Mr. Macaulay, in his famous Third Chapter, gives us a picture, painted in his own bold and striking way, of the life of an English country gentleman, in the latter part of the seventeenth century. As usual, he catches the remarkable traits of that life, and hits off, happily enough, the whims and deficiencies of the rustic squire under James and William; but, as usual, he leaves you with the impression that the rustic squire was made up of whims and deficiencies; that he had no characteristics but ignorance at which every sound scholar must laugh, and prejudices of which every good Whig ought to be ashamed. So that, to disabuse ourselves of this notion, we have to turn to dear old Sir Roger, and there find that Addison and Steele, with their right loving hearts, saw and knew that, in that day, the true strength of England, the honesty, the faith, the virtue, and the pride, lay, not in courtiers or statesmen or scholars, not in the Church or the sects, but in those



very country gentlemen, so self-willed and stupid, and that to their prejudices we owe it, that through those dangerous times the great heart of England beat ever steadily on, and that we were not overwhelmed by foreign influence, when foreign influence would have been our ruin. But thus much is very clear, that the country squire of 1680 was very different, and in a very different position, from the country squire of a hundred years before. He had the same honest sturdy English spirit as his great-grandfather, but he was much less cultivated, much less capable of cultivation; less fitted to do his country service in the council-chamber or the parliament-house; less able to train his children in the way they should go, and to give to his dependents an example of self-control and Christian culture; less awake both to the deepest duties and hopes, and to the graces and delicacies of life. And in consequence of this, and of that extraordinary principle of modern Puritanism, (which had by this time sprung up from the ruins of that glorious old Puritanism which was gibbeted with Oliver,) that a Christian has something else to do than to serve his country to the best of his powers;—in fact, that he had best keep aloof from public work altogether, as worldly and carnal;—in consequence of these things the government of the country fell into the hands of a special class of professed politicians and placemen, neither particularly honest nor particularly enlightened; and intrigue, chicanery, and partisanship became the order of the day. Now, turn to the country gentleman of Elizabeth’s age. Thanks to the awakening influences of the time, the spirit of generous inquiry, and the shattering of all superstructure of prejudice, while the foundations of faith remain solid and unshaken, he is a scholar and a divine; his classical and Italian studies have given him grace and refinement of tone, and great store of knowledge and thought, while his Bible and his Prayer-book have taught him how to serve God with a reasonable service. Moreover, these are days of action, and the circumstances of the times, and the wise policy of our Tudor rulers, force upon men the necessity, and, at the same time, grant them the opportunity of fighting their sovereign’s battles and administering their sovereign’s affairs. So that your country squire must needs show himself no cipher in parliament, no “poor scarecrow ” on the justice’s bench. He is not out of place at court, nor in the company of wits and divines; and finally, he is able to serve her Majesty how and where she will; and he does serve her, well and faithfully. Burleigh and Walsingham, Nicholas Bacon, Thomas Smith and Henry Sidney, Raleigh and Grenville, what were they but country gentlemen, above, but not much above, the common type? for there were a hundred who could have done the work



which they did, and nearly as well as they. It was William’s curse, that he was forced to make use of men whom he knew to be unprincipled; it was Elizabeth’s glory, that, seek where she might, she was sure to find godly and honourable men, who were ready to spend and be spent in her service.

I have made these remarks, because I wish you to bear in mind, that Philip Sidney’s early life, though a country life, was by no means a boorish one; that the men and women with whom he passed his time, were as refined, and in many respects more refined, than the same class at the present day; and were, moreover, much better educated; but to this I shall recur in the course of a page or two. And now for the facts of my hero’s boyhood.

Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst, on the 29th of November, 1554; and named in compliment to Philip, king of Spain, who had used his influence to save Lady Mary and her brothers (all but Guildford, who was too deeply implicated,) from the fate of the Duke and Jane Grey. It is said, but, I think, on no sufficient authority, that Philip was one of the child’s sponsors. At all events, it is clear that the queen and he treated the Sidney family with great consideration, and that Mary found Sir Henry a faithful and valuable servant.

Penshurst, then, is the world to young Philip during those years when outward things make the most impression in the mind, and, for a first glance at creation, one might go far to find a pleasanter place. It lies high up the Medway, in the county of Kent, but not far from where Kent, Sussex, and Surrey meet. A fine old baronial hall, of the later Plantagenets, still standing, foursquare, enclosing a court and shaven lawn; a church near it, of somewhat earlier date, “with a nave, aisles, transepts,” &c., as deponent* somewhat learnedly informs us; in an undulating country of rounded swelling hills, watered by the Medway and Eden; rich, you would say; richly wooded, at all events. Indeed, its woods are its pride and boast; beech and oak, and chestnut, with “purple shades at gloaming,” worthy indeed of “poet in his youth.” One beech they show you of almost fabulous girth, and an oak (Bear Oak), which is one of the common-places of poets, having been planted, says Ben Jonson, “at his high birth where all the Muses met.” Waller, indeed, seems to have thought it too a beech (being blinded probably by Love), for he exclaims:

• “Go, boy, and carve my passion on the bark
• Of sacred Sidney’s tree.”

There was a shadow upon Philip’s childhood; a pensive gloom which overhung the loveliness of those woods and streams, and weighing especially upon his mother’s heart, must have weighed upon him also, to whom she was dearest. Those were awful times; times of fire and blood, and sore smiting and tribulation; men’s hearts failed them for fear; there was trouble in all faces; the Evil Spirit was rending this nation of ours before he went out of it. One day after another some one the Lady Mary had known and reverenced died by the most terrible of deaths, and the end was not yet. I cannot wonder, then, at the pensive boy, “from a child none other than a man,” staid and grave beyond his years; and, even in happier times, when there was nothing but peace and joy around him, “not over cheerful by nature,” as we learn from his father’s letter.

When Philip is six or seven years of age, we find his home at Ludlow, where his father rules as Lord President of the Marches of Wales. But Sir Henry’s great work lies in Ireland. He is generally away, and the boy’s companion and friend is his mother. She knows that that rare and excellent soul is a trust of God to her; and she



spends her whole time and her whole heart in moulding it into what it may and ought to be. And she has a present reward in the docility and gentleness and deep affection of this her firstborn.

Ludlow Castle is a place that seems, as some places do, destined to help the development of genius. In after years it shall see “the Masque of Comus” performed in that princely banqueting-hall; and, again, in darker days, when men have forgotten that genius is a priceless treasure for which no shrine is too costly, and which neglect and contempt can embitter and pervert, but not destroy;—in those evil times the author of Hudibras shall experience among these towers the sickness of hope deferred, the baseness and blindness that will turn his and Dryden’s and many another “wholesome heart to gall.” But to men in Butler’s day, the turrets and portcullises of Ludlow had ceased to have a meaning, as vivid presentations of the soul of the chivalrous ages; but it was not so with young Philip. He still breathed a feudal atmosphere. The new order of things had not annihilated the old; the old was overlapping it, and blending with it; and in and about that mighty Norman fortress, the central point of all the view from so many broad dales and bare heathery hills, jostling and crowding one another right into the heart of Wales, the old feudal feelings must have lingered long. Doubtless the boy shared in the sentiment of his time, and loved the flowing Teme, and that pleasant Herefordshire Arcadia, into which it led him, more than the westward ranges, seen so black against the sunset, one behind another, from the slope of Whitcliffe. And, indeed, we find in his writings little of that sense of the mystery of outward nature; that powerful charm that lies in the wild and the untrodden and the far, which grows up so naturally in our own minds. Philip was placed in the new-founded Grammar School of Shrewsbury, to be near his home; and is, to this day, the pride and boast of the school; the first of that long line of distinguished Alumni, who have done it such honour in the study and in the world. I have said that he was remarkable for the gravity of his demeanour. Greville (Lord Brooke)* his relation and playfellow who lived with him and knew him from a child, “yet never knew him other than a man; with such staiednesse of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years. His talk was ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind.” “Lumen familiæ suæ,” his father calls him. So conspicuous even now are his gifts of mind. Unfortunately his health is by no means firm. At fourteen his uncle, Leicester, has to procure for him, from archbishop Parker, a license to eat flesh in Lent. At twelve, he writes to his father in Latin and in French; and has, in answer, a letter of advice, a sort of formal epistle such as fathers often sent to their sons in those days, full of weighty precepts for the guidance of their lives. A letter so wise, so noble, and so comprehensive, that I shall not scruple to give it in full.

I have reaceaved too Letters from you, one written in Latine, the other in French, which I take in good parte, and will yow to exercise that Practise of Learninge often: For that will stand yow in moste steede, in that Profession of Lyf thet yow are born to live in. And, since this ys my first Letter that ever I did write to yow, I will not that it be all emptie of some Advyses, which my naturall Care of yow provokethe me to wishe you to folowe, as Documents to you, in this your tendre Age. Let your first Actyon be, the Lyfting up of your mynd to Almighty God, by harty Prayer, and felyngly dysgest the Woords you speake in Prayer, with

contynuall Meditation, and Thinkinge of him to whom you praye, and of the matter for which you praye. And use this as an ordinarye Act, and at an ordinarye Hower. Whereby the Tyme ytself will put yow in Remembraunce to doe that, which you are accustomed to doe. In that Tyme apply your Study to suche Houres as your discrete master dothe assign you, earnestlye; and the Time (I knowe) he will so lymitt, as shal be both sufficient for your Learninge, and saf for your Health. And mark the Sens and the Matter of that yow reade, as well as the Woordes. So shall yow bothe enrieche your Tonge with Woordes, and your Wytte with Matter; and Judgment will growe as Yeares growyth in you. Be humble and obedient to your Master, for unles yow frame your selfe to obeye others; yea, and feele in your selfe what Obedience ys; yow shall never be able to teache others how to obey you. Be curteese of Gesture, and affable to all Men, with Diversitee of Reverence, accordinge to the Dignitie of the Person. Ther ys nothinge, thet wynneth so muche with so lytell Coste. Use moderate Dyet, so as, after your meate, yow may find your Wytte fresher, and not duller, and your Body more lyvely, and not more heavye. Seldome drinke Wine, and yet sometime doe, least, beinge enforced to drinke upon the sodayne, yow should find your-selfe inflamed. Use Exercise of Bodye, but suche as ys without Peryll of your Yoyntes or Bones. It will encrease your Force, and enlardge your Breathe. Delight to be cleanly, as well in all partes of your Bodye, as in your Garments. It shall make you gratefull in yche Company, and otherwise lothsome. Give your self to be merye, for yow degenerate from yowr Father, yf you find not your self most able in Wytte and Bodye to doe any Thinge, when yow be moste mery; But let your Myrthe be ever void of all Scurelitee, and bitinge Woords to any Man, for an Wound given by a Woorde, is oftentimes harder to cured, than that which is given by the Swerde. Be you rather a Herer, and Bearer away of other Mens Talke, than a Begynner or Procurer of Speeche, otherwise yow shal be counted to delight to heare your self speake. Yf yow heare a wise Sentence, or an apt Phrase, commytte yt to your Memorye, with respecte

of the Circumstaunce, when yow shall speake yt. Let never Othe be hard to come out of your Mouthe, nor Word of Rybaudrye; detest yt in others, so shall Custome make to your selfe a Lawe against hit in your self. Be modest in yche Assemble, and rather be rebuked of light Felowes, for Meden lyke Shame-fastnes, then of your sad Frends for pearte Boldnes. Thinke upon every Woorde that yow will speake, before yow utter hit, and remember how Nature hath rampared up (as yt were) the Tonge, with Teeth, Lippes, yea, and Here with out the Lippes and all be tokeninge Raynes, or Bridles for the loose Use of that Membre. Above all Thinges tell no Untruthe, no not in Trifels. The custome of yt is naughte, and let it not satisfie yow that for a Time, the Hearers take yt for a Truthe, for after yt wil be knowen as yt is, to your Shame; for ther cannot be a greater Reproche to a Gentellman, then to be accounted a Lyere. Study and endevour yourselfe to be vertuously occupied. So shall you make such an Habite of wel doing in yow, that yow shall not knowe how to do Evell, thoughe you wold. Remember, my Sonne, the noble Blood you are descended of, by your Mother’s Side; and thinke that only by vertuous Lyf, and good Action, you may be an Ornament to that illustre Famylie; and otherwise throughe Vice and Slouthe, you shal be counted labes generis, one of the greatest Curses that can happen to Man. Well (my litell Philippe) this is ynoughe for me, and to much I feare for yow. But, yf I shall find that this light Meale of Disgestione nourishe any Thinge the weake Stomake of your yonge capacitie, I will, as I find the same growe stronger, fead it with toefer Foode.”

There it is. How many fathers could write such a letter now? how many sons would value it? So let us leave young Philip to con over its weighty sentences by the deep-flowing Severn, while the bank, crowded with house and garden and turreted wall, and the grey steeples over all, quiver and sway in the multitudinous ripple. Let us leave him, that we may think for a few moments about the education he is undergoing; how it differs from the education which we patronize now.

Here is the case. We seem to have given up in despair the notion of looking



for any higher result of education than the mere fitting a man to the business of life; and yet we hear complaints all around that the education of the present day does not fit men for the business of life; that it is something quite extraneous to that business; that those who succeed best succeed in spite of their education. The standard, men say, has been lowered; the practice has been lowered more than proportionately. For it is certain that the education which Roger Ascham gave, the education which Philip Sidney received, was such an education as fitted men to quit themselves well in the world, and fitted them for much beside that, and of more importance than that. It is worth our while to try to see clearly what the point of difference is. There are two methods current in this country, both of which seem to me to be intrinsically wrong, not so much in their actual modus operandi, as in the spirit in which they set to work; and the latter of these two seems to be driving out the former. They are the classical or traditional method, and the practical method. The former either has no principle, and is merely empirical—seeking to retain old forms, which it sees have had potency and done good in times past; or else aims at carrying out the idea of education by the strict cultivation of a limited number of intellectual faculties. The latter has the advantage, because it sees clearly what it sets before itself to do. Its simple and sole aim is to prepare men for business, for money-making, and the practical part of life (so called), by giving them (by various patent processes) facility and versatility, and a store of available information. Such an attempt must fail; recoil upon itself, somehow; as attempts which have their root and ground in selfishness always do. Is it not true, in this, as in other matters, that we must seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; make it clear to the child’s mind that he is living in God’s world and must do His will, and receive His teachings; make him love righteousness and truth and purity for their own sakes; and so prepare him to expand and strengthen, in body and mind, according to the laws of God’s kingdom; and thus all these other things shall be added to him,— ability in business, and success in life?

Something of this was undoubtedly felt in those old Elizabethan days. Schoolmasters saw clearly what their task was. They knew that theirs was not all the education which the boy was receiving. They knew Who was teaching him beside,—teaching him deeper lessons, and those more constantly and impressively than they could do. And they set themselves to help that other education; to make its lessons clearer to the boy’s mind; to work in harmony with it, enforcing and illustrating all that it taught; and never attempted, by any mere mechanical appliances, or short and easy cuts, to counteract its working, to make the child other than God would have him be. The question they proposed to themselves was not, How shall we get most knowledge into this or that boy in a given time? nor, How shall we best help him to gain money or power? but, How shall we best help him to do his duty, to be that which God wills him to be? It was a noble effort; whether or no they succeeded, let the history of those times tell. This history will help to answer the question.

We shall go very far wrong if we suppose that what was best in the sixteenth century is therefore best in the nineteenth: but yet we may learn something from considering the methods of those days; one thing especially we may learn. This is the first age in which it has been forgotten that bodily culture is not less important than mental. The Greeks held gymnastics (the harmony of the body) and music (the harmony of the soul) to be equal and



co-ordinate branches of education. We, having far better reason to reverence the body than they, knowing as we do in Whose image it was made, and by Whose putting on it was sanctified, yet give way, practically, to those old atheistic and Neo-Platonic superstitions which sought to elevate the soul at the expense of the body, as if the two were not mysteriously joined together for weal or woe. Men knew better in Roger Ascham’s day. They knew that it was a man’s duty to do well whatever he did, and that the perfect man must be perfect in all bodily functions; and therefore they taught their boys “to ride comelie: to runne faire at the tilte or ring; to play at all weapons; to shoote faire in bowe, or surely in gunne; to vaut Iustely; to runne, to leape, to wrestle, to swimme; to daunce comelie; to sing and play of instruments cunningly: to hawke, to hunt, to play at tennis and all pastime generally which be joyned with labor, used in open place, and on the daylight.” Truly, it would be well for some of us to have had such schooling as this.

For the rest, their education was at once practical and classical. They made the classics their basis, not for any such reasons as we allege for doing so, but because they thought they could gain from them better lessons in history, in ethics, in philosophy, and in eloquence than they could from any other source. They knew of no language so fixed in its laws, no philosophy so clear in thought, no literature so rich in illustration and information, as those of Greece and Rome, with the radiance of whose new-found treasures, the world was fairly dazzled. They were taught from the very first to connect rules of language with rules of thought, and to draw from their text-books moral and practical as well as grammatical lessons. Hence that richness of classical allusion and anecdote, of valuable thoughts and maxims in the writings of Sidney, of Raleigh, and of Jeremy Taylor; whereas, though our education is not less strictly classical, we have so little of good to show from it.

But I can only hint at these things here; I may carry out the enquiry elsewhere; and in the mean time, I would recommend all who are interested in learning what was the nature of the education which prevailed in the noblest age of our country, (and who is not?) to study that treasure-house of wise and godly and practical thoughts —Ascham’s ‘Schoolmaster.’

At all events, we find Sidney’s school and college training nobly justified by its results in his life. True, he was εύφίης, a youth for whom nature had done much; but, as Ascham observes, such men repay best all that education can do for them. He had a rare combination of qualities; he was patient, industrious, and self-denying; and he was apt and ready.

At fifteen he goes up to Christ Church. All we hear of him there is, that his tutor is Mr. Thomas Thornton, a great Latinist of those days, and, which is higher praise, a “refuge of all poor and deserving Scholars;” among them, one that shall do him honour, the laborious and learned Camden; (on whom also Mr. Philip Sidney bestows friendship and encouragement;) and that he disputes in the schools, in presence of his uncles, Warwick and Leicester, with one Richard Carew, of Cornwall and Christ Church, who, afterwards, in writing a county history, says, that he was forced upon the dispute through a mistaken notion of his parts: from which we may fairly infer that Richard came off second best. Another Richard too is mentioned among Philip’s college associates, Hakluyt by name, the compiler of that memorable collection of voyages, which illustrates, perhaps more than anything else, the glory of the English nation and of the reign of Elizabeth.

It is pleasant to note the interest which Leicester—his head so full of



state affairs—takes in his nephew; and pleasant to find Philip, in later years coming forward in defence of Leicester, who seems to have been almost as hardly used in his own day as he has been by all ages since. History and fiction have wreaked their worst upon this man; one hopes the tide may turn, and people begin to look at the facts of his life, which they will find, as far as they can be clearly known, strangely at variance with the conventional theories which they have been led to adopt. His dealings with Philip Sidney are throughout those of a kind-hearted and honourable gentleman.

One other transaction of these days concerns our hero very closely, though one would wish to know more of his own share in the proceeding; I mean, a treaty for his marriage with Anne, daughter of Mr. Secretary Cecil (afterwards the great Burleigh). Leicester, it seems, set it on foot; but on account of some coolness (on whose part, one cannot now tell), it was, after considerable hesitation, broken off. Sir Henry appears from his letters to have set his heart thoroughly on the match; but, with such a press of Irish business, “I can never care or consider for wife, child, or myself;” otherwise the result might have been different. Of the lady we hear further that she is married to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and that her life with him is not happy, though she is sweet and gentle in disposition, and of good natural parts, as the daughter of Mildred Coke ought to be.

It is said that Philip Sidney, after he left Oxford, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (where Greville was then residing). If this were so, he must have been singularly fortunate in his connection with those two noble foundations, each of which (though neither was half a century old) was the wealthiest and the most esteemed in its university. But his stay at Cambridge could not have been long, for in May, 1572, he proceeds to Paris, (after the manner of the distinguished young English of his day,) with a licence from the Queen, permitting him to “go out of England into parts beyond the



seas, with three servants and four horses, to remain the space of two years, for attaining the study of foreign languages.”

When a poet long tried and proved great, issues a new volume of poems, what is the spirit in which the public ought to receive it? Is it not with docility and reverence, as another lesson from one who has been already accredited as a teacher of men? And that for two reasons; first, because we should hope and ardently desire, that one who has hitherto befriended and guided mankind may continue to be worthy of that great office; prepared to lament sincerely and deeply if he should at last prove incompetent,—and that not by way of triumph over him; but deploring his failure as a common misfortune and humiliation to the human race. And those whom this reason would not influence, ought at least to be affected by the following consideration; that it is altogether improbable that a great writer, in the full possession of his mental powers, will fail, unless some peculiar cause be at work. Genius is far less erratic than ordinary men love to fancy: it is, after all, only the human mind made somewhat after the likeness, and gifted with some approach to the powers, of that original and proper human mind which made Adam so much more glorious than the brutes. Therefore, a critic, who has regard for his reputation, should be very careful, should examine very minutely, and weigh very deliberately, before he ventures to condemn new poems of a poet already acknowledged great, lest the fault prove to be, not



in the poet, but in himself; while, to receive them, as “Maud” has been received by some who affect to guide the public taste, not with adverse criticism, but with the mere hissing of dispraise, all but carries its own condemnation with it. It has been hitherto my aim in this Essay to steer clear of all notice of other reviews of Tennyson. I have had too little space for the poet himself to spare any for those who, with more or less knowledge and discretion, have taken upon themselves to pass a judgment upon him; but “Maud” has been published so recently, that some notice of the so-called criticism upon it (I speak of course of the unfriendly criticism) cannot be avoided. Accordingly, I will state definitely at the outset, without any ambiguity or circumlocution, in the broadest possible contradiction to those unfavourable critics, my belief that it is one of the finest poems in the English language; in every way worthy (and greater praise cannot be bestowed) of the author of Œnone, Morte d’Arthur, and In Memoriam; a belief which I hope to justify by evidence well considered and carefully arranged; first endeavouring to answer the objections that have been brought against “Maud.” And since these have been founded principally upon the character of the hero, I must somewhat minutely analyse that character. It has been blamed chiefly for introspection, the poem and the poet being included in this condemnation by those whose judgments proceed upon careless glances at the surface. Let such be reminded that, while the dramatis personæ may justly be condemned, that very condemnation may be good cause why the poem and the author should be praised, a matter made plain at once by reference to the trite example of plays. For a more attentive and reflective reading of “Maud” would have shown that its great object is to expose and protest against that very perpetual self-examination, by exhibiting a mind given over to it, and tracing the evil effects of it upon that mind. For it is the part, not of a poet, but of an Ethical writer, to lay down, in so many words, express rules of morality, and to draw perfect characters for our imitation so far as our imperfection allows. A poet has done his part if he dramatically sets before us men of like passions with ourselves, so delineating them that all who read with due care may deduce the moral for themselves.—And now, let us briefly consider the nature of introspection in general, that we may learn whether it is an allowable and fit instrument for poets; and if we shall agree that it is, let us proceed to investigate the introspection in “Maud,” that we may decide whether it is of that nature which we shall have judged lawful and useful.

Now, what is introspection? Let us not be deceived by the mere sound of the word, which somehow seems to carry in these days a bad signification with it. Change it to self-examination, and a different, a favourable, impression at once succeeds. But what is the thing itself? Is it not the searching into one’s own mind and one’s own heart, thereby to discover what good and what evil lie therein? And what should be its ends? What but these two? the first, the bettering of self, by using that self-knowledge for increasing the good and lessening the evil; and the second, the bettering of others, by faithfully recording for them our experience. And lastly, what are



the means? There are two methods; one, the employment of the intellect, that investigates quite impartially, neither exaggerating the good, nor extenuating the bad, still less taking the good or the bad alone. The other is the dramatic exhibition of passions and feelings, and fancies; perhaps a less safe mode than the former; requiring more imperatively that the end be un-mistakeably good, and be steadily kept in view. Also, in this method, great care should be paid to the length of the process, that the reader may not receive more harm from that than good from the moral. And, lastly, perhaps we may add, that the process should not be too painful; a requirement which may be satisfied both directly and indirectly; indirectly, by beauty of imagery, melody of versification, &c.

Now, let us apply these remarks to “Maud.” The end is good, being the setting forth of warning and example to others by the exposure of morbid self-investigation, and the inculcation of the truth—not that action is the only real life, a half truth on the face of it; but the whole truth, that action, for the mass of men at least, is a necessary part of real life. The poem is short, so as not to detain us too long before we reach its moral. And, finally, it is rendered not too painful,—directly, by the introduction of pleasing details, the love between the hero and heroine, as far as the end of chapter xxi, the finding of the shell in chapter xxiii, and the noble and healthy close, when the hero starts with his countrymen for the war in defence of the right; and, indirectly, by extreme beauty of illustration, and by versification so melodious as not to be surpassed in our melodious language.

That there is a great outcry in our country against introspective writing is undeniable. I trust I have shown that it is unjust both when raised without modification against such writing universally, and, in particular, when directed against “Maud.” The causes of it are easy to be seen. Self-examination, though it is needful for us, and incumbent upon us, has its peculiar pains and perils, and those very great; pains, because a search into this human heart of ours must discover so much that is evil; perils, because it is most difficult to prevent self-examination from degenerating into morbid selfishness, and to unite it in due proportion with action. Another cause is to be found in the peculiar temperament of the English people; on the one hand, reserved and melancholy; and thus, by experience, keenly alive to the miseries of isolation; and, on the other hand, scientific and practical, and so drawn off to the outward and material world. A third may be added; the greater spread of education, and the increase of candidates for posts that require educated intellects, and, in consequence of that, the large number of men of mind and education who have not employment which can interest and satisfy them, have caused self-inquiry to prevail in this generation, as is shown in the writings of the younger poets, and in the works of Mr. Kingsley, who has set himself so earnestly to modify and guide this spirit. Accordingly, men whose minds are not comprehensive and painstaking enough to embrace the whole of a truth, rashly and unthinkingly condemn that which is a duty, however little practised among us, which would be one of the highest blessings, if practised aright. But though it be abandoned, in cowardice or pride, or carelessness, by the multitude, those may not fly from it who have been sent into the world to guide their brethren. If it so must be, they must “learn by suffering what they teach in song;” necessity is laid upon them, and woe to them if they preach not their gospel. For how can a man speak more directly and forcibly to the hearts of his fellows than by speaking from his own heart? How can he more deeply and surely



fathom the minds of others than by searching into his own mind, that inner little world which, in this brotherhood of humankind, is the miniature of the great world without him? Thus did Socrates, by a self-examination which none surely will call sickly or sentimental, work such a moral revolution as the world has seldom seen.

But let me not be misunderstood to imply that I regard “Maud” as historical of Tennyson’s own mind. That some of his poems, such as Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, and In Memoriam, perhaps The Palace of Art, and The Vision of Sin, are descriptive of mental phases through which he has passed, can scarcely be doubted; that much in “Maud” may have been suggested by old struggles, I am quite willing to allow; but In Memoriam seems to have completed the moral process so far as to allow room for no farther fundamental changes, and to have left the poet free to go entirely out of himself, and look more closely even than before on men and things outside him. I speak, of course, purely from internal evidence; but, that evidence I think very strong, and I have weighed it carefully.

We have now arrived at the analysis of the character of the hero, to which I beg particular attention; as I doubt not that a right understanding of him will show him to us as a man deserving, though not of our admiration, yet of our sympathy, our pity, and, to no small extent, our love. Let us run through his history. His family ruined, his father found dead, as he believes murdered, his mother dead also, his childish love parted and estranged from him; his life passed in solitude: from this utter loneliness he looks forth on the world, and sees that part of the truth which is the dark side of human life. His moralising is bitter, but true; only partially true, doubtless, but still true so far as it goes. And even already, we see plainly the earnestness, deep feeling, and truthfulness which in happier circumstances may make a gentle, trusting, and loving man. Observe how quickly his harshness begins to fade away before the softening influence of Maud. He is prepared to fall in love with her; for he has been betrothed to her even from the moment of her birth, as we find in that chapter which so many readers have failed to understand; a failure which can be attributed only to the careless reading due to that miserable and pernicious misapprehension, to which I have already alluded, that poetry is a branch of light literature.

• “Men were drinking together,
• Drinking, and talking of me;
• ‘Well, if it prove a girl,the boy
• Will have plenty; so let it be.’ ”

These men are the fathers of the hero and Maud, partners in a speculation and still friends; the time is just before the birth of Maud, and her father has made a proposal, that, if the child be a girl, she shall be married to the son of the other; to which his partner assents.

• “ ‘Well, if it prove a girl, my boy
• Will have plenty: so let it be.’ ”

Thus a childish love had grown up between them; and now, when they meet again, his love returns, with much fear and unwillingness, it is true; but it strengthens fast, though mingled with anger against her father and brother, if not hatred of them, checked at times even by suspicions of herself; but still it increases, working more and more its purifying work, making him long to give the right hand of fellowship to her supercilious brother; and, when his momentary warmth is frozen by the “stony British stare,” still prompting the soft answer that may turn away his own wrath,

• “Peace, angry spirit, and let him be!
• Has not his sister smiled on me?”

And now, in chapter xviii, when his love is accepted and returned, it changes his selfishness into devotion,



at least for one, making him ready to “die

• To save from some slight shame one simple girl;”

a devotion how infinitely nobler than all proud, cold, self-glorifying intellectuality! It has brought him at last even the sense of duty;

• “Not die, but live a life of truest breath,
• And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs.”

Still, alas! the old sickly fear remains—boundless, undefined fear, of he knows not what—fear of death:

• “O why should love, like men in drinking songs,
• Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death?”

Fear of far worse than death, of that most horrible of all dooms, whose shadow looms darkest when his happiness is brightest in the present. But the happiness must grow brighter and brighter, even to an excess of beauty and glory, which is almost painful; and then, when it has reached its consummation, the blow, so dreaded, falls, without any interval, shattering his love for ever in this world, and he sits

• “Stunned, and still
• Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill,”

with blood upon his head, and that the blood of the brother of his love; and from her parted, never to be joined again in life. Then flight, and ever-present fear, and only not torpid despair; saved from that only by the love which still remains—the last comfort, the last hope.

• “And as long, O God, as she
• Have a grain of love for me,
• So long, no doubt, no doubt,
• Shall I nurse in my dark heart,
• However weary, a spark of will
• Not to be trampled out.”

But not only comfort and hope; it now, in his utter misery, shines forth in all its glory of self-forgetfulness, uttering that noble prayer, which ought to cover the multitude of sins of weakness, pride, and self-absorption,

• “However this may be,
• Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,
• While I am over the sea!
• Let me and my passionate love go by,
• But speak to her all things holy and high,
• Whatever happen to me!
• Me and my harmful love go by;
• But come to her waking, find her asleep,
• Powers of the height, Powers of the deep,
• 10And comfort her though I die.”

But the cure is not to be yet; the tragedy must deepen, even till the misery and torpor end in madness; and after that the beginning of the end, the waking from madness, the waking from the false life of that isolation which in so great a degree was mere selfishness; the waking to the world without, where is wrong to be put down and right to be established; and, best of all, the waking to the desire to do something in defence of that right, a desire which soon takes shape in action. Yes, beyond a doubt, a weak, morbid, self-absorbed, not unselfish creature he is, throughout a large portion of the poem. But is there no moral for us, set in these times of mental tumult and strife, no lesson we can learn from the history, so fearfully and powerfully detailed, of such a mind, with so much evil and so much good mingled in it, so capable for good or for evil, purging away the evil, though through sin and suffering, and developing the good impulses into righteous action? Truly, as it seems to me, we have in this tremendous lyrical tragedy, a great and precious example to many, to be most diligently studied and faithfully profited by.

Of the other characters I will only observe that the brother of Maud seems to be intended by the poet, not as the villain the hero in general sets him forth, but as nothing worse, though this is bad enough, than a haughty upstart, with much contempt for others, and some coarseness of feeling, which, however, still leave room for much generosity, kindness, and manliness.



I will quote two passages to bear out this interpretation. As he lies dying, while his slayer is still lingering stupified near him,

• “ ‘The fault was mine, the fault was mine,’

---

• ‘The fault was mine,’ he whisper’d, ‘fly.’ ”

And, in chapter xxiii, we read,

• “And now I remember, I,
• When he lay dying there,
• I noticed one of his many rings,
• (For he had many, poor worm) and thought
• It is his mother’s hair.”

I have already spoken of Tennyson’s capacity for satire, which I conceive to be displayed in the highest degree in The Vision of Sin. The satire in “Maud” I have called “strong and bitter, and with a one-sided truth.” That it is strong and bitter everybody will at once admit; but I must say a few words in explanation of the third characteristic. In all human things there are good and evil mingled, often very closely, sometimes inextricably; to separate them, and give to each its precise proportional value, is the work of a very active, laborious and impartial mind. Accordingly, nearly all men, on nearly all occasions, attempt very little to do this, but select largely from the good and sparingly from the evil, or, perhaps, in general more largely from the evil; sometimes even taking the good or the evil alone, as the hero in “Maud” takes the evil alone, in the first part of the poem. His facts cannot be denied, but his judgments, founded upon those facts, we refuse as imperfect, and so false.

To those who love and reverence Tennyson, it will be of the highest interest—to all not without profit—to learn what is his estimate of the present age, and what are his hopes for the future. I will trace these at some length, from Locksley Hall, through the Princess, and In Memoriam, down to “Maud.” Locksley Hall is emphatically a poem of the young, and must have thrilled many a youthful heart as no other poem has ever done;—its battle-cry for the great struggle of Progress—embodying, as it does, the enthusiastic exultation of a young man in an age which seems to him the greatest of all the ages in the tides of time. True, he discerns clearly some of its most crying and distinctive evils—the social wants, the social lies, its sickening formalities, its love of money, which is the root of all evil. True, also is it, that his reason is painfully convinced that science is not, and cannot be, alone sufficient for the varied requirements of the immortal and infinite soul—that his heart at times is weary of the turmoil and strife of that very material advancement which is to him the glory of the age. Yet is the poem none the less an ecstatic Hymn of Praise to the honour of the present, with unbounded hope and fearless confidence for the future, inspired by youthful aspirations, and sung with youthful ardour: a Pæan to the maternal greatness of these later days, which can

• “Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun;”

but with scarcely a word about any moral greatness, except the advent of peace, which is prophesied to be near, because of the extension of commerce and the improvements of science; a prophecy how premature and vain the last two years have proved to our grief and our glory.

In the last chapter of The Princess, we find expressed the same firm belief in the great destiny of the human race; perhaps it would not be too much to say its perfectibility. Yet, with what a difference in the means! Very little also in praise of the present; nay, a plain implication that it is not far advanced on the road to perfection, since half of the human race, till now, have been systematically left uneducated, undeveloped; their kind feelings, good impulses, and lofty aspirations allowed to remain feelings and impulses and aspirations



only, instead of being trained into steadfast principles and holy realizations. And if woman has been left thus unimproved, what shall be said of her brother, her companion, man? Can he have made a great advance in truth, in beauty, in virtue? Surely not: how could this be?

• “For she that out of Lethe scales with man
• The shining steps of Nature, shares with man
• His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,
• Stays all the fair young planet in her hands;
• If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
• How shall men grow?”

And what shall be the remedy? Shall we now

• “Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun;”

That were a mere mockery of an answer. Regenerating powers altogether different are now pointed out; Love, and, that which differs from scientific culture far more than at first sight appears—real education, real training of the mind and soul; education for woman only stated definitely, but by a very easy inference education for man included. In the Prologue, we have an account of the “sport, half-science,” with which Sir Walter and the patrons of the Institute helped to educate the people; but in the Conclusion, science is rated at its due value.

• “The sport half-science fills me with a faith,
• This fine old world of ours is but a child
• Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time
• To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides.”

But most note-worthy and most impressive of all is the expression of this belief in human progress in several chapters of In Memoriam, in which again the means of attaining that perfection are more accurately stated than in Locksley Hall. I will quote in the order in which they occur in the poem, the passages which bear upon this question; in some of which the belief only is expressed; in others the instruments for effecting that progress are specified, while others, again, both express the belief and specify means:

• “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.”

Introduction.

• “O yet we trust that somehow good
• Will be the final goal of ill,” &c.

---

• “I can but trust that good shall fall,
• At last—far off—at last, to all,
• And every winter change to spring.”

Chap. liii.

• “And I,—my harp would prelude woe,—
• I cannot all command the strings;
• The glory of the sum of things
• Will flash along the chords and go.”

Chap. lxxxvii.

• “As one would sing the death of war,
• And one would chaunt the history
• Of that great race which is to be.”

Chap. cii.

• “Ring out wild bells to the wild shy.”
• To the end.

Chap. cv.

• “Who loves not knowledge? who shall rail
• Against her beauty?”
• To the end.

Chap, cxiii.

• “Till at the last arose the man;
• Who throve and branch’d from clime to clime,
• The herald of a higher race,” &c.

Chap, cxvii.

• “And hear at times a sentinel
• That moves about from place to place,
• And whispers to the vast of space
• Among the worlds, that all is well.”

Chap. cxxv.

• “And all is well, though faith and form
• Be sundered in the night of fear.”
• To the end.

Chap. cxxvi.

• “A closer link
• Betwixt us and the crowning race
• Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
• On knowledge, under whose command
• Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand
• Is Nature like an open book;
• No longer half-akin to brute.”

Conclusion.

Also I would refer to chapters xxi. lxxii. lxxiv. lxxxviii. cviii. cxii. cxxvii.

In so solemn and truthful a poem as In Memoriam, in which the poet so evidently writes in his own person, we cannot but regard this expression



of confidence in the destiny of man, and this enumeration of the instruments whereby that destiny is to be accomplished, as a deliberate and settled belief, in no way dramatic, but to be accepted as literally as if Tennyson were avowedly proclaiming to the world, in his own name, and in prose, and without any modification, his matured and final convictions.

Accordingly, after all this laudation of the present, this confidence in the future,—fiery, enthusiastic, impulsive in Locksley Hall,—with equal strength and more deliberation and definiteness in The Princess and In Memoriam, it is very startling to read the satire in “Maud,”with some expression of hope in the last chapter only.

• “And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars.”
• “When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right, &c.”
• “And noble thought be freer under the sun.”

Still more startling is it to find that this satire is perfectly true; the facts upon which it is founded are palpable, and no vanity, no wild boasting of the nineteenth century can rid us of them. What shall we say then? That the greatest poet of the age has given up the magnificent hopes, so often and so confidently uttered? God forbid: let us still cling to the belief that he is among those, neither few nor ignoble names, who, despite of all hindrances, yet look for the progress of humankind, yet trust that it is progressing: but this we may admit, and that not reluctantly or despondingly, that he no longer imagines that this progress is to be wrought by science alone; nor yet by commerce or political economy;—not by merely increasing the comforts of life ( commoda vitæ), upon which so much stress—very far too much—is laid in Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon, an emphasis twice in the Novum Organum in express words solemnly and earnestly deprecated by the English founder of positive science himself; but that, however honourable a part has been assigned to science by Him who created the material, not less than the moral, world; yet love and veneration, and virtue, and beauty, must have their share also, and that a most important one, in the great work of exalting this fallen, but still glorious, human nature to more than its original glory and nobleness in the garden of Eden.

I scarcely know whether it is worth while alluding to the absurd notion that “Maud” is an allegory. That a moral, that many morals, may be deduced from it, is very plain: it would be a strange poem if it were otherwise; for,

• “Any man that walks the mead,
• In bud or blade, or bloom, may find,
• According as his humours lead,
• A meaning suited to his mind.
• And liberal applications lie
• In art, like nature.”

But a capability for pointing a moral by no means renders a poem an allegory. Fortunately Tennyson has written two poems which are unmistakeably allegories; The Palace of Art, and The Vision of Sin; let us see how he has treated these. To the former, according to a practice very common with him, he has prefixed an introduction, the first line of which is:

• “I send you here a sort of allegory.”

The first line of The Vision of Sin too, is:

• “I had a Vision, when the night was late.”

The inference is very plain, that when Tennyson writes an allegory, he lets his reader see that it is one at the very outset. Indeed he, so truthful, so actual, would be the last of all writers to cheat us with abstractions, when he pretended to bring before us persons.

I should have liked much to enter at some length upon that varied melody which makes “Maud” a very miracle of versification, perhaps most of all Tennyson’s poems winning for his muse that title which I have already



given it, “a lyre of widest range;” ranging from the gigantic strength of that Homeric line, “And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam,” to the unsurpassable softness of the serenade, “Come into the garden, Maud,” and the still sweeter music of the description of Maud’s singing,

• “ A voice by the cedar tree
• In the meadow under the Hall, &c.”

to my ear melody of a far higher order than the better known chapter just instanced. Greatly also do I regret that I have not had space to analyse the psychology of the poem, not, as it has been confusedly called, metaphysics, of which there is not a line from the beginning to the end. And especially would it have been a work of love to have particularized many more chapters than I have had room for,—above all too, that noble one, “I have led her home, my love, my only friend,” and that surpassingly lovely one,

• “O that ’twere possible,
• After long grief and pain,
• To find the arms of my true love
• Round me once again.”

But I have been forced to give the review the form it has taken; a form which I am painfully conscious is a mere skeleton, catching scarcely anything of the life of the poem, which is itself so full of life. But let me hope that ere long the foolish hisses of unappreciating and incompetent criticism (to misuse for a moment so noble a name,) will have died away into the silence which is their inevitable and most just doom; and that then, a true critic, qualified both by ability and appreciation, may interpret to his countrymen, if interpretation be still needed; the grandeur and beauty and significance of this latest poem of him whom we have publicly acknowledged as the first of living English poets.

There have been those who have condemned “Maud,” who have bestowed heartfelt praise upon The Brook. It has been called the finest Idyl in the language; a judgment to which, if The Gardener’s Daughter fall under that title, I am far from assenting. Indeed, I have not myself taken much interest in it, though I would by no means upon that account presume to criticise unfavourably what others have found so tender and pathetic, and what I am perhaps unfit to appreciate.

The Letters displays the true Tennysonian intensity of feeling and terseness and force of language; but I think that perhaps one exception may be taken against it, that in so short a poem it would have been better to have kept to the one idea of the separation, the sudden reconciliation having a look of abruptness.

There can be no doubt, that next to “Maud,” the finest poem in the volume is the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. I would call particular attention to that characteristic which seems to me at once its best and its distinctive quality,—the noble, simple manliness which runs through the whole of it. The description of the character of the Great Duke, in the fourth paragraph, is most admirable for its truth and soldierlike pathos. The seventh paragraph, “A People’s Voice,” &c. sets forth most exactly that union of loyalty and love of freedom, which is one of the most honourable peculiarities of the English character. Indeed, it seems itself to be most truly “a people’s voice,” and surely the voice of the English people must give one universal assent to the poet, who has here so eloquently and so accurately spoken in the name of his countrymen. In the eighth paragraph, we have that old subject, which one would have thought had been long worn threadbare, the principle of Duty as the mainspring of the Duke’s actions, treated with a beauty of metaphor that gives it real originality. The last paragraph is beyond all praise, combining true Christian humility with the full consciousness of the dignity of man, and closes this grand poem



with that genuine religious feeling which is equally removed from cant and mock self-abasement as from irreverence and pride.

The Daisy ends very sweetly and pathetically, adding another to the many instances which bear witness to the gentle and loving disposition of the poet. For a man’s nature will, and cannot but show itself in his writings, as is evidenced even by the plays of one who was so much occupied with the portrayal of other men as Shakspeare.

The Address to Maurice I would regard simply as a friendly letter from one to whom writing in metre has become as easy and natural as writing in prose, and as such I welcome it as gladly as The Daisy.

“Will” has the genuine and unmistakeable signs of its author; vigour of thought, earnestness of purpose, and conciseness and exactness of language.

The Charge of the Light Brigade has generally received great praise, in some cases excessive; a popularity which possibly must be attributed in some degree to the subject itself. For myself, with much admiration for it as a whole, with the highest admiration for parts of it, I yet do not sympathize with the enthusiasm which calls it one of the noblest of war songs. But there is one point upon which it seems to me to have been unfairly found fault with, and that, unless I am misled by very strong internal evidence, by one from whom I am sorry to dissent, and a personal friend of Tennyson. The Reviewer in Fraser disapproves of the metre, because, as he says, it is dactylic, whereas it ought to have been anapæstic, the anapæst and spondee being the metrical feet that answer to the step of a horse at a galop. Now, I am perfectly willing to admit that the anapæstic would have been a very fit measure for this lyric; but I maintain, also, that the metre which the poet has chosen, taking into account the manner in which he has used it, is equally fit. Dactylic is an epithet which very inadequately describes it, some of the lines being at least equally spondaic and iambic. Again, the emphasis on the last syllable, which, in many lines is in rhyme, takes off much of the softness with which the Reviewer charges the metre. And, lastly, softness is a quality which can be by no means predicated universally of dactyls, as every classical reader’s memory will at once suggest. The critic has laid too much stress upon the resemblance between the feet of the metre and the step of the horses; an accident, not an essential, of that which I value, and which Tennyson values, as highly as the Reviewer can, echo of sound to sense. For the best and noblest echo of the sound to the sense, is, not that the word should imitate the sound of the action (as in the case of such words as dash, crash, roar, &c.) but that the rhythm and the language should catch and embody the spirit of the action; and if the language and versification of The Charge of the Light Brigade call back to the few who have survived that charge, or suggest to the many who can only boast of it as an unparalleled achievement of their countrymen, that fearful and heroic death-ride, surely we need not curiously enquire in what metre the poet has accomplished this, but much rather be contented and thankful that it has been done for us, leaving the poet to choose his own instruments. And that this has been accomplished we have the testimony of the critic himself, who tells us that the poem is popular among military men; and, to confirm this judgment, pronounced by those so competent to judge, I appeal to the reader himself, only begging him, when he makes the trial, to read the poem aloud.

And now my work is completed, no light one, and how imperfectly executed, I know too well; it may be in



some instances not merely with shortcomings, but also with positive errors. But this I can truly plead, that I have spared neither labour nor care; that I have given of my best to him who has for several years influenced my mind as no other secular writer has ever influenced it; who has brought me much of the highest and purest happiness I have ever felt. I have tried to apply real criticism to this interpretation of so great a poet, entering into minute details, openly confessing my love of my subject, and despising and neglecting that affectation of knowledge and ability which many seem to demand of a Reviewer, but which, being false, makes the reviews which it pervades to abound in worthless pretentious generalities. I seem to myself not wholly to have failed: one good result at least let me hope may reward my efforts,— that some of those readers who have hitherto undervalued Tennyson, and whom my arguments have not convinced, may yet be moved by my zeal, and, not with shallow coldness deciding against both critic and poet, because of the critic’s enthusiasm, may themselves examine more carefully than they have done the poems for which I avow so much love, thereby to discover what there is in those poems to win such affection. If they do this, I confidently predict that the poet will ever more and more satisfy their intellects and grow upon their hearts. Nay, I will say far more than this, and here I speak deliberately my firm conviction, that a critical reading of all English poets will bring out from that glorious band, which we, their countrymen, hold to be unexcelled, if not unequalled, in all times and among all nations, one name, and one name only, worthy to be set by the side of Alfred Tennyson—that name—it could be no other, the name of the unsurpassable—William Shakespeare.

I dreamed once, that four men sat by the winter fire talking and telling tales, in a house that the wind howled round.

And one of them, the eldest, said: “When I was a boy, before you came to this land, that bar of red sand rock, which makes a fall in our river, had only just been formed; for it used to stand above the river in a great cliff, tunnelled by a cave about midway between the green-growing grass and the green-flowing river; and it fell one night, when you had not yet come to this land, no, nor your fathers.

“Now, concerning this cliff, or pike rather (for it was a tall slip of rock and not part of a range), many strange tales were told; and my father used to say, that in his time many would have explored that cave, either from covetousness (expecting to find gold therein), or from that love of wonders which most young men have, but fear kept them back. Within the memory of man, however, some had entered, and, so men said, were never seen on earth again; but my father said that the tales told concerning such, very far from deterring him (then quite a youth) from the quest of this cavern, made him all the more earnestly long to go; so that one day in his fear, my grandfather, to prevent him, stabbed him in the shoulder, so that he was obliged to keep his bed for long; and somehow he never went, and died at last without ever having seen the inside of the cavern.

“My father told me many wondrous tales about the place, whereof for a long time I have been able to remember nothing; yet, by some means or another, a certain story has grown up in my heart, which I will tell you something of: a story which no living creature ever told me, though I do not remember



the time when I knew it not. Yes, I will tell you some of it, not all perhaps, but as much as I am allowed to tell.”

The man stopped and pondered awhile, leaning over the fire where the flames slept under the caked coal: he was an old man, and his hair was quite white. He spoke again presently. “And I have fancied sometimes, that in some way, how I know not, I am mixed up with the strange story I am going to tell you.” Again he ceased, and gazed at the fire, bending his head down till his beard touched his knees; then, rousing himself, said in a changed voice (for he had been speaking dreamily hitherto): “That strange-looking old house that you all know, with the limes and yew-trees before it, and the double line of very old yew-trees leading up from the gateway-tower to the porch—you know how no one will live there now because it is so eerie, and how even that bold bad lord that would come there, with his turbulent followers, was driven out in shame and disgrace by invisible agency. Well, in times past there dwelt in that house an old grey man, who was lord of that estate, his only daughter, and a young man, a kind of distant cousin of the house, whom the lord had brought up from a boy, as he was the orphan of a kinsman who had fallen in combat in his quarrel. Now, as the young knight and the young lady were both beautiful and brave, and loved beauty and good things ardently, it was natural enough that they should discover as they grew up that they were in love with one another; and afterwards, as they went on loving one another, it was, alas! not unnatural that they should sometimes have half-quarrels, very few and far between indeed, and slight to lookers-on, even while they lasted, but nevertheless intensely bitter and unhappy to the principal parties thereto. I suppose their love then, whatever it has grown to since, was not so all-absorbing as to merge all differences of opinion and feeling, for again there were such differences then. So, upon a time it happened, just when a great war had arisen, and Lawrence (for that was the knight’s name) was sitting, and thinking of war, and his departure from home; sitting there in a very grave, almost a stern mood, that Ella, his betrothed, came in, gay and sprightly, in a humour that Lawrence often enough could little understand, and this time liked less than ever, yet the bare sight of her made him yearn for her full heart, which he was not to have yet; so he caught her by the hand, and tried to draw her down to him, but she let her hand lie loose in his, and did not answer the pressure in which his heart flowed to hers; then he arose and stood before her, face to face, but she drew back a little, yet he kissed her on the mouth and said, though a rising in his throat almost choked his voice, ‘Ella, are you sorry I am going?’ ‘Yea,’ she said, ‘and nay, for you will shout my name among the sword-flashes, and you will fight for me.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘for love and duty, dearest.’ ‘For duty? ah! I think, Lawrence, if it were not for me, you would stay at home and watch the clouds, or sit under the linden trees singing dismal love ditties of your own making, dear knight: truly, if you turn out a great warrior, I too shall live in fame, for I am certainly the making of your desire to fight.’ He let drop his hands from her shoulders, where he had laid them, and said, with a faint flush over his face, ‘You wrong me, Ella, for, though I have never wished to fight for the mere love of fighting, and though,’ (and here again he flushed a little) ‘and though I am not, I well know, so free of the fear of death as a good man would be, yet for this duty’s sake, which is really a higher love, Ella, love of God, I trust I would risk



life, nay honour, even if not willingly, yet cheerfully at least.’ ‘Still duty, duty,’ she said; ‘you lay, Lawrence, as many people do, most stress on the point where you are weakest; moreover, those knights who in time past have done wild, mad things merely at their ladies’ word, scarcely did so for duty; for they owed their lives to their country surely, to the cause of good, and should not have risked them for a whim, and yet you praised them the other day.’ ‘Did I?’ said Lawrence; ‘well, and in a way they were much to be praised, for even blind love and obedience is well; but reasonable love, reasonable obedience is so far better as to be almost a different thing; yet, I think, if the knights did well partly, the ladies did altogether ill: for if they had faith in their lovers, and did this merely from a mad longing to see them do ‘noble’ deeds, then had they but little faith in God, Who can, and at His good pleasure does give time and opportunity to every man, if he will but watch for it, to serve Him with reasonable service, and gain love and all noble things in greater measure thereby: but if these ladies did as they did, that they might prove their knights, then surely did they lack faith both in God and man. I do not think that two friends even could live together on such terms but for lovers—ah! Ella, Ella, why do you look so at me? on this day, almost the last, we shall be together for long; Ella, your face is changed, your eyes—O Christ! help her and me, help her, good Lord.’ ‘Lawrence,’ she said, speaking quickly and in jerks, ‘dare you, for my sake, sleep this night in the cavern of the red pike? for I say to you that, faithful or not, I doubt your courage.’ But she was startled when she saw him, and how the fiery blood rushed up to his forehead, then sank to his heart again, and his face became as pale as the face of a dead man: he looked at her and said, ‘Yes, Ella, I will go now; for what matter where I go?’ He turned and moved toward the door; he was almost gone, when that evil spirit left her, and she cried out aloud, passionately, eagerly: ‘Lawrence, Lawrence, come back once more, if only to strike me dead with your knightly sword.’ He hesitated, wavered, turned, and in another moment she was lying in his arms weeping into his hair.

“ ‘And yet, Ella, the spoken word, the thought of our hearts cannot be recalled, I must go, and go this night too, only promise one thing.’ ‘Dearest what? you are always right!’ ‘Love, you must promise that if I come not again by to-morrow at moonrise, you will go to the red pike, and, having entered the cavern, go where God leads you, and seek me, and never leave that quest, even if it end not but with death.’ ‘Lawrence, how your heart beats! poor heart! are you afraid that I shall hesitate to promise to perform that which is the only thing I could do? I know I am not worthy to be with you, yet I must be with you in body or soul, or body and soul will die.’ They sat silent, and the birds sang in the garden of lilies beyond; then said Ella again; ‘Moreover, let us pray God to give us longer life, so that if our natural lives are short for the accomplishment of this quest, we may have more, yea, even many more lives.’ ‘He will, my Ella,’ said Lawrence, ‘and I think, nay, am sure that our wish will be granted; and I, too, will add a prayer, but will ask it very humbly, namely, that he will give me another chance or more to fight in his cause, another life to live instead of this failure.’ ‘Let us pray too that we may meet, however long the time be before our meeting,’ she said: so they knelt down and prayed, hand fast locked in hand meantime; and afterwards they sat in that chamber facing the east, hard by the garden of lilies; and the sun fell from his noontide light gradually, lengthening the shadows, and when he sank below the sky-line all the sky was faint, tender,



crimson on a ground of blue; the crimson faded too, and the moon began to rise, but when her golden rim first showed over the wooded hills, Lawrence arose; they kissed one long trembling kiss, and then he went and armed himself; and their lips did not meet again after that, for such a long, long time, so many weary years; for he had said: ‘Ella, watch me from the porch, but touch me not again at this time; only, when the moon shows level with the lily-heads, go into the porch and watch me from thence.’

“And he was gone;—you might have heard her heart beating while the moon very slowly rose, till it shone through the rose-covered trellises, level with the lily heads; then she went to the porch and stood there,—

“And she saw him walking down toward the gateway tower, clad in his mail coat, with a bright, crestless helmet on his head, and his trenchant sword newly grinded, girt to his side; and she watched him going between the yew-trees, which began to throw shadows from the shining of the harvest moon. She stood there in the porch, and round by the corners of the eaves of it looked down towards her and the inside of the porch two serpent-dragons, carved in stone; and on their scales, and about their leering eyes, grew the yellow lichen; she shuddered as she saw them stare at her, and drew closer toward the half-open door; she, standing there, clothed in white from her throat till over her feet, altogether ungirdled; and her long yellow hair, without plait or band, fell down behind and lay along her shoulders, quietly, because the night was without wind, and she too was now standing scarcely moving a muscle.

“She gazed down the line of the yew-trees, and watched how, as he went for the most part with a firm step, he yet shrank somewhat from the shadows of the yews; his long brown hair flowing downward, swayed with him as he walked; and the golden threads inter- woven with it, as the fashion was with the warriors in those days, sparkled out from among it now and then; and the faint, far-off moonlight lit up the waves of his mailcoat; he walked fast, and was disappearing in the shadows of the trees near the moat, but turned before he was quite lost in them, and waved his ungauntletted hand; then she heard the challenge of the warder, the falling of the drawbridge, the swing of the heavy wicket-gate on its hinges; and, into the brightening lights, and deepening shadows of the moonlight he went from her sight; and she left the porch and went to the chapel, all that night praying earnestly there.

“But he came not back again all the next day, and Ella wandered about that house pale, and fretting her heart away; so when night came and the moon, she arrayed herself in that same raiment that she had worn on the night before, and went toward the river and the red pike.

“The broad moon shone right over it by the time she came to the river; the pike rose up from the other side, and she thought at first that she would have to go back again, cross over the bridge, and so get to it; but, glancing down on the river just as she turned, she saw a little boat fairly gilt and painted, and with a long slender paddle in it, lying on the water, stretching out its silken painter as the stream drew it downwards, she entered it, and taking the paddle made for the other side; the moon meanwhile turning the eddies to silver over the dark green water: she landed beneath the shadow of that great pile of sandstone, where the grass grew green, and the flowers sprung fair right up to the foot of the bare barren rock; it was cut in many steps till it reached the cave, which was overhung by creepers and matted grass; the stream swept the boat downwards, and Ella, her heart beating so as almost to stop her breath, mounted the steps slowly, slowly. She reached at last the



platform below the cave, and turning, gave a long gaze at the moonlit country; ‘her last,’ she said; then she moved, and the cave hid her as the water of the warm seas close over the pearl-diver.

“Just so the night before had it hidden Lawrence. And they never came back, they two:—never, the people say. I wonder what their love has grown to now; ah! they love, I know, but cannot find each other yet: I wonder also if they ever will.”

So spoke Hugh the white-haired. But he who sat over against him, a soldier as it seemed, black-bearded, with wild grey eyes that his great brows hung over far; he, while the others sat still, awed by some vague sense of spirits being very near them; this man, Giles, cried out—“Never? old Hugh, it is not so.—Speak! I cannot tell you how it happened, but I know it was not so, not so:—speak quick, Hugh! tell us all, all!”

“Wait a little, my son, wait,” said Hugh; “the people indeed said they never came back again at all, but I, but I—Ah! the time is long past over.” So he was silent, and sank his head on his breast, though his old thin lips moved, as if he talked softly to himself, and the light of past days flickered in his eyes.

Meanwhile Giles sat with his hands clasped finger over finger, tightly, “till the knuckles whitened;” his lips were pressed firmly together; his breast heaved as though it would burst, as though it must be rid of its secret. Suddenly he sprang up, and in a voice that was a solemn chant, began: “In full daylight, long ago, on a slumberously-wrathful, thunderous afternoon of summer;”—then across his chant ran the old man’s shrill voice: “On an October day, packed close with heavy-lying mist, which was more than mere autumn-mist:”—the solemn stately chanting dropped, the shrill voice went on; Giles sank down again, and Hugh standing there, swaying to and fro to the measured ringing of his own shrill voice, his long beard moving with him, said:—

“On such a day, warm, and stifling so that one could scarcely breathe even down by the sea-shore, I went from bed to bed in the hospital of the pest-laden city with my soothing draughts and medicines. And there went with me a holy woman, her face pale with much watching; yet I think even without those same desolate lonely watchings her face would still have been pale. She was not beautiful, her face being somewhat peevish-looking; apt, she seemed, to be made angry by trifles, and, even on her errand of mercy, she spoke roughly to those she tended:— no, she was not beautiful, yet I could not help gazing at her, for her eyes were very beautiful and looked out from her ugly face as a fair maiden might look from a grim prison between the window-bars of it.

“So, going through that hospital, I came to a bed at last, whereon lay one who had not been struck down by fever or plague, but had been smitten through the body with a sword by certain robbers, so that he had narrowly escaped death. Huge of frame, with stern suffering face he lay there; and I came to him, and asked him of his hurt, and how he fared, while the day grew slowly toward even, in that pest-chamber looking toward the west; the sister came to him soon and knelt down by his bed-side to tend him.

“O Christ! As the sun went down on that dim misty day, the clouds and the thickly-packed mist cleared off, to let him shine on us, on that chamber of woes and bitter unpurifying tears; and the sunlight wrapped those two, the sick man and the ministering woman, shone on them—changed, changed utterly. Good Lord! How was I struck dumb, nay, almost blinded by that change; for there—yes there, while no man but I wondered; there, instead of the unloving nurse, knelt a wonderfully beautiful maiden, clothed



all in white, and with long golden hair down her back. Tenderly she gazed at the wounded man, as her hands were put about his head, lifting it up from the pillow but a very little; and he no longer the grim, strong wounded man, but fair, and in the first bloom of youth; a bright polished helmet crowned his head, a mail coat flowed over his breast, and his hair streamed down long from his head, while from among it here and there shone out threads of gold.

“So they spake thus in a quiet tone: ‘Body and soul together again, Ella, love; how long will it be now before the last time of all?’ ‘Long,’ she said, ‘but the years pass; talk no more, dearest, but let us think only, for the time is short, and our bodies call up memories, change love to better even than it was in the old time.’

“Silence so, while you might count a hundred, then with a great sigh: ‘Farewell, Ella, for long,’— ‘Farewell, Lawrence,’ and the sun sank, all was as before.

“But I stood at the foot of the bed pondering, till the sister coming to me, said: ‘Master Physician, this is no time for dreaming; act—the patients are waiting, the fell sickness grows worse in this hot close air; feel’—(and she swung open the casement), ‘the outer air is no fresher than the air inside; the wind blows dead toward the west, coming from the stagnant marshes; the sea is like a stagnant pool too, you can scarce hear the sound of the long, low surge breaking.’ I turned from her and went up to the sick man, and said: ‘Sir Knight, in spite of all the sickness about you, you yourself better strangely, and another month will see you with your sword girt to your side again.’ ‘Thanks, kind master Hugh,’ he said, but impatiently, as if his mind were on other things, and he turned in his bed away from me restlessly.

“And till late that night I ministered to the sick in that hospital; but when I went away, I walked down to the sea, and paced there to and fro over the hard sand: and the moon showed bloody with the hot mist, which the sea would not take on its bosom, though the dull east wind blew it onward continually. I walked there pondering till a noise from over the sea made me turn and look that way; what was that coming over the sea? Laus Deo! the west wind: Hurrah! I feel the joy I felt then over again now, in all its intensity. How came it over the sea? first, far out to sea, so that it was only just visible under the red-gleaming moonlight, far out to sea, while the mists above grew troubled, and wavered, a long level bar of white; it grew nearer quickly, it rushed on toward me fearfully fast, it gathered form, strange, misty, intricate form—the ravelled foam of the green sea; then oh! hurrah! I was wrapped in it,— the cold salt spray—drenched with it, blinded by it, and when I could see again, I saw the great green waves rising, nodding and breaking, all coming on together; and over them from wave to wave leaped the joyous west wind; and the mist and the plague clouds were sweeping back eastward in wild swirls; and right away were they swept at last, till they brooded over the face of the dismal stagnant meres, many miles away from our fair city, and there they pondered wrathfully on their defeat.

“But somehow my life changed from the time when I beheld the two lovers, and I grew old quickly.” He ceased; then after a short silence said again; “And that was long ago, very long ago, I know not when it happened.” So he sank back again, and for a while no one spoke; till Giles said at last:

“Once in full daylight I saw a vision, while I was waking, while the eyes of men were upon me: long ago on the afternoon of a thunderous summer day, I sat alone in my fair garden near the city; for on that day a mighty reward was to be given to the brave man who had saved us all, leading us so mightily



in that battle a few days back; now the very queen, the lady of the land, whom all men reverenced almost as the Virgin Mother, so kind and good and beautiful she was, was to crown him with flowers and gird a sword about him; after the ‘Te Deum’ had been sung for the victory, and almost all the city were at that time either in the Church, or hard by it, or else were by the hill that was near the river where the crowning was to be: but I sat alone in the garden of my house as I said; sat grieving for the loss of my brave brother, who was slain by my side in that same fight.

“I sat beneath an elm tree; and as I sat and pondered on that still, windless day, I heard suddenly a breath of air rustle through the boughs of the elm. I looked up, and my heart almost stopped beating, I knew not why, as I watched the path of that breeze over the bowing lilies and the rushes by the fountain; but when I looked to the place whence the breeze had come, I became all at once aware of an appearance that told me why my heart stopped beating. Ah! there they were, those two whom before I had but seen in dreams by night, now before my waking eyes in broad daylight. One, a knight (for so he seemed), with long hair mingled with golden threads, flowing over his mail-coat, and a bright crestless helmet on his head, his face sad-looking, but calm; and by his side, but not touching him, walked a wondrously fair maiden, clad in white, her eyelids just shadowing her blue eyes: her arms and hands seeming to float along with her as she moved on quickly, yet very softly; great rest on them both, though sorrow gleamed through it.

“When they came opposite to where I stood, these two stopped for a while, being in nowise shadowy, as I have heard men say ghosts are, but clear and distinct. They stopped close by me, as I stood motionless, unable to pray; they turned to each other, face to face, and the maiden said, ‘Love, for this our last true meeting before the end of all, we need a witness; let this man, softened by sorrow, even as we are, go with us.’

“I never heard such music as her words were; though I used to wonder when I was young whether the angels in heaven sung better than the choristers sang in our church, and though, even then the sound of the triumphant hymn came up to me in a breath of wind, and floated round me, making dreams, in that moment of awe and great dread, of the old long-past days in that old church, of her who lay under the pavement of it; whose sweet voice once, once long ago, once only to me—yet I shall see her again.” He became silent as he said this, and no man cared to break in upon his thoughts, seeing the choking movement in his throat, the fierce clenching of hand and foot, the stiffening of the muscles all over him; but soon, with an upward jerk of his head, he threw back the long elf locks that had fallen over his eyes while his head was bent down, and went on as before:

“The knight passed his hand across his brow, as if to clear away some mist that had gathered there, and said, in a deep murmurous voice, ‘Why the last time, dearest, why the last time? Know you not how long a time remains yet? the old man came last night to the ivory house and told me it would be a hundred years, ay, more, before the happy end.’ ‘So long,’ she said; ‘so long; ah! love, what things words are; yet this is the last time; alas! alas! for the weary years! my words, my sin!’ ‘O love, it is very terrible,’ he said; ‘I could almost weep, old though I am, and grown cold with dwelling in the ivory house: O, Ella, if you only knew how cold it is there, in the starry nights when the north wind is stirring; and there is no fair colour there, nought but the white ivory, with one narrow line of gleaming gold over every window, and a fathom’s-



breadth of burnished gold behind the throne. Ella, it was scarce well done of you to send me to the ivory house.’ ‘Is it so cold, love?’ she said, ‘I knew it not; forgive me! but as to the matter of a witness, some one we must have, and why not this man?’ ‘Rather old Hugh,’ he said, ‘or Cuthbert, his father; they have both been witnesses before.’ ‘Cuthbert,’ said the maiden, solemnly, ‘has been dead twenty years; Hugh died last night.’ ” (Now, as Giles said these words, carelessly, as though not heeding them particularly, a cold sickening shudder ran through the other two men, but he noted it not and went on.) “ ‘This man then be it,’ said the knight, and therewith they turned again, and moved on side by side as before; nor said they any word to me, and yet I could not help following them, and we three moved on together, and soon I saw that my nature was changed, and that I was invisible for the time; for, though the sun was high, I cast no shadow, neither did any man that we past notice us, as we made toward the hill by the riverside.

“And by the time we came there the queen was sitting at the top of it, under a throne of purple and gold, with a great band of knights gloriously armed on either side of her; and their many banners floated over them. Then I felt that those two had left me, and that my own right visible nature was returned; yet still did I feel strange, and as if I belonged not wholly to this earth. And I heard one say, in a low voice to his fellow, ‘See, sir Giles is here after all; yet, how came he here, and why is he not in armour among the noble knights yonder, he who fought so well? how wild he looks too!’ ‘Poor knight,’ said the other, ‘he is distraught with the loss of his brother; let him be; and see, here comes the noble stranger knight, our deliverer.’ As he spoke, we heard a great sound of trumpets, and therewithal a long line of knights on foot wound up the hill towards the throne, and the queen rose up, and the people shouted; and, at the end of all the procession went slowly and majestically the stranger knight; a man of noble presence he was, calm, and graceful to look on; grandly he went amid the gleaming of their golden armour; himself clad in the rent mail and tattered surcoat he had worn on the battle-day; bareheaded, too; for, in that fierce fight, in the thickest of it, just where he rallied our men, one smote off his helmet, and another, coming from behind, would have slain him, but that my lance bit into his breast.

“So, when they had come within some twenty paces of the throne, the rest halted, and he went up by himself toward the queen; and she, taking the golden hilted sword in her left hand, with her right caught him by the wrist, when he would have knelt to her, and held him so, tremblingly, and cried out, ‘No, no, thou noblest of all knights, kneel not to me; have we not heard of thee even before thou camest hither? how many widows bless thee, how many orphans pray for thee, how many happy ones that would be widows and orphans but for thee, sing to their children, sing to their sisters, of thy flashing sword, and the heart that guides it! And now, O noble one! thou hast done the very noblest deed of all, for thou hast kept grown men from weeping shameful tears! Oh truly! the greatest I can do for thee is very little; yet, see this sword, golden-hilted, and the stones flash out from it,’ (then she hung it round him) ‘and see this wreath of lilies and roses for thy head; lilies no whiter than thy pure heart, roses no tenderer than thy true love; and here, before all these my subjects, I fold thee, noblest, in my arms, so, so.’ Ay, truly it was strange enough! those two were together again; not the queen and the stranger knight, but the young-seeming knight and the maiden I had seen in the garden. To my eyes they clung together



there; though they say, that to the eyes of all else, it was but for a moment that the queen held both his hands in hers; to me also, amid the shouting of the multitude, came an under current of happy song: ‘Oh! truly, very truly, my noblest, a hundred years will not be long after this.’ ‘Hush! Ella, dearest, for talking makes the time speed; think only.’

“Pressed close to each other, as I saw it, their bosoms heaved—but I looked away—alas! when I looked again, I saw nought but the stately stranger knight, descending, hand in hand, with the queen, flushed with joy and triumph, and the people scattering flowers before them.

“And that was long ago, very long ago.” So he ceased; then Osric, one of the two younger men, who had been sitting in awe-struck silence all this time, said, with eyes that dared not meet Giles’s, in a terrified half whisper, as though he meant not to speak, “How long?” Giles turned round and looked him full in the face, till he dragged his eyes up to his own, then said, “More than a hundred years ago.”

“So they all sat silent, listening to the roar of the south-west wind; and it blew the windows so, that they rocked in their frames.

“Then suddenly, as they sat thus, came a knock at the door of the house; so Hugh bowed his head to Osric, to signify that he should go and open the door; so he arose, trembling, and went.

“And as he opened the door the wind blew hard against him, and blew something white against his face, then blew it away again, and his face was blanched, even to his lips; but he plucking up heart of grace, looked out, and there he saw, standing with her face upturned in speech to him, a wonderfully beautiful woman, clothed from her throat till over her feet in long white raiment, ungirt, unbroidered, and with a long veil, that was thrown off from her face, and hung from her head, streaming out in the blast of the wind; which veil was what had struck against his face: beneath her veil her golden hair streamed out too, and with the veil, so that it touched his face now and then. She was very fair, but she did not look young either, because of her statue-like features. She spoke to him slowly and queenly; ‘I pray you give me shelter in your house for an hour, that I may rest, and so go on my journey again.’ He was too much terrified to answer in words, and so only bowed his head; and she swept past him in stately wise to the room where the others sat, and he followed her, trembling.

“A cold shiver ran through the other men when she entered and bowed low to them, and they turned deadly pale, but dared not move; and there she sat while they gazed at her, sitting there and wondering at her beauty, which seemed to grow every minute; though she was plainly not young, oh no, but rather very, very old, who could say how old? there she sat, and her long, long hair swept down in one curve from her head, and just touched the floor. Her face had the tokens of a deep sorrow on it, ah! a mighty sorrow, yet not so mighty as that it might mar her ineffable loveliness; that sorrow-mark seemed to gather too, and at last the gloriously-slow music of her words flowed from her lips: ‘Friends, has one with the appearance of a youth come here lately; one with long brown hair, interwoven with threads of gold, flowing down from out of his polished steel helmet; with dark blue eyes and high white forehead, and mail-coat over his breast, where the light and shadow lie in waves as he moves; have you seen such an one, very beautiful?’

“Then withal as they shook their heads fearfully in answer, a great sigh rose up from her heart, and she said: ‘Then must I go away again presently, and yet I thought it was the last night of all.’

“And so she sat awhile with her head resting on her hand; after, she arose as if about to go, and turned her glorious head round to thank the master of the house; and they, strangely enough, though they were terrified at her presence, were yet grieved when they saw that she was going.

“Just then the wind rose higher than ever before, yet through the roar of it they could all hear plainly a knocking at the door again; so the lady stopped when she heard it, and, turning, looked full in the face of Herman the youngest, who thereupon, being constrained by that look, rose and went to the door; and as before with Osric, so now the wind blew strong against him; and it blew into his face, so as to blind him, tresses of soft brown hair mingled with glittering threads of gold; and blinded so, he heard some one ask him musically, solemnly, if a lady with golden hair and white raiment was in that house; so Herman, not answering in words, because of his awe and fear, merely bowed his head; then he was ’ware of some one in bright armour passing him, for the gleam of it was all about him, for as yet he could not see clearly, being blinded by the hair that had floated about him.

“But presently he followed him into the room, and there stood such an one as the lady had described; the wavering flame of the light gleamed from his polished helmet, touched the golden threads that mingled with his hair, ran along the rings of his mail.

“They stood opposite to each other for a little, he and the lady, as if they were somewhat shy of each other after their parting of a hundred years, in spite of the love which they had for each other: at last he made one step, and took off his gleaming helmet, laid it down softly, then spread abroad his arms, and she came to him, and they were clasped together, her head lying over his shoulder; and the four men gazed, quite awe-struck.

“And as they gazed, the bells of the church began to ring, for it was New- Year’s-eve; and still they clung together, and the bells rang on, and the old year died.

“And there beneath the eyes of those four men the lovers slowly faded away into a heap of snow-white ashes. Then the four men kneeled down and prayed, and the next day they went to the priest, and told him all that had happened.

“So the people took those ashes and buried them in their church, in a marble tomb, and above it they caused to be carved their figures lying with



clasped hands; and on the sides of it the history of the cave in the red pike.

“And in my dream I saw the moon shining on the tomb, throwing fair colours on it from the painted glass; till a sound of music rose, deepened, and fainted; then I woke.”

• “No memory labours longer from the deep
• Gold mines of thought to lift the hidden ore
• That glimpses, moving up, than I from sleep
• To gather and tell o’er
• Each little sound and sight.”

Seven years, seven long weary years, and never once out of doors, and half the time in bed; it’s a sore change for me that used to be out on the wide waters night and day; but this morning I heard the doctor say—they were whispering together up in the corner, but I heard him say—‘It can’t last much longer.’ What made them whisper as though they were afraid of me hearing it? What should I be afraid of death for? No, no; let them that can eat and drink in plenty, and sleep sound, and go and come when and where they like, let them be afraid of dying, but an old woman like me, why should I be afraid?—Hark! what’s that, Jenny? It’s an awful night; worse than— What’s that?”

“It’s only the sea, mother;” replied her daughter, a woman about forty-five years old, a fisherman’s wife, like the mother, with features and complexion apparently delicate and soft originally, but hardened and made rough by exposure to the elements.

“Only the sea!” cried the old woman, petulantly: “what do you mean by saying it’s only the sea? How do you know what’s in the sea?”

“Oh mother, don’t speak and look like that. You quite frighten me.”

“You’re a poor body to be frightened by the like of that. But you haven’t seen what your mother’s seen. God forbid you ever should. But don’t say it’s only the sea again. There, there, will you tell me that’s only the water? Didn’t I hear a shriek, the shriek of a child? there, out on the sea, right straight before the window.”

“It was the wind, dearie, coming up the beach. Do keep quiet, there’s a darling! The doctor said you should be kept quite still.”

“It’s easy to say that; but I can’t be kept still. With the wind howling like that:—hark there!” she cried, as a more powerful blast drove the door of the hut in, “there’s quiet for you; let him make the wind and the waves still, and then I’ll try to keep quiet too.”

Here she sank down for a few minutes, as if exhausted, then suddenly started up, and, looking round, asked sharply, “Where’s Jacky?”

“Here, grandam,” said the voice of a boy of ten, who was sitting on a wooden bench close to the fire.

“Come here, lad; I want to speak to you; and I can’t raise my voice to you sitting there.”

The boy went to her bedside, somewhat unwillingly and timidly, and she said,

“Ye’re overfond of the fire-side, Jacky; a great deal too fond for a fisher-lad. But ye’re not afraid of the wind and the rain, neither, are ye?”

“No, grandam;” said the boy, with some hesitation.

“And ye wouldn’t be afraid to go by yourself up to the Hall for your poor grandam, that can’t go for herself? that for seven long, long years has never set foot out of the house. Ye’re not afraid, lad, are ye?”

“No, grandam, I’m not afraid, only—”

“Then go and say your grandmother—no, tell Lord Lilworth that Elsie Mackay—he’ll remember the name, he must have heard it from his father—wants to see him to-night, and can’t be said nay to; for the doctor says,” and she laughed feebly and hideously, “it can’t last much longer. Now mind, boy, what you’ve got to say, that Elsie Mackay—it’s a pretty name, and she was a pretty lass once that bore it—wants to see his lordship to-night, and must see him. And don’t be long away. I shall listen for you, and hear you coming, for all the night’s so rough.”

The boy departed, and walked stoutly through the rain and wind to the Hall, which was about a mile and a half from the cottage. Lord Lilworth, who was alone, complied with the request without hesitation, and at once set out with him on foot. They reached the cottage about an hour after the boy had left it, and found old Elsie sitting upright in bed, eagerly watching for them. On their entrance, her features for a moment lost their grimness, and wore a gentle look, as her eyes rested on the thoughtful face of the nobleman.

“Have ye brought the clergyman with you?” were her first words.

“No, my good woman;” answered Lord Lilworth, “I did not know that you desired him.”

“Don’t call me good woman,” she said querulously, “you know well enough I’m not good; no more are you, nor anybody else; though it isn’t often you rich people flatter us poor. But perhaps it don’t much matter that the clergyman hasn’t come. I could never see what use those parsons were. They never seemed to me half as clever as the lecturer that came down in these parts once, and said it was all lies they told about hell-fire and the—What’s that noise?” she suddenly broke off, as the wind with one long wild sweep drove a mountain of waves upon the shore, and, racing madly over the level coast, dashed against the house with a fury that threatened to hurl it down.

“I wish the wind wouldn’t blow in that way,” she muttered. “Not that I’m afraid of it. I’ve seen the time when I cared neither for weather nor anything else. Ay, many’s the day, and night too, when I’ve steered poor John, that’s dead and gone, poor soul, all safe when many a bold young fellow wouldn’t have had the nerve. But it’s different now: I’m getting old now, and old nerves are not like young ones.”

“If you wish for the clergyman,”—said Lord Lilworth.

“Who wished for the clergyman?” she interrupted him, sternly. “I thought perhaps he’d come with you, as they’re very fond of coming to poor people’s houses in bad nights like this.”

Here she stopped a little; and then said, in a tone very different from her former fierce sneering one:

“A fine lord like you would be above letting a poor old fish-wife kiss him, wouldn’t you? Though I’ve seen the time when fine handsome young lords thought it a favour to kiss little Elsie; but that was a long while ago, yet not so very long; I’m not so old as all that: I’ve known many a one quite young at sixty-five.”

Lord Lilworth, though greatly surprised by this strange request, yet, as the old woman raised her face to his, to humour her, gave her his cheek, which she kissed tenderly.

“Jenny, what’s that song you used to sing? Come, sing it now, his lordship would like to hear it.”

“Oh sir! you musn’t mind mother now she’s so ill. She hardly knows what she’s saying.”

“I can sing it myself, if you wont.”

And the old woman began in a quavering voice, that might once have been strong and clear, but was now scarcely audible amid the raging of the elements:—

• “A fisher row’d forth on the sea one night,
• Sing ho! ho! the winds and the waves.
• The waters with foam gleamed wild and white,
• Sing ho! ho! the winds and the waves.
• The fisherman’s wife she steered the helm,
• Sing ho! ho! the winds and the waves.”

“Ah! I can’t sing now; it’s no use trying. I mind the time, but it’s long gone by. They are strange things, those songs. Those who make them sometimes seem to know what’s gone on in your own mind, and all that’s happened to you. There are songs, I know, that it’s an awful thing to hear. But I’m wearying you, my lord, with my wild talk. Sit down here, close by me, I’ve something to tell you; ay, something that will make you look paler than ever.”

He sat down in some alarm, not knowing what to make of the old woman’s ominous words. She was silent a few moments, then said abruptly:

“Ye see Jenny, my daughter, there?”

He looked towards her.

“She isn’t so delicate as the fine young ladies that are brought up to do nothing from morning till night, and wear silk gloves on their hands for fear they shouldn’t be white, and veils on their faces to keep them from the wind and the blessed sun. No, Jenny’s faced the sun and the wind, and the



rain, and the snow, night and day for forty years and more; and so she isn’t so fair and delicate as you grand people might like. But for all that, what should you think of her for a sister, my lord?”

He replied only by a look of utter astonishment, while her daughter shrieked out:

“Oh! mother, your wits are turned.”

“Ay,” she went on, “what should you think of her for a sister? Why not? You work as hard as she’s done, and go in the wind and sun as much, and your face wont be as fair and pale as it is now. But what o’ that? You rich folk are always saying that fair skin and soft hand make no difference in the nature; and so why mayn’t Jenny Norton be kin to Lord Lilworth?” She ended with a fierce laugh, when he cried:

“Woman! in heaven’s name cease jesting in this horrible manner on a sick bed.”

“A sick bed!” she took up his words mockingly; “Why don’t you say a death-bed at once? Did ye think it would hurt me? D’ye suppose I want to drag on this wretched life any longer, never going out into the blessed sunshine; never riding on the free waters, with the merry winds carrying the boat on gaily? It’s very well for you rich, who eat and drink of the best, and sleep the softest, and never have anything to trouble you while you’re well; and, if you fall sick, have servants to wait on you, and carriages to take you out in the air;—it’s very natural for you to want to live: but a miserable, poor, old fish-wife like me—No, no, the lecturer was right; he was a deal cleverer than the parsons, and he proved it straight out of hand, that all they said about judgment and punishment was only lies,—lies to put money in their pockets;—nobody shall ever say old Elsie durstn’t die in her old age.”

“Wretched woman, you surely have not been the dupe—”

“Never mind who’s been the dupe. Maybe there’s some that don’t think it. But sit you down—here, close—and I’ll tell ye a tale the like of which ye have never read of in all your books.”

He was awed by her manner, and sat down where she motioned him. She did not speak for two or three minutes, seeming wrapt in recollections; then began in a musing tone as if speaking to herself.

“Forty-five years ago! it’s a long while. I was very different then, just twenty; and he two or three years older. Oh he was a handsome man, a deal handsomer than him they call his son ever was or ever will be; and a sweet-spoken man too he was, too sweet-spoken for me; I was but a girl, only twenty; besides, he said he’d marry me; he did indeed;”—and her voice became more earnest, quite pleading:— “he vow’d it, and he’d ha’ done it, if they’d left him to himself, for he wasn’t cruel; no, Henry wasn’t cruel; he never meant to leave me miserable; only his family thought scorn that Lord Lilworth should marry poor Elsie Mackay, the daughter of a Scotch farmer; so, they married him to the pale-faced Lady Mary—. Oh, how I hated her! Why should she steal my love from me? he never loved her; I know he never did; he never could, though he never ill-used her; for Henry was always kind, kind to all when they let him alone. Well, I left these parts while they courted, and then Jenny was born; and, when I came back Henry was married, and before long they’d a little boy; oh! such a delicate child, with mild blue eyes and soft chestnut hair, like his mother; but I hated him for that: and, when he was three years old they’d another boy, and I’d been married too, and had a son, born the very same day as Lady Mary’s; and in about a week her’s died all of a sudden in its nurse’s arms; and the nurse came down here, frightened to death, for she durstn’t for her life go up to the Hall, and tell them; and I and John—that’s my husband,



you know, that’s been dead this many a long year—we considered a long while, and at last we let her have our child—”

“O God!” exclaimed Lord Lilworth, “then do you mean to say that I—”

“That you are my son! yes, yes, my own true son; flesh of my flesh; as God’s—as sure as I lie here. And I’ve watched you, and loved you, as only a mother can, all your life; and nobody can ever know what I’ve suffered all these many years; and now that I was going to die, I could bear it no longer, so I sent for you—”

“You drive me wild with this horrible story. I do not know what to say or think. But it cannot be; it is impossible, impossible. What proof can you give?”

“What proof can I give?” she cried passionately, rising upright in her bed, and stretching out her arms towards him. “Howard, Howard, will you kill me before my time! It’s only two or three days at most, may be only as many hours. What should I tell lies on my death-bed for? Not that I fear punishment hereafter: but what could I gain by it? But if you want proof, you shall have it. You know Widow Trevor, the woman that nursed you; send for her, and see if she’s not in the same tale with me.”

“But how can she come here in this stormy night?”

“Eh, she’s not so old as all that. She isn’t seventy yet, only a year or two older than me, and a deal heartier; them that are ill-favoured in youth often wear best when they begin to get old.”

“But who will fetch her?”

“Who fetched you? Here, Jacky, my lad, you must go out again, and fetch Widow Trevor; you know where she lives: tell her Lord Lilworth and I want to see her—she knows what about —and she’ll come with you, though the wind should blow the sea up here.”

They waited for an hour and a half, during which not a word was spoken; for the nobleman was lost in thought, and the old woman seemed to be dozing.

Widow Trevor fully justified Elsie’s remarks upon her ill-favouredness. Features, originally harsh, though not repellent, had been for many years hardened and made coarse by the elements (for she too was a fisherman’s wife, having left the former Lord Lilworth’s service to be married, when his lady died), and were now shrunk and withered by old age.

“I knew you’d come,” said Elsie, with a sort of quiet triumph. “My lord here was afraid you wouldn’t such a night as this.”

“Speak louder,” said the older woman, turning her right ear towards her, “I’ve been rather hard o’ hearing since the bad weather set in.”

“Ah!” said Elsie in her former tone, not without some satisfaction, “she’ll soon follow me, I doubt.”

Then in a louder voice,

“I’ve been talking with my lord about what happened forty years ago.”

“Forty year ago!” mumbled the other, “it’s a sight o’ time to look back. Many’s the thing that’s happened since then.”

“Poor old creature,” observed Elsie in her lower tone, “her memory’s failing too, I see.”

Then again raising her voice,

“But you remember what happened forty years ago—it may be a year or two more—when my lord there was born. You’ve not forgotten that?”

The old woman’s face lighted up all of a sudden.

“Forgotten it? What should make me forget it? I wish I could. Oh he was a sweet child, and he died in my arms, and I could’nt—”

“ Who died in your arms?” burst in Lord Lilworth.

“The son of Lord and Lady Lilworth, my lord,” she answered, in a tone that had something of mockery in it.

“For the mercy of heaven explain yourself,” entreated the poor lord.

“Why, my lord,” she said, her mocking manner changed to a sort of respectful pity, “if you wont be angry with me, I’ll tell you just how it was. I was nursing Lady Lilworth’s baby—such a sweet child it was, more like a girl than a boy, with blue eyes and little curly chestnut hair”—(Lord Lilworth’s hair and eyes were dark), “when all of a sudden it was taken with fits, and in half an hour—oh I shall never forget it!—died in my arms. I was frightened out of my senses; for I knew, if I told my lady, she’d go raving mad: besides, I was afraid they might say I’d murdered him: so I wrapt, him up in my shawl, and came down here; and here I found John Norton, sitting by the fire, and Elsie in bed, nursing her baby, that was just as old as Lady Mary’s to a day. So I told them of my trouble, and we’d a long talk together; and we did’nt know what to do for a long time; till at last a thought struck me, and it made me go all white, and took my breath away, at first; but, when I got over that, I said, suppose they were to bury the dead child as soon as they could, and say theirs had died suddenly of the fever, and let me take him to the Hall, and nurse him like Lady Mary’s; and they didn’t like it at all at first, and Elsie cried, and said she could never part with him, and John swore it should never be: but I showed them how there was no harm in it, and how Lady Mary would never see any difference, and their child would be brought up like a gentleman, instead of having to earn his bread on the sea, and perhaps be drowned. So at last they let me have him, and I drest him in young Lord Howard’s clothes, and took him to my lady, and she never found it out; only at first she said, how baby was altered; but I told her he only grew handsomer and handsomer every day. So nobody knew of it, or heard a word about it till to-night, and never would, only neighbour Norton sent for me to ease her mind.”

“What do you say now, my lord,” asked Elsie, after a pause of a few seconds; “do you want any more proof?”

“I can say nothing,” he answered, in the most distressed bewilderment. “I can’t ever collect myself enough to think about it. It is dreadful, fearful.”

“Fearful!” she almost shrieked; “ye’ll say that, when ye’ve heard what’s coming now. Two years after that, Arthur—that was the eldest son, that was so like his mother, a year younger than my Jenny—he was five years old then—oh! he’d such sweet blue eyes, and such long chestnut curls hanging down over his shoulders, and such pretty ways with him, you could hardly help loving him only to look at him; but I did, I hated him. Well, one afternoon John and I persuaded his mother to let us take him out for a ride on the water: we’d hard work to persuade her, for she was very timorous, and hardly trusted him out of her sight; but she let him go at last, and very glad he was to go, and ran and danced so, it would have done—almost any heart good to see him. It was quite fine then, in the afternoon, late in the summer, and the sea was quite still, and we promised his mother to be back before dusk; but I persuaded John to row out a long way into the sea, and the child was delighted to be out, and sat by me, watching the water; so it was quite dark when we were more than a mile from land, and then a storm of wind came on, and John went to trim the sails, when, my God! he turned round all of a sudden, as white as a sheet, and cried,“ the child’s overboard!” What did he say that to me for? Did he think I didn’t know it? me, who—yes, he was leaning over the boat, looking into the water—John’s back was turned—I gave him one little push, and he was over, in among the tumbling waves.”

“Wretch! monster!” shouted her horrified listener; “impossible! you are surely raving; you could’nt have had the heart—”

“Didn’t he have the heart,” she interrupted him with fierce impetuosity, “to marry her? Didn’t she have the heart to take him from me? Didn’t his family have the heart to make him cast me off? Was I worse than them? Never prate to me like that. Well, John was going to jump in after him, but I held tight to him, screaming out to him not to risk his life; and when he shook me off it was too late, it was too late,” (and her eyes flashed with savage triumph) “he was lying fathoms deep, down at the bottom of the sea. We took the news of the accident home to his father and mother: I went with John, but I let him tell it, for I knew he’d do it more naturally than I could; I only cried and sobbed, and Lady Mary, even in her own trouble, was sorry for me, and tried to comfort me, and said they’d never show any difference to us because of this—she did; I could have stabbed her as her words stabbed me.”

She stopped here. Lord Lilworth in horror could only gasp out, “God forgive you! God forgive you!”

“I don’t care about that,” she cried frantically; “it’s you I want to forgive me; you that I’ve nursed on my knees, my own child—”

“Miserable woman, how can I forgive you, the murderer of my own brother?”

“He was’nt your brother, I tell you: he was no kin at all to you, neither by father nor mother.”

“Why did you make this horrible confession now, when nothing can be done? Or why did you make it to me? Why did’nt you—”

“Make it to the clergyman?” she broke in with a sneer, “and be told I was a miserable sinner, as if I didn’t know that before. Or to the priest, and be set penance to do, as if I hadn’t had penance enough already, with all these years of sitting in the house by day, and lying awake at night, or else dreaming—oh such dreams! sometimes when I’ve had them I’ve almost believed in hell pains. Or may be, you’d have liked me to tell it to one of those preachers, and hear him talk about conversion, change of heart; as if I wanted my heart to be changed. No, no, I love Henry, and can’t help loving him; and I hate her, and always have hated her, and always shall; and as for the child, it didn’t seem like my doing; I couldn’t help doing it, and if it was to be done again to-morrow, I couldn’t: you people that believe in the devil will understand that.”

Thus they went on for more than an hour, the old woman striving, now frantically, now piteously, to gain an acknowledgment of love, at least of forgiveness, from her son; and he, feeling a loathing of her no belief in her parental claim could for the present lessen; at the end of that time, despite of her entreaties, which sometimes sounded like menaces, he left the cottage, and walked back to the Hall, through the night, utterly unconscious of the storm that beat upon him. For several days she lay in a sort of heavy sleep, from which she never fairly rallied, till one evening she suddenly sprang up, and said, with a wild, eager look,—

“Is he coming?”

“Keep quiet, there’s a dearie; do keep still,” her daughter said, soothingly.

“Will you tell me whether he’s coming or not? He’s not, I know it, or you’d tell me at once, to keep me quiet. Wont he come to see his own mother before she dies? My—no, no; perhaps he’s ill; ay, perhaps he’s dying: yes, he is; I see it in your face; you needn’t tell me; I know it as well as that I’m lying here.”

“O mother, don’t take on like that: he’s not so very ill; the doctor says he may get better yet.”

“There, there; I knew it; I’ve killed him; like him he thought was his brother; and so I shall never see him again: I’m going fast; it can’t last much longer; I don’t want the doctor



to tell me that now: one more night, if that, and then—”

Here the doctor himself entered.

“How do you find yourself now?” he asked kindly.

“Oh very well, very well now, doctor: it can’t last much longer you know; a few hours, that’s all.”

“But you’ll see the clergyman now you’re aware you are so near your end?”

“What for? What good ’ud he do me? No, no; I’m not afraid of hell-fire. I know where I’m going to; to the pit; not the pit you mean, the pit o’ torment; but the pit o’ darkness and forgetfulness; where I shall be all quiet at last; no more moping in the house, no more tossing about the bed, no more dreams. Oh it’ll be a happy change. But I should like one thing more; I should like to see them there; Henry, that I loved so, and love still, though he deceived me,—and Howard, that I nursed on my knee, though it was forty years ago; that I’ve watched all that time, and been obliged to speak like a stranger to; and he’s passed me by like a poor old fishwife, that so fine a lord as him couldn’t demean himself to; and I waited, and thought the day would come some time; and now I’m dying, and so is he, and I shall never see my poor boy again; I don’t like that: but no, it can’t be true what they say; it’s all dark, dark there; no meeting there, no burning.”

“I’ve been by many a terrible death-bed,” whispered the doctor to her daughter; “but never a more awful one than this.”

The dying woman’s sharpened ears caught the whisper, and she said,

“ And so ye’re frightened to sit by me, are ye? If ye’d been one of the clergy, I shouldn’t ha’ wondered; but you doctors—I’ll say that for you—are not so timorous. But it’s an awful night; I mind but one like it; and I don’t wonder at your being skeered. There’s a blast of wind for you. There’s many a fishwife, ay, and many a grand lady too, that’s uneasy by their firesides to-night. There’ll be many a brave fellow the less before the morning.”

“Raving!” she said, in answer to another whisper of the doctor to her daughter; “that’s what you bookish folks say the sea does when the winds blow across it, and the waves come dashing up the beach, one over the other, like mad things. Eugh! there’s a deal more in the world than your books’ll ever teach you. There’s not one of you ever heard it sing the song I’ve heard it sing; though I’ve sung it myself many a time, and so has Jenny too there:

• “Under the waters waste and wild,
• Sing heigho the winds and the waves.
• He sleeps for ever that fair-hair’d child,
• Sing heigho the winds and the waves.

• O woe for the lady that waits in her bower!
• Sing heigho the winds and the waves.
• And woe for the lord that looks from his tower!
• Sing heigho the winds and the waves.

• Wait ever and watch, but for ever in vain:
• 10Sing heigho the winds and the waves.
• Your fair-hair’d boy will come never again,
• Sing heigho the winds and the waves.”

“That’s somewhat like a song, and



the sea’s sung it many a day, and many a night too; and I’ve been the only one that knew what it was singing; and it’s singing it now: there, don’t you hear it?

• “Your fair-hair’d boy will come never again.

Never, never again. But it will never sing it more after to-night, never more, nor there will be no one to understand it.”

And in the hall the same tragedy of death was enacting; the same in the carpeted and curtained chamber as within the bare walls of the fisherman’s hut. The reputed Lord Lilworth was dying, his secret escaping amid the ravings of fever, to which the wind played a fearful music, though far less fearful than that human voice, so changed, jangled, out of tune; and about the same time that the old fishwife fell into the slumber that preceded death, her son (we will call him Lord Lilworth no longer, on his deathbed) breathed his last; and the mother and son, who had been divided in life, were joined in death—beyond which let none presume to follow them.

I am not going to attempt a regular classification of Robert Browning’s “Men and Women;” yet the poems do fall naturally into some order, or rather some of them go pretty much together; and, as I have no great space, I will go through those that do so fall together, saying little or nothing about the others.

The three that strike me first, are ‘The Epistle of Karshish,’ ‘Cleon,’ and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology.’



They have all three to do with belief and doubt, with the thoughts and fancies, and strange longings that circle round these; they are dramatic too, not expressing, except quite incidentally, the poet’s own thoughts. ‘Cleon,’ and the ‘Epistle of Karshish,’ are especially dramatic, and are very considerably alike: they both tell of the desires and doubts of men out of Christianity, and in the days when Christianity was the true faith of a very few unknown men, not a mere decent form to all the nations.

Karshish is an Arab physician, a man of science; Cleon is poet, painter, sculptor. The Arab is the more genial of the two, less selfish, somewhat deeper too, I think; Cleon, with his intense appreciation of beauty, even with his long life spent in producing that beauty, is yet intensely selfish; he despises utterly the common herd; he would bring about, if he could, a most dreary aristocracy of intellect, where the commoners would be bound hand and foot, mere slaves to the great men, and their great lordly minds, not loyal freemen, honouring the heroes; he plumes himself, too, on being no less great than his fathers, greater even than they, saying;

• “Marvel not,
• We of these latter days, with greater mind
• Than our forerunners, since more composite,
• Look not so great (beside their simple way),
• To a judge who only sees one way at once,
• One mind-point, and no other at a time;
• Compares the small part of a man of us
• With some whole man of the heroic age,
• Great in his way—not ours, nor meant for ours,
• 10And ours is greater, had we skill to know.”

Saying wrongly, too, as I am sure, for it was little more than mere restless vanity that made him try to master so many things, instead of giving up his mind to one, as the grand elders did.

Yes, he is selfish—so selfish that he can see little joy in those powers of creation which he possessed; the king had said, in his letter, that though he, a mere king, would die utterly, yet it would not be so with Cleon, for his pictures, poems, statues, would live after him, he would live through them. Cleon says the king stumbles at mere words; that the reality is otherwise:

• “What? dost thou verily trip upon a word,
• Confound the accurate view of what joy is,
• (Caught somewhat clearer by my eyes than thine,)
• With feeling joy? confound the knowing how
• And showing how to live (my faculty)
• With actually living? Otherwise,
• Where is the artist’s vantage o’er the king?
• I know the joy of kingship: well—thou art king!”

He says too, that this same appreciation of beauty, of enjoyment, all the knowledge that he has, all his desires, so much finer than those of other men, only make the fear of death bitterer than it otherwise would be:

• “Every day my sense of joy
• Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
• In power and insight) more enlarged, more keen,
• While every day my hairs fall more and more,
• My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase,
• The horror quickening still from year to year,
• The consummation coming past escape,
• When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy.”

Till at last, in his agony, fierce words are wrung from the calm proud man; he cannot help it—he cries out,

• “It is so horrible,
• I dare at times imagine to my need
• Some future state reveal’d to us by Zeus,
• Unlimited in capability
• For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
• To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us,
• That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
• On purpose to make sweet the life at large,
• Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
• 10We burst then as the worm into the fly,
• Who while a worm still, wants his wings. But no!
• Zeus has not yet reveal’d it; and, alas!
• He must have done so, were it possible!

And from this agony he comes down again to a kind of careless despair, and ends by saying just a little, contemptuously enough, of Paulus and his new doctrines; the cursed pride of knowledge lowering him so, that he even seems to be jealous that the king has sent presents and enquiries to Paulus also, a barbarian, one circumcised; so that about the doctrines of Paulus, he says:

• “And (as I gathered from a by-stander)
• His doctrines could be held by no sane man.”

Poor Cleon! he was not wont to accept things on hearsay; yet now so has his pride lowered him; and we must leave him and his longings for Karshish the Arab.

Karshish is, as I said, a better man than Cleon; a simpler man, one with great knowledge, always thirsting after more, and brave in his pursuit of it; yet, on the whole, I think, kindly, and not puffed up with that knowledge. He writes from Jerusalem to his old master, to tell him how he has seen Lazarus; yet he is half fearful that he will seem ridiculous, unphilosophical, and does not like to acknowledge at first, even to himself, till he grows warmer from the longings that stir within him, what impression has been made on him; and he breaks off now and then to talk about his knowledge; yet he comes back to this always at last, for he cannot help it; and so he writes; very beautifully does he tell of the perfect faith of Lazarus, of his love of God and man, nay, of beasts, nay, of the very flowers; of his resignation and obedience to God through everything; of his strange clear second-sight; yearningly does he dwell on all this, excusing himself from ridicule now and then, by saying, “yet the man was mad.” He knows how little all knowledge is, how it can never be perfected through all the generations; but he longs to love perfectly; his God is different from Lazarus’s God; his idea of Him is so different, that he mentions with shuddering horror that which Lazarus had told him; “that he, Lazarus, who stood there in the flesh, had seen God in the flesh too;” in horror; yet if it only could be true, that story told by the madman!

• “The very God! think, Abib, dost thou think?
• So, the All-great, were the All-Loving too;
• So, through the thunder comes a human voice,
• Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!
• Face, my hands fashion’d, see it in myself,
• Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine,
• But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
• And thou must love me who have died for thee!’
• The madman saith he said so: it is strange.”

You see, too, he does not say, as Cleon did to his dream of Heaven, “it is



not possible;” he only says, “it is strange.”

It is all gloriously told; here is something beside our present question which I quote for its beauty; Karshish’s first meeting with Lazarus:

• “I met him thus—
• I cross’d a ridge of short sharp broken hills,
• Like an old lion’s cheek-tooth—out there came
• A moon made like a face, with certain spots
• Multiform, manifold, and menacing:
• Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
• In this old sleepy town at unaware,
• The man and I.”

Concerning ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ I can say little here, it embraces so many things; the Bishop’s interlocutor, “Gigadibs, the literary man,” comes in only as an objector, or little else; he is a man without fixed faith; the bishop is one who is trying to ‘believe that he believes,’ and is succeeding, I think, pretty well: for my part I dislike him thoroughly, yet he says many true things, as Browning says in the Epilogue; “he said true things, but called them by wrong names.”

He agrees too with Cleon concerning the unpleasantness of the possession of the creative power. It is of no use to him, he says; he is more selfish even than Cleon, and not nearly so interesting: he is tolerably well content with the present state of things as regards himself, has no such very deep longings, and is not so much troubled with doubts probably as even he says he is. Browning says of him, “For Blougram, he believed, say half he spoke.”

I will go on to the next band that seem to go together, those about art, namely; they are Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Old Pictures at Florence, A Toccata of Galuppi, and Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.

Andrea del Sarto, and Fra Lippo Lippi are a good deal alike, only the first has more about the man, the second about the art he lives in. What a joy it is to have these men brought up before us, made alive again, though they have passed away from the earth so long ago; made alive, seeming indeed not as they might very likely have seemed to us, the lesser men, had we lived in their times; but rescued from the judgment of the world, “which charts us all in its broad blacks or whites”—and shown to us as they really were.

Think of Andrea del Sarto sitting there in Florence, looking over to Fiesole, trying to forget all the shame, all the weariness, to forget the pain of them at least, to live for one half-hour in the present; yet so, that the past and the future may mingle with it very quietly, like the long weeds that the stream sways with it. And Lucrezia is sitting by him, Lucrezia, who he knows is not worthy of his love—no, not even of his love, the breaker of troth, the runaway; and yet he goes on loving her nevertheless, she has wound her toils about him so. Oh! true story, told so often, in so many ways. And it shall all go into a picture for the wearied man resting there:

• “The whole seems to fall into a shape,
• As if I saw alike my work and self,
• And all that I was bound to be and do,
• A twilight-piece.”

And how calmly he can talk of himself and his art, his great success that was rather a bitter failure to him now:

• “I do what many dream of all their lives, —
• Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
• And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
• On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
• Who strive—you don’t know how the others strive
• To paint a little thing like that you smear’d,
• Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,
• Yet do much less, so much less, some one says,
• (I know his name, no matter) so much less!
• 10Well, less is more, Lucrezia! I am judged,
• There burns a truer light of God in them,
• In their vex’d, beating, stuff’d and stopp’d-up brain,
• Heart, or whate’er else, than goes on to prompt
• This low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand of mine.
• Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
• Reach many a time a heaven that’s shut to me,



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• Enter and take their place there sure enough,
• Though they come back and cannot tell the world.”

Calmly he speaks of the wrong she had been to him, of what she might have been; calmly of his life in France, and of his sin even when he fled from thence a very thief: and she, in spite of all, is rather in a hurry to get away, is rather bored by his talk, howsoever loving, for her ‘cousin’ waits for her below: and so you can almost see the flutter of her dress through the doorway, almost hear her feet down the stairs, and the greeting of the bad woman without a heart with that ‘cousin.’ Almost? nay, quite.

Then for Fra Lippo Lippi. He, found in questionable haunts by the police, first awes them somewhat by mention of his patron’s name, Cosimo de Medici; then, being a man with wrongs and one who must speak to somebody, he tells the officer the very simple story of his life, and his grievance:

• “Rub all out! well, well, there’s my life, in short,
• And so the thing has gone on ever since—
• I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds.

• “And yet the old schooling sticks—the old grave eyes
• Are peeping o’er my shoulder as I work,
• The heads shake still. ‘It’s Art’s decline, my son!
• You’re not of the true painters, great and old:
• Brother Angelico’s the man, you’ll find:
• Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer—
• 10Fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third.’ ”

• “I’m not the third then: bless us, they must know!
• Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know!
• They, with their Latin? so I swallow my rage,
• Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
• To please them.”

This too is an often-told tale, to be told many times again I fear before the world is done with. To this same officer he vindicates himself: everything almost is worth painting, surely it is best (whatever may be good) to paint everything as well as possible:

• “You be judge!
• You speak no Latin more than I, belike—
• However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world—
• The beauty and the wonder and the power,
• The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
• Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!”

• “What’s it all about?
• To be pass’d o’er, despised? or dwelt upon,
• Wonder’d at? oh, this last of course, you say;
• 10But why not do as well as say,—paint these
• Just as they are, careless of what comes of it?
• God’s works—paint any one, and count it crime
• To let a truth slip. Don’t object, ‘His works
• Are here already—nature is complete:
• Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can’t)
• There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then!’
• For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
• First, when we see them painted, things we have pass’d
• Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see;
• 20And so they are better, painted—better to us,
• Which is the same thing. Art was given for that—
• God uses us to help each other so,
• Lending our minds out.”

It is very grand, this intense love of art; and I suppose that those who cannot paint, and who therefore cannot feel quite the same herein, have nevertheless sometimes had a sick longing for the power to do so, without being able to give any reason for it, such a longing as I think is felt for nothing else under the sun,—at least for no other power.

And so we leave Fra Lippo Lippi, not certainly feeling altogether disgusted with the man, in spite of his sins; you see, he had not a very good education, and yet is not so selfish as one might have expected him to be either.

No less great than these two is “Old Pictures at Florence;” beautiful in the beginning, that gazing on Florence from the garden, in spring-tide; beautiful and very true, that indignant vindication of the early mediaeval painters; that comparison of their imperfect painting, with the perfect sculpture of the Greeks, perfect, but not so good as the other; for the other was



higher in its aim, higher in the thoughts that it called up in men’s minds; higher too, that in its humility it gave more sympathy to poor struggling, falling men. Here is a stanza or two of that vindication:—

• “Wherever a fresco peels and drops,
• Wherever an outline weakens and wanes
• Till the latest life in the painting stops,
• Stands one whom each fainter pulse-tick pains!
• One, wishful each scrap should clutch its brick,
• Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,
• A lion who dies of an ass’s kick,
• The wrong’d great soul of an ancient master.

• “For oh, this world and the wrong it does!
• 10They are safe in heaven with their backs to it,
• The Michaels and Rafaels, you hum and buzz
• Round the works of, you of the little wit!
• Do their eyes contract to the earth’s old scope,
• Now that they see God face to face,
• And have all attain’d to be poets, I hope?
• ’Tis their holiday now, in any case.

• “Much they reck of your praise and you!
• But the wronged great souls—can they be quit
• Of a world where all their work is to do?

These are the three that have most to do with artists and painting. Then come two concerning music, “A Toccata of Galuppi,” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.”

There is not so much to say about the first of these, it seems to have been written principally for the music; yet I think Galuppi’s music itself could not have beaten it, played though it was between the sea and the palaces, it rings so gloriously throughout; not one line in it falls from beginning to end, from the first:

• “Oh, Galuppi Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
• I could hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
• But although I give you credit, ’tis with such a heavy mind!”

to the last:

• “ ‘Dust and ashes!’ so you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
• Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
• Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.”

Worthy to go with this for music is “Master Hugues;” exquisite in melody, it is beautiful also in its pictures, true in its meaning. As to its melody, there is to me something perfectly wonderful in the piling up of the words from verse to verse. The thing fascinates me, though I cannot tell where the wonder is;—but it is there; the first stanza is almost as good as any for this music:

• “Hist, but a word, fair and soft!
• Forth and be judged, Master Hugues!
• Answer the question I’ve put you so oft—
• What do you mean by your mountainous fugues?
• See, we’re alone in the loft.”

Then these others go together in my mind; “Before” and “After,” “Childe Roland to the dark tower came,” “The Patriot,” “A light Woman,” and perhaps some others; but these will do. They are all more concerned with action than thought, and are wholly dramatical.

Here is the first stanza from “The Patriot:”—

• “It was roses, roses, all the way,
• With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.
• The house-roofs seem’d to heave and sway,
• The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
• A year ago on this very day!”

The poem is very short, yet very attractive, somehow; the man’s life is shown wonderfully, though the poem is so short; how he knew before, when he liberated these people, that they would not be faithful to him for long, yet, nevertheless, went on hoping against hope! He is not vain, for he knows he could not have done other than he did; yet he knows he has done well, and so comforts himself, thinking of the next world:—

• “Thus I enter’d Brescia, and thus I go!
• In such triumphs people have dropp’d down dead.
• ‘Thou paid by the world—what dost thou owe
• Me?’ God might have question’d: but now instead,
• ’Tis God shall requite! I am safer so.

Yet, to the reader, it is very sad to read this “old story;” and I think also it was bitter to him, in spite of all.

Telling lies for truth’s sake, acting unfaithfully for faith’s sake, are what is treated of in the “Light Woman;” it is told, slight sketch though it is, in a masterly way; perhaps we shall hear something more about it soon, judging from the last two lines:

• “And, Robert Browning, you writer of plays,
• Here’s a subject made to your hand!”

“Before” and “After,” are rather parts of the same poem, than separate poems. “Before,” written in a splendid fighting measure, is spoken by a by-stander, just before a duel: listen, here!

• “Why, you would not bid men, sunk in such a slough,
• Strike no arm out further, stick and stink as now,
• Leaving right and wrong to settle the embroilment,
• Heaven with snaky hell, in torture and entoilment?

• Which of them’s the culprit, how must he conceive
• God’s the queen he caps to, laughing in his sleeve!
• ’Tis but decent to profess oneself beneath her—
• Still, one must not be too much in earnest either.

• Better sin the whole sin, sure that God observes,
• 10Then go live his life out! life will try his nerves,
• When the sky which noticed all, makes no disclosure,
• And the earth keeps up her terrible cornposure.

• Let him pace at pleasure, past the walls of rose,
• Pluck their fruits when grape-trees graze him as he goes;
• For he ’gins to guess the purpose of the garden,
• With the sly mute thing beside there for a warden.

• What’s the leopard-dog-thing, constant to his side,
• A leer and lie in every eye on its obsequious hide?
• When will come an end of all the mock obeisance,
• 20And the price appear that pays for this misfeasance?”

Yes, truly so! the one poisoning sin in a man’s life, never to leave him in the midst of his dearly-bought pleasures; he has gone wrong once, and the chance of his turning back is desperate indeed; all his life is a lie now, with that terrible unrepented sin lying on him. Did ever any of you read Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter?” Then for his adversary:—

• “So much for the culprit? Who’s the martyr’d man?
• Let him bear one stroke more, for be sure he can.
• Him that strove thus evils lump with good to leaven,
• Let him give his blood at last and get his heaven.”

Yet with neither wronger nor wronged has it come to this yet; death may equalize it somewhat: so in “After,” this has indeed happened. I quote it entire without comment:

• “Take the cloak from his face, and at first
• Let the corpse do its worst—
• How he lies in the rights of a man!
• Death has done all death can.
• And absorb’d in the new life he leads,
• He recks not, he heeds
• Nor his wrong nor my vengeance—both strike
• On his senses alike,
• And are lost in the solemn and strange
• 10Surprise of the change.
• Ha! what avails death to erase
• His offence, my disgrace?
• I would we were boys as of old
• In the field, by the fold;—
• His outrage, God’s patience, man’s scorn,
• Were so easily borne.
• I stand here now,—he lies in his place—
• Cover the face.”

I think these two among the most perfect short poems that Robert Browning has written, as perfect in their way as “Evelyn Hope” among the love-poems. “Childe Roland,”—how grand that is! some reviewer thinks it an “allegory,” and rates the poet for not having told us what happened to Childe Roland inside the “round, squat turret.”

Well, it may in some sort be an allegory, for in a certain sense everything is so, or almost everything that is done on this earth. But that is not its first meaning; neither, as some people think, was it written for the sake of the fearful pictures merely, or even principally; they, grand as they are, the grandest things of the kind that I have ever read, are yet only a means to an end; for the poet’s real design was to show us a brave man doing his duty, making his way on to his point through all dreadful things. What do all these horrors matter to him? he must go on, they cannot stop him; he will be slain certainly, who knows by what unheard-



of death; yet he can leave all this in God’s hands, and go forward, for it will all come right at the end. And has not Robert Browning shown us this well? Do you not feel as you read, a strange sympathy for the lonely knight? so very, very lonely; not allowed even the fellowship of kindly memories:

• “I shut my eyes and turn’d them on my heart,
• As a man calls for wine before he fights,
• I ask’d one draught of earlier, happier sights
• Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
• Think first, fight afterwards—the soldiers’ art:
• One taste of the old times sets all to rights!
• Not it! I fancied Cuthbert’s reddening face
• Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
• Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
• 10An arm in mine to fix me to the place
• That way he used. Alas! one night’s disgrace!
• Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.

• Better this present than a past like that—
• Back therefore to my darkening path again.”

Yet, for all this utter loneliness, for all these horrors, so subtly has the consummate poet wrought, through the stately flow of the magnificent rhythm, that we do not feel desponding, but rather triumphant, at the glorious end; an end so glorious, that the former life, whatever it was, was well worth living with that to crown it; and it was well too for the poet to leave us there, so that we see not the mere struggle of physical courage, or the mere groans and tears of suffering humanity under those things which are to be borne indeed, but hardly ever very calmly, hardly ever very resignedly; but now “Childe Roland” passes straight from our eyes to the place where the true and brave live for ever; and as far as we go, his life flows out triumphantly with that blast he blew.

And was it not well to leave us with that snatch of old song ringing through our ears like the very horn-blast that echoed all about the windings of that dismal valley of death?

• “I saw them and I knew them all; and yet
• Dauntless the stag-horn to my lips I set,
• And blew: ‘ Childe Roland to the dark tower came.’ ”

In my own heart I think I love this poem the best of all in these volumes.

And yet I scarcely know; for this and all the others seem to me but a supplement to the love-poems, even as it is in all art, in all life; love I mean of some sort; and that life or art where this is not the case, is but a wretched mistake after all.

And in these love-poems of Robert Browning there is one thing that struck me particularly; that is their intense, unmixed love; love for the sake of love, and if that is not obtained, disappointment comes, falling-off, misery. I suppose the same kind of thing is to be found in all very earnest love-poetry, but I think more in him than in almost anybody else.

“Any wife to any husband,” “The last ride together,”—read them, and I think you will see what I mean. I cannot say it clearly, it cannot be said so but in verse; love for love’s sake, the only true love, I must say.—Pray Christ some of us attain to it before we die!

Yet after all I am afraid I shall be able to say less about these love-poems than the others.

“Evelyn Hope” is quite perfect in its way; Tennyson himself has written nothing more beautiful; it is easy to be understood; very simple, everybody must like it: so full of faith and quiet manly tenderness, hopeful and brave; a very jewel set in the gold of the poet’s crown. I must quote a little:

• “I claim you still, for my own love’s sake,
• Delay’d it may be for more lives yet
• Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
• Much is to learn and much to forget
• Ere the time be come for taking you.

• “But the time will come,—at last it will,
• When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I shall say,
• In the lower earth, in the years long still,
• That body and soul so pure and gay?
• 10Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,



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• And your mouth of your own geraniums’ red—
• And what you would do with me, in fine,
• In the new life come in the old one’s stead.

• “I have lived, I shall say, so much since then,
• Given up myself so many times,
• Gain’d me the gains of various men,
• Ransack’d the ages, spoil’d the climes;
• Yet one thing, one in my soul’s full scope,
• Either I miss’d or itself miss’d me—
• 20And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
• What is the issue? let us see!

• “I loved you, Evelyn, all the while;
• My heart seem’d full as it could hold—
• There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
• And the red young mouth, and the hair’s young gold:
• So, hush! I will give you this leaf to keep;
• See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand.
• There, that is our secret! go to sleep;
• You will wake, and remember, and understand.”

Do you not see them there, in the darkened room,—the wise, learned, world-worn man hanging over the fair, dead girl, who “perhaps had scarcely heard his name?” Coming close to “Evelyn Hope” is “A Woman’s Last Word,” and almost as beautiful as that:

• “Be a god and hold me
• With a charm—
• Be a man, and fold me
• With thine arm!

• “Teach me, only teach, Love!
• As I ought
• I will speak thy speech, Love,
• Think thy thought.

• “Meet, if thou require it,
• 10Both demands,
• Laying flesh and spirit
• In thy hands!

• “That shall be to-morrow,
• Not to-night:
• I must bury sorrow
• Out of sight.

• “Must a little weep, Love!
• Foolish me!
• And so fall asleep, Love,
• 20Loved by thee.”

Is it not perfect in thought as in music? and does it not illustrate what I said just now about the intense passion of these poems?

So does this next one that I come to, “By the Fireside.” It is the history of a life of love, that life which first began by the chapel there in Italy; all things to this man, past, present, and to come, are centred in that one fact:

• “I am named and known by that hour’s feat,
• There took my station and degree.
• So grew my own small life complete
• As nature obtain’d her best of me—
• One born to love you, sweet!”

It reminds me a good deal of Tennyson in parts, of “Maud” especially; but I suppose that is the effect of its melody; it is all told in such sweet, half-mournful music, as though in compassion to those who have not obtained this love, who will not obtain it while they live on earth, though they may in heaven.

Such love too is in it for the beautiful country where the new life came to him:

• “Oh! woman-country, woo’d, not wed;
• Loved all the more by earth’s male-lands,
• Laid to their hearts instead.”

Such pictures of the fair autumn-tide.

• “Oh! the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers,
• And the thorny balls, each three in one,
• The chestnuts throw on our path in showers
• For the drop of the woodland fruit’s begun,
• These early November hours.”

I like it one of the best of all.

“The Statue and the Bust” is a story, a sad story too. Unlawful love that was never acted, but thought only, thought through life; yet were the lovers none the less sinners, therefore; rather the more, in that they were cowards; for in thought they indulged their love freely, and no fear of God, no hate of wrong or love of right restrained them, but only a certain cowardly irresolution. So Robert Browning thinks:

• “So! while these wait the trump of doom!



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• How do their spirits pass, I wonder,
• Nights and days in the narrow room?

• “Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder
• What a gift life was, ages ago,
• Six steps out of the chapel yonder

• “Surely they see not God, I know,
• Nor all that chivalry of His,
• The soldier-saints, who, row on row,

• 10“Burn upward each to his point of bliss—
• Since the end of life being manifest,
• He had cut his way through the world to this.”

I cannot tell the story, you must read it; it is one of the best in the two volumes: the rhythm so wonderfully suited to the story, it draws you along through the days and years that the lovers passed in delay, so quietly, swiftly, smoothly.

Here is another, “The last ride together;” one disappointed in his best hopes of love, looking on the whole world struggling so, with calm hopeless eyes; so calm, though not altogether miserable. There is no need for him to struggle now he thinks; he has failed; that is enough, failed as all others fail: he is not worse off than his fellows. Meanwhile she is riding with him; the present is somewhat blissful; more over he says:

• “Who knows what’s fit for us? Had fate
• Proposed bliss here should sublimate
• My being; had I signed the bond—
• Still one must lead some life beyond,
• Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried.
• This foot once planted on the goal,
• This glory-garland round my soul,
• Could I descry such? Try and test!
• I sink back shuddering from the quest—
• 10Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?
• Now, Heaven, and she are beyond this ride”

Then over him comes a strange feeling—he does not know—it is all so blissful, so calm: “She has not spoke so long,”—suppose it, be that it was Heaven now at this moment.

• “What if we still ride on, we two,
• With life for ever old, yet new,
• Changed not in kind but in degree,
• The instant made eternity—
• And Heaven just prove that I and she
• Ride, ride together, for ever ride?”

“In a Balcony” is a strange poem, hard to make out at first; and for my part, I am not at all sure that I apprehend it rightly.

It seems to me, that Constance and Norbert, being cowardly, did at first intend merely to deceive the queen, then, that Constance, moved by the poor woman’s joy at her supposed lover, and by her unexpected declaration of affection for herself, really intended to sacrifice her love to the queen; but that Norbert’s sick fear, his wild passionate terror, overcomes her, and their love is declared, with who knows what fate in store for them; but it is all intricate and difficult—like human action.

“Women and roses” I must mention, seeing that some reviewer thinks it impossible to solve the riddle of it. I will try, not thinking it so very difficult either. Some man thinking, dreaming of women, they fall into three bands— those that have been, those that are, those that will be; but with neither of these bands can he feel entire sympathy. He cannot enter into the heart of them; their very vividness of face and form draws his heart away from their souls, and so they seem to him cold and unloving.

It certainly does not sound very well as I have put it; in fact it does not often help poems much to solve them, because there are in poems so many exquisitely small and delicate turns of thought running through their music, and along with it, that cannot be done into prose, any more than the infinite variety of form, and shadow, and colour in a great picture can be rendered by a coloured woodcut.

Which (in the case of the poem) is caused, I suppose, by its being concentrated thought.

I quote some of this poem (“Women and Roses”):—

• “I dream of a red-rose tree,
• And which of its roses three
• Is the dearest rose to me?
• Round and round, like a dance of snow
• In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go



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• Floating the women, faded for ages,
• Sculptured in stone, on the poet’s pages.
• Then follow the women, fresh and gay,
• Living and loving, and loved to-day.
• 10Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens,
• Beauties unborn: and all, to one cadence,
• They circle the rose on my rose-tree.”

Very worthily are the love-poems crowned by the final dedication to E. B. B. I quote the last four lines:

• “Oh their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
• Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno,
• Wrote one song—and in my brain I sing it;
• Drew one angel—borne, see, on my bosom!”

Pardon me, reader, that I have said little about many of the best poems; that I have said nothing at all about several; nothing about the ecstacy of prayer and love in “Saul;” nothing about the sacrifice of life, and its enjoyments, to knowledge in the “Grammarian’s Funeral;” nothing about the passionate “Lover’s Quarrel,” about “Mesmerism,” “Any wife to any husband,” and many others. My consolation is, that we shall have a good deal more to say of Robert Browning in this Magazine, and then we can make amends.

Yet a few words, and I have done. For, as I wrote this, many times angry indignant words came to my lips, which stopped my writing till I could be quieter. For I suppose, reader, that you see whereabouts among the poets I place Robert Browning; high among the poets of all time, and I scarce know whether first, or second, in our own: and, it is a bitter thing to me to see the way in which he has been received by almost everybody; many having formed a certain theory of their own about him, from reading, I suppose, some of the least finished poems among the “Dramatic Lyrics,” make all facts bend to this theory, after the fashion of theory-mongers: they think him, or say they think him, a careless man, writing down anyhow anything that comes into his head. Oh truly! “The statue and the bust” shows this! or the soft solemn flow of that poem, “By the Fireside!” “Paracelsus!”—that, with its wonderful rhythm, its tender sadness, its noble thoughts, must have been very easy to write, surely!

Then they say, too, that Browning is so obscure as not to be understood by any one. Now, I know well enough what they mean by “obscure,” and I know also that they use the word wrongly; meaning difficult to understand fully at first reading, or, say at second reading, even: yet, taken so, in what a cloud of obscurity would “Hamlet” be! Do they think this to be the case? they daren’t say so at all events, though I suspect some of them of thinking so.

Now, I don’t say that Robert Browning is not sometimes really obscure. He would be a perfect poet (of some calibre or other) if he were not; but I assert, fearlessly, that this obscurity is seldom so prominent as to make his poems hard to understand on this ground: while, as to that which they call obscurity, it results from depth of thought, and greatness of subject, on the poet’s part, and on his readers’ part, from their shallower brains and more bounded knowledge; nay, often I fear from mere wanton ignorance and idleness.

So I believe that, though this obscurity, so called, would indeed be very objectionable, if, as some seem to think, poetry is merely a department of “light literature;” yet, if it is rather one of the very grandest of all God’s gifts to men, we must not think it hard if we have sometimes to exercise thought



over a great poem, nay, even sometimes the utmost straining of all our thoughts, an agony almost equal to that of the poet who created the poem.

However, this accusation against Browning of carelessness, and consequent roughness in rhythm, and obscurity in language and thought, has come to be pretty generally believed; and people, as a rule, do not read him; this evil spreading so, that many, almost unconsciously, are kept from reading him, who, if they did read, would sympathize with him thoroughly.

But it was always so; it was so with Tennyson when he first published his poems; it was so last year with Maud; it is so with Ruskin; they petted him indeed at first; his wonderful eloquence having some effect even upon the critics; but, as his circle grew larger, and larger, embracing more and more truth, they more and more fell off from him; his firm faith in right they call arrogance and conceit now; his eager fighting with falsehood and wrong they call unfairness. I wonder what they will say to his new volume.

The story of the Præ-Raphaelites—we all know that, only here, thank Heaven! the public has chosen to judge for itself somewhat, though to this day their noblest pictures are the least popular.

Yes, I wonder what the critics would have said to “Hamlet Prince of Denmark,” if it had been first published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall in the year 1855.

We have all by this time read Mr. Macaulay’s two new volumes. We have been interested, as we never were before; we have been dazzled; we have learnt much; we have unlearnt much; we have received so many new notions; we have submitted to the displacement of so many old notions, that our minds have scarcely yet recovered equilibrium and order. And yet, amid all the pleasure which the reading of this book has given us, one question rises continually, and is dismissed as often without an answer; Has Mr. Macaulay given us the real history of the period about which he has written, or merely a collection of brilliant sketches, some helping us to attain to a knowledge of the real history, others merely confusing us in our search for such knowledge? It is painful that such a question should recur; for, if Mr. Macaulay, with all his research, and with all his skill, has failed in putting before us things and people as they were, who shall succeed? If this is not history, where is history to be found? Alas, my friends, this, of all products of human genius, is the rarest to be met with genuine. Simple-hearted men of old, who wrote what they had seen and heard, seeking and loving only the truth, without caring to evolve a root-idea, or to illustrate a maxim, or to gain glory in any way for themselves, or their philosophy, or their party;—such have been: but in days like these it is hard to follow them; so many husks of self-conceit, and prejudice, and party-feeling have to be cast off, before one can become as a little child, and set himself, humbly and reverently, to learn and teach the truth as he finds it.

But I must not prejudge the case; I will rather state in few words what principle of criticism I intend to follow; guarding first against the supposition that it is by virtue of any recondite knowledge of the history of those times that I sit in judgment upon Mr. Macaulay. I shall not touch his facts. I shall assume that he is right (as he must generally be) in points of detail; for I have no sympathy with those jealous critics who, pained by the reflection that the author knows infinitely more than they do, set about restoring their peace of mind by proving that, after all, he is not omniscient. There was too much of this when the first instalment of Mr. Macaulay’s work came out; your party men, complaining, and often with justice, that Mr. Macaulay slighted their traditions or depreciated their heroes, angrily set to work to pick holes in his reputation for correctness of detail, deeming themselves happy if they could convict him of a mistake, and doubly happy if they could plausibly allege that it was a falsehood. For my part, I cannot imitate—I can only admire—the unceasing diligence, the laborious research, the affluence of reading, which have contributed to make this book what it is; which have furnished material for that magical power which extracts gold, or something as glittering as gold, from all it deals with. Political pasquinades, street ballads, caricatures, sermons, controversial tracts, prize-poems, plays, farces,—as well as the ordinary materials of history, the memoirs, newspapers, and public records of the time,—all are put under requisition, all are commanded to yield what of illustration or information lurks in each. It were easy to show that this very affluence is cumbersome; nay, that it must often mislead; and this I shall perhaps have opportunity of showing; I direct attention to it at present, merely to make it obvious that a minute criticism of Mr. Macaulay’s details would be not only an ungracious, but a most preposterous and presumptuous task;—at the best, a pitting of seven weeks against seven years and a lifetime beside, and, even if one could do it with any show of success, not worth the labour. As criticism goes in these days, there are Nicholas Rigbys enough and to spare to do this work. My course will be a quite different one; I shall try to point out the more striking peculiarities of Mr. Macaulay’s intellect, exemplifying them from the volumes before me, and I shall help you to judge whether or no these peculiarities are such as qualify a man for writing history. I shall deal with this question, I hope, in no captious or flippant spirit: I am conscious of owing much to Mr. Macaulay, and I am fully prepared to see very much that is useful and good in him; at the same time I am convinced that, to a publication which aspires, like this, to be a teacher, it is a sacred duty, considering what Mr. Macaulay is, and what he claims to be, not to let his pretensions go unchallenged.

Past ages have for us two special kinds of interest, arising from distinct mental phenomena;—the interest with which we view any man, action, or event, transcendently great, and the interest of association with which we view everything connected with, or bearing upon, ourselves, and the things immediately around us. To speak generally, we read ancient history with the former feeling, and modern history with the latter; ancient history to love and wonder at its heroes and their deeds; modern history, to trace the beginning and growth and meaning of the institutions of our own day. Or we may say that the Cromwellian period is an example of the former class,



an age of giants, of mighty and noble souls, but an age in modes of thought and action wonderfully unconnected with our own; while the times which Mr. Macaulay deals with fall under the latter class,—interest us not from any intrinsic greatness, but as the beginning of the present state of things, the era in which our constitution finally shaped itself into what it is, in which many of the “great facts” of these latter days,—the newspaper press, for instance, and the national debt, and the government by ministries,—were first evolved out of chaos. For the Revolution, to which we owe our national existence, passed through two stages; first, through smoke and blood and confusion, and the battle of the Titans, and the majesty and freedom of the human soul asserting itself in a voice of thunder; and then there came a pause and a reaction, and the base things of earth crept out again,—anarchy and fraud and uncleanness and whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie; so that a faithless generation triumphed, and said that the bubble had burst, that there would be no revolution after all. But the end came; Marstoon Moor and Naseby had not been in vain; it came as God would have it come, not as man would wish to see it,—resplendent with rainbow-dyes, with peace and plenty and universal virtue and goodwill to men; it came not fair to outward seeming, repulsive rather, with its formalities and strict constitutional etiquette and unamiable Dutch Coryphaeus, and without strength, as it seemed to beat back the kingdom of evil for one single day; yet quietly, without bloodshed, without even flourish of trumpets, working once and for ever changes which the fathers of that generation had died to gain, and died, as it seemed to them, in vain. This second stage of the Revolution has Mr. Macaulay chosen to illustrate for us, chosen it, I think, by an instinct of self-knowledge which warned him that he was deficient in reverence, that he was incapable of appreciating the men of the former period, those great rugged souls who did the work they were appointed to do, not tenderly, not with formality and decorum, but well and righteously, in God’s sight and in man’s.

Therefore I will say this much for Mr. Macaulay, that it is well we have a man who will leave the salient points, the mountain peaks in a nation’s history, for those that sympathize better with them, and depict for us, in such vivid colours, with such picturesqueness of description and fertility of illustration, some region of the plainland, which we might have passed over as flat and unprofitable. Not but that he has missed much of the veritable history, the true tone of society, the undercurrents of the nation’s life, working each in its place; here taking away, there adding, here strengthening, there weakening; and so rearing up, unseen, what we call the fabric of modern English society. But, as I said, who in these days have written history so? One man has done it, and two or three more have shown that they can do it; and, as things go, this is a prodigality of power for which we ought to be very thankful, especially as there is something which tells us that it is but an earnest of that which is to be. But, till better times come, we may as well hear what Mr. Macaulay has to tell us; and, after all, is not that clear bright logic of his, and straightforward English sense, worth something for solving many a knotty point of politics, many a surface problem of history? Has he not, in his vivid and complacent way, fixed in our minds a hundred facts—materials of history; fixed them so distinctly that we caught his own tone of self-satisfaction, and congratulated ourselves on our clearness of conception? Has he not, best of all, by putting in our way the most readable of books, suggested, to some of us for the first time, that history is not that valley of dry bones which our text-books taught



us to think it was—that it has an intense human interest, that its characters are men, to be loved and hated, like the men who walk this earth now, and that the very dullest-seeming of its walks will well repay the man who patiently and humbly explores it.

It is as well too, perhaps, that this history was written by a zealous Whig, from a purely Whig point of view. They tell us the species is dying out, and so it well may, for it has done the work appointed for it to do, and, like other things which have done their work, nothing is left for it but one longing lingering glance back to the time of its triumphs, and then a decent and speedy euthanasia. This whole period of the Revolution of Eighty-eight, and the succeeding reign or reigns, to the Act of Settlement and the Scottish Union, is the period of the culmination of Whiggery—the period of constitutional reform constitutionally effected, by a simple rectification, of the machinery of government; and who but Mr. Macaulay should sing the swan-song that celebrates it? For, in these days, people are beginning to think that government is not a machine at all, not a mere police for keeping men from tearing one another to pieces, but rather, in some mysterious way, a continual embodiment of the will of the Highest, a continual assertion that perfect liberty is perfect obedience, and that, unless we live for one another, it were better that we did not live at all. And some would go so far as to say, that the great task of these times is to reduce these high thoughts to practice, so that a government may really be what it professes to be, and may govern, not only the body and property of a man, but his soul and spirit; dealing, not with chattels, as heretofore, but with men; a change which no Whig principles, or rectifications of machinery, can in any way effect. Whether the men who talk thus are mere dreamers or no, I do not here say, but this I say, that a man who talks thus is not a man to sit down with a good will and write the history of the English Revolution.

But what if one should say, can a Whig write history at all? When you call a man a Whig, do not you imply something of this kind—that he is a well-meaning man, with much confidence in common sense and logic; seeing distinctly enough so far as he sees, but not seeing far; not seeing that his traditions and Whig principles, true though they may be, are but a one-sided and fractional view of the Truth; noticing the differentiæ, the peculiarities of a thing far more readily than the great general laws which connect it with the rest of creation: deficient in reverence and the “religious sentiment,” and not believing much in any invisible, but on the whole virtuous and right-minded, and courageous enough in his small way? Make your Whig also a rhetorician, and you have Mr. Macaulay, the best and the worst of him, in one glance.

You have especially those two features of his character, to which most of his faults and failings are traceable. The rhetorical power, uncontrolled by reverence, has led Mr. Macaulay into grievous temptations. His shallowness of thought peeps out in every page; and in every page you see some paltry sacrifice of truth at the shrine of fine language, some reputation damaged to preserve an antithesis, some character misjudged for the sake of three superlatives. And this is a charge so grave in itself, and so deeply affecting Mr. Macaulay’s character as an historian, that I must not pass it over with a bare mention.

It was long ago asserted that rhetoric was one of the basest of all arts; nay, that it did not deserve to be ranked as an art at all, but was, like the making of sauces and the science of cosmetics, the mere semblance and shadow of an art; for whereas all true art had its foundation deep in the principles of things, and sought as its end



the bettering of our moral nature, these had no foundation but in empirical rules, and no object but the immediate gratification of the senses. We have all heard that language was given us for the purpose of concealing thought: thus much is true, that the greatest skill in language is oftenest used for the purpose of perverting thought, of making the worse appear the better reason, or of making the better reason appear so by virtue, not of its being the better, but of its being better set forth. Mr. Macaulay’s style is at first sight beautiful; there are certain arrangements of neatness, and clearness, and perfection about it, which fascinate you, till you look into it and see what has been sacrificed to gain them. I call it a vicious and immoral style in the highest degree; putting into the way of the writer, at all times, the strongest temptation, or absolutely making it necessary for him to pervert the truth.

Its peculiarities are obvious enough, and well known: I shall enumerate them, partly for the sake of convenience, and partly because they lead, easily and naturally, to the consideration of those deep-rooted faults of character on which they depend. There is nothing, perhaps, that distinguishes Mr. Macaulay’s style more than his fondness for antithesis, for strong contrasts elaborated or hinted at. But he constantly perverts the truth of things for the sake of heightening this contrast, or of maintaining the balance of the sentence. The first example of what I mean which occurs to me, is one in the well-known “Essay on Bacon.” He is extolling his own University, according to his wont, at the expense of Oxford. He speaks of its superiority, during its whole history, in intellectual activity, and in readiness to admit improvements; and he illustrates this by telling us that “Cambridge had the honour of educating those celebrated Protestant Bishops whom Oxford had the honour of burning.” Now it is true enough that these martyrs were burnt at Oxford, but in what sense is it true that Oxford, that is to say, the University of Oxford, burnt them?

But this fondness for exaggerated contrasts peeps out everywhere. If a man is to be shown as virtuous, his mother, by way of contrast, is “the most abandoned of women;” if Wharton is the truest of Whigs, he is “in all other relations the falsest of mankind;” if Harley is made an object of interest by circumstances, he is in himself of all men the least interesting. Every accomplished man is the most accomplished man in Europe; every rascal the most rascally of mankind. Porter is “destitute of all religious, and of all political principle;” a rake and a coxcomb, who drinks, swears, tells extravagant lies, has been convicted of manslaughter, and suspected of deeds far worse. So far so good, but then we are told that Goodman is a knave “more abandoned than Porter,” and then that Parkyns “bears, indeed, a much fairer character, but is in one respect more culpable than either.” Arvaux is a man totally destitute of all moral sense. He sometimes “recommends wickedness so horrible, that even wicked men stand aghast at it.” Of course this habit is now and then made subservient to party purposes. Another critic has pointed out how a Tory “skulks” where a Whig “seeks a place of concealment,” how a Tory scrambles down the hill which a Whig would have descended in a more decorous manner. “The most virulent of Whigs, on changing his politics, becomes only one of the most virulent of Tories.” Sometimes this Boythornism, this desire of putting a case as strongly as possible, hurries him into paradox. The Master of Stair was a “very good-natured man,” “a man of large views,” “a lover of law and of order;” he was not likely to gain anything by the destruction of the



Macdonalds; he had no personal reason to wish them ill; “yet he hated them with a hatred as fierce and implacable as if they had laid waste his fields, burned his mansion, murdered his child in the cradle.” Again, the Quakers are not more than a fiftieth part of the Protestant population of Ireland; their wealth is not more than a fiftieth part of the Protestant wealth; moreover, they are peculiarly favoured by the powers that be; yet their losses from the Rapparees, during a short season, amount to £100,000. Mr. Macaulay evidently wishes to make the impression, without absolutely committing himself to the statement, that the total loss of the Protestant population of Ireland, during these troubles, reached considerably more than £5,000,000; obviously a sheer impossibility. This mode of dealing with things reminds one of a well-known story of the Duke of Wellington. He observed that in India the musk-rats often caused great annoyance by creeping in and out of bottles, and leaving a strong odour behind them. “I suppose,” said a lady, “the rats were very small, or else the bottles were very large.” “On the contrary, Madam, the bottles were very small, and the rats were very large.”

Another peculiarity of his style is the habit of using the names of individual things, members of a class, instead of the names of classes. For “any Roman emperor,” he will specify “Commodus or Aurelian;” for “a ministry in the time of the Georges,” he will say, “the ministry of Pelham.” So far this is very good; indeed, it is the chief element of the life and freshness of his style; it clenches in our minds what he has to say; for all men shun the abstract and love the concrete. But there is a danger of carrying this habit too far; there are things which cannot be expressed concretely; there are ideas the main force of which lies in some mental principle which can only be described very inadequately, if at all, by any picture of its sensible results and concomitants. If William longs to revisit Holland, it may be correct to say, that he sighed for the “straight canals, the trim gardens, the painted villas, the storks’ nests among the chimneys,” &c.; but surely it scarcely helps you to understand why the man loved his country, and what he loved in it. But when we find Puritanism described, more than once, as consisting in “Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes, nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long,” we are disposed to believe that such descriptions are not only not useful, but absolutely and utterly false, as distracting our attention from the real meaning of Puritanism to the ludicrous circumstances connected with it in the popular mind.

Moreover, before I go into the deeper question which this last instance suggests, I have something to say against Mr. Macaulay’s pictures both of scenes and men. I find very little in his descriptions of scenery which seems to indicate any true and loving appreciation of nature, or sympathy with her multiformity and depth. He deals with her, I must confess, much as a sign-painter does. None of his descriptions bring a picture before you; for none of them are drawn from any picture in his own mind; they are compiled of the various items proper to the scene which he has gleaned in the course of his multifarious reading. If he has to paint a procession, he gives you garter king-at-arms, the ushers and the beef-eaters; you miss nothing, except just that artistic power which would have helped you to see these things as they were, and imagine for yourself half of what he has so carefully particularized. Just so in his Kerry landscape; there is the arbutus and the myrtle; there are the winding bays and the lakes; there is all, and yet not all. The most elaborate piece of painting in these volumes is that of the scene of the Glencoe massacre, (iv.



p. 191) where he has done all that selected words can do to bring a scene of gloom and desolation before his reader; and even here you are painfully conscious that he is “not the magician.”

When he deals with characters it is in the same way; he is led wrong both by a tendency to dwell on all sorts of striking contrasts and ludicrous inconsistencies, and by his very faulty prejudgments. Your old historians of the Hume school treated a man simply as a bundle of attributes; Mr. Macaulay sees at once what are the salient points in a character, and ignores all those softer and less conspicuous elements, which go so far to counteract the effect of the “ruling passion.” You will see what I mean when I come to speak more especially of Marlborough; I shall not go further at present, for I feel that I am out of my depth in treating of this question before I have carefully analysed what I consider to be the fundamental vice of Mr. Macaulay’s intellect.

Faith in the unseen, what is life without it? And yet our writers, our historians, our directors of the public mind, are only now, after these modern ages have set in, beginning to feel that there is such a thing; they have been so dazzled by the things which are seen, by the wonders and glories of modern civilization, that they have forgotten that all these things are temporal, mere phenomena; while the realities are those things which are not seen, which are eternal. And so, with all the appliances of mechanical and social progress, in spite of 1800 years of Christian teaching, your Robertsons and Gibbons and Macaulays do not know as much as Plato; do not know as much as St. Clement or St. Bernard, about man and God, about the life which now is, and the life which is to come.

It is only the lower part of our nature, the more earthly of our desires, that Mr. Macaulay deals with or can understand. All the higher part; all that connects itself directly with heaven;—the inspiration that is in every man, the divinity of every man’s soul, the voice of God that speaks, loudly or lowly, in every man, and in some men louder than any thunder—all this he ignores. A prophet has no interest for him; he would rather go forth to see a reed shaken by the wind; much rather, a man clothed in soft raiment. And if the prophet come in his way, he will see only the garment of camels’ hair and the meal of locusts, and nothing of the Spirit of God that is in him. Look at George Fox. He is worth your looking at, for he is a reality, born into a world of shams. He goes about from false prophet to false prophet, seeking help and finding none. Smooth things are prophesied unto him; lies and shams he knows them all to be. Yet there is truth. It will surely be revealed to him: is not he, too, a son of the Highest? so these unutterable longings and aspirations for truth and light drive this man to do this significant thing. He makes himself a suit of leather clothing which will not wear out: he goes into the woods; he feeds on roots and berries; he holds discourse with no man; he prays only, and cries, and agonizes, till light come; till God reveal Himself, and speak distinctly to his soul. He knows He will so speak, though he knows not how. And does He not speak? Is not that message which he carries from the solitude into the city—carries to ungodly priests and ignorant people, carries to grim old Oliver and to every town and village in England, the good news that there is a well-spring of inspiration in every heart, a Light that lighteth every man, high and low, learned and ignorant; that God’s own Spirit is speaking in the heart and conscience of all; that whosoever shall restrict the inspiration of that Spirit to a particular book, to a particular caste or craft, is fighting for a delusion and a lie;—is not that a message worth living years in the



woods to learn and teach to men? To me this man and his whole doings seem something sacred and reverend, not to be spoken of lightly, not to be laughed at, more than you would laugh at the written Oracles of God. But it is not so with Mr. Macaulay; he takes him up and sets him before you expressly to raise a laugh at him; at his uncouth phraseology and long wandering sentences, at his whims and crotchets, at his extraordinary habits and peregrinations; but above all, at the leather breeches. He had better have left Fox alone; he belonged to an age previous to that of which this is the history, but he forces his caricature upon us as if to provoke a comparison between it and the opinion of a man in whom Mr. Macaulay ought to recognize an infinitely truer and deeper soul than his own;—I mean Thomas Carlyle. Unhappily, in this age at least, these volumes of Mr. Macaulay will be read by many who have never read “Sartor Resartus,” or it would have been needless to dwell upon this point at all.

Mr. Macaulay’s further remarks on Quakerism are worth looking at, as an illustration of his style of dealing with the questions that circle round faith and reverence. He has shown what a mere madman the founder of the Quakers was; indistinguishable from Ludowick Muggleton or Joanna Southcote; he then admits that even among the earliest Quakers were men of great mental power as well as courtiers and gentlemen. Unfortunately, instead of leaving the case as a paradox, as is his wont, he treats it as a dilemma, and attempts to extricate himself from it. He says, and says it with the air of a man who has discovered something profound, that the wisest and greatest of men are not much better able than the meanest to investigate religious truth, that “in theology the interval is small between Aristotle and a little child.” Why so cautious? Has he not learned long ago from his Bible and from all he has seen of human nature, that the advantage is very decidedly on the side of the little child, that unless Aristotle can divest himself of his theorizing and his systematizing and pride of intellect, and come to the search for truth humbly and patiently, “as a little child,” it will be for ever hidden from him? When Mr. Macaulay finds this out, he will know that Penn and Barclay were wiser than he, that there was something in George Fox which they saw and reverenced, and which he, looking at, but not seeing, can only mock and grin at.

But he has no sympathy with any struggles for a clearer belief, no consciousness, so far as I can see, of the necessity of belief at all. His own belief in God and His Providence is a mere acquiescence in the use of the words; his belief in human nature is limited as closely as may be, embracing only William III. and his devoted partizans; and all that he can be said to believe in besides is resolvable into two heads;—the art of writing well, and the nineteenth century.

For the first; every one must have noticed the strength and the frequency of Mr. Macaulay’s bursts of indignation against some unhappy poetaster, or tedious, slipshod writer of prose. Mr. Macaulay himself has written from earliest youth (witness “Knight’s Quarterly Magazine”) with fluency, vigour, and freshness, both in prose and verse, which have seldom been surpassed; naturally, though unconsciously, he is on that account the more severe upon all who have not the same facility. The truth is, that Mr. Macaulay, though a legislator and a politician, prides himself not so much on these things, not so much on his especial merit as historian or poet, as on belonging to the guild of literary men. How strong is this esprit de corps, how much of his sympathy is with literature (using the word in its widest sense), these volumes sufficiently attest; they find him making constant use of



the written memorials of the period;—the plays, farces, satires, and sermons; and seeking for a ray of illustration, for a fresh circumstance to heighten the piquancy of the narrative, in regions quite beyond these legitimate bounds, in scurrilous fly-leaves, in the transactions of Merry-Andrew booths, in mere temporary street ballads; as if some Macaulay of the future, perhaps the identical New-Zealander, whose acquaintance we made, prospectively, in the Essay on Ranke, should compile the history of these days not merely from our friend Punch, but from the play-books of the “penny gaffs” or the ballads pattered about Ratcliffe Highway. Observe, I am far from restricting the historian to those materials to which Professor Dryasdust has for a long time confined himself; the State Papers, the Cottonian and Harleian MSS., Clarendon and Burnet; nothing is too common for him; all notion of the “dignity of history” is, one hopes, by this time exploded. But, considering what a sink of infamy and mendacity the lowest literature of that age was, one feels doubtful in admitting as facts many things which Mr. Macaulay has raked up from thence. Literature, like the oak in the Georgics:

• “Quantum vertice ad auras
• Æthereas, tantum radice in Tartara tendit:”

and Mr. Macaulay seems to sympathize with the lowest fibres of the root, as well as with the topmost branches; he welcomes collaborateurs as well in Aphra Behn as in Temple and Dryden. But he never spares doggrel; he seldom uses the matter of any of these trashy scribblers without an angry growl at the manner. He is still more indignant if a lord or a statesman or a bishop publishes mediocre verses, if any one who could do anything else well does this poorly; he resents it like an intrusion into his own province, resents it as William resented the interference of a churchman in military matters. Sprat and Charles Montague perhaps are fair game, but why attack Harley, who has never been set up by himself or any one else as an English classic? He is always tearing men for their bad verses. Truly, it is a grievous sin, and one for which the law, one sometimes thinks, ought to provide a remedy; but there are many worse sins to which Mr. Macaulay is very lenient. The virtues of a bad writer, like works done before grace, partake of the nature of sin; they are worse vices (in his eyes) than even the vices of a good writer. One cannot help feeling that George Fox’s wretched style has a great deal to do with the depreciation of George Fox’s life and mission. Anthony Hamilton relates the scurrilous chronicles of the vicious court of Charles in a book revolting for its frivolity, for its utter disbelief in female virtue and manly honesty; yet this is nothing to Mr. Macaulay, for it is “of all books the most exquisitely French” in manner and style, that ever was written. Blount was an atheist and a blasphemer, and died by his own act; yet people, in recollecting this, will forget that he rendered, though not by his own act, a great service to literature in bringing about the liberty of the press. Surely there is no praise due but to John Milton. One is reminded of that extraordinary argument in favour of the Jews brought forward by Disraeli, in his Life of Lord George Bentinck. In one of the Essays, we have, in the same spirit, a sigh for the “eloquence and logical acuteness” which might have made John Wesley eminent in literature, but which, unfortunately, he wasted in reclaiming the middle and lower classes of England from a moral darkness worse than death.

And yet Mr. Macaulay, sparing in his judgment of few men, is often more than ordinarily unmerciful toward the great names of our literature. It seems as if he thought that a man acknowledged a great poet or a great philosopher is by that very acknowledgment



raised so high that he can afford to have his moral qualities depreciated to any extent. Mr. Macaulay seldom conceives of a man as a harmonious whole; he denies in toto the existence of a necessary connection between genius and virtue. He cannot be right here: Bacon cannot be the meanest as well as the wisest of mankind. True, that genius has its great temptations; that the complacency of the theorist easily slides into self-esteem and vain-glory; that “the passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice;” but, as a rule, I fearlessly lay down that men of genius have been, and generally must be, good men. For mark what this genius is;—the common sense of mankind acknowledges, the consciousness of its possessor tells him (and has told him from earliest ages), that it is Inspiration; that it is something which does not grow up in his own mind, no fictitious Muse, “formed or fabled at the minstrel’s will;” but something breathed into him by a higher Power, a living external Power: what but (I speak with all reverence) the very Spirit of God himself. And surely if that highest Inspiration was only consistent with a pure moral atmosphere; if Peter and Paul knew more than others only in proportion as they were better men, we shall find the same law to hold with those also who in our day have had messages from God for us. That intuitive-seeming perception of truth which great men, such as Plato and Shakespeare, certainly have, must it not lift them in all ways nearer to Him whose essence is Truth? Therefore, when I look at a man like Bacon, I acknowledge to myself at once that his crime, bad as it was, was not of the essence of his character more than the adultery of David or the perjury of Abraham; and I am very cautious lest it should lead me to judge wrongly of the whole man. Not so Mr. Macaulay; he delights in representing Marlborough (by a double exaggeration, or rather a double misuse of terms) as the “wisest and wickedest of men;” with all his belief in Dryden as a poet, he has no belief in Dryden as a man: we all know his opinion of Pope; and, to come still nearer to the point, we have all wondered at the shallowness with which he has treated this very subject in the Essay on Bacon.

I mentioned as another article of Mr. Macaulay’s reverence, the present age: I should have spoken with some restriction. What he admires in the nineteenth century is not the sudden awakening of men’s minds, the renewal of their early love of nature and simplicity, the signs of a healthier and truer spirit which are patent everywhere, the craving for the good time coming, when faith shall be joined with knowledge, and they shall reign together, for the happy chimes that “ring in the Christ that is to be;” he knows nothing of this, nothing either of that dark undercurrent of misery and social degradation which many of us see so vividly now,—see, as I firmly believe, only by the dawning light of that happier time to come. No: if one wants proof that Mr. Macaulay does not understand the true strength of this present age, very startling evidence is afforded by a passage in his thirteenth chapter; wherein he contrasts the feelings of those who viewed Highland scenery a hundred years ago with the feelings of those who view it now. The fact of the difference is obvious enough; one would have thought the cause of it equally obvious. The travellers of that day, it seems, think and speak of Highland scenery as something dreadful and gloomy, and not comparable with the pleasant meadows and gardens of Holland. Surely Oliver Goldsmith had sensibilities equal to the “crowd of shopmen and milliners” who now-a-days fall into ecstasies about Ben Lomond and the Trossachs. Here must be the reason:—the roads are so much better than they used to be; there is no danger of falling down a precipice and



breaking your neck. I’faith, a most excellent reason, and a new motive to “lift up your hands and bless General Wade!” Why did not Mr. Macaulay’s constituents send him a copy of Ruskin’s “Edinburgh Lectures?” He would there have found traced for him, if he could not trace it for himself, the gradual awakening of men’s minds, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, to truer perceptions of the beauty of nature, and especially of the sublimity and significance of rugged and rocky scenery; and instead of sneering at the shopmen and milliners of the day, he would have thanked God that they had so pure and deep a source of happiness opened to them.

But Mr. Macaulay does admire something in this age. He admires progress; that material progress which has widened the streets of Inverness, and raised the buildings on College Green, which has “lighted up the night with the splendour of the day; which has accelerated motion, which has annihilated distance; which has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business; which has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind.” He delights in comparing the past with the present, in showing how what once was of mud is now of marble; how security reigns where footpads roved; how enlightened are these ages: how dark were those. For he has no sympathy with the grand simplicity of the mediæval times; he calls it shallow ignorance: he finds fault with the Church Latin, the Latin of the “Dies iræ” and the “Te Deum,” as a language in the last stage of decay: he is loud and constant in his condemnation of the original constitution of the English Church, of whatever modes of thought, whatever institutions modern civilization and enlightened Whigdom have swept away.

There remains the third article of Mr. Macaulay’s creed,—the personal grandeur of William’s character, and the utter villainy of all who hesitated to give him a full support. It is refreshing to meet with a man whom Mr. Macaulay loves,—loves, as far as I can judge, very sincerely; it is most interesting (if we can fully surrender ourselves for the time to his views) to trace with him the contest between these two giants,—the embodied principles of good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman; William, with his active and comprehensive mind, ever scheming, not for personal power, but for the liberty and happiness of the nation entrusted to him and for the establishment and propagation of the Good Cause in Europe; James, the most bigoted and narrow-minded of mortals, scowling in the impotence of selfish hate at those whom he cannot injure, so great a power restrains him. It is a fine picture: on the whole, a true one. I like to think of that puny, asthmatic man, pale and thin, yet with such decision in his face, such energy in his action; the pride of his own, the defence of his adopted country; so loved at Amsterdam, so hated at Paris, so feared at Rome: I like to think of him, especially in battle, at the Boyne or at Namur, when the true nobility of his soul flashed out from the dulness, when he was all fire, all life, full of encouragement for all, sparing all but himself. At such times the man was himself; for a man is himself when he is noblest; but in the council-chamber and the palace he was far different. It stands recorded against him, spite of all that can be said for him, that he was peevish and morose, even to his wife who loved him so: that he was not consistently faithful to his marriage tie; that he had not the “genius to be loved” by his people; that he never fairly made the effort; and that,



great as he was, as statesman and warrior, he was not great as an English King. It is a mark of your greatest, your Elizabeths, and Cromwells, and Napoleons, that somehow, being loved by all who come near them, they impart their spirit,—their energy, their conscientiousness in doing their work well, their love for their people—to all who surround them, to all their subordinates and servants, so that the work of every post is done well; mal-administration is a thing unheard of; the country flourishes in every way. Perhaps there is a war languishing on without vigour, a spiritless, lifeless thing; a Chatham comes somehow to the head of affairs, and forthwith every admiral and general feels that he must do something great,—and does it. It may be Arnold in a school, or Williams in a beleaguered fortress: your really great man’s presence always works thus. But there was little of this about William III.; circumstances were very much against him, truly; there was a great bar between him and English hearts; yet I cannot help thinking that, had he been a man of the very first order, he would have raised up from the great aggregate of honest and healthy English feeling, efficient and enthusiastic servants, who would have brought energy like his to bear on home affairs, and would have made his reign in many respects a much more glorious one for England. Not one of his servants caught his spirit; not one faithfully and earnestly helped him to carry out his views. The Glencoe affair, from first to last, proves that the king was far too easy about home affairs; and there was undoubtedly a very general mal-administration in nearly every department of state, very tardily and inefficiently checked.

The unpardonable sin, in Mr. Macaulay’s eyes, is not mal-administration or carelessness, but correspondence with St. Germains. Treason is vile, always; but it is not always easy to say what is treason. For one who has sworn allegiance to William to hold correspondence with James is base; but let us not forget that all who did so had sworn allegiance to James first. Let us look at a few cases. Penn’s has been disposed of. Mr. Hepworth Dixon has shown clearly enough that Mr. Macaulay’s prejudices against Penn have led him in several instances to what looks very like wilful perversion of facts. There is Russell; he is visited with natural compunction for having deserted James; he is coward enough to be anxious to be on the safe side, in the event of a counter-revolution: he enters into correspondence with James. But the hour of trial comes; Russell is in command of William’s channel-fleet; James has provoked him by that outrageous proclamation of his, for he is sound at core; the French are upon him: the brave heart stirs within him: to an emissary of the tempter, making grandiloquent offers of honours and rewards, he answers, “My solicitude is for the public; if I meet the French I will fight them, though King James should be on board.” He does fight them; gains a glorious victory, and gives the coup-de-grace to James’s hopes. I cannot find that this man did one single thing, overt or covert, for the advantage of James, and yet Mr. Macaulay repeatedly calls him a villain, and accounts for his brave conduct in the hour of peril by saying that “bad as he was, he was much under the influence of two feelings, which, though they cannot be called virtuous, have some affinity to virtue;—party spirit and professional spirit.” By their fruits ye shall know them!

Again, take Marlborough, about whom I wish I had space to say more, such injustice, I believe, has been done him. He has taken the oath; but he



is not easy in conscience; he is full of contrition when he thinks of that great treason of November, ’88; he unburdens his mind to the Jacobites; he receives instructions from James; he is to go over to the enemy with the troops he is commanding in Flanders. The time comes: he does not go over; what more natural? The man shrinks from becoming a double traitor. There is nothing noble in all this truly, but it is natural enough; we are all weak. Yet Mr. Macaulay does not scruple to assert, on no authority but a doubt which crossed James’s own mind, that Marlborough was deliberately playing both James and William false, that he had conceived a gigantic plan for dashing them to pieces against one another, and raising himself on their ruins. All the treasons in the world, he says, would not have caused him so much annoyance as the loss of a single half-guinea. And this is the view of Marlborough’s character, which Englishmen, proud of his achievements, are expected complacently to receive!

I will not say more. I conceive myself to have shown what I attempted to show;—that Mr. Macaulay is too deficient in reverence, and in that human sympathy which springs from reverence, too showy and too superficial to be considered as a great historian. I do not profess to have given more than a partial criticism of his history; a supplement to what others, better fitted than I, have said, and will say, about it. I have written, not as an historian, nor as a judge, but simply as a student of history, expressing the feelings of my brother students, who are so many of them, dissatisfied with the claim of a book, written in the style and spirit of this to be the History of England.

We believe that we shall be right in describing the feeling of the nation as to the acceptance by Russia of the Austrian proposals as one of doubt, uneasiness, and suspicion. To be summoned to lay down our arms, just at the time when we were becoming habituated to their use, and had nerved ourselves for a long and obstinate struggle; just at the time, moreover, when the tide of success seemed about to set steadily towards us, is in itself a baffling and irritating thing, sufficient to produce lassitude and disgust. After pointing everything in the direction of Russia, after making sacrifices and exertions already sufficient to force from the enemy concessions far greater than can at present be demanded, we are, it seems, to abandon our dockyards, dismantle our ships, disband our troops, and, at the end of the second year of war, to experience a financial pressure, probably scarcely less severe than would be felt at the close of a war long enough to have reduced Russia to the boundaries she occupied last century. Add to this the very reasonable suspicion of the sincerity of our consummate and unscrupulous adversary, and the distrust entertained of the power of British statesmen to cope with Russian diplomatists, and it will be seen that the repugnance of the nation to the prospect of peace is not without reason. The opinions expressed by us last month, as to the necessity of an European pact or federation against the Russian danger, and as to the points of defence to be aimed at by such a federation, remaining the same, it will be understood that the approach of peace, in the present situation, is not regarded by us with unmixed satisfaction. It would be presumptuous, however, amid the uncertainty



and anxiety now felt by the best and wisest amongst us, to declare positively either for or against the prospect of peace; and we shall rather seek at present to gain a correct idea of the position in which we now stand; although, in so doing, we shall be necessitated to come to conclusions which to some may appear immature.

Assuming, then, that the object of the war is to give a permanent check to Russian aggression, and that the manner in which this is to be done is, as we formerly intimated, simply by undoing, so far as possible, whatever Russia has been doing from the time when she first commenced her career of foreign conquest, let us inquire how far this has been effected by the war which we are told to consider as virtually at an end. There can be no question but that a large portion of the task we had set before us has been completed: modern warfare can show no example of results of the same magnitude obtained in so marvellously short a time. The integrity of Turkey has been triumphantly vindicated, not less by the arms of the Western nations than by the victorious courage of its own soldiers. The Russian Black Sea fleet, with its twenty millions of money, lies beneath the waves; the Russian strong-hold of the South, with its thirty thousand builders, and its innumerable defenders, has flown upward into dust. The Circassian coast has been delivered from the cordon of Russian forts which girdled it; and is not that enough for Circassia? Sweden has been declared our ally, and her safety is to be secured by the neutralization of the Aland islands. Is not this enough for the North? Many will say that the object of the war has been fully attained; that the status quo ante bellum has been regained, and more than regained; that Turkey has been delivered from all danger of invasion, the Danubian Principalities recovered, Russia demobilized and compelled to sue for peace. That all we have to do, in order to render our success permanent and complete, is to follow up the paths which we have opened to us by the war, to re-organize Turkey, to assign the Principalities to a capable government, and to insist upon certain provisions in our treaty, which are obvious to all the world. All this it is true has been done, or is in our power to do. We are very far from any desire to disparage the achievements of the last two gallant years; but is this enough? We think that there are one or two important points respecting the weakness of Europe, and affecting the happiness of mankind, which have been brought prominently before us during the war, but which are overlooked by the enthusiasts for peace, and assuredly will meet with no provision in the future treaty.

The great point of danger to Europe is the weakness of her centre—Germany. It really is appalling to reflect upon the utter apathy which has been manifested throughout this struggle by the nations that lie most directly in the line of Russian conquest. We have not been made aware by any sign of life from any part of the great German land that there is any such thing as public opinion in Germany. Much less is there the slightest trace of an enlightened Germanizing party,—a party which should strive to make Germany strong and united, whether by incorporating or “mediatizing” some score of the minute patches of sovereignty



which parcel out the land, or by any other means; so that something new should grow up in the centre of Europe, side by side with Austria and Prussia, of whom the earth despairs. ^* Here, then, in this weakness of Germany, is an evil to which the continuance of the war might have brought a remedy, but which at present is untouched: and in this lies a peril to Europe beyond the reach of any such temporary check as that which has been given to Russia in the loss of her fleet and fortress. We have had proof positive of the inertness, the corruption, the Russianization of Germany; we lose, perhaps for ever, by the conclusion of peace, the opportunity for revivifying Germany. The Polish question is to remain in abeyance once more, and it may even now be too late. Russian Poland, abandoned once again, is to submit finally to Russia, to cease the struggle, casting away all hope, and renouncing for ever the idea of a national existence. Yet it is most certain that the reconstitution of Poland is the only means for, the necessary preliminary to, the restoration of Germany to strength and dignity; inasmuch as the reconstitution of Poland is the most immediate thing in the power of the Western nations to effect with regard to Germany, and the impulse must be given from without. Equally certain is it that the restoration of Germany is a vital point to the safety of France and England.

The prospect of peace causes bitter disappointment in Sardinia. That gallant state, when it joined its forces with ours, hoped to advance through many a battle field to the realization of liberty, right order, and prosperity, for which she has ever battled with such temperate courage. It is beyond doubt that Sardinia, which seems to be almost the only state on the Continent possessing wisdom and courage in unison, will eventually succeed in presenting Italy with freedom and good government; but the disappointment is not the less severe that the war should come to a termination without effecting an alteration in the condition of those who groan under the despotisms of central Europe. If Sardinia is our ally, we are connected through her with enslaved Italian and Sclavonic races, whom she, by example and precept, strives to aid. At any rate, as our rulers have, justly and wisely, discountenanced the wild revolutionary efforts which these races have made to free themselves, so now, with unwise ingratitude, we seem about to leave Sardinia as before unassisted in her noble work of restoring them by means of the principles of law and order, after reaping to the utmost the benefits of an alliance with Sardinia. It was wisely done on the part of Austria to send that strenuous remonstrance to Russia, to entreat her to pause in her career before the war assumed the shape of an European revolution. In making peace in the present situation, we leave the old leaven of revolution and violence to work in the midst of Europe; the pathos of all former struggles for liberty counts for nothing with us; the moderate party will be regarded henceforth as false friends, and “Pansclavism” will be in all probability the creed and hopeless hope of the Magyars, Serfs, Roumans, and Italians, who are oppressed beneath the Austrian yoke. We do not exactly mean to lament the establishment of peace because we lose thereby the opportunity of bringing into question Austria,—that most ancient of the tyrannies of Europe that have nurtured schemes of universal dominion. We do wish to



express the strongest sympathy for the oppressed races of Europe, and to point out some of the possibilities which we are missing.

Again, we hear that the prospect of peace has been as ill received by Sweden as by Sardinia. Thus, our present course is disapproved by the only two nations into which the progress of hostilities has been able to infuse some vitality. We saw in the Swedish treaty the germ of what we continue to regard as the only means of protecting the North against the designs of Russia, viz. a Scandinavian alliance, to combine the Northern Powers in an attitude of permanent watchfulness against Russia. All this is now to be abandoned; the Swedes are to discontinue their preparations for an active part in the war, happy if they can secure impunity for what they have already done; and the throne of Denmark is to be left to descend peacefully and in all human probability to the family of the Czar.

Throughout the foregoing remarks we have regarded Russia as placed beyond the pale of nations. In the case of any other power we should have considered the humiliation and loss already inflicted as a lesson too severe to be easily forgotten. But Russia has so openly and repeatedly violated all the laws of justice and mercy, her power to do mischief is so unequalled, that we can with difficulty conceive any measures for her coercion as too stern. We question whether, notwithstanding all that has been said and written on the subject, the real extent of the danger to Europe from Russia is understood by those who have the management of affairs. Russia stands in the possession of the conditions necessary to foreign aggression in a more formidable degree than any of the powers of our modern world who have from time to time aimed at universal dominion. She has at once the most absolute centralization, the most decided hereditary tendency, and the most fanatical population in the world. We are not fighting with an ordinary conqueror, in opposition to an ordinary scheme of domination, such as we have before now frustrated. We have to check the strong instincts of a countless race thronging onwards, southward and westward as if in obedience to a law of nature;—the fierce enthusiasm of a nation of fanatics, eager to fraternize with millions of co-religionists of the same race. To oppose this united idea of conquest and religion we have found no one in our Government really competent. The majority of our representatives are unable to comprehend or believe, that foreign aggression can be the end and object of the policy which nevertheless they are unable to deny has turned Russia into one mighty camp. Others again we find, who have contracted a dangerous habit of playing with the principles which as a free nation we have ever antagonized, who love theory, delight to place themselves under absolute authority, to become amenable to superior will, to cover themselves, like the little Ajax, behind a broader Ægis, and so to find a sphere for the exercise of the dexterity and finesse which generally distinguishes this kind. Such men as these contemplate with admiration the swift, steady, noiseless working of the Russian system, and sympathize freely with the enthusiastic hordes of ignorant serfs which that system propels against the south and centre of Europe. Were they Russian subjects, they would be among the most able and devoted agents of the Czar. Enthusiasm is a very fine thing in itself, but when we know that it is made subservient to the most lawless dreams of spoliation and oppression, it becomes necessary to close the valves of sympathy, and oppose a little counter-enthusiasm on behalf of freedom, justice, and humanity.

Yet though Russia possesses all the conditions for success in foreign aggression which we have just specified,



the present war has shown that she is powerless against the West. As far as France and England are immediately concerned, the war has been glorious and decisive beyond parallel. It has been demonstrated by events that the perfect mechanism of the Russian government has worn away the material from which it was constructed. Entire centralization applied to races with the genius of which it is at variance, has to a great extent destroyed the characteristics which rendered these races formidable to the world. In short the attempt to saddle and bridle the enthusiasm of the Russian people by the ruthless and complicated Russian state system, has had the worst result as to their military efficiency. What, for example, has been heard in the present war of the Cossacks, those headlong riders, who seventy years ago poured themselves upon the Tatar squadrons in the Crimea, and in 1812 harassed so cruelly the broken army of Napoleon? They seem almost to have disappeared as a military force; their nomad life, their freedom, has been interfered with by the vast centralizing system which reaches to every quarter of the Czar’s dominions.

It is not then with regard to our own material interests that we regret the prospect of peace. We have in two campaigns placed ourselves beyond the power of Russia. We have saved India for a long time to come from the touch of Russian intrigue; we have destroyed the Russian fleet, and opened another sea for our own shipping. And yet it is beyond denial that many will say even in England and France, that the war, if now concluded, is incomplete; that we have spared where we ought to have struck heaviest, and abandoned interests which ultimately affect us as vitally as the points which we now insist upon. The struggle has been rendered memorable by the reconcilement of the noblest foes the world has ever seen opposed. The two nations of the earth who have beyond all others been zealous for freedom and social good, have joined arms in order to coerce the great wrongdoers of Europe. Oppressed and struggling populations, whom we, like elder brothers, have chidden and yet sympathized with, have looked to us as their mighty avengers and restorers. And now if we are reproached with having converted a war of principles into one of expediency, what are we to say? What are we to think of a war so splendidly begun, which ends by leaving Russia within easy march of Vienna and Berlin, and which has not succeeded in calling forth the national spirit of Germany, or, in lieu of this, in creating nationalities as barriers to the slavish influences of Russia? We do not modify the map of Europe; we abandon to oppression, with fitful changes of revolution, the heroic races



who have striven so often to throw off the yoke of Austria and Russia; those who are one with us in the sentiment of freedom, and who have looked to us, how long! for aid and redress. A month ago the terrible heat of the battle with the giant of fraud and violence was upon our faces, and in our hearts the sternest determination to do such a work as the world never witnessed; and now we are withdrawing from a half-finished contest, ourselves doubtful and remorseful, leaving the cause of freedom only half-asserted, and granting a respite to the foe, that the wounds already inflicted may have time to heal. As far as we are concerned, the world may now return, though with somewhat less of hope than before, to its ancient common of Magyar insurrections and Austrian Concordats.

It has passed into a fashion to call the Inductive Philosophy a philosophy of “fruit,” by which many understand material results, supposing also that these were the objects proposed to himself by the English founder of that system. But it would be only common justice to Bacon if those who write and speak thus would read carefully and remember the 124th Aphorism, and a passage to the same effect in the 129th Aphorism, of the first Book of the “Novum Organum,” in which it will be found that the conveniences of life ( commoda vitæ) were not the end which Bacon set before him; but that his highest aim was that which Plato and the great ancient philosophers sought after, which all really great men must seek after, the discovery of truth. Equally too did the ancient and the modern philosopher place before themselves, as an end necessarily



connected with and dependent upon the former, the amelioration of the condition of mankind; although undoubtedly they conceived of this amelioration very differently, Plato understanding by it the reformation of each man’s own mind, to the neglect of circumstances; whereas Bacon, evidently because these had been too little investigated by his predecessors, turned his attention chiefly to these external influences. Doubtless, also, the results of the two systems differ very widely; and it is upon this that we moderns plume ourselves so much—in my opinion unwisely and unjustly. It would be well if we could rate those results at the value which Bacon sets upon them, deeming it the highest praise of Utility that it is identical with Truth, not valuing and honouring these material products in and for themselves. I am indignant to see men in this age, which calls itself so enlightened and moral, writing as if Bacon—an intellect such as all time can scarcely parallel, cannot surpass—would have regarded the electric telegraph or the steam-engine as the noblest production of the human mind: for I cannot think that any transcendent genius, in its essence so spiritual, can be satisfied with any mere material results, however magnificent and wonderful. Alas, we all know, by too bitter experience, that the marvels of science, as we take such pride and pleasure in calling them, cannot of themselves regenerate the earth; how much they can do in the great work we can at present only roughly guess: but this we already certainly know, that despite of the advance of civilization, the old vices and defects still cling to man’s nature; that while railroads are laid down, while our fleet sinks the ships of the enemy by the very terror of its superhuman might, while our commerce flows on as prosperously in a great war as in peace; yet, despite of all this greatness and prosperity, huge masses of unutterable misery and degradation are gathering in the midst of our vast and wealthy cities; while in the middle classes the love of money, that root of all evil, deadens the affections and blunts the taste, and among the highest ranks the social lies that warp us from the truth, are fixed so firmly, that, did we not know that whatsoever is a lie must perish, we could scarcely hope to see them ever unseated from their ancient throne of fashion. Happily we know all this, and are seeking for the remedy. We are providing, however slowly and inadequately, for the housing of the homeless; we are founding here and there establishments for the reclamation of those offenders against the law who are too young to be yet hardened in crime; we are sending forth a few missionaries among the worse than heathen of our own countrymen. And not only that, we are moving towards the right goal by another path, we are turning more and more to Art; we are fostering more and



more poetry, painting; music, architecture; we are learning that, with all our boasting and the boasting of the last few generations, our safety lies in imitating in much that Past which they and we have too much despised and neglected; in imitating it so far as we are as yet able, for in some things we are almost hopelessly behind it. And it is this perception of the insufficiency of science unassisted, that confirms in me that confidence in the present age which its scientific greatness commenced. If I still believe that, despite of all its sins and short-comings, this nineteenth century is yet an age of progress,—of real, moral, intellectual progress,—it is because it has produced, not only great engineers and great astronomers, but great poets also, great painters, great exponents of art; because Wordsworth and Turner are still remembered as living; Tennyson, Hunt, and Ruskin are our contemporaries. Yet it is the fashion among very many to speak of the present as a practical age, an age of facts, in which imagination lies dead or dying, while art is neglected or cultivated feebly and unsuccessfully. They are constantly complaining that we have no Phidias, no Raphael, no Milton, in short, no great men of any kind—strange conjunction, great age and little men; they call us a knowing, not a seeing, generation; nay, far lower than this, a machine-making, money-getting generation of commerce and manufacture. And these are the very men who look for the earth soon to recover its pristine innocence; as if they fancied that the Garden of Eden had been a region of steam and smoke, and noise and confusion. They delight to contrast the present with past ages, with the Mediæval times, with the times of Greece and Rome. They delight to contrast former with present knowledge and power; the old philosophy with the new, deriding the futility of the one and singing the triumph of the other. Some of them even do not scruple to extol the founder of the new above the great teacher of the old; forgetting, or having never learned, that there are ties which join the good and great of all ages and all countries; that an ancient Greek and a modern Englishman, searching after truth, thereby to benefit the human race, must have far more in common than can be nullified by any difference, or even opposition, in the details of their methods; diversity which can be satisfactorily accounted for by difference of time, of race, and of situation. Let us then set Plato and Bacon side by side in the first rank of



great and noble men, attending more to their agreement than their difference; united as they are by the grand bond that both unceasingly strove to expose and uproot the vain imaginations of men,—the Phantasms of the one, the Idols of the other,—and to discover for themselves and teach their brethren that Truth, which the modern, borrowing the language of the ancient, calls the Ideas of the mind of God; both being assured, also, that in this way alone they could attain their collateral aim, the improvement of the condition of mankind.