XXXIV. POETS AFTER WORDSWORTH…

XXXIV. POETS AFTER WORDSWORTH

We now turn to the poets of the nineteenth century, after Wordsworth, though the first on the list was his senior in years. He is less important for his work than as the pioneer of the poets who, in the United States, contributed to the poetic literature of the English language.

Philip Freneau.

Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the first American poet of any note. America, colonial or independent, has scarcely any early literary history, which may be mainly accounted for by the preoccupation of men's minds in taming the waste, in dispossessing the warlike natives, in establishing the Puritan theocracy in New England, and in war, whether colonial, against France and her Indian allies, or against the Old Country. Yet we might have expected lyrics, at least, from the non-Puritan settlers of the very literary age of Elizabeth and James I. and from Cavalier exiles of the period of Charles I. They must have been in love; but that poetic passion, among the colonists, was singularly tuneless. We might have looked for volumes on the new country in addition to the learned volume of William Strachey (who compares the religion, rites, and legends of the Red Tribes with those of Greece and Rome) and the larger and more romantic tome of Captain John Smith. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of this Isle of Britain lived even more hardly than the colonists in America; yet we have seen that, even in its scanty fragments, their poetry has distinction, sentiment, and pathos. But American poetry did not begin at the beginning in poems of personal sentiment and experience and in heroic lays. Religion, theological controversy, colonial history, and witchcraft fully occupied the flowing pen of Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The theocracy, like that of Calvin, Knox, and Andrew Melville, which he supported, was broken by the turn of public opinion in 1692, against the hangings of witches on "spectral evidence" (subjective apparitions of the witches to their victims). On the witches, on religion, on colonial history with a controversial purpose ("Magnalia"), and on many other themes, Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a Bostonian, a Harvard man, and learned; in fact, he was the counterpart of his correspondent, Wodrow, the author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under the Restoration". His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, and the curious will find him "full of matter".

Religion inspired Jonathan Edwards; politics, science, and homely Hesiodic advice occupied Benjamin Franklin, but, as for poetry in America, it begins with Freneau, who was born eight years before Prince Charles's last hope of recovering England failed, and who died in the death year of Sir Walter Scott (1832). Freneau was a sailor, a journalist, a writer of patriotic verse during the War of Independence, and his best known poem is "The Indian Cemetery," which displays the same regret for a vanished people as the Anglo-Saxon "The Ruined City".

Thomas Campbell stole, consciously or unconsciously, a line from this piece. Here is Campbell, in "O'Connor's Child"--

Now on the grass-green turf he sits, His tasselled horn beside him laid; Now o'er the hills in chase he flits, The hunter and the deer--a shade.

Freneau has--

By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, In habit for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer--a shade.

This plagiarism, by a Scot who ought to have known better, must be taken as a real case of extremely petty larceny. Any mortal who cared for grammar would have written, not "The hunter and the deer--a shade"--for arithmetically there were two shades--but

The hunter like the deer, a shade.

Campbell, if not Freneau, must have known that the passage coincides with the scene in Homer ("Odyssey," Book XI.) where the shade of Heracles pursues the shades of the animals which on earth he had slain. The cadences of Freneau are those of Mickle in "Cumnor Hall".

The dews of summer night did fall, The Moon, sweet Regent of the sky, Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall And many an oak that grew thereby.

As a rule, Freneau's "Muse," like that of Mr. Lothian Dodd when slightly exhilarated, "was the patriotic," inspiriting to the contemporary warrior, but not of imperishable literary value. As senior in years to Tennyson and Browning, Freneau's compatriots, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, may here follow him in chronological order.

William Cullen Bryant.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was one of those concerning whom Sainte-Beuve says that they carry about in them a poet who died young. His tendency was to write Hymns to Proserpine; among the works which fascinated his boyhood were Blair's "Grave," Bishop Porteous on "Death" (the ghost of Mrs. Veal (1705), a qualified critic, preferred Drelincourt), and the hectic verses of Kirke White. Later came Wordsworth, perhaps too late; for Bryant's "Thanatopsis," written when he was 17, descends from such later works as follow the author of the Anglo-Saxon poem of "The Grave". Not much later came "The Water Fowl," a favourite of the compilers of anthologies. "Thanatopsis" was frequently retouched, and now closes with a passage of the highest ethical dignity, though to be sure there is little of hope in the idea that

each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of Death.

He was successful as a journalist,

the friend of Freedom's cause As far away as Paris is,

and also at home, where the negro was concerned. He did not cease when an editor to write poetry, and he translated Homer into blank verse. In reading Bryant's poems we cannot but see that he offered the best wine first, in pieces like "To a Water Fowl" and "The Yellow Violet". The former is full of charm in atmosphere and cadence, though the concluding moral, as in "The Yellow Violet," is inspired by Wordsworth. His best pieces of landscape, pictures of autumn and winter, are somewhat reminiscent of Cooper. "The Ages," a summary of the world's history in the stanza of Spenser, is more remarkable for the happy patriotism of its conclusion than for originality of thought. It is really amusing to see his inability to escape from the charms of the tomb,--tombs of Red Indians, or of conquerors or of kings, "in dusty darkness hid," all are welcome to him; and in "The Child's Funeral" the reader is happily surprised by the discovery that the infant, prematurely placed in the vault, is alive and enjoying himself.

John Greenleaf Whittier.

Whittier (1807-1892) was born of a rural Quaker family in Massachusetts. He was mainly self-taught; he early commenced journalist, on the side of the party opposed to slavery; and he retained no high esteem for his early flights in verse. He wrote much in the journal, "The New Era," which was fortunate enough to publish Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and during the great war he was one of the bards who stimulated the valour of the North; much as another Quaker, by waving his hat, encouraged the Duke of Cumberland's dragoons at Prince Charles's rearguard action at Clifton. But there the side befriended by the English Quaker was not victorious. In "Snow-Bound" (1866) (the name-giving piece is a delightful picture of a happy winter's night in such a cottage as that of Whittier's boyhood) Whittier first met a popular success as a poet, though already some of his poems (probably pirated) were not unpopular in England. He was a good, earnest and amiable man, and, as a poet, copious and wholesome, rather than of curious and exquisite distinction. Many of his verses are religious, moral or political, and, despite his love of nature, his lines are not always, where nature is concerned, on a level with the best of Bryant. His stories in ballad or balladish form were naturally popular; "Maud Muller" is perhaps the best known in England; he had a variety of themes, colonial, Red Indian, and generally historical. He even went to the "Rig-Veda"; and catholicity of taste is shown when an American Quaker sings of Soma, the rather mysterious nectar of Indra and other deities of the Indian Olympus. That his poems of war should be energetic, while he was professedly a man of peace, is not so remote from the practice of the earlier Friends as we are apt to suppose.[1]

His life,--his rustic and laborious youth, his irregular education, his absorption in the politics of his own country, his enthusiasm for Freedom's cause,--has a resemblance to the life of Burns, and makes him distinctly a national poet. But it is needless to enumerate the points in Bums which are missing in Whittier!

Perhaps an alien may venture to utter an idea which was in his mind before he found that it had been expressed by a fellow-countryman of the poet. Professor Barrett Wendell writes, concerning some of Whittier's pieces, "they belong to that school of verse which perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical columns of country newspapers". The verse of the country newspaper was the wild-stock of Whittier's rose; the wild-stock of Burns was the folk-song of Scotland. Whittier had to educate himself, and his genius often lifted him far above the artless verse of his youth. He was not wholly unimitative. In his famous appeal, "Massachusetts to Virginia," we read--

And sandy Barnstaple rose up, wet with the salt sea spray; And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narraganset Bay, Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill, And the cheers of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke hill, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle!

It is Macaulay's "Armada"!

There is a mountain peak in America which bears the name of the renowned statesman, Daniel Webster. Whittier, in days before the war, had written against Daniel Webster, more in sorrow than in anger, the poem called "Ichabod".

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore! The glory from his grey hairs gone For ever more.

Much later, in a kind of palinode, he, addressing the shade of Webster, gave a good example of the vigour of his octosyllabics!

But, where the native mountains bare Their foreheads to diviner air, Fit emblem of enduring fame, One lofty summit keeps thy name. For thee, the cosmic forces did The rearing of that pyramid, The prescient ages shaping with Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.

The rigorous critic may say that the idea is derived from Byron; and object to

forces did The rearing of that pyramid,

as a somewhat colloquial idiom, but the lines have very great speed and vigour.

If we insist that a very young literature must produce for inspection her national poet (and Mr. Lowell says that foreign critics made this demand very early indeed) the poet cannot be Poe, and Whitman is hardly eligible. Whittier seems, so far, to be the best candidate for the bays.

Many admirers of Burns will be eager to confess that Whittier's "Snow-bound" has merits superior to those of the Ayrshire ploughman's companion-piece, "The Cottar's Saturday Night".

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow, by far the most popular, in his own country and in England, of American poets, was born at Portland, Maine, in 1807; he was two years older than Tennyson. He was a contemporary at Bowdoin College of his country's greatest novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1826 he began three "travel-years" which prepared him for the Chair of French and Spanish literature, first held by George Ticknor in 1817; he first taught at Bowdoin, and in 1836 succeeded Ticknor at Harvard. American literature now began to be affected by the poets of the European continent, which had, ever since Chaucer, and especially in the Elizabethan age, fostered the poetry of England. Only the morally pure and elevating elements in continental literature affected Longfellow; and this was not precisely the case where Chaucer and the Elizabethans were concerned. Indeed, the greater literature of the United States is not mastered by the Passions; Byron, Shelley, and Burns were never its idols, and Hawthorne did a daring thing when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter". Longfellow, whom Poe absurdly accuses of plagiarism, was no imitator. He had a note, simple indeed, but his own. As far as any traces in his work of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, are apparent, we might suppose that he had never read them. This kind of originality is not always found even in considerable poets. The measure of Scott's "Lay" is borrowed from "Christabel"; Burns usually had a model which he transfigured; Byron's Oriental tales in verse are bad copies from Scott in versification;--but the minor poet is always imitative.

Longfellow, like the enemy of Bonaparte mentioned by Heine, was "still a professor" till 1854, when he was succeeded by Mr. Lowell. While occupying an academic Chair he published perhaps his best-known work, "The Voices of the Night" (1839), his "Evangeline" (pathos in English hexameters) in 1847, and "The Golden Legend" in 1851. In his first book Longfellow "made a bull's-eye" in hitting the public taste. The bull's-eye rang to the anvil strokes of "The Village Blacksmith". Young men shouted "Excelsior" as they walked the streets, like the two Writers to the Signet who met each other shouting lines from Flodden in "Marmion" on the North Bridge of Edinburgh. It is true that

To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,

or

The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood,

or

The laurel, the palms, and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake,

are perhaps even more provocative than "Excelsior" to him who shouts "for his personal diversion". But it is much to write verses which provoke this kind of enthusiasm among persons not apt to be stirred by literature. On mature reflection, the maiden in "Excelsior" was rather "in a coming on disposition,"

He answered as he turned away, "What would the Junior Proctor say?"

is a pardonable academic parody. If you analyse the similes in "The Psalm of Life," you meet some shipwrecked brother who, though he has piled up his bark on some reef, is still sailing o'er Time's dreary main, and taking comfort in observing, through his glass, that somebody has left footprints on the sands. Enfin, these poems have "that!" as Reynolds said, though the metaphors are mixed as if by the master-hand of Sir Boyle Roche. These things are not Longfellow's masterpieces, and they, with the apocryphal viking's "Skeleton in Armour," are best read in happy and uncritical boyhood. At any age we may appreciate such lines as--

The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair, The best beloved Night,

and

I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tide, tossing free, And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and the mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea.

Simplicity is dominant in Longfellow's verse; and he has "a message" on which he is perhaps too fond of dwelling. In one of his anti-slavery poems the hero, like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, is a king in his own country, though the slave trade in "black ivory" direct from Africa was no longer extant. In "Hiawatha" he reproduced the measure of the Finnish "Kalewala" with much of the woodland perfume of the original poem. To boys fresh from Cooper's novels the tale is a delight if it has palled on more sophisticated tastes. Theocritus hoped that his verses "would be on men's lips, above all on the lips of the young". If this were Longfellow's ambition he had his reward in full. He wrote for a young people, in the boyhood of its own literature, and opened for it the magical volume of old romance, and his hold on those who read him in youth can never be shaken, being strengthened by all happy and tender memories. His muse

Sits and gazes at us, With those deep and tender eyes. Like the stars, so still and saint-like. Looking downwards from the skies.

Alfred Tennyson.

Born in 1809, the son of the Rev. George Tennyson, Rector of the parish at Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Alfred Tennyson was a schoolboy when Keats and Byron died. At the age of 8, he says, "I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott..." it was this--

With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood.

The context is absent, but the line is sonorous, and utterly unlike anything that the child could find in the poems with which he was already acquainted, those of Thomson, Scott, Byron, and Campbell. Even if he had read Milton, the line gave promise of his originality as an "inventor of harmonies" in blank verse. After imitating Pope, and, on a large scale (6000 verses), copying Scott, Tennyson wrote, at 14, a drama in blank verse. Of this a chorus survives in Tennyson's volume of 1830, and in such lines as these about the mountains riven

By secret fire and midnight storms That wander round their windy cones,

we already find his manner, his use of a favourite epithet, and his interest in the forces that

Draw down the æonian hills and sow The dust of continents to be.

At 17 (1826), after being "dominated by Byron," he "put him away altogether," and this was the tendency of his generation at Cambridge, of Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, and others. In 1827 "Poems by Two Brothers," Alfred and his brother Frederick (Charles, too, contributed) were published, but contained none of the verses stamped with his own unmistakable mark which he had already composed. Among these the ballad on a wooing like that of the Bride of Lammermoor is specially original. At 19 (1828) Tennyson wrote "The Lover's Tale" in blank verse,--he had not yet read Shelley, but the Italian scenery, and the rich imagery, are somewhat in Shelley's manner. The book was published fifty years later (1879); only the two first parts were written in youth. Tennyson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1828, where he met Thackeray, FitzGerald, Milnes (Lord Houghton), and Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, and the foremost of his friends. He contributed to the essays of this set,--"The Apostles," a paper on "Ghosts," and won the prize poem on "Timbuctoo" by an obscure production in blank verse. Concerning the cause of its success there is an amusing if apocryphal anecdote.

In 1830, when Bulwer Lytton was declaring that novels had killed the taste for poetry, Tennyson's first volume appeared. The obvious fault was the affected diction; babblings as of Leigh Hunt; but in "Mariana in the Moated Grange," Tennyson declared his real self; as in "The Ode to Memory," "The Dying Swan," "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," and "Oriana". Here we discern Tennyson's mastery of original cadences; his close observation of Nature; his opulent language, and his visions of romance. "The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind" displays the doubts that recur in "In Memoriam"; and "The Mystic" reveals a very potent element in his character, that of the visionary with elusive experiences of "dissociation" approaching to "trance". In a beautiful passage of "In Memoriam," these experiences are again cast, as far as possible, "in matter moulded forms of speech". Before 1830 Tennyson had anticipated, in an essay, the modern doctrine of the evolution of man from the lowest rudimentary forms of life, and had also personal psychological experiences like those of Plotinus and other late Platonic philosophers.

In 1832 almost all of the poems of the new volume of 1833 had been composed. This book included the first shape, magical but more or less humorous, and confused in form, of "The Lady of Shalott"; with the first form of "Œnone" (written in the Pyrenees during a tour with Hallam), "The Miller's Daughter," which needed and received much correction, as did "The Palace of Art". Here, too, first appeared the passion of "Fatima," the perfect "Mariana in the South," and "The Lotus Eaters," which has, in brief space, all the languor and all the charm of Spenser; it is a poem never excelled by Tennyson. A very amusing review, by Lockhart in "The Quarterly," mocked at all the many faults, but never alluded to the more numerous and essential beauties of the book. Ten years later Lockhart repented, and handed Tennyson's two volumes of 1842 to his friend Sterling, for criticism which could not be mocking. The poet, though naturally sensitive to criticism, had bowed to censures which, as he saw, were deserved, and had substituted noble lines for the earlier inequalities and eccentricities.

The sudden death at Vienna, of Arthur Hallam, in September, 1833, was a shock and a sorrow which left an indelible mark on the poet's character and genius. He composed, not much later, "The Two Voices," and the resolute and noble "Ulysses"; with "Sir Galahad," that absolute romantic lyric; "Tithonus," perhaps the most perfect of all his poems on classical mythology; "The Morte d'Arthur," the greatest of his idylls on the cycle of Arthur; and he wrote many parts of "In Memoriam". He had chosen Poverty for his mate, with poetry, like Wordsworth.

In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contain the flower and fruit of Tennyson's youth. Much that was new, with more that was re-formed from early immature phases, was offered; and such excellence in so many various styles, including the rural idylls--the light and charming "Day Dream" (The Sleeping Beauty), "The Talking Oak," and again "The Dream of Fair Women," the strange romantic "Vision of Sin"; the classical and Arthurian poems--to mention no others,--was never exhibited by a young English poet. There was little to regret or discard, and even "The May Queen" had this merit or demerit that it at once became extremely popular. Here was a fortunate "alacrity in sinking"! In the opinion of "Old Fitz" (Fitz Gerald), Tennyson never regained the level of these two thin volumes of 1842: perhaps we may say that he never rose above that level.

"The Princess" (1847) contains several of his most perfect lyrics, and all the charm of his blank verse, but it is professedly a fantasy; the poet "is not always wholly serious," he writes somewhat in the vein of "Love's Labour's Lost". In 1850 appeared, anonymously, "In Memoriam," the record of three years of pain, and of strivings with the Giant of Bunyan's Doubting Castle. We cannot discuss the reasonings, the waverings, the reviewings of the then most recent theories of evolution, with their presumed theological consequences; but the lover of poetry who cannot find it in "In Memoriam" may perhaps be regarded as not destitute of prejudices. Tennyson would be more universally appreciated as a great and delightful poet if he had never expressed any of his personal opinions about politics, society, morals, or religion in verse. His two volumes of 1842 contain nothing, or very little, that can annoy the most sensitive up-to-date spirit.

In 1850, Tennyson, by that time married, succeeded Wordsworth in the Laureateship. The first fruits of his office was the magnificent "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852). In 1855 appeared "Maud," which is prejudiced by the "topical" allusions to the Crimean War, and by the appearance, as hero and narrator, of a modern Master of Ravenswood, who is, according to the poet himself "a morbid poetic soul... an egotist with the makings of a cynic". The love-poetry is beautiful; and most beautiful are the exquisite lines "O that 'twere possible". But the day for a kind of tale or novel of modern life, in verse, had passed before the death of Crabbe.

In 1859 appeared the first four "Idylls of the King," "Enid," from a mediaeval tale in the Welsh "Mabinogion"; "Elaine," and "Guinevere," from the "Morte d'Arthur," and "Vivien," they beguiler of the wise Merlin, from the same source. All are rich in beauties of style, in visions of Nature, in such characters as Elaine and Lancelot, and in delicate observation; except "Vivien" all the Idylls were eagerly welcomed; though some critics held that Arthur preached too much to his fallen Queen.

Thackeray wrote to his "dear old Alfred" that the Idylls had given him "a splendour of happiness.... Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an ardour of gratitude? But I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has come to me since I was a young man." Old men who were schoolboys when Thackeray wrote thus, felt, and feel, what Thackeray expresses. The Idylls were continued later, to the number of twelve;--not all are of equal merit; none perhaps is so good as the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, but the whole are the poetic rival, in romantic charm, in haunting evasive allegory, and in ethics, of Malory's great old book. In the Idylls, as in Malory, we find, as Caxton had written four hundred years earlier, "the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these days, noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin." The tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere, the mystic interlude of the Quest for the Grail, the ruin of that world, and the passing of Arthur, were all given by old romance, and are all beautified by charm of diction, and countless pictures of Nature, and similes worthy of Homer, such as

So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, As on a dull day in an Ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence.

In "Enoch Arden" (1864) Tennyson again displayed his matchless variety of command over all classes of poetic themes, and added to "In Memoriam" a lyric full of the tranquil tenderness of an immortal love, "In the Valley of Cauteretz". Once more choosing a novel and difficult and sublime topic, he gave us "Lucretius," a study of the magnificent ruin of a supreme heart and soul and intellect.

Of the seven plays published between 1875 and 1892 there is not space to speak; but by common admission the genius of Tennyson was not fitted for the drama of the stage. In 1880 the poet, unconquerable by Time, gave, in "Ballads and Other Poems," the nobly passionate dramatic monologue of "Rizpah"; and his most thrilling war-song, "The Revenge". With 1885 came the Virgilian cadences of the lines to Virgil, written for the poet's townsmen, the Mantuans, on that

Golden branch amid the shadows, Kings and realms that pass to rise no more.

Tennyson's genius was, indeed, akin to that of Virgil in tenderness, in "the sense of tears in mortal things," in elaborate and exquisite art, and in the selecting and polishing and re-setting of jewels from the poetry of ancient Greece. We saw, in the opening of this volume, how from age to age Homer's descriptions of the Elysian land, and of the home of the gods, reached an Anglo-Saxon minstrel; and now Tennyson recasts the thoughts in his picture of "the island valley of Avilion," the Celtic paradise.

At the age of 81, like Sophocles unsubdued by time, and still absolute master of his art, he composed one of his supreme lyrics, "Crossing the Bar": we repeat it and we marvel at the exquisite unison of thought with music. Even in "The Death of Œnone" the aged hand no "uncertain warbling made".

The poet crossed the bar on 6 October, 1892, his Shakespeare by his side, and his open chamber-window flooded by moonlight. It is probable that we live too near Tennyson to appreciate his greatness. "Men hardly know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley; the phenomenon is too familiar; but later generations will know and understand, and through the darkness of time will follow the light of this "Golden Branch among the Shadows".

Robert Browning.

Born three years later than Tennyson, in May, 1812, Robert Browning's first published poem, "Pauline," appeared in the same year as Tennyson's second volume of verse, namely in 1833. Thenceforward the careers of the two poets were, in some respects, curiously similar, as each "flourished" most decisively in 1840-1850. Browning was a native of a London suburb, his father was a man of very active intelligence, a reader of old books; and though Browning, in boyhood, was educated at a private school, his essential instruction was that which he gave himself in his father's library. At an early age, about 16, he read Shelley, and an intense enthusiasm for Shelley, as a man and poet, pervades his "Pauline". The poem is a monologue addressed to Pauline, on "the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study," as Browning wrote in the dedication of "Sordello". The poem is, naturally, more or less autobiographical; like Wordsworth's "The Prelude," it was intended to be but part of a large work, "so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine--poetry always dramatic in principle," so the author wrote in 1867, and the speaker in "Pauline" is really but as one of Browning's "Men and Women," and "Dramatis Personæ". The work contains several passages of great beauty, written in a "regular" style of blank verse without eccentricity, and is full of promise of success in a path which, later, as far as form is concerned, Browning did not follow. The construction of the paragraphs of blank verse is in places difficult, indeed obscure, a fault which haunted the poet's manner.

Of "Pauline" not a single copy was purchased: and it was with reluctance that Browning, much later, permitted it to appear among his works. His "Paracelsus" (1835) is in form a drama with four characters, and is, again, a story of "incidents in the development of a soul," that of a famous chemist, half mystic, half charlatan (1493-1541) who

determined to become The greatest and most glorious man on earth.

For him unattainable Science is "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and her, dead votaries call to him

Lost, lost! yet come! With our wan troop make thy home.

There are one or two charming lyrics, but there is a weight of prolixity, and almost entire absence of action. The poem, however, obtained for Browning recognition among men of letters and special students of poetry, when he was not yet 24 years of age. He knew Talfourd, whose "Ion" (1835) was a recognized dramatic triumph at the moment; Forster, the friend and biographer of Dickens (with Forster, Browning's relations later were stormy), and Macready, the actor, who (1837) put his "Strafford" on the stage, with but slight success. Browning's dramas intended to be acted have had even less hold on the scenic world than Tennyson's; "A Blot in the Scutcheon," (1843) might have fared better but was thwarted by the internal politics of the stage. "Sordello" (1840), a narrative in heroic verse, though of an original sort that would have puzzled Dry den, was again the study of "a soul," that of a legendary Mantuan mediaeval poet and soldier, mentioned by Dante. The abundance of mediaeval Italian history,--introducing, as familiar to all, matters which were but vaguely known by few,--and the long hurrying sentences, following trains of ideas associated only in the poet's mind, defeated the ordinary reader. As

Here the Chief immeasurably yawned

in a long passage of exposition, so did the world, and "Sordello" was a stumbling-block in the path of the poet's fame.

On the other hand, in "Pippa Passes" (1841) Browning produced a drama partly lyrical, partly in prose, partly in blank verse, full of variety, humour, strength, and charm, and with that vein of optimism which is never unwelcome. Just as Tennyson "came to his own" with his two volumes of 1842, so the works published by Browning (1841-1846) in cheap numbers, as "Bells and Pomegranates," gave assurance of his originality and his greatness. His dramatic lyrics, when they came, were poetry of a new kind, in measures as various as the moods; here was a "garden of the souls" so rich and strange, so full of novelty of incident, of observation in Italy and in England, as had never before been presented to a world which, for the moment, regarded it not. The strangeness in places might throw a shade on the beauty; the poet did not by any means always choose to make audible, in his verse, the music to which, as an art, he was devoted. In 1855 his "Men and Women" did at last win to the favour first of an enthusiastic few, then of all lovers of poetry. The very names of the poems, from "Bishop Blougram" to "In a Gondola," "Porphyria's Lover," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "The Last Ride together," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "A Grammarian's Funeral," call up a troop of visionary pictures; while "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" (1850) opens Browning's series of meditations on faith and the mysteries of existence. The poet's life, from his marriage to another poet, Miss Barrett (1846), to her death in 1861, was spent, in great part, in Italy, mainly in Florence; and Italian history, literature, art, and politics constantly inspired him.

In 1864 appeared his "Dramatis Personæ," of the same varied character as "Men and Women". Of the new poems the speculations of "Abt Vogler," the musician, of "Rabbi Ben Ezra,"--the faith pronouncing all things very good,--the gallant resolution in face of death of "Prospice," won for Browning the applause of readers who value "thought" in poetry. Of these, many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by the manner of the poet.

In 1868 a world which had neglected Browning fell with enthusiasm on the four successive volumes of "The Ring and the Book". Here all persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders of 1698, and many lookers-on, give their own versions and their own views of the characters and events, while the lawyers have their say, and the Pope sums up all in a poem by a fourth part longer than the "Iliad".

The last twenty years of the poet's life were prolific in books very various in character from "Fifine at the Fair" (1872), and "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" (1873), to "Asolando," in 1889, the year of his death. His "Transcript" from Euripides is not merely rugged, but very quaint. The method is the old method, but a growing wilfulness often mars the results--the defect of Browning's quality. His resolute courage never failed; he was firm on the rock of his belief; but it is probable that he will always be best known by the work of his central period, from "Pippa Passes" to "Dramatis Personæ". He is the poet of love, of life, and of the will to live; here and beyond the grave; and he is the expounder, and, indeed, the creator, of innumerable characters, while, if his poetry lacks "natural magic," and supreme felicity of phrase, his pictures are largely and vigorously designed and coloured. No poet perhaps, save Scott, showed so little of the poet in general society; no man was more kindly and natural in his ways.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Poe, born in 1809 at Boston, was on the mother's side English, but in genius he was of no nationality. His parents, who were actors, died early, and he was adopted at the age of 2 by a gentleman of Virginia, Mr. Allan, with whom he passed five years in Europe (1815-1820). From the University of Virginia he passed, as poets are apt to do, in the disfavour of his dons, nor did he long abide at West Point, the military school, leaving in 1831 in very unfortunate circumstances. Like Shakespeare in the tradition he "was given to all manner of unluckiness," such as losing more money at cards than he could pay, which estranged his guardian. In 1827, at the age of 18, he had published the now almost indiscoverable volume of verse, "Tamerlane and Other Poems". He betook himself to journalism, writing verses, criticisms (whereby he made many enemies) and short stories. With his genius for these, whether tales of gruesome mystery, or of treasure-hunting, or of a marvellous detective, he would, in the America of to-day, have been rich, as authors count riches. But his pay was infinitesimal, and he lived in dire poverty, always longing for a magazine of his own; but his engagements as an editor were neither permanent nor lucrative. He was, in "The Gold Bug," the founder of all stories of hidden treasure, and all detective stories descend from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". In composing "crawlers," as R. L. Stevenson called tales of horror, he had no rival. He always avoided the supernatural; his effects were mortuary, and he was too partial to premature burials. His style was that of an artist, clean and sober, in "The Gold Bug," but in such pieces as "The Fall of the House of Usher" he aimed at poetical effects in prose. The doors of the doomed mansion "threw slowly back their ponderous and ebony jaws". Poe appears to have had the wish to be a scholar; he may even, by many allusions to unfamiliar books, give the impression that his reading is very wide, but scholarship was inconsistent with his restless and poverty-stricken life. Yet something of the fastidiousness of the scholar possessed him, and made him a student of style, and a relentless reviewer of the many nobodies who formed the majority of his literary contemporaries. His poetry is the very reverse of "a criticism of life". His heroes, if in love at all, are constant to some belle morte, Annabel Lee or the Lost Lenore; and he has no hope of attaining to the love of his most beautiful poem,--

Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicèan barques of yore,

(where Nicèan seems to mean Phæacian). He combines the maximum of music in his verse with the minimum of human nature, of flesh and blood. His "Ulalume," with its recurrent and re-echoing double rhymes, trembles on the verge between pure nonsense and some realm beyond the bounds of known romanticism:--

Hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir.

Weir, we surmise, is not far from

the sunset land of Boshen, In the midmost of the Ocean,

where dwelt the Yonghi Bonghi Bo.

The celebrated "Raven," probably by far his most popular poem, winged his way to Poe's study from the cliffs which frown on the dim lake of Auber. His fancy for ever dwells "out of space, out of time," where it has learned that mysterious music of his which can be parodied, but cannot be recaptured. He has heard the harping of Israfel, and follows it in "a mortal melody".

Thus, in "The Haunted Palace,"

Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow,. (This--all this--was in the olden Times long ago.) And every gentle air that dallied In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid A winged odour went away.

Poe's versification was self-taught, and his verse, so small in volume and so original, was precisely adapted to the dreams of which his poetry is made. He wrote "There is no such thing as a long poem," meaning that no long poem can be uniformly exquisite. Yet he never attained to what is most entirely exquisite, apart from actuality, and dreamlike, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". As has been said of Gerard de Nerval, "his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from human shores, his fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars "; night is light to him, and daytime is darkness. Like Gerard's, his overword is

Où sont nos amoureuses? Elles sont au tombeau! Elles sont plus heureuses Dans un séjour plus beau.

Perhaps because he is so non-American, so decidedly a citizen of no city, Poe has been more admired on the Continent, and translated into more languages than any poet of America. His works were admirably rendered into French by Charles Baudelaire, himself an adorer of

The love whom I shall never meet, The land where I shall never be.

Poe died in 1849; legends of his life are many and negligible. He is a poet who has not much honour in his own country, or who, at least, has more honour in countries not his own. To call him a great poet is impossible, but he is a haunting poet. His prose stories were dismissed as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens" by a great English critic, but really his horrors are carefully designed and elaborated works, polished ad unguem; rather cold than frenzied,--witness "The Cask of Amontillado".

Critics, and many readers, have a passion for "classing" poets, as if they were in an examination. We cannot call Poe great, for poetry deals with life, with action, with passion, with duty, and with the whole of the great spectacle of Nature. To the Muse of Poe these things are indifferent; but to the singing of the dreams with which he dwells he brings such originality of tone and touch as is rare indeed in the poetry of any people. As a critic, too, he is a pioneer of the school of l'art pour l'art, of art for art's sake--a school distinctly decadent, and therefore in modern Europe he, rather than Aristotle, is hailed as a prince of critics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803) was born at Boston of what the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table liked to call "the Brahmin caste"; that is the educated clerical class, ministers from father to son. A similar class existed in Scotland after the Reformation.[2] Preaching was in the blood of these gentlemen of Boston. Emerson, after breaking away from Unitarianism in a singular sermon at Boston (1832), continued to preach, when he could find an audience, and then betook himself to lecturing, first on scientific subjects, and next on literature and things in general. In 1837 he delivered to the F B K Society at Harvard a lecture on "The American Scholar". He said: "Mr. President and Gentlemen, This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe". Indeed Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell successively held a Chair founded for the precise purpose of listening to the courtly Muses of mediaeval and modern Europe. But the American scholar, it seems, was to listen neither to them nor to Homer, Virgil, and Horace, nor even to Isaiah, who was much about an Asiatic Court. Walt Whitman must be the typical American scholar, from the point of view of Emerson.

The position of Emerson, as poet and essayist, is matter of controversy among the learned of his own country. In a poem styled "Nature," Emerson writes:--

She is gamesome and good But of mutable mood,-- No dreary repeater now and again, She will be all things to all men, She who is old but nowise feeble Pours her power into the people.

As to his prose, Prof. Barrett Wendell of Harvard writes: "The Essays are generally composed of materials which he collected for purposes of lecturing.... He would constantly make note of any idea which occurred to him; and when he wished to give a lecture he would huddle together as many of those notes as would fill the assigned time, trusting with all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism that the truth inherent in the separate memoranda would give them all together the unity implied in the fact of their common sincerity.... The fact that these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us of what they really are.... Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers."

Professor Trent of Columbia University asks: "Shall we not follow Emerson's own lead, and call him frankly a great poet, basing the title on these and similar essays" ("Circles" and "The Oversoul") "and on the somewhat scanty but still important mass of his compositions in authentic poetic form"--of which a poor specimen has just been given. Some of Emerson's fellow-citizens, Professor Trent says, answer his question in the affirmative. Emerson, on the strength of his prose and verse, is "a great poet". "Others equally cultivated maintain that many of his poems are only versified versions of his essays, and declare that save in rare passages he is deficient in passion, in sensuousness, in simplicity ..." while Mr. Trent, speaking for himself, says that Emerson "is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste". Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Charles Baudelaire, agreed with the second and less favourable party of American critics. Baudelaire's remarks were intemperate in style, but Mr. Trent thinks that, "it seems as if the time had come for Emerson's countrymen frankly to accept the verdict" of Matthew Arnold, that Emerson's prose "was not of sufficient merit to entitle him to be ranked as a great man of letters".

It does not become an alien to interfere in this unsettled controversy. In literary criticism of modern English poetry Emerson said that Pope "wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake". Walter Scott "wrote a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland," Wordsworth had the merit of being "conscientious," Byron was "passional," Tennyson "factitious".

It is, of course, impossible here to discuss Emerson as a philosopher. He is spoken of as an Idealist, but he seems to lean a little to Pragmatism. "The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular theory is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind." To whose mind? Emerson visited England twice; after the second tour he wrote "English Traits". Dickens had done, regrettably, the same sort of work in "American Notes," and "Martin Chuzzlewit". Authors on each side of the Atlantic took the advice of the elder Mr. Weller, and abused the countries and peoples that they visited, Emerson hitting the darker blots in our society. He had an influence, mainly over young men, in both countries, scarcely inferior to that of Carlyle; but left nothing so massive and concrete as Carlyle's "Frederick," "Cromwell," and "The French Revolution". Having quoted from Professor Barrett Wendell passages which leave rather a mournful impression, we must add that, in his opinion, Emerson's work "surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom of temper as makes great literature so inevitably lasting". Professor Trent, while confessing "that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent from Emerson's verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome," declines to rank him with Tennyson, Shelley, or Longfellow, and ends: "But to Americans, at least, Emerson is an important poet, whose best work seems likely to gain rather than to lose value".

James Russell Lowell.

The poetic qualities of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) are pleasantly indicated in Mr. Lowell's sonnet to Whittier on his seventy-fifth birthday.[3]

Here is deserved praise of Whittier's studies of Nature, and of his anti-slavery Tyrtæan verse, while the poet betrays his own affection for the sonorous, heroic song of early mediaeval France, "The Song of Roland".

The circumstances of Lowell's birth and career were as different as possible from those of the tuneful farm-boy. Lowell, like Holmes, Emerson, and so many others, was of the hereditarily cultivated class of New England, clergymen from generation to generation. He was born at his father's place, Elmwood, near Cambridge, was educated at Harvard, lived there, as Matthew Arnold said of himself at Balliol, "as if it had been a great country house," was sent down, for some frolic, to Concord, where he met the sage Emerson, "chaffed" that philosopher and Carlyle in rhymes, and displayed, generally, the gaiety of the undergraduate. Mr. Lowell, in fact, in manner and personal appearance, was, though an enthusiastic patriot, like anything but a "foreigner". He was called to the bar, but preferred literature to law, and wrote prose and verse for the magazines. In 1846 he began the first set of "The Biglow Papers," very lively studies in American politics as rurally understood by the Rev. Hosea Wilbur and Bird o' Freedom Sawin. In satiric and humorous poetry, in dialect, he was supreme from the first. In 1848, he produced "A Fable for Critics"; the idea may have been suggested by Suckling's rhymed and bantering criticism of contemporary minstrels, in his "Session of the Poets". The rhymes in "The Festival of the Poets" are more than Hudibrastic; the measure is anapæstic. It is the work of a young man who is amusing himself in a crowd of scribblers, each claiming to be "the American Scott," "the American Dante," and so forth. Hawthorne finds a place and Cooper.

Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so; But he need take no pains to convince us he's not (As his enemies say) the American Scott.

Of Emerson

His prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr--; no, it's not even prose. All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got, To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what.

As for Bryant, somebody

Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth,

cries this patriot.

Whittier's manliness is applauded,

But his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes, And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes.

Concerning Poe,

Three-fifths of him's genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,

which is perfectly true, but where, except in Poe and Hawthorne, was the man with even two-fifths of genius? That Theocritus, were he living, "would scarce change a line" in the hexameters of Longfellow's "Evangeline," is a criticism dictated by friendship. The mere name of "The Vision of Sir Launfal" suggests the influence of Tennyson. The verse, however, is not imitative; the moral is excellent, and "American children," we learn, have been set to studying "Sir Launfal" in annotated editions, perhaps a pathetic illustration of what may be called "the patriotic fallacy in matters connected with literature".[4]

In 1862-1863, the Civil War gave a motive for new "Biglow Papers," which were deservedly popular in England as well as in America. "The Commemoration Ode" has the same origin, in patriotism and resentment of the European attitude. This Ode is perhaps the seal of Mr. Lowell's diploma as a poet; the third and fifth sections, on the Harvard men who fell in battle, are swift, sonorous, and inspiring. When the poet exclaims, "Tell us not of Plantagenets," the critic can only murmur that he had no notion of telling of persons like Richard Cœur de Lion, "whose thin blood crawls". "'Tis with Lincoln, not with Richard, that the poem has to do," Bret Harte might have said. Indeed the Ode is too long. The ode "Under the Old Elm," practically an ode to Washington, is dignified, and of historic interest; perhaps no other poet has more worthily celebrated "that unblemished gentleman," the national hero; and the last section, addressed to Virginia, has a noble dying fall, like the close of the "Iliad". But not of popular appeal are such lines as these:--

O for a drop of that Cornelian ink Which gave Agricola dateless length of days.

Here the Professor (who held Longfellow's chair at Harvard) interrupts the poet. The reference is to the brief biography by Tacitus of his father-in-law.

In 1877 Mr. Lowell went as American Minister to Spain, a country always of high attraction to American men of letters, historians, or poets. From 1880 to 1885 Mr. Lowell represented his country at the Court of St. James, and won the hearts of all who had the honour of his friendship. As a speaker on many occasions where literature and art were concerned he was without a rival; in conversation his humour, wit, vast knowledge of men and of books, and his simple spontaneous kindness, endeared him to all. With Shenstone his friends might say, "Quanto minus est cum reliquis versari, quam tui meminisse,"--"Memory of him is dearer than life with others".

Concerning the mass of Mr. Lowell's shorter poems, many of them occasional, it may, perhaps, be said that few of them stamp themselves on the memory by any strong individuality of thought and cadence, and that he did not take Keats's advice to Shelley, "load every rift with ore". In a favourite passage opening:--

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays.

the last line has a certain dissonance. His critical essays are of many various degrees of value. In his essay on "Swinburne's Tragedies" (1866, "Chastelard" and "Atalanta") he never seems to perceive the extraordinary and unprecedented merit of the lyrical measures, which are something better than "graceful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase". In quite a different field the long essay on "Witchcraft" is rather antiquated, because we now know so much more about the psychology of the subject than was known when the essay was written. After philosophizing with Mr. E. B. Tylor on the origin of the belief in spirits, the critic honestly exclaims: "I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below". That is the puzzle, and Lucretius, who is quoted, could not solve it, nor had Mr. Lowell heard of "deferred telepathic impressions". This kind of topic allowed the author to bring in countless illustrations from his wide knowledge of all literatures, especially from the early mediaeval French, of which he was a votary before "Aucassin et Nicolete" and the heroic epics and sweet earliest lyrics were appreciated out of France. The essay on Rousseau contains the usual apologies which critics of English blood make for a man of genius whom at heart they do not like, while the criticism of Pope is true and just, but not specially original; and the paper on Milton (a review of a recent biography and edition) would be better if purged of comments on Professor Masson. The comments on Wordsworth are extremely amusing to non-Wordsworthians, for the Wordsworthian draws a decent veil over the poet's incredible treatment of "Helen of Kirkconnel".

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain The Gordon), sailed away to Spain, And fought with rage incessant, Against the Moorish crescent,

using, no doubt, the javelin with which he had pinked Lochinvar. "In 'The Excursion' we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenuating circumstances." It is not that Mr. Lowell judged Wordsworth by his feet of clay, but having once observed the absurdities of the bard of Rydal he did not know where to stop in treating a theme so diverting. To Dunbar he was absolutely ruthless: "whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content". "I would rather have written that half stanza of Longfellow's in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' of 'the billow that swept her crew like icicles from her deck' than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together." Mr. Lowell was not a Scot, and was an attached friend of Professor Longfellow, whose half stanza is not of ravishing merit. This raid across the Border is made in an essay on Spenser, wherein Nash is said "to have far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais". This is extremely severe on Rabelais! The undying youth of Mr. Lowell as of Matthew Arnold, may bear the blame of such freaks as theirs in criticism. Shelley's letters are not really of more merit than his lyrics, nor, if we are to call any one an English Rabelais, is Nash more worthy of the compliment than the author of "Gulliver"!

Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was the son of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby, and author of a History of Rome. At Rugby and Balliol he gained the prize-poems; he was a Fellow of Oriel, where he did not reside long, marrying and becoming an Inspector of Schools in 1851. Melancholy as much of his poetry seems, he was known to his friends as "Glorious Mat," and, in his own words, he and his brother Thomas lived in Balliol as in a large country house. He was a great walker in Wordsworth's country and a keen trout-fisher. His first verses, signed A, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems," appeared in a slim volume in 1849; they have nothing of the amateur, and possess a note of their own, though the influence of Wordsworth is discernible. "He is the man for me," Arnold might have said, as Boileau did of Molière. Arnold did not think Tennyson un esprit puissant; indeed Wordsworth was the last of our poets whom he greatly admired, though he placed Byron (for other than Wordsworth's qualities) on the same eminence; and preferred Shelley's letters to his lyrics. Such were what most amateurs think the freaks of Arnold as a critic.

Of the play, or masque, or whatever it should be called, "Empedocles on Etna," his taste later rejected all but a few glorious passages; but again he relented, and admitted "Empedocles" within the canon of his works. He put forth a new volume of verse in 1855; "Merope," an imitation of the Greek tragedy, not of much merit, in 1858, and "New Poems" in 1867. The prefaces to "Empedocles" and "Merope" are good examples of his more sober style of criticism. Like his own Apollo he is "young but intolerably severe," and, like Milton, he freely used, as in "The Strayed Reveller," verse in short unrhymed measures. Though these are distasteful to some critics, others, in Arnold's and Milton's employment of them, find grace and harmony so delightful that they do not regret the absence of rhyme. Arnold's rhymed verse is in simple old-fashioned forms, in lyrics and in the beautiful stanzas of two of his most beautiful poems, where majesty and sweetness meet, "The Scholar Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," an elegy on A. H. Clough, the friend of his Oxford days.

Never has the scenery around Oxford been so nobly celebrated; he makes classical "the stripling Thames," "Bablock Hythe," "the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills," "the Fyfield tree," all the landscape through which Shelley wandered and left unsung. Thus Arnold has for Oxford men the same charm as Scott for Borderers; he is their own poet; and the pieces called "Switzerland" seem to recall a long vacation in the Alps. They are full of beauty in the descriptions of Nature and of Marguerite, a daughter of France, who seems to have inherited the charm of Manon Lescaut in the famous novel of the Abbé Prévost. For the rest, Arnold did not pen, or did not publish, sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, and his lyrics reveal no more of his personality than his love of natural beauty, his delight in Nature, and a melancholy not unconnected with instability of religious belief; as in the flux and reflux of the sonorous lines in "Dover Beach," and "Yes, in the sea of life enisled". There are moments in youth (perhaps confined to Oxonians) when the grave charm of Arnold (as in the verses in the conclusion of "Sohrab and Rustum") seems the pearl highest of price in modern poetry. But in narrative, even in "Sohrab and Rustum" with its Homeric similes, still more in the narrative of "Tristram and Iseult," Arnold does not shine, and in "Merope" he certainly does not overstimulate. His "Forsaken Merman" is perhaps most admired by readers who are least delighted with the mass of his best poems, and least appreciative of "Requiescat," which is a worthy mate of the noblest "swallow flights of song" in the Greek Anthology, as hopeless and as beautiful as they. In his genius there was something Greek; there was nothing of frenzy and false excitement.

Arnold's criticism cannot always be termed "unaffected," and his manner and tone varied with the nature of the subject which he was discussing. It must be admitted that he "was not always wholly serious," and his banter, his "educated insolence" as Aristotle says, was apt rather to provoke than to convert people who differed from him, as to education, politics, social problems, or literature. But he had an unsurpassed skill in provoking discussion, and the public, which for long did not read him, became acquainted with his name, and his views through the newspapers. It is said that a meeting of persons connected with the Income Tax complained to him that his returns of his literary gains did not correspond with his immense literary reputation. He then, with his habitual urbanity, catechized his catechizers. Had any one of them ever bought or read a book of his? Not one could answer in the affirmative; "So there, you see," he remarked.

His "Lectures on Translating Homer," delivered at Oxford when he was Professor of Poetry (1857-1867) are not only admirable expositions of Homeric art, and "the grand style," but rich in his peculiar vein of lofty irony and academic "chaff"--of a translator who did the "Iliad" into the metre of "Yankee Doodle". He advocated the use of English hexameters--which, indeed, would be excellent, if any one could write readable hexameters. His "Essays in Criticism" (1865) pleaded vainly for an Academy on the French model, for "ideas," and for culture, a term caught at and misapplied by feebler folk. His remarks on two unessential French writers illustrated his inability to appreciate the poetry as compared with the prose of France. He conceived, however, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual purposes, one great confederation... whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another". He had the knowledge, though appreciation did not always accompany it, while the French, he complained, were almost wholly ignorant of his favourite Wordsworth. Yet, much as he rejoiced in Wordsworth's "criticism of life" (a favourite phrase), he admitted that, save in 1798-1808, the poet was devoid of inspiration, though "a great and powerful body of work remains," when the dross is cleared away. Generally, Arnold had a trick of taking a single line or two, perhaps of the worst, from a poet, using this inferior brick as a sample of the building, and contrasting it with specimens superlatively excellent from poets whom he wanted to extol. Thus he contrasted Théophile Gautier with Wordsworth, taking Théo as an inn on the road, and Wordsworth as a home eternal in the heavens. But surely we may tarry at an inn on our way and enjoy ourselves, though perhaps only one human being has seriously exclaimed: "I place Théophile only after Shakespeare". In this case the trick of setting a verse from Gautier beside a verse from Wordsworth was not played. After the appreciation of Wordsworth it is curious to find Arnold speaking of Molière as "altogether a larger and more splendid luminary in the poetical heaven" than the Bard of Rydal, because the two authors are not in any way comparable with each other. The "high seriousness" in which Wordsworth is pre-eminent was indeed familiar to the comic author called "le Contemplateur," but the nature of his art did not permit him to hint at the existence of this quality, except in irony; while Lucretius, not, as in Wordsworth's case, Plato, was his favourite philosopher.

Arnold's eager curiosity led him into fields of which he had no first-hand knowledge, as in his delightful book on "The Study of Celtic Literature". We cannot assign all "natural magic" in poetry to the Celtic strain of blood in the population, and the peculiar wistfulness of old Gaelic and Welsh poetry may be found in Greek, Finnish, and even savage poetry. Though the book led others into much senseless writing, it is in itself full of revelations of beauty. Arnold was no Orientalist, and had no special knowledge of New Testament Greek, nor of the comparative study of religions. These defects, with surprising errors in taste, prevent his "St. Paul and Protestantism," "God and the Bible," and "Literature and Dogma" from reaching a high level in their way. But Arnold wrote beautiful prose, and wrote with that high sense of critical superiority which was his own, as it had been Dryden's. Both occasionally surprise, or even shock, by their idiosyncrasies, as do Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt; but they all delight and excite and instruct.

GENERAL WRITERS.

To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corresponding to every facet of his singular intellect and character, justice cannot possibly be done within our space. The son of a rich wine-merchant of Scottish extraction, he was born and bred among books and works of art, and, without attending any public school, entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner. He won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843 published the first volume of his "Modern Painters". His primary object was to assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a comparative study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the intellectual, literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies in which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe Nature accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the development of the forms of trees, and, indeed, of "the meanest flower that blows". He drew excellently, and many of the copious and beautiful illustrations are from his own pencil. His own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied greatly at different times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote in a style as highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The effect of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but his verses proved to the world, as they must have done to himself, that formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections were with les primitifs, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, before the Revival of learning, before Raphael; and he was actually fierce over Claude and Salvator Rosa. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1852) continued the teaching of "Modern Painters". In his "Academy Notes" his attitude was thus described by a painter in "Punch".

I sits and paints, Hears no complaints, I sells before I'm dry; Comes savage Ruskin, Puts his tusk in-- And nobody will buy.

Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti--whom he knew well, and bought from gladly--Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less celebrated, with whom were joined William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They went back to the art of the Middle Ages, often applying its minute study of detail to incidents in modern life. The value of Ruskin's theories of art is now, and has long been, disputed. Ruskin was not an "impressionist," and the libel action brought against him by Whistler, characteristically appealing to a British jury on a question of art, and receiving one farthing of damages, left the questions open to each impartial mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in "Unto This Last" have had infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his æsthetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. There never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, whether it was his pictures and other objects of art, or his money that he lavishly bestowed. In the sixties and later he produced many small books with pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all things from personal confessions to social problems: he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, and his "Fors Clavigera," an autobiography in numbers, came out in parts. It contains many examples of his style at its best, that is, at its simplest. One glorious passage gives a great Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such prospect is visible! In "Fors" Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and affection about Sir Walter Scott.

In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his complicated character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a vision of "the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his work with eccentricity; and he sought retirement near Coniston Lake with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn.

Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people participators, for while others had written on art, none had done so with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and magnificent imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as often invaded by blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according to R. L. Stevenson, an irruption of blank verse into prose is a symptom of great fatigue. In one short sentence of prose in Swinburne's essay on Lamb and Wither we read:--

Behind him and beneath we see.... The Hazlitts prattling at his heel, The Dyces labouring in his wake.

Two other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent that they cannot here be critically estimated. Both were devoted to literature and art, classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. Both had their peculiar styles, that of Symonds very animated, but somewhat Corinthian; that of Pater remarkable for a kind of hieratic precision, and sedulous daintiness, and a vocabulary in which certain favourite terms occurred but too frequently. Symonds sufflaminandus erat; in his "History of the Renaissance in Italy" he is certainly unable to keep the stream of his learning and enthusiasm within its banks; while an impatient reader might demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious movement in the style of Pater. His first volume, "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" (1873), brought to young readers the same kind of pleasant surprise as "The Defence of Guenevere" or "Atalanta in Calydon". The essay on Coleridge, and the "little poem in prose" on the Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models of excellence. This book remains the most characteristic of the author, though he seems to have thought that his style verged perilously on that of poetry. He avoided this possible danger, without ceasing "still to be neat, still to be dressed," in his reflective novel of Roman life, "Marius the Epicurean" (1885), in which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in the vulgar sense of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the period. The book, like "Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much for the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, and of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the pictures of the manners of the age. "Plato and Platonism" is a valuable study, and "Imaginary Portraits" shows more imagination in the designing of character than Marius. The reef which he and R. L. Stevenson did not always steer clear of was préciosité, over-anxious effort towards novelty and perfection of phrase.

[1] See "English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674," by Professor Wilbur C. Abbott, "American Historical Review," April, July, 1909.

[2] The Simpsons produced ministers in every generation from 1560 to 1730, when one of them fell into heresy.

[3] Vol. IV, p. 134, "To Whittier".

[4] Professor W. P. Trent.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXV. LATE VICTORIAN POETS

Edward FitzGerald.

Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a contemporary at Trinity College, Cambridge, of Thackeray and Tennyson, was in later life the friend of both. Though he vehemently admired Tennyson's poems up to 1842, he never was quite contented with them later; yet detested all the work of both of the Brownings, as if jealous of the supremacy of his friend. He was, indeed, a humorous person, and a person "of humours," in Ben Jonson's sense of the word. He was a great reader, a delicate and sound critic, where prejudice did not interfere; a most interesting letter-writer; and, for the rest, passed away his life with his books, his garden, his boat, and his pipe. Nothing of the little that he wrote, for example, translations from Æschylus and Calderon, reached the public, nor for long did his very free version of quatrains in the Persian, attributed to Omar Khayyám, an astronomer. It is impossible here to discuss how many of these quatrains are really, by Omar, how many are masterless verses assigned to him by tradition, and how much of the merit of the "Rubáiyàt" is due to FitzGerald. But it is hardly too bold to say that but for the new music and melancholy of FitzGerald's verse, but for FitzGerald's own contribution of a sad and humorous stoicism under an Epicurean wash of colour, Omar and his company would never have been known to the general English reader. The slim pamphlet of the "Rubáiyàt" (1859) was "a drug in the market" till the set of Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it and talked about it. Then a wider circle of young University men made it an idol; to adore it was a sign of grace; and, in the long run, to admire Omar and the old French tale of "Aucassin et Nicolete" became a substitute for a liberal education. It was no longer necessary to have read anything else. It was not FitzGerald's fault that the saying of the Alexandrian Philistine in Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all," became "Omar is enough for all". But, though idolised by the worst judges, FitzGerald's little masterpiece remains a very original and, in Wordsworth's phrase, "a very pretty piece of paganism". His letters are probably the best and most interesting of any letters much concerned with literature that have been published since those of Byron.

George Meredith.

As a poet, Meredith attained, when he chose (and he often did choose) to a pitch of obscurity no less deserving of admiration, and of interpretative commentaries, than the darkest verses of Browning. He did not begin in this manner; his early verses, such as "Juggling Jerry," "The Old Chartist," "Marian," "Love in the Valley," have the charm of being fresh, natural, and easily readable by him who runs; while, like most of Meredith's verses, they are the poetry of a lover of the Earth, with all that she bears and nourishes. Many poems read like hymns to Earth by an Earth-intoxicated pagan. But "Modern Love"--a long sequence of pieces of sixteen lines, which exceed the sonnet in length without possessing its answering and echoing rhymes--contains a story, and a sad story, of the pangs of two wedded lovers. What that story is, perhaps some commentator has told in prose; if not, the poet needs such a commentary. The preluding sonnet to "Modern Love" may contain the secret, it closes thus:--

But listen in the thought; so may there come Conception of a newly added chord, Commanding space beyond where ear has home. In labour of the trouble at its fount, Leads Life to an intelligible Lord The rebel discords up the sacred Mount.

We "listen in the thought," but conception of a newly added chord does not readily arrive, not where ear has home at all events, and nothing leads us to an intelligible Lord, if that means an intelligible poet. Persons cultivated enough to love English poetry more obscure than an "unseen" piece of Pindar, find much matter in verses like these.

The two lovers, married apparently, in "Modern Love," are "condemned to do the flitting of the bat," but, in the dark, we lose sight of them, and can only admire luminous breaks of two or three lines here and there, glow-worms in the darkness of the grass. The mystery of Byron's "Manfred," reckoned fine in its day, the new poet explains as "an after dinner's indigest". Byron, no doubt, could have said something not less witty about "The Nuptials of Attila".

Meredith's manner, in short, "is not of the centre". Great poets rarely conceal their meaning like hidden wealth; he who does so, values too cheaply the leisure of the reader, or values too highly the reader's industry and ingenuity.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Elizabeth Barrett, later the wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born on 6 March, 1806 (died in 1861). Her father was a man of considerable wealth and eccentricity; at least he appears to have resented almost as much as Queen Elizabeth the idea of any one marrying. His daughter had a good education, some knowledge of Greek, and wrote verse early. In several of her most pleasing verses, such as "Little Ellie," and "Hector in the Garden," we hear echoes of the memories of her childhood. She translated from the Greek, and also wrote a kind of romantic ballads (not in the manner of the Border ballads) which had abundant life and movement. She took up the cause of children overworked in factories at an age when they should not have worked at all. Her health became deplorable, her life that of a valetudinarian, till, in 1846, Robert Browning married her and took her out of her father's sphere of influence. Thenceforth her health improved; at this time her fame and popularity as a poet of great variety and passion far exceeded those of the author of "Men and Women". Her sonnets, really original, though published as "From the Portuguese" were not so popular as her lyrics and romances, but her genius, somewhat too eager and careless, especially in her recklessness of correct rhymes, was in need of the formal restraints of the sonnet. Her "Casa Guidi Windows" (1851) and other poems displayed her enthusiasm for a free and united Italy; her "Aurora Leigh," a tendenz novel in verse, attracted much attention, if it does not bear the test of time so well as her briefer poems; her "Poems before Congress" were of somewhat temporary interest. Mrs. Browning, with Miss Rossetti, holds the highest place among the women-poets of England, but her Muse is neither trimly girdled nor neatly shod; and her manner not infrequently does injustice to the pity and passion of her sympathies, conceptions, and emotions.

Christina Rossetti.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) as a poet resembled her brother as much as a woman who lived a somewhat fugitive and cloistered life, practising the rites of her religion and in the exercise of good works, could resemble an artist so unapt for self-control as Dante Rossetti. Both felt the same half-exotic influences of a family half-Italian; both shared the same early enthusiasm for mediaeval art, and there is a certain sameness in the colour and harmonies of their verse and in their use of words. In 1862 Miss Rossetti published, in brief, irregular rhymed lines, "Goblin Market," a tale of the affection of sisters dwelling in a rural England that marches with a country of fantastic malevolent elves, a species of fairy of her own invention. The whole effect is magical yet moral "which is strange," and the moral is not strained or didactic, but natural, and a great part of the charm of this delightful composition. "The Prince's Progress," in the same way, is suggested by the beautiful tale of "The Black Bull of Norroway," but the suggestion is remote and the bewitched Prince comes too late to his bride. The best lyrics of the author are singularly musical with an anticipation of some of Swinburne's effects, as in "Dreamland".

She left the rosy morn, She left the fields of corn, For twilight lone and lorn And water springs.

Through sleep as through a veil, She sees the sky look pale, And hears the nightingale That sadly sings.

"When I am dead, my dearest," is not less musical and melancholy. Many of the sacred poems have great sincerity as well as original beauty of form; and some of these, with some of the sonnets, half reveal the sorrow of a life and its religious consolations,--see the sequence of sonnets styled "Monna Innominata" and "Later Life". She is, indeed, a true poet of the inner life and of nature. To institute comparisons between her and Mrs. Browning is apt to cause injustice to either or to both.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

While Tennyson was in the mid-flush of his fame, there arose a school, in poetry and pictorial art, which, like him, turned to the Middle Ages for subjects and inspiration, but also reverted to the ideals of the great Italian painters who were before Raphael. The leader and the eldest of the little Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of Gabriel Rossetti, a devout interpreter of Dante, and of his wife, a Miss Polidori, a kinswoman of Byron's strange and ill-fated young Italian physician. Dante was born in 1828, from his earliest days wrote verses and drew, and, after passing through King's College School, became a student of art, and a painter whose colour was undoubtedly excellent, while his subjects were chosen from religion and romance; his portraits being in a high degree romantic, and his mannerisms tending towards the monotonous. They were the paintings of a poet; and his poetry is that of a painter. While some of his poetry, like "The Blessed Damozel," his most characteristic piece, appeared early in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856) and "The Germ," he published no book before 1861, when his translations from the early Italian poets gave evidence that, as a translator, he was unique and unapproached. Bizarre circumstances, connected with his grief for the death of his wife, delayed the appearance of his collected sonnets and other verses till 1870, when the work excited enthusiasm among all who desired some new thing in poetry; while certain mannerisms of slight importance spoiled the pleasure of others, and the choice of themes in two or three cases offended the precise. Indeed, the sonnet has no wide popular appeal, and the sequence styled "The House of Life," with its kind of mysticism proved nearly as puzzling, in another way, as the sonnets of Shakespeare. The pictorial and visionary beauty and the novel harmonies of the verse, could not but be admired. The ballads were too artificial for the ballad farm, which is nothing if not simple, though the ballads also have Rossetti's special note and impress, his colour, passion, mystery, and romance. Rossetti, after many years, vexed by insomnia and by sleepy drugs, died in 1882. It is not easy to say whether he was fortunate or unfortunate in that the newness of his manner had been to some extent anticipated, through the delay of his own poems, by the not dissimilar newness of his sister Christina, and of Swinburne. Their works made some aspects of his manner seem not so new, and at the same time not so likely to deter by entire unfamiliarity of tone.

William Morris.

A younger associate of Rossetti was William Morris, educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. His Muse was "pre-Raphaelite" and mediaeval in his early prose stories in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856), and his later fictions, in the same archaic and fantastic manner (there were seven of them between 1889 and 1898), never could wholly recapture the magic of "The Hollow Land" of his undergraduate days. It is even the author's opinion that Morris never, in his voluminous later poetry, reached the same level of original effect as in several poems in his "Defence of Guenevere," published when his age was 24, in 1858. This opinion can scarcely be the result of "ossification of the intellect," which seldom sets in when the critic is an undergraduate, and is eagerly expecting a new poem from a favourite author. That poem, "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867), was, to some devotees of "The Defence of Guenevere," a disappointment. The vigour and melancholy of "The Haystack in the Floods," and "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," and "The Sailing of the Sword," and the unanalysable magic of "The Blue Closet" and "The Wind," were not in "Jason," and could not be, and never will be anywhere again. In the earlier book the young poet had caught a rare element in mediaeval romance and song, a vague but poignant sense of colour and yearning and mystery, not to be defined in prose, and scarcely, except perhaps in "Sir Galahad," apprehended by Tennyson. We were carried again into such chambers as that wherein--

Beside the bed there was a stone Corpus Christi written thereon;

or we were brought face to face with some forgotten tragedy of the Hundred Years' War, and saw the true lovers and the parting that they had beside the haystack in the floods, such dull grey floods in a dull green land as Shelley saw in fact, and recognized with terror that he had seen before--in vision.

The new poem, "Jason," retold, with an approach to Chaucer's manner in versification and in mediaeval tone, the immortal pre-Homeric story of the adventure of the Fleece of Gold. The poem, in rhymed decasyllabic couplets, with songs interspersed, should be compared with the ancient poems on the subject, especially with the "Argonautica" of Apollonius Rhodius. Morris had succeeded in telling of the love of Medea and the adventures of the heroes, in the tone of romance, with "abundant fluency, distinctness, and distinction". He had already in hand many of the tales in "that ocean of the sea of stories," "The Earthly Paradise" in four volumes (1868-1870). Of the twenty-four tales half are from classical, half from romantic sources. To some readers the opening, the adventure of English voyagers of the time of Edward III., who find the Earthly Paradise, is more congenial, the heroes being men of this world, than the languor which seems to hang over the personages in the tales of Lotusland. The tales are more like work in tapestry than in painting; the manner tends to monotony; we need a wind from the wings of the Muse of Homer. Morris called himself "the idle singer of an empty day". No man was more industrious, not only in his great poetic task, but in Icelandic studies,--hence the ringing anapæsts of his "Sigurd the Volsung"--in study of the arts of the Middle Ages; in manufacture and sale of objects of household decoration, and of furniture, in glass for church windows, and in printing. Coming into close touch with artisans and labourers, and being more and more impressed by the hideousness of their modern conditions of life, and by the contrasted mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social democratic league, tersely described as meant "to blow the guts out of everybody". The beauty and happy æsthetic simplicity of the society which is to follow after this initial process he described in "News from Nowhere," and he chanted for the toilers in "Poems by the Way". Not for the people, perhaps, in fact for few, he produced translations of the Volsunga Saga, combining the fragments from Icelandic prose and poetry about that glorious tragic fable; and also rendered the Saga of "Grettir the Strong" and others, into an English of his own, with archaicisms of various ages blended. His verse translation of "Beowulf" is obscure, owing to his effort to find living words in the form of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. These things, and even the series of his tales, such as "The Story of the Glittering Plain," and "The Roots of the Mountains," are delightful to the few but "caviare to the general". In things æsthetic, literary, and revolutionary, the idle singer of an empty day has been a most active and enduring influence.[1]

It has been said of Morris that he is "the most Homeric" of English poets. Despite the excellence of his fighting scenes, as in "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung," and the interest in the details of the arts and crafts which he shares with Homer, he has neither the strength nor the simplicity nor the speed of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," nor the delicate power in the drawing of character, nor the unconscious magic of the Achæan "Father of the Rest". Indeed no English poetry after "Beowulf" is, or in any way could be, Homeric.

Swinburne.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, of an old Northumbrian family, which, according to the poet's verses, had suffered in the cause of Mary Stuart and of the last Stuarts, was born in 1837, the eldest son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane Ashburnham. He was educated at Eton, where, as he tells us, Charles Lamb led him to study the early dramatists. When he was aged 12 he composed a tragedy in imitation of Cyril Tourneur's works ("The Atheist's Tragedy," "The Revenger's Tragedy"), but exceeding greatly their average of rapes and murders. The choice of themes, and of the model, argues unsurpassed precocity--among other things. Many of Swinburne's lyrics

Sang themselves to him in class time, When idle of hand as of tongue.

He went up to Balliol, where he took no part whatever in the sports and amusements of the College, and appears to have lived in the society of Mr. T. H. Green (later the critic of Hume, and exponent of Hegel), and of Mr. John Nichol, later Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow. Swinburne obtained the Taylor Scholarship in Modern Languages, open to the whole University, and like Shelley and Landor, but not for the same sort of reasons, left Oxford without entering the Final Schools. He made the acquaintance at Oxford of Morris' Burne-Jones, and Dante Rossetti, who were painting on the ceiling of the Union the romantic pictures which instantly vanished away owing to some defect in the medium employed. Swinburne must already have had an extensive and peculiar knowledge of literature. In his last year as an undergraduate he began his play of "Chastelard," published in 1865, and he was contributing to "The Spectator" some of his poems including "Faustine". He must already have been the master of his rapid, ringing, and infinitely varied metres; his blank verse, taste, and manner were already themselves in his neglected volume of two plays, "The Queen Mother" (Catherine de Medici) and "Rosamund" (Fair Rosamund) (1860), and he had made an intimate study of the manners and absence of morals at the Court of the Valois. He had the cruelty to poison Chicot, who, in Dumas, survives immortally. In 1865 appeared "Atalanta in Calydon," a small quarto with a decorative white cloth binding. The poem at once swept every young reader off his feet by the wonderfully original and novel metres of the choruses, and by the remarkable beauty of the blank verse, which was entirely independent of the then reigning influence of Tennyson. Swinburne was indeed an "inventor of harmonies," and if his persons were not strictly Greek, the verdict of youth was that they were something much better! The action of the tragedy, the avenging by Althæa of her brothers on their slayer, her son, was more in the Germanic than the Greek taste, so here we had a "Revenger's Tragedy" wholly unlike that of Cyril Tourneur, and dignified by the beautiful figure of the maiden Atalanta.

It is probable that "Atalanta" remains Swinburne's masterpiece in poetry; but, owing to its classical character, it did not achieve the instantaneous popularity of his "Poems and Ballads" of 1866. Here was a nest of singing birds of every note, from the sonorous splendour of "The Triumph of Time," in a new stanza already employed in "Atalanta," to "The Garden of Proserpine" (in the measure, improved, of Keats's "Some drear-nighted December") and "The Hymn to Proserpine" with the surge and reflux of its anapæsts, and "Dolores" in a measure which Mr. Chivers, an American poet, had already used, with a poor ha'porth of sense to a monstrous deal of sound. Some of the subjects ("very curious and disgusting") and some of the sentiments (distinctly anticlerical, to state it mildly) were unfavourably criticized, not unnaturally, and the volume was transferred from Mr. Moxon, long the poets' publisher, to Messrs. Chatto & Windus.[2] But most of Swinburne's readers, at Oxford at least, were quite-indifferent as to the nature of his opinions and sentiments, which were suspected to be, in Lamb's words, "only his fun". He was staunch to them, however, always, both in prose and poetry; indeed, whatever be the subject of his prose, he usually gets in hits at the clergy of all denominations, "The blood on the hands of the King, and the lie on the lips of the priest". He also attacks Carlyle, in and out of season, and is severe on a race of reptiles unnamed who haunt his imagination. Meanwhile his "Chastelard" had not the attraction of his lyrics. "Bothwell," the second in the trilogy of Queen Mary, was of excessive length, though the natural limit of a play is almost as much defined as that of a sonnet; and the last of the trilogy, "Mary Beaton" was rather too daring in contradiction of historic fact. Mistress Beaton was not in love with Chastelard any more than Queen Mary was. She did not vengefully pursue her mistress to Fotheringay, but married Ogilvy of Boyne, when Lady Jane Gordon (in love with Ogilvy) married the Earl of Bothwell, who was in love with her, never with the Queen.

In his poem of farewell to the Queen of Scots, Swinburne sang of her eyes as "blue," a curious error to make after so many years of study. "Songs before Sunrise" were often of great technical--beauty, abounding in the old political enthusiasms and aversions; while lovers of poetry almost wished, with all respect, that the applause of Victor Hugo could be "taken as read," with the panegyrics of babies, and the abuse of "Bonaparte the Bastard". The tragedy "Erechtheus" more closely conformed to the early Greek model than "Atalanta," but the subject was of inferior interest, and what FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson's later poems, called "the old champagney flavour" was, in the choruses, less exhilarating. Narrative was not the poet's forte, he was too ebullient, and neither "Tristram" (in rhymed heroic couplets) nor "Balin and Balan" (in the stanza of'"The Lady of Shalott") was on a level with the early triumphs. Three or four later volumes of verse were marked by the tour de force of using lines of extraordinary length; the skill never failed the poet, what failed more and more was the interest of his readers. The generation which first welcomed him had grown grey, it may be said, and cold to new poetry, but it did not appear that the new generation was warmer. In his delight in the sea, tempest, frost and fire, and all meteoric forces and elemental things, Swinburne resembled Shelley, but Shelley's music is more spontaneous and of a more natural charm than Swinburne's, who relied so much on "apt alliteration's artful aid," and on double rhymes. His characters, in play and narrative poetry, do not dwell in the memory like the creations of great tragedians and narrators; they are rather sonorous than sympathetic, more "heroic" than human. Queen Mary and her Maries did not speak in Swinburne's tones, but like women of this world. "Before his fortieth year," Mr. Gosse informs us, "there had set in a curious ossification of Swinburne's intellect." But this appears merely to mean that he saw no merit in Ibsen, Stevenson, Dostoieffsky. As to Ibsen, it was not likely that he should see any merit; as to the others, most ageing men rather shun new novelists, there is nothing "curious" in that; while with his "hostility to Zola" it is easy to sympathise. The ossification left him as exuberant as ever in his old tastes, which included all that is best in the literature of the world, and as vehement in the old way on the old themes. But if, by forty, he "had done his do" in Cromwell's phrase, the phenomenon is usual among poets, "the new wine is best," with most of them, and perhaps none, save Scott, has ever been able to turn with success to an entirely fresh field.

As a critic, Swinburne had a transcendent knowledge of literature, and a power of appreciation only rivalled by Charles Lamb; but whether he loved or hated an author, his language was certainly too violent in praise or dispraise. His essay on Wordsworth and Byron, and incidentally on Matthew Arnold, contains many things that are true, and needed to be said, but their truth would not be less apparent if the critic did not speak in the tones of a demoniac, and write sentences longer, and less easily to be construed, than those of Clarendon. Of his prose works the "George Chapman," "Essays and Studies," "Note on Charlotte Brontë," "Study of Shakespeare," and "Miscellanies," may all be read with pleasure, instruction, and gratitude, though here and there with surprise and regret. The vehemence and turbulence appear almost incompatible with the possession of humour, of which, none the less, whether in Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, or the Bab Ballads, Swinburne had a very keen appreciation. Humour was not conspicuous in his book of parodies, "Cap and Bells," and memory recalls no amusing comic relief in his tragedies. But he must have meant to-be amusing when he said that "in all things he desired to preserve the golden mean of scrupulous moderation". There is somewhat lacking to that remarkable genius of almost the last true English poet; we can but say "he was born to be so". As English in heart he was as Shakespeare, but a patriot need not have insulted the enemies of his country, especially, in one instance, when they were Republicans.

One field in which he worked industriously has yet to be mentioned, his punctual and frequent celebration of the recently dead. Of his many elegies that on Charles Baudelaire is perhaps the best, but it attains not unto "Lycidas," "Adonais," and "Thyrsis".

Poetic Underwoods.

There was, in the age of the great poets of the early nineteenth century, a considerable growth of underwood. Among the more conspicuous plants are Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore. Campbell (1777-1844) was born and bred at Glasgow. His first verses, "The Pleasures of Hope," in rhyming heroic couplets, appeared in a poetic dearth (1799) and were fair samples of a kind of poetry which was near its death. His "Gertrude of Wyoming" was pathetic (1809), few have even heard of his "Pilgrimage of Glencoe," and Campbell lives by short spirited things, "Hohenlinden," "Ye Mariners of England," "Of Nelson and the North," "Lochiel, Lochiel, Beware of the Day," and the longer piece which displays the resolution and fortitude of "The Last Man" in a very pleasing light. Campbell lived by ordinary writing, critical and editorial. He was a scrupulous, almost a timid corrector of his own verses. A draft for, one of his great naval songs, in the library at Abbotsford, is much longer and not nearly so good as the published version. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was a man of wealth, and the friend of men of letters, especially of Byron, through as many generations as Nestor reigned over. His "Italy" (1822) se sauve sur les planches, on the plates by Turner.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) had greater intelligence, vivacity, agility, an endearing if trivial lyric note of his own, and plenty of witty banter. His songs were meant to be sung, and were sung to the accompaniment of the piano, or the Harp of Erin. He was born in Dublin, was barely 20 when he translated Anacreon, or the poems that were attributed to Anacreon, while his "Poems by Thomas Little" were more than Anacreontic. A duel with the editor of the "Edinburgh Review," Jeffrey, would have advertised him better if Byron had not spoken of the pistols as leadless; Byron and he, thereafter, became bosom friends (see Byron's Correspondence, in which he tells whom he has been kissing). As the biographer of the noble poet, Moore's asterisks are not often successful in wrapping the facts in a mystery. By "Irish Melodies" (1807) Moore chiefly lives; "The Twopenny Postbag," being "topical" and dealing in Whig witticisms, cannot be popular with an age in which few have read "The Rovers," "The Loves of the Triangles," and the other classical drolleries of the "Anti-jacobin" (mainly by Ellis, Frere, and Canning). Not to have read these is to be deficient in liberal education. "Lalla Rookh," Oriental stories in verse, was welcomed almost as eagerly as Byron's "Giaour," "Lara," and similar romances of the land of the cypress and myrtle. The "Life of Byron" (1830) was also, though hampered by disputes and the burning of Byron's Memoirs, a great success, but neither then nor now can a complete view of Byron's life be given. Moore enjoyed his reputation and social opportunities in his own day, but the competition of the great contemporary and of later poets has injured his laurels.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was at the opposite pole from Moore as a man and a poet. Educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke, Oxford, he made poetry his main object in a lonely and dissatisfied life, always struggling with a chaotic tragedy in the most sombre Elizabethan manner, "Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy". He could not satisfy himself with it; chaotic it remains, but it contains beautiful passages, and, among other admirable lyrics, he produced--

If there were Dreams to sell, What would you buy?

His letters, though frequently morbid, are often interesting. He died abroad, dubiously sane. What is poetic in the mass of Beddoes's writings is true poetry.

It is not possible here to do more than mention Thomas Hood (1799-1845) whose abundant animal spirits and puns were, and if any one cares to look into his facetious works still are, highly entertaining. His "Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" is in a serious vein, and though it has much charm, it never was appreciated. "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs" made for him a name by their pathos, while his character, his fortitude, and irrepressible spirits, not to be subdued by hack-work and misfortune, made him an honour to his profession.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839, Eton and Cambridge) is remembered for his lively and adroit occasional verses, more than for his essay in the grotesque and terrible, "The Red Fisherman". Praed was certainly the foremost writer of vers de société of his day, though he was not a Gay or a Prior.

[1] See his Life by Mr. Mackail and the admirable biographical "Introductions" by his daughter, Miss May Morris, to each volume of the new edition of his Collected Works. Longmans & Co.

[2] On the back of my copy of the original edition I found three superimposed paper tickets with three publishers' names, Pickering, Moxon, and Chatto & Windus.

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XXXVI. LATEST GEORGIAN AND VICTORIAN NOVELISTS

Scott's example and success naturally attracted many writers towards the novel. Byron, Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, with Polidori, Byron's physician, all amused themselves with writing romances in the "truly horrid" style during a period of rainy weather on the Lake of Geneva. Byron's first chapters of a romance of a vampire, with the opening scene, in the desert near Ephesus, are admirable and tantalizing. Completed as heaven pleased by Polidori, the story was popular on the Continent, was made the theme of more than one opera, and was dramatized by Charles Nodier. Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein," highly praised by Scott, really is very satisfactorily horrid; her later novels are forgotten.

So far, and also in the three Scottish novels of Miss Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) there was no imitation of Scott, indeed her tale "Marriage" (1818) was published four years after "Waverley". This work, with "Inheritance," and "Destiny," contained humorous studies of Scottish character--of these Miss Pratt is the best remembered.

John Galt (1779-1839) was a man of affairs and a prolific general writer, an acquaintance of Byron. The best of his books, "The Annals of the Parish," is very good indeed: the old innocent minister records the humours and sorrows of his flock from year to year, throughout the commercial "awakening of Scotland". Except for the fact that the book deals with Scottish life it is not an imitation of Sir Walter; nor is "The Provost," or "The Ayrshire Legatees," who travel south as Humphry Clinker travelled north of Tweed, and, like Humphry's company, narrate their adventures and record their reflections. Galt's best books are still well worth reading; they, not Scott's romances, are the ancestors of the modern "Kailyard School," as it was called in its day.

Beginning with an imitation of Scott, William Harrison Ainsworth (born 1805) became a literary man very young, published for the first time in "A Christmas Box," Scott's "Bonny Dundee," and, as editor, advertised himself colossally (he was a strikingly handsome person), and poured out historical novels, "The Tower," "Rookwood," "Jack Sheppard," and many others. He "crammed" for the historical details, of which he was too lavish, and, aided by Cruikshank's designs, attained a wide popularity, which has vanished. He continued to write almost till his death in 1882.

G. P. R. James (1799-1860) is only remembered for his famous two horsemen in his opening scenes; long before his death his vogue had passed.

His contemporary, Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881), for a man so active in politics, wrote a great mass of fiction, from the "Vivian Grey" of his boyhood, to more mature works in which many of the characters were easily recognized by contemporaries. The political novels, such as "Coningsby" abound in satire, "Sybil" in reflections on society; all are full of a fantasy rather Oriental, and "Lothair," in 1870, was as personal in its allusions as "Coningsby". "Ixion" and "The Infernal Marriage" are brief apologues, full of mocking mirth; everywhere there is brilliance; but substance in the way of human character and of "convincing" narrative is rare. The author was amusing himself and his world between the innings of a greater game. Thackeray's burlesque "Codlingsby" may survive "Coningsby".

Perhaps Thackeray's "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth," may also outlive its originals, the military novels of Charles Lever (1806-1872), tales of the camp, the march and the battle. Yet they lose great pleasure who neglect Major Monsoon, Micky Free, and Baby Blake, in Lever's "Charles O'Malley"; the major is a jewel of a character. The early scenes at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the Galway of the old days of claret and pistols are admirable; and Lever knew many anecdotes of the Peninsular War to which he does full justice. He was in his early years a most spirited narrator, full of humour, with sometimes a cloud of melancholy crossing the landscape which dwells in the memory. No man could always maintain the high spirits of "Charles O'Malley" and "Harry Lorrequer," and Lever turned to tales of a more subdued and ordinary kind. One of them, "A Day's Ride: a Life's Romance," considerably lowered the circulation of Dickens's "All the Year Round". But it will be in a sad kind of world that "Charles O'Malley" will die.

Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was (perhaps after Robert Chambers, but far more conspicuously) the most versatile man of letters of his age. He entered Parliament very early, before the passing of the Reform Bill, and already he had impressed Scott by his novel "Pelham". Sir Walter wrote to Lockhart, curious about "Pelham" and its author. Lockhart, replied curtly that "Pelham is a puppy," and its author, like Disraeli, certainly aimed at being a dandy, and had a Byronic pose. Perhaps for this reason Thackeray regarded Lytton as a mass of affectations in thought and style, with his pretensions to classical learning and Neo-Platonic lore, and mysticism, and his affection for virtuous criminals as in "Eugene Aram". Thackeray's burlesque of Lytton, "George de Barnwell," was his favourite among his own works, and is a joy for ever with its sham history, sham classics, and sham sentiment. When Lytton, in a satire, attacked Tennyson as "Miss Alfred" the poet finished the fight in a single round. However, Lytton's novels continued to win admiration, whether they were historical romances (of these "The Last Days of Pompeii" is probably the best of all tales which introduce early Christians, and is still very readable) or whether they were stories of modern life. "Zanoni" has several times defeated the present writer; but "The Caxtons" is full of interest. There is no better romance of the supernormal than "A Strange Story"; and perhaps a kind of sketch for it, "The Haunted and the Haunters," is at least as good. The marvels, we may say, are "spread too thick," but Lytton manifestly had in his mind the well-authenticated story of Willington Mill. To the last Lytton kept changing his manner and working, with wonderful freshness, in new fields. He missed being in the first rank of novelists, and the bloom is very early off the rye of novelists who fall short of that rank.

Of Lockhart's novels, though he tried his hand four times (once in the unlucky early Christian period with "Valerius"), only one is read, "Adam Blair," a vigorous and gloomy study of the temptation and fall of a Scottish parish minister. Hogg's "Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a most astonishing work, when once it gets under way, anticipating R. L. Stevenson's handling o the terrible in a lonely upland parish (see "Thrawn Janet"). But if the story is tardy in its earlier chapters, in the later, it rivals not only Stevenson but Hawthorne, yet few people can be induced to give it a trial.

Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) is a novelist of the days of Nelson's fleet, and nothing is more surprising, nothing in the same field more distressing, than the neglect into which the nautical novels of the creator of "Peter Simple," "Mr. Midshipman Easy," "Masterman Ready" and "Snarley-yow" appear to have fallen. They are full of humour, high spirits, genuine adventures, and sound honest views of life and duty. Carlyle ungratefully called them "nonsense," but he read them when under the blow of the destruction of his manuscript of the French Revolution. They are the best sort of boys' books, but the inexplicable taste of boys leads them to prefer the works of Mr. Henty to those which their grandfathers read, the books of Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Dickens, and Captain Marryat.

They were not so fond of Michael Scott's "Tom Cringle's Log," and "The Cruise of the Midge," but they did read and shudder over Mrs. Shelley's best novel, "Frankenstein". Of infinitely more merit than these novelists are the glories of the Victorian period, Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë.

Dickens.

"A star danced and under that was he born" might have been the astrological explanation of the genius of Charles Dickens (born at Portsmouth, 1812). Explorers of "heredity" can find no source of the humour and art of Dickens in his father (Mr. Micawber), a dockyard clerk whose fortunes were never so high as his buoyant hopes; and who was in prisons often for debt. As Mrs. Dickens, the mother, confessedly lent traits to Mrs. Nickleby, we need not look for genius on that side. Dickens's early literary education was mainly derived from some old books which he found in a cupboard. There were "The Arabian Nights," for example, and Fielding's novels (he played at being Tom Jones, a child's Tom Jones, an innocent creature), stories of shipwrecks (he went about in fear of savages and determined to sell his life dearly), in fact there was plenty of good reading. He seems also to have had a nurse who told stories delightfully "frightening". We see many traits of his fantastic childish thoughts and dreams in the early Pip of "Great Expectations"; there are memories, too, in Little Dombey, and in the infancy of David Copperfield. He was, in short, born with an elfish imagination; always he retained the primitive habit of giving souls and characters to lifeless things. His power of minute observation was precocious, and he was a dreamer of day-dreams till the poverty, and negligence, of his family sent him to win his tiny wages and choose his own poor meals, in the service of a warehouse.

All this bitter part of his life made him a close observer of poverty; a schemer of expedients; a little man of a child. The improvement of his family's affairs gave him some rather irregular schooling; it was enough to teach him to draw inimitably well the various kinds of schoolboy, except the cruel bully, whom he would have found rampant and abominable at any public school. Like David Copperfield he learned shorthand, was a reporter in Parliament, and conceived a contempt for Parliamentary institutions. We all know how he felt when his first magazine article was published: in 1836 papers of his appeared as "Sketches by Boz," and in them his peculiar humour, not without debt to Theodore Hook and other well forgotten comic contemporaries, is already conspicuous.

In 1836 he was asked to write papers of the comic and sporting sort, for illustrations of the adventures of a club of citizens. "I thought of Mr. Pickwick," he says, and, though Mr. Pickwick did not often run, he ran away with Dickens's fancy as Dugald Dalgetty ran away with Scott's. The peripatetic Socrates of his younger companions, Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, find Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick kept on improving as vir pietate gravis, chivalrous as Don Quixote, adventurous as he, benevolent, and innocent as a child, yet dignified, and to be trifled with by no man or cabman. We remember Mr. Pickwick's idea of an attitude of self-defence! The influence of Smollett is on Dickens as on Fanny Burney; "Pickwick" is a sequel of adventures of the road and of the inn, filled full of the highest animal-spirits, witness the adventure of The Lady with Yellow Curl-papers! Some extraneous stories are placed in the middle of the tale, as by Fielding and Smollett: the book is not a novel, it is something better, it is "Pickwick"!

Already, like Fielding, and with more pertinacity, Dickens was attacking social abuses, imprisonment for debt, the Fleet Prison, the Law, as represented by Messrs. Dodson and Fogg and Mr. Justice Stareleigh. Accidental happy thoughts occurred to him, Mr. Samuel Weller for one, as the tale went on appearing in monthly numbers, and the author was never much ahead of the printer. This mode of publication is responsible for the length and diffuseness of many of the novels both of Dickens and Thackeray. The sheets had to be filled: compression and construction could not be attained; and, in later works, when Dickens did labour hard to construct a plot, we find it, often, as involuted and obscure as the plots of Congreve's comedies.

"Pickwick" was an overwhelming success; Dickens found himself famous and entangled in engagements to produce more concurrent fictions than even Scott could have kept up simultaneously. Yet his high animal spirits and glowing fancy poured themselves out in "Nicholas Nickleby," "Oliver Twist," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Barnaby Rudge," and "Martin Chuzzlewit" (the American scenes are due to his experiences of the United States), between 1838 and 1843. Consider the immense variety, the humour, the crowd of eternally amusing characters; caricatures, if any one pleases, but the most laughable of caricatures. The Squeerses, the Crummleses, the Dodger, Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Pecksniff, Bailey junior, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Richard Swiveller, the Marchioness--he who loves them not knows them not! The melodramatic and pathetic characters and scenes are less universally admired; Ralph Nickleby, Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit rather try our belief, and all the world does not weep over Little Nell. To say, with R. L. Stevenson, that Dickens, in delineating Little Dombey, Tiny Tim, Little Nell, and Dora in "David Copperfield," "wallowed naked in the pathetic," is to offend many devout admirers. We can take Chaucer's counsel and "turn the other page".

In "David Copperfield" (1849-1850), with the charm of the infancy of David, the pain of his days in the warehouse, with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Spenlow and Jorkins, Peggotty, Mr. Dick, Betsy Trotwood, and the rest, Dickens reached, perhaps, the highest mark of his genius. In "Bleak House" (1852-1853), despite the Jellybys, and Harold Skimpole, he was too much engaged in the work of reform, and trysted with too difficult a plot, to reach similar success. The plot of "Little Dorrit" (1855-1857) is not readily intelligible; the book was disappointing. In "A Tale of Two Cities" he won the votes of very many readers who do not care for his lighter works: In "Great Expectations" he was himself again, and the plot is the best that he ever constructed, his Pip, from childhood onwards, is a masterpiece; Mr. Wopsle, and Mr. Pumblechook are joys for ever; and Miss Havisham, though severely criticized, is not, perhaps, untrue to nature, or at least to the actual facts of the case on which Dickens worked.

Of "Our Mutual Friend," it must be confessed that the plot is difficult: in "Dombey and Son" (1846-1848) Dickens appears to have deserted his idea, on an important point, as Scott did in "St. Ronan's Well," in deference to the wishes of a friend, and the same change seems to have been made, for a similar reason, in the fortunes of Estella, in "Great Expectations".

In "Edwin Drood," written in the last year of Dickens's life, (1869-1870), when he was outworn by the feverish energy of his nature, and by the fatigues of travel and of giving readings in hospitable America, Dickens at least left an unsolved puzzle to his students. What was "the Mystery" of Edwin Drood? Did Jasper murder him, or fail to murder him? Some external and some internal evidence favours the idea that Jasper succeeded, but we have seen that Dickens was very capable of relenting at the last moment. In this novel, as in some of his short stories, Dickens shows that leaning to the "supernormal" which he usually kept well in hand; so much, indeed, that in his "Child's History of England," he treats Jeanne d'Arc as a conceited, hysterical little prig. Dickens had none of the qualities of a historian, and all the contempt of a Liberal of his day for the Middle Ages. He was not a man of much bookish knowledge: he was a unique genius presenting, as in a magic mirror, worlds that appeared to himself alone, but that all were rejoiced to see as he saw them.

He did not see the world of "Society" as others see it who live in it (he avoided it), but then what world did he see as other people do? Other worlds he beheld with more sympathy, indeed, but all things presented a kind of fantastic vividness in that enchanted crystal of his imagination. That some of his mannerisms are vexatious is not to be denied: that there are moments of want of balance, of excitement born of fatigue, of breaking into unconscious blank verse, in the great mass of his work is too manifest in his letters we see the causes and occasions of these defects. But it is ill work, in so brief a sketch, to find faults in the productions of a genius so unique that it has, in our literature, no parallel, and can never be an example. Dickens had imitators, but he could not found a school: he was "the only Boz". His defects were perfectly visible to the critics of his own day, who did not spare them, but the world did not suffer its pleasure to be darkened by the spots on the sun. We flatter ourselves that Dickens is peculiarly English, and so he is in his idealization of punch and other creature comforts; yet he is remarkably popular, even in translations, among the French, and by the Poles he is, among our authors, the most admired.

Thackeray.

It has been the lot of Thackeray to be constantly pitted against Dickens, like Gray against Collins, and Browning against Tennyson. People have taken sides for one or another, as taste and fancy led, for they were contemporaries, they were novelists, humorists, satirists. But while Dickens, like the minstrel of Odysseus, was "self-taught," and was never a man of books, Thackeray (born at Calcutta in 1811) was educated at Charterhouse, and, with Tennyson, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his career was not unlike that of his Arthur Pendennis, though he took no degree. To Thackeray, Charterhouse was what Christ's Hospital was to Lamb, a constant rather rueful memory; a memory, in Thackeray's case, of fagging, fights (in one he received an honourable scar), of idleness, story-telling, rhyming, caricaturing, and of the classics, stupidly taught. But, like Fielding, he did not forget his classics. His bent was to the art of design: many of his sketches, though often out of drawing, are very humorous; his Becky Sharp, carrying a coal scuttle, is the actual Becky, and Emmy, in the dance at Pumpernickel, wears the charming face that haunted his pencil. On leaving Cambridge he visited Germany and met Goethe: he lost his patrimony, partly to Mr. Deuceace, partly in the attempt to found a newspaper. In Paris, and in London, after an early marriage (1836), broken by a lifelong sorrow (Mrs. Thackeray survived him), he wrote for the press, continuing the vein of his scribbling in undergraduate papers like "The Snob," and of his comic prize poem, "Timbuctoo," with its dominant note "Africa for the Africans".

I see her sons the hill of glory mount And sell their sugars on their own account.

His Parisian miscellanies in "The Paris Sketchbook" (1840) are of varied quality, but are all characteristic. He had found his style, with its harmonies, as in the essay on George Sand: and his British scorn of some French vagaries is offensive to many cosmopolitan minds. Unlike Dickens he is unpopular in France; he trod the soil with an air of remembering Agincourt and Waterloo. He wrote for "The Times," and in "Fraser," published the "Yellowplush Papers" of that great menial whose Christian names, Charles James, reveal the Stuart "mistry" in which his "ma" wrapped up his "buth". Jeames was a critic, much too personal, of Bulwer Lytton and Dionysius Lardner, that encyclopædist; and, as a momentary capitalist, as de la Pluche, is a satirist of the age of rapid railway-made fortunes. The simple humours of his spelling recall Smollett's Winifred Jenkins in "Humphry Clinker"; while Thackeray's Major Gahagan is a delightful Irish Captain Bobadil. "Catherine" was a burlesque on the heroes and heroines of novels of virtuous criminals, showing that knowledge of the eighteenth century which was Thackeray's favourite period ("Barry Lyndon," "Esmond," "The English Humorists," "Denis Duval," "The Four Georges").

Thackeray was much inclined to historical studies. "I like History, it is so gentlemanly," he said, but a man, not being a professor, cannot live by history alone, and he never finished, probably never began, his contemplated "Reign of Queen Anne".

Everywhere among his early essays and burlesques, his tenderness peeps out, his pathos, his love of children, and of goodness; and his haunting melancholy. These are especially conspicuous in "The Shabby Genteel Story," written at a time of great sorrow and struggle with poverty. "Barry Lyndon" was overlooked, despite its masterly ironic study of the vain-glorious Irish adventurer of the eighteenth century; its pictures, from the gambler's point of view, of Berlin under Frederick the Great, of the little German duchies, of the wild half-ruined Irish gentry; of the Chevalier de Balibari, so perfect as a Catholic, a disillusioned Jacobite, a gentleman, and a swindler. The later adventures of Barry are drawn from Robertson, and the Dowager Lady Strathmore, and their squalid romance. This book, among Thackeray's, corresponds to Fielding's "Jonathan Wild," though the irony is broken by the author's comments, which are deemed inartistic. There are moments when Barry's blackguardism breaks down, and he yields to what some may call sentiment, and others, the soul of good in things evil. Nothing so great and nothing more unlike Dickens, had appeared since Fielding's day, but "Barry Lyndon" passed without a welcome.

"The Irish Sketchbook" (1843) was the best Irish sketchbook since that of Giraldus Cambrensis, but neither that, nor "From Cornhill to Cairo" (1846) "caught this great stupid public by the ears". "Mrs. Perkins's Ball" (1847), a Christmas trifle, contains the immortal figure of The Mulligan, to think of whom is to laugh as one writes. He was sketched from a well-known Irishman of the day. The little vignettes of other guests of Mrs. Perkins are worthy of Addison, down to the greengrocer butler.

In "Punch," Thackeray had been writing and drawing things good and things commonplace. His burlesques of novelists include "George de Barnwell" (Lytton) which he is said to have thought his masterpiece, and "Codlingsby" (Disraeli), which is hardly inferior; but Lever was annoyed by his "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth". Thackeray is the classic parodist; his gift of imitation is as wonderful in the "Burlesques" as in "Esmond". Scott, who was privately on the side of Rebecca, in "Ivanhoe," and who had deliberately made Rowena "very English," would not have been vexed, like Lever, by Thackeray's "Rowena and Rebecca," wherein, on false news of Wilfrid's death, the English princess espouses Athelstane.

It was "The Book of Snobs," with its cruel satire of our British vice, that came home, when republished from "Punch," to men's bosoms. Thackeray avowed that de me fabula, that he was a snob himself: and, to some readers, it is matter for regret that he dwelt so long and so intensely on the mean admiration of things mean. He told Motley (1858) that he could not read "The Book of Snobs".

At last, in "Vanity Fair," which appeared, like Dickens's novels, in monthly parts (with yellow covers), Thackeray, after so many vain endeavours, "took this great stupid public by the ears". Here was another epic, like "Tom Jones," of English life, from the year preceding Waterloo: though the Marquis of Steyne was too closely studied from a contemporary wicked Marquis. From the first chapter, the scene of Becky with the Dictionary, to the end where (quite out of character, say Becky's admirers) she appears as a melodramatic Clytæmnestra, the author "never stoops his wing". Never, surely, did man create, in a single novel, characters so many, so varied, so justly conceived, so immortal. Fielding has not a quarter of Thackeray's variousness, does not see so wide a vision of life. Think of them; all the Crawleys, the two Sir Pitts, Rawdon (amo Rawdon), Jim Crawley; Miss Crawley, the old patrician Whig and sceptic; the two Osbornes, the little boys, Osborne III. and little Rawdon; Mrs. O'Dowd; the spunging-house keeper; Mr. Wenham, Ensign Stubble, Lord Steyne, the Misses Pinkerton, Briggs, Waterloo Sedley, the Belgian courier, Glorvina, the Lady Bareacres,--the catalogue is endless. Dobbin is as good as that honest gentleman can be made: we can only say that Thackeray's good women are not at once as human and as angelic as Fielding's Sophia and Amelia. Emmy is not clever; Emmy can be jealous; a vice from which Mrs. Rawdon Crawley is nobly free. The nearest woman to Sophia in Thackeray is Theo in "The Virginians". But Sophia is a paragon.

Thackeray was now, by no fault of his, set up as the rival of Dickens, whose works he constantly praised, in season and out of season, in public and in private. But as every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, a Whig or a Tory, so men are born to take one side or other about the Great Twin Brethren of English fiction, in place of admiring and enjoying both. Each has his masterpieces, Dickens with "Pickwick," "David Copperfield," and "Great Expectations"; Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," "Esmond," "The Newcomes," and "Pendennis". That admirable but lengthy picture of the life of school, of the University, literature, and Society, and of Mr. Henry Foker, bears traces, in discrepancies and fatigue, of a severe illness which affected the author's memory of part of the tale, as a malady swept from Scott's the whole of "The Bride of Lammermoor".

The noble tour de force of "Esmond" (1852) was, for the most part, dictated in disturbing conditions, which makes yet greater the marvel of its style of Queen Anne's date; not uniform, to be sure, not all antique (any more than Colonel Esmond's political views are all antique or uniform), but still, a kind of prodigy. Beatrix Esmond is indeed, as her lover said, a "paragon," and it is historically impossible that, in the end, she should have betrayed "the blameless king," King James III., whom Thackeray converted from a melancholy Quietist into a witty and profligate prince. There was no "Queen Oglethorpe". Scott never took this kind of liberty with an historical character, in fiction; and Thackeray rivalled Scott's other licences by making the Duke of Hamilton an unmarried man. But nobody thinks of these things when "Esmond" admits him into the society of the Augustan age, and when Bolingbroke hiccups about Jonathan's readiness to command the fleet.

"The Newcomes" (1855) revived the public taste for Thackeray; the public did not, it is said, quite understand "Esmond". Like all novels published in parts throughout two years, "The Newcomes" is too long, and has its languors, but every one wept over the good Colonel, loathed the Campaigner, delighted in Fred Bayham, wished "to beat Barnes Newcome on the nose," was afraid of Lady Kew; sighed with Clive, was more or less in love with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to see no more of Laura Pendennis: an angel perhaps, but a recording angel.

At Rome, in winter, 1853, Thackeray, to amuse some children, wrote "The Rose and the Ring," a classic of the nursery, of the schoolroom, and of the "grown up". He who writes was a child in 1855, and to him Bulbo, Hedzoff, King Valoroso, and the Countess Gruffanuff, with the usual contrasted heroines, Angelica and Rosalba, were not dearer then than they are now. Even then the equation was plain:--

{Angelica Rosalba} Fair and {Becky Emmy } Dark and false {Blanche Amory Laura } true and {Rowena Rebecca} tender.

Thackeray's naughty women are "fair and false," his good women are "dark, and true, and tender".

The novelist's is a "dreadful trade". He has to raise ever new crops from soil more or less exhausted. Dickens had his "Dombey," his "Little Dorrit," his "Mutual Friend"; and Thackeray had his "Virginians," the grandsons of Colonel Esmond, with their kinswoman, Beatrix Esmond, fallen into an old age of cards, and rouge and powder. Beatrix, for her beauty's sake, should have been translated, like the fairest woman of the ancient world, Helen, to the plain Elysian. We do not want to see her in old age, or to hear her last wild words, "Mesdames, Je suis la ----" La Reine, the Queen.

"The Virginians" is full of excellent things, wonderful studies of the later eighteenth century; and Harry is a deal, brave, stupid lad, and George is a sardonic, melancholy descendant of Colonel Esmond, and ancestor of "Stunner Warrington" in Pendennis; and Will Esmond and Chaplain Sampson are worthy of Fielding, but the author was tired; after "Vanity Fair" he was always tired, and the book has barren expanses and languors. "'The Virginians,'" he said to Motley, "is devilish stupid, but at the same time most admirable." Thackeray's health was worn out; as a change of work he founded, but soon wearied of editing, "The Cornhill Magazine"; was at his lowest level in "Lovel the Widower"; was so weary in "Philip" that he styled the hero "Clive" by inadvertence, though he endowed his clumsy Philip with one of his best women, Charlotte. He ventured into melodrama, which he liked, but could not write well; yet his "Roundabout Papers" show that he was, as an essayist, equal to his younger self.

His "Denis Duval" seemed to promise a return of his genius, but Christmas Day, 1863, was a black Christmas, for the author had died, suddenly and alone, in the night of Christmas Eve.

He had a great faculty of enjoyment, a generous heart sorely tried, a melancholy that was not causeless: immense kindness and love of the young, in short the character, in these respects, of Molière and of Charles Lamb. Let us confess that he was unjust to Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond. But he had a Shakespearean tenderness for his rogues, and having conceived the draconic design of hanging Colonel Altamont, he respited that bold adventurer. From boyhood he had his own originality of style.

In the cultivated town of Highbury My father kept a circulating library,

are boyish lines of his, and we recognize him even there, beginning to be what he is in his "Book of Ballads," so various, so merry, so melancholy, so fresh as they are. Though the influences of the prose of Queen Anne and of Fielding helped to form his style, it is entirely his own; with the blended accents of his own humour and pathos, and harmonies before unheard; exquisite passages of verbal music.

The Brontë Sisters.

Concerning the Brontë sisters much, mainly personal, has been written, in proportion to the amount of their works. Their novels, especially those of Charlotte ("Jane Eyre," "Shirley," "Villette," "The Professor"), seem like the extraordinary and almost automatic products of their parentage and surroundings. The father, the Rev. Patrick Prunty or Brontë, was an Irish Protestant of County Down, who, after struggles with circumstances, was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took holy orders. His Protestantism and politics were those of an Orangeman: his hero (who could have a better?) was the Duke of Wellington, and he was addicted to the composition of verse. His wife, a Cornish woman, was of feeble health, and died after giving birth to six children, two of whom, Maria and Elizabeth, died in early youth; the others were Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), Emily (1818), and Anne (1820). On the mother's death the father lived a sequestered studious life in a bleak parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, and the children were entirely devoted to drawing, reading books and magazines meant for their elders, to writing, day-dreaming, and to wandering from the grim rectory over the open moors. Their health was blighted by the conditions of the school called Lowood in "Jane Eyre"; their tempers were hardened and sharpened by poverty and the white slave's life of the governess, so much dreaded and so well understood by Miss Austen's Jane Fairfax in "Emma". The unhappy Branwell, in the end, haunted the rectory, an awful presence of intellect degraded, and while Emily wrapped herself up in a kind of Christian stoicism, Charlotte was left to the contrast between the dreams of her fiery genius, and the facts of her narrow life. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily became inmates of the school of Monsieur and Madame Heger at Brussels, which later afforded to Charlotte the scene and two characters in "Villette". In 1846 the three sisters published "Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell". Of this book two copies were sold, of the poems Emily's alone are still admired for their sombre energy and resolute spirit.

The sisters now wrote novels, Emily, "Wuthering Heights," Charlotte, "The Professor"; Anne, "Agnes Grey". In August, 1846, Charlotte began "Jane Eyre," which, when finished, came into the hands of Thackeray's publishers, Messrs. Smith & Elder, and filled them with amazement and enthusiasm. The book appeared in autumn, 1847, pleased Lockhart, then editor of "The Quarterly Review," no less than it pleased Mr. Smith, and at once became the "daughter of debate," discussed everywhere, praised and reviled, and, in some unintelligible way, most reviled by "The Quarterly". The critic detected in the author an unregenerate, violent rebel against society, and a woman who was a dishonour to her sex! Certainly--

A wounded human spirit turns Here on its bed of pain.

The unparalleled vigour and genius of the early scenes, the cruelties which the lonely child supports with unconquered spirit, were things new in fiction, while the repressed passion of the plain yet seductive governess during the wooing of the too Byronic Mr. Rochester, and in a house as terrible as the castle of Mrs. Radcliffe's "Sicilian Romance," excited a lively romantic interest, accompanied by a tendency to smile at an ignorant imagination. Borrowed romance combined with instinctive realism, bitter experience blended with the day-dreams of a life, a frankness long forgotten by early Victorian fiction, made the novel a strange and triumphantly successful combination. That mentor of young novelists, George Lewes, recommended to the author the study of Miss Austen, whose novels Charlotte Brontë was not happy enough (because she never had been happy) to appreciate. That she had no humour we cannot say, but she had none of the kindly humour of her great predecessor.

Meanwhile "Wuthering Heights," that strange and strenuous study of violent characters, was eclipsed by "Jane Eyre," though it has now come to its own, thanks to the appreciations of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne. The author did not live to find herself famous; Anne Brontë also died, leaving their sister in deeper solitude. Charlotte's "Shirley" (1849), with its caricatures of the local curates, caused the discovery of her authorship: the curates were forgiving, and the novel was welcomed. Miss Brontë visited London, a shy and tameless lioness, and met Thackeray, whom she had regarded as a Saul among the prophets, and discovered to be something rather different. Her shyness permitted her to rebuke him in good set terms, but blighted his guests. Her last novel, "Villette" (1852), with romantic situations, is a record of her personal experiences at Brussels; unfortunate for her hosts, and a cause of much gossip and personal discussion. The book is not destitute of the hungry bitterness which Matthew Arnold detected and disliked; and we ask how in the nature of things it could be otherwise? Her experience had been narrow, atrocious, and on her experience and from her experience she always drew when she did not borrow from her day-dreams. In life she did not find the love of which she dreamed: in 1854 (she had rejected several other suitors) she married the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, and died in the following year. Her life, her character, and her books were one, and were unique. "This little Jeanne d'Arc," as Thackeray called her, this eager rebel and ardent Tory, broke into the placidity of the contemporary novel, and opened a pathway unto many, who had little or none of her genius.

The best estimate of the Brontës, clear of and contemptuous of trivialities and gossip, is in French, "Les Sœurs Brontë," by the Abbé Dimnet.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The end of all that Greeks and Trojans suffered for Helen's sake was "that there might be a song in the ears of men of after times". In the view of the interests of art (and in no other) the end of Puritanism in New England was to inspire the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). He was more certainly the classical author of American fiction than either Thackeray or Dickens is in England. They were prodigal of their genius, giving "as rich men give who care not for their gifts," or, if you please, as poor men when the printer's devil is at the door, even as did Sir Walter, who never thought about "art". But Hawthorne hoarded his inspirations, and when he used them gave them in the best form which was within his means. The inspiration was always moral, and usually bizarre. In his published note-books we see his method; he conceived some strange situations; over some of these he brooded till the characters disengaged themselves and lived before his eyes, and worked out their wyrd under stress of sin and remorse. He thought of the effect of a sudden homicidal act on a character gay, innocent, and faunlike, and we have Donatello in "The Marble Faun" (or "Transformation"). He thought of the amour of a Puritan preacher (like Lockhart in "Adam Blair") and the idea grew into "The Scarlet Letter". He thought of the beautiful poisonous girl (an old legend) and we have "Rappacini's Daughter". The Puritan sense of sin, and the old New England sorrows of the witchcraft trials, and the shadows of the woods, and the fear of the Indians, among whom Meikle John Gibb (a Covenanter who went too far even for the Rev. Mr. Cargill) was a great medicine-man, dwelt in his imagination. He felt acutely, though not a man of religion, the horrors of the Genevan creed, which did not make the people who believed in it more unhappy than their Episcopalian neighbours. They were accustomed to the doctrines which horrified Hawthorne's contemporaries in America, and, like the Black Laird of Ormistoun, hanged for Darnley's murder, and richly deserving to be hanged for his daily misdeeds, they saw their way out of a doom of eternal fire which Hawthorne supposed them always to anticipate. Nervousness had not set in, the climate had not produced its effect on the sturdy Puritans of New England. By Hawthorne's time the climate had produced its effect, and he brooded blackly over what his ancestors should have felt--but did not feel. The Black Laird of Ormistoun had only to convince himself that he was of the Elect, as he did, and death, to him, meant, as he said, that he should sup that night in Paradise. Not understanding this buoyancy of temperament, Hawthorne dwelt on the horrors which he supposed his ancestors to have fed full of, and, in his stories, expressed his emotions in terms of imperishable art. Though he had no theological basis he remained a Puritan. He, to whom beauty was everything, talked of "the squeamish love of beauty". In Europe he is said (like an excellent Pope who had tin aprons made for the classic nude figures of Graeco-Roman sculpture) to have been horrified by the innocent nudities of ancient art. They had never seen anything so improper at Salem, Massachusetts, a decaying seaport where he was born, and lived for fourteen years after taking his degree at Bowdoin in 1825. Here he wrote short tales with little acceptance; and he did not till 1849-1854, publish his best known novels, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and (a result of a stay at a peaceful and purely amateur socialist settlement, Brook Farm) "The Blithedale Romance". His "Tanglewood Tales," from Greek myths (in which Hermes is called "Quicksilver") at first repel, for obvious reasons, but, in fact and on reflection, have much charm, and with Kingsley's "The Heroes" ought not to be neglected by parents and guardians, but rather "placed in the hands" of children. Though some amateurs may prefer "The House of the Seven Gables," haunted as it is by the blood which chokes the Justice, and a little enlivened by the dusty humour of Hepzibah, a decayed gentlewoman, and pervaded by the pretty charm of Phoebe, "The Scarlet Letter" is probably Hawthorne's masterpiece. It may be, and has been, denied by specialists that the hectic and craven Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale could possibly have been the father of the elf-like child Pearl, but these are "oppositions of science, falsely so called". Hester's avenging husband may be, in conception, Dickenslike, but the treatment is far from suggesting Dickens, while the passion of Hester is a masterpiece of poetical fiction. Knots may be sought and found in any reed of fictitious narrative, but "The Scarlet Letter" remains, in its human characters and its dim lights, in its purposeful limitations, and hints at something unrevealed, a masterpiece of romance written under classical conditions. "The Marble Faun" (the plot and mystery were suggested by the murder, by a French duke, of his wife; Miriam is the British governess in that unholy affair) has noble moments and passages, and unconsciously reveals what his Note Books publicly avow, that Hawthorne was terribly ill at ease in Europe, and among monuments of classic and mediaeval art. He had some scruple about enjoying them--they were not at all American, and he was rather bitterly patriotic, one might almost say parochial, in certain moods. But he had lived for most of his life in Salem, Massachusetts; he had, for several years, been American consul at Liverpool; he was a genius of the most exquisite nature, and no more is needed to explain some acerbities and some misappreciations, while we can all sympathize with his criticisms of the adiposity of some British matrons.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

What has been said about Longfellow may be whispered about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was at once poet, essayist, and novelist. Both authors should be read first while the reader is young, and can enjoy their books with the freshness of an unsophisticated taste. This is not true of the very great things in literature, in these with advancing experience we ever find new merits, while in studying some early favourites we can scarcely recapture our original delight.

Holmes was born in the same year as Edgar Allan Poe (1809) at Cambridge in New England, where his father was "Orthodox minister of the First Church". This appears to mean that he was a Calvinist, while Harvard, where the son was educated, was devoted to the Unitarian creed, of which the Articles are, to the writer, unknown. Holmes accepted them. Medicine was his profession, he held for some time a Chair of Anatomy; in Boston, where he lived for the greater part of his life, he practised for some time, but his productions in verse and prose gradually caused him to occupy himself mainly with letters. In 1831 he first produced part of his "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," monologues with rare interruptions from the fellow guests of a pension. In 1857 he returned to this pleasant form of discursive essays, the other guests breaking in occasionally according to their ages and characters. Hitherto Holmes had been best known for "occasional verses," especially verses written for the Phi Beta Kappa Society of his University, and for college anniversaries. The "One Hoss Shay" is, in England, with "The Nautilus," the best known of these social feats. In his discursive essays he frequently breaks a lance with his old enemy, Calvinistic theology. This is not very exhilarating; at least to readers who never learned, or if they learned never attached any meaning to the Shorter Catechism. Holmes, who, to be sure, had a minister as his tutor, and Hawthorne, appear to have understood the doctrines, which were useful to Holmes as a butt, and to Hawthorne as a background in his novels, gloomy and alarming,--"The ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir". Naturally Holmes found the sciences to which he was bred very useful in supplying anecdotes and illustrations to his essays and romances. In "Elsie Venner," the heroine, on good Calvinistic principles, is of the seed of the Serpent, and inherits its nature, owing to some mishap of her mother with a rattlesnake. Whether this be scientifically conceivable or not, Elsie is, by inheritance, a perfectly original young woman in an ordinary environment of New England. We do not expect to meet Melusine so far from Lusignan. In "The Guardian Angel" the heroine has several complex personalities, derived from different ancestors, one of them a Red Indian. These devices are in Hawthorne's manner of fantastic invention, without Hawthorne's grasp and power, but the heroines are surrounded by characters more humorous and natural than Hawthorne's people, and the stories are extremely good reading, as are the discursive essays. There is abundance of knowledge of the world, of wit, of humour, and of kind good-humour. There is plenty of strange lore from old books of mystic medicine, and Holmes confessed to being "a little superstitious". Near the house of his boyhood there were "Devil's Footsteps" in a field, and a house from which a portion of the wall had been carried away "from within outward". The marks were associated with a story of a diabolical apparition at a Hell Fire Club, just as at Brasenose College, Oxford. The terrors of his childhood left their mark on his books. There was the faintest touch of Cotton Mather in this foe of Cotton's creed, which, out of fashion or not, was the nurse of many virtues inherited by its tireless opponent. His enduring fame rests on his "Autocrat" and other essays. "No man in England," said Thackeray in 1858, "can write with his charming mixture of wit, pathos, and imagination."

Charles Kingsley.

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a novelist "by way of by-work," and had intellect and energy which might have found for themselves other fields; born thirty years earlier he might have distinguished himself under Wellington or Nelson. But in piping times of peace, after living the life of an athlete, sportsman, and reading man at Magdalene, Cambridge, he took holy orders, as Colonel Gardiner might have done, had he been earlier converted. As Rector of Eversley in Hampshire, he was an energetic parish priest, and had opportunities of angling for those uneducated trout which he commemorates in his pleasant "Chalk Stream Studies," for he was a born naturalist and observer of nature. The agitation among the labouring classes in the times of the Chartists awakened him to social questions and "Christian Socialism"; but as the excitement of the populace lulled, his interest slackened. The fruits of it were the novels of "Yeast" and "Alton Locke" (1848, 1850) which well deserve to be read, and repay the reader. It is almost incredible that Cambridge crews, in Kingsley's day, rowed in the May week after wine-parties and much eating of ices; but the sympathy with "sweated" artisans and the delineation of rural scenes and sports, are fiery, forcible, and sincere, whatever the truth may be about Cambridge training at that distant date. In 1853 he produced "Hypatia," a romance of the pagan girl-philosopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob of Alexandria. The advent of Goths who cut up these beasts is a welcome relief, but the Jew who attempts humorous philosophy is merely a proof of Kingsley's lack of humour and an example of his characteristically strenuous efforts to be humorous. The book is, indeed, a boy's book, and has something in it, Kingsley's preoccupation with sexual ethics, which is not so agreeable to reflective seniors. Somewhat of this, with an aggressive Protestantism, and the sin of "jocking wi' deeficulty," mar the otherwise delightful romance of "Westward Ho!" the adventures of Amyas Leigh on the Spanish Main and in tropical forests in the great days of Elizabethan adventure. Kingsley hates and execrates the Spaniards. We have ourselves exterminated some savage peoples, and nearly exterminated others, and have no right to throw the first stone at the Spanish conquerors in America, odious beyond words as their dealings with Aztecs and Incas were; while the Privy Council, under Cecil, could give points in cruelty to the Spanish Inquisition of the day. But the boy who reads, or ought to read, "Westward Ho!" has none of these chilling reflections, nor had Kingsley. Taking the facts as Kingsley saw them, in the old English way, the novel is a superlatively excellent romance of English virtue and valour; and there is no doubt as to the valour and the adventurers had no doubts as to their own virtues. The whole is the work of a poet--for a poet Kingsley was,--and of a patriot, sympathizing with Drake's England in the crucial trial whence she emerged a victor. "Where are the galleons of Spain?"

"Two Years Ago," a novel of the Crimean War, must take its chances with the historical facts; and, in "Hereward the Wake," the bloodthirsty hero, despite the glory of his final fight, which rivals that of the brave Bussy or of Grettir the Strong in the Saga, in places awakes the smile even of the reflective schoolboy, to whom however, it may be recommended. "The Water Babies" is not always defective in humour, and would be excellent as a tale for children were it not for satire directed at the parents of the period. "The Heroes" initiate the young into the glories of the romance of Minyans and Minoans, and can only be spoken of by those who read it in early boyhood with entire gratitude and the remembrance of delight. Indeed, no one who has read Kingsley after the age of 16 is a fair critic of an author who, like R. L. Stevenson, was always at heart a boy; to appreciate him we must put away grown-up things; while, as to his verse, his songs and ballads, in "Andromeda" (1858), and even his hexameters, deserve immortality. He was not fitted for the Chair of History at Cambridge.

Froude thinks that Kingsley's a divine, And Kingsley goes to Froude for history,

said the poet. His controversy with Cardinal Newman brought him into contact with a prettier fighter, and he did not come up to time against the author of the "Apologia". His essays, especially that on the Puritan aversion to the Caroline drama, are vigorous, and well worth reading.

The brother of Charles Kingsley, Henry (1830-1876) either wanted leisure or lacked care and constructive faculty, but in his earlier works he displayed high spirits, and kind humour, with a good deal of skill in drawing character, and an engaging reckless manner. His most careful book, "Geoffrey Hamlyn," though promising, is not so dear to its readers as "Ravenshoe," a delightful topsy-turvy romance. The children in Henry Kingsley's books are especially fascinating.

Here we may briefly advert to two writers who with remarkable originality of character and outlook as novelists appeal to but small but devoted audiences. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was an almost self-made classical scholar, and a friend of Shelley's. His contributions to Shelley's biography are those of a rather candid though intensely admiring friend. His novels, from the early "Headlong Hall" and "Melincourt," and "Nightmare Abbey," to "Gryll Grange," at the end of his career, are not so much romances as discursive and satirical studies of, and dialogues about, contemporary society, opinion, and taste. Some of the characters are drawn, in part, from real personages, for example, from Shelley himself. The wit which Shelley called so keen, occasionally yields place to somewhat florid burlesque. The interest of Peacock is partly that which we feel in his own character and satiric views of life; partly it is historical.

George Borrow (1803-1881), a Norfolk man, who in childhood had followed his father's regiment as Sterne had done, can be best estimated by a study of his "Lavengro," really a sort of autobiography. Here he paints himself as a genius in the study of many languages, a friend of gypsies and their fellow-wanderer; an expert in the art of boxing, and altogether as a character equally vigorous and eccentric, and a sturdy Low Churchman who hates Papists, snobs, and Sir Walter Scott. Whether on the moors with the Viper-catcher; or at horse-fairs with jockeys and thimble-riggers; or as the hack of a niggardly publisher; or fighting the Flaming Tinman under the eyes of the lovely but unconvincing Isopel Berners, Borrow is always the strong, wild, tameless heroic figure. As an agent for the Bible Society in Spain he was in a place which suited his genius, and his "The Bible in Spain" is at least as romantic as evangelical. "The Romany Rye" is of the same fantastically autobiographical form as "Lavengro"; brilliantly capricious and picturesque. Other books are "The Gypsies in Spain," and "Wild Wales". Borrow plumed himself much on his wide range of philological learning, from Welsh to Manchu, but the strict modern science does not regard him as a very great scholar. There are dull stagnant places in his books, and there are passages aflame with genius.

Mrs. Oliphant (Mary Margaret Wilson (1828-1897)) was a woman of letters who heroically undertook incessant labour for the sake of others who were dependent on her pen. Consequently her gifts were diluted, and she must always be best known for the novels styled "The Chronicles of Carlingford," which are remarkable for their placid unstrained humour. More than once she displayed a very unusual power of dealing with the supernatural, especially in "A Beleaguered City," and "Old Lady Mary". In these pieces her manner is unique for tenderness and sympathy. In her historical biographies, as of Molière and Jeanne d'Arc, she suffered from want of strict training, and if she found a good thing of apocryphal source, inserted it on its literary merits. Her work on the publishing "House of Blackwood" is valuable to the student of literature and literary lives in the days of Wilson and Lockhart. Few who have written so much have written so well.

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), a close associate of Dickens, was an assiduous professional novelist, who strenuously did his best and achieved two or three immense popular successes. His main strength lay in the construction of plots which powerfully excited curiosity, as in "The Woman in White," "No Name," and "The Moonstone"; the former was apparently suggested by the mystery of a French law suit, which dragged on from before the Revolution to the reign of Louis Philippe. The central puzzle, a question of identity, never was solved. Collins did his best to create characters, as well as to tell stories, but his humour was laboured (Captain Wragge is his chief success), and he shared with Dickens the mannerism of constantly dwelling on the tricks and hobbies of his people. For a long and warm appreciation of Collins, Mr. Swinburne's essay may be consulted. The work of his later years and overtasked fancy, such as "Poor Miss Finch" and "The Haunted Hotel," may be neglected; some of his short stories are good.

Popular novelists were Major Whyte-Melville, best in tales of sport and the affections, but ranging all fields from ancient Assyria to "The Queen's Maries"; George Lawrence, the author of that joy of boyhood, "Guy Livingstone," "Sword and Gown," and other tales military and sporting. He was the intellectual father of "Ouida" (Miss de la Ramée) with her magnificent guardsmen, and innocent descriptions of racing and of field sports. She was for long very prolific and very popular, she lashed the vices of society, and was the constant friend of animals. Gorgeous is the epithet that may be applied to her style, and humour did not enter into her genius, which may be called "heroic" in the manner of the seventeenth century tragedies.

James Payn, on the other hand, had almost too much humour for the purposes of a novelist, accompanied by the most delightful high spirits. These would have interfered with the success of his novels, from "Lost Sir Massingberd" onwards, in which he provided the public with highly wrought melodramas,--the style of the serious characters being "heroic" in a high degree,--had the public perceived that he was laughing in his sleeve. But his domestic sentiment, and his spirited heroes and heroines, carried the serious reader on, while light-hearted readers were convulsed with laughter. His best novels proper are perhaps "By Proxy" and "Halves". He was one of the best and kindest of men, and most hospitable, as editor of "The Cornhill Magazine," to the work of younger authors, such as Mr. Stanley Weyman and R. L. Stevenson. The "John Inglesant" of Mr. Shorthouse, a dignified and thoughtful novel of the Great Rebellion, which had a resonant success, Mr. Payn declined when it came before him in manuscript; he also took no pleasure in the works of Æschylus.

George Meredith.

George Meredith, novelist and poet, was, in his literary fortunes, a somewhat mysterious power; a somewhat thwarted force. His early novels, the comic Oriental tale of "The Shaving of Shagpat," "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming," were full of humour, wit, pathos, the charm of Love's young dream; were peopled by delightful heroines, whose heroes were appropriate, brave, and not too staid. Rose Jocelyn, Lucy, the Countess, the dark Rhoda Fleming, the beautiful hapless Dahlia, certainly very young readers in those old days of the early' sixties were in love with them--thought the aphorisms of "The Pilgrim's Scrip" the acme of witty wisdom; rejoiced in Mrs. Berry as in the Nurse of Julia, delighted in the hypochondriac Hippy, and in Adrian, the Wise Young Man; nearly shed tears over Clare Doria Forey, who let concealment, like the worm i' the bud, feed on her damask cheek; admired the Glorious Mel; laughed sympathetically over Algernon, the Young Fool, and his Derby day, and generally were a most favourable public. But the general public was unfavourable. Meredith's "Evan Harrington" nearly ruined "Once a Week,"--even aided by Charles Keene's designs it was a failure; and the editor had to call in Shirley Brooks, with "The Silver Cord," which no man remembereth, perhaps, except him who writes. Those early novels were not obscure, even to the reading boy; the wit was net too subtle and alembicated, or too profuse; the humour was English--beer and cricket were provided--there was pathos, comedy, character in abundance, but the novels did not appeal to that happy reading public which had still Thackeray and Dickens; and George Eliot for the thoughtful, and Miss Braddon, in the full flush of her early genius, for all who liked a plain tale well told, a humorous melodrama (such as "The Doctor's Wife"); or while Mrs. Henry Wood poured forth romances that deans and princes and everybody could appreciate. It is said to be a fact that Her Majesty Queen Victoria took pleasure in Mrs. Wood's novels; and it is quite certain that another lady, believed by many to be the great granddaughter of Charles III. (better known as Prince Charlie) shared the royal taste.

Possibly this competition caused Meredith's grace to be hid; possibly, curious as it may seem, he was best appreciated by readers in extreme youth. This is probably the truth, for, in much later years, the writer has seen quite unaffected young girls absorbed in "The Egoist" or "Diana of the Crossways," while he, after gallant efforts, was defeated by both in a very early round, tripped up on every page by the Leg of Sir Wilfrid, the Egoist. Too much seemed to be made of that limb. But with "The Egoist," which is doubtless a triumph in wit and knowledge of human nature (as such it was rapturously hailed by R. L. Stevenson), Meredith's fortunes turned. The enthusiasm of young critics at last communicated itself to the more cultured public, and to the public which wished to seem cultured, a lucrative circle. It was like the success of Mr. Browning, which came so many years after "Men and Women". People then turned back on Meredith's early novels, and discovered the manifold virtues which had been overlooked by contemporaries. They who had been boys in the 'sixties might think that by the 'eighties an over-excessive straining after wit and epigram, and a subtlety which was too near neighbour to obscurity, with a mannerism of style too precious and too easily imitable, had overtaken the Master. The truth may be that age had dulled the wits of these critics; that they had lost wit and zest. To them the English prose of "One of Our Conquerors" seemed darkling and decadent, and in "The Amazing Marriage" the baby was the most astonishing element. Whether they were in the right or in the wrong, the admiration of Meredith, like the admiration of FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyám," had become, not only a "cult" (it had already, as in Omar's case, been a cult with the few), but a cult with mysteries open to what Coleridge did not love, "the reading public". Be it as it may, the Master came to his own, as a novelist who to wit, fancy, humour, and power of creating characters, added the still rarer qualities of a true though decidedly difficult poet.

Anthony Trollope.

"The pace is too good" in the world of novel-writing and of novel readers to inquire deeply into the characteristics of the genius of Anthony Trollope, who was born in the year of Waterloo, held a place in the Post Office, pursued the fox; knew much of many sides of life in London, and much of a cathedral town, but did not make a great impression on public taste till, in 1855, he began his series of tales of Barchester. The Bishop, Dr. Proudie, his termagant wife, his chaplain, his Archdeacon Grantley, with the loves and marriages of their children, and the ecclesiastical politics of the age, were the farrago libelli. Trollope had a good deal of humour, his heroines, Lily Dale and Lucy Robartes and the rest were, in various degrees, "nice girls," his political characters and Dukes were of their date; he was extremely fluent; and he stamped his own ideas of his art and of the true method of composition on his brief life of Thackeray.[1]

People who have read Trollope will probably bear witness that many of his characters live in memory, and are friendly inmates of her cell. This can scarcely be said of the characters of Lytton, for example, and in his power of creating characters Trollope comes before any novelist of his own rank, and of his now neglected age. It would be easy to write a long catalogue of Trollope's memorable people, mainly, but by no means solely, dwellers in Barchester. The Grantleys, the Proudies, Bertie Stanhope and his sister, "the last of the Neros," the Crawleys (not of Queen's Crawley) Adolphus Crosby, Johnny Eames, Amelia Roper, "Planty Pal" (so justly driven back to the path of virtue by Griselda), Mr. Slope, these are only a few of his creations. With this creative gift, Trollope, though not refined, or "daring," or emancipated, or passionate, has a claim to be remembered; and the right readers will still find in his works abundance of entertainment.

George Eliot.

In 1857 "Blackwood's Magazine," always notable for discovering good new hands, began to publish "Scenes from Clerical Life," which at once attracted notice by their humour, tenderness, and quiet accomplished style. Were they by a man or a woman? Dickens voted that "George Eliot" was a woman; he was right. She was Miss Mary Ann Evans, born in Warwickshire in 1819. Familiar from childhood with the rural characters whom she drew so admirably (perhaps this art was her true forte, in other fields her humour was inconspicuous or absent), she went to London, associated with advanced philosophers, such as Mr. Herbert Spencer, changed her theological views and made her home with George Henry Lewes, author of a "Life of Goethe," and of a surprising "History of Philosophy". He was a married man, separated from his wife with no chance of a divorce, and he was the constant mentor of the new novelist, though his own essays in the art of fiction were absolute failures. In 1859 George Eliot made a very great success with "Adam Bede," which, to the merits of her "Scenes from Clerical Life", added a plot and a story of a not heartless seducer who fights and is knocked out of time by a hardy carpenter, his rival, the hero. The little victim, Hetty, is like a more heartless Effie Deans, and her crime, not committed by poor Effie, caused many sympathetic tears. The Jeanie Deans of the story is a female preacher, with considerable strength of character. "The Mill on the Floss," which followed, is excellent in the humorous parts, and the heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is delightful as a child, less interesting when she falls in love with a distasteful admirer. "Silas Marner," a much shorter is perhaps a still better tale, and marks the central period of the author's genius. In "Romola" (1863), a story of the Florentine Renaissance, the author was out of the environment which she knew, and was thought to be too moral and didactic. In "Middlemarch" her heroes were, to men, distasteful, and they preferred her pretty to her noble heroine, while Mr. Casaubon, of the "Key to All Mythologies," was held to be too closely studied from the life. "Daniel Deronda" was very long, and a kind of scientific jargon had been taking the place of the old rustic humours. Moreover people felt that they were being preached at, and Mr. Swinburne, contrasting Charlotte Brontë with George Eliot, helped to turn the tide from worship of the living to adoration of the dead woman of genius. George Eliot (Mrs. Cross after Lewes's death, and her own marriage to Mr. Cross in 1880) wrote no more than a book of reflections, "The Opinions of Theophrastus Such". She died in 1880. "Culture," which had exaggerated her merits, began unjustly to disparage them. To understand the injustice it is only necessary to read her books written before "Romola". There has been no better novelist since the death of Dickens.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) no one who found his works were sympathetic will deny the title of a man of genius. It is unnecessary to dwell on the details of his life; the essence of them is to be gathered from his own essays and from his published correspondence. From his earliest childhood his health was so unstable that he appeared to live on his astonishing intellectual and moral energy rather than on his physical basis. His education was casual and frequently interrupted by recurrent maladies; from childhood a dreamer of dreams and teller of tales, he educated himself, by study of great models mainly in old French and English, in the formation of style and the choice of words. His contributions to magazines, essays and short stories, revealed the last successor of the school of Lamb and Hazlitt, a scholar with a philosophy of life of his own, the philosophy of youth: see the Essays collected and published in "Virginibus Puerisque" (1881), and "Familiar Studies of Men and Books" (1882). At the same time such brief tales of his as "A Lodging for the Night," and "The Sire de Malétroit's Door," and "Thrawn Janet," in periodicals, proved him to be a master of romance, and a master with a thorough understanding of historical characters, surroundings, superstition, and the power of communicating the ancestral thrill of superstition. His interest in history was intense and sympathetic, and was even a danger in his path, as he would willingly have engaged himself in that unpopular study. But he was, as Johnson told Boswell that he was, "longer a boy than other people," and in 1878 he wrote for an obscure periodical "The New Arabian Nights," a fantasy of humour and of perilous adventure, "in a spirit of mockery" like his own "Young Man with the Cream Tarts". In 1881, in a boy's paper, he wrote "Treasure Island," a story meant for boys, but delightful to a critic so little apt to notice his juniors as Mr. Matthew Arnold. "Prince Otto" (1885) is a Court romance of the eighteenth century, full of brilliant passages, but confessedly written and rewritten again and again under the influence of George Meredith. In 1886 "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," a fantasy not uninfluenced, perhaps, by Edgar Poe, but rich in his own philosophy, humour, and style, at last captured public attention, caused "a new shudder," and was rapturously welcomed, as a moral allegory, from the pulpits "of all denominations". The story, or at least the mechanism of the story, came, like "Kubla Khan," to the author in a dream. What is probably his best novel (without a woman in it), "Kidnapped" was suggested by his studies of Highland history after 1745. It was planned on a much larger scale, but now, as sometimes occurred, the pen simply dropped from the author's hand, in one of his many maladies. Such studies of Highland and Lowland character as he gave in "Kidnapped" (though the evil uncle is, in his own phrase, "too steep") are only equalled or excelled in those of Sir Walter Scott, while the pictures of Highland and Lowland life and society at a period (just after Culloden) untouched by Scott, are historically accurate. The same period is again viewed in that bitter study of almost insane fraternal hatred, "The Master of Ballantrae" (1889), supposed to be narrated by a loyal servitor who is also a constitutional coward. There is little relief in this romance except that which comes from one of Prince Charles's Irish officers, the inimitable Chevalier Bourke. In 1893 appeared "Catriona," the sequel to "Kidnapped," in which (for the first time except in the exotic "Prince Otto," and in a short story, "The Pavilion on the Links") Stevenson introduced "the love-interest," and drew an admirably chivalrous and amiable heroine, Catriona herself; with her even more attractive foil, the daring and dominating Barbara Grant. Alan Breck in this sequel is worthy of himself in "Kidnapped," and James More Macgregor is a masterly historical portrait.

"The Wrong Box" (1889) is a humorous fantasy somewhat in the manner of "The New Arabian Nights," with many scenes which provoke laughter unquenchable. "The Wrecker" (1892) is rich in reminiscences of the author's youth in Paris and of Fontainebleau, and the plot, up to a certain point, strongly excites curiosity, but, despite the brilliance of some oceanic adventures, the story is not well constructed, and is rather disappointing. "The Ebb Tide" (1894) was spoken of by the author as "his blooming failure," for his colloquial style was not classical.[2] "St. Ives" (1897), left unfinished, and completed by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, shows signs of fatigue, but the fragment of "Weir of Hermiston," in which his foot is on his native heath, gave all promise of a masterpiece in its many delineations of character. In all his work, in whatever kind, the charm of his style accompanied the reader like the murmur of a burn that runs by the wayside.

Of his verses, "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885) is the most like himself: a few of his serious poems in English have noble effects, but perhaps the best of his poems in the Lowland vernacular are to be preferred. His plays, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, were too literary, or for some other reason were unsuccessful on the stage ("Deacon Brodie," "Beau Austin," "Admiral Guinea").

When we consider the great variety of Stevenson's works, their wide range, their tenderness, their sympathy, their mastery of terror and pity, their gloom and their gaiety; when we remember that his sympathy and knowledge are as conspicuous in his tales of the brown natives of the Pacific ("The Beach of Falesa") as of Highlanders and Lowlanders, and the French of the fifteenth century; we can have little doubt concerning his place in literature.

Minor Novelists.

Among other novelists not hitherto named, the author of Charlotte Brontë's biography, Mrs. Gaskell (née Stevenson) was born at Chelsea, but lived and married in Manchester, and in 1848 rendered the life of a manufacturing population, with their strikes and grimy lives, then a new theme for fiction, in her story of "Mary Barton" (1848). Her "Cranford" (1853), in a very different field, pictures the placid existence of maiden ladies in a quiet village. Her "Sylvia's Lovers," "North and South," and her delightful (unfinished) "Wives and Daughters" (1866) (the author died in 1865), all deservedly hold their place among the classics of our fiction.

With them "a little clan" would place novels unjustly forgotten, "The School for Fathers," by Talbot Gwynne, and "The Initials," by the Baroness Tautphœus.

Charles Reade (1814-1884) was a very prominent and emphatic character of his age, a kind of Lawrence Boythorn, engaged in fiction and the drama. He was a Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford, a barrister who did not practise, a philanthropist, some of whose novels had a purpose, a combatant whose lance was ever in rest, and as kind and generous as he was pugnacious. For a thoroughly appreciative study of Reade a characteristic essay by Mr. Swinburne should be read. His "Never too Late to Mend," a study, very painful, of the torture of prisoners in jails, and a much more pleasant picture of adventurous life in Australia (Jacky, the black fellow, is a jewel), was most successful (1856), and some reckon "The Cloister and the Hearth," a moving romance of latest mediaeval life in Germany and Italy, a masterpiece of historical fiction. The tone is perhaps too modern and certainly too "robustious". "Peg Woffington" (1852) is perhaps really better as a historical tale. "Griffith Gaunt" and "A Terrible Temptation," with "Foul Play" and "The Wandering Heir" (the claimant in the great Annesley case of 1743) have but few to praise them, and the last mentioned is too manifestly made up of the materials in the never-decided law case; itself stranger than fiction, but destitute of a single sympathetic character.

Space affords room for no more than a grateful mention of Mr. William Black, whose pictures of Scottish characters, sport, and landscape gave much pleasure to his contemporaries; and of Sir Walter Besant whose gift of humour in character and incident was combined, on occasion, with a singular power of fantasy, while his "Dorothy Forster," a tale of the Rising of 1715, is probably the best historical romance of that period after "Rob Roy".

[1] "English Men of Letters Series."

[2] In these three books Mr. Stevenson's stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, collaborated.

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XXXVII. HISTORIANS

After the appearance of the works of Hume and Robertson, History became, as we have heard Gibbon say, the most popular theme with the reading public. His own monumental work gave new impetus to historical study. Sharon Turner (1768-1847) devoted himself mainly to Anglo-Saxon researches. Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) distinguished himself by research into the institutions and events of England and of English history from the Conquest to the days of the Plantagenets. Dr. Lingard, a Catholic priest (1771-1851), produced a general history of the country up to 1688, which perhaps has not yet been superseded by any book of similar scope, and which is the more valuable as indicating the aspect of events in the eyes of a Catholic. Necessarily the works of these authors lack much information, contained in manuscripts not then accessible to them, but now opened to students by the better arrangement and cataloguing of State Papers. The historians of the end of the eighteenth and the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth century, were not so heavily laden with documents as historical writers of to-day, and they had leisure enough to assimilate their less ponderous materials and to arrange them with more of reflection and of art than is now common.

The historian who wears best is decidedly Henry Hallam (1777-1859). The son of a Canon of Windsor, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church. He entered the Middle Temple, but obtained a fairly lucrative post in the Civil Service, had property of his own, and devoted himself, in his leisure, to literary and historical study. His "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages" holds its ground, despite the absence of materials now made common coin by Stubbs, Maitland, and others. Considering the immensity of the ground which Hallam surveys, his accuracy is remarkable (for example he corrects, all in vain, an important if minute error of detail which still infests the latest works on Jeanne d'Arc), and, though he is compelled to be concise, we see in his pages, for instance on Charlemagne, that he can combine spirit and interest with brevity. The same praise must be given to his "Constitutional History of England" (Henry VII.--George II.). It is commonly said that an impartial historian cannot be interesting. On the other hand, Hallam's conscientious efforts to be impartial lend much interest to his books. He has no flights of impetuous rhetoric; he is the last man to let his imagination transfigure prosaic facts into glittering fancies. We see an honourable, learned, and sober-minded man, who sums up life like a judge and does not plead like an advocate. "Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else to look," says Macaulay in his review of Hallam's book, a review even unusually rich in the unmeasured invective of the more popular historian. If we think Hallam "dull," the dullness is in ourselves. Hallam has not the current delusion that the Protestant reformers, from 1550 to 1688, were friends of freedom of conscience.

His last important book "An Introduction to the Literature of Europe" (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) is very deficient in taste for the early works of les primitifs: "we cannot place the 'Iliad' on a level with the Jerusalem of Tasso," in some essential respects. On the other hand, Hallam speaks thus of Christopher North (Professor Wilson): "A living writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty waters," with more to the same effect. Spenser's stanza "is particularly inconvenient and languid in narration". Hallam has, in fact, very little space for inspiriting literary criticism, on account of the vast scope of his theme. He has to treat of Scioppius, his "Infamia Famiani," and of Ubbo Emmius, of Grævius and Spanheim, Camerarius and Grew. The encyclopædic nature of Hallam's task made it impossible for him to avoid aridity, and to mingle much pleasure with instruction. He is otherwise associated with poetry, as his son Arthur was the friend of Tennyson, and dying early, inspired the long elegy of "In Memoriam," and the beautiful lines on "The Valley of Cauteretz".

Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, on 25 October, 1800, is an ideal representative of one mood of the English mind and character during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the Mac in his patronymic be Gaelic, he and his forefathers had little in them of the typical Celt. The name Macaulay means MacOlaf (Olafson) and the Norseman rather than the Celt predominated in Macaulay. His great grandfather, the Rev. Aulay, and his grandfather the Rev. John, are reported by Bishop Forbes (in "The Lyon in Mourning") to have been personally and peculiarly active in attempting to gain the prize of £30,000 offered by the English Government for Prince Charles. Their enterprise did not suit the Celtic character. Macaulay's father, Zachary, was a deeply religious man, a member of the so-called "Clapham Sect" of Evangelicals. Though he was at one time prosperous in business, so much of his time and energy were given to negro emancipation that misfortunes came, and Macaulay had to work hard for his livelihood.

There are no more delightful chapters in Biography than those in which Sir George Trevelyan describes Macaulay's childhood. His intelligence was precocious; his memory was a marvel. At the age of 9 he read once through "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and was able to repeat the whole of the poem. This exceeds even Scott's feat of repeating the whole of a ballad of eighty verses which he had heard read once by the author. Macaulay's memory lasted throughout his life, and gave him, naturally, that amazing readiness and richness in literary and historical allusions which have made his Essays and History popular beyond rivalry. No doubt like Scott he relied on memory too confidently; styling Claverhouse, for example, "James Graham". He read with a rapidity inconceivable; and he read everything, from Plato, Herodotus, and Æschylus to the worst novels, forgetting nothing in them that was accidentally good or exquisitely absurd. Even in childhood he was a copious and accomplished writer, his "Family Epic on Olaf, King and Saint," presents a remarkably successful imitation of Scott's style in "The Lady of the Lake". With these intellectual gifts he combined intense affection, good humour, and a turn for loud and vehement argument. Going from a private school to Trinity College, Cambridge, Macaulay regretted that he had not chosen Oxford; for mathematics were his abomination. He twice gained, as Tennyson did once, the Chancellor's medal for a prize poem, but in the Tripos of 1822 "Macaulay of Trinity was gulfed," by "the cross-grained Muses of the cube and square". They did not prevent him from obtaining a Fellowship at Trinity. He won a prize essay on William III., which is written in the very cadences of style that mark his History; and, at intervals, in the same short sentences. "He knew where to pause. He outraged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He altered no venerable name." Possibly it is a pity that these sentences do not describe William's conduct in Scottish affairs.

His early pieces, Macaulay contributed to "Knight's Quarterly Magazine". At the age of 25 he wrote in "The Edinburgh Review," that essay on poetry in general and on Milton as poet, man, and politician in particular, which took the world as suddenly and as completely as Byron's "Childe Harold" had done. "The family breakfast-table was covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter of London." To readers who in our day read the essay this enthusiasm seems creditable to the world, but rather surprising. Of Æschylus, Macaulay wrote: "considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as choruses, they are above all praise". Milton's admiration of Euripides reminds him of "Titania kissing the long ears of Bottom".

Grateful as every reader is to Macaulay for the vivid and lucid expression of his knowledge and thought in his essays, we must admit that, like Charles Lamb, he was a man of "imperfect sympathies". Miss Edgeworth, delighted to find her own name in a footnote to his "History of England," expressed to him her regret that Scott, who had written with entire impartiality about Macaulay's period, was not once mentioned. In truth, after reading Lockhart's "Life of Scott," with its magnificent and melancholy close in the "Journal" of a man working himself to death for honour's sake, Macaulay wrote thus of Sir Walter: "In politics a bitter and unscrupulous partisan; profuse and ostentatious in expense; agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler,... sacrificing the perfection of his compositions to his eagerness for money... in order to satisfy wants which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious speculations; this is the way in which he appears to me". Scott was a Tory: and from Macaulay's remarks we understand the justice of his studies of historical characters.

The rapacious speculator, in fact, had shown "extravagant waste" in publishing books (not his own) of disinterested research; when he was ruined he gave away his work, because he had not money to give; the "bitter and unscrupulous partisan" as a historian of his country was more than scrupulously fair. Of Brougham's essays Macaulay wrote: "All the characters are either too black or too fair. The passions of the writer do not suffer him even to maintain the decent appearance of impartiality." These are the very charges brought against Macaulay's own "characters" of William Penn the Quaker, and Claverhouse the Cavalier; while no historian, perhaps, can defend his account of Sir Elijah Impey. Had a Stuart King behaved as William III. did in the matter of the Darien enterprise, we can easily imagine the style in which Macaulay would have "dusted the varlet's jacket". But with lapse of time his bias, his prejudices, can be discounted. As early as 1828 he wrote "a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque". That power of imagination he possessed and exercised so delightfully that his History was at once purchased more eagerly than a poem or romance. Both as a collector of materials and as a traveller to the scenes of which he was to write, Macaulay toiled with his own unexampled energy and rapidity. It is well worth while to read his account of his own methods both in study and in composition.[1]

It is not the good fortune of most historians to possess even Macaulay's private means, the savings of five years passed in India as legal member of the Indian Council. Nor can his practical knowledge of politics and of the world be often found among students, while his natural gifts of imagination and of expression are almost unexampled. His intellect had the limits of his class, his age, and his robust and hasty temperament.

His poems, "The Lays of Ancient Rome," have been as popular as his prose. He tried at 40 to write such ballads as he conceived the folk-songs of republican Rome to have been, and nobody can deny that the "Lays" have abundance of spirit and "go". The ballad of the Armada, and of "The Last Buccaneer" possess the same virtues and will always be dear to young people of spirit. Arrived at the age of 50, Macaulay wrote, in the very words of the dying Hazlitt, "Well, I have had a happy life!" It was extended to 1859, he died on 28 December, leaving a name justly honourable and a cherished memory.

Thomas Carlyle.

Carlyle (1795-1881), with Burns, Knox, and Scott, is the chief representative in letters of "the good and the not so good" (in his own words applied to Sir Walter) of the Scottish character. Unlike the other three, Carlyle was "thrawn," a word not easily translated, but implying a certain twist, or perversion, towards the whole nature of things. The apostle of silence was the most voluble of mortals; the peasant stoic felt the pain of the pea beneath a heap of mattresses as keenly as the delicate princess of the fairy tale.

Carlyle was first of all a Scottish humorist; that peculiar humour of which Southrons deny the existence underlay the fateful gloom of the philosopher and historian who beheld his country "shooting Niagara," who saw that society was rotten and doomed, and who found no remedy except in the arrival of a Cromwell or a Frederick. He "praised the keen unscrupulous force" of such heroes: though he did not use the term "superman," he believed in the idea. It is quite certain that he had great tenderness and friendliness; his affection for Lockhart, so unlike him superficially (though Lockhart, too, was tender, melancholy, and "thrawn") is really touching. Carlyle had "our Scottish kindness," in Knox's phrase, that is attachment to kin and clan. Even in his dourest moods of personal invective his bark was worse than his bite, but there was a great deal of bark. The conclusion of the whole matter in the long dispute as to the relations of Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle is that, with a deep mutual affection, theirs was a life of cat and dog.

Born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Carlyle was the son of a stone mason, though his genealogy traces him back behind the Conquest to the Carlyle Lords of Torthorwald. Educated at the Grammar School of Annan, and the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle was for some years a dominie, much at odds with himself and the universe. He found guidance in Goethe and other Germans; wrote in "Fraser's Magazine," and elsewhere, essays often historical; in London met Coleridge and Lamb, who was in one of his wildest moods; wrote a "Life of Schiller" in the style of a man of this world; married in 1826, and for six years was brooding, grumbling, studying, writing, and "making himself," in the bitter solitude of his wife's little lairdship, Craigenputtock. Here he produced, in his own characteristic manner, "Sartor Resartus," a disguised autobiography, a humorous and mournful version of his own struggles to find bottom in a universe apparently bottomless. That most things are shams, and that shams are doomed, was Carlyle's message. The fate of shams was illustrated in the fiery pages of his "French Revolution," written after he went to his life-long home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where it could not be said that, as in Kilmeny's fairy-land, "the cock never crew". When, despite cocks and other disturbances, Carlyle, with heroic efforts of study, had finished the first volume, John Stuart Mill lent it to a lady, and it was never seen again. Her cook may have been a Betty Barnes. Carlyle returned to his task, and in 1837 the book astonished the world. It had all the colour of romance, and despite the discoveries of recent research, it seems substantially accurate in detail.

"Heroes and Hero-Worship," and the "Past (mediaeval) and Present," preluded to his very laborious "Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell" (1845). With many a groan over the confusion of his materials, and with many a shout of applause to the orator of the speeches, Carlyle set Oliver in the light of day, interpreting the studied ambiguities of such speeches of the hero as he makes to the puzzled Wildrake in "Woodstock". Sir Walter's Cromwell is probably as correct a portrait of the Protector as Carlyle's, and Carlyle's must be compared with the less enthusiastic study by Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Carlyle took conscientious pains with the military part of his history, visiting the battlefields, and becoming epic in the fiery spirit of his description of the defeat of his countrymen at Dunbar. A chart-picture of the battle evaded his research, and his account is not absolutely correct. After another prophetic cry of doom in "Latter Day Pamphlets" (1850) Carlyle plunged for many years into the labour of studying "Frederick the Great". The toil outwore his force, and it may be complained that he did not focus his subject. Yet none of his books is of greater interest, and he is the prophet of the modern greatness of Germany. We see how fortis Etruria crevit; through discipline, patriotism, self-sacrifice, "enduring hardness," and obedient to her greatest men. No other than Carlyle could have told the story with so much alluring animation; his military history, too, is most conscientiously studied. His native gift of observing and divining, and describing (in his own words on a singularly private scene, witnessed by him) "with perhaps some humorous exaggeration," found ample scope in his work on Frederick, as well as in his "French Revolution". No doubt he overdid the trick of reiterating traits in Dickens's manner;--for a truly candid censure of his style an essay by his obliged friend, Leigh Hunt, may be consulted (see remarks on Leigh Hunt).

Occasionally, as in his essays on "Cagliostro" and "The Diamond Necklace," Carlyle's freedom of style, and his attacks on his authorities, are somewhat infuriating; the reader wants to be told a plain tale without these excursions, exclamations, and imaginations. Carlyle regarded imagination as one of the wings of history, and perhaps encouraged the too freely imaginative narrations of his friend Froude.

To him, unhappily, he bequeathed the autobiographical papers of himself and his wife, which Froude handled, to the best of his power, as he understood that Carlyle had desired that they should be treated. There followed outcries from the more ferocious admirers of Carlyle, though Froude had done his best to obey his master! That he could not be absolutely accurate is certain; but disloyal he never was. There is no doubt that Carlyle, irritable, absorbed in his work, and taking his wife's exemplary care of him for granted, was "gey ill to live wi'," while "she had a tongue with a tang". These facts have produced a jungle of deplorable writings; but of Carlyle's genuine goodness and kindness no one who saw him could reasonably doubt.

The style of Carlyle was unique, unimaginable except by himself, the worst of models for others, and exquisitely fitted to embody his own idiosyncrasies--in short, it is, in prose, not wholly unlike that of Browning in many of his poems. To address the world in this voice, when he was almost unknown, demanded a courage and confidence in which Carlyle was not deficient. One is occasionally reminded of the methods, illegitimate but effective, of the author of "Tristram Shandy," and, again, of Rabelais.

James Anthony Froude.

In one way, as a historian, Froude (1818-1894) may be called the pupil, as he was the devoted friend, of Carlyle. That sage worshipped force in men, and Froude, failing a Cromwell or a Frederick, made a hero of Henry VIII., "that blot of blood and grease on the pages of English history," as Dickens called the king who found "the gospel light in Boleyn's eyes". It is not from Carlyle that a young historian can learn the unpopular grace of impartiality. To read Froude you would suppose that the Protestant party in the sixteenth century were innocent of the blood shed by political assassins; whereas the godly slayers of Beaton, Riccio, and the Duc de Guise, like Elizabeth when she bade Paulet murder Mary Stuart, were precisely on a level with the would-be murderers of Elizabeth; and Henry VIII. was burning martyrs of all shades in England, while the Beatons were doing the same thing to heretics in Scotland. Henry was perhaps even more treacherous than he was lustful and cruel, but it is in the original sources, not in Froude's History, that you discover the fact.

However, impartial history is notoriously dull, whereas that of Froude is so entertaining that to take up a volume is to go on reading, fascinated by his charm, and delighted by a style remote as the poles from Carlyle's. It is as simple as Swift's, admirably lucid, excelling in the gift of narrative, without imitable peculiarities, and as entirely spontaneous as if the author were writing an ordinary letter.

Froude, with his brother Richard, was at Oxford when Newman was the great influence among the junior Fellows (Exeter was Froude's College), and Froude went so far with the Movement as to work at the Lives of some early English Saints. But the innocent legends of their miracles were too much for his belief, despite the excellent evidence for some of those of St. Thomas of Canterbury. His scepticism extended, and his short anti-religious novel, "The Nemesis of Faith" (1849), is said to have been thrown into the fire by a don of his own college.

He turned to History--that of England from the reign of Henry VIII. to the defeat of the Armada, and he resolutely attacked the great masses of Spanish contemporary manuscripts at Simancas. It was a knightly deed, when we think of the handwriting of the period, and the sometimes inextricably bad grammar of the writers. Different modern historians, in one case, give diverse translations of one crucial passage, and it seems that all of them are wrong. But Froude committed many errors which were not perceived by his furious assailant, Freeman (who did not know where to have him), but are conspicuous when we compare his work with his authorities. He is quite untrustworthy; he has taken fragments from three letters of three different dates, and printed them, with marks of quotation, as if they occurred in a single letter. He accuses Mary Stuart of a certain action, on the authority of the English ambassador, and when we read his letter we find him saying that rumour charges Mary with the fact, but that he does not believe it.

Froude describes a dramatic scene in which Elizabeth triumphs over the Scottish envoys sent to plead for Mary's life; and when we examine the authorities, to which an erroneous reference is given, we find in them no such matter, no such scene. The impression given is that Froude read his authorities, let what he read simmer in his mind, let his fancy play freely over it, and then wrote in picturesque and alluring fashion, on the dictates of romance, without ever comparing what he wrote with what his authorities recorded. They are uninteresting, Froude is extremely interesting: as a maker of literature he is in the first rank; as a chronicler of the truth he is not always trustworthy. He did not know his subject "all round"; of Scotland he knew little, and was wedded to the belief that James I. was the first of the Stuart line. He gravely repeats and embellishes Knox's mythical account of the disaster of Solway Moss, but probably the English despatches of the day were not accessible to him. How much of the interest of his book would survive if it were reduced to the sober verities one cannot estimate, but his wonderful power of giving a kind of bird's-eye views of most complicated European situations in politics must remain unmatched.

Froude, against his bias, made it seem almost certain that Elizabeth had guilty foreknowledge of the death of Amy Robsart. He leaned on a letter of the Spanish ambassador, and reading the Spanish for "last month" as "the present month," he left an erroneous impression. At the moment (1856-1869) there seems to have been no English reviewer who had the necessary knowledge; for Freeman merely picked holes in the fringes of Froude's work. Froude wrote "The English in Ireland," wrote books of political observations made in our colonies, and, succeeding Freeman as Professor of Modern History at Oxford, lectured on Erasmus and published his lectures, which were flown upon by the critics. He also wrote a good "Life of Bunyan," and a longer biography of Cæsar. His "Short Studies" are as interesting as his History, which is not likely to be superseded. As a literary view of a great period of history, it has no rival. It is as rich in original research as in portraits of characters. All that it lacks is a final comparison of the results with the authorities.

Edward Augustus Freeman.

Freeman (1823-1892) will always be best known by his long "History of the Norman Conquest," a work which embraces most of our island story before the great event of 1066. The author, a Fellow of Trinity, Oxford, was also a squire in Somerset, and could afford to devote his time to a gentlemanly but usually unremunerative form of literature. His work is protracted, minute, and influenced by a passion for the ideal English in the national character. Prodigiously industrious in his study of the original sources in print; he had a kind of dislike of research in manuscripts. He was well versed in architecture, topography, and local history; he was as much at home in Sicily as in England, with Graeco-Roman as with Norman remains; he was combative, and, in an earlier age, would probably have invited Mr. Robertson to settle the question of the English overlordship of Scotland in the lists. His great work is more profitable to the serious student than interesting to the general reader. He wrote much in "The Saturday Review" without adding to the popularity of that periodical. He was constantly correcting the errors of others, and died during a controversy with Mr. Horace Round on the existence or non-existence of a palisade at the Battle of Hastings (or Senlac). His friend and pupil, J. R. Green (1837-1883), is celebrated for his "Short History of the English People" (1874), a work written in a style rather acrocorinthian, and in its first edition rich in errors, later corrected. The book is written with so much spirit and sympathy that it may tempt many a reader to go more deeply into books less popular. Green had the power of exciting interest in topics generally deemed arid, and, with Freeman, contributed to the success of the History School at Oxford, though even more was due to the work of Bishop Stubbs on charters and constitutional history, and to the tutorial lectures and influence of the late Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, author of a history of the Popes.

William Hickling Prescott.

William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), the celebrated historian of the two greatest adventures of the modern world, was born, like Hawthorne, at Salem, and was educated at Harvard. Here some student threw a piece of bread at him in hall, his eye was struck, and his sight was so much injured that he could only write by aid of a kind of framework with cross lines; while his reading, whether from books or manuscripts, was almost wholly done by proxy. The works were read aloud, he listened; probably had notes made of the passages which he meant to use in his histories, composed his periods and then dictated them to a copyist. His "Ferdinand and Isabella," the history of Spain in her glory, is of 1837. Six years later he published "The Conquest of Mexico" (1843), "The Conquest of Peru" in 1847, and, up till his death in 1859, he was at work on the first decadence of Spain, under Philip II.

In glancing over the list of historical writers in English, from Gibbon downwards, we remark that almost all were men who could afford to deal with a theme so generally unpopular as the past. Hume and Robertson and Gibbon were all, when they worked at history, men in possession of a competence, or more than a competence. So was Hallam, so was Sir Walter Scott; Grote, Prescott, Freeman, Macaulay, were at least equally fortunate, while Carlyle, by dint of the strictest economy, was at least able to wait for years before reaping the emoluments of his labours. The man of letters who must live by his pen must live by hackwork of various kinds, and cannot afford the time to collect and digest his information, to select the little ore from the quarry of documents, and then present in an artistic form the result of his researches. Professors of history who must employ their days by lecturing to and correcting the essays of pupils, "live from the altar" of history, but are almost never great and are never popular historians.

The chief American and English historical writers of 1840-1890 were fortunate in another way; of which Prescott took full advantage. They might dare to be interesting, to describe striking events with what eloquence they had at command, and venture to dwell on the characters and fortunes of historical persons, famous or obscure. Science, through the lips of a hundred professors, did not then insist that historical writers must be dry, impersonal, impartial weighers of anise and cummin, students of economics. Scores of unread specialists were not lying in wait to pounce upon every slip, and blot out every touch of colour. Indeed, Mr. Froude could, and did, go as he pleased, and his most unfriendly critics did not know the period of which he wrote. Nobody, like Mr. Gardiner later, gave a whole year of study to the documents of a single year. Now accuracy is a precious thing, but historians who live in constant fear of making a slip have not hitherto produced books which stand high as literature, books which are read "for human pleasure". Again, in the last golden age of history which was literature, "the reading public," always a minute minority, was not wholly absorbed in new novels. Thus the historians of that time had many advantages, and they were men who deserved their opportunities.

Once more, when Prescott set to work, the States of Europe at last began to permit men of letters to make free use of their collections of old public documents, letters, despatches, books of accounts, while the Royal Academy of History at Madrid gave the greatest facilities to the assistants of Prescott,--a favour denied, in the eighteenth century, to Dr. Robertson. The President of the Academy placed his own fine collection of documents at the disposal of the American historian, as did Sir Thomas Phillipps in England, and the archives of Mexico were opened to him, while he read, of course, through the remarkable book composed, after the Conquest, from the evidence of the learned Aztecs, by Sahagun; and the delightful chronicle of one of the conquerors, Bernal Diaz. New materials may since have come to light, but Prescott, rejoicing in the rich mine of true romance; writing with zest and spirit and wide erudition, produced his two books on the two great adventures of Cortes and Pizarro in such a form that his works cannot be superseded. It is said by an American critic that "the Imperial palaces which he saw in an imagination kindled by that of the Spanish conquerors have dwindled to large communal houses inhabited by barbarians," and that "he lived too early to make use of the results of archæological research". But any one who looks at the scanty relics of ancient Anahuac in the British Museum knows what kind of "barbarians" produced such objects of art. Moreover, the Spaniards came from a land of palaces, the land of the Alhambra, and of glorious cathedrals! it is not possible to believe that they were deceived, and described Aztec buildings as palaces, while they were merely "long houses" like those of the Iroquois. This appears to the writer to be a vain imagination, and the works of Prescott, though romantic, are not romances.

John Lothrop Motley.

The chief historical writers of the United States occur in a group, between the years of Macaulay and Froude. One of the most popular, and deservedly popular, is John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877). He chose neither American nor English history for his theme, but, in selecting the Dutch Republic, found a topic exciting to republicans in one country and to Protestants and friends of Freedom's cause in both.

Motley, who was born near Boston, had a father of substantial wealth who liked literature. He went to Harvard, and then studied at Berlin and Göttingen, where he became the friend of the great Bismarck. Like Macaulay, Hallam, and others, he spent his leisure in the most intellectual society, whether abroad or in America, and in constant touch with men of literary genius, Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, Thackeray; and also with diplomatists occupied with national affairs. He was not a student and recluse, who can scarcely ever be a historian, in the literary sense, however serviceable he may be as an archivist, a collector and critic of the materials of history.

Motley, returning to America, tried to write novels, without success; then chose his subject, for years toiled at the massive printed books of the Dutch, and for some four years worked at manuscript documents in Holland, Belgium, and elsewhere.

Between 1851 and 1856 he accomplished his task, "The Rise of the Dutch Republic". The firm of Murray declined to embark in it, and might rue their caution, for, once published, the book was received with acclaim, both by critics, including Mr. Froude, and by the purchasing public, who found it "as interesting as a novel". "The Saturday Review," then in the academic and educated arrogance of its youth, was unfriendly; perhaps partly because the author was an American, partly because of his Protestant enthusiasm. Prescott, who was working at the same period, and generously welcomed the enterprise of the younger man, told Motley that he had "whittled away" Philip II., and that he saw the events "through Dutch spectacles". But these were popular spectacles; and few persons know the Spanish and Catholic side of the shield. Dutch critics, while they praised, made their reserves; and an old feud reawoke when, later, Motley wrote on the Arminian, not the Calvinist side of the great party quarrel in Holland, and on the career of John Barneveld.

As a diplomatist (in 1869 American Minister in England) Motley knew the nature of the inmost political councils; he knew European society; he had, in much the same measure as Froude, the art of making the dry bones of the past clothe themselves in flesh and blood, in steel armour, or in satins and velvets. He had access to many despatches, often in cipher, always in the hardest of all handwritings (that of the sixteenth century before the "Roman hand" was adopted), and he laboured at these with iron endurance, turning his results "to favour and to prettiness" by the graces of his pictorial style.

His continuation of his work, "The History of the United Netherlands" (published by Mr. Murray) was completed in 1865; his "Life of John of Barneveld" in 1874. He died in England (1877) and there is buried. His work has not been, and for English readers is never likely to be, superseded, though it would gain by addition of notes from eminent Dutch critical historians. He was of a beautiful presence, and, according to Lady Byron, had a "most wonderful" likeness to the poet. His letters are full of amusing gossip about the world of Thackeray and Macaulay.

Other Historians.

Sir William Napier (1785-1860) who fought with distinction under Wellington in the Peninsula, combined with his great personal knowledge of the war conscientious research in documents, and a style of the most brilliant eloquence. Impartial he was not, and he had the fiery temper of the Napiers; but modern research, as in Mr. Oman's great work, now corrects him, and now complements his information.

The great work of George Grote (1794-1871), a Radical in politics, a banker by profession, is "The History of Greece". It is too well known to need description. Though Grote's aim was to set Athenian democracy in what he held to be its true light, he laboured not less assiduously among the mythic legends and the heroic poetry of Hellas; he was most erudite in every fragment of Greek records, and his work, though destitute of much new light recently discovered by excavations of Greek sites and from inscriptions, yet holds its place, unsurpassed, as a general history of Hellas.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) was educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, and began his literary career as a writer of verse.

The poet-priest Milman So ready to kill man,

is thus mentioned by Byron, who thought that Milman had attacked him, or Shelley, or both, in "The Quarterly Review". He later wrote "The History of the Jews," now out of date, and his chief and very meritorious work "The History of Latin Christianity" (1855).

Space, and the nature of his subjects, logical, philosophical, political, and social, forbid more than a mention of a man so prominent and influential as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Mill was privately educated and forced into precocity by his father, James Mill, a Liberal doctrinaire. In 1843 he gave to the world his "System of Logic," in 1848 his "Political Economy"; the former, at least, was for many years read almost as much as the "Ethics" of Aristotle by competitors for honours at Oxford. His "Liberty" (1859) was an extremely advanced book in its day; as was his "Subjection of Women". Mill sowed large handfuls of the seed of the dragon's teeth. He was an earnest, precise, and lucid writer; but not successful in Parliament.

Newman.

The bearers of some of the greatest literary names of the nineteenth century produced books which had vast influence on the development of thought, and yet left little work that, as mere literature, is of the highest merit. They were concerned with the religious, theological, social, and political ideas of their own time, which, like all the ideas personal, as it were, to one or two generations, could not remain fixed, but glided into protean forms of change. Thus John Henry Newman (born in London, 1801, educated at Trinity College, Oxford; Fellow of Oriel, 1822) passed through various phases of religious and ecclesiastical belief; was a leader with Pusey, Keble, and many others in the Oxford Anglican Movement; found that his reason led him into the Roman fold (he was made a Cardinal finally) and wrote voluminously, and in a style confessedly of the highest merit. Yet no doubt his most widely and permanently interesting work took the form of a defensive autobiography ("Apologia pro Vita Sua," 1864), which is more read for its vivid study of his own mental vicissitudes, and personal experiences, than for its theological science. It answers, in his generation, to the "Confessions" of St. Augustine.

Newman describes himself as not only religious but superstitious in boyhood; he read Law's "Serious Call," and crossed himself when he went into the dark. His search for truth was earnest, his nature was almost sceptical but hospitable towards the marvellous, and his own party, to whatsoever party he belonged at any period, never knew where or how far his theory of the Development of Doctrine would carry him. As a tutor of Oriel, and Vicar of St. Mary's, he exercised, as much by his personality and sanctity of life as by his intellect, an unprecedented influence over the minds of the young. In 1843-4 he began to publish "Lives of the English Saints" from the earliest period: many of these were done by Newman's disciples. The narratives abound in miracles of all sorts which proved too much for the faith of J. A. Froude. Newman's doctrine developed in a way which puzzled himself and others. His heart and his tastes drew him towards Catholicism; his earlier ideas caused him to preach against the old faith; at last his reason sided with his "secret longing love of Rome," his "Tract 90" in "Tracts for the Times," alarmed the academic authorities. "I hardly knew where I stood... when I wanted to be in peace and silence I had to speak out, and I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority". He retired from the University pulpit, and after a period of retreat and reflection, crossed the Rubicon. There was a long and bitter period of trials, of broken friendships, of charges of duplicity and so forth. In reviewing Froude's "History," Charles Kingsley spoke as if more than doubtful of Newman's respect for truth as such; a correspondence followed; Kingsley wrote an offensive pamphlet: "What then does Dr. Newman Mean?" Newman, by this time a man of 63, answered the question in his "Apologia"; first making a terrible display of acute personal irony, and then giving a narrative of the development of his opinions. In later editions he omitted the polemical pages, and when Kingsley died said a Mass for his soul. The book was received with almost universal applause--yet it had not been easy for Kingsley to understand what Newman meant. His "Grammar of Assent" was so many times rewritten as to leave the impression that he himself did not easily ascertain his own meaning. It is curious to find him quoting a writer in "The Penny Cyclopædia" as an authority on the religion of the Australian tribes; the writer was not correctly informed.

Newman's works range from twelve volumes of sermons, through treatises and essays, historical and critical, and polemical works, to novels of which "Callista," a tale of the early Christians in Africa, is the best, and to poetry. In this, "The Dream of Gerontius" displays intense imaginative power; and "Lead, Kindly Light" is the most admired of his religious lyrics. Perhaps this great and good man is most intelligible in his "Life," by Mr. Wilfrid Ward (1912).

In his love of truth, and in his courage and natural independence of mind, Newman was what we call "thoroughly English". "I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe by another's lungs," he wrote. As much might be said for two authors who differed from him so widely as Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). The nature of their studies was, as a rule, remote from the literary, and must find record and criticism in the History of Science. The greatness of Darwin's character and intellect is among the chief intellectual glories of his country. Huxley, apart from his own special researches, was the Thangbrand of Evolution, the popular fighting man, of a brisk humorous pugnacity; his mental lungs expanding in an atmosphere which would have asphyxiated Newman. He had very wide general reading; of his more literary works his "Life of David Hume" in the series of "English Men of Letters" is an admirable example. He is not to be accepted as an impeccable authority on the religions of the more backward races. The same caution must be extended to the anthropological works of Herbert Spencer, a single-hearted seeker after truth, with a very peculiar scientific style of his own. Of all men who wrote much, and earnestly, and persuasively, Spencer was the least of a reader; to much good literature he was even antipathetic. His tastes may be studied in his autobiography.

W. E. H. Lecky.

Among historians of the later Victorian age, W. E. H. Lecky (1838-1903) held a position which was all his own. He was not an explorer among difficult and ancient archives like Froude; he had not Froude's imaginative and pictorial genius, and power of bringing dead times and personages vividly before the inner eye. He had neither the wide general historical knowledge of Freeman, nor Green's combination of effective rhetoric with very considerable learning. The minute and laborious accuracy of Gardiner, focused on a space comparatively limited, was not his; it was said of him at the moment when, still very young, he produced his "History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe" (1865) that he seemed infinitely more familiar with Latin and French than with Greek and German, and so he continued to be. But he gave, to the general reader, the results of wide reading; he was as lucid as he was fluent; his style was unborrowed, but descended from that of the eighteenth century; and so candid was he, that he spoke of the honesty of "The Old Pretender" (James VIII and III) as "heroic". Few historians have been so precocious; few more popular. Born in 1838, of a landed Irish family of Scottish descent, he was educated at Cheltenham College, and Trinity College, Dublin. In his twenty-third year he was already a published historical writer ("Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland"). He travelled in Spain, Italy, and France, and in 1865 published his work on the "History of Rationalism," which was warmly welcomed, and remains a justly popular book. But, in accordance with the nature of historical science, it is such a history of Rationalism, beginning with a study of the belief in witchcraft and the attendant cruelties, as a young man of talent, taking up the subject to-day, could no longer write. Much is adopted from Michelet, Maury, and Guerinet; the psychology of the topic was, in 1865, unknown: and to-day only a very daring youth could aver that the Rev. Mr. Kirk published "A Secret Commonwealth" in 1691 or at any other date. But the work is full of interest for the general reader: the author won a deserved success, and was 31 years of age when he followed it up with his "History of European Morals," a topic that might have taxed the erudition of the maturity of Gibbon. It involved a philosophical dissertation on the origin of morality, Lecky professing a theory of "intuition," which, though opposed to "rationalistic" ideas, is not unsympathetic to some anthropologists; though in knowledge of the ethics of savages, he could not, at the period when he wrote, be accomplished. Again, a study of Neoplatonism was involved, and had to be written without the aid of much psychological inquiry, posterior to the date of the work. The researches of the future antiquate works on such large subjects as the History of Morals with ruthless rapidity. Lecky's works, so far, were in the manner of Montesquieu and other great French philosophes, but, while severe enough on the errors of the clergy, he had none of Gibbon's mischievous love of degrading the early Christian ideal.

The central part of Lecky's literary career, till 1890, was engaged with his great work "The History of England in the Eighteenth Century". This vast and important book is the useful successor of Macaulay's History, and is written with much fairness, though, as usual, a considerable mass of information has since accrued from materials not accessible to the author. This work is not only valuable as a political record, but for its close attention to the changes in thought, manners, literature, and society. Lecky was not, as an Irishman, likely to neglect the affairs of his native island where he had access to the Archives in Dublin public offices. He was in politics a Unionist, but did not conceal his dislike of "the manner of the wooing". His other best-known works are "Democracy and Liberty," and "Historical and Political Essays". He sat in Parliament as the representative of his University; was the friend of all the most eminent men of letters of his time; and, thanks to the amiability of his character, he probably never had an enemy.

With the name of Lecky this work must close, leaving in such brief record much excellent work unchronicled, as too recent to have passed into history.

[1] Sir George Trevelyan's "Life of Lord Macaulay," Chapter XI.

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