SOME DIVERSIONS

OF

A MAN OF LETTERS

BY

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1920

First published October 1919
New Impressions November 1919; February 1920

OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE

Northern Studies. 1879.

Life of Gray. 1882.

Seventeenth-Century Studies. 1883.

Life of Congreve. 1888.

A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1889.

Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. 1890.

Gossip in a Library. 1891.

The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance. 1892.

Questions at Issue. 1893.

Critical Kit-Kats. 1896.

A Short History of Modern English Literature. 1897.

Life and Letters of John Donne. 1899.

Hypolympia. 1901.

Life of Jeremy Taylor. 1904.

French Profiles. 1904.

Life of Sir Thomas Browne. 1905.

Father and Son. 1907.

Life of Ibsen. 1908.

Two Visits to Denmark. 1911.

Collected Poems. 1911.

Portraits and Sketches. 1912.

Inter Arma. 1916.

Three French Moralists. 1918.

TO

EVAN CHARTERIS

CONTENTS

PREFACE:

ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE

When Voltaire sat down to write a book on Epic Poetry, he dedicated his first chapter to "Differences of Taste in Nations." A critic of to-day might well find it necessary, on the threshold of a general inquiry, to expatiate on "Differences of Taste in Generations." Changes of standard in the arts are always taking place, but it is only with advancing years, perhaps, that we begin to be embarrassed by the recurrence of them. In early youth we fight for the new forms of art, for the new æsthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess. But the years glide on, and, behold! one morning, we wake up to find our own predilections treated with contempt, and the objects of our own idolatry consigned to the waste-paper basket. Then the matter becomes serious, and we must either go on struggling for a cause inevitably lost, or we must give up the whole matter in indifference. This week I read, over the signature of a very clever and very popular literary character of our day, the remark that Wordsworth's was "a genteel mind of the third rank." I put down the newspaper in which this airy dictum was printed, and, for the first time, I was glad that poor Mr. Matthew Arnold was no longer with us. But, of course, the evolutions of taste must go on, whether they hurt the living and the dead, or no.

Is there, then, no such thing as a permanent element of poetic beauty? The curious fact is that leading critics in each successive generation are united in believing that there is, and that the reigning favourite conforms to it. The life of a reputation is like the life of a plant, and seems, in these days, to be like the life of an annual. We watch the seed, admiration for Wordsworth, planted about 1795, shoot obscurely from the ground, and gradually clothe itself with leaves till about 1840; then it bursts into blossom of rapturous praise, and about 1870 is hung with clusters of the fruit of "permanent" appreciation. In 1919, little more than a century from its first evolution in obscurity, it recedes again in the raggedness of obloquy, and cumbers the earth, as dim old "genteel" Wordsworth, whom we are assured that nobody reads. But why were "the best judges" scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of what gave the noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to "the best judges" in 1870? The execution of the verse has not altered, the conditions of imagination seem the same, why then is the estimate always changing? Is every form of poetic taste, is all trained enjoyment of poetry, merely a graduated illusion which goes up and down like a wave of the sea and carries "the best judges" with it? If not, who is right, and who is wrong, and what is the use of dogmatising? Let us unite to quit all vain ambition, and prefer the jangle of the music-halls, with its direct "æsthetic thrill."

So far as I know, the only philosopher who has dared to face this problem is Mr. Balfour, in the brilliant second chapter of his "Foundations of Belief." He has there asked, "Is there any fixed and permanent element in beauty?" The result of his inquiry is disconcerting; after much discussion he decides that there is not. Mr. Balfour deals, in particular, with only two forms of art, Music and Dress, but he tacitly includes the others with them. It is certain that the result of his investigations is the singularly stultifying one that we are not permitted to expect "permanent relations" in or behind the feeling of poetic beauty, which may be indifferently awakened by Blake to-day and by Hayley to-morrow. If the critic says that the verse of Blake is beautiful and that of Hayley is not, he merely "expounds case-made law." The result seems to be that no canons of taste exist; that what are called "laws" of style are enacted only for those who make them, and for those whom the makers can bully into accepting their legislation, a new generation of lawbreakers being perfectly free to repeal the code. Southey yesterday and Keats to-day; why not Southey again to-morrow, or perhaps Tupper? Such is the cynical cul-de-sac into which the logic of a philosopher drives us.

We have had in France an example of volte-face in taste which I confess has left me gasping. I imagine that if Mr. Balfour was able to spare a moment from the consideration of fiscal reform, he must have spent it in triumphing over the fate of M. Sully-Prudhomme. In the month of September 1906 this poet closed, after a protracted agony, "that long disease, his life." He had compelled respect by his courage in the face of hopeless pain, and, one might suppose, some gratitude by the abundance of his benefactions. His career was more than blameless, it was singularly exemplary. Half-blind, half-paralysed, for a long time very poor, pious without fanaticism, patient, laborious, devoted to his friends, he seems to have been one of those extraordinary beings whose fortitude in the face of affliction knows no abatement. It would be ridiculous to quote any of these virtues as a reason for admiring the poetry of Sully-Prudhomme. I mention them merely to show that there was nothing in his personal temperament to arouse hatred or in his personal conditions to excuse envy. Nothing to account for the, doubtless, entirely sincere detestation which his poetry seemed to awaken in all "the best minds" directly he was dead.

As every one knows, from about 1870 to 1890, Sully-Prudhomme was, without a rival, the favourite living poet of the French. Victor Hugo was there, of course, until 1885—and posthumously until much later—but he was a god, and the object of idolatry. All who loved human poetry, the poetry of sweetness and light, took Sully-Prudhomme to their heart of hearts. The Stances et Poèmes of 1865 had perhaps the warmest welcome that ever the work of a new poet had in France. Théophile Gautier instantly pounced upon Le Vase Brisé (since too-famous) and introduced it to a thousand school-girls. Sainte-Beuve, though grown old and languid, waked up to celebrate the psychology and the music of this new poetry, so delicate, fresh and transparent. An unknown beauty of extreme refinement seemed to have been created in it, a beauty made up of lucidity, pathos and sobriety. Readers who are now approaching seventy will not forget with what emotion they listened, for instance, to that dialogue between the long-dead father and the newly-buried son, which closes:—

"J' ai laissé ma sœur et ma mère
Et les beaux livres que j' ai lus;
Vous n'avez pas de bru, mon père,
On m'a blesse, je n'aime plus."

"De tes aïeux compte le nombre,
Va baiser leurs fronts inconnus,
Et viens faire ton lit dans l'ombre
A côté des derniers venus.

"Ne pleure pas, dors dans l'argile
En espérant le grand reveit."
"O père, qu'il est difficile
De ne plus penser au soleil!"

This body of verse, to which was presently added fresh collections—Les Epreuves (1886), Les Vaines Tendresses (1875), Le Prisme (1886),—was welcomed by the elder Sanhedrim, and still more vociferously and unanimously by the younger priesthood of criticism. It pleased the superfine amateurs of poetry, it was accepted with enthusiasm by the thousands who enjoy without analysing their enjoyment. In 1880, to have questioned that Sully-Prudhomme was a very noble poet would have been like challenging Tennyson in 1870, or Cowley in 1660. Jules Lemaître claimed that he was the greatest artist in symbols that France had ever produced. Brunetière, so seldom moved by modern literature, celebrated with ardour the author of Les Vaines Tendresses as having succeeded better than any other writer who had ever lived in translating into perfect language the dawn and the twilight of emotion. That Gaston Paris and M. Anatole France competed in lofty praise of the lyrics of Sully-Prudhomme, is perhaps less remarkable than that Paul Verlaine, whom all the younger schools still look upon as their apostle and guide, declared, in reviewing Les Ecuries d'Augias, that the force of style of Sully-Prudhomme was excelled only by the beauty of his detail. It is needless to multiply examples of the unanimous praise given by the divers schools of criticism to Sully-Prudhomme up to about 1890. His was, perhaps, the least contested literary glory of France.

His death startlingly reminded us that this state of things had to be entirely reversed. It is true that the peculiar talent of Sully-Prudhomme, being almost exclusively lyrical, scarcely survived his youth, and that he cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy wrecks, La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1898), round which the feet of the fairies could hardly be expected to trip. One must be an academician and hopelessly famous before one dares to inflict two elephantine didactic epics on one's admirers. Unfortunately, too, the poet undertook to teach the art of verse in his Réflexions (1892) and his Testament Poétique (1901), brochures which greatly irritated the young. It is probably wise for academicians, whether poets or the reverse, to sit beside their nectar, and not to hurl bolts down into the valley. But, behind these errors of judgment, there they remain—those early volumes, which seemed to us all so full of exquisite little masterpieces. Why is it that nobody, except a few elderly persons, any longer delights in them? The notices which Sully-Prudhomme's death awakened in the Paris Press were either stamped with the mark of old contemporary affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were as frigid as the tomb itself. "Ses tendresses sucrées, sirupeuses, sont vaines en effet," said a critic of importance! Indeed, it would appear so; and where are the laurels of yester-year?

To those who were young when Sully-Prudhomme entered into his immortality it seems impossible to realise that the glory has already departed. Gaston Paris celebrated "the penetrating sincerity and the exquisite expression of feeling" which distinguished Sully-Prudhomme above all other poets. He was the bard of the inner life, sincere and dignified, full of melancholy reverie. A great critic compared La Vote Lactic and Les Stalactites with the far-off sound of bells heard down some lovely valley in a golden afternoon. Yet the images and the language were precise; Sully-Prudhomme was a mathematician, and if he was reproached with anything like a fault, it was that his style was slightly geometrical. It would be otiose to collect any more tributes to his genius, as it appeared to all Frenchmen, cultivated or semi-cultivated, about the year 1880. With an analysis of Sully-Prudhomme's poetry I am not here concerned, but with the question of why it is that such an authority as Rémy de Gourmont could, in 1907, without awakening any protest among persons under fifty say that it was a "sort of social crime" to impose such balderdash as the verse of Sully-Prudhomme on the public.

It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may think such prolongation of their severities ungraceful. But a single contrast will suffice. When, in 1881, Sully-Prudhomme was elected to the French Academy, expert opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in admitting that this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric poet of the age. In 1906, when a literary journal sent out this question, "Who is the poet you love best?" and was answered by more than two hundred writers of verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive; such poets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodenbach, received votes, all the great masters received many. But Sully-Prudhomme, alone, received not one vote. A new generation had arisen, and one of its leaders, with cruel wit, transferred to the reputation of the author his own most famous line:—"N'y touchez pas, il est brisé."

It is necessary to recollect that we are not dealing with the phenomenon of the inability of very astute literary people to recognise at once a startling new sort of beauty. When Robert Browning lent the best poems of Keats to Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with the remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might be expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman, but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of great art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering the much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product which has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation, and is contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is not, on this occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are considering, but his critics. If Théophile Gautier was right in 1867, Rémy de Gourmont must have been wrong in 1907; yet they both were honourable men in the world of criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single man, which, however ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is worse than that; it is the fact that one whole generation seems to have agreed with Gautier, and that another whole generation is of the same mind as Rémy de Gourmont.

Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his "cold music," comes in and tells us that this is precisely what we have to expect. All beauty consists in the possession of certain relations, which being withdrawn, beauty disappears from the object that seemed to possess it. There is no permanent element in poetic excellence. We are not to demand any settled opinion about poetry. So Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, and we want the heart to scold. But is it quite so certain that there is no fixed norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic pleasure cannot "be supposed to last any longer than the transient reaction between it" and the temporary prejudice of our senses? If this be true, then are critics of all men most miserable.

Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very clever people despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quite certain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom you revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! It is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy me too, if I were not a philosopher. But it only shows how right I was to tell, you not to expect permanent relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all is illusion, and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but only a variation of fashion."

Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is no standard? It must be admitted that there seems to be no fixed rule of taste, not even a uniformity of practice or general tendency to agreement in particular cases. But the whole study of the fine arts would lead to despair if we allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implying that no conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not be able to produce it, like a yard-measure, and submit works of imagination to it, once and for all, in the eyes of a consternated public. But when we observe, as we must allow, that art is no better at one age than at another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactly to locate, yet revealed by the light it throws on distant portions of the sky. At all events, it appears to me that this is the only theory by which we can justify a continued interest in literature when it is attacked, now on one side, now on another, by the vicissitudes of fashion.

The essays which are here collected deal, for the most part, with figures in the history of English literature which have suffered from the changes of fortune and the instability of taste. In every case, there has been something which is calculated to attract the sympathy and interest of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned with two distinct but not unrelated branches of his subject, the literary character and the literary craft. More than fifty years have passed—like a cloud, like a dream!—since I first saw my name printed below a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within that half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed! We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Légende des Siècles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is on its head or its feet—"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels," as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be found in an incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history and analysis of the vagaries of literary character. To pursue this analysis and this exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice is to sum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books.

August 1919.

THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN[1]

Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded, in presence of a vast throng of spectators, on the scaffold of Old Palace Yard in Westminster. General Gordon said that England is what her adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English history a more shining and violent specimen of the adventurous type than Raleigh. I am desired to deliver a brief panegyric on this celebrated freebooter, and I go behind the modern definition of the word "panegyric" (as a pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original significance, which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a great assembly of persons, of the reason why they have been brought together in the name of a man long dead. Therefore I shall endeavour, in the short space of time allotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to explain and to define what Sir Walter Raleigh was and represents.

I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the details of his career and character, that the central feature of Raleigh, as he appears to us after three hundred years, is his unflinching determination to see the name of England written across the forehead of the world. Others before him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh was the first man who laid it down, as a formula, that "England shall by the favour of God resist, repel and confound all whatsoever attempts against her sacred kingdom." He had no political sense nor skill in statecraft. For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men of experience and judgment. But he understood that England had enemies and that those enemies must be humbled and confounded. He understood that the road of England's greatness, which was more to him than all other good things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe for the assertion of English liberty, of English ascendancy, too; and the opportunity of the moment lay in "those happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided," the fortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the most eminent as he was also, in a sense, the most unfortunate.

A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the shadow of a fierce bird of prey hovering over its victim. Ever since Ferdinand expelled the Moors out of Granada, Spain had been nursing insensate dreams of universal empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant system of European civilisation by every means of brutality and intrigue which the activity of her arrogance could devise. The Kings of Spain, in their ruthless ambition, encouraged their people in a dream of Spanish world-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with their vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they had spread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print," distributing braggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals, of their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and they held that the force of arms which they brandished would weigh against justice, humanity, and freedom in the servitude which they meant to inflict upon Europe. It was to be Spanien über alles.

But there was one particular nation against which the malignity of the great enemy blazed most fiercely. The King of Spain blasphemously regarded himself as the instrument of God, and there was one country which more than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was England, and for that reason England was more bitterly hated than any other enemy. The Spaniards did "more greedily thirst after English blood than after the lives of any other people of Europe." The avowed purpose of Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England on which the very existence of the English State depends. The significance of Sir Walter Raleigh consists in the clairvoyance with which he perceived and the energy with which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other noble Englishmen of his time, and before his time, had been clear-sighted and had struck hard against the evil tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism, but no other man before or since was so luminously identified with resistance. He struts upon the stage of battle with the limelight full upon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained in the Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea of 1591, where the splendid defiance and warning of the Preface are like trumpets blown to the four quarters of the globe. Raleigh stands out as the man who above all others laboured, as he said, "against the ambitious and bloody pretences of the Spaniards, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall be themselves devoured."

There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I do not present Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man. In that wonderful Elizabethan age there were blossoming, side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the subtlety of Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable wisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of these, and to complain of that would be to grumble because a hollyhock is neither a violet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak," and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation of his courage and nobility. For long years his violent and haughty temper made him the most unpopular man in England, except in Devonshire, where everybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes," and he did not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are amused, we are almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves with serpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted from ambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his protestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive pertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strong silent" type of soldier which the nineteenth century invented for exclusive British consumption.

In judging his character we must take into consideration not only the times in which he lived, but the leaders of English policy with whom he came into collision. He was not thirty years of age, and still at the height of his vivacity, when he was taken into the close favour of Queen Elizabeth. There can be no question that he found in the temper of the monarch something to which his own nature intimately responded. The Queen was an adventurer at heart, as he was, and she was an Englishman of Englishmen. We are accustomed to laugh at the extravagance of the homage which Raleigh paid to a woman old enough to be his mother, at the bravado which made him fling his new plush cloak across a puddle for the Queen to tread over gently, as Fuller tells us, "rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth," or at the story of the rhymes the couple cut on the glass with their diamond rings. In all this, no doubt, there was the fashion of the time, and on Raleigh's part there was ambition and the desire to push his fortunes without scruple. But there was, you may be sure, more than that; there was the instinctive sympathy between the two who hated with the most unflagging and the most burning hate the wicked aggression of Spain. We may be sure that Elizabeth never for a day forgot that Pope Alexander VI. had generously bestowed the Western world on the Crown of Spain. Raleigh spoke a language which might be extravagant and which might be exasperating, which might, in fact, lead to outrageous quarrels between his Cynthia and himself, but which, at least, that Cynthia understood.

But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and had his splendours behind him, there came another Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. James I. was the type of the cautious man who only looks to the present, who hopes by staving off a crisis till Tuesday that something fresh will "turn up" by Wednesday. He was disposed, from the very first, to distrust and to waylay the plans of Raleigh. We are told, and can well believe it, that he was "diffident" of Sir Walter's designs. He was uncomfortable in the presence of that breezy "man of desperate fortunes." A very excellent example of the opposition of the two types is offered by the discussion about the golden city of Manoa. Raleigh believed, and after all disappointments continued to be sure, that in the heart of the swamps of the Orinoco there existed a citadel of magnificent wealth, an emporium of diamonds and gold, from which Spain was secretly drawing the riches with which she proposed to overwhelm civilisation. He struggled for nearly a quarter of a century to win this marvellous city for England. James I. chopped in with his cold logic, and declined to believe that any golden mine existed in Guiana "anywhere in nature," as he craftily said. When Raleigh returned after his last miserable failure in May 1617, the monarch spared no sneer and no reproof to the pirate of the seas. Of course, the King was right; there was no mine of diamonds, no golden city. But the immense treasures that haunted Raleigh's dreams were more real than reality; they existed in the future; he looked far ahead, and our sympathies to-day, and our gratitude also, are all for the noble and valorous knight who sailed out into the West searching for an unknown El Dorado.

It is not so easy to defend the character of our hero against those who, like Hume, have objected to his methods in the prosecution of his designs. To Hume, as to many others before and since, Raleigh seemed "extremely defective either in solid understanding, or morals, or both." The excellent historians of the eighteenth century could not make up their minds whether he was a hero or an impostor. Did he believe in the Guiana mine, or was he, through all those strenuous years, hoodwinking the world? Had he any purpose, save to plunder the Spaniard? Perhaps his own family doubted his sanity, for his son Walter, when he charged the Spanish settlement at San Thomé, pointed to the house of the little colony and shouted to his men: "Come on, this is the true mine, and none but fools would look for any other!" Accusations of bad faith, of factious behaviour, of disloyal intrigue, were brought up against Sir Walter over and over again during the "day of his tempestuous life, drawn on into an evening" of ignominy and blood. These charges were the "inmost and soul-piercing wounds" of which he spoke, still "aching," still "uncured."

There is no need to recount to you the incidents of his life, but I may remind you that after the failure of the latest expedition to South America the Privy Council, under pressure from the Spanish Ambassador, gave orders to Sir Lewis Stukeley to bring the body of Sir Walter Raleigh speedily to London. This was the culmination of his fall, since, three days after Raleigh landed at Plymouth, the King had assured Spain that "not all those who have given security for Raleigh can save him from the gallows." His examination followed, and the publication of the Apology for the Voyage to Guiana. The trial dragged on, while James I., in a manner almost inconceivable, allowed himself to be hurried and bullied by the insolent tyrant Philip II. If the English King did not make haste to execute Raleigh the Spaniards would fetch him away and hang him in Madrid. In these conditions, and clutching at life as a man clutches at roots and branches when he is sliding down a precipice, the conduct of Raleigh has given cause to his critics to blaspheme. He wriggled like an eel, he pretended to be sick, he pretended to be mad, in order to protract his examination. He prevaricated about his mine, about the French alliance, about the Spanish treaties, about his stores and instruments. Did he believe, or did he not believe, in the Empire of the Inca, in the Amazons or Republic of Women, in the gold lying hidden in the hard white spar of El Dorado? We do not know, and his own latest efforts at explanation only cloud our counsel. He was perhaps really a little mad at last, his feverish brain half-crazed by the movement on land and sea of the triumphant wealth of Spain.

Let us never overlook that the master-passion of his whole career was hatred of this tyrannous prosperity of England's most formidable rival. He acted impulsively, and even unjustly; there was much in his methods that a cool judgment must condemn; but he was fighting, with his back to the wall, in order that the British race should not be crowded out of existence by "the proud Iberian." He saw that if Spain were permitted to extend her military and commercial supremacy unchecked, there would be an end to civilisation. Democracy was a thing as yet undeveloped, but the seeds of it were lying in the warm soil of English liberty, and Raleigh perceived, more vehemently than any other living man, that the complete victory of Spain would involve the shipwreck of England's hopes of future prosperity. Nor was he exclusively interested in England, though all his best hopes were ours. When he had been a lad at Oxford he had broken away from his studies in 1569 to help the Protestant princes as a gentleman volunteer in France, and he took part in the famous battle of Jarnac. He is supposed to have fought in France for six years. From early youth his mind was "bent on military glory," and always in opposition to Spain. His escape from the bloody Vespers of Saint Bartholomew had given him a deep distrust of the policy of Rome. The Spaniard had "abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of Flanders. Sir Walter Raleigh dreamed that by the combination in arms of England, France, and the Low Countries, the Spaniards "might not only be persuaded to live in peace, but all their swelling and overflowing streams might be brought back into their natural channels and old banks."

Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against "the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men." The rulers in Madrid, transported by their own arrogance, had determined to impose their religion, their culture, their form of government, on the world. It was a question whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy of England and France would not be crushed beneath the heel of Spain. Raleigh was ready to sacrifice everything, to imperil his own soul, to prevent that. He says you might as well "root out the Christian religion altogether" as join "the rest of all Europe to Spain." In his zeal to prevent "the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men," he lent himself to acts which we must not attempt to condone. There is no use in trying to explain away the facts of his cruel and even savage fanaticism in Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always apt to be abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path. But even his Irish career offers aspects on which we may dwell with pure pleasure. Nothing could be more romantic than those adventures, like the feats of a paladin of the Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood of Lismore; while the story of how he carried off Lord and Lady Roche from their breakfast-table in their own castle of Ballyinharsh, and how he rode with them up ravines and round precipices in that mad flight from their retainers, is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas père.

Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and the name fits him well, even though his flock were less like sheep than like a leash of hunting leopards. His theory was that with a pack of small and active pinnaces he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleons without their being able to hit back. He was, in contradistinction to many preceding English admirals, a cautious fighter at sea, and he says, in a striking passage of the History of the World, written towards the end of his career, "to clap ships together without any consideration belongs rather to a madman than to a man of war." He must have taken the keenest interest in the gigantic failure of the Felicissima Armada in 1588, but, tantalisingly enough, we have no record of his part in it. On the other hand, the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the Relation of the Action in Cadiz Harbour and the incomparable Report on the Fight in the Revenge, supply us with ample materials for forming an idea of his value as a naval strategist. Raleigh's earliest biographer, Oldys the antiquary, speaks of him as "raising a grove of laurels out of the sea," and it is certainly upon that element that he reaches his highest effect of prominence. It was at sea that he could give fullest scope to his hatred of the tyrannous prosperity of Spain. He had to be at once a gamekeeper and a poacher; he had to protect the legitimate interests of English shipping against privateers and pirates, while he was persuaded to be, or felt himself called upon to become, no little of a pirate himself. He was a passionate advocate of the freedom of the seas, and those who look upon Raleigh as a mere hot-brained enthusiast should read his little book called Observations on Trade and Commerce, written in the Tower, and see what sensible views he had about the causes of the depression of trade. These sage opinions did not check him, or his fleets of hunting-pinnaces, from lying in wait for the heavy wallowing plate-ships, laden with Indian carpets and rubies and sandalwood and ebony, which came swinging up to the equator from Ceylon or Malabar. The "freedom of the seas" was for Raleigh's ship, the Roebuck; it was by no means for the Madre de Dios. We find these moral inconsistencies in the mind of the best of adventurers.

A sketch of Raleigh's character would be imperfect indeed if it contained no word concerning his genius as a coloniser. One of his main determinations, early in life, was "to discover and conquer unknown lands, and take possession of them in the Queen's name." We celebrate in Sir Walter Raleigh one of the most intelligent and imaginative of the founders of our colonial empire. The English merchantmen before his time had been satisfied with the determination to grasp the wealth of the New World as it came home to Spain; it had not occurred to them to compete with the great rival at the fountain-head of riches. Even men like Drake and Frobisher had been content with a policy of forbidding Spain, as the poet Wither said, "to check our ships from sailing where they please." South America was already mainly in Spanish hands, but North America was still open to invasion. It was Raleigh's half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who first thought of planting an English settlement in what is now the United States, in 1578. But Gilbert had "no luck at sea," as Queen Elizabeth observed, and it was Raleigh who, in 1584, took up the scheme of colonisation. He did not drop it until the death of Elizabeth, when, under the east wind of the new régime, the blossom of his colonial enterprises flagged.

The motion for the ceremony of to-day originated with the authorities of an important American city, which proudly bears the name of our adventurer. The earliest settlement in what are now the United States was made at Roanoke, in Virginia, on a day which must always be prominent in the annals of civilisation, August 17th, 1585. But this colony lasted only ten months, and it was not until nearly two years later that the fourth expedition which Raleigh sent out succeeded in maintaining a perilous foothold in the new country. This was the little trembling taper to which his own name was given, the twinkling spark which is now the flourishing city of Raleigh in North Carolina. We may well marvel at the pertinacity with which Sir Walter persisted, in the face of innumerable difficulties, in sending out one colonising fleet after another, although, contrary to common legend, he himself never set foot in North America. It was fortunate that at this period of his career he was wealthy, for the attempts to plant settlements in the vast region which he named Virginia cost him more than £40,000. We note at all turns of his fortune his extraordinary tenacity of purpose, which he illustrated, as though by a motto, in the verses he addressed to a comrade towards the end of his imprisonment in the Tower:—

"Change not! to change thy fortune 'tis too late;
Who with a manly faith resolves to die
May promise to himself a lasting State,
Though not so great, yet free from infamy."

So we may think of him in his prime, as he stood on the Hoe of Plymouth twenty years before, a gallant figure of a man, bedizened with precious stones, velvets, and embroidered damasks, shouting his commands to his captains in a strong Devonshire accent. We think of him resolutely gazing westward always, with the light of the sea in his eyes.

We come to the final scene which we are here to-day to commemorate. Little honour to the rulers of England in 1618 redounds from it, and yet we may feel that it completed and even redeemed from decay the character of Raleigh. This tragedy, which was almost a murder, was needed to round off the accomplishment of so strange and frantic a career of romantic violence, and to stamp it with meaning. If Raleigh had been thrown from his horse or had died of the ague in his bed, we should have been depressed by the squalid circumstances, we should have been less conscious than we are now of his unbroken magnanimity. His failures and his excesses had made him unpopular throughout England, and he was both proud and peevish in his recognition of the fact. He declared that he was "nothing indebted" to the world, and again that, "the common people are evil judges of honest things." But the thirteen years of his imprisonment caused a reaction. People forgot how troublesome he had been and only recollected his magnificence. They remembered nothing but that he had spent his whole energy and fortune in resisting the brutality and avarice of the Spaniard.

Then came the disgraceful scene of his cross-examination at Westminster, and the condemnation by his venal judges at the order of a paltry king. It became known, or shrewdly guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. a hectoring alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or sent alive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was a cowardly and ignominious submission of the English Government to the insolence of England's hereditary enemy. Raleigh seemed for the moment to have failed completely, yet it was really like the act of Samson, who slew more men at his death than in all his life. Samuel Pepys, who had some fine intuitions at a time when the national moral was very low, spoke of Raleigh as being "given over, as a sacrifice," to our enemies. This has been, in truth, the secret of his unfailing romantic popularity, and it is the reason of the emotion which has called us together here three hundred years after his death upon the scaffold.

THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE

Among the "co-supremes and stars of love" which form the constellated glory of our greatest poet there is one small splendour which we are apt to overlook in our general survey. But, if we isolate it from other considerations, it is surely no small thing that Shakespeare created and introduced into our literature the Dramatic Song. If with statistical finger we turn the pages of all his plays, we shall discover, not perhaps without surprise, that these contain not fewer than fifty strains of lyrical measure. Some of the fifty, to be sure, are mere star-dust, but others include some of the very jewels of our tongue. They range in form from the sophisticated quatorzains of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (where, however, comes "Who is Silvia?") to the reckless snatches of melody in Hamlet. But all have a character which is Shakespearean, and this regardless of the question so often raised, and so incapable of reply, as to whether some of the wilder ones are Shakespeare's composition or no. Whoever originally may have written such scraps as "They bore him bare-faced on the bier" and "Come o'er the bourne, Bessy, to me," the spirit of Shakespeare now pervades and possesses them.

Our poet was a prodigious innovator in this as in so many other matters. Of course, the idea and practice of musical interludes in plays was not quite novel. In Shakespeare's early youth that remarkable artist in language, John Lyly, had presented songs in several of his plays, and these were notable for what his contemporary, Henry Upchear, called "their labouring beauty." We may notice that Lyly's songs were not printed till long after Shakespeare's death, but doubtless he had listened to them. Peele and Greene had brilliant lyrical gifts, but they did not exercise them in their dramas, nor did Lodge, whose novel of Rosalynde (1590) contains the only two precedent songs which we could willingly add to Shakespeare's juvenile repertory. But while I think it would be rash to deny that the lyrics of Lodge and Lyly had their direct influence on the style of Shakespeare, neither of those admirable precursors conceived the possibility of making the Song an integral part of the development of the drama. This was Shakespeare's invention, and he applied it with a technical adroitness which had never been dreamed of before and was never rivalled after.

This was not apprehended by the early critics of our divine poet, and has never yet, perhaps, received all the attention it deserves. We may find ourselves bewildered if we glance at what the eighteenth-century commentators said, for instance, about the songs in Twelfth Night. They called the adorable rhapsodies of the Clown "absurd" and "unintelligible"; "O Mistress mine" was in their ears "meaningless"; "When that I was" appeared to them "degraded buffoonery." They did not perceive the close and indispensable connection between the Clown's song and the action of the piece, although the poet had been careful to point out that it was a moral song "dulcet in contagion," and too good, except for sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. The critics neglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away, Death," and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must not really have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignant dramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence of the blinded pair. But indeed the whole of Twelfth Night is burdened with melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at each change of scene some unseen hand is overheard touching a harp-string. The lovely, infatuated lyrics arrive, dramatically, to relieve this musical tension at its height.

Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case of A Winter's Tale, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and where the songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into one bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sung by "a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense" could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned men were unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of the drama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament of Autolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hysterical balancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden sentimentality, like the Clown's

"Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown!"

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tenderness that the firm hand of the creator of character reveals itself.

But it is in The Tempest that Shakespeare's supremacy as a writer of songs is most brilliantly developed. Here are seven or eight lyrics, and among them are some of the loveliest things that any man has written. What was ever composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately fairy-like than Ariel's First Song?

"Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd,—
The wild waves whist."

That is, not "kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctuators pretend, but, parenthetically, "kissed one another,—the wild waves being silent the while." Even fairies do not kiss waves, than which no embrace could be conceived less rewarding. Has any one remarked the echo of Marlowe here, from Hero and Leander,

"when all is whist and still,
Save that the sea playing on yellow sand
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land!"

But Marlowe, with all his gifts, could never have written the lyrical parts of The Tempest. This song is in emotional sympathy with Ferdinand, and in the truest sense dramatic, not a piece of pretty verse foisted in to add to the entertainment.

Ariel's Second Song has been compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an æolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's Fourth Song,—"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw in Ariel the imaginative genius of English poetry, recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glance at Dry den's recension of The Tempest we may be inclined to think that the "wicked dam" soon won back her mastery. With all respect to Dryden, what are we to think of his discretion in eking out Shakespeare's insufficiencies with such staves as this:—

"Upon the floods we'll sing and play
And celebrate a halcyon day;
Great Nephew Aeolus make no noise,
Muzzle your roaring boys."

and so forth? What had happened to the ear of England in seventy years?

As a matter of fact the perfection of dramatic song scarcely survived Shakespeare himself. The early Jacobeans, Heywood, Ford, and Dekker in particular, broke out occasionally in delicate ditties. But most playwrights, like Massinger, were persistently pedestrian. The only man who came at all close to Shakespeare as a lyrist was John Fletcher, whose "Lay a garland on my hearse" nobody could challenge if it were found printed first in a Shakespeare quarto. The three great songs in "Valentinian" have almost more splendour than any of Shakespeare's, though never quite the intimate beauty, the singing spontaneity of "Under the greenwood tree" or "Hark, hark, the lark." It has grown to be the habit of anthologists to assert Shakespeare's right to "Roses, their sharp spikes being gone." The mere fact of its loveliness and perfection gives them no authority to do so; and to my ear the rather stately procession of syllables is reminiscent of Fletcher. We shall never be certain; and who would not swear that "Hear, ye ladies that are coy" was by the same hand that wrote "Sigh no more, ladies," if we were not sure of the contrary? But the most effective test, even in the case of Fletcher, is to see whether the trill of song is, or is not, an inherent portion of the dramatic structure of the play. This is the hall-mark of Shakespeare, and perhaps of him alone.

CATHARINE TROTTER,

THE PRECURSOR OF THE BLUESTOCKINGS

The practically complete absence of the Woman of Letters from our tropical and profuse literature of the early and middle seventeenth century has often been observed with wonder. While France had her Madeleine de Scudéry and her Mlle. de Gournay and her Mère Angelique Arnauld, Englishwomen of the Stuart age ventured upon no incursions into philosophy, fiction, or theology. More and more eagerly, however, they read books; and as a consequence of reading, they began at last to write. The precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed with every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the earliest professional woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, to whose genius justice has only quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs. Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left no heritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set of female writers, who enlivened the last years of the century, but who were soon eclipsed by the wits of the age of Anne, and who have been entirely forgotten. It is to the most interesting of these "transient phantoms" that I wish to draw attention.

The extreme precocity of Catharine Trotter makes her seem to belong to the age of Dryden, but she was in reality younger than Addison and most of the other contemporaries of Pope. She was born on August 16th, 1679, the younger daughter of a naval officer, Captain David Trotter, R.N.; her mother's maiden name had been Sarah Ballenden, probably of the well-known Catholic family of that ilk. She "had the honour of being nearly related to the illustrious families of Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale and Drummond, Earl of Perth." The Jacobite fourth Earl of Perth seems to have been the patron of Captain Trotter, of whom he wrote in 1684 that he was "an ornament to his country." Apparently the gallant captain was attached to Trinity House, where his probity and integrity earned him the epithet of "honest David," and where he attracted the notice of George, first Lord Dartmouth, when that rising statesman was appointed Master. Captain Trotter had served the Crown from his youth, "with great gallantry and fidelity, both by land and sea," and had been very successful in the Dutch wars. He had a brother who was a commander in the Navy. We get an impression of high respectability in the outer, but not outermost, circles of influential Scottish society. Doubtless the infancy of Catharine was spent in conditions of dependent prosperity. These conditions were not to last. When she was four years old Lord Dartmouth started on the famous expedition to demolish Tangier, and he took Captain Trotter with him as his commodore. In this affair, as before, the captain distinguished himself by his ability, and instead of returning to London after Tangier he was recommended to King Charles II. as the proper person to convoy the fleet of the Turkey Company to its destination. Apparently it was understood that this would be the final reward of his services and that he was to "make his fortune" out of the Turks. Unhappily, after convoying his charge safely to Scanderoon, he fell sick of the plague that was raging there, and died, in the course of January 1684, in company with all the other officers of his ship. Every misfortune now ensued; the purser, who was thus left to his own devices, helped himself to the money destined for the expenses of the voyage, while, to crown all, the London goldsmith in whose hands the captain had left his private fortune took this occasion to go bankrupt. The King, in these melancholy circumstances, granted an Admiralty pension to the widow, but when he died early in the following year this was no longer paid, and the unfortunate ladies of the Trotter family might well murmur:—

"One mischief brings another on his neck,
As mighty billows tumble in the seas."

From the beginning of her fifth year, then, Catharine experienced the precarious lot of those who depend for a livelihood on the charity of more or less distant relatives. We dimly see a presentable mother piteously gathering up such crumbs as fell from the tables of the illustrious families with whom she was remotely connected. But the Duke of Lauderdale himself was now dead, and the Earl of Perth had passed the zenith of his power. No doubt in the seventeenth century the protection of poor relations was carried on more systematically than it is to-day, and certainly Mrs. Trotter contrived to live and to bring up her two daughters genteelly. The first years were the worst; the accession of William III. brought back to England and to favour Gilbert Burnet, who became Bishop of Salisbury in 1688, when Catharine was nine years old. Mrs. Trotter found a patron and perhaps an employer in the Bishop, and when Queen Anne came to the throne her little pension was renewed.

There is frequent reference to money in Catharine Trotter's writings, and the lack of it was the rock upon which her gifts were finally wrecked. With a competency she might have achieved a much more prominent place in English literature than she could ever afford to reach. She offers a curious instance of the depressing effect of poverty, and we get the impression that she was never, during her long and virtuous career, lifted above the carking anxiety which deadens the imagination. As a child, however, she seems to have awakened hopes of a high order. She was a prodigy, and while little more than an infant she displayed an illumination in literature which was looked upon, in that age of female darkness, as quite a portent. She taught herself French, "by her own application without any instructor," but was obliged to accept some assistance in acquiring Latin and logic. The last-mentioned subject became her particular delight, and at a very tender age she drew up "an abstract" of that science "for her own use." Thus she prepared for her future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. When she was very small, in spite of frequent conferences with learned members of the Church of England, she became persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coincided with the conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor Perth, but as events turned out it cannot but have added to the sorrows of that much-tried woman, her mother. (It should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglican faith when she was twenty-eight years of age.)

She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of James II. came to a close. Mrs. Trotter's connections were now in a poor plight. The new Earl of Lauderdale was in great distress for money; Lord Dartmouth, abandoned by the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where he died on October 25th, 1691, in which year the estates of the Earl of Perth were sequestered and he himself hunted out of the country. Ruin simultaneously fell on all the fine friends of our infant prodigy, and we can but guess how it affected her. Yet there were plenty of other Jacobites left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance shows that she cultivated their friendship. She published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox; she was then fourteen years of age. Higgons was a young man of twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled court in France, where he had distinguished himself by his agreeable manners, and who had just made a name for himself by poems addressed to Dryden and by a prologue to Congreve's Old Batchelor. He was afterwards to become famous for a little while as a political historian. Catharine Trotter's verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as "lovely youth," and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms which are almost boisterous. This poem was not only her introduction to the public, but, through Bevil Higgons, was probably the channel of her acquaintance with Congreve and Dryden.

Throughout her life she was fond of writing letters to celebrated people; she now certainly wrote to Congreve and doubtless to Dryden. A freedom in correspondence ran in the family. Her poor mother is revealed to us as always "renewing her application" to somebody or other. We next find the youthful poet in relation with the Earl of Dorset, from whom she must have concealed her Jacobite propensities. Dorset was the great public patron of poetry under William III., and Catharine Trotter, aged sixteen, having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It was very graciously granted, and Agnes de Castro, in five acts and in blank verse, "written by a young lady," was produced at the Theatre Royal in 1695, under the "protection" of Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event caused a considerable commotion. No woman had written for the English stage since the death of Mrs. Behn, and curiosity was much excited. Mrs. Verbruggen, that enchanting actress, but in male attire, recited a clever, ranting epilogue at the close of the performance, in which she said:—

"'tis whispered here
Our Poetess is virtuous, young and fair,"

but the secret was an open one. Wycherley, who contributed verses, knew all about it, and so did Mrs. Manley, while Powell and Colley Cibber were among the actors. We may be sure that little Mistress Trotter's surprising talents were the subjects of much discussion at Will's Coffee House, and that the question of securing her for the rival theatre was anxiously debated at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her success in Agnes de Castro was the principal asset which Drury Lane had to set that season against Congreve's splendid adventure with Love for Love.

Agnes de Castro is an immature production, and shows a juvenile insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and treatment are borrowed implicitly from a French novel by Mlle. de Brillac, published in Paris and London a few years before.[2] The conception of court life at Coimbra in the fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and is innocent of Portuguese local colour. But, as the dramatic work of a girl of sixteen, the play is rather extraordinary for nimble movement and adroit theatrical arrangements. It is evident that Catharine Trotter was well versed in the stage traditions of her own day, and we may wonder how a highly respectable girl of sixteen found her opportunity. The English playhouse under William III. was no place for a very young lady, even if she wore a mask. There is a good deal of meritorious character-drawing in Agnes de Castro. The conception of a benevolent and tenderly forgiving Princess is well contrasted with the fierce purity of Agnes and the infatuation of the Prince. Towards the close of the first act there is a capital scene of exquisite confusion between this generous and distracted trio. The opening of the third act, between Elvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not at all an unpromising one.

Early in 1696 Agnes de Castro, still anonymous, was published as a book, and for the next five or six years we find Catharine Trotter habitually occupied in writing for the stage. Without question she did so professionally, though in what way dramatists at the close of the seventeenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture. A very rare play, The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets, the authorship of which has hitherto defied conjecture, was acted at Drury Lane after Catharine Trotter had been tempted across to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is evidently inspired by the intense jealousy which smouldered between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotter incited two older ladies to compete with her; these were Mrs. Delariviere Manley, who was a discarded favourite of Barbara Villiers, and fat Mrs. Mary Pix, the stage-struck consort of a tailor. These rather ridiculous women professed themselves followers of Catharine, and they produced plays of their own not without some success. With her they formed the trio of Female Wits who were mocked in the lively but, on the whole, rather disappointing play I have just mentioned, in the course of which it is spitefully remarked of Calista—who is Miss Trotter—that she has "made no small struggle in the world to get into print," and is "now in such a state of wedlock to pen and ink that it will be very difficult" for her "to get out of it."

In acting The Female Wits Mrs. Temple, who had played the Princess in Agnes de Castro, took the part of Calista, and doubtless, in the coarse fashion of those days, made up exactly like poor Catharine Trotter, who was described as "a Lady who pretends to the learned Languages, and assumes to herself the name of a Critic." This was a character, however, which she would not have protested against with much vigour, for she had now quite definitely taken up the position of a reformer and a pioneer. She posed as the champion of women's intellectual rights, and she was accepted as representing in active literary work the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowed in her remarkable Serious Proposal to Ladies of 1694. We turn again to The Female Wits, and we find Marsilia (Mrs. Manley) describing Calista to Mrs. Wellfed (Mrs. Fix) as "the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing! She pretends to grammar! writes in mood and figure! does everything methodically!" Yet when Calista appears on the stage, Mrs. Manley rushes across to fling her arms around her and to murmur: "O charmingest Nymph of all Apollo's Train, let me embrace thee!" Later on Calista says to Mrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, "I cannot but remind you, Madam ... I read Aristotle in his own language"; and of a certain tirade in a play of Ben Jonson she insists: "I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into Latin." Mrs. Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she "can go no further than the eight parts of speech." This brings down upon her an icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say ... you impose upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness of manner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air of priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in that loose theatre of William III.

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to the Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of ill Nature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think their peculiar Prerogative"—that is, intellectual distinction. Catharine Trotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced her tragedy of Fatal Friendship, the published copy of which (1698) is all begarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a succession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told that she had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched the stage." This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage, in which all the dramatists of the day were violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women.

"You as your Sex's champion art come forth
To fight their quarrel and assert their worth,"

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:—

"You stand the first of stage-reformers too."

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and at vindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel."

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career of our bluestocking. Fatal Friendship enjoyed a success which Catharine Trotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only one which has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremely sentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries said that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in company with Congreve and Granville "the polite," who had written a She-Gallants, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish her plays to be. Fatal Friendship has an ingenious plot, in which the question of money takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. Felicia, sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain her), is wooed by the wealthy Roquelaure, although she is secretly married to Gramont, who is also too poor to support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will make love to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades him—in order that his best friend, Castalio, may be released from a debtor's prison—bigamously to many Lamira, a wealthy widow. But Castalio is in love with Lamira, and is driven to frenzy by Gramont's illegal marriage. It all depends upon income in a manner comically untragical. The quarrel between the friends in the fifth act is an effective piece of stage-craft, but the action is spoiled by a ridiculous general butchery at the close of all. However, the audience was charmed, and even "the stubbornest could scarce deny their Tears."

Fatal Friendship was played at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre, and no doubt it was Congreve who brought Miss Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warm friendship for her had unquestionably a great deal to do with her success and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in which the great dramatist acknowledges, in 1697, the congratulations of his young admirer, and it breathes an eager cordiality. Congreve requested Betterton to present him to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality for her company is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of The Female Wits insinuates that Congreve made the looking-over of Catharine's scenes "his pretence for daily visits." Another satirist, in 1698, describes Congreve sitting very gravely with his hat over his eyes, "together with the two she-things called Poetesses which write for his house," half-hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar, too, seeing the celebrated writer of Fatal Friendship in the theatre on the third night of the performance of his Love and a Bottle, had "his passions wrought so high" by a sight of the beautiful author that he wrote her a letter in which he called her "one of the fairest of the sex, and the best judge." If Catharine Trotter, as the cynosure of delicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through Love and a Bottle without a blush, even her standard of decency was not very exacting. But in all this rough, coarse world of wit her reputation never suffered a rebuff.

Encouraged by so much public and private attention, our young dramatist continued to work with energy and conscientiousness. But her efforts were forestalled by an event, or rather a condition of the national temper, of which too little notice has been taken by literary historians. The attacks on the stage for its indecency and blasphemy had been flippantly met by the theatrical agents, but they had sunk deeply into the conscience of the people. There followed with alarming abruptness a general public repulsion against the playhouses, and to this, early in 1699, a roughly worded Royal Proclamation gave voice. During the whole of that year the stage was almost in abeyance, and even Congreve, with The Way of the World, was unable to woo his audience back to Lincoln's Inn. During this time of depression Catharine Trotter composed at least two tragedies, which she was unable to get performed, while the retirement of Congreve in a paroxysm of annoyance must have been a very serious disadvantage to her.

On May 1st, 1700, Dryden died, and with him a dramatic age passed away. What Miss Trotter's exact relations with the great poet had been is uncertain; she not only celebrated his death in a long elegy, in which she speaks on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more important poem, in which she gives very sound advice to the poetical beginner, who is to take Dryden as a model, and to be particularly careful to disdain Settle, Durfey, and Blackmore, typical poetasters of the period. She recommends social satire to the playwright:—

"Let the nice well-bred beau himself perceive
The most accomplished, useless thing alive;
Expose the bottle-sparks that range the town,—
Shaming themselves with follies not their own,—
But chief these foes to virgin innocence,
Who, while they make to honour vain pretence,
With all that's base and impious can dispense."

Honour to those who aim high and execute boldly!

"If Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire,
The animated scene throughout inspire;
If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest,
Each sees his darling folly made a jest;
If Garth's and Dryden's genius, through each line,
In artful praise and well-turn'd satire shine,—
To us ascribe the immortal sacred flame."

In this dead period of the stage Catharine Trotter found a warm friend and doubtless an efficient patron in a Lady Piers, of whom we should be glad to know more. Sir George Piers, the husband of this lady, was an officer of rank under the Duke of Marlborough, later to become useful to Catharine Trotter. Meanwhile the latter returned to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where, in 1701, under the patronage of Lord Halifax—Pope's "Bufo"—she produced her third tragedy, The Unhappy Penitent. The dedication of this play to Halifax is a long and interesting essay on the poetry of the age. The author passes Dryden, Otway, Congreve, and Lee under examination, and finds technical blemishes in them all:—

"The inimitable Shakespeare seems alone secure on every side from an attack. I speak not here of faults against the rules of poetry, but against the natural Genius. He had all the images of nature present to him, studied her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her various features, for though he has chiefly exerted himself on the more masculine passions, 'tis as the choice of his judgment, not the restraint of his genius, and he has given us as a proof he could be every way equally admirable."

Lady Piers wrote the prologue to The Unhappy Penitent in verses better turned than might have been expected. She did not stint praise to her young friend, whom she compares to the rising sun:—

"Like him, bright Maid, Thy great perfections shine
As awful, as resplendent, as divine!...
Minerva and Diana guard your soul!"

The Unhappy Penitent is not a pleasing performance: it is amorous and violent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory was better than her practice. Nevertheless, it seems to have been successful, for the author some time afterwards, speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas, remarks that "the taste is mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only public section of Catharine Trotter's career was now over, and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of twenty-two, to more elevated studies.

When Love at a Loss was published the author had already left town, and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent she now settled at Salisbury, at the house of a physician, Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister. Her growing intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have had something to do with her determination to make this city her home. She formed a very enthusiastic friendship with the Bishop's second lady, who was an active theologian and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess was fascinated by Mrs. Burnet. "I have not met," she writes in 1701, "such perfection in any of our sex." She now visited in the best Wiltshire society. When the famous singer, John Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave a concert at the palace, and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that she rode out after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at Lord Arundell of Wardour's house. She had a great appreciation of the Bishop's "volatile activity." It is now that the name of Locke first occurs in her correspondence, and we gather that she came into some personal contact with him through a member of the Bishop's family—George Burnet of Kemney, in Aberdeenshire—probably a cousin, with whom she now cultivated an ardent intellectual friendship. He left England on a mission which occupied him from the middle of 1701 until 1708, and this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented their acquaintance from ripening into a warmer feeling. The romance and tragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather, it is plain, around this George Burnet, who was a man of brilliant accomplishments and interested, like herself, in philosophical studies.

These, it would appear, Catharine Trotter had never abandoned, but she applied herself to them closely at Salisbury, where she made some superior acquaintances. One of these was John Norris of Bemerton, whose Theory of an Ideal and Intelligible World had just made some sensation. By the intermediary of George Burnet she came in touch with some of the leading French writers of the moment, such as Malebranche and Madame Dacier. There is a French poet, unnamed, who understands English, but he is gone to Rome before he can be made to read The Fatal Friendship. Meanwhile, Catharine Trotter's obsession with the ideas of Locke was giving some anxiety to her friends. That philosopher had published his famous Essay on the Human Understanding in 1690, and it had taken several years for the opposition to his views, and in particular to his theological toleration, to take effect. But in 1697 there were made a number of almost simultaneous attacks on Locke's position. The circle at Salisbury was involved in them, for one of these was written by Norris of Bemerton, and another is attributed to a member of the Burnet family. Catharine Trotter, who had studied Locke's later works with enthusiastic approval, was scandalised by the attacks, and sat down to refute them. This must have been in 1701.

Although the intellectual society of Salisbury was prominent in taking the conservative view of Locke, our bluestocking could not refrain from telling Mrs. Burnet what she had done, nor from showing her treatise to that friend under vows of confidence. But Mrs. Burnet, who was impulsive and generous, could not keep the secret; she spoke about it to the Bishop, and then to Norris of Bemerton, and finally (in June 1702) to Locke himself. Locke was at Oates, confined by his asthma; he was old and suffering, but still full of benevolence and curiosity, and he was graciously interested in his remarkable defender at Salisbury. As he could not himself travel, he sent his adopted son to call on Catharine Trotter, with a present of books; this was Peter King, still a young man, but already M.P. for Beer Alston, and later to become Lord Chancellor and the first Lord King of Ockham. George Burnet, writing from Paris, had been very insistent that Catharine should not publish her treatise, but she overruled his objections, and her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding appeared anonymously in May 1702. People were wonderfully polite in those days, and Locke himself wrote to his "protectress" a charming letter in which he told her that her "Defence was the greatest honour my Essay could have procured me."

She sent her Defence to Leibnitz, who criticised it at considerable length:—[3]

"J'ai lu livre de Mlle. Trotter. Dans la dedicace elle exhorte M. Locke à donner des démonstrations de morale. Je crois qu'il aurait eu de la peine à y reussir. L'art de démontrer n'est pas son fait. Je tiens que nous nous appercevons sans raisonnement de ce qui est juste et injuste, comme nous nous appercevons sans raison de quelques theoremes de Geometrie; mais il est tousjours bon de venir à la démonstration. Justice et injustice ne dependent seulement de la nature humaine, mais de la nature de la substance intelligente en général; et Mlle. Trotter remarque fort bien qu'elle vient de la nature de Dieu et n'est point arbitraire. La nature de Dieu est tousjours fondée en raison."

Notwithstanding all this, the commentators of Locke appear, without exception, to ignore the Defence, and it was probably never much read outside the cultivated Salisbury circle.

In this year, 1702, the health of Catharine Trotter began to give her uneasiness, and it was for this reason that she left Salisbury for a while. She was once more living in that city, however, from May 1703 to March 1704, making a special study of geography. "My strength," she writes to George Burnet, "is very much impaired, and God knows whether I shall ever retrieve it." Her thoughts turned again to the stage, and in the early months of 1703 she composed her fifth and last play, the tragedy of The Revolution in Sweden; "but it will not be ready for the stage," she says, "till next winter." Her interest in philosophy did not flag. She was gratified by some communications, through Burnet, with Leibnitz, and she would have liked to be the intermediary between Locke and some philosophical "gentlemen" on the Continent, probably Malebranche and Leibnitz, in a controversy. But this was hopeless, and she writes (March 16th, 1704):—

"Mr. Locke is unwilling to engage in controversy with the gentlemen you mention; for, I am informed, his infirmities have obliged him, for some time past, to desist from his serious studies, and only employ himself in lighter things, which serve to amuse and unbend the mind."

Locke, indeed, had but six months more to live, and though he retained his charming serenity of spirit he was well aware that the end approached. Never contentious or desirous of making a sensation, he was least of all, in his present precarious state, likely to enter into discussion with foreign philosophers. It does not appear that Catharine Trotter ever enjoyed the felicity of seeing in the flesh the greatest object of her homage; but he occupied most of her thoughts. She was rendered highly indignant by the efforts made by the reactionaries at Oxford and elsewhere to discourage the writings of Locke and to throw suspicion on their influence. She read over and over again his philosophical, educational, and religious treatises, and ever found them more completely to her taste. If she had enjoyed the power to do so she would have proclaimed the wisdom and majesty of Locke from every housetop, and she envied Lady Masham her free and constant intercourse with so beautiful a mind. Catharine Trotter watched, but from a distance, the extinction of a life thus honoured, which came to a peaceful end at Oates on October 28th, 1704. The following passage does not appear—or I am much mistaken—to have attracted the attention of Locke's biographers:—

"I was very sensibly touched with the news of Mr. Locke's death. All the particulars I hear of it are that he retained his perfect senses to the last, and spoke with the same composedness and indifference on affairs as usual. His discourse was much on the different views a dying man has of worldly things; and that nothing gives him any satisfaction, but the reflection of what good he has done in his life. Lady Masham went to his chamber to speak to him on some, business; when he had answered in the same manner he was accustomed to speak, he desired her to leave the room, and, immediately after she was gone, turned about and died."

She records that, after the death of Locke, Lady Masham communicated with Leibnitz, and Catharine is very indignant because a doubt had been suggested as to whether the writer's thoughts and expressions were her own. This was calculated to infuriate Catharine Trotter, who outpours in forcible terms her just indignation:—

"Women are as capable of penetrating into the grounds of things, and reasoning justly, as men are, who certainly have no advantage of us, but in their opportunities of knowledge. As Lady Masham is allowed by everybody to have great natural endowments, she has taken pains to improve them; and no doubt profited much by a long intimate society with so extraordinary a man as Mr. Locke. So that I see no reason to suspect a woman of her character would pretend to write anything that was not entirely her own. I pray, be more equitable to her sex than the generality of your's are, who, when anything is written by a woman that they cannot deny their approbation to, are sure to rob us of the glory of it by concluding 'tis not her own."

This is the real voice of Catharine Trotter, raised to defend her sex, and conscious of the many intellectual indignities and disabilities which they suffered.

The first draft of The Revolution in Sweden being now completed, she sent it to Congreve, who was living very quietly in lodgings in Arundell Street. He allowed some time to go by before, on November 2nd, 1703, he acknowledged it. His criticism, which is extremely kind, is also penetrating and full. "I think the design in general," he says, "very great and noble; the conduct of it very artful, if not too full of business which may run into length and obscurity." He warns her against having too much noise of fighting on the stage in her second act, and against offending probability in the third. The fourth act is confused, and in the fifth there are too many harangues. Catharine Trotter has asked him to be frank, and so he is, but his criticism is practical and encouraging. This excellent letter deserves to be better known.

To continue the history of Miss Trotter's fifth and last play, The Revolution in Sweden was at length brought out at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, towards the close of 1704. It had every advantage which popular acting could give it, since the part of the hero, Count Arwide, was played by Betterton; that of Constantia, the heroine, by Mrs. Barry; Gustavus by Booth; and Christina by Mrs. Harcourt. In spite of this galaxy of talent, the reception of the play was unfavourable. The Duchess of Marlborough "and all her beauteous family" graced the theatre on the first night, but the public was cold and inattentive. Some passages of a particularly lofty moral tone provoked laughter. The Revolution in Sweden, in fact, was shown to suffer from the ineradicable faults which Congreve had gently but justly suggested. It was very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed, nor was she completely consoled by being styled—by no less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia—"The Sappho of Scotland." She determined, however, to appeal to readers against auditors, and when, two years later, after still further revision, she published The Revolution in Sweden, she dedicated it in most grateful terms to the Duke of Marlborough's eldest daughter, Henrietta Godolphin.

How Miss Trotter came to be favoured by the Churchills appears from various sources to be this. Her brother-in-law, Dr. Inglis, was now physician-general in the army, and was in personal relations with the General. When the victory at Blenheim (August 1704) was announced, Catharine Trotter wrote a poem of welcome back to England. It is to be supposed that a manuscript copy of it was shown by Inglis to the Duke, with whose permission it was published about a month later. The poem enjoyed a tremendous success, for the Duke and Duchess and Lord Treasurer Godolphin "and several others" all liked the verses and said they were better than any other which had been written on the subject. George Burnet, who saw the Duke in Germany, reported him highly pleased with her—"the wisest virgin I ever knew," he writes. She now hoped, with the Duke's protection, to recover her father's fortune and be no longer a burden to her brother-in-law. A pension of £20 from Queen Anne gave her mother now a shadow of independence, but Catharine herself was wholly disappointed at that "settlement for my life" which she was ardently hoping for. I think that, if she had secured it, George Burnet would have come back from Germany to marry her. Instead of that he sent her learned messages from Bayle and from Leibnitz, who calls her "une Demoiselle fort spirituelle."

Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and took up her abode at Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in Surrey, as companion to an invalid, Mrs. De Vere. She probably chose this place on account of the Locke connection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is now much in her correspondence about Damaris, Lady Masham, and others in that circle in which George Burnet himself was intimate. But great changes were imminent. Although her correspondence at this time is copious it is not always very intelligible, and it is very carelessly edited. Her constant interchange of letters with George Burnet leaves the real position between them on many points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that he was dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter that he had left her £100 in his will, and added: "Pray God I might live to give you much more myself." He regrets that he had so easily "pulled himself from her company," and suggests that if she had not left London to settle in Salisbury he would have stayed in England. Years after they had parted we find him begging her to continue writing to him "at least once a week." She, on her part, tells him that he well knows that there is but one person she could ever think of marrying. He seems to have made her want of vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to her, but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that it was her want of a fortune which actuated him most strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her by telling her that he "knows of parties" in the city of Hanover "who might bring him much honour and comfort" were he "not afraid of losing (Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They write to one another with extreme formality, but that proves nothing. A young woman, passionately in love with a man whom she had just accepted as her future husband, was expected, in 1705, to close her letter by describing herself as "Sir, your very humble servant."

If George Burnet hinted of "parties" in Hanover, Catharine Trotter on her side could boast of Mr. Fenn, "a young clergyman of excellent character," who now laid an ardent siege to her heart. Embarrassed by these attentions, she took the bold step of placing the matter before Mr. Cockburn, a still younger clergyman, of even more excellent character. The letter in which she makes this ingenuous declaration as to a father confessor is one of the tenderest examples extant of the "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" form of correspondence. Mr. Cockburn, one of the minor clergy of the Salisbury set, did speak for himself, and George Burnet having at length announced his own projected marriage with a lady of old acquaintance, Catharine Trotter hesitated no longer but accepted the hand of Mr. Cockburn. They were married early in 1708. Thackeray could have created an amusing romance out of the relations of these four people to one another, and in particular it would have been very interesting to see what he would have made of the character of George Burnet.

Catharine Cockburn was now, after so eventful a life of emotional and intellectual experience, still a young woman, not far past her twenty-eighth birthday. She was to survive for more than forty-three years, during which time she was to correspond much, to write persistently, and to publish whenever opportunity offered. But I do not propose to accompany her much further on her blameless career. All through her married life, which was spent at various places far from London, she existed almost like a plant in a Leyden jar. Constant genteel poverty, making it difficult for her to buy books and impossible to travel was supported by her with dignity and patience, but it dwarfed her powers. Her later writings, on philosophy, on morality, on the principles of the Christian religion, are so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one's eyes. She who had sparkled as a girl with Congreve and exchanged polite amenities with Locke lived on to see modern criticism begin with Samuel Johnson and the modern novel start with Samuel Richardson, but without observing that any change had come into the world of letters. Her husband, owing to his having fallen "into a scruple about the oath of abjuration," lost his curacy and "was reduced to great difficulties in the support of his family." Nevertheless—a perfect gentleman at heart—he "always prayed for the King and Royal family by name." Meanwhile, to uplift his spirits in this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He reminds us of Dr. Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine.

So little mark did poor Mrs. Cockburn make on her younger contemporaries that she disappeared forthwith from literary history. Her works, especially her plays, have become so excessively rare as to be almost unprocurable. The brief narrative of her life and her activities which I have taken the liberty of presenting to-day would be hopelessly engulfed in obscurity, and we should know as little of Catharine Trotter as we do of Mary Pix, and Delariviere Manley, and many late seventeenth-century authors more eminent than they, had it not been that in 1751, two years after her death, all her papers were placed in the hands of an ingenious clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Birch, who printed them for subscribers in two thick and singularly unpleasing volumes. This private edition was never reissued, and is now itself a rare book. It is the sort of book that for two hundred and fifty years must fatally have been destroyed as lumber whenever an old country mansion that contained it has been cleared out.

During all that time no one, so far as I can discover, has evinced the smallest interest in Catharine Trotter. We gain an idea of the blackness of her obscurity when we say that even Mr. Austin Dobson appears to have never heard of her. The champion of Locke and Clarke, the correspondent of Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar, she seems to have slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold on time. But I hope her thin little lady-like ghost, still hovering in a phantom-like transparence round the recognised seats of learning, will be a little comforted at last by the polite attention of a few of my readers.

TWO PIONEERS OF ROMANTICISM:

JOSEPH AND THOMAS WARTON[4]

The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature have been examined so closely and so often that it might be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted. But no subject of any importance in literature is ever exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with your permission, to present to you a familiar phase of the literary life of the eighteenth century from a fresh point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of a Warton Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly what it is which a lecturer proposes to himself to achieve during the brief hour in which you indulge him with your attention; it certainly makes his task the easier if he does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in poetry, as it existed up to the period of their childhood, which was stimulating to the Wartons, and what they disapproved of in the verse which was fashionable and popular among the best readers in their day.

There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are apt to neglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic pleasure experienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader, at any epoch of history. We are far too much in the habit of supposing that what we—that is the most instructed and sensitive of us—admire now must always have been admired by people of a like condition. This has been one of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people as illustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing generations as if it were not only heretical, but despicable as well. Young men to-day speak of those who fifty years ago expatiated in admiration of Tennyson as though they were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked, neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly analogous to themselves that those portions of Tennyson were adored which the young repudiate to-day. Not to expand too largely this question of the oscillation of taste—which, however, demands more careful examination than it has hitherto received—it is always important to discover what was honestly admired at a given date by the most enthusiastic and intelligent, in other words by the most poetic, students of poetry. But to do this we must cultivate a little of that catholicity of heart which perceives technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an earlier date, and not merely where the current generation finds it.

Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of an Oxford professor of poetry, an old Jacobite of no observable merit beyond that of surrounding his family with an atmosphere of the study of verse. The elder brother was born in 1722, the younger in 1728. I must be forgiven if I dwell a little tediously on dates, for our inquiry depends upon the use of them. Without dates the whole point of that precedency of the Wartons, which I desire to bring out, is lost. The brothers began very early to devote themselves to the study of poetry, and in spite of the six years which divided them, they appear to have meditated in unison. Their writings bear a close resemblance to one another, and their merits and their failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventional reference to definite objects.

Above all they read the poets who were out of fashion, and no doubt the library of their father, the Professor of Poetry, was at their disposal from a very early hour. The result of their studies was a remarkable one, and the discovery was unquestionably first made by Joseph. He was, so far as we can gather, the earliest person in the modern world of Europe to observe what vain sacrifices had been made by the classicists, and in particular by the English classicists, and as he walked enthusiastically in the forest he formed a determination to reconquer the realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct became a purpose, we may say that the great Romantic Movement, such as it has enlarged and dwindled down to our own day, took its start. The Wartons were not men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose or verse, have not taken hold of the national memory. But the advance of a great army is not announced by a charge of field-marshals. In the present war, the advance of the enemy upon open cities has generally been announced by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heralds of the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the bicyclist-scouts who prophesied of an advance which was nearly fifty years delayed.

The general history of English literature in the eighteenth century offers us little opportunity for realising what the environment could be of two such lads as the Wartons, with their enthusiasm, their independence, and their revolutionary instinct. But I will take the year 1750, which is the year of Rousseau's first Discours and therefore the definite starting-point of European Romanticism. You will perhaps find it convenient to compare the situation of the Wartons with what is the situation to-day of some very modern or revolutionary young poet. In 1750, then, Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty-two. Pope had died six years before, and this was equivalent to the death of Swinburne in the experience of our young man of to-day. Addison's death was as distant as is from us that of Matthew Arnold; and Thomson, who had been dead two years, had left The Castle of Indolence as an equivalent to Mr. Hardy's Dynasts. All the leading writers of the age of Anne—except Young, who hardly belonged to it—were dead, but the Wartons were divided from them only as we are from those of the age of Victoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant from them than Swinburne is from us, but really a more just parallel is with Tennyson. The Wartons, wandering in their woodlands, were confronted with a problem such as would be involved, to a couple of youths to-day, in considering the reputation of Tennyson and Browning.

There remains no doubt in my mind, after a close examination of such documents as remain to us, that Joseph Warton, whose attitude has hitherto been strangely neglected, was in fact the active force in this remarkable revolt against existing conventions in the world of imaginative art. His six years of priority would naturally give him an advantage over his now better-known and more celebrated brother. Moreover, we have positive evidence of the firmness of his opinions at a time when his brother Thomas was still a child. The preface to Joseph's Odes of 1746 remains as a dated document, a manifesto, which admits of no question. But the most remarkable of his poems, "The Enthusiast," was stated to have been written in 1740, when he was eighteen and his brother only twelve years of age. It is, of course, possible that these verses, which bear no sign of juvenile mentality, were touched up at a later date. But this could only be a matter of diction, of revision, and we are bound to accept the definite and repeated statement of Joseph, that they were essentially composed in 1740. If we accept this as a fact, "The Enthusiast" is seen to be a document of extraordinary importance. I do not speak of the positive merit of the poem, which it would be easy to exaggerate. Gray, in a phrase which has been much discussed, dismissed the poetry of Joseph Warton by saying that he had "no choice at all." It is evident to me that Gray meant by this to stigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is jejune, verbose, and poor. He had little magic in writing; he fails to express himself with creative charm. But this is not what constitutes his interest for us, which is moreover obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian versification. What should arrest our attention is the fact that here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasised and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria. "The Enthusiast" is the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by Joseph Warton that it is extremely difficult to realise that he could not have come under the fascination of Rousseau, whose apprenticeship to love and idleness was now drawing to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not to write anything characteristic until ten years later.

But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them had vaguely occurred to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, all of whom received from Joseph Warton the ardent sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry held the same relation to the Wartons as the so-called Celtic Revival would to a young poet to-day; the Tea-Table Miscellany dates from 1724, and Allan Ramsay was to the author of "The Enthusiast" what Mr. Yeats is to us. But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed no system, they were accompanied by no principles of selection or rejection. These we find for the first time in Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the old formulas and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is very interesting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws of poetical practice is his solicitude for the sensations of the individual. These had been reduced to silence by the neo-classic school in its determination to insist on broad Palladian effects of light and line. The didactic and moral aim of the poets had broken the springs of lyrical expression, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, those indiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of a romantic spirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution, by reticence and vagueness.

It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly what the principles of the classic poetry had been. The time had passed when readers and writers in England gave much attention to the sources of the popular poetry of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and the vigorous Art poétique of Boileau, which had been eagerly studied at the close of the seventeenth century, was forgotten. Even the Prefaces of Dryden had ceased to be read, and the sources of authority were now the prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young readers these stood in the same relation as the writings of the post-Tennysonian critics stand now. To reject them, to question their authority, was like eschewing the essays of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In particular, the Essay on Criticism was still immensely admired and read; it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as the Studies in the Renaissance did from 1875 onwards. It was the last brilliant word on the aims and experiences of poetical art, and how brilliant it was can be judged by the pleasure with which we read it to-day, in spite of our total repudiation of every æsthetic dogma which it conveys. It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, and it stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring landmark. This was the apparently impregnable fortress which the Wartons had the temerity to bombard.

Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judgment, but what did he mean by nature? He had meant the "rules," which he declared were "Nature methodis'd" or, as we should say, systematised. The "rules" were the maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in a famous treatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite, "led"—as Pope says in one of those rare lines in which he catches, in spite of himself, the Romantic accent—"led by the light of the Mæonian Star." Aristotle illustrated by Homer—that was to be the standard of all poetic expression. But literature had wandered far from Homer, and we have to think of what rules the Essay on Criticism laid down. The poet was to be cautious, "to avoid extremes": he must be conventional, never "singular"; there was constant reference to "Wit," "Nature," and "The Muse," and these were convertible terms. A single instance is luminous. We have the positive authority of Warburton for saying that Pope regarded as the finest effort of his skill and art as a poet the insertion of the machinery of the Sylphs into the revised edition of The Rape of the Lock (1714). Now this insertion was ingenious, brilliant, and in strict accordance with the practice of Vida and of Boileau, both of whom it excelled. But the whole conception of it was as unlike that of Romanticism as possible.

In particular, the tendency of the classic school, in its later development, had been towards the exclusion of all but didactic and ethical considerations from treatment in verse. Pope had given great and ever-increasing emphasis to the importance of making "morals" prominent in poetry. All that he wrote after he retired to Twickenham, still a young man, in 1718, was essentially an attempt to gather together "moral wisdom" clothed in consummate language. He inculcated a moderation of feeling, a broad and general study of mankind, an acceptance of the benefits of civilisation, and a suppression of individuality. Even in so violent and so personal a work as the Dunciad he expends all the resources of his genius to make his anger seem moral and his indignation a public duty. This conception of the ethical responsibility of verse was universal, and even so late as 1745, long after the composition of Warton's "Enthusiast," we find Blacklock declaring, with general acceptance, that "poetical genius depends entirely on the quickness of moral feeling," and that not to "feel poetry" was the result of having "the affections and internal senses depraved by vice."

The most important innovation suggested by Joseph Warton was an outspoken assertion that this was by no means the object or the proper theme of poetry. His verses and those of his brother, the Essay on Pope of the elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger, may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence of moral or didactic sentiment. The instructive and ethical mannerisms of the later classicists had produced some beautiful and more accomplished verse, especially of a descriptive order, but its very essence had excluded self-revelation. Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but who was in several respects a better critic than either Addison or himself, had come close to the truth sometimes, but was for ever edged away from it by the intrusion of the moral consideration. Dennis feels things æsthetically, but he blunders into ethical definition. The result was that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of didactic reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects being the only relief, since

"who could take offence
While pure description held the place of sense?"

To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem is Joseph Warton's most remarkable innovation. The lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or rather its instinct for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is first foreshadowed in "The Enthusiast," and when the history of the school comes to be written there will be a piquancy in tracing an antinomianism down from the blameless Wartons to the hedonist essays of, Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less remarkable, or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism of the classical school. "Avoid extremes," Pope had said, and moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excitement had been laid down as capital injunctions. Joseph Warton's very title, "The Enthusiast," was a challenge, for "enthusiasm" was a term of reproach. He was himself a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course of some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks

"Thou didst seek
Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream
Or grove of fairy: then thy nightly ear,
As from the wild notes of some airy harp,
Thrilled with strange music."

The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged in Joseph's own earliest verses:—

"All beauteous Nature! by thy boundless charms
Oppress'd, O where shall I begin thy praise,
Where turn the ecstatic eye, how ease my breast
That pants with wild astonishment and love?"

The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from the "Nature methodis'd" of the Essay on Criticism. It is not to be distinguished from the object of pantheistic worship long afterwards to be celebrated in widely differing language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworth and Senancour, by Chateaubriand and Shelley.

Closely connected with this attitude towards physical nature is the determination to deepen the human interest in poetry, to concentrate individuality in passion. At the moment when the Wartons put forth their ideas, a change was taking place in English poetry, but not in the direction of earnest emotion. The instrument of verse had reached an extraordinary smoothness, and no instance of its capability could be more interesting than the poetry of Shenstone, with his perfect utterance of things essentially not worth saying. In the most important writers of that very exhausted moment, technical skill seems the only quality calling for remark, and when we have said all that sympathy can say for Whitehead and Akenside, the truth remains that the one is vapid, the other empty. The Wartons saw that more liberty of imagination was wanted, and that the Muse was not born to skim the meadows, in short low flights, like a wagtail. They used expressions which reveal their ambition. The poet was to be "bold, without confine," and "imagination's chartered libertine"; like a sort of Alastor, he was

"in venturous bark to ride
Down turbulent Delight's tempestuous tide."

These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but the aim of them is undeniable and noteworthy.

A passion for solitude always precedes the romantic obsession, and in examining the claim of the Wartons to be pioneers, we naturally look for this element. We find it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomas was only seventeen—the precocity of the brothers was remarkable—he wrote a "Pleasures of Melancholy," in which he expresses his wish to retire to "solemn glooms, congenial to the soul." In the early odes of his brother Joseph we find still more clearly indicated the intention to withdraw from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of the spirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of foreshadowing the theories of Rousseau, to which I have already referred, produces an effect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique in English literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to the sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothing had been suggested in the pure Romantic style.

In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the picturesque—the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of

"the pine-topped precipice
Abrupt and shaggy."

There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that

"God and Nature link'd the general frame,
And bade Self-love and Social be the same."

Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live

"With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt
The boar and tiger through savannahs wild,
Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves,"

indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principle in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the "little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale" in Pope's complacent Fourth Epistle, but an æolian harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude.

"Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd
To smoky cities."

Already the voice is that of Obermann, of René, of Byron.

Another point in which the recommendations of the Wartons far outran the mediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. To comprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse as Parnell's Hermit or Addison's Campaign could be regarded as satisfactory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we must realise the aim which those poets put before them. Nothing was to be mentioned by its technical—or even by its exact name; no clear picture was to be raised before the inner eye; nothing was to be left definite or vivid. We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose this conventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a still greater if we attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When Pope referred to the sudden advent of a heavy shower at a funeral in these terms—

"'Tis done, and nature's various charms decay;
See gloomy clouds obscure the cheerful day!
Now hung with pearls the dropping trees appear,
Their faded honours scatter'd on her bier,"

it was not because he had not the skill to come into closer touch with reality, but that he did not wish to do so. It had been plainly laid down by Malherbe and confirmed by Boileau that objects should be named in general, not in precise terms. We are really, in studying the descriptive parts of the Classicist poets, very close to the theories of Mallarmé and the Symbolists which occupied us twenty years ago. The object of the poet was not to present a vivid picture to the reader, but to start in him a state of mind.

We must recollect, in considering what may seem to us the sterility and stiffness of the English poets from 1660 to 1740, that they were addressing a public which, after the irregular violence and anarchical fancy of the middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn for regularity, common sense, and a moderation in relative variety. The simplest ideas should be chosen, and should depend for their poetical effect, not upon a redundant and gorgeous ornament, but solely upon elegance of language. There were certain references, certain channels of imagery, which were purely symbolical, and these could be defended only on the understanding that they produced on the mind of the reader, instantly and without effort, the illustrative effect required. For instance, with all these neo-classicists, the mythological allusions, which seem vapid and ridiculous to us, were simplified metaphor and a question of style. In short, it rested the jaded imagination of Europe, after Gongora and Marini, Donne and D'Aubigné, to sink back on a poetry which had taken a vow to remain scrupulous, elegant, and selected.

But the imagination of England was now beginning to be impatient of these bonds. It was getting tired of a rest-cure so prolonged. It asked for more colour, more exuberance, more precise reproduction of visual impressions. Thomson had summed up and had carried to greater lengths the instinct for scenery which had never entirely died out in England, except for a few years after the Restoration. It was left to Joseph Warton, however, to rebel against the whole mode in which the cabbage of landscape was shredded into the classical pot-au-feu. He proposes that, in place of the mention of "Idalia's groves," when Windsor Forest is intended, and of milk-white bulls sacrificed to Phoebus at Twickenham, the poets should boldly mention in their verses English "places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of druids, bards, and wizards," and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a model far superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude of his references to objects, and because of his more realistic appeal to the imagination. Description, Warton says, should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and allusive, but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He very pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of extraordinary cleverness—which was to be read, more than half a century later, even by Wordsworth, with pleasure—confines himself to rural beauty in general, and declines to call up before us the peculiar beauties which characterise the Forest of Windsor.

A specimen of Joseph Warton's descriptive poetry may here be given, not for its great inherent excellence, but because it shows his resistance to the obstinate classic mannerism:—

"Tell me the path, sweet wanderer, tell,
To thy unknown sequestered cell,
Where woodbines cluster round the door,
Where shells and moss o'erlay the floor,
And on whose top an hawthorn blows,
Amid whose thickly-woven boughs
Some nightingale still builds her nest,
Each evening warbling thee to rest;
Then lay me by the haunted stream,
Rapt in some wild poetic dream,
In converse while methinks I rove
With Spenser through a fairy grove."

To show how identical were the methods of the two brothers we may compare the foregoing lines with the following from Thomas Warton's "Ode on the Approach of Summer" (published when he was twenty-five, and possibly written much earlier):—

"His wattled cotes the shepherd plaits;
Beneath her elm the milkmaid chats;
The woodman, speeding home, awhile
Rests him at a shady stile;
Nor wants there fragrance to dispense
Refreshment o'er my soothèd sense;
Nor tangled woodbine's balmy bloom,
Nor grass besprent to breathe perfume,
Nor lurking wild-thyme's spicy sweet
To bathe in dew my roving feet;
Nor wants there note of Philomel,
Nor sound of distant-tinkling bell,
Nor lowings faint of herds remote,
Nor mastiff's bark from bosom'd cot;
Rustle the breezes lightly borne
O'er deep embattled ears of corn;
Round ancient elms, with humming noise,
Full loud the chafer-swarms rejoice."

The youthful poet is in full revolt against the law which forbade his elders to mention objects by their plain names. Here we notice at once, as we do in similar early effusions of both the Wartons, the direct influence of Milton's lyrics. To examine the effect of the rediscovery of Milton upon the poets of the middle of the eighteenth century would lead us too far from the special subject of our inquiry to-day. But it must be pointed out that L'Allegro and Il Penseroso had been entirely neglected, and practically unknown, until a date long after the rehabilitation of Paradise Lost. The date at which Handel set them to music, 1740, is that of the revived or discovered popularity of these two odes, which then began to be fashionable, at all events among the younger poets. They formed a bridge, which linked the new writers with the early seventeenth century across the Augustan Age, and their versification as well as their method of description were as much resisted by the traditional Classicists as they were attractive, and directly preferred above those of Pope, by the innovators. Joseph Warton, who attributed many of the faults of modern lyrical writing to the example of Petrarch, sets Milton vehemently over against him, and entreats the poets "to accustom themselves to contemplate fully every object before they attempt to describe it." They were above all to avoid nauseous repetition of commonplaces, and what Warton excellently calls "hereditary images."

We must not, however, confine ourselves to a consideration of "The Enthusiast" of 1740 and the preface to the Odes of 1746. Certain of the expressions, indeed, already quoted, are taken from the two very important critical works which the brothers published while they were still quite young. We must now turn particularly to Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius of Pope of 1756, and to Thomas Warton's Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754. Of these the former is the more important and the more readable. Joseph's Essay on Pope is an extraordinary production for the time at which it was produced. Let me suggest that we make a great mistake in treating the works of old writers as if they had been always written by old men. I am trying to present the Wartons to you as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic youths, flushed with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how poetry shall be produced as musicians make airs, by inspiration, not by rote. Remember that when they took their walks in the forest at Hackwood, the whole world of culture held that true genius had expired with Pope, and this view was oracularly supported by Warburton and such-like pundits. I have already pointed out to you that Pope was divided from them not more than Swinburne is divided from us. Conceive two very young men to-day putting their heads together to devise a scheme of poetry which should entirely supersede that, not of Swinburne only, but of Tennyson and Browning also, and you have the original attitude of the Wartons.

It is difficult for us to realise what was the nature of the spell which Pope threw over the literary conscience of the eighteenth century. Forty years after the revolt of the Wartons, Pope was still looked upon by the average critic as "the most distinguished and the most interesting Poet of the nation." Joseph Warton was styled "the Winton Pedant" for suggesting that Pope paid too dearly for his lucidity and lightness, and for desiring to break up with odes and sonnets the oratorical mould which gave a monotony of form to early eighteenth-century verse. His Essay on Pope, though written with such studied moderation that we may, in a hasty reading, regard it almost as a eulogy, was so shocking to the prejudices of the hour that it was received with universal disfavour, and twenty-six years passed before the author had the moral courage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated it to Young, who, alone of the Augustans, had admitted that charm in a melancholy solitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects, which was to be one of the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and who dimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be "the two chief nerves of all genuine poetry."

Warton's Essay on the Genius of Pope is not well arranged, and, in spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer much attraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one which is very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it was advanced. In the author's own words it was to prove that "a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet." The custom of critics had been to say that, when supported by a profound moral sense, they were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the overwhelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope had taken this position himself and, as life advanced, the well of pure poetry in him had dried up more and more completely, until it had turned into a sort of fountain of bright, dry sand, of which the Epilogue to the Satires, written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years of age, may be taken as the extreme instance. The young author of the Essay made the earliest attempt which any one made to put Pope in his right place, that is to say, not to deny him genius or to deprecate the extreme pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, by the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower rank than that of the supreme poets, with whom he was commonly paralleled when he was not preferred to them all.

Warton admitted but three supreme English poets—Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton—and he vehemently insisted that moral, didactic and panegyrical poetry could never rise above the second class in importance. To assert this was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy of Pope, but it was to flout the claims of all those others to whom the age gave allegiance. Joseph Warton does not shrink from doing this, and he gives reason for abating the claims of all the classic favourites—Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him that he showed arrogance in placing his opinion against that of a multitude of highly trained judges, he replied that a real "relish and enjoyment of poetry" is a rare quality, and "a creative and glowing imagination" possessed by few. When the dicta of Boileau were quoted against him, he repudiated their authority with scarcely less vivacity than Keats was to display half a century later.

Joseph Warton's Essay wanders about, and we may acknowledge ourselves more interested in the mental attitude which it displays than in the detail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on the value of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating a poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was so ready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal." We need not then be surprised when Joseph Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings of Pope approaches Eloisa to Abelard in the quality of being "truly poetical." He was perhaps led to some indulgence by the fact that this is the one composition in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics, but there was much more than that. So far as I am aware, Eloisa to Abelard had never taken a high place with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtless because of its obsession with horror and passion. But when we read how

"o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence and a dead repose,"

and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and powerful appeals which the poem makes to emotion unbridled by moral scruple, we have no difficulty in perceiving why Eloisa to Abelard exercised so powerful an attraction on Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, the licence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he rejoiced in finding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly, faithless to his formula. It is worth while to note that Joseph Warton's sympathy with the sentimental malady of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism permitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renaissance who recognised with pleasure the tumult of the Atys of Catullus and the febrile sensibility of Sappho.

Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination was what English poetry needed; that the lark had been shut up long enough in a gilded cage. We have a glimpse of Thomas Warton introducing the study of the great Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we see him crowned with laurel in the common-room of Trinity College at the age of nineteen. This was in the year before the death of Thomson. No doubt he was already preparing his Observations on the Faerie Queene, which came out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford before he was thirty. Both the brothers took great pleasure in the study of Spenser, and they both desired that the supernatural "machinery" of Ariosto, in common with the romance of The Faerie Queene, should be combined with a description of nature as untrimmed and unshackled as possible. Thomas Warton, in his remarkable Oxford poem, "The Painted Window," describes himself as

"A faithless truant to the classic page,
Long have I loved to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme,"

and again he says:—

"I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore
Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age,"

that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore."

After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is rather disappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian of literature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he followed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge. His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make too tiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brother in his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to call Romantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spoke of with respect. He warmly recommends the Morte d'Arthur, which had probably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions Ben Jonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "the charmed boats and the enchanted wharves," which sounds like a foretaste of Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." The public of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons, and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adult literature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mighty magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that epic poetry—and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser—would never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had been in vogue.

Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, and no other part of the Observations is so valuable as the pages in which those two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the former poet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently fantastic in the plot of the Orlando Furioso. On that point he says, "The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction and fable," but perhaps he did not observe that although there is no chivalry in The Schoolmistress, that accomplished piece was the indirect outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson were presently received. The earliest specimens of Ossian were revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence of any welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. The brothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation, and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters," the laugh was really at the expense of his school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom Collins seems to have owed his boyish inspiration, although he was by a few months the senior.

Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of the Wartons, though he held Thomas, at least, in great personal regard. He objected to the brothers that they "affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival," and his boutade about their own poetry is well known:—

"Phrase that time hath flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet."

This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson; there was a general tendency to resist the reintroduction into language and literature of words and forms which had been allowed to disappear. A generation later, a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being dismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our national vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries for glossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their own writings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one of the symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with the diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. Chatterton, who was not yet born when the Wartons formed and expressed their ideas, was to carry this instinct to a preposterous extreme in his Rowley forgeries, where he tries to obtain a mediæval colouring by transferring words out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without discerning the actual meaning of those words.

Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, to repeat their definition of poetry, but it cannot be said that either of them advanced. So far as Joseph is concerned, he seems early to have succumbed to the pressure of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he became head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In the head master of a great public school, reiterated murmurs against bondage to the Classical Greeks and Romans would have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was a man of the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he murmured, as disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, "Say, are the days of blest delusion fled?" Yet traces of the old fire were occasionally manifest; still each brother woke up at intervals to censure the criticism of those who did not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, and who made the mistake of putting "discernment" in the place of "enthusiasm." I hardly know why it gives me great pleasure to learn that "the manner in which the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion Service was remarkably awful," but it must be as an evidence that he carried a "Gothick" manner into daily life.

The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the Wartons, took its revenge upon Thomas in the form of a barren demon named Joseph Ritson, who addressed to him in 1782 what he aptly called A Familiar Letter. There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole history of literature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a hornet and the same insect's inability to produce honey of his own, was considered by the reactionaries to have "punched Tom Warton's historick body full of deadly holes." But his strictures were not really important. In marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made perhaps a couple of dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances these with a reiteration and a violence worthy of a maniac. Moreover, and this is the fate of angry pedants, he himself is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton when examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton of "never having consulted or even seen" the books he quotes from, and of intentionally swindling the public, was in private life a vegetarian who is said to have turned his orphan nephew on to the streets because he caught him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far and wide, for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself "that great luminary, or rather dark lantern of literature."

If we turn over Ritson's distasteful pages, it is only to obtain from them further proof of the perception of Warton's Romanticism by an adversary whom hatred made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the History of English Poetry for presuming to have "rescued from oblivion irregular beauties" of which no one desired to be reminded. He charges Warton with recommending the poetry of "our Pagan fathers" because it is untouched by Christianity, and of saying that "religion and poetry are incompatible." He accuses him of "constantly busying himself with passages which he does not understand, because they appeal to his ear or his fancy." "Old poetry," Ritson says to Warton, "is the same thing to you, sense or nonsense." He dwells on Warton's marked attraction to whatever is prodigious and impossible. The manner in which these accusations are made is insolent and detestable; but Ritson had penetration, and without knowing what he reached, in some of these diatribes he pierced to the heart of the Romanticist fallacy.

It is needful that I should bring these observations to a close. I hope I have made good my claim that it was the Wartons who introduced into the discussion of English poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use a metaphor of which both of them would have approved, that principle was to them like the mystical bowl of ichor, the ampolla, which Astolpho was expected to bring down from heaven in the Orlando Furioso. If I have given you an exaggerated idea of the extent to which they foresaw the momentous change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt by extracting a great number of slight and minute remarks, and by putting them together, the critic may produce an effect which is too emphatic. But you will be on your guard against such misdirection. It is enough for me if you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers, and I do not think that it can be contested.

Thomas Warton said, "I have rejected the ideas of men who are the most distinguished ornaments" of the history of English poetry, and he appealed against a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. The brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than in starting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pomps and prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, no store of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wide as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and vagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers, while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct was present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's Hero and Leander and failing to observe its beauties. We are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate. His brother Joseph felt the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attaining more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.

All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between 1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to make itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faint conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbé Du Bos had laid down in his celebrated Réflexions (1719) that the poet's art consists of making a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, and embellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and acted upon by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectful attention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is due to Joseph and Thomas Warton.

THE CHARM OF STERNE[5]

It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was born, at Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an English regiment just home from the Low Countries. "My birthday," Laurence Sterne tells us, "was ominous to my poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife and two children." The life of the new baby was one of perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, who had been an old campaigner, daughter of what her son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been the widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In the extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the regiment was hurried from place to place—as was that of the father of the infant Borrow a century later—and with it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne, for ever bearing and for ever losing children, "most rueful journeys," marked by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. Finally, at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the last, picked a quarrel about a goose and was pinked through the body, surviving in a thoroughly damaged condition, to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in barracks in Jamaica.

It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better calculated than this to encourage pathos in a humorist and fun in a sentimentalist. His account, in his brief autobiography, of the appearance and disappearance of his hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how early life appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of an April day. We read there of how at Wicklow "we lost poor Joram, a pretty boy"; how "Anne, that pretty blossom, fell in the barracks of Dublin"; how little Devijehar was "left behind" in Carrickfergus. We know not whether to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, I think, we have revealed to us the prime characteristic of Sterne, from which all his other characteristics branch away, for evil or for good. As no other writer since Shakespeare, and in a different and perhaps more intimate way than even Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that succeed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which succeeds the passion of tears. From early childhood, and all through youth and manhood, he had been collecting observations upon human nature in these rapidly alternating moods.

He observed it in its frailty, but being exquisitely frail himself, he was no satirist. A breath of real satire would blow down the whole delicate fabric of Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. Sterne pokes fun at people and things; he banters the extravagance of private humour; but it is always with a consciousness that he is himself more extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a moment with Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in a sermon; or with Smollett, who snarls and bites like an angry beast; we feel at once that Sterne could not breathe in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the other. Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His own ideal, surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic and gentle Yorick, who never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of old and young. "Labour stood still as he passed; the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had got out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a jest in his heart.

There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the intellectual development of Sterne, and I should like to dwell upon them for a moment, because I think a lack of recognition of them has been apt to darken critical counsel in the consideration of his writings. You will remember that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been a country parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that "cadaverous bale of goods," from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He had spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century were familiar to him and to him alone in England.

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in his brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with one another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed with the preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the annals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, and there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertained readers of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it is the source of considerable injustice done by modern criticism to the real merits of Sterne. When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much of Tristram Shandy as "a sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world," he hits the nail on the head of why so many readers nowadays turn with impatience from that work. But they should persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and gradually dropped the "uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched out of Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclusively on his own rich store of observations taken directly from human nature. In the adorable seventh volume of Tristram, and in The Sentimental Journey, there is nothing left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice of style.

The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of those events which must be continually regretted, because to the very end of his life he was growing in ease and ripeness, was discovering more perfect modes of self-expression, and was purging himself of his compromising intellectual frailties. It is true that from the very first his excellences were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which Hazlitt truly said is "one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature," occurs, or rather begins, in the second volume of Tristram Shandy. But the marvellous portraits which the early sections of that work contain are to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's determination to gain piquancy by applying old methods to new subjects. Frankly, much as I love Sterne, I find Kunastrockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspect they have driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoyment of Tristram Shandy.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading Dissenting minister, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in answer to a question: "Do I like Sterne? Yes, to be sure I should deserve to be hanged if I didn't!" That was the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultivation more than one hundred years ago. But it was their attitude only on some occasions. There is no record of the fact, but I am ready to believe that Mr. Fawcett may, with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a godless wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purse of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in a different mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel." No one else has ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternating powers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. He is attar of roses to-day and asafœtida to-morrow, and it is not by any means easy to define the elements which draw us towards him and away from him. Like Yorick, he had "a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously and impudently "in the naked temper which a merry heart discovered." As he "seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony, he had but too many temptations in life of scattering his wit and his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him."

So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have had manifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But lie was not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions to defend," but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristics he was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate his readers by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they were weeping, or put them out of countenance by ending a farcical story on a melancholy note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite sure of the tone of what they read; they wish an author to be straightforward; they dread irony and they loathe impishness. Now Sterne is the most impish of all imaginative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in describing the vagaries of the nursery, used to call "a limb of Satan." Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that "there's not so much difference between good and evil as the world is apt to imagine." No doubt that is so, but the world does not like its preachers to play fast and loose with moral definitions.

The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness, the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of the heaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even such masters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown in comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth century. Before the eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Hume against a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage out of Selden. Common justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept within formal lines until the sensitive recklessness of Sterne broke up the mould, and gave it the flying forms of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful inspiration to what Nietzsche calls his "squirrel-soul," which leaped from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of conventional restraint to every gust of emotion. Well might Goethe be inspired to declare that Sterne was the most emancipated spirit of his century.

His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's admirers nowadays are often divided in their allegiance to him. A frequent part of his humour deals very flippantly with subjects that are what we have been taught to consider indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than useless to try to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware of it and did it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross and carnal parts of a composition will go down." His indecency was objected to in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would like to call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views on this subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes of expression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex by our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still interested in these matters, but we have agreed not to joke about them. I read the other day a dictum of one of those young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen: he prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty years, be not merely reprehensible, as it is now, but unintelligible. Very proper, no doubt, only do not let us call this morality, it is only a change of habits.

Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at irrelevancy. It is part of his charm, and it is at the same time his most whimsical habit, never to proceed with his story when you expect him to do so, and to be reminded by his own divagations of delightful side-issues which lead you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going. He did not merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, but he sought them out and eagerly cultivated them. Remember that a whole chapter of Tristram is devoted to the attitude of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself to read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, plump little hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon every occasion. But this is what makes his books the best conversational writing in the English language. He writes for all the world exactly as though he were talking at his ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, idle, penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchalantly, with persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, the immortal figures of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more.

This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch to an end, is Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke up the rhetorical manner of composition, or, rather, he produced an alternative manner which was gradually accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you to read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked the way for Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how completely new that method of describing, of facing a literary problem, was in 1765. I speak here to an audience of experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to a close consideration of the workmanship of their métier. I ask them where, at all events in English, anything like that scene had been found before the days of Sterne. Since those days we have never been without it.

To trace the Shandean influence down English literature for the last century and a half would take me much too long for your patience. In Dickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is often present and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would have expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And coming down to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. The pathos of Sir James Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator of Uncle Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of all the books which Stevenson read it was not the Sentimental Journey which made the deepest impression upon him.

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary of Poe in this country, the fact of his having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers hoped that it might be overlooked, as without importance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, the statement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prose writer of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and not the verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centre of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it is illustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The Gold Bug," I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the best poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poetic artists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be for this reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves persistent commemoration.

The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenth century has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is only natural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objections so persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame of Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and it was encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivated minority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentials were grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest culture of his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are not quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of American letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it was ill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvation if it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the son of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians," settled in the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it now appears that he actually was a native, as it were by accident, of Boston itself. In the words of the Psalmist, "Lo! there was he born!" This Gentile poet, such was the then state of American literature, could not arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of Massachusetts. But that concession was not known to the high priests, the Lowells, the Holmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from Javan or Gadire.

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to find himself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislike by the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticism as well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron and his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworth and Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphatic approbation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of letters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behind the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later moment Rossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and even serenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good taste in America.

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected from a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P. Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of Europe, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able to enjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have been successfully annihilated.

Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that he should be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than the artistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie Stephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms of praise for Poe was "simply preposterous." And one whom I admire so implicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is not favourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularly valueless verses."

This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different attitude adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent English poets, as well as by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the whole younger school in France, was obstinately preserved, and has not wholly subsided. It would be a tactical mistake for those who wish to insist on Poe's supremacy in his own line to ignore the serious resistance which has been made to it. In the canonisation-trial of this whimsical saint, the Devil's advocates, it may be confessed, are many, and their objections are imposing. It is possible that local pique and a horror of certain crude surroundings may have had something to do with the original want of recognition in New England, but such sources of prejudice would be ephemeral. There remained, and has continued to remain, in the very essence of Poe's poetry, something which a great many sincere and penetrating lovers of verse cannot endure to admit as a dominant characteristic of the art.

To recognise the nature of this quality is to take the first step towards discovering the actual essence of Poe's genius. His detractors have said that his verses are "singularly valueless." It is therefore necessary to define what it is they mean by "value." If they mean an inculcation, in beautiful forms, of moral truth; if they mean a succession of ideas, clothed in exalted and yet definite language; if they are thinking of what stirs the heart in reading parts of Hamlet and Comus, of what keeps the pulse vibrating after the "Ode to Duty" has been recited; then the verses of Poe are indeed without value. A poet less gnomic than Poe, one from whom less, as they say in the suburbs, "can be learned," is scarcely to be found in the whole range of literature. His lack of curiosity about moral ideas is so complete that evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers than his are grown through the length and breadth of Parnassus. There is hardly a phrase in his collected writings which has a bearing upon any ethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth called "chains of valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere.

In 1840 they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to Emerson, to Hawthorne; and it is more than excusable that those who were endeavouring to refine the very crude community in the midst of which they were anxiously holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should see nothing to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then being issued by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What the New England critics wanted, patriotically as well as personally, was as little like "Ulalume" as can possibly be conceived. They defined what poetry should be—there was about that time a mania for defining poetry—and what their definition was may be seen no less plainly in the American Fable for Critics than in the preface to the English Philip van Artevelde. It was to be picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, above all, with moral "truths"; it was to avoid vagueness and to give no uncertain sound; it was to regard "passion" with alarm, as the siren which was bound sooner or later to fling a bard upon the rocks. It is not necessary to treat this conception of poetry with scorn, nor to reject principles of precise thought and clear, sober language, which had been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by Gray in the past. The ardent young critics of our own age, having thrown off all respect for the traditions of literature, speak and write as if to them, and them alone, had been divinely revealed the secrets of taste. They do not give themselves time to realise that in Apollo's house there are many mansions.

It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort of Poe's position resided in the fact that he was not admitted into so much as the forecourt of the particular mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell. There is a phrase in one of his own rather vague and "valueless" essays (for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were accidentally, describes his ideal in poetry, although it is not his own verse of which he is speaking. He described—in 1845, when his ripe genius had just brought forth "The Raven"—the poetic faculty as producing "a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight." This shadowy but absorbing and mastering pleasure impregnated his own best writings to such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlikeness to his contemporaries, and states the claim of his individuality. Without precisely knowing it or perceiving his revolution, in an age of intelligent, tame, lucid and cautiously-defined poetry, Edgar Poe expressed the emotions which surged within him in numbers that were, even to excess, "dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable."

His early verses are remarkably exempt from the influences which we might expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man of genuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his models were not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; they were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe found nothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among his Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which reveal to us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of his genius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen," which is said to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise his mature poems:—

"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

This was not published, however, until the author was two-and-twenty, and it may have been touched up. Here is a fragment of a suppressed poem, "Visit of the Dead," which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenth year:—

"The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token;
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!"

This is not so perfect, but it is even more than "To Helen" symptomatic of Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty as fostering a state of indefinite and indeed indefinable delight. And from these faint breathings how direct is the advance to such incomparable specimens of symbolic fancy as "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and finally "Ulalume"!

The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was protected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, by the possession of one or two signal gifts to which attention must now be paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, happily for us, in language so definite and pure that when he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an absence of all fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be paralleled in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645 volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occasionally, Collins in some of his shorter odes, have reached that perfection of syllabic sweetness, that clear sound of a wave breaking on the twilight sands, which Poe contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:—

"By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon,[6] nam'd Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime.
Out of space, out of time."

The present moment is one in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. He holds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, that Donne did to Spenser three hundred years ago. In this condition of things it may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground of the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover once more that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When that re-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of the most uniformly melodious of all those who have used the English language.

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosody have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks." On the other hand, if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearly seventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judged definite errors against taste in detail—Poe's taste was never very sure—but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal intervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with the personal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny its value.

It is not, however, in "The Bells" or in "The Raven," marvellous as are these tours de force, that we see the essential greatness of Poe revealed. The best of his poems are those in which he deals less boisterously with the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a technical point of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, which he wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect upon subsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are "Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," "For Annie." One of Poe's greatest inventions was the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould it to the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Many poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with the stanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain is practised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and elastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest revision, "For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all in the sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations of sentiment.

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim to commemoration is that he was the pioneer in restoring to the art of poetry a faculty which it had almost lost in its attempt to compete with science and philosophy. It had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay before those who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest modern poet who substituted the symbol for the exact description of an object or an event. That "expression directe," about which the French have been debating for the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphe Retté and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like Fathers of the Church, was perceived and was deliberately repudiated by Poe eighty years ago. He was deeply impregnated with the sense that the harmony of imagination is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over a subject veil after veil of suggestion. His native temperament aided him in his research after the symbol. He was naturally a cultivator of terror, one who loved to people the world with strange and indefinable powers. His dreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with supernatural terrors, weighed upon by the imminence of shadowy presentments. He trembled at he knew not what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of the world, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls the action of their alarms.

The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that he restored to poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisation seemed successfully to have deprived her. He rejected the doctrinal expression of positive things, and he insisted upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to clothe unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody that was like the wind wandering over the strings of an æolian harp. In other words, he was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to the confines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature. He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism.

1909.

THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM"

One hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since the birth of Bulwer-Lytton, and he continues to be suspended in a dim and ambiguous position in the history of our literature. He combined extraordinary qualities with fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, and failed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted from the main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes an important table-land elsewhere. Bulwer-Lytton never secured the ungrudging praise of the best judges, but he attained great popularity, and has even now not wholly lost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers, and yet he holds a place of his own from which it is improbable that he will ever be dislodged. Although he stood out prominently among his fellows, and although his career was tinged with scandal and even with romance, very little has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by the discretion of one party and the malignity of another. The public has not been in a position to know the truth, nor to possess the real portrait of a politician and a man of letters who has been presented as an angel and as a gargoyle, but never as a human being. Forty years after his death the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us at last in a memoir of unusual excellence.

In no case would Lord Lytton's task have been an easy one, but it must have been made peculiarly difficult by the work of those who had preceded him. Of these, the only one who deserves serious attention is Robert Lytton, who published certain fragments in 1883. That the son wished to support the memory of his father is unquestionable. But it is difficult to believe that he intended his contribution to be more than an aid to some future biographer's labour. He scattered his material about him in rough heaps. Apart from the "Literary Remains," which destroyed the continuity of even such brief biography as he gave, Robert Lytton introduced a number of chapters which are more or less of the nature of essays, and are often quite foreign to his theme. Moreover, he dedicated several chapters to literary criticism of his father's works. It is, in fact, obvious to any one who examines the two volumes of 1883 which Robert Lytton contrived to fill, that he was careful to contribute as little as he possibly could to the story which he had started out to relate. Although there is much that is interesting in the memoirs of 1883, the reader is continually losing the thread of the narrative. The reason is, no doubt, that Robert Lytton stood too close to his parents, had seen too much of their disputes, was too much torn by the agonies of his own stormy youth, and was too sensitively conscious of the scandal, to tell the story at all. We have the impression that, in order to forestall any other biography, he pretended himself to write a book which he was subtle enough to make unintelligible.

This baffling discretion, this feverish race from hiding-place to hiding-place, has not only not been repeated by Lord Lytton in the new Life, but the example of his father seems to have positively emphasised his own determination to be straightforward and lucid. I know no modern biography in which the writer has kept more rigidly to the business of his narrative, or has less successfully been decoyed aside by the sirens of family vanity. It must have been a great difficulty to the biographer to find his pathway cumbered by the volumes of 1883, set by his father as a plausible man-trap for future intruders. Lord Lytton, however, is the one person who is not an intruder, and he was the only possessor of the key which his father had so diplomatically hidden. His task, however, was further complicated by the circumstance that Bulwer-Lytton himself left in MS. an autobiography, dealing very fully with his own career and character up to the age of twenty-two. The redundancy of all the Lyttons is amazing. Bulwer-Lytton would not have been himself if he had not overflowed into reflections which swelled his valuable account of his childhood into monstrous proportions. Lord Lytton, who has a pretty humour, tells an anecdote which will be read with pleasure:—

"An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwer-Lytton's trusted domestic servants, is still living in a cottage at Knebworth. One day she was talking to me about my grandfather, and inadvertently used an expression which summed him up more perfectly than any elaborate description could have done. She was describing his house at Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker, and added: 'In one of his attacks of fluency, I nursed him there for many weeks.' 'Pleurisy,' I believe, was what she meant."

The bacillus of "fluency" interpenetrates the Autobiography, the letters, the documents of every kind, and at any moment this disease will darken Bulwer-Lytton's brightest hours. But curtailed by his grandson, and with its floral and heraldic ornaments well pared away, the Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It is written with deliberate candour, and recalls the manner of Cobbett, a writer with whom we should not expect to find Bulwer-Lytton in sympathy. It is probable that the author of it never saw himself nor those who surrounded him in precisely their true relation. There was something radically twisted in his image of life, which always seems to have passed through a refracting surface on its way to his vision. No doubt this is more or less true of all experience; no power has given us the gift "to see ourselves as others see us." But in the case of Bulwer-Lytton this refractive habit of his imagination produced a greater swerving aside from positive truth than is usual. The result is that an air of the fabulous, of the incredible, is given to his narratives, and often most unfairly.

A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography results in confirming the historic truth of it. What is surprising is not, when we come to consider them, the incidents themselves, but Bulwer-Lytton's odd way of narrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment, provides us with curious material for the verification of his grandfather's narrative. He prints, here and there, letters from entirely prosaic persons which tally, often to a surprising degree, with the extravagant statements of Bulwer-Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkable character, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholarship produced, at the age of seventeen, upon sober, elderly people, who were dazzled with his accomplishments and regarded him as a youthful prodigy. It is the sort of confession, rather full-blooded and lyrical, which we might easily set down to that phenomenon of refraction. But Lord Lytton prints a letter from Dr. Samuel Parr (whom, by the way, he calls "a man of sixty-four," but Parr, born in 1747, was seventy-four in 1821), which confirms the autobiographer's account in every particular. The aged Whig churchman, who boasted a wider knowledge of Greek literature than any other scholar of his day, and whose peremptory temper was matter of legend, could write to this Tory boy a long letter of enthusiastic criticism, and while assuring Bulwer-Lytton that he kept "all the letters with which you have honoured me," could add: "I am proud of such a correspondent; and, if we lived nearer to each other, I should expect to be very happy indeed in such a friend." Letters of this kind, judiciously printed by Lord Lytton in his notes, serve to call us back from the nebulous witchcraft in which Bulwer-Lytton was so fond of wrapping up the truth, and to remind us that, in spite of the necromancer, the truth is there.

From the point where the fragment of autobiography closes, although for some time much the same material is used and some of the same letters are quoted, as were quoted and used by Robert Lytton, the presentation of these is so different that the whole effect is practically one of novelty. But with the year 1826, when Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at the age of three-and-twenty, became engaged to Rosina Doyle Wheeler, all is positively new. The story of the marriage, separation, and subsequent relations has never before been presented to the world with any approach to accuracy or fulness. No biographical notices of Bulwer-Lytton even touch on this subject, which has been hitherto abandoned to the gossip of irresponsible contemporaries. It is true that a Miss Devey composed a "Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton," in which the tale was told. This work was immediately suppressed, and is inaccessible to the public; but the only person who is known to be familiar with its contents reports that it "contains fragments of the narrative, obviously biassed, wholly inaccurate, and evidently misleading." So far as the general public is concerned, Lord Lytton's impartial history of the relations between his grandfather and his grandmother is doubtless that portion of his book which will be regarded as the most important. I may, therefore, dwell briefly upon his treatment of it.

The biographer, in dealing with a subject of this incalculable difficulty, could but lay himself open to the censure of those who dislike the revelation of the truth on any disagreeable subject. This lion, however, stood in the middle of his path, and he had either to wrestle with it or to turn back. Lord Lytton says in his preface that it was necessary to tell all or nothing of the matrimonial adventures of his grandparents, but, in reality, this was not quite the alternative, which was to tell the truth or to withdraw from the task of writing a Life of Bulwer-Lytton. The marriage and its results were so predominant in the career of the man, and poisoned it so deeply to the latest hour of his consciousness, that to attempt a biography of him without clear reference to them would have been like telling the story of Nessus the Centaur without mentioning the poisoned arrow of Heracles. But Lord Lytton shall give his own apology:—

"As it was impossible to give a true picture of my grandfather without referring to events which overshadowed his whole life, and which were already partially known to the public, I decided to tell the whole story as fully and as accurately as possible, in the firm belief that the truth can damage neither the dead nor the living. The steps which led to the final separation between my grandparents, and the forces which brought about so disastrous a conclusion of a marriage of love, apart from their biographical interest, afford a study of human nature of the utmost value; and so great are the moral lessons which this story contains, that I venture to hope that the public may find in much that is tragic and pitiful much also that is redeeming, and that the ultimate verdict of posterity may be that these two unfortunate people did not suffer entirely in vain."

His story, therefore, is not written with any partiality, and it seems to be as full and as truthful as the ample materials at the author's disposal permitted. The reader will conjecture that Lord Lytton could have given many more details, but apart from the fact that they would often have been wholly unfit for publication, it is difficult to see that they would in any degree have altered the balance of the story, or modified our judgment, which is quite sufficiently enlightened by the copious letters on both sides which are now for the first time printed.

Voltaire has remarked of love that it is "de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu'elle attaque, à la fois, la tête, le cœur, le corps." It is a commonplace to say that Edward Bulwer's whole career might have been altered if he had never met Rosina Wheeler, because this is true in measure of every strong juvenile attachment: but it is rarely indeed so copiously or so fatally true as it was in his case. His existence was overwhelmed by this event; it was turned topsy-turvey, and it never regained its equilibrium. In this adventure all was exaggerated; there was excess of desire, excess of gratification, an intense weariness, a consuming hatred.

On the first evening when the lovers met, in April 1826, an observer, watching them as they talked, reflected that Bulwer's "bearing had that aristocratic something bordering on hauteur" which reminded the onlooker "of the passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thou!'" The same observer, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the loveliness of Miss Wheeler, judged that it would be best "to regard her as we do some beautiful caged wild creature of the woods—at a safe and secure distance." It would have preserved a chance of happiness for Bulwer-Lytton to possess something of this stranger's clairvoyance. It was not strange perhaps, but unfortunate, that he did not notice—or rather that he was not repelled by, for he did notice—the absence of moral delicacy in the beautiful creature, the radiant and seductive Lamia, who responded so instantly to his emotion. He, the most fastidious of men, was not offended by the vivacity of a young lady who called attention to the vulgarity of her father's worsted stockings and had none but words of abuse for her mother. These things, indeed, disconcerted the young aristocrat, but he put them down to a lack of training; he persuaded himself that these were superficial blemishes and could be remedied; and he resigned his senses to the intoxication of Rosina's beauty.

At first—and indeed to the last—she stimulated his energy and his intellect. His love and his hatred alike spurred him to action. In August 1826, in spite of the violent opposition of his mother, he and Rosina were betrothed. By October Mrs. Bulwer had so far prevailed that the engagement was broken off, and Edward tossed in a whirlpool of anger, love, and despair. It took the form of such an attack of "fluency" as was never seen before or after. Up to that time he had been an elegant although feverish idler. Now he plunged into a strenuous life of public and private engagements. He prepared to enter the House of Commons; he finished Falkland, his first novel; he started the composition of Pelham and of another "light prose work," which may have disappeared; he achieved a long narrative in verse, O'Neill, or the Rebel; and he involved himself in literary projects without bound and without end. The aim of all this energy was money. It is true that he had broken off his betrothal; but it was at first only a pretence at estrangement, to hoodwink his mother. He was convinced that he could not live without possessing Rosina, and as his mother held the strings of the common purse, he would earn his own income and support a wife.

Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, who had a Roman firmness, was absolutely determined that her son should not marry "a penniless girl whose education had been so flagrantly neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humour and a conspicuous lack of principle." At this point the story becomes exceedingly interesting. A Balzac would strip it of its romantic trappings, and would penetrate into its physiology. Out of Rosina's sight, and diverted by the excess of his literary labours, Edward's infatuation began to decline. His mother, whose power of character would have been really formidable if it had been enforced by sympathy or even by tact, relaxed her opposition; and instantly her son, himself, no longer attacked, became calmer and more clear-sighted. Rosina's faults were patent to his memory; the magic of her beauty less invincible. Within a month all was changed again. Rosina fretted herself into what she contrived to have reported to Bulwer-Lytton as an illness. She begged for an interview, and he went with reluctance to bid her farewell for ever. It was Bulwer-Lytton's habit to take with him a masterpiece of literature upon every journey. It seems unfortunate that on this occasion The Tempest was not his companion, for it might have warned him, as Prospero warned Ferdinand, against the fever in the blood:—

"No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it, both."

When his short interview, which was to have been a final one, was over, that had happened which made a speedy marriage necessary, whatever the consequences might be.

The new conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, but that formidable lady belonged to an earlier generation, and saw no reason for Quixotic behaviour. Her conscience had been trained in the eighteenth century, and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Torn between his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passed through a period of moral agony. He wrote to his mother: "I am far too wretched, and have had too severe a contest with myself, not to look to the future rather with despondency than pleasure, and the view you take of the matter is quite enough to embitter my peace of mind." Miss Wheeler, not unnaturally stung to anger, used disrespectful expressions regarding Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, and these bickerings filled the lover and son with indignation. His life, between these ladies, grew to be hardly worth living, and in the midst of one such crisis this brilliant young dandy of four-and-twenty wrote:—"I feel more broken-hearted, despondent, and sated than any old valetudinarian who has seen all his old hopes and friends drop off one by one, and finds himself left for the rest of his existence to the solitary possession of gloom and gout." Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward determined to close the matter; on August 29th, 1827, he married Rosina.

At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility of his mother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage of the mother drove the husband to the wife. Lord Lytton has noted that in later years all that his grandfather and his grandmother said about one another was unconsciously biassed by their memory of later complications. Neither Bulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history of their relations at the beginning, because the mind of each was prejudiced by their knowledge of the end. Each sought to justify the hatred which both had lived to feel, by representing the other as hateful from the first. But the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to prove that this was entirely untrue. It must be admitted that their union was never based upon esteem, but wholly upon passion, and that from the first they lacked that coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was needed to fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard how bitterly these two unfortunate people hated one another in later life will be astonished to learn that they spent the two first years together like infatuated turtle-doves.

Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from all support by the implacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, they depended on a combined income of £380 a year and whatever the husband could make to increase it. Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in Oxon, and lived at the rate of several thousands a year. There they basked in an affluent splendour of bad taste which reminds us of nothing in the world so much as of those portions of The Lady Flabella which Mrs. Wititterly was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. The following extract from one of Rosina's lively letters-and she was a very sprightly correspondent—gives an example of her style, of her husband's Pelhamish extravagance, and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner of life. They had now been married nearly two years:—

"How do you think my audacious husband has spent his time since he has been in town? Why, he must needs send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made up, four Gros des Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones, an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket handkerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies and air and brodée by the fairies, they are so exquisitely fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin, and six French long pellerines very richly embroidered on the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of figured plush—I forget what they call it (it came from Paris), and a hat of the same—such a hat as can only be made in the Rue Vivienne. You would think that this 'little Christmas box' would have been enough to have lasted for some time. However, he thought differently, for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious cross to it that I ever saw—the chain is as thick as my dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty guineas, but that he should think it had cost more."

Rosina, who has only £80 a year of her own, will not be outdone, and cannot "resist ordering" Edward "a gold toilette, which he has long wished for.... Round the rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I have ordered a wreath of narcissus in dead gold, which, for Mr. Pelham, you'll own, is not a bad idea."

It would be expected that all this crazy display would lead the young couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That it did not do so is the most curious phase of the story. Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently without the slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the sober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may be held to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did not know what failure was; he made money by Devereux; even The New Timon went into many editions. To earn what was required, however—and in these early years he seems to have made £3000 his minimum of needful return—to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree. His mother continued to exasperate him; his wife suddenly failed to please him; his health waned; and he became the most miserable of men; yet without ceasing for a moment to be the most indefatigable of authors. The reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is of poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of literature.

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious posthumous fortune that he has seemed solitary in his intellectual if not in his political and social action. We think of him as one of those morose and lonely bees that are too busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, with a painful craving for affection, he had not the genius of friendship. The general impression given by his biography is one of isolation; in "the sea of life" he was one of those who are most hopelessly "enisled." Nothing is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive temperament from those who surround it closely and to whom it stretches out its arms in vain. But a careful reading of these interesting volumes leaves us in no doubt of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton, with all his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural kindliness may take the place of comprehension. But Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean fancy which perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was always moving, but always on the wrong track.

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify this unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, for Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meant to be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and dignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the receiver. His dealings with his son, of whom he was exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are of the saddest character, because of the father's want of comprehension, haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact that a son, a wife, or a mother could with impunity be addressed in terms of exaggerated sensibility, because there could be no appeal, was a snare to the too-ready pen of Bulwer-Lytton, which, poured out its oceans of ink without reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence were given, the post went out again later in the day, and equally violent self-humiliation would restore the emotional balance. But what could not be restored was the sense of confidence and domestic security.

In his contact with other literary men of his own age more restraint was necessary, and we learn from Lord Lytton's pages of valuable and prolonged acquaintanceships which were sometimes almost friendships. His company was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd persons. Lord Lytton prints a series of most diverting letters from the notorious Harriette Wilson, who, in spite of the terror into which her "Memoirs" had thrown society, desired to add the author of Pelham to the aviary of her conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes of so shrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to see the lady, but he kept her amazing letters. This was in 1829, when the novelist seems to have had no literary or political associates. But by 1831, we find him editing the New Monthly Magazine, and attaching himself to Lord Melbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to Disraeli and Dickens on the other. When to these we have added Lady Blessington and Letitia Landon, we have mentioned all those public persons with whom Bulwer-Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during his early manhood. All through these years he was an incessant diner-out and party-goer, and the object of marvellous adulation, but he passed through all this social parade as though it had been a necessary portion of the exterior etiquette of life. Why he fatigued himself by these formal exercises, in which he seems to have found no pleasure, it is impossible to conceive, but a sense of the necessity of parade was strangely native to him.

He had, however, one close and constant friend. John Forster was by far the most intimate of all his associates throughout his career. Bulwer-Lytton seems to have met him first about 1834, when he was twenty-eight and Forster only twenty-two. In spite of this disparity in age, the younger man almost at once took a tone of authority such as the elder seldom permitted in an acquaintance. Forster had all the gifts which make a friend valuable. He was rich in sympathy and resource, his temper was reasonable, he comprehended a situation, he knew how to hold his own in argument and yet yield with grace. Lord Lytton prints a very interesting character-sketch of Forster, which he has found among his grandfather's MSS. It is a tribute which does equal credit to him who makes it and to him of whom it is made:—

"John Forster.... A most sterling man, with an intellect at once massive and delicate. Few, indeed, have his strong practical sense and sound judgment; fewer still unite with such qualities his exquisite appreciation of latent beauties in literary art. Hence, in ordinary life, there is no safer adviser about literary work, especially poetry; no more refined critic. A large heart naturally accompanies so masculine an understanding. He has the rare capacity for affection which embraces many friendships without loss of depth or warmth in one. Most of my literary contemporaries are his intimate companions, and their jealousies of each other do not diminish their trust in him. More than any living critic, he has served to establish reputations. Tennyson and Browning owed him much in their literary career. Me, I think, he served in that way less than any of his other friends. But, indeed, I know of no critic to whom I have been much indebted for any position I hold in literature. In more private matters I am greatly indebted to his counsels. His reading is extensive. What faults he has lie on the surface. He is sometimes bluff to rudeness. But all such faults of manner (and they are his only ones) are but trifling inequalities in a nature solid and valuable as a block of gold."

This was written with full experience, as the names of Tennyson and Browning will remind us, for Bulwer-Lytton was slow to admit the value of these younger talents. His relations with Tennyson have always been known to be unfortunate; as they are revealed in Lord Lytton's biography they approach the incredible. He met Browning at Covent Garden Theatre during the Macready "revival" of the poetic stage, but it was not until after the publication of Men and Women that he became conscious of Browning's claim, which he then very grudgingly admitted. He was grateful to Browning for his kindness to Robert Lytton in Italy, but he never understood his genius or his character.

What, however, we read with no less pleasure than surprise are the evidences of Bulwer-Lytton's interest in certain authors of a later generation, of whom the general public has never suspected him to have been aware. Something almost like friendship sprang up as lately as 1867 between him and a man whom nobody would suppose him to admire, Matthew Arnold. It sometimes happens that a sensitive and petulant artist finds it more easy to acknowledge the merits of his successors than to endure those of his immediate contemporaries. The Essays in Criticism and The Study of Celtic Literature called forth from the author of My Novel and The Caxtons such eulogy as had never been spared for the writings of Thackeray or Carlyle. Matthew Arnold appeared to Bulwer-Lytton to have "brought together all that is most modern in sentiment, with all that is most scholastic in thought and language." Arnold was a guest at Knebworth, and brought the Duke of Genoa with him. He liked Bulwer-Lytton, and their relations became very cordial and lasted for some years; Arnold has given an amusing, but very sympathetic, account of the dignified hospitalities of Knebworth.

No revelation in Lord Lytton's volumes is, however, more pleasing or more unexpected than his grandfather's correspondence with Swinburne. It is thought that he heard of him through Monckton Milnes; at all events, he was an early reader of Atalanta in Calydon. When, in 1866, all the furies of the Press fell shrieking on Poems and Ballads, Bulwer-Lytton took a very generous step. He wrote to Swinburne, expressing his sympathy and begging him to be calm. The young poet was extremely touched, and took occasion to beg the elder writer for his advice, the publisher having, without consulting him, withdrawn his volume from sale. Bulwer-Lytton's reply was a most cordial invitation to stay with him at Knebworth and talk the matter over. Swinburne gratefully accepted, and John Forster was asked to meet him. It was Bulwer-Lytton, it appears, who found another publisher for the outraged volume, and helped Swinburne out of the scrape. He was always kindness itself if an appeal was made to his protection, and to his sense of justice. However, pleasant as the visit to Knebworth was, there is no evidence that it was repeated. Bulwer-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869 he told his son Robert, that Victor Hugo was "but an epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism," there must have been wigs on the green at Knebworth.

The student of the biography, if he is already familiar with the more characteristic works of Bulwer-Lytton, will find himself for the first time provided with a key to much that has puzzled him in the nature of that author. The story itself, apart from the tragic matrimonial trouble which runs through it like a blood-red cord, is of unusual interest. It is a story of strife, without repose, without enjoyment, but with a good deal of splendour and satisfaction. Almost to the end Bulwer-Lytton was engaged in struggle. As an ambitious social being he was fighting the world; as an author he was battling with his critics; as a statesman he was always in the wild storm of party politics. As a private individual he was all the time keeping his head up against the tide of social scandal which attacked him when he least expected it, and often threatened to drown him altogether. This turmoil contrasts with the calm of the evening years, after the peerage had been won, the ambition satisfied, the literary reputation secured.

Few writers have encountered, in their own time and after their death, so much adverse criticism, and yet have partly survived it. It is hardly realised, even perhaps by Lord Lytton, how unwilling the reviewers were to give credit to his grandfather. He never found favour in their eyes, and it was a matter of constant resentment with him that they did him, as he thought, injustice. The evidence of his wounded feelings is constant in his letters. The Quarterly Review never mentioned him without contempt until 1865, when the publication of his works, in forty-three volumes, forced it to consider this indefatigable and popular writer with a measure of respect. Sir Walter Scott, with his universal geniality, read Pelham in 1828 and "found it very interesting: the light is easy and gentlemanlike, the dark very grand and sombrous." He asked who was the author, and he tried to interest his son-in-law in the novel. But Lockhart was implacable: "Pelham," he replied, "is writ by a Mr. Bulwer, a Norfolk squire, and horrid puppy. I have not read the book, from disliking the author." Lockhart, however, did read Devereux, and three years afterwards, when reviewing some other novel, he said of the historical characters in that romance: "It seems hard to disquiet so many bright spirits for the sole purpose of showing that they could be dull." That was the attitude of the higher criticism to Bulwer-Lytton from, let us say, 1830 to 1860; he was "a horrid puppy" and he was also "dull."

But this was far from being the opinion of the reading public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published The Last Days of Pompeii, again in 1837 when he published Ernest Maltravers, the ecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the mask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was just before the outburst of the great school of Victorian novelists; Bulwer had as yet practically no one but Disraeli to compete with. These two, the author of Pelham and the author of Vivian Grey, raced neck and neck at the head of the vast horde of "fashionable" novel-writers; now all but them forgotten. In Bulwer-Lytton's romances the reader moved among exalted personages, alternately flippant and sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm" was claimed for the writer by the readers of his day. It was the latest and most powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had been so shortlived in verse, but which was to survive in prose until Bulwer-Lytton adopted his Caxtons manner in the middle of the century. As always in Byronic periods, the portrait of the author himself was searched for among his most fatal conceptions. To the young library subscriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in The Disowned, was exactly what was wanted as a representation of the mysterious novelist himself. Pelham was the apotheosis of the man of fashion, and it is amusing to read how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they were gazed at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess.

It would be difficult to improve upon the language used so early as 1832 by one of the very few critics who attempted to do justice to Bulwer-Lytton's merits. The Edinburgh Review found in him "a style vigorous and pliable, sometimes strangely incorrect, but often rising into a touching eloquence." Ten years later such was the private opinion of D.G. Rossetti, who was "inspired by reading Rienzi and Ernest Maltravers, which is indeed a splendid work." Now that we look back at Bulwer-Lytton's prodigious compositions, we are able to perceive more justly than did the critics of his own day what his merits were. For one thing, he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books, we must be astonished at their variety. He painted the social life of his own day, he dived into spectral romance, he revived the beautiful ceremonies of antiquity, he evoked the great shades of English and of Continental history, he made realistic and humorous studies of middle-class life, he engaged in vehement controversy on topics of the hour, he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies and tragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His canvasses were myriad and he crowded every one of them with figures. At his most Byronic moment he flung his dark cloak aside, and danced in motley through Paul Clifford, with its outrageous caricature of George IV. and his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps his best claim to regard is the insatiability of his human curiosity, evinced in the almost infinite variety of his compositions.