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Among My Books

James Russell Lowell

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AMONG MY BOOKS

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by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

To R.W. EMERSON.

A love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened, though

priceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one capable of

inspiring them. Yet I cannot deny myself the pleasure of so far intruding

on your reserve as at least to make public acknowledgment of the debt I

can never repay.

CONTENTS.

DANTE

SPENSER

WORDSWORTH

MILTON

KEATS

DANTE.[1]

On the banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that it

seems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rains

with an Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shudders

under the impatient heap of waters behind it, stands a city which, in its

period of bloom not so large as Boston, may well rank next to Athens in

the history which teaches _come l' uom s' eterna_.

Originally only a convenient spot in the valley where the fairs of the

neighboring Etruscan city of Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from a

huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its

ancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, the

science, and the commerce[2] of modern Europe. For her Cimabue wrought,

who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling;

for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure with

it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellous

boy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure and

drapery were never beyond the reach of genius;[3] for her Brunelleschi

curved the dome which Michel Angelo hung in air on St. Peter's; for her

Giotto reared the bell-tower graceful as an Horatian ode in marble; and

the great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and culture called

her mother. There is no modern city about which cluster so many elevating

associations, none in which the past is so contemporary with us in

ads:

unchanged buildings and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante is

still shown; children still receive baptism at the font (_il mio bel San

Giovanni_) where he was christened before the acorn dropped that was to

grow into a keel for Columbus; and an inscribed stone marks the spot

where he used to sit and watch the slow blocks swing up to complete the

master-thought of Arnolfo. In the convent of St. Mark hard by lived and

labored Beato Angelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo,

who taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls Savonarola went forth to

his triumphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. The

plain little chamber of Michel Angelo seems still to expect his return;

his last sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the corner, and

his slippers wait before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills,

just without the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs that

Milton climbed to visit Galileo. To an American there is something

supremely impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full of

inspiration and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof that

moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins

behind it. Time, who with us obliterates the labor and often the names of

yesterday, seems here to have spared almost the prints of the _care

piante_ that shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor.

Around the courtyard of the great Museum of Florence stand statues of her

illustrious dead, her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors,

and statesmen; and as the traveller feels the ennobling lift of such

society, and reads the names or recognizes the features familiar to him

as his own threshold, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace here as

Notoriety everywhere else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the

privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose claim to

pre-eminence the whole world would concede. Among them is one figure

before which every scholar, every man who has been touched by the tragedy

of life, lingers with reverential pity. The haggard cheeks, the lips

clamped together in unfaltering resolve, the scars of lifelong battle,

and the brow whose sharp outline seems the monument of final victory,--

this, at least, is a face that needs no name beneath it. This is he who

among literary fames finds only two that for growth and immutability can

parallel his own. The suffrages of highest authority would now place him

second in that company where he with proud humility took the sixth

place.[4]

Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli Alighieri was born at

Florence in 1265, probably during the month of May.[5] This is the date

given by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he makes a blunder

in saying, _sedendo Urbano quarto nella cattedra di San Pietro_, for

Urban died in October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few of the

early manuscript copies of the _Divina Commedia_, would have him born

five years earlier, in 1260. According to Arrivabene,[6] Sansovino was

the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the authority of the poet

himself, basing his argument on the first verse of the _Inferno_,--

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita";

the average age of man having been declared by the Psalmist to be seventy

years, and the period of the poet's supposed vision being unequivocally

fixed at 1300.[7] Leonardo Aretino and Manetti add their testimony to

that of Boccaccio, and 1265 is now universally assumed as the true date.

Voltaire,[8] nevertheless, places the poet's birth in 1260, and jauntily

forgives Bayle (who, he says, _ecrivait a Rotterdam_ currente calamo

_pour son libraire_) for having been right, declaring that he esteems him

neither more nor less for having made a mistake of five years. Oddly

enough, Voltaire adopts this alleged blunder of five years on the next

page in saying that Dante died at the age of 56, though he still more

oddly omits the undisputed date of his death (1321), which would have

shown Bayle to be right. The poet's descent is said to have been derived

from a younger son of the great Roman family of the Frangipani, classed

by the popular rhyme with the Orsini and Colonna:--

"Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani,

Prendono oggi e pagano domani."

That his ancestors had been long established in Florence is an inference

from some expressions of the poet, and from their dwelling having been

situated in the more ancient part of the city. The most important fact of

the poet's genealogy is, that he was of mixed race, the Alighieri being

of Teutonic origin. Dante was born, as he himself tells us,[9] when the

sun was in the constellation Gemini, and it has been absurdly inferred,

from a passage in the _Inferno_,[10] that his horoscope was drawn and a

great destiny predicted for him by his teacher, Brunetto Latini. The

_Ottimo Comento_ tells us that the Twins are the house of Mercury, who

induces in men the faculty of writing, science, and of acquiring

knowledge. This is worth mentioning as characteristic of the age and of

Dante himself, with whom the influence of the stars took the place of the

old notion of destiny.[11] It is supposed, from a passage in Boccaccio's

life of Dante, that Alighiero the father was still living when the poet

was nine years old. If so, he must have died soon after, for Leonardo

Aretino, who wrote with original documents before him, tells us that

Dante lost his father while yet a child. This circumstance may have been

not without influence in muscularizing his nature to that character of

self-reliance which shows itself so constantly and sharply during his

after-life. His tutor was Brunetto Latini, a very superior man (for that

age), says Aretino parenthetically. Like Alexander Gill, he is now

remembered only as the schoolmaster of a great poet, and that he did his

duty well may be inferred from Dante's speaking of him gratefully as one

who by times "taught him how man eternizes himself." This, and what

Villani says of his refining the Tuscan idiom (for so we understand his

_farli scorti in bene parlare_),[12] are to be noted as of probable

influence on the career of his pupil. Of the order of Dante's studies

nothing can be certainly affirmed. His biographers send him to Bologna,

Padua, Paris, Naples, and even Oxford. All are doubtful, Paris and Oxford

most of all, and the dates utterly undeterminable. Yet all are possible,

nay, perhaps probable. Bologna and Padua we should be inclined to place

before his exile; Paris and Oxford, if at all, after it. If no argument

in favor of Paris is to be drawn from his _Pape Satan_[13] and the

corresponding _paix, paix, Sathan,_ in the autobiography of Cellini, nor

from the very definite allusion to Doctor Siger,[14] we may yet infer

from some passages in the _Commedia_ that his wanderings had extended

even farther;[15] for it would not be hard to show that his comparisons

and illustrations from outward things are almost invariably drawn from

actual eyesight. As to the nature of his studies, there can be no doubt

that he went through the _trivium_ (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the

_quadrivium_ (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) of the then

ordinary university course. To these he afterward added painting (or at

least drawing,--_designavo un angelo sopra certe tavolette_),[16]

theology, and medicine. He is said to have been the pupil of Cimabue, and

was certainly the friend of Giotto, the designs for some of whose frescos

at Assisi and elsewhere have been wrongly attributed to him, though we

may safely believe in his helpful comment and suggestion. To prove his

love of music, the episode of Casella were enough, even without

Boccaccio's testimony. The range of Dante's study and acquirement would

be encyclopedic in any age, but at that time it was literally possible to

master the _omne scibile_, and he seems to have accomplished it. How

lofty his theory of science was, is plain from this passage in the

_Convito_: "He is not to be called a true lover of wisdom (_filosofo_)

who loves it for the sake of gain, as do lawyers, physicians, and almost

all churchmen (_li religiosi_), who study, not in order to know, but to

acquire riches or advancement, and who would not persevere in study

should you give them what they desire to gain by it.... And it may be

said that (as true friendship between men consists in each wholly loving

the other) the true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom

every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and

allows no one of his thoughts to wander to other things."[17] The

_Convito_ gives us a glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle (whom

he calls the philosopher, the master) cited seventy-six times; Cicero,

eighteen; Albertus Magnus, seven; Boethius, six; Plato (at second-hand),

four; Aquinas, Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, Lucan, and Ovid, three

each; Virgil, Juvenal, Statius, Seneca, and Horace, twice each; and

Algazzali, Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and Homer (at

second-hand), once. Of Greek he seems to have understood little; of

Hebrew and Arabic, a few words. But it was not only in the closet and

from books that Dante received his education. He acquired, perhaps, the

better part of it in the streets of Florence, and later, in those

homeless wanderings which led him (as he says) wherever the Italian

tongue was spoken. His were the only open eyes of that century, and, as

nothing escaped them, so there is nothing that was not photographed upon

his sensitive brain, to be afterward fixed forever in the _Commedia_.

What Florence was during his youth and manhood, with its Guelphs and

Ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its

kaleidoscopic revolutions, "all parties loving liberty and doing their

best to destroy her," as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our province

to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as events are when we look back

on them across so many ages, only the upheavals of party conflict

catching the eye, while the spaces of peace between sink out of the view

of history, a whole century seems like a mere wild chaos. Yet during a

couple of such centuries the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and Siena got

built; Cimabue, Giotto, Arnolfo, the Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti

gave the impulse to modern art, or brought it in some of its branches to

its culminating point; modern literature took its rise; commerce became a

science, and the middle class came into being. It was a time of fierce

passions and sudden tragedies, of picturesque transitions and contrasts.

It found Dante, shaped him by every experience that life is capable

of,--rank, ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger,

dependence, despair,--until he became endowed with a sense of the

nothingness of this world's goods possible only to the rich, and a

knowledge of man possible only to the poor. The few well-ascertained

facts of Dante's life may be briefly stated. In 1274 occurred what we may

call his spiritual birth, the awakening in him of the imaginative

faculty, and of that profounder and more intense consciousness which

springs from the recognition of beauty through the antithesis of sex. It

was in that year that he first saw Beatrice Portinari. In 1289 he was

present at the battle of Campaldino, fighting on the side of the Guelphs,

who there utterly routed the Ghibellines, and where, he says

characteristically enough, "I was present, not a boy in arms, and where I

felt much fear, but in the end the greatest pleasure, from the various

changes of the fight."[18] In the same year he assisted at the siege and

capture of Caprona.[19] In 1290 died Beatrice, married to Simone dei

Bardi, precisely when is uncertain, but before 1287, as appears by a

mention of her in her father's will, bearing date January 15 of that

year. Dante's own marriage is assigned to various years, ranging from

1291 to 1294; but the earlier date seems the more probable, as he was the

father of seven children (the youngest, a daughter, named Beatrice) in

1301. His wife was Gemma dei Donati, and through her Dante, whose family,

though noble, was of the lesser nobility, became nearly connected with

Corso Donati, the head of a powerful clan of the _grandi_, or greater

nobles. In 1293 occurred what is called the revolution of Gian Della

Bella, in which the priors of the trades took the power into their own

hands, and made nobility a disqualification for office. A noble was

defined to be any one who counted a knight among his ancestors, and thus

the descendant of Cacciaguida was excluded.

Della Bella was exiled in 1295, but the nobles did not regain their

power. On the contrary, the citizens, having all their own way, proceeded

to quarrel among themselves, and subdivided into the _popolani grossi_

and _popolani minuti_, or greater and lesser trades,--a distinction of

gentility somewhat like that between wholesale and retail tradesmen. The

_grandi_ continuing turbulent, many of the lesser nobility, among them

Dante, drew over to the side of the citizens, and between 1297 and 1300

there is found inscribed in the book of the physicians and apothecaries,

_Dante d' Aldighiero, degli Aldighieri, poeta Fiorentino_[20] Professor

de Vericour[21] thinks it necessary to apologize for this lapse on the

part of the poet, and gravely bids us take courage, nor think that Dante

was ever an apothecary. In 1300 we find him elected one of the priors of

the city. In order to a perfect misunderstanding of everything connected

with the Florentine politics of this period, one has only to study the

various histories. The result is a spectrum on the mind's eye, which

looks definite and brilliant, but really hinders all accurate vision, as

if from too steady inspection of a Catharine-wheel in full whirl. A few

words, however, are necessary, if only to make the confusion palpable.

The rival German families of Welfs and Weiblingens had given their names,

softened into Guelfi and Ghibellini,--from which Gabriel Harvey[22]

ingeniously, but mistakenly, derives elves and goblins,--to two parties

in Northern Italy, representing respectively the adherents of the pope

and of the emperor, but serving very well as rallying-points in all

manner of intercalary and subsidiary quarrels. The nobles, especially the

greater ones,--perhaps from instinct, perhaps in part from hereditary

tradition, as being more or less Teutonic by descent,--were commonly

Ghibellines, or Imperialists; the bourgeoisie were very commonly Guelphs,

or supporters of the pope, partly from natural antipathy to the nobles,

and partly, perhaps, because they believed themselves to be espousing the

more purely Italian side. Sometimes, however, the party relation of

nobles and burghers to each other was reversed, but the names of Guelph

and Ghibelline always substantially represented the same things. The

family of Dante had been Guelphic, and we have seen him already as a

young man serving two campaigns against the other party. But no immediate

question as between pope and emperor seems then to have been pending; and

while there is no evidence that he was ever a mere partisan, the reverse

would be the inference from his habits and character. Just before his

assumption of the priorate, however, a new complication had arisen. A

family feud, beginning at the neighboring city of Pistoja, between the

Cancellieri Neri and Cancellieri Bianchi,[23] had extended to Florence,

where the Guelphs took the part of the Neri and the Ghibellines of the

Bianchi.[24] The city was instantly in a ferment of street brawls, as

actors in one of which some of the Medici are incidentally named,--the

first appearance of that family in history. Both parties appealed at

different times to the pope, who sent two ambassadors, first a bishop and

then a cardinal. Both pacificators soon flung out again in a rage, after

adding the new element of excommunication to the causes of confusion. It

was in the midst of these things that Dante became one of the six priors

(June, 1300),--an office which the Florentines had made bimestrial in its

tenure, in order apparently to secure at least six constitutional chances

of revolution in the year. He advised that the leaders of both parties

should be banished to the frontiers, which was forthwith done; the

ostracism including his relative Corso Donati among the Neri, and his

most intimate friend the poet Guido Cavalcanti among the Bianchi. They

were all permitted to return before long (but after Dante's term of

office was over), and came accordingly, bringing at least the Scriptural

allowance of "seven other" motives of mischief with them. Affairs getting

worse (1301), the Neri, with the connivance of the pope (Boniface VIII.),

entered into an arrangement with Charles of Valois, who was preparing an

expedition to Italy. Dante was meanwhile sent on an embassy to Rome

(September, 1301, according to Arrivabene,[25] but probably earlier) by

the Bianchi, who still retained all the offices at Florence. It is the

tradition that he said in setting forth: "If I go, who remains? and if I

stay, who goes?" Whether true or not, the story implies what was

certainly true, that the council and influence of Dante were of great

weight with the more moderate of both parties. On October 31, 1301,

Charles took possession of Florence in the interest of the Neri. Dante

being still at Rome (January 27, 1302), sentence of exile was pronounced

against him and others, with a heavy fine to be paid within two months;

if not paid, the entire confiscation of goods, and, whether paid or no,

exile; the charge against him being pecuniary malversation in office. The

fine not paid (as it could not be without admitting the justice of the

charges, which Dante scorned even to deny), in less than two months

(March 10, 1302) a second sentence was registered, by which he with

others was condemned to be burned alive if taken within the boundaries of

the republic.[26] From this time the life of Dante becomes semi-mythical,

and for nearly every date we are reduced to the "as they say" of

Herodotus. He became now necessarily identified with his fellow-exiles

(fragments of all parties united by common wrongs in a practical, if not

theoretic, Ghibellinism), and shared in their attempts to reinstate

themselves by force of arms. He was one of their council of twelve, but

withdrew from it on account of the unwisdom of their measures. Whether he

was present at their futile assault on Florence (July 22, 1304) is

doubtful, but probably he was not. From the _Ottimo Comento_, written at

least in part[27] by a contemporary as early as 1333, we learn that Dante

soon separated himself from his companions in misfortune with mutual

discontents and recriminations.[28] During the nineteen years of Dante's

exile, it would be hard to say where he was not. In certain districts of

Northern Italy there is scarce a village that has not its tradition of

him, its _sedia, rocca, spelonca,_ or _torre di Dante_; and what between

the patriotic complaisance of some biographers overwilling to gratify as

many provincial vanities as possible, and the pettishness of others

anxious only to snub them, the confusion becomes hopeless.[29] After his

banishment we find some definite trace of him first at Arezzo with

Uguccione della Faggiuola; then at Siena; then at Verona with the

Scaligeri. He himself says: "Through almost all parts where this language

[Italian] is spoken, a wanderer, wellnigh a beggar, I have gone, showing

against my will the wound of fortune. Truly I have been a vessel without

sail or rudder, driven to diverse ports, estuaries, and shores by that

hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty; and I have shown myself to the

eyes of many who perhaps, through some fame of me, had imagined me in

quite other guise, in whose view not only was my person debased, but

every work of mine, whether done or yet to do, became of less

account."[30] By the election of the emperor Henry VII. (of Luxemburg,

November, 1308), and the news of his proposed expedition into Italy, the

hopes of Dante were raised to the highest pitch. Henry entered Italy,

October, 1310, and received the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan, on the

day of Epiphany, 1311. His movements being slow, and his policy

undecided, Dante addressed him that famous letter, urging him to crush

first the "Hydra and Myrrha" Florence, as the root of all the evils of

Italy (April 16, 1311). To this year we must probably assign the new

decree by which the seigniory of Florence recalled a portion of the

exiles, excepting Dante, however, among others, by name.[31] The

undertaking of Henry, after an ill-directed dawdling of two years, at

last ended in his death at Buonconvento (August 24, 1313; Carlyle says

wrongly September); poisoned, it was said, in the sacramental bread, by a

Dominican friar, bribed thereto by Florence.[32] The story is doubtful,

the more as Dante nowhere alludes to it, as he certainly would have done

had he heard of it. According to Balbo, Dante spent the time from August,

1313, to November, 1314, in Pisa and Lucca, and then took refuge at

Verona, with Can Grande della Scala (whom Voltaire calls, drolly enough,

_le grand can de Verone_, as if he had been a Tartar), where he remained

till 1318. Foscolo with equal positiveness sends him, immediately after

the death of Henry, to Guido da Polenta[33] at Ravenna, and makes him

join Can Grande only after the latter became captain of the Ghibelline

league in December, 1318. In 1316 the government of Florence set forth a

new decree allowing the exiles to return on conditions of fine and

penance. Dante rejected the offer (by accepting which his guilt would

have been admitted), in a letter still hot, after these five centuries,

with indignant scorn. "Is this then the glorious return of Dante

Alighieri to his country after nearly three lustres of suffering and

exile? Did an innocence, patent to all, merit this?--this, the perpetual

sweat and toil of study? Far from a man, the housemate of philosophy, be

so rash and earthen hearted a humility as to allow himself to be offered

up bound like a school-boy or a criminal! Far from a man, the preacher of

justice, to pay those who have done him wrong as for a favor! This is not

the way of retaining to my country; but if another can be found that

shall not derogate from the fame and honor of Dante, that I will enter on

with no lagging steps. For if by none such Florence may be entered, by me

then never! Can I not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and stars?

speculate on sweetest truths under any sky without first giving myself up

inglorious, nay, ignominious, to the populace and city of Florence? Nor

shall I want for bread." Dionisi puts the date of this letter in

1315.[34] He is certainly wrong, for the decree is dated December 11,

1316. Foscolo places it in 1316, Troya early in 1317, and both may be

right, as the year began March 25. Whatever the date of Dante's visit to

Voltaire's great Khan[35] of Verona, or the length of his stay with him,

may have been, it is certain that he was in Ravenna in 1320, and that, on

his return thither from an embassy to Venice (concerning which a curious

letter, forged probably by Doni, is extant), he died on September 14,

1321 (13th, according to others). He was buried at Ravenna under a

monument built by his friend, Guido Novello.[36] Dante is said to have

dictated the following inscription for it on his death-bed:--

JVRA MONARCHIAE SVPEROS PHLEGETHONTA LACVSQVE

LVSTRANDO CECINI VOLVERVNT FATA QVOVSQVE

SED QVIA PARS CESSIT MELIORIBVS HOSPITA CASTRIS

AVCTOREMQVE SVVM PETIIT FELICIOR ASTRIS

HIC CLAVDOR DANTES PATRIIS EXTORRIS AB ORIS

QVEM GENVIT PARVI FLORENTIA MATER AMORIS.

Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a translation:--

The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire, the Pit,

In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit;

But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,

And, happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars,

Here am I Dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore,

Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.[37]

If these be not the words of Dante, what is internal evidence worth? The

indomitably self-reliant man, loyal first of all to his most unpopular

convictions (his very host, Guido, being a Guelph), puts his Ghibellinism

(_jura monarchiae_) in the front. The man whose whole life, like that of

selected souls always, had been a war fare, calls heaven another camp,--a

better one, thank God! The wanderer of so many years speaks of his soul

as a guest,--glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharpest

reproaches of Florence are always those of an outraged lover, finds it

bitter that even his unconscious bones should lie in alien soil.

Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a contemporary, thus

sketches him: "This man was a great scholar in almost every science,

though a layman; was a most excellent poet, philosopher, and rhetorician;

perfect, as well in composing and versifying as in haranguing; a most

noble speaker.... This Dante, on account of his learning, was a little

haughty, and shy, and disdainful, and like a philosopher almost

ungracious, knew not well how to deal with unlettered folk." Benvenuto da

Imola tells us that he was very abstracted, as we may well believe of a

man who carried the _Commedia_ in his brain. Boccaccio paints him in this

wise: "Our poet was of middle height; his face was long, his nose

aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip protruding somewhat beyond the

upper; a little stooping in the shoulders; his eyes rather large than

small; dark of complexion; his hair and beard thick, crisp, and black;

and his countenance always sad and thoughtful. His garments were always

dignified; the style such as suited ripeness of years; his gait was grave

and gentlemanlike; and his bearing, whether public or private,

wonderfully composed and polished. In meat and drink he was most

temperate, nor was ever any more zealous in study or whatever other

pursuit. Seldom spake he, save when spoken to, though a most eloquent

person. In his youth he delighted especially in music and singing, and

was intimate with almost all the singers and musicians of his day. He was

much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few, and most assiduous in

study as far as he could find time for it. Dante was also of marvellous

capacity and the most tenacious memory." Various anecdotes of him are

related by Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and others, none of them verisimilar,

and some of them at least fifteen centuries old when revamped. Most of

them are neither _veri_ nor _ben trovati_. One clear glimpse we get of

him from the _Ottimo Comento_, the author of which says:[38] "I, the

writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than

he would, but that many a time and oft (_molte e spesse volte_) he had

made words say for him what they were not wont to express for other

poets." That is the only sincere glimpse we get of the living, breathing,

word-compelling Dante.

Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to have been an utter and

disastrous failure. What its inward satisfactions must have been, we,

with the _Paradiso_ open before us, can form some faint conception. To

him, longing with an intensity which only the word _Dantesque_ will

express to realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled and

misunderstood, the far greater part of his mature life must have been

labor and sorrow. We can see how essential all that sad experience was to

him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide the luck in the ugly

black casket; but to him, then and there, how seemed it?

Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee,

Beloved most dearly; this that arrow is

Shot from the bow of exile first of all;

And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath

The bread of others, and how hard a path

To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs![39]

_Come sa di sale!_ Who never wet his bread with tears, says Goethe, knows

ye not, ye heavenly powers! Our nineteenth century made an idol of the

noble lord who broke his heart in verse once every six months, but the

fourteenth was lucky enough to produce and not to make an idol of that

rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who could hold heartbreak at

bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die till he had done his

task. At the end of the _Vita Nuova_, his first work, Dante wrote down

that remarkable aspiration that God would take him to himself after he

had written of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of woman.

It was literally fulfilled when the _Commedia_ was finished twenty-five

years later. Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy felt

instinctively that this was her great man. Boccaccio tells us that in

1329[40] Cardinal Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise _De

Monarchia_, to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to dig

up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been a heretic;

but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this

was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the reproof of

whose simony Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat

vacant,[41] whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy,[42] and

against whose election he had endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a

vehement letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the sum of ten

golden florins to be paid by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to

Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at

Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, and begged in vain for the

metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had threatened to make literal

cinders if she could catch him alive. In 1429[43] she begged again, but

Ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michel

Angelo would have built the monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the

sacred dust to be removed. Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years

after the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly built in Santa

Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the usual lot of such, with three

colossal figures on it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and

Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built originally in 1483, by

Cardinal Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, and finally

rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of

whom commemorated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a little shrine

covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, and is

now the chief magnet which draws foreigners and their gold to Ravenna.

The _valet de place_ says that Dante is not buried under it, but beneath

the pavement of the street in front of it, where also, he says, he saw my

Lord Byron kneel and weep. Like everything in Ravenna, it is dirty and

neglected.

In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair of the _Divina Commedia_,

and Boccaccio was named first professor. He accordingly began his

lectures on Sunday, October 3, following, but his comment was broken off

abruptly at the 17th verse of the 17th canto of the _Inferno_ by the

illness which ended in his death, December 21, 1375. Among his successors

were Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bologna was the first to follow the

example of Florence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his lectures,

according to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375. Chairs were established also

at Pisa, Venice, Piacenza, and Milan before the close of the century. The

lectures were delivered in the churches and on feast-days, which shows

their popular character. Balbo reckons (but this is guess-work) that the

MS. copies of the _Divina Commedia_ made during the fourteenth century,

and now existing in the libraries of Europe, are more numerous than those

of all other works, ancient and modern, made during the same period.

Between the invention of printing and the year 1500 more than twenty

editions were published in Italy, the earliest in 1472. During the

sixteenth century there were forty editions; during the seventeenth,--a

period, for Italy, of sceptical dilettanteism,--only three; during the

eighteenth, thirty-four; and already, during the first half of the

nineteenth, at least eighty. The first translation was into Spanish, in

1428.[44] M. St. Rene Taillandier says that the _Commedia_ was condemned

by the inquisition in Spain; but this seems too general a statement, for,

according to Foscolo,[45] it was the commentary of Landino and

Vellutello, and a few verses in the _Inferno_ and _Paradiso_, which were

condemned. The first French translation was that of Grangier, 1596, but

the study of Dante struck no root there till the present century.

Rivarol, who translated the _Inferno_ in 1783, was the first Frenchman

who divined the wonderful force and vitality of the _Commedia_.[46] The

expressions of Voltaire represent very well the average opinion of

cultivated persons in respect of Dante in the middle of the eighteenth

century. He says: "The Italians call him divine; but it is a hidden

divinity; few people understand his oracles. He has commentators, which,

perhaps, is another reason for his not being understood. His reputation

will go on increasing, because scarce anybody reads him."[47] To Father

Bettinelli he writes: "I estimate highly the courage with which you have

dared to say that Dante was a madman and his work a monster." But he

adds, what shows that Dante had his admirers even in that flippant

century: "There are found among us, and in the eighteenth century, people

who strive to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant and

barbarous."[48] Elsewhere he says that the _Commedia_ was "an odd poem,

but gleaming with natural beauties, a work in which the author rose in

parts above the bad taste of his age and his subject, and full of

passages written as purely as if they had been of the time of Ariosto and

Tasso."[49] It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination which

Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to his own.

At the beginning of this century Chateaubriand speaks of Dante with vague

commendation, evidently from a very superficial acquaintance, and that

only with the _Inferno_, probably from Rivarol's version.[50] Since then

there have been four or five French versions in prose or verse, including

one by Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not condescend to the

conventional elegance which makes the charm of French, and the most

virile of poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most feminine of

languages. Yet in the works of Fauriel, Ozanam, Ampere, and Villemain,

France has given a greater impulse to the study of Dante than any other

country except Germany. Into Germany the _Commedia_ penetrated later. How

utterly Dante was unknown there in the sixteenth century is plain from a

passage in the "Vanity of the Arts and Sciences" of Cornelius Agrippa,

where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories: "There

have been many of these historical pandars, of which some of obscure

fame, as Aeneas Sylvius, Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus,"

etc.[51] The first German translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809).

Versions by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (late king) of Saxony

followed. Goethe seems never to have given that attention to Dante which

his ever-alert intelligence might have been expected to bestow on so

imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. Unless the conclusion of the

second part of "Faust" be an inspiration of the _Paradiso_, we remember

no adequate word from him on this theme. His remarks on one of the German

translations are brief, dry, and without that breadth which comes only of

thorough knowledge and sympathy. But German scholarship and constructive

criticism, through Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been of

pre-eminent service in deepening the understanding and facilitating the

study of the poet. In England the first recognition of Dante is by

Chaucer in the "Hugelin of Pisa" of the "Monkes Tale,"[52] and an

imitation of the opening verses of the third canto of the _Inferno_

("Assembly of Foules"). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop of Fermo,

completed a Latin prose translation of the _Commedia_, a copy of which,

as he made it at the request of two English bishops whom he met at the

council of Constance, was doubtless sent to England. Later we find Dante

now and then mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only,[53] till the

time of Spenser, who, like Milton fifty years later, shows that he had

read his works closely. Thenceforward for more than a century Dante

became a mere name, used without meaning by literary sciolists. Lord

Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, and Dr. Drake in his "Literary Hours"[54]

could speak of Darwin's "Botanic Garden" as showing the "wild and

terrible sublimity of Dante"! The first complete English translation was

by Boyd,--of the _Inferno_ in 1785, of the whole poem in 1802. There have

been eight other complete translations, beginning with Cary's in 1814,

six since 1850, beside several of the _Inferno_ singly. Of these that of

Longfellow is the best. It is only within the last twenty years, however,

that the study of Dante, in any true sense, became at all general. Even

Coleridge seems to have been familiar only with the _Inferno_. In America

Professor Ticknor was the first to devote a special course of

illustrative lectures to Dante; he was followed by Longfellow, whose

lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with

grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full

significance of the great Christian poet. A translation of the _Inferno_

into quatrains by T.W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit,

faithfulness, and elegance. In Denmark and Russia translations of the

_Inferno_ have been published, beside separate volumes of comment and

illustration. We have thus sketched the steady growth of Dante's fame and

influence to a universality unparalleled except in the case of

Shakespeare, perhaps more remarkable if we consider the abstruse and

mystical nature of his poetry. It is to be noted as characteristic that

the veneration of Dantophilists for their master is that of disciples for

their saint. Perhaps no other man could have called forth such an

expression as that of Ruskin, that "the central man of all the world, as

representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual

faculties, all at their highest, is Dante."

The first remark to be made upon the writings of Dante is that they are

all (with the possible exception of the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_)

autobiographic, and that all of them, including that, are parts of a

mutually related system, of which the central point is the individuality

and experience of the poet. In the _Vita Nuova_ he recounts the story of

his love for Beatrice Portinari, showing how his grief for her loss

turned his thoughts first inward upon his own consciousness, and, failing

all help there, gradually upward through philosophy to religion, and so

from a world of shadows to one of eternal substances. It traces with

exquisite unconsciousness the gradual but certain steps by which memory

and imagination transubstantiated the woman of flesh and blood into a

holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of sorrow and hope that faith

which is the instinctive refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of God

which higher natures learn to find in the trial which passeth all

understanding, and that perfect womanhood, the dream of youth and the

memory of maturity, which beckons toward the forever unattainable. As a

contribution to the physiology of genius, no other book is to be compared

with the _Vita Nuova_. It is more important to the understanding of Dante

as a poet than any other of his works. It shows him (and that in the

midst of affairs demanding practical ability and presence of mind)

capable of a depth of contemplative abstraction, equalling that of a

Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in some

sort to see how, from being the slave of his imaginative faculty, he rose

by self-culture and force of will to that mastery of it which is art. We

comprehend the _Commedia_ better when we know that Dante could be an

active, clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same time. Various

dates have been assigned to the composition of the _Vita Nuova_. The

earliest limit is fixed by the death of Beatrice in 1290 (though some of

the poems are of even earlier date), and the book is commonly assumed to

have been finished by 1295; Foscolo says 1294. But Professor Karl Witte,

a high authority, extends the term as far as 1300.[55] The title of the

book also, _Vita Nuova_, has been diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who

published an English version of it at Florence in 1846, entitles it the

"Early Life of Dante." Balbo understands it in the same way.[56] But we

are strongly of the opinion that "New Life" is the interpretation

sustained by the entire significance of the book itself.

His next work in order of date is the treatise _De Monarchia_. It has

been generally taken for granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics up

to the time of his banishment, and that out of resentment he then became

a violent Ghibelline. Not to speak of the consideration that there is no

author whose life and works present so remarkable a unity and logical

sequence as those of Dante, Professor Witte has drawn attention to a fact

which alone is enough to demonstrate that the _De Monarchia_ was written

before 1300. That and the _Vita Nuova_ are the only works of Dante in

which no allusion whatever is made to his exile. That bitter thought was

continually present to him. In the _Convito_ it betrays itself often, and

with touching unexpectedness. Even in the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_,

he takes as one of his examples of style: "I have most pity for those,

whosoever they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their country

only in dreams." We have seen that the one decisive act of Dante's

priorate was to expel from Florence the chiefs of both parties as the

sowers of strife, and he tells us (_Paradiso_, XVII.) that he had formed

a party by himself. The king of Saxony has well defined his political

theory as being "an ideal Ghibellinism"[57] and he has been accused of

want of patriotism only by those short-sighted persons who cannot see

beyond their own parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of the same

kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus had done before) to confound

license with liberty. The argument of the _De Monarchia_ is briefly this:

As the object of the individual man is the highest development of his

faculties, so is it also with men united in societies. But the individual

can only attain the highest development when all his powers are in

absolute subjection to the intellect, and society only when it subjects

its individual caprices to an intelligent head. This is the order of

nature, as in families, and men have followed it in the organization of

villages, towns, cities. Again, since God made man in his own image, men

and societies most nearly resemble him in proportion as they approach

unity. But as in all societies questions must arise, so there is need of

a monarch for supreme arbiter. And only a universal monarch can be

impartial enough for this, since kings of limited territories would

always be liable to the temptation of private ends. With the internal

policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and kingdoms, the monarch would

have nothing to do, only interfering when there was danger of an

infraction of the general peace. This is the doctrine of the first book,

enforced sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with great fertility

of illustration. It is an enlargement of some of the _obiter dicta_ of

the _Convito_. The earnestness with which peace is insisted on as a

necessary postulate of civic well-being shows what the experience had

been out of which Dante had constructed his theory. It is to be looked on

as a purely scholastic demonstration of a speculative thesis, in which

the manifold exceptions and modifications essential in practical

application are necessarily left aside. Dante almost forestalls the

famous proposition of Calvin, "that it is possible to conceive a people

without a prince, but not a prince without a people," when he says, _Non

enim gens propter regem, sed e converso rex propter gentem_.[58] And in

his letter to the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming of Henry

VII., he bids them "obey their prince, but so as freemen preserving their

own constitutional forms." He says also expressly: _Animadvertendum sane,

quod cum dicitur humanum genus potest regi per unum supremum principem,

non sic intelligendum est ut ab illo uno prodire possint municipia et

leges municipales. Habent namque nationes, regna, et civitates inter se

proprietates quas legibus differentibus regulari oportet_. Schlosser the

historian compares Dante's system with that of the United States.[59] It

in some respects resembled more the constitution of the Netherlands under

the supreme stadtholder, but parallels between ideal and actual

institutions are always unsatisfactory.[60]

The second book is very curious. In it Dante endeavors to demonstrate the

divine right of the Roman Empire to universal sovereignty. One of his

arguments is, that Christ consented to be born under the reign of

Augustus; another, that he assented to the imperial jurisdiction in

allowing himself to be crucified under a decree of one of its courts. The

atonement could not have been accomplished unless Christ suffered under

sentence of a court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his condemnation

would have been an injustice and not a penalty. Moreover, since all

mankind was typified in the person of Christ, the court must have been

one having jurisdiction over all mankind; and since he was delivered to

Pilate, an officer of Tiberius, it must follow that the jurisdiction of

Tiberius was universal. He draws an argument also from the wager of

battle to prove that the Roman Empire was divinely permitted, at least,

if not instituted. For since it is admitted that God gives the victory,

and since the Romans always won it, therefore it was God's will that the

Romans should attain universal empire. In the third book he endeavors to

prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and not by permission of

the pope. He assigns supremacy to the pope in spirituals, and to the

emperor in temporals. This was a delicate subject, and though the king of

Saxony (a Catholic) says that Dante did not overstep the limits of

orthodoxy, it was on account of this part of the book that it was

condemned as heretical.[61]

Next follows the treatise _De Vulgari Eloquio_. Though we have doubts

whether we possess this book as Dante wrote it, inclining rather to think

that it is a copy in some parts textually exact, in others an abstract,

there can be no question either of its great glossological value or that

it conveys the opinions of Dante. We put it next in order, though written

later than the _Convito_, only because, like the _De Monarchia_, it is

written in Latin. It is a proof of the national instinct of Dante, and of

his confidence in his genius, that he should have chosen to write all his

greatest works in what was deemed by scholars a _patois_, but which he

more than any other man made a classic language. Had he intended the _De

Monarchia_ for a political pamphlet, he would certainly not have composed

it in the dialect of the few. The _De Vulgari Eloquio_ was to have been

in four books. Whether it was ever finished or not it is impossible to

say; but only two books have come down to us. It treats of poetizing in

the vulgar tongue, and of the different dialects of Italy. From the

particularity with which it treats of the dialect of Bologna, it has been

supposed to have been written in that city, or at least to furnish an

argument in favor of Dante's having at some time studied there. In Lib.

II. Cap. II., is a remarkable passage in which, defining the various

subjects of song and what had been treated in the vulgar tongue by

different poets, he says that his own theme had been righteousness.

The _Convito_ is also imperfect. It was to have consisted of fourteen

treatises, but, as we have it, contains only four. In the first he

justifies the use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the Latin. In the

other three he comments on three of his own _Canzoni_. It will be

impossible to give an adequate analysis of this work in the limits

allowed us.[62] It is an epitome of the learning of that age,

philosophical, theological, and scientific. As affording illustration of

the _Commedia_, and of Dante's style of thought, it is invaluable. It is

reckoned by his countrymen the first piece of Italian prose, and there

are parts of it which still stand unmatched for eloquence and pathos. The

Italians (even such a man as Cantu among the rest) find in it and a few

passages of the _Commedia_ the proof that Dante, as a natural philosopher

was wholly in advance of his age,--that he had, among other things,

anticipated Newton in the theory of gravitation. But this is as idle as

the claim that Shakespeare had discovered the circulation of the blood

before Harvey,[63] and one might as well attempt to dethrone Newton

because Chaucer speaks of the love which draws the apple to the earth.

The truth is, that it was only as a poet that Dante was great and

original (glory enough, surely, to have not more than two competitors),

and in matters of science, as did all his contemporaries, sought the

guiding hand of Aristotle like a child. Dante is assumed by many to have

been a Platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense of the word.

Like all men of great imagination, he was an idealist, and so far a

Platonist, as Shakespeare might be proved to have been by his sonnets.

But Dante's direct acquaintance with Plato may be reckoned at zero, and

we consider it as having strongly influenced his artistic development for

the better, that transcendentalist as he was by nature, so much so as to

be in danger of lapsing into an Oriental mysticism, his habits of thought

should have been made precise and his genius disciplined by a mind so

severely logical as that of Aristotle. This does not conflict with what

we believe to be equally true, that the Platonizing commentaries on his

poem, like that of Landino, are the most satisfactory. Beside the prose

already mentioned, we have a small collection of Dante's letters, the

recovery of the larger number of which we owe to Professor Witte. They

are all interesting, some of them especially so, as illustrating the

prophetic character with which Dante invested himself. The longest is one

addressed to Can Grande della Scalla, explaining the intention of the

_Commedia_ and the method to be employed in its interpretation. The

authenticity of this letter has been doubted, but is now generally

admitted.

We shall barely allude to the minor poems, full of grace and depth of

mystic sentiment, and which would have given Dante a high place in the

history of Italian literature, even had he written nothing else. They are

so abstract, however, that without the extrinsic interest of having been

written by the author of the _Commedia_, they would probably find few

readers. All that is certainly known in regard to the _Commedia_ is that

it was composed during the nineteen years which intervened between

Dante's banishment and death. Attempts have been made to fix precisely

the dates of the different parts, but without success, and the

differences of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has constructed an

ingenious and forcible argument to show that no part of the poem was

published before the author's death. The question depends somewhat on the

meaning we attach to the word "published." In an age of manuscript the

wide dispersion of a poem so long even as a single one of the three

divisions of the _Commedia_ would be accomplished very slowly. But it is

difficult to account for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during the

latter years of his life, unless we suppose that parts, at least, of his

greatest work had been read or heard by a large number of persons. This

need not, however, imply publication; and Witte, whose opinion is

entitled to great consideration, supposes even the _Inferno_ not to have

been finished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where certainty would be

impossible, it is of little consequence to reproduce conjectural dates.

In the letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante himself has stated

the theme of his song. He says that "the literal subject of the whole

work is the state of the soul after death simply considered. But if the

work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by merit or demerit,

through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or

punishment of justice." He tells us that the work is to be interpreted in

a literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly

employed with the Scriptures,[64] and of which he gives the following

example: "To make which mode of treatment more clear, it may be applied

in the following verses: _In exitu Israel de Aegypto, domus Jacob de

populo barbaro, facta est Judaea sanctificatio ejus, Israel potestas

ejus_.[65] For if we look only at the literal sense, it signifies the

going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if

at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption through Christ; if at the

moral, it signifies the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery

of sin to a state of grace; and if at the anagogical, it signifies the

passage of the blessed soul from the bondage of this corruption to the

freedom of eternal glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old

commentators, puts the matter compactly together for us:--

"_Litera_ gesta refert; quid credas _allegoria_;

_Moralis_ quid agas; quid speres _anagogia_."

Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because it has a fortunate

ending, and gives its title thus: "Here begins the comedy of Dante

Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not in morals."[66] The poem

consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is

divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the

Saviour's life; for though the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto

is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may

find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the

threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Symbolic meanings

reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the

architecture of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem would be out of

place here, but we must say a few words of Dante's position as respects

modern literature. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is the first

Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose whole

system of thought is colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian

theology. Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption, these are the

subjects of the three parts of the poem: or, otherwise stated,

intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (symbol

also of that imperialism whose origin he sang); moral conversion after

repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with

God, and actual blinding vision of him,--"The pure in heart shall see

God." Here are general truths which any Christian may accept and find

comfort in. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is the real

history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant

human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow, and that the ladder

of that faith by which man climbs to the actual fruition of things not

seen _ex quovis ligno non fit_, but only of the cross manfully borne. The

poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman Indeed, as

Marvell's drop of dew mirrored the whole firmament, so we find in the

_Commedia_ the image of the Middle Ages, and the sentimental gyniolatry

of chivalry, which was at best but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an

ideal and universal plane. It is the same with Catholicism, with

imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy, and nothing is more

wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who

could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with

such, cosmopolitan truth to human nature and to his own individuality, as

to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We

protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade

Dante to a mere partisan, which sees in him a Luther before his time, and

would clap the _bonnet rouge_ upon his heavenly muse.

Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conservative, and,

arriving precisely in that period of transition when Church and Empire

were entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he strove to preserve

both by presenting the theory of both in a pristine and ideal perfection.

The whole nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There is proof upon

proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission Like the

Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was

back to the old worship and the God of the fathers that he called his

people, and not Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that

sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the composition of

a sceptic. In Dante's time, learning had something of a sacred character,

the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of

supernatural powers, it was with the next generation, with the elegant

Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely

literary life, and that dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of

scepticism, began. As a merely literary figure, the position of Dante is

remarkable. Not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthetics

also, his great poem stands as a monument on the boundary line between

the ancient and modern. He not only marks, but is in himself, the

transition. _Arma virumque cano_, that is the motto of classic song; the

things of this world and great men. Dante says, _subjectum est homo_, not

_vir_; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic and drama

was in this world, and its catastrophe here; Dante lays his scene in the

human soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He makes himself the

protagonist of his own drama. In the _Commedia_ for the first time

Christianity wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal

principle. But aesthetically also, as well as morally, Dante stands

between the old and the new, and reconciles them. The theme of his poem

is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its treatment

is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and it is limited by a

form of classic severity. In the same way he sums up in himself the two

schools of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while essentially

lyrical in his subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he

combines the deeper and more abstract religious sentiment of the Teutonic

races with the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the

Romanic. In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can in some sort

account for such representative men as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even

Shakespeare) by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the age in

which they lived, Dante seems morally isolated and to have drawn his

inspiration almost wholly from his own internal reserves. Of his mastery

in style we need say little here. Of his mere language, nothing could be

better than the expression of Rivarol "His verse holds itself erect by

the mere force of the substantive and verb, without the help of a single

epithet." We will only add a word on what seems to us an extraordinary

misapprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante by comparing his

Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He seems to have forgotten that the precise

measurements of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by the

nature of his poem. He is describing an actual journey, and his exactness

makes a part of the verisimilitude. We read the "Paradise Lost" as a

poem, the _Commedia_ as a record of fact; and no one can read Dante

without believing his story, for it is plain that he believed it himself.

It is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with the imaginative.

Milton's angels are not to be compared with Dante's, at once real and

supernatural; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, while

nothing in all poetry approaches the imaginative grandeur of Dante's

vision of God at the conclusion of the _Paradiso_. In all literary

history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life

and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the

unessential; and there is no moral more touching than that the

contemporary recognition of such a nature, so endowed and so faithful to

its endowment, should be summed up in the sentence of Florence: _Igne

comburatur sic quod moriatur_.[67]

The range of Dante's influence is not less remarkable than its intensity.

Minds, the antipodes of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel

the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of his light and

warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais are touched with the same reverential

enthusiasm. The imaginative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have seen,

perhaps beyond the limit where critical appreciation merges in

enthusiasm; and the matter-of-fact Schlosser tells us that "he, who was

wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, has made use

of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in his solitude to bring a heavenly

light into his inward life." Almost all other poets have their seasons,

but Dante penetrates to the moral core of those who once fairly come

within his sphere, and possesses them wholly. His readers turn students,

his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion. The

homeless exile finds a home in thousands of grateful hearts. _E venne da

esilio in questa pace!_

Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be, and has been, made

to the _Divina Commedia_, especially by critics who have but a

superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with the _Inferno_, which is

as far as most English critics go. Coleridge himself, who had a way of

divining what was in books, may be justly suspected of not going further,

though with Carey to help him. Mr. Carlyle, who has said admirable things

of Dante the man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or he

would never have put Sordello in hell and the meeting with Beatrice in

paradise. In France it was not much better (though Rivarol has said the

best thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epithet)[68] before Ozanam,

who, if with decided ultramontane leanings, has written excellently well

of our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though not without

relentings toward a poet who had put popes heels upward in hell, regards

him on the whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was no better in

Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who affirms that "neither Pelli nor

others deservedly more celebrated than he ever read attentively the poem

of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from the first verse to the

last."[69] Accordingly we have heard that the _Commedia_ was a sermon, a

political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed Ghibelline,

nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is bigoted, it is

savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is

scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of _la

Crusca_, its ideas are not those of an enlightened eighteenth century, it

is everything, in short, that a poem should not be; and yet, singularly

enough, the circle of its charm has widened in proportion as men have

receded from the theories of Church and State which are supposed to be

its foundation, and as the modes of thought of its author have become

more alien to those of his readers. In spite of all objections, some of

which are well founded, the _Commedia_ remains one of the three or four

universal books that have ever been written.

We may admit, with proper limitations, the modern distinction between the

Artist and the Moralist. With the one Form is all in all, with the other

Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the other to convince. The

one is master of his purpose, the other mastered by it. The whole range

of perception and thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to

imagination, to the other only as it is available for argument. With the

moralist use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior purpose; with

the artist beauty is use, good in and for itself. In the fine arts the

vehicle makes part of the thought, coalesces with it. The living

conception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or modulated sound, and

henceforth the two are inseparable. The results of the moralist pass into

the intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode of

conveyance. But where, as in Dante, the religious sentiment and the

imagination are both organic, something interfused with the whole being

of the man, so that they work in kindly sympathy, the moral will

insensibly suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light. Then that

fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the assonance between facts

seemingly remote and unrelated, between the outward and inward worlds,

though convinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be

persuaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but imply a substance

somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty of the visible image

because it suggests the ineffably higher charm of the unseen original.

Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strengthening of that native

instinct of the soul which leads it to strive backward toward its divine

source, may sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for the light

of truth and the splendor of God to shine through. In him as in Calderon

the perpetual presence of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy

of life and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols of

material beauty. Though Dante's conception of the highest end of man was

that he should climb through every phase of human experience to that

transcendental and super-sensual region where the true, the good, and the

beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet the prism of his

imagination forever resolved the ray into color again, and he loved to

show it also where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became

beautiful once more to the eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the

use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). And this part

cannot in this life have its perfect use, which is to behold God (who is

the highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch as the intellect

considers and beholds him in his effects.[70] Underlying Dante the

metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was always Dante the poet,[71]

irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a picturesque phrase, or

touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and

subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern outline of his system

wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of

imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in

serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not

realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the

horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the

empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome whereof Christ is a Roman,[72]

the citadel of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow

and self denial, transhumanized[73] to the divine abstraction of pure

contemplation. "And it is called Empyrean," he says in his letter to Can

Grande, "which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not

because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual one,

which is blessed love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth, if

sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most often in types of winning

grace.

Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. A Platonist by

nature, an Aristotelian by training, his feet keep closely to the narrow

path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are

fixed on the stars and his brain is busy with things not demonstrable,

save by that grace of God which passeth all understanding, nor capable of

being told unless by far off hints and adumbrations. Though he himself

has directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of

his greatest work,[74] though he has indirectly pointed out the way to

its interpretation in the _Convito_, and though everything he wrote is

but an explanatory comment on his own character and opinions,

unmistakably clear and precise, yet both man and poem continue not only

to be misunderstood popularly, but also by such as should know

better.[75] That those who confined their studies to the _Commedia_

should have interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the

first or literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider

circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own heavens, giving and

receiving light.[76] Indeed, Dante himself is partly to blame for this.

"The form or mode of treatment," he says, "is poetic, fictive,

descriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal definitive, divisive,

probative, improbative, and positive of examples." Here are conundrums

enough, to be sure! To Italians at home, for whom the great arenas of

political and religious speculation were closed, the temptation to find a

subtler meaning than the real one was irresistible. Italians in exile, on

the other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse from behind which they

could take a long shot at Church and State, or at obscurer foes.[77]

Infinitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of intense sympathy

which drawst hese latter toward their great forerunner, _exul immeritus_

like themselves.[78] But they have too often wrung a meaning from Dante

which is injurious to the man and out of keeping with the ideas of his

age. The aim in expounding a great poem should be, not to discover an

endless variety of meanings often contradictory, but whatever it has of

great and perennial significance; for such it must have, or it would long

ago have ceased to be living and operative, would long ago have taken

refuge in the Chartreuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all

mankind. We do not mean to say that this minute exegesis is useless or

unpraiseworthy, but only that it should be subsidiary to the larger way.

It serves to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in Dante,

namely, the omnipresence of his memory throughout the work, so that its

intimate coherence does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and

complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them. The poem has many

senses, he tells us, and there can be no doubt of it; but it has also,

and this alone will account for its fascination, a living soul behind

them all and informing all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of

doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own

phrase, the bread of angels.

Nor is this unity characteristic only of the _Divina Commedia_. All the

works of Dante, with the possible exception of the _De vulgari Eloquio_

(which is unfinished), are component parts of a Whole Duty of Man

mutually completing and interpreting one another. They are also, as truly

as Wordsworth's "Prelude," a history of the growth of a poet's mind. Like

the English poet he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt

after Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. _Sempre il magnanimo si

magnifica in suo cuore; e cosi lo pusillanimo per contrario sempre si

tiene meno che non e._[79] As in the prose of Milton, whose striking

likeness to Dante in certain prominent features of character has been

remarked by Foscolo, there are in Dante's minor works continual allusions

to himself of great value as material for his biographer. Those who read

attentively will discover that the tenderness he shows toward Francesca

and her lover did not spring from any friendship for her family, but was

a constant quality of his nature, and that what is called his revengeful

ferocity is truly the implacable resentment of a lofty mind and a lover

of good against evil, whether showing itself in private or public life;

perhaps hating the former manifestation of it the most because he

believed it to be the root of the latter,--a faith which those who have

watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be

inclined to share. His gentleness is all the more striking by contrast,

like that silken compensation which blooms out of the thorny stem of the

cactus. His moroseness,[80] his party spirit, and his personal

vindictiveness are all predicated upon the _Inferno_, and upon a

misapprehension or careless reading even of that. Dante's zeal was not of

that sentimental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched, that hovers

on the surface of shallow minds,

"Even as the flame of unctuous is wont

To move upon the outer surface only";[81]

it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the whole character of

the man through and through, like the minarets of his own city of

Dis.[82] He was, as seems distinctive in some degree of the Latinized

races, an unflinching _a priori_ logician, not unwilling to "syllogize

invidious verities,"[83] wherever they might lead him, like Sigier, whom

he has put in paradise, though more than suspected of heterodoxy. But at

the same time, as we shall see, he had something of the practical good

sense of that Teutonic stock whence he drew a part of his blood, which

prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield without breaking to the

inevitable, but incalculable pressure of human nature and the stiffer

logic of events. His theory of Church and State was not merely a

fantastic one, but intended for the use and benefit of men as they were;

and he allowed accordingly for aberrations, to which even the law of

gravitation is forced to give place; how much more, then, any scheme

whose very starting-point is the freedom of the will!

We are thankful for a commentator at last who passes dry-shod over the

_turbide onde_ of inappreciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside the

thick atmosphere which has gathered about the character of Dante both as

man and poet, opens for us his City of Doom with the divining-rod of

reverential study. Miss Rossetti comes commended to our interest, not

only as one of a family which seems to hold genius by the tenure of

gavelkind, but as having a special claim by inheritance to a love and

understanding of Dante. She writes English with a purity that has in it

something of feminine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. Her

lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace through the metaphysical

and other intricacies of her subject. She brings to her work the refined

enthusiasm of a cultivated woman and the penetration of sympathy. She has

chosen the better way (in which Germany took the lead) of interpreting

Dante out of himself, the pure spring from which, and from which alone,

he drew his inspiration, and not from muddy Fra Alberico or Abbate

Giovacchino, from stupid visions of Saint Paul or voyages of Saint

Brandan. She has written by far the best comment that has appeared in

English, and we should say the best that has been done in England, were

it not for her father's _Comento analitico_, for excepting which her

filial piety will thank us. Students of Dante in the original will be

grateful to her for many suggestive hints, and those who read him in

English will find in her volume a travelling map in which the principal

points and their connections are clearly set down. In what we shall say

of Dante we shall endeavor only to supplement her interpretation with

such side-lights as may have been furnished us by twenty years of

assiduous study. Dante's thought is multiform, and, like certain street

signs, once common, presents a different image according to the point of

view. Let us consider briefly what was the plan of the _Divina Commedia_

and Dante's aim in writing it, which, if not to justify, was at least to

illustrate, for warning and example, the ways of God to man. The higher

intention of the poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwisdom,

and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and consequently in the life to

come, which is but the continuation and fulfilment of this. The scene

accordingly is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly denizens now

as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the human soul in its journey

upwards from error through repentance to atonement with God. To make it

apprehensible by those whom it was meant to teach, nay, from its very

nature as a poem, and not a treatise of abstract morality, it must set

forth everything by means of sensible types and images.

"To speak thus is adapted to your mind,

Since only from the sensible it learns

What makes it worthy of intellect thereafter,

On this account the Scripture condescends

Unto your faculties, and feet and hands

To God attributes, and means something else."[84]

Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its branches need not be told

that Dante's age was one that demanded very palpable and even revolting

types. As in the old legend, a drop of scalding sweat from the damned

soul must shrivel the very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make them

wince if not to turn them away from evil doing. To consider his hell a

place of physical torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine. Its

mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before the feet of every man

everywhere who goeth about to do evil. His hell is a condition of the

soul, and he could not find images loathsome enough to express the moral

deformity which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his own abhorrence

of it. Its inmates meet you in the street every day.

"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place, for where we are is hell,

And where hell is there we must ever be."[85]

It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the appearance of good, and out

of a crooked hag makes a bewitching siren. The reason enlightened by the

grace of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench and corruption.[86]

It is this office of reason which Dante undertakes to perform, by divine

commission, in the _Inferno_. There can be no doubt that he looked upon

himself as invested with the prophetic function, and the Hebrew

forerunners, in whose society his soul sought consolation and

sustainment, certainly set him no example of observing the conventions of

good society in dealing with the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of

good society were not altogether those of this world in any generation.

He would have defined it as meaning "the peers" of Philosophy, "souls

free from wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits, endowed with

genius and memory."[87] Dante himself had precisely this endowment, and

in a very surprising degree. His genius enabled him to see and to show

what he saw to others; his memory neither forgot nor forgave. Very

hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern

theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the

fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for

purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp

of retribution, weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is

the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante indeed saw

clearly enough that the Divine justice did at length overtake Society in

the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of

civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied

with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. "It is Thou," he says

sternly, "who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be

damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This

is not my judgment, but that of universal Nature[88] from before the

beginning of the world."[89] Accordingly the highest reason, typified in

his guide Virgil, rebukes him for bringing compassion to the judgments of

God,[90] and again embraces him and calls the mother that bore him

blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone among the other dogs.[91]

This latter case shocks our modern feelings the more rudely for the

simple pathos with which Dante makes Argenti answer when asked who he

was, "Thou seest I am one that weeps." It is also the one that makes most

strongly for the theory of Dante's personal vindictiveness,[92] and it

may count for what it is worth. We are not greatly concerned to defend

him on that score, for he believed in the righteous use of anger, and

that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and

Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day

merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and

thoroughly trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He

believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a

conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever and whoever

hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was

to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God's law,

and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man,

as it was also his only way to true felicity. It has been commonly

assumed that Dante was a man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he

took up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with his fallen

fortunes, and that his theory of life and of man's relations to it was

altogether reshaped for him by the bitter musings of his exile. This

would be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells us that he "felt

himself indeed four-square against the strokes of chance," and whose

convictions were so intimate that they were not merely intellectual

conclusions, but parts of his moral being. Fortunately we are called on

to believe nothing of the kind. Dante himself has supplied us with hints

and dates which enable us to watch the germination and trace the growth

of his double theory of government, applicable to man as he is a citizen

of this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a freeman of the

celestial city. It would be of little consequence to show in which of two

equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six

hundred years ago, but it is worth something to know that a man of

ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of

factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all.

Dante's opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from

living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned

out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not

weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the

hour.

Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark? he borrows a lantern;

Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars.

It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of Dante's thought.

When his ancestor Cacciaguida prophesies to him the life which is to be

his after 1300,[93] he says, speaking of his exile:--

"And that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders

Will be the bad and foolish company

With which into this valley thou shalt fall;

* * * * *

"Of their bestiality their own proceedings

Shall furnish proof; _so 'twill be well for thee

A party to have made thee by thyself_."

Here both context and grammatical construction (infallible guides in a

writer so scrupulous and exact) imply irresistibly that Dante had become

a party by himself before his exile. The measure adopted by the Priors of

Florence while he was one of them (with his assent and probably by his

counsel), of sending to the frontier the leading men of both factions,

confirms this implication. Among the persons thus removed from the

opportunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend Guido Cavalcanti, to

whom he had not long before addressed the _Vita Nuova_.[94] Dante

evidently looked back with satisfaction on his conduct at this time, and

thought it both honest and patriotic, as it certainly was disinterested.

"We whose country is the world, as the ocean to the fish," he tells us,

"though we drank of the Arno in infancy, and love Florence so much that,

_because we loved her, we suffer exile unjustly,_ support the shoulders

of our judgment rather upon reason than the senses."[95] And again,

speaking of old ago, he says: "And the noble soul at this age blesses

also the times past, and well may bless them, because, revolving them in

memory, she recalls her righteous conduct, without which she could not

enter the port to which she draws nigh, with so much riches and so great

gain." This language is not that of a man who regrets some former action

as mistaken, still less of one who repented it for any disastrous

consequences to himself. So, in justifying a man for speaking of himself,

he alleges two examples,--that of Boethius, who did so to "clear himself

of the perpetual infamy of his exile"; and that of Augustine, "for, by

the process of his life, which was from bad to good, from good to better,

and from better to best, he gave us example and teaching."[96] After

middle life, at least, Dante had that wisdom "whose use brings with it

marvellous beauties, that is, contentment with every condition of time,

and contempt of those things which others make their masters."[97] If

Dante, moreover, wrote his treatise _De Monarchia_ before 1302, and we

think Witte's inference,[98] from its style and from the fact that he

nowhere alludes to his banishment in it, conclusive on this point, then

he was already a Ghibelline in the same larger and unpartisan sense which

ever after distinguished him from his Italian contemporaries.

"Let, let the Ghibellines ply their handicraft

Beneath some other standard; for this ever

Ill follows he who it and justice parts,"

he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Roman eagle.[99] His

Ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the result of what he had seen of

Italian misgovernment, embraced in its theoretical application the

civilized world. His political system was one which his reason adopted,

not for any temporary expediency, but because it conduced to justice,

peace, and civilization,--the three conditions on which alone freedom was

possible in any sense which made it worth having. Dante was intensely

Italian, nay, intensely Florentine, but on all great questions he was, by

the logical structure of his mind and its philosophic impartiality,

incapable of intellectual provincialism.[100] If the circle of his

affections, as with persistent natures commonly, was narrow, his thought

swept a broad horizon from that tower of absolute self which he had

reared for its speculation. Even upon the principles of poetry,

mechanical and other,[101] he had reflected more profoundly than most of

those who criticise his work, and it was not by chance that he discovered

the secret of that magical word too few, which not only distinguishes his

verse from all other, but so strikingly from his own prose. He never took

the bit of art[102] between his teeth where only poetry, and not

doctrine, was concerned.

If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was practical a guide for the

conduct of life, it was, on the other, a much more transcendent thing,

whose body was wisdom her soul love, and her efficient cause truth. It is

a practice of wisdom from the mere love of it, for so we must interpret

his _amoroso uso di sapienzia_, when we remember how he has said

before[103] that "the love of wisdom for its delight or profit is not

true love of wisdom." And this love must embrace knowledge in all its

branches, for Dante is content with nothing less than a pancratic

training, and has a scorn of _dilettanti_, specialists, and quacks.

"Wherefore none ought to be called a true philosopher who for any delight

loves any part of knowledge, as there are many who delight in composing

_Canzoni_, and delight to be studious in them, and who delight to be

studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and abandon the other

sciences which are all members of wisdom."[104] "Many love better to be

held masters than to be so." With him wisdom is the generalization from

many several knowledges of small account by themselves; it results

therefore from breadth of culture, and would be impossible without it.

Philosophy is a noble lady (_donna gentil_),[105] partaking of the divine

essence by a kind of eternal marriage, while with other intelligences she

is united in a less measure "as a mistress of whom no lover takes

complete joy."[106] The eyes of this lady are her demonstrations, and her

smile is her persuasion. "The eyes of wisdom are her demonstrations by

which truth is beheld most certainly; and her smile is her persuasions in

which the interior light of wisdom is shown under a certain veil, and in

these two is felt that highest pleasure of beatitude which is the

greatest good in paradise."[107] "It is to be known that the beholding

this lady was so largely ordained for us, not merely to look upon the

face which she shows us, but that we may desire to attain the things

which she keeps concealed. And as through her much thereof is seen by

reason, so by her we believe that every miracle may have its reason in a

higher intellect, and consequently may be. Whence our good faith has its

origin, whence comes the hope of those unseen things which we desire, and

through that the operation of charity, by the which three virtues we rise

to philosophize in that celestial Athens where the Stoics, Peripatetics,

and Epicureans through the art of eternal truth accordingly concur in one

will."[108]

As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy we will cite a passage from

the _Convito_, all the more to our purpose as it will illustrate his own

method of allegorizing. "Verily the use of our mind is double, that is,

practical and speculative, the one and the other most delightful,

although that of contemplation be the more so. That of the practical is

for us to act virtuously, that is, honorably, with prudence, temperance,

fortitude, and justice. [These are the four stars seen by Dante,

_Purgatorio_, I. 22-27.] That of the speculative is not to act for

ourselves, but to consider the works of God and nature.... Verily of

these uses one is more full of beatitude than the other, as it is the

speculative, which without any admixture is the use of our noblest

part.... And this part in this life cannot have its use perfectly, which

is to see God, except inasmuch as the intellect considers him and beholds

him through his effects. And that we should seek this beatitude as the

highest, and not the other, the Gospel of Mark teaches us if we will look

well. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary

Salome went to find the Saviour at the tomb and found him not, but found

a youth clad in white who said to them, 'Ye seek the Saviour, and I say

unto you that he is not here; and yet fear ye not, but go and say unto

his disciples and Peter that he will go before them into Galilee, and

there ye shall see him even as he told you.' By these three women may be

understood the three sects of the active life, that is, the Epicureans,

the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, who go to the tomb, that is, to the

present life, which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek the

Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not, but they find a youth in

white raiment, who, according to the testimony of Matthew and the rest,

was an angel of God. This angel is that nobleness of ours which comes

from God, as hath been said, which speaks in our reason and says to each

of these sects, that is, to whoever goes seeking beatitude in this life,

that it is not here, but go and say to the disciples and to Peter, that

is, to those who go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like Peter

who had denied), that it will go before them into Galilee, that is, into

speculation. Galilee is as much as to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a body

full of corporeal light more than any other, and so contemplation is

fuller of spiritual light than anything else here below. And he says, 'it

will go before,' and does not say, 'it will be with you,' to give us to

understand that God always goes before our contemplation, nor can we ever

overtake here Him who is our supreme beatitude. And it is said, 'There ye

shall see him as he told you,' that is, here ye shall have of his

sweetness, that is, felicity, as is promised you here, that is, as it is

ordained that ye can have. And thus it appears that we find our

beatitude, this felicity of which we are speaking, first imperfect in the

active life, that is, in the operations of the moral virtues, and

afterwards wellnigh perfect in the operation of the intellectual ones,

the which two operations are speedy and most direct ways to lead to the

supreme beatitude, the which cannot be had here, as appears by what has

been said."[109]

At first sight there may seem to be some want of agreement in what Dante

says here of the soul's incapacity of the vision of God in this life with

the triumphant conclusion of his own poem. But here as elsewhere Dante

must be completed and explained by himself. "We must know that everything

most greatly desires its own perfection, and in that its every desire is

appeased, and by that everything is desired. [That is, the one is drawn

toward, the other draws.] And this is that desire which makes every

delight maimed, for no delight is so great in this life that it can take

away from the soul this thirst so that desire remain not in the

thought."[110] "And since it is most natural to wish to be in God, the

human soul naturally wills it with all longing. And since its being

depends on God and is preserved thereby it naturally desires and wills to

be united with God in order to fortify its being. And since in the

goodnesses of human nature is shown some reason for those of the Divine,

it follows that the human soul unites itself in a spiritual way with

those so much the more strongly and quickly as they appear more perfect,

and this appearance happens according as the knowledge of the soul is

clear or impeded. And this union is what we call Love, whereby may be

known what is within the soul, seeing those it outwardly loves.... And

the human soul which is ennobled with the ultimate potency, that is,

reason, participates in the Divine nature after the manner of an eternal

Intelligence, because the soul is so ennobled and denuded of matter in

that sovran potency that the Divine light shines in it as in an

angel."[111] This union with God may therefore take place before the

warfare of life is over, but is only possible for souls _perfettamente

naturati_, perfectly endowed by nature.[112] This depends on the virtue

of the generating soul and the concordant influence of the planets. "And

if it happen that through the purity of the recipient soul, the

intellectual virtue be well abstracted and absolved from every corporeal

shadow, the Divine bounty is multiplied in it as a thing sufficient to

receive the same."[113] "And there are some who believe that if all the

aforesaid virtues [powers] should unite for the production of a soul in

their best disposition, so much of the Deity would descend into it that

it would be almost another incarnate God."[114] Did Dante believe himself

to be one of these? He certainly gives us reason to think so. He was born

under fortunate stars, as he twice tells us,[115] and he puts the middle

of his own life at the thirty-fifth year, which is the period he assigns

for it in the diviner sort of men.[116]

The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral growth may, we think, be

reckoned with some approach to exactness from data supplied by himself.

In the poems of the _Vita Nuova_, Beatrice, until her death, was to him

simply a poetical ideal, a type of abstract beauty, chosen according to

the fashion of the day after the manner of the Provencal poets, but in a

less carnal sense than theirs. "And by the fourth nature of animals, that

is, the sensitive, man has another love whereby he loves according to

sensible appearance, even as a beast.... And by the fifth and final

nature, that is, the truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is,

rational, man has a love for truth and virtue.... Wherefore, since this

nature is called _mind_, I said that love discoursed in my mind to make

it understood that this love was that which is born in the noblest of

natures, that is, [the love] of truth and virtue, and to _shut out every

false opinion by which it might be suspected that my love was for the

delight of sense._"[117] This is a very weighty affirmation, made, as it

is, so deliberately by a man of Dante's veracity, who would and did speak

truth at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and forever all the idle

tales of Dante's amours, of la Montanina, Gentucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and

the rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts _la onde la stoltezza

dipartille._[118] We think Miss Rossetti a little hasty in allowing that

in the years which immediately followed Beatrice's death Dante gave

himself up "more or less to sensual gratification and earthly aim." The

earthly aim we in a certain sense admit; the sensual gratification we

reject as utterly inconsistent, not only with Dante's principles, but

with his character and indefatigable industry. Miss Rossetti illustrates

her position by a subtle remark on "the lulling spell of an intellectual

and sensitive delight in good running parallel with a voluntary and

actual indulgence in evil." The dead Beatrice beckoned him toward the

life of contemplation, and it was precisely during this period that he

attempted to find happiness in the life of action. "Verily it is to be

known, that we may in this life have two felicities, following two ways,

good and best, which lead us thither. The one is the active, the other

the contemplative life, the which (though by the active we may attain, as

has been said, unto good felicity) leads us to the best felicity and

blessedness."[119] "The life of my heart, that is, of my inward self, was

wont to be a sweet thought which went many times to the feet of God, that

is to say, in thought I contemplated the kingdom of the Blessed. And I

tell the final cause why I mounted thither in thought when I say, 'Where

it [the sweet thought] beheld a lady in glory,' that I might make it

understood that I was and am certain, by _her gracious revelation, that

she was in heaven,_ [not on earth, as I had vainly imagined,] whither I

went in thought, so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt."[120]

This passage exactly answers to another in _Purgatorio_, XXX. 115-138:--

"Not only by the work of those great wheels

That destine every seed unto some end,

According as the stars are in conjunction,

_But by the largess of celestial graces,_

* * * * *

"Such had this man become in his New Life

Potentially, that every righteous habit

Would have made admirable proof in him;

* * * * *

"Some time I did sustain him with my look (_volto_);

Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,

I led him with me turned in the right way.

As soon as ever of my second age

I was upon the threshold and changed life,

Himself from me he took and gave to others.

When from the flesh to spirit I ascended,

And beauty and virtue were in me increased,

I was to him less dear and less delightful,

And into ways untrue he turned his steps,

Pursuing the false images of good

That never any promises fulfil[121]

Nor prayer for inspiration me availed,[122]

_By means of which in dreams and otherwise

I called him back_, so little did he heed them.

So low he fell, that all appliances

For his salvation were already short

Save showing him the people of perdition."

Now Dante himself, we think, gives us the clew, by following which we may

reconcile the contradiction, what Miss Rossetti calls "the astounding

discrepancy," between the Lady of the _Vita Nuova_ who made him

unfaithful to Beatrice, and the same Lady in the _Convito_, who in

attributes is identical with Beatrice herself. We must remember that the

prose part of the _Convito_, which is a comment on the _Canzoni_, was

written after the _Canzoni_ themselves. How long after we cannot say with

certainty, but it was plainly composed at intervals, a part of it

probably after Dante had entered upon old age (which began, as he tells

us, with the forty-fifth year), consequently after 1310. Dante had then

written a considerable part of the _Divina Commedia_, in which Beatrice

was to go through her final and most ethereal transformation in his mind

and memory. We say in his memory, for such idealizations have a very

subtle retrospective action, and the new condition of feeling or thought

is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into harmony whatever is

inconsistent with it in the past. The inward life unwillingly admits any

break in its continuity, and nothing is more common than to hear a man,

in venting an opinion taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, "I

have always thought so and so." Whatever belief occupies the whole mind

soon produces the impression on us of having long had possession of it,

and one mode of consciousness blends so insensibly with another that it

is impossible to mark by an exact line where one begins and the other

ends. Dante in his exposition of the _Canzoni_ must have been subject to

this subtlest and most deceitful of influences. He would try to reconcile

so far as he conscientiously could his present with his past. This he

could do by means of the allegorical interpretation. "For it would be a

great shame to him," he says in the _Vita Nuova_, "who should poetize

something under the vesture of some figure or rhetorical color, and

afterwards, when asked, could not strip his words of that vesture in such

wise that they should have a true meaning." Now in the literal exposition

of the _Canzone_ beginning, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel

movete,"[123] he tells us that the _grandezza_ of the _Donna Gentil_ was

"temporal greatness" (one certainly of the felicities attainable by way

of the _vita attiva_), and immediately after gives us a hint by which we

may comprehend why a proud[124] man might covet it. "How much wisdom and

how great a persistence in virtue (_abito virtuoso_) are hidden for want

of this lustre!"[125] When Dante reaches the Terrestrial Paradise[126]

which is the highest felicity of this world, and therefore the

consummation of the Active Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its

symbol,

"Who went along

Singing and culling floweret after floweret."

and warming herself in the rays of Love, or "actual speculation," that

is, "where love makes its peace felt."[127] That she was the symbol of

this is evident from the previous dream of Dante,[128] in which he sees

Leah, the universally accepted type of it,

"Walking in a meadow,

Gathering flowers; and singing she was saying,

'Know whosoever may my name demand

That I am Leah, who go moving round

My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,'"

that is to say, of good works. She, having "washed him thoroughly from

sin,"[129]

"All dripping brought

Into the dance of the four beautiful,"[130]

who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and

Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the Practical Life, which he had

seen when he came out of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin,

and arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That these were the

special virtues of practical goodness Dante had already told us in a

passage before quoted from the _Convito_.[131] That this was Dante's

meaning is confirmed by what Beatrice says to him,[132]

"Short while shalt thou be here a forester (_silvano_)

And thou shalt be with me forevermore

A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman";

for by a "forest" he always means the world of life and action.[133] At

the time when Dante was writing the _Canzoni_ on which the _Convito_ was

a comment, he believed science to be the "ultimate perfection itself, and

not the way to it,"[134] but before the _Convito_ was composed he had

become aware of a higher and purer light, an inward light, in that

Beatrice, already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the mind, "who

lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul."[135]

So spiritually does Dante always present Beatrice to us, even where most

corporeal, as in the _Vita Nuova_, that many, like Biscione and Rossetti,

have doubted her real existence. But surely we must consent to believe

that she who speaks of

"The fair limbs wherein

I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth,"

was once a creature of flesh and blood,--

"A creature not too bright and good

For human nature's daily food."

When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance, filled her room up

with something fairer than the reality had ever been. There is no

idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy

as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo that change into

something rich and strange in the sea[136] of his mind which so

completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not impossible, we think,

to follow the process of transformation. During the period of the

_Convito Canzoni_, when he had so given himself to study that to his

weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur,"[137] this star

of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had

never been of the senses (which is bestial),[138] so his sorrow was all

the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her

to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler

impulses of his nature,--

("Such had this man become in his New Life

Potentially,")

and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the highest good. With

that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him,

her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed

(_beat_), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that

Theosophy which enables man to see God and to be mystically united with

him even in the flesh. Already, in the _Vita Nuova_,[139] she appears to

him as afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of

flame which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate God in himself,

simply, and not in his relation to the Son or the Holy Spirit.[140] When

misfortune came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity failed,

and science was helpless to console, as it had never been able wholly to

satisfy, she already rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth,

reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is,

perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with

such minute precision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his own

twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of

adolescence.[141]

That there should seem to be a discrepancy between the Lady of the _Vita

Nuova_ and her of the _Convito_, Dante himself was already aware when

writing the former and commenting it. Explaining the sonnet beginning

_Gentil pensier_, he says, "In this sonnet I make two parts of myself

according as my thoughts were divided in two. The one part I call

_heart_, that is, the appetite, the other _soul_, that is, reason.... It

is true that in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart against

the eyes [which were weeping for the lost Beatrice], and that appears

contrary to what I say in the present one; and therefore I say that in

that sonnet also I mean by my _heart_ the appetite, because my desire to

remember me of my most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold this

one, albeit I had already some appetite for her, but slight as should

seem: whence it appears that the one saying is not contrary to the

other."[142] When, therefore, Dante speaks of the love of this Lady as

the "adversary of _Reason_," he uses the word in its highest sense, not

as understanding (_Intellectus_), but as synonymous with _soul_. Already,

when the latter part of the _Vita Nuova_, nay, perhaps the whole of the

explanatory portion of it, was written the plan of the _Commedia_ was

complete, a poem the higher aim of which was to keep the soul alive both

in this world and for the next. As Dante tells us, the contradiction in

his mind was, though he did not become aware of it till afterwards, more

apparent than real. He sought consolation in study, and, failing to find

it in Learning (_scienza_), he was led to seek it in Wisdom (_sapienza_),

which is the love of God and the knowledge of him.[143] He had sought

happiness through the understanding; he was to find it through intuition.

The lady Philosophy (according as she is moral or intellectual) includes

both. Her gradual transfiguration is exemplified in passages already

quoted. The active life leads indirectly by a knowledge of its failures

and sins (_Inferno_), or directly by a righteous employment of it

(_Purgatorio_), to the same end. The use of the sciences is to induce in

us the ultimate perfection, that of speculating upon truth; the use of

the highest of them, theology, the contemplation of God.[144] To this

they all lead up. In one of those curious chapters of the _Convito_,[145]

where he points out the analogy between the sciences and the heavens,

Dante tells us that he compares moral philosophy with the crystalline

heaven or _Primum Mobile_, because it communicates life and gives motion

to all the others below it. But what gives motion to the crystalline

heaven (moral philosophy) itself? "The most fervent appetite which it has

in each of its parts to be conjoined with each part of that most divine

quiet heaven" (Theology).[146] Theology, the divine science, corresponds

with the Empyrean, "because of its peace, the which, through the most

excellent certainty of its subject, which is God, suffers no strife of

opinions or sophistic arguments."[147] No one of the heavens is at rest

but this, and in none of the inferior sciences can we find repose, though

he likens physics to the heaven of the fixed stars, in whose name is a

suggestion of the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable.

Dante had this comparison in mind, it may be inferred, when he said,

"Well I perceive that never sated is

Our intellect unless the Truth illume it

Beyond which nothing true[148] expands itself.

It rests therein as wild beast in his lair;

When it attains it, and it can attain it;

If not, then each desire would frustrate be.

Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot,

Doubt at the foot of truth, and this is nature

Which to the top from height to height impels us."[149]

The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself into an essential,

easily apprehensible, if mystical, unity. Dante at first gave himself to

the study of the sciences (after he had lost the simple, unquestioning

faith of youth) as the means of arriving at certainty. From the root of

every truth to which he attained sprang this sucker (_rampollo_) of

doubt, drawing out of it the very sap of its life. In this way was

Philosophy truly an adversary of his soul, and the reason of his remorse

for fruitless studies which drew him away from the one that alone was and

could be fruitful is obvious enough. But by and by out of the very doubt

came the sweetness[150] of a higher and truer insight. He became aware

that there were "things in heaven and earth undreamt of in your

philosophy," as another doubter said, who had just finished _his_

studies, but could not find his way out of the scepticism they engendered

as Dante did.

"Insane is he who hopeth that our reason

Can traverse the illimitable way

Which the one Substance in three Persons follows!

Mortals, remain contented at the _Quia_;

For, if ye had been able to see all,

No need there were [had been] for Mary to bring forth.

And ye have seen desiring without fruit,

Those whose desire would have been quieted

Which evermore is given them for a grief.

I speak of Aristotle and of Plato

And many others."[151]

Whether at the time when the poems of the _Vita Nuova_ were written the

Lady who withdrew him for a while From Beatrice was (which we doubt) a

person of flesh and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose

narrative was composed. Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings

will hardly question that by putting her at a window, which is a place to

look out of, he intended to imply that she personified Speculation, a

word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes as _looking

for_, sometimes as seeing (like Shakespeare's

"There is no speculation in those eyes"),

sometimes as _intuition_, or the beholding all things in God, who is the

cause of all. This is so obvious, and the image in this sense so

familiar, that we are surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked.

It is plain that, even when the _Vita Nuova_ was written, the Lady was

already Philosophy, but philosophy applied to a lower range of thought,

not yet ascended from flesh to spirit. The Lady who seduced him was the

science which looks for truth in second causes, or even in effects,

instead of seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the First Cause;

she was the Philosophy which looks for happiness in the visible world (of

shadows), and not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial) world. The

guerdon of his search was doubt. But Dante, as we have seen, made his

very doubts help him upward toward certainty; each became a round in the

ladder by which he climbed to clearer and clearer vision till the

end.[152] Philosophy had made him forget Beatrice; it was Philosophy who

was to bring him back to her again, washed clean in that very stream of

forgetfulness that had made an impassable barrier between them.[153]

Dante had known how to find in her the gift of Achilles's lance,

"Which used to be the cause

First of a sad and then a gracious boon."[154]

There is another possible, and even probable, theory which would

reconcile the Beatrice of the _Purgatorio_ with her of the _Vita Nuova_.

Suppose that even in the latter she signified Theology, or at least some

influence that turned his thoughts to God? Pietro di Dante, commenting

the _pargoletta_ passage in the _Purgatorio_, says expressly that the

poet had at one time given himself to the study of theology and deserted

it for poesy and other mundane sciences. This must refer to a period

beginning before 1290. Again there is an early tradition that Dante in

his youth had been a novice in a Franciscan convent, but never took the

vows. Buti affirms this expressly in his comment on _Inferno_, XVI.

106-123. It is perhaps slightly confirmed by what Dante says in the

_Convito_,[155] that "one cannot only turn to Religion by making himself

like in habit and life to St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and

St. Dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true religion in a

state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us but of the heart." If

he had ever thought of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut

short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed the real Beatrice

Portinari, and was disappointed, might not this be the time when his

thoughts took that direction? If so, the impulse came indirectly, at

least, from her.

We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari was a real creature,

"Col sangue suo e con le sue giunture";

but _how_ real she was, and whether as real to the poet's memory as to

his imagination, may fairly be questioned. She shifts, as the controlling

emotion or the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a woman loved

and lost to a gracious exhalation of all that is fairest in womanhood or

most divine in the soul of man and ere the eye has defined the new image

it has become the old one again, or another mingled of both.

"Nor one nor other seemed now what it was,

E'en as proceedeth on before the flame

Upward along the paper a brown color,

Which is not black as yet, and the white dies."[156]

As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice (her demonstrations), so

she in his own,

"Now with the one, now with the other nature;

Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled

When I beheld the thing itself stand still

And in its image it transformed itself."[157]

At the very moment when she had undergone her most sublimated allegorical

evaporation, his instinct as poet, which never failed him, realized her

into woman again in those scenes of almost unapproached pathos which make

the climax of his _Purgatorio_. The verses tremble with feeling and shine

with tears.[158] Beatrice recalls her own beauty with a pride as natural

as that of Fair Annie in the old ballad, and compares herself as

advantageously with the "brown, brown bride" who had supplanted her. If

this be a ghost, we do not need be told that she is a woman still.[159]

We must remember, however, that Beatrice had to be real that she might be

interesting, to be beautiful that her goodness might be persuasive, nay,

to be beautiful at any rate, because beauty has also something in it of

divine. Dante has told, in a passage already quoted, that he would rather

his readers should find his doctrine sweet than his verses, but he had

his relentings from this Stoicism.

"'Canzone, I believe those will be rare

Who of thine inner sense can master all,

Such toil it costs thy native tongue to learn;

Wherefore, if ever it perchance befall

That thou in presence of such men shouldst fare

As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern,

I pray thee then thy grief to comfort turn,

Saying to them, O thou my new delight,

'Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.'"[160]

We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been as purely imaginary as

the Dulcinea of Don Quixote, useful only as _motives_, but a real

Beatrice is as essential to the human sympathies of the _Divina Commedia_

as her glorified Idea to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante

understood perfectly well.[161] Take _her_ out of the poem, and the heart

of it goes with her; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of its soul.

She is the menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into

unity. Those who doubt her existence must find Dante's graceful

sonnet[162] to Guido Cavalcante as provoking as Sancho's story of his

having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat was to his master, "so alien is it

from all that which eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved

for other exercises and entertainments, do and ought to do."[163] But we

should always remember in reading Dante that with him the allegorical

interpretation is the true one (_verace sposizione_), and that he

represents himself (and that at a time when he was known to the world

only by his minor poems) as having made righteousness (_rettitudine_, in

other words, moral philosophy) the subject of his verse.[164] Love with

him seems first to have meant the love of truth and the search after it

(_speculazione_), and afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite

source (_speculazione_ in its higher and mystical sense). This is the

divine love "which where it shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all

other loves."[165] Wisdom is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to

contemplate God the true mirror (_verace spegio, speculum_), wherein all

things are seen as they truly are. Nay, she herself "is the brightness of

the eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."[166]

There are two beautiful passages in the _Convito_, which we shall quote,

both because they have, as we believe a close application to Dante's own

experience, and because they are good specimens of his style as a writer

of prose. In the manly simplicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and

in the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far beyond that of any of

his contemporaries as his verse, nay, more, has hardly been matched by

any Italian from that day to this. Illustrating the position that "the

highest desire of everything and the first given us by nature is to

return to its first cause," he says: "And since God is the beginning of

our souls and the maker of them like unto himself, according as was

written, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness,' this soul most

greatly desires to return to him. And as a pilgrim who goes by a way he

has never travelled, who believes every house he sees afar off to be his

inn, and not finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and so

from house to house till he come to the inn, so our soul forthwith on

entering upon the new and never-travelled road of this life directs its

eyes to the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes whatever

thing it sees that seems to have in it any good to be that. And because

its first knowledge is imperfect by reason of not being experienced nor

indoctrinated, small goods seem to it great. Wherefore we see children

desire most greatly an apple, and then proceeding further on desire a

bird, and then further yet desire fine raiment, and then a horse, and

then a woman, and then, riches not great, and then greater and greater.

And this befalls because in none of these things it finds that which it

goes seeking, and thinks to find it further on. By which it may be seen

that one desirable stands before another in the eyes of our soul in a

fashion as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at first covers the whole

of them, and is as it were the apex of the highest desirable, which is

God, as it were the base of all; so that the further we go from the apex

toward the base the desirables appear greater; and this is the reason why

human desires become wider one after the other. Verily this way is lost

through error as the roads of earth are; for as from one city to another

there is of necessity one best and straightest way, and one that always

leads farther from it, that is, the one which goes elsewhere, and many

others, some less roundabout and some less direct, so in human life are

divers roads whereof one is the truest and another the most deceitful,

and certain ones less deceitful, and certain less true. And as we see

that that which goes most directly to the city fulfils desire and gives

repose after weariness, and that which goes the other way never fulfils

it and never can give repose, so it falls out in our life. The good

traveller arrives at the goal and repose, the erroneous never arrives

thither, but with much weariness of mind, always with greedy eyes looks

before him."[167] If we may apply Dante's own method of exposition to

this passage, we find him telling us that he first sought felicity in

knowledge,

"That apple sweet which through so many branches

The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of,"[168]

then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we follow,[169] then in

being esteemed of men ("to be clothed in purple, ... to sit next to

Darius, ... and be called Darius his cousin "), then in power,[170] then

in the riches of the Holy Spirit in larger and larger measure.[171] He,

too, had found that there was but one straight road, whether to the

Terrestrial Paradise or the Celestial City, and may come to question by

and by whether they be not parallel one with the other, or even parts of

the same road, by which only repose is to be reached at last. Then, when

in old age "the noble soul returns to God as to that port whence she set

forth on the sea of this life, ... just as to him who comes from a long

journey, before he enters into the gate of his city, the citizens thereof

go forth to meet him, so the citizens of the eternal life go to meet

_her_, and do so because of her good deeds and contemplations, who,

having already betaken herself to God, seems to see those whom she

believes to be nigh unto God."[172] This also was to be the experience of

Dante, for who can doubt that the _Paradiso_ was something very unlike a

poetical exercise to him who appeals to the visions even of sleep as

proof of the soul's immortality?

When did his soul catch a glimpse of that certainty in which "the mind

that museth upon many things" can find assured rest? We have already said

that we believe Dante's political opinions to have taken their final

shape and the _De Monarchia_ to have been written before 1300.[173] That

the revision of the _Vita Nuova_ was completed in that year seems

probable from the last sonnet but one, which is addressed to pilgrims on

their way to the Santa Veronica at Rome.[174] In this sonnet he still

laments Beatrice as dead; he would make the pilgrims share his grief. It

is the very folly of despairing sorrow, that calls on the first comer,

stranger though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully give, and he

least of all. But in the next sonnet, the last in the book, there is a

surprising change of tone. The transfiguration of Beatrice has begun, and

we see completing itself that natural gradation of grief which will

erelong bring the mourner to call on the departed saint to console him

for her own loss. The sonnet is remarkable in more senses than one, first

for its psychological truth, and then still more for the light it throws

on Dante's inward history as poet and thinker. Hitherto he had celebrated

beauty and goodness in the creature; henceforth he was to celebrate them

in the Creator whose praise they were.[175] We give an extempore

translation of this sonnet, in which the meaning is preserved so far as

is possible where the grace is left out. We remember with some

compunction as we do it, that Dante has said, "know every one that

nothing harmonized by a musical band can be transmuted from its own

speech to another without breaking all its sweetness and harmony,"[176]

and Cervantes was of the same mind:[177]

"Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre

Passeth the sigh[178] that leaves my heart below;

A new intelligence doth love bestow

On it with tears that ever draws it higher;

When it wins thither where is its desire,

A Lady it beholds who honor so

And light receives, that, through her splendid glow,

The pilgrim spirit[179] sees her as in fire;

It sees her such, that, telling me again

I understand it not, it speaks so low

Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell;

Its speech is of that noble One I know,

For 'Beatrice' I often hear full plain,

So that, dear ladies, I conceive it well."

No one can read this in its connection with what goes before and what

follows without feeling that a new conception of Beatrice had dawned upon

the mind of Dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to seem so, and yet the

authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising as the light of his day

and the guide of his feet, the divine wisdom whose glory pales all meaner

stars. The conception of a poem in which Dante's creed in politics and

morals should be picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of the high

place which Beatrice should take in it, had begun vaguely to shape itself

in his thought. As he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself

clearly. "Soon after this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous

vision[180] wherein I saw things which made me propose not to say more of

that blessed one until I could treat of her more worthily. And to arrive

at that I study all I can, as she verily knows. So that, if it be the

pleasure of Him through whom all things live, that my life hold out yet a

few years, I hope to say that of her which was never yet said of any

(woman). And then may it please Him who is the Lord of Courtesy that my

soul may go to see the glory of her Lady, that is, of that blessed

Beatrice who gloriously beholds the face of Him _qui est per omnia

saecula benedictus_." It was the method of presentation that became clear

to Dante at this time,--the plan of the great poem for whose completion

the experience of earth and the inspiration of heaven were to combine,

and which was to make him lean for many years.[181] The doctrinal scope

of it was already determined. Man, he tells us, is the only creature who

partakes at once of the corruptible and incorruptible nature; "and since

every nature is ordained to some ultimate end, it follows that the end of

man is double. And as among all beings he alone partakes of the

corruptible and incorruptible, so alone among all beings he is ordained

to a double end, whereof the one is his end as corruptible, the other as

incorruptible. That unspeakable Providence therefore foreordered two ends

to be pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life, which consists in

the operation of our own virtue, and is figured by the Terrestrial

Paradise, and the beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a fruition

of the divine countenance, whereto our own virtue cannot ascend unless

aided by divine light, which is understood by the Celestial Paradise."

The one we attain by practice of the moral and intellectual virtues as

they are taught by philosophers, the other by spiritual teachings

transcending human reason, and the practice of the theological virtues of

Faith, Hope, and Charity. For one, Reason suffices ("which was wholly

made known to us by philosophers"), for the other we need the light of

supernatural truth revealed by the Holy Spirit and "needful for us." Men

led astray by cupidity turn their backs on both, and in their bestiality

need bit and rein to keep them in the way. "Wherefore to man was a double

guidance needful according to the double end," the Supreme Pontiff in

spiritual, the Emperor in temporal things.[182]

But how to put this theory of his into a poetic form which might charm

while it was teaching? He would typify Reason in Virgil (who would serve

also as a symbol of political wisdom as having celebrated the founding of

the Empire), and the grace of God in that Beatrice whom he had already

supernaturalized into something which passeth all understanding. In

choosing Virgil he was sure of that interest and sympathy which his

instinct led him to seek in the predisposition of his readers, for the

popular imagination of the Middle Ages had busied itself particularly

with the Mantuan poet. The Church had given, him a quasi-orthodoxy by

interpreting his _jam redit et virgo_ as a prophecy of the birth of

Christ. At Naples he had become a kind of patron saint, and his bones

were exhibited as relics. Dante himself may have heard at Mantua the hymn

sung on the anniversary of St. Paul, in which the apostle to the Gentiles

is represented as weeping at the tomb of the greatest of poets. Above

all, Virgil had described the descent of Aeneas to the under-world.

Dante's choice of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made for

him. But the mere Reason[183] of man without the illumination of divine

Grace cannot be trusted, and accordingly the intervention of Beatrice was

needed,--of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably well expresses it

"already transfigured, potent not only now to charm and soothe, potent to

rule; to the Intellect a light, to the Affections a compass and a

balance, a sceptre over the Will."

The wood obscure in which Dante finds himself is the world.[184] The

three beasts who dispute his way are the sins that most easily beset us,

Pride, the Lusts of the Flesh, and Greed. We are surprised that Miss

Rossetti should so localize and confine Dante's meaning as to explain

them by Florence, France, and Rome. Had he written in so narrow a sense

as this, it would indeed be hard to account for the persistent power of

his poem. But it was no political pamphlet that Dante was writing.

_Subjectum est Homo_, and it only takes the form of a diary by Dante

Alighieri because of the intense realism of his imagination, a realism as

striking in the _Paradiso_ as the _Inferno_, though it takes a different

shape. Everything, the most supersensual, presented itself to his mind,

not as abstract idea, but as visible type. As men could once embody a

quality of good in a saint and _see_ it, as they even now in moments of

heightened fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country and speak of

England, France, or America, as if they were real beings, so did Dante

habitually.[185] He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the

hypochondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their form and color

were but the outward form of an inward and spiritual condition. Whatever

subsidiary interpretations the poem is capable of, its great and primary

value is as the autobiography of a human soul, of yours and mine, it may

be, as well as Dante's. In that lie its profound meaning and its

permanent force. That an exile, a proud man forced to be dependent,

should have found some consolation in brooding over the justice of God,

weighed in such different scales from those of man, in contrasting the

outward prosperity of the sinner with the awful spiritual ruin within, is

not wonderful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes finding the wrath of

God sweeter than his mercy. But it is wonderful that out of the very

wreck of his own life he should have built this three-arched bridge,

still firm against the wash and wear of ages, stretching from the Pit to

the Empyrean, by which men may pass from a doubt of God's providence to a

certainty of his long-suffering and loving-kindness.

"The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms

That it receives whatever turns to it."[186]

A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of them.[187] It cannot be

too often repeated that Dante's Other World is not in its first

conception a place of _departed_ spirits. It is the Spiritual World,

whereof we become denizens by birth and citizens by adoption. It is true

that for artistic purposes he makes it conform so far as possible with

vulgar preconceptions, but he himself has told us again and again what

his real meaning was. Virgil tells Dante,--

"Thou shalt behold the people dolorous

Who have foregone the good of intellect."[188]

The "good of the intellect," Dante tells us after Aristotle, is

Truth.[189] He says that Virgil has led him "through the deep night of

the _truly dead_."[190] Who are they? Dante had in mind the saying of the

Apostle, "to be carnally minded is death." He says: "In man to live is to

use reason. Then if living is the being of man, to depart from that use

is to depart from being, and so to be dead. And doth not he depart from

the use of reason who doth not reason out the object of his life?" "I say

that so vile a person is dead, seeming to be alive. For we must know

_that the wicked man may be called truly dead_." "He is dead who follows

not the teacher. And of such a one some might say, how is he dead and yet

goes about? I answer that the man is dead and the beast remains."[191]

Accordingly he has put living persons in the _Inferno_, like Frate

Alberigo and Branca d' Oria, of whom he says with bitter sarcasm that he

still "eats and drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his highest

ideal of the true ends of life.[192] There is a passage in the first

canto of the _Inferno_[193] which has been variously interpreted:--

"The ancient spirits disconsolate

Who cry out each one for the _second death_."

Miss Rossetti cites it as an example of what she felicitously calls "an

ambiguity, not hazy, but prismatic, and therefore not really perplexing."

She gives us accordingly our choice of two interpretations, "'each cries

out on account of the second death which he is suffering,' and 'each

cries out for death to come a second time and ease him of his

sufferings.'"[194] Buti says: "Here one doubts what the author meant by

the second death, and as for me I think he meant the last damnation,

which shall be at the day of judgment, because they would wish through

envy that it had already come, that they might have more companions,

since the first death is the first damnation, when the soul parted from

the body is condemned to the pains of hell for its sins. The second is

when, resuscitated at the judgment day, they shall be finally condemned,

soul and body together.... It may otherwise be understood as

annihilation." Imola says, "Each would wish to die again, if he could, to

put an end to his pain. Do not hold with some who think that Dante calls

the second death the day of judgment," and then quotes a passage from St.

Augustine which favors that view. Pietro di Dante gives us four

interpretations among which to choose, the first being that,

"allegorically, depraved and vicious men are in a certain sense dead in

reputation, and this is the first death; the second is that of the body."

This we believe to be the true meaning. Dante himself, in a letter to the

"most rascally (_scelestissimis_) dwellers in Florence," gives us the

key: "but you, transgressors of the laws of God and man, whom the direful

maw of cupidity hath enticed not unwilling to every crime, does not the

terror of the _second death_ torment you?" Their first death was in their

sins, the second is what they may expect from the just vengeance of the

Emperor Henry VII. The world Dante leads us through is that of his own

thought, and it need not surprise us therefore if we meet in it purely

imaginary beings like Tristrem[195] and Renoard of the club.[196] His

personality is so strongly marked that it is nothing more than natural

that his poem should be interpreted as if only he and his opinions,

prejudices, or passions were concerned. He would not have been the great

poet he was if he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he could never

have won the cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known how to

generalize his special experience into something mediatorial for all of

us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto of the

_Purgatorio_ says that "unless you understand him and his figures

allegorically, you will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our

author made his pilgrimage as the representative of the rest (_in,

persona ceterorum_).[197] To give his vision reality, he has adapted it

to the vulgar mythology, but to understand it as the author meant, it

must be taken in the larger sense. To confine it to Florence or to Italy

is to banish it from the sympathies of mankind. It was not from the

campanile of the Badia that Dante got his views of life and man.

The relation of Dante to literature is monumental, and marks the era at

which the modern begins. He is not only the first great poet, but the

first great prose writer who used a language not yet subdued to

literature, who used it moreover for scientific and metaphysical

discussion, thus giving an incalculable impulse to the culture of his

countrymen by making the laity free of what had hitherto been the

exclusive guild of clerks.[198] Whatever poetry had preceded him, whether

in the Romance or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its

simplicity without forethought, or, as in the _Nibelungen_, for a kind of

savage grandeur that rouses the sympathy of whatever of the natural man

is dormant in us. But it shows no trace of the creative faculty either in

unity of purpose or style, the proper characteristics of literature. If

it have the charm of wanting artifice, it has not the higher charm of

art. We are in the realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with

phosphorescent gleams here and there, star stuff, but uncondensed in

stars. The _Nibelungen_ is not without far-reaching hints and forebodings

of something finer than we find in it, but they are a glamour from the

vague darkness which encircles it, like the whisper of the sea upon an

unknown shore at night, powerful only over the more vulgar side of the

imagination, and leaving no thought, scarce even any image (at least of

beauty) behind them. Such poems are the amours, not the lasting

friendships and possessions of the mind. They thrill and cannot satisfy.

But Dante is not merely the founder of modern literature. He would have

been that if he had never written anything more than his _Canzoni_, which

for elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor of sentiment were something

altogether new. They are of a higher mood than any other poems of the

same style in their own language, or indeed in any other. In beauty of

phrase and subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the Greek

tragic choruses. We are constantly moved in them by a nobleness of tone,

whose absence in many admired lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by

conceits. So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material, that in

compositions, as he himself has shown, so artificial,[199] the form seems

rather organic than mechanical, which cannot be said of the best of the

Provencal poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's sonnets also have a

grace and tenderness which have been seldom matched. His lyrical

excellence would have got him into the Collections, and he would have

made here and there an enthusiast as Donne does in English, but his great

claim to remembrance is not merely Italian. It is that he was the first

Christian poet, in any proper sense of the word, the first who so subdued

dogma to the uses of plastic imagination as to make something that is

still poetry of the highest order after it has suffered the

disenchantment inevitable in the most perfect translation. Verses of the

kind usually called _sacred_ (reminding one of the adjective's double

meaning) had been written before his time in the vulgar tongue,--such

verses as remain inviolably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked at

with distant reverence by the pious, and with far other feelings by the

profane reader. There were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict

between Christianity and Paganism[200] furnished the subject, but in

which the theological views of the authors, whether doctrinal or

historical, could hardly be reconciled with any system of religion

ancient or modern. There were Church legends of saints and martyrs

versified, fit certainly to make any other form of martyrdom seem amiable

to those who heard them, and to suggest palliative thoughts about

Diocletian. Finally, there were the romances of Arthur and his knights,

which later, by means of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and

edifying; every one who listened to them paying the minstrel his money,

and having his choice whether he would take them as song or sermon. In

the heroes of some of these certain Christian virtues were typified, and

around a few of them, as the Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of

cloistered piety and withdrawal. Wolfram von Eschenbach, indeed, has

divided his _Parzival_ into three books, of Simplicity, Doubt, and

Healing, which has led Gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful

analogy between that poem and the _Divina Commedia_. The doughty old

poet, who says of himself,--

"Of song I have some slight control,

But deem her of a feeble soul

That doth not love my naked sword

Above my sweetest lyric word,"

tells us that his subject is the choice between good and evil;

"Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride

And sets himself on Evil's side,

Chooses the Black, and sure it is

His path leads down to the abyss;

But he who doth his nature feed

With steadfastness and loyal deed

Lies open to the heavenly light

And takes his portion with the White."

But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows good feeling rather than

settled conviction. Above all it is wandering (as he himself confesses),

and altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to whatever extent

Christianity had insinuated itself into and colored European literature,

it was mainly as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet incorporated

itself. It was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully what he

accomplished we must form some conception of what is meant by the

Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, let us contrast it with

the Greek idea as it appears in poetry; for we are not dealing with a

question of theology so much as with one of aesthetics.

Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the most perfect that we

know. But its circle of motives was essentially limited; and the Greek

drama in its passion, its pathos, and its humor is primarily Greek, and

secondarily human. Its tragedy chooses its actors from certain heroic

families, and finds its springs of pity and terror in physical suffering

and worldly misfortune. Its best examples, like the _Antigone_,

illustrate a single duty, or, like the _Hippolytus_, a single passion, on

which, as on a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in its

details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are sometimes made to do,

displaying its different sides in one invariable light. The general

impression left on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one than any

drawn from single examples) is that the duty is one which is owed to

custom, that the passion leads to a breach of some convention settled by

common consent,[201] and accordingly it is an outraged society whose

figure looms in the background, rather than an offended God. At most it

was one god of many, and meanwhile another might be friendly. In the

Greek epic, the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and

log-roll for their candidates. The tacit admission of a revealed code of

morals wrought a great change. The complexity and range of passion is

vastly increased when the offence is at once both crime and sin, a wrong

done against order and against conscience at the same time. The relation

of the Greek Tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly antagonistic,

struggle against an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of heroes,

but sure of defeat at last. And that defeat is final. Grand figures are

those it exhibits to us, in some respects unequalled, and in their severe

simplicity they compare with modern poetry as sculpture with painting.

Considered merely as works of art, these products of the Greek

imagination satisfy our highest conception of form. They suggest

inevitably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and

independence, of something rounded and finished in itself. The secret of

those old shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk

deeper than ever plummet sounded. The type of their work is the Greek

Temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection of

design, in harmony and subordination of parts, and in entireness of

impression. But in this aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly

and complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there with it.

Now the Christian idea has to do with the human soul, which Christianity

may be almost said to have invented. While all Paganism represents a few

pre-eminent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of races, as

of kin with the gods, Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity,

makes monarch and slave the children of one God. Its heroes struggle not

against, but upward and onward _toward_, the higher powers who are always

on their side. Its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic, but

moral. With it prosperity and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds

enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pagan and even Hebrew

literature saw the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow,

poverty, humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only

implacable foes. While it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or

country and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the individual man

whoever and wherever he may be. Above all, an entirely new conception of

the Infinite and of man's relation to it came in with Christianity. That,

and not the finite, is always the background, consciously or not. It

changed the scene of the last act of every drama to the next world.

Endless aspiration of all the faculties became thus the ideal of

Christian life, and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal of

essentially Christian art. It was this which the Middle Ages

instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral,--no accidental growth,

but the visible symbol of an inward faith,--which soars forever upward,

and yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone.

It is not without significance that Goethe, who, like Dante, also

absorbed and represented the tendency and spirit of his age, should,

during his youth and while Europe was alive with the moral and

intellectual longing which preluded the French Revolution, have loved the

Gothic architecture. It is no less significant that in the period of

reaction toward more positive thought which followed, he should have

preferred the Greek. His greatest poem, conceived during the former era,

is Gothic. Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary tradition,

began to write the _Divina Commedia_ in Latin, and had elaborated several

cantos of it in that dead and intractable material. But that poetic

instinct, which is never the instinct of an individual, but of his age,

could not so be satisfied, and leaving the classic structure he had begun

to stand as a monument of failure, he completed his work in Italian.

Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was

foreign and artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic

which he wished to write in the universal language of scholars, and which

might have had its ten lines in the history of literature, would sing

itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out to be written in the universal

dialect of mankind. Thus all great poets have been in a certain sense

provincial,--Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the

"Heart of Midlothian" and "Bride of Lammermoor,"--because the office of

the poet is always vicarious, because nothing that has not been living

experience can become living expression, because the collective thought,

the faith, the desire of a nation or a race, is the cumulative result of

many ages, is something organic, and is wiser and stronger than any

single person, and will make a great statesman or a great poet out of any

man who can entirely surrender himself to it.

As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the Christian idea, so is

it also of Dante's poem. And as that in its artistic unity is but the

completed thought of a single architect, which yet could never have been

realized except out of the faith and by the contributions of an entire

people, whose beliefs and superstitions, whose imagination and fancy,

find expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm saints and

martyrs now at rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied niches,

and its wanton grotesques thrusting themselves forth from every pinnacle

and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is as personal and peculiar as

if it were his private journal and autobiography, we can yet read the

diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth century and of the Italian

people. Complete and harmonious in design as his work is, it is yet no

Pagan temple enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph of

corporeal beauty; it is not a private chapel housing a single saint and

dedicate to one chosen bloom of Christian piety or devotion; it is truly

a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the

Divine made human to teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence

of the spiritual, not overhanging and threatening, but informing and

sustaining the material. In this cathedral of Dante's there are

side-chapels as is fit, with altars to all Christian virtues and

perfections; but the great impression of its leading thought is that of

aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three divisions of the poem we may

trace something more than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica.

There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purgatorial middle-space,

and last the holy of holies dedicated to the eternal presence of the

mediatorial God.

But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to the title of the first

Christian poem is not merely its doctrinal truth or its Christian

mythology, but the fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world,

but in the soul of man; that it is the allegory of a human life, and

therefore universal in its significance and its application. The genius

of Dante has given to it such a self-subsistent reality, that one almost

gets to feel as if the chief value of contemporary Italian history had

been to furnish it with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it

was written assumes towards it the place of a satellite. For Italy, Dante

is the thirteenth century.

Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which

they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had

made up his mind as to the true purpose and meaning of our existence in

this world, shortly after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. He had

already conceived the system about which as a connecting thread the whole

experience of his life, the whole result of his studies, was to cluster

in imperishable crystals. The cornerstone of his system was the Freedom

of the Will (in other words, the right of private judgment with the

condition of accountability), which Beatrice calls the "noble

virtue."[202] As to every man is offered his choice between good and

evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature originally evil a habit of

virtue may be engrafted,[203] no man is excused. "All hope abandon ye who

enter in," for they have thrown away reason which is the good of the

intellect, "and it seems to me no less a marvel to bring back to reason

him in whom it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him who has

been four days in the tomb."[204] As a guide of the will in civil affairs

the Emperor; in spiritual, the Pope.[205] Dante is not one of those

reformers who would assume the office of God to "make all things new." He

knew the power of tradition and habit, and wished to utilize it for his

purpose. He found the Empire and the Papacy already existing, but both

needing reformation that they might serve the ends of their original

institution. Bad leadership was to blame, men fit to gird on the sword

had been turned into priests, and good preachers spoiled to make bad

kings.[206] The spiritual had usurped to itself the prerogatives of the

temporal power.

"Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was

Two suns to have which one road and the other,

Of God and of the world, made manifest.

One has the other quenched, and to the crosier

The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it,

* * * * *

"Because, being joined one feareth not the other."[207]

Both powers held their authority directly from God, "not so, however,

that the Roman Prince is not in some things subject to the Roman Pontiff,

since that human felicity [to be attained only by peace, justice, and

good government, possible only under a single ruler] is in some sort

ordained to the end of immortal felicity. Let Caesar use that reverence

toward Peter which a first-born son ought to use toward a father; that,

shone upon by the light of paternal grace, he may more powerfully

illumine the orb of earth over which he is set by him alone who is the

ruler of all things spiritual and temporal."[208] As to the fatal gift of

Constantine, Dante demonstrates that an Emperor could not alienate what

he held only in trust; but if he made the gift, the Pope should hold it

as a feudatory of the Empire, for the benefit, however, of Christ's

poor.[209] Dante is always careful to distinguish between the Papacy and

the Pope. He prophesies for Boniface VIII. a place in hell,[210] but

acknowledges him as the Vicar of Christ, goes so far even as to denounce

the outrage of Guillaume de Nogaret at Anagni as done to the Saviour

himself.[211] But in the Spiritual World Dante acknowledges no such

supremacy, and, when he would have fallen on his knees before Adrian V.,

is rebuked by him in a quotation from the Apocalypse:--

"Err not, fellow-servant am I

With thee and with the others to one power."[212]

So impartial was this man whose great work is so often represented as a

kind of bag in which he secreted the gall of personal prejudice, so truly

Catholic is he, that both parties find their arsenal in him. The Romanist

proves his soundness in doctrine, the anti-Romanist claims him as the

first Protestant, the Mazzinist and the Imperialist can alike quote him

for their purpose. Dante's ardent conviction would not let him see that

both Church and Empire were on the wane. If an ugly suspicion of this

would force itself upon him, perhaps he only clung to both the more

tenaciously; but he was no blind theorist. He would reform the Church

through the Church, and is less anxious for Italian independence than for

Italian good government under an Emperor from Germany rather than from

Utopia.

The Papacy was a necessary part of Dante's system, as a supplement to the

Empire, which we strongly incline to believe was always foremost in his

mind. In a passage already quoted, he says that "the soil where Rome sits

is worthy beyond what men preach and admit," that is, as the birthplace

of the Empire. Both in the _Convito_ and the _De Monarchia_ he affirms

that the course of Roman history was providentially guided from the

first. Rome was founded in the same year that brought into the world

David, ancestor of the Redeemer after the flesh. St. Augustine said that

"God showed in the most opulent and illustrious Empire of the Romans how

much the civil virtues might avail even without true religion, that it

might be understood how, this added, men became citizens of another city

whose king is truth, whose law charity, and whose measure eternity."

Dante goes further than this. He makes the Romans as well as the Jews a

chosen people, the one as founders of civil society, the other as

depositaries of the true faith.[213] One side of Dante's mind was so

practical and positive, and his pride in the Romans so intense,[214] that

he sometimes seems to regard their mission as the higher of the two.

Without peace which only good government could give, mankind could not

arrive at the highest virtue, whether of the active or contemplative

life. "And since what is true of the part is true of the whole, and it

happens in the particular man that by sitting quietly he is perfected in

prudence and wisdom, it is clear that the human race in the quiet or

tranquillity of peace is most freely and easily disposed for its proper

work which is almost divine, as it is written, 'Thou hast made him a

little lower than the angels'[215] Whence it is manifest that universal

peace is the best of those things which are ordained for our beatitude.

Hence it is that not riches, not pleasures, not honors, not length of

life, not health, not strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shepherds

from on high, but peace."[216] It was Dante's experience of the confusion

of Italy, where

"One doth gnaw the other

Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in,"[217]

that suggested the thought of a universal umpire, for that, after all,

was to be the chief function of his Emperor. He was too wise to insist on

a uniformity of political institutions _a priori_,[218] for he seems to

have divined that the surest stay of order, as of practical wisdom, is

habit, which is a growth, and cannot be made offhand. He believed with

Aristotle that vigorous minds were intended by nature to rule,[219] and

that certain races, like certain men, are born to leadership.[220] He

calls democracies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (_tyrannides_)

"oblique policies which drive the human race to slavery, as is patent in

all of them to one who reasons."[221] He has nothing but pity for mankind

when it has become a many-headed beast, "despising the higher intellect

irrefragable in reason, the lower which hath the face of

experience."[222] He had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the

divine right of _I'm as good as you_. He thought it fatal to all

discipline: "The confounding of persons hath ever been the beginning of

sickness in the state."[223] It is the same thought which Shakespeare

puts in the mouth of Ulysses:--

"Degree being vizarded,

The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask,

When degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

The enterprise is sick."[224]

Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he had a high sense of the

worth of freedom, whether in thought or government. He represents,

indeed, the very object of his journey through the triple realm of shades

as a search after liberty.[225] But it must not be that scramble after

undefined and indefinable rights which ends always in despotism, equally

degrading whether crowned with a red cap or an imperial diadem. His

theory of liberty has for its corner-stone the Freedom of the Will, and

the will is free only when the judgment wholly controls the

appetite.[226] On such a base even a democracy may rest secure, and on

such alone.

Rome was always the central point of Dante's speculation. A shadow of her

old sovereignty was still left her in the primacy of the Church, to which

unity of faith was essential. He accordingly has no sympathy with

heretics of whatever kind. He puts the ex-troubadour Bishop of

Marseilles, chief instigator of the horrors of Provence, in

paradise.[227] The Church is infallible in spiritual matters, but this is

an affair of outward discipline merely, and means the Church as a form of

polity. Unity was Dante's leading doctrine, and therefore he puts Mahomet

among the schismatics, not because he divided the Church, but the

faith.[228] Dante's Church was of this world, but he surely believed in

another and spiritual one. It has been questioned whether he was orthodox

or not. There can be no doubt of it so far as outward assent and

conformity are concerned, which he would practice himself and enforce

upon others as the first postulate of order, the prerequisite for all

happiness in this life. In regard to the Visible Church he was a

reformer, but no revolutionist; it is sheer ignorance to speak of him as

if there were anything new or exceptional in his denunciation of the

corruptions of the clergy. They were the commonplaces of the age, nor

were they confined to laymen.[229] To the absolute authority of the

Church Dante admitted some exceptions. He denies that the supreme Pontiff

has the unlimited power of binding and loosing claimed for him.

"Otherwise he might absolve me impenitent, which God himself could not

do."[230]

"By malison of theirs is not so lost

Eternal Love that it cannot return."[231]

Nor does the sacredness of the office extend to him who chances to hold

it. Philip the Fair himself could hardly treat Boniface VIII. worse than

he. With wonderful audacity, he declares the Papal throne vacant by the

mouth of Saint Peter himself.[232] Even if his theory of a dual

government were not in question, Dante must have been very cautious in

meddling with the Church. It was not an age that stood much upon

ceremony. He himself tells us he had seen men burned alive, and the

author of the _Ottimo Comento_ says: "I the writer saw followers of his

[Fra Dolcino] burned at Padua to the number of twenty-two together."[233]

Clearly, in such a time as this, one must not make "the veil of the

mysterious Terse" _too_ thin.[234]

In the affairs of this life Dante was, as we have said, supremely

practical, and he makes prudence the chief of the cardinal virtues.[235]

He has made up his mind to take things as they come, and to do at Rome as

the Romans do.

"Ah, savage company! but in the Church

With saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons!"[236]

In the world of thought it was otherwise, and here Dante's doctrine, if

not precisely esoteric, was certainly not that of his day, and must be

gathered from hints rather than direct statements. The general notion of

God was still (perhaps is largely even now) of a provincial, one might

almost say a denominational, Deity. The popular poets always represent

Macon, Apolm, Tervagant, and the rest as quasi-deities unable to resist

the superior strength of the Christian God. The Paynim answers the

arguments of his would-be converters with the taunt that he would never

worship a divinity who could not save himself from being done

ignominiously to death. Dante evidently was not satisfied with the narrow

conception which limits the interest of the Deity to the affairs of Jews

and Christians That saying of Saint Paul, "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly

worship, him declare I unto you," had perhaps influenced him, but his

belief in the divine mission of the Roman people probably was conclusive.

"The Roman Empire had the help of miracles in perfecting itself," he

says, and then enumerates some of them. The first is that "under Numa

Pompilius, the second king of the Romans, when he was sacrificing

according to the rite of the Gentiles, a shield fell from heaven into the

city chosen of God."[237] In the _Convito_ we find "Virgil speaking in

the person of God," and Aeacus "wisely having recourse to God," the god

being Jupiter.[238] Ephialtes is punished in hell for rebellion against

"the Supreme Jove,"[239] and, that there may be no misunderstanding,

Dante elsewhere invokes the

"Jove Supreme,

Who upon earth for us wast crucified."[240]

It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident design, constantly

alternates examples drawn from Christian and Pagan tradition or

mythology.[241] He had conceived a unity in the human race, all of whose

branches had worshipped the same God under divers names and aspects, had

arrived at the same truth by different roads. We cannot understand a

passage in the twenty-sixth _Paradiso_, where Dante inquires of Adam

concerning the names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen People had

done in this thing even as the Gentiles did.[242] It is true that he puts

all Pagans in Limbo, "where without hope they live in longing," and that

he makes baptism essential to salvation.[243] But it is noticeable that

his Limbo is the Elysium of Virgil, and that he particularizes Adam,

Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and others as prisoners there with the rest

till the descent of Christ into hell.[244] But were they altogether

without hope? and did baptism mean an immersion of the body or a

purification of the soul? The state of the heathen after death had

evidently been to Dante one of those doubts that spring up at the foot of

every truth. In the _De Monarchia_ he says: "There are some judgments of

God to which, though human reason cannot attain by its own strength, yet

is it lifted to them by the help of faith and of those things which are

said to us in Holy Writ,--as to this, that no one, however perfect in the

moral and intellectual virtues both as a habit [of the mind] and in

practice, can be saved without faith, it being granted that he shall

never have heard anything concerning Christ; for the unaided reason of

man cannot look upon this as just; nevertheless, with the help of faith,

it can."[245] But faith, it should seem, was long in lifting Dante to

this height; for in the nineteenth canto of the _Paradiso_, which must

have been written many years after the passage just cited, the doubt

recurs again, and we are told that it was "a cavern," concerning which he

had "made frequent questioning." The answer is given here:--

"Truly to him who with me subtilizes,

_If so the Scripture were not over you_,

For doubting there were marvellous occasion."

But what Scripture? Dante seems cautious, tells us that the eternal

judgments are above our comprehension, postpones the answer, and when it

comes, puts an orthodox prophylactic before it:--

"Unto this kingdom never

Ascended one who had not faith in Christ

Before or since he to the tree was nailed

But look thou, _many crying are, 'Christ, Christ!'

Who at the judgment shall be far less near

To him than some shall be who knew not Christ_."

There is, then, some hope for the man born on the bank of Indus who has

never heard of Christ? Dante is still cautious, but answers the question

indirectly in the next canto by putting the Trojan Ripheus among the

blessed:--

"Who would believe, down in the errant world,

That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round

Could be the fifth one of these holy lights?

Now knoweth he enough of what the world

Has not the power to see of grace divine,

Although _his_ sight may not discern the bottom."

Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the Church legend of Trajan

brought back to life by the prayers of Gregory the Great that he might be

converted, and after an interval of fifty lines tells us how Ripheus was

saved:--

"The other one, through grace that from so deep

A fountain wells that never hath the eye

Of any creature reached its primal wave,

Set all his love below on righteousness;

Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose

His eye to our redemption yet to be,

Whence he believed therein, and suffered not

From that day forth the stench of Paganism,

And he reproved therefor the folk perverse.

Those maidens three, whom at the right hand wheel[246]

Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism

More than a thousand years before baptizing."

If the reader recall a passage already quoted from the _Convito_,[247] he

will perhaps think with us that the gate of Dante's _Limbo_ is left ajar

even for the ancient philosophers to slip out. The divine judgments are

still inscrutable, and the ways of God past finding out, but faith would

seem to have led Dante at last to a more merciful solution of his doubt

than he had reached when he wrote the _De Monarchia_. It is always

humanizing to see how the most rigid creed is made to bend before the

kindlier instincts of the heart. The stern Dante thinks none beyond hope

save those who are dead in sin, and have made evil their good. But we are

by no means sure that he is not right in insisting rather on the

implacable severity of the law than on the possible relenting of the

judge. Exact justice is commonly more merciful in the long run than pity,

for it tends to foster in men those stronger qualities which make them

good citizens, an object second only with the Roman-minded Dante to that

of making them spiritually regenerate, nay, perhaps even more important

as a necessary preliminary to it. The inscription over the gate of hell

tells us that the terms on which we receive the trust of life were fixed

by the Divine Power (which can what it wills), and are therefore

unchangeable; by the Highest Wisdom, and therefore for our truest good;

by the Primal Love, and therefore the kindest. These are the three

attributes of that justice which moved the maker of them. Dante is no

harsher than experience, which always exacts the uttermost farthing; no

more inexorable than conscience, which never forgives nor forgets. No

teaching is truer or more continually needful than that the stains of the

soul are ineffaceable, and that though their growth may be arrested,

their nature is to spread insidiously till they have brought all to their

own color. Evil is a far more cunning and persevering propagandist than

Good, for it has no inward strength, and is driven to seek countenance

and sympathy. It must have company, for it cannot bear to be alone in the

dark, while

"Virtue can see to do what Virtue would

By her own radiant light."

There is one other point which we will dwell on for a moment as bearing

on the question of Dante's orthodoxy. His nature was one in which, as in

Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was continually streamed

over by the northern lights of mysticism, through which the familiar

stars shine with a softened and more spiritual lustre. Nothing is more

interesting than the way in which the two qualities of his mind

alternate, and indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact

sometimes with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving an almost

geometrical precision to his most mystical visions. In his letter to Can

Grande he says: "It behooves not those to whom it is given to know what

is best in us to follow the footprints of the herd; much rather are they

bound to oppose its wanderings. For the vigorous in intellect and reason,

endowed with a certain divine liberty, are constrained by no customs. Nor

is it wonderful, since they are not governed by the laws, but much more

govern the laws themselves." It is not impossible that Dante, whose love

of knowledge was all-embracing, may have got some hint of the doctrine of

the Oriental Sufis. With them the first and lowest of the steps that lead

upward to perfection is the Law, a strict observance of which is all that

is expected of the ordinary man whose mind is not open to the conception

of a higher virtue and holiness. But the Sufi puts himself under the

guidance of some holy man [Virgil in the _Inferno_], whose teaching he

receives implicitly, and so arrives at the second step, which is the Path

[_Purgatorio_] by which he reaches a point where he is freed from all

outward ceremonials and observances, and has risen from an outward to a

spiritual worship. The third step is Knowledge [_Paradiso_], endowed by

which with supernatural insight, he becomes like the angels about the

throne, and has but one farther step to take before he reaches the goal

and becomes one with God. The analogies of this system with Dante's are

obvious and striking. They become still more so when Virgil takes leave

of him at the entrance of the Terres trial Paradise with the words:--

"Expect no more a word or sign from me;

Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,

And error were it not to do its bidding;

Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre,"[248]

that is, "I make thee king and bishop over thyself; the inward light is

to be thy law in things both temporal and spiritual." The originality of

Dante consists in his not allowing any divorce between the intellect and

the soul in its highest sense, in his making reason and intuition work

together to the same end of spiritual perfection. The unsatisfactoriness

of science leads Faust to seek repose in worldly pleasure; it led Dante

to find it in faith, of whose efficacy the short-coming of all logical

substitutes for it was the most convincing argument. That we cannot know,

is to him a proof that there is some higher plane on which we can believe

and see. Dante had discovered the incalculable worth of a single idea as

compared with the largest heap of facts ever gathered. To a man more

interested in the soul of things than in the body of them, the little

finger of Plato is thicker than the loins of Aristotle.

We cannot but think that there is something like a fallacy in Mr.

Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the

direction of science, and not in that of morals. No doubt the laws of

morals existed from the beginning, but so also did those of science, and

it is by the application, not the mere recognition, of both that the race

is benefited. No one questions how much science has done for our physical

comfort and convenience, and with the mass of men these perhaps must of

necessity precede the quickening of their moral instincts; but such

material gains are illusory, unless they go hand in hand with a

corresponding ethical advance. The man who gives his life for a principle

has done more for his kind than he who discovers a new metal or names a

new gas, for the great motors of the race are moral, not intellectual,

and their force lies ready to the use of the poorest and weakest of us

all. We accept a truth of science so soon as it is demonstrated, are

perfectly willing to take it on authority, can appropriate whatever use

there may be in it without the least understanding of its processes, as

men send messages by the electric telegraph, but every truth of morals

must be redemonstrated in the experience of the individual man before he

is capable of utilizing it as a constituent of character or a guide in

action. A man does not receive the statements that "two and two make

four," and that "the pure in heart shall see God," on the same terms. The

one can be proved to him with four grains of corn; he can never arrive at

a belief in the other till he realize it in the intimate persuasion of

his whole being. This is typified in the mystery of the incarnation. The

divine reason must forever manifest itself anew in the lives of men, and

that as individuals. This atonement with God, this identification of the

man with the truth,[249] so that right action shall not result from the

lower reason of utility, but from the higher of a will so purified of

self as to sympathize by instinct with the eternal laws,[250] is not

something that can be done once for all, that can become historic and

traditional, a dead flower pressed between the leaves of the family

Bible, but must be renewed in every generation, and in the soul of every

man, that it may be valid. Certain sects show their recognition of this

in what are called revivals, a gross and carnal attempt to apply truth,

as it were, mechanically, and to accomplish by the etherization of

excitement and the magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the

solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high moral of Dante's poem.

We have likened it to a Christian basilica; and as in that so there is

here also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness the

artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of the holy place. We may

linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central thought

that runs like the nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an image

of the divine made human, to teach us how the human might also make

itself divine. Dante beholds at last an image of that Power, Love, and

Wisdom, one in essence, but trine in manifestation, to answer the needs

of our triple nature and satisfy the senses, the heart, and the mind.

"Within the deep and luminous subsistence

Of the High Light appeared to me three circles

Of threefold color and of one dimension,

And by the second seemed the first reflected

As iris is by iris, and the third

Seemed fire that equally by both is breathed.

* * * * *

"Within itself, of its own very color,

Seemed to me painted with our effigy,

Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein."

He had reached the high altar where the miracle of transubstantiation is

wrought, itself also a type of the great conversion that may be

accomplished in our own nature (the lower thing assuming the qualities of

the higher), not by any process of reason, but by the very fire of the

divine love.

"Then there smote my mind

A flash of lightning wherein came its wish."[251]

Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the first great poet who

ever made a poem wholly out of himself, but, rightly looked at, it

implies a wonderful self-reliance and originality in his genius. His is

the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human

consciousness to find a new world of poetry.

"L'acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse."[252]

He discovered that not only the story of some heroic person, but that of

any man might be epical; that the way to heaven was not outside the

world, but through it. Living at a time when the end of the world was

still looked for as imminent,[253] he believed that the second coming of

the Lord was to take place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of

man; that his kingdom would be established in the surrendered will. A

poem, the precious distillation of such a character and such a life as

his through all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must have a

meaning in it which few men have meaning enough in themselves wholly to

penetrate. That its allegorical form belongs to a past fashion, with

which the modern mind has little sympathy, we should no more think of

denying than of whitewashing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we

may nature, which is also full of double meanings, either as picture or

as parable, either for the simple delight of its beauty or as a shadow of

the spiritual world. We may take it as we may history, either for its

picturesqueness or its moral, either for the variety of its figures, or

as a witness to that perpetual presence of God in his creation of which

Dante was so profoundly sensible. He had seen and suffered much, but it

is only to the man who is himself of value that experience is valuable.

He had not looked on man and nature as most of us do, with less interest

than into the columns of our daily newspaper. He saw in them the latest

authentic news of the God who made them, for he carried everywhere that

vision washed clear with tears which detects the meaning under the mask,

and, beneath the casual and transitory, the eternal keeping its sleepless

watch. The secret of Dante's power is not far to seek. Whoever can

express _himself_ with the full force of unconscious sincerity will be

found to have uttered something ideal and universal. Dante intended a

didactic poem, but the most picturesque of poets could not escape his

genius, and his sermon sings and glows and charms in a manner that

surprises more at the fiftieth reading than the first, such variety of

freshness is in imagination.

There are no doubt in the _Divina Commedia_ (regarded merely as poetry)

sandy spaces enough both of physics and metaphysics, but with every

deduction Dante remains the first of descriptive as well as moral poets.

His verse is as various as the feeling it conveys; now it has the

terseness and edge of steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness

like the breast of a dove. In vividness he is without a rival. He drags

back by its tangled locks the unwilling head of some petty traitor of an

Italian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the sullen face for a

moment, and it sears itself into the memory forever. He shows us an angel

glowing with that love of God which makes him a star even amid the glory

of heaven, and the holy shape keeps lifelong watch in our fantasy

constant as a sentinel. He has the skill of conveying impressions

indirectly. In the gloom of hell his bodily presence is revealed by his

stirring something, on the mount of expiation by casting a shadow. Would

he have us feel the brightness of an angel? He makes him whiten afar

through the smoke like a dawn,[254] or, walking straight toward the

setting sun, he finds his eyes suddenly unable to withstand a greater

splendor against which his hand is unavailing to shield him. Even its

reflected light, then, is brighter than the direct ray of the sun.[255]

And how mack more keenly do we feel the parched lips of Master Adam for

those rivulets of the Casentino which run down into the Arno, "making

their channels cool and soft"! His comparisons are as fresh, as simple,

and as directly from nature as those of Homer.[256] Sometimes they show a

more subtle observation, as where he compares the stooping of Antaeus

over him to the leaning tower of Garisenda, to which the clouds, flying

in an opposite direction to its inclination, give away their motion.[257]

His suggestions of individuality, too, from attitude or speech, as in

Farinata, Sordello, or Pia,[258] give in a hint what is worth acres of

so-called character-painting. In straightforward pathos, the single and

sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no competitor. He is too sternly

touched to be effusive and tearful:

"Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai."[259]

His is always the true coin of speech,

"Si lucida e si tonda

Che nel suo conio nulla ci s'inforsa,"

and never the highly ornamented promise to pay, token of insolvency.

No doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities that a poet must be

judged, for it is by these, if by anything, that he is to maintain his

place in literature. And he must be judged by them absolutely, with

reference, that is, to the highest standard, and not relatively to the

fashions and opportunities of the age in which he lived. Yet these

considerations must fairly enter into our decision of another side of the

question, and one that has much to do with the true quality of the man,

with his character as distinguished from his talent, and therefore with

how much he will influence men as well as delight them. We may reckon up

pretty exactly a man's advantages and defects as an artist; these he has

in common with others, and they are to be measured by a recognized

standard; but there is something in his _genius_ that is incalculable. It

would be hard to define the causes of the difference of impression made

upon us respectively by two such men as Aeschylus and Euripides, but we

feel profoundly that the latter, though in some respects a better

dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. Aeschylus stirs something in

us far deeper than the sources of mere pleasurable excitement. The man

behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the impulse he

gives to what is deepest and most sacred in us, though we cannot always

explain it, is none the less real and lasting. Some men always seem to

remain outside their work; others make their individuality felt in every

part of it; their very life vibrates in every verse, and we do not wonder

that it has "made them lean for many years." The virtue that has gone out

of them abides in what they do. The book such a man makes is indeed, as

Milton called it, "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Theirs is

a true immortality, for it is their soul, and not their talent, that

survives in their work. Dante's concise forthrightness of phrase, which

to that of most other poets is as a stab[260] to a blow with a cudgel,

the vigor of his thought, the beauty of his images, the refinement of his

conception of spiritual things, are marvellous if we compare him with his

age and its best achievement. But it is for his power of inspiring and

sustaining, it is because they find in him a spur to noble aims, a secure

refuge in that defeat which the present always seems, that they prize

Dante who know and love him best. He is not merely a great poet, but an

influence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him she

learns that, "married to the truth, she is a mistress, but otherwise a

slave shut out of all liberty."[261]

All great poets have their message to deliver us, from something higher

than they. We venture on no unworthy comparison between him who reveals

to us the beauty of this world's love and the grandeur of this world's

passion and him who shows that love of God is the fruit whereof all other

loves are but the beautiful and fleeting blossom, that the passions are

yet sublimer objects of contemplation, when, subdued by the will, they

become patience in suffering and perseverance in the upward path. But we

cannot help thinking that if Shakespeare be the most comprehensive

intellect, so Dante is the highest spiritual nature that has expressed

itself in rhythmical form. Had he merely made us feel how petty the

ambitions, sorrows, and vexations of earth appear when looked down on

from the heights of our own character and the seclusion of our own

genius, or from the region where we commune with God, he had done much:

"I with my sight returned through one and all

The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe

Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance."[262]

But he has done far more; he has shown us the way by which that country

far beyond the stars may be reached, may become the habitual

dwelling-place and fortress of our nature, instead of being the object of

its vague aspiration in moments of indolence. At the Round Table of King

Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish

the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat because

of the dangers he must encounter who would win it. In the company of the

epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian

idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious, who

should make us partakers of that cup of sorrow in which all are

communicants with Christ. He who should do this would indeed achieve the

perilous seat, for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning

wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity,--and

Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry

he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers,

"All honor to the loftiest of poets!"

Footnotes:

[1] The Shadow of Dante, being an Essay towards studying Himself, his

World, and his Pilgrimage. By Maria Francesca Rossetti.

"Se Dio te lasci, lettor prender frutto

Di tua lezione."

Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1872. 8vo. pp. 296.

[2] The Florentines should seem to have invented or re-invented

banks, book-keeping by double entry, and bills of exchange. The last,

by endowing Value with the gift of fern seed and enabling it to walk

invisible, turned the flank of the baronial tariff-system and made

the roads safe for the great liberalizer Commerce. This made Money

omnipresent, and prepared the way for its present omnipotence.

Fortunately it cannot usurp the third attribute of

Deity,--omniscience. But whatever the consequences, this Florentine

invention was at first nothing but admirable, securing to brain its

legitimate influence over brawn. The latter has begun its revolt, but

whether it will succeed better in its attempt to restore mediaeval

methods, than the barons in maintaining them remains to be seen.

[3] Ghiberti's designs have been criticised by a too systematic

aestheticism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and painting.

But is not the _riliero_ precisely the bridge by which the one art

passes over into the territory of the other?

[4] Inferno, IV. 102.

[5] The Nouvelle Biographie Generale gives May 8 as his birthday.

This is a mere assumption, for Boccaccio only says generally May. The

indication which Dante himself gives that he was born when the sun

was in Gemini would give a range from about the middle of May to

about the middle of June, so that the 8th is certainly too early.

[6] Secolo di Dante, Udine edition of 1828, Vol. III. Part I. p.578.

[7] Arrivabene, however, is wrong. Boccaccio makes precisely the same

reckoning in the first note of his Commentary (Bocc. Comento, etc.,

Firenze, 1844, Vol. I. pp. 32, 33).

[8] Dict. Phil., art. _Dante_.

[9] Paradise, XXII.

[10] Canto XV.

[11] Purgatorio, XVI.

[12] Though he himself preferred French, and wrote his _Tresor_ in

that language for two reasons, _"l'una perche noi siamo in Francia, e

l'altra perche, la parlatura francesca e piu dilettevolee piu comune

che tutti li altri linguaggi_." (_Proemio, sul fine_.)

[13] Inferno, Canto VII.

[14] Paradiso, Canto X.

[15] See especially Inferno, IX. 112 et seq.; XII. 120; XV. 4 et

seq.; XXXII. 25-30.

[16] Vit. Nuov. p. 61, ed. Pesaro, 1829.

[17] Tratt. III. Cap. XI.

[18] Letter of Dante, now lost, cited by Aretino.

[19] Inferno, XXI. 94.

[20] Balbo, Vita di Dante, Firenze, 1853, p. 117.

[21] Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 80.

[22] Notes to Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar."

[23] See the story at length in Balbo, Vita di Dante, Cap. X.

[24] Thus Foscolo. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that at

first the blacks were the extreme Guelphs, and the whites those

moderate Guelphs inclined to make terms with the Ghibellines. The

matter is obscure, and Balbo contradicts himself about it.

[25] Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He would seem to have been in Rome

during the Jubilee of 1300. See Inferno, XVIII. 28-33.

[26] That Dante was not of the _grandi_, or great nobles (what we

call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, is

plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list and

with no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen _domini_. Bayle,

however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been

obscure.

[27] See Witte, "Quando e da chi sia composto l' Ottimo Comento,"

etc. (Leipsic, 1847)

[28] Ott. Com. Parad. XVII.

[29] The loose way in which many Italian scholars write history is as

amazing as it is perplexing. For example: Count Balbo's "Life of

Dante" was published originally at Turin, in 1839. In a note (Lib. I.

Cap. X.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of Dante's banishment

should not be 1303, and inclines to think it should be. Meanwhile, it

seems never to have occurred to him to employ some one to look at the

original decree, still existing in the archives. Stranger still, Le

Monnier, reprinting the work at Florence in 1853, within a stone's

throw of the document itself, and with full permission from Balbo to

make corrections, leaves the matter just where it was.

[30] Convito, Tratt. I. Cap. III.

[31] Macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited

in the preface to the Udine edition of the "Codex Bartolinianus" as

placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such thing, but expressly

implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch. Op. ed. Baretti,

London, 1772, Vol. I. p. 60.)

[32] See Carlyle's "Frederic," Vol. I. p. 147.

[33] A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna till several

years later. But Boccaccio also assigns 1313 as the date of Dante's

withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may have been one of

the other Polentani to whom Guido (surnamed Novello, or the Younger;

his grandfather having borne the same name) succeeded.

[34] Under this date (1315) a 4th _condemnatio_ against Dante is

mentioned _facta in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Rainerium, D.

Zachario de Urbeveteri, olim et tunc vicarium regium civitatis

Florentia_, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in

1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, to

wit: _Una possessione cum vinea et cum domibus super ea, combustis et

non combustis, posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnlao_. In the

_domibus combustis_ we see the blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by

marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of the

exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city by Charles of

Valois. (See "De Romanis," notes on Tiraboschi's Life of Dante, in

the Florence ed. of 1830, Vol. V. p. 119.)

[35] Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by

Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the Middle Ages,

Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each other, and

adds: _Il n'y a donc pas trop a s'etonner des noms bizarres de

Mastino et de Cane donnes a ces Della Scala_. (Dante, heretique,

revolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.)

[36] If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted by

Balbo (Vita, I. Lib. II. Cap. XVII.), whom De Vericour copies without

question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation of the

original epitaph replaced by Cardinal Bembo when he built the new

tomb, in 1483. Bembo's own inscription implies an already existing

monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epitaphial Latin verses

are not to be taken too literally, considering the exigencies of that

branch of literary ingenuity. The doggerel Latin has been thought by

some unworthy of Dante, as Shakespeare's doggerel English epitaph has

been thought unworthy of him. In both cases the rudeness of the

verses seems to us a proof of authenticity. An enlightened posterity

with unlimited superlatives at command, and in an age when

stone-cutting was cheap, would have aimed at something more befitting

the occasion. It is certain, at least in Dante's case, that Cardinal

Bembo would never have inserted in the very first words an allusion

to the De Monarchia, a book long before condemned as heretical.

[37] We have translated _lacusque_ by "the Pit," as being the nearest

English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the several circles

of his Hell, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the centre. As a

curious specimen of English we subjoin Professor de Vericour's

translation: "I have sang the rights of monarchy; I have sang, in

exploring them, the abode of God, the Phlegethon and the impure

lakes, as long as destinies have permitted. But as the part of

myself, which was only passing, returns to better fields, and

happier, returned to his Maker, I, Dante, exiled from the regions of

fatherland, I am laid here, I, to whom Florence gave birth, a mother

who experienced but a feeble love." (The Life and Times of Dante,

London, 1858, p. 208.)

[38] Inferno, X. 85.

[39] Paradiso, XVII.

[40] He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany, which

took place in that year. The De Monarchia was afterward condemned by

the Council of Trent.

[41] Paradiso, XXVII.

[42] Inferno, XI.

[43] See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedito d' artisti, Vol. I. p.

123.

[44] St. Rene Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, December 1,

1856.

[45] Dante, Vol. IV. p. 116.

[46] Ste. Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, Tome XI. p. 169.

[47] Dict. Phil., art. _Dante_.

[48] Corresp. gen., Oeuvres, Tome LVII. pp. 80, 81.

[49] Essai sur les moeurs, Oeuvres, Tome XVII. pp. 371, 372.

[50] Genie du Christianisme, Cap. IV.

[51] Ed. Lond. 1684, p. 199.

[52] It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical judgment,

that he calls Dante "the great poet of Itaille," while in the

"Clerke's Tale" he speaks of Petrarch as a "worthy clerk," as "the

laureat poete" (alluding to the somewhat sentimental ceremony at

Rome), and says that his

"Rhetorike sweete

Enlumined all Itaille of poetry."

[53] It is possible that Sackville may have read the Inferno, and it

is certain that Sir John Harrington had. See the preface to his

translation of the Orlando Furioso.

[54] Second edition, 1800.

[55] Dante Alighieri's lyrische Gedichte, Leipzig, 1842, Theil II.

pp. 4-9.

[56] Vita, p. 97.

[57] Comment on Paradiso, VI.

[58] Jean de Meung had already said,--

"Ge n'en met hors rois ne prelas

* * * * *

"Qu'il sunt tui serf au menu pueple."

Roman de la Rose (ed. Meon), V. ii. pp. 78, 79.

[59] Dante, Studien, etc., 1855, p. 144.

[60] Compare also Spinoza, Tractat. polit., Cap. VI.

[61] It is instructive to compare Dante's political treatise with

those of Aristotle and Spinoza. We thus see more clearly the

limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to a

broader view of him as poet.

[62] A very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the Molini

edition of Dante, pp. 391-433.

[63] See Field's "Theory of Colors."

[64] As by Dante himself in the Convito.

[65] Psalm cxiv. 1, 2.

[66] He commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase as _exul

immeritus_.

[67] In order to fix more precisely in the mind the place of Dante in

relation to the history of thought, literature, and events, we

subjoin a few dates: Dante born, 1265; end of Crusades, death of St.

Louis, 1270; Aquinas died, 1274; Bonaventura died, 1274; Giotto born,

1276; Albertus Magnus died, 1280; Sicilian vespers, 1282; death of

Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282; death of Beatrice, 1290; Roger

Bacon died, 1292; death of Cimabue, 1302; Dante's banishment, 1302;

Petrarch born, 1304; Fra Dolcino burned, 1307; Pope Clement V. at

Avignon, 1309; Templars suppressed, 1312; Boccaccio born, 1313; Dante

died, 1321; Wycliffe born, 1324; Chaucer born, 1328.

[68] Rivavol characterized only a single quality of Dante's style,

who knew how to spend as well as spare. Even the Inferno, on which he

based his remark, might have put him on his guard. Dante understood

very well the use of ornament in its fitting place. _Est enim

exornatio alicujus convenientis additio_, he tells us in his De

Vulgari Eloquio (Lib. II. C. II.). His simile of the doves (Inferno,

V. 82 et seq.), perhaps the most exquisite in all poetry, quite

oversteps Rivarol's narrow limit of "substantive and verb."

[69] Discorso sul testo, ec., sec. XVIII.

[70] Convito, B. IV. C. XXII.

[71] It is remarkable that when Dante, in 1297, as a preliminary

condition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of

physicians and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the title

_poeta_. The arms of the Alighieri (curiously suitable to him who

_sovra gli altri come aquila vola_) were a wing of gold in a field of

azure. His vivid sense of beauty even hovers sometimes like a

_corposant_ over the somewhat stiff lines of his Latin prose. For

example, in his letter to the kings and princes of Italy on the

coming of Henry VII: "A new day brightens, revealing the dawn which

already scatters the shades of long calamity; already the breezes of

morning gather; _the lips of heaven are reddening!"_

[72] Purgatorio, XXXII. 100.

[73] Paradiso, I. 70.

[74] In a letter to Can Grande (XI. of the Epistolae).

[75] Witte, Wegele, and Ruth in German, and Ozanam in French, have

rendered ignorance of Dante inexcusable among men of culture.

[76] Inferno, VII. 75. "Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti, "is more

than concise: it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first thought

often lies coiled up and hidden under a second; the words which state

the conclusion involve the premises and develop the subject." (p. 3.)

[77] A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be selected

from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nannucci's excellent

tract "Intorno alle voci usate da Dante," Corfu, 1840. Even Foscolo

could not always refrain. Dante should have taught them to shun such

vulgarities. See Inferno, XXX. 131-148.

[78] "My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee too much I

have lost thee, and, perhaps, ... ah, may God avert the omen! But

more proud than sorrowful, for an evil endured for thee alone, I

continue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone.... An exile full of

anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more in thy Alighieri that

lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy smiling sky; and an

exile equally wearisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to

sharpen my small genius so that it may penetrate into what he left

written for thy instruction and for his glory." (Rossetti, Disamina,

ec., p. 405.) Bossetti is himself a proof that a noble mind need not

be narrowed by misfortune. His "Comment" (unhappily incomplete) is

one of the most valuable and suggestive.

[79] The great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart, and in

like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he is.

(Convito, Tr. I. c. 11.)

[80] Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has any

one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he in the

Convito. She is "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes," and he dwells

on the delights of her love with a rapture which kindles and

purifies. So far from making her an inquisitor, he says expressly

that she "should be gladsome and not sullen in all her works."

(Convito, Tr. I. c. 8.) "Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools

suppose"!

[81] Inferno, XIX. 28, 29.

[82] Inferno, VIII. 70-75.

[83] Paradise, X. 138.

[84] Paradiso, IV. 40-45 (Longfellow's version).

[85] Marlowe's "Faustus." "Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell."

(Paradise Lost, IV. 75.) In the same way, _ogni dove in cielo o

Paradiso_. (Paradiso, III. 88, 89.)

[86] Purgatorio, XIX. 7-33.

[87] Convito, Tr. II. c. 16.

[88] _La natura universale, cioe Iddio._ (Convito, Tr. III. c. 4.)

[89] Inferno, III. 7, 8.

[90] Inferno, XX. 30. Mr. W.M. Rossetti strangely enough renders this

verse "Who hath a passion for God's judgeship" _Compassion porta_, is

the reading of the best texts, and Witte adopts it. Buti's comment is

"_cioe porta pena e dolore di colui che giustamente e condannato da

Dio che e sempre giusto_." There is an analogous passage in "The

Revelation of the Apostle Paul," printed in the "Proceedings of the

American Oriental Society" (Vol. VIII. pp. 213, 214): "And the angel

answered and said, 'Wherefore dost thou weep? Why! art thou more

merciful than God?' And I said, 'God forbid, O my lord; for God is

good and long-suffering unto the sons of men, and he leaves every one

of them to his own will, and he walks as he pleases'" This is

precisely Dante's view.

[91] Inferno, VIII 40.

[92] "I following her (Moral Philosophy) in the work as well as the

passion, so far as I could, abominated and disparaged the errors of

men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, but of the errors."

(Convito, Tr IV. c. 1.) "Wherefore in my judgment as he who defames

a worthy man ought to be avoided by people and not listened to, so a

vile man descended of worthy ancestors ought to be hunted out by

all." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 29.)

[93] Paradise, XVII. 61-69.

[94] It is worth mentioning that the sufferers in his Inferno are in

like manner pretty exactly divided between the two parties. This is

answer enough to the charge of partiality. He even puts persons there

for whom he felt affection (as Brunetto Latini) and respect (as

Farinata degli Uberti and Frederick II.). Till the French looked up

their MSS., it was taken for granted that the _beccajo di Parigi_

(Purgatorio, XX. 52) was a drop of Dante's gall. "Ce fu Huez Capez e'

on apelle bouchier." Hugues Capet, p. 1.

[95] De Vulgari Eloquio, Lib. I, Cap. VI. Cf. Inferno, XV. 61-64.

[96] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 23. Ib. Tr. I. c. 2.

[97] Convito, Tr. III. c. 13.

[98] Opp. Min., ed. Fraticelli, Vol. II. pp. 281 and 283. Witte is

inclined to put it even earlier than 1300, and we believe he is

right.

[99] Paradiso, VI. 103-105.

[100] Some Florentines have amusingly enough doubted the genuineness

of the De vulgari Eloquio, because Dante therein denies the

pre-eminence of the Tuscan dialect.

[101] See particularly the second book of the De vulgari Eloquio.

[102] Purgatorio, XXXIII. 141. "That thing one calls beautiful whose

parts answer to each other, because pleasure results from their

harmony." (Convito, Tr. I. c. 5.) Carlyle says that "he knew too,

partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man could do." He

knew it fully. Telling us how Giotto's fame as a painter had eclipsed

that of Cimabue, he takes an example from poetry also, and selecting

two Italian poets,--one the most famous of his predecessors, the

other of his contemporaries,--calmly sets himself above them both

(Purgatorio, XI. 97-99), and gives the reason for his supremacy

(Purgatorio, XXIV. 49-62). It is to be remembered that _Amore_ in the

latter passage does not mean love in the ordinary sense, but in that

transcendental one set forth in the Convito,--that state of the soul

which opens it for the descent of God's spirit, to make it over into

his own image. "Therefore it is manifest that in this love the Divine

virtue descends into men in the guise of an angel, ... and it is to

be noted that the descending of the virtue of one thing into another

is nothing else than reducing it to its own likeness." (Convito, Tr.

III. c. 14.)

[103] Convito, Tr. III. c. 11. Ib. Tr. I. c. 11.

[104] Convito, Tr. III. c. 12-15.

[105] Inferno, II. 94. The _donna gentil_ is Lucia, the prevenient

Grace, the _light_ of God which shows the right path and guides the

feet in it. With Dante God is always the sun, "which leadeth others

right by every road." (Inferno, I. 18.) "The spiritual and

unintelligible Sun, which is God." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 12) His

light "enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world," but his

dwelling is in the heavens. He who wilfully deprives himself of this

light is spiritually dead in sin. So when in Mars he beholds the

glorified spirits of the martyrs he exclaims, "O Elios, who so

arrayest them!" (Paradiso, XIV. 96.) Blanc (Vocabolario, _sub voce_)

rejects this interpretation. But Dante, entering the abode of the

Blessed, invokes the "good Apollo," and shortly after calls him

_divina virtu._ We shall have more to say of this hereafter.

[106] Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.

[107] Convito, Tr. III. c. 15. Recalling how the eyes of Beatrice

lift her servant through the heavenly spheres, and that smile of hers

so often dwelt on with rapture, we see how Dante was in the habit of

commenting and illustrating his own works. We must remember always

that with him the allegorical exposition is the true one (Convito,

Tr. IV. c. 1), the allegory being a truth which is hidden under a

beautiful falsehood (Convito, Tr. II. c. 1), and that Dante thought

his poems without this exposition "under some shade of obscurity, so

that to many their beauty was more grateful than their goodness"

(Convito, Tr. I. c. 1), "because the goodness is in the meaning, and

the beauty in the ornament of the words" (Convito, Tr. II. c. 12).

[108] Convito, Tr. III. c. 14.

[109] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22.

[110] Convito, Tr. III. c. 6.

[111] Convito, Tr. III. c. 2. By _potenzia_ and _potenza_ Dante means

the faculty of receiving influences or impressions. (Paradiso, XIII.

61; XXIX. 34.) Reason is the "sovran potency" because it makes us

capable of God.

[112]

"O thou _well-born_, unto whom Grace concedes

To see the thrones of the Eternal triumph,

Or ever yet the warfare be abandoned."

Paradiso, V. 115-118.

[113] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 21.

[114] Convito, Tr. III. c. 7.

[115] Inferno, X. 55, 56; Paradiso, XXII. 112-117.

[116] Convito, Tr. I. c. 23 (cf. Inferno, I. IV).

[117] Convito, Tr. III. c. 3; Paradiso, XVIII. 108-130.

[118] See an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter by

Witte, who so highly deserves the gratitude of all students of Dante,

in Dante Alighieri's Lyrische Gedichte, Theil II. pp. 48-57. It was

kindly old Boccaccio, who, without thinking any harm, first set this

nonsense agoing. His "Life of Dante" is mainly a rhetorical exercise.

After making Dante's marriage an excuse for revamping all the old

slanders against matrimony, he adds gravely, "Certainly I do not

affirm these things to have happened to Dante, for I do not know it,

though it be true that (whether things like these or others were the

cause of it), once parted from her, he would never come where she was

nor suffer her to come where he was, for all that she was the mother

of several children by him." That he did not come to her is not

wonderful, for he would have been burned alive if he had. Dante could

not send for her because he was a homeless wanderer. She remained in

Florence with her children because she had powerful relations and

perhaps property there. It is plain, also, that what Boccaccio says

of Dante's _lussuria_ had no better foundation. It gave him a chance

to turn a period. He gives no particulars, and his general statement

is simply incredible. Lionardo Bruni and Vellutello long ago pointed

out the trifling and fictitious character of this "Life." Those

familiar with Dante's allegorical diction will not lay much stress on

the literal meaning of _pargoletta_ in Purgatono, XXXI. 59. Gentucca,

of course, was a real person, one of those who had shown hospitality

to the exile. Dante remembers them all somewhere, for gratitude

(which is quite as rare as genius) was one of the virtues of his

unforgetting nature Boccaccio's "Comment" is later and far more

valuable than the "Life."

[119] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 17; Purgatorio, XXVII. 100-108.

[120] Convito, Tr. II. c. 8.

[121] That is, _wholly_ fulfil, _rendono intera_.

[122] We should prefer here,

"Nor inspirations _won by prayer_ availed,"

as better expressing _Ne l'impetrare spirazion_. Mr. Longfellow's

translation is so admirable for its exactness as well as its beauty

that it may be thankful for the minutest criticism, such only being

possible.

[123] Which he cites in the Paradiso, VIII. 37.

[124] Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as

appears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition, in

Purgatorio, XIII. 136, 137.

[125] Convito, Tr. II. c. 11.

[126] Purgatorio, XXVIII.

[127] Purgatorio, XXVIII. 40-44; Convito, Tr. III. c. 13.

[128] Purgatorio, XXVII. 94-105.

[129] Psalm li. 2. "And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's]

beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous

appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the which

appetite removes us from the natural as well as other vices."

(Convito, Tr. III. c. 15.)

[130] Purgatorio, XXXI. 103,104.

[131] Tr. IV. c. 22.

[133] Purgatorio, 100-102.

[133] Such is the _selva oscura_ (Inferno, I. 2), such, the _selva

erronea di questa vita_ (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24).

[134] Convito, Tr. I. c. 13.

[135] Convito, Tr. II. c. 2.

[136] _Mar di tutto il senno_, he calls Virgil (Inferno, VIII. 7).

Those familiar with his own works will think the phrase singularly

applicable to himself.

[137] Convito, Tr. III. c. 9.

[138] Convito, Tr. III. c. 3.

[139] Vita Nuova, XI.

[140] Vita Nuova, Tr. II. c. 6.

[141] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24. The date of Dante's birth is uncertain,

but the period he assigns for it (Paradiso, XXII. 112-117) extends

from the middle of May to the middle of June. If we understand Buti's

astrological comment, the day should fall in June rather than May.

[142] Vita Nuova, XXXIX. Compare for a different view, "The New Life

of Dante, an Essay with Translations," by C. E. Norton, pp. 92. et

seq.

[143] There is a passage in the Convito (Tr. III. c. 15) in which

Dante seems clearly to make the distinction asserted above, "And

therefore the desire of man is limited in this life to that

_knowledge_ (_scienzia_) which may here be had, and passes not save

by error that point which is beyond our natural understanding. And so

is limited and measured in the angelic nature the amount of that

_wisdom_ which the nature of each is capable of receiving." Man is,

according to Dante, superior to the angels in this, that he is

capable both of reason and contemplation, while they are confined to

the latter. That Beatrice's reproaches refer to no human

_pargoletta_, the context shows, where Dante asks,

"But wherefore so beyond my power of sight

Soars your desirable discourse that aye

The more I strive, so much the more I lose it?

That thou mayst recognize, she said, the school

Which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far

Its doctrine follows after my discourse,

And mayst behold your path from the divine

Distant as far as separated is

From earth the heaven that highest hastens on."

Purgatorio, XXXIII. 82-90.

The _pargoletta_ in its ordinary sense was necessary to the literal

and human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with that

non-natural interpretation which, according to Dante's repeated

statement, lays open the true and divine meaning.

[144] "So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye

are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of

God dwell in you." Romans viii. 8, 9.

[145] Convito, Tr. II. c. 14, 15.

[146] Convito, Tr. II. c. 4. Compare Paradiso, I. 76, 77.

[147] "Vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called."

1 Tim. vi. 20.

[148] That is, no partial truth.

[149] Paradise, IV. 124-132.

[150] "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came

forth sweetness."--Judges xiv. 14.

[151] Purgatorio, III. 34-44. The allusions in this passage are all

to sayings of Saint Paul, of whom Dante was plainly a loving reader.

"Remain contented at the _Quia_," that is, be satisfied with

knowing _that_ things are, without inquiring too nicely _how_ or

_why_. "Being justified by faith we have peace with God" (Rom. v. 1).

_Infinita via_: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and

knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways

past finding out!" (Rom. xi. 93) _Aristotle and Plato_: "For the

wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and

unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness.... For

the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are

clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his

eternal power and Godhead, so _that they are without excuse_. Because

that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were

thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish

heart was darkened" (Rom. i. 18-21). He refers to the Greeks. The

Epistle to the Romans, by the way, would naturally be Dante's

favorite. As Saint Paul made the Law, so he would make Science, "our

schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by

faith" (Gal. iii. 24). He puts Aristotle and Plato in his Inferno,

because they did not "adore God duly" (Inferno, IV. 38), that is,

they "held the truth in unrighteousness." Yet he calls Aristotle "the

master and guide of human reason" (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 6), and Plato

"a most excellent man" (Convito, Tr. II. c 5). Plato and Aristotle,

like all Dante's figures, are types. We must disengage our thought

from the individual, and fix on the genus.

[152] It is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing

when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by

clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards again

_a riveder le stelle_. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed at

the point

"To which things heavy draw from every side";

as God is Light and Warmth, so is he "cold obstruction"; the very

effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his wings begets the

chilly blast that freezes him more immovably in his place of doom.

The danger of all science save the highest (theology) was that it led

to materialism There appears to have been a great deal of it in

Florence in the time of Dante. Its followers called themselves

Epicureans, and burn in living tombs (Inferno, X.). Dante held them in

special horror. "Of all bestialities that is the most foolish and

vile and hurtful which believes there is no other life after this."

"And I so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that we pass to

another better life after this" (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9). It is a fine

divination of Carlyle from the _Non han speranza di morte_ that "one

day it had risen sternly benign in the scathed heart of Dante that

he, wretched, never resting, worn as he was, would [should] full

surely _die_."

[153] Purgatorio, XXXI. 103.

[154] Inferno, XXXI. 5, 6.

[155] Tr. IV. c. 28.

[156] Inferno, XXV. 64-67.

[157] Purgatorio, XXXI. 123-126.

[158] Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platonizing side, and who was

probably the first English poet since Chaucer that had read the

Commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the

"Faerie Queene" (B. VI. c. 10). He has turned it into a compliment,

and a very beautiful one, to a living mistress. It is instructive to

compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with that of

Dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them. They are

singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model

had done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a "sage and

serious poet"; he would be the last to take offence if we draw from

him a moral not without its use now that Priapus is trying to

persuade us that pose and drapery will make him as good as Urania.

Better far the naked nastiness; the more covert the indecency, the

more it shocks. Poor old god of gardens! Innocent as a clownish

symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last

century, they set him up in Beatrice recalls her Germany and in

France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light of which came

too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long endurable.

[159] This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim humor

for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be in that

passage (Inferno, XV. 119) where Brunetto Latini lingers under the

burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former pupil. There is

a comical touch of nature in an author's solicitude for his little

work, not, as in Fielding's case, after _its_, but his own damnation.

We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary flicker of a

smile across those serious eyes of Dante's. There is something like

humor in the opening verses of the XVI. Paradiso, where Dante tells

us how even in heaven he could not help glorying in being gently

born,--he who had devoted a Canzone and a book of the Convito to

proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue. But there is, after

all, something touchingly natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly

robbed of his property, and with it of the independence so dear to

him, seeing

"Needy nothings trimmed in jollity,

And captive Good attending Captain Ill,"

would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could neither

buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the Convito which

shows how bitterly he resented his undeserved poverty. He tells us

that buried treasure commonly revealed itself to the bad rather than

the good. "Verily I saw the place on the flanks of a mountain in

Tuscany called Falterona, where the basest peasant of the whole

countryside digging found there more than a bushel of pieces of the

finest silver, which perhaps had awaited him more than a thousand

years." (Tr. IV. c. 11.) One can see the grimness of his face as he

looked and thought, "how salt a savor hath the bread of others!"

[160] L'Envoi of Canzone XIV. of the Canzoniere, I. of the Convito.

Dante cites the first verse of this Canzone, Paradiso, VIII. 37.

[161] How Dante himself could allegorize even historical personages

may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito (Tr. IV. c. 28),

where, commenting on a passage of Lucan, he treats Martia and Cato as

mere figures of speech.

[162] II. of the Canzoniere. See Fraticelli's preface.

[163] Don Quixote, P. II. c. VIII.

[164] De vulgari Eloquio, L. II. c. 2. He says the same of Giraud de

Borneil, many of whose poems are moral and even devotional. See,

particularly, "Al honor Dieu torn en mon chan" (Raynouard, Lex Rom I.

388), "Ben es dregz pos en aital port" (Ib. 393), "Jois sia

comensamens" (Ib. 395), and "Be veg e conosc e say" (Ib. 398).

Another of his poems ("Ar ai grant joy," Raynouard, Choix, III. 304)

may _possibly_ be a mystical profession of love for the Blessed

Virgin, for whom, as Dante tells us, Beatrice had a special devotion.

[165] Convito, Tr. III. c. 14. In the same chapter is perhaps an

explanation of the two rather difficult verses which follow that in

which the _verace speglio_ is spoken of (Paradise, XXVI. 107, 108).

"Che fa di se pareglie l' altre cose

E nulla face lui di se pareglio."

Buti's comment is, "that is, makes of itself a receptacle to other

things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen in it."

Dante says (_ubi supra_), "The descending of the virtue of one thing

into another is a reducing that other into a likeness of itself....

Whence we see that the sun sending his ray down hitherward reduces

things to a likeness with his light in so far as they are able by

their disposition to receive light from his power. So I say that God

reduces this love to a likeness with himself as much as it is

possible for it to be like him." In Provencal _pareilh_ means _like_,

and Dante may have formed his word from it. But the four earliest

printed texts read:--

"Che fa di se pareglio all' altre cose."

Accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should be

corrected thus:--

"E nulla face a lui di se pareglio."

We would form _pareglio_ from _parere_ (a something in which things

_appear_), as _miraglio_ from _mirare_ (a something in which they are

_seen_). God contains all things in himself, but nothing can wholly

contain him. The blessed behold all things in him as if reflected,

but not one of the things so reflected is capable of his image in its

completeness. This interpretation is confirmed by Paradiso, XIX.

49-51.

"E quinci appar _ch' ogni minor natura

E corto recettacolo a quel bene

Che non ha fine_, e se con se misura."

[166] "Wisdom of Solomon," VII. 26, quoted by Dante (Convito, Tr.

III. c. 15) There are other passages in the "Wisdom of Solomon"

besides that just cited which we may well believe Dante to have had

in his mind when writing the Canzone beginning,--

"Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,"

and the commentary upon it, and some to which his experience of life

must have given an intenser meaning. The writer of that book also

personifies Wisdom as the mistress of his soul: "I loved her and

sought her out from my youth, I desired to make her my spouse, and I

was a lover of her beauty." He says of Wisdom that she was "present

when thou (God) madest the world," and Dante in the same way

identifies her with the divine Logos, citing as authority the

"beginning of the Gospel of John." He tells us, "I perceived that I

could not otherwise obtain her except God gave her me," and Dante

came at last to the same conclusion. Again, "For the very true

beginning of her is the desire of discipline; and the care of

discipline is love. And love is the keeping of her laws; and the

giving heed unto her laws is the assurance of incorruption." But who

can doubt that he read with a bitter exultation, and applied to

himself passages like these which follow? "When the righteous _fled

from his brothers wrath, she guided him in right paths showed him the

kingdom of God, and gave him knowledge of holy things_. She defended

him from his enemies and kept him safe from those that lay in wait,

... that he might know that godliness is stronger than all.... She

forsook him not, but delivered him from sin; _she went down with him

into the pit_, and left him not in bonds till she brought him the

sceptre of the kingdom, ... and gave him perpetual glory." It was,

perhaps, from this book that Dante got the hint of making his

punishments and penances typical of the sins that earned them.

"Wherefore, whereas men lived dissolutely and unrighteously, thou

hast tormented them with their own abominations." Dante was intimate

with the Scriptures. They do even a scholar no harm. M. Victor Le

Clerc, in his "Histoire Litteraire de la France au quatorzieme

siecle" (Tom. II. p. 72), thinks it "not impossible" that a passage

in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, paraphrased by Dante, may have been

suggested to him by Rutebeuf or Tristan, rather than by the prophet

himself! Dante would hardly have found himself so much at home in the

company of _jongleurs_ as in that of prophets. Yet he was familiar

with French and Provencal poetry. Beside the evidence of the _Vulgari

Eloquio_, there are frequent and broad traces in the Commedia of the

_Roman de la Rose_, slighter ones of the _Chevalier de la Charette,

Guillaume d'Orange,_ and a direct imitation of Bernard de Ventadour.

[167] Convito, Tr. I. c. 12.

[168] Purgatorio, XXII. 115, 116.

[169] That Dante loved fame we need not be told. He several times

confesses it, especially in the De Vulgari Eloquio, I. 17. "How

glorious she [the Vulgar Tongue] makes her intimates [_familiares_,

those of her household], we ourselves have known, who in the

sweetness of this glory put our exile behind our backs."

[170] Dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image of

rule. See especially Purgatorio, VI. 99, and Convito, Tr. IV. c. 11.

[171] "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge

of God!" Dante quotes this in speaking of the influence of the stars,

which, interpreting it presently "by the theological way," he

compares to that of the Holy Spirit "And thy counsel who hath known,

except thou give wisdom and send thy Holy Spirit from above?" (Wisdom

of Solomon, ix. 17.) The last words of the Convito are, "her

[Philosophy] whose proper dwelling is in the depths of the Divine

mind". The ordinary reading is _ragione_ (reason), but it seems to us

an obvious blunder for _magione_ (mansion, dwelling).

[172] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 28.

[173] He refers to a change in his own opinions (Lib II. sec. 1), where

he says, "When I knew the nations to have murmured against the

preeminence of the Roman people, and saw the people imagining vain

things _as I myself was wont_." He was a Guelph by inheritance, he

became a Ghibelline by conviction.

[174] It should seem from Dante's words ("at the time when much

people went to see the blessed image," and "ye seem to come from a

far off people") that this was some extraordinary occasion, and what

so likely as the jubilee of 1300? (Compare Paradiso, XXXI. 103-108.)

Dante's comparisons are so constantly drawn from actual eye-sight,

that his allusion (Inferno, XIII. 28-33) to a device of Boniface

VIII. for passing the crowds quietly across the bridge of Saint

Angelo, renders it not unlikely that he was in Rome at that time, and

perhaps conceived his poem there as Giovanni Villani his chronicle.

That Rome would deeply stir his mind and heart is beyond question

"And certes I am of a firm opinion that the stones that stand in her

walls are worthy of reverence, and the soil where she sits worthy

beyond what is preached and admitted of men." (Convito, Tr. IV. c.

5.)

[175] _Beatrice, loda di Dio vera_, Inferno, II. 103. "Surely vain

are all men by nature who are ignorant of God, and could not out of

the good things that are seen know him that is, neither by

considering the works did they acknowledge the work-master.... For,

being conversant in his works, they search diligently and believe

their sight, because the things are beautiful that are seen. Howbeit,

neither are they to be pardoned." (Wisdom of Solomon, XIII. 1, 7, 8.)

_Non adorar debitamente, Dio_. "For the invisible things of him from

the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the

things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that

they are without excuse." It was these "invisible things" whereof

Dante was beginning to get a glimpse.

[176] Convito, Tr. I. c. 7.

[177] "And here we would have forgiven Mr. Captain if he had not

betrayed him (_traido, traduttore traditore_) to Spain and made him a

Castilian, for he took away much of his native worth, and so will all

those do who shall undertake to turn a poem into another tongue; for

with all the care they take and ability they show, they will never

reach the height of its original conception," says the Curate,

speaking of a translation of Ariosto. (Don Quixote, P. I. c. 6.)

[177] In his own comment Dante says, "I tell whither goes my thought,

calling it by the name of one of its effects."

[178] _Spirito_ means in Italian both breath (_spirto ed acqua

fessi_, Purgatorio, XXX. 98) and spirit.

[180] By _visione_ Dante means something seen waking by the inner

eye. He believed also that dreams were sometimes divinely inspired,

and argues from such the immortality of the soul. (Convito, Tr. II.

c. 9.)

[181] Paradiso, XXV. 1-3.

[182] De Monarchia, Lib. III. sec. _ult_. See the whole passage in

Miss Rossetti, p 39. It is noticeable that Dante says that the Pope

is to _lead_ (by example), the Emperor to _direct_ (by the enforcing

of justice) The duty, we are to observe, was a double but not a

divided one. To exemplify this unity was indeed one object of the

Commedia.

[183]

"What Reason seeth here

Myself [Virgil] can tell thee; beyond that await

For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of Faith."

_Purgatorio_, XVIII. 46-48.

Beatrice here evidently impersonates Theology. It would be

interesting to know what was the precise date of Dante's theological

studies. The earlier commentators all make him go to Paris, the great

fountain of such learning, after his banishment. Boccaccio indeed

says that he did not return to Italy till 1311. Wegele (Dante's

"Leben und Werke," p. 85) puts the date of his journey between 1292

and 1297. Ozanam, with a pathos comically touching to the academic

soul, laments that poverty compelled him to leave the university

without the degree he had so justly earned. He consoles himself with

the thought that "there remained to him an incontestable erudition

and the love of serious studies." (Dante et la philosophic

catholique, p. 112.) It _is_ sad that we cannot write _Dantes

Alighierius, S. T. D._! Dante seems to imply that he began to devote

himself to Philosophy and Theology shortly after Beatrice's death.

(Convito, Tr. II. c. 13.) He compares himself to one who, "seeking

silver, should, without meaning it, find gold, which an occult cause

presents to him, not perhaps without the divine command." Here again

apparently is an allusion to his having found Wisdom while he sought

Learning. He had thought to find God in the beauty of his works, he

learned to seek all things in God.

[184] In a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses, no

doubt with a recollection of Aristotle's [Greek: hylae].

[185] As we have seen, even a sigh becomes _He_. This makes one of

the difficulties of translating his minor poems. The modern mind is

incapable of this subtlety.

[186] Purgatorio, III. 122,123.

[187] Purgatorio, V. 107.

[188] Inferno, III. 17, 18 (_hanno perduto_ = thrown away).

[189] Convito, Tr. II. c. 14.

[190] Purgatorio, XXIII. 121, 122.

[191] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7.

[192] Inferno, XXXIII. 118, et seq.

[193] Inferno, I. 116, 117.

[194] Mr. Longfellow's _for_, like the Italian _per_, gives us the

same privilege of election. We "freeze for cold," we "hunger for

food."

[195] Inferno, V. 67.

[196] Paradiso, XVIII. 46. Renoard is one of the heroes (a rudely

humorous one) in "La Bataille d'Alischans," an episode of the

measureless "Guillaume d'Orange." It was from the graves of those

supposed to have been killed in this battle that Dante draws a

comparison, Inferno, IX. Boccaccio's comment on this passage might

have been read to advantage by the French editors of "Alischans."

[197] We cite this comment under its received name, though it is

uncertain if Pietro was the author of it. Indeed, we strongly doubt

it. It is at least one of the earliest, for it appears, by the

comment on Paradiso, XXVI., that the greater part of it was written

before 1341. It is remarkable for the strictness with which it holds

to the spiritual interpretation of the poem, and deserves much more

to be called Ottimo, than the comment which goes by that name. Its

publication is due to the zeal and liberality of the late Lord

Vernon, to whom students of Dante are also indebted for the

parallel-text reprint of the four earliest editions of the Commedia.

[198] See Wegele, _ubi supra_, p. 174, et seq. The best analysis of

Dante's opinions we have ever met with is Emil Ruth's "Studien ueber

Dante Alighieri," Tuebingen, 1853. Unhappily it wants an index, and

accordingly loses a great part of its usefulness for those not

already familiar with the subject. Nor are its references

sufficiently exact. We always respect Dr. Ruth's opinions, if we do

not wholly accept them, for they are all the results of original and

assiduous study.

[199] See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio. The only other

Italian poet who reminds us of Dante in sustained dignity is Guido

Guinicelli. Dante esteemed him highly, calls him maximus in the De

Vulgari Eloquio, and "the father of me and of my betters," in the

XXVI. Purgatorio. See some excellent specimens of him in Mr. D. G.

Rossetti's remarkable volume of translations from the early Italian

poets. Mr. Rossetti would do a real and lasting service to literature

by employing his singular gift in putting Dante's minor poems into

English.

[200] The old French poems confound all unbelievers together as

pagans and worshippers of idols.

[201] Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the

difference is that with him society is something divinely ordained.

He follows Aristotle pretty closely, but on his own theory crime and

sin are identical.

[202] Purgatorio, XVIII. 73. He defines it in the De Monarchia (Lib.

I. sec. 14). Among other things he calls it "the first beginning of our

liberty." Paradiso, V. 19, 20, he calls it "the greatest gift that in

his largess God creating made." "Dico quod judicium medium est

apprehensionis et appetitus." (De Monarchia, _ubi supra_.)

"Right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides."

_Troilus and Cressida._

[203] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22.

[204] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7. "Qui descenderit ad inferos, non

ascendet." Job vii. 9.

[205] But it may he inferred that he put the interests of mankind

above both. "For citizens," he says, "exist not for the sake of

consuls, nor the people for the sake of the king, but, on the

contrary, consuls for the sake of citizens, and the king for the sake

of the people."

[206] Paradiso, VIII. 145, 146.

[207] Purgatorio, XVI. 106-112.

[208] De Monarchia, sec. _ult_.

[209] De Monarchia Lib III sec. 10. "Poterat tamen Imperator in

patrocinium Eccelesiae patrimonium et alia deputare immoto semper

superiori dominio cujus unitas divisio non patitur. Poterat et

Vicarius Dei recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed tanquam fructuum

pro Eccelesia proque Christi pauperibus dispensator." He tells us

that St. Dominic did not ask for the tithes which belong to the poor

of God. (Paradiso, XII. 93, 94.) "Let them return whence they came,"

he says (De Monarchia, Lib II. sec. 10); "they came well, let them

return ill, for they were well given and ill held."

[210] Inferno, XIX. 53; Paradiso, XXX. 145-148.

[211] Purgatorio, XX. 86-92.

[212] Purgatorio, XIX. 134, 135.

[213] This results from the whole course of his argument in the

second book of De Monarchia, and in the VI. Paradiso he calls the

Roman eagle "the bird of God" and "the scutcheon of God." We must

remember that with Dante God is always the "Emperor of Heaven," the

barons of whose court are the Apostles. (Paradiso, XXIV. 115; Ib.,

XXV. 17.)

[214] Dante seems to imply (though his name be German) that he was of

Roman descent He makes the original inhabitants of Florence (Inferno,

XV. 77, 78) of Roman seed, and Cacciaguida, when asked by him about

his ancestry, makes no more definite answer than that their dwelling

was in the most ancient part of the city (Paradiso, XVI. 40.)

[215] Man was created, according to Dante (Convito, Tr. II. c. 6), to

supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a sense superior to

the angels, inasmuch as he has reason, which they do not need.

[216] De Monarchia, Lib I. sec. 5.

[217] Purgatorio, VI. 83, 84.

[218] De Monarchia, Lib. I. sec. 16.

[219] De Monarchia, Lib. I. sec. 5.

[220] De Monarchia, Lib II. sec. 7.

[221] Purgatorio, XVI. 67, 68.

[222] "Troilus and Cressida," Act I. s. 3. The whole speech is very

remarkable both in thought and phrase.

[223] Purgatorio, I. 71.

[224] De Monarchia, Lib. I. sec. 14.

[225] De Monarchia, Lib. I. sec. 18.

[226] De Monarchia, Lib. I. sec. 14.

[227] Paradiso, IX.

[228] Inferno, XXXVIII; Purgatorio, XXXII.

[229] See the poems of Walter Mapes (who was Archdeacon of Oxford);

the "Bible Guiot," and the "Bible au seignor de Berze," Barbezan and

Meon, II.

[230] De Monarchia, Lib. III. sec. 8.

[231] Purgatorio, III. 133, 134.

[232] Paradiso, XXVII. 22.

[233] Purgatorio, XXVII. 18; Ottimo, Inferno, XXVIII. 55.

[234] Inferno, IX. 63; Purgatorio, VIII. 20.

[235] Purgatorio, XXIX. 131, 132.

[236] Inferno, XXII. 13, 14.

[237] De Monarchia, Lib. II. sec. 4.

[238] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 4; Ib., c. 27; Aeneid, I. 178, 179; Ovid's

Met., VII.

[239] Inferno, XXXI. 92.

[240] Purgatorio, VI. 118, 119. Pulci, not understanding, has

parodied this. ("Morgante," Canto II. st. 1.)

[241] See, for example, Purgatorio, XX. 100-117.

[242] We believe that Dante, though he did not understand Greek, knew

something of Hebrew. He would have been likely to study it as the

sacred language, and opportunities of profiting by the help of

learned Jews could not have been wanting to him in his wanderings. In

the above-cited passage some of the best texts read _I s' appellava_,

and others _Un s' appellava_. God was called I (the _Je_ in Jehovah)

or _One_, and afterwards _El_,--the strong,--an epithet given to many

gods. Whichever reading we adopt, the meaning and the inference from

it are the same.

[243] Inferno, IV.

[244] Dante's "Limbo," of course, is the older "Limbus Patrum."

[245] De Monarchia, Lib. II. sec. 8.

[246] Faith, Hope, and Charity. (Purgatorio, XXIX. 121.) Mr.

Longfellow has translated the last verse literally. The meaning is,

"More than a thousand years ere baptism was."

[247] In which the _celestial Athens_ is mentioned.

[248] Purgatorio, XXVII. 139-142.

[249] "I conceived myself to be now," says Milton, "not as mine own

person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was

persuaded."

[250]

"But now was turning my desire and will,

Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The Love that moves the sun and other stars."

Paradiso, XXXIII., closing verses of the Divina Commedia.

[251] Dante seems to allude directly to this article of the Catholic

faith when he says, on entering the Celestial Paradise, "to signify

transhumanizing by words could not be done," and questions whether he

was there in the renewed spirit only or in the flesh also:--

"If I was merely _what of me thou newly

Createdst_, Love who governest the heavens,

Thou knowest who didst lift me with thy light."

Paradiso, I. 70-75.

[252] Paradiso, II. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast:--

"Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante

Trita solo."

[253] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 15.

[254] Purgatorio, XVI. 142. Here is Milton's "Far off his coming

shone."

[255] Purgatorio, XV. 7, et seq.

[256] See, for example, Inferno, XVII. 127-132; Ib. XXIV. 7-12;

Purgatorio, II. 124-129; Ib., III. 79-84; Ib., XXVII. 76-81;

Paradiso, XIX. 91-93; Ib. XXI. 34-39; Ib. XXIII. 1-9.

[257] Inferno, XXXI. 136-138.

"And those thin clouds above, in fakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars."

Coleridge, "Dejection, an Ode."

See also the comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around him

in Paradise to "a pearl on a white forehead." (Paradiso, III. 14.)

[258] Inferno, X. 35-41; Purgatorio, VI. 61-66; Ib., X. 133.

[259] For example, Cavalcanti's _Come dicesti egli ebbe_? (Inferno,

X. 67, 68.) Anselmuccio's _Tu guardi si, padre, che hai_? (Inferno,

XXXIII. 51.)

[260] To the "bestiality" of certain arguments Dante says, "one would

wish to reply, not with words, but with a knife." (Convito, Tr. IV.

c. 14.)

[261] Convito, Tr. IV. c. 2.

[262] Paradiso, XXII. 132-135; Ib., XXVII. 110.

SPENSER.

Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years ere England had

secreted choice material enough for the making of another great poet. The

nature of men living together in societies, as of the individual man,

seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the

ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore

between them is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with

such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the

next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding

foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and holds

the sunshine.

From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the indefatigable Ritson in

his _Bibliographia Poetica_ has made us a catalogue of some six hundred

English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred

of them are mere names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some

of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their works have

perished because they were written in an obsolete dialect; for it is the

poem that keeps the language alive, and not the language that buoys up

the poem. The revival of letters, as it is called, was at first the

revival of _ancient_ letters, which, while it made men pedants, could do

very little toward making them poets, much less toward making them

original writers. There was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity,

invention, and careless faith in the present which make many of the

productions of the Norman Trouveres delightful reading even now. The

whole of Europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has

continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic. I

do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it

was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic

succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still

unextinguished torch of intelligence, the _lampada vitae_, to those who

came after them. But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself

by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and

exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that

consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without

being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something

neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It

is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Beranger's

French prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language however thorny, no

dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of

the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them. If poems

die, it is because there was never true life in them, that is, that true

poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no

sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing

at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination. Take Aristotle's

ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic

system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the

Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, and

tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an

incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live? Yes, Dante can create such

a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred and fifty editions of

his poem shall be called for in these last sixty years, the first half of

the sixth century since his death. Accordingly I am apt to believe that

the complaints one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature

are the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does not

need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could any

amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut.

On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth century has more meat

in it than the English, but this is to say very little. Where it is meant

to be serious and lofty it falls into the same vices of unreality and

allegory which were the fashion of the day, and which there are some

patriots so fearfully and wonderfully made as to relish. Stripped of the

archaisms (that turn every _y_ to a meaningless _z_, spell which

_quhilk_, shake _schaik_, bugle _bowgill_, powder _puldir_, and will not

let us simply whistle till we have puckered our mouths to _quhissill_) in

which the Scottish antiquaries love to keep it disguised,--as if it were

nearer to poetry the further it got from all human recognition and

sympathy,--stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it from the

contemporary verse-mongering south of the Tweed. Their compositions are

generally as stiff and artificial as a trellis, in striking contrast with

the popular ballad-poetry of Scotland (some of which possibly falls

within this period, though most of it is later), which clambers,

lawlessly if you will, but at least freely and simply, twining the bare

stem of old tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural

sympathies. I find a few sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar's "Merle and

Nightingale,"--indeed one whole stanza that has always seemed exquisite

to me. It is this:--

"Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man

Than made this merry, gentle nightingale.

Her sound went with the river as it ran

Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale;

O merle, quoth she, O fool, leave off thy tale,

For in thy song good teaching there is none,

For both are lost,--the time and the travail

Of every love but upon God alone."

But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the serious verses of

Dunbar that does not seem to me tedious and pedantic. I dare say a few

more lines might be found scattered here and there, but I hold it a sheer

waste of time to hunt after these thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy

haystacks of verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it the better.

His "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," over which the excellent Lord

Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarseness; and

if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under

the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such

wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is

but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could,

and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a

great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his

"Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough

of it, and seems to find a sort of national savor therein, such as

delights his countrymen in a _haggis_, or the German in his

_sauer-kraut_. The uninitiated foreigner puts his handkerchief to his

nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can.

Barbour's "Brus," if not precisely a poem, has passages whose simple

tenderness raises them to that level. That on Freedom is familiar.[263]

But its highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage

in it, the easy and familiar way in which Barbour always takes chivalrous

conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you could ask

of any man. I modernize a few verses to show what I mean. When the King

of England turns to fly from the battle of Bannockburn (and Barbour with

his usual generosity tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de Valence led

him away by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles d'Argente

"Saw the king thus and his menie

Shape them to flee so speedily,

He came right to the king in hy [hastily]

And said, 'Sir, since that is so

That ye thus gate your gate will go,

Have ye good-day, for back will I:

Yet never fled I certainly,

And I choose here to bide and die

Than to live shamefully and fly.'"

The "Brus" is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever written. It is

national in a high and generous way, but I confess I have little faith in

that quality in literature which is commonly called nationality,--a kind

of praise seldom given where there is anything better to be said.

Literature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets

beyond sight of the parish steeple, is not what I understand by

literature. To tell you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is

because it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To

say it of a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be

true of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some

north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can understand the nationality

of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former glories of his country,

he tells us that "the nightingale still sings old Persian"; I can

understand the nationality of Burns when he turns his plough aside to

spare the rough burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or two for

dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of nationality belongs to a country of

which we are all citizens,--that country of the heart which has no

boundaries laid down on the map. All great poetry must smack of the soil,

for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and substance from it, but it

must do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that climbs forever

toward diviner air, and not in the grovelling fashion of the potato. Any

verse that makes you and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but

no poetry at all. Dunbar's works were disinterred and edited some thirty

years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles may

browse there to his heart's content. I am inclined for other pasture,

having long ago satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading that

every generation is sure of its own share of bores without borrowing from

the past.

A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of the Aeneid is

linguistically valuable, and whose introductions to the seventh and

twelfth books--the one describing winter and the other May--have been

safely praised, they are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic

feeling in them, and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as

is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays

over one furrow of verse, and then turns about to lay the next as

cleverly alongside it as he can. But it is a wrong done to good taste to

hold up this _item_ kind of description any longer as deserving any other

credit than that of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a

_post-mortem_ inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not

called for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book

is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true

word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head does not give us

everything, but only the _best_ of everything. He selects, he combines,

or else gives what is characteristic only; while the false style of which

I have been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of impertinences

on its shoulders as Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress was to be rid of

his. One strong verse that can hold itself upright (as the French critic

Rivarol said of Dante) with the bare help of the substantive and verb, is

worth acres of this dead cord-wood piled stick on stick, a boundless

continuity of dryness. I would rather have written that half-stanza of

Longfellow's, in the "Wreck of the Hesperus," of the "billow that swept

her crew like icicles from her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious

enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together. A real landscape is

never tiresome; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed succession

of isolated particulars; we take it in with one sweep of the eye,--its

light, its shadow, its melting gradations of distance: we do not say it

is this, it is that, and the other; and we may be sure that if a

description in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mistake somewhere.

All the pictorial adjectives in the dictionary will not bring it a

hair's-breadth nearer to truth and nature. The fact is that what we see

is in the mind to a greater degree than we are commonly aware. As

Coleridge says,--

"O lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone doth Nature live!"

I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a diatribe on the subject

of descriptive poetry, because I find that this old ghost is not laid

yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a true

enjoyment of poetry,--and the medicine by which vampires were cured was

to unbury them, drive a stake through them, and get them under ground

again with all despatch. The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful,

and it is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a

kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics of something to

which our judgment will not consent, and from which our taste revolts. A

collection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts in ten, of this

perfunctory verse-making, and I never look at one without regretting that

we have lost that excellent Latin phrase, _Corpus poetarum_. In fancy I

always read it on the backs of the volumes,--a _body_ of poets, indeed,

with scarce one soul to a hundred of them.

One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth

century,--John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality.

Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost

brutal coarseness. He was truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is

a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular

attraction. A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his

verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and casting

back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds.

But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long and dreary

winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him from Italy the

blank-verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to some extent

another exception. He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed

feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We

have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as

a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in

love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their

poems are nothing more than bundles of such tied trimly together. They

are said to have refined our language. Let us devoutly hope they did, for

it would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. But I fear it

was not so, for only genius can do that; and Sternhold and Hopkins are

inspired men in comparison with them. For Sternhold was at least the

author of two noble stanzas:--

"The Lord descended from above

And bowed the heavens high,

And underneath his feet he cast

The darkness of the sky;

On cherubs and on cherubims

Full royally he rode,

And on the wings of all the winds

Came flying all abroad."

But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the worst school of

Italian love poetry into an awkward English dress. The Italian proverb

says, "Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo incarnato," that an Englishman

Italianized is the very devil incarnate, and one feels the truth of it

here. The very titles of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is

the cause of the dulness that is in other men. "The lover, deceived by

his love, repenteth him of the true love he bare her." As thus:--

"Where I sought heaven there found I hap;

From danger unto death,

Much like the mouse that treads the trap

In hope to find her food,

And bites the bread that stops her breath,--

So in like case I stood."

"The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness, proposeth to live

in liberty." He says:--

"But I am like the beaten fowl

That from the net escaped,

And thou art like the ravening owl

That all the night hath waked."

And yet at the very time these men were writing there were simple

ballad-writers who could have set them an example of simplicity, force,

and grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of these poetasters to kindle

themselves by a painted flame, and to be pathetic over the lay figure of

a mistress, with the wild vigor and almost fierce sincerity of the "Twa

Corbies":--

"As I was walking all alone

I heard twa corbies making a moan.

The one unto the other did say,

Where shall we gang dine to-day?

In beyond that old turf dyke

I wot there lies a new slain knight;

And naebody kens that he lies there

But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,

His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home,

His lady has ta'en another mate,

So we may make our dinner sweet.

O'er his white bones as they lie bare

The wind shall blow forevermair."

There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could they have

understood it. But they were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of

the plague.

Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into which Spenser

was born, and which he did more than any one else to redeem from the

leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born the

year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier

emancipated than his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps

even more directly influential in educating the taste and refining the

vocabulary of, his contemporaries and immediate successors. The better of

his pastoral poems in the "Arcadia" are, in my judgment, more simple,

natural, and, above all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who

sometimes strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit

the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was

unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted

such themes.[264] He recognized the distinction between simplicity and

vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have

divined the fact that there is but one kind of English that is always

appropriate and never obsolete, namely, the very best.[265] With the

single exception of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting classical

metres to English verse are more successful than those of his

contemporaries. Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and

it can hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of

Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own _Catullian

Hendecasyllabics_. Spenser, perhaps out of deference to Sidney, also

tried his hand at English hexameters, the introduction of which was

claimed by his friend Gabriel Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an

immortality of grateful remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts

and jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He seems to

have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a gleam of mischief

in what he writes to Harvey: "I like your late English hexameter so

exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometime in that kind, which I

find indeed, as I have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard

nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue.

For the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which

sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of

that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the number, as in

_Carpenter_; the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it

shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one

leg after her; and _Heaven_ being used short as one syllable, when it is

in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds up

one leg."[266] It is almost inconceivable that Spenser's hexameters

should have been written by the man who was so soon to teach his native

language how to soar and sing, and to give a fuller sail to English

verse.

One of the most striking facts in our literary history is the

pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously conceded to Spenser by

his contemporaries. At first, it is true, he had not many rivals. Before

the "Faery Queen" two long poems were printed and popular,--the "Mirror

for Magistrates" and Warner's "Albion's England,"--and not long after it

came the "Polyolbion" of Drayton and the "Civil Wars" of Daniel. This was

the period of the saurians in English poetry, interminable poems, book

after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching _vertebrae_, that

at first sight would seem to have rendered earth unfit for the habitation

of man. They most of them sleep well now, as once they made their readers

sleep, and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of

Chambers and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face and general

atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men of that generation,

but it is no marvel when even their relaxations were such downright hard

work. Fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the

leaf and left the task to be finished by their sons,--a dreary

inheritance. Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of

them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the

shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could make poetry coalesce with

gazetteering or chronicle-making. It was like trying to put a declaration

of love into the forms of a declaration in trover. The "Polyolbion"

is nothing less than a versified gazetteer of England and

Wales,--fortunately Scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem would have

been even longer, and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains,

rivers, and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes,

or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses in the

seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he

says,--

"Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand,

As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand";

and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that comes

near being fine; but the far greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider

the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that our days are as a

post, and then think whether we can afford to honor such a draft upon our

time as is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines! Even the

laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more

entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book.

Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of

fancy, as his "Nymphidia" proves. His poem "To the Cambro-Britons on

their Harp" is full of vigor; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like

swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to a charge.

Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did indeed refine our

tongue, and deserved the praise his contemporaries concur in giving him

of being "well-languaged."[267] Writing two hundred and fifty years ago,

he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen

words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become

obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally

remarkable judgment. There is an equable dignity in his thought and

sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems always remind me of a

table-land, where, because all is so level, we are apt to forget on how

lofty a plane we are standing. I think his "Musophilus" the best poem of

its kind in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression

condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. But he

also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the characters were

incapable of that remoteness from ordinary associations which is

essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape into the ideal by _merely_

emigrating into the past or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the

little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in the present will seat

himself on the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if

the magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off his own

shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age, and it is very likely that

Daniel had only the thinking and languaging parts of a poet's outfit,

without the higher creative gift which alone can endow his conceptions

with enduring life and with an interest which transcends the parish

limits of his generation. In the prologue to his "Masque at Court" he has

unconsciously defined his own poetry:--

"Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport,

But tender passions, motions soft and grave,

The still spectator must expect to have."

And indeed his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary associations

and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry,

but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current

and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His best-known poem,

blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the

Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's _Integer

Vitae_, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the

compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. It is very

fine English, but it is the English of diplomacy somehow, and is never

downright this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so, with

sentiments of the highest consideration. Yet the praise of

_well-languaged_, since it implies that good writing then as now demanded

choice and forethought, is not without interest for those who would

classify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well.

His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a

suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. His

"Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than verse),

has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more

light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us

Occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word:--

"And who in time knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores

The gain of our best glory may be sent

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident

May come refined with accents that are ours?"

During the period when Spenser was getting his artistic training a great

change was going on in our mother-tongue, and the language of literature

was disengaging itself more and more from that of ordinary talk. The

poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify

and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds

in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still

pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very

much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in

America. This demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no

man contributed so much to the transformation of style and language as

Spenser; for not only did he deliberately endeavor at reform, but by the

charm of his diction, the novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method

of treatment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the new manner

popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth

of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured

self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true

bent of his genius,--that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it

might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own

individuality. Before his time the boundary between poetry and prose had

not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal

treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a

ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first

revealed to his countrymen. He at first sought for that remoteness, which

is implied in an escape from the realism of daily life, in the

pastoral,--a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original

intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of human as opposed

to heroic sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of

abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and was not long in

choosing between an unreality which pretended to be real and those

everlasting realities of the mind which seem unreal only because they lie

beyond the horizon of the every-day world and become visible only when

the mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal

atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age imposes on

its poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue; and when every

device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and with a touch the

miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always are after they are

wrought.

Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.[268] Nothing is known

of his parents, except that the name of his mother was Elizabeth; but he

was of gentle birth, as he more than once informs us, with the natural

satisfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the business talent

of the middle class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment.

In 1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in due

course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and his master's in 1576. He

is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met

with some disgust or disappointment during his residence at the

University.[269] Between 1576 and 1578 Spenser seems to have been with

some of his kinsfolk "in the North" It was during this interval that he

conceived his fruitless passion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for

another shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily

bemoaned in his pastorals[270] Before the publication of his "Shepherd's

Calendar" in 1579, he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and

was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or

literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he is in the household

of the Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de

Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of

his life, with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in

search of preferment. His residence in that country has been compared to

that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward points

of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was surrounded were to the full as

savage, as hostile, and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the

Scythians[271] who made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier

English settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who

disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in Ireland

as a banishment. In his "Colm Clout's come Home again" he tells us that

Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 1589, and heard what was then

finished of the "Faery Queen,"--

"'Gan to cast great liking to my lore

And great disliking to my luckless lot,

That banisht had myself, like wight forlore,

Into that waste, where I was quite forgot

The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me,

Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful,

And wend with him his Cynthia to see,

Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful."

But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle (which, with 3,028

acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was

confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid scenery at once placid

and noble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain,

with Ovid,--

"Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem,"

for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him the

stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. Above all, he

was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation,

while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those

worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic

enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this

sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal

visions of the "Faery Queen" and to giving his "soul a loose" than

"The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome,

And all the busy pageantry

That wise men scorn and fools adore."

Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness of Bussy-Rabutin

in exile from the Parisian sun, yet enough to make him joyfully accompany

Raleigh thither in the early winter of 1589, carrying with him the first

three books of the great poem begun ten years before. Horace's _nonum

prematur in annum_ had been more than complied with, and the success was

answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness

of the work. But Spenser did not stay long in London to enjoy his fame.

Seen close at hand, with its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish

basenesses, the court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance of

Kilcolman. A nature so prone to ideal contemplation as Spenser's would be

profoundly shocked by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of

contemporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal motives the

noble opportunities of the world are at any given moment endangered. It

is a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by ignoble men.

"Vide questo globo

Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sembiante."

In his "Colin Clout," written just after his return to Ireland, he speaks

of the Court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems

to me, there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of the gall of

personal disappointment. He speaks, so he tells us,--

"To warn young shepherds' wandering wit

Which, through report of that life's painted bliss,

Abandon quiet home to seek for it

And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss;

For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life

For shepherd fit to live in that same place,

Where each one seeks with malice and with strife

To thrust down other into foul disgrace

Himself to raise; and he doth soonest rise

That best can handle his deceitful wit

In subtle shifts....

To which him needs a guileful hollow heart

Masked with fair dissembling courtesy,

A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art,

No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery.

For arts of school have there small countenance,

Counted but toys to busy idle brains,

And there professors find small maintenance,

But to be instruments of others' gains,

Nor is there place for any gentle wit

Unless to please it can itself apply.

* * * * *

"Even such is all their vaunted vanity,

Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away.

* * * * *

"So they themselves for praise of fools do sell,

And all their wealth for painting on a wall.

* * * * *

"Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty

Do wander up and down despised of all."[272]

And again in his "Mother Hubberd's Tale," in the most pithy and masculine

verses he ever wrote:--

"Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate

Hath brought to Court to sue for _Had-I-wist_

That few have found and many one hath mist!

Full httle knowest thou that hast not tried

What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good days that might be better spent,

To waste long nights in pensive discontent,

To speed to day, to be put back to-morrow,

To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow,

To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers',

To have thy asking yet wait many years,

To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares,

To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs,

To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,

To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

* * * * *

"Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate

In safe assurance, without strife or hate,

Finds all things needful for contentment meek,

And will to court for shadows vain to seek,

* * * * *

"That curse God send unto mine enemy!"[273]

When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat and serene

companionship of his great poem, with what profound and pathetic

exultation must he have recalled the verses of Dante!--

"Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi

Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio,

E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi,

E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio,

Chi nei diletti della carne involto

S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio,

Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto,

Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo

Cotanto gloriosamente accolto."[274]

What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning and

literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an

unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty

pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands already

mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way hindered

the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him

either in reproach or remonstrance. In "The Ruins of Time," after

speaking of the death of Walsingham,

"Since whose decease learning lies unregarded,

And men of armes do wander unrewarded,"

he gives the following reason for their neglect.--

"For he that now wields all things at his will,

Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill.

O grief of griefs! O gall of all good hearts,

To see that virtue should despised be

Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts,

And now, broad spreading like an aged tree,

Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be:

O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned

Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned!"

And in the introduction to the fourth book of the "Faery Queen," he says

again:--

"The rugged forehead that with grave foresight

Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state,

My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite

For praising Love, as I have done of late,--

* * * * *

"By which frail youth is oft to folly led

Through false allurement of that pleasing bait,

That better were in virtues discipled

Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed.

"Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love

Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame;

Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove,

Ne natural affection faultless blame

For fault of few that have abused the same:

For it of honor and all virtue is

The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame

That crown true lovers with immortal bliss,

The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."

If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales' tongues as

the "Faery Queen," he is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The

sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be wounded when a poem in

which he proposed to himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part

of Moral Philosophy"[275] could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks

in the same strain and without any other than a general application in

his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes the defence of

poesy because it was undervalued. But undervalued by whom? By the only

persons about whom he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now

call Society and who were then called the Court. The inference I would

draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the marvellous

efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the

influence of direct patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost

nothing.[276] Then, as when the same phenomenon has happened elsewhere,

there must have been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so

called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and

everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations

([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing

capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277]

England had long been growing more truly insular in language and

political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national

consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe.

Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly

hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud or

not as the case might be, but there was no England as a separate entity

from the sovereign who embodied it for the time being.[278] But now an

English people began to be dimly aware of itself. Their having got a

religion to themselves must have intensified them much as the having a

god of their own did the Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long

tension of anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the

hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a provincial

deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring into flower all that

there was of imaginative or sentimental in the English nature, already

just in the first flush of its spring.

("The yonge sonne

Had in _the Bull_ half of his course yronne.")

And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the

golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he

first opened Chapman's Homer,--

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific, and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise,"

if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the

results of this culture,--results that permeated all thought, all

literature, and all talk,--fancy what must have been the awakening shock

and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new

world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of

a great organ, which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in

the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders of

tragedy, and its passionate _vox humana!_ It might almost seem as if

Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first

sight of the king and his courtiers,

"O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world

That hath such people in't!"

The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English

literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in which no

great principles were involved which could shake all minds with

controversy and heat them to intense conviction. A conflict of opposing

ambitions wears out the moral no less than the material forces of a

people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convictions may realize

resources of character which before were only potential, may transform a

merely gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible

of the dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a

common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought or was going on

in England. For the first time a distinct image of her was disengaging

itself from the tangled blur of tradition and association in the minds of

her children, and it was now only that her great poet could speak

exultingly to an audience that would understand him with a passionate

sympathy, of

"This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

England, bound in with the triumphant sea!"

Such a period can hardly recur again, but something like it, something

pointing back to similar producing causes, is observable in the revival

of English imaginative literature at the close of the last and in the

early years of the present century. Again, after long fermentation, there

was a war of principles, again the national consciousness was heightened

and stung by a danger to the national existence, and again there was a

crop of great poets and heroic men.

Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him three more books of

the "Faery Queen," in 1595. He is supposed to have remained there during

the two following years.[279]

In 1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his somewhat

artificial _amoretti_. By her he had four children. He was now at the

height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age,

and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had

been put out of the way by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In

the next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for

the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates! In October

the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of

Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife

and children barely escaped.[280] He sought shelter in London and died

there on the 16th January, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster.

He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the cost of

the Earl of Essex, poets bearing his pall and casting verses into his

grave. He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his life may be

reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must

have commonly been. If they feel more passionately the pang of the

moment, so also the compensations are incalculable, and not the least of

them this very capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is

to be measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the

opportunity given for the development and free play of the genius. It

should be remembered that the power of expression which exaggerates their

griefs is also no inconsiderable consolation for them. We should measure

what Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the

unavailing tears be shed for Rosalind. A careful analysis of these leaves

no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe that the

passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral accessories of

pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more than one

profound passion in his life, and that luckily was for his "Faery Queen."

He was fortunate in the friendship of the best men and women of his time,

in the seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the

past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we know of

him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to the friendships of

his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal

with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, but the sweetener and

ennobler of the street and the fireside.

There are two ways of measuring a poet, either by an absolute aesthetic

standard, or relatively to his position in the literary history of his

country and the conditions of his generation. Both should be borne in

mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair judgment. If his positive merit

is to be settled irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism

will find its advantage not only in considering what he was, but what,

under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be.

The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the Orlando of

Ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost

always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the hint of some

predecessor, must not lead us to overlook his manifest claim to

originality. It is not what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what

he has taken, that shows what native force is in him. Above all, did his

mind dwell complacently in those forms and fashions which in their very

birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those

qualities which are permanent in language and whatever is wrought in it?

There is much in Spenser that is contemporary and evanescent; but the

substance of him is durable, and his work was the deliberate result of

intelligent purpose and ample culture. The publication of his "Shepherd's

Calendar" in 1579 (though the poem itself be of little interest) is one

of the epochs in our literature. Spenser had at least the originality to

see clearly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry back

again to some kind of understanding with nature. His immediate

predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise,

born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well

defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they

were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a

bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and

feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another,

with the useful ambition of _keeping it up_ as long as they could. To my

mind the old comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle" is worth the whole of

them. It may be coarse, earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at

least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs.

The form of Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar," it is true, is artificial,

absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside,--not, perhaps, the

wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the

"Congressional Globe,"--but the spirit of it is fresh and original We

have at last got over the superstition that shepherds and shepherdesses

are any wiser or simpler than other people. We know that wisdom can be on

only by wide commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of

manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. But the

pastorals of Spenser were very different things, different both in the

moving spirit and the resultant form from the later ones of Browne or the

"Piscatory Eclogues" of Phinehas Fletcher. And why? Browne and Fletcher

wrote because Spenser had written, but Spenser wrote from a strong inward

impulse--an instinct it might be called--to escape at all risks into the

fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into which rhymer after rhymer

had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and

in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation. His longing for

something truer and better was as honest as that which led Tacitus so

long before to idealize the Germans, and Rousseau so long after to make

an angel of the savage.

Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm between himself and

Chaucer, as Dante between himself and Virgil. He called Chaucer master,

as Milton was afterwards to call _him_. And, even while he chose the most

artificial of all forms, his aim--that of getting back to nature and

life--was conscious, I have no doubt, to himself, and must be obvious to

whoever reads with anything but the ends of his fingers. It is true that

Sannazzaro had brought the pastoral into fashion again, and that two of

Spenser's are little more than translations from Marot; but for manner he

instinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and then only great

English poet. He has given common instead of classic names to his

personages, for characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has

gone to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and

freshen his poetical vocabulary.[281]

I look upon the "Shepherd's Calendar" as being no less a conscious and

deliberate attempt at reform than Thomson's "Seasons" were in the topics,

and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" in the language of poetry. But the

great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their matter as their

manner. They show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto

displayed by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from

Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But

here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety,

elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. If not

passion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat

stately movement of Spenser's mind would allow him to come. Sidney had

tried many experiments in versification, which are curious and

interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the _sliding_ rhymes

of Sannazzaro in English. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a

'prentice hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at least in

verse, and we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater master, in

the "Shepherd's Calendar" as well as in the "Faery Queen." We have seen

that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney[282] and Harvey,

tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he

taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and

noble. Chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show

elsewhere,[283] but Spenser was to prove

"That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired

For verse, and that sweet music to the ear

Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."

The "Shepherd's Calendar" contains perhaps the most picturesquely

imaginative verse which Spenser has written. It is in the eclogue for

February, where he tells us of the

"Faded oak

Whose body is sere, whose branches broke,

Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire."

It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked in secret,

that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untranslatable into reasonable

prose, and which the imagination welcomes at once without caring whether

it be exactly conformable to _barbara_ or _celarent_. Another pretty

verse in the same eclogue,

"But gently took that ungently came,"

pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. But in

general it is not so much the sentiments and images that are new as the

modulation of the verses in which they float. The cold obstruction of two

centuries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks

out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The

service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of

harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance,

his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase,

made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and

Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he

that

"Taught the dumb on high to sing,

And heavy ignorance aloft to fly

That added feathers to the learned's wing,

And gave to grace a double majesty."

I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he had already achieved

that transmutation of language and metre by which he was afterwards to

endow English verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in

which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a

feeling of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain,

that he had been talking prose all his life,--but already he gave clear

indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to

carry it forward to ultimate perfection. A harmony and alacrity of

language like this were unexampled in English verse:--

"Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook

Do bathe your breast,

Forsake your watery bowers and hither look

At my request....

And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell,

Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well,

Help me to blaze

Her worthy praise,

Which in her sex doth all excel."

Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal and slow,

as befits an invocation; and now mark how the same feet shall be made to

quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune:--

"Bring here the pink and purple columbine,

With gilliflowers;

Bring coronations and sops in wine,

Worne of paramours;

Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies,

And cowslips and kingcups and loved lilies;

The pretty paunce

And the chevisance

Shall match with the fair flowerdelice."[284]

The argument prefixed by E.K. to the tenth Eclogue has a special interest

for us as showing how high a conception Spenser had of poetry and the

poet's office. By Cuddy he evidently means himself, though choosing out

of modesty another name instead of the familiar Colin. "In Cuddy is set

forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which finding no maintenance of his

state and studies, complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the causes

thereof, specially having been in all ages, and even amongst the most

barbarous, always of singular account and honor, _and being indeed so

worthy and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift and

heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labor and learning, but adorned

with both, and poured into the wit by a certain Enthousiasmos and

celestial inspiration_, as the author hereof elsewhere at large

discourseth in his book called THE ENGLISH POET, which book being lately

come into my hands, I mind also by God's grace, upon further advisement,

to publish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried out his intention, and

the book is no doubt lost; a loss to be borne with less equanimity than

that of Cicero's treatise _De Gloria_, once possessed by Petrarch. The

passage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and reminds one of

the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us,

"he [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's 'Calendar,' about

wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and Piers).[285] These verses

are in this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having the approval of

dear old Ben, the best critic of the day, and because they are a good

sample of Spenser's earlier verse:--

"Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage;

O, if my temples were distained with wine,

And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine,

How I could rear the Muse on stately stage

And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine

With quaint Bellona in her equipage!"

In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style which was to

distinguish him, and which, like his own Fame,

"With golden wings aloft doth fly

Above the reach of ruinous decay,

And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky,

Admired of base-born men from far away."[286]

He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding the "Faery

Queen":--

"Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust

* * * * *

"To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts

And helms unbruised waxen daily brown:

There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing,

And stretch herself at large from East to West."

Verses like these, especially the last (which Dryden would have liked),

were such as English ears had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of

the maturer man. The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an

ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so

hardly help being poetical.

It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that forthwith

won for Spenser his never-disputed rank as the chief English poet of that

age, and gave him a popularity which, during his life and in the

following generation, was, in its select quality, without a competitor.

It may be thought that I lay too much stress on this single attribute of

diction. But apart from its importance in his case as showing their way

to the poets who were just then learning the accidence of their art and

leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to their hands, it

should be remembered that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that

happy coalescence of music and meaning, where each reinforces the other,

that define a man as poet and make all ears converts and partisans.

Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved "seld-seen costly" words

perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness

and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of

seeming association. He had not the concentrated power which can

sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet,

for his genius is rather for dilatation than compression.[287] But he

was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of

our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy

and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand

manner and high bred ways of the society he frequented. But even to the

last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was

habitual with the generation that preceded him. In the fifth book of the

"Faery Queen," where he is describing the passion of Britomart at the

supposed infidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-like

realism,[288]--he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing Hours

of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth and that far

away beneath. But his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and

refined luxury.

He shows his mature hand in the "Muiopotmos," the most airily fanciful of

his poems, a marvel for delicate conception and treatment, whose breezy

verse seems to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable

sunshine. No other English poet has found the variety and compass which

enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. It can hardly be

doubted that in Clarion the butterfly he has symbolized himself, and

surely never was the poetic temperament so picturesquely exemplified:--

"Over the fields, in his frank lustiness,

And all the champain o'er, he soared light,

And all the country wide he did possess,

Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously,

That none gainsaid and none did him envy.

"The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green,

With his air-cutting wings he measured wide,

Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen,

Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried;

But none of these, however sweet they been,

Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide;

His choiceful sense with every change doth flit;

No common things may please a wavering wit.

"To the gay gardens his unstaid desire

Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;

There lavish Nature, in her best attire,

Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights,

And Art, with her contending doth aspire,

To excel the natural with made delights;

And all that fair or pleasant may be found,

In riotous excess doth there abound.

"There he arriving, round about doth flie,

From bed to bed, from one to the other border,

And takes survey with curious busy eye,

Of every flower and herb there set in order,

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,

Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,

Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace,

But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

"And evermore with most variety

And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet)

He casts his glutton sense to satisfy,

Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet,

Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie,

Now in the same bathing his tender feet;

And then he percheth on some branch thereby

To weather him and his moist wings to dry.

"And then again he turneth to his play,

To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise;

The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray,

Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes,

The roses reigning in the pride of May,

Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies

Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme,

Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime,

"Cool violets, and orpine growing still,

Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale,

Fresh costmary and breathful camomill,

Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale,

Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill,

Sound savory, and basil hearty-hale,

Fat coleworts and comforting perseline,

Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine.[289]

"And whatso else of virtue good or ill,

Grew in this garden, fetched from far away,

Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey;

Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill,

In the warm sun he doth himself embay,

And there him rests in riotous suffisance

Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance.

"What more felicity can fall to creature

Than to enjoy delight with liberty,

And to be lord of all the works of nature?

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,

To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,

To take whatever thing doth please the eye?

Who rests not pleased with such happiness,

Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."

The "Muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string

of classical association by adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne.

"Talking the other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he

observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or

continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as

classical authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that

characteristic death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the information

as authentic, and be glad that we have more news of Ulysses than we

looked for."[290]

We can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad to admit this

exquisitely fantastic illumination into his margin.

No German analyzer of aesthetics has given us so convincing a definition

of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "To reign in the air" was

certainly Spenser's function. And yet the commentators, who seem never

willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not

been so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out

from his "Mother Hubberd's Tale" that he might have been a very sensible

matter of-fact man if he would. For my own part, I am quite willing to

confess that I like him none the worse for being _un_practical, and that

my reading has convinced me that being too poetical is the rarest fault

of poets. Practical men are not so scarce, one would think, and I am not

sure that the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it

nothing but ship-timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent into the world

to be part of its motive power. The blind old engine would not know the

difference though we got up its steam with attar of roses, nor make one

revolution more to the minute for it. What practical man ever left such

an heirloom to his countrymen as the "Faery Queen"?

Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in the highest vocation of

all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him "our sage and serious poet,

whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

And good Dr. Henry More was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices

so beautiful now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them

if we chanced to meet them; for he could not escape from his genius,

which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract contemplation of the

beautiful, left him as poet open to every impression of sensuous delight.

When he wrote the "Shepherd's Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and

probably so by conviction rather than from any social influences or

thought of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the

second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability,"

"Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"

which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which

it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is

very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in

him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty

destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of

Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical

worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in

"Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic

relish in his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that

makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as

perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the winter woods as "bare

ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang";--

"But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave

Guyon broke down with rigor pitiless,

Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save

Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness,

But that their bliss he turned to balefulness;

Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface,

Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress,

Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase,

And of the fairest late now made the foulest place."

But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opinions (which do not

nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic

mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out

of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with

their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay.

He who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to

the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory,

expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:--

"Lifting himself out of the lowly dust

On golden plumes up to the purest sky."

Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration,

nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an

enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as

in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter. There is an

exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I

shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately

coherent and transcendentally logical poems that "moveth altogether if it

move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it

would a perfect group of crystals. Whatever there is of sentiment and

passion is for the most part purely disembodied and without sex, like

that of angels,--a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion,

whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps one may venture to

hint that the animal instincts are those that stand in least need of

stimulation. Spenser's notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from

those of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not to

disqualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy Grail, and accordingly

it is not uninstructive to remember that he had drunk, among others, at

French sources not yet deboshed with _absinthe_.[292] Yet, with a purity

like that of thrice-bolted snow, he had none of its coldness. He is, of

all our poets, the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton probably

meant it when he said that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and

passionate." A poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and

illumines his senses; when they, on the other hand, muddy the mind, he

becomes sensual. Every one of Spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive

to the impressions of material, as every organ of his soul was to those

of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if he painted the weeds of sensuality

at all, he could not help making them "of glorious feature." It was this,

it may be suspected, rather than his "praising love," that made Lord

Burleigh shake his "rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut, indeed, is a wide

one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight in "precious odors fetched

from far away" upward to such refinement as

"Upon her eyelids many graces sate

Under the shadow of her even brows,"

where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He is court-painter in

ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealizes these frail

favorites of his majesty King Lusty Juventus, till they half believe

themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which he travesties them.[293]

In his great poem he had two objects in view: first the ephemeral one of

pleasing the court, and then that of recommending himself to the

permanent approval of his own and following ages as a poet, and

especially as a moral poet. To meet the first demand, he lays the scene

of his poem in contemporary England, and brings in all the leading

personages of the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their

squires and lady-loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the

second book:--

"Of Faery Land yet if he more inquire,

By certain signs, here set in sundry place,

He may it find; ...

And thou, O fairest princess under sky,

In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face

And thine own realms in land of Faery."

Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them were once

as easily recognizable as those of Mademoiselle de Scudery. This, no

doubt, added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the allusions. The

interest they would excite may be inferred from the fact that King James,

in 1596, wished to have the author prosecuted and punished for his

indecent handling of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, under the name of

Duessa.[294] To suit the wider application of his plan's other and more

important half, Spenser made all his characters double their parts, and

appear in his allegory as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities.

When the cardinal and theological virtues tell Dante,

"Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle,"

the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, to

swallow without solution the problem of being in two places at the same

time. But there is something fairly ludicrous in such a duality as that

of Prince Arthur and the Earl of Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and

Belphoebe and Elizabeth.

"In this same interlude it doth befall

That I, one Snout by name, present a wall."

The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard enough to

manage. But Spenser had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as

Wordsworth,[295] or he could never have carried his poem on with

enthusiastic good faith so far as he did. It is evident that to him the

Land of Faery was an unreal world of picture and illusion,

"The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil,"

in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its shortcomings

and failures.

"The ways through which my weary steps I guide

In this delightful land of Faery

Are so exceeding spacious and wide,

And sprinkled with such sweet variety

Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye,

That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight,

My tedious travail do forget thereby,

And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might,

It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright."

Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness; but the alacrity of his

mind is so great that, even where his invention fails a little, we do not

share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by the variety and

sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical

felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. In

this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to

Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost

their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should

continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how

full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. As

a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that kind of writing is

capable. The characters are vague, and, even were they not, they drop out

of the story so often and remain out of it so long, that we have

forgotten who they are when we meet them again; the episodes hinder the

advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of incident or

novelty of situation; the plot, if plot it may be called,

"That shape has none

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,"

recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance; while the

fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously sincere, is between

shadow and shadow, where we know that neither can harm the other, though

are tempted to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and

says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with

it. But how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal question? The

truth is that it is too often forced upon us against our will, as people

were formerly driven to church till they began to look on a day of rest

as a penal institution, and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion

of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. The

true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion

as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double

meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he

meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to

prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest

again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval

church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are

reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our

feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that

we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving

to embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his own in

all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his own prose-epic.

This is the secret of his power and his charm, that, while the

representation of what may happen to all men comes home to none of us in

particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its

startling parallel in that of every one of us. The very homeliness of

Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our

guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his

allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream.

Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at

setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford

jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which

it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind

become _things_, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. But

Spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered

on the Muses' musterroll by the specious trick of personification. There

is likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted

which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,[296] for example, is by no

means the Ossianic figure into which artists who mistake the vague for

the sublime have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with

his malicious wife; and he comes forth to us from those regions of early

faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by the imagination.

These figures of Bunyan's are already familiar inmates of the mind, and,

if there be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness of his

verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those of the later romances, except

that grand figure with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the

most original of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure

eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so

Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, to

unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of Alma,[297] for

instance:--

"The master cook was cald Concoctioen,

A careful man, and full of comely guise;

The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion,

Did order all the achates in seemly wise."

And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of Ecclesiastes

understood these matters better in that last pathetic chapter of his,

blunderingly translated as it apparently is. This, I admit, is the worst

failure of Spenser in this kind; though, even here, when he gets on to

the organs of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and style come to

the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of

armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such

visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most

prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile

confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us

as of children who _play_ that everything is something else, and are

quite satisfied with the transformation.

The problem for Spenser was a double one: how to commend poetry at all to

a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[298] and how he,

Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend _his_

poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual

mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his

soul. _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_ was not only an

irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met

the case in point. He would convince the scorners that poetry might be

seriously useful, and show Master Bull his new way of making fine words

butter parsnips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised,

was imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and

illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and

pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he

proceeded to put forth; but he so bordered it with bright-colored

fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in

others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani

missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its

adornment. Worse than all, does not his brush linger more lovingly along

the rosy contours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of the Wise

Virgins? "The general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to

Sir Walter Raleigh, "is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in

virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he evidently has

a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had interpreted his promise of

cuts: "To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather

have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at

large,[299] as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical

devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but how

could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said,

"And whatso else, _of virtue good or ill,_

Grew in that garden, fetcht from far away,

Of every one he takes and tastes at will,

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey"?

One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure sense of the

beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might interpret it to our

duller perceptions So exquisite was his sensibility,[300] that with him

sensation and intellection seem identical, and we "can almost say his

body thought." This subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that

gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full

of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere

intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet associate it

with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call sensibility by the

physical name of heart.

Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him

the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for

perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in

fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming,

but because it was the only wear. The true use of him is as a gallery of

pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour

or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as

to cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his

style Venetian,[301] but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of

an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And again,

as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from

Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle

sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you

lullingly along from picture to picture.

"If all the pens that ever poet held

Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts,

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts

Their minds and muses on admired themes,

If all the heavenly quintessence they still

From their immortal flowers of poesy,

If these had made one poem's period,

And all combined in beauty's worthiness;

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best,

Which into words no virtue can digest."[302]

Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable

something as any other poet. He is so purely poet that with him the

meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music

makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant

paths. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well

that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a

beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless abundance only to be

justified by incomes of immortal youth.

"Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco

Si puo quivi albergare in alcun cuore;

Non entra quivi disagio ne inopia,

Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia."[303]

This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser appear in the

very structure of his verse. He found the _ottava rima_ too monotonously

iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the let

from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes

with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a

bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another

line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the

melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that

which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on

the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings

and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with

and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness

indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but

a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the

first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives

spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become

languorous. He knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in

such verses as,

"But he, my lion, and my noble lord,

How does he find in cruel heart to hate

Her that him loved and ever most adored

As the God of my life? Why hath he me abhorred?"[304]

or this,

"Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily!"[305]

Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its "constraint led him

into many absurdities." Of these he instances three, of which I shall

notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for

words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one who knows the poet.

It is that it "obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however

unimportant with trifling and tedious circumlocutions, namely, Faery

Queen, II. ii. 44:--

"'Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face

Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world,

Sith last I left that honorable place,

In which her royal presence is enrolled.'

"That is, it is three months since I left her palace."[306] But Dr. Warton

should have remembered (what he too often forgets in his own verses)

that, in spite of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that

verse only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its

province.[307] Verse itself is an absurdity except as an expression of

some higher movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift other minds

to the same ideal level. It is the cothurnus which gives language an

heroic stature. I have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser's

style was its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than

compresses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural in an age

when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as now. He is the last of

the poets, who went (without affectation) by the great clock of the

firmament. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the same timepiece, is

full of these roundabout ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to

do with Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these

stately revolutions of the _superne ruote_. Time itself becomes more

noble when so measured; we never knew before of how precious a commodity

we had the wasting. Who would prefer the plain time of day to this?

"Now when Aldebaran was mounted high

Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair";

or this?

"By this the northern wagoner had set

His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star

That was in ocean's waves yet never wet,

But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far

To all that in the wide deep wandering are";

or this?

"At last the golden oriental gate

Of greatest heaven gan to open fair,

And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,

Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair

And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air."

The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less as of no

account, is in keeping with that sense of endless leisures which it is

one chief merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dilatation extends

to thoughts as well as to phrases and images. He does not love the

concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of

natural growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest stick

of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested

by Homer:[308]

"Upon the top of all his lofty crest

A bunch of hairs discolored diversly,

With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest,

Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity;

Like to an almond-tree mounted high

On top of green Selinus all alone

With blossoms brave bedecked daintily,

Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At every little breath that under heaven is blown."

And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant verses of Dante:--

"Seggendo in piume

In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre,

Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma,

Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia

Qual fumo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma."[309]

"Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she,

Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss,

Does waste his days in dark obscurity

And in oblivion ever buried is;

Where ease abounds it's eath to do amiss:

But who his limbs with labors and his mind

Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.

Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind,

Who seeks with painful toil shall Honor soonest find.

"In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell,

And will be found with peril and with pain,

Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell

Unto her happy mansioen attain;

Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain,

And wakeful watches ever to abide;

But easy is the way and passage plain

To pleasure's palace; it may soon be spied,

And day and night her doors to all stand open wide."[310]

Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room. His thoughts are

never pithily expressed, but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as

if under the open sky, that seems to me very noble. For example,--

"The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought

And is with child of glorious-great intent

Can never rest until it forth have brought

The eternal brood of glory excellent."[311]

One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. And here is a

passage which Milton had read and remembered:--

"And is there care in Heaven? and is there love

In heavenly spirits to these creatures base,

That may compassion of their evils move?

There is: else much more wretched were the case

Of men than beasts: but O, the exceeding grace

Of highest God, that loves his creatures so,

And all his works with mercy doth embrace,

That blessed angels he sends to and fro,

To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe!

"How oft do they their silver bowers leave,

To come to succor us that succor want!

How oft do they with golden pinions cleave

The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant,

Against foul fiends to aid us militant!

They for us fight, they watch and duly ward,

And their bright squadrons round about us plant;

And all for love and nothing for reward;

O, why should heavenly God to men have such regard?"[312]

His natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. He loves to

prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the

translucent cup of a lily. So entirely are beauty and delight in it the

native element of Spenser, that, whenever in the "Faery Queen" you come

suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a

kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of

strawberries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets. Sensation

passing through emotion into revery is a prime quality of his manner. And

to read him puts one in the condition of revery, a state of mind in which

our thoughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish do in a

gentle stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep

themselves from going down with the current, while their bodies yield

indolently to all its soothing curves. He chooses his language for its

rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. To characterize

his style in a single word, I should call it _costly_. None but the

daintiest and nicest phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one

to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet

lapses of verse, that never any word seems more eminent than the rest,

nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to the end

before you have time to stop and muse over the wealth that has been

lavished on you. But he has characterized and exemplified his own style

better than any description could do:--

"For round about the walls yclothed were

With goodly arras of great majesty,

Woven with gold and silk so close and near

That the rich metal lurked privily

As faining to be hid from envious eye;

Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares

It showed itself and shone unwillingly

Like to a discolored snake whose hidden snares

Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back declares."[313]

And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a sample:--

"And, more to lull him in his slumber soft,

A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down

And ever drizzling rain upon the loft,

Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun

Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon.

No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries,

As still are wont to annoy the walled town,

Might there be heard: but careless quiet lies

Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies."[314]

In the world into which Spenser carries us there is neither time nor

space, or rather it is outside of and independent of them both, and so is

purely ideal, or, more truly, imaginary; yet it is full of form, color,

and all earthly luxury, and so far, if not real, yet apprehensible by the

senses. There are no men and women in it, yet it throngs with airy and

immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women, and hint at some

kind of foregone reality. Now this place, somewhere between mind and

matter, between soul and sense, between the actual and the possible, is

precisely the region which Spenser assigns (if I have rightly divined

him) to the poetic susceptibility of impression,--

"To reign in the air from the earth to highest sky."

Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul and spirit of it,

dormant till they are magnetized by some powerful emotion. Then whatever

is imperishable in us recognizes for an instant and claims kindred with

something outside and distinct from it, yet in some inconceivable way a

part of it, that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes

all other companionship. This exaltation with which love sometimes

subtilizes the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the

thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the joy of it, the

soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to have been the normal

condition of Spenser. While the senses of most men live in the cellar,

his "were laid in a large upper chamber which opened toward the

sunrising."

"His birth was of the womb of morning dew,

And his conception of the joyous prime."

The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one of them?)

have a way, I admit, of getting within our inmost consciousness and in a

manner betraying us to ourselves. There is in Spenser a remoteness very

different from this, but it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable,

perhaps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away

from ourselves and those importunate trifles which we gravely call the

realities of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind everything

"Suffers a sea change

Into something rich and strange."

He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal distance

where no mortal, I had almost said human, fleck is visible. Instead of

the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epithalamion fit

for a conscious goddess, and the "savage soil"[315] of Ireland becomes a

turf of Arcady under her feet, where the merchants' daughters of the town

are no more at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan

mythology whom they meet there. He seems to have had a common-sense side

to him, and could look at things (if we may judge by his tract on Irish

affairs) in a practical and even hard way; but the moment he turned

toward poetry he fulfilled the condition which his teacher Plato imposes

on poets, and had not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His

fancy, habitually moving about in worlds not realized, unrealizes

everything at a touch. The critics blame him because in his Prothalamion

the subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave it at Temple

Gardens as noble damsels; but to those who are grown familiar with his

imaginary world such a transformation seems as natural as in the old

legend of the Knight of the Swan.

"Come now ye damsels, daughters of Delight,

Help quickly her to dight:

But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot

In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, ...

And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen,

The which do still adorn her beauty's pride,

Help to adorn my beautifulest bride.

* * * * *

"Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal,

And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine,

And let the Graces dance unto the rest,--

For they can do it best.

The whiles the maidens do their carols sing,

To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring."

The whole Epithalamion is very noble, with an organ-like roll and majesty

of numbers, while it is instinct with the same joyousness which must have

been the familiar mood of Spenser. It is no superficial and tiresome

merriment, but a profound delight in the beauty of the universe and in

that delicately surfaced nature of his which was its mirror and

counterpart. Sadness was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be

sure, a decorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a

temperament; but his condolences are graduated to the unimpassioned scale

of social requirement. Even for Sir Philip Sidney his sighs are regulated

by the official standard. It was in an unreal world that his affections

found their true object and vent, and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he

had never known that he puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has

evaporated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic verses he

ever penned:--

"I hate the day because it lendeth light

To see all things, but not my love to see."[316]

In the Epithalamion there is an epithet which has been much admired for

its felicitous tenderness:--

"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,

Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes

And blesseth her with his two _happy_ hands."

But the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already guided him to

this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holiness--a dame surely as far

abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of--to

Una, who, like the visionary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of

womanhood, except that of being alive as Juliet and Beatrice are.

"O happy earth,

Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread!"[317]

Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would be as soft as that

of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen,--can we conceive of her

treading anything so sordid? No; it is only on some unsubstantial floor

of dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. And it is only when

Spenser has escaped thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied

his wife till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination

as the other ideal images with which he converses, that his feeling

becomes as nearly passionate--as nearly human, I was on the point of

saying--as with him is possible. I am so far from blaming this idealizing

property of his mind, that I find it admirable in him. It is his quality,

not his defect. Without some touch of it life would be unendurable prose.

If I have called the world to which he transports us a world of

unreality, I have wronged him. It is only a world of unrealism. It is

from pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inch-long politics

that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that to-morrow, always

coming and never come, where ideas shall reign supreme.[318] But I am

keeping my readers from the sweetest idealization that love ever

wrought:--

"Unto this place whenas the elfin knight

Approached, him seemed that the merry sound

Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height,

And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground,

That through the woods their echo did rebound;

He nigher drew to wit what it mote be.

There he a troop of ladies dancing found

Full merrily and making gladful glee;

And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.

"He durst not enter into the open green

For dread of them unwares to be descried,

For breaking of their dance, if he were seen;

But in the covert of the wood did bide

Beholding all, yet of them unespied;

There he did see that pleased so much his sight

That even he himself his eyes envied,

A hundred naked maidens lily-white,

All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight.

"All they without were ranged in a ring,

And danced round; but in the midst of them

Three other ladies did both dance and sing,

The while the rest them round about did hem,

And like a garland did in compass stem.

And in the midst of these same three was placed

Another damsel, as a precious gem

Amidst a ring most richly well enchased,

That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced.

"Look how the crown which Ariadne wove

Upon her ivory forehead that same day,

That Theseus her unto his bridal bore,

(When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray,

With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay)

Being now placed in the firmament,

Through the bright heaven doth her beams display,

And is unto the stars an ornament,

Which round about her move in order excellent;

"Such was the beauty of this goodly band,

Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell,

But she that in the midst of them did stand,

Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel,

Crowned with a rosy garland that right well

Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew

About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell,

And fragrant odors they upon her threw;

But most of all those three did her with gifts endue.

"Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight,

Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt

Upon this hill and dance there, day and night;

Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant

And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt

Is borrowed of them; but that fair one

That in the midst was placed paravant,

Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone,

That made him pipe so merrily, as never none.

"She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass

Which piped there unto that merry rout;

That jolly shepherd that there piped was

Poor Colin Clout; (who knows not Colin Clout?)

He piped apace while they him danced about;

Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace,

Unto thy love that made thee low to lout;

Thy love is present there with thee in place,

Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace."[319]

Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles with simple

delight as this? It is a sky of Italian April full of sunshine and the

hidden ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more that it reminds us

of that passage in his friend Sidney's _Arcadia_, where the shepherd-boy

pipes "as if he would never be old." If we compare it with the mystical

scene in Dante,[320] of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost

like a bit of real life; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned in

our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud. The sound of

that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far away as Thessaly when Apollo

was keeping sheep there. Sorrow, the great idealizer, had had the

portrait of Beatrice on her easel for years, and every touch of her

pencil transfigured the woman more and more into the glorified saint. But

Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of flesh and blood, who would sit down

at meat with the poet on the very day when he had thus beatified her. As

Dante was drawn upward from heaven to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so

was Spenser lifted away from the actual by those of that ideal Beauty

whereof his mind had conceived the lineaments in its solitary musings

over Plato, but of whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses had

already premonished him. The intrusion of the real world upon this

supersensual mood of his wrought an instant disenchantment:--

"Much wondered Calidore at this strange sight

Whose like before his eye had never seen,

And, standing long astonished in sprite

And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween,

Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen,

Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show

With which his eyes might have deluded been,

Therefore resolving what it was to know,

Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go.

"But soon as he appeared to their view

They vanished all away out of his sight

And clean were gone, which way he never knew,

All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite

Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite."

Ben Jonson said that "he had consumed a whole night looking to his great

toe, about which he had seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians,

fight in his imagination"; and Coleridge has told us how his "eyes made

pictures when they were shut" This is not uncommon, but I fancy that

Spenser was more habitually possessed by his imagination than is usual

even with poets. His visions must have accompanied him "in glory and in

joy" along the common thoroughfares of life and seemed to him, it may be

suspected, more real than the men and women he met there. His "most fine

spirit of sense" would have tended to keep him in this exalted mood. I

must give an example of the sensuousness of which I have spoken :--

"And in the midst of all a fountain stood

Of richest substance that on earth might be,

So pure and shiny that the crystal flood

Through every channel running one might see;

Most goodly it with curious imagery

Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys,

Of which some seemed with lively jollity

To fly about, playing their wanton toys,

Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys.

"And over all, of purest gold was spread

A trail of ivy in his native hue;

For the rich metal was so colored

That he who did not well avised it view

Would surely deem it to be ivy true;

Low his lascivious arms adown did creep

That themselves dipping in the silver dew

Their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep,

Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep.

"Infinite streams continually did well

Out of this fountain, sweet and fair to see,

The which into an ample laver fell,

And shortly grew to so great quantity

That like a little lake it seemed to be

Whose depth exceeded not three cubits' height,

That through the waves one might the bottom see

All paved beneath with jasper shining bright,

That seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright.

"And all the margent round about was set

With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend

The sunny beams which on the billows bet,

And those which therein bathed mote offend.

As Guyou happened by the same to wend

Two naked Damsels he therein espied,

Which therein bathing seemed to contend

And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide

Their dainty parts from view of any which them eyed.

"Sometimes the one would lift the other quite

Above the waters, and then down again

Her plunge, as overmastered by might,

Where both awhile would covered remain,

And each the other from to rise restrain;

The whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil,

So through the crystal waves appeared plain:

Then suddenly both would themselves unhele,

And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal.

"As that fair star, the messenger of morn,

His dewy face out of the sea doth rear;

Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born

Of the ocean's fruitful froth, did first appear;

Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear

Crystalline humor dropped down apace.

Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him near,

And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace;

His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace.

"The wanton Maidens him espying, stood

Gazing awhile at his unwonted guise;

Then the one herself low ducked in the flood,

Abashed that her a stranger did avise;

But the other rather higher did arise,

And her two lily paps aloft displayed,

And all that might his melting heart entice

To her delights, she unto him bewrayed;

The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made.

"With that the other likewise up arose,

And her fair locks, which formerly were bound

Up in one knot, she low adown did loose,

Which flowing long and thick her clothed around,

And the ivory in golden mantle gowned:

So that fair spectacle from him was reft,

Yet that which reft it no less fair was found;

So hid in locks and waves from lookers' theft,

Naught but her lovely face she for his looking left.

"Withal she laughed, and she blushed withal,

That blushing to her laughter gave more grace,

And laughter to her blushing, as did fall.

* * * * *

"Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,

Of all that mote delight a dainty ear,

Such as at once might not on living ground,

Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere:

Right hard it was for wight which did it hear

To read what manner music that mote be;

For all that pleasing is to living ear

Was there consorted in one harmony;

Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree.

"The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade,

Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet;

The angelical soft trembling voices made

To the instruments divine respondence mete;

The silver-sounding instruments did meet

With the base murmur of the water's fall;

The water's fall with difference discreet,

Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."

Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, had said, "Why, a God's name,

may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?"

This is in the tone of Bellay, as is also a great deal of what is said in

the epistle prefixed to the "Shepherd's Calendar." He would have been

wiser had he followed more closely Bellay's advice about the introduction

of novel words: "Fear not, then, to innovate somewhat, particularly in a

long poem, with modesty, however, with analogy, and judgment of ear; and

trouble not thyself as to who may think it good or bad, hoping that

posterity will approve it,--she who gives faith to doubtful, light to

obscure, novelty to antique, usage to unaccustomed, and sweetness to

harsh and rude things." Spenser's innovations were by no means always

happy, as not always according with the genius of the language, and they

have therefore not prevailed. He forms English words out of French or

Italian ones, sometimes, I think, on a misapprehension of their true

meaning; nay, he sometimes makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion

of Romance on a Teutonic root. His theory, caught from Bellay, of

rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted oblivion, was excellent; not so

his practice of being archaic for the mere sake of escaping from the

common and familiar. A permissible archaism is a word or phrase that has

been supplanted by something less apt, but has not become unintelligible;

and Spenser's often needed a glossary, even in his own day.[321] But he

never endangers his finest passages by any experiments of this kind.

There his language is living, if ever any, and of one substance with the

splendor of his fancy. Like all masters of speech, he is fond of toying

with and teasing it a little; and it may readily be granted that he

sometimes "hunted the letter," as it was called, out of all cry. But even

where his alliteration is tempted to an excess, its prolonged echoes

caress the ear like the fading and gathering reverberations of an Alpine

horn, and one can find in his heart to forgive even such a debauch of

initial assonances as

"Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide,

More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky."

Generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, reminding us of the

arrangement of voices in an ancient catch, where one voice takes up the

phrase another has dropped, and thus seems to give the web of harmony a

firmer and more continuous texture.

Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, mirrors that differ

very widely in the truth and beauty of the images they reflect; but

Spenser's is a magic glass in which we see few shadows cast back from

actual life, but visionary shapes conjured up by the wizard's art from

some confusedly remembered past or some impossible future; it is like one

of those still pools of mediaeval legend which covers some sunken city of

the antique world; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem to have been

gathered. As we float upon it, we see that it pictures faithfully enough

the summer-clouds that drift over it, the trees that grow about its

margin, but in the midst of these shadowy echoes of actuality we catch

faint tones of bells that seem blown to us from beyond the horizon of

time, and looking down into the clear depths, catch glimpses of towers

and far-shining knights and peerless dames that waver and are gone. Is it

a world that ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a delusion?

Spenser's world, real to him, is real enough for us to take a holiday in,

and we may well be content with it when the earth we dwell on is so often

too real to allow of such vacations. It is the same kind of world that

Petrarca's Laura has walked in for five centuries with all ears listening

for the music of her footfall.

The land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but it is also the land of

Rest. To read him is like dreaming awake, without even the trouble of

doing it yourself, but letting it be done for you by the finest dreamer

that ever lived, who knows how to color his dreams like life and make

them move before you in music. They seem singing to you as the sirens to

Guyon, and we linger like him:--

"O, thou fair son of gentle Faery

That art in mighty arms most magnified

Above all knights that ever battle tried,

O, turn thy rudder hitherward awhile,

Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride,

This is the port of rest from troublous toil,

The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.[322]

"With that the rolling sea, resounding swift

In his big bass, them fitly answered,

And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft,

A solemn mean unto them measured,

The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled

His treble, a strange kind of harmony

Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled

That he the boatman bade row easily

And let him hear some part of their rare melody."

Despite Spenser's instinctive tendency to idealize, and his habit of

distilling out of the actual an ethereal essence in which very little of

the possible seems left, yet his mind, as is generally true of great

poets, was founded on a solid basis of good-sense. I do not know where to

look for a more cogent and at the same time picturesque confutation of

Socialism than in the Second Canto of the Fifth Book. If I apprehend

rightly his words and images, there is not only subtile but profound

thinking here. The French Revolution is prefigured in the well-meaning

but too theoretic giant, and Rousseau's fallacies exposed two centuries

in advance. Spenser was a conscious Englishman to his inmost fibre, and

did not lack the sound judgment in politics which belongs to his race. He

was the more English for living in Ireland, and there is something that

moves us deeply in the exile's passionate cry:--

"Dear Country! O how dearly dear

Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band

Be to thy foster-child that from thy hand

Did common breath and nouriture receive!

How brutish is it not to understand

How much to her we owe that all us gave,

That gave unto us all whatever good we have!"

His race shows itself also where he tells us that

"chiefly skill to ride seems a science

Proper to gentle blood,"

which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's saying that the finest

sight God looked down on was a fine man on a fine horse.

Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells us that the "Faery

Queen" "faded before" Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas. But

Wordsworth held a brief for himself in this case, and is no exception to

the proverb about men who are their own attorneys. His statement is

wholly unfounded. Both poems, no doubt, so far as popularity is

concerned, yielded to the graver interests of the Civil War. But there is

an appreciation much weightier than any that is implied in mere

popularity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as

well as the amount of influence it exerts. Spenser has _coached_ more

poets and more eminent ones than any other writer of English verse. I

need say nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples like Browne, the

two Fletchers, and More. Oowley tells us that he became "irrecoverably a

poet" by reading the "Faery Queen" when a boy. Dryden, whose case is

particularly in point because he confesses having been seduced by Du

Bartas, tells us that Spenser had been his master in English. He regrets,

indeed, comically enough, that Spenser could not have read the rules of

Bossu, but adds that "no man was ever born with a greater genius or more

knowledge to support it." Pope says, "There is something in Spenser that

pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read

the _Faery Queen_ when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight;

and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two

ago." Thomson wrote the most delightful of his poems in the measure of

Spenser; Collins, Gray, and Akenside show traces of him; and in our own

day his influence reappears in Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

Landor is, I believe, the only poet who ever found him tedious. Spenser's

mere manner has not had so many imitators as Milton's, but no other of

our poets has given an impulse, and in the right direction also, to so

many and so diverse minds; above all, no other has given to so many young

souls a consciousness of their wings and a delight in the use of them. He

is a standing protest against the tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the

seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the dull uses

to which it may be put.

Three of Spenser's own verses best characterize the feeling his poetry

gives us:--

"Among wide waves set like a little nest,"

"Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies,"

"The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil."

We are wont to apologize for the grossness of our favorite authors

sometimes by saying that their age was to blame and not they; and the

excuse is a good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks us while

we tolerate the thing. Spenser needs no such extenuations. No man can

read the "Faery Queen" and be anything but the better for it. Through

that rude age, when Maids of Honor drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet

could say a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely abstracted and

high, the Don Quixote of poets. Whoever can endure unmixed delight,

whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever

wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be

silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen." There is the land

of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter.

Footnotes:

[263] Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the

word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but which could

not without an impossible anachronism have been present to his mind.

He meant merely freedom from prison.

[264] In his "Defence of Poesy" he condemns the archaisms and

provincialisms of the "Shepherd's Calendar."

[265] "There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a

language of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chaucer's

time, and is spoken in ours; equally understood then and now; and of

which the Bible is the written and permanent standard, as it has

undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it." (Southey's Life

and Correspondence, III. 193, 194.)

[266] Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the

English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's

hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which

is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and

Beechneld, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the

deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on

his tiptoes." It was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted

way) prose written in the form of verse.

[267] Edmund Bolton in his _Hypercritica_ says, "The works of Sam

Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and

copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, and _fitter

perhaps for prose than measure_." I have italicized his second

thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves in the

mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, Vol. II.) Wordsworth, an

excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to the Countess of

Cumberland.

[268] Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the

Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the

strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. But it is not established

that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet

is not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round number forty,

which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one,

which might have been truer to the measure of his days.

[269] This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel

Harvey's letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the

many allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was his

own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption would take

it for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in all his grudges.

Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of

classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency

(to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose

gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction

remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity

explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of

emphasis with which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash

had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of

the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry.

[270] The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay,

makes it extremely probable that Rosalinde is the anagram of Rose

Daniel, sister of the poet and married to John Florio He leaves

little doubt, also, that the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto

unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See "Atlantic Monthly," Vol II 674

November, 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed me that he found the substance

of his essay among the papers of his father, the late Rev. N. J.

Halpine, of Dublin. The latter published in the series of the

Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract entitled "Oberon,"

which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its

ingenuity and research.

[271] In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some

memory of Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the

Scythians.

[272] Compare Shakespeare's LXVI. Sonnet.

[273] This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his

dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth."

But he had evidently retouched it. The verses quoted show a firmer

hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that

they were added after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson

epigrammatized Spenser's indictment into

"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,

Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,"

but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point.

[274] Paradiso, XI. 4-12 Spenser was familiar with the "Divina

Commedia," though I do not remember that his commentators have

pointed out his chief obligations to it.

[275] His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's

Spenser, I. lx.) The whole passage is very interesting as giving us

the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with

his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see him,

surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett

tells us that he was "perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very

well read in philosophy both moral and natural." He encouraged

Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help him in it.

Comparing the last verse of the above citation of the "Faery Queen"

with other passages in Spenser, I cannot help thinking that he wrote,

"do not love amiss."

[276]

"And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know,

That 'tis not in the power of kings to raise

A spirit for verse that is not born thereto;

Nor are they born in every prince's days"

_Daniel's Dedic Trag. of "Philotas."_

[277] Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have

created French literature. He may more truly be said to have

petrified it so far as his influence went. The French _renaissance_

in the preceding century was produced by causes similar in essentials

to those which brought about that in England not long after. The

_grand siecle_ grew by natural processes of development out of that

which had preceded it, and which, to the impartial foreigner at

least, has more flavor, and more French flavor too, than the

Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from its stool. The best modern

French poetry has been forced to temper its verses in the colder

natural springs of the ante-classic period.

[278] In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France" we

constantly used to signify the kings of those countries.

[279] I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and

Peregrine, indicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spenser

continued to regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile.

The two other children are added on the authority of a pedigree drawn

up by Sir W. Betham and cited in Mr. Hales's Life of Spenser prefixed

to the Globe edition.

[280] Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames.

But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of

course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding

poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his

tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public.

Giles Fletcher in his "Purple Island" (a poem which reminds us of the

"Faery Queen" by the supreme tediousness of its allegory, but in

nothing else) set the example in the best verse he ever wrote:--

"Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died."

Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as

authentic history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by

comparison. The whole story of his later days has a strong savor of

legend. He must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebellion, and

would probably have sent away his wife and children to Cork, if he

did not go thither himself. I am inclined to think that he did,

carrying his papers with him, and among them the two cantos of

Mutability, first published in 1611. These, it is most likely, were

the only ones he ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was

evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember that ten years were

given to the elaboration of the first three books, and that five more

elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no vain

regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the

carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland.

[281] Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. "That same framing

of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since

neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in

Italian did affect it." ("Defence of Poesy.") Ben Jonson, on the

other hand, said that Guarini "kept not decorum in making shepherds

speak as well as himself could." ("Conversations with Drummond.") I

think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia is a purely ideal

world, and should be treated accordingly. But whoever looks into the

glossary appended to the "Calendar" by E.K., will be satisfied that

Spenser's object was to find unhackneyed and poetical words rather

than such as should seem more on a level with the speakers. See also

the "Epistle Dedicatory." I cannot help thinking that E.K. was

Spenser himself, with occasional interjections of Harvey. Who else

could have written such English as many passages in this Epistle?

[282] It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has

come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of

Sidney's are pleasing.

[283] See "My Study Windows," 264 _seqq_.

[284] Of course _dillies_ and _lilies_ must be read with a slight

accentuation of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to

chime with _delice_. In the first line I have put _here_ instead of

_hether_, which (like other words where _th_ comes between two

vowels) was then very often a monosyllable, in order to throw the

accent back more strongly on _bring_, where it belongs. Spenser's

innovation lies in making his verses by ear instead of on the

finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than any of the single

verses that compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to

all others in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name.

Milton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from Spenser

than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and applied

it with more various mastery. I have little doubt that the tune of

the last stanza cited above was clinging in Shakespeare's ear when he

wrote those exquisite verses in "Midsummer Night's Dream" ("I know a

bank"), where our grave pentameter is in like manner surprised into a

lyrical movement. See also the pretty song in the eclogue for August.

Ben Jonson, too, evidently caught some cadences from Spenser for his

lyrics. I need hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example)

where Spenser thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call

the _riding-rhyme_ of Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He had

evidently learned to scan his master's verses better when he wrote

his "Mother Hubberd's Tale."

[285] Drummond, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes

Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's "Lycidas" there are reminiscences of

this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more

evident, but I think that Spenser's

"Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,"

suggested Milton's

"But not the praise,

Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears."

Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare

"But, ah, Mecaenas is yclad in clay,

And great Augustus long ago is dead,

And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead,"

with

"King Pandion, he is dead;

All thy friends are lapt in lead."

It is odd that Shakespeare, in his "lapt in lead," is more Spenserian

than Spenser himself, from whom he caught this "hunting of the

letter."

[286] "Ruins of Time." It is perhaps not considering too nicely to

remark how often this image of _wings_ recurred to Spenser's mind. A

certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings of his

style.

[287] Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the

"sea-shouldering whales," B. II 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight

in prolongations For example, he makes such words as _glorious_,

_gratious_, _joyeous_, _havior_, _chapelet_ dactyles, and that, not

at the end of verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in

the first half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as

it were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the

opposite of this. He also shuns a _hiatus_ which does not seem to

have been generally dipleasing to Spenser's ear, though perhaps in

the compound epithet _bees-alluring_ he intentionally avoids it by

the plural form.

[288]

"Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep

Is broken with some fearful dream's affright,

With froward will doth set himself to weep

Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might,

But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight,

Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing,

Now seeking darkness and now seeking light,

Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing."

He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of

Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the

Illiad. So also in the "Epithalamion" it grates our nerves to hear,

"Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful,

Pour out to all that wull."

Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's _aurum

potabile_ the language needed.

[289] I could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden,

though it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence of

his master Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser

himself. He could not help planting a flower or two among his

serviceable plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied,

but begins the next stanza with "And whatso _else_."

[290] Leigh Hunt's Indicator, XVII.

[291] Ben Jonson told Drummond "that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had

of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the

Puritans were understood." But this is certainly wrong. There were

very different shades of Puritanism, according to individual

temperament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a mellowness of which

Endicott and Standish were incapable The gradual change of Milton's

opinions was similar to that which I suppose in Spenser. The passage

in Mother Hubberd may have been aimed at the Protestant clergy of

Ireland (for he says much the same thing in his "View of the State of

Ireland"), but it is general in its terms.

[292] Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his

earliest known verses are translations from Bellay, a poet who was

charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad

school. We must not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the

_demi-monde_ will give us all the elements of the French character.

It has been both grave and profound; nay, it has even contrived to be

wise and lively at the same time, a combination so incomprehensible

by the Teutonic races that they have labelled it levity. It puts them

out as nature did Fuseli.

[293] Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little

eating and drinking there is in the "Faery Queen." The only time he

fairly sets a table is in the house of Malbecco, where it is

necessary to the conduct of the story. Yet taste is not wholly

forgotten:--

"In her left hand a cup of gold she held,

And with her right the riper fruit did reach,

Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld,

Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach

Of her fine fingers without foul impeach,

That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet."

B. II c. xii. 56.

Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment!

[294] Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his

friend Raleigh's saying, that "whosoever in writing modern history

shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his

teeth." The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in the

"Faery Queen." Spenser was copying Ariosto; but the Italian poet,

with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generalities. Spenser

goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. He did this, no

doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival; and this gives us a

measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary manner. It becomes

only the more marvellous that the fine flower of his genius could

have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and

sweetness which are its own peculiar properties.

[295] There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of "Mother

Hubberd's Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they should

disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more

successfully, says,--

"Be you the soldier, for you likest are

For manly semblance _and small skill in war."_

[296] Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giants suicidal offer of

"knife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's "swords, ropes, poison,"

in Faery Queen, B. I. c. ix. 1.

[297] Book II. c. 9.

[298] See Sidney's "Defence," and Puttenham's "Art of English Poesy,"

Book I. c. 8.

[299] We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who

was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.

[300] Of this he himself gives a striking hint, when speaking in his

own person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate

cry,

"Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled."

_Faery Queen_, B. I. c. x. 43.

[301] Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example?

"Arachne figured how Jove did abuse

Europa like a bull, and on his back

Her through the sea did bear: ...

She seemed still back unto the land to look,

And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear

The dashing of the waves, that up she took

Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near....

Before the bull she pictured winged Love,

With his young brother Sport, ...

And many nymphs about them flocking round,

And many Tritons which their horns did sound."

_Muiopotmos_, 281-296.

Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the "Commonwealth

and Government of Venice" (1599) with this beautiful verse,

"Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight."

Perhaps we should read "lost"?

[302] Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," Part I. Act V. 2.

[303]

Grayheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may

Take up its lodging here in any heart;

Unease nor Lack can enter at this door;

But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore.

_Orl. Fur._, e. vi. 78.

[304] B. I. c. iii. 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympathetic of

critics, has remarked the passionate change from the third to the

first person in the last two verses.

[305] B. II. c. viii. 3.

[306] Observations on Faery Queen, Vol. I pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes

also objects to Spenser's measure, that it is "closed always by a

fullstop, in the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were

a distinct paragraph." (Todd's Spenser, II. xli.) But he could hardly

have read the poem attentively, for there are numerous instances to

the contrary. Spenser was a consummate master of versification, and

not only did Marlowe and Shakespeare learn of him, but I have little

doubt that, but for the "Faery Queen," we should never have had the

varied majesty of Milton's blank verse.

[307] As where Dr. Warton himself says:--

"How nearly had my spirit past,

Till stopt by Metcalf's skilful hand,

To death's dark regions wide and waste

And the black river's mournful strand,

Or to," etc.,

to the end of the next stanza. That is, I had died but for Dr.

Metcalf 's boluses.

[308] Iliad, XVII. 55 _seqq_. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery

Queen, B. I. c. vii. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off with

an alexandrine has Homer's [Greek: pnoiai pantoion anemon] expanded!

Chaplin unfortunately has slurred this passage in his version, and

Pope _tittivated_ it more than usual in his. I have no other

translation at hand. Marlowe was so taken by this passage in

Spenser that he put it bodily into his _Tamburlaine_.

[309] Inferno, XXIV. 46-52.

"For sitting upon down,

Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame,

Withouten which whoso his life consumeth

Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth

As smoke in air or in the water foam."

_Longfellow._

It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that none

of the commentators on Spenser notice his most important obligations

to the great Tuscan.

[310] Faery Queen, B. II. c. iii. 40, 41.

[311] Ibid., B. I. c. v. 1.

[312] Ibid., B. II. c. viii. 1,2.

[313] B. III. c. xi. 28.

[314] B. I. c. i. 41.

[315] This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of

Ormond and in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to

the "Faery Queen". These sonnets are of a much stronger build than

the "Amoretti", and some of them (especially that to Sir John Norris)

recall the firm tread of Milton's, though differing in structure.

[316] Daphnaida, 407, 408.

[317] Faery Queen, B. I. c. x. 9.

[318] Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not _much_ more imaginary

than that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He who

is familiar with mediaeval epics will be extremely cautious in

drawing inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He

evidently _archaizes_ like the rest.

[319] Faery Queen, B. VI. c. x. 10-16.

[320] Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX.

[321] I find a goodly number of Yankeeisms in him, such as _idee_

(not as a rhyme); but the oddest is his twice spelling _dew deow_,

which is just as one would spell it who wished to phonetize its sound

in rural New England.

[322] This song recalls that in Dante's Purgatorio (XIX. 19--24), in

which the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements.

Browne's beautiful verses ("Turn, hither turn your winged pines")

were suggested by these of Spenser. It might almost seem as if

Spenser had here, in his usual way, expanded the sweet old verses:--

"Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely

When Knut king rew thereby;

'Roweth knightes near the loud,

That I may hear these monkes song.'"

WORDSWORTH.

A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the

family in the churchyard at Grasmere.[323] Perhaps it is hardly yet time

to take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. To do this

is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last shot

which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics which began

when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and which came to a pause

rather than end when they flung up their caps with the rest at his final

coronation. Something of the intensity of the _odium theologicum_ (if

indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the more bitter of the two)

entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they

had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclusiveness and

partiality to which sects are liable. The verses of the master had for

them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant of zeal and not amenable

to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criticism. Like the hymns of the

Huguenots and Covenanters, they were songs of battle no less than of

worship, and the combined ardors of conviction and conflict lent them a

fire that was not naturally their own. As we read them now, that virtue

of the moment is gone out of them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there

is gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. It is something like the

difference between the _Marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the

edge of battle, or by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read

coolly in the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Therese.

It was natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career to dwell most

fondly on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some

sort the measure of a man's right to judge of poetry at all. But now we

must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less

essential elements in forming a sound judgment as to whether the seer and

artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in by

himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the few

great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and safe

outlet to their passions through the imagination, while insensibly

helping them toward balance of character and serenity of judgment by

stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of

means to ends. In none of our poets has the constant propulsion of an

unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive, if I must not say

somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the original endowment

of nature effective, and in none accordingly does the biography throw so

much light on the works, nor enter so largely into their composition as

an element whether of power or of weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I

think never wished to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness and

experience. He early conceived himself to be, and through life was

confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he was, a "dedicated

spirit,"[324] a state of mind likely to further an intense but at the

same time one-sided development of the intellectual powers. The solitude

in which the greater part of his mature life was passed, while it

doubtless ministered to the passionate intensity of his musings upon man

and nature, was, it may be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by

depriving him of any standard of proportion outside himself by which to

test the comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and

more incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by

commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone

without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the

distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call

originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything odd,

but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most points of

its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own

powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and

perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and

adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The

poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a

knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng of men

and lifting their common aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly

revealed to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer ether and a

wider reach of view. We cannot, if we would, read the poetry of

Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other page we find ourselves

entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The world-old question of matter

and form of whether nectar _is_ of precisely the same flavor when served

to us from a Grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up

for decision anew. The Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy

preference of the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any

shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets

us long forget the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben

da lui_.

* * * * *

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of

April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John Wordsworth,

an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther, afterwards first Earl

of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the daughter of a mercer in

Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been settled immemorially at

Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather had emigrated to

Westmoreland. His mother, a woman, of piety and wisdom, died in March,

1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father, who never

entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death, survived her

but five years, dying in December, 1783, when William was not quite

fourteen years old.

The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly

with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to

have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who

practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and

not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by

which children are apt to be converted from natural logicians into

impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, who

afterwards became his wife.

In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of

York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small

market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile northwest

of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a people of simple

habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His earliest

intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native

district, and the associations with which his mind was stored during its

most impressible period were noble and pure. The boys were boarded among

the dames of the village, thus enjoying a freedom from scholastic

restraints, which could be nothing but beneficial in a place where the

temptations were only to sports that hardened the body, while they

fostered a love of nature in the spirit and habits of observation in the

mind. Wordsworth's ordinary amusements here were hunting and fishing,

rowing, skating, and long walks around the lake and among the hills, with

an occasional scamper on horseback.[325] His life as a school-boy was

favorable also to his poetic development, in being identified with that

of the people among whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where

there are small diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are

displayed with less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with

that primal human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold,

and to which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying

drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race

who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more picturesque

time. A common level of interests and social standing fostered

unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human sympathies.

Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its own resources,

and individuality of character. Where everybody knew everybody, and

everybody's father had known everybody's father, the interest of man in

man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report

When death knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an echo from

every fireside, and a wedding dropt its white flowers at every threshold.

There was not a grave in the churchyard but had its story, not a crag or

glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal hue of legend It was here

that Wordsworth learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and

sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could

obliterate the deep trace of that early training which enables him to

speak directly to the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed

early to the difficult art of being himself.

At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,

and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any

peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in his

fourteenth year to become a poet.[326] "It is recorded," says his

biographer vaguely, "that the poet's father set him very early to learn

portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early age he

could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser."[327]

The great event of Wordsworth's school days was the death of his father,

who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of

claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of which, though

their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some

unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October, 1787, he left

school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we are told, a

fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in mathematics. The

earliest books we hear of his reading were Don Quixote, Gil Blas,

Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tub; but at school he had also

become familiar with the works of some English poets, particularly

Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had learned many by heart. What is

more to the purpose, he had become, without knowing it, a lover of Nature

in all her moods, and the same mental necessities of a solitary life

which compel men to an interest in the transitory phenomena of scenery,

had made him also studious of the movements of his own mind, and the

mutual interaction and dependence of the external and internal universe.

Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming a

character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to itself,

clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly and freely,

unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has become a truism,

that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but perhaps this is

chiefly true of such as have made themselves distinguished by their

industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves of

only an average quality. It is rather to be noted how little is known of

the parentage of men of the first magnitude, how often they seem in some

sort foundlings, and how early an apparently adverse destiny begins the

culture of those who are to encounter and master great intellectual or

spiritual experiences.

Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is

characteristic. He himself tells us that he was "stiff, moody, and of

violent temper." His mother said of him that he was the only one of her

children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that he would

be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resentment at some fancied

injury, he resolved to kill himself but his heart failed him. I suspect

that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these momentary

suggestions of despairing helplessness. "On another occasion," he says,

"while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith, along with my eldest

brother Richard we were whipping tops together in the long drawing-room,

on which the carpet was only laid down on particular occasions. The walls

were hung round with family pictures, and I said to my brother, 'Dare you

strike your whip through that old lady's petticoat?' He replied, 'No, I

won't.' 'Then,' said I, 'here goes,' and I struck my lash through her

hooped petticoat, for which, no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was

properly punished. But, possibly from some want of judgment in

punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in defying

chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise." This last anecdote

is as happily typical as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured

the lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find

him afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of

the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punishment

of the Reviewers.

Of his college life the chief record is to be found in "The Prelude." He

did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any

incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in

biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life. He

speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,[328]

but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest published poems.

The greater part of his vacations was spent in his native Lake-country,

where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his rambles. She was

a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and

had much to do with the formation and tendency of the poet's mind. It was

she who called forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and taught an

originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with fancy

and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She

was his first public, and belonged to that class of prophetically

appreciative temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early

solitude of original minds with messages from the future. Through the

greater part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical

conscience to him.

Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon the

Continent (1790). In January, 1791, he took his degree of B.A., and left

Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and, after

declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was not of age

for ordination, went over to France in November, and remained during the

winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with the republican General

Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he ardently sympathized. In

the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and returned thence to Orleans, which

he finally quitted in October for Paris. He remained here as long as he

could with safety, and at the close of the year went back to England,

thus, perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after overtook his friends

the Brissotins.

As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not

less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period of

his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely and

familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime forms of

nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative faculty can

receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds and waters, but

he had known man only as an actor in fireside histories and tragedies,

for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage. In France he first felt the

authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was a spectator at one of those

dramas where the terrible footfall of the Eumenides is heard nearer and

nearer in the pauses of the action; and he saw man such as he can only be

when he is vibrated by the orgasm of a national emotion. He sympathized

with the hopes of France and of mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young

man and a poet; and if his faith in the gregarious advancement of men was

afterward shaken, he only held the more firmly by his belief in the

individual, and his reverence for the human as something quite apart from

the popular and above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he

had been recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was

inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which

always compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary

leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever was

convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in religion. He

reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who does not find in

them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur of his

destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and virtue, the

capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal liberty possible and

assures its permanence. He was to make men better by opening to them the

sources of an inalterable well-being; to make them free, in a sense

higher than political, by showing them that these sources are within

them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently emancipate narrow

natures and depraved minds. His politics were always those of a poet,

circling in the larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the

transitory oscillation of events.

The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was

complete soon after his return from France, and was perhaps due in part

to the influence of Burke.

"While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,

Against all systems built on abstract rights,

Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims

Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;

Declares the vital power of social ties

Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,

Exploding upstart theory, insists

Upon the allegiance to which men are born.

.... Could a youth, and one

In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved

Under the weight of classic eloquence,

Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?"[329]

He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up

whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of

tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly to

piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce artificially

that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main safeguard of

vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory through

intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain

radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809 Sir

George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, "Wordsworth may perhaps walk in;

if he do I caution you both against his terrific democratic notions"; and

it must have been many years later that Wordsworth himself told Crabb

Eobinson, "I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal

of the Chartist in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he

travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the week.[330]

He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer. "Wordsworth defended

earnestly the Church establishment. He even said he would shed his blood

for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised against him on account

of his having confessed that he knew not when he had been in a church in

his own country. 'All our ministers are so vile,' said he. The mischief

of allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the multitude he

thought more than outweighed all the evils of an establishment."[331] In

December, 1792, Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the following

year published "Descriptive Sketches" and the "Evening Walk." He did

this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that, although he had

gained no honors at the University, he _could_ do something. They met

with no great success, and he afterward corrected them so much as to

destroy all their interest as juvenile productions, without communicating

to them any of the merits of maturity. In commenting, sixty years

afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems,--

"And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines

Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,"--

he says: "This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect

distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was

important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of

the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by

the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them,

and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency."

It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here, misled

by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which leads men

first to desire that their lives should have been without break or seam,

and then to believe that they have been such. The more distant ranges of

perspective are apt to run together in retrospection. How far could

Wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of all ages

and countries,--he who to his dying day could not endure to read Goethe

and knew nothing of Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest

influence traceable in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and

it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already begun that

his first volume of "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) was put forth by

Johnson, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of

Burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his

expression. But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it

is that his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the

eighteenth century. "The first verses from which he remembered to have

received great pleasure were Miss Carter's 'Poem on Spring,' a poem in

the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed

much in,--for example, 'Ruth.'" This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's

lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always narrow.

His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his lighter

effusions, as he would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting

in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like

improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm us in our

Elizabethan drama and whose last warble died with Herrick; but Shelley,

Tennyson, and Browning have shown that the simple pathos of their music

was not irrecoverable, even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be

gone beyond recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly

if we compare such verses as

"Like an army defeated

The snow hath retreated

And now doth fare ill

On the top of the bare hill,"

with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the lines

(as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one

after another like blossoms upon turf.

"The Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches" show plainly the prevailing

influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the mechanism of

the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone and judgment in

selection which have made the "Traveller" and the "Deserted Village,"

perhaps, the most truly classical poems in the language. They bear here

and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Wordsworth, not

only in a certain blunt realism, but in the intensity and truth of

picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from which Wordsworth never wholly

freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a specimen. After

describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag,

his fancy goes back to the bereaved wife and son:--

"Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,

Passing his father's bones in future days,

Start at the reliques of that very thigh

On which so oft he prattled when a boy."

In these poems there is plenty of that "poetic diction" against which

Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.

"To wet the peak's impracticable sides

He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,

Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes

Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies."

Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as well

as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron made

fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of fleshliness

which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.[332]

"Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade

Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,

Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire

To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire;

Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go

Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;

Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,

And rising by the moon of passion swayed."

The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he changes

"despot courts" into "tyranny." One of the alterations is interesting. In

the "Evening Walk" he had originally written

"And bids her soldier come her wars to share

Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar."

An _erratum_ at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:--

"Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar."[333]

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful bird.

He had himself done so in the "Evening Walk," and corrects his epithets

to suit his later judgment, putting "gladsome" for "boding," and

replacing

"The tremulous sob of the complaining owl"

"The sportive outcry of the mocking owl."

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the revision

as to make the dates appended to them a misleading anachronism. But there

is one truly Wordsworthian passage which already gives us a glimpse of

that passion with which he was the first to irradiate descriptive poetry

and which sets him on a level with Turner.

"'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour

All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:

The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;

Dark is the region as with coming night;

But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,

Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;

Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine

The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;

Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,

At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;

Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun

The West that burns like one dilated sun,

Where in a mighty crucible expire

The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire."

Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the

worse, by substituting "glorious" (which was already implied in "glances"

and "fire-clad") for "wheeling." In later life he would have found it

hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline over a lake.

On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these poems is their

want of continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture of

unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the incongruous clothing of

prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of poesy.

During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political

tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the

hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had

without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in favor

of that ideal republic "which never was on laud or sea," but fortunately

he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his own nobler

calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which he found

freedom enough in England as it was.[334] Dr. Wordsworth admits that his

uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect that they

remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He had himself

suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great landholder, and he was

born and bred in a part of England where there is a greater social

equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of the Cumberland people

especially are such as recall very vividly to a New-Englander the

associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from New England to New

Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes no distinctions of

Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him. The debt due to his

father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth was one of those rare

idealists who esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to live

for, and not on, his neighbor. He at first proposed establishing a

periodical journal to be called "The Philanthropist," but luckily went no

further with it, for the receipts from an organ of opinion which

professed republicanism, and at the same time discountenanced the plans

of all existing or defunct republicans, would have been necessarily

scanty. There being no appearance of any demand, present or prospective,

for philanthropists, he tried to get employment as correspondent of a

newspaper. Here also it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too

great to be merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a

private opinion on all subjects to be able to express that average of

public opinion which constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to

the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the

wing with food from heaven; and while Wordsworth's relatives were getting

impatient at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he

had gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare

attorney that was lost in him,[335] the prescient muse guided the hand of

Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a legacy

of L900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help came to

Wordsworth at the turning point of his life and made it honest for him to

write poems that will never die, instead of theatrical critiques as

ephemeral as play bills, or leaders that led only to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at

Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years

were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some

extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political dreams,

and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is consistent with a

healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had contrived to see

something more in the "Descriptive Sketches" than the public had

discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The sympathy and

appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied him with that

external motive to activity which is the chief use of popularity, and

justified to him his opinion of his own powers It was now that the

tragedy of "The Borderers" was for the most part written, and that plan

of the "Lyrical Ballads" suggested which gave Wordsworth a clew to lead

him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled. It was

agreed between the two young friends, that Wordsworth was to be a

philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune uncommon to such conspiracies,

Nature had already consented to the arrangement. In July, 1797, the two

Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they might be

near Coleridge, who in the mean while had married and settled himself at

Nether-Stowey. In November "The Borderers" was finished, and Wordsworth

went up to London with his sister to offer it for the stage. The good

Genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected,

and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first

tragi-comedy so common to young authors.

The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as Jane Eyre. It shares with

many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written to

illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis is

continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama, such

predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables them for

being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he published

"The Borderers" in 1842, and says in a note that it was "at first written

... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage." But he was

mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he

was long in giving up the hope of getting it accepted by some theatrical

manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the

"Lyrical Ballads" for the press, and it was published toward the close of

1798. The book, which contained also "The Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge,

attracted little notice, and that in great part contemptuous. When Mr.

Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman,

that of the "Lyrical Ballads" was reckoned at _zero_, and it was at last

given up to the authors. A few persons were not wanting however, who

discovered the dawn-streaks of a new day in that light which the critical

fire-brigade thought to extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold

water.[336]

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself

famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made with a

little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would have

thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer, Wordsworth

might have said that he awoke and found himself in-famous, for the

publication of the "Lyrical Ballads" undoubtedly raised him to the

distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus has two

peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other where the

singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes from the

whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen

fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and after nightfall

to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust

which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the man of talent

insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers had been in

a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind him. He went quietly

over to Germany to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on the

growth of his own mind, at a time when there were only two men in the

world (himself and Coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least

one anywise differing from those mechanically uniform ones which are

stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper of society.

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after dinner

they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The respectable

old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the chimney-corner,

Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been rather

bewildered by the apparition of a living genius. The record is of value

now chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth's mind. Among

other things he said, "that it was the province of a great poet to raise

people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs,"--memorable words,

the more memorable that a literary life of sixty years was in keeping

with them.

It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's studies during his

winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It may be

guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the German

language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him

in his theories as to the language of poetry. The Spinosism with which he

has been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any German

influence, for it appears unmistakably in the "Lines composed at Tintern

Abbey" in July, 1798. It is more likely to have been derived from his

talks with Coleridge in 1797.[337] When Emerson visited him in 1833, he

spoke with loathing of "Wilhelm Meister," a part of which he had read in

Carlyle's translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it

should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly

concluded that the help of Germany in the development of his genius may

be reckoned as very small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance

both in form and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those

of Goethe. His poem of the "Thorn," though vastly more imaginative, may

have been suggested by Buerger's _Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain_. The

little grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement,

certainly recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.

After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister returned

to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in

Westmoreland. In 1800, the first edition of the "Lyrical Ballads" being

exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.

Longman paying L100 for the copyright of two editions. The book passed to

a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805.[338] Wordsworth sent a

copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending to

his attention the poems "Michael" and "The Brothers," as displaying the

strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of those

domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under the

influence of manufactories and poor houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil

acknowledgment, saying that his favorites among the poems were "Harry

Gill," "We are Seven," "The Mad Mother," and "The Idiot," but that he was

prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple subjects. Any

political significance in the poems he was apparently unable to see. To

this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an argumentative Preface, in

which he nailed to the door of the cathedral of English song the critical

theses which he was to maintain against all comers in his poetry and his

life. It was a new thing for an author to undertake to show the goodness

of his verses by the logic and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth

carried to the reform of poetry all that fervor and faith which had lost

their political object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and

greatness of his mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their

concomitant, that he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous

to the greater number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated

that the true judgment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false

judgment, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a

well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward

added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for

philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has

been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to set

a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were unsalable.

The strength of an argument for self reliance drawn from the example of a

great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who uses it; such

arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong

against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate the weak or

sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.

An advertisement prefixed to the "Lyrical Ballads," as originally

published in one volume, warned the reader that "they were written

chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation in

the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes of

poetic pleasure." In his preface to the second edition, in two volumes,

Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a little

(perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge),

and now says of the former volume that "it was published as an experiment

which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to

metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real language of men in a state

of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure

may be imparted which a poet may _rationally endeavor_ to impart."[339]

Here is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position, though Wordsworth

seems to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer

clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose into which his original

theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still

further change, and an assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind

and of his own poetic method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever

a thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that

appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words "rationally

endeavor to impart." In the preface of that year he says, "The

observations prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was

published many years ago under the title of 'Lyrical Ballads' have so

little of special application to the greater part of the present enlarged

and diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as

an introduction to it." It is a pity that he could not have become an

earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that "prose was words in

their best order and poetry the _best_ words in the best order." But

idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn

painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley and

to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too frequent

choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a manifest jar

between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great mistake lay. For

example, in "The Blind Highland Boy" he had originally the following

stanzas:--

"Strong is the current, but be mild,

Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!

If ye in anger fret or chafe,

A bee-hive would be ship as safe

As that in which he sails.

"But say, what was it? Thought of fear!

Well may ye tremble when ye hear!

--A household tub like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes,

This carried the blind boy."

In endeavoring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the

last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus

robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest. Any

extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality. But

Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which

suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her nostrils.

Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never quite satisfied

him that he was capable of making a mistake. He yielded silently to

friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave up, for example, the

ludicrous exactness of

"I've measured it from side to side,

'T is three feet long and two feet wide."

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he

could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which

renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and sometimes

so distasteful.[340] "Simon Lee," after his latest revision, still

contains verses like these:--

"And he is lean and he is sick;

His body, dwindled and awry,

Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;

His legs are thin and dry;

* * * * *

"Few months of life he has in store,

As he to you will tell,

For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell,"--

which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the

same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on

the ballad-style,--that their "_matter_ is contemptible." The

sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives

utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a

ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in unguarded

moments. We are reminded of a passage in the "Excursion":--

"List! I heard

From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat,

Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_."

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was

thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,

conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of finding

the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius taught him

that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that no adventurer

ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the

appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the purest hearts

gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he made a short

visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon after his

return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on the 4th of October

of the same year. Of the good fortune of this marriage no other proof is

needed than the purity and serenity of his poems, and its record is to be

sought nowhere else.

On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the

14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot

journey into Scotland Coleridge was their companion during a part of this

excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he

made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part of the "Lay of

the Last Minstrel," then in manuscript. The travellers returned to

Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this year that

Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George Beaumont began. Sir

George was an amateur painter of considerable merit, and his friendship

was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in making him familiar with the

laws of a sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies of

his criticism, the tendency of which was toward too great exclusiveness.

Sir George Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not forego his regard for the

poet, but contrived to hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an

annuity of L100, to defray the charges of a yearly journey.

In March, 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the shipwreck

of the Abergavenny East-Indiaman, of which he was captain. He was a man

of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to his sense of

duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible to save him.

Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such grief at his death

as only solitary natures like his are capable of, though mitigated by a

sense of the heroism which was the cause of it. The need of mental

activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may account for the

great productiveness of this and the following year. He now completed

"The Prelude," wrote "The Wagoner," and increased the number of his

smaller poems enough to fill two volumes, which were published in 1807.

This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his

shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable Odes to Duty and on

Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The reviewers had

another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they scoffed, particularly

Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth showed as incongruously as

a sacred vestment on the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an

abbey.[341]

There was a general combination to put him down, but on the other hand

there was a powerful party in his favor, consisting of William

Wordsworth. He not only continued in good heart himself, but, reversing

the order usual on such occasions, kept up the spirits of his

friends.[342]

Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George

Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere

having become too small for his increased family. On his return to the

Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived three

years. During this period he appears to have written very little poetry,

for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the smokiness of the

Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure of the

summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly in the open air.

It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon the Convention of

Cintra, which was published too late to attract much attention, though

Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that which one of Milton's

tracts might have had upon a contemporary.[343] It was at Allan Bank that

Coleridge dictated "The Friend," and Wordsworth contributed to it two

essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes[344] (Professor Wilson),

and the other on Epitaphs, republished in the Notes to "The Excursion."

Here also he wrote his "Description of the Scenery of the Lakes." Perhaps

a truer explanation of the comparative silence of Wordsworth's Muse

during these years is to be found in the intense interest which he took

in current events, whose variety, picturesqueness, and historical

significance were enough to absorb all the energies of his imagination.

In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage at Grasmere.

Here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate

experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and

Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.[345]

Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither, changed

his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of this year he

was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland, an

office whose receipts rendered him independent, and whose business he was

able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure for nobler duties.

De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an instance of the remarkable

good luck which waited upon Wordsworth through his whole life. In our

view it is only another illustration of that scripture which describes

the righteous as never forsaken. Good luck is the willing handmaid of

upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.

Wordsworth owed his nomination to the friendly exertions of the Earl of

Lonsdale, who desired to atone as far as might be for the injustice of

the first Earl, and who respected the honesty of the man more than he

appreciated the originality of the poet.[346] The Collectorship at

Whitehaven (a more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to

Wordsworth, and declined. He had enough for independence, and wished

nothing more. Still later, on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for

Cumberland, a part of that district was annexed to Westmoreland, and

Wordsworth's income was raised to something more than L1,000 a year.

In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in company

with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year "the Excursion" was

published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied the

demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies was

published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 "The White Doe of

Rylstone" appeared, and in 1816 "A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in which

Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be observed by the

biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable suggestions, but

allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to which he was

constitutionally indifferent.[347] Nearly the same date may be ascribed

to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the Aeneid, a

specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge "Philological Museum"

(1832). In 1819 "Peter Bell," written twenty years before, was published,

and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers, found a

more rapid sale than any of his previous volumes. "The Wagoner," printed

in the same year, was less successful. His next publication was the

volume of Sonnets on the river Duddon, with some miscellaneous poems,

1820. A tour on the Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another

collection, published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the

volume of "Ecclesiastical Sketches." His subsequent publications were

"Yarrow Revisited," 1835, and the tragedy of "The Borderers," 1842.

During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily, and

his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of friends which

his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them deserved. Public

honors followed private appreciation. In 1838 the University of Dublin

conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839 Oxford did the same, and

the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the University

was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor,

and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of putting him upon the civil list for

a pension of L300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express

understanding that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties

except such as might be self-imposed. His only official production was an

Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University

of Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should

seem, that he might receive that honor which he had truly conquered for

himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a century,

unparalleled for the scorn with which its labors were received, and the

victorious acknowledgment which at last crowned them. Surviving nearly

all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had, a foretaste of

immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous renown, for the hardy

slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its durability. He died on

the 23d of April, 1850, the anniversary of the death of Shakespeare.

We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life uneventful

even for a man of letters, a life like that of an oak, of quiet self

development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side whence the

prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in proportion to the

rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The life and growth of his

mind, and the influences which shaped it, are to be looked for, even more

than is the case with most poets, in his works, for he deliberately

recorded them there.

Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was somewhat above

the middle height, but, according to De Quincey, of indifferent figure,

the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature was the eye,

which was gray and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says: "I never

beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They were like

fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of

regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes."

Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and Haydon that he had

none of form. The best likeness of him, in De Quincey's judgment, is the

portrait of Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes on Paradise Lost. He

was active in his habits, composing in the open air, and generally

dictating his poems. His daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his

manners were dignified and kindly; and in his letters and recorded

conversations it is remarkable how little that was personal entered into

his judgment of contemporaries.

The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to be

fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of judgment

uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the doors.

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when the

artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority of long

succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost inevitable that

Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgment was a rebel against the

existing order, should become a partisan. Unfortunately, he became not

only the partisan of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its

representative. Right in general principle, he thus necessarily became

wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that greatness only achieves its

ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the

following his instincts too much to a system, mistook his own resentments

for the promptings of his natural genius, and, compelling principle to

the measure of his own temperament or even of the controversial exigency

of the moment, fell sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself

artificial. If a poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his

being merely peculiar.

Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew older,

from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[348] but those

theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the growth of his

fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles through which his

earlier poems were to be studied, and the public insisted on looking

through them at his mature works, and were consequently unable to see

fairly what required a different focus. He forced his readers to come to

his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and thus gave

them beforehand the impression of something like mechanical artifice, and

deprived them of the contented repose of implicit faith. To the child a

watch seems to be a living creature; but Wordsworth would not let his

readers be children, and did injustice to himself by giving them an

uneasy doubt whether creations which really throbbed with the very

heart's-blood of genius, and were alive with nature's life of life, were

not contrivances of wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told

to expect has lost the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in

Cornelius Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable

emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow

self-satisfaction in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the

thaumaturgy; but to a tree that has grown as God willed we come without a

theory and with no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and

thankfully; or the Imagination recreates for us its past summers and

winters, the birds that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have

clustered in its shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs

that have drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter.

The Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and

Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company

by laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at

the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable

emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be caught.

But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had

another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and

permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not only

to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet, and to

this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question whether the

epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the history of a

single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the

requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubted

whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into

chapter and section. It is rather something which is more energetic in a

word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts unclose themselves

instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while they would stand firm

against the reading of the whole body of philosophy. In point of fact,

the one element of greatness which "The Excursion" possesses indisputably

is heaviness. It is only the episodes that are universally read, and the

effect of these is diluted by the connecting and accompanying lectures on

metaphysics. Wordsworth had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto

Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to throw in everything,

debasing the metal, lest it should run short. Separated from the rest,

the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and without example in the

language.

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic of

the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he made

for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of leisure and

the employment of minds without definite object. It may be doubted,

indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing but his

own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively as an

exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the

imagination.[349] He says of himself, speaking of his youth:--

"In fine,

I was a better judge of thoughts than words,

Misled in estimating words, not only

By common inexperience of youth,

But by the trade in classic niceties,

The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase

From languages that want the living voice

To carry meaning to the natural heart;

To tell us what is passion, what is truth,

What reason, what simplicity and sense."[350]

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of

him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its

weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he did not

earlier give himself to "the trade of classic niceties." It was precisely

this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe dignity and

reserved force which alone among later poets recall the tune of Milton,

and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's blank-verse

(though the passion be profounder) is always essentially that of Cowper.

They were alike also in their love of outward nature and of simple

things. The main difference between them is one of scenery rather than of

sentiment, between the life-long familiar of the mountains and the

dweller on the plain.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the

poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and

commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the great

golden veins of his imagination are imbedded.[351] He wrote too much to

write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but a

compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He set

tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make

Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout "The Prelude"

and "The Excursion" he seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with

the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent

spell-word which would make the particles cohere. There is an arenaceous

quality in the style which makes progress wearisome. Yet with what

splendors as of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded! what golden rounds of

verse do we not see stretching heavenward with angels ascending and

descending! what haunting harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like

the undying barytone of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through

sands and desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that

syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest

consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in

any other poet!

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow, and

what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humor, no

dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless

quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a

letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most

successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of

natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression of

the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own mind, and

of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn took from his

mood or temperament. His finest passages are always monologues. He had a

fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind

us of local histories in the undue relative importance given to trivial

matters. He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of

particularization (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what

gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of

Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or sentiment. It was

this that made him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook forced

upon him the limits which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity)

was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary

and meditative temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of

what was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but

fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault

of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels in

monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. In

"The Excursion" we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of

extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and elemental

movement of Milton's, which, like the tradewind, gathered to itself

thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some deep

with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their

battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over

the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the

unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton

mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet's ardors or

the slim delicacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in great

crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the

intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his

lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate

instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar

stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of

Admetus,--that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible

universe,--the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge

and gifted with her dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes

of human joy or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful

tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it no doubt confirmed his

self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical incongruity

into which he was often led by his earlier theory concerning the language

of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to

have been indicative of a certain dulness of perception in other

directions.[352] We cannot help feeling that the material of his nature

was essentially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the power

of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspiration failed or was

factitious, remained obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many

poets would seem to approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind

could be raised only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And

in proportion to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly

aglow is the very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the

productions of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such,

delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that

pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre

of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of

fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immutable

grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very

ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood

which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of

prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavoring it, falls more below

himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in imaginative

quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having the feeling

sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of these passages, rather

than that these are the natural jets and elations of a mind energized by

the rapidity of its own motion. In other words, the happy couplet or

gracious image seems not to spring from the inspiration of the poem

conceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind

of the poet in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has

patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in

form and of a material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless

quality of the gem it encumbers.[353] During the most happily productive

period of his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the

mechanical portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to

have been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted

on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected

his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he certainly

had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was always a

little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best poem in

these respects is the "Laodamia," and it is not uninstructive to learn

from his own lips that "it cost him more trouble than almost anything of

equal length he had ever written." His longer poems (miscalled epical)

have no more intimate bond of union than their more or less immediate

relation to his own personality. Of character other than his own he had

but a faint conception, and all the personages of "The Excursion" that

are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his

self-concentrated nature was incapable of projecting itself into the

consciousness of other men and seeing the springs of action at their

source in the recesses of individual character. The best parts of these

longer poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were

always clumsy at the _callida junctura_. The stream of narration is

sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque

placido aequore sylvas_); we are forced to do our own rowing, and only

when the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal

consciousness do we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but

impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is

precious in Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some

greater poets than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be

borne in mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to

call it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows

those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian with

an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we feel in

the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half conscious of

this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an enthusiasm of

wondering admiration that would have been profoundly comic[354] but for

its simple sincerity and for the fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire,

of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William Wordsworth whom he so

heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize two voices in him, as

Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch. If the

prophet cease from dictating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle,

employs his pen in jotting down some anecdotes of his master, how he one

day went out and saw an old woman, and the next day did _not_, and so

came home and dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon, and how

another day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations have been carelessly

taken up into the text, have been religiously held by the pious to be

orthodox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have been made to yield

deeply oracular meanings. Presently the real prophet takes up the word

again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and

invisible power. Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity,

the absolute abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay,

that belong to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more

his own than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This

gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and

accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the

period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that

deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[355] He did not grow as those

poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One of the most

delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet

Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand,

does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of Wordsworth's later

poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self.

They would never, as Sir John Harrington says of poetry, "keep a child

from play and an old man from the chimney-corner."[356]

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who was

arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by saying,

"Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court of the

United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth has

this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points till the reader

feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat underrated. He is

over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly

absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not when to stop. If he

feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it

were, by asking himself a series of questions sometimes not needing, and

often incapable of answer. There are three stanzas of such near the close

of the First Part of "Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of

the dead body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending with one

which reaches the height of comicality:--

"Is it a fiend that to a stake

Of fire his desperate self is tethering?

Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,

In solitary ward or cell,

Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?"

The same want of humor which made him insensible to incongruity may

perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion

which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther on

in "Peter Bell" we find:--

"_Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark

That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,

And in a moment to the verge

Is lifted of a foaming surge--

Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!"

And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the

sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat

too lofty for the service to which they are put.[357]

The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood to meditative

for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and reflections too much

to sacrifice the least of them to the interests of his story. Moreover,

it is never action that interests him, but the subtle motives that lead

to or hinder it. "The Wagoner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with

"Tam O'Shanter" infinitely to its own disadvantage. "Peter Bell," full

though it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering and

disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to confess that he did not like it. "The

White Doe," the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the

epithet, is also only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant.

What charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is the

"Happy tone

Of meditation slipping in between

The beauty coming and the beauty gone,"

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of

our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable

as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us without our

being able to say that they are much in themselves. They rather narcotize

than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he

admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we

find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours

of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of

faltering purpose and personal independence of character. His system of a

Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean Jaques and continued by Cowper,

certainly breaks down as a whole. The Solitary of "The Excursion," who

has not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal

mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the lectures

of Pedler and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this would be so,

and accordingly never saw his way clear to finishing the poem. But the

treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as

it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure,

indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in

constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a

fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities.

The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become

fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight in

its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this world,

rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another.

If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, they

found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have

seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a

grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the Mighty Mother

whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the tussle for

existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those

qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may

not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to justify

his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable

lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out unexpected

vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a

radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. If it

be the most delightful function of the poet to set our lives to music,

yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do

his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and enlighten; if he

define and encourage our vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece

together our fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger

life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of

our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great poets

there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes

like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it

floats, but which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies.

Wordsworth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than

one or two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but

he was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is

always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that

stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark

passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that

gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared with

Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which

results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost

provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather brightness

by revolving on their own axis. But through this very limitation of range

he gains perhaps in intensity and the impressiveness which results from

eagerness of personal conviction. If we read Wordsworth through, as I

have just done, we find ourselves changing our mind about him at every

other page, so uneven is he. If we read our favorite poems or passages

only, he will seem uniformly great. And even as regards "The Excursion"

we should remember how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. For

my part I know of but one,--the Odyssey.

None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of the

word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions which

inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that shore

between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted in

the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible

only at exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no other

poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases become household words as of

Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to

Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given

us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of

other-worldliness of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the

hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has

won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes

only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his

companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches

the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual

purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having

emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to

our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid

"Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh

To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie

A little nearer Spenser";

for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is

now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets.

Footnotes:

[323] "I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at

Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Crabb

Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine pathos, thirteen

years after his master's death. Wordsworth was always considerate and

kind with his servants, Robinson tells us.

[324] In the Prelude he attributes this consecreation to a sunrise

seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some

village festival where he had danced all night--

"My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly,

A dedicated spirit."--B. IV.

[325] Prelude, Book II.

[326]

"I to the muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong indentures."

_Idiot Boy_ (1798).

[327] I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the

influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith

was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Evening

Walk. I speak of them as originally printed.

[328] Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge, his

teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It

may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic

study of English poetry was due to the copy of Andersen's British

Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on setting out for

his last voyage in 1805.

[329] Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a

still earlier date. "Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat

under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." (Southey to

Miss Barker, May, 1806.)

[330] This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss

Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for

publication as early as 1805.

[331] Crabb Robinson, I. 250, Am. Ed.

[332] Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to

prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr.

Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian

Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group of

Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The dev-ils!"

[333] The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The

original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately

Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor C. E.

Norton.

[334] Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so

far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and

Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them

shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with

Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer.

There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but

apparently written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that

Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy.

"Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_ that he

has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden

estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired."

Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's insulation of character and

habitual want of sympathy with anything but the moods of his own mind

that rendered him incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He

appears to have regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly

loved as much as it was possible for him to love anything but his own

poems) as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a

mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.

[335] Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, "that, after

he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what

his future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough

for the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined

for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience

and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from

the Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for

the higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history

with great interest, and the strategy of war, and he always fancied

that he had talents for command, and he at one time thought of a

military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if

he were ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him

from the yellow fever, and he gave that up." (Memoirs, II. 466.) It

is curious to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness

between him and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each

other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in

a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character

somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety

in Woidsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point

of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make

Wellington a great commander.

[336] Cottle says, "The sale was so slow and the severity of most of

the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be

certain." But the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then

the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, especially to

Wordsworth's share in the volume. The Monthly says, "So much genius

and originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to

see another from the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in

the whole range of English, poetry we scarcely recollect anything

superior to a passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey," sums up

thus: "Yet every piece discovers genius; and ill as the author has

frequently employed his talents, they certainly rank him with the

best of living poets." Such treatment cannot surely be called

discouraging.

[337] A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia

Literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion

of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant

references to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show

how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in accordance with

the usage of the last generation in New England.

[338] Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a

hearing in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, a

Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient _list of

subscribers_ to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The

second English edition, however, having been published before he had

wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially followed in the

first American, which was published in 1802.

[339] Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is now

printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815.

[340] "On my alluding to the line,

"'Three feet long and two feet wide,'

"and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said,

'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His

ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to

appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity

to judge of poetry at all.

[341] Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these

volumes not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as

saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack

on Hours of Idleness. "The young man will do something if he goes

on," he said.

[342] The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle

with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only

matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's "History of the Protectorate House

of Cromwell." It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into

the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are

among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the

clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of

Wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be

read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the

principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a

letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself

upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with

what I trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add

sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young

and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and

therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is

their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after

we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves....

To conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile

criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings

and; after what I have said, I am sure yours will be the same I doubt

not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my

writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the

benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and

that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser,

better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary

relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers;

it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith

from his own inexhaustible cistern.

[343] "Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general

effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend

De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure

by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July,

1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.

[344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

[345] Wordsworth's children were,--

John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman.

Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847.

Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.

Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812.

William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as

Stamp-Distributor.

[346] Good luck (in the sense of _Chance_) seems properly to be the

occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows

how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's

Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound

common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to

fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man

could not have been found in Westmoreland.

[347]

"I am not one who much or oft delight

In personal talk."

[348] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose

influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had

protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of

the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode

which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement

of some later copyist of Pope:--

"While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."

And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a

thermometer or barometer called

"The well-wrought scale

Whose sentient tube instructs to time

A purpose to a fickle clime."

Still worse in the "Eclipse of the Sun," 1821:--

"High on her speculative tower

Stood Science, waiting for the hour

When Sol was destined to endure

That darkening."

So in "The Excursion,"

"The cold March wind raised in her tender throat

Viewless obstructions."

[349] According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be

"not worth five shillings."

[350] Prelude, Book VI.

[351] This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss

Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's

conversation: "Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with

which he dwells on trifles; at other times he flows on in the utmost

grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." Robinson tells

us that he read "Resolution" and "Independence" to a lady who was

affected by it even to tears, and then said, "I have not heard

anything for years that so much delighted me; but, _after all, it is

not poetry_."

[352] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than

when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of

Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness

of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering

compression is masterly. Compare

"Curst be the heart that thought the thought,

And curst the hand that fired the shot,

When in my arms burd Helen dropt,

That died to succor me!

O, think ye not my heart was sair

When my love dropt down and spake na mair?"

compare this with,--

"Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts

That through his brain are travelling,

And, starting up, to Bruce's heart

He launched a deadly javelin:

Fair Ellen saw it when it came,

And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,

Did with her body cover

The Youth, her chosen lover.

* * * * *

"And Bruce (_as soon, as he had slain

The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,

And fought with rage incessant

Against the Moorish Crescent."

These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a stanza

when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also

departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by

substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had

he written,--

"And Gordon never gave a hint,

But, having somewhat picked his flint,

Let fly the fatal bullet

That killed that lovely pullet,"

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He

shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in

the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: "The poem of my friend has

indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no

distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a

human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural

impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something

supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually

acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection,

do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat

laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, and

drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would

think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems

lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.

[353]

"A hundred times when, roving high and low,

I have been harassed with the toil of verse,

Much pains and little progress, and at once

Some lovely Image in the song rose up,

Full formed, like Venus rising from the sea."

_Prelude_, Book IV.

[354] Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and

Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, "These

quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed

me; it seemed almost as if he were _awed by the greatness of his own

power, the gifts with which he had been endowed_." (The italics are

mine.)

[355] His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate

influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is

evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who

have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a

hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream." (Letters,

Conversations, and Recollections of S.T.C., Vol. I. pp. 5-6.)

"Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound

of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:

"'The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

"This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats

thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with

the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.)

Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, "My ear is susceptible

to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help

thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.

[356] In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

[357] In "Resolution" and "Independence".

MILTON.[358]

If the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk which Mr.

Masson is giving to that of Milton, their authors should send a phial of

_elixir vitae_ with the first volume, that a purchaser might have some

valid assurance of surviving to see the last. Mr. Masson has already

occupied thirteen hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to

his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches between

the dates of the first and second instalments of his published labors. As

Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, with the "Ode on

the Nativity," and as by far the more important part of it lies between

the year at which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six,

we might seem to have the terms given us by which to make a rough

reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land. But when we recollect

the baffling character of the winds and currents we have already

encountered, and the eddies that may at any time slip us back to the

reformation in Scotland or the settlement of New England; when we

consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped the _grand siecle_ of

French literature, with its irresistible temptations to digression and

homily for a man of Mr Masson's temperament, we may be pardoned if a sigh

of doubt and discouragement escape us. We envy the secular leisures of

Methusaleh, and are thankful that _his_ biography at least (if written in

the same longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject

would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spacious predilections!

Even if he himself can count on patriarchal prorogations of existence,

let him hang a print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to remind

him of the ambushes which Fate lays for the toughest of us. For myself, I

have not dared to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his work.

Even with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I feel by no

means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in her husband's house; for

it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, with the diabolical art of a

practised serial writer, leaves us while he goes into an exhaustive

account of the Westminster Assembly and the political and religious

notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One could not help thinking, after

having got Milton fairly through college, that he was never more mistaken

in his life than when he wrote,

"How _soon_ hath Time, that subtle thief of youth,

Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!"

Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's wheels?

It is plain from the Preface to the second volume that Mr. Masson himself

has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton

ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of his own biography. He

tells us that, "whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on

the subject from the outside, no one can study the life of Milton as it

ought to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and

intimately the contemporary history of England, and even incidentally of

Scotland and Ireland too.... Thus on the very compulsion, or at least the

suasion, of the biography, a history grew on my hands. It was not in

human nature to confine the historical inquiries, once they were in

progress, within the precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the

biography, even had it been possible to determine these limits

beforehand; and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me,

was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always with a

sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous in itself." If a

"hasty person" be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have his

button held by a biographer ere he begin his next sentence, I take to

myself the sting of Mr. Masson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a

pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem

its promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. I could scarce await the

"Autocrat" himself so long. The heroic age of literature is past, and

even a duodecimo may often prove too heavy [Greek: oion nun brotoi] for

the descendants of men to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does Mr.

Masson mean by "continuous"? To me it seems rather as if his somewhat

rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted now and then

by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in

and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the

mean while. The reader, immersed in Scottish politics or the schemes of

Archbishop Laud, is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on

being reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of the

drama. _Pars minima est ipsa puella sui_.

If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of his age as

well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in order to understand

the motives and conduct of the man we must first make ourselves intimate

with the time in which he lived. We have therefore no fault to find with

the thoroughness of Mr. Masson's "historical inquiries." The more

thorough the better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory

performance of his task. But it is only such contemporary events,

opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of the man

we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to familiarize

ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of explaining them as of

understanding him. The biographer, especially of a literary man, need

only mark the main currents of tendency, without being officious to trace

out to its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its tiny

pitcherful with the rest. Much less should he attempt an analysis of the

stream and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever

effectual singly and not in combination. Human motives cannot be thus

chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any true knowledge of

character by such minute subdivision of its ingredients. Nothing is so

essential to a biographer as an eye that can distinguish at a glance

between real events that are the levers of thought and action, and what

Donne calls "unconcerning things, matters of fact,"--between substantial

personages, whose contact or even neighborhood is influential, and the

supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and afterwards the

interstices of a biographical dictionary.

"Time hath a wallet at his back

Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion."

Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and merciful deposit,

and not renew for us the bores of a former generation as if we had not

enough of our own. But if he cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness,

we may fairly complain when he insists on taking us along with him in the

processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted results

in their bearing on the life and character of his subject, whether for

help or hindrance. We are blinded with the dust of old papers ransacked

by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no relation whatever to his

hero. He had been wise if he had kept constantly in view what Milton

himself says of those who gathered up personal traditions concerning the

Apostles: "With less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John

had written than was listened to one that could say, 'Here he taught,

here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited; and O,

happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he

rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.'.... Thus while all

their thoughts were poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after

such men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this means they

lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of saving

knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so

_poured out his mind upon circumstances_, that his work reminds us of

Allston's picture of Elijah in the Wilderness, where a good deal of

research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a

conundrum in the landscape where the very ravens could scarce have found

him out, except by divine commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a

speck on the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through which he

may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. I will cite a

single example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is reduced in

order to hitch Milton on to his own biography. He devotes the first

chapter of his Second Book to the meeting of the Long Parliament.

"Already," he tells us, "in the earlier part of the day, the Commons had

gone through the ceremony of hearing the writ for the Parliament read,

and the names of the members that had been returned called over by Thomas

Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery. His deputy, _Agar,

Milton's brother-in-law, may have been in attendance on such an

occasion_. During the preceding month or two, _at all events_, Agar and

his subordinates in the Crown Office had been unusually busy with the

issue of the writs and with the other work connected with the opening of

Parliament." (Vol. II. p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute "at all events" is

very amusing. Meanwhile

"The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."

Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, if to him we owe the

modern fashion of writing history picturesquely. At least his method

leads to most unhappy results when essayed by men to whom nature has

denied a sense of what the picturesque really is. The historical

picturesque does not consist, in truth of costume and similar

accessaries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression of the

figures, caught when they are unconscious that the artist is sketching

them. The moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man of

genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an inferior

artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be squeezed out of

color-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets,

and flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre, as if the

light had been scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that

vanished with the foot-lights. It is the power of catching the actors in

great events at unawares that makes the glimpses given us by

contemporaries so vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the great

masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art when he

tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw

"_du premier coup d'oeil vivement porte_, tout ce qui leur echappoit et

tout ce qui les accableroit." It is the gift of producing this reality

that almost makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a

keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which we had no right,--it is this

only that can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has

this power of contemporizing himself with bygone times, he cheats us to

"Play with our fancies and believe we see";

but we find the _tableaux vivants_ of the apprentices who "deal in his

command without his power," and who compel us to work very hard indeed

with our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker arms to shoot

with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent literature with more

than enough fruitless twanging.

Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably awkward when he

strives to make up for the want of St. Simon's _premier coup d'oeil_ by

impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For

example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton from the University to a

"suburb sink" of London? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to

himself, "A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk

all the way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry where I live,

and so have an exact notion of my whereabouts? There has been plague in

the neighborhood certainly; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep tidy

for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was

courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather "choose

a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred"? Mr. Masson forthwith breaks

forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this

wise: "What have we here? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to

construe it, than a marriage advertisement! Ho, all ye virgins of England

(widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such as seldom occurs: a

bachelor, unattached; age, thirty-three years and three or four months;

height [Milton, by the way, would have said _highth_] middle or a little

less; personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion and

light auburn hair; circumstances independent; tastes intellectual and

decidedly musical; principles Root-and-Branch! Was there already any

young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in her way,

it would have raised a conscious flutter? If so, did she live near

Oxford?" If there _is_ anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to

write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being

facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad

damp foot of a hippopotamus.

I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history, when it means,

as it too often does, that dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity.

Too well do I recall the sorrows of my youth, when I was shipped in

search of knowledge on the long Johnsonian swell of the last century,

favorable to anything but the calm digestion of historic truth. I had

even then an uneasy suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that

thoughts were never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were

strong enough to go alone. But surely there should be such a thing as

good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian himself,

that should not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity of his

subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto invested the figure of Milton,

and our image of him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from the

vulgarities of life. No diaries, no private letters, remain to give the

idle curiosity of after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed

seclusion of his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles were written

in the language of Cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was so great

that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he always does

it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose self-respect even in

youth was so profound that it resembles the reverence paid by other men

to a far-off and idealized character,--that he should be treated in this

offhand familiar fashion by his biographer seems to us a kind of

desecration, a violation of good manners no less than of the laws of

biographic art. Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the

back with impunity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such

presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least,

be kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer!

But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idiomatic, can do

something worse than what has been hitherto quoted. He can be even

vulgar. Discussing the motives of Milton's first marriage, he says, "Did

he come seeking his L500, and did Mrs. Powell _heave a daughter at him?_"

We have heard of a woman throwing herself at a man's head, and the image

is a somewhat violent one; but what is this to Mr. Masson's improvement

on it? It has been sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image may be

tested by trying whether a picture could be made of it or not. Mr. Masson

has certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical school

of British art. A little further on, speaking of Mary Powell, he says,

"We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her appearance; but on

the usual rule of the elective affinities of opposites, Milton being

fair, _we will vote her_ to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of

the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the

fact that Mr. Masson himself had left us in doubt whether the match

was one of convenience or inclination. I know not how it may be

with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to resent this

hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "_we_ will vote." In some

cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of style may possibly be

accounted for as attempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of

its ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive

element of the compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious.

Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie

not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and vivid, I shall

leave the reader to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript copy of

Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which

the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had

originally been, "_On his Door when the City expected an Assault_."

Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted "_When the Assault

was intended to the City_." Mr. Masson fancies "a mood of jest or

semi-jest in the whole affair"; but we think rather that Milton's quiet

assumption of equality with two such famous poets was as seriously

characteristic as Dante's ranking himself _sesto tra cotanto senno_. Mr.

Masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince

Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of his

"Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently.

'Oho!' the Cavalier Captain might then have said, 'Pindar and Euripides

are all very well, by G----! I've been at college myself; and when I meet

a gentleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat him; but neither

Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of England,

by G----! It won't do, Mr. Milton!'" This, it may be supposed, is Mr.

Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is

shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her

son? Again, when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of

1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, "It was more than an

insult; it was a sarcasm! It was as if the King, while giving Alexander

Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend

Presbyter's back!" Now one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took

the Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father under any

circumstances. He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but

surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that

"He nothing common did or mean,"

upon any of the "memorable scenes" of his life. The image is, therefore,

out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a

grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous

actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs.

Katherine Chidley, who wrote in defence of the Independents against

Thomas Edwards, he says, "People wondered who this she-Brownist,

Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in her when

they found that she was an oldish woman, and a member of some

hole-and-corner congregation in London. Indeed, _she put her nails into

Mr. Edwards with some effect_." Why did he not say at once, after the

good old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his face"? In

another place he speaks of "Satan standing with his _staff_ around him."

Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse

when forced to condescend to every-day matters. He can no more dismount

and walk than the man in armor on a Lord Mayor's day. "It [Aldersgate

Street] stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile as one

continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by Long Lane and the Barbican, it

parts with the name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new names of

Goswell Street and Goswell Road, _completes its tendency towards the

suburbs_ and fields about Islington." What a noble work might not the

Directory be if composed on this scale! The imagination even of an

alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous

thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these passages of civic

grandeur; but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an image

to deal with. Speaking of Milton's "two-handed engine" in Lycidas, he

says: "May not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming

English Parliament with its two Houses? Whatever he meant, his prophecy

had come true. As he sat among his books in Aldersgate Street, the

two-handed engine at the door of the English Church was on the swing.

Once, twice, thrice, it had swept its arcs to gather energy; now it was

on the backmost poise, and the blow was to descend." One cannot help

wishing that Mr. Masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast

in Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel. There is

something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no matter what he

meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he might mean "whatever else"

he pleased, so long as he _may_ have meant what we choose to think he

did, reasoning backward from the assumed fulfilment! But perhaps there

may be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that

prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude.

How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to be

more dignified),

"Sweeping--vehemently sweeping,

No pause admitted, no design avowed,"

like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw? I make

the suggestion modestly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Masson's

system of exegesis, which reminds one of the casuists' doctrine of

probables, in virtue of which a man may be _probabiliter obligatus_ and

_probabiliter deobligatus_ at the same time. But perhaps the most

remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are

told that the king might have established a _bona fide_ government "by

giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary element in his

Council, and _inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the new

policy, or to withdraw and become inactive."_ There is something

consoling in the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral

suasion. It is really too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want of

such an appeal to its moral sense as should "induce it to accept the new

policy." Of Mr. Masson's unhappy infection with the _vivid_ style an

instance or two shall be given in justification of what has been alleged

against him in that particular. He says of London that "he was committed

to the Tower, where for more than two months he lay, with as near a

prospect as ever prisoner had of a _chop_ with the executioner's axe on a

scaffold on Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidious, but the word "chop"

offends my ears with its coarseness, or if that be too strong, has

certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old

Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that "he gart kings ken they had a lith

in their necks," is a good example of really vivid phrase, suggesting the

axe and the block, and giving one of those dreadful hints to the

imagination which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose

skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly

picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will serve also as an

example of that tendency to _surplusage_, which adds to the bulk of Mr.

Masson's sentences at the cost of their effectiveness. If he had said

simply "chop on Tower Hill" (if chop there must be), it had been quite

enough, for we all know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are

implied in it. Once more, and I have done with the least agreeable part

of my business. Mr. Masson, after telling over again the story of

Strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus: "On Wednesday, the

12th of May, that proud _curly_ head, the casket of that brain of power,

rolled on the scaffold of Tower Hill." Why _curly_? Surely it is here a

ludicrous impertinence. This careful thrusting forward of outward and

unmeaning particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture

which genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in modern

descriptive writing. It reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of

dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very clothes they wore

when they did the deed, or with the real halter round their necks

wherewith they expiated it. It is probably very effective with the torpid

sensibilities of the class who look upon wax figures as works of art.

True imaginative power works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving

to wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the more there to

the mind of the spectator because it is not there at all, is a type of

the methods it employs and the intensity of their action.

Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. Masson's faults of manner,

which I should not have dwelt on so long had they not greatly marred a

real enjoyment in the reading, and were they not the ear-mark of a school

which has become unhappily numerous, I turn to a consideration of his

work as a whole. I think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was

guilty of a misnomer in his title. His book is not so much a life of

Milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader may

sift the main facts of the poet's biography. His passion for minute

detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on points mainly if not

altogether irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Literature,

occupying one hundred and twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written

in the main with good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion

upon nearly every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a

contemporary of Milton. I have no doubt all this would be serviceable and

interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edinburgh University, and they may

well be congratulated on having so competent a teacher; but what it has

to do with Milton, unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to

have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not clearly see.

Most readers of a life of Milton may be presumed to have some knowledge

of the general literary history of the time, or at any rate to have the

means of acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style was his own) was

very little affected by any of the English poets, with the single

exception, in his earlier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also has

something to say about everybody, from Wentworth to the obscurest

Brownist fanatic who was so much as heard of in England during Milton's

lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's duty should hold, our

grandchildren may expect to see "A Life of Thackeray, or who was who in

England, France, and Germany during the first Half of the Nineteenth

Century." These digressions of Mr. Masson's from what should have been

his main topic (he always seems somehow to be "completing his tendency

towards the suburbs" of his subject), give him an uneasy feeling that he

must get Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were only to

remind the reader that he has a certain connection with the book. He is

eager even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though an untenable one, if it

will only increase the number of pages devoted specially to Milton, and

thus lessen the apparent disproportion between the historical and the

biographical matter. Milton tells us that his morning wont had been "to

read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary,

or memory have his full fraught; then with useful and generous labors

preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear,

and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our

country's liberty when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to

stand and cover their stations rather than see the rum of our

Protestantism and the enforcement of a slavish life." Mr. Masson snatches

at the hint: "This is interesting," he says; "Milton, it seems, has for

some time been practising drill! The City Artillery Ground was near....

Did Milton among others make a habit of going there of mornings? Of this

more hereafter." When Mr. Masson returns to the subject he speaks of

Milton's "all but positive statement ... that in the spring of 1642, or a

few months before the breaking out of the Civil War, he was in the habit

of spending a part of each day in _military exercise somewhere not far

from his house in Aldersgate Street_." What he puts by way of query on

page 402 has become downright certainty seventy-nine pages further on.

The passage from Milton's tract makes no "statement" of the kind it

pleases Mr. Masson to assume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that

he took regular exercise, because he believed that moral no less than

physical courage demanded a sound body. And what proof does Mr. Masson

bring to confirm his theory? Nothing more nor less than two or three

passages in "Paradise Lost," of which I shall quote only so much as is

essential to his argument:--

"And now

Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front

Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise

Of warriors old with _ordered_ spear and shield,

Awaiting what command their mighty chief

Had to impose."[359]

Mr. Masson assures us that "there are touches in this description (as,

for example, the _ordering_ of arms at the moment of halt, and without

word of command) too exact and technical to have occurred to a mere

civilian. Again, at the same review....

"'He now prepared

To speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend

From wing to wing, and half enclose him round

With all his peers; _attention_ held them mute.'[360]

"To the present day this is the very process, or one of the processes,

when a commander wishes to address his men. They wheel inward and stand

at 'attention.'" But his main argument is the phrase "_ported_ spears,"

in Book Fourth, on which he has an interesting and valuable comment. He

argues the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that

Milton _must_ have had some practical experience of military drill. I

confess a very grave doubt whether "attention" and "ordered" in the

passages cited have any other than their ordinary meaning, and Milton

could never have looked on at the pike-exercise without learning what

"ported" meant. But, be this as it may, I will venture to assert that

there was not a boy in New England, forty years ago, who did not know

more of the manual than is implied in Milton's use of these terms. Mr.

Masson's object in proving Milton to have been a proficient in these

martial exercises is to increase our wonder at his not entering the army.

"If there was any man in England of whom one might surely have expected

that he would be in arms among the Parliamentarians," he says, "that man

was Milton." Milton may have had many an impulse to turn soldier, as all

men must in such times, but I do not believe that he ever seriously

intended it. Nor is it any matter of reproach that he did not. It is

plain, from his works, that he believed himself very early set apart and

consecrated for tasks of a very different kind, for services demanding as

much self-sacrifice and of more enduring result. I have no manner of

doubt that he, like Dante, believed himself divinely inspired with what

he had to utter, and, if so, why not also divinely guided in what he

should do or leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he loved a weapon

far more effective than a sword.

It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method, that a great deal of

space is devoted to what might have befallen his hero and what he might

have seen. This leaves a broad margin indeed for the insertion of purely

hypothetical incidents. Nay, so desperately addicted is he to what he

deems the vivid style of writing, that he even goes out of his way to

imagine what might have happened to anybody living at the same time with

Milton. Having told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his last visit

to London, perhaps saw Milton "a fair child of six playing at his

father's door," he must needs conjure up an imaginary supper at the

Mermaid. "Ah! what an evening ... was that; and how Ben and Shakespeare

_be-tongued_ each other, while the others listened and wondered; and how,

when the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard their departing

footsteps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs." Certainly, if we

may believe the old song, the stars "had nothing else to do," though

their chance of shining in the middle of a London November may perhaps be

reckoned very doubtful. An author should consider how largely the art of

writing consists in knowing what to leave in the inkstand.

Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal of very valuable matter,

whatever one may think of its bearing upon the life of Milton. The

chapters devoted to Scottish affairs are particularly interesting to a

student of the Great Rebellion, its causes and concomitants. His analyses

of the two armies, of the Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly, are

sensible additions to our knowledge. A too painful thoroughness, indeed,

is the criticism we should make on his work as a biography. Even as a

history, the reader might complain that it confuses by the multiplicity

of its details, while it wearies by want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks

the skill of an accomplished story-teller. A fact is to him a fact, never

mind how unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his devotion

to accuracy. The very order of his title-page, "The Life of Milton,

narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary

History of his Time," shows, it should seem, a misconception of the true

nature of his subject. Milton's chief importance, it might be fairly said

his only importance, is a literary one. His place is fixed as the most

classical of our poets.

Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did Milton leave any

distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of

opinion. In both these lines of his activity circumstances forced upon

him the position of a controversialist whose aims and results are by the

necessity of the case desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him and

Hobbes after him had a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles than

he. His studies in these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and his

opinions were heated to the temper of the times and shaped to the instant

exigencies of the forum, sometimes to his own convenience at the moment,

instead of being the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened by

intellectual and above all historical sympathy with his subject. His

interest was rather in the occasion than the matter of the controversy.

No aphorisms of political science are to be gleaned from his writings as

from those of Burke. His intense personality could never so far

dissociate itself from the question at issue as to see it in its larger

scope and more universal relations. He was essentially a _doctrinaire_,

ready to sacrifice everything to what at the moment seemed the abstract

truth, and with no regard to historical antecedents and consequences,

provided those of scholastic logic were carefully observed. He has no

respect for usage or tradition except when they count in his favor, and

sees no virtue in that power of the past over the minds and conduct of

men which alone insures the continuity of national growth and is the

great safeguard of order and progress. The life of a nation was of less

importance to him than that it should be conformed to certain principles

of belief and conduct. Burke could distill political wisdom out of

history because he had a profound consciousness of the soul that

underlies and outlives events, and of the national character that gives

them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his words are still living and

operative, while Milton's pamphlets are strictly occasional and no longer

interesting except as they illustrate him. In the Latin ones especially

there is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public orator. His

training, so far as it was thorough, so far, indeed, as it may be called

optional, was purely poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made

boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.

Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match for some of his

antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical learning. But he brought

into the contest a white heat of personal conviction that counted for

much. His self-consciousness, always active, identified him with the

cause he undertook. "I conceived myself to be now not as mine own person,

but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded and

whereof I had declared myself openly to be the partaker."[361]

Accordingly it does not so much seem that he is the advocate of

Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or the People of England, as that all

these are _he_, and that he is speaking for himself. He was not nice in

the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump from the

dunghill of Luther; but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy

turn to golden arrows of Phoebus in his trembling hands, singing as they

fly and carrying their messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his

prose as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and

there is that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious

feet. From the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated and set

apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a divine mission which sometimes

lifts his speech from personal to cosmopolitan significance; his genius

unmistakably asserts itself from time to time, calling down fire from

heaven to kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the

hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of mankind.

Plainly enough here was a man who had received something other than

Episcopal ordination. Mysterious and awful powers had laid their

unimaginable hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler service.

Yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the

"Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through

them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated

for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a

drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of silver,

as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had

garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent.

Which, being interpreted, means that his prose is of value because it is

Milton's, because it sometimes exhibits in an inferior degree the

qualities of his verse, and not for its power of thought, of reasoning,

or of statement. It is valuable, where it is best, for its inspiring

quality, like the fervencies of a Hebrew prophet. The English translation

of the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized, not the English mind,

but the Puritan temper. Those fierce enthusiasts could more easily find

elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal Israel than in a practical

England. It was convenient to see Amalek or Philistia in the men who met

them in the field, and one unintelligible horn or other of the Beast in

their theological opponents. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish

race found something congenial in the English mind. Their national

egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was especially sympathetic

with the personal egotism of Milton. It was only as an inspired and

irresponsible person that he could live on decent terms with his own

self-confident individuality. There is an intolerant egotism which

identifies itself with omnipotence,[362] and whose sublimity is its

apology; there is an intolerable egotism which subordinates the sun to

the watch in its own fob. Milton's was of the former kind, and

accordingly the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in

his verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they are

often unconsciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin and combustion

hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause; Philistia

is the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Milton would have done if

he could.

The "Areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that also is a plea

rather than an argument, and his interest in the question is not one of

abstract principle, but of personal relation to himself. He was far more

rhetorician than thinker. The sonorous amplitude of his style was better

fitted to persuade the feelings than to convince the reason. The only

passages from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional,

not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative

beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's power lay in dilation.

Touched by him, the simplest image, the most obvious thought,

"Dilated stood

Like Teneriffe or Atlas....

.... nor wanted in his grasp

What _seemed_ both spear and shield."

But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective weapon than

these fantastic arms of his. He had not the secret of compression that

properly belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of

himself, "nothing but abstract ideas makes any impression." Almost every

aphoristic phrase that he has made current is borrowed from some one of

the classics, like his famous

"License they mean when they cry liberty,"

from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his true function,

that of poet, is concerned. It is his peculiar glory that literature was

with him so much an art, an end and not a means. Of his political work he

has himself told us, "I should not choose this manner of writing,

wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial power of

nature to another task), I have the use, as I may account, but of my left

hand."

Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis of these writings, selecting

with great judgment the salient passages, which have an air of

blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the corrupted

passages of Shakespeare. We are particularly thankful to him for his

extracts from the pamphlets written against Milton, especially for such

as contain criticisms on his style. It is not a little interesting to see

the most stately of poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low

words. We seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his "choiceful sense"

to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his native

tongue "search all her coffers round." One cannot help thinking also that

his practice in prose, especially in the long involutions of Latin

periods, helped him to give that variety of pause and that majestic

harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so unapproachably his own.

Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught

somewhat more than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his

length of stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it,

but with how long an interval! Bryant has not seldom attained to its

serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats has caught

something of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous

severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in

slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buckles on

her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays

the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of the

slow processes by which Milton arrived at that classicism which sets him

apart from, if not above, all our other poets.

In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work as a

whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake

than for ours. The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable,

his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of

understanding Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is it about

Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of

portrait-painting. There is hardly a more stately figure in literary

history than Milton's, no life in some of its aspects more tragical,

except Dante's. In both these great poets, more than in any others, the

character of the men makes part of the singular impressiveness of what

they wrote and of its vitality with after times. In them the man somehow

overtops the author. The works of both are full of autobiographical

confidences. Like Dante, Milton was forced to become a party by himself.

He stands out in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great

movement of the Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the

Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man. Very

much alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr. Masson made him alive to

us again? I fear not. At the same time, while we cannot praise either the

style or the method of Mr. Masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful

for it. It is not so much a book for the ordinary reader of biography as

for the student, and will be more likely to find its place on the

library-shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any sense belong to

light literature, but demands all the muscle of the trained and vigorous

reader. "Truly, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect

that it is Milton's life it is naught."

Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates of Milton's career renders

him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake an edition of the

poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has distinguished merits. The

introductions to the several poems are excellent and leave scarcely

anything to be desired. The general Introduction, on the other hand,

contains a great deal that might well have been omitted, and not a little

that is positively erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's

English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to whom English is in some

sort a foreign tongue. It is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined

to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any altogether satisfactory

study should surely be the Miltonic prose; nay, should include all the

poetry and prose of his own age and of that immediately preceding it. The

uses to which Mr. Masson has put the concordance to Milton's poems tempt

one sometimes to class him with those whom the poet himself taxed with

being "the mousehunts and ferrets of an index." For example, what profits

a discussion of Milton's [Greek: hapax legomena], a matter in which

accident is far more influential than choice?[363] What sensible addition

is made to our stock of knowledge by learning that "the word _woman_ does

not occur in any form in Milton's poetry before 'Paradise Lost,'" and

that it is "exactly so with the word _female_"? Is it any way remarkable

that such words as _Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Sin, Satan_, and

_Serpent_ should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise Lost"? Would it not

rather have been surprising that they should not? Such trifles at best

come under the head of what old Warner would have called cumber-minds. It

is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting

great poets. Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the

Brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a

trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest Hippocrene after the

critic's solar microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical,

syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every

drop of it. When a poet has been so much edited as Milton, the temptation

of whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen

becomes great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not

been seen before.

Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernize the spelling of

Milton, for surely the reading of our classics should be made as little

difficult as possible, and he is right also in making an exception of

such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for

melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the

original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself

appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in

these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the

thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet

Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds,

in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as

men's ears differ, he tells us that the short _a_ sound is the same in

_man_ and _Darby_, the short _o_ sound in _God_ and _does_, and what he

calls the long _o_ sound in _broad_ and _wrath_. Speaking of the

apostrophe, Mr. Masson tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a

possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark: _hero's_ for

_heroes_, _myrtle's_ for _myrtles_, _Gorgons_ and _Hydra's_, etc." Now,

in books printed about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was put in

almost at random, and in all the cases cited is a misprint, except in the

first, where it serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not heroes

as it had formerly been.[364] In the "possessive singular of nouns

already ending in _s_" Mr. Masson tells us, "Milton's general practice is

not to double the _s_; thus, _Nereus wrinkled look, Glaucus spell_. The

necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms. In a

possessive followed by the word _sake_ or the word _side_, dislike to

[of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. In

addition to '_for righteousness' sake_' such phrases as '_for thy name

sake_' and '_for mercy sake_,' are allowed to pass; _bedside_ is normal

and _riverside_ nearly so." The necessities of metre need not be taken

into account with a poet like Milton, who never was fairly in his element

till he got off the soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his

verse under him like a steed that knows his rider. But does the dislike

of the double sibilant account for the dropping of the _s_ in these

cases? Is it not far rather the presence of the _s_ already in the sound

satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slovenliness in the

pronunciation of double consonants? It was this which led to such forms

as _conscience sake_ and _on justice side_, and which beguiled Ben Jonson

and Dryden into thinking, the one that _noise_ and the other that _corps_

was a plural,[365] What does Mr. Masson say to _hillside, Bankside,

seaside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospelside_ (of a church),

_nightside, countryside, wayside, brookside_, and I know not how many

more? Is the first half of these words a possessive? Or is it not rather

a noun impressed into the service as an adjective? How do such words

differ from _hilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman_, and the

like, where no double _s_ can be made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton

would not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote

"And airy tongues that syllable men's names

On sands and shores and desert wildernesses,"

"So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"

"And seat of Salmanasser whose success,"

verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and who was, I think,

fonder of the sound than any other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds of

the kind we always make a distinction wholly independent of the doubled

_s_. Nobody would boggle at _mountainside_; no one would dream of saying

_on the fatherside_ or _motherside_.

Mr. Masson speaks of "the Miltonic forms _vanquisht, markt, lookt_, etc."

Surely he does not mean to imply that these are peculiar to Milton?

Chapman used them before Milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in

_nak't_ and _saf't_ for _naked_ and _saved_. He often prefers the

contracted form in his prose also, showing that the full form of the past

participle in _ed_ was passing out of fashion, though available in

verse.[366] Indeed, I venture to affirm that there is not a single

variety of spelling or accent to be found in Milton which is without

example in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even _highth_, which is

thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and

still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason for

Milton's preference of it "as indicating more correctly the formation of

the word by the addition of the suffix _th_ to the adjective _high_." Is

an adjective, then, at the base of _growth_, _earth_, _birth_, _truth_,

and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this.

If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in

the spelling _bearth_ (Paradise Lost, IX. 624), which he interprets as

"collective produce," though in the only other instance where it occurs

it is neither more nor less than _birth_, it should seem that Milton had

hit upon Horne Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn trifling to lay

any stress on the spelling of the original editions, after having

admitted, as Mr. Masson has honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton

had nothing to do with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word

_voutsafe_ he hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of

Milton's ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton "must have had a reason for

it,"[367] and finds that reason in "his dislike to [of] the sound _ch_,

or to [of] that sound combined with _s_.... His fine ear taught him not

only to seek for musical effects and cadences at large, but also to be

fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions

of consonants, except when there might be a musical reason for harshness

or difficulty. In the management of the letter _s_, the frequency of

which in English is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I

believe, most careful and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in

Shakespeare will one word ending in _s_ be found followed immediately in

Milton by another word beginning with the same letter; or, if he does

occasionally pen such a phrase as _Moab's sons_, it will be difficult to

find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as _earth's substance_, of

which many writers would think nothing. [With the index to back him Mr.

Masson could safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even more

apparent in his management of the _sh_ sound. He has it often, of course;

but it may be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He

writes _Basan_ for _Bashan_, _Sittim_ for _Shittim_, _Silo_ for _Shiloh_,

_Asdod_ for _Ashdod_. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary

of the compound sound _ch_ as in _church_. Of his sensitiveness to this

sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet entitled

'An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' where,

having occasion to quote these lines from one of the Satires[368] of his

opponent, Bishop Hall,

"'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,

Wearying echo with one changeless word,'

"he adds, ironically, 'And so he well might, and all his auditory besides,

with his _teach each!_'" Generalizations are always risky, but when

extemporized from a single hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed

no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of _teach

each_. Did Milton reject the _h_ from _Bashan_ and the rest because he

disliked the sound of _sh_, or because he had found it already rejected

by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into

English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words beginning with _sh_ seven

hundred and fifty four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in

which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in _tion_. Hall,

had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own

"Manli_est_, resolut_est_, br_east_,

As the magnetick hard_est_ iron draws,"

or his

"What moves thy inquisition?

Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall,

And my promotion thy destruction?"

With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that

too much _est-est_ is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that

danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly _shun_ned it. Nay, he

might even have found an echo almost tallying with his own in

"To begirt the almighty throne

Beseeching or besieging,"

a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have twitted him with

"a _seq_uent king who _seeks_." As for the _sh_ sound, a poet could

hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote,

"Gna_sh_ing for angui_sh_ and despite and _sh_ame,"

or again,

"Then bursting forth

Afre_sh_ with con_sc_ious terrors vex me round

That rest or intermi_ssion_ none I find.

Before mine eyes in oppos_ition_ sits

Grim Death, my son."

And if Milton disliked the _ch_ sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain

by verses such as these,--

"Straight cou_ch_es close; then, rising, _ch_anges oft

His cou_ch_ant wat_ch_, as one who _ch_ose his ground";

still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."[369] The truth

is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. There are, no

doubt, some exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina Fair ") among his

earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which

produced or trained the authors of our best English glees, as ravishing

in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also

showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar

distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn

Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical

construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before,

giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay

silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various

language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing

breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and

original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as

respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also,

and often to the single words of which a period is composed. He loved

phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like

Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp him great, the

verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather

with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is

cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his

orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region

of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold

it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a

master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals

between and unobviously in his blank-verse:--

"There rest, if any rest can harbour _there_;

And, reassembling our afflicted powers,

Consult how we may henceforth most offend

Our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_,

How overcome this dire calamity,

What reinforcement we may gain from hope,

If not, what resolution from des_pair_."[370]

There is one almost perfect quatrain,--

"Before thy fellows, ambitious to win

From me some plume, that thy success may show

Destruction to the rest. This pause between

(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know";

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance,--

"If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge

Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft

In worst extremes and on the perilous edge

Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."

There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first passage cited were

intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others; but Milton's ear has

tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and others in which the

assonance almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blankverse:--

"From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these),

From India and the Golden Chersonese";

"That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired

What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired";

"And will alike be punished, whether thou

Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow";

"Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,

Save what is in destroying, other joy";

"Shall all be Paradise, far happier place

Than this of Eden, and far happier days";

"This my long sufferance and my day of grace

They who neglect and scorn shall never taste";

"So far remote with diminution seen,

First in his East the glorious lamp was seen."[371]

These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to show that Milton's

ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always

careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant

in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses

through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but

he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In

reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an

illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the

abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen

ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is

with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. His

imagination seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash

of a single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his

descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the

blue streams of air, controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign

or of sea, and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser

expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the

indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any other of our

poets. He loved epithets (like _old_ and _far_) that suggest great

reaches, whether of space or time. This bias shows itself already in his

earlier poems, as where he hears

"The _far off_ curfew sound

Over some _widewatered_ shore,"

or where he fancies the shores[372] and sounding seas washing Lycidas far

away; but it reaches its climax in the "Paradise Lost." He produces his

effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than

by concentrating them upon too precise particulars. Thus in a famous

comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming

nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes

always instead of specifying,--the true secret of the ideal treatment in

which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never

turgid. Tasso begins finely with

"Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne

II rauco suon della tartarea tromba;

Treman le spaziose atre caverne,

E l'aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"

but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons with thunder

and intestinal convulsions of the earth; in other words, he is unwary

enough to give us a standard of measurement, and the moment you furnish

Imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statistical

poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with this passage in his memory, is

too wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be brought

to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming indefiniteness;

"He called so loud that all the hollow deep

Of hell resounded,"

thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual method of

prolonged evolution. No caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn,

because they have limits. He could practise this self-denial when his

artistic sense found it needful, whether for variety of verse or for the

greater intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. His more

elaborate passages have the multitudinous roll of thunder, dying away to

gather a sullen force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that

the attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short

without echo and leave us listening. There are no such vistas and avenues

of verse as his. In reading the "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of

spaciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's respect for himself

and for his own mind and its movements rises wellnigh to veneration. He

prepares the way for his thought and spreads on the ground before the

sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and

romance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe at what a

reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak of himself, as at

the beginning of the Third Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength

is especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail;

the wind and tide always serve; there is never any fluttering of the

canvas In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has to

go through with a great deal of _yo-heave-ohing_ before he gets under

way. And though, in the didactic parts of "Paradise Lost," the wind dies

away sometimes, there is a long swell that will not let us forget it, and

ever and anon some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer

peers heaped with stormy memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent;

we feel all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great

controlling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly.

Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, it seems to me, for the

most part unsatisfactory He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a

history of the genitival form _its_, which adds nothing to our previous

knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to Milton except for

its bearing on the authorship of some verses attributed to him against

the most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr. Masson is

altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough

"recollectiveness of Latin constructions" in Milton, and scents them

sometimes in what would seem to the uninstructed reader very idiomatic

English. More than once, at least, he has fancied them by

misunderstanding the passage in which they seem to occur. Thus, in

"Paradise Lost," XI. 520, 521,

"Therefore so abject is their punishment,

Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own,"

has no analogy with _eorum deformantium_, for the context shows that it

is the _punishment_ which disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds

constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words needing annotation

that are common to all poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his

notes seem not seldom to have been written by a foreigner. On this

passage in "Comus,"--

"I do not think my sister so to seek

Or so unprincipled in virtue's book

And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever

As that the single want of light and noise

* * * * *

"(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)

Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,"

Mr. Masson tells us, that "in very strict construction, _not being_ would

cling to _want_ as its substantive; but the phrase passes for the Latin

ablative absolute." So on the words _forestalling night_, "i. e.

anticipating. Forestall is literally to anticipate the market by

purchasing goods before they are brought to the stall." In the verse

"Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good,"

he explains that "_while_ here has the sense of _so long as_." But Mr.

Masson's notes on the language are his weakest. He is careful to tell us,

for example, "that there are instances of the use of _shine_ as a

substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other poets." It is but another

way of spelling _sheen_, and if Mr. Masson never heard a shoeblack in the

street say, "Shall I give you a shine, sir?" his experience has been

singular.[373] His notes in general are very good (though too long).

Those on the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I think he is

sometimes a little too scornful of parallel passages,[374] for if there

is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is that his

great and original imagination was almost wholly nourished by books,

perhaps I should rather say set in motion by them. It is wonderful how,

from the most withered and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his

grand images rise like an exhalation; how from the most battered old lamp

caught in that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning,

he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whatever he touches

swells and towers. That wonderful passage in Comus of the airy tongues,

perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured

out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples

help us to understand the poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne had

said before Milton, that Adam "was _the wisest of all men since_," I am

glad to find this link between the most profound and the most stately

imagination of that age. Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the

historical development of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so

to speak. Every one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous proper

names, which have not only an acquired imaginative value by association,

and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a

merely musical significance. This he probably caught from Marlowe, traces

of whom are frequent in him. There is certainly something of what

afterwards came to be called Miltonic in more than one passage of

"Tamburlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the

block, as in Michel Angelo's Dawn.

Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of Milton are, in the main,

judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree

with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely,

and yet, when he comes to what he calls _variations_, he talks of the

"substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the

regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for

the same." This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr.

Masson calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse,

and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either

were not so in Milton's day,[375] or were so or not at choice of the

poet, according to their place in the verse. There is not an elision of

Milton's without precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned to

write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of them, except

Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur)

oftener than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse,

only because his epic form demanded it more for variety's sake. How

Milton would have _read_ them, is another question. He certainly often

marked them by an apostrophe in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed

according to quantity, so far as that is possible in English, and as

Cowper somewhat extravagantly says, "gives almost as many proofs of it in

his 'Paradise Lost' as there are lines in the poem."[376] But when Mr.

Masson tells us that

"Self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail,"

and

"Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare,"

are "only nine syllables," and that in

"Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,"

"either the third foot must be read as an _anapaest_ or the word _hugest_

must be pronounced as one syllable, _hug'st_," I think Milton would have

invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of course Milton read it

"Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream,"

just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's facsimile)

"Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,"

a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in the

Italian poets.[377]

"Gest that swim" would be rather a knotty _anapaest_, an insupportable

foot indeed! And why is even _hug'st_ worse than Shakespeare's

"_Young'st_ follower of thy drum"?

In the same way he says of

"For we have also our evening and our morn,"

that "the metre of this line is irregular," and of the rapidly fine

"Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,"

that it is "a line of unusual metre." Why more unusual than

"As being the contrary to his high will"?

What would Mr. Masson say to these three verses from Dekkar?--

"And _knowing_ so much, I muse thou art so poor";

"I fan away the dust _flying_ in mine eyes";

"_Flowing_ o'er with court news only of you and them."

All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) were

normally of one syllable, permissibly of two.[378] If Mr. Masson had

studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has studied _him_, he would

never have said that the verse

"Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills,"

was "peculiar as having a distinct syllable of overmeasure." He retains

Milton's spelling of _hunderd_ without perceiving the metrical reason for

it, that _d, t, p, b,_ &c., followed by _l_ or _r_, might be either of

two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find it both ways in two

consecutive verses:--

"A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse,

Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms."[379]

Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or more

unaccented syllables, and even argues in his Introduction that some of

them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites some lines of Spenser as

confirming his theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes the

conditions of the case by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but

more emphatically in Spenser's day) on the last syllable.

"A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"

he calls "a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or even

thirteen syllables." Surely Milton's ear would never have tolerated a

dissyllabic "spirit" in such a position. The word was then more commonly

of one syllable, though it might be two, and was accordingly spelt

_spreet_ (still surviving in _sprite_), _sprit_, and even _spirt_, as

Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's facsimiles.[380]

Shakespeare, in the verse

"Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"

uses the word admirably well in a position where it _cannot_ have a

metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a dancing

movement to the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old metrists were

careful of elasticity, a quality which modern verse has lost in

proportion as our language has stiffened into uniformity under the

benumbing fingers of pedants.

This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it seems.

A great deal of nonsense has been written about imperfect measures in

Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic effect produced by filling up

the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice

in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible,

but in passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I

do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a

single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way and in how

mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute

such _faults_ (as a geologist would call them) to anything rather than to

the deliberate design of the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best

metrists among them, have given us a standard by which to measure what

licenses they took in versification,--the one in his translations, the

other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are very few, and

all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the

chances of supervision and increased those of error. There are only two,

indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are,

"Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"

and

"With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."

This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been

stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in

a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only

the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting

the word _bottomless_ on the second syllable would be "too horrible."

Certainly not, if Milton so accented it, any more than _blasphemous_ and

twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may be, Milton

could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also,

with an unmusical verse, and in the only other passage where the word

occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable:

"With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."

As _bottom_ is a word which, like _bosom_ and _besom_, may be

monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am persuaded

that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event)

gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or

meant to write,--

"Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"

which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that Milton liked

best.[381]

Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduction of the way in which the

verses of Milton should be read is judicious enough, though some of the

examples he gives, of the "comicality" which would ensue from compressing

every verse into an exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a

surprising ignorance of the laws which guided our poets just before and

during Milton's time in the structure of their verses. Thus he seems to

think that a strict scansion would require us in the verses

"So he with difficulty and labor hard,"

and

"Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,"

to pronounce _diffikty_ and _purp'_. Though Mr. Masson talks of "slurs

and elisions," his ear would seem somewhat insensible to their exact

nature or office. His _diffikty_ supposes a hiatus where none is

intended, and his making _purple_ of one syllable wrecks the whole verse,

the real slur in the latter case being on _azure or_.[382] When he asks

whether Milton required "these pronunciations in his verse," no positive

answer can be given, but I very much doubt whether he would have thought

that some of the lines Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good Blank

Verse even with the most leisurely natural enunciation of the spare

syllable," and I am sure he would have stared if told that "the number of

accents" in a pentameter verse was "variable." It may be doubted whether

elisions and compressions which would be thought in bad taste or even

vulgar now were more abhorrent to the ears of Milton's generation than to

a cultivated Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose. After all,

what Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible axiom that poetry

should be read as poetry.

Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main principles, but the examples he

quotes make one doubt whether he knows what a verse is. For example, he

thinks it would be a "horror," if in the verse

"That invincible Samson far renowned"

we should lay the stress on the first syllable of _invincible_. It is

hard to see why this should be worse than _conventicle_ or _remonstrance_

or _successor_ or _incompatible_, (the three latter used by the correct

Daniel) or why Mr. Masson should clap an accent on _surface_ merely

because it comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to _invincible_. If

one read the verse just cited with those that go with it, he will find

that the accent _must_ come on the first syllable of _invincible_ or else

the whole passage becomes chaos.[383] Should we refuse to say _obleeged_

with Pope because the fashion has changed? From its apparently greater

freedom in skilful hands, blank-verse gives more scope to sciolistic

theorizing and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter couplet, but it is

safe to say that no verse is good in the one that would not be good in

the other when handled by a master like Dryden. Milton, like other great

poets, wrote some bad verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so

than to conjure up some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept

them as the better for their badness. Such a bad verse is

"Rocks, caves, lakes, _fens_, bogs, _dens_ and shapes of death,"

which might be cited to illustrate Pope's

"And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low words. He

rather loved them tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six feet

high in their stockings, and fit to go into the grenadiers. He loved them

as much for their music as for their meaning,--perhaps more. His style,

therefore, when it has to deal with commoner things, is apt to grow a

little cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl would

boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shakespeare would

have understood this. Milton would have made him talk like an eagle. His

influence is not to be left out of account as partially contributing to

that decline toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he

died. If it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may

be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets. If to

Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to, they have sat at the feet

of Milton to be taught. Our language has no finer poem than "Samson

Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere dignity or in the

skill with which the poet's personal experience is generalized into a

classic tragedy.

Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem to show him, he had in

him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of the haughty and

defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michel Angelo. In no other English

author is the man so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty

conception of himself enters into all he says and does. Always the

necessity of this one man became that of the whole human race for the

moment. There were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when _he_

wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary Powell, the

cavalier's daughter, find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster

_incompatible_ and leave it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an

easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If _he_ is blind, it is with

excess of light, it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with

angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted among the prophets

because they, too, had lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of

more account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he was past

fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes "the

invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre."

If the structure of _his_ mind be undramatic, why, then, the English

drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest

notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the

blinded Samson for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme.

Plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no

way responsible for their to-morrows. And this makes him perennially

interesting even to those who hate his politics, despise his Socinianism,

and find his greatest poem a bore. A new edition of his poems is always

welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each new

student, and Mr. Masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us,

with much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that is a

solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge.

It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Milton into the

fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so uniformly

self-conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare that he had the power

of transforming himself into everything; of Milton, that he had that of

transforming everything into himself. Dante is individual rather than

self-conscious, and he, the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of

grain at the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. But

Milton never let himself go for a moment. As other poets are possessed by

their theme, so is he _self_-possessed, his great theme being John

Milton, and his great duty that of interpreter between him and the world.

I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and it is

out of Hebrew that the version is made. Pope says he makes God the Father

reason "like a school divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He

makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had the poem been

written a few years later, the Almighty would have become more heterodox.

Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting terms with heaven.

Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, I suspect, which goes

far toward making the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's-breadth

short thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puritanism showed both the strength

and weakness of its prophetic nurture; enough of the latter to be scoffed

out of England by the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of

the former to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. It has

left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great monuments

are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton. It is a high inspiration

to be the neighbor of great events; to have been a partaker in them and

to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence become the very

means of ignoble ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion

of regret deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its

sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it

makes him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is

reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime independence of human

sympathy like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But it

is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habitual companions of whose

mind were the Past and Future. I always seem to see him leaning in his

blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will guard

the song which the other had inspired.

Footnotes:

[358] The Life of John Milton: narrated in Connection with the

Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David

Masterson, M.D., LL.D. Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature

in the University of Edinburgh. Vols. I., II. 1638-1643. London and

New York: Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. pp. xii, 608.

The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction, Notes

and an Essay on Milton's English by David Masson, M.A., LL.D.

Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of

Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co. 1874.

[359] Book I. 562-567.

[360] Ibid., 615-618.

[361] Apology for Smectymnuus.

[362]

"For him I was not sent, nor yet to free

That people, victor once, now vile and base,

Deservedly made vassal."--P.R. IV. 131-133.

[363] If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty

inferences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably printing

[Greek: _apax legomena_!]

[364]

"That you may tell heroes, when you come

To banquet with your wife."

_Chapman's Odyssey_, VIII. 336, 337.

In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find

"Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings,"

which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.

[365] Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from

Drummond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an authority

in English,--

"Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest."

The survival of _Horse_ for _horses_ is another example. So by a

reverse process _pult_ and _shay_ have been vulgarly deduced from the

supposed plurals _pulse_ and _chaise_.

[366] Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked

after his printed texts. I have two copies of his "Byron's

Conspiracy," both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than

the other, for it shows corrections. The more solemn ending in _ed_

was probably kept alive by the reading of the Bible in churches.

Though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right

hearing of the more metrical passages in the Old Testament, which are

finer and more scientiflc than anything in the language, unless it be

some parts of "Samson Agonistes." I remember an old gentleman who

always used the contracted form of the participle in conversation,

but always gave it back its embezzled syllable in reading. Sir Thomas

Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At any rate he

has the spelling _empuzzeled_ in prose.

[367] He thinks the same of the variation _strook_ and _struck_,

though they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's "Faustus"

two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words "Cursed be

he that struck." In a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the

old editions (there were three) have _stroke_ and _strooke_ in the

first instance, and all agree on _strucke_ in the second. No

inference can be drawn from such casualties.

[368] The lines are _not_ "from one of the Satires," and Milton made

them worse by misquoting and bringing _love_ jinglingly near to

_grove_. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often

harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very

terms of the preface to Paradise Lost.

[369] Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton

may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a _t_ out of _slep'st_,

"for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear _boast'st_ and--one

stares and gasps at it--_doat'dst_. There is, by the way, a familiar

passage in which the _ch_ sound predominates, not without a touch of

_sh_, in a single couplet:--

"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould

Breathe su_ch_ divine enchanting ravi_sh_ment?"

"Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss,"

and perhaps

"I see his tents

Pitched about Sechem"

might be added.

[370] I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of

_enemy_ and _calamity_ in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the

comma after _If not_, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the

sense, and certainly to keep _not_ a little farther apart from

_what_, ("teach each"!)

[371] "First in his East," is not soothing to the ear.

[372] There seems to be something wrong in this word _shores_. Did

Milton write _shoals_?

[373] But his etymological notes are worse. For example, "_recreant_,

renouncing the faith, from the old French _recroire_, which again is

from the mediaeval Latin _recredere_, to 'believe back,' or

apostatize." This is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in

either language. He derives _serenate_ from _sera_, and says that

_parle_ means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as

_parley_, had the same meanings, and was commonly pronounced like it,

as in Marlowe's

"What, shall we _parle_ with this Christian?"

It certainly never meant _treaty_, though it may have meant

_negotiation_. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the

principals. On the verses

"And some flowers and some bays

For thy hearse to strew the ways,"

he has a note to tell us that _hearse_ is not to be taken "in our

sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or

framework over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to strew the

ways for thy hearse." How could one do that for a tomb or the

framework over it?

[374] A passage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its reference

to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of "Nature taught

art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier

commentators would also have been of great service in the

astronomical notes.

[375] Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a

diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was confirmed

and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, with

whose usage in this respect he closely conforms.

[376] Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.

[377] So Dante:--

"Ma sapienza e amore e virtute."

So Donne:--

"Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."

[378] Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with

the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained,

but seems to have learned something from Abbott's "Shakespearian

Grammar" in the interval between writing his notes and his

Introduction. Walker's "Shakespeare's Versification" would have been

a great help to him in default of original knowledge.

[379] Milton has a verse in Comus where the _e_ is elided from the

word _sister_ by its preceding a vowel:--

"Heaven keep my sister! again, again, and near!"

This would have been impossible before a consonant.

[380] So _spirito_ and _spirto_ in Italian, _esperis_ and _espirs_ in

Old French.

[381] Milton, however, would not have balked at _th' bottomless_ any

more than Drayton at _th' rejected_ or Donne at _th' sea_. Mr. Masson

does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects _i' th'

midst_ to _i' the midst_, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He

might better have restored the _n_ in _i'_, where it is no

contraction, but merely indicates the pronunciation, as _o'_ for _of_

and _on_.

[382] Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to

two syllables.

[383] Milton himself has _invisible_, for we cannot suppose him

guilty of a verse like

"Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"

while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions

that he loved.

KEATS.

There are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of their personal

history than those of Keats; yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose

real lives, or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more

clearly traceable in what they have written. To write the life of a man

was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of

circumstances, of those things which stood about the life and were more

or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But Biography from

day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so far as

its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are

by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material; but the

gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves

characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is

those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man

that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the

surface that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature

hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts

will depend very much upon the shape of that,--upon the knots and twists

which existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the cradle,

perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping

ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor

to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many

broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined character, for

that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many

influences by which the world, as it may happen then to be, endeavors to

mould every one in its own image. What his temperament was we can see

clearly, and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the

discipline of art.

* * * * *

John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer and Spenser, was a

Londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. Lord

Houghton, who seems to have had a kindly wish to create him gentleman by

brevet, says that he was "born in the upper ranks of the middle class."

This shows a commendable tenderness for the nerves of English society,

and reminds one of Northcote's story of the violin-player who, wishing to

compliment his pupil, George III., divided all fiddlers into three

classes,--those who could not play at all, those who played very badly,

and those who played very well,--assuring his Majesty that he had made

such commendable progress as to have already reached the second rank. We

shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of Keats (as

Lord Houghton had told us in an earlier biography) "was employed in the

establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of large livery-stables on

the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly opposite the entrance into Finsbury

Circus." So that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, Mr. Jennings

was a _proprietor_; second, he was the proprietor of an _establishment_;

third, he was the proprietor of a _large_ establishment; and fourth, this

large establishment was _nearly_ opposite Finsbury Circus,--a name which

vaguely dilates the imagination with all sorts of potential grandeurs. It

is true Leigh Hunt asserts that Keats "was a little too sensitive on the

score of his origin,"[384] but we can find no trace of such a feeling

either in his poetry or in such of his letters as have been printed. We

suspect the fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the

vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which measured genius by

genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedigree is of the best,

tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at

livery even in the largest establishments in Moorfields.

As well as we can make out, then, the father of Keats was a groom in the

service of Mr. Jennings, and married the daughter of his master. Thus, on

the mother's side, at least, we find a grandfather, on the father's there

is no hint of such an ancestor, and we must charitably take him for

granted. It is of more importance that the elder Keats was a man of sense

and energy, and that his wife was a "lively and intelligent woman, who

hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love of amusement,"

bringing him into the world, a seven-months' child, on the 29th October,

1795, instead of the 29th of December, as would have been conventionally

proper. Lord Houghton describes her as "tall, with a large oval face, and

a somewhat saturnine demeanour." This last circumstance does not agree

very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, but he

consoles us by adding that "she succeeded, _however_, in inspiring her

children with the profoundest affection." This was particularly true of

John, who once, when between four and five years old, mounted guard at

her chamber door with an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor had

ordered her not to be disturbed.[385]

In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed by a fall

from his horse. His mother seems to have been ambitious for her children,

and there was some talk of sending John to Harrow. Fortunately this plan

was thought too expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of Mr.

Clarke at Enfield with his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had

distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camperdown, was the

hero of his nephews, and they went to school resolved to maintain the

family reputation for courage. John was always fighting, and was chiefly

noted among his school-fellows as a strange compound of pluck and

sensibility. He attacked an usher who had boxed his brother's ears; and

when his mother died, in 1810, was moodily inconsolable, hiding himself

for several days in a nook under the master's desk, and refusing all

comfort from teacher or friend.

He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and impressed his

companions with a sense of his power. They thought he would one day be a

famous soldier. This may have been owing to the stories he told them of

the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by

the boy Homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at the least,

as it would have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had

been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great man, which is the

main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more

discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was,

we will tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by

necessity or fear of the police reports.

Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else especially worthy of

record in the school-life of Keats. He translated the twelve books of the

Aeneid, read Robinson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into

Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but

he had studied Spence's Polymetis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's

Dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good

company perhaps for him as artists and aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy

the horror of those respectable writers if their pages could suddenly

have become alive tinder their pens with all that the young poet saw in

them.[386]

On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at

Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, "of some eminence" in his

profession, as Lord Houghton takes care to assure us. The place was of

more importance than the master, for its neighborhood to Enfield enabled

him to keep up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr.

Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was in his

seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the "Faerie Queene."

Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Amphion is more wonderful than this

miracle of Spenser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great

poet. Keats learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his

indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the Muse

defend her son. It is the old story,--the lost heir discovered by his

aptitude for what is gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us "that he used

sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should never be a poet, and

if he was not he would destroy himself." This was perhaps a

half-conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he

had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of the

shortness of his own career.[387]

Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and afterward

Milton. But Chapman's translations had a more abiding influence on his

style both for good and evil. That he read wisely, his comments on the

"Paradise Lost" are enough to prove. He now also commenced poet himself,

but does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession. He was

a youth of energy and purpose, and though he no doubt penned many a

stanza when he should have been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals

accompanied by the early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable

examination in 1817. In the spring of this year, also, he prepared to

take his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small volume

containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It attracted

little attention, and the rest of this year seems to have been occupied

with a journey on foot in Scotland, and the composition of "Endymion,"

which was published in 1818. Milton's "Tetrachordon" was not better

abused; but Milton's assailants were unorganized, and were obliged each

to print and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural

laws of demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was

arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice. They might

be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the sentence was

published, and the penalty inflicted before all England. The difference

between his fortune and Milton's was that between being pelted by a mob

of personal enemies and being set in the pillory. In the first case, the

annoyance brushes off mostly with the mud; in the last, there is no

solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This solace,

to a certain extent, Keats had; for his ambition was noble, and he hoped

not to make a great reputation, but to be a great poet. Haydon says that

Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he had ever seen who looked

conscious of a lofty purpose.

It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they suspect to

be good verses, than what they know to be bad morals. Is it because they

feel themselves incapable of the one and not of the other? Probably a

certain amount of honest loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement

is to be taken into account, and quite as much of the cruelty of

criticism is due to want of thought as to deliberate injustice. However

it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men who

scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as if there were never a

_not_ in any of them, felt every sentiment of their better nature

outraged by the "Lyrical Ballads." It is idle to attempt to show that

Keats did not suffer keenly from the vulgarities of Blackwood and the

Quarterly. He suffered in proportion as his ideal was high, and he was

conscious of falling below it. In England, especially, it is not pleasant

to be ridiculous, even if you are a lord; but to be ridiculous and an

apothecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly to be

excommunicated. _A priori_, there was something absurd in poetry written

by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables of Mr. Jennings, even

though they were an establishment, and a large establishment, and nearly

opposite Finsbury Circus. Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the

Quarterly, and Mr. Terry, the actor,[388] thought so even more distinctly

in Blackwood, bidding the young apothecary "back to his gallipots!" It is

not pleasant to be talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to have

the advantage of position, nor to be drenched with ditchwater, though you

know it to be thrown by a scullion in a garret.

Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensibility was excessive, could

not but be galled by this treatment. He was galled the more that he was

also a man of strong sense, and capable of understanding clearly how hard

it is to make men acknowledge solid value in a person whom they have once

heartily laughed at. Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of

wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light

by which the world looks for and finds merit. Keats longed for fame, but

longed above all to deserve it. To his friend Taylor he writes, "There is

but one way for me. The road lies through study, application, and

thought." Thrilling with the electric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in

vision, like Dante, that small procession of the elder poets to which

only elect centuries can add another laurelled head. Might he, too,

deserve from posterity the love and reverence which he paid to those

antique glories? It was no unworthy ambition, but everything was against

him,--birth, health, even friends, since it was partly on their account

that he was sneered at. His very name stood in his way, for Fame loves

best such, syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like

Spenserian, Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great deal in

names, and when the fairies come with their gifts to the cradle of the

selected child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a name for him from

which well-sounding derivatives can be made, and, best of all, with a

termination in _on_. Men judge the current coin of opinion by the ring,

and are readier to take without question whatever is Platonic, Baconian,

Newtonian, Johnsonian, Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, and all

the rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of Keats,--the more

pity,--and to say a thing is _Keatsy_ is to contemn it. Fortune likes

fine names.

Haydon tells us that Keats was very much depressed by the fortunes of his

book. This was natural enough, but he took it all in a manly way, and

determined to revenge himself by writing better poetry. He knew that

activity, and not despondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune.

Haydon is sure of the change in his spirits, because he would come to the

painting-room and sit silent for hours. But we rather think that the

conversation, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled that in a young author's

first play, where the other interlocutors are only brought in as

convenient points for the hero to hitch the interminable web of his

monologue upon. Besides, Keats had been continuing his education this

year, by a course of Elgin marbles and pictures by the great Italians,

and might very naturally have found little to say about Mr. Haydon's

extensive works, that he would have cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the

other hand, in his eagerness to prove that Keats was not killed by the

article in the Quarterly, is carried too far toward the opposite extreme,

and more than hints that he was not even hurt by it. This would have been

true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant companionship with mountains, had

acquired something of their manners, but was simply impossible to a man

of Keats's temperament.

On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect Keats the less for having been

gifted with sensibility, and may even say what we believe to be true,

that his health was injured by the failure of his book. A man cannot have

a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be

imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the

amount of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the

world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken spectre, the

projected shadow of ourselves; but as long as we do not know it, it is a

very passable giant. We are not without experience of natures so purely

intellectual that their bodies had no more concern in their mental doings

and sufferings than a house has with the good or ill fortune of its

occupant. But poets are not built on this plan, and especially poets like

Keats, in whom the moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the

physical man, that you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his

hands, so truly did his body, like that of Donne's Mistress Boulstred,

think and remember and forebode. The healthiest poet of whom our

civilization has been capable says that when he beholds

"desert a beggar born,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,"

alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his day,

"And simple truth miscalled simplicity,"

as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case,

"And captive Good attending Captain Ill,"

that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life seems to have

been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, "tired of all

these," had nothing for it but to cry for "restful Death."

Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill fortune courageously. He

certainly did not overestimate "Endymion," and perhaps a sense of humor

which was not wanting in him may have served as a buffer against the too

importunate shock of disappointment. "He made Ritchie promise," says

Haydon, "he would carry his 'Endymion' to the great desert of Sahara and

fling it in the midst." On the 9th October, 1818, he writes to his

publisher, Mr. Hessey, "I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who

have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get acquainted with my

own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on

the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of

his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without

comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could inflict; and

also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow

as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J.S. is

perfectly right in regard to 'the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no

fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as

good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its

being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over

every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to

fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently _without

judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_, hereafter. The

Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be

matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself.

That which is creative must create itself. In 'Endymion' I leaped

headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the

soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the

green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.

I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among

the greatest."

This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the side which a

large-minded person would display to a friend. This is what he thought,

but whether it was what he _felt_, I think doubtful. I look upon it

rather as one of the phenomena of that multanimous nature of the poet,

which makes him for the moment that of which he has an intellectual

perception. Elsewhere he says something which seems to hint at the true

state of the case. "I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a

man: _they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a passion_." One

cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth,--the one altogether poet;

the other essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added,--the

one shifting from form to form, and from style to style, and pouring his

hot throbbing life into every mould; the other remaining always the

individual, producing works, and not so much living in his poems as

memorially recording his life in them. When Wordsworth alludes to the

foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks serenely and generously of

Wordsworth the poet, as if he were an unbiassed third person, who takes

up the argument merely in the interest of literature. He towers into a

bald egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy was his

employment; it was Keats's very existence, and he felt the rough

treatment of his verses as if it had been the wounding of a limb. To

Wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise, his slow pulse and

imperturbable self trust gave him assurance of a life so long that he

could wait, and when we read his poems we should never suspect the

existence in him of any sense but that of observation, as if Wordsworth

the poet were a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by Mr. Wordsworth the

distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper. But every one of Keats's

poems was a sacrifice of vitality, a virtue went away from him into every

one of them; even yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and

thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and the flutter of

his electrical nerves, and we do not wonder he felt that what he did was

to be done swiftly.

In the mean time his younger brother languished and died, his elder seems

to have been in some way unfortunate and had gone to America, and Keats

himself showed symptoms of the hereditary disease which caused his death

at last. It is in October, 1818, that we find the first allusion to a

passion which was, erelong, to consume him It is plain enough beforehand,

that those were not moral or mental graces that should attract a man like

Keats. His intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his art, his books,

and his friends He could have companionship and appreciation from men;

what he craved of woman was only repose. That luxurious nature, which

would have tossed uneasily on a crumpled rose leaf, must have something

softer to rest upon than intellect, something less ethereal than culture.

It was his body that needed to have its equilibrium restored, the waste

of his nervous energy that must be repaired by deep draughts of the

overflowing life and drowsy tropical force of an abundant and healthily

poised womanhood. Writing to his sister-in-law, he says of this nameless

person: "She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian; she has a

rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes

into a room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess.

She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may

address her. From habit, she thinks that _nothing particular_. I always

find myself at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives

me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything

inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward

or in a tremble. I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You

will by this time think I am in love with her, so, before I go any

farther, I will tell you that I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a

tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an

amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an

imperial woman, the very _yes_ and _no_ of whose life is to me a

banquet.... I like her and her like, because one has no _sensation_; what

we both are is taken for granted.... She walks across a room in such a

manner that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic power.... I believe,

though, she has faults, the same as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have

had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are

two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly,

theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal.

In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian hold the first

place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his

child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As

a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal

being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I

should like you to save me."

It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head with such pains, while

his whole body is so clearly visible, as in this extract. This lady, it

seems, is not a Cleopatra, only a Charmian; but presently we find that

she is imperial. He does not love her, but he would just like to be

ruined by her, nothing more. This glimpse of her, with her leopardess

beauty, crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically, is all

we have. She seems to have been still living in 1848, and as Lord

Houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred. "She is an

East-Indian," Keats says, "and ought to be her grandfather's heir." Her

name we do not know. It appears from Dilke's "Papers of a Critic" that

they were betrothed: "It is quite a settled thing between John Keats and

Miss ----. God help them. It is a bad thing for them. The mother says she

cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go off. He

don't like any one to look at her or to speak to her." Alas, the tropical

warmth became a consuming fire!

"His passion cruel grown took on a hue

Fierce and sanguineous."

Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems to have worked

assiduously. Of course, worldly success was of more importance than ever.

He began "Hyperion," but had given it up in September, 1819, because, as

he said, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote

"Lamia" after an attentive study of Dryden's versification. This period

also produced the "Eve of St. Agnes," "Isabella," and the odes to the

"Nightingale" and to the "Grecian Urn." He studied Italian, read Ariosto,

and wrote part of a humorous poem, "The Cap and Bells." He tried his hand

at tragedy, and Lord Houghton has published among his "Remains," "Otho

the Great," and all that was ever written of "King Stephen." We think he

did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to show how ill his

_biographee_ could do anything.

In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on the top of a

stage-coach, and came home in a state of feverish excitement. He was

persuaded to go to bed, and in getting between the cold sheets, coughed

slightly. "That is blood in my mouth," he said; "bring me the candle; let

me see this blood." It was of a brilliant red, and his medical knowledge

enabled him to interpret the augury. Those narcotic odors that seem to

breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager who is

drifting toward the shore of the mysterious Other World, appeared to

envelop him, and, looking up with sudden calmness, he said, "I know the

color of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that

color. That drop is my death-warrant; I must die."

There was a slight rally during the summer of that year, but toward

autumn he grew worse again, and it was decided that he should go to

Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend, Mr. Severn, an artist.

After embarking, he wrote to his friend, Mr. Brown. We give a part of

this letter, which is so deeply tragic that the sentences we take almost

seem to break away from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches

of Dante's lamentable wood.

"I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. There is one

I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would recover of

itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most

for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help

it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my

state? I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am

harping,--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my

illness at your house I wish for death every day and night to deliver me

from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy

even those pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness

and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer

forever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may

say the bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you, that you

might flatter me with the best. I think, without my mentioning it, for my

sake, you would be a, friend to Miss ---- when I am dead. You think she

has many faults, but for my sake think she has not one. If there is

anything you can do for her by word or deed I know you will do it. I am

in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more

power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my

sensations with respect to Miss ---- and my sister is amazing,--the one

seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my

brother and sister in America; the thought of leaving Miss ---- is beyond

everything horrible,--the sense of darkness coming over me,--I eternally

see her figure eternally vanishing, some of the phrases she was in the

habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears.

Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There

must be; we cannot be created for this sort of suffering."

To the same friend he writes again from Naples, 1st November, 1820:--

"The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown,

I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained

well. I can bear to die,--I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God!

Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me

like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my

head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her,--I see her, I hear her.

There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from

her a moment. This was the case when I was in England, I cannot

recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's,

and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a

good hope of seeing her again,--now!--O that I could be buried near where

she lives! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her,--to

see her handwriting would break my heart. Even to hear of her anyhow, to

see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what

am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance

of recovery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the whole of my

illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never

ceased wearing me out."

The two friends went almost immediately from Naples to Rome, where Keats

was treated with great kindness by the distinguished physician, Dr.

(afterward Sir James) Clark.[389] But there was no hope from the first.

His disease was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The very

fact that life might be happy deepened his despair. He might not have

sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked only the

blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-torch that promised

safety and love and rest.

It is good to know that one of Keats's last pleasures was in hearing

Severn read aloud from a volume of Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to

Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but, finding on the second page

these lines,

"Misera me! sollievo a me non resta

Altro che il pianto, ed il pianto e delitto,"

he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the 14th February, 1821,

Severn speaks of a change that had taken place in him toward greater

quietness and peace. He talked much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep,

in which he seemed to have happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft

footfall of the angel of Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be

his Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon

his gravestone,--

"HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."

On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. His last words

were, "I am dying; I shall die easy; don't be frightened, be firm and

thank God it has come!"

He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, in that part of it

which is now disused and secluded from the rest. A short time before his

death he told Severn that he thought his intensest pleasure in life had

been to watch the growth of flowers; and once, after lying peacefully

awhile, he said, "I feel the flowers growing over me." His grave is

marked by a little headstone on which are carved somewhat rudely his name

and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or shrub has been

planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover, crowd

his small mound with a galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous

than those under which he lived.[390] In person, Keats was below the

middle height, with a head small in proportion to the breadth of his

shoulders. His hair was brown and fine, falling in natural ringlets about

a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every

feature was delicately cut; the chin was bold; and about the mouth

something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were mellow and glowing,

large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a

beautiful thought they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth

trembled.[391] Haydon says that his eyes had an inward Delphian look that

was perfectly divine.

The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but it should be

remembered that he died at twenty-five, and that he offends by

superabundance and not poverty. That he was overlanguaged at first there

can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back

to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the rich that the costly

plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is

attainable.

Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it useful to discuss

until it has been settled what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us

that this merit (whatever it is) has been denied to Keats, because his

poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time

he wrote them. But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness

of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features

of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations. In the

parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the

past. It is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom he

learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of

externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an

action of trover against every author who used his words. It is the man

behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare help himself

to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him to

listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his

intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning. Enough that we

recognize in Keats that indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we

call genius. The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands

of years it has built out of the same light and vapor its visionary

cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night

shall utterly abase and destroy.

Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other,--Wordsworth, Keats,

and Byron,--were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the

sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance

of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the

only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the existing formalism

injured his earlier poems by tingeing them with something of iconoclastic

extravagance. He was the deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a

poet, and Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. Keats had the

broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides, and he was

able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron, equally conscious, through

his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one and the many

littlenesses of the other, while Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of

his prophetic character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous

instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the

most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those

of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste

and feeling; and those of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the

understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he

lived. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets;

Keats, their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination less for

his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in

poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires

not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with motives by the duties

of life.

Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination

which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself

with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these

later days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and

caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their

sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His

imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he "hops about the

gravel with the sparrows"; was he morbid, he "would reject a Petrarcal

coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers."

So impressible was he as to say that he "had no nature," meaning

character. But he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, "The

imagination may be compared to Adam's dream: he awoke and found it

truth." He had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things, and

for him they had no other use. We are apt to talk of the classic

_renaissance_ as of a phenomenon long past, nor ever to be renewed, and

to think the Greeks and Romans alone had the mighty magic to work such a

miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is that in

him we have an example of the _renaissance_ going on almost under our own

eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him kindled by a purely

English leaven. He had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare

had, but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his

purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore. Of the

self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in one so young) the

second draft of Hyperion as compared with the first is a conclusive

proof. And far indeed is his "Lamia" from the lavish indiscrimination of

"Endymion." In his Odes he showed a sense of form and proportion which we

seek vainly in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets

(taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in our

language. No doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth

in his sudden maturity, but it _was_ maturity nevertheless. Happy the

young poet who has the saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the

shaping faculty that sooner or later will amend it!

As every young person goes through all the world-old experiences,

fancying them something peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with

every new generation, whose youth always finds its representatives in its

poets. Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in

the dictionary. Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found

in vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when it is

upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words, which are

in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic

expression than any modern English poet. And by poetic expression I do

not mean merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which

heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and

gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than is

commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions

are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or

reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times

repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. This power of language

is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants

of some word. As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or

sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the

discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the

societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the

small academy of the immortals.

The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry; for, however often we

may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious

expression that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been

reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The lowest

point was indicated when there was such an utter confounding of the

common and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke

prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good

poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as if one should say

that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles could be

made of it. We find Keats at first going to the other extreme, and

endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow; but we

see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic

gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later

poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like that of the

eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In him a vigorous

understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty;

thought emancipated itself from expression without becoming its tyrant;

and music and meaning floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on

the smooth element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness, his

poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was

elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which

underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.

Footnotes:

[384] Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed.), Vol. II. p. 36.

[385] Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Houghton's

version the best.

[386] There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of

accessary after the fact in any success; always an old woman or two,

ready to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the

childhood of persons who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a

certain "Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury," assures Mr. George

Keats, when he tells her that John is determined to be a poet, "that

this was very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of

answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the

last word people said, and then laugh." The early histories of

heroes, like those of nations, are always more or less mythical, and

I give the story for what it is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of

intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one

should _determine_ to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint

that the matter was determined earlier and by a higher disposing

power. There are few children who do not soon discover the charm of

rhyme, and perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs.

Graftys, of Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See

Haydon's Autobiography, Vol I. p.361.

[387] "I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read some

lines from (I think) the 'Bristowe Tragedy' with an enthusiasm of

admiration such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true

poetry only could have excited."--J. H. C., in Notes & Queries, 4th

s. x. 157.

[388] Haydon (Autobiography, Vol. I. p.379) says that he "strongly

suspects" Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood.

[389] The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first

house on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn's

Studio is said to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of

the Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Roman

home of their countryman Crawford.

[390] Written in 1856. O irony of Time! Ten years after the poet's

death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr. Dilke, that

"the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to

which circumstances had condemned him"! (Papers of a Critic, I. 11.)

O Time the atoner! In 1874 I found the grave planted with shrubs and

flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent

American sculptor.

[391] Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, II. 43.

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