arrived in merry Carlisle from Dumfries. A white day in my years. I
found the youth I sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleasant
he seems to me, and his wife a most accomplished, agreeable woman.
Truth and peace and faith dwell with them and beautify them. I never
saw more amiableness than is in his countenance."
This passage, of course, refers to his visit to Carlyle, to visit whom
Emerson had driven over from Dumfries to Craigenputtock, where Carlyle
had been living for the last five years. In this connection it is
interesting to read what the man visited had to say about his
visitor: "That man," Carlyle said to Lord Houghton, "came to see me. I
don't know what brought him, and we kept him one night, and then he
left us. I saw him go up the hill; I didn't go with him to see him
descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel."
[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON
From a wood engraving of a life photograph]
In writing of this interview, Mr. Cabot, one of the biographers of
Emerson, says: "To Emerson the interview was a happy one, and
gratified the chief wish he had in coming to England, though he did
not find all that he had sought. He had been looking for a master, but
in the deepest matters Carlyle, he found, had nothing to teach him.
'My own feeling,' he says in a letter to Mr. Ireland a few days
afterwards, 'was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth.' But he had come close to the
affectionate nature and the nobility of soul that lay behind the cloud
of whim and dyspepsia, and he kept to that, and for the rest, confined
his expectations thenceforth to what Carlyle had to give. 'The
greatest power of Carlyle,' he afterwards wrote, 'like that of Burke,
seems to me to reside in the form. Neither of them is a poet, born to
announce the will of the god, but each has a splendid rhetoric to
clothe the truth.'"
During this first visit Emerson dined with Lafayette and a hundred
Americans. By the time he made his second visit Emerson was a far more
distinguished man than during his first trip. His second visit was
made in 1847. This time he was a lion among men. He again calls on the
Carlyles. This time the door is opened by Jane.
"They were very little changed (he writes) from their old selves of
fourteen years ago, when I left them at Craigenputtock. 'Well,' said
Carlyle, 'here we are, shoveled together again.' The flood-gates of
his talk are quickly opened and the river is a great and constant
stream. We had large communication that night until nearly one
o'clock, and at breakfast next morning it began again. At noon or
later we went together, Carlyle and I, to Hyde Park and the palaces,
about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the
Strand--Carlyle melting all Westminster and London down into his talk
and laughter as he walked. We came back to dinner at five or later,
then Dr. Carlyle came in and spent the evening, which again was long
by the clock, but had no other measure. Here in this house we
breakfast about nine; Carlyle is very apt, his wife says, to sleep
till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker he is, and
altogether as extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing--I
think even more so. You will never discover his real vigor and range,
or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing
him. I find my few hours' discourse with him in Scotland, long since,
gave me not enough knowledge of him, and I have now at last been taken
by surprise.... Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. Nothing
could be more engaging than their ways, and in her book-case all his
books are inscribed to her, as they came, from year to year, each with
some significant lines."
In another place he writes:
"I had good talk with Carlyle last night. He says over and over for
years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his
perception of the sole importance of truth and justice, and he too
says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite
contemptuous about _Kunst_ (art) also, in Germans, or English, or
Americans.... His sneers and scoffs are thrown in every direction. He
breaks every sentence with a scoffing laugh--'windbag,' 'monkey,'
'donkey,' 'bladder;' and let him describe whom he will, it is always
'poor fellow.' I said 'What a fine fellow you are to bespatter the
whole world with this oil of vitriol!' 'No man,' he replied, 'speaks
truth to me.' I said, 'See what a crowd of friends listen to and
admire you.' 'Yes, they come to hear me, and they read what I write;
but not one of them has the smallest intention of doing these
things.'"
While Emerson was in London he was elected to membership in the
Athenaeum Club, during his stay in England. Here he had the opportunity
of meeting many famous men. He writes:
"Milnes and other good men are always to be found there. Milnes is the
most good-natured man in England, made of sugar; he is everywhere and
knows everything. He told of Landor that one day, in a towering
passion, he threw his cook out of the window, and then presently
exclaimed, 'Good God, I never thought of those violets!' The last time
he saw Landor he found him expatiating on our custom of eating in
company, which he esteems very barbarous. He eats alone, with
half-closed windows, because the light interferes with the taste. He
has lately heard of some tribe in Crim Tartary who have the practice
of eating alone, and these he extols as much superior to the
English.... Macaulay is the king of diners-out. I do not know when I
have seen such wonderful vivacity. He has the strength of ten men,
immense memory, fun, fire, learning, politics, manners, and pride, and
talks all the time in a steady torrent. You would say he was the best
type of England."
Of Tennyson he writes: "I saw Tennyson, first at the house of Coventry
Patmore, where we dined together. I was contented with him at once. He
is tall and scholastic looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain
strength about him, and though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet,
sluggish sense and thought; refined, as all English are, and
good-humored. There is in him an air of great superiority that is very
satisfactory. He lives with his college set, ... and has the air of
one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives
with. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness, and let him talk easily and
fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson. I told him that his
friends and I were persuaded that it was important to his health to
make an instant visit to Paris, and that I was to go on Monday if he
was ready. He was very good-humored, and affected to think that I
should never come back alive from France; it was death to go. But he
had been looking for two years for somebody to go to Italy with, and
was ready to set out at once, if I would go there.... He gave me a
cordial invitation to his lodgings (in Buckingham Palace), where I
promised to visit him before I went away.... I found him at home in
his lodgings, but with him was a clergyman whose name I did not know,
and there was no conversation. He was sure again that he was taking a
final farewell of me, as I was going among the French bullets, but
promised to be in the same lodgings if I should escape alive....
Carlyle thinks him the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and
used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall,
where Tennyson's pipe was laid up."
XXXII
LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS OF MAX MUELLER
Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I
watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was
beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and
schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm
in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice
and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public
dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of
them judges, bishops, and ministers, he would groan over the drudgery
he had to go through every day of his life in examining dirty
school-boys and school-girls. But he saw the fun of it, and laughed.
What a pity it was that his friends--and he had many--could find no
better place for him. Most of his contemporaries rose to high position
in Church and State, he remained to the end an examiner of elementary
schools. Of course it may be said that like so many of his literary
friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by
potboilers of various kinds. But there was something nobler and
refined in him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he
gave to the world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it,
and he did not think that he possessed the talent for novels. His
saying that "no Arnold can ever write a novel" is well known, but it
has been splendidly falsified of late by his own niece. Arnold was a
delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced
that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most
patronizing way he would generally end by, "Yes, yes! my good fellow,
you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different,
and I have little doubt it is the true one!" This went so far that
even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him....
Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and as
uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he
was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with
his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his
own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his
pen that made him say bitter things.... He was really the most
tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where
no one else saw it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I
remember him as diffident as a young girl, full of questions, and
grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him
listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his
presence. His voice was always most winning, and his language simply
perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of
tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteaus, bags, tugs,
and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight
in building up his sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to
make each deliverance a work of art....
And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has
taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything
unbeautiful, and anything low or ignoble in men revolted him and made
him thoroughly unhappy. I remember once taking Emerson to lunch with
him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend
of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. But some quite
indifferent subject turned up, a heated discussion ensued, and Ruskin
was so upset that he had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson
was most unhappy, and did all he could to make peace, but he had to
leave without a reconciliation....
Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first
visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in
High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment
was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a poet
laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford
was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked
him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time
almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o'clock.
My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our unexpected guest.
He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out
by finding the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He
was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the
only advantage he got from being a poet laureate, that he generally
received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast,
we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of
cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived, to
see him whip off the cover of a hot dish, and to hear the exclamation,
"Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England." However, these
were but minor matters, though not without importance in the eyes of a
young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the immortals. He was
full of interest and inquiries about the East, more particularly about
Indian poetry, and I believe it was then that I told him that there
was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there
should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems
to have been, who would probably have answered my question by "You are
a fool, sir; use your own judgment," while Tennyson made the very
sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory....
It was generally after dinner ... that Tennyson began to thaw, and to
take a more active part in conversation. People who have not known him
then, have hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very
silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an
active part in the conversation of his friends. His pipe was almost
indispensable to him, and I remember one time when I and several
friends were staying at his house, the question of tobacco turned up.
I confessed that for years I had been a perfect slave to tobacco, so
that I could neither read nor write a line without smoking, but that
at last I had rebelled against the slavery, and had entirely given up
tobacco. Some of his friends taunted Tennyson that he could never give
up tobacco. "Anybody can do that," he said, "if he chooses to do it."
When his friends still continued to doubt and to tease him, "Well," he
said, "I shall give up smoking from to-night." The very same evening I
was told that he threw his tobacco and his pipes out of the window of
his bedroom. The next day he was most charming, though somewhat
self-righteous. The second day he became very moody and captious, the
third day no one knew what to do with him. But after a disturbed night
I was told that he got out of bed in the morning, went quietly into
the garden, picked up one of his broken pipes, stuffed it with the
remains of the tobacco scattered about, and then having had a few
puffs, came to breakfast, all right again.
He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight.
"But mind," he said, "you will be watched from morning till evening."
This was, in fact, his great grievance, that he could not go out
without being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the
downs behind his house, he suddenly started, left us, and ran home,
simply because he had descried two strangers coming towards us.
I was told that he once complained to the queen, and said that he
could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists
who came to stare at him. The queen, with a kindly irony, remarked
that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson not
seeing what she meant, replied, "No, madam, and if I could clap a
sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be troubled either."
It must be confessed that people were very inconsiderate. Rows of
tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for
his appearance. The guides were actually paid by sight-seers,
particularly by those from America, for showing them the great poet.
Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson,
and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, the
tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask him, "Now, are you the real
Tennyson?" This, no doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord
Tennyson was driven to pay a large sum for some useless downs near his
house, simply in order to escape from the attentions of admiring
travelers.
XXXIII
THE EARLY EDUCATION OF JOHN STUART MILL
At an age when most children are playing with a Noah's Ark or a doll,
John Stuart Mill was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek
language. "I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn
Greek," writes Mill, "I have been told that it was when I was three
years old." Latin was not begun until his eighth year. By that time he
had read in Greek,--AEsop, the Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, the
Cyropaedia, the Memorabilia, parts of Diogenes Laertius, and of Lucian,
Isocrates; also six dialogues of Plato. An equipment like this
suggests the satiric lines of Hudibras:
Besides, 'tis known he could speak Greek
As naturally as pigs squeak.
In considering the difficulties that this child--shall we say
babe?--had to overcome one must remember that the aids to learning
Greek were not then what they are now. In 1820 the Greek lexicon was a
ponderous thing, almost as big and heavy as the infant student
himself. Worse than this, the definitions were not in English, but in
Greek and Latin, and as the boy had not yet learned Latin he had to
ask his father for the meaning of every new word. The immense task
placed thus upon the child makes one feel indignant and wish that some
organization for the prevention of cruelty to infants had interfered
with the ambition of the learned father. But we must admire the
patience of the father, however we may question his good sense. "What
he himself was willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction,"
says the son in describing his father's teaching, "may be judged from
the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek
lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was
writing.... I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of
every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption, he, one
of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that
interruption several volumes of his History and all else that he had
to write during those years."
But this does not tell the whole story. Fearing that the Greek might
be too heavy and concentrated a food for the tender intellect of his
child, the considerate father added a diet of English history and
biography. The boy carefully studied and made notes upon Robertson,
Hume, Gibbon, Watson, Hooke, Langhorne's _Plutarch_, Burnet's _History
of His Own Time_, Millar's _Historical View of the English
Government_, Mosheim's _Ecclesiastical History_. In biography and
travel he read the life of Knox, the histories of the Quakers,
Beaver's _Africa_, Collin's _New South Wales_, Anson's _Voyages_, and
Hawkesworth's _Voyages Round the World_. "Of children's books, any
more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional
gift from a relation or acquaintance.... It was no part, however, of
my father's system to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed
them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to
none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are the
_Arabian Nights_, Cazotte's _Arabian Tales_, _Don Quixote_, Miss
Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, and a book of some reputation in its day,
Brooke's _Fool of Quality_."
All this, it is to be remembered, was done by a boy who was not beyond
his eighth year. In his eighth year he began Latin, not only as a
learner but as a teacher. It was his duty to teach the younger
children of the family what he had learned. This practice he does not
recommend. "The teaching, I am sure, is very inefficient as teaching,
and I well know that the relation between teacher and taught is not a
good moral discipline to either." By the time this prodigy of
intellect and industry reached the age of fourteen he had studied the
following formidable list: Virgil, Horace, Phaedrus, Livy, Sallust,
the Metamorphoses, Terence, Cicero, Homer, Thucydides, the Hellenica,
Demosthenes, AEschines, Lysias, Theocritus, Anacreon, Aristotle's
Rhetoric; Euclid, Algebra, the higher mathematics, Joyce's Scientific
Dialogues, and various treatises on Chemistry; and in addition to all
this he had read parts of other Greek and Latin authors, and much of
English poetry and history.
A boy with so heavy a burden of learning is very prone to an equal
amount of self-conceit. But the father tried to overcome this danger
by holding up a very high standard of comparison,--"not what other
people did, but what a man could and ought to do." He succeeded so
well that the boy was not aware that his attainments were
extraordinary. "I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly; I did not
estimate myself at all. If I thought anything about myself, it was
that I was rather backward in my studies, since I always found myself
so, in comparison of what my father expected of me." To this assertion
Mr. Mill very candidly adds: "I assert this with confidence, though it
was not the impression of various persons who saw me in my childhood.
They, as I have since found, thought me greatly and disagreeably
self-conceited; probably because I was disputatious, and did not
scruple to give direct contradictions to things which I heard said."
A boy who is kept at his studies as assiduously as was young Mill has
little time for play or association with other boys. This lack of
contact with companions is a grave defect in the education of Mill. "I
constantly remained long," writes Mill, "and in a less degree have
always remained, inexpert in anything requiring manual dexterity; my
mind, as well as my hands, did its work very lamely when it was
applied, or ought to have been applied, to the practical details
which, as they are the chief interest of life to the majority of men,
are also the things in which whatever mental capacity they have,
chiefly shows itself."
On the whole we feel that the childhood of Mill could hardly have been
a happy one. The joy of physical achievement, the free-hearted
abandonment of the young barbarian at his play, the power to do as
well as to know--these are the birthright of every child. But while we
may pity him for his lack of these joys, we dare not forget that to
have lived the life or done the work of John Stuart Mill is no small
thing. And perhaps this life could not have been lived had his
education been other than it was.
XXXIV
CARLYLE GOES TO THE UNIVERSITY
One of the most tender pictures in the history of English literature
is that of Carlyle as he starts for his University career. Just a boy,
a child not yet fourteen! It is early morning in November at
Ecclefechan--and Edinburgh with its famous University is a hundred
miles away. The father and mother have risen early to get Thomas
ready--not for the cab to take him to the "purple luxury and plush
repose" of the Pullman on the Limited Express. No, Tom is going to
walk,--his only companion a boy two or three years older. These
rugged, poor, and godly parents had long discussed the sending of
Tommy to the great University. James Bell, one of the wise men of the
community, had said: "Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his
ignorant parents," but they knew that depended on the boy. "Thou hast
not done so; God be thanked," said James Carlyle to his son in after
years.
But let us come back to our picture. In our mind's eye we see the
Scotch lad starting out on his hundred-mile trip in the mist of a
foggy November morning. Almost three-score years after, Carlyle
himself beautifully describes the event: "How strangely vivid, how
remote and wonderful, tinged with the views of far-off love and
sadness, is that journey to me now after fifty-seven years of time! My
mother and father walking with me in the dark frosty November morning
through the village to set us on our way; my dear and loving mother,
her tremulous affection, etc."
That's the picture of an unknown boy going to the University to become
what every pious Scotch mother wants her boy to be--a minister of the
gospel.