Monthly’); there will be two more reports, and then all will end in
smoke. The poem has been suppressed to the orthodox maturity of the
ninth year, but, like poor wine, it is, I fear, only the worse for not
having been drunk and forgotten long ago.
The ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ I hope, makes its way. I am glad to see it
so national, so little characterised by any mercantile importations
from our side. I have a great distaste to the prevalent professional
literature of the metropolis, a fungoid vegetation springing up on the
rotting remains of the giants of the old literary forest, whose honours
are no more.
_To C. E. Norton, Esq._
London: March 26, 1858.
Many thanks for your kind inquiries after my wife and family: they are
very well, especially the ‘family.’
Things have been tolerably eventful over here of late, have they not?
I confess myself a sort of admirer of Orsini, though I do not consider
assassination good policy, and therefore consider it wrong.
A Tory government, meantime, is a strange dispensation to live under;
happily it is only on sufferance. Lord Palmerston, we consider, fell
chiefly through his appointment of Lord Clanricarde.
The days of the Company you will, of course, have felt to be numbered,
on seeing Lord Ellenborough gazetted as President of the Board of
Control.
_To Professor F. J. Child._
April 10, 1858.
I am very glad there is a prospect of your coming over here; but
doubtless you will transform yourself into a worm, and be during
your whole visit lost to sight in the MSS. of the British Museum.
Nevertheless, even so, pray do not fail to come over. Charles Norton, I
hope, is well through the winter. By this time the snows are beginning,
I suppose, to disappear in your parts: in a month or so the Common will
begin to exchange its brown for its green suit; there will be buds
in the Washington elm; frogs will again be vocal, and double-robins
visible.
Do you see that the Frenchman who translated the ‘Canterbury Tales’ has
found at Paris the original of the ‘Squire’s Tale,’ 30,000 lines? I
wonder if it is like Spenser’s, in any respect.
The great literary success of the last twelve months has been Buckle’s
‘History of Civilisation.’ Really, it is wonderful what numbers of
people have read this thick volume, and what a reputation its author
has gained by it. High and low--and high quite as much as low--write in
its praise. Are you Buckle-bewitched in Boston, or do you retain a sane
mind?
I do not suppose that anybody finds much natural pleasure in my
five-act epistolary tragi-comedy, or comi-tragedy. I like Part III.
rather better than its predecessors myself; but other people, I dare
say, will not. I think it will have some merit in its conclusion; but
to that also, I dare say, there will be no affirmation but my own.
However, so it was, and no otherwise could be. So much for keeping
poems nine years, instead of burning them at once.
Tennyson’s two unpublished Arthur poems gave me pleasure, and I am
sorry they do not appear. Otherwise England seems as unpoetical as
between Chaucer and Spenser.
_To C. E. Norton, Esq._
London: April 17, 1858.
Perhaps the beginning of May will find you once more at Shady Hill, for
the brief North American interval between the two penal fierce extremes
of heat and cold.
Between the two Indian Bills, the Directors, it is thought, will escape
for the present, and survive a little longer. I myself was not so
absolutely unfavourable to the Ellenborough Bill as the English world
in general. I desire much to see a franchise given to those who have
served. That offered to the five towns is perhaps impracticable. My
notion is to make a great Council of all who have served in certain
offices, and give them the appointment of half the Executive Council.
But our people hate all refinements of this sort.
Politics are almost at a dead lock with us. Palmerston cannot come back
with his own party alone to back him. Lord John Russell has joined
Milner Gibson, and has formed a sufficient body of opponents in the
Liberal part of the House to make it impossible for Palmerston to get
sufficient support there. So that for the present the Derby people
stay, and are almost ashamed and indignant to stay, by the help of Lord
John and his Manchester allies.
_To the same._
London: May 17, 1858.
Things here are in sad confusion. Lord Ellenborough, who is really
competent, has thrown himself overboard, and cannot be by his best
friends acquitted of a great indiscretion. In India the enemy all
abroad again, and a hot weather campaign before us. Not, however, it
seems by Sir Colin’s fault; for he was bid to clear all the other
districts first, and not till then to attack Lucknow, but was overruled
by Lord Canning. John Mill, it is said, does not consider Lord
Canning’s proclamation wrong; but is very sorry, on general grounds, to
lose Lord Ellenborough.
Pray read Hogg’s ‘Life of Shelley.’ It is a great pleasure to see
Shelley really alive, and treading the vulgar earth--Hogg’s transparent
absurdity being the only intervening impediment.
I am reading, too, Gladstone’s ‘Homer’: it is very direct and
plain-sailing, and in that respect is an agreeable contrast to German
annotation. The working out of his theory about Danaans, Achæans,
Argives, and Hellenes was to me satisfactory; but at the end he goes
off all at once out of his depth into general ethnology. Gladstone’s
uncompromising belief in Homer and the heroes, as real people, gives
the book a solidity and substance which is acceptable. Carlyle said
he read carefully Homer and the controversy some years ago, and was
quite convinced that ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ were written at different
ages--the ‘Odyssey’ by one man, the ‘Iliad’ not; and he likes the
‘Odyssey’ best. He thinks anyone mad who holds the ‘Iliad’ and
‘Odyssey’ to be written by one man.
While I wrote came a rumour, not from a private secretary, that news
had come from India that the proclamation had been stopped at the
last moment, at the _entreaty_ of Sir C. Campbell, Sir John Lawrence,
Outram, and Mansfield, who went on their knees to Lord Canning, and
besought him, in the name of England’s honour, no less than for the
sake of present security. So that, if this be true, Lord Ellenborough
is right after all.
_To the same._
Cowley House, Oxford: May 21, 1858.
Hither we came on the 19th on a visit. Yesterday we went about walking,
and seeing things and people--new things and old people; heard a
lecture from Max Müller on the origin of the French language; thence
to the new Museum in the Venetian style, by Woodward. I think Venetian
windows, whose beauty is their deep setting, might do for you who have
some sun to keep out; for us, not. We want light, and must place the
glass too near the outer plane of the walls to allow the proper effect
to the tracery.
The M.P.s meet to-night for their great decision. Already, perhaps,
the new evidence of the government despatches is in their hands.
A proclamation, it is clear, has been issued, and an _altered_
proclamation. A private letter tells us that the Ministry may possibly
have a majority of five or six--a different story from that which
prevailed when I began this letter. Wednesday, the day of our coming
here, intervened, with the absorbing interests of the Derby. To be
winner of the Derby while in office as Prime Minister was, it is
said, Lord Derby’s ambition, but would be, it was thought, too high a
felicity for any simply human Earl. Toxophilite’s defeat may, it is
presumed, be the inevitable sacrifice that may avert the parliamentary
catastrophe.
_To the same._
Downing Street: June 23, 1858.
I have had, _mirabile dictu_, a letter from Emerson, who reprimanded
me strongly for the termination of the ‘Amours de Voyage,’ in which he
may be right, and I may be wrong; and all my defence can only be, that
I always meant it to be so, and began it with the full intention of its
ending so; but very likely I was wrong all the same.
I cannot help wishing to preserve some Corporate Body or Privy Council
for India, to elect half the Ministers’ Council, though I have no
liking for the constituency of 7,000 or 8,000 to whom Lord Stanley did
propose to give this power.
Last night I heard Tennyson read a third Arthur poem: the detection of
Guenevere and the last interview with Arthur. These poems all appear to
me to be maturer and better than any he has written hitherto.
As for wars and rumours of wars, I trust we need not alarm ourselves
at present. I hope the French are at heart pacific; they cannot well
afford the money for a war, and though I believe they might inflict,
if the chances favoured them, immense damage upon us, in the end they
would find themselves the weaker vessels. Their population, it is said
by the statistical authorities, is decreasing, and they ought to nurse
their vitality carefully. It has not yet recovered the losses of the
wars of 1812-15.
_To the same._
Downing Street: July 30, 1858.
We are cooler and less odorous than we were, and I begin to hope that
we may get to the end of August without any terrible outbreak of
cholera. Time has often been compared to a river; if the Thames at
London represent the stream of traditional wisdom, the comparison will
indeed be of an ill savour. The accumulated wisdom of the past will
be proved upon analogy to be, as it were, the collected sewage of the
centuries, and the great problem, how to get rid of it.
In a commercial point of view, the publication of the ‘Amours’ has
been a great event to me. This is the first money I ever received for
verse-making, and it is really a very handsome sum.
October 1.
I have just read the ‘Courtship of Miles Standish’ with much pleasure.
I think in one or two points the story should have been differently
managed; but it is a very pleasant poem.
A perversion, as the Anglican people call it, seems to me a very sad
thing; it is, according to all experience, so irrevocable a change.
I have known one or two instances of a return out of the Babylonish
Captivity, but they seem rarely to happen.
The only remarkable phenomenon of the time is a continuous one, viz.
the comet, which is a really wonderful, portentous-looking, historical
sort of comet, with a tail sweeping a considerable space in the
northern skies. It sets at 9 P.M., but leaves its streamer behind it
for some time.
Another continuous study with me is Barth’s ‘Africa,’ which is really
worth reading, laborious though it be, and needlessly filled up with
daily records. Barth is, I believe, gone back to Hamburg, his native
place; a little disappointed, perhaps, with finding so little come of
his long toil. Livingstone published just after him, and took the wind
out of his sails. Yet there is more permanently valuable and curious
information in Barth, though Livingstone will do more himself in a
practical way, we will hope.
There is as yet but a very slight ripple on the face of our political
waters. The interest taken in these matters by the nation seems to grow
less and less. People will not mind if the other party come in, but
they don’t want Lord Palmerston again; and if these men don’t play the
fool in some way, they may stay in. Your matters are more serious.
India, I suppose, will keep us at the military boiling point for some
time to come (more’s the pity, perhaps, if only France were safely
pacific!), and improvements in organisation will slowly creep in: they
are certainly much wanted. In the medical department a good deal has
been effected this year.
I am greatly ashamed of our English proceedings in this
France-bullying-Portugal case. So far as I can see, it has been sheer
timidity; terror of being taken undefended while India is still
unsettled, and ought to disgrace us in the eyes of all European
nations. But there may be diplomatic explanations proving France in the
technical right.
Bright and his speech at Birmingham deserve notice. But I doubt whether
he can rouse the towns; and people in general, _i.e._ the people who
are more or less represented, care little about it. I believe that
a Reform would give us a better and more rational House of Commons;
but many things press. Reform takes up so much time, and gives so
much trouble; how is the Government to be carried on meantime, the
government of India included?
_To the same._
London: January 26, 1859.
Child brought me your present of Emerson’s picture, which is really,
I think, without any question, the best portrait of any living and
known-to-me man that I have ever seen. It is a great pleasure to
possess it.
Bright’s agitation will bear fruits. The Ministerial Bill would
have been very different without this. Bright is scoffed at in the
metropolitan papers, and at all clubs. But his hold on the country is
such as no M.P. whatever, except himself, possesses; and in the main,
the course he has taken is right, I think. Lord Stanley seems to be a
present guarantee for the tolerable government of India; but he, of
course, may go any day. I wish the Council were on a surer basis: the
self-electing plan can hardly be permanent.
February 9.
They say it is to be peace. France is utterly indisposed to fight;
so much so as to praise ‘la sagesse Anglaise’ for discrediting the
sentimental Imperial oratory, and holding fast to treaties as they are,
and peace, with or without good-will, upon earth. Moreover, the sinews
of war are wanting. Rothschild will not lend money to Austria, and only
acts as commission agent for the loan.
People are a little agog about the Bible-in-India question. Old Indians
seem to be pretty tolerably unanimous against having it read in the
schools.
_To the same._
London: April 1, 1859.
I am getting on with ‘The Bothie,’ acting on a criticism which appeared
to me correct, that the letters and sermonising parts were too long
and least to the point. I believe I may have cut out something which
for old acquaintance you may regret, but the general effect to a new
reader will, I think, be improved; and a reduction in the amount of
disquisition was certainly required.
Excuse this letter all about my own concerns. I am pretty busy, and
have time for little else; such is our fate after forty. My figure
forty stands nearly three months behind me on the roadway, unwept,
unhonoured, and unsung; an _octavum lustrum_ bound up and laid on the
shelf. ‘So-and-so is dead,’ said a friend to Lord Melbourne, of some
author. ‘Dear me, how glad I am! Now I can bind him up.’
Here is a jest of Lord Derby’s to a friend who told him he was in a
great mess. ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘but Benjamin’s mess is five times
greater than those of his brethren.’
We have been having deaths lately for our news, as for example that of
William Arnold, who, after lying ill for some time at Cairo, started
and sailed from Alexandria just as one of his brothers was coming in
to see him; just set his foot on Europe, and died, at St. Roque, a few
miles from Gibraltar; a great loss, I think, public and private.
_To the same._
May 27, 1859.
As for the war, alas! to whom can we desire success? Garibaldi is the
only person I sympathise with. I hope he will do something. But how can
it end otherwise than ill?
Here is the dictum of the Duc de Malakhoff: ‘Nous les battrons, nous
leur offrirons des conditions bien douces. Ils les refuseront. _Puis_,
nous les battrons encore, et nous leur offrirons des conditions bien
dures. Ils les accepteront.’ Meantime, the French feeling has become,
it appears, universally warlike; and the wise people think that the
dynasty, which must have fallen otherwise, will, unless the Austrians
drive all before them, be secured.
I have never thanked you for your article on Sleeman’s ‘Oude,’ which
came safely to hand, and which I fear is only too favourable to British
rule. Let us, however, hope for the best, though the climate is so
sadly against any fair development of English qualities, and the war
has left behind it a fierce and insulting spirit.
Disraeli, in answer to some friendly regrets at his fall, said it
could only be a check for a time. But I think Palmerston may regain
the general confidence of the country, as he has in a great measure
of the Liberal members, or at any rate the Liberal statesmen, and may
perhaps maintain himself, even if Lord John secede. The new Ministry
will be strongly Italian in composition; Lord John and Gladstone in
addition to Palmerston. It is almost to be feared that they will outrun
the national feeling, and go too much in the track of Louis Napoleon.
We who live nearer to Louis Napoleon, with only the Channel, and not
the whole Atlantic to divide and protect us from him, do not feel
quite the same liberty to indulge the natural feelings of enthusiasm
in witnessing his aggrandisement in Europe, though it be merely as a
liberator that he affects it at present. One thing I devoutly hope;
that, with French influence predominating in Italy, the Pope will go to
the dogs, with all his canaille accompanying. Evidently the conclave
fear this, and there is no doubt at all that instructions came from
Rome to the Roman Catholic leaders that they should support Lord Derby,
who would support Austria. It has not been uniformly obeyed, but that
the order was issued is, I believe, certain.
_To the same._
London: July 22, 1859.
I shall be very glad indeed of your notice of Plutarch in the ‘North
American.’ I hope the Lives will be readable to the young public of
your most reading country. Meantime Plutarch has arrived here, and
certainly looks very well; but they have not put in all the errata I
sent. I hope the young America will read it. Young England, I fear, is
too critical, and thinks Plutarch an old fool.
Here we are reading the last bulletin of that wonderful melodramatic
genius Napoleon III., of which what can be said? ‘L’Empire, c’est la
paix?’ Certainly one did not desire the enfranchisement of Italy to be
effected by his means; and one may hope, also, that the general result
will be to damage him and his dynasty.
Mill’s ‘Dissertations’ and Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ are also
before an admiring public. I certainly think these Idylls are the best
thing that Tennyson has done.
We are having a burning July, and the length of our day makes it in
some respects worse than it would be in a more southern latitude. But,
after all, 90° in the shade was not, I think, what we endured when
I lived with you at Shady Hill, six years ago. You should come here
again soon, and we will try and sweeten the Thames for you ‘during the
current year.’
I think Louis Napoleon less formidable since the Italian war, unless
the army prove to have tasted blood and to be greedy for more, in which
case of course he must let them have it. But I don’t much believe in
the love of the French soldier for war; he wants to go to his _pays_
again.
Dana has sent his book on Cuba, which is very pleasant reading. And is
he really gone off again to circumnavigate the _orbis veteribus notus_?
I have always felt an instinctive desire to go round, and have coveted
the sensation of having ascertained the fact by one’s own bodily
locomotion.
_To the same._
September 9.
I begin a sheet just to say that we are leaving the house in which you
saw us, near the Regent’s Park, and have taken one on Campden Hill,
Kensington, far to the west. It is just under Macaulay’s.
October 13.
Plutarch is too dear for the English; however, a favourable article,
and really I think a good article, in the ‘Athenæum,’ has put a little
wind in its sails. Plutarch is not sought for here as a library book;
indeed, he is quite put out of fashion by Thirlwall, Grote, and Co.,
and some effort is needed to recall attention to him.
The French Emperor’s ‘allocution’ to the Cardinal at Bordeaux is a
slight improvement on his doings lately; perhaps a feeler to the
country, for if he were not afraid of the popular adherence to the Pope
and clergy in France, I suppose he would certainly take the holy father
by the temporal beard in Bologna.
Council Office: December 5.
We are here in a state of rifle fever, which I do not think will be
allayed by the imperial smooth words. Palmerston is not to go to the
Congress, and France, I fear, will do as she pleases.
I was glad to have your account of Brown. His behaviour before his
death struck me quite in the way in which you regard it: nothing could
be plainer, and more composed and upright.
_To the same._
Hastings: December 29, 1859.
I have been sent here for ventilation, after an attack of scarlatina,
which made me an inconvenient neighbour to a little boy just born to
us, who arrived on the 16th of this month. This is dull enough, the old
town with the old churches in the hollow between the East Hill and the
West Hill, the latter crowned by remnants of the castle, the new town
stretching along the shore for nearly a couple of miles, one row deep,
with a handsome sea terrace all along.
Here my chief discovery has been a cottage improvement society, so
successful as to pay yearly dividends of 6 per cent. The working man
is my doctor--Dr. Greenhill--who is secretary. Most of these societies
have been quite failures as regards finance. The principles here are
(1) Repairing, not building; (2) Rigorous collection of rents. There is
a benevolent society attached to the cottage society, but it acts quite
separately. Rent is rent, and charity, charity.
_To the same._
January 26, 1860.
Your artist friend, Stillman, has presented his credentials; he called
at Campden Hill, and of course I was out; but we hope to see him on
Sunday, to dinner, in the ‘native American’ manner, at 2 P.M.
March 3.
Stillman has commenced operations on my face, and returns to the
charge on Monday. He is making many friends. We dined with him at
Robert Mackintosh’s a week ago, which much reminded me of Longfellow’s
dinner-table. I have read your critique on Plutarch in the ‘Atlantic
Monthly’ carefully since I wrote, and find it very satisfactory. The
early lives are certainly faulty. I did not feel as if it was done
rightly till I was doing Otho and Galba. The life which is most mine is
that of Demetrius, which is really almost mine. Dion, however, is just
about an average specimen.
When is Rowse coming over? Will you give him a letter to me? I continue
to think his picture of Emerson the best portrait I know of anyone I
know.
How unsatisfactory the world in general is just now! The French having
made a ‘belle guerre’ for an idea, are now bent on _realising_ their
ideas. The Pope, after all, won’t be sent a begging. Austria will yet
bully Hungary with the help of her big brother further east, and the
big brother, with the help of the smaller one, will have his own bad
way in Turkey, probably.
_To the same._
21 Campden Hill Road: July 13, 1860.
I had your letter, heaping coals of fire on my head, last Monday. I
enclose a fragment of the past, in token of my having contributed
somewhat to the pavement below in respect of you.
To break one’s toe is no fair reason against using one’s fingers, but
it prevents one’s walking, and impairs one’s energies in general. Rowse
has done me very nearly. You will, I hope, have a photograph, and I
hope he won’t spoil it before he finishes. He has done Owen, and seems
well pleased with his work, but is sadly afflicted with Heimweh.
_To the same._
July 20, 1860.
To-day I was at a breakfast party of statisticians, attending the
International Statistical Congress, and met Dr. Jervis from your parts.
Quetelet, the divine statistician, I have also seen. He is getting
rather feeble with age, and complains of forgetting names. A certain
Swede, un nommé Berg, is said to be the _aureus alter_ who will succeed
to the primacy.