Of nothing possessed;
But if thou wouldst, dear,
Expire well dressed....
Let nothing vex thee,--
Love's silly story,
Ghosts of grand festivals
Spectres of glory;
Let naught annoy thee:
The burdens of fame,
The manifold perils
That wait on a name.
Content thyself, baby,
With learning to read:
Don't be vainglorious;
That's all thou canst need.
All promptings of genius
Confine in thy breast,
If thou wouldst, baby,
Expire well dressed....
Let not God nor Devil
Concern thy poor wits,
And tell no more truth
Than politeness permits.
With thy soul and thy body,
Still worship the Real;
Nor ever attempt
To pursue the Ideal.
As for thy scruples,
Let them be suppressed,
If thou wouldst, baby,
Expire well dressed.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
THE STEAM-GUILLOTINE
[The monarch satirized in this poem was Francesco IV., Duke of
Modena, a petty Nero, who executed not a few of the Italian
patriots of 1831.]
A most wonderful steam-machine,
One time set up in China-land,
Outdid the insatiate guillotine,
For in three hours, you understand,
It cut off a hundred thousand heads
In a row, like hospital beds.
This innovation stirred a breeze,
And some of the bonzes even thought
Their barbarous country by degrees
To civilization might be brought,
Leaving Europeans, with their schools,
Looking like fools.
The Emperor was an honest man--
A little stiff, and dull of pate;
Like other asses, hard and slow.
He loved his subjects and the State,
And patronized all clever men
Within his ken.
His people did not like to pay
Their taxes and their other dues,--
They cheated the revenue, sad to say:
So their good ruler thought he'd choose
As the best argument he'd seen,
This sweet machine.
The thing's achievements were so great,
They gained a pension for the man,--
The executioner of State,--
Who got a patent for his plan,
Besides becoming a Mandarin
Of great Pekin.
A courtier cried: "Good guillotine!
Let's up and christen it, I say!"
"Ah, why," cries to his counselor keen
A Nero of our present day,
"Why was not born within _my_ State
A man so great?"
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
[Illustration: WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE.]
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
(1809-)
In view of his distinguished career, it is interesting to know that it
is a part of Mr. Gladstone's unresting ambition to take a place among
the literary men of the time, and to guide the thoughts of his
countrymen in literary as well as in political, social, and economic
subjects. Mr. Gladstone's preparation to become a man of letters was
extensive. Born in Liverpool December 29th, 1809, he was sent to Eton
and afterwards to Oxford, where he took the highest honors, and was the
most remarkable graduate of his generation. His fellow students carried
away a vivid recollection of his _viva voce_ examination for his degree:
the tall figure, the flashing eye, the mobile countenance, in the midst
of the crowd who pressed to hear him, while the examiners plied him with
questions till, tested in some difficult point in theology, the
candidate exclaimed, "Not yet, if you please" and began to pour forth a
fresh store of learning and argument.
From the university Mr. Gladstone carried away two passions--the one for
Greek literature, especially Greek poetry, the other for Christian
theology. The Oxford that formed these tastes was intensely conservative
in politics, representing the aristocratic system of English society and
the exclusiveness of the Established Church, whose creed was that of the
fourth century. Ecclesiasticism is not friendly to literature; but how
far Oxford's most loyal son was permeated by ecclesiasticism is a matter
of opinion. Fortunately, personality is stronger than dogma, and ideas
than literary form; and Mr. Gladstone, than whom few men outside the
profession of letters have written more, is always sure of an
intelligent hearing. His discussion of a subject seems to invest it with
some of his own marvelous vitality; and when he selects a book for
review, he is said to make the fortune of both publisher and author, if
only the title be used as a crotchet to hang his sermon on.
And this not merely because curiosity is excited concerning the opinion
of the greatest living Englishman (for notwithstanding his political
vacillations, his views on inward and higher subjects have little
changed since his Oxford days, and may easily be prognosticated), but on
account of the subtlety and fertility of his mind and the adroitness of
his argument. Plunging into the heart of the subject, he is at the same
time working round it, holding it up for inspection in one light and
then in another, reasoning from this premise and that; while the string
of elucidations and explanations grows longer and longer, and the
atmosphere of complexity thickens. It was out of such an atmosphere that
a barrister advised his client, a bigamist, to get Mr. Gladstone to
explain away one of his wives.
When Mr. Gladstone made his debut as an author, he locked horns with
Macaulay in the characteristic paper 'Church and State' (1837). He
published his 'Studies in Homer and the Homeric Age' in 1858, 'Juventus
Mundi' in 1869, 'Homeric Synchronism' in 1857. In 1879 most of his
essays, political, social, economic, religious, and literary, written
between 1843 and 1879, were collected in seven volumes, and appeared
under the title of 'Gleanings of Past Years.' He has published a very
great number of smaller writings not reprinted.
From that time to the present, neither his industry nor his energy has
abated; but he is probably at his best in the several remarkable essays
on Blanco White, Bishop Patterson, Tennyson, Leopardi, and the position
of the Church of England. The reader spoiled for the Scotch quality of
weight by the "light touch" which is the graceful weapon of the age,
wonders, when reading these essays, that Mr. Gladstone has not more
assiduously cultivated the instinct of style,--sentence-making. Milton
himself has not a higher conception of the business of literature; and
when discussing these congenial themes, Mr. Gladstone's enthusiasm does
not degenerate into vehemence, nor does he descend from the high moral
plane from which he views the world.
It is the province of the specialist to appraise Mr. Gladstone's Homeric
writings; but even the specialist will not, perhaps, forbear to quote
the axiom of the pugilist in the Iliad concerning the fate of him who
would be skillful in all arts. No man is less a Greek in temperament,
but no man cherishes deeper admiration for the Greek genius, and nowhere
else is a more vivid picture of the life and politics of the heroic age
held up to the unlearned. While the critic may question technical
accuracy, or plausible structures built on insufficient data, the laity
will remember how earnestly Mr. Gladstone insists that Homer is his own
best interpreter, and that the student of the Iliad must go to the Greek
text and not elsewhere for accurate knowledge.
But Greek literature is only one of Mr. Gladstone's two passions, and
not the paramount one. That he would have been a great theologian had he
been other than Mr. Gladstone, is generally admitted. And it is
interesting to note that while he glories in the combats of the heroes
of Hellas, his enthusiasm is as quickly kindled by the humilities of
the early Church. He recognizes the prophetic quality of Homer, but he
bows before the sublimer genius of an Isaiah, and sees in the lives and
writings of the early Fathers the perfect bloom of human genius and
character.
MACAULAY
From 'Gleanings of Past Years'
Lord Macaulay lived a life of no more than fifty-nine years and three
months. But it was an extraordinarily full life, of sustained exertion;
a high table-land, without depressions. If in its outer aspect there
be anything wearisome, it is only the wearisomeness of reiterated
splendors, and of success so uniform as to be almost monotonous. He
speaks of himself as idle; but his idleness was more active, and carried
with it hour by hour a greater expenditure of brain power, than what
most men regard as their serious employments. He might well have been,
in his mental career, the spoiled child of fortune; for all he tried
succeeded, all he touched turned into gems and gold. In a happy
childhood he evinced extreme precocity. His academical career gave
sufficient, though not redundant, promise of after celebrity. The new
Golden Age he imparted to the Edinburgh Review, and his first and most
important, if not best, Parliamentary speeches in the grand crisis of
the first Reform Bill, achieved for him, years before he had reached the
middle point of life, what may justly be termed an immense distinction.
For a century and more, perhaps no man in this country, with the
exceptions of Mr. Pitt and of Lord Byron, had attained at thirty-two the
fame of Macaulay. His Parliamentary success and his literary eminence
were each of them enough, as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any
brain and heart of a meaner order. But to these was added, in his case,
an amount and quality of social attentions such as invariably partake of
adulation and idolatry, and as perhaps the high circles of London never
before or since have lavished on a man whose claims lay only in himself,
and not in his descent, his rank, or his possessions....
One of the very first things that must strike the observer of this man
is, that he was very unlike to any other man. And yet this unlikeness,
this monopoly of the model in which he was made, did not spring from
violent or eccentric features of originality, for eccentricity he had
none whatever, but from the peculiar mode in which the ingredients were
put together to make up the composition. In one sense, beyond doubt,
such powers as his famous memory, his rare power of illustration, his
command of language, separated him broadly from others: but gifts like
these do not make the man; and we now for the first time know that he
possessed, in a far larger sense, the stamp of a real and strong
individuality. The most splendid and complete assemblage of intellectual
endowments does not of itself suffice to create an interest of the kind
that is, and will be, now felt in Macaulay. It is from ethical gifts
alone that such an interest can spring.
These existed in him not only in abundance, but in forms distant from
and even contrasted with the fashion of his intellectual faculties, and
in conjunctions which come near to paradox. Behind the mask of splendor
lay a singular simplicity; behind a literary severity which sometimes
approached to vengeance, an extreme tenderness; behind a rigid
repudiation of the sentimental, a sensibility at all times quick, and in
the latest times almost threatening to sap, though never sapping, his
manhood. He who as speaker and writer seemed above all others to
represent the age and the world, had the real centre of his being in the
simplest domestic tastes and joys. He for whom the mysteries of human
life, thought, and destiny appear to have neither charm nor terror, and
whose writings seem audibly to boast in every page of being bounded by
the visible horizon of the practical and work-day sphere, yet in his
virtues and in the combination of them; in his freshness, bounty,
bravery; in his unshrinking devotion both to causes and to persons; and
most of all, perhaps, in the thoroughly inborn and spontaneous character
of all these gifts,--really recalls the age of chivalry and the
lineaments of the ideal. The peculiarity, the _differentia_ (so to
speak) of Macaulay seems to us to lie in this: that while as we frankly
think, there is much to question--nay, much here and there to regret or
even censure--in his writings, the excess, or defect, or whatever it may
be, is never really ethical, but is in all cases due to something in the
structure and habits of his intellect. And again, it is pretty plain
that the faults of that intellect were immediately associated with its
excellences: it was in some sense, to use the language of his own
Milton, "dark with excessive bright."...
His moderation in luxuries and pleasures is the more notable and
praiseworthy because he was a man who, with extreme healthiness of
faculty, enjoyed keenly what he enjoyed at all. Take in proof the
following hearty notice of a dinner _a quattr' occhi_ to his friend:
"Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock,
and macaroni. I think that I will note dinners, as honest Pepys did."
His love of books was intense, and was curiously developed. In a walk he
would devour a play or a volume. Once, indeed, his performance embraced
no less than fourteen Books of the Odyssey. "His way of life," says Mr.
Trevelyan, "would have been deemed solitary by others; but it was not
solitary to him." This development blossomed into a peculiar specialism.
Henderson's 'Iceland' was "a favorite breakfast-book" with him. "Some
books which I would never dream of opening at dinner please me at
breakfast, and _vice versa_!" There is more subtlety in this distinction
than could easily be found in any passage of his writings. But how
quietly both meals are handed over to the dominion of the master
propensity! This devotion, however, was not without its drawbacks.
Thought, apart from books and from composition, perhaps he disliked;
certainly he eschewed. Crossing that evil-minded sea the Irish Channel
at night in rough weather, he is disabled from reading; he wraps himself
in a pea-jacket and sits upon the deck. What is his employment? He
cannot sleep, or does not. What an opportunity for moving onward in the
processes of thought, which ought to weigh on the historian! The wild
yet soothing music of the waves would have helped him to watch the
verging this way or that of the judicial scales, or to dive into the
problems of human life and action which history continually is called
upon to sound. No, he cared for none of this. He set about the marvelous
feat of going over 'Paradise Lost' from memory, when he found he could
still repeat half of it. In a word, he was always conversing, or
recollecting, or reading, or composing; but reflecting never.
The laboriousness of Macaulay as an author demands our gratitude; all
the more because his natural speech was in sentences of set and ordered
structure, well-nigh ready for the press. It is delightful to find that
the most successful prose writer of the day was also the most
painstaking. Here is indeed a literary conscience. The very same
gratification may be expressed with reference to our most successful
poet, Mr. Tennyson. Great is the praise due to the poet; still greater,
from the nature of the case, that share which falls to the lot of
Macaulay. For a poet's diligence is, all along, a honeyed work. He is
ever traveling in flowery meads. Macaulay, on the other hand,
unshrinkingly went through an immense mass of inquiry, which even he
sometimes felt to be irksome, and which to most men would have been
intolerable. He was perpetually picking the grain of corn out of the
bushel of chaff. He freely chose to undergo the dust and heat and strain
of battle, before he would challenge from the public the crown of
victory. And in every way it was remarkable that he should maintain his
lofty standard of conception and performance. Mediocrity is now, as
formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the
successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the
very rarest exceptions. The tests of excellence in prose are as much
less palpable as the public appetite is less fastidious. Moreover, we
are moving downward in this respect. The proportion of middling to good
writing constantly and rapidly increases. With the average of
performance, the standard of judgment progressively declines. The
inexorable conscientiousness of Macaulay, his determination to put out
nothing from his hand which his hand was still capable of improving, was
a perfect godsend to the best hopes of our slipshod generation.
It was naturally consequent upon this habit of treating composition in
the spirit of art, that he should extend to the body of his books much
of the regard and care which he so profusely bestowed upon their soul.
We have accordingly had in him, at the time when the need was greatest,
a most vigilant guardian of the language. We seem to detect rare and
slight evidences of carelessness in his Journal: of which we can only
say that in a production of the moment, written for himself alone, we
are surprised that they are not more numerous and considerable. In
general society, carelessness of usage is almost universal, and it is
exceedingly difficult for an individual, however vigilant, to avoid
catching some of the trashy or faulty usages which are continually in
his ear. But in his published works his grammar, his orthography, nay,
his punctuation (too often surrendered to the printer), are faultless.
On these questions, and on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of a word, he
may even be called an authority without appeal; and we cannot doubt that
we owe it to his works, and to their boundless circulation, that we have
not in this age witnessed a more rapid corruption and degeneration of
the language.
To the literary success of Macaulay it would be difficult to find a
parallel in the history of recent authorship. For this and probably for
all future centuries, we are to regard the public as the patron of
literary men; and as a patron abler than any that went before to heap
both fame and fortune on its favorites. Setting aside works of which the
primary purpose was entertainment, Tennyson alone among the writers of
our age, in point of public favor and of emolument following upon it,
comes near to Macaulay. But Tennyson was laboriously cultivating his
gifts for many years before he acquired a position in the eye of the
nation. Macaulay, fresh from college in 1825, astonished the world by
his brilliant and most imposing essay on Milton. Full-orbed, he was seen
above the horizon; and full-orbed after thirty-five years of constantly
emitted splendor, he sank beneath it.
His gains from literature were extraordinary. The check for L20,000 is
known to all. But his accumulation was reduced by his bounty; and his
profits would, it is evident, have been far larger still had he dealt
with the products of his mind on the principles of economic science
(which however he heartily professed), and sold his wares in the dearest
market, as he undoubtedly acquired them in the cheapest. No one can
measure the elevation of Macaulay's character above the mercenary level,
without bearing in mind that for ten years after 1825 he was a poor and
a contented man, though ministering to the wants of a father and a
family reduced in circumstances; though in the blaze of literary and
political success; and though he must have been conscious from the first
of the possession of a gift which by a less congenial and more
compulsory use would have rapidly led him to opulence. Yet of the
comforts and advantages, both social and physical, from which he thus
forbore, it is so plain that he at all times formed no misanthropic or
ascetic, but on the contrary a very liberal and genial estimate. It is
truly touching to find that never, except as a minister, until 1851,
when he had already lived fifty years of his fifty-nine, did this
favorite of fortune, this idol of society, allow himself the luxury of a
carriage.
It has been observed that neither in art nor letters did Macaulay
display that faculty of the higher criticism which depends upon certain
refined perceptions and the power of subtle analysis. His analysis was
always rough, hasty, and sweeping, and his perceptions robust. By these
properties it was that he was so eminently [Greek: phortikos], not in
the vulgar sense of an appeal to spurious sentiment, but as one bearing
his reader along by violence, as the River Scamander tried to bear
Achilles. Yet he was never pretentious; and he said frankly of himself
that a criticism like that of Lessing in his 'Laocoon,' or of Goethe on
'Hamlet,' filled him with wonder and despair. His intense devotion to
the great work of Dante is not perhaps in keeping with the general tenor
of his tastes and attachments, but is in itself a circumstance of much
interest.
We remember however at least one observation of Macaulay's in regard to
art, which is worth preserving. He observed that the mixture of gold
with ivory in great works of ancient art--for example, in the Jupiter of
Phidias--was probably a condescension to the tastes of the people who
were to be the worshipers of the statue; and he noticed that in
Christian times it has most rarely happened that productions great in
art have also been the objects of warm popular veneration....
It has been felt and pointed out in many quarters that Macaulay as a
writer was the child, and became the type, of his country and his age.
As fifty years ago the inscription "Bath" used to be carried on our
letter-paper, so the word "English" is, as it were, in the water-mark of
every leaf of Macaulay's writing. His country was not the Empire, nor
was it the United Kingdom. It was not even Great Britain. Though he was
descended in the higher, that is the paternal, half from Scottish
ancestry, and was linked specially with that country through the signal
virtues, the victorious labors, and the considerable reputation of his
father Zachary,--his country was England. On this little spot he
concentrated a force of admiration and of worship which might have
covered all the world. But as in space, so in time, it was limited. It
was the England of his own age.
The higher energies of his life were as completely summed up in the
present as those of Walter Scott were projected upon the past. He would
not have filled an Abbotsford with armor and relics of the Middle Ages.
He judges the men and institutions and events of other times by the
instruments and measures of the present. The characters whom he admires
are those who would have conformed to the type that was before his eyes:
who would have moved with effect in the court, the camp, the senate,
the drawing-room of to-day. He contemplates the past with no
_desiderium_, no regretful longing, no sense of things admirable which
are also lost and irrecoverable. Upon this limitation of his retrospects
it follows in natural sequence that of the future he has no glowing
anticipations, and even the present he is not apt to contemplate on its
mysterious and ideal side. As in respect to his personal capacity of
loving, so in regard to the corresponding literary power. The faculty
was singularly intense, and yet it was spent within a narrow circle.
There is a marked sign of this narrowness, in his disinclination even to
look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he disliked.