Thus, by God’s blessing, it befell thee

_Nec turpem senectam_

_Degere, nec cithara carentem_.

I would, Father, that I could get at the verity about thy poems. Those

recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of Dr. Donne

and others of thy friends, redound more to the praise of thy kind heart

than thy fancy. But what or whose was the pastoral poem of “Thealma and

Clearchus,” which thou didst set about printing in 1678, and gavest to

the world in 1683? Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author’s name, and

a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester, being eighty years of

his age, in 1679. Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as “a friend of

Edmund Spenser’s,” and how could this be?

Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill was but a name of a friend,

borrowed by thee out of modesty, and used as a cloak to cover poetry of

thine own inditing? When Mr. Flatman writes of Chalkhill, ’tis in words

well fitted to thine own merit:

Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows

Except himself, who charitably shows

The ready road to virtue and to praise,

The road to many long and happy days.

However it be, in that road, by quiet streams and through green pastures,

thou didst walk all thine almost century of years, and we, who stray into

thy path out of the highway of life, we seem to hold thy hand, and listen

to thy cheerful voice. If our sport be worse, may our content be equal,

and our praise, therefore, none the less. Father, if Master Stoddard,

the great fisher of Tweedside, be with thee, greet him for me, and thank

him for those songs of his, and perchance he will troll thee a catch of

our dear River.

Tweed! winding and wild! where the heart is unbound,

They know not, they dream not, who linger around,

How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin

From thee—the bliss withered within.

Or perhaps thou wilt better love,

The lanesome Tala and the Lyne,

And Manor wi’ its mountain rills,

An’ Etterick, whose waters twine

Wi’ Yarrow frae the forest hills;

An’ Gala, too, and Teviot bright,

An’ mony a stream o’ playfu’ speed,

Their kindred valleys a’ unite

Amang the braes o’ bonnie Tweed!

So, Master, may you sing against each other, you two good old anglers,

like Peter and Corydon, that sang in your golden age.

X.

_To M. Chapelain_.

MONSIEUR,—You were a popular poet, and an honourable, over-educated,

upright gentleman. Of the latter character you can never be deprived,

and I doubt not it stands you in better stead where you are, than the

laurels which flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.

Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day,

But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but _your_ laurel

certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus

and where Homer are. Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot

doubt it, awaited _un si bon homme_. But the moral excellence that even

Boileau admitted, _la foi, l’honneur, la probité_, do not in Parnassus

avail the popular poet, and some luckless Glatigny or Théophile, Regnier

or Gilbert, attains a kind of immortality denied to the man of many

contemporary editions, and of a great commercial success.

If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should

have been that fortunately manufactured article. You were, in matters of

the Muses, the child of many prayers. Never, since Adam’s day, have any

parents but yours prayed for a poet-child. Then Destiny, that mocks the

desires of men in general, and fathers in particular, heard the appeal,

and presented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbière his wife with the future

author of “La Pucelle.” Oh futile hopes of men, _O pectora cæca_! All

was done that education could do for a genius which, among other

qualities, “especially lacked fire and imagination,” and an ear for

verse—sad defects these in a child of the Muses. Your training in all

the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim,

like Rasselas, “Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human being can

ever be a Poet.” Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal

Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you received a

pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of the Cardinal’s

Minstrels, as M. de Tréville was Captain of the King’s Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more

richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in Prehistoric

English, among us niggard moderns! How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or

even, as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise and pension _me_;

but envy be still! Your existence was made happy indeed; you constructed

odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Hôtel Rambouillet, while the

learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious

celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic. “Who, indeed,” says

a sympathetic author, M. Théophile Gautier, “who could expect less than a

miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art—a perfect Turk in

the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the

great?” Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good faith to

advertise your merits. Hard must have been the heart that could resist

the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de

Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur

Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a genius for

finance.

If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers skilled in finance, and

some critics (Ménage and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), if ladies of birth and

taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a

great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and

appraising yourself at the public estimate?

It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops

especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the

testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you

listened to the plaudits of your friends. Nay, you ventured to pronounce

judgment on contemporaries—whom Posterity has preferred to your

perfections. “Molière,” said you, “understands the genius of comedy, and

presents it in a natural style. The plot of his best pieces is borrowed,

but not without judgment; his _morale_ is fair, and he has only to avoid

scurrility.”

Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!

Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that

your “courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work not

absolutely good.” And yet you regarded “La Pucelle” with some

complacency.

On the “Pucelle” you were occupied during a generation of mortal men. I

marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly

pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no

Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creation. First you

gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for

five whole years. Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but

appropriate medium? What says the Précieuse about you in Boileau’s

satire?

In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,

She finds but one defect, he can’t be read;

Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden’s woes,

If only he would turn his verse to prose!

The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.

Yet for this precious “Pucelle,” in the age when “Paradise Lost” was sold

for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand.

Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a

wise man who first spoke of _aurea mediocritas_. At length the great

work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden

to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so

strangely. In folio, in italics, with a score of portraits and

engravings, and _culs de lampe_, the great work was given to the world,

and had a success. Six editions in eighteen months are figures which

fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration. And then, alas! the

bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de Longueville, hearing the “Pucelle”

read aloud, murmured that it was “perfect indeed, but perfectly

wearisome.” Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you

till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbé at Ménage’s

had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.

I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the

onslaught on your “Pucelle.” These qualities, alas! are not strange to

literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us that “potter hates potter,

and poet hates poet”? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius.

Who suffered more than Molière from cabals? Yet neither the court nor

the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I

admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault

and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Visé, what were they all

compared to your enemy, Boileau? Brossette tells a story which really

makes a man pity you. You remember M. de Puimorin, who, to be in the

fashion, laughed at your once popular Epic. “It is all very well,” said

you, “for a man to laugh who cannot even read.” Whereon M. de Puimorin

replied: “Qu’il n’avoit que trop sû lire, depuis que Chapelain s’étoit

avisé de faire imprimer.” A new horror had been added to the

accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published. This repartee

was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram. He

did complete the last couplet,

Hélas! pour mes péchés, je n’ai sû que trop lire

Depuis que tu fais imprimer.

But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his

epigram. Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance. I

almost blush to think that M. Despréaux, M. Racine, and M. de Molière,

the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor

jest, and assail you. Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud

that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other

poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay

put forth his hand, and “Satan Montgomery” was no more. It did not need

a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow

him into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary

failures or successes I do not speak.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you

doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of

Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets

has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect posterity to reverse

the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice? You answered your

earliest assailant, Linière, and, by a few changes of words, turned his

epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm,

unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself. According to M. de

Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead,

you “conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious

veneration for yourself and your genius.” Probably you were protected by

the invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that

mere jealousy dictated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain’s real

fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success,

Qu’il soit le mieux renté de tous les beaux-esprits.

This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not

altogether mistaken. Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours,

and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with that eternal

problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry? Burns was a poet: and

popular. Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict

of their own generations. But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no

poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality.

Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy

left Chimène as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that

perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes

ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the

malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who

takes? Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet? I doubt it, Sir,

holding that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own

nature. Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as bad poets are

successful, and bad poets will assuredly reflect that their assailants

are merely envious, and (while their vogue lasts) that the purchasing

public is the only judge. After all, the bad poet who is popular and

“sells” is not a whit worse than the bad poets who are unpopular, and who

deride his songs.

Monsieur,

Votre très-humble serviteur, &c.

XI.

_To Sir John Maundeville_, _Kt._

(OF THE WAYS INTO YNDE.)

SIR JOHN,—Wit you well that men holden you but light, and some clepen you

a Liar. And they say that you never were born in Englond, in the town of

Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone through manye diverse Londes. And

there goeth an old knight at arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath

been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester John’s country. And he hath

been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded. Now

men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great

booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. For he saith that ye did

pill your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with

shells as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that ye

say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye took not

his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir

John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a

merry; so now, come, let me tell you of the new ways into Ynde.

In that Lond they have a Queen that governeth all the Lond, and all they

ben obeyssant to her. And she is the Queen of Englond; for Englishmen

have taken all the Lond of Ynde. For they were right good werryoures of

old, and wyse, noble, and worthy. But of late hath risen a new sort of

Englishman very puny and fearful, and these men clepen Radicals. And

they go ever in fear, and they scream on high for dread in the streets

and the houses, and they fain would flee away from all that their fathers

gat them with the sword. And this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean

folk and certain of the baser sort hear them gladly, and they say ever

that Englishmen should flee out of Ynde.

Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by many dyverse Contreyes. For Englishmen

ben very stirring and nymble. For they ben in the seventh climate, that

is of the Moon. And the Moon (ye have said it yourself, Sir John,

natheless, is it true) is of lightly moving, for to go diverse ways, and

see strange things, and other diversities of the Worlde. Wherefore

Englishmen be lightly moving, and far wandering. And they gon to Ynde by

the great Sea Ocean. First come they to Gibraltar, that was the point of

Spain, and builded upon a rock; and there ben apes, and it is so strong

that no man may take it. Natheless did Englishmen take it fro the

Spanyard, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For ye may sail all about

Africa, and past the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way unto Ynde

is long and the sea is weary. Wherefore men rather go by the Midland

sea, and Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea.

For first they have taken an Yle that is clept Malta; and therein built

they great castles, to hold it against them of Fraunce, and Italy, and of

Spain. And from this Ile of Malta Men gon to Cipre. And Cipre is right

a good Yle, and a fair, and a great, and it hath 4 principal Cytees

within him. And at Famagost is one of the principal Havens of the sea

that is in the world, and Englishmen have but a lytel while gone won that

Yle from the Sarazynes. Yet say that sort of Englishmen where of I told

you, that is puny and sore adread, that the Lond is poisonous and barren

and of no avail, for that Lond is much more hotter than it is here. Yet

the Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, and the skill is

that they may ben the more fresh.

From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night he

that hath a good wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie. Now the Lond

of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of

Egypt. And when I say this, I do jape with words, and may hap ye

understond me not. Now Englishmen went in shippes to Alessandrie, and

brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their soudyours warred agen the

Bedoynes, and all to hold the way to Ynde. For it is not long past since

Frenchmen let dig a dyke, through the narrow spit of lond, from the

Midland sea to the Red sea, wherein was Pharaoh drowned. So this is the

shortest way to Ynde there may be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon

by sea.

But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale enchaunted; for no man may

do his business well that goes thither, but always fares he evil, and

therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, and the sepulchre of

reputations. And men say there that is one of the entrees of Helle. In

that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold and Silver, for many misbelieving

men, and many Christian men also, have gone often time for to take of the

Thresoure that there was of old, and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore

there is none left. And Englishmen have let carry thither great store of

our Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they will see it

agen I misdoubt me. For that Vale is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes

that men clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde is the Lond of

Bondage. And whatsoever Thresoure cometh into the Lond, these Devyls of

Bondholders grabben the same. Natheless by that Vale do Englishmen go

unto Ynde, and they gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the mouth of the

Flood of Ynde. Thereby they send their souldyours, when they are adread

of them of Muscovy.

For, look you, there is another way into Ynde, and thereby the men of

Muscovy are fain to come, if the Englishmen let them not. That way

cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from the sea that is clept Caspian,

even to Khiva, and so to Merv; and then come ye to Zulfikar and Penjdeh,

and anon to Herat, that is called the Key of the Gates of Ynde. Then ye

win the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great prince and a rich, and

he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, and stars, and coats that captains

wearen, than any other man on earth.

For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen maken him gifts, and he

keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his own counsel. For his lond lieth

between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, wherefore both Englishmen and men

of Muscovy would fain have him friendly, yea, and independent. Wherefore

they of both parties give him clocks, and watches, and stars, and

crosses, and culverins, and now and again they let cut the throats of his

men some deal, and pill his country. Thereby they both set up their rest

that the Emir will be independent, yea, and friendly. But his men love

him not, neither love they the English, nor the Muscovy folk, for they

are worshippers of Mahound, and endure not Christian men. And they love

not them that cut their throats, and burn their country.

Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, and they ben subtle for to make a thing

seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind. Wherefore Englishmen

putten no trust in them of Muscovy, save only the Englishmen clept

Radicals, for they make as if they loved these Develes, out of the fear

and dread of war wherein they go, and would be slaves sooner than fight.

But the folk of Ynde know not what shall befall, nor whether they of

Muscovy will take the Lond, or Englishmen shall keep it, so that their

hearts may not enduren for drede. And methinks that soon shall

Englishmen and Muscovy folk put their bodies in adventure, and war one

with another, and all for the way to Ynde.

But St. George for Englond, I say, and so enough; and may the Seyntes

hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee tormenten. But

to thy Boke I list not to give no credence.

XII.

_To Alexandre Dumas_.

SIR,—There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as

yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most

intrepid disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of your days,

you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, “I seem to see myself set on a

pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands.” These

sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation

more solid than the rock. As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the

authors of the “Arabian Nights,” or the first inventors of the stories of

Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed,

have perished), as the creator of “Les Trois Mousquetaires” alarm himself

with the thought that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.

Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force

in modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your

genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish?

Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a super-human burden; but your

imaginative strength never found a task too great for it. What an

extraordinary vigour, what health, what an overflow of force was yours!

It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the

free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas’s men—so

gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen.

Like M. de Rochefort in “Vingt Ans Après,” like that prisoner of the

Bastille, your genius “n’est que d’un parti, c’est du parti du grand

air.”

There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment;

in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic,

kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the

virtue which went out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary

charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in

England and at home? They say you employed in your novels and dramas

that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the “sculptor’s

ghost” is fabled to afford.

Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and

impotent as “the strengthless tribes of the dead” in Homer’s Hades,

before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary

valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these

collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they

parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are

the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their

own strength? They are forgotten with last year’s snows; they have

passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of

D’Artagnan, when severed from his three friends—from Porthos, Athos, and

Aramis—“he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each

of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of that

electric fluid which was his gift from heaven.”

No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none

gave of it more freely to all who came—to the chance associate of the

hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked

from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you approached the

supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the

living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, so

masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the

reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with wit, you could

not be “serious;” because you created with a word, you were said to scamp

your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of

greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia—a generation

devoted to the “chiselled phrase,” to accumulated “documents,” to

microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records

of what in humanity is least human—may readily bring these unregarded and

railing accusations. Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of

Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To

you, who can amuse the world—to you who offer it the fresh air of the

highway, the battlefield, and the sea—the world must always return:

escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the _bouges_, from the surgeries

and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the

wearisome De Goncourt.

With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which,

if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how

healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat

over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense.

The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are

clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the

clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of

adventures! Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the

Cycle of the Valois (“La Reine Margot,” “La Dame de Montsoreau,” “Les

Quarante-cinq”), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (“Les

Trois Mousquetaires,” “Vingt Ans Après,” “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne”);

and, beside these two trilogies—a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard

by the three pyramids—“Monte Cristo.”

In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to

that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship.

You had Brantôme, you had Tallemant, you had Rétif, and a dozen others,

to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would

have outdone even the present _naturalistes_. From these alcoves of “Les

Dames Galantes,” and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have

spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as

Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary

uses. You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and

tragical true love of La Mole’s, that devotion—how tender and how

pure!—of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valour of

D’Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of Athos:

Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters are real

people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the end of

“Bragelonne,” and to part with them for ever. “Suppose Porthos, Athos,

and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their

moustaches.” How we would welcome them, forgiving D’Artagnan even his

hateful _fourberie_ in the case of Milady. The brilliance of your

dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees

glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. Then what

duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces! I know four good

fights of one against a multitude, in literature. These are the Death of

Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward

the Wake, the Death of Bussy d’Amboise. We can compare the strokes of

the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon

my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of

Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of

your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley’s Hereward.

They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you knew

it. La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas “after deceiving circle;”

for the parry was not invented except by your immortal Chicot, a genius

in advance of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes would have fought

with shields and axes, not with small swords. But what matters this

pedantry? In your works we hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing in the

clash of steel; and even, at times, your very phrases are unconsciously

Homeric.

Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in

terror from the Queen’s chamber, and “find the door too narrow for their

flight:” the very words were anticipated in a line of the “Odyssey”

concerning the massacre of the Wooers. And the picture of Catherine de

Médicis, prowling “like a wolf among the bodies and the blood,” in a

passage of the Louvre—the picture is taken unwittingly from the “Iliad.”

There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and

simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates “Monte Cristo,”

the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of

that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have

little room, and less skill, to speak. “Antony,” they tell me, was “the

greatest literary event of its time,” was a restoration of the stage.

“While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe

and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the

coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room

in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the

last degree of terror and of pity.”

The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame—for a moment.

The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when “La Curée” and

“Pot-Bouille” are more forgotten than “Le Grand Cyrus,” men and

women—and, above all, boys—will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre

Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood. I

remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the “Three Musketeers”

when he should have been occupied with “Wilkins’s Latin Prose.” “Twenty

years after” (alas! and more) he is still constant to that gallant

company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering whether

Grimaud will steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal’s prison.

XIII.

_To Theocritus_.

“SWEET, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree,” so,

Theocritus, with that sweet word ἁδύ, didst thou begin and strike the

keynote of thy songs. “Sweet,” and didst thou find aught of sweet, when

thou, like thy Daphnis, didst “go down the stream, when the whirling wave

closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the Nymphs”?

Perchance below those waters of death thou didst find, like thine own

Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia

with her April eyes. In the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there dwell

aught that is fair, and can the low light on the fields of asphodel make

thee forget thy Sicily? Nay, methinks thou hast not forgotten, and

perchance for poets dead there is prepared a place more beautiful than

their dreams. It was well for the later minstrels of another day, it was

well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim Elysium of their own,

where the sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of the earth, where

the poplars are duskier, and the waters more pale than in the meadows of

Anjou.

There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from sword

and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit the torch,

there these learned singers would fain have wandered with their learned

ladies, satiated with life and in love with an unearthly quiet. But to

thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow Land was dear, but the high

suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country maidens were happiness

enough. For thee, therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium

beneath the summer of a far-off system, with stars not ours and alien

seasons. There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be

with thee the whole year through, where there is neither frost, nor is

the heat so heavy on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things

blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and dawn. Space is wide, and

there be many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had a

care of his own. Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of

the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and sea.

Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant shadow of the

pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or glades where

feathered ferns make “a couch more soft than Sleep.” The short grass of

the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou wouldst lie, and watch, with

the tunny watcher till the deep blue sea was broken by the burnished

sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam with their gambols in the brine.

There the Muses met thee, and the Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering

his old thraldom with Admetus, would lead once more a mortal’s flocks,

and listen and learn, Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas,

“didst sweetly sing.”

There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, “reclined on deep beds

of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript leaves of

the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar, many an elm-tree,

and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the mouth of the cavern of

the nymphs.” And when night came, methinks thou wouldst flee from the

merry company and the dancing girls, from the fading crowns of roses or

white violets, from the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and the Bibline

wine, from these thou wouldst slip away into the summer night. Then the

beauty of life and of the summer would keep thee from thy couch, and

wandering away from Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst

watch the low cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods of reed

were leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floated up her

waves, and filled the waste with sound. There didst thou see thine

ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from their bed of dry seaweed, and

heardst them stirring, drowsy, among their fishing gear, and heardst them

tell their dreams.

Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty feet through the ways that the

dust makes silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were driven

forth with the morning, came fresh to thee, and the trailing dewy branch

of honeysuckle struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou wouldst see the Dawn

awake in rose and saffron across the waters, and Etna, grey and pale

against the sky, and the setting crescent would dip strangely in the

glow, on her way to the sea. Then, methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like

thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, “Farewell, Selene, bright and

fair; farewell, ye other stars, that follow the wheels of the quiet

Night.” Nay, surely it was in such an hour that thou didst behold the

girl as she burned the laurel leaves and the barley grain, and melted the

waxen image, and called on Selene to bring her lover home. Even so, even

now, in the islands of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the prayers

of maidens. ‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near the waters, go thou

and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, saying

“Never will I leave thee.” And lo, he hath left me as men leave a field

reaped and gleaned, like a church where none cometh to pray, like a city

desolate.’

So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen,

and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god’s

house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old

divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants. It is none of

the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our

time, “Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering

to the other world? The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by

one they perish, the petals of the rose. I will send thee my tears shed

on a napkin, and what though it burneth in the flame, if my tears reach

thee at the last.”

Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these shores beneath the sun,

where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of

he-goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited belt.

Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines and shadowy

lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise of Alexandria.

What love of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee away from the red

cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water wreathed with

maidenhair?

The music of thy rustic flute

Kept not for long its happy country tone;

Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note

Of men contention tost, of men who groan,

Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat—

It failed, and thou wast mute!

What hadst thou to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes

give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine? Thy

Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and

wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand. “Who

will open his door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is

there that will not send them back again without a gift? And they with

naked feet and looks askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me

when they have gone on a vain journey, and listless again in the bottom

of their empty coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly

knees, where is their drear abode, when portionless they return.” How

far happier was the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar

chest where the blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of

tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!

Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the

galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones,

and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory.

Thou soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned

write still on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and

Antagoras of Rhodes. So ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy,

jealousy, and all unkindness.

Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though all

these centuries, more than two thousand years, they have laboured to vie

with thee. There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied

thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup

time; and all the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the

_sow challenged Athene_. They never knew the shepherd’s life, the long

winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when

over the parched grass all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the

shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains in high-heeled shoon, and

lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all

concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy

golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus! Somewhat,

Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought the

shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the

shepherds.

XIV.

_To Edgar Allan Poe_.

SIR,—Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances

than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred

which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men, will not marvel that

certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still

harass your name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out

their incredible and unheeded slanders in the literary papers of New

York. But their persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain

the dislike with which many American critics regard the greatest poet,

perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their country. With a

commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low;

and you, I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost

without honour in his own country.

The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable

study of your career (“Edgar Allan Poe,” by George Woodberry: Houghton,

Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it,

and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a

Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein,

that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony

ways of contemporary criticism! About the writers of his own generation

a leader of that generation should hold his peace. He should neither

praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at

the buzzing ephemeræ of letters. The breath of their life is in the

columns of “Literary Gossip;” and they should be allowed to perish with

the weekly advertisements on which they pasture. Reviewing, of course,

there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who

have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.

Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you

vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What “irritation of a

sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,” drove you

(in Mr. Longfellow’s own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we

may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon

comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,

Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. “The New Yorkers

never forgave him,” says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels

at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone,

but the whole literary class that you assailed. “As a literary people,”

you wrote, “we are one vast perambulating humbug.” After that

declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet

writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He

who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your

personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,

private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling

above your tomb.

For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen,

and that in an age when the author of “To Helen” and “The Cask of

Amontillado” was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such

poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that

of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton’s, were inevitable and assured.

No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth—_infelix

opportunitate vitæ_. Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth,

applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.

Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of

letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which

would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of

Mark Twain and of “Called Back.” It may be that your criticisms helped

to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite

unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect

for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as “objectional”

in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a

sentence as “his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the

frequent puffs of himself,” and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of

short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate

poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of

poetry, “the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,” exhaust your theory,

and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural bent,

and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you

too intolerant of what you call the “didactic” element in verse. Even if

morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at

present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for

gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the

largest public.

“Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you

wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should

be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we

should aim at in poetry.” You aimed at that mark, and struck it again

and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted

Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea.” But by some

Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world,

the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly

artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means

particularly “vague.” So a portion of the public know little of Shelley

but the “Skylark,” and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the

raven, bear each of them a poet’s name, _vivu’ per ora virum_. Your

theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of “Kubla

Khan”) the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would

come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote “Golden Wings,” “The Blue

Closet,” and “The Sailing of the Sword;” and, close up, Mr. Lear, the

author of “The Yongi Bongi Bo,” an the lay of the “Jumblies.”

On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned

Molière. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the

deliberate verdict of the world, your æsthetic does not seem to hold

water. The “Odyssey” is not really inferior to “Ulalume,” as it ought to

be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor “Le Festin de Pierre” to

“Undine.” Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your

poetic practice, to your poetic principles—principles commonly deserted

by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their æsthetic system.

Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like

Fielding, “a barren rascal.” But how can a writer’s verses be numerous

if with him, as with you, “poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . .

which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations

or the more paltry commendations of mankind!” Of you it may be said,

more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that “to ask you for anything

human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton.”

Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of

poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which

(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single

string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You

chose, or you were destined

To vary from the kindly race of men;

and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.

For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that

highest success—the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By

this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,

M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.

Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted all

those ideas of “progress” which “came from Hell or Boston.” On this

point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M. Baudelaire,

and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism and universal

suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your ultimate ideas is

perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.

An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as

“Hawthorne and delirium tremens.” I am not aware that extreme

orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a

predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If

they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal

of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your

completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of

jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his

command. He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom

America has produced. But you and he have not much in common, except a

certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the

workings of conscience.

I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American

fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about

brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would

not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,

now your countrymen’s favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he

is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were

called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute

observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute

of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,

the charm of “Daisy Miller.” You would admit the unity of effect secured

in “Washington Square,” though that effect is as remote as possible from

the terror of “The House of Usher” or the vindictive triumph of “The Cask

of Amontillado.”

Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to

the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet among

poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training,

embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his

consolations.

XV.

_To Sir Walter Scott_, _Bart._

Rodono, St. Mary’s Loch:

Sept. 8, 1885.

SIR,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of

all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for

you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your

company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of

turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that

fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You,

almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and

charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the

scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all

the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled with

letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your

simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that

envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but

never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the

Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?

Were the word “genial” not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy

good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old

term might be applied, above all men, to “the Shirra.” But perhaps we

scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare,

or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott.

Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey

round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one

falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour’s shape), it is

of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently

brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the

dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory

of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to

inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your

song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as

in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless

you.

It is not, “Sixty Years Since” the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell

for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is

altered! But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from

Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still

vending, in George Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the

heart to speak. Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen

since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of “burke Sir

Walter.” We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken

away from many evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of

Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and

many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity! On

the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or

wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with

Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among

the bravest! Only he who told how

The stubborn spearmen still made good

Their dark impenetrable wood

could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at

M’Neill’s Zareba and at Abu Klea,

Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,

As fearlessly and well.

Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes

may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting

men might cry, with Leyden,

My name is little Jock Elliot,

And wha daur meddle wi’ me!

Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but much

remains. The little towns of your time are populous and excessively

black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very

flourishing. In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the

cluster of cottages round the Laird’s lodge, like the clachan of Tully

Veolan. But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost

buried in a multitude of “smoky dwarf houses”—a living poet, Mr. Matthew

Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all.

All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are

filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk

man. To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often

promised, I cannot see much change—for the better. Abbotsford, luckily,

is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk,

Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the other hand, your

ill-omened later dwelling, “the unhappy palace of your race,” is

overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their larches, hotels

of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange place. Whisky is exiled

from some of our caravanserais, and they have banished Sir John

Barleycorn. It seems as if the views of the excellent critic (who wrote

your life lately, and said you had left no descendants, _le pauvre

homme_!) were beginning to prevail. This pious biographer was greatly

shocked by that capital story about the keg of whisky that arrived at the

Liddesdale farmer’s during family prayers. Your Toryism also was an

offence to him.

Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let us

be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the Border

country remains as kind and homely as ever. I looked at Ashiestiel some

days ago: the house seemed just as it may have been when you left it for

Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the

opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the crest with turnips, and the

burn did not sing below the little bridge, for in this arid summer the

burn was dry. But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March

brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank. This may not interest you,

who styled yourself

No fisher,

But a well-wisher

To the game!

Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have “grand

gallops among the hills”—those grave wastes of heather and bent that

sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from

Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren

Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant

still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, _purior electro_, of

Yarrow. St. Mary’s Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the

St. Mary’s of North and of the Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a

myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than of yore. The Shepherd could

no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the

country people took them for herrings.

The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies,

within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the

graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep “Piers Cockburn and

Marjory his wife.” Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where

they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried

him rests now with her wild lord.

Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,

When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair;

Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,

When I turned about and went my way! {160}

Here too hearts have broken, and there is a sacredness in the shadow and

beneath these clustering berries of the rowan-trees. That sacredness,

that reverent memory of our old land, it is always and inextricably

blended with our memories, with our thoughts, with our love of you.

Scotchmen, methinks, who owe so much to you, owe you most for the example

you gave of the beauty of a life of honour, showing them what, by

heaven’s blessing, a Scotchman still might be.

Words, empty and unavailing—for what words of ours can speak our thoughts

or interpret our affections! From you first, as we followed the deer

with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine on his midnight

errand, did we learn what Poetry means and all the happiness that is in

the gift of song. This and more than may be told you gave us, that are

not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our praise be unequal to our

gratitude. _Fungor inani munere_!

XVI.

_To Eusebius of Cæsarea_.

(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN.)

TOUCHING the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not

ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there

is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of

men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat

meat offered to idols. Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured

forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the

fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no

more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the

sweet-voiced water is silent.” The fane is ruinous, and the images of

men’s idolatry are dust.

Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings

of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how

first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.

Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit,

there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers

believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly

persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who,

long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained,

fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the

likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set

forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am,

do give my consent. But on the other side are many and learned men,

chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the

whole inhabited world. These, being unwilling to suppose that the

Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of utter

darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen

philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst

confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of

thy wit.

Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the gods

of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the

blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time

went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer

understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled

into fashioning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of

mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an

eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.

Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men argue,

even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound. For

they declare the gods to have been natural elements, sun and sky and

storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, “they

are nowise at one with each other in their explanations.” For of old

some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love

of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and

others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she

was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth,

the men who first worshipped Hera had understanding of these things! And

when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant

(said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of

the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.

To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera

could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of

sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions

were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And why—thou

saidst—even if the Gods were pure natural creatures, are such foul things

told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare.

“These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and seductions, that would

be shameful in men, why,” thou saidst, “were they attributed to the

natural elements; and wherefore did the Gods constantly show themselves,

like the sorcerers called werewolves, in the shape of the perishable

beasts?” But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of

the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the

other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.

To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the heathen

answered thee. But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that

the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the

nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own

speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the

pure Gods—these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves. Nay,

they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and

Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear with me,

Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend

among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call

“Science”!

Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even

as—among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never

knewest—goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of

their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the “Cratylus,” made

Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For,

when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his

name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them

according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and

Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their

turn. How saith Socrates? “I bethink me of a very new and ingenious

idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I

should be by to-morrow’s dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull

out letters at pleasure and alter the accents.”

Even so do the learned—not at pleasure, maybe, but according to certain

fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they agree among

themselves. And I deny not that they discover many things true and good

to be known; but, as touching the names of the Gods, their learning, as

it standeth, is confusion. Look, then, at the goddess Athene: taking one

example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the

most erudite of the doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed.

Concerning Athene, he saith that her name is none other than, in the

ancient tongue of the Brachmanæ, _Ahanâ_, which, being interpreted, means

the Dawn. “And that the morning light,” saith he, “offers the best

starting-point for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe,

beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil.” {169}

Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his nation,

the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of Athene,

taken from the speech of the old Medes. But Muellerus declares to us

that whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius “will be bound,

in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable.” This, Father, is

“one for Benfeius,” as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that

these matters “admit of almost mathematical precision,” it would seem

that Benfeius is but a _Dummkopf_, as the Alemanni say, in their own

language, when they would be pleasant among themselves.

Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of the

facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with

Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet that

she is “the feminine of the Zend _Thrâetâna athwyâna_.” Lo, you! how

Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from _Ahanâ_ and

the old Brachmanæ, nor _athwyâna_ and the old Medes, but from “the root

_αἰθ_, whence _αἴθηρ_, the air, or _ἀθ_, whence _ἄνθος_, a flower.” Yea,

and Prellerus will have it that no man knows the verity of this matter.

None the less he is very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it

that Athene was, from the first, “the clear pure height of the Air, which

is exceeding pure in Attica.”

Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in, with

a mighty great volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for

his ally. And these doctors will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus,

take Athene for “wisdom in person;” nor with Welckerus and Prellerus, for

“the goddess of air;” nor even, with Muellerus and mathematical

certainty, for “the Morning-Red:” but they say that Athene is the “black

thunder-cloud, and the lightning that leapeth therefrom”! I make no

doubt that other Alemanni are of other minds: _quot Alemanni tot

sententiæ_.

Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Οὐδὲ γὰρ ἀλλήλοις σύμφωνα

φυσιολογοῦσιν_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call “Science”! But

if any man says to the learned: “Best of men, you are erudite, and

laborious and witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your

opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no

avail whereon to found any doctrine concerning the Gods”—that man is

railed at for his “mean” and “weak” arguments.

Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must

still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were invented

“when man’s life was yet brutish and wandering” (as is the life of many

tribes that even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour by

the later Greeks “because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his

ancestors.” Farewell, Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy

well-wisher and thy disciple.

XVII.

_To Percy Bysshe Shelley_.

SIR,—In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as

to what was said by “the herd of mankind,” if I may quote your own

phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his

less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their

discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where,

as you say, we “pursue our serious folly as of old,” you are, one may

guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your

reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your

letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands

of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be “Guilty,” and the

sentence “Death.” Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent

in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier

flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and

a merciful. The verdict is “Well done,” and the sentence Immortality of

Fame. There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be

less and less heard as the years go on.

One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true

province, and that your letters will out-live your lays. I know not

whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of

your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats)

as “a gallery of your failures.” But the general voice does not echo

these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University (not

your own) once existed a band of men known as “The Trinity Sniffers.”

Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors

who from time to time make themselves heard in your case. The “Quarterly

Review,” I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your attempts as

tainted by the spirit of “The Liberal Movement in English Literature;”

and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a

Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms

where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once

guilty of similar negligence?) are now shown to pious pilgrims.

But Conservatives, ’tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and

are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and,

indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems,

like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet “in the

mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young.” It is in your

lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an

examination in the plot of “Prometheus Unbound.” Talking of this piece,

by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering

after life in a cave—doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from

cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of

deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,

intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now

agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.

Fortunately you gave us “Adonais” and “Hellas” instead of this treatise,

and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for

ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming a cave-dweller he was a

Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his

original condition. _L’homme est un méchant animal_, in spite of your

boyish efforts to add pretty girls “to the list of the good, the

disinterested, and the free.”

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics,

were “the haunts meet for thee.” Watching the yellow bees in the ivy

bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the

sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and

fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was

the task of Shelley! “To ask you for anything human,” you said, “was

like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.” Nay, rather, like asking

Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia,

and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer;

you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn

away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is

spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like

Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on

the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind

with excess of light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but

Shelley!

Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things

didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will

disappoint you, who had “a passion for reforming it.” Kings and priests

are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who assails

them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never,

like “kind Hunt,” been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of

treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious

ways of destroying principalities and powers. You would be interested in

the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical

force, would regret their application.

Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider

satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and

we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and

described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence

somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!

he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will

Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining

buds and beams.

In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been

carried. Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else

she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds

unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the

paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone

says) are “our own flesh and blood,” and, as we compel them to be

vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.

Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!) has a Bill for

extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic

Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political

happiness which we have long sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret

to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something

for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in

the “Queen Mab” stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust

condition of intellectual development.

As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much

of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of

_ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This

curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of

commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe. They

swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like

night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written

on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether

it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which

escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly

among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of “old unhappy far-off

things, and sorrows long ago.” Let us leave them and their squabbles

over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.

The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has

produced two heavy volumes, styled by him “The Real Shelley.” The real

Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so

prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I

wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative

Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist,

the Englishman who called you “a damned Atheist” in the post-office at

Pisa. He finds that you had “a little turned-up nose,” a feature no less

important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to

Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose,

you were a “phenomenal” liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly

insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of

self-approbation—in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.

Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, “a bad

old man.” But enough of this inopportune brawler.

For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts

extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly

as doom came on Jupiter in your “Prometheus,” but as surely. If this

nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the

ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of

the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the latest

of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone

(says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he

will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the

gloom of earthquake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in fancy, with

the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure

of the heavens. In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will

survive; for your “voice is as the voice of winds and tides,” and perhaps

more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing

of the human spirit.

XVIII.

_To Monsieur de Molière_, _Valet de Chambre du Roi_.

MONSIEUR,—With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the

great Molière! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his

comb!) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your

dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his

titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière—you found

your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the

dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for

French comedy; and the baton of Scapin still wields its sway though the

sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so

he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame

the Channel. If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through

you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty of

Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden

borrowed “L’Etourdi,” our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters

theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.

In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you

lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial

business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their

large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière. Now they are

diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they

borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.

But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and

imitated your successes—still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our

_bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We

are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a

comedy pleases the town which has not first been “cut out” from the

countrymen of Molière. Why this should be, and what “tenebriferous star”

(as Paracelsus, your companion in the “Dialogues des Morts,” would have

believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but

certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.

Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor “a wilderness of monkeys”

like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to

Europe.

While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and

beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that

we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with

daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you “let no

musty _bouquin_ escape you” (so your enemies declared), it was to some

purpose that you laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who

came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we

turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from

Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your

creations. “Creations” one may well say, for you anticipated Nature

herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a

gentleman not a lacquey; in a _mot_ of Don Juan’s, the secret of the new

Religion and the watchword of Comte, _l’amour de l’humanité_.

Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour;

and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular

civilisation? With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and

generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life

endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope,

or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all,

the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary

blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens, you,

Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you found

invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and

Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of

their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived

that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking

every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons preached to Agnès we

surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity which

are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal

self-defence of superstition. Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for

the permanent element of life—precisely where Pascal recognised all that

was most fleeting and unsubstantial—in _divertissement_; in the pleasure

of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of

the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to

regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the

tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of

tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human

as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to

leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.

Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest—our sympathy,

somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman,

despite his misadventures.

Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and

defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you

did not mean that they should win it. They go off with laughter, and

their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth,

behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your

sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are having their day; you can

throw a bone or a crust to the dog that has had his, and has been taught

that it is over and ended. Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy,

in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and

the husband of Célimène be untaught in that experience?), you never sided

quite heartily, as other comedians have done, with young prosperity and

rank and power.

I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for just

after your own death the author of “Les Dialogues des Morts” gave you

Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of “Le Jugement de Pluton” made

the “mighty warder” decide that “Molière should not talk philosophy.”

These writers, like most of us, feel that, after all, the comedies of the

_Contemplateur_, of the translator of Lucretius, are a philosophy of life

in themselves, and that in them we read the lessons of human experience

writ small and clear.

What comedian but Molière has combined with such depths—with the

indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of

Don Juan—such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit!

Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much

water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles of

contemporary mirth (_cetera fluminis ritu feruntur_), even now we never

laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the

boards in the Maison de Molière. Since those mobile dark brows of yours

ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the “demoniac”

manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player

has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of

Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comédie Française. In him you have a

successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of

your date might cry, could they see him, that Molière had come again.

But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle.

Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss

of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Célimène,

Armande. Yet had you ever so merry a _soubrette_ as Mdme. Samary, so

exquisite a Nicole?

Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago,

you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility

and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve.

Are not the Molièristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism? Any

scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely

touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15

not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians.

Concerning your private life, these men often speak more like malicious

enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger,

and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers.

It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as

the veteran and inveterate M. Arsène Houssaye, or the industrious but

puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead,

and the immortal Molière among the sweepings of attorneys’ offices. As I

regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their

trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Molière’s works to gossip

about Molière’s great-grand-mother’s second-best bed—I sometimes wish

that Molière were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, “Les

Molièristes.” How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked

with you, who saw you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells

us, by the kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the

most open-handed in friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the

heartiest sympathy! Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in

the study, rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller’s shop,

strolling through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine’s,

dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls. Would

that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry with

Boileau, and with Racine,—not yet a traitor,—laughing over Chapelain,

combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking

your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes. Surely of all the wits

none was ever so good a man, none ever made life so rich with humour and

friendship.

XIX.

_To Robert Burns_.

SIR,—Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are some to

whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there are others

whom we admire rather than love. By some we are won with our will, by

others conquered against our desire. It has been your peculiar fortune

to capture the hearts of a whole people—a people not usually prone to

praise, but devoted with a personal and patriotic loyalty to you and to

your reputation. In you every Scot who _is_ a Scot sees, admires, and

compliments Himself, his ideal self—independent, fond of whisky, fonder

of the lassies; you are the true representative of him and of his nation.

Next year will be the hundredth since the press of Kilmarnock brought to

light its solitary masterpiece, your Poems; and next year, therefore,

methinks, the revenue will receive a welcome accession from the abundance

of whisky drunk in your honour. It is a cruel thing for any of your

countrymen to feel that, where all the rest love, he can only admire;

where all the rest are idolators, he may not bend the knee; but stands

apart and beats upon his breast, observing, not adoring—a critic. Yet to

some of us—petty souls, perhaps, and envious—that loud indiscriminating

praise of “Robbie Burns” (for so they style you in their Change-house

familiarity) has long been ungrateful; and, among the treasures of your

songs, we venture to select and even to reject. So it must be! We

cannot all love Haggis, nor “painch, tripe, and thairm,” and all those

rural dainties which you celebrate as “warm-reekin, rich!” “Rather too

rich,” as the Young Lady said on an occasion recorded by Sam Weller.

Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware

That jaups in luggies;

But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,

Gie her a Haggis!

You _have_ given her a Haggis, with a vengeance, and her “gratefu’

prayer” is yours for ever. But if even an eternity of partridge may pall

on the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights, cometh

satiety at last. And yet what a glorious Haggis it is—the more

emphatically rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse! We have had

many a rural bard since Theocritus “watched the visionary flocks,” but

you are the only one of them all who has spoken the sincere Doric. Yours

is the talk of the byre and the plough-tail; yours is that large

utterance of the early hinds. Even Theocritus minces matters, save where

Lacon and Comatas quite out-do the swains of Ayrshire. “But thee,

Theocritus, wha matches?” you ask, and yourself out-match him in this

wide rude region, trodden only by the rural Muse. “_Thy_ rural loves are

nature’s sel’;” and the wooer of Jean Armour speaks more like a true

shepherd than the elegant Daphnis of the “Oaristys.”

Indeed it is with this that moral critics of your life reproach you,

forgetting, perhaps, that in your amours you were but as other Scotch

ploughmen and shepherds of the past and present. Ettrick may still, with

Afghanistan, offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your antithesis,

and the complement of the Scotch character) supposed; but the morals of

Ettrick are those of rural Sicily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your

days. Over these matters the Kirk, with all her power, and the Free Kirk

too, have had absolutely no influence whatever. To leave so delicate a

topic, you were but as other swains, or, as “that Birkie ca’d a lord,”

Lord Byron; only you combined (in certain of your letters) a libertine

theory with your practice; you poured out in song your audacious

raptures, your half-hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn. You

spoke the truth about rural lives and loves. We may like it or dislike

it but we cannot deny the verity.

Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for

Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages

and of two worlds—precisely in the moment when bookish literature was

beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to

admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries? Before you how many singers

not less truly poets than yourself—though less versatile not less

passionate, though less sensuous not less simple—had been born and had

died in poor men’s cottages! There abides not even the shadow of a name

of the old Scotch song-smiths, of the old ballad-makers. The authors of

“Clerk Saunders,” of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” of “Fair Annie,” and

“Sir Patrick Spens,” and “The Bonny Hind,” are as unknown to us as Homer,

whom in their directness and force they resemble. They never, perhaps,

gave their poems to writing; certainly they never gave them to the press.

On the lips and in the hearts of the people they have their lives; and

the singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame,

are forgotten. “The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his Poppy.”

Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as these

unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan—verses retained

only by Memory. You would have been but the minstrel of your native

valley: the wider world would not have known you, nor you the world.

Great thoughts of independence and revolt would never have burned in you;

indignation would not have vexed you. Society would not have given and

denied her caresses. You would have been happy. Your songs would have

lingered in all “the circle of the summer hills;” and your scorn, your

satire, your narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown. To

the world what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should have possessed

but a few of your lyrics, as

When o’er the hill the eastern star

Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;

And owsen frae the furrowed field,

Return sae dowf and wearie O!

How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek! You found,

oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives

Even Sappho’s flame!

But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in these

strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day μετενίσσετο

βουλυτόνδε? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent

glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that in

your songs reminds us of the Poet’s Corner in the “Kirkcudbright

Advertiser.” We should not have read how

Phœbus, gilding the brow o’ morning,

Banishes ilk darksome shade!

Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,

Had we never loved sae kindly,

Had we never loved sae blindly,

Never met—or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush

would have been untaught in “the style of the Bird of Paradise.”

A quiet life of song, _fallentis semita vitæ_, was not to be yours. Fate

otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the strife with

the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and

success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the

world with “Tam o’ Shanter,” the “Jolly Beggars,” and “Holy Willie’s

Prayer.” Who can praise them too highly—who admire in them too much the

humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the unsurpassed energy and courage? So

powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that Beggars’ Chorus, that,

methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the brain of our greatest living

poet when he conceived the “Vision of Sin.” You shall judge for

yourself. Recall:

Here’s to budgets, bags, and wallets!

Here’s to all the wandering train!

Here’s our ragged bairns and callets!

One and all cry out, Amen!

A fig for those by law protected!

Liberty’s a glorious feast!

Courts for cowards were erected!

Churches built to please the priest!

Then read this:

Drink to lofty hopes that cool—

Visions of a perfect state:

Drink we, last, the public fool,

Frantic love and frantic hate.

* * * * *

Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,

While we keep a little breath!

Drink to heavy Ignorance,

Hob and nob with brother Death!

Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder

recklessness?

So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of so

much company, good and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, ever

gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a life more strenuous,

engaged in an eternal conflict of the passions, and by them

overcome—“mighty and mightily fallen.” When we think of you, Byron

seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree from actual truth,

and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.

XX.

_To Lord Byron_.