It may be said, to his credit, that he had by no means conducted his

suit upon that narrow programme which he had drawn up at the outset. He

very soon discovered that Gertrude's resentment--if resentment there

was--was a substance utterly impalpable even to his most delicate tact,

and he had accordingly set to work to woo her like an honest man, from

day to day, from hour to hour, trusting so devoutly for success to

momentary inspiration, that he felt his suit dignified by a certain

flattering _faux air_ of genuine passion. He occasionally reminded

himself, however, that he might really be owing more to the subtle force

of accidental contrast than Gertrude's lifelong reserve--for it was

certain she would not depart from it--would ever allow him to measure.

It was as an honest man, then, a man of impulse and of action, that

Gertrude had begun to like him. She was not slow to perceive whither his

operations tended; and she was almost tempted at times to tell him

frankly that she would spare him the intermediate steps, and meet him at

the goal without further delay. It was not that she was prepared to love

him, but she would make him an obedient wife. An immense weariness had

somehow come upon her, and a sudden sense of loneliness. A vague

suspicion that her money had done her an incurable wrong inspired her

with a profound distaste for the care of it. She felt cruelly hedged out

from human sympathy by her bristling possessions. "If I had had five

hundred dollars a year," she said in a frequent parenthesis, "I might

have pleased him." Hating her wealth, accordingly, and chilled by her

isolation, the temptation was strong upon her to give herself up to that

wise, brave gentleman who seemed to have adopted such a happy medium

betwixt loving her for her money and fearing her for it. Would she not

always stand between men who would represent the two extremes? She would

anticipate security by an alliance with Major Luttrel.

One evening, on presenting himself, Luttrel read these thoughts so

clearly in her eyes, that he made up his mind to speak. But his mind was

burdened with a couple of facts, of which it was necessary that he

should discharge it before it could enjoy the freedom of action which

the occasion required. In the first place, then, he had been to see

Richard Clare, and had found him suddenly and decidedly better. It was

unbecoming, however,--it was impossible,--that he should allow Gertrude

to linger over this pleasant announcement.

"I tell the good news first," he said, gravely. "I have some very bad

news, too, Miss Whittaker."

Gertrude sent him a rapid glance, "Some one has been killed," she said.

"Captain Severn has been shot," said the Major,--"shot by a guerilla."

Gertrude was silent. No answer seemed possible to that uncompromising

fact. She sat with her head on her hand, and her elbow on the table

beside her, looking at the figures on the carpet. She uttered no words

of commonplace regret; but she felt as little like giving way to serious

grief. She had lost nothing, and, to the best of her knowledge, _he_ had

lost nothing. She had an old loss to mourn,--a loss a month old, which

she had mourned as she might. To give way to passion would have been but

to impugn the solemnity of her past regrets. When she looked up at her

companion, she was pale, but she was calm, yet with a calmness upon

which a single glance of her eye directed him not inconsiderately to

presume. She was aware that this glance betrayed her secret; but in view

both of Severn's death and of the Major's attitude, such betrayal

mattered less. Luttrel had prepared to act upon her hint, and to avert

himself gently from the topic, when Gertrude, who had dropped her eyes

again, raised them with a slight shudder. "I'm cold," she said. "Will

you shut that window beside you, Major? Or stay, suppose you give me my

shawl from the sofa."

Luttrel brought the shawl, placed it on her shoulders, and sat down

beside her. "These are cruel times," he said, with studied simplicity.

"I'm sure I hardly know what's to come of it all."

"Yes, they are cruel times," said Gertrude. "They make one feel cruel.

They make one doubt of all he has learnt from his pastors and masters."

"Yes, but they teach us something new also."

"I'm sure I don't know," said Gertrude, whose heart was so full of

bitterness that she felt almost malignant. "They teach us how mean we

are. War is an infamy, Major, though it _is_ your trade. It's very well

for you, who look at it professionally, and for those who go and fight;

but it's a miserable business for those who stay at home, and do the

thinking and the sentimentalizing. It's a miserable business for women;

it makes us more spiteful than ever."

"Well, a little spite isn't a bad thing, in practice," said the Major.

"War is certainly an abomination, both at home and in the field. But as

wars go, Miss Whittaker, our own is a very satisfactory one. It involves

something. It won't leave us as it found us. We're in the midst of a

revolution, and what's a revolution but a turning upside down? It makes

sad work with our habits and theories and our traditions and

convictions. But, on the other hand," Luttrel pursued, warming to his

task, "it leaves something untouched, which is better than these,--I

mean our feelings, Miss Whittaker." And the Major paused until he had

caught Gertrude's eyes, when, having engaged them with his own, he

proceeded. "I think they are the stronger for the downfall of so much

else, and, upon my soul, I think it's in them we ought to take refuge.

Don't you think so?"

"Yes, if I understand you."

"I mean our serious feelings, you know,--not our tastes nor our

passions. I don't advocate fiddling while Rome is burning. In fact it's

only poor, unsatisfied devils that are tempted to fiddle. There is one

feeling which is respectable and honorable, and even sacred, at all

times and in all places, whatever they may be. It doesn't depend upon

circumstances, but they upon it; and with its help, I think, we are a

match for any circumstances. I don't mean religion, Miss Whittaker,"

added the Major, with a sober smile.

"If you don't mean religion," said Gertrude, "I suppose you mean love.

That's a very different thing."

"Yes, a very different thing; so I've always thought, and so I'm glad to

hear you say. Some people, you know, mix them up in the most

extraordinary fashion. I don't fancy myself an especially religious man;

in fact, I believe I'm rather otherwise. It's my nature. Half mankind

are born so, or I suppose the affairs of this world wouldn't move. But I

believe I'm a good lover, Miss Whittaker."

"I hope for your own sake you are, Major Luttrel."

"Thank you. Do you think now you could entertain the idea for the sake

of any one else?"

Gertrude neither dropped her eyes, nor shrugged her shoulders, nor

blushed. If anything, indeed, she turned somewhat paler than before, as

she sustained her companion's gaze, and prepared to answer him as

directly as she might.

"If I loved you, Major Luttrel," she said, "I should value the idea for

my own sake."

The Major, too, blanched a little. "I put my question conditionally," he

answered, "and I have got, as I deserved, a conditional reply. I will

speak plainly, then, Miss Whittaker. _Do_ you value the fact for your

own sake? It would be plainer still to say, Do you love me? but I

confess I'm not brave enough for that. I will say, Can you? or I will

even content myself with putting it in the conditional again, and asking

you if you could; although, after all, I hardly know what the _if_

understood can reasonably refer to. I'm not such a fool as to ask of any

woman--least of all of you--to love me contingently. You can only answer

for the present, and say yes or no. I shouldn't trouble you to say

either, if I didn't conceive that I had given you time to make up your

mind. It doesn't take forever to know James Luttrel. I'm not one of the

great unfathomable ones. We've seen each other more or less intimately

for a good many weeks; and as I'm conscious, Miss Whittaker, of having

shown you my best, I take for granted that if you don't fancy me now,

you won't a month hence, when you shall have seen my faults. Yes, Miss

Whittaker, I can solemnly say," continued the Major, with genuine

feeling, "I have shown you my best, as every man is in honor bound to

do who approaches a woman with those predispositions with which I have

approached you. I have striven hard to please you,"--and he paused. "I

can only say, I hope I have succeeded."

"I should be very insensible," said Gertrude, "if all your kindness and

your courtesy had been lost upon me."

"In Heaven's name, don't talk about courtesy," cried the Major.

"I am deeply conscious of your devotion, and I am very much obliged to

you for urging your claims so respectfully and considerately. I speak

seriously, Major Luttrel," pursued Gertrude. "There is a happy medium of

expression, and you have taken it. Now it seems to me that there is a

happy medium of affection, with which you might be content. Strictly, I

don't love you. I question my heart, and it gives me that answer. The

feeling that I have is not a feeling to work prodigies."

"May it at least work the prodigy of allowing you to be my wife?"

"I don't think I shall over-estimate its strength, if I say that it may.

If you can respect a woman who gives you her hand in cold blood, you are

welcome to mine."

Luttrel moved his chair and took her hand. "Beggars can't be choosers,"

said he, raising it to his mustache.

"O Major Luttrel, don't say that," she answered. "I give you a great

deal; but I keep a little,--a little," said Gertrude, hesitating, "which

I suppose I shall give to God."

"Well, I shall not be jealous," said Luttrel.

"The rest I give to you, and in return I ask a great deal."

"I shall give you all. You know I told you I'm not religious."

"No, I don't want more than I give," said Gertrude.

"But, pray," asked Luttrel, with a delicate smile, "what am I to do with

the difference?"

"You had better keep it for yourself. What I want is your protection,

sir, and your advice, and your care. I want you to take me away from

this place, even if you have to take me down to the army. I want to see

the world under the shelter of your name. I shall give you a great deal

of trouble. I'm a mere mass of possessions: what I am, is nothing to

what I have. But ever since I began to grow up, what I am has been the

slave of what I have. I am weary of my chains, and you must help me to

carry them,"--and Gertrude rose to her feet as if to inform the Major

that his audience was at an end.

He still held her right hand; she gave him the other. He stood looking

down at her, an image of manly humility, while from his silent breast

went out a brief thanksgiving to favoring fortune.

At the pressure of his hands, Gertrude felt her bosom heave. She burst

into tears. "O, you must be very kind to me!" she cried, as he put his

arm about her, and she dropped her head upon his shoulder.

* * * * *

When once Richard's health had taken a turn for the better, it began

very rapidly to improve. "Until he is quite well," Gertrude said, one

day, to her accepted suitor, "I had rather he heard nothing of our

engagement. He was once in love with me himself," she added, very

frankly. "Did you ever suspect it? But I hope he will have got better of

that sad malady, too. Nevertheless, I shall expect nothing of his good

judgment until he is quite strong; and as he may hear of my new

intentions from other people, I propose that, for the present, we

confide them to no one."

"But if he asks me point-blank," said the Major, "what shall I answer?"

"It's not likely he'll ask you. How should he suspect anything?"

"O," said Luttrel, "Clare is one that suspects everything."

"Tell him we're not engaged, then. A woman in my position may say what

she pleases."

It was agreed, however, that certain preparations for the marriage

should meanwhile go forward in secret; and that the marriage itself

should take place in August, as Luttrel expected to be ordered back into

service in the autumn. At about this moment Gertrude was surprised to

receive a short note from Richard, so feebly scrawled in pencil as to be

barely legible. "Dear Gertrude," it ran, "don't come to see me just yet.

I'm not fit. You would hurt me, and _vice versa_. God bless you! R.

CLARE." Miss Whittaker explained his request, by the supposition that a

report had come to him of Major Luttrel's late assiduities (which it was

impossible should go unobserved); that, leaping at the worst, he had

taken her engagement for granted; and that, under this impression, he

could not trust himself to see her. She despatched him an answer,

telling him that she would await his pleasure, and that, if the doctor

would consent to his having letters, she would meanwhile occasionally

write to him. "She will give me good advice," thought Richard

impatiently; and on this point, accordingly, she received no account of

his wishes. Expecting to leave her house and close it on her marriage,

she spent many hours in wandering sadly over the meadow-paths and

through the woodlands which she had known from her childhood. She had

thrown aside the last ensigns of filial regret, and now walked sad and

splendid in the uncompromising colors of an affianced bride. It would

have seemed to a stranger that, for a woman who had freely chosen a

companion for life, she was amazingly spiritless and sombre. As she

looked at her pale cheeks and heavy eyes in the mirror, she felt ashamed

that she had no fairer countenance to offer to her destined lord. She

had lost her single beauty, her smile; and she would make but a ghastly

figure at the altar. "I ought to wear a calico dress and an apron," she

said to herself, "and not this glaring finery." But she continued to

wear her finery, and to lay out her money, and to perform all her old

duties to the letter. After the lapse of what she deemed a sufficient

interval, she went to see Mrs. Martin, and to listen dumbly to her

narration of her brother's death, and to her simple eulogies.

Major Luttrel performed his part quite as bravely, and much more

successfully. He observed neither too many things nor too few; he

neither presumed upon his success, nor mistrusted it. Having on his side

received no prohibition from Richard, he resumed his visits at the farm,

trusting that, with the return of reason, his young friend might feel

disposed to renew that anomalous alliance in which, on the hapless

evening of Captain Severn's farewell, he had taken refuge against his

despair. In the long, languid hours of his early convalescence, Richard

had found time to survey his position, to summon back piece by piece the

immediate past, and to frame a general scheme for the future. But more

vividly than anything else, there had finally disengaged itself from his

meditations a profound aversion to James Luttrel.

It was in this humor that the Major found him; and as he looked at the

young man's gaunt shoulders, supported by pillows, at his face, so livid

and aquiline, at his great dark eyes, luminous with triumphant life, it

seemed to him that an invincible spirit had been sent from a better

world to breathe confusion upon his hopes. If Richard hated the Major,

the reader may guess whether the Major loved Richard. Luttrel was amazed

at his first remark.

"I suppose you're engaged by this time," Richard said, calmly enough.

"Not quite," answered the Major. "There's a chance for you yet."

To this Richard made no rejoinder. Then, suddenly, "Have you had any

news of Captain Severn?" he asked.

For a moment the Major was perplexed at his question. He had assumed

that the news of Severn's death had come to Richard's ears, and he had

been half curious, half apprehensive as to its effect. But an instant's

reflection now assured him that the young man's estrangement from his

neighbors had kept him hitherto and might still keep him in ignorance of

the truth. Hastily, therefore, and inconsiderately, the Major

determined to confirm this ignorance. "No," said he; "I've had no news.

Severn and I are not on such terms as to correspond."

The next time Luttrel came to the farm, he found the master sitting up

in a great, cushioned, chintz-covered arm-chair which Gertrude had sent

him the day before out of her own dressing-room.

"Are you engaged yet?" asked Richard.

There was a strain as if of defiance in his tone. The Major was

irritated. "Yes," said he, "we _are_ engaged now."

The young man's face betrayed no emotion.

"Are you reconciled to it?" asked Luttrel.

"Yes, practically I am."

"What do you mean by practically? Explain yourself."

"A man in my state can't explain himself. I mean that, however I feel

about it, I shall accept Gertrude's marriage."

"You're a wise man, my boy," said the Major, kindly.

"I'm growing wise. I feel like Solomon on his throne in this chair. But

I confess, sir, I don't see how she could have you."

"Well, there's no accounting for tastes," said the Major,

good-humoredly.

"Ah, if it's been a matter of taste with her," said Richard, "I have

nothing to say."

They came to no more express understanding than this with regard to the

future. Richard continued to grow stronger daily, and to defer the

renewal of his intercourse with Gertrude. A month before, he would have

resented as a bitter insult the intimation that he would ever be so

resigned to lose her as he now found himself. He would not see her for

two reasons: first, because he felt that it would be--or that at least

in reason it ought to be--a painful experience to look upon his old

mistress with a coldly critical eye; and secondly, because, justify to

himself as he would his new-born indifference, he could not entirely

cast away the suspicion that it was a last remnant of disease, and that,

when he stood on his legs again in the presence of those exuberant

landscapes with which he had long since established a sort of sensuous

communion, he would feel, as with a great tumultuous rush, the return of

his impetuous manhood and of his old capacity. When he had smoked a pipe

in the outer sunshine, when he had settled himself once more to the long

elastic bound of his mare, then he would see Gertrude. The reason of the

change which had come upon him was that she had disappointed him,--she

whose magnanimity it had once seemed that his fancy was impotent to

measure. She had accepted Major Luttrel, a man whom he despised; she had

so mutilated her magnificent heart as to match it with his. The validity

of his dislike to the Major, Richard did not trouble himself to examine.

He accepted it as an unerring instinct; and, indeed, he might have asked

himself, had he not sufficient proof? Moreover he labored under the

sense of a gratuitous wrong. He had suffered an immense torment of

remorse to drive him into brutishness, and thence to the very gate of

death, for an offence which he had deemed mortal, and which was after

all but a phantasm of his impassioned conscience. What a fool he had

been! a fool for his nervous fears, and a fool for his penitence.

Marriage with Major Luttrel,--such was the end of Gertrude's fancied

anguish. Such, too, we hardly need add, was the end of that idea of

reparation which had been so formidable to Luttrel. Richard had been

generous; he would now be just.

Far from impeding his recovery, these reflections hastened it. One

morning in the beginning of August, Gertrude received notice of

Richard's presence. It was a still, sultry day, and Miss Whittaker, her

habitual pallor deepened by the oppressive heat, was sitting alone in a

white morning-dress, languidly fanning aside at once the droning flies

and her equally importunate thoughts. She found Richard standing in the

middle of the drawing-room, booted and spurred.

"Well, Richard," she exclaimed, with some feeling, "you're at last

willing to see me!"

As his eyes fell upon her, he started and stood almost paralyzed,

heeding neither her words nor her extended hand. It was not Gertrude he

saw, but her ghost.

"In Heaven's name what has happened to you?" he cried. "Have _you_ been

ill?"

Gertrude tried to smile in feigned surprise at his surprise; but her

muscles relaxed. Richard's words and looks reflected more vividly than

any mirror the dejection of her person; and this, the misery of her

soul. She felt herself growing faint. She staggered back to a sofa and

sank down.

Then Richard felt as if the room were revolving about him, and as if his

throat were choked with imprecations,--as if his old erratic passion had

again taken possession of him, like a mingled legion of devils and

angels. It was through pity that his love returned. He went forward and

dropped on his knees at Gertrude's feet. "Speak to me!" he cried,

seizing her hands. "Are you unhappy? Is your heart broken? O Gertrude!

what have you come to?"

Gertrude drew her hands from his grasp and rose to her feet. "Get up,

Richard," she said. "Don't talk so wildly. I'm not well. I'm very glad

to see you. _You_ look well."

"I've got my strength again,--and meanwhile you've been failing. You're

unhappy, you're wretched! Don't say you're not, Gertrude: it's as plain

as day. You're breaking your heart."

"The same old Richard!" said Gertrude, trying to smile again.

"Would that you were the same old Gertrude! Don't try to smile; you

can't!"

"I _shall_!" said Gertrude, desperately. "I'm going to be married, you

know."

"Yes, I know. I don't congratulate you."

"I have not counted upon that honor, Richard. I shall have to do without

it."

"You'll have to do without a great many things!" cried Richard,

horrified by what seemed to him her blind self-immolation.

"I have all I ask," said Gertrude.

"You haven't all _I_ ask then! You haven't all your friends ask."

"My friends are very kind, but I marry to suit myself."

"You've not suited yourself!" retorted the young man. "You've

suited--God knows what!--your pride, your despair, your resentment." As

he looked at her, the secret history of her weakness seemed to become

plain to him, and he felt a mighty rage against the man who had taken a

base advantage of it. "Gertrude!" he cried, "I entreat you to go back.

It's not for my sake,--_I_'ll give you up,--I'll go a thousand miles

away, and never look at you again. It's for your own. In the name of

your happiness, break with that man! Don't fling yourself away. Buy him

off, if you consider yourself bound. Give him your money. That's all he

wants."

As Gertrude listened, the blood came back to her face, and two flames

into her eyes. She looked at Richard from head to foot. "You are not

weak," she said, "you are in your senses, you are well and strong; you

shall tell me what you mean. You insult the best friend I have. Explain

yourself! you insinuate foul things,--speak them out!" Her eyes glanced

toward the door, and Richard's followed them. Major Luttrel stood on the

threshold.

"Come in, sir!" cried Richard. "Gertrude swears she'll believe no harm

of you. Come and tell her that she's wrong! How can you keep on

harassing a woman whom you've brought to this state? Think of what she

was three months ago, and look at her now!"

Luttrel received this broadside without flinching. He had overheard

Richard's voice from the entry, and he had steeled his heart for the

encounter. He assumed the air of having been so amazed by the young

man's first words as only to have heard his last; and he glanced at

Gertrude mechanically as if to comply with them. "What's the matter?" he

asked, going over to her, and taking her hand; "are you ill?" Gertrude

let him have her hand, but she forbore to meet his eyes.

"Ill! of course she's ill!" cried Richard, passionately. "She's

dying,--she's consuming herself! I know I seem to be playing an odious

part here, Gertrude, but, upon my soul, I can't help it. I look like a

betrayer, an informer, a sneak, but I don't feel like one! Still, I'll

leave you, if you say so."

"Shall he go, Gertrude?" asked Luttrel, without looking at Richard.

"No. Let him stay and explain himself. He has accused you,--let him

prove his case."

"I know what he is going to say," said Luttrel. "It will place me in a

bad light. Do you still wish to hear it?"

Gertrude drew her hand hastily out of Luttrel's. "Speak, Richard!" she

cried, with a passionate gesture.

"I will speak," said Richard. "I've done you a dreadful wrong, Gertrude.

How great a wrong, I never knew until I saw you to-day so miserably

altered. When I heard that you were to be married, I fancied that it was

no wrong, and that my remorse had been wasted. But I understand it now;

and _he_ understands it, too. You once told me that you had ceased to

love Captain Severn. It wasn't true. You never ceased to love him. You

love him at this moment. If he were to get another wound in the next

battle, how would you feel? How would you bear it?" And Richard paused

for an instant with the force of his interrogation.

"For God's sake," cried Gertrude, "respect the dead!"

"The dead! Is he dead?"

Gertrude covered her face with her hands.

"You beast!" cried Luttrel.

Richard turned upon him savagely. "Shut your infernal mouth!" he roared.

"You told me he was alive and well!"

Gertrude made a movement of speechless distress.

"You would have it, my dear," said Luttrel, with a little bow.

Richard had turned pale, and began to tremble. "Excuse me, Gertrude," he

said, hoarsely, "I've been deceived. Poor, unhappy woman! Gertrude," he

continued, going nearer to her, and speaking in a whisper, "_I_ killed

him."

Gertrude fell back from him, as he approached her, with a look of

unutterable horror. "I and _he_," said Richard, pointing at Luttrel.

Gertrude's eyes followed the direction of his gesture, and transferred

their scorching disgust to her suitor. This was too much for Luttrel's

courage. "You idiot!" she shouted at Richard, "speak out!"

"He loved you, though you believed he didn't," said Richard. "I saw it

the first time I looked at him. To every one but you it was as plain as

day. Luttrel saw it too. But he was too modest, and he never fancied you

cared for him. The night before he went back to the army, he came to bid

you good by. If he had seen you, it would have been better for every

one. You remember that evening, of course. We met him, Luttrel and I. He

was all on fire,--he meant to speak. I knew it, you knew it, Luttrel: it

was in his fingers' ends. I intercepted him. I turned him off,--I lied

to him and told him you were away. I was a coward, and I did neither

more nor less than that. I knew you were waiting for him. It was

stronger than my will,--I believe I should do it again. Fate was against

him, and he went off. I came back to tell you, but my damnable jealousy

strangled me. I went home and drank myself into a fever. I've done you a

wrong that I can never repair. I'd go hang myself if I thought it would

help you." Richard spoke slowly, softly, and explicitly, as if

irresistible Justice in person had her hand upon his neck, and were

forcing him down upon his knees. In the presence of Gertrude's dismay

nothing seemed possible but perfect self-conviction. In Luttrel's

attitude, as he stood with his head erect, his arms folded, and his cold

gray eye fixed upon the distance, it struck him that there was something

atrociously insolent; not insolent to him,--for that he cared little

enough,--but insolent to Gertrude and to the dreadful solemnity of the

hour. Richard sent the Major a look of the most aggressive contempt. "As

for Major Luttrel," he said, "_he_ was but a passive spectator. No,

Gertrude, by Heaven!" he burst out; "he was worse than I! I loved you,

and he didn't!"

"Our friend is correct in his facts, Gertrude," said Luttrel, quietly.

"He is incorrect in his opinions. I _was_ a passive spectator of his

deception. He appeared to enjoy a certain authority with regard to your

wishes,--the source of which I respected both of you sufficiently never

to question,--and I accepted the act which he has described as an

exercise of it. You will remember that you had sent us away on the

ground that you were in no humor for company. To deny you, therefore, to

another visitor, seemed to me rather officious, but still pardonable.

You will consider that I was wholly ignorant of your relations to that

visitor; that whatever you may have done for others, Gertrude, to me you

never vouchsafed a word of information on the subject, and that Mr.

Clare's words are a revelation to me. But I am bound to believe nothing

that he says. I am bound to believe that I have injured you only when I

hear it from your own lips."

Richard made a movement as if to break out upon the Major; but Gertrude,

who had been standing motionless with her eyes upon the ground, quickly

raised them, and gave him a look of imperious prohibition. She had

listened, and she had chosen. She turned to Luttrel. "Major Luttrel,"

she said, "you _have_ been an accessory in what has been for me a

serious grief. It is my duty to tell you so. I mean, of course, a

profoundly unwilling accessory. I pity you more than I can tell you. I

think your position more pitiable than mine. It is true that I never

made a confidant of you. I never made one of Richard. I had a secret,

and he surprised it. You were less fortunate." It might have seemed to a

thoroughly dispassionate observer that in these last four words there

was an infinitesimal touch of tragic irony. Gertrude paused a moment

while Luttrel eyed her intently, and Richard, from a somewhat tardy

instinct of delicacy, walked over to the bow-window. "This is the most

painful moment of my life," she resumed. "I hardly know where my duty

lies. The only thing that is plain to me is, that I must ask you to

release me from my engagement. I ask it most humbly, Major Luttrel,"

Gertrude continued, with warmth in her words, and a chilling coldness in

her voice,--a coldness which it sickened her to feel there, but which

she was unable to dispel. "I can't expect that you should give me up

easily; I know that it's a great deal to ask, and"--she forced the

chosen words out of her mouth--"I should thank you more than I can say

if you would put some condition upon my release. You have done honorably

by me, and I repay you with ingratitude. But I can't marry you." Her

voice began to melt. "I have been false from the beginning. I have no

heart to give you. I should make you a despicable wife."

The Major, too, had listened and chosen, and in this trying conjuncture

he set the seal to his character as an accomplished man. He saw that

Gertrude's movement was final, and he determined to respect the

inscrutable mystery of her heart. He read in the glance of her eye and

the tone of her voice that the perfect dignity had fallen from his

character,--that his integrity had lost its bloom; but he also read her

firm resolve never to admit this fact to her own mind, nor to declare it

to the world, and he honored her forbearance. His hopes, his ambitions,

his visions, lay before him like a colossal heap of broken glass; but

he would be as graceful as she was. She had divined him; but she had

spared him. The Major was inspired.

"You have at least spoken to the point," he said. "You leave no room for

doubt or for hope. With the little light I have, I can't say I

understand your feelings, but I yield to them religiously. I believe so

thoroughly that you suffer from the thought of what you ask of me, that

I will not increase your suffering by assuring you of my own. I care for

nothing but your happiness. You have lost it, and I give you mine to

replace it. And although it's a simple thing to say," he added, "I must

say simply that I thank you for your implicit faith in my

integrity,"--and he held out his hand. As she gave him hers, Gertrude

felt utterly in the wrong; and she looked into his eyes with an

expression so humble, so appealing, so grateful, that, after all, his

exit may be called triumphant.

When he had gone, Richard turned from the window with an enormous sense

of relief. He had heard Gertrude's speech, and he knew that perfect

justice had not been done; but still there was enough to be thankful

for. Yet now that his duty was accomplished, he was conscious of a

sudden lassitude. Mechanically he looked at Gertrude, and almost

mechanically he came towards her. She, on her side, looking at him as he

walked slowly down the long room, his face indistinct against the

deadened light of the white-draped windows behind him, marked the

expression of his figure with another pang. "He has rescued me," she

said to herself; "but his passion has perished in the tumult. Richard,"

she said aloud, uttering the first words of vague kindness that came

into her mind, "I forgive you."

Richard stopped. The idea had lost its charm. "You're very kind," he

said, wearily. "You're far too kind. How do you know you forgive me?

Wait and see."

Gertrude looked at him as she had never looked before; but he saw

nothing of it. He saw a sad, plain girl in a white dress, nervously

handling her fan. He was thinking of himself. If he had been thinking of

her, he would have read in her lingering, upward gaze, that he had won

her; and if, so reading, he had opened his arms, Gertrude would have

come to them. We trust the reader is not shocked. She neither hated him

nor despised him, as she ought doubtless in consistency to have done.

She felt that he was abundantly a man, and she loved him. Richard on his

side felt humbly the same truth, and he began to respect himself. The

past had closed abruptly behind him, and tardy Gertrude had been shut

in. The future was dimly shaping itself without her image. So he did not

open his arms.

"Good by," he said, holding out his hand. "I may not see you again for a

long time."

Gertrude felt as if the world were deserting her. "Are you going away?"

she asked, tremulously.

"I mean to sell out and pay my debts, and go to the war."

She gave him her hand, and he silently shook it. There was no contending

with the war, and she gave him up.

With their separation our story properly ends, and to say more would be

to begin a new story. It is perhaps our duty, however, expressly to add,

that Major Luttrel, in obedience to a logic of his own, abstained from

revenge; and that, if time has not avenged him, it has at least rewarded

him. General Luttrel, who lost an arm before the war was over, recently

married Miss Van Winkel of Philadelphia, and seventy thousand a year.

Richard engaged in the defence of his country, on a captain's

commission, obtained with some difficulty. He saw a great deal of

fighting, but he has no scars to show. The return of peace found him in

his native place, without a home, and without resources. One of his

first acts was to call dutifully and respectfully upon Miss Whittaker,

whose circle of acquaintance had apparently become very much enlarged,

and now included a vast number of gentlemen. Gertrude's manner was

kindness itself, but a more studied kindness than before. She had lost

much of her youth and her simplicity. Richard wondered whether she had

pledged herself to spinsterhood, but of course he didn't ask her. She

inquired very particularly into his material prospects and intentions,

and offered most urgently to lend him money, which he declined to

borrow. When he left her, he took a long walk through her place and

beside the river, and, wandering back to the days when he had yearned

for her love, assured himself that no woman would ever again be to him

what she had been. During his stay in this neighborhood he found himself

impelled to a species of submission to one of the old agricultural

magnates whom he had insulted in his unregenerate days, and through whom

he was glad to obtain some momentary employment. But his present

position is very distasteful to him, and he is eager to try his fortunes

in the West. As yet, however, he has lacked even the means to get as far

as St. Louis. He drinks no more than is good for him. To speak of

Gertrude's impressions of Richard would lead us quite too far. Shortly

after his return she broke up her household, and came to the bold

resolution (bold, that is, for a woman young, unmarried, and ignorant of

manners in her own country) to spend some time in Europe. At our last

accounts she was living in the ancient city of Florence. Her great

wealth, of which she was wont to complain that it excluded her from

human sympathy, now affords her a most efficient protection. She passes

among her fellow-countrymen abroad for a very independent, but a very

happy woman; although, as she is by this time twenty-seven years of age,

a little romance is occasionally invoked to account for her continued

celibacy.

THE GROWTH, LIMITATIONS, AND TOLERATION OF SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS.

In an article on Shakespeare in the June number of this Magazine, we

spoke of his general comprehensiveness and creativeness, of his method

of characterization, and of the identity of his genius with his

individuality. In the present article we purpose to treat of some

particular topics included in the general theme; and as criticism on him

is like coasting along a continent, we shall make little pretension to

system in the order of taking them up.

The first of these topics is the succession of Shakespeare's works,

considered as steps in the growth and development of his powers,--a

subject which has already been ably handled by our countryman, Mr.

Verplanck. The facts, as far as they can be ascertained, are these.

Shakespeare went to London about the year 1586, in his twenty-second

year, and found some humble employment in one of the theatrical

companies. Three years afterwards, in 1589, he had risen to be one of

the sharers in the Blackfriars' Theatre. In 1592 he had acquired

sufficient reputation as a dramatist, or at least as a recaster of the

plays of others, to excite the jealousy of the leading playwrights,

whose crude dramas he condescended to rewrite or retouch. That graceless

vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent death-bed his old

friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe, and trying to dissuade them from

"spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully

declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that,

with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as

able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an

absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene

in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the

productions of others includes some dramas which have not been

preserved, as the company to which Shakespeare was attached owned the

manuscripts of a great number of plays which were never printed; and it

was a custom, when a play had popular elements in it, for other

dramatists to be employed in making such additions as would give

continual novelty to the old favorite. But of the plays published in our

editions of Shakespeare's writings, it is probable that "The Comedy of

Errors," and the three parts of "King Henry VI.," are only partially

his, and should be classed among his early adaptations, and not among

his early creations. The play of "Pericles" bears no marks of his mind,

except in some scenes of transcendent power and beauty, which start up

from the rest of the work like towers of gold from a plain of sand; but

these scenes are in his latest manner. In regard to the tragedy of

"Titus Andronicus," we are so constituted as to resist all the external

evidence by which such a shapeless mass of horrors and absurdities is

fastened on Shakespeare. Mr. Verplanck thinks it one of Shakespeare's

first attempts at dramatic composition; but first attempts must reflect

the mental condition of the author at the time they were made; and we

know the mental condition of Shakespeare in his early manhood by his

poem of "Venus and Adonis," which he expressly styles "the first heir of

his invention." Now leaving out of view the fact that "Titus Andronicus"

stamps the impression, not of youthful, but of matured depravity of

taste, its execrable enormities of feeling and incident could not have

proceeded from the sweet and comely nature in which the poem had its

birth. The best criticism on "Titus Andronicus" was made by Robert

Burns, when he was nine years old. His schoolmaster was reading the play

aloud in his father's cottage, and when he came to the scene where

Lavinia enters with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, little

Robert fell a-crying, and threatened, in case the play was left in the

cottage, to burn it. It is hard to believe that what Burns despised and

detested at the age of nine could have been written by Shakespeare at

the age of twenty-five. Taking, then, "Venus and Adonis" as the point of

departure, we find Shakespeare at the age of twenty-two endowed with all

the faculties, but relatively deficient in the passions, of the poet.

The poem is a throng of thoughts, fancies, and imaginations, but

somewhat cramped in the utterance. Coleridge says, that "in his poems

the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war

embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction

of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought

each with its shield before the breast of the other." Fine as this is,

it would perhaps be more exact to say, that in his earlier poems his

intellect, acting apart from his sensibility, and playing with its own

ingenuities of fancy and meditation, condensed its thoughts in crystals.

Afterwards, when his whole nature became liquid, he gave us his thoughts

in a state of fusion, and his intellect flowed in streams of fire.

Take, for example, that passage in the poem where Venus represents the

loveliness of Adonis as sending thrills of passion into the earth on

which he treads, and as making the bashful moon hide herself from the

sight of his bewildering beauty:--

"But if thou fall, O, then imagine this!

The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips,

And all is but to rob thee of a kiss.

Rich preys make true men thieves; so do thy lips

Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn,

Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn.

"Now of this dark night I perceive the reason:

Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shine,

Till forging Nature be condemned of treason,

For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine.

Wherein she framed thee, in high heaven's despite.

To shame the sun by day and her by night."

This is reflected and reflecting passion, or, at least, imagination

awakening passion, rather than passion penetrating imagination.

Now mark, by contrast, the gush of the heart into the brain, dissolving

thought, imagination, and expression, so that they run molten, in the

delirious ecstasy of Pericles in recovering his long-lost child:--

"O Helicanus, strike me, honored sir!

Give me a gash; put me to present pain;

Lest this great sea of joys, rushing upon me,

O'erbear the shores of my mortality,

And drown me with their sweetness."

If, as is probable, "Venus and Adonis" was written as early as 1586, we

may suppose that the plays which represent the boyhood of his genius,

and which are strongly marked with the characteristics of that poem,

namely, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," the first draft of "Love's

Labor's Lost," and the original "Romeo and Juliet," were produced before

the year 1592. Following these came "King Richard III.," "King Richard

II.," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "King John," "The Merchant of

Venice," and "King Henry IV.," all of which we know were written before

1598, when Shakespeare was in his thirty-fourth year. During the next

eight years he produced "King Henry V.," "The Merry Wives of Windsor,"

"As You Like It," "Hamlet," "Twelfth Night," "Measure for Measure,"

"Othello," "Macbeth," and "King Lear." In this list are the four great

tragedies in which his genius culminated. Then came "Troilus and

Cressida," "Timon of Athens," "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra,"

"Cymbeline," "King Henry VIII.," "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," and

"Coriolanus." If heed be paid to this order of the plays, it will be

seen at once that a quotation from Shakespeare carries with it a very

different degree of authority, according as it refers to the youth or

the maturity of his mind.

Indeed, when we reflect that between the production of "The Two

Gentlemen of Verona" and "King Lear" there is only a space of fifteen

years, we must admit that the history of the human intellect presents no

other example of such marvellous progress; and if we note the giant

strides by which it was made, we shall find that they all imply a

progressive widening and deepening of soul, a positive growth of the

nature of the man, until in Lear the power became supreme and becomes

amazing. Mr. Verplanck considers the period when he produced his four

great tragedies to be the period of his intellectual grandeur, as

distinguished from an earlier period which he thinks shows the

perfection of his merely poetic and imaginative power; but the fact

would seem to be that his increasing greatness as a philosopher was

fully matched by his increasing greatness as a poet, and that in the

devouring swiftness of his onward and upward movement imagination kept

abreast of reason. His imagination was never more vivid, all-informing,

and creative,--never penetrated with more unerring certainty to the

inmost spiritual essence of whatever it touched,--never forced words and

rhythm into more supple instruments of thought and feeling,--than when

it miracled into form the terror and pity and beauty of Lear.

Indeed, the coequal growth of his reason and imagination was owing to

the wider scope and increased energy of the great moving forces of his

being. It relates primarily to the heart rather than the head. It is the

immense fiery force behind his mental powers, kindling them into white

heat, and urging them to efforts almost preternatural,--it is this which

impels the daring thought beyond the limits of positive knowledge, and

prompts the starts of ecstasy in whose unexpected radiance nature and

human life are transfigured, and for an instant shine with celestial

light. In truth he is, relatively, more intellectual in his early than

in his later plays, for in his later plays his intellect is thoroughly

impassioned, and, though it has really grown in strength and

massiveness, it is so fused with imagination and emotion as to be less

independently prominent.

The sources of individuality lie below the intellect; and as Shakespeare

went deeper into the soul of man, he more and more represented the brain

as the organ and instrument of the heart, as the channel through which

sentiment, passion, and character found an intelligible outlet. His own

mind was singularly objective; that is, he saw things as they are in

themselves. The minds of his prominent characters are all subjective,

and see things as they are modified by the peculiarities of their

individual moods and emotions. The very objectivity of his own mind

enables him to assume the subjective conditions of less-emancipated

natures. Macbeth peoples the innocent air with menacing shapes,

projected from his own fiend-haunted imagination; but the same air is

"sweet and wholesome" to the poet who gave being to Macbeth. The

meridian of Shakespeare's power was reached when he created Othello,

Macbeth, and Lear, complex personalities, representing the conflict and

complication of the mightiest passions in colossal forms of human

character, and whose understandings and imaginations, whose perceptions

of nature and human life, and whose weightiest utterances of moral

wisdom, are all thoroughly subjective and individualized. The greatness

of these characters, as compared with his earlier creations, consists in

the greater intensity and amplitude of their natures, and the wider

variety of faculties and passions included in the strict unity of their

natures. Richard III., for example, is one of his earlier characters,

and though excellent of its kind, its excellence has been approached by

other dramatists, as, for instance, Massinger, in "Sir Giles Overreach."

But no other dramatist has been able to grasp and represent a character

similar in kind to Macbeth, and the reason is that Richard is

comparatively a simple conception, while Macbeth is a complex one.

There is unity and versatility in Richard; there is unity and variety in

Macbeth. Richard is capable of being developed with almost logical

accuracy; for though there is versatility in the play of his intellect,

there is little variety in the motives which direct his intellect. His

wickedness is not exhibited in the making. He is so completely and

gleefully a villain from the first, that he is not restrained from

convenient crime by any scruples and relentings. The vigor of his will

is due to his poverty of feeling and conscience. He is a brilliant and

efficient criminal because he is shorn of the noblest attributes of man.

Put, if you could, Macbeth's heart and imagination into him, and his

will would be smitten with impotence, and his wit be turned to wailing.

The intellect of Macbeth is richer and grander than Richard's, yet

Richard is relatively a more intellectual character; for the intellect

of Macbeth is rooted in his moral nature, and is secondary in our

thoughts to the contending motives and emotions it obeys and reveals. In

crime, as in virtue, what a man overcomes should enter into our estimate

of the power exhibited in what he does.

The question now comes up,--and we suppose it must be met, though we

should like to evade it,--How, amid the individualities that Shakespeare

has created, are we to detect the individuality of Shakespeare himself?

In answer it may be said, that, if we survey his dramas in the mass, we

find three degrees of unity;--first, the unity of the individual

characters; second, the unity of the separate plays in which they

appear; and third, the unity of Shakespeare's own nature, a nature which

deepened, expanded, and increased in might, but did not essentially

change, and which is felt as a potent presence throughout his works,

binding them together as the product of one mind. He did not go out of

himself to inform other natures, but he included these natures in

himself; and though he does not infuse his individuality into his

characters, he does infuse it into the general conceptions which the

characters illustrate. His opinions, purposes, theory of life, are to be

gathered, not from what his characters say and do, but from the results

of what they say and do; and in each play he so combines and disposes

the events and persons that the cumulative impression shall express his

own judgment, indicate his own design, and convey his own feeling. His

individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it

so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his

mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and

the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a

common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in

truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative action, like other

minds, within the limits of its personal sympathies, though these

sympathies in him were keener, quicker, and more general than in other

men of genius. He was a great-hearted, broad-brained person, but still a

person, and not what Coleridge calls him, an "omnipresent creativeness."

Whatever he could sympathize with, he could embody and vitally

represent; but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being

universal, and when he was indifferent or hostile, the dramatist was

partially suspended in the satirist and caricaturist, and oversight took

the place of insight. Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated

than his enlargements. We know what he has not done more surely than we

know what he has done; for if we attempt to follow his genius in any of

the numerous lines of direction along which it sweeps with such

victorious ease, we soon come to the end of our tether, and are confused

with a throng of thoughts and imaginations, which, as Emerson

exquisitely says, "sweetly torment us with invitations to their own

_inaccessible_ homes." But there were some directions which his genius

did not take,--not so much from lack of mental power as from lack of

disposition or from positive antipathy. Let us consider some of these.

And first, Shakespeare's religious instincts and sentiments were

comparatively weak, for they were not creative. He has exercised his

genius in the creation of no character in which religious sentiment or

religious passion is dominant. He could not, of course,--he, the poet of

feudalism,--overlook religion as an element of the social organization

of Europe, but he did not seize Christian ideas in their essence, or

look at the human soul in its direct relations with God. And just think

of the field of humanity closed to him! For sixteen hundred years,

remarkable men and women had appeared, representing all classes of

religious character, from the ecstasy of the saint to the gloom of the

fanatic; yet his intellectual curiosity was not enough excited to

explore and reproduce their experience. Do you say that the subject was

foreign to the purpose of an Elizabethan playwright? The answer is, that

Decker and Massinger attempted it, for a popular audience, in "The

Virgin Martyr"; and though the tragedy of "The Virgin Martyr" is a

huddled mass of beauties and deformities, its materials of incident and

characters, could Shakespeare have been attracted to them, might have

been organized into as great a drama as Othello. Again, Marlowe, in his

play of "Dr. Faustus," has imperfectly treated a subject which in

Shakespeare's hands would have been made into a tragedy sublimer than

Lear could he have thrown himself into it with equal earnestness.

Marlowe, from the fact that he was a positive atheist, and a brawling

one, had evidently at some time directed his whole heart and imagination

to the consideration of religious questions, and had resolutely faced

facts from which Shakespeare turned away.

Shakespeare, also, in common with the other dramatists of the time,

looked at the Puritans as objects of satire, laughing _at_ them instead

of gazing _into_ them. They were doubtless grotesque enough in external

appearance; but the poet of human nature should have penetrated through

the appearance to the substance, and recognized in them, not merely the

possibility of Cromwell, but of the ideal of character which Cromwell

but imperfectly represented. You may say that Shakespeare's nature was

too sunny and genial to admit the Puritan. It was not too sunny or

genial to admit Richards, and Iagos, and Gonerils, and "secret, black,

and midnight hags."

It may be doubted also if Shakespeare's affinities extended to those

numerous classes of human character that stand for the reforming and

philanthropic sentiments of humanity. We doubt if he was hopeful for the

race. He was too profoundly impressed with its disturbing passions to

have faith in its continuous progress. Though immensely greater than

Bacon, it may be questioned if he could thoroughly have appreciated

Bacon's intellectual character. He could have delineated him to

perfection in everything but in that peculiar philanthropy of the mind,

that spiritual benignity, that belief in man and confidence in his

future, which both atone and account for so many of Bacon's moral

defects. There is no character in his plays that covers the elements of

such a man as Hildebrand or Luther, or either of the two Williams of

Orange, or Hampden, or Howard, or Clarkson, or scores of other

representative men whom history celebrates. Though the broadest

individual nature which human nature has produced, human nature is

immensely broader than he.

It would be easy to quote passages from Shakespeare's works which would

seem to indicate that his genius was not limited in any of the

directions which have been pointed out; but these passages are thoughts

and observations, not men and women. Hamlet's soliloquy, and Portia's

address to Shylock, might be adduced as proofs that he comprehended the

religious element; but then who would take Hamlet or Portia as

representative of the religious character in any of its numerous

historical forms? There is a remark in one of his plays to this

effect:--

"It is an heretic that makes the fire,

Not she which burns in't."

This might be taken as a beautiful expression of Christian toleration,

and is certainly admirable as a general thought; but it indicates

Shakespeare's indifference to religious passions in indicating his

superiority to them. It would have been a much greater achievement of

genius to have passed into the mind and heart of the conscientious

burner of heretics, seized the essence of the bigot's character, and

embodied in one great ideal individual a class of men whom we now both

execrate and misconceive. If he could follow the dramatic process of his

genius for Sir Toby Belch, why could he not do it for St. Dominic?

Indeed, toleration, in the sense that Shakespeare has given to the word,

is not expressed in maxims directed against intolerance, but in the

exercise of charity towards intolerant men; and it is thus necessary to

indicate the limitations of his sympathy with his race, in order to

appreciate its real quality and extent. His unapproached greatness

consists not in including human nature, but in taking the point of view

of those large classes of human nature he did include. His sympathetic

insight was both serious and humorous; and he thus equally escaped the

intolerance of taste and the intolerance of intelligence. What we would

call the worst criminals and the most stupid fools were, as mirrored in

his mind, fairly dealt with; every opportunity was afforded them to

justify their right to exist; their words, thoughts, and acts were

viewed in relation to their circumstances and character, so that he made

them inwardly known, as well as outwardly perceived. The wonder of all

this would be increased, if we supposed, for the sake of illustration,

that the persons and events of all Shakespeare's plays were historical,

and that, instead of being represented by Shakespeare, they were

narrated by Macaulay. The result would be that the impression received

from the historian of every incident and every person would be

different, and would be wrong. The external facts might not be altered;

but the falsehood would proceed from the incapacity or indisposition of

the historian to pierce to the heart of the facts by sympathy and

imagination. There would be abundant information, abundant eloquence,

abundant invective against crime, abundant scorn of stupidity and folly,

perhaps much sagacious reflection and judicial scrutiny of evidence; but

the inward and essential truth would be wanting. What external statement

of the acts and probable motives of Macbeth and Othello would convey the

idea we have of them from being witnesses of the conflict of their

thoughts and passions? How wicked and shallow and feeble and foolish

would Hamlet appear, if represented, not in the light of Shakespeare's

imagination, but in the light of Macaulay's epigrams! How the historian

would "play the dazzling fence" of his rhetoric on the indecision of the

prince, his brutality to Ophelia, his cowardice, his impotence between

contending motives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he

sinks from view! The subject would be even a better one for him than

that of James II.; yet the very supposition of such a mode of treatment

makes us feel the pathos of the real Hamlet's injunction to the friend

who strives to be his companion in death:--

"Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

_To tell my story_."

If the historian would thus deal with the heroes, why, such "small deer"

as Bardolph and Master Slender would of course be puffed out of

existence with one hiss of lordly contempt. Yet Macaulay has a more

vivid historical imagination, more power of placing himself in the age

about which he writes, than historians like Hume and Hallam, whose

judgments of men are summaries of qualities, and imply no inwardness of

vision, no discerning of spirits. In the whole class, the point of view

is the historian's, and not the point of view of the persons the

historian describes. The curse which clings to celebrity is, that it

commonly enters history only to be puffed or lampooned.

The truth is, that most men, the intelligent and virtuous as well as the

ignorant and vicious, are intolerant of other individualities. They are

uncharitable by defect of sympathy and defect of insight. Society, even

the best, is apt to be made up of people who are engaged in the

agreeable occupation of despising each other; for one association for

mutual admiration there are twenty for mutual contempt; yet while

conversation is thus mostly made up of strictures on individuals, it

rarely evinces any just perception of individualities. James is

indignant or jeering at the absence of James in John, and John is

horror-stricken at the impudence of James in refusing to be John. Each

person feels himself to be misunderstood, though he never questions his

power to understand his neighbor. Egotism, vanity, prejudice, pride of

opinion, conceit of excellence, a mean delight in recognizing

inferiority in others, a meaner delight in refusing to recognize the

superiority of others, all the honest and all the base forms of

self-assertion, cloud and distort the vision when one mind directs its

glance at another. For one person who is mentally conscientious there

are thousands who are morally honest. The result is a vast massacre of

character, which would move the observer's compassion were it not that

the victims are also the culprits, and that pity at the spectacle of the

arrow quivering in the sufferer's breast is checked by the sight of the

bow bent in the sufferer's hands. This depreciation of others is the

most approved method of exalting ourselves. It educates us in

self-esteem, if not in knowledge. The savage conceives that the power of

the enemy he kills is added to his own. Shakespeare more justly

conceived that the power of the human being with whom he sympathized was

added to his own.

This toleration, without which an internal knowledge of other natures is

impossible, Shakespeare possessed beyond any other man recorded in

literature or history. It is a moral as well as mental trait, and

belongs to the highest class of virtues. It is a virtue which, if

generally exercised, would remove mutual hostility by enlightening

mutual ignorance. And in Shakespeare we have, for once, a man great

enough to be modest and charitable; who has the giant's power, but,

instead of using it like a giant, trampling on weaker creatures, prefers

to feel them in his arms rather than feel them under his feet; and whose

toleration of others is the exercise of humility, veracity, beneficence,

and justice, as well as the exercise of reason, imagination, and humor.

We shall never appreciate Shakespeare's genius until we recognize in him

the exercise of the most difficult virtues, as well as the exercise of

the most wide-reaching intelligence.

It is, of course, not so wonderful that he should take the point of view

of characters in themselves beautiful and noble, though even these might

appear very different under the glance of a less soul-searching eye. To

such aspects of life, however, all genius has a natural affinity. But

the marvel of his comprehensiveness is his mode of dealing with the

vulgar, the vicious, and the low,--with persons who are commonly spurned

as dolts and knaves. His serene benevolence did not pause at what are

called "deserving objects of charity," but extended to the undeserving,

who are, in truth, the proper objects of charity. If we compare him, in

this respect, with poets like Dante and Milton, in whom elevation is the

predominant characteristic, we shall find that they tolerate humanity

only in its exceptional examples of beauty and might. They are

aristocrats of intellect and conscience,--the noblest aristocracy, but

also the haughtiest and most exclusive. They can sympathize with great

energies, whether celestial or diabolic, but their attitude towards the

feeble and the low is apt to be that of indifference, or contempt.

Milton can do justice to the Devil, though not, like Shakespeare, to

"poor devils." But it may be doubted if the wise and good have the right

to cut the Providential bond which connects them with the foolish and

the bad, and set up an aristocratic humanity of their own, ten times

more supercilious than the aristocracy of blood. Divorce the loftiest

qualities from humility and geniality, and they quickly contract a

pharisaic taint; and if there is anything which makes the wretched more

wretched, it is the insolent condescension of patronizing

benevolence,--if there is anything which makes the vicious more vicious,

it is the "I-am-better-than-thou" expression on the face of conscious

virtue. Now Shakespeare had none of this pride of superiority, either in

its noble or ignoble form. Consider that, if his gigantic powers had

been directed by antipathies instead of sympathies, he would have left

few classes of human character untouched by his terrible scorn. Even if

his antipathies had been those of taste and morals, he would have done

so much to make men hate and misunderstand each other,--so much to

destroy the very sentiment of humanity,--that he would have earned the

distinction of being the greatest satirist and the worst man that ever

lived. But instead, how humanely he clings to the most unpromising forms

of human nature, insists on their right to speak for themselves as much

as if they were passionate Romeos and high-aspiring Buckinghams, and

does for them what he might have desired should be done for himself had

he been Dogberry, or Bottom, or Abhorson, or Bardolph, or any of the

rest! The low characters, the clowns and vagabonds, of Ben Jonson's

plays, excite only contempt or disgust. Shakespeare takes the same

materials as Ben, passes them through the medium of his imaginative

humor, and changes them into subjects of the most soul-enriching mirth.

Their actual prototypes would not be tolerated; but when his genius

shines on them, they "lie in light" before our humorous vision. It must

be admitted that in his explorations of the lower levels of human nature

he sometimes touches the mud deposits; still he never hisses or jeers at

the poor relations through Adam he there discovers, but magnanimously

gives them the wink of recognition!

This is one extreme of his genius, the poetic comprehension and

embodiment of the low. What was the other extreme? How high did he mount

in the ideal region, and what class of his characters represent his

loftiest flight? It is commonly asserted that his supernatural beings,

his ghosts, spectres, witches, fairies, and the like, exhibiting his

command of the dark side and the bright side, the terror and the grace,

of the supernatural world, indicate his rarest quality; for in these, it

is said, he went out of human nature itself, and created beings that

never existed. Wonderful as these are, we must recollect that in them he

worked on a basis of popular superstitions, on a mythology as definite

as that of Greece and Rome, and though he re-created instead of copying

his materials, though he Shakespearianized them, he followed no

different process of his genius in delineating Hecate and Titania than

in delineating Dame Quickly and Anne Page. All his characters, from the

rogue Autolycus to the heavenly Cordelia, are in a certain sense ideal;

but the question now relates to the rarity of the elements, and the

height of the mood, and not merely to the action of his mind; and we

think that the characters technically called supernatural which appear

in his works are much nearer the earth than others which, though they

lack the name, have more of the spiritual quality of the thing. The

highest supernatural is to be found in the purest, highest, most

beautiful souls.

Did it never strike you in reading "The Tempest," that Ariel is not so

supernatural as Miranda? We may be sure that Ferdinand so thought, in

that rapture of wonder when her soul first shone on him through her

innocent eyes; and afterwards when he asks,

"I do beseech you

(Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers)

What is your name?"

And doubtless there was a more marvellous melody in her voice than in

the mysterious magical music

"That crept by him upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and his passion

With its sweet air."

Shakespeare, indeed, in his transcendently beautiful embodiments of

feminine excellence, the most exquisite creations in literature, passed

into a region of sentiment and thought, of ideals and of ideas,

altogether higher and more supernatural than that region in which he

shaped his delicate Ariels and his fairy Titanias. The question has been

raised whether sex extends to soul. However this may be decided, here is

a soul, with its records in literature, who is at once the manliest of

men, and the most womanly of women; who can not only recognize the

feminine element in existing individuals, but discern the idea, the

pattern, the radiant genius of womanhood itself, as it hovers, unseen to

other eyes, over the living representatives of the sex. Literature

boasts many eminent female poets and novelists; but not one has ever

approached Shakespeare in the purity, the sweetness, the refinement, the

elevation, of his perceptions of feminine character,--much less

approached him in the power of embodying his perceptions in persons.

These characters are so thoroughly domesticated on the earth, that we

are tempted to forget the heaven of invention from which he brought

them. The most beautiful of spirits, they are the most tender of

daughters, lovers, and wives. They are "airy shapes," but they "syllable

men's names." Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia, Viola, Perdita, Miranda,

Desdemona, Hermione, Portia, Isabella, Imogen, Cordelia,--if their names

do not call up their natures, the most elaborate analysis of criticism

wilt be of no avail. Do you say that these women are slightly idealized

portraits of actual women? Was Cordelia, for example, simply a good,

affectionate daughter of a foolish old king? To Shakespeare, himself,

she evidently partook of divineness; and he hints of the still ecstasy

of contemplation in which her nature first rose upon his imagination,

when, speaking through the lips of a witness of her tears, he hallows

them as they fall:--

"She shook the holy water from her heavenly eyes."

And these Shakespearian women, though all radiations from one great

ideal of womanhood, are at the same time intensely individualized. Each

has a separate soul, and the processes of intellect as well as emotion

are different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with the faculty,

and is steeped in the atmosphere, of imagination; but who could mistake

the imagination of Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen?--the

loitering, lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating whatever

it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency, the flash and the

bolt, of the other? Imogen is perhaps the most completely expressed of

Shakespeare's women; for in her every faculty and affection is fused

with imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is combined with

vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind darts in an instant to the

ultimate of everything. After she has parted with her husband, she does

not merely say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged, and

in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up, she goes up; she would

have charged him, she says,

"At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,

T'encounter me with orisons, for then

_I am in heaven for him_."

When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possible object of his

sensual whim is at once consumed in the fire that leaps from her

impassioned lips,--

"Some jay of Italy,

Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him."

Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive action of

Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, "smothers her with

painting." Now Imogen's wrath first reduces the light woman to the most

contemptible of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and

then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, annihilates her

very being with the swift thought that the paint on her cheeks is her

mother,--that she is nothing but the mere creation of painting, a

phantom born of a color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to

show that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women are as

individual as their dispositions.

And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul! Within the immense

space which stretches between Dogberry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or

Cordelia, lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever exhibited such

philosophic comprehensiveness, but philosophic comprehensiveness is

often displayed apart from creative comprehensiveness, and along the

whole vast line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations that

Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were vital, his

insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in forms. And now was he proud

of his transcendent superiorities? Did he think that he had exhausted

all that can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of the

soul? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undiscovered and undiscerned

regions of existence was never felt with more reverent humility than by

this discoverer, who had seen in rapturous vision so many new worlds

open on his view. In the play which perhaps best indicates the ecstatic

action of his mind, and which is alive in every part with that fiery

sense of unlimited power which the mood of ecstasy gives,--in the play

of "Antony and Cleopatra," he has put into the mouth of the Soothsayer

what seems to have been his own modest judgment of the extent of his

glance into the universe of matter and mind:--

"In Nature's infinite book of secrecy

A little I can read!"

LONGFELLOW'S TRANSLATION OF DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA.

In the North American Review for March, 1809, we read of Cary's Dante:

"This we can pronounce, with confidence, to be the most literal

translation in poetry in our language."

"As to Cary," writes Prescott in 1824, "I think Dante would have given

him a place in his ninth heaven, if he could have foreseen his

translation. It is most astonishing, giving not only the literal

corresponding phrase, but the spirit of the original, the true Dantesque

manner. It should be cited as an evidence of the compactness, the

pliability, the sweetness of the English tongue."

If we turn to English scholars, we shall find them holding the same

language, and equally ready to assure you that you may confidently

accept Cary's version as a faithful transcript of the spirit and letter

of the original. And this was the theory of translation throughout

almost the first half of the present century. Cary's position in 1839

was higher even than it was in 1824. With many other claims to respect,

he was still best known as the translator of Dante.

In 1839 Mr. Longfellow published five passages from the _Purgatorio_,

translated with a rigorous adhesion to the words and idioms of the

original. Coming out in connection with translations from the Spanish

and German, and with original pieces which immediately took their place

among the favorite poems of every household, they could not be expected

to attract general attention. But scholars read them with avidity, for

they found in them the first successful solution of one of the great

problems of literature,--Can poetry pass from one language into another

without losing its distinctive characteristics of form and expression?

Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, had answered no for Greek and Latin,

Coleridge for German, Fairfax and Rose and Cary for Italian. But if Mr.

Longfellow could translate the whole of the _Divina Commedia_ as he had

translated these five passages, great as some of these names were, it

was evident that the lovers of poetry would call for new translations of

all the great poets. This he has now done. The whole poem is before us,

with its fourteen thousand two hundred and seventy-eight lines, the

English answering line for line and word for word to the original

Italian. We purpose to show, by a careful comparison of test-passages

with corresponding passages of Cary, what the American poet has done for

the true theory of translation.

It is evident that, while both translators have nominally the same

object in view, they follow different paths in their endeavors to reach

it; or, in other words, that they come to their task with very different

theories of translation, and very different ideas of the true meaning of

faithful rendering. Translation, according to Mr. Cary, consists in

rendering the author's idea without a strict adherence to the author's

words. According to Mr. Longfellow, the author's words form a necessary

accompaniment of his idea, and must, wherever the idioms of the two

languages admit of it, be rendered by their exact equivalents. The

following passage, from the twenty-eighth canto of the _Purgatorio_,

will illustrate our meaning:--

"In questa altezza che tutta è disciolta

Nell'aer vivo, tal moto percuote,

E fa sonar la selva perch' è folta."

Literally,

In this height which is all detached

In the living air, such motion strikes,

And makes the wood resound because it is thick.

Such are the words of Dante line by line. Let us now see how Cary

renders them:--

"Upon the summit, which on every side

To visitation of the impassive air

Is open, doth that motion strike, and makes

Beneath its sway the umbrageous wood resound."

The fundamental idea of this passage is the explanation of the sound of

the forest, and this idea Cary has preserved. But has he preserved it in

its force and simplicity and Dantesque directness? We will not dwell

upon the rendering of _altezza_ by _summit_, although a little more care

would have preserved the exact word of the original. But we may with

good reason object to the expansion of Dante's three lines into four. We

may with equal reason object to

"which on every side

To visitation of the impassive air

Is open,"

as a correct rendering of

"che tutta è disciolta

Nell'aer vivo,"--

which is all detached

In the living air.

"To visitation of the impassive air,"

is a sonorous verse; but it is not Dante's verse, unless _all detached_

means _on every side is open to visitation_, and _impassive air_ means

_living air_. _Beneath its sway_, also, is not Dante's; nor can we

accept _umbrageous wood_, with its unmeaning epithet, for _the wood

because it is thick_, an explanation of the phenomenon which had excited

Dante's wonder.

Here, then, we have Cary's theory, the preservation of the fundamental

idea, but the free introduction of such accessory ideas as convenience

may suggest, whether in the form of epithet or of paraphrase.

Mr. Longfellow's translation of this passage may also be accepted as the

exposition of his theory:--

"Upon this height that all is disengaged

In living ether, doth this motion strike,

And make the forest sound, for it is dense."

We have here the three lines of the original, and in the order of the

original; we have the exact words of the original, _disciolta_ meaning

_disengaged_ as well as _detached_, and therefore the ideas of the

original without modification or change. The passage is not a remarkable

one in form, although a very important one in the description of which

it forms a part. The sonorous second line of Mr. Cary's version is

singularly false to the movement, as well as to the thought, of the

original. Mr. Longfellow's lines have the metric character of Dante's

precise and direct description.

The next triplet brings out the difference between the two theories even

more distinctly:--

"E la percossa pianta tanto puote

Che della sua virtute l'aura impregna,

E quella poi girando intorno scuote."

And the stricken plant has so much power

That with its virtue it impregnates the air,

And that then revolving shakes around.

Thus far Dante.

"And in the shaken plant such power resides,

That it impregnates with its efficacy

The voyaging breeze, upon whose subtle plume

_That_, wafted, flies abroad."

Thus far Cary.

Cary's first line is a tolerably near approach to the original, although

a distinction might be made between the force of _power resides in_, and

_power possessed by_. The second line falls short of the conciseness of

the original by transposing the object of _impregnates_ into the third.

This, however, though a blemish, might also be passed over. But what

shall we say to the expansion of _aura_ into a full line, and that line

so Elizabethan and un-Dantesque as

"The voyaging breeze upon whose subtle plume"?

In this, too, Mr. Cary is faithful to his theory. Mr. Longfellow is

equally faithful to his:--

"And so much power the stricken plant possesses,

That with its virtue it impregns the air,

And this, revolving, scatters it around."

We have seen how Cary's theory permits the insertion of a new line, or,

more correctly speaking, the expansion of a single word into a full

line. But it admits also of the opposite extreme,--the suppression of an

entire line.

"Ch'io vidi, e anche udi'parlar lo rostro,

E sonar nella voce ed _io_ e _mio_,

Quand'era nel concetto _noi_ e _nostro_."

For I saw and also heard speak the beak,

And sound in its voice and _I_ and _my_,

When it was in the conception _we_ and _our_.

_Paradiso_, XIX. 10.

There is doubtless something quaint and peculiar in these lines, but it

is the quaintness and peculiarity of Dante. The _I_ and _my_, the _we_

and _our_, are traits of that direct and positive mode of expression

which is one of the distinctive characteristics of his style. Do we find

it in Cary?

"For I beheld and heard

The beak discourse; and what intention formed

Of many, singly as of one express."

Do we not find it in Longfellow?

"For speak I saw, and likewise heard, the beak,

And utter with its voice both _I_ and _My_,

When in conception it was _We_ and _Our_."

It is not surprising that the two translators, starting with theories

essentially so different, should have produced such different results.

Which of these results is most in harmony with the legitimate object of

translation can hardly admit of a doubt. For the object of translation

is to convey an accurate idea of the original, or, in other words, to

render the words and idioms of the language from which the translation

is made by their exact equivalents in the language into which it is

made. The translator is bound by the words of the original. He is bound,

so far as the difference between languages admits of it, by the idioms

of the original. And as the effect of words and idioms depends in a

great measure upon the skill with which they are arranged, he is bound

also by the rhythm of the original. If you would copy Raphael, you must

not give him the coloring of Titian. The calm dignity of the "School of

Athens" conveys a very imperfect idea of the sublime energy of the

sibyls and prophets of the Sistine Chapel.

But can this exactitude be achieved without forcing language into such

uncongenial forms as to produce an artificial effect, painfully

reminding you, at every step, of the labor it cost? And here we come to

the question of fact; for if Mr. Longfellow has succeeded, the answer is

evident. We purpose, therefore, to take a few test-passages, and,

placing the two translations side by side with the original, give our

readers an opportunity of making the comparison for themselves.

First, however, let us remind the reader that, if it were possible to

convey an accurate idea of Dante's style by a single word, that word

would be _power_. Whatever he undertakes to say, he says in the form

best suited to convey his thought to the reader's mind as it existed in

his own mind. If it be a metaphysical idea, he finds words for it which

give it the distinctness and reality of a physical substance. If it be a

landscape, he brings it before you, either in outline or in detail,

either by form or by color, as the occasion requires, but always with

equal force. That landscape of his ideal world ever after takes its

place in your memory by the side of the landscapes of your real world.

Even the sounds which he has described linger in the ear as the types of

harshness, or loudness, or sweetness, instantly coming back to you

whenever you listen to the roaring of the sea, or the howling of the

wind, or the carol of birds. He calls things by their names, never

shrinking from a homely phrase where the occasion demands it, nor

substituting circumlocution for direct expression. Words with him seem

to be things, real and tangible; not hovering like shadows over an idea,

but standing out in the clear light, bold and firm, as the distinct

representatives of an idea. In his verse every word has its appropriate

place, and something to do in that place which no other word could do

there. Change it, and you feel at once that something has been lost.

Next to power, infinite variety is the characteristic of Dante's style,

as it is of his invention. With a stronger individuality than any poet

of any age or country, there is not a trace of mannerism in all his

poem. The stern, the tender, the grand, simple exposition, fierce

satire, and passionate appeal have each their appropriate words and

their appropriate cadence. This Cary did not perceive, and has told the

stories of Francesca and of Ugolino with the same Miltonian modulation.

Longfellow, by keeping his original constantly before him, has both seen

and reproduced it.

We begin our quotations with the celebrated inscription over the gate of

hell, and the entrance of the two poets into "the secret things." The

reader will remember that the last three triplets contain a remarkable

example of the correspondence of sound with sense.

"Per me si va nella città dolente;

Per me si va nell'eterno dolore;

Per me si va tra la perduta gente;

Giustizia mosse'l mio alto fattore;

Fecemi la divina potestate,

La somma sapienza e'l primo amore.

Dinanzi a me non fur cose create

Se non eterne, ed io eterno duro:

Lasciate ogni speranza voi che'ntrate.

Queste parole di colore oscuro

Vid'io scritte al sommo d'una porta;

Perch'io: maestro, il senso lor m'è duro.

Ed egli a me, come persona accorta:

Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto,

Ogni viltà convien che qui sia morta.

Noi sem venuti al luogo ov'io t'ho detto

Che vederai le genti dolorose

Ch' hanno perduto il ben dello'ntelletto.

E poichè la sua mano alla mia pose

Con lieto volto, ond'io mi confortai,

Mi mise dentro alle secrete cose.

Quivi sospiri, pianti ed alti guai

Risonavan per l'aer senza stelle,

Perch'io al cominciar ne lagrimai.

Diverse lingue, orribili favelle,

Parole di dolore, accenti d'ira,

Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle,

Facevano un tumulto il qual s'aggira

Sempre'n quell'aria senza tempo tinta,

Come la rena quando'l turbo spira."

_Inferno_, III. 1-30.

"'Through me the way is to the city dolent;

Through me the way is to eternal dole;

Through me the way among the people lost.

Justice incited my sublime Creator;

Created me divine Omnipotence,

The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.

Before me there were no created things,

Only eterne, and I eternal last.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!'

These words in sombre color I beheld

Written upon the summit of a gate;

Whence I: 'Their sense is, Master, hard to me!'

And he to me, as one experienced:

'Here all suspicion needs must be abandoned,

All cowardice must needs be here extinct.

We to the place have come, where I have told thee

Thou shalt behold the people dolorous

Who have foregone the good of intellect.'

And after he had laid his hand on mine

With joyful mien, whence I was comforted,

He led me in among the secret things.

There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud

Resounded through the air without a star,

Whence I, at the beginning, wept thereat.

Languages diverse, horrible dialects,

Accents of anger, words of agony,

And voices high and hoarse, with sound of hands,

Made up a tumult that goes whirling on

Forever in that air forever black,

Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes."--_Longfellow_.

"'Through me you pass into the city of woe:

Through me you pass into eternal pain:

Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric moved:

To rear me was the task of power divine,

Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things

Eternal, and eternal I endure.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.'

Such characters, in color dim, I marked

Over a portal's lofty arch inscribed.

Whereat I thus: 'Master, these words import

Hard meaning.' He as one prepared replied:

'Here thou must all distrust behind thee leave;

Here be vile fear extinguished. We are come

Where I have told thee we shall see the souls

To misery doomed, who intellectual good

Have lost.' And when his hand he had stretched forth

To mine, with pleasant looks, whence I was cheered.

Into that secret place he led me on.

Here sighs, with lamentations and loud moans,

Resounded through the air pierced by no star,

That e'en I wept at entering. Various tongues,

Horrible languages, outcries of woe,

Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,

With hands together smote that swelled the sounds,

Made up a tumult, that forever whirls

Round through that air with solid darkness stained,

Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies."

_Cary._

The following, though less remarkable for its poetry than many others

which we might select, is very difficult for the translator. We cite it

as an illustration of the boldness with which Mr. Longfellow meets

difficulties.

"E quale è quei che suo dannaggio sogna,

Che sognando disidera sognare,

Si che quel ch'è, come non fosse, agogna;

Tal mi fec'io non potendo parlare:

Che disiava scusarmi e scusava

Me tuttavia e not mi credea fare

Maggior difetto men vergogna lava,

Disse'l maestro, che'l tuo non è stato:

Però d'ogni tristizia ti disgrava;

E fa ragion ch'io ti sempre allato,

Se più avvien che fortuna t'accoglia

Dove sien genti in simigliante piato:

Che voler ciò udire è bassa voglia."

_Inferno_, XXX. 136-148.

"And as he is who dreams of his own harm.

Who dreaming wishes it may be a dream,

So that he craves what is, as if it were not;

Such I became, not having power to speak,

For to excuse myself I wished, and still

Excused myself, and did not think I did it.

'Less shame doth wash away a greater fault,'

The Master said, 'than this of thine has been;

Therefore thyself disburden of all sadness,

And make account that I am aye beside thee,

If e'er it come to pass that fortune bring thee

Where there are people in a like dispute;

For a base wish it is to wish to hear it.'"

_Longfellow._

"As a man that dreams of harm

Befallen him, dreaming wishes it a dream,

And that which is, desires as if it were not;

Such then was I, who, wanting power to speak,

Wished to excuse myself, and all the while

Excused me, though unweeting that I did.

'More grievous fault than thine has been, less shame,'

My master cried, 'might expiate. Therefore cast

All sorrow from thy soul; and if again

Chance bring thee where like conference is held,

Think I am ever at thy side. To hear

Such wrangling is a joy for vulgar minds.'"

_Cary._

The following passage from the Purgatorio is not only strikingly

difficult, but strikingly beautiful.

"Ed un di lor, non questi che parlava,

Si torse sotto'l peso che lo 'mpaccia,

E videmi e conobbemi, e chiamava

Tenendo gli occhi con fatica fisi

A me che tutto chin con loro andava.

Oh, diss'io lui, non se'tu Oderisi,

L'onor d'Agobbio e l'onor di quell'arte

Ch'_alluminare_ è chiamata in Parisi?

Frate, diss' egli, più ridon le carte

Che pennelleggia Franco Bolognese:

L'onore è tutto or suo, e mio in parte.

Ben non sare'io stato sì cortese

Mentre ch'io vissi, per lo gran disio

Dell'eccellenza ove mio core intese.

Di tal superbia qui si paga il fio:

Ed ancor non sarei qui, se non fosse

Che, possendo peccar, mi volsi a Dio.

Oh vana gloria dell'umane posse,

Com' poco verde in su la cima dura

Se non è giunta dall'etadi grosse!

Credette Cimabue nella pintura

Tenor lo campo; ed ora ha Giotto il grido,

Sì che la fama di colui s' oscura.

Così ha tolto l'uno all'altro Guido

La gloria della lingua; e forse è nato

Chi l'uno e l'altro caccerà di nido.

Non è il mondan romore altro ch' un fiato

Di vento ch' or vien quinci ed or vien quindi,

E muta nome perchè muta lato.

Che fama avrai tu più se vecchia scindi

Da te la carne, che se fossi morto

Innanzi che lasciassi il pappo e'l dindi,

Pria che passin mill'anni? ch'è più corto

Spazio all' eterno ch'un muover di ciglia

Al cerchio che più tardi in cielo è torto.

Colui che del cammin sì poco piglia

Diranzi a te, Toscana sonò tutta,

Ed ora appena in Siena sen pispiglia,

Ond'era sire, quando fu distrutta

La rabbia Fiorentina, che superba

Fu a quel tempo sì com'ora è putta.

La vostra nominanza è color d'erba

Che viene e va, e quei la discolora

Per cui ell'esce della terra acerba."

_Purgatorio_, XI. 74-117.

"And one of them, not this one who was speaking,

Twisted himself beneath the weight that cramps him,

And looked at me, and knew me, and called out,

Keeping his eyes laboriously fixed

On me, who all bowed down was going with them.

'O,' asked I him, 'art thou not Oderisi,

Agobbio's honor, and honor of that art

Which is in Paris called illuminating?'

'Brother,' said he, 'more laughing are the leaves

Touched by the brush of Franco Bolognese;

All his the honor now, and mine in part.

In sooth I had not been so courteous

While I was living, for the great desire

Of excellence, on which my heart was bent.

Here of such pride is payed the forfeiture:

And yet I should not be here, were it not

That, having power to sin, I turned to God.

O thou vain glory of the human powers,

How little green upon thy summit lingers,

If 't be not followed by an age of grossness!

In painting Cimabue thought that he

Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry,

So that the other's fame is growing dim.

So has one Guido from the other taken

The glory of our tongue, and he perchance

Is born, who from the nest shall chase them both.

Naught is this mundane rumor but a breath

Of wind, that comes now this way and now that,

And changes name, because it changes side.

What fame shalt thou have more, if old peel off

From thee thy flesh, than if thou hadst been dead

Before thou left the _pappo_ and the _dindi_,

Ere pass a thousand years? which is a shorter

Space to the eterne, than twinkling of an eye

Unto the circle that in heaven wheels slowest.

With him, who takes so little of the road

In front of me, all Tuscany resounded;

And now he scarce is lisped of in Siena,

Where he was lord, what time was overthrown

The Florentine delirium, that superb

Was at that day as now 'tis prostitute.

Your reputation is the color of grass

Which comes and goes, and that discolors it

By which it issues green from out the earth.'"

_Longfellow._

"Listening I bent my visage down: and one

(Not he who spake) twisted beneath the weight

That urged him, saw me, knew me straight, and called;

Holding his eyes with difficulty fixed

Intent upon me, stooping as I went

Companion of their way. 'Oh!' I exclaimed,

'Art thou not Oderigi? art not thou

Agobbio's glory, glory of that art

Which they of Paris call the limner's skill?'

'Brother!' said he, 'with tints that gayer smile,

Bolognian Franco's pencil lines the leaves.

His all the honor now; my light obscured.

In truth, I had not been thus courteous to him

The while I lived, through eagerness of zeal

For that pre-eminence my heart was bent on.

Here, of such pride, the forfeiture is paid.

Nor were I even here, if, able still

To sin, I had not turned me unto God.

O powers of man! how vain your glory, nipped

E'en in its height of verdure, if an age

Less bright succeed not. Cimabue thought

To lord it over painting's field; and now

The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.

Thus hath one Guido from the other snatched

The lettered prize; and he, perhaps, is born,

Who shall drive either from their nest. The noise

Of worldly fame is but a blast of wind,

That blows from diverse points, and shifts its name,

Shifting the point it blows from. Shalt thou more

Live in the mouths of mankind, if thy flesh

Part shrivelled from thee, than if thou hadst died

Before the coral and the pap were left,

Or e'er some thousand years have passed? and that

Is, to eternity compared, a space

Briefer than is the twinkling of an eye

To the heaven's slowest orb. He there, who treads

So leisurely before me, far and wide

Through Tuscany resounded once; and now

Is in Sienna scarce with whispers named:

There was he sovereign, when destruction caught

The maddening rage of Florence, in that day

Proud as she now is loathsome. Your renown

Is as the herb, whose hue doth come and go;

And his might withers it, by whom it sprang

Crude from the lap of earth.'"--_Cary._

For much the same reason as that already stated, we give the following

beautiful passage, a touching story in itself, but how deeply touching

in the energetic directness and simplicity of Dante's verse!

"Io mossi i piè del luogo dov'io stava

Per avvisar da presso un'altra storia

Che diretro a Micol mi biancheggiava.

Quivi era storiata l'alta gloria

Del roman prence lo cui gran valore

Mosse Gregorio alla sua gran vittoria:

I' dico di Trajano imperadore;

Ed una vedovella gli era al freno

Di lagrime atteggiata e di dolore.

Dintorno a lui parea calcato e pieno

Di cavalieri, e l'aguglie nell'oro

Sovr' essi in vista al vento si movieno.

La miserella intra tutti costoro

Parea dicer: signor, fammi vendetta

Del mio figliuol ch'è morto, ond'io m'accoro;

Ed egli a lei rispondere: ora aspetta

Tanto ch'io torni; e quella: signor mio

(Come persona in cui dolor s'affretta)

Se tu non torni? ed ei: chi fia dov'io,

La ti farà; ed ella: l'altrui bene

A te che fia, se'l tuo metti in oblio?

Ond'elli: or ti conforta, che conviene

Ch'io solva il mio dovere anzi ch'io muova:

Giustizia vuole e pietà mi ritiene.

Colui che mai non vide cosa nuova

Produsse esto visibile parlare,

Novello a noi perchè qui non si truova."

_Purgatorio_, X. 70-96.

"I moved my feet from where I had been standing,

To examine near at hand another story,

Which after Michal glimmered white upon me.

There the high glory of the Roman Prince

Was chronicled, whose great beneficence

Moved Gregory to his great victory;

'Tis of the Emperor Trajan I am speaking;

And a poor widow at his bridle stood,

In attitude of weeping and of grief.

Around about him seemed it thronged and full

Of cavaliers, and the eagles in the gold

Above them visibly in the wind were moving.

The wretched woman in the midst of these

Seemed to be saying: 'Give me vengeance, Lord,

For my dead son, for whom my heart is breaking.'

And he to answer her: 'Now wait until

I shall return.' And she: 'My Lord,' like one

In whom grief is impatient, 'shouldst thou not

Return?' And he: 'Who shall be where I am

Will give it thee.' And she: 'Good deed of others

What boots it thee, if thou neglect thine own?

Whence he: 'Now comfort thee, for it behoves me

That I discharge my duty ere I move;

Justice so wills, and pity doth retain me.'

He who on no new thing has ever looked

Was the creator of this visible language,

Novel to us, for here it is not found."

_Longfellow._

"To behold the tablet next,

Which, at the back of Michol, whitely shone,

I moved me. There was storied on the rock

The exalted glory of the Roman prince,

Whose mighty worth moved Gregory to earn

His mighty conquest, Trajan the Emperor.

A widow at his bridle stood, attired

In tears and mourning. Round about them trooped

Full throng of knights; and overhead in gold

The eagles floated, struggling with the wind.

The wretch appeared amid all these to say:

'Grant vengeance, Sire! for, woe beshrew this heart,

My son is murdered.' He replying seemed:

'Wait now till I return.' And she, as one

Made hasty by her grief: 'O Sire! if thou

Dost not return?'--'Where I am, who then is,

May right thee.'--'What to thee is other's good,

If thou neglect thy own?'--'Now comfort thee,'

At length he answers. 'It beseemeth well

My duty be performed, ere I move hence:

So justice wills; and pity bids me stay.'

He, whose ken nothing new surveys, produced

That visible speaking, new to us and strange,

The like not found on earth."--_Cary._

How different is the character of the following description, which fills

the ear with its grand and varied harmony, as it fills the mind with a

rapid succession of pictures!

"Io m'era mosso e seguia volentieri

Del mio maestro i passi, ed amendue

Già mostravam com'eravam leggieri,

Quando mi disse: Volgi gli occhi in giue;

Buon ti sarà per alleggiar la via

Veder lo letto delle piante tue.

Come, perchè di lor memoria fia,

Sovr'a'sepolti le tombe terragne

Portan segnato quel ch'elli eran pria;

Onde li molte volte si ripiagne

Per la puntura della rimembranza

Che solo a'pii dà delle calcagne:

Si vid'io li, ma di miglior sembianza,

Secondo l'artificio, figurato

Quanto per via di fuor del monte avanza.

Vedea colui che fu nobil creato

Più d'altra creatura giù dal cielo

Folgoreggiando scendere da un lato.

Vedeva Briareo fitto dal teio

Celestial giacer dall'altra parte,

Grave alia terra per lo mortal gelo

Vedea Timbreo, vedea Pallade e Marte

Armati ancora intorno al padre loro

Mirar le membra de'giganti sparte.

Vedea Nembrotto appiè del gran lavoro

Quasi smarrito riguardar le genti

Che'n Sennaar con lui insieme foro.

O Niobe, con che occhi dolenti

Vedev'io te segnata in su la strada

Tra sette e sette tuoi figliuoli spenti!

O Saul, come'n su la propria spada

Quivi parevi morto in Gelboè

Che poi non sentì pioggia nè rugiada!

O folle Aragne, si vedea io te

Già mezza ragna, trista in su gli stracci

Dell opera che mal per te si fe'.

O Roboam, già non par che minnacci

Quivi il tuo segno, ma pien di spavento

Nel porta un carro prima ch' altri'l cacci.

Mostrava ancora il duro pavimento

Come Almeone a sua madre fe'caro

Parer lo sventurato adornamento.

Mostrava come i figli si gittaro

Sovra Sennacherib dentro dal tempio,

E come morto lui quivi lasciaro.

Mostrava la ruina e'l crudo scempio

Che fe'Tamiri quando disse a Ciro

Sangue sitisti, ed io di sangue t'empio.

Mostrava come in rotta si fuggiro

Gli Assiri poi che fu morto Oloferne,

Ed anche le reliquie del martiro.

Vedeva Troja in cenere e in caverne:

O Ilion, come te basso e vile

Mostrava il segno che lì si discerne!

Qual di pennel fu maestro o di stile,

Che ritraesse l'ombre e gli atti ch'ivi

Mirar farieno uno'ngegno sottile?

Morti li morti, e i vivi parean vivi.

Non vide me'di me chi vide'l vero,

Quant'io calcai fin che chinato givi."

_Purgatorio_, XII. 10-69

"I had moved on, and followed willingly

The footsteps of my Master, and we both

Already showed how light of foot we were,

When unto me he said: 'Cast down thine eyes;

'Twere well for thee, to alleviate the way,

To look upon the bed beneath thy feet.'

As, that some memory may exist of them,

Above the buried dead their tombs in earth

Bear sculptured on them what they were before;

Whence often there we weep for them afresh,

From pricking of remembrance, which alone

To the compassionate doth set its spur;

So saw I there, but of a better semblance

In point of artifice, with figures covered

Whate'er as pathway from the mount projects.

I saw that one who was created noble

More than all other creatures, down from heaven

Flaming with lightnings fall upon one side.

I saw Briareus smitten by the dart

Celestial, lying on the other side,

Heavy upon the earth by mortal frost.

I saw Thymbræus, Pallas saw, and Mars,

Still clad in armor round about their father,

Gaze at the scattered members of the giants.

I saw, at foot of his great labor, Nimrod,

As if bewildered, looking at the people

Who had been proud with him in Sennaar.

O Niobe! with what afflicted eyes

Thee I beheld upon the pathway traced,

Between thy seven and seven children slain!

O Saul! how fallen upon thy proper sword

Didst thou appear there lifeless in Gilboa,

That felt thereafter neither rain nor dew!

O mad Arachne! so I thee beheld

E'en then half spider, sad upon the shreds

Of fabric wrought in evil hour for thee!

O Rehoboam! no more seems to threaten

Thine image there; but full of consternation

A chariot bears it off, when none pursues!

Displayed moreo'er the adamantine pavement

How unto his own mother made Alcmæon

Costly appear the luckless ornament;

Displayed how his own sons did throw themselves

Upon Sennacherib within the temple,

And how, he being dead, they left him there;

Displayed the ruin and the cruel carnage

That Tomyris wrought, when she to Cyrus said,

'Blood didst thou thirst for, and with blood I glut thee!'

Displayed how routed fled the Assyrians

After that Holofernes had been slain,

And likewise the remainder of that slaughter.

I saw there Troy in ashes and in caverns;

O Ilion! thee, how abject and debased,

Displayed the image that is there discerned!

Who e'er of pencil master was or stile,

That could portray the shades and traits which there

Would cause each subtile genius to admire?

Dead seemed the dead, the living seemed alive;

Better than I saw not who saw the truth,

All that I trod upon while bowed I went."

_Longfellow._