Blasphemy, cry you, good reader? Are you sure you understand it? The

first line I gave you was easy Byron--almost shallow Byron--these are of

the man in his depth, and you will not fathom them, like a tarn--nor in

a hurry.

"Just now behaved as in the Holy Land." How _did_ Carnage behave in the

Holy Land then? You have all been greatly questioning, of late, whether

the sun, which you find to be now going out, ever stood still. Did you

in any lagging minute, on those scientific occasions, chance to reflect

what he was bid stand still _for_? or if not--will you please look--and

what also, going forth again as a strong man to run his course, he saw,

rejoicing?

"Then Joshua passed from Makkedah unto Libnah--and fought against

Libnah. And the Lord delivered it and the king thereof into the hand of

Israel, and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls

that were therein." And from Lachish to Eglon, and from Eglon to

Kirjath-Arba, and Sarah's grave in the Amorites' land, "and Joshua smote

all the country of the hills and of the south--and of the vale and of

the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly

destroyed all that breathed--as the Lord God of Israel commanded."

58. Thus, "it is written": though you perhaps do not so often hear

_these_ texts preached from, as certain others about taking away the

sins of the world. I wonder how the world would like to part with them!

hitherto it has always preferred parting first with its life--and God

has taken it at its word. But Death is not _His_ Begotten Son, for all

that; nor is the death of the innocent in battle carnage His "instrument

for working out a pure intent" as Mr. Wordsworth puts it; but Man's

instrument for working out an impure one, as Byron would have you to

know. Theology perhaps less orthodox, but certainly more

reverent;--neither is the Woolwich Infant a Child of God; neither does

the iron-clad "Thunderer" utter thunders of God--which facts if you had

had the grace or sense to learn from Byron, instead of accusing him of

blasphemy, it had been better at this day for _you_, and for many a

savage soul also, by Euxine shore, and in Zulu and Afghan lands.

59. It was neither, however, for the theology, nor the use, of these

lines that I quoted them; but to note this main point of Byron's own

character. He was the first great Englishman who felt the cruelty of

war, and, in its cruelty, the shame. Its guilt had been known to George

Fox--its folly shown practically by Penn. But the _compassion_ of the

pious world had still for the most part been shown only in keeping its

stock of Barabbases unhanged if possible: and, till Byron came, neither

Kunersdorf, Eylau, nor Waterloo, had taught the pity and the pride of

men that

"The drying up a single tear has more

Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore."[78]

Such pacific verse would not indeed have been acceptable to the

Edinburgh volunteers on Portobello sands. But Byron can write a battle

song too, when it is _his_ cue to fight. If you look at the introduction

to the "Isles of Greece," namely the 85th and 86th stanzas of the 3rd

canto of "Don Juan,"--you will find--what will you _not_ find, if only

you understand them! "He" in the first line, remember, means the typical

modern poet.

"Thus usually, when he was asked to sing,

He gave the different nations something national.

'Twas all the same to him--'God save the King'

Or 'Ca ira' according to the fashion all;

His muse made increment of anything

From the high lyric down to the low rational:

If Pindar sang horse-races, what should hinder

Himself from being as pliable as Pindar?

In France, for instance, he would write a chanson;

In England a six-canto quarto tale;

In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on

The last war--much the same in Portugal;

In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on

Would be old Goethe's--(see what says de Staël)

In Italy, he'd ape the 'Trecentisti';

In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t'ye."

60. Note first here, as we did in Scott, the concentrating and

foretelling power. The "God Save the Queen" in England, fallen hollow

now, as the "Ca ira" in France--not a man in France knowing where either

France or "that" (whatever "that" may be) is going to; nor the Queen of

England daring, for her life, to ask the tiniest Englishman to do a

single thing he doesn't like;--nor any salvation, either of Queen or

Realm, being any more possible to God, unless under the direction of the

Royal Society: then, note the estimate of height and depth in poetry,

swept in an instant, "high lyric to low rational." Pindar to Pope

(knowing Pope's height, too, all the while, no man better); then, the

poetic power of France--resumed in a word--Béranger; then the cut at

Marmion, entirely deserved, as we shall see, yet kindly given, for

everything he names in these two stanzas is the best of its kind; then

'Romance in Spain on--the _last_ war, (_present_ war not being to

Spanish poetical taste,) then, Goethe the real heart of all Germany, and

last, the aping of the Trecentisti which has since consummated itself in

Pre-Raphaelitism! that also being the best thing Italy has done through

England, whether in Rossetti's "blessed damozels" or Burne Jones's "days

of creation." Lastly comes the mock at himself--the modern English

Greek--(followed up by the "degenerate into hands like mine" in the song

itself); and then--to amazement, forth he thunders in his

Achilles-voice. We have had one line of him in his clearness--five of

him in his depth--sixteen of him in his play. Hear now but these, out of

his whole heart:--

"What,--silent yet? and silent _all_?

Ah no, the voices of the dead

Sound like a distant torrent's fall,

And answer, 'Let _one_ living head,

But one, arise--we come--we come:'

--'Tis but the living who are dumb."

Resurrection, this, you see like Bürger's; but not of death unto death.

61. "Sound like a distant torrent's fall." I said the _whole_ heart of

Byron was in this passage. First its compassion, then its indignation,

and the third element, not yet examined, that love of the beauty of this

world in which the three--unholy--children, of its Fiery Furnace were

like to each other; but Byron the widest-hearted. Scott and Burns love

Scotland more than Nature itself: for Burns the moon must rise over

Cumnock Hills,--for Scott, the Rymer's glen divide the Eildons; but,

for Byron, Loch-na-Gar _with Ida_, looks o'er Troy, and the soft murmurs

of the Dee and the Bruar change into voices of the dead on distant

Marathon.

Yet take the parallel from Scott, by a field of homelier rest:--

"And silence aids--though the steep hills

Send to the lake a thousand rills;

In summer tide, so soft they weep,

The sound but lulls the ear asleep;

Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,

So stilly is the solitude.

Nought living meets the eye or ear,

But well I ween the dead are near;

For though, in feudal strife, a foe

Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low,

Yet still beneath the hallowed soil,

The peasant rests him from his toil,

And, dying, bids his bones be laid

Where erst his simple fathers prayed."

And last take the same note of sorrow--with Burns's finger on the fall

of it:

"Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens,

Ye hazly shaws and briery dens,

Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens

Wi' toddlin' din,

Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens

Frae lin to lin."

62. As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the

great masters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in their

passion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from that

of "Parching summer hath no warrant"? Is it more profane, think you--or

more tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?

For instance, when we are told that

"Wharfe, as he moved along,

To matins joined a mournful voice,"

is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite

logically accounted for by the previous statement, (itself by no means

rythmically dulcet,) that

"The boy is in the arms of Wharfe,

And strangled by a merciless force"?

Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,

"How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more

Than 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline,

From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!"

--is the divinity of the extract assured to us by its being made at

leisure, and in a reclining attitude--as compared with the meditations

of otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many of

us, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity and

Humanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position?

63. On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few

words more of the school of Belial?

Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Some

very wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically,

into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselves safe

indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them to drink:

"A little stream came tumbling from the height

And straggling into ocean as it might.

Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray

And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray,

Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure

And fresh as Innocence; and more secure.

Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep

As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep,

While, far below, the vast and sullen swell

Of ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell."[79]

Now, I beg, with such authority as an old workman may take concerning

his trade, having also looked at a waterfall or two in my time, and not

unfrequently at a wave, to assure the reader that here is entirely

first-rate literary work. Though Lucifer himself had written it, the

thing is itself good, and not only so, but unsurpassedly good, the

closing line being probably the best concerning the sea yet written by

the race of the sea-kings.

64. But Lucifer himself _could_ not have written it; neither any servant

of Lucifer. I do not doubt but that most readers were surprised at my

saying, in the close of my first paper, that Byron's "style" depended in

any wise on his views respecting the Ten Commandments. That so

all-important a thing as "style" should depend in the least upon so

ridiculous a thing as moral sense: or that Allegra's father, watching

her drive by in Count G.'s coach and six, had any remnant of so

ridiculous a thing to guide,--or check,--his poetical passion, may alike

seem more than questionable to the liberal and chaste philosophy of the

existing British public. But, first of all, putting the question of who

writes or speaks aside, do you, good reader, _know_ good "style" when

you get it? Can you say, of half a dozen given lines taken anywhere out

of a novel, or poem, or play, That is good, essentially, in style, or

bad, essentially? and can you say why such half-dozen lines are good, or

bad?

65. I imagine that in most cases, the reply would be given with

hesitation, yet if you will give me a little patience, and take some

accurate pains, I can show you the main tests of style in the space of a

couple of pages.

I take two examples of absolutely perfect, and in manner highest, _i.

e._, kingly, and heroic, style: the first example in expression of

anger, the second of love.

(1)

"We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us,

His present, and your pains, we thank you for.

When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,

We will in France, by God's grace, play a set

Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard."

(2)

"My gracious Silence, hail!

Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home

That weep'st to see me triumph? Ah, my dear,

Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear

And mothers that lack sons."

66. Let us note, point by point, the conditions of greatness common to

both these passages, so opposite in temper.

A. Absolute command over all passion, however intense; this the

first-of-first conditions, (see the King's own sentence just before, "We

are no tyrant, but a Christian King, Unto _whose grace_ our passion is

as subject As are our wretches fettered in our prisons"); and with this

self-command, the supremely surveying grasp of every thought that is to

be uttered, before its utterance; so that each may come in its exact

place, time, and connection. The slightest hurry, the misplacing of a

word, or the unnecessary accent on a syllable, would destroy the "style"

in an instant.

B. Choice of the fewest and simplest words that can be found in the

compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words

being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way;

allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without

obscurity: (thus, "his present, and your pains, we thank you for" is

better than "we thank you for his present and your pains," because the

Dauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; but

"when to these balls our rackets we have matched" would have spoiled the

style in a moment, because--I was going to have said, ball and racket

are of equal rank, and therefore only the natural order proper; but also

here the natural order is the desired one, the English racket to have

precedence of the French ball). In the fourth line the "in France" comes

first, as announcing the most important resolution of action; the "by

God's grace" next, as the only condition rendering resolution possible;

the detail of issue follows with the strictest limit in the final word.

The King does not say "danger," far less "dishonor," but "hazard" only;

of _that_ he is, humanly speaking, sure.

67. C. Perfectly emphatic and clear utterance of the chosen words;

slowly in the degree of their importance, with omission however of every

word not absolutely required; and natural use of the familiar

contractions of final dissyllable. Thus "play a set shall strike" is

better than "play a set _that_ shall strike," and "match'd" is kingly

short--no necessity of meter could have excused "matched" instead. On

the contrary, the three first words, "We are glad," would have been

spoken by the king more slowly and fully than any other syllables in the

whole passage, first pronouncing the kingly "we" at its proudest, and

then the "are" as a continuous state, and then the "glad," as the exact

contrary of what the ambassadors expected him to be.[80]

D. Absolute spontaneity in doing all this, easily and necessarily as the

heart beats. The king _cannot_ speak otherwise than he does--nor the

hero. The words not merely come to them, but are compelled to them. Even

lisping numbers "come," but mighty numbers are ordained, and inspired.

E. Melody in the words, changeable with their passion, fitted to it

exactly, and the utmost of which the language is capable--the melody in

prose being Eolian and variable--in verse, nobler by submitting itself

to stricter law. I will enlarge upon this point presently.

F. Utmost spiritual contents in the words; so that each carries not only

its instant meaning, but a cloudy companionship of higher or darker

meaning according to the passion--nearly always indicated by metaphor:

"play a set"--sometimes by abstraction--(thus in the second passage

"silence" for silent one) sometimes by description instead of direct

epithet ("coffined" for dead) but always indicative of there being more

in the speaker's mind than he has said, or than he can say, full though

his saying be. On the quantity of this attendant fullness depends the

majesty of style; that is to say, virtually, on the quantity of

contained thought in briefest words, such thought being primarily loving

and true: and this the sum of all--that nothing can be well said, but

with truth, nor beautifully, but by love.

68. These are the essential conditions of noble speech in prose and

verse alike, but the adoption of the form of verse, and especially rymed

verse, means the addition to all these qualities of one more; of music,

that is to say, not Eolian merely, but Apolline; a construction or

architecture of words fitted and befitting, under external laws of time

and harmony.

When Byron says "rhyme is of the rude,"[81] he means that Burns needs

it,--while Henry the Fifth does not, nor Plato, nor Isaiah--yet in this

need of it by the simple, it becomes all the more religious: and thus

the loveliest pieces of Christian language are all in ryme--the best of

Dante, Chaucer, Douglas, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney.

69. I am not now able to keep abreast with the tide of modern

scholarship; (nor, to say the truth, do I make the effort, the first

edge of its waves being mostly muddy, and apt to make a shallow sweep of

the shore refuse:) so that I have no better book of reference by me than

the confused essay on the antiquity of ryme at the end of Turner's

"Anglo-Saxons." I cannot however conceive a more interesting piece of

work, if not yet done, than the collection of sifted earliest fragments

known of rymed song in European languages. Of Eastern I know nothing;

but, this side Hellespont, the substance of the matter is all given in

King Canute's impromptu

"Gaily" (or is it sweetly?--I forget which, and it's no matter)

"sang the monks of Ely,

As Knut the king came sailing by;"

much to be noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and their

Sunday the eclipse of the week. And observe further, that if Milton does

not ryme, it is because his faculty of Song was concerning Loss,

chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain;

while Dante, though modern readers never go further with him than into

the Pit, is stayed only by Casella in the ascent to the Rose of Heaven.

So, Gibbon can write in _his_ manner the Fall of Rome; but Virgil, in

_his_ manner, the rise of it; and finally Douglas, in _his_ manner,

bursts into such rymed passion of praise both of Rome and Virgil, as

befits a Christian Bishop, and a good subject of the Holy See.

"Master of Masters--sweet source, and springing well,

Wide where over all rings thy heavenly bell;

* * * * *

Why should I then with dull forehead and vain,

With rude ingene, and barane, emptive brain,

With bad harsh speech, and lewit barbare tongue

Presume to write, where thy sweet bell is rung,

Or counterfeit thy precious wordis dear?

Na, na--not so; but kneel when I them hear.

But farther more--and lower to descend

Forgive me, Virgil, if I thee offend

Pardon thy scolar, suffer him to ryme

Since _thou_ wast but ane mortal man sometime."

"Before honor is humility." Does not clearer light come for you on that

law after reading these nobly pious words? And note you _whose_

humility? How is it that the sound of the bell comes so instinctively

into his chiming verse? This gentle singer is the son of--Archibald

Bell-the-Cat!

70. And now perhaps you can read with right sympathy the scene in

"Marmion" between his father and King James.

"His hand the monarch sudden took--

'Now, by the Bruce's soul,

Angus, my hasty speech forgive,

For sure as doth his spirit live

As he said of the Douglas old

I well may say of you,--

That never king did subject hold,

In speech more free, in war more bold,

More tender and more true:'

And while the king his hand did strain

The old man's tears fell down like rain."

I believe the most infidel of scholastic readers can scarcely but

perceive the relation between the sweetness, simplicity, and melody of

expression in these passages, and the gentleness of the passions they

express, while men who are not scholastic, and yet are true scholars,

will recognize further in them that the simplicity of the educated is

lovelier than the simplicity of the rude. Hear next a piece of Spenser's

teaching how rudeness itself may become more beautiful even by its

mistakes, if the mistakes are made lovingly.

"Ye shepherds' daughters that dwell on the green,

Hye you there apace;

Let none come there but that virgins been

To adorn her grace:

And when you come, whereas she in place,

See that your rudeness do not you disgrace;

Bind your fillets fast,

And gird in your waste,

For more fineness, with a taudry lace.

Bring hither the pink and purple cullumbine

With gylliflowers;

Bring coronatiöns, and sops in wine,

Worn of paramours;

Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies

And cowslips, and kingcups, and loved lilies;

The pretty paunce

And the chevisaunce

Shall match with the fair flowre-delice."[82]

71. Two short pieces more only of master song, and we have enough to

test all by.

(1)

"No more, no more, since thou art dead,

Shall we e'er bring coy brides to bed,

No more, at yearly festivals,

We cowslip balls

Or chains of columbines shall make,

For this or that occasion's sake.

No, no! our maiden pleasures be

Wrapt in thy winding-sheet with thee."[83]

(2)

"Death is now the phoenix nest,

And the turtle's loyal breast

To eternity doth rest.

Truth may seem, but cannot be;

Beauty brag, but 'tis not she:

Truth and beauty buried be."[84]

72. If now, with the echo of these perfect verses in your mind, you turn

to Byron, and glance over, or recall to memory, enough of him to give

means of exact comparison, you will, or should, recognize these

following kinds of mischief in him. First, if anyone offends him--as for

instance Mr. Southey, or Lord Elgin--"his manners have not that repose

that marks the caste," etc. _This_ defect in his Lordship's style, being

myself scrupulously and even painfully reserved in the use of

vituperative language, I need not say how deeply I deplore.[85]

Secondly. In the best and most violet-bedded bits of his work there is

yet, as compared with Elizabethan and earlier verse, a strange taint; an

indefinable--evening flavor of Covent Garden, as it were;--not to say,

escape of gas in the Strand. That is simply what it proclaims

itself--London air. If he had lived all his life in Green-head Ghyll,

things would of course have been different. But it was his fate to come

to town--modern town--like Michael's son; and modern London (and Venice)

are answerable for the state of their drains, not Byron.

Thirdly. His melancholy is without any relief whatsoever; his jest

sadder than his earnest; while, in Elizabethan work, all lament is full

of hope, and all pain of balsam.

Of this evil he has himself told you the cause in a single line

prophetic of all things since and now. "Where _he_ gazed, a gloom

pervaded space."[86]

So that, for instance, while Mr. Wordsworth, on a visit to town, being

an exemplary early riser, could walk, felicitous, on Westminster Bridge,

remarking how the city now did like a garment wear the beauty of the

morning; Byron, rising somewhat later, contemplated only the garment

which the beauty of the morning had by that time received for wear from

the city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religious

rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame

demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance,

and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still

lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it,

"The sordor of civilization, mixed

With all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed."[87]

73. Fourthly, with this steadiness of bitter melancholy, there is joined

a sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower

animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, color-depth, and

morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,--with

other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be

analyzed by extreme care,--is found, to the full, only in five men that

I know of in modern times; namely, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and

myself,--differing totally and throughout the entire group of us, from

the delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti; and

separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer,

Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for "Rokkes blak"

and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans,

which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and

Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to

climb, or cross;--all this love of impending mountains, coiled

thunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky,

almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmettes, gulfs of

Spezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and close

brushwood at Coniston.

74. And, lastly, also in the whole group of us, glows volcanic instinct

of Astræan justice returning not to, but up out of, the earth, which

will not at all suffer us to rest any more in Pope's serene "whatever

is, is right"; but holds, on the contrary, profound conviction that

about ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong:

conviction making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders

of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine

monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less

sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope

and the implacableness of Fate.

In Byron the indignation, the sorrow, and the effort are joined to the

death: and they are the parts of his nature (as of mine also in its

feebler terms), which the selfishly comfortable public have, literally,

no conception of whatever; and from which the piously sentimental

public, offering up daily the pure oblation of divine tranquillity,

shrink with anathema not unembittered by alarm.

75. Concerning which matters I hope to speak further and with more

precise illustration in my next paper; but, seeing that this present one

has been hitherto somewhat somber, and perhaps, to gentle readers, not a

little discomposing, I will conclude it with a piece of light biographic

study, necessary to my plan, and as conveniently admissible in this

place as afterwards;--namely, the account of the manner in which

Scott--whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient and

palpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is of

the Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, damnable,--spent his Sunday.

76. As usual, from Lockhart's farrago we cannot find out the first thing

we want to know,--whether Scott worked after his week-day custom, on the

Sunday morning. But, I gather, not; at all events his household and his

cattle rested (L. iii. 108). I imagine he walked out into his woods, or

read quietly in his study. Immediately after breakfast, whoever was in

the house, "Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read prayers at eleven, when

I expect you all to attend" (vii. 306). Question of college and other

externally unanimous prayer settled for us very briefly: "if you have no

faith, have at least manners." He read the Church of England service,

lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (_ibid._). After

the service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After sermon, if

the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests, to

_cold_ picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblical

novelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, by

heart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). These

lessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whether

there was picnic or not. For the rest of the afternoon he took his

pleasure in the woods with Tom Purdie, who also always appeared at his

master's elbow on Sunday after dinner was over, and drank long life to

the laird and his lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whisky

or a tumbler of wine, according to his fancy (vi. 195). Whatever might

happen on the other evenings of the week, Scott always dined at home on

Sunday; and with old friends: never, unless inevitably, receiving any

person with whom he stood on ceremony (v. 335). He came into the room

rubbing his hands like a boy arriving at home for the holidays, his

Peppers and Mustards gamboling about him, "and even the stately Maida

grinning and wagging his tail with sympathy." For the usquebaugh of the

less honored week-days, at the Sunday board he circulated the champagne

briskly during dinner, and considered a pint of claret each man's fair

share afterwards (v. 339). In the evening, music being to the Scottish

worldly mind indecorous, he read aloud some favorite author, for the

amusement or edification of his little circle. Shakespeare it might be,

or Dryden,--Johnson, or Joanna Baillie,--Crabbe, or Wordsworth. But in

those days "Byron was pouring out his spirit fresh and full, and if a

new piece from _his_ hand had appeared, it was _sure to be read by Scott

the Sunday evening afterwards_; and that with such delighted emphasis

as showed how completely the elder bard had kept up his enthusiasm for

poetry at pitch of youth, and all his admiration of genius, free, pure,

and unstained by the least drop of literary jealousy" (v. 341).

77. With such necessary and easily imaginable varieties as chanced in

having Dandie Dinmont or Captain Brown for guests at Abbotsford, or

Colonel Mannering, Counselor Pleydell, and Dr. Robertson in Castle

Street, such was Scott's habitual Sabbath: a day, we perceive, of eating

the fat, (_dinner_, presumably not cold, being a work of necessity and

mercy--thou also, even thou, Saint Thomas of Turnbull, hast thine!) and

drinking the sweet, abundant in the manner of Mr. Southey's cataract of

Lodore,--"Here it comes, sparkling." A day bestrewn with coronatiöns and

sops in wine; deep in libations to good hope and fond memory; a day of

rest to beast, and mirth to man, (as also to sympathetic beasts that can

be merry,) and concluding itself in an Orphic hour of delight,

signifying peace on Tweedside, and goodwill to men, there or far

away;--always excepting the French, and Boney.

"Yes, and see what it all came to in the end."

Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite other

things; of _these_, came such length of days and peace as Scott had in

his Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands.

78. Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes

overmuch lightmindedness, was administered to him by the more grave and

thoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heart

as well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother as

her dearest possession. Knew it, and what was more, had thought of it,

and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain to

seek.

And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in

the way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance,

remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning,

every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of

him before courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as

his own "Bride of Abydos," for instance, which he had written from

beginning to end in four days, or even the traveling reflections of

Harold and Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday

afternoon's reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates

to him a work of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part

he has done his best,--the drama of "Cain." Of which dedication the

virtual significance to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and

last of Border soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs,

and of White Maidens, also of Gray Friars, and Green Fairies; also of

sacred hollies by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the

bushes that the black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the

crooks in the glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet

the mightiest of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means

yet a dwarfed one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie

Elliot may tremblingly ask "Gude guide us, what's yon?" hast thou yet

known, seeing that thou hast yet told, _nothing_.

Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: September, 1880.]

[Footnote 74: "It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and

verse for verse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic

country and a bigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion--and so

tell those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy.

"I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I

must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with

the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead,

and the new one not appointed yet--but the masquing goes on the same."

(Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1820.) "A

dreadfully moral place, for you must not look at anybody's wife, except

your neighbor's."]

[Footnote 75: See quoted _infra_ the mock, by Byron, of himself and all

other modern poets, "Juan," canto iii. stanza 80, and compare canto xiv.

stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will stand

always for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, for

line.]

[Footnote 76: "Island," ii. 16, where see context.]

[Footnote 77: "Juan," viii. 5; but, by your Lordship's quotation,

Wordsworth says "instrument,"--not "daughter." Your Lordship had better

have said "Infant" and taken the Woolwich authorities to witness: only

Infant would not have rymed.]

[Footnote 78: "Juan," viii. 3; compare 14, and 63, with all its lovely

context 61-68: then 82, and afterwards slowly and with thorough

attention, the Devil's speech, beginning, "Yes, Sir, you forget" in

scene 2 of "The Deformed Transformed": then Sardanapalus's, act i. scene

2, beginning, "he is gone, and on his finger bears my signet," and

finally the "Vision of Judgment," stanzas 3 to 5.]

[Footnote 79: "Island," iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the "slings

its high flakes, shivered into sleet" of stanza 7.]

[Footnote 80: A modern editor--of whom I will not use the expressions

which occur to me--finding the "we" a redundant syllable in the iambic

line, prints, "we're." It is a little thing--but I do not recollect, in

the forty years of my literary experience, any piece of editor's retouch

quite so base. But I don't read the new editions much: that must be

allowed for.]

[Footnote 81: "Island," ii. 5. I was going to say, "Look to the

context," but am fain to give it here; for the stanza, learned by heart,

ought to be our school-introduction to the literature of the world.

"Such was this ditty of Tradition's days,

Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys

In song, where fame as yet hath left no sign

Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine;

Which leaves no record to the skeptic eye,

But yields young history all to harmony;

A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre

In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire.

For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave,

Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave,

Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side,

Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide,

Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear,

Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear;

Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme

For sages' labors or the student's dream;

Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil--

The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil,

Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude,

But such inspired the Norseman's solitude,

Who came and conquer'd; such, wherever rise

Lands which no foes destroy or civilize,

Exist; and what can our accomplish'd art

Of verse do more than reach the awaken'd heart?"]

[Footnote 82: "Shepherd's Calendar." "Coronatiön," loyal-pastoral for

Carnation; "sops in wine," jolly-pastoral for double pink; "paunce,"

thoughtless pastoral for pansy; "chevisaunce," I don't know (not in

Gerarde); "flowre-delice"--pronounce dellice--half made up of "delicate"

and "delicious."]

[Footnote 83: Herrick, "Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter."]

[Footnote 84: "Passionate Pilgrim."]

[Footnote 85: In this point compare the "Curse of Minerva" with the

"Tears of the Muses."]

[Footnote 86: "He,"--Lucifer; ("Vision of Judgment," 24). It is

precisely because Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the

gloom. To the Devil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both

cheerfulness and prosperity; with a delightful sense of their own wisdom

and virtue; and of the "progress" of things in general:--in smooth sea

and fair weather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil:

as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom.]

[Footnote 87: "Island," ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe;

no denial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay,

nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with

deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in

its civilization.]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

IV.[88]

79. I fear the editor of the _Nineteenth Century_ will get little thanks

from his readers for allowing so much space in closely successive

numbers to my talk of old-fashioned men and things. I have nevertheless

asked his indulgence, this time, for a note or two concerning yet older

fashions, in order to bring into sharper clearness the leading outlines

of literary fact, which I ventured only in my last paper to secure in

_silhouette_, obscurely asserting itself against the limelight of recent

moral creed, and fiction manufacture.

The Bishop of Manchester, on the occasion of the great Wordsworthian

movement in that city for the enlargement, adornment, and sale of

Thirlmere, observed, in his advocacy of these operations, that very few

people, he supposed, had ever seen Tairlmere. His Lordship might have

supposed, with greater felicity, that very few people had ever read

Wordsworth. My own experience in that matter is that the amiable persons

who call themselves "Wordsworthian" have read--usually a long time

ago--"Lucy Gray," "The April Mornings," a picked sonnet or two, and the

"Ode on the Intimations," which last they seem generally to be under the

impression that nobody else has ever met with: and my further experience

of these sentimental students is, that they are seldom inclined to put

in practice a single syllable of the advice tendered them by their model

poet.

Now, as I happen myself to have used Wordsworth as a daily text-book

from youth to age, and have lived, moreover, in all essential points

according to the tenor of his teaching, it was matter of some

mortification to me, when, at Oxford, I tried to get the memory of Mr.

Wilkinson's spade honored by some practical spadework at Ferry Hincksey,

to find that no other tutor in Oxford could see the slightest good or

meaning in what I was about; and that although my friend Professor

Rolleston occasionally sought the shades of our Rydalian laurels with

expressions of admiration, his professorial manner of "from pastoral

graves extracting thoughts divine" was to fill the Oxford Museum with

the scabbed skulls of plague-struck cretins.

80. I therefore respectfully venture to intimate to my bucolic friends,

that I know, more vitally by far than they, what _is_ in Wordsworth, and

what is not. Any man who chooses to live by his precepts will thankfully

find in them a beauty and rightness, (_exquisite_ rightness I called it,

in "Sesame and Lilies,") which will preserve him alike from mean

pleasure, vain hope, and guilty deed: so that he will neither mourn at

the gate of the fields which with covetous spirit he sold, nor drink of

the waters which with yet more covetous spirit he stole, nor devour the

bread of the poor in secret, nor set on his guest-table the poor man's

lamb:--in all these homely virtues and assured justices let him be

Wordsworth's true disciple; and he will then be able with equanimity to

hear it said, when there is need to say so, that his excellent master

often wrote verses that were not musical, and sometimes expressed

opinions that were not profound.

And the need to say so becomes imperative when the unfinished verse, and

uncorrected fancy, are advanced by the affection of his disciples into

places of authority where they give countenance to the popular national

prejudices from the infection of which, in most cases, they themselves

sprang.

81. Take, for example, the following three and a half lines of the 38th

Ecclesiastical Sonnet:--

"Amazement strikes the crowd; while many turn

Their eyes away in sorrow, others burn

With scorn, invoking a vindictive ban

From outraged Nature."

The first quite evident character of these lines is that they are

extremely bad iambics,--as ill-constructed as they are unmelodious; the

turning and burning being at the wrong ends of them, and the ends

themselves put just when the sentence is in its middle.

But a graver fault of these three and a half lines is that the

amazement, the turning, the burning, and the banning, are all alike

fictitious; and foul-fictitious, calumniously conceived no less than

falsely. Not one of the spectators of the scene referred to was in

reality amazed--not one contemptuous, not one maledictory. It is only

our gentle minstrel of the meres who sits in the seat of the

scornful--only the hermit of Rydal Mount who invokes the malison of

Nature.

What the scene verily was, and how witnessed, it will not take long to

tell; nor will the tale be useless: but I must first refer the reader to

a period preceding, by nearly a century, the great symbolic action under

the porch of St. Mark's.

82. The Protestant ecclesiastic, and infidel historian, who delight to

prop their pride, or edge their malice, in unveiling the corruption

through which Christianity has passed, should study in every fragment of

authentic record which the fury of their age has left, the lives of the

three queens of the Priesthood, Theodora, Marozia, and Matilda, and the

foundation of the merciless power of the Popes, by the monk Hildebrand.

And if there be any of us who would satisfy with nobler food than the

catastrophes of the stage, the awe at what is marvelous in human sorrow

which makes sacred the fountain of tears in authentic tragedy, let them

follow, pace by pace, and pang by pang, the humiliation of the fourth

Henry at Canossa, and his death in the church he had built to the Virgin

at Spire.

His antagonist, Hildebrand, died twenty years before him; captive to the

Normans in Salerno, having seen the Rome in which he had proclaimed his

princedom over all the earth, laid in her last ruin; and forever. Rome

herself, since her desolation by Guiscard, has been only a grave and a

wilderness[89]--what _we_ call Rome, is a mere colony of the stranger

in her "Field of Mars." This destruction of Rome by the Normans is

accurately and utterly the end of her Capitoline and wolf-suckled power;

and from that day her Leonine or Christian power takes its throne in the

Leonine city, sanctified in tradition by its prayer of safety for the

Saxon Borgo, in which the childhood of our own Alfred had been trained.

And from this date forward, (recollected broadly as 1090, the year of

the birth of St. Bernard,) no longer oppressed by the remnants of Roman

death,--Christian faith, chivalry, and art possess the world, and

recreate it, through the space of four hundred years--the twelfth,

thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

And, necessarily, in the first of these centuries comes the main debate

between the powers of Monk and Knight which was reconciled in this scene

under the porch of St. Mark's.

83. That debate was brought to its crisis and issue by the birth of the

new third elemental force of the State--the Citizen. Sismondi's

republican enthusiasm does not permit him to recognize the essential

character of this power. He speaks always of the Republics and the

liberties of Italy, as if a craftsman differed from a knight only in

political privileges, and as if his special virtue consisted in

rendering obedience to no master. But the strength of the great cities

of Italy was no more republican than that of her monasteries, or

fortresses. The Craftsman of Milan, Sailor of Pisa, and Merchant of

Venice are all of them essentially different persons from the soldier

and the anchorite:--but the city, under the banner of its _caroccio_,

and the command of its _podesta_, was disciplined far more strictly than

any wandering military squadron by its leader, or any lower order of

monks under their abbot. In the founding of civic constitutions, the

Lord of the city is usually its Bishop:--and it is curious to hear the

republican historian--who, however in judgment blind, is never in heart

uncandid, prepare to close his record of the ten years' war of Como with

Milan, with this summary of distress to the heroic mountaineers--that

"they had lost their Bishop Guido, who was their soul."

84. I perceive for quite one of the most hopeless of the many

difficulties which Modernism finds, and will find, insuperable either by

steam or dynamite, that of either wedging or welding into its own

cast-iron head, any conception of a king, monk, or townsman of the

twelfth and two succeeding centuries. And yet no syllable of the

utterance, no fragment of the arts of the middle ages, far less any

motive of their deeds, can be read even in the letter--how much less

judged in spirit--unless, first of all, we can somewhat imagine all

these three Living souls.

First, a king who was the best knight in his kingdom, and on whose own

swordstrokes hung the fate of Christendom. A king such as Henry the

Fowler, the first and third Edwards of England, the Bruce of Scotland,

and this Frederic the First of Germany.

Secondly, a monk who had been trained from youth in greater hardship

than any soldier, and had learned at last to desire no other life than

one of hardship;--a man believing in his own and his fellows'

immortality, in the aiding powers of angels, and the eternal presence of

God; versed in all the science, graceful in all the literature,

cognizant of all the policy of his age; and fearless of any created

thing, on the earth or under it.

And, lastly, a craftsman absolutely master of his craft, and taking such

pride in the exercise of it as all healthy souls take in putting forth

their personal powers: proud also of his city and his people; enriching,

year by year, their streets with loftier buildings, their treasuries

with rarer possession; and bequeathing his hereditary art to a line of

successive masters, by whose tact of race, and honor of effort, the

essential skills of metal-work in gold and steel, of pottery,

glass-painting, woodwork, and weaving, were carried to a perfectness

never to be surpassed; and of which our utmost modern hope is to produce

a not instantly detected imitation.

These three kinds of persons, I repeat, we have to conceive before we

can understand any single event of the Middle Ages. For all that is

enduring in them was done by men such as these. History, indeed, records

twenty undoings for one deed, twenty desolations for one redemption; and

thinks the fool and villain potent as the wise and true. But Nature and

her laws recognize only the noble: generations of the cruel pass like

the darkness of locust plagues; while one loving and brave heart

establishes a nation.

85. I give the character of Barbarossa in the words of Sismondi, a man

sparing in the praise of emperors:--

"The death of Frederic was mourned even by the cities which so long had

been the objects of his hostility, and the victims of his vengeance. All

the Lombards--even the Milanese--acknowledged his rare courage, his

constancy in misfortune--his generosity in conquest.

"An intimate conviction of the justice of his cause had often rendered

him cruel, even to ferocity, against those who still resisted; but after

victory he took vengeance only on senseless walls; and irritated as he

had been by the people of Milan, Crema, and Tortona, and whatever blood

he had shed during battle, he never sullied his triumph by odious

punishments. In spite of the treason which he on one occasion used

against Alessandria, his promises were in general respected; and when,

after the peace of Constance, the towns which had been most inveterately

hostile to him received him within their walls, they had no need to

guard against any attempt on his part to suppress the privileges he had

once recognized."

My own estimate of Frederic's character would be scarcely so favorable;

it is the only point of history on which I have doubted the authority

even of my own master, Carlyle. But I am concerned here only with the

actualities of his wars in Italy, with the people of her cities, and the

head of her religion.

86. Frederic of Suabia, direct heir of the Ghibelline rights, while

nearly related by blood to the Guelph houses of Bavaria and Saxony, was

elected emperor almost in the exact middle of the twelfth century

(1152). He was called into Italy by the voices of Italians. The then

Pope, Eugenius III., invoked his aid against the Roman people under

Arnold of Brescia. The people of Lodi prayed his protection against the

tyrannies of Milan.

Frederic entered the plain of Verona in 1154, by the valley of the

Adige,--ravaged the territory of Milan,--pillaged and burned Tortona,

Asti, and Chieri,--kept his Christmas at Novara; marched on

Rome,--delivered up Arnold to the Pope[90] (who, instantly killing him,

ended for that time Protestant reforms in Italy)--destroyed Spoleto; and

returned by Verona, having scorched his path through Italy like a level

thunderbolt along the ground.

Three years afterwards, Adrian died; and, chiefly, by the love and will

of the Roman people, Roland of Siena was raised to the Papal throne,

under the name of Alexander III. The conclave of cardinals chose another

Pope, Victor III.; Frederic on his second invasion of Italy (1158)

summoned both elected heads of the Church to receive judgment of their

claims before _him_.

The Cardinals' Pope, Victor, obeyed. The people's Alexander, refused;

answering that the successor of St. Peter submitted himself to the

judgment neither of emperors nor councils.

The spirit of modern prelacy may perhaps have rendered it impossible for

an English churchman to conceive this answer as other than that of

insolence and hypocrisy. But a faithful Pope, and worthy of his throne,

could answer no otherwise. Frederic of course at once confirmed the

claims of his rival; the German bishops and Italian cardinals in council

at Pavia joined their powers to the Emperor's and Alexander, driven from

Rome, wandered--unsubdued in soul--from city to city, taking refuge at

last in France.

87. Meantime, in 1159, Frederic took and destroyed Crema, having first

bound its hostages to his machines of war. In 1161, Milan submitted to

his mercy, and he decreed that her name should perish. Only a few

pillars of a Roman temple, and the church of St. Ambrose, remain to us

of the ancient city. Warned by her destruction, Verona, Vicenza, Padua,

Treviso, and Venice, joined in the vow--called of the Lombard League--to

reduce the Emperor's power within its just limits. And, in 1164,

Alexander, under the protection of Louis VII. of France and Henry II. of

England, returned to Rome, and was received at Ostia by its senate,

clergy, and people.

Three years afterwards, Frederic again swept down on the Campagna;

attacked the Leonine city, where the basilica of the Vatican, changed

into a fortress, and held by the Pope's guard, resisted his assault

until, by the Emperor's order, fire was set to the Church of St. Mary of

Pity.

The Leonine city was taken; the Pope retired to the Coliseum, whence,

uttering once again his fixed defiance of the Emperor, but fearing

treachery, he fled in disguise down the Tiber to the sea, and sought

asylum at Benevento.

The German army encamped round Rome in August of 1166, with the sign

before their eyes of the ruins of the church of Our Lady of Pity. The

marsh-fever struck them--killed the Emperor's cousin, Frederic of

Rothenburg, the Duke of Bavaria, the Archbishop of Cologne, the Bishops

of Liége, Spire, Ratisbonne, and Verden, and two thousand knights; the

common dead were uncounted. The Emperor gathered the wreck of his army

together, retreated on Lombardy, quartered his soldiery at Pavia, and

escaped in secret over the Mont Cenis with thirty knights.

88. No places of strength remained to him south of the Alps but Pavia

and Montferrat; and to hold these in check, and command the plains of

Piedmont, the Lombard League built the fortress city, which, from the

Pope who had maintained through all adversity the authority of his

throne and the cause of the Italian people, they named "Alessandria."

Against this bulwark the Emperor, still indomitable, dashed with his

utmost regathered strength after eight years of pause, and in the temper

in which men set their souls on a single stake. All had been lost in

his last war, except his honor--in this, he lost his honor also.

Whatever may be the just estimate of the other elements of his

character, he is unquestionably, among the knights of his time, notable

in impiety. In the battle of Cassano, he broke through the Milanese

vanguard to their _caroccio_, and struck down with his own hand its

golden crucifix;--two years afterwards its cross and standard were bowed

before him--and in vain.[91] He fearlessly claims for himself right of

decision between contending popes, and camps against the rightful one on

the ashes of the Church of the Virgin.

Foiled in his first assault on Alessandria, detained before it through

the inundations of the winter, and threatened by the army of the League

in the spring, he announced a truce to the besieged, that they might

keep Good Friday. Then violating alike the day's sanctity and his own

oath, he attacked the trusting city through a secretly completed mine.

And, for a second time, the verdict of God went forth against him. Every

man who had obtained entrance within the city was slain or cast from its

ramparts;--the Alessandrines threw all their gates open--fell, with the

broken fugitives, on the investing troops, scattered them in disorder,

and burned their towers of attack. The Emperor gathered their remains

into Pavia on Easter Sunday,--spared in his defeat by the army of the

League.

89. And yet, once more, he brought his cause to combat-trial.

Temporizing at Lodi with the Pope's legates, he assembled, under the

Archbishops of Magdebourg and Cologne, and the chief prelates and

princes of Germany, a seventh army; brought it down to Como across the

Splügen, put himself there at its head, and in the early spring of 1176,

the fifteenth year since he had decreed the effacing of the name of

Milan, was met at Legnano by the specter of Milan.

Risen from her grave, she led the Lombard League in this final battle.

Three hundred of her nobles guarded her _caroccio_; nine hundred of her

knights bound themselves--under the name of the Cohort of Death--to win

for her, or to die.

The field of battle is in the midst of the plain, now covered with maize

and mulberry trees, from which the traveler, entering Italy by the Lago

Maggiore, sees first the unbroken snows of the Rosa behind him and the

white pinnacles of Milan Cathedral in the south. The Emperor, as was his

wont, himself led his charging chivalry. The Milanese knelt as it

came;--prayed aloud to God, St. Peter, and St. Ambrose--then advanced

round their _caroccio_ on foot. The Emperor's charge broke through their

ranks nearly up to their standard--then the Cohort of Death rode against

him.

90. And all his battle changed before them into flight. For the first

time in stricken field, the imperial standard fell, and was taken. The

Milanese followed the broken host until their swords were weary; and the

Emperor, struck fighting from his horse, was left, lost among the dead.

The Empress, whose mercy to Milan he had forbidden, already wore

mourning for him in Pavia, when her husband came, solitary and

suppliant, to its gate.

The lesson at last sufficed; and Barbarossa sent his heretic bishops to

ask forgiveness of the Pope, and peace from the Lombards.

Pardon and peace were granted--without conditions. "Cæsar's successor"

had been the blight of Italy for a quarter of a century; he had ravaged

her harvests, burnt her cities, decimated her children with famine, her

young men with the sword; and, seven times over, in renewed invasion,

sought to establish dominion over her, from the Alps to the rock of

Scylla.

She asked of him no restitution;--coveted no province--demanded no

fortress, of his land. Neither coward nor robber, she disdained alike

guard and gain upon her frontiers: she counted no compensation for her

sorrow; and set no price upon the souls of her dead. She stood in the

porch of her brightest temple--between the blue plains of her earth and

sea, and, in the person of her spiritual father, gave her enemy pardon.

"Black demons hovering o'er his mitered head," think you, gentle

sonneteer of the daffodil-marsh? And have Barbarossa's race been taught

of better angels how to bear themselves to a conquered emperor,--or

England, by braver and more generous impulses, how to protect his exiled

son?

The fall of Venice, since that day, was measured by Byron in a single

line:

"An Emperor tramples where an emperor knelt."

But what words shall measure the darker humiliation of the German

pillaging his helpless enemy and England leaving her ally under the

savage's spear?

91. With the clews now given, and an hour or two's additional reading of

any standard historian he pleases, the reader may judge on secure

grounds whether the truce of Venice and peace of Constance were of the

Devil's making: whereof whatever he may ultimately feel or affirm, this

at least he will please note for positive, that Mr. Wordsworth, having

no shadow of doubt of the complete wisdom of every idea that comes into

his own head, writes down in dogmatic sonnet his first impression of

black instrumentality in the business; so that his innocent readers,

taking him for their sole master, far from caring to inquire into the

thing more deeply, may remain even unconscious that it is disputable,

and forever incapable of conceiving either a Catholic's feeling, or a

careful historian's hesitation, touching the centrally momentous crisis

of power in all the Middle Ages! Whereas Byron, knowing the history

thoroughly, and judging of Catholicism with an honest and open heart,

ventures to assert nothing that admits of debate, either concerning

human motives or angelic presences; but binds into one line of massive

melody the unerringly counted sum of Venetian majesty and shame.

92. In a future paper, I propose examining his method of dealing with

the debate, itself on a higher issue: and will therefore close the

present one by trampling a few of the briers and thorns of popular

offense out of our way.

The common counts against Byron are in the main, three.

I. That he confessed--in some sort, even proclaimed defiantly (which is

a proud man's natural manner of confession)[92]--the naughtiness of his

life.

The hypocrisy[93] even of Pall Mall and Petit Trianon does not, I

assume, and dares not, go so far as to condemn the naughtiness itself?

And that he _did_ confess it, is precisely the reason for reading him by

his own motto "Trust Byron." You always may; and the common

smooth-countenanced man of the world is guiltier in the precise measure

of your higher esteem for him.

II. That he wrote about pretty things which ought never to be heard of.

In the presence of the exact proprieties of modern Fiction, Art, and

Drama, I am shy of touching on the question of what should be mentioned,

and seen--and should not. All that I care to say, here, is that Byron

tells you of realities, and that their being pretty ones is, to my

mind,--at the first (literally) blush, of the matter, rather in his

favor. If however you have imagined that he means you to think Dudu as

pretty as Myrrha,[94] or even Haidee, whether in full dress or none, as

pretty as Marina, it is your fault, not his.

93. III. That he blasphemed God and the King.

Before replying to this count, I must ask the reader's patience in a

piece of very serious work, the ascertainment of the real and full

meaning of the word Blasphemy. It signifies simply "Harmful

speaking"--Male-diction--or shortly "Blame"; and may be committed as

much against a child or a dog, if you _desire_ to hurt them, as against

the Deity. And it is, in its original use, accurately opposed to another

Greek word, "Euphemy," which means a reverent and loving manner of

benediction--fallen entirely into disuse in modern sentiment and

language.

Now the compass and character of essential Male-diction, so-called in

Latin, or Blasphemy, so-called in Greek, may, I think, be best explained

to the general reader by an instance in a very little thing, first

translating the short pieces of Plato which best show the meaning of the

word in codes of Greek morality.

"These are the things then" (the true order of the Sun, Moon, and

Planets), "oh my friends, of which I desire that all our citizens

and youths should learn at least so much concerning the Gods of

Heaven, as not to blaspheme concerning them, but to eupheme

reverently, both in sacrificing, and in every prayer they

pray."--Laws, VII. Steph. 821.

"And through the whole of life, beyond all other need for it, there

is need of Euphemy from a man to his parents, for there is no

heavier punishment than that of light and winged words," (to

_them_)? "for Nemesis, the angel of Divine Recompense, has been

throned Bishop over all men who sin in such manner."--IV. Steph.

717.

The word which I have translated "recompense" is more strictly that

"heavenly Justice"--the proper Light of the World, from which nothing

can be hidden, and by which all who will may walk securely; whence the

mystic answer of Ulysses to his son, as Athena, herself invisible, walks

with them, filling the chamber of the house with light, "This is the

justice of the Gods who possess Olympus." See the context in reference

to which Plato quotes the line.--Laws, X. Steph. 904. The little story

that I have to tell is significant chiefly in connection with the second

passage of Plato above quoted.

94. I have elsewhere mentioned that I was a homebred boy, and that as my

mother diligently and scrupulously taught me my Bible and Latin Grammar,

so my father fondly and devotedly taught me my Scott, my Pope, and my

Byron.[95] The Latin grammar out of which my mother taught me was the

11th edition of Alexander Adam's--(Edinb.: Bell and Bradfute,

1823)--namely, that Alexander Adam, Rector of Edinburgh High School,

into whose upper class Scott passed in October 1782, and who--previous

masters having found nothing noticeable in the heavy-looking lad--_did_

find sterling qualities in him, and "would constantly refer to him for

dates, and particulars of battles, and other remarkable events alluded

to in Horace, or _whatever other authors the boys were reading_; and

called him the historian of his class" (L. i. 126). _That_ Alex. Adam,

also, who, himself a loving historian, remembered the fate of every boy

at his school during the fifty years he had headed it, and whose last

words--"It grows dark, the boys may dismiss," gave to Scott's heart the

vision and the audit of the death of Elspeth of the Craigburn-foot.

Strangely, in opening the old volume at this moment (I would not give it

for an illuminated missal) I find, in its article on Prosody, some

things extremely useful to me, which I have been hunting for in vain

through Zumpt and Matthiæ. In all rational respects I believe it to be

the best Latin Grammar that has yet been written.

When my mother had carried me through it as far as the syntax, it was

thought desirable that I should be put under a master: and the master

chosen was a deeply and deservedly honored clergyman, the Rev. Thomas

Dale, mentioned in Mr. Holbeach's article, "The New Fiction,"

(_Contemporary Review_ for February of this year), together with Mr.

Melville, who was our pastor after Mr. Dale went to St. Pancras.

95. On the first day when I went to take my seat in Mr. Dale's

schoolroom, I carried my old grammar to him, in a modest pride,

expecting some encouragement and honor for the accuracy with which I

could repeat, on demand, some hundred and sixty close-printed pages of

it.

But Mr. Dale threw it back to me with a fierce bang upon his desk,

saying (with accent and look of seven-times-heated scorn), "That's a

_Scotch_ thing."

Now, my father being Scotch, and an Edinburgh High School boy, and my

mother having labored in that book with me since I could read, and all

my happiest holiday time having been spent on the North Inch of Perth,

these four words, with the action accompanying them, contained as much

insult, pain, and loosening of my respect for my parents, love of my

father's country, and honor for its worthies, as it was possible to

compress into four syllables and an ill-mannered gesture. Which were

therefore pure, double-edged and point-envenomed blasphemy. For to make

a boy despise his mother's care, is the straightest way to make him also

despise his Redeemer's voice; and to make him scorn his father and his

father's house, the straightest way to make him deny his God, and his

God's Heaven.

96. I speak, observe, in this instance, only of the actual words and

their effect; not of the feeling in the speaker's mind, which was almost

playful, though his words, tainted with extremity of pride, were such

light ones as men shall give account of at the Day of Judgment. The real

sin of blasphemy is not in the saying, nor even in the thinking; but in

the wishing which is father to thought and word: and the nature of it is

simply in wishing evil to anything; for as the quality of Mercy is not

strained, so neither that of Blasphemy, the one distilling from the

clouds of Heaven, the other from the steam of the Pit. He that is unjust

in little is unjust in much, he that is malignant to the least is to the

greatest, he who hates the earth which is God's footstool, hates yet

more Heaven which is God's throne, and Him that sitteth thereon.

Finally, therefore, blasphemy is wishing ill to _any_ thing; and its

outcome is in Vanni Fucci's extreme "ill manners"--wishing ill to God.

On the contrary, Euphemy is wishing well to everything, and its outcome

is in Burns' extreme "good manners," wishing well to--

"Ah! wad ye tak a thought, and men'!"

That is the supreme of Euphemy.

97. Fix then, first in your minds, that the sin of malediction, whether

Shimei's individual, or John Bull's national, is in the vulgar

malignity, not in the vulgar diction, and then note further that the

"phemy" or "fame" of the two words, blasphemy and euphemy, signifies

broadly the bearing of _false_ witness _against_ one's neighbor in the

one case, and of _true_ witness _for_ him in the other: so that while

the peculiar province of the blasphemer is to throw firelight on the

evil in good persons, the province of the euphuist (I must use the word

inaccurately for want of a better) is to throw sunlight on the good in

bad ones; such, for instance, as Bertram, Meg Merrilies, Rob Roy, Robin

Hood, and the general run of Corsairs, Giaours, Turks, Jews, Infidels,

and Heretics; nay, even sisters of Rahab, and daughters of Moab and

Ammon; and at last the whole spiritual race of him to whom it was said,

"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?"

98. And being thus brought back to our actual subject, I purpose, after

a few more summary notes on the luster of the electrotype language of

modern passion, to examine what facts or probabilities lie at the root

both of Goethe's and Byron's imagination of that contest between the

powers of Good and Evil, of which the Scriptural account appears to Mr.

Huxley so inconsistent with the recognized laws of political economy;

and has been, by the cowardice of our old translators, so maimed of its

vitality, that the frank Greek assertion of St. Michael's not daring to

blaspheme the devil,[96] is tenfold more mischievously deadened and

caricatured by their periphrasis of "durst not bring against him a

railing accusation," than by Byron's apparently--and only

apparently--less reverent description of the manner of angelic encounter

for an inferior ruler of the people.

"Between His Darkness and His Brightness

There passed a mutual glance of great politeness."

PARIS, _September 20, 1880._

POSTSCRIPT.

99. I am myself extremely grateful, nor doubt a like feeling in most of

my readers, both for the information contained in the first of the two

following letters; and the correction of references in the second, of

which, however, I have omitted some closing sentences which the writer

will, I think, see to have been unnecessary.[97]

NORTH STREET, WIRKSWORTH:

_August 2, 1880._

DEAR SIR,--When reading your interesting article in the June

number of the _Nineteenth Century_, and your quotation from Walter

Scott, I was struck with the great similarity between some of the Scotch

words and my native tongue (Norwegian). _Whigmaleerie_, as to the

derivation of which you seem to be in some perplexity, is in Norwegian

_Vægmaleri_. _Væg_, pronounced "Vegg," signifying wall, and Maleri

"picture," pronounced almost the same as in Scotch, and derived from _at

male_, to paint. Siccan is in Danish _sikken_, used more about something

comical than great, and scarcely belonging to the written language, in

which _slig_, such, and _slig en_, such a one, would be the equivalent.

I need not remark that as to the written language Danish and Norwegian

is the same, only the dialects differ.

Having been told by some English friends that this explanation would

perhaps not be without interest to yourself, I take the liberty of

writing this letter. I remain yours respectfully,

THEA BERG.

INNER TEMPLE: _September 9, 1880._

SIR,--In your last article on Fiction, Foul and Fair

(_Nineteenth Century_, September 1880) you have the following note:

"Juan viii. 5" (it ought to be 9) "but by your Lordship's quotation,

Wordsworth says 'instrument' not 'daughter.'"

Now in Murray's edition of Byron, 1837, octavo, his Lordship's quotation

is as follows:--

"But thy most dreaded instrument

In working out a pure intent

Is man arranged for mutual slaughter;

Yea, Carnage is thy daughter."

And his Lordship refers you to "Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode."

I have no early edition of Wordsworth. In Moxon's, 1844, no such lines

appear in the Thanksgiving Ode, but in the ode dated 1815, and printed

immediately before it, the following lines occur.

"But man is thy most awful instrument

In working out a pure intent."

It is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that Wordsworth altered

the lines after "Don Juan" was written. I am, with great respect, your

obedient servant,

RALPH THICKNESSE.

JOHN RUSKIN, Esq.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 88: November, 1880.--ED.]

[Footnote 89: "Childe Harold," iv. 79; compare "Adonais," and Sismondi,

vol. i. p. 148.]

[Footnote 90: Adrian the Fourth. Eugenius died in the previous year.]

[Footnote 91: "All the multitudes threw themselves on their knees,

praying mercy in the name of the crosses they bore: the Count of

Blandrata took a cross from the enemies with whom he had served, and

fell at the foot of the throne, praying for mercy to them. All the court

and the witnessing army were in tears--the Emperor alone showed no sign

of emotion. Distrusting his wife's sensibility, he had forbidden her

presence at the ceremony; the Milanese, unable to approach her, threw

towards her windows the crosses they carried, to plead for

them."--Sismondi (French edition), vol. i. p. 378.]

[Footnote 92: The most noble and tender confession is in Allegra's

epitaph, "I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me."]

[Footnote 93: Hypocrisy is too good a word for either Pall Mall or

Trianon, being justly applied (as always in the New Testament), only to

men whose false religion has become earnest, and a part of their being:

so that they compass heaven and earth to make a proselyte. There is no

relation between minds of this order and those of common rogues. Neither

Tartuffe nor Joseph Surface are hypocrites--they are simply impostors:

but many of the most earnest preachers in all existing churches are

hypocrites in the highest; and the Tartuffe-Squiredom and Joseph

Surface-Masterhood of our virtuous England which build churches and pay

priests to keep their peasants and hands peaceable, so that rents and

per cents may be spent, unnoticed, in the debaucheries of the

metropolis, are darker forms of imposture than either heaven or earth

have yet been compassed by; and what they are to end in, heaven and

earth only know. Compare again, "Island," ii. 4, "the prayers of Abel

linked to deeds of Cain," and "Juan," viii. 25, 26.]

[Footnote 94: Perhaps some even of the attentive readers of Byron may

not have observed the choice of the three names--Myrrha (bitter

incense), Marina (sea lady), Angiolina (little angel)--in relation to

the plots of the three plays.]

[Footnote 95: I shall have lost my wits very finally when I forget the

first time that I pleased my father with a couplet of English verse

(after many a year of trials); and the radiant joy on his face as he

declared, reading it aloud to my mother with emphasis half choked by

tears,--that "it was as fine as anything that Pope or Byron ever

wrote!"]

[Footnote 96: Of our tingle-tangle-titmouse disputes in Parliament like

Robins in a bush, but not a Robin in all the house knowing his great A,

hear again Plato: "But they, for ever so little a quarrel, uttering much

voice, blaspheming, speak evil one of another,--and it is not becoming

that in a city of well-ordered persons, such things should be--no;

nothing of them nohow nowhere,--and let this be the one law for all--let

nobody speak mischief of anybody ([Greek: Mêdena kakêgoreitô

mêdeis])."--Laws, book ii. s. 935; and compare Book iv. 117.]

[Footnote 97: A paragraph beginning "I find press corrections always

irksome work, and in my last paper trust the reader's kindness to make

some corrections in the preceding paper," is here omitted, and the

corrections made.--ED.]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

V.[98]

THE TWO SERVANTS.

100. I have assumed throughout these papers, that everybody knew what

Fiction meant; as Mr. Mill assumed in his Political Economy, that

everybody knew what wealth meant. The assumption was convenient to Mr.

Mill, and persisted in: but, for my own part, I am not in the habit of

talking, even so long as I have done in this instance, without making

sure that the reader knows what I am talking about; and it is high time

that we should be agreed upon the primary notion of what Fiction is.

A feigned, fictitious, artificial, supernatural,

put-together-out-of-one's-head, thing. All this it must be, to begin

with. The best type of it being the most practically fictile--a Greek

vase. A thing which has two sides to be seen, two handles to be carried

by, and a bottom to stand on, and a top to be poured out of, this, every

right fiction _is_, whatever else it may be. Planned rigorously, rounded

smoothly, balanced symmetrically, handled handily, lipped softly for

pouring out oil and wine. Painted daintily at last with images of

eternal things--

Forever shalt thou love, and she be fair.

101. Quite a different thing from a "cast,"--this work of clay in the

hands of the potter, as it seemed good to the potter to make it. Very

interesting, a cast from life may perhaps be; more interesting, to some

people perhaps, a cast from death;--most modern novels are like

specimens from Lyme Regis, impressions of skeletons in mud.

"Planned rigorously"--I press the conditions again one by one--it must

be, as ever Memphian labyrinth or Norman fortress. Intricacy full of

delicate surprise; covered way in secrecy of accurate purposes, not a

stone useless, nor a word nor an incident thrown away.

"Rounded smoothly"--the wheel of Fortune revolving with it in unfelt

swiftness; like the world, its story rising like the dawn, closing like

the sunset, with its own sweet light for every hour.

"Balanced symmetrically"--having its two sides clearly separate, its war

of good and evil rightly divided. Its figures moving in majestic law of

light and shade.

"Handled handily"--so that, being careful and gentle, you can take easy

grasp of it and all that it contains; a thing given into your hand

henceforth to have and to hold. Comprehensible, not a mass that both

your arms cannot get round; tenable, not a confused pebble heap of which

you can only lift one pebble at a time.

"Lipped softly"--full of kindness and comfort: the Keats line indeed the

perpetual message of it--"For ever shalt thou love, and she be fair."

All beautiful fiction is of the Madonna, whether the Virgin of Athens or

of Judah--Pan-Athenaic always.

And all foul fiction is _leze majesté_ to the Madonna and to womanhood.

For indeed the great fiction of every human life is the shaping of its

Love, with due prudence, due imagination, due persistence and perfection

from the beginning of its story to the end; for every human soul, its

Palladium. And it follows that all right imaginative work is beautiful,

which is a practical and brief law concerning it. All frightful things

are either foolish, or sick, visits of frenzy, or pollutions of plague.

102. Taking thus the Greek vase at its best time, for the symbol of fair

fiction: of foul, you may find in the great entrance-room of the Louvre,

filled with the luxurious _orfèvrerie_ of the sixteenth century, types

perfect and innumerable: Satyrs carved in serpentine, Gorgons platted in

gold, Furies with eyes of ruby, Scyllas with scales of pearl; infinitely

worthless toil, infinitely witless wickedness; pleasure satiated into

idiocy, passion provoked into madness, no object of thought, or sight,

or fancy, but horror, mutilation, distortion, corruption, agony of war,

insolence of disgrace, and misery of Death.

It is true that the ease with which a serpent, or something that will be

understood for one, can be chased or wrought in metal, and the small

workmanly skill required to image a satyr's hoof and horns, as compared

to that needed for a human foot or forehead, have greatly influenced the

choice of subject by incompetent smiths; and in like manner, the

prevalence of such vicious or ugly story in the mass of modern

literature is not so much a sign of the lasciviousness of the age, as of

its stupidity, though each react on the other, and the vapor of the

sulphurous pool becomes at last so diffused in the atmosphere of our

cities, that whom it cannot corrupt, it will at least stultify.

103. Yesterday, the last of August, came to me from the Fine Art

Society, a series of twenty black and white scrabbles[99] of which I am

informed in an eloquent preface that the author was a Michael Angelo of

the glebe, and that his shepherds and his herdswomen are akin in dignity

and grandeur to the prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine.

Glancing through the series of these stupendous productions, I find one

peculiarly characteristic and expressive of modern picture-making and

novel-writing,--called "Hauling" or more definitely "Paysan rentrant du

Fumier," which represents a man's back, or at least the back of his

waistcoat and trousers, and hat, in full light, and a small blot where

his face should be, with a small scratch where its nose should be,

elongated into one representing a chink of timber in the background.

Examining the volume farther, in the hope of discovering some trace of

reasonable motive for the publication of these works by the Society, I

perceive that this Michael Angelo of the glebe had indeed natural

faculty of no mean order in him, and that the woeful history of his life

contains very curious lessons respecting the modern conditions of

Imagination and Art.

104. I find in the first place, that he was a Breton peasant; his

grandmother's godson, baptized in good hope, and christened Jean, after

his father, and François after the Saint of Assisi, his godmother's

patron. It was under her care and guidance and those of his uncle, the

Abbé Charles, that he was reared; and the dignified and laborious

earnestness of these governors of his was a chief influence in his life,

and a distinguishing feature in his character. The Millet family led an

existence almost patriarchal in its unalterable simplicity and

diligence; and the boy grew up in an environment of toil, sincerity and

devoutness. He was fostered upon the Bible, and the great book of

nature.... When he woke, it was to the lowing of cattle and the song of

birds; he was at play all day, among "the sights and sounds of the open

landscape; and he slept with the murmur of the spinning-wheel in his

ears, and the memory of the evening prayer in his heart.... He learned

Latin from the parish priest, and from his uncle Charles; and he soon

came to be a student of Virgil, and while yet young in his teens began

to follow his father out into the fields, and thenceforward, as became

the eldest boy in a large family, worked hard at grafting and plowing,

sowing and reaping, scything and shearing and planting, and all the many

duties of husbandmen. Meanwhile, he had taken to drawing ... copied

everything he saw, and produced not only studies but compositions also;

until at last his father was moved to take him away from farming, and

have him taught painting."

105. Now all this is related concerning the lad's early life by the

prefatory and commenting author, as if expecting the general reader to

admit that there had been some advantage for him in this manner of

education:--that simplicity and devoutness are wholesome states of mind;

that parish curés and uncle Abbés are not betrayers or devourers of

youthful innocence--that there is profitable reading in the Bible, and

something agreeably soothing--if not otherwise useful--in the sound of

evening prayer. I may observe also in passing, that his education, thus

far, is precisely what, for the last ten years, I have been describing

as the most desirable for all persons intending to lead an honest and

Christian life: (my recommendation that peasants should learn Latin

having been, some four or five years ago, the subject of much merriment

in the pages of _Judy_ and other such nurses of divine wisdom in the

public mind.) It however having been determined by the boy's father that

he should be a painter, and that art being unknown to the Abbé Charles

and the village Curé (in which manner of ignorance, if the infallible

Pope did but know it, he and his _now_ artless shepherds stand at a

fatal disadvantage in the world as compared with monks who could

illuminate with color as well as word)--the simple young soul is sent

for the exalting and finishing of its artistic faculties to Paris.

106. "Wherein," observers my prefatory author, "the romantic movement

was in the full tide of prosperity."

Hugo had written "Notre Dame," and Musset had published "Rolla" and the

"Nuits"; Balzac the "Lys dans la Vallée"; Gautier the "Comédie de la

Mort"; Georges Sand "Léone Léonie"; and a score of wild and eloquent

novels more; and under the instruction of these romantic authors, his

landlady, to whom he had intrusted the few francs he possessed, to dole

out to him as he needed, fell in love with him, and finding he could

not, or would not, respond to her advances, confiscated the whole

deposit, and left him penniless. The preface goes on to tell us how, not

feeling himself in harmony with these forms of Romanticism, he takes to

the study of the Infinite, and Michael Angelo; how he learned to paint

the Heroic Nude; how he mixed up for imitation the manners of Rubens,

Ribera, Mantegna, and Correggio; how he struggled all his life with

neglect, and endured with his family every agony of poverty; owed his

butcher and his grocer, was exposed to endless worry and annoyance from

writs and executions; and when first his grandmother died, and then his

mother, neither death-bed was able to raise the money that would have

carried him from Barbizon to Gruchy.

The work now laid before the public by the Fine Art Society is to be

considered, therefore--whatever its merits or defects may be--as an

expression of the influence of the Infinite and Michael Angelo on a mind

innocently prepared for their reception. And in another place I may take

occasion to point out the peculiar adaptability of modern etching to the

expression of the Infinite, by the multitude of scratches it can put on

a surface without representing anything in particular; and to

illustration of the majesty of Michael Angelo by preference of the backs

and legs of people to their faces.

107. But I refer to the book in this paper, partly indeed because my

mind is full of its sorrow, and I may not be able to find another

opportunity of saying so; but chiefly, because the author of the preface

has summed the principal authors of depraved Fiction in a single

sentence; and I want the reader to ask himself why, among all the forms

of the picturesque which were suggested by this body of literary

leaders, none were acceptable by, none helpful to, the mind of a youth

trained in purity and faith.

He will find, if he reflect, that it is not in romantic, or any other

healthy aim, that the school detaches itself from those called sometimes

by recent writers "classical"; but first by Infidelity, and an absence

of the religious element so total that at last it passes into the hatred

of priesthood which has become characteristic of Republicanism; and

secondly, by the taint and leprosy of animal passion idealized as a

governing power of humanity, or at least used as the chief element of

interest in the conduct of its histories. It is with the _Sin_ of Master

Anthony that Georges Sand (who is the best of them) overshadows the

entire course of a novel meant to recommend simplicity of life--and by

the weakness of Consuelo that the same authoress thinks it natural to

set off the splendor of the most exalted musical genius.

I am not able to judge of the degree of moral purpose, or conviction,

with which any of the novelists wrote. But I am able to say with

certainty that, whatever their purpose, their method is mistaken, and

that no good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of

its diseases.

108. All healthy and helpful literature sets simple bars between right

and wrong; assumes the possibility, in men and women, of having healthy

minds in healthy bodies, and loses no time in the diagnosis of fever or

dyspepsia in either; least of all in the particular kind of fever which

signifies the ungoverned excess of any appetite or passion. The

"dullness" which many modern readers inevitably feel, and some modern

blockheads think it creditable to allege, in Scott, consists not a

little in his absolute purity from every loathsome element or excitement

of the lower passions; so that people who live habitually in Satyric or

hircine conditions of thought find him as insipid as they would a

picture of Angelico's. The accurate and trenchant separation between him

and the common railroad-station novelist is that, in his total method of

conception, only lofty character is worth describing at all; and it

becomes interesting, not by its faults, but by the difficulties and

accidents of the fortune through which it passes, while, in the railway

novel, interest is obtained with the vulgar reader for the vilest

character, because the author describes carefully to his recognition the

blotches, burrs and pimples in which the paltry nature resembles his

own. The "Mill on the Floss" is perhaps the most striking instance

extant of this study of cutaneous disease. There is not a single person

in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but

themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's

type in their description. There is no girl alive, fairly clever, half

educated, and unluckily related, whose life has not at least as much in

it as Maggie's, to be described and to be pitied. Tom is a clumsy and

cruel lout, with the making of better things in him (and the same may be

said of nearly every Englishman at present smoking and elbowing his way

through the ugly world his blunders have contributed to the making of);

while the rest of the characters are simply the sweepings out of a

Pentonville omnibus.[100]

109. And it is very necessary that we should distinguish this

essentially Cockney literature, developed only in the London suburbs,

and feeding the demand of the rows of similar brick houses, which branch

in devouring cancer round every manufacturing town,--from the really

romantic literature of France. Georges Sand is often immoral; but she is

always beautiful, and in the characteristic novel I have named, "Le

Péché de Mons. Antoine," the five principal characters, the old Cavalier

Marquis,--the Carpenter,--M. de Chateaubrun,--Gilberte,--and the really

passionate and generous lover, are all as heroic and radiantly ideal as

Scott's Colonel Mannering, Catherine Seyton, and Roland Graeme; while

the landscape is rich and true with the emotion of years of life passed

in glens of Norman granite and beside bays of Italian sea. But in the

English Cockney school, which consummates itself in George Eliot, the

personages are picked up from behind the counter and out of the gutter;

and the landscape, by excursion train to Gravesend, with return ticket

for the City-road.

110. But the second reason for the dullness of Scott to the uneducated

or miseducated reader lies far deeper; and its analysis is related to

the most subtle questions in the Arts of Design.

The mixed gayety and gloom in the plan of any modern novel fairly clever

in the make of it, may be likened, almost with precision, to the

patchwork of a Harlequin's dress, well spangled; a pretty thing enough,

if the human form beneath it be graceful and active. Few personages on

the stage are more delightful to me than a good Harlequin; also, if I

chance to have nothing better to do, I can still read my Georges Sand or

Alfred de Musset with much contentment, if only the story end well.

But we must not dress Cordelia or Rosalind in robes of triangular

patches, covered with spangles, by way of making the _coup d'oeil_ of

them less dull; and so the story-telling of Scott is like the robe of

the Sistine Zipporah--embroidered only on the edges with gold and blue,

and the embroidery involving a legend written in mystic letters.

And the interest and joy which he intends his reader to find in his

tale, are in taking up the golden thread here and there in its intended

recurrence--and following, as it rises again and again, his melody

through the disciplined and unaccented march of the fugue.

111. Thus the entire charm and meaning of the story of the Monastery

depend on the degree of sympathy with which we compare the first and

last incidents of the appearance of a character, whom perhaps not one in

twenty readers would remember as belonging to the dramatis

personæ--Stawarth Bolton.

Childless, he assures safety in the first scene of the opening tale to

the widow of Glendinning and her two children--the elder boy challenging

him at the moment, "I will war on thee to the death, when I can draw my

father's sword." In virtually the last scene, the grown youth, now in

command of a small company of spearmen in the Regent Murray's service,

is on foot, in the first pause after the battle at Kennaquhair, beside

the dead bodies of Julian Avenel and Christie, and the dying

Catherine.[101]

Glendinning forgot for a moment his own situation and duties, and was

first recalled to them by a trampling of horse, and the cry of St.

George for England, which the English soldiers still continued to use.

His handful of men, for most of the stragglers had waited for Murray's

coming up, remained on horseback, holding their lances upright, having

no command either to submit or resist.

"There stands our captain," said one of them, as a strong party of

English came up, the vanguard of Foster's troop.

"Your captain! with his sword sheathed, and on foot in the presence of

his enemy? a raw soldier, I warrant him," said the English leader. "So!

ho! young man, is your dream out, and will you now answer me if you will

fight or fly?"

"Neither," answered Halbert Glendinning, with great tranquillity.

"Then throw down thy sword and yield thee," answered the Englishman.

"Not till I can help myself no otherwise," said Halbert, with the same

moderation of tone and manner.

"Art thou for thine own hand, friend, or to whom dost thou owe service?"

demanded the English captain.

"To the noble Earl of Murray."

"Then thou servest," said the Southron, "the most disloyal nobleman who

breathes--false both to England and Scotland."

"Thou liest," said Glendinning, regardless of all consequences.

"Ha! art thou so hot now, and wert so cold but a minute since? I lie, do

I? Wilt thou do battle with me on that quarrel?"

"With one to one, one to two, or two to five, as you list," said Halbert

Glendinning; "grant me but a fair field."

"That thou shalt have. Stand back, my mates," said the brave

Englishman. "If I fall, give him fair play, and let him go off free with

his people."

"Long life to the noble captain!" cried the soldiers, as impatient to

see the duel as if it had been a bull.

"He will have a short life of it, though," said the sergeant, "if he, an

old man of sixty, is to fight for any reason, or for no reason, with

every man he meets, and especially the young fellows he might be father

to. And here comes the warden, besides, to see the sword-play."

In fact, Sir John Foster came up with a considerable body of his

horsemen, just as his captain, whose age rendered him unequal to the

combat with so strong and active a youth as Glendinning, lost his

sword.[102]

"Take it up for shame, old Stawarth Bolton," said the English warden;

"and thou, young man, get you gone to your own friends, and loiter not

here."

Notwithstanding this peremptory order, Halbert Glendinning could not

help stopping to cast a look upon the unfortunate Catherine, who lay

insensible of the danger and of the trampling of so many horses around

her--insensible, as the second glance assured him, of all and forever.

Glendinning almost rejoiced when he saw that the last misery of life was

over, and that the hoofs of the war-horses, amongst which he was

compelled to leave her, could only injure and deface a senseless corpse.

He caught the infant from her arms, half ashamed of the shout of

laughter which rose on all sides, at seeing an armed man in such a

situation assume such an unwonted and inconvenient burden.

"Shoulder your infant!" cried a harquebusier.

"Port your infant!" said a pikeman.

"Peace, ye brutes!" said Stawarth Bolton, "and respect humanity in

others, if you have none yourselves. I pardon the lad having done some

discredit to my gray hairs, when I see him take care of that helpless

creature, which ye would have trampled upon as if ye had been littered

of bitch-wolves, not born of women."

The infant thus saved is the heir of Avenel, and the intricacy and

fateful bearing of every incident and word in the scene, knitting into

one central moment all the clews to the plot of two romances, as the

rich boss of a Gothic vault gathers the shaft moldings of it, can only

be felt by an entirely attentive reader; just as (to follow out the

likeness on Scott's own ground) the willow-wreaths changed to stone of

Melrose tracery can only be caught in their plighting by the keenest

eyes. The meshes are again gathered by the master's own hand when the

child now in Halbert's arms, twenty years hence, stoops over him to

unlace his helmet, as the fallen knight lies senseless on the field of

Carberry Hill.[103]

112. But there is another, and a still more hidden method in Scott's

designing of story, in which, taking extreme pains, he counts on much

sympathy from the reader, and can assuredly find none in a modern

student. The moral purpose of the whole, which he asserted in the

preface to the first edition of Waverley, was involved always with the

minutest study of the effects of true and false religion on the

conduct;--which subject being always touched with his utmost lightness

of hand and stealthiness of art, and founded on a knowledge of the

Scotch character and the human heart, such as no other living man

possessed, his purpose often escapes first observation as completely as

the inner feelings of living people do; and I am myself amazed, as I

take any single piece of his work up for examination, to find how many

of its points I had before missed or disregarded.

113. The groups of personages whose conduct in the Scott romance is

definitely affected by religious conviction, may be arranged broadly, as

those of the actual world, under these following heads:

1. The lowest group consists of persons who, believing in the general

truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and

are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence.

I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red

Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are

three of the principal types.

2. The next rank above these consists of men who believe firmly and

truly enough to be restrained from any conduct which they clearly

recognize as criminal, but whose natural selfishness renders them

incapable of understanding the morality of the Bible above a certain

point; and whose imperfect powers of thought leave them liable in many

directions to the warping of self-interest or of small temptations.

Fairservice. Blattergowl. Kettledrummle. Gifted Gilfillan.

3. The third order consists of men naturally just and honest, but with

little sympathy and much pride, in whom their religion, while in the

depth of it supporting their best virtues, brings out on the surface all

their worst faults, and makes them censorious, tiresome, and often

fearfully mischievous.

Richie Moniplies. Davie Deans. Mause Hedrigg.

4. The enthusiastic type, leading to missionary effort, often to

martyrdom.

Warden, in "Monastery." Colonel Gardiner. Ephraim Macbriar. Joshua

Geddes.

5. Highest type, fulfilling daily duty; always gentle, entirely firm,

the comfort and strength of all around them; merciful to every human

fault, and submissive without anger to every human oppression.

Rachel Geddes. Jeanie Deans. Bessie Maclure, in "Old Mortality"--the

Queen of all.

114. In the present paper, I ask the reader's patience only with my

fulfillment of a promise long since made, to mark the opposition of the

effects of an entirely similar religious faith in two men of inferior

position, representing in perfectness the commonest types in Scotland

of the second and third order of religionists here distinguished, Andrew

Fairservice ("Rob Roy"), and Richie Moniplies ("Nigel").

The names of both the men imply deceitfulness of one kind or

another--Fairservice, as serving fairly only in pretense; Moniplies, as

having many windings, turns, and ways of escape. Scott's names are

themselves so Moniplied that they need as much following out as

Shakespeare's; and as their roots are pure Scotch, and few people have a

good Scottish glossary beside them, or would use it if they had, the

novels are usually read without any turning of the first keys to them. I

did not myself know till very lately the root of Dandie Dinmont's

name--"Dinmont," a two-year-old sheep; still less that of Moniplies,

which I had been always content to take Master George Heriot's rendering

of: "This fellow is not ill-named--he has more plies than one in his

cloak." ("Nigel," i. 72.) In its first sense, it is the Scotch word for

tripe, Moniplies being a butcher's son.

115. Cunning, then, they both are, in a high degree--but Fairservice

only for himself, Moniplies for himself and his friend; or, in grave

business, even for his friend first. But it is one of Scott's first

principles of moral law that cunning never shall succeed, unless

definitely employed _against an enemy_ by a person whose essential

character is wholly frank and true; as by Roland against Lady Lochleven,

or Mysie Happer against Dan of the Howlet-hirst; but consistent cunning

in the character always fails: Scott allows no Ulyssean hero.

Therefore the cunning of Fairservice fails always, and totally; but that

of Moniplies precisely according to the degree of its selfishness:

wholly, in the affair of the petition--("I am sure I had a' the right

and a' the risk," i. 73)--partially, in that of the carcanet. This he

himself at last recognizes with complacency:--

"I think you might have left me," says Nigel in their parting scene (i.

286), "to act according to my own judgment."