(1788-1857)
he poetry of the Romantic School is the poetry of longing. It is filled with a spirit of passionate yearning that gives to it its pathos, and makes each poem seem the expression of an undefined but ardent wish. The poet's soul is reaching out for that which no longer is, but which has been and may be again. Novalis has symbolized this yearning in the quest for the mysterious "blue flower." Men longed for the glories of the past, and among the knights and minstrels of mediæval court and castle they sought for that blue flower whose odor is love. In the bleak unfriendliness of the foggy Northern clime, the sunny expansive beauty of the South, where the magnificence of ancient ages still shimmered through a mellow haze, drew all sensitive hearts to Italy. Goethe felt the strong attraction, and fled without leave-taking across the Alps, to recover his genius under Italian skies. He gave to this deep and universal longing for Italy its classic incarnation in the pathetic figure of Mignon. In the very year in which Goethe returned from Rome, Joseph von Eichendorff was born. He was the last and most ardent of the Romanticists, and all the restless longing of those times found in him its typical interpreter.
Eichendorff was born on the family estate at Lubowitz in Silesia, on March 10th, 1788. He was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, to which thereafter so many of his brother poets were converted. He studied law in Halle, Heidelberg, and Paris. At Heidelberg he took his degree, and at Heidelberg he came definitely under the Romantic influence through his association with Arnim, Brentano, and Görres. In Vienna, where he spent three years, he stood in close relations with Schlegel. His qualities of mind were essentially South German, for he was an Austrian by birth. He was on the point of entering the Austrian service when the famous appeal of February 3d, 1813, from the King of Prussia, roused every German patriot. Eichendorff enlisted as a volunteer in the Prussian army. Throughout that thrilling campaign of the wars for freedom he fought in the cause of the wider Fatherland. He became an officer in the "Lützow Corps," which Körner has made famous in his verse. Scarcely had he obtained his dismissal after the first peace of Paris, when the news of Napoleon's return from Elba summoned him to arms again. In 1816, however, he began his career, after a brilliant showing before the examiners, as an officer in the civil service of Prussia. Henceforth his life was outwardly uneventful. He married soon after his appointment. Intellectually he maintained relations with the finest spirits of his land and time. Having served the State in various capacities for more than a quarter of a century, he was dismissed at his own request in 1844, and retired to private life. He died at Neisse on November 26th, 1857. Heine had died early in the preceding year. With Eichendorff the last great poet of the Romantic School passed away.
It would be fruitless to catalogue the works of Eichendorff that are no longer read. His first independent effort was published at the end of the Napoleonic campaign, under the title of 'Ahnung und Gegenwart' (Presage and Presence). Stories, comedies, tragedies, and excellent translations from the Spanish followed, until now his works fill ten volumes; but of these, only his poems and his tale 'Out of the Life of a Good-for-Nothing' retain their full vitality to-day.
His poems possess enduring beauty. They are full of that profound longing for purer days and fairer realms, and of that dreamy lyric charm, that makes men young again. There is a breath in them of a vanished time; they sing of a golden age in which all men were idle and all women pure. The music of his verse has attracted many composers, from Mendelssohn, his friend, to Robert Franz in our own day. Eichendorff looked down upon the rhetorical ideality of Schiller and the symbolic naturalism of Goethe. He sang of the soul and its homesickness; of its longing for a lost inheritance.
The delightful 'Life of a Good-for-Nothing' appeared in 1824, and it remains to-day one of the most popular tales in German literature. It is the apotheosis of idleness and vagabondism. "In this little book," says Brandes, "all the old charms of romance are shut up, as in a cage, to make music for us. There is the odor of the woods and the song of birds, the longing for travel and the joys of wandering." The book describes the vagabond life of a child of genius, idle with a hundred aptitudes, pure with a hundred temptations, and amid a hundred dangers careless and irresponsible. This Good-for-Nothing illustrates in his roving life the romantic quest of the "blue flower." He lives for pure pleasures and the joys of unremunerative art; his is the infinite longing which never can be stilled, but only rendered endurable by poetry, by music, and by moonlight on forest, field, and stream. The book is an exquisite idyl; it is full of strange adventures and all the romantic machinery of singular disguises, lofty and secluded castles, and mysterious beauties who throw flowers from shaded balconies; and yet it is essentially idyllic, and the beautiful lyrics which are scattered through its pages create an atmosphere of eternal summer in which we are made to forget the work-a-day world where men earn their daily bread and feel the salutary pressure of duty.
Eichendorff himself was a faithful public servant, and in the 'Life of a Good-for-Nothing' we have the confession only of what the author perhaps thought he would have liked to be, rather than of what he was. He was reverent and pious, and one of the most evenly balanced minds in all that circle of madcap poets. He has told us of those early days of the Romantic School and of the deep thrills which agitated the entire German people when Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegels, and Tieck began their life work in literature. And this work was done in the days when the sword of Napoleon hung suspended over Germany: in days when even the poet who was to sing the praises of the dolce far nicnte of Good-for-Nothingness was ready to give three years of his life for the defense of his native land. So far had literature and life lost sight of each other, and the men of vigorous action and solid achievement still sang sweetly of the blue flower and of the pleasures of idleness, leaving behind them a body of literature which, however unreal, will not lose its power to soothe and charm.
FROM 'OUT OF THE LIFE OF A GOOD-FOR-NOTHING'
The wheel of my father's mill rushed and roared again right merrily, the melting snow trickled steadily down from the roof, the sparrows twittered and bustled about. I sat on the door-sill and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes; I felt so comfortable in the warm sunshine. Just then my father came out of the house. He had worked since daybreak in the mill, and had his tasseled cap awry upon his head. To me he said:—"You Good-for-Nothing! There you are sunning yourself again and stretching and straining your bones tired, and leave me to do all the work alone. I cannot feed you here any longer. Spring is at the door; go out into the world and earn your own bread." "Now," said I, "if I am a Good-for-Nothing, well and good; I will go out into the world and seek my fortune." And really I was very well pleased, for it had shortly before occurred to me too to travel, when I heard the yellow-hammer, who always sung his note in autumn and winter so plaintively at our window, now calling again in the beautiful spring so proudly and merrily from the trees. I went accordingly into the house and got my violin, which I played quite cleverly, down from the wall; my father gave me besides a few groschens to take along, and so I sauntered out through the long village. It gave me in truth a secret pleasure when I saw all my old acquaintances and comrades, right and left, just as yesterday, and day before yesterday, and always, going out to work, to dig and to plow; while I thus wandered out into the free world. I called out to the poor people on all sides proudly and contentedly, Adieu! but nobody paid very much attention to it. In my soul it seemed to me like an eternal Sunday. And when I at last came out into the open fields, I took up my dear violin and played and sang as I walked along the highway....
When I presently looked about, a fine traveling carriage came up quite near to me, that may have been for some time driving along behind me without my having noticed it, since my heart was so full of music; for it went along quite slowly, and two ladies put their heads out of the carriage and listened to me. The one was particularly beautiful and younger than the other, but really both of them pleased me. When I now ceased singing, the elder one had the driver stop and spoke to me kindly: "Ah, you happy fellow, you know how to sing very pretty songs." To which I, not at all backward, answered, "If it please your Excellency, I may have some that are prettier still." Thereupon she asked me again, "Where then are you wandering so early in the morning?" Then I was ashamed that I did not know, myself, and said boldly, "To Vienna." Thereupon both spoke together in a foreign language that I did not understand. The younger one shook her head several times, but the other laughed continuously and finally called out to me, "Spring up behind us: we are also going to Vienna." Who was happier than I! I made a bow, and at a jump was on behind the carriage, the coachman cracked his whip, and we flew along over the glistening road, so that the wind whistled about my hat.
Behind me disappeared village, gardens, and church towers; before appeared new villages, castles, and mountains. Below me grain fields, copse, and meadows flew in many colors past; above me were countless larks in the blue air. I was ashamed to cry aloud, but inwardly I exulted, and stamped and danced about on the footboard of the carriage, so that I had nearly lost my violin which I held under my arm. As the sun, however, rose continually higher, and heavy white noonday clouds came up round about the horizon, and everything in the air and on the broad plains became so empty and close and still over the gently waving grain fields,—then for the first time came into my mind my village, and my father, and our mill, and how it was so comfortable and cool there by the shady pond, and that now everything lay so far, far behind me. I felt so strangely, and as if I must turn back again. I put my violin in between my coat and waistcoat, sat down full of thought upon the footboard, and fell asleep.
When I opened my eyes the carriage stood still under tall linden-trees, behind which a broad stairway led up between columns into a splendid castle. On one side, through the trees, I saw the towers of Vienna. The ladies, it appeared, had long since got out, and the horses were unharnessed. I was much frightened when I found myself all at once alone. As I sprang quickly up into the castle, I heard somebody above laughing out of the window.
In this castle it fared strangely with me. In the first place, as I was looking about in the wide cool hall, some one tapped me with a stick upon the shoulder. I turned quickly, and there stood a great gentleman in court dress, a broad scarf of gold and silk hanging down to his hips, with a silver-topped staff in his hand, and an extraordinarily long, hooked, princely nose, big and splendid as a puffed-up turkey, who asked me what I wanted there. I was quite taken aback, and for fear and astonishment could not bring forth a sound. Thereupon more servants came running up and down the stairs, who said nothing at all, but looked at me from head to foot. Straightway came a lady's-maid (as I afterward learned she was) right up to me and said that I was a charming fellow, and her ladyship desired to ask me whether I would take service here as a gardener. I put my hand to my waistcoat. My couple of groschens, God knows, must have sprung out of my pocket in my dancing about in the carriage, and were gone. I had nothing but my violin-playing, for which, moreover, the gentleman with the staff, as he said to me curtly, would not give a farthing. In my anguish of heart I accordingly said yes to the lady's-maid, my eyes still directed from one side to the uncomfortable figure which continually, like the pendulum of a steeple clock, moved up and down the hall, and just then again came majestically and awfully up out of the background. Last of all the head gardener finally came, growled something to himself about rabble and country bumpkins, and led me to the garden, preaching to me on the way a long sermon—how I should be sober and industrious, should not rove about in the world, should not devote myself to unprofitable arts and useless stuff: in that case I might in time be of some account. There were still more very pretty, well-put, useful maxims, only since then I have forgotten almost all of them again. On the whole, I did not really at all rightly know how everything had come about. I only said yes continually to everything, for I was like a bird whose wings had been wet. Thus I was, God be praised, in possession of my daily bread.
In the garden, life went on finely. I had every day my warm food in plenty, and more money than I needed for wine,—only, alas! I had quite a good deal to do. The temples, too, the arbors, and the beautiful green walks,—all that would have pleased me very well, if I had only been able to walk placidly about and converse rationally, like the ladies and gentlemen who came there every day. As often as the head gardener was away and I was alone, I immediately pulled out my short tobacco pipe, sat down and thought out pretty polite speeches, such as I would use to entertain the young and beautiful lady who brought me along with her into the castle, if I were a cavalier and walked about with her. Or I lay down on my back on sultry afternoons, when everything was so still that one could hear the bees buzzing, and watched the clouds as they floated along to my own village, and the grasses and flowers as they moved hither and thither, and thought of the lady; and then it often happened too that the beautiful lady, with her guitar or a book, really went through the garden at a distance, as gently, as lofty and gracious, as an angel, so that I did not rightly know whether I dreamed or was awake....
Close by the castle garden ran the highway, only separated from it by a high wall. A very neat little toll-keeper's house with a red tile roof was built there, and behind it was a little flower garden, inclosed with a gay-colored picket fence, which, through a break in the wall of the castle garden, bordered on its shadiest and most concealed part. The toll-keeper had just died, who had occupied it all. Early one morning while I still lay in the soundest sleep, the secretary from the castle came to me and called me in all haste to the head steward. I dressed myself quickly and sauntered along behind the airy secretary, who on the way, now here, now there, broke off a flower and stuck it on the lapel of his coat, now brandished his cane skillfully in the air, and talked to the wind all sorts of matters of which I understood nothing, since my eyes and ears were still full of sleep. When I entered the office, where it was not yet wholly light, the steward looked at me from behind a tremendous inkstand and piles of paper and books and a portly wig, like an owl from her nest, and began, "What's your name? Where do you come from? Can you write, read, and cipher?" When I had answered this affirmatively, he added, "Well, her ladyship designs to offer you, in consideration of your good behavior and your particular merits, the vacant toll-keeper's position." I went over quickly in my mind my previous behavior and manners, and I was obliged to confess that I found at the end, myself, that the steward was right. And so I was, then, really toll-keeper, before I was aware of it.
I moved now immediately into my new dwelling, and in a short time was settled. I found a number of things that the late toll-keeper had left behind, among others a splendid red dressing-gown with yellow dots, green slippers, a tasseled cap, and some pipes with long stems. All these things I had wished for when I was still at home, when I always saw our pastor going about so comfortably. The whole day (I had nothing further to do) I sat there on the bench before my house in dressing-gown and cap, smoking tobacco out of the longest pipe that I had found among those left by the late toll-keeper, and looked at the people on the highway as they went to and fro, and drove and rode about. I only wished all the time that people too out of my own village, who always said that nothing would come of me all the days of my life, might come by and see me. The dressing-gown was very becoming to me, and in point of fact all of it pleased me very well. So I sat there and thought of all sorts of things: how the beginning is always hard, how a higher mode of life is nevertheless very comfortable; and secretly came to the decision henceforth to give up all traveling about, to save money, too, like others, and in good time surely to amount to something in the world. In the mean time, however, with all my decisions, cares, and business, I by no manner of means forgot the beautiful lady.
The potatoes and other vegetables that I found in my little garden I threw away, and planted it entirely with the choicest flowers; at which the janitor from the castle, with the big princely nose, who since I lived here often came to me and had become my intimate friend, looked askance and apprehensively at me, and regarded me as one whom sudden fortune had made mad. But I did not allow this to disturb me, for not far from me in the manor garden I heard low voices, among which I thought to recognize that of my beautiful lady, although on account of the thick shrubbery I could see nobody. Then I bound every day a nosegay of the most beautiful flowers that I had, climbed every evening when it was dark over the wall, and placed it on a stone table which stood in the middle of an arbor, and every evening when I brought the new bouquet the old one was gone from the table....
I continually felt as I always feel when spring is at hand,—so restless and glad without knowing why, as if a piece of great good fortune or something else extraordinary awaited me. The hateful accounts, in particular, would no longer get on at all; and when the sunshine through the chestnut-tree before the window fell green-golden upon the figures, and added them up so nimbly from "amount brought forward" to "balance," and then up and down again, very strange thoughts came to me, so that I often became quite confused and actually could not count up to three. For the eight appeared always to me like the stout, tightly laced lady with the broad hat that I knew, and the unlucky seven was wholly like a guide-post always pointing backward, or a gallows. The nine however played the greatest pranks, in that often, before I was aware of it, it stood itself as a six merrily on its head; while the two looked on so cunningly, like an interrogation point; as if it would ask:—"What shall be the outcome of all this in the end, you poor naught? Without her, this slender one-and-all, you will always be nothing!"
Sitting outside before the door, too, no longer pleased me. I took a footstool out with me, in order to make myself more comfortable, and stretched out my feet upon it, and I mended an old parasol of the toll-keeper's and held it against the sun above me, like a Chinese summer-house. But it did not at all avail. It seemed to me as I sat thus, and smoked and speculated, that my legs gradually became longer from very weariness, and my nose grew from idleness, as I looked down on it for hours at a time. And when many a time before daybreak an extra post came by, and I stepped half asleep out into the cool air, and a pretty little face, of which in the dim light only the sparkling eyes were to be seen, bent with curiosity out of the carriage and gave me pleasantly a good-morning, and in the village round about the cocks crew so freshly out over the gently waving grain fields, and between the morning clouds high in the heavens already soared a few too early awakened larks, and the postilion took his post-horn and drove on, and blew and blew—then I stood for a long time still and looked after the coach, and it seemed to me as if nothing else would do, except to go along with them, far, far out into the world.
The nosegays I always placed, in the mean time, as soon as the sun went down, on the stone table in the dim arbor. But that was just it. That was all over now, since that evening; no one troubled himself about them. As often as I, early in the morning, looked after them, the flowers still lay there just as they did the day before, and looked at me in real sorrow with their wilted hanging heads, and the dew-drops standing on them as if they wept. That grieved me very much. I bound no more nosegays. In my garden the weeds might now flourish as they would, and the flowers I let stand and grow until the wind blew away the leaves. My heart was just as waste and wild and disordered....
In these critical times it came to pass that once when I was lying in the window at home and looking gloomily out into the empty air, the lady's-maid from the castle came tripping along the road. When she saw me, she turned quickly toward me and stood still at the window. "His Lordship returned yesterday from his journey," said she briskly. "Is it so?" I replied in astonishment, for for several weeks past I had not concerned myself about anything, and did not even know that his Lordship was away. "Then his daughter, the gracious young lady, has also had, I am sure, a very pleasant time." The lady's-maid looked at me oddly from top to toe, so that I really was forced to consider whether I had not said something stupid. "You don't know anything at all," she finally said, and turned up her little nose. "Now," she continued, "there is going to be a dance and masquerade this evening at the castle in his Lordship's honor. My mistress is also to go in mask, as a flower-girl—do you quite understand?—as a flower-girl. Now my mistress has noticed that you have particularly beautiful flowers in your garden." "That is strange," thought I to myself, "since there are now scarcely any more flowers to be seen on account of the weeds." But she continued: "As my mistress needs beautiful flowers for her costume, but quite fresh ones that have just come out of the flower-bed, you are to bring her some, and wait with them this evening, when it has grown dark, under the great pear-tree in the castle garden. She will come and get the flowers."
I was quite dumbfounded by this news, and in my rapture ran from the window out to the lady's-maid.
"Pah! the nasty dressing-gown!" she cried out when she saw me all at once out-of-doors in my costume. That vexed me. I did not wish to be behind her in gallantry, and made a few pretty motions to catch her and kiss her. But unfortunately the dressing-gown, which was much too long for me, got tangled up at the same time under my feet and I fell my whole length on the ground. When I pulled myself together again the lady's-maid was far away, and I heard her still laughing in the distance; so that she had to hold her sides.
Now, however, I had something to think about and to make me happy. She still thought of me and of my flowers! I went into my garden and quickly pulled all the weeds out of the flower-beds, and threw them high up over my head away into the glistening air, as if I drew out with the roots every bit of evil and melancholy. The roses were again like her mouth; the sky-blue morning-glories like her eyes; the snow-white lily with its sorrowfully drooping head looked quite like her. I laid them all carefully in a little basket together.
It was a still, beautiful evening, with not a cloud in the heavens. A few stars were already out in the sky; from afar came the sound of the Danube over the fields; in the tall trees in the castle garden near me joyfully sang innumerable birds. Ah, I was so happy!
When night finally came on, I took my little basket over my arm and set out on my way to the great garden. In my basket all lay so bright and pretty together—white, red, blue, and so fragrant that my heart fairly laughed when I looked in.
Full of happy thoughts, I went along in the beautiful moonlight through the quiet paths tidily strewed with sand, over the little white bridges, under which the swans sat sleeping upon the water, and past the pretty arbors and summer-houses. I had soon found the great pear-tree, for it was the same one under which I had lain on sultry afternoons when I was still a gardener.
Here it was so lonely and dark. Only a tall aspen continually whispered with its silver leaves. From the castle sounded now and then the dance music. At times I heard, too, in the garden human voices, which often came quite near to me, and then all at once it was again perfectly still.
My heart beat fast. A strange feeling of dread came over me, as if I intended to steal from somebody. I stood for a long time stock still, leaning against the tree and listened on all sides; but as nobody came, I could no longer endure it. I hung my basket on my arm and climbed quickly up into the pear-tree, in order to breathe again in the open air....
I now directed my eyes immovably toward the castle, for a circle of torches below on the steps of the entrance threw a strange light there, over the sparkling windows and far out into the garden. It was the servants, who were just then serenading their young master and mistress. In the midst of them, splendidly dressed like a minister of state, stood the porter before a music stand, working hard on his bassoon.
Just as I had seated myself aright in order to listen to the beautiful serenade, all at once the doors opened, up on the balcony of the castle. A tall gentleman, handsome and stately in his uniform and with many glittering stars on his breast, stepped out upon the balcony, leading by the hand—the beautiful young lady in a dress all of white, like a lily in the night or as if the moon passed across the clear firmament.
I could not turn my glance from the place, and garden, trees, and fields vanished from my senses; as she, so wondrously illuminated by the torches, stood there tall and slender, and now talked pleasantly with the handsome officer and then nodded kindly down to the musicians. The people below were beside themselves with joy, and I too could not restrain myself at last, and joined in the cheers with all my might.
As she however soon afterward again disappeared from the balcony, and below one torch after the other went out and the music stands were taken away, and the garden now round about also became dark again and rustled as before,—for the first time I noticed all this,—then it fell all at once upon my heart that it was really only the aunt who had sent for me with the flowers, and that the beautiful lady did not think of me at all and was long since married, and that I myself was a great fool.
All of this plunged me truly into an abyss of reflection. I wrapped myself up like a hedgehog in the stings of my own thoughts; from the castle the dance music came more rarely across, the clouds wandered lonely along over the dark garden. And so I sat up in the tree, like a night owl, all night long in the ruins of my happiness.
The cool morning air waked me finally from my dreamings. I was fairly astonished when I looked all at once about me. Music and dance was long over, and in the castle and round about the castle, on the lawn, and the stone steps, and the columns, everything looked so still and cool and solemn; only the fountain before the entrance plashed solitarily along. Here and there in the twigs near me the birds were already awakening and shaking their bright feathers; and while they stretched their little wings they looked with curiosity and astonishment at their strange bedfellow. The joyous beaming rays of morning sparkled along over the garden upon my breast.
Then I straightened myself out up in my tree, and for the first time for a long while, once more looked fairly out into the land, and saw how a few ships were already sailing down the Danube between the vineyards, and how the still empty highways swung themselves like bridges across the glistening country, far out over the mountains and valleys.
I do not know how it came about, but all at once my old desire to travel seized hold of me again: all the old sadness and joy and great anticipation. It came into my mind, at the same time, how the beautiful lady up in the castle was sleeping among the flowers and under silken coverlets, and an angel was sitting beside her on the bed in the stillness of the morning.—"No," I cried out, "I must go away from here, and on and on, as far as the sky is blue!"
And at this I took my basket and threw it high into the air, so that it was very pretty to see how the flowers lay gayly round about in the twigs and on the greensward below. Then I climbed down quickly and went through the quiet garden to my dwelling. Often indeed I stopped still at many a place where I had once seen her, or where lying in the shade I had thought of her.
In and about my house everything still looked just as I had left it yesterday. The garden was plundered and bare; in my room inside, the great account-book still lay open; my violin, which I had almost wholly forgotten, hung covered with dust on the wall. A morning beam, however, from the window opposite fell gleaming across the strings. That struck a true accord within my heart. "Yes," I said, "do thou come here, thou faithful instrument! Our kingdom is not of this world!"
And so I took the violin from the wall, left the account-book, dressing-gown, slippers, pipes, and parasol lying, and wandered, as poor as I had come, out of my little house away on the glistening highway.
I still often looked back. A strange feeling had taken possession of me. I was so sad and yet again so thoroughly joyous, like a bird escaping from its cage. And when I had gone a long way I took up my violin, out there in the free air, and sang.
The castle, the garden, and the towers of Vienna had already disappeared behind me in the fragrance of morning; above me exulted innumerable larks high in the air. Thus I went between the green mountains and past cheerful cities and villages down toward Italy.
Translation of William H. Carpenter.
SEPARATION
Brown was the heather,
The sky was blue;
We sat together
Where flowers grew.
Is this the thrilling
Nightingale's beat?
Are larks still trilling
Their numbers sweet?
I spend the hours
Exiled from thee;
Spring has brought flowers,
But none for me.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Charles Harvey Genung.
LORELEI
'Tis very late, 'tis growing cold;
Alone thou ridest through the wold?
The way is long, there's none to see,
Ah, lovely maid, come follow me.
"I know men's false and guileful art,
And grief long since has rent my heart.
I hear the huntsman's bugle there:
Oh fly,—thou know'st me not,—beware!"
So richly is the steed arrayed,
So wondrous fair the youthful maid,
I know thee now—too late to fly!
Thou art the witch, the Lorelei.
Thou know'st me well,—my lonely shrine
Still frowns in silence on the Rhine;
'Tis very late, 'tis growing cold,—
Thou com'st no more from out the wold!
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Charles Harvey Genung.
GEORGE ELIOT
(1819-1880)
BY CHARLES WALDSTEIN
o George Eliot will always have to be assigned a prominent place in the history of the literature of the nineteenth century as a foremost novelist, poet, and social philosopher.
Mary Ann, or, as she subsequently spelt her Christian name, Marian, Evans was born at South Farm, a mile from Griff, in the parish of Calton in Warwickshire, on November 22d, 1819. Her father, the prototype of Adam Bede, was Robert Evans, of Welsh origin; who started life as a carpenter, but soon became a land agent in Warwickshire. This position implies great responsibilities, and demands thorough business capacities as well as firmness and trustworthiness of character, in his relations to his employers as well as his subordinates. He was intrusted with the management of the extensive estates of five great noblemen and land-owners in the county of Warwickshire. He was thus a man of considerable importance and power in the country, and would hold a social position ranking with the highest professional classes of the neighborhood.
This position of her father gave her the opportunity of gaining considerable insight into the lives and characters of English people of every class in the country, and from its neutral height between the great landlord and the farmer, down to the farm laborer, she could command the horizon line of all these lives, realize their habits, their aspirations and sufferings, and command its extent as well as its limitations. The country, the fields, the garden about Griff House, where her childhood was spent, as well as the village with its inhabitants,—with whom, through her mother as well as her father, she came in contact,—all stimulated her loving and sympathetic observation and formed that background of experience in the youthful mind, out of which subsequently rose, with strong spontaneity and truthful precision of design, the characters and scenes of her novels. They will ever remain the classical expositions of English provincial life in literature. The upright strength and pertinacity of her characters, as well as the insight into practical life and the life of men, were no doubt derived from her father, and from the intimate intercourse with him for so many years of the most important formative period of her life.
Her mother was a housewife of the old-fashioned type, whose health was always poor, and who died when Marian was about fifteen years of age. She is supposed to be portrayed in Mrs. Hackit in 'Amos Barton.' She seems to have been a woman with ready wit, a somewhat sharp tongue, an undemonstrative but tender-hearted nature. In many respects she seems also to have been the model for that masterpiece of character-drawing, Mrs. Poyser. Though Marian had two sisters, her brother Isaac Evans was her playmate. The youthful relation between brother and sister was very much like that of Tom Tulliver and Maggie in 'The Mill on the Floss,'—no doubt the most autobiographical of her novels, as regards at least the drawing of Maggie's character.
Marian was at first sent to a school at the neighboring Nuneaton; and at a very early age she taught at Sunday school,—which may have instilled a magisterial bias into her mind from the very outset. At the age of twelve she proceeded to a school at Coventry, kept by the Misses Franklin, which enjoyed considerable reputation in the neighborhood. She remained in this school for three years; beyond elementary school duties she devoted much time to English composition, French and German. Her life was then rather solitary, moved by strong inner religious convictions, upon which she dwelt with passionate fervor. Her religious views were at first simply those of the Church of England, then those of the Low Church, and then became "anti-supernatural." The second phase was no doubt strongly influenced by her aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, the "Derbyshire Methodist," the prototype of Dinah Morris in 'Adam Bede.' The earnest, almost lugubrious conception of life which she formed in these times, and which subsequent years and experiences only intensified, no doubt gave the keynote to her whole temperament and genius. It produced in her that supreme development of the idea of duty and compassion for human suffering which elevates the tone of her writing with a lofty conception of life, enables her to penetrate into the feelings and aspirations of all classes, and while it widened the range of her sympathy, never did so at the cost of genuineness or intensity of feeling. At the same time this serious keynote, though it was not opposed to humor,—the growth of which it even favored,—led to some limitations in the harmonious development of her artistic nature; notably in that it counteracted the sense for the playful and joyous side of life. The eternal conflict between Hellenism and Hebraism, between the vine-wreath and the crown of thorns, was not reconciled by her, but led to the suppression or defeat of Hellenism. The true, the joyous spirit of Hellenism, with its ideals of beauty and happiness in life, never really possessed her soul. In her own words she has put this eternal dualism:—
"For evermore
With grander resurrection than was feigned
Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece
Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form
Of calmly joyous beauty, marble-limbed,
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its limbs,
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave
At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god
Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns."
Only in the tragic manifestation of the Greek mind, above all in an Æschylus, did she find true resonance to the passionate beats of her God-loving and world-renouncing heart. Yet more and more, as her mind grew and severed itself from the traditional beliefs of her childhood,—with which however she ever remained in deepest sympathy,—did this love of God and renunciation of the world mean the love of man and the tolerance of weakness, the pity with suffering and the active effort to help to rectify and to improve. The one element in Hellenism which she adopted and clung to, and which as a supporting wall she added to the whole structure of her more Hebraistic beliefs and ideals, was the worship of Sanity. This worship only intensified the tolerance of the unsound, the pity for the diseased and distorted and miserable. And though she never became a professed Positivist, it was no doubt the response which Comte's philosophy gave to these cravings that made his views ultimately most congenial to her.
The true and independent development of her mind began when after the death of her mother she took charge of Griff House for her father; but especially when in 1841 her father retired from his active duties, and settled at Foleshill near Coventry. It was here, while taking lessons in Latin and Greek from Mr. Sheepshanks, and also devoting herself to music, that she formed the friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray of Coventry and their kinsman Mr. Charles C. Hennell, the Unitarian philosopher and writer. These people, deeply interested in philosophy and literature, and important contributors to the philosophico-religious literature of the day, responded fully to the mental needs of George Eliot. Out of this intellectual affinity grew a friendship which lasted through life. They also introduced her to the philosophical and critical literature of Germany, and it was through them that she began in 1843 her first literary task, the translation of David Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' which had been begun by Miss Brabant, who became Mrs. Charles Hennell. The task of translating Strauss's great work, which occupied three years of her life, was followed by work of the same nature, which, though not as taxing as the life of Christ, must still have called upon thought and perseverance to a high degree: it was 'The Essence of Christianity,' by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. These works, which stand on the border line between philosophy and religion, led her by a natural development into the domain of pure philosophy; so that the next more extensive task which she undertook, but to our knowledge never completed, was a translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics.'
She was now fairly, at the age of twenty-seven, launched in her literary career; though as yet it was on the side of science and religion and not of art. The essays which belong to the following period, together with her editorial occupation, again formed a transition from the more scientific character of her writing to the domain of pure literature. And though these works belong to the field of criticism, it was criticism as applied to pure literature, fiction, and biography, and thus brought her inherently ponderous and theoretical mind, by natural stages, from analysis and speculation to the more imaginative sphere of synthesis and creation. This early theoretical and scientific direction of her occupation and thought may have produced that fault in her later writing with which she has often been reproached,—it may have made her style and diction clumsy and pedantic. On the other hand, it was a most excellent training for the future writer of even fiction. For it exercised the mind in gaining full mastery over thought; in recognizing and defining the nicest and most delicate shadings of meaning and of expression; in insisting upon their logical sequence, and thus impressing upon the author the rudiments of exposition and composition; in extending and enriching the domain of knowledge and fact; and finally, in producing and training the force of intellectual sympathy, which sharpens as well as intensifies insight into life and character, and gives to the mind that pliancy which directs the feeling heart to beat in sympathy with all forms of experiences, desires, and passions,—however far the lives and personalities may be removed from the author who constructs or describes them.
In 1849 the death of her father threw her into a state of deepest depression. It was then that her kind friends the Brays took her for a tour on the Continent, to Italy and Switzerland. She remained at Geneva in the family of the artist D'Albert for eight months, where she no doubt found congenial local associations; for the shores of the Lake of Geneva, haunted by the spirits of Calvin, Rousseau, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Gibbon, Byron, and Shelley, seem bound up with world-stirring thought as no other place in Europe. Upon her return to England she made her home with the Brays at Rosehill for about a year, and then accepted the offer of Dr. John Chapman to become sub-editor of the Westminster Review and to make her home in his family. She here entered a circle of the most prominent literary men and women of the day, and among these she became an intimate friend of Herbert Spencer, John Oxenford, James and Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and others. Emerson she had met before at Rosehill. Besides her arduous sub-editorial work, she contributed several remarkable papers to the Review. Among these are: 'Carlyle's Life of Sterling' and 'Margaret Fuller' in 1852; 'Women in France: Madame de Tablé,' 1854; 'Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,' 1855; 'German Wit: Heinrich Heine,' 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,' 'The Natural History of German Life,' 1856; 'Worldliness and Otherworldliness: the Poetry of Young' in 1857.
It was in 1854 that occurred the great event in her life; she joined George Henry Lewes as his wife, though the latter's wife was still alive. Lewes was separated from his first wife, though circumstances made it impossible for him to get a divorce. From that moment George Eliot remained the most faithful and devoted wife to Lewes and mother to his children, until his death in 1878. She united her life with that of Lewes after due and full deliberation, and with a thorough weighing of consequences and duties. But that she felt the deepest regret in that her complete union was not in accordance with the established laws of the society in which she lived, is evident from all her letters and writings; and though it need not have led to her marriage with her late husband Mr. Cross, the opportunity afforded of showing her respect to the established rules of matrimonial life must certainly have made it easier for her to form a new alliance, after the death of her first husband.
With Lewes she went to Germany, living for some time at Berlin and Weimar, while he was writing his 'Life of Goethe' and she was working at her translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics' and was contributing some articles on German literature. Upon their return they settled in London, finally in the Priory, North Bank, in the northwest of the metropolis, which was for many years a salon of the London literary world. The Sunday afternoons of this remarkable couple united all the talent and genius, residents or foreign visitors. One might meet in one and the same afternoon Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Richard Wagner, Joachim the violinist, Huxley, Clifford, Du Maurier, and Turgénieff. Lewes, the most brilliant and versatile conversationalist of his day, gave life and freedom to these meetings; but the intellectual and moral centre always remained George Eliot, with her soft, sweet voice, her clear intonation, her friendly and encouraging smile, lighting up as by a contrast the earnestness of her serious and large features, which resembled those of Savonarola, whose character she has drawn in such strong lines in 'Romola.' But the quality of searching sympathy and benignant humor, so remarkable in her writings, gave the warmth of kindness and cordiality to these formidably intellectual meetings. The present writer remembers with grateful piety how, when he was a very young man struggling to put a crude thought into presentable form before these giants of thought and letters, she would divine his meaning even in its embryonic uncouthness of expression, and would give it back to him and to them in a perfect and faultless garb; so that in admiring and worshiping the woman, he would be pleased with his own thoughts and would think well of himself. It is this sympathetic and unselfish helpfulness of great and noble minds, which gives confidence and increases the self-esteem of all who come in contact with them. No wonder that one often saw and heard of a great number of people, young girls or young men, who by letter or in person sought help and spiritual guidance from her, and went away strengthened by her sympathy and advice.
Her first attempt at fiction was made when in her thirty-seventh year, in September 1856. The account of this is best shown in her own words here given among the extracts from her writings. Her first story was a short one, called 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.' This was followed by 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' and 'Janet's Repentance,' and soon there was that remarkable volume called 'Scenes of Clerical Life.' Lewes and she and the world all realized that she was a true novelist, and from that moment she directed all her energies to the production of those works which will ever live, in spite of all changes of fashions and modes of story-telling, classical specimens of English fiction. In rapid succession now followed 'Adam Bede' in 1858; 'The Mill on the Floss' in 1860; 'Silas Marner' in 1861; 'Romola' in 1863; 'Felix Holt, the Radical,' in 1866; the poem 'The Spanish Gypsy' in 1868; 'Jubal and Other Poems' in 1870; 'Middlemarch' in 1872; 'Daniel Deronda' in 1876; and her last work, 'The Impressions of Theophrastus Such,' which was not published till after the death of Lewes, which occurred in 1878. She married Mr. Cross in May, 1880. She died on December 22d, 1880.
To lead to the fuller understanding of George Eliot's works, it was necessary to sketch in broad outlines the growth of her life and personality. As a writer she was not only a novelist but also a poet, and above all a social philosopher. Her ethical bias is so strong, moreover, that one cannot understand her as a novelist or a poet unless one has grasped her social philosophy and the all-pervading and ever-present influence it has upon her mind and writing.
In her delineation of character and depiction of scenes, especially those of rural and domestic life, truthful rendering is to her the supreme duty; and one need but open the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' 'Adam Bede,' 'The Mill on the Floss,' 'Silas Marner,' and 'Middlemarch,' on any page, to realize the fullness of truth with which she has painted. At the time of their appearance, not only were the persons and the environment identified with the originals she had in her mind, but as lasting types they tallied exactly with people and local life known to each English reader. This truthful rendering was also conceived by her as a primary duty of the novelist. We would refer the reader to what, in an essay, she says of the English peasant in fiction, and would recall her own words in the same essay:—
"A picture of human life, such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of sentiment.... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life."
Another interesting passage is one containing an estimate of Dickens, in which she considers the Oliver Twists, Joes, and Nancys terrible and pathetic pictures of London life:—
"And if Dickens had been able to give us their psychological character, their conception of life, and their emotions, with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution to art ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."
George Eliot might thus be classified as one of the greatest if not the greatest realist of the analytical or psychological order. But this would, to our mind, be a one-sided and incomplete estimate of the chief character in her writing and genius. Truthful rendering of life and character may have been one of the chief motives to composition, and a fundamental requisite to the art of her fiction; but it remained a means to a further end—the ultimate end—of her writing, as it no doubt was the fundamental stimulus to her imagination and design. And this end and motive make her an idealist and not a realist in fiction. The direction in which this idealism goes we have indicated in the lines we have italicized in the passages we quote from her, and is to be found in the ethical motive below and beyond all her thought and composition, the predominance of the social philosophy in her fiction and poetry, to which we have already referred.
We will dismiss the coarse and caricatured distinction between realism and idealism, in which the one is supposed to render truthfully whatever is, without any principle of selection or composition; while the other starts with preconceived notions of the ought to be, be it from the point of view of formal beauty or spiritual harmony, and proves the facts that are. Art, and the novel above all,—which deals with life at once so clear and familiar to us, and so perplexingly manifold and varied as constantly to elude choice and design,—can neither forego truth nor unity of design.
But in the novelist's attitude towards human life there are two distinct points of view from which a new classification of novelists might be made: the position given to ethics, the moral laws in the presentation of life. The laws of human conduct are so essential to the relation of man to man, that the fundamental question as to what position ethics holds in our narrative cannot be ignored. The novelist must have decided whether he is going to consider its claims in the primary structure of his novel, and in the creation and development of characters, or not. Is he going to prepare the groundwork of artistic labor with a view to ethical design, or pure artistic design? It may be said that the best work requires both. But still, in so far as the one is heeded more than the other, will the writer be an idealist or a realist in this sense.
The idealist will focus his view of the characters, their experiences and sufferings and surroundings, from a view of moral fitness and design; the realist will find the design and composition, the harmony which all art needs, in the characters, in the scenes, in the life itself, and the inner organic relation of the parts to the whole. The one leads to the best idealism, the other to the best realism. The one produces a George Eliot, the other a Guy de Maupassant. This realist ignores the general fitness of things, the moral law, and says:—"This character is interesting in itself, this situation is amusing, curious, striking, or terrible,—they are worth depicting, without any question as to their relation to social or moral ideals." Guy de Maupassant takes characters and situations and depicts them with consummate art; he never troubles himself about general moral fitness, —we never know what his moral and social ideals are, nor whether he has any at all. Jane Austen is interested in her characters, in the tone and range of ideas of the period and the society in which she lives, the types of life, and she draws them with consummate art; but though we are left in no doubt in her case as to the good and the bad, and though the good generally prevails and the bad is defeated, these are not subordinated to a clear conception of an ideal social order, without which the characters and the story could not have been conceived and developed—as is always the case with George Eliot. Gwendolen Harleth, Felix Holt, Maggie, Dorothea, Lydgate, the life and surroundings of these figures, all bear a fixed relation to the social ideals of the author; and it is in this relation that she conceives and develops them. Nay, it is for the purpose of illustrating and fixing this that she creates them at all. Strange as it may sound, in so far Jane Austen might be called a realist and be classed with Guy de Maupassant; while George Sand, with whom she has so much similarity of spirit, is by contrast an idealist. It is a difference in the initial methods of dealing with life in fiction.
It is not enough for George Eliot to present an interesting character, to follow up its fate and growth, to force the reader into sympathy, to make him hope for success or fear failure; nor even to show the struggle with the surroundings, to depict interesting and complex situations and centres. Her writings always depend upon a primary postulate, and to this postulate all characters, scenes, and situations are ultimately subordinated. This postulate is: The ideal social order as a whole, the establishment of sane and sound social relations in humanity, the development and progress of human society towards such an ideal of general human life. All characters and situations, all scenes of life, whether clerical or provincial, whether of the present or of the past (and this may here be a grave fault), are developed and viewed by her in their relation to this general standard of ideal society; how far they fit into this general harmony, and failing this, how far they can in her stories be made to fit more fully; or they are left to a more tragic end which emphasizes the facts of their unfitness. Herein lies her distinctive character as a novelist, a point in which her delineation differs from most of the other great novelists—from a Balzac and a Flaubert, a George Sand, a Thackeray, and a Dickens, a Turgénieff and an early Tolstoy. I do not mean to say that these novelists had not a social ideal at the foundation of their constructive imagination; but it did not play that essential part in their conception and working out of characters and plots, it was not ever present in their minds while they were describing characters, feelings, incidents, and situations, as it appears to have been with George Eliot. Her philosophical and ethical bias thus manifests itself, in that there was an idea of general social fitness and happiness modifying and directing her representation of individual life and character.
To understand this social ideal of a rational and essentially sane world, we must conceive her as an expression of the spirit of the age out of which she grew. And she will thus hold a place not only as a novelist, but as a pregnant and significant exponent of the thought of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
The time in which her mind was formed is marked on the side of social ethics, in that a broad and powerful humanitarian wave spread over English life and thought. Negatively it manifested itself in that it was a period of storm and stress toward the birth of tolerance—tolerance with all forms of belief and even unbelief. In the English Church itself, it was the period of clear accentuations of shades of belief that differed to a very marked degree from one another. The Church of Rome was brought nearer to the Anglican believer, and was robbed of its Apocalyptic horrors by a Newman and a Manning; a definite political act was the Irish Church Act. But an especial feature of this tolerance was the social recognition of agnosticism, in its scientific aspect through a Darwin, and in its more ethical aspect through a Mill, a Herbert Spencer, and a Matthew Arnold; while divines of the English Church itself, like Stanley, Maurice, Kingsley, and Jowett, bridged over the gaps between dogmatism and agnosticism. The repeal of the Test Act (according to which the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles was a condition for obtaining a scholarship or fellowship) abolished all disqualifications from freethinkers at the great universities. Quakers and Jews had before been admitted to Parliament, and now took prominent and leading places.
But more positively, the philosophy of Auguste Comte with its English exponents, especially Mill, impressed the religious feeling of humanitarianism. There had been a wave of this before, a wave the commotion of which was felt even in our days. It was the humanitarianism of Rousseau, under which George Sand stood. But this differs in a marked manner from that of our friend. With Rousseau it was deductive, based upon the inalienable rights of man, of the individual,—a deductive sociology. In our times it was essentially guided by the prevailing spirit and methods of thought of Charles Darwin, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Clifford, and Matthew Arnold, with the regenerated and refined sense of truth which they have given to the world. It has thus led to an inductive sociology and inductive humanitarianism, freed from all romantic character and admixture, essentially sober and sane, though none the less passionate and deep-seated. The last wave of Rousseauesque feeling filtered through German sources to us in Carlyle and Ruskin. But this mode of thought was foreign to George Eliot. She disliked all forms of exaggeration.
She has always clear in her mind the sane and sober ideals of a society based upon the truthful observation and recognition of its wants and needs. The claims of truth, the claims of charity and unselfishness, are supreme. To this ideal the individual must subordinate himself if he wishes to be happy and noble, beloved and honored; must have "that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what the addition of a central ganglion is to animal life."
Pure applied psychology and knowledge of the coeur humain, which have actuated so many great novelists,—the careful and studied development of an individual life and character as such within its surroundings,—were not enough to absorb the desires of George Eliot's efforts in fiction; still less mere striking incidents, and the engrossing consequences and sequences as they push on in the plot of a story; but the coeur humain and incidents in life are viewed in their relation to society as a whole, to social ideals. She is thus an idealistic and an ethical novelist.
Even in her poetry this bias manifests itself; and here, from an artistic point of view, the effect is often more disturbing than in her novels. For in poetry the purely artistic, emotional, and lyrical aspect is more important and essential; and any general and impersonal ideal counteracts the reality of the characters, the mood, and the passion. Thus in her longest and greatest poem, 'The Spanish Gypsy,' the feelings and expressions put into the mouth of Fedalma and Zarca are the nineteenth-century thoughts and feelings of a George Eliot, and lose their immediate truthfulness and convincing power from being thus expressed by fictitious persons; while the personalities themselves, their thoughts and feelings, do not strike one with a sense of reality, because they express views which sound anachronistic and have not their proper local coloring. In spite of some beautiful shorter poems, passages, and lines, she fails when criticized as a lyrical poetess; nor will her poems stand faultless when judged from the epic point of view. But if there be any justification (which we hold there is) for didactic poetry,—poetry which calls in artistic emotion to impress truths and moral laws,—then she will always hold a prominent place in this sphere. 'Stradivarius' and the 'Positivist Hymn' will, together with Matthew Arnold's 'Self-Dependence,' rank among the finest types of didactic poems of our age.
Though at times her ethical bias has obtruded itself out of place, and may have counteracted her certainty of touch in drawing lifelike character (as for instance in the construction of Daniel Deronda's personality), it has, on the whole, not prevented her from giving full play to her marvelous power of clear and deep insight into life and of sensuous description.
In studying life she had learned observation in the scientific inductive school, and had thus acquired, with minuteness of perception, the clear-sighted and unprejudiced intellectual justice of vision which enabled her to appreciate fully and to grasp the inner core of all the characters, motives, and passions which her command over her thoughts and language and her docile pen enabled her to fix in so masterly a manner. But these faculties would not have been enough to lead to her creation of human types, had she not possessed to that intense and exalted degree the power of feeling which gave the initial stimulus to her penetration of the human heart and its motives and passions, and which her intellectual control converted into all-encompassing and all-pervading sympathy. She was, after all, what Elizabeth Browning expressed in the pregnant phrase—"a large-brained woman and a large-hearted man."
Nay, this sympathy was so intense and leading a feature of her genius that it again serves to establish a distinct general classification of novelists. Like great actors, great writers of fiction may be classified, according to their mode of rendering the life they study, as subjective and objective interpreters. The former are intellectually so wide and emotionally so responsive, that their great souls and minds grasp and assimilate, absorb for the time being, all the different natures which they portray; they thrill with them—they become them. The objective artists possess more the painter's and sculptor's attitude of mind; they eliminate self completely during the period of observation, and enter, through the fullness and delicacy of their perceptions, into the lives and characters they depict. For the time they see only the object of their study, and reproduce it with clear and dispassionate touch. This is the case with Balzac, Turgénieff, Thackeray, and Dickens. The objective method is the safest and least likely to produce faults in drawing which make the characters at times inconsistent and fall out of their parts; but the subjective method may at times attain depth of insight, and fullness of passion and veracity, which lies hidden from the dispassionate draughtsmen and impersonators. The Brontés had this subjective penetration to the highest degree; but they had not, on the other hand, the inductive and scientific training of George Eliot, which sobered down and made more objective, as it made more humorous, the sympathetic impersonations in her stories. Above all, the purely emotional subjectivity of George Eliot was counteracted by the passion for the general ethical and the social ideal which we have already considered as playing so essential a part in her mind. Upon this we must take our stand in order to appreciate her leading method of composition, which can be traced, we venture to believe, through all her novels.
Starting with a well-defined ideal of social fitness for this world, the harmony in life towards which all action, effort, and individuality must tend, the problem which each novel sets itself to solve is the reconciliation of the conflict arising out of the unfitness of the leading characters (the "hero" or "heroine," as we may call them) as measured by this ideal—the want of harmony between their characters, aspirations, and ambitions, their views of life, and on the other hand the surroundings in which they live. The Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and all great dramatists, have ever dealt with this central struggle between man and society. But they started with this fact, and had merely the artistic aim of evoking sympathy and pity in the audience because of this tragic struggle, the powerful and perfect representation of which became the final aim of their artistic endeavor. With George Eliot the process of adaptation, the resolution of the discord, and if not the establishment of harmony, then the clear and impressive indication of the best way to its establishment, is the real motive and end of her writing. There is in her no great tragic fatalism, which makes the art of the Greek dramatist so deeply and overwhelmingly tragic. Each one of her leading characters is at fault, when viewed in the light of the healthy social ideal. In the exposition of the character the fault will be shown up strongly; the hero will either be developed into greater social perfection, or the tragic end will impress upon the reader the disease and its remedy, the bane and its antidote.
The social failings and shortcomings which stand in the way of this harmony are grouped by her into two leading faults of a general nature: the discord between the individual and selfish and the general and altruistic; between thoughtless social materialism and conformity, and questioning originality and spiritual revolt; between conventionality and originality; between common-sense and prophetic far-sightedness; between the Philistine and the artistic, the humdrum worker and the world-reformer, the materialist and the dreamer. The one looks down before him on the ground and ignores the heights beyond and the clear sky above, and in his heavy-footed advance shoves the sky-gazer aside and walks over him when he has fallen; the other gazes at the heights and the stars, and spurns the clod and soil, tripping over them,—nay, slipping in the mud. They each ignore one another and the world in which each lives, or they despise each other and their respective goals and aims.
Now, in all her novels this problem is repeated and a solution is attempted. Over and over again she presents this situation as the central point in the composition of her novels, in different layers of society, in most varied characters. And the understanding of this is the key to the understanding of George Eliot's works. She either brings it out in presenting two central figures as the contrasts which represent either faulty extreme, or one figure as opposed to the surroundings, or both these means are used to impress the central fact.
We shall take one pregnant instance to illustrate this: 'Daniel Deronda' has been estimated and criticized chiefly as a novel in which the Jewish question has been discussed by her in a dramatic manner. That it deals powerfully with this question is no doubt true; but the Jewish question is but a side issue—no doubt appealing to her deep sympathies and sense of justice; but it is not the central motive to the story nor the artistic keystone of the novel as constructed. The central figure in that story is Gwendolen Harleth (who ought properly to have given her name to the novel). The contrasting figure at the other extreme is Mordecai the Jew, and Daniel is the intermediary figure (almost figure-head) between these two extremes. The personality which, I am sure, set her sympathetic intellect and imagination throbbing into artistic creation was Gwendolen. As an ordinary though beautiful young lady of English society (in her rank what Hetty Sorrel and Rosamond Vincy are in theirs), she is the clod-born, materialistic, and hopelessly selfish representative of the unsocial member of a society in which ideas and ideals are unknown, and in which blind impulse, feebly directed by prejudice and tradition, petty vanity and greed, at most personal ambition, are the motives to action, and produce the discord and misery which surround even those who live in affluence. Her beauty, her position in her family, her whole education, have kept from her every higher ideal, all semblance of an ideal, and all altruism and feeling for or with her fellow-men. Her world in the opening of the story is the most contracted world of a small self, with a pervading passion out of all proportion to its extent, in which the desires whirl round and round this little circle in hideous compression. Now the fundamental problem of the story is: How can this little, selfish, and materialistic nature, which only realizes the things before its desiring eyes and grasping touch, be made large, unselfish, and idealistic, so that it reaches out beyond and above the world of self into the regions of great ideas, in which the individual is completely submerged; and that through this wholesome straining of the heart and of sympathetic power, through this realization and love of the ideal, it may learn to love and pity, and think for and in, mankind and all men and women? And this process of artistic development of character is sensuously and convincingly represented in this novel. The reader enters sympathetically into the little soul of that beautiful girl at the very beginning of the story, and in her he passes through all the phases, until without any forced hiatus he sees before him at the end the purified and enlarged Gwendolen, who has learnt her ennobling lesson in the great school of suffering. It is perhaps the greatest achievement in her art.
The more definite question is: How can such a girl realize the great world of ideas? The answer is: It must come through the heart, through the emotions and not the intellect,—the intellect will be widened and matured after her personality has been thrilled. She must fall in love with a man who is the impersonation of an idea, whose whole existence centres round a great desire far removed from the petty world of self in which she has lived,—nay, opposed to it, in direct contrast to it.
This impersonation is presented in Daniel Deronda; and the fault in the book is that George Eliot's theoretical bias has been too strong for her, and in her eagerness to make him the bearer of an idea to the central figure of the story she has sacrificed the realistic drawing of Daniel, who is an impersonation at the cost of flesh and blood. Given the fact that Daniel must in his personality represent some unselfish idea, the question was: What actual idea, great in extent and enough to fill a man's mind and soul, should be chosen? The difficulty here arose, that if George Eliot had chosen some purely imaginary topic it would have lacked reality, and would have moved neither Gwendolen nor the reader into sympathy. If on the other hand she had taken some stirring question of the day, the question as such would have engrossed the interest and attention of the reader, and would no longer have been subordinated to the chief artistic purpose it has in the story. As it is, to many, the Jewish question as treated and suggested in the novel has itself engrossed the attention of readers, and has diverted their minds from the main artistic gist of the story. But to the ordinary English reader the subject of Jewish social life and aspirations was sufficiently remote. Nay, so narrow are the sympathies and the intellectual horizon of many cultivated Englishmen, that though they can be interested in the lives of gipsies and farm laborers, they cannot "screw up an interest in those Jews."
To Daniel however it was a real, stirring, and great idea to which he wished to devote his life. Now, in order that Gwendolen should realize in herself such a great impersonal idea, she had to fall in love with the man whose life they filled, and through her heart and her love for him it would reach her mind and raise her thoughts. Daniel, again, the man she loves, is contrasted with the narrow and selfish man, the hardened and crystallized type of another social world, consuming itself in its own self-love.
All Gwendolen's experiences directly or indirectly tend to bring about this development of her soul. A striking scene in this sense is her interview with Klesmer, the genuine and thorough musician devoted to his art and work. And when she comes out of the final soul's tragedy we feel that the woman has stood the test of fire, and has realized the greatness and overwhelming vastness of the spiritual world. G. H. Lewes, to whom the writer communicated this conception of 'Daniel Deronda' assured him that he had grasped the central idea which George Eliot had in her mind, and the actual history in the story's construction.
Gwendolen's counterpart (and there are many in George Eliot's books) is Dorothea in 'Middlemarch.' She starts with great and extraordinary ideas, and must, through life and suffering, realize the moral justification of the simple and commonplace in life. The contrasting types illustrating this central point can be found in every work: Dorothea and Rosamond on the one side,—original, spiritual, striving as commonplace selfishness,—and Dorothea and Ladislaw as heavy, serious, intellectual morality, and light, playful, artistic freedom, on the other; Lydgate with his great reformatory ideas, slowly enfeebled and annihilated in his Samson-like vigor by the pretty, selfish, shallow-souled Rosamond of provincial worldliness. Gwendolen is also contrasted with Mirah. In 'Adam Bede,' again, Dinah and Hetty present the same contrasts as do Tito Melema and Romola, Esther and Felix Holt. Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, the spirit of revolt in Maggie and the hard conventionality of respectability in her brother Tom, are strongly marked types of this kind. Maggie's conflict with her narrow and commonplace surroundings and their conventional respectability are typified in the Mill. It is a wonderful touch of artistic suggestion that she and her brother are finally submerged in the Mill, carried away by the flood. This novel reflects more thoroughly the spirit of Greek tragedy than any other work of modern fiction. The Mill, and the part it plays in the life of the Tulliver family and in Maggie's sorrows, are like great Fate in the Greek tragedy. It is an embodiment of the hard and unrelenting tyranny of the powers that are. Even in 'Silas Marner,' the most artistic and least doctrinaire of her novels, the moral process of remedying Silas's social unfitness and misanthropy is the central idea. Space will not allow us to give further illustrations of this idea in her novels; but enough has been said to enable the reader to test it and follow it up for himself.
The two most striking qualities in George Eliot as a writer are her humor and her sympathy. They are realty connected with one another. The power of intellectual observation, when coupled with the power of feeling sympathy, produces humor; the purely intellectual or objective cast of mind produces wit; while the purely subjective habit of mind is unable to produce either.
But with all her wide range of sympathy, upon which we have been dwelling, its limitations can still be discerned. The careful observer will recognize that the subjective attitude of the woman cannot wholly be hidden from view. The chief women into whom she projects herself are after all those that are nearest to herself, and she cannot help treating them as favorites and bestowing the greater attention upon them: Daniel only exists as a creation to develop Gwendolen; nay, Savonarola is really constructed for Romola's spiritual development, Casaubon for Dorothea, and so on. A still more marked and important limitation in her sympathies, arising out of her ethical bias, is her pronounced dislike to all morbid art, all that is fantastic. The poetry of Byron, the music of Chopin, all forms of morbid sentiment, are so repulsive to her nature that she cannot treat them with tolerance or even with humor. Remarks on Esther in 'Felix Holt' bear this out. Probably this is an autobiographical touch, and having freed herself from these morbid tendencies in her youth, she could never look back upon them with tolerance.
Her seriousness and ethical bias may at times also have impaired her style. Her extensive studies in science and philosophy often make her ponderous in thought and in expression. The fondness with which she takes her similes from science is often confusing to the reader who is unfamiliar with the facts and thoughts that are used as illustrations. She never quite overcame the temptation to insert what was new and striking to herself; so that her science and philosophy never reached that mature stage of mental assimilation in which they manifest themselves merely in the general fullness of thought, without ever asserting themselves as science or as philosophy. Still, no writer of fiction has ever introduced reflections and episodes in propria persona which are so striking and well worth reading in themselves. When her imitators attempt this they fail signally, and one need but compare such passages with those of George Eliot to realize her greatness as a writer and as a thinker.
To sum up the estimate of George Eliot as a novelist, we would say that she is the greatest representative of the analytical and psychological school, fixing with truth and sensuousness the types of English provincial life; with a final purpose, which she achieved, of illustrating by them the ideals of social ethics for the wider life of humanity.
THE FINAL RESCUE
From 'The Mill on the Floss'
At that moment Maggie felt a startling sensation of sudden cold about her knees and feet; it was water flowing under her. She started up; the stream was flowing under the door that led into the passage. She was not bewildered for an instant; she knew it was the flood!
The tumult of emotion she had been enduring for the last twelve hours seemed to have left a great calm in her; without screaming, she hurried with the candle up-stairs to Bob Jakin's bedroom. The door was ajar; she went in and shook him by the shoulder.
"Bob, the flood is come! it is in the house! let us see if we can make the boats safe."
She lighted his candle, while the poor wife, snatching up her baby, burst into screams; and then she hurried down again to see if the waters were rising fast. There was a step down into the room at the door leading from the staircase; she saw that the water was already on a level with the step. While she was looking, something came with a tremendous crash against the window and sent the leaded panes and the old wooden framework inwards in shivers, the water pouring in after it.
"It is the boat!" cried Maggie. "Bob, come down to get the boats!"
And without a moment's shudder of fear she plunged through the water, which was rising fast to her knees, and by the glimmering light of the candle she had left on the stairs she mounted on to the window-sill and crept into the boat, which was left with the prow lodging and protruding through the window. Bob was not long after her, hurrying without shoes or stockings, but with the lantern in his hand.
"Why, they're both here,—both the boats," said Bob, as he got into the one where Maggie was. "It's wonderful this fastening isn't broke too, as well as the mooring."
In the excitement of getting into the other boat, unfastening it, and mastering an oar, Bob was not struck with the danger Maggie incurred. We are not apt to fear for the fearless when we are companions in their danger, and Bob's mind was absorbed in possible expedients for the safety of the helpless in-doors. The fact that Maggie had been up, had waked him, and had taken the lead in activity, gave Bob a vague impression of her as one who would help to protect, not need to be protected. She too had got possession of an oar and had pushed off, so as to release the boat from the overhanging window frame.
"The water's rising so fast," said Bob, "I doubt it'll be in at the chambers before long,—th' house is so low. I've more mind to get Prissy and the child and the mother into the boat, if I could, and trusten to the water,—for th' old house is none so safe. And if I let go the boat—but you!" he exclaimed, suddenly lifting the light of his lantern on Maggie, as she stood in the rain with the oar in her hand and her black hair streaming.
Maggie had no time to answer, for a new tidal current swept along the line of the houses, and drove both the boats out on to the wide water with a force that carried them far past the meeting current of the river.
In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading; it was the transition of death without its agony,—and she was alone in the darkness with God.
The whole thing had been so rapid, so dream-like, that the threads of ordinary association were broken; she sank down on the seat clutching the oar mechanically, and for a long while had no distinct conception of her position. The first thing that waked her to fuller consciousness was the cessation of the rain, and a perception that the darkness was divided by the faintest light, which parted the overhanging gloom from the immeasurable watery level below. She was driven out upon the flood,—that awful visitation of God which her father used to talk of, which had made the nightmare of her childish dreams. And with that thought there rushed in the vision of the old home, and Tom, and her mother,—they had all listened together.
"O God, where am I? Which is the way home?" she cried out, in the dim loneliness.
What was happening to them at the Mill? The flood had once nearly destroyed it. They might be in danger, in distress,—her mother and her brother, alone there, beyond reach of help! Her whole soul was strained now on that thought; and she saw the long-loved faces looking for help into the darkness, and finding none.
She was floating in smooth water now,—perhaps far on the over-flooded fields. There was no sense of present danger to check the outgoing of her mind to the old home; and she strained her eyes against the curtain of gloom that she might seize the first sight of her whereabouts,—that she might catch some faint suggestion of the spot towards which all her anxieties tended.
Oh, how welcome the widening of that dismal watery level, the gradual uplifting of the cloudy firmament, the slowly defining blackness of objects above the glassy dark! Yes, she must be out on the fields; those were the tops of hedgerow trees. Which way did the river lie? Looking behind her, she saw the lines of black trees; looking before her, there were none; then the river lay before her. She seized an oar and began to paddle the boat forward with the energy of wakening hope; the dawning seemed to advance more swiftly, now she was in action; and she could soon see the poor dumb beasts crowding piteously on a mound where they had taken refuge. Onward she paddled and rowed by turns in the growing twilight; her wet clothes clung round her, and her streaming hair was dashed about by the wind, but she was hardly conscious of any bodily sensations,—except a sensation of strength, inspired by mighty emotion. Along with the sense of danger and possible rescue for those long-remembered beings at the old home, there was an undefined sense of reconcilement with her brother: what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs? Vaguely Maggie felt this, in the strong resurgent love towards her brother that swept away all the later impressions of hard, cruel offense and misunderstanding, and left only the deep, underlying, unshakable memories of early union.
But now there was a large dark mass in the distance, and near to her Maggie could discern the current of the river. The dark mass must be—yes, it was—St. Ogg's. Ah, now she knew which way to look for the first glimpse of the well-known trees—the gray willows, the now yellowing chestnuts—and above them the old roof! But there was no color, no shape yet; all was faint and dim. More and more strongly the energies seemed to come and put themselves forth, as if her life were a stored-up force that was being spent in this hour, unneeded for any future.
She must get her boat into the current of the Floss, else she would never be able to pass the Ripple and approach the house: this was the thought that occurred to her, as she imagined with more and more vividness the state of things round the old home. But then she might be carried very far down, and be unable to guide her boat out of the current again. For the first time distinct ideas of danger began to press upon her; but there was no choice of courses, no room for hesitation, and she floated into the current. Swiftly she went now, without effort; more and more clearly in the lessening distance and the growing light she began to discern the objects that she knew must be the well-known trees and roofs; nay, she was not far off a rushing muddy current that must be the strangely altered Ripple.
Great God! there were floating masses in it, that might dash against her boat as she passed, and cause her to perish too soon. What were those masses?
For the first time Maggie's heart began to beat in an agony of dread. She sat helpless, dimly conscious that she was being floated along, more intensely conscious of the anticipated clash. But the horror was transient; it passed away before the oncoming warehouses of St. Ogg's. She had passed the mouth of the Ripple, then; now, she must use all her skill and power to manage the boat and get it if possible out of the current. She could see now that the bridge was broken down; she could see the masts of a stranded vessel far out over the watery field. But no boats were to be seen moving on the river,—such as had been laid hands on were employed in the flooded streets.
With new resolution Maggie seized her oar, and stood up again to paddle; but the now ebbing tide added to the swiftness of the river, and she was carried along beyond the bridge. She could hear shouts from the windows overlooking the river, as if the people there were calling to her. It was not till she had passed on nearly to Tofton that she could get the boat clear of the current. Then with one yearning look towards her uncle Deane's house that lay farther down the river, she took to both her oars and rowed with all her might across the watery fields, back towards the Mill. Color was beginning to awake now, and as she approached the Dorlcote fields, she could discern the tints of the trees, could see the old Scotch firs far to the right; and the home chestnuts,—oh, how deep they lay in the water,—deeper than the trees on this side the hill! And the roof of the Mill—where was it? Those heavy fragments hurrying down the Ripple,—what had they meant? But it was not the house,—the house stood firm; drowned up to the first story, but still firm;—or was it broken in at the end towards the Mill?
With panting joy that she was there at last,—joy that overcame all distress,—Maggie neared the front of the house. At first she heard no sound; she saw no object moving. Her boat was on a level with the up-stairs window. She called out in a loud piercing voice:—
"Tom, where are you? Mother, where are you? Here is Maggie!"
Soon, from the window of the attic in the central gable, she heard Tom's voice:—
"Who is it? Have you brought a boat?"
"It is I, Tom,—Maggie. Where is mother?"
"She is not here; she went to Garum the day before yesterday. I'll come down to the lower window."
"Alone, Maggie?" said Tom, in a voice of deep astonishment, as he opened the middle window, on a level with the boat.
"Yes, Tom; God has taken care of me, to bring me to you. Get in quickly. Is there no one else?"
"No," said Tom, stepping into the boat, "I fear the man is drowned; he was carried down the Ripple, I think, when part of the Mill fell with the crash of trees and stones against it; I've shouted again and again, and there has been no answer. Give me the oars, Maggie."
It was not till Tom had pushed off and they were on the wide water,—he face to face with Maggie,—that the full meaning of what had happened rushed upon his mind. It came with so overpowering a force,—it was such a new revelation to his spirit of the depths in life that had lain beyond his vision, which he had fancied so keen and clear,—that he was unable to ask a question. They sat mutely gazing at each other,—Maggie with eyes of intense life looking out from a weary, beaten face; Tom pale, with a certain awe and humiliation. Thought was busy though the lips were silent; and though he could ask no question, he guessed a story of almost miraculous, Divinely protected effort. But at last a mist gathered over the blue-gray eyes, and the lips found a word they could utter,—the old childish "Magsie!"
Maggie could make no answer but a long, deep sob of that mysterious, wondrous happiness that is one with pain.
As soon as she could speak, she said:—"We will go to Lucy, Tom; we'll go and see if she is safe, and then we can help the rest."
Tom rowed with untired vigor, and with a different speed from poor Maggie's. The boat was soon in the current of the river again, and soon they would be at Tofton.
"Park House stands high up out of the flood," said Maggie. "Perhaps they have got Lucy there."
Nothing else was said; a new danger was being carried towards them by the river. Some wooden machinery had just given way on one of the wharves, and huge fragments were being floated along. The sun was rising now, and the wide area of watery desolation was spread out in dreadful clearness around them; in dreadful clearness floated onward the hurrying, threatening masses. A large company in a boat that was working its way along under the Tofton houses observed their danger, and shouted, "Get out of the current!"
But that could not be done at once; and Tom, looking before him, saw death rushing on them. Huge fragments, clinging together in fatal fellowship, made one wide mass across the stream.
"It is coming, Maggie!" Tom said, in a deep, hoarse voice, loosing the oars and clasping her.
The next instant the boat was no longer seen upon the water, and the huge mass was hurrying on in hideous triumph.
But soon the keel of the boat reappeared, a black speck on the golden water.
The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.
Nature repairs her ravages,—repairs them with her sunshine, and with human labor. The desolation wrought by that flood had left little visible trace on the face of the earth, five years after. The fifth autumn was rich in golden cornstacks, rising in thick clusters among the distant hedgerows; the wharves and warehouses on the Floss were busy again, with echoes of eager voices, with hopeful lading and unlading.
And every man and woman mentioned in this history was still living, except those whose end we know.
Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
Dorlcote Mill was rebuilt. And Dorlcote church-yard—where the brick grave that held a father whom we know, was found with the stone laid prostrate upon it after the flood—had recovered all its grassy order and decent quiet.
Near that brick grave there was a tomb erected, very soon after the flood, for two bodies that were found in close embrace; and it was visited at different moments by two men who both felt that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were forever buried there.
One of them visited the tomb again with a sweet face beside him; but that was years after.
The other was always solitary. His great companionship was among the trees of the Red Deeps, where the buried joy seemed still to hover, like a revisiting spirit.
The tomb bore the names of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, and below the names it was written:—
"In their death they were not divided."
THE VILLAGE WORTHIES
From 'Silas Marner'
The conversation, which was at a high pitch of animation when Silas approached the door of the Rainbow, had as usual been slow and intermittent when the company first assembled. The pipes began to be puffed in a silence which had an air of severity; the more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funeral duty attended with embarrassing sadness. At last Mr. Snell, the landlord, a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor, broke silence by saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher:—
"Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday, Bob?"
The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a few puffs before he spat, and replied, "And they wouldn't be fur wrong, John."
After this feeble delusive thaw, the silence set in as severely as before.
"Was it a red Durham?" said the farrier, taking up the thread of discourse after the lapse of a few minutes.
The farrier looked at the landlord, and the landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who must take the responsibility of answering.
"Red it was," said the butcher, in his good-humored husky treble,—"and a Durham it was."
"Then you needn't tell me who you bought it of," said the farrier, looking round with some triumph: "I know who it is has got the red Durhams o' this country-side. And she'd a white star on her brow, I'll bet a penny?" The farrier leaned forward with his hands on his knees as he put this question, and his eyes twinkled knowingly.
"Well, yes—she might," said the butcher, slowly, considering that he was giving a decided affirmative. "I don't say contrairy."
"I knew that very well," said the farrier, throwing himself backward again, and speaking defiantly; "if I don't know Mr. Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who does—that's all. And as for the cow you've bought, bargain or no bargain, I've been at the drenching of her—contradick me who will."
The farrier looked fierce, and the mild butcher's conversational spirit was roused a little.
"I'm not for contradicking no man," he said; "I'm for peace and quietness. Some are for cutting long ribs—I'm for cutting 'em short myself; but I don't quarrel with 'em. All I say is, it's a lovely carkiss—and anybody as was reasonable, it 'ud bring tears into their eyes to look at it."
"Well, it's the cow as I drenched, whatever it is," pursued the farrier, angrily; "and it was Mr. Lammeter's cow, else you told a lie when you said it was a red Durham."
"I tell no lies," said the butcher, with the same mild huskiness as before; "and I contradick none—not if a man was to swear himself black; he's no meat o' mine, nor none o' my bargains. All I say is, it's a lovely carkiss. And what I say I'll stick to; but I'll quarrel wi' no man."
"No," said the farrier with bitter sarcasm, looking at the company generally; "and p'raps you aren't pig-headed; and p'raps you didn't say the cow was a red Durham; and p'raps you didn't say she'd got a star on her brow—stick to that, now you're at it."
"Come, come," said the landlord, "let the cow alone. The truth lies atween you; you're both right and both wrong, as I allays say. And as for the cow's being Mr. Lammeter's, I say nothing to that; but this I say, as the Rainbow's the Rainbow. And for the matter o' that, if the talk is to be o' the Lammeters, you know the most upo' that head, eh, Mr. Macey? You remember when first Mr. Lammeter's father come into these parts, and took the Warrens?"
Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk, the latter of which functions rheumatism had of late obliged him to share with a small-featured young man who sat opposite him, held his white head on one side, and twirled his thumbs with an air of complacency, slightly seasoned with criticism. He smiled pityingly in answer to the landlord's appeal, and said:—
"Ay, ay; I know, I know; but I let other folks talk. I've laid by now, and gev up to the young uns. Ask them as have been to school at Tarley; they've learned pernouncing; that's come up since my day."
"If you're pointing at me, Mr. Macey," said the deputy clerk, with an air of anxious propriety, "I'm nowise a man to speak out of my place. As the psalm says:—
"'I know what's right; nor only so,
But also practice what I know.'"
"Well, then, I wish you'd keep hold o' the tune when it's set for you; if you're for practicing I wish you'd practice that," said a large jocose-looking man, an excellent wheelwright in his weekday capacity, but on Sundays leader of the choir. He winked, as he spoke, at two of the company who were known officially as "the bassoon" and "the key bugle," in the confidence that he was expressing the sense of the musical profession in Raveloe.
Mr. Tookey the deputy clerk, who shared the unpopularity common to deputies, turned very red, but replied with careful moderation:—"Mr. Winthrop, if you'll bring me any proof as I'm in the wrong, I'm not the man to say I won't alter. But there's people set up their own ears for a standard, and expect the whole choir to follow 'em. There may be two opinions, I hope."
"Ay, ay," said Mr. Macey, who felt very well satisfied with this attack on youthful presumption; "you're right there, Tookey: there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself."
"Well, Mr. Macey," said poor Tookey, serious amidst the general laughter, "I undertook to partially fill up the office of parish clerk by Mr. Crackenthorp's desire, whenever your infirmities should make you unfitting; and it's one of the rights thereof to sing in the choir—else why have you done the same yourself?"
"Ah! but the old gentleman and you are two folks," said Ben Winthrop. "The old gentleman's got a gift. Why, the Squire used to invite him to take a glass, only to hear him sing the 'Red Rovier'; didn't he, Mr. Macey? It's a nat'ral gift. There's my little lad Aaron, he's got a gift—he can sing a tune off straight, like a throstle. But as for you, Master Tookey, you'd better stick to your 'Amens': your voice is well enough when you keep it up in your nose. It's your inside as isn't right made for music: it's no better nor a hollow stalk."
This kind of unflinching frankness was the most piquant form of joke to the company at the Rainbow, and Ben Winthrop's insult was felt by everybody to have capped Mr. Macey's epigram.
"I see what it is plain enough," said Mr. Tookey, unable to keep cool any longer. "There's a consperacy to turn me out o' the choir, as I shouldn't share the Christmas money—that's where it is. But I shall speak to Mr. Crackenthorp; I'll not be put upon by no man."
"Nay, nay, Tookey," said Ben Winthrop. "We'll pay you your share to keep out of it—that's what we'll do. There's things folks 'ud pay to be rid on, besides varmin."
"Come, come," said the landlord, who felt that paying people for their absence was a principle dangerous to society; "a joke's a joke. We're all good friends here, I hope. We must give and take. You're both right and you're both wrong, as I say. I agree wi' Mr. Macey here, as there's two opinions; and if mine was asked, I should say they're both right. Tookey's right and Winthrop's right, and they've only got to split the difference and make themselves even."
The farrier was puffing his pipe rather fiercely, in some contempt at this trivial discussion. He had no ear for music himself, and never went to church, as being of the medical profession, and likely to be in requisition for delicate cows. But the butcher, having music in his soul, had listened with a divided desire, for Tookey's defeat and for the preservation of the peace.
"To be sure," he said, following up the landlord's conciliatory view, "we're fond of our old clerk; it's nat'ral, and him used to be such a singer, and got a brother as is known for the first fiddler in this country-side. Eh, it's a pity but what Solomon lived in our village, and could give us a tune when he liked, eh, Mr. Macey? I'd keep him in liver and lights for nothing—that I would."
"Ay, ay," said Mr. Macey, in the height of complacency; "our family's been known for musicianers as far back as anybody can tell. But them things are dying out, as I tell Solomon every time he comes round; there's no voices like what there used to be, and there's nobody remembers what we remember, if it ain't the old crows."
"Ay, you remember when first Mr. Lammeter's father came into these parts, don't you, Mr. Macey?" said the landlord.
"I should think I did," said the old man, who had now gone through that complimentary process necessary to bring him up to the point of narration; "and a fine old gentleman he was—as fine and finer nor the Mr. Lammeter as now is. He came from a bit north'ard, so far as I could ever make out. But there's nobody rightly knows about those parts; only it couldn't be far north'ard, nor much different from this country, for he brought a fine breed o' sheep with him, so there must be pastures there, and everything reasonable. We heard tell as he'd sold his own land to come and take the Warrens, and that seemed odd for a man as had land of his own, to come and rent a farm in a strange place. But they said it was along of his wife's dying; though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on—that's pretty much what I've made out; though some folks are so wise that they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't. Howsomever, it was soon seen as we'd got a new parish'ner as know'd the rights and customs o' things, and kep a good house, and was well looked on by everybody. And the young man—that's the Mr. Lammeter as now is, for he'd niver a sister—soon begun to court Miss Osgood, that's the sister o' the Mr. Osgood as now is, and a fine handsome lass she was—eh, you can't think—they pretend this young lass is like her, but that's the way wi' people as don't know what come before 'em. I should know, for I helped the old rector, Mr. Drumlow as was, I helped him marry 'em."
Here Mr. Macey paused; he always gave his narrative in installments, expecting to be questioned according to precedent.
"Ay, and a partic'lar thing happened, didn't it, Mr. Macey, so as you were likely to remember that marriage?" said the landlord, in a congratulatory tone.
"I should think there did—a very partic'lar thing," said Mr. Macey, nodding sideways. "For Mr. Drumlow—poor old gentleman, I was fond on him, though he'd got a bit confused in his head, what wi' age and wi' taking a drop o' summat warm when the service come of a cold morning; and young Mr. Lammeter he'd have no way but he must be married in Janiwary, which, to be sure, 's a unreasonable time to be married in, for it isn't like a christening or a burying, as you can't help; and so Mr. Drumlow—poor old gentleman, I was fond on him; but when he come to put the questions, he put 'em by the rule o' contrairy like, and he says, 'Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded wife?' says he, and then he says, 'Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded husband?' says he. But the partic'larest thing of all is, as nobody took any notice on it but me, and they answered straight off 'Yes,' like as if it had been me saying 'Amen' i' the right place, without listening to what went before."
"But you knew what was going on well enough, didn't you, Mr. Macey? You were live enough, eh?" said the butcher.
"Lor bless you!" said Mr. Macey, pausing, and smiling in pity at the impotence of his hearers' imagination,—"why, I was all of a tremble: it was as if I'd been a coat pulled by the two tails, like; for I couldn't stop the parson, I couldn't take upon me to do that; and yet I said to myself, I says, 'Suppose they shouldn't be fast married, 'cause the words are contrairy?' and my head went working like a mill, for I was allays uncommon for turning things over and seeing all round 'em; and I says to myself, 'Is't the meanin' or the words as makes folks fast i' wedlock?' For the parson meant right, and the bride and bridegroom meant right. But then when I come to think on it, meanin' goes but a little way i' most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you? And so I says to mysen, 'It isn't the meanin', it's the glue.' And I was worreted as if I'd got three bells to pull at once, when we got into the vestry, and they begun to sign their names. But where's the use o' talking?—you can't think what goes on in a 'cute man's inside."
"But you held in for all that, didn't you, Mr. Macey?" said the landlord.
"Ay, I held in tight till I was by mysen, wi' Mr. Drumlow, and then I out wi' everything, but respectful, as I allays did. And he made light on it, and he says:—'Pooh, pooh, Macey, make yourself easy,' he says, 'it's neither the meaning nor the words—it's the register does it—that's the glue.' So you see he settled it easy; for parsons and doctors know everything by heart, like, so as they aren't worreted wi' thinking what's the rights and wrongs o' things, as I'n been many and many's the time. And sure enough the wedding turned out all right, on'y poor Mrs. Lammeter—that's Miss Osgood as was—died afore the lasses were growed up; but for prosperity and everything respectable, there's no family more looked on."
Every one of Mr. Macey's audience had heard this story many times, but it was listened to as if it had been a favorite tune, and at certain points the puffing of the pipes was momentarily suspended, that the listeners might give their whole minds to the expected words. But there was more to come; and Mr. Snell, the landlord, duly put the leading question:—
"Why, old Mr. Lammeter had a pretty fortin, didn't they say, when he come into these parts?"
"Well, yes," said Mr. Macey; "but I dare say it's as much as this Mr. Lammeter's done to keep it whole.... Why, they're stables four times as big as Squire Cass's, for he thought o' nothing but hosses and hunting, Cliff didn't—a Lunnon tailor, some folks said, as had gone mad wi' cheating. For he couldn't ride, Lor bless you! they said he'd got no more grip o' the hoss than if his legs had been cross-sticks: my grandfather heared old Squire Cass say so many and many a time. But ride he would, as if Old Harry had been a-driving him; and he'd a son, a lad o' sixteen; and nothing would his father have him do but he must ride and ride—though the lad was frightened, they said. And it was a common saying as the father wanted to ride the tailor out o' the lad, and make a gentleman on him—not but what I'm a tailor myself, but in respect as God made me such, I'm proud on it, for 'Macey, tailor,' 's been wrote up over our door since afore the Queen's heads went out on the shillings. But Cliff, he was ashamed o' being called a tailor, and he was sore vexed as his riding was laughed at, and nobody o' the gentlefolks here about could abide him. Howsomever, the poor lad got sickly and died, and the father didn't live long after him, for he got queerer nor ever, and they said he used to go out i' the dead o' the night, wi' a lantern in his hand, to the stables, and set a lot o' lights burning, for he got as he couldn't sleep; and there he'd stand, cracking his whip and looking at his hosses; and they said it was a mercy as the stables didn't get burnt down wi' the poor dumb creaturs in 'em. But at last he died raving, and they found as he'd left all his property, Warrens and all, to a Lunnon Charity, and that's how the Warrens come to be Charity Land; though as for the stables, Mr. Lammeter never uses 'em—they're out o' all charicter—Lor bless you! if you was to set the doors a-banging in 'em, it 'ud sound like thunder half o'er the parish."
"Ay, but there's more going on in the stables than what folks see by daylight, eh, Mr. Macey?" said the landlord.
"Ay, ay; go that way of a dark night, that's all," said Mr. Macey, winking mysteriously, "and then make believe, if you like, as you didn't see lights i' the stables, nor hear the stamping o' the hosses, nor the cracking o' the whips, and howling too, if it's tow'rt daybreak. 'Cliff's Holiday' has been the name of it ever sin' I were a boy; that's to say, some said as it was the holiday Old Harry gev him from roasting, like. That's what my father told me, and he was a reasonable man, though there's folks nowadays know what happened afore they were born better nor they know their own business."
"What do you say to that, eh, Dowlas?" said the landlord, turning to the farrier, who was swelling with impatience for his cue: "here's a nut for you to crack."
Mr. Dowlas was the negative spirit in the company, and was proud of his position.
"Say? I say what a man should say as doesn't shut his eyes to look at a finger-post. I say as I'm ready to wager any man ten pound, if he'll stand out wi' me any dry night in the pasture before the Warren stables, as we shall neither see lights nor hear noises, if it isn't the blowing of our own noses. That's what I say, and I've said it many a time; but there's nobody 'ull ventur a ten-pun' note on their ghos'es as they make so sure of."
"Why, Dowlas, that's easy betting, that is," said Ben Winthrop. "You might as well bet a man as he wouldn't catch the rheumatise if he stood up to 's neck in the pool of a frosty night. It 'ud be fine fun for a man to win his bet as he'd catch the rheumatise. Folks as believe in Cliff's Holiday aren't a-going to ventur near it for a matter o' ten pound."
"If Master Dowlas wants to know the truth on it," said Mr. Macey, with a sarcastic smile, tapping his thumbs together, "he's no call to lay any bet; let him go and stan' by himself—there's nobody 'ull hinder him; and then he can let the parish'ners know if they're wrong."
"Thank you! I'm obliged to you," said the farrier, with a snort of scorn. "If folks are fools, it's no business o' mine. I don't want to make out the truth about ghos'es; I know it a'ready. But I'm not against a bet—everything fair and open. Let any man bet me ten pound as I shall see Cliff's Holiday, and I'll go and stand by myself. I want no company. I'd as lief do it as I'd fill this pipe."
"Ah, but who's to watch you, Dowlas, and see you do it? That's no fair bet," said the butcher.
"No fair bet?" replied Mr. Dowlas angrily. "I should like to hear any man stand up and say I want to bet unfair. Come now, Master Lundy, I should like to hear you say it."
"Very like you would," said the butcher. "But it's no business o' mine. You're none o' my bargains, and I aren't a-going to try and 'bate your price. If anybody'll bid for you at your own vallying, let him. I'm for peace and quietness, I am."
"Yes, that's what every yapping cur is, when you hold a stick up at him," said the farrier. "But I'm afraid o' neither man nor ghost, and I'm ready to lay a fair bet—I aren't a turntail cur."
"Ay, but there's this in it, Dowlas," said the landlord, speaking in a tone of much candor and tolerance. "There's folks, i' my opinion, they can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as a pike-staff before 'em. And there's reason i' that. For there's my wife, now, can't smell, not if she'd the strongest o' cheese under her nose. I never seed a ghost myself; but then I says to myself, 'Very like I haven't got the smell for 'em.' I mean, putting a ghost for a smell, or else contrariways. And so I'm for holding with both sides; for as I say, the truth lies between 'em. And if Dowlas was to go and stand, and say he'd never seen a wink o' Cliff's Holiday all the night through, I'd back him; and if anybody said as Cliff's Holiday was certain sure for all that, I'd back him too. For the smell's what I go by."
The landlord's analogical argument was not well received by the farrier—a man intensely opposed to compromise.
"Tut, tut," he said setting down his glass with refreshed irritation; "what's the smell got to do with it? Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye? That's what I should like to know. If ghos'es want me to believe in 'em, let 'em leave off skulking i' the dark and i' lone places—let 'em come where there's company and candles."
"As if ghos'es 'ud want to be believed in by anybody so ignorant!" said Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier's crass imcompetence to apprehend the conditions of ghostly phenomena.
THE HALL FARM
From 'Adam Bede'
Evidently that gate is never opened; for the long grass and the great hemlocks grow close against it; and if it were opened, it is so rusty that the force necessary to turn to on its hinges would be likely to pull down the square stone-built pillars, to the detriment of the two stone lionesses which grin with a doubtful carnivorous affability above a coat of arms surmounting each of the pillars. It would be easy enough, by the aid of the nicks in the stone pillars, to climb over the brick wall with its smooth stone coping; but by putting our eyes close to the rusty bars of the gate, we can see the house well enough, and all but the very corners of the grassy inclosure.
It is a very fine old place, of red brick, softened by a pale powdery lichen, which has dispersed itself with happy irregularity, so as to bring the red brick into terms of friendly companionship with the limestone ornaments surrounding the three gables, the windows, and the door-place. But the windows are patched with wooden panes, and the door, I think, is like the gate—it is never opened: how it would groan and grate against the stone floor if it were! For it is a solid, heavy, handsome door, and must once have been in the habit of shutting with a sonorous bang behind a liveried lackey who had just seen his master and mistress off the grounds in a carriage and pair.
But at present one might fancy the house in the early stage of a chancery suit, and that the fruit from that grand double row of walnut-trees on the right hand of the inclosure would fall and rot among the grass; if it were not that we heard the booming bark of dogs echoing from great buildings at the back. And now the half-weaned calves that have been sheltering themselves in a gorse-built hovel against the left-hand wall come out and set up a silly answer to that terrible bark, doubtless supposing that it has reference to buckets of milk.
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity. Put your face to one of the glass panes in the right-hand window: what do you see? A large open fireplace, with rusty dogs in it, and a bare boarded floor; at the far end, fleeces of wool stacked up; in the middle of the floor, some empty corn-bags. That is the furniture of the dining-room. And what through the left-hand window? Several clothes-horses, a pillion, a spinning-wheel, and an old box wide open, and stuffed full of colored rags. At the edge of this box there lies a great wooden doll, which so far as mutilation is concerned bears a strong resemblance to the finest Greek sculpture, and especially in the total loss of its nose. Near it there is a little chair, and the butt-end of a boy's leather long-lashed whip.
The history of the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks and warehouses busy and resonant, the life at the Hall has changed its focus, and no longer radiates from the parlor, but from the kitchen and the farm-yard.
Plenty of life there! though this is the drowsiest time of the year, just before hay harvest; and it is the drowsiest time of the day too, for it is close upon three by the sun, and it is half-past three by Mrs. Poyser's handsome eight-day clock. But there is always a stronger sense of life when the sun is brilliant after rain; and now he is pouring down his beams, and making sparkles among the wet straw, and lighting up every patch of vivid green moss on the red tiles of the cow-shed, and turning even the muddy water that is hurrying along the channel to the drain into a mirror for the yellow-billed ducks, who are seizing the opportunity of getting a drink with as much body in it as possible. There is quite a concert of noises: the great bull-dog, chained against the stables, is thrown into furious exasperation by the unwary approach of a cock too near the mouth of his kennel, and sends forth a thundering bark, which is answered by two fox-hounds shut up in the opposite cow-house; the old top-knotted hens, scratching with their chicks among the straw, set up a sympathetic croaking as the discomfited cock joins them; a sow with her brood, all very muddy as to the legs, and curled as to the tail, throws in some deep staccato notes; our friends the calves are bleating from the home croft; and under all, a fine ear discerns the continuous hum of human voices.
For the great barn doors are thrown wide open, and men are busy there mending the harness under the superintendence of Mr. Goby the "whittaw," otherwise saddler, who entertains them with the latest Treddleston gossip. It is certainly rather an unfortunate day that Alick the shepherd has chosen for having the whittaws, since the morning turned out so wet; and Mrs. Poyser has spoken her mind pretty strongly as to the dirt which the extra number of men's shoes brought into the house at dinner-time. Indeed, she has not yet recovered her equanimity on the subject, though it is now nearly three hours since dinner and the house floor is perfectly clean again; as clean as everything else in that wonderful house-place, where the only chance of collecting a few grains of dust would be to climb on the salt-coffer, and put your finger on the high mantel shelf on which the glittering brass candlesticks are enjoying their summer sinecure; for at this time of year of course every one goes to bed while it is yet light, or at least light enough to discern the outline of objects after you have bruised your shins against them. Surely nowhere else could an oak clock-case and an oak table have got to such a polish by the hand: genuine "elbow polish," as Mrs. Poyser called it, for she thanked God she never had any of your varnished rubbish in her house. Hetty Sorrel often took the opportunity, when her aunt's back was turned, of looking at the pleasing reflection of herself in those polished surfaces, for the oak table was usually turned up like a screen, and was more for ornament than for use; and she could see herself sometimes in the great round pewter dishes that were ranged on the shelves above the long deal dinner-table, or in the hobs of the grate, which always shone like jasper.
Everything was looking at its brightest at this moment, for the sun shone right on the pewter dishes, and from their reflecting surfaces pleasant jets of light were thrown on mellow oak and bright brass;—and on a still pleasanter object than these; for some of the rays fell on Dinah's finely molded cheek, and lit up her pale-red hair to auburn, as she bent over the heavy household linen which she was mending for her aunt. No scene could have been more peaceful, if Mrs. Poyser, who was ironing a few things that still remained from the Monday's wash, had not been making a frequent clinking with her iron, and moving to and fro whenever she wanted it to cool; carrying the keen glance of her blue-gray eye from the kitchen to the dairy, where Hetty was making up the butter, and from the dairy to the back kitchen, where Nancy was taking the pies out of the oven. Do not suppose however that Mrs. Poyser was elderly or shrewish in her appearance; she was a good-looking woman, not more than eight-and-thirty, of fair complexion and sandy hair, well-shapen, light-footed; the most conspicuous article in her attire was an ample checkered linen apron, which almost covered her skirt; and nothing could be plainer or less noticeable than her cap and gown, for there was no weakness of which she was less tolerant than feminine vanity, and the preference of ornament to utility. The family likeness between her and her niece Dinah Morris, with the contrast between her keenness and Dinah's seraphic gentleness of expression, might have served a painter as an excellent suggestion for a Martha and Mary. Their eyes were just of the same color, but a striking test of the difference in their operation was seen in the demeanor of Trip, the black-and-tan terrier, whenever that much-suspected dog unwarily exposed himself to the freezing arctic ray of Mrs. Poyser's glance. Her tongue was not less keen than her eye, and whenever a damsel came within earshot, seemed to take up an unfinished lecture, as a barrel organ takes up a tune, precisely at the point where it had left off.
The fact that it was churning day was another reason why it was inconvenient to have the whittaws, and why, consequently, Mrs. Poyser should scold Molly the housemaid with unusual severity. To all appearance Molly had got through her after-dinner work in an exemplary manner, had "cleaned herself" with great dispatch, and now came to ask submissively if she should sit down to her spinning till milking-time. But this blameless conduct, according to Mrs. Poyser, shrouded a secret indulgence of unbecoming wishes, which she now dragged forth and held up to Molly's view with cutting eloquence.
"Spinning, indeed! It isn't spinning as you'd be at, I'll be bound, and let you have your own way. I never knew your equals for gallowsness. To think of a gell o' your age wanting to go and sit with half-a-dozen men! I'd ha' been ashamed to let the words pass over my lips if I'd been you. And you, as have been here ever since last Michaelmas, and I hired you at Treddles'on stattits, without a bit o' character—as I say, you might be grateful to be hired in that way to a respectable place; and you knew no more o' what belongs to work when you come here than the mawkin i' the field. As poor a two-fisted thing as ever I saw, you know you was. Who taught you to scrub a floor, I should like to know? Why, you'd leave the dirt in heaps i' the corners—anybody 'ud think you'd never been brought up among Christians. And as for spinning, why you've wasted as much as your wage i' the flax you've spoiled learning to spin. And you've a right to feel that, and not to go about as gaping and as thoughtless as if you was beholding to nobody. Comb the wool for the whittaws, indeed! That's what you'd like to be doing, is it? That's the way with you—that's the road you'd all like to go, headlongs to ruin. You're never easy till you've got some sweetheart as is as big a fool as yourself: you think you'll be finely off when you're married, I dare say, and have got a three-legged stool to sit on, and never a blanket to cover you, and a bit o' oat-cake for your dinner, as three children are a-snatching at."
"I'm sure I donna want t' go wi' the whittaws," said Molly, whimpering, and quite overcome by this Dantean picture of her future; "on'y we allays used to comb the wool for 'n at Mester Ottley's, an' so I just asked ye. I donna want to set eyes on the whittaws again; I wish I may never stir if I do."
"Mr. Ottley's, indeed! It's fine talking o' what you did at Mr. Ottley's. Your missis there might like her floors dirted wi' whittaws for what I know. There's no knowing what people wonna like—such ways as I've heard of! I never had a gell come into my house as seemed to know what cleaning was; I think people live like pigs, for my part. And as to that Betty as was dairymaid at Trent's before she come to me, she'd ha' left the cheeses without turning from week's end to week's end; and the dairy thralls, I might ha' wrote my name on 'em, when I come down-stairs after my illness, as the doctor said it was inflammation—it was a mercy I got well of it. And to think o' your knowing no better, Molly, and been here a-going i' nine months, and not for want o' talking to, neither;—and what are you stanning there for, like a jack as is run down, instead o' getting your wheel out? You're a rare un for sitting down to your work a little while after it's time to put by."
"Munny, my iron's twite told; pease put it down to warm."
The small chirruping voice that uttered this request came from a little sunny-haired girl between three and four, who, seated on a high chair at the end of the ironing-table, was arduously clutching the handle of a miniature iron with her tiny fat fist, and ironing rags with an assiduity that required her to put her little red tongue out as far as anatomy would allow.
"Cold, is it, my darling? Bless your sweet face!" said Mrs. Poyser, who was remarkable for the facility with which she could relapse from her official objurgatory to one of fondness or of friendly converse. "Never mind! Mother's done her ironing now. She's going to put the ironing things away."
"Munny, I tould 'ike to do into de barn to Tommy, to see de whittawd."
"No, no, no; Totty 'ud get her feet wet," said Mrs. Poyser, carrying away her iron. "Run into the dairy and see Cousin Hetty make the butter."
"I tould 'ike a bit of pum-take," rejoined Totty, who seemed to be provided with several relays of requests; at the same time taking the opportunity of her momentary leisure to put her fingers into a bowl of starch and drag it down so as to empty the contents with tolerable completeness on to the ironing-sheet.
"Did ever anybody see the like?" screamed Mrs. Poyser, running towards the table when her eye had fallen on the blue stream. "The child's allays i' mischief if your back's turned a minute. What shall I do to you, you naughty, naughty gell?"
Totty, however, had descended from her chair with great swiftness, and was already in retreat towards the dairy with a sort of waddling run, and an amount of fat on the nape of her neck which made her look like the metamorphosis of a white sucking pig.
The starch having been wiped up by Molly's help, and the ironing apparatus put by, Mrs. Poyser took up her knitting, which always lay ready at hand and was the work she liked best, because she could carry it on automatically as she walked to and fro. But now she came and sat down opposite Dinah, whom she looked at in a meditative way, as she knitted her gray worsted stocking.
"You look th' image o' your Aunt Judith, Dinah, when you sit a-sewing. I could almost fancy it was thirty years back, and I was a little gell at home, looking at Judith as she sat at her work after she'd done the house up; only it was a little cottage, father's was, and not a big rambling house as gets dirty i' one corner as fast as you clean it in another; but for all that I could fancy you was your Aunt Judith, only her hair was a deal darker than yours, and she was stouter and broader i' the shoulders. Judith and me allays hung together, though she had such queer ways, but your mother and her never could agree. Ah! your mother little thought as she'd have a daughter just cut out after the very pattern o' Judith, and leave her an orphan too, for Judith to take care on, and bring up with a spoon when she was in the grave-yard at Stoniton. I allays said that o' Judith, as she'd bear a pound weight any day to save anybody else carrying a ounce. And she was just the same from the first o' my remembering her; it made no difference in her, as I could see, when she took to the Methodists, only she talked a bit different, and wore a different sort o' cap; but she'd never in her life spent a penny on herself more than keeping herself decent."
"She was a blessed woman," said Dinah: "God had given her a loving, self-forgetting nature, and he perfected it by grace. And she was very fond of you too, Aunt Rachel. I've often heard her talk of you in the same sort of way. When she had that bad illness, and I was only eleven years old, she used to say, 'You'll have a friend on earth in your Aunt Rachel, if I'm taken from you; for she has a kind heart;' and I'm sure I've found it so."
"I don't know how, child; anybody 'ud be cunning to do anything for you, I think; you're like the birds o' th' air, and live nobody knows how. I'd ha' been glad to behave to you like a mother's sister, if you'd come and live i' this country, where there's some shelter and victual for man and beast, and folks don't live on the naked hills, like poultry a-scratching on a gravel bank. And then you might get married to some decent man, and there'd be plenty ready to have you, if you'd only leave off that preaching, as is ten times worse than anything your Aunt Judith ever did. And even if you'd marry Seth Bede, as is a poor wool-gathering Methodist, and's never like to have a penny beforehand, I know your uncle 'ud help you with a pig, and very like a cow, for he's allays been good-natur'd to my kin, for all they're poor, and made 'em welcome to the house; and 'ud do for you, I'll be bound, as much as ever he'd do for Hetty, though she's his own niece. And there's linen in the house as I could well spare you, for I've got lots o' sheeting, and table-clothing, and toweling, as isn't made up. There's a piece o' sheeting I could give you as that squinting Kitty spun—she was a rare girl to spin, for all she squinted and the children couldn't abide her; and you know the spinning's going on constant, and there's new linen wove twice as fast as the old wears out. But where's the use o' talking, if ye wonna be persuaded, and settle down like any other woman in her senses, i'stead o' wearing yourself out with walking and preaching, and giving away every penny you get, so as you've nothing saved against sickness; and all the things you've got i' the world, I verily believe, 'ud go into a bundle no bigger nor a double cheese. And all because you've got notions i' your head about religion more nor what's i' the Catechism and the Prayer-book."
"But not more than what's in the Bible, Aunt," said Dinah.
"Yes, and the Bible too, for that matter," Mrs. Poyser rejoined rather sharply; "else why shouldn't them as know best what's in the Bible—the parsons and people as have got nothing to do but learn it—do the same as you do? But for the matter o' that, if everybody was to do like you, the world must come to a standstill; for if everybody tried to do without house and home, and with poor eating and drinking, and was allays talking as we must despise the things o' the world, as you say, I should like to know where the pick o' the stock, and the corn, and the best new-milk cheeses 'ud have to go. Everybody 'ud be wanting bread made o' tail ends, and everybody 'ud be running after everybody else to preach to 'em, istead o' bringing up their families, and laying by against a bad harvest. It stands to sense as that can't be the right religion."
"Nay, dear Aunt, you never heard me say that all people are called to forsake their work and their families. It's quite right the land should be plowed and sowed, and the precious corn stored, and the things of this life cared for, and right that people should rejoice in their families, and provide for them; so that this is done in the fear of the Lord, and that they are not unmindful of the soul's wants while they are caring for the body. We can all be servants of God wherever our lot is cast, but he gives us different sorts of work, according as he fits us for it and calls us to it. I can no more help spending my life in trying to do what I can for the souls of others, than you could help running if you heard little Totty crying at the other end of the house; the voice would go to your heart, you would think the dear child was in trouble or in danger, and you couldn't rest without running to help her and comfort her."
"Ah," said Mrs. Poyser, rising and walking towards the door, "I know it 'ud be just the same if I was to talk to you for hours. You'd make me the same answer, at th' end. I might as well talk to the running brook, and tell it to stan' still."
The causeway outside the kitchen door was dry enough now for Mrs. Poyser to stand there quite pleasantly and see what was going on in the yard, the gray worsted stocking making a steady progress in her hands all the while. But she had not been standing there more than five minutes before she came in again, and said to Dinah in rather a flurried, awe-stricken tone:—
"If there isn't Captain Donnithorne and Mr. Irwine a-coming into the yard! I'll lay my life they're come to speak about your preaching on the Green, Dinah; it's you must answer 'em, for I'm dumb. I've said enough a'ready about your bringing such disgrace upo' your uncle's family. I wouldn't ha' minded if you'd been Mr. Poyser's own niece—folks must put up wi' their own kin, as they put up wi' their own noses; it's their own flesh and blood. But to think of a niece o' mine being cause o' my husband's being turned out of his farm, and me brought him no fortin but my savins—"
"Nay, dear Aunt Rachel," said Dinah gently, "you've no cause for such fears. I've strong assurance that no evil will happen to you and my uncle and the children from anything I've done. I didn't preach without direction."
"Direction! I know very well what you mean by direction," said Mrs. Poyser, knitting in a rapid and agitated manner. "When there's a bigger maggot than usial in your head you call it 'direction'; and then nothing can stir you—you look like the statty o' the outside o' Treddles'on church, a-starin' and a-smilin' whether it's fair weather or foul. I hanna common patience with you."
By this time the two gentlemen had reached the palings and had got down from their horses: it was plain they meant to come in. Mrs. Poyser advanced to the door to meet them, curtseying low, and trembling between anger with Dinah and anxiety to conduct herself with perfect propriety on the occasion. For in those days the keenest of bucolic minds felt a whispering awe at the sight of the gentry, such as of old men felt when they stood on tiptoe to watch the gods passing by in tall human shape.
"Well, Mrs. Poyser, how are you after this stormy morning?" said Mr. Irwine with his stately cordiality. "Our feet are quite dry; we shall not soil your beautiful floor."
"Oh, sir, don't mention it," said Mrs. Poyser. "Will you and the captain please to walk into the parlor?"
"No, indeed, thank you, Mrs. Poyser," said the captain, looking eagerly round the kitchen, as if his eye were seeking something it could not find. "I delight in your kitchen. I think it is the most charming room I know. I should like every farmer's wife to come and look at it for a pattern."
"Oh, you're pleased to say so, sir. Pray take a seat," said Mrs. Poyser, relieved a little by this compliment and the captain's evident good-humor, but still glancing anxiously at Mr. Irwine, who she saw was looking at Dinah and advancing towards her.
"Poyser is not at home, is he?" said Captain Donnithorne, seating himself where he could see along the short passage to the open dairy door.
"No, sir, he isn't; he's gone to Rosseter to see Mr. West, the factor, about the wool. But there's father i' the barn, sir, if he'd be of any use."
"No, thank you; I'll just look at the whelps and leave a message about them with your shepherd. I must come another day and see your husband; I want to have a consultation with him about horses. Do you know when he's likely to be at liberty?"
"Why, sir, you can hardly miss him, except it's o' Treddles'on market-day—that's of a Friday, you know. For if he's anywhere on the farm we can send for him in a minute. If we'd got rid of the Scantlands we should have no outlying fields; and I should be glad of it, for if ever anything happens he's sure to be gone to the Scantlands. Things allays happen so contrairy, if they've a chance; and it's an unnat'ral thing to have one bit o' your farm in one county and all the rest in another."
"Ah, the Scantlands would go much better with Choyce's farm, especially as he wants dairy land and you've got plenty. I think yours is the prettiest farm on the estate, though; and do you know, Mrs. Poyser, if I were going to marry and settle, I should be tempted to turn you out, and do up this fine old house, and turn farmer myself."
"Oh, sir," said Mrs. Poyser, rather alarmed, "you wouldn't like it at all. As for farming, it's putting money into your pocket wi' your right hand and fetching it out wi' your left. As fur as I can see, it's raising victual for other folks, and just getting a mouthful for yourself and your children as you go along. Not as you'd be like a poor man as wants to get his bread: you could afford to lose as much money as you liked i' farming; but it's poor fun losing money, I should think, though I understan' it's what the great folks i' London play at more than anything. For my husband heard at market as Lord Dacey's eldest son had lost thousands upo' thousands to the Prince o' Wales, and they say my lady was going to pawn her jewels to pay for him. But you know more about that than I do, sir. But as for farming, sir, I canna think as you'd like it; and this house—the draughts in it are enough to cut you through, and it's my opinion the floors up-stairs are very rotten, and the rats i' the cellar are beyond anything."
"Why, that's a terrible picture, Mrs. Poyser. I think I should be doing you a service to turn you out of such a place. But there's no chance of that. I'm not likely to settle for the next twenty years, till I'm a stout gentleman of forty; and my grandfather would never consent to part with such good tenants as you."
"Well, sir, if he thinks so well o' Mr. Poyser for a tenant, I wish you could put in a word for him to allow us some new gates for the Five Closes, for my husband's been asking and asking till he's tired; and to think o' what he's done for the farm; and's never had a penny allowed him, be the times bad or good. And as I've said to my husband often and often, I'm sure if the captain had anything to do with it, it wouldn't be so. Not as I wish to speak disrespectful o' them as have got the power i' their hands, but it's more than flesh and blood 'ull bear sometimes, to be toiling and striving, and up early and down late, and hardly sleeping a wink when you lie down for thinking as the cheese may swell, or the cows may slip their calf, or the wheat may grow green again i' the sheaf—and after all, at th' end o' the year, it's like as if you'd been cooking a feast and had got the smell of it for your pains."
Mrs. Poyser, once launched into conversation, always sailed along without any check from her preliminary awe of the gentry. The confidence she felt in her own powers of exposition was a motive force that overcame all resistance.
"I'm afraid I should only do harm instead of good, if I were to speak about the gates, Mrs. Poyser," said the captain; "though I assure you there's no man on the estate I would sooner say a word for than your husband. I know his farm is in better order than any other within ten miles of us; and as for the kitchen," he added, smiling, "I don't believe there's one in the kingdom to beat it. By-the-by, I've never seen your dairy: I must see your dairy, Mrs. Poyser."
"Indeed, sir, it's not fit for you to go in, for Hetty's in the middle o' making the butter, for the churning was thrown late, and I'm quite ashamed." This Mrs. Poyser said blushing, and believing that the captain was really interested in her milkpans, and would adjust his opinion of her to the appearance of her dairy.
"Oh, I've no doubt it's in capital order. Take me in," said the captain, leading the way, while Mrs. Poyser followed.
MRS. POYSER "HAS HER SAY OUT"
From 'Adam Bede'
Something unwonted must clearly be in the wind, for the old Squire's visits to his tenantry were rare; and though Mrs. Poyser had during the last twelvemonth recited many imaginary speeches, meaning even more than met the ear, which she was quite determined to make to him the next time he appeared within the gates of the Hall Farm, the speeches had always remained imaginary.
"Good-day, Mrs. Poyser," said the old Squire, peering at her with his short-sighted eyes—a mode of looking at her which, as Mrs. Poyser observed, "allays aggravated her: it was as if you was a insect, and he was going to dab his finger-nail on you."
However, she said, "Your servant, sir," and curtsied with an air of perfect deference as she advanced towards him; she was not the woman to misbehave towards her betters, and fly in the face of the Catechism, without severe provocation.
"Is your husband at home, Mrs. Poyser?"
"Yes, sir; he's only i' the rick-yard. I'll send for him in a minute, if you'll please to get down and step in."
"Thank you; I will do so. I want to consult him about a little matter; but you are quite as much concerned in it, if not more. I must have your opinion too."
"Hetty, run and tell your uncle to come in," said Mrs. Poyser as they entered the house, and the old gentleman bowed low in answer to Hetty's curtsy; while Totty, conscious of a pinafore stained with gooseberry jam, stood hiding her face against the clock, and peeping round furtively.
"What a fine old kitchen this is!" said Mr. Donnithorne, looking round admiringly. He always spoke in the same deliberate, well-chiseled, polite way, whether his words were sugary or venomous. "And you keep it so exquisitely clean, Mrs. Poyser. I like these premises, do you know, beyond any on the estate."
"Well, sir, since you're fond of 'em, I should be glad if you'd let a bit o' repairs be done to 'em, for the boarding's i' that state as we're like to be eaten up wi' rats and mice; and the cellar, you may stan' up to your knees i' water in 't, if you like to go down; but perhaps you'd rather believe my words. Won't you please to sit down, sir?"
"Not yet; I must see your dairy. I have not seen it for years, and I hear on all hands about your fine cheese and butter," said the Squire, looking politely unconscious that there could be any question on which he and Mrs. Poyser might happen to disagree. "I think I see the door open there: you must not be surprised if I cast a covetous eye on your cream and butter. I don't expect that Mrs. Satchell's cream and butter will bear comparison with yours."
"I can't say, sir, I'm sure. It's seldom I see other folks' butter, though there's some on it as one's no need to see—the smell's enough."
"Ah, now this I like," said Mr. Donnithorne, looking round at the damp temple of cleanliness, but keeping near the door. "I'm sure I should like my breakfast better if I knew the butter and cream came from this dairy. Thank you, that really is a pleasant sight. Unfortunately, my slight tendency to rheumatism makes me afraid of damp; I'll sit down in your comfortable kitchen. Ah, Poyser, how do you do? In the midst of business, I see, as usual. I've been looking at your wife's beautiful dairy: the best manager in the parish, is she not?"
Mr. Poyser had just entered in shirt-sleeves and open waistcoat, with a face a shade redder than usual, from the exertion of "pitching." As he stood, red, rotund, and radiant, before the small, wiry, cool old gentleman, he looked like a prize apple by the side of a withered crab.
"Will you please to take this chair, sir?" he said, lifting his father's arm-chair forward a little; "you'll find it easy."
"No, thank you, I never sit in easy-chairs," said the old gentleman, seating himself on a small chair near the door. "Do you know, Mrs. Poyser—sit down, pray, both of you—I've been far from contented, for some time, with Mrs. Satchell's dairy management. I think she has not a good method, as you have."
"Indeed, sir, I can't speak to that," said Mrs. Poyser, in a hard voice, rolling and unrolling her knitting, and looking icily out of the window, as she continued to stand opposite the Squire. Poyser might sit down if he liked, she thought: she wasn't going to sit down, as if she'd give in to any such smooth-tongued palaver. Mr. Poyser, who looked and felt the reverse of icy, did sit down in his three-cornered chair.
"And now, Poyser, as Satchell is laid up, I am intending to let the Chase Farm to a respectable tenant. I'm tired of having a farm on my own hands—nothing is made the best of in such cases, as you know. A satisfactory bailiff is hard to find; and I think you and I, Poyser, and your excellent wife here, can enter into a little arrangement in consequence, which will be to our mutual advantage."
"Oh," said Mr. Poyser, with a good-natured blankness of imagination as to the nature of the arrangement.
"If I'm called upon to speak, sir," said Mrs. Poyser, after glancing at her husband with pity at his softness, "you know better than me; but I don't see what the Chase Farm is t' us—we've cumber enough wi' our own farm. Not but what I'm glad to hear o' anybody respectable coming into the parish: there's some as ha' been brought in as hasn't been looked on i' that character."
"You're likely to find Mr. Thurle an excellent neighbor, I assure you: such a one as you will feel glad to have accommodated by the little plan I'm going to mention; especially as I hope you will find it as much to your own advantage as his."
"Indeed, sir, if it's anything t' our advantage, it'll be the first offer o' the sort I've heared on. It's them as take advantage that get advantage i' this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em."
"The fact is, Poyser," said the Squire, ignoring Mrs. Poyser's theory of worldly prosperity, "there is too much dairy land, and too little plow land, on the Chase Farm, to suit Thurle's purpose—indeed, he will only take the farm on condition of some change in it: his wife, it appears, is not a clever dairywoman like yours. Now, the plan I'm thinking of is to effect a little exchange. If you were to have the Hollow Pastures, you might increase your dairy, which must be so profitable under your wife's management; and I should request you, Mrs. Poyser, to supply my house with milk, cream, and butter, at the market prices. On the other hand, Poyser, you might let Thurle have the Lower and Upper Ridges, which really, with our wet seasons would be a good riddance for you. There is much less risk in dairy land than corn land."
Mr. Poyser was leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, his head on one side, and his mouth screwed up—apparently absorbed in making the tips of his fingers meet so as to represent with perfect accuracy the ribs of a ship. He was much too acute a man not to see through the whole business, and to foresee perfectly what would be his wife's view of the subject; but he disliked giving unpleasant answers: unless it was on a point of farming practice, he would rather give up than have a quarrel, any day; and after all, it mattered more to his wife than to him. So, after a few moments' silence, he looked up at her and said mildly, "What dost say?"
Mrs. Poyser had had her eyes fixed on her husband with cold severity during his silence, but now she turned away her head with a toss, looked icily at the opposite roof of the cow-shed, and spearing her knitting together with the loose pin, held it firmly between her clasped hands.
"Say? Why, I say you may do as you like about giving up any o' your corn land afore your lease is up, which it won't be for a year come next Michaelmas, but I'll not consent to take more dairy work into my hands, either for love or money; and there's nayther love nor money here, as I can see, on'y other folks' love o' theirselves, and the money as is to go into other folks' pockets. I know there's them as is born t' own the land, and them as is born to sweat on 't"—here Mrs. Poyser paused to gasp a little—"and I know it's christened folks' duty to submit to their betters as fur as flesh and blood 'ull bear it; but I'll not make a martyr o' myself, and wear myself to skin and bone, and worret myself as if I was a churn wi' butter a-coming in 't, for no landlord in England, not if he was King George himself."
"No, no, my dear Mrs. Poyser, certainly not," said the Squire, still confident in his own powers of persuasion; "you must not overwork yourself; but don't you think your work will rather be lessened than increased in this way? There is so much milk required at the Abbey, that you will have little increase of cheese and butter making from the addition to your dairy; and I believe selling the milk is the most profitable way of disposing of dairy produce, is it not?"
"Ay, that's true," said Mr. Poyser, unable to repress an opinion on a question of farming profits, and forgetting that it was not in this case a purely abstract question.
"I dare say," said Mrs. Poyser bitterly, turning her head half-way towards her husband, and looking at the vacant arm-chair—"I dare say it's true for men as sit i' th' chimney-corner and make believe as everything's cut wi' ins an' outs to fit int' everything else. If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner. How do I know whether the milk 'ull be wanted constant? What's to make me sure as the house won't be put o' board wage afore we're many months older, and then I may have to lie awake o' nights wi' twenty gallons o' milk on my mind—and Dingall 'ull take no more butter, let alone paying for it; and we must fat pigs till we're obliged to beg the butcher on our knees to buy 'em, and lose half of 'em wi' the measles. And there's the fetching and carrying, as 'ud be welly half a day's work for a man an' hoss—that's to be took out o' the profits, I reckon? But there's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water."
"That difficulty—about the fetching and carrying—you will not have, Mrs. Poyser," said the Squire, who thought that this entrance into particulars indicated a distant inclination to compromise on Mrs. Poyser's part—"Bethell will do that regularly with the cart and pony."
"Oh, sir, begging your pardon, I've never been used t' having gentlefolks' servants coming about my back places, a-making love to both the gells at once, and keeping 'em with their hands on their hips listening to all manner o' gossip when they should be down on their knees a-scouring. If we're to go to ruin, it shanna be wi' having our back kitchen turned into a public."
"Well, Poyser," said the Squire, shifting his tactics, and looking as if he thought Mrs. Poyser had suddenly withdrawn from the proceedings and left the room, "you can turn the Hollows into feeding land. I can easily make another arrangement about supplying my house. And I shall not forget your readiness to accommodate your landlord as well as a neighbor. I know you will be glad to have your lease renewed for three years when the present one expires; otherwise, I dare say, Thurle, who is a man of some capital, would be glad to take both the farms, as they could be worked so well together. But I don't want to part with an old tenant like you."
To be thrust out of the discussion in this way would have been enough to complete Mrs. Poyser's exasperation, even without the final threat. Her husband, really alarmed at the possibility of their leaving the old place where he had been bred and born—for he believed the old Squire had small spite enough for anything—was beginning a mild remonstrance explanatory of the inconvenience he should find in having to buy and sell more stock, with—
"Well, sir, I think as it's rather hard—" when Mrs. Poyser burst in with the desperate determination to have her say out this once, though it were to rain notices to quit, and the only shelter were the workhouse.
"Then, sir, if I may speak—as, for all I'm a woman, and there's folks as thinks a woman's fool enough to stan' by an' look on while the men sign her soul away, I've a right to speak, for I make one quarter o' the rent, and save another quarter—I say, if Mr. Thurle's so ready to take farms under you, it's a pity but what he should take this, and see if he likes to live in a house wi' all the plagues o' Egypt in 't—wi' the cellar full o' water, and frogs and toads hoppin' up the steps by dozens—and the floors rotten, and the rats and mice gnawing every bit o' cheese, and runnin' over our heads as we lie i' bed till we expect 'em to eat us up alive—as it's a mercy they hanna eat the children long ago. I should like to see if there's another tenant besides Poyser as 'ud put up wi' never having a bit o' repairs done till a place tumbles down—and not then, on'y wi' begging and praying, and having to pay half—and being strung up wi' the rent as it's much if he gets enough out o' the land to pay, for all he's put his own money into the ground beforehand. See if you'll get a stranger to lead such a life here as that: a maggot must be born i' the rotten cheese to like it, I reckon. You may run away from my words, sir," continued Mrs. Poyser, following the old Squire beyond the door—for after the first moments of stunned surprise he had got up, and waving his hand towards her with a smile, had walked out towards his pony. But it was impossible for him to get away immediately, for John was walking the pony up and down the yard, and was some distance from the causeway when his master beckoned—
"You may run away from my words, sir, and you may go spinnin' underhand ways o' doing us a mischief, for you've got Old Harry to your friend, though nobody else is; but I tell you for once as we're not dumb creatures to be abused and made money on by them as ha' got the lash i' their hands, for want o' knowing how t' undo the tackle. An' if I'm th' only one as speaks my mind, there's plenty o' the same way o' thinking i' this parish and the next to 't, for your name 's no better than a brimstone match in everybody's nose—if it isna two-three old folks as you think o' saving your soul by giving 'em a bit o' flannel and a drop o' porridge. An' you may be right i' thinking it'll take but little to save your soul, for it'll be the smallest savin' y' iver made, wi' all your scrapin'."
There are occasions on which two servant-girls and a wagoner may be a formidable audience, and as the Squire rode away on his black pony, even the gift of short-sightedness did not prevent him from being aware that Molly and Nancy and Tim were grinning not far from him. Perhaps he suspected that sour old John was grinning behind him—which was also the fact. Meanwhile the bull-dog, the black-and-tan terrier, Alick's sheep-dog, and the gander hissing at a safe distance from the pony's heels, carried out the idea of Mrs. Poyser's solo in an impressive quartet.
Mrs. Poyser, however, had no sooner seen the pony moved off than she turned round, gave the two hilarious damsels a look which drove them into the back kitchen, and unspearing her knitting, began to knit again with her usual rapidity, as she re-entered the house.
"Thee'st done it now," said Mr. Poyser, a little alarmed and uneasy, but not without some triumphant amusement at his wife's outbreak.
"Yes, I know I've done it," said Mrs. Poyser; "but I've had my say out, and I shall be th' easier for 't all my life. There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly like a leaky barrel. I shan't repent saying what I think, if I live to be as old as th' old Squire; and there's little likelihoods—for it seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted i' th' other world."
"But thee wutna like moving from th' old place, this Michaelmas twelvemonth," said Mr. Poyser, "and going into a strange parish, where thee know'st nobody. It'll be hard upon us both, and upo' father too.'"
"Eh, it's no use worreting; there's plenty o' things may happen between this and Michaelmas twelvemonth. The captain may be master afore then, for what we know," said Mrs. Poyser, inclined to take an unusually hopeful view of an embarrassment which had been brought about by her own merit, and not by other people's fault.
"I'm none for worreting," said Mr. Poyser, rising from his three-cornered chair, and walking slowly towards the door; "but I should be loath to leave th' old place, and the parish where I was bred and born, and father afore me. We should leave our roots behind us, I doubt, and niver thrive again."
THE PRISONERS
From 'Romola'
In 1493 the rumor spread and became louder and louder that Charles the Eighth of France was about to cross the Alps with a mighty army; and the Italian populations, accustomed, since Italy had ceased to be the heart of the Roman empire, to look for an arbitrator from afar, began vaguely to regard his coming as a means of avenging their wrongs and redressing their grievances.
And in that rumor Savonarola had heard the assurance that his prophecy was being verified. What was it that filled the ears of the prophets of old but the distant tread of foreign armies, coming to do the work of justice? He no longer looked vaguely to the horizon for the coming storm: he pointed to the rising cloud. The French army was that new deluge which was to purify the earth from iniquity; the French King, Charles VIII, was the instrument elected by God as Cyrus had been of old, and all men who desired good rather than evil were to rejoice in his coming. For the scourge would fall destructively on the impenitent alone. Let any city of Italy, let Florence above all—Florence beloved of God, since to its ear the warning voice had been specially sent—repent and turn from its ways like Nineveh of old, and the storm cloud would roll over it and leave only refreshing rain-drops.
Fra Girolamo's word was powerful; yet now that the new Cyrus had already been three months in Italy, and was not far from the gates of Florence, his presence was expected there with mixed feelings, in which fear and distrust certainly predominated. At present it was not understood that he had redressed any grievances; and the Florentines clearly had nothing to thank him for. He held their strong frontier fortresses, which Piero de' Medici had given up to him without securing any honorable terms in return; he had done nothing to quell the alarming revolt of Pisa, which had been encouraged by his presence to throw off the Florentine yoke; and "orators," even with a prophet at their head, could win no assurance from him, except that he would settle everything when he was once within the walls of Florence. Still, there was the satisfaction of knowing that the exasperating Piero de' Medici had been fairly pelted out for the ignominious surrender of the fortresses, and in that act of energy the spirit of the Republic had recovered some of its old fire.
The preparations for the equivocal guest were not entirely those of a city resigned to submission. Behind the bright drapery and banners symbolical of joy, there were preparations of another sort made with common accord by government and people. Well hidden within walls there were hired soldiers of the Republic, hastily called in from the surrounding districts; there were old arms duly furbished, and sharp tools and heavy cudgels laid carefully at hand, to be snatched up on short notice; there were excellent boards and stakes to form barricades upon occasion, and a good supply of stones to make a surprising hail from the upper windows. Above all, there were people very strongly in the humor for fighting any personage who might be supposed to have designs of hectoring over them, they having lately tasted that new pleasure with much relish. This humor was not diminished by the sight of occasional parties of Frenchmen, coming beforehand to choose their quarters, with a hawk, perhaps, on their left wrist, and metaphorically speaking, a piece of chalk in their right hand to mark Italian doors withal; especially as creditable historians imply that many sons of France were at that time characterized by something approaching to a swagger, which must have whetted the Florentine appetite for a little stone-throwing.
And this was the temper of Florence on the morning of the 17th of November, 1494.
The sky was gray, but that made little difference in the Piazza del Duomo, which was covered with its holiday sky of blue drapery, and its constellations of yellow lilies and coats of arms. The sheaves of banners were unfurled at the angles of the Baptistery, but there was no carpet yet on the steps of the Duomo, for the marble was being trodden by numerous feet that were not at all exceptional. It was the hour of the Advent sermons, and the very same reasons which had flushed the streets with holiday color were reasons why the preaching in the Duomo could least of all be dispensed with.
But not all the feet in the Piazza were hastening towards the steps. People of high and low degree were moving to and fro with the brisk pace of men who had errands before them; groups of talkers were thickly scattered, some willing to be late for the sermon, and others content not to hear it at all.
The expression on the faces of these apparent loungers was not that of men who are enjoying the pleasant laziness of an opening holiday. Some were in close and eager discussion; others were listening with keen interest to a single spokesman, and yet from time to time turned round with a scanning glance at any new passer-by. At the corner looking towards the Via de' Cerrettani—just where the artificial rainbow light of the Piazza ceased, and the gray morning fell on the sombre stone houses—there was a remarkable cluster of the working people, most of them bearing on their dress or persons the signs of their daily labor, and almost all of them carrying some weapon, or some tool which might serve as a weapon upon occasion. Standing in the gray light of the street, with bare brawny arms and soiled garments, they made all the more striking the transition from the brightness of the Piazza. They were listening to the thin notary, Ser Cioni, who had just paused on his way to the Duomo. His biting words could get only a contemptuous reception two years and a half before in the Mercato; but now he spoke with the more complacent humor of a man whose party is uppermost, and who is conscious of some influence with the people.
"Never talk to me," he was saying in his incisive voice, "never talk to me of bloodthirsty Swiss or fierce French infantry; they might as well be in the narrow passes of the mountains as in our streets; and peasants have destroyed the finest armies of our condottieri in time past, when they had once got them between steep precipices. I tell you, Florentines need be afraid of no army in their own streets."
"That's true, Ser Cioni," said a man whose arms and hands were discolored by crimson dye, which looked like blood-stains, and who had a small hatchet stuck in his belt; "and those French cavaliers who came in squaring themselves in their smart doublets the other day, saw a sample of the dinner we could serve up for them. I was carrying my cloth in Ognissanti, when I saw my fine Messeri going by, looking round as if they thought the houses of the Vespucci and the Agli a poor pick of loadings for them, and eyeing us Florentines, like top-knotted cocks as they are, as if they pitied us because we didn't know how to strut. 'Yes, my fine Galli,' says I, 'stick out your stomachs; I've got a meat-axe in my belt that will go inside you all the easier;' when presently the old cow lowed,[A] and I knew something had happened—no matter what. So I threw my cloth in at the first doorway, and took hold of my meat-axe and ran after my fine cavaliers towards the Vigna Nuova. And, 'What is it, Guccio?' said I, when he came up with me. 'I think it's the Medici coming back,' said Guccio. Bembè! I expected so! And up we reared a barricade, and the Frenchmen looked behind and saw themselves in a trap; and up comes a good swarm of our Ciompi,[B] and one of them with a big scythe he had in his hand mowed off one of the fine cavaliers' feathers:—it's true! And the lasses peppered a few stones down to frighten them. However, Piero de' Medici wasn't come after all; and it was a pity; for we'd have left him neither legs nor wings to go away with again."
"Well spoken, Oddo," said a young butcher, with his knife at his belt; "and it's my belief Piero will be a good while before he wants to come back, for he looked as frightened as a hunted chicken when we hustled and pelted him in the piazza. He's a coward, else he might have made a better stand when he'd got his horsemen. But we'll swallow no Medici any more, whatever else the French king wants to make us swallow."
"But I like not those French cannon they talk of," said Goro, none the less fat for two years' additional grievances. "San Giovanni defend us! If Messer Domeneddio means so well by us as your Frate says he does, Ser Cioni, why shouldn't he have sent the French another way to Naples?"
"Ay, Goro," said the dyer; "that's a question worth putting. Thou art not such a pumpkin-head as I took thee for. Why, they might have gone to Naples by Bologna, eh, Ser Cioni?—or if they'd gone to Arezzo—we wouldn't have minded their going to Arezzo."
"Fools! It will be for the good and glory of Florence," Ser Cioni began. But he was interrupted by the exclamation, "Look there!" which burst from several voices at once, while the faces were all turned to a party who were advancing along the Via de' Cerretani.
"It's Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and one of the French noblemen who are in his house," said Ser Cioni, in some contempt at this interruption. "He pretends to look well satisfied—that deep Tornabuoni—but he's a Medicean in his heart; mind that."
The advancing party was rather a brilliant one, for there was not only the distinguished presence of Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and the splendid costume of the Frenchman with his elaborately displayed white linen and gorgeous embroidery; there were two other Florentines of high birth, in handsome dresses donned for the coming procession, and on the left hand of the Frenchman was a figure that was not to be eclipsed by any amount of intention or brocade—a figure we have often seen before. He wore nothing but black, for he was in mourning; but the black was presently to be covered by a red mantle, for he too was to walk in procession as Latin Secretary to the Ten. Tito Melema had become conspicuously serviceable in the intercourse with the French guests, from his familiarity with Southern Italy and his readiness in the French tongue, which he had spoken in his early youth; and he had paid more than one visit to the French camp at Signa. The lustre of good fortune was upon him; he was smiling, listening, and explaining, with his usual graceful unpretentious ease, and only a very keen eye bent on studying him could have marked a certain amount of change in him which was not to be accounted for by the lapse of eighteen months. It was that change which comes from the final departure of moral youthfulness—from the distinct self-conscious adoption of a part in life. The lines of the face were as soft as ever, the eyes as pellucid; but something was gone—something as indefinable as the changes in the morning twilight.
The Frenchman was gathering instructions concerning ceremonial before riding back to Signa, and now he was going to have a final survey of the Piazza del Duomo, where the royal procession was to pause for religious purposes. The distinguished party attracted the notice of all eyes as it entered the Piazza, but the gaze was not entirely cordial and admiring; there were remarks not altogether allusive and mysterious to the Frenchman's hoof-shaped shoes—delicate flattery of royal superfluity in toes; and there was no care that certain snarlings at "Mediceans" should be strictly inaudible. But Lorenzo Tornabuoni possessed that power of dissembling annoyance which is demanded in a man who courts popularity, and Tito, besides his natural disposition to overcome ill-will by good-humor, had the unimpassioned feeling of the alien towards names and details that move the deepest passions of the native.
Arrived where they could get a good oblique view of the Duomo, the party paused. The festoons and devices placed over the central doorway excited some demur, and Tornabuoni beckoned to Piero di Cosimo, who, as was usual with him at this hour, was lounging in front of Nello's shop. There was soon an animated discussion, and it became highly amusing from the Frenchman's astonishment at Piero's odd pungency of statement, which Tito translated literally. Even snarling onlookers became curious, and their faces began to wear the half-smiling, half-humiliated expression of people who are not within hearing of the joke which is producing infectious laughter. It was a delightful moment for Tito, for he was the only one of the party who could have made so amusing an interpreter, and without any disposition to triumphant self-gratulation he reveled in the sense that he was an object of liking—he basked in approving glances. The rainbow light fell about the laughing group, and the grave church-goers had all disappeared within the walls. It seemed as if the Piazza had been decorated for a real Florentine holiday.
Meanwhile in the gray light of the unadorned streets there were on-comers who made no show of linen and brocade, and whose humor was far from merry. Here too the French dress and hoofed shoes were conspicuous, but they were being pressed upon by a large and larger number of non-admiring Florentines. In the van of the crowd were three men in scanty clothing; each had his hands bound together by a cord, and a rope was fastened round his neck and body in such a way that he who held the extremity of the rope might easily check any rebellious movement by the threat of throttling. The men who held the ropes were French soldiers, and by broken Italian phrases and strokes from the knotted end of the rope, they from time to time stimulated their prisoners to beg. Two of them were obedient, and to every Florentine they had encountered had held out their bound hands and said in piteous tones:—
"For the love of God and the Holy Madonna, give us something towards our ransom! We are Tuscans; we were made prisoners in Lunigiana."
But the third man remained obstinately silent under all the strokes of the knotted cord. He was very different in aspect from his two fellow prisoners. They were young and hardy, and in the scant clothing which the avarice of their captors had left them, looked like vulgar, sturdy mendicants. But he had passed the boundary of old age, and could hardly be less than four or five and sixty. His beard, which had grown long in neglect, and the hair which fell thick and straight round his baldness, were nearly white. His thick-set figure was still firm and upright, though emaciated, and seemed to express energy in spite of age—an expression that was partly carried out in the dark eyes and strong dark eyebrows, which had a strangely isolated intensity of color in the midst of his yellow, bloodless, deep-wrinkled face with its lank gray hairs. And yet there was something fitful in the eyes which contradicted the occasional flash of energy; after looking round with quick fierceness at windows and faces, they fell again with a lost and wandering look. But his lips were motionless, and he held his hands resolutely down. He would not beg.
This sight had been witnessed by the Florentines with growing exasperation. Many standing at their doors or passing quietly along had at once given money—some in half-automatic response to an appeal in the name of God, others in that unquestioning awe of the French soldiery which had been created by the reports of their cruel warfare, and on which the French themselves counted as a guarantee of immunity in their acts of insolence. But as the group had proceeded farther into the heart of the city, that compliance had gradually disappeared, and the soldiers found themselves escorted by a gathering troop of men and boys, who kept up a chorus of exclamations sufficiently intelligible to foreign ears without any interpreter. The soldiers themselves began to dislike their position, for with a strong inclination to use their weapons, they were checked by the necessity for keeping a secure hold on their prisoners, and they were now hurrying along in the hope of finding shelter in a hostelry.
"French dogs!" "Bullock-feet!" "Snatch their pikes from them!" "Cut the cords and make them run for their prisoners. They'll run as fast as geese—don't you see they're web-footed?" These were the cries which the soldiers vaguely understood to be jeers, and probably threats. But every one seemed disposed to give invitations of this spirited kind rather than to act upon them.
"Santiddio! here's a sight!" said the dyer, as soon as he had divined the meaning of the advancing tumult; "and the fools do nothing but hoot. Come along!" he added, snatching his axe from his belt, and running to join the crowd, followed by the butcher and all the rest of his companions except Goro, who hastily retreated up a narrow passage.
The sight of the dyer, running forward with blood-red arms and axe uplifted, and with his cluster of rough companions behind him, had a stimulating effect on the crowd. Not that he did anything else than pass beyond the soldiers and thrust himself well among his fellow-citizens, flourishing his axe; but he served as a stirring symbol of street-fighting, like the waving of a well-known gonfalon. And the first sign that fire was ready to burst out was something as rapid as a little leaping tongue of flame; it was an act of the conjurer's impish lad Lollo, who was dancing and jeering in front of the ingenuous boys that made the majority of the crowd. Lollo had no great compassion for the prisoners, but being conscious of an excellent knife which was his unfailing companion, it had seemed to him from the first that to jump forward, cut a rope, and leap back again before the soldier who held it could use his weapon, would be an amusing and dexterous piece of mischief. And now, when the people began to hoot and jostle more vigorously, Lollo felt that his moment was come: he was close to the eldest prisoner; in an instant he had cut the cord.
"Run, old one!" he piped in the prisoner's ear, as soon as the cord was in two; and himself set the example of running as if he were helped along with wings, like a scared fowl.
The prisoner's sensations were not too slow for him to seize the opportunity; the idea of escape had been continually present with him, and he had gathered fresh hope from the temper of the crowd. He ran at once; but his speed would hardly have sufficed for him if the Florentines had not instantaneously rushed between him and his captor. He ran on into the Piazza, but he quickly heard the tramp of feet behind him, for the other two prisoners had been released, and the soldiers were struggling and fighting their way after them, in such tardigrade fashion as their hoof-shaped shoes would allow—impeded, but not very resolutely attacked, by the people. One of the two younger prisoners turned up the Borgo di San Lorenzo, and thus made a partial diversion of the hubbub; but the main struggle was still towards the Piazza, where all eyes were turned on it with alarmed curiosity. The cause could not be precisely guessed, for the French dress was screened by the impending crowd.
"An escape of prisoners," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, as he and his party turned round just against the steps of the Duomo, and saw a prisoner rushing by them. "The people are not content with having emptied the Bargello the other day. If there is no other authority in sight they must fall on the sbirri and secure freedom to thieves. Ah! there is a French soldier; that is more serious."
The soldier he saw was struggling along on the north side of the Piazza, but the object of his pursuit had taken the other direction. That object was the eldest prisoner, who had wheeled round the Baptistery and was running towards the Duomo, determined to take refuge in that sanctuary rather than trust to his speed. But in mounting the steps, his foot received a shock; he was precipitated towards the group of signori, whose backs were turned to him, and was only able to recover his balance as he clutched one of them by the arm.
It was Tito Melema who felt that clutch. He turned his head, and saw the face of his adoptive father, Baldassarre Calvo, close to his own.
The two men looked at each other, silent as death: Baldassarre, with dark fierceness and a tightening grip of the soiled worn hands on the velvet-clad arm; Tito, with cheeks and lips all bloodless, fascinated by terror. It seemed a long while to them—it was but a moment.
The first sound Tito heard was the short laugh of Piero di Cosimo, who stood close by him and was the only person that could see his face.
"Ha, ha! I know what a ghost should be now."
"This is another escaped prisoner," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni. "Who is he, I wonder?"
"Some madman, surely," said Tito.
He hardly knew how the words had come to his lips: there are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of premeditation.
The two men had not taken their eyes off each other, and it seemed to Tito, when he had spoken, that some magical poison had darted from Baldassarre's eyes, and that he felt it rushing through his viens. But the next instant the grasp on his arm had relaxed, and Baldassarre had disappeared within the church.
FOOTNOTES
[A] "La vacca muglia" was the phrase for the sounding of the great bell in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.
[B] The poorer artisans connected with the wool trade—wool-beaters, carders, washers, etc.
"OH, MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE"
Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.
So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing as beauteous order, that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed, and agonized,
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,—
Poor anxious penitence,—is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air;
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burthen of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better—saw within
A worthier image for the sanctuary,
And shaped it forth before the multitude
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reverence more mixed with love—
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread for ever.
This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven; be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony;
Enkindle generous ardor; feed pure love;
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty—
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion even more intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(1803-1882)
BY RICHARD GARNETT
oteworthy also," says Carlyle, "and serviceable for the progress of this same Individual, wilt thou find his subdivision into Generations."
It is indeed the fact that the course of human history admits of being marked off into periods, which, from their average duration and the impulse communicated to them by those who enter upon adolescence along with them, may be fitly denominated generations, especially when their opening and closing are signalized by great events which serve as historical landmarks. No such event, indeed, short of the Day of Judgment or a universal deluge, can serve as an absolute line of demarcation; nothing can be more certain than that history and human life are a perpetual Becoming; and that, although the progress of development is frequently so startling and unforeseen as to evoke the poet's exclamation,—
"New endless growth surrounds on every side,
Such as we deemed not earth could ever bear."—
this growth is but development after all. The association of historical periods with stages in the mental development of man is nevertheless too convenient to be surrendered; the vision is cleared and the grasp strengthened by the perception of a well-defined era in American history, commencing with the election of Andrew Jackson to the Presidency in 1828 and closing with the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865,—a period exactly corresponding with one in English history measured from the death of Lord Liverpool, the typical representative of a bygone political era in the prime of other years, and that of Lord Palmerston, another such representative, in the latter. The epoch thus bounded almost precisely corresponds to the productive period of the two great men who, more than any contemporaries, have stood in the conscious attitude of teachers of their age. With such men as Tennyson and Browning, vast as their influence has been, the primary impulse has not been didactic, but artistic; Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others, have been chiefly operative upon the succeeding generation; Mill and the elder Newman rather address special classes than the people at large; and Ruskin and Kingsley would have willingly admitted that however eloquent the expression of their teaching, its originality mainly consisted in the application of Carlyle's ideas to subjects beyond Carlyle's range. Carlyle and Emerson, therefore, stand forth like Goethe and Schiller as the Dioscuri of their period; the two men to whom beyond others its better minds looked for guidance, and who had the largest share in forming the minds from which the succeeding generation was to take its complexion. Faults and errors they had; but on the whole it may be said that nations have rarely been more fortunate in their instructors than the two great English-speaking peoples during the age of Carlyle and Emerson. Of Carlyle this is not the place to speak further; but writing on Emerson, it will be necessary to exhibit what we conceive to have been the special value of his teaching; and to attempt some description of the man himself, in indication of the high place claimed for him.
It has been said of some great man of marked originality that he was the sole voice among many echoes. This cannot be said of Emerson; his age was by no means deficient in original voices. But his may be said with truth to have been the chief verbal utterance in an age of authorship. It is a trite remark, that many of the men of thought whose ideas have most influenced the world have shown little inclination for literary composition. The president of a London freethinking club in Goldsmith's time supposed himself to be in possession of the works of Socrates, no less than of those of "Tully and Cicero," but no other trace of their existence has come to light. Had Emerson lived in any age but his own, it is doubtful whether, any more than Socrates, he would have figured as an author. "I write," he tells Carlyle, "with very little system, and as far as regards composition, with most fragmentary result—paragraphs incomprehensible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." We also hear of his going forth into the woods to hunt a thought as a boy might hunt a butterfly, except that the thought had flown with him from home, and that his business was not so much to capture it as to materialize it and make it tangible. This peculiarity serves to classify Emerson among the ancient sages, men like Socrates and Buddha, whose instructions were not merely oral but unmethodical and unsystematic; who spoke as the casual emergency of the day dictated, and left their observations to be collected by their disciples. An excellent plan in so far as it accomplishes the endowment of the sage's word with his own individuality; exceptionable when a doubt arises whether the utterance belongs to the master or the disciple, and in the case of diametrically opposite versions, whether Socrates has been represented more truly by the prose of Xenophon or the poetry of Plato. We may be thankful that the spirit of Emerson's age, and the exigencies of his own affairs, irresistibly impelled him to write: nevertheless the fact remains that with him Man Thinking is not so much Man Writing as Man Speaking, and that although the omnipotent machinery of the modern social system caught him too, and forced him into line with the rest, we have in him a nearer approach to the voice, apart from the disturbing and modifying habits of literary composition, than in any other eminent modern thinker. This annuls one of the most weighty criticisms upon Emerson, so long as he is regarded merely as an author,—his want of continuity, and consequent want of logic. Had he attempted to establish a philosophical system, this would have been fatal. But such an undertaking is of all things furthest from his thoughts. He does not seek to demonstrate, he announces. Ideas have come to him which, as viewed by the inward light, appear important and profitable. He brings these forward to be tested by the light of other men. He does not seek to connect these ideas together, except in so far as their common physiognomy bespeaks their common parentage. Nor does he seek to fortify them by reasoning, or subject them to any test save the faculty by which the unprejudiced soul discerns good from evil. If his jewel will scratch glass, it is sufficiently evinced a diamond.
It follows that although Emerson did not write most frequently or best in verse, he is, as regards the general constitution of his intellect, rather to be classed with poets than with philosophers. Poetry cannot indeed dispense with the accurate observation of nature and mankind, but poetic genius essentially depends on intuition and inspiration. There is no gulf between the philosopher and the poet; some of the greatest of poets have also been among the most powerful of reasoners; but their claim to poetical rank would not have been impaired if their ratiocination had been ever so illogical. Similarly, a great thinker may have no more taste for poetry than was vouchsafed to Darwin or the elder Mill, without any impeachment of his power of intellect. The two spheres of action are fundamentally distinct, though the very highest geniuses, such as Shakespeare and Goethe, have sometimes almost succeeded in making them appear as one. To determine to which of them a man actually belongs, we must look beyond the externalities of literary form, and inquire whether he obtains his ideas by intuition, or by observation and reflection. No mind will be either entirely intuitive or entirely reflective, but there will usually be a decided inclination to one or other of the processes; and in the comparatively few cases in which thoughts and feelings seem to come to it unconsciously, as leaves to a tree, we may consider that we have a poet, though perhaps not a writer of poetry. If indeed the man writes at all, he will very probably write prose, but this prose will be impregnated with poetic quality. From this point of view we are able to set Emerson much higher than if we regarded him simply as a teacher. He is greater as the American Wordsworth than as the American Carlyle. We shall understand his position best by comparing him with other men of genius who are poets too, but not pre-eminently so. In beauty of language and power of imagination, John Henry Newman and James Martineau, though they have written little in verse, yield to few poets. But throughout all their writings the didactic impulse is plainly the preponderating one, their poetry merely auxiliary and ornamental; hence they are not reckoned among poets. With Emerson the case is reversed: the revealer is first in him, the reasoner second; oral speech is his most congenial form of expression, and he submits to appear in print because the circumstances of his age render print the most effectual medium for the dissemination of his thought. It will be observed that whenever possible he resorts to the medium of oration or lecture; it may be further remarked that his essays, often originally delivered as lectures, are very like his discourses, and his discourses very like his essays. In neither, so far as regards the literary form of the entire composition, distinguished from the force and felicity of individual sentences, can he be considered as a classic model. The essay need not be too severely logical, yet a just conception of its nature requires a more harmonious proportion and more symmetrical construction, as well as a more consistent and intelligent direction towards a single definite end, than we usually find in Emerson. The orator is less easy to criticize than the essayist, for oratory involves an element of personal magnetism which resists all critical analysis. Hence posterity frequently reverses (or rather seems to reverse, for the decision upon a speech mutilated of voice and action cannot be really conclusive) the verdicts of contemporaries upon oratory. "What will our descendants think of the Parliamentary oratory of our age?" asked a contemporary of Burke's, "when they are told that in his own time this man was accounted neither the first, nor the second, nor even the third speaker?" Transferred to the tribunal of the library, Burke's oratory bears away the palm from Pitt and Fox and Sheridan; yet, unless we had heard the living voices of them all, it would be unsafe for us to challenge the contemporary verdict. We cannot say, with the lover in Goethe, that the word printed appears dull and soulless, but it certainly wants much which conduced to the efficacy of the word spoken:—
"Ach wie traurig sieht in Lettern,
Schwarz auf weiss, das Lied mich an,
Das aus deinem Mund vergöttern,
Das ein Herz zerreissen kann!"
Emerson's orations are no less delightful and profitable reading than his essays, so long as they can be treated as his essays were intended to be treated when they came into print; that is, read deliberately, with travelings backward when needed, and frequent pauses of thought. But if we consider them as discourses to be listened to, we shall find some difficulty in reconciling their popularity and influence with their apparent disconnectedness, and some reason to apprehend that, occasional flashes of epigram excepted, they must speedily have passed from the minds of the hearers. The apparent defect was probably remedied in delivery by the magnetic power of the speaker; not that sort of power which "wields at will the fierce democracy," but that which convinces the hearer that he is listening to a message from a region not as yet accessible to himself. The impassioned orator usually provokes the suspicion that he is speaking from a brief. Not so Emerson: above all other speakers he inspires the confidence that he declares a thing to be, not because he wishes, but because he perceives it to be so. His quiet, unpretending, but perfectly unembarrassed manner, as of a man with a message which he simply delivers and goes away, must have greatly aided to supply the absence of vigorous reasoning and skillful oratorical construction. We could not expect a spirit commissioned to teach us to condescend to such methods; and Emerson's discourse, whether in oration or essay, though by no means deficient in human feeling nor of the "blessed Glendoveer" order, frequently does sound like that of a being from another sphere, simply because he derived his ideas from a higher world; as must always be the case with the man of spiritual, not of course with the man of practical genius. It matters nothing whether this is really so, or whether what wears the aspect of imparted revelation is but a fortifying of the natural eye, qualifying it to look a little deeper than neighboring eyes into things around. In either case the person so endowed stands a degree nearer to the essential truth of things than his fellows; and the consciousness of the fact, transpiring through his personality, gives him a weight which might otherwise seem inexplicable. Nothing can be more surprising than the deference with which the learned and intelligent contemporaries of the humble and obscure Spinoza resort to his judgment before he has so much as written a book.
This estimate of Emerson as an American Wordsworth, one who like Wordsworth not merely enforced but practically demonstrated the proposition that
"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can,"
is controverted by many who can see in him nothing but a polisher and stringer of epigrammatic sayings. It is impossible to argue with any who cannot recognize the deep vitality of 'Nature,' of the two series of Essays first published, and of most of the early orations and discourses; but it may be conceded that Emerson's fountain of inspiration was no more perennial than Wordsworth's, and that in his latter years his gift of epigrammatic statement enabled him to avoid both the Scylla and the Charybdis of men of genius whose fount of inspiration has run low. In some such cases, such as Wordsworth's, the author simply goes on producing, with less and less geniality at every successive effort. In others, such as Browning's, he escapes inanity by violent exaggeration of his characteristic mannerisms. Neither of these remarks applies to Emerson: he does not, in ceasing to be original, become insipid, nor can it be said that he is any more mannered at the last than at the first. This is a clear proof that his peculiarity of speech is not mannerism but manner; that consequently he is not an artificial writer, and that, since the treatment of his themes as he has chosen to treat them admits of no compromise between nature and rhetoric, he has the especial distinction of simplicity where simplicity is difficult and rare. That such is the case will appear from an examination of his earlier and more truly prophetic writings.
Of these, the first in importance as in time is the tract 'Nature,' commenced in 1833, rewritten, completed, and published in 1836. Of all Emerson's writings this is the most individual, and the most adapted for a general introduction to his ideas. These ideas are not in fact peculiar to him; and yet the little book is one of the most original ever written, and one of those most likely to effect an intellectual revolution in the mind capable of apprehending it. The reason is mainly the intense vitality of the manner, and the translation of abstract arguments into concrete shapes of witchery and beauty. It contains scarcely a sentence that is not beautiful,—not with the cold beauty of art, but with the radiance and warmth of feeling. Its dominant note is rapture, like the joy of one who has found an enchanted realm, or who has convinced himself that old stories deemed too beautiful to be true are true indeed. Yet it is exempt from extravagance, the splendor of the language is chastened by taste, and the gladness and significance of the author's announcements would justify an even more ardent enthusiasm. They may be briefly summed up as the statements that Nature is not mechanical, but vital; that the Universe is not dead, but alive; that God is not remote, but omnipresent. There was of course no novelty in these assertions, nor can Emerson bring them by a hair's-breadth nearer demonstration than they had always been. He simply re-states them in a manner entirely his own, and with a charm not perhaps surpassing that with which others had previously invested them, but peculiar and dissimilar. Everything really Emersonian in Emerson's teaching may be said to spring out of this little book: so copious, however, were the corollaries deducible from principles apparently so simple, that the flowers veiled the tree; and precious as the tract is, as the first and purest draught of the new wine, it is not the most practically efficient of his works, and might probably have passed unperceived if it had not been reinforced by a number of auxiliary compositions, some produced under circumstances which could not fail to provoke wide discussion and consequent notoriety. The principles unfolded in 'Nature' might probably have passed with civil acquiescence if Emerson had been content with the mere statement; but he insisted on carrying them logically out, and this could not be done without unsettling every school of thought at the time prevalent in America. The Divine omnipresence, for example, was admitted in words by all except materialists and anti-theists; but if, as Emerson maintained, this involved the conception of the Universe as a Divine incarnation, this in its turn involved an optimistic view of the universal scheme totally inconsistent with the Calvinism still dominant in American theology. If all existence was a Divine emanation, no part of it could be more sacred than another part,—which at once abolished the mystic significance of religious ceremonies so dear to the Episcopalians; while the immediate contact of the Universe with the Deity was no less incompatible with the miraculous interferences on which Unitarianism reposed its faith. Such were some of the most important negative results of Emerson's doctrines; in their positive aspect, by asserting the identity of natural and spiritual laws, they invested the former with the reverence hitherto accorded only to the latter, and restored to a mechanical and prosaic society the piety with which men in the infancy of history had defied the forces of Nature. Substantially, except for the absence of any definite relation to literary art, Emerson's mission was very similar to Wordsworth's; but by natural temperament and actual situation he wanted the thousand links which bound Wordsworth to the past, and eventually made the sometime innovator the patron of a return towards the Middle Ages.
Emerson had no wish to regress, and, almost alone among thinkers who have reached an advanced age, betrays no symptom of reaction throughout the whole of his career. The reason may be, that his scrupulous fairness and frank conceptions to the Conservative cast of thought had left him nothing to retract or atone for. He seems to have started on his journey through life with his Conservatism and Liberalism ready made up, taking with him just as much of either as he wanted. This is especially manifest in the discourse 'The Conservative' (1841), in which he deliberately weighs conservative against progressive tendencies, impersonates each in an imaginary interlocutor, and endeavors to display their respective justification and shortcomings. Nothing can be more rigidly equitable or more thoroughly sane than his estimate; and as the issues between conservatism and reform have broadened and deepened, time has only added to its value. It is a perfect manual for thoughtful citizens, desirous of understanding the questions that underlie party issues, and is especially to be commended to young and generous minds, liable to misguidance in proportion to their generosity.
This celebrated discourse is one of a group including one still more celebrated, the address to the graduating class of Divinity College, Cambridge, published as 'The Christian Teacher' (1838). This, says Mr. Cabot, seems to have been struck off at a heat, which perhaps accounts for its nearer approach than any of his other addresses to the standard of what is usually recognized as eloquence. Eloquent in a sense Emerson usually was, but here is something which could transport a fit audience with enthusiasm. It also possessed the power of awakening the keenest antagonism; but censure has long since died away, and nothing that Emerson wrote has been more thoroughly adopted into the creed of those with whom external observances and material symbols find no place. Equally epoch-making in a different way was the oration on 'Man Thinking, or the American Scholar' (1837), entitled by Dr. Holmes "our intellectual Declaration of Independence," and of which Mr. Lowell says: "We were socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water." In these three great discourses, and in a less measure in 'The Transcendentalist' and 'Man the Reformer' (both in 1841), America may boast of possessing works of the first class, which could have been produced in no other country, and which—even though, in Emerson's own phrase, wider circles should come to be drawn around them—will remain permanent landmarks in intellectual history.
These discourses may be regarded as Emerson's public proclamations of his opinions; but he is probably more generally known and more intimately beloved by the two unobtrusive volumes of Essays, originally prefaced for England by Carlyle. Most of these, indeed, were originally delivered as lectures, but to small audiences, and with little challenge to public attention. It may be doubted whether they would have succeeded as lectures but for the personal magnetism of the speaker; but their very defects aid them with the reader, who, once fascinated by their beauty of phrase and depth of spiritual insight, imbibes their spirit all the more fully for his ceaseless effort to mend their deficient logic with his own. Like Love in Dante's sonnet, Emerson enters into and blends with the reader, and his influence will often be found most potent where it is least acknowledged. Each of the twenty may be regarded as a fuller working out of some subject merely hinted at in 'Nature,'—statues, as it were, for niches left vacant in the original edifice. The most important and pregnant with thought are 'History,' where the same claim is preferred for history as for the material world, that it is not dead but alive; 'Self-Reliance,' a most vigorous assertion of a truth which Emerson was apt to carry to extremes,—the majesty of the individual soul; 'Compensation,' an exposition of the universe as the incarnation of unerring truth and absolute justice; 'Love,' full of beauty and rapture, yet almost chilling to the young by its assertion of what is nevertheless true, that even Love in its human semblance only subserves ulterior ends; 'Circles,' the demonstration that this circumstance is no way peculiar to Love, that there can be nothing ultimate, final, or unrelated to ulterior purpose,—nothing around which, in Emersonian phrase, you cannot draw a circle; 'The Over-Soul,' a prose hymn dedicated to an absolutely spiritual religion; 'The Poet,' a celebration of Poetry as coextensive with Imagination, and in the highest sense with Reason also; 'Experience' and 'Character,' valuable essays, but evincing that the poetical impulse was becoming spent, and that Emerson's mind was more and more tending to questions of conduct. The least satisfactory of the essays is that on 'Art,' where he is only great on the negative side, Art's inevitable limitations. The æsthetical faculty, which contemplates Beauty under the restraints of Form, was evidently weak in him.
'Representative Men,' Emerson's next work of importance (1845), shows that his parachute was descending; but he makes a highly successful compromise by taking up original ideas as reflected in the actions and thoughts of great typical men, one remove only from originality of exposition on his own part. The treatment is necessarily so partial as to exercise a distorting influence on his representation of the men themselves. Napoleon, for example, may have been from a certain point of view the hero of the middle class, as Emerson chooses to consider him; but he was much besides, which cannot even be hinted at in a short lecture. The representation of such a hero, nevertheless, whether the character precisely fitted Napoleon or not, is highly spirited and suggestive; and the same may be said of the other lectures. That on Shakespeare is the least satisfying, the consummate art which is half Shakespeare's greatness making little appeal to Emerson. He appears also at variance with himself when he speaks of Shakespeare's existence as "obscure and profane," such a healthy, homely, unambitious life being precisely what he elsewhere extols as a model. The first lecture of the series, 'Uses of Great Men,' would seem to have whispered the message more vociferously repeated by Walt Whitman.
Emerson was yet to write two books of worth, not illumed with "the light that never was on sea or land," but valuable complements to his more characteristic work, and important to mankind as an indisputable proof that a teacher need not be distrusted in ordinary things because he is a mystic and a poet. 'The Conduct of Life' (1851), far inferior to his earlier writings in inspiration, is yet one of the most popular and widely influential of his works because condescending more nearly to the needs and intelligence of the average reader. It is not less truly Emersonian, less fully impregnated with his unique genius; but the themes discussed are less interesting, and the glory and the beauty of the diction are much subdued. Without it, we should have been in danger of regarding Emerson too exclusively as a transcendental seer, and ignoring the solid ground of good sense and practical sagacity from which the waving forests of his imagery drew their nutriment. It greatly promoted his fame and influence by coming into the hands of successive generations of readers who naturally inquired for his last book, found the author, with surprise, so much nearer their own intellectual position than they had been led to expect, and gradually extended the indorsement which they could not avoid according to the book, to the author himself. When the Reason and the Understanding have agreed to legitimate the pretensions of a speculative thinker, these may be considered stable. Emerson insensibly took rank with the other American institutions; it seemed natural to all, that without the retractation or modification of a syllable on his part, Harvard should in 1866 confer her highest honors upon him whose address to her Divinity School had aroused such fierce opposition in 1838. Emerson's views, being pure intuitions, rarely admitted of alteration in essence, though supplement or limitation might sometimes be found advisable. The Civil War, for instance, could not but convince him that in his zeal for the independence of the individual he had dangerously impaired the necessary authority of government. His attitude throughout this great contest was the ideal of self-sacrificing patriotism: in truth, it might be said of him, as of so few men of genius, that you could not find a situation for him, public or private, whose obligations he was not certain to fulfill. He had previously given proof of his insight into another nation by his 'English Traits,' mainly founded upon the visit he had paid to England in 1847-48: a book to be read with equal pleasure and profit by the nation of which and by the nation for which it was written; while its insight, sanity, and kindliness justify what has been said on occasion of another of Emerson's writings: "The ideologist judges the man of action more shrewdly and justly than the man of action judges the ideologist." This was the secret of Napoleon's bitter animosity to "ideologists": he felt instinctively that the man of ideas could see into him and through him, and recognize and declare his place in the scheme of the universe as an astronomer might a planet's. He would have wished to be an incalculable, original, elemental force; and it vexed him to feel that he was something whose course could be mapped and whose constitution defined by a mere mortal like a Coleridge or a De Staël, who could treat him like the incarnate Thought he was, and show him, as Emerson showed the banker, "that he also was a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe proving dim and impalpable before his sense."
The later writings of Emerson, though exhibiting few or no traces of mental decay, are in general repetitions or at least confirmations of what had once been announcements and discoveries. This can scarcely be otherwise when the mind's productions are derived from its own stuff and substance. Emerson's contemporary Longfellow could renovate and indeed augment his poetical power by resort in his old age to Italy; but change of environment brings no reinforcement of energy to the speculative thinker. Events however may come to his aid; and when Emerson was called before the people by a momentous incident like the death of President Lincoln, he rose fully to the height of the occasion. His last verses, also, are among his best. We have spoken of him as primarily and above all things a poet; but his claim to that great distinction is to be sought rather in the poetical spirit which informs all his really inspired writings, than in the comparatively restricted region of rhyme and metre. It might have been otherwise. Many of his detached passages are the very best things in verse yet written in America: but though a maker, he is not a fashioner. The artistic instinct is deficient in him; he is seldom capable of combining his thoughts into a harmonious whole. No one's expression is better when he aims at conveying a single thought with gnomic terseness, as in the mottoes to his essays; few are more obscure when he attempts continuous composition. Sometimes, as in the admirable stanzas on the Bunker Hill dedication, the subject has enforced the due clearness and compression of thought; sometimes, as in the glorious lines beginning "Not from a vain or shallow thought," he is guided unerringly by a divine rapture; in one instance at least, 'The Rhodora,' where he is writing of beauty, the instinct of beauty has given his lines the symmetry as well as the sparkle of the diamond. Could he have always written like this, he would have been supreme among American poets in metre; as it is, comparison seems unfair both to him and to them.
What we have to learn from Emerson is chiefly the Divine immanence in the world, with all its corollaries; no discovery of his, but re-stated by him in the fashion most suitable to his age, and with a cogency and attractiveness rivaled by no contemporary. If we tried to sum up his message in a phrase, we might perhaps find this in Keats's famous 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'; only, while Keats was evidently more concerned for Beauty than for Truth, Emerson held an impartial balance. These are with him the tests of each other: whatever is really true is also beautiful, whatever is really beautiful is also true. Hence his especial value to a world whose more refined spirits are continually setting up types of æsthetic beauty which must needs be delusive, as discordant with beauty contemplated under the aspect of morality; while the mass never think of bringing social and political arrangements to the no less infallible test of conformity to an ideally beautiful standard. Hence the seeming idealist is of all men the most practical; and Emerson's gospel of beauty should be especially precious to a country like his own, where circumstances must for so long tell in favor of the more material phases of civilization. Even more important is that aspect of his teaching which deals with the unalterableness of spiritual laws, the impossibility of evading Truth and Fact in the long run, or of wronging any one without at the same time wronging oneself. Happy would it be for the United States if Emerson's essay on 'Compensation' in particular could be impressed upon the conscience, where there is any, of every political leader; and interwoven with the very texture of the mind of every one who has a vote to cast at the polls!
The special adaptation of Emerson's teaching to the needs of America is, nevertheless, far from the greatest obligation under which he has laid his countrymen. His greatest service is to have embodied a specially American type of thought and feeling. It is the test of real greatness in a nation to be individual, to produce something in the world of intellect peculiar to itself and indefeasibly its own. Such intellectual growths were indeed to be found in America before Emerson's time, but they were not of the highest class. Franklin was a great sage, but his wisdom was worldly wisdom. Emerson gives us, in his own phrase, morality on fire with emotion,—the only morality which in the long run will really influence the heart of man. Man is after all too noble a being to be permanently actuated by enlightened selfishness; and when we compare Emerson with even so truly eminent a character as Franklin, we see, as he saw when he compared Carlyle with Johnson, how great a stride forward his country had taken in the mean time. But he could do for America what Carlyle could not do for Great Britain, for it was done already: he could and did create a type of wisdom especially national, as distinctive of the West as Buddha's of the East.
All the following citations from Emerson's works are reprinted by special arrangement with, and the kind permission of, Mr. Emerson's family, and Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers, Boston, Mass.
THE TIMES
From the Lecture on 'The Times,' 1841
But the subject of the Times is not an abstract question. We talk of the world, but we mean a few men and women. If you speak of the age, you mean your own platoon of people, as Dante and Milton painted in colossal their platoons, and called them Heaven and Hell. In our idea of progress we do not go out of this personal picture. We do not think the sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or our climate more temperate, but only that our relation to our fellows will be simpler and happier. What is the reason to be given for this extreme attraction which persons have for us, but that they are the Age? They are the results of the Past; they are the heralds of the Future. They indicate—these witty, suffering, blushing, intimidating figures of the only race in which there are individuals or changes—how far on the Fate has gone, and what it drives at. As trees make scenery, and constitute the hospitality of the landscape, so persons are the world to persons.... These are the pungent instructors who thrill the heart of each of us, and make all other teaching formal and cold. How I follow them with aching heart, with pining desire! I count myself nothing before them. I would die for them with joy. They can do what they will with me. How they lash us with those tongues! How they make the tears start, make us blush and turn pale, and lap us in Elysium to soothing dreams and castles in the air! By tones of triumph, of dear love, by threats, by pride that freezes, these have the skill to make the world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem the nest of tenderness and joy. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, when I remember what I have experienced from the varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of supernatural powers. There is no interest or institution so poor and withered but if a new strong man could be born into it he would immediately redeem and replace it. A personal ascendency,—that is the only fact much worth considering. I remember, some years ago, somebody shocked a circle of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed that our people were identified with their religious denominations, by declaring that an eloquent man—let him be of what sect soever—would be ordained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. To be sure he would; and not only in ours but in any church, mosque, or temple on the planet: but he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method and classification by the superior beauty of his own. Every fact we have was brought here by some person; and there is none that will not change and pass away before a person whose nature is broader than the person whom the fact in question represents. And so I find the Age walking about in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes and pleasant thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so than in the statute-book, or in the investments of capital, which rather celebrate with mournful music the obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a fanatic; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city boys very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised him shall be; in the love-glance of a girl; in the hair-splitting conscientiousness of some eccentric person who has found some new scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal,—is to be found that which shall constitute the times to come, more than in the now organized and accredited oracles. For whatever is affirmative and now advancing contains it. I think that only is real which men love and rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose; what they embrace and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify them.
And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery? Let us paint the painters. Whilst the daguerreotypist, with camera-obscura and silver plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our camera also, and let the sun paint the people. Let us paint the agitator, and the man of the old school, and the member of Congress, and the college professor, the formidable editor, the priest, and reformer, the contemplative girl, and the fair aspirant for fashion and opportunities, the woman of the world who has tried and knows—let us examine how well she knows. Could we indicate the indicators, indicate those who most accurately represent every good and evil tendency of the general mind, in the just order which they take on this canvas of time, so that all witnesses should recognize a spiritual law, as each well-known form flitted for a moment across the wall, we should have a series of sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality of ours.
Certainly I think if this were done there would be much to admire as well as to condemn; souls of as lofty a port as any in Greek or Roman fame might appear; men of great heart, of strong hand, and of persuasive speech; subtle thinkers, and men of wide sympathy, and an apprehension which looks over all history and everywhere recognizes its own. To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of men, more than enough; bloated promises, which end in nothing or little. And then, truly great men, but with some defect in their composition which neutralizes their whole force. Here is a Damascus blade, such as you may search through nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village to rust and ruin. And how many seem not quite available for that idea which they represent! Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which is much in advance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but predicts what shall soon be the general fullness; as when we stand by the sea-shore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a long while none comes up to that mark; but after some time the whole sea is there and beyond it.
FRIENDSHIP
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present....
Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to such a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of the noblest benefit.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want; but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good....
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great.
NATURE
There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal; they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame: what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood fire to which the chilled traveler rushes for safety,—and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains; and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye field; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innummerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to wind-harps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room,—these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities,—yes, and the world of villages and personalities,—behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enchantment and sequel to this original beauty. I am over-instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance; but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence.
COMPENSATION
A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or rather, it is a harpoon thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat; and if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke. The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb "I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix,—with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches,—that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow; and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be revised.
Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.
Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory of himself and his neighbor, and every new transaction alters according to its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."
A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that it is the part of prudence to face every claimant and pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base—and that is the one base thing in the universe—to receive favors and render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.
LOVE
Here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society; but as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline dove's-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find." The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires "whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence."
In like manner personal beauty is then first charming and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.
If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfill the promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out; and this with mutual joy that they are now able without offense to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.
CIRCLES
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens....
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe, seen by God, is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away as if it had been statues of ice; here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics; fortifications by gunpowder; roads and canals by railways; sails by steam; steam by electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever behind the coarse effect is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Everything is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series,—every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story,—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions, the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new hour.
SELF-RELIANCE
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the Divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it: so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room the voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic! It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the play-house: independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with éclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the Church. On my saying, "What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?" my friend suggested, "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this: the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him:—"Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be: but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold relief societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold....
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
HISTORY
Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain words, There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us; kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,—the roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strassburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell pre-exists in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabited them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world. I remember one summer day in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches,—a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snowdrift along the sides of the stone wall, which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," says Heeren in his 'Researches on the Ethiopians,' "determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings, have been, associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods, in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained-glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime.
EACH AND ALL
Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;—
He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;
The gay enchantment was undone—
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, "I covet truth:
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:"—
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;—
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
THE RHODORA
ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.
THE HUMBLE-BEE
Burly, dozing humble-bee,
Where thou art is clime for me.
Let them sail for Porto Rique.
Far-off heats through seas to seek;
I will follow thee alone,
Thou animated torrid zone!
Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines;
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.
Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion!
Sailor of the atmosphere;
Swimmer through the waves of air;
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June;
Wait, I prithee, till I come
Within earshot of thy hum,—
All without is martyrdom.
When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze
Silvers the horizon wall,
And with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And infusing subtle heats,
Turns the sod to violets,—
Thou in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace,
With thy mellow, breezy bass.
Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me, thy drowsy tone
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers;
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound,
In Indian wildernesses found;
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.
Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen;
But violets and bilberry bells,
Maple-sap and daffodels,
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern, and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue
And brier-roses, dwelt among;
All beside was unknown waste,
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher!
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous.
THE PROBLEM
I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles.
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowlèd churchman be.
Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure?
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,—
The canticles of love and woe:
The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;—
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Know'st thou what wove yon wood-bird's nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.
These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned;
And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost
Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind inspires.
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the Fathers wise,—
The Book itself before me lies,
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,—
Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines.
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowlèd portrait dear;
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.
DAYS
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under the solemn fillet saw the scorn.
MUSKETAQUID
Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And through my rock-like, solitary wont
Shot million rays of thought and tenderness.
For me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the Spring
Visits the valley;—break away the clouds,—
I bathe in the morn's soft and silvered air,
And planted world, and full executor
Of their imperfect functions.
But these young scholars who invade our hills—
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And traveling often in the cut he makes—
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names; for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, "Not in us;"
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant, and mineral say, "Not in us;"
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain;
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due;
But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;
And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
Sparrows far off, and nearer, April's bird,
Blue-coated,—flying before from tree to tree,
Courageous sing a delicate overture
To lead the tardy concert of the year.
Onward and nearer rides the sun of May;
And wide around, the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain
The surge of summer's beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.
Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plow unburies;
Here in pine houses built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.
Traveler, to thee perchance a tedious road,
Or it may be, a picture; to these men,
The landscape is an armory of powers,
Which, one by one, they know to draw and use;
They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;
They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,
And, like the chemist mid his loaded jars,
Draw from each stratum its adapted use
To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.
They turn the frost upon their chemic heap,
They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,
They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,
And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow,
Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods
O'er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,
They fight the elements with elements
(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,
Transmuted in these men to rule their like),
And by the order in the field disclose
The order regnant in the yeoman's brain.
What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,
I followed in small copy in my acre;
For there's no rood has not a star above it;
The cordial quality of pear or plum
Ascends as gladly in a single tree
As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
And every atom poises for itself,
And for the whole. The gentle deities
Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty,
The miracle of generative force,
Far-reaching concords of astronomy
Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linkèd purpose of the whole,
And—chiefest prize—found I true liberty
In the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave.
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.
For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:
"Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?
Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like nature pass
Into the winter night's extinguished mood?
Canst thou shine now, then darkle,
And being latent, feel thyself no less?
As, when the all-worshiped moon attracts the eye,
The river, hill, stems, foliage, are obscure,
Yet envies none, none are unenviable."
FROM THE 'THRENODY'
The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return....
O child of paradise,
Boy who made dear his father's home,
In whose deep eyes
Men read the welfare of the times to come,
I am too much bereft.
The world dishonored thou hast left.
O truth's and Nature's costly lie!
O trusted broken prophecy!
O richest fortune sourly crossed!
Born for the future, to the future lost!
The deep Heart answered, "Weepest thou?
Worthier cause for passion wild
If I had not taken the child.
And deemest thou as those who pore,
With agèd eyes, short way before,—
Think'st Beauty vanished from the coast
Of matter, and thy darling lost?
Taught he not thee—the man of eld,
Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
Heaven's numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?
To be alone wilt thou begin,
When worlds of lovers hem thee in?
To-morrow, when the masks shall fall
That dizen Nature's carnival,
The pure shall see by their own will,
Which overflowing Love shall fill,
'Tis not within the force of fate
The fate-conjoined to separate.
But thou, my votary, weepest thou?
I gave thee sight—where is it now?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, Bible, or of speech;
Wrote in thy mind's transparent table,
As far as the incommunicable;
Taught thee each private sign to raise
Lit by the supersolar blaze.
Past utterance, and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,
The mysteries of Nature's heart;
And though no Muse can these impart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
"I came to thee as to a friend;
Dearest, to thee I did not send
Tutors, but a joyful eye,
Innocence that matched the sky,
Lovely locks, a form of wonder,
Laughter rich as woodland thunder,
That thou might'st entertain apart
The richest flowering of all art:
And, as the great all-loving Day
Through smallest chambers takes its way,
That thou might'st break thy daily bread
With prophet, savior, and head;
That thou might'st cherish for thine own
The richest of sweet Mary's Son,
Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon.
And thoughtest thou such guest
Would in thy hall take up his rest?
Would rushing life forget her laws,
Fate's glowing revolution pause?
High omens ask diviner guess;
Not to be conned to tediousness.
And know my higher gifts unbind
The zone that girds the incarnate mind.
When the scanty shores are full
With thought's perilous, whirling pool;
When frail Nature can no more,
Then the Spirit strikes the hour:
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow,
Whose streams through Nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the half climbed zodiac?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one,—
Wilt thou transfix and make it none?
Its onward force too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineament?
Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,—
Talker!—the unreplying Fate?
Nor see the genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul?
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom?
Fair the soul's recess and shrine,
Magic-built to last a season;
Masterpiece of love benign,
Fairer that expansive reason
Whose omen 'tis, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthening scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of saints that inly burned,—
Saying, What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
Heart's love will meet thee again.
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds;
Or like a traveler's fleeing tent,
Or bow above the tempest bent;
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broad-sowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found."
CONCORD HYMN
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, April 19, 1836
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
ODE
Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857
O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.
The cannon booms from town to town,
Our pulses beat not less,
The joy-bells chime their tidings down,
Which children's voices bless.
For He that flung the broad blue fold
O'er mantling land and sea,
One third part of the sky unrolled
For the banner of the free.
The men are ripe of Saxon kind
To build an equal state,—
To take the statue from the mind
And make of duty fate.
United States! the ages plead,—
Present and Past in under-song,—
Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.
For sea and land don't understand,
Nor skies without a frown
See rights for which the one hand fights
By the other cloven down.
Be just at home; then write your scroll
Of honor o'er the sea,
And bid the broad Atlantic roll,
A ferry of the free.
And henceforth there shall be no chain,
Save underneath the sea
The wires shall murmur through the main
Sweet songs of liberty.
The conscious stars accord above,
The waters wild below,
And under, through the cable wove,
Her fiery errands go.
For He that worketh high and wise,
Nor pauses in his plan,
Will take the sun out of the skies
Ere freedom out of man.
All the above citations from Emerson's works are reprinted by permission of his family, and of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers, Boston, Mass., as stated on a previous page.
Marking the Battle Field of April 19, 1775.
From a Photograph.
