#THE WORLD'S#
GREAT CLASSICS
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COMM1TTEE
Timothy Dwight, D.D. LLD.
Richard Henry Stoddard
Arthur Richmond Marsh. A.B.
Paul van Dyke, D.D.
Albert Ellery Bergh
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[Illustration: Robert Burns]
HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE
HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
HENRY VAN LAUN
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY
J. SCOTT CLARK, A. M.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
REVISED EDITION
VOLUME III
CONTENTS
BOOK III.--THE CLASSIC AGE
(_Continued_)
CHAPTER SEVENTH
The Poets
Section I.--The Domination of the Classical Spirit
Section II.--Alexander Pope.--His Education and Mode of Life
Section III.--Eloisa to Abelard.--The Rape of the Lock.--The Dunciad
Section IV.--Pope's Descriptive Talent.--His Didactic Poems
Section V.--The Poets Prior, Gay, and Thomson
Section VI.--The Beginnings of the Modern Age
BOOK IV.--MODERN LIFE
CHAPTER FIRST
Ideas and Productions
Section I.--Rise of Democracy
Section II.--Robert Burns
Section III.--Conservative rule in England.--Cowper's Poetry
Section IV.--The Romantic School
Section V.--Philosophy Enters into Literature.--Wordsworth.--Shelley
CHAPTER SECOND
Lord Byron
Section I.--His Life and Character
Section II.--The Style of Byron's Poetry
Section III.--Byron's Short Poems
Section IV.--Manfred
Section V.--What Byron's Contemporaries Thought of Him.--His
Morals
Section VI.--The Malady of the Age
CHAPTER THIRD
The Past and Present
_Part I.--The Past_
Section I.--The Saxon Invasion--The Norman Conquest
Section II.--Formative Periods
Section III.--The Broadening of Ideas
_Part II.--The Present_
Section I.--Effects of the Saxon Invasion and the Norman Conquest
Section II.--English Commerce and Industry
Section III.--Agriculture
Section IV.--English Society.--Philosophy.--Religion
Section V.--What Forces Have Produced the Present Civilization
BOOK V.--MODERN AUTHORS
Introductory Note
CHAPTER FIRST
The Novel.--Dickens
_Part I.--The Author_
Section I.--Importance of the Imaginative Faculty
Section II.--Boldness of Dickens's Imagination
Section III.--His Trivialities.--His Minuteness
Section IV.--His Emotions.--His Pathos.--His Humor
_Part II.--The Public_
Section I.--The Morality of English Novels
_Part III.--The Characters_
Section I.--Dickens's Love for Natural Characters
Section II.--The Hypocrite.--The Positive Man.--The Proud Man
Section III.--Children
Section IV.--The Ideal Man
CHAPTER SECOND
The Novel (Continued)--Thackeray
Comparison between Dickens and Thackeray
_Part I.--The Satirist_
Section I.--The English Satirist
Section II.--The English Temperament
Section III.--Superiority of Thackeray as a Satirist.--Literary Snobs
Section IV.--Resemblance of Thackeray to Swift
Section V.--Thackeray's Misanthropy
Section VI.--His Characters
_Part II.--The Artist_
Section I.--The Art of Thackeray
Section II.--Portrait of Henry Esmond.--Historical Talent
Section III.--Literature the Definition of Man
CHAPTER THIRD
Criticism and History--Macaulay
Section I.--His Position in England
Section II.--Essays
Section III.--His Critical Method
Section IV.--His Love of Political Liberty
Section V.--Characteristics of Macaulay's Style
Section VI.--His Rudeness and Humor
Section VII.--Estimate of Macaulay's Work
Section VIII.--Comparison of Macaulay with French Historians
CHAPTER FOURTH
Philosophy and History--Carlyle
_Part I.--Style and Mind_
Section I.--Carlyle's Obscurity and Crudeness
Section II.--The Humor of Carlyle
Section III.--Perception of the Real and the Sublime
Section IV.--His Passion for Actuality
Section V.--His Mode of Thought
_Part II.--Vocation_
Section I.--The Appearance and Development of Original Minds
Section II.--Characteristics of the German Form of Mind
Section III.--German Aptitude for General Ideas
Section IV.--Faults of the German Form of Thought
Section V.--How Ideas are Reshaped
Section VI.--Growth of German Ideas in England
_Part III.--Philosophy, Morality, and Criticism_
Section I.--Carlyle's Metaphysics
Section II.--His Transposition of German Metaphysics into English
Puritanism
Section III.--Conception of God and Duty
Section IV.--Conception of Christianity
Section V.--Carlyle's Criticism
Section VI.--The Future of Criticism
_Part IV.--Conception of History_
Section I.--Great Men
Section II.--Wherein Carlyle is Original
Section III.--In what Genuine History Consists
Section IV.--Carlyle's History of Cromwell
Section V.--His History of the French Revolution
Section VI.--His Opinion of Modern England
Section VII.--The Dangers of Enthusiasm.--Comparison of Carlyle and
Macaulay
CHAPTER FIFTH
Philosophy--Stuart Mill
Section I.--Lack of General Ideas
Section II.--Why Metaphysics are Lacking
Section III.--Mill's Philosophical Method
_Part I.--Experience_
Section I--The Object of Logic
Section II.--Discussion of Ideas
Section III.--The Two Corner-stones of Logic
Section IV.--Theory of Definitions
Section V.--Theory of Proof
Section VI.--Theory of Axioms
Section VII.--Theory of Induction
Section VIII.--Applications of the Theory of Induction
Section IX.--The Province and Method of Deduction
Section X.--Comparison of the Methods of Induction and Deduction
Section XI.--Limits of Our Knowledge
_Part II.--Abstraction_
Section I.--Agreement of this Philosophy with the English Mind
Section II.--The Nature of Abstraction
Section III.--Definitions Explain the Abstract Generating Elements of
Things
Section IV.--The Basis of Proof in Syllogism is an Abstract Law
Section V.--Axioms are Relations between Abstract Truths
Section VI.--The Methods of Induction
Section VII.--Experience and Abstraction
Section VIII.--Idea and Limits of Metaphysics
Section IX.--A Morning in Oxford
CHAPTER SIXTH
Poetry--Tennyson
Section I.--His Talent and Work
Section II.--Portraits of Women
Section III.--Wherein Tennyson is at One with Nature
Section IV.--In Memoriam.--The Princess
Section V.--The Idylls of the King
Section VI.--Comparison of English and French Society
ILLUSTRATIONS
ROBERT BURNS
Photogravure from a painting
THE CASTLE OF CHILLON
Photogravure from an etching
PAGE FROM THE LETTERS OF ST. JEROME
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Fifteenth Century
PAGE FROM THE PRAYER-BOOK OF JUANA OF CASTILE
Fac-simile example of Book Illumination in the Sixteenth Century
CHRIST CROWNED WITH THORNS
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Sixteenth Century
BOOK III.--THE CLASSIC AGE
(_Continued_)
CHAPTER SEVENTH
THE POETS
Section I--The Domination of the Classical Spirit
When we take in at one view the vast literary region in England,
extending from the restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution,
we perceive that all the productions, independently of the English
character, bear a classical impress, and that this impress, special to
this region, is met with neither in the preceding nor in the succeeding
time. This dominant form of thought is imposed on all writers from
Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson and Hume: there
is an art to which they all aspire; the work of a hundred and fifty
years, practice and theory, inventions and imitations, examples and
criticism, are employed in attaining it. They comprehend only one kind
of beauty; they establish only the precepts which may produce it; they
rewrite, translate, and disfigure on its pattern the great works of
other ages; they carry it into all the different kinds of literature,
and succeed or fail in them according as it is adapted to them or not.
The sway of this style is so absolute that it is imposed on the
greatest, and condemns them to impotence when they would apply it beyond
its domain. The possession of this style is so universal that it is met
with in the weakest authors, and raises them to the height of talent
when they apply it in its domain.[1] This it is which brings to
perfection prose, discourse, essay, dissertation, narration, and all the
productions which form part of conversation and eloquence. This it is
which destroyed the old drama, debased the new, impoverished and
diverted poetry, produced a correct, agreeable, sensible, colorless, and
narrow-minded history. This spirit, common to England and France,
impressed its form on an infinite diversity of literary works, so that
in its universal manifest ascendancy we cannot but recognize the
presence of one of those internal forces which bend and govern the
course of human genius.
In no branch was it displayed more manifestly than in poetry, and at no
time did it appear more clearly than in the reign of Queen Anne. The
poets have just attained to the art which they had before dimly
discerned. For sixty years they were approaching it; now they possess
it, handle it; they use and exaggerate it. The style is at the same time
finished and artificial. Let us open the first that comes to hand,
Parnell or Philips, Addison or Prior, Gay or Tickell, we find a certain
turn of mind, versification, language. Let us pass to a second, the same
form reappears; we might say that they are imitations of one another.
Let us go on to a third; the same diction, the same apostrophes, the
same fashion of arranging an epithet and rounding a period. Let us turn
over the whole lot; with little individual differences, they seem to be
all cast in the same mould; one is more epicurean, another more moral,
another more biting; but a noble language, an oratorical pomp, a
classical correctness, reign throughout; the substantive is accompanied
by its adjective, its knight of honor; antithesis balances its
symmetrical architecture; the verb, as in Lucan or Statius, is
displayed, flanked on each side by a noun decorated by an epithet; we
would say that it is of a uniform make, as if fabricated by a machine;
we forget what it wishes to make known; we are tempted to count the
measure on our fingers; we know beforehand what poetical ornaments are
to embellish it. There is a theatrical dressing, contrasts, allusions,
mythological elegance, Greek or Latin quotations. There is a scholastic
solidity, sententious maxims, philosophic commonplaces, moral
developments, oratorical exactness. We might imagine ourselves to be
before a family of plants; if the size, color, accessories, names
differ, the fundamental type does not vary; the stamens are of the same
number, similarly inserted around similar pistils, above leaves arranged
on the same plan: a man who knows one knows all; there is a common
organism and structure which involves the uniformity of the rest. If we
review the whole family we will doubtless find there some characteristic
plant which displays the type in a clear light, whilst all around it and
by degrees it alters, degenerates, and at last loses itself in the
surrounding families. So here we see classical art find its centre in
the neighbors of Pope, and above all in Pope himself, then, after being
half effaced, mingle with foreign elements until it disappears in the
poetry which succeeded it.[2]
Section II.--Alexander Pope.--His Education and Mode of Life
In 1688, at a linen draper's in Lombard Street, London, was born a
little, delicate, and sickly creature, by nature artificial, constituted
beforehand for a studious existence, having no taste but for books, who
from his early youth derived his whole pleasure from the contemplation
of printed books. He copied the letters, and thus learned to write. He
passed his infancy with them, and was a verse-maker as soon as he knew
how to speak. At the age of twelve he had written a little tragedy out
of the Iliad, and an "Ode on Solitude." From thirteen to fifteen he
composed a long epic of four thousand verses, called "Alcander." For
eight years shut up in a little house in Windsor Forest, he read all the
best critics, almost all the English, Latin, and French poets who had a
reputation, Homer, the Greek poets, and a few of the great ones in the
original, Tasso and Ariosto in translations, with such assiduity that he
nearly died from it. He did not search in them for passions, but style:
there was never a more devoted adorer, never a more precocious master of
form. Already his taste showed itself: amongst all the English poets his
favorite was Dryden, the least inspired and the most classical. He
perceived his career. He states that Mr. Walsh told him there was one
way left of excelling. "We have several great poets," he said, "but we
never had one great poet that was correct; and he advised me to make
that my study and aim."[3] He followed this advice, tried his hand in
translations of Ovid and Statius, and in recasting parts of old Chaucer.
He appropriated all the poetic elegances and excellences, stored them up
in his memory; he arranged in his head a complete dictionary of all
happy epithets, all ingenious turns of expression, all sonorous rhythms
by which a poet may exalt, render precise, illuminate an idea. He was
like those little musicians, infant prodigies, who, brought up at the
piano, suddenly acquire a marvellous touch, roll out scales, brilliant
shakes, make the octaves vault with an agility and accuracy which drive
off the stage the most famous performers. At seventeen, becoming
acquainted with old Wycherley, who was sixty-nine, he undertook, at his
request, to correct his poems, corrected them so well that the other was
at once charmed and mortified. Pope blotted out, added, recast, spoke
frankly, and eliminated firmly. The author, in spite of himself, admired
the corrections secretly, and tried openly to make light of them, until
at last his vanity, wounded at owing so much to so young a man, and at
finding a master in a scholar, ended by breaking off an intercourse by
which he profited and suffered too much. For the scholar had at the
outset carried the art beyond any of the masters. At sixteen[4] his
Pastorals bore witness to a correctness which no one had possessed, not
even Dryden. When people observed these choice words, these exquisite
arrangements of melodious syllables, this science of division and
rejection, this style so fluent and pure, these graceful images rendered
still more graceful by the diction, and all this artificial and
many-tinted garland of flowers which Pope called pastoral, they thought
of the first eclogues of Vergil. Mr. Walsh declared "that it is not
flattery at all to say that Vergil had written nothing so good at his
age."[5] When later they appeared in a volume, the public was dazzled.
"You have only displeased the critics," wrote Wycherley, "by pleasing
them too well."[6] The same year the poet of twenty-one finished his
"Essay on Criticism," a sort of "Ars Poetica"; it is the kind of a poem
a man might write at the end of his career, when he has handled all
modes of writing and has grown gray in criticism; and in this subject,
of which the treatment demands the experience of a whole literary life,
he was at the first onset as ripe as Boileau.
What will this consummate musician, who begins by a treatise on harmony,
make of his incomparable mechanism and his science as a teacher? It is
well to feel and think before, writing: a full source of living ideas
and real passions is necessary to make a genuine poet, and in him, seen
closely, we find that everything, to his very person, is scanty and
artificial; he was a dwarf, four feet high, contorted, hunchbacked,
thin, valetudinarian, appearing, when he arrived at maturity, no longer
capable of existing. He could not get up himself, a woman dressed him;
he wore three pairs of stockings, drawn on one over the other, so
slender were his legs; "when he rose, he was invested in bodices made of
stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were
laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat;"[7] next came a sort of
fur doublet, for the least thing made him shiver; and lastly, a thick
linen shirt, very warm, with fine sleeves. Over all this he wore a black
garment, a tye-wig, a little sword; thus equipped, he went and took his
place at the table of his great friend, the Earl of Oxford. He was so
small that he had to be raised on a chair of his own; so bald that when
he had no company he covered his head with a velvet cap; so punctilious
and exacting that the footman evaded going his errands, and the Earl had
to discharge several "for their resolute refusal of his messages." At
dinner he ate too much; like a spoiled child, he would have highly
seasoned dishes, and thus "would oppress his stomach with repletion."
When cordials were offered him, he got angry, but did not refuse them.
He had all the appetite and whims of an old child, an old invalid, an
old author, an old bachelor. We are prepared to find him whimsical and
susceptible. He often, without saying a word, and without any known
cause, quitted the house of Lord Oxford, and the footman had to go
repeatedly with messages to bring him back. If Lady Mary Wortley, his
former poetical divinity, were unfortunately at table, there was no
dining in peace; they would not fail to contradict, peck at each other,
quarrel; and one or other would leave the room. He would be sent for and
would return, but he brought his hobbies back with him. He was as crafty
and malignant as a nervous abortion, which he was; when he wanted
anything, he dared not ask for it plainly; with hints and contrivances
of speech he induced people to mention it, to bring it forward, after
which he would make use of it. "Thus he teased Lord Orrery till he
obtained a screen. He hardly drank tea without a stratagem. Lady
Bolingbroke used to say that 'he played the politician about cabbages
and turnips.'"[8]
The rest of his life is not much more noble. He wrote libels on the Duke
of Chandos, Aaron Hill, Lady Mary Wortley, and then lied or equivocated
to disavow them. He had an ugly liking for artifice, and played a
disloyal trick on Lord Bolingbroke, his greatest friend. He was never
frank, always acting a part; he aped the _blasé_ man, the impartial
great artist, a contemner of the great, of kings, of poetry itself. The
truth is, that he thought of nothing but his phrases, his author's
reputation, and "a little regard shown him by the Prince of Wales melted
his obduracy."[9] When we read his correspondence, we find that there
are not more than about ten genuine letters; he is a literary man even
in the moments when he opened his heart; his confidences are formal
rhetoric; and when he conversed with a friend he was always thinking of
the printer, who would give his effusions to the public. Through this
very pretentiousness he grew awkward, and unmasked himself. One day
Richardson and his father, the painter, found him reading a pamphlet
that Cibber had written against him. "These things," said Pope, "are my
diversion. They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features
writhing with anguish; and young Richardson said to his father, when
they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion."[10]
After all, his great cause for writing was literary vanity: he wished to
be admired, and nothing more; his life was that of a coquette studying
herself in a glass, painting her face, smirking, receiving compliments
from anyone, yet declaring that compliments weary her, that paint makes
her dirty, and that she has a horror of affectation. Pope has no dash,
no naturalness or manliness; he has no more ideas than passions; at
least such ideas as a man feels it necessary to write, and in connection
with which we lose thought of words. Religious controversy and party
quarrels resound about him; he studiously avoids them; amidst all these
shocks his chief care is to preserve his writing-desk; he is a very
lukewarm Catholic, all but a deist, not well aware of what deism means;
and on this point he borrows from Bolingbroke ideas whose scope he
cannot see, but which he thinks suitable to be put into verse. In a
letter to Atterbury (1717) he says: "In my politics, I think no further
than how to prefer the peace of my life, in any government under which I
live; nor in my religion, than to preserve the peace of my conscience in
any church with which I communicate. I hope, all churches and
governments are so far of God, as they are rightly understood and
rightly administered; and where they err, or may be wrong, I leave it to
God alone to mend or reform them."[11] Such convictions do not torment a
man. In reality, he did not write because he thought, but thought in
order to write; manuscript and the noise it makes in the world, when
printed, was his idol; if he wrote verses, it was merely for the sake of
doing so.
This is the best training for versification. Pope gave himself up to it;
he was a man of leisure, his father had left him a very fair fortune; he
earned a large sum by translating the Iliad and Odyssey; he had an
income of eight hundred pounds. He was never in the pay of a publisher;
he looked from an eminence upon the beggarly authors grovelling in their
free and easy life, and, calmly seated in his pretty house at
Twickenham, in his grotto, or in the fine garden which he had himself
planned, he could polish and file his writings as long as he chose. He
did not fail to do so. When he had written a work he kept it at least
two years in his desk. From time to time he re-read and corrected it;
took counsel of his friends, then of his enemies; no new edition was
unamended; he altered without wearying. His first outburst became so
recast and transformed that it could not be recognized in the final
copy. The pieces which seem least retouched are two satires, and Dodsley
says that in the manuscript "almost every line was written twice over; I
gave him a clean transcript, which he sent some time afterwards to me
for the press, with almost every line written twice over a second
time."[12] Dr. Johnson says: "From his attention to poetry he was never
diverted. If conversation offered anything that could be improved, he
committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression, more
happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an
independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion; and
some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of
lines, to be wrought upon at some other time."[13] His writing-desk had
to be placed upon his bed before he rose. "Lord Oxford's domestic
related that, in the dreadful winter of 1740, she was called from her
bed by him four times in one night to supply him with paper, lest he
should lose a thought."[14] Swift complains that he was never at leisure
for conversation, because he "had always some poetical scheme in his
head." Thus nothing was lacking for the attainment of perfect
expression; the practice of a lifetime, the study of every model, an
independent fortune, the company of men of the world, an immunity from
turbulent passions, the absence of dominant ideas, the facility of an
infant prodigy, the assiduity of an old man of letters. It seems as
though he were expressly endowed with faults and good qualities, here
enriched, there impoverished, at once narrowed and developed, to set in
relief the classical form by the diminution of the classical depth, to
present the public with a model of a worn-out and accomplished art, to
reduce to a brilliant and rigid crystal the flowing sap of an expiring
literature.
Section III.--Eloisa to Abelard.--The Rape of the Lock.--The Dunciad
It is a great misfortune for a poet to know his business too well; his
poetry then shows the man of business, and not the poet. I wish I could
admire Pope's works of imagination, but I cannot. In vain I read the
testimony of his contemporaries, and even that of the moderns, and
repeat to myself that in his time he was the prince of poets; that his
epistle from "Eloisa to Abelard" was received with a cry of enthusiasm;
that a man could not then imagine a finer expression of true passion;
that to this very day it is learned by heart, like the speech of
Hippolyte in the "Phèdre" of Racine; that Johnson, the great literary
critic, ranked it amongst "the happiest productions of the human mind";
that Lord Byron himself preferred it to the celebrated ode of Sappho. I
read it again and am bored; this is not as it ought to be; but, in spite
of myself, I yawn, and I open the original letters of Eloisa to find the
cause of my weariness.
Doubtless poor Eloisa is a barbarian, nay worse, a literary barbarian;
she puts down learned quotations, arguments, tries to imitate Cicero, to
arrange her periods; she could not do otherwise, writing a dead
language, with an acquired style; perhaps the reader would do as much if
he were obliged to write to his mistress in Latin.[15] But how does true
feeling pierce through the scholastic form! "Thou art the only one who
can sadden me, console me, make me joyful.... I should be happier and
prouder to be called thy mistress than to be the lawful wife of an
emperor.... Never, God knows, have I wished for anything else in thee
but thee. It is thee alone whom I desire; nothing that thou couldst
give; not marriage, not dowry: I never dreamt of doing my own pleasure
or my own will, thou knowest it, but thine." Then come passionate words,
genuine love words,[16] then the unrestrained words of a penitent, who
says and dares everything, because she wishes to be cured, to show her
wound to her confessor, even her most shameful wound; perhaps also
because in extreme agony, as in child-birth, modesty vanishes. All this
is very crude, very rude; Pope has more wit than she, and how he endues
her with it! In his hands she becomes an academician, and her letter is
a repertory of literary effects; portraits and descriptions; she paints
to Abelard the nunnery and the landscape:
"In these lone walls (their days eternal bound),
These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crowned,
Where awful arches make a noon-day night,
And the dim windows shed a solemn light....
The wandering streams that shine between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling rills,
The dying gales that pant upon the trees,
The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze."[17]
Declamation and commonplace: she sends Abelard discourses on love and
the liberty which it demands, on the cloister and the peaceful life
which it affords, on writing and the advantages of the post.[18]
Antitheses and contrasts, she forwards them to Abelard by the dozen; a
contrast between the convent illuminated by his presence and desolate by
his absence, between the tranquillity of the pure nun and the anxiety of
the sinful nun, between the dream of human happiness and the dream of
divine happiness. In fine, it is a _bravura_, with contrasts of _forte_
and _piano_, variations and change of key. Eloisa makes the most of her
theme, and sets herself to crowd into it all the powers and effects of
her voice. Admire the _crescendo_, the shakes by which she ends her
brilliant _morceaux_; to transport the hearer at the close of the
portrait of the innocent nun, she says:
"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted and each wish resigned;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
'Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;'
Desires composed, affections ever even;
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her, th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heavenly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day."[19]
Observe the noise of the big drum; I mean the grand contrivances, for so
may be called all that a person says who wishes to rave and cannot; for
instance, speaking to rocks and walls, praying the absent Abelard to
come, fancying him present, apostrophizing grace and virtue:
"O grace serene! O virtue heavenly fair!
Divine oblivion of low-thoughted care!
Fresh-blooming hope, gay daughter of the sky!
And faith, our early immortality!
Enter, each mild, each amicable guest;
Receive, and wrap me in eternal rest!"[20]
Hearing the dead speaking to her, telling the angels:
"I come! I come! Prepare your roseate bow'rs,
Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow'rs."[21]
This is the final symphony with modulations of the celestial organ. I
presume that Abelard cried "Bravo" when he heard it.
But this is nothing in comparison with the art exhibited by her in every
phrase. She puts ornaments into every line. Imagine an Italian singer
trilling every word. O what pretty sounds! how nimbly and brilliantly
they roll along, how clear, and always exquisite! it is impossible to
reproduce them in another tongue. Now it is a happy image, filling up a
whole phrase; now a series of verses, full of symmetrical contrasts; two
ordinary words set in relief by strange conjunction; an imitative rhythm
completing the impression of the mind by the emotion of the senses; the
most elegant comparisons and the most picturesque epithets; the closest
style and the most ornate. Except truth, nothing is wanting. Eloisa is
worse than a singer, she is an author: we look at the back of her
epistle to Abelard to see if she has not written on it "For Press."
Pope has somewhere given a receipt for making an epic poem: take a
storm, a dream, five or six battles, three sacrifices, funeral games, a
dozen gods in two divisions; shake together until there rises the froth
of a lofty style. We have just seen the receipt for making a
love-letter. This kind of poetry resembles cookery; neither heart nor
genius is necessary to produce it, but a light hand, an attentive eye,
and a cultivated taste.
It seems that this kind of talent is made for light verses. It is
factitious, and so are the manners of society. To make pretty speeches,
to prattle with ladies, to speak elegantly of their chocolate or their
fan, to jeer at fools, to criticise the last tragedy, to be good at
insipid compliments or epigrams--this, it seems, is the natural
employment of a mind such as this, but slightly impassioned, very vain,
a perfect master of style, as careful of his verses as a dandy of his
coat. Pope wrote the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Dunciad"; his
contemporaries went into ecstasies about the charm of his badinage and
the precision of his raillery, and believed that he had surpassed
Boileau's "Lutrin" and "Satires."
That may well be; at all events the praise would be scanty. In Boileau
there are, as a rule, two kinds of verse, as was said by a man of
wit;[22] most of which seem to be those of a sharp schoolboy in the
third class, the rest those of a good schoolboy in the upper division.
Boileau wrote the second verse before the first: this is why once out of
four times his first verse only serves to stop a gap. Doubtless Pope had
a more brilliant and adroit mechanism; but this faculty of hand does not
suffice to make a poet, even a poet of the boudoir. There, as elsewhere,
we need genuine passion, or at least genuine taste. When we wish to
paint the pretty nothings of conversation and the world, we must at
least like them. We can only paint well what we love.[23] Is there no
charming grace in the prattle and frivolity of a pretty woman? Painters,
like Watteau, have spent their lives in feasting on them. A lock of hair
raised by the wind, a pretty arm peeping from underneath a great deal of
lace, a stooping figure making the bright folds of a petticoat sparkle,
and the arch half-engaging, half-mocking smile of the pouting
mouth--these are enough to transport an artist. Certainly he will be
aware of the influence of the toilet, as much so as the lady herself,
and will never scold her for passing three hours at her glass; there is
poetry in elegance. He enjoys it as a picture; delights in the
refinements of worldly life, the grand quiet lines of the lofty,
wainscoted drawing-room, the soft reflection of the high mirrors and
glittering porcelain, the careless gayety of the little sculptured
Loves, locked in embrace above the mantelpiece, the silvery sound of
these soft voices, buzzing scandal round the tea-table. Pope hardly if
at all rejoices in them; he is satirical and English amidst this amiable
luxury, introduced from France. Although he is the most worldly of
English poets, he is not enough so: nor is the society around him. Lady
Mary Wortley Montague, who was in her time "the pink of fashion" and who
is compared to Mme de Sévigné, has such a serious mind, such a decided
style, such a precise judgment, and such a harsh sarcasm, that we would
take her for a man. In reality the English, even Lord Chesterfield and
Horace Walpole, never mastered the true tone of the _salon._ Pope is
like them; his voice is out of tune, and then suddenly becomes biting.
Every instant a harsh mockery blots out the graceful images which he
began to awaken. Consider "The Rape of the Lock" as a whole; it is a
buffoonery in a noble style. Lord Petre had cut off a lock of hair of a
fashionable beauty, Mrs. Arabella Fermor; out of this trifle the problem
is to make an epic, with invocations, apostrophes, the interventions of
supernatural beings, and the rest of poetic mechanism; the solemnity of
style contrasts with the littleness of the events; we laugh at these
bickerings as at insects quarrelling.
Such has always been the case in England; whenever Englishmen wish to
represent social life, it is with a superficial and assumed politeness;
at the bottom of their admiration there is scorn. Their insipid
compliments conceal a mental reservation; let us observe them well, and
we will see that they look upon a pretty, well-dressed, and coquettish
woman as a pink doll, fit to amuse people for half an hour by her
outward show. Pope dedicates his poem to Mrs. Arabella Fermor with every
kind of compliment. The truth is, he is not polite; a Frenchwoman would
have sent him back his book, and advised him to learn manners; for one
commendation of her beauty she would find ten sarcasms upon her
frivolity. Is it very pleasant to have it said: "You have the prettiest
eyes in the world, but you live in the pursuit of trifles"? Yet to this
all his homage is reduced.[24] His complimentary emphasis, his
declaration that the "ravish'd hair... adds new glory to the shining
sphere,"[25] all his stock of phrases is but a parade of gallantry which
betrays indelicacy and coarseness. Will she
"Stain her honor, or her new brocade,
Forget her pray'rs or miss a masquerade,
Or lose her heart, or necklace at a ball?"[26]
No Frenchman of the eighteenth century would have imagined such a
compliment. At most, that bearish Rousseau, that former lackey and
Geneva moralist, might have delivered this disagreeable thrust. In
England it was not found too rude. Mrs. Arabella Fermor was so pleased
with the poem that she gave away copies of it. Clearly she was not hard
to please, for she had heard much worse compliments. If we read in Swift
the literal transcript of a fashionable conversation, we shall see that
a woman of fashion of that time could endure much before she was angry.
But the strangest thing is, that this trifling is, for Frenchmen, at
least, no badinage at all. It is not at all like lightness or gayety.
Dorat, Gresset, would have been stupefied and shocked by it. We remain
cold under its most brilliant hits. Now and then at most a crack of the
whip arouses us, but not to laughter. These caricatures seem strange to
us, but do not amuse. The wit is no wit: all is calculated, combined,
artificially prepared; we expect flashes of lightning, but at the last
moment they do not descend. Thus Lord Petre, to "implore propitious
heaven, and every power,"
"To Love an altar built
Of twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt.
There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves,
And all the trophies of his former loves;
With tender billets-doux he lights the pyre,
And breathes three am'rous sighs to raise the fire."[27]
We remain disappointed, not seeing the comicality of the description. We
go on conscientiously, and in the picture of Melancholy and her palace
find figures much stranger:
"Here sighs a jar, and there a goose-pye talks;
Men proved with child, as pow'rful fancy works,
And maids turned bottles, call aloud for corks."[28]
We say to ourselves now that we are in China: that so far from Paris and
Voltaire we must be surprised at nothing, that these folk have ears
different from ours, and that a Pekin mandarin vastly relishes
kettle-music. Finally, we comprehend that, even in this correct age and
this artificial poetry, the old style of imagination exists; that it is
nourished as before, by oddities and contrasts; and that taste, in spite
of all culture, will never become acclimatized; that incongruities, far
from shocking, delight it; that it is insensible to French sweetness and
refinements; that it needs a succession of expressive figures,
unexpected and grinning, to pass before it; that it prefers this coarse
carnival to delicate insinuations; that Pope belongs to his country, in
spite of his classical polish and his studied elegances, and that his
unpleasant and vigorous fancy is akin to that of Swift.
We are now prepared and can enter upon his second poem, "The Dunciad."
We need much self-command not to throw down this masterpiece as insipid,
and even disgusting. Rarely has so much talent been spent to produce
greater tedium. Pope wished to be avenged on his literary enemies, and
sang of Dulness, the sublime goddess of literature, "daughter of Chaos
and eternal Night,... gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,"[29]
queen of hungry authors, who chooses for her son and favorite, first
Theobald and afterwards Cibber. There he is, a king, and to celebrate
his accession she institutes public games in imitation of the ancients;
first a race of booksellers, trying to seize a poet; then the struggle
of the authors, who first vie with each other in braying, and then dash
into the Fleet-ditch filth; then the strife of critics, who have to
undergo the reading of two voluminous authors, without falling
asleep.[30] Strange parodies, to be sure, and, in truth, not very
striking. Who is not deafened by these hackneyed and bald allegories,
Dulness, poppies, mists, and Sleep? What if I entered into details, and
described the poetess offered for a prize, "with cow-like udders, and
with ox-like eyes"; if I related the plunges of the authors, the
floundering in the Fleet-ditch, the vilest sewer in the town; if I
transcribed all the extraordinary verses in which
"First he relates, how sinking to the chin,
Smit with his mien, the mud-nymphs suck'd him in:
How young Lutetia, softer than the down,
Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown,
Vied for his love in jetty bow'rs below."...[31]
I must stop. Swift alone might have seemed capable of writing some
passages, for instance, that on the fall of Curll. We might have excused
it in Swift; the extremity of despair, the rage of misanthropy, the
approach of madness, might have carried him to such excess. But Pope,
who lived calm and admired in his villa, and who was only urged by
literary rancor! He can have had no nerves! How could a poet have
dragged his talent wantonly through such images, and so constrained his
ingeniously woven verses to receive such dirt? Picture a pretty
drawing-room basket, destined only to contain flowers and fancy work
sent down to the kitchen to be turned into a receptacle for filth. In
fact, all the filth of literary life is here; and heaven knows what it
then was! In no age were hack-writers so beggarly and so vile. Poor
fellows, like Richard Savage, who slept during one winter in the open
air on the cinders of a glass manufactory, lived on what he received for
a dedication, knew the inside of a prison, rarely dined, and drank at
the expense of his friends; pamphleteers, like Tutchin, who was soundly
whipped; plagiarists, like Ward, exposed in the pillory and pelted with
rotten eggs and apples; courtesans, like Eliza Heywood, notorious by the
shamelessness of their public confessions; bought journalists, hired
slanderers, venders of scandal and insults, half rogues, complete
roisterers, and all the literary vermin which haunted the
gambling-houses, the stews, the gin-cellars, and at a signal from a
bookseller, stung honest folk for a crownpiece. These villanies, this
foul linen, the greasy coat six years old, the musty pudding, and the
rest, are to be found in Pope as in Hogarth, with English coarseness and
precision. This is their error, they are realists, even under the
classical wig; they do not disguise what is ugly and mean; they describe
that ugliness and meanness with their exact outlines and distinguishing
marks; they do not clothe them in a fine cloak of general ideas; they do
not cover them with the pretty innuendoes of society. This is the reason
why their satires are so harsh. Pope does not flog the dunces, he knocks
them down; his poem is hard and malicious; it is so much so that it
becomes clumsy; to add to the punishment of dunces, he begins at the
deluge, writes historical passages, represents at length the past,
present, and future empire of Dullness, the library of Alexandria burned
by Omar, learning extinguished by the invasion of the barbarians and by
the superstition of the Middle Ages, the empire of stupidity which
extends over England and will swallow it up. What paving-stones to crush
flies!
"See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that leaned on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on sense!...
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine,
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all."[32]
The last scene ends with noise, cymbals and trombones, crackers and
fireworks. As for me, I carry away from this celebrated entertainment
only the remembrance of a hubbub. Unwittingly I have counted the lights,
I know the machinery, I have touched the toilsome stage property of
apparitions and allegories. I bid farewell to the scene-painter, the
machinist, the manager of literary effects, and go elsewhere to find the
poet.
Section IV.--Pope's Descriptive Talent.--His Didactic Poems
However, a poet exists in Pope, and to discover him we have only to read
him by fragments; if the whole is, as a rule, wearisome or shocking, the
details are admirable. It is so at the close of every literary age.
Pliny the younger, and Seneca, so affected and so stiff, are charming in
small bits; each of their phrases, taken by itself, is a masterpiece;
each verse in Pope is a masterpiece when taken alone. At this time, and
after a hundred years of culture, there is no movement, no object, no
action, which poets cannot describe. Every aspect of nature was
observed; a sunrise, a landscape reflected in the water,[33] a breeze
amid the foliage, and so forth. Ask Pope to paint in verse an eel, a
perch, or a trout, he has the exact phrase ready; we might glean from
him the contents of a "Gradus." He gives the features so exactly, that
at once we think we see the thing; he gives the expression so copiously,
that our imagination, however obtuse, will end by seeing it. He marks
everything in the flight of a pheasant:
"See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings....
Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?"[34]
He possesses the richest store of words to depict the sylphs which
flutter round his heroine, Belinda:
"But now secure the painted vessel glides,
The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides:
While melting music steals upon the sky,
And softened sounds along the waters die;
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,
The lucid squadrons round the sails repair:
Soft o'er the shrouds the aerial whispers breathe,
That seemed but zephyrs to the train beneath.
Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,
Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;
Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light.
Loose to the wind their airy garment flew,
Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,
Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies,
Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes;
While ev'ry beam new transient colors flings,
Colors that change whene'er they wave their wings."[35]
Doubtless these are not Shakespeare's sylphs; but side by side with a
natural and living rose, we may still look with pleasure on a flower of
diamonds, as they come from the hand of the jeweller, a masterpiece of
art and patience, whose facets make the light glitter, and cast a shower
of sparkles over the filagree foliage in which they are embedded. A
score of times in a poem of Pope's we stop to look with wonder on some
of these literary adornments. He feels so well in what the strong point
of his talent lies, that he abuses it; he delights to show his skill.
What can be staler than a card party, or more repellent to poetry than
the queen of spades or the king of hearts? Yet, doubtless for a wager,
he has recorded in the "Rape of the Lock" a game of ombre; we follow it,
hear it, recognize the dresses:
"Behold four kings in majesty revered,
With hoary whiskers and a forky beard;
And four fair queens whose hands sustain a flower,
Th' expressive emblem of their softer power;
Four knaves in garb succinct, a trusty band;
Caps on their heads and halberts in their hand;
And parti-coloured troops, a shining train,
Drawn forth to combat on the velvet plain."[36]
We see the trumps, the cuts, the tricks, and instantly afterwards the
coffee, the china, the spoons, the fiery spirits (to wit, spirits of
wine); we have here in advance the modes and periphrases of Delille. The
celebrated verses in which Delille at once employs and describes
imitative harmony are translated from Pope.[37] It is an expiring
poetry, but poetry still: an ornament to put on a mantelpiece is an
inferior work of art, but still it is a work of art. To descriptive
talent Pope unites oratorical talent. This art, proper to the classical
age, is the art of expressing ordinary general ideas. For a hundred and
fifty years men of both the thinking countries, England and France,
employed herein all their study. They seized those universal and limited
truths, which, being situated between lofty philosophical abstractions
and petty sensible details, are the subject-matter of eloquence and
rhetoric, and form what we nowadays call commonplaces. They arranged
them in compartments; methodically developed them; made them obvious by
grouping and symmetry; disposed them in regular processions, which with
dignity and majesty advanced well disciplined, and in a body. The
influence of this oratorical reason became so great that it was imposed
on poetry itself. Buffon ends by saying, in praise of certain verses,
that they are as fine as fine prose. In fact, poetry at this time became
a more affected prose subjected to rhyme. It was only a higher kind of
conversation and more select discourse. It is powerless when it is
necessary to paint or represent an action, when the need is to see and
make visible living passions, large genuine emotions, men of flesh and
blood; it results only in college epics like the "Henriade," freezing
odes and tragedies like those of Voltaire and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, or
those of Addison, Thomson, Dr. Johnson, and the rest. It makes them up
of dissertations, because it is capable of nothing else but
dissertations. Here henceforth is its domain; and its final task is the
didactic poem, which is a dissertation in verse. Pope excelled in it,
and his most perfect poems are those made up of precepts and arguments.
Artifice in these is less shocking than elsewhere. A poem--I am wrong,
essays like his upon "Criticism," on "Man" and the "Government of
Providence," on the "Knowledge and Characters of Men," deserve to be
written after reflection; they are a study, and almost a scientific
monograph. We may, we even ought, to weigh all the words, and verify all
the connections: art and attention are not superfluous, but necessary;
the question concerns exact precepts and close arguments. In this Pope
is incomparable. I do not think that there is in the world a versified
prose like his; that of Boileau is not to be compared to it. Not that
its ideas are very worthy of attention; we have worn them out, they
interest us no longer. "The Essay on Criticism" resembles Boileau's
"Epitres" and "L'Art Poétique," excellent works, no longer read but in
classes at school. It is a collection of very wise precepts, whose only
fault is their being too true. To say that good taste is rare; that we
ought to reflect and learn before deciding; that the rules of art are
drawn from nature; that pride, ignorance, prejudice, partiality, envy,
pervert our judgment; that a critic should be sincere, modest, polished,
kindly--all these truths might then be discoveries, but they are so no
longer. I suppose that in the time of Pope, Dryden, and Boileau, men had
special need of setting their ideas in order, and of seeing them very
distinctly in very clear phrases. Now that this need is satisfied, it
has disappeared: we demand ideas, not arrangement of ideas; the
pigeon-holes are manufactured, fill them. Pope was obliged to do it once
in the "Essay on Man," which is a sort of "Vicaire Savoyard,"[38] less
original than the other. He shows that God made all for the best, that
man is limited in his capacity and ought not to judge God, that our
passions and imperfections serve for the general good and for the ends
of Providence, that happiness lies in virtue and submission to the
divine will. We recognize here a sort of deism and optimism, of which
there was much at that time, borrowed, like those of Rousseau, from the
"Théodicée" of Leibnitz,[39] but tempered, toned down, and arranged
for the use of respectable people. The conception is not very lofty:
this curtailed deity making his appearance at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, is but a residuum: religion having disappeared, he
remained at the bottom of the crucible; and the reasoners of the time,
having no metaphysical inventiveness, kept him in their system to stop a
gap. In this state and at this place this deity resembles classic verse.
He has an imposing appearance, is comprehended easily, is stripped of
power, is the product of cold argumentative reason, and leaves the
people who attend to him very much at ease; on all these accounts he is
akin to an Alexandrine. This poor conception is all the more wretched in
Pope because it does not belong to him, for he is only accidentally a
philosopher; and to find matter for his poem, three or four systems,
deformed and attenuated, are amalgamated in his work. He boasts of
having tempered them one with the other, and having "steered between the
extremes."[40] The truth is, that he did not understand them, and that
he jumbles incongruous ideas at every step. There is a passage in which,
to obtain an effect of style, he becomes a pantheist; moreover he is
bombastic, and assumes the supercilious, imperious tone of a young
doctor of theology. I find no individual invention except in his "Moral
Essays"; in them is a theory of dominant passion which is worth reading.
After all he went farther than Boileau, for instance, in the knowledge
of man. Psychology is indigenous in England; we meet it there
throughout, even in the least creative minds. It gives rise to the
novel, dispossesses philosophy, produces the essay, appears in the
newspapers, fills current literature, like those indigenous plants which
multiply on every soil.
But if the ideas are mediocre, the art of expressing them is truly
marvellous: marvellous is the word. "I chose verse," says Pope in his
"Design of an Essay on Man, because I found I could express them
(ideas) more shortly this way than in prose itself." In fact, every word
is effective: every passage must be read slowly; every epithet is an
epitome; a more condensed style was never written; and, on the other
hand, no one labored more skilfully in introducing philosophical
formulas into the current conversation of society. His maxims have
become proverbs. I open his "Essay on Man" at random, and fall upon the
beginning of his second book. An orator, an author of the school of
Buffon, would be transported with admiration to see so many literary
treasures collected in so small a space:
"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride;
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world."[41]
The first verse epitomizes the whole of the preceding Epistle, and the
second epitomizes the present Epistle, it is, as it were, a kind of
staircase leading from one temple to another, regularly composed of
symmetrical steps, so aptly disposed that from the first step we see at
a glance the whole building we have left, and from the second the whole
edifice we are about to visit. Have we ever seen a finer entrance, or
one more conformable to the rules which bid us unite our ideas, recall
them when developed, pre-announce them when not yet developed? But this
is not enough. After this brief announcement, which premises that he is
about to treat of human nature, a longer announcement is necessary, to
paint beforehand, with the greatest possible splendor, this human nature
of which he is about to treat. This is the proper oratorical exordium,
like those which Bossuet places at the beginning of his funeral
orations; a sort of elaborate portico to receive the audience on their
entrance, and prepare them for the magnificence of the temple. The
antitheses follow each other in couples like a succession of columns;
thirteen couples form a suite; and the last is raised above the rest by
a word, which concentrates and combines all. In other hands this
prolongation of the same form would become tedious; in Pope's it
interests us, so much variety is there in the arrangement, and the
adornments. In one place the antithesis is comprised in a single line,
in another it occupies two; now it is in the substantives, now in the
adjectives and verbs; now only in the ideas, now it penetrates the sound
and position of the words. In vain we see it reappear; we are not
wearied, because each time it adds somewhat to our idea, and shows us
the object in a new light. This object itself may be abstract, obscure,
unpleasant, opposed to poetry; the style spreads over it its own light;
noble images borrowed from the grand and simple spectacles of nature
illustrate and adorn it. For there is a classical architecture of ideas
as well as of stones: the first, like the second, is a friend to
clearness and regularity, majesty and calm; like the second, it was
invented in Greece, transmitted through Rome to France, through France
to England, and slightly altered in its passage. Of all the masters who
have practised it in England, Pope is the most skilled.
After all, is there anything in the lines just quoted but decoration?
Translate them literally into prose, and of all those beauties there
remains not one. If the reader dissects Pope's arguments, he will hardly
be moved by them; he would instinctively think of Pascal's "Pensées,"
and remark upon the astonishing difference between a versifier and a
man. A good epitome, a good bit of style, well worked out, well written,
he would say, and nothing further. Clearly the beauty of the verses
arose from the difficulty overcome, the well-chosen sounds, the
symmetrical rhythms; this was all, and it was not much. A great writer
is a man who, having passions, knows his dictionary and his grammar;
Pope thoroughly knew his dictionary and his grammar, but stopped there.
People will say that this merit is small, and that I do not inspire them
with a desire to read Pope's verses. True; at least I do not counsel
them to read many. I would add, however, by way of excuse, that there is
a kind in which he succeeds, that his descriptive and oratorical talents
find in portraiture matter which suits them, and that in this he
frequently approaches La Bruyère; that several of his portraits, those
of Addison, Lord Hervey, Lord Wharton, the Duchess of Marlborough, are
medals worthy of finding a place in the cabinets of the curious, and of
remaining in the archives of the human race; that when he chisels one of
these heads, the comprehensive images, the unlooked-for connections of
words, the sustained and multiplied contrasts, the perpetual and
extraordinary conciseness, the incessant and increasing impulse of all
the strokes of eloquence brought to bear upon the same spot, stamp upon
the memory an impress which we never forget. It is better to repudiate
these partial apologies, and frankly to avow that, on the whole, this
great poet, the glory of his age, is wearisome--wearisome to us. "A
woman of forty," says Stendhal, "is only beautiful to those who have
loved her in their youth." The poor muse in question is not forty years
old for us; she is a hundred and forty. Let us remember, when we wish to
judge her fairly, the time when we made French verses like our Latin
verse. Taste became transformed an age ago, for the human mind has
wheeled round; with the prospect the perspective has changed; we must
take this change of place into account. Nowadays we demand new ideas and
bare sentiments; we care no longer for the clothing, we want the thing.
Exordiums, transitions, peculiarities of style, elegances of expression,
the whole literary wardrobe, is sent to the old-clothes shop; we only
keep what is indispensable; we trouble ourselves no more about
adornment, but about truth. The men of the preceding century were quite
different. This was seen when Pope translated the Iliad; it was the
Iliad written in the style of the "Henriade": by virtue of this travesty
the public admired it. They would not have admired it in the simple
Greek guise; they only consented to see it in powder and ribbons. It was
the costume of the time, and it was very necessary to put it on. Dr.
Johnson, in his commercial and academical style, affirms even that the
demand for elegance had increased so much, that pure nature could no
longer be borne.
Good society and men of letters made a little world by themselves, which
had been formed and refined after the manner and ideas of France. They
adopted a correct and noble style at the same time as fashion and fine
manners. They held by this style as by their coat; it was a matter of
propriety or ceremony; there was an accepted and unalterable pattern;
they could not change it without indecency or ridicule; to write, not
according to the rules, especially in verse, effusively and naturally,
would have been like showing one's self in the drawing-room in slippers
and a dressing-gown. Their pleasure in reading verse was to try whether
the pattern had been exactly followed, originality was only permitted in
details; a man might adjust here a lace, there some embroidered stripe,
but he was bound scrupulously to preserve the conventional form, to
brush everything minutely, and never to appear without new gold lace and
glossy broadcloth. The attention was only bestowed on refinements; a
more elaborate braid, a more brilliant velvet, a feather more gracefully
arranged; to this were boldness and experiment reduced; the smallest
incorrectness, the slightest incongruity, would have offended their
eyes; they perfected the infinitely little. Men of letters acted like
these coquettes, for whom the superb goddesses of Michael Angelo and
Rubens are but milk-maids, but who utter a cry of pleasure at the sight
of a ribbon at twenty francs a yard. A division, a displacing of verses,
a metaphor delighted them, and this was all which could still charm
them. They went on day by day embroidering, bedizening, narrowing the
bright classic robe, until at last the human mind, feeling fettered,
tore it, cast it away, and began to move. Now that this robe is on the
ground the critics pick it up, hang it up in their museum of ancient
curiosities, so that everybody can see it, shake it, and try to
conjecture from it the feelings of the fine lords and of the fine
speakers who wore it.
Section V.--The Poets Prior, Gay and Thomson
It is not everything to have a beautiful dress, strongly sewn and
fashionable; a man must be able to get into it easily. Reviewing the
whole train of the English poets of the eighteenth century, we perceive
that they do not easily get into the classical dress. This
gold-embroidered jacket, which fits a Frenchman so well, hardly suits
their figure; from time to time a too powerful, awkward movement makes
rents in the sleeves and elsewhere. For instance, Matthew Prior seems at
first sight to have all the qualities necessary to wear the jacket well;
he has been an ambassador to the French court, and writes pretty French
impromptus; he turns off with facility little jesting poems on a dinner,
a lady; he is gallant, a man of society, a pleasant storyteller,
epicurean, even sceptical like the courtiers of Charles II, that is to
say, as far as and including political roguery; in short, he is an
accomplished man of the world, as times went, with a correct and flowing
style, having at command a light and a noble verse, and pulling,
according to the rules of Bossu and Boileau, the string of mythological
puppets. With all this, we find him neither gay enough nor refined
enough. Bolingbroke called him wooden-faced, stubborn, and said there
was something Dutch in him. His manners smacked very strongly of those
of Rochester, and the well-clad scamps whom the Restoration bequeathed
to the Revolution. He took the first woman at hand, shut himself up with
her for several days, drank hard, fell asleep, and let her make off with
his money and clothes. Amongst other drabs, ugly enough and always
dirty, he finished by keeping Elizabeth Cox, and all but married her;
fortunately he died just in time. His style was like his manners. When
he tried to imitate La Fontaine's "Hans Carvel," he made it dull, and
lengthened it; he could not be piquant, but he was biting; his
obscenities have a cynical harshness; his raillery is a satire; and in
one of his poems, "To a Young Gentleman in Love," the lash becomes
knock-down blow. On the other hand, he was not a common roisterer. Of
his two principal poems, one on "Solomon" paraphrases and treats of the
remark of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity." From this picture we see
forthwith that we are in a Biblical land: such an idea would not then
have occurred to a boon companion of the Duke of Orleans, Regent of
France. Solomon relates how he in vain "proposed his doubts to the
lettered Rabbins," how he has been equally unfortunate in the hopes and
desires of love, the possession of power, and ends by trusting to an
"omniscient Master, omnipresent King." Here we have English gloom and
English conclusions.[42] Moreover, under the rhetorical and uniform
composition of his verses, we perceive warmth and passion, rich
painting, a sort of magnificence, and the profusion of an overcharged
imagination. The sap in England is always stronger than in France; the
sensations there are deeper, and the thoughts more original. Prior's
other poem, very bold and philosophical, against conventional truths and
pedantries, is a droll discourse on the seat of the soul, from which
Voltaire has taken many ideas and much foulness. The whole armory of the
sceptic and materialist was built and furnished in England, when the
French took to it. Voltaire has only selected and sharpened the arrows.
This poem is also wholly written in a prosaic style, with a harsh
common-sense and a medical frankness, not to be terrified by the foulest
abominations.[43] "Candide" and the "Earl of Chesterfield's Ears," by
Voltaire, are more brilliant but not more genuine productions. On the
whole, with his coarseness, want of taste, prolixity, perspicacity,
passion, there is something in this man not in accordance with classical
elegance. He goes beyond it or does not attain it.
This dissonance increases, and attentive eyes soon discover under the
regular cloak a kind of energetic and precise imagination, ready to
break through it. In this age lived Gay, a sort of La Fontaine, as near
La Fontaine as an Englishman can be, that is, not very near, but at
least a kind and amiable good fellow, very sincere, very frank,
strangely thoughtless, born to be duped, and a young man to the last.
Swift said of him that he ought never to have lived more than twenty-two
years. "In wit a man, simplicity a child," wrote Pope. He lived, like La
Fontaine, at the expense of the great, travelled as much as he could at
their charge, lost his money in South Sea speculations, tried to get a
place at court, wrote fables full of humanity to form the heart of the
Duke of Cumberland,[44] and ended as a beloved parasite and the domestic
poet of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry. He had little of the grave
in his character, and neither many scruples nor manners. It was his sad
lot, he said, "that he could get nothing from the court, whether he
wrote for or against it." And he wrote his own epitaph:
"Life is a jest; and all things show it,
I thought so once; but now I know it."[45]
This laughing, careless poet, to revenge himself on the minister, wrote
the "Beggars' Opera," the fiercest and dirtiest of caricatures. In this
Opera they cut the throat of men in place of scratching them; babes
handle the knife like the rest. Yet Gay was a laugher, but in a style of
his own, or rather in that of his country. Seeing "certain young men of
insipid delicacy,"[46] Ambrose Philips, for instance, who wrote elegant
and tender pastorals, in the manner of Fontenelle, he amused himself by
parodying and contradicting them, and in the "Shepherd's Week"
introduced real rural manners into the metre and form of the visionary
poetry; "Thou wilt not find my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds,
but milking the kine, tying up the sheaves, or if the hogs are astray,
driving them to their styes. My shepherd... sleepeth not under myrtle
shades, but under a hedge, nor doth he vigilantly defend his flocks from
wolves, because there are none."[47] Fancy a shepherd of Theocritus or
Vergil, compelled to put on hobnailed shoes and the dress of a
Devonshire cowherd; such an oddity would amuse us by the contrast of His
person and his garments. So here "The Magician, The Shepherd's
Struggle," are travestied in a modern guise. Listen to the song of the
first shepherd, "Lobbin Clout":
"Leek to the Welch, to Dutchmen butter's dear,
Of Irish swains potatoe is the chear;
Oat for their feast, the Scotish shepherds grind,
Swetet turnips are the food of Blouzelind.
While she loves turnips, butter I'll despise,
Nor leeks, nor oatmeal, nor potatoe prize."[48]
The other shepherd answers in the same metre; and the two continue verse
after verse, in the ancient manner, but now amidst turnips, strong beer,
fat pigs, bespattered at will by modern country vulgarities and the dirt
of a northern climate. Van Ostade and Tenies love these vulgar and
clownish idyls; and in Gay, as well as with them, unvarnished and
sensual drollery has its sway. The people of the north, who are great
eaters, always liked country fairs. The vagaries of toss-pots and
gossips, the grotesque outburst of the vulgar and animal mind, put them
into good humor. A man must be a genuine man of the world or an artist,
a Frenchman or an Italian, to be disgusted with them. They are the
product of the country, as well as meat and beer; let us try, in order
that we may enjoy them, to forget wine, delicate fruits, to give
ourselves blunted senses, to become in imagination compatriots of such
men. We have become used to the pictures of these drunken boobies, whom
Louis XIV called "baboons," to these red-faced cooks who clean fish, and
to the like scenes. Let us get used to Gay; to his poem, "Trivia, or the
Art of Walking the Streets of London"; to his advice as to dirty
gutters, and shoes "with firm, well-hammer'd soles"; his description of
the amours of the goddess Cloacina and a scavenger, whence sprang the
little shoe-blacks. He is a lover of the real, has a precise
imagination, does not see objects wholesale and from a general point of
view, but singly, with all their outlines and surroundings, whatever
they may be, beautiful or ugly, dirty or clean. The other literary men
act likewise, even the chief classical writers, including Pope. There is
in Pope a minute description, with high-colored words, local details, in
which comprehensive and characteristic features are stamped with such a
liberal and sure hand, that we would take the author for a modern
realist, and would find in the work an historical document.[49] As to
Swift, he is the bitterest positivist, and more so in poetry than in
prose. Let us read his eclogue on "Strephon and Chloe," if we would know
how far men can debase the noble poetic drapery. They make a dishclout
out of it, or dress clodhoppers in it; the Roman toga and Greek chlamys
do not suit these barbarians' shoulders. They are like those knights of
the Middle Ages, who, when they had taken Constantinople, muffled
themselves for a joke in long Byzantine robes, and went riding through
the streets in these disguises, dragging their embroidery in the gutter.
These men will do well, like the knights, to return to their manor, to
the country, the mud of their ditches, and the dunghill of their
farm-yards. The less man is fitted for social life, the more he is
fitted for solitary life. He enjoys the country the more for enjoying
the world less. Englishmen have always been more feudal and more fond of
the country than Frenchmen. Under Louis XIV and Louis XV the worst
misfortune for a nobleman was to go to his estate in the country and
grow rusty there; away from the smiles of the king and the fine
conversation of Versailles, there was nothing left but to yawn and die.
In England, in spite of artificial civilization and the charms of polite
society, the love of the chase and of bodily exercise, political
interests and the necessities of elections brought the nobles back to
their estates. And there their natural instincts returned. A sad and
impassioned man, naturally self-dependent, converses with objects; a
grand gray sky, whereon the autumn mists slumber, a sudden burst of
sunshine lighting up a moist field, depress or excite him; inanimate
things seem to him instinct with life; and the faint light, which in the
morning reddens the fringe of heaven, moves him as much as the smile of
a young girl at her first ball. Thus is genuine descriptive poetry born.
It appears in Dryden, in Pope himself, even in the writers of elegant
pastorals, and shines in Thomson's "Seasons." This poet, the son of a
clergyman, and very poor, lived, like most of the literary men of the
time, on donations and literary subscriptions, on sinecures and
political pensions; for lack of money he did not marry; wrote tragedies,
because tragedies brought in plenty of money; and ended by settling in a
country house, lying in bed till midday, indolent, contemplative, but a
simple and honest man, affectionate and beloved. He saw and loved the
country in its smallest details, not outwardly only, as Saint
Lambert,[50] his imitator; he made it his joy, his amusement, his
habitual occupation; a gardener at heart, delighted to see the spring
arrive, happy to be able to add another field to his garden. He paints
all the little things, without being ashamed, for they interest him, and
takes pleasure in "the smell of the dairy." We hear him speak of the
"insect armies," and "when the envenomed leaf begins to curl,"[51] and
of the birds which, foreseeing the approaching rain, "streak their wings
with oil, to throw the lucid moisture trickling off."[52] He perceives
objects so clearly that he makes them visible: we recognize the English
landscape, green and moist, half drowned in floating vapors, blotted
here and there by violet clouds, which burst in showers at the horizon,
which they darken, but where the light is delicately dimmed by the fog,
and the clear heavens show at intervals very bright and pure:
"Th' effusive South
Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven
Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.[53]...
Thus all day long the full-distended clouds
Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered earth
Is deep enriched with vegetable life;
Till in the western sky, the downward sun
Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.
The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes
The illumined mountain; through the forest streams;
Shakes on the floods; and in a yellow mist,
Far smoking o'er the interminable plain,
In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around."[54]
This is emphatic, but it is also opulent. In this air and this
vegetation, in this imagination and this style, there is a heaping up,
and, as it were, an impasto of effaced or sparkling tints; they are here
the glistening and lustrous robe of nature and art. We must see them in
Rubens--he is the painter and poet of the teeming and humid clime; but
we discover it also in others; and in this magnificence of Thomson, in
this exaggerated, luxuriant, grand coloring, we find occasionally the
rich palette of Rubens.
Section VI.--The Beginnings of the Modern Age
All this suits ill the classical embroidery. Thomson's visible
imitations of Vergil, his episodes inserted to fill up space, his
invocations to spring, to the muse, to philosophy, all these pedantic
relics and conventionalisms, produce incongruity. But the contrast is
much more marked in another way. The worldly artificial life, such as
Louis XIV had made fashionable, began to weary Europe. It was found
meagre and hollow; people grew tired of always acting, submitting to
etiquette. They felt that gallantry is not love, nor madrigals poetry,
nor amusement happiness. They perceived that man is not an elegant doll,
or a dandy the masterpiece of nature, and that there is a world beyond
the drawing-room. A Genevese plebeian (J. J. Rousseau), a Protestant and
a recluse, whom religion, education, poverty, and genius had led more
quickly and further than others, spoke out the public secret aloud; and
it was thought that he had discovered or rediscovered the country,
conscience, religion, the rights of man, and natural sentiments. Then
appeared a new personality, the idol and model of his time, the man of
feeling who, by his grave character and liking for nature, contrasted
with the man at court. Doubtless the man of feeling has not escaped the
influence of the places he has frequented. He is refined and insipid,
melting at the sight of the young lambs nibbling the newly grown grass,
blessing the little birds, who give a concert to celebrate their
happiness. He is emphatic and wordy, writes tirades about sentiment,
inveighs against the age, apostrophizes virtue, reason, truth, and the
abstract divinities, which are engraved in delicate outline on
frontispieces. In spite of himself, he continues a man of the
drawing-room and the academy; after uttering sweet things to the ladies,
he utters them to nature, and declaims in polished periods about the
Deity. But after all, it is through him that the revolt against
classical customs begins; and in this respect, he is more advanced in
Germanic England than in Latin France. Thirty years before Rousseau,
Thompson had expressed all Rousseau's sentiments, almost in the same
style. Like him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm.
Like him, he contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with
modern miseries and corruption. Like him, he exalted deep love, conjugal
tenderness, the union of souls and perfect esteem animated by desire,
paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he combated
temporary frivolity, and compared the ancient republics with modern
States:
"Proofs of a people, whose heroic aims
Soared far above the little selfish sphere
Of doubting modern life."[55]
Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty, virtue; rose
from the spectacle of nature to the contemplation of God, and showed to
man glimpses of immortal life beyond the tomb. Like him, in short, he
marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of his poetry by
sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing, and by such an
abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous invocations and
oratorical tirades, that we perceive in him beforehand the false and
ornamental style of Thomas,[56] David,[57] and the first French
Revolution.
Other authors follow in the same track. The literature of that period
might be called the library of the man of feeling. First there was
Richardson, the puritanic printer, with his Sir Charles Grandison, a man
of principles, an accomplished model of a gentleman, a professor of
decorum and morality, with a soul into the bargain. There is Sterne too,
a refined and sickly blackguard, who, amidst his buffooneries and
oddities, pauses to weep over an ass or an imaginary prisoner. There is,
in particular, Henry Mackenzie, "the Man of Feeling," whose timid,
delicate hero weeps five or six times a day; who grows consumptive
through sensibility, dares not broach his love till at the point of
death, and dies in broaching it. Naturally, praise induces satire; and
in the opposite camp we see Fielding, a valiant roisterer, and Sheridan,
a brilliant but naughty fellow, the one with Blifil, the other with
Joseph Surface, two hypocrites, especially the second, not coarse,
red-faced, and smelling of the vestry, like Tartuffe, but worldly,
well-clad, a fine talker, loftily serious, sad and gentle from excess of
tenderness, who, with his hand on his heart and a tear in his eye,
showers on the public his sentences and periods whilst he soils his
brother's reputation and debauches his neighbor's wife. When a man of
feeling has been thus created, he soon has an epic made for him. A
Scotsman, a man of wit, of too much wit, having published on his own
account an unsuccessful rhapsody, wished to recover his expenses,
visited the mountains of his country, gathered picturesque images,
collected fragments of legends, plastered over the whole an abundance of
eloquence and rhetoric, and created a Celtic Homer, Ossian, who with
Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe, and, about
1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French _grisettes_ and
_perruquiers._ Macpherson displayed to the world an imitation of
primitive manners, not over-true, for the extreme rudeness of barbarians
would have shocked the people, but yet well enough preserved or
portrayed to contrast with modern civilization, and persuade the public
that they were looking upon pure nature. A keen sympathy with Scottish
landscape, so grand, so cold, so gloomy, rain on the hills, the birch
trembling to the wind, the mist of heaven and the vague musing of the
soul, so that every dreamer found there the emotions of his solitary
walks and his philosophic sadness; chivalric exploits and magnanimity,
heroes who set out alone to engage an army, faithful virgins dying on
the tomb of their betrothed; an impassioned, colored style, affecting to
be abrupt, yet polished; able to charm a disciple of Rousseau by its
warmth and elegance: here was something to transport the young
enthusiasts of the time; civilized barbarians, scholarly lovers of
nature, dreaming of the delights of savage life, whilst they shook off
the powder which the hairdresser had left on their coats.
Yet this is not the course of the main current of poetry; it runs in the
direction of sentimental reflection; the greatest number of poems, and
those most sought after, are emotional dissertations. In fact, a man of
feeling breaks out in excessive declamations. When he sees a cloud, he
dreams of human nature and constructs a phrase. Hence at this time among
poets, swarm the melting philosophers and the tearful academicians;
Gray, the morose hermit of Cambridge, and Akenside, a noble thinker,
both learned imitators of lofty Greek poetry; Beattie, a metaphysical
moralist, with a young girl's nerves and an old maid's hobbies; the
amiable and affectionate Goldsmith, who wrote the "Vicar of Wakefield,"
the most charming of Protestant pastorals; poor Collins, a young
enthusiast, who was disgusted with life, would read nothing but the
Bible, went mad, was shut up in an asylum, and in his intervals of
liberty wandered in Chichester cathedral, accompanying the music with
sobs and groans; Glover, Watts, Shenstone, Smart, and others. The titles
of their works sufficiently indicate their character. One writes a poem
on "The Pleasures of Imagination," another odes on the "Passions" and on
"Liberty"; one an "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and a "Hymn to
Adversity," another a poem on a "Deserted Village," and on the character
of surrounding civilizations (Goldsmith's "Traveller"); one a sort of
epic on "Thermopylæ," and the other the moral history of a young
minstrel. They were nearly all grave, spiritual men, impassioned for
noble ideas, with Christian aspirations or convictions, given to
meditating on man, inclined to melancholy, to description, invocation,
lovers of abstraction and allegory, who, to attain greatness, willingly
mounted on stilts. One of the least strict and most noted of them was
Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," a clergyman and a courtier, who,
having vainly attempted to enter Parliament, then to become a bishop,
married, lost his wife and children, and made use of his misfortunes to
write meditations on "Life, Death, Immortality, Time, Friendship, The
Christian Triumph, Virtue's Apology, A Moral Survey of the Nocturnal
Heavens," and many other similar pieces. Doubtless there are brilliant
flashes of imagination in his poems; seriousness and elevation are not
wanting; we can even see that he aims at them; but we discover much more
quickly that he makes the most of his grief, and strikes attitudes. He
exaggerates and declaims, studies effect and style, confuses Greek and
Christian ideas. Fancy an unhappy father, who says:
"Silence and Darkness! Solemn sisters! Twins
From ancient Night! I to Day's soft-ey'd sister pay my court,...[58]
(Endymion's rival!) and her aid implore;
Now first implor'd in succour to the Muse."[59]
And a few pages further on he invokes heaven and earth, when mentioning
the resurrection of the Saviour. And yet the sentiment is fresh and
sincere. Is it not one of the greatest of modern ideas to put Christian
philosophy into verse? Young and his contemporaries say beforehand that
which Chateaubriand and Lamartine were to discover. The true, the
futile, all is here forty years earlier than in France. The angels and
the other celestial machinery long figured in England before appearing
in Chateaubriand's "Génie du Christianisme" and the "Martyrs." Atala
and Chactas are of the same family as Malvina and Fingal. If Lamartine
read Gray's odes and Akenside's reflections, he would find there the
melancholy sweetness, the exquisite art, the fine arguments, and half
the ideas of his own poetry. And nevertheless, near as they were to a
literary renovation, Englishmen did not yet attain it. In vain the
foundation was changed, the form remained. They did not shake off the
classical drapery; they write too well, they dare not be natural. They
have always a patent stock of fine suitable words, poetical elegances,
where each of them thought himself bound to go and pick out his phrases.
It boots them nothing to be impassioned or realistic; like Shenstone, to
dare to describe a schoolmistress, and the very part on which she whips
a young rascal; their simplicity is conscious, their frankness archaic,
their emotion formal, their tears academical. Ever at the moment of
writing, an august model starts up, a sort of schoolmaster, weighing on
each with his full weight, with all the weight which a hundred and
twenty years of literature can give his precepts. Their prose is always
the slave of the period: Dr. Johnson, who was at once the La Harpe and
the Boileau of his age, explains and imposes on all the studied,
balanced, irreproachable phrase; and classical ascendancy is still so
strong that it domineers over nascent history, the only kind of English
literature which was then European and original. Hume, Robertson, and
Gibbon, were almost French in their taste, language, education,
conception of man. They relate like men of the world, cultivated and
well-informed, with charm and clearness, in a polished, rhythmic,
sustained style. They show a liberal spirit, an unvaried moderation, an
impartial reason. They banish from history all coarseness and
tediousness. They write without fanaticism or prejudice. But, at the
same time, they attenuate human nature; comprehend neither barbarism nor
loftiness; paint revolutions and passions, as people might do who had
seen nothing but decked drawing-rooms and dusted libraries; they judge
enthusiasts with the coldness of chaplains or the smile of a sceptic;
they blot out the salient features which distinguish human
physiognomies; they cover all the harsh points of truth with a brilliant
and uniform varnish. At last there started up an unfortunate Scotch
peasant (Burns), rebelling against the world, and in love, with the
yearnings, lusts, greatness, and irrationality of modern genius. Now and
then, behind his plough, he lighted on genuine verses, verses such as
Heine and Alfred de Musset have written in our own days. In those few
words, combined after a new fashion, there was a revolution. Two hundred
new verses sufficed. The human mind turned on its hinges, and so did
civil society. When Roland, being made a minister, presented himself
before Louis XVI in a simple dress-coat and shoes without buckles, the
master of the ceremonies raised his hands to heaven, thinking that all
was lost. In reality, all was changed.
[Footnote 1: Paul Louis Courier (1772-1825) says, "a lady's maid, in Louis
XIV's time, wrote better than the greatest of modern writers."]
[Footnote 2: The Rev. Whitwell Elwin, in his second volume of the works
of Alexander Pope, at the end of his introduction to "An Essay on Man,"
p. 338, says: "M. Taine asserts that from the Restoration to the French
Revolution, from Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson
and Hume, all our literature, both prose and verse, bears the impress of
classic art. The mode, he says, culminated in the reign of Queen Anne,
and Pope, he considers, was the extreme example of it.... Many of the
most eminent authors who flourished between the English Restoration
wrote in a style far removed from that which M. Taine calls classical...
The verse differs like the prose, though in a less degree, and is not
'of a uniform make, as if fabricated by a machine.'... Neither is the
substance of the prose and verse, from the Restoration to the French
Revolution, an invariable common-sense mediocrity.... There is much
truth in his (M. Taine's) view, that there was a growing tendency to
cultivate style, and in some writers the art degenerated into the
artificial."--Tr.]
[Footnote 3: R. Carruthers, "Life of Alexander Pope," 2d ed. 1857. ch. I.
33.]
[Footnote 4: It is very doubtful whether Pope was not older than sixteen
when he wrote the Pastorals. See on this subject, Pope's Works, ed.
Elwin, London, 1871, I. 230 et passim.--Tr.]
[Footnote 5: Ibid. 233.]
[Footnote 6: Pope's Works, ed. Elwin, I. 242.]
[Footnote 7: Johnson, "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets." 3
vols. ed. Cunningham, 1854. A. Pope, III. 96.]
[Footnote 8: Johnson. "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets"; A.
Pope, III. 99.]
[Footnote 9: Boswell's "Life of Johnson," ch. LXXI. 670.]
[Footnote 10: Carruthers's "Life of Pope," ch. X. 377.]
[Footnote 11: Carruthers's "Life of Pope," ch. IV. 164.]
[Footnote 12: Johnson, "The Lives of the English Poets"; Alexander Pope,
III. 114.]
[Footnote 13: Ibid. III. 111.]
[Footnote 14: Ibid. III. 105.]
[Footnote 15: Rev. W. Elwin, in his edition of Pope's Works, II. 224,
says: "The authenticity of the Latin letters has usually been taken for
granted, but I have a strong belief that they are a forgery.... It is
far more likely that they are the fabrication of an unconcerned
romancer, who speaks in the name of others with a latitude which people,
not entirely degraded, would never adopt towards themselves. The
suspicion is strengthened when the second party to the correspondence,
the chief philosopher of his generation, exhibits the same exceptional
depravity of taste."--Tr.]
[Footnote 16: "Vale, unice."]
[Footnote 17: Pope's Works, ed. Elwin; "Eloisa to Abelard," II. 245,
lines 141-160.]
[Footnote 18: Ibid. II. 240, lines 51-58.
"Heav'n first taught letters for some
wretch's aid,
Some banished lover, or some captive
maid;
They live, they speak, they breathe
what love inspires,
Warm from the soul, and faithful to
its fires,
The virgin's wish without her fears
impart,
Excuse the blush, and pour out all
the heart,
Speed the soft intercourse from soul
to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the
Pole."]
[Footnote 19: Ibid. II. 249, lines 207-222.]
[Footnote 20: Ibid. 255, line 317.]
[Footnote 21: "Eloisa to Abelard," II. 254, lines 297-302.]
[Footnote 22: M. Guillaume Guizot.]
[Footnote 23: Goethe sings:
"Liebe sei vor alien Dingen,
Unser Thema, wenn wir singen."]
[Footnote 24: See his "Epistle of the Characters of Women." According
to Pope, this character is composed of love of pleasure and love of power.]
[Footnote 25: "Rape of the Lock," c. V. 181, line 141.]
[Footnote 26: Ibid. c. II. 153, lines 37-42.]
[Footnote 27: Ibid. c. IV. 169, line 52.]
[Footnote 28: Ibid. c. II. 156, line 107.]
[Footnote 29: Pope's Works, "The Dunciad," bk. I.]
[Footnote 30: Ibid. bk. II.]
[Footnote 31: "The Dunciad," bk. II.]
[Footnote 32: "The Dunciad," the end.]
[Footnote 33: Pope's Works, I. 352; "Windsor Forest," line 211.
"Oft in her glass the musing shepherd
spies
The headlong mountains and the
downward skies,
The wat'ry landscape of the pendant
woods,
And absent trees that tremble in the
floods."]
[Footnote 34: Ibid. I. 347; "Windsor Forest," lines 111-118.]
[Footnote 35: Ibid. II. 154; "The Rape of the Lock," c. 2, lines 47-68.]
[Footnote 36: Pope's Works, II. 160, "The Rape of the Lock," c. 3,
160, lines 37-44.]
[Footnote 37: "Peins-moi légèrement l'amant léger
de Flore,
Qu'un doux ruisseau murmure en
vers plus doux encore."]
[Footnote 38: A tale of J. J. Rousseau, in which he tries to depict
a philosophical clergyman.--Tr.]
[Footnote 39: The "Théodicée" was written in French, and published in
1710.--Tr.]
[Footnote 40: These words are taken from the "Design of an Essay on Man."]
[Footnote 41: Pope's Works, II.; "An Essay on Man," Ep. II. 375,
lines 1-18.]
[Footnote 42: Prior's Works, ed. Gilfillan, 1851:
"In the remotest wood and lonely grot,
Certain to meet that worst of evils,
thought."]
[Footnote 43: "Alma," canto II. lines 937-978:
"Your nicer Hottentots think meet
With guts and tripe to deck their feet;
With downcast looks on Totta's legs
The ogling youth most humbly begs,
She would not from his hopes remove
At once his breakfast and his
love....
Before you see you smell your toast,
And sweetest she who stinks the
most."]
[Footnote 44: The same duke who was afterwards nicknamed "the Butcher."]
[Footnote 45: "Poems on Several Occasions," by Mr. John Gay, 1745, 2 vols.
II. 141.]
[Footnote 46: Ibid. The Poem to "The Shepherd's Week." I. 6.]
[Footnote 47: Ibid. I. 66.]
[Footnote 48: Gay's Poems, "The Shepherd's Week"; first pastoral,
"The Squabble," p. 80.]
[Footnote 49: "Epistle to Mrs. Blount, on Her Leaving the Town."]
[Footnote 50: A French pastoral writer (1717-1803), who wrote, in
imitation of Thomson, "Les Saisons."--Tr.]
[Footnote 51: Poetical Works of T. Thomson, ed. R. Bell, 1855, 2 vols.;
II. "Spring," 18.]
[Footnote 52: Ibid. 19.]
[Footnote 53: Ibid. 20.]
[Footnote 54: Ibid.]
[Footnote 55: Poetical Works of Thomson, "Liberty," part I. 102.]
[Footnote 56: Anthony Léonard Thomas (1732-1785) wrote memoirs and
essays on the character of celebrated men in highly oratorical and
pompous style.--Tr.]
[Footnote 57: See the paintings of David, called "Les Fêtes de la
Révolution."]
[Footnote 58: Young's "Night Thoughts." Night the First: On Life, Death,
and Immortality.]
[Footnote 59: Ibid. Night the Third: Narcissa.]
BOOK IV--MODERN LIFE
CHAPTER FIRST
IDEAS AND PRODUCTIONS
Section I--Rise of Democracy
On the eve of the nineteenth century the great modern revolution began
in Europe. The thinking public and the human mind changed, and whilst
these changes took place a new literature sprang up.
The preceding age had done its work. Perfect prose and classical style
put within reach of the most backward and the dullest minds the notions
of literature and the discoveries of science. Moderate monarchies and
regular administrations had permitted the middle class to develop itself
under the pompous aristocracy of the court, as useful plants may be seen
shooting up beneath trees which serve for show and ornament. They
multiply, grow, rise to the height of their rivals, envelop them in
their luxuriant growth, and obscure them by their dense clusters. A new
world, a world of citizens and plebeians, henceforth occupies the
ground, attracts the gaze, imposes its form on manners, stamps its image
on minds. Towards the close of the century a sudden concourse of
extraordinary events brings it all at once to the light, and sets it on
an eminence unknown to any previous age. With the grand applications of
science, democracy appears. The steam-engine and spinning-jenny create
in England towns of from three hundred and fifty thousand to five
hundred thousand souls. The population is doubled in fifty years, and
agriculture becomes so perfect that, in spite of this enormous increase
of mouths to be fed one-sixth of the inhabitants provide from the same
soil food for the rest; imports increase threefold, and even more; the
tonnage of vessels increases sixfold, the exports sixfold and more.[60]
Comfort, leisure, instruction, reading, travel, whatever had been the
privilege of a few, became the common property of the many. The rising
tide of wealth raised the best of the poor to comfort, and the best of
the well-to-do to opulence. The rising tide of civilization raised the
mass of the people to the rudiments of education, and the mass of
citizens to complete education. In 1709 appeared the first daily
newspaper,[61] as big as a man's hand, which the editor did not know how
to fill, and which, added to all the other papers, did not circulate to
the extent of three thousand numbers in the year. In 1844 the Stamp
Office showed that seventy-one million newspapers had been printed
during the past year, many as large as volumes, and containing as much
matter. Artisans and townsfolk, enfranchised, enriched, having gained a
competence, left the low depths where they had been buried in their
narrow parsimony, ignorance, and routine; they made their appearance on
the stage now, doffed their workman's and supernumerary's dress, assumed
the leading parts by a sudden irruption or a continuous progress, by
dint of revolutions, with a prodigality of labor and genius, amidst vast
wars, successively or simultaneously in America, France, the whole of
Europe, founding or destroying states, inventing or restoring sciences,
conquering or acquiring political rights. They grew noble through their
great deeds, became the rivals, equals, conquerors of their masters;
they need no longer imitate them, being heroes in their turn: like them,
they can point to their crusades; like them, they have gained the right
of having a poetry; and like them, they will have a poetry.
In France, the land of precocious equality and completed revolutions, we
must observe this new character--the plebeian bent on getting on;
Augereau, son of a green-grocer; Marceau, son of a lawyer; Murat, son of
an innkeeper; Ney, son of a cooper; Hoche, formerly a sergeant, who in
his tent, by night, read Condillac's "Traité des Sensations"; and chief
of all, that spare young man, with lank hair, hollow cheeks, eaten up
with ambition, his heart full of romantic fancies and grand roughhewn
ideas, who, a lieutenant for seven years, read twice through the whole
stock of a bookseller at Valence, who about this time (1792) in Italy,
though suffering from itch, had just destroyed five armies with a troop
of barefooted heroes, and gave his government an account of his
victories with all his faults of spelling and of French. He became
master, proclaimed himself the representative of the Revolution,
declared "that a career is open to talent," and impelled others along
with him in his enterprises. They follow him, because there is glory,
and above all, advancement, to be won. "Two officers," says Stendhal,
"commanded a battery at Talavera; a ball laid low the captain. 'So!'
said the lieutenant, 'François is dead, I shall be captain. Not yet,'
said François, who was only stunned, and got on his feet again." These
two men were neither enemies nor wicked; on the contrary, they were
companions and comrades; but the lieutenant wanted to rise a step. Such
was the sentiment which provided men for the exploits and carnage of the
Empire, which caused the Revolution of 1830, and which now, in this vast
stifling democracy, compels men to vie with each other in intrigues and
labor, genius and baseness, to get out of their primitive condition, and
raise themselves to the summit, of which the possession is given up to
their rivalry or promised to their toil. The dominant character nowadays
is no longer the man of the drawing-room, whose position in society is
settled and whose fortune is made: elegant and careless, with no
employment but to amuse himself and to please; who loves to converse,
who is gallant, who passes his life in conversation with finely dressed
ladies, amidst the duties of society and the pleasures of the world: it
is the man in a black coat who works alone in his room or rushes about
in a cab to make friends and protectors; often envious, feeling himself
always above or below his station in life, sometimes resigned, never
satisfied, but fertile in invention, not sparing his labor, finding the
picture of his blemishes and his strength in the drama of Victor Hugo
and the novels of Balzac.[62]
This man has also other and greater cares. With the state of human
society, the form of the human mind has changed. It changed by a natural
and irresistible development, like a flower growing into fruit, like
fruit turning to seed. The mind renews the evolution which it had
already performed in Alexandria, not as then in a deleterious
atmosphere, amidst the universal degradation of enslaved men, in the
increasing decadence of a disorganized society, amidst the anguish of
despair and the mists of a dream; but lapt in a purifying atmosphere,
amidst the visible progress of an improving society and the general
ennobling of lofty and free men, amidst the proudest hopes, in the
wholesome clearness of experimental sciences. The oratorical age which
declined, as it declined in Athens and Rome, grouped all ideas in
beautiful commodious compartments, whose subdivisions instantaneously
led the gaze towards the object which they define, so that thenceforth
the intellect could enter upon the loftiest conceptions, and seize the
aggregate which it had not yet embraced. Isolated nations, French,
English, Italians, Germans, drew near and became known to each other
through the upheaving of the first French Revolution and the wars of the
Empire, as formerly races divided from one another, Greeks, Syrians,
Egyptians, Gauls, by the conquests of Alexander and the domination of
Rome: so that henceforth each civilization, expanded by the collision
with neighboring civilizations, can pass beyond its national limits, and
multiply its ideas by the commixture of the ideas of others. History and
criticism spring up as under the Ptolemies; and from all sides,
throughout the universe, in all directions, they were engaged in
resuscitating and explaining literatures, religions, manners,
societies, philosophies: so that thenceforth the intellect, enfranchised
by the spectacle of past civilizations, can escape from the prejudices
of its century, as it has escaped from the prejudices of its country. A
new race, hitherto torpid, gave the signal: Germany communicated to the
whole of Europe the impetus to a revolution of ideas, as France to a
revolution of manners. These simple folk who smoked and warmed
themselves by a stove, and seemed only fit to produce learned editions,
became suddenly the promoters and leaders of human thought. No race has
such a comprehensive mind; none is so well adapted for lofty
speculation. We see it in their language, so abstract, that away from
the Rhine it seems an unintelligible jargon. And yet, thanks to this
language, they attained to superior ideas. For the specialty of this
revolution, as of the Alexandrian revolution, was that the human mind
became more capable of abstraction. They made, on a large scale, the
same step as the mathematicians when they pass from arithmetic to
algebra, and from ordinary calculation to the computation of the
infinite. They perceived that beyond the limited truths of the
oratorical age, there were deeper unfoldings; they passed beyond
Descartes and Locke; as the Alexandrians went beyond Plato and
Aristotle: they understood that a great operative architect, or round
and square atoms, were not causes; that fluids, molecules, and monads
were not forces; that a spiritual soul or a physiological secretion
would not account for thought. They sought religious sentiment beyond
dogmas, poetic beauty beyond rules, critical truths beyond myths. They
desired to grasp natural and moral powers as they are, and independently
of the fictitious supports, to which their predecessors had attached
them. All these supports, souls and atoms, all these fictions, fluids
and monads, all these conventions, rules of the beautiful and of
religious symbols, all rigid classifications of things natural, human
and divine, faded away and vanished. Thenceforth they were nothing but
figures; they were only kept as an aid to the memory, and as auxiliaries
of the mind; they served only provisionally, and as starting-points.
Through a common movement along the whole line of human thought, causes
draw back into an abstract region, where philosophy had not been to
search them out for eighteen centuries. Then appeared the disease of the
age, the restlessness of Werther and Faust, very like that which in a
similar moment agitated men eighteen centuries ago; I mean discontent
with the present, the vague desire of a higher beauty and an ideal
happiness, the painful aspiration for the infinite. Man suffered through
doubt, yet he doubted; he tried to seize again his beliefs, they melted
in his hand: he would settle and rest in the doctrines and the
satisfactions which sufficed for his predecessors, and he does not find
them sufficient. He launches, like Faust, into anxious researches
through science and history, and judges them vain, dubious, good for men
like Wagner,[63] learned pedants and bibliomaniacs. It is the "beyond"
he sighs for; he forebodes it through the formulas of science, the texts
and confessions of the churches, through the amusements of the world,
the intoxication of love. A sublime truth exists behind coarse
experience and transmitted catechisms; a grand happiness exists beyond
the pleasures of society and family joys. Whether men are sceptical,
resigned, or mystics, they have all caught a glimpse of or imagined it,
from Goethe to Beethoven, from Schiller to Heine; they have risen
towards it in order to stir up the whole swarm of their grand dreams;
they will not be consoled from falling away from it; they have mused
upon it, even during their deepest fall; they have instinctively dwelt,
like their predecessors the Alexandrians and Christians, in that
splendid invisible world in which, in ideal peace, slumber the creative
essences and powers; and the vehement aspiration of their heart has
drawn from their sphere the elementary spirits, "film of flame, who flit
and wave in eddying motion! birth and the grave, an infinite ocean, a
web ever growing, a life ever glowing, ply at Time's whizzing loom, and
weave the vesture of God."[64]
Thus rises the modern man, impelled by two sentiments, one democratic,
the other philosophic. From the shallows of his poverty and ignorance he
exerts himself to rise, lifting the weight of established society and
admitted dogmas, disposed either to reform or to destroy them, and at
once generous and rebellious. These two currents from France and Germany
at this moment swept into England. The dykes there were so strong, they
could hardly force their way, entering more slowly than elsewhere, but
entering nevertheless. They made for themselves a new channel between
the ancient barriers, and widened without bursting them, by a peaceful
and slow transformation which continues till this day.
Section II.--Robert Burns
The new spirit broke out first in a Scottish peasant, Robert Burns: in
fact, the man and the circumstances were suitable; scarcely ever was
seen together more of misery and talent. He was born January, 1759, amid
the hoar frost of a Scottish winter, in a cottage of clay built by his
father, a poor farmer of Ayrshire; a sad condition, a sad country, a sad
lot. A part of the gable fell in a few days after his birth, and his
mother was obliged to seek refuge with her child, in the middle of a
storm, in a neighbor's house. It is hard to be born in Scotland; it is
so cold there, that in Glasgow on a fine day in July, whilst the sun was
shining, I did not feel my overcoat too warm. The soil is wretched;
there are many bare hills, where the harvest often fails. Burns's
father, no longer young, having little more than his arms to depend
upon, having taken his farm at too high a rent, burdened with seven
children, lived parsimoniously, or rather fasting, in solitude, to avoid
temptations to expense. "For several years butchers' meat was a thing
unknown in the house." Robert went barefoot and bareheaded; at "the age
of thirteen he assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen he
was the principal laborer on the farm." The family did all the labor;
they kept no servant, male or female. They had not much to eat, but they
worked hard. "This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with
the unceasing toil of a galley slave--brought me to my sixteenth year,"
Burns says. His shoulders were bent, melancholy seized him; "almost
every evening he was constantly afflicted with a dull headache, which at
a future period of his life was exchanged for a palpitation of the
heart, and a threatening of fainting and suffocation in his bed in the
night-time. The anguish of mind which we felt," says his brother, "was
very great." The father grew old; his gray head, careworn brow, temples
"wearing thin and bare," his tall bent figure, bore witness to the grief
and toil which had spent him. The factor wrote him insolent and
threatening letters which "set all the family in tears." There was a
respite when the father changed his farm, but a lawsuit sprang up
between him and the proprietor: "After three years' tossing and whirling
in the vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors
of a gaol by consumption, which after two years' promises kindly stepped
in." In order to snatch something from the claws of the lawyers, the two
sons were obliged to step in as creditors for arrears of wages. With
this little sum they took another farm. Robert had seven pounds a year
for his labor; for several years his whole expenses did not exceed this
wretched pittance; he had resolved to succeed by dint of abstinence and
toil: "I read farming books, I calculated crops, I attended markets;...
but the first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed, the second from
a late harvest, we lost half our crops." Troubles came apace; poverty
always engenders them. The master-mason Armour, whose daughter was
Burns's sweetheart, was said to contemplate prosecuting him, to obtain a
guarantee for the support of his expected progeny, though he refused to
accept him as a son-in-law. Jean Armour abandoned him; he could not give
his name to her child. He was obliged to hide; he had been publicly
admonished by the church. He said: "Even in the hour of social mirth, my
gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the
executioner." He resolved to leave the country; he agreed with Dr.
Charles Douglas for thirty pounds a year to be bookkeeper or overseer on
his estate in Jamaica; for want of money to pay the passage, he was
about to "indent himself," that is, become bound as apprentice, when the
success of a volume of poetry he had published put a score of guineas
into his hands, and for a time brought him brighter days. Such was his
life up to the age of twenty-seven, and that which succeeded was little
better.
Let us fancy in this condition a man of genius, a true poet, capable of
the most delicate emotions and the loftiest aspirations, wishing to
rise, to rise to the summit, of which he deemed himself capable and
worthy.[65]
Ambition had early made itself heard in him: "I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind groping of Homer's
Cyclops around the walls of his cave.... The only two openings by which
I could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy,
or the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so
contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it; the last I
always hated--there was contamination in the very entrance."[66] Low
occupations depress the soul even more than the body; man perishes in
them--is obliged to perish; of necessity there remains of him nothing
but a machine: for in the kind of action in which all is monotonous, in
which throughout the very long day the arms lift the same flail and
drive the same plough, if thought does not take this uniform movement,
the work is ill done. The poet must take care not to be turned aside by
his poetry; to do as Burns did, "think only of his work whilst he was at
it." He must think of it always, in the evening unyoking his cattle, on
Sunday putting on his new coat, counting on his fingers the eggs and
poultry, thinking of the kinds of dung, finding a means of using only
one pair of shoes, and selling his hay at a penny a truss more. He will
not succeed if he has not the patient dulness of a laborer, and the
crafty vigilance of a petty shopkeeper. How could poor Burns succeed? He
was out of place from his birth, and tried his utmost to raise himself
above his condition.[67] At the farm at Lochlea, during mealtimes, the
only moments of relaxation, parents, brothers, and sisters, ate with a
spoon in one hand and a book in the other. Burns, at the school of Hugh
Rodger, a teacher of mensuration, and later at a club of young men at
Tarbolton, strove to exercise himself in general questions, and debated
_pro_ and _con_ in order to see both sides of every idea. He carried a
book in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields; he wore out
thus two copies of Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling. The collection of songs
was my _vade mecum._ I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to
labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender,
sublime, or fustian." He maintained a correspondence with several of his
companions in the same rank of life in order to form his style, kept a
commonplace-book, entered in it ideas on man, religion, the greatest
subjects, criticising his first productions. Burns says, "Never did a
heart pant more ardently than mine to be distinguished." He thus divined
what he did not learn, rose of himself to the level of the most highly
cultivated; in a while, at Edinburgh, he was to read through and through
respected doctors, Blair himself; he was to see that Blair had
attainments, but no depth. At this time he studied minutely and lovingly
the old Scotch ballads; and by night in his cold little room, by day
whilst whistling at the plough, he invented forms and ideas. We must
think of this in order to measure his efforts, to understand his
miseries and his revolt. We must think that the man in whom these great
ideas are stirring, threshed the corn, cleaned his cows; went out to dig
peats, waded in the muddy snow, and dreaded to come home and find the
bailiffs prepared to carry him off to prison. We must think also, that
with the ideas of a thinker he had the delicacies and reveries of a
poet. Once having cast his eyes on an engraving representing a dead
soldier, and his wife beside him, his child and dog lying in the snow,
suddenly, involuntarily, he burst into tears. He writes:
"There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more--I do not know if I
should call it pleasure--but something which exalts me, something which
enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high
plantation, in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling
among the trees and raving over the plain.[68]... I listened to the
birds and frequently turned out of my path, lest I should disturb their
little songs or frighten them to another station."
The slavery of mechanical toil and perpetual economy crushed this swarm
of grand or graceful dreams as soon as they began to soar. Burns was
moreover proud, so proud, that afterwards in the world, amongst the
great, "an honest contempt for whatever bore the appearance of meanness
and servility" made him "fall into the opposite error of hardness of
manner." He had also the consciousness of his own merits. "_Pauvre
inconnu_ as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an opinion of myself
and of my works as I have at this moment, when the public has decided in
their favor."[69] Who can wonder that we find at every step in his poems
the bitter protests of an oppressed and rebellious plebeian?
We find such recriminations against all society, against State and
Church. Burns has a harsh tone, often the very phrases of Rousseau, and
wished to be a "vigorous savage," quit civilized life, the dependence
and humiliations which it imposes on the wretched.
"It is mortifying to see a fellow, whose abilities would scarcely have
made an eight-penny tailor, and whose heart is not worth three
farthings, meet with attention and notice that are withheld from the son
of genius and poverty."[70] It is hard to
"See yonder poor, o'erlabour'd wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, though a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn."[71]
Burns says also:
"While winds frae off Ben-Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,...
I grudge a wee the great folks' gift,
That live so bien an' snug:
I tent less, and want less
Their roomy fire-side;
But hanker and canker
To see their cursed pride.
"It's hardly in a body's power
To keep, at times, frae being sour,
To see how things are shar'd;
How best o' chiels are whiles in want,
While coofs on countless thousands rant,
And ken na how to wair't."[72]
But "a man's a man for a' that," and the peasant is as good as the lord.
There are men noble by nature, and they alone are noble; the coat is the
business of the tailor, titles a matter for the Herald's office. "The
rank is but the guinea's stamp, the man's the gowd for a' that."
Against men who reverse this natural equality Burns is pitiless; the
least thing puts him out of temper. Read his "Address of Beelzebub, to
the Right Honourable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right
Honourable and Honourable the Highland Society, which met on the 23d of
May last at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to concert ways and means to
frustrate the designs of five hundred Highlanders, who, as the society
were informed by Mr. Mackenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to
attempt an escape from their lawful lords and masters, whose property
they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. M'Donald of Glengarry to
the wilds of Canada, in search of that fantastic thing--liberty!"
Rarely was an insult more prolonged and more biting, and the threat is
not far behind. He warns Scotch members like a revolutionist, to
withdraw "that curst restriction on aquavitæ, get auld Scotland back
her kettle":
"An', Lord, if ance they pit her till't,
Her tartan petticoat she'll kilt,
An' durk an' pistol at her belt,
She'll tak the streets,
An' rin her whittle to the hilt
I' the first she meets!"[73]
In vain he writes, that
"In politics if thou wouldst mix
And mean thy fortunes be;
Bear this in mind, be deaf and blind,
Let great folks hear and see."[74]
Not alone did he see and hear, but he also spoke, and that aloud. He
congratulates the French, on having repulsed conservative Europe, in
arms against them. He celebrates the Tree of Liberty, planted "where
ance the Bastile stood":
"Upo' this tree there grows sic fruit,
Its virtues a' can tell, man;
It raises man aboon the brute,
It makes him ken himsel', man.
Gif ance the peasant taste a bit,
He's greater than a Lord, man....
King Loui' thought to cut it down,
When it was unco sma', man.
For this the watchman cracked his crown.
Cut off his head and a', man."[75]
A strange gayety, savage and nervous, and which, in better style,
resembles that of the _Ça ira._
Burns is hardly more tender to the church. At that time the strait
puritanical garment began to give way. Already the learned world of
Edinburgh had Frenchified, widened, adapted it to the fashions of
society, decked it with ornaments, not very brilliant, it is true, but
select. In the lower strata of society dogma became less rigid, and
approached by degrees the looseness of Arminius and Socinus. John
Goldie, a merchant, had quite recently discussed the authority of
Scripture.[76] John Taylor had denied original sin. Burns's father,
pious as he was, inclined to liberal and humane doctrines, and detracted
from the province of faith to add to that of reason. Burns, after his
wont, pushed things to an extreme, thought himself a deist, saw in the
Saviour only an inspired man, reduced religion to an inner and poetic
sentiment, and attacked with his railleries the paid and patented
orthodox people. Since Voltaire, no literary man in religious matters
was more bitter or more jocose. According to him, ministers are
shopkeepers trying to cheat each other out of their customers, decrying
at the top of their voice the shop next door, puffing their drugs in
numberless advertisements, and here and there setting up fairs to push
the trade. These "holy fairs" are gatherings of the pious, where the
sacrament is administered. One after another the clergymen preach and
thunder, in particular a Rev. Mr. Moodie, who raves and fumes to throw
light on points of faith--a terrible figure:
"Should Hornie, as in ancient days,
'Mong sons o' God present him,
The vera sight o' Moodie's face
To's ain het hame had sent him
Wi' fright that day.
"Hear how he clears the points o' faith
Wi' rattlin' an' wi' thumpin'!
Now meekly calm, now wild in wrath,
He's stampin' an' he's jumpin'!
His lengthen'd chin, his turn'd-up snout,
His eldritch squeel and gestures,
Oh! how they fire the heart devout.
Like cantharidian plasters,
On sic a day!"[77]
The minister grows hoarse; now "Smith opens out his cauld harangues,"
then two more ministers speak. At last the audience rest, "the
Change-house fills," and people begin to eat; each brings cakes and
cheese from his bag; the young folks have their arms round their lasses'
waists. That was an attitude to listen in! There is a great noise in the
inn; the cans rattle on the board; whiskey flows, and provides arguments
to the tipplers commenting on the sermons. They demolish carnal reason,
and exalt free faith. Arguments and stamping, shouts of sellers and
drinkers, all mingle together. It is a "holy fair":
"But now the Lord's ain trumpet touts,
Till a' the hills are rairin',
An' echoes back return the shouts;
Black Russell is na sparin';
His piercing words, like Highlan' swords,
Divide the joints and marrow.
His talk o' hell, where devils dwell,
Our vera sauls does harrow
Wi' fright that day.
"A vast unbottom'd boundless pit,
Fill'd fu' o' lowin' brunstane.
Wha's raging flame, an scorchin' heat,
Wad melt the hardest whunstane.
The half-asleep start up wi' fear,
An' think they hear it roarin',
When presently it does appear
'Twas but some neebor snorin'
Asleep that day....
"How monie hearts this day converts
O' sinners and o' lasses!
Their hearts o' stane, gin night, are gane,
As saft as ony flesh is.
There's some are fou o' love divine,
There's some are fou o' brandy."[78]
Etc., etc.
The young men meet the girls, and the devil does a better business than
God. A fine ceremony and morality! Let us cherish it carefully, and our
wise theology too, which damns men.
As for that poor dog common-sense, which bites so hard, let us send him
across seas; let him go "and bark in France." For where shall we find
better men than our "unco guid"--Holy Willie for instance? He feels
himself predestinated, full of never-failing grace; therefore all who
resist him resist God, and are fit only to be punished; may He "blast
their name, who bring thy elders to disgrace, and public shame."[79]
Burns says also:
"An honest man may like a glass,
An honest man may like a lass,
But mean revenge an' malice fause
He'll still disdain;
And then cry zeal for gospel laws
Like some we ken....
... I rather would be
An atheist clean,
Than under gospel colours hid be
Just for a screen."[80]
There is a beauty, an honesty, a happiness outside the conventionalities
and hypocrisy, beyond correct preachings and proper drawing-rooms,
unconnected with gentlemen in white ties and reverends in new bands.
In 1785 Burns wrote his masterpiece, the "Jolly Beggars," like the
"Gueux" of Béranger; but how much more picturesque, varied, and
powerful! It is the end of autumn, the gray leaves float on the gusts of
the wind; a joyous band of vagabonds, happy devils, come for a junketing
at the change-house of Poosie Nansie:
"Wi' quaffing and laughing
They ranted and they sang;
Wi' jumping and thumping
The very girdle rang."
First, by the fire, in old red rags, is a soldier, and his old woman is
with him; the jolly old girl has drunk freely; he kisses her, and she
again pokes out her greedy lips; the coarse loud kisses smack like "a
cadger's whip. Then staggering and swaggering, he roar'd this ditty up:"
"I lastly was with Curtis, among the floating batt'ries,
And there I left for witness an arm and a limb;
Yet let my country need me, with Elliot to head me,
I'd clatter on my stumps at the sound of a drum....
He ended; and the kebars sheuk,
Aboon the chorus' roar;
While frighted rattoons backward leuk,
And seek the benmost bore."
Now it is the "doxy's" turn:
"I once was a maid, tho' I cannot tell when,
And still my delight is in proper young men....
Some one of a troop of dragoons was my daddie,
No wonder I'm fond of a sodger laddie.
The first of my loves was a swaggering blade,
To rattle the thundering drum was his trade....
The sword I forsook for the sake of the church....
Full soon I grew sick of my sanctified sot,
The regiment at large for a husband I got,
From the gilded spontoon to the fife I was ready,
I ask no more but a sodger laddie.
But the peace it reduc'd me to beg in despair,
Till I met my old boy at a Cunningham fair;
His rags regimental they flutter'd so gaudy,
My heart it rejoic'd at a sodger laddie....
But whilst with both hands I can hold the glass steady,
Here's to thee, my hero, my sodger laddie."
This is certainly a free and easy style, and the poet is not mealy
mouthed. His other characters arc in the same taste, a Merry Andrew, a
raucle carlin (a stout beldame), "a pigmy-scraper wi' his fiddle," a
travelling tinker--all in rags, brawlers and gypsies, who fight, bang,
and kiss each other, and make the glasses ring with the noise of their
good humor:
"They toomed their pocks, and pawned their duds,
They scarcely left to co'er their fuds,
To quench their lowin' drouth."
And their chorus rolls about like thunder, shaking the rafters and walls.
"A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty's a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest!
"What is title? What is treasure?
What is reputation's care?
If we lead a life of pleasure,
'Tis no matter how or where!
"With the ready trick and fable,
Round we wander all the day;
And at night, in barn or stable,
Hug our doxies on the hay.
"Life is all a variorum,
We regard not how it goes;
Let them cant about decorum,
Who have characters to lose.
"Here's to budgets, bags and wallets!
Here's to all the wandering train!
Here's our ragged brats and callets!
One and all cry out--Amen."
Has any man better spoken the language of rebels and levellers? There is
here, however, something else than the instinct of destruction and an
appeal to the senses; there is hatred of cant and return to nature.
Burns sings:
"Morality, thou deadly bane,
Thy tens o' thousands thou hast slain;
Vain is his hope, whose stay and trust is
In moral mercy, truth and justice!"[81]
Mercy! this grand word renews all. Now, as formerly, eighteen centuries
ago, men rose above legal formulas and prescriptions; now, as formerly,
under Vergil and Marcus Aurelius, refined sensibility and wide
sympathies embraced beings who seemed forever out of the pale of society
and law. Burns pities, and that sincerely, a wounded hare, a mouse whose
nest was upturned by his plough, a mountain daisy. Is there such a very
great difference between man, beast, or plant? A mouse stores up,
calculates, suffers like a man:
"I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live."
We even no longer wish to curse the fallen angels, the grand
malefactors, Satan and his troop. Like the "randie, gangrel bodies, who
in Poosie Nancy's held the splore," they have their good points, and
perhaps after all are not so bad as people say:
"Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An' let poor damned bodies be;
I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie,
E'n to a deil,
To skelp an' scaud poor dogs like me,
An' hear us squeel!...
"Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!
Ye came to Paradise incog.,
An' played on man a cursed brogue,
(Black be your fa'!)
An' gied the infant warld a shog,
'Maist ruin'd a'....
"But, fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben!
O wad ye tak a thought an' men'!
Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken--
Still hae a stake--
I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
Ev'n for your sake."[82]
We see that he speaks to the devil as to an unfortunate comrade, a
disagreeable fellow, but fallen into trouble. Let us take another step,
and we will see in a contemporary, Goethe, that Mephistopheles himself
is not overmuch damned; his god, the modern god, tolerates him and tells
him he has never hated such as he. For wide conciliating nature
assembles in her company, on equal terms, the ministers of destruction
and life. In this deep change the ideal changes; citizen and orderly
life, strict Puritan duty, do not exhaust all the powers of man. Burns
cries out in favor of instinct and enjoyment, so as to seem epicurean.
He has genuine gayety, a glow of jocularity; laughter commends itself to
him; he praises it as well as the good suppers of good comrades, where
wine is plentiful, pleasantry abounds, ideas pour forth, poetry
sparkles, and causes a carnival of beautiful figures and good-humored
people to move about in the human brain.
He always was in love.[83] He made love the great end of existence, to
such a degree that at the club which he founded with the young men of
Tarbolton, every member was obliged "to be the declared lover of one or
more fair ones." From the age of fifteen this was his main business. He
had for companion in his harvest toil a sweet and lovable girl, a year
younger than himself: "In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself,
initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid
disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to
be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below."[84] He sat
beside her with a joy which he did not understand, to "pick out from her
little hand the cruel nettle-stings and thistles." He had many other
less innocent fancies; it seems to me that by his very nature he was in
love with all women: as soon as he saw a pretty one, he grew lively; his
commonplace-book and his songs show that he set off in pursuit after
every butterfly, golden or not, which seemed about to settle. Moreover,
he did not confine himself to Platonic reveries; he was as free of
action as of words; broad jests crop up freely in his verses. He calls
himself an unregenerate heathen, and he is right. He has even written
obscene verses; and Lord Byron refers to a quantity of his letters, of
course unpublished, than which worse could not be imagined:[85] it was
the excess of the sap which overflowed in him, and soiled the bark.
Doubtless he did not boast about these excesses, he rather repented of
them; but as to the uprising and blooming of the free poetic life in the
open air, he found no fault with it. He thought that love, with the
charming dreams it brings, poetry, pleasure, and the rest, are beautiful
things, suitable to human instincts, and therefore to the designs of
God. In short, in contrast with morose Puritanism, he approved joy and
spoke well of happiness.[86]
Not that he was a mere epicurean; on the contrary, he could be
religious. When, after the death of his father, he prayed aloud in the
evening, he drew tears from those present; and his "Cottar's Saturday
Night" is the most heartfelt of virtuous idyls. I even believe he was
fundamentally religious. He advised his "pupil as he tenders his own
peace, to keep up a regular warm intercourse with the Deity." What he
made fun of was official worship; but as for religion, the language of
the soul, he was greatly attached to it. Often before Dugald Stewart at
Edinburgh, he disapproved of the sceptical jokes which he heard at the
supper table. He thought he had "every evidence for the reality of a
life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence"; and many a
time, side by side with a jocose satire, we find in his writings stanzas
full of humble repentance, confiding fervor, or Christian resignation.
These, if you will, are a poet's contradictions, but they are also a
poet's divinations; under these apparent variations there rises a new
ideal; old narrow moralities are to give place to the wide sympathy of
the modern man, who loves the beautiful wherever it meets him, and who,
refusing to mutilate human nature, is at once Pagan and Christian.
This originality and divining instinct exist in his style as in his
ideas. The specialty of the age in which we live, and which he
inaugurated, is to blot out rigid distinctions of class, catechism, and
style; academic, moral, or social conventions are falling away, and we
claim in society a mastery for individual merit, in morality for inborn
generosity, in literature for genuine feeling. Burns was the first to
enter on this track, and he often pursues it to the end. When he wrote
verses, it was not on calculation or in obedience to fashion: "My
passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got
vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell,
soothed all into quiet."[87] He hummed them to old Scotch airs which he
passionately loved, as he drove his plough, and which, he says, as soon
as he sang them, brought ideas and rhymes to his lips. That, indeed, was
natural poetry; not forced in a hot-house, but born of the soil between
the furrows, side by side with music, amidst the gloom and beauty of the
climate, like the violet heather of the moors and the hillside. We can
understand that it gave vigor to his tongue. For the first time this man
spoke as men speak, or rather as they think, without premeditation, with
a mixture of all styles, familiar and terrible, hiding an emotion under
a joke, tender and jeering in the same place, apt to place side by side
tap-room trivialities and the high language of poetry,[88] so
indifferent was he to rules, content to exhibit his feeling as it came
to him, and as he felt it. At last, after so many years, we escape from
measured declamation, we hear a man's voice! and what is better still,
we forget the voice in the emotion which it expresses, we feel this
emotion reflected in ourselves, we enter into relations with a soul.
Then form seems to fade away and disappear: I think that this is the
great feature of modern poetry; seven or eight times has Burns reached
it.
He has done more; he has made his way, as we say nowadays. On the
publication of his first volume he became suddenly famous. Coming to
Edinburgh, he was feasted, caressed, admitted on a footing of equality
in the best drawing-rooms, amongst the great and the learned, loved of a
woman who was almost a lady. For one season he was sought after, and he
behaved worthily amidst these rich and noble people. He was respected,
and even loved. A subscription brought him a second edition and five
hundred pounds. He also at last had won his position, like the great
French plebeians, amongst whom Rousseau was the first. Unfortunately, he
brought thither, like them, the vices of his condition and of his
genius. A man does not rise with impunity, nor, above all, desire to
rise with impunity: we also have our vices, and suffering vanity is the
first of them. "Never did a heart pant more ardently than mine to be
distinguished," said Burns. This grievous pride marred his talent, and
threw him into follies. He labored to attain a fine epistolary style,
and brought ridicule on himself by imitating in his letters the men of
the academy and the court. He wrote to his lady-loves with choice
phrases, full of periods as pedantic as those of Dr. Johnson. Certainly
we dare hardly quote them, the emphasis is so grotesque.[89] At other
times he committed to his commonplace-book literary expressions that
occurred to him, and six months afterwards sent them to his
correspondents as extemporary effusions and natural improvisations. Even
in his verses, often enough, he fell into a grand conventional
style;[90] brought into play sighs, ardors, flames, even the big
classical and mythological machinery. Béranger, who thought or called
himself the poet of the people, did the same. A plebeian must have much
courage to venture on always remaining himself, and never slipping on
the court dress. Thus Burns, a Scottish villager, avoided, in speaking,
all Scotch village expressions: he was pleased to show himself as
well-bred as fashionable folks. It was forcibly and by surprise that his
genius drew him away from the proprieties: twice out of three times his
feeling was marred by his pretentiousness.
His success lasted one winter, after which the wide incurable wound of
plebeianism made itself felt--I mean that he was obliged to work for his
living. With the money gained by the second edition of his poems he took
a little farm. It was a bad bargain; and, moreover, we can imagine that
he had not the money-grubbing character necessary. He says: "I might
write you on farming, on building, on marketing; but my poor distracted
mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked, and bedeviled with the task of the
superlatively damned obligation to make one guinea do the business of
three, that I detest, abhor, and swoon at the very word business." Soon
he left his farm, with empty pockets, to fill at Dumfries the small post
of exciseman, which was worth, in all, £90 a year. In this fine
employment he branded leather, gauged casks, tested the make of candles,
issued licenses for the transit of spirits. From his dunghills he passed
to office work and grocery: what a life for such a man! He would have
been unhappy, even if independent and rich. These great innovators,
these poets, are all alike. What makes them poets is the violent afflux
of sensations. They have a nervous mechanism more sensitive than ours;
the objects which leave us cool, transport them suddenly beyond
themselves. At the least shock their brain is set going, after which
they once more fall flat, loathe existence, sit morose amidst the
memories of their faults and their lost pleasures. Burns said: "My worst
enemy is _moi-même._... There are just two creatures I would envy: a
horse in his wild state traversing the forests of Asia, or an oyster on
some of the desert shores of Europe. The one has not a wish without
enjoyment, the other has neither wish nor fear." He was always in
extremes, at the height of exaltation or in the depth of depression; in
the morning, ready to weep; in the evening at table or under the table;
enamored of Jean Armour, then on her refusal engaged to another, then
returning to Jean, then quitting her, then taking her back, amidst much
scandal, many blots on his character, still more disgust. In such heads
ideas are like cannon balls: the man, hurled onward, bursts through
everything, shatters himself, begins again the next day, but in a
contrary direction, and ends by finding nothing left in him, but ruins
within and without. Burns had never been prudent, and was so less than
ever, after his success at Edinburgh. He had enjoyed too much; he
henceforth felt too acutely the painful sting of modern man, namely the
disproportion between the desire for certain things and the power of
obtaining them. Debauch had all but spoiled his fine imagination, which
had before been "the chief source of his happiness"; and he confessed
that, instead of tender reveries, he had now nothing but sensual
desires. He had been kept drinking till six in the morning; he was very
often drunk at Dumfries, not that the whiskey was very good, but it
makes thoughts to whirl about in the head; and hence poets, like the
poor, are fond of it. Once at Mr. Riddell's he made himself so tipsy
that he insulted the lady of the house; next day he sent her an apology
which was not accepted, and, out of spite, wrote rhymes against her: a
lamentable excess, betraying an unseated mind. At thirty-seven he was
worn out. One night, having drunk too much, he sat down and went to
sleep in the street. It was January, and he caught rheumatic fever. His
family wanted to call in a doctor. "What business has a physician to
waste his time on me?" he said; "I am a poor pigeon not worth plucking."
He was horribly thin, could not sleep, and could not stand on his legs.
"As to my individual self, I am tranquil. But Burns' poor widow and half
a dozen of his dear little ones, there I am as weak as a woman's tear."
He was even afraid he should not die in peace, and had the bitterness of
being obliged to beg. Here is a letter he wrote to a friend: "A rascal
of a haberdasher, taking into his head that I am dying, has commenced a
process against me, and will infallibly put my emaciated body into jail.
Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post,
with ten pounds? O James! did you know the pride of my heart, you would
feel doubly for me! Alas, I am not used to beg!"[91] He died a few days
afterwards, at thirty-eight. His wife was lying-in of her fifth child at
the time of her husband's funeral.
Section III.--Conservative Rule in England.--Cowper's Poetry
A sad life, most often the life of the men in advance of their age; it
is not wholesome to go too quick. Burns was so much in advance that it
took forty years to catch him. At this time in England the conservatives
and the believers took the lead before sceptics and revolutionists. The
constitution was liberal, and seemed to be a guarantee of rights; the
church was popular, and seemed to be the support of morality. Practical
capacity and speculative incapacity turned the mind aside from the
propounded innovations, and bound them down to the established order.
The people found themselves well off in their great feudal house,
widened and accommodated to modern needs; they thought it beautiful,
they were proud of it; and national instinct, like public opinion,
declared against the innovators who would throw it down to build it up
again. Suddenly a violent shock changed this instinct into a passion,
and this opinion into fanaticism. The French Revolution, at first
admired as a sister, had shown itself a fury and a monster. Pitt
declared in Parliament, "that one of the leading features of this
(French) Government was the extinction of religion and the destruction
of property."[92] Amidst universal applause, the whole thinking and
influential class rose to stamp out this party of robbers, united
brigands, atheists on principle; Jacobinism, sprung from blood to sit in
purple, was persecuted even in its child and champion, "Buonaparte, who
is now the sole organ of all that was formerly dangerous and pestiferous
in the revolution."[93] Under this national rage liberal ideas dwindled;
the most illustrious friends of Fox--Burke, Windham, Spencer--abandoned
him: out of a hundred and sixty partisans in the House of Commons, only
fifty remained to him. The great Whig party seemed to be disappearing;
and in 1799, the strongest minority that could be collected against the
Government was twenty-nine. Yet English Jacobinism was taken by the
throat and held down:
"The Habeas Corpus Act was repeatedly suspended.... Writers who
propounded doctrines adverse to monarchy and aristocracy, were
proscribed and punished without mercy. It was hardly safe for a
republican to avow his political creed over his beefsteak and his bottle
of port at a chophouse.... Men of cultivated mind and polished manners
were (in Scotland), for offences which at Westminster would have been
treated as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany
Bay."[94]
But the intolerance of the nation aggravated that of the Government. If
anyone had dared to avow democratic sentiments, he would have been
insulted. The papers represented the innovators as wretches and public
enemies. The mob in Birmingham burned the houses of Priestley and the
Unitarians. And in the end Priestley was obliged to leave England.
New theories could not arise in this society armed against new theories.
Yet the revolution made its entrance; it entered disguised, and through
an indirect way, so as not to be recognized. It was not social ideas, as
in France, that were transformed, nor philosophical ideas as in Germany,
but literary ideas; the great rising tide of the modern mind, which
elsewhere overturned the whole edifice of human conditions and
speculations, succeeded here only at first in changing style and taste.
It was a slight change, at least apparently, but on the whole of equal
value with the others; for this renovation in the manner of writing is a
renovation in the manner of thinking: the one led to all the rest, as a
central pivot being set in motion causes all the indented wheels to move
also.
Wherein consists this reform of style? Before defining it, I prefer to
exhibit it; and for that purpose, we must study the character and life
of a man who was the first to use it, without any system--William
Cowper: for his talent is but the picture of his character, and his
poems but the echo of his life. He was a delicate, timid child, of a
tremulous sensibility, passionately tender, who, having lost his mother
at six, was almost at once subjected to the fagging and brutality of a
public school. These, in England, are peculiar: a boy of about fifteen
singled him out as a proper object upon whom he might practise the
cruelty of his temper: and the poor little fellow, ceaselessly
ill-treated, "conceived," he says, "such a dread of his (tormentor's)
figure,... that I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him
higher than his knees; and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles
than by any other part of his dress."[95] At the age of nine melancholy
seized him, not the sweet reverie which we call by that name, but the
profound dejection, gloomy and continual despair, the horrible malady of
the nerves and the soul, which leads to suicide, Puritanism, and
madness. "Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror, and
rising up in despair."[96]
The evil changed form, diminished, but did not leave him. As he had only
a small fortune, though born of a high family, he accepted, without
reflection, the offer of his uncle, who wished to give him a place as
clerk of the journals of the House of Lords; but he had to undergo an
examination, and his nerves were unstrung at the very idea of having to
speak in public. For six months he tried to prepare himself; but he read
without understanding. His continual misery brought on at last a nervous
fever. Cowper writes of himself: "The feelings of a man when he arrives
at the place of execution, are probably much like mine, every time I set
my foot in the office, which was every day, for more than a half year
together.[97] In this situation, such a fit of passion has sometimes
seized me, when alone in my chambers, that I have cried out aloud, and
cursed the hour of my birth; lifting up my eyes to heaven not as a
suppliant, but in the hellish spirit of rancorous reproach and blasphemy
against my Maker."[98] The day of examination came on: he hoped he was
going mad, so that he might escape from it; and as his reason held out,
he thought even of "self-murder." At last, "in a horrible dismay of
soul," insanity came, and he was placed in an asylum, whilst "his
conscience was scaring him, and the avenger of blood pursuing him"[99]
to the extent even of thinking himself damned, like Bunyan and the first
Puritans. After several months his reason returned, but it bore traces
of the strange lands where it had journeyed alone. He remained sad, like
a man who thought himself in disfavor with God, and felt himself
incapable of an active life. However, a clergyman, Mr. Unwin, and his
wife, very pious and very regular people, had taken charge of him. He
tried to busy himself mechanically, for instance, in making
rabbit-hutches, in gardening, and in taming hares. He employed the rest
of the day like a Methodist, in reading Scripture or sermons, in singing
hymns with his friends, and speaking of spiritual matters. This way of
Irving, the wholesome country air, the maternal tenderness of Mrs. Unwin
and Lady Austen, brought him a few gleams of light. They loved him so
generously, and he was so lovable! Affectionate, full of freedom and
innocent raillery, with a natural and charming imagination, a graceful
fancy, and exquisite delicacy, and so unhappy! He was one of those to
whom women devote themselves, whom they love maternally, first from
compassion, then by attraction, because they find in them alone the
consideration, the minute and tender attentions, the delicate
observances which men's rude nature cannot give them, and which their
more sensitive nature nevertheless craves. These sweet moments, however,
did not last. He says: "My mind has always a melancholy cast, and is
like some pools I have seen, which, though filled with a black and
putrid water, will nevertheless in a bright day reflect the sunbeams
from their surface." He smiled as well as he could, but with effort; it
was the smile of a sick man who knows himself incurable, and tries to
forget it for an instant, at least to make others forget it: "Indeed, I
wonder that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my
intellects, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if
harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse
is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable at
any rate, but more specially so if they should distort the features of
the mournful attendants into laughter. But the mind, long wearied with
the sameness of a dull, dreary prospect, will gladly fix his eyes on
anything that may make a little variety in its contemplations, though it
were but a kitten playing with her tail."[100] In reality, he had too
delicate and too pure a heart: pious, irreproachable, austere, he
thought himself unworthy of going to church, or even of praying to God.
He says also: "As for happiness, he that once had communion with his
Maker must be more frantic than ever I was yet, if he can dream of
finding it at a distance from him."[101] And elsewhere: "The heart of a
Christian, mourning yet rejoicing, (is) pierced with thorns, yet
wreathed about with roses. I have the thorn without the rose. My brier
is a wintry one; the flowers are withered, but the thorn remains." On
his death-bed, when the clergyman told him to confide in the love of the
Redeemer, who desired to save all men, he uttered a passionate cry,
begging him not to give him such consolations. He thought himself lost,
and had thought so all his life. One by one, under this terror all his
faculties gave way. Poor charming soul, perishing like a frail flower
transplanted from a warm land to the snow: the world's temperature was
too rough for it; and the moral law, which should have supported it,
tore it with its thorns.
Such a man does not write for the pleasure of making a noise. He made
verses as he painted or worked at his bench to occupy himself, to
distract his mind. His soul was too full; he need not go far for
subjects. Picture this pensive figure, silently-wandering and gazing
along the banks of the Ouse. He gazes and dreams. A buxom peasant girl,
with a basket on her arm; a distant cart slowly rumbling on behind
horses in a sweat; a sparkling spring, which polishes the blue
pebbles--this is enough to fill him with sensations and thoughts. He
returned, sat in his little summer-house, as large as a sedan-chair, the
window of which opened out upon a neighbor's orchard, and the door on a
garden full of pinks, roses, and honeysuckle. In this nest he labored.
In the evening, beside his friend, whose needles were working for him,
he read, or listened to the drowsy sounds without. Rhymes are born in
such a life as this. It sufficed for him, and for their birth. He did
not need a more violent career: less harmonious or monotonous, it would
have upset him; impressions small to us were great to him; and in a
room, a garden, he found a world. In his eyes the smallest objects were
poetical. It is evening; winter; the postman comes:
"The herald of a noisy world,
With spattered boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks;
News from all nations lumbering at his back.
True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined inn;
And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some."[102]
At last we have the precious "close-packed load"; we open it; we wish to
hear the many noisy voices it brings from London and the universe:
"Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in."[103]
Then he unfolds the whole contents of the newspaper--politics, news,
even advertisements--not as a mere realist, like so many writers of
to-day, but as a poet; that is, as a man who discovers a beauty and
harmony in the coals of a sparkling fire, or the movement of fingers
over a piece of wool-work; for such is the poet's strange distinction.
Objects not only spring up in his mind more powerful and more precise
than they were of themselves, and before entering there; but also, once
conceived, they are purified, ennobled, colored, like gross vapors,
which, being transfigured by distance and light, change into silky
clouds, lined with purple and gold. For him there is a charm in the
rolling folds of the vapor sent up by the tea-urn, sweetness in the
concord of guests assembled around the same table in the same house.
This one expression, "News from India," causes him to see India itself,
"with her plumed and jeweled turban."[104] The mere notion of "excise"
sets before his eyes "ten thousand casks, forever dribbling out their
base contents, touched by the Midas finger of the State, (which) bleed
gold for ministers to sport away."[105] Strictly speaking, nature is to
him like a gallery of splendid and various pictures, which to us
ordinary folk are always covered up with cloths. At most, now and then,
a rent suffers us to imagine the beauties hid behind the uninteresting
curtains; but the poet raises these curtains, one and all, and sees a
picture where we see but a covering. Such is the new truth Cowper's
poems brought to light. We know from him that we need no longer go to
Greece, Rome, to the palaces, heroes, and academicians, in search of
poetic objects. They are quite near us. If we see them not, it is
because we do not know how to look for them; the fault is in our eyes,
not in the things. We may find poetry, if we wish, at our fireside, and
amongst the beds of our kitchen-garden.[106]
Is the kitchen-garden indeed poetical? To-day, perhaps; but to-morrow,
if my imagination is barren, I shall see there nothing but carrots and
other kitchen stuff. It is my feelings which are poetical, which I must
respect, as the most precious flower of beauty. Hence a new style. We
need no longer, after the old oratorical fashion, box up a subject in a
regular plan, divide it into symmetrical portions, arrange ideas into
files, like the pieces on a draught-board. Cowper takes the first
subject that comes to hand--one which Lady Austen gave him at
haphazard--the "Sofa," and speaks about it for a couple of pages; then
he goes whither the bent of his mind leads him, describing a winter
evening, a number of interiors and landscapes, mingling here and there
all kinds of moral reflections, stories, dissertations, opinions,
confidences, like a man who thinks aloud before the most intimate and
beloved of his friends. Let us look at his great poem, the "Task. The
best didactic poems," says Southey, "when compared with the 'Task,' are
like formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery." If we enter
into details, the contrast is greater still. He does not seem to dream
that he is being listened to; he only speaks to himself. He does not
dwell on his ideas, as the classical writers do, to set them in relief,
and make them stand out by repetitions and antitheses; he marks his
sensation, and that is all. We follow this sensation in him as it
gradually springs up; we see it rising from a former one, swelling,
falling, remounting, as we see vapor issuing from a spring, and
insensibly rising, unrolling, and developing its shifting forms.
Thought, which in others was congealed and rigid, becomes here mobile
and fluent; the rectilinear verse grows flexible; the noble vocabulary
widens its scope to let in vulgar words of conversation and life. At
length poetry has again become lifelike; we no longer listen to words,
but we feel emotions; it is no longer an author, but a man who speaks.
His whole life is there, perfect, beneath its black lines, without
falsehood or concoction; his whole effort is bent on removing falsehood
and concoction. When he describes his little river, his dear Ouse, "slow
winding through a level plain of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled
o'er,"[107] he sees it with his inner eye; and each word, caesura,
sound, answers to a change of that inner vision. It is so in all his
verses; they are full of personal emotions, genuinely felt, never
altered or disguised; on the contrary, fully expressed, with their
transient shades and fluctuations; in a word, as they are, that is, in
the process of production and destruction, not all complete, motionless,
and fixed, as the old style represented them. Herein consists the great
revolution of the modern style. The mind, outstripping the known rules
of rhetoric and eloquence, penetrates into profound psychology, and no
longer employs words except to mark emotions.
Section IV.--The Romantic School
Now[108] appeared the English romantic school, closely resembling the
French in its doctrines, origin, and alliances, in the truths which it
discovered, the exaggerations it committed, and the scandal it excited.
The followers of that school formed a sect, a sect of "dissenters in
poetry," who spoke out aloud, kept themselves close together, and
repelled settled minds by the audacity and novelty of their theories.
For their foundation were attributed to them the anti-social principles
and the sickly sensibility of Rousseau; in short, a sterile and
misanthropical dissatisfaction with the present institutions of society.
Southey, one of their leaders, began by being a Socinian and Jacobin;
and one of his first poems, "Wat Tyler," cited the glory of the past
Jacquerie in support of the present revolution. Another, Coleridge, a
poor fellow, who had served as a dragoon, his brain stuffed with
incoherent reading and humanitarian dreams, thought of founding in
America a communist republic, purged of kings and priests; then, having
turned Unitarian, steeped himself at Göttingen in heretical and
mystical theories on the Logos and the absolute. Wordsworth himself, the
third and most moderate, had begun with enthusiastic verses against
kings:
"Great God,... grant that every sceptred child of clay,
Who cries presumptuous, 'Here the flood shall stay,'
May in its progress see thy guiding hand,
And cease the acknowledged purpose to withstand;
Or, swept in anger from the insulted shore,
Sink with his servile bands, to rise no more!"[109]
But these rages and aspirations did not last long; and at the end of a
few years, the three, brought back into the-pale of Church and State,
became, Coleridge, a Pittite journalist, Wordsworth, a distributor of
stamps, and Southey, poet-laureate; all zealous converts, decided
Anglicans, and intolerant Conservatives. In point of taste, however,
they had advanced, not retired. They had violently broken with
tradition, and leaped over all classical culture to take their models
from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. One of their friends, Charles
Lamb, like Saint-Beuve, had discovered and restored the sixteenth
century. The most unpolished dramatists, like Marlowe, seemed to these
men admirable; and they sought in the collections of Percy and Warton,
in the old national ballads and ancient poetry of foreign lands, the
fresh and primitive accent which had been wanting in classical
literature, and whose presence seemed to them to be a sign of truth and
beauty. Above every other reform, they labored to destroy the grand
aristocratical and oratorical style, such as it sprang from methodical
analyses and court polish. They proposed to adapt to poetry the ordinary
language of conversation, such as is spoken in the middle and lower
classes, and to replace studied phrases and a lofty vocabulary by
natural tones and plebeian words. In place of the classical mould, they
tried stanzas, sonnets, ballads, blank verse, with the roughness and
subdivisions of the primitive poets. They adopted or arranged the metres
and diction of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Charles Lamb
wrote an archaic tragedy, "John Woodvil," which we might fancy to have
been written during Elizabeth's reign. Others, like Southey, and
Coleridge, in particular, manufactured totally new rhythms, as happy at
times, and at times also as unfortunate, as those of Victor Hugo: for
instance, a verse in which accents, and not syllables, were
counted;[110] a singular medley of confused attempts, manifest
abortions, and original inventions. The plebeian having doffed the
aristocratical costume, sought another; borrowed one piece of his dress
from the knights or the barbarians, another from peasants or
journalists, not too critical of incongruities, pretentious and
satisfied with his motley and badly sewn cloak, till at last, after many
attempts and many rents, he ended by knowing himself, and selecting the
dress that fitted him.
In this confusion of labors two great ideas stand out: the first
producing historical poetry, the second philosophical; the one
especially manifest in Southey and Walter Scott, the other in Wordsworth
and Shelley; both European, and displayed with equal brilliancy in
France by Hugo, Lamartine, and Musset; with greater brilliancy in
Germany by Goethe, Schiller, Rückert, and Heine; both so profound, that
none of their representatives, except Goethe, divined their scope; and
hardly now, after more than half a century, can we define their nature,
so as to forecast their results.
The first consists in saying, or rather foreboding, that our ideal is
not the ideal; it is only one ideal, but there are others. The
barbarian, the feudal man, the cavalier of the Renaissance, the
Mussulman, the Indian, each age and each race has conceived its beauty,
which was a beauty. Let us enjoy it, and for this purpose put ourselves
entirely in the place of the discoverers; for it will not suffice to
depict, as the previous novelists and dramatists have done, modern and
national manners under old and foreign names; let us paint the
sentiments of other ages and other races with their own features,
however different these features may be from our own, and however
unpleasing to our taste. Let us show our hero as he was, grotesque or
not, with his true costume and speech: let him be fierce and
superstitious if he was so; let us dash the barbarian with blood, and
load the Covenanter with his bundle of biblical texts. Then one by one
on the literary stage men saw the vanished or distant civilizations
return; first the Middle Age and the Renaissance; then Arabia,
Hindostan, and Persia; then the classical age, and the eighteenth
century itself; and the historic taste becomes so eager, that from
literature the contagion spread to other arts. The theatre changed its
conventional costumes and decorations into true ones. Architecture built
Roman villas in our northern climates, and feudal towers amidst our
modern security. Painters travelled to imitate local coloring, and
studied to reproduce moral coloring. Every man became a tourist and an
archæologist; the human mind quitting its individual sentiments to
adopt all sentiments really felt, and finally all possible sentiments,
found its pattern in the great Goethe, who by his "Tasso, Iphigenia,
Divan," his second part of "Faust," became a citizen of all nations and
a contemporary of all ages, seemed to live at pleasure at every point of
time and place, and gave an idea of universal mind. Yet this literature,
as it approached perfection, approached its limit, and was only
developed in order to die. Men did comprehend at last that attempted
resurrections are always incomplete, that every imitation is only an
imitation, that the modern accent infallibly penetrates the words which
we place in the mouths of ancient characters, that every picture of
manners must be indigenous and contemporaneous, and that archaic
literature is essentially untrue. People saw at last that it is in the
writers of the past that we must seek the portraiture of the past; that
there are no Greek tragedies but the Greek tragedies; that the concocted
novel must give place to authentic memoirs, as the fabricated ballad to
the spontaneous; in other words, that historical literature must vanish
and become transformed into criticism and history, that is, into
exposition and commentary of documents.
How shall we select in this multitude of travellers and historians,
disguised as poets? They abound like swarms of insects, hatched on a
summer's day amidst a rank vegetation; they buzz and glitter, and the
mind is lost in their sparkle and hum. Which shall I quote? Thomas
Moore, the gayest and most French of all, a witty railer,[111] too
graceful and _recherché_, writing descriptive odes on the Bermudas,
sentimental Irish melodies, a poetic Egyptian tale,[112] a romantic poem
on Persia and India;[113] Lamb, a restorer of the old drama; Coleridge,
a thinker and dreamer, a poet and critic, who in "Christabel" and the
"Ancient Mariner" reopened the vein of the supernatural and the
fantastic; Campbell, who, having begun with a didactic poem on the
"Pleasures of Hope," entered the new school without giving up his noble
and half-classical style, and wrote American and Celtic poems, only
slightly Celtic and American; in the first rank, Southey, a clever man,
who, after several mistakes in his youth, became the professed defender
of aristocracy and cant, an indefatigable reader, an inexhaustible
writer, crammed with erudition, gifted in imagination, famed like Victor
Hugo for the freshness of his innovations, the combative tone of his
prefaces, the splendors of his picturesque curiosity, having spanned the
universe and all history with his poetic shows, and embraced in the
endless web of his verse, Joan of Arc, Wat Tyler, Roderick the Goth,
Madoc, Thalaba, Kehama, Celtic and Mexican traditions, Arabic and Indian
legends, successively a Catholic, a Mussulman, a Brahmin, but only in
verse; in reality, a prudent and respectable Protestant. The
above-mentioned authors have to be taken as examples merely--there are
dozens behind; and I think that, of all fine visible or imaginable
sceneries, of all great real or legendary events, at all times, in the
four quarters of the world, not one has escaped them. The diorama they
show us is very brilliant; unfortunately we perceive that it is
manufactured. If we would have its fellow picture, let us imagine
ourselves at the opera. The decorations are splendid, we see them coming
down from above, that is, from the ceiling, thrice in an act; lofty
Gothic cathedrals, whose rose-windows glow in the rays of the setting
sun, whilst processions wind round the pillars, and the lights flicker
over the elaborate copes and the gold embroidery of the priestly
vestments; mosques and minarets, moving caravans creeping afar over the
yellow sand, whose lances and canopies, ranged in line, fringe the
immaculate whiteness of the horizon; Indian paradises, where the heaped
roses swarm in myriads, where fountains mingle their plumes of pearls,
where the lotus spreads its large leaves, where thorny plants raise
their many thousand purple calices around the apes and crocodiles which
are worshipped as divinities, and crawl in the thickets. Meantime the
dancing-girls lay their hands on their heart with deep and delicate
emotion, the tenors sing that they are ready to die, tyrants roll forth
their deep bass voice, the orchestra struggles hard, accompanying the
variations of sentiment with the gentle sounds of flutes, the lugubrious
clamors of the trombones, the angelic melodies of the harps; till at
last, when the heroine sets her foot on the throat of the traitor, it
breaks out triumphantly with its thousand vibrant voices harmonized into
a single strain. A fine spectacle! we depart mazed, deafened; the senses
give way under this inundation of splendors; but as we return home, we
ask ourselves what we have learnt, felt--whether we have, in truth, felt
anything. After all, there is little here but decoration and scenery;
the sentiments are factitious; they are operatic sentiments: the authors
are only clever men, libretti-makers, manufacturers of painted canvas;
they have talent without genius; they draw their ideas not from the
heart, but from the head. Such is the impression left by "Lalla Rookh,
Thalaba, Roderick the last of the Goths, The Curse of Kehama," and the
rest of these poems. They are great decorative machines suited to the
fashion. The mark of genius is the discovery of some wide unexplored
region in human nature, and this mark fails them; they prove only much
cleverness and knowledge. After all, I prefer to see the East in
Orientals from the East, rather than in Orientals in England; in Vyasa
or Firdousi, rather than in Southey[114] and Moore. These poems may be
descriptive or historical; they are less so than the texts, notes,
emendations, and justifications which their authors carefully print at
the foot of the page.
Beyond all general causes which have fettered this literature, there is
a national one: the mind of these men is not sufficiently flexible, and
too moral. Their imitation is only literal. They know past times and
distant lands only as antiquaries and travellers. When they mention a
custom, they put their authorities in a foot-note; they do not present
themselves before the public without testimonials; they establish by
weighty certificates that they have not committed an error in topography
or costume. Moore, like Southey, named his authorities; Sir John
Malcolm, Sir William Ouseley, Mr. Cary, and others, who returned from
the East, and had lived there, state that his descriptions are
wonderfully faithful, that they thought that Moore had travelled in the
East. In this respect their minuteness is ridiculous;[115] and their
notes, lavished without stint, show that their matter-of-fact public
required to ascertain whether their poetical commodities were genuine
produce. But that broader truth, which lies in penetrating into the
feelings of characters, escaped them; these feelings are too strange and
immoral. When Moore tried to translate and recast Anacreon, he was told
that his poetry was fit for "the stews."[116] To write an Indian poem,
we must be pantheistical at heart, a little mad, and pretty generally
visionary; to write a Greek poem, we must be polytheistic at heart,
fundamentally pagan, and a naturalist by profession. This is the reason
that Heine spoke so fitly of India, and Goethe of Greece. A genuine
historian is not sure that his own civilization is perfect, and lives as
gladly out of his country as in it. Judge whether Englishmen can succeed
in this style. In their eyes there is only one rational civilization,
which is their own; every other morality is inferior, every other
religion is extravagant. With such narrowness, how can they reproduce
these other moralities and religions? Sympathy alone can restore
extinguished or foreign manners, and sympathy here is forbidden. Under
this narrow rule, historical poetry, which itself is hardly likely to
live, languishes as though suffocated under a leaden cover.
One of them, a novelist, critic, historian, and poet, the favorite of
his age, read over the whole of Europe, was compared and almost equalled
to Shakespeare, had more popularity than Voltaire, made dressmakers and
duchesses weep, and earned about two hundred thousand pounds. Murray,
the publisher, wrote to him: "I believe I might swear that I never
experienced such unmixed pleasure as the reading of this exquisite work
(first series of 'Tales of my Landlord' has afforded me....) Lord Holland
said, when I asked his opinion: 'Opinion! we did not one of us go to bed
last night--nothing slept but my gout.'"[117] In France, fourteen
hundred thousand volumes of these novels were sold, and they continue to
sell. The author, born in Edinburgh, was the son of a writer to the
signet, learned in feudal law and ecclesiastical history, himself an
advocate, a sheriff, and always fond of antiquities, especially national
antiquities; so that by his family, education, by his own instincts, he
found the materials for his works and the stimulus for his talent. His
past recollections were impressed on him at the age of three, in a
farm-house, where he had been taken to try the effect of bracing air on
his little shrunken leg. He was wrapped naked in the warm skin of a
sheep just killed, and he crept about in this attire, which passed for a
specific. He continued to limp, and became a reader. From his infancy he
listened to the stories which he afterwards gave to the public--that of
the battle of Culloden, of the cruelties practised on the Highlanders,
the wars and sufferings of the Covenanters. At three he used to sing out
the ballad of Hardyknute so loudly that he prevented the village
minister, a man gifted with a very fine voice, from being heard, and
even from hearing himself. As soon as he had heard "a Border-raid
ballad," he knew it by heart. But in other things he was indolent,
studied by fits and starts, and did not readily learn dry, hard facts;
yet for poetry, old songs, and ballads, the flow of his genius was
precocious, swift, and invincible. The day on which he first opened,
"under a platanus tree," the volumes in which Percy had collected the
fragments of ancient poetry, he forgot dinner, "notwithstanding the
sharp appetite of thirteen," and thenceforth he overwhelmed with these
old rhymes not only his school-fellows, but everyone else who would
listen to him. After he had become a clerk to his father, he crammed
into his desk all the works of imagination which he could find. "The
whole Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy tribe I abhorred," he said, "and it
required the art of Burney, or the feeling of Mackenzie, to fix my
attention upon a domestic tale. But all that was adventurous and
romantic,... that touched upon knight-errantry, I devoured."[118] Having
fallen ill, he was kept a long time in bed, forbidden to speak, with no
other pleasure than to read the poets, novelists, historians, and
geographers, illustrating the battle-descriptions by setting in line and
disposing little pebbles, which represented the soldiers. Once cured,
and able to walk well, he turned his walks to the same purpose, and
developed a passion for the country, especially the historical regions.
He said:
"But show me an old castle or a field of battle, and I was at home at
once, filled it with its combatants in their proper costume, and
overwhelmed my hearers by the enthusiasm of my description. In crossing
Magus Moor, near St. Andrews, the spirit moved me to give a picture of
the assassination of the Archbishop of St. Andrews to some
fellow-travellers with whom I was accidentally associated, and one of
them, though well acquainted with the story, protested my narrative had
frightened away his night's sleep."[119]
Amidst other excursions, in search after knowledge, he travelled once
every year during seven years in the wild district of Liddesdale,
exploring every stream and every ruin, sleeping in the shepherds' huts,
gleaning legends and ballads. We can judge from this of his antiquarian
tastes and habits. He read provincial charters, the wretched Middle Age
Latin verses, the parish registers, even contracts and wills. The first
time he was able to lay his hand on one of the great "old Border
war-horns," he blew it all along his route. Rusty mail and dirty
parchment attracted him, filled his head with recollections and poetry.
In truth, he had a feudal mind, and always wished to be the founder of a
distinct branch of an historical family. Literary glory was only
secondary; his talent was to him only as an instrument. He spent the
vast sums which his prose and verse had won, in building a castle in
imitation of the ancient knights, "with a tall tower at either end,...
sundry zigzagged gables,... a myriad of indentations and parapets, and
machicollated eaves; most fantastic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a
few of them painted glass;... stones carved with heraldries
innumerable";[120] apartments filled with sideboards and carved chests,
adorned with "cuirasses, helmets, swords of every order, from the
claymore and rapier to some German executioner's swords." For long years
he held open house there, so to speak, and did to every stranger the
"honours of Scotland," trying to revive the old feudal life, with all
its customs and its display; dispensing liberal and joyous hospitality
to all comers, above all to relatives, friends, and neighbors; singing
ballads and sounding pibrochs amidst the clinking of glasses; holding
gay hunting-parties, where the yeomen and gentlemen rode side by side;
and encouraging lively dances, where the lord was not ashamed to give
his hand to the miller's daughter. He himself, frank of speech, happy,
amidst his forty guests, kept up the conversation with a profusion of
stories, lavished from his vast memory and imagination, conducted his
guests over his domain, extended at large cost, amidst new plantations
whose future shade was to shelter his posterity; and he thought with a
poet's smile of the distant generations who would acknowledge for their
ancestor Sir Walter Scott, first baronet of Abbotsford.
"The Lady of the Lake, Marmion, The Lord of the Isles, The Fair Maid of
Perth, Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward," who does not know these
names by heart? From Walter Scott we learned history. And yet is this
history? All these pictures of a distant age are false. Costumes,
scenery, externals alone are exact; actions, speech, sentiments, all the
rest is civilized, embellished, arranged in modern guise. We might
suspect it when looking at the character and life of the author; for
what does he desire, and what do the guests, eager to hear him, demand?
Is he a lover of truth as it is, foul and fierce; an inquisitive
explorer, indifferent to contemporary applause, bent alone on defining
the transformations of living nature? By no means. He is in history, as
he is at Abbotsford, bent on arranging points of view and Gothic halls.
The moon will come in well there between the towers; here is a nicely
placed breastplate, the ray of light which it throws back is pleasant to
see on these old hangings; suppose we took out the feudal garments from
the wardrobe and invited the guests to a masquerade? The entertainment
would be a fine one, in accordance with their reminiscences and their
aristocratic principles. English lords, fresh from a bitter war against
French democracy, ought to enter zealously into this commemoration of
their ancestors. Moreover, there are ladies and young girls, and we must
arrange the show, so as not to shock their severe morality and their
delicate feelings, make them weep becomingly; not put on the stage
over-strong passions, which they would not understand; on the contrary,
select heroines to resemble them, always touching, but above all
correct; young gentlemen, Evandale, Morton, Ivanhoe, irreproachably
brought up, tender and grave, even slightly melancholic (it is the
latest fashion), and worthy to lead them to the altar. Is there a man
more suited than the author to compose such a spectacle? He is a good
Protestant, a good husband, a good father, very moral, so decided a Tory
that he carries off as a relic a glass from which the king has just
drunk. In addition, he has neither talent nor leisure to reach the
depths of his characters. He devotes himself to the exterior; he sees
and describes forms and externals much more at length than inward
feelings. Again, he treats his mind like a coal-mine, serviceable for
quick working, and for the greatest possible gain: a volume in a month,
sometimes in a fortnight even, and this volume is worth one thousand
pounds. How should he discover, or how dare exhibit, the structure of
barbarous souls? This structure is too difficult to discover, and too
little pleasing to show. Every two centuries, amongst men, the
proportion of images and ideas, the mainspring of passions, the degree
of reflection, the species of inclinations, change. Who, without a long
preliminary training, now understands and relishes Dante, Rabelais, and
Rubens? And how, for instance, could these great Catholic and mystical
dreams, these vast temerities, or these impurities of carnal art, find
entrance into the head of this gentlemanly citizen? Walter Scott pauses
on the threshold of the soul, and in the vestibule of history, selects
in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages only the fit and agreeable, blots
out plain-spoken words, licentious sensuality, bestial ferocity. After
all, his characters, to whatever age he transports them, are his
neighbors, "cannie" farmers, vain lairds, gloved gentlemen, young
marriageable ladies, all more or less commonplace, that is, steady; by
their education and character at a great distance from the voluptuous
fools of the Restoration, or the heroic brutes and fierce beasts of the
Middle Ages. As he has the greatest supply of rich costumes, and the
most inexhaustible talent for scenic effect, he makes all his people get
on very pleasantly, and composes tales which, in truth, have only the
merit of fashion, though that fashion may last a hundred years yet.
That which he himself acted lasted for a shorter time. To sustain his
princely hospitality and his feudal magnificence, he went into
partnership with his printers; lord of the manor in public and merchant
in private, he gave them his signature, without keeping a check over the
use they made of it.[121] Bankruptcy followed; at the age of fifty-five
he was ruined, and one hundred and seventeen thousand pounds in debt.
With admirable courage and uprightness he refused all favor, accepting
nothing but time, set to work on the very day, wrote untiringly, in four
years paid seventy thousand pounds, exhausted his brain so as to become
paralytic, and to perish in the attempt. Neither in his conduct nor his
literature did his feudal tastes succeed, and his manorial splendor was
as fragile as his Gothic imaginations. He had relied on imitation, and
we live by truth only; his glory is to be found elsewhere; there was
something solid in his mind as well as in his writings. Beneath the
lover of the Middle Ages we find, first the "pawky" Scotchman, an
attentive observer, whose sharpness became more intense by his
familiarity with law; a good-natured man, easy and cheerful, as beseems
the national character, so different from the English. One of his
walking companions (Shortreed) said: "Eh me, sic an endless fund o'
humour and drollery as he had wi' him! Never ten yards but we were
either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie
he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made
himsel' the great man, or took ony airs in the company."[122] Grown
older and graver, he was none the less amiable, the most agreeable of
hosts, so that one of his guests, a farmer, I think, said to his wife,
when home, after having been at Abbotsford, "Ailie, my woman, I'm ready
for my bed.... I wish I could sleep for a towmont, for there's only ae
thing in this warld worth living for, and that's the Abbotsford
hunt!"[123]
In addition to a mind of this kind, he had all-discerning eyes, an
all-retentive memory, a ceaseless studiousness which comprehended the
whole of Scotland, and all classes of people; and we see his true talent
arise, so agreeable, so abundant and so easy, made up of minute
observation and gentle raillery, recalling at once Teniers and Addison.
Doubtless he wrote badly, at times in the worst possible manner:[124] it
is clear that he dictated, hardly reread his writing, and readily fell
into a pasty and emphatic style--a style very common in the present
times, and which we read day after day in the prospectuses and
newspapers. What is worse, he is terribly long and diffuse; his
conversations and descriptions are interminable; he is determined, at
all events, to fill three volumes. But he has given to Scotland a
citizenship of literature--I mean to the whole of Scotland: scenery,
monuments, houses, cottages, characters of every age and condition, from
the baron to the fisherman, from the advocate to the beggar, from the
lady to the fishwife. When we mention merely his name they crowd
forward; who does not see them coming from every niche of memory? The
Baron of Bradwardine, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies, the Antiquary,
Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans and her father--innkeepers, shopkeepers,
old wives, an entire people. What Scotch features are absent? Saving,
patient, "cannie," and of course "pawky"; the poverty of the soil and
the difficulty of existence has compelled them to be so: this is the
specialty of the race. The same tenacity which they introduced into
every-day affairs they have introduced into mental concerns--studious
readers and perusers of antiquities and controversies, poets also;
legends spring up readily in a romantic land, amidst time-honored wars
and brigandism. In a land thus prepared, and in this gloomy clime,
Presbyterianism sunk its sharp roots. Such was the real and modern
world, lit up by the far-setting sun of chivalry, as Sir Walter Scott
found it; like a painter who, passing from great show-pictures, finds
interest and beauty in the ordinary houses of a paltry provincial town,
or in a farm surrounded by beds of beet-roots and turnips. A continuous
archness throws its smile over these interior and _genre_ pictures, so
local and minute, and which, like the Flemish, indicate the rise of
well-to-do citizens. Most of these good folk are comic. Our author makes
fun of them, brings out their little deceits, parsimony, fooleries,
vulgarity, and the hundred thousand ridiculous habits people always
contract in a narrow sphere of life. A barber, in "The Antiquary," moves
heaven and earth about his wigs; if the French Revolution takes root
everywhere, it was because the magistrates gave up this ornament. He
cries out in a lamentable voice: "Haud a care, haud a care, Monkbarns!
God's sake, haud a care!--Sir Arthur's drowned already, and an ye fa'
over the cleugh too, there will be but ae wig left in the parish, and
that's the minister's."[125] Mark how the author smiles, and without
malice: the barber's candid selfishness is the effect of the man's
calling, and does not repel us. Walter Scott is never bitter; he loves
men from the bottom of his heart, excuses or tolerates them; does not
chastise vices, but unmasks them, and that not rudely. His greatest
pleasure is to pursue at length, not indeed a vice, but a hobby; the
mania for odds and ends in an antiquary, the archaeological vanity of
the Baron of Bradwardine, the aristocratic drivel of the Dowager Lady
Bellenden--that is, the amusing exaggeration of an allowable taste; and
this without anger, because, on the whole, these ridiculous people are
estimable, and even generous. Even in rogues like Dirk Hatteraick, in
cut-throats like Bothwell, he allows some goodness. In no one, not even
in Major Dalgetty, a professional murderer, a result of the thirty
years' war, is the odious unveiled by the ridiculous. In this critical
refinement and this benevolent philosophy, he resembles Addison.
He resembles him again by the purity and endurance of his moral
principles. His amanuensis, Mr. Laidlaw, told him that he was doing
great good by his attractive and noble tales, and that young people
would no longer wish to look in the literary rubbish of the circulating
libraries. When Walter Scott heard this, his eyes filled with tears: "On
his deathbed he said to his son-in-law: 'Lockhart, I have but a minute
to speak to you. My dear, be a good man--be virtuous, be religious--be a
good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie
here.'"[126] This was almost his last word. By this fundamental honesty,
and this broad humanity, he was the Homer of modern citizen life. Around
and after him, the novel of manners, separated from the historical
romance, has produced a whole literature, and preserved the character
which he stamped upon it. Miss Austen, Miss Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell,
George Eliot, Bulwer, Thackeray, Dickens, and many others, paint,
especially or entirely in his style, contemporary life, as it is,
unembellished, in all ranks, often amongst the people, more frequently
still amongst the middle class. And the causes which made the historical
novel come to naught, in Scott and others, made the novel of manners, by
the same authors, succeed. These men were too minute copyists and too
decided moralists, incapable of the great divinations and the wide
sympathies which unlock the door of history; their imagination was too
literal, and their judgment too unwavering. It is precisely by these
faculties that they created a new species of novel, which multiplies to
this day in thousands of offshoots, with such abundance, that men of
talent in this branch of literature may be counted by hundreds, and that
we can only compare them, for their original and national spirit, to the
great age of Dutch painting. Realistic and moral, these are their two
features. They are far removed from the great imagination which creates
and transforms, as it appeared in the Renaissance or in the seventeenth
century, in the heroic or noble ages. They renounce free invention; they
narrow themselves to scrupulous exactness; they paint with infinite
detail costumes and places, changing nothing; they mark little shades of
language; they are not disgusted by vulgarities or platitudes. Their
information is authentic and precise. In short, they write like citizens
for fellow-citizens, that is, for well-ordered people, members of a
profession, whose imagination does not soar high, and sees things
through a magnifying glass, unable to relish anything in the way of a
picture except interiors and make-believes. Ask a cook which picture she
prefers in the museum, and she will point to a kitchen, in which the
stewpans are so well painted that a man is tempted to put soup and bread
in them. Yet beyond this inclination, which is now European, Englishmen
have a special craving, which with them is national and dates from the
preceding century; they desire that the novel, like all other things,
should contribute to their great work--the amelioration of man and
society. They ask from it the glorification of virtue, and the
chastisement of vice. They send it into all the corners of civil
society, and all the events of private history, in search of examples
and expedients, to learn thence the means of remedying abuses, succoring
miseries, avoiding temptations. They make of it an instrument of
inquiry, education, and morality. A singular work, which has not its
equal in all history, because in all history there has been no society
like it, and which--of moderate attraction for lovers of the beautiful,
admirable to lovers of the useful--offers, in the countless variety of
its painting, and the invariable stability of its spirit, the picture of
the only democracy which knows how to restrain, govern, and reform
itself.
Section V.--Philosophy Enters into Literature.--Wordsworth.--Shelley
Side by side with this development there was another, and with history
philosophy entered into literature, in order to widen and modify it. It
was manifest throughout, on the threshold as in the centre. On the
threshold it had planted aesthetics: every poet, becoming theoretic,
defined before producing the beautiful, laid down principles in his
preface and originated only alter a preconceived system. But the
ascendancy of metaphysics was much more visible yet in the middle of the
work than on its threshold; for not only did it prescribe the form of
poetry, but it furnished it with its elements. What is man, and what has
he come into the world to do? What is this far-off greatness to which he
aspires? Is there a haven which he may reach, and a hidden hand to
conduct him thither? These are the questions which poets, transformed
into thinkers, agreed to agitate; and Goethe, here as elsewhere the
father and promoter of all lofty modern ideas, at once sceptical,
pantheistic, and mystic, wrote in "Faust" the epic of the age and the
history of the human mind. Need I say that in Schiller, Heine,
Beethoven, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and dc Musset, the poet, in his
individual person, always speaks the words of the universal man? The
characters which they have created, from Faust to Ruy Blas, only served
them to exhibit some grand metaphysical and social idea; and twenty
times this too great idea, bursting its narrow envelope, broke out
beyond all human likelihood and all poetic form, to display itself to
the eyes of the spectators. Such was the domination of the philosophical
spirit, that, after doing violence to literature, or rendering it rigid,
it imposed on music humanitarian ideas, inflicted on painting symbolical
designs, penetrated current speech, and marred style by an overflow of
abstractions and formulas, from which all our efforts now fail to
liberate us. As an overstrong child, which at its birth injures its
mother, so it has contorted the noble forms which had endeavored to
contain it, and dragged literature through an agony of struggles and
sufferings.
This philosophical spirit was not born in England, and from
Germany to England the passage was very long. For a considerable time it
appeared dangerous or ridiculous. One of the reviews stated even, that
Germany was a large country peopled by hussars and classical scholars;
that if folks go there, they will see at Heidelberg a very large tun,
and could feast on excellent Rhine wine and Westphalian ham, but that
their authors were, very heavy and awkward, and that a sentimental
German resembles a tall and stout butcher crying over a killed calf. If
at length German literature found entrance, first by the attraction of
extravagant dramas and fantastic ballads, then by the sympathy of the
two nations, which, allied against French policy and civilization,
acknowledged their cousinship in speech, religion, and blood, German
metaphysics did not enter, unable to overturn the barrier which a
positive mind and a national religion opposed to it. It tried to pass,
with Coleridge for instance, a philosophical theologian and dreamy poet,
who toiled to widen conventional dogma, and who, at the close of his
life, having become a sort of oracle, endeavored, in the pale of the
Church, to unfold and unveil before a few faithful disciples the
Christianity of the future. It did not make head; the English mind was
too positive, the theologians too enslaved. It was constrained to
transform itself and become Anglican, or to deform itself and become
revolutionary; and to produce a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Shelley, instead
of a Schiller and Goethe.
The first, Wordsworth, a new Cowper, with less talent and more ideas
than the other, was essentially a man of inner feelings, that is,
engrossed by the concerns of the soul. Such men ask what they have come
to do in this world, and why life has been given to them; if they are
right or wrong, and if the secret movements of their heart are
conformable to the supreme law, without taking into account the visible
causes of their conduct. Such, for men of this kind, is the master
conception which renders them serious, meditative, and as a rule
gloomy.[127] They live with eyes turned inwards, not to mark and
classify their ideas, like physiologists, but as moralists, to approve
or blame their feelings. Thus understood, life becomes a grave business,
of uncertain issue, on which we must incessantly and scrupulously
reflect. Thus understood, the world changes its aspect; it is no longer
a machine of wheels working into each other, as the philosopher says,
nor a splendid blooming plant, as the artist feels--it is the work of a
moral being, displayed as a spectacle to moral beings.
Figure such a man facing life and the world; he sees them, and takes
part in it, apparently like anyone else; but how different is he in
reality! His great thought pursues him; and when he beholds a tree, it
is to meditate on human destiny. He finds or lends a sense to the least
objects: a soldier marching to the sound of the drum makes him reflect
on heroic sacrifice, the support of societies; a train of clouds lying
heavily on the verge of a gloomy sky, endues him with that melancholy
calm, so suited to nourish moral life. There is nothing which does not
recall him to his duty and admonish him of his origin. Near or far, like
a great mountain in a landscape, his philosophy will appear behind all
his ideas and images. If he is restless, impassioned, sick with
scruples, it will appear to him amidst storm and lightning, as it did to
the genuine Puritans, to Cowper, Pascal, Carlyle. It will appear to him
in a grayish kind of fog, imposing and calm, if he enjoys, like
Wordsworth, a calm mind and a quiet life. Wordsworth was a wise and
happy man, a thinker and a dreamer, who read and walked. He was from the
first in tolerably easy circumstances, and had a small fortune. Happily
married, amidst the favors of government and the respect of the public,
he lived peacefully on the margin of a beautiful lake, in sight of noble
mountains, in the pleasant retirement of an elegant house, amidst the
admiration and attentions of distinguished and chosen friends, engrossed
by contemplations which no storm came to distract, and by poetry which
was produced without any hinderance. In this deep calm he listens to his
own thoughts; the peace was so great, within him and around him, that he
could perceive the imperceptible. "To me, the meanest flower that blows,
can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." He saw a
grandeur, a beauty, a teaching in the trivial events which weave the
woof of our most commonplace days. He needed not, for the sake of
emotion, either splendid sights or unusual actions. The dazzling glare
of lamps, the pomp of the theatre, would have shocked him; his eyes were
too delicate, accustomed to quiet and uniform tints. He was a poet of
the twilight. Moral existence is commonplace existence, such was his
object--the object of his choice. His paintings are cameos with a gray
ground, which have a meaning; designedly he suppresses all which might
please the senses, in order to speak solely to the heart.
Out of this character sprang a theory--his theory of art, altogether
spiritualistic, which, after repelling classical habits, ended by
rallying Protestant sympathies, and won for him as many partisans as it
had raised enemies.[128] Since the only important thing is moral life,
let us devote ourselves solely to nourishing it. The reader must be
moved, genuinely, with profit to his soul; the rest is indifferent: let
us, then, show him objects moving in themselves, without dreaming of
clothing them in a beautiful style. Let us strip ourselves of
conventional language and poetic diction. Let us neglect noble words,
scholastic and courtly epithets, and all the pomp of factitious
splendor, which the classical writers thought themselves bound to
assume, and justified in imposing. In poetry, as elsewhere, the grand
question is, not ornament, but truth. Let us leave show, and seek
effect. Let us speak in a bare style, as like as possible to prose, to
ordinary conversation, even to rustic conversation, and let us choose
our subjects at hand, in humble life. Let us take for our characters an
idiot boy, a shivering old peasant woman, a hawker, a servant stopping
in the street. It is the truth of sentiment, not the dignity of the
folks, which makes the beauty of a subject; it is the truth of
sentiment, not dignity of the words, which makes the beauty of poetry.
What matters that it is a villager who weeps, if these tears enable me
to see the maternal sentiment? What matters that my verse is a line of
rhymed prose, if this line displays a noble emotion? Men read that they
may carry away emotion, not phrases; they come to us to look for moral
culture, not pretty ways of speaking. And thereupon Wordsworth
classifying his poems according to the different faculties of men and
the different ages of life, undertakes to lead us through all
compartments and degrees of inner education, to the convictions and
sentiments which he has himself attained.
All this is very well, but on condition that the reader is in
Wordsworth's position; that is, essentially a philosophical moralist,
and an excessively sensitive man. When I shall have emptied my head of
all worldly thoughts, and looked up at the clouds for ten years to
refine my soul, I shall love this poetry. Meanwhile the web of
imperceptible threads by which Wordsworth endeavors to bind together all
sentiments and embrace all nature, breaks in my fingers; it is too
fragile; it is a woof of woven spider-web, spun by a metaphysical
imagination, and tearing as soon as a hand of flesh and blood tries to
touch it. Half of his pieces are childish, almost foolish;[129] dull
events described in a dull style, one platitude after another, and that
on principle. All the poets in the world would not reconcile us to so
much tedium. Certainly a cat playing with three dry leaves may furnish a
philosophical reflection, and figure forth a wise man sporting with the
fallen leaves of life; but eighty lines on such a subject make us
yawn--much worse, smile. At this rate we will find a lesson in an old
tooth-brush, which still continues in use. Doubtless, also, the ways of
Providence are not to be fathomed, and a selfish and brutal artisan like
Peter Bell may be converted by the beautiful conduct of an ass full of
fidelity and unselfishness; but this sentimental prettiness quickly
grows insipid, and the style, by its factitious simplicity, renders it
still more insipid. We are not over-pleased to see a grave man seriously
imitate the language of nurses, and we murmur to ourselves that, with so
many emotions, he must wet so many handkerchiefs. We will acknowledge,
if you like, that your sentiments are interesting; yet there is no need
to trot them all out before us.
We imagine we hear him say: "Yesterday I read Walton's 'Complete
Angler'; let us write a sonnet about it. On Easter Sunday I was in a
valley in Westmoreland; another sonnet. Two days ago I put too many
questions to my little boy and caused him to tell a lie; a poem. I am
going to travel on the Continent and through Scotland; poems about all
the incidents, monuments, adventures of the journey."
You must consider your emotions very precious, that you put them all
under glass! There are only three or four events in each of our lives
worthy of being related; our powerful sensations deserve to be
exhibited, because they recapitulate our whole existence; but not the
little effects of the little agitations which pass through us, and the
imperceptible oscillations of our every-day condition. Else I might end
by explaining in rhyme that yesterday my dog broke his leg, and that
this morning my wife put on her stockings inside out. The specialty of
the artist is to cast great ideas in moulds as great; Wordsworth's
moulds are of bad common clay, cracked, unable to hold the noble metal
which they ought to contain.
But the metal is really noble: and besides several very beautiful
sonnets, there is now and then a work, amongst others his largest, "The
Excursion," in which we forget the poverty of the getting up to admire
the purity and elevation of the thought. In truth, the author hardly
puts himself to the trouble of imagining; he walks along and converses
with a pious Scotch peddler; this is the whole of the story. The poets
of this school always walk, look at nature and think of human destiny;
it is their permanent attitude. He converses, then, with the peddler, a
meditative character, who has been educated by a long experience of men
and things, who speaks very well (too well!) of the soul and of God, and
relates to him the history of a good woman who died of grief in her
cottage; then he meets a solitary, a sort of sceptical Hamlet--morose,
made gloomy by the death of his family, and the disappointments suffered
during his long journeyings; then a clergyman, who took them to the
village churchyard, and described to them the life of several
interesting people who are buried there. Observe that, just in
proportion as reflections and moral discussions arise, and as scenery
and moral descriptions spread before us in hundreds, so also
dissertations entwine their long thorny hedgerows, and metaphysical
thistles multiply in every corner. In short, the poem is as grave and
dull as a sermon. And yet, in spite of this ecclesiastical air and the
tirades against Voltaire and his age,[130] we feel ourselves impressed
as by a discourse of Théodore Jouffroy. After all, Wordsworth is
convinced; he has spent his life meditating on these kind of ideas, they
are the poetry of his religion, race, climate; he is imbued with them;
his pictures, stories, interpretations of visible nature and human life
tend only to put the mind in a grave disposition which is proper to the
inner man. I enter here as in the valley of Port Royal: a solitary nook,
stagnant waters, gloomy woods, ruins, gravestones, and above all the
idea of responsible man and the obscure beyond, to which we
involuntarily move. I forget the careless French fashions, the custom of
not disturbing the even tenor of life. There is an imposing seriousness,
an austere beauty in this sincere reflection; we begin to feel respect,
we stop and are moved. This book is like a Protestant temple, august,
though bare and monotonous. The poet sets forth the great interests of
the soul:
"On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,
Musing in solitude, I oft perceive
Fair trains of imagery before me rise,
Accompanied by feelings of delight
Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed;
And I am conscious of affecting thoughts
And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes
Or elevates the Mind, intent to weigh
The good and evil of our mortal state.
--To these emotions, whencesoe'er they come,
Whether from breath of outward circumstance,
Or from the Soul--an impulse to herself,--
I would give utterance in numerous verse.
Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread;
Of the individual Mind that keeps her own
Inviolate retirement, subject there
To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all--
I sing."[131]
This intelligence, the only holy part of man, is holy in all stages; for
this, Wordsworth selects as his characters a peddler, a parson,
villagers; in his eyes rank, education, habits, all the worldly envelope
of a man, is without interest; what constitutes our worth is the
integrity of our conscience; science itself is only profound when it
penetrates moral life; for this life fails nowhere;
"To every Form of being is assigned...
An active principle:--howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flow'r and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.
Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds."[132]
Reject, then, with disdain this arid science:
"Where Knowledge, ill begun in cold remarks
On outward things, with formal inference ends;
Or, if the mind turn inward, she recoils,
At once--or not recoiling, is perplexed--[133]
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research....
Viewing all objects unremittingly
In disconnexion dead and spiritless;
And still dividing, and dividing still,
Breaks down all grandeur."[134]
Beyond the vanities of science and the pride of the world, there is the
soul, whereby all are equal, and the broad and inner Christian life
opens at once its gates to all who would enter:
"The sun is fixed,
And the infinite magnificence of heaven
Fixed within reach of every human eye.
The sleepless Ocean murmurs for all ears,
The vernal field infuses fresh delight
Into all hearts....
The primal duties shine aloft like stars,
The charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered at the feet of man--like flowers."
So, at the end of all agitation and all search appears the great
truth, which is the abstract of the rest:
"Life, I repeat, is energy of love
Divine or human; exercised in pain,
In strife and tribulation; and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass
Through shades and silent rest to endless joy."[135]
The verses sustain these serious thoughts by their grave harmony, as a
motet accompanies meditation or prayer. They resemble the grand and
monotonous music of the organ, which in the eventide, at the close of
the service, rolls slowly in the twilight of arches and pillars.
When a certain phase of human intelligence comes to light, it does so
from all sides; there is no part where it does not appear, no instinct
which it does not renew. It enters simultaneously the two opposite
camps, and seems to undo with one hand what it has made with the other.
If it is, as it was formerly, the oratorical style, we find it at the
same time in the service of cynical misanthropy, and in that of decorous
humanity, in Swift and in Addison. If it is, as now, the philosophical
spirit, it produces at once conservative harangues and socialistic
utopias, Wordsworth and Shelley.[136] The latter, one of the greatest
poets of the age, son of a rich baronet, beautiful as an angel, of
extraordinary precocity, gentle, generous, tender, overflowing with all
the gifts of heart, mind, birth, and fortune, marred his life, as it
were, wantonly, by allowing his conduct to be guided by an enthusiastic
imagination which he should have kept for his verses. From his birth he
had "the vision" of sublime beauty and happiness; and the contemplation
of an ideal world set him in arms against the real. Having refused at
Eton to be a fag of the big boys, he was treated by boys and masters
with a revolting cruelty; suffered himself to be made a martyr, refused
to obey, and, falling back into forbidden studies, began to form the
most immoderate and most poetical dreams. He judged society by the
oppression which he underwent, and man by the generosity which he felt
in himself; thought that man was good, and society bad, and that it was
only necessary to suppress established institutions to make earth "a
paradise." He became a republican, a communist, preached fraternity,
love, even abstinence from flesh, and as a means the abolition of kings,
priests, and God.[137] We can fancy the indignation which such ideas
roused in a society so obstinately attached to established order--so
intolerant, in which, above the conservative and religious instincts,
Cant spoke like a master. Shelley was expelled from the university; his
father refused to see him; the Lord Chancellor, by a decree took from
him, as being unworthy, the custody of his two children; finally, he was
obliged to quit England. I forgot to say that at eighteen he married a
young girl of inferior rank, that they separated, that she committed
suicide, that he undermined his health by his excitement and
suffering,[138] and that to the end of his life he was nervous or ill.
Is not this the life of a genuine poet? Eyes fixed on the splendid
apparitions with which he peopled space, he went through the world not
seeing the highroad, stumbling over the stones of the roadside. He
possessed not that knowledge of life which most poets share in common
with novelists. Seldom has a mind been seen in which thought soared in
loftier regions, and more removed from actual things. When he tried to
create characters and events--in "Queen Mab," in "Alastor," in "The
Revolt of Islam," in "Prometheus"--he only produced unsubstantial
phantoms. Once only, in the "Cenci," did he inspire a living figure
(Beatrice) worthy of Webster or old Ford; but in some sort this was in
spite of himself, and because in it the sentiments were so unheard of
and so strained that they suited superhuman conceptions. Elsewhere his
world is throughout beyond our own. The laws of life are suspended or
transformed. We move in Shelley's world between heaven and earth, in
abstraction, dreamland, symbolism: the beings float in it like those
fantastic figures which we see in the clouds, and which alternately
undulate and change form capriciously, in their robes of snow and gold.
For souls thus constituted, the great consolation is nature. They are
too finely sensitive to find amusement in the spectacle and picture of
human passions. Shelley instinctively avoided that spectacle; the sight
reopened his own wounds. He was happier in the woods, at the sea-side,
in contemplation of grand landscapes. The rocks, clouds, and meadows,
which to ordinary eyes seem dull and insensible, are, to a wide
sympathy, living and divine existences, which are an agreeable change
from men. No virgin smile is so charming as that of the dawn, nor any
joy more triumphant than that of the ocean when its waves swell and
shimmer, as far as the eye can reach, under the lavish splendor of
heaven. At this sight the heart rises unwittingly to the sentiment of
ancient legends, and the poet perceives in the inexhaustible bloom of
things the peaceful soul of the great mother by whom everything grows
and is supported. Shelley spent most of his life in the open air,
especially in his boat; first on the Thames, then on the Lake of Geneva,
then on the Arno, and in the Italian waters. He loved desert and
solitary places, where man enjoys the pleasure of believing infinite
what he sees, infinite as his soul. And such was this wide ocean, and
this shore more barren than its waves. This love was a deep Teutonic
instinct, which, allied to pagan emotions, produced his poetry,
pantheistic and yet full of thought, almost Greek and yet English, in
which fancy plays like a foolish, dreamy child, with the splendid skein
of forms and colors. A cloud, a plant, a sunrise--these are his
characters: they were those of the primitive poets, when they took the
lightning for a bird of fire, and the clouds for the flocks of heaven.
But what a secret ardor beyond these splendid images, and how we feel
the heat of the furnace beyond the colored phantoms, which it sets
afloat over the horizon![139] Has anyone since Shakespeare and Spenser
lighted on such tender and such grand ecstasies? Has anyone painted so
magnificently the cloud which watches by night in the sky, enveloping in
its net the swarm of golden bees, the stars:
"The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead...[140]
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn."[141]
Read again those verses on the garden, in which the sensitive plant
dreams. Alas! they are the dreams of the poet; and the happy visions
which floated in his virgin heart up to the moment when it opened out
and withered. I will pause in time; I will not proceed, as he did,
beyond the recollections of his springtime:
"The snowdrop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh odor, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.
"Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness.
"And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;
"And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odor within the sense;
"And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare;
"And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Mænad, its moonlight-colored cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through the clear dew on the tender sky...
"And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was prankt, under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,
"Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,
And starry river-buds glimmered by,
And round them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
"And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across,
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,
"Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells,
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flowerets which drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew."[142]
Everything lives here, everything breathes and yearns for something.
This poem, the story of a plant, is also the story of a soul--Shelley's
soul, the sensitive. Is it not natural to confound them? Is there not
a community of nature amongst all the dwellers in this world? Verily
there is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul; be the
existence what it will, uncultured or rational, defined or vague, ever
beyond its sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine,
which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or
penetrating it. It is this presentiment and yearning which sustains all
modern poetry--now in Christian meditations, as with Campbell and
Wordsworth, now in pagan visions, as with Keats and Shelley. They hear
the great heart of nature beat; they wish to reach it; they try all
spiritual and sensible approaches, through Judea and through Greece, by
consecrated doctrines and by proscribed dogmas. In this splendid and
fruitless effort the greatest become exhausted and die. Their poetry,
which they drag with them over these sublime tracks, is torn to pieces.
One alone, Byron, attains the summit; and of all these grand poetic
draperies, which float like banners, and seem to summon men to the
conquest of supreme truth, we see now but tatters scattered by the
wayside.
Yet these men did their work. Under their multiplied efforts, and by
their unconscious working together, the idea of the beautiful is
changed, and other ideas change by contagion. Conservatives contribute
to it as well as revolutionaries, and the new spirit breathes through
the poems which bless and those which curse Church and State. We learn
from Wordsworth and Byron, by profound Protestantism[143] and confirmed
scepticism, that in this sacred cant-defended establishment there is
matter for reform or for revolt; that we may discover moral merits other
than those which the law tickets and opinion accepts; that beyond
conventional confessions there are truths; that beyond respected social
conditions there are grandeurs; that beyond regular positions there are
virtues; that greatness is in the heart and the genius; and all the
rest, actions and beliefs, are subaltern. We have just seen that beyond
literary conventionalities there is a poetry, and consequently we are
disposed to feel that beyond religious dogmas there may be a faith, and
beyond social institutions a justice. The old edifice totters, and the
Revolution enters, not by a sudden inundation, as in France, but by slow
infiltration. The wall built up against it by public intolerance cracks
and opens: the war waged against Jacobinism, republican and imperial,
ends in victory; and henceforth we may regard opposing ideas, not as
opposing enemies, but as ideas. We regard them, and, accommodating them
to the different countries, we import them. Roman Catholics are
enfranchised, rotten boroughs abolished, the electoral franchise
lowered; unjust taxes, which kept up the price of corn, are repealed;
ecclesiastical tithes changed into rent-charges; the terrible laws
protecting property are modified, the assessment of taxes brought more
and more on the rich classes; old institutions, formerly established for
the advantage of a race, and in this race of a class, are only
maintained when for the advantage of all classes; privileges become
functions; and in this triumph of the middle class, which shapes opinion
and assumes the ascendancy, the aristocracy, passing from sinecures to
services, seems now legitimate only as a national nursery, kept up to
furnish public men. At the same time narrow orthodoxy is enlarged.
Zoology, astronomy, geology, botany, anthropology, all the sciences of
observation, so much cultivated and so popular, forcibly introduce their
dissolvent discoveries. Criticism comes in from Germany, rehandles the
Bible, rewrites the history of dogma, attacks dogma itself. Meanwhile,
poor Scottish philosophy is dried up. Amidst the agitations of sects,
endeavoring to transform each other, and rising Unitarianism, we hear at
the gates of the sacred ark the continental philosophy roaring like a
tide. Now already it has reached literature: for fifty years all great
writers have plunged into it--Sydney Smith, by his sarcasms against the
numbness of the clergy, and the oppression of the Catholics; Arnold, by
his protests against the religious monopoly of the clergy, and the
ecclesiastical monopoly of the Anglicans; Macaulay, by his history and
panegyric of the liberal revolution; Thackeray, by attacking the nobles,
in the interests of the middle class; Dickens, by attacking dignitaries
and wealthy men, in the interests of the lowly and poor; Currer Bell and
Mrs. Browning, by defending the initiative and independence of women;
Stanley and Jowett, by introducing the German exegesis, and by giving
precision to biblical criticism; Carlyle, by importing German
metaphysics in an English form; Stuart Mill, by importing French
positivism in an English form; Tennyson himself, by extending over the
beauties of all lands and all ages the protection of his amiable
dilettantism and his poetical sympathies--each according to his power
and his difference of position; all retained within reach of the shore
by their practical prejudices, all strengthened against falling by their
moral prejudices; all bent, some with more of eagerness, others with
more of distrust, in welcoming or giving entrance to the growing tide of
modern democracy and philosophy in State and Church, without doing
damage, and gradually, so as to destroy nothing, and to make everything
bear fruit.
[Footnote 60: See Alison, "History of Europe"; Porter, "Progress of
the Nation."]
[Footnote 61: In the "Fourth Estate," by F. Knight Hunt, 2 vols. 1840,
it is said (I. 175) that the first daily and morning paper, "The
Daily Courant," appeared in 1709.--Tr.]
[Footnote 62: To realize the contrast, compare Gil Blas and Ruy Blas,
Marivaux's Paysan Parvenu and Stendhal's Julien Sorel (in "Rouge et
Noir").]
[Footnote 63: The disciple of Faust.]
[Footnote 64: Goethe's "Faust," sc. 1.]
[Footnote 65: Most of these details are taken from the "Life and Works
of Burns," by R. Chambers, 1851, 4 vols.]
[Footnote 66: Ibid. I. 14.]
[Footnote 67: My great constituent elements are pride and passion.]
[Footnote 68: Extract from Burns's commonplace-book; Chambers's
"Life," I. 79.]
[Footnote 69: Ibid. I. 231. Burns had a right to think so; when he
arrived at night in an inn, the very servants woke their fellow-laborers
to come and hear him talk.]
[Footnote 70: Ibid. II. 68.]
[Footnote 71: "Man was made to Mourn," a dirge.]
[Footnote 72: "First Epistle to Davie, a brother poet."]
[Footnote 73: "Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives."]
[Footnote 74: "The Creed of Poverty;" Chambers's "Life," IV. 86.]
[Footnote 75: "The Tree of Liberty."]
[Footnote 76: 1780.]
[Footnote 77: "The Holy Fair."]
[Footnote 78: "The Holy Fair."]
[Footnote 79: "Holy Willie's Prayer."]
[Footnote 80: "Epistle to the Rev. John M'math."]
[Footnote 81: "A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton."]
[Footnote 82: "Address to the Deil."]
[Footnote 83: He himself says: "I have been all along a miserable dupe
to Love." His brother Gilbert said: "He was constantly the victim of
some fair enslaver."]
[Footnote 84: Chambers's "Life of Burns," I. 12.]
[Footnote 85: Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols, II. 302, "Journal,"
Dec. 13, 1813.]
[Footnote 86: See a passage from Burns's commonplace-book in Chambers's
"Life of Burns," I. 93.]
[Footnote 87: Chambers's "Life," I. 38.]
[Footnote 88: See "Tam o' Shanter. Address to the Deil, The Jolly
Beggars, A Man's a Man for a' that, Green Grow the Rashes," etc.]
[Footnote 89: "O Clarinda, shall we not meet in a state, some yet
unknown state of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister
to the highest wish of benevolence, and where the chill north-wind
of prudence shall never blow over the flowery fields of enjoyment?"]
[Footnote 90: "Epistle to James Smith:"
"O Life, how pleasant is thy morning,
Young Fancy's rays the hills
adorning,
Cold-pausing Caution's lesson
spurning!"]
[Footnote 91: Chambers's "Life"; Letter to Mr. Js. Burnes, IV. 205.]
[Footnote 92: "The Speeches of William Pitt," 2d ed. 3 vols. 1808, II.
17, Jan. 21, 1794.]
[Footnote 93: "The Speeches of William Pitt," III. 152, Feb. 17, 1800.]
[Footnote 94: Macaulay's Works, VII.; "Life of William Pitt," 396.]
[Footnote 95: "The Works of W. Cowper," ed. Southey, 8 vols. 1843.]
[Footnote 96: Ibid. I. 18.]
[Footnote 97: Ibid. 79.]
[Footnote 98: Ibid. 81.]
[Footnote 99: "The Works of W. Cowper," I. 97.]
[Footnote 100: "The Works of W. Cowper," ed. Southey; Letter to the
Rev. John Newton, July 12, 1780.]
[Footnote 101: Ibid. Letter to Rev. J. Newton, August 5, 1786.]
[Footnote 102: "The Task," IV; The Winter Evening.]
[Footnote 103: Ibid.]
[Footnote 104: Ibid.]
[Footnote 105: "The Task," IV; The Winter Evening.]
[Footnote 106: Crabbe may also be considered one of the masters and
renovators of poetry, but his style is too classical, and he has
been rightly nicknamed "a Pope in worsted stockings."]
[Footnote 107: "The Task," I; The Sofa.]
[Footnote 108: 1793-1794.]
[Footnote 109: Wordsworth's Works, new edition, 1870, 6 vols.;
"Descriptive Sketches during a Pedestrian Tour," I. 42.]
[Footnote 110: In English poetry as since modified, no one dreams of
limiting the number of syllables, even in blank verse.--Tr.]
[Footnote 111: See "The Fudge Family."]
[Footnote 112: "The Epicurean."]
[Footnote 113: "Lalla Rookh."]
[Footnote 114: See also "The History of the Caliph Vathek," a fantastic
but powerfully written tale, by W. Beckford, published first in French
in 1784.]
[Footnote 115: See the notes of Southey, worse than those of Chateaubriand
in the "Martyrs."]
[Footnote 116: "Edinburgh Review."]
[Footnote 117: Lockhart, "Life of Sir Walter Scott," 10 vols. 2d ed.
1839, II. ch. XXXVII. p. 170.]
[Footnote 118: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott;" Autobiography,
I. 62.]
[Footnote 119: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," Autobiography,
I. 72.]
[Footnote 120: Ibid, VII; Abbotsford in 1825.]
[Footnote 121: If Constable's "Memorials" (3 vols. 1873) had been
published when M. Taine wrote this portion of his work he perhaps would
have seen reason to alter this opinion, because it is clear that, so far
from Sir Walter's printer and publisher ruining him, they, if not
ruined by Sir Walter, were only equal sharers with him in the imprudences
that led to the disaster.--Tr.]
[Footnote 122: Lockhart's "Life," I. ch. VII. 269.]
[Footnote 123: Ibid. VI. ch. XLIX. 252.]
[Footnote 124: See the opening of "Ivanhoe": "Such being our chief
scene, the date of our story refers to a period towards the end of the
reign of Richard I., when his return from his long captivity had
become an event rather wished than hoped for by his despairing subjects,
who were in the meantime subjected to every species of subordinate
oppression." It is impossible to write in a heavier style.]
[Footnote 125: Sir Walter Scott's Works, 48 vols., 1829; "The Antiquary,"
ch. VIII.]
[Footnote 126: Lockhart's "Life," X. 217.]
[Footnote 127: The Jansenists, the Puritans, and the Methodists are the
extremes of this class.]
[Footnote 128: See the preface of his second edition of "Lyrical
Ballads."]
[Footnote 129: "Feter Bell, The White Doe, The Kitten and Falling
Leaves," etc.]
[Footnote 130: "This dull product of a scoffer's pen
Impure conceits discharging from a
heart
Hardened by impious pride!"
--Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849; "The Excursion," book 2; "The
Solitary."]
[Footnote 131: Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849, VII; "The Excursion,"
Preface, 11.]
[Footnote 132: Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849, VII. book 9; "Discourse
of the Wanderer," opening verses, 315.]
[Footnote 133: Ibid. VII; "The Excursion," book 4; "Despondency
Corrected," 137.]
[Footnote 134: Ibid, VII; "The Excursion," book 4; "Despondency
Corrected," 149.]
[Footnote 135: Ibid, last lines of book 5, "The Pastor," 20.]
[Footnote 136: See also the novels of Godwin, "Caleb Williams" and
others.]
[Footnote 137: "Queen Mab," and notes. At Oxford Shelley issued a kind
of thesis, calling it "On the Necessity of Atheism."]
[Footnote 138: Some time before his death, when he was twenty-nine, he
said, "If I die now, I shall have lived as long as my father."]
[Footnote 139: See in Shelley's Works, 1853, "The Witch of Atlas, The
Cloud, To a Sky-lark," the end of "The Revolt of Islam, Alastor," and
the whole of "Prometheus."]
[Footnote 140: "The Cloud," c. III. 502.]
[Footnote 141: Ibid. c. IV. 503.]
[Footnote 142: Shelley's Works, 1853, "The Sensitive Plant," 490.]
[Footnote 143: "Our life is turned out of her course, whenever man is
made an offering, a sacrifice, a tool, or implement, a passive thing
employed as a brute mean."--Wordsworth, "The Excursion."]
CHAPTER SECOND
LORD BYRON
Section I.--His Life and Character
I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English of these
literary men; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall
learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest
put together. His ideas were proscribed during his life; it has been
attempted to depreciate his genius since his death. Even at the present
day English critics are hardly just to him. He fought all his life
against the society from which he was descended; and during his life, as
after his death, he suffered the penalty of the resentment which he
provoked, and the dislike to which he gave rise. A foreign critic may be
more impartial, and freely praise the powerful hand whose blows he has
not felt.
If ever there was a violent and madly sensitive soul, but incapable of
shaking off its bonds; ever agitated, but yet shut in; predisposed to
poetry by its innate fire, but limited by its natural barriers to a
single kind of poetry--it was Byron's.
This promptitude to extreme emotions was with him a family legacy, and
the result of education. His great-uncle, a sort of raving and
misanthropical maniac, had slain in a tavern brawl, by candle-light, Mr.
Chaworth, his relative, and had been tried before the House of Lords.
His father, a brutal roisterer, had eloped with the wife of Lord
Carmarthen, ruined and ill-treated Miss Gordon, his second wife; and,
after living like a madman and a scoundrel, had gone with the remains of
his wife's family property, to die abroad. His mother, in her moments of
fury, would tear her dresses and her bonnets to pieces. When her
wretched husband died she almost lost her reason, and her cries were
heard in the street. It would take a long story to tell what a childhood
Byron passed under the care of "this lioness"; in what torrents of
insults, interspersed with softer moods, he himself lived, just as
passionate and more bitter. His mother ran after him, called him a "lame
brat," shouted at him, and threw fire-shovel and tongs at his head. He
held his tongue, bowed, and none the less felt the outrage. One day,
when he was "in one of his silent rages," they had to take out of his
hand a knife which he had taken from the table, and which he was already
raising to his throat. Another time the quarrel was so terrible that son
and mother, each privately, went to "the apothecary's, inquiring
anxiously whether the other had been to purchase poison, and cautioning
the vendor of drugs not to attend to such an application, if made."[144]
When he went to school, "his friendships were passions." Many years
after he left Harrow, he never heard the name of Lord Clare, one of his
old schoolfellows, pronounced, without "a beating of the heart."[145] A
score of times he got himself into trouble for his friends, offering
them his time, his pen, his purse. One day, at Harrow, a big boy claimed
the right to fag his friend, little Peel, and finding him refractory,
gave him a beating on the inner fleshy side of his arm, which he had
twisted round to render the pain more acute. Byron, too small to fight
the rascal, came up to him, "blushing with rage," tears in his eyes, and
asked with a trembling voice how many stripes he meant to inflict.
"Why," returned the executioner, "you little rascal, what is that to
you? Because, if you please," said Byron, holding out his arm, "I would
take half."[146] He never met with objects of distress without affording
them succor.[147] In his latter days, in Italy, he gave away a thousand
pounds out of every four thousand he spent. The upwellings of this heart
were too copious, and flooded forth good and evil impetuously, and at
the least collision. Like Dante, in his early youth, Byron, at the age
of eight, fell in love with a child named Mary Duff.
"How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that
girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning
of the word!... I recollect all our caresses,... my restlessness, my
sleeplessness. My misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I
sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. When I heard
of her being married,... it nearly threw me into convulsions."[148]
At twelve years he fell in love with his cousin, Margaret Parker:
"My passion had its usual effects upon me. I could not sleep--I could
not eat--I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she
loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time which must
elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of
separation. But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now."[149]
He never was wiser, read hard at school; took too much exercise; later
on, at Cambridge, Newstead, and London, he changed night into day,
rushed into debauchery, kept long fasts, led an unwholesome way of
living, and engaged in the extreme of every taste and every excess. As
he was a dandy, and one of the most brilliant, he nearly let himself die
of hunger for fear of becoming fat, then drank and ate greedily during
his nights of recklessness. Moore said:
"Lord Byron, for the last two days, had done nothing towards sustenance
beyond eating a few biscuits and (to appease appetite) chewing
mastic.... He confined himself to lobsters, and of these finished two or
three to his own share,--interposing, sometimes, a small liqueur-glass
of strong white brandy, sometimes a tumbler of very hot water, and then
pure brandy again, to the amount of near half a dozen small glasses of
the latter.... After this we had claret, of which having despatched two
bottles between us, at about four o'clock in the morning we
parted."[150]
Another day we find in Byron's journal the following words:
"Yesterday, dined _tête-à-tête_ at the 'Cocoa' with Scrope
Davies--sat from six till midnight--drank between us one bottle of
champagne and six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect
me."[151]
Later, at Venice:
"I have hardly had a wink of sleep this week past. I have had some
curious masking adventures this carnival.... I will work the mine of my
youth to the last vein of the ore, and then--good night. I have lived,
and am content."[152]
At this rate the organs wear out, and intervals of temperance are not
sufficient to repair them. The stomach does not continue to act, the
nerves get out of order, and the soul undermines the body, and the body
the soul.
"I always wake in actual despair and despondency, in all respects, even
of that which pleased me over-night. In England, five years ago, I had
the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst
that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night
after going to bed, and been still thirsty,... striking off the necks of
bottles from mere thirsty impatience."[153]
Much less is necessary to ruin mind and body wholly. Thus these vehement
minds live, ever driven and broken by their own energy, like a cannon
ball, which, when fired, turns and spins round quickly, but at the
smallest obstacle leaps up, rebounds, destroys everything, and ends by
burying itself in the earth. Beyle, a most shrewd observer, who lived
with Byron for several weeks, says that on certain days he was mad; at
other times, in presence of beautiful things, he became sublime. Though
reserved and proud, music made him weep. The rest of his time, petty
English passions, pride of rank, for instance, a vain dandyism, unhinged
him: he spoke of Brummel with a shudder of jealousy and admiration. But
small or great, the passion of the hour swept down upon his mind like a
tempest, roused him, transported him either into imprudence or genius.
Byron's own journal, his familiar letters, all his unstudied prose, is,
as it were, trembling with wit, anger, enthusiasm; the smallest words
breathe sensitiveness; since Saint Simon we have not seen more lifelike
confidences. All styles appear dull, and all souls sluggish by the side
of his.
In this splendid rush of unbridled and disbanded faculties, which leaped
up at random, and seemed to drive him without option to the four
quarters of the globe, one took the reins, and cast him on the wall
against which he was broken.
"Sir Walter Scott describes Lord Byron as being a man of real goodness
of heart, and the kindest and best feelings, miserably thrown away by
his foolish contempt of public opinion. Instead of being warned or
checked by public opposition, it roused him to go on in a worse strain,
as if he said, 'Ay, you don't like it; well, you shall have something
worse for your pains.'"[154]
This rebellious instinct is inherent in the race; there was a whole
cluster of wild passions, born of the climate,[155] which nourished him:
a gloomy humor, violent imagination, indomitable pride, a relish for
danger, a craving for strife, that inner exaltation, only satiated by
destruction, and that sombre madness which urged forward the
Scandinavian Berserkirs, when, in an open bark, beneath a sky cloven
with lightning, they abandoned themselves to the tempest, whose fury
they had breathed. This instinct is in the blood: people are born so, as
they are born lions or bull-dogs.[156] Byron was still a little boy in
petticoats when his nurse scolded him roughly for having soiled or torn
a new frock which he had just put on. He got into one of his silent
rages, seized the garment with his hands, rent it from top to bottom,
and stood erect, motionless, and gloomy before the storming nurse, so as
to set more effectually her wrath at defiance. His pride mastered him.
When at ten he inherited the title of lord, and his name was first
called at school, preceded by the title dominas, he could not answer the
customary _adsum_, stood silent amidst the general stare of his
school-fellows, and at last burst into tears. Another time, at Harrow,
in a dispute which was dividing the school, a boy said, "Byron won't
join us, for he never likes to be second anywhere." He was offered the
command, and then only would he condescend to take part with them. Never
to submit to a master; to rise with his whole soul against every
semblance of encroachment or rule; to keep his person intact and
inviolate at all cost, and to the end against all; to dare everything
rather than give any sign of submission,--such was his character. This
is why he was disposed to undergo anything rather than give signs of
weakness. At ten he was a stoic from pride. His foot was painfully
stretched in a wooden contrivance whilst he was taking his Latin lesson,
and his master pitied him, saying "he must be suffering. Never mind,
Mr. Rogers," he said, "you shall not see any signs of it in me."[157]
Such as he was as a child, he continued as a man. In mind and body he
strove, or prepared himself for strife. Every day, for hours at a time,
he boxed, fired pistols, practised sword-exercise, ran and leaped, rode,
overcame obstacles. These were the exploits of his hands and muscles;
but he needed others. For lack of enemies he found fault with society,
and made war upon it. We know to what excesses the dominant opinions
then ran. England was at the height of the war with France, and thought
it was fighting for morality and liberty. In English eyes, at this time,
Church and State were holy things: anyone who touched them became a
public enemy. In this fit of natural passion and Protestant severity,
whosoever publicly avowed liberal ideas and manners seemed an
incendiary, and stirred up against himself the instincts of property,
the doctrines of moralists, the interests of politicians, and the
prejudices of the people. Byron chose this moment to praise Voltaire and
Rousseau, to admire Napoleon, to avow himself a sceptic, to plead for
nature and pleasure against cant and regularity, to say that high
English society, debauched and hypocritical, made phrases and killed
men, to preserve its sinecures and rotten boroughs. As though political
hatred was not enough, he contracted, in addition, literary animosities,
attacked the whole body of critics,[158] ran down the new poetry,
declared that the most celebrated were "Claudians," men of the later
empire, raged against the Lake school, and in consequence had in Southey
a bitter and unwearied enemy. Thus provided with enemies, he laid
himself open to attack on all sides. He decried himself through his
hatred of cant, his bravado, his boasting about his vices. He depicted
himself in his heroes, but for the worse; in such a way that no man
could fail to recognize him, and think him much worse than he was.
Walter Scott wrote, immediately after seeing "Childe Harold":
"'Childe Harold' is, I think, a very clever poem, but gives no good
symptom of the writer's heart or morals... Vice ought to be a little
more modest, and it must require impudence almost equal to the noble
Lord's other powers, to claim sympathy gravely for the ennui arising
from his being tired of his wassailers and his paramours. There is a
monstrous deal of conceit in it, too, for it is informing the inferior
part of the world that their little old-fashioned scruples of limitation
are not worthy of his regard."[159]
"My noble friend is something like my old peacock, who chooses to
bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window, to keep me
awake with his screeching lamentation. Only, I own he is not equal in
melody to Lord Byron."[160]
Such were the sentiments which he called forth in all respectable
classes. He was pleased thereat, and did worse--giving out that in his
adventures in the East he had dared a good many things; and he was not
indignant when identified with his heroes. He said he should like to
feel for once the sensations of a man who had committed a murder.
Another time he wrote in his diary:
"Hobhouse told me an odd report--that I am the actual Conrad, the
veritable Corsair, and that part of my travels are supposed to have
passed in privacy. Um! people sometimes hit near the truth, but never
the whole truth. He don't know what I was about the year after he left
the Levant; nor does anyone--nor--nor--nor--however, it is a lie--'but I
doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth.'"[161]
These dangerous words were turned against him like a dagger; but he
loved danger, mortal danger, and was only at ease when he saw the points
of all angers bristling against him. Alone against all, against an armed
society; erect, invincible, even against common-sense, even against
conscience--it was then he felt in all his strained nerves the great and
terrible sensation, to which his whole being involuntarily inclined.
A last imprudence brought down the attack. As long as he was an
unmarried man, his excesses might be excused by the overstrong passions
of a temperament which often causes youth in England to revolt against
good taste and rule; but marriage settles them, and it was marriage
which in him completed his unsettling. He found that his wife was a kind
of paragon of virtue, known as such, "a creature of rule," correct and
without feelings, incapable of committing a fault herself, and of
forgiving. His servant Fletcher observed, "It is very odd, but I never
yet knew a lady that could not manage my Lord _except_ my Lady."[162]
Lady Byron thought her husband mad, and had him examined by physicians.
Having learned that he was in his right mind, she left him, returned to
her father, and refused ever to see him again. Thereupon he passed for a
monster. The papers covered him with obloquy; his friends induced him
not to go to a theatre or to Parliament, fearing that he would be hooted
or insulted. The rage and pangs which so violent a soul, precociously
accustomed to brilliant glory felt in this universal storm of outrage,
can only be learned from his verses. He grew stubborn, went to Venice,
and steeped himself in the voluptuous Italian life, even in low
debauchery, the better to insult the Puritan prudery which had condemned
him, and left it only through an offence still more blamed, his public
intimacy with the young Countess Guiccioli. Meanwhile he showed himself
as bitterly republican in politics as in morality. He wrote in 1813: "I
have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing
governments." This time, at Ravenna, his house was the centre and
storehouse of conspirators, and he generously and imprudently prepared
to take arms with them, to strike for the deliverance of Italy:
"They meant to insurrect here, and are to honour me with a call
thereupon. I shall not fall back; though I don't think them in force and
heart sufficient to make much of it. But, _onward...._ What signifies
_self?_... It is not one man nor a million, but the _spirit_ of liberty
which must be spread.... The mere selfish calculation ought never to be
made on such occasions; and, at present, it shall not be computed by
me.... I should almost regret that my own affairs went well, when those
of nations are in peril."[163]
In the meantime he had quarrels with the police: his house was watched,
he was threatened with assassination, and yet he rode out daily, and
went into the neighboring pine-forest to practise pistol-shooting. These
are the sentiments of a man standing at the muzzle of a loaded cannon,
waiting for it to go off. The emotion is great, nay, heroic, but it is
not agreeable; and certainly, even at this season of great emotion, he
was unhappy. Nothing is more likely to poison happiness than a combative
spirit. He writes:
"What is the reason that I have been, all my lifetime, more or less
_ennuyé?_... I do not know how to answer this, but presume that it is
constitutional,--as well as the waking in low spirits, which I have
invariably done for many years. Temperance and exercise, which I have
practised at times, and for a long time together vigorously and
violently, made little or no difference. Violent passions did: when
under their immediate influence--it is odd, but--I was in agitated, but
_not_ in depressed spirits.... Wine and spirits make me sullen and
savage to ferocity--silent, however, and retiring, and not quarrelsome,
if not spoken to. Swimming also raises my spirits; but in general they
are low, and get daily lower. That is _hopeless_; for I do not think I
am so much _ennuyé_ as I was at nineteen. The proof is, that then I
must game, or drink, or be in motion of some kind, or I was
miserable."[164]
"What I feel most growing upon me are laziness, and a disrelish more
powerful than indifference. If I rouse, it is into fury. I presume that
I shall end (if not earlier by accident, or some such termination) like
Swift, 'dying at top.'[165] Lega (his servant) came in with a letter
about a bill unpaid at Venice which I thought paid months ago. I flew
into a paroxysm of rage, which almost made me faint. I have always had
_une âme_, which not only tormented itself, but everybody else in
contact with it, and an _esprit violent_, which has almost left me
without any esprit at all."[166]
A horrible foreboding, which haunted him to the end! On his death-bed,
in Greece, he refused, I know not why, to be bled, and preferred to die
at once. They threatened that the uncontrolled disease might end in
madness. He sprang up: "There! you are, I see, a d--d set of butchers!
Take away as much blood as you like, but have done with it,"[167] and
stretched out his arm. Amidst such wild outbursts and anxieties he
passed his life. Anguish endured, danger braved, resistance overcome,
grief relished, all the greatness and sadness of the black warlike
madness--such are the images which he needs must let pass before him. In
default of action he had dreams, and he only betook himself to dreams
for want of action. He said, when embarking for Greece, that he had
taken poetry for lack of better, and that it was not his fit work. "What
is a poet? what is he worth? what does he do? He is a babbler." He
augured ill of the poetry of his age, even of his own; saying that, if
he lived ten years more, they should see something else from him than
verses. In reality, he would have been more at home as a sea-king, or a
captain of a band of troopers during the Middle Ages. Except two or
three gleams of Italian sunshine, his poetry and life, are those of a
Scald transplanted into modern life, who in this over-well-regulated
world did not find his vocation.
Section II.--The Style of Byron's Poetry
Byron was a poet, but in his own way--a strange way, like that in which
he lived. There were internal tempests within him, avalanches of ideas,
which found issue only in writing. He wrote: "I have written from the
fulness of my mind, from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but
not 'for their sweet voices.' To withdraw myself from myself has ever
been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all--and
publishing also the continuance of the same object, by the action it
affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself." He wrote almost
always with astonishing rapidity, "The Corsair" in ten days, "The Bride
of Abydos" in four days. While it was printing he added and corrected,
but without recasting: "I told you before that I can never recast
anything. I am like the tiger. If I miss the first spring, I go
grumbling back to my jungle again; but if I do it, it is crushing."[168]
Doubtless he sprang, but he had a chain: never, in the freest flight of
his thoughts, did he liberate himself from himself. He dreams of
himself, and sees himself throughout. It is a boiling torrent, but
hedged in with rocks. No such great poet has had so narrow an
imagination; he could not metamorphose himself into another. They are
his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which, hardly
transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He does not
invent, he observes; he does not create, he transcribes. His copy is
darkly exaggerated, but it is a copy. "I could not write upon anything,"
says he, "without some personal experience and foundation." We will find
in his letters and note-books, almost feature for feature, the most
striking of his descriptions. The capture of Ismail, the shipwreck of
Don Juan, are, almost word for word, like two accounts of it in prose.
If none but cockneys could attribute to him the crimes of his heroes,
none but blind men could fail to see in him the sentiments of his
characters. This is so true that he has not created more than one.
Childe Harold, Lara, the Giaour, the Corsair, Manfred, Sardanapalus,
Cain, Tasso, Dante, and the rest, are always the same--one man
represented under various costumes, in several lands, with different
expressions; but just as painters do, when, by change of garments,
decorations, and attitudes, they draw fifty portraits from the same
model. He meditated too much upon himself to be enamored of anything
else. The habitual sternness of his will prevented his mind from being
flexible; his force, always concentrated for effort and bent upon
strife, shut him up in self-contemplation, and reduced him never to make
a poem, save of his own heart.
What style would he adopt? With these concentrated and tragic sentiments
he had a classical mind. By the strangest mixture, the books which he
preferred were at once the most violent or the most proper, the Bible
above all: "I am a great reader and admirer of those books (the Bible),
and had read them through and through before I was eight years old; that
is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the
other as a pleasure."[169] Observe this word: he did not relish the
tender, and self-denying mysticism of the gospel, but the cruel
sternness and lyrical outcries of the old Hebrews. Next to the Bible he
loved Pope, the most correct and formal of men:
"As to Pope, I have always regarded him as the greatest name in our
poetry. Depend upon it, the rest are barbarians. He is a Greek Temple,
with a Gothic Cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish Mosque and all sorts
of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare
and Milton pyramids, but I prefer the Temple of Theseus or the Parthenon
to a mountain of burnt brickwork.... The grand distinction of the
under-forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do
not mean they are coarse, but shabby-genteel."[170]
And he presently wrote two letters with incomparable vivacity and spirit
to defend Pope against the scorn of modern writers. These writers,
according to him, have spoiled the public taste. The only ones who were
worth anything--Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers--imitate the style of Pope. A
few others had talent; but, take them all together, those who had come
last had perverted literature: they did not know their own language;
their expressions are only approximate, above or below the true tone,
forced or dull. He ranges himself amongst the corrupters,[171] and we
soon see that this theory is not an invention, springing from bad temper
and polemics; he returns to it. In his two first attempts--"Hours of
Idleness, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"--he tried to follow it up.
Later, and in almost all his works, we find its effect. He recommends
and practises the rule of unity in tragedy. He loves oratorical form,
symmetrical phrase, condensed style. He likes to plead his passions.
Sheridan tried to induce Byron to devote himself to eloquence; and the
vigor, piercing logic, wonderful vivacity, close argument of his prose,
prove that he would have taken the first rank amongst pamphleteers.[172]
If he attains to it amongst the poets, it is partly due to his classical
system. This oratorical form, in which Pope compresses his thought like
La Bruyère, magnifies the force and swing of vehement ideas; like a
narrow and straight canal, it collects and dashes them in their right
direction; there is then nothing which their impetus does not carry
away; and it is thus Lord Byron from the first, in the face of hostile
criticisms, and over jealous reputations, has made his way to the
public.[173]
Thus "Childe Harold" made its way. At the first onset every man who
read it was agitated. It was more than an author who spoke; it was a
man. In spite of his denial, the author was identified with his hero: he
calumniated himself, but still it was himself whom he portrayed. He was
recognized in that young voluptuous and disgusted man, ready to weep
amidst his orgies, who
"Sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But pride congeal'd the drop within his ee:
Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg'd, he almost long'd for woe."[174]
Fleeing from his native land, he carried, amongst the splendors and
cheerfulness of the south, his unwearying persecutor, "demon thought,"
implacable behind him. The scenery was recognized: it had been copied on
the spot. And what was the whole book but a diary of travel? He said in
it what he had seen and thought. What poetic fiction is so valuable as
genuine sensation? What is more penetrating than confidence, voluntary
or involuntary? Truly, every word here expressed an emotion of eye or
heart:
"The tender azure of the unruffled deep....
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrown'd...
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough."...[175]
All these beauties, calm or imposing, he had enjoyed, and sometimes
suffered through them: and hence we see them through his verse. Whatever
he touched, he made palpitate and live, because when he saw it, his
heart had beaten and he had lived. He himself, a little later, quitting
the mask of Harold, took up the parable in his own name; and who is not
touched by an avowal so passionate and complete?
"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poison'd. 'Tis too late!
Yet am I changed: though still enough the same
In strength to bear what time can not abate,
And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate....
"But soon he knew himself the most unfit
Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell'd
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompell'd,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell'd;
Proud though in desolation, which could find,
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind....
"Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars,
Till he had peopled them with beings bright
As their own beams; and earth, and earth-born jars,
And human frailties, were forgotten quite:
Could he have kept his spirit to that flight
He had been happy; but this clay will sink
In spark immortal, envying it the light
To which it mounts, as if to break the link
That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink.
"But in Man's dwellings he became a thing
Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome,
Droop'd as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing,
To whom the boundless air alone were home:
Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome,
As eagerly the barr'd-up bird will beat
His breast and beak against his wiry dome
Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat
Of his impeded soul would through his bosom eat."[176]
Such are the sentiments wherewith he surveyed nature and history, not to
comprehend them and forget himself before them, but to seek in them and
impress upon them the image of his own passions. He does not leave
objects to speak of themselves, but forces them to answer him. Amidst
their peace, he is only occupied by his own emotion. He attunes them to
his soul, and compels them to repeat his own cries. All is inflated
here, as in himself; the vast strophe rolls along, carrying in its
overflowing bed the flood of vehement ideas; declamation unfolds itself,
pompous, and at times artificial (it was his first work), but potent,
and so often sublime that the rhetorical rubbish, which he yet
preserved, disappeared under the afflux of splendors, with which it is
loaded. Wordsworth, Walter Scott, by the side of this prodigality of
accumulated splendors, seemed poor and dull: never since Æschylus was
seen such a tragic pomp; and men followed with a sort of pang, the train
of gigantic figures, whom he brought in mournful ranks before their
eyes, from the far past;
"I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years, their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!
"She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such she was!--her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased....[177]
"Lo! where the Giant on the mountain stands,
His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon;
Restless it rolls, now fix'd and now anon
Flashing afar,--and at his iron feet
Destruction cowers, to mark what deeds are done;
For on this morn three potent nations meet,
To shed before his shrine the blood he deems most sweet.
"By Heaven! it is a splendid sight to see
(For one who hath no friend, no brother there)
Their rival scarfs of mix'd embroidery,
Their various arms that glitter in the air!
What gallant war-hounds rouse them from their lair,
And gnash their fangs, loud yelling for the prey!
All join the chase, but few the triumph share;
The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away,
And Havoc scarce for joy can number their array....[178]
"What from this barren being do we reap?
Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep,
And all things weigh'd in custom's falsest scale;
Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much light.
"And thus they plod in sluggish misery,
Rotting from sire to son, and age to age,
Proud of their trampled nature, and so die,
Bequeathing their hereditary rage
To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage
War for their chains, and rather than be free,
Bleed gladiator-like and still engage
Within the same arena where they see
Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree."[179]
Has ever style better expressed a soul? It is seen here laboring and
expanding. Long and stormily the ideas boiled within this soul like bars
of metal heaped in the furnace. They melted there before the strain of
the intense heat; they mingled therein their heated mass amidst
convulsions and explosions, and then at last the door is opened; a slow
stream of fire descends into the trough prepared beforehand, heating the
circumambient air, and its glittering hues scorch the eyes which persist
in looking upon it.
Section III.--Byron's Short Poems
Description and monologue did not suffice Byron; and he needed, to
express his ideal, events and actions. Only events try the force and
elasticity of the soul; only actions display and regulate this force and
elasticity. Amidst events he sought for the most powerful, amidst
actions the strongest; and we see appear successively "The Bride of
Abydos, The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara, Parisina, The Siege of Corinth,
Mazeppa," and "The Prisoner of Chillon."
I know that these sparkling poems have grown dull in forty years. In
their necklace of Oriental pearls have been discovered beads of glass;
and Byron, who only half loved them, judged better than his judges. Yet
he judged amiss; those which he preferred are the most false. His
"Corsair" is marred by classic elegancies: the pirates' song at the
beginning is no truer than a chorus at the Italian opera; his scamps
propound philosophical antitheses as balanced as those of Pope. A
hundred times ambition, glory, envy, despair, and the other abstract
personages, whose images in the time of the first Empire the French used
to set upon their drawing-room clocks, break in amidst living
passions.[180] The noblest passages are disfigured by pedantic
apostrophes, and the pretentious poetic diction sets up its threadbare
frippery and conventional ornaments.[181] Far worse, he studies effect
and follows the fashion. Melodramatic strings pull his characters at the
right time, so as to obtain the grimace which shall make his public
shudder:
"Who thundering comes on blackest steed,
With slacken'd bit and hoof of speed!
... Approach, thou craven crouching slave,
Say, is not this Thermopylæ?"
Wretched mannerisms, emphatic and vulgar, imitated from Lucan and our
modern Lucans, but which produce their effect only on a first perusal,
and on the common herd of readers. There is an infallible means of
attracting a mob, which is, to shout out loud; with shipwrecks, sieges,
murders, and combats, we shall always interest them; show them pirates,
desperate adventurers--these distorted or raging faces will draw them
out of their regular and monotonous existence; they will go to see them
as they go to melodramas, and through the same instinct which induces
them to read novels in penny numbers. Add, by way of contrast, angelic
women, tender and submissive, beautiful as angels. Byron describes all
this, and adds to these seductions a bewitching scenery, oriental or
picturesque adornments; old Alpine castles, the Mediterranean waves, the
setting suns of Greece, the whole in high relief, with marked shadows
and brilliant colors. We are all of the people, as regards emotion; and
the great lady, like the waiting-woman, sheds tears, without cavilling
with the author as to the means he uses.
And yet, after all, there is a great deal of truth in Byron's poems. No;
this man is not a mere arranger of effects or an inventor of phrases. He
has lived amidst the spectacles he describes; he has experienced the
emotions he relates. He has been in the tent of Ali Pacha, and relished
the strong savor of ocean adventure and savage manners. He has been a
score of times near death--in the Morea, in the anguish and the solitude
of fever; at Suli, in a shipwreck; at Malta, in England, and in Italy,
in the dangers of a duel, plots of insurrection, commencements of sudden
attacks, at sea, in arms, on horseback, having seen assassinations,
wounds, agonies close to, him, and that more than once. "I am living
here exposed to it (assassination) daily, for I have happened to make a
powerful and unprincipled man my enemy; and I never sleep the worse for
it, or ride in less solitary places, because precaution is useless, and
one thinks of it as of a disease which may or may not strike."[182] He
spoke the truth; no one ever held himself more erect and firm in danger.
One day, near the Gulf of San Fiorenzo, his yacht was thrown on the
coast; the sea was terrific, and the rocks in sight; the passengers
kissed their rosaries, or fainted with horror; and the two captains
being consulted, declared shipwreck inevitable. "Well," said Lord Byron,
"we are all born to die; I shall go with regret, but certainly not with
fear." And he took off his clothes, begging the others to do the same,
not that they could save themselves amidst such waves; but "it is every
man's duty to endeavour to preserve the life God has given him; so I
advise you all to strip: swimming, indeed, can be of little use in these
billows; but as children, when tired with crying, sink placidly to
repose, we, when exhausted with struggling, shall die the easier..." He
then sat down, folding his arms, very calm; he even joked with the
captain, who was putting his dollars into his waistcoat pocket.... The
ship approached the rocks. All this time Byron was not seen to change
countenance. A man thus tried and moulded can paint extreme situations
and sentiments. After all, they are never painted otherwise than by
experience. The most inventive--Dante and Shakespeare--though quite
different, yet do the same thing. However high their genius rose, it
always had its feet on observation; and their most foolish, as well as
their most splendid pictures, never offer to the world more than an
image of their age, or of their own heart. At most, they deduce; that
is, having derived from two or three features the inward qualities of
the man within themselves and of the men around them, they draw thence,
by a sudden ratiocination of which they have no consciousness, the
varied skein of actions and sentiments. They may be artists, but they
are observers. They may invent, but they describe. Their glory does not
consist in the display of a phantasmagoria, but in the discovery of a
truth. They are the first to enter some unexplored province of humanity,
which becomes their domain, and thenceforth supports their name like an
appanage. Byron found his domain, which is that of sad and tender
sentiments: it is a heath, and full of ruins; but he is at home there,
and he is alone.
What an abode! And it is on this desolation that he dwells. He muses on
it. See the brothers of Childe Harold pass--the characters who people
it. One in his prison, chained up with his two remaining brothers. Their
father and three others had perished fighting, or were burnt for their
faith. One by one, before the eyes of the eldest, the last two languish
and fade: a silent and slow agony amidst the damp darkness into which a
beam of the sickly sun pierces through a crevice. After the death of the
first, the survivors "begged as a boon" that he shall at least be buried
on a spot "whereon the day might shine." The jailers
"Coldly laugh'd--and laid him there:
The flat and turfless earth above
The being we so much did love;
His empty chain above it leant."[183]
Then the youngest "faded" daily
"With all the while a cheek whose bloom
Was as a mockery of the tomb,
Whose tints as gently sunk away
As a departing rainbow's ray."[184]
But the pillars to which they are chained are too far apart--the elder
cannot approach his dying younger brother; he listens and hears the
failing sighs; he cries for succor, and none comes. He bursts his chain
with one strong bound: all is over. He takes that cold hand, and then,
before the motionless body, his senses are lost, his thoughts arrested;
he is like a drowning man, who, after passing through pangs of agony,
lets himself sink down like a stone, and no longer feels existence but
by a complete petrifaction of horror. Here is another brother of Childe
Harold, Mazeppa, bound naked on a wild horse, rushing over the steppes.
He writhes, and his swollen limbs, cut by the cords, are bleeding. A
whole day the course continues, and behind him the wolves are howling.
The night through he hears their long monotonous chase, and at the end
his energy fails.
"... The earth gave way, the skies roll'd round,
I seem'd to sink upon the ground;
But err'd, for I was fastly bound.
My heart turn'd sick, my brain grew sore,
And throbb'd awhile, then beat no more;
The skies spun like a mighty wheel;
I saw the trees like drunkards reel,
And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes,
Which saw no further: he who dies
Can die no more than then I died....
I felt the blackness come and go,
And strove to wake; but could not make
My senses climb up from below:
I felt as on a plank at sea,
When all the waves that dash o'er thee,
At the same time upheave and whelm,
And hurl thee towards a desert realm."[185]
[Illustration: The Castle of Chillon
Photogravure from an etching]
Shall I enumerate them all? Hugo, Parisina, the Foscari, the Giaour, the
Corsair. His hero is always a man striving with the worst anguish, face
to face with shipwreck, torture, death--his own painful and prolonged
death, the bitter death of his well-beloved, with remorse for his
companion, amidst the gloomy prospects of a threatening eternity, with
no other support but innate energy and hardened pride. These men have
desired too much, too impetuously, with a senseless swing, like a horse
which does not feel the bit, and thenceforth their inner doom drives
them to the abyss which they see, and cannot escape from. What a night
was that of Alp before Corinth! He is a renegade, and comes with the
Mussulmans to besiege the Christians, his old friends--Minotti, the
father of the girl he loves. Next day he is to lead the assault, and he
thinks of his death, which he forebodes, the carnage of his own
soldiers, which he is preparing. There is no inner support, but rooted
resentment and a firm and stern will. The Mussulmans despise him, the
Christians execrate him, and his glory only publishes his treason.
Dejected and fevered, he passes through the sleeping camp, and wanders
on the shore:
"'Tis midnight: on the mountains brown
The cold, round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light....
The waves on either shore lay there
Calm, clear, and azure as the air;
And scarce their foam the pebbles shook,
But murmured meekly as the brook.
The winds were pillow'd on the waves;
The banners droop'd along their staves....
And that deep silence was unbroke,
Save where the watch his signal spoke,
Save where the steed neighed oft and shrill,...
And the wide hum of that wild host
Rustled like leaves from coast to coast...."[186]
How the heart sickens before such spectacles! What a contrast between
his agony and the peace of immortal nature! How man stretches then his
arms towards ideal beauty, and how impotently they fall back at the
contact of our clay and mortality! Alp advances over the sandy shore to
the foot of the bastion, exposed to the fire of the sentinels; and he
hardly thinks of it:
"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb;
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws, when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;
So well had they broken a lingering fast
With those who had fallen for that night's repast.
And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,
The foremost of these were the best of his band:
Crimson and green were the shawls of their wear,
And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair,
All the rest was shaven and bare.
The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.
But close by the shore on the edge of the gulf,
There sat a vulture flapping a wolf,
Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,
Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay."[187]
Such is the goal of man; the hot frenzy of life ends here; buried or
not, it matters little: vultures or jackals, one gravedigger is as good
as another. The storm of his rages and his efforts have but served to
cast him to these animals for their food, and to their beaks and jaws he
comes only with the sentiment of frustrated hopes and insatiable
desires. Could any of us forget the death of Lara after once reading it?
Has anyone elsewhere seen, save in Shakespeare, a sadder picture of the
destiny of a man vainly rearing against inevitable fate? Though
generous, like Macbeth, he has, like Macbeth, dared everything against
law and conscience, even against pity and the most ordinary feelings of
honor. Crimes committed have forced him into other crimes, and blood
poured out has made him glide into a pool of blood. As a corsair, he has
slain; as a cut-throat, he assassinates; and his former murders which
haunt his dreams come with their bat's-wings beating against the portals
of his brain. He does not drive them away, these black visitors; though
the mouth remains silent, the pallid brow and strange smile bear witness
to their approach. And yet it is a noble spectacle to see man standing
with calm countenance even under their touch. The last day comes, and
six inches of iron suffice for all this energy and fury. Lara is lying
beneath a lime tree, and his wound "is bleeding fast from life away."
With each convulsion the stream gushes blacker, then stops; the blood
flows now only drop by drop, and his brow is already moist, his eyes
dim. The victors arrive--he does not deign to answer them; the priest
brings near the absolving cross, "but he look'd upon it with an eye
profane." What remains to him of life is for his poor page, the only
being who loved him, who has followed him to the end, and who now tries
to stanch the blood from his wound:
"He scarce can speak, but motions him 'tis vain,
He clasps the hand that pang which would assuage,
And sadly smiles his thanks to that dark page....
His dying tones are in that other tongue,
To which some strange remembrance wildly clung....
And once, as Kaled's answering accents ceased,
Rose Lara's hand, and pointed to the East:
Whether (as then the breaking sun from high
Roll'd back the clouds) the morrow caught his eye,
Or that 'twas chance, or some remember'd scene,
That raised his arm to point where such had been,
Scarce Kaled seem'd to know, but turn'd away,
As if his heart abhorr'd that coming day,
And shrunk his glance before that morning light,
To look on Lara's brow--where all grew night....
But from his visage little could we guess,
So unrepentant, dark, and passionless....
But gasping heaved the breath that Lara drew,
And dull the film along his dim eye grew;
His limbs stretch'd fluttering, and his head droop'd o'er."[188]
All is over, and of this haughty spirit there remains but a poor piece
of clay. After all, it is the desirable lot of such hearts; they have
spent life amiss, and only rest well in the tomb.
A strange and altogether northern poetry, with its root in the Edda and
its flower in Shakespeare, born long ago under an inclement sky, on the
shores of a stormy ocean--the work of a too wilful, too strong, too
sombre race--and which, after lavishing its images of desolation and
heroism, ends by stretching like a black veil over the whole of living
nature the dream of universal destruction: this dream is here, as in the
Edda, almost equally grand:
"I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day....
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black....
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face....
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food:
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one.
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died."[189]
Section IV.--Manfred
Amongst these unrestrained and gloomy poems, which incessantly return
and dwell on the same subject, there is one more imposing and lofty than
the rest, "Manfred," twin-brother of the greatest poem of the age,
Goethe's "Faust." Goethe says of Byron: "This singular intellectual poet
has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest
nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the
impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no
one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account
that I cannot enough admire his genius." The play is indeed original.
Byron writes: "His (Goethe's) 'Faust' I never read, for I don't know
German, but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of
it to me _vivâ voce_, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it
was the 'Steinbach' and the 'Jungfrau' and something else, much more
than Faustus, that made me write 'Manfred.'"[190] Goethe adds: "The
whole is so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task
for the critic to point out not only the alterations he (Byron) has
made, but their degree of resemblance or dissimilarity to the original."
Let us speak of it, then, quite freely: the subject of "Manfred" is the
dominant idea of the age, expressed so as to display the contrast of two
masters, and of two nations.
What constitutes Goethe's glory is, that in the nineteenth century he
did produce an epic poem--I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and
speak. This appeared impossible in the nineteenth century, since the
special work of our age is the refined consideration of creative ideas,
and the suppression of the poetic characters by which other ages have
never failed to represent them. Of the two divine families, the Greek
and the Christian, neither seemed capable of re-entering the epic world.
Classic literature dragged down in its fall the mythological puppets,
and the ancient gods slept on their old Olympus, whither history and
archaeology alone might go to arouse them. The angels and saints of the
Middle Ages, as strange and almost as far from our thoughts, slept on
the vellum of their missals and in the niches of their cathedrals; and
if a poet, like Chateaubriand, tried to make them enter the modern
world,[191] he succeeded only in degrading them, and in making of them
vestry decorations and operatic machinery. The mythic credulity
disappeared amid the growth of experience, the mystic amid the growth of
prosperity. Paganism, at the contact of science, was reduced to the
recognition of natural forces; Christianity, at the contact of morality,
was reduced to the adoration of the ideal. In order again to deify
physical powers, man should have become once more a healthy child, as in
Homer's time. In order again to deify spiritual powers, man should have
become once more a sickly child as in Dante's time. But he was an adult,
and could not ascend again to civilizations or epics, from which the
current of his thought and of his life had withdrawn him forever. How
was he to be shown his gods, the modern gods? how could he reclothe them
in a personal and visible form, since he had toiled to strip them
precisely of all personal and sensible form, and had succeeded in this?
Instead of rejecting legend, Goethe took it up again. He chose a
mediaeval story for his theme. Carefully, scrupulously, he tracked old
manners and old beliefs; an alchemist's laboratory, a sorcerer's
conjuring-book, coarse villagers, students' or drunkards' gayety, a
witches' meeting on the Brocken, a mass in church; we might fancy we saw
an engraving of Luther's time, conscientious and minute: nothing is
omitted. Heavenly characters appear in consecrated attitudes after the
text of Scripture, like the old mysteries: the Lord with his angels,
then with the devil, who comes to ask permission to tempt Faust, as
formerly he tempted Job; heaven, as St. Francis imagined it and Van Eyck
painted it, with anchorites, holy women and doctors--some in a landscape
with bluish rocks, others above in the sublime air, hovering in choirs
about the Virgin in glory, one tier above another. Goethe affects even
to be so orthodox as to write under each her Latin name, and her due
niche in the Vulgate.[192] And this very fidelity proclaims him a
sceptic. We see that if he resuscitates the ancient world, it is as a
historian, not as a believer. He is only a Christian through remembrance
and poetic feeling. In him the modern spirit overflows designedly the
narrow vessel in which he designedly seems to enclose it. The thinker
percolates through the narrator. Every instant a calculated word, which
seems involuntary, opens up glimpses of philosophy, beyond the veils of
tradition. Who are they, these supernatural personages--this god, this
Mephistopheles, these angels? Their substance incessantly dissolves and
re-forms, to show or hide alternately the idea which fills it. Are they
abstractions or characters? Mephistopheles, a revolutionary and a
philosopher, who has read "Candide," and cynically jeers at the
Powers--is he anything but "the spirit of negation"?
The angels
"Rejoice to share
The wealth exuberant of all that's fair,
Which lives, and has its being everywhere!
And the creative essence which surrounds,
And lives in all, and worketh evermore.
Encompass... within love's gracious bounds;
And all the world of things, which flit before
The gaze in seeming fitful and obscure.
Do... in lasting thoughts embody and secure."[193]
Are these angels, for an instant at least, anything else than the ideal
intelligence which comes, through sympathy, to love all, and through
ideas, to comprehend all? What shall we say of this Deity, at first
biblical and individual, who little by little is unshaped, vanishes and,
sinking to the depths, behind the splendors of living nature and mystic
reverie, is confused with the inaccessible absolute? Thus is the whole
poem unfolded, action and characters, men and gods, antiquity and Middle
Ages, aggregate and details, always on the confines of two worlds--one
visible and figurative, the other intelligible and formless; one
comprehending the moving externals of history or of life, and all that
hued and perfumed bloom which nature lavishes on the surface of
existence, the other containing the profound generative powers and
invisible fixed laws by which all these living beings come to the light
of day.[194] At last we see our gods: we no longer parody them, like our
ancestors, by idols or persons; we perceive them as they are in
themselves, and we have no need, in order to see them, to renounce
poetry, nor break with the past We remain on our knees before the
shrines where men have, prayed for three thousand years; we do not tear
a single rose from the chaplets with which they have crowned their
divine Madonnas; we do not extinguish a single candle which they have
crowded on the altar steps; we behold with an artist's pleasure the
precious shrines where, amidst the wrought candlesticks, the suns of
diamonds, the gorgeous copes, they have scattered the purest treasures
of their genius and their heart. But our thoughts pierce further than
our eyes. For us, at certain moments, these draperies, this marble, all
this pomp vacillates; it is no longer aught but beautiful phantoms; it
vanishes in the smoke, and we discover through it and behind it the
impalpable ideal which has set up these pillars, lighted these roofs,
and hovered for centuries over the kneeling multitude.
To understand the legend and also to understand life, is the object of
this work, and of the whole work of Goethe. Everything, brutish or
rational, vile or sublime, fantastic or tangible, is a group of powers,
of which our mind, through study and sympathy, may reproduce in itself
the elements and the disposition. Let us reproduce it, and give it in
our thought a new existence. Is a gossip like Martha, babbling and
foolish--a drunkard like Frosch, brawling and dirty, and the other Dutch
boors--unworthy to enter a picture? Even the female apes, and the apes
who sit beside the caldron, watching that it does not boil over, with
their hoarse cries and disordered fancies, may repay the trouble of art
in restoring them. Wherever there is life, even bestial or maniacal,
there is beauty. The more we look upon nature, the more we find it
divine--divine even in rocks and plants. Consider these forests, they
seem motionless; but the leaves breathe, and the sap mounts insensibly
through the massive trunks and branches, to the slender shoots,
stretched like fingers at the end of the twigs; it fills the swollen
ducts, leaks out in living forms, loads the frail aments with
fecundating dust, spreads profusely through the fermenting air the
vapors and odors: this luminous air, this dome of verdure, this long
colonnade of trees, this silent soil, labor and are transformed; they
accomplish a work, and the poet's heart has but to listen to them to
find a voice for their obscure instincts. They speak in his heart; still
better, they sing, and other beings do the same; each, by its distinct
melody, short or long, strange or simple, solely adapted to its nature,
capable of manifesting it fully, in the same manner as a sound, by its
pitch, its height, its force, manifests the inner structure of the body
which has produced it. This melody the poet respects; he avoids altering
it by confusing its ideas or accent; his whole care is to keep it intact
and pure. Thus is his work produced, an echo of universal nature, a vast
chorus in which gods, men, past, present, all periods of history, all
conditions of life, all orders of existence agree without confusion, and
in which the flexible genius of the musician, who is alternately
transformed into each one of them in order to interpret and comprehend
them, only bears witness to his own thought in giving an insight, beyond
this immense harmony, into the group of ideal laws whence it is derived,
and the inner reason which sustains it.
Beside this lofty conception, what is the supernatural part of Manfred?
Doubtless Byron is moved by the great things of nature; he had just left
the Alps; he has seen those glaciers which are like "a frozen
hurricane"--those "torrents which roll the sheeted silver's waving
column o'er the crag's headlong perpendicular, like the pale courser's
tail, as told in the Apocalypse"--but he has brought nothing from them
but images. His witch, his spirits, his Arimanes, are but stage gods. He
believes in them no more than we do. Genuine gods are created with much
greater difficulty; we must believe in them; we must, like Goethe, have
assisted long at their birth, like philosophers and scholars; we must
have seen of them more than their externals. He who, whilst continuing a
poet, becomes a naturalist and geologist, who has followed in the
fissures of the rocks the tortuous waters slowly distilled, and driven
at length by their own weight to the light, may ask himself, as the
Greeks did formerly, when they saw them roll and sparkle in their
emerald tints, what these waters might be thinking, whether they
thought. What a strange life is theirs, alternately at rest and in
violent motion. How far removed from ours! With what effort must we tear
ourselves from our worn and complicated passions, to comprehend the
youth and divine simplicity of a being without reflection and form! How
difficult is such a work for a modern man! How impossible for an
Englishman! Shelley, Keats approached it--thanks to the nervous delicacy
of their sickly or overflowing imagination; but how partial still was
this approach! And how we feel, on reading them, that they would have
needed the aid of public culture, and the aptitude of national genius,
which Goethe possessed! That which the whole of civilization has alone
developed in the Englishman, is energetic will and practical faculties.
Here man has braced himself up in his efforts, become concentrated in
resistance, fond of action, and hence shut out from pure speculation,
from wavering sympathy, and from disinterested art. In him metaphysical
liberty has perished under utilitarian preoccupation, and pantheistic
reverie under moral prejudices. How would he frame and bend his
imagination so as to follow the numberless and fugitive outlines of
existences, especially of vague existences? How would he leave his
religion so a£ to reproduce indifferently the powers of indifferent
nature? And who is further from flexibility and indifference than he?
The flowing water, which in Goethe takes the mould of all the contours
of the soil, and which we perceive in the sinuous and luminous distance
beneath the golden mist which it exhales, was in Byron suddenly frozen
into a mass of ice, and makes but a rigid block of crystal. Here, as
elsewhere, there is but one character, the same as before. Men, gods,
nature, all the changing and multiplex world of Goethe, has vanished.
The poet alone subsists, as expressed in his character. Inevitably
imprisoned within himself, he could see nothing but himself; if he must
come to other existences, it is that they may reply to him; and through
this pretended epic he persisted in his eternal monologue.
But how all these powers, assembled in a single being, make him great!
Into what mediocrity and platitude sinks the Faust of Goethe, compared
to Manfred! As soon as we cease to see humanity in this Faust, what does
he become? Is he a hero? A sad hero, who has no other task but to speak,
is afraid, studies the shades of his sensations, and walks about! His
worst action is to seduce a grisette, and to go and dance by night in
bad company--two exploits which many a German student has accomplished.
His wilfulness is whim, his ideas are longings and dreams. A poet's soul
in a scholar's head, both unfit for action, and not harmonizing well
together; discord within, and weakness without; in short, character is
wanting: it is German all over. By his side, what a man is Manfred! He
is a man; there is no fitter word, or one which could depict him better.
He will not, at the sight of a spirit, "quake like a crawling, cowering,
timorous worm." He will not regret that "he has neither land, nor pence,
nor worldly honours, nor influence." He will not let himself be duped by
the devil like a schoolboy, or go and amuse himself like a cockney with
the phantasmagoria of the Brocken. He has lived like a feudal chief, not
like a scholar who has taken his degree; he has fought, mastered others;
he knows how to master himself. If he has studied magic arts, it is not
from an alchemist's curiosity, but from a spirit of revolt:
"From my youth upwards
My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh....
My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite, or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along
On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave....
To follow through the night the moving moon,
The stars and their development; or catch
The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim;
Or to look, list'ning, on the scatter'd leaves,
While Autumn winds were at their evening song.
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one--
Hating to be so--cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again....[195]
I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway--and soothe--and sue--
And watch all time--and pry into all place--
And be a living lie--who would become
A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain'd to mingle with
A herd, though to be leader--and of wolves..."[196]
He lives alone, and he cannot live alone. The deep source of love, cut
off from its natural issues, then overflows and lays waste the heart
which refused to expand. He has loved, too well, one too near to him,
his sister it may be; she has died of it, and impotent remorse fills the
soul which no human occupation could satisfy:
"... My solitude is solitude no more,
But peopled with the Furies;--I have gnash'd
My teeth in darkness till returning morn,
Then cursed myself till sunset;--I have pray'd
For madness as a blessing--'tis denied me.
I have affronted death--but in the war
Of elements the waters shrunk from me,
And fatal things pass'd harmless--the cold hand
Of an all-pitiless demon held me back,
Back by a single hair, which would not break.
In fantasy, imagination, all
The affluence of my soul.... I plunged deep,
But, like an ebbing wave, it dashed me back
Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought....
I dwell in my despair,
And live, and live for ever."[197]
He only wishes to see her once more: to this sole and all-powerful
desire flow all the energies of his soul. He calls her up in the midst
of spirits; she appears, but answers not. He prays to her--with what
cries, what doleful cries of deep anguish! How he loves! With what
yearning and effort all his downtrodden and outcrushed tenderness gushes
out and escapes at the sight of those well-beloved eyes, which he sees
for the last time! With what enthusiasm his convulsive arms are
stretched towards that frail form which, shuddering, has quitted the
tomb!--towards those cheeks in which the blood, forcibly recalled,
plants "a strange hectic--like the unnatural red which Autumn plants
upon the perished leaf."
"... Hear me, hear me--
Astarte! my beloved! speak to me:
I have so much endured--so much endure--
Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me
Too much as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not--that I do bear
This punishment for both--that thou wilt be
One of the blessed--and that I shall die;
For hitherto all hateful things conspire
To bind me in existence--in a life
Which makes me shrink from immortality--
A future like the past. I cannot rest.
I know not what I ask, nor what I seek:
I feel but what thou art--and what I am;
And I would hear yet once before I perish
The voice which was my music--Speak to me!
For I have call'd on thee in the still night,
Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs,
And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves
Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name,
Which answer'd me--many things answer'd me--
Spirits and men--but thou wert silent all....
Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth,
And never found thy likeness--Speak to me!
Look on the fiends around--they feel for me:
I fear them not, and feel for thee alone--
Speak to me! though it be in wrath;--but say--
I reck not what--but let me hear thee once--
This once--once more!"[198]
She speaks. What a sad and doubtful reply! Manfred's limbs are convulsed
when she disappears. But an instant after the spirits see that:
"... He mastereth himself, and makes
His torture tributary to his will.
Had he been one of us, he would have made
An awful spirit."[199]
Will is the unshaken basis of this soul. He did not bend before the
chief of the spirits; he stood firm and calm before the infernal throne,
whilst all the demons were raging who would tear him to pieces: now he
dies, and they assail him, but he still strives and conquers:
"... Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts--
Is its own origin of ill and end--
And its own place and time--its innate sense,
When stripp'd of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without;
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey--
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.--Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me--but not yours!"[200]
This "I," the invincible I, who suffices to himself, on whom nothing has
a hold, demons nor men, the sole author of his own good and ill, a sort
of suffering or fallen god, but god always, even in its quivering flesh,
amidst his soiled and blighted destiny--such is the hero and the work of
this mind, and of the men of his race. If Goethe was the poet of the
universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if in one the German
genius found its interpreter, the English genius found its interpreter
in the other.
Section V.--What Byron's Contemporaries Thought of Him.--His Morals
We can well imagine that Englishmen clamored at and repudiated the
monster. Southey, the poet-laureate, said of him, in good biblical
style, that he savored of Moloch and Belial--most of all of Satan; and,
with the generosity of a brother poet, called the attention of
government to him. We should fill many pages if we were to copy the
reproaches of the respectable reviews against these "men of diseased
hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to
suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the
holiest ordinances of human society, and, hating that revealed religion
which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to
disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by
infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul."[201] This
sounds like the emphasis of an episcopal charge and scholastic pedantry:
in England the press does the duty of the police, and it never did it
more violently than at that time. Opinion backed the press. Several
times, in Italy, Lord Byron saw gentlemen leave a drawing-room with
their wives, when he was announced. Owing to his title and celebrity,
the scandal which he caused was more conspicuous than any other: he was
a public sinner. One day an obscure parson sent him a prayer which he
had found amongst the papers of his wife--a charming and pious lady,
recently dead, and who had secretly prayed to God for the conversion of
the great sinner. Conservative and Protestant England, after a quarter
of a century of moral wars, and two centuries of moral education,
carried its severity and rigor to extremes; and Puritan intolerance,
like Catholic intolerance previously in Spain, put recusants out of the
pale of the law. The proscription of voluptuous or abandoned life, the
narrow observation of order and decency, the respect of all police,
human and divine; the necessary bows at the mere name of Pitt, of the
king, the church, the God of the Bible; the attitude of a gentleman in a
white tie, conventional, inflexible, implacable--such were the customs
then met with across the Channel, a hundred times more tyrannical than
nowadays: at that time, as Stendhal says, a peer at his fireside dared
not cross his legs, for fear of its being improper. England held herself
stiff, uncomfortably laced in her stays of decorum. Hence arose two
sources of misery: a man suffers, and is tempted to throw down the ugly
choking apparatus, when he is sure that it can be done secretly. On the
one side constraint, on the other hypocrisy--these are the two vices of
English civilization; and it was these which Byron, with his poet's
discernment and his combative instincts, attacked.
He had seen them from the first; true artists are perspicacious: it is
in this that they outstrip us; we judge from hearsay and formulas, like
cockneys; they, like eccentric beings, from accomplished facts, and
things: at twenty-two he perceived the tedium born of constraint
desolating all high life:
"There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink
With the three-thousandth curtsy;...
Saloon, room, hall, o'erflow beyond their brink,
And long the latest of arrivals halts,
'Midst royal dukes and dames condemn'd to climb,
And gain an inch of staircase at a time."[202]
He wrote also:
"He (the Count) ought to have been in the country during the hunting
season, with 'a select party of distinguished guests,' as the papers
term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the
hunting days), and the soirée ensuing thereupon--and the women looking
as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished
that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect at Lord
C----'s--small, but select, and composed of the most amusing people. The
dessert was hardly on the table, when, out of twelve, I counted five
asleep."[203]
As for the morals of the upper classes, this is what he says:
"Went to my box at Covent Garden to-night.... Casting my eyes round the
house, in the next box to me, and the next, and the next, were the most
distinguished old and young Babylonians of quality.... It was as if the
house had been divided between your public and your understood
courtesans;--but the intriguantes much outnumbered the regular
mercenaries. Now, where lay the difference between Pauline and her
mother,... and Lady---- and daughter? except that the two last may enter
Carlton and any other house, and the two first are limited to the Opera
and b-- house. How I do delight in observing life as it really is!--and
myself, after all, the worst of any!"[204]
Decorum and debauchery; moral hypocrites, "_qui mettent leurs vertus en
mettant leurs gants blancs_";[205] an oligarchy which, to preserve its
places and its sinecures, ravages Europe, preys on Ireland, and excites
the people by making use of the grand words, virtue, Christianity, and
liberty: there was truth in all these invectives.[206] It is only thirty
years since the ascendancy of the middle class diminished the privileges
and corruptions of the great; but at that time hard words could with
justice be thrown at their heads. Byron said, quoting from Voltaire:
"'_La Pudeur s'est enfuie des cœurs, et s'est réfugiée sur les
lèvres.' ... 'Plus les mœurs sont dépravées, plus les expressions
deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu'on a perdu en
vertu._' This is the real fact, as applicable to the degraded and
hypocritical mass which leavens the present English generation; and it
is the only answer they deserve.... Cant is the crying sin of this
double-dealing and false-speaking time of selfish spoilers."[207]
And then he wrote his masterpiece, "Don Juan."[208]
All here was new, form as well as substance; for he had entered into a
new world. The Englishman, the Northman, transplanted amongst southern
manners and into Italian life, had become imbued with a new sap, which
made him bear new fruit. He had been induced to read[209] the rather free
satires of Buratti, and the more than voluptuous sonnets of Baffo. He
lived in the happy Venetian society, still exempt from political
animosities, where care seemed a folly, where life was looked upon as a
carnival, pleasure displayed itself openly, not timid and hypocritical,
but loosely arrayed and commended. He amused himself here, impetuously
at first, more than sufficient, even more than too much, and almost
killed himself by these amusements; but after vulgar gallantries, having
felt a feeling of love, he became a _cavalier' servente_, after the
fashion of the country where he dwelt, with the consent of the family of
the lady, offering his arm, carrying her shawl, a little awkwardly at
first, and wonderingly, but on the whole happier than he had ever been,
and fanned by a warm breath of pleasure and abandon. He saw in Italy the
overthrow of all English morality, conjugal infidelity established as a
rule, amorous fidelity raised to a duty: "There is no convincing a woman
here that she is in the smallest degree deviating from the rule of right
or the fitness of things in having an _amorosa._[210]... Love (the
sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an
actual virtue, provided it is disinterested, and not a caprice, and is
confined to one object."[211] A little later he translated the "Morgante
Maggiore" of Pulci, to show "What was permitted in a Catholic country
and a bigoted age to a churchman on the score of religion, and to
silence those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy."[212] He
rejoiced in this liberty and this ease, and resolved never to fall again
under the pedantic inquisition, which in his country had condemned and
damned him past forgiveness. He wrote his "Beppo" like an improvisatore,
with a charming freedom, a flowing and fantastic lightness of mood, and
contrasted in it the recklessness and happiness of Italy with the
prejudices and repulsiveness of England:
"I like... to see the Sun set, sure he'll rise to-morrow,
Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as
A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow,
But with all Heaven t' himself; that day will break as
Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forced to borrow
That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers
Where reeking London's smoky caldron simmers.
"I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet South,
And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in,
That not a single accent seems uncouth,
Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural,
Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.
"I like the women too (forgive my folly),
From the rich peasant cheek of ruddy bronze,
And large black eyes that flash on you a volley
Of rays that say a thousand things at once,
To the high dama's brow, more melancholy,
But clear, and with a wild and liquid glance,
Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies."[213]
With other manners there existed in Italy another morality; there is one
for every age, race, and sky--I mean that the ideal model varies with
the circumstances which fashion it. In England the severity of the
climate, the warlike energy of the race, and the liberty of the
institutions prescribe an active life, severe manners, Puritanic
religion, the marriage tie strictly kept, a feeling of duty and
self-command. In Italy the beauty of the climate, the innate sense of
the beautiful, and the despotism of the government induced an idle life,
loose manners, imaginative religion, the culture of the arts, and the
search after happiness. Each model has its beauties and its plots--the
epicurean artist like the political moralist;[214] each shows by its
greatnesses the littlenesses of the other, and, to set in relief the
disadvantages of the second, Lord Byron had only to set in relief the
seductions of the first.
Thereupon he went in search of a hero, and did not find one, which, in
this age of heroes, is "an uncommon want." For lack of a better he chose
"our ancient friend Don Juan"--a scandalous choice: what an outcry the
English moralists will make! But, to cap the horror, this Don Juan is
not wicked, selfish, odious, like his fellows; he does not seduce, he is
no corrupter. When an opportunity arises, he lets himself drift; he has
a heart and senses, and, under a beautiful sun, they are easily touched:
at sixteen a youth cannot help himself, nor at twenty, nor perhaps at
thirty. Lay it to the charge of human nature, my dear moralists; it is
not I who made it as it is. If you will grumble, address yourselves
higher: we are here as painters, not as makers of human puppets, and we
do not answer for the inner structure of our dancing-dolls. Our Don Juan
is now going about; he goes about in many places, and in all he is
young; we will not launch thunderbolts on his head because he is young;
that fashion is past: the green devils and their capers only came on the
stage in the last act of Mozart's "Don Giovanni." And, moreover, Juan is
so amiable! After all, what has he done that others don't do! He has
been a lover of Catherine II, but he only followed the lead of the
diplomatic corps and the whole Russian army. Let him sow his wild oats;
the good grain will spring up in its time. Once in England, he will
behave himself decently. I confess that he may even there, when
provoked, go a-gleaning in the conjugal gardens of the aristocracy; but
in the end he will settle, go and pronounce moral speeches in
Parliament, become a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
If you wish absolutely to have him punished, we will "make him end in
hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the
severest: the Spanish tradition says hell; but it is probably only an
allegory of the other state."[215] At all events, married or damned, the
good folk at the end of the piece will have the pleasure of knowing that
he is burning all alive.
Is not this a singular apology? Does it not aggravate the fault? Let us
wait; we know not yet the whole venom of the book: together with Juan
there are Donna Julia, Haidée, Gulbeyaz, Dudu, and many more. It is
here the diabolical poet digs in his sharpest claw, and he takes care to
dig it into our weakest side. What will the clergymen and white-chokered
reviewers say? For, to speak the truth, there is no preventing it: we
must read on, in spite of ourselves. Twice or three times following we
meet here with happiness; and when I say happiness, I mean profound and
complete happiness--not mere voluptuousness, not obscene gayety; we are
far removed from the nicely-written ribaldry of Dorat, and the unbridled
license of Rochester. Beauty is here, southern beauty, resplendent and
harmonious, spread over everything, over the luminous sky, the calm
scenery, corporal nudity, artlessness of heart. Is there a thing it does
not deify? All sentiments are exalted under its hands. What was gross
becomes noble; even in the nocturnal adventure in the seraglio, which
seems worthy of Faublas, poetry embellishes licentiousness. The girls
are lying in the large silent apartment, like precious flowers brought
from all climates into a conservatory:
"One with her flush'd cheek laid on her white arm,
And raven ringlets gather'd in dark crowd
Above her brow, lay dreaming soft and warm;
One with her auburn tresses lightly bound,
And fair brows gently drooping, as the fruit
Nods from the tree, was slumbering with soft breath,
And lips apart, which show'd the pearls beneath....
A fourth as marble, statue-like and still,
Lay in a breathless, hush'd, and stony sleep;
White, cold, and pure... a carved lady on a monument."[216]
However, "the fading lamps waned dim and blue"; Dudu is asleep, the
innocent girl; and if she has cast a glance on her glass,
"'Twas like the fawn, which, in the lake display'd,
Beholds her own shy, shadowy image pass,
When first she starts, and then returns to peep,
Admiring this new native of the deep."[217]
What will become now of Puritanic prudery? Can the proprieties prevent
beauty from being beautiful? Will you condemn a picture of Titian for
its nudity? What gives value to human life, and nobility to human
nature, if not the power of attaining delicious and sublime emotions? We
have just had one--one worthy of a painter; is it not worth that of an
alderman? Shall we refuse to acknowledge the divine because it appears
in art and enjoyment, and not only in conscience and action? There is a
world beside ours, and a civilization beside ours; our rules are narrow,
and our pedantry tyrannic; the human plant can be otherwise developed
than in our compartments and under our snows, and the fruits it will
then bear will not be less precious. We must confess it, since we relish
them when they are offered to us. Who has read the love of Haidée, and
has had any other thought than to envy and pity her? She is a wild child
who has picked up Juan--another child cast ashore senseless by the
waves. She has preserved him, nursed him like a mother, and now she
loves him: who can blame her for loving him? Who, in presence of the
splendid nature which smiles on and protects them, can imagine for them
anything else than the all-powerful feeling which unites them:
"It was a wild and breaker-beaten coast,
With cliffs above, and a broad sandy shore,
Guarded by shoals and rocks as by an host,...
And rarely ceased the haughty billow's roar,
Save on the dead long summer days, which make
The outstretch'd ocean glitter like a lake....
And all was stillness, save the sea-bird's cry,
And dolphin's leap, and little billow crost
By some low rock or shelve, that made it fret
Against the boundary it scarcely wet....
"And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand,
Over the shining pebbles and the shells,
Glided along the smooth and harden'd sand,
And in the worn and wild receptacles
Work'd by the storms, yet work'd as it were plann'd,
In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells,
They turn'd to rest; and, each clasp'd by an arm,
Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm.
"They looked up to the sky whose floating glow
Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright;
They gazed upon the glittering sea below,
Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight;
They heard the wave's splash and the wind so low,
And saw each other's dark eyes darting light
Into each other--and, beholding this,
Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss....
"They were alone, but not alone as they
Who shut in chambers think it loneliness;
The silent ocean, and the starlight bay
The twilight glow, which momently grew less,
The voiceless sand, and dropping caves that lay
Around them, made them to each other press,
As if there were no life beneath the sky
Save theirs, and that their life could never die."[218]
An excellent opportunity to introduce here your formularies and
catechisms:
"Haidée spoke not of scruples, ask'd no vows,
Nor offer'd any...
She was all which pure, ignorance allows,
And flew to her young mate like a young bird."[219]
Nature suddenly expands, for she is ripe, like a bud bursting into
bloom, nature in her fulness, instinct, and heart:
"Alas! they were so young, so beautiful,
So lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour
Was that in which the heart is always full,
And, having o'er itself no further power,
Prompts deeds eternity cannot annul...."[220]
O admirable moralists, you stand before these two flowers like patented
gardeners, holding in your hands a model of the bloom sanctioned by your
society of horticulture, proving that the model has not been followed,
and deciding that the two weeds must be cast into the fire, which you
keep burning to consume irregular growths. You have judged well, and you
know your art.
Besides British cant, there is universal hypocrisy; besides English
pedantry, Byron wars against human roguery. Here is the general aim of
the poem, and to this his character and genius tended. His great and
gloomy dreams of juvenile imagination have vanished; experience has
come; he knows man now; and what is man once known? does the sublime
abound in him? Do we think that the grand sentiments--those of Childe
Harold, for instance--are the ordinary course of life?[221] The truth
is, that man employs most of his time in sleeping, dining, yawning,
working like a horse, amusing himself like an ape. According to Byron,
he is an animal; except for a few minutes, his nerves, his blood, his
instincts lead him. Routine works over it all, necessity whips him on,
the animal advances. As the animal is proud, and moreover imaginative,
it pretends to be marching for its own pleasure, that there is no whip,
that at all events this whip rarely touches its flanks, that at least
its stoic back can make-believe that it does not feel it. It thinks that
it is decked with the most splendid trappings, and thus struts on with
measured steps, fancying that it carries relics and treads on carpets
and flowers, whilst in reality it tramples in the mud, and carries with
it the stains and bad smells of every dunghill. What a pastime to touch
its mangy back, to set before its eyes the sacks full of flour which it
carries, and the goad which makes it go![222] What a pretty farce! It is
the eternal farce; and not a sentiment thereof but provides him with an
act: love in the first place. Certainly Donna Julia is very lovable, and
Byron loves her; but she comes out of his hands, as rumpled as any other
woman. She is virtuous, of course; and what is better still, she desires
to be so. She plies herself, in connection with Don Juan, with the
finest arguments; what a fine thing are arguments, and how suited they
are to check passion! Nothing can be more solid than a firm purpose,
propped up by logic, resting on the fear of the world, the thought of
God, the recollection of duty; nothing can prevail against it except a
_tête-à-tête_ in June, on a moonlight evening. At last the deed is
done, and the poor timid lady is surprised by her outraged husband; in
what a situation! Let us look again at the book. Of course she will be
speechless, ashamed and full of tears, and the moral reader duly reckons
on her remorse. My dear reader, you have not reckoned on impulse and
nerves. To-morrow she will feel shame; the business is now to overwhelm
the husband, to deafen him, to confound him, to save Juan, to save
herself, to fight. The war once begun, is waged with all kinds of
weapons, and chiefly with audacity and insults. The only idea is the
present need, and this absorbs all others; it is in this that woman is a
woman. This Julia cries lustily. It is a regular storm: hard words and
recriminations, mockery and challenges, fainting and tears. In a quarter
of an hour she has gained twenty years' experience. You did not know,
nor she either, what an actress can emerge, all on a sudden, unforeseen,
out of a simple woman. Do you know what can emerge from yourself? You
think yourself rational, humane; I admit it for to-day; you have dined,
and you are comfortable in a pleasant room. Your human mechanism works
without getting into disorder, because the wheels are oiled and well
regulated; but place it in a shipwreck, a battle, let the failing or the
plethora of blood for an instant derange the chief pieces, and we shall
see you howling or drivelling like a madman or an idiot. Civilization,
education, reason, health, cloak us in their smooth and polished cases;
let us tear them away one by one, or all together, and we laugh to see
the brute, who is lying at the bottom. Here is our friend Juan reading
Julia's last letter, and swearing in a transport never to forget the
beautiful eyes which he caused to weep so much. Was ever feeling more
tender or sincere? But unfortunately Juan is at sea, and sickness sets
in. He cries out:
"Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea,
Than I resign thine image, oh, my fair!...
(Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.)...
Sooner shall heaven kiss earth--(here he fell sicker.)
Oh, Julia! what is every other woe?
(For God's sake let me have a glass of liquor;
Pedro, Battista, help me down below.)
Julia, my love!--(You rascal, Pedro, quicker)--
Oh, Julia!--(this curst vessel pitches so)
Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!
(Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)...
Love's a capricious power...
Against all noble maladies he's bold,
But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet;...
Shrinks from the application of hot towels,
And purgatives are dangerous to his reign,
Sea-sickness death."[223]
Many other things cause the death of Love:
"'Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine.
Although they both are born in the same clime;
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine--
A sad, sour, sober beverage.[224]...
An honest gentleman, at his return,
May not have the good fortune of Ulysses;...
The odds are that he finds a handsome urn
To his memory--and two or three young misses
Born to some friend, who holds his wife and riches--
And that his Argus bites him by--the breeches."[225]
These are the words of a sceptic, even of a cynic. Sceptic and cynic, it
is in this he ends. Sceptic through misanthropy, cynic through bravado,
a sad and combative humor always impels him; southern voluptuousness has
not conquered him; he is only an epicurean through contradiction and for
a moment:
"Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication."[226]
We see clearly that he is always the same, going to extremes and
unhappy, bent on destroying himself. His "Don Juan," also, is a
debauchery; in it he diverts himself outrageously at the expense of all
respectable things, as a bull in a china shop. He is always violent, and
often ferocious; a sombre imagination intersperses his love stories with
horrors leisurely enjoyed, the despair and famine of shipwrecked men,
and the emaciation of the raging skeletons feeding on each other. He
laughs at it horribly, like Swift; he jests over it like Voltaire:
"And next they thought upon the master's mate,
As fattest; but he saved himself, because,
Besides being much averse from such a fate,
There were some other reasons: the first was,
He had been rather indisposed of late;
And that which chiefly proved his saving clause,
Was a small present made to him at Cadiz,
By general subscription of the ladies."[227]
With his specimens in hand,[228] Byron follows with a surgeon's
exactness all the stages of death, gorging, rage, madness, howling,
exhaustion, stupor; he wishes to touch and exhibit the naked and
ascertained truth, the last grotesque and hideous element of humanity.
Let us read again the assault on Ismail--the grape-shot and the bayonet,
the street massacres, the corpses used as fascines, and the thirty-eight
thousand slaughtered Turks. There is blood enough to satiate a tiger,
and this blood flows amidst an accompaniment of jests; it is in order to
rail at war, and the butcheries dignified with the name of exploits. In
this pitiless and universal demolition of all human vanities, what
remains? What do we know except that life is a "scene of all-confess'd
inanity," and that men are,
"Dogs, or men!--for I flatter you in saying
That ye are dogs--your betters far--ye may
Read, or read not, what I am now essaying
To show ye what ye are in every way?"[229]
What does he find in science but deficiencies, and in religion but
mummeries?[230] Does he so much as preserve poetry? Of the divine
mantle, the last garment which a poet respects, he makes a rag to
trample upon, to wring, to make holes in, out of sheer wantonness. At
the most touching moment of Haidée's love he vents a buffoonery. He
concludes an ode with caricatures. He is Faust in the first verse, and
Mephistopheles in the second. He employs, in the midst of tenderness or
of murder, penny-print witticisms, trivialities, gossip, with a
pamphleteer's vilification and a buffoon's whimsicalities. He lays bare
the poetic method, asks himself where he has got to, counts the stanzas
already done, jokes the Muse, Pegasus, and the whole epic stud, as
though he wouldn't give twopence for them. Again, what remains? Himself,
he alone, standing amidst all this ruin. It is he who speaks here; his
characters are but screens; half the time even he pushes them aside, to
occupy the stage. He lavishes upon us his opinions, recollections,
anger, tastes; his poem is a conversation, a confidence, with the ups
and downs, the rudeness and freedom of a conversation and a confidence,
almost like the holographic journal, in which, by night, at his
writing-table, he opened his heart and discharged his feelings. Never
was seen in such a clear glass the birth of lively thought, the tumult
of great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, always impassioned,
inexhaustibly fertile and creative, in whom suddenly, successively,
finished and adorned, bloomed all human emotions and ideas--sad, gay,
lofty, low, hustling one another, mutually impeding one another like
swarms of insects who go humming and feeding on flowers and in the mud.
He may say what he likes; willingly or unwillingly we listen to him; let
him leap from sublime to burlesque, we leap with him. He has so much
wit, so fresh a wit, so sudden, so biting, such a prodigality of
knowledge, ideas, images picked up from the four corners of the horizon,
in heaps and masses, that we are captivated, transported beyond all
limits; we cannot dream of resisting. Too vigorous, and hence
unbridled--that is the word which ever recurs when we speak of Byron;
too vigorous against others and himself, and so unbridled, that after
spending his life in setting the world at defiance, and his poetry in
depicting revolt, he can only find the fulfilment of his talent and the
satisfaction of his heart, in a poem waging war on all human and poetic
conventions. When a man lives in such a manner he must be great, but he
becomes also morbid. There is a malady of heart and mind in the style of
"Don Juan," as in Swift. When a man jests amidst his tears, it is
because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm,
and we see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness; in another,
excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was
exhausted in him. The last cantos of "Don Juan" drag: the gayety became
forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored.
A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his
hands; in the drama he only attained to powerful declamation, his
characters had no life; when he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him; he
went to Greece in search of action, and only found death.
Section VI.--The Malady of the Age
So lived and so died this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had
no more distinguished prey. Around him, like a hecatomb, lie the others,
wounded also by the greatness of their faculties and their immoderate
desires--some ending in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by
pleasure or work: these driven to madness or suicide; those beaten down
by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their too acute or
aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age,
the happiest, having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their
scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their
century, and we stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of
their cries. We were sad like them, and like them inclined to revolt.
The reign of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them;
the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without satisfying
it. In this wide-open career, the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity,
and the sceptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the sceptic, attacked
by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience,
abandoned his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared
happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man
abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea arose, the centre
of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age, to-wit, that here
is a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social
structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement.
What advice have they given us to cure this? They were great; were they
wise? "Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you; if the human
mechanism breaks, so much the worse! Cultivate your garden, bury
yourself in a little circle, re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden.
Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and
your conduct to manuals of devotion. Make your way; aspire to power,
honours, wealth." Such are the various replies of artists and citizens,
Christians and men of the world. Are they replies? And what do they
propose but to satiate one's self, to become stupid, to turn aside, to
forget? There is another and a deeper answer which Goethe was the first
to give, the truth of which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the
labor and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the
subject-matter of future literature: "Try to understand yourself, and
things in general." A strange reply, which seems hardly new, whose scope
we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet men will feel
their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets.
For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their
aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two
steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For
a long time they will bear like fetters the necessities which they ought
to have embraced as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been
tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half get rid
of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at tranquillity. All we can heal at
present is our intellect; we have no hold upon our feelings. But we have
a right to conceive for others the hopes which we no longer entertain
for ourselves, and to prepare for our descendants the happiness which we
shall never enjoy. Brought up in a more wholesome air, they will have,
mayhap, a wholesomer heart. The reformation of ideas ends by reforming
the rest, and the light of the mind produces serenity of heart.
Hitherto, in our judgments on men, we have taken for our masters the
oracles and poets, and like them we have received for undoubted truths
the noble dreams of our imagination and the imperious suggestions of our
heart. We have bound ourselves to the partiality of religious
divinations, and the inexactness of literary divinations, and we have
shaped our doctrines according to our instincts and our vexations.
Science at last approaches, and approaches man; it has gone beyond the
visible and palpable world of stars, stones, plants, amongst which man
disdainfully confined her. It reaches the heart provided with exact and
penetrating implements, whose justness has been proved, and their reach
measured by three hundred years of experience. Thought, with its
development and rank, its structure and relations, its deep material
roots, its infinite growth through history, its lofty bloom at the
summit of things, becomes the object of science--an object which, sixty
years ago, it foresaw in Germany, and which, slowly and surely probed,
by the same methods as the physical world, will be transformed before
our eyes, as the physical world has been transformed. It is already
being transformed, and we have left behind us the light in which Byron
and the French poets had considered it. No, man is not an abortion or a
monster; no, the business of poetry is not to disgust or defame him. He
is in his place, and completes a chain. Let us watch him grow and
increase, and we shall cease to rail at or curse him. He, like
everything else, is a product, and as such it is right he should be what
he is. His innate imperfection is in order, like the constant abortion
of a stamen in a plant, like the fundamental irregularity of four facets
in a crystal. What we took for a deformity, is a form; what seemed to us
the subversion of a law, is the accomplishment of a law. Human reason
and virtue have for their foundation instincts and animal images, as
living forms have for their instruments physical laws, as organic
matters have for their elements mineral substances. What wonder if
virtue or human reason, like living form or organic matter, sometimes
fails or decomposes, since like them, and like every superior and
complex existence, they have for support and control inferior and simple
forces, which, according to circumstances, now maintain it by their
harmony, now mar it by their discord? What wonder if the elements of
existence, like those of quantity, receive, from their very nature, the
immutable laws which constrain and reduce them to a certain species and
order of formation? Who will rise up against geometry? Who, especially,
will rise up against a living geometry? Who will not, on the contrary,
feel moved with admiration at the sight of those grand powers which,
situated at the heart of things, incessantly urge the blood through the
limbs of the old world, disperse it quickly in the infinite network of
arteries, and spread over the whole surface the eternal flower of youth
and beauty? Who, finally, will not feel himself ennobled, when he finds
that this pile of laws results in a regular series of forms, that matter
has thought for its goal, that nature ends in reason, and that this
ideal to which, amidst so many errors, all the aspirations of men cling,
is also the end to which aim, amidst so many obstacles, all the forces
of the universe? In this employment of science, and in this conception
of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new
religion, and it is in the present time our task to try and discover
them.
[Footnote 144: Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols. 1832; "Life," I. 102.]
[Footnote 145: Ibid. 63.]
[Footnote 146: Ibid. 69.]
[Footnote 147: Ibid. 137.]
[Footnote 148: Ibid. 26.]
[Footnote 149: Byron's Works, "Life," I. 53.]
[Footnote 150: Ibid. III. 83.]
[Footnote 151: Ibid. III. 20, March 28, 1814.]
[Footnote 152: Ibid. IV. 81; Letter to Moore, Feb. 12, 1818.]
[Footnote 153: Byron's Works, "Life," V. 96, Feb. 2, 1821.]
[Footnote 154: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," VII. 323.]
[Footnote 155: "If I was born, as the nurses say, with a 'silver spoon
in my mouth,' it has stuck in my throat, and spoiled my palate, so that
nothing put into it is swallowed with much relish--unless it be
cayenne.... I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep, and I have no
conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome."]
[Footnote 156: "I like Junius: he was a good hater. I don't understand
yielding sensitiveness. What I feel is an immense rage for forty-eight
hours."]
[Footnote 157: Byron's Works, "Life," I. 41.]
[Footnote 158: In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."]
[Footnote 159: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," III. 389.]
[Footnote 160: Ibid. V. 141.]
[Footnote 161: Moore's "Life of Byron," III. 12, March 10, Thor's day.
The last part of the sentence is a quotation from "Macbeth," V. 5.]
[Footnote 162: Ibid. IV. 169, note.]
[Footnote 163: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 67, Jan. 9, 1821.]
[Footnote 164: Ibid. V. 60, Jan. 6, 1821.]
[Footnote 165: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 97, February 2, 1821.]
[Footnote 166: Ibid. 95.]
[Footnote 167: Ibid. VI. 206.]
[Footnote 168: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 33, Ravenna, Nov. 18,
1820.]
[Footnote 169: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 265.]
[Footnote 170: Ibid. V. 150, Ravenna, May 3, 1821.]
[Footnote 171: "All the styles of the day are bombastic. I don't except
my own; no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language."]
[Footnote 172: See his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."]
[Footnote 173: Thirty thousand copies of "The Corsair" were sold in one
day.]
[Footnote 174: Byron's Works, VIII; "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I.
6.]
[Footnote 175: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 19.]
[Footnote 176: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. III. 7-15.]
[Footnote 177: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. IV. 1 and 2.]
[Footnote 178: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 39 and 40.]
[Footnote 179: Ibid. c. IV. 93 and 94.]
[Footnote 180: For example, "as weeping Beauty's cheek at Sorrow's tale."]
[Footnote 181: Here are verses like Pope, very
beautiful and false:
"And havock loath so much the waste
of time,
She scarce had left an uncommitted
crime,
One hour beheld him since the tide
he stemm'd,
Disguised, discover'd, conquering,
ta'en condemn'd,
A chief on land, an outlaw on the
deep,
Destroying, saving, prison'd, and
asleep!"]
[Footnote 182: Moore's "Life," IV. 345.]
[Footnote 183: Byron's Works, X., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. VII. 234.]
[Footnote 184: Byron's Works, X., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. VIII. 236.]
[Footnote 185: Ibid, XI., "Mazeppa," c. XIII. 167.]
[Footnote 186: Byron's Works, X., "The Siege of Corinth," c. XI. 116.]
[Footnote 187: Byron's Works, X., "The Siege of Corinth," c. XVI. 123.]
[Footnote 188: Byron's Works, X; "Lara," c. 2, st. 17-20, 60.]
[Footnote 189: Byron's Works, X; "Darkness," 283.]
[Footnote 190: Byron's Works, IV. 320; Letter to Mr. Murray, Ravenna,
June 7, 1820.]
[Footnote 191: The angel of holy loves, the angel of the ocean, the
choirs of happy spirits. See this at length in the "Martyrs."]
[Footnote 192: "Magna peccatrix." S. Lucæ. VII. 36: "Mulier Samaritana."
S. Johannis, IV; "Maria Ægyptiaca" (Acta Sanctorum), etc.]
[Footnote 193: Goethe's "Faust," translated by Theodore Martin. Prologue
in Heaven.]
[Footnote 194: Goethe sings:
"Wer ruft das Einzelne zur allgemeinen Weihe
Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlägt?"]
[Footnote 195: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 2, 32.]
[Footnote 196: Ibid.; "Manfred," III. 1, 56.]
[Footnote 197: Ibid.; "Manfred," II. 2, 35.]
[Footnote 198: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 4, 47.]
[Footnote 199: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 4, 49.]
[Footnote 200: Ibid. III. 4. 70.]
[Footnote 201: Southey, Preface to "A Vision of Judgment."]
[Footnote 202: Byron's Works, XVII; "Don Juan," c. 11, st. LXVII.]
[Footnote 203: Ibid. VI. 18; Letter 512, April 5, 1823.]
[Footnote 204: Ibid. II. 303; Journal, December 17, 1813.]
[Footnote 205: Alfred de Musset.]
[Footnote 206: See his terrible satirical poem, "The Vision of Judgment,"
against Southey, George IV, and official pomp.]
[Footnote 207: Byron's Works, XVI. 131; Preface to "Don Juan," cantos VI.,
VII., and VIII.]
[Footnote 208: "Don Juan" is a satire on the abuses in the present state
of society, and not a eulogy of vice.]
[Footnote 209: Stendhal, "Mémoires sur Lord Byron."]
[Footnote 210: Byron's Works, III. 333; Letter to Murray, Venice,
January 2, 1817.]
[Footnote 211: Ibid. III. 363; Letter to Moore, Venice, March 25, 1817.]
[Footnote 212: Byron's Works, IV. 279; Letter to Murray. Ravenna,
February 7, 1820.]
[Footnote 213: Ibid. XI; "Beppo," c. XLIII-XLV. 121.]
[Footnote 214: See Stendhal, "Vie de Giacomo Rossini," and Dean Stanley's
"Life of Dr. Arnold." The contrast is complete. See also Mme. de Staël's
"Corinne," where this opposition is very clearly grasped.]
[Footnote 215: Byron's Works, V. 127; Letter to Mr. Murray, Ravenna,
February 16, 1821.]
[Footnote 216: Ibid. XVI; "Don Juan," c. VI. st. LXVI-LXVIII.]
[Footnote 217: Byron's Works, "Don Juan," c. VI. st. LX.]
[Footnote 218: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st.
CLXXVII-CLXXXVIII.]
[Footnote 219: Ibid, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st CXC.]
[Footnote 220: Ibid. c. II. st. CXCII.]
[Footnote 221: Byron says (V. October 12, 1820), "Don Juan is too true,
and would. I suspect, live longer than Childe Harold. The women hate
many things which strip off the tinsel of sentiment."]
[Footnote 222: "Don Juan," c. VII. st. 2. "I hope it is no crime to
laugh at all things. For I wish to know what, after all, are all
things--but a show?"]
[Footnote 223: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. XIX-XXIII.]
[Footnote 224: Ibid. c. III. st. V.]
[Footnote 225: Ibid. c. III. st. XXIII.]
[Footnote 226: Ibid. c. II. st. CLXXVIII., CLXXIX.]
[Footnote 227: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. LXXXI.]
[Footnote 228: Byron had before him a dozen authentic descriptions.]
[Footnote 229: Byron's Works, XVI; "Don Juan," c. VII. st. 7.]
[Footnote 230: See his "Vision of Judgment."]
CHAPTER THIRD
THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
Part I.--The Past
Section I.--The Saxon Invasion.--The Norman Conquest
Having reached the limits of this long review, we can now survey as a
whole the aggregate of English civilization: everything is connected
there: a few primitive powers and circumstances have produced the rest,
and we have only to pursue their continuous action in order to
comprehend the nation and its history, its past and its present. At the
beginning and far away in the region of causes, comes the race. A whole
people, Angles and Saxons, destroyed, drove away, or enslaved the old
inhabitants, wiped out the Roman culture, settled by themselves and
unmixed, and, amongst the later Danish pirates, only encountered a new
reinforcement of the same blood. This is the primitive stock: from its
substance and innate properties is to spring almost the whole future
growth. At this time and as they then were, alone in their island, the
Angles and Saxons attained a development such as it was, rough, brutal,
and yet solid. They ate and drank, built and cleared the land, and in
particular, multiplied: the scattered tribes who crossed the sea in
leather boats, became a strong compact nation--three hundred thousand
families, rich, with store of cattle, abundantly provided with corporal
subsistence, partly at rest in the security of social life, with a king,
respected and frequent assemblies, good judicial customs: here, amidst
the fire and vehemence of barbarian temperament, the old Germanic
fidelity held men together, whilst the old Germanic independence held
them upright. In all else they barely advanced. A few fragmentary songs,
an epic in which still are to be found traces of the warlike excitement
of ancient barbarism, gloomy hymns, a harsh and fierce poetry, sometimes
sublime and always rude--this is all that remains of them. In six
centuries they had scarcely gone one step beyond the manners and
sentiments of their uncivilized Germany: Christianity, which obtained a
hold on them by the greatness of its biblical tragedies and the troubled
sadness of its aspirations, did not bring to them a Latin civilization:
this remained outside, hardly accepted by a few great men, deformed,
when it did enter, by the difference between the Roman and Saxon
genius--always altered and reduced; so much so, that for the men of the
Continent these islanders were but illiterate dullards, drunkards, and
gluttons; at all events, savage and slow by mood and nature, rebellious
against culture, and sluggish in development.
The empire of this world belongs to force. These people were conquered
forever and permanently--conquered by Normans; that is, by Frenchmen
more clever, more quickly cultivated and organized than they. This is
the great event which was to complete their character, decide their
history, and stamp upon character and history an impress of the
political and practical spirit which separates them from other German
nations. Oppressed, enclosed in the unyielding meshes of Norman
organization, they were not destroyed although they were conquered, they
were on their own soil, each with his friends and in his tithings; they
formed a body; they were yet twenty times more numerous than their
conquerors. Their situation and their necessities create their habits
and their aptitudes. They endure, protest, struggle, resist together and
unanimously; strive to-day, to-morrow, daily, not to be slain or
plundered, to restore their old laws, to obtain or extort guarantees;
and they gradually acquire patience, judgment, all the faculties and
inclinations by which liberties are maintained and states are founded.
By a singular good fortune, the Norman lords assist them in this; for
the king has secured to himself so much, and is so formidable, that, in
order to repress the great pillager, the lesser ones are forced to make
use of their Saxon subjects, to ally themselves with them, to give them
a share in their charters, to become their representatives, to admit
them into Parliament, to leave them to labor freely, to grow rich, to
acquire pride, strength, authority, to interfere with themselves in
public affairs. Thus, then, gradually the English nation, struck down by
the Conquest to the ground, as if with a mace, extricates and raises
itself; five hundred years and more being occupied in this re-elevation.
But during all this time, leisure failed for refined and lofty culture:
it was needful to live and defend themselves, to dig the ground, spin
wool, practise the bow, attend public meetings, serve on juries, to
contribute and argue for common interests: the important and respected
man is he who knows how to fight well and to gain much money. It was the
energetic and warlike manners which were developed, the active and
positive spirit which predominated; learning and elegance were left to
the gallicized nobles of the court. When the valiant Saxon townsfolk
quitted bow and plough, it was to feast copiously, or to sing the ballad
of "Robin Hood." They lived and acted; they did not reflect or write;
their national literature was reduced to fragments and rudiments,
harpers' songs, tavern epics, a religious poem, a few books on religious
reformation. At the same time Norman literature faded; separated from
the stem, and on a foreign soil, it languished in imitations; only one
great poet, almost French in mind, quite French in style, appeared, and,
after him, as before him, we find helpless drivel. For the second time,
a civilization of five centuries became sterile in great ideas and
works; this still more so than its neighbors, and for a twofold
reason--because to the universal impotence of the Middle Ages was added
the impoverishment of the Conquest, and because of the two component
literatures, one transplanted, became abortive, and the other,
mutilated, ceased to expand.
Section II.--Formative Periods
But amongst so many attempts and trials a character was formed, and the
rest was to spring from it. The barbarous age established on the soil a
German race, phlegmatic and grave, capable of spiritual emotions and
moral discipline. The feudal age imposed on this race habits of
resistance and association, political and utilitarian prepossessions.
Fancy a German from Hamburg or Bremen confined for five hundred years in
the iron corselet of William the Conqueror: these two natures, one
innate, the other acquired, constitute all the springs of his conduct.
So it was in other nations. Like runners drawn up in line at the
entrance of the arena, we see at the epoch of the Renaissance the five
great peoples of Europe start, though we are unable at first to foresee
anything of their career. At first sight it seems as if accidents or
circumstances will alone regulate their speed, their fall, and their
success. It is not so: from themselves alone their history depends: each
nation will be the artisan of its fortune; chance has no influence over
events so vast; and it is national tendencies and faculties which,
overturning or raising obstacles, will lead them, according to their
fate, each one to its goal--some to the extreme of decadence, others to
the height of prosperity. After all, man is ever his own master and his
own slave. At the outset of every age he in a certain fashion _is_: his
body, heart, mind have a distinct structure and disposition: and from
this lasting arrangement, which all preceding centuries have contributed
to consolidate or construct, spring permanent desires or aptitudes, by
which he determines and acts. Thus is formed in him the ideal model,
which, whether obscure or distinct, complete or rough-hewn, will
henceforth float before his eyes, rally all his aspirations, efforts,
forces, and will cause him to aim for centuries at one effect, until at
length, renewed by impotence of success, he conceives a new goal, and
assumes new energy. The Catholic and enthusiastic Spaniard figures life
like the Crusaders, lovers, knights, and abandoning labor, liberty, and
science, casts himself, in the wake of the inquisition, and his king,
into fanatical war, romanesque slothfulness, superstitious and
impassioned obedience, voluntary and incurable ignorance.[231] The
theological and feudal German settles in his district docilely and
faithfully under his petty chief, through natural patience and
hereditary loyalty, engrossed by his wife and household, content to have
conquered religious liberty, clogged by the dulness of his temperament
in gross physical existence, and in sluggish respect for established
order. The Italian, the most richly gifted and precocious of all, but,
of all, the most incapable of voluntary discipline and moral austerity,
turns towards the fine arts and voluptuousness, declines, deteriorates
beneath foreign rule, takes life at its easiest, forgetting to think,
and satisfied to enjoy. The sociable and levelling Frenchman rallies
round his king, who secures for him public peace, external glory, the
splendid display of a sumptuous court, a regular administration, a
uniform discipline, a predominating influence in Europe, and universal
literature. So, if we look at the Englishman in the sixteenth century,
we shall find in him the inclinations and the powers which for three
centuries are to govern his culture and shape his constitution. In this
European expansion of natural existence and pagan literature we find at
first in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the tragic poets, in Spenser,
Sidney, and the lyric poets, the national features, all with
incomparable depth and splendor, and such as race and history have
impressed and implanted in them for a thousand years. Not in vain did
invasion settle here so serious a race, capable of reflection. Not in
vain did the Conquest turn this race toward warlike life and practical
preoccupations. From the first rise of original invention, its work
displays the tragic energy, the intense and disorderly passion, the
disdain of regularity, the knowledge of the real, the sentiment of inner
things, the natural melancholy, the anxious divination of the obscure
beyond--all the instincts which, forcing man upon himself, and
concentrating him within himself, prepare him for Protestantism and
combat. What is this Protestantism which establishes itself? What is
this ideal model which it presents; and what original conception is to
furnish to this people, its permanent and dominant poem? The harshest
and most practical of all--that of the Puritans, which neglecting
speculation, falls back upon action, encloses human life in a rigid
discipline, imposes on the soul continuous efforts, prescribes to
society a cloistral austerity, forbids pleasure, commands action, exacts
sacrifice, and forms a moralist, a laborer, a citizen. Thus it is
implanted, the great English idea--I mean the conviction that man is
before all a free and moral personage, and that, having conceived alone
in his conscience and before God the rule of his conduct, he must employ
himself entirely in applying it within himself, beyond himself,
obstinately, inflexibly, by offering a perpetual resistance to others,
and imposing a perpetual restraint upon himself. In vain will this idea
at first bring discredit upon itself by its transports and its tyranny;
weakened by practice, it will gradually accommodate itself to humanity,
and, carried from Puritan fanaticism to laic morality, it will win all
public sympathy, because it answers to all the national instincts. In
vain it will vanish from high society, under the scorn of the
Restoration, and the importation of French culture; it subsists
underground. For French culture did not come to a head in England: on
this too alien soil it produced only unhealthy, coarse, or imperfect
fruit. Refined elegance became low debauchery; hardly expressed doubt
became brutal atheism; tragedy failed, and was but declamation; comedy
grew shameless, and was but a school of vice; of this literature, there
remained only studies of close reasoning and good style; it was driven
from the public stage, together with the Stuarts, at the beginning of
the eighteenth century; and liberal and moral maxims resumed the
ascendancy, which they will not again lose. For, with ideas, events have
followed their course: national inclinations have done their work in
society as in literature; and the English instincts have transformed the
constitution and politics at the same time as the talents and minds.
These rich tithings, these valiant yeomen, these rude, well-armed
citizens, well-fed, protected by their juries, wont to reckon on
themselves, obstinate, combative, sensible, such as the English Middle
Ages bequeathed them to modern England, did not object if the king
practised his temporary tyranny on the classes above them, and oppressed
the nobility with a rigorous despotism, which the recollection of the
Civil Wars and the danger of high treason justified. But Henry VIII, and
Elizabeth herself were obliged to follow in great interests the current
of public opinion: if they were strong, it was because they were
popular; the people only supported their designs, and authorized their
violences, because they found in them defenders of their religion, and
the protectors of their labor.[232] The people themselves became
immersed in this religion, and, from under a State-church, attained to
personal belief. They grew rich by toil, and under the first Stuart
already occupied the highest place in the nation. At this moment
everything was decided: whatever happened, they must one day become
masters. Social situations create political situations; legal
constitutions always accommodate themselves to real things; and acquired
preponderance infallibly results in written rights. Men so numerous, so
active, so resolute, so capable of keeping themselves, so disposed to
educe their opinions from their own reflection, and their subsistence
from their own efforts, will under all circumstances seize the
guarantees which they need. At the first onset, and in the ardor of
primitive faith, they overturn the throne, and the current which bears
them is so strong, that, in spite of their excess and their failure, the
Revolution is accomplished by the abolition of feudal tenures, and the
institution of Habeas Corpus under Charles II; by the universal
upheaving of the liberal and Protestant spirit, under James II; by the
establishment of the constitution, the act of toleration, the freedom of
the press, under William III. From that moment England had found her
proper place; her two interior and hereditary forces--moral and
religious instinct, practical and political aptitude--had done their
work, and were henceforth to build, without impediment or destruction,
on the foundation which they had laid.
Section III.--The Broadening of Ideas
Thus was the literature of the eighteenth century born, altogether
conservative, useful, moral, and limited. Two powers direct it, one
European, the other English: on one side a talent of oratorical analysis
and habits of literary dignity, which belong to a classical age; on the
other, a taste for application and an energy of precise observation,
which are peculiar to the national mind. Hence that excellence and
originality of political satire, parliamentary discourse, solid essays,
moral novels, and all kinds of literature which demand an attentive good
sense, a correct good style, and a talent for advising, convincing, or
wounding others. Hence that weakness or impotence of speculative
thought, of genuine poetry, of original drama, and of all the kinds
which require a grand, free curiosity, or a grand, disinterested
imagination. The English did not attain complete elegance, nor superior
philosophy; they dulled the French refinements which they copied, and
were terrified by the French boldness which they suggested; they
remained half cockneys and half barbarians; they only invented insular
ideas and English ameliorations, and were confirmed in their respect for
their constitution and their tradition. But, at the same time, they
cultivated and reformed themselves; their wealth and comfort increased
enormously; literature and opinion became severe and even intolerant;
their long war against the French Revolution caused their morality to
become strict and even immoderate; whilst the invention of machinery
developed their comfort and prosperity a hundredfold. A salutary and
despotic code of approved maxims, established proprieties, and
unassailable beliefs, which fortifies, strengthens, curbs, and employs
man usefully and painfully, without permitting him ever to deviate or
grow weak; a minute apparatus, and an admirable provision of commodious
inventions, associations, institutions, mechanisms, implements, methods,
which incessantly co-operate to furnish body and mind with all which
they need--such are henceforth the leading and special features of this
people. To constrain themselves and to provide for themselves, to govern
themselves and nature, to consider life as moralists and economists,
like a close garment, in which people must walk becomingly, and like a
good garment, the best to be had, to be at once respectable and
comfortable: these two words embrace all the mainsprings of English
actions. Against this limited good sense, and this pedantic austerity, a
revolt broke out. With the universal renewal of thought and imagination,
the deep poetic source, which flowed in the sixteenth century, seeks
anew an outlet in the nineteenth, and a fresh literature springs up;
philosophy and history infiltrate their doctrines into the old
establishment; the greatest poet of the time shocks it incessantly with
its curses and sarcasms; from all sides, to this day, in science and
letters, in practice and theory, in private and in public life, the most
powerful minds endeavor to open up a new channel to the stream of
continental ideas. But they are patriots as well as innovators,
conservative as well as revolutionary; if they touch religion and
constitution, manners and doctrines, it is to widen, not to destroy
them: England is made; she knows it, and they know it. Such as this
country is, based on the whole national history, and on all the national
instincts, it is more capable than any other people in Europe of
transforming itself without recasting, and of devoting itself to its
future without renouncing its past.
Part II.--The Present
Section I.--Effects of the Saxon Invasion and the Norman Conquest
I began to perceive these ideas when I first landed in England, and I
was singularly struck how they were corroborated by observation and
history; it seemed to me that the present was completing the past, and
the past explained the present.
At first the sea troubles and strikes a man with wonder; not in vain is
a people insular and maritime, especially with such a sea and such
coasts; their painters, not very gifted, perceive, in spite of all, its
alarming and gloomy aspect; up to the eighteenth century, amidst the
elegance of French culture, and under the joviality of Flemish
tradition, we will find in Gainsborough the ineffaceable stamp of this
great sentiment. In pleasant moments, in the fine calm summer days, the
moist fog stretches over the horizon its pearl-grey veil; the sea has a
pale slate color; and the ships, spreading their canvas, advance
patiently through the mist. But let us look around, and we will soon see
the signs of daily peril. The coast is eaten out, the waves have
encroached, the trees have vanished, the earth is softened by incessant
showers, the ocean is here, ever intractable and fierce. It growls and
bellows eternally, that old hoarse monster; and the barking pack of its
waves advances like an endless army, before which all human force must
give way. Think of the winter months, the storms, the long hours of the
tempest-tossed sailor whirled about blindly by the squalls! Now, and in
this fine season, over the whole circle of the horizon, rise the dull,
wan clouds, some like the smoke of a coal-fire, some of a frail and
dazzling white, so swollen that they seem ready to burst. Their heavy
masses creep slowly along; they are gorged, and already here and there
on the limitless plain a patch of sky is shrouded in a sudden shower.
After an instant, the sea becomes dirty and cadaverous; its waves leap
with strange gambols, and their sides take an oily and livid tint. The
vast gray dome drowns and hides the whole horizon; the rain falls, close
and pitiless. We cannot have an idea of it until we have seen it. When
the southern men, the Romans, came here for the first time, they must
have thought themselves in the infernal regions. The wide space between
earth and sky, and on which our eyes dwell as their domain, suddenly
fails; there is no more air, we see but a flowing mist. No more colors
or forms. In this yellowish smoke, objects look like fading ghosts;
nature seems a bad crayon-drawing, over which a child has awkwardly
smeared his sleeve. Here we are at Newhaven, then at London; the sky
disgorges rain, the earth returns her mist, the mist floats in the rain;
all is swamped: looking round us, we see no reason why it should ever
end. Here, truly, is Homer's Cimmerian land: our feet splash, we have no
use left for our eyes; we feel all our organs stopped up, becoming rusty
by the mounting damp; we think ourselves banished from the breathing
world, reduced to the condition of marshy beings dwelling in dirty
pools: to live here is not life. We ask ourselves if this vast town is
not a cemetery, in which dabble busy and wretched ghosts. Amidst the
deluge of moist soot, the muddy stream with its unwearying iron ships,
like black insects which take on board and land shades, makes us think
of the Styx. As there is no light, they create it. Lately, in a large
square in London, in the finest hotel, it was necessary to leave the gas
alight for five days running. We become melancholy; we are disgusted
with others and with ourselves. What can people do in this sepulchre? To
remain at home without working is to gnaw one's vitals, and to prepare
one's self for suicide. To go out is to make an effort, to care neither
for damp nor cold, to brave discomfort and unpleasant sensations. Such a
climate prescribes action, forbids sloth, develops energy, teaches
patience. I was looking just now on the steamboat at the sailors at the
helm--their tarpaulins, their great steaming boots, their sou'westers,
so attentive, so precise in their movements, so grave, so
self-contained. I have since seen workmen at their looms--calm, serious,
silent, economizing their efforts, and persevering all day, all the
year, all their life, in the same regular and monotonous struggle of
mind and body: their soul is suited to their climate. Indeed it must be
so in order to live: after a week, we feel that here a man must renounce
refined and heartfelt enjoyment, the happiness of careless life,
complete idleness, the easy and harmonious expansion of artistic and
animal nature; that here he must marry, bring up a houseful of children,
assume the cares and importance of a family man, grow rich, provide
against an evil day, surround himself with comfort, become a Protestant,
a manufacturer, a politician; in short, capable of activity and
resistance; and in all the ways open to men, endure and strive.
Yet there are charming and touching beauties here--those, to-wit, of a
well-watered land. When, on a partly clear day, we take a drive into the
country and reach an eminence, our eyes experience a unique sensation,
and a pleasure hitherto unknown. In the far distance, wherever we look
on the horizon, in the fields, on the hills, spreads the always visible
verdure, plants for fodder and food, clover, hops; lovely meadows
overflowing with high thick grass; here and there a cluster of lofty
trees; pasture lands hemmed in with hedges, in which the heavy cows
ruminate in peace. The mist rises insensibly between the trees, and in
the distance float luminous vapors. There is nothing sweeter in the
world, nor more delicate, than these tints; we might pause for hours
together gazing on these pearly clouds, this fine aerial down, this soft
transparent gauze which imprisons the rays of the sun, dulls them, and
lets them reach the ground only to smile on it and to caress it. On both
sides of our carriage pass before our eyes incessantly meadows each more
lovely than the last, in which buttercups, meadow-sweet, Easter-daisies,
are crowded in succession with their dissolving hues; a sweetness almost
painful, a strange charm, breathes from this inexhaustible and transient
vegetation. It is too fresh, it cannot last; nothing here is staid,
stable and firm, as in the South; all is fleeting, springing up, or
dying away, hovering betwixt tears and joy. The rolling water-drops
shine on the leaves like pearls; the round tree-tops, the widespread
foliage, whisper in the feeble breeze, and the sound of the falling
tears left by the last shower never ceases. How well these plants thrive
in the glades, spread out wantonly, ever renewed and watered by the
moist air! How the sap mounts in these plants, refreshed and protected
against the weather! And how sky and land seem made to guard their
tissue and refresh their hues! At the least glimpse of sun they smile
with delicious charm; we would call them delicate and timid virgins
under a veil about to be raised. Let the sun for an instant emerge, and
we will see them grow resplendent as in a ball dress. The light falls in
dazzling sheets; the lustrous golden petals shine with a too vivid
color; the most splendid embroideries, velvet starred with diamonds,
sparkling silk seamed with pearls, are not to be compared to this deep
hue; joy overflows like a brimming cup. In the strangeness and the
rarity of this spectacle, we understand for the first time the life of a
humid land. The water multiplies and softens the living tissues; plants
increase, and have no substance; nourishment abounds, and has no savor;
moisture fructifies, but the sun does not fertilize. Much grass, much
cattle, much meat; large quantities of coarse food: thus an absorbing
and phlegmatic temperament is supported; the human growth, like the
animal and vegetable, is powerful, but heavy; man is amply but coarsely
framed; the machine is solid, but it turns slowly on its hinges, and the
hinges generally creak and are rusty. When we look at the people closer,
it seems that their various parts are independent, at least that they
need time to let sensations pass through them. Their ideas do not at
first break out in passions, gestures, actions. As in the Fleming and
the German, they dwell first of all in the brain; they expand there,
they rest there; man is not shaken by them, he has no difficulty in
remaining motionless, he is not wrapped; he can act wisely, uniformly;
for his inner motive power is an idea or a watchword, not an emotion or
an attraction. He can bear tedium, or rather he does not weary himself;
his ordinary course consists of dull sensations, and the insipid
monotony of mechanical life has nothing which need repel him. He is
accustomed to it, his nature is suited for it. When a man has all his
life eaten turnips, he does not wish for oranges. He will readily resign
himself to hear fifteen consecutive discourses on the same subject,
demanding for twenty years the same reform, compiling statistics,
studying moral treatises, keeping Sunday schools, bringing up a dozen
children. The piquant, the agreeable, are not a necessity to him. The
weakness of his sensitive impulses contributes to the force of his moral
impulses. His temperament makes him argumentative; he can get on without
policemen; the shocks of man against man do not here end in explosions.
He can discuss in the market-place aloud, religion and politics, hold
meetings, form associations, rudely attack men in office, say that the
Constitution is violated, predict the ruin of the State; there is no
objection to this; his nerves are calm; he will argue without cutting
throats; he will not raise revolutions; and perhaps he will obtain a
reform. Observe the passers-by in the streets; in three hours we will
see all the visible features of this temperament: light hair, in
children almost white; pale eyes, often blue as Wedgwood-ware, red
whiskers, a tall figure, the motions of an automaton; and with these
other still more striking features, those which strong food and
combative life have added to this temperament. Here the enormous
guardsman, with rosy complexion, majestic, slightly bent, who struts
along twirling a little cane in his hand, displaying his chest, and
showing a clear parting between his pomaded hair; there the over-fed
stout man, short, sanguine, like an animal fit for the shambles, with
his startled, dazed, yet sluggish air; a little further on the country
gentleman, six feet high, stout and tall, like the German who left his
forest, with the muzzle and nose of a bulldog, tremendous savage-looking
whiskers, rolling eyes, apoplectic face; these are the excesses of
coarse blood and food; add to which, even in the women, the white front
teeth of a carnivorous animal, and big feet solidly shod, excellent for
walking in the mud. Again, look at the young men in a cricket match or
picnic party; doubtless mind does not sparkle in their eyes, but life
abounds there; there is something of decision and energy in their whole
being; healthy and active, ready for motion, for enterprise, these are
the words which rise involuntarily to our lips when we speak of them.
Many look like fine, slender harriers, sniffing the air, and in full
cry. A life passed in gymnastic exercises or in venturesome deeds is
honored in England; they must move their body, swim, throw the ball, run
in the damp meadow, row, breathe in their boats the briny sea-vapor,
feel on their foreheads the raindrops falling from the large oak trees,
leap their horses over ditches and gates; the animal instincts are
intact. They still relish natural pleasures; precocity has not spoiled
them. Nothing can be simpler than the young English girls; amidst many
beautiful things, there are few so beautiful in the world; slim, strong,
self-assured, so fundamentally honest and loyal, so free from coquetry!
A man cannot imagine, if he has not seen it, this freshness and
innocence; many of them are flowers, expanded flowers; only a morning
rose, with its transient and delicious color, with its petals drenched
in dew, can give us an idea of it; it leaves far behind the beauty of
the South, and its precise, stable, finished contours, its well-defined
outlines; here we perceive fragility, delicacy, the continual budding of
life; candid eyes, blue as periwinkles, looking at us without thinking
of our look. At the least stirring of the soul, the blood rushes in
purple waves into these girls' cheeks, neck, and shoulders; we see
emotions pass over these transparent complexions, as the colors change
in the meadows; and their modesty is so virginal and sincere, that we
are tempted to lower our eyes from respect. And yet, natural and frank
as they are, they are not languishing or dreamy; they love and endure
exercise like their brothers; with flowing locks, at six years they ride
on horseback and take long walks. Active life in this country
strengthens the phlegmatic temperament, and the heart is kept more
simple whilst the body grows healthier. Another observation: far above
all these figures one type stands out, the most truly English, the most
striking to a foreigner. Post yourself for an hour, early in the
morning, at the terminus of a railway, and observe the men above thirty
who come to London on business: the features are drawn, the faces pale,
the eyes steady, preoccupied; the mouth open and, as it were,
contracted; the man is tired, worn out, and hardened by too much work;
he runs without looking round him. His whole existence is directed to a
single end; he must incessantly exert himself to the utmost, practise
the same exertion, a profitable one; he has become a machine. This is
especially visible in workmen; perseverance, obstinacy, resignation, are
depicted on their long bony and dull faces. It is still more visible in
women of the lower orders: many are thin, consumptive, their eyes
hollow, their nose sharp, their skin streaked with red patches; they
have suffered too much, have had too many children, have a washed-out,
or oppressed, or submissive, or stoically impassive air; we feel that
they have endured much, and can endure still more. Even in the middle or
upper class this patience and sad hardening are frequent; we think when
we see them of those poor beasts of burden, deformed by the harness,
which remain motionless under the falling rain without thinking of
shelter. Verily the battle of life is harsher and more obstinate here
than elsewhere; whoever gives way, falls. Beneath the rigor of climate
and competition, amidst the strikes of industry, the weak, the
improvident, perish or are degraded; then comes gin and does its work;
thence the long files of wretched women who sell themselves by night in
the Strand to pay their rent; thence those shameful quarters of London,
Liverpool, all the great towns, those spectres in tatters, gloomy or
drunk, who crowd the dram-shops, who fill the streets with their dirty
linen, and their rags hung out on ropes, who lie on a soot-heap, amidst
troops of wan children; horrible shoals, whither descend all whom their
wounded, idle, or feeble arms could not keep on the surface of the great
stream. The chances of life are tragic here, and the punishment of
improvidence cruel. We soon understand why, under this obligation to
fight and grow hard, fine sensations disappear; why taste is blunted,
how man becomes ungraceful and stiff; how discords, exaggerations, mar
the costume and the fashion: why movements and forms become finally
energetic and discordant, like the motions of a machine. If the man is
German by race, temperament, and mind, he has been compelled in process
of time to fortify, alter, altogether turn aside his original nature; he
is no longer a primitive animal, but a well-trained animal; his body and
mind have been transformed by strong food, by bodily exercise, by
austere religion, by public morality, by political strife, by perpetuity
of effort; he has become of all men the most capable of acting usefully
and powerfully in all directions, the most productive and effectual
laborer, as his ox has become the best animal for food, his sheep the
best for wool, his horse the best for racing.
Section II.--English Commerce and Industry
Indeed, there is no greater spectacle than his work; in no age or
amongst no nation on the earth, I believe, has matter ever been better
handled and utilized. If we enter London by water, we see an
accumulation of toil and work which has no equal on this planet. Paris,
by comparison, is but an elegant city of pleasure; the Seine, with its
quays, a pretty serviceable plaything. Here all is vast. I have seen
Marseilles, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, but I had no idea of such a mass. From
Greenwich to London the two shores are a continuous wharf: merchandise
is always being piled up, sacks hoisted, ships moored; ever new
warehouses for copper, beer, ropework, tar, chemicals. Docks,
timber-yards, calking-basins, and shipbuilders' yards, multiply and
encroach on each other. On the left there is the iron framework of a
church being finished, to be sent to India. The Thames is a mile broad,
and is but a populous street of vessels, a winding workyard. Steamboats,
sailing vessels, ascend and descend, come to anchor in groups of two,
three, ten, then in long files, then in dense rows; there are five or
six thousand of them at anchor. On the right, the docks, like so many
intricate, maritime streets, disgorge or store up the vessels. If we get
on a height, we see vessels in the distance by hundreds and thousands,
fixed as if on the land; their masts in a line, their slender rigging,
make a spider-web which girdles the horizon. Yet on the river itself,
towards the west, we see an inextricable forest of masts, yards, and
cables; the ships are unloading, fastened to one another, mingled with
chimneys, amongst the pulleys of the storehouses, cranes, capstans, and
all the implements of the vast and ceaseless toil. A foggy smoke,
penetrated by the sun, wraps them in its russet veil; it is the heavy
and smoky air of a big hot-house; soil and man, light and air, all is
transformed by work. If we enter one of these docks, the impression will
be yet more overwhelming: each resembles a town; always ships, still
more ships, in a line, showing their heads; their wide sides, their
copper chests, like monstrous fishes under their breastplate of scales.
When we are on the ground, we see that this breastplate is fifty feet
high; many ships are of three thousand or four thousand tons. Clippers
three hundred feet long are on the point of sailing for Australia,
Ceylon, America. A bridge is raised by machinery; it weighs a hundred
tons, and only one man is needed to raise it. Here are the wine
stores--there are thirty thousand tuns of port in the cellars; here the
place for hides, here for tallow, here for ice. The store for groceries
extends as far as the eye can see, colossal, sombre as a picture by
Rembrandt filled with enormous vats, and crowded with many men, who move
about in the flickering shade. The universe tends to this centre. Like a
heart, to which blood flows, and from which it pours, money, goods,
business arrive hither from the four quarters of the globe, and flow
thence to the distant poles. And this circulation seems natural, so well
is it conducted. The cranes turn noiselessly; the tuns seem to move of
themselves; a little car rolls them at once, and without effort; the
bales descend by their own weight on the inclined planes, which lead
them to their place. Clerks, without flurry, call out the numbers; men
push or pull without confusion, calmly, husbanding their labor; whilst
the stolid master, in his black hat, gravely, with spare gestures, and
without one word, directs the whole.
Now let us take rail and go to Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool,
Manchester, to see their industry. As we advance into the coal country,
the air is darkened with smoke; the chimneys, high as obelisks, are in
hundreds, and cover the plain as far as we can see; many and various
rows of lofty buildings, in red monotonous brick, pass before our eyes,
like files of economical and busy beehives. The blast-furnaces flame
through the smoke; I counted sixteen in one group. The refuse of
minerals is heaped up like mountains; the engines run like black ants,
with monotonous and violent motion, and suddenly we find ourselves
swallowed up in a monstrous town. This manufactory has five thousand
hands, one mill three hundred thousand spindles. The Manchester
warehouses are Babylonian edifices of six stories high, and wide in
proportion. In Liverpool there are five thousand ships along the Mersey,
which choke one another up; more wait to enter. The docks are six miles
long, and the cotton warehouses on the side extend their vast red
rampart out of sight. All things here seem built in unmeasured
proportions, and as though by colossal arms. We enter a mill; nothing
but iron pillars, as thick as tree-trunks, cylinders as big as a man;
locomotive shafts like vast oaks, notching machines which send up iron
chips, rollers which bend sheet-iron like paste, flywheels which become
invisible by the swiftness of their revolution. Eight workmen, commanded
by a kind of peaceful colossus, pushed into and pulled from the fire a
tree of red-hot iron as big as my body. Coal has produced all this.
England produces twice as much coal as the rest of the world. It has
also brick, on account of the great schists, which are close to the
surface; it has also estuaries filled by the sea, so as to make natural
ports. Liverpool and Manchester, and about ten towns of forty thousand
to one hundred thousand souls, are springing up in the basin of
Lancashire. If we glance over a geological map we see whole parts shaded
with black; they represent the Scotch, the North of England, the
Midland, the Welsh, the Irish coal districts. The old antediluvian
forests, accumulating here their fuel, have stored up the power which
moves matter, and the sea furnishes the true road by which matter can be
transported. Man himself, mind and body, seems created to make the most
of these advantages. His muscles are firm, and his mind can support
tedium. He is less subject to weariness and disgust than other men. He
works as well in the tenth hour as in the first. No one handles machines
better; he has their regularity and precision. Two workmen in a
cotton-mill do the work of three, or even four, French workmen. Let us
look now in the statistics how many leagues of stuffs they manufacture
every year, how many millions of tons they export and import, how many
tens of millions they produce and consume; let us add the industrial or
commercial states they have founded, or are founding, in America,
China, India, Australia; and then perhaps, reckoning men and
money-value--considering that their capital is seven or eight times
greater than that of France, that their population has doubled in fifty
years, that their colonies, wherever the climate is healthy, are
becoming new Englands--we will obtain some notion, very slight, very
imperfect, of a work whose magnitude the eyes alone can measure.
There remains yet one of its parts to explore, the cultivation of the
land. From the railway carriage we see quite enough to understand it: a
field with a hedge, then another field with another hedge, and so on: at
times vast squares of turnips; all this well laid out, clean, glossy; no
forests, here and there only a cluster of trees. The country is a great
kitchen-garden--a manufactory of grass and meat. Nothing is left to
nature and chance; all is calculated, regulated, arranged to produce and
to bring in profits. If we look at the peasants, we find no genuine
peasants; nothing like French peasants--a sort of fellahs, akin to the
soil, mistrustful and uncultivated, separated by a gulf from the
townsmen. The countryman here is like an artisan; and, in fact, a field
is a manufactory, with a farmer for the foreman. Proprietors and farmers
lavish their capital like great contractors. They drain the land, and
have a rotation of crops; they have produced cattle, the richest in
returns of any in the world; they have introduced steam-engines into
cultivation, and into the rearing of cattle; they perfect already
perfect stables. The greatest of the aristocracy take a pride in it;
many country gentlemen have no other occupation. Prince Albert, near
Windsor, had a model farm, and this farm brought in money. A few years
ago the papers announced that the Queen had discovered a cure for the
turkey-disease. Under this universal effort,[233] the products of
agriculture have doubled in fifty years. In England, two and a half
acres (_hectare_) receive eight or ten times more manure than the same
number of French acres; though of inferior quality, the produce is
double that of the French. Thirty persons are enough for this work, when
in France forty would be required for half thereof. We come upon a farm,
even a small one, say of a hundred acres; we find respectable,
dignified, well-clad men, who express themselves clearly and sensibly; a
large, wholesome, comfortable dwelling--often a little porch, with
creepers--a well-kept garden, ornamental trees, the inner walls
whitewashed yearly, the floors washed weekly--an almost Dutch
cleanliness; therewith plenty of books--travels, treatises on
agriculture, a few volumes of religion or history; and above all, the
great family Bible. Even in the poorest cottages we find a few objects
of comfort and recreation; a large cast-iron stove, a carpet, nearly
always paper on the walls, one or two moral tales, and always the Bible.
The cottage is clean; the habits are orderly; the plates, with their
blue pattern, regularly arranged, look well above the shining dresser;
the red floor-tiles have been swept; there are no broken or dirty panes;
no doors off hinges, shutters unhung, stagnant pools, straggling
dunghills, as amongst the French villagers; the little garden is kept
free from weeds; frequently roses and honeysuckle round the door; and on
Sunday we can see the father and mother, seated by a well-scrubbed
table, with tea, bread and butter, enjoying their _home_, and the order
they have established there. In France the peasant on Sunday leaves his
hut to visit _his land_: what he aspires to is possession; what
Englishmen love is comfort. There is no land in which they demand more
in this respect. An Englishman said to me, not very long ago: "Our great
vice is the strong desire we feel for all good and comfortable things.
We have too many wants, we spend too much. As soon as our peasants have
a little money, they buy the best sherry and the best clothes they can
get, instead of buying a bit of land."[234]
As we rise to the upper classes, this taste becomes stronger. In the
middle ranks a man burdens himself with toil, to give his wife gaudy
dresses, and to fill his house with the hundred thousand baubles of
quasi-luxury. Higher still, the inventions of comfort are so multiplied
that people are bored by them; there are too many newspapers and reviews
on the table; too many kinds of carpets, washstands, matches, towels in
the dressing-room; their refinement is endless; in thrusting our feet
into slippers, we might imagine that twenty generations of inventors
were required to bring sole and lining to this degree of perfection. We
cannot conceive clubs better furnished with necessaries and
superfluities, houses so well arranged and managed, pleasure and
abundance so cleverly understood, servants so reliable, respectful,
handy. Servants in the last census were "the most numerous class of Her
Majesty's subjects"; in England there are five, where in France they
have two. When I saw in Hyde Park the rich young ladies, the gentlemen
riding or driving, when I thought of their country houses, their dress,
their parks and stables, I said to myself that verily this people is
constituted after the heart of economists: I mean, that it is the
greatest producer and the greatest consumer in the world; that none is
more apt at squeezing out and absorbing the quintessence of things; that
it has developed its wants at the same time as its resources; and we
involuntarily think of those insects which, after their metamorphosis,
are suddenly provided with teeth, feelers, unwearying claws, admirable
and terrible instruments, fitted to dig, saw, build, do everything, but
furnished also with incessant hunger and four stomachs.
Section III.--Agriculture
How is this ant-hill governed? As the train moves on, we perceive,
amidst farms and tilled lands, the long wall of a park, the frontage of
a castle, more generally of some vast ornate mansion, a sort of country
town-house, of inferior architecture, Gothic or Italian pretensions, but
surrounded by beautiful lawns, large trees scrupulously preserved. Here
lives the rich _bourgeois_; I am wrong, the word is false--I must say
_gentleman_: _bourgeois_ is a French word, and signifies the lazy
_parvenus_, who devote themselves to rest, and take no part in public
life; here it is quite different; the hundred or hundred and twenty
thousand families, who spend a thousand and more annually, really govern
the country. And this is no government imported, implanted artificially
and from without; it is a spontaneous and natural government. As soon as
men wish to act together, they need leaders; every association,
voluntary or not, has one; whatever it be, state, army, ship, or parish,
it cannot do without a guide to find the road, to take the lead, call
the rest, scold the laggards. In vain we call ourselves independent; as
soon as we march in a body, we need a leader; we look right and left,
expecting him to show himself. The great thing is to pick him out, to
have the best, and not to follow another in his stead; it is a great
advantage that there should be one, and that we should acknowledge him.
These men, without popular election, or selection from government, find
him ready-made and recognized in the large landed proprietor, a man
whose family has been long in the county, influential through his
connections, dependents, tenantry, interested above all else by his
great estates in the affairs of the neighborhood, expert in directing
these affairs which his family have managed for three generations, most
fitted by education to give good advice, and by his influence to lead
the common enterprise to a good result. Indeed, it is thus that things
fall out; rich men leave London by hundreds every day to spend a day in
the country; there is a meeting on the affairs of the county or of the
church; they are magistrates, overseers, presidents of all kinds of
societies, and this gratuitously. One has built a bridge at his own
expense, another a chapel or a school; many establish public libraries,
where books are lent out, with warmed and lighted rooms, in which the
villagers in the evening can read the papers, play draughts, chess, and
have tea at low charges--in a word, simple amusements which may keep
them from the public-house and gin-shop. Many of them give lectures;
their sisters or daughters teach in Sunday schools; in fact, they
provide for the ignorant and poor, at their own expense, justice,
administration, civilization. I know a very rich man who in his Sunday
school taught singing to little girls. Lord Palmerston offered his park
for archery meetings; the Duke of Marlborough opens his daily to the
public, "requesting," this is the word used, "the public not to destroy
the grass." A firm and proud sentiment of duty, a genuine public spirit,
a noble idea of what a gentleman owes to himself, gives them a moral
superiority which sanctions their command; probably from the time of the
old Greek cities, no education or condition has been seen in which the
innate nobility of man has received a more wholesome or completer
development. In short, they are magistrates and patrons from their
birth, leaders of the great enterprises in which capital is risked,
promoters of all charities, all improvements, all reforms, and with the
honors of command they accept its burdens. For observe, in contrast with
the aristocracies of other countries, they are are well educated,
liberal, and march in the van, not in the rear of public civilization.
They are not drawing-room exquisites, like the French marquises of the
eighteenth century: an English lord visits his fisheries, studies the
system of liquid manures, speaks to the purpose about cheese: and his
son is often a better rower, walker, and boxer than the farmers. They
are not malcontents, like the French nobility, behind their age, devoted
to whist, and regretting the Middle Ages. They have travelled through
Europe, and often further; they know languages and literature; their
daughters read Schiller, Manzoni, and Lamartine with ease. By means of
reviews, newspapers, innumerable volumes of geography, statistics, and
travels, they have all the world at their finger-ends. They support and
preside over scientific societies; if the free inquirers of Oxford,
amidst conventional rigor, have been able to give their explanations of
the Bible, it is because they knew themselves to be backed by
enlightened laymen of the highest rank. There is also no danger that
this aristocracy should become a set; it renews itself; a great
physician, a profound lawyer, an illustrious general, become ennobled
and found families. When a manufacturer or merchant has gained a large
fortune, he first thinks of acquiring an estate; after two or three
generations his family has taken root and shares in the government of
the country: in this way the best saplings of the great popular forest
fill up the aristocratic nursery. Observe, finally, that an aristocracy
in England is not an isolated fact. Everywhere there are leaders
recognized, respected, followed with confidence and deference, who feel
their responsibility, and carry the burden as well as the advantages of
the dignity. Such an aristocracy exists in marriage, where the man
incontestably rules, followed by his wife to the end of the world,
faithfully waited for in the evenings, unshackled in his business, of
which he does not speak. There is such in the family, when the
father[235] can disinherit his children, and keeps up with them, in the
most petty circumstances of daily life, a degree of authority and
dignity unknown in France: if in England a son, through ill-health, has
been away for some time from his home, he dare not come into the country
to see his father without first asking if he may come; a servant to whom
I gave my card refused to take it, saying, "Oh! I dare not hand it in
now. Master is dining." There is respect in all ranks, in the workshops
as well as in the fields, in the army as in the family. Throughout there
are inferiors and superiors who feel themselves so; if the mechanism of
established power were thrown out of gear, we should behold it
reconstructed of itself; below the legal constitution is the social, and
human action is forced into a solid mould prepared for it.
It is because this aristocratic network is strong that human action can
be free; for local and natural government being rooted throughout, like
ivy, by a hundred small, ever-growing fibres, sudden movements, violent
as they are, are not capable of pulling it up altogether. In vain men
speak, cry out, call meetings, hold processions, form leagues: they will
not demolish the state; they have not to deal with a set of
functionaries who have no real hold on the country, and who, like all
external applications, can be replaced by another set: the thirty or
forty gentlemen of a district, rich, influential, trusted, useful as
they are, will become the leaders of the district. "As we see in the
papers," says Montesquieu, speaking of England, "that they are playing
the devil, we fancy that the people will revolt to-morrow." Not at all,
it is their way of speaking; they only talk loudly and rudely. Two days
after I arrived in London, I saw advertising men walking with a placard
on their backs and their stomachs, bearing these words: "Great
usurpation! Outrage of the Lords, in their vote on the budget,
against the rights of the people." But then the placard added,
"Fellow-countrymen, petition!" Things end thus; they argue freely, and
if the reasoning is good it will spread. Another time in Hyde Park,
orators were declaiming in the open air against the Lords, who were
called rogues. The audience applauded or hissed, as it pleased them.
"After all," said an Englishman to me, "this is how we manage our
business. With us, when a man has an idea, he writes it; a dozen men
think it good, and all contribute money to publish it; this creates a
little association, which grows, prints cheap pamphlets, gives lectures,
then petitions, calls forth public opinion, and at last takes the matter
into Parliament; Parliament refuses or delays it; yet the matter gains
weight: the majority of the nation pushes, forces open the doors, and
then you'll have a law passed." It is open to everyone to do this;
workmen can league against their masters; in fact, their associations
embrace all England; at Preston I believe there was once a strike which
lasted more than six months. They will sometimes mob, but never revolt;
they know political economy by this time, and understand that to do
violence to capital is to suppress work. Their chief quality is
coolness; here, as elsewhere, temperament has great influence. Anger,
blood does not rise at once to their eyes, as in the southern nations; a
long interval always separates idea from action, and wise arguments,
repeated calculations, occupy the interval. If we go to a meeting, we
see men of every condition, ladies who come for the thirtieth time to
hear the same speech, full of figures, on education, cotton, wages. They
do not seem to be wearied; they can bring argument against argument, be
patient, protest gravely, recommence their protest; they are the same
people who wait for the train on the platform, without getting crushed,
and who play cricket for a couple of hours without raising their voices
or quarrelling for an instant. Two coachmen, who run into one another,
set themselves free without storming or scolding. Thus their political
association endures; they can be free because they have natural leaders
and patient nerves. After all, the state is a machine like other
machines; let us try to have good wheels, and take care not to break
them; Englishmen have the double advantage of possessing very good ones,
and of managing them coolly.
Section IV.--English Society.--Philosophy.--Religion
Such is our Englishman, with his laws and his administration. Now that
he has private comfort and public security, what will he do, and how
will he govern himself in this higher, nobler domain, to which man
climbs in order to contemplate beauty and truth? At all events, the arts
do not lead him there. That vast London is monumental; but, like the
castle of a man who has become rich, everything there is well preserved
and costly, but nothing more. Those lofty houses of massive stone,
burdened with porches, short columns, Greek decorations, are generally
gloomy; the poor columns of the monuments seem washed with ink. On
Sunday, in foggy weather, we would think ourselves in a cemetery; the
perfect readable names on the houses, in brass letters, are like
sepulchral inscriptions. There is nothing beautiful: at most, the
varnished middle-class houses, with their patch of green, are pleasant;
we feel that they are well kept, commodious, capital for a business man
who wants to amuse himself and unbend after a hard day's work. But a
finer and higher sentiment could relish nothing here. As to the statues,
it is difficult not to laugh at them. We see the Duke of Wellington with
a cocked hat and iron plumes; Nelson, with a cable which serves him for
a tail, planted on his column, and pierced by a lightning-conductor,
like a rat impaled on the end of a pole; or again, the half-dressed
Waterloo generals, crowned by Victory. The English, though flesh and
bone, seem manufactured out of sheet-iron: how much stiffer will English
statues look? They pride themselves on their painting; at least they
study it with surprising minuteness, in the Chinese fashion; they can
paint a truss of hay so exactly that a botanist will tell the species of
every stalk; one artist lived three months under canvas on a heath, so
that he might thoroughly know heath. Many are excellent observers,
especially of moral expression, and succeed very well in showing the
soul in the face; we are instructed by looking at them; we go through a
course of psychology with them; they can illustrate a novel; we are
touched by the poetic and dreamy meaning of many of their landscapes.
But in genuine painting, picturesque painting, they are revolting. I do
not think there were ever laid upon canvas such crude colors, such stiff
forms, stuffs so much like tin, such glaring contrasts. Fancy an opera
with nothing but false notes in it. We may see landscapes painted
blood-red, trees which split the canvas, turf which looks like a pot of
overturned green, Christs looking as if they were baked and preserved in
oil, expressive stags, sentimental dogs, undressed women, to whom we
should like forthwith to offer a garment. In music, they import the
Italian opera; it is an orange-tree kept up at great cost in the midst
of turnips. The arts require idle, delicate minds--not stoics,
especially not puritans--easily shocked by dissonance, inclined to
visible pleasure, employing their long periods of leisure, their free
reveries, in harmoniously arranging, and with no other object but
enjoyment, forms, colors, and sounds. I need not say that here the bent
of mind is quite the opposite; and we see clearly enough why, amidst
these combative politicians, these laborious toilers, these men of
energetic action, art can but produce exotic or ill-shaped fruit.
Not so in science; but in science there are two divisions. It may be
treated as a business, to glean and verify observations, to combine
experiments, to arrange figures, to weigh probabilities to discover
facts, partial laws, to possess laboratories, libraries, societies
charged with storing and increasing positive knowledge; in all this
Englishmen excel. They have even a Lyell, a Darwin, an Owen, able to
embrace and renew a science; in the construction of the vast edifice,
the industrious masons, masters of the second rank, are not lacking; it
is the great architects, the thinkers, the genuine speculative minds,
who fail them; philosophy, especially metaphysics, is as little
indigenous here as music and painting; they import it, and yet they
leave the best part on the road. Carlyle was obliged to transform it
into a mystical poetry, humorous and prophetic fancies; Hamilton touched
upon it only to declare it chimerical; Stuart Mill and Buckle only
seized the most palpable part--a heavy residuum, positivism. It is not
in metaphysics that the English mind can find its vent. It is on other
objects that the spirit of liberal inquiry--the sublime instincts of the
mind, the craving for the universal and the infinite, the desire of
ideal and perfect things--will fall back. Let us take the day on which
the hush of business leaves a free field for disinterested aspirations.
There is no more striking spectacle for a foreigner than Sunday in
London. The streets are empty, and the churches full. An Act of
Parliament forbids any playing to-day, public or private; the
public-houses are not allowed to harbor people during divine service.
Moreover, all respectable people are at worship, the seats are full: it
is not as in France, where there are none but servants, old women, a few
sleepy people, of private means, and a sprinkling of elegant ladies; but
in England we see men well dressed, or at least decently clad, and as
many gentlemen as ladies in church. Religion does not remain out of the
pale, and below the standard of public culture; the young, the learned,
the best of the nation, all the upper and middle classes, continue
attached to it. The clergyman, even in a village, is not a peasant's
son, with not over-much polish, just out of the seminary, shackled in a
cloistral education, separated from society by celibacy, half-buried in
mediævalism. In England he is a man of the times, often a man of the
world, often of good family, with the interests, habits, freedom of
other men; keeping sometimes a carriage, several servants, having
elegant manners, generally well informed, who has read and still reads.
On all these grounds he is able to be in his neighborhood the leader of
ideas, as his neighbor the squire is the leader of business. If he does
not walk in the same path as the free-thinkers, he is not more than a
step or two behind them; a modern man, a Parisian, can talk with him on
all lofty themes, and not perceive a gulf between his own mind and the
clergyman's. Strictly speaking, he is a layman like ourselves; the only
difference is, that he is a superintendent of morality. Even in his
externals, except for occasional bands and the perpetual white tie, he
is like us; at first sight we would take him for a professor, a
magistrate, or a notary; and his sermons agree with his person. He does
not anathematize the world; in this his doctrine is modern; he follows
the broad path in which the Renaissance and the Reformation impelled
religion. When Christianity arose, eighteen centuries ago, it was in the
East, in the land of the Essenes and the Therapeutists, amid universal
dejection and despair, when the only deliverance seemed a renunciation
of the world, an abandonment of civil life, destruction of the natural
instincts, and a daily waiting for the kingdom of God. When it rose
again, three centuries ago, it was in the West, amongst laborious and
half-free peoples, amidst universal restoration and invention, when man,
improving his condition, regained confidence in his worldly destiny, and
widely expanded his faculties. No wonder if the new Protestantism
differs from the ancient Christianity, if it enjoins action instead of
preaching asceticism, if it authorizes comforts in place of prescribing
mortification, if it honors marriage, work, patriotism, inquiry,
science, all natural affections and faculties, in place of praising
celibacy, withdrawal from the world, scorn of the age, ecstasy,
captivity of mind, and mutilation of the heart. By this infusion of the
modern spirit, Christianity has received new blood, and Protestantism now
constitutes, with science, the two motive organs, and, as it were, the
double heart of European life. For, in accepting the rehabilitation of
the world, it has not renounced the purification of man's heart; on the
contrary, it is towards this that it has directed its whole effort. It
has cut off from religion all the portions which are not this very
purification, and, by reducing it, has strengthened it. An institution,
like a machine, and like a man, is the more powerful for being more
special: a work is done better because it is done singly, and because we
concentrate ourselves upon it. By the suppression of legends and
religious observances, human thought in its entirety has been
concentrated on a single object--moral amelioration. It is of this men
speak in the churches, gravely and coldly, with a succession of sensible
and solid arguments; how a man ought to reflect on his duties, mark them
one by one in his mind, make for himself principles, have a sort of
inner code, freely accepted and firmly established, to which he may
refer all his actions without bias or hesitation; how these principles
may be rooted by practice; how unceasing examination, personal effort,
the continual edification of himself by himself ought slowly to confirm
our resolution in uprightness. These are the questions which, with a
multitude of examples, proofs, appeals to daily experience,[236] are
brought forward in all the pulpits, to develop in man a voluntary
reformation, a guard and empire over himself, the habit of
self-restraint, and a kind of modern stoicism, almost as noble as the
ancient. On all hands laymen help in this; and moral warning, given by
literature as well as by theology, harmoniously unites society and the
clergy. Hardly ever does a book paint a man in a disinterested manner:
critics, philosophers, historians, novelists, poets even, give a lesson,
maintain a theory, unmask or punish a vice, represent a temptation
overcome, relate the history of a character being formed. Their exact
and minute description of sentiments ends always in approbation or
blame; they are not artists, but moralists: it is only in a Protestant
country that we will find a novel entirely occupied in describing the
progress of moral sentiment in a child of twelve.[237] All co-operate in
this direction in religion, and even in the mystic part of it. Byzantine
distinctions and subtleties have been allowed to fall away; Germanic
inquisitiveness and speculations have not been introduced; the God of
conscience reigns alone; feminine sweetness has been cut off; we do not
find the husband of souls, the lovable consoler, whom the author of the
"Imitation of Christ" follows even in his tender dreams; something manly
breathes from religion in England; we find that the Old Testament, the
severe Hebrew Psalms, have left their imprint here. It is no longer an
intimate friend to whom a man confides his petty desires, his small
troubles, a sort of affectionate and quite human priestly guide; it is
no longer a king whose relations and courtiers he tries to gain over,
and from whom he looks for favor or place; we see in him only a guardian
of duty, and we speak to him of nothing else. What we ask of him is the
strength to be virtuous, the inner renewal by which we become capable of
always doing good; and such a prayer is in itself a sufficient lever to
tear a man from his weaknesses. What we know of the Deity is that he is
perfectly righteous; and such a reliance suffices to represent all the
events of life as an approach to the reign of righteousness. Strictly
speaking, righteousness alone exists; the world is a figure which
conceals it, but heart and conscience sustain it, and there is nothing
important or true in man but the embrace by which he holds it. So speak
the old grave prayers, the severe hymns which are sung in the church,
accompanied by the organ. Though a Frenchman, and brought up in a
different religion, I listened to them with a sincere admiration and
emotion. Serious and grand poems, which, opening a path to the Infinite,
let in a ray of light into the limitless darkness, and satisfy the deep
poetic instincts, the vague desire of sublimity and melancholy, which
this race has manifested from its origin, and which it has preserved to
the end.
Section V.--What Forces Have Produced the Present Civilization
As the basis of the present as well as of the past ever reappears an
inner and persistent cause, the character of the race; transmission and
climate have maintained it; a violent perturbation--the Norman
Conquest--warped it; finally, after various oscillations, it was
manifested by the conception of a special ideal, which gradually
fashioned or produced religion, literature, institutions. Thus fixed and
expressed, it was henceforth the mover of the rest; it explains the
present, on it depends the future; its force and direction will produce
the present and future civilization. Now that great historic
violences--I mean the destructions and enslavements of peoples--have
become almost impracticable, each nation can develop its life according
to its own conception of life; the chances of a war, a discovery, have
no hold but on details; national inclinations and aptitudes alone now'
show the great features of a national history; when twenty-five millions
of men conceive the good and useful after a certain type, they will seek
and end by attaining this kind of the good and useful. The Englishman
has henceforth his priest, his gentleman, his manufacture, his comfort,
and his novel. If we wish to know in what sense this work will alter, we
must inquire in what sense the central conception will change. A vast
revolution has taken place during the last three centuries in human
intelligence--like those regular and vast uprisings which, displacing a
continent, displace all the prospects. We know that positive discoveries
go on increasing day by day, that they will increase daily more and
more, that from object to object they reach the most lofty, that they
begin by renewing the science of man, that their useful application and
their philosophical consequences are ceaselessly unfolded; in short,
that their universal encroachment will at last comprise the whole human
mind. From this body of invading truths springs in addition an original
conception of the good and the useful, and, moreover, a new idea of
church and state, art and industry, philosophy and religion. This has
its power, as the old idea had; it is scientific, if the other was
national; it is supported on proved facts, if the other was upon
established things. Already their opposition is being manifested;
already their labors begin; and we may affirm beforehand, that the
proximate condition of English civilization will depend upon their
divergence or their agreement.
[Footnote 231: See the "Travels of Madame d'Aulnay in Spain," at the end
of the seventeenth century. Nothing is more striking than this revolution,
if we compare it with the times before Ferdinand the Catholic, namely the
reign of Henry IV, the great power of the nobles, and the independence of
the towns. Read about this history, Buckle's "History of Civilization,"
1867, 3 vols. II. ch. VIII.]
[Footnote 232: Buckle, "History of Civilization," I. ch. VII.]
[Footnote 233: Léonce de Lavergne, "Economie rurale en Angleterre,"
passim.]
[Footnote 234: De Foe was of the same opinion, and pretended that economy
was not an English virtue, and that an Englishman can hardly live with
twenty shillings a week, while a Dutchman with the same money becomes
wealthy, and leaves his children very well off. An English laborer lives
poor and wretchedly with nine shillings a week, whilst a Dutchman lives
very comfortably with the same wages.]
[Footnote 235: In familiar language, the father is called in England
the "governor"; in France "le banquier."]
[Footnote 236: Let the reader, amongst many others, peruse the sermons
of Dr. Arnold, delivered in the school chapel at Rugby.]
[Footnote 237: "The Wide, Wide World," by Elizabeth Wetherell (an American
book). See also the novels of Miss Yonge, and chiefly those of George
Eliot.]
BOOK V--MODERN AUTHORS
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The translator thinks it due to M. Taine to state that the fifth book,
on the Modern Authors, was written whilst Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay,
and Mill were still alive. He also gives the original preface of that
book:
"This fifth book is the complement to the 'History of English
Literature'; it is written on another plan, because the subject is
different. The present period is not yet completed, and the ideas which
govern it are in process of formation, that is, in the rough. We cannot
therefore as yet systematically arrange them. When documents are still
mere indications, history is necessarily reduced to 'studies'; knowledge
is moulded from life; and our conclusions cannot be other than
incomplete, so long as the facts which suggest them are unfinished.
Fifty years hence the history of this age may be written; in the
meantime we can but sketch it. I have selected from contemporary English
writers the most original minds, the most consistent, and the most
contrasted; they may be regarded as specimens, representing the common
features, the opposing tendencies, and consequently the general
direction of the public mind.
"They are only specimens. By the side of Macaulay and Carlyle we have
historians like Hallam, Buckle, and Grote; by the side of Dickens,
novel-writers like Bulwer, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell, George
Eliot, and many more; by the side of Tennyson, poets like Elizabeth
Browning; by the side of Stuart Mill, philosophers like Hamilton, Bain,
and Herbert Spencer. I pass over the vast number of men of talent who
write anonymously in reviews, and who, like soldiers in an army, display
at times more clearly than their generals the faculties and inclinations
of their time and their country. If we look for the common marks in this
multitude of varied minds, we shall, I think, find the two salient
features which I have already pointed out. One of these features is
proper to English civilization, the other to the civilization of the
nineteenth century. The one is national, the other European. On the one
hand, special to this people, their literature is an inquiry instituted
into humanity, altogether positive, and consequently only partially
beautiful or philosophical, but very exact, minute, useful, and moreover
very moral; and this to such a degree, that sometimes the generosity or
purity of its aspirations raises it to a height which no artist or
philosopher has transcended. On the other hand, in common with the
various peoples of our age, this literature subordinates dominant creeds
and institutions to private inquiry and established science--I mean, to
that irresponsible tribunal which is erected in each man's individual
conscience, and to that universal authority which the diverse human
judgments, mutually rectified, and controlled by practice, borrow from
the verifications of experience, and from their own harmony.
"Whatever be the judgment passed on these tendencies and on these
doctrines, we cannot, I think, refuse them the merit of spontaneity and
originality. They are living and thriving plants. The six writers,
described in this volume, have expressed efficacious and complete ideas
on God, nature, man, science, religion, art, and morality. To produce
such ideas we have in Europe at this day but three nations--England
Germany, and France. Those of England will here be found arranged,
discussed, and compared with those of the other two thinking countries."
CHAPTER FIRST
THE NOVEL--DICKENS
Were Dickens dead, his biography might be written.
On the day after the burial of a celebrated man, his friends and enemies
apply themselves to the work; his school-fellows relate in the
newspapers his boyish pranks; another man recalls exactly, and word for
word, the conversations he had with him more than a score of years ago.
The lawyer who manages the affairs of the deceased draws up a list of
the different offices he has filled, his titles, dates and figures, and
reveals to the matter-of-fact readers how the money left has been
invested, and how the fortune has been made; the grand-nephews and
second cousins publish an account of his acts of humanity, and the
catalogue of his domestic virtues. If there is no literary genius in the
family, they select an Oxford man, conscientious, learned, who treats
the deceased like a Greek author, collects endless documents, overloads
them with endless comments, crowns the whole with endless discussions,
and comes ten years later, some fine Christmas morning, with his white
tie and placid smile, to present to the assembled family three quartos
of eight hundred pages each, the easy style of which would send a German
from Berlin to sleep. He is embraced by them with tears in their eyes;
they make him sit down; he is the chief ornament at their feasts; and
his work is sent to the "Edinburgh Review." The latter groans at the
sight of the enormous present, and tells off a young and intrepid member
of the staff to concoct some kind of a biography from the table of
contents. Another advantage of posthumous biographies is, that the dead
man is no longer there to refute either biographer or man of learning.
Unfortunately, Dickens is still alive, and refutes the biographies made
of him. What is worse, he claims to be his own biographer. His
translator in French once asked him for a few particulars of his life;
Dickens replied that he kept them for himself. Without doubt, "David
Copperfield," his best novel, has much the appearance of a
confession;[238] but where does the confession end, and how far does
fiction embroider truth? All that is known, or rather all that is told,
is that Dickens was born in 1812, that he is the son of a
shorthand-writer, that he was at first a shorthand-writer, that he was
poor and unfortunate in his youth, that his novels, published in parts,
have gained for him a great fortune and an immense reputation. The
reader may conjecture the rest; Dickens will tell it him one day, when
he writes his memoirs. Meanwhile he closes the door, and leaves outside
the too inquisitive folk who go on knocking. He has a right to do so.
Though a man may be illustrious, he is not on that account public
property; he is not compelled to be confidential; he still belongs to
himself; he may reserve of himself what he thinks proper. If we give our
works to our readers, we do not give our lives. Let us be satisfied with
what Dickens has given us. Forty volumes suffice, and more than suffice,
to enable us to know a man well; moreover, they show of him all that is
important to know. It is not through the accidental circumstances of his
life that he belongs to history, but by his talent; and his talent is in
his books. A man's genius is like a clock; it has its mechanism, and
amongst its parts a mainspring. Find out this spring, show how it
communicates movement to the others, pursue this movement from part to
part down to the hands in which it ends. This inner history of genius
does not depend upon the outer history of the man; and it is worth more.
Part I.--The Author
Section I.--Importance of the Imaginative Faculty
The first question which should be asked in connection with an artist is
this: How does he regard objects? With what clearness, what energy, what
force? The reply defines his whole work beforehand; for in a writer of
novels the imagination is the master faculty; the art of composition,
good taste, the feeling of what is true, depend upon it; one degree more
of vehemence destroys the style which expresses it, changes the
characters which it produces, breaks the plot in which it is enclosed.
Consider the imaginative power of Dickens, and you will perceive therein
the cause of his faults and his merits, his power and his excess.
Section II.--Boldness of Dickens' Imagination
There is a painter in him, and an English painter. Never surely did a
mind figure to itself with more exact detail or greater force all the
parts and tints of a picture. Read this description of a storm; the
images seem photographed by dazzling flashes of lightning:
"The eye, partaking of the quickness of the flashing light, saw in its
every gleam a multitude of objects which it could not see at steady noon
in fifty times that period. Bells in steeples, with the rope and wheel
that moved them; ragged nests of birds in cornices and nooks; faces full
of consternation in the tilted wagons that came tearing past: their
frightened teams ringing out a warning which the thunder drowned;
harrows and ploughs left out in fields; miles upon miles of
hedge-divided country, with the distant fringe of trees as obvious as
the scarecrow in the beanfield close at hand; in a trembling, vivid,
flickering instant, everything was clear and plain: then came a flush of
red into the yellow light; a change to blue; a brightness so intense
that there was nothing else but light; and then the deepest and
profoundest darkness."[239]
An imagination so lucid and energetic cannot but animate inanimate
objects without an effort. It provokes in the mind in which it works
extraordinary emotions, and the author pours over the objects which he
figures to himself something of the ever-welling passion which overflows
in him. Stones for him take a voice, white walls swell out into big
phantoms, black wells yawn hideously and mysteriously in the darkness;
legions of strange creatures whirl shuddering over the fantastic
landscape; blank nature is peopled, inert matter moves. But the images
remain clear; in this madness there is nothing vague or disorderly;
imaginary objects are designed with outlines as precise and details as
numerous as real objects, and the dream is equal to the reality.
There is, amongst others, a description of the night wind, quaint and
powerful, which recalls certain pages of "Notre-Dame de Paris." The
source of this description, as of all those of Dickens, is pure
imagination. He does not, like Walter Scott, describe in order to give
his reader a map, and to lay down the locality of his drama. He does
not, like Lord Byron, describe from love of magnificent nature, and in
order to display a splendid succession of grand pictures. He dreams
neither of attaining exactness, nor of selecting beauty. Struck with a
certain spectacle, he is transported, and breaks out into unforeseen
figures. Now it is the yellow leaves, pursued by the wind, fleeing and
jostling, shivering, scared, in a giddy chase, clinging to the furrows,
drowned in the ditches, perching on the trees.[240] Here it is the night
wind, sweeping round a church, moaning as it tries with an unseen hand
the windows and the doors, and seeking out some crevices by which to
enter:
"And when it has got in; as one not finding what he seeks, whatever that
may be; it wails and howls to issue forth again: and, not content with
stalking through the aisles, and gliding round and round the pillars,
and tempting the deep organ, soars up to the roof, and strives to rend
the rafters: then flings itself despairingly upon the stones below, and
passes, muttering, into the vaults. Anon, it comes up stealthily, and
creeps along the walls: seeming to read, in whispers, the inscriptions
sacred to the dead. At some of these, it breaks out shrilly, as with
laughter; and at others, moans and cries as if it were lamenting."[241]
Hitherto you have only recognized the sombre imagination of a man of the
north. A little further you perceive the impassioned religion of a
revolutionary Protestant, when he speaks to you of "a ghostly sound too,
lingering within the altar; where it seems to chaunt, in its wild way,
of wrong and murder done, and false Gods worshipped; in defiance of the
tables of the law, which look so fair and smooth, but are so flawed and
broken. Ugh! Heaven preserve us, sitting snugly round the fire! It has
an awful voice, that wind at midnight, singing in a church!" But an
instant after, the artist speaks again; he leads you to the belfry, and
in the jingle of the accumulated words, communicates to your nerves the
sensation of an aerial tempest. The wind whistles, blows, and gambols in
the arches: "High up in the steeple, where it is free to come and go
through many an airy arch and loop-hole, and to twist and twine itself
about the giddy stair, and twirl the groaning weathercock, and make the
very tower shake and shiver!"[242] Dickens has seen it all in the old
belfry; his thought is a mirror; not the smallest or ugliest detail
escapes him. He has counted "the iron rails ragged with rust"; "the
sheets of lead," wrinkled and shrivelled, which crackle and heave
beneath the unaccustomed tread; "the shabby nests" which "the birds
stuff into corners" of the old oaken joists and beams; the gray dust
heaped up; "the speckled spiders, indolent and fat with long security,"
which, hanging by a thread, "swing idly to and fro in the vibration of
the bells," and which "climb up sailor-like in quick-alarm, or drop upon
the ground and ply a score of nimble legs to save one life." This
picture captivates us. Kept up at such a height, amongst the fleeting
clouds which cast their shadows over the town, and the feeble lights
scarce distinguished in the mist, we feel a sort of dizziness; and we
nearly discover, with Dickens, thought and a soul in the metallic voice
of the chimes which inhabit this trembling castle.
He writes a story about them, and it is not the first. Dickens is a
poet; he is as much at home in the imaginative world as in the actual.
Here the chimes are talking to the old messenger and consoling him.
Elsewhere it is the Cricket on the Hearth singing of all domestic joys,
and bringing before the eyes of the lonely master the happy evenings,
the intimate conversations, the comfort, the quiet cheerfulness which he
has enjoyed, and which he has no longer. In another tale it is the
history of a sick and precocious child who feels itself dying, and who,
sleeping in the arms of its sister, hears the distant song of the
murmuring waves which rocked him to sleep. Objects, with Dickens, take
their hue from the thoughts of his characters. His imagination is so
lively that it carries everything with it in the path which it chooses.
If the character is happy, the stones, flowers, and clouds must be happy
too; if he is sad, nature must weep with him. Even to the ugly houses in
the street, all speak. The style runs through a swarm of visions; it
breaks out into the strangest oddities. Here is a young girl, pretty and
good, who crosses Fountain Court and the law purlieus in search of her
brother. What can be more simple? what even more trivial? Dickens is
carried away by it. To entertain her, he summons up birds, trees,
houses, the fountain, the offices, law papers, and much besides. It is a
folly, and it is all but an enchantment:
"Whether there was life enough left in the slow vegetation of Fountain
Court for the smoky shrubs to have any consciousness of the brightest
and purest-hearted little woman in the world, is a question for
gardeners, and those who are learned in the loves of plants. But that it
was a good thing for that same paved yard to have such a delicate little
figure flitting through it; that it passed like a smile from the grimy
old houses, and the worn flagstones, and left them duller, darker,
sterner than before; there is no sort of doubt. The Temple fountain
might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful
maidenhood, that in her person stole on, sparkling, through the dry and
dusty channels of the Law; the chirping sparrows, bred in Temple chinks
and crannies, might have held their peace to listen to imaginary
skylarks, as so fresh a little creature passed; the dingy boughs, unused
to droop, otherwise than in their puny growth might have bent down in a
kindred gracefulness, to shed their benedictions on her graceful head;
old love-letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and
made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had
strayed, and of which, in their degeneracy, they formed a part, might
have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient
tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that
did not happen, and never will, for the love of Ruth."[243]
This is far-fetched, without doubt. French taste, always measured,
revolts against these affected strokes, these sickly prettinesses. And
yet this affectation is natural; Dickens does not hunt after
quaintnesses; they come to him. His excessive imagination is like a
string too tightly stretched; it produces of itself, without any violent
shock, sounds not heard elsewhere.
We shall see how it is excited. Imagine a shop, no matter what shop, the
most repulsive; that of a mathematical-instrument maker. Dickens sees
the barometers, chronometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps,
sextants, speaking-trumpets, and so forth. He sees so many, sees them so
clearly, they are crowded and crammed, they replace each other so
forcibly in his brain, which they fill and obstruct; there are so many
geographical and nautical ideas exposed under the glass cases hung from
the ceiling, nailed to the wall, they swamp him from so many sides, and
in such abundance, that he loses his judgment. "The shop itself,
partaking of the general infection, seemed almost to become a snug,
sea-going, ship-shape concern, wanting only good sea-room, in the event
of an unexpected launch, to work its way securely to any desert island
in the world."[244]
The difference between a madman and a man of genius is not very great.
Napoleon, who knew men, said so to Esquirol.[245] The same faculty leads
us to glory or throws us into a cell in a lunatic asylum. It is
visionary imagination which forges the phantoms of the madman and
creates the personages of an artist, and the classifications serving for
the first may serve for the second. The imagination of Dickens is like
that of monomaniacs. To plunge one's self into an idea, to be absorbed
by it, to see nothing else, to repeat it under a hundred forms, to
enlarge it, to carry it, thus enlarged, to the eye of the spectator, to
dazzle and overwhelm him with it, to stamp it upon him so firmly and
deeply that he can never again tear it from his memory--these are the
great features of this imagination and style. In this, "David
Copperfield" is a masterpiece. Never did objects remain more visible and
présent to the memory of a reader than those which he describes. The
old house, the parlor, the kitchen, Peggotty's boat, and above all the
school play-ground, are interiors whose relief, energy, and precision
are unequalled. Dickens has the passion and patience of the painters of
his nation; he reckons his details one by one, notes the various hues of
the old tree-trunks; sees the dilapidated cask, the greenish and broken
flagstones, the chinks of the damp walls; he distinguishes the strange
smells which rise from them; marks the size of the mildewed spots, reads
the names of the scholars carved on the door, and dwells on the form of
the letters. And this minute description has nothing cold about it; if
it is thus detailed, it is because the contemplation was intense; it
proves its passion by its exactness. We felt this passion without
accounting for it; suddenly we find it at the end of a page; the
boldness of the style renders it visible, and the violence of the phrase
attests the violence of the impression. Excessive metaphors bring before
the mind grotesque fancies. We feel ourselves beset by extravagant
visions. Mr. Mell takes his flute, and blows on it, says Copperfield,
"until I almost thought he would gradually blow his whole being into the
large hole at the top, and ooze away at the keys."[246] Tom Pinch,
disabused at last, discovers that his master Pecksniff is a hypocritical
rogue. He "had so long been used to steep the Pecksniff of his fancy in
his tea, and spread him out upon his toast, and take him as a relish
with his beer, that he made but a poor breakfast on the first morning
after his expulsion."[247] We think of Hoffman's fantastic tales; we are
arrested by a fixed idea, and our head begins to ache. These
eccentricities are in the style of sickness rather than of health.
Therefore Dickens is admirable in depicting hallucinations. We see that
he feels himself those of his characters, that he is engrossed by their
ideas, that he enters into their madness. As an Englishman and a
moralist, he has described remorse frequently. Perhaps it may be said
that he makes a scarecrow of it, and that an artist is wrong to
transform himself into an assistant of the policeman and the preacher.
What of that? The portrait of Jonas Chuzzlewit is so terrible that we
may pardon it for being useful. Jonas, leaving his chamber secretly, has
treacherously murdered his enemy, and thinks henceforth to breathe in
peace; but the recollection of the murder gradually disorganizes his
mind, like poison. He is no longer able to control his ideas; they bear
him on with the fury of a terrified horse. He is forever thinking, and
shuddering as he thinks, of the room where people believed he slept. He
sees this room, counts the tiles of the floor, pictures the long folds
of the dark curtains, the tumbled bed, the door at which some one might
have knocked. The more he wants to escape from this vision, the more he
is immersed in it; it is a burning abyss in which he rolls, struggling,
with cries and sweats of agony. He fancies himself lying in his bed, as
he ought to be, and an instant after he sees himself there. He fears
this other self. The dream is so vivid that he is not sure that he is
not in London. "He became, in a manner, his own ghost and phantom." And
this imaginary being, like a mirror, only redoubles before his
conscience the image of assassination and punishment. He returns, and
shuffles, with pale face, to the door of his chamber. He, a man of
business, a man of figures, a coarse machine of positive reasoning, has
become as fanciful as a nervous woman. "He stole on, to the door, on
tip-toe, as if he dreaded to disturb his own imaginary rest." At the
moment when he turns the key in the lock, "a monstrous fear beset his
mind. What if the murdered man were there before him?" At last he
enters, and tumbles into bed, burnt up with fever. "He buried himself
beneath the blankets," so as to try not to see "that infernal room"; he
sees it more clearly still. The rustling of the clothes, the buzz of an
insect, the beatings of his heart, all cry to him Murderer! His mind
fixed with "an agony of listening" on the door, he ends by thinking that
people open it; he hears it creak. His senses are distorted; he dares
not mistrust them, he dares no longer believe in them; and in this
nightmare, in which drowned reason leaves nothing but a chaos of hideous
forms, he finds no reality but the incessant burden of his convulsive
despair. Thenceforth all his thoughts, dangers, the whole world
disappears for him in "the one dread question only, When would they find
the body in the wood?" He forces himself to distract his thoughts from
this; they remain stamped and glued to it; they hold him to it as by a
chain of iron. He continually figures himself going into the wood,
"going softly about it and about it among the leaves, approaching it
nearer and nearer through a gap in the boughs, and startling the very
flies, that were thickly sprinkled all over it like heaps of dried
currants." His mind was fixed and fastened on the discovery, for
intelligence of which he listened intently to every cry and shout;
listened when any one came in, or went out; watched from the window the
people who passed up and down the street. At the same time, he has ever
before his eyes that corpse "lying alone in the wood"; "he was forever
showing and presenting it, as it were, to every creature whom he saw.
'Look here! do you know of this? Is it found? Do you suspect me?' If he
had been condemned to bear the body in his arms, and lay it down for
recognition at the feet of every one he met, it could not have been more
constantly with him, or a cause of more monotonous and dismal occupation
than it was in this state of his mind."[248]
Jonas is on the verge of madness. There are other characters quite mad.
Dickens has drawn three or four portraits of madmen, very funny at first
sight, but so true that they are in reality horrible. It needed an
imagination like his, irregular, excessive, capable of fixed ideas, to
exhibit the derangements of reason. Two especially there are, which make
us laugh, and which make us shudder. Augustus, a gloomy maniac, who is
on the point of marrying Miss Pecksniff; and poor Mr. Dick, partly an
idiot, partly a monomaniac, who lives with Miss Trotwood. To understand
these sudden exaltations, these unforeseen gloominesses, these
incredible somersaults of perverted sensitiveness; to reproduce these
hiatuses of thought, these interruptions of reasoning, this recurrence
of a word, always the same, which breaks in upon a phrase attempted and
overturns renascent reason; to see the stupid smile, the vacant look,
the foolish and uneasy physiognomy of these haggard old children, who
painfully grope about from one idea to another, and stumble at every
step on the threshold of the truth which they cannot attain, is a
faculty which Hoffman alone has possessed in an equal degree with
Dickens. The play of these shattered reasons is like the creaking of a
door on its rusty hinges; it makes one sick to hear it. We find in it,
if we like, a discordant burst of laughter, but we discover still more
easily a groan and a lamentation, and we are terrified to gauge the
lucidity, strangeness, exaltation, violence of imagination which has
produced such creations, which has carried them on and sustained them
unbendingly to the end, and which found itself in its proper sphere in
imitating and producing their irrationality.
Section III.--His Trivialities.--His Minuteness
To what can this force be applied? Imaginations differ not only in their
nature, but also in their object; after having gauged their energy, we
must define their domain; in the wide world the artist makes a world for
himself; involuntarily he chooses a class of objects which he prefers;
others do not warm his genius, and he does not perceive them. Dickens
does not perceive great things; this is the second feature of his
imagination. Enthusiasm seizes him in connection with everything,
especially in connection with vulgar objects: a curiosity shop, a
sign-post, a town-crier. He has vigor, he does not attain beauty. His
instrument produces vibrating, but not harmonious sounds. If he is
describing a house, he will draw it with geometrical clearness; he will
put all its colors in relief, discover a face and thought in the
shutters and the spouts; he will make a sort of human being out of the
house, grimacing and forcible, which attracts our attention, and which
we shall never forget; but he will not see the grandeur of the long
monumental lines, the calm majesty of the broad shadows boldly divided
by the white plaster; the cheerfulness of the light which covers them,
and becomes palpable in the black niches in which it dives, as though to
rest and to sleep. If he is painting a landscape, he will perceive the
haws which dot with their red fruit the leafless hedges, the thin vapor
steaming from a distant stream, the motion of an insect in the grass;
but the deep poetry which the author of "Valentine" and "André"[249]
would have felt, will escape him. He will be lost, like the painters of
his country, in the minute and impassioned observation of small things;
he will have no love of beautiful forms and fine colors. He will not
perceive that the blue and the red, the straight line and the curve, are
enough to compose vast concerts, which amidst so many various
expressions maintain a grand serenity, and open up in the depths of the
soul a spring of health and happiness. Happiness is lacking in him; his
inspiration is a feverish rapture, which does not select its objects,
which animates promiscuously the ugly, the vulgar, the ridiculous, and
which communicating to his creations an indescribable jerkiness and
violence, deprives them of the delight and harmony which in other hands
they might have retained. Miss Ruth is a very pretty housekeeper; she
puts on her apron; what a treasure this apron is! Dickens turns it over
and over, like a milliner's shopman who wants to sell it. She holds it
in her hands, then she puts it round her waist, ties the strings,
spreads it out, smoothes it that it may fall well. What does she not do
with her apron? And how delighted is Dickens during these innocent
occupations? He utters little exclamations of joyous fun. "Oh heaven,
what a wicked little stomacher!" He apostrophizes a ring, he sports
round Ruth, he is so delighted he claps his hands. It is much worse when
she is making the pudding; there is a whole scene, dramatic and lyric,
with exclamations, protasis, sudden inversions as complete as a Greek
tragedy. These kitchen refinements and this waggery of imagination make
us think, by way of contrast, of the household pictures of George Sand,
of the room of Geneviève the flower-girl. She, like Ruth, is making a
useful object, very useful, since she will sell it to-morrow for
ten-pence; but this object is a full-blown rose, whose fragile petals
are moulded by her fingers as by the fingers of a fairy, whose fresh
corolla is purpled with a vermilion as tender as that of her cheeks; a
fragile masterpiece which bloomed on an evening of poetic emotion,
whilst from her window she beheld in the sky the piercing and divine
eyes of the stars, and in the depths of her virgin heart murmured the
first breath of love. Dickens does not need such a sight for his
transports; a stagecoach throws him into dithyrambs; the wheels, the
splashing, the cracking whip, the clatter of the horses, harness, the
vehicle; here is enough to transport him. He feels sympathetically the
motion of the coach; it bears him along with it; he hears the gallop of
the horses in his brain, and goes off, uttering this ode, which seems to
proceed from the guard's horn:
"Yoho, among the gathering shades; making of no account the deep
reflections of the trees, but scampering on through light and darkness,
all the same, as if the light of London, fifty miles away, were quite
enough to travel by, and some to spare. Yoho, beside the village green,
where cricket-players linger yet, and every little indentation made in
the fresh grass by bat or wicket, ball or player's foot, sheds out its
perfume on the night. Away with four fresh horses from the Baldfaced
Stag, where topers congregate about the door admiring; and the last
team, with traces hanging loose, go roaming off towards the pond, until
observed and shouted after by a dozen throats, while volunteering boys
pursue them. Now, with a clattering of hoofs and striking out of fiery
sparks, across the old stone bridge, and down again into the shadowy
road, and through the open gate, and far away, away into the wold. Yoho!
"Yoho, behind there, stop that bugle for a moment! Come creeping over to
the front, along the coach-roof, guard, and make one at this basket! Not
that we slacken in our pace the while, not we: we rather put the bits of
blood upon their mettle, for the greater glory of the snack. Ah! It is
long since this bottle of old wine was brought into contact with the
mellow breath of night, you may depend, and rare good stuff it is to wet
a bugler's whistle with. Only try it. Don't be afraid of turning up your
finger, Bill, another pull! Now, take your breath, and try the bugle,
Bill. There's music! There's a tone! 'Over the hills and far away,'
indeed, Yoho! The skittish mare is all alive tonight. Yoho! Yoho!
"See the bright moon; high up before we know it; making the earth
reflect the objects on its breast like water. Hedges, trees, low
cottages, church steeples, blighted stumps and flourishing young slips,
have all grown vain upon the sudden, and mean to contemplate their own
fair images till morning. The poplars yonder rustle, that their
quivering leaves may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak;
trembling does not become him; and he watches himself in his stout old
burly steadfastness, without the motion of a twig. The moss-grown gate,
ill poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed, swings to and
fro before its glass like some fantastic dowager; while our own ghostly
likeness travels on, Yoho! Yoho! through ditch and brake, upon the
ploughed land and the smooth, along the steep hill-side and steeper
wall, as if it were a phantom-Hunter.
"Clouds too! And a mist upon the Hollow! Not a dull fog that hides it,
but a light, airy, gauze-like mist, which in our eyes of modest
admiration gives a now charm to the beauties it is spread before: as
real gauze has done ere now, and would again, so please you, though we
were the Pope. Yoho! Why, now we travel like the Moon herself. Hiding
this minute in a grove of trees, next minute in a patch of vapour,
emerging now upon our broad, clear course, withdrawing now, but always
dashing on, our journey is a counterpart of hers. Yoho! A match against
the Moon!
"The beauty of the night is hardly felt, when Day comes leaping up.
Yoho! Two stages, and the country roads are almost changed to a
continuous street. Yoho, past market gardens, rows of houses, villas,
crescents, terraces, and squares; past wagons, coaches, carts; past
early workmen, late stragglers, drunken men, and sober carriers of
loads; past brick and mortar in its every shape; and in among the
rattling pavements, where a jaunty-seat upon a coach is not so easy to
preserve! Yoho down countless turnings, and through countless mazy ways,
until an old Inn-yard is gained, and Tom Pinch, getting down, quite
stunned and giddy, is in London!"[250]
All this to tell us that Tom Pinch is come to London! This fit of lyric
poetry, in which the most poetic extravagances spring from the most
vulgar commonplaces, like sickly flowers growing in a broken old
flower-pot, displays in its natural and quaint contrasts all the sides
of Dickens's imagination. We shall have his portrait if we picture to
ourselves a man who, with a stew-pan in one hand and a postilion's whip
in the other, took to making prophecies.
Section IV.--His Emotions.--His Pathos.--His Humor
The reader already foresees what vehement emotions this species of
imagination will produce. The mode of conception in a man governs the
mode of thought. When the mind, barely attentive, follows the indistinct
outlines of a rough-sketched image, joy and grief glide past him with
insensible touch. When the mind, with rapt attention, penetrates the
minute details of a precise image, joy and grief shake the whole man.
Dickens has this attention, and sees these details: this is why he meets
everywhere with objects of exaltation. He never abandons his impassioned
tone; he never rests in a natural style and in simple narrative; he only
rails or weeps; he writes but satires or elegies. He has the feverish
sensibility of a woman who laughs loudly, or melts into tears at the
sudden shock of the slightest occurrence. This impassioned style is
extremely potent, and to it may be attributed half the glory of Dickens.
The majority of men have only weak emotions. We labor mechanically, and
yawn much; three-fourths of things leave us cold; we go to sleep by
habit, and we no longer remark the household scenes, petty details,
stale adventures, which are the basis of our existence. A man comes, who
suddenly renders them interesting; nay, who makes them dramatic, changes
them into objects of admiration, tenderness and dread. Without leaving
the fireside or the omnibus, we are trembling, our eyes full of tears,
or shaken by fits of inextinguishable laughter. We are transformed, our
life is doubled; our soul has been vegetating; now it feels, suffers,
loves. The contrast, the rapid succession, the number of the sentiments,
add further to its trouble; we are immersed for two hundred pages in a
torrent of new emotions, contrary and increasing, which communicates its
violence to the mind, which carries it away in digressions and falls,
and only casts it on the bank enchanted and exhausted. It is an
intoxication, and on a delicate soul the effect would be too forcible;
but it suits the English public, and that public has justified it.
This sensibility can hardly have more than two issues--laughter and
tears. There are others, but they are only reached by lofty eloquence;
they are the path to sublimity, and we have seen that for Dickens this
path is cut off. Yet there is no writer who knows better how to touch
and melt; he makes us weep, absolutely shed tears; before reading him we
did not know there was so much pity in the heart. The grief of a child,
who wishes to be loved by his father, and whom his father does not love;
the despairing love and slow death of a poor half-imbecile young man;
all these pictures of secret grief leave an ineffaceable impression. The
tears which he sheds are genuine, and compassion is their only source.
Balzac, George Sand, Stendhal have also recorded human miseries; is it
possible to write without recording them? But they do not seek them out,
they hit upon them; they do not dream of displaying them to us; they
were going elsewhere, and met them on their way. They love art better
than men. They delight only in setting in motion the springs of
passions, in combining large systems of events, in constructing powerful
characters: they do not write from sympathy with the wretched, but from
love of beauty. When we have finished George Sand's "Mauprat," our
emotion is not pure sympathy; we feel, in addition, a deep admiration
for the greatness and the generosity of love. When we have come to the
end of Balzac's "Le Père Goriot," our heart is pained by the tortures
of that anguish; but the astonishing inventiveness, the accumulation of
facts, the abundance of general ideas, the force of analysis, transport
us into the world of science, and our painful sympathy is calmed by the
spectacle of this physiology of the heart. Dickens never calms our
sympathy; he selects subjects in which it alone, and more than
elsewhere, is unfolded: the long oppression of children persecuted and
starved by their schoolmaster; the life of a factory-hand Stephen,
robbed and degraded by his wife, driven away by his fellow-workmen,
accused of theft, lingering six days at the bottom of a pit into which
he has fallen, maimed, consumed by fever, and dying when he is at length
discovered. Rachael, his only friend, is there; and his delirium, his
cries, the storm of despair in which Dickens envelops his characters,
have prepared the way for the painful picture of this resigned death.
The bucket brings up a poor, crushed human creature, and we see "the
pale, worn, patient face looking up to the sky, whilst the right hand,
shattered and hanging down, seems as if waiting to be taken by another
hand." Yet he smiles, and feebly said "Rachael!" She stooped down, and
bent over him until her eyes were between his and the sky, for he could
not so much as turn them to look at her. Then in broken words he tells
her of his long agony. Ever since he was born he has met with nothing
but misery and injustice; it is the rule--the weak suffer, and are made
to suffer. This pit into which he has fallen "has cost hundreds and
hundreds o' men's lives--fathers, sons, brothers, dear to thousands an'
thousands, an' keeping 'em fro' want and hunger.... The men that works
in pits... ha' pray'n an' pray'n the lawmakers for Christ's sake not to
let their work be murder to 'em, but to spare 'em for th' wives and
children, that they loves as well as gentlefok loves theirs"; all in
vain. "When the pit was in work, it killed wi'out need; when 't is let
alone, it kills wi'out need."[251] Stephen says this without anger,
quietly, merely as the truth. He has his calumniator before him; he does
not get angry, accuses no one; he only charges old Gradgrind to clear
him and make his name good with all men as soon as he shall be dead. His
heart is up there in heaven, where he has seen a star shining. In his
agony, on his bed of stones, he has gazed upon it, and the tender and
touching glance of the divine star has calmed, by its mystical serenity,
the anguish of mind and body.
"'It ha' shined in upon me,' he said reverently, 'in my pain and trouble
down below. It ha' shined into my mind. I ha' lookn at't and thowt o'
thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit,
I hope. If soom ha' been wantin' in unnerstan'in' me better, I, too, ha'
been wantin' in unnerstan'in' them better.
"'In my pain an' trouble, lookin' up yonder--wi' it shinin' on me--I ha'
seen more clear, and ha' made it my dyin' prayer that aw th' world may
on'y coom toogether more, an' get a better unnerstan'in' o' one another,
than when I were in't my own weak seln.
"'Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin' on me down there in my
trouble, I thowt it were the star as guided to our Saviour's home. I
awmust think it be the very star!'
"They carried him very gently along the fields, and down the lanes, and
over the wide landscape; Rachael always holding the hand in hers. Very
few whispers broke the mournful silence. It was soon a funeral
procession. The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor;
and through humility, and sorrow, and forgiveness, he had gone to his
Redeemer's rest."[252]
This same writer is the most railing, the most comic, the most jocose of
English authors. And it is moreover a singular gayety! It is the only
kind which would harmonize with this impassioned sensibility. There is a
laughter akin to tears. Satire is the sister of elegy: if the second
pleads for the oppressed, the first combats the oppressors. Feeling
painfully all the wrongs that are committed, and the vices that are
practised, Dickens avenges himself by ridicule. He does not paint, he
punishes. Nothing could be more damaging than those long chapters of
sustained irony, in which the sarcasm is pressed, line after line, more
sanguinary and piercing in the chosen adversary. There are five or six
against the Americans--their venal newspapers, their drunken
journalists, their cheating speculators, their women authors, their
coarseness, their familiarity, their insolence, their brutality--enough
to captivate an absolutist, and to justify the French Liberal who,
returning from New York, embraced with tears in his eyes the first
gendarme whom he saw on landing at Havre. Starting of commercial
companies, interviews between a member of Parliament and his
constituents, instructions of a member of the House of Commons to his
secretary, the outward display of great banking-houses, the laying of
the first stone of a public building, every kind of ceremony and lie of
English society, are depicted with the fire and bitterness of Hogarth.
There are parts where the comic element is so violent that it has the
semblance of vengeance--as the story of Jonas Chuzzlewit. "The very
first word which this excellent boy learnt to spell was gain, and the
second (when he came into two syllables) was money." This fine education
had unfortunately produced two results: first, that, "having been long
taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had imperceptibly
acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor himself";
secondly, that being taught to regard everything as a matter of
property, "he had gradually come to look with impatience on his parent
as a certain amount of personal estate," who would be very well
"secured," in that particular description of strong-box which is
commonly called a coffin, and banked in the grave.[253] "Is that my
father snoring, Pecksniff?" asked Jonas; "tread upon his foot; will you
be so good? The foot next you is the gouty one."[254] Young Chuzzlewit
is introduced to us with this mark of attention; we may judge by this of
his other feelings. In reality, Dickens is gloomy, like Hogarth; but,
like Hogarth, he makes us burst with laughter by the buffoonery of his
invention and the violence of his caricatures. He pushes his characters
to absurdity with unwonted boldness. Pecksniff hits off moral phrases
and sentimental actions in so grotesque a manner that they make him
extravagant. Never were heard such monstrous oratorical displays.
Sheridan had already painted an English hypocrite, Joseph Surface; but
he differs from Pecksniff as much as a portrait of the eighteenth
century differs from a cartoon of "Punch." Dickens makes hypocrisy so
deformed and monstrous that his hypocrite ceases to resemble a man; we
would call him one of those fantastic figures whose nose is greater than
his body. This exaggerated comicality springs from excess of
imagination. Dickens uses the same spring throughout. The better to make
us see the object he shows us, he dazzles the reader's eyes with it; but
the reader is amused by this irregular fancy; the fire of the execution
makes him forget that the scene is improbable, and he laughs heartily as
he listens to the undertaker, Mould, enumerating the consolations which
filial piety, well backed by money, may find in his shop. What grief
could not be softened by
"'Four horses to each vehicle... velvet trappings... drivers in cloth
cloaks and top-boots... the plumage of the ostrich, dyed black... any
number of walking attendants, dressed in the first style of funeral
fashion, and carrying batons tipped with brass... a place in Westminster
Abbey itself, if he choose to invest it in such a purchase. Oh! do not
let us say that gold is dross, when it can buy such things as these. Ay,
Mrs. Gamp, you are right,' rejoined the undertaker. 'We should be an
honoured calling. We do good by stealth, and blush to have it mentioned
in our little bills. How much consolation may I--even I,' cried Mr.
Mould, 'have diffused among my fellow-creatures by means of my four
long-tailed prancers, never harnessed under ten pund ten!'"[255]
Usually Dickens remains grave whilst drawing his caricatures. English
wit consists in saying very jocular things in a solemn manner. Tone and
ideas are then in contrast; every contrast makes a strong impression.
Dickens loves to produce them, and his public to hear them.
If at times he forgets to castigate his neighbor, if he tries to sport,
to amuse himself, he is not the more happy for all that. The chief
element of the English character is its want of happiness. The ardent
and tenacious imagination of Dickens is impressed with things too firmly
to pass lightly and gayly over the surface. He leans too heavily on
them, he penetrates, works into, hollows them out; all these violent
actions are efforts, and all efforts are sufferings. To be happy, a man
must be light-minded, as a Frenchman of the eighteenth century, or
sensual, as an Italian of the sixteenth; a man must not get anxious
about things, if he wishes to enjoy them. Dickens does get anxious and
does not enjoy. Let us take a little comical accident, such as we meet
with in the street--a gust of wind, which blows about the garments of a
street-porter. Scaramouche will grin with good humor; Le Sage smile like
a diverted man; both will pass by and think no more of it. Dickens muses
over it for half a page. He sees so clearly all the effects of the wind,
he puts himself so entirely in its place, he imagines for it a will so
impassioned and precise, he shakes the clothes of the poor man hither
and thither so violently and so long, he turns the gust into a tempest,
into a persecution so great, that we are made giddy; and even whilst we
laugh, we feel in ourselves too much emotion and compassion to laugh
heartily:
"And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed,
tooth-chattering place it was, to wait in, in the winter-time, as Toby
Veck well knew. The wind came tearing round the corner--especially the
east wind--as if it had sallied forth, express, from the confines of the
earth, to have a blow at Toby. And often-times it seemed to come upon
him sooner than it had expected; for, bouncing round the corner, and
passing Toby, it would suddenly wheel round again, as if it cried":
"'Why, here he is!' Incontinently his little white apron would be caught
up over his head like a naughty boy's garments, and his feeble little
cane would be seen to wrestle and struggle unavailingly in his hand, and
his legs would undergo tremendous agitation; and Toby himself, all
aslant, and facing now in this direction, now in that, would be so
banged and buffeted, and tousled, and worried, and hustled, and lifted
off his feet, as to render it a state of things but one degree removed
from a positive miracle that he wasn't carried up bodily into the air as
a colony of frogs or snails or other portable creatures sometimes are,
and rained down again, to the great astonishment of the natives, on some
strange corner of the world where ticket-porters are unknown."[256]
If now we would picture in a glance this imagination--so lucid, so
violent, so passionately fixed on the object selected, so deeply touched
by little things, so wholly attached to the details and sentiments of
vulgar life, so fertile in incessant emotions, so powerful in rousing
painful pity, sarcastic raillery, nervous gayety--we must fancy a London
street on a rainy winter's night. The flickering light of the gas
dazzles our eyes, streams through the shop windows, floods over the
passing forms; and its harsh light, settling upon their contracted
features, brings out, with endless detail and damaging force, their
wrinkles, deformities, troubled expression. If in this close and dirty
crowd we discover the fresh face of a young girl, this artificial light
covers it with false and excessive lights and shades; it makes it stand
out against the rainy and cold blackness with a strange halo. The mind
is struck with wonder; but we carry our hand to our eyes to cover them,
and whilst we admire the force of this light, we involuntarily think of
the real country sun and the tranquil beauty of day.
Part II.--The Public
Section I.--The Morality of English Novels
Plant this talent on English soil; the literary opinion of the country
will direct its growth and explain its fruits. For this public opinion
is its private opinion; it does not submit to it as to an external
constraint, but feels it inwardly as an inner persuasion; it does not
hinder, but develops it, and only repeats aloud what it said to itself
in a whisper.
The counsels of this public taste are somewhat like this; the more
powerful because they agree with its natural inclination, and urge it
upon its special course:
"Be moral. All your novels must be such as may be read by young girls.
We are practical minds, and we would not have literature corrupt
practical life. We believe in family life, and we would not have
literature paint the passions which attack family life. We are
Protestants, and we have preserved something of the severity of our
fathers against enjoyment and passions. Amongst these, love is the
worst. Beware of resembling in this respect the most illustrious of our
neighbors. Love is the hero of all George Sand's novels. Married or not,
she thinks it beautiful, holy, sublime in itself; and she says so. Don't
believe this; and if you do believe it don't say it. It is a bad
example. Love thus represented makes marriage a secondary matter. It
ends in marriage, or destroys it, or does without it, according to
circumstances; but whatever it does, it treats it as inferior; it does
not recognize any holiness in it beyond that which love gives it, and
holds it impious if it is excluded. A novel of this sort is a plea for
the heart, the imagination, enthusiasm, nature; but it is also often a
plea against society and law: we do not suffer society and law to be
touched, directly or indirectly. To present a feeling as divine, to make
all institutions bow before it, to carry it through a series of generous
actions, to sing with a sort of heroic inspiration the combats which it
wages and the attacks which it sustains, to enrich it with all the force
of eloquence, to crown it with all the flowers of poetry, is to paint
the life, which it results in, as more beautiful and loftier than
others, to set it far above all passions and duties, in a sublime
region, on a throne, whence it shines as a light, a consolation, a hope,
and draws all hearts towards it. Perhaps this is the world of artists;
it is not the world of ordinary men. Perhaps it is true to nature; we
make nature give way before the interests of society. George Sand paints
impassioned women; paint you for us good women. George Sand makes us
desire to be in love; do you make us desire to be married.
"This has its disadvantages without doubt; art suffers by it, if the
public gains. Though your characters give the best examples, your works
will be of less value. No matter; you may console yourself with the
thought that you are moral. Your lovers will be uninteresting; for the
only interest natural to their age is the violence of passion, and you
cannot paint passion. In 'Nicholas Nickleby' you will show two good
young men, like all young men, marrying two good young women, like all
young women; in 'Martin Chuzzlewit' you will show two more good young
men, perfectly resembling the other two, marrying again two good young
women, perfectly resembling the other two; in 'Dombey and Son' there
will be only one good young man and one good young woman. Otherwise
there is no difference. And so on. The number of your marriages is
marvellous, and you marry enough couples to people England. What is more
curious still, they are all disinterested, and the young man and young
woman snap their fingers at money as sincerely as in the Opéra Comique.
You will not cease to dwell on the pretty shynesses of the betrothed,
the tears of the mothers, the tears of all the guests, the amusing and
touching scenes of the dinner table; you will create a crowd of family
pictures, all touching, and almost all as agreeable as screen-paintings.
The reader is moved; he thinks he is beholding the innocent loves and
virtuous attentions of a little boy and girl of ten. He should like to
say to them: 'Good little people, continue to be very proper.' But the
chief interest will be for young girls, who will learn in how devoted
and yet suitable a manner a lover ought to court his intended. If you
venture on a seduction, as in 'Copperfield,' you do not relate the
progress, ardor, intoxication of love; you only depict its miseries,
despair and remorse. If in 'Copperfield' and the 'Cricket on the Hearth'
you present a troubled marriage and a suspected wife, you hasten to
restore peace to the marriage and innocence to the wife; and you will
deliver, by her mouth, so splendid a eulogy on marriage, that it might
serve for a model to Émile Augier.[257] If in 'Hard Times' the wife
treads on the border of crime, she shall check herself there. If in
'Dombey and Son' she flees from her husband's roof, she remains pure,
only incurs the appearance of crime, and treats her lover in such a
manner that the reader wishes to be the husband. If, lastly, in
'Copperfield' you relate the emotions and follies of love, you will
rally this poor affection, depict its littlenesses, not venture to make
us hear the ardent, generous, undisciplined blast of the all-powerful
passion; you turn it into a toy for good children, or a pretty
marriage-trinket. But marriage will compensate you. Your genius of
observation and taste for details is exercised on the scenes of domestic
life; you will excel in the picture of a fireside, family prattle,
children on the knees of their mother, a husband watching by lamplight
by the side of his sleeping wife, the heart full of joy and courage,
because it feels that it is working for its own. You will describe
charming or grave portraits of women; of Dora, who after marriage
continues to be a little girl, whose pouting, prettinesses,
childishnesses, laughter, make the house gay, like the chirping of a
bird; Esther, whose perfect goodness and divine innocence cannot be
affected by trials or years; Agnes, so calm, patient, sensible, pure,
worthy of respect, a very model of a wife, sufficient in herself to
claim for marriage the respect which we demand for it. And when it is
necessary to show the beauty of these duties, the greatness of this
conjugal love, the depth of the sentiment which ten years of confidence,
cares, and reciprocal devotion have created, you will find in your
sensibility, so long constrained, speeches as pathetic as the strongest
words of love.[258]
"The worst novels are not those which glorify love. A man must live
across the Channel to dare what the French have dared. In England, some
admire Balzac; but no man would tolerate him. Some pretend that he is
not immoral; but every one will recognize that he always and everywhere
makes morality an abstraction. George Sand has only celebrated one
passion; Balzac has celebrated them all. He has considered them as
forces; and holding that force is beautiful, he has supported them by
their causes, surrounded them by their circumstances, developed them in
their effects, pushed them to an extreme, and magnified them so as to
make them into sublime monsters, more systematic and more true than the
truth. We do not admit that a man is only an artist, and nothing else.
We would not have him separate himself from his conscience, and lose
sight of the practical. We will never consent to see that such is the
leading feature of our own Shakespeare; we will not recognize that he,
like Balzac, brings his heroes to crime and monomania, and that, like
him, he lives in a land of pure logic and imagination. We have changed
much since the sixteenth century, and we condemn now what we approved
formerly. We would not have the reader interested in a miser, an
ambitious man, a rake. And he is interested in them when the writer,
neither praising nor blaming, sets himself to unfold the mood, training,
shape of the head, and habits of mind which have impressed in him this
primitive inclination, to prove the necessity of its effects, to lead it
through all its stages, to show the greater power which age and
contentment give, to expose the irresistible fall which hurls man into
madness or death. The reader, caught by this reasoning, admires the work
which it has produced, and forgets to be indignant against the personage
created. He says, What a splendid miser! and thinks not of the evils
which avarice causes. He becomes a philosopher and an artist, and
remembers not that he is an upright man. Always recollect that you are
such, and renounce the beauties which may flourish on this evil soil.
"Amongst these, the first is greatness. A man must be interested in
passions to comprehend their full effect, to count all their springs, to
describe their whole course. They are diseases; if a man is content to
blame them he will never know them; if you are not a physiologist, if
you are not enamoured of them, if you do not make your heroes out of
them, if you do not start with pleasure at the sight of a fine feature
of avarice, as at the sight of a valuable symptom, you will not be able
to unfold their vast system, and to display their fatal greatness. You
will not have this immoral merit; and, moreover, it does not suit your
species of mind. Your extreme sensibility, and ever-ready irony, must
needs be exercised; you have not sufficient calmness to penetrate to the
depths of a character, you prefer to weep over or to rail at it; you lay
the blame on it, make it your friend or foe, render it touching or
odious; you do not depict it; you are too impassioned, and not enough
inquisitive. On the other hand, the tenacity of your imagination, the
vehemence and fixity with which you impress your thought into the detail
you wish to grasp, limit your knowledge, arrest you in a single feature,
prevent you from reaching all the parts of a soul, and from sounding its
depths. Your imagination is too lively, too meagre. These, then, are the
characters you will outline. You will grasp a personage in a single
attitude, you will see of him only that and you will impose it upon him
from beginning to end. His face will always have the same expression,
and this expression will be almost always a grimace. Your personages
will have a sort of knack which will not quit them. Miss Mercy will
laugh at every word; Mark Tapley will say 'jolly' in every scene; Mrs.
Gamp will be ever talking of Mrs. Harris; Dr. Chillip will not venture a
single action free from timidity; Mr. Micawber will speak through three
volumes the same kind of emphatic phrases, and will pass five or six
times, with comical suddenness, from joy to grief. Each of your
characters will be a vice, a virtue, a ridicule personified; and the
passion, with which you endow it, will be so frequent, so invariable, so
absorbing, that it will no longer be like a living man, but an
abstraction in man's clothes. The French have a Tartuffe like your
Pecksniff, but the hypocrisy which he represents has not destroyed the
other traits of his character; if he adds to the comedy by his vice, he
belongs to humanity by his nature. He has, besides his ridiculous
feature, a character and a mood; he is coarse, strong, red in the face,
brutal, sensual; the vehemence of his blood makes him bold; his boldness
makes him calm; his boldness, his calm, his quick decision, his scorn of
men, make him a great politician. When he has entertained the public
through five acts, he still offers to the psychologist and the physician
more than one subject of study. Your Pecksniff will offer nothing to
these. He will only serve to instruct and amuse the public. He will be a
living satire of hypocrisy, and nothing more. If you give him a taste
for brandy, it is gratuitously; in the mood which you assign to him,
nothing requires it; he is so steeped in oily hypocrisy, in softness, in
a flowing style, in literary phrases, in tender morality that the rest
of his nature has disappeared; it is a mask, and not a man. But this
mask is so grotesque and energetic that it will be useful to the public,
and will diminish the number of hypocrites. It is our end and yours, and
the list of your characters will have rather the effect of a book of
satires than of a portrait gallery.
"For the same reason, these satires, though united, will continue
effectually detached, and will not constitute a genuine collection. You
began with essays, and your larger novels are only essays, tagged
together. The only means of composing a natural and solid whole is to
write the history of a passion or of a character, to take them up at
their birth, to see them increase, alter, become destroyed, to
understand the inner necessity for their development. You do not follow
this development; you always keep your character in the same attitude;
he is a miser, or a hypocrite, or a good man to the end, and always
after the same fashion: thus he has no history. You can only change the
circumstances in which he is met with, you do not change him; he remains
motionless, and at every shock that touches him, emits the same sound.
The variety of events which you contrive is, therefore, only an amusing
phantasmagoria; they have no connection, they do not form a system, they
are but a heap. You will only write lives, adventures, memoirs,
sketches, collections of scenes, and you will not be able to compose an
action. But if the literary taste of your nation, added to the natural
direction of your genius, imposes upon you moral intentions, forbids you
the lofty depicture of characters, vetoes the composition of united
aggregates, it presents to your observation, sensibility and satire, a
succession of original figures which belong only to England, which drawn
by your hand, will form a unique gallery, and which, with the stamp of
your genius, will offer that of your country and of your time."
Part III.--The Characters
Section I.--Dickens's Love for Natural Characters
Take away the grotesque characters, who are only introduced to fill up
and to excite laughter, and you will find that all Dickens's characters,
belong to two classes--people who have feelings and emotions, and people
who have none. He contrasts the souls which nature creates with those
which society deforms. One of his last novels, "Hard Times," is an
abstract of all the rest. He there exalts instinct above reason,
intuition of heart above positive knowledge; he attacks education built
on statistics, figures, and facts; overwhelms the positive and
mercantile spirit with misfortune and ridicule; combats the pride,
harshness, selfishness of the merchant and the aristocrat; falls foul of
manufacturing towns, towns of smoke and mud, which fetter the body in an
artificial atmosphere, and the mind in a factitious existence. He seeks
out poor artisans, mountebanks, a foundling, and crushes beneath their
common-sense, generosity, delicacy, courage, and gentleness, the false
science, false happiness, and false virtue of the rich and powerful who
despise them. He satirizes oppressive society; mourns over oppressed
nature; and his elegiac genius like his satirical genius, finds ready to
his hand in the English world around him, the sphere which it needs for
its development.
Section II.--The Hypocrite.--The Positive Man.--The Proud Man
The first fruits of English society is hypocrisy. It ripens here under
the double breath of religion and morality; we know their popularity and
sway across the Channel. In a country where it is shocking to laugh on
Sunday, where the gloomy Puritan has preserved something of his old
rancor against happiness, where the critics of ancient history insert
dissertations on the relative virtue of Nebuchadnezzar, it is natural
that the appearance of morality should be serviceable. It is a needful
coin: those who lack good money coin bad; and the more public opinion
declares it precious, the more it is counterfeited. This vice is
therefore English. Mr. Pecksniff is not found in France. His speech
would disgust Frenchmen. If they have an affectation, it is not of
virtue, but of vice: if they wish to succeed, they would be wrong to
speak of their principles: they prefer to confess their weaknesses; and
if they have quacks, they are boasters of immorality. They had their
hypocrites once, but it was when religion was popular. Since Voltaire,
Tartuffe is impossible. Frenchmen no longer try to affect a piety which
would deceive no one, and lead to nothing. Hypocrisy comes and goes,
varying with the state of morals, religion, and mind; we can see, then,
how Pecksniff's suits the dispositions of his country. English religion
is not very dogmatical, but wholly moral. Therefore Pecksniff does not,
like Tartuffe, utter theological phrases; he expands altogether in
philanthropic tirades. He has progressed with the age; he has become a
humanitarian philosopher. He calls his daughters Mercy and Charity. Fie
is tender, he is kind, he gives vent to domestic effusions. He
innocently exhibits, when visited, charming domestic scenes; he displays
his paternal heart, marital sentiments, the kindly feeling of a good
master. The family virtues are honored nowadays; he must muffle himself
therewith. Orgon formerly said, as taught by Tartuffe:
"My brother, children, mother, wife might die!
You think I'll care; no surely, no! not I!"[259]
Modern virtue and English piety think otherwise; we must not despise
this world in view of the next; we must improve it. Tartuffe speaks of
his hair-shirt and his discipline; Pecksniff, of his comfortable little
parlor, of the charm of friendship, the beauties of nature. He tries to
make men "dwell in unity." He is like a member of the Peace Society. He
develops the most touching considerations on the benefits and beauties
of union among men. It will be impossible to hear him without being
affected. Men are refined nowadays, they have read much elegiac poetry;
their sensibility is more active; they can no longer be deceived by the
coarse impudence of Tartuffe. This is why Mr. Pecksniff will use
gestures of sublime long-suffering, smiles of ineffable compassion,
starts, free and easy movements, graces, tendernesses which will seduce
the most reserved and charm the most delicate. The English in their
Parliament, meetings, associations, public ceremonies, have learned the
oratorical phraseology, the abstract terms, the style of political
economy, of the newspapers and the prospectus. Pecksniff talks like a
prospectus. He possesses its obscurity, its wordiness, and its emphasis.
He seems to soar above the earth, in the region of pure ideas, in the
bosom of truth. He resembles an apostle, brought up in the "Times"
office. He spouts general ideas on every occasion. He finds a moral
lesson in the ham and eggs he has just eaten. As he folds his napkin, he
rises to lofty contemplations:
"Even the worldly goods of which we have just disposed, even they have
their moral. See how they come and go. Every pleasure is
transitory."[260]
"'The process of digestion, as I have been informed by anatomical
friends, is one of the most wonderful works of nature. I do not know how
it may be with others, but it is a great satisfaction to me to know,
when regaling on my humble fare, that I am putting in motion the most
beautiful machinery with which we have any acquaintance. I really feel
at such times as if I was doing a public service. When I have wound
myself up, if I may employ such a term/ said Mr. Pecksniff with
exquisite tenderness, 'and know that I am Going, I feel that in the
lesson afforded by the works within me, I am a Benefactor to my
Kind!'"[261]
We recognize a new species of hypocrisy. Vices, like virtues, change
in every age.
The practical, as well as the moral spirit, is English; by commerce,
labor, and government, this people has acquired the taste and talent for
business; this is why they regard the French as children and madmen. The
excess of this disposition is the destruction of imagination and
sensibility. Man becomes a speculative machine, in which figures and
facts are set in array; he denies the life of the mind and the joys of
the heart; he sees in the world nothing but loss and gain; he becomes
hard, harsh, greedy, and avaricious; he treats men as machinery; on a
certain day he finds himself simply a merchant, banker, statistician; he
has ceased to be a man. Dickens has multiplied portraits of the positive
man--Ralph Nickleby, Scrooge, Anthony Chuzzlewit, Jonas Chuzzlewit,
Alderman Cute, Mr. Murdstone and his sister, Bounderby, Gradgrind: we
can find them in all his novels. Some are so by education, others by
nature; but all are odious, for they all rail at and destroy kindness,
sympathy, compassion, disinterested affections, religious emotions, a
fanciful enthusiasm, all that is lovely in man. They oppress children,
strike women, starve the poor, insult the wretched. The best are
machines of polished steel, methodically performing their official
duties, and not knowing that they make others suffer. These kinds of men
are not found in France. Their rigidity is not in the French character.
They are produced in England by a school which has its philosophy, its
great men, its glory, and which has never been established amongst the
French. More than once, it is true, French writers have depicted
avaricious men, men of business, and shopkeepers: Balzac is full of
them: but he explains them by their imbecility, or makes them monsters,
like Grandet and Gobseck. Those of Dickens constitute a real class, and
represent a national vice. Read this passage of "Hard Times," and see
if, body and soul, Mr. Gradgrind is not wholly English:
"'Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the
principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle
on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'
"The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the
speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring
every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis
was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his
eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two
dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the
speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was
helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and
dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which
bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep
the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the
crust of a plum-pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the
hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat,
square legs, square shoulders--nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take
him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact,
as it was--all helped the emphasis.
"'In this life we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!'
"The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial
gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.[262]
"'Thomas Gradgrind, sir! A man of realities. A man of facts and
calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are
four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for
anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir--peremptorily Thomas--Thomas
Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication
table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel
of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere
question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get
some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or
Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all
supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas
Gradgrind--no, sir!'
"In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether
to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In
such terms, no doubt, substituting the words 'boys and girls' for 'sir,'
Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers
before him, who were to be filled so full of facts."[263]
Another fault, arising from the habit of commanding and striving, is
pride. It abounds in an aristocratic country, and no one has more
soundly rated aristocracy than Dickens; all his portraits are sarcasms.
James Harthouse, a dandy disgusted with everything, chiefly with
himself, and rightly so; Lord Frederick Verisopht, a poor duped idiot,
brutalized with drink, whose wit consists in staring at men and sucking
his cane; Lord Feenix, a sort of mechanism of parliamentary phrases, out
of order, and hardly able to finish the ridiculous periods into which he
always takes care to lapse; Mrs. Skewton, a hideous old ruin, a coquette
to the last, demanding rose-colored curtains for her death-bed, and
parading her daughter through all the drawing-rooms of England, in order
to sell her to some vain husband; Sir John Chester, a wretch of high
society, who, for fear of compromising himself, refuses to save his
natural son, and refuses it with all kinds of airs, as he finishes his
chocolate. But the most complete and most English picture of the
aristocratic spirit is the portrait of a London merchant, Mr. Dombey.
In France people do not look for types among the merchants, but they are
found among that class in England, as forcible as in the proudest
châteaux. Mr. Dombey loves his house as if he were a nobleman, as much
as himself. If he neglects his daughter and longs for a son, it is to
perpetuate the old name of his bank. He has his ancestors in commerce,
and he likes to have his descendants in the same branch of business. He
maintains traditions, and continues a power. At this height of opulence,
and with this scope of action, he is a prince, and with a prince's
position he has his feelings. We see there a character which could only
be produced in a country whose commerce embraces the globe, where
merchants are potentates, where a company of merchants has trafficked in
continents, maintained wars, destroyed kingdoms, founded an empire of a
hundred million men. The pride of such a man is not petty, but terrible;
it is so calm and high that to find a parallel we must read again the
memoirs of the Duke of Saint Simon. Mr. Dombey has always commanded, and
it does not enter his mind that he could yield to anyone or anything. He
receives flattery as a tribute to which he has a right, and sees men
beneath him, at a vast distance, as beings made to beseech and obey him.
His second wife, proud Edith Skewton, resists and scorns him; the pride
of the merchant is pitted against the pride of the highborn woman, and
the restrained outbursts of the growing opposition reveal an intensity
of passion, which souls thus born and bred alone can feel. Edith, to
avenge herself, flees on the anniversary of her marriage, and gives
herself the appearance of being an adulteress. It is then that his
inflexible pride asserts itself in all its rigidity. He has driven out
of the house his daughter, whom he believes the accomplice of his wife;
he forbids the one or the other to be recalled to his memory; he
commands his sister and his friends to be silent; he receives guests
with the same tone and the same coldness. With despair in his heart, and
feeling bitterly the insult offered to him by his wife, the
conscientiousness of his failure, and the idea of public ridicule, he
remains as firm, as haughty, as calm as ever. He launches out more
recklessly in speculations, and is ruined; he is on the point of
suicide. Hitherto all was well: the bronze column continued whole and
unbroken; but the exigencies of public morality mar the idea of the
book. His daughter arrives in the nick of time. She entreats him; his
feelings get the better of him, she carries him off; he becomes the best
of fathers, and spoils a fine novel.
Section III.--Children
Let us look at some different personages. In contrast with these bad and
factitious characters, produced by national institutions, we find good
creatures such as nature made them; and first, children.
We have none in French literature. Racine's little Joas could only exist
in a piece composed for the ladies' college of Saint Cyr; the little
child speaks like a prince's son, with noble and acquired phrases, as if
repeating his catechism. Nowadays these portraits are only seen in
France in New-Year's books, written as models for good children. Dickens
painted his with special gratification; he did not think of edifying the
public, and he has charmed it. All his children are of extreme
sensibility; they love much, and they crave to be loved. To understand
this gratification of the painter, and this choice of characters, we
must think of their physical type. English children have a color so
fresh, a complexion so delicate, a skin so transparent, eyes so blue and
pure, that they are like beautiful flowers. No wonder if a novelist
loves them, lends to their soul a sensibility and innocence which shine
forth from their looks, if he thinks that these frail and charming roses
are crushed by the coarse hands which try to bend them. We must also
imagine to ourselves the households in which they grow up. When, at five
o'clock, the merchant and the clerk leave their office and their
business, they return as quickly as possible to the pretty cottage,
where their children have played all day on the lawn. The fireside by
which they will pass the evening is a sanctuary, and domestic tenderness
is the only poetry they need. A child deprived of these affections and
this happiness seems to be deprived of the air we breathe, and the
novelist does not find a volume too much to explain its unhappiness.
Dickens has recorded it in ten volumes, and at last he has written the
history of "David Copperfield." David is loved by his mother, and by an
honest servant girl, Peggotty; he plays with her in the garden; he
watches her sew; he reads to her the natural history of crocodiles; he
fears the hens and geese, which strut in a menacing and ferocious manner
in the yard; he is perfectly happy. His mother marries again, and all
changes. The father-in-law, Mr. Murdstone, and his sister Jane, are
harsh, methodical, and cold beings. Poor little David is every moment
wounded by harsh words. He dare not speak or move; he is afraid to kiss
his mother; he feels himself weighed down, as by a leaden cloak, by the
cold looks of the new master and mistress. He falls back on himself;
mechanically studies the lessons assigned him; cannot learn them, so
great is his dread of not knowing them. He is whipped, shut up with
bread and water in a lonely room. He is terrified by night, and fears
himself. He asks himself whether in fact he is not bad or wicked, and
weeps. This incessant terror, hopeless and issueless, the spectacle of
this wounded sensibility and stupefied intelligence, the long anxieties,
the sleepless nights, the solitude of the poor, imprisoned child, his
passionate desire to kiss his mother or to weep on the breast of his
nurse--all this is sad to see. These children's griefs are as heartfelt
as the sorrows of a man. It is the history of a frail plant, which was
flourishing in a warm air, beneath a mild sun, and which, suddenly
transplanted to the snow, sheds its leaves and withers.
The working-classes are like children, dependent, not very cultivated,
akin to nature, and liable to oppression. And so Dickens extols them.
That is not new in France; the novels of Eugène Sue have given us more
than one example, and the theme is as old as Rousseau; but in the hands
of the English writer it has acquired a singular force. His heroes
possess feelings so delicate, and are so self-sacrificing, that we
cannot admire them sufficiently. They have nothing vulgar but their
pronunciation; the rest is but nobility and generosity. We see a
mountebank abandon his daughter, his only joy, for fear of injuring her
in any way. A young woman devotes herself to save the unworthy wife of a
man who loves her, and whom she loves; the man dies; she continues, from
pure self-sacrifice, to care for the degraded creature. A poor wagoner,
who thinks his wife unfaithful, loudly pronounces her innocent, and all
his vengeance is to think only of loading her with tenderness and
kindness. None, according to Dickens, feel so strongly as they do the
happiness of loving and being loved--the pure joys of domestic life.
None have so much compassion for those poor, deformed and infirm
creatures whom they so often bring into the world, and who seem only
born to die. None have a juster and more inflexible moral sense. I
confess that even Dickens's heroes unfortunately resemble the indignant
fathers of French melodramas. When old Peggotty learns that his niece is
seduced, he sets off, stick in hand, and walks over France, Germany, and
Italy, to find her and bring her back to duty. But above all, they have
an English sentiment, which fails in Frenchmen: they are Christians. It
is not only women, as in France, who take refuge in the idea of another
world; men turn also their thoughts towards it. In England, where there
are so many sects, and everyone chooses his own, each one believes in
the religion he has made for himself; and this noble sentiment raises
still higher the throne upon which the uprightness of their resolution
and the delicacy of their heart have placed them.
In reality, the novels of Dickens can all be reduced to one phrase,
to-wit: Be good, and love; there is genuine joy only in the emotions of
the heart; sensibility is the whole man. Leave science to the wise,
pride to the nobles, luxury to the rich; have compassion on humble
wretchedness; the smallest and most despised being may in himself be
worth as much as thousands of the powerful and the proud. Take care not
to bruise the delicate souls which flourish in all conditions, under all
costumes, in all ages. Believe that humanity, pity, forgiveness, are the
finest things in man; believe that intimacy, expansion, tenderness,
tears, are the sweetest things in the world. To live is nothing; to be
powerful, learned, illustrious, is little; to be useful is not enough.
He alone has lived and is a man who has wept at the remembrance of a
kind action which he himself has performed or received.
Section IV.--The Ideal Man
We do not believe that this contrast between the weak and the strong, or
this outcry against society in favor of nature, are the caprice of an
artist or the chance of the moment. When we penetrate deeply into the
history of English genius, we find that its primitive foundation was
impassioned sensibility, and that its natural expression was lyrical
exaltation. Both were brought from Germany, and make up the literature
existing before the Conquest. After an interval you find them again in
the sixteenth century, when the French literature, introduced from
Normandy, had passed away: they are the very soul of the nation. But the
education of this soul was opposite to its genius; its history
contradicted its nature; and its primitive inclination has clashed with
all the great events which it has created or suffered. The chance of a
victorious invasion and an imposed aristocracy, whilst establishing the
enjoyment of political liberty, has impressed on the character habits of
strife and pride. The chance of an insular position, the necessity of
commerce, the abundant possession of the first materials for industry,
have developed the practical faculty and the positive mind. The
acquisition of these habits, faculties, and mind, to which must be added
former hostile feelings to Rome, and an inveterate hatred against an
oppressive church, has given birth to a proud and reasoning religion,
replacing submission by independence, poetic theology by practical
morality, and faith by discussion. Politics, business, and religion,
like three powerful machines, have created a new man above the old.
Stern dignity, self-command, the need of authority, severity in its
exercise, strict morality, without compromise or pity, a taste for
figures and dry calculation, a dislike of facts not palpable and ideas
not useful, ignorance of the invisible world, scorn of the weaknesses
and tendernesses of the heart--such are the dispositions which the
stream of facts and the ascendancy of institutions tend to confirm in
their souls. But poetry and domestic life prove that they have only half
succeeded. The old sensibility, oppressed and perverted, still lives and
works. The poet subsists under the Puritan, the trader, the statesman.
The social man has not destroyed the natural man. This frozen crust,
this unsociable pride, this rigid attitude, often cover a good and
tender nature. It is the English mask of a German head; and when a
talented writer, often a writer of genius, reaches the sensibility which
is bruised or buried by education and national institutions, he moves
his reader in the most inner depths, and becomes the master of all
hearts.
[Footnote 238: Taine was not wrong in thinking so. In the "Life of Charles
Dickens" by J. Forster we find (vol. I. p. 8) the following words: "And
here I may at once expressly mention, what already has been hinted, that
even as Fielding described himself and his belongings in Captain Booth
and Amelia, and protested always that he had writ in his books nothing
more than he had seen in life, so it may be said of Dickens, in more
especial relation to David Copperfield. Many guesses have been made
since his death, connecting David's autobiography with his own.
... There is not only truth in all this, but it will very shortly be
seen that the identity went deeper than any had supposed, and covered
experiences not less startling in the reality than they appear to be
in the fiction."--Tr.]
[Footnote 239: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XLII. The translator has used
the "Charles Dickens" edition, 1868, 18 vols.]
[Footnote 240: "It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go
wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves; but
this wind happening to come up with a great heap of them just after
venting its humour on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter
them that they fled away, pell-mell, some here, some there, rolling over
each other, whirling round and round upon their thin edges, taking
frantic flights into the air, and playing all manner of extraordinary
gambols in the extremity of their distress. Nor was this enough for its
malicious fury: for, not content with driving them abroad, it charged
small parties of them and hunted them into the wheel-wright's saw-pit,
and below the planks and timbers in the yard, and, scattering the
sawdust in the air, it looked for them underneath, and when it did meet
with any, whew! how it drove them on and followed at their heels!
"The scared leaves only flew the faster for all this, and a giddy chase
it was: for they got into unfrequented places, where there was no outlet,
and where their pursuer kept them eddying round and round at his pleasure;
and they crept under the eaves of houses, and clung tightly to the sides
of hayricks, like bats; and tore in at open chamber windows, and cowered
close to hedges; and, in short, went anywhere for safety."--"Martin
Chuzzlewit," ch. II.]
[Footnote 241: "The Chimes," first quarter.]
[Footnote 242: "The Chimes," first quarter.]
[Footnote 243: "Martin Chuzzlewit." ch. XLV.]
[Footnote 244: "Dombey and Son," ch. IV.]
[Footnote 245: See ante, vol. I. note, page 393.]
[Footnote 246: "David Copperfield," ch. V.]
[Footnote 247: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XXXVI.]
[Footnote 248: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. LI.]
[Footnote 249: Novels of George Sand.]
[Footnote 250: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XXXVI.]
[Footnote 251: "Hard Times," bk. 3, ch. VI.]
[Footnote 252: Ibid.]
[Footnote 253: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. VIII.]
[Footnote 254: Ibid.]
[Footnote 255: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XIX.]
[Footnote 256: "The Chimes," the first quarter.]
[Footnote 257: A living French author, whose dramas are all said to have
a moral purpose.--Tr.]
[Footnote 258: "David Copperfield," ch. LXV; the scene between the
doctor and his wife.]
[Footnote 259: "Et je verrais mourir frère, enfants,
mère, et femme
Que je m'en soucierais autant que
de cela."
These lines, said by Orgon to his brother-in-law Cléante, are from
Molière's "Tartuffe," I. 6.]
[Footnote 260: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. II.]
[Footnote 261: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. VIII.]
[Footnote 262: "Hard Times," book I. ch. I.]
[Footnote 263: Ibid, book I. ch. II.]
[Illustration: Page from the Letters of St. Jerome.
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Fifteenth Century.]
CHAPTER SECOND
THE NOVEL CONTINUED--THACKERAY
Comparison Between Dickens and Thackeray
The novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are
several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant thrives well
in its own soil; secondly, it is a natural outlet: there is no music in
England as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who must
think and feel find in it a means of feeling and thinking. On the other
hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the stagnation of
gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope for imagination
and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and practical counsels, it
opens up a career to the precise and moral mind. The critic thus is, as
it were, swamped in this copiousness; he must select in order to grasp
the whole, and confine himself to a few in order to embrace all.
In this crowd two men have appeared of superior talent, original and
contrasted, popular on the same grounds, ministers to the same cause,
moralists in comedy and drama, defenders of natural sentiments against
social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the depth
of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their attacks,
have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old combative
spirit of Swift and Fielding.
One, more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an
impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric
prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic
invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness
of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of
his caricatures, he has displayed all the forces and weaknesses of an
artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and all the oddities of
the imagination.
The other, more contained, better informed and stronger, a lover
of moral dissertations, a counsellor of the public, a sort of
lay preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on
censuring man, has brought to the aid of satire a sustained
common-sense, a great knowledge of the heart, consummate cleverness,
powerful reasoning, a treasure of meditated hatred, and has persecuted
vice with all the weapons of reflection. By this contrast the one
completes the other; and we may form an exact idea of English taste by
placing the portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray by the side of that
of Charles Dickens.
Part I.--The Satirist
Section I.--The English Satirist
No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and
reflective man is impelled to it by his character; he is still further
impelled by the surrounding manners. He is not permitted to contemplate
passions as poetic powers; he is bidden to appreciate them as moral
qualities. His pictures become sentences; he is a counsellor rather than
an observer, a judge rather than an artist. We see by what machinery
Thackeray has changed novel into satire.
I open at random his three great works--"Pendennis, Vanity Fair, The
Newcomes." Every scene sets in relief a moral truth: the author desires
that at every page we should form a judgment on vice and virtue; he has
blamed or approved beforehand, and the dialogues or portraits are to him
only means by which he adds our approbation to his approbation, our
blame to his blame. He is giving us lessons; and beneath the sentiments
which he describes, as beneath the events which he relates, we
continually discover rules for our conduct and the intentions of a
reformer.
On the first page of "Pendennis" we see the portrait of an old major, a
man of the world, selfish and vain, seated comfortably in his club, at
the table by the fire, and near the window, envied by Surgeon Glowry,
whom nobody ever invites, seeking in the records of aristocratic
entertainments for his own name, gloriously placed amongst those of
illustrious guests. A family letter arrives. Naturally he puts it aside
and reads it, carelessly, last of all. He utters an exclamation of
horror; his nephew wants to marry an actress. He has places booked in
the coach (charging the sum which he disburses for the seats to the
account of the widow and the young scape-grace of whom he is guardian),
and hastens to save the young fool. If there were a low marriage, what
would become of his invitations? The manifest conclusion is: Let us not
be selfish, or vain, or fond of good living, like the major.
Chapter the second: Pendennis, the father of the young man in love, had
"exercised the profession of apothecary and surgeon," but, being of good
birth, his "secret ambition had always been to be a gentleman." He comes
into money; is called Doctor, marries the very distant relative of a
lord, tries to get acquainted with high families. He boasts to the last
day of his life of having been invited by Sir Pepin Ribstone to an
entertainment. He buys a small estate, tries to sink the apothecary, and
shows off in the new glory of a landed proprietor. Each of these details
is a concealed or evident sarcasm, which says to the reader: "My good
friend, remain the honest John Tomkins that you are; and for the love of
your son and yourself, avoid taking the airs of a great nobleman."
Old Pendennis dies. His son, the noble heir of the domain, "Prince of
Pendennis and Grand Duke of Fairoaks," begins to reign over his mother,
his cousin, and the servants. He sends wretched verses to the county
papers, begins an epic poem, a tragedy in which sixteen persons die, a
scathing history of the Jesuits, and defends church and king like a
loyal Tory. He sighs after the ideal, wishes for an unknown maiden, and
falls in love with an actress, a woman of thirty-two, who learns her
parts mechanically, as ignorant and stupid as can be. Young folks, my
dear friends, you are all affected, pretentious, dupes of yourselves and
of others. Wait to judge the world until you have seen it, and do not
think you are masters when you are scholars.
The lesson continues, and lasts as long as the life of Arthur. Like Le
Sage in "Gil Blas," and Balzac in "Le Père Goriot," the author of
"Pendennis" depicts a young man having some talent, endowed with good
feelings, even generous, desiring to make a name, whilst, at the same
time, he falls in with the maxims of the world; but Le Sage only wished
to amuse us, and Balzac only wished to stir our passions: Thackeray,
from beginning to end, labors to correct us.
This intention becomes still more evident if we examine in detail one of
his dialogues and one of his pictures. We will not find there impartial
energy, bent on copying nature, but attentive thoughtfulness, bent on
transforming into satire objects, words, and events. All the words of
the character are chosen and weighed so as to be odious or ridiculous.
It accuses itself, is studious to display vice, and behind its voice we
hear the voice of the writer who judges, unmasks, and punishes it. Miss
Crawley, a rich old woman, falls ill.[264] Mrs. Bute Crawley, her
relative, hastens to save her, and to save the inheritance. Her aim is
to have excluded from the will a nephew, Captain Rawdon, an old
favorite, presumptive heir of the old lady. This Rawdon is a stupid
guardsman, a frequenter of taverns, a too clever gambler, a duellist,
and a _roué._ Fancy the capital opportunity for Mrs. Bute, the
respectable mother of a family, the worthy spouse of a clergyman,
accustomed to write her husband's sermons! From sheer virtue she hates
Captain Rawdon, and will not suffer that such a good sum of money should
fall into such bad hands. Moreover, are we not responsible for our
families? and is it not for us to publish the faults of our relatives?
It is our strict duty, and Mrs. Bute acquits herself of hers
conscientiously. She collects edifying stories of her nephew, and
therewith she edifies the aunt. He has ruined so and so; he has wronged
such a woman. He has duped this tradesman; he has killed this husband.
And above all, unworthy man, he has mocked his aunt! Will that generous
lady continue to cherish such a viper? Will she suffer her numberless
sacrifices to be repaid by such ingratitude and such ridicule? We can
imagine the ecclesiastical eloquence of Mrs. Bute. Seated at the foot of
the bed, she keeps the patient in sight, plies her with draughts,
enlivens her with terrible sermons, and mounts guard at the door against
the probable invasion of the heir. The siege was well conducted, the
legacy attacked so obstinately must be yielded up; the virtuous fingers
of the matron grasped beforehand and by anticipation the substantial
heap of shining sovereigns. And yet a carping spectator might have found
some faults in her management. Mrs. Bute managed rather too well. She
forgot that a woman persecuted with sermons, handled like a bale of
goods, regulated like a clock, might take a dislike to so harassing an
authority. What is worse, she forgot that a timid old woman, confined to
the house, overwhelmed with preachings, poisoned with pills, might die
before having changed her will, and leave all, alas, to her scoundrelly
nephew. Instructive and formidable example! Mrs. Bute, the honor of her
sex, the consoler of the sick, the counsellor of her family, having
ruined her health to look after her beloved sister-in-law, and to
preserve the inheritance, was just on the point, by her exemplary
devotion, of putting the patient in her coffin, and the inheritance in
the hands of her nephew.
Apothecary Clump arrives; he trembles for his dear client; she is worth
to him two hundred a year; he is resolved to save this precious life, in
spite of Mrs. Bute. Mrs. Bute interrupts him, and says: "I am sure, my
dear Mr. Clump, no efforts of mine have been wanting to restore our dear
invalid, whom the ingratitude of her nephew has laid on the bed of
sickness. I never shrink from personal discomfort; I never refuse to
sacrifice myself.... I would lay down my life for my duty, or for any
member of my husband's family."[265] The disinterested apothecary
returns to the charge heroically. Immediately she replies in the finest
strain; her eloquence flows from her lips as from an over-full pitcher.
She cries aloud: "Never, as long as nature supports me, will I desert
the post of duty. As the mother of a family and the wife of an English
clergyman, I humbly trust that my principles are good. When my poor
James was in the small-pox, did I allow any hireling to nurse him? No!"
The patient Clump scatters about sugared compliments, and pressing his
point amidst interruptions, protestations, offers of sacrifice, railings
against the nephew, at last hits the mark. He delicately insinuates that
the patient "should have change, fresh air, gaiety. The sight of her
horrible nephew casually in the Park, where I am told the wretch drives
with the brazen partner of his crimes," Mrs. Bute said (letting the cat
of selfishness out of the bag of secrecy), "would cause her such a shock
that we should have to bring her back to bed again. She must not go out,
Mr. Clump. She shall not go out as long as I remain to watch over her.
And as for my health, what matters it? I give it cheerfully, sir. I
sacrifice it at the altar of my duty." It is clear that the author
attacks Mrs. Bute and all legacy-hunters. He gives her ridiculous airs,
pompous phrases, a transparent, coarse, and blustering hypocrisy. The
reader feels hatred and disgust for her the more she speaks. He would
unmask her; he is pleased to see her assailed, driven into a corner,
taken in by the polished manoeuvres of her adversary, and rejoices with
the author, who tears from her and emphasizes the shameful confession of
her tricks and her greed.
Having arrived so far, satirical reflection quits the literary form. In
order the better to develop itself, it exhibits itself alone. Thackeray
now attacks vice himself, and in his own name. No author is more fertile
in dissertations; he constantly enters his story to reprimand or
instruct us; he adds theoretical to active morality. We might glean from
his novels one or two volumes of essays, in the manner of La Bruyère or
of Addison. There are essays on love, on vanity, on hypocrisy, on
meanness, on all the virtues, on all the vices; and turning over a few
pages, we shall find one on the comedies of legacies, and on too
attentive relatives:
"What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker's! How
tenderly we look at her faults, if she is a relative (and may every
reader have a score of such), what a kind, good-natured old creature we
find her! How the junior partner of Hobbs and Dobbs leads her smiling to
the carriage, with the lozenge upon it, and the fat wheezy coachman!
How, when she comes to pay us a visit, we generally find an opportunity
to let our friends know her station in the world! We say (and with
perfect truth) I wish I had Miss MacWhirter's signature to a cheque for
five thousand pounds. She wouldn't miss it, says your wife. She is my
aunt, say you, in an easy, careless way, when your friend asks if Miss
MacWhirter is any relative? Your wife is perpetually sending her little
testimonies of affection; your little girls work endless worsted
baskets, cushions, and foot-stools for her. What a good fire there is in
her room when she comes to pay you a visit, although your wife laces her
stays without one! The house during her stay assumes a festive, neat,
warm, jovial, snug appearance, not visible at other seasons. You
yourself, dear sir, forget to go to sleep after dinner, and find
yourself all of a sudden (though you invariably lose) very fond of
rubber. What good dinners you have--game every day, Malmsey-Madeira, and
no end of fish from London! Even the servants in the kitchen share in
the general prosperity; and, somehow, during the stay of Miss
MacWhirter's fat coachman, the beer is grown much stronger, and the
consumption of tea and sugar in the nursery (where her maid takes her
meals) is not regarded in the least. Is it so, or is it not so? I appeal
to the middle classes. Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an
old aunt--a maiden aunt--an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage, and a
front of light coffee-coloured hair--how my children should work
workbags for her, and my Julia and I would make her comfortable!
Sweet--sweet vision! Foolish--foolish dream!"[266]
There is no disguising it. The reader most resolved not to be warned, is
warned. When we have an aunt with a good sum to leave, we shall value
our attentions and our tenderness at their true worth. The author has
taken the place of our conscience, and the novel, transformed by
reflection, becomes a school of manners.
Section II.--The English Temperament
The lash is laid on very heavily in this school; it is the English
taste. About tastes and whips there is no disputing; but without
disputing we may understand, and the surest means of understanding the
English taste is to compare it with the French taste.
I see in France, in a drawing-room of men of wit, or in an artist's
studio, a score of lively people: they must be amused, that is their
character. You may speak to them of human wickedness, but on condition
of diverting them. If you get angry, they will be shocked; if you teach
a lesson, they will yawn. Laugh, it is the rule here--not cruelly, or
from manifest enmity, but in good humor and in lightness of spirit. This
nimble wit must act; the discovery of a clean piece of folly is a
fortunate hap for it. As a light flame, it glides and flickers in sudden
outbreaks on the mere surface of things. Satisfy it by imitating it, and
to please gay people be gay. Be polite, that is the second commandment,
very like the other. You speak to sociable, delicate, vain men, whom you
must take care not to offend, but whom you must flatter. You would wound
them by trying to carry conviction by force, by dint of solid arguments,
by a display of eloquence and indignation. Do them the honor of
supposing that they understand you at the first word, that a hinted
smile is to them as good as a sound syllogism, that a fine allusion
caught on the wing reaches them better than the heavy onset of a dull
geometrical satire. Think, lastly (between ourselves), that, in politics
as in religion, they have been for a thousand years very well governed,
over-governed; that when a man is bored he desires to be so no more;
that a coat too tight splits at the elbows, and elsewhere. They are
critics from choice; from choice they like to insinuate forbidden
things; and often, by abuse of logic, by transport, by vivacity, from
ill humor, they strike at society through government, at morality
through religion. They are scholars who have been too long, under the
rod; they break the windows in opening the doors. I dare not tell you to
please them: I simply remark that, in order to please them, a grain of
seditious humor will do no harm.
I cross seven leagues of sea, and here I am in a great unadorned hall,
with a multitude of benches, with gas burners, swept, orderly, a
debating club or a preaching-house. There are five hundred long faces,
gloomy and subdued;[267] and at the first glance it is clear that they
are not there to amuse themselves. In this land a grosser mood,
overcharged with a heavier and stronger nourishment, has deprived
impressions of their swift nobility, and thought, less facile and
prompt, has lost its vivacity and its gayety. If we rail before them, we
must think that we are speaking to attentive, concentrated men, capable
of durable and profound sensations, incapable of changeable and sudden
emotion. Those immobile and contracted faces will preserve the same
attitude; they resist fleeting and half-formed smiles; they cannot
unbend; and their laughter is a convulsion as stiff as their gravity.
Let us not skim over our subject, but lay stress upon it; let us not
pass over it lightly, but impress it; let us not dally, but strike; be
assured that we must vehemently move vehement passions, and that shocks
are needed to set these nerves in motion. Let us also not forget that
our hearers are practical minds, lovers of the useful; that they come
here to be taught; that we owe them solid truths; that their
common-sense, somewhat contracted, does not fall in with hazardous
extemporizations or doubtful hints; that they demand worked-out
refutations and complete explanations; and that if they have paid to
come in, it was to hear advice which they might apply, and satire
founded on proof. Their mood requires strong emotions; their mind asks
for precise demonstrations. To satisfy their mood, we must not merely
scratch, but torture vice; to satisfy their mind, we must not rail in
sallies, but by arguments. One word more: down there, in the midst of
the assembly, behold that gilded, splendid book, resting royally on a
velvet cushion. It is the Bible: around it there are fifty moralists,
who awhile ago met at the theatre and pelted an actor off the stage,
with apples, who was guilty of having the wife of a citizen for his
mistress. If with our finger-tip, with all the compliments and disguises
in the world, we touch a single sacred leaf, or the smallest moral
conventionalism, immediately fifty hands will fasten themselves on our
coat collar and put us out at the door. With Englishmen we must be
English, with their passion and their common-sense adopt their
leading-strings. Thus confined to recognize truths, satire will become
more bitter, and will add the weight of public belief to the pressure of
logic and the force of indignation.
Section III.--Superiority of Thackeray as a Satirist.--Literary Snobs
No writer was better gifted than Thackeray for this kind of satire,
because no faculty is more proper to satire than reflection. Reflection
is concentrated attention, and concentrated attention increases a
hundredfold the force and duration of emotions. He who is immersed in
the contemplation of a vice feels a hatred of vice, and the intensity of
his hatred is measured by the intensity of his contemplation. At first,
anger is a generous wine, which intoxicates and excites; when preserved
and shut up, it becomes a liquor burning all that it touches, and
corroding even the vessel which contains it. Of all satirists,
Thackeray, after Swift, is the most gloomy. Even his countrymen have
reproached him with depicting the world uglier than it is.[268]
Indignation, grief, scorn, disgust, are his ordinary sentiments. When he
digresses, and imagines tender souls, he exaggerates their sensibility,
in order to render their oppression more odious. The selfishness which
wounds them appears horrible, and their resigned sweetness is a mortal
insult to their tyrants: it is the same hatred which has calculated the
kindliness of the victims and the harshness of the persecutors.[269]
This anger, exasperated by reflection, is also armed by reflection. It
is clear that the author is not carried away by passing indignation or
pity. He has mastered himself before speaking. He has often weighed the
rascality which he is about to describe. He is in possession of the
motives, species, results, as a naturalist is of his classifications. He
is sure of his judgment, and has matured it. He punishes like a man
convinced, who has before him a heap of proofs, who advances nothing
without a document or an argument, who has foreseen all objections and
refuted all excuses, who will never pardon, who is right in being
inflexible, who is conscious of his justice, and who rests his sentence
and his vengeance on all the powers of meditation and equity. The effect
of this justified and contained hatred is overwhelming. When we have
read to the end of Balzac's novels, we feel the pleasure of a naturalist
walking through a museum, past a fine collection of specimens and
monstrosities. When we have read to the end of Thackeray, we feel the
shudder of a stranger brought before a mattress in the operating-room of
a hospital, on the day when cautery is applied or a limb is taken off.
In such a case the most natural weapon is serious irony, because it
bears witness to concentrated hatred: he who employs it suppresses his
first feeling; he feigns to be speaking against himself, and constrains
himself to take the part of his adversary. On the other hand, this
painful and voluntary attitude is the sign of excessive scorn; the
protection which apparently is afforded to an enemy is the worst of
insults. The author seems to say: "I am ashamed to attack you; you are
so weak that, even supported, you must fall; your reasonings are your
shame, and your excuses are your condemnation." Thus the more serious
the irony, the stronger it is; the more you take care to defend your
adversary, the more you degrade him; the more you seem to aid him the
more you crush him. This is why Swift's grave sarcasm is so terrible; we
think he is showing respect, and he slays; his approbation is a
flagellation. Amongst Swift's pupils, Thackeray is the first. Several
chapters in the "Book of Snobs"--that, for instance, on literary
snobs--are worthy of Gulliver. The author has been passing in review all
the snobs of England; what will he say of his colleagues, the literary
snobs? Will he dare to speak of them? Certainly:
"My dear and excellent querist, whom does the Schoolmaster flog so
resolutely as his own son? Didn't Brutus chop his offspring's head off?
You have a very bad opinion indeed of the present state of Literature
and of literary men, if you fancy that any one of us would hesitate to
stick a knife into his neighbour penman, if the latter's death could do
the State any service.
"But the fact is, that in the literary profession there are no Snobs.
Look round at the whole body of British men of letters, and I defy you
to point out among them a single instance of vulgarity, or envy, or
assumption."
"Men and women, as far as I have known them, they are all modest in
their demeanour, elegant in their manners, spotless in their lives, and
honourable in their conduct to the world and to each other. You may
occasionally, it is true, hear one literary man abusing his brother; but
why? Not in the least out of malice; not at all from envy: merely from a
sense of truth and public duty. Suppose, for instance, I good-naturedly
point out a blemish in my friend Mr. Punch's person, and say Mr. P. has
a hump-back, and his nose and chin are more crooked than those features
in the Apollo or Antinous, which we are accustomed to consider as our
standards of beauty; does this argue malice on my part towards Mr.
Punch? Not in the least. It is the critic's duty to point out defects as
well as merits, and he invariably does his duty with the utmost
gentleness and candour....
"That sense of equality and fraternity amongst Authors has always struck
me as one of the most amiable characteristics of the class. It is
because we know and respect each other, that the world respects us so
much; that we hold such a good position in society, and demean ourselves
so irreproachably when there.
"Literary persons are held in such esteem by the nation, that about two
of them have been absolutely invited to Court during the present reign;
and it is probable that towards the end of the season, one or two will
be asked to dinner by Sir Robert Peel.
"They are such favourites with the public, that they are continually
obliged to have their pictures taken and published; and one or two could
be pointed out, of whom the nation insists upon having a fresh portrait
every year. Nothing can be more gratifying than this proof of the
affectionate regard which the people has for its instructors.
"Literature is held in such honour in England, that there is a sum of
near twelve hundred pounds per annum set apart to pension deserving
persons following that profession. And a great compliment this is, too,
to the professors, and a proof of their generally prosperous and
flourishing condition. They are generally so rich and thrifty, that
scarcely any money is wanted to help them."[270]
We are tempted to make a mistake; and to comprehend this passage, we
must remember that, in an aristocratical and monarchical society, amidst
money-worship and adoration of rank, poor and low born talent is treated
as its low birth and poverty deserve.[271] What makes these ironies yet
stronger, is their length; some are prolonged during a whole tale, like
the Fatal Boots. A Frenchman could not keep up a sarcasm so long. It
would escape, right or left, through various emotions; it would change
countenance, and not preserve so fixed an attitude--the mark of such a
decided animosity, so calculated and bitter. There are characters which
Thackeray develops through three volumes--Blanche Amory, Rebecca
Sharp--and of whom he never speaks but with insult; both are base, and
he never introduces them without plying them with tendernesses: dear
Rebecca! tender Blanche! The tender Blanche is a sentimental and
literary young creature, obliged to live with her parents, who do not
understand her. She suffers so much that she ridicules them aloud before
everybody; she is so oppressed by the folly of her mother and
father-in-law that she never omits an opportunity of making them feel
their folly. In good conscience, could she do otherwise? Would it not be
on her part a lack of sincerity to affect a gayety which she has not, or
a respect which she cannot feel? We understand that the poor child is in
need of sympathy. When she gave up her dolls, this loving heart became
first enamoured of Trenmor, a high-souled convict, the fiery Sténio,
Prince Djalma, and other heroes of French novels. Alas! the imaginary
world is not sufficient for wounded souls, and to satisfy the craving
for the ideal, for satiety, the heart at last gives itself up to beings
of this world. At eleven years of age Miss Blanche felt tender emotions
towards a young Savoyard, an organ-grinder at Paris, whom she persisted
in believing to be a prince carried off from his parents; at twelve, an
old and hideous drawing-master had agitated her young heart; at Madame
de Carmel's boarding-school a correspondence by letter took place with
two young gentlemen at the College Charlemagne. Dear forlorn girl, her
delicate feet are already wounded by the briers in her path of life;
every day her illusions shed their leaves; in vain she puts them down in
verse, in a little book bound in blue velvet, with a clasp of gold,
entitled "Mes Larmes." In this isolation, what is she to do? She grows
enthusiastic over the young ladies whom she meets, feels a magnetic
attraction at sight of them, becomes their sister, except that she casts
them aside to-morrow like an old dress: we cannot command our feelings,
and nothing is more beautiful than the natural. Moreover, as the amiable
child has much taste, a lively imagination, a poetic inclination for
change, she keeps her maid Pincott at work day and night. Like a
delicate person, a genuine dilettante and lover of the beautiful, she
scolds her for her heavy eyes and her pale face:
"Our muse, with the candour which distinguished her, never failed to
remind her attendant of the real state of matters. 'I should send you
away, Pincott, for you are a great deal too weak, and your eyes are
failing you, and you are always crying and snivelling, and wanting the
doctor; but I wish that your parents at home should be supported, and I
go on enduring, for their sake, mind,' the dear Blanche would say to her
timid little attendant. Or, 'Pincott, your wretched appearance and
slavish manner, and red eyes, positively give me the migraine; and I
think I shall make you wear rouge, so that you may look a little
cheerful'; or, 'Pincott, I can't bear, even for the sake of your
starving parents, that you should tear my hair out of my head in that
manner; and I will thank you to write them and say that I dispense with
your services.'"[272]
This fool of a Pincott does not appreciate her good fortune. Can one be
sad in serving such a superior being as Miss Blanche? How delightful to
furnish her with subjects for her style! for, to confess the truth, Miss
Blanche has not disdained to write "some very pretty verses about the
lonely little tiring-maid, whose heart was far away, sad exile in a
foreign land." Alas! the slightest event suffices to wound this too
sensitive heart. At the least emotion her tears flow, her feelings are
shaken, like a delicate butterfly, crushed as soon as touched. There she
goes, aërial, her eyes fixed on heaven, a faint smile lingering round
her rosy lips, a touching sylphide, so consoling to all who surround her
that everyone wishes her at the bottom of a well.
One step added to serious irony leads us to serious caricature. Here, as
before, the author pleads the rights of his neighbor; the only
difference is, that he pleads them with too much warmth; it is insult
upon insult. Under this head it abounds in Thackeray. Some of his
grotesques are outrageous: for instance, M. Alcide de Mirobolant, a
French cook, an artist in sauces, who declares his passion to Miss
Blanche through the medium of symbolic dishes, and thinks himself a
gentleman; Mrs. Major O'Dowd, a sort of female grenadier, the most
pompous and talkative of Irishwomen, bent on ruling the regiment, and
marrying the bachelors will they nill they; Miss Briggs, an old
companion, born to receive insults, to make phrases and to shed tears;
the Doctor, who proves to his scholars who write bad Greek, that
habitual idleness and bad construing lead to the gallows. These
calculated deformities only excite a sad smile. We always perceive
behind the oddity of the character the sardonic air of the painter, and
we conclude that the human race is base and stupid. Other figures, less
exaggerated, are not more natural. We see that the author throws them
expressly into palpable follies and marked contradictions. Such is Miss
Crawley, an old maid, without any morals, and a free-thinker, who
praises unequal marriages, and falls into a fit when on the next page
her nephew makes one; who calls Rebecca Sharp her equal, and at the same
time bids her "put some coals on the fire"; who, on learning the
departure of her favorite, cries with despair: "Gracious goodness, and
who's to make my chocolate"? These are comedy scenes, and not pictures
of manners. There are twenty such. You see an excellent aunt, Mrs.
Hoggarty, of Castle Hoggarty, settling down in the house of her nephew,
Titmarsh, throw him into vast expenses, persecute his wife, drive away
his friends, make his marriage unhappy. The poor ruined fellow is thrown
into prison. She denounces him to the creditors with genuine
indignation, and reproaches him with perfect sincerity. The wretch has
been his aunt's executioner; she has been dragged by him from her home,
tyrannized over by him, robbed by him, outraged by his wife. She writes:
"Such waist and extravygance never, never, never did I see. Butter
waisted as if it had been dirt, coles flung away, candles burned at both
ends;... and now you have the audassaty, being placed in prison justly
for your crimes, for cheating me of £3000.... You come upon me to pay
your detts! No, sir, it is quite enough that your mother should go on
the parish, and that your wife should sweep the streets, to which you
have indeed brought them; I at least... have some of the comforts to
which my rank entitles me. The furniture in this house is mine; and as I
presume you intend your lady to sleep in the streets, I give you warning
that I shall remove it all to-morrow. Mr. Smithers will tell you that I
had intended to leave you my intire fortune. I have this morning, in his
presents, solamly toar up my will, and hereby renounce all connection
with you and your beggarly family. P.S.--I took a viper into my bosom,
and it stung me."[273]
This just and compassionate woman finds her match, a pious
man, John Brough, Esquire, M.P., director of the Independent
West Diddlesex Fire and Life Insurance Company. This virtuous
Christian has sniffed from afar the cheering odor of her
lands, houses, stocks, and other landed and personal property.
He pounces upon the fine property of Mrs. Hoggarty, is sorry
to see that it only brings that lady four per cent., and resolves to
double her income. He calls upon her at her lodgings when her
face was shockingly swelled and bitten by--never mind what:
"'Gracious heavens!' shouted John Brough, Esquire, 'a lady of your rank
to suffer in this way!--the excellent relative of my dear boy, Titmarsh!
Never, madam--never let it be said that Mrs. Hoggarty of Castle Hoggarty
should be subject to such horrible humiliation, while John Brough has a
home to offer her--a humble, happy Christian home, madam, though unlike,
perhaps, the splendour to which you have been accustomed in the course
of your distinguished career. Isabella, my love!--Belinda! speak to Mrs.
Hoggarty. Tell her that John Brough's house is hers from garret to
cellar. I repeat it, madam, from garret to cellar. I desire--I insist--I
order, that Mrs. Hoggarty of Castle Hoggarty's trunks should be placed
this instant in my carriage!'"[274]
This style raises a laugh, if you will, but a sad laugh. We have just
learned that man is a hypocrite, unjust, tyrannical, blind. In our
vexation we turn to the author, and we see on his lips only sarcasms, on
his brow only chagrin.
Section IV.--Resemblance of Thackeray to Swift
Let us look carefully; perhaps in less grave matters we shall find
subject of genuine laughter. Let us consider, not a rascality, but a
misadventure; rascality revolts, a misadventure might amuse. But
amusement alone is not here; even in a diversion the satire retains its
force, because reflection retains its intensity. There is in English fun
a seriousness, an effort, an application that is marvellous, and their
comicalities are composed with as much knowledge as their sermons. The
powerful attention decomposes its object in all its parts, and
reproduces it with illusive detail and relief. Swift describes the land
of speaking horses, the politics of Liliput, the inventors of the Flying
Island, with details as precise and harmonious as an experienced
traveller, an exact inquirer into manners and countries. Thus supported,
the impossible monster and the literary grotesque enter upon actual
existence, and the phantoms of imagination take the consistency of
objects which we touch. Thackeray introduces this imperturbable gravity,
this solid conception, this talent for illusion, into his farce. Let us
study one of his moral essays; he wishes to prove that in the world we
must conform to received customs, and he transforms this commonplace
into an Oriental anecdote. Let us count up the details of manners,
geography, chronology, cookery, the mathematical designation of every
object, person, and gesture, the lucidity of imagination, the profusion
of local truths; we will then understand why his raillery produces so
original and biting an impression, and we will find here the same degree
of study and the same attentive energy as in the foregoing ironies and
exaggerations: his humor is as reflective as his hatred; he has changed
his attitude, not his faculty:
"I am naturally averse to egotism, and hate self-laudation consumedly;
but I can't help relating here a circumstance illustrative of the point
in question, in which I must think I acted with considerable prudence.
"Being at Constantinople a few years since--(on a delicate mission)--the
Russians were playing a double game, between ourselves, and it became
necessary on our part to employ an extra negotiator--Leckerbiss Pasha of
Roumelia, then Chief Galeongee of the Porte, gave a diplomatic banquet
at his summer palace at Bujukdere. I was on the left of the Galeongee;
and the Russian agent Count de Diddloff on his dexter side. Diddloff is
a dandy who would die of a rose in aromatic pain: he had tried to have
me assassinated three times in the course of the negotiation: but of
course we were friends in public, and saluted each other in the most
cordial and charming manner.
"The Galeongee is--or was, alas! for a bow-string has done for him--a
staunch supporter of the old school of Turkish politics. We dined with
our fingers, and had flaps of bread for plates; the only innovation he
admitted was the use of European liquors, in which he indulged with
great gusto. He was an enormous eater. Amongst the dishes a very large
one was placed before him of a lamb dressed in its wool, stuffed with
prunes, garlic, assafœtida, capsicums, and other condiments, the most
abominable mixture that ever mortal smelt or tasted. The Galeongee ate
of this hugely; and, pursuing the Eastern fashion, insisted on helping
his friends right and left, and when he came to a particularly spicy
morsel, would push it with his own hands into his guests' very mouths.
"I shall never forget the look of poor Diddloff, when his Excellency,
rolling up a large quantity of this into a ball, and exclaiming, 'Buk
Buk' (it is very good), administered the horrible bolus to Diddloff. The
Russian's eyes rolled dreadfully as he received it: he swallowed it with
a grimace that I thought must precede a convulsion, and seizing a bottle
next him, which he thought was Sauterne, but which turned out to be
French brandy, he drank off nearly a pint before he knew his error. It
finished him; he was carried away from the dining-room almost dead, and
laid out to cool in a summer-house on the Bosphorus.
"When it came to my turn, I took down the condiment with a smile, said
'Bismillah,' licked my lips with easy gratification, and when the next
dish was served, made up a ball myself so dexterously, and popped it
down the old Galeongee's mouth with so much grace, that his heart was
won. Russia was put out of Court at once, and the treaty of Kabobanople
was signed. As for Diddloff, all was over with him; he was recalled to
St. Petersburg, and Sir Roderick Murchison saw him, under the No. 3,067,
working in the Ural mines."[275]
The anecdote is evidently authentic; and when De Foe related the
apparition of Mrs. Veal, he did not better imitate the style of an
authenticated account.
Section V.--Thackeray's Misanthropy
Such attentive reflection is a source of sadness. To amuse ourselves
with human passions, we must consider them as inquisitive men, like
shifting puppets, or as learned men, like regulated wheels, or as
artists, like powerful springs. If we only consider them as virtuous or
vicious, our lost illusions will enchain us in gloomy thoughts, and we
will find in man only weakness and ugliness. This is why Trackeray
depreciates our whole nature. He does, as a novelist, what Hobbes does
as a philosopher. Almost everywhere, when he describes fine sentiments,
he derives them from an ugly source. Tenderness, kindness, love, are in
his characters the effect of the nerves, of instinct, or of a moral
disease. Amelia Sedley, his favorite, and one of his master-pieces, is a
poor little woman, snivelling, incapable of reflection and decision,
blind, a superstitious adorer of a coarse and selfish husband, always
sacrificed by her own will and fault, whose love is made up of folly and
weakness, often unjust, accustomed to see falsely, and more worthy of
compassion than respect. Lady Castlewood, so good and tender, is
enamoured, like Amelia, of a drunken and imbecile boor; and her wild
jealousy, exasperated on the slightest suspicion, implacable against her
husband, giving utterance violently to cruel words, shows that her love
springs not from virtue but from mood. Helen Pendennis, a model mother,
is a somewhat silly country prude, of narrow education, jealous also,
and having in her jealousy all the harshness of Puritanism and passion.
She faints on learning that her son has a mistress: it is "such a sin,
such a dreadful sin. I can't bear to think that my boy should commit
such a crime. I wish he had died, almost, before he had done it."[276]
Whenever she is spoken to of little Fanny, "the widow's countenance,
always soft and gentle, assumed a cruel and inexorable expression."[277]
Meeting Fanny at the bedside of the sick young man, she drives her away,
as if she were a prostitute and a servant. Maternal love, in her as in
the others, is an incurable blindness: her son is her idol; in her
adoration she finds the means of making his lot unbearable, and himself
unhappy. As to the love of the men for the women, if we judge from the
pictures of the author, we can but feel pity for it, and look on it as
ridiculous. At a certain age, according to Thackeray, nature speaks: we
meet Somebody; a fool or not, good or bad, we adore her; it is a fever.
At the age of six months dogs have their disease; man has his at twenty.
If a man loves, it is not because the lady is lovable, but because it is
his nature so to do. "Do you suppose you would drink if you were not
thirsty, or eat if you were not hungry?"[278]
He relates the history of this hunger and thirst with a bitter vigor. He
seems like an intoxicated man grown sober, railing at drunkenness. He
explains at length, in a half-sarcastic tone, the follies which Major
Dobbin commits for the sake of Amelia; how the Major buys bad wines from
her father; how he tells the postilions to make haste, how he rouses the
servants, persecutes his friends, to see Amelia more quickly; how, after
ten years of sacrifice, tenderness, and service, he sees that he is held
second to an old portrait of a faithless, coarse, selfish, and dead
husband. The saddest of these accounts is that of the first love of
Pendennis--Miss Fotheringay, the actress, whom he loves, a
matter-of-fact person, a good housekeeper, who has the mind and
education of a kitchen-maid. She speaks to the young man of the fine
weather, and the pie she has just been making: Pendennis discovers in
these two phrases a wonderful depth of intellect and a superhuman
majesty of devotion. He asks Miss Fotheringay, who has just been playing
Ophelia, if the latter loved Hamlet. Miss Fotheringay answers:
"'In love with such a little ojous wretch as that stunted manager of a
Bingley?' She bristled with indignation at the thought. Pen explained it
was not of her he spoke, but of Ophelia of the play. 'Oh, indeed; if no
offence was meant, none was taken: but as for Bingley, indeed, she did
not value him--not that glass of punch.' Pen next tried her on Kotzebue.
'Kotzebue? who was he? The author of the play in which she had been
performing so admirably. She did not know that--the man's name at the
beginning of the book was Thompson,' she said. Pen laughed at her
adorable simplicity."
"'How beautiful she is,' thought Pen, cantering homewards. 'Pendennis,
Pendennis--how she spoke the word! Emily, Emily! how good, how noble,
how beautiful, how perfect she is!'"[279]
The first volume runs wholly upon this contrast; it seems as though
Thackeray says to his reader: "My dear brothers in humanity, we are
rascals forty-nine days in fifty; in the fiftieth, if we escape pride,
vanity, wickedness, selfishness, it is because we fall into a hot fever;
our folly causes our devotion."
Section VI.--His Characters
Yet, short of being Swift, a man must love something; he cannot always
be wounding and destroying; and the heart, wearied of scorn and hate,
needs repose in praise and tenderness. Moreover, to blame a fault is to
laud the contrary quality; and a man cannot sacrifice a victim without
raising an altar: it is circumstance which fixes on the one, and which
builds up the other; and the moralist who combats the dominant vice of
his country and his age, preaches the virtue contrary to the vice of his
age and his country. In an aristocratical and commercial society, this
vice is selfishness and pride! Thackeray therefore extols sweetness and
tenderness. Let love and kindness be blind, instinctive, unreasoning,
ridiculous, it matters little: such as they are, he adores them; and
there is no more singular contrast than that of his heroes and of his
admiration. He creates foolish women, and kneels before them; the artist
within him contradicts the commentator: the first is ironical, the
second laudatory; the first represents the pettiness of love, the second
writes its panegyric; the top of a page is a satire in action, the
bottom is a dithyramb in periods. The compliments which he lavishes on
Amelia Sedley, Helen Pendennis, Laura, are infinite; no author ever more
visibly and incessantly paid court to his female creations; he
sacrifices his male creations to them, not once, but a hundred times:
"Very likely female pelicans like so to bleed under the selfish little
beaks of their young ones: it is certain that women do. There must be
some sort of pleasure which we men don't understand, which accompanies
the pain of being sacrificed.[280]... Do not let us men despise these
instincts because we cannot feel them. These women were made for our
comfort and delectation, gentlemen--with all the rest of the minor
animals.[281]... Be it for a reckless husband, a dissipated son, a
darling scapegrace of a brother, how ready their hearts are to pour out
their best treasures for the benefit of the cherished person; and what a
deal of this sort of enjoyment are we on our side, ready to give the
soft creatures! There is scarce a man that reads this, but has
administered pleasure in that fashion to his womankind, and has treated
them to the luxury of forgiving him."[282]
When he enters the room of a good mother, or of a young honest girl, he
casts down his eyes as on the threshold of a sanctuary. In the presence
of Laura resigned, pious, he checks himself:
"And as that duty was performed quite noiselessly--while the
supplications which endowed her with the requisite strength for
fulfilling it, also took place in her own chamber, away from all mortal
sight--we, too, must be perforce silent about these virtues of hers,
which no more bear public talking about than a flower will bear to bloom
in a ballroom."[283]
Like Dickens, he has a reverence for the family, for tender and simple
sentiments, calm and pure contentments, such as are relished by the
fireside between a child and a wife. When this misanthrope, so
reflective and harsh, lights upon a filial effusion or a maternal grief,
he is wounded in a sensitive place, and, like Dickens, he makes us
weep.[284]
We have enemies because we have friends, and aversions because we have
preferences. If we prefer devoted kindliness and tender affections, we
dislike arrogance and harshness; the cause of love is also the cause of
hate; and sarcasm, like sympathy, is the criticism of a social form and
a public vice. This is why Thackeray's novels are a war against
aristocracy. Like Rousseau, he praised simple and affectionate manners;
like Rousseau, he hated the distinction of ranks.
He wrote a whole book on this, a sort of moral and half political
pamphlet, the "Book of Snobs." The word does not exist in France,
because they have not the thing. The snob is a child of aristocratical
societies; perched on his step of the long ladder, he respects the man
on the step above him, and despises the man on the step below, without
inquiring what they are worth, solely on account of their position; in
his innermost heart he finds it natural to kiss the boots of the first,
and to kick the second. Thackeray reckons up at length the degrees of
this habit. Hear his conclusion:
"I can bear it no longer--this diabolical invention of gentility, which
kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed!
Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie
and should he flung into the fire. Organize rank and precedence! that
was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward,
some great marshal, and organize Equality in society."
Then he adds, with common-sense, altogether English bitterness and
familiarity:
"If ever our cousins the Smigsmags asked me to meet Lord Longears, I
would like to take an opportunity after dinner, and say, in the most
good-natured way in the world:--Sir, Fortune makes you a present of a
number of thousand pounds every year. The ineffable wisdom of our
ancestors has placed you as a chief and hereditary legislator over me.
Our admirable Constitution (the pride of Britons and envy of surrounding
nations) obliges me to receive you as my senator, superior, and
guardian. Your eldest son, Fitz-Heehaw, is sure of a place in
Parliament; your younger sons, the De Brays, will kindly condescend to
be post-captains and lieutenant-colonels, and to represent us in foreign
courts, or to take a good living when it falls convenient. These prizes
our admirable Constitution (the pride and envy of, etc.) pronounces to
be your due; without count of your dulness, your vices, your
selfishness; of your entire incapacity and folly. Dull as you may be
(and we have as good a right to assume that my lord is an ass, as the
other proposition, that he is an enlightened patriot);--dull, I say, as
you may be, no one will accuse you of such monstrous folly, as to
suppose that you are indifferent to the good luck which you possess, or
have any inclination to part with it. No--and patriots as we are, under
happier circumstances, Smith and I, I have no doubt, were we dukes
ourselves, would stand by our order.
"We would submit good-naturedly to sit in a high place. We would
acquiesce in that admirable Constitution (pride and envy of, etc.) which
made us chiefs and the world our inferiors; we would not cavil
particularly at that notion of hereditary superiority which brought so
many simple people cringing to our knees. May be we would rally round
the Corn-Laws; we would make a stand against the Reform Bill; we would
die rather than repeal the acts against Catholics and Dissenters; we
would, by our noble system of class-legislation, bring Ireland to its
present admirable condition.
"But Smith and I are not Earls as yet. We don't believe that it is for
the interest of Smith's army, that young De Bray should be a Colonel at
five-and-twenty, of Smith's diplomatic relations, that Lord Longears
should go ambassador to Constantinople--of our politics, that Longears
should put his hereditary foot into them.
"This booing and cringing, Smith believes to be the act of Snobs; and he
will do all in his might and main to be a Snob, and to submit to Snobs
no longer. To Longears he says, 'We can't help seeing, Longears, that we
are as good as you. We can spell even better; we can think quite as
rightly; we will not have you for our master, or black your shoes any
more.'"[285]
Thackeray's opinion on politics only continues his remarks as a
moralist. If he hates aristocracy, it is less because it oppresses man
than because it corrupts him; in deforming social life, it deforms
private life; in establishing injustice, it establishes vice; after
having made itself master of the government, it poisons the soul; and
Thackeray finds its trace in the perversity and foolishness of all
classes and all sentiments.
The king opens this list of vengeful portraits. It is George IV, "the
first gentleman in Europe." This great monarch, so justly regretted,
could cut out a coat, drive a four-in-hand nearly as well as the
Brighton coachman, and play the fiddle well. "In the vigour of youth and
the prime force of his invention, he invented Maraschino punch, a
shoe-buckle, and a Chinese pavilion, the most hideous building in the
world:"
"Two boys had leave from their loyal masters to go from Slaughter House
School where they were educated, and to appear on Drury Lane stage,
amongst a crowd which assembled there to greet the king. The king? There
he was. Beef-eaters were before the august box: the Marquis of Steyne
(Lord of the Powder Closet) and other great officers of state were
behind the chair on which he sate, He sate--florid of face, portly of
person, covered with orders, and in a rich curling head of hair--How we
sang God save him! How the house rocked and shouted with that
magnificent music. How they cheered, and cried, and waved handkerchiefs.
Ladies wept: mothers clasped their children: some fainted with
emotion.... Yes, we saw him. Fate cannot deprive us of that. Others have
seen Napoleon. Some few still exist who have beheld Frederick the Great,
Doctor Johnson, Marie Antoinette, etc.--be it our reasonable boast to
our children, that we saw George the Good, the Magnificent, the
Great."[286]
Dear prince! the virtues emanating from his heroic throne spread through
the hearts of all his courtiers. Whoever presented a better example than
the Marquis of Steyne? This lord, a king in his own house, tried to
prove that he was so. He forces his wife to sit at table beside women
without any character, his mistresses. Like a true prince, he had for
his special enemy his eldest son, presumptive heir to the marquisate,
whom he leaves to starve, and compels to run into debt. He is now making
love to a charming person, Mrs. Rebecca Crawley, whom he loves for her
hypocrisy, coolness, and unequalled insensibility. The Marquis, by dint
of debasing and oppressing all who surround him, ends by hating and
despising men; he has no taste for anything but perfect rascalities.
Rebecca rouses him; one day even she transports him with enthusiasm. She
plays Clytemnestra in a charade, and her husband Agamemnon; she advances
to the bed, a dagger in her hand; her eyes are lighted up with a smile
so ghastly that people quake as they look at her; Brava! brava! old
Steyne's strident voice was heard roaring over all the rest, "By----,
she'd do it too!" We can hear that he has the true conjugal feeling. His
conversation is remarkably frank. "I can't send Briggs away," Becky
said.--"You owe her her wages, I suppose," said the peer.--"Worse than
that, I have ruined her."--"Ruined her? then why don't you turn her
out?"
He is, moreover, an accomplished gentleman, of fascinating sweetness; he
treats his women like a pacha, and his words are like blows. Let us read
again the domestic scene in which he gives the order to invite Mrs.
Crawley. Lady Gaunt, his daughter-in-law, says that she will not be
present at dinner, and will go home. His lordship answered:
"I wish you would, and stay there. You will find the bailiffs at
Bareacres very pleasant company, and I shall be freed from lending money
to your relations, and from your own damned tragedy airs. Who are you to
give orders here? You have no money. You've got no brains. You were here
to have children, and you have not had any. Gaunt's tired of you; and
George's wife is the only person in the family who doesn't wish you were
dead. Gaunt would marry again if you were. ... You, forsooth, must give
yourself airs of virtue.... Pray, madame, shall I tell you some little
anecdotes about my Lady Bareacres, your mamma?"[287]
The rest is in the same style. His daughters-in-law, driven to despair,
say they wish they were dead. This declaration rejoices him, and he
concludes with these words; "This Temple of Virtue belongs to me. And if
I invite all Newgate or all Bedlam here, by----, they shall be welcome."
The habit of despotism makes despots, and the best means of implanting
despots in families is to preserve nobles in the State.
Let us take rest in the contemplation of the country gentleman. The
innocence of the fields, hereditary respect, family traditions, the
pursuit of agriculture, the exercise of local magistracy, must have
produced these upright and sensible men, full of kindness and probity,
protectors of their county, and servants of their country. Sir Pitt
Crawley is a model; he has four thousand a year and two parliamentary
boroughs. It is true that these are rotten boroughs, and that he sells
the second for fifteen hundred a year. He is an excellent steward, and
shears his farmers so close that he can only find bankrupt-tenants. A
coach proprietor, a government contractor, a mine proprietor, he pays
his subordinates so badly, and is so niggard in outlay, that his mines
"are filled with water; and as for his coach-horses, every mail
proprietor in the kingdom knew that he lost more horses than any man in
the country"; the Government flung his contract of damaged beef upon his
hands. A popular man, he always prefers the society of a horse-dealer to
the company of a gentleman. "He was fond of drink, of swearing, of
joking with the farmers' daughters;... would cut his joke and drink his
glass with a tenant, and sell him up the next day; or have his laugh
with the poacher he was transporting, with equal good humour." He speaks
with a country accent, has the mind of a lackey, the habits of a boor.
At table, waited on by three men and a butler, on massive silver, he
inquires into the dishes, and the beasts which have furnished them.
"What _ship_ was it, Horrocks, and when did you kill? One of the
black-faced Scotch, Sir Pitt: we killed on Thursday. Who took any? Steel
of Mudbury took the saddle and two legs, Sir Pitt; but he says the last
was too young and confounded woolly, Sir Pitt. What became of the
shoulders?" The dialogue goes on in the same tone; after the Scotch
mutton comes the Black Kentish pig: these animals might be Sir Pitt's
family, so much is he interested in them. As for his daughters, he lets
them stray to the gardener's cottage, where they pick up their
education. As for his wife, he beats her from time to time. If he pays
his people one farthing more than he owes them he asks it back. "A
farthing a day is seven shillings a year; seven shillings a year is the
interest of seven guineas. Take care of your farthings, old Tinker, and
your guineas will come quite natural. He never gave away a farthing in
his life," growled Tinker. "Never, and never will: it is against my
principle." He is impudent, brutal, coarse, stingy, shrewd, extravagant;
but is courted by ministers, is a high-sheriff, honored, powerful, he
rolls in a gilded carriage, and is one of the pillars of the State.
These are the rich; probably money has corrupted them. Let us look for a
poor aristocrat, free from temptations; his lofty mind, left to itself,
will display all its native beauty. Sir Francis Clavering is in this
case. He has played, drunk, and supped until he has nothing more left.
Transactions at the gambling-table speedily effected his ruin; he had
been forced to sell out of his regiment; had shown the white feather,
and after frequenting all the billiard-rooms in Europe, been thrown into
prison by his uncourteous creditors. To get out he married a
good-natured Indian widow, who outrages spelling, and whose money was
left her by her father, a disreputable old lawyer and indigo-smuggler.
Clavering ruins her, goes on his knees to obtain gold and pardon, swears
on the Bible to contract no more debts, and when he goes out runs
straight to the money-lender. Of all the rascals that novelists have
ever exhibited, he is the basest. He has neither resolution nor
common-sense; he is simply a man in a state of dissolution. He swallows
insults like water, weeps, begs pardon, and begins again. He debases
himself, prostrates himself, and the next moment swears and storms, to
fall back into the depths of the extremest cowardice. He implores,
threatens, and in the same quarter of an hour accepts the threatened man
as his intimate confidant and friend:
"Now, ain't it hard that she won't trust me with a single tea-spoon;
ain't it ungentlemanlike, Altamont? You know my lady's of low
birth--that is--I beg your pardon--hem--that is, it's most cruel of her
not to show more confidence in me. And the very servants begin to
laugh--the dam scoundrels!... They don't answer my bell; and--and my man
was at Vauxhall last night with one of my dress shirts and my velvet
waistcoat on, I know it was mine--the confounded impudent
blackguard!--and he went on dancing before my eyes, confound him! I'm
sure he'll live to be hanged--he deserves to be hanged--all those
infernal rascals of valets!"[288]
His conversation is a compound of oaths, whines, and ravings; he is not
a man, but the wreck of a man: there survive in him but the discordant
remains of vile passions, like the fragments of a crushed snake, which,
unable to bite, bruise themselves and wriggle about in their slaver and
mud. The sight of a banknote makes him launch blindly into a mass of
entreaties and lies. The future has disappeared for him, he sees but the
present. He will sign a bill for twenty pounds at three months to get a
sovereign. His degradation has become imbecility; his eyes are shut; he
does not see that his protestations excite mistrust, that his lies
excite disgust, that by his very baseness he loses the fruit of his
baseness; so that when he comes in, a man feels a violent inclination to
take the honorable baronet, the member of Parliament, the proud
inhabitant of a historic house, by the neck, and pitch him, like a
basket of rubbish, from the top of the stairs to the bottom.
We must stop. A volume would not exhaust the list of perfections which
Thackeray discovers in the English aristocracy. The Marquis of
Farintosh, twenty-fifth of his name, an illustrious fool, healthy and
full of self-conceit, whom all the women ogle and all the men bow to;
Lady Kew, an old woman of the world, tyrannical and corrupted, at enmity
with her daughter, and a match-maker; Sir Barnes Newcome, one of the
most cowardly of men, the wickedest, the falsest, the best-abused and
beaten who has ever smiled in a drawing-room or spoken in Parliament. I
see only one estimable character, and he is not in the front rank--Lord
Kew, who, after many follies and excesses, is touched by his Puritan old
mother, and repents. But these portraits are sweet, compared to the
dissertations; the commentator is still more bitter than the artist; he
wounds more in speaking than in making his personages speak. We must
read his biting diatribes against marriages for the sake of money or
rank, and against the sacrifice of girls; against the inequality of
inheritance and the envy of younger sons; against the education of the
nobles, and their traditionary insolence; against the purchase of
commissions in the army, the isolation of classes, the outrages on
nature and family, invented by society and law. Behind this philosophy
is shown a second gallery of portraits as insulting as the first: for
inequality, having corrupted the great men whom it exalts, corrupts the
small men whom it degrades; and the spectacle of envy or baseness in the
small, is as ugly as that of insolence or despotism in the great.
According to Thackeray, English society is a compound of flatteries and
intrigues, each striving to hoist himself up a step higher on the social
ladder and to push back those who are climbing. To be received at court,
to see one's name in the papers amongst a list of illustrious guests, to
give a cup of tea at home to some stupid and bloated peer; such is the
supreme limit of human ambition and felicity. For one master there are
always a hundred lackeys. Major Pendennis, a resolute man, cool and
clever, has contracted this leprosy. His happiness to-day is to bow to a
lord. He is only at peace in a drawing-room, or in a park of the
aristocracy. He craves to be treated with that humiliating condescension
wherewith the great overwhelm their inferiors. He pockets lack of
attention with ease, and dines graciously at a noble board, where he is
invited twice in three years, to stop a gap. He leaves a man of genius
or a woman of wit to converse with a titled fool or a tipsy lord. He
prefers being tolerated at a Marquis's to being respected at a
commoner's. Having exalted these fine dispositions into principles, he
inculcates them on his nephew, whom he loves, and to push him on in the
world offers him in marriage a basely acquired fortune and the daughter
of a convict. Others glide through the proud drawing-rooms, not with
parasitic manners, but on account of their splendid balance at the
banker's. Once upon a time in France the nobles manured their estates
with the money of citizens; now, in England, the citizens ennoble their
money by marrying a lady of noble birth. For a hundred thousand pounds
to the father, Pump, the merchant, marries Lady Blanche Stiffneck, who,
though married, remains my Lady. Naturally young Pump is scorned by her,
as a tradesman, and moreover, hated for having made her half a woman of
the people. He dare not see his own friends in his own house; they are
too vulgar for his wife. He dare not visit the friends of his wife; they
are too high for him. He is his wife's butler, the butt of his
father-in-law, the servant of his son, and consoles himself by thinking
that his grandsons, when they become Lord Pump, will blush for him and
never mention his name.[289] A third means of entering the aristocracy
is to ruin one's self, and never see anyone. This ingenious method is
employed by Mrs. Major Ponto in the country. She has an incomparable
governess for her daughters, who thinks that Dante is called Alighieri
because he was born at Algiers, but who has educated two marchionesses
and a countess.
"Some one wondered we were not enlivened by the appearance of some of
the neighbours.--We can't in our position of life, we can't well
associate with the attorney's family, as I leave you to suppose--and
the Doctor--one may ask one's medical man to one's table, certainly:
but his family.--The people in that large red house just outside
of the town.--What! the _château-calicot._ That purse-proud
ex-linendraper.--The parson--Oh! he used to preach in a surplice. He is
a Puseyite!"
This sensible Ponto family yawns in solitude for six months, and the
rest of the year enjoys the gluttony of the country squires whom they
regale, and the rebuffs of the great lords whom they visit. The son, an
officer of the hussars, requires to be kept in luxury so as to be on an
equality with his noble comrades, and his tailor receives above three
hundred a year out of the nine hundred which make up the whole family
income.[290] I should never end, if I recounted all the villainies and
miseries which Thackeray attributes to the aristocratic spirit, the
division of families, the pride of the ennobled sister, the jealousy of
the sister who has not been ennobled, the degradation of the characters
trained up from school to reverence the little lords, the abasement of
the daughters who strive to compass noble marriages, the rage of
snubbed vanity, the meanness of the attentions offered, the triumph of
folly, the scorn of talent, the consecrated injustice, the heart
rendered unnatural, the morals perverted. Before this striking picture
of truth and genius, we need remember that this injurious inequality is
the cause of a wholesome liberty, that social injustice produces
political welfare, that a class of hereditary nobles is a class of
hereditary statesmen, that in a century and a half England has had a
hundred and fifty years of good government, that in a century and a half
France has had a hundred and fifty years of bad government, that all is
compensated, and that it is possible to pay dearly for capable leaders,
a consistent policy, free elections, and the control of the government
by the nation. We must also remember that this talent, founded on
intense reflection, concentrated in moral prejudices, could not but have
transformed the picture of manners into a systematic and combative
satire, exasperate satire into calculated and implacable animosity,
blacken human nature, and attack again and again with studied,
redoubled, and natural hatred, the chief vice of his country and of his
time.
Part II.--The Artist
Section I--The Art of Thackeray
In literature as well as in politics, we cannot have everything.
Talents, like happiness, do not always follow suit. Whatever
constitution it selects, a people is always half unhappy; whatever
genius he has, a writer is always half impotent. We cannot preserve at
once more than a single attitude. To transform the novel is to deform
it; he who, like Thackeray, gives to the novel satire for its object,
ceases to give it art for its rule, and the complete strength of the
satirist is the weakness of the novelist.
What is a novelist? In my opinion he is a psychologist, who naturally
and involuntarily sets psychology at work; he is nothing else, nor more.
He loves to picture feelings, to perceive their connections, their
precedents, their consequences; and he indulges in this pleasure. In his
eyes they are forces, having various directions and magnitudes. About
their justice or injustice he troubles himself little. He introduces
them in characters, conceives the dominant quality, perceives the traces
which this leaves on the others, marks the discordant or harmonious
influences of temperament, of education, of occupation, and labors to
manifest the invisible world of inward inclinations and dispositions by
the visible world of outward words and actions. To this is his labor
reduced. Whatever these bents are, he cares little. A genuine painter
sees with pleasure a well-shaped arm and vigorous muscles, even if they
be employed in knocking down a man. A genuine novelist enjoys the
contemplation of the greatness of a harmful sentiment, or the organized
mechanism of a pernicious character. He has sympathy with talent,
because it is the only faculty which exactly copies nature; occupied in
experiencing the emotions of his personages, he only dreams of marking
their vigor, kind, and mutual action. He represents them to us as they
are, whole, not blaming, not punishing, not mutilating them; he
transfers them to us intact and separate, and leaves to us the right of
judging, if we desire it. His whole effort is to make them visible, to
unravel the types darkened and altered by the accidents and
imperfections of real life, to set in relief grand human passions, to be
shaken by the greatness of the beings whom he animates, to raise us out
of ourselves by the force of his creations. We recognize art in this
creative power, impartial and universal as nature, freer and more potent
than nature, taking up the rough-drawn or disfigured work of its rival
in order to correct its faults and give effect to its conceptions.
All is changed by the intervention of satire; and more particularly, the
part of the author. When, in an ordinary novel, he speaks in his own
name, it is to explain a sentiment or mark the cause of a faculty; in a
satirical novel it is to give us moral advice. It has been seen to how
many lessons Thackeray subjects us. That they are good ones, no one
disputes; but at least they take the place of useful explanations. A
third of a volume, being occupied by warnings, is lost to art. Summoned
to reflect on our faults, we know the character less. The author
designedly neglects a hundred delicate shades which he might have
discovered and shown to us. The character, less complete, is less
lifelike; the interest, less concentrated, is less lively. Turned away
from it, instead of brought back to it, our eyes wander and forget it;
instead of being absorbed, we are absent in mind. And, what is worse, we
end by experiencing some degree of weariness. We judge these sermons
true, but repeated till we are sick of them, we fancy ourselves
listening to college lectures, or handbooks for the use of young
priests. We find similar things in books with gilt edges and pictured
covers, given as Christmas presents to children. Are we much rejoiced to
learn that marriages for the sake of money or rank have their
inconvenience, that in the absence of a friend we readily speak evil of
him, that a son often afflicts his mother by his irregularities, that
selfishness is an ugly fault? All this is true; but it is too true. We
listen in order to hear new things. These old moralities, though useful
and well spoken, smack of the paid pedant, so common in England, the
clergyman in white tie, standing bolt upright in his room, and droning,
for three hundred a year, daily admonition to the young gentlemen whom
parents have sent to his educational hot-house.
This regular presence of a moral intention spoils the novel as well as
the novelist. It must be confessed, a volume of Thackeray has the cruel
misfortune of recalling the novels of Miss Edgeworth or the stories of
Canon Schmidt. Here is one which shows us Pendennis proud, extravagant,
hare-brained, lazy, shamefully plucked at his examination; whilst his
companions, less intellectual but more studious, take high places in
honors, or pass with decent credit. This edifying contrast does not warn
us; we do not wish to go back to school; we shut the book, and recommend
it, like medicine, to our little cousin. Other puerilities, less
shocking, end in wearying us just as much. We do not like the prolonged
contrast between good Colonel Newcome and his wicked relatives. The
Colonel gives money and cakes to every child, money and shawls to all
his cousins, money and kind words to all the servants; and these people
only answer him with coldness and coarseness. It is clear, from the
first page, that the author would persuade us to be affable, and we kick
against the too matter-of-course invitation; we don't want to be scolded
in a novel; we are in a bad humor with this invasion of pedagogy. We
wanted to go to the theatre; we have been taken in by the outside bill,
and we growl _sotto voce_ to find ourselves at a sermon.
Let us console ourselves: the characters suffer as much as we; the
author spoils them in preaching to us; they like us, are sacrificed to
satire. He does not animate beings, he lets puppets act. He only
combines their actions to make them ridiculous, odious, or
disappointing. After a few scenes we recognize the spring, and
thenceforth we are always foreseeing when it is going to act. This
foresight deprives the character of half its truth, and the reader of
half his illusion. Perfect fooleries, complete mischances, unmitigated
wickednesses, are rare things. The events and feelings of real life are
not so arranged as to make such calculated contrasts and such clever
combinations. Nature does not invent these dramatic effects: we soon see
that we are before the foot-lights, in front of bedizened actors, whose
words are written for them, and their gestures arranged.
To bring before our mind exactly this alteration of truth and art, we
must compare two characters step by step. There is a personage,
unanimously recognized as Thackeray's masterpiece, Becky Sharp, an
intriguante and a bad character, but a superior and well-mannered woman.
Let us compare her to a similar personage of Balzac, in "Les Parents
Pauvres," Valérie Marneffe. The difference of the two works will
exhibit the difference of the two literatures. As the English excel as
moralists and satirists, so the French excel as artists and
novel-writers.
Balzac loves his Valérie; this is why he explains and magnifies her. He
does not labor to make her odious, but intelligible. He gives her the
education of a prostitute, a "husband as depraved as a prison full of
galley-slaves," luxurious habits, recklessness, prodigality, womanly
nerves, a pretty woman's dislikes, an artist's rapture. Thus born and
bred, her corruption is natural. She needs elegance, as she needs air.
She takes it, no matter whence, remorselessly, as we drink water from
the first stream. She is not worse than her profession: she has all its
innate and acquired excuses, of mood, tradition, circumstance,
necessity; she has all its powers, abandon, charms, mad gayety,
alternations of triviality and elegance, sudden audacity, comical
devices, magnificence and success. She is perfect of her kind, like a
proud and dangerous horse, which we admire while we fear it. Balzac
delights to paint her only for the sake of his picture. He dresses her,
lays on for her her patches, arranges her garments, trembles before her
dancing-girl's motions. He details her gestures with as much pleasure
and truth as if he were her waiting-woman. His artistic curiosity is fed
on the least traits of character and manners. After a violent scene, he
pauses at a spare moment, and shows her idle, stretched on her couch
like a cat, yawning and basking in the sun. Like a physiologist, he
knows that the nerves of the beast of prey are softened, and that it
only ceases to bound in order to sleep. But what bounds! She dazzles,
fascinates; she defends herself successively against three proved
accusations, refutes evidence, alternately humiliates and glorifies
herself, rails, adores, demonstrates, changing a score of times her
voice, her ideas, tricks, and all this in one quarter of an hour. An old
shopkeeper, protected against emotions by trade and avarice, trembles at
her speech: "She sets her feet on my heart, crushes me, stuns me. Ah,
what a woman! When she looks cold at me, it is worse than a
stomach-ache.... How she tripped down the steps, making them bright with
her looks!" Everywhere passion, force, atrocity, conceal the ugliness
and corruption. Attacked in her fortune by a respectable woman, Mme.
Marneffe gets up an incomparable comedy, played with a great poet's
eloquence and exaltation, and broken suddenly by the burst of laughter
and coarse triviality of a porter's daughter on the stage. Style and
action are raised to the height of an epic. "When the words 'Hulot and
two hundred thousand francs' were mentioned, Valérie gave a passing
look from between her two long eyelids, like the glare of a cannon
through its smoke." A little further, caught in the act by one of her
lovers, a Brazilian, and quite capable of killing her, she blenched for
an instant; but recovering the same moment, she checked her tears. "She
came to him, and looked so fiercely that her eyes glittered like
daggers." Danger roused and inspired her, and her excited nerves propel
genius and courage to her brain. To complete the picture of this
impetuous nature, superior and unstable, Balzac at the last moment makes
her repent. To proportion her fortune to her vice, he leads her
triumphantly through the ruin, death, or despair of twenty people, and
shatters her in the supreme moment by a fall as terrible as her success.
Before such passion and logic, what is Becky Sharp? A calculating
plotter, cool in temperament, full of common-sense, an ex-governess,
having parsimonious habits, a genuine woman of business, always proper,
always active, unsexed, void of the voluptuous softness and diabolical
transport which can give brilliancy to her character and charm to her
profession. She is not a prostitute, but a petticoated and heartless
barrister. Nothing is more fit to inspire aversion. The author loses no
opportunity of expressing his own; through two-thirds of the book he
pursues her with sarcasms and misfortunes; he puts only false words,
perfidious actions, revolting sentiments, in her mouth. From her coming
on the stage, at the age of seventeen, treated with rare kindness by a
simple-minded family, she lies from morning to night, and by coarse
expedients tries to fish there for a husband. The better to crush her,
Thackeray himself sets forth all this baseness, these lies, and
indecencies. Rebecca ever so gently presses the hand of fat Joseph: "It
was an advance, and as such, perhaps some ladies of indisputable
correctness and gentility will condemn the action as immodest; but, you
see, poor dear Rebecca had all this work to do for herself. If a person
is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his
own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear mamma to settle matters with the
young man, she must do it for herself."[291] Whilst Becky was a
governess at Sir Pitt Crawley's, she gains the friendship of her pupils,
by reading to them the tales of Crébillon the younger, and of Voltaire.
She writes to her friend Amelia: "The rector's wife paid me a score of
compliments about the progress my pupils made, and thought, no doubt, to
touch my heart--poor, simple, country soul! as if I cared a fig about my
pupils."[292] This phrase is an imprudence hardly natural in so careful
a person, and the author adds it gratuitously to her part, to make it
odious. A little further Rebecca is grossly adulatory and mean to old
Miss Crawley; and her pompous periods, manifestly false, instead of
exciting admiration, raise disgust. She is selfish and lying to her
husband, and knowing that he is on the field of battle, busies herself
only in getting together a little purse. Thackeray designedly dwells on
the contrast: the heavy dragoon "went through the various items of his
little catalogue of effects, striving to see how they might be turned
into money for his wife's benefit, in case any accident should befall
him. Faithful to his plan of economy, the captsin dressed himself in his
oldest and shabbiest uniform" to get killed in:
"And this famous dandy of Windsor and Hyde Park went off on his
campaign... with something like a prayer on the lips for the woman he
was leaving. He took her up from the ground, and held her in his arms
for a minute, tight pressed against his strong beating heart.. His face
was purple and his eyes dim, as he put her down and left her.... And
Rebecca, as we have said, wisely determined not to give way to
unavailing sentimentality on her husband's departure.... 'What a fright
I seem,' she said, examining herself in the glass, 'and how pale this
pink makes one look.' So she divested herself of this pink raiment;...
then she put her bouquet of the ball into a glass of water, and went to
bed, and slept very comfortably."[293]
From these examples, judge of the rest. Thackeray's whole business is to
degrade Rebecca Sharp. He convicts her of being harsh to her son,
robbing tradesmen, deceiving everybody. And after all, he makes her a
dupe; whatever she does, comes to nothing. Compromised by the advances
which she has lavished on foolish Joseph, she momentarily expects an
offer of marriage. A letter comes, announcing that he has gone to
Scotland, and presents his compliments to Miss Rebecca. Three months
later she secretly marries Captain Rawdon, a poor dolt. Sir Pitt
Crawley, Rawdon's father, throws himself at her feet, with four thousand
a year, and offers her his hand. In her consternation she weeps
despairingly. "Married, married, married already!" is her cry; and it is
enough to pierce sensitive souls. Later, she tries to win her
sister-in-law by passing for a good mother. "Why do you kiss me here?"
asks her son; "you never kiss me at home." The consequence is, complete
discredit; once more she is lost. The Marquis of Steyne, her lover,
presents her to society, loads her with jewels, banknotes, and has her
husband appointed to some island in the East. The husband enters at the
wrong moment, knocks my lord down, restores the diamonds, and drives her
away. Wandering on the Continent, she tries five or six times to grow
rich and appear honest. Always, at the moment of success, accident
brings her to the ground. Thackeray sports with her as a child with a
cockchafer, letting her hoist herself painfully to the top of the
ladder, in order to pluck her down by the foot and make her tumble
disgracefully. He ends by dragging her through taverns and greenrooms,
and pointing his finger at her from a distance, as a gamester, a
drunkard: is unwilling to touch her further. On the last page he
installs her vulgarly in a small fortune, plundered by doubtful devices,
and leaves her in bad odor, uselessly hypocritical, abandoned to the
shadiest society. Beneath this storm of irony and contempt, the heroine
is dwarfed, illusion is weakened, interest diminished, art attenuated,
poetry disappears, and the character, more useful, has become less true
and beautiful.
Section II.--Portrait of Henry Esmond.--Historical Talent
Suppose that a happy chance lays aside these causes of weakness, and
keeps open these sources of talent. Amongst all these transformed novels
appears a single genuine one, elevated, touching, simple, original: the
history of Henry Esmond. Thackeray has not written a less popular nor a
more beautiful story.
This book comprises the fictitious memoirs of Colonel Esmond, a
contemporary of Queen Anne, who, after a troubled life in Europe,
retired with his wife to Virginia, and became a planter there. Esmond
speaks; and the necessity of adapting the tone to the character
suppresses the satirical style, the reiterated irony, the bitter
sarcasm, the scenes contrived to ridicule folly, the events combined to
crush vice. Thenceforth we enter the real world; we let illusion guide
us, we rejoice in a varied spectacle, easily unfolded, without moral
intention. We are no more harassed by personal advice; we remain in our
place, calm, sure, no actor's finger pointed at us to warn us at an
interesting moment that the piece is played on our account, and to do us
good. At the same time, and unconsciously, we are at ease. Quitting
bitter satire, pure narration charms us; we take rest from hating. We
are like an army surgeon, who, after a day of fights and manœuvres,
sits on a hillock and beholds the motion in the camp, the procession of
carriages, and the distant horizon softened by the sombre tints of
evening.
On the other hand, the long reflections, which seem vulgar and out of
place under the pen of the writer, become natural and interesting in the
mouth of the chief character in this novel. Esmond is an old man,
writing for his children, and remarking upon his experience. He has a
right to judge life; his maxims are suitable to his years: having passed
into sketches of manners, they lose their pedantic air; we hear them
complacently, and perceive, as we turn the page, the calm and sad smile
which has dictated them.
With the reflections we endure the details. Elsewhere, the minute
descriptions appear frequently puerile; we blamed the author for
dwelling, with the preciseness of an English painter, on school
adventures, coach scenes, inn episodes; we thought that this intense
studiousness, unable, to grasp lofty themes of art, was compelled to
stoop to microscopical observations and photographic details. Here,
everything is changed. A writer of memoirs has a right to record his
childish impressions. His distant recollections, mutilated remnants of a
forgotten life, have a peculiar charm; we accompany him back to infancy.
A Latin lesson, a soldier's march, a ride behind someone, become
important events embellished by distance; we enjoy his peaceful and
familiar pleasure, and feel with him a vast sweetness in seeing once
more, with so much ease and in so clear a light, the well-known phantoms
of the past. Minute detail adds to the interest in adding to the
naturalness. Stories of campaign life, random opinions on the books and
events of the time, a hundred petty scenes, a thousand petty facts,
manifestly useless, are on that very account illusory. We forget the
author, we listen to the old Colonel, we find ourselves carried back a
hundred years, and we have the extreme pleasure, so uncommon, of
believing in what we read.
Whilst the subject obviates the faults, or turns them into virtues, it
offers for these virtues the very finest theme. A powerful reflection
has decomposed and reproduced the manners of the time with a most
astonishing fidelity. Thackeray knows Swift, Steele, Addison, St. John,
Marlboro, as well as the most attentive and learned historian. He
depicts their habits, household conversation, like Walter Scott himself;
and, what Walter Scott could not do, he imitates their style so that we
are deceived by it; and many of their authentic phrases, inwoven with
the text, cannot be distinguished from it. This perfect imitation is not
limited to a few select scenes, but pervades the whole volume. Colonel
Esmond writes as people wrote in the year 1700. The feat, I was going to
say the genius, is as great as the attempt of Paul Louis Courier, in
imitating successfully the style of ancient Greece. The style of Esmond
has the calmness, the exactness, the simplicity, the solidity of the
classics. Our modern temerities, our prodigal imagery, our jostled
figures, our habit of gesticulation, our striving for effect, all our
bad literary customs have disappeared. Thackeray must have gone back to
the primitive sense of words, discovered there forgotten shades of
meaning, recomposed an obliterated state of intellect and a lost species
of ideas, to make his copy approach so closely to the original. The
imagination of Dickens himself would have failed in this. To attempt and
accomplish this needed all the sagacity, calmness, and power of
knowledge and meditation.
But the masterpiece of the work is the character of Esmond. Thackeray
has endowed him with that tender kindliness, almost feminine, which he
everywhere extols above all other human virtues, and that self-mastery
which is the effect of habitual reflection. These are the finest
qualities of his psychological armory; each by its contrast increases
the value of the other. We see a hero, but original and new, English in
his cool resolution, modern by the delicacy and sensibility of his
heart.
Henry Esmond is a poor child, the supposed bastard of Lord Castlewood,
brought up by his heirs. In the opening chapter we are touched by the
modulated and noble emotion which we retain to the end of the work. Lady
Castlewood, on her first visit to the castle, comes to him in the
"book-room, or yellow gallery"; being informed by the house-keeper who
the little boy is, she blushes and walks back; the next instant, touched
by remorse, she returns:
"With a look of infinite pity and tenderness in her eyes, she took his
hand again, placing her other fair hand on his head, and saying some
words to him, which were so kind, and said in a voice so sweet, that the
boy, who had never looked upon so much beauty before, felt as if the
touch of a superior being or angel smote him down to the ground, and
kissed the fair protecting hand as he knelt on one knee. To the very
last hour of his life, Esmond remembered the lady as she then spoke and
looked, the rings on her fair hands, the very scent of her robe, the
beam of her eyes lighting up with surprise and kindness, her lips
blooming in a smile, the sun making a golden halo round her
hair.[294]... There seemed, as the boy thought, in every look or gesture
of this fair creature, an angelical softness and bright pity--in motion
or repose she seemed gracious alike; the tone of her voice, though she
uttered words ever so trivial, gave him a pleasure that amounted almost
to anguish. It cannot be called love, that a lad of twelve years of age,
little more than a menial, felt for an exalted lady, his mistress; but
it was worship."[295]
This noble and pure feeling is expanded by a series of devoted actions,
related with extreme simplicity; in the least words, in the turn of a
phrase, in a chance conversation, we perceive a great heart,
passionately grateful, never tiring of doing a kindness, or a service,
sympathizing, friendly, giving advice, defending the honor of the family
and the fortune of the children. Twice Esmond interposed between Lord
Castle wood and Mohun, the duellist; it was not his fault that the
murderer's weapon did not reach his own breast. When Lord Castlewood on
his death-bed revealed that Esmond was not a bastard, but that the title
and fortune of Castlewood were lawfully his, the young man, without a
word, burned the confession which would have rescued him from the
poverty and humiliation in which he had so long pined. Insulted by the
Lady Castlewood, sick of a wound received by his kinsman's side, accused
of ingratitude and cowardice, he persisted in his silence with the
justification in his hand: "And when the struggle was over in Harry's
mind, a glow of righteous happiness filled it; and it was with grateful
tears in his eyes that he returned thanks to God for that decision which
he had been enabled to make."[296] Later, being in love, but sure not to
marry if his birth remained under a cloud in the eyes of the world,
having repaid his benefactress, whose son he had saved, entreated by her
to resume the name which belonged to him, he smiled sweetly, and gravely
replied:
"'It was settled twelve years since, by my dear lord's bedside,' says
Colonel Esmond. 'The children must know nothing of this. Frank and his
heirs after him must bear our name. 'Tis his rightfully; I have not even
a proof of that marriage of my father and mother, though my poor lord,
on His death-bed, told me that Father Holt had brought such a proof to
Castlewood. I would not seek it when I was abroad. I went and looked at
my poor mother's grave in her convent. What matter to her now? No court
of law on earth, upon my mere word, would deprive my Lord Viscount and
set me up. I am the head of the house, dear lady; but Frank is Viscount
of Castlewood still. And rather than disturb him, I would turn monk, or
disappear in America.'
"As he spoke so to his dearest mistress, for whom he would have been
willing to give up his life, or to make any sacrifice any day, the fond
creature flung herself down on her knees before him, and kissed both his
hands in an outbreak of passionate love and gratitude, such as could not
but melt his heart, and make him feel very proud and thankful that God
had given him the power to show his love for her, and to prove it by
some little sacrifice on his own part. To be able to bestow benefits or
happiness on those one loves is sure the greatest blessing conferred
upon a man--and what wealth or name, or gratification of ambition or
vanity, could compare with the pleasure Esmond now had of being able to
confer some kindness upon his best and dearest friends?
"'Dearest saint,' says he, 'purest soul, that has had so much to suffer,
that has blest the poor lonely orphan with such a treasure of love. 'Tis
for me to kneel, not for you: 'tis for me to be thankful that I can make
you happy. Hath my life any other aim? Blessed be God that I can serve
you!'"[297]
This noble tenderness seems still more touching when contrasted with the
surrounding circumstances. Esmond goes to the wars, serves a political
party, lives amidst dangers and bustle, judging revolutions and politics
from a lofty point of view; he becomes a man of experience, well
informed, learned, far-sighted, capable of great enterprises, possessing
prudence and courage, harassed by his own thoughts and griefs, ever sad
and ever strong. He ends by accompanying to England the Pretender,
half-brother of Queen Anne, and keeps him, disguised, at Castlewood,
awaiting the moment when the queen, dying and won over to the Tory
cause, should declare him her heir. This young prince, a true Stuart,
pays court to Lord Castlewood's daughter Beatrix, whom Esmond loves, and
gets out at night to join her. Esmond, who waits for him, sees the crown
lost and his house dishonored. His insulted honor and outraged love
break forth in a proud and terrible rage. Pale, with set teeth, his
brain on fire by four sleepless nights of anxiety, he keeps his mind
clear, and his voice calm; he explains to the prince with perfect
etiquette, and with the respectful coldness of an official messenger,
the folly which the prince has committed, and the villainy which the
prince contemplated. The scene must be read to show how much superiority
and passion this calmness and bitterness imply:
"'What mean you, my lord?' says the Prince, and muttered something about
a _guet-à-pens_, which Esmond caught up.
"'The snare, Sir,' said he, 'was not of our laying; it is not we that
invited you. We came to avenge, and not to compass, the dishonor of our
family.'
"'Dishonor! _Morbleu!_ there has been no dishonor,' says the Prince,
turning scarlet, 'only a little harmless playing.'
"'That was meant to end seriously.'
"'I swear,' the Prince broke out impetuously, 'upon the honor of a
gentleman, my lords'--
"'That we arrived in time. No wrong hath been done, Frank,' says Colonel
Esmond, turning round to young Castlewood, who stood at the door as the
talk was going on. 'See! here is a paper whereon his Majesty hath
deigned to commence some verses in honor, or dishonor, of Beatrix. Here
is "Madame" and "Flamme, Cruelle" and "Rebelle," and "Amour" and
"Jour," in the Royal writing and spelling. Had the Gracious lover been
happy, he had not passed his time in sighing.' In fact, and actually as
he was speaking, Esmond cast his eyes down towards the table, and saw a
paper on which my young Prince had been scrawling a madrigal, that was
to finish his charmer on the morrow.
"'Sir,' says the Prince, burning with rage (he had assumed his Royal
coat unassisted by this time), 'did I come here to receive insults?'
"'To confer them, may it please your Majesty,' says the Colonel, with a
very low bow, 'and the gentlemen of our family are come to thank you.'
"'_Malédiction!_' says the young man, tears starting into his eyes with
helpless rage and mortification. 'What will you with me, gentlemen?'
"'If your Majesty will please to enter the next apartment,' says Esmond,
preserving his grave tone, 'I have some papers there which I would
gladly submit to you, and by your permission I will lead the way;' and
taking the taper up, and backing before the Prince with very great
ceremony, Mr. Esmond passed into the little Chaplain's room, through
which we had just entered into the house:--'Please to set a chair for
his Majesty, Frank,' says the Colonel to his companion, who wondered
almost as much at this scene, and was as much puzzled by it, as the
other actor in it. Then going to the crypt over the mantelpiece, the
Colonel opened it, and drew thence the papers which so long had lain
there.
"'Here, may it please your Majesty,' says he, 'is the Patent of Marquis
sent over by your Royal Father at St. Germain's to Viscount Castlewood,
my father: here is the witnessed certificate of my father's marriage to
my mother, and of my birth and christening; I was christened of that
religion of which your sainted sire gave all through life so shining
example. These are my titles, dear Frank, and this what I do with them:
here go Baptism and Marriage, and here the Marquisate and the August
Sign-Manual, with which your predecessor was pleased to honor our race.'
And as Esmond spoke he set the papers burning in the brazier. 'You will
please, sir, to remember,' he continued, 'that our family hath ruined
itself by fidelity to yours; that my grandfather spent his estate, and
gave his blood and his son to die for your service; that my dear lord's
grandfather (for lord you are now, Frank, by right and title too) died
for the same cause; that my poor kinswoman, my father's second wife,
after giving away her honor to your wicked perjured race, sent all her
wealth to the King, and got in return that precious title that lies in
ashes, and this inestimable yard of blue riband. I lay this at your
feet, and stamp upon it: I draw this sword, and break it and deny you;
and had you completed the wrong you designed us, by Heaven I would have
driven it through your heart, and no more pardoned you than your father
pardoned Monmouth.'"[298]
Two pages later he speaks thus of his marriage to Lady Castlewood:
"That happiness which hath subsequently crowned it, cannot be written in
words; 'tis of its nature sacred and secret, and not to be spoken of,
though the heart be ever so full of thankfulness, save to Heaven and the
One ear alone--to one fond being, the truest and tenderest and purest
wife ever man was blessed with. As I think of the immense happiness
which was in store for me, and of the depth and intensity of that love
which, for so many years, hath blessed me, I own to a transport of
wonder and gratitude for such a boon--nay, am thankful to have been
endowed with a heart capable of feeling and knowing the immense beauty
and value of the gift which God hath bestowed upon me. Sure, love,
_vincit omnia_, is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than
wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he
hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
In the name of my wife I write the completion of hope, and the summit of
happiness. To have such a love is the one blessing, in comparison with
which all earthly joy is of no value; and to think of her, is to praise
God."
A character capable of such contrasts is a lofty work; it is to be
remembered that Thackeray has produced no other; we regret that moral
intentions have perverted these fine literary faculties; and we deplore
that satire has robbed art of such talent.
Section III.--Literature the Definition of Man
Who is he; and what is the value of this literature of which he is one
of the princes? At bottom, like every literature, it is a definition of
man; and to judge it, we must compare it with man. We can do so now; we
have just studied a mind, Thackeray himself; we have considered his
faculties, their connections, results, their different degrees; we have
before our eyes a model of human nature. We have a right to judge of the
copy by the model, and to control the definition which his novels lay
down by the definition which his character furnishes.
The two definitions are contrary, and his portrait is a criticism on his
talent. We have seen that in him the same faculties produce the
beautiful and the ugly, force and weakness, success and failure; that
moral reflection, after having provided him with every satirical power,
debases him in art; that, after having spread over his contemporary
novels a tone of vulgarity and falseness, it raises his historical novel
to the level of the finest productions; that the same constitution of
mind teaches him the sarcastic and violent, as well as the modulated and
simple style, the bitterness and harshness of hate with the effusion and
delicacy of love. The evil and the good, the beautiful and the ugly, the
repulsive and the agreeable, are in him then but remoter effects, of
slight importance, born of changing circumstances, acquired and
fortuitous qualities, not essential and primitive, different forms which
different streams present in the same current. So it is with other men.
Doubtless moral qualities are of the first rank; they are the motive
power of civilization, and constitute the nobleness of the individual;
society exists by them alone, and by them alone man is great. But if
they are the finest fruit of the human plant, they are not its root;
they give us our value, but do not constitute our elements. Neither the
vices nor the virtues of man are his nature; to praise or to blame him
is not to know him; approbation or disapprobation does not define him;
the names of good or bad tell us nothing of what he is. Put the robber
Cartouche in an Italian court of the fifteenth century: he would be a
great statesman. Transport this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into
a shop; he will be an exemplary tradesman. This public man, of
inflexible probity, is in his drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This
father of a family, so humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue
in its circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its
circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two
sides: on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential man is
found concealed far below these moral badges; they only point out the
useful or noxious effect of our inner constitution; they do not reveal
our inner constitution. They are safety or advertising lights attached
to our names, to warn the passer-by to avoid or approach us; they are
not the explanatory chart of our being. Our true essence consists in the
causes of our good or bad qualities, and these causes are discovered in
the temperament, the species and degree of imagination, the amount and
velocity of attention, the magnitude and direction of primitive
passions. A character is a force, like gravity, or steam, capable, as it
may happen, of pernicious or profitable effects, and which must be
defined otherwise than by the amount of the weight it can lift or the
havoc it can cause. It is therefore to ignore man, to reduce him, as
Thackeray and English literature generally do, to an aggregate of
virtues and vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior
and social side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element. We will
find the same fault in English criticism, always moral, never
psychological, bent on exactly measuring the degree of human honesty,
ignorant of the mechanism of our sentiments and faculties; we will find
the same fault in English religion, which is but an emotion or a
discipline; in their philosophy, destitute of metaphysics; and if we
ascend to the source, according to the rule which derives vices from
virtues, and virtues from vices, we will see all these weaknesses
derived from their native energy, their practical education, and that
kind of severe and religious poetic instinct which has in time past made
them Protestant and Puritan.
[Footnote 264: "Vanity Fair." Unless the original octavo edition is
mentioned, the translator has always used the collected edition of
Thackeray's works in small octavo, 1855-1868, 14 vols.]
[Footnote 265: "Vanity Fair," ch. XIX.]
[Footnote 266: "Vanity Fair," ch. IX.]
[Footnote 267: Thackeray, in his "Book of Snobs," says: "Their usual
English expression of intense gloom and subdued agony."]
[Footnote 268: "The Edinburgh Review."]
[Footnote 269: See the character of Amelia in "Vanity Fair," and of
Colonel Newcome in the "Newcomes."]
[Footnote 270: "The Book of Snobs," ch. XVI; On Literary Snobs.]
[Footnote 271: Stendhal says: "L'esprit et le génie perdent vingt-cinq
pour cent de leur valeur en abordant en Angleterre."]
[Footnote 272: These remarks are only to be found in the octavo
edition of "Pendennis."--Tr.]
[Footnote 273: "The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty
Diamond," ch. XI.]
[Footnote 274: Ibid. ch. IX.]
[Footnote 275: "The Book of Snobs," ch. I., The Snob playfully dealt with.]
[Footnote 276: "Pendennis," ch. LIV.]
[Footnote 277: Ibid. ch. LII.]
[Footnote 278: Ibid. ch. LIII.]
[Footnote 279: Ibid. ch. V.]
[Footnote 280: "Pendennis," ch. XXI. This passage is only found in the
octavo edition.--Tr.]
[Footnote 281: Ibid. ch. XXI.]
[Footnote 282: Ibid. ch. XXI. These words are only found in the octavo
edition.--Tr.]
[Footnote 283: Ibid. ch. LI.]
[Footnote 284: See, for example, in the "Great Hoggarty Diamond," the
death of the little child. The "Book of Snobs" ends thus: "Fun is good.
Truth is still better, and Love best of all."]
[Footnote 285: "The Book of Snobs," last chapter.]
[Footnote 286: "Vanity Fair," ch. XLVIII. This passage is only found in
the original octavo edition.--Tr.]
[Footnote 287: "Vanity Fair," ch. XLIX.]
[Footnote 288: "Pendennis," ch. LX.]
[Footnote 289: "The Book of Snobs," ch. VIII; Great City Snobs.]
[Footnote 290: "The Book of Snobs," ch. XXVI; On Some Country Snobs.]
[Footnote 291: "Vanity Fair," ch. IV.]
[Footnote 292: Ibid. ch. XI.]
[Footnote 293: "Vanity Fair," ch. XXX.]
[Footnote 294: "The History of Henry Esmond," bk. I. ch. I.]
[Footnote 295: Ibid. bk. I. ch. VII.]
[Footnote 296: Ibid. bk. II. ch. I.]
[Footnote 297: "The History of Henry Esmond," bk. III. ch. II.]
[Footnote 298: "The History of Henry Esmond," bk. III. ch. XIII.]
CHAPTER THIRD
CRITICISM AND HISTORY--MACAULAY
Section I.--His Position in England
I shall not here attempt to write the life of Lord Macaulay. It can only
be related twenty years hence, when his friends shall have put together
all their recollections of him. As to what is public now, it seems to me
useless to recall it: everyone knows that his father was an abolitionist
and a philanthropist; that Macaulay passed through a most brilliant and
complete classical education; that at twenty-five his essay on Milton
made him famous; that at thirty he entered Parliament, and took his
standing there amongst the first orators; that he went to India to
reform the law, and that on his return he was appointed to high offices;
that on one occasion his liberal opinions in religious matters lost him
his seat in Parliament; that he was re-elected amidst universal
congratulations; that he continued to be the most celebrated publicist
and the most accomplished writer of the Whig party; and that on this
ground, towards the close of his life, the gratitude of his party and
the public admiration made him a British peer. It will be a fine
biography to write--a life of honor and happiness, devoted to noble
ideas, and occupied by manly enterprises; literary in the first place,
but sufficiently charged with action and immersed in business to furnish
substance and solidity to his eloquence and style, to form the observer
side by side with the artist, and the thinker side by side with the
writer. On the present occasion I will only describe the thinker and
writer: I leave the life, I take his works; and first his Essays.
Section II.--His Essays
His Essays are a collection of articles from reviews: I confess to a
fondness for books of this kind. In the first place we can throw down
the volume after a score of pages, begin at the end, or in the middle;
we are not its slave, but its master; we can treat it like a newspaper:
in fact, it is the journal of a mind. In the second place, it is
miscellaneous: in turning over a page, we pass from the Renaissance to
the nineteenth century, from England to India: this diversity surprises
and pleases. Lastly, involuntarily, the author is indiscreet; he
displays himself to us, keeping back nothing; it is a familiar
conversation, and no conversation is worth so much as that of England's
greatest historian. We are pleased to mark the origin of this generous
and powerful mind, to discover what faculties have nourished his talent,
what researches have shaped his knowledge, what opinions he formed on
philosophy, religion, the state, literature; what he was, and what he
has become; what he wishes, and what he believes.
Seated in an arm-chair, with our feet on the fender, we see little by
little, as we turn over the leaves of the book, an animated and
thoughtful face arise before us; the countenance assumes expression and
clearness; the different features are mutually explained and lightened
up; presently the author lives again for us, and before us; we perceive
the causes and birth of all his thoughts, we foresee what he is going to
say; his bearing and mode of speech are as familiar to us as those of a
man whom we see every day; his opinions correct and affect our own; he
enters partly into our thoughts and our life; he is two hundred leagues
away, and his book stamps his image on us, as the reflected light paints
on the horizon the object from which it is emitted. Such is the charm of
books which deal with all kinds of subjects, which give the author's
opinions on all sorts of things, which lead us in all directions of his
thoughts, and make us, so to speak, walk around his mind.
Macaulay treats philosophy in the English fashion, as a practical man.
He is a disciple of Bacon, and sets him above all philosophers; he
decides that genuine science dates from him; that the speculations of
old thinkers are only witticisms; that for two thousand years the human
mind was on a wrong tack; that only since Bacon it has discovered the
goal to which it must turn, and the method by which it must arrive
there. This goal is utility. The object of knowledge is not theory, but
application. The object of mathematicians is not the satisfaction of an
idle curiosity, but the invention of machines calculated to alleviate
human labor, to increase the power of subduing nature, to render life
more secure, commodious, and happy. The object of astronomy is not to
furnish matter for vast calculations and poetical cosmogonies, but to
subserve geography and to guide navigation. The object of anatomy and
the zoological sciences is not to suggest eloquent systems on the nature
of organization, or to set before the eyes the orders of the animal
kingdom by an ingenious classification, but to conduct the surgeon's
hand and the physician's prognosis. The object of every research and
every study is to diminish pain, to augment comfort, to ameliorate the
condition of man; theoretical laws are serviceable only in their
practical use; the labors of the laboratory and the cabinet receive
their sanction and value only through the use made of them by workshops
and mills; the tree of knowledge must be estimated only by its fruits.
If we wish to judge of a philosophy, we must observe its effects; its
works are not its books, but its acts. The philosophy of the ancients
produced fine writings, sublime phrases, infinite disputes, hollow
dreams, systems displaced by systems, and left the world as ignorant, as
unhappy, and as wicked as it found it. That of Bacon produced
observations, experiments, discoveries, machines, entire arts and
industries:
"It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished
diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new
securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it
has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to
our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to
earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has
extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of
the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated
distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly
offices, all despatch of business; it 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."[299]
The first was consumed in solving unsolvable enigmas, fabricating
portraits of an imaginary sage, mounting from hypothesis to hypothesis,
tumbling from absurdity to absurdity; it despised what was practicable,
promised what was impracticable; and because it disregarded the limits
of the human mind, ignored its power. The other, measuring our force and
weakness, diverted us from roads that were closed to us, to start us on
roads that were open to us; it recognized facts and laws, because it
resigned itself to remain ignorant of their essence and principles; it
rendered man more happy because it has not pretended to render him
perfect; it discovered great truths and produced great effects, because
it had the courage and good sense to study small things, and to keep for
a long time to petty vulgar experiments; it has become glorious and
powerful, because it deigned to become humble and useful. Formerly,
science furnished only vain pretensions and chimerical conceptions,
whilst it held itself far aloof from practical existence, and styled
itself the sovereign of man. Now, science possesses acquired truths, the
hope of loftier discoveries, an ever-increasing authority, because it
has entered upon active existence, and has declared itself the servant
of man. Let it keep to its new functions; let it not try to penetrate
the region of the invisible; let it renounce what must remain unknown;
it does not contain its own issue, it is but a medium; man was not made
for it, but science was made for man; it is like the thermometers and
piles which it constructs for its own experiments; its whole glory,
merit, and office, is to be an instrument:
"We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written, in
which a disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be
introduced as fellow-travellers. They come to a village where the
small-pox has just begun to rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse
suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in terror over their
children. The Stoic assures the dismayed population that there is
nothing bad in the small-pox, and that to a wise man disease, deformity,
death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian takes out a
lancet and begins to vaccinate. They find a body of miners in great
dismay. An explosion of noisome vapours had just killed many of those
who were at work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the
cavern. The Stoic assures them that such an accident is nothing
but a mere ἀποπροηγμένον. The Baconian, who has no such fine
word at his command, contents himself with devising a safety-lamp.
They find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his hands on the shore.
His vessel, with an inestimable cargo, had just gone down, and he
is reduced in a moment from opulence to beggary. The Stoic exhorts
him not to seek happiness in things which lie without himself,
and repeats the whole chapter of Epictetus, πρὸς τοὺς τὴν αποριαν
δεδοικότας. The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down
in it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck. It
would be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference between the
philosophy of thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the philosophy of
words and the philosophy of works."[300]
It is not for me to discuss these opinions; it is for the reader to
blame or praise them, if he sees fit: I do not wish to criticise
doctrines, but to depict a man; and truly nothing could be more striking
than this absolute scorn for speculation, and this absolute love for the
practical. Such a mind is entirely suitable to the national genius: in
England a barometer is still called a philosophical instrument;
philosophy is there a thing unknown. The English have moralists,
psychologists, but no metaphysicians: if there is one--Hamilton, for
instance--he is a sceptic in metaphysics; he has only read the German
philosophers to refute them; he regards speculative philosophy as an
extravagance of visionaries, and is compelled to apologize to his
readers for the strangeness of his subject, when he tries to make them
understand somewhat of Hegel's conceptions. The positive and practical
English, excellent politicians, administrators, fighters, and workers,
are no more suited than the ancient Romans for the abstractions of
subtle dialectics and grand systems; and Cicero, too, once excused
himself when he tried to expound to his audience of senators and public
men the deep and audacious deductions of the Stoics.
Section III.--His Critical Method
The only part of philosophy which pleases men of this kind is morality,
because like them it is wholly practical, and only attends to actions.
Nothing else was studied at Rome, and everyone knows what place it holds
in English philosophy: Hutcheson, Price, Ferguson, Wollaston, Adam
Smith, Bentham, Reid, and many others, have filled the last century with
dissertations and discussions on the rule of duty and the faculty which
discovers our duty; and Macaulay's Essays are a new example of this
national and dominant inclination: his biographies are less portraits
than judgments. What strictly is the degree of uprightness and
dishonesty of the personage he describes, that is the important question
for him; he makes all other questions refer to it; he applies himself
throughout only to justify, excuse, accuse, or condemn. If he speaks of
Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, Sir William Temple, Addison, Milton, or any
other man, he devotes himself, first of all, to measure exactly the
number and greatness of their faults and virtues; he interrupts himself,
in the midst of a narration, to examine whether the action which he is
relating is just or unjust; he considers it as a legist and a moralist,
according to positive and natural law; he takes into account the state
of public opinion, the examples which surrounded the accused, the
principles he professed, the education he has received; he bases his
opinion on analogies drawn from ordinary life, from the history of all
peoples, the laws of all countries; he brings forward so many proofs,
such certain facts, such conclusive reasonings, that the best advocate
might find a model in him, and when at last he pronounces judgment, we
think we are listening to the summing up of a judge. If he analyzes a
literature--that of the Restoration, for instance--he impanels before
the reader a sort of jury to judge it. He makes it appear at the bar,
and reads the indictment; he then presents the plea of the defenders,
who try to excuse its levities and indecencies: at last he begins to
speak in his turn, and proves that the arguments set forth are not
applicable to the case in question; that the accused writers have
labored effectually and with premeditation to corrupt morals; that they
not only employed unbecoming words, but that they designedly, and with
deliberate intent, represented unbecoming things; that they always took
care to conceal the hatefulness of vice, to render virtue ridiculous, to
make adultery fashionable and a necessary exploit of a man of taste;
that this intention was all the more manifest from its being in the
spirit of the times, and that they were pandering to a crime of their
age. If I dare employ, like Macaulay, religious comparisons, I should
say that this criticism was like the Last Judgment, in which the
diversity of talents, characters, ranks, employments, will disappear
before the consideration of virtue and vice, and where there will be no
more artists, but a judge of the righteous and the wicked.
In France, criticism has a freer gait; it is less subservient to
morality, and more akin to art. When we try to relate a life, or paint
the character of a man, we more readily consider him as a simple subject
of painting or science: we only think of displaying the various feelings
of his heart, the connection of his ideas and the necessity of his
actions; we do not judge him, we only wish to represent him to the eyes,
and make him intelligible to the reason. We are spectators, and nothing
more. What matters it if Peter or Paul is a rascal? that is the business
of his contemporaries: they suffered from his vices, and ought to think
only of despising and condemning him. Now we are beyond his reach, and
hatred has disappeared with danger. At this distance, and in the
historic perspective, I see in him but a mental machine, provided with
certain springs, animated by a primary impulse, affected by various
circumstances. I calculate the play of his motives; I feel with him the
impact of obstacles; I see beforehand the curve which his motion will
trace out; I feel for him neither aversion nor disgust; I have left
these feelings on the threshold of history, and I taste the very deep
and pure pleasure of seeing a soul act after a definite law, in a fixed
groove, with all the variety of human passions, with the succession and
constraint, which the inner structure of man imposes on the external
development of his passions.
In a country where men are so much occupied by morality, and so little
by philosophy, there is much religion. For lack of natural theology they
have a positive theology, and demand from the Bible the metaphysics not
supplied by reason. Macaulay is a Protestant; and though a very candid
and liberal man, he at times retains the English prejudices against the
Roman-Catholic religion.[301] Popery in England always passes for an
impious idolatry and for a degrading servitude. After two revolutions,
Protestantism, allied to liberty, seemed to be the religion of liberty;
and Roman-Catholicism, allied to despotism, seemed the religion of
despotism: the two doctrines have both assumed the name of the cause
which they supported. To the first has been transferred the love and
veneration which were felt for the rights which it defended; on the
second has been poured the scorn and hatred which were felt for the
slavery which it would have introduced: political passions have inflamed
religious beliefs; Protestantism has been confounded with the victorious
fatherland, Roman-Catholicism, with the conquered enemy; prejudices
survive when the strife is ended, and to this day English Protestants do
not feel for the doctrines of Roman Catholics the same good-will or
impartiality which French Roman Catholics feel for the doctrines of
Protestants.
But these English opinions are moderated in Macaulay by an ardent love
for justice. He is a liberal, in the largest and best sense of the word.
He demands that all citizens should be equal before the law, that men of
all sects should be declared capable to fill all public functions--that
Roman Catholics and Jews may, as well as Lutherans, Anglicans, and
Calvinists, sit in Parliament. He refutes Mr. Gladstone and the
partisans of State religion with incomparable ardor and eloquence,
abundance of proof, and force of argument; he clearly proves that the
State is only a secular association, that its end is wholly temporal,
that its single object is to protect the life, liberty, and property of
the citizens; that in entrusting to it the defence of spiritual
interests, we overturn the order of things; and that to attribute to it
a religious belief, is as though a man, walking with his feet, should
also confide to his feet the care of seeing and hearing. This question
has often been discussed in France; it is so to this day; but no one has
brought to it more common-sense, more practical reasoning, more palpable
arguments. Macaulay withdraws the discussion from the region of
metaphysics; he leads it back to the earth; he brings it home to all
minds; he takes his proofs and examples from the best known facts of
ordinary life; he addresses the shopkeeper, the citizen, the artist, the
scholar, everyone; he connects the truth, which he asserts, with the
familiar and intimate truths which no one can help admitting, and which
are believed with all the force of experience and habit; he carries off
and conquers our belief by such solid reasons that his adversaries will
thank him for convincing them; and if by chance a few amongst us have
need of a lesson on tolerance, they had better look for it in Macaulay's
Essay on that subject.
Section IV--His Love of Political Liberty
This love of justice becomes a passion when political liberty is at
stake; this is the sensitive point; and when we touch it, we touch the
writer to the quick. Macaulay loves it interestedly, because it is the
only guarantee of the properties, happiness, and life of individuals; he
loves it from pride, because it is the honor of man: he loves it from
patriotism, because it is a legacy left by preceding generations;
because for two hundred years a succession of upright and great men have
defended it against all attacks, and preserved it in all dangers;
because it has made the power and glory of England; because in teaching
the citizens to will and to decide for themselves, it adds to their
dignity and intelligence; because in assuring internal peace and
continuous progress, it guarantees the land against bloody revolutions
and silent decay. All these advantages are perpetually present to his
eyes; and whoever attacks the liberty, which forms their foundation,
becomes at once his enemy. Macaulay cannot look calmly on the oppression
of man; every outrage on human will hurts him like a personal outrage.
At every step bitter words escape him, and the stale adulation of
courtiers, which he meets with, brings to his lips a sarcasm the more
violent from being the more deserved. Pitt, he says, at college wrote
Latin verses on the death of George I. In this piece "the Muses are
earnestly entreated to weep over the urn of Cæsar: for Cæsar, says the
poet, loved the muses; Cæsar, who could not read a line of Pope, and
who loved nothing but punch and fat women."[302] Elsewhere, in the
biography of Miss Burney, he relates how the poor young lady, having
become celebrated by her two first novels, received as a reward, and as
a great favor, a place of keeper of the robes of Queen Charlotte; how,
worn out with watching, sick, nearly dying, she asked as a favor the
permission to depart; how "the sweet queen" was indignant at this
impertinence, unable to understand that anyone could refuse to die in
and for her service, or that a woman of letters should prefer health,
life, and glory to the honor of folding her Majesty's dresses. But it is
when Macaulay comes to the history of the Revolution that he hauls to
justice and vengeance those men who violated the rights of the public,
who hated and betrayed the national cause, who outraged liberty. He does
not speak as a historian, but as a contemporary; it seems as though his
life and his honor were at stake, that he pleaded for himself, that he
was a member of the Long Parliament, that he heard at the door the
muskets and swords of the guards sent to arrest Pym and Hampden. M.
Guizot has related the same history; but we recognize in his book the
calm judgment and impartial emotion of a philosopher. He does not
condemn the actions of Strafford or Charles; he explains them; he shows
in Strafford the imperious character, the domineering genius, which
feels itself born to command and to crush opposition, whom an invincible
bent rouses against the law or the right which restrains him, who
oppresses from a sort of inner craving, and who is made to govern as a
sword is to strike. He shows in Charles the innate respect for royalty,
the belief in divine right, the rooted conviction that every
remonstrance or demand is an insult to his crown, an outrage on his
rights, an impious and criminal sedition. Thenceforth we see in the
strife of king and parliament but the strife of two doctrines; we cease
to take an interest in one or the other, to take an interest in both; we
are spectators of a drama; we are no longer judges at a trial. But it is
a trial which Macaulay conducts before us; he takes a side in it; his
account is the address of a public prosecutor before the court, the most
entrancing, the most acrimonious, the best reasoned, that was ever
written. He approves of the condemnation of Strafford; he honors and
admires Cromwell; he exalts the character of the Puritans; he praises
Hampden to such a degree that he calls him the equal of Washington; he
has no words scornful and insulting enough for Laud; and what is more
terrible, each of his judgments is justified by as many quotations,
authorities, historic precedents, arguments, conclusive proofs, as the
vast erudition of Hallam, or the calm dialectics of Macintosh could have
assembled. Judge of this transport of passion and this withering logic
by a single passage:
"For more than ten years the people had seen the rights which were
theirs by a double claim, by immemorial inheritance and by recent
purchase, infringed by the perfidious King who had recognized them. At
length circumstances compelled Charles to summon another parliament:
another chance was given to our fathers: were they to throw it away as
they had thrown away the former? Were they again to be cozened by _le
Roi le veut?_ Were they again to advance their money on pledges which
had been forfeited over and over again? Were they to lay a second
Petition of Right at the foot of the throne, to grant another lavish aid
in exchange for another unmeaning ceremony, and then to take their
departure, till, after ten years more of fraud and oppression, their
prince should again require a supply and again repay it with a perjury?
They were compelled to choose whether they would trust a tyrant, or
conquer him. We think that they chose wisely and nobly.
"The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors
against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all
controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling
testimony to character. He had so many private virtues! And had James
the Second no private virtues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest
enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what,
after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not
more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded,
and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones
in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A good
husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution,
tyranny, and falsehood!
"We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told
that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up his
people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and
hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little
son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the
articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable
consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was
accustomed to hear prayers at six o'clock in the morning! It is to such
considerations as these, together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome
face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his
popularity with the present generation.
"For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a
good man, but a bad king. We can as easily conceive a good man and an
unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We cannot, in
estimating the character of an individual, leave out of our
consideration his conduct in the most important of all human relations;
and if in that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and
deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, in spite of
all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel."[303]
This is for the father; now the son will receive something. The reader
will perceive, by the furious invective, what excessive rancor the
government of the Stuarts left in the heart of a patriot, a Whig, a
Protestant, and an Englishman:
"Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of
servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish
talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow
minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The King
cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a
viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her degrading
insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots, and the
jests of buffoons, regulated the policy of the state. The government had
just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute.
The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and
the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place,
worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch; and England
propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and
bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace,
till the race accursed of God and man was a second time driven forth, to
wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of
the head to the nations."[304]
This piece, with all the biblical metaphors, which has preserved
something of the tone of Milton and the Puritan prophets, shows to what
an issue the various tendencies of this great mind were turning--what
was its bent--how the practical spirit, science and historic talent, the
unvaried presence of moral and religious ideas, love of country and
justice, concurred to make of Macaulay the historian of liberty.
Section V.--Characteristics of Macaulay's Style
In this his talent assisted him: for his opinions are akin to his
talent.
What first strikes us in him is the extreme solidity of his mind. He
proves all that he says, with astonishing vigor and authority. We are
almost certain never to go astray in following him. If he cites a
witness, he begins by measuring the veracity and intelligence of the
authors quoted, and by correcting the errors they may have committed,
through negligence or partiality. If he pronounces a judgment, he relies
on the most certain facts, the clearest principles, the simplest and
most logical deductions. If he develops an argument, he never loses
himself in a digression; he always has his goal before his eyes; he
advances towards it by the surest and straightest road. If he rises to
general considerations he mounts step by step through all the grades of
generalization, without omitting one; he feels his way every instant; he
neither adds nor subtracts from facts; he desires at the cost of every
precaution and research to arrive at the precise truth. He knows an
infinity of details of every kind; he owns a great number of philosophic
ideas of every species; but his erudition is as well-tempered as his
philosophy, and both constitute a coin worthy of circulation amongst all
thinking minds. We feel that he believes nothing without reason; that if
we doubted one of the facts which he advances, or one of the views which
he propounds, we should at once encounter a multitude of authentic
documents and a serried phalanx of convincing arguments. In France and
Germany we are too much accustomed to receive hypotheses for historic
laws, and doubtful anecdotes for attested events. We too often see whole
systems established, from day to day, according to the caprice of a
writer; a sort of castles in the air, whose regular arrangement
stimulates the appearance of genuine edifices, and which vanish at a
breath, when we come to touch them. We have all made theories, in a
fireside discussion, in case of need, when for lack of argument we
required some fictitious reasoning, like those Chinese generals who, to
terrify their enemies, placed amongst their troops formidable monsters
of painted card-board. We have judged men at random, under the
impression of the moment, on a detached action, an isolated document;
and we have dressed them up with vices or virtues, folly or genius,
without controlling by logic or criticism the hazardous decisions to
which our precipitation had carried us. Thus we feel a deep satisfaction
and a sort of internal peace, on leaving so many doctrines of ephemeral
bloom in our books or reviews, to follow the steady gait of a guide so
clear-sighted, reflective, instructed, able to lead us aright. We
understand why the English accuse the French of being frivolous, and the
Germans of being chimerical. Macaulay brings to the moral sciences that
spirit of circumspection, that desire for certainty, and that instinct
of truth, which make up the practical mind, and which from the time of
Bacon have constituted the scientific merit and power of his nation. If
art and beauty lose by this, truth and certainty are gained; and no one,
for instance, would blame our author for inserting the following
demonstration in the life of Addison:
"He (Pope) asked Addison's advice. Addison said that the poem as it
stood was a delicious little thing, and entreated Pope not to run the
risk of marring what was so excellent in trying to mend it. Pope
afterwards declared that this insidious counsel first opened his eyes to
the baseness of him who gave it.
"Now there can be no doubt that Pope's plan was most ingenious, and that
he afterwards executed it with great skill and success. But does it
necessarily follow that Addison's advice was bad? And if Addison's
advice was bad, does it necessarily follow that it was given from bad
motives? If a friend were to ask us whether we would advise him to risk
his all in a lottery, of which the chances were ten to one against him,
we should do our best to dissuade him from running such a risk. Even if
he were so lucky as to get the thirty thousand pound prize, we should
not admit that we had counselled him ill; and we should certainly think
it the height of injustice in him to accuse us of having been actuated
by malice. We think Addison's advice good advice. It rested on a sound
principle, the result of long and wide experience. The general rule
undoubtedly is that when a successful work of the imagination has been
produced, it should not be recast. We cannot, at this moment, call to
mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with
happy effect, except the instance of the 'Rape of the Lock.' Tasso
recast his 'Jerusalem,' Akenside recast his 'Pleasures of the
Imagination' and his 'Epistle to Curio.' Pope himself, emboldened no
doubt by the success with which he had expanded and remodelled the 'Rape
of the Lock,' made the same experiment on the 'Dunciad.' All these
attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope would, once in his life,
be able to do what he could not himself do twice, and what nobody else
has ever done?
"Addison's advice was good. But had it been bad, why should we pronounce
it dishonest? Scott tells us that one of his best friends predicted the
failure of Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a
subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the
'History of Charles the Fifth.' Nay, Pope himself was one of those who
prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, and advised
Addison to print it without risking a representation. But Scott, Goethe,
Robertson, Addison, had the good sense and generosity to give their
advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of the
same kind with theirs."[305]
What does the reader think of this dilemma, and this double series of
inductions? The demonstrations would not be more studied or rigorous, if
a physical law were in question.
This demonstrative talent was increased by his talent for development.
Macaulay enlightens inattentive minds, as well as he convinces opposing
minds; he manifests, as well as he persuades, and spreads as much
evidence over obscure questions as certitude over doubtful points. It is
impossible not to understand him; he approaches the subject under every
aspect, he turns it over on every side; it seems as though he addressed
himself to every spectator, and studied to make himself understood by
every individual; he calculates the scope of every mind, and seeks for
each a fit mode of exposition; he takes us all by the hand, and leads us
alternately to the end which he has marked out beforehand. He sets out
from the simplest facts, he descends to our level, he brings himself
even with our mind; he spares us the pain of the slightest effort; then
he leads us on, and smoothes the road throughout; we rise gradually,
without perceiving the slope, and at the end we find ourselves at the
top, after having walked as easily as on the plain. When a subject is
obscure, he is not content with a first explanation; he gives a second,
then a third: he sheds light in abundance from all sides, he searches
for it in all regions of history; and the wonderful thing is, that he is
never prolix. In reading him we find ourselves in our proper sphere; we
feel as though we could understand; we are annoyed to have taken
twilight so long for day; we rejoice to see this abounding light rising
and leaping forth in torrents; the exact style, the antithesis of ideas,
the harmonious construction, the artfully balanced paragraphs, the
vigorous summaries, the regular sequence of thoughts, the frequent
comparisons, the fine arrangement of the whole--not an idea or phrase of
his writings in which the talent and the desire to explain, the
characteristic of an orator, does not shine forth. Macaulay was a member
of Parliament, and spoke so well, we are told, that he was listened to
for the mere pleasure of listening. The habit of public speaking is,
perhaps, the cause of this incomparable lucidity. To convince a great
assembly, we must address all the members; to rivet the attention of
absentminded and weary men, we must save them from all fatigue; they
must take in too much in order to take in enough. Public speaking
vulgarizes ideas; it drags truth from the height at which it dwells,
with some thinkers, to bring it amongst the crowd: it reduces it to the
level of ordinary minds, who, without this intervention, would only have
seen it from afar, and high above them. Thus, when great orators consent
to write, they are the most powerful of writers; they make philosophy
popular; they lift all minds a stage higher, and seem to enlarge human
intelligence. In the hands of Cicero, the dogmas of the Stoics and the
dialectics of the Academicians lose their prickles. The subtle Greek
arguments become united and easy; the hard problems of providence,
immortality, highest good, become public property. Senators, men of
business, lawyers, lovers of formulas and procedure, the massive and
narrow intelligence of publicists, comprehend the deductions of
Chrysippus; and the book "De Officiis" has made the morality of
Panætius popular. In our days, M. Thiers, in his two great histories,
has placed within reach of everybody the most involved questions of
strategy and finance; if he would write a course of political economy
for street-porters, I am sure he would be understood; and pupils of the
lower classes at school have been able to read M. Guizot's "History of
Civilization."
When, with the faculty for proof and explanation, a man feels the desire
of proving, he arrives at vehemence. These serried and multiplied
arguments which all tend to a single aim, these reiterated logical
points, returning every instant, one upon the other, to shake the
opponent, give heat and passion to the style. Rarely was eloquence more
captivating than Macaulay's. He has the oratorical afflatus; all his
phrases have a tone; we feel that he would govern minds, that he is
irritated by resistance, that he fights as he discusses. In his books
the discussion always seizes and carries away the reader; it advances
evenly, with accumulating force, straightforward, like those great
American rivers, impetuous as a torrent and wide as a sea. This
abundance of thought and style, this multitude of explanations, ideas,
and facts, this vast aggregate of historical knowledge goes rolling on,
urged forward by internal passion, sweeping away objections in its
course, and adding to the dash of eloquence the irresistible force of
its mass and weight. We might say that the history of James II. is a
discourse in two volumes, spoken without stopping, and with
never-failing voice. We see the oppression and discontent begin,
increase, widen, the partisans of James abandoning him one by one, the
idea of revolution arise in all hearts, confirmed, fixed, the
preparations made, the event approaching, growing imminent, then
suddenly falling on the blind and unjust monarch, and sweeping away his
throne and dynasty, with the violence of a foreseen and fatal tempest.
True eloquence is that which thus perfects argument by emotion, which
reproduces the unity of events by the unity of passion, which repeats
the motion and the chain of facts by the motion and the chain of ideas.
It is a genuine imitation of nature; more complete than pure analysis;
it reanimates beings; its dash and vehemence form part of science and of
truth. Of whatever subject Macaulay treats, political economy, morality,
philosophy, literature, history, he is impassioned for his subject. The
current which bears away events, excites in him, as soon as he sees it,
a current which bears forward his thought. He does not set forth his
opinion; he pleads it. He has that energetic, sustained, and vibrating
tone which bows down opposition and conquers belief. His thought is an
active force; it is imposed on the hearer; it attacks him with such
superiority, falls upon him with such a train of proofs, such a manifest
and legitimate authority, such a powerful impulse, that we never think
of resisting it; and it masters the heart by its vehemence, whilst at
the same time it masters the reason by its evidence.
All these gifts are common to orators; they are found in different
proportions and degrees, in men like Cicero and Livy, Bourdaloue and
Bossuet, Fox and Burke. These fine and solid minds form a natural
family, and all have for their chief feature the habit and talent of
passing from particular to general ideas, orderly and successively, as
we climb a ladder by setting our feet one after the other on every
round. The inconvenience of this art is the use of commonplace. They who
practise it do not depict objects with precision; they fall easily into
vague rhetoric. They hold in their hands ready-made developments, a sort
of portable scales, equally applicable on both sides of the same and
every question. They continue willingly in a middle region, amongst the
tirades and arguments of the special pleader, with an indifferent
knowledge of the human heart, and a fair number of amplifications on
that which is useful and just. In France and at Rome, amongst the Latin
races, especially in the seventeenth century, these men love to hover
above the earth, amidst grand words or general considerations, in the
style of the drawing-room and the academy. They do not descend to minor
facts, convincing details, circumstantial examples of every-day life.
They are more inclined to plead than to prove. In this Macaulay is
distinguished from them. His principle is, that a special fact has more
hold on the mind than a general reflection. He knows that, to give men a
clear and vivid idea, they must be brought back to their personal
experience. He remarks[306] that, in order to make them realize a storm,
the only method is to recall to them some storm which they have
themselves seen and heard, with which their memory is still charged, and
which still re-echoes through all their senses. He practises, in his
style, the philosophy of Bacon and Locke. With him, as well as with
them, the origin of every idea is a sensation. Every complicated
argument, every entire conception, has certain particular facts for its
only support. It is so for every structure of ideas, as well as for a
scientific theory. Beneath long calculations, algebraical formulas,
subtle deductions, written volumes which contain the combinations and
elaborations of learned minds, there are two or three sensible
experiences, two or three little facts on which we may lay our finger, a
turn of the wheel in a machine, a scalpel-cut in a living body, an
unlooked-for color in a liquid. These are decisive specimens. The whole
substance of theory, the whole force of proof, is contained in this.
Truth is here, as a nut in its shell: painful and ingenious discussion
adds nothing thereto; it only extracts the nut. Thus, if we would
rightly prove, we must before everything present these specimens, insist
upon them, make them visible and tangible to the reader, as far as may
be done in words. This is difficult, for words are not things. The only
resource of the writer is to employ words which bring things before the
eyes. For this he must appeal to the reader's personal observation, set
out from his experience, compare the unknown objects presented to him
with the known objects which he sees every day: place past events beside
contemporary events. Macaulay always has before his mind English
imaginations, full of English images: I mean full of the detailed and
present recollections of a London street, a dram-shop, a wretched alley,
an afternoon in Hyde Park, a moist green landscape, a white ivy-covered
country-house, a clergyman in a white tie, a sailor in a sou'-wester. He
has recourse to such recollections; he makes them still more precise by
descriptions and statistics; he notes colors and qualities; he has a
passion for exactness; his descriptions are worthy both of a painter and
a topographer; he writes like a man who sees a physical and sensible
object, and who at the same time classifies and weighs it. We will see
him carry his figures even to moral or literary worth, assign to an
action, a virtue, a book, a talent, its compartment and its step in the
scale, with such clearness and relief, that we could easily imagine
ourselves in a classified museum, not of stuffed skins, but of feeling,
suffering, living animals.
Consider, for instance, these phrases, by which he tries to render
visible to an English public, events in India:
"During that interval the business of a servant of the Company was
simply to wring out of the natives a hundred or two hundred thousand
pounds as speedily as possible, that he might return home before his
constitution had suffered from the heat, to marry a peer's daughter, to
buy rotten boroughs in Cornwall, and to give balls in St. James's
Square.[307]... There was still a nabob of Bengal, who stood to the
English rulers of his country in the same relation in which Augustulus
stood to Odoacer, or the last Merovingians to Charles Martel and Pepin.
He lived at Moorshedabad, surrounded by princely magnificence. He was
approached with outward marks of reverence, and his name was used in
public instruments. But in the government of the country he had less
real share than the youngest writer or cadet in the Company's
service."[308]
Of Nuncomar, the native servant of the Company, he writes:
"Of his moral character it is difficult to give a notion to those who
are acquainted with human nature only as it appears in our island. What
the Italian is to the Englishman, what the Hindoo is to the Italian,
what the Bengalee is to other Hindoos, that was Nuncomar to other
Bengalees. The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble, even to
effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are
sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages
he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds.
Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution
and his situation are equally unfavorable. His mind bears a singular
analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness, for purposes of
manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of
sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt. All those
arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this
subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of
the dark ages. What the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the
tiger, what the sting is to the bee, what beauty, according to the old
Greek song, is to woman, deceit is to the Bengalee. Large promises,
smooth excuses, elaborate tissues of circumstantial falsehood,
chicanery, perjury, forgery, are the weapons, offensive and defensive,
of the people of the Lower Ganges. All those millions do not furnish one
sepoy to the armies of the Company. But as usurers, as money-changers,
as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a
comparison with them."[309]
It was such men and such affairs, which were to provide Burke with the
amplest and most brilliant subject-matter for his eloquence; and when
Macaulay described the distinctive talent of the great orator, he
described his own:
"He (Burke) had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man
is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the
unreal. India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most
Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real
people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the
cocoa-tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the
Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble; the thatched roof
of the peasant's hut; the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaum
prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols,
the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden, with the pitcher
on her head, descending the steps to the river-side, the black faces,
the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing
robes, the spears and the silver maces, the elephants with their
canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close
litter of the noble lady, all those things were to him as the objects
amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects which lay on
the road between Beaconsfield and St. James's Street. All India was
present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where suitors laid gold
and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns, to the wild moor where the gipsy
camp was pitched, from the bazaar, humming like a bee-hive with the
crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier
shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyenas. He had just as
lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon's
riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of the execution of Dr. Dodd.
Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the
streets of London."[310]
Section VI.--His Rudeness and Humor
Other forms of his talent are more peculiarly English. Macaulay has a
rough touch; when he strikes, he knocks down. Béranger sings:
"_Chez nous, point.
Point de ces coups de poing
Qui font tant d'honneur à l'Angleterre._"[311]
And a French reader would be astonished if he heard a great historian
treat an illustrious poet in this style:
"But in all those works in which Mr. Southey has completely abandoned
narration, and has undertaken to argue moral and political questions,
his failure has been complete and ignominious. On such occasions his
writings are rescued from utter contempt and derision solely by the
beauty and purity of the English. We find, we confess, so great a charm
in Mr. Southey's style that, even when he writes nonsense, we generally
read it with pleasure, except indeed when he tries to be droll. A more
insufferable jester never existed. He very often attempts to be
humorous, and yet we do not remember a single occasion on which he has
succeeded, further than to be quaintly and flippantly dull. In one of
his works he tells us that Bishop Spratt was very properly so-called,
inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in the book now before us he
cannot quote Francis Bugg, the renegade Quaker, without a remark on his
unsavoury name. A wise man might talk folly like this by his own
fireside; but that any human being, after having made such a joke should
write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer, and
correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is enough to
make us ashamed of our species."[312]
We may imagine that Macaulay does not treat the dead better than the
living. Thus he speaks of Archbishop Laud:
"The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on
him would have been to set him at liberty and send him to Oxford. There
he might have staid, tortured by his own diabolical temper, hungering
for Puritans to pillory and mangle, plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of
somebody else to plague, with his peevishness and absurdity, performing
grimaces and antics in the cathedral, continuing that incomparable
diary, which we never see without forgetting the vices of his heart in
the imbecility of his intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the
drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of the
salt, and listening for the note of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy
was the only vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a
ridiculous old bigot."[313]
While he jests he remains grave, as do almost all the writers of his
country. Humor consists in saying extremely comical things in a solemn
tone, and in preserving a lofty style and ample phraseology, at the very
moment when the author is making all his hearers laugh. Such is the
beginning of an article on a new historian of Burleigh:
"The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that
which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag,
and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as
buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every
component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an
ordinary preface; the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary
book: and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We
cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies
before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand
closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches
cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoir-du-pois. Such a
book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by
Hilpah and Shalum. But unhappily the life of man is now threescore years
and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to
demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence."[314]
This comparison, borrowed from Swift, is a mockery in Swift's taste.
Mathematics become in English hands an excellent means of raillery; and
we remember how the Dean, comparing Roman and English generosity by
numbers, overwhelmed Marlborough by a sum in addition. Humor employs
against the people it attacks, positive facts, commercial arguments, odd
contrasts drawn from ordinary life. This surprises and perplexes the
reader, without warning; he falls abruptly into some familiar and
grotesque detail; the shock is violent; he bursts out laughing without
being much amused; the trigger is pulled so suddenly and so roughly that
it is like a knockdown blow. For instance, Macaulay is refuting those
who would not print the indecent classical authors:
"We find it difficult to believe that, in a world so full of temptations
as this, any gentleman whose life would have been virtuous if he had not
read Aristophanes and Juvenal will be made vicious by reading them. A
man who, exposed to all the influences of such a state of society as
that in which we live, is yet afraid of exposing himself to the
influence of a few Greek or Latin verses, acts, we think, much like the
felon who begged the sheriffs to let him have an umbrella held over his
head from the door of Newgate to the gallows, because it was a drizzling
morning, and he was apt to take cold."[315]
Irony, sarcasm, the bitterest kinds of pleasantry, are the rule with
Englishmen. They tear when they scratch. To be convinced of this, we
should compare French scandal, as Molière represents it in the
"Misanthrope," with English scandal as Sheridan represents it, imitating
Molière and the "Misanthrope." Célimène pricks, but does not wound;
Lady Sneerwell's friends wound, and leave bloody marks on all the
reputations which they handle. The raillery, which I am about to give,
is one of Macaulay's tenderest:
"They (the ministers) therefore gave the command to Lord Galway, an
experienced veteran, a man who was in war what Molière's doctors were
in medicine, who thought it much more honorable to fail according to
rule, than to succeed by innovation, and who would have been very much
ashamed of himself if he had taken Monjuich by means so strange as those
which Peterborough employed. This great commander conducted the campaign
of 1707 in the most scientific manner. On the plain of Almanza he
encountered the army of the Bourbons. He drew up his troops according to
the methods prescribed by the best writers, and in a few hours lost
eighteen thousand men, a hundred and twenty standards, all his baggage
and all his artillery."[316]
These incivilities are all the stronger, because the ordinary tone is
noble and serious.
Hitherto we have seen only the reasoner, the scholar, the orator, and
the wit: there is still in Macaulay a poet; and if we had not read his
"Lays of Ancient Rome," it would suffice to read a few of his periods,
in which the imagination, long held in check by the severity of the
proof, breaks out suddenly in splendid metaphors, and expands into
magnificent comparisons, worthy by their amplitude of being introduced
into an epic:
"Ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some mysterious law of
her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a
foul and poisonous snake. Those who injured her during the period of her
disguise were forever excluded from participation in the blessings which
she bestowed. But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, pitied
and protected her, she afterwards revealed herself in the beautiful and
celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their steps,
granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them
happy in love and victorious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times
she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she
stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And
happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and
frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her
beauty and her glory!"[317]
These noble words come from the heart; the fount is full, and though it
flows, it never becomes dry. As soon as the writer speaks of a cause
which he loves, as soon as he sees Liberty rise before him, with
Humanity and Justice, Poetry bursts forth spontaneously from his soul
and sets her crown on the brows of her noble sisters:
"The Reformation is an event long past. That volcano has spent its rage.
The wide waste produced by its outbreak is forgotten. The landmarks
which were swept away have been replaced. The ruined edifices have been
repaired. The lava has covered with a rich incrustation the fields which
it once devastated, and, after having turned a beautiful and fruitful
garden into a desert, has again turned the desert into a still more
beautiful and fruitful garden. The second great eruption is not yet
over. The marks of its ravages are still all around us. The ashes are
still hot beneath our feet. In some directions, the deluge of fire still
continues to spread. Yet experience surely entitles us to believe that
this explosion, like that which preceded it, will fertilize the soil
which it has devastated. Already, in those parts which have suffered
most severely, rich cultivation and secure dwellings have begun to
appear amidst the waste. The more we read of the history of past ages,
the more we observe the signs of our own times, the more do we feel our
hearts filled and swelled up by a good hope for the future destinies of
the human race."[318]
I ought, perhaps, in concluding this analysis, to point out the
imperfections caused by these high qualities; how ease, charm, a vein of
amiability, variety, simplicity, playfulness, are wanting in this manly
eloquence, this solid reasoning, and this glowing dialectic; why the art
of writing and classical purity are not always found in this partisan,
fighting from his platform; in short, why an Englishman is not a
Frenchman or an Athenian. I prefer to transcribe another passage, the
solemnity and magnificence of which will give some idea of the grave and
rich ornament, which Macaulay throws over his narrative, a sort of
potent vegetation, flowers of brilliant purple, like those which are
spread over every page of "Paradise Lost" and "Childe Harold." Warren
Hastings had returned from India, and had just been placed on his trial:
[Illustration: Page from the Prayer-book of Juana of Castile
Fac-simile example of Book Illumination in the Sixteenth Century]
"On the thirteenth of February, 1788, the sittings of the Court
commenced. There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to grown-up
children, than that which was then exhibited at Westminster; but,
perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well calculated to strike a
highly cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative mind. All the various
kinds of interests which belong to the near and to the distant, to the
present and to the past, were collected on one spot, and in one hour.
All the talents and all the accomplishments which are developed by
liberty and civilization were now displayed, with every advantage that
could be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in
the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled
centuries, to the days when the foundations of our constitution were
laid; or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations
living under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing
strange characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was
to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the
Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the
lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the princely
house of Oude.
"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great Hall of William
Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the
inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the just
sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall where the
eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious
party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where Charles had
confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has
half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The
avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by
cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshalled by the
heralds under Garter King at-arms. The judges in their vestments of
state attended to give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and
seventy lords, three-fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then
was, walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the
tribunal. The junior baron present led the way, George Eliot Lord
Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence of Gibraltar
against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The long procession
was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of the realm, by the
great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all
came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble
bearing. The gray old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries
were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the
emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of
a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female
loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and
of every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young
daughters of the house of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great
Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no
other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of
her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the
imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought
of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and
when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by
side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The
spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us
the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet
smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his
labors in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast
treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too
often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still
precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of
her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith.
There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint
Cecilia whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has
rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant
society which quoted, criticised, and exchanged repartees, under the
rich peacock-hangings of Mrs. Montague. And there the ladies whose lips,
more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster
election against palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of
Devonshire."[319]
This evocation of the national history, glory, and constitution forms a
picture of a unique kind. The species of patriotism and poetry which it
reveals is an abstract of Macaulay's talent; and the talent, like the
picture, is thoroughly English.
Section VII.--Estimate of Macaulay's Work
Thus prepared, he entered upon the history of England; and he chose
therefrom the period best suited to his political opinions, his style,
his passion, his knowledge, the national taste, the sympathy of Europe.
He related the establishment of the English constitution, and
concentrated all the rest of history about this unique event, "the
finest in the world," to the mind of an Englishman and a politician. He
brought to this work a new method of great beauty, extreme power; its
success has been extraordinary. When the second volume appeared, 30,000
copies were ordered beforehand. Let us try to describe this history, to
connect it with that method, and that method to that order of mind.
The history is universal and not broken. It comprehends events of every
kind, and treats of them simultaneously. Some have related the history
of races, others of classes, others of governments, others of
sentiments, ideas, and manner; Macaulay has related all.
"I should very imperfectly execute the task which I have undertaken if I
were merely to treat of battles and sieges, of the rise and fall of
administrations, of intrigues in the palace, and of debates in the
parliament. It will be my endeavor to relate the history of the people
as well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of
useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious sects and
the changes of literary taste, to portray the manners of successive
generations, and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which
have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements. I
shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity
of history, if I can succeed in placing before the English of the
nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors."[320]
He kept his word. He has omitted nothing, and passed nothing by. His
portraits are mingled with his narrative. We find those of Danby,
Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Howe, during the account of a session, between
two parliamentary divisions. Short, curious anecdotes, domestic details,
the description of furniture, intersect without disjointing, the record
of a war. Quitting the narrative of important business, we gladly look
upon the Dutch tastes of William, the Chinese museum, the grottoes, the
mazes, aviaries, ponds, geometrical garden-beds, with which he defaced
Hampton Court. A political dissertation precedes or follows the relation
of a battle; at other times the author is a tourist or a psychologist
before becoming a politician or a tactician. He describes the Highlands
of Scotland, semi-papistical and semi-pagan, the seers wrapped in bulls'
hides to await the moment of inspiration, Christians making libations of
milk or beer to the demons of the place; pregnant women, girls of
eighteen, working a wretched patch of oats, whilst their husbands or
fathers, athletic men, basked in the sun; robbery and barbarities looked
upon as honorable deeds; men stabbed from behind or burnt alive;
repulsive food, coarse oats, and cakes made of the blood of a live cow,
offered to guests as a mark of favor and politeness; infected hovels
where men lay on the bare ground, and where they woke up half smothered,
half blinded by the smoke, and half mad with the itch. The next instant
he stops to mark a change in the public taste, the horror then
experienced on account of these brigands' retreats, this country of wild
rocks and barren moors; the admiration now felt for this land of heroic
warriors, this country of grand mountains, seething waterfalls,
picturesque defiles. He finds in the progress of physical welfare the
causes of this moral revolution, and concludes that, if we praise
mountains and an uncivilized life, it is because we are satiated with
security. He is successively an economist, a literary man, a publicist,
an artist, a historian, a biographer, a story-teller, even a
philosopher; by this diversity of parts he imitates the diversity of
human life, and presents to the eyes, heart, mind, all the faculties of
man, the complete history of the civilization of his country.
Others, like Hume, have tried, or are trying to do it. They set forth
now religious matters, a little further political events, then literary
details, finally general considerations on the change of society and
government, believing that a collection of histories is history, and
that parts joined endwise are a body. Macaulay did not believe it and he
did well. Though English, he had the spirit of harmony. So many
accumulated events form with him not a total, but a whole. Explanations,
accounts, dissertations, anecdotes, illustrations, comparisons,
allusions to modern events, everything is connected in his book. It is
because everything is connected in his mind. He had a most lively
consciousness of causes; and causes unite facts. By them scattered
events are assembled into a single event; they unite them because they
produce them, and the historian, who seeks them all out, cannot fail to
perceive or to feel the unity which is their effect. Read, for instance,
the voyage of James II to Ireland: no picture is more curious. Is it,
however, nothing more than a curious picture? When the king arrived at
Cork there were no horses to be found. The country is a desert. No more
industry, cultivation, civilization, since the English and Protestant
colonists were driven out, robbed and slain. James was received between
two hedges of half-naked Rapparees, armed with skeans, stakes, and
half-pikes; under his horse's feet they spread by way of carpet the
rough frieze mantles, such as the brigands and shepherds wore. He was
offered garlands of cabbage stalks for crowns of laurel. In a large
district he only found two carts. The palace of the lord-lieutenant in
Dublin was so ill-built that the rain drenched the rooms. The king left
for Ulster; the French officers thought they were travelling "through
the deserts of Arabia." The Count d'Avaux wrote to the French court that
to get one truss of hay they had to send five or six miles. At
Charlemont, with great difficulty, as a matter of favor, they obtained a
bag of oatmeal for the French legation. The superior officers lay in
dens which they would have thought too foul for their dogs. The Irish
soldiers were half-savage marauders, who could only shout, cut throats,
and disband. Ill fed on potatoes and sour milk, they cast themselves
like starved men on the great flocks belonging to the Protestants. They
greedily tore the flesh of oxen and sheep, and swallowed it half raw and
half rotten. For lack of kettles, they cooked it in the skin. When Lent
began, the plunderers generally ceased to devour, but continued to
destroy. A peasant would kill a cow merely in order to get a pair of
brogues. At times a band slaughtered fifty or sixty beasts, took the
skins, and left the bodies to poison the air. The French ambassador
reckoned that in six weeks there had been slain 50,000 horned cattle,
which were rotting on the ground. They counted the number of the sheep
and lambs slain at 400,000. Cannot the result of the rebellion be seen
before-hand? What could be expected of these gluttonous serfs, so stupid
and savage? What could be drawn from a devastated land, peopled with
robbers? To what kind of discipline could these marauders and butchers
be subjected? What resistance will they make on the Boyne, when they see
William's old regiments, the furious squadrons of French refugees, the
enraged and insulted Protestants of Londonderry and Enniskillen, leap
into the river and run with uplifted swords against their muskets? They
will flee, the king at their head; and the minute anecdotes scattered
amidst the account of receptions, voyages, and ceremonies, will have
announced the victory of the Protestants. The history of manners is thus
seen to be involved in the history of events; the one is the cause of
the other, and the description explains the narrative.
It is not enough to see some causes; we must see a great many of them.
Every event has a multitude. Is it enough for me, if I wish to
understand the action of Marlborough or of James, to be reminded of a
disposition or a quality which explains it? No; for, since it has for a
cause a whole situation and a whole character, I must see at one glance
and in abstract the whole character and situation which produced it.
Genius concentrates. It is measured by the number of recollections and
ideas which it assembles in one point. That which Macaulay has assembled
is enormous. I know no historian who has a surer, better furnished,
better regulated memory. When he is relating the actions of a man or a
party, he sees in an instant all the events of his history, and all
the*maxims of his conduct; he has all the details present; he remembers
them every moment, and a great many of them. He has forgotten nothing;
he runs through them as easily, as completely, as surely, as on the day
when he enumerated or wrote them. No one has so well taught or known
history. He is as much steeped in it as his personages. The ardent Whig
or Tory, experienced, trained to business, who rose and shook the House,
had not more numerous, better arranged, more precise arguments. He did
not better know the strength and weakness of his cause; he was not more
familiar with the intrigues, rancors, variation of parties, the chances
of the strife, individual and public interests. The great novelists
penetrate the soul of their characters, assume their feelings, ideas,
language; it seems as if Balzac had been a commercial traveller, a
female doorkeeper, a courtesan, an old maid, a poet, and that he had
spent his life in being each of these personages: his existence is
multiplied, and his name is legion. With a different talent, Macaulay
has the same power: an incomparable advocate, he pleads an infinite
number of causes; and he is master of each cause, as fully as his
client. He has answers for all objections, explanations for all
obscurities, reasons for all tribunals. He is ready at every moment, and
on all parts of his case. It seems as if he had been Whig, Tory,
Puritan, Member of the Privy Council, Ambassador. He is not a poet like
Michelet; he is not a philosopher like Guizot; but he possesses so well
all the oratorical powers, he accumulates and arranges so many facts, he
holds them so closely in his hand, he manages them with so much ease and
vigor, that he succeeds in recomposing the whole and harmonious woof of
history, not losing or separating one thread. The poet reanimates the
dead; the philosopher formulates creative laws; the orator knows,
expounds, and pleads causes. The poet resuscitates souls, the
philosopher composes a system, the orator redisposes chains of
arguments; but all three march towards the same end by different routes,
and the orator, as well as his rivals, and by other means than his
rivals, reproduces in his work the unity and complexity of life.
A second feature of this history is clearness. It is popular; no one
explains better, or so much, as Macaulay. It seems as if he were making
a wager with his reader, and said to him: Be as absent in mind, as
stupid, as ignorant as you please; in vain you will be absent in mind,
you shall listen to me; in vain you will be stupid, you shall
understand; in vain you will be ignorant, you shall learn. I will repeat
the same idea in so many different forms, I will make it sensible by
such familiar and precise examples, I will announce it so clearly at the
beginning, I will resumé it so carefully at the end, I will mark the
divisions so well, follow the order of ideas so exactly, I will display
so great a desire to enlighten and convince you, that you cannot help
being enlightened and convinced. He certainly thought thus when he was
preparing the following passage on the law which, for the first time,
granted to Dissenters the liberty of exercising their worship:
"Of all the Acts that have ever been passed by Parliament, the
Toleration Act is perhaps that which most strikingly illustrates the
peculiar vices and the peculiar excellences of English legislation. The
science of Politics bears in one respect a close analogy to the science
of Mechanics. The mathematician can easily demonstrate that a certain
power, applied by means of a certain lever or of a certain system of
pulleys, will suffice to raise a certain weight. But his demonstration
proceeds on the supposition that the machinery is such as no load will
bend or break. If the engineer, who has to lift a great mass of real
granite by the instrumentality of real timber and real hemp, should
absolutely rely on the propositions which he finds in treatises on
Dynamics, and should make no allowance for the imperfection of his
materials, his whole apparatus of beams, wheels, and ropes would soon
come down in ruin, and, with all his geometrical skill, he would be
found a far inferior builder to those painted barbarians who, though
they never heard of the parallelogram of forces, managed to pile up
Stonehenge. What the engineer is to the mathematician, the active
statesman is to the contemplative statesman. It is indeed most important
that legislators and administrators should be versed in the philosophy
of government, as it is most important that the architect who has to fix
an obelisk on its pedestal, or to hang a tubular bridge over an estuary,
should be versed in the philosophy of equilibrium and motion. But, as he
who has actually to build must bear in mind many things never noticed by
D'Alembert and Euler, so must he who has actually to govern be
perpetually guided by considerations to which no allusion can be found
in the writings of Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. The perfect law-giver
is a just temper between the mere man of theory, who can see nothing but
general principles, and the mere man of business, who can see nothing
but particular circumstances. Of law-givers, in whom the speculative
element has prevailed to the exclusion of the practical, the world has
during the last eighty years been singularly fruitful. To their wisdom
Europe and America have owed scores of abortive constitutions, scores of
constitutions which have lived just long enough to make a miserable
noise, and have then gone off in convulsions. But in English legislation
the practical element has always predominated, and not seldom unduly
predominated, over the speculative. To think nothing of symmetry and
much of convenience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it is an
anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance is felt; never to
innovate except so far as to get rid of the grievance; never to lay down
any proposition of wider extent than the particular case for which it is
necessary to provide; these are the rules which have, from the age of
John to the age of Victoria, generally guided the deliberations of our
two hundred and fifty Parliaments."[321]
Is the idea still obscure or doubtful? Does it still need proofs,
illustrations? Do we wish for anything more? You answer, No; Macaulay
answers, Yes. After the general explanation comes the particular; after
the theory, the application; after the theoretical demonstration, the
practical. We would fain stop; but he proceeds:
"The Toleration Act approaches very near to the idea of a great English
law. To a jurist, versed in the theory of legislation, but not
intimately acquainted with the temper of the sects and parties into
which the nation was divided at the time of the Revolution, that Act
would seem to be a mere chaos of absurdities and contradictions. It will
not bear to be tried by sound general principles. Nay, it will not bear
to be tried by any principle, sound or unsound. The sound principle
undoubtedly is, that mere theological error ought not to be punished by
the civil magistrate. This principle the Toleration Act not only does
not recognize, but positively disclaims. Not a single one of the cruel
laws enacted against non-conformists by the Tudors or the Stuarts is
repealed. Persecution continues to be the general rule. Toleration is
the exception. Nor is this all. The freedom which is given to conscience
is given in the most capricious manner. A Quaker, by making a
declaration of faith in general terms, obtains the full benefit of the
Act without signing one of the thirty-nine Articles. An Independent
minister, who is perfectly willing to make the declaration required from
the Quaker, but who has doubts about six or seven of the Articles,
remains still subject to the penal laws. Howe is liable to punishment if
he preaches before he has solemnly declared his assent to the Anglican
doctrine touching the Eucharist. Penn, who altogether rejects the
Eucharist, is at perfect liberty to preach without making any
declaration whatever on the subject.
"These are some of the obvious faults which must strike every person who
examines the Toleration Act by that standard of just reason which is the
same in all countries and in all ages. But these very faults may perhaps
appear to be merits, when we take into consideration the passions and
prejudices of those for whom the Toleration Act was framed. This law,
abounding with contradictions which every smatterer in political
philosophy can detect, did what a law framed by the utmost skill of the
greatest masters of political philosophy might have failed to do. That
the provisions which have been recapitulated are cumbrous, puerile,
inconsistent with each other, inconsistent with the true theory of
religious liberty, must be acknowledged. All that can be said in their
defence is this: that they removed a vast mass of evil, without shocking
a vast mass of prejudice; that they put an end, at once and forever,
without one division in either House of Parliament, without one riot in
the streets, with scarcely one audible murmur even from the classes most
deeply tainted with bigotry, to a persecution which had raged during
four generations, which had broken innumerable hearts, which had made
innumerable firesides desolate, which had filled the prisons with men of
whom the world was not worthy, which had driven thousands of those
honest, diligent and god-fearing yeomen and artisans, who are the true
strength of a nation, to seek a refuge beyond the ocean among the
wigwams of red Indians and the lairs of panthers. Such a defence,
however weak it may appear to some shallow speculators, will probably be
thought complete by statesmen."[322]
What I find complete in this, is the art of developing. This antithesis
of ideas, sustained by the antithesis of words, the symmetrical periods,
the expressions designedly repeated to attract attention, the exhaustion
of proof, set before our eyes the special-pleader's and oratorical
talent, which we just before encountered in the art of pleading all
causes, of employing an infinite number of methods, of mastering them
all and always, during every incident of the lawsuit. The final
manifestation of a mind of this sort is the faults into which its talent
draws it. By dint of development, he protracts. More than once his
explications are commonplace. He proves what all allow. He makes clear
what is already clear. In one of his works there is a passage on the
necessity of reactions which reads like the verbosity of a clever
schoolboy. Other passages, excellent and novel, can only be read with
pleasure once. On the second reading they appear too true; we have seen
it all at a glance, and are wearied. I have omitted one-third of the
passage on the Act of Toleration, and acute minds will think that I
ought to have omitted another third.
The last feature, the most singular, the least English of this history,
is, that it is interesting. Macaulay wrote, in the "Edinburgh Review,"
several volumes of essays; and everyone knows that the first merit of a
reviewer or a journalist is to make himself readable. A thick volume
naturally bores us; it is not thick for nothing; its bulk demands at the
outset the attention of him who opens it. The solid binding, the table
of contents, the preface, the substantial chapters, drawn up like
soldiers in battle-array, all bid us take an arm-chair, put on a
dressing-gown, place our feet on the fender, and study; we owe no less
to the grave man who presents himself to us, armed with 600 pages of
text and three years of reflection. But a newspaper which we glance at
in a club, a review which we finger in a drawing-room in the evening,
before sitting down to dinner, must needs attract the eyes, overcome
absence of mind, conquer readers. Macaulay attained, through practice,
this gift of readableness, and he retains in his history the habits
which he acquired in periodicals. He employs every means of keeping up
attention, good or indifferent, worthy or unworthy of his great talent;
amongst others, allusion to actual circumstances. You may have heard the
saying of an editor, to whom Pierre Leroux offered an article on God,
"God! there is no actuality about it!" Macaulay profits by this remark.
He never forgets the actual. If he mentions a regiment, he points out in
a few lines the splendid deeds which it has done since its formation up
to our own day; thus the officers of this regiment, encamped in the
Crimea, stationed at Malta, or at Calcutta, are obliged to read his
history. He relates the reception of Schomberg in the House: who is
interested in Schomberg? Forthwith he adds that Wellington, a hundred
years later, was received, under like circumstances, with a ceremony
copied from the first: what Englishman is not interested in Wellington?
He relates the siege of Londonderry, he points out the spot which the
ancient bastions occupy in the present town, the field which was covered
by the Irish camp, the well at which the besiegers drank: what citizen
of Londonderry can help buying his book? Whatever town he comes upon, he
notes the changes which it has undergone, the new streets added, the
buildings repaired or constructed, the increase of commerce, the
introduction of new industries: hence all the aldermen and merchants are
constrained to subscribe to his work. Elsewhere we find an anecdote of
an actor and actress: as the superlative degree is interesting, he
begins by saying that William Mountford was the most agreeable comedian,
that Anne Bracegirdle was the most popular actress of the time. If he
introduces a statesman, he always announces him by some great word: he
was the most insinuating, or the most equitable, or the best informed,
or the most inveterately debauched, of all the politicians of the day.
But Macaulay's great qualities serve him as well in this matter as his
literary machinery: a little too manifest, a little too copious, a
little too coarse. The astonishing number of details, the medley of
psychological and moral dissertations, descriptions, relations,
opinions, pleadings, portraits, beyond all, good composition and the
continuous stream of eloquence, seize and retain the attention to the
end. We have hard work to finish a volume of Lingard or Robertson; we
should have hard work not to finish a volume of Macaulay.
Here is a detached narrative which shows very well, and in the abstract,
the means of interesting which he employs, and the great interest which
he excites. The subject is the Massacre of Glencoe. Macaulay begins by
describing the spot like a traveller who has seen it, and points it out
to the bands of tourists and dilettanti, historians and antiquarians,
who every year start from London:
"Mac Ian dwelt in the mouth of a ravine situated not far from the
southern shore of Loch Leven, an arm of the sea which deeply indents the
western coast of Scotland, and separates Argyleshire from
Inverness-shire. Near his house were two or three small hamlets
inhabited by his tribe. The whole population which he governed was not
supposed to exceed two hundred souls. In the neighbourhood of the little
cluster of villages was some copsewood and some pasture land: but a
little further up the defile no sign of population or of fruitfulness
was to be seen. In the Gaelic tongue, Glencoe signifies the Glen of
Weeping: and, in truth, that pass is the most dreary and melancholy of
all the Scottish passes, the very Valley of the Shadow of Death. Mists
and storms brood over it through the greater part of the finest summer;
and even on those rare days when the sun is bright, and when there is no
cloud in the sky, the impression made by the landscape is sad and awful.
The path lies along a stream which issues from the most sullen and
gloomy of mountain pools. Huge precipices of naked stone frown on both
sides. Even in July the streaks of snow may often be discerned in the
rifts near the summits. All down the sides of the crags heaps of ruin
mark the headlong paths of the torrents. Mile after mile the traveller
looks in vain for the smoke of one hut, or for one human form wrapped in
a plaid, and listens in vain for the bark of a shepherd's dog, or the
bleat of a lamb. Mile after mile the only sound that indicates life is
the faint cry of a bird of prey from some stormbeaten pinnacle of rock.
The progress of civilization, which has turned so many wastes into
fields yellow with harvests or gay with apple blossoms, has only made
Glencoe more desolate. All the science and industry of a peaceful age
can extract nothing valuable from that wilderness: but, in an age of
violence and rapine, the wilderness itself was valued on account of the
shelter which it afforded to the plunderer and his plunder."[323]
The description, though very beautiful, is written for effect. The final
antithesis explains it; the author has made it in order to show that the
Macdonalds were the greatest brigands of the country.
The Master of Stair, who represented William III in Scotland, relying on
the fact that Mac Ian had not taken the oath of allegiance on the
appointed day, determined to destroy the chief and his clan. He was not
urged by hereditary hate nor by private interest; he was a man of taste,
polished and amiable. He did this crime out of humanity, persuaded that
there was no other way of pacifying the Highlands. Thereupon Macaulay
inserts a dissertation of four pages, very well written, full of
interest and knowledge, whose diversity affords us rest, which leads us
over all kinds of historical examples, and moral lessons:
"We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country,
for their favorite schemes of political and social reform, what they
would not do to enrich or to avenge themselves. At a temptation directly
addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever
virtue we have takes the alarm. But virtue itself may contribute to the
fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some
general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on
a commonwealth, on mankind. He silences the remonstrances of conscience,
and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by
repeating to himself that his intentions are pure, that his objects are
noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good. By
degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the
excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal
twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe
that Dominic would, for the best archbishopric in Christendom, have
incited ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and
industrious population, that Edward Digby would, for a dukedom, have
blown a large assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would
have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from
philanthropy."[324]
Do we not recognize here the Englishman brought up on psychological and
moral essays and sermons, who involuntarily and every instant spreads
one over the paper? This species of literature is unknown in French
lecture-rooms and reviews; this is why it is unknown in French
histories. When we wish to enter English history, we have only to step
down from the pulpit and the newspaper.
I do not transcribe the sequel of the explanation, the examples of James
V, Sixtus V, and so many others, whom Macaulay cites to find precedents
for the Master of Stair. Then follows a very circumstantial and very
solid discussion, to prove that William III was not responsible for the
massacre. It is clear that Macaulay's object, here as elsewhere, is less
to draw a picture than to suggest a judgment. He desires that we should
have an opinion on the morality of the act, that we should attribute it
to its real authors, that each should bear exactly his own share, and no
more. A little further, when the question of the punishment of the crime
arises, and William, having severely chastised the executioners,
contents himself with recalling the Master of Stair, Macaulay writes a
dissertation of several pages to consider this injustice and to blame
the king. Here, as elsewhere, he is still an orator and a moralist;
nothing has more power to interest an English reader. Happily for us, he
at length becomes once more a narrator; the petty details which he then
selects fix the attention, and place the scene before our eyes:
"The sight of the red coats approaching caused some anxiety among the
population of the valley. John, the eldest son of the Chief, came,
accompanied by twenty clansmen, to meet the strangers, and asked what
this visit meant. Lieutenant Lindsay answered that the soldiers came as
friends, and wanted nothing but quarters. They were kindly received, and
were lodged under the thatched roofs of the little community. Glenlyon
and several of his men were taken into the house of a tacksman who was
named from the cluster of cabins over which he exercised authority,
Inverriggen. Lindsay was accommodated nearer to the abode of the old
chief. Auchintriater, one of the principal men of the clan, who governed
the small hamlet of Auchnaion, found room there for a party commanded by
a sergeant named Barbour. Provisions were liberally supplied. There was
no want of beef, which had probably fattened in distant pastures: nor
was any payment demanded: for in hospitality, as in thievery, the Gaelic
marauders rivalled the Bedouins. During twelve days the soldiers lived
familiarly with the people of the glen. Old Mac Ian, who had before felt
many misgivings as to the relation in which he stood to the government,
seems to have been pleased with the visit. The officers passed much of
their time with him and his family. The long evenings were cheerfully
spent by the peat fire, with the help of some packs of cards which had
found their way to that remote corner of the world, and of some French
brandy which was probably part of James's farewell gift to his Highland
supporters. Glenlyon appeared to be warmly attached to his niece and her
husband Alexander. Every day he came to their house to take his morning
draught. Meanwhile he observed with minute attention all the avenues by
which, when the signal for the slaughter should be given, the Macdonalds
might attempt to escape to the hills; and he reported the result of his
observations to Hamilton....
"The night was rough. Hamilton and his troops made slow progress, and
were long after their time. While they were contending with the wind and
snow, Glenlyon was supping and playing at cards with those whom he meant
to butcher before daybreak. He and Lieutenant Lindsay had engaged
themselves to dine with the old Chief on the morrow.
"Late in the evening a vague suspicion that some evil was intended
crossed the mind of the Chief's eldest son. The soldiers were evidently
in a restless state; and some of them uttered strange exclamations. Two
men, it is said, were overheard whispering: 'I do not like this job,'
one of them muttered; 'I should be glad to fight the Macdonalds. But to
kill men in their beds--We must do as we are bid,' answered another
voice. 'If there is anything wrong, our officers must answer for it.'
John Macdonald was so uneasy, that, soon after midnight, he went to
Glenlyon's quarters. Glenlyon and his men were all up, and seemed to be
getting their arms ready for action. John, much alarmed, asked what
these preparations meant. Glenlyon was profuse of friendly assurances.
'Some of Glengarry's people have been harrying the country. We are
getting ready to march against them. You are quite safe. Do you think
that, if you were in any danger, I should not have given a hint to your
brother Sandy and his wife?' John's suspicions were quieted. He returned
to his house, and lay down to rest."[325]
On the next day, at five in the morning, the old chieftain was
assassinated: his men shot in their beds or by the fireside. Women were
butchered; a boy twelve years old, who begged his life on his knees, was
slain; they who fled half-naked, women and children, died of cold and
hunger in the snow.
These precise details, these soldiers' conversations, this picture of
evenings by the fireside, give to history the animation and life of a
novel. And still the historian remains an orator: for he has chosen all
these facts to exhibit the perfidy of the assassins and the horrible
nature of the massacre; and he will make use of them later on, to
demand, with all the power and passion of logic, the punishment of the
criminals.
Section VIII.--Comparison of Macaulay with French Historians
Thus this History, whose qualities seem so little English, bears
throughout the mark of genuine English talent. Universal, connected, it
embraces all the facts in its vast, undivided, and unbroken woof.
Developed, abundant, it enlightens obscure facts, and opens up to the
most ignorant the most complicated questions. Interesting, varied, it
attracts and preserves the attention. It has life, clearness, unity,
qualities which appear to be wholly French. It seems as if the author
were a popularizer like Thiers, a philosopher like Guizot, an artist
like Thierry. The truth is, that he is an orator, and that after the
fashion of his country; but, as he possesses in the highest degree the
oratorical faculties, and possesses them with a national tendency and
instincts, he seems to supplement through them the faculties which he
has not. He is not genuinely philosophical; the mediocrity of his
earlier chapters on the ancient history of England proves this
sufficiently; but his force of reasoning, his habits of classification
and order, bestow unity upon his History. He is not a genuine artist;
when he draws a picture, he is always thinking of proving something; he
inserts dissertations in the most interesting and affecting places; he
has neither charm, lightness, vivacity, nor _finesse_, but a marvellous
memory, vast knowledge, an ardent, political passion, a great legal
talent for expounding and pleading every cause, a precise knowledge of
precise and petty facts which rivet the attention, charm, diversify,
animate, and warm a narrative. He is not simply a popularizer; he is too
ardent, too eager to prove, to conquer belief, to beat down his foes, to
have only the limpid talent of a man who explains and expounds, with no
other end than to explain and expound, which spreads light throughout,
and never spreads heat; but he is so well provided with details and
reasons, so anxious to convince, so rich in his expositions, that he
cannot fail to be popular. By this breadth of knowledge, this power of
reasoning and passion, he has produced one of the finest books of the
age, whilst manifesting the genius of his nation. This solidity, this
energy, this deep political passion, these moral prepossessions, these
oratorical habits, this limited philosophical power, this somewhat
uniform style, without flexibility or sweetness, this eternal gravity,
this geometrical progress to a settled end, announce in him the English
mind. But if he is English to the French, he is not so to his nation.
The animation, interest, clearness, unity of his narrative, astonish
them. They think him brilliant, rapid, bold; it is, they say, a French
mind. Doubtless he is so, in many respects: if he understands Racine
badly, he admires Pascal and Bossuet; his friends say that he used daily
to read Mme de Sévigné. Nay more, by the structure of his mind, by
his eloquence and rhetoric, he is Latin; so that the inner structure of
his talent places him amongst the classics; it is only by his lively
appreciation, of special, complex, and sensible facts, by his energy and
fierceness, by the rather heavy richness of his imagination, by the
depth of his coloring, that he belongs to his race. Like Addison and
Burke, he resembles a strange graft, fed and transformed by the sap of
the national stock. At all events, this judgment is the strongest mark
of the difference between the two nations. To reach the English
intellect, a Frenchman must make two voyages. When he has crossed the
first interval, which is wide, he comes upon Macaulay. Let him
re-embark; he must accomplish a second passage, just as long, to arrive
at Carlyle for instance--a mind fundamentally Germanic, on the genuine
English soil.
[Footnote 299: Macaulay's Works, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. 1866;
"Essay on Bacon," VI. 222.]
[Footnote 300: Macaulay's Works; "Essay on Bacon," VI. 223.]
[Footnote 301: "Charles himself, and his creature Laud, while they
abjured the innocent badges of Popery, retained all its worst vices--a
complete subjection of reason to authority, a weak preference of form to
substance, a childish passion for mummeries, an idolatrous veneration
for the priestly character, and, above all, a merciless
intolerance."--Macaulay, V. 24; Milton.
"It is difficult to relate without a pitying smile, that in the sacrifice
of the mass, Loyola saw transubstantiation take place, and that, as he
stood praying on the steps of the Church of St. Dominic, he saw the
Trinity in Unity, and wept aloud with joy and wonder."--Macaulay, VI.
468; Ranke, "History of the Popes."]
[Footnote 302: Macaulay, VI. 39; An Essay on William Pitt, Earl of
Chatham.]
[Footnote 303: Macaulay, V. 27; Milton.]
[Footnote 304: Macaulay, V. 35; Milton.]
[Footnote 305: Macaulay, VII. 109; "Life and Writings of Addison."]
[Footnote 306: See in his "Essay on the Life and Writings of Addison"
(VII. 78) Macaulay's observations on the "Campaign."]
[Footnote 307: Macaulay, VI. 549; "Warren Hastings."]
[Footnote 308: Ibid. 553.]
[Footnote 309: Macaulay, VI. 555; "Warren Hastings."]
[Footnote 310: Ibid. VI. 619; "Warren Hastings."]
[Footnote 311: Béranger, "Chansons," 2 vols. 1853; Les Boxeurs, ou
L'Anglomane.]
[Footnote 312: Macaulay, V. 333; "Southey's Colloquies on Society."]
[Footnote 313: Macaulay, V. 204; "Hallam's Constitutional History."]
[Footnote 314: Ibid. 587; "Burleigh and his Times."]
[Footnote 315: Macaulay, VI. 491; "Comic Dramatists of the Restoration."]
[Footnote 316: Ibid. V. 672; "Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in
Spain."]
[Footnote 317: Macaulay, V. 31; "Milton."]
[Footnote 318: Ibid. 595; "Burleigh and his Times."]
[Footnote 319: Macaulay, VI. 628; "Warren Hastings."]
[Footnote 320: Macaulay, I. 2; "History of England before the
Restoration," ch. I.]
[Footnote 321: Macaulay, II. 463, "History of England," ch. XI.]
[Footnote 322: Macaulay, II. 465, "History of England," ch. XI.]
[Footnote 323: Macaulay, III. 513, "History of England," ch. XVIII.]
[Footnote 324: Macaulay, III. 519, "History of England," ch. XVIII.]
[Footnote 325: Macaulay, III. 526, "History of England," ch. XVIII.]
CHAPTER FOURTH
PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY--CARLYLE
When we ask Englishmen, especially those under forty, who amongst them
are the great thinkers, they first mention Carlyle; but at the same time
they advise us not to read him, warning us that we will not understand
him at all. Then, of course, we hasten to get the twenty volumes of
Carlyle--criticism, history, pamphlets, fantasies, philosophy; we read
them with very strange emotions, contradicting every morning our opinion
of the night before. We discover at last that we are in presence of a
strange animal, a relic of a lost family, a sort of mastodon, who has
strayed in a world not made for him. We rejoice in this zoological good
luck, and dissect him with minute curiosity, telling ourselves that we
shall probably never find another like him.
Part I.--Style and Mind
Section I.--Carlyle's Obscurity and Crudeness
We are at first put out. All is new here--ideas, style, tone, the shape
of the phrases, and the very vocabulary. He takes everything in a
contrary meaning, does violence to everything, to expressions as well as
to things. With him paradoxes are set down for principles; common-sense
takes the form of absurdity. We are, as it were, carried into an unknown
world, whose inhabitants walk head downwards, feet in the air, dressed
in motley, as great lords and maniacs, with contortions, jerks, and
cries; we are grievously stunned by these extravagant and discordant
sounds; we want to stop our ears, we have a headache, we are obliged
to decipher a new language. We see upon the table volumes which
ought to be as clear as possible--"The History of the French
Revolution," for instance; and there we read these headings to the
chapters: "Realized Ideals--Viaticum--Astræa Redux--Petition in
Hieroglyphs--Windbags--Mercury de Brézé--Broglie the War-God." We ask
ourselves what connection there can be between these riddles and such
simple events as we all know. We then perceive that Carlyle always
speaks in riddles. "Logic-choppers" is the name he gives to the analysts
of the eighteenth century; "Beaver science" is his word for the
catalogues and classifications of our modern men of science;
"Transcendental moonshine" signifies the philosophical and sentimental
dreams imported from Germany. The religion of the "rotary calabash"
means external and mechanical religion.[326] He cannot be contented with
a simple expression; he employs figures at every step; he embodies all
his ideas; he must touch forms. We see that he is besieged and haunted
by brilliant or gloomy visions; every thought with him is a shock; a
stream of misty passion comes bubbling into his overflowing brain, and
the torrent of images breaks forth and rolls on amidst every kind of mud
and magnificence. He cannot reason, he must paint. If he wants to
explain the embarrassment of a young man obliged to choose a career
amongst the lusts and doubts of the age, in which we live, he tells you
of
"A world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the
measure of its iniquities was full; the abysses, and subterranean and
supernal deluges, plainly broken loose; in the wild dim-lighted chaos
all stars of Heaven gone out. No star of Heaven visible, hardly now to
any man; the pestiferous fogs and foul exhalations grown continual,
have, except on the highest mountain-tops, blotted out all stars:
will-o'-wisps, of various course and colour, take the place of stars.
Over the wild surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares
of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic
phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an
ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking
fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun--though visibly it is but
a Chinese Lantern made of paper mainly, with candle-end foully dying in
the heart of it."[327]
Imagine a volume, twenty volumes, made up of such pictures, united by
exclamations and apostrophes; even history--that of the French
Revolution--is like a delirium. Carlyle is a Puritan seer, before whose
eyes pass scaffolds, orgies, massacres, battles, and who, beset by
furious or bloody phantoms, prophesies, encourages, or curses. If we do
not throw down the book from anger or weariness, we will become dazed;
our ideas leave us, nightmare seizes us, a medley of grinning and
ferocious figures whirl about in our head; we hear the howls of
insurrection, cries of war; we are sick; we are like those hearers of
the Covenanters whom the preaching filled with disgust or enthusiasm,
and who broke the head of their prophet, if they did not take him for
their leader.
These violent outbursts will seem to us still more violent if we mark
the breadth of the field which they traverse. From the sublime to the
ignoble, from the pathetic to the grotesque, is but a step with Carlyle.
At one and the same time he touches the two extremes. His adorations end
in sarcasms. The Universe is for him an oracle and a temple, as well as
a kitchen and a stable. He moves freely about, and is at his ease in
mysticism, as well as in brutality. Speaking of the setting sun at the
North Cape, he writes:
"Silence as of death; for Midnight, even in the Arctic latitudes, has
its character: nothing but the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the
peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar Ocean, over which in the
utmost North the great Sun hangs low and lazy, as if fie too were
slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of crimson and cloth-of-gold;
yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters, like a tremulous
fire-pillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, and hide itself under my
feet. In such moments, Solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak,
or be looked on, when behind him lies all Europe and Africa, fast
asleep, except the watchmen; and before him the silent Immensity, and
Palace of the Eternal, whereof our Sun is but a porch-lamp?"[328]
Such splendors he sees whenever he is face to face with nature. No one
has contemplated with a more powerful emotion the silent stars which
roll eternally in the pale firmament and envelop our little world. No
one has contemplated with more of religious awe the infinite obscurity
in which our slender thought appears for an instant like a gleam, and by
our side the gloomy abyss in which the hot frenzy of life is to be
extinguished. His eyes are habitually fixed on this vast Darkness, and
he paints with a shudder of veneration and hope the effort which
religions have made to pierce it:
"In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead
all slumbering round it, under their white memorial stones, 'in hope of
a happy resurrection';--dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in any hour
(say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and
Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to thee--things
unspeakable, that went to thy soul's soul. Strong was he that had a
Church, what we can call a Church: he stood thereby, though 'in the
centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,' yet manlike
towards God and man: the vague shoreless Universe had become for him a
firm city, and dwelling which he knew."[329]
Rembrandt alone has beheld these sombre visions drowned in shade,
traversed by mystic rays: look, for example, at the church which he has
painted; glance at the mysterious floating apparition, full of radiant
forms, which he has set in the summit of the heavens, above the stormy
night and the terror which shakes mortality.[330] The two imaginations
have the same painful grandeur, the same scintillations, the same agony,
and both sink with like facility into triviality and crudeness. No
ulcer, no filth, is repulsive enough to disgust Carlyle. On occasion he
will compare the politician who seeks popularity to "the dog that was
drowned last summer, and that floats up and down the Thames with ebb and
flood.... You get to know him by sight... with a painful oppression of
nose.... Daily you may see him,... and daily the odour of him is getting
more intolerable."[331] Absurdities, incongruities, abound in his style.
When the frivolous Cardinal de Loménie proposed to convoke a Plenary
Court, he compares him to "trained canary birds, that would fly
cheerfully with lighted matches and fire cannon; fire whole powder
magazines."[332] At need, he turns to funny images. He ends a dithyramb
with a caricature: he bespatters magnificence with eccentric and coarse
language: he couples poetry with puns:
"The Genius of England no longer soars Sunward, world defiant, like an
Eagle through the storms, 'mewing her mighty youth,' as John Milton saw
her do: the Genius of England, much liker a greedy Ostrich intent on
provender and a whole skin mainly, stands with its other extremity
Sunward; with its Ostrich-head stuck into the readiest bush, of old
Church-tippets, King-cloaks, or what other 'sheltering Fallacy' there
may be, and so awaits the issue. The issue has been slow; but it is now
seen to have been inevitable. No Ostrich, intent on gross terrene
provender, and sticking its head into Fallacies, but will be awakened
one day--in a terrible _à-posteriori_ manner, if not otherwise?"[333]
With such buffoonery he concludes his best book, never quitting his tone
of gravity and gloom, in the midst of anathemas and prophecies. He needs
these great shocks. He cannot remain quiet, or stick to one literary
province at a time. He leaps in unimpeded jerks from one end of the
field of ideas to the other; he confounds all styles, jumbles all forms,
heaps together pagan allusions, Bible reminiscences, German
abstractions, technical terms, poetry, slang, mathematics, physiology,
archaic words, neologies. There is nothing he does not tread down and
ravage. The symmetrical constructions of human art and thought,
dispersed and upset, are piled under his hands into a vast mass of
shapeless ruins, from the top of which he gesticulates and fights, like
a conquering savage.
Section II.--The Humor of Carlyle
This kind of mind produces humor, a word untranslatable in French,
because in France they have not the idea. Humor is a species of talent
which amuses Germans, Northmen; it suits their mind, as beer and brandy
suit their palate. For men of another race it is disagreeable; they
often find it too harsh and bitter. Amongst other things, this talent
embraces a taste for contrasts. Swift jokes with the serious mien of an
ecclesiastic, performing religious rites, and develops the most
grotesque absurdities, like a convinced man. Hamlet, shaken with terror
and despair, bristles with buffooneries. Heine mocks his own emotions,
even whilst he displays them. These men love travesties, put a solemn
garb over comic ideas, a clown's jacket over grave ones. Another feature
of humor is that the author forgets the public for whom he writes. He
tells us that he does not care for us, that he needs neither to be
understood nor approved, that he thinks and amuses himself by himself,
and that if his taste and ideas displease us we have only to take
ourselves off. He wishes to be refined and original at his ease; he is
at home in his book, and with closed doors, he gets into his slippers,
dressing-gown, often with his feet in the air, sometimes without a
shirt. Carlyle has a style of his own, and marks his idea in his own
fashion; it is our business to understand it. He alludes to a saying of
Goethe, or Shakespeare, or to an anecdote which strikes him at the
moment; so much the worse for us if we do not know it. He shouts when
the fancy takes him; the worse for us if our ears do not like it. He
writes on the caprice of his imagination, with all the starts of
invention; the worse for us if our mind goes at a different pace. He
catches on the wing all the shades, all the oddities of his conception;
the worse for us if ours cannot reach them. A last feature of humor is
the irruption of violent joviality, buried under a heap of sadness.
Absurd incongruity appears unexpected. Physical nature, hidden and
oppressed under habits of melancholic reflection, is laid bare for an
instant. We see a grimace, a clown's gesture, then everything resumes
its wonted gravity. Add lastly the unforeseen flashes of imagination.
The humorist covers a poet; suddenly, in the monotonous mist of prose,
at the end of an argument, a vista opens up; beautiful or ugly, it
matters not; it is enough that it strikes our eyes. These inequalities
fairly paint the solitary, energetic, imaginative German, a lover of
violent contrasts, based on personal and gloomy reflection, with sudden
up-wellings of physical instinct, so different from the Latin and
classical races, races of orators or artists, where they never write but
with an eye to the public, where they relish only consequent ideas, are
only happy in the spectacle of harmonious forms, where the fancy is
regulated, and voluptuousness appears natural. Carlyle is profoundly
German, nearer to the primitive stock than any of his contemporaries,
strange and unexampled in his fancies and his pleasantries; he calls
himself "a bemired aurochs or urus of the German woods,... the poor
wood-ox so bemired in the forests."[334] For instance, his first book,
"Sartor Resartus," which is a clothes-philosophy, contains, _à propos_
of aprons and breeches, metaphysics, politics, psychology. Man,
according to him, is a dressed animal. Society has clothes for its
foundation. "How, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ,
soul's seat, and true pineal gland of the Body social: I mean a
PURSE:"[335]
"To the eye of vulgar Logic," says he, "what is man? An omnivorous Biped
that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a
Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious Me, there lies,
under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses) contextured
in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells
with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a
Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years.
Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colours
and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet
it is skywoven, and worthy of a God."[336]
The paradox continues, at once eccentric and mystical, hiding theories
under follies, mixing together fierce ironies, tender pastorals,
love-stories, explosions of rage, and carnival pictures. He says well:
"Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern History is not the Diet
of Worms, still less the battle of Austerlitz, Wagram, Waterloo,
Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an incident passed carelessly over by
most Historians, and treated with some degree of ridicule by others:
namely, George Fox's making to himself a suit of Leather."[337]
For, thus clothed for the rest of his life, lodging in a tree and eating
wild berries, man could remain idle and invent Puritanism, that is,
conscience-worship, at his leisure. This is how Carlyle treats the ideas
which are dearest to him. He jests in connection with the doctrine,
which was to employ his life and occupy his whole soul.
Should we like an abstract of his politics, and his opinion about his
country? He proves that in the modern transformation of religions two
principal sects have risen, especially in England; the one of "Poor
Slaves" the other of Dandies. Of the first he says:
"Something Monastic there appears to be in their Constitution: we find
them bound by the two Monastic Vows, of Poverty and Obedience; which
Vows, especially the former, it is said, they observe with great
strictness; nay, as I have understood it, they are pledged, and be it by
any solemn Nazarene ordination or not, irrevocably consecrated thereto,
even _before_ birth. That the third Monastic Vow, of Chastity, is
rigidly enforced among them, I find no ground to conjecture.
"Furthermore, they appear to imitate the Dandiacal Sect in their grand
principle of wearing a peculiar Costume.... Their raiment consists of
innumerable skirts, lappets, and irregular wings, of all cloths and of
all colours; through the labyrinthic intricacies of which their bodies
are introduced by some unknown process. It is fastened together by a
multiplex combination of buttons, thrums, and skewers; to which
frequently is added a girdle of leather, of hempen or even of straw
rope, round the loins. To straw rope, indeed, they seem partial, and
often wear it by way of sandals....
"One might fancy them worshippers of Hertha, or the Earth: for they dig
and affectionately work continually in her bosom; or else, shut up in
private Oratories, meditate and manipulate the substances derived from
her; seldom looking-up towards the Heavenly Luminaries, and then with
comparative indifference. Like the Druids, on the other hand, they live
in dark dwellings; often even breaking their glass-windows, where they
find such, and stuffing them up with pieces of raiment, or other opaque
substances, till the fit obscurity is restored....
"In respect of diet they have also their observances. All Poor Slaves
are Rhizophagous (or Root-eaters); a few are Ichthyophagous, and use
Salted Herrings; other animal food they abstain from; except indeed,
with perhaps some strange inverted fragment of a Brahminical feeling,
such animals as die a natural death. Their universal sustenance is the
root named Potato, cooked by fire alone.... In all their Religious
Solemnities, Potheen is said to be an indispensable requisite, and
largely consumed."[338]
Of the other sect he says:
"A certain touch of Manicheism, not indeed in the Gnostic shape, is
discernible enough: also (for human error walks in a cycle, and
reappears at intervals) a not-inconsiderable resemblance to that
Superstition of the Athos Monks, who by fasting from all nourishment,
and looking intensely for a length of time into their own navels, came
to discern therein the true Apocalypse of Nature, and Heaven Unveiled.
To my own surmise, it appears as if this Dandiacal Sect were but a new
modification, adapted to the new time, of that primeval Superstition,
_Self-worship._...
"They affect great purity and separatism; distinguish themselves by a
particular costume (whereof some notices were given in the earlier part
of this Volume); likewise, so far as possible, by a particular speech
(apparently some broken _Lingua-franca_, or English-French); and, on the
whole, strive to maintain a true Nazarene deportment, and keep
themselves unspotted from the world."
"They have their Temples, whereof the chief, as the Jewish Temple did,
stands in their metropolis; and is named _Almack's_, a word of uncertain
etymology. They worship principally by night; and have their Highpriests
and Highpriestesses, who, however, do not continue for life. The rites,
by some supposed to be of the Menadic sort, or perhaps with an Elusinian
or Cabiric character, are held strictly secret. Nor are Sacred Books
wanting to the Sect; these they call _Fashionable Novels_: however, the
Canon is not completed, and some are canonical, and others not...."[339]
Their chief articles of faith are:
"1. Coats should have nothing of the triangle about them; at the same
time, wrinkles behind should be carefully avoided.
"2. The collar is a very important point: it should be low behind, and
slightly rolled.
"3. No licence of fashion can allow a man of delicate taste to adopt the
posterial luxuriance of a Hottentot.
"4. There is safety in a swallow-tail.
"5. The good sense of a gentleman is nowhere more finely developed than
in his rings.
"6. It is permitted to mankind, under certain restrictions, to wear
white waistcoats.
"7. The trousers must be exceedingly tight across the hips.
"All which Propositions I, for the present, content myself with modestly
but peremptorily and irrevocably denying."[340]
This premised, he draws conclusions:
"I might call them two boundless and indeed unexampled Electric Machines
(turned by the 'Machinery of Society'), with batteries of opposite
quality; Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism the Positive: one attracts
hourly towards it and appropriates all the Positive Electricity of the
nation (namely, the Money thereof); the other is equally busy with the
Negative (that is to say the Hunger), which is equally potent. Hitherto
you see only partial, transient sparkles and sputters: but wait a
little, till the entire nation is in an electric state; till your whole
vital Electricity, no longer healthfully Neutral, is cut into two
isolated portions of Positive and Negative (of Money and of Hunger); and
stands there bottled-up in two World-Batteries! The stirring of a
child's finger brings the two together; and then--What then? The Earth
is but shivered into impalpable smoke by that Doom's thunder-peal: the
Sun misses one of his Planets in Space, and thenceforth there are no
eclipses of the Moon. Or better still, I might liken----"[341]
He stops suddenly, and leaves you to your conjectures. This bitter
pleasantry is that of an enraged or despairing man, who designedly, and
simply by reason of the violence of his passion, would restrain it and
force himself to laugh; but whom a sudden shudder at the end reveals
just as he is. In one place Carlyle says that there is, at the bottom of
the English character, underneath all its habits of calculation and
coolness, an inextinguishable furnace:
"Deep hidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial central fire,
with stratum after stratum of arrangement, traditionary method, composed
productiveness, all built above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it:
justice, clearness, silence, perseverance unhasting, unresting
diligence, hatred of disorder, hatred of injustice, which is the worst
disorder, characterise this people: the inward fire we say, as all such
fires would be, is hidden in the centre. Deep hidden, but awakenable,
but immeasurable; let no man awaken it."
It is a fire of extraordinary fierceness, as the rage of devoted
Berserkirs, who, once rushing to the heat of the battle, felt no more
their wounds, and lived, fought, and killed, pierced with strokes, the
least of which would have been mortal to an ordinary man. It is this
destructive frenzy, this rousing of inward unknown powers, this
loosening of a ferocity, enthusiasm, and imagination disordered and not
to be bridled, which appeared in these men at the Renaissance and the
Reformation, and a remnant of which still endures in Carlyle. Here is a
vestige of it, in a passage almost worthy of Swift, which is the
abstract of his customary emotions, and at the same time his conclusion
on the age in which we live:
"Supposing swine (I mean four-footed swine), of sensibility and superior
logical parts, had attained such culture; and could, after survey and
reflection, jot down for us their notion of the Universe, and of their
interests and duties there--might it not well interest a discerning
public, perhaps in unexpected ways, and give a stimulus to the
languishing book-trade? The votes of all creatures, it is understood at
present, ought to be had; that you may 'legislate' for them with better
insight. 'How can you govern a thing,' say many, 'without first asking
its vote?' Unless, indeed, you already chance to know its vote--and even
something more, namely, what you are to think of its vote; what _it_
wants by its vote; and, still more important, what Nature wants--which
latter, at the end of the account--the only thing that will be
got!----Pig Propositions, in a rough form, are somewhat as follows:
"1. The Universe, so far as sane conjecture can go, is an immeasurable
Swine's-trough, consisting of solid and liquid, and of other contrasts
and kinds;--especially consisting of attainable and unattainable, the
latter in immensely greater quantities for most pigs.
"2. Moral evil is unattainability of Pig's-wash; moral good, attainability
of ditto.
"3. 'What is Paradise, or the State of Innocence?' Paradise, called also
State of Innocence, Age of Gold, and other names, _was_ (according to
Pigs of weak judgment) unlimited attainability of Pig's-wash; perfect
fulfilment of one's wishes, so that the Pig's imagination could not
outrun reality; a fable and an impossibility, as Pigs of sense now see.
"4. 'Define the Whole Duty of Pigs.' It is the mission of universal
Pighood, and the duty of all Pigs, at all times, to diminish the
quantity of unattainable and increase that of attainable. All knowledge
and device and effort ought to be directed thither and thither only: Pig
science, Pig enthusiasm and Devotion have this one aim. It is the Whole
Duty of Pigs.
"5. Pig Poetry ought to consist of universal recognition of the
excellence of Pig's-wash and ground barley, and the felicity of Pigs
whose trough is in order, and who have had enough: Hrumph!
"6. The Pig knows the weather; he ought to look out what kind of weather
it will be.
"7. 'Who made the Pig?' Unknown;--perhaps the Pork-butcher.
"8. 'Have you Law and Justice in Pigdom?' Pigs of observation have
discerned that there is, or was once supposed to be, a thing called
Justice. Undeniably at least there is a sentiment in Pig-nature called
indignation, revenge, etc., which, if one Pig provoke another, comes out
in a more or less destructive manner: hence laws are necessary, amazing
quantities of laws. For quarrelling is attended with loss of blood, of
life, at any rate with frightful effusion of the general stock of
Hog's-wash, and ruin (temporary ruin) to large Sections of the universal
Swine's trough: wherefore let justice be observed, that so quarrelling
be avoided.
"9. 'What is justice?' Your own share of the general Swine's-trough; not
any portion of my share.
"10. 'But what is "my" share?' Ah! there, in fact, lies the grand
difficulty; upon which Pig science, meditating this long while, can
settle absolutely nothing. My share--hrumph!--my share is, on the whole,
whatever I can contrive to get without being hanged or sent to the
hulks."[342]
Such is the mire in which he plunges modern life, and, beyond all
others, English life; drowning at the same time, and in the same filth,
the positive mind, the love of comfort, industrial science, Church,
State, philosophy, and law. This cynical catechism thrown in amidst
furious declamations, gives, I think, the dominant note of this strange
mind: it is this mad tension which constitutes his talent; which
produces and explains his images and incongruities, his laughter and his
rages. There is an English expression which cannot be translated into
French, but which depicts this condition, and illustrates the whole
physical constitution of the race: His blood is up. In fact, the cold
and phlegmatic temperature covers the surface; but when the roused blood
has swept through the veins, the fevered animal can only be glutted by
devastation, and be satiated by excess.
Section III.--Perception of the Real and the Sublime
It seems as though a soul so violent, so enthusiastic, so savage, so
abandoned to imaginative follies, so entirely without taste, order, and
measure, would be capable only of rambling, and expending itself in
hallucinations, full of sorrow and danger. In fact, many of those who
had this temperament, and who were his genuine forefathers--the Norse
pirates, the poets of the sixteenth century, the Puritans of the
seventeenth--were madmen, hurting others and themselves, bent on
devastating things and ideas, destroying the public security and their
own heart. Two entirely English barriers have restrained and directed
Carlyle: the sentiment of actuality, which is the positive spirit, and
of the sublime, which makes the religious spirit; the first turned him
to real things, the other furnished him with the interpretation of real
things: instead of being sickly and visionary, he became a philosopher
and a historian.
Section IV.--His Passion for Actuality
We must read his history of Cromwell to understand how far this
sentiment of actuality penetrates him; with what knowledge it endows
him; how he rectifies dates and texts; how he verifies traditions and
genealogies; how he visits places, examines the trees, looks at the
brooks, knows the agriculture, prices, the whole domestic and rural
economy, all the political and literary circumstances; with what
minuteness, precision, and vehemence he reconstructs before his eyes and
before ours the external picture of objects and affairs, the internal
picture of ideas and emotions. And it is not simply on his part
conscience, habit, or prudence, but need and passion. In this great
obscure void of the past, his eyes fix upon the rare luminous points as
on a treasure. The black sea of oblivion has swallowed up the rest: the
million thoughts and actions of so many million beings have disappeared,
and no power will make them rise again to the light. These few points
subsist alone, like the summits of the highest rocks of a submerged
continent. With what ardor, what deep feeling for the destroyed worlds,
of which these rocks are the remains, does the historian lay upon them
his eager hands, to discover from their nature and structure some
revelation of the great drowned regions, which no eye shall ever see
again! A number, a trifling detail about expense, a petty phrase of
barbarous Latin, is priceless in the sight of Carlyle. I should like you
to read the commentary with which he surrounds the chronicle of the monk
Jocelin of Brakelond,[343] to show you the impression which a proved
fact produces on such a soul; all the attention and emotion that an old
barbarous word, a bill from the kitchen summons up:
"Behold, therefore, this England of the year 1200 was no chimerical
vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's
Fœdera, and Doctrines of the Constitution; but a green solid place,
that grew corn and several other things. The sun shone on it; the
vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn;
ditches were dug, furrow-fields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day
all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home
weary, to their several lairs.... The _Dominus Rex_, at departing, gave
us 'thirteen _sterlingii_,' one shilling and one penny, to say a mass
for him.... For king Lackland _was_ there, verily he.... There, we say,
is the grand peculiarity; the immeasurable one; distinguishing to a
really infinite degree, the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction
whatsoever. 'Fiction,' 'Imagination, Imaginative poetry,' etc., etc.,
except as the vehicle for truth, or is fact of some sort... what is
it?[344]... And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and
dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious
purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black
ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun
as walls, long ago.... Their architecture, belfries, land-carucates?
Yes--and that is but a small item of the matter. Does it never give thee
pause, this other strange item of it, that men then had a _soul_--not by
hearsay alone, and as a figure of speech; but as a truth that they
_knew_ and practically went upon!"[345]
And then he tries to resuscitate this soul before our eyes; for this is
his special feature, the special feature of every historian who has the
sentiment of actuality, to understand that parchments, walls, dress,
bodies themselves, are only cloaks and documents; that the true fact is
the inner feeling of men who have lived, that the only important fact is
the state and structure of their soul, that the first and sole business
is to reach that inner feeling, for that all else diverges from it. We
must tell ourselves this fact over and over again; history is but the
history of the heart; we have to search out the feelings of past
generations, and nothing else. This is what Carlyle perceives; man is
before him, risen from the dead; he penetrates within him, sees that he
feels, suffers, and wills, in that special and individual manner, now
absolutely lost and extinguished, in which he did feel, suffer, and
will. And he looks upon this sight, not coldly, like a man who only half
sees things in a gray mist, indistinctly and uncertain, but with all the
force of his heart and sympathy, like a convinced spectator, for whom
past things, once proved, are as present and visible as the corporeal
objects which his hand handles and touches, at the very moment. He feels
this fact so clearly that he bases upon it all his philosophy of
history. In his opinion, great men, kings, writers, prophets, and poets,
are only great in this sense: "It is the property of the hero, in every
time, in every place, in every situation, that he comes back to reality;
that he stands upon things and not shows of things."[346] The great man
discovers some unknown or neglected fact, proclaims it; men hear him,
follow him; and this is the whole of history. And not only does he
discover and proclaim it, but he believes and sees it. He believes it,
not as hearsay or conjecture, like a truth simply probable and handed
down; he sees it personally, face to face with absolute and indomitable
faith; he deserts opinion for conviction, tradition for intuition.
Carlyle is so steeped in his process, that he imputes it to all great
men. And he is not wrong, for there is none more potent. Wherever he
penetrates with this lamp, he carries a light not known before. He
pierces mountains of paper erudition, and enters into the hearts of men.
Everywhere he goes beyond political and conventional history. He divines
characters, comprehends the spirit of extinguished ages, feels, better
than any Englishman, better than Macaulay himself, the great revolutions
of the soul. He is almost German in his power of imagination, his
antiquarian perspicacity, his broad general views, and yet he is no
dealer in guesses. The national common-sense and the energetic craving
for profound belief retain him on the limits of supposition; when he
does guess, he gives it for what it is worth. He has no taste for
hazardous history. He rejects hearsay and legends; he accepts only
partially, and under reserve, the Germanic etymologies and hypotheses.
He wishes to draw from history a positive and active law for himself and
us. He expels and tears away from it all the doubtful and agreeable
additions which scientific curiosity and romantic imagination
accumulate. He puts aside this parasitic growth to seize the useful and
solid wood. And when he has seized it, he drags it so energetically
before us, in order to make us touch it, he handles it in so violent a
manner, he places it under such a glaring light, he illuminates it by
such coarse contrasts of extraordinary images, that we are infected, and
in spite of ourselves reach the intensity of his belief and vision.
He goes beyond, or rather is carried beyond this. The facts seized upon
by this vehement imagination are melted in it as in a fire. Beneath this
fury of conception, everything wavers. Ideas, changed into
hallucinations, lose their solidity, realities are like dreams; the
world, appearing in a nightmare, seems no more than a nightmare; the
attestation of the bodily senses loses its weight before inner visions
as lucid as itself. Man finds no longer a difference between his dreams
and his perceptions. Mysticism enters like smoke within the over-heated
walls of a collapsing imagination. It was thus that it once penetrated
into the ecstasies of ascetic Hindoos, and into the philosophy of our
first two centuries. Throughout, the same state of the imagination has
produced the same teaching. The Puritans, Carlyle's true ancestors, were
inclined to it. Shakespeare reached it by the prodigious tension of his
poetic dreams, and Carlyle ceaselessly repeats after him that "we are
such stuff as dreams are made of." This real world, these events so
harshly followed up, circumscribed, and handled, are to him only
apparitions; the universe is divine. "Thy daily life is girt with
wonder, and based on wonder; thy very blankets and breeches are
miracles.... The unspeakable divine significance, full of splendour, and
wonder, and terror, lies in the being of every man and of everything;
the presence of God who made every man and thing."
"Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures,
experiments, and what-not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be
bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counters: but the natural sense
of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply his sense, proclaims it
to be a living thing--ah, an unspeakable, godlike thing; towards which
the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout
prostration and humility of soul: worship, if not in words, then in
silence."[347]
In fact, this is the ordinary position of Carlyle. It ends in wonder.
Beyond and beneath objects, he perceives as it were an abyss, and is
interrupted by shudderings. A score of times, a hundred times in the
"History of the French Revolution," we have him suspending his
narrative, and falling into a reverie. The immensity of the black night
in which the human apparitions rise for an instant, the fatality of the
crime which, once committed, remains attached to the chain of events as
by a link of iron, the mysterious conduct which impels these floating
masses to an unknown but inevitable end, are the great and sinister
images which haunt him. He dreams anxiously of this focus of existence,
of which we are only the reflection. He walks fearfully amongst this
people of shadows, and tells himself that he too is a shadow. He is
troubled by the thought that these human phantoms have their substance
elsewhere, and will answer to eternity for their short passage. He
exclaims and trembles at the idea of this motionless world, of which
ours is but the mutable figure. He divines in it something august and
terrible. For he shapes it, and he shapes our world according to his own
mind; he defines it by the emotions which he draws from it, and figures
it by the impressions which he receives from it. A moving chaos of
splendid visions, of infinite perspectives, stirs and boils within him
at the least event which he touches; ideas abound, violent, mutually
jostling, driven from all sides of the horizon amidst darkness and
flashes of lightning; his thought is a tempest, and he attributes to the
universe the magnificence, the obscurities, and the terrors of a
tempest. Such a conception is the true source of religious and moral
sentiment. The man who is penetrated by them passes his life, like a
Puritan, in veneration and fear. Carlyle passes his in expressing and
impressing veneration and fear, and all his books are preachings.
Section V.--His Mode of Thought
Here truly is a strange mind, and one which makes us reflect. Nothing is
more calculated to manifest truths than these eccentric beings. It will
not be time misspent to discover the true position of this mind, and to
explain for what reasons, and in what measure, he must fail to possess,
or must attain to, beauty and truth.
As soon as we wish to begin to think, we have before us a whole and
distinct object--that is, an aggregate of details connected amongst
themselves, and separated from their surroundings. Whatever the object,
tree, animal, sentiment, event, it is always the same; it always has
parts, and these parts always form a whole: this group, more or less
vast, comprises others, and is comprised in others, so that the smallest
portion of the universe is, like the entire universe, a group. Thus the
whole employment of human thought is to reproduce groups. According as a
mind is fit for this or not, it is capable or incapable. According as it
can reproduce great or small groups, it is great or small. According as
it can produce complete groups, or only some of their parts, it is
complete or partial.
What is it, then, to reproduce a group? It is first to separate
therefrom all the parts, then to arrange them in ranks according to
their resemblances, then to form these ranks into families, lastly to
combine the whole under some general and dominant mark; in short, to
imitate the hierarchical classifications of science. But the task is not
ended there: this hierarchy is not an artificial and external
arrangement, but a natural and internal necessity. Things are not dead,
but living; there is in them a force which produces and organizes this
group, which binds together the details and the whole, which repeats the
type in all its parts. It is this force which the mind must reproduce in
itself, with all its effects; it must perceive it by rebound and
sympathy: this force must engender in the mind the entire group, and
must be developed within it as without it: the series of internal ideas
must imitate the series of external; the emotion must follow the
conception, vision must complete analysis; the mind must become, like
nature, creative. Then only can we say: We know.
All minds take one or other of these routes, and are divided by them
into two great classes, corresponding to opposite temperaments. In the
first are the plain men of science, the popularizes, orators,
writers--in general, the classical ages and the Latin races; in the
second are the poets, prophets, commonly the inventors--in general, the
romantic ages and the Germanic races. The first proceed gradually from
one idea to the next: they are methodical and cautious; they speak for
the world at large, and prove what they say; they divide the field which
they would traverse into preliminary Sections, in order to exhaust their
subject; they march on straight and level roads, so as to be sure never
to fall; they proceed by transitions, enumerations, summaries; they
advance from general to still more general conclusions; they form the
exact and complete classification of a group. When they go beyond simple
analysis, their whole talent consists in eloquently pleading a thesis.
Amongst the contemporaries of Carlyle, Macaulay is the most complete
model of this species of mind. The others, after having violently and
confusedly rummaged amongst the details of a group, rush with a sudden
spring into the mother-notion. They see it then in its entirety; they
perceive the powers which organize it; they reproduce it by divination;
they depict it, abridged by the most expressive and strangest words;
they are not capable of decomposing it into regular series, they always
perceive in a lump. They think only sudden concentrations of vehement
ideas. They have a vision of distant effects or living actions; they are
revealers or poets. Michelet, amongst the French, is the best example of
this form of intellect, and Carlyle is an English Michelet.
He knows it, and argues plausibly that genius is an intuition, an
insight: "Our Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common
school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the
skirts of the other; but at best that of practical Reason, proceeding by
large Intuition over whole systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby we
might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns in his
Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith
whispers, not without a plan."[348] Doubtless, but disadvantages,
nevertheless, are not wanting; and, in the first place, obscurity and
barbarism. In order to understand him, we must study laboriously, or
else have precisely the same kind of mind as he. But few men are critics
by profession, or natural seers; in general, an author writes to be
understood, and it is annoying to end in enigmas. On the other hand,
this visionary process is hazardous: when we wish to leap immediately
into the inner and generative idea, we run the risk of falling short;
the gradual progress is slower, but more sure. The methodical people, so
much ridiculed by Carlyle, have at least the advantage over him in being
able to verify all their steps. Moreover, these vehement divinations and
assertions are very often void of proof. Carlyle leaves the reader to
search for them: the reader at times does not search for them, and
refuses to believe the soothsayer on his word. Consider, again, that
affectation infallibly enters into this style. It must assuredly be
inevitable, since Shakespeare is full of it. The simple writer, prosaic
and rational, can always reason and stick to his prose; his inspiration
has no gaps, and demands no efforts. On the contrary, prophecy is a
violent condition which does not sustain itself. When it fails, it is
replaced by grand gesticulation. Carlyle gets up the steam in order to
continue glowing. He struggles hard; and this forced, perpetual epilepsy
is a most shocking spectacle. We cannot endure a man who wanders,
repeats himself, returns to oddities and exaggerations which he had
already employed; makes a jargon of them, declaims, exclaims, and makes
it a point, like a wretched bombastic comedian, to upset our nerves.
Finally, when this species of mind coincides in a lofty mind with the
habits of a gloomy preacher, it results in objectionable manners. Many
will find Carlyle presumptuous, coarse; they will suspect from his
theories, and also from his way of speaking, that he looks upon himself
as a great man, neglected, of the race of heroes; that, in his opinion,
the human race ought to put themselves in his hands, and trust him with
their business. Certainly he lectures us, and with contempt. He despises
his epoch; he has a sulky, sour tone; he keeps purposely on stilts. He
disdains objections. In his eyes, opponents are not up to his form. He
abuses his predecessors: when he speaks of Cromwell's biographers, he
takes the tone of a man of genius astray amongst pedants. He has the
superior smile, the resigned condescension of a hero who feels himself a
martyr, and he only quits it, to shout at the top of his voice, like an
ill-bred plebeian.
All this is redeemed, and more, by rare merits. He speaks truly: minds
like his are the most fertile. They are almost the only ones which make
discoveries. Pure classifiers do not invent: they are too dry. "To know
a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing,
sympathize with it. Fantasy is the organ of the Godlike, the
understanding is indeed thy window; too clear thou canst not make it;
but fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or
diseased." In more simple language, this means that every object,
animate or inanimate, is gifted with powers which constitute its nature
and produce its development; that, in order to know it, we must recreate
it in ourselves, with the train of its potentialities, and that we only
know it entirely by inwardly perceiving all its tendencies, and inwardly
seeing all its effects. And verily this process, which is the imitation
of nature, is the only one by which we can penetrate nature; Shakespeare
had it as an instinct, and Goethe as a method. There is none so powerful
or delicate, so fitted to the complexity of things and to the structure
of our mind. There is none more proper to renew our ideas, to withdraw
us from formulas, to deliver us from the prejudices with which education
involves us, to overthrow the barriers in which our surroundings enclose
us. It is by this that Carlyle escaped from conventional English ideas,
penetrated into the philosophy and science of Germany, to think out
again, in his own manner, the Germanic discoveries, and to give an
original theory of man and of the universe.
Part II--Vocation
It is from Germany that Carlyle has drawn his greatest ideas. He studied
there, he knows perfectly its literature and language, he sets this
literature in the highest rank: he translated "Wilhelm Meister," he
wrote upon the German writers a long series of critical articles, he has
just written a life of Frederick the Great. He is the best accredited
and most original of the interpreters who have introduced the German
mind into England. This is no small thing to do, for it is in such a
work that every thinking person is now laboring.
Section I.--The Appearance and Development of Original Minds
From 1780-1830 Germany has produced all the ideas of our historic age;
and for half a century still, perhaps for a whole century, our great
work will be to think them out again. The thoughts which have been born
and have blossomed in a country, never fail to propagate themselves in
neighboring countries, and to be engrafted there for a season. That
which is happening to us has happened twenty times already in the world;
the growth of the mind has always been the same, and we may, with some
assurance, foresee for the future what we observe in the past. At
certain times appears an original form of mind, which produces a
philosophy, a literature, an art, a science, and which, having renewed
the form of man's thought, slowly and infallibly renews all his
thoughts. All minds, which seek and find, are in the current; they only
advance through it: if they oppose it, they are checked; if they
deviate, they are slackened; if they assist it, they are carried beyond
the rest. And the movement goes on so long as there remains anything to
be discovered. When art has given all its works, philosophy all its
theories, science all its discoveries, it stops; another form of mind
takes the sway, or man ceases to think. Thus at the Renaissance appeared
the artistic and poetic genius, which, born in Italy and carried into
Spain, was there extinguished, after a century and a half, in the
universal extinction, and which, with other characteristics,
transplanted into France and England, ended after a hundred years in the
refinements of mannerists and the follies of sectarians, having produced
the Reformation, confirmed free thought, and founded science. Thus with
Dryden in England, and with Malherbe in France, was born the oratorical
and classical spirit, which, having produced the literature of the
seventeenth century and the philosophy of the eighteenth, dried up under
the successors of Voltaire and Pope, and died after two hundred years,
having polished Europe and raised the French Revolution. Thus at the end
of the last century arose the philosophic German genus, which, having
engendered a new metaphysics, theology, poetry, literature, linguistic
science, an exegesis, erudition, descends now into the sciences and
continues its evolution. No more original spirit, more universal, more
fertile in consequences of every scope and species, more capable of
transforming and reforming everything, has appeared for three hundred
years. It is of the same order as that of the Renaissance and of the
Classical Age. It, like them, connects itself with the great works of
contemporary intelligence, appears in all civilized lands, is propagated
with the same inward qualities, but under different forms. It, like
them, is one of the epochs of the world's history. It is encountered in
the same civilization and in the same races. We may then conjecture,
without too much rashness, that it will have a like duration and
destiny. We thus succeed in fixing, with some precision, our place in
the endless stream of events and things. We know that we are almost in
the midst of one of the partial currents which compose it. We can
perceive the form of mind which directs it, and seek beforehand the
ideas to which it conducts us.
Section II.--Characteristics of the German Form of Mind
Wherein consists this form? In the power of discovering general ideas.
No nation and no age has possessed it in so high a degree as the
Germans. This is their governing faculty; it is by this power that they
have produced all that they have done. This gift is properly that of
comprehension (_Begreifen_). By it we find the aggregate conceptions
(_Begriffe_); we reduce under one ruling idea all the scattered parts of
a subject; we perceive, under the divisions of a group, the common bond
which unites them; we conciliate objections; we bring down apparent
contrasts to a profound unity. It is the pre-eminent philosophical
faculty; and, in fact, it is the philosophical faculty which has
impressed its seal on all their works. By it, they vivified dry studies,
which seemed only fit to occupy pedants of the academy or seminary. By
it, they divined the involuntary and primitive logic which created and
organized languages, the great ideas which are hidden at the bottom of
every work of art, the secret poetic emotions and vague metaphysical
intuitions which engendered religions and myths. By it, they perceived
the spirit of ages, civilizations, and races, and transformed into a
system of laws the history which was but a heap of facts. By it, they
rediscovered or renewed the sense of dogmas, connected God with the
world, man with nature, spirit with matter, perceived the successive
chain and the original necessity of the forms, whereof the aggregate is
the universe. By it, they created a science of linguistics, a mythology,
a criticism, an aesthetics, an exegesis, a history, a theology and
metaphysics, so new that they continued long incomprehensible, and could
only be expressed by a special language. And this bent was so dominant
that it subjected to its empire even art and poetry. The poets by it
have become erudite, philosophical; they constructed their dramas,
epics, and odes, after prearranged theories, and in order to manifest
general ideas. They rendered moral theses, historical periods, sensible;
they created and applied aesthetics; they had no artlessness, or made
their artlessness an instrument of reflection; they loved not their
characters for themselves, they ended by transforming them into symbols;
their philosophical ideas broke, every instant, out of the poetic shape
in which they tried to enclose them; they have been all critics,[349]
bent on constructing or reconstructing, possessing erudition and method,
attracted to imagination by art and study, incapable of producing living
beings unless by science and artifice, really systematical men, who, to
express their abstract conceptions, employed, in place of formulas, the
actions of personages and the music of verse.
Section III.--German Aptitude for General Ideas
From this aptitude to conceive the aggregate, one sole idea could be
produced--the idea of aggregates. In fact, all the ideas worked out for
fifty years in Germany are reduced to one only, that of development
(_Entwickelung_), which consists in representing all the parts of a
group as jointly responsible and complemental, so that each necessitates
the rest, and that, all combined, they manifest, by their succession and
their contrasts, the inner quality which assembles and produces them. A
score of systems, a hundred dreams, a hundred thousand metaphors, have
variously figured or disfigured this fundamental idea. Despoiled of its
trappings, it merely affirms the mutual dependence which unites the
term, of a series, and attaches them all to some abstract property
within them. If we apply it to Nature, we come to consider the world as
a scale of forms, and, as it were, a succession of conditions, having in
themselves the reason for their succession and for their existence,
containing in their nature the necessity for their decay and their
limitation, composing by their union an invisible whole, which,
sufficing for itself, exhausting all possibilities, and connecting all
things, from time and space to existence and thought, resembles by its
harmony and its magnificence some omnipotent and immortal god. If we
apply it to man, we come to consider sentiments and thoughts as natural
and necessary products, linked amongst themselves like the
transformations of an animal or plant; which leads us to conceive
religions, philosophies, literatures, all human conceptions and
emotions, as necessary series of a state of mind which carries them away
on its passage, which, if it returns, brings them back, and which, if we
can reproduce it, gives us in consequence the means of reproducing them
at will. These are the two doctrines which run through the writings of
the two chief thinkers of the century, Hegel and Goethe. They have used
them throughout as a method: Hegel to grasp the formula of everything,
Goethe to obtain the vision of everything; they steeped themselves
therein so thoroughly that they have drawn thence their inner and
habitual sentiments, their morality and their conduct. We may consider
them to be the two philosophical legacies which modern Germany has left
to the human race.
Section IV.--Faults of the German Form of Thought
But these legacies have not been unmixed, and this passion for aggregate
views has marred its proper work by its excess. It is rarely that the
mind can grasp aggregates: we are imprisoned in too narrow a corner of
time and space: our senses perceive only the surface of things; our
instruments have but a small scope; we have only been experimentalizing
for three centuries; our memory is short, and the documents by which we
dive into the past are only doubtful lights, scattered over an immense
region, which they show by glimpses without illuminating them. To bind
together the small fragments which we are able to attain, we have
generally to guess the causes, or to employ general ideas so vast that
they might suit all facts; we must have recourse either to hypothesis or
abstraction, invent arbitrary explanations, or be lost in vague ones.
These, in fact, are the two vices which have corrupted German thought.
Conjecture and formula have abounded. Systems have multiplied, some
above the others, and broken out into an inextricable growth, into which
no stranger dare enter, having found that every morning brought a new
budding, and that the definitive discovery proclaimed over-night was
about to be choked by another infallible discovery, capable at most of
lasting till the morning after. The public of Europe was astonished to
see so much imagination and so little common-sense, pretensions so
ambitious and theories so hollow, such an invasion of chimerical
existences and such an overflow of useless abstractions, so strange a
lack of discernment and so great a luxuriance of irrationality. The fact
was, that folly and genius flowed from the same source; a like faculty,
excessive and all-powerful, produced discoveries and errors. If to-day
we behold the workshop of human ideas, overcharged as it is and
encumbered by its works, we may compare it to some blast-furnace, a
monstrous machine which day and night has flamed unwearyingly, half
darkened by choking vapors, and in which the raw ore, piled heaps on
heaps, has descended, bubbling in glowing streams, into the channels in
which it has become hard. No other furnace could have melted the
shapeless mass, crusted over with the primitive scoriæ; this obstinate
elaboration and this intense heat were necessary to overcome it. Now the
heavy castings burden the earth; their weight discourages the hands
which touch them; if we would turn them to some use, they defy us or
break: as they are, they are of no use; and yet as they are, they are
the material for every tool, and the instrument of every work; it is our
business to cast them over again. Every mind must carry them back to the
forge, purify them, temper them, recast them, and extract the pure metal
from the rough mass.
Section V.--How Ideas are Reshaped
But every mind will re-forge them according to its own inner warmth; for
every nation has its original genius, in which it moulds the ideas
elsewhere derived. Thus Spain, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, renewed in a different spirit Italian painting and poetry.
Thus the Puritans and Jansenists thought out in new shapes primitive
Protestantism; thus the French of the eighteenth century widened and put
forth the liberal ideas which the English had applied or proposed in
religion and politics. It is so in the present day. The French cannot at
once reach, like the Germans, lofty aggregate conceptions. They can only
march step by step, starting from concrete ideas, rising gradually to
abstract ideas, after the progressive methods and gradual analysis of
Condillac and Descartes. But this slower route leads almost as far as
the other; and, in addition, it avoids many wrong steps. It is by this
route that we succeed in correcting and comprehending the views of Hegel
and Goethe; and if we look around us, at the ideas which are gaining
ground, we find that we are already arriving thither. Positivism, based
on all modern experience, and freed since the death of its founder from
his social and religious fancies, has assumed a new life, by reducing
itself to noting the connection of natural groups and the chain of
established sciences. On the other hand, history, novels, and criticism,
sharpened by the refinements of Parisian culture, have made us
acquainted with the laws of human events; nature has been shown to be an
order of facts, man a continuation of nature; and we have seen a
superior mind, the most delicate, the most lofty of our own time,
resuming and modifying the German divinations, expounding in the French
manner everything which the science of myth, religion, and language had
stored up, beyond the Rhine, during the last sixty years.[350]
Section VI.--Growth of German Ideas in England
The growth in England is more difficult; for the aptitude for general
ideas is less, and the mistrust of general ideas is greater: they reject
at once all that remotely or nearly seems capable of injuring practical
morality or established dogma. The positive spirit seems as if it must
exclude all German ideas; and yet it is the positive spirit which
introduces them. Thus theologians,[351] having desired to represent to
themselves with entire clearness and certitude the characters of the New
Testament, have suppressed the halo and mist in which distance enveloped
them; they have figured them with their garments, gestures, accent, all
the shades of emotion of their style, with the species of imagination
which their age has imposed, amidst the scenery which they have looked
upon, amongst the mains of former ages before which they have spoken,
with all the circumstances, physical or moral, which learning and travel
can render sensible, with all the comparisons which modern physiology
and psychology could suggest; they have given us their precise and
demonstrated, colored and graphic, idea; they have seen these
personages, not through ideas and as myths, but face to face, and as
men. They have applied Macaulay's art to exegesis; and if the entire
German erudition could pass unmutilated through this crucible, its
solidity, as well as its value, would be doubled.
But there is another wholly Germanic route by which German ideas may
become English. This is the road which Carlyle has taken; by this,
religion and poetry in the two countries are alike; by it, the two
nations are sisters. The sentiment of internal things (insight) is in
the race, and this sentiment is a sort of philosophical divination. At
need, the heart takes the place of the brain. The inspired, impassioned
man penetrates into things; perceives the cause by the shock which he
feels from it; he embraces aggregates by the lucidity and velocity of
his creative imagination; he discovers the unity of a group by the unity
of the emotion which he receives from it. For as soon as we create, we
feel within ourselves the force which acts in the objects of our
thought; our sympathy reveals to us their sense and connection;
intuition is a finished and living analysis; poets and prophets,
Shakespeare and Dante, St. Paul and Luther, have been systematic
theorists, without wishing it, and their visions comprise general
conceptions of man and the universe. Carlyle's mysticism is a power of
the same kind. He translates, into a poetic and religious style, German
philosophy. He speaks, like Fichte, of the divine idea of the world, the
reality which lies at the bottom of every apparition. He speaks, like
Goethe, of the spirit which eternally weaves the living robe of
Divinity. He borrows their metaphors, only he takes them literally. He
considers the god, which they consider as a form or a law, as a
mysterious and' sublime being. He conceives by exaltation, by painful
reverie, by a confused sentiment of the interweaving of existences, that
unity of nature which they arrive at by dint of reasonings and
abstractions. Here is a last route, steep doubtless, and little
frequented, for reaching the summits from which German thought at first
issued forth. Methodical analysis added to the co-ordination of the
positive sciences; French criticism, refined by literary taste and
worldly observation; English criticism, supported by practical
common-sense and positive intuition; lastly, in a niche apart,
sympathetic and poetic imagination; these are the four routes by which
the human mind is now proceeding to reconquer the sublime heights to
which it believed itself carried, and which it has lost. These routes
all conduct to the same summit, but with different prospects. That by
which Carlyle has advanced, being the lengthiest, has led him to the
strangest perspective. I will let him speak for himself; he will tell
the reader what he has seen.
Part III.--Philosophy, Morality, and Criticism
"However it may be with Metaphysics, and other abstract Science
originating in the Head (_Verstand_) alone, no Life-Philosophy
(_Lebens-philosophie_), such as this of Clothes pretends to be, which
originates equally in the Character (_Gemüth_), and equally speaks
thereto, can attain its significance till the Character itself is known
and seen."[352]
Carlyle has related, under the name of Teufelsdroeckh, all the
succession of emotions which lead to this Life-Philosophy. They are
those of a modern Puritan; the same doubts, despairs, inner conflicts,
exaltations, and pangs, by which the old Puritans arrived at faith: it
is their faith under other forms. With him, as with them, the spiritual
and inner man frees himself from the exterior and carnal; perceives duty
amidst the solicitations of pleasure; discovers God through the
appearances of nature; and, beyond the world and the instincts of sense,
sees a supernatural world and instinct.
Section I.--Carlyle's Metaphysics
The specialty of Carlyle, as of every mystic, is to see a double meaning
in everything. For him texts and objects are capable of two
interpretations: the one gross, open to all, serviceable for ordinary
life; the other sublime, open to a few, serviceable to a higher life.
Carlyle says:
"To the eye of vulgar Logic, what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears
Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and
divine Apparition. Round his mysterious Me, there lies, under all those
wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of
Heaven.... Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and
Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricably
over-shrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a God."[353]
"For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation
of Spirit: were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing
Visible, nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as
Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial,
Invisible, 'unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright?'"[354]
"All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own
account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only
spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and _body_ it forth."[355]
Language, poetry, arts, church, state, are only symbols:
"In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or
less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the
Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand
visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is
man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds
himself encompassed with Symbols, recognised as such or not recognised:
the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it,
what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does
symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is
in him?"[356]
Let us rise higher still and regard Time and Space, those two abysses
which it seems nothing could fill up or destroy, and over which hover
our life and our universe. "They are but forms of our thought.... There
is neither Time nor Space; they are but two grand fundamental,
world-enveloping appearances, SPACE and TIME. These as spun and woven
for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial Me for dwelling
here, and yet to blind it--lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas,
or warp and woof, whereby all minor illusions, in this Phantasm and
Existence, weave and paint themselves."[357] Our root is in eternity; we
seem to be born to die, but actually, _we are._
"Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are
perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and
whatever will be, is even now and for ever.... Are we not Spirits, that
are shaped into a body, into an appearance; and that fade away again
into air and Invisibility?"[358] "O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is
awful, to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within
him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them;
this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are
dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through
some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the
Flesh.
"And again, do we not squeak and gibber (in our discordant,
screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and
feeble, and fearful; or uproar (_poltern_), and revel in our mad Dance
of the Dead--till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still
Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day?"[359]
What is there, then, beneath all these empty appearances? What is this
motionless existence, whereof nature is but the "changing and living
robe"? None knows; if the heart divines it, the mind perceives it not.
"Creation, says one, lies before us like a glorious rainbow; but the sun
that made it lies behind us, hidden from us." We have only the sentiment
thereof, not the idea. We feel that this universe is beautiful and
terrible, but its essence will remain ever unnamed. We have only to fall
on our knees before this veiled face; wonder and adoration are our true
attitude:
"The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and
worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried
the whole _Mécanique Céleste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and the
epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories, with their results, in
his single head--is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no
Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.
"Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy world by
the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the handlamp of
what I call Attorney-Logic: and 'explain' all, 'account' for all, or
believe nothing of it. Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; who so
recognises the unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which is
everywhere under our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe is
an oracle and Temple, as well as a Kitchen and Cattle-stall--he shall be
a delirious Mystic; to him thou, with sniffing charity, wilt
protrusively proffer thy Hand-lamp, and shriek, as one injured, when he
kicks his foot through it."[360]
"We speak of the Volume of Nature; and truly a Volume it is--whose
Author and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much as
well know the Alphabet thereof? With its Words, Sentences, and grand
descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar
Systems, and Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is a Volume
written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which
even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line.
As for your Institutes, and Academies of Science, they strive bravely,
and from amid the thick-crowded, inextricably intertwisted hieroglyphic
writing, pick out, by dexterous combination, some Letters in the vulgar
Character and therefrom put together this and the other economic Recipe,
of high avail in Practice."[361]
Do we believe, perhaps,
"That Nature is more than some boundless Volume of such Recipes, or
huge, well-nigh inexhaustible Domestic-Cookery Book, of which the whole
secret will in this manner one day evolve itself?..."[362]
"And what is that Science, which the scientific head alone, were it
screwed off, and (like the Doctor's in the Arabian tale) set in a basin,
to keep it alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart, but one
other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts, for which the Scientific
Head (having a soul in it) is too noble an organ? I mean that Thought,
without Reverence, is barren, perhaps poisonous."[363]
Let the scales drop from our eyes, and let us look:
"Then sawest thou that this fair-Universe, were it in the meanest
province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that
through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every
Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams."[364]
"Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and
forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission appears. What
Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of
Industry; one, hunter-like, climbing the giddy Alpine heights of
Science; one, madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with
his fellow:--and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture
falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like
some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does
this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn,
quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a
God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-ho§t, we emerge from the Inane;
haste stormfully across the astonished Earth, then plunge again into the
Inane.... But whence?--O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows
not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to
God."[365]
Section II.--His Transposition of German Metaphysics into English
Puritanism
This vehement religious poetry, charged as it is with memories of Milton
and Shakespeare, is but an English transcription of German ideas. There
is a fixed rule for transposing--that is, for converting into one
another the ideas of a positivist, a pantheist, a spiritualist, a
mystic, a poet, a head given to images, and a head given to formulas. We
may mark all the steps which lead simple philosophical conception to its
extreme and violent state. Take the world as science shows it; it is a
regular group or series, which has a law; according to science, it is
nothing more. As from the law we deduce the series, we may say that the
law engenders it, and consider this law as a force. If we are an artist,
we will seize in the aggregate the force, the series of effects, and the
fine regular manner in which force produces the series. To my mind, this
sympathetic representation is of all the most exact and complete:
knowledge is limited, as long as it does not arrive at this, and it is
complete when it has arrived there. But beyond, there commence the
phantoms which the mind creates, and by which it dupes itself. If we
have a little imagination, we will make of this force a distinct
existence, situated beyond the reach of experience, spiritual, the
principle and the substance of concrete things. That is a metaphysical
existence. Let us add one degree to our imagination and enthusiasm, and
we will say that this spirit, situated beyond time and space, is
manifested through these: that it subsists and animates everything, that
we have in it motion, existence, and life. When carried to the limits of
vision and ecstasy, we will declare that this principle is the only
reality, that the rest is but appearance: thenceforth we are deprived of
all the means of defining it; we can affirm nothing of it, but that it
is the source of things, and that nothing can be affirmed of it; we
consider it as a grand unfathomable abyss; we seek, in order to come at
it, a path other than that of clear ideas; we extol sentiment,
exaltation. If we have a gloomy temperament, we seek it, like the
sectarians, painfully, amongst prostrations and agonies. By this scale
of transformations, the general idea becomes a poetical, then a
philosophical, then a mystical existence; and German metaphysics,
concentrated and heated, is changed into English Puritanism.
Section III.--Conception of God and Duty
What distinguishes this mysticism from others, is its practicality. The
Puritan is troubled not only about what he ought to believe, but about
what he ought to do; he craves an answer to his doubts, but especially a
rule for his conduct; he is tormented by the notion of his ignorance, as
well as by the horror of his vices; he seeks God, but duty also. In his
eyes the two are but one; moral sense is the promoter and guide of
philosophy:
"Is there no God, then: but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever
since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and _see_ing it
go? Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine
Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made-up of Desire and
Fear, of emanations from the gallows and from Dr. Graham's
Celestial-Bed? Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of
Tarsus, whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that _he_ was the
'chief of sinners;' and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (_wohlgemuth_),
spend much of his time in fiddling? Foolish Word-monger and
Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the
Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of
pleasure--I tell thee, Nay!"[366]
There is an instinct within us which says Nay. We discover within us
something higher than love of happiness--the love of sacrifice. That is
the divine part of our soul. We perceive in it and by it the God, who
otherwise would continue ever unknown. By it we penetrate an unknown and
sublime world. There is an extraordinary state of the soul, by which it
leaves selfishness, renounces pleasure, cares no more for itself, adores
pain, comprehends holiness.[367]
This obscure beyond, which the senses cannot reach, the reason cannot
define, which the imagination figures as a king and a person; this is
holiness, this is the sublime. "The hero is he who lives in the inward
sphere of things, in the True, Divine, Eternal, which exists always,
unseen to most under the Temporary, Trivial; his being is in that....
His life is a piece of the everlasting heart of nature itself."[368]
Virtue is a revelation, heroism is a light, conscience a philosophy; and
we shall express in the abstract this moral mysticism, by saying that
God, for Carlyle, is a mystery whose only name is the Ideal.
Section IV.--Conception of Christianity
This faculty for perceiving the inner sense of things and this
disposition to search out the moral sense of things, have produced in
him all his doctrines, and first his Christianity. This Christianity is
very broad: Carlyle takes religion in the German manner: after a
symbolical fashion. This is why he is called a Pantheist, which in plain
language means a madman, or a rogue. In England, too, he is exorcised.
His friend Sterling sent him long dissertations, to bring him back to a
personal God. Every moment he wounds to the quick the theologians, who
make of the prime cause an architect or an administrator. He shocks them
still more when he touches upon dogma; he considers Christianity as a
myth, of which the essence is the Worship of Sorrow:
"Knowest thou that '_Worship of sorrow_'? The Temple thereof founded
some eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle,
the habitation of doleful creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; in a
low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the Altar still
there, and its sacred Lamp perennially burning."[369]
But its guardians know it no more. A frippery of conventional adornments
hides it from the eyes of men. The Protestant Church in the nineteenth
century, like the Catholic Church in the sixteenth, needs a reformation.
We want a new Luther:
"For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body
Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; and if all your
Craft-Guilds and Associations for Industry, of hand or of head, are the
Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying _under_ such
SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;--then is Religion the inmost
Pericardial and Nervous Tissue which ministers Life and warm Circulation
to the whole...
"Meanwhile, in our era of the World, those same Church Clothes have gone
sorrowfully out-at-elbows: nay, far worse, many of them have become mere
hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure or Spirit any
longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid
accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares on you with
its glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of Life--some generation and half
after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in unnoticed nooks is
weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith to reappear and bless us, or
our sons or grandsons."[370]
Christianity, once reduced to the sentiment of abnegation, other
religions resume, in consequence, dignity and importance. They are, like
Christianity, forms of universal religion. "They have all had a truth in
them, or men would not have taken them up."[371] They are no quack's
imposture or poet's dream. They are an existence, more or less troubled
by the mystery august and infinite, which is at the bottom of the
universe:
"Canopus shining down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness
(that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever
witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man,
whom it was guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart,
with all feelings in it, with no _speech_ for any feeling, it might seem
a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep
Eternity; revealing the inner Splendour to him."[372]
"Grand Lamaism," Popery itself, interpret after their fashion the
sentiment of the divine; therefore Popery itself is to be respected.
"While a pious life remains capable of being led by it,... let it last
as long as it can."[373] What matters if people call it idolatry?
"Idol is _Eidolon_, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a symbol
of God.... Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by
_eidola_, or things seen?... The most rigorous Puritan has his
Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things,
and worships thereby.... All creeds, liturgies, religious forms,
conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense
_eidola_, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols,
by Idols:--we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst
Idolatry is only more idolatrous."[374]
The only detestable idolatry is that from which the sentiment has
departed, which consists only in ceremonies learned by rote, in
mechanical repetition of prayers, in decent profession of formulas not
understood. The deep veneration of a monk of the twelfth century,
prostrated before the relics of St. Edmund, was worth more than the
conventional piety and cold philosophical religion of a Protestant of
to-day. Whatever the worship, it is the sentiment which gives it its
whole value. And this sentiment is that of morality:
"The one end, essence, and use of all religion, past, present, and to
come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience, or Inner Light
of ours, alive and shining.... All religion was here to remind us,
better or worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite
_infinite_ difference there is between a Good man and a Bad; to bid us
love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the other--strive
infinitely to _be_ the one, and not to be the other. 'All religion
issues in due Practical Hero-worship.'"[375]
"All true Work is religion; and whatsoever religion is not Work may go
and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where
it will; with me it shall have no harbour."[376]
Though it has "no harbour" with Carlyle, it has elsewhere. We touch here
the English and narrow feature of this German and broad conception.
There are many religions which are not moral; there are more still which
are not practical. Carlyle would reduce the heart of man to the English
sentiment of duty, and his imagination to the English sentiment of
respect. The half of human poetry escapes his grasp. For if a part of
ourselves raises us to abnegation and virtue, another part leads us to
enjoyment and pleasure. Man is pagan as well as Christian; nature has
two faces: several races, India, Greece, Italy, have only comprehended
the second, and have had for religions merely the adoration of
overflowing force and the ecstasy of grand imagination; or otherwise the
admiration of harmonious form, with the culture of pleasure, beauty, and
happiness.
Section V.--Carlyle's Criticism
His criticism of literary works is of the same character and violence,
and has the same scope and the same limits, the same principle and the
same conclusions, as his criticism of religious works. Carlyle has
introduced the great ideas of Hegel and Goethe, and has confined them
under the narrow discipline of Puritan sentiment.[377] He considers the
poet, the writer, the artist, as an interpreter of "The Divine Idea of
the World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance;" as a revealer
of the infinite, as representing his century, his nation, his age: we
recognize here all the German formulas. They signify that the artist
detects and expresses better than anyone, the salient and durable
features of the world which surrounds him, so that we might draw from
his work a theory of man and of nature, together with a picture of his
race and of his time. This discovery has renewed criticism. Carlyle owes
to it his finest views, his lessons on Shakespeare and Dante, his
studies on Goethe, Dr. Johnson, Burns, and Rousseau. Thus, by a natural
enthusiasm, he becomes the herald of German literature; he makes himself
the apostle of Goethe; he has praised him with a neophyte's fervor, to
the extent of lacking on this subject skill and perspicacity; he calls
him a Hero, presents his life as an example to all the men of our
century; he will not see his paganism, manifest as it is, and so
repellent to a Puritan. Through the same causes, he has made of
Jean-Paul Richter, an affected clown, and an extravagant humorist: "a
giant," a sort of prophet; he has heaped eulogy on Novalis and the
mystic dreamers; he has set the democrat Burns above Byron; he has
exalted Dr. Johnson, that honest pedant, the most grotesque of literary
behemoths. His principle is, that in a work of the mind, form is little:
the basis alone is important. As soon as a man has a profound sentiment,
a strong conviction, his book is beautiful. A writing, be it what it
will, only manifests the soul: if the soul is serious, if it is
intimately and habitually shaken by the grave thoughts which ought to
preoccupy a soul; if it loves what is good, is devoted, endeavors with
its whole effort, without any mental reservation of interest or
self-love, to publish the truth which strikes it, it has reached its
goal. We have nothing to do with the talent; we need not to be pleased
by beautiful forms; our sole object is to find ourselves face to face
with the sublime; the whole destiny of man is to perceive heroism;
poetry and art have no other employment or merit. We see how far and
with what excess Carlyle possesses the Germanic sentiment, why he loves
the mystics, humorists, prophets, illiterate writers, and men of
action, spontaneous poets, all who violate regular beauty through
ignorance, brutality, folly, or deliberately. He goes so far as to
excuse the rhetoric of Dr. Johnson because Johnson was loyal and
sincere; he does not distinguish in him the literary man from the
practical; he avoids seeing the classic declaimer, a strange compound of
Scaliger, Boileau, and La Harpe, majestically decked out in the
Ciceronian gown, in order to see only a man of faith and conviction.
Such a habit prevents a man seeing one-half of things. Carlyle speaks
with scornful indifference[378] of modern dilettanteism, seems to
despise painters, admits no sensible beauty. Wholly on the side of the
authors, he neglects the artists; for the source of art is the sentiment
of form; and the greatest artists, the Italians, the Greeks, did not
know, like their priests and poets, any beauty beyond that of
voluptuousness and force. Thence also it comes that he has no taste for
French literature. The exact order, the fine proportions, the perpetual
regard for the agreeable and proper, the harmonious structure of clear
and consecutive ideas, the delicate picture of society, the perfection
of style--nothing which moves us has attraction for him. His mode of
comprehending life is too far removed from ours. In vain he tries to
understand Voltaire, all he can do is to slander him:
"We find no heroism of character in him, from first to last; nay, there
is not, that we know of, one great thought in all his six-and-thirty
quartos.... He sees but a little way into Nature; the mighty All, in its
beauty and infinite mysterious grandeur, humbling the small _me_ into
nothingness, has never even for moments been revealed to him; only this
and that other atom of it, and the differences and discrepancies of
these two, has he looked into and noted down. His theory of the world,
his picture of man and man's life is little; for a poet and philosopher,
even pitiful. 'The Divine idea, that which lies at the bottom of
appearances,' was never more invisible to any man. He reads history, not
with the eyes of a devout seer, or even of a critic, but through a pair
of mere anticatholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama enacted on the
theatre of Infinitude, with suns for lamps and Eternity as a
background,... but a poor wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through
ten centuries, between the _Encyclopédie_ and the _Sorbonne._... God's
Universe is a larger patrimony of St. Peter, from which it were well and
pleasant to hunt out the Pope.... The still higher praise of having had
a right or noble aim cannot be conceded him without many limitations,
and may, plausibly enough, be altogether denied.... The force necessary
for him was nowise a great and noble one; but small, in some respects a
mean one, to be nimbly and seasonably put into use. The Ephesian temple,
which it had employed many wise heads and strong arms for a lifetime to
build, could be _un_built by one madman, in a single hour."[379]
These are big words; we will not employ the like. I will simply say,
that if a man were to judge Carlyle, as a Frenchman, as he judges
Voltaire as an Englishman, he would draw a different picture of Carlyle
from that which I am trying here to draw.
Section VI.--The Future of Criticism
This trade of calumny was in vogue fifty years ago: in fifty more it
will probably have altogether ceased. The French are beginning to
comprehend the gravity of the Puritans; perhaps the English will end by
comprehending the gayety of Voltaire: the first are laboring to
appreciate Shakespeare; the second will doubtless attempt to appreciate
Racine. Goethe, the master of all modern minds, knew well how to
appreciate both.[380] The critic must add to his natural and national
soul five or six artificial and acquired souls, and his flexible
sympathy must introduce him to extinct or foreign sentiments. The best
fruit of criticism is to detach ourselves from ourselves, to constrain
us to make allowance for the surroundings in which we live, to teach us
to distinguish objects themselves through the transient appearances,
with which our character and our age never fail to clothe them. Each
person regards them through glasses of diverse focus and hue, and no one
can reach the truth save by taking into account the form and tint which
his glasses give to the objects which he sees. Hitherto we have been
wrangling and pommelling one another--this man declaring that things are
green, another that they are yellow; others, again, that they are red;
each accusing his neighbor of seeing wrong, and being disingenuous. Now,
at last, we are learning moral optics; we are finding that the color is
not in the objects, but in ourselves; we pardon our neighbors for seeing
differently from us; we recognize that they may see red what to us
appears blue, green what to us appears yellow; we can even define the
kind of glasses which produces yellow; and the kind which produces
green, divine their effects from their nature, predict to people the
tint under which the object we are about to present to them will appear,
construct beforehand the system of every mind, and perhaps one day free
ourselves from every system. "As a poet," said Goethe, "I am a
polytheist; as a naturalist, a pantheist; as a moral man, a deist; and
in order to express my mind, I need all these forms." In fact, all these
glasses are serviceable, for they all show us some new aspect of things.
The important point is to have not one, but several, to employ each at
the suitable moment: not to mind the particular color of these glasses,
but to know that behind these million moving poetical tints, optics only
prove transformations, governed by a law.
Part IV.--Conception of History
Section I.--Great Men
"Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this
world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns,
and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men
contrived to do, or to attain; all things that we see standing
accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the
practical realisation and embodiment of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great
Men sent into the world; the soul of the whole world's history, it may
justly be considered, were the history of these."[381]
Whatever they be, poets, reformers, writers, men of action, revealers,
he gives them all a mystical character;
"Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at
first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings
to us.... Direct from the Inner Fact of things;--he lives, and has to
live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he
is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it glares in upon
him.... It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion
of the primal reality of things."[382]
In vain the ignorance of his age and his own imperfections mar the
purity of his original vision; he ever attains some immutable and
life-giving truth; for this truth he is listened to, and by this truth
he is powerful. That which he has discovered is immortal and
efficacious:
"The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene
owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism,
what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great
exactness added to the Eternities; remains forever a new divine portion
of the Sum of things."[383]
"No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself,
dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the
vivifying influence in man's life. Religion, I find, stands upon it ...
What, therefore, is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but
an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great?
Society is founded on Hero-worship."[384]
This feeling is the deepest part of man. It exists even in this
levelling and destructive age: "I seem to see in this indestructibility
of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant, lower than which the confused
wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall."[385]
Section II.--Wherein Carlyle is Original
We have here a German theory, but transformed, made precise, thickened
after the English manner. The Germans said that every nation, period,
civilization, has its idea; that is, its chief feature, from which the
rest were derived; so that philosophy, religion, arts, and morals, all
the elements of thought and action, could be deduced from some original
and fundamental quality, from which all proceeded and in which all
ended. Where Hegel proposed an idea, Carlyle proposes a heroic
sentiment. It is more palpable and moral. To complete his escape from
the vague, he considers this sentiment in a hero. He must give to
abstractions a body and soul; he is not at ease in pure conceptions, and
wishes to touch a real being.
But this being, as he conceives it, is an abstract of the rest. For
according to him, the hero contains and represents the civilization in
which he is comprised; he has discovered, proclaimed or practised an
original conception, and in this his age has followed him. The knowledge
of a heroic sentiment, thus gives us a knowledge of a whole age. By this
method Carlyle has emerged beyond biography. He has rediscovered the
grand views of his masters. He has felt, like them, that a civilization,
vast and dispersed as it is over time and space, forms an indivisible
whole. He has combined, in a system of hero-worship, the scattered
fragments which Hegel united by a law. He has derived from a common
sentiment the events which the Germans derived from a common definition.
He has comprehended the deep and distant connection of things, such as
bind a great man to his time, such as connect the works of accomplished
thought with the stutterings of infant thought, such as link the wise
inventions of modern constitutions to the disorderly furies of primitive
barbarism:
"Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were
specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men
and things;--progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons. ... Hrolf or
Rollo, Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing
England at this hour."[386]
"No wild Saint Dominies and Thebaïd Eremites, there had been no
melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavour, Scandinavian and other, from
Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakespeare to
speak. Nay, the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his
epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long
there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed."[387]
His great poetical or practical works only publish or apply this
dominant idea; the historian makes use of it to rediscover the primitive
sentiment which engenders them, and to form the segregate conception
which unites them.
[Illustration: Christ Crowned with Thorns
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Sixteenth Century.]
Section III.--In What Genuine History Consists
Hence, a new fashion of writing history. Since the heroic sentiment is
the cause of the other sentiments, it is to this the historian must
devote himself. Since it is the source of civilization, the mover of
revolutions, the master and regenerator of human life, it is in this
that he must observe civilization, revolutions and human life. Since it
is the spring of every movement, it is by this that we shall understand
every movement. Let the metaphysicians draw up deductions and formulas,
or the politicians expound situations and constitutions. Man is not an
inert being, moulded by a constitution, nor a lifeless being expressed
by formula; he is an active and living soul, capable of acting,
discovering, creating, devoting himself, and before all, of daring;
genuine history is an epic of heroism. This idea is, in my opinion,
brilliant and luminous. For men have not done great things without great
emotions. The first and sovereign motive of an extraordinary revolution
is an extraordinary sentiment. Then we see appear and swell a lofty and
all-powerful passion, which has burst the old dykes, and hurled the
current of things into a new bed. All starts from this, and it is this
which we must observe. Let us leave metaphysical formulas and political
considerations, and regard the inner state of every mind. Let us quit
bare narrative, forget abstract explanations, and study impassioned
souls. A revolution is only the birth of a great sentiment. What is this
sentiment, how is it bound to others, what is its degree, source,
effect, how does it transform the imagination, understanding, common
inclinations; what passions feed it, what proportion of folly and reason
does it embrace--these are the main questions. If anyone wishes to
represent to me the history of Buddhism, he must show me the calm
despair of the ascetics who, deadened by the contemplation of the
infinite void, and by the expectation of final annihilation, attain in
their monotonous quietude the sentiment of universal fraternity. If
anyone wishes to represent to me the history of Christianity, he must
show me the soul of a Saint John or Saint Paul, the sudden renewal of
the conscience, the faith in visible things, the transformation of a
soul penetrated by the presence of a paternal God, the irruption of
tenderness, generosity, abnegation, trust, and hope, which rescued the
wretches oppressed under the Roman tyranny and decline. To explain a
revolution is to write a partial psychology; the analysis of critics and
the divination of artists are the only instruments which can attain to
it: if we would have it precise and profound we must ask it of those
who, through their profession or their genius, possess a knowledge of
the soul--Shakespeare, Saint-Simon, Balzac, Stendhal. This is why we
may occasionally ask it of Carlyle. And there is a history which we may
ask of him in preference to all others, that of the Revolution which had
conscience for its source, which set God in the councils of the state,
which imposed strict duty, which provoked severe heroism. The best
historian of Puritanism is a Puritan.
Section IV.--Carlyle's History of Cromwell
The history of Cromwell, Carlyle's masterpiece, is but a collection of
letters and speeches, commented on and united by a continuous narrative.
The impression which they leave is extraordinary. Grave constitutional
histories hang heavy after this compilation. The author wished to make
us comprehend a soul: the soul of Cromwell, the greatest of the
Puritans, their chief, their abstract, their hero, and their model. His
narrative resembles that of an eye-witness. A covenanter who should have
collected letters, scraps of newspapers, and daily added reflections,
interpretations, notes, and anecdotes, might have written just such a
book. At last we are face to face with Cromwell. We have his words, we
can hear his tone of voice; we seize, around each action, the
circumstances which produced it: we see him in his tent, in council,
with the proper background, with his face and costume: every detail, the
most minute, is here. And the sincerity is as great as the sympathy; the
biographer confesses his ignorance, the lack of documents, the
uncertainty; he is perfectly loyal, though a poet and a sectarian. With
him we simultaneously restrain and give free play to our conjectures;
and we feel at every step, amidst our affirmations and our reservations,
that we are firmly planting our feet upon the truth. Would that all
history were like this, a selection of texts provided with a commentary!
I would exchange, for such a history, all the regular arguments, all the
beautiful, colorless narrations of Robertson and Hume. I can verify the
judgment of the author whilst reading this; I no more think after him,
but for myself; the historian does not obtrude himself between me and
his subject. I see a fact, and not an account of a'fact; the oratorical
and personal envelope, with which a narrative covers the truth,
disappears; I can touch the truth itself. And this Cromwell, with his
Puritans, comes forth from the test, recreated and renewed. We divined
pretty well already that he was not a mere man of ambition, a hypocrite,
but we took him for a fanatic and hateful disputant. We consider these
Puritans as gloomy madmen, shallow brains, and full of scruples. Let us
quit our French and modern ideas, and enter into these souls: we shall
find there something else than hypochondria, namely, a grand
sentiment--am I a just man? And if God, who is perfect justice, were to
judge me at this moment, what sentence would he pass upon me?--Such is
the original idea of the Puritans, and through them came the Revolution
into England. The feeling of the difference there is between good and
evil, filled for them all time and space, and became incarnate, and
expressed for them, by such words as Heaven and Hell. They were struck
by the idea of duty. They examined themselves by this light, severely
and without intermission; they conceived the sublime model of infallible
and complete virtue; they were imbued therewith; they drowned in this
absorbing thought all worldly prejudices and all inclinations of the
senses; they conceived a horror even of imperceptible faults, which an
honest mind will excuse in itself; they exacted from themselves absolute
and continuous perfection, and they entered into life with a fixed
resolve to suffer and do all, rather than deviate one step. We laugh at
a revolution about surplices and chasubles; there was a sentiment of the
divine, underneath all these disputes about vestments. These poor folk,
shopkeepers and farmers, believed, with all their heart, in a sublime
and terrible God, and the manner how to worship Him was not a trifling
thing for them:
"Suppose now it were some matter of vital concernment, some transcendent
matter (as Divine worship is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb
with its excess of feeling, knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance
at all, and preferred formless silence to any utterance there
possible--what should we say of a man coming forward to represent or
utter it for you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man--let him
depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; are
mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately
offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the
Greeks."[388]
This has caused the Revolution, and not the Writ of Ship-money, or any
other political vexation. "You may take my purse,... but the Self is
mine and God my Maker's."[389] And the same sentiment which made them
rebels, made them conquerors. Men could not understand how discipline
could exist in an army in which an inspired corporal would reproach a
lukewarm general. They thought it strange that generals, who sought the
Lord with tears, had learned administration and strategy in the Bible.
They wondered that madmen could be men of business. The truth is, that
they were not madmen, but men of business. The whole difference between
them and practical men whom we know, is that they had a conscience; this
conscience was their flame; mysticism and dreams were but the smoke.
They sought the true, the just; and their long prayers, their nasal
preaching, their quotations from the Bible, their tears, their anguish,
only mark the sincerity and ardor with which they applied themselves to
the search. They read their duty in themselves; the Bible only aided
them. At need they did violence to it, when they wished to verify by
texts the suggestions of their own hearts. It was this sentiment of duty
which united, inspired, and sustained them, which made their discipline,
courage, and boldness; which raised to ancient heroism Hutchinson,
Milton, and Cromwell; which instigated all decisive deeds, grand
resolves, marvellous successes, the declaration of war, the trial of the
king, the purge of Parliament, the humiliation of Europe, the protection
of Protestantism, the sway of the seas. These men are the true heroes of
England; they display, in high relief, the original characteristics and
noblest features of England--practical piety, the rule of conscience,
manly resolution, indomitable energy. They founded England, in spite of
the corruption of the Stuarts and the relaxation of modern manners, by
the exercise of duty, by the practice of justice, by obstinate toil, by
vindication of right, by resistance to oppression, by the conquest of
liberty, by the repression of vice. They founded Scotland, they founded
the United States; at this day they are, by their descendants, founding
Australia and colonizing the world. Carlyle is so much their brother
that he excuses or admires their excesses--the execution of the king,
the mutilation of Parliament, their intolerance, inquisition, the
despotism of Cromwell, the theocracy of Knox. He sets them before us as
models, and judges both past and present by them alone.
Section V.--His History of the French Revolution
Hence, he saw nothing but evil in the French Revolution. He judges it as
unjustly as he judges Voltaire, and for the same reasons. He understands
our manner of acting no better than our manner of thinking. He looks for
Puritan sentiment; and, as he does not find it, he condemns us. The idea
of duty, the religious spirit, self-government, the authority of an
austere conscience, can alone, in his opinion, reform a corrupt society;
and none of all these are to be met with in French society. The
philosophy which has produced and guided the Revolution was simply
destructive, proclaiming no other gospel but "that a lie cannot be
believed! Philosophy knows only this: Her other relief is mainly that in
spiritual, supra-sensual matters, no belief is possible." The theory of
the Rights of Man, borrowed from Rousseau, is only a logical game, a
pedantry almost as opportune as a "Theory of Irregular Verbs." The
manners in vogue were the epicurism of Faublas. The morality in vogue
was the promise of universal happiness. Incredulity, hollow rant,
sensuality, were the mainsprings of this reformation. Men let loose
their instincts and overturned the barriers. They replaced corrupt
authority by unchecked anarchy. In what could a jacquerie of brutalized
peasants, impelled by ecclesiastical arguments, end?
"For ourselves, we answer that French Revolution means here the open
violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against
corrupt, worn-out Authority....[390]
"So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst up from its infinite
depths; and these men its rulers and healers, without life-rule for
themselves--other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques! To
the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an
accident under the sky. Man is without duty round him, except it be to
make the Constitution. He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath
him; he has no God in the world.
"While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the upper, and want and
stagnation of the lower, and universal misery is very certain, what
other thing is certain?... What will remain? The five unsatiated senses
will remain, the sixth insatiable sense (of vanity); the whole
_dœmoniac_ nature of man will remain.
"Man is not what we call a happy animal; his appetite for sweet victual
is too enormous.... (He cannot subsist) except by girding himself
together for continual endeavour and endurance."[391]
But set the good beside the evil; put down virtues beside vices. These
sceptics believed in demonstrated truth, and would have her alone for
mistress. These logicians founded society only on justice, and risked
their lives rather than renounce an established theorem. These
epicureans embraced in their sympathies entire humanity. These furious
men, these workmen, these hungry, threadbare peasants, fought on the
frontiers for humanitarian interests and abstract principles. Generosity
and enthusiasm abounded in France, as well as in England; acknowledge
them under a form which is not English. These men were devoted to
abstract truth, as the Puritan to divine truth; they followed
philosophy, as the Puritans followed religion; they had for their aim
universal salvation, as the Puritans had individual salvation. They
fought against evil in society, as the Puritans fought it in the soul.
They were generous, as the Puritans were virtuous. They had, like them,
a heroism, but sympathetic, sociable, ready to proselytize, which
reformed Europe, whilst the English one only served England.
Section VI.--His Opinion of Modern England
This exaggerated Puritanism, which revolted Carlyle against the French
Revolution, revolts him against modern England:
"We have forgotten God;--in the most modern dialect and very truth of
the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it is _not._
We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things,
and opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. We quietly
believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible
PERHAPS; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive
Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges,
Dining-tables--whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the Truth of
this Universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the pudding
and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical man.
"There is no longer any God for us! God's Laws are become a
Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency; the Heavens
overarch, us only as an Astronomical Timekeeper; a butt for
Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at:
in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the _soul_ out of him; and
now, after the due period--begins to find the want of it! This is verily
the plague-spot; centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening
all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it,
here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its worldwide
upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world lies
writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our
disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand
on this. There is no religion: there is no God; man has lost his soul,
and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing
Reform bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found
no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour,
reappears in new force and desperateness next hour."[392]
Since the return of the Stuarts, we are utilitarians or sceptics. We
believe only in observation, statistics, gross and concrete truth; or
else we doubt, half believe, on hearsay, with reserve. We have no moral
convictions, and we have only floating convictions. We have lost the
mainspring of action; we no longer set duty in the midst of our resolve,
as the sole and undisturbed foundation of life; we are caught by all
kinds of little experimental and positive receipts, and we amuse
ourselves with all kinds of pretty pleasures, well chosen and arranged.
We are egotists or dilettanti. We no longer look on life as an august
temple, but as a machine for solid profits, or as a hall for refined
amusements. We have our rich men, our manufacturers, our bankers, who
preach the gospel of gold; we have gentlemen, dandies, lords, who preach
the gospel of manners. We overwork ourselves to heap up guineas, or else
we make ourselves insipid to attain an elegant dignity. Our hell is no
longer, as under Cromwell, the dread of being found guilty before the
just Judge, but the dread of making a bad speculation, or of
transgressing etiquette. We have for our aristocracy greedy shopkeepers,
who reduce life to a calculation of cost and sale-prices; and idle
amateurs, whose great business in life is to preserve the game on their
estates. We are no longer governed. Our government has no other ambition
than to preserve the public peace, and to get in the taxes. Our
constitution lays it down as a principle that, in order to discover the
true and the good, we have only to make two million imbeciles vote. Our
Parliament is a great word-mill, where plotters out-bawl each other for
the sake of making a noise.[393]
Under this thin cloak of conventionalities and phrases, ominously growls
the irresistible democracy. England perishes if she ever ceases to be
able to sell a yard of cotton at a farthing less than others. At the
least check in the manufactures, 1,500,000 workmen,[394] without work,
live upon public charity. The formidable masses, given up to the hazards
of industry, urged by lust, impelled by hunger, oscillate between the
fragile cracking barriers; we are nearing the final breaking-up, which
will be open anarchy, and the democracy will heave amidst the ruins,
until the sentiment of the divine and of duty has rallied them around
the worship of heroism; until it has discovered the means of calling to
power the most virtuous and the most capable;[395] until it has given
its guidance into their hands, instead of making them subject to its
caprices; until it has recognized and reverenced its Luther and its
Cromwell, its priest and its king.
Section VII.--The Dangers of Enthusiasm.--Comparison of Carlyle and
Macaulay
Nowadays, doubtless, in the whole civilized world, democracy is swelling
or overflowing, and all the channels in which it flows are fragile or
temporary. But it is a strange offer to present for its issue the
fanaticism and tyranny of the Puritans. The society and spirit which
Carlyle proposes, as models for human nature, lasted but an hour, and
could not last longer. The asceticism of the Republic produced the
debauchery of the Restoration; Harrison preceded Rochester, men like
Bunyan raised up men like Hobbes; and the sectaries, in instituting the
despotism of enthusiasm, established by reaction the authority of the
positive mind, and the worship of gross pleasure. Exaltation is not
stable, and it cannot be exacted from man without injustice and danger.
The sympathetic generosity of the French Revolution ended in the
cynicism of the Directory and the slaughters of the empire. The
chivalric and poetic piety of the great Spanish monarchy emptied Spain
of men and of thought. The primacy of genius, taste, and intellect in
Italy, reduced her at the end of a century to voluptuous sloth and
political slavery. "What makes the angel makes the beast;" and perfect
heroism, like all excesses, ends in stupor. Human nature has its
explosions, but with intervals: mysticism is serviceable but when it is
short. Violent circumstances produce extreme conditions; great evils are
necessary in order to raise great men, and you are obliged to look for
shipwrecks when you wish to behold rescuers. If enthusiasm is beautiful,
its results and its originating circumstances are sad; it is but a
crisis, and a healthy state is better. In this respect, Carlyle himself
may serve for a proof. There is, perhaps, less genius in Macaulay than
in Carlyle; but when we have fed for some time on this exaggerated and
demoniacal style, this marvellous and sickly philosophy, this contorted
and prophetic history, these sinister and furious politics, we gladly
return to the continuous eloquence, to the vigorous reasoning, to the
moderate prognostications, to the demonstrated theories, of the generous
and solid mind which Europe has just lost, who brought honor to England,
and whose place none can fill.
[Footnote 326: Because the Kalmucks put written prayers into a calabash
turned by the wind, which in their opinion produces a perpetual adoration.
In the same way are the prayer-mills of Thibet used.]
[Footnote 327: The "Life of John Sterling," ch. V; "A Profession."]
[Footnote 328: "Sartor Resartus," 1868, bk. II. ch. VIII; Centre of
Indifference.]
[Footnote 329: "History of the French Révolution," bk. I. ch. II; Realised
Ideals.]
[Footnote 330: In the "Adoration of the Magi."]
[Footnote 331: "Latter-Day Pamphlets," 1850; Stump Orator, 35.]
[Footnote 332: "The French Revolution," I. bk. III. ch. VII; Internecine.]
[Footnote 333: "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," III. X; the end.]
[Footnote 334: "Life of Sterling."]
[Footnote 335: "Sartor Resartus," bk. I. ch. X; Pure Reason.]
[Footnote 336: Ibid.]
[Footnote 337: Ibid. bk. III. ch. I; Incident in Modern History.]
[Footnote 338: "Sailor Resartus," bk. III. ch. X; The Dandiacal Body.]
[Footnote 339: "Sartor Resartus," bk. III. ch. X; The Dandiacal Body.]
[Footnote 340: Ibid.]
[Footnote 341: Ibid.]
[Footnote 342: "Latter-Day Pamphlets," 1850; Jesuitism, 28.]
[Footnote 343: In "Past and Present," bk. II.]
[Footnote 344: Ibid. ch. I; Jocelin of Brakelond.]
[Footnote 345: Ibid. ch. II; St. Edmondsbury.]
[Footnote 346: "Lectures on Heroes," 1868.]
[Footnote 347: "Lectures on Heroes," I: The Hero as Divinity.]
[Footnote 348: "Sartor Resartus," bk. I, ch, VIII; The World out of
Clothes.]
[Footnote 349: Goethe, the greatest of them all.]
[Footnote 350: M. Renan.]
[Footnote 351: In particular, Stanley and Jowett.]
[Footnote 352: "Sartor Resartus," bk. I. ch. XI; Prospective.]
[Footnote 353: Ibid. bk. I. ch. X; Pure Reason.]
[Footnote 354: Ibid.]
[Footnote 355: Ibid. bk. I. ch. XI; Prospective.]
[Footnote 356: "Sartor Resartus," bk. III. ch. III; Symbols.]
[Footnote 357: Ibid. bk. III. ch. VIII; Natural Supernaturalism.]
[Footnote 358: Ibid.]
[Footnote 359: Ibid.]
[Footnote 360: "Sartor Resartus," bk. I. ch. X; Pure Reason.]
[Footnote 361: Ibid. bk. III. ch. VIII; Natural Supernaturalism.]
[Footnote 362: Ibid.]
[Footnote 363: "Sartor Resartus," bk. I. ch. X; Pre Reason.]
[Footnote 364: Ibid. bk. III. ch. VIII; Natural Supernaturalism.]
[Footnote 365: Ibid.]
[Footnote 366: "Sartor Resartus," bk. II. ch. VII; The Everlasting No.]
[Footnote 367: "Only this I know: If what thou namest Happiness be our
true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion
man may front much. But what, in these dull, unimaginative days, are
the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver! Not on Morality,
but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our
frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and
live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect!"--"Sartor
Resartus," bk. II. ch. VII.]
[Footnote 368: "Lectures on Heroes."]
[Footnote 369: "Sartor Resartus," bk. II. ch. IX; The Everlasting Yea.]
[Footnote 370: Ibid. bk. III. ch. II; Church Clothes.]
[Footnote 371: "Lectures on Heroes," I; The Hero as Divinity.]
[Footnote 372: "Lectures on Heroes," I; The Hero as Divinity.]
[Footnote 373: Ibid, IV; The Hero as Priest.]
[Footnote 374: Ibid.]
[Footnote 375: "Past and Present," bk. III. ch. XV; Morrison Again.]
[Footnote 376: Ibid. bk. III. ch. XII; Reward.]
[Footnote 377: "Lectures on Heroes;" Miscellanies, passim.]
[Footnote 378: "Life of Sterling."]
[Footnote 379: "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays," 4 vols.; II.
Voltaire.]
[Footnote 380: See this double praise in "Wilhelm Meister."]
[Footnote 381: "Lectures on Heroes," I; The Hero as Divinity.]
[Footnote 382: Ibid. II; The Hero as Prophet.]
[Footnote 383: "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," III. part X;
Death of the Protector.]
[Footnote 384: "Lectures on Heroes," I; The Hero as Divinity.]
[Footnote 385: Ibid.]
[Footnote 386: "Lectures on Heroes," I; The Hero as Divinity.]
[Footnote 387: Ibid. IV; The Hero as Priest.]
[Footnote 388: "Lectures on Heroes," VI; The Hero as King.]
[Footnote 389: Ibid.]
[Footnote 390: "The French Revolution," I. bk. VI. ch. I; Make the
Constitution.]
[Footnote 391: Ibid.]
[Footnote 392: "Past and Present," bk. III. ch. I; Phenomena.]
[Footnote 393: "It is his effort and desire to teach this and the other
thinking British man that said finale, the advent namely of actual open
Anarchy, cannot be distant, now when virtual disguised Anarchy,
long-continued, and waxing daily, has got to such a height; and that the
one method of staving off the fatal consummation, and steering towards
the Continents of the Future, lies not in the direction of reforming
Parliament, but of what he calls reforming Downing Street; a thing
infinitely urgent to be begun, and to be strenuously carried on. To find
a Parliament more and more the express image of the People, could,
unless the people chanced to be wise as well as miserable, give him no
satisfaction. Not this at all; but to find some sort of King, made in
the image of God, who could a little achieve for the People, if not
their spoken wishes, yet their dumb wants, and what they would at last
find to have been their instinctive will--which is a far different
matter usually, in this babbling world of ours."--Parliaments, in
"Latter-Day Pamphlets."
"A king or leader, then, in all bodies of men, there must be; be their
work what it may, there is one man here who by character, faculty,
position, is fittest of all to do it.
"He who is to be my ruler, whose will is to be higher than my will, was
chosen for me in Heaven. Neither, except in such obedience to the
Heaven-chosen, is freedom so much as conceivable."]
[Footnote 394: Official Report, 1842.]
[Footnote 395: "Latter-Day Pamphlets;" Parliaments.]
CHAPTER FIFTH
PHILOSOPHY--STUART MILL
Section I.--Lack of General Ideas
When at Oxford, some years ago, during the meeting of the British
Association, I met, amongst the few students still in residence, a young
Englishman, a man of intelligence, with whom I became intimate.[396] He
took me in the evening to the New Museum, well filled with specimens.
Here short lectures were delivered, new models of machinery were set to
work; ladies were present and took an interest in the experiments; on
the last day, full of enthusiasm, "God Save the Queen" was sung. I
admired this zeal, this solidity of mind, this organization of science,
these voluntary subscriptions, this aptitude for association and for
labor, this great machine pushed on by so many arms, and so well fitted
to accumulate, criticise, and classify facts. But yet in this abundance,
there was a void; when I read the Transactions, I thought I was present
at a congress of heads of manufactories. All these learned men verified
details and exchanged recipes. It was as though I listened to foremen,
busy in communicating their processes for tanning leather, or dyeing
cotton: general ideas were wanting. I used to regret this to my friend;
and in the evening, by his lamp, amidst that great silence in which the
university town lay wrapped, we both tried to discover its reasons.
Section II.--Why Metaphysics are Lacking
One day I said to him: You lack philosophy--I mean, what the Germans
call metaphysics. You have learned men, but you have no thinkers. Your
God impedes you. He is the Supreme Cause, and you dare not reason on
causes, out of respect for him. He is the most important personage in
England, and I see clearly that he merits his position; for he forms
part of your constitution, he is the guardian of your morality, he
judges in final appeal on all questions whatsoever, he replaces with
advantage the prefects and gendarmes with whom the nations on the
Continent are still encumbered. Yet, this high rank has the
inconvenience of all official positions; it produces a cant, prejudices,
intolerance, and courtiers. Here, close by us, is poor Mr. Max Müller,
who, in order to acclimatize the study of Sanscrit, was compelled to
discover in the Vedas the worship of a moral God, that is to say, the
religion of Paley and Addison. Some time ago, in London, I read a
proclamation of the Queen, forbidding people to play cards, even in
their own houses, on Sundays.[397] It seems that, if I were robbed, I
could not bring my thief to justice without taking a preliminary
religious oath; for the judge has been known to send a complainant away
who refused to take the oath, deny him justice, and insult him into the
bargain. Every year, when we read the Queen's speech in your papers, we
find there the compulsory mention of Divine Providence, which comes in
mechanically, like the invocation to the immortal gods on the fourth
page of a rhetorical declamation; and you remember that once, the pious
phrase having been omitted, a second communication was made to
Parliament for the express purpose of supplying it. All these cavillings
and pedantries indicate to my mind a celestial monarchy; naturally it
resembles all others; I mean that it relies more willingly on tradition
and custom than on examination and reason. A monarchy never invited men
to verify its credentials. As yours is, however, useful, well adapted to
you, and moral, you are not revolted by it; you submit to it without
difficulty, you are, at heart, attached to it; you would fear, in
touching it, to disturb the constitution and morality. You leave it in
the clouds, amidst public homage. You fall back upon yourselves, confine
yourselves to matters of fact, to minute disSections, to experiments in
the laboratory. You go culling plants and collecting shells. Science is
deprived of its head; but all is for the best, for practical life is
improved, and dogma remains intact.
Section III.--Mill's Philosophical Method
You are truly French, he answered; you ignore facts, and all at once
find yourself settled in a theory. I assure you that there are thinkers
amongst us, and not far from hence, at Christ Church, for instance. One
of them, the professor of Greek, has spoken so deeply on inspiration,
the creation and final causes, that he is out of favor. Look at this
little collection which has recently appeared, "Essays and Reviews;"
your philosophic freedom of the last century, the latest conclusions of
geology and cosmogony, the boldness of German exegesis, are here in
abstract. Some things are wanting, amongst others the waggeries of
Voltaire, the misty jargon of Germany, and the prosaic coarseness of
Comte; to my mind, the loss is small. Wait twenty years, and you will
find in London the ideas of Paris and Berlin.--But they will still be
the ideas of Paris and Berlin. Whom have you that is original?--Stuart
Mill.--Who is he?--A political writer. His little book "On Liberty" is
as admirable as Rousseau's "Contrat Social" is bad.--That is a bold
assertion.--No, for Mill decides as strongly for the independence of the
individual as Rousseau for the despotism of the State.--Very well, but
that is not enough to make a philosopher. What besides is he?--An
economist who goes beyond his science, and subordinates production to
man, instead of man to production.--Well, but this is not enough to make
a philosopher. Is he anything else?--A logician.--Very good; but of what
school?--Of his own. I told you he was original.--Is he Hegelian?--By no
means; he is too fond of facts and proofs.--Does he follow
Port-Royal?--Still less; he is too well acquainted with modern
sciences.--Does he imitate Condillac?--Certainly not; Condillac has only
taught him to write well.--Who, then, are his friends?--Locke and Comte
in the first rank; then Hume and Newton.--Is he a system-monger, a
speculative reformer?--He has too much sense for that; he only arranges
the best theories, and explains the best methods. He does not
attitudinize majestically in the character of a restorer of science; he
does not declare, like your Germans, that his book will open up a new
era for humanity. He proceeds gradually, somewhat slowly, often
creepingly, through a multitude of particular facts. He excels in giving
precision to an idea, in disentangling a principle, in discovering it
amongst a number of different facts; in refuting, distinguishing,
arguing. He has the astuteness, patience, method, and sagacity of a
lawyer.--Very well, you admit that I was right. A lawyer, an ally of
Locke, Newton, Comte, and Hume; we have here only English philosophy;
but no matter. Has he reached a grand conception of the
universe?--Yes.--Has he an individual and complete idea of nature and
the mind?--Yes.--Has he combined the operations and discoveries of the
intellect under a single principle which puts them all in a new
light?--Yes; but we have to discover this principle.--That is your
business, and I hope you will undertake it.--But I shall fall into
abstract generalities.--There is no harm in that?--But this close
reasoning will be like a quick-set hedge. We will prick our fingers with
it.--But three men out of four would cast aside such speculations as
idle.--So much the worse for them. For in what does the life of a nation
or a century consist, except in the formation of such theories? We are
not thoroughly men unless so engaged. If some dweller in another planet
were to come down here to ask us the nature of our race, we should have
to show him the five or six great ideas which we have formed of the mind
and the world. That alone would give him the measure of our
intelligence. Expound to me your theory, and I shall go away better
instructed than after having seen the masses of brick, which you call
London and Manchester.
Part I.--Experience
Section I.--The Object of Logic
Let us begin, then, at the beginning, like logicians. Mill has written
on logic. What is logic? It is a science. What is its object? The
sciences; for, suppose that you have traversed the universe, and that
you know it thoroughly: stars, earth, sun, heat, gravity, chemical
affinities, the species of minerals, geological revolutions, plants,
animals, human events, all that classifications and theories explain and
embrace, there still remain these classifications and theories to be
learnt. Not only is there an order of beings, but also an order of the
thoughts which represent them; not only plants and animals, but also
botany and zoology; not only lines, surfaces, volumes, and numbers, but
also geometry and arithmetic. Sciences, then, are as real things as
facts themselves, and therefore, as well as facts, become the subject of
study. We can analyze them as we analyze facts, investigate their
elements, composition, order, relations, and object. There is,
therefore, a science of sciences; this science is called logic, and is
the subject of Mill's work. It is no part of logic to analyze the
operations of the mind, memory, the association of ideas, external
perception, etc.; that is the business of psychology. We do not discuss
the value of such operations, the veracity of our consciousness, the
absolute certainty of our elementary knowledge; this belongs to
metaphysics. We suppose our faculties to be at work, and we admit their
primary discoveries. We take the instrument as nature has provided it,
and we trust to its accuracy. We leave to others the task of taking its
mechanism to pieces, and the curiosity which criticises its results.
Setting out from its primitive operations, we inquire how they are added
to each other; how they are combined; how one is convertible into
another; how, by dint of additions, combinations, and transformations,
they finally compose a system of connected and developed truths. We
construct a theory of science, as others construct theories of
vegetation, of the mind, or of numbers. Such is the idea of logic; and
it is plain that it has, as other sciences, a real subject-matter, its
distinct province, its manifest importance, its special method, and a
certain future