Principle in Art, Etc.

by Coventry Patmore

II

Genius, like sanctity, is commonly more or less foolish in the eyes of the world. Its riches are “the riches of secret places”; and they so much exceed, in its esteem, those that are considered riches by the common sense of men, that its neglect of the ordinary goods of life often amounts to real imprudence—imprudence even from its own point of view, whereby it is bound to avoid hindrances to its free life and exercise. The follies, however, of a Blake or a Hartley Coleridge are venial when compared with those of the thoughtful and prudent fool—the fool in respect of great things, as the other is in respect of small. Who can measure the harm that may be done to the world by a thoughtful and earnest fool—one who starts from data which he is too dull to verify, and who multiplies his mistakes in proportion to the perspicuity and extent of his deductions? The man of “talent” who is merely such, is not a very common phenomenon—for “talent” is in great part the product of culture; which “genius,” or the power of seeing, is not. Most persons of talent still possess a share of that obscure kind of genius called common sense, which keeps them from taking up with false principles and following them into wild conclusions. We need, however, only recall some famous figures in the present and past generation in order to be assured that immense talent is consistent with an almost complete deficiency of real insight. When the discursive understanding is in great force, and has at its command abundant stores of external information, we behold a power that may work the ruin of empires amid applauding peoples, though it can never build them up. The natural and exact sciences are the proper fields for the exertions of such a faculty.

Stupid persons fancy they derogate from the supremacy of the pure intellect or genius by observing that it is always associated with a vivid imagination, which they regard as a faculty for seeing things as they are not. Shelley made a mistake in a totally different direction when he declared that the imagination is the power by which spiritual things are discerned; whereas the truth is that intellect is the power by which such things are discerned, and imagination is that by which they are expressed. Sensible things alone can be expressed fully and directly by sensible terms. Symbols and parables, and metaphors—which are parables on a small scale—are the only means of adequately conveying, or rather hinting, supersensual knowledge. “He spake not without a parable.” Hebrew, Greek, Indian, and Egyptian religions all spoke in parables; and poets deal in images and parables simply because there is no other vehicle for what they have to say. “The things which are unseen may be known by the things which are seen,” but only by way of symbol and parable. Imagination, though it is not, as Shelley says it is, the power of spiritual insight, is its invariable concomitant; and even that dull kinsman of genius, common sense, would feel sadly hampered in its endeavours to convey its perceptions to the minds of others, were it wholly without the faculty of speaking in parables.

It has often been noted that men of genius have bad memories, and that persons having extraordinary memories, like Cardinal Mezzofanti, have little else. The truth is that there are two quite distinct kinds of memory: the memory for external facts and words, apart from their significance; and the memory for spiritual facts and principles. The man of genius, who may have no special reason for cultivating the lower kind of memory, may even find it rather a hindrance than a help. His prayer is, “Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” So long as his heart retains the significance of the facts he has seen and the words he has heard, he is willing to let the words and the facts go, as a man casts away the shells after he has eaten the oysters. The “well-informed” person commonly differs from the man of genius in this: that he carries about with him all the shells of all the oysters he has ever eaten, and that his soul has grown thin under the burthen.

A commonplace about men of genius is that they usually have religious dispositions. It would be strange were it otherwise, seeing that genius is nothing but the power of discerning the things of the spirit. The first principle of the most recent form of “psychology” is, indeed, that there is no soul; but that man must have little genius who would not say “Amen” to St. Bernard’s epigram, “He must have little spirit who thinks that a spirit is nothing.”

After what has just been said, it seems paradoxical to be obliged to admit that the sins to which men of genius are usually most subject are those of sense. From pride, and its offspring envy, hatred, and malice, which play so terrible a part in the affairs of most men, they are comparatively exempt. That they should often be more subject than others to be misled by the ease and pleasure of the senses may be because the senses of men of genius are more subtly permeated by the spirit, of which they are the ultimate life, than are those of the world at large, and are thereby rendered more acute and less sordidly wicked. This may be said, I hope, without in any way condoning error.

Men of genius, who are therewithal men of cultivated talents and great stores of appropriate information, are the only safe legislators and governors of empires; not only because theirs alone is the sufficiency of sound and far-seeing wisdom, but because they are far less likely than other men to be misled by personal motives and weak fears. But such men, unhappily, are the last to come to the front in states of ultra-popular government; and in such states they have accordingly to suffer that last misery (as by one of the greatest philosophers it has been called), the misery of being governed by worse men than themselves.

IV
POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES

If we take stock of the world’s actual achievements—intellectual, moral, and artistic—in the six thousand years during which we know anything about it, it is impossible not to be struck with the extreme smallness of the sum of the acquisitions and attainments of the human race which can bear any comparison with its desires and apparent possibilities. If those desires and possibilities had in no instances been fulfilled, the entire absence of attainment would have been less startling than is its actual paucity. It would not have been nearly so wonderful if none had reached the high table-lands of excellence in any department of human activity, as it is that those heights have been reached by some and by so few. And the marvel of this paucity becomes yet further increased when it is considered that not only is it all that mankind has done, but in all likelihood nearly as much as it could have done had it tried ever so hard. For it is a peculiarity of the very highest work in every kind, that it is not the result of painful labour, but that it is easier to do it than not to do it, when it can be done at all. So that humanity must not be allowed to cover its enormous shortcomings with an “I could an’ I would.” How many philosophers has philosophy produced? If Aristotle be the type, where is the other specimen of the species? How many statesmen have there been whose faculties and characters, nearly inspected, do not provoke the exclamation, “With how little wisdom the world is governed!” In how many Christians has Christianity flowered, as in the souls of St. John and St. Francis? Greek architecture and Greek sculpture mean little more than the Parthenon and its friezes. What survives of Greek poetry will scarcely fill one bookshelf, and English poetry, which forms the greater part of the rest of the poetry of the human race, would rest easily on three. The building of the Middle Ages is nothing but the repetition of one inspiration, which would remain transmitted to us almost in its entirety were the Cathedral of Freiburg the only specimen left to us. A single gallery of the Vatican would provide wall-room sufficient for all the paintings of the world that are able to fill with satisfying peace the eye which has been educated by Botticelli, Luini, and Raphael. An ordinary life affords abundant leisure to take in all that two hundred generations of mankind have so done as to fill the craving for what all men feel to be alone satisfyingly human. That is to say, one man in twenty millions or so has been able, during some—often very small—proportion of his life, to be and to do that which all men, when they behold such being and doing, feel to be their natural though utterly unattainable prerogative. Thousands and thousands climb, with praiseworthy struggles and integrity of purpose and with shouts of “Excelsior!” the minor peaks of life; while two or three in a generation are seen walking with easy breath about those great and tranquil table-lands for which all of us, on beholding them, feel that we were born. It is not that, in a world of inequalities, some two or three in a generation must naturally stand higher than all the rest, as only one among many competitors can be Senior Wrangler. That fuller excellence is a region, and not a pinnacle; and those who reach it are all upon a great and facile equality, their altitude being simply that of right and unhindered human faculty.

Every individual of the human race is, in this regard, an image of the race itself. Only for a few hours, perhaps, of the million which is about the sum of the longest lifetime, has each one easily and unaccountably found himself to be living indeed. Some accident, some passing occasion which has called upon him to be more than himself, some glimpse of grace in nature or in woman, some lucky disaster even, or some mere wayward tide of existence, has caused the black walls of his prison-house to vanish; and he has breathed in a realm of vision, generosity, and gracious peace, “too transient for delight and too divine.” These prophetic moments—one in a million—pass; but, unless he has despised and denied them, they leave him capable, more or less, of understanding prophecy; and he knows that in him also there is a potentiality, realisable perhaps under other than present conditions, of becoming one in that great society in which such states of life appear to be not momentary crises but habits. The wider and the deeper his personal experience of beauty and felicity, the more readily will a man confess that life contains scarcely anything for fruition but abundance for hope; and the better he is acquainted with that which has been best done and said in all ages, the less he will be inclined to believe that the world is making any advances towards the realisation of the promise which every age repeats. An enigma for which science has no key is the certain fact, that if the world be not a prophecy of good things which it shows no likelihood of providing, then it is all nothing but a purposeless and badly conceived tragedy, upon which the sooner the black curtain drops the better. For if the world be not such a prophecy, then the best of men are of all men the most miserable; to these is given beyond others the “transitory gleam” which shows the dulness of their ordinary life for the lingering death it really is; but, knowing little or nothing of life as it is known to such, the stupid and “the wicked have no bonds in their death,” and can only feel the comparatively tolerable evils of external and accidental adversity.

There never was a time in which the “higher life,” “high art,” etc., were less known than in the present, when every goose is gabbling about them. The proof is in the way these names are constantly associated with that of “progress”; whereas progress, as respects the realities, is, if it exists at all, most certainly a progress backwards. The rejoicings of Lord Macaulay and his like over the recent advances of mankind are exactly those of a prosperous shopman over the increase of his business; and the hallelujahs of science are mainly over the elaboration of mighty means for petty ends and of theories which explain away God and exhibit all that past ages have called wisdom as folly. It is too absurd! Yet we must not allow the present eclipse of the electric lights of true learning by the flaring tar-barrels of jubilant ignorance to discourage us in the belief that there is, on the whole, no cessation of the work for which the world goes on. The conscience of mankind, though occasionally confused and obscured, will always cry “Amen” to the great word of St. Augustine, “What ought to be must be;” and the rare achievements of genius and sanctity and the few and far-between glimpses of the life that is indeed life, which are accorded to all, will continue to be accepted as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

V
CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART

“Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice,” says one of the highest authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in psychological science writes—

A cheerful heart is what the Muses love.

Dante makes Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own interior gaiety—of which a word by and by—is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; and that the good are gay is a commonplace, and one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it is, when rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave heart is always gay in this sense: that, although it may be afflicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of others, it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to despondency; and thus a habit of mind is formed which can discern in most of its own afflictions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can thence infer at least a probability of such cause in cases where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows, it is not over-troubled by those of others, however tender and helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for that in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and when we see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt for its cowardice.

A couple of generations ago most people would have opened their eyes wide at any one who should have thought remarks like these worth making. Such truth formed part of the universal tradition of civilisation and moral culture. But a wilful melancholy, and, the twin sign of corruption, a levity which acutely fears and sympathises with pains which are literally only skin-deep, have been increasing upon us of late in a most portentous way. The much-vaunted growth of “humanity” has been due rather to a softening of the brain than of the heart. Huge moral ill, the fact of national degradation, the prospect of national disaster, arouses less pain in the sympathetic hearts of humanitarians than the yelp of a poodle which has had its ear pinched. Men and times do not talk about the virtues they possess. Which is more inhuman: to punish with rack and wheel the treason which voluntarily sacrifices or jeopardises the welfare of millions, or to condone or ignore it for the sake of momentary ease? The England in which melancholy and levity are becoming prevalent habits is merry England no more. “The nation thou hast multiplied, but not increased the joy.” And we are not the only nation which deserves this lamentation of the prophet. The growths of melancholy and levity have been still more marked in France. In America, some traveller has remarked, “there is comfort everywhere, but no joy.” America is accordingly the only country which has no art.

It is, as we have said, a vulgar error to consider Dante a melancholy poet. In the whole range of art, joy is nowhere expressed so often and with such piercing sweetness as in the Paradiso; and it flashes occasionally through the dun atmosphere of the other parts of the poem. The Inferno is pervaded by the vigorous joy of the poet at beholding thoroughly bad people getting their deserts; and the penances of purgatory are contemplated by him with the grave pleasure which is often felt by the saner sort of persons, even in this world, under the sufferings they acknowledge to be the appropriate punishment of and purification from the sins they have fallen into. Shakespeare is the most cheerful of poets. We read his deepest tragedies without contracting even a momentary stain of melancholy, however many tears they may have drawn from us. Calderon flies among horrors and disasters on the wings of a bird of Paradise, without any resulting incongruity; and like things may be said of the greatest painters and musicians, until quite recent times. But since about the beginning of this century how many of our geniuses have mingled their songs with tears and sighs over “insoluble problems” and “mysteries of life” which have no existence for a man who is in his right senses and who minds his own business; while the “scrannel pipes” of the smaller wits have been playing to the sorry Yankee tune of “There’s nothing new, and there’s nothing true, and it doesn’t signify.” Music has taken to imitate the wailing of lost spirits or the liveliness of the casino; and the highest ambition of several of our best painters seems to have been to evoke a pathos from eternal gloom.

This is false art, and represents a false life, or rather that which is not life at all; for life is not only joyful, it is joy itself. Life, unhindered by the internal obstruction of vice or the outward obscurations of pain, sorrow, and anxiety, is pure and simple joy; as we have most of us experienced during the few hours of our lives in which, the conscience being free, all bodily and external evils have been removed or at least quiescent. And, though these glimpses of perfect sunshine are few and far between, the joy of life will not be wholly obscured to us by any external evil—provided the breast is clear of remorse, envy, discontent, or any other habitually cherished sin. The opportunities and hindrances of joyful life are pretty fairly distributed among all classes and persons. God is just, and His mercy is over all His works. If gardens and parks are denied to the inhabitant of a city lane, his eye is so sharpened by its fasts that it can drink in its full share of the sweetness of nature from a flowering geranium or a pot of crocuses on his window-sill. There are really very few persons who have not enough to eat. Marriage is open almost equally to all, except, perhaps, the less wealthy members of the upper orders. None are without opportunities of joy and abundant reasons for gratitude: and the hindrances of joy are, if justly considered, only opportunities of acquiring new capacities for delight. In proportion as life becomes high and pure it becomes gay. The profound spiritualities of the Greek and Indian myths laugh for joy; and there are, perhaps, no passages of Scripture more fondly dwelt upon in the Roman Breviary than those which paint the gladness of the Uncreated Wisdom: “When he balanced the foundations of the earth, I was with him, forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times, playing in the world: and my delight is to be with the children of men.”

VI
THE POINT OF REST IN ART

Coleridge, who had little technical knowledge of any art but that in which, when he was himself, he supremely excelled—poetry—had nevertheless a deeper insight into the fundamental principles of art than any modern writer, with the sole exception of Goethe. And this is one of his many fruitful sayings: “All harmony is founded on a relation to rest—on relative rest. Take a metallic plate and strew sand on it, sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no point of rest.”

Without pretending to be able to trace this principle of rest to more than a very limited distance, and in a very few examples, I think it is worth notice in a time when art generally is characterised by a want of that repose which until recent times has especially “marked the manners of the great.” Look through the National Gallery, and few pictures will be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the motive. Step into an Academy Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skilful and in many respects admirable they may be, would not constitute points of unrest, if they were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same with nearly all modern poetry, sculpture, and architecture; and if it is not true of music, it is because music absolutely cannot exist without some reference to a point or points of rest, in keynote, fundamental strain, or reiterated refrain.

It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, this point should be that on which the eye should repose in order to bring the remainder into focal proportion; and this is true with regard to those painters who paint on the theory that the eye is fixed, and not roving in its regard. But this theory has never been that of the greatest times of art. Crome, Constable, and Gainsborough’s landscapes do not fade off from a certain point on which the eye is supposed to be fixed; yet there will usually be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose.

The most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that it is not in itself the most but the least interesting point in the whole work. It is the punctum indifferens to which all that is interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. In an elaborate landscape it may be—as it is in one of Constable’s—the sawn-off end of a branch of a tree: or a piece of its root, as it is in one of Michael Angelo’s pieces in the Sistine Chapel. In the Dresden “Madonna” of Raphael it is the heel of the Infant. No one who has not given some thought to the subject can have any idea of the value of these apparently insignificant points in the pictures in which they occur, unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them. Cover them from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered.

In proportion to the extent and variety of points of interest in a painting or a poem the necessity for this point of rest seems to increase. In a lyric or idyll, or a painting with very few details, there is little need for it. It is accordingly in the most elaborate plays of Shakespeare that we find this device in its fullest value; and it is from two or three of these that we shall draw our main illustrations of a little-noticed but very important principle of art. In King Lear it is by the character of Kent, in Romeo and Juliet by Friar Laurence, in Hamlet by Horatio, in Othello by Cassio, and in the Merchant of Venice by Bassanio, that the point of rest is supplied; and this point being also in each case a point of vital comparison by which we measure and feel the relationships of all the other characters, it becomes an element of far higher value than when it is simply an, as it were, accidental point of repose, like the lopped branch in Constable’s landscape. Each of these five characters stands out of the stream of the main interest, and is additionally unimpressive in itself by reason of its absolute conformity to reason and moral order from which every other character in the play departs more or less. Thus Horatio is the exact punctum indifferens between the opposite excesses of the characters of Hamlet and Laertes—over-reasoning inaction and unreasoning action—between which extremes the whole interest of the play vibrates. The unobtrusive character of Kent is, as it were, the eye of the tragic storm which rages round it; and the departure, in various directions, of every character more or less from moderation, rectitude, or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt from our more or less conscious reference to him. So with the central and comparatively unimpressive characters in many other plays—characters unimpressive on account of their facing the exciting and trying circumstances of the drama with the regard of pure reason, justice, and virtue. Each of these characters is a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate: a vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference.

It is obvious, as I have indicated, that a point of rest and comparison is necessary only when the objects and interests are many and more or less conflicting; but the principle is sometimes at play in forms and works in which we should scarcely have expected to find it. An armlet, or even a finger-ring, gives every portion of the nude figure an increase of animation, unity, and repose. The artistic justification of the unmeaning “burthen” of many an old ballad may probably be found, at least in part, in the same principle; as may also be that of the trick—as old as poetry—of occasionally repeating a line or phrase without any apparent purpose in the repetition.

Of course the “point of rest” will not create harmony where—as in most modern works—its elements are absent; but, where harmony exists, it will be strangely brought out and accentuated by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes, perhaps, even accidental accessory.

VII
IMAGINATION

There are things which can never be more than approximately defined, and which, even when so defined, are only to be rightly understood in proportion to the degrees in which they are possessed by those who would attempt to comprehend them. Such are, for example, “imagination” and “genius”; which, being faculties that are possessed in a very low degree by nearly all and in a very high degree by extremely few, are matters of the most general interest and the most variable apprehension. That such faculties should, however, as far as possible, be understood is of great practical importance to all persons; inasmuch as it greatly concerns all to know something of the signs, sanctions, and claims of those powers by which they are inevitably more or less ruled, externally and internally.

It is nothing against a definition of an entity which cannot be fully defined to say that such definition is “new.” It was objected against an interpretation by St. Augustine of some Old Testament history or parable, that other authorities had given other interpretations. “The more interpretations the better,” was the saint’s reply. In such cases various definitions and interpretations are merely apprehensions of various sides of a matter not wholly to be embraced or comprehended by any single definition or interpretation. In recent times genius and imagination have come to be widely regarded as one and the same thing. They are not so, however, though they are perhaps indissolubly connected. The most peculiar and characteristic mark of genius is insight into subjects which are dark to ordinary vision and for which ordinary language has no adequate expression. Imagination is rather the language of genius: the power which traverses at a single glance the whole external universe, and seizes on the likenesses and images, and their combinations, which are best able to embody ideas and feelings which are otherwise inexpressible; so that the “things which are unseen are known by the things which are seen.” Imagination, in its higher developments, is so quick and subtle a power that the most delicate analysis can scarcely follow its shortest flights. Coleridge said that it would take a whole volume to analyse the effect of a certain passage of only a few syllables in length. In dealing with such a work as The Tempest criticism is absolutely helpless, and its noblest function is to declare its own helplessness by directing attention to beauty beyond beauty which defies analysis. The Tempest, like all very great works of art, is the shortest and simplest, and indeed the only possible expression of its “idea.” The idea is the product of genius proper; the expression is the work of imagination. There are cases, however, in which it is hard to distinguish at all between these inseparable qualities. The initiation of a scientific theory seems often to have been due to the action of the imagination working independently of any peculiar direct insight; the analogy-discovering faculty—that is, the imagination—finding a law for a whole sphere of unexplained phenomena in the likeness of such phenomena to others of a different sphere of which the law is known. Hence the real discoverers of such theories are scarcely ever those who have obtained the credit of them; for nothing is usually more abhorrent to men of extraordinary imagination than “fact-grinding.” Such men, after having flung out their discoveries to the contempt or neglect of their contemporaries, leave the future proof of them to mental mechanics; religiously avoiding such work themselves, lest, as Goethe said of himself, they should find themselves imprisoned in “the charnel-house of science.” Genius and imagination of a very high kind are not at all uncommon in children under twelve years of age, especially when their education has been “neglected.” The writer can guarantee the following facts from personal witness: A clever child of seven, who could not read, and had certainly never heard of the Newtonian theory of gravitation, said to his mother suddenly, “What makes this ball drop when I leave hold of it?—Oh, I know: the ground pulls it.” Another child, a year or two older, lay stretched on a gravel path, staring intently on the pebbles. “They are alive,” he cried, in the writer’s hearing; “they are always wanting to burst, but something draws them in.” This infantine rediscovery of the doctrine of the coinherence of attraction and repulsion in matter seems to have been an effort of direct insight. The repetition of the Newtonian apple revelation seems rather to have been the work of the imagination, tracking likeness in difference; but to discern such likeness is, again, an effort of direct insight, and justifies Aristotle’s saying that this power of finding similitude in things diverse is a proof of the highest human faculty, and that thence poetry is worthier than history. The poet’s eye glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and his faculty of discerning likeness in difference enables him to express the unknown in the terms of the known, so as to confer upon the former a sensible credibility, and to give the latter a truly sacramental dignity. The soul contains world upon world of the most real of realities of which it has no consciousness until it is awakened to their existence by some parable or metaphor, some strain of rhythm or music, some combination of form or colour, some scene of beauty or sublimity, which suddenly expresses the inexpressible by a lower likeness. The vulgar cynic, blessing when he only means to bray, declares that love between the sexes is “all imagination.” What can be truer? What baser thing is there than such love, when it is not of imagination all compact? or what more nearly divine when it is? Why? Because the imagination deals with the spiritual realities to which the material realities correspond, and of which they are only, as it were, the ultimate and sensible expressions. And here it may be noted, by the way, that Nature supplies the ultimate analogue of every divine mystery with some vulgar use or circumstance, in order, as it would seem, to enable the stupid and the gross to deny the divine without actual blasphemy.

Profligacy and “fact-grinding” destroy the imagination by habitually dwelling in ultimate expressions while denying or forgetting the primary realities of which they are properly only the vessels. Purity ends by finding a goddess where impurity concludes by confessing carrion. Which of these is the reality let each man judge according to his taste. “Fact-grinding”—which Darwin confessed and lamented had destroyed his imagination and caused him to “nauseate Shakespeare”—commonly ends in destroying the religious faculty, as profligacy destroys the faculty of love; for neither love nor religion can survive without imagination, which Shelley, in one of his prefaces, identifying genius with imagination, declares to be the power of discerning spiritual facts. Those who have no imagination regard it as all one with “fancy,” which is only a playful mockery of imagination, bringing together things in which there is nothing but an accidental similarity in externals.

VIII
PATHOS

Neither Aristotle nor Hegel, the two great expositors of the relation of the emotions to art, has discussed the nature of that which is understood by moderns as “pathos.” Aristotle has described in his Rhetoric, with the greatest acuteness and sensibility, the conditions and modes of exciting pity. But pity includes much that is excluded by pathos; and it may be useful to endeavour to ascertain what the limitations of the latter are, and what are its conditions in relation more particularly to art, in which it plays so important a part.

Pity, then, differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emotional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature; though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect, may be indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul. Pity is helpful, and is not deadened or repelled by circumstances which disgust the simply sensitive nature; and its ardour so far consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the person who truly pities finds the field of pathos extended far beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity and pathos, which is the feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass of men and women there is sufficient virtue of pity—pity that would act if it had the opportunity—to extend in them the feeling of pity, that is pathos, to a far larger range of circumstances than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even if it had the chance.

Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity; for absolute wickedness, with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be quite content, cannot be certainly predicated of any individual sufferer; but pathos, whether in a drawing-room tale of delicate distress or in a tragedy of Æschylus or Shakespeare, requires that some obvious goodness, or beauty, or innocence, or heroism should be the subject of suffering, and that the circumstance or narration of it should have certain conditions of repose, contrast, and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending from the immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the fact of goodness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer, contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sadness of Desdemona’s death is immensely heightened by the black shadow of Iago; and perhaps the most intense touch of pathos in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum, while his betrayer occupies himself, between the acts of a comedy at the Criterion, in devising how best he may excuse his presence there by denying that he was aware of the contretemps or by representing his news of it as non-official. The singer of Fair Rosamund’s sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang—

Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled.

Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman’s tears.

Nought is there under heav’n’s wide hollowness
That moves more dear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness.

It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage of happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic; but it is still more the way in which she is given to smiling through them. The author of the Rhetoric shows his usual incomparable subtilty of observation when he notes that a little good coming upon or in the midst of extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest pathos; and when the shaft of a passionate female sorrow is feathered with beauty and pointed with a smile there is no heart that can refuse her her will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffering there is no pathos. Nothing in the Inferno has this quality except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing, through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos, “tempering extremities with extreme sweet,” or at least with the memory of it. Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of pathos to their “crown,” which is “remembering happier things.” No one weeps in sympathy with the “base self-pitying tears” of Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is without some contrasting dignity of curb. Even a little child does not move us by its sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. A great and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is also a source of pathos; if indeed it be not the same with that which Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceeding ill and a little good. There is pathos in a departing pleasure, however small. It is the fact of sunset, not its colours—which are the same as those of sunrise—that constitutes its sadness; and in mere darkness there may be fear and distress, but not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in literature as the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding’s novel, had prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come, and that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charterhouse pensioner. In each of these cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast of noble reticence with a sorrow which has no direct expression. The same necessity for contrast renders reconciliations far more pathetic than quarrels, and the march to battle of an army to the sound of cheerful military music more able to draw tears than the spectacle of the battle itself.

The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few writers are sufficiently aware of this. Humour is cumulative and diffusive, as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew; but how many a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the historian of Little Nell by an attempt to make too much of it! A drop of citric acid will give poignancy to a feast; but a draught of it——! Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye ever shed a tear over the Vita Nuova, whatever an Italian may have done. Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence the exquisitely touching points in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Two on a Tower, The Trumpet-Major, and other of Hardy’s novels.

Pathos is the luxury of grief, and when it ceases to be other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence Tennyson’s question in “Love and Duty,” “Shall sharpest pathos blight us?” involves a misunderstanding of the word; although his understanding of the thing is well proved by such lyrics as “Tears, idle tears,” and “O well for the fisherman’s boy.” Pleasure and beauty—which may be said to be pleasure visible—are without their highest perfection if they are without a touch of pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound pleasure and to great beauty by the mere fact of the incongruity of their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaustible and (except by Dante) almost unworked mine of poetry, Catholic theology, that the felicity of the angels and glorified saints and of God Himself would not be perfect without the edge of pathos, which it receives from the fall and reconciliation of man. Hence, on Holy Saturday the Church exclaims, “O felix culpa!” and hence “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine righteous who need no repentance.” Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of heaven; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its beatitude.

IX
POETICAL INTEGRITY

The assertion that the value of the words of a poet does and ought to depend very much upon his personal character may seem, at the first glance, a violent paradox; but it is demonstrably true. A wise or tender phrase in the mouth of a Byron or a Moore will be despised, where a commonplace of morality or affection in that of a Wordsworth or a Burns is respected. If the author of Don Juan had said that for him “the meanest flower that blows could give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” as he would have said had it occurred to him to do so, no one would have believed him; it would have passed for a mere “poetical licence,” and would have been excused as such and forgotten. Byron and Wordsworth have both declared in words of similar force and beauty that the sights and sounds of nature “haunted them like a passion.” But the declaration was not consistent with what we know of Byron, and it was consistent with what we know of Wordsworth; and in the one case it creates a like frame of mind in the reader, while in the other it passes like a melodious wind, leaving no impression. Now this mighty element of character resides, not in the poet’s active life, by which he is and ought to be socially judged; but in the spiritual consistency and integrity of his mind and heart, as it is to be inferred from the cumulative testimony of his words, which are, after all, the safest witnesses of what the man truly is. A man’s actions—although we are bound socially to judge him thereby—may belie him: his words never. Out of his mouth shall the interior man be judged; for the interior man is what he heartily desires to be, however miserably he may fail to bring his external life into correspondence with his desire; and the words of the man will infallibly declare what he thus inwardly is, especially when, as in the case of the poet, the powers of language are so developed as to become the very glass of the soul, reflecting its purity and integrity, or its stains and insincerities, with a fidelity of which the writer himself is but imperfectly conscious.

To a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign of shallowness and of interior corruption than that habitual predominance of form over formative energy, of splendour of language and imagery over human significance, which has so remarkably distinguished a great deal of the most widely praised poetry of the past eighty years. Much of this poetry has about as much relation to actual or imaginative reality as the transformation scene of a pantomime; and much more—called “descriptive”—has so low a degree of significance and betrays so inhuman an absorption in the merest superficies of nature, that when the writer pretends to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity which, directly or indirectly, are the main region of every true poet’s song, he has to overcome our sense that he is an habitual trifler before he can gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving utterance to what may really be a passing strain of true poetic thought and feeling. A poet who is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of nature may probably attain to an accuracy and splendour of analytical description which has its value in its way, and which may, in certain transitory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the highest pinnacle of favour. But such poetry will be judged, in the end, by its human significance; and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of “heartless” recorded against him—a verdict which even in the time of his favour is implicitly pronounced by the indifference with which his professions of human principle and feeling are received, even by his admirers.

The slightest touch of genuine humanity is of more actual and poetic value than all that is not human which the sun shines on. The interest of what is called “descriptive” or “representative” in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, in other words, “imaginative.” A description by Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Burns, a landscape by Crome, Gainsborough, or Constable, is not merely nature, but nature reflected in and giving expression to a state of mind. The state of mind is the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered; and there has never been a greater critical fallacy than that contained in Mr. Ruskin’s strictures on the “pathetic fallacy.” Nature has no beauty or pathos (using the term in its widest sense) but that with which the mind invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like a flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of reflecting the colours of the light. The true light of nature is the human eye; and if the light of the human eye is darkness, as it is in those who see nothing but surfaces, how great is that darkness!

The saying of Wordsworth concerning the Poet, that

You must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love,

which at first reading sounds very much like nonsense, is absolutely true. He must have won your credit and confidence in his words, by proofs of habitual veracity and sincerity, before you can so receive the words which come from his heart that they will move your own. If, in the utterance of what he offers to you as the cry or the deep longing of passion, you catch him in busily noticing trifles—for which very likely he gets praised for “accurate observation of nature”—you will put him down as one who knows nothing of the passion he is pretending to express. If you detect him in the endeavour to say “fine things” in order to win your admiration for himself, instead of rendering his whole utterance a single true thing, which shall win your sympathy with the thought or feeling by which he declares himself to be dominated, the result will be the same; as also it will be if you discover that the beauty of his words is obtained rather by the labour of polish than the inward labour and true finish of passion. When, on the other hand, some familiarity with the poet’s work has assured you that, though his speech may be unequal and sometimes inadequate, it is never false; that he has always something to say, even when he fails in saying it: then you will not only believe in and be moved by what he says well; but when the form is sometimes imperfect you will be carried over such passages, as over thin ice, by the formative power of passion or feeling which quickens the whole; although you would reject such passages with disgust were they found in the writing of a man in whose thoughts you know that the manner stands first and the matter second.

X
THE POETRY OF NEGATION

Poetry is essentially catholic and affirmative, dealing only with the permanent facts of nature and humanity, and interested in the events and controversies of its own time only so far as they evolve manifestly abiding fruits. But the abiding fruits of such events and controversies are very rarely manifest until the turmoil in which they are produced has long since subsided; and therefore poets, in all times before our own, have either allowed the present to drift unheeded by or have so handled its phenomena as to make them wholly subsidiary to and illustrative of matters of well-ascertained stability. The many occasional poems of past times, of which temporary incidents have been the subjects, in no way contradict this assertion in the main; and the casual example of a poet like Dryden affords only the confirming exception. Dryden was fond of protesting, especially when he was a Catholic; and there is no doubt but that this habit added greatly to his popularity in his lifetime, as it does to the favour in which some of the most distinguished of our modern poets are now held; but all those points which probably constituted the high lights of Dryden’s poetry to his contemporaries have suffered in course of time a change like that which has come over the whites of many of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ pictures; and it is much to be feared that a similar fate awaits a large proportion of what has been written by several of the best poets of the generation which is now passing away. Most of our recent poets, even while condemning political revolution, have shared in the ideas or feelings which are at the bottom of revolutions, a hope which the facts of nature do not justify, and a disbelief in what those facts do justify—namely, the ineradicable character of moral evil, with its circumstantial consequences. The heart of the modern poet is, as a rule, always vibrating between the extremes of despondent grumbling at the present conditions and hasty and unreasonable aspirations for the improvement of his kind; his tragedies and hymns of rejoicing are alike void of the dignity and repose which arise from a sound confession of the facts of humanity and a cheerful resignation to its imperfections; and he whose true function is to stand aside as the tranquil seer too often now becomes the excited agent in matters which concern him least of all men, because of all men he is the least fitted to meddle with them. It is hard to say which is more wonderful—the clearness of the true poet’s vision for things when he is contented with looking at them as they are, or his blindness when he fancies he can mend them. Famous statesmen have marvellously drivelled in verse, but not more marvellously than famous poets have drivelled in what pertains to statesmanship. It is scarcely without a feeling of amazement that a man of ordinary good sense contrasts the power of poetic vision in writers like Victor Hugo and Carlyle with the childishness of their judgments when they propose antidotes for evils which they so clearly see, but for which they do not see that there are no antidotes, but only palliatives. Looking for what they fancy may be, when their vocation is to proclaim with clearness that which is, one poet will shriek to us (for untruths cannot be sung) that all will be well when King Log is down and King Stork reigns in his stead; another that Niagara may yet be dammed if country gentlemen will hire drill-sergeants to put their gardeners and farm-labourers through the goose-step; another says the world will be saved if a few gentlemen and ladies, with nothing better to do, will take to playing at being their own domestics; a fourth, in order to save morals, proposes their abolition; a fifth proclaims that all will have good wages when there remains no one to pay them; a sixth discovers in the science of the future a sedative for human passions instead of a wider platform for their display; and so on. Others, who have no patent medicines on hand, impotently grumble or rage at evils in which, if they looked steadily, they might discern the good of justice, or that of trial, or both (as great poets in past times always have done); and, instead of truly singing, they sob hysterical sympathy with such sufferings in others as, if they were their own, they either would bear or know that they ought to bear with equanimity.

The statesman, the social reformer, the political economist, the natural philosopher, the alms-giver, the hospital visitor, the preacher, even the cynical humorist, has each his function, and each is rightly more or less negative; but the function of the poet is clearly distinguished from all of these, and is higher though less obtrusive than any. It is simply affirmative of things which it greatly concerns men to know, but which they have either not discovered or have allowed to lapse into the death of commonplace. He alone has the power of revealing by his insight and magic words the undreamt-of mines of felicity which exist potentially for all in social relationships and affections. The inexhaustible glories of nature are a blank for many who are yet able to behold them reflected in his perceptions. His convincing song can persuade many to believe in, if they do not attain to taste—as he, if indeed he be a poet, must have tasted—the sweet and wholesome kernel which the rough shell of unmerited suffering conceals for those who are patient. And he can so contemplate the one real evil in the world as to give body and life and intelligibility to that last and sharpest cry of faith, “O felix culpa!”

The temptations which our time offers to the poet in order to induce him to forsake his own line are very great, and poets are human. The conceited present craves to have singers of its own, who will praise it, or at least abuse it; and it pays them well for pandering to its self-consciousness, lavishing its best honours upon them as leaders of the “Liberal movement,” and scoffing at those, as “behind their time,” who stand apart and watch and help those abiding developments of humanity which advance “with the slow process of the suns.”

XI
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS

In art, as in higher matters, “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it;” and the initial cause of failure, in many who seem to have faculties which should ensure success, is not so much the difficulty of the road which leads to it, as want of humility in confessing its narrowness. Each man is by birth a unique individuality, which the circumstances of his life will increase and develop continually, if he be content to do his duty in the station, intellectual and otherwise, to which it has pleased God to call him, without falling below its obligations or assuming others which have not been laid upon him. The low but still priceless degree of genius which consists in individuality in manners, and which renders the possessor of it powerfully though imperceptibly edifying in all companies, is open to all, though few are sufficiently simple and honest and unambitious to attain to it, by turning neither to the right hand nor the left in pursuit of their particular good of life.

“Originality,” whether in manners, action, or art, consists simply in a man’s being upon his own line; in his advancing with a single mind towards his unique apprehension of good; and in his doing so in harmony with the universal laws which secure to all men the liberty of doing as he is doing, without hindrance from his or any other’s individuality. Unless “originality” thus works in submission to and harmony with general law, it loses its nature. In morals it becomes sin or insanity, in manners and in art oddity and eccentricity, which are in reality the extreme opposites and travesties of originality. As in religion it is said that “no man can know whether he is worthy of love,” so in art and ordinary life no man can know whether he is original. If through habitual fidelity to his idea of good he has attained to originality, he will be the last person in the world to know it. If he thinks he is original, he is probably not so; and if he is commonly praised for originality, he may hardly hope to attain to any such distinction. Originality never expresses itself in harsh and obtrusive singularities. A society of persons of true originality in manners would be like an oak-tree, the leaves of which all look alike until they are carefully compared, when it is found that they are all different. In art, the sphere of extraordinary originalities, there is the same absence of strongly pronounced distinctions, and therefore the same withdrawal from the recognition of the vulgar, who look for originality in antics, oddities, crudities, and incessant violations of the universal laws, which true originality religiously observes; its very function consisting, as it does, in upholding those laws and illustrating them and making them unprecedentedly attractive by its own peculiar emphases and modulations.

The individuality or “genius” of a man, which results from fidelity in life and art to his “ruling love,” is almost necessarily narrow. Shakespeare is the only artist that ever lived whose genius has even approached to universality. His range is so great that ordinary readers, if, like Mr. Frederic Harrison, they had the courage to speak their impressions, would with him condemn the greater part of his work as “rubbish”—that is, as having no counterpart in the “positivism” of their actual or imaginative experience. Every play of Shakespeare is a new vision—not only a new aspect of his vision, as is the case with the different works of nearly all other artists, even the greatest. Narrowness, indeed, so far from being opposed to greatness in art, is often its condition. Dante and Wordsworth are proofs that greatness of genius consists in seeing clearly rather than much; and well it would have been both for poets and for readers had the former always or even generally understood the economy of moving always on their own lines. Nothing has so much injured modern art as the artist’s ambition to show off his “breadth”; and many an immortal lyric or idyll has been lost because the lyric or idyllic poet has chosen to forsake his line for the production of exceedingly mortal epics or tragedies. The modern custom of exhibiting all the works of a single painter at a time affords proof which every one will understand of what has been said. Who, with an eye for each painter’s true quality, can have gone over the collections in recent years of the pictures of Landseer, Reynolds, Rossetti, Blake, Holman Hunt, and others, without a feeling of surprise, and some perhaps irrational disappointment, at the discovery for the first time of the artist’s limitations? Each had painted the same vision over and over again! There was no harm in that. The mistake was in bringing together the replicas which should have adorned “palace chambers far apart.” But poets, whose “works” are always collectively exhibited, should beware how they betray the inevitable fact of the narrowness of genius. Not only should they never leave their own line for another which is not their own, but they should be equally careful not to go over it again when they have once got to the end of it.

XII
LOVE AND POETRY

Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or at any rate feels, that love, though the least “serious,” is the most significant of all things. The wise do not talk much about this knowledge, for fear of exposing its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the profligate and unbelieving, and because its light, though, and for the reason that, it exceeds all other, is deficient in definition. But they see that to this momentary transfiguration of life all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and that it is for this the race exists, and not this for the race—the seed for the flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this love, and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest and highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a “great Sacrament,” holding that, with Transubstantiation—which it resembles—it is only unreasonable because it is above reason. “The love which is the best ground of marriage,” writes also the Protestant and “judicious” Hooker, “is that which is least able to render a reason for itself.” Indeed, the extreme unreasonableness of this passion, which gives cause for so much blaspheming to the foolish, is one of its surest sanctions and a main cause of its inexhaustible interest and power; for who but a “scientist” values greatly or is greatly moved by anything he can understand—that which can be comprehended being necessarily less than we are ourselves?

In this matter the true poet must always be a mystic—altogether to the vulgar, and more or less to all who have not attained to his peculiar knowledge. For what is a mystery but that which one does not know? The common handicrafts used to be called mysteries; and their professors were mystics to outsiders exactly in the sense that poets or theologians, with sure, but to them uncommunicated and perhaps incommunicable, knowledge, are mystics to the many. The poet simply knows more than they do; but it flatters their malignant vanity to call him names which they mean to be opprobrious, though they are not, because he is not such a spiritual pauper as themselves. But poets are mystics, not only by virtue of knowledge which the greater part of mankind does not possess, but also because they deal with knowledge against which the accusation of dunces who know the differential calculus is etymologically true—namely, that it is absurd. Love is eternally absurd, for that which is the root of all things must itself be without root. Aristotle says that things are unintelligible to man in proportion as they are simple; and another says, in speaking of the mysteries of love, that the angels themselves desire in vain to look into these things.

In the hands of the poet mystery does not hide knowledge, but reveals it as by its proper medium. Parables and symbols are the only possible modes of expressing realities which are clear to perception though dark to the understanding. “Without a parable he spake not” who always spake of primary realities. Every spiritual reality fades into something else, and none can tell the point at which it fades. The only perfectly definite things in the universe are the conceptions of a fool, who would deny the sun he lives by if he could not see its disk. Natural sciences are definite, because they deal with laws which are not realities but conditions of realities. The greatest and perhaps the only real use of natural science is to supply similes and parables for poets and theologians.

But if the realities of love were not in themselves dark to the understanding, it would be necessary to darken them—not only lest they should be profaned, but also because, as St. Bernard says, “The more the realities of heaven are clothed with obscurity, the more they delight and attract, and nothing so much heightens longing as such tender refusal.” “Night,” says the inspirer of St. Bernard, “is the light of my pleasures.”

Love is rooted deeper in the earth than any other passion; and for that cause its head, like that of the Tree Igdrasil, soars higher into heaven. The heights demand and justify the depths, as giving them substance and credibility. “That He hath ascended—what is it but because He first also descended into the lower parts of the earth?” Love “reconciles the highest with the lowest, ordering all things strongly and sweetly from end to end.” St. Bernard says that “divine love” (religion) “has its first root in the most secret of the human affections.” This affection is the only key to the inner sanctuaries of that faith which declares, “Thy Maker is thy Husband;” the only clue by which searchers of the “secret of the King,” in the otherwise inscrutable writings of prophet and apostle, discover, as Keble writes, “the loving hint that meets the longing guess,” which looks to the future for the satisfying and abiding reality, the passage of whose momentary shadow forms the supreme glory of our mortality.

The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life’s transient transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, “Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” The greatest perversion of the poet’s function is to falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the senses, and to make light of its sacramental character. This character is instantly recognised by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every youth and maiden; but it is very easily forgotten and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its prophets—all the more powerful because, like the prophets of old, they are wholly independent of the priests, and are often the first to discover and rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is always tending to fall. If society is to survive its apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly by guarding and increasing the purity of the sources in which society begins. The world is finding out, as it has often done before, and more or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that religion does in transfiguring love: as any one may see who compares one state or time with another. Love is sure to be something less than human if it is not something more; and the so-called extravagances of the youthful heart, which always claims a character for divinity in its emotions, fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, reaction, if those claims are not justified to the understanding by the faith which declares man and woman to be priest and priestess to each other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and proclaimed in the words “Let us make man in our own image” and “male and female created he them.” Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious—and true lovers always are—that, for the season at least, they justify the words “I have said, Ye are gods.” Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. Its felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved; and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, without which love cannot long exist as emotion. Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded as a “great sacrament.” It is the inculcation of this significance which has made love between man and woman what it is now—at least to the idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced more clearly. Love being much more respected and religion much less than of old, the danger of profanation is not so great as it was when religion was revered and love despised. The most characteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most alluring of her weaknesses—her not caring for masculine truth and worth unless they woo her with a smile or a touch or some such flattery of her senses—is the prevailing vice of most men, especially in these times. This general effeminacy is the poet’s great opportunity. It is his pontifical privilege to feel the truth; and his function is to bridge the gulf between severe verity and its natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech which, without any sacrifice of the former, is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” He insinuates in nerve-convincing music the truths which the mass of mankind must feel before they believe. He leads them by their affections to things above their affections, making Urania acceptable to them by her prænomen Venus. He is the apostle of the Gentiles, and conveys to them, without any flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which the chosen people have too often denied or disgraced in their eyes.

XIII
KEATS

Mr. Sidney Colvin’s book upon Keats is, in the main, a welcome exception to what has become, of late, the rule in this class of work. It is remarkably just, and every good reader will feel it to be the more warmly appreciative because it is scarcely ever extravagantly so. The bulk of Keats’s poetry, including “Endymion,” is estimated at its true worth, which, as Keats—the severest judge of his own work—knew and confessed, was not much; and the little volume (justly styled by Mr. Colvin “immortal”) which was published in 1820, and which does not consist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared to contain nearly the whole of the poet’s effective writing. And even in this little volume—which includes “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the five “Odes,” and “Hyperion”—Mr. Colvin acutely detects and boldly points out many serious defects. From the comparatively worthless waste of the rest of Keats’s writing, Mr. Colvin picks out with accurate discernment the few pieces and passages of real excellence; and he does criticism good service in directing attention to the especial value of the fragment called “The Eve of St. Mark,” and of that which is probably the very finest lyric in the English language, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

As long as Mr. Colvin limits himself to the positive beauties and defects of Keats’s poetry he is nearly always right; it is only in his summing up and in his estimate of the comparative worth of his subject that a less enthusiastic critic must part company with him. “I think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare.” Is not the truth rather that, among real poets, Keats was the most un-Shakespearian poet that ever lived? True poets may be divided into two distinct classes, though there is a border-line at which they occasionally become confused. In the first class, which contains all the greatest poets, with Shakespeare at their head, intellect predominates; governing and thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty and sweetness as accidents—though inevitable accidents—of its operation. The vision of such poets may almost be described in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of the Beatific Vision. “The vision,” he writes, “is a virtue, the beatitude an accident.” Such poets are truly spoken of as masculine. In the other class—in which Keats stands as high as any other, if not higher—the “beatitude,” the beauty and sweetness, is the essential, the truth and power of intellect and passion the accident. These poets are, without any figure of speech, justly described as feminine (not necessarily effeminate); and they are separated from the first class by a distance as great as that which separates a truly manly man from a truly womanly woman. The trite saying that the spirit of the great poet has always a feminine element is perfectly true notwithstanding. “The man is not without the woman;” though “the man is not for the woman, but the woman for the man.” The difference lies in that which has the lead and mastery. In Keats the man had not the mastery. For him a thing of beauty was not only a joy for ever, but was the supreme and only good he knew or cared to know; and the consequence is that his best poems are things of exquisite and most sensitively felt beauty, and nothing else. But it is a fact of primary significance, both in morals and in art (a fact which is sadly lost sight of just now), that the highest beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy the first place as motives, but only when they are more or less the accidents of the exercise of the manly virtue of the vision of truth. There is at fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny sweetness about that which is truly masculine, whether in character or in art, which women and womanly artists never attain—an inner radiance of original loveliness and joy which comes, and can only come, of the purity of motive which regards external beauty and delight as accidental.

In his individual criticisms of Keats’s poems Mr. Colvin fully recognises their defect of masculine character. In speaking of “Isabella” he says: “Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance: its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediæval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all; its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth; and without these no great literature can exist.” Again: “In Keats’s conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite; as, indeed, a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature.” And again: “In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. Both alike were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever they liked in art, books, and nature.” In these and other equally just and unquestionable criticisms of Keats’s character and works, surely Mr. Colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion that this writer was “by temperament” “the most Shakespearian” of poets since Shakespeare. And whether he was also such (as Mr. Colvin further asserts him to have been) “by power,” let the poet’s work declare. In his own lovely line—which he faithfully kept to in “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and the “Odes”—he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled. When he is true to that line we do not feel the want of anything better, though we may know that there is something better: as, in the presence of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she is not a General Gordon or a Sir Thomas More. But let Keats try to assume the man—as he does in his latest work, his attempts at dramatic composition or at satirical humour, in the “Cap and Bells”—and all his life and power seem to shrivel and die, like the beauty of Lamia in the presence of Apollonius. Some of his readers may object the semblance of Miltonic strength in certain passages of the fragment “Hyperion”; but Keats himself knew and admitted that it was only a semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself with having shown the world that there was no object of merely external nature, from “roses amorous of the moon” to

The solid roar
Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,
Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,

which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should feel as he did.

In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men.

XIV
WHAT SHELLEY WAS

Professor Dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon Shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most important point—his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given—the Professor’s eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden’s arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to blaspheming whatever society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the King and his father—an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another—a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet—notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies—by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia Viviani—with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like that of the spheres (witness “Epipsychidion”); and, anon, Harriet is “a frantic idiot,” Elizabeth a “brown demon,” and Emilia a “centaur.” “It was,” says his biographer, “one of the infirmities of Shelley’s character that, from thinking the best of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other side and think the worst.” It is, perhaps, fortunate that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such “infirmities”; otherwise we might take them for something more than mere saints and poets. The hero, as became absolute charity, gave every one credit—at least, when it suited his mood and convenience—for being as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting Harriet Westbrook for money after he had run away with his fresh “wife,” her rival. He was addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most “charming” eccentricities. “When Bysshe,” then quite a child, “one day set a fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he might have ‘a little hell of his own.’” At Eton “in a paroxysm of rage he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his tormentor.” On another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him “What on earth are you doing, Shelley?” he replied, “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil.” The pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. “Here I swear,” he writes to Mr. Hogg, “and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me—here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge.” His resolutions to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide “men who pray” and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such a world! He had all the naïveté as well as the self-reliance of true greatness. He had no sooner become an undergraduate at Oxford than he printed a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” and sent copies to the Vice-Chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with “a pretty letter in his own handwriting” to each. He was summoned before the University authorities, who “pleaded, implored, and threatened; on the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to think, and declare his thoughts to others.” Much evil as he believed of such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of which they were capable. Hogg—the dear and life-long friend who tried to seduce his wife—writes: “He rushed in; he was terribly agitated. ‘I am expelled,’ he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; ‘I am expelled!’... He sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive vehemence the words ‘Expelled! expelled!’” Professor Dowden thinks “it was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good feeling” would not have punished so severely what “was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will”: for what was it “to fling out a boy’s defiance against the first article of the Creed,” compared with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who were yet allowed to remain in the University? The conduct of the authorities was the less excusable that we have Mr. Hogg’s authority for the fact that at this time “the purity and sanctity of his life were most conspicuous,” and that “in no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley.” Of course, in face of such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of Thornton Hunt that “he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that Shelley while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction ‘marked by horror,’” is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that Shelley might have been all the better had he left the University at the usual time, and with his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. “His voyage,” says his biographer, “must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore and flying sails set, must often have run upon her side and drunk the water; all the more reason, therefore, for laying in some ballast below before she raced into the gale.” Every one knows how the craft raced into the gale, with Miss Westbrook on board, as soon as the Oxford hawser was cut. Shelley might have done much worse. She was a good and attractive person. He began by liking her. “There are some hopes,” he says, “of this dear little girl; she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I could get hold of her.” She seems to have been sincerely devoted to him and he afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or undivulged made his home insupportable to her, and she became the “frantic idiot” who, though she would give Shelley money when she had it, was apparently not sufficiently “tolerant” upon other points—such as that of his proposition that she should enjoy the scenery of Switzerland in his company and that of her supplanter; and it certainly showed some narrowness of mind to cast herself, upon his final desertion of her, first into some desperation of living and afterwards into the Serpentine, when she might have shared, or at least witnessed, the “eternal rapture” and “divine aspirations” which her husband was enjoying in the arms of another woman. Poor little “idiot” as she was, she constitutes almost the only point in all this bewildering “romance of reality” upon which the mind can rest with any peace or pleasure.

What Shelley was at first he remained to the last: a beautiful, effeminate, arrogant boy—constitutionally indifferent to money, generous by impulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end of all that it most behoves a responsible being to know, and so conceited that his ignorance was incurable; showing at every turn the most infallible sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human perfectibility; and rushing at once to the conclusion, when he or others met with suffering, that some one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong. If to do what is right in one’s own eyes is the whole of virtue, and to suffer for so doing is to be a martyr, then Shelley was the saint and martyr which a large number of—chiefly young—persons consider him to have been as a man; and if to have the faculty of saying everything in the most brilliant language and imagery, without having anything particular to say beyond sublime commonplaces and ethereal fallacies about love and liberty, is to be a “supreme” poet, then Shelley undoubtedly was such. But, as a man, Shelley was almost wholly devoid of the instincts of the “political animal,” which Aristotle defines a man to be. If he could not see the reasons for any social institution or custom, he could not feel any; and forthwith set himself to convince the world that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. He was equally deficient in what is commonly understood by natural affection. The ties of relationship were no ties to him: for he could only see them as accidents. “I, like the God of the Jews,” writes Shelley, “set up myself as no respecter of persons; and relationship is regarded by me as bearing that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire.” As these deficiencies were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, the imperfections of his poetry, which is all splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness, and little or no true wisdom or true love. The very texture of his verse suffers from these causes. In his best poems it is firm, fluent, various, and melodious; but the more serious and subtle music of life which he had not in his heart he could not put into his rhythms; which no one who knows what rhythm is will venture to compare with the best of Tennyson’s or Wordsworth’s, far less with the best of our really “supreme” poets. A very great deal of his poetry is much like the soap-bubbles he was so fond of blowing—its superficies beauty, its substance wind; or like many a young lady who looks and moves and modulates her speech like a goddess, and chatters like an ape.

After Shelley, the chief male figure in this romance—which would be altogether incredible were it not real—is that of the guide, philosopher, and friend of the poet’s youth, Godwin. Pecksniff is genteel comedy compared with the grim farce of this repulsive lover of wisdom as embodied in himself. Like the German poet who was entrusted by one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to another, and, bit by bit, ate it all on his way, Godwin “sincerely abhorred all that was sordid and mean; but he liked sausage”; and the way he combined the necessity for nibbling at Shelley’s future fortune by making incessant claims, which the latter could only satisfy by repeated and ruinous post-obits, with the other necessity for keeping up the insulted and injured dignity of a man whom Shelley had wronged past pardon, is funny beyond description. His writing to tell Shelley that he had insulted him by giving him a heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made payable to his (Godwin’s) own name, thereby making the gift liable to be construed as such by the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive the gift at all, unless the name was changed to “Hume” or any other the poet might select, is a touch which Shakespeare might have coveted for Ancient Pistol.

It appears that there still exists a good deal of writing by and concerning Shelley which it has not been deemed expedient to publish. A footnote, for instance, assures us that “a poetical epistle to Graham referring to his father in odious terms” is still “in existence”; and various other unprinted letters and poems are alluded to. But it is scarcely to be supposed that any future Life of Shelley will supersede Professor Dowden’s—unless, indeed, it should be an abridgment, more suitable in bulk and perhaps in tone than the present publication is, for the use of those who, undazzled, or possibly repelled, by the glamour of Shelley’s personality and revolutionary convictions, admire the meteoric splendour of his genius and allow it its not unimportant place in the permanent literature of England.

XV
BLAKE

Blake’s poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in the other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel. A sensible person can easily distinguish between that which he cannot understand and that in which there is nothing to be understood. Mr. W. Rossetti, who is an enthusiast for “the much-maligned Paris Commune” and for Blake’s poetry, says of some of the latter, where it is nearly at its worst, “We feel its potent and arcane influence, but cannot dismember this into articulated meanings.” This sentence, if put into less exalted English, expresses tolerably well the aspect of mind with which we regard much of the writing of the Prophets and of the great ancient and modern mystics. Some light of their meaning forces itself through the, in most cases, purposely obscure cloud of their words and imagery; but when, by chance, a glimpse of the disk itself is caught, it is surprisingly strong, bright, and intelligible. Such writers are only spoken of with irreverence by those that would have given their verdict in favour of the famous Irishman who, being confronted with one witness swearing to having seen him take a handkerchief from another gentleman’s pocket, brought four who testified with equal solemnity to not having seen him do any such thing. The obvious rule in regard to such writers is, “When you cannot understand a man’s ignorance, think yourself ignorant of his understanding.” Again, if a man’s sayings are wholly unintelligible to us, he may claim the benefit of a small possibility of a doubt that his meanings may be too great and necessarily “arcane” for our powers of reception. But when a writer’s works consist of a few passages of great beauty and such simplicity that a child may understand them—like Blake’s “Chimney-Sweep,” “Tiger,” “Piping down the valleys wild,” “Why was Cupid a boy?” and “Auguries of Innocence”—and a great deal more that is mere ill-expressed but perfectly intelligible platitude and commonplace mixed with petty spite, and a far larger quantity still which to the ear of the natural understanding is mere gibberish, he has no right to claim, as Blake does, that the latter shall be regarded as plenarily inspired, or, indeed, as being anything better than the delirious rubbish it obviously is.

Mr. W. Rossetti, though he goes a great way further in his admiration of Blake than reason can be shown for, does the cause of reason a good service in declaring his opinion that the poet was probably mad. “When,” says he, “I find a man pouring forth conceptions and images for which he professes himself not responsible, and which are in themselves in the highest degree remote, nebulous, and intangible, and putting some of these, moreover, into words wherein congruent sequence and significance of expression or analogy are not to be traced, then I cannot resist a strong presumption that that man was in some true sense of the word mad.” As Pope “could not take his tea without a stratagem,” so Blake could not “mix his colours with diluted glue” without declaring that “the process was revealed to him by St. Joseph”; and it was the ghost of his brother who taught him the new, though, had we not been told otherwise, the not supernaturally wonderful device of saving the expense of ordinary typography by etching the words of his verses on the copper plate which bore their illustrations. Blake was morally as well as intellectually mad; proposing on one occasion, for example, that his wife should allow him to introduce a second partner to his bed, and doing so with a bonâ fide unconsciousness of anything amiss in such a suggestion as perfect as that with which Shelley urged his wife to come and share the delights of a tour in Switzerland with him and his mistress Mary Godwin.

That “great wits to madness nearly are allied” is not true; but it is not only true but psychologically explicable that small “geniuses” often are so. Most children are geniuses before the dawn of moral and intellectual responsibilities; and there are some who remain, not children, but moral and intellectual manikins, all their lives. It must be confessed that conscience makes, not only cowards, but more or less dullards, of us all. The child, that

Mighty prophet, seer blest,
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

owes his power of vision to his not being able to see the flaming sword of conscience which turns every way, and hinders all men but a very few from getting a glimpse through the closed gates of Paradise. Yet it is better to be a purblind man with a conscience than a seeing manikin with none. It is better still, and best of all, when the man of developed intellect and fully accepted responsibilities retains a cherished memory of and an innocent sympathy with the knowledge that came to him in childhood and early youth, and uses his trained powers of expression in order to make the world partakers of those thoughts and feelings which had no tongue when they first arose in him, and leave no memory in the mass of men until the man of true and sane genius touches chords of recollection that would otherwise have slept in them for ever. One of the few really good things ever said by Hazlitt is that “men of genius spend their lives in teaching the world what they themselves learned before they were twenty.”

For the time, however, the manikin type of genius is all the fashion, especially with a class of critics who have it in their power to give notoriety, if they cannot give fame. Craziness alone passes at present for a strong presumption of genius, and where genius is really found in company therewith it is at once pronounced “supreme.” This is partly because most people can see that craziness has something abnormal about it, and are ready, therefore, to identify it with genius, of which most persons only know that it also is “abnormal”; and partly because the manikin mind is always red republican, and ardent in its hatred of kings, priests, “conventions,” the “monopoly” of property and of women, and all other hindrances put in the way of virtue, liberty, and happiness by the wicked “civilizee.”

Blake, as an artist, is a more important figure than Blake the poet; and naturally so, for the smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness and complexity of thought which are only required in paintings of a character which Blake rarely attempted. Yet, even as a painter his reputation has until lately been much exaggerated. The recent exhibition of his collected drawings and paintings was a great blow to the fame which had grown up from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers with a few sketches or an illustrated poem. Here and there there was a gleam of such pure and simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of a finely natured child amid its ordinary chatter; here and there the expression of a tender or distempered dream, which was not like anything else in the spectator’s experience; now and then an outline that had a look of Michael Angelo, with sometimes hints which might have formed the themes of great works, and which justified the saying of Fuseli that “Blake is damned good to steal from”; but the effect of the whole collection was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little towards confirming its creator’s opinion that Titian, Reynolds, and Gainsborough were bad artists, and Blake, Barry, and Fuseli good ones.

XVI
ROSSETTI AS A POET

The claims of Rossetti as a painter and a poet have obtained a full and generous recognition; and he has acquired a standing in either art which will in all probability abide, though it is far too soon to attempt any estimate of his relative position in the permanent ranks of artists and writers. His thoughtfulness, and the clearness and intensity of his perceptions, do not require to be insisted upon, nor the almost unexampled way in which he has merged—and often, it must be admitted, confounded—the functions of painter and poet. This he has done to the detriment of his perfection in either art; in neither of which can he be truly said to have attained the character of mastery which may be found, more or less, in almost all other workers of equal genius with himself, and sometimes in those whose natural qualifications have been inferior to his. Little of his drawing and none of his painting can be enjoyed without the drawback of some sense of manifest technical failure; and nearly all his poetry—which is more or less difficult by reason of the quick succession of out-of-the-way thoughts and images, needing the closest attention for their appreciation—is rendered unnecessarily so by language which rarely has the fluency of perfection. In the two or three instances in which his verse becomes fluent and more or less masterly—notably in the “Burden of Nineveh” and “Jenny”—it ceases to be characteristic or subtle. The “Burden of Nineveh” might have been written by Southey, or any other writer of forcible words and thoughts in somewhat commonplace rhythm. This fact, that fluency fails him as soon as he gets upon his own proper ground, renders it extremely difficult to discern and to describe exactly what that ground is. Style, which is the true expression of the poet’s individuality—the mark by which we discover, not what, but how, he thinks and feels—is almost suffocated, in Rossetti’s most characteristic work, by voluntary oddities of manner and by a manifest difficulty in so moving in the bonds of verse as to convert them into graces. If subtle thoughts and vivid imagery were all that went to make a poet, Rossetti would stand very high. But these qualities must have the running commentary and musical accompaniment of free feeling, which only a correspondingly subtle and vivid versification can express, before they can be allowed to constitute a claim to the highest poetical rank. Rossetti as a versifier was as technically defective as Rossetti as a painter; his best poems and his best paintings are the outcome, not only of very high aims—which are as common as blackberries—but of very high aims deeply and characteristically felt; and his superiority to many far more technically perfect artists results from the fact that his characteristic feeling is strong enough to make itself powerfully, however indistinctly, perceived through the mist and obstructions of his mannerism and defective verse.

Like all men of strong artistic individuality combined with serious artistic faults, Rossetti has had a great influence upon the literature of his day—such an influence as comparatively faultless writers never exert, at least in their time. Many young versifiers and painters fancy they are reproducing Rossetti’s intensity when they are only imitating the most prevailing fault of his art, its tensity. His brother, William Rossetti, in his modest and judicious introduction to these volumes, tells how he and Gabriel used to amuse themselves in making bouts-rimés. William says of his brother’s literary toys of this sort: “Some have a faux air of intensity of meaning, as well as of expression; but their real core of significance is small.” It cannot be denied that a careful scrutiny of much of Rossetti’s published work is open to this criticism. It is tense without being intense. This fault is his great attraction to his imitators, whose every sensation is represented as a pang, delicious or otherwise, and whose mental sky is a canopy of iron destiny compared with which the melancholy of Byron, which likewise had so many copyists, was no more than a pleasant shade.

In endeavouring to do justice to Rossetti it must be remembered that, though born and bred in England, he was an Italian by blood and sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen and English books was by no means wide. Love, the constant theme of his art, is in some of his most important poems, not the English love whose stream is steady affection and only its occasional eddies passion, and which, when disappointed, does not cease to be love, though it becomes sorrow: but the Italian ardour, in perennial crisis, which stabs its rival and hates its object, if she refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships her so long as there is hope. The limitations, also, which characterise Rossetti’s poetry belong to Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in it, but much acuteness. Dante is to Shakespeare as the Peak of Teneriffe to the tableland of Tibet; and, as any reader of Rossetti’s translations of the minor Italian poets may see, the same proportion prevails between them and the lesser singers of England. It is therefore quite unfair to try an essentially Italian poet, like Rossetti, by comparing his works with the classical poetry of a nation which, for combined breadth and height, far surpasses the poetry of all other languages present and past, with the doubtful exception of the Greek. The English language itself is not made for Italian thought and passion. It has about four times as many vowel sounds as Italian and a corresponding consonantal power; that is to say, it differs from the Italian about as much as an organ differs from a flute. Rossetti uses little beside the flute-notes of our English organ; and, if he had made himself complete master of those notes, it would have been the most that could have been expected of him. In appearance and manners Rossetti was thoroughly Italian. In his youth especially he had the sweet and easy courtesy peculiar to his nation. His brother says, “There was a certain British bluffness streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility.” This describes, better than perhaps Mr. William Rossetti intended, a characteristic which occasionally, but fortunately not often, appears in his poetry, which is most pleasing when it is least “streaked” with British bluffness: as it is, for example, in “Jenny.”

Rossetti’s power is chiefly shown in his long ballads, such as “Sister Helen,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “Rose Mary,” and “The King’s Tragedy.” Had these been found in Percy’s “Relics,” they would have constituted the chief ornaments of that collection. As it is, it is impossible not to feel that they are more or less anachronisms, both in spirit and in form. The repetition of a refrain through the fifty stanzas or so of “Sister Helen,” the most forcible of all these lyrical narratives, has no sufficient justification for its interruption of the fiercely flowing history. A refrain which extends to more than three or four stanzas requires and originally assumed a musical accompaniment. The constant high-pressure of passion in these ballads is also an anachronism; and to the cultured modern reader this character is calculated to defeat the poet’s purpose, giving him an impression of cold instead of warmth, as if the fire had a salamander instead of a heart in its centre. A kindred fault, which Rossetti has in common with some of the most famous poets of the century, is that of conferring upon all his images an acute and independent clearness which is never found in the natural and truly poetical expression of feeling. It is true, and great poets (especially Shakespeare) have noted it, that in extreme crises of passion there will sometimes be a moment of calm in which the minutiæ of some most trifling object or circumstance will, as it were, photograph themselves upon the mind. But this præternatural calm is only the “eye of the storm”; and to scatter broadcast, over a long poem, imagery with the sharpest outlines is to prove, not only that it has not been written from true passion, but that the poet has not even observed the phenomena of true passion. Such independent force and clearness of imagery can only be justified in poems of the very lowest type of artistic construction, such as Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” and “Childe Harold,” which scarcely profess to have more unity than is to be found in a scrap-book. A fine poem may or may not be full of “fine things”; but, if it does abound in them, their independent value should only appear when they are separated from their context. In Rossetti, as in several other modern poets of great reputation, we are constantly being pulled up, in the professedly fiery course of a tale of passion, to observe the moss on a rock or the note of a chaffinch. High finish has nothing to do with this quality of extreme definiteness in detail; indeed, it is more often exercised by the perfect poet in blurring outlines than in giving them acuteness. It must be admitted, however, that Rossetti had an unusual temptation to this kind of excess in his extraordinary faculty for seeing objects in such a fierce light of imagination as very few poets have been able to throw upon external things. He can be forgiven for spoiling a tender lyric by a stanza such as this, which seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab of agate—

But the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies,
Where the lean black craft, like flies,
Seem wellnigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.

Though the foregoing strictures apply to a large portion of Rossetti’s work, there is a really precious residuum which they do not touch. There are several pieces—such as “Love’s Nocturn,” “The Portrait,” “A Little While,” and many sonnets—which are full of natural feeling expressed with simple and subtle art; and in much of his work there is a rich and obscure glow of insight into depths too profound and too sacred for clear speech, even if they could be spoken: a sort of insight not at all uncommon in the great art of past times, but exceedingly rare in the art of our own.

XVII
MR. SWINBURNE’S SELECTIONS

It has probably been a misfortune for Mr. Swinburne’s growth as a poet that no winter of critical neglect preceded the full recognition of his very remarkable talents. His best friends must allow that he is still somewhat younger in judgment than in his years and experience of authorship. It is not, however, much to be wondered at that he should have been tempted to rest content with having apparently attained at a single step a height of reputation to reach which has been with most poets the work of hard climbing during many years. Mr. Swinburne is still in the prime of life and in full possession of his powers, and some of his later work shows that he has that continued power of growth which is one of the greatest privileges of genius. If he will only listen to his own critical conscience, he may yet do work better and much more enduring than any he has yet done. He cannot, indeed, hope to excel certain single passages of prose and verse in which he has attained a character of breadth and poetic ardour scarcely to be found in any other writer of the time; but he can (and there have of late been signs that he intends to) modify his manner of thinking and writing so that his best—which is very good indeed—may not be discredited by so much of the jejune in thought and composition as is to be found in a great deal of his work heretofore. Hitherto Mr. Swinburne has been too much given to protesting; which is not the poet’s work, even when it is done wisely. In his future writing we shall probably hear more of the whisper of affirmative wisdom than the whirlwind of passionate negation; he will recognise more and more fully that the world is not and never will be made up of Swinburnes and Rossettis, and that it is vain to denounce popular beliefs and institutions, when he has only, to set up in their places, others which are, and for ever will be, unintelligible by the great majority of mankind, and inapplicable to their demands. The people will always insist on having kings and priests; and Mr. Swinburne has, no doubt, had his eyes too well opened by very recent history not to discern that it would be of little use to dethrone King Log in favour of Prime Minister Stork, or to unfrock an Archbishop of Canterbury in order to transfer his authority to a General Booth.

Hitherto it has been impossible not to feel that there has been some disproportion between Mr. Swinburne’s power of saying things and the things he has to say. This defect of the “body of thought,” which Coleridge once complained was wanting in an otherwise good poem, has reacted upon Mr. Swinburne’s language itself, producing sometimes a reiteration of words and imagery surpassing even that which is to be found in the works of Shelley, and which in them arose from the same inadequacy of matter. For example, in a passage of thirteen lines in the present volume we have “flowery forefront of the year,” “foam-flowered strand,” “blossom-fringe,” “flower-soft face,” and “spray-flowers”; and in Mr. Swinburne’s poems generally it must be confessed that flowers, stars, waves, flames and three or four other entities of the natural order, come in so often as to suggest some narrowness of observation and vocabulary. This defect, also, is less manifest than it used to be, though probably the abandonment to the mere joy of words, which is natural and not altogether ungraceful in a writer who can use them so splendidly, will always be a characteristic of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry. It reminds us of the rapture of Tristram in the truly magnificent description of the bath he took before breakfast in “Sea and Sunrise,” and the reader is often carried with like joy upon the waves of words without troubling himself as to whether he and the poet are not both out of their depth.

Mr. Swinburne’s mode of dealing with human passions is somewhat of an anachronism. His heroes and heroines, like those of the old English drama and the Scandinavian poems, often become heroic by the sacrifice of humanity, and, thereby, of the reader’s sympathy. The pictures of Mary Queen of Scots and of Iseult in this volume, for instance, though painted with a great brush are not truly great, because they are not greatly true—at all events, to any conditions which the modern world recognises or should desire to recognise. Nor, granting that the characters and situations are poetical, is the execution quite what it ought to be. The effects are obtained by a cumulative rather than a developing process; and, at the end of a long poem or passage full of strong words and images, the idea of strength thence derived is rather that given by a hill than the living hole of a huge tree.

Mr. Swinburne’s metrical practice should be criticised with respect; for he has an unquestionably fine ear, and has ransacked the literature of all times in order to discover and appropriate, or modify to his own uses, a number of movements which, unlike our familiar English metres, are whirlwinds and blasts of passion in themselves. Such metres, however, should be sparingly used. They almost satisfy the ear without any accompaniment of sound meaning, and evoke, as it were by a trick, a current of emotion that is independent of any human feeling in the poet himself. This is a great temptation, and Mr. Swinburne has not always avoided the traps which he has thus set for himself. Such metres have, moreover, the disadvantage of fixing in too peremptory a manner the key in which the poems written in them must be sustained. They allow none of the endless modulations which are open to the poet who writes in almost any of our native and less emphatic measures. Mr. Swinburne has the less reason for resorting so habitually as he does to this too easy means of obtaining passionate effect, inasmuch as some of his very best and most effective passages are written in our common metres. Witness the almost incomparable apostrophe to Athens, in “Erechtheus” (unfortunately not included in these selections), and “Sea and Sunrise,” and “Herse.”

There is one still easier and far less excusable source of effect which every friend of the poet must rejoice to see that he has of late abandoned. There is nothing in the Selections which a schoolgirl might not be permitted to read and understand, if she could; and there are a number of pieces about children which are so full of pure and tender perceptions as to cause a doubt whether, in some of his earlier writings, the poet was not wantonly flouting the world’s opinion rather than expressing any very real phase of his own feeling.

XVIII
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Clough worshipped Truth with more than the passion of a lover, and his writings are, for the most part, the tragic records of a life-long devotion to a mistress who steadily refused his embraces; but as it is greatly better to have loved without attaining than to have attained without loving, so Clough’s ardent and unrewarded stumblings in the dark towards his adored though unseen divinity are greatly more attractive and edifying to those who have shared, successfully or not, the same passion, than is that complacent fruition of her smiles which she often accords to those who are contented to be no more than her speaking acquaintances. Regarded from a purely intellectual point of view, Clough’s utterances on religion, duty, etc., are little better than the commonplaces which in these days pass through the mind and more or less affect the feelings of almost every intelligent and educated youth before he is twenty years of age; but there are commonplaces which cease to be such, and become indefinitely interesting, in proportion as they are animated by moral ardour and passion. Speech may work good by warming as well as by enlightening; and if Clough’s writings teach no new truth, they may inflame the love of truth, which is perhaps as great a service. Though he professes that he can nowhere see light where light is most necessary and longed for, his mind is utterly opposed to the negative type; and he exactly exemplifies the class of believer whom Richard Hooker endeavours to comfort, in his great sermon on “the perpetuity of faith in the elect,” by the reminder that a longing to believe is implicit faith, and that we cannot sorrow for the lack of that which we interiorly hold to be nonexistent. A question that must suggest itself to most readers is, What is the use and justification of these endless and tautological lamentations over the fact—as Clough conceived it to be—that, for such as him at least, “Christ is not risen”? The reply is, that the responsibility of the publication of so much that is profoundly passionate but far from profoundly intellectual scepticism was not his. With the exception of some not very significant critical essays, his prose consists of letters, which were of course not meant for the public; and the greater part of his poetry remained to the day of Clough’s death in his desk, and would probably never have left it, with his consent, unless to be put in the fire.

Those who recognise in the “Bothie” Clough’s almost solitary claim to literary eminence must somewhat wonder at the considerable figure he stands for in the estimation of the present generation. The fact is that Clough, like James Spedding, was personally far more impressive than his works; and the singularly strong effect produced among his friends by the extreme simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and manners, and the at once repellent and alluring severity of his truthfulness, gave his character a consequence beyond that of his writings with all who knew him though ever so slightly; and the halo of this sanctity hangs, through the report of his friends, about all that he has done, and renders cold criticism of it almost impossible. No one who knew Clough can so separate his personality from his writings as to be able to criticise them fairly as literature; no one who has not known him can understand their value as the outcome of character.

The impressionable and feminine element, which is manifest in all genius, but which in truly effective genius is always subordinate to power of intellect, had in Clough’s mind the preponderance. The masculine power of intellect consists scarcely so much in the ability to see truth, as in the tenacity of spirit which cleaves to and assimilates the truth when it is found, and which steadfastly refuses to be blown about by every wind of doctrine and feeling. The reiterated theme of Clough’s poetry is that the only way of forgetting certain problems now, and of securing their solution hereafter, is to do faithfully our nearest duty. This is no new teaching: it is that of every religion and all philosophy. But Clough had no power of trusting patiently to the promise, “Do my commandments, and you shall know of the doctrine.” This was the ruin of what might otherwise have been a fine poetic faculty. A “Problem” will not sing even in the process of solution, much less while it is only a hopeless and irritating “Pons.” Clough was curiously attracted by Emerson, of whom he spoke as the only great contemporary American. Now Emerson, at his very best, never approached greatness. He was at highest only a brilliant metaphysical epigrammatist. But a religion without a dogma, and with only one commandment, “Thou shalt neither think nor do anything that is customary,” had great attractions for Clough; to whom it never seems to have occurred that the vast mass of mankind, for whose moral and religious welfare he felt so keenly, has not and never can have a religion of speechless aspirations and incommunicable feelings, and that to teach men to despise custom is to cut the immense majority of them adrift from all moral restraint. The promise that we shall all be priests and kings seems scarcely to be for this world. At all events we are as far from its fulfilment now as we were two thousand years ago; and we shall not be brought nearer to it by any such outpourings of sarcastic discontent as go to the making of such poems as the tedious Mephistophelian drama called “Dipsychus,” which Clough had the good sense not to publish, though it is included with many others of equally doubtful value in posthumous editions of his works. This class of his poems possesses, indeed, a lively interest for a great many people of our own time, who are in the painful state of moral and religious ferment which these verses represent; but it is a mere accident of the time that there is any considerable audience for such utterances, and in a generation or two it is probable that most men will feel surprise that there could ever have been a public who found poetry in this sort of matter.

The “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” is the only considerable poem of Clough’s in which he seems, for a time, to have got out of his slough of introspection and doubt and to have breathed the healthy air of nature and common humanity. In spite of many artistic shortcomings, this poem is so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely fail to survive when a good deal of far more fashionable verse shall have disappeared from men’s memories. The one infallible note of a true poet—the power of expressing himself in rhythmical movements of subtilty and sweetness which baffle analysis—is also distinctly manifest in passages of the “Bothie,” passages the music of which was, we fancy, lingering in the ear of Tennyson when he wrote certain parts of “Maud.” The originality of this idyl is beyond question. It is not in the least like any other poem, and an occasionally ostentatious touch of the manner of “Herman and Dorothea” seems to render this originality all the more conspicuous in the main. Another note of poetical power, scarcely less questionable than is that of sweetness and subtilty of rhythm, is the warm and pure breath of womanhood which is exhaled from the love-passages of this poem. Clough seems to have felt, in the presence of a simple and amiable woman, a mystery of life which acted for a time as the rebuke and speechless solution of all doubts and intellectual distresses. These passages in the “Bothie,” and, in a less degree, some others in the “Amours de Voyage,” stand, in the disturbed course of Clough’s ordinary verse, like the deep, pure, and sky-reflecting pools which occasionally appear in the course of a restless mountain river.

XIX
EMERSON

The life and writings of Emerson owe their chief claim on our attention to the fact that they represent with singular force a line of thought and belief—if belief it can be called—which an immense number of the young, intelligent, and sincere of the past and present generation have been endeavouring to follow, though as yet without any remarkable or satisfactory results. “Every man is potentially a man of genius,” is the one dogma of Emerson’s religion—though it is nowhere put thus plainly by him; and its one commandment is “Be a man of genius.” Absolute nonconformity with everything, we are taught, is the first condition of personal and social well-being; and we are enjoined to look upon our individual insight as our one infallible guide, though it may bid us go one way to-day and the opposite to-morrow. At the time when Emerson was debating with himself as to whether he should throw up his office as Unitarian preacher he seems to have had some searchings of heart as to the validity of the new doctrine. “How,” he writes, in his Journal, “shall the droning world get on if all its beaux esprits recalcitrate upon its approved forms and accepted constitutions and quit them in order to be single-minded? The double-refiners would produce at the other end the double-damned.” This is perhaps the wisest thing ever said by Emerson; but he nevertheless chose his part definitively with the “double refiners.” “I hate preaching,” he writes in a subsequent page of his Journal. “Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” In the free use of his proviso he accordingly, for the remainder of his life, followed and taught others to follow what he called “intuition,” even though it should not wait for “to-morrow” to contradict itself. For example, in the last page but one of the essay on “Character” we are instructed to reject the doctrine of the divinity of Christ because “the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king and on the following page we are told that, “when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring ... comes into our streets and houses, only the pure and aspiring can know its face.”

Emerson’s life, journals, and letters considerably modify the impression which his published essays and lectures are calculated to leave—namely, that he was a mere stringer-together of lively thoughts, images, and poetical epigrams. He seems to have made the best of his own humanity, and to have always done the right according to his judgment, though the doing of it sometimes involved serious pecuniary inconvenience, and, as in the case of his opposition to the fugitive slave law, violent popular disapprobation. He was kindly and moral in his family and social relationships, and was conscientious even to a fault in avoiding those venial sins of language to which the most of us are perhaps too indifferent. His American admirers sometimes spoke of him as an “angel.” At any rate, he was a sort of sylph. He noted of his compatriots generally that “they have no passions, only appetites.” He seems to have had neither passion nor appetite; and there was an utter absence of “nonsense” about him which made it almost impossible to be intimate with him. Margaret Fuller, his closest friend, and even his wife, whom he loved in his own serene way, seem to have chafed under the impossibility of getting within the adamantine sphere of self-consciousness which surrounded him. He not only could not forget himself, but he could not forget his grammar; and when he talked he seemed rather to be “composing” his thoughts than thinking them. His friend and admirer, Mr. Henry James the elder, complains that for this reason his conversation was without charm. “For nothing ever came but epigrams, sometimes clever, sometimes not.” His manners and discourse were, however, invariably kind and amiable. He never seems to have uttered a personal sarcasm, and only once in his life to have been seriously angry. This was on occasion of the famous fugitive slave law, which he indignantly declared would be disobeyed, if need be, by himself and every honest man.

Dr. W. H. Furness writes of Emerson: “We were babies and schoolfellows together. I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ plays.... I can as little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance.” Indeed, “orating” was in Emerson’s blood. Nearly all his known ancestors and relatives seem to have been “ministers” of some denomination or other. His school-days—though he never became a scholar in any department of learning—began before he was three years old. His father complains of the baby of two years and odd months—“Ralph does not read very well yet”; and during all the rest of his youth Dr. Furness says that he grew up under “the pressure of I know not how many literary atmospheres.” Add to this the fact that his father and mother and his aunt—who was the chief guide of his nonage—were persons who seemed to think that love could only be manifested by severe duty, and rarely showed him any signs of the weaknesses of “affection,” and we have as bad a bringing-up for a moral, philosophical, and religious teacher as could well have been devised. “The natural first, and afterwards the spiritual.” Where innocent joy and personal affection have not been main factors of early experience the whole life wants the key to Christianity; and a rejection of all faith—except that in “genius,” “over-soul,” “a somewhat which makes for righteousness,” or some other such impotent abstraction—is, in our day, almost inevitable in a mind of constitutional sincerity like Emerson’s, especially when such sincerity is unaccompanied, as it was in him, by a warm and passionate nature and its intellectual correlative, a vigorous conscience. Emerson, though a good man—that is, one who lived up to his lights—had little or no conscience. He admired good, but did not love it; he denounced evil, but did not hate it, and did not even maintain that it was hateful, but only greatly inexpedient.

Though Emerson could not see that a religion of which there is nothing left but an “over-soul” is much the same thing as a man of whom there is nothing left but his hat, the religious bodies to which he was for many years more or less attached were less devoid of humour, and the joke of a faith without a dogma became, in time, too much for their seriousness. Consequently they agreed amicably to part, and Emerson pursued his course; that which had hitherto been called “preaching” becoming thenceforward lecturing and “orating.”

There can be no greater misfortune for a sincere and truthful mind like Emerson’s than to have to get a living by “orating.” This was his predicament, however; and there can be no doubt that his mind and his writings were the worse for this necessity. His philosophy afforded him only a very narrow range of subject. In all his essays and lectures he is but ringing the changes upon three or four ideas—which are really commonplace, though his sprightly wit and imagination give them freshness; and it is impossible to read any single essay, much less several in succession, without feeling that the licence of tautology is used to its extremest limits. In a few essays—for example, “The Poet,” “Character,” and “Love”—the writer’s heart is so much in the matter that these endless variations of one idea have the effect of music which delights us to the end with the reiteration of an exceedingly simple theme; but in many other pieces it is impossible not to detect that weariness of the task of having to coin dollars out of transcendental sentiments to which Emerson’s letters and journals often bear witness. But, whether delighted with or weary of his labour, there is no progress in his thought, which resembles the spinning of a cockchafer on a pin rather than the flight of a bird on its way from one continent to another.

Emerson’s was a sweet and uniformly sunny spirit; but the sunshine was that of the long Polar day, which enlightens but does not fructify. It never even melted the icy barrier which separated his soul from others; and men and women were nothing to him, because he never got near enough to understand them. Hence his journals and letters about his visits to Europe, and especially to England, are curiously superficial in observation. He made many acute and witty remarks, such as, “Every Englishman is a House of Commons, and expects that you will not end your speech without proposing a measure;” but, on the whole, he quite misunderstood the better class of our countrymen, of whom, in his second visit to England, he had the opportunity of seeing a good deal. Although there was much constitutional reserve, there was no real reticence in him. His ethereal, unimpassioned ideas had, indeed, nothing in them that, for him, commanded reticence; and he concluded that the best sort of Englishmen were without any motives that “transcend” sense, because he did not feel, as all such Englishmen do, that though that which transcends sense may be infinitely dearer than all else, and even because it is so dear, it is better not to talk of things which can scarcely be spoken of without inadequacy and even an approach to nonsense. Many an Englishman would turn aside with a jest from any attempt to lead him into “transcendental” talk, not because he was less, but because he was more “serious” than his interlocutor; and also because the very recognition of certain kinds of knowledge involves the recognition of obligations, to confess directly or indirectly the fulfilment or neglect of which implies either self-praise or self-blame, which, in ordinary circumstances, are alike indecent. In fact, Emerson was totally deficient in the religious sense, which is very strong in the hearts of a vast number of Englishmen who own to no fixed creed, but who would be revolted by the profound and unconscious irreverence with which Emerson was in the habit of speaking and writing of the most sacred things and names. The name of “Jesus” frequently occurs in such sentences as this: “Nor Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Cæsar, nor Angelo, nor Washington,” etc.

If we put aside Emerson’s unconscious malpractices in this sort, the attitude of his mind with regard to the serious beliefs of the world were too childish for resentment or exposure. It is as if one should be angry with a young lady who should simper, “Oh, my religion is the religion of the Sermon on the Mount!” in answer to an attempt to talk with her about Bossuet or Hooker.

XX
CRABBE AND SHELLEY

The firmament of fame is full of variable stars, and they are nowhere thicker than in that great constellation of poets which marks the end of the last and the commencement of this century. Among the names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott, there are only two the lustre of whose names has remained perfectly steady and seems likely to remain so. Two or three, which blazed forth at once as luminaries of the first magnitude, have gradually and persistently waned—whether or not ever to recover any part of their lost splendour is very doubtful. The light of one or two others has fluctuated violently, and continues to do so, with a manifest diminution, however, in their total sum of light; one or two others have suffered a distinct degradation from first into second or third class lustres, and at present show no sign of further alteration. Two at least have grown astonishingly in conspicuousness, and now glow like the Dog-star and Aldebaran—though there are not wanting sky-critics who declare that they discern conditions of coming change and retrogression; and one at least has almost disappeared from the heaven of public recognition, not, however, without prognostications from some of an assured reassertion of a moderate if not predominating position.

To quit figures of speech, Coleridge and Burns—though poets of very different calibre—are the only two of the thirteen above mentioned whose reputations have been altogether unaffected by the violent changes of literary fashion which have taken place in the course of the century. Each of these two poets has written a good deal which the world will willingly let die; but Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his comparatively small way, have done a certain moderate amount of work so thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it into question or ever will. By the leaders of poetic fashion Moore and Rogers have come to be accounted as almost nowhere as poets. Southey and Cowper now depend mainly for their fame upon a few small pieces, which in their own day were not regarded as of much account in comparison with such works as The Task and The Curse of Kehama; Campbell now lives only, but vigorously, in a few lyrics. Who but Mr. Ruskin is there that would not laugh now to hear the name of Scott coupled with those of Keats and Shelley? Byron, who once outblazed all others, is now considered, by many judges not altogether to be disregarded, less as a great fixed star than as a meteor formed from earthly fumes condensed and for a time incandescent in the upper air. Wordsworth’s fame, though all agree that it is assured, has suffered and is likely still to suffer some fluctuations; and, when poetry is talked about in circles of modern experts, no one ever hears of Crabbe, though here and there one comes upon some literary oddity who maintains that he has as good a claim as Shelley to a place in the heavens of abiding fame. As this, to most modern ears astounding, paradox is certainly maintained, in private at least, by several persons whose opinion the most advanced critic would not think of despising, it may be worth while to see what can be said for it.

Things, it is said, are best known by comparison with their opposites; and, if so, surely Crabbe must be best illustrated by Shelley and Shelley by Crabbe. Shelley was an atheist and profoundly immoral; but his irreligion was radiant with pious imagination, and his immorality delicately and strictly conscientious. Crabbe was a most sincere Christian in faith and life; but his religion and morality were intolerant, narrow, and scrupulous, and sadly wanting in all the modern graces. Shelley had no natural feeling or affection and the greatest sensitiveness; Crabbe had the tenderest and strongest affections, but his nerves and æsthetic constitution were of the coarsest. Shelley’s taste often stood him in the stead of morality. He would have starved rather than write begging letters to Thurlow, Burke, and other magnates, as Crabbe did when he wanted to better his condition as an apothecary’s apprentice. Crabbe’s integrity produced some of the best effects of taste, and made him at once an equal in manners with the dukes and statesmen with whom he associated as soon as he had been taken from his beggary by Burke. Through years and years of poverty and almost hopeless trial Crabbe was a devoted and faithful lover, and afterwards as devoted and faithful a husband to his “Myra,” whom he adored in verses that justified some one’s description of his style as “Pope in worsted stockings.” Shelley breathes eternal vows in music of the spheres, to woman after woman, whom he will abandon and speak or write of with hatred and contempt as soon as their persons have ceased to please him. Crabbe knew nothing of the “ideal,” but loved all actualities, especially unpleasant ones, upon which he would turn the electric light of his peculiar powers of perception till the sludge and dead dogs of a tidal river shone. Jeffrey described the true position of Crabbe among poets better than any one else has done when he wrote, “He has represented his villagers and humble burghers as altogether as dissipated and more dishonest and discontented than the profligates of higher life.... He may be considered as the satirist of low life—an occupation sufficiently arduous, and in a great degree new and original in our language.” In this his proper vocation Crabbe is so far from being a “Pope in worsted stockings,” that his lines often resemble the strokes of Dryden’s sledge-hammer rather than the stings of his successor’s cane. But, when uninspired by the intensely disagreeable or vicious, Crabbe’s “diction” is to modern ears, for the most part, intolerable. In his cooler moments he poured forth thousands of such couplets as

It seems to us that our Reformers knew
Th’ important work they undertook to do.

And to such vile newspaper prose he not only added the ghastly adornment of verse, but also frequently enlivened it with the “poetic licences” and Parnassian “lingo” of the Pope period. What a contrast with Shelley! He erred quite as much as Crabbe did from the imaginative reality which is the true ideal; but it was all in the opposite way. If Crabbe’s eye, in its love for the actual and concrete, dwelt too habitually upon the hardness and ugliness of the earth on which he trod, Shelley’s thoughts and perceptions were for the most part

Pinnacled dim in the intense inane

of a fancy which had no foundation in earth or heaven. His poetry has, however, the immortal reality of music; and his songs are songs, though they may be often called “songs without words,” the words meaning so little though they sound so sweet.

This “parallel”—as lines starting and continued in opposite directions have got to be called—might be carried much further with advantage to the student of poetry; and the comparison might be still more profitable if the best poems of Coleridge were examined as illustrations of the true poetic reality from which Crabbe and Shelley diverge equally, but in contrary ways. Crabbe mistakes actuality for reality; Shelley’s imagination is unreal. Coleridge, when he is himself, whether he is in the region of actuality, as in “Genevieve,” or in that of imagination, as in “Christabel,” is always both real and ideal in the only true poetic sense, in which reality and ideality are truly one. In each of these poems, as in every work of true art, there is a living idea which expresses itself in every part, while the complete work remains its briefest possible expression, so that it is as absurd to ask What is its idea? as it would be to ask what is the idea of a man or of an oak. This idea cannot be a simple negation; and simple evil—which is so often Crabbe’s theme—is simple negation. On the other hand, good, in order to be the ground of the ideal in art, must be intelligible—that is to say, imaginatively credible, though it may want the conditions of present actuality. But is there any such ideal as this in Shelley?

XXI
SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE?

The modern practice of sending the hat round for money to set up in the Abbey or elsewhere a statue, or at least a bust, of Smith, during or immediately after his lifetime, in grateful remembrance of the service or pleasure he may have done us, can rarely be indulged without danger of making him and ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of our children; or even in our own, should we survive for a few years the amiable folly of having raised an abiding memorial of our possibly transient enthusiasm. There could have been no doubt of the propriety of setting up a statue to the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, however much there may reasonably have been about the propriety of the statue itself which the ladies of England dedicated to the hero. But even in the case of such obvious and measurable merits as those of warriors, it is best not to be in a hurry. Historical criticism has discovered that the credit of great battles and even campaigns has not always been rightly due to the commanders-in-chief. Again, improvements like those of the steam jet, by which it became at once possible to raise the rate of railway travelling from under ten to over fifty miles an hour, the penny post, and the electric telegraph, are certainly matters for permanent memorials, provided that they are raised to the right men. But improvements and inventions of this magnitude scarcely ever are, in the first instance, attributed to the right men, who are generally more or less obscure and unrewarded geniuses. It is the practical man, who has the quickness to see the money value of a great invention and the means of removing the last external hindrance to its popular use, that gets the statue, and the money too. Few would envy him the latter; but it is cruel to him no less than to ourselves to be in such haste to decorate him with a laurel crown, which the touch of time may change into a fool’s cap. Again, unless statues are due to good intentions ardently prosecuted without reference to results, we ought to be very careful how we impose immortality upon great philanthropists and humanitarians. It would not have been for the abiding happiness and honour of the two eminent prelates and the able editor who lately constituted themselves high commissioners of public morality, to have had their images set up in Hyde Park back to back, like the figure of Hecate Triformis, and so to have been forbidden eternally to blush unseen, as no doubt they now desire to do. It would be prudent, also, to wait a while before conferring diplomas of immortality upon the heroes of legislation. The fame of repealers of navigation laws and founders of household franchise should be considered as in a state of pupilage for at least fifty years; and they should not be allowed to sport bronze thighs and the toga virilis, before the public buildings or in the squares of the metropolis, ere the paper on which their Bills are printed is well dry. It should be remembered that, in our haste, we may be placing an awful and easy vengeance in the hands of posterity; which might choose, not to pull down such monuments, but—to let them stand.

But of all modes of premature insistence upon the verdict of fame, that which is most to be avoided, if we would avoid making ourselves unnecessarily absurd, is that of decreeing immortality during or soon after their lifetime to literary men and artists. If, indeed, there existed academies of art and literature, which should consist of all the best men of their kind, all actuated by the most disinterested appreciation of merit not their own in their own profession, then we might have some approximation—but only an approximation—to a safe tribunal; and if Smith and his friends were such boobies as to want the cake of fame before it was baked, Smith might be “busted up” in the Abbey, or obtain a parliamentary guarantee of being puff-worthy, in his own day or immediately after, with little more to be said against it than that it was a want of decorum, all the more disgusting on account of the dignity of the occasion and the absence of any call for hurry. But, as no such academy could exist, or, if it existed, could make its decrees prevail with those who are the decreers of statues, how does the matter stand? A man who has done his best, perhaps, to give us harmless amusement, and whose only crime is that of having succeeded too well in adapting himself to the poor capacities and passing moods of his present audience, is now in such danger as he never was at any former time of finding himself rewarded with ten thousand per annum here and an eternity of contempt hereafter.

If persons of culture and natural taste have often to confess that the painter or poet or novelist whose muse was the seemingly faultless mistress of his affections five-and-twenty years ago, now stands before him as a false Duessa, what should we think of the right to raise monuments claimed by that public which is as changeable in its tastes as it is liberal in paying for their indulgence? Yet it is this public that is venturing more and more audaciously to anticipate the verdict of time. True, it often uses a Minister or a committee of experts as its agent, councillor, and representative; but it is none the safer for that. If the agents themselves know better, they know the value of their own popularity too well to say so; or they may have a secret grudge against Smith, and so cry “Ay” with all their hearts when the people ask, “Shall Smith have a statue?”

XXII
IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS IN ARCHITECTURE

St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Great riches are not required for the habit of magnificence; it is enough that a man should dispose of such as he possesses greatly, according to time and place.” As in life, so in art, and especially in architecture, greatness of style is quite independent of wealth of material; indeed, wealth of material is constantly found by true artists to be a fatal hindrance to grandeur of effect. Hence great poets and painters are usually very shy of what commonly pass for great subjects—that is, subjects full of obvious interest and splendour; and, if they treat such subjects at all, they begin by denuding them as far as possible of all that makes them attractive to the novice in art, until they come to a simple greatness which was hitherto a secret.

Now I wish to point out what I conceive to be a principal condition of great effect with small means and in small or comparatively small buildings. It is magnificence in the expenditure of such material as the architect possesses, and especially of stone, brick, and timber. It is commonly supposed, even by architects, that a solidity of wall and roof sufficient to put far out of sight any idea of insecurity or decay, if properly shown forth and expressed by chamfer, moulding, cornice, shafted recess, and the many other “decorations” which are principally methods of showing the thickness of wall and weight of roof, is all that noble building calls for; and that the frequent—nay, general—practice of ancient architecture in going much further than this was simply waste of material caused by want of mechanical knowledge. But those who know most of ancient architecture know best that there was no want of mechanical knowledge displayed in it, but quite the reverse. Not only is mechanical knowledge, equal if not beyond our own, proved by such buildings as York and Salisbury Cathedrals, but the house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems to have known all the details of his business fully as well as the most ingenious economist of material that ever “scamped” a modern tenement of the same order. He was fully aware that the strength of a rafter lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an old house that strikes us as “architectural” though it may not contain a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a similar house of the time of Henry VII or Elizabeth. A man now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: “I will build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have over I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall want them?” The answer is: Because that very “waste” is the truest and most striking ornament; and though you and your family’s usufruct of a house thus magnanimously built may be but a fifth of its natural age, there lies in that very fact an “ornament” of the most noble and touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant; whereas the meanness of your own plan will be only the more apparent with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.

I have said that a modest ostentation of extreme substantiality is also an element of architectural effect in the kind of building contemplated. This, indeed, is the properly architectural or artistic element. A house will look respectable, and something more than respectable, which has only the reality of being built somewhat better than well. But consciousness is the life of art, and there must be a quiet rejoicing in strength, solidity, and permanence, to give these characters that power over the imagination which a work of art must have. A labourer’s cottage or the smallest village church which has this character is an artistic and rightly architectural work; and the nobleman’s mansion or the cathedral which wants it is not. Here comes in that true “decoration” which scarcely the humblest house of the sixteenth or early part of the seventeenth century was altogether without. In out-of-the-way villages and roadside inns of that period, you will find your attention directed to the thickness and weight of the roof-timbers by a carved or moulded cornice, which measures and expatiates upon the depth and substance of the rafters which terminate therein; or one or more of the brackets supporting the joists of the overhanging bedroom floor will have a touch of carving, to declare with what ease and pleasure the burthen is borne upon their sturdy shoulders; or the lintel of the door will show and boast of the thickness of the wall by a moulded chamfer. A single touch of such decoration glorifies the whole, and puts the living spirit of art into the body of an honest building, however humble it may be.

So far is size from being needful to greatness in architecture, that one of the very grandest pieces of domestic building I ever saw is a little village inn of extremely early date in a Sussex village which scarcely anybody has ever heard of, though it stands but two miles from Berwick Station on the South Coast Railway. This village is Aldfriston. It has in its little market-place an extremely ancient stone cross, far gone in decay, having never been touched by restorer. The whole village has an air of antiquity such as breathes from no other English village I have ever seen; but older than anything, except the cross, is its hostelry—no bigger than a well-to-do bailiff’s cottage, showing no Elizabethan “variety” in its ground-plan, and the front to the street having but three windows above and one on either side of the doorway. Coming upon it quite unprepared for seeing anything particular in the village, this house fairly took my breath away by its exemplification of the way in which ideal and material greatness differ. It was like coming, in a newspaper article, upon three or four lines of great and unknown poetry. Yet it was nothing but a cottage built mightily, and with a mighty consciousness of being so built. It seems never to have been touched, except here and there by the house-painter, since the date at which it was raised, which was probably in the fifteenth century, the carved foliage in the spandrels of the small arched doorway indicating that period. An architect learned in mouldings might perhaps fix the date to within twenty-five years, from those of the cornice. The bedroom story projects considerably over the ground-floor, and is borne by great oak brackets, the faces of which are adorned with painted carvings of figures in mitres, one being St. Hubert, as is shown by the stag at his feet. The spaces between these brackets are ceiled with a great plaster “cavetto,” which, together with the brackets, springs from a wide timber cornice above the door and windows of the ground-floor. In the hollow of this cornice are four or five grotesque faces, the painting of which, though fresh, seems, like the painting of all the other decorations, to be nothing but the original colouring faithfully transmitted. The three windows of the upper floor are bays, and are carried by great spread brackets, carved and painted with most curiously quaint and simple representations of St. George and the Dragon and symbols of his tradition, the tails of two dragons in the central bracket running in their extremities into the outlines of a pointed and foliated arch. The roof is covered in with slabs of ragged stone, thick enough for a London pavement. The dimensions of the timbers of the roof are proved inferentially by the fact that the roof-tree has not sagged an inch under some four hundred years of this burthen; and their mass and power are expressed artistically by their termination in a cornice of immense depth, and consisting of a greater number of moulded “members” than I remember to have seen in any other feature of the kind. The walls are plastered in their plain spaces, but indicate their construction of solid oak—which, by the way, is far more durable than either brick or any ordinary stone—by the chance appearance in one place of a strange animal which runs up the face of the wall and is obviously carved out of a beam otherwise hid by the plaster.

There is nothing heavy in the total effect of this extraordinary piece of cottage architecture; for there is artistic animation everywhere, and the expression of its strength is that of living power and not mere passive sufficiency.

To build such a cottage now might cost about three times as much as it does to build a common country inn of the same dimensions. It would not, of course, suit a London citizen so well as a Chiselhurst villa of like size and cost; but it would be a fit abode for a duke in difficulties.

XXIII
“OLD ENGLISH” ARCHITECTURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN

The style of architecture in which the great majority of country houses, and very many town houses, from the cottage to the mansion, have been built during the past fifteen years, is a very great improvement upon the nameless mode—for which no better title could be invented than the “factory style”—which prevailed in house architecture during great part of last century and the first half of this. And it is a yet greater improvement upon the falsification of that simple though sordid way of building, by attempting to change its misery into magnificence by “compo” mockeries of stone construction and a style of ornament created to express the thickness of the wall or the weight of roof of a Renaissance palace. Most persons are contented with describing the improved mode as Old English, fancying that it is a real return to the way in which houses were built in the reign of Elizabeth or James or thereabouts. But there is a notable distinction between ancient and modern “Old English.” It is this: the “variety” in form which is of the essence of the last was but the accident of the first. Whitehall and the Parthenon are not more simply symmetrical in their masses than are many of the finest specimens of Early English domestic architecture; and the “variety” which we moderns suppose we are copying is, in nearly all cases, either the result of change of plan in the process of building, or of subsequent additions by which the original symmetry was sacrificed. That the sacrifice was often without loss, and often even a gain—as such a sacrifice could never be in the case of a Greek or Renaissance building—is owing to the fact that domesticity is the central thought and expression of the one kind of architecture and public ostentation of the other. Accordingly, the keynote of an Early English house is its stack of chimneys, upon which it was considered impossible to lavish too much ornament. From the cottage of the Sussex labourer to the great nobleman’s mansion—such as that most exquisite of all existing specimens of Tudor building, “Compton in the Hole”—the chimneys are the things which first attract the eye and delight it longest; whereas the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance house is heartily ashamed of its smoke, and has never yet succeeded thoroughly in dealing with its disgrace. Symmetry, then, in the old country house was looked upon as good; but convenience and comfort, and the expression of convenience and comfort, better. Now, in a house well and deliberately planned for the convenience of any household, large or small, the ground-plan and elevation will be naturally simple and symmetrical; simplicity, too, is economical, and economy a part of domesticity. Accordingly, the great Tudor mansions and palaces of England, the builders of which could have best afforded to pay for the supposed charm of “variety,” are, for the most part, the simplest in plan and elevation; while it is in the ill-planned and often-added-to village inn or rectory that the vagaries of “variety,” so alluring to the modern mind, are almost exclusively found.

In Old English architecture this variety is a very real though accidental beauty. It has the double charm of intensifying the primary expression of domesticity by the very sense of the sacrifice which has been made to it, and of giving the building, however small, a touch of historical character. But what if these beauties of the old architecture are sought to be obtained in the modern by sacrifices of convenience, economy, and domesticity, and by a deliberate planning of structural “after-thoughts,” or subsequent necessities, from the beginning! What if a house, full of small and uncomfortable rooms connected, or rather isolated, by mazes of dark staircases, landings, and passages, has been manifestly built at one blow, and at twice the cost at which a simple and symmetrical and scarcely less—nay, to the initiated, more—beautiful house of the same period of architecture might have been built, without the sacrifice of any modern convenience? Surely, if the devil were an architect his “favourite sin” would be this kind of “cottage of gentility.”

The “variety” of a real Old English house is not only nearly always the outcome of some convenience or necessity discovered or arising after the first building of it, but is nearly always obviously so. Some little difference of style not too great to break harmony, will indicate a difference of date; or it will be shown by some infraction of the lines of the original building. The library or parlour which cuts off a return of the label of the pantry window is manifestly an addition. But it would be too ridiculous to copy such proofs of accident and alteration into a nineteenth-century rectory, villa, or mansion; and the consequence is, that to an understanding eye its variety is often in appearance, as it is in reality, mere imbecility aping the movements of reason.

There is no real anachronism in the revival of the ordinary details of Old English house architecture, though there is sometimes in that of the material. The “half-timbered” wall belongs only to times and places in which bricks and tiles are not to be had, and in which abundance of the best oak timber is. But hooded gables, deep cornices, bracketed bays, weather-tiled walls, the projection of upper over lower stories, and almost all the other charming features of the mode, have sound reasons of use which hold as good now as they did in the year 1600; and in these reasons alone consists their architectural charm. The characteristic Old English chimney—the most ornamental feature of the style—has its full justification in use; the loading of the top with projecting layer after layer of bricks, laid even or notch-wise, forming that security against hurricane which is so often sought, in the “factory” style, by the one or more long iron rods which agreeably break the sky-line of many modern mansions. Even the scalloped tile, which so often replaces the square in old weather-tiled walls, has its utilitarian purpose—a saving of material; the greatest breadth of the scallop being superposed upon the juncture of the tiles below, so as to protect it from wet. The projection, in a long low house of the modest rectory or farmhouse type, of the bedroom story over the basement is the feature farthest of all from being merely ornamental. In such a house more space was usually wanted for bedrooms than for living-rooms and offices, and a very moderate projection of the upper story supplies this additional space.

XXIV
ARCHITECTURAL STYLES