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A PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE; from a Medallion by T. Woolner; mounted so as to bind with the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine .

London:—Bell and Daldy, 186, Fleet Street.

Perhaps it is well to advertise at once, that the following pages are written by one who “believes” in Carlyle. This is for the benefit of the reader, who is invited thereby to skip or to read. (I would rather you read if you please!) For the sake of the writer, let it be added, that he has heard of the old saying, “Amicus Plato, amicior veritas,” and thinks it one worthy to be followed.

This being said, it will be understood that I do not in this Essay propose to act schoolmaster to Carlyle, look over his exercises, admonish him, run my pen through his blunders, and administer the ferule; no! that would be folly, and worse; nor, on the other hand, need I drug my intellect, but rather keep it wide awake as possible, and approaching reverently this great mind, (it will be found dwelling in no dark cavern, but in a temple of light!) look well into it, and mark what it



is, and what it has done. In fact, I have already done this as well as I can, and now hasten to give my results to any friendly reader, who can believe that so wonderful a genie, or any part of him worth looking at, can be got into a little casket like this of a Magazine article, or into two such—they are little to be sure, but they gave the fisherman some trouble to haul up from out the vasty pool—and I hope that we may both discover the truth; may together understand what is the true character of Carlyle’s mind, as manifested in his seventeen or eighteen volumes of original writing; and may, in some imperfect manner, measure the nature and worth of the services he has done to our generation.

I intend, on this occasion, to introduce the reader to Carlyle—is it their first meeting, or not their first?—by some words of his, which once did the like office for another young Englishman. The incident to be spoken of is a trivial one, important chiefly to one person only; yet let it not be scorned; for, great or little, it is a true event in human history, helping to make up the sum total of good and evil now in the world; and besides, it is useful for our present purpose. A year or two ago, then, early one morning, at Cambridge, the young Englishman, an undergraduate, “all in his gown so blue,” strolled into a friend’s rooms at College; found him gone out; but on the table lay a book, Heroes and Hero Worship! He opened it and read as follows: “It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s Religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign, and in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the out-works of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe, (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others,) the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is, in all cases, the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. This is his religion.” (p. 3.)

These few sentences made a deep impression on our friend; they set him reading Carlyle in deep earnest, and have kept him doing so;—and now not content with reading, he must needs be writing too! But, forgetting him and his destinies, let us, you and I, reader, ponder these words, for they furnish a fit starting point for our present enterprise. They are true words,



and profoundly true; at once a help and a warning for our judgment of all human work and character, but especially a clue to discover what we desire to learn respecting him who wrote these very words out of his own heart. The drawback is, that we are hereby compelled to enter into subjects, which, though constrained to think of secretly, much and often, one would willingly have avoided talking or writing about at all, especially in the slight thing called Periodical Literature, whose office (so says an exigeant public that knows how to hiss and to clap, to give and withhold hard cash,) is to talk lively, tell pleasant stories, pirouette gaily over the surface of things in general, and, in one word, amuse. However, in no other way could our purpose be satisfactorily even attempted; and, though to publish views about the Universe be not wise, yet the views set forth shall not be so much mine as Carlyle’s.

The question, then, must be put and answered, What is Carlyle’s Religion? what is his chief belief respecting the Universe? Know then, reader, the true answer to be this, That there is an Eternal living God, who owns and rules the world. Strange that this belief should be predicated as characteristic of Carlyle! for it would seem to be the necessary faith of all reasonable men, and so in truth partially it is and must be; yet, in no other writer of this generation, who has dealt with things called Secular, that is, with the breadth and entireness and everyday and all-day of human life, and not the Sunday section of it only, is this thought, I think, so sure, so abiding, so paramount. But perhaps, (perhaps?—no doubt) some think it strange to be said of Carlyle at all. For the old sacred names he uses rarely, and talks much of nature, the gods, the destinies, the eternities and immensities, and other heathen or fanciful things. Nevertheless, any reader who cares to know, soon finds out all such phrases, even in the latter works, where they become rather offensively frequent, to be mere mannerisms of the writer, and discovers the true faith they invariably signify. For neither Carlyle, nor any man, is to be interpreted by his words only, like an act of Parliament; words being at the best a feeble and imperfect exponent of thought. The essence of all words and acts is their spirit, which can be fully discerned only by one who has some sympathy for the speaker or doer, most of all when the speaker is one so fond of symbolism and ambuscading humour, so careless of the vulgar intelligence, as Carlyle. In his works, the animating spirit (especially if you take him by sentences) is often veiled in fantastic clouds, but it is always there and always one; and now and then it gleams forth a ray of pure light, recognisable by all as solemn, beautiful, true, and for some illuminating a whole world of thought from east even to west.

It is often said that Carlyle believes in a great overruling Power, but not in a Personal Deity. But this notion of the poor public arises, partly because he avoids all discussion of religion as stated in formal propositions, regarding it as a living truth, which can be discovered, not by logic, but only by spiritual insight; he therefore never tries to prove the existence of Deity, but always takes it for granted, as the foundation of all thought, and of the thinking power; and partly it arises, because he adopts phraseology different from the common, sometimes out of mere waywardness or the force of habit, but more often from the impulse of genius, to choose its own form of expression; and the deep conviction, that truths, even the greatest, dressed in their old uniforms are for the most part disregarded as every-day presences, not worth thinking about, or only at appointed times, church levees and the like, when they strut and bustle about officially. Yet, for all this, he is sometimes the simplest of the simple



in phrase, uttering the greatest truths, just like his friend Mahomet, “There is but one God,—God is great!” It would be well for our scribes and pharisees to know that.

But to go a little deeper into this question of words. It appears, on reflection, that, as man, to express worthily the nature or operation of things below him, has to invest them for the while with qualities only belonging to himself, so he must also express his notions of that which is above him, which is infinite and properly unspeakable, in symbols of the highest human attributes; he therefore calls God a Person, because spiritual personality is the chief attribute of human nature, a something we know not what, but infinite, unchanging, indefeasible, eternal. He cannot mean to define the form of God, (forgive the thought!) because He is a Spirit, and no man hath seen Him at any time, and form is always changeable, mortal, even the most stable heaven continually changing its aspect, and the human form, the highest we know, dissolving into dust. He must mean only this, that God is a Being, Whose nature is spiritual, comprehending and transcending the spirit of men; Who is the eternal Father. One must symbolise after all; every word in this sentence is a human symbolism. We are tied down to the earth and cannot escape.

• So free we seem, so fettered fast we are;
• I feel, He laid the fetter: let it lie!

Such we may most positively assert, is the meaning and devout conviction of Carlyle, to be observed, I have said, everywhere penetrating and guiding his thought. For his own exposition of such Divinity I would recommend the Essays on German Literature, Diderot, and Voltaire, in the Miscellanies. As for the charge of Pantheism, which unthinking persons, who love to condemn rather than to open their eyes and learn, often bring against Carlyle, little need be said; for the notion of Pantheism, so far as it means anything more than the omnipresence of divine power, is utterly repugnant to Carlyle’s Theory of the Universe, which is one of Order, Subordination, above all of Unity. Indeed, I never can understand what is meant by the word Pantheism; unless it be the notion that every thing and every man is perfect divinity, and that every creature is to have his own will done in the world; a theory which is sufficiently contradicted by every one’s experience, and explicitly and emphatically denied by ordinary Christian teaching and Carlyle. If the reader has not already discovered this, let him try and accept it for a fact, at least for the present; and know that Carlyle means what he says when he declares he does not believe in an absentee God sitting outside the world and seeing it go, and that in a Sovereign Ruler ever with us he does believe; it will, I think, explain all his other doctrines, some of which are too often utterly misunderstood.

For, filled with this belief, Carlyle has looked forth upon the world, the wide wide world, and he finds it sacred, divine, full of infinite wonder, mysterious beauty and terror. The least thing that exists, is it not His work, His? the greatest of all, man and his doings, what are not they? Things for ever unspeakable, of which one dare scarcely think without bended knee. The body of man is a temple, wherein the holy of holies dwells; “a person is ever sacred to us,” “we touch heaven when we touch the body of man;” so he loves to quote from his favourite Novalis. And a still holier mystery is the soul of man, it is a ray of God himself. Again, the history of men is but a record of divine deeds; not the history of the Jews only is so, but the history of England, and all history, even the year 1856 being counted in Heaven’s calendar. And so also every stroke of genuine human work is to him worthy of deep reverence; even work of the commonest, sorriest kind; that of the housemaid,



who, this morning, on her knees, scrubbed clean our neighbour’s doorstep or our own; and so on, up to the ministry of a true High Priest, or the faithful life-work of a righteous King. To him all this is sacred; may it be to us too! Again, Carlyle perpetually strives to bring to our remembrance this vital truth, that all things are under the dominion of divine law, and not least, the thoughts and doings of men. Man is no landlord here below, but a tenant only, one of the old sort, a frank or free tenant, bound to be his “Lord’s man, of life and limb and earthly worship,”—nay, and of heavenly worship. He is not here to do his own will, but Another’s will, which more or less he must therefore do, and, if he leaves it undone, it will be surely done for him, that is, against him. There is nothing Carlyle asserts more often or more earnestly than “This is the Law, and the eternal laws must be obeyed!” “My friend,” writes he, in the shrill sardonic manner of his Latter-day Pamphlets, “do you think, had the united Posterity of Adam voted, and since the Creation done nothing but vote, that three and three were seven,—would this have altered the laws of arithmetic; or put to the blush the solitary Cocker, who continued to assert privately that three and three were six? I consider, not. And is arithmetic, think you, a thing more fixed by the Eternal, than the laws of justice are, and what the right is of man towards man? The builder of this world was Wisdom and Divine Foresight, not Folly and Chaotic Accident. Eternal Law is silently present, everywhere and everywhen.” (Parliaments, p. 26.)

“Well, we all know that,” answers one of the children of this world, “why tell us of it? of course it’s true.” True indeed it is; but unfortunately that is no reason why it should be believed. And the sin of this time is, that in a degree rarely precedented, men in high places and men in low have in the matter of truth and justice forgotten that there is a law, or only half believe it. Else, why would a writer, not unpopular, (Testis mearum centimanus Gyges Sententiarum!) preface a passage, one of the most impressive and faithful in his works, with such a sentence as this: “That honesty is the best policy, is a maxim which we firmly believe to be generally correct,” ( “generally correct!” Good God! are there any exceptions then?) “even with respect to the temporal interest of individuals; but with respect to societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions;” (there are exceptions, then, it seems?) “and that, for this reason, that the life of societies is longer than the life of individuals.” ( Macaulay’s Essay on Clive.) Or why, in another essay ( Essay on Von Ranke), does the same not unpopular author, hint that transubstantiation is a lie, yet tell us that it has a fair chance of immortality in this earth, (which is certainly God’ s kingdom, or only probably so?) and that the Papacy, though an admitted imposture, “may exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand, shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s?” A sorry faith is this, the faith only of a Mr. Mistrust; who, we hope will nevertheless, reach Heaven at last, and there, if not before, find his “exceptions” to be Divine judgments out at secret compound interest, most surely paid in this world in authentic coin of one kind or another. Let us, however, be just to him, and judge him, as Carlyle would have us judge every man, by his merits, not by his defects. Very grateful would we be to him for all his bright, laborious services: even in this unlucky sentence of his just quoted, the fancy is clear and startling, and bids us smile good-humouredly, an invitation which we will not be churlish enough to refuse; and the confession that the outer fashion of even dear old England’s



truth and glory must pass away, is a thought of pathos and humility that shall check our spiritual pride. Faith is the proper comeliness and joy of man; the bright colours which he should carry ever flying in his path; the trusty rudder which should guide his course: and Macaulay’s faith, we must say, is but a little one. But Macaulay is not the only tail-less fox amongst us. Alas! we are a company of poor, snub-tailed creatures! As spiritual beings, which verily we are, the plague-spot of Unbelief is upon us all; like the small-pox, searing our native beauty, grievously affecting our eyesight.

Nevertheless, our reader, I hope, does so far agree with Carlyle, and accept his faith in the enduring kingship of God quite unreservedly. Already then, as a sentinel keeping watch on the confines of Belief, he has received the first of Carlyle’s messengers into the camp, and has reverently presented arms to him, as one indubitably authorized to take supreme command. But now, peering into the gloom, he descries two strangers of more questionable aspect approaching; marching proudly along, hand in hand, just as if they had a good title to come! Briskly, for a fine young soldier is our reader, briskly he rings out his challenge, “Ho! Who goes there?” “ A Friend! A Friend!” “Advance friends, and give the countersign!” “ Might is Right, and Hero-Worship!” “Hicoccolorum! that was not the watch-word my corporal gave me,” thinks the honest man; so down goes his musket to the charge. These must surely be mere emissaries from the enemy, the prince of darkness and idolatry! The strangers submit to be questioned; the musket is discharged into the air; the corporal comes bustling up, and is, at first, for shooting them out of hand; but the sentinel, struck by the earnest, manly looks of both, pleads for them, and reference is finally made to the new commander; when lo! one of them at least forthwith turns out to be as he said, a friend, ay, and a very old and true friend, the inseparable ally of the Commander, come almost direct from the Generalissimo himself, and henceforth to be a great accession to the camp.

And now, dropping metaphor, let us in sober language examine into the doctrine: “Might is Right;” which has been the subject of so much accusation against Carlyle; deification of mere force; blind idolatry of success, &c. &c. Not that these accusations appear much in print, because people are afraid to match their “tailor’s bodkin” against his “Ithuriel spear,” at least in public; but in conversation, one hears again and again these perverse objections.

To explain first of all the terms used: Might is taken by Carlyle to mean any force of whatsoever kind, resident in things or men, certainly including the highest kind of force; and Right he uses in its true and, proper sense, a something ordained ( rectum), not an independent privilege by any means, for Carlyle denies any such at all to exist, but either a duty, or its reciprocal, a due, prescribed;—which may often be far from a pleasure to either party, as for instance, killing and being killed. And by the phrase, might is right, must not be understood, Might makes Right (though Carlyle may possibly sometimes use this loose form of expression —I don’t recollect any instance), as if Might had any creative power of its own underived, and this Universe were only a complicated machine; but rather that Might and Right are interchangeable terms, because everlastingly, and in every case, co-existent. Indeed, to speak plainly at once the very heart of the matter, this proposition of Carlyle’s, Might is Right, is founded in his belief that God is the maker of all, that He makes and gives nothing in vain, but to every gift of power assigns an exactly corresponding duty or right. The formula may appear strange to us, because the truth is stated in its naked



result; it is uncredited because we do not reflect upon it, or because we do not practically believe what it enunciates. For that old line of Homer:

• “ εί μάλα καρτερός έσσι, θεός που σοί τό γ’ εδωκευ .”

• “If exceeding strong thou art, surely ’twas God that gave thee that,”

is really undeniably true, and so are these sacred words, not unfamiliar to us all: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” Carlyle’s formula, rightly interpreted, is the very same thing in other words. The doctrine then is true, and as being truth, must be more and more recognised and really believed, until it finally become universal. Yet it is not to be expected, that these terms of Carlyle’s, though they are philosophically accurate, and though their pithy compact form and quick echo are most proverb-like, will be popularly accepted. For the word Might to the vulgar, signifies mere animal force, and has no spiritual meaning, especially in these days, when a strong arm is not so important as it once was, and has, in consequence, lost somewhat of its reverence in the eyes of men; and moreover, pitiful fallacies are abroad, embodied in such expressions as “amiable weakness,” “good-nature,” and the like. So that this truth, it is likely, will be more often approached from the other side, that of Right, a word which, notwithstanding the many perversions and degraded narrowing of its meaning, still exercises a hallowed spell upon the ear. However, there is some practical worth in the form Carlyle uses, which the reader, at least, will do well to consider. It is just this: that a man’s notions of his rights, the infinite number of pleasant things he is entitled to, is vast and generally quite irreducible to practice; but, on the other hand, every one knows that his mights are limited, and must conform themselves to the order of things about him. Or the reader may learn this from Carlyle’s own mouth: “The rights of man are little worth ascertaining in comparison to the mights of man; to what portion of his rights he has any chance of being able to make good! The accurate final rights of man lie in the far deeps of the ideal, where the Ideal weds itself to the Possible, as the philosophers say. The ascertainable temporary rights of man vary not a little, according to place and time. They are known to depend much on what a man’s conviction of them are. The Highland wife, with her husband at the foot of the gallows, patted him on the shoulder, (if there be historical truth in Joseph Miller,) and said, amid her tears,‘Go up, Donald, my man; the Laird bids ye.’ ”— Chartism, p. 46.

The story is not quite convincing, is it? nor is the prelude to it either quite satisfying; especially if we are, as more or less we all are, in the predicament of poor Donald; and so some further explanation may be required; for once more, the words seem strange to us, very strange. That “Right is Might” is a proposition gloriously true, all men admit in theory, certainly all who are earnestly engaged in what they know to be a worthy work. But can Wrong be Might? For if not, then, since there is no tertium quid to right and wrong, Might is and must be Right. Now Carlyle asserts and insists that wrong never can be might, but as the devil, its master, with all his cunning could make nothing, not even a rope, and strictly speaking is a very incapable, a mere destroyer, so wrong can do nothing either, but only undo, mar, or hinder a good thing; can never really succeed, but only seem to succeed, must certainly in due time, still more certainly in eternity, come to its proper issue, zero. Let us take the most adverse case conceivable. Courvoisier murders his master, Lord William; he does his work, as he thinks, most effectually, with the might of deadly midnight cunning,



the might of his right hand, the might of sharp steel; and we will say, (no impossible case) is not hanged in consequence, but lives and dies to all appearance very comfortably. Was might right here? . . . Nay, before verdict, it is well to use a little of your large discourse, looking before and after. That red hand is connected with the whole man, the man with all men; that deed with the whole future history of the world. The world is alive, and did not stop spinning on that fatal night, nor did the heavenly laws cease their fulfilment. Reflect a moment, and you will see; in truth, it was not the strength of the man, but the absence of strength, that caused that seeming deed; a little more true strength and the revengeful passion, the cruel hand would have been stayed; the deed moreover, he thought he did, was not a doing, but merely an undoing of something, the removal of Lord William from a life mortal and immortal, to an immortal one only; while the real final result is good, entirely good; the dross is all purged away, even the contagion which belongs to every evil thing, and the good remains for ever.

For what is the final result? One cannot, except imperfectly, understand, far less measure it; partly, however, it is a declaration of what human forethought and the human right hand may do with nobler purpose; but chiefly, it is that which was caused by the efficacy of some other and greater might than what appeared; namely, in the wretched man himself, unspeakable remorse, or still more painful, barrenness of soul; and in all other men, horror of his wickedness. In fine, an assertion of justice and of right! Thus, even in this most untoward instance, we see Might is Right, and that this is a truth indissolubly connected with no less truths than these: that man is a SPIRIT; that time is lost in eternity; that the good and true alone exist; that the Universe is a living unity, and its Ruler is the Just God.

Forgive, kind reader, my choosing such an unpleasant example; and as a sweet afterthought, read these words of Carlyle: “The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not They, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them, with which they fought unprevailing; they (the ethereal God-given force that dwelt in them, and was their self) have now shuffled off that heavy environment, and are free and pure; their life-long battle, go how it might, is all ended, with many wounds or with fewer; they have been recalled from it, and the once harsh-jarring battle-field has become a silent awe-inspiring Golgotha and Gottesacker (Field of God!)” Miscell, iii. 12.

But to return, though we have scarcely wandered. Far more manifestly is the saying true, and therefore to more minds an irresistible and joyful belief, when the apparent as well as the real might is doing work for the cause of Right. The sturdy arm of the labourer wielding plough or hammer, the stroke of the noble warrior, the sentence of the just judge, the convincing thought of the gifted thinker, the strong will of the wise ruler—these are Right, and sooner rather than later all men know them to be so. Many shrink from confessing the universal truth, because they feel the world is a world of contradiction, but happily in many and in most cases, their practical reason teaches them truly. Good people! they were not intended to be philosophers, and to have theories, or at least to be conscious of them, but to live a wise and true life from hour to hour.

Our great “Might is Right” is beleaguered by many Lilliputian enemies, but they are filled most with pious rage, when he takes the form of Intellectual Power; for there is not a Lilliputian but knows that Carlyle never



means that brute force is to reign over us supreme; whereas many, being well aware how the thing called “Cleverness” is worshipped amongst us in modern times, and perhaps doing a little in that sort themselves, think he too bows his knee to this Baal. They could not make a greater mistake, the Lilliputians. No writer so incessantly as Carlyle, smites, sears with hot iron, and does all manner of execution upon this shallow, pretentious quality, which he calls the Vulpine Intellect, or Quackery, or on the respect commonly paid to it, which he calls Quack-worship. They are both in his opinion counterfeits, and therefore utterly condemnable; but the counterfeits of what? The one, of the most precious gift given to man, true Intellect, Talent, or by whatever name we name our thinking faculty; the other of man’s most important duty, Reverence, obedience to the truly wise. By Intellect, where he uses the term, Carlyle means “the understanding heart,” which penetrates the “open secret,” which through the external forms of things discerns their essence, and so knows the inner laws which govern them, and the laws which must govern men in dealing with them; or (hardest and highest of all) which sees the true God-ordained relations of man to man, and the methods which must be employed on each occasion to realize them. This faculty, he asserts, and oh how earnestly, how perpetually! must be reverenced above all things, must be unweariedly sought for, and when found, joyfully recognised, and with all speed promoted to rule over the affairs of men. Carlyle, therefore, does not divorce intellect from goodness; he indissolubly weds them, or rather declares them indissolubly wedded by a Higher than he. “Truly, a thinking man,” he writes, “is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such a one announces himself, I doubt not, there runs a shudder through the Nether Empire.”— Sartor, p. 132. (Or read the chapter in Chartism, called “Rights and Mights.”) The phrase “Intellect,” I know, sounds not celestial, but earth-born, and Carlyle himself would admit how inadequate it or any other word is to express the thing signified; indeed he is not bigoted to it at all, but rings the change upon such phrases as the Able, the Wise, the Gifted, the Seeing man, the Hero, always, pray observe, where possible, treating of men, not of qualities. After all said in the last hundred years, including all by the great Coleridge, the qualities spoken of, as Intellectual or Moral, Reason, Understanding, Conscience, heart and head, are by no means integral factors of man’s being; on the contrary, man’s being is a prime number, and such terms as these, though intelligible enough, express distinctions between things never altogether distinct, and are used chiefly by metaphysicians or by men living in an age whose spirit is metaphysical. Thus in the Bible knowledge is constantly used to signify the wisdom of holiness; and Plato, after all his investigations, comes to the conclusion that virtue is an έπιστήμη or faculty of knowing. For the ultimate question to be asked is this, What is it that perceives the manifold laws of God? To which we answer, The whole man; not a part of him can be spared. His senses five, his brave heart, or his logical faculty, his spiritual vision, or that mystery of mysteries we call the will,—we want them all, for the greatest or the least work, to make it true and complete. The man is One.

Oh to go back for one instant from Carlyle to the world! The world condemns Carlyle for his “Might is Right,” and calls him idolator; but what sort of reading does the world like, distributing solid rewards accordingly? Macaulay, Times’ leaders, Opposition speeches, and other mighty clever things more or less unconscionable; things in great measure, as it appears to me, manifesting that seeming Might



which is without Right. Is this a fact, reader? or is it not? Truly a sincere, wise, and consistent world, that thinks it knows black from white,—and does not!

“Might is Right” we may now say with Carlyle, is universally true; true in nature and in man, and even in God, though Might and Right here merge in the Author of both; is not His name the All-mighty, the All-just One? It is true in Nature, as exhibited, not only in its loveliest and most enduring forms, as the sustained glory of the heavens, and the grand fixity of the earth, but no less in things transient, terrible, hateful, and even disgusting; in the breath of the summer wind, and the flush of the sunset cloud; in the destroying down-rush of the lightning, and the overwhelming of the merciless sea; in the pestilential river-fog, the deadly serpent’s fang, the voracity of the rat, and the foul busyness of vermin; in the forces both of life and death; in all these the thoughtful mind will acknowledge a Divine appointment, a sacredness, goodness, and even blessedness; far more shall it acknowledge the ordained might and right of man to rule over all these, to make them his servants, or to war with them either defensively or in aggression even to extermination. But the most difficult and noble requirement is to see that the law holds good in all the manifold complexity of man’s dealing with man; to see with unerring eye and know with undoubting heart, that, looking backward over history, where-ever a good result has been achieved, so much virtue, so much Divine strength was possessed by those who did that thing, and wherever there was a true strength, there also, whether now visible or not, there followed an everlasting fruit; that looking forward, what we can do, that we ought and shall do; and so far exactly and no further, as the work we undertake is true and just, will it succeed, so far as it is false and sinful will it utterly fail. The main difficulty lies in the application; in discerning what results are real, what only apparent; what is verily might, and what weakness; what is right, and what is wrong. Truly this is a difficult task! It is because Carlyle, especially in his maturer works, has with the utmost daring chosen the most difficult cases to decide; cases in which terrible violence in the war between good and evil has been or is to be done; has chosen out for judgment the deeds of the middle ages, the life of an Oliver Cromwell, with his doings at Tredah, in the Long Parliament, and elsewhere; the phenomena of conquerors, of revolutionists in thought and politics; the practice of slavery, of government, of penal law; and has in these given a verdict contrary to the popular opinion, that he is so loudly condemned. Just so a Turner, while he worked in browns and greys and well-known things, found favour with all men; but when he chose for himself sunsets and rainbows and all the glorious host of heaven, his critics blinded with excess of light called him mad. Like Turner, Carlyle loves to face the sun.

It is not to be supposed that in these high matters Carlyle has quite convinced the world, though really it seems to me in much he is convincing it. If what he says be true, he must be! Here and there victory has already declared itself for him. As an example of the way in which he can now and then extinguish an ugly phantom, and set the public (true-hearted after all!) laughing and rejoicing over the discovery of its own error, like any young prince in faery tale at the transformation of some loathly hag into a lovely princess, all ready and willing to be loved, I can give no happier instance than his reading of Boswell’s



true character ( Miscell. iii). “Corsica Boswell” had many faults, it is true, and Carlyle allows them all, describing them with picturesque accuracy and force by no means inferior to Macaulay’s; but Bozzy had one virtue, a great and in his days an extremely rare one, a deep reverence for living wisdom; he felt Johnson to be a wise man, and so loved and honoured him exceedingly. For which, as Carlyle teaches us, we also should love and honour Bozzy himself, instead of sneering at him; and know besides, that he wrote a good book just because he had this virtue in him, and for no other reason; his vices, every one of them, being all against both him and us. If the reader disagrees with this, if he too will not laugh and rejoice, I can only say I am sorry for him. He is unworthy of the lovely lady; the hag then be his portion, for wed he must! In the language of modern episcopal anathema, I pray for him.

There is no reason why Carlyle or we should flinch from the full consequences of this doctrine, “Might is Right,” but on the contrary, every reason why we should pursue them to the utmost verge of thought. Indeed we cannot help it if we would. The result then is, that the necessary condition of all just judgment of the past, and of all effectual work for the present and future, is to know that this world is, as it was made, essentially very good. (Read on, please!) I know this is a hard doctrine to be compassed and received, as indeed all men acknowledge the presence of evil in God’s world to be a mystery. Yet again, it must be said it is true. Dare any one find fault with the Maker of the world? No one; not even the friend of Goethe’s youth, the one-eyed disloyal philosopher, ^* if he would seriously reflect upon it. The world is very good. All that we behold and experience is full of blessings; even our sins and sufferings and sorrows we feel to be His judgments, our deserved trials, containing within them gifts for higher spiritual attainments than we have yet reached. This has been the faith of all good men since the beginning of time, and is the faith of every man in his holiest, happiest mood. Without it, what hope were there in the world? Yet a hope we have, though a hidden hope; “behind the veil, behind the veil.”

Carlyle quotes thus, with loving approbation, from the fair Jewess Rahel, the spiritual queen of Germany: “So long as we do not take even the injustice which is done us, and which forces even the burning tears from us; so long as we do not take even this for just and right, we are in the thickest darkness, without dawn.” ( Misc. iv. 188.) And thus he writes himself in a Latter-day pamphlet: “The free man is he who is loyal to the laws of this universe; who in his heart sees and knows, across all contradictions, that injustice cannot befall him here; that except by sloth and cowardly falsity, it is not possible here.” ( Parliaments, p. 44.)

Is this thought, then, quite unfamiliar to the reader? Does it not remind him of words he heard long ago in his childhood? “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” Well for him if he has taken them to heart! If he has not, let him do so at once. So advises him a wise man, who has seen many years, and thought much,—Thomas Carlyle.

Let it not, however, be judged from all this that Carlyle is a mere Fatalist, perhaps no man is less so. As he believes in Necessity, so likewise he believes in Free Will. This of course involves a flat logical contradiction; but what of that, when the thing itself is a contradiction, a mystery (above logic therefore), cannot be even so



much as stated without contradiction? —as two succeeding verses of an Apostle might show us. Yet it can be translated into a certainty, which shall be satisfying. How? By Action based upon acceptance of both terms. Carlyle does accept both terms; and while affirming that Good is evermore with us, he affirms likewise that Evil is with us for the present, and must be incessantly warred against. Is it not enough to remind the reader that Carlyle is known chiefly as a denouncer, that he is for hanging our supreme scoundrel, and scoundrels generally, and urges us to do it with all speed? So far from denying evil, he greatly enlarges the common scope of the word. He really thinks a lie to be accursed, were it ever so little a one; stockjobbing he abominates; the stockjobber he would not raise on a column high, but “sink him in a coal-shaft rather:” submitting to be ruled by little men he calls a national crime; money-worship is with him mammon-worship; contentedness with hearsay belief, passive treason; cloth-subserviency, service to Belial; and idleness he holds to be flat rebellion against the Most High. The difference between him and common men is, that he looks upon evil as sin against the Just God, and not against the comfort of men. Service to Him he passionately recommends, and urges with voice of command, entreaty, expostulation, denunciation, with laughter and with tears, the duty of purpose, of choice, of earnest, earnest work. “Know thy work and do it.” “Work in well-doing, like a star unhasting yet unresting.” “Work while it is called day, for the night cometh:” are his favourite maxims. And in one place he thus writes: “With the ring of necessity we are all begirt; happy he for whom a heavenly sun brightens it into a ring of duty, and plays round it with beautiful prismatic diffractions!” ( Sartor, p. 107.) Indeed, one of his chief aims, as I shall hereafter show, is to recall us, chiefly such as you and me, reader, from the painful barren process of questioning, and talking, and sentimentalising about all things, which only breeds incessant grumbling (disloyalty, sin! the Englishman’s privilege?) to the fruitful, joyful process of work; one condition only being prescribed, that men first learn the stern laws under which they have to work. So Carlyle is not a Fatalist! No, Mr. Quarterly Reviewer, no! I for one, am ready to kiss the book upon it! not a thumb only, as is the wont of some reviewers.

Inseparably connected with all the foregoing is the faith that a good thing never dies. ^* In one form or another, and always in many forms, it lives and bears fruit for evermore. The words of One that walked in Galilee eighteen hundred years ago, what have they not done for mankind, what are they not doing and to do? Or again, take this example, which for being modern is not the less true. Carlyle, perhaps twenty years ago, thinks his brave thought in his quiet London home, and utters it in print. I, unknown to him, read it, and write this article in our young Magazine; another, most likely unknown to either, reads what is here written, and it may be a spark of thought, faithfully transmitted from the bright parent flame, lights up the heart of that reader, as he sits in his comfortable arm-chair. The breath of God is not in vain! That thought, if it be true, has might and right, and that eternally; it is now fairly in the world, incorporated into human life; qualifies, even if we know it not, henceforward every thought and action of the reader’s life and mine, and from thence colours the whole history of the world. More wondrous still, it would have ultimately come to its goal by another route, if never uttered at all, so only that it had been thought. Strange and beautiful mystery! Even so a single flower



produces often a thousand seeds, which the winds of heaven (not at random either) carry hither and thither, far and wide, unknown to the flower and to all men, but the wide earth receives them—and who shall tell the end thereof? Or take a stone, big or little, but the larger the better, and pitch it into yonder lake or pond, or puddle. First comes the splash, then the silent ever-widening circles, and then final—rest? No! the rotation of the vast world itself is altered thereby; so the mathematicians say, and I believe them.

Good, truth, fact, do never die. A precious thought to whoso thinks of either past or present! Still more to him who looks, as we all must now and then look, into the dim future, near or far away. For with no doubtful prophecy it tells us of the continuous progress and ultimate perfecting of man; that the result is only a matter of time (though what is Time? Never mind, it is either Time or nothing). The words, “Thy kingdom come,” rise on our lips, and those other words, that “for the elects’ sake those days,” the days of trial and battle, “shall be shortened;” and to the inmost soul of every man is revealed the blessed truth, that by his faithful lifelong efforts some small portion of that kingdom may be realized, and the days shall be shortened. Ah, it is Carlyle that helps us to feel this! And further, he teaches us that feeling unfollowed by doing is worth but little, and talking without doing is worse than worthless.

Most readily shall it be admitted by me that all that I have said, or even all that Carlyle has said, does not prove these things; and in fact, that they cannot be proven at all; also, that speculation such as we have been pursuing does not very much help us, chiefly because of this, that a man cannot be always contemplating his relation to the whole universe, but has to act and judge every day of his life, at a moment’s notice, with only hard present fact staring him in the face. However, as the need is practical and perpetual, so a remedy is provided accordingly; not one of argument or speculation, but this, a righteous life, which is open to all men; so only can a man’s judgment of himself and his brother-men be made true; so only an enduring blessed belief be built up in his heart, and his work be both descried and done. This too is Carlyle’s doctrine, one that he asserts, and keeps unceasingly asserting. “Most true is it,” he writes in the Sartor, (p. 211), “that Doubt of any sort cannot be removed, except by Action. On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness and uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn ripen into day, lay this other precept to heart, which to me was of invaluable service, ‘Do the duty which lies nearest to thee, that which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer!’ ”

Perhaps it may be a satisfaction to the reader if, by a reference or two, I show how some of these Carlylean thoughts, which have taken me so long to set forth, are connected with the thoughts of other inspired men; for the wise we find of all time are tolerably agreed in the main; nay, so far as they think truly they exactly coincide, or beautifully harmonize. I suggest, then, to the sympathizing reader, the old Greek word for the world, Kosmos, or Order, the perpetual doctrine of the Old Testament respecting Divine law, Divine judgments, and God-given might ruling and to rule society; the doctrine of the New Testament (which chiefly treats of the inner man) speaking of that which is to rule in our hearts, and to bring every thought into captivity; (mark the word!) then the mediæval trial by combat, founded on deep faith, but faith



without patience; then Milton’s Ode to Time; and for modern writers, much of our wise, devout Maurice; much of Kingsley, who, under Maurice, as general of a division, is like Ney, “le plus brave des braves;” much of Ruskin, who has taught us the lesson that Art too is no field for arbitrary taste, but a glorious empire, subject to Divine law; then for poets (the chief teachers of our time), Wordsworth and his Ode to Duty; our beloved Tennyson, who has travailed for himself and us not a little in these world problems, take especially his In Memoriam, Two Voices, Love and Duty, and the Golden Year; and, lastly, these fine lines of Browning:—

• “ Each deed thou hast done
• Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e’en as the sun,
• Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface,
• Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace
• The results of his past summer prime— so each ray of thy will,
• Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill
• The whole people, the countless, with ardour, till they too give forth
• A like cheer to their sons, who in turn fill the south and the north
• With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in the past.”

And with all these, take two grand specimens of Might is Right, from Carlyle himself. The first is from the French Revolution, in the chapter called the “General Overturn.” “Still bread comes not. The harvest is reaped and garnered, yet still we have no bread. Urged by despair and hope, what can drudgery do, but rise, as predicted, and produce the general overturn? Fancy, then, some five full-grown millions of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces ( figures hâves), in woollen jupes, with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots, starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed upper classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question—How have ye treated us? how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames over the nightly summer-sky. This is the feeding and leading we have had of you; EMPTINESS—of pocket, of stomach, of head, and of heart. Behold there is nothing in us, nothing but what nature gives her wild children of the desert: ferocity and appetite, strength grounded on hunger. Did ye mark, among your Rights of Man, that man was not to die of starvation while there was bread reaped by him? It is among the Mights of Man.”

The other is from Past and Present, the glorious chapter called Plugson of Undershot: it is on war, and introduced only by way of illustration. “Fighting, as I often say to myself, fighting with steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than working, take it how you will; yet even of fighting, in religious Abbot Samson’s days, see what a feudalism there had grown; ‘a glorious chivalry,’ much besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the impossiblest things? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another’s flesh, converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a chivalry come out of that, how anything that was not hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth considering by and by. I remark for the present, two things: first, that the fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a fighting without cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier, his life ‘a battle and a march’ under the right general. It is for ever indispensable for a man to fight: now with necessity, with barrenness, scarcity,



with puddles, bogs, tangled forests, unkempt cotton; now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow-men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor fellow-man; make him claim over me rights which are not his. All fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of strengths, each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words, the justest,—of mights, which do in the long run, and for ever will in this just universe, in the long run, mean rights. In conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off into dust; this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true and exact. And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful operations, a noble devout-hearted chevalier will comfort himself, and an ignoble godless bucanier and Choctaw Indian: victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble man it lies for ever legible, that as an Invisible Just God made him, so will and must God’s justice, and this only, were it never so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and enterprises, and battles whatsoever. What an influence! ever present—like a soul in the rudest Caliban of a body; like a ray of heaven, an illuminative creative Fiat-Lux, in the wastest terrestrial chaos! Blessed Divine influence, traceable even in the horror of battle-fields and garments rolled in blood; how it ennobles even the battle-field; and in place of a Choctaw massacre, makes it a field of honour! A battle-field too is great: considered well, it is a kind of quintessence of labour; labour distilled into its utmost concentration; the significance of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail. Here too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul; thou shalt dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life; in rage thou shalt remember mercy, justice; thou shalt be a knight and not a Choctaw, if thou wouldst prevail! It is the rule of all battles, against hallucinating fellow-men, against unkempt cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be, which a man in this world has to fight. Howel Davies dyes the West Indian seas with blood, piles his decks with plunder, approves himself the expertest seaman, the daringest sea-fighter; but he gains no lasting victory,—lasting victory is not possible for him; not, had he fleets larger than the combined British navy all united with him in bucaniering: he, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel; he strikes down his man, yes, but his man, or his man’s representative, has no notion to lie struck down; neither, though slain ten times, will he keep so lying; nor has the universe any notion to keep him so lying! On the contrary, the universe and he have, at all moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out at last to St. Helena, the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men; but what profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down, nay two enemies: mankind and the Maker of men. On the great scale, or on the small, in fighting of men, or fighting of difficulties, I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies; it is not the bucanier, it is the hero only that can gain victory, that can do more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating, for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and effort whatsoever in this fight of life. It is a poor gospel, cash-gospel, or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear tone, uncontradictable, carry conviction to all hearts, for ever keep men in mind



of these things. Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a great degree, forgotten them.”

Reader, if you are a brave man, as I doubt not, methinks these words must somewhat stir you. Perhaps ecstatic thoughts swell in your heart, and you know not whether to bow the head and worship, or to shout aloud in joy and triumph: both are good, but there is a method better still,—Up and prove the truth, by deed and deeds!

All this while, we have left a friend of ours, vainly uttering, “Hero-worship, hero-worship,” in the charge of the corporal of the watch. (Who shall stand for this corporal? The editor of a religious journal, an ex-Constitutionalist Minister; a great man of Exeter, or St. Martin’s, or St. George’s Hall, or alas! saddest of all, a respectable father of a family, who is somewhat stupid? there are many candidates.) Well, the brave fellow is much suspected, being taken by the corporal and others for a stray fanatic from the distant land of the dark ages; however, he is humble and patient, for he knows his loyalty, yet a little downcast too, for he too would fain be believed. Let us hear what he has to say for himself, or as that may not be, what I can say for him.

Strictly speaking, Hero-worship is only the highest example of Might is Right. Carlyle knows and feels deeply that there is a Lawgiver and a Law for the world; above all, for that which is infinitely the noblest of the created, Man. Mankind cannot be a mere aggregate of men; splintered up into fragments and units, by some blind force at random, and driven pell-mell hither and thither by passion, chance, circumstance; but for every man and for every society of men, at every moment of time, and in every possible conjuncture of circumstance, there must be a thing ordained to be done, a right to be fulfilled, and a might whereby this is to be accomplished. In short, he believes that every man comes into the world under orders , a covenanted servant, and continues such until he dies. So far as the appointed order is obeyed, all will be well with him; so far as it is not obeyed, neglected or mistaken, punishment of him and his must be the inevitable consequence. As I have said before, this truth is much forgotten now-a-days; every man of the smallest reflection must have observed, that most things are treated as questions of opinion only, to be determined by “voting, counting of heads upon the matter;” and there is a general tendency to let things take their course, “for experience will teach every man, and bring all right in the end.” In a sense this is true, but before that end come, what will befall? Sin and sorrow countless on us and on our children! It is therefore, thinks Carlyle, of the utmost necessity that we learn the true order which we have to follow. Deep meditation on the nature of man, his wondrous gifts and faculties; deep meditation on the nature of society; the voices of the great past, the sad present, lead him infallibly to this conclusion, that man must be governed by his brother-man. Governed, not in this or that thing only, but as far as may be, in every operation of his own being, in every possible relation to others; governed in his life. The direction of his outward action is one of the foremost needs, but by no means only or chief; the rule and guidance of his soul and intellect are no less necessary; and all must continuously be brought nearer to perfection. Accordingly, in the judgment of Carlyle, to every man born into the world attaches one or both of these two duties, ruling or obeying his fellow-man, visible there before him. Much, very much of these duties he performs unconsciously, for the mights, like the ministries of day and night, work often silently; but at all times men have to be thinking and trying



what they may do to fulfil this work of government; and continually, in ever-varying form the problem arises, demanding quick solution, “Who are to be Governors? How shall they be chosen? What shall they do?” Carlyle says, Might is Right, and the might of truth, wisdom, valour, is ever the mightiest; and your Governors shall be true, wise, brave men, in a word, heroes. And they shall be worshipped! Flat burglary! cries some Dogberry or other, meaning, I suppose, blasphemy. In truth, it must be admitted that Carlyle is fond of a paradox, if only by way of a whoo-hoop to startle away weak-minded people come to stare,—startle them away, or else convince them by storm; but if the noun worship be taken in its native sense of worth-ship, and the tribute due to worth-ship, and the verb be construed accordingly, there is little harm in the word. Carlyle, however, has a further meaning, for he always insists that human worth is sacred, a true divine emanation, which commands infinite, yes, infinite awe and reverence from those who can recognise it; which awe and reverence are to take shape, not in feeling only, but in dutiful, loving obedience. This is for those who can see and acknowledge human worth, who cannot but be good men; but for those who will not acknowledge it, they too shall worship, they shall be forced to worship! or at least to submit; compulsion, chastisement, even death shall be theirs, if they do not. The rod for the back of fools, for those who will not be wise! To inflict such unsparingly is the duty of the wise Governor, and to suffer such is the due of those who will not obey him; strictly, the appointed right of either party. This is further enforced by the thought that man is made in the image of God, and must realize his method of governing, so far as he can; a method of ever-watchful supervision, peremptory order, yet with large trustfulness; favour and blessedness to those who obey, terrible punishment to those who do not.

This applies most palpably to mere political government; but, mutatis mutandis, to all government whatsoever. As will be seen in our next chapter, Carlyle has a much larger scope for government than the reader (if he has not read Carlyle) is probably aware of.

Still, man is man; that is to say, imperfect, prone to abuse his powers, wilfully suffering what is baser in him to elude for a while the mastery of the divine. The cry is: We can’t get a just governor! See what a man of mischief is your despot! We can’t afford to trust him! We can’t trust anybody to rule over us. Let us ’bout ship and try the other tack, and see if we can prosper with no government, or as little as may be. Carlyle says, that this is what we have done in England, or been trying to do, for now almost two centuries; that it has proved a worse failure than ever; that it is now high time we should call all hands on deck, and ’bout ship once more; that we must strenuously endeavour to choose wise governors and trust them, or—.

Here, then, we have at length fairly arrived at a definite and practical doctrine of Carlyle’s, palpably at difference with the modern mind. For certainly these notions of government are not popular, which any one with insight into the time will confess, and as the reader may verify by asking himself, whether the following words do not faithfully describe a feeling very common amongst Englishmen: “What is the universally arrogated Virtue, almost the sole remaining Catholic Virtue of these days? For some half century it has been the thing you name, ‘Independence:’ suspicion of servility, of reverence for superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow.” And now, let him read on: “Fools!” cries Teufelsdröck (Carlyle), “were your Superiors worthy to govern, and you to obey,



reverence for them were your only possible freedom. Independence in all kinds is rebellion; if unjust rebellion, why parade it and everywhere prescribe it?” And does the reader think this fanciful? then let him consider another word of Teufelsdröck’s: “Know that there is in man a quite indestructible Reverence for whatsoever holds of Heaven, or even plausibly counterfeits such holding. Show the dullest clodpole, show the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is actually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.”— Sartor. p. 273.

In olden time Service was not thought a disgrace. Read Sir John Froissart’s preface to his history, and you will see; or read those grand old oaths of Homage and Fealty as recorded for us in Lyttelton. Neither is it, if of the right kind, anything but honourable and delightful, were it ever so humble, for it is the fulfilment of order, which is the Divine law. There is perhaps, or certainly, no one who has not at some moment of his life felt the pride and joy of obeying one whom he really loved and honoured; a father, maybe, or a teacher, or master. And, considering how few lords there are, how little any man can have his own will, this would be a miserable world if it were otherwise. Yet in the teeth of this, modern theory, and even modern practice, so far as hunger, manifold desires, silent right instincts, and noble traditions do not compel us otherwise, asserts that Service is ignoble. This may be observed in the forms of dress and speech and outward ceremony which image so much of our inner thoughts. Footmen and coachmen of my acquaintance, though Thackeray and John Leech speak only too truly of their vanity for plush, are secretly ashamed of their service, and love to go out holiday-making to Greenwich in strict incognito; the Undergraduate dons his beaver whenever he may, or throws his gown over his arm, not for reasons of convenience only; Officers have ceased to be proud of Her Majesty’s uniform, and, parade done, cast it aside for the gentlemanly black frock-coat, which tells no tale of its owner, or, better still, for the shooting-coat, which says, “See, my master is a free man!” Yet a uniform, a fitting and distinctive badge of duty, is a pleasant, even a solemn sight to the simple-hearted, and ought to be to all, were it only the drayman’s red cap or the butcher’s blouse; still more if it is the scarlet robe of the judge, and the royal chain of honour round his neck. Again, in words and social ceremonies, think of our boastful “Free and Independent Electors,” and compare it with “my loving subjects” or “our Liege Lord” of earlier English history. Or think of our newly-coined phrase “Governor” for father, remembering that sons once Sirred their fathers, and would not sit down in their presence without permission asked and given; and that old ladies still alive, had in their girlhood to drop a curtsey when they entered the parlour, just as all men have still to salute Her Majesty’s quarter-deck. Or again, consider the term ‘Dons’ for college superiors, contrasting it with the requirements of our ancient statutes: or the opprobrious term “Parson” for a man once and even still for habit’s sake called ‘Reverend,’ while his Bishop was called ‘Right Reverend Father in God,’—‘Right Reverend Father in God!’—The difference is striking enough.

The fact, then, of this modern dislike and contempt for authority is obvious, and the immediate justification that suggests itself is that it is hard to trust to others interests so precious to us as life, property, liberty, belief. Yet the office, the necessity of trust in the world is great. Paley writes thus in his Moral Philosophy: “It is not considered how every hour of our lives we trust to and depend upon



others, and how impossible it is to stir a step, or, what is worse, to sit still a moment, without such trust and dependence. I am now writing at my ease, not doubting (or rather, never distrusting, and therefore never thinking about it,) that the butcher will send in the joint of meat which I ordered; that his servant will bring it; that my cook will dress it; that my footman will serve it up, and that I shall find it upon my table at one o’clock.” Truly Dinner is an important interest to an Arch-deacon, and to all men: yet here we find it committed to the care of alien hands, the hands of mere fallible, sinful mortals. That cook and footman and butcher of Paley’s we may be sure were men and women, and no more; and Paley was a fortunate householder, if at least once or twice in his life they did not deceive him: even if they never did, it was because he was wise enough to take some pains in choosing and managing them. True they were his servants, but in a sense they were governors too; one was queen of the kitchen; another king of the pantry. And we soon find this principle of wise choice and ample measure of trust is the only method by which any satisfactory work can be obtained, and the higher the work, the more necessity for wiser choice and also ampler trust. The Romans knew this, and if Hannibal was at the gates, would make one man Dictator, with powers of life and death in his hand. In military matters (human enterprises still) the same always holds good, and without it what would become of your armies and you? A wise Englishman also and a civilian knew this, one who lived not long ago,—Dr. Arnold. He insisted that he should have entire control of his school, and his demand was granted. The result has been a grand effective piece of work, for Rugby and for England.

Yet, for the most part, in all higher departments of human need and work, this principle is almost entirely disregarded, and even denied; in the State, the Church, the Professions, in Labour, and in Literature. The true reason must now be given; it is Carlyle’s. Men have long ceased to look earnestly for worth and true capacity; have in great part ceased to believe that good, wise, really able men exist and are to be found by searching for them; in a word, many have forgotten God, and deny Him. This is the way of the fool and the coward. “There’s lime in this sack, too,” says the old worldly poltroon; “there’s nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man . . . If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.” There have been too many such men and thinkers amongst us; but times are bettering; Carlyle himself is a living proof of that. The old faith in God and man must be revived once more, nay it is reviving. Blot out that faith, and the sun himself no longer shines for us in the heaven, and the earth is become a hell, full only of darkness and gnashing of teeth. But the sun is still in the heavens! And a voice cries, “Look up! Look up! Heart and Eye!”

Governors, then, are to be chosen and trusted; but by whom chosen and how? Carlyle again answers,“By wise men, and by the wisest methods they can devise.” Not by any machinery once discovered, and then set going for ever; but by men who can really discern and value worth, who know that men have both to act and to learn, and that the secret of Action is Order,



and of learning an open mind. These men shall choose your Rulers; and they shall establish a fit system, fit systems, and shall change them when the due time comes. Perhaps the reader thinks this Utopianism; he will be wiser if he thinks it counsel to labour after perfection, to rest satisfied with nothing less.

And Carlyle continues, That all that is great in the past has been done by great men commanding virtually or actually smaller men, and all that shall be great in the future must be done in like manner; that the character of the leaders chosen, and the method of choice adopted, do in the main exactly represent the character of those who follow them, whether men or nations. All these he asserts again and again as absolute truths, and applies them in a most rigorous, determined manner to the past and present of human action; to Literature, Belief, Politics, and Social Work of almost every kind. Of some of these truly surprising decisions I shall speak in the next chapter.

The reader, therefore, will do well to consider this doctrine, which Carlyle calls “Hero Worship;” it is his chief message to men.

Meanwhile, what does he think of it already? What does our Sentinel do? As he hesitates, in earnest voice I would whisper in his ear, “Present Arms!”. . . I think I hear the clanging of his firelock! And now let him carry and shoulder arms at his leisure, and tread, if he can, his beat in peace, until next May-day, when I hope Carlyle and he and I may meet again,—good friends all three.

Our age,” I read, “is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.” And truly it is as if some interval of time must always pass before we can take in all the magnitude of a man, or cycle, or event, just as interspace is needed by the eye before it can see proportion in visible objects, so that we never recognise in the slowly heaving sides of a great mountain, as we walk over it, what seemed in the distance so abrupt, terrible and majestic. And this severance of possession from enjoyment, and familiarity from comprehension, seems to me, in the breadth and depth of the losses it brings with it, one of the saddest curses that has followed on the Fall. We do, indeed, well to build the sepulchres of the fathers; yet I fear we should have slain some of them with scorn outright, and buried others in a far different kind of tomb had they lived now. Certainly, regarding how complacently we suffer the critic-fogs to come between us and God’s light, to our own eclipsing, strange fancies arise, sometimes, how the world’s pet names would fare if their owners were living now; if the men who ever said or did a noble thing, and having so done, were glad to die, and could do so with a certain majesty, were alive this day—all the dignity of utterance fretted into nervous speech, by reason of certain “long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise, Because their natures are little.” And, so far, the thought is entertaining, and may be followed to strange issues. But the fancy grows too horrible for definiteness, if we try to realize for a moment



how it had been with us, if He “Who at mid-watch ca, By the starlight naming a dubious name,” those ages long ago, had tarried till now to visit us. I protest that here the thought grows too terrible for completion. Yet we wrong ourselves daily in this self-immolation to the dead, in ever writing Mishnas to results and truths, that men of old arrived at because they looked forwards and not backwards. We are fit, I know, for better things than this; neither is nature so exhausted, that it has no need of us, for if this were so, we should never have been born. Let us take example from the sky. Is it this morning so very like the sky of yesterday, or any that we remember, so conservative of the old type that it cannot find a language for itself? It renews itself daily, and has not ceased to do so from the morning God spread it out for a covering to the earth. And in us also there are mines of measureless wealth, if we would rise up and work them; “for, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth,” and what has the past with all its glories and judgments, and grave counsels, to set beside the words “ a living man,” and to outweigh them?

Here stands one to the point at issue: no writer of Mishnas, nor binder of the sheaves of other men’s reaping; but one who has stood face to face with the mornings, and caught some new truth before the sun went down. Speaking, if ever man spoke, by the Spirit and approval of Heaven—truths pre-eminent and noble, most worthy to be believed by us: a good man confessedly, one deeply moved by things holy, unseen, eternal; counting everything on earth to be soluble only by reference to Heaven; seeing humanity bounded not in death but Godhead, temporality bounded, not in decay, but eternity; whose philosophy begins and ends with this, that “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” And withal, telling all this so grandly, that I question if the gift of language has more than once or twice reached such majesty and beauty. This also affording worthy credentials, if we accept it rightly. I find one saying of beautiful language, that it is “at once a commanding certificate, that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.” Why, there are passages so lovely, and utterly solemn in their quietness, and magnificent in the clash of words and roll of music, that should one ask another, the moment after the sound was gone, what he heard in them, he could answer only with Hamlet’s answer, “Words, words, words:” for they flame along the page till the very type grows beautiful with the names most honoured there, God and Truth, Faith and Christ, increasing like a chorus, with a “dominant’s persistence, till it must be answered to.” And all this with total abandonment to the truth spoken, no consciousness of having said the thing well, or desire of getting praise of men. You will not suffer this man, being such and much more than I can express, to go on his way, witnessed against by lying spirits, obscured for you, and darkened by critics, whose pitiful revenge would sacrifice truth, and conscience, and fair name, and anything, and everything, to wreak its little monthly vengeance; to be laughed at, even as St. Paul was once, for a madman; to go to his own place at the last, with a life embittered, and a death embalmed. True men and good, lovers of honesty and fair encounter, feel a righteous indignation at this, and cannot long endure it. And, although I am not so arrogant as to ask them to



believe me rather than adverse critics—not but that I believe firmly, for my own part, that true judgment in all things is to be attained soonest by the loving heart,—yet I have a certain confidence in appealing to them only to read and judge for themselves; having this much faith in others, and lowliness about themselves, as to know that when a man has spent long years, hard travail of soul, and prayer, in attaining the understanding of anything, the chances are, they are not his equals without the same initiation; that the facts and laws which have cost him so much labour to gather together and deduce, are at least worthy of courteous audience, and even reverence. And, again, as concerns the difficulty; to take this consolation, that there is no royal road to anything worth attaining; that whatever is noble in art or nature, may not be comprehended without vigilance; that what part soever of it commends itself at once to the senses, is the least and lowest; the chief and most desirable coming last in order of intelligence. That half the things, moreover, in visible nature, are seen long before they are noticed, and half the facts of the inner life passed over from very familiarity; so that it is quite possible to hear a thing every day, and not to know it, and see a thing every day, and not observe it: while often the thought we are most in want of lies at our feet, and the man, we should be most thankful to, is he who tells us what we all know. If ever we hope to understand a teacher, or learn anything from him, we must begin so; first of all respecting each other’s individuality, considering that we cannot see entirely with our brother’s eyes, nor hear with his ears, nor in anywise incorporate ourselves with him, more than we can reproduce the past, or live the future. Every man to his work, and all to Heaven. Shall I, who from choice or destiny spend all my days in a dreary city with men and traffic, quarrel with my friend who comes to tell me of the outer glories of sun, and wind, and cloud? He has seen more this morning in the forest, than I should in a lifetime;—had more sweet fancies at sunrise, thinking of the East, and all that has come from it—in the sunset, thinking of the West, and all that has gone to it—filled the mountains with the chariots of the host of God, and the blue sky with many companies of angels—been encircled with a cloud of witnesses— thrilled at the names of heroes—heard music where was no sound, and yet audible voices—poured out his spirit at the sight of lovely colours—wept at the growing of the flowers—felt strange ecstacy at the blue above the trees— lain among the grasses, living their life for a moment of exultation and utter joy. Fancy despising him for this— him to whom God has given the heart of a little child, and a greater measure of his Spirit than to me.

So, let us take and try to understand this book, and what the writer of it says. He will speak better things and worthier about nature than did ever man before him. He will tell you more credible tidings about God and man than you are like to meet with in many a long day’s journey.

Now, the first part of this work upon Modern Painters was written to be a vindication of Turner, and prove his fidelity to nature, while the great old man was still living among us in the uncertain hope of arresting a persecution that was visibly embittering his last years, and seemed to thicken around him as his days gathered to a close; and it was dedicated, as was fitting, to the Landscape Artists of England, of whom Turner was chief. There followed on this effort a success beyond the custom of such things; and to the “Modern Painters” it was chiefly owing that the outcry weakened and grew faint, and began to give place altogether to a faint glimmering of comprehension, and avowal of wonder. The acknowledgment came too late,



indeed, to serve its right and proper function, encouragement, namely: the only thing a great man asks for, the only reward a people can give him. Turner died in 1851, when the world was too busy about its gains to think of its losses; and there ceased the necessity of hurrying on to conclusion a work which kept widening and expanding with a growth, that it was not well to stop. So, what began as a treatise upon Turner and external nature, as he gave it, has now, from following out to their last results what came up as suggestions only at an earlier stage, and from linking together into one form what was before isolated and collateral, grown to a complete exposition of the laws and poetry of art, for the first time in the annals of literature, and as beautiful as it is complete. In no case will you be cheated by mere surface work, or silenced by dogmatism; you will penetrate by his help to the root-questions of all that he touches. Is there such a thing as Beauty, unchangeable, fixed as Truth, with laws like it, and tests like it, that may never be altered in any wise by our custom, feeling, or negligence? And then, for the first time perhaps, having the assurance of a firm ground-work, you will mount with him to other levels, getting wider glimpses of the whole region of art—when and how it is greatest, and why: then the grades of its greatness, from the first and chief of its masters down to those who take questionable rank and precedence in “the abyss:” and still higher, till you take in all poetry, sung or painted, the laws and working of the Imagination and Fancy that produced it: higher yet till all humanity lies out before you, like a great scroll thickly strewn with words—the life and spirit of the three great ages, the Trinity of Time, Classical, Mediæval, and Modern; wherein lay their greatness, and their weakness; how the two first fell, and how the last may yet rise.

After an interval of ten years, during which “ The Seven Lamps of Architecture;” and “ The Stones of Venice,” have been written, and in which architecture has undergone the same complete investigation, been brought to the same principles, and allied for ever under the same one name, the work is taken up again in the third volume, which treats, as the title says, “of many things.” Out of these many things, I purpose, in the next few pages, to secure at least an abstract of the chapters touching High Art, and the Ideal. It will be a shallow and meagre one, I am conscious, even of such a fractional part of the whole work, but this part will suffer less by epitome than the chapters on landscape which follow. No man loses so much by translation, abstract, report, comment, or other mutilation, as Ruskin. Of the practical results of his writings, it would be hard to say which are owing to the undeniable truth that is in them, which to their strangely beautiful eloquence, like pure light passing through a prism and coming out in a band of seven-fold colour. As you read him for the third and fourth time through you will understand my meaning when I compare his language to Turner’s painting, and say you are losers if you miss a single line.

At the commencement of the first volume, it was shown that the sources of pleasure in art are mainly three, arising in ideas of truth (simple resemblances to nature), ideas of beauty, and ideas of relation (the significance and relation of things): and after that, the volume went on to treat of the first of these ideas, and show how far different artists had succeeded in their expression. The second volume opened the inquiry into the second and third sources, by analyzing the two faculties of mind which grasp such ideas, the contemplative namely, and imaginative. It is the object of the third volume to examine how far Turner principally, and then other painters, have succeeded in these also;



“who among them has conveyed the noblest ideas of beauty, and touched the deepest sources of thought.” And the first question to be met and answered is the claim of the School of High Art, as it has been uniformly stated and acted upon for a hundred and fifty years. It was laid down in an early part of the work, that “the art is greatest which includes the greatest ideas;” now the question is to define the nature of greatness in the ideas themselves, when they are great, and what it is that makes them so. At the outset of this question it is thought needful to protest against the common illogical custom of the day, in “opposing painting to poetry, instead of regarding poetry as consisting in a noble use, whether of colours or words. Painting is properly to be opposed to speaking or writing, but not to poetry.” What, then, is poetry? for the answer to this question will help to a solution of the other.

Now for the degrees of more or less; what it is that makes one painter above another, and one work of art greater than another?—what are the elements and characters of greatness of style? They are found to consist of four, and are given in order of increasing importance. I. Choice of noble subjects; “the habitual choice of subjects of thought which involve wide interests and profound passions, as opposed to those which involve narrow interests and slight passions.” And first in order come sacred subjects, and highest of these, celebrations of the acts of Christ; as Leonardo’s painting of The Last Supper; Hunt’s painting of the Light of the World: then representations of the acts of great men, their deeds and meditations; for instance, Raphael in the School of Athens:—then in the third order the portrayal of the passions of common life; and under this division will come first the painter of deep thoughts and sorrows, and acts of heroism, like Hunt in the Claudio and Isabella, and Millais in The Rescue: next, he who represents inferior passions, the petty malignities and jealousies of the drawing-room, like Leslie: then in the third rank in the third order will come those who paint the sports of boys, or simplicities of clowns, like Webster and Teniers. All these, observe, working in sincerity the thoughts that are natural to them, and all good;



ceasing to be good when they despise or envy one another, when the great has no fellowship for the small man, and when the latter, striving to be what nature never intended, nor will suffer him to be, draws down ridicule, not on himself only, but on the holy thing he has defiled. For there must be sincerity in their choice, or they will come to take no rank at all as poets, but rather some inverted order in the abyss: and this sincerity, and natural aptitude for one definite form of sympathy or another, no forced or uncongenial labour can conceal. It happened in the great periods of art, that the painter had not left to him, as now, the choice of subject; it was all determined for him, whether he should pass long days in giving form to a holy thought, some passion in the life of Christ, that would make him pale and lean with watching, or in peaceful decoration of a wall with fair coloured flowers, on which his eye and heart could rest passionless; but through all, the temper of the man would show itself, be clearly discernible to a vigilant looker-on.

To the sincere expressional purpose there must be added also such technical skill, as the power of the painter, and the knowledge of the day, can give him: and wherever these two requirements exclude one another, one of two broad and pervading forms of error is manifest; the one, where technical excellence predominates over, and supersedes expression, distinguishing the Venetian school principally; and the other where expression supersedes skill, producing some such phase as the modern school of “High Art;” the latter being the vainer and more pretentious of the two errors; for until a man can paint and draw well, he has not even acquired the language of his Art, and should be content to take a place in the category of those “whose feelings can be better imagined than described.” Thus his choice must be wise as well as sincere, so that, if an ambitious man, he mistake not his vanity for inspiration; or, if a weak man, desirous of doing right, and confessing with a noble confession the subjects he most loves to honour, he degrade not what he meant to reverence. It is difficult because dangerous to consign men’s names to a condemned class, knowing so little, as we do or can, of one another; but under one of these two classes nearly all the professed religious painters of modern Germany and England would fall.

The second element is Love of Beauty: “that it introduces in the conception of its subject as much beauty as is possible, consistently with Truth.” Not denying the forms of viciousness and inferiority, or ever seeking to alter them, but dwelling oftenest upon the fairest, and feeling happiest in them, and everywhere bringing out the beauty that is in things, and insisting upon that rather than the ugliness. Under this division, therefore, as under the former, do schools of art range themselves in orders, according to the measure of their love and apprehension of beauty. First, Angelico, in his comprehension of spiritual beauty: then Paul Veronese and Correggio, in love of physical beauty:



in the third rank Albert Durer, Rubens, and in general the northern artists, apparently insensible to beauty, so careful after truth, whether fair or not. After these come aspirants to the orders “in the abyss”—Teniers, Salvator, Caravaggio, and their brethren.

The third is Sincerity: “that it includes the largest possible quantity of Truth in the most perfectly possible harmony.” And since all cannot be given, choosing always the most dignified and essential truths. After exemplifying the way in which Rembrandt will sacrifice the harmonious sum of truth to the expression of a not very important fraction of it, there follows this testimony to Paul Veronese, that he “Chooses to represent the great relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven above, and to the earth beneath them. He holds it more important to show how a figure stands relieved from delicate air, or marble wall; how as a red, or purple, or white figure, it separates itself, in clear discernibility, from things not red, not purple, nor white; how infinite daylight shines around it; how innumerable veils of faint shadow invest it; how its blackness and darkness are, in the excess of their nature, just as limited and local as its intensity of light: all this I say he feels to be more important than showing merely the exact measure of the spark of sunshine that gleams on a dagger-hilt, or glows on a jewel. All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious,—capable of being joined in one great system of spacious truth. And with inevitable watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites all this in tenderest balance, noting in each hair’s breadth of colour, not merely what its rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what its relation is to every other on his canvass: restraining, for truth’s sake, his exhaustless energy, reining back, for truth’s sake, his fiery strength; veiling, before truth, the vanity of brightness; penetrating, for truth, the discouragement of gloom; ruling his restless invention with a rod of iron; pardoning no error, no thoughtlessness; no forgetfulness; and subduing all his powers, impulses, and imaginations, to the arbitrement of a merciless justice, and the obedience of an incorruptible verity.”

From this law and requirement of sincerity flow three corollaries: — 1. That in general all great drawing is distinct drawing; is tested by its assertion of something, known by its calmness, distinctness, luminousness, and positiveness: bad drawing, on the other hand, without firmness or fineness, by its assertion of nothing, its slurring, obscurity, and indecision. 2. That great art deals in large masses, and works upon a large scale, expressing generally such qualities of mind as are imperfectly denoted by such terms as breadth, massing, unity, boldness, etc., “all of which are indeed great qualities when they mean breadth of truth, weight of truth, unity of truth, and courageous assertion of truth; but which have all their correlative errors and mockeries, almost universally mistaken for them,—the breadth which has no contents, the weight which has no value, the unity which plots deception, and the boldness which faces out fallacy.” 3. That all great art is delicate to the highest possible degree, and conversely, all coarse work an infallible sign of low art; and to this rule there is no exception.

The fourth and last and chief element is invention: “that it must be produced by the imagination.” This is the application of the poetic or creative faculty, and here it is that a barrier is for ever set between high and low art, so as for ever to place the former beyond the reach or hope of the latter. This is the power that cannot be gained nor imparted. For “The greatness or smallness of a man is, in the most conclusive sense, determined for him at his birth, as strictly as it is determined for a fruit whether it is to be a currant or an apricot. Education, favourable circumstances, resolution, and industry can do much; in a certain sense they do everything; that is to say, they determine whether the poor apricot shall fall in the form of a green bead, blighted by the east wind, and be trodden under foot, or whether it shall expand into tender pride, and sweet brightness of golden velvet. But



apricot out of currant—great man out of small—did never yet art or effort make; and, in a general way, men have their excellence nearly fixed for them when they are born; a little cramped and frost-bitten on one side, a little sun-burnt, and fortune-spotted on the other, they reach, between good and evil chances, such size and taste as generally belong to the men of their calibre, and the small in their serviceable bunches, the great in their golden isolation, have, these no cause for regret, nor those for disdain.”

The old false claims of High Art being thus dethroned, and new ones in their place invested with such a dignity as you see, two questions arise, touching the ideal; one from the second element of greatness, “How may beauty be sought in defiance of truth?” and one from that of invention. “How does the imagination show itself in dealing with truth? Now while, on the one hand, the faithful pursuit of the ideal is a noble and legitimate use of the imagination, bringing before us what is possible and true with full power and presence, it so happens that nearly all the artistical and poetical seeking after it springs from the abuse of the imagination in its pursuit of the impossible and untrue: and in this way, by suffering itself to create false images where its duty is to create true ones; and first, and most perniciously in the example of the religious ideal. As long as this ideal remained, and was understood to be purely conventional, making no pretence to historical accuracy, but expressive only of the painter’s love and veneration for his subject, arraying it in all devices of fair transparent colour and gold, setting it off with whatever, in his great simple heart, spoke of power and majesty, so long the religious ideal was noble, and stands to this day unapproachable in its touching purity and solemnity. This is the passionate or Angelican ideal, called from Angelico, its central master. But the effects of the first false step, when religious facts were employed for the display of art , instead of art for their display, were ruinously rapid: Raffaelle was yet living to see the beginning of the end which his pre-eminent power had brought about. The substitution of the ‘ philosophical for the passionate’ ideal, the confusion of classicalism with Christianity, of falsehood with veracity, of emptiness and insipidity with what was so eminently earnest and solemn, divorced Religion from Art at once, and henceforward they went on their separate ways, to the paralyzing of what was best and noblest in the one, and not to the bettering of the other either. Next is the profane ideal. It brought profane art into existence; so long as men cared for truth first, and beauty afterwards, they cared chiefly for the chief truth, and all art was intensely religious. The whole of this fifth chapter on the “profane ideal” following its course down the dark centuries to this day, tracing it in our language, manners, and education, is grand. There has been enough mutilation and discrowning of fine passages in the outline above for me to have heart to attack this. You who read it will find it among the most fruitful, in suggesting after-thoughts of all in the volume. I do not envy the man who will rise unawed by its solemn ending.

Yet there is a True Ideal; for though the noblest work of the imagination be “to summon up the memories of past events, and the anticipations of future ones, under aspects which would bear the sternest tests of historical investigation, or abstract reasoning—nevertheless it has permissible functions peculiarly its own, and certain rights of feigning, adorning, and fancifully arranging, inalienable from its nature.” The loving enthusiasm which seeks for a beauty fit to be the object of eternal love, the inventive skill which gathers together whatever is beautiful, emphasizing, without altering, the finest forms among them, and the creative skill which delights itself in aspects of the impossible, feigning for itself fairies and suchlike



things, are three forms of Idealism more or less allied with the three conditions of the artistical mind, dwelt upon in the great sixth chapter in The Stones of Venice. It was there found that three classes of men approached nature, receiving three separate impressions from it, giving forth in art three separate results. First come the men with the tender and pure minds, who choose the good only—these are the Purists: then the men of strong and universal mind, who grasp things in their entirety, taking the evil and the good together, because Truth impels them—these are the Naturalists: last, the men of foul and impure mind, who choose the evil and leave the good, and who were called Sensualists. Now it will be seen at once, that the two first forms of Idealism correspond nearly enough to the Purists and Naturalists to evidence at once some close connexion between them; but in the last case the matter is not so plain; the link that connects them lies somewhere in the union between that vague sense of the presence of evil and wild dreamlike fancies, resulting from long contemplation of it, which is denoted by the word Grotesque.

We have, therefore, the three forms arranged thus:—(A.) Purist Idealism, (B.) Naturalist Idealism, (C.) Grotesque Idealism.

And first, Purist Idealism is the result of a mind more than ordinarily tender and holy, incapable of dwelling on the evil that seems bound up with existence by an ordinance for ever; perhaps not even seeing it, except under a veil of final good, which transfigures it with a beauty not its own. It indicates a somewhat childish mind, and in history produced a somewhat childish form of art—using this term “childish,” observe, in all veneration. Now, since it is ideal, it is in no wise to be taken as intended for any representation of facts; for being without the element of evil, it would be false idealism, but is to be understood as signifying only the expression of the painter’s personal affections and aspirations. It is noble when instinctive, when it is the greatest and best a man can give, though it be not the greatest nor the best sometimes allotted to the sons of men: its safety lies in knowing its inferiority, and being contented with it.

(B.) Naturalist Idealism.—This is the central and highest part concerned with things as they are, accepting alike the good and evil, not seeking to mend God’s earth, nor alter it in any wise. Yet how can this be ideal at all? or art at all, in a great sense, seeing art was laid down before to be a product of the imagination? Now comes in the appliance of that faculty, which was explained so deeply in the second volume, Associative Imagination, whose essence lies in the power of arrangement, and in so contrasting good with evil, beauty with decay, that the goodness and beauty are exalted by the contrast, and the evil and decay have yet themselves all the good that is in them set forth. The Naturalists are pre-eminently, and above all others, the men of truth, inasmuch as they grasp not a part of it only, but the whole thing as it has come from God through man, with the beauty of the first and the sorrow of the second. And observe, it is not the chief and highest form only that is ideal—this is a common and confusing error with us—all are ideal by virtue of their harmony, none are ideal in their isolation: Thersites must be as ideal as Achilles, Alecto as Helen. See what follows also in this insight into, and continual presence of, nature; the painter sees all this, truly and really, before he lays pencil to canvass, sees it in the strong vision of his great faculty more distinctly than bodily appearance, more really than the realized form of it: to us his work is ideal, to himself real and verily existent; over his life you may see the words of the greatest apocalypse that ever poet was blessed with, “enamelled in fire.” Write the things which thou



hast seen, and the things which are. There is no selection with him, the choice was made for him long ago; he cannot choose but say what he has seen; no choice of prettiness, rejection of vulgarity: what is vulgar to him? it is a word below his understanding; in the wide grasp of his sympathy and mighty intellect, that takes in all specific things, and makes of them one music, he can spare no single note, can endure the blotting out of nothing that exists.

I am glad that Ruskin has dwelt upon this world vulgarity, and traced it home, and found out its disreputable lineage. Of all the very foolish things that are ever being said about poetry, painted or written, the very saddest, coldest and most utterly hateful to hear is this same charge of vulgarity, which sweeps alike into its shallow waters the tender pathos of what is lowly, and the simplicity of what is childish, and the pure instinct of what is natural, with the low brutality of what is vicious. I hope all who dearly love art have seen, once in their lives, Hunt’s Claudio and Isabella; they will remember the picture well, having once seen it. It is taken at that part where poor Claudio cries out, “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.” None will forget those faces having once seen them. How do you think Claudio is standing as he jerks out his terrified words? in a set attitude, with legs astride, and hand smitten upon the forehead? Not so saw the painter. He stands leaning back against the wall of his prison, playing fretfully—so feverously with the band of his shoe, his right leg drawn upwards, and his eyes set so stedfastly, as eyes are wont to do when the mind is otherwhere and full of anguish; you would think, to look at him, that the matter of life and death lay in tracing with his eye the veins of the wainscotting, or the division of the stone. He is no hero, poor Claudio; see how he has spent the hours before his death that is to be, carving his own name and hers, for whom he suffered. The truth being, that the painter saw verily before him all that happened, just as it did happen when Shakespeare saw it: without rule of composition, or “precept for production of the beautiful;” for the matter of that, in defiance of law and precept. And yet I have heard that painting, which has not many like it in the whole world, so grand and truthful, called vulgar—and by people whose combined geniuses set to work upon a thought, could produce nothing from it that would not be hopelessly and ineffably vulgar;—for a man may be pardoned indignation at the sight of a pompous and padded world, laughing into scorn whatever is lowly and impulsive. Remember once for all, the noblest things in the hands of the weak man are vulgar, and the meanest things in the hands of the great man are noble; and in the presence of the latter we may feel confidence always, and trust ourselves blindly to him.

(C.) Grotesque Idealism.—It must be remembered that in the Stones of Venice the Grotesque was divided principally into three kinds,—1. Art arising from healthful but irrational play of the imagination in times of rest; 2. Art arising from irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things, or evil in general; 3. Art arising from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp. It is the second of these forms which allies itself with sensualism, but it is the third with which we have to do chiefly now. This is a thoroughly noble form of the Grotesque; it is the art by which thoughts otherwise expressionless, “such as no language may declare,” are perpetuated and comprehended; dreams and half-conceptions of truth, and truth mingled inextricably with error, and prophetic utterances, and vaguest aspirations. It includes nearly all symbolism and allegory, and such



other noble use of the imagination, in art and poetry. “No element of imagination has a wider range, a more magnificent use, or so colossal a grasp of sacred truth.” “If a really great painter, thoroughly capable of giving substantial truth, and master of the elements of pictorial effect which have been developed by modern art, would solemnly and yet fearlessly cast his fancy free in the spiritual world, and faithfully follow out such masters of that world as Dante and Spenser, there seems no limit to the splendour of thought which painting might express.” Nay, in many of the works of Watts and Rossetti the author sees “already visible the dawn of a new era of art, in a true unison of the grotesque with the realistic power.” The chapter concludes, of course magnificently, with a comparison between two examples chosen from false and true grotesque Idealism. So end the chapters on the True Ideal: it seemed to me better to confine myself wholly to them, trusting to another opportunity for saying something about Realization and Finish, and the use of Pictures and Landscape, with all the glorious things that are written about the Greeks and Mediævals, rather than hurry through so precious a work with a mere transcript of the table of contents.

One would like to say a few words about hope and the future. Seeing what a great and noble thing this art is really, how divine a work it has set itself to do, what a gospel it has to preach, and woe impending if it preach it not; reading also in the golden and somewhat mournful history of its disciples what a perilous gift it has been to men; how fairly it showed in its beginnings, how it grew and gathered strength, found a voice for its yearnings, and very pinions for its imaginings, drew nigh to the very borders of completion, then fell, a house divided against itself, assailable to all the winds that blow; how from that time to this, Art and Religion, that at the first were as thought and utterance to one another, as soul and body, “that never can be sunder’d without tears,” have stood, riven indeed and divided, but with a cruel semblance of unity that is the worst evil of all:—seeing all this, it is time to ask what hope lies in the future, and what counsel in the past. Great hope, if we are mindful of the counsel. See the testimony of Ruskin, regarding religious art. “It will exist; nay, I believe the era of its birth has come, and that those bright Turnerian imageries, which the European public declared to be ‘dotage,’ and those calm Pre-Raphaelite studies, which, in like manner, it pronounced ‘puerility,’ form the first foundation that has been ever laid for true sacred art.” We have even now returned again to the beginnings, treading in the ancient ways and true, and there is fairer hope dawning through the very tears of our backsliding. Once more art has renewed itself, done battle for itself, like a little Hercules has crushed its serpents, the first of many labours; laid the foundation of a new renaissance, amidst scorn and derision, as ill-fated as the laugh that Remus laughed over the building of the great city when the death-stroke met him; above all, has linked itself again to faith and religion, its natural home and source of inspiration. And along with it,—see what God will do for us,—in the very nick of time, an interpreter is given to us.

• “The river’s a-wave
• With smooth paper-reeds, grazing each other when prophet-winds rave.”

And just as, in the beginning, it is said that the Maker set a greater light to rule the day, I believe now that we are come out of a certain dark and mournful night, and are living in the dawning of a great day, and that he has set a greater light to rule it, in the long and goodly company of noble men alive and speaking. Oh! it is happy; after infinite wanderings, strangest misconceptions,



wofullest repulses, to come again at last to this, having found the point of our divergence, and cause of all our failure to lie herein—that we understood not how art which ends in art is ignoble, the spirit only noble; that whensoever art is the expression of the breath of life, which the Master of Life at the beginning did breathe into man, whereby he became a living soul, it is good and true for ever; but whensoever it is expressionless and altogether dead, or, if not so, expressing only the pestilential breath which comes from the abyss, the spirit of death, it is for ever false, Unclean, unclean.

And two eminent results at once follow; justice to the past, veritable grounds of hope for the coming years. The graceless striving of those far-off, earnest centuries—we will smile at them no more, nor any longer “gaze scorn down from the heights of Raffaelhood:” they were our masters, acknowledging the spirit that burned in them; they have won, long, long ago, and sit in heaven; we, doing despite to the same spirit, have lost in the same race, and the laugh, if any laugh there be, is against us. What are we vain about in the comparison? Is it greater skill? Are we, then, so blinded with the dust of our long travelling? “If these had not walked their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?” At the feet of Giotto and Orcagna, therefore, and Albert Durer, we have begun again, and God be with us.

As to the future, our reasonable hope springs out of what has been done already. The rule of faith in art once more established, the honour of God, namely, and ennobling of humanity, our road onwards is clear. Look back a moment at what this school of Pre-Raphaelites has done already. If their principles had in them anything of truth, they knew that condemnation, misconstruction,—oblivion, if you will, would not quench its light for ever: some day it would burn through with consuming fire. The beginnings, therefore, were among the lowly things of the earth, “whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure;” ever mounting upwards to one end: the running stream becoming a great river, and the quiet light a burning torch; teaching lessons of purity, singing legends of heroism, wakening into horror the fickle cruelty of unholy love, startling into alarm and remorse whatever is cold, cruel, and inconstant, finding at last a consummation and happy fellowship in such thoughts as realized the “Light of the World.”

There is The Huguenot, one of the first efforts, with its teaching of high and devoted religious principle, in a conflict with deep and passionate love. Then, how shall I number them in order? the Ophelia—who does not remember that sorrowful picture? thinking that truly death was most terrible in youth, most fearful in the mocking light of day, and brightness of the Summer-time: for the banks were crowned with flowers, and the birds were out, the robin on the willow-bough; and all lay in deep light and sunshine, but her eyes were glazed even now, and the inner light was closed for ever; and, upon the water lay fantastic garlands she had wrought of “crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.”

• “Her clothes spread wide;
• And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
• Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes,
• As one incapable of her own distress.”

Her brow looked very calm and quiet, but you might know how the fever burned under, for her hands rippled through the water in feverish playfulness, and so “singing in her song she died.” Then “Mariana, in the moated Grange;” how sad it made one. She stood at the window so desolate, with expectation still upon her weary sleepless eyes, looking at the lonely poplar and the shadow, risen from



that endless broidery that should never more delight her, her lips parted in the listless singing of her dirge, “He will not come.”

Highest of all, the “Light of the World” Ruskin has called it, in this last volume, “the most perfect instance of expressional purpose with technical power, which the world has yet produced.” So new, but so familiar; those large mournful eyes, set in such sorrowful expectation, till the door shall open, the head slightly bending, even as it bowed upon the cross: it is the Son of Man standing before us, in all the beauty and the sadness of our common humanity: we could call Him Brother, and inexpressibly beautiful the thought seems to us: but another look, and it is the Son of God, risen and glorified, the royal crown upon His Head, and the royal robes enfolding Him, starred with jewels: so we are bowed down with awe before the Judge of quick and dead; yet are there signs of comfort, making the God whom we worship, and the Brother whom we love, one; and these are the crown of thorns budding with new leaves, and the pierced hands;—the perfect God and Perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. And while the heart is bowed downwards yet in silence, filled through and through with its glory, that wondrously lovely background, earth and sky together, comes upon one like a soft wind, when the brain is overwrought and fevered: the orchard, too, and fruit trees, till one remembers the written words of the wise king; “As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my Beloved among the sons.” Have we not seen it many a time, that strange pale green colour in the sky at night, so bright along the east that we know the day is coming? The stars up in heaven are very bright, piercing through the boughs till they seem to hang like white blossoms among the leaves, but above the Head is one, very bright and large and dazzling, and we know it for His star that led the wise men westwards, and think perhaps of the time when that star shone above Him, in the lowly stable of Bethlehem.

I believe that every man, to whom God has granted truthfulness, veneration and earnestness, will come from the diligent reading of this book with a spirit of deep solemnity upon him. He may know nothing as yet, nor be ever able to know anything of Art; the names of its great history may be dead languages to him; the works of its inspiration a sealed book to him; his very manner of life may be a continual severance from this nature whose beauty and infinity he finds recorded; yet, I promise, he will feel his heart warmer, his sympathy wider, his knowledge deeper, his thoughts purer. Or he may be an artist in act or power, and reject everything that is at war with old opinions, or militates against his School; yet he also, even he will come from this fiery trial of Truth, that assays all things, and proves them, with some fancies quickened, some doubts directed, some aspirations ennobled, some emotions deepened and confirmed. How otherwise? seeing such names as Truth and Faith guarding every page with their presences; feeling confident that in the mazes of intricate argument, so lengthened and prolonged, at times, that all memory of what has gone before is lost under need of present concentration—feeling confidence in all that the argument orbs about to the first principle, and never forsakes it, that “Man’s use and function are, to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience, and resultant happiness.” How otherwise but be purified and exalted by such words?

To have given long years in the centre of his life to one prolonged act of devotion—the rendering tardy justice to the memory of a great Englishman, dead and wronged; to have spoken



truthfully, earnestly, faithfully all the time; to have given honour to every noble thought and passion, to have set himself, heart and mind, and body, to cry against falsehood, and appeal for Truth; to have suffered a righteous indignation at deceit and lies, to pass never the limits of mercifulness, nor be ever other than it should be, an inverted love; to have opened world upon world of new desires, new sympathies to many and many an one, who will be quiet and unknown for ever, unable even to thank him, and say, “You made me happy;” to cause all who read him ever so shallowly, to feel for the time at least a spell of earnestness upon them —this, and more than I can calculate, is his temporal crown and reward. Let us be grateful, brothers, and not be ashamed to speak feelingly. I think if we used more abandonment in speech to one another, were less careful for our own petty passing fame, how this may sound, and that be construed; more desirous of securing first the thing to be said, and having no thought for the how, believing that will be given us, we should understand each other better, feel more boldness and faith in a brother’s sympathy, or at the least, merciful patience. And daily we should wither less and less under parody and satire, and that Michal-like derision of enthusiasm, which silences half the world, and gives the other half to jesting. And the good that would come of it, could we thus “Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die,” we cannot even measure or conceive; the cold hearts that would thaw to us, and the gentle ones that would blossom for us, and the deep ones that would sing to us, when the winter of our coldness is past and forgotten.

I know that God will suffer no good work to fall to the ground fruitless. I know that He will honour the seed of His sowing, and raise up a harvest of good, far off, though we shall not live to see it; though he who has wrought so well and fairly, and poured out his spirit, pure as the waters of the city of God, where he will stand sometime, will not see it upon earth.

After all, how true are the words of that Eastern philosopher, “A man cannot be hid. A man cannot be hid.”

Ever since I can remember, even when I was quite a child, people have always told me that I had no perseverance, no strength of will; they have always kept on saying to me, directly and indirectly, “Unstable as water thou shalt not excel;” and they have always been quite wrong in this matter, for of all men I ever heard of, I have the strongest will for good and evil. I could soon find out whether a thing were possible or not to me; then if it were not, I threw it away for ever, never thought of it again, no regret, no longing for that, it was past, and over to me; but if it were possible, and I made up my mind to do it, then and there I began it, and in due time finished it, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, till it was done. So I did with all things that I set my hand to.

Love only, and the wild restless passions that went with it, were too strong for me, and they bent my strong will, so that people think me now a weak man, with no end to make for in the purposeless wanderings of my life.

Yes, my life is purposeless now. I have failed, I know, but I know that I have fought too; I know the weary struggle from day to day, in which, with my loins girded, and my muscles all a-strain, I have fought, while years and years have passed away. I know what they do not, how that Passion trembled in my grasp, shook, staggered: how I grew stronger and stronger; till when, as I stood at last quivering with collected force, the light of victory across my lips and brow, God’s



hand struck me, and I fell at once, and without remedy; and am now a vanquished man; and really without any object in life, not desiring death any more than life, or life any more than death; a vanquished man, though no coward; forlorn, hopeless, unloved, living now altogether in the past.

I will tell you how I fell, and then I pray you all to pity me, and if you can, love me, and pray for me that I may be forgiven.

I said, when I left her that day, that I would forget her, look upon her as if she had never been; coming and going to and from that house, indeed, seeing her often, talking to her, as to any other friendly and accomplished lady; but seeing Mabel, my Mabel, that had been, no more. She was dead, and the twenty years that I had lived with her, man and boy, and little child, were gone—dead too, and forgotten. No shadow of them should rest upon my path, I said. Meantime the world wanted help; I was strong and willing, and would help it. I saw all about me men without a leader, looking and yearning for one to come and help them. I would be that leader, I said; there was no reason for me to be bitter and misanthropical, for I could forget the past utterly, could be another man in short. Why! I never loved that woman there, with her heavy, sweeping, black hair, and dreamily-passionate eyes; that was some one past away long ago. Who knows when he lived? but I am the man that knows, that feels all poetry and art, that can create, that can sympathize with every man and woman that ever lived—even with that cold, proud woman there, without a heart, but with heavy, sweeping hair, and great dreamily-passionate eyes, which might cause a weak man to love her.

Yes, I said so when I left her—nay, even before I left her, for in my agonized pleading I had said words that made her cold, selfish blood run quick enough to speak scornful things to me. “Mabel!” I said, “Mabel! think awhile before you turn from me for ever! Am I not good enough for you? Yet tell me, I pray you, for God’s sake, what you would have me do? what you would have me make myself, and I will do that thing, make myself such, whatever it is. Think how long I have worshipped you, looked on all the world through your eyes. I loved you as soon as I saw you, even when I was a child, before I had reason almost; and my love and my reason have grown together, till now. Oh! Mabel, think of the things we have talked of together, thought of together! Will you ever find another man who thinks the same as you do in everything? Nay, but you must love me. Such letters you have written me too! Oh! Mabel, Mabel, I know God will never let love like mine go unrequited. You love me, I know. I am sure of it; you are trying me only; let it be enough now, my own Mabel, the only one that loves me. See, do not I love you enough?”

I fell there before her feet. I caught the hem of her garment. I buried my face in its folds; madly I strove to convince myself that she was but trying me, that she could not speak for her deep love, that it was a dream only. Oh! how I tried to wake, to find myself, with my heart beating wildly, and the black night round me, lying on my bed; as often, when a child, I used to wake from a dream of lions, and robbers, and ugly deaths, and the devil, to find myself in the dear room, though it was dark, my heart bounding with the fear of pursuit and joy of escape.



But no dream breaks now, desperate desperate, earnest. The dreams have closed round me, and become the dismallest reality, as I often used to fear those other dreams might; the walls of this fact are closed round about me now like the sides of an iron chest, hurrying on down some swift river, with the black water above, to the measureless, rolling sea. I shall never any more wake to anything but that.

For listen to what she said, you who are happy lovers. Can you believe it? I can scarce do so myself. I, not looking up from where I lay, felt her lips curl into a cruel smile, as she drew herself from my grasp, and said:

“Listen, Hugh. I call you ‘Hugh,’ by the way, not because I am fond of you, but because surnames never seemed to me to express anything; they are quite meaningless. Hugh, I never loved you, never shall, nay, something more. I am not quite sure that I do not hate you, for coming to claim me as a right in this way, and appealing to God against me. Who gave you any right to be lord over me, and question my heart? Why, for this long time I have seen that you would claim me at last, and your ‘love,’ which I now cast from me for ever, and trample upon, so—so,—your ‘love,’ I say, has been a bitterly heavy burden to me, dogging me up and down, everywhere. You think my thoughts? Yes, verily, you who think yourself the teacher of such an one as I am, have few thoughts of your own to think. What do I want better than you? Why, I want a man who is brave and beautiful. You are a coward and a cripple. Am I trying you? No, Hugh; there is no need for that. I think I know you well enough, weak and irresolute, you will never do anything great. I must marry a great man—

• ‘White honour shall be like a plaything to him,
• Borne lightly, a pet falcon on his wrist;
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• One who can feel the very pulse o’ the time,
• Instant to act, to plunge into the strife,
• And with a strong arm hold the rearing world.’ ”

But before she had begun to quote, my life had changed. While I lay there, in I know not what agony, that which I have just said came suddenly across me. I became calm all at once. I began to bend my passion beneath my strong will; the fight I fought so bravely had begun.

I rose up quietly before she began to quote, and when she saw me standing there, so calmly, ay, and looking so brave too, though I was a “cripple and a coward,” she quailed before me, her voice fell, even in the midst of her scornful speech; then I thought, “so cool, and can quote pretty verses at such a time. Oh! but my revenge is good, and sure too, it is almost as if I killed her, stabbed her to the heart, here in this room.” Then my heart grew quite obedient, and my purpose began to work, so that I could speak with no shadow of passion in my words, and with no forced unnatural calm either. I could seem, and for years and years did seem, to be no hard cold man of the world, no mere calculating machine for gauging God’s earth by modern science; but a kindly genial man; though so full of knowledge, yet having room for love too, and enthusiasm, and faith. Ah! they who saw me as such did not see the fight, did not see that bitter passage in the room of the old house at Riston, where the river widens.

I stood there silent for a very short time; then, raising my eyes to hers, said, “Well, Mabel, I shall go up to London, and see the publishers, and perhaps stay there a day or two, so that I shall probably be back again at Casley by Tuesday; and I daresay I shall find time to walk over to Riston on Wednesday or Thursday, to tell you what we have determined on— good bye.” She trembled, and turned pale, as I gave her my hand, and said,



“goodbye,” in a forced tone, that was in strong contrast to my natural-seeming calmness. She was frightened of me then, already. Good.

So I walked away from Riston to my own house at Casley (which was about two miles from Riston), and got ready to start for London; then, about an hour after I had parted from her, set out again across the fields to the railway, that was five miles from my house. It was on the afternoon of a lovely spring day; I took a book with me, a volume of poems just published, and my dead friend’s manuscript; for my purpose in going to London was to see to its publication.

Then, looking at that over which so many years of toil and agony of striving had been spent, I thought of him who wrote it; thought how admirable he was, how that glorious calm purpose of his shone through all his restless energy. I thought, too, as I had never done before, of the many, many ways he had helped me, and my eyes filled with tears, as I remembered remorsefully the slight return I had given him for his affection, my forgetfulness of him in the years when I was happy. I thought of his quiet, successful love, and that sweet wife of his, the poor widow that was now, who lived at Florence, watching the shadows come and go on her husband’s tomb, the rain that washed it, the sun and moon that shone on it; then how he had died at Florence, and of the short letter he had written to me, or rather that had been written, just before his death, by his wife, from his dictation, and stained with the many tears of the poor heart-broken lady. Those farewell words that threw but a slight shadow over the happy days when I loved Mabel, had more weight now, both for sorrow and consolation; for the thought that that dead man cared for me surely did me good, made me think more of the unseen world, less of the terrible earth-world that seemed all going wrong, and which the unseen was slowly righting.

I had the letter with me at that very time. I had taken it out with the manuscript, and together with that, another, a sealed letter that came with it, and which, according to the dying man’s wish, I had never yet opened. I took out both the letters, and turning aside from the path sat down under a willow by the side of the river, a willow just growing grey-green with the spring. And there, to the music of the west wind through the slim boughs, to the very faint music of the river’s flow, I read the two letters, and first the one I had read before.

“Dear friend, I am going the last journey, and I wish to say farewell before I go. My wife’s tears fall fast, as she writes, and I am sorry to go, though, I think, not afraid to die. Two things I want to say to you: the first and least has to do with my writings; I do not wish them to perish: you know I wrote, thinking I might do some one good; will you see about this for me? Do you know, Hugh, I never cared for any man so much as for you: there was something which drew me to you wonderfully; it used to trouble me sometimes to think that you scarcely cared for me so much; but only sometimes, for I saw that you knew this, and tried to love me more; it was not your fault that you could not; God bless you for the trying even! When you see my wife, be kind to her; we have had happy talk about you often, thinking what a great man you ought to be. Yet one thing more. I send you with this a sealed enclosure. On the day that you are married to Mabel, or on the day that she dies, still loving you, burn this unopened; but, oh friend, if such a misfortune happen to you, as I scarce dare hint at even, then open it, and read it for the sake of, Frank.”

Then I remembered, sadly, how when I read this, I was angry at first, even with the dead man, for his suspicion; only, when I thought of him dying, and



how loving he was, my anger quickly sunk into regret for him; not deep anguish, but quiet regret. Ah! what a long time it was since I loved Mabel! how I had conquered my raging passion! Frank will surely applaud my resolution. Dear heart! how wise he was in his loving simplicity.

I looked at the sealed letter; it also was directed in his wife’s handwriting; I broke the seal, and saw Frank’s writing there; it was written, therefore, some time before his death.

How solemn the wind was through the willow boughs, how solemn the faint sound of the swirls of the lowland river! I read—

“O Hugh, Hugh! poor wounded heart! I saw it all along, that she was not worthy of that heart stored up with so much love. I do not ask for that love, dear friend; I know you cannot give it me; I was never jealous of her; and I know, moreover, that your love for her will not be wasted. I think, for my part, that there is One Who gathers up all such wandering love, and keeps it for Himself; think, Hugh, of those many weary hours on the Cross; in that way did they requite His Love then, and how do we requite it now? Should He not then sympathize with all those whose love is not returned?

“And, Hugh, sweet friend, I pray you, for Christ’s love, never strive to forget the love you bore her in the days when you thought her noble, the noblest of all things, never cast away the gift of memory; never cast it away for your ease, never even for the better serving of God; He will help Himself, and does not want mere deeds; you are weak, and love cannot live without memory. Oh! Hugh! if you do as I pray you, this remembered love will be a very bright crown to you up in Heaven; meantime, may it not be that your love for others will grow, that you will love all men more, and me, perhaps, even much more? And I, though I never see you again in the body till the Day of Doom, will nevertheless be near you in spirit, to comfort you somewhat through the days of your toiling on earth; and now, Frank prays God to bless poor wounded Hugh!”

I ceased reading; a dull pain came about my forehead and eyes. What! must I be all alone in my struggle with passion? not even Frank to help me? dear fellow! to think how fond he was of me! I am very very sorry he cannot be with me in this fight; for I must kill her utterly in my memory, and I think, if he knew all, how very noble I thought her, how altogether base she really is, he would be with me after all. Yet, Frank, though I do not do this that you pray me to do, you shall still be my friend, will you not? you shall help me to become more like you, if that is possible in any degree.

So, I determined to forget her; and was I not successful, at first; ah! and for long too? nevertheless, alas! alas! Frank’s memory faded with her memory, and I did not feel his spirit by me often, only sometimes, and those were my weakest times, when I was least fit to have him by me; for then my purpose would give in somewhat, and memory would come to me, not clear and distinct, but only as a dull pain about my eyes and forehead; but my strong will could banish that, for I had much work to do, trying to help my fellow-men, with all my heart I thought. I threw myself heart and soul into that work, and joy grew up in my soul; and I was proud to think that she had not exhausted the world for me.

Nor did I shrink once from the sight of her, but came often, and saw her at her father’s house at Riston, that the broadening river flows by always; nay, I sat at her wedding, and saw her go up to the altar with firm step, and heard her say her part in the unfaltering music of her rich voice, wherein was neither doubt nor love; and



there I prayed that the brave noble-hearted soldier, her husband, might be happy with her, feeling no jealousy of him, pitying him rather; for I did not think that it was in her nature to love any one but herself thoroughly. Yet, what a Queen she looked on that marriage-day! her black hair crowning her so, her great deep eyes looking so full of all slumbering passion as of old, her full lips underneath, whence the music came; and, as she walked there between the grey walls of that Abbey where they were married, the light fell on her through the jewel-like windows, colouring strangely the white and gold of her gorgeous robes. She also seemed, or wished to seem, to have forgotten that spring-day at Riston; at least, she spoke to me when she went away quite kindly, and very calmly; “Good bye, Hugh, we hear of you already; you will be a great man soon, and a good man you always were, and always will be; and we shall think of you often, and always with pleasure.”

Yet I knew she hated me; oh! her hollow heart! The dull pain came about my forehead and eyes; somehow I could not keep up the farce just then. I spoke bitterly, a smile that I know now I should not have smiled, curling my lip. “Well done, Mabel! it is a nicely composed parting speech to an old friend; but you were always good at that kind of thing. Forget you?—no—you are too handsome for that; and, if I were a painter or sculptor, I would paint you or carve you from memory. As it is, I never forget beautiful faces—good bye:” and I turned away from her a little without giving my hand. She grew pale at first, then flushed bright crimson, like a stormy sky, and turned from me with a scornful devil’s glance.

She was gone, and a sharp pang of memory shot through me for a single instant, a warning of my fall which was to be. For a single instant I saw her sitting there, as of old, in the garden hard by the river, under the gold-dropping laburnums, heard her for a single instant singing wildly in her magnificent voice, as of old:

• “Wearily, drearily,
• Half the day long,
• Flap the great banners
• High over the stone;
• Strangely and eerily
• Sounds the wind’s song,
• Bending the banner-poles.

• “While, all alone,
• Watching the loophole’s spark,
• 10Lie I, with life all dark,
• Feet tether’d, hands fetter’d
• Fast to the stone,
• The grim walls, square letter’d,
• With prison’d men’s groan.

• “Still strain the banner-poles
• Through the wind’s song,
• Westward the banner rolls
• Over my wrong.”

But it was gone directly, that pang; everything, voice, face, and all: like the topmost twigs of some great tree-limb, that, as it rolls round and round, griding the gravel and mud at the bottom of a flooded river, shows doubtfully for a second, flashing wet in the February sunlight, then, sinking straightway, goes rolling on toward the sea, in the swift steady flow of the flooded river; yet it appears again often, till it is washed ashore at last, who knows where or when?

But for me, these pangs of memory did not come often; nay, they came less and less frequently for long, till at last, in full triumph, as I thought it, I fell.

That marriage-day was more than two years after the day in April that I have told you of, when I read the sealed letter; then, for three years after her marriage, I went on working, famous now, with many who almost worshipped me, for the words I had said, the many things I had taught them; and I in return, verily loved these earnestly; yet, round about me clung some shadow that was not the mere dulled memory of what had been, and it deepened sometimes in my drearier moods into



fearful doubts that this last five years of my life had been, after all, a mistake, a miserable failure; yet, still I had too much to do to go on doubting for long; so these shadowy doubts had to hold back till, though I knew it not, a whole army of them was marching upon me in my fancied security.

Well, it was Spring-time, just about five years from that day; I was living in London, and for the last few months had been working very hard indeed, writing and reading all day long and every day, often all night long also, and in those nights the hours would pass so quickly that the time between night-fall and dawn scarcely seemed ten minutes long. So I worked, worked so hard, that one day, one morning early, when I saw through my window, on waking about six o’clock, how blue the sky was, even above the London roofs, and remembered how, in the fields all about, it was the cowslip time of the year, I said to myself, “No work to-day; I will make holiday for once in the sweet spring-time; I will take a book with some tale in it, go into the country, and read it there, not striving particularly to remember it, but enjoying myself only.” And, as I said this, my heart beat with joy, like a boy’s at thought of holiday. So I got up, and as I was dressing, I took up a volume of Shakespeare, and opened it at Troilus and Cressida, and read a line or two just at the place where the parting comes; it almost brought the tears to my eyes. “How soft-hearted I am this morning,” I said; “yet I will take this, and read it; it is quite a long time since I read any Shakespeare, and, I think, years and years since I have read Troilus and Cressida.” Yes, I was soft-hearted that morning, and when I looked in the glass and saw my puny deformed figure there, and my sallow thin face, eaten into many furrows by those five years, those furrows that gave a strange grotesque piteousness to the ugly features, I smiled at first, then almost wept for self-pity; the tears were in my eyes again; but I thought, “I will not spoil my holiday,” and so forbore; then I went out into the streets, with a certain kind of light-heartedness, which I knew might turn any moment into very deep sadness. The bells of a church, that I passed in my way Essex-ward, were ringing, and their music struck upon my heart so, that I walked the faster to get beyond their sound.

I was in the country soon: people called it an ugly country, I knew, that spreading of the broad marsh lands round the river Lea; but I was so weary with my hard work that it seemed very lovely to me then; indeed, I think I should not have despised it at any time. I was always a lover of the sad lowland country. I walked on, my mind keeping up a strange balance between joy and sadness for some time, till gradually all the beauty of things seemed to be stealing into my heart, and making me very soft and womanish, so that, at last, when I was now quite a long way off from the river Lea, and walking close by the side of another little river, a mere brook, all my heart was filled with sadness, and joy had no place there at all; all the songs of birds ringing through the hedges, and about the willows; all the sweet colours of the sky, and the clouds that floated in the blue of it; of the tender fresh grass, and the sweet young shoots of flowering things, were very pensive to me, pleasantly so at first perhaps, but soon they were lying heavy on me, with all the rest of things created; for, within my heart rose memory, green and fresh as the young spring leaves. Ah! such thoughts of the old times came about me thronging, that they almost made me faint. I tried hard to shake them off; I noticed every turn of the banks of the little brook, every ripple of its waters over the brown stones, every line of the broad-



leaved waterflowers; I went down towards the brook, and, stooping down, gathered a knot of lush marsh-marigolds; then, kneeling on both knees, bent over the water with my arm stretched down to it, till both my hand and the yellow flowers were making the swift-running little stream bubble about them; and, even as I did so, still stronger and stronger came the memories, till they came quite clear at last, those shapes and words of the past days. I rose from the water in haste, and, getting on to the road again, walked along tremblingly, my head bent toward the earth, my wet hand and flowers marking the dust of it as I went. Ah! what was it all, that picture of the old past days.

I see a little girl sitting on the grass, beneath the limes in the hot summer-tide, with eyes fixed on the far away blue hills, and seeing who knows what shapes there; for the boy by her side is reading to her wondrous stories of knight and lady, and fairy thing, that lived in the ancient days; his voice trembles as he reads—

“And so Sir Isumbras, when he had slain the giant, cut off his head, and came to the town where the lady Alicia lived, bringing with him that grim thing, the giant’s head, and the people pressed all about him at the gate, and brought him to the king, and all the court was there, and the whole palace blazed with gold and jewels. So there, among the ladies, was the Lady Alicia, clothed in black, because she thought that through her evil pride she had caused the death of the good knight and true, who loved her: and when she saw Sir Isumbras with the head of the giant, even before the king, and all, she gave a great cry, and ran before all, and threw her arms round about him.” “Go on, Hugh,” says the little girl, still looking into the blue distance, “why do you stop?” “I was—I was looking at the picture, Mabel,” says the boy. “Oh! is there a picture of that? let’s see it;” and her eyes turn towards him at last. What a very beautiful child she is! “Not exactly of that,” says Hugh, blushing as their eyes meet, and, when she looks away for a second, drawing his hand across his eyes, for he is softhearted, “not exactly of that, but afterwards, where she crowns him at the tournament; here it is.” “Oh! that is pretty though; Hugh, I say Hugh!” “Yes,” says Hugh. “Go and get me some of the forget-me-not down by the brook there, and some of the pretty white star-shaped flower; I’ll crown you too.” Off runs Hugh, directly, carrying the book with him. “Stop, don’t lose the place, Hugh; here, give me the book.” Back he goes, then starts again in a great hurry; the flowers are not easy to get, but they are got somehow; for, Hugh, though deformed, is yet tolerably active, and for her. So, when the flowers come, she weaves them into a crown, blue flowers golden-hearted, and white ones star-shaped, with the green leaves between them.

Then she makes him kneel down, and, looking at the picture in the fairy story-book, places him this way and that, with her smooth brows knit into a puzzled frown; at last she says, “It wont do somehow; I can’t make it out. I say, Hugh,” she blurts out at last, “I tell you what, it wont do; you are too ugly.” “Never mind, Mabel,” he says; “shall I go on reading again?” “Yes, you may go on.” Then she sits down; and again her eyes are fixed on the far-away blue hills, and Hugh is by her, reading again, only stumbling sometimes, seemingly not so much interested as he was before.

“Poor Hugh!” I said out loud, for strangely, the thing was so strong, that it had almost wrought its own cure; and I found myself looking at my old self, and at her, as at people in a story; yet I was stunned as it were, and knew well that I was incapable of



resistance against that memory now. Yes, I knew well what was coming.

I had by this time left the brook, and gone through a little village on the hill above, and on the other side of it; then turned to my right into the forest, that was all about, the quaint hornbeam forest. There, sitting down, I took out the Troilus and Cressida I had brought with me, and began to read, saying to myself (though I did not believe it) that I would cast those memories quite away from me, be triumphantly victorious over them.

Yes, there under the hornbeams I read Troilus and Cressida, the play with the two disappointments in it, Hector dead, and Cressida unfaithful; Troy and Troilus undone. And when I had finished, I thought no more of Troilus and Cressida, or of any one else in the wide world but Mabel.

“O Mabel!” I said, burying my face in the grass as I had before, long ago, in her long robes; “O Mabel! could you not have loved me? I would have loved you more than any woman was ever loved. Or if you could not love me, why did you speak as you did on that day? I thought you so much above me, Mabel; and yet I could not have spoken so to any one. O Mabel! how will it be between us when we are dead? O Lord! help me, help me! Is it coming over again?”

For as I lay there, I saw again, as clearly as years ago, the room in the old house at Riston, at the noontide of the warm sunny spring weather. The black oak panelling, carved so quaintly, all round the room, whereon, in the space of sunlight that, pouring through the window, lit up the shadowed wall, danced the shadows of the young lime-leaves; the great bay window, with its shattered stone mullions, round which the creepers clung; the rustling of the hard magnolia leaves in the fresh blast of the west wind; the garden, with its clusters of joyous golden daffodils under the acacia-trees, seen through the open window; and beyond that, rolling and flashing in the sun, between it long lines of willows and poplars, the mighty lowland river going to the sea.

And she sat there by the fire-place, where there was no fire burning now. She sat by the cold hearth, with her back to the window, her long hands laid on her knees, bending forward a little, as if she were striving to look through and through something that was far off—there she sat, with her heavy, rolling, purple hair, like a queen’s crown above her white temples, with her great slumbrously-passionate eyes, and her full lips underneath, whence the music came. Except that the wind moved a little some of the folds of her dress, she was as motionless and quiet as an old Egyptian statue, sitting out its many thousand years of utter rest, that it may the better ponder on its own greatness; more lifelessly far she looked than any one of the grey saints, that hang through rain, and wind, and sunshine, in the porches of the abbey which looks down on the low river waves.

And there was one watched her from near the door, a man with long arms, crooked shoulders, and pale, ugly-featured face, looking out from long, lank, black hair. Yes, his face is pale always; but now it is much paler than usual, as pale almost as the face of a dead man; you can almost hear his heart beat as he stands there; the cold sweat gathers on his brow. Presently he moves towards the lady; he stands before her with one hand raised, and resting on the mantel-shelf. You can see his arm trembling as he does this; he stands so while you might count twenty, she never looking up the while. Then, half choking, he says, “Mabel, I want to speak to you, if you please, for a moment;” and she looks round with a calm, unconcerned look at first; but presently a scornful smile begins to flicker about the corners of her mouth. Then that pale



man says, “Ah! I have told you all the rest before;” for he knew the meaning of the flickering smile—and that was five years ago.

And I shall never forget it while I live—never forget those words of hers—never forget a single line of her beautiful, cruel face, as she stood there five years ago. All the world may go by me now; I care not. I cannot work any more. I think I must have had some purpose in coming here; but I forget what it was. I will go back to London, and see if I can remember when I get there—so that day under the hornbeam trees I fell from my steady purpose of five years. I was vanquished then, once and for ever; there was no more fighting for me any more.

And have I ever forgotten it—that day, and the words she spoke? No, not for one moment. I have lived three years since then of bitter anguish. Every moment of that time has been utter pain and woe to me; that is what my life has been these three years. And what death may be like I cannot tell; I dare not even think for fear.

And I have fled from the world; no one of all my worshippers knows what has become of me, and the people with whom I live now, call me a man without a purpose, without a will.

Yes, I wonder what death would be like. The Eure is deep at Louviers I know—deep, and runs very swiftly towards the Seine, past the cloth mills.

Louviers! Louviers! What am I saying? Where am I? O Christ! I hold the sealed letter—Frank’s sealed letter, in my hand, the seal just broken. Five years! Eight years! It was but two hours ago that my head lay before her feet; yet I seem to have lived those eight years. Then I have not been famous; have not forgotten; never sat under the hornbeams by Chigwell; and she is sitting there, still perhaps in that same oak room.

How strange it is, fearfully strange, yet true; for here is Frank’s letter; here is his manuscript, the ink on it, brown through the years of toil and longing. There close by my side the great river is going to the sea, and the wind goes softly through the willow-boughs this sunny spring afternoon.

And now what shall I do? I know my will is strong, though I failed so in that dream I have awoke from. I know too, “That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.” Shall I wear this crown then while I live on earth, or forget, and be brave and strong? Ah! it must be a grand thing to be crowned; and if it cannot be with gold and jewels, or better still, with the river flowers, then must it be with thorns. Shall I wear this or cast it from me?



I hear the wind going through the willow-boughs; it seems to have a message for me.

“Good and true, faithful and brave, loving always, and crowned with all wisdom in the days gone by. He was all this and more. Trust your friend Hugh—your friend who loved you so, though you hardly knew it; wear the crown of memory.” Yes, I will wear it; and, O friend! you who sent me this dream of good and evil, help me, I pray you, for I know how bitter it will be. Yes, I will wear it, and then, though never forgetting Mabel, and the things that have been, I may be happy at some time or another.

Yet I cannot see now how that can ever come to pass.

Oh, Mabel! if you could only have loved me.

“Lord, keep my memory green.”

The past, it is written, ever explains to us the present; we feel this to be especially true of Oxford. Everything about us that we see or hear carries us back to far-off ages. Latin statutes, old-fashioned costume and names, the broad straight walks, Gothic buildings hoary or black with time, all speak of other days. We seem to live in the past. Some may even believe that the centuries have gone over us, and have left us unchanged. And yet what has been the fact? How many, I wonder, know that the Colleges which now constitute the University, once formed but an insignificant part of it, were only petty feudal states, as it were, in the vast kingdom of the University? It is, indeed, hard to realize the pictures of Oxford given



to us by Anthony à Wood, how “the old struggle between the Faculties of Medicine and Law concerning the pre-heminence again broke out;” how “in the time of Henry III. there were 30,000 students of twelve years old and upwards:” how the University course was prolonged to eight or ten years: how under Edward II., besides the Colleges, there were 300 halls or “hostelries;” and these were for those of the higher grade; for many lived in “obscure places in poor cabbins under the town wall; in the Turrets or Turrells of the said wall converted into lodging; and in Chambers over the common Gate that led into the town.” “It is well known,” says he elsewhere, “that the Professors accommodated the University at their first coming with such learning procured from externe parts, that in short time after it gave place to no academy throughout the learned world.” It is gone, that old University; the place thereof knoweth it no more. Can it in any part be revived? This may be a question worth thinking of.

Again, what was a mediæval college? Let the modern reader, if he can, conceive a monastery, a college, and an alms-house united into a single building, and governed by fixed laws, the bounty providing thin diet, shelter, and perhaps a yearly present of coarse clothing; the head a real ruler, the fellows obedient students, with suffrages on important occasions; all of them poor monks, who have renounced the world, and chosen Oxford for their recess; living two or three together in bare comfortless rooms, never leaving the city except for short periods, and with special licence; pacing soberly in hood and cowl the “studious walks and shades,” talking Latin at hall, or listening in silence to the reading of the Bible, spending most of their day in chapel services; for the rest making palimpsests, or illuminating manuscripts, or reading Aristotle and the Fathers. Thus did their still life pass away in prayer and study. Let no man laugh (it is very easy so to do) at these religious sages, thus writing palimpsests, and praying without ceasing: at their confounding religion with asceticism, reducing the fine arts to chaunting and illuminating manuscripts, at their ecclesiasticising everything. For myself I cannot but admire the manful simplicity of purpose in these old Founders. They had a distinct object before them—to establish an institution for religion and learning. How was this to be done? This was the question they honestly asked themselves; and we know the answer they found to it. Noble objects, I say, nobly wrought out. A highly civilized age, priding itself upon its representative governments, Sunday worshippings, and its thousand



and one charities, might not without profit perhaps cast a backward glance upon those dark and barbarous times, when the service of God was the end of life; no mere sentiment, still less a phantom, but a faith that fulfilled itself in works of charity to men; and in the wisest charity, that which makes man wiser and better. The works too, let it be marked, were neither casual nor desultory, but embodied in a vast system. Even the shadow that remains may strike us with awe. “Let our college,” we think we hear the old founder saying, as he sat amongst his architects and his counsellors, “be of solid stone, that it may withstand time and tempest; let it be beautiful and worthy; let it be self-sufficient in all things; let there be a library, where the students may store their minds with the knowledge of antiquity; a hall, where they may meet and live together; a chapel, where prayers may ‘rise up as a fountain day and night;’ let the constitution and statutes be binding for ever and ever.” But whether the design and the system seem to us in this nineteenth century small or great, it is certain how they were received at the time. Never since has Oxford been so great: legal privileges were granted to it, as the relaxation of the Statute of Mortmain, the liberty of self-government; Royal visits were frequent; state questions were referred to it; monks were raised into judges and diplomatists; the eyes of all England were turned to it as the seat of learning. Even present practical anachronisms bear witness to the once wide-spread influence of the Universities. The elaborate logic of the law, the disguise of medical prescriptions in Latin, the litigious character of theological works, even the rhetorical vein of parliamentary eloquence, point back to Oxford schools and schoolmen, to divinity disputations, to lectures on Aristotle, and to times when men believed and taught that rhetoric was the art of life.

Many outward aids, it is true, strengthened the position of Oxford towards the country. Oxford was the servant of the Church, which then had civil as well as spiritual authority, assumed to be the sole depository of all truth, and gave a religion to the entire nation. The wars rendered learning safe only near the shrine or the cloister. The art of printing had not yet scattered knowledge broadcast over the land: local grammar schools, inns of law, and schools of medicine, had hardly been established elsewhere. Thus Oxford naturally became a great centre of learning; it was felt to give as good an education as was then conceivable, and to satisfy all the known wants of the time. There was little or no need of progress. Romanism prohibited all enterprise of religious thought. Learning moved but slowly in that tumultuous period, and the rules of college life were fitted to the times, or where violated or impracticable, an annual absolution from the Pope wiped away the perjury. So then let us say, that down to the 16th century the University had a distinct history, and played a definite part. It was identified with the country at large, and kept alive in England a reverence both for religion and learning.

But a change was coming. Perhaps men were already restless under the imperious hand of Romanism, or were here and there stumbling upon new forms of knowledge, untaught at Oxford, when the tempest of the Reformation suddenly broke. Then, if ever, was there need of a great man to step forward and take the helm; for some one who inherited the forecast and constructive power of the ancient founders to fit Oxford for the change of times, a change which every year was to make greater and greater. But none did step forward; and Oxford stood, as it were, confounded by the suddenness of the blow, taking no thought of her new position. It was indeed quite altered. If her estates



were spared, while other religious houses were plundered, the Roman Catholic Church, the pillar on which she rested, had been cut away from under her. The Protestant Church, the prop to which she now clung, was as yet young and weak, instead of being ancient and strong; professed no infallibility; could give no absolutions for perjury; had no civil power; did not bind her to the whole nation, but only to a large portion, which must needs become smaller with every new schism, that, using the new-born right of private judgment, should spring into existence. It was clear that an exclusive connexion with the Established Church would in the course of time be a source of weakness, as it had been of strength; would separate her from, as it had bound her to, the country at large. The relation of Religion and learning evidently required speedy resettlement. Again, as to Learning itself, the spoliation of the Religious houses had deprived the University of Exhibitions, that hitherto had been the main support of poor students not housed in the Colleges. Finally, the great impulse and freedom given to individual thought by the Reformation, and the discovery of printing, pointed to a time not far distant, when learning should cease to be confined to the Church and to the Universities, but should flourish in every town in the land, and should extend its way to as yet unknown kingdoms of knowledge. A thousand rivals would soon be in the field, armed with new weapons as well as the old. Oxford, if she would hold her own, must make desperate and continuous efforts. If Progress was to be the order of the day, Oxford, though having a long start, must yet push on with all speed.

Such was the new world in which Oxford found herself, imposing the necessity of instant choice and action. But she chose, alas! the thoroughly unheroic part, or still more unheroically, she did not choose at all. Instead of rousing herself at the call, recognizing and providing for the present, and looking forward into the future, she sat still, her hands folded before her, submissive indeed, but doing nothing, understanding nothing. If forced to move, she moved; if left alone, she remained stationary. Henceforward to the end of the last century, Oxford has properly no history; becomes a thing unintelligible to us; nowhere is manifested in her any vital principle, any character, any purpose: the voice of duty and the significancies of experience are alike lost upon her; she has become the mere creature of necessity, lying, as it were, a log upon the sea of time, the sport of the winds and waves, drifting drifting on whither no man knows, least of all herself. As to religion, the change of masters was accomplished without any difficulty; the altars were pulled down, the masses silenced, recusants hunted out and expelled; and Oxford was declared Protestant. This work, in this workman-like manner, having been done, the University relapsed into slumber, and all things were allowed to go on as before. Two similar metamorphoses are accomplished with like ease on the passive subject under Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth; and from that time her religion and her rest have been undisturbed. Thus did Oxford receive the Reformed faith in apathy: with what consequences let us see. Oxford merely accepted a new creed—to repeat it, or enforce it to be repeated. Her spirit was not changed. It is not yet changed. To this day Oxford has not yet accepted the true message of the Reformation—“Let every man be sincere to himself, be tolerant to others.” The old spirit of Romanism, with all its evils and none of its justification, still survives in Oxford. Knowledge is still chilled by the shadow of ecclesiasticism; dictatorial orthodoxy and formulism is still upheld as genuine religion; reverence is still declared to consist in blind acceptance



rather than in obedience after honest inquiry.

As to Education, the story is the same. The non-attached students no longer receiving help from the religious houses, fell away; the University made no effort to keep them; the public Professors gradually lost their audiences; the offices and salaries survived. A happy relief for both University and Professors! “In the University of Oxford,” writes Adam Smith, at the end of the last century, “the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether the pretence of teaching.” The University curriculum, however, was not changed by the Reformation; so, of course the University volunteered none. Indeed, the question of adapting the education to the wants of the times has never since been raised. Edward VI., to be sure, sent down a new code of statutes; but these were never formally adopted, and soon fell into disuse. Then Laud came; a vigorous man, and in his way a true reformer; a man not to be trifled with; but he was a bigot, and blindly attached to the church system. He did just what all men might have expected him to do; invented nothing new or wise, but re-enacted the old system under severe penalties, and imitating its worst feature, gave it under his hand and seal a new patent of immortality. “The archbishop confirmed, approved, and ratified it for ever.” The course of study was to be for all seven years; for many, as much as nine or ten, interspersed with strict examinations. The history of these “immortal” statutes I shall here omit; my readers will perhaps think it sufficient to know their tragic beginning, and their comic euthanasia. I quote from the University Commission Report: “The exercise”, writes the President of St. John’s, about the new examination, A. D. 1639, “is passing solemn, and cannot but beget an extraordinary care in the actors on both sides to fit themselves for this awful trial.” One student committed suicide the day before he was to undergo Examination. . . . . And now for the close. In Hilary Term, February, 1770, “Mr. John Scott, of University College, (afterwards Lord Eldon) took his Bachelor’s degree. ‘An examination for a degree in Oxford,’ he used to say, ‘was a farce in my time. I was examined in Hebrew and in History. What is the Hebrew for the place of a skull?’ I replied, ‘Golgotha.’ ‘Who founded University College?’ I stated (though, by the way, the point is sometimes doubted) that King Alfred founded it. ‘Very well, Sir,’ said the Examiner, ‘you are competent for your degree’. . . . . . . At this time the Examiners were chosen by the candidate himself from among his friends, and he was expected to provide a dinner for them after the examination was over.” With this let the curtain drop upon the University.

Let us now turn to the Colleges. Though each has a history of its own, yet, for our purpose, they may be all dealt with together. These, too, the Reformation changed far more radically than could be judged by its immediate effect. Henry VIII., with his rough hand, purged them of Romanists and Romanism in the same manner, and at the same time, as he had purged the University. But the ancient form of colleges was incompatible with Protestantism. Up to this time, colleges had been, 1stly, religious houses, 2ndly, of an eleemosynary character, 3rdly, permanent places of residence and study. With the fall of monasticism all these features disappeared. Colleges ceased to be dedicated to religion, or to have any special connexion with the Church, beyond holding patronage and continuing daily (Protestant) service in the chapel. Fellows were no longer bound to renounce the world and the good things thereof; and these last soon fell to their lot by



the rise of the value of land. Formerly the estates had yielded but a scanty pittance, now they brought in a handsome income. Besides, when poverty ceased to be gilded with sanctity, it was natural for the college to elect gentlemen, cleanliness and good manners being, cæteris paribus, then as now, preferable to their opposites; and thus, as soon as the University was merged in the Colleges, it became addicted to the Upper Classes. Had the colleges remained as they were founded, for poor men and religious men, I suspect they would have melted their plate, not for King Charles and his handsome cavaliers, but for Colonel Cromwell and his devout Ironsides. Lastly all reasons for residence were taken away; there were no masses requiring a chorus of chaunting monks; one reader sufficed for the plain Protestant service; a recluse life of study was held a Popish delusion; and so, by an easy transition, the poor hard-working monk, living his life in Oxford and never leaving it without licence, soon passed into a do-nothing fellow, with £200 a-year in his pocket, and leave to roam over the world.

Such were the consequences of the Reformation upon the Colleges. A statesman might perhaps have foreseen them; a practical man would have dealt with them as they came up; no honest man could have ignored them. But what did the Colleges do? Nothing. For were they not under Medic and Persian laws? Had they not sworn “on the Holy Gospels” to maintain their Statutes inviolable? This being their position, no man need trouble himself about their history: we hasten on to the end.

Let us suppose at the close of last century a foreigner entering Oxford for the first time: he stands gazing at the grey fronts of our colleges, following with his eye “the stream-like winding of our glorious street;” or admiring the sturdy muniment towers guarding as of yore the sacred archives. He thinks with reverence of the great Englishmen of olden time; the work of their hands seems to him imperishable fidelity. Not less so are the words of their mouth;—he hears that the statutes dictated by the founder are still law, that the colleges loyally swear to them and ‘keep them with an equal mind.’ He reverences still more the distant forecast of those men of olden time, the pious fidelity of after generations. He recognizes and salutes, as it were, the presence of an aged father still in the midst of his children and guiding them with his hand. But what if he were to enter within the precincts, and there, deciphering the “musty parchments,” look with his own eyes upon the inner life? He would find many of the old forms,—constitutions, offices, customs, oaths,—but now forms only, or hurtful anachronisms,—for the rest a complete change; religious institutions secularized, resident students turned into non-residents, or calling themselves teachers; what was meant for the shelter of the poor used for the enrichment of the rich; the ascetic monk succeeded by the luxurious fellow. Worse changes than these; Scholarships and Fellowships given away without regard to competence, or for baser reasons; Professorships falling obsolete, or surviving as sinecures; whole colleges ceasing to be educational. Our foreigner, seeing this, would turn away from Oxford as from a sepulchre, noble indeed to outward view and raised over noble departed ones, but now only haunted with obscene spectres, and full of all the impurities of decay. The upshot of all this is to be remarked; the founder’s statutes, though sworn to ‘on the Holy Gospels,’ though preserved inviolable on parchment (except when botched by Visitorial injunctions), were not observed, not observed either in form or spirit. The colleges were not what the founders had meant them to be,—far other than that. And yet there had been no revolution, no positive legislation,



no symptom, in fact, of any human activity whatever. Time had effected all this; Time with its silent force, both creative and destructive. If a man reflect on this, he will find the scene truly mournful. The founder’s bounty had become a curse. For imagine an honest, vigorous man under these circumstances elected a fellow of a college. He lives in the eighteenth century under rules for the fifteenth; is forbidden by oaths to move, is pushed on by the advance of modern life; sees custom enervate, encroach, yet pretends not to see it; now blindly clings to the letter of the law, valuing benefices by the King’s books, and maintaining Celibacy for new reasons; now tries in vain to justify himself by the statutes, stretching or narrowing their meaning, construing “pauperes et indigentes” as those who more than others want £200 a year, confining the property disqualifications for a fellowship to ecclesiastical benefices and real property; witnesses obnoxious rules pass away, the subordinates evading, the authorities winking; watches offices yearly accomplish less and less, flickering, expiring; above all, he must look on without putting forth a finger to help matters: he has sworn to attempt no change; when he entered the door he left hope behind. But then perhaps he can reconcile himself to his lot. Is he not comfortably housed? Does he not receive some £200 sterling into his pocket? A lot that seemed perhaps to the angels as pitiful as any they looked upon in this earth. A man’s stomach fully victualled, his conscience and reason ordered by law to lie inactive!—No wonder learning did not thrive, if learning has ought to do with development of soul; if not learning, still less was there any other human virtue. How could such a man be sincere, when he had daily to shut his eyes to facts, and call things by their wrong names? How could he be earnest, if condemned to be neutral in man’s life-struggle against evil and for good? He became full of selfishness. It broke out in the hateful doctrine that fellowships are not public trusts, but private property. But the extreme penalty; this was judicial blindness. Such an one learnt to feel the material, not the moral, necessities of the times; to put orthodoxy for religion, pedantry for knowledge; to love darkness rather than light; to oppose all reforms, whether from within or from Parliament without.

I would not judge these ruling bodies of the colleges harshly. I readily confess that they meant to do no harm, but rather to be faithful; that they were overpowered by circumstances, and had visited on them not only their own sins but their fathers’ also. They were best forgotten, were not their history needful for us to remember, now that we are on the eve of organic changes in the University. What then was their crime? They misunderstood System. Order, let us say, is the peculiar work of man: he is born to be lord over all, and then only fulfils his mission, when his mind is victorious over matter. Each of us in his own lesser or greater world has to reduce Chaos into Kosmos. Now suppose a man looking at the circumstances that environ him, and discerning the true end to be striven for: he organizes a means to it: this is a true system: it impresses order upon things, it accomplishes the purpose of his mind: here Art subserves Nature; here one has a beautiful harmony of freedom and law. But supposing the end attained, or the circumstances changing; how then? Let him modify it to suit the end; let him reject the system, as salt that has lost its savour, and invent a new one as best he may; thereby alone can he himself remain a free man, and can order be perpetuated. Let him keep it, and from a good servant it becomes a bad master: there is now no more order, but only Chaos calling itself order: the man sinks into a slave: at first a passive obedient slave; anon, his mind



stirring, his fidelity wavers, becomes treacherous, rebels. Unfortunately this is no rare occurrence; systems tend to live too long. Statesmen are less modest than Solon, and would fain be perpetual law-givers. Not all “glorious” constitutions can claim for their wisest law, that one, that no law shall be irrevocable. Besides the mass of men cling to system: they love the logical harmony, and the seeming order of it: they are not sorry to be saved the trouble of settling things for themselves. Long ago did Bacon sneer at the “mera Sequacitas” of humanity. But further, can any system be perpetual? No; the world rolls round and brings changes; we live and learn. The needs of the time alter; the aspirations of men are raised: system must be squared with these, and the sooner the better. It will have to be done at last. It is in vain to declare the system immortal, or to pray with the Spaniard for his royal master, that it may live for ever, or even for 1,000 years. Death is inexorable with systems as with men. It knocks at the door of the palace as of the cottage. Every day customs have passed away. Feudalism too has passed away. The Roman Church in England has passed away: so too will all outward Churches, and give place to new. It is a false sentiment that would seek to perpetuate systems that have done their work. We may be thankful that the old order does change; else “one good custom might corrupt the world.” Under an effete system a man might abate his industry, and his continual endeavours after better things. He might cease to ask himself the one needful question, “What is my work here to do?” Yes! there is a higher than system—Duty. “Woe be to him to whom that word has lost its meaning!” The Jesuit spoke truly: there can be a noble casuistry of life. Allegiance to kings, promises to friends, oaths to founders, are as nothing when weighed with a solemn sense of personal responsibility to God.

It is thus I read the history of the University. It was a noble system when ushered into the world, accomplished its work, and was honoured accordingly. Times changed, but the system was retained; and thenceforward there was nothing but evil; the old system was not observed, because it could not be; and the new wants that sprung up were not provided for, because there was no new organization. Oxford suffered at once from having an effete system, and having no system at all.

I chose the close of the 18th century as a landmark, not because evil then ceased, (would to Heaven it had!) but because good then first declared itself. Copleston and Whately, men of energy, came, woke up the University from its sleep, established effective public examinations, and once more made Oxford a place of industry. Since then there has been a constant progress; a higher class of men have been chosen for Professors; the strict system of classical scholarship and Aristotle’s text has been relaxed to let in Philosophy and Thought; and Modern History, Law and Natural Science have at last been recognized, and with the happiest result. All this is excellent; and let us hail it as a promise of still further progress. The Colleges too have become more active bodies; and for this change all friends of Oxford should bless the memory of the late Master of Balliol. To that college he was as a founder, and more than a founder, if a life-offering is a better sacrifice than a death-bed bequest, and to breathe the breath of life into the dry bones of a society, a nobler work than to be the builder of chapels and colleges. He indeed must be a great Benefactor, who restores one College to Education. But this would give a small idea of what Jenkyns did for the



University. He showed what are the true conditions of success to a college, and what one bold, single-minded and patient man can do. “Everything should go by merit.” This was his simple canon: so able men were chosen as scholars, the able scholars became able tutors, and under him conscientious too; and the pupils catching the same spirit from him and them, and passing from Balliol elsewhere, have communicated it to the University. To him, if to one man, we owe the present Commission. Indirectly, indeed: he himself may have been opposed to strangers intruding into the vineyard wherein he had laboured so long and so faithfully, and may have charitably believed that others of themselves might do as he had done. But it was his influence passing from him to others, and gaining strength in its course, that at last induced Parliament to help us, when we refused to help ourselves.

And now the Gaul is within our gates; the Commission has come. The appointment of it, was it not a declaration of University bankruptcy? Not that the funds are expended—far from it; but that the credit is gone: so now the creditors (the British Public) had better state their grievances, and each college must in turn come up and render its accounts, and be duly whitewashed,—then dismissed with a first, a second or third class certificate, as the case may be. This work will naturally be of the Augæan kind; the clearance of evils, which have accumulated during centuries. To abolish sinecures, to burn the lumber of old statutes, to open close fellowships and scholarships, to secure an open field and no favour, to set free over-ecclesiasticized foundations, to stop the ruinous system of college leases, this, and much beside, the Commissioners, stopping their ears to all excuses of Founder’s wills, old custom, &c. will have to do, even if it be necessary for the purpose to turn the Isis and Cherwell through the colleges. But, on the present occasion, let us pass on; let us leave the Commissioners to pry into each nook and corner, to drive out the evil spirit, and to sweep and garnish the place respectably. Suppose the work done, and the time (happily now not inconceivable) come, when all Professors give lectures, all heads of houses are Abbot Sampsons, all Fellows chosen by merit, all Estates let at rack-rent, &c. &c.; is the work of Reform over? Will the Millennium for the University have come? Shall the great months then begin to roll? Alas! no. The real difficulty then only begins. To say that there is no absurd waste of funds, or mismanagement of property, no jobbery, no sinecurism in a University, is to say very little indeed for it. Remember what Oxford was once—a National place of Religion and Learning. Whether it is that now—and if not, how it can be made so; these are questions that demand an answer, but require some previous review of the actual position of Oxford.

How does the University stand with the country? Any place of public Education ought to be interesting; but, above all others, Oxford, considering her revenues and libraries and privileges, her high professions, her splendid connexions and ancient name. And yet it must be confessed England has but little faith or interest in Oxford. The question of Oxford Reform has been long before the public; but it was and is impossible to raise any general enthusiasm on the subject: people seem not to know, and not to care to know, about it. The matter is settled in the House of Commons—as a provincial question of some magnitude—the interested parties alone contend, viz., sons of Alma Mater, others striking in where general principles or party objects are touched upon. The fact of this estrangement from the country at large is but too clear; the reason of it will be found,



I think, in Oxford having made exclusive alliance with Institutions, most noble indeed, but still constituting only parts of the nation. I speak of her connexion with the Church and the Aristocracy.

As to the Church, she is the depository of large patronage, and is one of the two great seminaries of the Clergy. On this matter we know the serene faith of one Oxford dignitary in the position of Oxford. “Look up,” he is reported to have said to a foreigner, as he pointed out to him St. Mary’s spire; “that is St. Mary’s. That is the University Church. Don’t you know that England has been the salvation of Europe? the Church the salvation of England? Oxford the salvation of the Church?” He should have added, “and the Dons the salvation of Oxford.” Whether the country would endorse either the premises or the conclusion of this Oxford sorites, is perhaps doubtful. However, it is certain that a Church connexion is not now what it once was. Human minds, and English minds in particular, have undergone a revolution with regard to Ecclesiasticism. To be bound up with the Established Church was once to be bound up with the whole nation; is now to be separated from one-half of it, and, if we are to believe the census, an increasing half; to profess to have all truth, and to repress the speculation of others was the pride and duty of a priest, it is now his reproach; monasticism once cast a saintly halo round the head of the priest; the semi-monasticism which now remains is but a mist hiding the shepherd from his flock. Nor is the Church interest in favour of the progressive views of the nineteenth century. It checks a spirit of inquiry, declares that irreverent, which is felt to be the highest form of reverence. It thwarts practical reforms. Had we followed those who “rallied” round the Church, we might have had no Catholic Emancipation Bill, no Jew Bill, no Sunday Bill, no Ecclesiastical Reform, perhaps not even an Educational Bill on a narrow Church basis. Anglicanism, the culminating point of Protestant Ecclesiasticism, has not helped the case: it has done well so far as it has reunited things holy and things beautiful, and has been accepted: but the attempt to revive antique formalism and the reign of authority, has only weakened that which it meant to strengthen. Altogether indeed the nation, especially the more thoughtful part of it, seems slowly moving away, leaving the Church behind it. Oxford therefore, bound up as she is with the Church, is equally estranged, and more so; for she is held in part responsible for the Church. What the Clergy have preached and done abroad, they have learnt in Oxford.

The connection of the University with the Aristocracy is more obviously an exclusive one. Now-a-days a degree can hardly be taken under £600. Every undergraduate is a gentleman. It was not so once. In early times there was room at Oxford both for rich and poor. Edward the Black Prince and Wickliff met together at Queen’s. That the University should be solely for the rich is a theory of modern times, fruitful of many evils; amongst others, of an estrangement between the two classes, and of the detestable notion that the poor need no education, and are better without it:—a theory very much out of place in this century, when Social questions and Universal Education are perhaps the two uppermost thoughts with statesmen.

But the nation might well forget that Oxford is not Catholic in its associations, could they identify it with what is really greatest. Unfortunately they cannot. They compare it with other Universities. “Cambridge,” say they, “turns out good men of business, and mathematics produce physical discoverers. German students live in the clouds, and solve, or try to solve, universe-problems. But Oxford,



what is it? It is neither a workshop, nor yet a ϕροντιστήριον. The Education there is something unique; men there seem to live tolerably unconscious of a spiritual world above them, or of a very practical world outside them.” Truly the world is not far wrong in this its supposition. As it was said in the times of the Inquisition, that all valuable literature was to be sought for in the Index Expurgatorius, so what is most prized as education is certainly not taught in Oxford. Take the most spiritual kind of knowledge, just that in which England is most wanting, and which a University should specially supply. What of poetry, or philosophy, do we find in Oxford? Indeed, we find Oxford rather shy of the great writers, as Mill and Carlyle, who are shaping the thoughts of the present generation. The fine Arts, wherein Truth appears in its most loveable aspect, where are they? Mr. Ruskin says, bitterly, that only they who have had the blessing of a bad education can be expected to know anything of painting. Certainly Oxford must bear a large share of the shame that in England the fine Arts are considered only as “accomplishments” for ladies, and Artists are held to follow only a superior trade. Natural Science, too, how has that fared? Excellent professors have been chosen, but, being unsupported by the University, have produced little fruit. Or, again, take the more practical part of Education, which, as a practical nation, the English have a right to expect of us, I mean that relative to the professions. How does Oxford stand to the world in this? It simply gives no special training whatever for them. Even the general education seems not to be satisfactory. The best physicians do not come from Oxford. In the law we are not nearly so successful as our Cambridge friends. As to politics, we have produced Sir R. Peel and Mr. Gladstone, both of whom, especially the latter, may be said to have been made at Oxford. But yet, Mr. Bright’s experience of us is, ‘that Oxford is the seat of the dead languages and undying prejudices.’

But if the mass of the nation be estranged from Oxford, it is not so with the members of the University. The philosopher may regard a privileged class with calmness, even though as a philanthropist he be impatient of false distinctions between man and man. The excluded ones may regard it with envy, leavened with a sense of injustice; but the member of the class feels a natural pride in it. Whatever the University is, to the Oxford man it is his own. There have been passed three years of his span of life; there he first tasted of manhood; there, perhaps, Tennyson-like, he has made the friends of his life. Whatever associations Oxford possesses with history, with men, with the great institutions of the Aristocracy and the Church, on him, too, as on her son, is the glory of them, however faintly, reflected. He, too, honest pride may whisper, has been educated amongst those who have gone forth to be the spiritual teachers of the English nation, and has lived in the presence of some of the best blood of England, with those who are now before the eyes of the world, in Parliament, in the Professions, or, as giving laws to little rural empires of their own. And then, too, he knows the place; he knows Oxford. No one but he who has lived under the shadow of what still remains to us of the University system, can conceive how mighty must that Structure have been in olden times. Such an one may remember the public Instruction, the Spartan-like συσσίτια, the Common prayers in the Chapel daily; He still has sounding in his ear those never-silent melodious bells that marked the duties of every day, and commemorated festivals and fasts, Saints and Scholars. He remembers—or his infant’s favourite picture-book may remind him of—the antique University uniforms, those



strange figures, the Scholar with his swelling sleeves, the shorn Commoner, the Doctor, the Scarlet man, flaunting in “the High” ‘cum bis ter ulnarum togâ.’ He sees before him the trim grass plots trod by no profane foot; the stiff and stately broad walks; the colleges, by their very front declaring themselves self-complete and autonomous, each guarded by its tower and the Cerberus thereof; each sanctified by its Chapel, and standing “foursquare to all the winds that blow.’ All these familiar sights and sounds impress him with the majesty of that ancient and all-penetrating Order, which is the yet more striking because standing side by side with fresh and laughing young life.

If you ask an Oxford man what he got best from Oxford, “Society to be sure,” he will say, and I believe say truly. Certainly, in the last century, there was little else to get. We must needs then look into this Oxford Society. And first, a Philosopher, addicted to construct on paper ideal Societies, might observe that this Oxford society is an imperfect one. In it he finds no womankind and their household affections; no poor to call out tender pity and wise helpfulness for the sufferings of life; no faithful elders to be companions and counsellors to the young; the undergraduates live in a world of their own; and each undergraduate lives for himself: though this last the Professor might remark is a necessary condition of all University life—Is it not himself that a man comes to educate? However, leaving our learned professor to his lucubrations, let us descend to fact. Everybody says that they are happy at Oxford. Why so? For several reasons, I fancy; partly because Oxford, with its Sports, Rooms, Independence, Society, Friends, &c, ought to be the happiest place under the Sun; partly because men between eighteen and twenty-one cannot help being happy; partly, too, because everybody else say they are happy. Many men, I know, have spent the happiest years of their life at Oxford; but they have been men, either possessing the rare gift of unconsciousness of self, or else who have lived a life independent of society, having been thrown by kind fortune or wise choice into a congenial set, or having sought for “perennial fire-proof enjoyments,” viz. work in their own rooms, which an Oxford man, more perhaps than any other Englishman, feels to be his castle. I speak not of these, but rather of the mass of men, who come up to the University with no set purpose, but simply to take the place as they find it; and I wish to know whether the tendency of society is to place them in their right position, where the indestructible happiness of youth will find full scope for enjoyment. But, at the outset, I must warn my reader not to measure happiness by the number of enjoyable things, (else Oxford, with its furniture of pleasures, were indeed perfect,) but rather to place it in a healthy sense of satisfaction of the whole man. On the present occasion I wish to judge Oxford simply by this standard; Is it happy or not? Perhaps every man may be happy; certainly young men should be. If a man finds ‘the world bitter at twenty-five,’ something must be wrong somewhere. So far as Oxford society is really enjoyable, I know it must be healthy; and, moreover, be giving the best of all educations. Oxford will have done her duty, as often as she send out one of her sons into the world, gay, hopeful, and of wide sympathy, as a bridegroom out of his chamber, rejoicing as a (young) giant to run his course. So then, I say, if Oxford is to be the seat of the Muses, let her also be the seat of the Sports. Nothing can ever spoil them. The New Racket court I salute; may its shadow never grow less! May future sons of Alma Mater have their scurries with the Drag on runaway hacks! bravely mount their Pink at Bradwell Grove, and do credit to their cloth ere



the day be done! May they, too, have their days on Magdalen, their College triumphs at the Gut, their Royal Tennis-battles!

• “Et nos aliquando lusimus horam,
• Nec lusisse piget.”

But Life, unfortunately (or fortunately) cannot be made up of Sports. “The German Bursch,” writes a modern author, “strives to say, in the strongest language he can, ‘See, I am an unmoneyed scholar and a free man.’ The Oxonian and the Cantab again endeavour to say, ‘See, I am a moneyed man and a spirited gentleman!’ ” Who is there that does not recognize this picture? The truth is, Oxford Society is Aristocratical: it is a microcosm of London fashionable world, minus the ladies and old gentlemen, and with this addition, that you can’t get out of it. An Oxford man looks upon his University career chiefly as having given him a Social degree, as having put upon him the “guinea-stamp” of gentleman. No one will deny that there is much good to be got out of such society. There is, as within all Aristocratical bodies, a certain seeming equality, which is very pleasing—a gentleman is a gentleman. Such society certainly breeds courtesy, it “mollifies our manners, and forbids us to be fierce,” and, best of all, it keeps from our eyes all things sordid. In short we may say that Oxford, in three years, and at the prime cost of some six hundred guineas, does manufacture the article which the world asks for under the name of “gentleman.” Nor, Christianity apart, can we deny that there is something very majestic and imposing in the grand old gentleman of the old school, who appears in Aristotle under the title of μεγαλόψυχος. But black care sits behind the gorgeous knight. Nowhere does Public opinion seem to me more tyrannical than at Oxford. Perhaps it may be more so at School; but there it is the tyranny of a healthy naturalism, ignorant of better things. At Oxford it is an Aristocratic spirit, natural only to a few, and resolved, right or wrong, to be in the first place. It is present everywhere; in college it looks at you from the windows; it follows you into the street; it even comes up into your room. Nothing is too high or too low for its observation; it settles that you shall have tight boots and worse than military collars; it chooses for you whether or not you shall be a reading man, and perhaps even a religious man. An Oxford Undergraduate, does he not live as it were in a French drawing-room, hung all round with mirrors, eyes behind every curtain, and gossipping tongues in every corner? Nowhere is a man so self-conscious. Do you doubt it? Then look, pray, at yonder Freshman: you would not think he is a poor clergyman’s son, and at bottom a mild, modest individual, so unexceptionably is he “got up” for the market. Mark his eyes; they are now cast down upon his sportingly-capped boots, presently, however, they will look up surreptitiously at you, to see if you too are looking at them—ah! there they go! and immediately they fall again. Or follow him further: he meets a grandee he knows at home (perhaps the son of the squire in the village): “Will he choose to know me or not?” thinks he to himself as they approach; “Shall I speak to him?” He hesitates, half raises his eyes as if going to speak, then passes sheepishly by. His grandee friend looks on with a cold stare; he knows him perfectly well, but at that moment he was walking with——a still greater grandee than himself. Thank God, this is not the rule at Oxford; but such occurrences are but too familiar to us. I myself know of one instance, in which two school friends went to different colleges, and finding their new world rather desolate, were much together in their first term as Freshmen: in the second, one came to the other, and half-sorrowfully bade him good bye, saying, that his college did not approve of out-



college acquaintances. The evil of this spirit is very much increased by the Oxford system of small colleges. These small colleges acquire a narrow character, either sectarian, or Alsatian, or aristocratic, or otherwise; which is maintained by an esprit de corps, and which transmits itself, or is thought to transmit itself to each of its members; and so men learn to judge of others and even of themselves by their college. “Oxford men talk to me,” said a lady once, laughing, to a friend of mine, “as if I should think better or worse of them according as they came from one college or another!” Besides, in a narrow circle there is so much less independence of life; the public surveillance is closer, the contagion of this aristocratic spirit stronger. This last of course, by its nature, domineers, and has for its motto, “He that is not with me is against me. A milder man has either to join in it or submit to it; escape from it he cannot: he is jostled against it a hundred times a day—in hall, at lecture, in “Quad,” or in the High. In a large college he might perhaps find congenial friends who would make a joint stand, or at least he might remain unknown, as ships course safely in the open sea, but in the narrow channel founder on rocks, or dash against each other. Few will deny that Oxford life is an artificial one. Almost every one squares himself to one standard, and that a high one: £200 a year is a deep drain on the purse of most fathers. But it does not stop here: there is every temptation to go beyond it; you feel every outlay of capital purchases you a step in society. Men are not content to be gentlemen, they must needs be fine gentlemen; and so it is to this Aristocratical spirit that we must attribute the greater part of defleta parentibus, Oxford extravagances. But extravagance seems to me one of the lightest of the evils: this influence of society makes so many men play parts. The life of many is accommodated neither to their means nor likings. Poor men do not like to confess themselves poor: some pray to be saved from their friends, those who are not presentable; others become fast for an object, viz., that they may get on in society. How often have I heard certain fast men denouncing dons as “stuck up” unnatural men, and thought they will one day look for the mote in their own eye! These same men sometimes know all along that they are leading false lives, but cannot free themselves because they dare not strike the blow; or if they do not know it already, they will find it out very soon. Have you never compared a bachelor with an undergraduate? There is a difference between them that no difference of age can account for: one is sensitive, and self-conscious; the other far happier, and more natural, walking as it were in the calm upper air. Still more remarkable is the sudden change that often overtakes a man on leaving the University. A few months, and even less, and he is an altered man. It would seem that with his gown he had put on a false character, and in putting off one he had also put off the other. Now, so far as this Society extends (and how far it does I leave to each of my Oxford readers to judge for himself by his own experience), can it be otherwise than unhappy? A Society that forces each of its members to be, from the beginning, over-circumspect in his ways, seems to me to turn him out of the best course of enjoyment, I mean the course whither Nature leads him. A false man is always uncomfortable. Him that would ape grandeur, and wear peacock’s feathers, let no man call happy: he is an impostor, and ever trembles for the hour of exposure, and we would here advise him, as he values his own comfort, to drop the peacock’s feathers before the world pluck them out. But the genuine aristocrat—he whose birth and wealth seem to entitle him to be aristocratic—he affects to be only what he is—how



can he be leading a false life? And yet, alas! he too is false—false to his own better self. Is there not reason within him, whereby he can look into a man and judge of him? Has he not a heart too under that gold-buttoned waistcoat, naturally flowing forth in sympathy towards others? But here we find him, systematically judging men by other standards than reason, by their dress, manner, birth, and even college; and consenting to shut up his sympathy, save to unexceptionable persons, because, forsooth! society says it is infra dig. to make himself too common! This aristocratical spirit seems to me to frustrate its own objects: it seeks to purify society, it really poisons it: it would help men to enjoy life, it cuts them off from a thousand pleasures of sympathy; it would make true gentlemen, brave men respecting themselves and others, and instead of that it produces men who are afraid of society, looking down upon others and secretly despising themselves for so doing. Besides, whatever educational power is in society, is thus clearly nullified. Where a man is not a free agent he gets no practice in choosing and acting for himself; not only is his circle of acquaintance with humanity narrowed, but there is instilled into him a false canon of judging men, viz., to look at superficial points, and these not with a brother’s eye. Such a man, let him look ever so long, will never see beyond skin-deep, and loses his best chance of gaining the best gift that Oxford can give—friends. Finally, we must say Oxford is the last place under the sun where this spirit should live: for youth, and especially English youth, is naturally frank and truthful. It is to a place of education that we look to raise men’s views above Beau Brummellism, or the fear of society, or other prejudices that can be excused in the vulgar, and to instil into them the duty of self-cultivation and true judgment of others.

I have dwelt long on this subject of Society for two reasons. First, I am sure it is more leavened with the aristocratical spirit than most of us are aware. Few will deny, that it is the ruling spirit in the leading colleges of Oxford; but my readers, who are not conscious of being themselves either aristocrats or flunkeys, may perhaps feel indignant at these remarks, think them unjust, or at least that they do not concern them. Let them not be too sure. It is a mistake to suppose the evils of aristocracy lie only in toadying or being toadied; they lie much deeper and wider than this. The sum of them is, that the true thoughts of the individual, whether consciously or not, are lowered to the standard of the world-conventionalities. They show themselves, in a thousand forms, in studied manners, in deference to others, in aversion to quiet home life, in repugnance to work, in false judgments of men and professions, and life in general; in short, in all the idola of the beau monde. It is just these which Oxford should extinguish in us, and which, I believe, she especially fosters. Secondly, Oxford education seems to lie almost wholly in the society of the place. For as to Religion and Learning, the objects of our pious benefactors, and for which we thank God every Sunday at St. Mary’s, these, let it be confessed with all shame, seem to fade away before us as we look at them more closely.

Where might a parent hope for his son to become religious, if not in Oxford, the city of churches, ruled by clergymen, filled with embryo clergymen? But with the son it will be otherwise. Of Divinity he will find little or none; the school divinity proving a modicum of names, places, texts, and articles to be learnt by heart; and the public lectures being chiefly valued as a required qualification for Orders. If the young man is no better than his neighbour, he will attend College Chapel as he attends a lecture, because he must; but, unless specially desired



by his father so to do, he will show himself a “parcus cultor” at St. Mary’s, where he has to sit on backless benches through learned homilies or epideictic harangues called sermons, listened to chiefly by the regular professional attendants, heads of Houses, respectable College Tutors, and—bulldogs. He will find, if I mistake not, this punctilious worship to be no index of dutiful every-day lives, and all this church-going and chapel-going, to produce few working Heads of Houses, few largely conscientious tutors. He will find Church parties, High Church and Low Church, vigorously contending against each other, but ready to combine to prefer Sabbatarian petitions, or protests against admission of Dissenters; or to cast out from Oxford, on a charge of heresy, her best tutor and her best divine. The present writer well knows that there are many truly religious men in Oxford, and more that believe themselves to be such; but it is his opinion that, except in form, Oxford is not more religious than any well-ordered family or country town in England; and that, as things go, the religion which a student is likely to gather from Oxford (if he gathers any) will probably be of that kind which is least creditable to a place of Education, viz. the unthoughtful or unfruitful kind.

Then as to learning; if we speak truly, the amount gained in statu pupillari is very small. All of us, whether idle or reading men, read too much with an eye to the schools; the idle to get their testamur and Bachelor’s gown; the more ambitious to get Kudos, first Classes and Fellowships. The first of these (as all the world knows) may take credit for being able inter alia to construe certain Latin and Greek books without gross blunders; to solve simple equations, and in divinity to know Pauline journeys, Herod pedigrees, &c. These we may part company with in the words of an old chronicler: “Oxoniam veniunt multi, redeunt quoque stulti.” The select few read very hard, perhaps too hard, make themselves good scholars, and gain a smattering of Ancient History and Philosophy; and better than all, habits of industry. Some of this learning is, I fear, of the genus, “cram;” but of this elsewhere. Here I do not wish to criticise hardly either the quantity or quality of these attainments; we must not expect the fruit of any three years’ work, especially of these three, to be very considerable. The question is, how far they thus acquire a love of knowledge, a belief in it. Some I know do: especially since the establishment of the New Schools and under the abler tutors: but the mass? Let us look to the after-piece. The toga virilis assumed, the B.A., whether Passman or classman (unless retained for College Service or by private pupils), holds his Education completed; he packs up his books to adorn his shelves, or sells them cheap to Abrahams; thinks now there is nothing more to be learnt but his profession, and maybe a dash of politics, and thereupon rushes into life. Many go away with the vulgar notion that a literary man is probably “mild,” certainly of less importance to the world than a man with title or money. These have to undeceive themselves hereafter, or perhaps never do that, but go and beget children to bear their father’s name and hold their father’s sentiments. Few return to their books as to old and tried friends; still fewer leave the place with any love for literature, any conception of the relation of knowledge to man or its function in the world, with any belief that their Education has only begun, and must never cease but with their lives. Oxford fails altogether here. If a University does not teach her sons to honour wisdom, how little has she done! General cultivation or mind-work is indeed now (but only lately) recognized in the schools, but even there it is swamped by book-work. The Colleges at Fellowship Examinations are more liberal patrons,



especially Oriel, which has had its reward in Arnold and Whately and other great men, and in the public belief that a fellow of that college is a man of power. For this help, such as it is, let the student be duly thankful, hopeful, too, that every year more and more will be vouchsafed to him. At present, certainly, no Dr. Dryasdust need fear literary taste being forced on too quickly in the hot-bed of University Patronage. What there is of it in Oxford, let us say, seems mostly to have been gathered by the wayside, or here and there to have been planted in little garden-plots by loving, unofficial hands: knowledge, desultory indeed and shapeless (there being no wise head gardener), but healthy and genuine. An undergraduate’s opinions, and still more his beliefs, have they not been formed by the fireside, in the Union Library, in the chances of daily intercourse? Perhaps my reader may bethink him of sundry evenings devoted to pipes and philosophy, or of midnight hours spent in the company of Tennyson or Ruskin, his spiritual teachers, or of the Sabbath journey over breezy Shotover, and a walking controversy upon Carlyle and Macaulay, or the last number of the Newcomes. Or again, what are Union Societies debating whether “Cromwell was the greatest monarch or the greatest rascal that ever sat on the English Throne;” Alfred Societies censuring the “conduct of St. Augustine as uncatholic and uncalled-for;” Shakespeare Reading Societies, Architectural Societies, Mutual Improvement Societies, &c,—what are these but so many co-operations, better or worse than beaverism, of the instinctive cravings of the human animal after knowledge, his own proper food; and protests, as clear as if engrossed on a monster-petition roll, as loud as if shouted forth by a chorus of human voices, against the School System of treating mind as mere Memory, and pouring into it things to be remembered or forgotten, as it partakes of the nature of an iron-bound pail, or a sieve of the Danaides!

Another question, somewhat allied to this one we have been discussing, may arise: that is, how far do three years of education at Oxford impress upon men the necessity of work. People sometimes forget that since the fall of Adam, work has been the condition of man’s life here below, and if his condition, then his glory or his shame as he fulfils or rejects it. If a sense of this duty is absent from Oxford, it must be attributed mainly to the modern aristocratical notions of the place. I say modern, for it was not so in the middle ages. Then the knight, born great, felt he was no knight unless he did knightly deeds. So he lived in his own county, ruling and judging, or girding on his sword, he sallied forth to labour, to fight, if need be to die. Such was the ideal of the infancy of Europe: a rude ideal, but the best then known to man and nobly carried out. Plato would have appointed these knights his guards of the second class, his επίκουροι. Men of modern times, if they knew it, are born for greater things. The building up of the whole society by industry, this is their calling, the calling of the highest even more than of the lowest. But the modern aristocrat refuses to accept this creed; he clings to the “spirited element,” which in our peaceful times is but mimickry of olden heroism: he is first in society as it is; what more can he want? why dull his spirit with work any more than coarsen his hands with the plough? Let him enjoy life, and do—nothing; or if he must needs follow a profession, let it be that which gives the least work and most pay. Nobody who knows Oxford can deny that these views are popular in the undergraduate world; they are perhaps not unnatural to youth, but are just such as we might hope good tutors to correct by example and precept. Unhappily this has been made impossible by their character, their teaching,



and position. Until lately, except at three of the best colleges, Tutors have not been appointed because of fitness. Scholars were elected on close foundations, in due time developed into fellows, and of these fellows such as chose to reside in Oxford (generally those who had no enterprise to seek a calling elsewhere), were the only candidates for the tutorships, and were appointed either by seniority, or by reason of what merit they might seem to possess. To this method of selection, add Classics as the subject of teaching, and Donnism as the law of life, and you have a notion of the Tutorial system. It has failed far more on account of its inherent defects than of the men who worked it; many faithful men have wasted their efforts in trying to reach their pupils through the classical medium at the distance prescribed by University etiquette. The great majority of tutors have sunk under it; have ceased to try to make friends of their pupils, to enlarge the system, or to improve themselves for the sake of their pupils. Some few, greater men than ordinary, have persevered. My own experience testifies that there are some tutors in Oxford who, because true friends and helpers, earn far more reverence from their pupils than any assumption of dignity could ever procure for them. “Donnism” I can call nothing but a solemn trick to impose on the vulgar from a distance; it is utterly irreconcileable with real teaching. Not so did Socrates move the Athenian youth—he descended barefoot into the market-place. Not so has the sacred relation of Disciple and Master ever been established on this earth. As for our Tutorial system, the results of it are open for any man to see; no mere negative results, as if nothing was pretended to be taught. The Tutor is the worse sufferer of the two: he must sometimes feel himself but a sham-teacher; or if faithful to the end, he will petrify into a lonely formalist, and become a solecism among men, such as we may imagine the άλίβαντες, creatures without the sap of life. The undergraduate—he lives in his own world, and shapes his course as best he can: one thing a shrewd spectator may perhaps prophesy of him—he will totally refuse to develope into a solecism by the approved process of gerund-grinding—against that, against work in general he sees a standing warning in his own tutor. Him, therefore, he caps reverently, and passes on deriding, or perhaps pitying.

It is now time to suggest certain practical remedies. Not that I put my faith in any nostrum or number of nostrums, but rather in a better spirit which is already dawning at Oxford, a spirit of active and earnest liberality. This, in due season, will bring forth fruit, suggesting the right measure at the right time. But first we must have an ideal; and here, though I am sorry to go back to that which has been so mournfully abused, I must say that I can conceive of no higher ideal than that old one, a National place of Religion and Education. Only the system must be Catholic; “now no more Roman Catholic, but human Catholic.” Oxford must open her doors, and welcome in all classes, all religions, all forms of knowledge. The old connexion between Religion and Learning has been broken, but we cannot afford to separate them; we must cherish for ever that noble belief of our ancient founders, that learning is sacred; that the whole world of truth is bound round the feet of God. Still less must Religion and Learning be antagonistic: on the one hand, let us have no Jowett denunciations, Maurice persecutions; on the other, let no man on the score of Religion refuse to listen to the historical theories of Comte, or the humanity-theories of Carlyle; or hinder Geologists from pursuing the Vestiges of Creation. Something, I say, must be done “to reconcile the hard divorce Between the natural and divine.” How that is to be we must trust to time to



reveal to us; at present it is wrapped in mystery: it may be through the mediation of Art; it may be by our finding Religion to be the culmination of thought; it may be by our realizing the old monkish adage, Laborare est orare. Meantime, let us work and pray with Tennyson:

• “Let knowledge grow from more to more,
• But more of reverence in us dwell;
• That mind and soul according well
• May make one music as before,
• But vaster.”

I. Oxford must be Catholic towards the Nation.—It is idle to expect the same “fabulous numbers to come to Oxford that flocked thither in the time of Henry III.;” nor is it possible or even desirable to confine colleges, as of old, to poor men. But they might be extended, and undergraduates attached to them might live in lodgings, as they do at Cambridge. As a college becomes larger it becomes freer. Each man can choose his own life; if rich, he can see society; if poor, he can live alone; if literary, he can find a set after his own heart. But at present, where the colleges are small, keep to themselves, and sometimes despise each other, a man finds himself in a narrow and ill-assorted society, where the fast set lay down the law. Nothing struck me more in visiting Trinity Cambridge, than to observe how independent there men are of those who do not suit them: how much more freely richer and poorer mixed together; and how much more decided was the literary element of the place, because embodied into a set, instead of, as at Oxford, being scattered amongst the various little worlds of the colleges. Then again, size gives permanence. A small college is a reed shaken by the wind; it rises and falls with its governing body; may be changed for better or worse by the influx of a few. But a large college, having once gained a character, never loses it, only improves it: it is built on a rock, and grows there. Compare Trinity Cambridge, and Magdalen Oxford, equally rich colleges. What might Balliol or Oriel not have become, had colleges been capable of indefinitely extending themselves beyond the circuit of their walls? Private Halls this writer does not believe in. They offer nothing more in point of economy and less in point of society, than colleges. They are sure to become distinctive of sects or castes, and then any one who knows Oxford can foretell their fate. They will add to the number of despised places in Oxford. But the most important move will be to establish lodging-houses independent of the colleges. Until that is done, we can never hope to revive the old University, because without them we can have no really poor men. Infallible Bursars may show us ever so plainly (on paper) that college expenses need not exceed £50 a year. Be it so. We know also that very few get through the year under £200. It is society, hemming men in, that is expensive: her demands, depend upon it, will be paid as punctiliously as those of any Infallible Bursar. But supposing there is a man found ready to live on the thin diet the said Bursar prescribes for him, is his a happy lot? He is lonely; but is he alone? Is he as if there were no society around him? or is he conscious of standing in humiliating contrast side by side with his richer brethren? But further, if he be brave enough to face this too, it will not be enough. Why should there not be still others at Oxford; men still poorer,—too poor to pay even college dues, men able only to afford time for their education; men, in short, with no pretence to the name of gentlemen? Oxford will not be degraded by manful struggles against poverty. Oxford need not be ashamed



to own as sons such men as booksellers’ clerk Faraday, Hugh Miller quarryman, or barber’s son Joseph M. W. Turner: nay, however she treated* Samuel Johnson, poor Commoner of Pembroke, she prides herself in being the Alma Mater of Dr. Johnson, the author of the English Dictionary.

For such a change the country at large might be grateful. Whole classes of men would be raised: Miltons and Hampdens might be rescued from inglorious muteness and deserted villages. But least of all Oxford herself would be a loser by condescending to assimilate herself to the world at large. As a place of society, each man, in every rank, would be free to hold his own. The gentleman would live in College with gentlemen, and be a gentleman, and, if it so pleased him, a fine gentleman. But the humble Student would sit under the public Professor, and return unknown to his unknown home, poor, but not ashamed of his poverty. As a place of Education, it might hope to gain a spirit of work from the access of men bent wholly on work; and form the habit of keeping practical duties in view, and of constantly referring Philosophy to the wants of the age. It would become a national Institution, bound to England, not by a single thread, but by all the fibres of the body politic. This would be an immense blessing. One great cause of Oxford’s degeneracy has been her isolation. As over her fair city set within her circle of hills there often hangs a Bœotian mist, while the breezes play over the open country beyond, so for three centuries the world outside was gaining in liberality, knowledge, and power, and the University grew little the wiser or better for it.

II. Oxford must be Catholic in Religion.—Parliament has already given to Dissenters the key of the University, and perhaps, if once independent lodgings were sanctioned, this would be enough. But there need be no difficulty in admitting them to Colleges also, if the authorities would admit what every one feels, that, except to very few, chapel and divinity lectures form a most insignificant part of college education, and that for these they would be kept intact. But no guests will enter to the splendidest feast of an unwilling host. It is in vain for the country to invite Dissenters into the University, if the spirit of intolerance remains. It is this that we must cast off. Let every man accept his position: he is born to live in a world of many creeds. Let him be true to himself, and then he need not fear encouraging others to be true to themselves. Oh! that Oxford felt more deeply the necessity, the absolute necessity for every man to be religious, in the orthodox way if possible, but if not, then in the heterodox, but any how religious. Listen to the words of the Most Reverend Father in God Robert Leighton, D. D. Archbishop of Glasgow:—“A man, though he err, if he do it calmly and meekly, may be a better man than he who is stormy and furiously orthodox. Had I a strong voice, as it is the weakest alive, yea, could I lift it up as a trumpet, I would sound a retreat from our unnatural contentions and irreligious strivings for religion. Oh! what are the things we fight for, compared to the great things of God?”

III. Oxford must be Catholic as to Learning.—And here, as in the question of Religion, I would call my reader’s attention to the sentence prefixed at the head of this article. “The subject of University Reform is deep, deep as the world.” Here I can only shadow forth the principle, and point out a few practical reforms, leaving it to time to do the rest.

But first the Classical Monopoly of the schools and Fellowships must cease. Whatever be the merits of Classics (and I for one should think them most admirable, if made, not the basis, but the coping-stone of our Education), they are removed from modern life, its thought and feeling. It is the austerest kind of knowledge, and in Oxford (and still more at Cambridge) it is taught mostly in its austerest form, and by men who know little of language and care less. What wonder then, if men are taught nothing else for long years, if they are daily lectured, often examined, sometimes plucked in these dreary, dreary classics, what wonder if they turn and say in their haste, “All knowledge is pedantry?” The knowledge we want in Oxford is not a dim veiled phantom of antiquity, but a flesh and blood figure, standing in modern garb before us, and its human face divine open for all men to look upon. Whatever, whether known or to be known, whether of home-growth or imported from elsewhere, whatever can help man made of clay, and having an immortal soul, we must teach and learn in Oxford. We must invite Poetry and Philosophy: but we must not forget Languages and Mechanics. History must be with us, and prophesy of the future as well as tell of the past: Science also, to open to man the treasures of the world, but also to reveal to him of the Creator. We must have the Fine Arts, where truth reaches the topmost heaven: we must have Professional knowledge dwelling upon the earth among men. Not otherwise can we hope our students to have any lofty aspirations of soul, to live wisely in their sojourn here below. Not that I wish to see the University course sink into a trade-apprenticeship; far otherwise than that: but it is only by a constant comparison of the Practical and the Ideal that we can bring either to perfection. The Infinite embraces all things, and is itself one. The Ideal too lies in fact, in material fact as well as spiritual. Practical professional reforms are then useful where based upon a scientific knowledge of the parts of the profession, and of the relation of the whole profession to society and general truth. This scientific knowledge, would it not be gained better in the University than elsewhere? For instance, lawyers cannot reform their profession in the press of business, in the excitement of a lawsuit, and while at the mercy of solicitors. But in Oxford we might expect them to establish a science of Jurisprudence, on the basis of practical Justice, and to pave the way to a simpler system of laws. That the Professions could be so taught, is abundantly shown in the First Commission Report: and surely some such provision is especially needed for an age and country like the present, in which the principle of division of labour is carried far enough to shut out from professions, now becoming degraded into tricks of trade, the use of science and duty, and in which there is so little faith in the necessity of a spiritual Education.

This expansion of the circle of Education would involve other weighty consequences. It would introduce a new system of teaching, and another stamp of teacher. Dons, their teachings and their ways, would depart from us. We should no longer see in Oxford that melancholy spectacle—a tutor called a teacher, dictating in the lecture-room; men, called pupils, taking or not taking his dictation down. The object would be, not as heretofore, to make knowledge repulsive, but to give it its own comeliness that we should desire it. The broad gulf between the tutors and undergraduates—gods and men—should be bridged over. They should know and be known. The younger should be left no longer to wander on without a guide; nor the other to the

• “Sapless days,
• The dull mechanic pacings to and fro,
• The set grey life and apathetic end.”

Other men should be chosen as tutors; not men who are hewers of wood and drawers of water; but men, let us say, Architectonic, who know much, and love what they know, and are ever eager to know more. German Universities have had their Kants and Fichtes; why should Oxford be wanting? But such men will refuse to come, if they have to pay the price of Celibacy. This is the monster-wave that our frail bark must surmount as it best can. Sometimes I look on it simply as a joke, a lusus naturæ, that men should conspire to keep each other as old bachelors. At other times, again, it seems altogether mournful, that the usefulness and happiness of so many worthy men should be thus thrown away. However, he who moots the question of married fellows, stands awkwardly enough between two fires. Each party thinks him absurd; one for dreaming of it, the other for not taking it for granted. “Pshaw!” says the man of the world, “I should like to know what difference there is between a fellow of a college and any other mortal. In the year of our Lord 1856, to talk of celibacy! Why, it’s sheer monkhood!” The senior fellow may reply, by no means blushing, but bringing to bear his light artillery, and letting a glassy smile pass over his learned countenance: “What, fellows marry! Would you have our Quadrangle littered with children and baby-chaises, our common room profaned into a drawing-room, the statute against marbles systematically violated? Our pious founders left no room for nurseries, Sir. Why the fellows, there would be no getting rid of them—they would last for ever—and the tutors would do nothing but think of their families.” Neither of these two worthies is likely to convince the other; at least I can answer for the man of the world, he’ll never change. As for us, we may dismiss the fellow’s fear of Idleness. The whole world votes against the Senior Fellow on that head. Nor need we be alarmed about room in the colleges; bricklayers and carpenters will come to our rescue, when we want them. Perpetual fellows would certainly be a nuisance; but why need they be perpetual? A Fellowship might be determinable after a fixed period, say seven or eight years—that period never to be prolonged, except at the unanimous desire of the college, and then only in favour of college officers. The present system works absurdly enough; a college often loses a valuable officer because of his wife, or is saddled with a useless one till Heaven please to take him. Or, if fellowships are (as some say) alms to the poor, not the old bachelor, but the father of a family, or a young hopeful, should have the first claim. The real objection to the abolition of celibacy is, that it is difficult to conceive the effects of it; it would revolutionize Oxford. To think of sweeping away the common room; that Valhalla of the Gods, where, careless of mankind, they drink ambrosial draughts of old crusted Port, and look out upon the troublous world outside! No, no, it will never do. And yet, perhaps, a true son of Adam might prefer the company of the wife of his bosom and the pleasant babble of children.

One night I dreamt I stood, about evening-time, on a bridge. I felt conscious of being near to a veiled female figure. She bore a wand in her hand, and her presence struck me with a peculiarly mysterious awe. The place seemed familiar to me. I looked round, and Magdalen Tower stood full in front of me, keeping ward over the bridge and the city. Its deep bell just then chimed eight o’clock. Yes! It was Oxford. The figure here waved her wand, and a black cloud (which I know not why reminded me of Illiberalism), that had before hung over the city rolled away beyond the horizon, and the city



lay in the clear air of the yellow evening sunlight, and from it there came up a breeze, as of health, that fanned and cooled the air about me. The city seemed as fair as ever; the river was rolling gloriously by; and just then a cannon sounded. Immediately I heard, or fancied I heard, “the measured pulse of racing oars Among the willows,” and from Iffley up the river was borne, at first rising and falling with the wind, but soon growing nearer and stronger, the ringing cheers of men and the heavy tramp of rushing multitudes. This stirred my very soul, and I felt bent upon entering the city, and once again seeing places familiar and dear to me of old. My guide did not restrain me. As I walked up the High-street, I was passed by a riding party coming back from Bullingdon, and a four-horse drag, full of cricketers, in I know not what new-fangled straw hats and harlequin dresses, and trolling out lustily one of the old, old drinking choruses. I could not resist paying a flying visit to the Tennis-court, and to my great delight found it, as of yore, in perfect trim. The city, as I said, looked as fair as ever, and pretty much as I had known it. I found my favourite Merton Chapel; St. Mary’s spire still stood secure; and all the colleges were standing, as if firm for all time, just as ever, except perhaps still more grey and solemn with age. But I found to my surprise many new buildings, chiefly Gothic; new churches, new houses, Schools of Art, stately galleries with carved fronts, and filled within with pictures and statues; and there, in the parks, stood the new Museum, all-glorious, its bright stone already sobering with time. I looked into my old college, into my old rooms; “another name was on the door.” I entered; my old arm-chair I found gone, and, indeed, the furniture was all new; but, just as there used to be, were two or three jolly-looking fellows, with their pipes, chatting over the fire. They pressed us to join them, and I felt tempted to do so, but my guide beckoned me on. My guide took me into some of the galleries, where we found some longhaired students, eagerly seizing the few moments of day-light still left to them, to finish some copies of Hunt and Turner, they were engaged upon; into a laboratory too, where we actually found a Professor busy, and Students, in old jackets, and hands I shall not say of what colour, working, as if rooted to the spot, happy that the sun could not curtail their labours. My guide told me that no college was without its laboratory, and that more men went out in the Physical Science School than in any other school. We also entered several Music halls, which we always found crowded. In one of them there was going on a University performance of Mendelssöhn’s “Elijah.” As we walked, I could not help observing that the streets seemed to me much fuller of undergraduates than formerly. I met plenty of gentlemen, even more, I thought, than there used to be; though fewer, perhaps, of the man-milliner species that were wont to be the ornament and laughing-stock of the High: but I saw also many that I took to be of the middle rank, and (to my surprise) great numbers of men decidedly in humble life. For the most part like kept company with like; but here and there I saw a Clive Newcome, arm in arm with a beloved J. J.; and, generally, the men seemed easy and comfortable. When the different parties met or passed each other, I saw nothing like rudeness or swaggering on either side. It was much as one sees in London Streets, except that people were more courteous, here as there the poor naturally paying respect to the rich, and making way for them. I noticed, besides, the presence of many men, (clearly not aldermen or burghers,) past the prime of life, some of them walking forth with their wives and daughters, to enjoy the summer evening; and little children came



trooping past us, “a sight to make an old man young,” and I saw, too, not a few foreigners, with their many-coloured trowsers, their lively gesticulations, and strange bearded faces. Here my guide took me aside, into a narrow bye-street, and into some humble lodgings, up into an attic, where we found a poor pale-faced student poring over his books, which he had borrowed from the Bodleian library. “Mark him,” said my guide; “he is to be a second and a greater Johnson.” Everywhere we were courteously received: we entered several houses, both imposing and humble, and saw many happy home-scenes, the father at work, or with his children, the young with the old, and quiet family life in every phase. These to my surprise I learnt were the homes of the Fellows and Professors and Undergraduates. And now I found myself in a vast room, full of people of all ages, and of both sexes. There were young men and men in green old age, stately matrons too, and young brides, and gay maiden-faces; all talking in groups or couples, and seemingly very merry. If I was not very much mistaken, that pretty young lady, a Professor’s daughter, is in love with that undergraduate of Magdalen. At least her mother does not seem anxious to interrupt their conversation in the corner. Ugly visions flashed across me of Professors in petticoats, and three Misses President in blue stockings, living in isolated grandeur, such as used to become the belongings of those supreme dignitaries. Yonder was a Head of a House talking with a Professor. Heavens! I could have taken them for a statesman and a philosopher. I had pointed out to me a young Fellow of Oriel and his wife: he had been before somewhat of an epicurean, but getting his fellowship to marry on, he straightway wedded his first love, and has settled down into a self-denying, hard-working man. These two men, walking arm-in-arm, and laughing and talking together were Tutor and Undergraduate; what a bright genial look the Tutor had! and how happy his younger friend seemed to be with him! The tutor’s work I should have guessed to be lighter, had I not overheard two of his pupils speaking to one another of his wise help and prodigious exertions for them. The sight reminded me of Dr. Arnold and Fox Howe; and yet I could not help recalling my old college tutor, an unapproachable bachelor of superfine morality, and giving periodical tutor-breakfasts in the lecture room. Donnism seemed to have fled away, though I saw one solitary figure, who, by his præternaturally tall neckcloth and saturnine gravity, seemed, I fancied, to protest against this Saturnalian freedom of the inferior young men. Not thus, however, could he save his dignity; for I actually detected two youths of gross levity, mimicking and making caricatures of him in the corner. Altogether this society seemed very delightful to me; the University seemed to me what I had long wished it to be, a sort of family. The husbands seemed to have introduced the glorious equality of the common-room, and their wives to have broken down the hateful distinction between college and college. The ancient courtesy of the place had not left it, but now went hand in hand with an altogether new freshness and freedom; there was none of the stiffness or mock airs of the world, discernible; they had not entered here; but youth and the ever youthful minds of the truly wise seemed to have set the tone, whilst there was abundance of interest from the presence of so much young life, and of the wisdom of the older gathered into the place. For besides these that I have mentioned, were Poets, and Philosophers, and Artists, some talking together earnestly or chatting gaily, evidently enjoying each other’s society: others, again, with young admirers clustering round them and hanging on



their lips; and their eager eyes and bright faces told me they were drinking deep of the cup of pleasure. I fancied this must be a Commemoration time, and that these great men were here but to receive their degree, and to depart on the morrow. But my guide told me that I saw the place in no holiday attire, but that Oxford was to these their chosen home, the sacred grove, where each, as Numa of old, came to hold peaceful converse with the Egeria whom he worshipped. My guide was very considerate, and pointed out everybody to me. “Those two earnestly talking men were to be friends for life.” I thought of Tennyson and young Hallam. “That young Apollo, with a sunlike countenance, he was to be an English Goëthe; that sober youth, with broad forehead, with set lips and eyes sparkling with courage, he shall be a Bacon to the law, reform the Court of Chancery, and ‘mould a mighty state’s decrees;’ yon artist, in sorry clothes, but laughing with those two noble-looking men, and with geniality beaming from his restless eye, he shall be a second Turner, but his fresh heart shall never be frozen by the coldness of the world.” It was now time to depart, and my guide said to me, “You have now seen Oxford, but you have seen it only as the Metropolis of Genius, and a temple of industrious peace; at another time we will walk together into the great world outside, and you shall then see it as the ‘Eye of England.’ ” As I stood doubting how these things had come to pass, my eyes fell upon the wand which my guide had in his hand, and by which the black cloud had been rolled away; it was like what I had conceived a Spartan σκυάλη, and had writing rolled round it; but on the outside of the roll I deciphered the words, “The works of faithful men.” I looked up, and on her forehead, glittering through her veil, with its starlike letters, I read her name, TIME.