Letters on Literature eBook (2024)

Letters on Literature by Andrew Lang

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Table of Contents
Section	Page
Start of eBook	1
DEDICATION	1
PREFACE	1
INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY	1
OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY	5
FIELDING	9
LONGFELLOW	13
A FRIEND OF KEATS	17
ON VIRGIL	21
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE	24
PLOTINUS (A.D. 200-262)	28
LUCRETIUS	30
TO A YOUNG AMERICAN BOOK-HUNTER	34
ROCHEFOUCAULD	37
OF VERS DE SOCIETE	40
ON VERS DE SOCIETE	43
RICHARDSON	47
GERARD DE NERVAL	51
ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN	54
APPENDIX I	58
APPENDIX II	59
FOOTNOTES	60

DEDICATION

Dear Mr. Way,

After so many letters to people who never existed,may I venture a short one, to a person very real tome, though I have never seen him, and only know himby his many kindnesses? Perhaps you will addanother to these by accepting the Dedication of alittle work, of a sort experimental in English, andin prose, though Horace—­in Latin and inverse—­was successful with it long ago?

Very sincerely yours,

A. LANG.

To W. J. Way, Esq. Topeka, Kansas.

PREFACE

These Letters were originally published in the Independentof New York. The idea of writing them occurredto the author after he had produced “Lettersto Dead Authors.” That kind of Epistlewas open to the objection that nobody wouldwrite so frankly to a correspondent about his ownwork, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters mightbe attempted again. The Lettres a Emiliesur la Mythologie are a well-known model, butEmilie was not an imaginary correspondent. Thepersons addressed here, on the other hand, are allpeople of fancy—­the name of Lady VioletLebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray’s:gifted Hopkins is the minor poet in Dr. Oliver WendellHolmes’s “Guardian Angel.” The author’s object has been to discuss a fewliterary topics with more freedom and personal biasthan might be permitted in a graver kind of essay. The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady morefrequently the author’s critic than his collaborator.

INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.

Dear Wincott,—­You write to me, from your“bright home in the setting sun,” withthe flattering information that you have read my poor“Letters to Dead Authors.” You arekind enough to say that you wish I would write some“Letters to Living Authors;” but that,I fear, is out of the question,—­for me.

A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has alreadyremarked that the great men of the past would notcare for my shadowy epistles—­if they couldread them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, “Imay write till they can spell”—­anexercise of which ghosts are probably as incapableas was Matt’s little Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different people, andit would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to directone’s comments on them literally, in the Frenchphrase, “to their address.” Yetthere is no reason why a critic should not adopt theepistolary form.

Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatlerand Spectator, were originally nothing butletters. The vehicle permits a touch of personaltaste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shallwrite my “Letters on Literature,” of thepresent and of the past, English, American, ancient,or modern, to you, in your distant Kansas, orto such other correspondents as are kind enough toread these notes.

Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor Poetry! She is an ancient maiden of goodfamily, and is led out first at banquets, though manywould prefer to sit next some livelier and youngerMuse, the lady of fiction, or even the chatteringsoubrette of journalism. Seniores priores:Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of theworthiest lineage, and can boast a long train of gallantadmirers, dead and gone. She has been much incourts. The old Greek tyrants loved her; greatRhamses seated her at his right hand; every princehad his singers. Now we dwell in an age of democracy,and Poetry wins but a feigned respect, more out ofcourtesy, and for old friendship’s sake, thanfor liking. Though so many write verse, as inJuvenal’s time, I doubt if many read it. “None but minstrels list of sonneting.” The purchasing public, for poetry, must now consistchiefly of poets, and they are usually poor.

Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence ofthe art than the birth of so many poetical “societies”? We have the Browning Society, the Shelley Society,the Shakespeare Society, the Wordsworth Society—­latelydead. They all demonstrate that people have notthe courage to study verse in solitude, and for theirproper pleasure; men and women need confederates inthis adventure. There is safety in numbers, and,by dint of tea-parties, recitations, discussions,quarrels and the like, Dr. Furnivall and his friendskeep blowing the faint embers on the altar of Apollo. They cannot raise a flame!

In England we are in the odd position of having severalundeniable poets, and very little new poetry worthyof the name. The chief singers have outlived,if not their genius, at all events its flowering time. Hard it is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, byour very nature, to prefer “the newest songs,”as Odysseus says men did even during the war of Troy. Or, following another ancient example, we say, likethe rich nigg*rds who neglected Theocritus, “Homeris enough for all.”

Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinkingas dispassionately as we can, we still seem to readthe name of Tennyson in the golden book of Englishpoetry. I cannot think that he will ever fallto a lower place, or be among those whom only curiousstudents pore over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne, andthe rest. Lovers of poetry will always readhim as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge,and Chaucer. Look his defects in the face, throwthem into the balance, and how they disappear beforehis merits! He is the last and youngest of themighty race, born, as it were, out of due time, late,and into a feebler generation.

Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy,that he has a touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity,even an occasional perversity, a mannerism, a setof favourite epithets ("windy” and “happy"). There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay,in his earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in pieces like “Lilian”and “Eleanore,” and the others of thatkind and of that date.

Let it be admitted that “In Memoriam”has certain lapses in all that meed of melodious tears;that there are trivialities which might deserve (hereis an example) “to line a box,” or to curlsome maiden’s locks, that there are weaknessesof thought, that the poet now speaks of himself asa linnet, singing “because it must,” nowdares to approach questions insoluble, and again declinestheir solution. What is all this but the changefulmood of grief? The singing linnet, like the birdin the old English heathen apologue, dashes its lightwings painfully against the walls of the chamber intowhich it has flown out of the blind night that shallagain receive it.

I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in thatimmortal strain of sympathy and consolation, thatenchanted book of consecrated regrets. It isan easier if not more grateful task to note a certainpeevish egotism of tone in the heroes of “LocksleyHall,” of “Maud,” of “LadyClara Vere de Vere.” “You can’tthink how poor a figure you make when you tell thatstory, sir,” said Dr. Johnson to some unluckygentleman whose “figure” must certainlyhave been more respectable than that which is cut bythese whining and peevish lovers of Maud and CousinAmy.

Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the“Idylls,” is like an Albert in blank verse,an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, anda Lancelot for friend. The “Idylls,”with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability,and love of talking with Vivien about what is notso respectable. One wishes, at times, that the“Morte d’Arthur” had remained alonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, aspolished as Sophocles. But then we must havemissed, with many other admirable things, the “LastBattle in the West.”

People who come after us will be more impressed thanwe are by the Laureate’s versatility. He has touched so many strings, from “Will Waterproof’sMonologue,” so far above Praed, to the agonyof “Rizpah,” the invincible energy of“Ulysses,” the languor and the fairy musicof the “Lotus Eaters,” the grace as ofa Greek epigram which inspires the lines to Catullusand to Virgil. He is with Milton for learning,with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for gracefulrecasting of ancient golden lines, and, even in thelatest volume of his long life, “we may tellfrom the straw,” as Homer says, “what thegrain has been.”

There are many who make it a kind of religion to regardMr. Browning as the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is thankful as for a veritablegreat poet; but can we believe that impartial posteritywill rate him with the Laureate, or that so large aproportion of his work will endure? The charmof an enigma now attracts students who feel proudof being able to understand what others find obscure. But this attraction must inevitably become a stumbling-block.

Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probablythe answer is that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be made out by a person ofaverage intelligence who will read them as hard as,for example, he would find it necessary to read the“Logic” of Hegel. There is a storyof two clever girls who set out to peruse “Sordello,”and corresponded with each other about their progress. “Somebody is dead in ‘Sordello,’”one of them wrote to her friend. “I don’tquite know who it is, but it must make thingsa little clearer in the long run.” Alas!a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clearthe stage of “Sordello.” It is hardlyto be hoped that “Sordello,” or “RedCotton Night Cap Country,” or “Fifine,”will continue to be struggled with by posterity. But the mass of “Men and Women,” thatunexampled gallery of portraits of the inmost heartsand secret minds of priests, prigs, princes, girls,lovers, poets, painters, must survive immortally, whilecivilization and literature last, while men care toknow what is in men.

No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntaryharshness of style, can destroy the merit of thesepoems, which have nothing like them in the lettersof the past, and must remain without successful imitatorsin the future. They will last all the betterfor a certain manliness of religious faith—­somethingsturdy and assured—­not moved by winds ofdoctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is certainlyone of Mr. Browning’s attractions in this fickleand shifting generation. He cannot be forgottenwhile, as he says—­

“Asunset touch,
A chorus ending of Euripides,”

remind men that they are creatures of immortality,and move “a thousand hopes and fears.”

If one were to write out of mere personal preference,and praise most that which best fits one’s privatemoods, I suppose I should place Mr. Matthew Arnoldat the head of contemporary English poets. Reasonand reflection, discussion and critical judgment,tell one that he is not quite there.

Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate,nor his versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor hiscopiousness. He had not the microscopic glanceof Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, whichtears the life out of them as the Aztec priest pluckedthe very heart from the victim. We know that,but yet Mr. Arnold’s poetry has our love; hislines murmur in our memory through all the stressand accidents of life. “The Scholar Gipsy,”“Obermann,” “Switzerland,”the melancholy majesty of the close of “Sohraband Rustum,” the tenderness of those elegiacson two kindred graves beneath the Himalayas and bythe Midland Sea; the surge and thunder of “DoverBeach,” with its “melancholy, long-withdrawingroar;” these can only cease to whisper to usand console us in that latest hour when life herselfceases to “moan round with many voices.”

My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting,and too didactic, that he protests too much, and considerstoo curiously, that his best poems are, at most, “achain of highly valuable thoughts.” Itmay be so; but he carries us back to “wet, bird-hauntedEnglish lawns;” like him “we know whatwhite and purple fritillaries the grassy harvest ofthe river yields,” with him we try to practiseresignation, and to give ourselves over to that spirit

“Whose purpose is not missed,
While life endures, while thingssubsist.”

Mr. Arnold’s poetry is to me, in brief, whatWordsworth’s was to his generation. Hehas not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, whennature does for him what his “lutin”did for Corneille, “takes the pen from his handand writes for him.” But he has none ofthe creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invadeseven “Tintern Abbey.” He is, as Mr.Swinburne says, “the surest-footed” ofour poets. He can give a natural and lovelylife even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, asto “these bright and ancient snakes, that oncewere Cadmus and Harmonia.”

Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruderworld coming to us “breathed softly throughthe flutes of the Grecians.” But even theGrecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apolloand Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr.Arnold’s song, that beautiful song in “Empedocleson Etna,” which has the perfection of sculptureand the charm of the purest colour. It is fullof the silver light of dawn among the hills, of themusic of the loch’s dark, slow waves among thereeds, of the scent of the heather, and the wet tressesof the birch.

Surely, then, we have had great poets living amongus, but the fountains of their song are silent, orflow but rarely over a clogged and stony channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone,or who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That is a melancholy question, which I shall tryto answer (with doubt and dread enough) in my nextletter. {1}

OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

My dear Wincott,—­I hear that a book haslately been published by an American lady, in whichall the modern poets are represented. The singershave been induced to make their own selections, andput forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot,anapaest or trochee, or whatever it may be. My information goes further, and declares that thereare but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspiredAmericans.

This Western collection of modern minstrelsy showshow very dangerous it is to write even on the Englishpoetry of the day. Eighteen is long odds againsta single critic, and Major Bellenden, in “OldMortality,” tells us that three to one are oddsas long as ever any warrior met victoriously, andthat warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.

I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimateeither the eighteen of England or the sixty of theStates. It is enough to speak about three livingpoets, in addition to those masters treated of in mylast letter. Two of the three you will have guessedat—­Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William Morris. The third, I dare say, you do not know even by name. I think he is not one of the English eighteen—­Mr.Robert Bridges. His muse has followed the epicureanmaxim, and chosen the shadowy path, fallentis semitavitae, where the dew lies longest on the grass,and the red rowan berries droop in autumn above theyellow St. John’s wort. But you will findher all the fresher for her country ways.

My knowledge of Mr. William Morris’s poetrybegins in years so far away that they seem like reminiscencesof another existence. I remember sitting beneathCardinal Beaton’s ruined castle at St. Andrews,looking across the bay to the sunset, while some onerepeated “Two Red Roses across the Moon.” And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense.With Mr. Morris’s other early verses, “TheDefence of Guinevere,” this song of the moonand the roses was published in 1858. Probablythe little book won no attention; it is not populareven now. Yet the lyrics remain in memorieswhich forget all but a general impression of the vast“Earthly Paradise,” that huge decorativepoem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men, andwaters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palacesare all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shakena little by the wind of death. They are notliving and breathing people, these persons of thefables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint,and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the characters in the lyrics in “The Defenceof Guinevere” are people of flesh and blood,under their chain armour and their velvet, and thetrappings of their tabards.

There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr.Morris’s old Oxford days when the spirit ofthe Middle Ages entered into him, with all its contradictionsof faith and doubt, and its earnest desire to enjoythis life to the full in war and love, or to makecertain of a future in which war is not, and all loveis pure heavenly. If one were to choose favouritesfrom “The Defence of Guinevere,” they wouldbe the ballads of “Shameful Death,” andof “The Sailing of the Sword,” and “TheWind,” which has the wind’s wail in itsvoice, and all the mad regret of “Porphyria’sLover” in its burden.

The use of “colour-words,” in all thesepieces, is very curious and happy. The red ruby,the brown falcon, the white maids, “the scarletroofs of the good town,” in “The Sailingof the Sword,” make the poem a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayerof his lady, in “The Wind”:

“For my chair is heavy andcarved, and with sweeping green behind
It is hung, and the dragons thereongrin out in the gusts of the wind;
On its folds an orange lies witha deep gash cut in the rind;
If I move my chair it will scream,and the orange will roll out far,
And the faint yellow juice oozeout like blood from a wizard’s jar,
And the dogs will howl for thosewho went last month the war.”

“The Blue Closet,” which is said to havebeen written for some drawings of Mr. Rossetti, isalso a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Ourbrief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60,when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburnewere undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiarturn of taste to admire these strange things, though“The Haystack in the Floods,” with itstragedy, must surely appeal to all who read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feelas if Mr. Morris’s long later poems, “TheEarthly Paradise” especially, were less art than“art manufacture.” This may be anungrateful and erroneous sentiment. “TheEarthly Paradise,” and still more certainly “Jason,”are full of such pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a contemporary politician, theyare “good, but copious.” Even fromnarrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold’s parableof “The Progress of Poetry.”

“The Mount is mute, the channeldry.”

Euripides has been called “the meteoric poet,”and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name—­Ionly knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaevaltale in prose—­when he published “Atalantain Calydon” in 1865. I remember takingup the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union,and being instantly led captive by the beauty andoriginality of the verse.

There was this novel “meteoric” characterin the poem: the writer seemed to rejoice insnow and fire, and stars, and storm, “the bluecold fields and folds of air,” in all the primitiveforces which were alive before this earth was; thenaked vast powers that circle the planets and farthestconstellations. This quality, and his variedand sonorous verse, and his pessimism, put into themouth of a Greek chorus, were the things that struckone most in Mr. Swinburne. He was, above all,“a mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies,”and one looked eagerly for his next poems. Theycame with disappointment and trouble.

The famous “Poems and Ballads” have becomeso well known that people can hardly understand thenoise they made. I don’t wonder at thescandal, even now. I don’t see the funof several of the pieces, except the mischievous funof shocking your audience. However, “TheLeper” and his company are chiefly boyish, inthe least favourable sense of the word. Theydo not destroy the imperishable merit of the “Hymnto Proserpine” and the “Garden of Proserpine”and the “Triumph of Time” and “Itylus.”

Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one’sold opinion, that English poetry contains no verbalmusic more original, sonorous, and sweet than Mr.Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young,remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago,then, he had enabled the world to take his measure;he had given proofs of a true poet; he was learnedtoo in literature as few poets have been since Milton,and, like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languagesof the ancient world and in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of great excellence;probably no scholar who was not also a poet could matchhis Greek lines on Landor.

What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poetof a rank even higher than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There is no science that canmaster this chemistry of the brain. He is toocopious. “Bothwell” is long enoughfor six plays, and “Tristram of Lyonesse”is prolix beyond even mediaeval narrative. Heis too pertinacious; children are the joy of the worldand Victor Hugo is a great poet; but Mr. Swinburnealmost makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. byhis endless odes to Hugo, and rondels to small boysand girls. Ne quid nimis, that is the goldenrule which he constantly spurns, being too luxuriant,too emphatic, and as fond of repeating himself asProfessor Freeman. Such are the defects of sonoble a genius; thus perverse Nature has decided thatit shall be, Nature which makes no ruby without aflaw.

The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strangeto many lovers of poetry who would like nothing betterthan to make acquaintance with his verse. Buthis verse is not so easily found. This poet neverwrites in magazines; his books have not appealed tothe public by any sort of advertisem*nt, only twoor three of them have come forth in the regular way. The first was “Poems, by Robert Bridges, Batchelorof Arts in the University of Oxford. Parva segessatis est. London: Pickering, 1873.”

This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, andthe author has distributed some portions of it insucceeding pamphlets, or in books printed at Mr. Daniel’sprivate press in Oxford. In these, as in allMr. Bridges’s poems, there is a certain austereand indifferent beauty of diction and a memory ofthe old English poets, Milton and the earlier lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased with the “Elegyon a Lady whom Grief for the Death of Her BetrothedKilled.”

“Let the priests go before,arrayed in white,
And let the dark-stoledminstrels follow slow
Next they that bear her, honouredon this night,
And then the maidensin a double row,
Each singing softand low,
And each on high a torch upstaying:
Unto her lover lead her forth withlight,
With music and with singing, andwith praying.”

This is a stately stanza.

In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeauxand triolets, turning his back on all these thingsas soon as they became popular. In spite oftheir popularity I have the audacity to like them still,in their humble twittering way. Much more inhis true vein were the lines, “Clear and GentleStream,” and all the other verses in which, likea true Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames:

“There is a hill beside thesilver Thames,
Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,
And brilliant under foot with thousand gems
Steeply the thickets to his floods decline.
Straight trees in every place
Their thick tops interlace,
And pendent branches trail their foliage fine
Upon his watery face.

* * * * *

A reedy island guards the sacredbower
And hides it from the meadow, where in peace
The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,
Robbing the golden market of the bees.
And laden branches float
By banks of myosote;
And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lys
Delay the loitering boat.”

I cannot say how often I have read that poem, andhow delightfully it carries the breath of our Riverthrough the London smoke. Nor less welcome arethe two poems on spring, the “Invitation to theCountry,” and the “Reply.” In these, besides their verbal beauty and their charmingpictures, is a manly philosophy of Life, which animatesMr. Bridges’s more important pieces—­his“Prometheus the Firebringer,” and his “Nero,”a tragedy remarkable for the representation of Nerohimself, the luxurious human tiger. From “Prometheus”I make a short extract, to show the quality of Mr.Bridges’s blank verse:

“Nor is there any spirit onearth astir,
Nor ’neath the airy vault,nor yet beyond
In any dweller in far-reaching space
Nobler or dearer than the spiritof man:
That spirit which lives in eachand will not die,
That wooeth beauty, and for allgood things
Urgeth a voice, or still in passionsigheth,
And where he loveth, draweth theheart with him.”

Mr. Bridges’s latest book is his “Erosand Psyche” (Bell & Sons, who publish the “Prometheus"). It is the old story very closely followed, and beautifullyretold, with a hundred memories of ancient poets:Homer, Dante, Theocritus, as well as of Apuleius.

I have named Mr. Bridges here because his poems areprobably all but unknown to readers well acquaintedwith many other English writers of late days. On them, especially on actual contemporaries or juniorsin age, it would be almost impertinent for me to speakto you; but, even at that risk, I take the chanceof directing you to the poetry of Mr. Bridges. I owe so much pleasure to its delicate air, that,if speech be impertinence, silence were ingratitude.{2}

FIELDING

To Mrs. Goodhart, in the Upper Mississippi Valley.

Dear Madam,—­Many thanks for the New Yorknewspaper you have kindly sent me, with the statisticsof book-buying in the Upper Mississippi Valley.Those are interesting particulars which tell one somuch about the taste of a community.

So the Rev. E. P. Roe is your favourite novelist there;a thousand of his books are sold for every two copiesof the works of Henry Fielding? This appearsto me to speak but oddly for taste in the Upper MississippiValley. On Mr. Roe’s works I have no criticismto pass, for I have not read them carefully.

But I do think your neighbours lose a great deal byneglecting Henry Fielding. You will tell mehe is coarse (which I cannot deny); you will remindme of what Dr. Johnson said, rebuking Mrs. Hannah More. “I never saw Johnson really angry with me butonce,” writes that sainted maiden lady. “I alluded to some witty passage in ‘TomJones.’” He replied: “I amshocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confessionwhich no modest lady should ever make.”

You remind me of this, and that Johnson was no prude,and that his age was tolerant. You add thatthe literary taste of the Upper Mississippi Valleyis much more pure than the waters of her majestic river,and that you only wish you knew who the two culpritswere that bought books of Fielding’s.

Ah, madam, how shall I answer you? Rememberthat if you have Johnson on your side, on mine I haveMrs. More herself, a character purer than “theconsecrated snow that lies on Dian’s lap.” Again, we cannot believe Johnson was fair to Fielding,who had made his friend, the author of “Pamela,”very uncomfortable by his jests. Johnson ownedthat he read all “Amelia” at one sitting. Could so worthy a man have been so absorbed by anunworthy book?

Once more, I am not recommending Fielding to boysand girls. “Tom Jones” was one ofthe works that Lydia Languish hid under the sofa; evenMiss Languish did not care to be caught with thathumorous foundling. “Fielding was the lastof our writers who drew a man,” Mr. Thackeraysaid, “and he certainly did not study from adraped model.”

For these reasons, and because his language is oftenunpolished, and because his morality (that he is alwayspreaching) is not for “those that eddy roundand round,” I do not desire to see Fielding popularamong Miss Alcott’s readers. But no manwho cares for books can neglect him, and many womenare quite manly enough, have good sense and good tasteenough, to benefit by “Amelia,” by muchof “Tom Jones.” I don’t sayby “Joseph Andrews.” No man everrespected your sex more than Henry Fielding. What says his reformed rake, Mr. Wilson, in “JosephAndrews”?

“To say the Truth, I do not perceive that Inferiorityof Understanding which the Levity of Rakes, the Dulnessof Men of Business, and the Austerity of the Learnedwould persuade us of in Women. As for my Wife,I declare I have found none of my own Sex capable ofmaking juster Observations on Life, or of deliveringthem more agreeably, nor do I believe any one possessedof a faithfuller or braver Friend.”

He has no other voice wherein to speak of a happymarriage. Can you find among our genteel writersof this age, a figure more beautiful, tender, devoted,and in all good ways womanly than Sophia Western’s? “Yes,” you will say; “but the manmust have been a brute who could give her to Tom Jones,to ‘that fellow who sold himself,’ as ColonelNewcome said.” “There you have meat an avail,” in the language of the old romancers.There we touch the centre of Fielding’s morality,a subject ill to discuss, a morality not for everydaypreaching.

Fielding distinctly takes himself for a moralist. He preaches as continually as Thackeray. Andhis moral is this: “Let a man be kind,generous, charitable, tolerant, brave, honest—­andwe may pardon him vices of young blood, and the stainsof adventurous living.” Fielding has nomercy on a seducer. Lovelace would have faredworse with him than with Richardson, who, I verilybelieve, admired that infernal (excuse me) cowardand villain. The case of young Nightingale, in“Tom Jones,” will show you what Fieldingthought of such gallants. Why, Tom himself preachesto Nightingale. “Miss Nancy’s Interestalone, and not yours, ought to be your sole Consideration,”cried Thomas, . . . “and the very best and truestHonour, which is Goodness, requires it of you,”that is, requires that Nightingale shall marry MissNancy.

How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which wereperfectly honest, with his own astonishing lack ofretenue, and with Lady Bellaston, is just thepuzzle. We cannot very well argue about it. I only ask you to let Jones in his right mind partlyexcuse Jones in a number of very delicate situations. If you ask me whether Sophia had not, after her marriage,to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I must admit thatprobably it was so. But Dr. Johnson himselfthought little of that.

I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding’smorality is to take the best of it and leave the remainderalone. Here I find that I have unconsciouslyagreed with that well-known philosopher, Mr. JamesBoswell, the younger, of Auchinleck:

“The moral tendency of Fielding’s writings. . . is ever favourable to honour and honesty, andcherishes the benevolent and generous affections.He who is as good as Fielding would make him is anamiable member of society, and may be led on by moreregulated instructions to a higher state of ethicalperfection.”

Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without hisvanity and his oddity, as brave and generous as Jones,without Jones’s faults, and what a world ofmen and women it will become! Fielding did notpaint that unborn world, he sketched the world heknew very well. He found that respectable peoplewere often perfectly blind to the duties of charityin every sense of the word. He found that theonly man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews,when stripped and beaten by robbers was a postilionwith defects in his moral character. In short,he knew that respectability often practised none butthe strictly self-regarding virtues, and that povertyand recklessness did not always extinguish a nativegoodness of heart. Perhaps this discovery madehim leniently disposed to “characters and situationsso wretchedly low and dirty, that I,” say theauthor of “Pamela,” “could not beinterested for any one of them.”

How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind thatbefogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darkenthe eyes of the author of “those deplorably tediouslamentations, ‘Clarissa’ and ‘SirCharles Grandison,’” as Horace Walpolecalls them!

Fielding asks his Muse to give him “humour andgood humour.” What novelist was ever sorich in both? Who ever laughed at mankind withso much affection for mankind in his heart? This love shines in every book of his. The poorhave all his good-will, and in him an untired advocateand friend. What a life the poor led in the Englandof 1742! There never before was such tyrannywithout a servile insurrection. I remember adreadful passage in “Joseph Andrews,” whereLady Booby is trying to have Fanny, Joseph’ssweetheart, locked up in prison:—­

“It would do a Man good,” says her accomplice,Scout, “to see his Worship, our Justice, commita Fellow to Bridewell; he takes so much pleasurein it. And when once we ha’ ’um there,we seldom hear any more o’ ’um. He’s either starved or eat up by Vermin in aMonth’s Time.”

This England, with its dominant Squires, who behavedmuch like robber barons on the Rhine, was the merryEngland Fielding tried to turn from some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults,it was a better place, with a better breed of men,than our England of to-day. But Fielding satirizedintolerable injustice.

He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. Ifwe are to have nothing but “Art for Art’ssake,” that burly body of Harry Fielding’smust even go to the wall. The first Beau Didapperof a critic that passes can shove him aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes “witha purpose” like Dickens—­obsoleteold authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewellhe goes, if l’Art pour l’Art isall the literary law and the prophets.

But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long. His noble English, his sonorous voice must be heard. There is somewhat inexpressibly heartening, to me,in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carriedalong, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trustingone’s self to every whirl and eddy, with a feelingof safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motionof the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more,as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has hisinnocent pedantry. He likes to quote Greek (fancyquoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make therogues of printers set it up correctly. He likesto air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece ofAristotle—­not hackneyed—­to showyou that if he is writing about “characters andsituations so wretchedly low and dirty,” heis yet a student and a critic.

Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, accordingto Johnson, was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understandBooth’s conversations with the author who remarkedthat “Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the French Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of MadameDacier and Monsieur Eustathius.” What knewSamuel of Eustathius? I not only can forgiveFielding his pedantry; I like it! I like a manof letters to be a scholar, and his little pardonabledisplay and ostentation of his Greek only brings himnearer to us, who have none of his genius, and donot approach him but in his faults. They makehim more human; one loves him for them as he lovesSquire Western, with all his failings. Delightful,immortal Squire!

It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that calledout “Hurray for old England! Twenty thousandhonest Frenchmen are landed in Sussex.” But it was Western that talked of “OneActon, that the Story Book says was turned into aHare, and his own Dogs kill’d ’un, andeat ’un.” And have you forgottenthe popular discussion (during the Forty-five) of theaffairs of the Nation, which, as Squire Western said,“all of us understand”? Said thePuppet-Man, “I don’t care what Religioncomes, provided the Presbyterians are not uppermost,for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows.” But the Puppet-Man had no vote in 1745. Now,to our comfort, he can and does exercise the gloriousprivilege of the franchise.

There is no room in this epistle for Fielding’sglorious gallery of characters—­for LadyBellaston, who remains a lady in her debaucheries,and is therefore so unlike our modern representativeof her class, Lady Betty, in Miss Broughton’s“Doctor Cupid;” for Square, and Thwackum,and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady Booby,and Honour, that undying lady’s maid, and Partridge,and Captain Blifil and Amelia, the fair and kind andgood!

It is like the whole world of that old England—­themaids of the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen,the hosts of the taverns, the beaux, the starvelingauthors—­all alive; all (save the authors)full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, everyman ready for a brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the lusty old militant world? What will become of us, and why do we prefer to Fielding—­anumber of meritorious moderns? Who knows? But do not let us prefer anything to our Englishfollower of Cervantes, our wise, merry, learned Sancho,trudging on English roads, like Don Quixote on thepaths of Spain.

But I cannot convert you. You will turn to somestory about store-clerks and summer visitors. Such is his fate who argues with the fair.

LONGFELLOW

To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

My dear Mainwaring,—­You are very good toask me to come up and listen to a discussion, by theCollege Browning Society, of the minor characters in“Sordello;” but I think it would suit mebetter, if you didn’t mind, to come up whenthe May races are on. I am not deeply concernedabout the minor characters in “Sordello,”and have long reconciled myself to the convictionthat I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearingSordello’s story told in an intelligible manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about mybookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here andthere.

What an interesting tract might be written by anyone who could remember, and honestly describe, theimpressions that the same books have made on him atdifferent ages! There is Longfellow, for example. I have not read much in him for twenty years. I take him up to-day, and what a flood of memorieshis music brings with it! To me it is like asad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing overthe empty fields, bringing the scents of October,the song of a belated bird, and here and there a redleaf from the tree. There is that autumnal senseof things fair and far behind, in his poetry, or,if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsakenlodges of the past. Yes, it comes to one outof one’s boyhood; it breathes of a world veryvaguely realized—­a world of imitative sentimentsand forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellowfirst woke me to that later sense of what poetry means,which comes with early manhood.

Before, one had been content, I am still content,with Scott in his battle pieces; with the balladsof the Border. Longfellow had a touch of reflectionyou do not find, of course, in battle poems, in a boy’sfavourites, such as “Of Nelson and the North,”or “Ye Mariners of England.”

His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite;they were neither when one was fifteen. To readthe “Voices of the Night,” in particular—­thoseearly pieces—­is to be back at school again,on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer’sday, high in some tree, with a wide prospect of gardensand fields.

There is that mysterious note in the tone and measurewhich one first found in Longfellow, which has sincereached our ears more richly and fully in Keats, inColeridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,

“The welcome, the thrice prayedfor, the most fair,
The best-belovedNight!”

Is not that version of Euripides exquisite—­doesit not seem exquisite still, though this is not thequality you expect chiefly from Longfellow, thoughyou rather look to him for honest human matter thanfor an indefinable beauty of manner?

I believe it is the manner, after all, of the “Psalmof Life” that has made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent people, that it is “asgood as a sermon,” that they value it for thisreason, that its lesson has strengthened the heartsof men in our difficult life. They say so, andthey think so: but the poem is not nearly as goodas a sermon; it is not even coherent. But itreally has an original cadence of its own, with itsdouble rhymes; and the pleasure of this cadence hascombined, with a belief that they are being edified,to make readers out of number consider the “Psalmsof Life” a masterpiece. You—­mylearned prosodist and student of Browning and Shelley—­willagree with me that it is not a masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experiencebrought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion,as your elders can.

How many other poems of Longfellow’s there arethat remind us of youth, and of those kind, vanishedfaces which were around us when we read “TheReaper and the Flowers”! I read again,and, as the poet says,

“Then the forms of the departed
Enter at the opendoor,
The beloved, the true-hearted
Come to visitme once more.”

Compare that simple strain, you lover of TheophileGautier, with Theo’s own “Chateau de Souvenir”in “Emaux et Camees,” and confess the truth,which poet brings the break into the reader’svoice? It is not the dainty, accomplished Frenchman,the jeweller in words; it is the simpler speaker ofour English tongue who stirs you as a ballad movesyou. I find one comes back to Longfellow, andto one’s old self of the old years. Idon’t know a poem “of the affections,”as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that Ilike better than Thackeray’s “Cane-bottomedChair.” Well, “The Fire of Driftwood”and this other of Longfellow’s with its absolutelack of pretence, its artful avoidance of art, is notless tender and true.

“And she sits and gazes atme
With those deepand tender eyes,
Like the stars, so still and saintlike,
Looking downwardfrom the skies.”

It is from the skies that they look down, those eyeswhich once read the “Voices of the Night”from the same book with us, how long ago! Solong ago that one was half-frightened by the legendof the “Beleaguered City.” I knowthe ballad brought the scene to me so vividly thatI expected, any frosty night, to see how

“The white pavilions roseand fell
On the alarmedair;”

and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath thedark “Three Brethren’s Cairn,” thatI half-hoped to watch when “the troubled armyfled”—­fled with battered bannersof mist drifting through the pines, down to the Tweedand the sea. The “Skeleton in Armour”comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the “Wreckof the Hesperus” touches one in the old, simpleway after so many, many days of verse-reading and evenverse-writing.

In brief, Longfellow’s qualities are so mixedwith what the reader brings, with so many kindliestassociations of memory, that one cannot easily criticizehim in cold blood. Even in spite of this friendlinessand affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, ofcourse, that he does moralize too much. Thefirst part of his lyrics is always the best; the partwhere he is dealing directly with his subject. Then comes the “practical application”as preachers say, and I feel now that it is sometimesuncalled for, disenchanting, and even manufactured.

Look at his “Endymion.” It is theearlier verses that win you:

“And silver white the rivergleams
As if Diana in her dreams
Had dropt hersilver bow
Upon the meadowslow.”

That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in mannerand matter. But the moral and consolatory applicationis too long—­too much dwelt on:

“Like Dian’s kiss, unasked,unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought.”

Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzasat the close, and not only does the poet “moralizehis song,” but the moral is feeble, and fantastic,and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriadsof persons now of whom it cannot be said that

“Some heart, though unknown,
Responds untohis own.”

If it were true, the reflection could only consolea school-girl.

A poem like “My Lost Youth” is neededto remind one of what the author really was, “simple,sensuous, passionate.” What a lovely versethis is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath ofLongfellow’s favourite Finnish “Kalevala,”“a verse of a Lapland song,” like a windover pines and salt coasts:

“I remember the black wharvesand the slips,
And the sea-tide,tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with beardedlips,
And the beauty and the mystery ofthe ships,
And the magicof the sea.”

Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magicianand master of language—­not a Keats by anymeans—­has often, by sheer force of plainsincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matchedhis thought with music that haunts us and will notbe forgotten:

“Ye open the eastern windows,
That look towardsthe sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows,
And the brooksof morning run.”

There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli’s, theVirgin seated with the Child by a hedge of roses,in a faint blue air, as of dawn in Paradise.This poem of Longfellow’s, “The Children’sHour,” seems, like Botticelli’s painting,to open a door into the paradise of children, wheretheir angels do ever behold that which is hidden frommen—­what no man hath seen at any time.

Longfellow is exactly the antithesis of Poe, who,with all his science of verse and ghostly skill, hasno humanity, or puts none of it into his lines. One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the otheris the poet of Death, and of bizarre shapesof death, from which Heaven deliver us!

Neither of them shows any sign of being particularlyAmerican, though Longfellow, in “Evangeline”and “Hiawatha,” and the “New EnglandTragedies,” sought his topics in the historyand traditions of the New World.

To me “Hiawatha” seems by far the bestof his longer efforts; it is quite full of sympathywith men and women, nature, beasts, birds, weather,and wind and snow. Everything lives with a humanbreath, as everything should live in a poem concernedwith these wild folk, to whom all the world, and allin it, is personal as themselves. Of course thereare lapses of style in so long a piece. It jarson us in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boyPersephone of the Indian Eleusinia, to be told that

“the gentleChibiabos
Sang in tones of deep emotion!”

“Tones of deep emotion” may pass in anovel, but not in this epic of the wild wood and thewild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy recordof those dim, mournful races which have left no storyof their own, only here and there a ruined wigwambeneath the forest leaves.

A poet’s life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does not wish he knew as little of Burn’sas of Shakespeare’s? Of Longfellow’sthere is nothing to know but good, and his poetrytestifies to it—­his poetry, the voice ofthe kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever bore. I think there are not many things in poets’lives more touching than his silence, in verse, asto his own chief sorrow. A stranger intermeddlesnot with it, and he kept secret his brief lay on thatinsuperable and incommunicable regret. Muchwould have been lost had all poets been as reticent,yet one likes him better for it than if he had givenus a new “Vita Nuova.”

What an immense long way I have wandered from “Sordello,”my dear Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books,his thoughts, like those of a boy, “are long,long thoughts.” I have not written on Longfellow’ssonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admitthat you admire them as much as I do.

A FRIEND OF KEATS

To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

Dear Egerton,—­Yes, as you say, Mr. SidneyColvin’s new “Life of Keats” {3}has only one fault, it’s too short. Perhaps,also, it is almost too studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers how Keats (like Shelley) hasbeen gushed about, and how easy it is to gush aboutKeats, one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his exampleof reserve. What a good fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in the best sense, moral heseems, when one compares his life and his letters withthe vagaries of contemporary poets who lived longerthan he, though they, too, died young, and who leftmore work, though not better, never so good, perhaps,as Keats’s best.

However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write,but of his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds. Noscitura sociis—­a man is known by the companyhe keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been excellentcompany, if we may judge him by his writings. He comes into Lord Houghton’s “Life andLetters of Keats” very early (vol. i. p. 30). We find the poet writing to him in the April of 1817,from the Isle of Wight. “I shall forthwithbegin my ‘Endymion,’ which I hope I shallhave got some way with before you come, when we willread our verses in a delightful place I have set myheart upon, near the castle.” Keats ends“your sincere friend,” and a man to whomKeats was a sincere friend had some occasion for pride.

About Reynolds’s life neither time nor spacepermits me to say very much, if I knew very much,which I don’t. He was the son of a masterin one of our large schools. He went to theBar. He married a sister of Thomas Hood. He wrote, like Hood, in the London Magazine. With Hood for ally, he published “Odes andAddresses to Great People;” the third edition,which I have here, is of 1826. The late relationsof the brothers-in-law were less happy; possibly theladies of their families quarrelled; that is usuallythe way of the belligerent sex.

Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial officein the Isle of Wight, some thirty years later thanhis famous friend, the author of “Endymion.”“It is to be lamented,” says Lord Houghton,“that Mr. Reynolds’s own remarkable verseis not better known.” Let us try to knowit a little better.

I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds’s firstvolume of poems, which was published before “Endymion.” It contained some Oriental melodies, and won a carelessgood word from Byron. The earliest work of hisI can lay my hand on is “The Fancy, a Selectionfrom the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran,of Gray’s Inn, Student at Law, with a briefmemoir of his Life.” There is a motto fromWordsworth:

“Frank are the sports, thestains are fugitive.” {4}

It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Everyone knows how Byron took lessons from Jackson theboxer; how Shelley had a fight at Eton in which hequoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; howChristopher North whipped the professional pugilist;how Keats himself never had enough of fighting atschool, and beat the butcher afterwards. Hisfriend Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the gloves. His imaginary character, Peter Corcoran, is a poeticallad, who becomes possessed by a passion for prize-fighting. It seems odd in a poet, but “the stains arefugitive.”

We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strengthand improving his science, than loafing about withlong hair and giving anxious thought to the colourof his necktie. It is a disinterested preference,as fighting was never my forte, any more thanit was Artemus Ward’s. At school I was“more remarkable for what I suffered than forwhat I achieved.”

Peter Corcoran “fought nearly as soon as hecould walk,” wherein he resembled Keats, andpart of his character may even have been borrowedfrom the author of the “Ode to the Nightingale.” Peter fell in love, wrote poetry, witnessed a “mill”at the Fives-Court, and became the Laureate of theRing. “He has made a good set-to with Eales,Tom Belcher (the monarch of the gloves!), andTurner, and it is known that he has parried the difficultand ravaging hand even of Randall himself.” “The difficult and ravaging hand”—­thereis a style for you!

Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; letus remember that Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus haveall described spirited rallies with admiration andgood taste. From his dissipation in cider-cellarsand coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrotea sonnet that applies well enough to Reynolds’sown career:

“Were this a feather froman eagle’s wing,
And thou, my tabletwhite! a marble tile
Taken from ancientJove’s majestic pile—­
And might I dip my feather in somespring,
Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:—­
And were my thoughtsbrought from some starry isle
In Heaven’sblue sea—­I then might with a smile
Write down a hymn to fame, and proudlysing!

“But I am mortal: andI cannot write
Aught that mayfoil the fatal wing of Time.
Silent, I lookat Fame: I cannot climb
To where her Temple is—­Notmine the might:—­
I have some glimmeringof what is sublime—­
But, ah! it is a most inconstantlight.”

Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholymood.

“About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang descriptionof a fight he had witnessed to a lady.” Unlucky Peter! “Was ever woman in thismanner wooed?” The lady “glanced hereye over page after page in hopes of meeting withsomething that was intelligible,” and no wondershe did not care for a long letter “devotedto the subject of a mill between Belasco and the Brummagemyouth.” Peter was so ill-advised as toappear before her with glorious scars, “twoblack eyes” in fact, and she “was inexorablycruel.” Peter did not survive her disdain. “The lady still lives, and is married”! It is ever thus!

Peter’s published works contain an Americantragedy. Peter says he got it from a friend,who was sending him an American copy of “GuyMannering” “to present to a young ladywho, strange to say, read books and wore pockets,”virtues unusual in the sex. One of the songs(on the delights of bull-baiting) contains the mostvigorous lines I have ever met, but they are toovigorous for our lax age. The tragedy ends mosttragically, and the moral comes in “better late,”says the author, “than never.” Theother poems are all very lively, and very much outof date. Poor Peter!

Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossibleto guess whether the poems of Peter Corcoran did ordid not contain allusions to his own more lucky loveaffair. “Upon my soul,” writes Keats,“I have been getting more and more close toyou every day, ever since I knew you, and now oneof the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage.” Reynolds was urging Keats to publish the “Potof Basil” “as an answer to the attackmade on me in Blackwood’s Magazine andthe Quarterly Review.”

Next Keats writes that he himself “never wasin love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has hauntedme these two days.” On September 22, 1819,Keats sent Reynolds the “Ode to Autumn,”than which there is no more perfect poem in the languageof Shakespeare. This was the last of his publishedletters to Reynolds. He was dying, haunted eternallyby that woman’s shape and voice.

Reynolds’s best-known book, if any of them canbe said to be known at all, was published under thename of John Hamilton. It is “The Gardenof Florence, and Other Poems” (Warren, London,1821). There is a dedication—­to hisyoung wife.

“Thou hast entreated me to ‘write no more,’”and he, as an elderly “man of twenty-four,”promises to obey. “The lily and myselfhenceforth are two,” he says, implyingthat he and the lily have previously been “one,”a quaint confession from the poet of Peter Corcoran. There is something very pleasant in the gracefulregret and obedience of this farewell to the Muse. He says to Mrs. Reynolds:

“I will not tell the worldthat thou hast chid
My heart for worshippingthe idol Muse;
That thy dark eye has given itsgentle lid
Tears for my wanderings;I may not choose
When thou dost speak but do as Iam bid,—­
And thereforeto the roses and the dews,
Very respectfully I make my bow;—­
And turn my back upon the tulipsnow.”

“The chief poems in the collection, taken fromBoccaccio, were to have been associated with talesfrom the same source, intended to have been writtenby a friend; but illness on his part and distractingengagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishingour plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow,has frustrated it for ever!”

I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats’skindness, to the most endearing quality our naturepossesses; the quality that was Scott’s in sucha winning degree, that was so marked in Moliere,

“He, who is gone, was one of the very kindestfriends I ever possessed, and yet he was not kinder,perhaps, to me than to others. His intense mindand powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have donethe world some service had his life been spared—­buthe was of too sensitive a nature—­and thushe was destroyed! One story he completed, andthat is to me now the most pathetic poem in existence.”

It was “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.”

The “Garden of Florence” is written inthe couplets of “Endymion,” and is a beautifulversion of the tale once more retold by Alfred de Mussetin “Simone.” From “The Romanceof Youth” let me quote one stanza, which appliesto Keats:

“He read and dreamt of youngEndymion,
Till his romanticfancy drank its fill;
He saw that lovely shepherd sittinglone,
Watching his whiteflocks upon Ida’s hill;
The Moon adored him—­andwhen all was still,
And stars werewakeful—­she would earthward stray,
And linger with her shepherd love,until
The hooves ofthe steeds that bear the car of day,
Struck silver light in the east,and then she waned away!”

It was on Latmos, not Ida, that Endymion shepherdedhis flocks; but that is of no moment, except to schoolmasters. There are other stanzas of Reynolds worthy of Keats;for example, this on the Fairy Queen:

“Her bodice was a pretty sightto see;
Ye who would knowits colour,—­be a thief
Of the rose’s muffled budfrom off the tree;
And for your knowledge,strip it leaf by leaf
Spite of your own remorse or Flora’sgrief,
Till ye have comeunto its heart’s pale hue;
The last, last leaf, which is thequeen,—­the chief
Of beautiful dimblooms: ye shall not rue,
At sight of that sweet leaf themischief which ye do.”

One does not know when to leave off gathering budsin the “Garden of Florence.” Evenafter Shakespeare, and after Keats, this passage onwild flowers has its own charm:

“We gathered wood flowers,—­someblue as the vein
O’er Hero’s eyelid stealing,and some as white,
In the clustering grass, as richEuropa’s hand
Nested amid the curls on Jupiter’sforehead,
What time he snatched her throughthe startled waves;—­
Some poppies, too, such as in Enna’smeadows
Forsook their own green homes andparent stalks,
To kiss the fingers of Proserpina:
And some were small as fairies’eyes, and bright
As lovers’ tears!”

I wish I had room for three or four sonnets, the RobinHood sonnets to Keats, and another on a picture ofa lady. Excuse the length of this letter, andread this:

“Sorrow hath made thine eyesmore dark and keen,
And set a whiterhue upon thy cheeks,—­
And round thypressed lips drawn anguish-streaks,
And made thy forehead fearfullyserene.
Even in thy steady hair her workis seen,
For its stillparted darkness—­till it breaks
In heavy curlsupon thy shoulders—­speaks
Like the sternwave, how hard the storm hath been!

“So looked that hapless ladyof the South,
Sweet Isabella!at that dreary part
Of all the passion’d hoursof her youth;
When her greenBasil pot by brother’s art
Was stolen away; so look’dher pained mouth
In the mute patienceof a breaking heart!”

There let us leave him, the gay rhymer of prize-fightersand eminent persons—­let us leave him ina serious hour, and with a memory of Keats. {5}

ON VIRGIL

To Lady Violet Lebas.

Dear Lady Violet,—­Who can admire too muchyour undefeated resolution to admire only the rightthings? I wish I had this respect for authority!But let me confess that I have always admired the thingswhich nature made me prefer, and that I have no powerof accommodating my taste to the verdict of the critical. If I do not like an author, I leave him alone, howevergreat his reputation. Thus I do not care forMr. Gibbon, except in his Autobiography, nor for theelegant plays of M. Racine, nor very much for someof Wordsworth, though his genius is undeniable, norexcessively for the late Prof. Amiel. Whyshould we force ourselves into an affection for them,any more than into a relish for olives or claret,both of which excellent creatures I have the misfortuneto dislike? No spectacle annoys me more thanthe sight of people who ask if it is “right”to take pleasure in this or that work of art. Their loves and hatreds will never be genuine, natural,spontaneous.

You say that it is “right” to like Virgil,and yet you admit that you admire the Mantuan, asthe Scotch editor joked, “wi’ deeficulty.” I, too, must admit that my liking for much of Virgil’spoetry is not enthusiastic, not like the admirationexpressed, for example, by Mr. Frederic Myers, inwhose “Classical Essays” you will findall that the advocates of the Latin singer can sayfor him. These heights I cannot reach, any morethan I can equal that eloquence. Yet must Virgilalways appear to us one of the most beautiful andmoving figures in the whole of literature.

How sweet must have been that personality which canstill win our affections, across eighteen hundredyears of change, and through the mists of commentaries,and school-books, and traditions! Does it touchthee at all, oh gentle spirit and serene, that we,who never knew thee, love thee yet, and revere theeas a saint of heathendom? Have the dead anydelight in the religion they inspire?

Id cinerem aut Manes credis curaresepultos?

I half fancy I can trace the origin of this personalaffection for Virgil, which survives in me despitethe lack of a very strong love of parts of his poems. When I was at school we met every morning for prayer,in a large circular hall, round which, on pedestals,were set copies of the portrait busts of great ancientwriters. Among these was “the Ionian fatherof the rest,” our father Homer, with a winningand venerable majesty. But the bust of Virgilwas, I think, of white marble, not a cast (so, atleast, I remember it), and was of a singular youthfulpurity and beauty, sharing my affections with a copyof the exquisite Psyche of Naples. It showedus that Virgil who was called “The Maiden”as Milton was named “The Lady of Christ’s.” I don’t know the archeology of it, perhapsit was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm ofthis image, beheld daily, overcame even the tediumof short scraps of the “AEneid” dailyparsed, not without stripes and anguish. So Iretain a sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceivethe many drawbacks of his poetry.

It is not always poetry at first hand; it is oftenimitative, like all Latin poetry, of the Greek songsthat sounded at the awakening of the world. This is more tolerable when Theocritus is the model,as in the “Eclogues,” and less obviousin the “Georgics,” when the poet is carriedaway into naturalness by the passion for his nativeland, by the longing for peace after cruel wars, bythe joy of a country life. Virgil had that loveof rivers which, I think, a poet is rarely without;and it did not need Greece to teach him to sing ofthe fields:

Propter aquam, tardis ingensubi flexibus
Mincius et tenera praetexit arundineripas.

“By the water-side, where mighty Mincius wanders,with links and loops, and fringes all the banks withthe tender reed.” Not the Muses of Greece,but his own Casmenae, song-maidens of Italy,have inspired him here, and his music is blown througha reed of the Mincius. In many such places heshows a temper with which we of England, in our lateage, may closely sympathize.

Do you remember that mediaeval story of the buildingof Parthenope, how it was based, by the Magician Virgilius,on an egg, and how the city shakes when the frailfoundation chances to be stirred? This too vastempire of ours is as frail in its foundation, and tremblesat a word. So it was with the Empire of Romein Virgil’s time: civic revolution mutteringwithin it, like the subterranean thunder, and the forcesof destruction gathering without. In Virgil,as in Horace, you constantly note their anxiety, theirapprehension for the tottering fabric of the Romanstate. This it was, I think, and not the contemplationof human fortunes alone, that lent Virgil his melancholy. From these fears he looks for a shelter in the sylvanshades; he envies the ideal past of the golden world.

Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnusagebat!

“Oh, for the fields! Oh, for Spercheiusand Taygetus, where wander the Lacaenian maids! Oh, that one would carry me to the cool valleys ofHaemus, and cover me with the wide shadow of the boughs! Happy was he who came to know the causes of things,who set his foot on fear and on inexorable Fate, andfar below him heard the roaring of the streams ofHell! And happy he who knows the rural deities,Pan, and Sylvanus the Old, and the sisterhood of thenymphs! Unmoved is he by the people’sfavour, by the purple of kings, unmoved by all theperfidies of civil war, by the Dacian marching downfrom his hostile Danube; by the peril of the Romanstate, and the Empire hurrying to its doom. Hewasteth not his heart in pity of the poor, he enviethnot the rich, he gathereth what fruits the branchesbear and what the kindly wilderness unasked bringsforth; he knows not our laws, nor the madness of thecourts, nor the records of the common weal”—­doesnot read the newspapers, in fact.

The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, theperil of the Empire, the shame and dread of each day’snews, we too know them; like Virgil we too deplorethem. We, in our reveries, long for some suchcareless paradise, but we place it not in Sparta butin the Islands of the Southern Seas. It is inpassages of this temper that Virgil wins us most,when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant,and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought,unborrowed and unforced, is wedded to the music ofhis own unsurpassable style.

But he does not always write for himself and out ofhis own thought, that style of his being far morefrequently misapplied, wasted on telling a story thatis only of feigned and foreign interest. Doubtlessit was the “AEneid,” his artificial andunfinished epic, that won Virgil the favour of theMiddle Aces. To the Middle Ages, which knew notGreek, and knew not Homer, Virgil was the representativeof the heroic and eternally interesting past. But to us who know Homer, Virgil’s epic is indeed,“like moonlight unto sunlight;” is a beautifulempty world, where no real life stirs, a world thatshines with a silver lustre not its own, but borrowedfrom “the sun of Greece.”

Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, ofheroic chiefs and beggar men, of hunts and sieges,of mountains where the lion roamed, and of fairy isleswhere a goddess walked alone. He lived on themarches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterraneanwas a sea unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descriedas the City of the Sun in Elizabeth’s reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil could onlyfollow and imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest,the things that were alive for Homer. What couldVirgil care for a tussle between two stout men-at-arms,for the clash of contending war-chariots, driven eachon each, like wave against wave in the sea? All that tide had passed over, all the story of the“AEneid” is mere borrowed antiquity, likethe Middle Ages of Sir Walter Scott; but the borrowerhad none of Scott’s joy in the noise and motionof war, none of the Homeric “delight in battle.”

Virgil, in writing the “AEneid,” executedan imperial commission, and an ungrateful commission;it is the sublime of hack-work, and the legend maybe true which declares that, on his death-bed, he wishedhis poem burned. He could only be himself hereand there, as in that earliest picture of romanticlove, as some have called the story of “Dido,”not remembering, perhaps, that even here Virgil hadbefore his mind a Greek model, that he was thinkingof Apollonius Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea. He could be himself, too, in passages of reflectionand description, as in the beautiful sixth book, withits picture of the under world, and its hints of mysticalphilosophy.

Could we choose our own heavens, there in that Elysianworld might Virgil be well content to dwell, in theshadow of that fragrant laurel grove, with them whowere “priests pure of life, while life was theirs,and holy singers, whose songs were worthy of Apollo.” There he might muse on his own religion and on theDivinity that dwells in, that breathes in, that is,all things and more than all. Who could wishVirgil to be one of the spirits that

Lethaeum ad flumen Dues evocatagmine magno,

that are called once more to the Lethean stream, andthat once more, forgetful of their home, “intothe world and wave of men depart?”

There will come no other Virgil, unless his soul,in accordance with his own philosophy, is among usto-day, crowned with years and honours, the singerof “Ulysses,” of the “Lotus Eaters,”of “Tithonus,” and “OEnone.”

So, after all, I have been enthusiastic, “maugremy head,” as Malory says, and perhaps, LadyViolet, I have shown you why it is “right”to admire Virgil, and perhaps I have persuaded nobodybut myself.

P.S.—­Mr. Coleridge was no great lover ofVirgil, inconsistently. “If you take fromVirgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?” Yet Mr. Coleridge had defined poetry as “thebest words, in the best order”—­thatis, “diction and metre.” He, therefore,proposed to take from Virgil his poetry, and thento ask what was left of the Poet!

AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE

To the Lady Violet Lebas.

Dear Lady Violet,—­I do not wonder thatyou are puzzled by the language of the first Frenchnovel. The French of “Aucassin et Nicolette”is not French after the school of Miss Pinkerton,at Chiswick. Indeed, as the little song-storyhas been translated into modern French by M. Bida,the painter (whose book is very scarce), I presumeeven the countrywomen of Aucassin find it difficult. You will not expect me to write an essay on the grammar,nor would you read it if I did. The chief thingis that “s” appears as the sign of thesingular, instead of being the sign of the plural,and the nouns have cases.

The story must be as old as the end of the twelfthcentury, and must have received its present form inPicardy. It is written, as you see, in alternatesnatches of verse and prose. The verse, whichwas chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each laisse,or screed, as in the “Chanson de Roland,”runs on the same final assonance, or vowel sound throughout.

So much for the form. Who is the author? We do not know, and never shall know. Apparentlyhe mentions himself in the first lines:

“Who would listen to the lay,
Of the captive old and gray;”

for this is as much sense as one can make out of deldeport du viel caitif.

The author, then, was an old fellow. I thinkwe might learn as much from the story. An oldman he was, or a man who felt old. Do you knowwhom he reminds me of? Why, of Mr. Bowes, ofthe Theatre Royal, Chatteris; of Mr. Bowes, that battered,old, kindly sentimentalist who told his tale withMr. Arthur Pendennis.

It is a love story, a story of love overmastering,without conscience or care of aught but the beloved. And the viel caitif tells it with sympathy,and with a smile. “Oh, folly of fondness,”he seems to cry; “oh, pretty fever and foolish;oh, absurd happy days of desolation:

“When I was young, as youare young,
And lutes were touched, and songswere sung!
And love-lamps in the windowshung!”

It is the very tone of Thackeray, when Thackeray istender; and the world heard it first from this elderlynameless minstrel, strolling with his viol and hissinging boys, a blameless D’Assoucy, from castleto castle in the happy poplar land. I thinkI see him and hear him in the silver twilight, inthe court of some chateau of Picardy, while the ladiesaround sit listening on silken cushions, and theirlovers, fettered with silver chains, lie at theirfeet. They listen, and look, and do not thinkof the minstrel with his gray head, and his green heart;but we think of him. It is an old man’swork, and a weary man’s work. You caneasily tell the places where he has lingered and beenpleased as he wrote.

The story is simple enough. Aucassin, son ofCount Garin, of Beaucaire, loved so well fair Nicolette,the captive girl from an unknown land, that he wouldnever be dubbed knight, nor follow tourneys; nor evenfight against his father’s mortal foe, CountBougars de Valence. So Nicolette was imprisonedhigh in a painted chamber. But the enemy werestorming the town, and, for the promise of “oneword or two with Nicolette, and one kiss,” Aucassinarmed himself and led out his men. But he wasall adream about Nicolette, and his horse bore himinto the press of foes ere he knew it. Thenhe heard them contriving his death, and woke out ofhis dream.

“The damoiseau was tall and strong, and thehorse whereon he sat fierce and great, and Aucassinlaid hand to sword, and fell a-smiting to right andleft, and smote through helm and headpiece, and armand shoulder, making a murder about him, like a wildboar the hounds fall on in the forest. Thereslew he ten knights, and smote down seven, and mightilyand knightly he hurled through the press, and chargedhome again, sword in hand.” For that hourAucassin struck like one of Mallory’s men inthe best of all romances. But though he tookCount Bougars prisoner, his father would not keephis word, nor let him have one word or two with Nicolette,and one kiss. Nay, Aucassin was thrown into prisonin an old tower. There he sang of Nicolette,

“Was it not the other day
That a pilgrim came this way?
And a passion him possessed,
That upon his bed he lay,
Lay, and tossed, and knew no rest,
In his pain discomforted.
But thou camest by his bed,
Holding high thine amice fine
And thy kirtle of ermine.
Then the beauty that is thine
Did he look on; and it fell
That the Pilgrim straight was well,
Straight was hale and comforted.
And he rose up from his bed,
And went back to his own place
Sound and strong, and fair of face.”

Thus Aucassin makes a Legend of his lady, as it were,assigning to her beauty such miracles as faith attributesto the excellence of the saints.

Meanwhile, Nicolette had slipped from the window ofher prison chamber, and let herself down into thegarden, where she heard the song of the nightingales. “Then caught she up her kirtle in both hands,behind and before, and flitted over the dew that laydeep on the grass, and fled out of the garden, andthe daisy flowers bending below her tread seemed darkagainst her feet, so white was the maiden.” Can’t you see her stealing with those “feetof ivory,” like Bombyca’s, down the darkside of the silent moonlit streets of Beaucaire?

Then she came where Aucassin was lamenting in hiscell, and she whispered to him how she was fleeingfor her life. And he answered that without herhe must die; and then this foolish pair, in the verymouth of peril, must needs begin a war of words asto which loved the other best!

“Nay, fair sweet friend,” saith Aucassin,“it may not be that thou lovest me more thanI love thee. Woman may not love man as man loveswoman, for a woman’s love lies no deeper thanin the glance of her eye, and the blossom of her breast,and her foot’s tip-toe; but man’s loveis in his heart planted, whence never can it issueforth and pass away.”

So while they speak

“In debate as birds are,
Hawk on bough,”

comes the kind sentinel to warn them of a danger. And Nicolette flees, and leaps into the fosse, andthence escapes into a great forest and lonely. In the morning she met shepherds merry over theirmeat, and bade them tell Aucassin to hunt in thatforest, where he should find a deer whereof one glancewould cure him of his malady. The shepherds arehappy, laughing people, who half mock Nicolette, andquite mock Aucassin, when he comes that way. But at first they took Nicolette for a fee,such a beauty shone so brightly from her, and lit upall the forest. Aucassin they banter; and indeedthe free talk of the peasants to their lord’sson in that feudal age sounds curiously, and may wellmake us reconsider our notions of early feudalism.

But Aucassin learns at least that Nicolette is inthe wood, and he rides at adventure after her, tillthe thorns have ruined his silken surcoat, and theblood, dripping from his torn body, makes a visibletrack in the grass. So, as he wept, he met amonstrous man of the wood, that asked him why he lamented. And he said he was sorrowing for a lily-white houndthat he had lost. Then the wild man mocked him,and told his own tale. He was in that estatewhich Achilles, among the ghosts, preferred to allthe kingship of the dead outworn. He was hindand hireling to a villein, and he had lost one ofthe villein’s oxen. For that he dared notgo into the town, where a prison awaited him. Moreover, they had dragged the very bed from underhis old mother, to pay the price of the ox, and shelay on straw; and at that the woodman wept.

A curious touch, is it not, of pity for the people? The old poet is serious for one moment. “Compare,”he says, “the sorrows of sentiment, of ladiesand lovers, praised in song, with the sorrows of thepoor, with troubles that are real and not of the heart!” Even Aucassin the lovelorn feels it, and gives thehind money to pay for his ox, and so riding on comesto a lodge that Nicolette has built with blossoms andboughs. And Aucassin crept in and looked througha gap in the fragrant walls of the lodge, and sawthe stars in heaven, and one that was brighter thanthe rest.

Does one not feel it, the cool of that old summernight, the sweet smell of broken boughs and troddengrass and deep dew, and the shining of the star?

“Star that I from far behold
That the moon draws to her fold,
Nicolette with thee doth dwell,
My sweet love with locks of gold,”

sings Aucassin. “And when Nicolette heardAucassin, right so came she unto him, and passed withinthe lodge, and cast her arms about his neck and kissedand embraced him:

“Fair sweet friend, welcomebe thou!”
“And thou, fair sweet love,be thou welcome!”

There the story should end, in a dream of a summer’snight. But the old minstrel did not end it so,or some one has continued his work with a heavierhand. Aucassin rides, he cares not whither, ifhe has but his love with him. And they cometo a fantastic land of burlesque, such as Pantagruel’screw touched at many a time. And Nicolette istaken by Carthaginian pirates, and proves to be daughterto the King of Carthage, and leaves his court andcomes to Beaucaire in the disguise of a ministrel,and “journeys end in lovers’ meeting.”

That is all the tale, with its gaps, its carelesspassages, its adventures that do not interest thepoet. He only cares for youth, love, spring,flowers, and the song of the birds; the rest, exceptthe passage about the hind, is mere “business”done casually, because the audience expects broadjests, hard blows, misadventures, recognitions. What lives is the touch of poetry, of longing, oftender heart, of humorous resignation. It lives,and always must live, “while the nature of manis the same.” The poet hopes his talewill gladden sad men. This service it did forM. Bida, he says, in the dreadful year of 1870-71,when he translated “Aucassin.” This,too, it has done for me in days not delightful. {6}

PLOTINUS (A.D. 200-262)

To the Lady Violet Lebas.

Dear Lady Violet,—­You are discursive anddesultory enough, as a reader, to have pleased eventhe late Lord Iddesleigh. It was “Aucassinand Nicolette” only a month ago, and to-dayyou have been reading Lord Lytton’s “StrangeStory,” I am sure, for you want information aboutPlotinus! He was born (about A.D. 200) in Wolf-town(Lycopolis), in Egypt, the town, you know, where thenatives might not eat wolves, poor fellows, just asthe people of Thebes might not eat sheep. Probablythis prohibition caused Plotinus no regret, for hewas a consistent vegetarian.

However, we are advancing too rapidly, and we mustdiscuss Plotinus more in order. His name isvery dear to mystic novelists, like the author of“Zanoni.” They always describe theirfavourite hero as “deep in Plotinus or Iamblichus,”and I venture to think that nearly represents the depthof their own explorations. We do not know exactlywhen Plotinus was born. Like many ladies heused to wrap up his age in a mystery, observing thatthese petty details about the body (a mere husk offlesh binding the soul) were of no importance. He was not weaned till he was eight years old, asingular circ*mstance. Having a turn for philosophy,he attended the schools of Alexandria, concerning whichKingsley’s “Hypatia” is the mostaccessible authority.

All these anecdotes, I should have said, we learnfrom Porphyry, the Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswellto Plotinus. The philosopher himself often remindsme of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson is describedby Mr. Carlyle. Just as the good doctor was asound Churchman in the beginning of the age of newideas, so Plotinus was a sound pagan in the beginningof the triumph of Christianity.

Like Johnson, Plotinus was lazy and energetic andshort-sighted. He wrote a very large numberof treatises, but he never took the trouble to readthrough them when once they were written, because hiseyes were weak. He was superstitious, like Dr.Johnson, yet he had lucid intervals of common sense,when he laughed at the superstitions of his disciples.Like Dr. Johnson, he was always begirt by disciples,men and women, Bozzys and Thrales. He was sofull of honour and charity, that his house was crowdedwith persons in need of help and friendly care. Though he lived so much in the clouds and among philosophicalabstractions, he was an excellent man of business. Though a philosopher he was pious, and was courageous,dreading the plague no more than the good doctor dreadedthe tempest that fell on him when he was voyagingto Coll.

You will admit that the parallel is pretty close foran historical parallel, despite the differences betweenthe ascetic of Wolf-town and the sage of Bolt Court,hard by Fleet Street!

To return to the education of Plotinus. He wastwenty-eight when he went up to the University ofAlexandria. For eleven years he diligently attendedthe lectures of Ammonius. Then he went on theEmperor Gordian’s expedition to the East, hopingto learn the philosophy of the Hindus. The Upanishadswould have puzzled Plotinus, had he reached India;but he never did. Gordian’s army was defeatedin Mesopotamia, no “blessed word” to Gordian,and Plotinus hardly escaped with his life. Hemust have felt like Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.

From Syria his friend and disciple Amelius led himto Rome, and here, as novelists say, “a curiousthing happened.” There was in Rome an Egyptianpriest, who offered to raise up the Demon, or GuardianAngel, of Plotinus in visible form. But therewas only one pure spot in all Rome, so said the priest,and this spot was the Temple of Isis. Here theseance was held, and no demon appeared, buta regular God of one of the first circles. Soterrified was an onlooker that he crushed to deaththe living birds which he held in his hands for someritual or magical purpose.

It was a curious scene, a cosmopolitan confusion ofEgypt, Rome, Isis, table-turning, the late Mr. Home,religion, and mummery, while Christian hymns of theearly Church were being sung, perhaps in the garretsaround, outside the Temple of Isis. The discoverythat he had a god for his guardian angel gave Plotinusplenty of confidence in dealing with rival philosophers. For example, Alexandrinus Olympius, another mystic,tried magical arts against Plotinus. But Alexandrinus,suddenly doubling up during lecture with unaffectedagony, cried, “Great virtue hath the soul ofPlotinus, for my spells have returned against myself.” As for Plotinus, he remarked among his disciples,“Now the body of Alexandrinus is collapsinglike an empty purse.”

How diverting it would be, Lady Violet, if our moderncontroversialists had those accomplishments, and ifMr. Max Muller could, literally, “double up”Professor Whitney, or if any one could cause Peppmullerto collapse with his queer Homeric theory! Plotinushad many such arts. A piece of jewellery wasstolen from one of his protegees, a lady, andhe detected the thief, a servant, by a glance. After being flogged within an inch of his life, theservant (perhaps to save the remaining inch) confessedall.

Once when Porphyry was at a distance, and was meditatingsuicide, Plotinus appeared at his side, saying, “Thisthat thou schemest cometh not of the pure intellect,but of black humours,” and so sent Porphyryfor change of air to Sicily. This was thoroughlygood advice, but during the absence of the disciplethe master died.

Porphyry did not see the great snake that glided intothe wall when Plotinus expired; he only heard of thecirc*mstance. Plotinus’s last words were:“I am striving to release that which is divinewithin us, and to merge it in the universally divine.” It is a strange mixture of philosophy and savagesurvival. The Zulus still believe that the soulsof the dead reappear, like the soul of Plotinus, inthe form of serpents.

Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians,or Gnostics. Like all great men, he was accusedof plagiarism. A defence of great men accusedof literary theft would be as valuable as Naude’swork of a like name about magic. On his deaththe Delphic Oracle, in very second-rate hexameters,declared that Plotinus had become a demon.

Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense andvirtue, and so modest that he would not allow hisportrait to be painted. His character drew goodmen round him, his repute for supernatural virtuesbrought “fools into a circle.” Whathe meant by his belief that four times he had, “whetherin the body or out of the body,” been unitedwith the Spirit of the world, who knows? Whatdoes Tennyson mean when he writes:

“So word by word, and lineby line,
The dead man touch’dme from the past,
And all at onceit seem’d at last
His living soul was flashed on mine.

And mine in his was wound and whirl’d
About empyrealheights of thought,
And came on thatwhich is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.”

Mystery! We cannot fathom it; we know not thepaths of the souls of Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinusand St. Paul. They are wise with a wisdom notof this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise.

In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist,or at least he was at war with pessimism.

“They that love God bear lightly the ways ofthe world—­bear lightly whatsoever befallsthem of necessity in the general movement of things.”He believed in a rest that remains for the people ofGod, “where they speak not one with the other;but, as we understand many things by the eyes only,so does soul read soul in heaven, where the spiritualbody is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned.” The arguments by which these opinions are buttressedmay be called metaphysical, and may be called worthless;the conviction, and the beauty of the language inwhich it is stated, remain immortal possessions.

Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remaineda pagan, while Christianity offered him a sympatheticrefuge, who can tell? Probably natural conservatism,in him as in Dr. Johnson—­conservatism andtaste—­caused his adherence to the formsat least of the older creeds. There was muchto laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like. Butif you read him in hopes of material for strange stories,you will be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lyttonand others who have invoked his name in fiction (likeVivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield’s tale) knewhis name better than his doctrine. His “Enneads,”even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, arenot very light subjects of study.

LUCRETIUS

To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford.

Dear Martin,—­“How individuals foundreligious consolation from the creeds of ancient Greeceand Rome” is, as you quote C. O. Muller, “avery curious question.” It is odd thatwhile we have countless books on the philosophy andthe mythology and the ritual of the classic peoples,we hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcelyanything from anybody. We know very well whatgods they worshipped, and what sacrifices they offeredto the Olympians, and what stories they told abouttheir deities, and about the beginnings of things. We know, too, in a general way, that the gods wereinterested in morality. They would all punishoffences in their own department, at least when itwas a case of numine laeso, when the god whoprotected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality,or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offendedby perjury.

But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What hope or what fears did he entertain with regardto the future life? Had he any sense of sin,as more than a thing that could be expiated by purificationwith the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasingthe prayers and “masses,” so to speak,of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned byPlato in the “Republic”? About thesegreat questions of the religious life—­theFuture and man’s fortunes in the future, thepunishment or reward of justice or iniquity—­wereally know next to nothing.

That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretiusseems so valuable to me. The De Rerum Naturawas written for no other purpose than to destroy Religion,as Lucretius understood it, to free men’s mindsfrom all dread as to future punishment, all hope ofHeaven, all dread or desire for the interference ofthe gods in this mortal life of ours on earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to “knowthe causes of things,” except that the knowledgewould bring “emancipation,” as peoplecall it, from the gods, to whom men had hitherto stoodin the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire,under the patria potestas or in manu patris.

As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to thisend, it follows that his fellow-countrymen musthave gone in a constant terror about spiritual penalties,which we seldom associate in thought with the “blithe”and careless existence of the ancient peoples. In every line of Lucretius you read the joy and theindignation of the slave just escaped from an intolerablethraldom to fear. Nobody could well have believedon any other evidence that the classical people hada gloomy Calvinism of their own time. True,as early as Homer, we hear of the shadowy existenceof the souls, and of the torments endured by the notablywicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphusand Tantalus. But when we read the opening booksof the “Republic,” we find the educatedfriends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives’fables. They have heard, they say, that suchnotions circulate among the people, but they seemnever for a moment to have themselves believed in afuture of rewards and punishments.

The remains of ancient funereal art, in Etruria orAttica, usually show us the semblances of the deadlying at endless feasts, or receiving sacrifices offood and wine (as in Egypt) from their descendants,or, perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friendswho have just rejoined them. But it is onlyin the descriptions by Pausanias and others of certainold wall-paintings that we hear of the torments ofthe wicked, of the demons that torture them and, aboveall, of the great chief fiend, coloured like a carrionfly. To judge from Lucretius, although so littleremains to us of this creed, yet it had a very stronghold of the minds of people, in the century beforeChrist. Perhaps the belief was reinforced bythe teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision of Er,in the “Republic,” brings back, in a myth,the old popular faith in a Purgatorio, if notin an Inferno.

In the “Phaedo,” for certain, we cometo the very definite account of a Hell, a place ofeternal punishment, as well as of a Purgatory, whencesouls are freed when their sins are expiated. “The spirits beyond redemption, for the multitudeof their murders or sacrileges, Fate hurls into Tartarus,whence they never any more come forth.” But souls of lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus,and then drift out down the streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. Thence they reach the marsh of Acheron, but are notreleased until they have received the pardon of thesouls whom in life they had injured.

All this, and much more to the same purpose in otherdialogues of Plato’s, appears to have been derivedby Socrates from the popular unphilosophic traditions,from Folk-lore in short, and to have been raised byhim to the rank of “pious opinion,” ifnot of dogma. Now, Lucretius represents nothingbut the reaction against all this dread of futuredoom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonicphilosophy or by popular belief. The lattermust have been much the more powerful and widely diffused. It follows that the Romans, at least, must have beenhaunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, fromwhich, but for the testimony of Lucretius and hismanifest sincerity, we might have believed them free.

Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Romanreligion, for it did its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language of Lucretius, whenhe can leave his attempts at scientific proof, thecloseness of his observation, his enjoyment of life,of Nature, and his power of painting them, a certainlargeness of touch, and noble amplitude of manner—­these,with a burning sincerity, mark him above all othersthat smote the Latin lyre. Yet these great qualitiesare half-crushed by his task, by his attempt to turnthe atomic theory into verse, by his unsympatheticeffort to destroy all faith and hope, because thesewere united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and Acheron.

It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophyof eternal sleep, without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly divorced from joy, which inspiresall the best art. This negation of hope has“close-lipped Patience for its only friend.”

In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life andNature so large, so glowing, so majestic that theyremind us of nothing but the “Fete Champetre”of Giorgione, in the Louvre. All that life isa thing we must leave soon, and forever, and mustbe hopelessly lapped in an eternity of blind silence. “I shall let men see the certain end of all,”he cries; “then will they resist religion, andthe threats of priests and prophets.” But this “certain end” is exactly whatmortals do not desire to see. To this sleepthey prefer even tenebras Orci, vastasque lacunas.

They will not be deprived of gods, “the friendsof man, merciful gods, compassionate.” They will not turn from even a faint hope in thoseto the Lucretian deities in their endless and indifferentrepose and divine “delight in immortal and peacefullife, far, far away from us and ours—­lifepainless and fearless, needing nothing we can give,replete with its own wealth, unmoved by prayer andpromise, untouched by anger.”

Do you remember that hymn, as one may call it, ofLucretius to Death, to Death which does not harm us. “For as we knew no hurt of old, in ages whenthe Carthaginian thronged against us in war, and theworld was shaken with the shock of fight, and dubioushung the empire over all things mortal by sea andland, even so careless, so unmoved, shall we remain,in days when we shall no more exist, when the bondof body and soul that makes our life is broken. Then naught shall move us, nor wake a single sense,not though earth with sea be mingled, and sea withsky.” There is no hell, he cries, or, likeOmar, he says, “Hell is the vision of a soulon fire.”

Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only theslave of passion and of love; your true Sisyphus (likeLord Salisbury in Punch) is only the politician,striving always, never attaining; the stone rolls downagain from the hill-crest, and thunders far alongthe plain.

Thus his philosophy, which gives him such a delightfulsense of freedom, is rejected after all these yearsof trial by men. They feel that since thoseremotest days

“Quum Venus in silvis jungebatcorpora amantum,”

they have travelled the long, the weary way Lucretiusdescribes to little avail, if they may not keep theirhopes and fears. Robbed of these we are robbedof all; it serves us nothing to have conquered thesoil and fought the winds and waves, to have builtcities, and tamed fire, if the world is to be “dispeopledof its dreams.” Better were the old lifewe started from, and dreams therewith, better thefree days—­

“Novitastum florida mundi
Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibusampla;”

than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, butone certain end of all before the eyes of all.

Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answerLucretius, the noblest Roman poet, and the least beloved,who sought, at last, by his own hand, they say, thedoom that Virgil waited for in the season appointed.

TO A YOUNG AMERICAN BOOK-HUNTER

To Philip Dodsworth, Esq., New York.

Dear Dodsworth,—­Let me congratulate youon having joined the army of book-hunters. “Everywherehave I sought peace and found it nowhere,” saysthe blessed Thomas a Kempis, “save in a cornerwith a book.” Whether that good monk wrotethe “De Imitatione Christi” or not, onealways likes him for his love of books. Perhapshe was the only book-hunter that ever wrought a miracle. “Other signs and miracles which he was wontto tell as having happened at the prayer of an unnamedperson, are believed to have been granted to his own,such as the sudden reappearance of a lost book inhis cell.” Ah, if Faith, that moveth mountains,could only bring back the books we have lost, thebooks that have been borrowed from us! But weare a faithless generation.

From a collector so much older and better experiencedin misfortune than yourself, you ask for some adviceon the sport of book-hunting. Well, I will giveit; but you will not take it. No; you will huntwild, like young pointers before they are properlybroken.

Let me suppose that you are “to middle fortuneborn,” and that you cannot stroll into the greatbook-marts and give your orders freely for all thatis rich and rare. You are obliged to wait andwatch an opportunity, to practise that maxim of theStoic’s, “Endure and abstain.” Then abstain from rushing at every volume, howeverout of the line of your literary interests, whichseems to be a bargain. Probably it is not evena bargain; it can seldom be cheap to you, if you donot need it, and do not mean to read it.

Not that any collector reads all his books. I may have, and indeed do possess, an Aldine Homerand Caliergus his Theocritus; but I prefer to studythe authors in a cheap German edition. The oldeditions we buy mainly for their beauty, and the sentimentof their antiquity and their associations.

But I don’t take my own advice. The shelvesare crowded with books quite out of my line—­awhole small library of tomes on the pastime of curling,and I don’t curl; and “God’s Revengeagainst Murther,” though (so far) I am not anassassin. Probably it was for love of Sir WalterScott, and his mention of this truculent treatise,that I purchased it. The full title of it is“The Triumphs of God’s Revenge againstthe Crying and Execrable Sinne of (willful and premeditated)Murther.” Or rather there is nearly acolumn more of title, which I spare you. Butthe pictures are so bad as to be nearly worth theprice. Do not waste your money, like your foolishadviser, on books like that, or on “Les SeptVisions de Don Francisco de Quevedo,” publishedat Cologne, in 1682.

Why in the world did I purchase this, with the title-pageshowing Quevedo asleep, and all his seven visionsfloating round him in little circles like soap-bubbles? Probably because the book was published by ClementMalassis, and perhaps he was a forefather of that whimsicalFrenchman, Poulet Malassis, who published for Banville,and Baudelaire, and Charles Asselineau. It wasa bad reason. More likely the mere cheapnessattracted me.

Curiosity, not cheapness, assuredly, betrayed me intoanother purchase. If I want to read “ThePilgrim’s Progress,” of course I read itin John Bunyan’s good English. Then whymust I ruin myself to acquire “Voyage d’unChrestien vers l’Eternite. Ecrit en Anglois,par Monsieur Bunjan, F.M., en Bedtfort, et nouvellementtraduit en Francois. Avec Figures. A Amsterdam,chez Jean Boekholt Libraire pres de la Bourse, 1685”? I suppose this is the oldest French version of thefamed allegory. Do you know an older? Bunyan was still living and, indeed, had just publishedthe second part of the book, about Christian’swife and children, and the deplorable young womanwhose name was Dull.

As the little volume, the Elzevir size, is bound inblue morocco, by Cuzin, I hope it is not wholly afoolish bargain; but what do I want, after all, witha French “Pilgrim’s Progress”? These are the errors a man is always making who doesnot collect books with system, with a conscience andan aim.

Do have a specially. Make a collection of workson few subjects, well chosen. And what subjectsshall they be? That depends on taste. Probablyit is well to avoid the latest fashion. For example,the illustrated French books of the eighteenth centuryare, at this moment, en hausse. Thereis a “boom” in them. Fifty yearsago Brunet, the author of the great “Manuel,”sneered at them. But, in his, “LibraryCompanion,” Dr. Dibdin, admitted their merit. The illustrations by Gravelot, Moreau, Marillier,and the rest, are certainly delicate, graceful, fullof character, stamped with style. But only theproofs before letters are very much valued, and forthese wild prices are given by competitive millionaires. You cannot compete with them.

It is better wholly to turn the back on these booksand on any others at the height of the fashion, unlessyou meet them for fourpence on a stall. Eventhen should a gentleman take advantage of a poor bookseller’signorance? I don’t know. I neverfell into the temptation, because I never was tempted. Bargains, real bargains, are so rare that you mayhunt for a lifetime and never meet one.

The best plan for a man who has to see that his collectionis worth what it cost him, is probably to confineone’s self to a single line, say, in your case,first editions of new English, French, and Americanbooks that are likely to rise in value. I wouldtry, were I you, to collect first editions of Longfellow,Bryant, Whittier, Poe, and Hawthorne.

As to Poe, you probably will never have a chance. Outside of the British Museum, where they have the“Tamerlane” of 1827, I have only seen oneearly example of Poe’s poems. It is “AlAaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe. Baltimore: Hatch and Dunning, 1829, 8vo, pp.71.” The book “came to Mr. Locker(Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson), through Mr. R. H.Stoddard, the American poet.” So says Mr.Locker-Lampson’s Catalogue. He also hasthe New York edition of 1831.

These books are extraordinarily rare; you are morelikely to find them in some collection of twopennyrubbish than to buy them in the regular market. Bryant’s “Poems” (Cambridge, 1821)must also be very rare, and Emerson’s of 1847,and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s of 1836, andLongfellow’s “Voices of the Night,”1839, and Mr. Lowell’s “A Year’sLife;” none of these can be common, and all aredesirable, as are Mr. Whittier’s “Legendsof New England” (1831), and “Poems”(1838).

Perhaps you may never be lucky enough to come acrossthem cheap; no doubt they are greatly sought for byamateurs. Indeed, all American books of a certainage or of a special interest are exorbitantly dear. Men like Mr. James Lenox used to keep the marketup. One cannot get the Jesuit “Relations”—­shabbylittle missionary reports from Canada, in dirty vellum.

Cartier, Perrot, Champlain, and the other early explorers’books are beyond the means of a working student whoneeds them. May you come across themin a garret of a farmhouse, or in some dusty lane ofthe city. Why are they not reprinted, as Mr.Arber has reprinted “Captain John Smith’sVoyages, and Reports on Virginia”? Thevery reprints, when they have been made, are rareand hard to come by.

There are certain modern books, new books, that “goup” rapidly in value and interest. Mr.Swinburne’s “Atalanta” of 1865, thequarto in white cloth, is valued at twenty dollars. Twenty years ago one dollar would have purchasedit. Mr. Austin Dobson’s “Proverbsin Porcelain” is also in demand among the curious. Nay, even I may say about the first edition of “Balladesin Blue China” (1880), as Gibbon said of his“Essay on the Study of Literature:”“The primitive value of half a crown has risento the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings,”or even more. I wish I had a copy myself, forold sake’s sake.

Certain modern books, “on large paper,”are safe investments. The “Badminton Library,”an English series of books on sport, is at a hugepremium already, when on “large paper.” But one should never buy the book unless, as in thecase of Dr. John Hill Burton’s “Book-Hunter”(first edition), it is not only on large paper, andnot only rare (twenty-five copies), but also readableand interesting. {7} A collector should have thetaste to see when a new book is in itself valuableand charming, and when its author is likely to succeed,so that his early attempts (as in the case of Mr.Matthew Arnold, Lord Tennyson, and a few others ofthe moderns) are certain to become things of curiousinterest.

You can hardly ever get a novel of Jane Austen’sin the first edition. She is rarer than Fieldingor Smollett. Some day it may be the same inMiss Broughton’s case. Cling to the fairand witty Jane, if you get a chance. Bewareof illustrated modern books in which “processes”are employed. Amateurs will never really valuemechanical reproductions, which can be copied to anyextent. The old French copper-plate engravingsand the best English mezzo-tints are so valuable becausegood impressions are necessarily so rare.

One more piece of advice. Never (or “hardlyever”) buy an imperfect book. It is aconstant source of regret, an eyesore. Here haveI Lovelace’s “Lucasta,” 1649, withoutthe engraving. It is deplorable, but I neverhad a chance of another “Lucasta.” This is not a case of invenies aliam. However you fare, you will have the pleasure of Hopeand the consolation of books quietem inveniendamin abditis recessibus et libellulis.

ROCHEFOUCAULD

To the Lady Violet Lebas.

Dear Lady Violet,—­I am not sure that Iagree with you in your admiration of Rochefoucauld—­ofthe Reflexions, ou Sentences et Maximes Morales,I mean. At least, I hardly agree when I haveread many of them at a stretch. It is not fairto read them in that way, of course, for there aremore than five hundred pensees, and so muchesprit becomes fatiguing. I doubt ifpeople study them much. Five or six of them havebecome known even to writers in the newspapers, andwe all copy them from each other.

Rochefoucauld says that a man may be too dull to beduped by a very clever person. He himself wasso clever that he was often duped, first by the generalhonest dulness of mankind, and then by his own acuteness.He thought he saw more than he did see, and he saideven more than he thought he saw. If the truemotive of all our actions is self-love, or vanity,no man is a better proof of the truth than the greatmaxim-maker. His self-love took the shape ofa brilliancy that is sometimes false. He istricked out in paste for diamonds, now and then, likea vain, provincial beauty at a ball. “Aclever man would frequently be much at a loss,”he says, “in stupid company.” Onehas seen this embarrassment of a wit in a companyof dullards. It is Rochefoucauld’s ownposition in this world of men and women. Weare all, in the mass, dullards compared with his cleverness,and so he fails to understand us, is much at a lossamong us. “People only praise others inhopes of being praised in turn,” he says. Mankind is not such a company of “log-rollers”as he avers.

There is more truth in a line of Tennyson’sabout

“The praiseof those we love,
Dearer to true young hearts thantheir own praise.”

I venture to think we need not be young to preferto hear the praise of others rather than our own. It is not embarrassing in the first place, as allpraise of ourselves must be. I doubt if any manor woman can flatter so discreetly as not to makeus uncomfortable. Besides, if our own performancesbe lauded, we are uneasy as to whether the honour isdeserved. An artist has usually his own doubtsabout his own doings, or rather he has his own certainties. About our friends’ work we need have no suchmisgivings. And our self-love is more delicatelycaressed by the success of our friends than by ourown. It is still self-love, but it is filtered,so to speak, through our affection for another.

What are human motives, according to Rochefoucauld? Temperament, vanity, fear, indolence, self-love,and a grain of natural perversity, which somehow delightsin evil for itself. He neglects that other element,a grain of natural worth, which somehow delights ingood for itself. This taste, I think, is quiteas innate, and as active in us, as that other tastefor evil which causes there to be something not whollydispleasing in the misfortunes of our friends.

There is a story which always appears to me a touchingproof of this grain of goodness, as involuntary, asfatal as its opposite. I do not remember inwhat book of travels I found this trait of native excellence.The black fellows of Australia are very fond of sugar,and no wonder, if it be true that it has on them anintoxicating effect. Well, a certain black fellowhad a small parcel of brown sugar which was pilferedfrom his lair in the camp. He detected the thief,who was condemned to be punished according to triballaw; that is to say, the injured man was allowed tohave a whack at his enemy’s head with a waddy,a short club of heavy hard wood. The whack wasduly given, and then the black who had suffered theloss threw down his club, burst into tears, embracedthe thief and displayed every sign of a lively regretfor his revenge.

That seems to me an example of the human touch thatRochefoucauld never allows for, the natural goodness,pity, kindness, which can assert itself in contemptof the love of self, and the love of revenge. This is that true clemency which is a real virtue,and not “the child of Vanity, Fear, Indolence,or of all three together.” Nor is it sotrue that “we have all fortitude enough to endurethe misfortunes of others.” Everybody haswitnessed another’s grief that came as near himas his own.

How much more true, and how greatly poetical is thatfamous maxim: “Death and the Sun are twothings not to be looked on with a steady eye.” This version is from the earliest English translationof 1698. The Maximes were first publishedin Paris in 1665. {8} “Our tardy apish nation”took thirty-three years in finding them out and appropriatingthem. This, too, is good: “If wewere faultless, we would observe with less pleasurethe faults of others.” Indeed, to observethese with pleasure is not the least of our faults. Again, “We are never so happy, nor so wretched,as we suppose.” It is our vanity, perhaps,that makes us think ourselves miserrimi.

Do you remember—­no, you don’t—­thatmeeting in “Candide” of the unfortunateCunegonde and the still more unfortunate old lady whowas the daughter of a Pope? “You lamentyour fate,” said the old lady; “alas,you have known no such sorrows as mine!” “What!my good woman!” says Cunegonde. “Unlessyou have been maltreated by two Bulgarians,received two stabs from a knife, had twoof your castles burned over your head, seen twofathers and two mothers murdered before youreyes, and two of your lovers flogged at twoautos-da-fe, I don’t fancy that you can havethe advantage of me. Besides, I was born a baronessof seventy-two quarterings, and I have been a cook.” But the daughter of a Pope had, indeed, been stillmore unlucky, as she proved, than Cunegonde; and theold lady was not a little proud of it.

But can you call this true: “Thereis nobody but is ashamed of having loved when oncehe loves no longer”? If it be true at all,I don’t think the love was much worth havingor giving. If one really loves once, one cannever be ashamed of it; for we never cease to love. However, this is the very high water of sentiment,you will say; but I blush no more for it than M. leDuc de Rochefoucauld for his own opinion. PerhapsI am thinking of that kind of love about which hesays: “True love is like ghosts; whicheverybody talks about and few have seen.” “Many be the thyrsus-bearers, few the Mystics,”as the Greek proverb runs. “Many are called,few are chosen.”

As to friendship being “a reciprocity of interests,”the saying is but one of those which Rochefoucauld’svanity imposed on his wit. Very witty it isnot, and it is emphatically untrue. “Oldmen console themselves by giving good advice for beingno longer able to set bad examples.” Capital;but the poor old men are often good examples of theresults of not taking their own good advice. “Many an ingrate is less to blame than hisbenefactor.” One might add, at least Iwill, “Every man who looks for gratitude deservesto get none of it.” “To say thatone never flirts—­is flirting.” I rather like the old translator’s version of“Il y a de bons mariages; mais il n’yen a point de delicieux”—­“Marriageis sometimes convenient, but never delightful.”

How true is this of authors with a brief popularity:“Il y a des gens qui ressemblent aux vaudevilles,qu’on ne chante qu’un certain temps.”Again, “to be in haste to repay a kindness isa sort of ingratitude,” and a rather insultingsort too. “Almost everybody likes to repaysmall favours; many people can be grateful for favoursnot too weighty, but for favours truly great thereis scarce anything but ingratitude.” Theymust have been small favours that Wordsworth had conferredwhen “the gratitude of men had oftener lefthim mourning.” Indeed, the very pettinessof the aid we can generally render each other, makesgratitude the touching thing it is. So muchis repaid for so little, and few can ever have thechance of incurring the thanklessness that Rochefoucauldfound all but universal.

“Lovers and ladies never bore each other, becausethey never speak of anything but themselves.” Do husbands and wives often bore each other for thesame reason? Who said: “To know allis to forgive all”? It is rather like“On pardonne tant que l’on aime”—­“Aslong as we love we can forgive,” a comfortablesaying, and these are rare in Rochefoucauld.“Women do not quite know what flirts they are”is also, let us hope, not incorrect. The maximthat “There is a love so excessive that it killsjealousy” is only a corollary from “aslong as we love, we forgive.” You rememberthe classical example, Manon Lescaut and the Chevalierdes Grieux; not an honourable precedent.

“The accent of our own country dwells in ourhearts as well as on our tongues.” Ah!never may I lose the Border accent! “Love’sMiracle! To cure a coquette.” “Mosthonest women are tired of their task,” says thisunbeliever. And the others? Are they neveraweary? The Duke is his own best critic afterall, when he says: “The greatest fault ofa penetrating wit is going beyond the mark.” Beyond the mark he frequently goes, but not whenhe says that we come as fresh hands to each new epochof life, and often want experience for all our years. How hard it was to begin to be middle-aged! Shall we find old age easier if ever we come to itsthreshold? Perhaps, and Death perhaps the easiestof all. Nor let me forget, it will be long beforeyou have occasion to remember, that “vivacitywhich grows with age is not far from folly.”

OF VERS DE SOCIETE

To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.

My Dear Hopkins,—­The verses which you havesent me, with a request “to get published insome magazine,” I now return to you. Ifyou are anxious that they should be published, sendthem to an editor yourself. If he likes themhe will accept them from you. If he does notlike them, why should he like them because they areforwarded by me? His only motive wouldbe an aversion to disobliging a confrere, andwhy should I put him in such an unpleasant position?

But this is a very boorish way of thanking you forthe premiere representation of your littlepoem. “To Delia in Girton” you callit, “recommending her to avoid the Muses, andseek the society of the Graces and Loves.” An old-fashioned preamble, and of the lengthiest,and how do you go on?—­

Golden hair is fairy gold,
Fairy gold thatcannot stay,
Turns to leaflets green and cold,
At the endingof the day!
Laurel-leavesthe Muses may
Twine about your golden head.
Will the crownreward you, say,
When the fairy gold is fled?

Daphne was a maid unwise—­
Shun the laurel,seek the rose;
Azure, lovely in the skies,
Shines less graciousin the hose!

Don’t you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusionto bas-bleus, if not indelicate, is a littlerococo, and out of date? Editors will think so,I fear. Besides, I don’t like “Fairygold that cannot stay.” If FairyGold were a horse, it would be all verywell to write that it “cannot stay.” ’Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songsof the salon.

This is a very difficult kind of verse that you areessaying, you whom the laurels of Mr. Locker do notsuffer to sleep for envy. You kindly ask myopinion on vers de societe in general. Well, I think them a very difficult sort of thingto write well, as one may infer from this, that theancients, our masters, could hardly write them at all. In Greek poetry of the great ages I only rememberone piece which can be called a model—­theAEolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany thegift of the ivory distaff. It was a present,you remember, to the wife of his friend Nicias, thephysician of Miletus. The Greeks of that agekept their women in almost Oriental reserve. One may doubt whether Nicias would have liked itif Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fanor a jewel. But there is safety in a spinninginstrument, and all the compliments to the lady, “thedainty-ankled Theugenis,” turn on her skill,and industry, and housewifery. So Louis XIV.,no mean authority, called this piece of vers desociete “a model of honourable gallantry.”

I have just looked all through Pomtow’s prettylittle pocket volumes of the minor Greek poets, andfound nothing more of the nature of the lighter versethan this of Alcman’s—­[Greek text]. Do you remember the pretty paraphrase of it in “Lovein Idleness”?

“Maidens with voices likehoney for sweetness that breathe desire,
Would that I were a sea bird withwings that could never tire,
Over the foam-flowers flying, withhalcyons ever on wing,
Keeping a careless heart, a sea-bluebird of the spring.”

It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended,the lament for his limbs weary with old age—­withold age sadder for the sight of the honey-voicedgirls.

The Greeks had not the kind of society that is thehome of “Society Verses,” where, as Mr.Locker says, “a boudoir decorum is, orought always to be, preserved, where sentiment neversurges into passion, and where humour never overflowsinto boisterous merriment.” Honest womenwere estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.

The Romans were little more fortunate. You cannotexpect the genius of Catullus not to “surgeinto passion,” even in his hours of gayer song,composed when

Multum lusimus in meis tabellis,
Ut convenerat esse delicatos,
Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum.

Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedicationof his book, are addressed to men, his friends,and thus they scarcely come into the category of whatwe call “Society Verses.” Given thecharacter of Roman society, perhaps we might say thatplenty of this kind of verse was written by Horaceand by Martial. The famous ode to Pyrrha doesnot exceed the decorum of a Roman boudoir,and, as far as love was concerned, it does not seemto have been in the nature of Horace to “surgeinto passion.” So his best songs in thiskind are addressed to men, with whom he drinks a little,and talks of politics and literature a great deal,and muses over the shortness of life, and the zestthat snow-clad Soracte gives to the wintry fire.

Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobsonhas rendered so prettily in a villanelle, maycome within the scope of this Muse, for it has a playfulnessmingled with its melancholy, a sadness in its play.Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, theseold French forms seem as fit vehicles as any for Latinpoetry that was written in the exotic measures ofGreece. There is a foreign grace and a littletechnical difficulty overcome in the English balladeand villanelle, as in the Horatian sapphics andalcaics. I would not say so much, on my ownresponsibility, nor trespass so far on the domain ofscholarship, but this opinion was communicated tome by a learned professor of Latin. I think,too, that some of the lyric measures of the old FrenchPleiad, of Ronsard and Du Bellay, would be well weddedwith the verse of Horace. But perhaps no translatorwill ever please any one but himself, and of Horaceevery man must be his own translator.

It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writingvers de societe, only he never troubles himselffor a moment about the “decorum of the boudoir.” Do you remember the lines on the ring which he gavehis lady? They are the origin and pattern ofall the verses written by lovers on that pretty metempsychosiswhich shall make them slippers, or fans, or girdles,like Waller’s, and like that which bound “thedainty, dainty waist” of the Miller’sDaughter.

“Ring that shalt bind thefinger fair
Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare;
Thou hast not any price above
The token of her poet’s love;
Her finger may’st thou mateas she
Is mated every wise with me!”

And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he werethis favoured, this fortunate jewel:

“In vain I wish! So,ring, depart,
And say ’with me thou hast his heart’!”

Once more Ovid’s verses on his catholic affectionfor all ladies, the brown and the blonde, the shortand the tall, may have suggested Cowley’s humorousconfession, “The Chronicle”:

“Margarita first possessed,
If I remember well, my breast,
Margarita, first of all;”

and then follows a list as long as Leporello’s.

What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of vers de societeis not so much his lack of “decorum” asthe monotonous singsong of his eternal elegiacs.The lightest of light things, the poet of society,should possess more varied strains; like Horace, Martial,Thackeray, not like Ovid and (here is a heresy) Praed. Inimitably well as Praed does his trick of antithesis,I still feel that it is a trick, and that mostrhymers could follow him in a mere mechanic art. But here the judgment of Mr. Locker would be opposedto this modest opinion, and there would be oppositionagain where Mr. Locker calls Dr. O. W. Holmes “perhapsthe best living writer of this species of verse.” But here we are straying among the moderns beforeexhausting the ancients, of whom I fancy that Martial,at his best, approaches most near the ideal.

Of course it is true that many of Martial’slyrics would be thought disgusting in any well-regulatedconvict establishment. His gallantry is rarely“honourable.” Scaliger used to burna copy of Martial, once a year, on the altar of Catullus,who himself was far from prudish. But Martial,somehow, kept his heart undepraved, and his taste inbooks was excellent. How often he writes versesfor the bibliophile, delighting in the details ofpurple and gold, the illustrations and ornaments forhis new volume! These pieces are for the few—­foramateurs, but we may all be touched by his grief forthe little lass, Erotion. He commends her inHades to his own father and mother gone before him,that the child may not be frightened in the dark,friendless among the shades

“Parvula ne nigras horrescatErotion umbras
Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis.”

There is a kind of playfulness in the sorrow, andthe pity of a man for a child; pity that shows itselfin a smile. I try to render that other inscriptionfor the tomb of little Erotion:

Here lies the body of the littlemaid
Erotion;
From her sixth winter’s snows her eager shade
Hath fleeted on!
Whoe’er thou be that after me shalt sway
My scanty farm,
To her slight shade the yearly offering pay,
So—­safe from harm—­
Shall thou and thine revere the kindly Lar,
And this alone
Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far,
A mournful stone!

Certainly he had a heart, this foul-mouthed Martial,who claimed for the study of his book no serious hours,but moments of mirth, when men are glad with wine,“in the reign of the Rose:” {9}

“Haec hora est tua, cumfurit Lyaeus,
Cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli;
Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones.”

But enough of the poets of old; another day we mayturn to Carew and Suckling, Praed and Locker, poetsof our own speech, lighter lyrists of our own time.{10}

ON VERS DE SOCIETE

To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.

Dear Gifted,—­If you will permit me to useyour Christian, and prophetic, name—­weimproved the occasion lately with the writers of lightverse in ancient times. We decided that theancients were not great in verses of society, becausethey had, properly speaking, no society to write versesfor. Women did not live in the Christian freedomand social equality with men, either in Greece orRome—­at least not “modest women,”as Mr. Harry Foker calls them in “Pendennis.” About the others there is plenty of pretty versein the Anthology. What you need for verses ofsociety is a period in which the social equality isrecognized, and in which people are peaceable enoughand comfortable enough to “play with light lovesin the portal” of the Temple of Hymen, withoutany very definite intentions, on either part, of goinginside and getting married.

Perhaps we should not expect vers de societefrom the Crusaders, who were not peaceable, and whowere very earnest indeed, in love or war. Butas soon as you get a Court, and Court life, in France,even though the times were warlike, then ladies arelauded in artful strains, and the lyre is struck levioreplectro. Charles d’Orleans, that captiveand captivating prince, wrote thousands of rondeaux;even before his time a gallant company of gentlemencomposed the Livre des Cent Ballades, one hundredballades, practically unreadable by modern men. Then came Clement Marot, with his gay and ratherempty fluency, and Ronsard, with his mythologicalcompliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and ledlike lambs to the altar of Helen or Cassandra. A few, here and there, of his pieces are lighter,more pleasant, and, in a quiet way, immortal, suchas the verses to his “fair flower of Anjou,”a beauty of fifteen. So they ran on, in France,till Voiture’s time, and Sarrazin’s withhis merry ballade of an elopement, and Corneille’sproud and graceful stanzas to Marquise de Gorla.

But verses in the English tongue are more worthy ofour attention. Mr. Locker begins his collectionof them, Lyra Elegantiarum (no longer a veryrare book in England), as far back as Skelton’sage, and as Thomas Wyat’s, and Sidney’s;but those things, the lighter lyrics of that day,are rather songs than poems, and probably were allmeant to be sung to the virginals by our musical ancestors.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” saysthe great Ben Jonson, or sings it rather. Thewords, that he versified out of the Greek prose ofPhilostratus, cannot be thought of without the tune. It is the same with Carew’s “He thatloves a rosy cheek,” or with “Roses, theirsharp spines being gone.” The lighterpoetry of Carew’s day is all powdered with golddust, like the court ladies’ hair, and is crownedand diapered with roses, and heavy with fabulous scentsfrom the Arabian phoenix’s nest. LittleCupids flutter and twitter here and there among theboughs, as in that feast of Adonis which Ptolemy’ssister gave in Alexandria, or as in Eisen’svignettes for Dorat’s Baisers:

“Ask me no more whither dostray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love did Heaven prepare
These powders to enrich your hair.”

It would be affectation, Gifted, if you rhymedin that fashion for the lady of your love, and presentedher, as it were, with cosmical cosmetics, and complimentsdrawn from the starry spaces and deserts, from skies,phoenixes, and angels. But it was a natural andpretty way of writing when Thomas Carew was young. I prefer Herrick the inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick,that parson-pagan, with the soul of a Greek of theAnthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!)in Devonshire. His Julia is the least mortalof these “daughters of dreams and of stories,”whom poets celebrate; she has a certain opulence offlesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and “richeyes,” like Keats’s lady; no vaporousBeatrice, she; but a handsome English wench, with

“A cuff neglectful and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note
In the tempestuous petticoat.”

Then Suckling strikes up a reckless military air;a warrior he is who has seen many a siege of hearts—­heartsthat capitulated, or held out like Troy-town, andthe impatient assailant whistles:

“Quit, quit, for shame:this will not move,
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her—­
The devil take her.”

So he rides away, curling his moustache, hiding hisdefeat in a big inimitable swagger. It is apleasanter piece in which Suckling, after a long leaguerof a lady’s heart, finds that Captain honouris governor of the place, and surrender hopeless. So he departs with a salute:

“March, march (quoth I), theword straight give,
Let’s lose no time but leave her:
That giant upon air will live,
And hold it out for ever.”

Lovelace is even a better type in his rare good thingsof the military amorist and poet. What apologyof Lauzun’s, or Bussy Rabutin’s for faithlessnesscould equal this?—­

“Why dost thou say I am forsworn,
Since thine Ivowed to be?
Lady, it is already morn;
It was last nightI swore to thee
That fond impossibility.”

Has “In Memoriam” nobler numbers thanthe poem, from exile, to Lucasta?—­

“Our Faith and troth
All time and space controls,
Above the highest sphere we meet,
Unseen, unknown, and greet as angelsgreet.”

How comes it that in the fierce fighting days thesoldiers were so tuneful, and such scholars? In the first edition of Lovelace’s “Lucasta”there is a flock of recommendatory verses, English,Latin, even Greek, by the gallant Colonel’smess-mates and comrades. What guardsman now writeslike Lovelace, and how many of his friends could applaudhim in Greek? You, my Gifted, are happily ofa pacific disposition, and tune a gentle lyre. Is it not lucky for swains like you that the soldiershave quite forsworn sonneting? When a man wasa rake, a poet, a warrior, all in one, what chancehad a peaceful minor poet like you or me, Gifted,against his charms? Sedley, when sober, musthave been an invincible rival—­invincible,above all, when he pretended constancy:

“Why then should I seek furtherstore,
And still makelove anew?
When change itself can give no more
’Tis easyto be true.”

How infinitely more delightful, musical, and captivatingare those Cavalier singers—­their numbersflowing fair, like their scented lovelocks—­thanthe prudish society poets of Pope’s day. “The Rape of the Lock” is very witty,but through it all don’t you mark the sneer ofthe contemptuous, unmanly little wit, the crooked dandy? He jibes among his compliments; and I do not wonderthat Mistress Arabella Fermor was not conciliatedby his long-drawn cleverness and polished lines. I prefer Sackville’s verses “writtenat sea the night before an engagement”:

“To all you ladies now onland
We men at seaindite.”

They are all alike, the wits of Queen Anne; and evenMatt Prior, when he writes of ladies occasionally,writes down to them, or at least glances up very saucilyfrom his position on his knees. But Prior isthe best of them, and the most candid:

“I court others in verse—­butI love thee in prose;
And they have my whimsies, but thouhast my heart.”

Yes, Prior is probably the greatest of all who dallywith the light lyre which thrills to the wings offleeting Loves—­the greatest English writerof vers de societe; the most gay, frank, good-humoured,tuneful and engaging.

Landor is great, too, but in another kind; the beesthat hummed over Plato’s cradle have left theirhoney on his lips; none but Landor, or a Greek, couldhave written this on Catullus:

“Tell me not what too wellI know
About the Bard of Sirmio—­
Yes, in Thalia’sson
Such stains there are as when aGrace
Sprinkles another’s laughingface
With nectar, andruns on!”

That is poetry deserving of a place among the rarestthings in the Anthology. It is a sorrow to methat I cannot quite place Praed with Prior in my affections. With all his gaiety and wit, he wearies one at lastwith that clever, punning antithesis. I don’twant to know how

“Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoilsa curry”—­

and I prefer his sombre “Red Fisherman,”the idea of which is borrowed, wittingly or unwittingly,from Lucian.

Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comesnearer Prior in breadth of humour and in unaffectedtenderness. Who can equal that song, “Onceyou come to Forty Year,” or the lines on theVenice Love-lamp, or the “Cane-bottomed Chair”? Of living English writers of verse in the “familiarstyle,” as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Lockerwhen he is tender and not untouched with melancholy,as in “The Portrait of a Lady,” and Mr.Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest,as in the “Song of Four Seasons” and “TheDead Letter.” He has ingenuity, pathos,mastery of his art, and, though the least pedanticof poets, is “conveniently learned.”

Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I preferthe verse of Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunesand turns, as comic as the “Heathen Chinee,”as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of childrenthat slipped its moorings in the fog. To meit seems that Mr. Bret Harte’s poems have never(at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed.Mr. Lowell has written ("The Biglow Papers” apart)but little in this vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes,your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written muchwith perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of vers de societe, my dear Gifted,goes a long way, as you will think, if ever you sitdown steadily to read right through any collectionof poems in this manner. So do not add too rapidlyto your own store; let them be “few, but roses”all of them.

RICHARDSON

By Mrs. Andrew Lang.

Dear Miss Somerville,—­I was much interestedin your fruitless struggle to read “Sir CharlesGrandison,”—­the book whose separatenumbers were awaited with such impatience by Richardson’sendless lady friends and correspondents, and evenby the rakish world—­even by Colley Cibberhimself. I sympathize entirely with your estimateof its dulness; yet, dull as it is, it is worth wadingthrough to understand the kind of literature whichcould flutter the dove-cotes of the last century ina generation earlier than the one that was moved totears by the wearisome dramas of Hannah More.

There is only one character in the whole of “SirCharles Grandison” where Richardson is in theleast like himself—­in the least like theRichardson of “Pamela” and “Clarissa.” This character is Miss Charlotte Grandison, the sisterof Sir Charles, and later (after many vicissitudes)the wife of Lord G. Miss Grandison’s conductfalls infinitely beneath the high standard attainedto by the rest of Sir Charles’s chosen friends. She is petulant and loves to tease; is uncertainof what she wants; she is lively and sarcastic, and,worse than all, abandons the rounded periods of herbrother and Miss Byron for free, not to say slang,expressions. “Hang ceremony!” sheoften exclaims, with much reason, while “Whata deuce!” is her favourite expletive.

The conscientious reader heaves a sigh of relief whenthis young lady and her many indiscretions appearon the scene; when Miss Grandison, like Nature, “takesthe pen from Richardson and writes for him.” But I gather that you, my dear Miss Somerville, nevergot far enough to make her acquaintance, and thereforeare still ignorant of the singular qualities of herbrother, Sir Charles—­Richardson’sidea of a perfect man, for both brother and sisterare introduced at almost the same moment.

Now it is nearly as difficult to realize that SirCharles is a young man of twenty-six, as it is tofeel that his antithesis, the adorable Pepys of the“Diary,” was of that precise age. Sir Charles might be borne with good-naturedly fora short time as an old gentleman who had become garrulousfrom want of contradiction, but in any other aspecthe would be shunned conscientiously. Yet Richardsonis not content with putting into his mouth lengthydiscourses tending chiefly, though expressed with mockhumility, to his own glorification; but he keeps allthe other characters perpetually dancing round theBaronet in a chorus of praise. “Was thereever such a man, my Harriet, so good, so just, so noblein his sentiments?” “Ah, my Lucy, dareI hope for the affection of the best of men?” Some people would have begged their friends to ceasemaking them ridiculous, but not so Sir Charles.

But, my dear, trying as Sir Charles is at all moments,he is infinitely at his worst when he attempts tobe jocose, when he rallies the step-mother of hisfriend Beauchamp in a sprightly manner, or exchangesquips with Harriet’s cousins at the house of“that excellent ancient,” her grandmother. It is a mammoth posing as a kitten, though whateverhe says or does, his audience throw up their handsand eyes and ask: “Was there ever sucha man?” “Thank Heaven, never!”the nineteenth century replies unanimously.

Secure as he is of the contemporary public verdict,Sir Charles does not attempt to repress his love of“pawing” all his female acquaintances. He is eternally taking their hands, putting his armround their waists, leading them up and down, andpermitting himself liberties that in a less perfectcharacter would be considered intolerable. Itis also interesting to note that he never addressesany of his female friends without the prefix “my.” “My Harriet,” “my Emily,”“my Charlotte,” are his usual forms, andhe is likewise very much addicted to the use of thethird person, which may, however, have been the resultof his long residence in Italy.

Little as you read of the book, no doubt you werestruck—­you must have been—­bythe singular practice in this very matter of Christiannames, and also by the enormous satisfaction withwhich every one promptly adopts every one else ashis brother or sister. As regards names, nosooner has Sir Charles rescued Harriet from the clutchesof Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, than he calls her “hisHarriet,” though, when he is once engaged toher, then this is changed into “infinitely obligingMiss Byron.” His eldest sister, one yearhis senior, is always “Lady L.” to him,and on her marriage “his Charlotte,” agedtwenty-four, becomes “Lady G.;” but noone ever ventures to address him with anything morefamiliar than “Sir Charles.” Harriet,indeed, once gets as far as “my Cha-” butthis was in a moment of extreme emotion—­oneof the excesses of youth.

Of course the method of telling his story in lettersnecessitates the acceptance of various improbabilities;reticence has sometimes to be violated, and confidencesto be unduly made. Still, with all these allowances,the gossip of every one with regard to the likelihoodof Sir Charles returning Harriet’s very thinlyveiled attachment is highly undignified, and oftenindecent. The Object himself, for whom no lessthan seven ladies were at that time openly sighing,alone ignores Harriet’s love, or, at any rate,appears to do so. But his sisters freely andfrequently charge her with having fallen in love withhim. She writes pages to her whole family asto his behaviour on particular occasions, while hisward, Emily Jervois, begs permission to take up herabode with Harriet when she and Sir Charles are married.

Miss Jervois, who is Richardson’s idea of ajeune personne bien elevee, is a compound oftears, of servility, and of undisguised love for herguardian. She is much more like the heroine ofa French drama than an English girl of fourteen, andI dread to think what effect she would have on a free-bornAmerican! Harriet, as you know, is not quitehopeless at first, but the descent is easy, and, inthe end, we quite agree with all the admiring circle,that they were made for each other. They wereequally pompous, and used stilts of equal height.

“Sir Charles Grandison” was the last,the most socially ambitious, and much the worst ofRichardson’s novel’s. Smollett cameto his best in his last, “Humphrey Clinker.” Fielding sobered down into the kind excellence ofhis last, “Amelia.” Neitherhad been flattered and coddled by literary ladies,like Richardson. What of “Pamela”and “Clarissa”? May a maiden readthe book that the young lady studied over Charles Lamb’sshoulder? Well, I think, as you have now passedyour quarter of a century, it would do you no harmto read the other two, which are infinitely betterthan “Sir Charles.” The worthy MissByron, aged only twenty, indeed, writes to her Lucyto remind her that “their grandmother had toldthem twenty and twenty frightful stories of the vileenterprises of men against innocent creatures,”and that they can both “call to mind storieswhich had ended much worse than hers (the affair withSir Hargrave Pollexfen) had done.”

Grandmothers now choose other topics of conversationfor their descendants, but in those old days whensedan-chairs made enlevements so very easy,it was considered necessary to caution girls againstall the possible wiles of man. Even little boys,strange as it may sound, were given “Pamela”to read after the Bible. More than this, onesmall creature, Harry Campbell by name, so young thathe always spoke of himself as “little Harry,”obtained the book by stealth in his guardian’shouse, and never stopped till he finished it. When Richardson, on being told of this, sent hima copy for his own, he nearly went out of his senseswith delight.

Of course you know the outline of Pamela’s story. How at eleven she was taken and educated by a lady,who on her death, when Pamela was sixteen, left hernot only more beautiful, but more accomplished thanany girl of her years. How Pamela’s youngmaster fell in love with her, persecuted her, andafter moving adventures of all kinds, being convincedthat she was not to be overcome, married her, andthey lived happy, with one brief exception, ever after. The proper frame of mind in which to read “Pamela”is to consider it in the light of an historical joke.

The absolute want of dignity that is almost as markeda characteristic in Richardson as his lack of humour,shows itself again and again. After all, Mr.B. would never have married Pamela if he could havepersuaded her to live with him in any other way; sothe cringing gratitude expressed by Pamela and herparents to the “good gentleman” and the“dear obliger” is only revolting. No woman with any delicacy of feeling could havesat complacently at her own table, while her husbandentertained his company with prolonged and minuteaccounts of his attempts on her virtue. Can youfancy Fielding composing such a scene, Fielding whomRichardson scouts as a profligate? It is impossiblenot to laugh at the bare idea; and no less funny arePamela’s poetical flights, especially when, likeHamilton of Bangour in exile, she paraphrases the paraphraseof the 137th Psalm, about her captivity in Lincolnshire. All through one has to remind one’s self perpetuallythat Pamela must not be expected to behave like alady, and that if her father had done as he ought andremoved her from her place when she first told himof her uneasiness, there would have been no storyat all, and some other book would have had to rankin the opinion of Richardson’s adorers “nextto the Bible.”

Still, whatever may have to be said as to Richardson’ssubjects, he is never coarse in his treatment of them. The pursuit of Pamela by Mr. B., or of Clarissa byLovelace, through eight volumes, may weary; it doesnot corrupt. No man or maid on earth could layit to his charge that he or she had been corruptedby these books, while no man on earth could read “Clarissa”without being touched by the noble ending. If“Clarissa” had never been written we shouldhave said that the good-natured, fussy, essentiallymiddle-class bookseller, Samuel Richardson, was unableto draw a lady; and it is curious to see how Clarissastands out, not only among Richardson’s femalecharacters, but among the female characters of alltime; eminent she is for purity of soul, and nobilityof feeling. There is no cant about her anywhere,no effort to pose or to strain after a state of mindwhich she cannot naturally experience. The business-likemanner in which she makes her preparations for deathhave nothing sentimental about them, nothing thateven faintly suggests the pretty death-beds with whichMr. Dickens and others have made us familiar; but Idoubt if the most practical money-maker in Wall Streetcould read it without feeling uncomfortable.

How, after describing such a character as Clarissa,Richardson could turn to the whale-bone figures in“Sir Charles Grandison” is quite incomprehensible. Had he been ruined by his numerous female admirersand correspondents, or by his desire to become fashionable,or, as is most likely, by the wish to create in SirCharles a virtuous foil to him whom he thought thewicked, witty, delightful, and detestable Lovelace?Whatever the reason, it is a thousand pities that hegave way to his impulse.

It would interest you as well as me to note littlepoints of manners that are to be gathered from thethree books. I have not time to write much more,but will tell you two or three that have struck me. If you read them, as I still hope you may, you willsee what early risers they all are, even the wickedMr. B.; while Clarissa, when in Dover Street, usuallygives Lovelace his interviews at six in the morning. One hears of two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. How much more wonderful is love that rises at six!

Richardson was a woman’s novelist, as Fieldingwas a man’s. I sometimes think of Dr.Johnson’s mot: “Claret forboys, port for men, and,” smiling, “brandyfor heroes.” So one might fancy him saying:“Richardson for women, Fielding for men, Smollettfor ruffians,” though some of his roughcustomers were heroes, too. But we now confineourselves so closely to “the later writers”of Russia, France, England, America, that the womanwho reads Richardson may be called heroic. “Tothe unknown heroine” I dedicate my respect,as the Athenians dedicated an altar to “theunknown hero.” Will you be the heroine? I am afraid you won’t!

GERARD DE NERVAL

To Miss Girton, Cambridge.

Dear Miss Girton,—­Yes, I fancy Gerard deNerval is one of that rather select party of Frenchwriters whom Mrs. Girton will allow you to read.But even if you read him, I do not think you will carevery much for him. He is a man’s author,not a woman’s; and yet one can hardly say why. It is not that he offends “the delicacy ofyour sex,” as Tom Jones calls it; I think itis that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not ofthe kind you like. Let it be admitted that,when his characters make love, they might do it “ina more human sort of way.”

In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nervalresembles Edgar Poe. Not that his heroes arealways attached to a belle morte in some distantAiden; not that they have been for long in the familysepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becomingshroud—­no, Aurelie and Sylvie, in LesFilles de Feu, are nice and natural girls; buttheir lover is not in love with them “in a humansort of way.” He is in love with somevaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is awanderer from his birth; he sees the old chateau,or the farmer’s cottage, or even the bright theatre,or the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men thatthey are fair and dear, in moonlight, in sunlight,in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, andlongs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him pause, and at last his urgentspirit leads him over the limit of this earth, andfar from the human shores; his delirious fancy hauntsgraveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars,and he who rested never, rests in the grave, forgettinghis dreams or finding them true.

All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, butfor me the man and his work have an attraction I cannotvery well explain, like the personal influence ofone who is your friend, though other people cannotsee what you see in him.

Gerard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) wasa young man of the young romantic school of 1830;one of the set of Hugo and Gautier. Their gallant,school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be dweltupon. They were much of Scott’s mind whenhe was young, and translated Burger, and “wishedto heaven he had a skull and cross-bones.” Two or three of them died early, two or three subsidedinto ordinary literary gentlemen (like M. Maquet,lately deceased), two, nay three, became poets—­VictorHugo, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval. It is not necessary to have heard of Gerard; eventhat queer sham, the lady of culture, admits withouta blush that she knows not Gerard. Yet he isworth knowing.

What he will live by is his story of “Sylvie;”it is one of the little masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. One reads it, andhowever old one is, youth comes back, and April, anda thousand pleasant sounds of birds in hedges, ofwind in the boughs, of brooks trotting merrily underthe rustic bridges. And this fresh nature ispeopled by girls eternally young, natural, gay, orpensive, standing with eager feet on the thresholdof their life, innocent, expectant, with the old balladsof old France on their lips. For the story isfull of those artless, lisping numbers of the popularFrench Muse, the ancient ballads that Gerard collectedand put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasantgirl.

Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on theBorder, and what good company to you the burn is thatruns beside the highway? Just so companionableis the music of the ballads in that enchanted countryof Gerard’s fancy, in the land of the Valois. All the while you read, you have a sense of the briefnessof the pleasure, you know that the hero cannot resthere, that the girls and their loves, the cottage andits shelter, are not for him. He is only passingby, happy yet wistful, far untravelled horizons arealluring him, the great city is drawing him to herselfand will slay him one day in her den, as Scylla slewher victims.

Conceive Gerard living a wild life with wilder youngmen and women in a great barrack of an old hotel thatthe painters amused themselves by decorating. Conceive him coming home from the play, or ratherfrom watching the particular actress for whom he hada distant, fantastic passion. He leaves thetheatre and takes up a newspaper, where he reads thattomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to meet the Archersof Loisy. These were places in his native district,where he had been a boy. They recalled manymemories; he could not sleep that night; the old scenesflashed before his half-dreaming eyes. This wasone of the visions.

“In front of a chateau of the time ofHenri IV., a chateau with peaked lichen-coveredroofs, with a facing of red brick varied by stoneworkof a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn set round withlimes and elms, and through the leaves fell the goldenrays of the setting sun. Young girls were dancingin a circle on the mossy grass, to the sound of airsthat their mothers had sung, airs with words so pureand natural that one felt one’s self indeedin that old Valois land, where for a thousand yearshas beat the heart of France.

“I was the only boy in the circle whither Ihad led my little friend, Sylvie, a child of a neighbouringhamlet; Sylvie, so full of life, so fresh, with herdark eyes, her regular profile, her sunburnt face. I had loved nobody, I had seen nobody but her, tillthe daughter of the chateau, fair and tall,entered the circle of peasant girls. To obtainthe right to join the ring she had to chant a scrapof a ballad. We sat round her, and in a fresh,clear voice she sang one of the old ballads of romance,full of love and sadness . . . As she sang, theshadow of the great trees grew deeper, and the broadlight of the risen moon fell on her alone, she standingwithout the listening circle. Her song was over,and no one dared to break the silence. A lightmist arose from the mossy ground, trailing over thegrass. We seemed to be in Paradise.”

So the boy twisted a wreath for this new enchantress,the daughter of a line of nobles with king’sblood in her veins. And little brown, desertedSylvie cried.

All this Gerard remembered, and remembering, hurrieddown to the old country place, and met Sylvie, nowa woman grown, beautiful, unspoiled, still rememberingthe primitive songs and fairy tales. They walkedtogether through the woods to the cottage of the auntof Sylvie, an old peasant woman of the richer class. She prepared dinner for them, and sent De Nervalfor the girl, who had gone to ransack the peasanttreasures in the garret.

Two portraits were hanging there—­one thatof a young man of the good old times, smiling withred lips and brown eyes, a pastel in an oval frame.Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, gay,piquante, in a bodice with ribbons fluttering,and with a bird perched on her finger. It wasthe old aunt in her youth, and further search discoveredher ancient festal-gown, of stiff brocade. Sylviearrayed herself in this splendour; patches were foundin a box of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of amber.

The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had beena keeper in the royal woods, was not far to seek,and Gerard and Sylvie appeared before the aunt, asher old self, and her old lover. “My children!”she cried and wept, and smiled through her tears atthe cruel and charming apparition of youth. Presently she dried her tears, and only rememberedthe pomp and pride of her wedding. “Wejoined hands, and sang the naive epithalamiumof old France, amorous, and full of flowery turns,as the Song of Songs; we were the bride and the bridegroomall one sweet morning of summer.”

I translated these fragments long ago in one of thefirst things I ever tried to write. The passagesare as touching and fresh, the originals I mean, aswhen first I read them, and one hears the voice ofSylvie singing:

“A Dammartin, l’ya trois belles filles,
L’y en a z’une plusbelle que le jour!”

So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marionin the “Ballad of Forty Years,” “Adrienne’sdead” in a convent. That is all the story,all the idyll. Gerard also wrote the idyll ofhis own delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Reveet la Vie) were in his pocket when they found himdead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.

Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace,like the grace of his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things like this:

“Ou sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sontau tombeau!
Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un sejourplus beau.”

But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air:

“Neithergood morn nor good night.”

The sunset is not yet, the mornis gone;
Yet in our eyesthe light hath paled and passed;
But twilight shall be lovely asthe dawn,
And night shallbring forgetfulness at last!

Gerard’s poems are few; the best are his visionof a lady with gold hair and brown eyes, whom he hadloved in an earlier existence, and his humorous littlepiece on a boy’s love for a fair cousin, andon their winter walk together, and the welcome smellof roast turkey which greets them on the stairs, whenthey come home. There are also poems of hismadness, called Chimeres, and very beautifulin form. You read and admire, and don’tunderstand a line, yet it seems that if we were alittle more or a little less mad we would understand:

“Et j’ai deux foisvainqueur traverse l’Acheron:
Modulant tour a tour sur la lyred’Orphee
Les soupirs de la sainte et lescris de la fee.”

Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable,the sonnet called—­

“El Desdichado.”

I am that dark, that disinherited,
That all dishonouredPrince of Aquitaine,
The Star uponmy scutcheon long hath fled;
A black sun on my lute doth yetremain!
Oh, thou that didst console me notin vain,
Within the tomb,among the midnight dead,
Show me Italianseas, and blossoms wed,
The rose, the vine-leaf, and thegolden grain.

Say, am I Love or Phoebus? haveI been
Or Lusignan or Biron? By aQueen
Caressed withinthe Mermaid’s haunt I lay,
And twice I crossed the unpermittedstream,
And touched on Orpheus’ lyreas in a dream,
Sighs of a Saint,and laughter of a Fay!

ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN

To Richard Wilby, Esq., Eton College, Windsor.

My Dear Dick,—­It is very good of you, amongyour severe studies at Eton, to write to your Uncle. I am extremely pleased to hear that your footballis appreciated in the highest circles, and shall behappy to have as good an account of your skill inmaking Latin verses.

I am glad you like “She,” Mr. Rider Haggard’sbook which I sent you. It is “somethinglike,” as you say, and I quite agree with you,both in being in love with the heroine, and in thinkingthat she preaches rather too much. But, then,as she was over two thousand years old, and had livedfor most of that time among cannibals, who did notunderstand her, one may excuse her for “jawing,”as you say, a good deal, when she met white men. You want to know if “She” is a true story. Of course it is!

But you have read “She,” and you haveread all Cooper’s, and Marryat’s, andMr. Stevenson’s books, and “Tom Sawyer,”and “Huckleberry Finn,” several times. So have I, and am quite ready to begin again. But, to my mind, books about “Red Indians”have always seemed much the most interesting. At your age, I remember, I bought a tomahawk, and,as we had also lots of spears and boomerangs fromAustralia, the poultry used to have rather a roughtime of it.

I never could do very much with a boomerang; but Icould throw a spear to a hair’s breadth, asmany a chicken had occasion to discover. Whenyou go home for Christmas I hope you will rememberthat all this was very wrong, and that you will considerwe are civilized people, not Mohicans, nor Pawnees. I also made a stone pipe, like Hiawatha’s, butI never could drill a hole in the stem, so it didnot “draw” like a civilized pipe.

By way of an awful warning to you on this score, andalso, as you say you want a true book aboutRed Indians, let me recommend to you the best bookabout them I ever came across. It is called“A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventuresof John Tanner, during Thirty Years’ Residenceamong the Indians,” and it was published at NewYork by Messrs. Carvill, in 1830.

If I were an American publisher, instead of a Britishauthor (how I wish I was!) I’d publish “JohnTanner” again, or perhaps cut a good deal out,and make a boy’s book of it. You are notlikely to get it to buy, but Mr. Steevens, the Americanbookseller, has found me a copy. If I lend youit, will you be kind enough to illustrate it on separatesheets of paper, and not make drawings on the pagesof the book? This will, in the long run, bemore satisfactory to yourself, as you will be ableto keep your pictures; for I want “John Tanner”back again: and don’t lend him to yourfa*g-master.

Tanner was born about 1780; he lived in Kentucky. Don’t you wish you had lived in Kentucky inColonel Boone’s time? The Shawnees wereroaming about the neighbourhood when Tanner was alittle boy. His uncle scalped one of them. This made bad feeling between the Tanners and theShawnees; but John, like any boy of spirit, wishednever to learn lessons, and wanted to be an Indianbrave. He soon had more of being a brave thanhe liked; but he never learned any more lessons, andcould not even read or write.

One day John’s father told him not to leavethe house, because from the movements of the horses,he knew that Indians were in the woods. So Johnseized the first chance and nipped out, and ran toa walnut tree in one of the fields, where he beganfilling his straw hat with walnuts. At thatvery moment he was caught by two Indians, who spilledthe nuts, put his hat on his head, and bolted withhim. One of the old women of the tribe had losther son, and wanted to adopt a boy, and so they adoptedJohnny Tanner. They ran with him till he wasout of breath, till they reached the Ohio, where theythrew him into a canoe, paddled across, and set offrunning again.

In ten days’ hard marching they reached thecamp, and it was worse than going to a new school,for all the Indians kicked John Tanner about, and“their dance,” he says, “was briskand cheerful, after the manner of the scalp dance!” Cheerful for John! He had to lie between thefire and the door of the lodge, and every one whopassed gave him a kick. One old man was particularlycruel. When Tanner was grown up, he came backto that neighbourhood, and the first thing he askedwas, “Where is Manito-o-geezhik?”

“Dead, two months since.”

“It is well that he is dead,” said JohnTanner. But an old female chief, Net-ko-kua,adopted him, and now it began to be fun. Forhe was sent to shoot game for the family. Couldanything be more delightful? His first shotwas at pigeons, with a pistol. The pistol knockeddown Tanner; but it also knocked down the pigeon. He then caught martins—­and measles, whichwas less entertaining. Even Indians have measles! But even hunting is not altogether fun, when youstart with no breakfast and have no chance of supperunless you kill game.

The other Red Indian books, especially the cheap ones,don’t tell you that very often the Indians aremore than half-starved. Then some one buildsa magic lodge, and prays to the Great Spirit. Tanner often did this, and he would then dream howthe Great Spirit appeared to him as a beautiful youngman, and told him where he would find game, and prophesiedother events in his life. It is curious to seea white man taking to the Indian religion, and havingexactly the same sort of visions as their red convertsdescribed to the Jesuit fathers nearly two hundredyears before.

Tanner saw some Indian ghosts, too, when he grew up. On the bank of the Little Saskawjewun there was acapital camping-place where the Indians never camped. It was called Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut—­“theplace of two Dead Men.” Two Indians ofthe same totem had killed each other there.Now, their totem was that which Tanner bore,the totem of his adopted Indian mother. The story was that if any man camped there, the ghostswould come out of their graves; and that was just whathappened. Tanner made the experiment; he campedand fell asleep. “Very soon I saw the two

dead men come and sit down by my fire opposite me. I got up and sat opposite them by the fire, and inthis position I awoke.” Perhaps he fellasleep again, for he now saw the two dead men, whosat opposite to him, and laughed and poked fun andsticks at him. He could neither speak nor runaway. One of them showed him a horse on a hill,and said, “There, my brother, is a horse I giveyou to ride on your journey home, and on your wayyou can call and leave the horse, and spend anothernight with us.” So, next morning, he foundthe horse and rode it, but he did not spend anothernight with the ghosts of his own totem. He had seen enough of them.

Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the GreatSpirit, he did not believe in those of hisIndian mother. He thought she used to prowlabout in the daytime, find tracks of a bear or deer,watch where they went to, and then say the beast’slair had been revealed to her in a dream. ButTanner’s own visions were “honest Injun.” Once, in a hard winter, Tanner played a trick onthe old woman. All the food they had was a quartof frozen bears’ grease, kept in a kettle witha skin fastened over it. But Tanner caught arabbit alive and popped him under the skin. So when the old woman went for the bears’ greasein the morning, and found it alive, she was not alittle alarmed.

But does not the notion of living on frozen pomatumrather take the gilt off the delight of being an Indian? The old woman was as brave and resolute as a man,but in one day she sold a hundred and twenty beaverskins and many buffalo robes for rum. She alwaysentertained all the neighbouring Indians as long asthe rum lasted, and Tanner had a narrow escape ofgrowing up a drunkard. He became such a savagethat when an Indian girl carelessly allowed his wigwamto be burned, he stripped her of her blanket and turnedher out for the night in the snow.

So Tanner grew up in spite of hunger and drink. Once, when starving, and without bullets, he meta buck moose. If he killed the moose he wouldbe saved, if he did not he would die. So hetook the screws out of the lock of his rifle, loadedwith them in place of bullets, tied the lock on withstring, fired, and killed the moose.

Tanner was worried into marrying a young squaw (atleast he says he did it because the girl wantedit), and this led to all his sorrows—­thisand a quarrel with a medicine-man. The medicine-manaccused him of being a wizard, and his wife got anotherIndian to shoot him. Tanner was far from surgeons,and he actually hacked out the bullet himself withan old razor. Another wounded Indian once amputatedhis own arm. The ancient Spartans could nothave been pluckier. The Indians had other virtuesas well as pluck. They were honest and so hospitable,before they knew white men’s ways, that theywould give poor strangers new mocassins and new buffalocloaks.

Will it bore you, my dear Dick, if I tell you of anold Indian’s death? It seems a pretty andtouching story. Old Pe-shau-ba was a friend ofTanner. One day he fell violently ill. He sent for Tanner and said to him: “Iremember before I came to live in this world, I waswith the Great Spirit above. I saw many goodand desirable things, and among others a beautifulwoman. And the Great Spirit said: ’Pe-shau-ba,do you love the woman?’ I told him I did. Then he said, ’Go down and spend a few winterson earth. You cannot stay long, and you mustremember to be always kind and good to my childrenwhom you see below.’ So I came down, butI have never forgotten what was said to me.

“I have always stood in the smoke between thetwo bands when my people fought with their enemies. . . I now hear the same voice that talked tome before I came into the world. It tells meI can remain here no longer.” He thenwalked out, looked at the sun, the sky, the lake, andthe distant hills; then came in, lay down composedlyin his place, and in a few minutes ceased to breathe.

If we would hardly care to live like Indians, afterall (and Tanner tired of it and came back, an oldman, to the States), we might desire to die like Pe-shau-ba,if, like him, we had been “good and kind to God’schildren whom we meet below.” So here isa Christmas moral for you, out of a Red Indian book,and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

APPENDIX I

Reynolds’s Peter Bell.

When the article on John Hamilton Reynolds ("A Friendof Keats”) was written, I had not seen his “PeterBell” (Taylor and Hessey, London, 1888). This “Lyrical Ballad” is described ina letter of Keats’s published by Mr. SidneyColvin in Macmillan’s Magazine, August,1888. The point of Reynolds’s joke wasto produce a parody before the original. Reynoldswas annoyed by what Hood called “The Betty Foybles”of Wordsworth, and by the demeanour of a poet whowas serious, not only in season, but out of season. Moreover, Wordsworth had damned “a pretty pieceof heathenism” by Keats, with praise which wasfaint even from Wordsworth to a contemporary. In the circ*mstances, as Wordsworth was not yet akind of solemn shade, whom we see haunting the hills,and hear chanting the swan song of the dying England,perhaps Reynolds’s parody scarce needs excuse. Mr. Ainger calls it “insolent,” meaningthat it has an unkind tone of personal attack. That is, unluckily, true, but to myself the parodyappears remarkably funny, and quite worthy of “thesneering brothers, the vile Smiths,” as Lambcalls the authors of “Rejected Addresses.” Lamb wrote to tell Wordsworth that he did not seethe fun of the parody—­perhaps it is as wellthat we should fail to see the fun of jests brokenon our friends. But will any Wordsworthian denyto-day the humour of this?—­

“He is rurally related;
Peter Bell hath country cousins,
(He had once a worthy mother),
Bells and Peters by the dozens,
But Peter Bell he hath no brothers,
Not a brother owneth he,
Peter Bell he hath no brother;
His mother had no other son,
No other son e’er called her‘mother,’
Peter Bell hath brother none.”

As Keats says in a review he wrote for The Examiner,“there is a pestilent humour in the rhymes,and an inveterate cadence in some of the stanzas thatmust be lamented.” In his review Keatstried to hurt neither side, but his heart was withReynolds; “it would be just as well to trounceLord Byron in the same manner.”

People still make an outcry over the trouncing ofKeats. It was bludgeonly done, but only partof a game, a kind of horseplay at which most men ofletters of the age were playing. Who but regretsthat, in his “Life of Keats,” Mr. Colvinshould speak as if Sir Walter Scott had, perhaps,a guilty knowledge of the review of Keats in Blackwood! There is but a tittle of published evidence to thetruth of a theory in itself utterly detestable, and,to every one who understands the character of Scott,wholly beyond possibility of belief. Even ifLockhart was the reviewer, and if Scott came to knowit, was Scott responsible for what Lockhart did in1819 or 1820, the very time when Mrs. Shelley thoughthe was defending Shelley in Blackwood (wherehe had praised her Frankenstein), and whenshe spoke of Sir Walter as “the only liberalman in the faction”? Unluckily Keats died,and his death was absurdly attributed to a pair ofreviews which may have irritated him, and which werecoarse, and cruel even for that period of robust reviewing. But Keats knew very well the value of these critiques,and probably resented them not much more than a footballplayer resents being “hacked” in the courseof the game. He was very willing to see Byronand Wordsworth “trounced,” and as readyas Peter Corcoran in his friend’s poem to “takepunishment” himself. The character of Keatswas plucky, and his estimate of his own genius wasperfectly sane. He knew that he was in the thickof a literary “scrimmage,” and he was notthe man to flinch or to repine at the consequences.

APPENDIX II

Portraits of Virgil and Lucretius.

In the Letter on Virgil some remarks are made on abust of the poet. It is wholly fanciful. Our only vestiges of a portrait of Virgil are in twoMSS.; the better of the two is in the Vatican. The design represents a youth, with dark hair anda pleasant face, seated reading. A desk is besidehim, and a case for manuscript, in shape like a band-box. (See Visconti, “Icon. Rom.” i. 179,plate 13.) Martial tells us that portraits of Virgilwere illuminated on copies of his “AEneid.” The Vatican MS. is of the twelfth century. But every one who has followed the fortunes of booksknows that a kind of tradition often preserves theillustrations, which are copied and recopied withoutmaterial change. (See Mr. Jacobs’s “Fablesof Bidpai,” Nutt, 1888.) Thus the Vatican MS.may preserve at least a shadow of Virgil.

If there be any portrait of Lucretius, it is a profileon a sard, published by Mr. Munro in his famous editionof the poet. The letters LVCR are inscribedon the stone, and appear to be contemporary with thegem. This, at least, is the opinion of Mr. A.S. Murray, of the late Mr. C. W. King, Braun, andMuller. On the other hand, Bernouilli ("Rom.Icon.” i. 247) regards this, and apparently mostother Roman gems with inscriptions, as “apocryphal.” The ring, which was in the Nott collection, is nowin my possession. If Lucretius were the ratherpedantic and sharp-nosed Roman of the gem, his wifehad little reason for the jealousy which took so deplorablea form. Cold this Lucretius may have been, volatile—­never!{11}

FOOTNOTES

{1} This was written during the lifetime of Mr. Arnoldand Mr. Browning.

{2} Since this was written, Mr. Bridges has madehis lyrics accessible in “Shorter Poems.” (G. Bell and Sons: 1890)

{3} Macmillans.

{4} Reynolds was, perhaps, a little irreverent. He anticipated Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell”by a premature parody, “Peter Bell the First.”

{5} Appendix on Reynolds’s “Peter Bell.”

{6} “Aucassin and Nicolette” has nowbeen edited, annotated, and equipped with a translationby Mr. F. W. Bourdillon (Kegan Paul & Trench, 1887).

{7} Edinburgh, 1862.

{8} The Elzevir piracy was rather earlier.

{9} Pindar, perhaps, in one of his fragments, suggestedthat pretty Cum regnat Rosa.

{10} See next letter.

{11} Mr. Munro calls the stone “a black agate,”and does not mention its provenance. The engraving in his book does no justice to the portrait.There is another gem representing Lucretius in theVatican: of old it belonged to Leo X. The twogems are in all respects similar. A seal withthis head, or one very like it, belonged to Evelyn,the friend of Mr. Pepys.