. 54.
* Walker'« Hldory of Indeijcndi^noj, 1648, pait ii. ]>. 49.

392 THE RENAISSANCE. [bOOK 11.

looked upon the Design of the Lord in this day to be the freeing of His
People from every Burden, and that was now accomplishing what was
prophesied in the 110th Psalm; from the Consideration of w^hich ho
was often encouniged to attend the effecting those Ends, spending at
least an hour in the Exposition of that Psalm.' ^ Granted that he was
a schemer, ambitious before everything, yet he was truly fanatical and
sincere. His doctor related that he had been very melancholy for years
at a time, with strange hallucinations, and the frequent fancy that he
was at death's door. Two years before the Eevolution he wrote to his
cousin : ' Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth
m the cause of his God than I. . . . The Lord accept me in His Son, and
give me to walk in the light, — and give us to walk in the light, as He
is the light ! . . . blessed be His Name for shining upon so dark a heart
as mine ! ' ^ Certainly he must have dreamed of becoming a saint as
well as a king, and aspired to salvation as well as to a throne. At the
moment when he was proceeding to Ireland, and was about to massacre
the Catholics there, he wrote to his daughter-in-law a letter of advice
which Baxter or Taylor might willingly have subscribed. In the midst
of pressing affairs, in 1651, he thus exhorted his wife: 'My dearest, I
could not satisfy myself to omit this post, although I have not much to
Avrite. ... It joys me to hear thy soul prospereth : the Lord increase
His favours to thee more and more. The great good thy soul can wish
is. That the Lord lift upon thee the light of His countenance, which is
better than life. The Lord bless all thy good counsel and example to
all those about thee, and hear all thy prayers, and accept thee always.' ^
Dying, he asked whether grace once received could be lost, and was
reassured to learn that it could not, being, as he said, certain that he
had once been in a state of grace. He died with this prayer : ' Lord,
though I am a miserable and wretched creature, I am in Covenant with
Thee through grace. And I may, I will, come to Thee, for Thy People.

' This passage may serve as an example of the difficulties and perplexities to
which a translator of any History of Literature must always be exposed, and this
without any fault of the original author. Ab vno disce omnes. M. Taine says
that Cromwell found justification for his policy in Psalm cxiii., which, on looking
out, I found to be ' an exhortation to praise God for His excellency and for His
mercy,' — a psalm by which Cromwell's conduct could nowise be justified. I opened
then Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters, etc., and found, in vol. ii. part vi. p. 157, the
same fact stated, but Psalm ex. mentioned and given, — a far more likely psalm to
have influenced Cromwell. Carlyle refers to Ludloic, i. 319, Taine to Guizot,
Portraits Politiques, p. 63, and to Carlyle. In looking in Guizot's volume, 5th
fd., 1862, I find that this writer also mentions Psalm cxiii. ; but on referring
finally to the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, printed at Vivay {sic) in the Canton
of Bern, 1698, I found, in vol. i. p. 319, the sentence, as given above ; therefore
Carlyle was in the right. — Tr.

- Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, ed. Carlyle, 1866, 3 vols., i. 79.

CHAP. V.j THE CHRISTIAN EENAISSANCE. 393

Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument to do
them some good, and Thee service. . . . Lord, however Thou do dispose
of me, continue and go on to do good for thern . . . and go on . . . with
the work of reformation ; and make the Name of Christ glorious in the
world.' ^ Underneath this practical, prudent, worldly spirit, there was
an English element of anxious and powerful imagination,^ capable of
engendering an impassioned Calvinism and mystic fears. The same
contrasts were jumbled together and reconciled in the other Inde-
pendents. In 1648, after unsuccessful tactics, they were in danger
between the king and the Parliament ; then they assembled for several
days together at Windsor to confess themselves to God, and seek His
assistance ; and they discovered that all their evils came from the con-
ferences they had had the weakness to propose to the king. ' And in
this path the Lord led us,' said Adjutant Allen, ' not only to see our
sin, but also our duty ; and this so imanimously set with weight upon
each heart that none was able hardly to speak a word to each other
for bitter weeping, partly in the sense and shame of our iniquities ; of
our unbelief, base fear of men, and carnal consultations (as the fruit
thereof) with our own wisdoms, and not with the Word of the Lord.' ^
Then they resolved to bring the kiog to judgment and death, and did
as they had resolved.

Around them, fanaticism and folly gained ground. Independents,
Millenarians, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Libertines, Familists, Quakers,
Enthusiasts, Seekers, Perfectionists, Socinians, Arians, anti- Trinitarians,
anti-Scripturalists, Sceptics ; the list of sects is interminable. Women,
troopers, suddenly got up into the pulpit and preached. The strangest
ceremonies took place in public. In 1644, says Dr. Featly, the Ana-
baptists rebaptised a hundred men and women together at twilight, m
streams, in branches of the Thames and elsewhere, plunging them in
the water over head and ears. One Gates, in the county of Essex,
was brought before a jury for the murder of Anne ]\Iartin, who died
a few days after her baptism of a cold which had seized her. George
Fox the Quaker spoke with God, and witnessed with a loud voice, in
the streets and market-places, against the sins of the age. William
Simpson, one of his disciples, ' was moved of the Lord to go, at several
times, for three years, naked and barefoot before them, as a sign unto
them, in the markets, courts, towns, cities, to priests' houses, and to
great men's houses, telling them, so shall they all be stripped naked,
as he was stripped naked. And sometimes he was moved to put on

1 Cromwell's Letters, ed. Carlyle, iii. 373.

- See his speeches. The style is disjointed, obscure, impassioned, marvellous,
like that of a man who is not master of his wits, and who yet sees straight by a
sort of intuition.

2 Cromwell's Letters, i. 265.

394 TPIE EENAISSANCE, [BOOK 11

liair sackcloth, and to besmear his face, and to tell them, so would the
Lord besmear all their religion as he was besmeared.^

' A female came into "Whitehall Chapel stark naked, in the midst
of public worship, the Lord Protector himself being present. A Quaker
came to the door of the Parliament House with a drawn sword, and
Avounded several who were present, saying that he was inspired by
the Holy Spirit to kill every man that sat in the house.' The Fifth
Monarchy men believed that Christ was about to descend to reign in
person upon earth for a thousand years, with the saints for His ministers.
The Ranters looked upon furious vociferations and contortions as the
principal signs of faith. The Seekers thought that religious truth
could only be seized in a sort of mystical fog, Avith doubt and fear.
The Muggletonians decided that ' John Reeve and Ludovick ^luggleton
were the two last prophets and messengers of God ; ' they declared the
Quakers possessed of the devil, exorcised him, and prophesied that
AVilliam Penn would be damned. I have before mentioned James
Nayler, an old quartermaster of General Lambert, adored as a god
by his followers. Several women led his horse, others cast before him
their kerchiefs and scarves, singing, Holy, holy. Lord God. They called
him ' lovely among ten thousand, the only Son of God, the prophet of
the Most High, King of Israel, the eternal Son of Justice, the Prince
of Peace, Jesus, him in whom the hope of Israel rests.' One of them,
Dorcas Erbury, declared that she had lain dead for two whole days in
her prison in Exeter Gaol, and that Nayler had restored her to life by
laying his hands upon her. Sarah Blackbury finding him a prisoner,
took him by the hand and said, ' Rise up my love, my dove, my fairest
one : why stayest thou among the pots ? ' Then she kissed his hand
and fell down before him. When he was put in the pillory, some of
his disciples began to sing, Aveep, smite their breasts ; others kissed
his hands, rested on his bosom, and kissed his wounds.^ Bedlam broken
loose could not have surpassed them.

Underneath these disorderly bubbles at the surface, the wise and
deep strata of the nation had settled, and the new faith was doing its
work with them, — a practical and positive, a political and moral work.
AVhilst the German Reformation, after the German w^ont, resulted in
great volumes and a scholastic system, the English Reformation, after
the English wont, resulted in action and establishments. ' How the
Church of Christ shall be governed ; ' that was the great question
Avhich was discussed among the sects. The House of Commons asked
the assembly of theologians: If the classical, provincial, and locid
assemblies were/ure divino, and instituted by the will and appointment

' A Journal of the Life, etc., of tliat Ancient, Eminent, and Faithful Servant
vf Je»us Christ, George Fox. 6tli edit., 1S36.

''Burton's Parliamentary Diary, i. 46-173. Neal, Histoi'y of the Puritans,
iii., Supplt.

CHAP, v.] THE CllKISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 395

of Jesus Christ ? If they were all so ? If only some were so, and
which ? If appeals carried by the elders of a congregation to p^'"- ■
vincial, departmental, and national assemblies were jure divcno, and
according to the will and appointment of Jesus Christ ? If some only
were Jure divino ? Which ? If the power of the assemblies in such ap-
peals was jure divino, and by the will and appointment of Jesus Christ ?
and a hundred other questions of the same kind. Parliament declared
that, according to Scripture, the dignities of priest and bishop were
equal ; it regulated ordinations, convocations, excommunications, juris-
dictions, elections ; spent half its time and exerted all its power in
establishing the Presbyterian Church.^ So, with the Independents,
fervour engendered courage and discipline. ' Cromwell's regiment of
horse were most of them freeholders' sons, who engaged in the war
upon principles of conscience ; and that being well armed within, by
the satisfaction of their consciences, and without with good iron arms,
they would as one man stand firmly and charge desperately.' ^ Tliis
army, in which inspired corporals preached to lukewarm colonels,
acted with the solidity and precision of a Russian regiment : it was a
duty, a duty to God, to fire straight and march in good order ; and a
perfect Christian made a perfect soldier. There was no separation
here between theory and practice, between private and public life,
between the spiritual and the temporal. They wished to apply Scrip-
ture to ' establish the kingdom of heaven npon earth,' to institute not
only a Christian church, but a Christian society, to change the law
into a guardian of morals, to exact piety and virtue ; and for a while
they succeeded in it, ' Though the discipline of the church was at an
end, there Avas nevertheless an uncommon spirit of devotion among
people in the parliament quarters ; the Lord's day was observed with
remarkable strictness, the churches being crouded with numerous and
attentive hearers three or four times in the day ; the officers of the
peace patroled the streets, and shut up all publick houses ; there was
no travelling on the road, or walking in the fields, except in cases
of absolute necessity. lieligious exercises were set \ip in private
families, as reading the Scriptures, family prayer, repeating sermons,
and singing of psalms, which was so universal, that you might walk
through the city of London on the evening of the Lord's day, without
seeing an idle person, or hearing anything but the voice of prayer or
praise from churches and private houses.' ® People would rise before
the day, and walk a great distance to be able to hear the word of God.
' There were no gaming-houses, or houses of pleasure ; no profane

^ See Neal, Hist, of the Puritans, ii. 418-450.

' AVhitelocke's Memorials, i. 68.

3 Neal, ii. 553. Compare with the French Revolution. When the Bastille
was demolished, they wrote on the ruins these words : ' Ici ron danse.' From thia
contrast we see the difference between the two doctrines and the two nations.

396 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

swearing, drunlcenness, or any kind of debauchery.'* The Parlia-
mentary soldiers came in great numbers to listen to sermons, spoke of
religion, prayed and sang psalms together, when on duty. In 1644
Parliament forbade the sale of commodities on Sunday, and ordained
' that no person shall travel, or carry a burden, or do any worldly
labour, upon penalty of 10s. for the traveller, and 5s. for every
burden. That no person shall on the Lord's day use, or be present
at, any wrestling, shooting, fowling, ringing of bells for pleasure,
markets, wakes, church-ales, dancing, games or sports whatsoever,
upon penalty of 5s. to every one above fourteen years of age. And
if children are found offending in the premises, their parents or
guardians to forfeit 12d. for every offence. If the several fines above
mentioned cannot be levied, the offending party shall be set in the
stocks for the space of three hours.' When the Independents were in
power, the severity was still more harsh. The officers in the army,
having convicted one of their quartermasters of blasphemy, con-
demned him to have his tongue bored with a red hot iron, his sword
broken over his head, and himself to be dismissed from the army.
During Cromwell's expedition in Ireland, we read that no blasphemy
was heard in the camp; the soldiers spent their leisure hours in reading
the Bible, singing psalms, and holding religious controversies. In
1650 the punishments inflicted on Sabbath-breakers were redoubled.
Stern laws were passed against betting, gallantry was reckoned a
crime ; the theatres were destroyed, the spectators fined, the actors
whipt at the cart's tail; adultery punished with death: in order to
reach crime more surely, they persecuted pleasure. But if they were
austere against others, they were so against themselves, and practised
the virtues they exacted. After the Restoration, two thousand
ministers, rather than conform to the new liturgy, resigned their
cures, though they and their families had to die of hunger. Many
of them, says Baxter, thinking that they were not justified in quitting
their ministry after being set apart for it by ordination, preached to
such as would hear them in the fields and in certain houses, until they
were seized and thrown into prisons, where a great number of them
perished. Cromwell's fifty thousand veterans, sviddenly disbanded
and without resources, did not bring a single recruit to the vagabonds
and bandits. ' The Eoyalists themselves confessed that, in every
department of honest industry, the discarded warriors prospered
beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery,
that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or
a waggoner attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in
all probability one of Oliver's old soldiers.' ^ Purified by persecution
and ennobled by patience, they ended by Avinning the tolerance of

' Neal, Hist, of the Puritans, ii. 555.

- J\Lacaulay, Hist, of L'nijtand, ed. Lady Trevulyaii, i. 121.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 397

the law and the respect of the public, and raised the national morality,
as they had saved the national liberty. But others, exiles in America,
pushed to an extremity this great religious and stoical spirit, with its
weaknesses and its power, with its vices and its virtues. Their de-
termination, intensified by a fervent faith, employed in political and
practical pursuits, invented the science of emigration, made exile
tolerable, drove back the Indians, fertilised the desert, raised a rigid
morality into a civil law, founded and armed a church, and on the
Bible as a basis built up a new state.^

That was not a conception of life from which a genuine literature
might be expected to issue. The idea of the beautiful is wanting, and
what is a literature without it ? The natural expression of the heart's
emotions is proscribed, and what is a literature without it? They
abolished as impious the free stage and the rich poesy which the Re-
naissance had brought them. They rejected as profane the ornate
style and ample eloquence which had been established aroimd them by
the imitation of antiquity and of Italy. They mistrusted reason, and
■were incapable of philosophy. They ignored the divine languor of
Jeremy Taylor, and the touching tenderness of the gospel. Their
character- exhibits only manliness, their conduct austerity, their mind
preciseness. We find amongst them only excited theologians, minute
controversialists, energetic men of action, limited and patient minds,
engrossed in positive proofs and practical labours, void of general ideas
and refined tastes, resting upon texts, dry and obstinate reasoners, who
twisted the Scripture in order to extract from it a form of government
or a table of dogma. What could be narrower or more repulsive than
these pursuits and wrangles ? A pamphlet of the time petitions for
liberty of conscience, and draws its arguments (1) from the parable of
the wheat and the tares which grow together till the harvest ; (2) from
this maxim of the Apostles, Let every man be thoroughly persuaded in
his own mind ; (3) from this text. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin ;
(4) from this divine rule of our Saviour, Do to otliers what you would
they should do unto you. Later, when the furious Commons desired to
pass judgment on James Nayler, the trial became entangled in an end-
less juridical and theological discussion, some declaring that the crime
committed was idolatry, others seduction, all emptying out before the
House their armoury of commentaries and texts.^ Seldom is a gene-

' A certain John Denis was publicly whipt for having sung a profane song.
Matbias, a girl, ba-sang given some roasted clipstuuts to Jeremiah Boosy, and tobi
liim ironically that tbey would put bim into Paradise, was ordered to ask pardon
three times in church, and to be three days on bread and water in prison. IGGU-
1670 ; records of Massachusetts.

2 ' Upon the common sense of Scripture, ' said Jlajor-general Disbrowe, ' there are
few but do commit blasphemy, as our Saviour puts it in Mark: "sins, blasphemies ;
if so, then none without blasphemy." It was charged upon David, and Eh's son,
"thou hast blasphemol. or caused others to blaspheme." ' — Burton's Diary, i. il.

398 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK IL

ration found more mutilated in all the faculties -wLich produce con-
templation and ornament, more limited in the faculties which nourish
discussion and morality. Like a beautiful insect which has become
transformed and has lost its wings, so we see the poetic generation of
Elizabeth disappear, leaving in its place but a sluggish caterpillar, a
stubborn and useful spinner, armed with industrious feet and formidable
jaws, spending its existence in eating into old leaves and devouring its
enemies. They are without style ; they speak like business men ; at
most, here and there, a pamphlet of Prynne possesses a little vigour.
Their histories, like May's for instance, are flat and heavy. Their
memoirs, even those of Ludlow and Mrs. Hutchinson, are long, weari-
some, mere statements, destitute of personal feelings, void of enthusiasm
or entertaining matter ; ' they seem to ignore themselves, and are en-
grossed by the general prospects of their cause.' ^ Good Avorks of piety,
solid and convincing sermons ; sincere, edifying, exact, methodical books,
like those of Baxter, Barclay, Calamy, John Owen ; personal narratives,
like that of Baxter, like Fox's journal, Bunyan's life, ^ large collection
of documents and arguments, conscientiously arranged, — this is all they
offer : the Puritan destroys the artist, stiffens the man, fetters the
writer ; and leaves of artist, man, writer, only a sort of abstract being,
the slave of a watchword. If a Milton springs up amongst them, it is
because by his wide curiosity, his travels, his comprehensive education,
above all by his youth saturated in the great poetry of the preceding age,
and by his independence of spirit, loftily adhered to even against the
sectarians. ^lilton passes beyond sectarianism. Strictly speaking, they
could but have one poet, an involuntary poet, a madman, a martyr, a hero,
and a victim of grace ; a genuine preacher, who attains the beautiful by
accident, whilst pursuing the useful on principle ; a poor tinker, who,
employing images so as to be understood by mechanics, sailors, servant-
girls, attained, without pretending to it, eloquence and high art.

YL

After the Bible, the book most widely read in England is the
Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan. I'he reason is, that the basis
of Protestantism is the doctrine of salvation by grace, and that no
writer has equalled Bunyan in making this doctrine understood.

To treat well of supernatural Impressions, one must have been sub-
ject to them. Bunyan had that kind of imagination which produces
them. Powerful as that of an artist, but more vehement, this imagina-
tion worked in the man without his co-operation, and besieged him with
visions which he had neither willed nor foreseen. From that moment
there was in him as it were a second self, dominating the first, grand
and terrible, whose apparitions were sudden, its motions unknown,
which redoubled or crushed his faculties, prostrated or transported him,

' Guizot, Portraits PoUfiqiies, 5tli ed.. 1S62.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAJT KENAISSAXCl!:. 309

bathed him in the sweat of anguish, ravished him Avith trances of joy,
and which by its force, strangeness, independence, impressed upon him
the presence and the action of a foreign and superior master. Bunyan,
like Saint Theresa, was from infancy 'greatly troubled with the thoughts
of the fearful torments of hell-fire,' sad in the midst of pleasures, be-
lieving himself damned, and so despairing, that he wished he was a
devil, ' supposing they were only tormentors ; that if it must needs be
that I went thither, I might be rather a tormentor, than be tormented
mysi'lf.' ' There already Avas the assault of exact and bodily images.
Under their influence reflexion ceased, and the man was suddenly
spurred into action. The first movement carried him with closed eyes,
as down a steep slope, into mad resolutions. One day, ' being in the
field, with my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the
highway : so I, having a stick, struck her over the back ; and having
stunned lier, I forced open her mouth with my stick, and plucked her
sting out with my fingers, by which act, had not God been merciful to
me, I might, by my desperateness, have brought myself to my end.' '
In his first approaches to conversion he was extreme in his emotions,
and penetrated to the heart by the sight of physical objects, ' adoring '
priest, service, altar, vestment. ' This conceit grew so strong upon my
spirit, that had I but seen a priest (though never so sordid and debauched
in his life), I should find my spirit fall under him, reverence him, and
knit unto him ; yea, I thought, for the love I did bear imto them (sup-
posing they were the ministers of God), I could have laid down at their
feet, and have been trampled upon by them ; their name, their garb,
and work did so intoxicate and bewitch me.'^ Already his ideas clung
to him with that irresistible hold which constitutes monomania ; no
matter how absurd they were, they ruled him, not by their truth, but
by their presence. The thought of an impossible danger terrified him
as much as the sight of an imminent peril. As a man hung over an
abyss by a sound rope, he forgot that the rope was sound, and vertigo
seized upon him. After the fashion of English villagers, he loved bell-
ringing: when he became a Puritan, he considered the amusement
profane, and gave it up ; yet, impelled by his desire, he would go into
the belfry and watch the ringers. ' But quickly after, I began to tliink,
" How if one of the bells should fall ? " Then I chose to stand imder
a main beam, that lay overthwart the steeple, from side to side, thinking
here I might stand sure : but then I thought again, should the bell fall
with a swing, it might first hit the wall, and then rebounding upon me,
might kill me for all this beam. This made me stand in the steeple-
door ; and now, thought I, I am safe enough, for if a bell should then
fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be preserved not-
withstanding. So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would
not go any farther than the steeple-door ; but then it came into my

' Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, § 7. - Ihid. § 12. ^ Jbul. § l7.

400 THE RENAISSANCE. [bOOR II.

head, "How if the steeple itself should fall?" And this thought (it
may, for aught 1 know, when I stood and looked on) did continually so
shake my mind, that I durst not stand at the steeple-door any longer,
but was forced to flee, for fear the steeple should fall upon my head.' ^
Frequently the mere conception of a sin became for him a temptation
so involuntary and so strong, that he felt upon him the sharp claw of
the devil. The fixed idea swelled in his head like a painful abscess,
full of sensitiveness and of his life's blood. ' Now no sin would serve
but that : if it were to be committed by speaking of such a word, then
I have been as if my mouth would have spoken that word whether I
would or no ; and in so strong a measure was the temptation upon me,
that often I have been ready to clap my hands under my chin, to hold
my mouth from opening ; at other times, to leap with my head down-
ward into some muckhill hole, to keep my mouth from speaking.' ^
Later, in the middle of a sermon which he was preaching, he was
assailed by blasphemous thoughts : the word came to his lips, and all
his power of resistance was barely able to restrain the muscle excited
by the tyrannous brain.

Once the minister of the parish was preaching against the sin of
dancing, oaths, and games, Avhen he was struck with the idea that the
sermon was for him, and returned home full of trouble. But he ate;
his stomach being charged, discharged his brain, and his remorse was
dispersed. Like a true child, entirely absorbed by the emotion of the
moment, he was transported, jumped out, and ran to the sports. He
had thrown his ball, and was about to begin again, Avhen a voice
from heaven suddenly pierced his soul. ' " Wilt thou leave thy sins
and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell ? " At this I was put
to an exceeding maze ; wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground, I
looked up to heaven, and was as if I had with the eyes of my under-
standing, seen the Lord Jesus look down upon me, as being very hotly
displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten me with some
grievous punishment for these and other ungodly practices.'^ Suddenly
reflecting that his sins were very great, and that he would certainly be
damned whatever he did, he resolved to enjoy himself in the meantin^e,
and to sin as much as he could in his life. He took up his ball again,
recommenced the game with ardour, and swore louder and oftener
than ever. A month afterwards, being reproved by a w^oman, ' I was
silenced, and put to secret shame, and that too, as I thought, before
the God of heaven : wherefore, while I stood there, hanging down my
head, I wished that I might be a little child again, and that my father
might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing ; for,
thought I, I am so accustomed to it, that it is in vain to think of a
reformation, for that could never be. But how it came to pass I know
not, 1 did from this time forward so leave my swearing, that it was a

i Grace Abounding, §§ 33, 34. - Ibkl. § 103. ^ Jii^^ g 22.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 401

great wonder to myself to observe it ; and whereas before I knew not
how to speak unless I put an oath before, and another behind, to make
my words have authority, now I could without it speak better, and
with more pleasantness, than ever I could before.' ^ These sudden
alternations, these vehement resolutions, this unlooked-for renewing of
heart, are the products of an involuntary and impassioned imagination,
which by its hallucinations, its mastery, its fixed ideas, its mad ideas,
prepares the Avay for a poet, and announces one inspired.

In him circumstances develop character ; his kind of life develops
liis kind of mind. He was born in the lowest and most despised rank,
a tinker's son, himself a wandering tinker, with a wife as poor as him-
self, so that they had not a spoon or a dish between them. He had
been taught in childhood to read and write, but he had since ' almost
wholly lost what he had learned.' Education draws out and disciplines
a man ; fills him with varied and rational ideas ; prevents him from
sinking into monomania or being excited by transport ; gives him de-
terminate thoughts instead of eccentric fancies, pliable opinions for fixed
convictions ; replaces impetuous images by calm reasonings, sudden
resolves by the results of reflection ; furnishes us with the wisdom and
ideas of others ; gives us conscience and self-command. Suppress this
reason and this discipline, and consider the poor working man at his
work ; his head works while his hands work, not ably, with methods
acquired from any logic he might have mustered, but with dark emo-
tions, beneath a disorderly flow of confused images. Morning and even-
ing, the hammer which he uses in his trade, drives in with its deafening
sounds the same thought perpetually returning and self-communing.
A troubled, obstinate vision floats before him in the brightness of the
hammered and quivering metal. In the red furnace where the iron is
bubbling, in the clang of the hammered brass, in the black corners where
the damp shadow creeps, he sees the flame and darkness of hell, and
the rattling of eternal chains. Next day he sees the same image, the
day after, the whole week, month, year. His brow wrinkles, his eyes
grow sad, and his wife hears him groan in the night-time. She remem-
bers that she has two volumes in an old bag. The Plain Maris Pathivay
to Heaven and The Practice of Piety ; she spells them out to console him ;
and the impressive thoughtfulness, already sublime, made more so by
the slowness with which it is read, sinks like an oracle into his sub-
dued faith. The braziers of the devils — the golden harps of heaven —
the bleeding Christ on the cross, — each of these deep-rooted ideas sprouts
poisonously or wholesomely in his diseased brain, spreads, pushes out
and springs higher with a ramification of fresh visions, so crowded, that
in his encumbered mind he has no further place nor air for more con-
ceptions. Will he rest when he sets forth in the winter on his tramp ?
During his long solitary wanderings, over wild heaths, in cnrced and

' Grace Ahounding, §§ 27 and 28.
2 C

402 THE RENAISSANCE. [dOOK II.

haunted bogs, always abandoned to his own thoughts, the inevitable
idea pursues him. These neglected roads where he sticks in the mud,
these sluggish rivers which he crosses on the cranky ferry-boat, these
threatening whispers of the woods at night, where in perilous places the
livid moon shadows out ambushed forms,— all that he sees and hears falls
into an involuntary poem around the one absorbing idea ; thus it changes
into a vast body of sensible legends, and multiplies its power as it mul-
tiplies its details. Having become a dissenter, Bunyan is shut up for
twelve 3'ears, having no other amusement but the Book of 3Iart>/rs and
the Bible, in one of those infectious prisons where the Puritans rotted
under the Eestoration. There he is, still alone, thrown back upon him-
self by the monotony of his dungeon, besieged by the terrors of the Old
Testament, by the vengeful outpourings or denunciations of the prophets,
by the thunder-striking words of Paul, by the spectacle of trances and of
martyrs, face to face with God, now in despair, now consoled, troubled
Avith involuntary images and unlooked-for emotions, seeing alternately
devil and angels, the actor and the witness of an internal drama whose
vicissitudes he is able to relate. He writes them : it is his book. You
see now the condition of this inflamed brain. Poor in ideas, full of
images, given up to a fixed and single thought, plunged into this
tliought by his mechanical pursuit, by his prison and his readings, by
his knowledge and his ignorance, circumstances, like nature, make hiiu
a visionary and an artist, furnish him with supernatural impressions
and sensible images, teaching him the history of grace and the means
of expressing it.

The PilgrurCs Progress is a manual of devotion for the use of simple
folk, "whilst it is an allegorical poem of grace. In it we hear a man of
the people speaking to the people, •who would render intelligible to all
the terrible doctrine of damnation and salvation.^ According to Bunyan,

^ This is an abstract of tlie events : — From highest heaven a voice has pro-
claimed vengeance against the City of Destruction, where lives a sinner of the
name of Christian. Terrified, he rises up amid the jeers of his neighbours, and
departs, for fear of being devoured by the fire whicli is to consume the criminals. A
lielpful man, Evangelist, shows him the right road. A treacherous man, Worldly-
wise, tries to turn him aside. His companion, Pliable, who had followed him at
first, gets stuck in the Slougli of Despond, and leaves him. He advances bravely
across the dirty water and the slippery mud, and reaches the Strait Gate, where a wise
Interpreter instructs him by visible shows, and points out the way to the Heavenly
City. He passes before a cross, and the hea\y burden of sins, which he carried on
his back, is loosened and falls off. He painfully climbs the steep hill of Difficulty,
and reaches a great castle, where Watchful, the guardian, gives him in charge to
his good daughters Piety and Prudencr, who warn him and arm him against the
monsters of hell. He finds his road barred by one of these demons, Apollyon,
who bids him abjure obedience to the heavenly King. After a long fight he slays
him. Yet the way grows narrow, the shades fall thicker, sulphurous flames rise
along the road : it is the valley of the Shadow of Death. He passes it, and arrives
at the town of Yanity, a vast lair of business, deceits, and shows, which he walke

CHAP, v.] THE CIIEISTUN RENAISSANCE. 403

we are * children of wrath,' condemned from our birth, guilty by nature,
justly predestined to destruction. Under this formidable thought the
heart gives way. The unhappy man relates how he trembled in all his
limbs, and in his fits it seemed to him as though the bones of his chest
would break. ' One day,' he tells us, ' I walked to a neighbouring town,
and sat down upon a settle in the street, and fell into a very deep pause
about the most fearful state my sin had brought me to ; and after long
musing, I lifted up my head, but methought I saw, as if the sun thai-
shineth in the lieavens did grudge to give light ; and as if the very
stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves
against me. O how happy now was every creature over I was ! For
tiiey stood fast, and kept tlieir station, but I v/as gone and lost.' ^ The
devils gathered together against the repentant sinner ; they choked his
sight, besieged him with phantoms, yelled at his side to drag him down
their precipices ; and the black valley into which the pilgrim plunges,
almost matches by tlie horror of its sight the anguish of the terrors by
which he is assailed : —

* I saw then in my Dream, so fur as this Valley reached, there was on the right
hand a very deep Ditch ; that Ditch is it into which the lilind have led tlie blind
in all ages, and have both there miserably perished. Again, behold on the left
hand, there was a very dangerous Quag, into which, if even a good man falls, he
can find no bottom for his foot to stand on. . . .

* The path-way was here also exceeding narrow, and therefore good Christian
was the more put to it ; for when he sought in the dark to shun the ditch on the
one hand, he was ready to tip over into the mire on the other ; also when he sought
to escape the mire, witliout gi-eat carefulness he would be ready to fall into the
ditch. Thus he went on, and I heard him here sigh bitterly ; for, besides the dangers
mentioned above, the path-way was here so dark, that ofttimes, when he lift up
his foot to set forward, he knew not where, or upon what he should set it next.

' About the midst of this Valley, I perceived the mouth of Hell to be, and it
stood also hard by the wayside. Now thought Christian, what shall I do ? And
ever and anon the flame and smoke would come out in such abundance, with sparks
and hideous noises, . . . that he was forced to put up his Sword, and betake himself
to another weapon, called All-prayer. So he cried in my hearing : "0 Lord I
beseech thee deliver my souL" Thus he went on a great while, yet still the flames
would be reaching towards him : Also he heard doleful voices, and rushings to and
fro, so that sometimes he thought he should be torn in pieces, or trodden down
like mire in the Streets. ' ^

by with lowered eyes, not wishing to take part in its festivities or falsehoods. The
people of the place beat him, throw him into prison, condemn him as a traitor and
rebel, bum his companion Faithful. Escaped from their hands, he falls into those
of Giant Despair, who beats him, leaves him in a poisonous dungeon without food,
and giving him daggers and cords, advises him to rid himself from so many mis-
fortunes. At last he reaches the Delectable Mountains, whence he sees the holy
city. To enter it he has only to cross a deep river, where there is no foothold,
■whore fhe water dims the sight, and which is called the river of Death.

1 Bunyan's Grace ahoundhnj to the Chief of Sinners, § 187.

* rilrjrim's Progress, Cambridge 18G2, First Part, p. 6i.

404 THE EENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

Against this anguish, neither his good deeds, nor his prayers, nor
his justice, nor all the justice and all the prayers of all other men, could
defend him. Grace alone justifies. God must impute to him the purity
of Christ, and save him by a free choice. What is more full of passion
than the scene in which, under the name of his poor pilgrim, he relates
his own doubts, his conversion, his joy, and the sudden change of his
heart ?

' Then the water stood in mine eyes, and I asked further, But Lord, may snch
a great sinner as I am be indeed accepted of thee, and be saved by thee ? And I
heard him say, And him that conieth to me I wilJ in no wise cast out. . . . And
now was my heart full of joy, mine eyes full of tears, and mine affections running
over with love to the Name, People, and Ways of Jesns Christ. . . .

' It made me see that all the World, notwithstanding; all the rij^hteonsness
thereof, is in a state of condemnation. It made me see that God the Father, thoujjh
he be just, can justly justify the coming sinner. It made me greatly ashamed of
the vileness of my former life, and confounded me with the sense of mine own
ignorance ; for there never came thought into my heart before now, that shewed
me so the beauty of Jesus Christ. It made me love a holy life, and long to do
something for the Honour and Glory of the Name of the Lord Jesus ; yea, I
thought that had I now a thousand gallons of blood in my body, I could spill it
all for the sake of the Lord Jesus. ' ^

Such an emotion does not weigh litei'ary calculations. Allegory,
the most artificial kind, is natural to Bunyan. If he employs it here,
it is because he does so throughout ; if he employs it throughout, it is
from necessity, not choice. As children, countrymen, and all unculti-
vated minds, he transforms arguments into parables ; he only grasps
truth when it is made simple by images ; abstract terms elude him ; he
must touch forms and contemplate colours. Dry general truths are a
sort of algebra, acquired by the mind slowly and after much trouble,
against our primitive inclination, which is to observe detailed events and
sensible objects ; man being incapable of contemplating pure formulas
until he is transformed by ten years' reading and reflection. We
understand at once the term purification of heart ; Bunyan understands
it fully only, after translating it by this fable : —

' Then the Interpreter took Christian by the hand, and led him into a very
large Parlour that was full of dust, because never swept ; the which after he had
reviewed a little while, the Interpreter called for a man to sweep. Now when he
began to sweep, the dust began so abundantly to fly about, that Christian had
almost therewith been choaked. Then said the Interpreter to a Damsel that stood
by, Bring hither the Water, and sprinkle the Eoom ; the which when she had
done, it was swept and cleansed with pleasure.

' Then said Christian, What means this ?

' The Interpreter answered. This parlour is the heart of a man that was never
sanctified by the sweet Grace of the Gospel : the dust is his Original Sin, and
inward Corruptions, that have defiled the whole man. He that began to sweep

* Pilgrim's Progress, First Part, p. 160.

CHAP. V.J THE CHEISTIAN RENAISSANCE. 405

at first, is the Law ; but she that brought water, and did sprinkle it, is the
Gospel. Now, whereas thou sawest that so soon as the first began to sweep, the
dust did so fly about that the Room by him could not be cleansed, but that thou
wast almost choaked therewith ; this is to shew thee, that the Law, instead of
cleansing the heart (by its working) from sin, doth revive, put strength into, and
increase it in the soul, even as it doth discover and forbid it, for it doth not give
power to subdue.

' Again, as thou sawest the Damsel sprinkle the room with Water, upon which
it was cleansed with pleasure ; this is to shew thee, that when the Gospel conies
in the sweet and precious influences thereof to the heart, then I say, even as
thou sawest the Damsel lay the dust by sprinkling the floor with Water, so is sin
vanquished and subdued, and the soul made clean, through the faith of it, and
consequently fit for the King of Glory to inhabit.' ^

These repetitions, embarrassed phrases, familiar comparisons, this frank
style, whose awkwardness recalls the childish periods of Herodotus, and
whose light-heartedness recalls tales for children, prove that if his work
is allegorical, it is so in order that it may be intelligible, and that
Bunyan is a poet because he is a child. ^

Again, under his simplicity you will find power, and in his puerility
the vision. These allegories are hallucinations as clear, complete, and
sound as ordinary perceptions. No one but Spenser is so lucid. Ima-
ginary objects rise of themselves within him. He has no trouble in
calling them up or forming them. They agree in all their details with
all the details of the precept which they represent, as a pliant veil fits
the body which it covers. He distinguishes and arranges all the parts
of the landscape — here the river, on the right the castle, a flag on its
left turret, the setting sun three feet lower, an oval cloud in the front
part of the sky — with the preciseness of a carpenter. We fancy in read-
ing him that we are looking at the old maps of the time, in which the
striking features of the angular cities are marked on the copperplate
by a tool as certain as a pair of compasses.^ Dialogues flow from his
pen as in a dream. He does not seem to be thinking ; we should even

1 Pilgrim's Progress, First Part, p. 26.

* Here is another of his allegories, almost spiritual, so just and simple it is.
See Pilgrim's Progress, First Part, p. 68: Now I saw in my Dream, that at the end
of this Valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of Pilgrims
that had gone this way formerly ; and while I was musing what should be the
reason, 1 espied a little before me a Cave, where two Giants, Pope and Pagan, dwelt
in old time ; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, ashes, etc. ,
lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without
much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered ; but I have learnt since, that Pagan
lias been dead many a day ; and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is by
reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger
days, grown so crazy, and stifl' in his joints, that he can now do little more than
sit in his Cave's mouth, grinning at Pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails,
because he cannot come at them.

* For insUnce, Hollar's work, Ciiies of Germany.

406 THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

siiy tliat he was not himself there. Events and speeches seem to grow
and dispose themselves ivithin him, independently of his v.-ill. Nothing,
as a rule, is colder than the characters in an allegory ; his are living.
Looking upon these details, so small and familiar, illusion gains upon
us. Giant Despair, a simple abstraction, becomes as real in his hands
as an English gaoler or farmer. He is heard talking by night in bed
with his wife Diffidence, who gives him good advice, because here, as
in other households, the strong and brutal animal is the least cunning
of the two : —

' Then she connselled him that when he arose in the morning he should (take
the two prisoners and) heat them without mercy. So when he arose, he getleth
him a grievous Crab-tree Cudgel, and goes down into the Dungeon to them, and
there first falls to rating of them as if they were dogs, although they gave him never
a word of distaste. Then he falls upon them, and beats them fearfully, in such
sort, that they were not able to help themselves, or to turn them upon the floor.''

This stick, chosen with a forester's experience, this instinct of rating
first and storming to get oneself into trim for knocking down, are traits
which attest the sincerity of the narrator, and succeed in persuading the
reader. Bunyan has the freedom, the tone, the ease, and the clearness
of Homer ; he is as close to Homer as an Anabaptist tinker could be to
an heroic singer, a creator of gods.

I err ; he is nearer. Before the sentiment of the sublime, in-
equalities are levelled. The depth of emotion raises peasant and poet
to the same eminence ; and here also, allegory stands the peasant in
stead. It alone, in the absence of ecstasy, can paint heaven ; for it
does not pretend to paint it : expressing it by a figure, it declares it
invisible, as a glowing sun at which we cannot look full, and whose
image we observe in a mirror or a stream. The ineffable world thus
retains all its mystery ; warned by the allegory, we imagine splendours
beyond all which it presents to us ; we feel behind the beauties which
are opened to us, the infinite which is concealed ; and the ideal city,
vanishing as soon as it appears, ceases to resemble the big Whitehall
imagined for Jehovah by Milton. Eead the arrival of the pilgrims in
the celestial land. Saint Theresa has nothinpr more beautiful : —

o

' Yea, here they heard continually the singing of Birds, and saw every day the
Flowers appear in the earth, and heard the voice of the Turtle in the land. In
this Country the Sun shineth night and day. . . . Here they were within sight of
the City they were going to, also here met them some of the inhabitants thereof ;
for in this land the Shining Ones commonly walked, because it was upon the bor-
ders of Heaven. . . . Here they heard voices from out of the City, loud voices,
saying, " Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold thy salvation cometh, behold
his reward is with him ! " Here all the inhabitants of the Country called them
"The holy People, The redeeniLd of the Lord, Sought out, etc."

' Now as they walked in this land, they had more rejoicing than in parts more

• PUgrini's Progress, First Part, p. 126.

CHAP, v.] THE CHRISTIAN KENAISSANCE. 407

remote from the Kingdom to which they were bound ; and drawing near to the
City, they had yet a more perfect view thereof. It was builded of Pearls and
Precious Stones, also the Street thereof was paved with Gold ; so that by reason of
the natural glory of the City, and the reflection of the Sun-beams upon it, Christian
with desire fell sick ; Hopeful also had a tit or two of the same disease. AVhere-
fore here they lay by it a while, crying out because of their pangs, "If you see
my Beloved, tell him that 1 am sick of love." ' . . .

' They therefore went up here with much agility and speed, though the founda-
tion upon which the City was framed was higher than the Clouds. They therefore
went up through the Regions of the Air, sweetly talking as they went, being com-
forted, because they safely got over the River, and had such glorious Companions
to attend them.

' The talk that they had with the Shining Ones was about the glory of the place,
who told them that the beauty and glory of it was inexpressible. There, said
they, is the Mount Sion, the heavenly Jerusalem, the innumerable company of
Angels, and the Spirits of just men made perfect. You are going now, said they,
to the Paradise of God, wherein you shall see the Tree of Life, and eat of the never-
fading fruits thereof ; and when you come there, you shall have white Robes given
you, and your walk and talk shall be every day with the King, even all the days
of Eternity.^

' There came out also at this time to meet them, several of the King's Trum-
peters, cloathed in white and shining Raiment, who with melodious noises and loud,
made even the Heavens to echo with their sound. These Trumpeters saluted
Christian and his fellow with ten thousand welcomes from the AVorld, and this
they did with shouting and sound of Trumpet.

' This done, they compassed them round on every side ; some went before,
some behind, and some on the right hand, some on the left (as 't were to guard
them through the upper Regions), continually sounding as they went with melo-
dious noise, in notes on high ; so that the very sight was to them that could behold
it, as if Heaven itself was come down to meet them. . . .

' And now were these two men as 't were in Heaven before they came at it,
being swallowed up with the sight of Angels, and with hearing of their melodious
notes. Here also they had the City itself in view, and they thought they heard
all the Bells therein ring to welcome them thereto. But above all, the warm and
joyful thoughts that they had about their own dwelling there, with such company,
and that for ever and ever. Oh, by what tongue or pen can their glorious joy be
expressed ! ' ' . . .

' Now I saw in my Dream that these two men went in at the Gate ; and lo, as
they entered, they were transfigured, and they had Raiinent put on that shone like
Gold. There was also that met them with Harps and Crowns, and gave them to
them, the Harps to praise withal, and the Crowns in token of honour. Then I
heard in my Dream that all the Bells in the City rang again for joy, and that it
was said unto them, " Enter ye into the joy of ycur Lord." I also heard the men
themselves, that they sang with a loud voice, saying, "Blessing, Honour, Glory,
and Power, be to him that sitteth upon tlie Throne, and to the Lamb for ever and
ever."

' Now, just as the Gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them,
and behold, the City shone like the Sun ; the Streets also were paved with Gold,

1 Pilgrim's Prorjress, First Part, p. I'i. ' Ibid. p. ITO.

8 Ibid, p 182.

40S THE KENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

and ill them walked man/ men, with Crowns on their heads, Palms in their hands,
and golden Harps to sing praises withal.

' There were also of them that had wings, and they answered one another
without intermission, saying, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord." And after that
they shut up the Gates. Which when I had seen, I wished myself among them. ' '

He was imprisoned for twelve years and a half; in his dungeon he
made wire snares to support himself and his family ; he died at the
age of sixty in 1688. At the same time Milton lingered obscure and
blind. The last two poets of the Eeformation thus survived, amid the
classical coldness which then dried up English literature, and the social
excess which then corrupted English morals. ' Shorn hypocrites, the
psalm-singers, gloomy bigots,' such were the names by which men who
reformed the manners and renewed the constitution of England were
insulted. But oppressed and insulted as they were, their work continued
of itself and without noise below the earth ; for the ideal which they
had raised was, after all, that which the clime suggested and the race
demanded. Gradually Puritanism began to approach the world, and
the world to approach Puritanism. The Restoration was to fall into
evil odour, the Revolution was to come, and under the insensible pro-
gress of national sympathy, as well as under the incessant effort of
public reflection, parties and doctrines were to rally around a free and
moral Protestantism.

' Pilgrim's Progress, First Part, p. 183, etc.

CUAP. VL] MILTON. 403

CHAPTER VI.

Milton

I. Goneral idea of his mind and character — Family — Education — Studies-
Travels — Return to England.
II. Effects of a concentrated and solitary character — Austerity — Inexperience —
Marriage — Children — Domestic Troubles.

III. Combative energy — Polemic against the bishops — Against the king — En-

thusiasm and sternness — Theories on government, church, and education
— Stoicism and virtue — Old age, occupations, person.

IV. Milton as a prose- writer — Changes during three centuries in appearances and

ideas — Heaviness of his logic — The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce —
Heavy humour — Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence — Clumsi-
ness of discussion — Defensio Popidi AngUcani~ Violence of his animosities
— The Reason of Church Gova-nment — Eikonoklastes — Liberality of doctrines
— Of Reformation — Areopagitica — Style — Breadth of eloquence — Wealth of
imagery — Lyric sublimity of diction.
V. Milton as a poet — How he approaches and is distinct from the poets of tlie
Renaissance — How he gives poetry a moral tone — Profane poems — L' Allegro
and Jl Penseroso — Comus — Lycidas — Religious poems — Paradise Lost —
Conditions of a genuine epic — They are not to be met with in the age or in
the poet — Comparison of Adam and Eve with an English family — Com-
parison of God and the angels to a monarch's court — The rest of the poem
— Comparison between the sentiments of Satan and the republican passions
— Lyrical and moral character of the scenery — Loftiness and sense of the
moral ideas — Situation of the poet and the poem between two ages — Com-
position of his genius and his work.

ON the borders of the licentious Renaissance which was drawing to
a close, and of the exact school of poetry which was springinsr
up, between the monotonous conceits of Cowley and the correct gal-
lantries of "Waller, appeared a mighty and s^iperb mind, prepared by
logic and enthusiasm for eloquence and the epic style ; liberal, Pro-
testant, a moralist and a poet ; adorning the cause of Algernon Sidney
and Locke with the inspiration of Spenser and Shakspeare ; the heir of
a poetical age, the precursor of an austere age, holding his place between
the epoch of unbiassed dreamland and the epoch of practical action ;
like his own Adam, who, entering a hostile earth, heard behind hira, iu
the closed Eden, the dying strains of heaven.

John Milton was not one of those fevered souls, void of self-com-
mand, whose rapture takes them bv fits, Avhom a sickly sensibility drives

410 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

for ever to tlie extreme of sorrow or joy, whose pliability prepares them
to produce a variety of characters, whose inquietude condemns them to
paint the insanity and contradictions of passion. Vast knowledge, close
lofric, and grand passion : these were his marks. His mind was lucid,
his imagination limited. He was incapable of disturbed emotion or of
transformation. He conceived the loftiest of ideal beauties, but he
conceived only one. He was not born for the drama, but for the ode.
He does not create souls, but constructs arguments and experiences
emotions. Emotions and arguments, all the forces and actions of his
soul, assemble and are arranged beneath a unique sentiment, that of
the sublime ; and the broad river of lyric poetry streams from him,
impetuous, with even flow, splendid as a cloth of gold.

I.

This dominant sense constituted the greatness and the firmness of
his character. Against external fluctuations he found a refuge in
himself; and the ideal city which he had built in his soul endured,
impregnable to all assaults. It was too beautiful, this inner city, for
him to wish to leave it ; it was too solid to be destroyed. He believed
in the sublime with the whole force of his nature, and the whole autho-
rity of his logic ; and with him, the cultivated reason strengthened by
its tests the suggestions of the primitive instinct. With this double
armour, man can advance firmly through life. He who is always
feeding himself with demonstrations is capable of believing, willing,
persevering in belief and will ; he does not turn aside to every event
and every passion, as that fickle and pliable being whom we call a
poet ; he remains at rest in fixed principles. He is capable of em-
bracing a cause, and of continuing attached to it, whatever may
happen, spite of all, to the end. No seduction, no emotion, no
accident, no change alters the stability of his conviction or the
lucidity of his knowledge. On the first day, on the last day, during
the whole time, he preserves intact the entire system of his clear ideas,
and the logical vigour of his brain sustains the manly vigour of his
heart. When at length, as here, this close logic is employed in the
service of noble ideas, enthusiasm is added to constancy. Man holds
his opinions not only as true, but as sacred. He fights for them,
not only as a soldier, but as a priest. He is impassioned, devoted,
religious, heroic. Earely is such a mixture seen ; but it was cleai-ly
seen in Milton.

He was of a family in which courage, moral nobility, the love of
art, were present to whisper the most beautiful and eloquent words
around his cradle. His mother was a most exemplary woman, well
known through all the neighbourhood for her benevolence.^ His

* Matre probatissinia et eleeniosynis per viciniam potissimiim iiota. — De/emio
Secund . Life of Milton, by Keiglitley.

CHAP. VI.] milto:jt. 411

fiitlier, a student of Christ Cliurch, and disinherited as a Protestant,
liad alone made his fortune, and, amidst his occupations as a scrivener
or writer, had preserved the taste for letters, being unwilling to give
up ' his liberal and intelligent tastes to the extent of becomini^
altogether a slave to the world;' he wrote verses, was an excellent,
musician, one of the best composers in his time ; he chose Cornelius
Jansen to paint his son's portrait when in his tenth year, and gave his
child the widest and fullest literary education.^ Let the reader try to
picture this child, in the street inhabited by merchants, in this citizen-
like and scholarly, religious and poetical family, whose manners were
regular and their aspirations lofty, where they set the psalms to music,
and wrote madrigals in honour of Oriana the queen, ^ where music,
letters, painting, all the adornments of the beauty-loving Renaissance,
decorated the sustained gravity, the hard-working honesty, the deep
Christianity of the Reformation. All Milton's genius springs from
this ; he carried the splendour of the Renaissance into the earnestness
of the Reformation, the magnificence of Spenser into the severity of
Calvin, and, with his family, found himself at the confluence of the
two civilisations which he combined. Before he was ten years old he
had a learned tutor, ' a Puritan, who cut his hair short ; ' after that he
went to Saint Paul's School, then to the University of Cambridge, that
he might be instructed in ' polite literature ; ' and at the age of twelve
he worked, in spite of his weak eyes and headaches, until midnight
and even later. His John the Baptist, a character resembling himself,
says :

' When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing ; aU my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,
What might be public good ; myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth.
All righteous things. ' ^

In fact, at school, then at Cambridge, then with his father, he was
strengthening and preparing himself with all his power, free from all
blame, and loved by all good men ; traversing the vast fields of Greek
and Latin literature, not only the great writers, but all the writers,
down to the half of the middle-age ; and simultaneously the ancient
Hebrew, Syriac and rabbinical Hebrew, French and Spanish, the old
English literature, all the Italian literature, with such zeal and profit
that be wrote Italian and Latin verse and prose like an Italian or ;i
Roman ; beyond this, music, mathematics, theology, and much besides.
A serious thought regulated this great toil. ' The church, to whose

' ' My father destined me while yet a little child for the study of humane
letters.' — Life, by Masson, 1859, i. 51.

* Queen Elizabeth.

^ The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Cleveland, 18C5, Paradise Rcrjaiatd,
Look i. 0. 201-206.

412 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

service, by t\ie intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of
a child, and in mine own resolutions : till coming to some maturity of
years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he
who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal,
which unless he took Avith a conscience that would retch, he must either
straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blame-
less silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with
servitude and forswearing.' ^

He refused to be a priest from the same feelings that he had wished
it : the desire and the renunciation all sprang from the same source — a
fixed resolve to act nobly. Falling back into the life of a layman, he
contmued to cultivate and perfect himself, studying with passion and
with method, but Avithout pedantry or rigour ; nay, rather, after his
master Spenser, in V Allegro, II Penseroso, Comiis, he set forth in spark-
ling and variegated dress the wealth of mythology, nature, and fancy ;
then, sailing for the land of science and beauty, he visited Italy, made
the acquaintance of Grotius and Galileo, sought the society of the
learned, the men of letters, the men of the world, heard the musicians,
steeped himself in all the beauties stored up by the Renaissance at
Florence and Rome. Everywhere his learning, his fine Italian and
I.atin style, secured him the friendship and attachment of scholars, so
that, on his return to Florence, he ' was as well received as if he had
returned to his native country.' He collected books and music, which
he sent to England, and thought of traversing Sicily and Greece, those
two homes of ancient letters and arts. Of all the flowers that opened
to the Soutli€rn sun under the influence of the two great Paganisms, he
gathered freely the sweetest and the most exquisite of odours, but with-
out staining himself with the mud Avhich surrounded them. ' I call the
Deity to witness,' he wrote later, * that in all those places in which vice
meets with so little discouragement, and is practised with so little shame,
I never once deviated from the paths of integrity and virtue, and per-
petually reflected that, though my conduct might escape the notice of
men, it could not elude the inspection ol God.' ^

Amid the licentious gallantries and inane sonnets such as those of
the Cicisbei and Academicians lavished forth, he had retained his sublime
idea of poetry : he thought to choose a heroic subject from ancient
English history; and as he says, '1 was confirmed in this opinion, that he
who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable
things, ought himself to be a true poem ; that is, a composition and
pattern of the best and honourablest things ; not presuming to sing high
praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the

' ililton's Prose Works, ed. St. John, 5 vols., 1848, The Reason of Church
Government, ii. 482.

* Ibid., Second Defence of the People of England, i. 257. See also his Italian
Sonnets, with their religious sentiment.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 413

experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." Amidst
Sill, he loved Dante and Petrarch for their purity, telling himself that ' if
unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such
a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image
and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much
more deflouring and dishonourable.'^ He thought ' that every free and
gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight,' for the
practice and defence of chastity, and he kept himself virgin till his mar-
riage. Whatever the temptation might be, whatever the attraction or
fear, it found him equally opposed and equally firm. From a sense of
gravity and propriety he avoided all religious disputes ; but if his own
creed were attacked, he defended it without any reserve or fear,' even
in Rome, before the Jesuits who plotted against him, within a few paces
of the Inquisition and the Vatican. Perilous duty, instead of driving
him away, attracted him. When the Revolution began to threaten,
he returned, drawn by conscience, as a soldier Avho hastens to danger
at the noise of arms, convinced, as he himself tells us, that it was
a shame to him leisurely to spend his life abroad, and for his own
pleasure, whilst his fellow-countrymen were striving for their liberty.
In battle he appeared in the front ranks as a volunteer, courting danger
everywhere. Throughout his education and throughout his youth,
in his profane readings and his sacred studies, in his acts and his
maxims, already a ruling and permanent thought grew manifest — the
resolution to develop and unfold within him the ideal man.

II.

Two special powers lead mankind — impulse and idea : the one
influencing sensitire, unfettered, poetical souls, capable of transforma-
tions, like Shakspeare ; the other governing active, combative, heroic
souls, capable of immutability, like Milton. The first are sympathetic
and effusive ; the second are concentrative and reserved.^ The first
give themselves up, the others withhold themselves. These, by reliance
and sociability, with an artistic instinct and a sudden imitative compre-
hension, involuntarily take the tone and disposition Df the men and
things which surround them, and an immediate counterpoise is effected
between the inner and the outer man. Those, by mistrust and rigidity,
with a combative instinct and a quick reference to rule, become natu-
rally throAvn back iipon themselves, and in their narrow retirement no
lons;er feel the solicitations and contradiations of t'leir surroundinsrs.

• Milton's "Works, Apology for Smectymnuus, ui. 117.

^ Ibid. 122. See also his Treatise on Divorce, wliich shows clearly Milton s
meaning.

■* ' Though Christianity had been but slightly taught me, yet a certain re-
servedness of natural disposition, and moral discipline, learnt out of the noblest
philosophy, was enough to keep me in disdain of far less incontinences tJiau this
oi the bordello. ' — Apology for Smectyrnnuus, iii. p. 122.

414 THE RENAISSANCE. [bOOK 11.

They have formed a model, and thenceforth this model like a watchword
restrains or urges them on. Like all powers destined to have sway,
the inner idea grows and absorbs to its use the rest of their being.
'J'hey bury it in themselves by meditation, they nourish it with reason-
ing, they put it in communication with the chain of all their doctrines
and all their experiences; so that when a temptation assails them, it is
not an isolated principle which it attacks, but it encounters the whole
combination of their belief, an infinitely ramified combination, and too
strong for a sensible seduction to tear asundex'. Thus a man is by habit
upon his guard ; the combative attitude is habitual to him, and he
stands erect, firm in the pride of his courage and the inveteracy of his
determination.

A soul thus fortified is like a diver in his bell; ^ it passes through
life as he passes through the sea, imstained but isohited. On his return
to England, Milton fell back among his books, and received a few pupils,
I'rom whom he exacted, as from himself, continuous toil, serious reading,
a frugal diet, a strict behaviour ; the life of a recluse, almost of a monk.
Suddenly, in a month, after a country visit, he married.^ A few weeks
afterwards, his wife returned to her father's house, would not return,
took no notice of his letters, and sent back his messenger with scorn.
The two characters had come into collision. Nothing displeases women
more than an austere and self-contained character. They see that they
have no hold upon it ; its dignity awes them, its pride repels, its pre-
occupations keep them aloof; they feel themselves of less value, neglected
fur general interests or speculative curiosities; judged, moreover, and
that after an inflexible rule ; at most regarded with condescension, as a
sort of less reasonable and inferior being, shut out from the equality
Avhich they look for, and the love which alone can recompense to them
the loss of equality. The ' priest ' character is made for solitude ; the
tact, abandon, charm, pleasantness, and sweetness necessary to all com-
panionship, is wanting to it ; we admire him, but we go no further,
especially if, like Milton's wife, we are somewhat dull and common-
place,^ adding mediocrity of intellect to the repugnance of our hearts.
] le had, so his biographers say, a certain gravity of nature, or severity
of mind which would not condescend to petty things, but kept him in
the clouds, in a region wliich is not that of the household. He was
accused of being harsh, choleric ; and certainly he stood upon his manly

' An expression of Jean Paul Richter. See an excellent article on Milton in the
Nat. Review, July 1859.

« 1643, at the age of 35.

2 'Mute and spiritless mate.' ' The hashful nuiteness of the virgin may often-
times hide all the unloveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for conversa-
tion.' 'A man shall find himself bound fast to an image of earth and phlegm,
with whom he looked to he the copartner of a sweet and delightsome society.' —
Doctrine and Dkcipline of Divorce. A pretty woman will say in reply : I cannot
Icve a man who caiiiefs i»is head like the Sacrament.

CHAP. YL] MILTON. 415

dignity, Lis ai;tliority as a husband, and was not so greatly esteemed,
respected, studied, as he thought he deserved to be. In short, he passed
the day amongst his books, and the rest of the time his heart Hved in
an abstracted and subhme world of which few wives catch a gUmpse, his
>vife least of all. He had, in fact, chosen like a student, the more at
random because his former life had been of ' a well-governed and wise
appetite.' Equally like a man of the closet, he resented her flight,
being the more irritated because the world's ways were unknown to
him. "Without dread of ridicule, and with the sternness of a specula-
tive man suddenly in collision with actual life, he wrote treatises on
Divorce, signed them with his name, dedicated them to Parliament, held
himself divorced, de facto because his wife refused to return, de jure
because he had four texts of Scripture for it ; whereupon he paid court
to a young lady, and suddenly, seeing his wife on her knees and weeping,
forgave her, took her back, renewed the dry and sad marriage-tie, not
profiting by experience, but on the other hand fated to contract two
other unions, the last with a wife thirty years younger than himself.
Other parts of his domestic life were neither better managed nor
happier. He had taken his daughters for secretaries, and made them
read languages which they did not understand, — a repelling task, of
which they bitterly complained. In return, he accused them of being
' undutiful and unkind,' of neglecting him, not caring whether they
left him alone, of conspiring with the servants to rob him in their
purchases, of stealing his books, so that they would have disposed of
the whole of them. Mary, the second, hearing one day that he was
going to be married, said that his marriage was no news; the best
news would be his death. An incredible speech, and one which throws
a strange light on tlie miseries of this family. Neither circumstances
nor nature had created him for happiness.

III.

They had created him for strife, and from his return to England he
had thrown himself heartily into it, armed with logic, indignation, and
learning, protected by conviction and conscience. AVhen ' the liberty
of speech was no longer subject to control, all mouths began to be
opened against the bishops. ... I saw that a way was opening for
the establishment of real liberty ; that the foundation was laying for ,
the deliverance of man from the yoke of slavery and supei'stition ; . . .
and as I had from my youth studied the distinction between religious
and civil rights, ... I determined to relinquish the other pursuits
in which I Avas engaged, and to transfer the Avhole lorce of my talents
and my industry to this one important object.' ^ And thereupon he
wrote his Eeformation in England,"^ jeering at and attacking with

* f?(cond Defence of the Peojtle of England, i. 257.

• lu 1641. Of Reforviation in England, and the Causes that hitherto have

416 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II,

haughtiness and scorn the prelacy and its defenders. Refuted and
attacked in turn, he doubled his bitterness, and crushed those whom
he had beaten. Transported to the limits of his creed, and like a
knight making a rush, and who pierces Avith a dash the whole line of
battle, he hurled himself upon the prince, concluded the abolition of
Royalty as well as the overthrow of the Episcopacy ; and one month
after the death of Charles I., justified his execution, replied to the
Eikon Basilike, then to Sahnasius' Defence of the King, with incom-
parable breadth of style and scorn, like a soldier, like an apostle, like
a man who everywhere feels the superiority of his science and logic,
who wishes to make it felt, Avho proudly treads down and crushes his
adversaries as ignoramuses, inferior minds, base hearts.^ ' Kings most
commonly,' he says, at the beginning of the Eikonoklastes,^ ' though
strong in legions, are but weak at argument ; as they who ever have
accustomed from their cradle to use their will only as their right
hand, their reason always as their left. Whence unexpectedly con-
strained to that kind of combat, they prove but weak and puny adver-
saries,' Yet, for love of those who suffer themselves to be overcome
by this dazzling name of royalty, he consents to ' take up King Charles'
gauntlet,' and bangs him with it in a style calculated to make the im-
prudent ones who had thrown it down, repent. Far from recoiling at
the accusation of murder, he accepts and boasts of it. He vaunts the
regicide, sets it on a triumphal car, decks it in all the light of heaven.
He relates with the tone of a judge, ' how a most potent king, after
he had trampled upon the laws of the nation, and given a shock to
its religion, and began to rule at his own will and pleasure, was at last
subdued in the field by his own subjects, who had undergone a long
slavery under him ; how afterwards he was cast into prison, and when
he gave no ground, either by words or actions, to hope better things of
him, was finally by the supreme council of the kingdom condemned
to die, and beheaded before the very gates of the royal palace, . . .
For what king's majesty sitting upon an exalted throne, ever shone so
brightly, as that of the people of England then did, when, shaking off
that old superstition, Avhich had prevailed a long time, they gave judg-
ment upon the king himself, or rather upon an enemy who had been
their king, caught as it Avere in a net by his own laws, (who alone of
all mortals challenged to himself impunity by a divine right,) and
scrupled not to inflict the same punishment upon him, being guilty,
which he would have inflicted upon any other? '^ After having justi-

hindered it. A Treatise of Prelatical Episcopacy. The Reason of Church Govern-
ment urged against Prelacy. Apology for Smectymnuus.

^ The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Kikonoklastes. Defensio Populi
A nglicani. Defensio Secunda. Authoris pro se defensio, Eesponsio.

^ Milton's Works, vol. i. p. 308.

* Preface to the Defence of the People of England, i. p, 3.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 417

fied the execution, he sanctified it ; consecrated it by decrees of heaven
when he had authorised it by the laws of the world; from the support
of Law he transferred it to the support of God. This is the God
who * uses to throw down proud and unruly kings, . . . and utterly
to extirpate them and ail tlieir family. By liis manifest impulse being
set at work to recover our almost lost liberty, following him as our
guide, and adoring the impresses of his divine power manifested upon
all occasions, we went on in no obscure but an illustrious passage,
pointed out and made plain to us by God himself,' ^ Here the
reasoning ends with a song of triumph, and enthusiasm breaks out
through the mail of the warrior. Such he displayed himself in all
his actions and in all his doctrines. The solid files of bristling and
well-ordered arguments which he disposed in battle-array were changed
in his heart in the moment of triumph into glorious processions of
crowned and resplendent hymns. He was transported by them, even
to self-illusion, and lived thus alone with the sublime, like a warrior-
pontiff, who in his stiff armour, or his glittering stole, stands face to
face with truth. Thus absorbed in strife and in his priesthood, he lived
out of the world, as blind to palpable facts as he was protected against
the seductions of the senses, placed above the stains and the lessons ot
experience, as incapable of leading men as of yielding to them. There
was nothing in him akin to the devices and delays of the statesman, the
crafty schemer, who pauses on his way, experimentalises, with eyes
fixed on what may turn up, who gauges what is possible, and employs
logic for practical purposes. He was speculative and chimerical.
Locked up in his own ideas, he sees but them, is attracted but by
them. Is he pleading against the bishops ? He would extirpate them
at once, without hesitation ; he demands that the Presbyterian worship
shall be at once established, without forethought, contrivance, hesita-
tion. It is the command of God, it is the duty of every faithful man ;
beware ho^\' you trifle with God or temporise with faith. Concord,

^ Defence, i. 4. This defence is in Latin. Milton ends the Defence thus :—
' He (God) has gloriously delivered you, the first of nations, from the two
greatest mischiefs of this life, and most pernicious to virtue, tyranny and super-
stition ; he has endued you with greatness of mind to be the first of mankind, who
after having conquered their own king, and having had him delivered into their
hands, have not scrupled to condemn him judicially, and, pursuant to that sen-
tence of condemnation, to put him to death. After the performing so glorious an
action as this, you ought to do nothing that is mean and little, not so much as to
think of, much less to do, anything but what is gi-eat and sublime. Which \o
attain to, this is your only way : as you have subdued your enemies in the field, so
to make appear, that unarmed, and in the highest outward peace and tranquillity,
you of all mankind are best able to subdue ambition, avarice, the love of riches,
and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt to introduce, (which
generally subdue and triumph over other nations,) to shew as great justice, tem-
perance, and moderation in the maintaining your liberty, as you have shewn
courage in freeing yourselves from slavery. '

2 b

418 THE RENAISSANCE. [COOK II.

gentleness, liberty, piety, he sees a whole swarm of virtues issue from
this new worship. Let tlie king fear nothing from it, his power Avill
be all the stronger. Twenty thousand democratic assemblies will take
care that his rights be not infringed. These ideas make us smile. We
recognise the party-man, who, on the verge of the Restoration, when
' the whole multitude was mad with desire for a king,' published A
Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commomvealth, and described
his method at lengtli. We recognise the theologian who, to obtain a
law of divorce, only appealed to Scripture, and aimed at transforming
the civil constitution of a people by changing the accepted sense of a
verse. With closed eyes, sacred text in hand, he advances from con-
sequence to consequence, trampling upon the prejudices, inclinations,
habits, wants of men, as if a reasoning or religious spirit Avere the whole
man, as if evidence always created belief, as if belief always resulted
in practice, as if, in the struggle of doctrines, truth or justice gave
doctrines the victory and sovereignty. To cap ail, he sketched out a
treatise on education, in which he proposed to teach each pupil every
science, every art, and, what is more, every virtue. ' He who had the
art and proper eloquence . . . might in a short space gain them to an
incredible diligence and courage, . . . infusing into their young breasts
such an ingenuous and noble ardour as would not fail to make many of
them renowned and matchless men.' IMilton had taught for many years
and at various times. To retain such deceptions after such experiences,
one must be insensible to experience or doomed to illusions.

But his obstinacy constituted his power, and the inner constitution,
which closed his mind to instruction, armed his heart against weaknesses.
With men generally, the source of devotion dries up when in contact
with life. Gradually, by dint of frequenting the world, we come to
acquire its tone. We do not choose to be dupes, and to abstain from
the liberty which others allow themselves ; we relax our youthful strict-
ness ; we even smile, attributing it to our heat of blood ; we come to
know our own motives, and cease to find ourselves sublime. We end
by taking it calmly, and we see the world wag, only trying to avoid
shocks, picking up here and there a few little harmless pleasures. Not
so Milton. He lived complete and untainted to the end, Avithout loss of
heart or weakness ; experience could not instruct nor misfortune depress
him ; he endured all, and repented of nothing. He lost his sight,
willingly, by writing, though ill, and against the prohibition of his
doctors, to justify the English people against the invectives of Sal-
masius. He saw the funeral of the Republic, the proscription of his
doctrines, the defamation of his honour. Around him rioted the disgust
of liberty, the enthusiasm of slavery. A whole people threw itself at
the feet of a young incapable and treacherous libertine. The glorious
leaders of the Puritan faith were condemned, executed, cut down alive
from the gallows, quartered amidst insults ; others, whom death had
saved from the hangman, were dug up and exposed on the gibbet ;

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 419

others, exiles in foreign lands, lived imder the menaces and outrages of
royalist arms ; others again, more unfortunate, had sold their cause for
money and titles, and sat amid the executioners of their former friends.
The most pious and austere citizens of England filled the prisons, or
Avandei'ed in poverty and opprobrium; and gross vice, shamelessly seated
on the throne, stirred up around it the riot of unbridled licentious lusts
and sensuaUties. Milton himself had been constrained to hide ; his books
had been burned by the hand of the hangman ; even after the general
act of indemnity he was imprisoned ; when set at liberty, he lived in
the expectancy of assassination, for private fanaticism might seize the
weapon relinquished by public revenge. Other smaller misfortunes
came to aggravate by their stings the great wounds which afflicted them.
Confiscations, a bankruptcy, finally, the great fire of London, had
robbed him of three-fourths of his fortune ; ^ his daughters neither
esteemed nor respected him; he sold his books, knowing that his family
could not profit by them after his death ; and amidst so many private
and public miseries, he continued calm. Instesid of repudiating what
he had done, he gloried in it ; instead of being cast down, he increased
in firmness. He says, in his 17th sonnet:

' Cyriack, this three years day these eyes, though clear,

To outward view, of blemish or of spot.

Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot ;

Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear

Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,

Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot

Of heart or hope ; but still bear up and steer

Right onward. AVhat supports me, dost thou ask ?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overpHed

In liberty's defence, my noble task.

Of which all Europe rings from side to side.

This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask

Content though blind, had I no better guide.' ^

That thought was indeed his guide ; he was ' armed in himself,' and
that 'breastplate of diamond'^ which had protected the strong man
against the wounds in battle, protected the old man against the tempta-
tions and doubts of defeat and adversity.

Milton lived in a small house in London, or in the country, in Buck-

' A scrivener caused him to lose £2000. At the Restoration he was refused pay-
ment of £2000 which he had put into the Excise Office, and de[)rived of an estate
of £50 a year, bought by him from the property of the Chapter of Westminster.
His house was burnt in the great fire. AVheu he died he only left £1500, including
the produce of his library.

^1552, 'Milton's Poetical Works, ed. Cleveland, 1865, Sonnet 17,

* Italian Sonntts.

420 THE KENAISSANCF- [BOOK II.

inghanishire, at the foot of a high green hill, published his History of
Britain, his Logic, a Treatise on True Religion and Heresy, meditated
his great Treatise on Christian Doctrine. Of all consolations, work is the
most fortifying and the most healthy, because it solaces a man not by
bringing him ease, but by requiring efforts. Every morning he had a
chapter of the Bible read to him in Hebrew, and remained for some
time in silence, grave, in order to meditate on what he had heard. He
never went to a place of worship. Independent in religion as in all
else, he was sufficient to himself ; finding in no sect the marks of the
true church, he prayed to God alone, without needing others' help.
He studied till mid-day ; then, after an hours exercise, he played the
organ or the bass-violin. Then he resumed his studies till six, and in
the evening enjoyed the society of his friends. When any one came
to visit him, he was usually found in a room hung with old green
hangings, seated in an arm-chair, and dressed quietly in black ; his
complexion was pale, says one of his visitors, but not sallow ; his hands
and feet were gouty ; his hair, of a light brown, was parted in the
midst, and fell in long curls ; his eyes, grey and clear, showed no sign
of blindness. He had been very beautiful in his youth, and his Eng-
lish cheeks, once delicate as a young girl's, retained their colour almost
to the end. His face, we are told, was pleasing ; his straight and manly
gait bore witness to intrepidity and courage. Something great and
proud breathes out yet from all his portraits ; and certainly few men
have done such honour to their kind. Thus expired this noble life,
like a setting siin, bright and calm. Amid so many trials, a pure and
lofty joy, altogether worthy of him, had been granted to him : the
poet, buried under the Puritan, had reappeared, more sublime than
ever, to give to Christianity its second Homer. The dazzling dreams
of his youth and the reminiscences of his ripe age were found in
him, side by side with Calvinistic dogmas and the visions of John, to
create the Protestant epic of damnation and grace ; and the vastness of
primitive horizons, the flames of the infernal dungeon, the splendours
of the celestial court, opened to the inner eye of the soul unknown
regions beyond the sights which the eyes of flesh had lost.

V.

I have before me the formidable volume in which, some time after
Milton's death, his prose works were collected.-^ ^\^hat a book ! The
chairs creak when you place it upon them, and a man who had turned
its leaves over for an hour, would have less pain in his head than in

* The titles of Milton's chief writings in prose are these : — History of Befor-
mation; The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy ; Animad-
versions upon the Remonstrants' Defence; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce;
Tetrachordon ; Tractate on Education; Areojiagitica ; Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates ; Eikonoklastes ; History of Britain; Thesaurus Linguae Latincz ;
History of Moscovia ; De Logicoe Arte.

CHAP, VI.] MILTON. 421

his arm. As the book, so were the men : from the mere outsides we
miffht sather some notion of the controversialists and theolocrians whose
doctrines they contain. Yet we must conclude that the author was
eminently learned, elegant, travelled, philosophic, and of high worldly
culture for the times. We think involuntarily of the portraits of the
theologians of the ago, severe faces engraved on steel by the hard tool
of masters, whose square brows and steady eyes stand out in startling
prominence against the black oak panel. We compare them to modern
countenances, in which the delicate and complex features seem to
shudder at the alternate contact of hardly begun sensations and in-
numerable ideas. We try to imagine the heavy Latin education, the
physical exercises, the rude treatment, the rare ideas, the imposed
dogmas, which once occupied, oppressed, fortified, and hardened the
young ; and we might fancy ourselves looking at an anatomy of mega-
theria and mastodons, reconstructed by Cuvier.

The race of living men is changed. Our mind fails us now-a-days
at the idea of this greatness and this barbarism ; but we discover that
barbarism was then the cause of greatness. As in other times we
might have seen, in the primitive slime and among the colossal ferns,
ponderous monsters slowly wind their scaly backs, and tear the flesh
from one another's sides with their misshapen talons; so nov;, at a
distance, from the height of our calm civilisation, we see the battles
of the theologians, who, armed with syllogisms, bristling Avith texts,
covered one another with filth, and laboured to devour each other.

Milton fought in the front rank, pre-ordained to barbarism and
greatness by his individual nature and surrounding manners, capable
of displaying in high prominence the logic, style, and spirit of his
age. It is drawing-room life which trims men into shape : the society
of ladies, the lack of serious interests, idleness, vanity, security, are
needed to bring men to elegance, urbanity, fine and light humour, to
teach the desire to please, the fear to become wearisome, a perfect clear-
ness, a finished precision, the art of insensible transitions and delicate
tact, the taste for suitable images, continual ease, and choice diversity.
Seek nothing like this in Milton. The old scholastic system was not
far off; it still weighed on those who were destroying it. Under this
secular armour discussion proceeded pedantically, with measured steps.
The first thing was to propound a thesis ; and Milton writes, in large
characters, at the head of his Treatise on Divorce, ' that indisposition,
unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature
unchangeable, hindering, and ever likely to hinder the main benefits of
conjugal society, which are solace and peace, is a greater reason of
divorce than natural frigidity, especially if there be no children, and
that there be mutual consent.' And then follow, legion after legion,
the disciplined army of the arguments. Battalion after battaUon they
pass by, numbered very distinctly. There is a dozen of them together,
each with its title in clear characters, and thv? little brigade of sub-

422 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

divisions which it commands. Sacred texts hold the post of honour.
They are discussed word by word, the substantive after the adjective,
the verb after tlie substantive, the preposition after the verb ; inter-
pretations, authorities, illustrations, are summoned up, and ranged
between palisades of new divisions. And yet there is a lack of order,
the question is not reduced to a single idea ; we cannot see our Avay ;
proofs succeed proofs without logical sequence ; we are rather tired out
than convinced. We remember that the author speaks to Oxford men,
lay or cleric, trained in pretended discussions, capable of obstinate
attention, accustomed to digest indigestible books. They are at home
in this thorny thicket of scholastic brambles ; they beat a path through,
somewhat at hazard, hardened against the hurts which repulse us, and
not giving a thought to the daylight which we require.

With such ponderous reasoners, you must not look for wit. Wit is
the nimbleness of victorious reason : here, because all is powerful, all
is heavy. When Milton wishes to joke, he looks like one of Cromwell's
pikemen, who, entering a room to dance, should fall upon the floor, and
that with the extra momentum of his armour. Few thino;s could be
more stupid than his Animadversions upon the Remonstrants' Defence.
At the end of an argument his adversary concludes with this specimen
of theological wit : ' In the meanwhile see, brethren, how you have with
Simon fished all night, and caught nothing.' And Milton boastfully
replies : ' If we, fishing with Simon the apostle, can catch nothing, see
what you can catch Avith Simon Magus ; for all his hooks and fishing
implements he bequeathed among you.' Here a great savage laugh
would break out. The spectators saw a charm in this way of insinuating
that his adversary was simoniacaL A little before, the latter says :
'Tell me, is this liturgy good or evil?' Answer: 'It is evil. Repair
the acheloian horn of your dilemma, how you can, against the next
push.' The doctors Avondered at the fine mythological simile, and re-
joiced to see the adversary so neatly compared to an ox, a beaten ox,
a pagan ox. On the next page the Remonstrant said, by way of a
spiritual and mocking reproach : ' Truly, brethren, you have not well
taken the height of the pole.' Answer : ' No marvel ; there be many
more that do not take well the height of your pole, but will take better
the declination of your altitude.' Three quips of the same savour follow
one upon the other ; all this looked pretty. Elsewhere, Salmasius ex-
claiming 'that the sun itself never beheld a more outrageous action' than
the murder of the king, Milton cleverly answers, ' The sun has beheld
many things that blind Bernard never saw. But we are content you
should mention the sun over and over. And it will be a piece of pru-
dence in you so to do. For though our wickedness does not require it,
the coldness of the defence that you ai-e making does.'^ The marvel-
'"us heaviness of these conceits betrays spirits yet entangled in the

^ A Defence of the People of England, i. cli. i. 20.

CILVr. VI.] MILTON. 4 2 "J

swaddling-clothes of learning. The Reformation was the inauguration
of free thought, but only the inauguration. Criticism was still unborn ;
authority still presses with a full half of its weight upon the most
enfranchised and bold minds. Milton, to prove that it was lawful to
put a king to death, quotes Orestes, the laws of Publicola, and the
death of Nero. His History of Britain is a farrago of all the traditions
and fables. Under every circumstance he adduces a text of Scripture
for proof ; his boldness consists in showing himself a rash grammarian, a
valorous commentator. He is blindly Protestant, as others were blindly
Catholic. He leaves in its bondage the higher reason, the mother of
principles ; he has but emancipated a subordinate reason, an interpreter
of texts. Like the vast half shapeless creatures, the birth of early times,
he is yet but half man and half mud.

Can we expect urbanity here? Urbanity is the elegant dignity
which answers insult by calm irony, and respects man whilst piercing
a dogma. Milton coarsely knocks his adversary down, A bristling
pedant, born from a Greek lexicon and a Syriac grammar, Salmasius
had disgorged upon the English people a vocabulary of insults and
a folio of quotations. Milton replies to him in the same style ; calling
him a buffoon, a moimtebank, '■ 2)rofessor triobolaris,'' a hired pedant, a
nobody, a rogue, a heartless being, a wi-etch, an idiot, sacrilegious, a
slave worthy of rods and a pitchfork, A dictionary of big Latin words
passed between them, ' You, who know so many tongues, who read
so many books, who write so much about them, you are yet but an ass.'
Finding the epithet good, he I'epeats and sanctifies it, ' O most drivel-
ling of asses, you come ridden by a woman, with the cured heads of
bishops whom you had wounded, a little image of the great beast of
the Apocalypse!' He ends by calling him savage beast, apostate, and
devih 'Doubt not that you are reserved for the same end as Judas,
and that, driven by despair rather than repentance, seif-disgusted, you
must one day hang yourself, and like your rival, burst asunder in your
belly.' ^ We fancy we are listening to the bellowing of two bulls.

They had all a bull's ferocity, I\Iilton hated heartily. He fought
with his pen, as the Ironsides with the sword, foot to foot, with a con-
centrated rancour and a fierce obstinacy. The bishops and the king
then suffered for eleven years of despotism. Each one recalled the
banishments, confiscations, punishments, the law violated systematically
and relentlessly, the liberty of the subject attacked by a well-laid

' Salmasius said of the death of the king : * Horribilis nuntius aures nostras
atroci vulnere, sed magis mentes perculit. ' iiiilton replied : ' Profecto nuntius iste
horribilis aut gladium multo longiorem eo quern strinxit Petrus habuerit oportet,
aut aures istse auritissimre fuerint, quas tarn longinquo vuhiere perculerit. '

' Oratorem tarn insipidum et insulium ut ne ex lacrymis quidem ejus mica salis
e.xiguissima possit expriini. '

' Salmasius nova quadam metamorphosi salmacis factus est.'

424 THE EEInAISSANCE. [book IL

plot, Epi?copal idolatry imposed on Christian consciences, the faithful
preachers driven into the wilds of America, or given up to the execu-
tioner and the stocks.' Such reminiscences, arising in powerful minds,
stamped them with inexpiable hatred, and the writings of !Milton bear
witness to an acerbity which is now unknown. The irapressicn left by
his Eikonoldastes"^ is oppressive. Phrase by phrase, harshly, bitterly,
the king is refuted and accused to the last, Avithout a minute's respite of
accusation, the accused being credited with not the slightest good in-
tention, the slightest excuse, the least show of justice, the accuser never
for an instant digressing to or resting upon a general idea. It is a
hand-to-hand fight, where every word is a blow, prolonged, obstinate,
without dash and Avithout weakness, of a harsh and fixed hostility,
where the only thought is how to wound most severely and to kill
surely. Against the bishops, who Avere alive and poAverful, his hatred
iloAved more violently still, and the fierceness of his envenomed meta-
phors hardly suffices to express it. Milton points to them 'basking in

* I copy from Neal's History of the Puritans, ii. ch. vii. 367, one ot these
sorrows and complaints. By the greatness of the outrage the reader can judge
of the intensity of hatred : —

' The humble petition of (Dr.) Alexander Leighton, Prisoner in the Fleet,—
' Humbly sheweth,

' That on Feb. 17, 1630, he Avas apprehended coming from sermon by a high
commission warrant, and dragged along the street Avith bills and staves to London-
house. That the gaoler of Newgate being sent for, clapt him in irons, and carried
him with a strong power into a loathsome and ruinous dog-hole, full of rats and
mice, that had no light but a little grate, and the roof being uncovered, the snow
and rain beat in upon him, having no bedding, nor place to make a fire, but the
ruins of an old smoaky chimney. In this woeful place he was shut up for fifteen
Aveeks, nobody being suffered to come near him, till at length his wife only Avas
admitted. That the fourth day after his commitment the pursuivant, with a
mighty multitude, came to his house to search for Jesuits books, and used his wife
in such a barbarous and inhuman manner as he is ashamed to express ; that they
rifled every person and place, holding a pistol to the breast of a child of five years
old, threatening to kill him if he did not discover the books ; that they broke open
chests, presses, boxes, and carried away everything, even houshold stuff, apparel,
arms, and other things ; that at the end of fifteen weeks he was served with a
subpcena, on an information laid against him by Sir Robert Heath, attorney-
general, whose dealing with him was full of cruelty and deceit ; but he was then
sick, and, in the opinion of four physicians, thought to be poisoned, because all
his hair and skin came off ; that in the height of this sickness the cruel sentence
was passed upon him mentioned in the year 1630, and executed Nov. 26 following,
when he received thirty-six stripes upon his naked back with a threefold cord, his
hands being tied to a stake, and then stood almost two hours in the pillory in the
frost and snow, before he was branded in the face, his nose slit, and his ears cut
off : that after this he was carried by Avater to the Fleet, and shut up in such a
room that he was never well, and after eight years was turned into the common gaol. '

' Answer tc the Etkoii BasiUke, a work in the king's favour, and attributed to
the king.

CHAP. VI.1 MILTON. 425

the sunny warmth of wealth and protection,' like a brood of foul reptiles.
' The sour leaven of human traditions, mixed in one putrified mass with
the poisonoiis dregs of hypocrisie in the heart of Prelates, ... is the
serpent's egg that will hatch an antichrist wheresoever, and ingender
the same monster as big or little as the lump is which breeds him.'

So much coarseness and dulness was as an outer breastplate, the
mark and the protection of the superabundant force and life which
coursed in those athletic limbs and chests. Now-a-days, the mind being
more refined, has become feebler ; convictions, being less stern, have
become less strong. The attention, delivered from the heavy scholastic
logic and scriptural tyranny, is softer. The faith and the will, dissolved
by universal tolerance and by the thousand opposing shocks of multi-
plied ideas, have engendered an exact and refined style, the instrument
of conversation and pleasure, and have expelled the poetic and rude
style, the weapon of war and enthusiasm. If we have effaced ferocity
and folly, we have diminished force and greatness.

Force and greatness are manifested in Milton, displayed in his
opinions and his style, the sources of his belief and his talent. This
superb reason aspired to unfold itself without shackles ; it demanded
that reason might unfold itself without shackles. It claimed for
humanity what it coveted for itself, and championed every liberty in
his every work. From the first he attacked the corpulent bishops, '^
scholastic upstarts, persecutors of free discussion, pensioned tyrants of
Christian conscience. Above the clamour of the Protestant Revolu-
tion, his voice was heard thundering against tradition and obedience.
He sourly railed at the pedantic theologians, devoted worshippers of
old texts, who took a mouldy martyrology for a solid argument, and
answered a demonstration with a quotation. He declared that most
of the Fathers were turbulent and babbling intriguers, that they were
not worth more collectively than individually, that their councils Avere
but a pack of underhand intrigues and vain disputes ; he rejected
their authority ^ and their example, and set up logic as the only in-
terpreter of Scripture. A Puritan as against bishops, an Independent
as against Presbyterians, he Avas always the master of his thought and
the inventor of his own faith. No one better loved, practised, and
praised the free and bold use of reason. He exercised it even rashly
and scandalously. He revolted against custom, the illegitimate queen
of human belief, the born and relentless enemy of truth, raised his
hand against marriage, and demanded divorce in the case of contrariety
of tempers. He declared that ' error supports custom, custom counte-
nances error ; and these two between them, . . . with the numerous
and vulgar train of their followers, . . . envy and cry down the

1 Of Reformation in England, ii.

2 ' The loss of Cicero's works alone, or those of Livy, could not be repaired by
all the Fathers of the cliurch.' — Areopagilica.

42 G THE EENAISSANCK. [BOOK II.

industry of free reasoning, under the terms of humour and innova-
tion.'^ He showed that truth 'never comes into the world, but like a
bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth ; till time, the
midwife rather than the mother of truth, have washed and salted the
infant, declared her legitimate.' ^ He held fast by three or four writings
against the flood of blame and anathemas, and dared even more ; he
attacked before Parliament censure, its own work ; he spoke as a man
who is wounded and oppressed, for whom a public prohibition is a
personal outrage, who is himself fettered by the fetters of the nation.
He does not want the pen of a paid ' licenser ' to insult by its approval
the first page of his book. He hates this ignorant and imperious hand,
and claims liberty of writing as he claims liberty of thought : —

* What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have
only escaped the ferula, to come under the fescue of an imprimatur ? if serious and
elaborate Avi-itiugs, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar-lad mider
his pedagogue, must not be uttered v;ithout the cursory eyes of a temporizing and
extemporizing licenser ? He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not
being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no
gi-eat argument to think himself reputed in the commonwealth wherein he was
born for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he
summons up all his reason and dehberation to assist him ; he searches, meditates,
is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends ; after all
which done, he takes himself to be informed in what he wiites, as well as any that
wrote before him ; if in this, the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness,
no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities, can bring him to that state
of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his
considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings, and expense of Palladian oil, to
the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far
his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book writing ;
and if he be not repulsed, or slighted, must appear in print like a puny with his
guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety,
that he is no idiot or seducer ; it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the
author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning.' ^

Throw open, then, all the doors ; let there be light ; let every man
think, and bring his thoughts to the light. Dread not any divergence,
rejoice in this great work; why insult the labourers by the name o^'
schismatics and sectarians?

' Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries, as if,
while the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the
marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men, who
could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the
quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone
is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be con-
tiguous in this world : neitlier can every piece of the building be of one form ;
nay, rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties

^ Doctrine and DisdpUne of Divorce, in. 172. "Ibid. 173.

^ Areopoijitic., ii, 7S.

CHAP. VI.] MiLTOX. 4

27

and brotherly dissimilitudes tliat are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly
and the gi-aceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.' '

Milton triumphs here through sympathy ; he breaks forth into
magnificent images, he displays in his style the force which he
perceives around him and in himself. He lauds the Eevolution, and
his praises seem like the blast of a trumpet, to come from a brazen
throat : —

' Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty,
encompassed and surrounded with his protection ; the shop of war has not there
more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of
armed justice in defence of beleagured truth, than there be pens and heads there,
sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and
ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching
reformation. . . . "What could a man require more from a nation so pliant, and
so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and
pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a
nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies ? ^ . . . Methinks I see in my mind a
noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and
shaking her invincible locks : methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty
youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam ; purging and
unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance ; while
the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the
twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble
would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms. ' ^

It is Milton -who speaks, and it is Milton whom he unwittingly
describes.

With a sincere veriter, doctrines foretell the style. The sentiments
and needs which form and govern his beliefs, construct and colour his
phrases. The same genius leaves once and again the same impress, in
the thought and in the form. The power of logic and entliusiasm
v'hich explains the opinions of Milton, explains his genius. The sec-
tarian and the writer are one man, and we shall find the faculties of
the sectarian in the talent of the writer.

When an idea is planted in a logical mind, it grows and fructifies
there in a multitude of accessory and explanatory ideas which surround
it, attached one to the others, and forming a thicket and a forest. The
phrases in Milton are immense ; page-long periods are necessary to
enclose the train of so many linked arguments, and so many accumulated
metaphors around the governing thought. In this great production,
heart and imagination are shaken ; Milton exults while he reasons, and
the phrase comes as from a catapiilt, doubling the force of its flight
by its heavy weight. I dare not place before a modern reader the
gigantic periods which commence the treatise on the Reformation in
England. We no longer possess this blast ; Ave only understand little
short phrases ; we cannot fix our attention on the same point for a

1 Areopagiilca, ii. C2. ^ Hid. ii. C'l. ' Ih'ul, li. 01

428 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

page at a time. We require manageable ideas ; we have disused the
big two-handed sword of our fathers, and Ave only carry a light foil.
T doubt, however, if the piercing phraseology of Voltaire be more
mortal than the cleaving of this iron mass : —

'If in less noble and almost mechanick arts he is not esteemed to deserve the
name of a compleat architect, an excellent painter, or the like, that bears not a
generous mind above the peasantly regard of wages and hire, much more must we
think him a most imperfect and incompleat divine, whc is so far from being a
contemner of filthy lucre, that his whole divinity is moulded and bred up in the
beggarly and brutish hopes of a fat prebendary, deanery, or bishoprick. '

If Michael Angelo's prophets could speak, it would be in this style ;
and twenty times while reading it, we may discern the sculptor.

The powerful logic which lengthens the periods sustains the images.
If Shakspeare and the masculine poets embrace a picture in the compass
of a fleeting expression, break upon their metaphors with new ones,
and exhibit successively in the same phrase the same idea in five or six
forms, the abrupt motion of their winged imagination authorises or
explains these varied colours and these mingling flashes. More con-
nected and more master of himself, Milton develops to the end the
threads which these poets break. All his images display themselves in
little poems, a sort of solid allegory, all whose interdependent parts
concentrate their light on the single idea which they are intended to
embellish or demonstrate : —

' In this manner the prelates, . . . coming from a mean and plebeian life on a
sudden to be lords of stately palaces, rich furniture, delicious fare, and princely
attendance, thought the plain and homespun verity of Christ's gospel unfit any
longer to hold their lordships' acquaintance, u'nless the poor threadbare matron
were put into better clothes : her chaste and modest veil, surrounded with celestial
beams, they overlaid with wanton tresses, and in a flaring tire bespeckled her
with all the gaudy allurements of a whore. ' ^

Politicians reply that this gaudy church supports royalty.

' What greater debasement can there be to royal dignity, whose towering and
steadfast height rests upon the unmovable foundations of justice, and heroic virtue,
than to chain it in a dependence of subsisting, or ruining, to the painted battle-
ments and gaudy rottenness of prelatry, which want but one puff of the king's to
blow them down like a pasteboard house built of court-cards ?'^

ISIetaphors thus sustained receive a singular breadth, pomp, and majesty.
They are spread forth without clashing together, like the wide folds of
a scarlet cloak, bathed in light and fringed with gold.

Do not take these metaphors for an accident. Milton lavishes them,
like a priest who in his worship exhibits splendours and wins the eye,
to gain the heart. He has been nourished by the reading of Spenser,
Drayton, Shakspeare, Beaumont, all the most sparkling poets ; and the
golden flow of the preceding age, though impoverished all around him

' Of Reformation in England, ii. first book, 382.
^ Ibid ii, second book, 397.

ClIAr. VI.] MILTOX. 429

and slackened in himself, has become enlarged like a lake through being
dammed up in his heart. Like Shakspeare, he imagines at every turn,
and even out of turn, and scandalises the classical and French taste.

' ... As if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not
make themselves heavenly and spiritual ; they began to draw down all the divine
intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea, the very shape of God himself, into an
exterior and bodily form ; . . . they liallowed it, they fumed up, they sprinkled
it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pm-e innocency, but of pure linen, with other
deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, and gewgaws fetched from
Aaron's old wardrobe, or the flamins vestry : then was the priest set to con his
motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means
of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace
downward : and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague,
the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken, and flagging,
shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly
flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod on in the old road, and drudg-
ing trade of outward conformity. ' '

If we did not discern here the traces of theological coarseness, we might
fancy we were reading an imitator of the Phcedo, and under the fana-
tical anger recognise the images of Plato. There is one phrase which
for manly beauty and enthusiasm recalls the tone of the Republic : —

' I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered, unexercised and unbreathed virtue,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that
immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. '

But Milton is only Platonic by his richness and exaltation. For the
rest, he is a man of the Renaissance, pedantic and harsh ; he insults the
Pope, who, after the gift of Pepin le Bref, 'never ceased baiting and
goring the successors of his best lord Constantine, what by his barking
curses and excommunications ;'^ he is mythological in his defence of
the press, showing that formerly ' no envious Juno sat cross-legged over
the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring.' It matters little: these
learned, familiar, grand images, whatever they be, are powerful and
natural.* Superabundance, like crudity, here only manifests the vigour
and lyric dash which Milton's character had predicted.

Even passion follows ; exaltation brings it with tlie images. Bold
expressions, exaggeration of style, cause us to hear the vibrating voice
of the suffering man, indignant and determined.

* For hooks are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in
them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are ; nay, they do pre-
serve as in a vial the purest eflicacy and extraction of that hving intellect that bred

^ Of Reformation in England, ii. book first, p. 365.

^ Of Reformation in Enrjland, ii. second book, 395.

3 Whatsoever time, or the heedless hand of bhnd chance, hath drawn down
from of old to this present, in her huge di-ag-net, whether fish or sea-weed, shells
or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, those are the fathers. {Of Prelatical Episcopacy,
iL 422.)

430 THE EEXAISSANCE. [BOOK 11,

tliem, I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous
dragon's teeth : and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed
men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a
man as kill a good book : who kUls a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image ;
but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it
were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth ; but a good book is the
precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a
life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps there is no
great loss ; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth,
for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore,
what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill
that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books ; since we see a kind of
homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom ; and if it extend to the
whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying
of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of
reason itself ; slays an immortality rather than a life. ' ^

This energy is sublime ; the man is equal to the cause, and never did
a loftier eloquence match a loftier truth. Terrible expressions over-
whelm the book-tyrants, the profaners of thought, the assassins of
liberty. ' The council of Trent and the Spanish inquisition, engender-
ing together, brought forth or perfected those catalogues and expurging
indexes, that rake through the entrails of many an old good author,
with a violation worse than any that could be offered to his tomb.'^
Similar expressions lash the carnal minds which believe without think-
ing, and make their servility into a religion. There is a passage which,
by its bitter familiarity, recalls Swift, and surpasses him in aU loftiness
of imagination and genius: —

' A man may be an heretic in the truth, and if he believes things only because
his pastor says so, . . . the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. ... A
wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic
so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot
skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. . . . What does he therefore, but
resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care and
credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs ; some divine of
note and estimation that must be. To htm he adheres, resigns tlie whole ware-
house of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his custody ; and indeed
makes the very person of that man his religion. ... So tliat a man may say his
religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and
goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house. He
entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him ; his religion comes home at
night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep ; rises, is saluted,
and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced bruage, and better breakfasted, . . .
his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop
trading all day without his religion.' ^

He condescended to mock for an instant, with Avhat piercing irony you

ireopar/itica, ii. 55. ^ Ih'ul. ii. CO. ^ Ihid. ii. 85.

CHAP. YL] MILTON. 431

have seen. But irony, piercing as it may be, seems to him weak.^
Hear him when he comes to himself, wlien he returns to open and
serious invective, ^vhen after the carnal believer he overwhelms the
carnal prelate : —

' The table of communion, now become a table of separation, stands like an
exalted platform upon the brow of the quire, fortified with bulwark and barricade,
to keep off the profane touch of the laics, whilst the obscene and surfeited priest
scruples not to paw and mammoc the sacramental bread, as familiarly as his tavern
biscuit. ' ^

He triumphs in believing that all these profanations are to be avenged.
The horrible doctrine of Calvin has once more fixed men's gaze on the
dogma of malediction and everlasting damnation. Hell in hand, Milton
menaces ; he is drunk with justice and vengeance amid the abysses
which he opens, and the flames which he wields : —

' They shall be thrown eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of hell,
where, under the despiteful controul, the trample and spurn of all the other
damned, that in the anguish of their torture shall have no other ease than to exer-
cice a raving and bestial tjTanny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall
remain in that plight for ever the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most
underfoot, and down-trodded vassals of perdition. '

Fury here mounts to the sublime, and Michael Angelo's Christ is not
more inexorable and vengeful.

Let us fill the measure ; let us add, as he does, the prospects of
heaven to the visions of darkness ; the pamphlet becomes a hymn : —

* When I recall to mind at last, after so many dark ages, wherein the huge
overshadowing train of error had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of
the church ; how the bright and blissful Reformation (by divine power) struck
tlir(jugh the black and settled night of ignorance and antichristian tyranny,
methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that
reads or hears ; and the sweet odour of the returning gospel imbathe his soul with
the fragrancy of heaven. ' ^

Overloaded with ornaments, infinitely prolonged, these periods are
triumphant choruses of angelic alleluias sung by deep voices to the
accompaniment of ten thousand harps of gold. In the midst of his
syllogisms, Milton prays, sustained by the accent of the prophets, sur-
rounded by memories of the Bible, ravished with the splendours of the
Apocalypse, but checked on the brink of hallucination by science and
logic, in the summit of the calm clear atmosphere, without rising to the
burning tracts where ecstasy dissolves the reason, with a majesty of

* When he is simply comic, he reaches, like Hogarth and Swift, a rude and
farcical address. ' A bishop's foot that has all his toes (maugre the gout), and a
linen sock over it, is the aptest emblem of the prelat himself ; who, being a.
pluralist, may, imder one surplice, hide four benefices, besides that great metro-
politan toe. '

* Of Reformation in Enfjlan^J, ii. 373. " lUid. ii. 3CG.

432 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

eloquence and a solemn grandeur never surpassed, wlioso perfection
proves that he has entered his domain, and gives piomise of the poet
beyond the prose-writer : —

' Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory nnapproachahle, parent of
angels and men ! next, thee I implore, omnipotent King, Eedeemer of that lost
remnant whose nature thou didst assume, inetfable and everlasting Love ! and
thou, the third subsistence of divine infinitude, illumining Spirit, the joy and
solace of created things ! one Tripersonal Godhead ! look upon this thy poor and
almost spent and expiring church. ... 0 let them not bring about their damned
designs, ... to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we
shall never more see the sun of thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn,
never more hear the bird of morning sing. ' '

' 0 Thou the ever-begotten Light and perfect Image of the Father, . . . "Who
is there that cannot trace thee now in thy beamy walk through the midst of thy
sanctuary, amidst those golden candlesticks, which have long suffered a dimness
amongst us through the violence of those that had seized them, and were more
taken with the mention of their gold than of their starry light ? . . . Come there-
fore, 0 thou that hast the seven stars in thy right hand, appoint thy choseu
priests according to their orders and courses of old, to minister before thee, and
duly to press and pour out the consecrated oil into thy holy and ever-burning lamps.
Thou hast sent out the spirit of prayer upon thy servants over all the land to this
effect, and stirred up their vows as the sound of many waters about thy throne.
... 0 perfect and accomplish thy glorious acts ! . . . Come forth out of th}'
royal chambers, 0 Prince of all the kings of the earth ! put on the visible robes of
thy imperial majesty, take up that unlimited sceptre which thy Almighty Father
hath beqiieathed thee ; for now the voice of thy bride calls thee, and all creatures
sigh to be renewed.'*

This song of supplications and cheerfulness is an outpouring of splen-
dours ; and if you search all literature, you will hardly find poets equal
to this writer of prose.

Is he truly a prose-writer? Entangled dialectics, a heavy and
awkward mind, fanatical and ferocious provincialism, an epic grandeur
of sustained and superabundant images, the blast and the temerities of
implacable and all-powerful passion, the sublimity of religious and
lyric exaltation : we do not recognise in these features a man born to
explain, persuade, and prove. The scholasticism and grossness of the
time have blunted or rusted his logic. Imagination and enthusiasm
carried him away and enchained him in metaphor. Thus dazzled or
marred, he could not produce a perfect work ; he did but write useful
tracts, called forth by practical interest and actual hate, and fine isolated
morsels, inspired by collision with a grand idea, and by the momentary
flight of genius. Yet, in all these abandoned fragments, the man shows
in his entirety. The systematic and lyric spirit is manifested in the
pamphlet as well as in the poem ; the faculty of embracing general
effects, and of being shaken by them, remains on an equality in Milton's

^ OJ Reformation in England, ii. 417. - Animadversions, etc., iii. 71.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 433

two careers, and you will see in the Paradise and Comus what you have
met with in the Treatise on the Reformation, and in the Animadversions
on the Remonstrant.

VI.

' Milton has acknowledged to me,' writes Dryden, ' that Spenser
was his original.' In fact, by the purity and elevation of their morals,
by the fulness and connection of their style, by the noble chivalric sen-
timents, and their fine classical arrangement, they are brothers. But
he had yet other masters — Beaumont, Fletcher, Burton, Drummond,
Ben Jonson, Shakspeare, the whole splendid English Renaissance, and
behind it the Italian poesy, Latin antiquity, the fine Greek literature,
and all the sources whence the English Renaissance sprang. He con-
tinued the great current, but in a manner of his own. He took their
mythology, their allegories, sometimes their conceits,^ and found the
trick of their rich colouring, their magnificent sentiment of living nature,
their inexhaustible admiration of forms and colours. But, at the same
time, he transformed their diction, and employed poetry in a new service.
He wrote, not by impulse, and at the mere contact with things, but like
a man of letters, a classic, in a scholarlike manner, with the assistance
of books, seeing objects as much through previous writings as in
themselves, adding to his images the images of others, borrowing and
re-casting their inventions, as an artist who unites and multiplies the
bosses and driven gold, already entwined on a diadem by twenty work-
men. He made thus for himself a composite and brilliant style, less
natural than that of his precursors, less fit for effusions, less akin to the
lively first glow of sensation, but more solid, more regular, more capable
of concentrating in one large patch of light all their sparklings and
splendours. He brings together, like .^schylus, words of 'six cubits,'
plumed and decked in purple, and made them flow like a royal train
before his idea, to exalt and announce it. He introduces to us

' The breathing roses of the wood,
Fair silver-buskin'd nymphs ;' ^

and tells how

' The gray-hooded Even,
Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed,
Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phcebus' wain ;' '

and speaks of

• All the sea-girt isles,
That, like to rich and various gems, inlay
The unadorned bosom of the deep j' *

See the Hymn on the Nativity ; ajnongst others, the first few strophes. See
also Lycidas.

^Arcades, v. 32. ^ Comus, v. 183-190. * Ibid. v. 21-23.

2F.

434 THE EENAISSA^^CE ^xiUOK U,

and

* That undisturbed song of pnre concent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne.
To Him that sits thereon,
AVith saintly shout, and solemn jubilee ;
Where the bright Seraphim, in burning row,
Their loud-uplifted angel -trumpets blow. ' ^

He gatliered into full nosegays the flowers scattered through the other

poets :

' Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks.
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks ;
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes.
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine.
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet.

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine.
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head.
And every flower that sad embroidery wears :
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears.
To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies. ' ^

When still quite young, on his quitting Cambridge, he inclined to the
magnificent and grand ; he wanted a great rolling verse, an ample and
sounding strophe, vast periods of fourteen and four-and-twenty lines.
He did not face objects on a level, as a mortal, but from on high, like
those archangels of Goethe,^ who embrace at a glance the whole ocean
lashing its coasts, and the earth rolling on, wrapt in the harmony of the
fraternal stars. It was not life that he felt, like the masters of the
Renaissance, but greatness, like ^schylus, and the Hebrew seers,*
manly and lyric spirits like his own, who, nourished like him in reli-
gious emotions and continuous enthusiasm, like him displayed sacerdotal
pomp and majesty. To express such a sentiment, images, and poetry
addressed only to the eyes, were not enough ; sounds also were requisite,
and that more introspective poetry which, purged from corporeal shows,
cotdd reach the soul : i\IiIton was a musician ; his hymns rolled with the
slowness of a measured song and the gravity of a declamation ; and he
seems himself to be describing his art in these incomparable verses,
which are evolved like the solemn harmony of a motett :

' Ode at a Solemn Music, v. 6-11. ^Lycidas, v. 136-151.

' Faust, Prolog im Hbnmel.

* See the prophecy against Archbishop Laud in Lycldas, v. 130 :
' But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. *

CHAP. YI.] MILTON. 435

* But else, in deep of nij,'ht, when drowsiness
Hath lock'd up mortal sense, then listen I
To the celestial sirens' harmony,
That sit upon the nine infolded spheres,
And sing to those that hold the vital shears.
And tiirn the adamantine spindle round.
On which the fate of gods and men is wound.
Such sweet compulsion doth in musick lie,
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measured motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould, with gross un purged ear. ' ^

With his style, his subjects differed ; he compacted and ennobled
the poet's domain as well as his language, and consecrated his thoughts
as well as his words. He who knows the true nature of poetry soon
finds, as Milton said a little later, what despicable creatures * libidinous
and ignorant poetasters' are, and to what religious, glorious, splendid
use poetry can be put in things divine and human. ' These abilities,
wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed,
but yet to some (though most abuse) in every nation; and are of power,
beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people
the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the
mind, and set the affections in right tune ; to celebrate in glorious and
lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what
he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in
his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds
and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith
against the enemies of Christ.' ^

In fact, from the first, at St. Paul's School and at Cambridge, he had
written Paraphrases of the Psalms, then composed odes on the Nativity,
Circumcision, and Passion. Presently appeared sad poems on the Death
of a Fair Infant, An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester ; then
grave and noble verses On I'ime, at a Solemn Musick, a sonnet On his
being arrived to the Age of Twenty-three, ' a late spring which shew'th
no bud or blossom.' At last we have him in the country with his father,
and the hopes, dreams, first enchantments of youth, rise from his heart
like the morning breath of a summer's day. But what a distance be-
tween these calm and bright contemplations and the warm youth, the
voluptuous Adonis of Shakspeare ! He walked, used his eyes, listened ;
there his joys ended ; they are but the poetic joys of the soul :

' To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing, startle the dull night.
From his watch-tower in the skies.
Till the dappled dawn doth rise ; . . .

1 Arcades, v. 61-73.

2 iii. The Reason of Church Government, book ii. Introduction, 479.

436 THE RENAISSANCE, [BOOK II.

While the plowman, near at hand.
Whistles o'er the furrow'd land,
And the milk -maid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his sithe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale. ' '

To see the village dances and gaiety ; to look upon the ' high triumphs '
and the 'busy hum of men' in the 'tower'd cities;' above ail, to
abandon himself to melody, to the divine roll of sweet verse, and the
charming dreams v?hich they spread before us in a golden light ; — this
is all ; and presently, as if he had gone too far, to counterbalance this
eulogy of sensuous joys, he summons Melancholy :

* Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure,
Sober, stedfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest gi'ain.
Flowing with majestick train,
And sable stole of Cyprus lawn
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With even step, and musing gait ;
And looks commercing with the skies.
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes. ' ^

With her he wanders amidst grave thoughts and grave sights, which
recall a man to his condition, and prepare him for his duties, now
amongst the high colonnades of primeval trees, whose ' high-embowed
roof retains the silence and the twilight under their shade ; now in

' The studious cloysters pale, . . .
With antick pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light ; ' ^

now again in the retirement of the study, where the cricket chirps,
where the lamp of labour shines, where the mind, alone with the noble
minds of the past, may

' Unsphere

The spirit of Plato, to unfold

What worlds or what vast regions hold

The immortal mind, that hath forsook

Her mansion m this fleshly nook. ' *

He was filled with this lofty philosophy. Whatever the language he
used, English, Italian, or Latin, whatever the kind of verse, sonnets,
hymns, stanzas, tragedy or epic, he always returned to it. He praised
above all chaste love, piety, generosity, heroic force. It was not from
scruple, but it was innate in him ; his chief need and faculty led him to
noble conceptions. He took a delight in admiring, as Shakspeare in creat-

1 U Allegro, v. 41-68. ^ II Penseroso, v. 31-40.

3 Ibid. V. 156-160. < Ibid. v. 88-92.

CHAP. VI.] milto:t. 437

ing, as Swift in destroying, as Byron in combating, as Spenser in dream-
ing. Even on ornamental poems, which were only employed to exhibit
costumes and introduce fairy-tales, in Masques, like those of Ben Jonson,
he impressed his own character. They were amusements for the castle ;
he made out of them lectures on magnanimity and constancy : one of
them, Comus, well worked out, with a complete originality and extra-
ordinary elevation of style, is perhaps his masterpiece, and is simply the
eulogy of virtue.

Here we are in the heavens at the first dash. A spirit, descended
in the midst of wild woods, repeats this ode :

' Before the stany threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is, where those immortal shape3
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air.
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
"Which men call earth ; and, with low-thoughted care
Confined, and pester'd in this pinfold here.
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being,
Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
Mter this mortal change, to her true servants,
Amongst the enthroned Gods on sainted seats.' •

Such characters cannot speak ; they sing. The drama is an antique
opera, composed like the Prometheus of solemn hymns. The spectator
is transported beyond the real world. He does not listen to men, but
to sentiments. He assists at a concert, as in Shakspeare ; the Comus
continues the Midsummer NigMs Dream, as a choir of deep men's voices
continues the glowing and sad symphony of the instruments :

' Through the perplex'd paths of this drear wood.
The nodding honour of whose shady brows
Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger,' ^

strays a noble lady, separated from her two brothers, troubled by the
savage cries and turbulent joy which she hears from afar. There the
son of Circe the enchantress, sensual Comus, dances and shakes his
torches amid the clamour of men transformed into brutes ; it is the
hour when

' The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move ;
And, on the tawny sands and shelves
Trip the pert faeries and the dapper elves. ' ^

The lady is terrified, and sinks on her knees ; and in the misty forms
which float above in the pale light, perceives the mysterious and
heavenly guardians who watch over her life and honour :

' 0, welcome, pure-eyed Faith ; white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings ;

i Comus. V. 1-11. 2 Ihid. v. 37-30. » m^^ ^^ 115-118.

438 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

And thou, Tintlemisli'd. form of Chastity !

1 see ye visibly, and now believe

That He, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill

Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,

"Would send a glistering guardian, if need were,

To keep my life and honour unassail'd.

"Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night ?

1 did not err ; there does a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night,

And casts a gleam over this tufted grove. ' *

She calls her brothers :

' At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound
Kose like a steam of rich distill'd perfumes,
And stole upon the air,^

across the ' violet-embroider'd vale,' to the dissolute god whom she
enchants. He comes disguised as a ' gentle shejjherd,' and says :

* Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine, enchanting ravishment ?
Sure something holy lodges in that dreast.
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night.
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness, till it smiled ! I have oft heard
My mother Circe with the syrens three,
Amidst the flowery -kirtled Naiades,
Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs ;
Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul.
And lap it in Elysium : Scylla wept,
* And chid her barking waves into attention. . . .

But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,
I never heard till now. ' ^

They were heavenly songs which Comus heard ; Milton describes,
and at the same time imitates them ; he makes us understand the
saying of his master Plato, that virtuous melodies teach virtue.

Circe's son has by deceit carried off the noble lady, and seats her,
with ' nerves all chained up,' in a sumptuous palace before a table
spread with all dainties. She accuses him, resists, insults him, and the
style assumes an air of heroical indignation, to scorn the offer of the
tempter.

' When lust,
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,

1 Comus, V. 210-225. « Hid. v. 555-557. ^ Ihld. v. 24i-2Ci.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 439

Lets in defilement to the inward parts ;

The soul grows clotted by contagion,

I ni bodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose

The divine property of her first being.

Such are those tliick and gloomy shadows damp,

Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres

Lingering, and sitting by a new-made grave,

As loth to leave the body that it loved. ' ^

Confounded, Comus pauses ; and at the same instant the brothers, led by
the attendant Spirit, cast themselves upon him with drawn swords. He
flees, carrying off his magic wand. To deliver the enchanted lady,
they summon Sabrina, the benevolent naiad, who sits

* Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy (her) amber-dropping hair. ' -

The ' goddess of the silver lake ' rises lightly from her ' coral-paven
bed,' and her chariot ' of turkis blue and emerald-green,' sets her down

' By the rushy-fringed bank,
"Where grows the willow, and the osier dank.' '

Sprinkled by this chaste and cool hand, the lady leaves the ' venom'd
seat' which held her spell-bound; the brothers, with their sister, reign
peacefully in their father's palace ; and the Spirit, who has conducted
all, pronounces this ode, in which the poetry leads up to philosophy :
the voluptuous light of an Oriental legend bathes the Elysium of the
good, and all the splendours of nature assemble to add a seductiveness
to virtue.

' To the ocean now I fly,

And those happy climes that lie

Where day never shuts his eye

Up in the broad fields of the sky :

There I suck the liquid air

All amidst the gardens fair

Of Hespems, and his daughters three

That sing about the golden tree :

Along the crisped shades and bowers

Eevels the spruce and jocund Spring ;

The Graces, and the ros3''-bosom'd Houi-a,

Thither all their bounties bring ;

There eternal Summer dwells,

And west winds, -wilh musky wing,

About the cedar'n alleys fling

Kard and cassia's balmy smells.

Iris there with humid bow

Waters the odorous banks, that blow

* Comus, V. 463-473. It is the elder brother who utters these lines when
speaking of his sister. — Tk.

^ Ibid. V. S61-863. ' Ibid. v. 890.

440 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK U.

Flowers of more mingled hew

Than her purpled scarf can shew ;

And drenches with Elysian dew

(List, mortals, if your ears be tine)

Beds of hyacinth and roses,

Where young Adonis oft reposes,

Waxing well of his deep wound

In slumber soft, and on the ground

Sadly sits the Assyrian queen :

But far above in spangled sheen

Celestial Cupid, her famed son, advanced,

Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranced.

After her wandering labours long,

Till free consent the gods among

Make her his eternal bride.

And from her fair unspotted side

Two blissful twins are to be bom,

Youth and Joy ; so Jove hath sworn.

But now my task is smoothly done,

I can fly, or I can run,

Quickly to the green earth's end.

Where the bow'd welkin slow doth bend ;

And from thence can soar as soon

To the comers of the moon.

Mortals, that would follow me,

Love Virtue ; she alone is free :

She can teach ye how to climb

Higher than the sphery chime ;

Or, if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her.' '

Should I have remarked on the awkwardnesses, strangenesses, over-
loaded expressions, the inheritance of the Renaissance, a philosophical
question, the work of a reasoner and a Platonist ? I have not perceived
these faults. All was effaced before the spectacle of the bright Renais-
sance, transformed by austere philosophy, and of sublimity adored upon
an altar of flowers.

That, 1 think, was his last profane poem. Already, in the one
which followed, Lycidas, celebrating in the style of Virgil the death of
a beloved friend,^ he suffers the Puritan wrath and prejudices to shine
through, inveighs against the bad teaching and tyranny of the bishops,
and speaks of * that two-handed engine at the door, ready to smite
once, and smite no more.' On his return from Italy, controversy and
action carried him away ; prose begins, poetry is arrested. From
time to time a patriotic or religious sonnet comes to break the long
silence ; now to praise the chief Puritans, Cromwell, Vane, Fairfax ;
now to celebrate the death of a pious lady, or the life of ' a virtuous
young lady;' once to pray God 'to avenge his slaughter'd saints,' the

1 Comus, V. 976-1023. ^ Edward King, 1637.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 441

xinhappy Protestants of Piedmont, 'whose bones lie scatter'd on the
Alpine mountains cold ;' again, on his second wife, dead a year after
their marriage, his well beloved 'saint' — 'brought to me, like Alcestis,
from the grave, . . . came, vested all in white, pure as her mind ; ' loyal
friendships, sorrows bowed to or subdued, aspirations generous or
stoical, which reverses did but purify. Old age came ; cut off from
power, action, even hope, he returned to the great dreams of his youth.
As of old, he went out of this low world in search of the sublime ; for
the actual is petty, and the familiar seems duU. He selects his new
characters on the verge of sacred antiquity, as he selected his old ones
on the verge of fabulous antiquity, because distance adds to their
stature ; and habit, ceasing to measure, ceases also to depreciate them.
Just now we had creatures of fancy : Joy, daughter of Zephyr and
Aurora ; Melancholy, daughter of Vesta and Saturn ; Comus, son of
Circe, ivy-crowned, god of echoing woods and tvirbulent excess. Now,
Samson, despiser of giants, elect of the strong god, exterminator of
idolaters, Satan and his peers, Christ and his angels, come and rise be-
fore our eyes like superhuman statues ; and their far removal, rendering
vain our curious hands, will preserve our admiration and their majesty.
Let us rise further and higher, to the origin of things, amongst eternal
beings, to the commencement of thought and life, to the battles of God,
in this unknown world where sentiments and existences, raised above
the ken of man, elude his judgment and criticism to command his
veneration and awe ; let the sustained song of solemn verse unfold the
actions of these shadowy figures : we shall experience the same emotion
as in a cathedral, while the organ prolongs its reverberations among the
arches, and through the dim light of the tapers the incense clouds en-
velope the colossal bulk of the columns.

But if the heart remains unchanged, the genius is transformed.
Manliness has supplanted youth. The richness has decreased, the
severity has increased. Seventeen years of fighting and misfortune
have steeped his soul in religious ideas. Mythology has yielded to
theology ; the habit of discussion has ended by subduing the lyric
flight ; accumulated learning by choking the original genius. The poet
no more sings sublime verse, he relates or harangues in grave verse.
He no longer invents a personal style ; he imitates antique tragedy or
epic. In Samson he finds a cold and lofty tragedy, in Paradise lie-
gained a cold and noble epic ; he composes an imperfect and sublime
poem in Paradise Lost.

Would he could have written it as he tried, in the shape of a drama,
or better, as the Prometheus of .^schylus, as a lyric opera I Such and
such a subject demands such and such a style ; if you resist, you de-
stroy your work, too happy if, in the deformed medley, chance pro-
duces and preserves a few beautiful fragments. To bring the super-
natural upon the scene, you must not continue in your original mood ;
if you du, you have the air of not believing in it. Vision reveals it,

442 THE KEXAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

and the style of vision must express it. When Spenser writes, he
dreams. We listen to the happy concerts of his aerial music, and the
varying train of his fanciful apparitions unfolds like a vapour before
our accommodating and dazzled gaze. When Dante writes, he is rapt ;
and his cries of anguish, his transports, the incoherent succession of his
infernal or mystical phantoms, carry us with him into the invisible
world which he describes. Ecstasy alone renders visible and credible
the objects of ecstasy. If you tell us of the exploits of the Deity as
you tell us of Cromwell's, in a grave and lofty tone, we do not see God ;
and as He constitutes the whole of your poem, we do not see anything.
We conclude that you have accepted a tradition, that you adorn it with
the fictions of your mind, that you are a preacher, not a prophet, a
decorator, not a poet. We find that you sing of God as the vulgar
pray to him, after a formula learnt, not from spontaneous emotion.
Change your style, or, if you can, change your emotion. Try and dis-
cover in yourself the ancient fervour of psalmists and apostles, to re-
create the divine legend, to feel over again the sublime motions by which
the inspired and disturbed mind perceives God ; then the grand lyric
verse will roll on, laden with splendours. Thus roused, we shall not have
to examine whether it be Adam or Messiah who speaks ; we shall not
have to demand that they shall be real, and constructed by the hand
of a psychologist ; we shall not trouble ourselves with their puerile or
unlocked for actions ; we shall be carried away, we shall share in your
creative madness; we shall be drawn ojiward by the flow of bold images,
or raised by the combination of gigantic metaphors ; we shall be moved
like j^ischylus, when his thunder-stricken Prometheus hears the uni-
versal concert of streams, seas, forests, and created beings, lament with
him,^ as David before Jehovah, for whom a thousand years are but as
yesterday, who ' earnest them away as with a flood ; in the morning
they are like grass which groweth up.'"

But the age of metaphysical inspiration, long diverted, had not yet
reappeared. Far in the past Dante was fading away ; far in the future
Goethe lay unrevealed. People saw not yet the pantheistic Faust, and
the vague nature which absorbs all transformed existence in her deep
bosom ; they saw no longer the mystic paradise and immortal Love,
whose ideal light envelopes souls redeemed. Protestantism had neither
altered nor renewed divine nature ; the guardian of an accepted creed
and ancient tradition, it had only transformed ecclesiastical discipline

' u ^7oi alShf xai mc^uvripci •prvoa.l
vrora/Auv ti -^nyat, ■ttovtiui ti KVjx.a.rut
AvripiSiiov yiXaa fio., •jra.f/.f/.riTop ri y7t,
Kdi 70V veato^TYiv xuxXov nXiov xxXu,
ioiir^i fi,', Ota, -rpo; Siuv •jrac^u fic;-

Prometlieus Viiu-ttis, ed. Ilenufiii, p. -IS", liue 88. — Tii.
s^ xc. «>.

» p

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 4i3

and the doctrine of grace. It had only called the Christian to personal
salvation and secular liberty. It had only remodelled man, it had not
re-created the Deity. It could not produce a divine epic, but a human
epic. It could not sing the battles and works of God, but the tempta-
tions and salvation of the soul. At the time of Christ came the poems
of cosmogony ; at tlie time of Milton, the confessions of psychology.
At the time of Christ each imagination produced a hiei'archy of super-
natural beings, and a history of the world ; at the time of Milton, every
heart recorded the series of its upliftings, and the history of grace.
Learning and reflection led ^lilton to a metaphysical poem which was
not the natural offspring of the age, whilst inspiration and ignoi'ance
revealed to Bunyan the psychological narrative which suited the age,
and the great man's genius was feebler than the tinker's simplicity.

And why? Milton's poem, suppressing lyrical illusion, admitted
critical inquiry. Free from enthusiasm we judge his characters ; we
demand that they shall be living, real, complete, harmonious, like those
of a novel or a drama. No longer hearing odes, we would see objects
and souls : we ask that Adam and Eve should act in conformity with
their primitive nature ; that God, Satan, and Messiah should act and
feel in conformity with their superhuman nature. Shakspeare would
barely have discharged the task ; Milton, the logician and reasoner,
failed in it. He gives us correct solemn discourse, and gives us nothing
more ; his characters are speeches, and in their sentiments we find only
heaps of puerilities and contradictions.

Adam and Eve, the first pair ! I approach, and it seems as though
I discovered the Adam and Eve of Raphael Sanzio, imitated by Milton,
so his biographers tell us, glorious, strong, voluptuous children, naked
in the light of heaven, motionless and absorbed before grand land-
scapes, with bright vacant eyes, with no more thought than the bull or
the horse on the grass beside them. I listen, and I hear an English
household, tAvo reasoners of the period — Colonel Hutchinson and his
wife. Heavens ! dress them at once. Folk so cultivated should have
invented before all a pair of trousers and modesty. What dialogues !
Dissertations capped by politeness, mutual sermons concluded by bows.
"What bows ! Philosophical compliments and moral smiles. I yielded,
says Eve,

' And from that time see
How beauty is excell'd by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly foir.' '

Dear learned poet, you would have been better satisfied if one of your
three wives had, as an apt pupil, uttered to you by way of conclusion
the above solid theoretical maxim. They did utter it to you ; this is
a scene from your own household :

* Paradise Lost, book iv. v. 489.

444 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

* So spake onr general mother ; and, vritli eyea
Of conjugal attraction unreproved
And meek surrender, half-embracing lean'd
On our first father ; half her swelling breast
Naked met his, under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid ; he, in delight
Both of her beauty and submissive charms.
Smiled with superiour love, . . . and press'd her matron lip
With kisses pure. ' ^

This Adam entered Paradise via England. There he learned respecta-
bility, and there he studied moral speechifying. Let us hear this man
before he has tasted of the tree of knowledge. A bachelor of arts, in his
introductory address, could not utter more fitly and nobly a greater
number of pithless Sentences :

* Fair consort, the hour
Of night, and all things now retired to rest.
Mind us of like repose ; since God hatli set
Labour and rest, as day and night, to men
Successive ; and the timely dew of sleep.
Now falling with soft slumbrous weight, inclines
Our eyelids ; other creatures all day long
Eove idle, uneraploy'd, and less need rest :
Man hath his daily work of body or mind
Appointed, which declares his dignity,
And the regard of Heaven on all his ways ;
While other animals unactive range,
And of their doings God takes no account. ' ^

A very useful and excellent Puritanical exhortation ! That is English
virtue and morality; and at evening, in every family, it can be read to the
children like the Bible. Adam is your true paterfamilias, with a vote,
an M.P., an old Oxford man, consulted at need by his wife, dealing
out to her with prudent measure the scientific explanations which she
requires. This night, for instance, the poor lady had a bad dream,
and Adam, in his trencher-cap, administers this learned psychological
draught : ^

' Know, that in the soul

Are many lesser faculties that serve

Eeason as chief ; among these Fancy next

Her office holds ; of all external things.

Which the five watchful senses represent,

She forms imaginations, aery shapes

AVhich Reason, joining or disjoining, frames

All what we affirm or what deny, and call

Our knowledge or opinion. . . .

1 Paradise Lost, book iv. v. 492-502. 2 n^i^ ^_ 610-622.

^ It would be impossible that a man so learned, so argumentative, should spend
Ms whole time in gardening and making up nosegays.

CHAP. VI. J MILTON. 445

Oft in her absence mimic fancy wakes
To imitate her ; but, misjoining shapes,
"Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams ;
111 matching words and deeds long past or late. ' *

Here was something to send Eve off to sleep agiiin. Her husband,
noting the effect, adds like an accredited casuist :

' Yet be not sad :

Evil into the mind of God or man

May come and go, so unapproved ; and leave

Uo spot or blame behind. '-

"We recognise the Protestant husband, his wife's confessor. Next day
comes an angel on a visit. Adam tells Eve :

* Go with speed,

And, what thy stores contain, bring forth, and pour

Abundance, fit to honour and receive

Our heavenly stranger ... he

Beholding sliall confess, that here on earth

God hath dispensed his bounties as in heaven. ' '

Mark this becoming zeal of a hospitable lady. She goes in haste :

' "What choice to choose for delicacy best ;
"Wliat order, so contrived as not to mix
Tastes, not well join'd, inelegant ; but bring
Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change. ' *

She makes sweet wine, perry, creams ; scatters flowers and leaves
under the table. Good housewife ! How many votes will she gain
among the country squires, when Adam stands for Parliament ! Adam
belongs to the Opposition, is a Whig, a Puritan. He

* Walks forth ; without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections : in himself was all his state ;
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,
Dazzles the crowd. ' *

The epic is changed into a political poem, and we have heard an
epigram against power. The preliminary ceremonies are somewhat
long; fortunately, the dishes being uncooked, ' no fear lest dinner
cool.' The angel, though ethereal, eats like a Lincolnshire farmer :

' Nor seemingly
Tlie angel, nor in mist, the common gloss
Of theologians ; but with keen dispatch
Of real hunger, and concoctive heat
To transubstantiate : what redounds, transpires
Through spirits with ease. ' ^

1 Paradise Lost, book v. v. 100-113. ^ Ihid. v. 1] 6-119. ' Ibid. v. 313-330.
* Ibid. V. 333-336. * Ibid. v. 351-357. ^ Ibid. v. 431-439.

440 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

At table Eve listens to the angel's stories, then discreetly rises at
dessert, when they are getting into politics. English ladies may learn
by her example to perceive from their lords' faces when they are
' entering on studious thoughts abstruse.' The sex does not mount
so high. A wise lady prefers her husband's talk to that of strangers.
'Her husband the relater she preferred.' Now Adam hears a little
treatise on astronomy. He concludes, like a practical Englishman :

' But to know
That which before us Hes in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom : what is more, is fume,
Oi emptiness, or fond impertinence ;
And renders us, in things that most concern,
Unpractised, unprepared, and still to seek.' '

The angel gone, Eve, dissatisfied with her garden, wishes to have it
improved, and proposes to her husband to work in it, she on one side,
he on the other. He says, with an approving smile :

' Nothing lovelier can be found
In woman, than to study household good,
And good works in her husband to promote.' -

But he fears for her. and would keep her at his side. She rebels with
a little prick of proud vanity, like a young lady who mayn't go out by
herself. She has her way, goes, and eats the apple. Here interminable
speeches come down on the reader, as numerous and cold as winter
showers. The speeches of Parliament after Pride's Purge were hardly
heavier. The serpent seduces Eve by a collection of arguments worthy
of the punctiliovis Chillingworth, and then the syllogistic mist enters
her poor brain :

* His forbidding

Commends thee more, while it infers the good

By thee communicated, and our want :

For good unknown sure is not had ; or, had

And yet unknown, is as not had at all. . . .

Such prohibitions bind not. ' ^

Eve is from Oxford too, has also learned law in the inns about the
Temple, and wears, like her husband, the doctor's trencher-cap.

"The flow of dissertations never pauses ; from Paradise it gets into
heaven : neither heaven nor earth, nor hell itself, would swamp it. "^

Of all characters which man could bring upon the scene, God is the
finest. The cosmogonies of peoples are sublime poems, and the artists'
genius does not attain perfection until it is sustained by such concep-
tions. The Hindoo sacred poems, the Biblical prophecies, the Edda,
the Olympus of Hesiod and Homer, the visions of Dante, are glowing
flowers from which a whole civilisation blooms, and every emotion

' Paradise Lost, book viii. v. 192-197.

« Ibid, book ix. v. 232. ' Ib'id. v. 753--760.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 447

vanishes before the lightning thought by which they have leapt from
the bottom of our heart. Nothing then can be more depressing than
the degradation of these noble ideas, settling into the regularity of
formulas, and under the discipline of a popular \^orship. What is
smaller than a god sunk to the level of a king and a man ? what more
repulsive than the Hebrew Jehovah, defined by theological pedantry,
governed in his actions by the last manual of doctrine, petrified by
literal interpretation ?

Milton's Jehovah is a grave king, who maintains a suitable state,
something like Charles i. When we meet him for the first time, in
Book III., he is holding council, and setting forth a matter of business.
From the style we see his grand furred cloak, his pointed Vandyke
beard, his velvet-covered throne and golden dais. The business con-
cerns a law which does not act well, and respecting which he desires to
justify his rule. Adam is about to eat the apple : why have exposed
Adam to the temptation ? The royal orator discusses the question, and
shows the reason :

' I made him jnst and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Such I created all the ethereal powers

And spirits, both them who stood and them who fail'd. . . .

Not fi-ee, what proof could they have given sincere

Of true allegiance, constant faith, or love ?

Where only, what they needs must do, appear'd,

Not what they would : what praise could they receive ?

What pleasure I from such obedience paid ?

When will and reason, (reason also is choice)

Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil'd.

Made passive both, had served necessity,

Not me. They therefore, as to right belong'd,

So were created, nor can justly accuse

Their Maker, or their making, or their fate ;

As if predestination over- ruled

Their will, disposed by absolute decree

Or high foreknowledge : they themselves decreed

Their own revolt, not I : if I foreknew.

Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault.

Which had no less proved certain nnforeknown.

So without least impulse or shadow of fate,

Or aught by me immutably foreseen,

They trespass, authours to themselves in all.

Both what they judge and what they choose. ' ^

The modern reader is not so patient as the Thrones, Seraphim, and
Dominations ; this is why I stop half-way in the royal speech. We
perceive that Milton's Jehovah is connected with the theologian James
1., versed in the arguments of Arminians and Gomarists, very clever

' Paradise Lost, book iii. v. 98-123.

448 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

at the disttnguo, and, before all, incomparably tedious. To get them to
listen to such tirades he must pay his councillors of state very well.
His son answers him respectfully in the same style. Goethe's God,
half abstraction, half legend, source of calm oracles, a vision just beheld
after a pyramid of ecstatic strophes,^ greatly excels this Miltonic God,
a business man, a schoolmaster, a man for show! I honour him too
much in giving him these titles. He deserves a worse name, when he
sends Raphael to warn Adam that Satan intends him some mischief:

* This let him know,
Lest, wilfully transgressing, he pretend
Surprisal, unadmonish'd, unforewarn'd.' *

This Miltonic Deity is only a schoolmaster, who, foreseeing the fault of
his pupU, tells him beforehand the grammar rule, so as to have the
pleasure of scolding him without discussion. Moreover, like a good
politician, he had a second motive, just as with his angels, ' For state,
as sovran king ; and to inure our prompt obedience.' The word is out ;
we see what Milton's heaven is : a Whitehall filled with bedizened foot-
men. The angels are the chapel singers, whose business is to sing
hymns about the king and before the king, relieving each other to sing
' melodious hymns about the sovran throne.' What a life for this poor
king 1 and what a cruel condition, to hear eternally his own praises ! '
To amuse himself, Milton's Deity decides to crown his son king —
partner-king, if you prefer it. Read the passage, and say if it be not a
ceremony of his time that the poet describes :

* Ten thousand thousand ensigns high advanced,
Standards and gonfalons 'twrxt van and rear
Stream in the air, and for distinction serve
Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees ;
Or in their glittering tissues bear imblazed
Holy memorials, acts of zeal and love
Kecorded eminent ; ' *

doubtless the capture of a Dutch vessel, the defeat of the Spaniards in
the Downs. The king brings forward his son, ' anoints' him, declares
him ' his great vicegerent : '

' To him shall bow

All knees in heaven. . . . Him who disobeys,

Me disobeys ; ' ^

* End of the continuation of Faust. Prologue in Heaven.
^Paradise Lost, book v. v. 243.

^ "We are reminded of the history of Ira in Voltaire, condemned to hear with-
out intermission or end the praises of four chamberlains, and the following hymn :
' Que son merite est extreme !
Que de graces, que de grandeur.
Ah ! combien monseigneur
Doit etre content de lui-meme ! '

* Paradise Lost, book v. v. 588-594. ^ Ibid. v. 607-612.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 449

and such were, in fact, expelled from heaven the same day. ' All
seem'd well pleased ; all seem'd, but were not all.' Yet

' That day, as other solemn days, they spent
In soni; and dance ahout the sacrcl hill. . .
Fortlnvith from dance to sweet repast they turn
Desirous. ' *

^lilton describes the tables, the dishes, the wine, the vessels. Tt is a
popular festival ; I miss the fireworks, the bell-ringing, as in London,
and I can fancy that all would drink to the health of the new king.
Then Satan revolts; he takes his troops to the other end of the country,
like Lambert or Monk, toward ' the quarters of the north,' Scotland
perhaps, passing through well-governed districts, ' empires,' with their
sheriffs and lord-lieutenants. Heaven is divided like a good map.
Satfln holds forth before his officers against royalty, opposes in a
word-combat the good royalist Abdiel, who refutes his ' blasphemous,
false, and proud' arguments and quits him to rejoin his prince at
Oxford. Well armed, the rebel marches with his pikemen and
artillery to attack the fortress.^ The two parties cut each other with
the sword, mow each other down with cannon-balls, knock each
other down with political arguments. These sorry angels have a
mind as well disciplined as the Parliamentarians ; they have passed
their youth in a class of logic and in a drill school. Satan holds
forth like a preacher :

' "What heaven's Lord had powerfulest to send
Against us from about his throne, and judged
Sufficient to subdue us to his will,
But proves not so : then fallible, it seems,
Of future we may deem him, though till now
Omniscient thought. ' '

He also talks like a drill-sergeant. ' Vanguard, to right and left the front
unfold.' He makes quips as clumsy as those of Harrison, the former
butcher turned officer. What a heaven ! It is enough to disgust one
with Paradise ; one would rather enter Charles i.'s troop of lackeys, or
Cromwell's Ironsides. We have orders of the day, a hierarchy, exact
submission, extra-duties, disputes, regulated ceremonials, prostrations,
etiquette, furbished arms, arsenals, depots of chariots and ammunition.
Was it worth while leaving earth to find in heaven carriage- works,

■ Paradise Lost, book v. v. 617-631.

* The Miltonic Deity is so much on the level of a king and man, that he uses
(with irony certainly) words like these : * Lest unwary we love this place, our
sanctuary, our hill. '

His son, about to flesh his maiden sword, replies : * If I be found the worst in
heaven,' etc. — Book vi.

^ Paradise Lost, book vi v. 425-430.

2 P

450 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK II.

buildings, artillery, a manual of tactics, the art of salutations, and the
Almanac de Gotha ? Are these the things which ' eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, nor hath entered into the heart to conceive ? ' What a gap
between this monarchical frippery^ and the visions of Dante, the souls
floating like stars amid the harmonies, the mingled splendours, the
mystic roses radiating* and vanishing in the azure, the impalpable world
in which all the laws of earthly life are dissolved, the unfathomable
abyss traversed by fleeting visions, like golden bees gliding in the rays
of the deep central sun ! Is it not a sign of extinguished imagination,
of the inroad of prose, of the birth of the practical genius, replacing
metaphysics by morality ? What a fall ! To measure it, read a true
Christian poem, the Apocalypse. I copy half-a-dozen verses ; think
what it has become in the hands of the imitator :

' And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw
seven golden candlesticks ;

' And in the midst ot the seven candlesticks, one like unto the Son of man,
clothed with a garment down to tlie toot, and girt about the paps with a golden
girdle.

' His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow ; and his eyes
were as a flame of fire ;

* And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace ; and his voice
as the sound of many waters.

' And he had in his right hand seven stars : and out of his mouth went a sharp
two edged sword : and his countenance was as the sun shiueth in his strength.

' And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. ' *

When Milton v.^as arranging his celestial show, he did not fall aa
dead.

But if the innate and inveterate habits of logical argument, joined
with the literal theology of the time, prevented him from attaining to
lyrical illusion or from creating living souls, the splendour of his grand
imagination, joined with the Puritan passions, furnished him with an
heroic character, several sublime hymns, and scenery which no one has
surpassed. The finest thing in connection with this Paradise is hell;
and in this history of God, the chief part is taken by the devih The
ridiculous devil of the middle-age, a horned enchanter, a dirty jester,
a petty and mischievous ape, band-leader to a rabble of old women,
has become a giant and a hero. Like a conquered and vanished Crom-
well, he remains admired and obeyed by those Avhom he has drawn
into the abyss. If he continues master, it is because he deserves it ;
firmer, more enterprising, more scheming than the rest, it is always

^ Wlien Raphael comes on earth, the angels who are * under watch, ' ' in honour
rise. ' The disagreeable and characteristic feature of this heaven is, that the uni-
versal motive is obedience, while in Dante's it is love. ' Lowly reverent they
bow. . . . Our happy state we hold, like yours, while our obedience holds.'

2 Rev. i. 12.

CHAJ". VI.] MILTON. 451

<rom him that deep counsels, unlooked-for resources, courageous deeds,
proceed. It was he who invented 'deep-throated engines . . . dis-
gorging, . . . chained thundorbohs, and hail of iron globes,' and won
the second day's victory ; he who in hell roused his dejected troops,
and planned the ruin of man ; he who, passing the guarded gates
and the endless chaos, amid so many dangers, and across so many
obstacles, made man revolt against God, and gained for hell the whole
posterity of the new-born. Though defeated, he prevails, since he has
won from the monarch on high the third part of his angels, and almost
all the sons of his Adam. Though wounded, he triumphs, for the thunder
which smote his head, left his heart invincible. Though feebler in
force, he remains superior in nobility, since he prefers suffering inde-
pendence to happy servility, and welcomes his defeat and his torments
as a glory, a liberty, and a joy. These are the proud and sombre
political passions of the constant though oppressed Puritans; Milton
had felt them in the vicissitudes of war, and the emigrants who had
taken refuge amongst the panthers and savages of America, found them
strong and energetic in the depths of their heart.

* Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost Archangel, this the seat
That we must change for heaven ? this mournful gloom
For that celestial light ? Be it so, since he,
Who now is Sovran, can dispose and bid
AVhat shall be right : farthest from him is best,
Whom reason has equal'd, force hath made supremo *

Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,
"Where joy for ever dwells ! Hail, horrours ; hail,
Infernal world ! and thou, profoundest hell,
Keceive thy nuw possessour ; one who brings

''A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where, if 1 be still the same,
And what I should be ; all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater ? Here at least
We shall be free ; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy ; will not drive us hence :
Here we may reign secure ; and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell :
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven. ' '

This sombre heroism, this harsh obstinacy, this biting irony, these
proud stiff arms which clasp grief as a mistress, this concentration of
invincible courage which, cast on its own resources, finds everything in
itself, this power of passion and sway over passion, —

' The unconquerable will.
And study of revenge, immortal hate,

» Paradise Lost, book L v. 242-263.

452 THE RENAISSANCE. [BOOK 11.

And coTirage never to submit or 3rield,
And what is else not to be overcome,' '

are features proper to the English character and to English literature,
and you will find them later on in Byron's Lara and Conrad.

Around the fallen angel, as Avilhin him, all is great. Dante's hell
is but a hall of tortures, whose cells, one below another, descend to the
deepest wells. Milton's hell is vast and vague :

*A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace, flamed ; yet from those flamea
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe.
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades.^ . . ,
Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies, dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind, and dire hail which on firm land
Thaws not ; but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile. ' ^

The angels gather, innumerable legions :

' As when heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
"With singed top their stately gi'owth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath. ' *

Milton needs the grand and infinite ; he lavishes them. His eyes are
only content in limitless space, and he produces colossuses to fill it.
Such is Satan wallowing on the surges of the livid sea :

' In bulk as huge . . . as . . . that sea- beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream :
Him, haply, slumbering on the Norway foam,
The pilot of some small night-founder'd skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind
Moors by his side under the lee, while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays. ' *

Spenser has discovered images just as fine, but he has not the tragic
gravity which the idea of hell impresses on a Protestant. No poetic
creation equals in horror and grandeur the spectacle that greeted Satan
on leaving his dungeon :

' At last appear

Hell bounds, high reaching to the horrid roof,

And thrice threefold the gates ; three folds were brass,

Three iron, three of adamantine rock,

Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire.

Yet unconsumed. Before the gates there sat

1 Paradise Lost, book i. v. 106-109. * Ibid. v. 61-65.

3 Ibid, book ii. v. 587-591. * Jbid. book i. v. 612-615.

" Jbid. V. 196-208.

CHAP. VI.J MILTON. 453

On either side a formidable shape ;

The one seem'd woman to the waist, and fair.

But ended foul in many a scaly fold

Voluminous and vast, a serpent aim'd

With mortal sting : about her middle round

A cry of hell hounds never ceasing bark'd

With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous peal : yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught distuib'd their noise, into her womb,

And kennel there ; yet thei'e still bark'd and howl'd

Within unseen, . . . The other shape.

If shape it might be call'd, that shape had none

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb.

Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,

For each seem'd either : black it stood as night,

Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell.

And shook a dreadful dart ; what seem'd his head

The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

Satan was now at hand, and from his seat

The monster moving onward came as fast,

With horrid strides ; hell trembled as he strode.

The undaunted fiend what this might be admired,

Admired, not fear'd. ' ^

The heroic glow of the old soldier of the Civil Wars animates the
infernal battle ; and if one were to ask why Milton creates things greater
than other men, I should answer, because he has a greater heart.

Hence the sublimity of his scenery. If I did not fear the paradox, I
should say that this scenery was a school of virtue. Spenser is a smooth
glass, which fills us with calm images. Shakspeare is a burning mirror,
which overpowers us, one after another, with multiplied and dazzling
visions. The one distracts, the other disturbs us. Milton raises our mind.
The force of the objects which he describes passes into us ; we become
great by sympathy with their greatness. Such is the effect of his descrip-
tion of the Creation. The calm and creative command of the Messiah
leaves its trace in the heart which listens to it, and we feel more vigour
and moral health at the sight of this great work of wisdom and will :

* On heavenly ground they stood ; and from the shore
They view'd the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turn'd by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains, to assault
Heaven's highth, and with the centre mix the pole.
"Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou deep, peace,"
Said then the omnific Word : "your discord end ! " . . ,
Let there be light, said God ; and forthwith light
Ethereal, first of things, quintcisence pure,
Spi-ung from the deep ; and from her native east

' Paradiae. Loxt, book ii. v. 643-678.

454 THE RENAISSANCE. [bOOK II.

To .ionrney through the aery gloom began,
Sphered in a radiant cloud. ...
The earth was form'd ; but in the womb as yet
Of waters, embrj'ou immature involved,
Appear'd not : over all the face of earth
Main ocean flow'd, not idle ; but, with warm
Prolific humour softening all her globe,
Fermented the great mother to conceive,
Satiate with genial moisture ; when God said,
"Be gatlier'd now, ye waters under heaven.
Into one place, and let dry land appear."
Immediately the mountains huge appear
Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave
Into the clouds ; their tops ascend the sicy :
So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters : thither they
Hasted with glad precipitance, uproll'd,
As drops on dust couglobing from the dry.' ^

This is the primitive scenery ; immense bare seas and mountains,
as Kaphael Siinzio outlines them in the background of his biblical
paintings. Milton embraces the general effects, and handles the whole
as easily as his Jehovah.

Let us quit superhviman and fanciful spectacles. A simple sunset
equals them. Milton peoples it with solemn allegories and regal figures,
and the sublime is born in the poet, as just before it was born from the
subject : —

' The sun, now fallen . . .

An-aying with reflected purple and gold

The clouds that on his western throne attend.

Now came still evening on, and twilight gray

Had in her sober livery all things clad :

Silence accompanied ; for beast and bird.

They to their grassy couch, these to their nests.

Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale ;

She all night long her amorous descant sung ;

SDence was pleased : now glowed the firmament

With living sapphires : Hesperus, that led

The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon.

Rising in clouded majesty, at length,

Apparent queen, unveil'd her peerless light.

And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw. ' ^

The changes of the light become here a religious procession of vague
beings who fill the soul with veneration. So sanctified, the poet prays.
Standing by the nuptial couch of Adam and Eve, he says : —
' HaU, wedded love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else !

» Paradise Lost, book vii. v. 210-29-2 * Jbld. book iv. v. 591-609.

CHAP. VI.] MILTON. 455

By thee adulterous lust was driven from men
Among the bestial herds to range : by thee.
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother, first were kno^vn.'*

He justifies it by the example of saints and patriarchs. He immo-
lates before it bought love and 'court amours,' wanton Avomen and
harlots. ^Ye are a thousand miles from Shakspeare ; and in this Pro-
testant eulogy of the family tie, of lawful love, of ' domestic sweets,' of
orderly piety and of home, we perceive a new literature and an altered
time.

A strange great man, and a strange spectacle! He was born with
the instinct of noble things ; and this instinct, strengthened in him by
solitary meditation, by accumulated knowledge, by stern logic, becomes
changed into a body of maxims and beliefs wliich no temptation could
dissolve, and no reverse shakp. Thus fortified, he passes life as a com-
batant, as a poet, with courageous deeds and splendid dreams, heroic
and rude, chimerical and impassioned, generous and calm, like every
self-contained reasoner, like every enthusiast, insensible to experience
and enamoured of the beautiful. Thrown by the chance of a revolution
into politics and theology, he demands for others the liberty which his
powerful reason requires, and strikes at the public fetters which im-
pede his personal energy. By the force of his intellect, he is more
capable than any one of accumulating science; by the force of his
enthusiasm, he is more capable than any of experiencing hatred. Thus
armed, he throws himself into controversy with all the clumsiness
and barbarism of the time; but this proud logic displays its argu-
ments with a marvellous breadth, and sustains its images with an
unwonted majesty : this lofty imagination, after having spread over
his prose an array of magnificent figures, carries him into a torrent of
passion even to the height of the sublime or excited ode — a sort of
archangel's sons; of adoration or vencreance. The chance of a throne
preserved, then re-established, carries him, before the revolution took
place, into pagan and moral poetry, after the revolution into Cliristian
and moral verse. In both he aims at the sublime, and inspires admira-
tion ; because the sublime is the work of enthusiastic reason, and ad-
miration is the enthusiasm of reason. In both, he arrives at his point
by the accumulation of splendours, by the sustained fulness of poetic
song, by the greatness of his allegories, the loftiness of his sentiments,
the description of infinite objects and heroic emotions. In the first, a
lyrist and a philosopher, with a wider poetic freedom, and the creator
of a stranger poetic illusion, he produces almost perfect odes and
choruses. In the second, an epic writer and a Protestant, enslaved by
a strict theology, robbed of the style which makes the supernatural

* Paradise Lost, book iv. v. 7;'0-757.

456 THE RENMSSANCE. [bOOK II.

visible, deprived of the dramatic sensibility which creates varied and
livins souls, he accumulates cold dissertations, transforms man and God
into orthodox and vulgar machines, and only regains his genius in
endowing Satan with his republican soul, in multiplying grand sceneries
and colossal apparitions, in consecrating his poetry to the praise ot
religion and duty.

Placed, as it happened, between two ages, he participates in their
two characters, as a stream which, flowing between two different soils,
is tinged by their two hues. A poet and a Protestant, he receives
from the closing age the free poetic afflatus, and from the opening age
the severe political religion. He employed the one in the service of
the other, and displayed the old inspiration in new subjects. In hia
works we recognise two Englands : one impassioned for the beautiful,
devoted to the emotions of an unshackled sensibility and the fancies of
pure imagination, with no law but the natural feelings, and no religion
but natural belief ; voluntarily pagan, often immoral ; such as it is ex-
hibited by Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Shakspeare, Spenser, and
the superb harvest of poets which covered the ground for a space of
fifty years : the other fortified by a practical religion, void of meta-
physical invention, altogether political, with worship and law, attached
to measured, sensible, useful, narrow opinions, praising the virtues of
the family, armed and stiffened by a rigid morality, driven into prose,
raised to the highest degree of power, wealth, and liberty. In this
sense, this style and these ideas are monuments of history : they con-
centrate, recall, or anticipate the past and the future ; and in the limits
of a single work are found the events and the feelings of several cen-
turies and of a whole natiou.

BOOK III.

THE CLASSIC AGK.

CHAPTER I.
The Bestoration.

1. The Roisterers.

I. The excesses of Puritanism — How they induce excesses of sensuality,

II. Picture of these manners by a stranger — The Mimoires de Grammont—

Difference of debauchery in France and England.

III. Butler's i/«f/(6ras— Platitude of his comic style, and harshness of his

rancorous style.

IV. Baseness, cruelty, brutality, debauchery of the court— Rochester, his life,

poems, style, morals.
V. Philosophy consonant with these manners— Hobbes, his spirit and his style
— His curtailments and his discoveries — His mathematical method — In
how much he resembles Descartes — His morality, sesthetics, politics,
logic, psychology, metaphysics — Spirit and aim of his philosophy.
VI. The theatre — Alteration in taste, and in the public— Audiences before and

after the Restoration.
VII. Dryden — Disparity of his comedies — Gaucherie of his indecencies — How he

translates Moliere's Ampliitryon.
VIII. Wycherley — Life — Character — Melancholy, greed, immodesty — Love in a
Wood, Country Wife, Dancing Master — Licentious pictures, and re-
pugnant details — His energy and realism — Parts of Olivia and llanly
in his Plain Dealer — CerUiin words of Milton.

2. The WonLDLiNos.

I. Appearance of the worldly life in Europe— Its conditions and causes — How
it was established in England — Etiquette, amusements, conversations,
manners, and talents of the drawing-room.
II. Dawn of the classic spirit in Europe — Its origin— Its nature— Difference of
conversation under Elizabeth and Charles II.

III. Sir William Temple— His life, character, spirit^ and style.

IV. Writers of fashion — Their correct language and gallant bearing— Sir Charles

Sedley, the Earl of Dorset, Edmund Waller — His opinions and style —

458 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK HI.

"WTierein consists his polish — WhereiTi he is not finfficfently polished —
Culture of style — Lack of poetry — Character of monarchical and classic
style.

V. Sir John Denham — His poem of Coorer's RHl — Oratorical swell of his
verse — En,c;lish seriousness ol his moral preoccupations — How people of
fashion and literary men followed then the fashions of France.
VI. The comic-authors — Comparison of this theatre with that of Moliere —
Arranf;ement of ideas in Moliere — General ideas in Moliere — How with
Moliere the odious is concealed, while the truth is depicted — How in
Jloliere the honest man is still the man of the world — How the honest
man of Moliere is a French t^Tie.
VIL Action — Complication of intrigues — Frivolity of purpose — Cmdeness of
the characters — Crossness of manners — Wherein consists the talent of
"VVycherley, Concrreve, Vanbi-ugh, and Farquhar — Kind of characters
they are able to produce.
Vin. Natural characters — Sir John Brute, the hushand ; Squire Sullen — SW Tun-
belli/, the father — Miss Hoyden, the youns lady — S'jidre Humphry, the
young gentleman — Idea of nature according to this theatre.
IX Artificial characters — "Women of the world — Misi Prue, Lady Wishfori,
Lady Pliant, Mrs Mihamani — Men of the world — Mirabell — Idea of
society according tc this theatre — Why this culture and this literature
have not produced durable works — Wherein they are opposed to the
English character — Transformation of taste and manners.

X. The continuation ol comedy — Sheridan — Life — Talent — The School for
Scandal — How comedy degenerates and is extinguished — Causes of the
decay of the theatre in Emope and in England.

1. The Roisterers.

WHEN we alternately look at the works of the court painters of
Charles i. and Charles il., and pass from the noble portraits of
Van Dyk to the figures of I.ely, the fall is sudden and great ; we have
left a palace, and we light on a bagnio.

Instead of the proud and dignified lords, at once cavaliers and
courtiers, instead of those fine yet simple ladies who look at the same
time princesses and modest maidens, instead of that generous and heroic
company, elegant and resplendent, in whom the spirit ot the Renaissance
yet survived, but who already displayed the refinement of the modern
age, we are confronted by perilous and importunate courtesans, with an
expression either vile or harsh, incapable of shame or of remorse.*
Their plump smooth hands toy fondlingly with their dimpled fingers;
ringlets of heavy hair fall on their bare shoulders ; their swimming eyes
languish voluptuously ; an insipid smile hovers on their sensual lips.
One is lifting a mass of dishevelled hair which streams over the curves
of her rosy flesh; another languishingly, and without constraint, uncloses
a sleeve whose soft folds display the full whiteness of her arms. Nearly

" See especially the portraits of Lady Moriand, Lady Williams, tlie Countess
of Ossory, the Duchess of Cleveland, Lady Price, and many otners.

CHAP I. ] THE EESTOKATION, 459

all are hnlf-draped ; many of them seem to be just rising from their
beds; the runipkd dressing-gown clings to the neck, and looks as
though it were soiled by the night's debauch ; the tumbled imder-
garnient slips down to the hips ; their feet crumple the bright and
glossy silk. Though shameless, with bosoms vmcovered, they are decked
out in all the luxurious extravagance of prostitutes; dian.ond girdles,
puffs of lace, the vulgar splendour of gilt, a superfluity of embroidered
and rustlinsi fabrics, enormous head-dresses, the curls and frinijes of
which, rolled up and sticking out, compel notice by the very height of
their shameless magnificence. Folding curtains hang round them in
the shape of an alcove, and the eyes penetrate through a vista into
the recesses of a wide park, whose solitude will not ill serve the purpose
of their pleasures.

All this came by way of contrast; Puritanism had brought on an
orgie, and fanatics had talked down the virtues. For many years the
gloomy English imagination, possessed by religious terrors, had desolated
the life of men. Conscience had become disturbed at the thought of
death and the dark eternity; half -expressed doubts swarmed within
like a bed of thorns, and the sick heart, starting at every emotion, had
ended by taking a disgust at all its pleasures, and a horror at all its
natural instincts. Thus poisoned at its spring, the divine sentiment of
justice became a mournl'ul madness. Man, confessedly perverse and
condemned, believed himself pent in a prison-house of perdition and
vice, into which no effort and no chance could durt a ray of light,
except a hand from above should come by free grace, to rend the sealed
stone of the tomb. Men lived the life of the condenmed, amid torments
and anguish, oppressed by a gloomy despair, haunted by spectres. Such
a one would frequently imagine himself at the point of death ; another
was Aveighed down by his grievous hallucinations as by a cross ; some
would feel within them the motions of an evil spirit; one and all j)nssed
the night Avith their ej'es chained to the tales of blood and the im-
passioned appeals of the Old Testament, listening to the threats and
thunders of a terrible God, and renewing in their own hearts the
ferocity of murderers and the exaltation of seers. Under such a stiain
reason gradually left them. While seeking after their Lord, they found
but a dream. After long hours of exhaustion, they laboured under a
warped and overwrought imagination. Dazzling forms, unwonted ideas,
sprang up on a sudden in their heated brain ; men were raised and
penetrated by extiaordinary emotions. So translbrmed, they knew
themselves no longer ; they did not ascribe to themselves these violent
and sudden inspirations which were forced upon them, Avhich compelled
them out of the beaten tracks, which had no connection one with
another, which shook and enlightened them when least expected, with-
out being able either to check or to govern them ; they saw m them the

460 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

agency of a supernatural power, and gave themselves up with enthusiasm
to the madness and the stubbornness of faith.

To crown all, the nature of fanaticism had been changed ; the sec-
tary had laid down all the steps of mental transfiguration, and reduced
the encroachment of his dream to a theory : he set about methodically to
drive out reason and enthrone ecstasy. George Fox wrote its history,
Bunyan gave it its laws. Parliament worked out its type, all the pulpits
lauded its practice. Artisans, soldiers, women discussed it, mastered
it, encouraged one another by the details of their experience and the
publicity of their exaltations. A new life was inaugurated which had
blighted and expelled the old. All secular tastes were suppressed, aJl
sensual joys forbidden; the spiritual man alone remained standing upon
the ruins of the past, and the heart, debarred from all its natural safety-
valves, could only direct its views or aspirations towards a sinister Deity.
The typical Puritan walked slowly along the streets, his eyes raised to-
wards heaven, with elongated features, yellow and haggard, with cropt
hair, clad in brown or black, unadorned, clothed only to cover his naked-
ness. If a man had round cheeks, he passed for lukewarm.^ The whole
body, the exterior, the very tone of his voice, all must wear the sign of
penitence and divine grace. Man spoke slowly, with a solemn and some-
what nasal tone of voice, as if to destroy the vivacity of conversation and
the melody of the natural voice. His speech stuffed with scriptural
quotations, his style borrowed from the prophets, his name and the
names of his children drawn from the Bible, bore witness that his
thoughts were confined to the terrible world of the seers and ministers
of divine vengeance. From within, the contagion spread outwards.
The fears of conscience were converted into laws of the state. Personal
asceticism grew into public tyranny. The Puritan proscribed pleasure
as an eeemy, for others as well as for himself. Parliament clcsed the
gambling-houses and theatres, and had the actors whipped at the cart's
tail ; oaths were fined ; the May-trees were cut down ; the bears, whose
fights amused the people, were put to death ; the plaster of Puritan
masons reduced nvide statues to decency ; the beautiful poetic festivals
were forbidden. Fines and corporal punishments shut out, even from
children, games, dancing, bell-ringing, rejoicings, junketings, wrestling,
the chase, all exercises and amusements which might pro.'ane the Sab-
bath. The ornaments, pictures, and statues in the churches were pulled
down or mutilated. The only pleasure which they retained and permitted
was the singing of psalms through the nose, the edification of long ser-
mons, the excitement of acrimonious controversies, the eager and sombre
joy of a victory gained over the enemy of mankind, and of the tyranny
exercised against the demon's supposed abettors. In Scotland, a colder
and sterner land, intolerance reached the utmost limits of ferocity and

' Colonel Hutchinson was at cue time held in suspicion because he wore long
hair and dressed welL

CHAP. 1.] THE RESTORATION. 461

pettiness, instituting a surveillance over the private life and the secret
devotions of every member of a family, depriving Catholics of their
children, imposing an oath of abjuration under pain ofperpetual impri-
sonment or death, dragging crowds of witches* to the stake. ^ It seemed
as though a black cloud had weighed down the life of man, drowning
all liglit, wiping out all beauty, extinguishing all joy, pierced here and
there by the glitter of the sword and by the flickering of torches, be-
neath which one might perceive the indistinct forms of gloomy despots,
of bilious sectarians, of silent victims.

II.

The king once re-established, a deliverance ensued. Like a checked
and flooded stream, public opinion dashed with all its natural force and
all its acquired momentum, into the bed from which it had been debarred.
The outburst carried away the dams. The violent return to the senses
drowned morality. Virtue had the semblance of Puritanism. Duty
and fanaticism became mingled in a common reproach. In this great
reaction, devotion and honesty, swept away together, left to mankind
but the wreck and the mire. The more excellent parts of human
nature disappeared ; there remained but the animal, without bridle or
guide, urged by his desires beyond justice and shame. ^

When we see these manners in a Hamilton or a Saint Evremond,
we can tolerate them. Their French varnish deceives us. Debauchery
in a Frenchman is only half disgusting ; with them, if the animal breaks
loose, it is without abandoning itself to excess. The foundation is not,

^ 1648 ; thirty in one day. One of them confessed that she had been at a
gathering of more than five hundred witches. — Pictorial History, iii. 489.

^ In 1652, the kirk-session of Glasgow ' brot boyes and servants before them, for
breaking the Sabbath, and other faults. They had clandestine censors, and gave
money to some for this end.' — Note 28, taken from Wodrow's Collection; Buckle,
History of Civilization in England, 3 vols. 1867, iii. 208.

Even yearlv in the eighteenth century, 'the most popular divines' in Scotland
affirmed that Satan ' frequently appears clothed in a corporeal substance.' — Ibid.
iii. 233, note 76, taken from Memoirs of C. L. Lewes.

' No husband shall kiss his wife, and no mother shall kiss her child on the
Sabbath day.' — Ibid. iii. 253, note from Revd. Lyon, with regard to government of
a colony.

' (Sept. 22, 1649) The quhilk day the Sessioitne caused mak this act, that
ther sould be no pypers at brydels,' etc. — Ibid. iii. 258, note 153. In 1719, the
Presbytery of Edinburgh indignantly declares : * Yea, some have arrived at that
height of impiety, as not to be ashamed of washing in waters, and swimmiug in
rivers upon the holy Sabbath.' — Ibid. iii. 266, note 187.

' I think David had never so sweet a time as then, when he was pursued as a
partridge by his son Absalom.' — Gray's Great and Precious Promises.

See the whole of chapter iii. vol. iii., in which Buckle has described, by similar
quotations, the condition of Scotland, chiefly in the seventeenth century.

462 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK m.

as witli the Englishman, coarse and powerful. You may break the
glittering ice which covers him, without bringing down upon yourself
the swollen and muddy torrent that roars beneath his neighbour ; ^ the
stream which will issue from it will only have its petty dribblings, and
will return quickly and of itself to its accustomed channel. The French-
man is mild, naturally refined, little inclined to great or gross sensuality,
affecting a sober style of talk, easily armed against filthy manners by
his delicacy and good taste. The Count de Grammont has too much
wit to love an orgie. After all, an orgie is not pleasant ; the breaking
of glasses, brawling, lewd talk, gluttony in eating and drinking, — there
is nothing in this very tempting to a delicate disposition : the French-
man, after Grammont's type, is born an epicurean, not a glutton or a
drunkard. What he seeks is amusement, not unrestrained joy or
bestial pleasure. I know well that he is not void of reproach. I Avould
not trust him with my purse, he forgets too readily the distinction be-
tween menm and tuwn ; above all, I would not trust him with my wife :
he is not over delicate ; his escapades at the gaming-table and with
women smack too much of the sharper and the false -swearer. But I
am wrong to use these big words in connection with him ; they are too
weighty, they crush so delicate and so pretty a specimen of humanity.
These heavy habits of honour or shame can only be worn by a serious
class of men, and Grammont takes nothing seriously, neither his fellow-
men, nor himself, nor vice, nor virtue. To pass his time agreeably is
his sole endeavour. 'They had said good-bye to dulness in the army,'
observed Hamilton, 'as soon as he was there.' That is his pride and
his aim ; he troubles himself, and cares for nothing beside. His valet
robs him : another would have brought the rogue to the gallows ; but
the theft was clever, and he keeps his rascal. He left England forget-
ting to marry the girl he Avas betrothed to ; he is caught at Dover; he
returns and marries her : this was an amusing contretemps ; he asks
for nothing better. One day, being penniless, he fleeces the Count de
Cameran at play. * Could Grammont, after the figure he had once cut,
pack off like any common fellow ? By no means ; he is a man of feeling ;
he will maintain the honour of France.' ■ He covers his cheating at play
with a joke ; at bottom, his notions of property are not over-clear. He
regales Cameran with Cameran's own money ; would Cameran have
done it better, or otherwise ? What matter if his money be in Gram-
mont's purse or his own ? The main point is arrived at, since there is
pleasure in getting the money, and thei'e is pleasure in spending it.
The hateful and the ignoble vanish from a life conducted thus. If he
pays his court to princes, you may be sure it is not on his knees ; so
lively a soul is not weighed down by respect ; his wit places him on a
level with the greatest ; under pretext of amusing the king, he tells

^ See, in Richardson, Swift, and Fiulduig, but particularly in Hogarth, tlia
deliaeutioii of this brutish debauchery.

CHAP. I.]> THE RESTORATION'. 4G3

him plain truths.* If he finds himself in London, snrrounded by open
debauchery, he does not plunge into it ; he passes through on tiptoe,
and so daintily that the mire does not stick to him. We do not recog-
nise any longer in his anecdotes the anguish and the brutality which
the circumstances actually conceal ; the narrative flows on quickly,
raising a smile, then another, and another yet, so that the mind is
brought by an adroit and easy progress to something like good humour.
At table, Grammont will never stuff himself; at play, he will never
grow violent ; with his mistress, he will never give vent to coarse
talk; in a duel, he will not hate his adversary. The v/it of a French-
man is like French wine ; it makes men neither brutal, nor wicked,
nor gloomy. Such is the spring of these pleasures : a supper will de-
stroy neither the delicacy, nor the good nature, nor the enjoyment.
The libertine remains sociable, polished, obliging; his gaiety culminates
only in the gaiety of others;^ he is attentive to them as naturally as
to himself; and in addition, he is ever on the alert and in a mood for
intellectual exertion : sallies, flashes of brilliancy, witty speeches, sparkle
on his lips ; he can think at table and in company, sometimes better
than if alone or sober. It is clear that with him debauchery does not
extinguish the man ; Grammont would say that it perfects him, that
wit, the heart, the intelligence only arrive at excellence and true en-
joyment, amid the elegance and animation of a choice supper.

III.

It is quite the contrary in England. When we scratch the covering
of an Englishman's morality, the brute appears in its violence and its
deformity. One of the English statesmen said that with the French an
unchained mob could be led by words of humanity and honour, but that
in England it was necessary, in order to appease them, to throw to them
raw flesh. Violence, blood, orgie, that is the food on which this mob
of noblemen precipitated itself. All that excuses a carnival was
absent ; and, in particular, wit. Three years after the return of the
king, Butler published his Hudihras ; and with what eclat his con-
temporaries only could tell, while the echo is sustained down to our
own days. How mean is the wit, with what awkwardness and dulness
he dilutes his splenetic satire ! Here and there lurks a happy picture,
the remnant of a poetry which has just perished ; but the whole
material of the work reminds one of a Scarron, as unworthy as the
other, and more malignant. It is written, they say, on the model of

^ The king was plnyincj at backgammon ; a doubtful throw occurs : ' Ah, hero
is Grammont, who'll decide for us; Grammont, come and decide.' 'Sire, you
have lost.' 'Wliat! you do not yet know.' . . . 'Ah, Sire, if the throw had
been merely doubtful, these gentlemen would not have failed to say you had won.'

^ Hamilton says of Grammont, ' He souglit out the uulbrtunate only to succour
thesi.'

464 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK m.

Don Quixote ; Hudibras is a Puritan knight, who goes about, like hi?
antitype, redressing wrongs, and pocketing beatings. It would be
truer to say that it resembles the wretched imitation of Avellaneda.^
The short metre, well suited to buffoonery, hobbles along without
rest on its crutches, floundering in the mud which it delights in, as
foul and as dull as that of the Ene'ide Travestie} The description of
Hudibras and his horse occupies the best part of a canto ; forty lines
are taken up by describing his beard, forty more by describing his
shoes. Endless scholastic discussions, arguments as long as those of the
Puritans, spread their wastes and briars over half the poem. No action,
no nature, all is would-be satire and gross caricature ; neither art, nor
harmony, nor good taste : the Puritan style is converted into a harsh
gibberish ; and the engalled rancour, missing its aim by its mere excess,
spoils the portrait it wishes to draw. Would you believe that such a
writer gives himself airs, wishes to enliven us, pretends to be funny ?
What delicate raillery is there in this picture of Hudibras' beard !
' His tawny beard was th' equal grace

Both of his wisdom and his face ;

In cut and die so like a tile,

A sudden view it would beguile :

The upper part whereof was whey,

The nether orange, mix'd with grey.

The hairy meteor did denounce

The fall of sceptres and of crowns :

"With grisly type did represent

Declining age of government,

And tell with hieroglyphic spade

Its own grave and the state's were made." '

Butler is so well satisfied with his insipid fun, that he prolongs it for a
good many lines :

* Like Samson's heart-breakers, it grew

In time to make a nation rue ;

Tho' it contributed its own fall.

To wait upon the public downfall. . . .

'Twas bound to suffer persecution

And martyrdom with resolution ;

T' oppose itself against the hate

And vengeance of the incens'd state.

In whose defiance it was worn,

Still ready to be pull'd and torn,

* A Spanish author, who continued and imitated Cervantes' Don Quixote.

' A work by Scarron. Hudibras, ed. Z. Grey, 1801, 2 vols., i canto L v. 289.

says also :

' For as ^neas bore his sire
Upon his shoulder through the fire.
Our knight did bear no less a pack
Of his own buttocks on his back.'

* Jhi'lihras, part L canto i v. 241-250.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 465

With rcd-liot irons to be tort^ir'd,
Kevil'd, and spit upon, and miirtyr'd.
Maugre all which, 'twas to stand fast
As long as monarchy should last ;
But when the state should hap to reel,
'Twas to submit to fatal steel.
And fall, as it was consecrate,
A sacrifice to fall of state.
Whose thread of life the fatal sisters
Did twist together with its whiskers, .
And twine so close, that time should never^
In life or death, their fortunes sever ;
But with his rusty sickle mow
Both down together at a blow. ' '

Could any one have taken pleasure in humour such as. this:

' This sword a dagger had, his page,
That was but little for his age ;
And therefore waited on hiin so
As dwarfs upon knights-errant do. . . «.
When it had stabb'd, or broke a head,
It would scrape trenchers, or chip bread. .... ^
'Twould make clean shoes, and in the earth
Set leeks and onions, and so forth. ' *

Everything turns on the trivial : if any beauty presents itself, it is
spoiled by burlesque. To read those long details of the kitchen, those
boisterous and crude jokes, one might fancy oneself in the company of
a common buffoon in the market ; it is the talk of the quacks on the
bridges, adapting their imagination and language to the manners of the
beer-shop and the hovel. There is filth to be met with there ; in short,
the rabble v;ill laugh when the mountebank alludes to the disgusting acts
of private life.^ Such is the grotesque stuff in which the courtiers of the
Restoration delighted ; their spite and tlieir coarseness took a pleasure

i Hud'ibra.% part i. canto i. v. 253-280. '^ Ihid. v. 375-386.

^ ' Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat. .
Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate ;
For though the thesis which thou lay'st
Be true ad amussim as thou say'st
(For that bear-baiting should appear.
Jure divinOi lawfuller
Than Synods are, thou do'st deny,,
Toiidem verbis; so do I),
Yet there is fallacy m this ;;
For if by thy homoeosis,
Tussis pro crepitu, ...
Thou wouldst sophistically imply,
Both are unlawful, I deny.'

Part i. canto i. v. 821-834.
2 G

4 Go THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK UI.

in the spectacle of these bawling puppets; even now, after two centuries,
we hear the ribald laughter of this audience of lackeys.

IV.

Charles ii., when at his meals, ostentatiously drew Grammont's
attention to the fact that his officers served him on their knees. They
were in the right ; it was their fit posture. Lord Chancellor Clarendon,
one of the most honoured and honest men of the Court, learns sud-
denly and in full council that his daughter Anne is enceinte by the Duke
of York, and that the duke, the king's brother, has promised her
marriage. Listen to the words of Uiis tender father; he has himself
taken care to hand them down::

' The Chancellor broke out into a very immoderate passion against the wicked-
ness of his daughter, and said with all imaginable earnestness, "that as soon as he
came home, he would turn her (his daughter) out of his house as a strumpet to
shift for herself^ and would never see her again. " ' '

Observe that this great man had received the news from the king
unprepared, and that he made use of these fatherly expressions on the
spur of the moment. He added, ' that he had much rather his daughter
should be the duke's whore than his wife.' Is this not heroical ? But
let Clarendon spetdc for himself. Only such a true monarchical heart
can surpass itself :

' He was ready to give a positive judgment, in which he hoped their lordships
would concur with him ; that the king should immediately cause the woman to be
sent to the Tower, and to be cast into a dungeon under so strict a guard, that no
person living should be admitted to come to her : and then that an act of parlia-
ment should be immediately passed for the cutting off her head, to which he would
not only give his consent, but would very willingly be the first man that should
propose it. ' ^

AVhat Roman virtue! Afraid of not being believed, he insists ; who-
ever knew the man, will believe that he said all this very heartily. He
is not yet satisfied ; he repeats his advice ; he addresses to the king
different conclusive reasonings, in order that they might cut off the head
of his daughter :

*D

' I had rather submit and bear it (this disgrace) with all humility, than that it
should be repaired by making her his wife, the thought whereof I do so much
abominate, that I had much rather see her dead, with all the infamy that is due
to her presumption. ' ^

In this manner, a man, who is in a difficulty, can keep his salary and
his Chancellor's robes. Sir Charles Berkley, captain of the Duke of
York's guards, did better still ; he solemnly swore ' that he had lam

^ The Life of Clarendon, ed. by himself, new ed., 1827, 3 vols., i. 378.
« Ihid. i. 379. » Ibid. i. 380.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION, 467

•with the young lady,' and declared himself ready to marry her ' for the
sake of the duke, though he knew well the familiarity the duke had
with her.' Then, shortly afterwards, he confessed that he had lied, but
in all good intention, in all honour, in order to save the royal family
from such a mesalliance. This admirable self-devotion was rewarded ;
he soon had a pension from the privy purse, and was created Earl of
Falmouth. From the first, the baseness of the public corporations
rivalled that of individuals. The House of Commons, but recently
master of the country, still full of Presbyterians, rebels, and con-
querors, voted ' that neither themselves nor the people of England
could be freed from the horrid guilt of the late unnatural rebellion,
or from the punishment which that guilt merited, unless they formally
availed themselves of his Majesty's grace and pardon, as set forth in
the declaration of Breda.' ^ Then all these heroes went in a body and
threw themselves with contrition at the sacred feet of their monarch.
In this universal weakness it seemed that no one had any courage left.
The king became the hireling of Louis xiv., and sold his country for a
pension of £200,000. Ministers, members of Parliament, ambassadors,
all received French money. The contagion spread even to patriots, to
men noted for their purity, to martyrs. Lord Russell intrigued with
Versailles ; Algernon Sidney accepted 500 guineas. They had not dis-
crimination enough to retain a show of spirit ; they had not spirit
enough to retain a show of honour.^

In men so degraded, the first thing that strikes you is the blood-
thirsty instinct of brute beasts. Sir John Coventry, a member of
Parliament, had let some word escape him, which was construed into
a reproach of the royal amours. His friend, the Duke of Monmouth,
contrived that he should be treacherously assaulted under the king's
command, by respectable men devoted to his service, Avho slit his nose
to the bone. A vile wretch of the name of Blood tried to assassinate
tlie Duke of Ormond, and to stab the guardian of the Tower, in order
to steal the crown and jewels. Charles ii., considering that this was
an interesting and distinguished man of his kind, pardoned him, gave
him an estate in Ireland, and admitted him to his presence, side by

* Pictorial History, ill. 664.

* ' Mr. Evelyn tells me of several of the menial servants of the Court lacking
bread, that have not received a farthing wages since the King's coming in.' — Pepys'
Diary, ed. Lord Braybrooke, 3d ed., 1848, 5 vols., iv. April 26, 1667.

' Mr. Povy says that to this day the King do follow the women as much as he
ever did ; that the Duke of York .... hath come out of his wife's bed, and
gone to others laid in bed for him ; . . . . that the family (of the duke) is in
horrible disorder by being in debt by spending above £60,000 per annum, when he
hath not £40,000' (Ibid. iv. June 23, 1667).

' It is certain that, as it now is, the seamen of England, in my conscience, would,
if they could, go over and serve the king of France or Holland rather than ua'
iliid. iv. June 25, 1307).

468 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

side with the Duke of Ormond, so that Blood became a sort of hero,
and was received in society. After such splendid examples, men dared
everything. The Duke of Buckingham, a lover of the Countess of
Shrewsbury, slew the Earl in a duel ; the Countess, disguised as a page,
held Buckingham's horse, while she embraced him, covered as he was
with her husband's blood; and the murderers and adulterers returned
publicly, as in a triumphal march, to the house of the dead man. One
can no longer wonder at hearing Count Konigsmark describe as a
'peccadillo' an assassination which he had committed by waylaying
his victim. I transcribe a duel out of Pepys, to give a notion of the
manners of these soldier cut-throats : —

* Sir H. Bellassis and Tom Porter, the greatest friends in the world, were
talking together : and Sir H. Bellassis talked a little louder than ordinary to Tom
Porter, giving of him some advice. Some of the company standing by said,
" What ! are they quarrelUng, that they talk so high ?" Sir H. Bellassis, hearing
it, said, " No ! " says he : "I would have you know I never quarrel, but I strike ;
and take that as a rule of mine ! " "How ? " says Tom Porter, "strike ! I would
I could see the man in England that durst give me a blow ! " with that Sir H.
Bellassis did give him a box of the eare ; and so they were going to fight there,
but were hindered. . . . Tom Porter, being informed that Sir H. Bellassis' coach
was coming, went out of the coffee-house where he staid for the tidings, and stopped
the coach, and bade Sir H. Bellassis come out. "Why," says H. Bellassis, "you
will not hurt me coming out, will you ? " "No," says Tom Porter. So out he
went, and both drew. , . . They wounded one another, and Sir H. Bellassis so
much that it is feared he will die, ' which he did ten days after. '

Bull-dogs like these, were .not to be expected to take pity on their
enemies. The Restoration opened with a butchery. The Lords con-
ducted the trials of the republicans with a shamelessness of cruelty and
an excess of rancour that were extraordinary. A sheriff struggled
with Sir Harry Vane on the scaffold, rvimmaging his pockets, and
taking from him a paper which he attempted to read. During the trial
of Major-General Harrison, the hangman was placed by his side, in a
black dress, with a rope in his hand ; they sought to give him a full
enjoyment of the foretaste of death. He was cut down alive from the
gibbet, and disemboAvelled ; he saw his entrails cast into the lire ; he
was then quartered, and his still beating heart was torn out and shown
to the people. The cavaliers gathered round for amusement. Here
and there one of them would do worse even than this. Colonel Turner,
seeing them quarter John Coke, the lawyer, told the sheriff's men to
bring Hugh Peters, another of the condemned, nearer ; the executioner
came up, and rubbing his bloody hands, asked the unfortunate man if
the work pleased him. The rotting bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and
Bradshaw were dug up in the night, and their heads fixed on poles
over Westminster Hall. Ladies went to see these disgraceful scenes ;

» Pepys' Diary, voL iv., 29th July 1667.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 469

the good Evelyn applauded them ; the courtiers made songs on them.
These people were fallen so low, that they did not even turn sick at it.
Sight and smell no longer brought a natural repugnance ; their senses
"were as dead as their hearts.

From carnage they threw themselves into debauchery. You should
read the life of the Earl of Rochester, a courtier and a poet, who was
the hero of the time. His manners were those of a lawless and wretched
mountebank ; his delight was to haunt the stews, to debauch women,
to write filthy songs and lewd pamphlets ; he spent his time between
scandal with the maids of honour, broils with men of letters, the re-
ceiving of insults, the giving of blows. By way of playing the gallant,
he eloped with his wife beibre he married her. To make a display of
scepticism, he ended by declining a duel, and gained the name of a
coward. For five years together he was said to be drunk. The spirit
within him failing of a worthy outlet, plunged him into adventures
more befittino- a clown. Once with the Duke of Buckinn;ham he rented
an inn on the Newmarket road, and turned innkeeper, supplying the
husbands with drink and defiling their wives. He introduced himself,
disguised as an old woman, into the house of a miser, robbed him of his
Avife, and passed her on to Buckingham. The husband hanged himself ;
they made very merry over the atfair. At another time he disguised
himself as a chairman, then as a beggar, and paid court to the gutter-
girls. He ended by turning charlatan, astrologer, and vendor of drugs
for procuring abortion, in the suburbs. It was the licentiousness of a
fervid imagination, which fouled itself as another Avould have adorned
ir, which forced its way into lewdness and folly as another would
have done into sense and beauty. What can come of love in hands
like these ? One cannot copy even the titles of his poems ; they were
Avritten only for the haunts of vice. Stendhal said that love is like a
dried up bough cast into a mine ; the crystals cover it, spread out into
filagree work, and end by converting the worthless stick into a spark-
ling tuft of the purest diamonds. Kochester begins by depriving love
of all its adornment, and to make sure of grasping it, converts it into
a stick. Every refined sentiment, every fancy ; the enchantment, the
serene, sublime glow which transforms in a moment this wretched world
of ours ; the illusion which, uniting all the powers of our being, shows
us perfection in a finite creature, and eternal bliss in a transient emo-
tion,— all has vanished ; there remain but satiated appetites and palled
senses. The worst of it is, that he writes without spirit, and methodi-
cally enough. He has no natural ardour, no picturesque sensuality ;
his satires prove him a disciple of Boileau. Nothing is more disgusting
than obscenity in cold blood. One can endure the obscene works of
Giulio Eomano, and his Venetian voluptousness, because in them genius
sets off sensuality, and the loveliness of the splendid coloured draperies
transforms an orgie into a work of art. We pardon Kabelais, when we
have entered into the deep current of manly joy and vigour, with which.

470 THE CLASSIC AGE. [bOOK III.

his feasts abound. We can hold our nose and have done with it, while
we follow with admiration, and even sympathy, tlie torrent of ideas and
fancies which flows through his mire. But to see a man trying to be
elegant and remaining coarse, endeavouring to paint the sentiments of
a navvy in the language of a man of the world, who tries to find a
suitable metaphor for every kind of obscenity, who plays the black-
guard studiously and deliberately, who, excused neither by character,
nor the glow of fancy, nor science, nor genius, degrades a good style of
writing to such a work, — it is like a rascal who sets himself to sully a
set of gems in a gutter. The end of all is but disgust and sickness.
While La Fontaine continues to the last day capable of tenderness and
happiness, this man at the age of thirty insults the weaker sex with
spiteful malignity :

* When she is young, she whores herself for sport ;
And when she's old, she bawds for her support. . . .
She is a snare, a shamble, and a stews ;
Her meat and sauce she does for lechery chuse,
And does in laziness delight the more,
Because by that she is provoked to whore.
Ungrateful, treacherous, enviously inclined,
Wild beasts are tamed, floods easier far confined.
Than is her stubborn and rebelHous mind. . . .
Her temper so extravagant we find.
She hates or is impertinently kind.
"Would she be grave, she then looks like a devil,
And like a fool or whore, when she be civil. . . .
Contentious, wicked, and not ht to trust,
And covetous to spend it on her lust.' '■

Wliat a confession is such a judgment! what an abstract of life ! You
see the roisterer dulled at the end of his career, dried up like a mummy,
eaten away by ulcers. Amid the choruses, the crude satires, the re-
membrance of abortive phms, the sullied enjoyments which are heaped
up in his wearied brain as in a sink, the fear of damnation is fermenting;
he dies a devotee at the age of thirty-three years.

At the head of all, the king sets the example. This ' old goat,' as
the courtiers call him, imagines himself a man of gaiety and elegance.
What gaiety ! what elegance ! French manners do not suit men beyond
the Channel. Catholics, they fall into a narrow superstition; epicureans,
into gross debauchery ; courtiers, into a base servility ; sceptics, into a
vulgar atheism. The court in England could imitate only French
furniture and dress. The regular and decent exterior which public
taste maintained at Versailles, was here dispensed Avith as troublesome.
Charles and his brother, in their state dress, would set off running as
in a carnival. On the day when the Dutch fleet burned the English

' It is doubtful if these lines are Eochester's, at least I have not been able to
find them in any edition of his works. — Tk.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 471

ships in the Thames, the king supped with the Duchess of ^lonmouth,
and amused himself by chasing a moth. In council, ■while business
WHS being transacted, he -would be playing with his dog. Rochester
and Buckingham insulted him by insolent repartees or dissolute epi-
grams ; he would fly into a passion and suffer them to go on. He
quarrelled with his mistress in public ; she called him an idiot, and he
called her a jade. He would leave her in the morning, ' so that the
very sentrys speak of it.' ^ He suffered her to play him false before the
eyes of all ; at one time she received a couple of actors, one of whom
was a mountebank. If need were, she would use abusive language to
him. ' The King hath declared that he did not get the child of Avhich
she is conceived at this time. But she told him, ' . . . ! but you
shall own it.' ^ Whereupon he did acknowledge the child, and took to
himself a couple of actresses for consolation. AVhen his new wife,
Catherine of Braganza, arrived, he drove away her attendants, used
coarse language to her, that he might force on her the familiarities of
his mistress, and finished by degrading her to a friendship such as this.
The good Pepys, notwithstanding his loyal heart, ends by saying,
' Having heard the King and the Duke talk, and seeing and observing
their habits of intercourse, God forgive me, though I admire them
with all the duty possible, yet the more a man considers and observes
them, the less he finds of difference between them and other men,
though, blessed be God ! they are both princes of great nobleness
and spirits.' ^ He heard that, on a certain day, the king was with
^Irs. Stewart ' into corners, together, and will be with her half
an hour, kissing her to the observation of all the world.' * Another
day. Captain Ferrers told him ' how, at a ball at Court, a child Avas
dropped by one of the ladies in dancing.' They took it ofT in a hand-
kerchief, 'and the King had it in his closet a week after, and did dissect
it, making great sport of it,' * These ghastly freaks about such vile
events make one shudder. The courtiers went with the stream. Miss
Jennings, who became Duchess of Tyrconnel, disguised herself one day
as an orange girl, and cried her wares in the street.* Pepys recounts
festivities in which lords and ladies smeared one another's faces with
candle- grease and soot, ' till most of us were like devils.' It was the
Aishion to swear, to relate scandalous adventures, to get drunk, to prate
against the preachers and Scripture, to gamble. Lady Castlemaine in
one night lost £25,000. The Duke of St. Albans, a bhnd man, eighty
years old, went to the gambling-house with an attendant at his side to
tell him the cards. Sedley and Buckhurst stripped nearly naked, and
ran through the streets after midnight. Another, in the open day,
stood naked at the window to address the people. I let Grammont keep

1 Pepys' Diary, ii. January 1, 1662-1663. * Ibid. iv. July 30, 1667.

^ Ibid. in. July 25, 1665. ♦ fhid. ii. Nov. 9, 1663.

6 Hid. ii. Feb.' 8, 17, 1662-3. « Hid. Feb. 20, 1664-1665.

472 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

to himself his accounts of the maids of honour brought to bed, and of
unnatural lusts. We must either exhibit or conceal them, and I have
not the courage lightly to insinuate them, after his fashion. I end by a
quotation from Pepys, which will serve for example : ' Here I first
understood by their talk the meaning of company that lately were
called Bailers ; Harris telling how it was by a meeting of some young
blades, where he was among them, and my Lady Bennet and her
ladies ; and their dancing naked, and all the roguish things in the
world.' ^ The maTvellovis thing is, that this fair is not even gay ; these
people were misanthropic, and became morose ; they quote the gloomy
Hobbes, and he is their master. In fact, the philosophy of Hobbes
shall give us the last word and the last characteristics of this society.

V.

Hobbes was one of those powerful, limited, and, as they are called,
positive minds so common in England, of the school of Swift and
Bentham, efficacious and remorseless as an iron machine. Hence we
find in him a method and style of surprising dryness and vigour, most
adapted to build up and pull down ; hence a philosophy which, by the
audacity of its teaching, has placed in an undying light one of the
indestructible appearances of the human mind. In every object, every
event, there is some primitive and constant fact, which forms, as it were,
the nucleus around which group themselves the various developments
which complete it^ The positive mind strikes down immediately upon
this nucleus, crushes the brilliant growth which covers it ; disperses,
annihilates it ; then, concentrating upon it the full force of its violent
grasp, loosens it, raises it up, pares it down, and lifts it into a con-
spicuous position, from whence it may henceforth shine out to all men
and for all time like a crystal. All ornament, all emotions, are ex-
cluded from the style of Hobbes ; it is a mere aggregate of arguments
and concise facts, united together by deduction, as by iron bands.
There are no tints, no fine or unusual word. He makes use only of
words most familiar to common and lasting usage ; there are not a
dozen employed by him which, during two hundred years, have grown
obsolete ; he pierces to the root of all sensation, removes the transient
and brilliant externals, compresses the solid portion which is the per-
manent subject-matter of all thought, and the proper object of common
intelligence. He curtails througliout in order to strengthen ; he attains
solidity by suppression. Of all the bonds which connect ideas, he
retains but one, and that the most stable ; his style is only a continuous
chain of the most stubborn description, wholly made up of additions
and subtractions, reduced to a combination of certain simple processes,
which, added on to or diminishing from one another, make up, under
various names, tlie totals or differences, of which we are for ever either

* Pepys' Diary, iv. May 30, 1668.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 473

studying the formation or unravelling the elements. He pursued before-
hand the method of Condillac, beginning with tracing to the original
fact, palpably and clearly, so as to pursue step by step the descent and
parentage of the ideas of which this primary fact is the stock, in such
a manner that the reader, conducted from total to total, may at any
moment test the exactness of his operation, and verify the truth of his
results. Such a logical system cuts across the grain of prejudice with a
mechanical stiffness and boldness. Hobbes clears science of scholastic
words and theories. He laughs down quiddities, he does away with
rational and intelligible classihcations, he rejects the authority of re-
ferences.^ He cuts, as with a surgeon's knife, at the heart of the most
living creeds. He denies the authenticity of the books of Moses, Joshua,
and the like. He declares that no argument proves the divinity of
Scripture, and that, in order to believe it, every man requires a super-
natural and personal revelation. He upsets in half-a-dozen words the
authority of this and every other revelation.^ He reduces man to a
mere body, the soul to a function, God to an unknown existence. His
phrases read like equations or mathematical results. In fact, it is from
mathematics ' that he derives the idea of all science. He would recon-
stitute moral science on the same basis. He assigns to it this foundation
when he lays down that sensation is an internal movement caused by
an external shock; desire, an internal movement toward an external
object ; and he builds upon these two notions the whole system of
morals. Again, he assigns to morals a mathematical method, when he
distinguishes, like the geometrician, between two simple ideas, which he
transforms by degrees into two more complex ; and when on the basis
of sensation and desire he constructs the passions, the rights and institu-
tions of man, just as the geometrician out of straight lines and curves
constructs all the varieties of figure. To morals he gives a mathe-
matical aspect, by mapping out the incomplete and rigid construction
of human life, like the network of imaginary forms which geometricians
have conceived. For the first time there was discernible in him, as well
as in Descartes, but exaggerated and standing out more conspicuously,
that S2)ecies of intellect which produced the classic age in Europe : nut

^ If we would pay respect to antiquity, the present age is the most ancient.

^ ' To say he liath spoken to him in a dream, is no more than to say he dreamed
that God spoke to hira. To say he hath seen a vision or heard a voice, is to say
that he has dreamed between sleeping and waking. To say he speaks by super-
natural inspiration, is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong
opinion of liimself for whicli he cannot allege any sulhcient and natural reason.'

2 ' From the principal parts of nature, reason, and passion, have proceeded two
kinds of learning, mathematical and dogmatical. The former is free from contro-
versy and dispute, because it consisteth in comparing figure and motion only, in
which things truth and the interest of men oppose not each other. But in the
other there is nothing imdisputable, because it compares men, and meddles with
thoir right and profit.'

474 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK HI.

the independence of inspiration and genius which marked the Renais-
sance ; not the mature experimental methods and conceptions combined
which distinguish the present age, but the independence of argumenta-
tive reasoning, whicli, dispensing with the imagination, liberating itself
from tradition, badly practising experience, acknowledges its queen in
logic, its model in mathematics, its instrument in ratiocination, its
audience in polished society, its employment in average truth, its sub-
ject-matter in abstract humanity, its formula in ideology, and in the
French Revolution at once its glory and its condemnation, its triumph
and its end.

But whereas Descartes, in the midst of a purified society and religion,
noble and calm, enthroned intelligence and elevated man, Hobbes, in the
midst of an overthrown society and a religion run mad, degraded man
and enthroned matter. Through disgust of Puritanism, the courtiers
reduced human existence to an animal licentiousness ; through disgust
of Puritanism, Hobbes reduced human nature to its merely animal
aspect. The courtiers were practically atheists and brutish, as he was
atheistic and brutish in the province of speculafion. They had estab-
lished the fashion of instinct and egotism; he wrote the philosophy of
egotism and instinct. They had wiped out from their hearts all refined
and noble sentiments ; he wiped out from the heart all noble and refined
sentiment. He arranged their manners into a theory, gave them the
manual of their conduct, wrote down beforehand^ the maxims which
they were to reduce to practice. With him, as with them, ' the greatest
good is the preservation of life and limb ; the greatest evil is death,
especially with pain,' The other goods and the other evils are only the
parts of these. None seek or wish for anything but that which is
pleasurable. ' No man gives except for a personal advantage,' Why
are friendships good things ? ' Because they are useful ; friends serve
for defence and otherwise,' Why do we pity one another? ' Because
we imagine that a similar misfortune may befall ourselves.' Why is it
noble to pardon hira who asks it ? ' Because thus one proves confi-
dence in self,' Such is the background of the human heart. Consider
now what becomes of the most precious flowers in these blighting hands.
* Music, painting, poetry are agreeable as imitations which recall the
past, because if the past was good, it is agreeable in its imitation as a
good thing ; but if it was bad, it is agreeable in its imitation as being
past.' To this gross mechanism he reduces the fine arts ; it was per-
ceptible in his attempt to translate the Iliad. In his sight, philosophy
is a thing of like kind. ' Wisdom is serviceable, because it has in it
some kind of pi'otection ; if it is desirable in itself, it is therefore plea-
sant.' Thus there is no dignity in science. It is a pastime or an
assistance ; good, as a servant or a puppet is a good thing. Money,
being more serviceable, is worth more. ' Not he who is wise is rich, as

' His chief works were written between 1646 and 1C55.

CHAP. 1. 1 THE RESTORATION. 47)

the Stoics say ; but, on the contrary, he who is rich is wise.* As to re-
ligion, it is but ' the fear of an invisible power, wliether this be a fig-
ment, or adnpted from history by general consent.' Indeed, this was
true for a Kochester or a Charles ii.; cowards or bullies, superstitious
or blasphemers, they conceived of nothing beyond. Neither is there
any natural right. ' Before men were bound by contract one with
another, each had the right to do what he would against whom he
would.' Nor any natural friendship. ' All association is for the cause
of advantage or of glory, that is, for love of one's self, not of one's
associates. The origin of great and durable associations is not mutual
•well-wishing, but mutual fear. The desire of injuring is innate in all.
. . . Warfare was the natural condition of men before societies were
formed ; and this not incidentally, but of all against all : and this war
is of its own nature eternal.' Sectarian violence let loose the conflict
of ambitions ; the fall of governments, the overflow of soured imagina-
tions and malevolent passions, had raised up this idea of society and of
mankind. One and all, philosophers and people, yearned for monarchy
and repose. Ilobbes, the inexorable logician, would have had it ab-
solute; repression would have been more stern, peace more lasting.
The sovereign should be unopposed. Whatsoever he might do against
a subject, under whatever pretext, Avould not be injustice. He ought
to decide upon the canonical books. He was pope, and more than
pcpe. Were he to command it, his subjects should renounce Christ, at
least with their mouth; the original contract has given up to him, with-
out any reservation, all responsibility of external actions ; at least,
according to this view, the sectarian will no longer have the pretext of
his conscience in harassing the state. To such extremities had the in-
tense weariness and horrors of civil war driven a narrow but logical
intellect. Upon the secure den in which lie had with every effort im-
prisoned and confined the evil beast of prey, he laid as a final weight, in
order that he might perpetuate the captivity of humanity, the whole
philosophy and theory not simply of man, but of the remainder of the
universe. He reduced judgment to the ' combination of two terms,'
ideas to conditions of the brain, sensations to motions of the body,
general laws to simple words, all substance to corporeality, all science
to the knowledge of sensible bodies, the human being to a body capable
of motion given or received ; so that man, recognising himself only under
this despised form, and degraded in his conception of himself and of
the world, might bow beneath the burden of a necessary authority, and
submit in the end to the yoke which his rebellious nature rejects, yet
is forced to undergo. Such, in brief, is the aim which this spectacle of
the English Restoration suggests. Men deserved then this treatment,
because they gave birth to this philosophy; they were represented on
the stage as they had proved themselves to be in theory and vu
liiunuers.

4.7 Q THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

VI.

When the theatres, which Parliament had closed, were re-opened,
the change of public taste was soon manifested. Shirley, the last of
the grand old school, Avrote and lived no longer. Waller, Buckingham,
and Dryden were compelled to dish up the plays of Shakspeare and
Fletcher and Beaumont, and to adapt them to the modern style.
Pepys, who went to see Midsummer Night's Di-eam, declared that he
would never go there again ; ' for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play
that ever I saw in my life.' ^ The comedy was transformed ; the fact
was, that the public was transformed.

What an audience was that of Shakspeare and Fletcher ! What
youthful and pleasing soids ! In this evil-smelling room in which it
was necessary to burn juniper, before that miserable half-lighted stage,
before decorations worthy of an alehouse, with men playing the women's
parts, illusion enchained them. They scarcely troubled themselves about
probabilities; they could be carried in an instant over forest and ocean,
from clime to clime, across twenty years of time, through ten battles and
all the hurry of adventure. They did not care to be always laughing ;
comedy, after a burst of buffoonery, resumed its serious or tender tone.
They came less to be amused than to muse. In these youthful minds,
amidst a woof of passions and dreams, there were dark passions and
brilliant dreams whose imprisoned swarm buzzed indistinctly, waiting
for the poet to come and lay bare to them the novelty and the splendour
of heaven. The green fields revealed by a lightning flash, the gray mane
of a long and overhanging billow, a wet forest nook where the deer
raise their frightened heads, the sudden smile and purpling cheek of a
young girl in love, the sublime and various flight of all delicate senti-
ments, a cloak of ecstatic and romantic passion over all, — these were
the sights and feelings which they came to seek. They raised themselves
without any assistance to the summit of the world of ideas; they
desired to contemplate extreme generosity, absolute love ; they w^ere
not astonished at the sight of fairy-land; they entered without an effort
into the region of poetical transformation, whose light was necessary to
their eyes. They took in at a glance its excess and its caprices ; they
needed no preparation ; they followed its digressions, its whimsicalities,
the crowding of its abundant creations, the sudden prodigality of its
high colouring, as a musician follows a symphony. They were in that
transient and strained condition in which the imagination, adult and
pure, laden with desire, curiosity, force, develops man ail at once, and
in that man the most exalted and exquisite feelings.

The roisterers took the place of these. They were rich, they had
tried to invest themselves with the polish of Frenchmen ; they added
to the stage moveable decorations, music, lights, probability, comfort,

' Pepys' Diary, it. Sept. 21?, 1CG2.

CHAP. I.J THE RESTORATION. 477

every external aid ; but they wanted the heart. Imagine these foppish
and half-intoxicated men, who saw in love nothing beyond desire, and
in man nothing beyond sensuality ; Rochester in the place of Mercutio.
What part of his soul could comprehend poesy and fancy ? Romantic
poetry was altogether beyond his reach ; he could only seize the actual
world, and of this world but tlie palpable and gross externals. Give
him an exact picture of ordinary life, commonplace and probable occur-
rences, literal imitations of what he himself is and does ; lay the scene
in London, in the current year; copy his coarse words, his brutal jokes,
his conversation with the orange girls, his rendezvous in the park, his
attempts at French dissertation. Let him recognise himself, let him
find again the people and the manners he has just left behind him in
the tavern or the ante-chamber; let the theatre and the street reproduce
one another. Comedy will give him the same entertainment as real
life; he will wallow equally well there in vulgarity and lewdness; to
be present there will demand neither imagination nor wit ; eyes and
memory are the only requisites. This exact imitation will amuse him
and instruct him at the same time. Fihhy words will make him laugh
through sympathy; shameless scenes will divert him by appealing to
his recollections. The author, too, will take care to arouse him by his
plot, which generally has the deceiving of a father or a husband for its
subject. The fine gentlemen agree with the author in siding with the
gallant ; they follow his fortunes with interest, and fancy that they
themselves have the same success with the fair. Add to this, women
debauched, and willing to be debauched ; and it is manifest how these
provocations, these manners of prostitutes, that interchange of exchanges
and surprises, that carnival of rendezvous and suppers, the impudence
of the scenes only stopping short of physical demonstration, those
songs with their double meaning, those indecent speeches and repartees
which accompanied the tableaux vivants, all that stage imitation of
orgie, must have stirred up the innermost feelings of the habitual
practisers of intrigue. And what is more, the theatre gave its sanction
to their manners. By representing nothing but vice, it authorised their
vices. Authors laid it down as a rule, that all women were impudent
hussies, and that all men were brutes. Debauchery in their hands
became a matter of course, nay more, a matter of good taste ; they
teach it. Rochester and Charles ii. could quit the theatre edined in
their hearts; more convinced than ever that virtue was only a pretence,
the pretence of clever rascals who wanted to sell themselves dear.

vn.

Dryden, who was amongst the first ^ to adopt this view of the
matter, did not adopt it heartily. A kind of hazy mist, the relic of the
former age, still floated over his plays. His wealthy imagination half

> His Wild Gallant dates from 1662.

478 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

bound liim to the comedy of romance. At one time he adapted Milton'3
Paradise, Shakspeare's Tempest, and Troilns and Cressida. Another time
he imitated, in Love in a Nunnery, in 3farriage a la Mode, in The Mock
Astrologer, the imbroglios and surprises of the Spanish stage. Some-
times he displays the sparkling images and lofty metaphors of the older
national poets, sometimes the affected phraseology and cavilling wit of
Calderon and Lope de Vega. He mingles the tragic and the humorous,
the overthrow of thrones and the ordinary description of manners. But
in this awkward compromise the poetic spirit of ancient comedy dis-
appears ; only the dress and the gilding remain. The new characters
are gross and vicious, with the instincts of a lackey under the externals
of a lord ; which is the more shocking, because by it Dryden contradicts
his own talents, being at bottom grave and a poet ; he follows the
fashion, and not his own mind ; he plays the libertine with deliberate
forethought, to adapt himself to the taste of the day.^ He plays the
blackguard awkwardly and dogmatically ; he is impious without en-
thusiasm, and in measured periods. One of his gallants cries :

* Is not love love without a priest and altars ?
The temples are inanimate, and know not
What vows are made in them ; the priest stands ready
For his hire, and cares not what hearts he couples ;
Love alone is marriage. ' ^

nippolita says, ' I wished the ball might be kept perpetually in our
cloister, and that halt the handsome nuns in it might be turned to men,
for the sake of the other.' ^ Dryden has no tact or contrivance. In his
Spanish Friar, the queen, a good enough woman, tells Torrismond that
she is going to have the old dethroned king put to death, in order to
marry him, Torrismond, more at her ease. Presently she is informed
that the murder is completed. 'Now,' says she, 'let us marry; this
night, this happy nighr, is yours and mine.' * Side by side with sensual
tragedy, a comic intrigue, pushed to the most indecent familiarity,
exhibits the love of a cavalier for a married woman, who in the end

^ ' We love tc get our mistresses, and purr over them, as cats do over mice,
and let them get a little way ; and all the pleasure is to pat them back again.' —
Mock Astrologer, ii. 1.

Wildblood says to his mistress : ' I am none of those unreasonable lovers that
propose to themselves the loving to eternity. A month is commonly my stint.*
And Jacintha replies : ' Oi would not a fortnight serve oiu: turn ? ' — Mock Astro-
coger, ii. 1.

Frequently one would think Dryden was translating Hobbes, by the harshness
of his jests.

^ Love in a Nunnery, ii. 3. ' Ibid. in. 3.

* Spanish Friar, iii. 3. And jumbled up with the plot we keep meeting with
political allusions. This marks the time. Torrismond, to excuse himself from
marrying the qiieen, says, ' Power which in one age is tyranny is ripen'd in the
next to true succession. She's in possession.' — Spanish Friar, iv. 2.

CH.U'. J.] THE RESTORATION. 4 79

turns out to be his sister. Dryden discovers nothing in this situation
to shock him. He has lost the commonest repugnances of natural
modesty. Translating any pretty broad play, Amphitri/on for instance,
he finds it too pure ; he strips off all its small delicacies, and enlarges
its very improprieties.^ Thus Jupiter says :

' Kings and priest are in a manner bounrl,
For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites. ' '

And he proceeds thereupon boldly to lay bare his own despotism. At
bottom, his sophisms and his shamelessness serve Dryden as a means of
decrying by rebound the arbitrary Divinity of the theologians :

* Fate is what I,
By virtue of omnipotence, have made it ;
And power omnipotent can do no wrong !
Not to myself, because I will it so ;
Nor yet to men, for what they are is mino. —
This night I will enjoy Amphitryon's wife ;
For when I made her, I decreed her such ■
As I should please to love. ' ^

This open pedantry is changed into open lust as soon as he sees
Alcmena. No detail is omitted : Jupiter speaks his whole mind to
her, and before the maids ; and next morning, when he is going away,
she outdoes him : she hangs on to him, and indulges in the most
familiar details. All the noble externals of high gallantry are torn
off like a troublesome garment ; it is a cynical recklessness in place of
an aristocratic decency ; the scene is written after the example of
Charles ii. and Castlemuine,* not of Louis xiv. and Mme. de INIontespan.

VIII.

I pass over several writers : Crowne, author of Sir Courtly Nice ;
Shadwell, an imitator of Ben Jonson ; Mrs. Aphra Behn, who calls her-
self Astrtea, a spy and a courtesan, paid by government and the public.
Etheredge is the first to set the example of imitative comedy in his

1 Plautus' Amphitryon has been imitated by Dryden and Moliere. Sir Walter
Scott, in the introduction to Dryden's play, says : ' He is, in general, coarse and
vulgar, where Moliere is witty ; and where the Frenchman ventures upon a double
meaning, the Englishman always contrives to make it a single one.' — Tr.
^ Amphitryon, i. 1. * Ibid.

* As Jupiter is departing, on the plea of daylight, Alcmena says to him :
' But you and I will draw our curtains close,
Extinguish daylight, and put out the sun.
Come back, my lord. . . .
You have not yet laid long enough in bed
To warm your widowed side.' — Act ii. 2.
Compare Plautus' Roman matron and Moliere 's honest Frenchwoman with this
expansive personage.

480 THE CLASSIC AGE, [BOOK III.

Man of Fosliion^ and to depict only the manners of his age; for the
rest he is an open roisterer, and frankly describes his habits :

* From hunting whores, and haunting play.
And minding nothing all the day,
And all the night too, you will say. ' . , .

Snch were his pursuits in London ; and further on, in a letter from
Ealisbon to Lord Middleton,

' He makes grave legs in formal fetters,
Converses with fools and writes dull letters ; '

and gets small consolation out of the German ladies. In this grave mood
Etheredge undertook the duties of an ambassador. One day, having
dined too freely, he fell from the top of a staircase, and broke his neck;
a loss of no great importance. But the hero of this society was William
Wycherley, the coarsest writer who has polluted the stage. Being sent
to France during the Eevolution, he there became a Roman Catholic ;
then on his return abjured ; then in the end, as Pope tells us, abjured
again. Robbed of their Protestant ballast, these shallow brains ran from
dogma to dogma, from superstition to incredulity or indifference, to end
in a state of fear. He had learnt of M. de Montausier^ the art of wearing
gloves and a peruke, which sufficed in those days to make a gentleman.
This merit, and the success of a filthy piece, Love in a Wood, drew upon
him the eyes of the Duchess of Cleveland, mistress of the king and of
anybody. This woman, who used to have amours with a rope-dancer,
picked him up one day in the very midst of the Ring. She put her
head out of her carriage-window, and cried to him before all, ' Sir, you

are a rascal, a villain, the son of a .' Touched by this compliment,

he accepted her favours, and in consequence obtained those of the king.
He lost them, married a woman of bad temper, ruined himself, remained
seven years in prison, passed the remainder of his life in pecuniary
difficulties, regretting his youth, losing his memory, scribbling bad
verses, which he got Pope to correct, pestering him with his pride and
self-esteem, stringing together dull obscenities, dragging his spent body
and enervated brain through the stages of misanthropy and libertinage,
playing the miserable part of a toothless roisterer and a white-haired
blackguard. Eleven days before his death he married a young girl, who
turned out to be a strumpet. He ended as he had begun, by unskil-
fulness and misconduct, having succeeded neither in becoming happy
nor honest, having used his vigorous intelligence and real talent only
to his own injury and the injury of others.

The reason was, that Wycherley was not an epicurean born. His
nature, genuinely English, that is to say, energetic and sombre, rebelled

* Himself a Huguenot, who had become a Roman Catholic, and the husband of
,1 ulie d'Angennes, for whom the French poets composed the celebrated Guirlande.
— Tb.

CHAP. l] THE EESTOEATION. 431

against the easy and amiable carelessness whicli enables one to take life as
a pleasure-party. His style is laboured, and troublesome to read. His
tone is virulent and bitter. Pie frequently forces his comedy in order
to get at spiteful satire. Effort and animosity mark all that he says
or puts into the mouths of others. It is Hobbes, not meditative and
calm, but active and angry, who sees in man nothing but vice, yet feels
himself man to the very core. The only fault he rejects is hypocrisy ;
the only virtu.e he preaches is frankness. He wants others to confess
their vice, and he begins by confessing his own.

• Though I cannot lie like them (the poets), I am as vain as they ; I cannot
but publicly give your Grace my humble acknowledgments. . . . This is the poet's
gratitude, which in plain English is only pride and ambition.' '

Vv^e find in him no poetry of expression, no glimpse of the ideal, no
system of morality which could console, raise, or purify men. He shuts
them up in their waywardness and uncleanness, and settles himself
along with them. He shows them the filth of the shoals in which he
confines them ; he expects them to breathe this atmosphere ; he plunges
them into it, not to disgust them with it as by an accidental fall, but to
accustom them to it as if it were their natural element. He tears down
the partitions and decorations by which they endeavour to conceal their
state, or regulate their disorder. He takes pleasure in making them
fight, he delights in the hubbub of their unfettered instincts ; he loves
the violent ragings of the human mass, the confusion of their crimes,
the rawness of their bruises. He strips their lusts, sets them forth at
full length, feels them in their rebound ; and whilst he condemns them
as nauseous, he relishes them. People take what pleasure they can
get : the drunkards in the suburbs, if asked how they can relish their
miserable liquor, will tell you it makes them drunk as soon as better
stuff, and that is the only pleasure they have.

I can understand that an author may dare much in a novel. It is a
psychological study, akin to criticism or history, having almost equal
licence, because it contributes almost equally to explain the anatomy of
the heart. It is quite necessary to expose moral diseases, especially
when this is done to add to science, coldly, accurately, and in the
fashion of a dissection. Such a book is by its nature abstruse ; must
be read in the study, by lamp-light. But transport it to the stage,
exaggerate the bed-room liberties, give them additional life by a few
disreputable scenes, bestow bodily vigour upon them by the energetic
action and words of the actresses ; let the eyes and the senses be filled
with them, not the eyes of an individual spectator, but of a thousand
men and women mingled together in the pit, excited by the interest of
the story, by the correctness of the literal imitation, by the glitter of

1 The Dramatic Worhs of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar,
ed. Leigh Hunt, 1840. Dedication of Love in a Wood to her Grace the Duchess

of Cleveland.

2 II

482 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK IIL

the lights, by the noise of applause, by the contagion of impressions
which run like a shudder across excited and stretched nerves. That
was the spectacle which Wycherley furnished, and which the court
appreciated. Is it possible that a public, and a select public, could
come and listen to such scenes ? In Love in a Wood, amidst the com-
plications of nocturnal rendezvous, and violations effected or begun, we
meet with a witling, named Dapperwit, who desires to sell his mistress
Lucy to a fine gentleman of that age. Ranger. With what minuteness
he bepraises her ! He knocks at her door ; the intended purchaser
meantime, growing impatient, is treating him like a slave. The mother
comes in, but wishing to sell Lucy on her own part and for her own
profit, scolds them and packs them off. Next appears an old puritanical
usurer and hypocrite, named Gripe, who at first will not bargain : —

* Mrs. Joyner. You must send for something to entertain her ■with. . . . Upon
my life a gi-oat ! what will this purchase ?

Gripe. Two black pots of ale and a cake, at the cellar. — Come, the wine has
arsenic in't. . . .

Mrs. J. A treat of a groat ! I will not wag.

O. Why don't you go ? Here, take more money, and fetch what you will ; take
here, half-a- crown.

Mrs. J. What will half-a-crown do ?

O. Take a crown then, an angel, a piece ; — begone !

Mrs. J. A treat only will not serve my turn ; I must buy the poor wretch there
some toys.

G. What toys ? what ? speak qiuckly.

Mrs. J. Pendants, necklaces, fans, ribbons, points, laces, stockings, gloves. . . .

G. But here, take half a piece for the other things.

Mrs. J. Half a piece ! —

G. Prithee, begone ! — take t'other piece then — two pieces — three pieces — five !
here ; 'tis all I have. ,

Mrs. J. I must have the broad-seal ring too, or I stir not. ' ^

She goes away at last, having extorted all, and Lucy plays the innocent,
seems to think that Gripe is a dancing-master, and asks for a lesson.
What scenes, what double meanings ! At last she calls out, her mother,
Mrs Crossbite, breaks open the door, and enters with men placed there
beforehand ; Gripe is caught in the trap ; they threaten to call in the
constable, they swindle him out of five hundred pounds. Need I
recount the plot of the Country Wife f It is useless to wish to skim
the subject only ; one sinks deeper and deeper. Horner, a man returned
from France, spreads the report that he is no longer able to trouble the
peace of husbands. You may imagine what becomes of such a subject in
Wycherley's hands, and he draws from it all that it contains. Women
converse about Horner's condition, even before him ; they suffer them-
selves to be undeceived, and boast of it. Three of them come to him and
hold a feast, drink, sing — such songs ! The excess of orgie triumphs,

1 Act iii. 3.

CHAP. I.] THE EESTORATION. 483

adjudges itself the crown, sets itself forth in maxims, ' Our virtue,' says
one of them, ' is like the statesman's religion, the quaker's word, the
gamester's oath, and the great man's honour ; but to cheat those that
trust us.' ^ In the last scene, the suspicions which had been aroused
are set at rest by a new declaration of Horner. All the marriages are
polluted, and the carnival ends by a dance of deceived husbands. To
crown all, Horner recommends his example to the public, and the actress
who comes on to recite the epilogue, completes the shamefulness of the
piece, by warning gallants that they must look what they are doing ; for
that if they can deceive men, * we women — there's no cozening us.' ^

But the special and most extraordinary sign of the times is, that
amid all these provocatives, no repellent circumstance is omitted, and
that the narrator seems to aim as much at disgusting as at depraving
us.^ The fine gentlemen, even the ladies, introduce into their con-
versation the ways and means by which, since the sixteenth century,
love has endeavoured to adorn itself. Dapperwit, when making an
offer of Lucy, says, in order to account for the delay :

' Pish ! give her but leave to . . . put on . . . the long patch under the left
eye ; awaken the roses on her cheeks with some Spanish wool, and warrant her
breath with some lemon-peel.'*

Lady Flippant, alone in the park, cries out :

' Unfortunate lady that I am ! I have left the herd on purpose to be chased, and
have wandered this hour here ; but the park affords not so much as a satyr for lue ;
and no Burgundy man or drunken scourer will reel my way. The rag-women
and cinder-women have better luck than I.' ^

If these are the sweetest morsels, judge of the rest ! Wycherley
makes it his business to revolt even the senses ; the nose, the eyes, every-
thing suffers in his plays; the audience must have had the stomach of a
sailor. And from this abyss English literature has ascended to the
severity of morality, the excessive decency which it now possesses ! This
stage is a declared war against beauty and delicacy of every kind. If
"Wycherley borrows a character anywhere, it is only to do it violence,
or de"-rade it to the level of his own characters. If he imitates the

1 The Country Wife, v. 4.

2 Eead the epilogue, and see what words and details authors dared then to put
in the mouths of actresses.

^ ' That spark, who has his fruitless designs upon the bed-ridden rich widow,
down to the sucking heiress in her . . . clout. ' — Love in a Wood, i. 2.

Mrs. Flippant : ' Though I had married the fool, I thought to have reserved the
wit as well as other ladies. ' — Ibid.

Dapperwit : ' I will contest with no rival, not with my old rival your coach-
man. ' — Ihid.

* She has a complexion like a Holland clieese, and no more teeth left, than such
as sX^Q a haut gout to her breath. ' — Ihid. ii. 1.

^4 The Country Wife., iii. 2.

48-i THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

Agnes cf Mcliere,' as he does in the Country Wife, he marries her in
order to profane marriage, deprives her of honour, still more of shame,
still more of grace, and changes her artless tenderness into shameless
instincts and scandalous confessions. If he takes Shakspeare's Viola,
as in the Plain Dealer, it is to drag her through the vileness of infamy,
amidst brutalities and surprises. If he translates the part of CeHmene,
he wipes out at one stroke the manners of a great lady, the woman's
delicacy, the tact of the lady of the house, the politeness, the refined
air, the superiority of wit and knowledge of the world, in order to
substitute the impudence and cheats of a foul-mouthed courtesan. If
he invents an almost innocent girl, Hippolita,^ he begins by putting
into her mouth words that will not bear transcribing. Whatever he
does or says, whether he copies or originates, blames or praises, his stage
is a defamation of mankind, which repels even when it attracts, and
which sickens one while it corrupts.

A certain gift hovers over all — namely, vigour — Avhich is never
absent in England, and gives a peculiar character to their virtues as
to their vices. When we have removed the oratorical and heavily
constructed phrases in the French manner, we get at the genuine
English talent — a deep sympathy with nature and hfe. Wycherley had
that lucid and vigorous perspicacity which in any j^articular situation
seizes upon gesture, physical expression, evident detail, which pierces to
the depths of the crude and base, which hits off, not men in general, and
passion as it ought to be, but an individual man, and passion as it is.
He is a realist, not of set purpose, as the realists of our day, but
naturally. In a violent manner he lays on his plaster over the grinning
and pimpled faces of his rascals, in order to bring under our very eyes
the stern mask to which the living imprint of their ugliness has clung
in a fleeting manner. He crams his plays with incident, he multiplies
action, he pushes comedy to the verge of dramatic effect ; he hustles
his characters amidst surprises and violence, and all but stultifies them
in order to exaggerate his satire. Observe in Olivia, a copy of Celi-
mene, the fury of the passions which he depicts. She paints her friends
as does Celimene, but with what insults ! Novel, a coxcomb, says :

' The letter of Agnes, in Moliere's VEcole des Femmes, iii. 4, begins thus : ' Je
veuK vous ecrire, et je suis bien en peine par ou je m'y prendrai. J'ai des pensees
que je desirerais que vous sussiez ; mais je ne sais comment faire pour vous les
dire, et je me defie de mes paroles,' etc. Observe how Wj'cherley translates it :
'Dear, sweet Mr. Horner, my husband would have me send you a base, rude,
unmannerly letter ; but I won't — and would have me forbid you loving me ; but
I won't — and would have me say to you, I hate you, poor Mr. Horner ; but I
won't tell a lie for him — for I'm sui'e if you and I were in the country at cards
together, I could not help treading on your toe under the table, or rubbing knees
with you, and staring in your face, till you saw me, and then looking down, and
blushing for an hour togethei-,' etc. — Country Wife, iy. 2.

^ In the Gentleman Dancing-Master.

CHAr. I.] THE RESTORATION. 485

' But, as I was saying, madam, I have been treated to-day with all the
ceremony and kindness imaginable at my lady Autumn's. But the
nauseous old woman at the upper hand of her table' . . . Olivia:
' Revives the old Grecian custom, of serving in a death's head with
their banquets. ... I detest her hollow cherry cheeks : she looks like
an old coach new painted. . . . She is still most splendidly, gallantly
tigly, and looks like an ill piece of daubing in a rich frame.' ^ The
scene is borrowed from Moliere's Misanthrope and the Critique de rEcole
des Femmes ; but how transformed! Our modern nerves would not
endure the portrait Olivia draws of INIanly, her lover; he hears her
imawares ; she forthwith stands before him, laughs at him to his face,
declares herself to be married ; tells him she means to keep the dia-
monds which he has given her, and defies him. Fidelia says to her:

' But, madam, what could make you dissemble love to him, when 'twas so hard
a thing for you ; and flatter his love to you ? ' Olivia. ' That which makes all the
world Hatter and dissemble, 'twas his money : I had a real passion for that. . . .
As soon as 1 had his money, I hastened his departure like a wife, who when she
has made the most of a dying husband's breath, pulls away his pillow. '*

The last phrase is rather that of a morose satirist than an accurate
observer. The woman's impudence is like a professed courtesan's. In
love at first sight Avith Fidelia, whom she takes for a young man, she
hangs upon her neck, ' stuffs her with kisses,' gropes about in the dark,
crying, 'Where are thy lips?' There is a kind of animal ferocity in
her love. She sends her husband off by an improvised comedy ; then
skipping about like a dancing girl, cries out :

' Go husband, and come up, friend : just the buckets in the well ; the absence
of one brings the other.' 'But I hope, like them too, they will not meet in the
way, jostle, and clash together.' ^

Surprised in flagrante delicto, and having confessed all to her cousin, as
soon as she sees a chance of safety, she swallows her avowal with the
effrontery of an actress : —

• Eliza. Well, cousin, this, I confess, was reasonable hypocrisy ; you were the
better for 't.

Olivia. What hypocrisy ?

E. Why, this last deceit of your husband was lawful, since in your own
defence.

0. What deceit ? I'd have you know I never deceived my husband.

E. You do not imderstand me, sure ; I say, this was an honest come-off, and a
o-ood one. But 'twas a sign your gallant had had enough of yoar conversation,
since he could so dexterously cheat your husband in passing for a woman.

0. What d'ye mean, once more, with my gallant, and passing for a woman ?

E. What do you mean ? you see your husband took him for a woman !

0. Whom?

The Plain Dealer, ii. 1. ^Ihid. iv. 2. ' Ibid.

4S6 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

E. Heyday ! why, the man he found you with. . . .

O. Lord, you rave sure !

E. Why, did you not tell me last night. . . . Fy, this fooling is so insipid, 'tis
ofTensive.

0. And fooling with my honour will be more offensive. . .

E. 0 admirable confidence ! . . .

O. Confidence, to me ! to me such language ! nay, then I'll never see your
face again. . . . Lettice, where are you ? Let us begone from this censorious ill
■woman. . . .

E. One word first, pray, madam ; can you swear that whom your husband
found you with . . .

0. Swear ! ay, that whosoever 'twas that stole up, unknown, into my room,
when 'twas dark, I know not, whether man or woman, by heavens, by all that's
good ; or, may I never more have joys here, or in the other world ! Nay, may
I eternally —

E. Be damned. So, so, you are damned enough already by your oaths. . . .
Yet take this advice with you, in this plain-dealing age, to leave off forswearing
yourself. . . .

0. 0 hideous, hideous advice ! let us go out of the hearing of it. She will
spoil us, Lettice. ' ^

Here is animation ; and if I dared relate the boldness and the assevera-
tion in the night scene, it would easily appear that Mme. Marneffe ^ had
a sister, and Balzac a predecessor.

There is a character who shows in a concise manner Wycherley's
talent and his morality, wholly formed of energy and indeUcacy, —
Manly, the * plain dealer,' so manifestly the author's favourite, that his
contemporaries gave him the name of his hero for a surname. Manly is
copied after Alceste, and the great difference between the two heroes
shows the difference between the two societies and the two countries.*
^lanly is not a courtier, but a ship-captain, with the bearing of a sailor
of the time, his cloak stained with tar, and smelling of brandy,* ready
with blows or foul oaths, calling those he came across dogs and s]aves,
and when they displeased him, kicldng them down stairs. And he
speaks in this fashion to a lord with a voice like a mastiff. Then, when
tiie poor nobleman tries to whisper something in his ear,

' My lord, all that you have made me know by your whispering which I knew
not before, is that you have a stinking breath ; there's a secret for your secret. '

» The Plain Dealer, v. 1. ^ See note 2, p. 256.

3 Compare with the sayings of Alceste, in Moliere's Misanthrope, such tirades
as this : ' Such as you, like common whores and pickpockets, are only dangerous
to those you embrace. ' And with the character of Philinte, in the same French
play, such phrases as these : ' But, faith, could you think I was a friend to those
I hugged, kissed, flattered, bowed to ? When their backs were turned, did not I
tell you they were rogues, villains, rascals, whom I despised and hated ? '

* Olivia says : ' I shall not have again my alcove smeU like a cabin, my chamber
perfumed with his tarpaulin Brandenburgn ; and hear voUies ot brandy-sighs,
eno\igh to make a fog in one's room.' — 21ie Plain Dealer, ii. 1.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 437

When he is in Olivia's drawing-room, ^vith * these fluttering parrots of
the town, these apes, these echoes of men,' he bawls out as if he were
on his quarter-deck, ' Peace, you Bartholomew, fair buffoons ! ' He
seizes them by the collar, and says :

' Why, you impudent, pitiful wretches, . . . you are in all thing's so like women,
that you may think it in me a kind of cowardice to beat you. Begone, I say. . . .
No chattering, baboons ; instantly begone, or ' . . .

Then he turns them out of the room. These are the manners of a
plain-dealing man. He has been ruined by Olivia, whom he loves, and
who dismisses him. Poor Fidelia, disguised as a man, and whom he
takes for a timid youth, comes and finds him while he is venting his

anger

' F. I warrant you, sir ; for, at worst, I could begj or steal for you.

M. Nay, more bragging ! . . . You said you'd beg for me.

F. I did, sir.

M. Then you shall beg for me.

F. With all my heart, sir.

M. That is, pimp for me.

F. How, sir ?

M. D' ye start? . . . No more dissemhling : here, (I say,) you must go use it
for me to Olivia. . . . Go, flatter, lie, kneel, promise, anything to get her for me :
I cannot live unless I have her. ' ^

And when Fidelia returns to him, saying that Olivia has embraced him,
by force, with an abandonment of love, he exclaims :

* Her love! — a whore's, a witch's love ! — But what, did she not kiss well, sir ?
I'm sure, I thought her lips — but I must not think of 'em more — but yet they
are such I could still kiss, — grow to, — and then tear off with my teeth, grind 'em
into mammocks, and spit 'em into her cuckold's face. ' ^

These savage words indicate savage actions. He goes by night to enter
Olivia's house with Fidelia, and under her name ; and Fidelia tries to
prevent him, through jealousy. Then his blood boils, a storm of fury
mounts to his face, and he speaks to her in a whispering, hissing voice :

* WTiat, you are my rival, then ! and therefore you shall stay, and keep the
door for me, whilst I go in for you ; hut when I'm gone, if you dare to stir oflF
from this very board, or breathe the least murmuring accent, I'll cut her throat
first ; and if you love her, you will not venture her life. — Nay, then I'll cut your
throat too, and I know you love your own life at least. . . . Not a word more, lest
I begin my revenge on her by killing you.' ^

He knocks over the husband, another traitor, seizes from Olivia the
casket of jewels he had given her, casts her one or two of them, saying,
' Here, madam, I never yet left my wench unpaid,' and gives this same
casket to Fideha, whom he marries. All these actions then appeared
natural. Wycherley took to himself in his dedication the title of his
hero, Plain Dealer ; he fancied he had dra\vn the portrait of a frank,

^ The Plain Dealer, ill 1. » Hid. iv. 1. ^ Hid. iv. 2.

4S8 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

honest man, and praised himself for having set the public a fine example ;
he had only given them the model of an avowed and energetic brute.
That was all that was left of manliness in this pitiable world. Wycherley
deprived man of his ill-fitting French cloak, and displayed him with his
framework of muscles, and in his naked shamelessness.

And in their midst, a great poet, blind, and fallen, his soul saddened
by tlie misery of the times, thus depicted the madness of the infernal

rout ;

' Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd
Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for itself . . . who niore oft than he
In temples and at altars, when the priest
Turns atheist, as did Eli's sons, who fiU'd
With lust and violence the house of God ?
In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury, and outrage : and when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. ' ^

2. The "Worldlings.
I.

In the seventeenth century a new mode of life was inaugurated in
Europe, the worldly, which soon took the lead of and shaped every
other. In France especially, and in England, it appeared and gained
ground, from the same causes and at the same time.

In order to people the drawing-rooms, a certain political condition
is necessary ; and this condition, which is the supremacy of the king in
combination with a regular system of police, was established at the
same period on both sides of the Channel. A regular police brings
about peace among men, draws them out of their feudal independence
and provincial isolation, increases and facilitates intercommunication,
confidence, union, conveniences, and pleasures. The kingly supremacy
calls into existence a court, the centre of intercourse, from which all
favours flow, and which calls for a display of pleasure and splendour.
The aristocracy thus attracted to one another, and attracted to the throne
by security, curiosity, amusement, and interest, meet together, and
become at once men of the world and men of the court. They are no
longer, like the barons of a preceding age, standing in their lofty halls,
armed and stern, possessed by the idea that they might perhaps, when
they quit their palace, cut each other to pieces, and that if they fall to
blov/s in the precincts of the court, the executioner is ready to cut off
their hand and stop the bleeding with a red-hot iron ; knowing, more-

* Paradise Lost, hook i. v. 490-502.

CHAP. I.] THE EESTOKATIOX. 489

over, that the king may probably have them beheaded to-morrow, and
ready accordingly to cast themselves on their knees and break out into
protestations of faithful submissiveness, but counting under their breath
the number of swords that will be mustered on their side, and the
trusty men who keep sentinel behind the drawbridge of their castles.^
The rights, privileges, constraints, and attractions of feudal life have
disappeared. There is no more need that the manor should be a fort-
ress. These men can no longer experience the joy of reigning there as
in a petty state. It has palled on them, and they quit it. Having no
further cause to quarrel with the king, they go to him. His court is a
drawing-room, most agreeable to the sight, and most serviceable to
those who frequent it. Here are festivities, splendid furniture, a
decked and chosen company, news and tittle-tattle ; here they find
pensions, titles, places for them and theirs ; they receive both amuse-
ment and profit ; it is all gain and all pleasure. Here they attend
the levee, assist at dinners, return to the ball, sit down to play, are
there when the king goes to bed. Here they cut a dash with their
half-French dress, their wigs, their hats loaded with feathers, their
trunk-hose, their cannions, the large rosettes on their shoes. The ladies
paint and patch their faces, display robes of magnificent satin and velvet,
laced up with silver and dragging behind, and above you may see their
white busts, whose brilliant nakedness is extended to their shoulders and
arms. They are gazed upon, saluted, approached. The king rides on
horseback to Hyde Park ; by his side canter the queen, and with her
the two mistresses. Lady Castlemaine and ISIrs. Stewart : ' the queen in
a white-laced waistcoate and a crimson short pettycoate, and her hair
dressed a la negligence ; . . . IMrs. Stewart with her hat cocked and a
red plume, with her sweet eye, little Eoman nose, and excellent taille.' ^
Then they returned to Whitehall, ' where all the ladies walked, talking
and fiddling Avith their hats and feathers, and changing and trying one
another's by one another's heads, and laughing.'^ In such fine company
there was no lack of gallantry. Perfumed gloves, pocket mirrors, work-
boxes fitted up, apricot paste, essences, and other Httle love-tokens, came
over every week from Paris. London furnished more substantial gifts,
ear-rings, diamonds, brilliants, and golden guineas ; the fair ones put
up with these, as if they had come from a greater distance.* Intrigues
abounded — Heaven knows how many or of what kind. Naturally, also,
conversation takes a similar tone. They did not mince the adventures
of Miss Warmestre the haughty, who, 'deceived apparently by a bad
reckoning, took the liberty of lying-in in the midst of the court.'*
They spoke in whispers about the attempts of JMiss Hobart, or the
happy misfortune of Miss Churchill, who, being very plain, but having

^ Consult all Shakspeare's historical plays.

2 Pepijs' Diary, ii. July 13, 1663. ^ Jhkl.

* Jleinoires de Grammont, by A. Hamilton. ^ Ibid. ch. ix.

490 THE CLASSIC AGE [BOOK IIL

the wit to fall from her horse, touched the eyes and heart of the
Duke of York. The Chevalier de Grammont related to the king the
history of Termes, or of Poussatin the almoner : every one leaves the
dance to hear it ; and when it is over, every one bursts out laughing.
We perceive that this is not the world of Louis xiv., and yet it is a
world ; and if it has more froth, it runs with the identical current.
The great object here also is selfish amusement, and to put on ap-
pearances; people strive to be men of fashion ; a coat gives glory.
Grammont was in despair when the roguery of his valet obliged him
to wear the same suit twice over. Another courtier piques himself on
his songs and his guitar-playing, ' Russell had a collection of two or
three hundred quadrilles in tabLiture, all of which he used to dance
without ever having studied them.' Jermyn was known for his success
with the fair. 'A gentleman,' said Etheredge, 'ought to dress well, dance
well, fence well, have a talent for love-letters, a pleasant voice in a room,
tc be always very amorous, sufficiently discreet, but not too constant.'
These are already the court manners as they continued in France up to
the time of Louis xvi. With such manners, words take the place of
deeds. Life is passed in visits and conversations. The art of conversing
became the chief of all ; of course, to converse agreeably, to employ an
hour, twenty subjects in an hour, hinting always, without going deep,
in such a fashion that conversation should not be a labour, but a pro-
menade. It was followed up by letters written in the evening, by
madrigals or epigrams to be read in the morning, by drawing-room
tragedies, or caricatures of society. In this manner a new literature
was produced, the work and the portrait of the world, which was at
once its audience and its model, which sprung from it, and ended in it.

IL

The art of conversation being then a necessity, people set themselves
to acquire it. A revolution was effected in mind as well as in manners.
As soon as circumstances assume new aspects, thought assumes a new
form. The Renaissance is ended, the Classic Age begins, and the artist
makes room for the author. Man is returned from his first voyage
round the world of facts ; the enthusiasm, the labour of a stirred ima-
gination, the tumultuous sensation of new ideas, all the faculties which
a first discovery calls into play, have become satiated, then depressed.
The incentive is blunted, because the work is done. The strangeness,
the far vistas, the unbridled originality, the all-powerful flights of genius
aimed at the centre of truth through the extremes of folly, all the
characteristics of the great discovery, are lost to sight. The imagination
is tempered ; the mind is disciplined : it retraces its steps ; it walks its
own domain once more with a satisfied curiosity, an acquired experience.
Judgment, as it were, chews the cud and corrects itself It finds a
religion, an art, a philosophy, to reform or to form anew. It is no
longer the minister of inspu-ed intuition, but of a regular process of

CHAT., I.J THE RESTORATION. 491

decomposition. It no longer feels or looks for the generality ; it handles
and observes the specialty. It selects and classifies; it refines and
regulates. It ceases to be the creator, and becomes the commentator.
It quits the province of invention and settles down into criticism. It
enters upon that magnificent and confused aggregate of dogmas and
forms, in which the preceding age has gathered up indiscriminately its
dreams and discoveries ; it draws thence the ideas which it modifies and
verifies. It arranges them in long chains of simple ratiocination, which
descend link by link to the vulgar apprehension. It expresses them in
exact terms, which present a graduated series, step by step, to the vulgar
reasoning power. It marks out in the entire field of thought a series of
compartments and a network of passages, which, excluding error and
digression, lead gradually every mind to every object. It becomes at
last clear, convenient, charming. And the world lends its aid; con-
tingent circumstances finish the natural revolution ; the taste becomes
changed through a declivity of its own, but also through the influence
of the court. When conversation becomes the chief business of life, it
modifies style after its own image, and according to its peculiar needs.
It repudiates digression, excessive metaphor, impassioned exclamations,
all loose and overstrained ways. "We cannot bawl, gesticulate, dream
aloud, in a drawing-room ; we restrain ourselves ; we criticise and keep
watch over ourselves ; we pass the time in narration and discussion ;
we stand in need of concise expression, exact language, clear and con •
nected reasoning ; otherwise we cannot fence or comprehend each other.
Correct style, good language, conversation, are self-generated, and very
quickly perfected ; for refinement is the aim of the man of the world :
he studies to render everything more becoming and more service-
able, his chattels and his speech, his periods and his dress. Art and
artifice are there the distinguishing mark. People pride themselves on
being perfect in their mother tongue, never to miss the correct sense of
any word, to avoid vulgar expressions, to string together their antitheses,
to develop their thoughts, to employ rhetoric. Nothing is more marked
than the contrast of the conversations of Shakspeare and Fletcher with
those of Wycherley and Congreve. In Shakspeare the dialogue re-
sembles an assault of arms ; we could imagine men of skill fencing
with words as it w^ere in a fencing-school. They play the buflfoon, sing,
think aloud, burst out into a laugh, into puns, into fishwomen's talk
and into poets' talk, into quaint whimsicalities ; they have a taste for the
ridiculous, the sparkhng ; one of them dances while he speaks ; they
would willingly walk on their hands ; there is not one grain of calcula-
tion to more than three grains of folly in their heads. Here, on the
other hand, the characters are steady ; they reason and dispute ; ratioci-
nation is the basis of their style ; they are so perfect that the thing is
overdone, and we see through it all the author stringing his phrases.
They arrange a tableau, multiply ingenious comparisons, balance well-
ordered periods. One character delivers a satire, another sexves up a

492 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

little essay on morality. "We might draw from the comedies of the
time a volume of sentences ; they are charged with literary morsels
which foreshadow the Spectator} They hunt for clever and humorous
expressions, they clothe indecent circumstances with decent words; they
skip nimbly over the fragile ice of decorum, and leave their mark with-
out breaking it. I see gentlemen, seated in gilt arm-chairs, of quiet wit
and studied speech, cool in observation, eloquent sceptics, expert in the
fashions, lovers of elegance, dainty of fine talk as much from vanity as
from taste, who, while conversing bet^^een a compliment and a rever-
ence, will no more neglect their gooJ style than their neat gloves or
their hat.

Ill

Amongst the best and most agreeable specimens of this new refine-
ment, appears Sir William Temple, a diplomatist and man of the world,
prudent, wise, and polite, gifted with tact in conversation and in busi-
ness, expert in the knowledge of the times, and in not compromising
himself, adroit in pressing forward and in standing aside, who knew
how to attract to himself the favour and the expectations of England,
to obtain the eulogies of men of letters, of savants, of politicians, of the
people, to gain a European reputation, to win all the crowns appro-
priated to science, patriotism, virtue, genius, without having too much
of science, patriotism, genius, or virtue. Such a life is the masterpiece
of that age : fine externals on a foundation not so fine ; this is its
abstract. His mode as an author agrees with his maxims as a politician.
His principles and style are homogeneous ; a genuine diplomatist, such
as one meets in the drawing-rooms, having probed Europe and touched
everywhere the bottom of things ; tired of everything, specially of
enthusiasm, admirable in an arm-chair or at a levee, a good story-
teller, waggish if need were, but in moderation, accomplished in the
art of maintaining the dignity of his station and of enjoying himself.
In his retreat at Sheen, afterwards at Moor Park, he employs his leisure
in writing ; and he writes as a man of his rank would speak, very
well, that is to say, with dignity and facility, particularly when he writes
of the countries he has visited, of the incidents he has seen, the noble
amusements which serve to pass his time.^ He has an income of fifteen
hundred a year, and a nice sinecure in Ireland. He retired from public
life during momentous struggles, siding neither with the king nor
against him, resolved, as he tells us himself, not to set himself against
the current when the current is irresistible. He lives peacefully in
the country with his wife, his sister, his secretary, his dependants,
receiving the visits of strangers, who are anxious to see the negotiator

1 Take, for example, Farquliar's Beaux Stratagem, ii. 1.

^ Consult especially, Obsei-vations upon the United Provinces o/ the Netherlands;
Of Gardening.

CHAP. I.l THE KESTORATIOX. 49 J

J

of the Triple AHIance, and sometimes of the new King "William, -who,
unable to obtain his services, comes occasionally to seek his counsel.
He plants and gardens, in a fertile soil, in a country the climate ot'
which agrees with him, amongst regular flower-beds, by the side of a
very straight canal, bordered by a straight terrace; and he lauds himself
in set terms, and with suitable discreetness, for the character he possesses
and the part he has chosen : —

' I have often wondered how such sharp and violent invectives come to be made
so generally against Epicurus, by the ages that followed him, whose admirable wit,
felicity of expression, excellence of nature, sweetness of conversation, temperance
of life and constancy of death, made him so beloved by his friends, admhed by
his scholars, and honoured by the Athenians.' ^

He does well to defend Epicurus, because he has followed his precepts,
avoiding every great disorder of the intelligence, and installing himself,
like one of Lucretius' gods, in the interspace of worlds ; as he says :

' Where factions were once entered and rooted iu a state, they thought it
madness for good men to meddle with pubUc affairs. '

And again :

' The true service of the public is a business of so miich labour and so much
care, that though a good and wise man may not refuse it, if he be called to it by
his Prince or his country, and thinks he may be of more than vulgar use, yet he
will seldom or never seek it ; but leaves it commonly to men who, under the dis-
guise of public good, pursue their own designs of wealth, power, and such bastard
honours as usually attend them, not that which is the true, and only true, reward
of virtue. ' ^

This is how he reveals himself. Thus presented to us, he goes on to
talk of the gardening which he practises, and first of the six grand
Epicureans who have illustrated the doctrine of their master — Cassar,
Atticus, Lucretius, Horace, Mjccenas, Virgil ; then of the various sorts
of gardens which have a name in the world, from the garden of Eden,
and the garden of Alcinous, to those of Holland and Italy; and all this
at some length, like a man who listens to himself and is listened to by
others, who does rather profusely the honours of his house and of his
wit to his guests, but does them with grace and dignity, not dogmati-
cally nor haughtily, but in varied tones, aptly modulating his voice and
gestures. He recounts the four kinds of grapes which he has introduced
into England, and confesses that he has been extravagant, yet does not
regret it ; for five years he has not once wished to see London, He
intersperses technical advice with anecdotes; whereof one relates to
Charles ii., who praised the English climate above all others, saying :

' He thought that was the best climate, where he could be abroad in the air
with pleasure, or at least without trouble or inconvenience, the most days of the
year, and the most hom-s of the day.'
Another about the Bishop of Munster, who, unable to grow anything

1 Temple's AVorks: 0/ Gardening, ii. 190. * Hid. ISl.

494 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK HT.

but cherries in his orchard, had collected all the varieties, and so per-
fected the trees that he had fruit from May to September, The reader
feels an inward gratification when he hears an eyewitness relate minute
details of such great men. Our attention is aroused immediately ; we
in consequence imagine ourselves denizens of the court, and smile com-
placently : no matter if the details be slender ; they serve passably well,
they constitute ' a half hour with the aristocracy,' like a lordly way of
taking snulF, or shaking the lace of one's ruffles. Such is the interest
of courtly conversation ; it can be held about nothing ; the excellence
of the manner lends this nothing a peculiar charm ; you hear the sound
of the voice, you are amused by the half smile, abandon yourself to the
fluent stream, forget that these are ordinary ideas ; you observe the
narrator, his wig, the cane he toys with, the ribbons on his shoes, his
easy walk over the smooth gravel of his garden paths between the
faultless hedges ; the ear, the mind even is charmed, captivated by the
appropriateness of his diction, by the abundance of his ornate periods,
by the dignity and fulness of a style Avhich is involuntarily regular,
which, at first artificial, like good breeding, ends, like true good breed-
ing, by being changed into a real necessity and a natural talent.

Unfortunately, this talent occasionally leads to blunders ; when a man
speaks well about everything, he thinks he has a right to speak of every-
thing. He plays philosopher, critic, even man of learning ; and indeed
becomes so actually, at least with the ladies. Such a man writes, like
Temple, Essays on the Nature of Government^ on Heroic Virtue,^ on
poetry ; that is, little treatises on society, on the beavitiful, on the philo-
sophy of history. He is the Locke, the Herder, the Bentley of the
drawing-room, and nothing else. Now and then, doubtless, his mother
wit leads him to fair original judgments. Temple was the first to dis-
cover a Pindaric glow in the old chant of Ragnar Lodbrog, and to
place Don Quixote in the first rank of modern fictions ; and moreover,
when he handles a subject within his range, like the causes of the power
and decline of the Turks, his reasoning is admirable. But otherwise,
he is simply the scholar ; nay, in him the pedant crops out, and the
worst of pedants, who, being ignorant, wishes to seem wise, Avho quotes
the history of every land, hauling in Jupiter, Saturn, Osiris, Fo-hi,
Confucius, Manco-Capac, Mahomet, and discourses on all these obscure
and unknown civilisations, as if he had laboriously studied them, on
his own behalf, at their source, and not at second hand, through the
extracts of his secretary, or the books of others. One day he came to
grief; having plunged into a literary dispute, and claimed superiority
for the ancients over the moderns, he imagined himself a Hellenist, an
antiquarian, related the voyages of Pythagoras, the education of Orpheus,
and remarked that the Greek sages

^ Compare this essay mth tliat of Carlyle, on Heroes and Hero- Worship ; the
title and subject are similar ; it is cmious to note the difference of the two centiuies.

CIIAr. I.] THE RESTORATIO:^. 41)5

' were commonly excellent poets, and great physicians : they were so learned
in natural philosophy, that they foretold not only eclipses in the heavens, but
earthquakes at land and storms at sea, great droughts and great plagues, much
plenty or much scarcity of certain sorts of fruits or grain ; not to mention the
magical powers attributed to several of them, to allay storms, to raise gales, to
appease commotions of people, to make plagues cease. ' '

Admirable faculties, which we no longer possess. Again he regretted
the decay of music, ' by which men and beasts, fishes, fowls, and ser-
pents, were so frequently enchanted, and their very natures changed ;
by which the passions of men were raised to the greatest hei£;ht and
violence, and then as suddenly appeased, so as they might be justly
said to be turned into lions or lambs, into wolves or into harts, by the
powers and charms of this admirable art.'^ He wished to enumerate
the greatest modern writers, and forgot to mention in his catalogue,
' amongst the Italians,'^ Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso ; in his list
of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, and Boileau ;
in his list of Spaniards, Lope and Calderon; and in his list of English,
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton;' though, byway of com-
pensation, he inserted the names of Paolo Sarpi, Guevara, Sir Philip
Sidney, Selden, Voiture, and Bussy-Rabutin, ' author of the Amours de
Gaul.'' To cap all, he declared the fables of iEsop a dull Byzantine
compilation, and the letters of Phalaris a wretched sophistical forgery,
admirable and authentic : —

' It may perhaps be further affirmed, in favour of the ancients, that the oldest
books we have are still in their kind the best. The two most ancient that I know
of in prose, among those we call profane authors, are iEsop's Fables and Phalaris'
Epistles, both living near the same time, which was that of Cyrus and Pythagoras.
As the first has been agreed by all ages since for the greatest master in his kind,
and all others of that sort have been but imitations of his original ; so I think the
Epistles of Phalaris to have more grace, more spirit, more force of wit and genius,
than any others I have ever seen, either ancient or modern.'

And then, in order to commit himself beyond remedy, he gravely
remarked :

' 1 know several learned men (or that usually pass for such, under the name of
critics) have not esteemed them genuine, and Politian with some others have attri-
buted them to Lucian ; but I think he must have little skill in painting that
cannot find out this to be an original : such diversity of passions, upon such
variety of actions and passages of life and government, such freedom of thought,
such boldness of expression, such bounty to his friends, such scorn of his enemies,
such honour of learned men, such esteem of good, such knowledge of life, such
contempt of death, with such fierceness of nature and cruelty of revenge, could
never be represented but by him that possessed them ; and I esteem Lucian to have
been no more capable of WTiting than of acting what Phalaris did. In all one writ,
you find the scholar or the sophist ; and in all the other, the tyrant and the
commander.'*

' Temple's Works, ii. : ^?i Essaij upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 155.
^ Ibid. 165. ^ JIaeaulay's Works, vi. 319 : Essay on Sir William Temple.

* An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 173.

496 THE CLASSIC AGE. [eOOK III.

Fine rhetoric truly ; it is sad that a passage so aptly turned should
cover so many stupidities. All this appeared very triumphant ; and the
universal applause with which this fine oratorical bombast was greeted
demonstrates the taste and the culture, the hollowness and the politeness,
of the elegant world of which Temple was the marvel, and which, like
Temple, loved only the varnish of truth.

IV.

Such were the ornate and polished manners which gradually pierce
through debauchery and assume the ascendant. Insensibly the current
grows clearer, and marks out its course like a stream, Avhich forcibly
entering a new bed, moves with difficulty at first through a heap of
mud, then pushes forward its still murky waters, which are purified
little by little. These debauchees try to be men of the world, and
sometimes succeed in it. Wycherley writes well, very clearly, without
the least trace of euphuism, almost in the French manner. He makes
Dapperwit say of Lucy, in measured phrase, ' She is beautiful without
affectation, amorous without impertinence, . . . froUc Avithout rudeness.'^
When he desires it he is ingenious, and his gentlemen exchange happy
comparisons. ' Mistresses,' says one, ' are like books : if you pore upon
them too much, they doze you, and make you unfit for company ; but
if used discreetly, you are the fitter for conversation by 'em.' * Yes,'
says another, ' a mistress should be like a little country retreat near the
town ; not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away, to taste
the town the better when a man returns.'^ These folk have style, even
out of place, and in spite of the situation or condition of the persons.
A shoemaker in one of Etheredge's plays says : ' There is never a man in
the town lives more like a gentleman Avith his wife than I do. I never
mind her motions ; she never inquires into mine. We speak to one
another civilly, hate one another heartily.' There is perfect art in this
little speech ; everything is complete, even to the symmetrical antithesis
of words, ideas, sounds : what a fine talker is this same satirical shoe-
maker ! After a satire, a madrigal. In one place a certain character
exclaims, in the very middle of a dialogue, and in sober prose, " Pretty
pouting lips, with a httle moisture hanging on them, that look like the
Province rose fresh on the bush, ere the morning sun has quite drawn
up the dew.' Is not this the graceful gallantry of the court ? Rochester
him_self sometimes might furnish a parallel. Two or three of his songs
are still to be found in the expurgated books of extracts in use amongst
modest young girls. It matters nothing that such men are really scamps;
they must be every moment using compliments and salutations : before
women whom they wish to seduce they are compelled to warble tender
words and insipidities : they acknowledge but one check, the necessity
to appear well-bred; yet this check suffices to restrain them. Rochester

' Love in a Wood, iii. 2. ^ Tlce Country Wife, i. 1.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 407

is correct even in the midst of his filth ; if he talks lewdly, it is in tlie
able and exact manner of Boileau. All these roisterers aim at being
wits and men of the world. Sir Charles Sedley ruins and pollutes him-
self, but Charles ii. calls him ' the viceroy of Apollo.' Buckingham
extols 'the magic of his style.' He is the most charming, the most
sought after of talkers ; he makes puns and verses, always agreeable,
sometimes refined ; he handles dexterously the pretty jargon of mytho-
logy; he insinuates into his airy, flowing verses all the dainty and
somewhat affected prettinesses of the drawing-room. lie sings thus
to Chloris :

' Ify passion with your beaut)' grew.
While Cupid at my heart,
Still as his mother favour'd you,
Threw a new flaming dart.'
And then sums np :

' Each gloried in their wanton part :
To make a lover, he
Employ'd the utmost of his art ;
To make a beauty, she. ' '

There is no love whatever in these pretty things ; they are received
as they are presented, with a smile ; they form part of the conventional
language, the polite attentions due from gentlemen to ladies. I suppose
they would send them in the morning with a nosegay, or a box of
preserved fruits. Roscommon indites some verses on a dead lapdog, on
a young lady's cold ; this naughty cold prevents her singing — cursed be
the winter! And hereupon he takes the winter to task, abuses it at
length. Here you have the literary amusements of the worldling.
They first treat love, then danger, most airily and gaily. On the eve
of a naval contest, Dorset, at sea, amidst the pitching of his vessel,
addresses a celebrated song to the ladies. There is nothing weighty in
it, either sentiment or wit ; people hum the couplets as they pass ; they
emit a gleam of gaiety ; the next moment they are forgotten. Dorset
at sea writes to the ladies, on the night before an engagement :

* Let's hear of no inconstancy,
"We have too much of that at sea.'
And again :

' Should foggy Opdam chance to know
Our sad and dismal story,
The Dutch would scorn so weak a foe,

And quit tlieir fort at Goeree.
For what resistance can they find
From men who've left their hearts behind ? '

Then come jests too much in the English style :
' Then if we write not by each post,
Think not we are unkind ; . . .

1 Sir Charles Sedley 's Works, ed. Briscoe, 1778, 2 vols.: The Mulbernj Garden, ii.

'A I

498 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

Our tears we'U send a speedier way ;
The tide shall bring them twice a day.'

Such tears can hardly flow from sorrow; the' lady regards them as the
lover sheds them, good-naturedly. She is 'at a play' (he thinks so,
and tells her so) :

* Whilst you, regardless of our woe,

Sit careless at a play,
Perliaps permit some happier man
To kiss yoiu" hand, or flii-t your fan.'*

Dorset hardly troubles himself about it, plays with poetry without excess
or assiduity, with a rapid pen, writing to-day a verse against Dorinda,
to-morrow a satire against Mr. Howard, always easily and without
study, like a true gentleman. He is an earl, a chamberlain, and rich ;
he pensions and patronises poets as he would flirts — to amuse himself,
•without binding himself. The Duke of Buckingham does the same,
and also the contrary ; caresses these, parodies those ; is flattered,
mocked, and ends by receiving his portrait at Dryden's hands, — a chef
(Voeuvre, but not flattering. We have seen such pastimes and such
bickerings in France ; we find here the same manners and the same
literature, because we find here also the same society and the same spirit.
Among these poets, and in the front rank, is Edmimd Waller, who
lived and wrote in this manner to his eighty-second year: a man of
wit and fashion, well-bred, familiar from his youth with great people,
endued with tact and foresight, quick at repartee, not easy to put out
of countenance, but selfish, of indifi^erent feelings, having changed
sides more than once, and bearing very well the memory of his ter-
giversations ; in short, a good model of the worldling and the courtier.
It Avas he who, having once praised Cromwell, and afterward. Charles ir.,
but the latter more feebly than the former, said by way of excuse :
' Poets, your Majesty, succeed better in fiction than in truth.' In
this kind of existence, three-quarters of the poetry is written for the
occasion; it is the small change of conversation or flattery; it resembles
the little events or the little sentiments from which it sprang. One
piece is written on tea, another on the queen's portrait ; it is necessary
to pay one's court ; moreover, ' His IMajesty has requested some verses.'
One lady makes him a present of a silver pen, straight he throws his
gratitude into rhyme; another has the power of sleeping at will, straight
a sportive stanza ; a false report is spread that she has just had her
portrait painted, straight a copy of verses on this grave affair. A little
further on there are verses to the Countess of Carlisle on her chamber,
condolences to my Lord of Northumberland on the death of his wife, a
pretty thing on a lady ' passing through a crowd of people,' an answer,
verse for verse, to some rhymes of Sir John Suckling. He seizes any-
thing frivolous, new, or convenient, on the wing ; and his poetry is only

1 Works of the Burls of Rochester, lioscommon, and L) or set, 2 vols., 1731, ii. i)\.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 499

a written conversation, — I mean the conversation which goes on at a
ball, when people speak for the sake of speaking, lifting a lock of one's
wig, or twisting about a glove. Gallantry, as he confesses, holds the
chief place here, and one may be pretty certain that the love is not
over-sincere. In fact, Waller sighs on purpose (Sacharissa had a fine
dowry), or at least for the sake of good manners ; that which is most
evident in his tender poems is, that he aims at a flowing style and good
rhymes. He is affected, he exaggerates, he strains after wit, he is
always an author. Not venturing to address Sacharissa herself, he
addresses Mrs. Braghton, her attendant, ' his fellow-servant : '

* So, in those nations whieli the Sun adore.
Some modest Persian, or some weak-eyed Jloor,
No higher dares advance his dazzled sight
Than to some gilded cloud, which near the light
Of their ascending god adorns the east,
And, graced with his beam, outshines the rest. ' ^

A fine comparison ! Tliat is a well-made courtesy ; I hope Sacharissa
responds with one equally correct. His despairs bear the same flavour ;
he pierces the groves of Penshurst with his cries, ' reports his flame to
the beeches,' and the well-bred beeches ' bow their heads, as if they
felt the same.'^ It is probable that, in these mournful walks, his
greatest care was lest he should wet the soles of his high-heeled shoes.
These transports of love bring in the classic machinery, Apollo and
the Muses. Apollo is annoyed that one of his servants is ill-treated,
and bids him depart ; and he departs, telling Sacharissa that she is
harder than an oak, and that she was certainly produced from a rock.^
There is one genuine reality in all this — sensuality ; not ardent, but
light and gay. There is a certain piece, The Fall, which an abbe of the
court of Louis xv. might have written:

1 The Poets of Great Brdaln, ed. R. Anderson, 14 vols., 1792, v. ; Waller,
Epistle X. 478.

^ Ibid. 452.

3 ' While in this park I sing, the lisfning deer
Attend my passion, and forget to fear ;
When to the beeches I report my flame.
They bow their heads, as if they felt the same.
To gods appealing, when I reach their bow'rs
With loud complaints, they answer me in show'rs.
To thee a wild and cruel soul is giv'n.
More deaf than trees, and prouder than the heav'n.

. , . The rock,
That cloven rock, produc'd thee. . . .
This last complaint th' indulgent ears did pierce
Of just Apollo, president of verse ;
Highly concerned that the Muse should bnng
Damage to one whom he had taught to sing. '— /i"'. p. 452.

500 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK IIL

' Then tlusli not, Fair ! or on him frown, . . .
How could the youth, alas ! hut hend
When his whole Heav'n upon him leau'd ;
If aught hy him amiss were done,
'Twas that he let you rise so soon.' '

Other pieces smack of their surroundings, and are not so polished:

' Amoret ! as sweet, as good,
As the most delicious food,
"Which but tasted does impart
Life and gladness to the heart. ' *

I should not be pleased, were I a woman, to be compared to a beef-
steak, though that be appetising ; nor should I like any more to find
myself, like Sacharissa, placed on a level with good wine, which flies

to the head :

' Sacharissa's beauty's wine.
Which to madness doth incline ;
Such a liquor as no brain
That is mortal can sustain. ' ^

This is too much honour for port wine and meat. The English back-
ground crops up here and elsewhere ; for example, the beautifid
Sacharissa, having ceased to be beautiful, asked Waller if he would
Avrite again verses for her ; he answered, ' Yes, madame, when you
are as young and as handsome as you were formerly.' Here is some-
thing to shock a Frenchman. Nevertheless Waller is usually amiable ;
a sort of brilliant light floats like a halo round his verses ; he is always
elegant, often graceful. His gracefulness is like the perfume exhaled
from the world ; fresh toilettes, ornamented drawing-rooms, the abund-
ance and all those refined and delicate comforts give to the soul a sort
of sweetness which is breathed forth in obliging compliments and smiles.
Waller has such, and that most flattering, apropos of a bud, a girdle,
a rose. Such bouquets become his hands and his art. He pays an
excellent compliment ' To young Lady Lucy Sidney ' on her age. And
what could be more attractive for a denizen of the drawing-rooms, than
this bud of still unopened youth, but which blushes already, and is on
the point of expanding ? •

* Yet, fanest blossom ! do not slight
That age which you may know so soon.
The rosy morn resigns her light
And milder glory to the noon. ' *

All his verses flow with a continuous harmony, clearness, facility,
though his voice is never raised, or out of tune, or rough, nor loses
its true accent, except by the worldling's affectation, which regularly
varies all tones in order to soften them. His poetry resembles one

^ The Poets of Great Bi-itain, Waller, v. 456.

2 Ihld. 479. s Ihld. * Ilid.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 50l

of those pretty, affected, bedizened women, busy in inclining their
head on one side, and murmuring with a soft voice commonplace things
which they cannot be said to think, yet agreeable in tlieir beribboned
dress, and who would please altogether if they did not dream of always
pleasing.

It is not that these men cannot handle grave subjects; but they handle
them in their own fashion, without gravity or depth. "What the courtier
most lacks is the genuine sentiment of a discovered and personal idea.
That Avhich interests him most is the correctness of the adornment, and
the perfection of external form. They care little for the foundation,
much for the outer shape. In fact, it is form which they take for their
subject in nearly all their serious poetry ; they are critics, they lay
down precepts, they compose Poetic Arts. Denham, and afterwards
Roscommon, teach in complete poems the art of translating poetry well.
The Duke of Buckingliam versified an Essay on Poetry, and an Essay
on Satire. Dryden is in the first rank of these pedagogues. Like
Dryden again, they turn translators, amplifiers. Roscommon translated
the Ars Poetica of Horace, Waller the first act of Pompee, Denham some
fragments of Homer and Virgil, and an Italian poem on Justice and
Temperance. Rochester composed a satire against Mankind, in the style
of Boileau, and also an epistle on Nothing ; the amorous "Waller wrote a
didactic poem on The Fear of God, and another in six cantos on Divine
Love. These are exercises of style. They take a theological thesis, an
open question of philosophy, a poetic maxim, and develop it in jointed
prose, furnished with rhymes ; they discover nothing, invent nothing,
feel little, and only aim at expressing good arguments in classical
metaphors, in exalted terms, after a conventional model. Most of their
verses consist of two nouns, furnished with epithets, and connected by
a verb, like one's college Latin verses. The epithet is good : they had
to hunt through the Gradas for it, or, as Boileau wills it, they had to
carry the line unfinished in their heads, and had to think about it an
hour in the open air, until at last, at the corner of a wood, they found
the word which had escaped. I yawn, but applaud. At this price a
generation ends by forming the sustained style which is necessary to
support, make public, and demonstrate great things. Meanwhile, with
their ornate, official diction, and their borrowed thought, they are like
formal chamberlains, in embroiderpd coats, present at a royal marriage
or an august baptism, empty of head, grave in manner, admirable for
dignity and bearing, with the punctilio and the ideas of a dummy.

V.

One of them only (Dryden always excepted) rose to .talent. Sir John
Denham, Charles the First's secretary. He was employed in public
affairs, and after a dissolute youth, turned to serious habits; and leaving
behind him satiric verse and party tricks, attained in riper years a lofty
oratorical style. His best poem, Cooper's Hill, is the description of a

502 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III

hill and its surroundings, blended with the historical ideas which the
sight recalls, and the moral reflections which its appearance naturally
suggests. All these subjects are in accordance with the nobility and
the limitation of the classical spirit, and display his vigour without
betraying his weaknesses ; the poet could show off his whole talent
without forcing it. His fine language exhibits all its beauty, because
it is sincere. We find pleasure in following the regular progress of
those copious passages in which his ideas, opposed or combined, attain
for the first time their definite place and full clearness, Avhere symmetry
only brings out the argument more clearly, expansion only completes
thought, antithesis and repetition do not induce trifling and aflfectation,
where the miisic of the verse, adding the breadth of sound to the fulness
of sense, conducts the chain of ideas, without effort or disorder, by an
appropriate measure to a becoming order and movement. Gratification
is united with solidity ; the author of Cooper's Hill knows how to please
as well as to impress. His poem is like a king's park, dignified and
level Anthout doubt, but arranged for the pleasure of the sight, and full
of choice prospects. It leads us by easy digressions across a multitude
of varied thoughts. It shows us here a mountain, yonder a memorial
of the nymphs, a classic memorial, like a portico filled with statues,
further on a wide river-course, and by its side the ruins of an abbey ;
each page of the poem is like a distinct alley, with its distinct perspective.
Further on, our thoughts are turned to the superstitions of the ignorant
middle-ages, and to the excesses of the recent revolution ; then comes
the picture of a royal hunt; we see the trembling stag brought to a
stand in the midst of the leaves:

' He calls to mind his strength, and then his speed.
His winged heels, and then Ms armed head ;
With these t' avoid, with that his fate to meet ;
But fear prevails, and bids him trust his feet.
So fast he flies, that his reviewing eye
Has lost the chasers, and his ear the crj'.' ^

These are the worthy spectacles and the studied diversity of the grounds
of a nobleman. Every object, moreover, receives here, as in a king's
palace, all the adornment which can be given to it ; elegant epithets
are introduced to embellish a feeble substantive ; the decorations of
art transform the commonplace of nature : vessels are 'floating towers;'
the Thames is the most loved of all the Ocean's sons ; the airy mountain
hides its proud head among the clouds, whilst a shady mantle clothes
its sides. Among different kinds of ideas, there is one kingly, full of
stately and magnificent ceremonies, of self-contained and studied ges-
tures, of correct yet commanding figures, uniform and imposing like
the appointments of a palace ; hence the classic writers, and Denham
amongst them, draw all their poetic tints. From this every object and

' ■ — — — ■ — -■ ■ — — ^•>i

^ Tlie Poets of Great Britain, v., Denham, 675.

CHAP. I.J THE EESTORATION. 503

circumstance takes its colouring, because constrained to come into
contact with it. Here the object and circumstances are compelled to
traverse other things. Denham is not a mere courtier, he is an
Englisliman ; that is, preoccupied by moral emotions. He often quits
his landscape to enter into some grave reflection ; politics, religion,
come to disturb the enjoyment of his eyes; in reference to a hill or a
forest, he meditates upon man ; externals lead him inward ; impressions
of the senses to contemplations of the soul. The men of this race
are by nature and custom esoteric. When he sees the Thames throw
itself into the sea, he compares it with 'mortal hfe hasting to meet
eternity.' The ftice of a mountain, beaten by storms, reminds him of
'the common fate of all that's high or great.' The course of the river
suggests to him ideas of inner reformation :

' 0 could I flow like thee ! and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my tlieme !
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle yet not dull ;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing, full.

But his proud head the airy mountain hides
Among the clouds ; his shoulders and his sides
A shady mantle clothes ; his curled brows
Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows ;
While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat,
The common fate of all that's high or great. ' ^

There is in the English mind an indestructible stock of moral instincts,
and grand melancholy ; and it is the greatest confirmation of this, that
we can discover such a stock at the court of Charles ii.

These are, however, but rare openings, and as it were level! ings of
the original rock. The habits of the worldling are as a thick layer whicli
cover it throughout. Manners, conversation, style, the stage, taste, all
is French, or tries to be ; they imitate France as they are able, and go
there to mould themselves. Many cavaliers went there, driven away
by Cromwell. Denham, Waller, Roscommon, and Rochester resided
there ; the Duchess of Newcastle, a poetess of the time, was married at
Paris ; the Duke of Buckingham served a campaign under Turenne ;
Wycherley was sent to France by his father, Avho wished to rescue him
from the contagion of Puritan opinions ; Vanbrugli, one of the best
comic playwrights, went thither to contract a polish. The two courts
were allied almost always in fact, and always in heart, by a com-
munity of interests, and of rehgious and monarchical ideas. Charles ii.
accepted from Louis xiv. a pension, a mistress, counsels, and examples;
the nobility followed their prince, and France was the model of the
Enghsh court. Her literature and manners, the finest of the classic
age, led the fashion. We perceive in English ^vritings that French
authors are tlitir masters, and that they were in the hands of all well-

' The Poets of Great Britain, v., Denham, 674.

501 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

educated people. They consulted Bossuet, translated Corneille, imitated
Moliere, respected Boileau. It went so far, that the greatest gallants of
them tried to be altogether French, to mix some scraps of French in
every phrase. ' It is as ill-breeding now to speak good English,' says
Wycherley, ' as to write good English, good sense, or a good hand.'
These Frenchified coxcombs '^ are compliment-mongers, always pow-
dered, perfumed, ' eminent for being bien gantes.' They affect delicacy,
they are fastidious ; they find the English coarse, gloomy, stiff ; they try
to be giddy and thoughtless ; they giggle and prate at random, placing
the glory of man in the perfection of his wig and his bows. The
theatre, which ridicules these imitators, is an imitator after their
fashion. French comedy, like French politeness, becomes their model.
They copy both, altering without equaUing them ; for monarchical and
classic France is, amongst all nations, the best fitted from its instincts
and institutions for the modes of worldly life, and the works of an
oratorical mind. England follows it in this course, being carried away
by the universal current of the age, but at a distance, and drawn aside
by its national peculiarities. It is this common direction and this
particular deviation which the society and its poetry have proclaimed,
and which the stage and its characters will display.

VI.

Four principal writers established this comedy — Wycherley, Con-
greve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar : ^ the first gross, and in the first irruption
of vice ; the others more sedate, possessing more a taste for urbanity
than debauchery ; yet all men of the world, and priding themselves on
their good breeding, on passing their days at court or in fine company,
on having the tastes and bearing of gentlemen. * I am not a literary
man,' said Congreve to Voltaire, ' I am a gentleman.' In fact, as Pope
s-aid, he lived more like a man of quality than a man of letters, was
noted for his successes with the fair, and passed his latter years in the
house of the Duchess of Marlborough. I have said that Wycherley,
imder Charles ii., was one of the most fashionable courtiers. He served
in the army for some time, as did also Vanbrugh and Farquhar; nothing
is more gallant than the name of Captain which they employed, the
military stories they brought back, and the feather they stuck in their
hats. They all wrote comedies on the same worldly and classical
model, made up of probable incidents such as we observe around us
every day, of well-bred characters such as we commonly meet in a draw-
ing-room, correct and elegant conversations such as well-bred men can
carry on. This theatre, wanting in poetry, fancy, and adventures, imita-
tive and discursive, was formed at the same time as that of Moliere, by

* Etlieredge's Sir FojpUng Flutter ; Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-
mnsfer, i. 2.

- From 1672 to 1726.

CHAP. I.J THE KESTORATION. 505

the same causes, and on his model, so that in order to comprehend it
we musi compare it with that of ^Moliere.

'Moliere belongs to no nation,' said a great English actor (Kemble);
*one day the god of comedy, wishing to write, became a man, and
happened to fall into France.' I accept this saying ; but in becoming
man he found himself, at the same time, a man of the seventeenth century
and a Frenchman, and that is how he was the god of comedy. ' To
amuse honest folk,' said Moliere, 'what a strange task !' Only the French
art of the seventeenth century could succeed in that ; for it consists in
leading by an agreeable path to general notions ; and the taste for these
notions, as well as the custom of treading this path, is the peculiar mark
of honest folk. Moliere, like Racine, expands and develops. Open any
one of his plays that comes to hand, and the first scene in it, chosen at
random; after three replies you are carried away, or rather led away.
The second continues the first, the third carries out the second, the
Iburth completes all ; a current is created which bears us on, which
bears us away, which does not release us until it is exhausted. There
is no check, no digression, no episodes to distract our attention. To
prevent the lapses of an absent mind, a secondary character intervenes,
a lackey, a lady's-maid, a wife, who, couplet by couplet, repeat in a
different fashion the reply of the principal character, and by means
of symmetry and contrast restrain us in the path laid down. Arrived
at the end, a second current seizes us and acts like the first. It is com-
posed like the other, and with regard to the other. It throws it out by
contrast, or strengthens it by resemblance. Here the valets repeat the
dispute, there the reconciliation of their masters. In one place, Alceste,
drawn in one direction through three pages by anger, is drawn in a
contrary direction, and through three pages, by love. Further on,
tradesmen, professors, neighbours, domestics, relieve each other scene
after scene, in order to bring out in clearer hght the pretentiousness
and guUibility of M. Jourdain. Every scene, every act, brings out in
greater relief, completes, or prepares another. All is united, and all is
simple; the action progresses, and progresses only to carry on the idea;
there is no complication, no incidents. One comic event suffices for the
story. A dozen conversations make up the play of the Misanthrope.
The same situation, five or six times renewed, is the whole of TEcole
des Femmes. These pieces are made out of nothing. They have no
need of incidents, they find ample space in the compass of one room
and one day, without surprises, without decoration, with a carpet and
four arm-chairs. This paucity of matter throws out the ideas more
clearly and quickly ; in fact, their whole aim is to bring those ideas
prominently forward ; the simplicity of the subject, the progress of the
action, the relation of the scenes, — to this everything tends. At every
step the clearness increases, the impression is deepened, the viciousness
stands out : ridicule is piled up until, before so many apt and united
appeals, laughter forces its way and breaks forth. And this laughter

505 THE CLASSIC AGE, [BOOK III.

is not a mere outburst of physical amusement ; it is the judgment which
incites it. The writer is a philosopher, who brings us into contact with
a universal truth by a particular example. We understand through
liim, as through La Bruyere or Nicole, the force of prejudice, the
obstinacy of conventionality, the blindness of love. The couplets of
his dialogue, like the arguments of their treatises, are but the worked
out proof and the logical justification of a preconceived conclusion.
We philosophise with him on humanity ; we think because he has
thought. And he has only thought thus in the character of a French-
man, for an audience of French men of the world. In him we taste a
national pleasure. French refined and systematic intelligence, the most
exact in seizing on the subordination of ideas, the most ready in sepa-
rating ideas from matter, the most fond, of clear and tangible ideas,
finds in him its nourishment and its echo. None who has sought to
shoAv us mankind, has led us by a straighter and easier mode to a more
distinct and speaking portrait.

I will add, to a more pleasing portrait, — and this is the main talent
of comedy : it consists in keeping back what is hateful ; and mark, in
the world that which is hateful abounds. As soon as you will paint
the world truly, philosophicall}'^, you meet Avith vice, injustice, and
everywhere indignation ; amusement flees before anger and morality.
Consider the basis of Tartnfe ; an obscene pedant, a red-faced hypo-
critical wretch, who, palming himself off on an honest and refined
family, tries to drive the son away, marry the daughter, corrupt the
wife, ruin and imprison the father, and almost succeeds in it, not by
clever plots, but by vulgar mummery, and by the coarse audacity of
his caddish disposition. What could be more repellent ? And how
is amusement to be drawn from such a subject, where Beaumarchais
and La Bruyere^ failed? Similarly, in the Misanthrope, is not the
spectacle of a loyally sincere and honest man, very much in love,
whom his virtue finally overwhelms Avith ridicule and drives from
society, a sad sight to see? Rousseau was annoyed that it should
produce laughter ; and if we Avere to look upon the subject, not in
Jloliere, but in itself, Ave should find enough to revolt our natural
generosity. Recall his other plots : Georges Dandin mj-stified, Geronte
beaten, Arnolphe duped, Harpagon plundered, Sganarelle married, girls
seduced, louts thrashed, simpletons turned financiers. There are sorrows
here, and deep ones ; many Avould rather Aveep than laugh at them.
Arnolphe, Dandin, Harpagon, are almost tragic characters ; and Avhen
we see them in the Avorld instead of the theatre, we are not disposed to
sarcasm, but to pity. Picture to yourself the originals from Avhom
!Moliere has taken his doctors. Consider this venturesome experimenta-
list, Avho, in the interest of science, tries a neAV saAV, or inoculates a

* Onuphre, in La Bruyere's Caracteres, ch. xiii. de la Mode; Lcgears, ia
Beaumarchais' la Mere Coupable.

CHAP. I.j TUE KESTOEATIOy. 507

virus ; think of his long nights at the hospital, the wan patient carried
on a mattress to the operating table, and stretching out his leg to the
knife ; or again of the peasant's bed of straw in the damp cottage, where
an old dropsical mother lies choking,^ while her children grudgingly
count up the crowns she has already cost them. You quit such scenes
with a swelling heart, charged with sympathy for human misery ; you
discover that life, seen near and face to face, is a mass of trivial harsli-
nesses and of grievous passions ; you are tempted, if you wish to depict
it, to enter into the mire of sorrows whereon Balzac and Shakspeare
have built: you see in it no other poetry than that audacious reasoning
power which from such a confusion abstracts the master-forces, or the
light of the genius which flickers over the throes and the falls of so
many polluted and murdered wretches. How all changes under the
hand of a mercurial Frenchman! how all this human U2;liness is blotted
out! how amusing is the spectacle which Moliere has arranged for us!
how we ouiiht to thank the great artist for havinir transformed his sub-
ject so well ! At last we have a laughing world, on canvas at least ;
we could not have it otherwise, but this we have. How pleasant it is to
forget truth ! Avhat an art is that which divests us of ourselves ! what a
point of view which converts the contortions of suffering into ridiculous
grimaces ! Gaiety has come upon us, the dearest of a Frenchman's
possessions. The soldiers of Villars used to dance that they might
forget they had no longer any bread. Of all French possessions, too,
it is the best. This gift does not destroy thought, but it masks it. In
Moliere, truth is at the bottom, but concealed; he has heard the sobs
of human tragedy, but he prefers not to echo them. It is quite enough
to feel our wounds ; let us not go to the theatre to see them again.
Philosophy, while it reveals them, advises us not to think of them too
much. Let us enliven our condition with the gaiety of free conversa-
tion and light wit, as we would the chamber of sickness. Let us muffle
up Tartufe, Harpagon, the doctors, with outrageous ridicule: ridicule
will make us forget their Adces ; they will afford us amusement instead
of causing horror. Let Alceste be grumpy and awkward. It is in tlic
first place true, because our more valiant virtues are only the outbreaks
of a temper out of harmony with circumstances ; but, in addition, it will
be amusing. His mishaps will cease to make him the martyr of justice;
they will be only the consequences of a cross-grained character. As to
the mystifications of husbands, tutors, and fathers, I fancy that we are
not to see in them a concerted attack on society or morality. For one
evening we are entertaining ourselves, nothing more. The syringes
and thrashings, the masquerades and dances, prove that it is a sheer
piece of buffoonery. Do not be afraid that philosophy will perish in a
pantomime ; it is present even in the Mariage force, even in the Malade
imaginaire. It is the mark of a Frenchman and a man of the world to

' Consultations of Sganarelle in the jMedecin maUjre lat.

508 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

clothe everything, even that which is serious, in laughter. When he
is thinking, he does not always wish to show it. In his most violent
moments he is still the master of the house, the polite host ; he talks
to you of his thoughts or of his suffering. Mirabeau, when in agony,
said to one of his friends with a smile, ' Come, you who take an interest
in plucky deaths, you shall see mine!' The French talk in this style
Avhen they are depicting life ; no other nation knows how to philosophise
lightly, and die with good taste.

This is the reason why in no other nation comedy, while it con-
tinues comic, alFords a moral ; Moliere is the only man who gives us
models without getting pedantic, without trenching on the tragic,
without groAving solemn. This model is the ' honest man,' as the
phrase was, Philinte, Ariste, Clitandre, Eraste ; ^ there is no other
who can at the same time instruct us and amuse. His talent has
reflection for its basis, but it is cultivated by the world. His character
has honesty for its basis, but it is in harmony with the world. You
may imitate him without transgressing either reason or duty ; he is
neither a coxcomb nor a roisterer. You can imitate him without
neglecting your interests or making yourself ridiculous ; he is neither
an ignoramus nor unmannerly. He has read and understands the
jargon of Trissotin and M. Lycidas, but in order to pierce them through
and through, to beat them with their own arguments, to set the gallery
in a roar at their expense. He will discuss even morality and religion,
but in a style so natural, Avith proofs so clear, with warmth so genuine,
that he interests women, and is listened to by men of the world. He
knows man, and reasons upon him, but in such brief sentences, such
living delineations, such pungent humour, that his philosophy is the
best of entertainments. He is faithful to his ruined mistress, his
calumniated Iriend, but gracefully, without fuss. All his actions, even
noble ones, have an easy way about them which adorns them ; he does
nothing without diversion. His great talent is knowledge of the world;
he wears it not only in the trivial circumstances of every-day life, but
in the most moving scenes, the most embarrassing positions. A noble
swordsman wants to take this 'honest man' as his second in a duel ; he
reflects a moment, excuses himself in a score of phrases, and ' without
playing the Hector,' leaves the bystanders convinced that he is no
coward. Armande insults him, then throws herself in his arms ; he
politely averts the storm, declines the offer with the most loyal frank-
ness, and without employing a single falsehood, leaves the spectators
convinced that he is no boor. When he loves Eliante,^ who prefers
Alceste, and whom Alceste may possibly marry, he proposes to her with
a complete delicacy and dignity, without lowering himself, without
recrimination, without wronging himself or his friend. When Oronte

' Amongst women, Eliante, Henriette, EHse, Uranie, Elmire.

' Compare the admhable tact and ccohiess of ]&liaute, Henriette, and Elmire.

CHAP. I.] THE IlESTOiiATION 509

reads him a sonnet, he does not assume in the fop a nature which he has
not, but praises the conventional verses in conventional language, and is
not so clumsy as to display a poetical judgment which ivould be out of
place. He takes at once his tone from the circumstances ; he perceives
instantly what he must speak and what be silent about, in what degree
and to what shade, what exact expedient will reconcile truth and con-
ventional propriety, how far he ought to go or where to take his stand,
what faint line separates decorum from flattery, truth from awkward-
ness. On this narrow path he proceeds free from embarrassment or
mistakes, never put out of his way by the shocks or changes of circum-
stance, never allowing the calm smile of politeness to quit his lips,
never omitting to receive with a laugh of good humour tlie nonsense
of his neighbour. This cleverness, entirely French, reconciles in him
fundamental honesty and worldly breeding ; without it, he would be
altogether on the one side or the other. In this way comedy finds its
hero half-way between the roue and the preacher.

Such a theatre depicts a race and an age. This mixture of solidity
and elegance belongs to the seventeenth century, and belongs to France.
The world does not deprave, it develops Frenchmen ; it polished then
not only their manners and their homes, but also their sentiments and
ideas. Conversation provoked thought ; it was no mere talk, but an
inquiry ; with the exchange of news, it called forth the interchange of
reflections. Theology entered into it, as did also philosophy ; morals,
and the observation of the heart, formed its daily pabulum. Science
kept up the sap, and lost only the thorns. Diversion cloaked reason,
but did not smother it. Frenchmen never think better than in society;
the play of features excites them ; their ready ideas flash into liglTtning,
in their shock with the ideas of others. The varied movements of
conversation suit their fits and starts ; the frequent change of subject
fosters their invention ; the pungency of piquant speeches reduces truth
to small but precious coin, suitable to the lightness of their hands. And
the heart is no more tainted by it than the intelligence. The French-
man is of a sober temperament, with little taste for the brutishness of
the drunkard, for violent joviality, for the riot of loose suppers ; he is
moreover gentle, obliging, always ready to please ; to set him at ease,
he needs that flow of goodwill and elegance which the world supplies
and cherishes. And in accordance therewith, he shapes his temperate
and amiable inclinations into maxims ; it is a point of honour with him
to be serviceable and refined. Such is the honest man, the product of
society in a sociable race. It was not so with the people in England.
Their ideas do not spring up in chance conversation, but by the con-
centration of solitary thought ; this is the reason why ideas were then
wanting. Honesty is not the fruit of sociable instincts, but of personal
reflection ; that is why honesty was then at a discount. The brutish
foundation remained; the outside alone was smooth. Manners were
gentle, sentiments harsh ; speech was studied, ideas frivolous. Thought

510 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

and refinement of soul were rare, talent and fluent wit abundant.
There was politeness of manner, not of heart ; they had only the set
rules and the conventionalisms of life, its giddiness and heedlessness.

VII.

The English comedy writers paint these vices, and possess them.
Their talent and their stage are tainted by them. Art and philosophy
are absent. The authors do not advance upon a general idea, and they
do not proceed by the most direct method. They put together ill, and
are embarrassed by materials. Their pieces have generally two inter-
mingled plots, manifestly distinct,^ combined in order to multiply inci-
dents, and because the public demands a multitude of characters and
facts. A strong current of boisterous action is necessary to stir up their
dense appreciation ; they do as the Romans did, who packed several
Greek plays into one. They grew tired of the French simplicity of
action, because they had not the French taste and quick apprehension.
The two series of actions mingle and jostle one with another. We
cannot see where Ave are going ; every moment we are turned out of
our path. The scenes are ill connected ; they change twenty times
from place to place. When one subject begins to develop itself, a
deluge of incidents interrupts. An irrelevant dialogue drags on be-
tween the incidents, suggesting a book with the notes introduced pro-
miscuously into the text. There is no plan carefully conceived and
rigorously carried out ; they took, as it were, a plan, and wrote out the
scenes one after another, pretty much as they came into their head.
Probability is not well cared for. There are poorly arranged disguises,
ill simulated folly, mock marriages, and attacks by robbers worthy of
the comic opera. To obtain a sequence of ideas and probability, one
must set out from some general idea. The conception of avarice,
hypocrisy, the education of women, disproportionate marriages, arranges
and binds together by its individual power the incidents which are to
reveal it. Here we look in vain for such a conception. Congreve,
Farquhar, Vanbrugh, are only men of wit, not thinkers. They slip
over the surface of things, but do not penetrate. They play with theii
characters. They aim at success, at amusement. They sketch carica-
tures, they spin out in lively fashion a vain and railing conversation ;
they make answers clash with one another, fling forth paradoxes ; their
nimble fingers manipulate and juggle with the incidents in a hundred
ingenious and unlooked-for ways. They have animation, they abound
in gesture and repartee ; the constant bustle of the stage and its lively
spirit surround them with continual excitement. But the pleasure is
only skin-deep ; you have seen nothing of the eternal foundation and
the real nature of mankind ; you carry no thought away ; you have

1 Dryden boasts of this. "With him, we always find a complete comedy grossly
amalgamated with a complete tragedy.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION". • 511

passed an hour, and that is all ; the amusement loaves you vacant, and
serves only to till up the evenings of coquettes and coxcombs.

Moreover, this pleasure is not real ; it has no resemblance to the
hearty laughter of Moliere. In English comedy there is always an
undercurrent of tartness. We have seen this, and more, in Wycherley ;
the others, though less cruel, joke sourly. Their characters in a joke
say harsh things to one another; they amuse themselves by hurting
each other ; a Frenchman is pained to hear this interchange of mock
politeness; he does not go to blows by way of fun. Their dialogue turns
naturally to virulent satire ; instead of covering vice, it makes it pro
minent ; instead of making it ridiculous, it makes it odious :

' Clarissa. Prithee, tell me how you have passed the night ? . . .

A raminta. Why, I have been studying aU the ways my brain could produce
to plague my husband.

CI. No wonder indeed j-ou look as fresh this morning, after the satisfaction
of such pleasing ideas aU night. ' '

These women are veritably wicked, and that too openly. Throughout
the vice is crude, pushed to extremes, served up. with material ad-
juncts. Lady Fidget says : 'Our virtue is like the statesman's religion,
the quaker's word, the gamester's oath, and the great man's honour ;
but to cheat those that trust us.' ^ Or again : ' If you'll consult the
widows of this town,' says a young lady who will not marry again,
' they'll tell you, you should never take a lease of a house you can
hire for a quarter's warning,' * Or again : ' My heart cut a caper up
to my mouth,' says a young heir, ' when I heard my father was shot
through the head.'* The gentlemen collar each other on the stage,
treat the ladies roughly before spectators, contrive an adultery not far
off between the wings. Base or ferocious parts abovmd. There are
fiu'ies like Mrs. Loveit and Lady Touchwood. There are swine like
parson Bull and the go-between Coupler. Lady Touchwood wants to
stab her lover on the stage.* Coupler, on the stage, uses gestures which
recall the court of Henry ill. of France. Wretches like Fainall and
jSIaskweU are unmitigated scoundrels, and their hatefulness is not even
cloaked by the grotesque. Even honest women like Silvia and Mrs.
Sullen are plunged into the most shocking situations. Nothing shocked
that public ; they had no real education, but only its varnish.

There is a forced connection between the mind of a writer, the
world which surrounds him, and the characters which he produces ; for
it is from this world that he draws the materials out of which he com-
poses them. The sentiments which he contemplates in others and feels

^ Vanbrugh, Confederacy, ii. 1. ^ Wycherley, Tlie Country U'l/e, v. 4.

3 Vanbrugh, Eelajyse, ii. end. * lUd.

° She says to llaskweU, her lover : ' You want but leisure to invent fresh false-
hood, and soothe me to a fond belii-f of all your fictions ; but I will stab the lie
that's forming in your heart, and save a sin, in pity to your soul. '— Congi-eve,
Double Dealer, y. 17.

512 , THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK HI.

himself are gradually arranged into characters ; he can only invent
after his given model and his acquired experience ; and his characters
only manifest what he is, or abridge what he has seen. Two features
are prominent in this world ; they are prominent also on this stage.
All the successful characters can be reduced to two classes — natural
beings on the one part, and artificial on the other ; the first with the
coarseness and shamelessness of their primitive inclinations, the second
with the frivolities and vices of worldly habits : the first uncultivated,
their simplicity revealing nothing but their innate baseness ; the second
cultivated, their refinement instilling into them nothing but a new cor-
ruption. And the talent of the writers is suited to the painting of these
two groups : they have the grand Enghsh faculty, which is the know-
ledge of exact detail and real sentiments ; they see gestures, surround-
ings, dresses ; they hear the sounds of voices, and they have the courage
to exhibit them ; they have inherited, very little, and at a great dis-
tance, and in spite of themselves, still they have inherited from Shak-
speare ; they manipulate openly, and Avithout any softening, the coarse
harsh red colour which alone can bring out the figures of their brutes.
On the other hand, they have animation and a good style ; they can
express the thoughtless chatter, the foolish affectations, the inexhaustible
and capricious abundance of drawing-room stupidities ; they have as
much liveliness as the most foolish, and at the same time they speak
as well as the best instructed ; they can give the model of witty con-
versations; they have lightness of touch, brilliancy, and also facility,
exactness, without Avhich you cannot draw the portrait of a man of
the world. They find naturally on their palette the strong colours which
suit their barbarians, and the pretty tints which suit their exquisites.

VIII.

First there is the blockhead, Squire Sullen, a low kind of sot, of
whom his wife speaks in this fashion : ' After his man and he had
I'oUed about the room, like sick passengers in a storm, he comes flounce
into bed, dead as a salmon into a fishmonger's basket ; his feet cold as
ice, his breath hot as a furnace, and his hands and his face as greasy as
his flannel nightcap. O matrimony ! He tosses up the clothes with a
barbarous swing over his shoulders, disorders the whole economy of
my bed, leaves me half naked, and my whole night's comfort is the
timeable serenade of that wakeful nightingale, his nose ! ' ^ Sir John
Brute says : ' What the plague did I marry her (his wife) for ? I knew
sliC did not like me ; if she had, she would have lain with me.' ^ He
turns his drawing-room into a stable, smokes it foul to drive the women
away, throws his pipe at their heads, drinks, swears, and curses. Coarse
words and oaths flow through his conversation like filth through a

' Farquhar, The Beaux Stratarjem, ii. 1.
^ Vanbrugh, Provofced Wife, v. 6.

CHAP, I.] THE RESTOKATION. 513

gutter. He drinks himself drunk at the tavern, and howls out, * Danm
morality ! and damn the watch ! and let the constable be married.' ^
He cries out tliat he is a free-born Englishman ; he wants to go out and
break everything. He leaves the inn with other besotted scamps, and
attacks the women in the street. He robs a tailor wha was carrying a
doctor's gown, puts it on, thrashes the guard. He is seized and taken
by the constable ; on the road he breaks out into abuse, and ends by
proposing to him, amid the hiccups and stupid reiterations of a drunken
man, to go and find out somewhere a bottle and a girl. He returns
at last, covered with blood and mud, growling like a dog, with red
swollen eyes, calling his wife a slut and a liar. He goes to her,
forcibly embraces her, and as she turns away, cries, ' I see it goes
damnably against your stomach — and therefore — kiss me again. (Kisses
and tumbles her.) So, now you being as dirty and as nasty as myself,
we may go pig together.' ^ He wants to get a cup of cold tea out of
the closet, kicks open the door, and discovers his wife's and niece's
gallants. He storms, raves madly with his clammy tongue, then sud-
denly falls asleep. His valet comes and takes the insensible burden on
his shoulders.^ It is the portrait of a mere animal, and I fancy it is
not a nice one.

That is tlie husband ; let us look at the father. Sir Tunbelly Clumsey,
a country gentleman, elegant, if any of them were. Tom Fashion knocks
at the door of the mansion, which looks like ' Noah's ark,' and where
they receive people as in a besieged city. A servant appears at a
window with a blunderbuss in his hand, who is at last unwillingly
persuaded tvhat he ought to let his master know. ' Ralph, go thy weas,
and ask Sir Tunbelly if he pleases to be waited upon. A*nd dost hear ?
call to nurse, that she may lock up Miss Hoyden before the geat's open.''*
You see in this house they keep a watch over the girls. Sir Tunbelly
comes up ,vith his people, armed with guns, pitchforks, scythes, and
clubs, in no amiable mood, and wants to know the name of his visitor.
' Till I know your name, I shall not ask you to come into my house ;
and when I know your name — 'tis six to four I don't ask you neither.' ^
He is like a watchdog growling and looking at the calves of an intruder.
But he presently learns that this intruder is his future son-in-law ; he
utters some exclamations, and makes his excuses. ' Cod's my life ! I
ask your lordship's pardon ten thousand times. (7q a servant.) Here,
run in a-doors quickly. Get a Scotch-coal fire in the great parlour ;
set all the Turkey-work chairs in their places ; get the great brass
candlesticks out, and be sure stick the sockets full of Laurel. Run ! . . .
And do you hear, run away to nurse, bid her let Miss Hoyden loose

^ Vanbrugh, Provoked Wife, iii. 2. * Ibid. v. 2.

'The valet Kasor says to his master: 'Come to your kennel, you cuckokly
drunken sot you. ' — Ibid.

* Vanbrugh 's Relapse, iii. 3. * Ibid,

2 K

5 1 4 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

again, and if it was not sliifting-day, let her put on a clean tucker,
quick I ' ^ The false son-in-law wants to marry Hoyden straight off.
* Not so soon neither ! that's shooting my girl before you bid her stand.
. . . Besides, my wench's wedding-gown is not come home yet.' '^ Tlie
otlter suggests that a speedy marriage will save money. Spare money ?
says the father, 'Udswoons, I'll give my wench a wedding-dinner, though
I go to grass with tiie king of Assyria for't. . . . Ah ! poor girl, she'll be
scared out of her wits on her wedding-night ; for, honestly speaking,
she does not know a man from a woman but by his beard and his
breeches,' ^ Foppington, the true son-in-law, arrives. Sir Tunbelly,
taking him for an impostor, calls him a dog ; Hoyden proposes to drag
him in the horse-pond ; they bind him hand and foot, and thrust him
into the dog-kennel ; Sir Tunbelly puts his fist under his nose, and
threatens to knock his teeth down his throat. Afterwards, having
discovered the impostor, he says, ' My lord, will you cut his throat ?
or shall I ? . . . Here, give me my dog- whip. . . . Here, here, here, let
me beat out his brains, and that will decide all.' * He behaves like a
lunatic, and wants to fall upon him with his fists. Such is the country
gentleman, landlord and farmer, boxer and drinker, brawler and beast.
There steams up from all these scenes a smell of cooking, the noise of
riot, the odour of a dunghill.

Like father like child. What a candid creature is Miss Hoyden !
She grumbles to herself, ' It's well I have a husband a-coming, or, ecod,
I'd marry the baker ; I would so ! Nobody can knock at the gate, but
presently I must be locked up ; and here's the young greyhound bitch
oan run loose about the house all the day long, she can ; 'tis very well.'*
When the nurse tells her her future husband has arrived, she leaps for
joy, and kisses the old woman. ' O Lord ! I'll go put on my laced smock,
tliough I'm whipped till the blood run down my heels for't.' ^ Tom
comes himself, and asks her if she will be his wife. ' Sir, I never disobey
my father in anything but eating of green gooseberries.' But your
father wants to wait ... 'a whole week.' ' A week ! — why, I shall be an
old woman by that time.' ' I cannot give all her answers. There is the
spirit of a she-goat under her kitchen-talk. She marries Tom secretly
on the spot, and the chaplain wishes them many children. ' Ecod,' she
says, ' with all my heart ! the more the merrier, I say ; ha ! nurse ! ' ^

^ Vanbragh's Relapse, iii. 3. ^ JhkJ. iii. 5. ' Thld. "* Tbld. v. 5.

5 Ibid. iii. 4. « Ihid. 1 lh\d. iv. 1.

^ Ih'id. iv. 4. Tlie character of the nurse is excellent. Tom Fashion thanks her
for the training she has given Hoyden : ' Ahis, all I can boast of is, I gave her pure
good milk, and so your honour would have said, an you had seen how the poor
thing sucked it. — Eh ! God's blessing on the sweet face on't ! hoAV it used to hang
r.t this poor teat, and suck and squeeze, and kick and sprawl it would, till the
Lelly on't was so full, it would drop off like a leech. '

This is genuine, even after Juliet's nurse in Shakspeare.

CHAP. l.J THE RESTORATION. 615

But Lord Foppington, the true intended, turns up, and Tom makes off.
Instantly her plan is formed. She bids the nurse and chaplain hold
their tongues. ' If you two will be sure to hold your tongues, and not
say a word of what's past, I'll e'en marry this lord too.' ' What,' says
nurse, ' two husbands, my dear ? ' ' Why, you had three, good nurse,
you may hold your tongue.' ' She nevertheless takes a dislike to the
lord, and very soon ; he is not well made, he hardly gives her enough
pocket-money ; she hesitates between the two. ' If I leave my lord,
I must leave my lady too ; and when I rattle about the streets in my
coach, they'll only say. There goes mistress — mistress — mistress what ?
What's this man's name I have married, nurse ? ' ' Squire Fashion.'
' Squire Fashion is it ? — Well, 'Squire, that's better than nothing.^ . . .
Love him ! why do you think I love him, nurse ? ecod, I would not
care if he were hanged, so I were but once married to him ! — No —
that which pleases me, is to think what work I'll make when I get to
London ; for when I am a wife and a lady both, nurse, ecod, I'll flaunt
it with the best of 'em.' ^ But she is cautious all the same. She
knows that her father has his dog's whip handy, and that he will give
her a good shake. ' But, d'ye hear ? ' she says to the nurse. ' Pray,
take care of one thing : when the business comes to break out, be sure
you get between me and my father, for you know his tricks ; he'll
knock me down.' * Here is your true moral ascendency. For such a
character, there is no other, and Sir Tunbelly does well to keep her
tied up, and to let her taste a discipline of daily stripes.'

IX.

Let us accompany this modest character to town, and place her with
her equals in fine society. All these candid folk do wonders there,
both in the way of actions and maxims. Wycherley's Count?-?/ Wife
gives us the tone. When one of them happens to find herself half
honest,^ she has the manners and the boldness of a hussar. Others
seem born with the souls of courtesans and procuresses. ' If I marry
my lord Aimwell,' says Dorinda, ' there will be title, place, and pre-
cedence, the Park, the play, and the drawing-room, splendour, equipage,
noise, and flambeaux. — Hey, my lady Aimwell's servants there ! Lights,
lights to the stairs ! my lady Aimwell's coach put forward ! Stand by,
make room for her ladyship ! — Are not these things moving?' ' She is
open, and so are others — Corinna, Miss Betty, Belinda, for example.
Belinda says to her aunt, whose virtue is tottering : * The sooner you
capitulate the better.'** Further on, when she has decided to marry

> Vanbnigh's Relapse, iv. 6. ^ Ibid. v. 5. ^ Ibid. iv. 1. * Ibid. v. 5.
* See also the character of a young stupid blockhead, Squire Humphrey.
(Vanbnigh's Journey to London.) He has only a single idea, to be always eating.
« Wycherley's Hippolita ; Farquhar's Silvia.
7 Farquhar's Beaux Stratagem, iv. 1. " Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife, i\L 3.

51 & THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

Heartfree, to save her aunt who is compromised, she makes a confes-
sion of faith which promises well for the future of her new spouse :
* Were't not for your affair in the balance, I should go near to pick
up some odious man of quality yet, and only take poor Heartfree for a
gallant.' ^ These young ladies are clever, and in all cases apt to follow
good instruction. Hear Miss Prue : * Look you here, madam, then,
what Mr. Tattle has given me. — -Look you here, cousin, here's a snuff-
box ; nay, there's snuff in't ; — here, will you have any ? — Oh, good !
how sweet it is! — Mr. Tattle is all over sweet; his peruke is sweet,
and his gloves are sweet, and his handkerchief is sweet, pure sweet,
sweeter than roses. — Smell him, mother, madam, I mean. — He gave me
this ring for a kiss. . . . Smell, cousin ; he says, he'll give me something
that will make my smocks smell this way. Is not it pure ? — It's better
than lavender, mun. — I'm resolved I Avon't let nurse put any more
lavender among my smocks — ha, cousin?'^ It is the silly chatter of
a young magpie, who flies for the first time. Tattle, alone with her,
tells her he is going to make love :

' Hiss P. Well ; and how will you make love to me ? come, I long to have you
begin. Must I make love too ? you must tell me how.

T. You must let me speak, miss, you must not speak first ; I must ask you
questions, and you must answer.

Hiss P. What, is it like the catechism ? — come then, ask me.

T. D'ye think you can love me ?

Miss P. Yes.

T. Pooh ! pox ! yoii must not say yes already ; I shan't care a farthing for you
then in a twinkling.

Miss P. What must I say then ?

T. Why, you must say no, or you believe not, or you can't tell.

Miss P. Why, must I tell a lie then ?

T. Yes, if you'd be well-bred ; — all well-bred persons lie. — Besides, you are a
woman, you must never speak what you think : your words must contradict your
thoughts ; but your actions may contradict your words. So, when I ask you, if you
can love me, you must say no, but you must love me too. If I tell you you are
handsome, you must deny it, and say I flatter you. But you must think yourself
more charming than I speak you : and like me, for the beauty which I say you
have, as much as if I had it myself. If I ask you to kiss me, you must be angry,
but you must not refuse me. . . .

Miss P. 0 Lord, I swear this is pure ! — I like it better than our old-fashioned
country way of speaking one's mind ; — and must not you lie too ?

T. Hum ! — Yes ; but you must believe I speak truth.

Miss P. 0 Gemini ! well, I always had a great mind to tell lies ; but they
frighted me, and said it was a sin.

T. Well, my pretty creature ; will you make me happy by giving me a kiss ?

Miss P. No, indeed ; I'm angry at you. {Buns and kisses him.)

T. Kold, hold, that's pretty well ; — but you should not have given it me, but
have suffered me to have taken it.

* Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife, v. 2. * Congreve's Love for Love, IL 10.

CHAP. I.] THE EESTOEATION. 517

Miss P. Well, we'll do it again.

T. With all my heart. Now, then, my little angel. (Kisses Iter.)

Miss P. Pish!

T. That's right— again, my charmer ! {Kisses aguhi.)
Miss P. 0 fy! nay, now I can't abide j'ou,

T. Admirable ! that was as well as if you had been born and bred in Covcnt
Garden.' 1

She makes such rapid progress, that we must stop the quotation
forthwith. And mark, Avhat is bred in the bone will come out in the
flesh. All these charming characters soon employ the language of
kitchen-maids. When Ben, the dolt of a sailor, wants to make love
to Miss Prue, she sends him off with a flea in his ear, raves, lets loose
a string of cries and coarse expressions, calls him a ' great sea-calf.'
' What does father mean,' he says, ' to leave me alone, as soon as I come
home, with such a dirty dowdy? Sea-calf! I an't calf enough to lick
jour chalked face, you cheese- curd, you.' Moved by these amenities,
she breaks out into a rage, weeps, calls him * a stinking tar-barrel.' ^
They come and pvit a stop to this first essay at gallantry. She fires up,
declares she will marry Tattle, or else Eobin the butler. Her father
says, ' Hussy, you shall have a rod.' She answers, ' A fiddle of a rod !
I'll have a husband : and if you won't get me one, I'll get one fur my-
self. I'll marry our Robin the butler.'^ Here are pretty and prancing
mares if you like ; but decidedly, in these authors' hands, the natural
man becomes nothing but a waif from the stable or the kennel.

Will you be better pleased by the educated man ? The worldly
life which they depict is a regular carnival, and the heads of their
heroines are full of wild imaginations and unchecked gossip. You
may see in Congreve how they chatter, with what a flow of words
and affectations, with what a shrill and modulated voice, with what
gestures, what twisting of arms and neck, what looks raised to heaven,
what genteel airs, what grimaces. Lady Wishfort speaks :

' But art thou sure Sir Rowland will not fail to come ? or will he not fail when
he does come ? AVill he be importunate, Foible, and push ? For if he should not
be importunate, I shall never break decorums : — I shall die with confusion, if I
am forced to advance. — Oh no, I can never advance ! — I shall swoon, if he should
expect advances. ' No, I hope Sir Rowland is better bred than to put a lady to the
necessity of breaking her forms. I won't be too coy neither — I won't give him
despair — but a little disdain is not amiss ; a little scorn is alluring.' Foible. ' A
little scorn becomes your lad)'ship.' Lady W. ' Yes, but tenderness becomes me
best — a sort of dyingness — you see that picture has a sort of a — ha, Foible I a
swimmingness in the eye — yes, I'll look so — my niece affects it ; but she wants
features. Is Sir Rowland handsome ? Let my toilet be removed — I'll dress above.
I '11 receive Sir Rowland here. Is he handsome ? Don't answer me. I won't know :
I'll be siuprised, I'll be taken by surprise.* . . . And how do I look, Foible ?

' Congreve's Love for Love, ii. 11. " JUL iii. 7. ' JUL v. 6.

* Congreve, The }Vai/ oj the World, iii. 5. ,

518 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

F. ' Most killing well, madam. ' Lady W. ' Well, and how sliaL I receive liim ?
in what figure shall I give his heart the first impression ? . . . Shall I sit ? — no, I
won't sit — I'll walk— ay, I'll walk from the door upon his entrance ; and then turn
full upon him — no, that will be too sudden. I'll lie — ay, I'll lie down — I'll
receive him in my little dressing-room ; there's a couch — yes, yes, I'll give the
first impression on a couch. I won't lie neither, but loll and lean upon one elbow :
with one foot a little dangling off, jogging in a thoughtful way — yes — and then
as soon as he appears, start, ay, start, and be surprised, and rise to meet him in a
pretty disorder. ' '

These hesitations of a finished coqiiette become still more vehement
at the critical moment. Lady Plyant thinks herself beloved by Mellefont,
who does not love her at all, and tries in vain to undeceive her.

Mel. 'For Heaven's sake, madam.' Lady P. ' 0, name it no more! — Bless
me, how can you talk of heaven ! and have so much wickedness in your heart ?
May be you don't think it a sin. — They say some of you gentlemen don't think it
a sin. — May be it is no sin to them that don't think it so ; indeed, if I did not
think it a sin — but still my honour, if it were no sin. — But then, to marry my
daughter, for the conveniency of frequent opportunities, I'll never consent to that ;
as sure as can be, I'll break the match.' Mel. 'Death and amazement. — Madam,
upon my knees. ' Lady P. ' Nay, nay, rise up ; come, you shaU see my good
nature. I know love is powerful, and nobody can help his passion : 'tis not your
fault ; nor I swear it is not mine. How can I help it, if I have charms ? and how
can you help it if you are made a captive ? I swear it is pity it should be a fault.
But my honour, — well, but your honour too — but the sin ! — well, but the necessity
— 0 Lord, here is somebody coming, I dare not stay. Well, you must consider of
your crime ; and strive as much as can be against it, — strive, be sure — but don't
be melancholic, don't despair. — But never think that I'll grant you anything ; O
Lord, no. — But be sure you lay aside all thoughts of the marriage : for though 1
know you don't love Cynthia, only as a blind to your passion for me, yet it will
make me jealous. — 0 Lord, what did I say ? jealous! no, no ; I can't be jealous,
for I must not love you — therefore don't hope, — but don't despair neither. — 0,
they're coming ! I must fly.' *

She escapes, and we will not follow her.

This giddiness, this volubility, this pretty corruption, these reckless
and affected airs, are collected in the most brilliant, the most worldly
portrait of the stage we are discussing, that of Mrs. Millamant, * a fine
lady,' as the Dramatis Person^e say.^ She enters, ' with her fan
spread and her streamers out,' dragging a train of furbelows and
ribbons, passing throi;gh the crowd of laced and bedizened fops, in
splendid perukes, who flutter about her path, haughty and wanton,
witty and scornful, toying with gallantries, petulant, with a horror of
every grave word and sustained action, falling in only with change
and pleasure. She laughs at the sermons of JMirabell, her suitor :

^ Congreve, The Way of the Wm'ld, iv.

* Congreve, The Double-dealer, ii. 5.

* Congreve, The Way of the World,

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 51 D

' Sententious Mirabell !— Prithee don't look with that violent and inflexible
\vise face, like Solomon at the dividing of the child in an old tapestry-hanging.' . . .
Ha ! ha ! ha! — pardon me, dear creature, though I grant you 'tis a little barbarous,
ha ! ha ! ha ! ' '-'

She breaks out into laughter, then gets into a rage, then banters,
then sings, then makes f^ces. Her attractions change at every motiou
while you look at her. It is a regular whirlpool ; all turns round in
her brain as in a clock when the mainspring is broken. Nothing can
be prettier than her fashion of entering on matrimony :

Mill. ' Ah ! I'll never marry unless I am first made sure of my will and pleasure !
. . . My dear liberty, shall I leave thee? my faithful solitude, my darling con-
templation, must I bid you then adieu ? Ay — h — adieu — my morning thouglits,
agreeable wakings, indolent slumbers, all ye douceurs, ye sommeils du matin,
adieu ? — I can't do it ; 'tis more than impossible — positively, Mirabell, I'll lie
a-bed in a morning as long as I please.' Mir. ' Then I'll get up in a morning as
early as I please.' Mill. 'Ah ! idle creature, get up when you will — and d'ye hear,
I won't be called names after I'm married ; positively I won't be called names.'
Mir. 'Names ! ' Mill. 'Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart,
and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsonicly
familiar — I shall never bear that — good Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or foml,
nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler, and Sir Francis. . . . Let us never visit
together, nor go to a play together ; but let us be very strange and well-bred : let
us be as strange as if we had been married a great while ; and as well-bred as if we
were not married at all.' . . . Mir. ' Shall I kiss your hand upon the contract ? ' ■'
Mill. Tainall, what shall I do ? shall I have him? I think I must have him.'
Fain. ' Ay, ay, take him. What should you do ? ' Mill. ' WeU then— I'll take
my death I'm in a horrid fright — Fainall, I shall never say it — well — I think —
I'll endure you.' Fain. ' Fy ! fy! have him, have him, and tell him so in plain
terms: for I am sure you have a mind to him. ' Mill. 'Are you? I think I have —
and the homd man looks as if he thought so too — well, you ridiculous thing you,
I'll have you — I won't be kissed, nor I won't be tliauked — here kiss my hand
though. — So, hold your tongue now, don't say a word.'*

The agreement is complete. I should like to see one more article to
it — a divorce ' a mensd et thoro :' this would be the genuine marriage
of the worldlings, that is, a decent divorce. And I answer for it ; in
two years, Mirabell and Millamant will come to this. Hither tends
the whole of this theatre ; for, with regard to the women, but particu-
larly with regard to the married women, I have only presented their
most amiable aspects. Deeper down it is all gloomy, bitter, above all,
pernicious. It represents a household as a prison, marriage as a warfare,
woman as a rebel, adultery as the result looked for, disorder as the
right condition, extravagance as pleasure.* A woman of fashion goes
— , ' fi . —

^ Congreve's Way of Ihe World, ii. 6. * Hid. iii. 11.

3 Ihid. iv. 5. * Hid. iv. G.

'^Amanda. ' How did you live together ? ' Berinthia. ' Like man and wifr,
asunder. — He loved the country, I the town. He hawks and hounds, I coaches and
tc^uipage. He eating and drinking, I carding and playing. He the sound ol a

520 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

to bed in the morning, rises at mid-day, curses her husband, listens to
obscenities, frequents balls, haunts the plays, ruins reputations, turns her
home into a gambling-house, borrows money, allures men, associates
her honour and fortune with debts and assignations. ' We are as wicked
(us men),' says Lady Bute, ' but our vices lie another way. Men have
more courage than we, so they commit more bold, impudent sins. They
quarrel, fight, swear, drink, blaspheme, and the like ; whereas we,
being cowards, only backbite, tell lies, cheat at cards, and so forth.' ^
Excellent catalogue, where the gentlemen are included with the rest !
The world has done nothing but arm them with correct phrases and
elegant dresses. In Congreve especially they have the best style ;
above all, they know how to hand ladies about and entertain them with
news ; they are expert in the fence of retorts and replies ; they are
never out of countenance, find means to make the most ticklish notions
understood ; they discuss very well, speak excellently, salute still better ;
but to sum up, they are blackguai'ds, epicureans on system, professed
seducers. They set forth immorality in maxims, and reason out their
vice. ' Give me,' says one, ' a man that keeps his five senses keen and
bright as his sword, that has 'em always drawn out in their just order
and strength, with his reason, as commander at the head of 'em, that
detaches 'em by turns upon whatever party of pleasure agreeably ofiers,
and commands 'em to retreat upon the least appearance of disadvantage
or danger. ... I love a fine house, but let another keep it; and just so
I love a fine woman.' ^ One deliberately seduces his friend's wife ;
another under a false name gets possession of his brother's intended.
A third hires false witnesses to secure a dowry. I must ask the reader
to consult for himself the fine stratagems of Worthy, Mirabell, and

horn, I the squeak of a fiddle. We were dull company at table, worse a-bed.
"Whenever we met, we gave one another the spleen ; and never agreed but once,
wliicli was about lying alone.' — Vanbnigh, Relapse, Act ii. ad fin.

Compare Vanbrugli, A Journey to London. Rarely has the repulsiveness and
corruption of the brutish or worldly nature been more vividly displayed. Little
Betty and her brother, Squire Humphry, deserve hanging.

Again. Mrs. Fores'ujlit. ' Do you think any woman honest ? ' Scandal. ' Yes,
several very honest; they'll cheat a little at cards, sometimes ; but that's nothing.'
M7-S. F. ' Pshaw ! but virtuous, I mean. S. ' Yes, faith ; I believe some women
are virtuous too ; but 'tis as I believe some men are valiant, through fear. For
why should a man court danger or a woman shun pleasui'e ?' — Congreve, Love for
Love, iii. 14.

' "Vanbnigh, Provoked W'fe, v. 2. Compare also in this piece the character of
Mademoiselle, the French chambermaid. They represent French vice as even more
shameless than English vice.

2 Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem, i. 1. ; and in the same piece here is the
catechism of love : ' What are the objects of that passion ? — youth, beauty, and
clean hnen.' And from the Mock Astrologer of Dry den : *As I am a gentleman, a
man about town, one that wears good cloths, eats, drinks, and wenches sufficiently.'

CHAP. O. THE IIESTOEATION. 621

others. They are coldblooded rascals who commit treachery, adultery,
scoundrelism, like trained experts. They are represented here as men
of fashion ; they are young leaders, heroes, and as such they manage
to get hold of an heiress. AVe must go to Mirabell for an example of
this medley of corruption and elegance. Mrs. Fainall, his old mistress,
married by him to a common friend, a miserable wretch, complains
to him of this hateful marriage. He appeases her, gives her advice,
shows her the precise mode, the true expedient for setting things on
a comfortable footing. ' You should have just so much disgust for
your husband, as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover.' She
cries in despair, ' Why did you make me marry this man ? ' He smiles
calmly, ' Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions ?
to save that idol, reputation.' How tender is this argument ! How
can a man better console a woman whom he has plunged into bitter
unhappiness ! What a touching logic in the insinuation Avhich follows :
' If the familiarities of our loves had produced that consequence of which
you were apprehensive, where could you have fixed a father's name with
credit, but on a husband ? ' He insists on his reason in an excellent
style; listen to the distinction of a man of feeling: 'A better man
ought not to have been sacrificed to the occasion ; a worse had not
answered to the purpose. When you are weary of him, you know your
remedy.' ^ Thus are a woman's feelings to be considered, especially a
woman whom we have loved. To cap all, this delicate conversation is
meant to force the poor deserted Mrs. Fainall into an intrigue which
shall obtain for Mirabell a pretty wife and a good dowry. Certainly
this gentleman knows the world ; no one could better employ a former
mistress. Such are the cultivated characters of this theatre, as dishonest
as the uncultivated ones : having transformed their evil instincts into
systematic vices, lust into debauchery, brutality into cynicism, perversity
into depravity, deliberate egotists, calculating sensualists, with rules for
their immorality, reducing feeling to self-interest, honour to decorum,
happiness to pleasure.

The English Restoration altogether was one of those great crises
which, while warping the development of a society and a literature,
show the inward spirit which they modify, but which contradicts them.
Society did not lack vigour, nor literature talent ; men of the world
■were polished, writers inventive. There was a court, drawing-rooms,
conversation, worldly life, a taste for letters, the example of France,
])eace, leisure, the influence of the sciences, politics, theology, — in short,
all the happy circumstances which can elevate the intellect and civilise
manners. There was the vigorous satire of Wycherley, the sparkling
dialogue and fine raillery of Congreve, the frank nature and animation
of Vanbrugh, the manifold inventions of Farquhar, in brief, all the
resources which might nourish the comic element, and add a genuine

* Congreve, The Way of the World, ii. 4.

522 THE CLASSIU AGE. [BOOK III.

theatre to the best constructions of hiiman intelligence. Nothing came
to a head ; all was abortive. The age has left nothing but the memory
of corruption ; their comedy remains a repertory of viciousness ; society
had only a soiled elegance, literature a frigid wit. Their manners were
gross and trivial; their ideas are futile or incomplete. Through disgust
and reaction, a revolution was at hand in literary feeling and moral
habits, as well as in general beliefs and political institutions. Man v.-iis
to change altogether, and at a single turn. The same repugnance and
the same experience was to detach him from every aspect of his old
condition. The Englisl,man discovered that he was not monarchical,
Papistical, nor sceptical, but liberal, Protestant, and devout. He came
to understand that he was not a roisterer nor a worldling, but reflective
and introspective. He contains a current of animal life too violent to
suffer him without danger to abandon himself to enjoyment ; he needs
a barrier of moral reasoning to repress his outbreaks. He contains a
current of attention and will too strong to suffer himself to rest content
with trifles ; he needs some weighty and sei'viceable labour on which to
expend his power. He needs a barrier and an employment. He
needs a constitution and a religion which shall restrain him by duties
which must be performed, and rights which must be defended. He is
content only in a serious and orderly life ; there he finds the natural
groove and the necessary outlet of his passions and his faculties. From
this time he enters upon it, and this theatre itself exhibits the token.
It remakes and transforms itself. Collier threw discredit upon it ;
Addison condemned it. National sentiment awoke from the dream ;
French manners are jeered at; the prologues celebrate the defeats of
Louis XIV. ; the licence, elegance, religion of his court, are presented
under a ridiculous or odious light.^ Immorality gradually diminishes,
marriage is more respected, the heroines go no further than to the
verge of adultery ;^ the roisterers are pulled up at the critical moment ;
one of them suddenly declares himself purified, and speaks in verse, the
better to mark his enthusiasm ; another praises marriage;* some aspire
in the fifth act to an orderly life. We shall soon see Steele writing a
moral treatise called The Cliristian Hero. Henceforth comedy declines,
and literary talent flows into another channel. Essay, romance, pam-
phlet, dissertation, displace the drama; and the English classical spirit,
abandoning the kinds of writing which are foreign to its nature, enters

^ The part of Chaplain Foigard in Farquhar's Beaux Stratagem ; of JMadenioi-
selle, and generally of all the French people.

^ The part of Amanda in Vanbrugh's Relapse ; of Mrs. Sullen ; the conversion
of two roisterers, in the Beavx Stratagem.

^ ' Though marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many blanks,
yet there is one inestimable lot, in which the only heaven upon earth is written.'

' To be capable of loving one, doubtless, is better than to possess a thousand,'

— VAKBliUaH.

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 523

upon tlie great works which are destined to immorttlise it and gi> ? it
expression.

X.

Nevertheless, in this continuous decline of dramatic invention, and
in the great change of literary vitality, some shoots strike out at dis-
tant intervals towards comedy; for mankind always seeks for entertain-
ment, and the theatre is always a place of entertainment. The tree
once planted grows, feebly without a doubt, with long intervals of almost
total dryness and almost constant barrenness, yet subject to imperfect
renewals of life, to passing partial blossomings, son)etimes to an inferior
fruitage bursting forth from the lowest branches. Even when the great
subjects are worn out, there is still room here and there for a happy idea.
Let a wit, clever and experienced, take it in hand, he will catch up a
few oddities on his way, he will introduce on the scene some vice or
fault of his time ; the public will come in crowds, and ask no better
than to recognise itself and laugh. There was one of these successes
when Gay, in the Beggars' Opera, brought out the rascaldom of the
great world, and avenged the public on Walpole and the court ;
another, when Goldsmith, inventing a series of mistakes, led his hero
and his audience through five acts of blunders.^ After all, if true
comedy can only exist in certain ages, ordinary comedy can exist in
any age. It is too near akin to the pamphlet, novels, satire, not to
raise itself occasionally by its propinquity. If I have an enemy, in-
stead of attacking him in a brochure, I can take my fling at him on
the stage. If I am capable of painting a character in a story, I am not
far from having the talent to bring out the pith of this same character
in a few turns of a dialogue. If I can quietly ridicule a vice in a copy
of verses, I shall easily arrive at making this vice speak out from the
mouth of an actor. At least I shall be tempted to try it ; I shall be
seditced by the wonderful eclat which the footlights, declamation,
scenery give to an idea ; I shall try and bring my own into this strong
light ; I shall go in for it even when it is necessary tJiat my talent be a
little or a good deal forced for the occasion. If need be, I shall delude
myself, substitute expedients for fresh originality and true comic genius.
If on a few points I am inferior to the great masters, on some, it may be,
I surpass them ; I can work up my style, refine upon it, discover
happier words, more striking jokes, livelier exchange of brilliant
repartees, newer images, more picturesque comparisons ; I can take
from this one a character, from the other a situation, borrow of a
neighbouring nation, out of old plays, good novels, biting pamphlets,
pointed satires, and small newspapers ; I can accumulate effects, serve
up to the public a stronger and more appetising stew ; above all, I
can perfect my machine, oil the wheels, plan the surprises, the stage

' ASVte SCcops to Conquer,

524 THE CLASSIC AGE. |_!iOOK lU.

effects, the see-saw of the plot, like a consummate playwright. The
art of constructing plays is as capable of development as the art of
clockmaking. Tlie Airce-writer of to-day sees that the catastrophe of
half of Moliere's plays is ridiculous; nay, many of them can produce
effects better than Moliere ; in the long run, they succeed in stripping
the theatre of all awkwardness and circumlocution. A piquant style,
and perfect machinery ; pungency in all the words, and animation in
all the scenes; a superabundance of wit, and marvels of ingenuity; over
all this, a true physical activity, and the secret pleasure of depicting
and justifying oneself, of public self-glorification : here is the founda-
tion of the School for Scandal, here the source of the talent and the
success of Sheridan.

He was the contemporary of Beaumarchais, and resembled him in
his talent and in his life. The two epochs, the two schools of drama,
the two characters, correspond. Like Beaumarchais, he was a lucky
adventurer, clever, amiable, and generous, reaching success through
scandal, who flashed up and shone in a moment, scaled with a rush the
empyrean of politics and literature, settled himself, as it were, among
the constellations, and, like a brilliant rocket, presently went out in the
darkness. Nothing failed him; he attained all at the first leap, without
apparent effort, like a prince who need only show himself to win his
place. All the most surpassing happiness, the most brilliant in art, the
most exalted in worldly position, he took as his birthright. The poor
unknown youth, wretched translator of an unreadable Greek sophist,
who at twenty walked about Bath in a red waistcoat and a cocked hat,
destitute of hope, and ever conscious of the emptiness of his pockets,
had gained the heart of the most admired beauty and musician of her
time, had carried her off from ten rich, elegant, titled adorers, had
fought with the best-hoaxed of the ten, beaten him, had carried by
storm the curiosity and attention of the public. Then, challenging
glory and wealth, he placed successively on the stage the most diverse
and the most applauded dramas, comedies, farce, opera, serious verse ;
he bought and worked a large theatre without a farthing, inaugurated
a reign of successes and pecuniary advantages, and led a life of elegance
amid the enjoyments of social and domestic joys, surrounded by univer-
sal admiration and wonder. Thence, aspiring yet higher, he conquered
power, entered the House of Commons, showed himself a match tor the
lirst orators, opposed Pitt, accused Warren Hastings, supported Fox,
jeered at Burke ; sustained with eclat, disinterestedness, and constancy,
a most difficult and generous part ; became one of the three or four most
noted men in England, an equal of the greatest lords, the friend of a
royal prince, in the end even Keceiver-General of the Duchy of Corn-
■vvall, treasurer to the fleet. lu every career he took the lead. As
Byron said of him :

' Whatsoever Sheridan has clone or chosen to do has been, par excellence,
always tjae best of its kind, lie has written the best comedy {The tSchooL for

CHAP. I.] THE KESTORATTON. 525

Scamlal), the test drama (in my mind far before that St. Giles lampoon The
j3eygar's Opera), the best faroe 'The Critic— it is only too good for a farce), and
the best Address (Monologue on Garrich), and, to crown all, delivered the very best
oration (the famous Begum Speech) ever conceived or heard in this country. ' ^

All ordinary rules were reversed in his favour. He was forty-four
years old, debts began to sliower down on liim ; he had supped and
drunk to excess ; his clireks were purple, his nose red. In this state
he met at the Duke of Devonshire's a charming young lady with whom
lie fell in love. At the first sight she exclaimed, ' What an ugly man ,
a regular monster!' He spoke to her; she confessed that he was very
ugly, but that he had a good deal of wit. He spoke again, and again,
and she found him very amiable. He spoke yet again, and she loved
him, and resolved at all hazard to marry him. The father, a prudent
man, wishing to end the affair, gave out that his future son-in-law must
provide a dowry of fifteen thousand pounds; the fifteen thousand pounds
were deposited as by magic in the hands of a banker; the young couple
set off into the country ; and Sheridan, meeting his son, a fine strapping
son, ill-disposed to the marriage, persuaded him that it was the most
reasonable thing a father could do, and the most fortunate event that a
son could rejoice over. Whatever the business, whoever the man, he
persuaded ; none withstood him, every one fell under his charm. What
is more difficult than for an ugly man to make a young girl forget
his U2;liness ?

There is one thing more difficult, and that is to make a creditor
forget you owe him money. There is something more difficult still,
and that is, to borrow money of a creditor who has come to demand it.
One day one of his friends was arrested for debt ; Sheridan sends for
Mr. Henderson, the crabbed tradesman, coaxes him, interests him,
moves him to tears, lifts him out of himself, hedges him in with general
considerations and lofty eloquence, so that Mr. Henderson offers his
purse, actually wants to lend two hundred pounds, insists, and finally,
to his great joy, obtains permission to lend it. No one was ever more
amiable, quicker to win confidence than Sheridan ; rarely has the sympa-
thetic, affectionate, and fascinating character been more fully displayed;
he was literally seductive. In the morning, creditors and visitors filled
the rooms in which he lived ; he came in smiling, with an easy manner,
with so much loftiness and grace, that the people forgot their wants and
their claims, and looked as if they had only come to see him. His
animation was irresistible ; no one had a more dazzling wit ; he had an
inexhaustible fund of puns, contrivances, sallies, novel ideas. Lord
Byron, who was a good judge, said that he had never heard nor con-
ceived of a more extraordinary conversation. Men spent nights in listen-
ing to him ; no one equalled him during a supper ; even when drunk
he retained his wit. One day he was picked up by the watch, and

' 2Vte Works of Lord Byron, 18 vols., ed, Moore, 1S32, ii. p. 303.

526 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK IIL

they asked him hi? name ; he gravely answered, ' Wilberforce.' With
stranger? and inferiors he had no arrogance or stiiFaess ; he possessed
in an eminent degree that unreserved character which always exhibits
itself complete, which hold? back none of its light, which abandons and
give? itself np : he wept when he received a sincere eulogy from Lord
Byron, or in recounting his miseries as a plebeian parvenu. Nothing is
more charming than these effusions ; they set out by placing people on a
footing of peace and amity ; men suddenly desert their defensive and
precautionary attitude ; they perceive that he is giving himself up to
them, and they give themselves up to him ; the outpouring of his heart
excite? the outpoui'ing of theirs. A minute later, Sheridan's impetuous
and sparkling individuality flashes out ; his wit explodes, rattles like a
discharge of fire-arms ; he takes the conversation to himself, with a
sustained brilliancy, a variety, an inexhaustible vigour, till five o'clock
in the morning. Against such a necessity for launching out in uncon-
sidered speech, of indulgence, of self-outpouring, a man had need be
Avell on his guard ; life cannot be passed like a holiday ; it is a strife
against others and against oneself ; people must think of the future,
mistrust themselves, make provision ; there is no subsisting without the
precaution of a shopkeeper, the calculation of a tradesman. If you
sup too often, you will end by not having wherewithal to dine upon ;
when your pockets have holes in them, the shillings will fall out ;
nothing is more of a truism, but it is true. Sheridan's debts accumu-
lated, his digestion failed. He lost his seat in Parliament, his theatre
was burned ; sherifTs officer succeeded sherifTs officer, and they had
long been in possession of his house. At last, a bailiff arrested the
dying man in his bed, and Avas for taking him off in his blankets ;
nor would he let him go until threatened with a lawsuit, the doctor
having declared that the sick man would die on the road. A certain
newspaper cried shame on the great lords who suffered such a man
ic end so miserably ; they hastened to leave their cards at his door. In
the funeral procession two brothers of the king, dukes, earls, bishops,
the first men in England, carried or followed the body. A singular
contrast, picturing in abstract all his talent, and all his life : lords at his
funeral, and bailiffs at his death-bed.

His theatre was in accordance ; all was brilliant, but the metal was
not all his own, nor was it of the best quality. His comedies were
comedies of society, the most amusing ever written, but merely comedies
of society. Imagine the exaggerated caricatures artists are wont to
improvise, in a drawing-room where they are intimate, about eleven
o'clock in the evening. His first play, The Rivals, and afterwards
Ins Duenna, and The Critic, are loaded Avith these, and scarce any-
thing else. There is Mrs Malaprop, .1 silly pretentious Avoman, aa'Iio
uses grand words higgledy-piggledy, delighted Avith herself, in ' a nice
derangement of epitaphs' before her nouns, and declaring that her niece
is ' as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.' There is

CHAP. 1,1 THE RESTORATION. 527

Mr. Acres, wlio suddenly becomes a hero, gets engaged in a duel,
and being led on the ground, calculates the effect of the balls, thinks
of his will, burial, embalmment, and wishes he were at home. There
is another in the person of a clumsy and cowardly servant, of an
irascible and brawling father, of a sentimental and romantic young
lady, of a touchy Irish duellist. All this jogs and jostles on, with-
out much order, amid the surprises of a twofold plot, by aid of ex-
pedients and rencontres, without the full and regular government of
a dominating idea. But in vain one perceives it is a patchwork ; the
high spirit carries off everything : we laugh heartily ; every single scene
has its facetious and rapid movement ; we forget that the clvmisy valet
makes remarks as witty as Sheridan himsehV and that the irascible
gentleman speaks as well as the most elegant of writers.^ The play-
wright is also a man of letters ; if, through mere animal and social spirit,
he wished to amuse others and to amuse himself, he does not forget the
interests of his talent and the care for his reputation. He has taste,
he appreciates the retinements of style, the worth of a new image, of a
striking contrast, of a witty and well-considered insinuation. He has,
above all, wit, a wonderful conversational wit, the art of rousing and
sustaining the attention, of being sharp, varied, of taking his hearers un-
awares, of throwing in a repartee, of setting folly in relief, of accumu-
lating one after another witticisms and happy phrases. He brought
himself to perfection subsequently to his first play, having acqtiired
theatrical experience, writing and erasing; trying various scenes, re-
casting, arranging ; his desire was that nothing should arrest the
interest, no improbability shock the spectator ; that his comedy might
glide on with the precision, certainty, uniformity of a good machine.
He invents jests, replaces them by better ones; he whets his jokes, Vjinds
them tip like a sheaf of arrows, and writes at the bottom of the last
page, ' Finished, thank God. — Amen.' He is right, for the work costs
him some pains ; he will not write a second. This kind of writing,
artificial and condensed as the satires of La Bruyere, is like a cut
phial, into which the author has distilled without reservation all his
reflections, his reading, his understanding.

What is there in this celebrated School for Scandal? And what is
there, that has cast upon English comedy, which day by day was being

' Acres. Odds blades ! David, no gentleman will ever risk the loss of his honour !

David. I say, then, it would be but civil in honour never to risk the loss of a
gentleman. — Look ye, master, this honour seems to me to be a marvellous false
friend; aj', truly, a very couvtier-llke servant. — The Dramatic Works of Richai-cl
Brinsley Sheridan, 1828 : The Rivals, iv. 1.

'■' Sir Anthony. — Nay, but Jack, such eyes! so innocently wild ! so bashfully
irresolute ! Kot a glance but speaks and kindles some thought of love ! Then,
J;ick, her cheeks! so deeply blushing at the insinuations of her tell-tale eyes!
Then, Jack, her lips ! 0 Jack, lips, smiling at their own discretion ! and if not
smiling, more sweetly pouting, more lovely in sullenness \--The Rivals, iii. 1.

528 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

more and more forgotten, the radiance of a last success? Sheridan
took two characters from Fielding, Blifil, and Tom Jones ; two plays of
Moliere, Le Misanthrope and Tartufe; and from these puissant materials,
condensed with admirable cleverness, he has constructed the most
brilliant firework imaginable. Moliere has only one female slanderer,
Celimene ; the other characters serve only to give her a cue: there is
quite enough of such a jeering woman ; she rails on within certain
bounds, without hurry, like a true queen of the drawing-room, who has
time to converse, who knows that she is listened to, who listens to
herself: she is a woman of society, who preserves the tone of refined
conversation ; and in order to smooth down the harshness, her slanders
are interrupted by the calm reason and sensible discourse of the amiable
Eliante. Moliere represents the malice of the world without exaggera-
tion ; but here they are rather caricatured than depicted. ' Ladies,
your servant,' says Sir Peter ; ' mercy upon me ! the whole set — a
character dead at every sentence.' ^ In fact, they are ferocious : it is a
regular quarry ; they even befoul one another, to deepen the outrage.
Mrs. Candour remarks: 'Yesterday Miss Prim assured me, that Mr. and
Mrs. Honeymoon are now become mere man and wife, like the rest of
their acquaintance. She likewise hinted, that a certain widow in the
next street had got rid of her dropsy, and recovered her shape in a
most surprising manner. ... I was informed, too, that Lord Flimsy
caught his wife at a house of no extraordinary fame ; and that Tom
Saunter and Sir Harry Idle were to measure swords on a similar
occasion.' ^ Their animosity is so bitter that they descend to the part
of buffoons. The most elegant person in the room, Lady Teazle, shows
her teeth to ape a ridiculous lady, draws her mouth on one side, and
makes faces. There is no pause, no softening ; sarcasms fly like pistol-
shots. The author had laid in a stock, he had to use them up. It is he
speaking through the mouth of each of his characters ; he gives them
all the same wit, that is his own, his irony, his harshness, his picturesque
vigour ; whatever they are, clowns, fops, old women, girls, no matter,
the author's main business is to break out into twenty explosions in a
minute :

* Mrs Candour. Well, I will never join in the ridicule of a friend ; so 1 tell my
cousin Ogle, and ye all know what pretensions she has to beauty.

Crab. She has the oddest countenance — a collection of features from all the
corners of the globe.

Sir Benjamin. She has, indeed, an Irish front.

Crab. Caledonian locks.

Sir B. Dutch nose.

Crab. Austrian lips.

Sir B. The complexion of a Spaniard.

Crab. And teeth d la Chinoise.

1 Tl(£ Scliool/or Scandal, ii. 2. « jn^^ i i^

CHAP. I.] THE RESTORATION. 529

Sir B. In sliort, her face resembles a table d'hdte at Spa, where no two guests
are of a nation.

Crab. Or a congress at the close of a general war, where every member seems to
have a different interest, and the nose and cliin are the only parties likely to join

issue.

1

Or again :

* Crab. Sad news upon his arrival, to hear how yoTir brother has gone on !

Joseph Surface. I hope no busy people have already prejudiced his uncle against
him — he may reform.

' Sir Benjamin. True, he may ; for my part, I never thought him so utterly void
of principle as people say, and though he has lost all his friends, I am told nobody
is better spoken of amongst the Jews.

C7-ab. Foregad, if the Old Jewry was a ward, Charles would be an alderman,
for he pays as many annuities as the Irish Tontine ; and when he is sick, they have
prayers for his recovery in all the Synagogues.

Sir B. Yet no man lives in greater splendor. — They tell me, when he enter-
tains his friends, he can sit down to dinner with a dozen of his own securities,
have a score of tradesmen waiting in the anti-chamber, and an officer behind every
guest's chair. ' ^

And again:

' Sir B. Mr. Surface, I did not mean to hurt you, but depend on't, your brother
is utterly undone.

Crab. Oh ! undone as ever man was — can't raise a guinea.

Sir B. Everjrthing is sold, I am told, that was moveable.

Crab. Not a moveable left, except some old bottles and some pictures, and they
seem to be framed in the wainscot, egad.

Sir B. I am sorry to hear also some bad stories of him.

Crab. Oh ! he has done many mean things, that's certain.

Sir B. But, however, he's your brother.

Crab. Ay ! as he is your brother — we'U tell you more another opportunity. ' ^

In this manner has he pointed, multiplied, thrust to the quick, the
measured epigrams of Moll ere. And yet is it possible to grow weary
of such a well-sustained discharge of malice and witticisms ?

Observe also the change which the hypocrite undergoes under
his treatment. Doubtless all the grandeur disappears from the part.
Joseph Surface does not uphold, like Tartufe, the interest of the comedy;
he does not possess, like his ancestor, the nature of a cabman, the bold-
ness of a man of action, the manners of a beadle, the neck and shoulders
of a monk. He is merely selfish and cautious ; if he is engaged in an
intrigue, it is rather against his will; he is only half-hearted in the
matter, like a correct young man, well dressed, with a fair income,
timorous and fastidious by nature, discreet in manners, and without
violent passions ; all about him is soft and polished, he takes his tone
from the times, he makes no display of religion, though he does of
morality ; he is a man of measured speech, of lofty sentiments, a dis-

iTAe School/or Scandal, ii. 2. 2 jj^ij^^ j. i^ 3 /^^j^^^

2 L

i

530 THE CLASSIC AGE. [BOOK III.

ciple of Johnson or of Rousseau, a dealer in set phrases. There is
nothing on which to construct a drama in this commonplace person ;
and the fine situations which Sheridan takes from Moliere lose half
their force through depending on such pitiful support. But how this
insufficiency is covered by the quickness, abundance, naturalness of the
incidents 1 hoAV skill makes up for everything 1 how it seems capable of
supplying everything, even genius! how the spectator laughs to see
Joseph caught in his sanctuary like a fox in his hole ; obliged to hide
the wife, then to conceal the husband ; forced to run from one to the
other; busy in hiding the one behind his screen, and the other in
his closet ; reduced in casting himself into his own snares, in justifying
those whom he wished to ruin, the husband in the eyes of the wife, the
nephew in the eyes of the uncle ; to ruin the only man whom he wished
to justify, namely, the precious and immaculate Joseph Surface ; to
turn out in the end ridiculous, odious, baffled, confounded, in spite of
his adroitness, even by reason of his adroitness, step by step, without
quarter or remedy ; to sneak off, poor fox, with his tail between his
legs, his skin spoiled, amid hootings and laughter! And how, at the
same time, side by side with this, the naggings of Sir Peter and his wife,
the suppers, songs, the picture sale at the spendthrift's house, weave a
comedy in a comedy, and renew the interest by renewing the attention !
We cease to think of the meagreness of the characters, as we cease to
think of the variation from truth ; we are willingly carried away by the
vivacity of the action, dazzled by the brilliancy of the dialogue ; we are
charmed, applaud ; admit that, after all, next to great inventive faculty,
animation and wit are the most agreeable gifts in the world : we appre-
ciate them in their season, and find that they also have their place in
the literary banquet; and that if they are not worth as much as the
substantial joints, the natural and generotis wines of the first course, at
least they furnish the dessert.

The dessert over, we must leave the table. After Sheridan, we
leave it forthwith. Henceforth comedy languishes, fails ; there is
nothing left but farce, such as Townley's High Life Below Stairs, the
burlesques of George Colman, a tutor, an old maid, countrymen and
their dialect ; caricature succeeds painting ; Punch raises a laugh when
the days of Reynolds and Gainsborough are over. There is nowhere
in Europe, at the present time, a more barren stage ; good company
abandons it to the people. The form of society, and the spirit which
had called it into being, have disappeared. Vivacity, and the subject
of original conceptions, had peopled the stage of the Renaissance in
England, — a surfeit which, unable to display itself in systematic argu-
ment, or to express itself in philosophical ideas, found its natural outlet
only in mimic action and talking characters. The wants of polished
society had nourished the English comedy of the seventeenth century, —
a society which, accustomed to the representations of the court and the
displays of the world, sought on the stage the copy of its intercourse

CHAP. I.] THE KESTOKATION. 531

and its drawing-rooms. With the decadence of the court and the
check of mimic invention, the genuine drama and the genuine comedy
disappeared ; they passed from the stage into books. The reason of it
is, that people no longer live in public, like the embroidered dukes of
Louis XIV. and Charles ii., but in their family, or at the study table ;
the novel replaces the theatre at the same time as citizen life replaces
the life of the court.

END OF VOLUME L

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