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POETS AND NOVELISTS

POETS AND NOVELISTS

A SERIES OF LITERARY STUDIES

BY

GEORGE BARNETT SMITH

LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1875

[All rights reserved]

i.

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I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME

TO

ROBERT BROWNING

IN REMEMBRANCE OF HIS PERSONAL KINDNESS

AND

AS A TRIBUTE TO HIS GENIUS

G. B. S.

LONDON : 1875

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PREFACE.

THE following Studies — however defective in other re- spects— possess some claim to exhaustiveness, and con- sequently I have ventured to hope that with many persons they may have a permanent value. They have been revised, and in some cases extended, from the leading Reviews and Magazines. Notwithstanding, how- ever, the favourable reception the Essays met with on their original appearance, I might not now have collected them, and endeavoured to give to them 'a local habitation and a name,' but for the fact that I have been repeatedly pressed to do so by numerous individuals — whose tribute (in some cases, at least) I cannot but regard as flattering — who were desirous of possessing them in a volume. I can only trust that the public and the press will now en- dorse their verdict. The subjects of the papers, however imperfectly treated, are amongst the most attractive which can be named for lovers of books. With regard to the Essay on Thomas Love Peacock, I may be pardoned for

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claiming that it was the first full and substantial recog- nition of his genius; since it appeared; an admirable edition of his works has been issued, and I am glad that this really remarkable writer has received a much fuller attention than he enjoyed during his lifetime, and even down to the last two or three years. As for the volume generally, my end will have been answered if it should hi any appreciable degree strengthen the taste for our noble English Literature.

G. B. S.

CONTENTS

PAGE

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY . I

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING . 57

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK • IIJ

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE . • *5l THE BRONTES .

HENRY FIELDING . . . 251

ROBERT BUCHANAN . • 3°7

ENGLISH FUGITIVE POETS . 3^5

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

[EDINBURGH REVIEW]

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

THE pure humourist is one of the rarest of literary characters. His nature is not content with detecting foibles, nor his pen with pointing them out for derision ; his purpose is infinitely higher and nobler. The humour- ist must have emotions, nerves, sensibilities, and that marvellous sympathy with human nature which enables him to change places at will with other members of his species. Humour does not produce the sneer of Voltaire ; it rather smiles through the tear of Montaigne. * True humour,' it has been wisely said, c springs not more from the head than from the heart ; it is not con- tempt, its essence is love ; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It is a sort of in- verse sublimity ; exalting as it were into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us. It is, in fact, the bloom and perfume, the purest effluence of a deep, fine, and loving nature.' Without humour, society would exist in Ice-

B 2

POETS AND NOVELISTS.

landic snows : wit, like the winter sun, might glint upon the icebergs, but they would not be plastic in its glance — calm, lofty, and cold they must remain. But humour is the summer heat that generates while it smiles — the power which touches dead things and revivifies them with its generous warmth and geniality. Wit engages and amuses the individual intellect ; humour knits hearts together ; is, in truth, in a broad sense, that ' touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.' Now the world may be regarded as being composed of three classes, viz., those of us who laugh, those with whom we laugh, and those at whom we laugh ; and the tenderest solicitude is experienced by each unit of humanity lest, through some fortuitous circumstances, he should irre- trievably find himself a denizen of the last-named class. To some of the first class is given the power of directing the laugh of others, and this power is current as wit ; when to the faculty of originating ridicule is added the power of concentrating pity or pathos upon the subject, this may be styled humour. But the irony must be subjugated to the feeling. The heart must love while the countenance may smile. It will, then, be perceived, in view of these distinctions, how the humourist may assert a claim in all great and essential things superior to that which can be advanced by the wit. Humourists

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 5

are the salt of the national intellectual life. England, who occasionally claims a questionable superiority in some respects over other nations, may, in the growth of genuine humour, be allowed the pre-eminence, Germany approaching her perhaps in the nearest degree. What other literature, since the days of Elizabeth, can show such a roll of humourists as that which is inscribed with the names (amongst others) of Richardson, Addison, Steele, Prior, Gay, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and Gold- smith ? Yet after the closing names of this galaxy a dearth was witnessed like that which immediately pre- ceded their advent. It appears as though the soil of literature, having grown to its utmost capacity the pro- duct of humour, demanded time for recuperating its powers. During the past thirty or forty years another growth sprang up, and Hood, Lamb, and other inheritors of the marvellous gift have enriched the world with the perfume of their lives and works. Amongst the latest band of humourists, however, there is no name more remarkable or more justly distinguished than that which is now under consideration.

From the operation of various causes, the works of Thackeray have not hitherto enjoyed a circulation com- mensurate with their intrinsic merits. The sale of the best of his writings in his lifetime fell far short of the

POETS AND NOVELISTS.

popular demand for the works of Scott or Dickens. But their hold on society, and the recognition of their per- manent value and excellence, have gone on steadily increasing with each succeeding year, and very recently new and complete editions of them have been issued, which are within the reach of all readers. At this period, then, it may be fitting to consider the life's work of this deepest and purest of modern English satirists.

It was in these pages that the first substantial recog- nition of the genius of the author of ' Vanity Fair ' ap- peared : a quarter of a century has elapsed since then ; but in the short period between that epoch in his career and his death, a series of brilliant works issued rapidly from his pen — a pen facile to charm, to instruct, and to reprove. These works have fully justified the terms of praise in which we referred to his first great fiction. Yet it would be difficult to name a writer of fiction of equal excellence who had so little of the inventive or imagi- native faculty. Keenness of observation and a nice appreciation of character supplied him with all the ma- terials of his creations. He wrote from the experience of life, and the foibles of mankind which he satirised were those that had fallen under his notice in the vicissi- tudes of his own career, or might sometimes be traced in the recesses of his own disposition. The key, therefore,

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 7

to Thackeray's works is to be found in his life ; and few literary biographies would be more interesting, if it were written with a just and discriminating pen. We would venture to suggest to his accomplished daughter, who has shown by her own writings that some at least of his gifts have descended to her by inheritance, that she should undertake a task which no one else can fulfil with so natural and delicate a feeling of her father's genius. Probably it might already have been attempted, but for the extreme repugnance of Thackeray himself to allow his own person to be brought before the world, or to suffer the sanctity of private correspondence to be in- vaded. Nobody wrote more amusing letters ; but he wrote them not for the public. As it is, even his birth and descent have not been correctly stated in the current works of the day. His great-grandfather was in the Church, once Master of Harrow, and afterwards an Archdeacon. He had seven sons, one of whom, also named William Makepeace Thackeray, entered the Civil Service of India, became a Member of Council, and sat at the Board with Warren Hastings, some of whose minutes he signed. The son of this gentleman, and the father of our novelist, was Richmond Thackeray, also a Civil servant, who died, in 1816, at the early age of thirty. Thackeray himself was born at Calcutta, in 1811, and

8 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

was sent to England when he was seven years old. On the voyage home the vessel touched at St. Helena, where the child saw Napoleon Bonaparte. The black servant who attended him attributed to the ex-Emperor the most ravenous propensities. ' He eats,' said the sable exagge- rator, ' three sheep every day, and all the children he can lay hands on.' The joke figured years afterwards in one of Thackeray's sketches. This early connection with India left its mark in his memory, and the pleasant allu- sions to the great Ramchunder and the Bundelcund Bank were suggested by the traditions of his own infancy, He inherited from his father (who died when he was five years old) a considerable fortune, part of which had fortunately been settled on his mother, who was re- married to Major Carmichael Smyth. The remainder was left at his own disposal, and rendered him an object of envy and admiration to his less fortunate contempo- raries. The boy was sent to the Charter House, where he remained for some years ; and here again the reader familiar with his works may trace a multitude of allusions to his school-days under Dr. Russell, then the master of that school. About the year 1828 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the friend and con- temporary of Tennyson, Venables, John Mitchell Kem- ble, Charles and Arthur Buller, John Sterling, R. Monck-

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 9

ton Mimes, and of that distinguished set of men, some of whom had preceded him by a year or two, who formed what was called the Society of the Apostles, though he was not himself a member of that society. It must be confessed that at Cambridge Thackeray gave no signs of distinguished ability. He was chiefly known for his in- exhaustible drollery, his love of repartee, and for his humourous command of the pencil. But his habits were too desultory for him to enter the lists of academic com- petition, and, like Arthur Pendennis, he left the Univer- sity without taking a degree. At the age of twenty-one he entered upon London life ; he visited Weimar, which he afterwards portrayed as the Court of Pumpernickel ; and he was frequently in Paris, where his mother resided since her second marriage. His fortune and position in society seemed to permit him to indulge his tastes and to live as a gentleman at large. But the dream was of short duration. Within a few months he contracted a sleeping partnership which placed his property in the hands of a man who turned out to be insolvent, and the fortune he relied on was lost before he had enjoyed it. The act was one of gross imprudence, no doubt, and he suffered bitterly for it ; but it is not true, as has some- times been supposed, from his lively description of scenes of folly and vice, that he lost his money by his own per-

io POETS AND NOVELISTS.

sonal extravagance. Thus, then, he found himself, at two or three and twenty, with very reduced means, for he had nothing to live on but the allowance his mother and grandmother were able to make him ; with no profession, with desultory tastes and habits, and with no definite prospects in life before him. His first scheme was to turn artist and to cultivate painting in the Louvre, for he now resided chiefly with his relatives in Paris. But in the art of design he was, in truth, no more than an ac- complished amateur. The drawings with which he after- wards illustrated his own books are full of expression, humour, grace, and feeling; but they want the correct- ness and mastery of the well-trained artist. He turned then, with more hope, at the age of thirty, to the resources of the pen. But it is remarkable that all his literary pro- ductions of this, his earlier period, were anonymous ; and his literary efforts, though not wanting in pungency and an admirable style, were scattered in multifarious publi- cations, and procured for him but small profit and no fame. These years, from thirty to seven-and-thirty, which ought to have been the brightest, were the most cheerless of his existence. He wrote letters in the 'Times' under the signature of Manlius Pennialinus. He wrote an article on Lord Brougham in the ' British and Foreign Review,' which excited attention. But po-

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 11

litical writing — even political sarcasm — was not his forte ; and when politics ceased to be a joke, they became to him a bore. Amongst other experiments he accepted the editorship of a London daily newspaper, called ' The Constitutional and Public Ledger/ but — like its name- sake, which had been started and edited, a few years before, by another man of great literary genius, destined to achieve in after-life a more illustrious career — this journal lingered for ten months and then expired. The foundation of ' Punch ' was a work after Thackeray's own heart, and he contributed largely to the earlier numbers. But it was not till 1841 that he really began to make his mark in literature, under the well-known pseudonym of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, a name in which the dream of the artist still haunted the fancy of the humourist. In the midst of his perplexities, with that genuine tenderness of feeling which lay at the bottom of all his sarcasms, Thackeray fell in love, and married a young lady who might have sat for the portrait of his own Amelia, but who was not better endowed than himself with the world's goods, and much less able than himself to battle with adverse fortune. But his domestic life was overclouded by a greater calamity than these, and the malady of his wife threw a permanent shadow over the best affections of his heart, which were thenceforward devoted to his

12 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

children alone. Such was the school in which the genius of Thackeray was educated. It was not imaginative ; it was not spontaneous ; it was the result of a hard and varied experience of life and the world. It left him somewhat prone to exaggerate the follies and baseness of mankind, but it never froze or extinguished his love and sympathy for justice, tenderness, and truth. In 1847, when he was six-and-thirty years of age, he braced him- self up, for the first time, for a great and continuous literary effort, and he came before the world, which hitherto had known him only as a writer of jests and magazine articles, as the author of 'Vanity Fair.' His style, which was the result of the most careful and fasti- dious study, had now attained a high degree of perfec- tion. In the comparison which was naturally drawn between himself and Dickens, then in the heyday of popularity, it was obvious that in the command of the English language Thackeray was incomparably the master. His style was to the style of Dickens what marble is to clay ; and although he never attained to the suc- cessful vogue of his contemporary, in his lifetime, it was evident to the critical eye that the writings of Thackeray had in them that which no time could dim or obliterate.

With this novel, then, so surprising in its frankness and in its knowledge of human nature, commenced a

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 13

career which could know no repression. A mine of gold had been struck, and the nuggets were cast up freely by the hands of the hard and honest worker. In the writing of books admired by every hater of pretence, and the delivery of lectures which were as new in their style and treatment as his novels, the rest of the life of Thackeray passed away. The last fifteen years of it were years of success, celebrity, and comparative affluence. He had attained a commanding position in literature and in society, though it must be acknowledged that except in a very small circle of intimate friends, he rarely put forth any brilliant social qualities. How he impaled snobbery in ' Punch ' and gave a new impetus to serial literature by his editorship of the ' Cornhill Magazine,' are facts too widely disseminated to be dilated upon. A most good-natured editor, conscientious as well as kind, was Thackeray ; but the work was not to his taste, and after a short period he relinquished it at a large pecuniary sacrifice. To that terrible person, the owner of a ' re- jected contribution/ he was frequently most generous, breaking the literary disappointment with the solace of a bank-note in many instances. But finding it painfully difficult to say ' No ' when it became imperative to reject would-be contributors, he fled from the field in despair. To a friend he said on one occasion, 'How

14 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

can I go into society with comfort ? I dined the other

day at 's, and at the table were four gentlemen

whose masterpieces of literary art I had been compelled to decline with thanks.' So he informed his readers for the last time that he would ' not be responsible for re- jected communications.' On Christmas Eve, 1863, came the event which touched the heart of Britain with a genuine grief. The not altogether uneventful career of one of the truest and best of men was closed. When it was known that the author of ' Vanity Fair ' would charm the world no longer by his truthful pictures of English life, the grief was what we would always have it be when a leader of the people in war, arts, or letters is stricken down in the strife — deep, general, and sincere.

Postponing for the moment a consideration of what we conceive to be the leading characteristics of Thackeray's genius, a certain measure of insight into the author's mind may be gained by a glance at his works — premising that they are not taken in strict chronological order. First, with regard to his more important novels. The key with which he opened the door of fame was un- doubtedly ' Vanity Fair.' Though other writings of a less ambitious nature had previously come from his pen, until the production of this book there was no evidence that Thackeray would ever assume the high position in

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 15

letters now unanimously awarded to him. But here, at any rate, was demonstrative proof that a new star had arisen. And yet, general as was this belief, no intelligible grounds were for a time assigned for it. The novelist himself always regarded his first work as his best ; though we think that in this respect he has followed the example of Milton and other celebrated authors, and chosen as his favourite that which is not absolutely the best, though it may be equal to any which succeeded it. Probably the book was one round whose pages a halo had been thrown by various personal circumstances. But the famous yellow covers in which the ' Novel without a Hero ' originally appeared were not at first sought after with much avidity. Soon, however, it became known that a new delineator of life was at work in society, and one whose pen was as keen as the dissecting knife of the surgeon. An author had sprung up who dared to shame society by a strong and manly scorn, and by proclaiming that it ought to loathe itself in dust and ashes. The world was not unwilling to read the reflection of its weaknesses and its vices mirrored with so much wit, originality, and genius. How account otherwise for the favour which the work subsequently attained, when it lacked as a novel many of those characteristics for which novels are most eagerly read ? To the initial difficulty

1 6 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

of a story without a hero, the writer had voluntarily added that of a lack of consecutiveness and complete- ness. It was probably begun by the author not only without a hero, but without a plot. We doubt whether any of his novels were written on a plan. Several of them evidently turned under his pen into something quite different from what he had originally intended. 'The Virginians ' completely reversed, for instance, his first conception. But the novelist had what he considered a greater end in view than mere plot, one which has been well summed up by La Bruyere, who says : — * Tout fesprii d'un auteur consiste a bien definir et a bien peindre? This sentence concisely expresses the fulfilled genius of Thackeray. His mode of narrative consists in a series of pictures after the manner of Hogarth, but their popu- larity sufficiently attested their accuracy. There is no one character in ' Vanity Fair ' which can be deemed perfectly satisfactory — not that the reader always cares for that, preferring sometimes the most thoroughpaced villainy (viewing authorship as a question of art) to the most superlative virtue. Becky Sharp, the unprincipled governess, has been as unduly detested as Amelia Sedley has been too lavishly praised. There is nothing in the earlier chapters to prove that Becky Sharp was naturally and entirely unprincipled and unscrupulous, and it was

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 17

obviously the intention of the author to show that society might justly assume a great portion of the responsibility for the after-development of those qualities. With certain ground to work upon, and given conditions as adjuncts, the influence of society on natures like Becky Sharp's would be to encrust them with selfishness and superinduce complete hypocrisy. If heroine there be in the novel it is this clever adventuress, and except on some half-dozen occasions it is scarcely possible to avoid a pity approaching to contempt for the character of Amelia Sedley, who is intended to personify the good element an author generally casts about to discover when concocting a story. Captain Dobbin is overdrawn, and one is well-nigh tempted to wish that he had a little less virtue and a little more selfishness. While we love him he has a tendency to make us angry. The most masterly touches in the volume are those in which the portraits of the Marquis of Steyne and of Sir Pitt Crawley are sketched. The aristocracy furnish the villains and the most contemptible specimens of the race, whilst the excellent persons come from the ranks of the middle class and the poor — their namby-pambyism, however, now and then reducing their claims to our regard. The author speaks for the most part in his own person^ and herein lies one of the principal reasons for the success of

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1 8 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

the book. We feel the satirist at our elbow ; he is not enveloped in thick folds in the distance ; as we read his trenchant observations and withering sarcasms we can almost see the glances of scorn or of pity which he would assume when engaged in his task. Well might the world exclaim that this was no novice who thus wrote of its meannesses and its glory, its virtues and its vices. This novel lifted him at once into the position of one of the ablest writers of subjective fiction. It is especially remarkable in connection with 'Vanity Fair' to note the extremely little conversational matter in a tale of this great length ; another proof that the strength of the author lay not in the conventional groove of the novelist, but in those other powers -of Thackeray — rare observation, an acute penetration of motives, an abhor- rence of sham or pretence, and an entirely new and genuine humour.

In ' Pendennis/ the next great work by Thackeray, there is not only some approach to a consecutive plot, but we are inclined to think finer drawing of individual character than in its predecessor. There is not so much brilliancy of writing, but there is a considerable advance in the art of the novelist. With all the graphic touches which took form in the features of Becky Sharp, Amelia Sedley, and Captain Dobbin, there is nothing in the

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 19

earlier work to compare with the portraits of George Warrington, Helen Pendennis, and Laura. The hero, Arthur, is one who succumbs to the ordinary temptations of life, and has very little attaching to him of that ro- mance in which a hero is generally expected to be en- shrined. Because it was so natural the book was not regarded at first as very successful : nothing could be truer to the original than the manner in which Arthur Pendennis is sketched, and his love passages with Miss Fotheringay, the actress, are naively related ; but it was of course impossible to become inspired with the same feelings towards him as are excited by the chivalric heroes of Scott. A man who resorts in the morning to a bottle of soda-water to correct the exuberant spirits of the night before is not calculated to awaken much per- sonal adoration. He is too fallible, and the novel-reading community demands sinless heroes and heroines ere it consents to raise them to the lofty pedestal accorded to its greatest favourites. There is no exaggeration in a single portrait to be found in ' Pendennis j ' all are true ; are true to the minutest detail, and the author has simply acted as the photographer to his clients— he 'nothing extenuates or sets down aught in malice.' The early follies of Pendennis, and his University career — which was chiefly noticeable for splendid suppers and dealings

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20 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

with money-lenders at a hundred per cent. — are de- scribed with no sparing pen. The case is typical of thousands now, and is no credit to the youth of the Universities. ' Only wild oats,' the apologists for under- graduate extravagance remind us ; but there is no natural necessity that this particular University crop should be sown ; many men, worthy men too, are compelled to go through life without the satisfaction of having ruined their friends by their follies. The result overtook Pendennis which righteously succeeds, or ought to succeed, to dissi- pation and neglect of study. When the degree examina- tions came, ' many of his own set who had not half his brains, but a little regularity and constancy of occupation, took high places in the honours, or passed with decent credit. And where in the list was Pen the superb. Pen the wit and dandy, Pen the poet and orator? Ah, where was Pen the widow's darling and sole pride? Let us hide our heads and shut up the page. The lists came out ; and a dreadful rumour rushed through the Univer- sity that Pendennis of Boniface was plucked.' Yet though he fled from the University the widow went on loving him still, just the same, and little Laura hugged to her heart with a secret passion the image of the young scapegrace. So inexplicable and so devoted is the character, of woman ! The little oiphan paid the debts

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 21

of the dashing, clever hero. More sketches of society with its hollowness and pretence follow this revelation, and then we find Arthur in the modern Babylon soon to become the friend of George Warrington, who was des- tined to be his guide, philosopher, and friend. The brains of our hero now became of service, and in dwell- ing on his intellectual labour Thackeray details the secret history of a literary hack, together with the story of the establishment of a newspaper for 'the gentlemen of England,' the prospectus of which was written by Captain Shandon in Fleet Prison. Brilliant indeed were the in- tellectual Bohemians who wrote for that witty and critical journal. There are no more interesting or amusing sketches in the whole of the author's novels than those relating to this paper, and the intimate knowledge dis- played in the details of the schemes of rival printers and publishers was a part of the author's own dearly-bought experience. Arthur is strangely consoled in his endea- vours to live by the aid of literature by his uncle Major Pendennis, who assures him that ' poetry and genius, and that sort of thing, were devilishly disreputable' in his time. But success waits on him, and he can afford to smile at the eccentric officer. Were it not for the closing pages of ' Pendennis ' we could almost feel angry with Thackeray for challenging our interest in Arthur. But

22 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

the lesson he had to teach compensates for all disappoint- ments. No stones are to be unnecessarily thrown at the erring, and the shadows in Pendennis's life are to teach others how to avoid similar errors. The unworthy often run away with the honours. The history of Pendennis closes with fruition for the hero, while the nobler cha- racter, George Warrington, suffers loss. But then the novelist justly observes : —

' If the best men do not draw the great prizes in life, we know that it has been so ordained by the Ordainer of the lottery ; we own, and see daily, how the false and worthless live and prosper, while the good are .called away, and the dear and young perish untimely. We perceive in every man's life maimed happiness, the frequent falling, the boot- less endeavour, the struggle of right and wrong, in which the strong often succumb and the swift fail ; we see flowers of good blooming in foul places, as in the most lofty and splendid fortunes, flaws of vice and meanness, and stains of evil, and, knowing how mean the best of us is, let us give a hand of charity to Arthur Pendennis, with all his faults and shortcomings, who does not claim to be a hero, but only a man and a brother.'

Passing by temporarily the lectures on the Humourists in order to preserve the chain of novels unbroken, we come to a work which is perhaps the most satisfactory of all Thackeray's writings, regarding them purely in the light of literary art. There are few productions in

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 23

the world of fiction which exhibit the finish of ' Esmond/ for the author has not only drawn his characters with unusual skill, but delighted the reader with repeated bursts of natural, unaffected eloquence, in language sedulously borrowed from the age of Steele and Addison. As regards style, indeed, 'Esmond' is an incredible tour- de-force, and is by far the most original of all his books. For the first time the author transplants us to that age which afterwards became of such absorbing interest to him that he could not tear himself away from it ; so imbued was he altogether with the literature of the time of Queen Anne and George I. that at last he seemed to live in it. At his death he had another work in contemplation whose period was fixed in the eighteenth century. It is easy even to the uninitiated to discover that Thackeray wrote this history of Esmond, a colonel in the service of Her Majesty Queen Anne, thoroughly con amore. He revelled in his theme and in the associa- tions it brought with it. Genial, witty Dick Steele and Mr. Joseph Addison are introduced to us, and we see them, along with Esmond, drinking the Burgundy, which, says Addison, 'my Lord Halifax sent me.' We are carried through portions of Marlborough's campaigns, and the spirit blazes with enthusiasm at the pluck which wrought such valiant deeds, and brought undying honour

24 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

on the British arms. The avarice and ambition of the brilliant Churchill are forgotten as the plans of his con- summate genius are unravelled. Esmond's career with General Webb is traced with intense interest, and the scenes become as real to us as they undoubtedly seemed to the author. The plot of the book is not of the happiest description, the machinations of the Jacobites being interwoven largely with the thread of the narrative. The hero loves in the outset Beatrix Esmond, daughter of a viscount, and the devotion he exhibits to the idol of his heart and his imagination is something extraordinary even in comparison with the loves of other heroes. Beatrix, however, was unworthy of it: homage she would receive, true passion she seemed incapable of returning. Self-willed to a degree, the noble nature of such a man as Esmond was as a sealed book to her. His gravest feelings she treated with levity, and at length her con- duct with the Pretender broke the spell, and threw down from its lofty pedestal, once and for ever, the idol he had set up. Like the marble it was beautiful to the eye ; like the marble it was cold and insensible to the touch. Finally, Esmond contracts a union with Beatrix's mother, Lady Castlewood, still handsome and comparatively young, and who had always cherished the memory of Esmond as one whom she dearly loved in his youth.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 25

Her affection for him had never waned. The volume closes with their settlement on the banks of the Potomac, in a calm and serene happiness. The autobiographer, in describing their Virginian estate and Transatlantic life, says : — ' Our diamonds are turned into ploughs and axes for our plantations, and into negroes, the • happiest and merriest, I think, in all this country; and the only jewel by which my wife sets any store, and from which she hath never parted, is that gold button she took from my arm on the day when she visited me in prison, and which she wore ever after, as she told me, on the tenderest heart in the world.' In reading ' Esmond/ so cleverly is the story told, and with such ease and truthfulness, that the reader does not stay to note what a difficult task the novelist has set himself in venturing to deal with a plot more than commonly unattractive. Thackeray, however, is nowhere the slave of a story; and in sometimes deli- berately fighting against conventional construction and probability, he has proved by his success in enlisting interest and sympathy that he wielded the pen of a master. The world can forgive its hero for not doing what ninety-nine heroes in a hundred perform, when his history is related with the fidelity and ability which dis- tinguish ' Esmond.' There are more characters carefully and vividly drawn in this book than are to be found in

26 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

the entire novels of many popular writers; and that pungency of Thackeray's pen which cuts through indi- vidualities as sharply and clearly as the diamond cuts through the glass, is here in full operation. It was as superior to its predecessor as the latter was to almost all the novels of the time. In regard to historical por- traiture it has never been excelled; to read it once is to be struck with its eloquence and power ; to read it a second time is to be impressed with its fidelity and photographic accuracy.

Thackeray rose to the perfection of his art in fiction in 'The Newcomes;' and it is such books as this which show us what a fine teacher and instructor the novel may become in the hands of genius. In the representation of human nature this story is worthy of Richardson or Fielding. It is the chef-d'oetivre, in our opinion, of its author. There is not lacking that infinite sarcasm observable in previous works, but the writer has touched more deeply the springs of human sympathy. Within the whole scope of fiction there is no single character which stands out more nobly for the admiration of readers to all time than that of Colonel Newcome. The painter of that portrait alone might well lay claim to an undying canvas. As faithfully and as naturally as though limned by the hand of Sir Joshua Reynolds

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 27

himself the features of the old soldier appear before us. Having written ' The Newcomes,' Thackeray may be said to have shaken hands as an equal with the two or three great masters of fiction. If it be the province of the novelist to depict human nature as it is, it must be conceded, at any rate, that there was nothing else left for the author to do to entitle him to the highest honours of his class. Nor is it a little singular too that in the story just mentioned Thackeray has given us the best female character which has proceeded from his fertile brain — Ethel Newcome. She comes to us as the sweet teacher of more goodness and religion than a whole company of preachers. We are inclined to agree with her cousin Clive Newcome that to look into her eyes would be almost too much for such unworthy imperfect creatures as men, and that she is one of that rare class of beings sent into the world occasionally to tell us that Heaven has not altogether forgotten us. What a story of society ' The Newcomes ' is ! First we have the Newcome family, with Sophia Alethea, whose mission and self-imposed duty it was ' to attend to the interests of the enslaved negro; to awaken the benighted Hot- tentot to a sense of the truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists ; to arouse the indifferent and often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in the

28 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

right way ; to head all the public charities of her sect; and do a thousand secret kindnesses that none knew of ; to answer myriads of letters, pension endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous baby linen/ — all which she did ' womanfully ' for nigh fourscore years. Then we have the Honeymans, with the singular story of the Rev. Charles Honeyman. Clive Newcome's uncles occupy a large portion of the narrative, and Sir Barnes Newcome appears and contrives to earn our unmitigated contempt. Grey Friars looms into view, with the hero Clive at school within its precincts. Good James Binnie is introduced, and honest J. J. Ridley. Electioneering contests, with all their humour, are por- trayed, while the scheming members of society are also flayed for their snobbery. From the heartlessness of vampires and fools— the Floracs, the Kews, &c. — we are pleased to hurry away and to light upon such pas- sages of sweetness and beauty as this, where the Colonel on his arrival in England from India is welcomed by his little niece Ethel :—

1 He took a little slim white hand and laid it down on his brown palm, where it looked all the whiter ; he cleared the grizzled moustachio from his mouth, and stooping down he kissed the little white hand with a great deal of grace and dignity. There was no point of resemblance, and yet a something in the girl's look, voice, and movements, which

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 29

caused his heart to thrill, and an image out of the past to rise up and salute him. The eyes which had brightened his youth (and which he saw in his dreams and thoughts for faithful years afterwards as though they looked at him out of heaven) seemed to shine upon him after five-and-thirty years. He remembered such a fair bending neck and clustering hair, such a light foot and airy figure, such a slim hand lying in his own — and now parted from it with a gap of ten thousand long days between. . . . Parting is death, at least as far as life is concerned. A passion comes to an end ; it is carried off in a coffin, or weeping in a post- chaise ; it drops out of life one way or other, and the earth clods close over it, and we see it no more. But it has been part of our souls and it is eternal. Does a mother not love her dead infant ? a man his lost mistress ? with the fond wife nestling at his side, — yes, with twenty children smiling round her knee. No doubt, as the old soldier held the girl's hand in his, the little talisman led him back to Hades, and he saw Leonora.'

The book has its love passages — in some cases sad and miserable. Chapters of pathetic interest abound, where the world is exhibited at its old tricks of topsy- turvy— Lady Clara loving Jack Belsize and being be- loved madly in return, while her hand is sold to Sir Barnes Newcome, ' society,' forsooth, blessing the bar- gain : Clive married to Rosey Mackenzie, whom he loves in a way, though his real devotion belongs to his cousin, who is put into the matrimonial auction and knocked down to an idiotic member of the peerage. As

30 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

for the marriages which 'have been arranged,' who has not heard uttered, as our satirist asks, 'the ancient words, " I promise to take thee," &c.> knowing them to be untrue; and is there a bishop on the bench that has not Amen'd the humbug in his lawn sleeves, and called a blessing over the kneeling pair of perjurers ? ' Hypo- crisy and humbug are succeeded by disaster in the novel. The grand old Colonel is ruined by the failure of the celebrated Bundelcund Bank, but when there comes in his need a cheque from one whom he had helped in days gone by, the bankrupt Colonel only exclaims, ' I thank my God Almighty for this ! ' and passes on the cheque immediately to another sufferer. The story rapidly pro- gresses. The death of Colonel Newcome is told with a pathos almost unequalled, and dear old Grey Friars becomes once more the witness of a scene to be ever held in remembrance. After this sad incident the novel speedily ends, with the united happiness of the two chil- dren whom the Colonel had most dearly loved. It is one of the few books which we close with regret when we have finished them. Genial, generous, and noble in its sentiments, we seem almost to reach the mind of Thackeray while perusing it. It gives us full assurance that his mission was of far wider import than that of a mere scourger of society. It is evidently written by a

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 31

man who loves the world, though he hates its follies. He has scorn for its dissimulation, indignation for its oppression, smiles for its happiness, and tears for its woes.

In continuation of his previous novel ' Esmond,' Thackeray returned to the historical vein in ' The Vir- ginians,' which follows the fortunes of the Esmond family after its migration to America. It was one of his cha- racteristics that the creations of his art acquired so com- plete a reality that he could not part from them, and they continued, as it were, to live on, and reappeared in his later works long after the fiction which had given birth to them had come to a close. Thus his i Virginians ' grew out of ' Esmond/ and it is one of the pleasantest of his works. The course of true love pursues a devious way, and the weaknesses of one character serve to set in bold relief the heroism of others. The fairer sex have no reason to complain of the treatment they receive at the hands of our author, and in this story two of their species are immortalised in a setting for which we must ever be grateful. But while we are interested in much love we are also admonished by much morality, though the moralising of Thackeray on all occasions is anything but offensive. He has the gift of so exhibiting foibles and idiosyncrasies that there is no need for him to lash himself

32 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

into a furious state of indignation, as the manner of some is ; that calm, sneering smile is sufficiently effectual ; heavy, clumsy weapons or bludgeons may make much demonstration, but it is the light, piercing touch of the pointed steel which is the most dangerous. Thackeray manages to find the one vulnerable point in our armour ; he introduces the rapier of his sarcasm, and we are slain. There is no withstanding his weapon. Surely the world should be the better for the fearless work which this man accomplished ! Honestly has he besought it to discard its deceit and selfishness, and who knows but vast results have followed the teaching of the life-long lesson ? Does he not ask us. brother man ! to be more true to ourselves, to our own nature ; to drop the cloak which we perpetu- ally wear when we step forth into the world ? He would have man walk abroad upright, strong in his own virtue, and not ashamed to meet his fellows, as though in the great game of life he was determined to revoke through every trick in order to seize upon the stakes. And is it so very inhuman to help a friend or a brother that it has become so uncommon? Are the heavens always to appear as brass when the cry for help is raised ? Harry Esmond Warrington ' in his distress asked help from his relations ; his aunt sent him a tract and her blessing ; his uncle had business out of town, and could not, of

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 33

course, answer the poor boy's petition. . . . My Lord and Lady Skinflint, when they consult in their bedroom about giving their luckless nephew a helping hand, and determine to refuse, and go down to family prayers and meet their children and domestics, and discourse vir- tuously before them and then remain together and talk nose to nose — what can they think of one another ? and of the poor kinsman falling among thieves and groaning for help unheeded? How can they go on with those virtuous airs ? How can they dare look each other in the face ? ' Brave writer ! these are manly words, but the world in great part still practises the selfish principle. It takes a long time to make it understand that a reli- gious tract, though possibly very cheap, is not very filling to the hungry stomach, nor does it go far in clothing the shivering limbs. Cropping up here and there in his sparkling leaves, such are the lessons Thackeray would teach. In novels like ' The Virginians ' they are sub- ordinate to the more leading purposes of the story, but human nature has changed little since the period when its scenes were fixed. Graphic pictures of American scenery abound in its pages, and celebrated characters of the reign of George II. appear on the stage. The philo- sophy of the novel may not be profound, but it is always plain and unmistakable. If there be any failure per-

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ceptible, it is a failure possessed in common with the greatest writers and dramatists, who, in attempting to depict the men, the morals, and the manners of a pre- ceding age, have never been able entirely to get rid of their own.

The remaining works of fiction produced subsequently to * The Virginians ' are somewhat slight in their con- struction (with the exception of one to be named), but generally exhibit great power. The exception, as regards length and plot, is * The Adventures of Philip,' a work worthy almost to take rank with any of those which are more widely known, on account of its extremely realistic pictures of life, and its depth of human interest. In the sketches of those ' who robbed Philip, those who helped him, and those who passed him by,' we come upon varieties of love, passion, and duplicity drawn with won- drous skill. The sad parts of the story are written with indelible ink, and all through that fine nervous sensibility which should distinguish the highest novelists is strikingly apparent. The same remark applies to the beautiful story of the ' Hoggarty Diamond.' Of the memoirs of that extraordinary youth Barry Lyndon, it is scarcely necessary to say more than that they are told with no diminution of vigour ; all the later short stories of Thackeray, in fact, are written in English noticeable for

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 35

its simplicity and purity. The wine is not so tart, does not sparkle quite so much, but it is mellower, and there is greater body in it. What could more conclusively exhibit this than the story the author left unfinished, ' Denis Duval ' ? Here we have the last lines he ever wrote — lines which triumphantly dispose of the taunt that Thackeray was writing himself out. Of few can it be said that their later works exhibit a strength and genius undimmed by time. Yet Thackeray was one of that rare minority. The period of decadence ha not set in with him. He had only just reached the top of the hill, he had taken no steps on his descent, To his powers of perception, and his possession of the critical faculty in no small degree, ' The Roundabout Papers/ the inimitable Paris, Irish, and Eastern Sketches, and his imitations of contemporary authors, bear ample testimony; while 'The Snob Papers,' bur- lesques, and ballads, overflow with comic humour. As regards the authorship of ballads alone, we have no writer of vers de societ'e at the present time who could be put into competition with him. 'Please- man X/ is famous ; yet even Praed or Father Prout can show nothing better than ' Peg of Limavaddy,' 'At the Church Gate,' and 'Little Billee.' Novel, sketch, ballad, or essay, Thackeray has summed up in

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great part the lessons he would inculcate in these well- known verses : —

1 O, Vanity of Vanities !

How wayward the decrees of Fate are ; How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are !

'Though thrice a thousand years are past,

Since David's son the sad and splendid, The weary King Ecclesiast,

Upon his awful tablets penned it, —

' Methinks the text is never stale, And life is every day renewing Fresh comments on the old, old tale, Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin.'

In noticing the various works of Thackeray thus briefly, we have purposely left the lectures on the Four Georges and the English Humourists till the close, as they belong to a new and entirely distinct class of effort. Probably this was the first occasion on which a writer assumed the lecturer and the critic in one. Those who were privileged to hear the author deliver his lectures in person will remember how he took the town by storm, and the same enthusiasm was manifested when Thackeray went to Edinburgh and visited the principal towns in England and America, where the whole of the intellectual classes of the population flocked to hear him. To get

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 37

the opinions of a famous literary man on his distinguished predecessors delivered vM voce was naturally attractive, and the imposing form of Titmarsh with his snowy hair has not yet passed out of the recollection of his auditors. We heard him on the age in which he was thoroughly at home. He had made that period in a manner his own by an intimate knowledge of all its leading spirits, and he appeared to strike a chord of self-satisfaction when he said, ' I knew familiarly a lady who had been asked in marriage by Horace Walpole, who had been patted on the head by George I.' This immediately takes him to the time of Johnson, Goldsmith, Steele, Pope, and Swift, and he is happy. He then goes on to talk pleasantly of the times and manners of the Four Georges, not sparing the gall of satire, however, when he deems it necessary to mix it with his ink. As a citizen of the time he thus describes the advent of the First George, and the facts of history but too fully justify the sweeping condemna- tion : —

' Here we are, all on our knees. Here is the Archbishop of Canterbury prostrating himself to the head of his church, with Kielmansegge and Schulenberg with their ruddled cheeks grinning behind the Defender of the Faith. Here is my Lord Duke of Marlborough kneeling, too, the greatest warrior of all times ; he who betrayed King William — be- trayed King James I. — betrayed Queen Anne — betrayed

38 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

England to the French, the Elector to the Pretender, the Pretender to the Elector ; there are my Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke, the latter of whom has just tripped up the heels of the former ; and if a month's more time had been allowed him, would have had King James at Westminster/

But foolish as the foreign gentleman was, he was astute enough to see through loyalty of this description. The bargain with England was that she wanted a Pro- testant puppet, and as George was not unwilling, for a consideration, to become one, matters were arranged. Though not without his faults, George I. had, as Thackeray points out, the countervailing virtues of justice, courage, and moderation. In introducing his immediate successor, the essayist sketches a memorable scene. An eager messenger in jack-boots, who had ridden from London, forced his way into a bedroom in Richmond Lodge, where the master was taking a nap after dinner. With a strong German accent and many oaths, the man on the bed, starting up, asked who dared to disturb him ? ' I am Sir Robert Walpole,' said the messenger. The awakened sleeper hated Sir Robert. ' I have the honour to announce to your Majesty, that your royal father, King George I., died at Osnaburg, on Saturday last, the roth instant' ' Dat is one big lief roared out his Sacred Majesty King George II., but that was how he came to be monarch nevertheless. The

WILLIAM: MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 39

Second George was more wrongheaded than his father, and England was saved during many years of his reign by the strong will of that strange mixture of courage, dissoluteness, statesmanship, and meanness, Sir Robert Walpole, and by the good sense and tact of Queen Caroline. Brave the King undoubtedly was, but in and around his court there was the old sickly air of corruption, fed rather than suppressed by a sycophant clergy. The trenchant words of the great satirist are not a whit too strong in which to describe the godlessness and hypocrisy of the period. And when the sovereign died, some of the divines carried their cant behind the grave, and re- ferred to their master as one too good for earth. They had crawled in the dust before his mistresses for prefer- ment, and having got it, must of course pay for it some- how. Diving beneath the surface of society, Thackeray wisely says, * It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England ; the working educated men, away from Lord North's bribery in the senate ; the good clergy not corrupted into parasites by the hope of prefer- ment ; the tradesmen rising into manly opulence ; the painters pursuing their gentle calling ; the men of letters in their quiet studies ; these are the men whom we love and like to read of in the last age.' With these classes pure and sound, kings and puppets may sport with im-

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punity ; the kingdom is safe ; it is when the middle classes are corrupt and worthless that the foundations of society begin to break up. Pleasant gossip of the good but obstinate King George, the third of his name, is vouchsafed to us, with glimpses of his pure court — would it had always remained so — within whose precincts many a battle was won over his opponents by the dogged monarch. Then we come to the period of his terrible malady, and in describing the closing scene of all, the essayist breaks out into a passage of touching eloquence, which we transcribe here as being in his most successful vein : —

1 What preacher need moralise on this story ; what words save the simplest are requisite to tell it ? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of such a misery smites me down in submission before the Ruler of kings and men, the Monarch Supreme over empires and republics, the inscrutable Dis- penser of life, death, happiness, victory. " O brothers ! " I said to those who heard me first in America — " O, brothers • speaking the same mother tongue — O comrades ! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse, and call a truce to battle ! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest ; dead, whom millions prayed for in vain." Driven off the throne ; buffeted by rude hands ; with his children in revolt ; the darling of his old age killed before him untimely ; our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries : " Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little !"

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 41

" Vex not his ghost — oh ! let him pass — he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer ! "

Hush ! strife and quarrel, over the solemn grave ! Sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy.'

The lectures on the English Humourists, a subject peculiarly adapted to the bent of Thackeray, commence with Swift, the genius who had a life-hunt for a bishopric and missed it. The bitterness of a generation of man- kind seemed to be concentrated in that one spirit. We scarcely understand him now, or if we do, then genius is miserably weak and vulnerable in some points if strong as adamant in others. He did not succeed, and it was his constant habit, we are assured, to keep his birthday as a day of mourning. Yet there are some aspects in which we like to regard him. We admire his utter scorn at times, his contempt for the tinsel, and the power of his eagle eye to pierce to the heart of things. He could also crush pretence, at once and effectually. A bumptious young wit said to him in company, ' You must know, Mr. Dean, that I set up for a wit ! ' 'Do you so ? ' said the Dean. ' Take my advice and sit down again.' Thackeray mistrusts the religion of Swift, and mentions as one of the strongest reasons for doing so, the fact of his recommend- ing the dissolute author of ' The Beggar's Opera ' to turn

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clergyman, and look out for a seat on the bench. But this master of irony varied so in his moods, that it is impossible to know whether this advice was not simply the result of that intense chagrin which possessed him, rather than of a deliberate recklessness of the good. That Swift suffered, mentally, more than almost any man history takes note of may be accepted, but it was partly due to the workings of an ' evil spirit.' It is justly said of him that 'he goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed of a devil. Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God ! it was, what a lonely rage of long agony — what a vulture that tore the heart of that giant ! It is awful to think of the great sufferings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone, somehow. Goethe was so. I can't fancy Shakspeare otherwise. The giants must live apart. The kings can have no company. But this man suffered so ; and deserved so to suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain.' And this pain went through life — in darkness, rage, and misery he spent his days ; no light broke through the starless night. The end came, and terrible is the story, — the witty, the eloquent, the gifted, the godlike in in- tellect, the devilish in heart, Swift passed away in a state

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 43

not unlike that against which he had prayed in a letter to Bolingbroke, when he said, ' It is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.' Excellent talk follows this sketch — gossip of Congreve and Addison, with wise critical remarks interspersed by the author, who may be said to have established a prescriptive right to the age of which he wrote. Somewhat too mudh, we are inclined to think, Thackeray made of Pope, though the executive ability of the young poet was of the most mar- vellous description. Poor Dick Steele, that bundle of failings and weaknesses, has a paper all to himself, and we rise from its perusal with our love for the kindly, miserable sinner intensified. It was surface wickedness with Steele entirely : his heart was tender, and his cha- racter simple as a child's. For the genius and character of Fielding Thackeray had of course the highest admira- tion. Very few lines need be read before it is apparent that the modern novelist had studied his predecessor minutely. He quotes Gibbon's famous saying about Fielding with intense relish. ' The successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren (the Fieldings) of England : but the romance of " Tom Jones," that exquisite picture of humour and manners, will outlive the palace of the

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Escurial, and the Imperial Eagle of Austria.' But here our pleasant reminiscences of the English humourists must end, and some observations of a general nature be made upon the genius of him who has bequeathed to us his thoughts and judgments on his illustrious prede- cessors.

The first characteristic which strikes the reader of Thackeray is unquestionably his humour. It does not gleam forth as flashes of lightning, rare and vivid, but is more like the ever-bubbling fountain, the perennial spring. It is a kind of permeating force throughout all his works — works now lashed into sarcasm and anon dis solved in pathos. It is one of the great mistakes regarding this author that he is satirical and nothing else. No critic who thus represents him can have either studied his novels or caught the spirit and purpose of the man. He is one of the best of English humourists simply be- cause his nature is sensitive at all points. What Carlyle has said of Jean Paul may be said of him — ' In his smile itself a touching pathos may lie hidden, a pity too deep for tears. He is a man of feeling, in the noblest sense of that word; for he loves all living with the heart of a brother ; his soul rushes forth, in sympathy with gladness and sorrow, with goodness or grandeur, over all creation. Every gentle and generous affection, every thrill of

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 45

mercy, every glow of nobleness, awakens in his bosom a response; nay, strikes his spirit into harmony.' It must ever be so. But when the first satirical papers of Thackeray were published the world had only seen one side of his humour. The 'Snob Papers' and burles- ques, and the memoirs of Mr. Yellowplush, gave place in due time to a richer vein in more important works. The sparkling Champagne was followed, as it were, by the deep rich Burgundy. As Dickens was his superior in the faculty of invention, so was the former eclipsed by the greater depth of Thackeray's penetration. Truth to life distinguishes nearly all the characters of Dickens, those at least which belong to the lower classes; but this truth is the obvious truth of caricature rather than of reality : Thackeray takes us below the surface ; we travel through the dark scenes of the human drama with him ; he makes his notes and comments without flattery and with astounding realism, and when we part company from his side we wish human nature were somewhat nobler than it is. But his wit does not preclude him from being fair and just. He is indeed scrupulously so, and to the erring kind and tender. It used to be said occasionally of his works as they appeared, ' Ah, there's the same old sneer' — so ready is the world to follow the course in which its attention is directed. Speaking of

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the maligners of Society, he says, ' You who have ever listened to village bells, or have walked to church as children on sunny Sabbath mornings ; you who have ever seen the parson's wife tending the poor man's bed- side ; or the town clergyman threading the dirty stairs of noxious alleys upon his sacred business ; — do not raise a shout when one of these falls away, or yell with the mob that howls after him.' Surely these are noble words to come from one whose intellectual current was set in the direction of contempt ! With all his keen sense of the ridiculous and his scathing powers of invective, there is no one instance where for the sake of the brilliancy of his satire he ever cast a slur upon truly philanthropic labour, or perilled his reputation for the worship of the pure and the good. If ever man's humour were useful to instruct as well as to delight, it is that of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. When he laughs we know he will do it fairly — his eye wanders round all, and neither friend nor foe, if vulnerable, can keep out the arrows of his wit. His position, as a humourist, is certainly that of the equal of most of the wits of whom he has written, and one scarcely inferior to even Swift or Sterne.

A second quality that is observable in him is his fidelity. And to this we do not attach the restricted meaning that the persons of his novels are faithful to

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 47

nature though that they incontestably are — but the

wide import of being true to the results of life as we see them daily. He does not allow the development of a story to destroy the unities of character, and in this respect he resembles the greatest of all writers. Take an example. At the close of * The Newcomes/ instead of preserving alive the noble Colonel to witness the happiness of the family in its resuscitated fortunes, Thackeray causes him to die, and that in the humblest manner. With most novelists we could predict a very different ending, but one not so true as Thackeray has had the courage to adopt. Sorrow we may indulge that the death should thus occur, but we must acknowledge that it is more consonant with our daily experience than any other conclusion would have been, however pleasant as matter of fiction. The same thing is noticed in the character of Beatrix Esmond ; we are first interested in her ; then our faith is gradually shattered ; and, finally, we are thoroughly disappointed by the catastrophe. The result is contrary to that which we expected j it is1 other than would have been given by most writers, but it is none the less true. Take the whole of his creations, let the test of fidelity be applied to each, and it will be found that the writers are very few indeed who have been so thoroughly able to disentangle themselves from the

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common method of adapting character to plot, or who have made their individualities so distinct, and kept them so to the end. To place him in comparison with other authors who are distinguished for their delineation of character as character — as witnessed at certain points or stages — is unfair both to him and to them. Conver- sations, with one, stamp individualities, and the test of their fidelity is the absence of contradiction in the out- ward forms of speech and action whenever the individuals are introduced : this was the life-painting of Dickens, for instance. With Thackeray the case is different. He does not depend so much on the conversational or de- scriptive recognition of character. He gives us more of their mind or heart than of their person. He does not tell us what they look like, but what they are ; and through all his novels they answer to the bent and the natural instincts we have been led to associate with them. It is this elevated form of fidelity that we would insist upon as preeminently to be noticed in Thackeray : and were it on this ground alone we should not hesitate to place him in the very first rank of novelists. In this essential particular, in truth, he has no rival. Others may excel him in various arts of fiction, but with this passport, even his superiors in minor detail will accord to him a perfect equality, if not a superiority, in the manifestation of the cardinal principle of novel- writing.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 49

The subjectiveness of Thackeray is another quality which has greatly enhanced the value of his works. It is generally admitted that subjective writers have a more powerful influence over humanity than those of the class styled objective. It is natural, perhaps, that the external descriptions of circumstances or scenery should not move us nearly so much as the life-record of a breathing, suffering, rejoicing human being. Be his station what it may, we are interested in every individual of the species whose career is faithfully pictured. The author of ' Vanity Fair ' is one of the few men who have been able to endue their characters with being and motion. When there were few writers who had either the courage or the gifts to be natural, Thackeray gave a new impetus to the world of fiction. So eminently sub- jective are his works, that those of his friends who knew him well are able to trace in them the successive stages of his personal career, and to show in what manner the incidents of his own life operated upon his novels. There are but few occurrences in the whole series that were not drawn either from his individual history or the history of some one of his friends or acquaintances. This is, doubtless, one of the most influential causes of the reality of his stories. No stiff, formal record of events, dispassionately told, is to be witnessed. If the

E

50 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

reader reads at all, he must perforce become interested in his work. There probably never were novels written in which there was so little exaggeration of colouring. His dear Harry Fielding has been his guide, but the author of ' Tom Jones ' has been almost outstripped by his pupil. The latter has been able to throw away more effectually the folds of drapery in which character has generally been presented to us. In his model he was happy, for, previous to Thackeray, Fielding was the most subjective writer in the annals of fiction. One can understand the charm which those writings exercised over his successor, and the desire which he felt to con- struct his novels after the fashion of which he had become so greatly enamoured. But the pupil has the greater claim to our regard in the fact that his work is such that not a line of it need be excised in public reading. He is Fielding purified. All the vivacity and the life-giving strokes which belonged to the pencil of the earlier master are reproduced in the younger, and the interest is also preserved intact. But with the later age has come the purer language, and Thackeray may be said to stand in precisely the same relation to the nineteenth century as Fielding stood to the eighteenth. The absence of exag- geration in Thackeray's drawing of character is very remarkable. Notwithstanding the multiplicity of his

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 51

personages, there are not two which in any sense resemble each other. The faculty is very rare of being able to transfer the lineaments of commonplace people in such a manner as that others will care to study them. Yet this is the result which Thackeray achieves, and without labour. Nothing transcendental, or that which is beyond human nature, is thrown in as a means of bribing the reader into closer acquaintanceship. As men passed Thackeray he observed them; as they interested him he drew them; but in doing so he felt that to add to the original would destroy the identity, and the conse- quence of his consummate art is that throughout the whole of his varied picture-gallery there is no portrait which bears the impress of falsity or distortion. To say the truth, and to describe what he saw before him, was always the novelist's own boast. There could be no nobler' ambition for any writer, but there are few who have attained the perfect height of the standard.

Leading out of his subjectiveness, or rather being a broader and grander development of it, we come to the fourth great characteristic of Thackeray — his humanity. That is the crown and glory of his work. And yet this man, who was sensitive almost beyond parallel, was charged with having no heart! Shallow critics, who gave

E2

52 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

a surface-reading to 'Vanity Fair,' imagined they had gauged the author, and in an off-hand manner described him as a man of no feeling — the cold, simple cynic. It will be remembered that the same charge of having no heart was made against Macaulay; but its baselessness was discovered on his death, when it became known that ' the heartless ' one had for years pursued a career of almost unexampled benevolence. So superficial are the judgments of the world! Against Thackeray the charge was doubly cruel; he was one of those men who are naturally full of sensibility to a degree. Men who understood him best knew that it cost him an effort to subdue that part of his nature which hastened to sympa- thise with others. Selfishness was as foreign to him as insincerity. The man was true as the light of heaven to the generous instincts of his nature. To veil at times this side of his character was essential in order to give play to that satire which kills. If his mission was to exalt the good and the pure, it was also as decidedly his mission to abase the false. To do this he must neces- sarily appear severe. But who that reads him well can fail to perceive that the eye accustomed to blaze with scorn could also moisten with sympathy and affection ? What man without heart could have written such passages

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 53

as that episode in the l Hoggarty Diamond ' ? Titmarsh is describing his journey to the Fleet Prison, accompanied by his wife : —

1 There was a crowd of idlers round the door as I passed out of it, and had I been alone I should have been ashamed of seeing them ; but, as it was, I was only thinking of my dear, dear wife, who was leaning trustfully on my arm, and smiling like heaven into my face — ay, and took heaven too into the Fleet Prison with me — or an angel out of heaven. Ah ! I had loved her before, and happy it is to love when one is hopeful and young in the midst of smiles and sun- shine ; but be chappy, and then see what it is to be loved by a good woman ! I declare before heaven, that of all the joys and happy moments it has given me, that was the crowning one — that little ride, with my wife's cheek on my shoulder, down Holborn to the prison ! Do you think I cared for the bailiff that sat opposite ? No, by the Lord ! I kissed her and hugged her — yes, and cried with her like- wise. But before our ride was over her eyes dried up, and she stepped blushing and happy out of the coach at the prison-door, as if she were a princess going to the Queen's drawing-room.'

Or is there to be found in all fiction a scene more pathetic than the one describing the death of Colonel Newcome? To have written that alone would have deservedly made any man great. Though it is doubt- less familiar to every reader, it will be impossible to illustrate fully the human tenderness of the author with-

54 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

out quoting some portion of it here. The scene is at Grey Friars: —

' Ethel came in with a scared face to our pale group. " He is calling for you again, dear lady," she said, going up to Madame de Florae, who was still kneeling ; " and just now he said he wanted Pendennis to take care of his boy. He will not know you." She hid her tears as she spoke. She went into the room where Clive was at the bed's foot ; the old man within it talked on rapidly for a while ; then again he would sigh and be still ; once more I heard him say hurriedly : " Take care of him when I am in India ;" and then with a heart-rending voice he called out, " Leonore, Ldonore ! " She was kneeling by his side now. The patient's voice sank into faint murmurs ; only a moan now and then announced that he was not asleep. At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcombe's hands outside the bed feebly beat time. And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, 11 Adsum ! :' and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were called ; and lo ! he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name and stood in the presence of The Master/

The principal defect alleged against Thackeray is that he is a mannerist. But when it is considered that the same charge could be laid against every writer in the roll of literature with the exception of the few imperial intellects of the universe, it must be conceded that the charge is of little moment. All men, save the Homers,

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 55

Shakspeares, and Goethes of the world, are mannerists. There is not a writer of eminence living at the present day who is not a mannerist. Tennyson, Browning, and Carlyle are all mannerists. It is impossible to quarrel with that which sets the stamp of individuality and origi- nality on the productions of the intellect.

To assign Thackeray's ultimate position in literature is a difficult task, for nothing is less certain than the per- manence of literary attractiveness and fame ; but we think that his works will be read and as keenly enjoyed after the lapse of a century as they are now. Fielding has survived longer than that period, and weightier reasons for immortality than could be advanced in his case might be advanced in favour of Thackeray. If his works ceased to be read as pictures of society and de- lineations of character, they would still retain no in- glorious place in English literature from the singular purity and beauty of their style. It is style even more than matter which embalms a literary reputation. To the faithfulness with which he spake the English tongue we believe future generations will testify. Whatsoever was good, honest, and true found in him a defender; whatsoever was base, unmanly, or false shrank abashed in his presence. A man with less pretence, less assump- tion, less sham never existed: he revolted from appear-

56 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

ing that which he was not. His works were the reflex of the man, and like a shaft of light, which, while it pierces into the deepest recesses of dissimulation and vice, smiles benignantly upon those aspirations and feelings which are the noblest glory of humanity.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

[CORNHILL MAGAZINE]

ELIZABETH BARRETT BRO WNING.

WHAT are the essential attributes of the Poet's art which cause him to be adorned with the noblest crown it is in the power of humanity to confer ? From the period when * the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle ' thundered that music which was to reverberate through all time, along the swift revolving centuries, even to our own somewhat prosaic day, we witness an unbroken succession of kings of song, whose thrones have been more permanent than those of the Pharaohs and the Caesars. What allegiance do we bear, or what sworn fealty have we kept, truer than that which we own towards those who have touched into activity the secret springs of our sensibility ? All the grandeurs of birth, and dignities which have blos- somed at the touch of monarchs, fail to move our admi- ration as compared with the simple majesty of genius, which has its rise in higher soil, and whose fruition is not dependent upon the smile of human potentates. One has somewhat bitterly said of good princes, that ail their names might be graven within the gem of one ring. The

60 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

same cannot be said of the royal race of poets. Theirs is not the accidental title to reverence which, with the majority of princes, ceases with the yielding up of life. There is nothing perishable with the poet but that clay which has hemmed him in, and restricted the flights of his burning and ever-aspiring spirit. His soul is im- mortal in his verse. And he possesses the gift beyond all others of transferring his mind and his heart into his effusions. But a momentary consideration will demon- strate the fact that the poet must, of necessity, have the largest fellowship with humanity. He it is who converses with our veritable selves, and not with our shadows ; other men affect us at a point somewhere on the surface — by varied means, but all failing to reach the chord that has its root in the heart's blood, and which vibrates whenever the true singer touches his fellow-man. What matters it whether the poet begs his bread through opulent cities, as the godlike Homer is affirmed to have done, or wields a powerful sceptre like that of David, 1 the sweet singer of Israel ' ? The ultimate glory of all is the same, the difference one of degree only. Posterity gives the crown which cannot wither. Again, the poet appears before mankind not only as the most indepen- dent teacher, but the most sympathetic — apparently a contradiction in terms. While the least biassed of all

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 61

teachers who instruct us, he has also the extraordinary power of reaching to the profoundest depths of our nature. We should regard the matter with comparative unconcern if we witnessed the world moved from its orbit beneath the lever of an Archimedes, provided our own gravity were preserved; the astounding achievement would excite little or no emotion in us ; but when the poet gives birth to a new idea, or when he revivifies old ones by the plastic and life-giving touch of his genius, the world is ready with something better than its applause — it reverences and it loves. It is not our intention here to magnify the Poet's office ; the unanimous verdict of men, from the remotest ages, has raised him to the highest pinnacle of fame, and in the great Valhalla of the universe there are no dead so illustrious as those in whom was perfected the divine melody of song. The poet is enthroned of man by virtue of a nobility which comes from God. His mission is to show us that to feel nobly is to be great, and to insist, with a lofty eloquence and in an impassioned strain, upon the importance and sacred character of truth, beauty, and virtue. We are not of those who restrict the scope of poetry, and con- sider it chiefly as a refinement and a delight ; that is to do wrong to its majestic spirit, whose wings touch the earth, but whose glorious eyes look into Heaven.

62 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

All true poets themselves have felt that their marvel- lous gift meant infinitely more than the mere utterance of melodious numbers. The outer music is but the shadow of that deeper soul-music which originated with the apprehension of a new truth, or a new phase of beauty. He is not a poet who does not possess this strange insight, which distinctly marks off the real singer from that adventitious writer who, in a happy moment, may throw off verses which a simply cursory examination might induce men to accept as the genuine presentment of poetry. It was the neglect to take due account of this matter which led the supporters of Pope to assume a much higher ground in the famous controversy upon his merits than his claims warranted. Soul, and not criticism, is desiderated in poetry. The foibles of humanity are excellent things as marks for the shafts of novelists and satirists ; but the man who would assure us of his divine mission in poetry takes a nobler range than that. He is for ever in search of, and thirsting for, the beauty of the universe, that he may interpret it to others. He brings it to us from the humblest places and in the humblest guises ; but his contact, while placing it before our vision, has glorified it, and shown that within it of whose existence we had iiever dreamed. Has Pope, or any other man who taught us how to think in measured

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 63

cadence, and delighted us with rhyming intellectualism — ever got beyond didactic assertions, and seized that fire which the real Prometheus of song invariably gains? The poet has impulses, gigantic and irresistible ; he has also love, ever operative and inextinguishable. His rhyme is an accident ; his poetry is eternal. He finds his divine manna everywhere ; he is the high-priest of nature and of God. He sings not so much because it is pleasant, or to direct attention to his own great and wondrous ability, but because he must. While he lives, he cannot avoid it. And the strange faculty of diving into the mystery of things extends to everything he sees around him. From no path where intuition can be of avail is he shut out. In this respect poets might well appropriate to themselves those lines of delightful old George Herbert, who himself possessed some share of the mystic gift : —

' For us the winds do blow, The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;

Nothing we see, but means our good,

As our delight, or as our treasure ; The whole is either our cupboard of food,

Or cabinet of pleasure.'

Now the main charge against the poetry of the Vic- torian age, if we read it rightly, is this— that however

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admirable much of it may be as regards finish, it is in- significant in conception. Emerson, who is unable to find any poetic genius in his own country to satisfy him, thus asks despairingly of England — 'Shall I find my heavenly bread in the reigning poets ? Where is great design in modern English poetry? The English have lost sight of the fact that poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or of fancy is yet essentially new, and out of the limits of prose, until this conviction is reached. Therefore the grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded their designs, and less considered the finish. It was their office to lead to the divine sources, out of which all this, and much more, readily springs ; and if this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can well afford some staidness, or hardness, or want of popular tune in the verses.' To say that the standard aimed at by this language is high, is a very inadequate description of it. Emerson's ideal is evidently one that is only reached every five hundred years. He would appear to look for a Homer or an ^Eschylus with every generation of humanity ; forgetting that we are not gods, but only summed up into one with the fulness of time — as Shakspeare succeeds to the great ancients after the lapse of centuries of mediocrity. But is it true that the

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 65

age has exhibited no design in poetry ? Did not Words- worth exhibit any, in spite of his stuttering articulation — a helplessness probably partly induced by his excess of spiritual vision ? Are Browning's grapplings with mag- nificent subjects to be accounted altogether as failures ? As for Tennyson, he has, it must be owned, never failed in anything, for he has been careful not to overweight himself.1 He is the perfect singer of the time. Yet he would fall under the reproach of Emerson — if it be a reproach — that he gives the age what it asks for, instead of striving after loftier ideas. Sympathising, how- ever, to a certain extent with the position assumed by the distinguished American essayist, we must admit that what we want is not so much the laborious poet as the emotional. Tennyson is undoubtedly both, but by no means in the same degree. His melody is stately and rich, but not overwhelming. He delights by grace, but never swells by passion. The light of consummate art gleams forth from all he does, but his moments of high exaltation of soul are very rare.

The contrary is the case with regard to the poet

1 To this statement some critics, judging from their published opinions, might object, alleging ' Queen Mary ' as an instance to the contrary ; but while that drama is not so satisfactory as much of Mr. Tennyson's previous work in the poetical sense, it is surely so in the dramatic.

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whose works we propose to discuss. She, at any rate, has demonstrated what emotional poetry really means, in contradistinction to the poetry of simple art ; and it cannot be said, either, that she has altogether come short in the matter of design — the design which stamps the greatest poets. Sensibility and intuition, those endow- ments of supereminent importance to individuals whose greatness is to grow in proportion to their understanding and interpretation of human life, were in her united in a degree seldom witnessed. Her history, sparse as it is in facts as yet given to the world, is one of intense interest. It is well known how that existence with her was almost one long round of continuous suffering. Her retired life sent her more closely to the companionship of the dead, though she had naturally an eager and insatiable thirst after knowledge. Her own sufferings could never daunt her in the pursuit of learning, and accordingly we find that as a scholar she was distinguished for the ripest erudition. Her account of the Greek Christian poets will serve to show in what direction a large portion of her studies lay ; and it is in this work, we imagine, that we discern what was her own ideal of the true nineteenth century poet. ' We want the touch of Christ's hand upon our literature,' she says, ' as it touched other dead things ; we want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 67

them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty.' This idea recurs again and again in different forms through her works. She yearns for poetry to be sanctified, to be made holy. This is how it was with the grand old Greeks, and how it should be now. It is because poetry is losing its sense of its intimate relations to God that it is in danger of dying out. And how is the sacredness of poetry to be truly apprehended ? By the method which Mrs. Browning adopted, of looking boldly into the human heart, and reading it fearlessly and trustfully. ' Foole, saide my muse to mee, looke in thine hearte, and write/ And poetry thus produced is that which preserves an everlasting freshness and fragrance. The human heart first, and Nature afterwards, were the teachers at whose feet our poet learned the deep lessons she subsequently transmitted to her species. By these were fostered in her a tenderness which breathes through all her writings, and whose spirit is mirrored therein as the blue sky mirrors itself upon the bosom of the deep. To her, also, it may be said that poetry brought ' its F 2

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own exceeding great reward.' In the company of the deep-browed poets, the monarchs of all the ages, she found consolation as well as intellectual life. With the fellowship of yEschylus, and Pindar, and Plato, and Sophocles, and Euripides, of the olden world, and Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspeare, of the modern, the burden of existence, that would otherwise have been in- supportable, became comparatively light with her. When but a girl she was able to read in the original some of the greatest masterpieces of antiquity ; and indeed almost her first work was an excellent translation of the ' Prome- theus ' of her great favourite amongst the poets. Her in- troduction to and intimate acquaintance with Greek literature was in a large measure due to the influence of her well-appreciated and cherished tutor, Boyd, the blind author of a work upon the Greek Fathers, to whom she addresses some of the best of her sonnets. But though the Greek was the language which afforded her the most delight, her acquaintance was not confined to this, her knowledge of the Hebrew being also most intimate, whilst the Bible in that language was amongst her most continuous studies. Little would men suspect in meeting her for the first time that within that slight and spiritual frame burned so much of the celestial fire. It was, perhaps, in consequence of the chance introduction of

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 69

some literary question, that it was discovered how much learning existed beneath so unpretending an exterior. She was like those branches which hang nearest the ground because of the prodigious crop of luscious fruit which is not always at first apparent to the eye. The love of knowledge, however, deep and lasting though it remained, never subdued or modified in her that great gift of the poet, a burning earnestness or enthusiasm. At the end, as at the beginning of life, the flame shone brightly. It was no flickering, artificial light, kept alive because the poet must simulate an earnestness that is not possessed; but it left an impress and a character upon her work which could not be mistaken. Her song resembled that which fable has associated with the name of Sappho — a living voice, eloquent with passion. Some- thing of her own intensity of feeling breathes in the lines when she speaks of

' Electric Pindar, quick as fear, With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear Slant startled eyes that seem to hear

The chariot rounding the last goal, To hurtle past it in his soul. And Sappho, with that gloriole

Of ebon hair on calmed brows — O poet-woman ! none foregoes The leap, attaining the repose.'

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Had song been less to her than indissolubly bound up with her life, one thinks she must have wavered in her devotion to it. But in truth her appetite grew by what it fed on, and the weakness of the body only led to a further development of soul. We like to think of her as accepted amongst the gods for her power over the divine art, and yet dear in her human relations for the exercise of a tenderness and a sympathy associated with the sex

which make home a second paradise.

» Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in London, in

the year 1809, and was the daughter of Mr. Barrett, an English country gentleman. At a very early age she had written much that was worthy of living, though -it was kept from all eyes save those of her father, whom she mentions in the first collected edition of her poems as 'my public and my critic.' Miss Mitford has de- scribed her as a ' slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam.' She possessed a grace and delicacy which almost defied representation. With so perfect a mental and spiritual organisation it was not given to her to be equally blessed in the physical. Always frail, it was her misfortune further to endanger her existence in 1837 by the bursting of a blood-vessel

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 71

on the lungs. The extremest care preserved her life, though the incident was succeeded by a long period of weakness and suffering. Two years afterwards, before she had quite recovered, she was again assailed by mis- fortune, experiencing the keenest anguish on witnessing the death of her favourite brother, who was drowned at Torquay. A long period of danger followed this cata- strophe, and when she was at length able to be removed to her father's house, it was only to become an invalid, with the prospect of a life couch-ridden to its close. For seven long years this period of seclusion lasted; but during that time Miss Barrett devoured all the books she could bring within her reach, and cultivated the art which was afterwards to bring her immortality. In 1846, that is, when she was in her thirty-seventh year, came the principal event of her life — viz., her marriage with Mr. Browning. He bore her away to Italy, where softer skies brought back that health which had so long for- saken her in her native land. The union was most felicitous, and the influence upon Mrs. Browning's genius must have been great. On this influence, however, we cannot now enlarge, for the husband of the author of ' Aurora Leigh ' still lives. Mrs. Browning died in Flo- rence in 1861, after testifying, in some of the noblest strains ever penned, her extraordinary devotion to the land of her adoption.

72 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

One beneficial result of the comparative seclusion of Mrs. Browning's life was the habit of introspection which it induced, and which, fortunately for posterity, led to the production of some of the finest subjective poetry extant. We can understand to some extent her admira- tion for Wordsworth, after noticing the tenor of her own existence, which ran in somewhat similar grooves. Where, but for the seclusion of her life, would have been that wealth of ancient lore which, while not destroying the freshness of her poetry, has added to it a classic grace and a finish most admirable and remarkable ? The excel- lent balancing of her faculties had a happy effect on her work, which is always good in conception, however defective it may occasionally be in expression. Her in- tellect was keen and comprehensive, not deficient even in masculinity ; and it was only in her theories— witness, for instance, references to social questions in her greatest poem — that she occasionally failed to exhibit that solidity of judgment, or practicality of judgment rather, which is generally associated with the opposite sex. As a poet she undoubtedly looked at men and things from the intensely personal view, in the sense, we mean, of in- dividuality. Instead of taking a broad sweep as Dante — whom we conceive as being merged in the mighty con- ceptions of his spirit — she had rather that other gift of

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 73

the poet, of making herself, the individual, apparent in all her writings. It is this quality which adds so greatly to the force of her lyrical effusions — indeed, without this quality no poet had better attempt the writing of lyrics. So far as regards this form of poetry, we understand its force and value to be that it is an appeal from one indivi- dual mind to another; and the most successful lyrics have been those which have excited in us a particular, and not a general, interest. A momentary reflection upon the lyrics of Burns and Beranger will attest the truth of this assertion. It was a portion of Mrs. Brown- ing's strength — and by no means an unimportant one — that she was able to achieve this result. Who will not continually feel indebted to her for many of her shorter poems, which have revealed so much of the human heart in them, and awakened impulses and sensations which have delighted and cheered the spirit? That was a happy observation passed upon her by one critic, who described her as Shakspeare's daughter. The same large- heartedness which pertained to the great dramatist is shown by the later poet. The benevolent eye looks out on men and nature with the same imperishable love. If the world has at any time possessed its ideal poets, she is worthy to be counted one of them.

From her earliest years, as will, indeed, have been

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discovered already, Mrs. Browning appears to have had the passion for books — a passion which is referred to more than once in 'Aurora Leigh' — and her studious habits, as well as that of writing, were encouraged by her father. Her early years are a reproach to any who, with stronger health and equal opportunities, take no heed to the storing and assimilation of knowledge. In all that we read of her subsequent works, the value of those early habits of insatiable study is apparent. Knowledge has made the full mind, and the richness of the stores is not without effect upon her original compositions. How must her fragile frame have thrilled when, in the course of her reading, as she says —

Because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets.

Doubtless, the slumbering possibilities in her nature were touched by this, and it must have been with wonder that the lights of the great bards first flashed across her vision : something, it would have appeared to her, of the nature of coming into a priceless inheritance. And the time arrived when all that she had acquired became of real moment to her. Let those who would despise erudition in a poet place Mrs. Browning beside other female poets, and see how they lose by comparison — not only in that

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 75

original power in which she was undoubtedly stronger. The poet cannot gain one fact too many; the poorest and commonest coinage which he receives from other mints may be transmuted into the purest gold in his own. The best minds have recognised this, and have laboured diligently after the perfection of knowledge, feeling that none are so gifted, even the gods, but that they may learn somewhat from men.

To attempt to pass in review all that Elizabeth Barrett Browning has left as her legacy for future ages is not our intention. We purpose, however, to examine some of her works individually before offering any criti- cisms of a general character upon her genius. ' A Drama of Exile,' which was a comparatively early production, is acknowledged to possess great sublimity in its ideas, though the conception as a whole is asserted to be a failure. For ourselves we were struck with the poetic wealth which it displays, and failure as applied to it must be taken in the comparative form. There are those whom the majestic Milton has not satisfied by his chef- d'ceuvre \ but the most fastidious will admit that if he has not touched the highest heavens he has come very near them. Of course, it is not pretended for a moment that {fie « Drama of Exile ' stands forth as magnificent a con- ception as ' Paradise Lost,' which Mrs. Browning's poem

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compels us to bring to memory, being upon the same subject ; neither can it be said to be perfectly original, coming after that epic : but in the later poem we find much in point of sustained language which reminds us of Milton's work. Milton's feet were more firmly set, and he has the stately march of a conqueror. Mrs. Browning can only in this work show her possibilities, not her ultimate perfection. This is an excellent touch, due, probably, partly to the fact that it was written by a woman; Gabriel, addressing Lucifer, says : —

' If thou hadst gazed upon the face of God This morning for a moment, thou hadst known That only pity fitly can chastise : Hate but avenges.'

These lines, put into the mouth of Adam, are also ex- quisite : —

' The Highest being the Holy and the Glad, Whoever rises must approach delight And sanctity in the act.'

But for a passage of unfaltering eloquence, and one instinct with true poetic fire, take the address of Adam to Eve after the twain have left Paradise. To demon- strate Mrs. Browning's power over blank verse, we cannot refrain from citing a portion of it : —

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 77

' Raise the majesties

Of thy disconsolate brows, O well-beloved, And front with level eyelids the To come, And all the dark o' the world !

******

Thy love

Shall chant itself its own beatitudes After its own life-working. A child's kiss, Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad ; A poor man served by thee, shall make thee rich ; A sick man helped by thee, shall make thee strong ; Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense Of service which thou renderest. Such a crown I set upon thy head, — Christ witnessing With looks of prompting love — to keep thee clear Of all reproach against the sin foregone, From all the generations which succeed. Thy hand, which plucked the apple, I clasp close, Thy lips, which spake wrong counsel, I kiss close, I bless thee in the name of Paradise, And by the memory of Edenic joys Forfeit and lost, — by that last cypress tree Green at the gatQ, which thrilled as we came out, — And by the blessed nightingale which threw Its melancholy music after us, — And by the flowers, whose spirits full of smells, Did follow softly, plucking us behind Back to the gradual banks and vernal bowers And fourfold river-courses — By all these, I bless thee to the contraries of these, I bless thee to the desert and the thorns, To the elemental change and turbulence,

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And to the roar of the estranged beasts, And to the solemn dignities of grief, — To each one of these ends,— and to their END Of Death and the Hereafter.'

It will be apparent that for one who had not yet attained the full maturity of her powers to write like this there must have been a great future in store. Whatever deductions might have to be made as regards the want of stupendousness in her conceptions, there was still sufficient breadth in her earlier work to prove that there were scarcely any heights to which she might not subse- quently attain. In the chorus of Eden spirits which comes into the ' Drama of Exile ' there is an abundance of lyrical music and power, given in metres which have since been most successfully adopted by other poets. In another poem, ' The Seraphim/ we observe the same noble moral glow which pervaded the drama to which we have just alluded. The time of the poem is that of the Crucifixion, and the sublime tragedy is handled with a delicacy and at the same time a force as nearly befitting so lofty a subject as we can well imagine. The deep religious spirit which pervaded Mrs. Browning led her frequently to the choice of topics in some way connected with the great verities of the Christian religion, in which she had a profound and intense belief, as will

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have been gathered, not only from repute, but from the attitude assumed in her works, by anyone who has made acquaintance with them. The faults which are princi- pally to be noted in her earliest poems are those related to art, a knowledge of which rarely comes at the outset to the most precocious. Before art can be exhibited, there must not only be capacity, but work accomplished — work compared with previous work, and each stage showing an advance upon that which went before. Al- though Mrs. Browning was never at any period of her career as distinguished for finish as she was for other and more important qualities, there is yet a considerable difference in this respect between her first effusions and her later lyrics. Her strength and pathos, however, generally overwhelm all other considerations in the reader's mind, whose attention is seized and retained by personal influence. It is the poet who does not throw himself entirely into his creations who is mostly eminent for finish. The value of the diamond to him consists in the way in which it is set, and he would prefer a stone of inferior water if it exhibited excess of polish to one much more massive if some touches of the rough still adhered to it. Yet, we are by no means contending that great poets are not also great in art. We are, speaking only of finish, which is but a portion of art, and that not

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the most important. In art are combined the larger qualities of fitness, proportion, and truth, which are the masters of finish the world over. In all these three points Mrs. Browning was the successful artist ; and he who objected to her because he discovered here and there a false rhyme or a defective line, would have lost sight of the towering mountain ahead in stumbling over a mole-hill. Having said thus much, let us at the same time frankly admit that the sense of adequateness is not strongly perceived in the lengthy poems to which we have adverted. We discover it in the highest degree in ' Paradise Lost,' and ought, of course, to find it in all work which is the matured result of a grand imagination — work that has attained solidity by frequent communing with and lifelong study of the bases on which it was grounded. So, had these poems of Mrs. Browning's been written at a later stage the beneficial result would have been apparent, in this one point at any rate upon which we are insisting. The unevenness in her execution would also have been considerably diminished, a matter of no small importance in conceptions of that nature. But take the poem and the drama as they stand, with all their faults, and we repeat there is still room for a feeling of genuine admiration over the result achieved. Mrs. Browning's chosen field of study was the one

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productive of her first work of great importance, viz. her rendering of the ' Prometheus Bound ' of ^Eschylus. She had most probably been incited to this work by the companion, before mentioned, of her studies in Greek. It is a deed of no small magnitude for a young lady to accomplish this at all, and might well daunt even deeper students ; but she had a profound appreciation of the old poet, and brought her love for his sublime tragedy to bear upon the task. It was scarcely to be expected that she would obtain a complete success, and she herself admitted that the translation was defective. She accord- ingly recast it, substantially changing the form of many passages. Though on reading it we gain the impression that it is a considerably Anglicised Greek drama, the vigour exhibited, and the true poetical fervour which is thrown around it, make it very welcome. The vocabulary of passion employed is rich and varied, whilst the rhythm affords scope for considerable poetic effects. In this, as in her other translations, she desired it to be understood that her one great idea was to catch the spirit of the original. The choruses are excellent, and possess, in addition to much music, all the fire that it is essential should burn in poems which have for their aim the depicting of the ecstasies and the writhings of passion. ' A Lament for Adonis,' from Bion, is very happy and

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full of a warm imagery, and indicates, besides, the instinct and apprehension of the original poet.

The genius of Mrs. Browning had two sides — the lyric and the dramatic : she had little special gift for either the idyllic or the epic. For the idyllic she was not either sufficiently didactic or intransitively calm ; for the epic her emotions were too keen and her sensibilities too quick and lively. Her longest poem has nothing of the epic about it, being in fact neither more nor less than a series of dramatic scenes. It does not profess to give the triumphant progress of a hero or a heroine, but to unfold to us the inner life of its principal character. In a word, it is an Autobiography in verse.

Considering first her lyrical capabilities— for it is really by means of these that her immortality is most secured — we are bound to say that they are of the highest order. Campbell was a great artist, but on reading his lyrics we are struck with the fact that they are in a large measure the product of a skilled mind rather than of a real singer. He has been succeeded by Tennyson in verbal perfection ; but to our mind neither of these true poets is the equal of Mrs. Browning in the matter of the lyric. Yet so high is our estimate of the authors of ' Hohenlinden ' and * Locksley Hall ' that no other poets in these later times, save Mrs. Browning and perhaps

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two others, can be put into comparison with them for real lyrical power. One of the two latter is Shelley, the other Burns, who is the superior of Shelley, and indubi- tably at the head of his race : and for this reason, that he invariably put his heart into his verse. Soul, not culture, thus gave us the best of our lyric poets. It is on the ground assigned in regard to Burns that we should give Mrs. Browning the next place amongst the moderns for lyrical genius, though these two poets were as wide asunder as the poles in all other respects. Let the reader dispassionately compare the lyrics which have been written by our principal singers during the past two or three generations. He will find, we think, that the position we have assumed is one which can be main- tained. Shelley undoubtedly exhibits the true lyrical fire, but his poems are not so varied as those of Mrs. Browning ; while her pathos is deeper than his and that of all his compeers. His imagination was, perhaps, somewhat higher, and he soared into cloud-land more fre- quently ; but the heart, which gave Burns his power, was the strength of Mrs. Browning. Shelley was almost too ethereal, too spiritual, and the consequence was that the human was somewhat overshadowed. His sensibility was of the keenest description, and many of his lyrics bear testimony to the truth of his averment that

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1 Most men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong ; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.'

One cannot help thinking that Shelley's natural place in the world would be that of a spiritualised .Spenser ; and if that calm could have come to him which alone can furnish the poet with the opportunity he ought to have, there is no knowing but he might have given us a work rich enough to justify this fancy of him. As it is, between writhings and groanings, the paroxysms of a much -tried spirit, he wrote those exquisite lyrics and poems, which we should be indeed loth to lose from our literature. Mrs. Browning had not the intense naturalness of Burns, and though both felt acutely, yet in character and tem- perament they had nothing in common. But, as we have said, the mainspring of the power of both was in the heart. They worked upon different principles and under different circumstances. Burns was moved to joy or sorrow by the impressions he drew from outward nature ; Mrs. Browning, on the contrary, found that nature re- ceived a tinge of melancholy or happiness from her own emotions. They are thus perfect contrasts in everything except the one great endowment of genius. And if the word epigrammatic may be used to denote that power which Burns had of describing an object in nature or a

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human emotion, Mrs. Browning was certainly not so epigrammatic as the northern singer. Leigh Hunt once referred to our poet as the sister of Alfred Tennyson, but the relation does not strike us as of the happiest. It does not set in the proper light either relatively to the other. In the first place, there is a good deal that is feminine (in the best sense) about the genius of Tenny- son, whilst occasionally there is that in Mrs. Browning's poetry as masculine as anything to be found in the Poet Laureate. In truth, we do not see much good in these comparisons at all ; the happiest expression yet given utterance to is the one previously mentioned, which describes her as Shakspeare's daughter. We are able to see some meaning in this ; we can feel that her genius stands in the same relation to that of the trans- cendent poet of the world as does a daughter to her parent. The lesser is the true miniature representation of the greater.

The precise order in which Mrs. Browning's lyrics were written has never been stated, and it is not possible to arrive at a correct chronology with regard to them by internal evidence. The dates of several, however, are well known : and amongst the earliest of her productions was that entitled ' A Vision of Poets,' written in a very attractive, though unusual metre. This vision of men of

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' foreheads royal with the truth,' as beheld in the magni- ficent temple of poetry, is one of her most successful as well as most graphic conceptions. No words are wasted in painting the portraits ; to each of the world-famous men are appropriated but a few lines, yet how telling

these are ! —

' Shakspeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world : O eyes sublime With tears and laughters for all time ! '

The national poet's eminence was never more felicitously indicated than in these simple words — that is, more of him can be grasped than pages of criticism could accom- plish, though the poet's description is by no means exhaustive. Other excellent touches are those devoted to Euripides, Lucretius, ' nobler than his mood,' Goethe, Chaucer, Milton, Schiller. —

' And Burns, with pungent passionings Set in his eyes : deep lyric springs Are of the fire-mount's issuings.

' And poor, proud Byron, sad as grave And salt as life ; forlornly brave, And quiv'ring with the dart he drave.'

And the lesson — it is worthy of the ' Vision.' Is it well for the poet to be born to suffer, and to die un- recognised and unrewarded? Verily so; he has lived for truth and beauty — scarcely two as the author tells us

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— and should therefore be content. His experience has been, after all, better than that of the lower man, with lower pains and less transporting pleasures. He will be crowned, but crowned with no ordinary crown. His highest glory is to know, however the end is gained. And after death he will have two lives — one in the Beyond, and one in the Past, in the songs he has left behind him. Thus the end of the whole matter is reached, the conclusion being that ' Knowledge by suffering entereth, and Life is perfected by Death.' The lesson in some of its applications is not new ; the martyrs to truth in whatever shape have always taught it, but now the poet-martyrs teach it. For they are martyrs too frequently ; and that is not martyrdom simply which affects or destroys the body. The spirituality of Mrs. Browning's nature shines in this poem ; she affords some clue as to her ideal. It is a strain singularly pure and lofty, and shows a developing imagination which augured powerfully and well for succeeding work. Its burden is more cheerful than that of ' The Two Voices,7 a poem cast in the same mould, and to which the thought of the reader inevitably reverts while reading the ' Vision.' Its meaning is not to be restricted alone to the class of beings with whom it deals upon the surface, for the con- clusion is a triumphant one for the whole of the human

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race, whose ends of life are also made sacred by the same method. Having read this poem, one rises with a more hopeful heart to engage in the world's conflict

We pass on from such poems as * The Romaunt of Margret ' and ' Isobel's Child ' with reluctance, for there is much in them both of concentrated strength and music which we could wish to have pointed out. Some have chosen them as well-nigh the happiest efforts of the poet, and they certainly are amongst the most beautiful notes of her lyre. Even the rhymes seem to possess a melan- choly befitting the subjects, whilst the mere repetition of the words ' Margret, Margret,' attains to real pathos in the cunning hands of the writer in the former poem. A singular affection for subjects which have in them the deepest anguish and suffering was early apparent in Mrs. Browning. The spirit very seldom danced, though when it did, the music was as true and fitting as the funeral dirge, which she more frequently gives us. Wandering amongst her poems is like standing in the forest alone, with the wailing wind and the flying rain as the only assurances of an existence sublimer than our own. But the profoundest depth of our heart is reached thereby. We would there had been no need for the lament and the sorrow, and yet we would not have lost those mys- terious thrills of the soul which her power has evoked-

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We must follow the poet in her quest of truth, follow her wherever she leads us, for by these means shall we emerge out of the thick folds of darkness into the broad light of day. This is one reason why we have such an admiration for, and attachment to her genius. Wherever she leads us, it is to make us better. Does she show us the poor whom we too often oppress ? It is that we may know wherein we have erred, and that in the future our hands may be washed clean from oppression and cruelty. Does she sometimes apparently darken the spirit ? It is only to make it reflect so that it may endeavour to grope through the mysteries of life and nature up to God. Intellectual doubts are frequently disposed of in a very summary method, and one which has at sundry times in the world's history been most effective ; she sees their lowering forms gradually attenuate and disperse before the calm eye of Faith. Whatever of evil was rampant in the world, this could not be crushed out of her. To her, it was not always necessary to understand all the wrong that she beheld; she saw it, and hated it. She has helped men by her writings to do something towards making an end of it. She has been a mouthpiece for the poor and miserable ; the light of love beams on her forehead and dwells in her eyes j the Divine feeling of compassion has swelled in her bosom, and for this

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reason, as for others, she has her place with those who are beloved of the human race.

In proceeding to indicate what we consider some of Mrs. Browning's most admirable lyrics, we must deci- dedly name among the chief, ' The Rhyme of the Duchess May.' This ballad has in it not only a quaint- ness which conveys us back to the days of chivalry, but a strength of expression which is generally absent in the productions of that period. It bears unquestionably the stamp of genius. The poet for the time has completely forgotten herself, projecting her thoughts so far into the subject as to realise a most intense and tragic phase of human existence. There is the ring of melancholy in the lines, which is deepened by the constant recurrence of the allusion to the passing bell. The whole concep- tion is well worked out, and the powers of the writer are not frittered away before the close of the poem, as is too frequently the case with lyrics of similar length. The perfection of what is touching is reached in ' Bertha in the Lane,' where the dying maiden tells with simple pathos the incident which has led to her own heart's breaking. There is nothing forced here ; indeed, the language in some passages does not rise higher than that of actual conversation, the only adventitious poetical aid given to the setting of the story being that of the rhyme,

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which again is well chosen. The author has wisely avoided the slightest straining after effect, leaving the natural pathos in the story to accomplish the end which she desires. l Lady Geraldine's Courtship ' is a romance which almost necessarily challenges comparison with ' Locksley Hall/ and what is strange about the two, Mrs. Browning has, in our judgment, most truthfully drawn the male characters, while Tennyson has been the happier in all else in his poem. The poet who loved Lady Geraldine has many excellences, but his vocation has not properly imbued him with the kingly spirit, and he fails in the strength and robustness which we should expect. Besides, we quickly grow indignant that he should be so slow in reading that which should have been patent to his eyes. The character of the Earl is well drawn, his natural dignity being admirably caught in the few lines devoted to his limning. The old story of love springing where it listeth, unforced and unexpected, is once more dilated upon, and brought in this instance 'to a satisfactory consummation. As another specimen of the perfection of lyric art we may cite * The Romance of the Swan's Nest,' one of the most beautiful and strangely- attractive series of stanzas ever penned.

But let us pass on to ' The Cry of the Children,' that noble and striking remonstrance against the greed and

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oppression of mankind. Its intense pathos could surely only spring from a woman's heart, wounded in its love for the human by deeds enough to make the heavens blush. We have heard something of the sorrows of the factory children, but these lines have brought them close to us, and compelled us to feel that the poorest and weakest are our brethren and sisters. When was the anguish of a young spirit grasped so clearly as in the following lines, which are supposed to be spoken by the little workers amongst the iron wheels — those wheels which roll on ruthlessly, scarcely giving time for rest ? —

' Two words, indeed, of praying we remember,

And at midnight's hour of harm, " Our Father," looking upward in the chamber,

We say softly, for a charm. We know no other words except " Our Father,"

And we think that, in some pause of angels' song, God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,

And hold both within His right hand, which is strong. " Our Father ! " If He heard us, He would surely

(For they call Him good and mild) Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely,

" Come and rest with Me, my child." '

England has cleared herself from something of the re- proach contained in the poem from whence these lines are taken, and by God's grace she will be, perhaps, wholly free from stain in the (let us hope not far distant)

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future. There are other poems which exhibit the same large sympathetic heart as the one founded upon the miseries of the factory children, such as 'Mother and Poet/ and * The Cry of the Human,' which latter reminds the world how many

1 Lips say, " God be pitiful," Who ne'er said, " God be praised !"'

She felt as did that other poet of the poor, of whom we are proud, for all who are in any way crushed or bruised by the pressure of society and of social distinctions, or of social misfortunes. To be despised or to be sad was the way to be sure of her deepest interest. This is a trait which will serve to keep her memory green, for who among us will willingly let die the names of our philan- thropists— those who have been genuine in the active and written expressions of their sympathy ? One likes to linger over the point how lofty genius steps down with more sincerity from its high estate to acknowledge fel- lowship with the mean and the wretched, than do the ^^/-philanthropists who consider that the claims of humanity are met by the doling out of a pittance to any who may appeal to their condescension. Not always, yet very often, the great intellect is the index to the generous and simple spirit

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To mark the range of our author's powers, compare such poems as ' A Child's Thought of God ' with those on Napoleon, or ' Casa Guidi Windows.' How sweetly and beautifully the first-named closes ! —

' God is so good, He wears a fold

Of heaven and earth across His face, Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

' But still I feel that His embrace

Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place :

' As if my tender mother laid

On my shut lips her kisses' pressure, Half waking me at night, and said,

" Who kiss'd you through the dark, dear guesser ? " '

This is better theology than the orthodox damnation with which we were terrified in our youth by narrow- minded bigots, who have probably ruined many a soul by preaching that God is powerful and vindictive, instead of God is love. We want more of the teaching which we get in the pages of this woman-poet. Then note how from these sweet and happy thoughts we can turn to matter more bold and striking, as in ' The Dead Pan,' which has a truly musical ring with it ; ' Cowper's Grave,' an immortal tribute to a suffering singer; « Crowned and Buried,' an appreciation of the great and deathless Napoleon; but, above all, in this class of effort, to ' Casa

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Guidi Windows.' This poem exhibits Mrs. Browning in her greatest intellectual strength. The fabric is solid and enduring; the poem as sustained as anything which she has written, and more perfect than her remaining longer one. Clearly her feeling was in this work as well as her imagination, and the combined powers have given us something which cannot fail to live.

Everyone who knows anything at all of the poet is familiar with her great love for Italy, one of the strongest passions of her life. It is in this poem that she chiefly unfolds to the world her feelings with regard to the emancipation of that country. From the Casa Guidi windows at Florence, her favourite city, she watched the struggle for liberty in which Italy engaged against Austria, and the assistance rendered towards this object by Napoleon III., without whom probably it would nevef have been accomplished. It was in praise of this cham- pion that she wrote some of her most impassioned strains. She knew the deceased Emperor at his best, when there seemed strongly upon him an enthusiasm for the cause which he had espoused that would be sure to go straight to the heart of the generous and impulsive poet; and in her utterances, therefore, she was lavish and unrestrained. To many in England this over-warmth of feeling will seem strange, but till we have felt all the bitterness which

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she felt for a degraded nation, and have seen the con- queror arise to lift her from the dust, we cannot say how deep our gratitude might be to such conqueror, his subsequent career notwithstanding. Our concern, how- ever, is with the poems, including those entitled * Poems before Congress,' in which Mrs. Browning set forth that patriotism, to be true, should not be manifested in behalf of one's own country alone. In ' Casa Guidi Windows ' the imagery is rich and the language flowing, worthy partners of the idea which engrossed the mind. In the course of the poem beautiful legends of Savona- rola and Michael Angelo are laid under contribution to heighten the charms of the song of their country ; and the closing pages of the poem contain an attractive episode in relation to the poet's infant son, whom she calls her young Florentine, he having been born in that city. She has thus connected her native land and that of her adoption more closely together, and claims nearer relationship to Italy than she ever felt before, through the link furnished in her child. It is impossible to do more than refer to the extraordinary wealth and strength of imagery which the poem contains; but as some justifi- cation for the high opinion we have expressed concerning it, we must not neglect to extract the passage in which, as before mentioned, the poet addresses her son : —

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1 The sun strikes through the windows, up the floor ; Stand out in it, my own young Florentine,

Not two years old, and let me see thee more ! It grows along thy amber curls, to shine

Brighter than elsewhere. Now, look straight before, And fix thy brave blue English eyes on mine,

And from thy soul, which fronts the future so, With unabashed and unabated gaze,

Teach me to hope for, what the angels know When they smile clear as thou dost. Down God's ways,

With just alighted feet, between the snow And snowdrops, where a little lamb may graze,

Thou hast no fear, my lamb, about the road ; Albeit in our vain-glory we assume

That, less than we have, thou hast learnt of God. Stand out, my blue-eyed prophet ! — thou, to whom

The earliest world-day light that ever flowed, Through Casa Guidi windows chanced to come !

Now shake the glittering nimbus of thy hair, And be God's witness that the elemental

New springs of life are gushing everywhere.'

It is, we imagine, almost universally accepted that to write the sonnet excellently is about the most difficult performance in the domain of poetry. At any rate, it is the one branch of the art least frequently successfully achieved. It is questionable whether we have more than three or four English poets who can be credited with the highest execution in this respect. But to these three or four must be added the name of Mrs. Browning.

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After Shakspeare, we should be inclined to maintain that she is the equal of any. For proof of this, let the reader turn to her ' Sonnets from the Portuguese,' which, under a disguised name, are her own sonnets. To us they seem to fulfil all the requisites of the sonnet, including strength, imagery, sweetness, proportion or art, and massiveness. They are certainly equal to any of Wordsworth's and most of Milton's. The sonnet, with the great poets, has been generally most successful when personal to them- selves. They appear to have caught their passion and confined it within bounds, so that the sonnet, in master hands, becomes, as it were, ' foursquare to all the winds that blow.' There is no weak corner — all is solid and compact.

These sonnets by Mrs. Browning bear upon them her own very distinct individuality, and, as a means of setting her truly before her readers, are more explanatory than any other of her writings. Let us study them for a moment In the first, the poet presents us with a picture of her mind at the period when she looked for Death as the release from a mortal imprisonment, whose shadow was laid deeply athwart her. The sonnet is exceedingly fine, and is as follows : —

' I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,

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Who each one in a gracious hand appears

To bear a gift for mortals, old or young ;

And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,

I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,

So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair ;

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove : —

"Guess now who holds thee ?" " Death," I said. But there,

The silver answer rang, " Not Death, but Love ! "'

Then comes a description of love, whose powei nothing can conquer, and which man is helpless to destroy. Spirits ' but vow the faster for the stars.' Yet, following on, we come to a declaration of her own un- worthiness, on the part of the singer, to be thus dis- covered and made blessed. The gloom is still too heavy about her, and will not be dispersed. She is fain to cry—

1 What hast thou to do, With looking from thy lattice lights at me, A poor, tired, wand'ring singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree ? The chrism is on thine head, — on mine, the dew, — And Death must dig the level where these agree.'

How beautiful and how pathetic are these lines! And

the strain is continued, with no diminution of sadness,

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through several succeeding sonnets. The soul has found its counterpart, yet bids it begone; the proffered happi- ness is too great for it; it must not be. ' Go from me ! ' is now the cry; but the spirit is evidently yielding to the conqueror, for it adds :

' The widest land

Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine, With pulses that beat double.'

The record of life progresses, and the great argument is discussed, ' Can it be right to give what I can give ? ' Witness the seventh and immediately subsequent sonnets, for their dissection of the love passion, as it thrills through and permeates the being. Truly autobiogra- phical, indeed, are these confessions ; the seal of genuine experience is upon each one with its alternating hopes and fears, and its unfolding of a woman's heart. Surely finer subjective poetry than this was never written. The poet speaks to us without veils, and we listen eagerly to the revelation. From the sadness and gloom we emerge at length into daylight ; the cypress has yielded to the rose. Love is justified ; it asks for and gives all. Troths are exchanged, and the singer has given up the grave for the sake of him who is now to be her life. We then see the plan of the whole work. First, we had the soul expecting death, then Life revivified by Love ; then the

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grave put behind the soul ; and lastly, comes the sequel, the marriage of those whose history has been traced in the series of poems now about to conclude. Thus the poet muses, as she stands midway in her existence — the past behind her, the blissful future immediately in view : —

' " My future will not copy my fair past." I wrote that once ; and, thinking at my side My ministering life-angel justified The word by his appealing look upcast To the white throne of God, I turned at last, And there, instead, saw thee, not unallied To angels in thy soul ! Then I, long tried By natural ills, received the comfort fast, While budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim's staff Gave out green leaves, with morning dews impearled. I seek no copy now of life's first half : Leave here the pages with long musing curled, And write me new my future's epigraph, New angel mine, unhoped for in the world ! '

But to show what the wonderful depth of woman's love is, and to reach what seems the absolute fulness of human expression, we have the following triumphant song at the close of this personal history we have been examining : —

• ' How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

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My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right ;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life ! — and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after Death.'

We have thus glanced briefly through this remarkable series of psychological poems, one of the most precious bequests which a poet can leave us, revealing, as they do so clearly, the inner life of the writer. After their perusal, just as in the case of a study of Tennyson's i In Memoriam,' we feel that we have done more towards grasping the character of the poet than we are able to do by an intimate acquaintance with all her other works. The unity of the * Sonnets from the Portuguese ' is pre- cise and definite ; no link in the chain can be with- drawn without destroying the value of the whole. There is no hesitancy in the utterance ; we here see Mrs. Browning at her highest, when she has passed through the noviciate of her art, and risen to the perfection of song. The sonnets glow with rapture, are exquisite in

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expression, and perfect in form. Taken collectively, and in the light of the one passion which they trace, from its inception to its culmination, we know nothing anywhere to compare with them. Intellect and passion are combined in an equal degree, and together fused into wondrous music.

The love poetry from the hand which wrote thus passionately — and including compositions other than the sonnets — would in itself, and in its entirety, form a com- plete study, for its variety, sweetness, and pathos. But there yet remain to us some remarks on the work upon which, chiefly, the author's fame is conceded to rest — ' Aurora Leigh.' A wide diversity of opinion exists with regard to its merits, and to the position which it ought to occupy in modern literature. The writer herself, in inscribing it to her cousin, described it as the most mature of all her works, and the one into which her * highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered/ Our own view of it is that, as a whole, it is somewhat inconsequent ; it lacks unity, for a poem of such magni- tude ; but even in these higher respects, though not per- fect, it is little beneath anything produced this generation. When we come to regard it in other aspects, however, our praise is almost necessarily unbounded. It is a poem which we could imagine Shakspeare dropping a

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tear over for its humanity. Its intense subjectivity will exempt its influence on men from decay. Were we not amazed with the beauty and fulness of its poetry, we should be struck with its philosophy. The following lines might almost be taken as a digest of the whole teaching of Carlyle : —

' Get leave to work

In this world — 'tis the best you get at all ; For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts Than men in benediction. God says " Sweat For foreheads," men say " crowns," and so we are crowned, Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work ; Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.'

The author's views on Art are set forth with some fulness. Art, we presume, notwithstanding all the dark- ness which has been cast around it by much speaking, means (if we are bound to describe it as concisely as possible) the closest and most perfect realisation of the various forms of Truth which it is in the power of man to attain. Some such idea as this certainly possessed the mind of Mrs. Browning ; and it was her opinion that that was real art which assisted in any degree to lead back the soul to contemplate God, the supreme Artist of the universe. Yet Art, even with her, was not the highest, the ultimate —

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 105

'Art is much, but Love is more ! O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more ! Art symbolises heaven, but Love is God And makes heaven.'

As a solution for many of the problems of social life ' Aurora Leigh ' must be pronounced a failure. It ex- hibits a wonderful sensitiveness to the evils resulting from the imperfect conditions of society, but it shows no powers of reconstruction. Its principal attraction, after its poetry, which stands supremely first therein, lies in the series of pictures of human life, in its varied phases, which it presents, and in its power of analysis of the human heart. Sincerity is also a prominent characteristic of the revelations which it makes ; it is an autobiography in which nothing is kept back, and the inner workings of a woman's heart were never more clearly transcribed. Unevenness characterises the narrative, but daring specu- lation and rich thought are embraced within the lines. There are passages of poetry as lofty and impassioned within the covers of this one book as are contained in any single lengthy modern poem of which we have know- ledge. From the level of occasional mediocrity we pass on to sublime imaginative heights. In this poem we have a vantage ground from which we survey the pano- rama of human life, illumined by the sun of genius. To

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attempt to extract its beauties would be futile ; it is a garden in which every flower of sweetness blooms. Its aroma is amongst the most fragrant in literature. Or again, to change the figure, the poem is like a mine which yields more and more as the human digger presses it. When he first enters into possession he beholds the faint yellow streaks which betoken the golden treasure, but it is the subsequent labour which brings to light the actual El Dorado.

One grand result of Mrs. Browning's literary career has been to disprove the assertion that women cannot write true poetry. Such a taunt may be considered as disposed of for ever. If we are to believe tradition, Sappho wrote the finest lyrics the world has seen ; but our own generation has beheld woman's genius take even a wider range. No woman, as yet, has written a great epic, or dramatic poetry of the highest order ; but how restricted is the number of men who have done this ! What there is in the nature of woman, however, to forbid her rivalling even the highest we do not know ; all we can say is, that genius, the dower of the gods, in its most transcendent manifestation, has, up to the present, been bestowed upon man. It may be, nevertheless, that we shall yet see the female complement of our great men — only, it cannot be obtained unless woman have a wider

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 107

personal sphere. Still, it is most interesting to note that,

in this nineteenth century she has demonstrated the

possibility of a future equality. What novelist, for

instance, has more conclusively made good his claim to

rank almost with the highest, than George Eliot ? How

many of our artists have excelled Rosa Bonheur in her

own special gifts ? What writer has exhibited a greater

breadth of imagination and power than Georges Sand ?

Lastly, where is the poetry which can be considered

superior to Mrs. Browning's? In poetry, fiction, and

art, at any rate, man has little supremacy to boast of for

the last forty or fifty years. We do not mean that his

genius may not have overtopped, in individual cases, that

of woman, but the difference has not be,en so perceptible

as in past ages. Woman is now more abreast of man. Her

altitude is no longer, when compared with him, that of

Mont Blanc beside Chimborazo. It is more than probable

that we shall never behold a female Homer, Plato, or

Shakspeare ; but anything short of these woman may, and

most probably will, become. Her passion is as deep, if

her ambition be not so great, as man's. As her sympathies

widen and she bears more of that burden of the world,

experience — which, in its greatest depths and most

extended scope, has hitherto largely pertained to man —

she will produce work which shall be as potent and

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beautiful as his, and possess the same inherent powers of immortality.

Meanwhile, let us be just to what she has already accomplished. A dispassionate examination of the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning can, we maintain, only lead to this result — that she is the equal of any poet of our time in genius. In particular qualities she may appear inferior to some who could be cited, and whose names will irresistibly suggest themselves ; but in others she is as indubitably their superior ; and, until we can decide who is greater, Byron or Wordsworth, Shelley or Coleridge, Homer or Shakspeare, we care not to assign her precise position. One thing is certain, however, her immortality is assured — she stands already crowned. As long as one human heart throbs for another she will be held in high esteem. Her poetry is that which refines, chastens, and elevates. We could think that with herself, as with one of her characters, * some grand blind Love came down, and groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss ; she learnt God that way.' And who were her teachers ? Can we ask that of one who said, ' Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bu?h afire with God ' ? The emerald beauty of a thousand valleys, embroidered by the silver threads of meandering rivers ; the grandeur of the everlasting hills with their lofty and

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 109

majestic calm ; the terrible rolling of the restless and unsatisfied sea ; the stars that at midnight shine, looking down upon us like the eyes of those we love ; above all, the whisper of God as it thrills through the human heart — these were her informers and teachers, the sources of her eminent inspiration. She sang of all these that men might be nobler, freer, and purer. Her apotheosis follows of Divine right with that of all the leaders of mankind : God endowed her, and we exalt her.

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

[FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW]

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK.

ONE trembles to think what the world would have be- come without its literary scourges. The soft irony of Montaigne, the withering gaze of Voltaire, the lightning flash of Swift, have now and again made it ashamed of its meanness and its vanity, and have discovered the pigmy concealed beneath the folds of the giant. There is no power touching whose exercise the whole of man- kind is so sensitive as that of ridicule. Man always has objected, and always will object, to being called a fool: how much greater, then, must his horror be at having the fact demonstrated. Agreeing with the critic in his con- demnation of the aphorism attributed to Shaftesbury, that ' ridicule is the test of truth,' we must still hold that it divides power almost equally with all other correctives of the public taste and morals. Wit dissects and de- stroys, but it has no creative force, is almost devoid of enthusiasm, and is no respecter of dignities and persons. There is much truth, however, which can in nowise come

i

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within its scope ; hence it is a fallacy to call it the test of truth. It is rather the discoverer of error. There is something in the mental constitution of the satirist which prevents him from taking an optimist view of things. He is all the more useful on that account. The negative gifts of the satirist, while not lifting him to an equality with the being who originates, still entitle him to a high place in the world's regard. It should be borne in mind, too, that though it will be generally found he lacks en- thusiasm, yet he possesses a sensitiveness as real, while differing in quality, as that of the artist and the poet.

Thomas Love Peacock had every opportunity for becoming the calm, contemplative cynic. His life was long but uneventful. His fourscore years did not em- brace ten events to be remembered even in an ordinary life. He was born at Weymouth in 1785, and when a little over thirty years of age, obtained a post in a public office, as many others have done who afterwards enriched the national literature by their works. Peacock entered the East India House in 1818, and was Examiner, of India correspondence from the death of James Mill in 1836 until March 1856, when he retired on a pension. He died January 23, 1866. He was a friend of Charles Lamb and of Shelley, for the latter of whom he acted as executor, and his wrongs doubtless made him still more

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. n5

sympathetic and friendly. His hatred of oppression in every guise is to be gathered in his novels, which breathe of liberty of thought, speech, and action. There were few, if any, riper scholars in his time. He was dis- tinguished especially for his love of the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics, in editions of which his library was extra- ordinarily rich. It is not a little singular to find one whose tastes were those of the recluse taking up in his writings the burning questions of the day and mingling in the fray of politics. His observation, however, was most extensive ; like his learning, it seemed to embrace all matters and topics which came to the surface of public life. In his own political views he must have been ardently progressive — Liberal in the highest sense of the word, and to the backbone. He would be as opposed to a Whig job as to a Conservative monopoly. The deep-rooted conviction he had of the rights of man, the individual, caused him to loathe injustice in whatever quarter it was perceived. It is impossible to read his works and not to admire his denunciations of the base, and his scorn of the petty, sins which are sometimes hugged so closely. He had many pagan qualities, and among them a pagan kind of rectitude.

As to his humour, it is exclusively his own; one never

I 2

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meets with its precise flavour either before or after him. Mingled sometimes with a dash of effrontery, it is very searching, attaining its end by a kind of intellectual travesty. To the quack and the mountebank he is a most dangerous person, wielding a power of castigation that is amazing. To his honour, however, it can be said that throughout his whole works there is no demonstra- tion of personal feeling. Considering his endowment and the great temptation to wield the lash which invariably accompanies it, his self-repression was very great. Prin- ciples, not men, were the objects of his satire, and if occasionally individuals recoiled from the smart, it only showed how true had been his perceptions of character. Some humourists gently play with their subjects and tease them as a cat does a mouse; others knock them down with a bludgeon ; whilst others again make them despise themselves by inverting their natures, and showing them their vanity, hollowness, and pretence. Peacock adopted the last method with all the human excrescences he dealt with. To rebuke incapacity in attempting to deal with things too high for it, and to tear the glazed mask from the hollow cheek of pretence, were the objects to which he devoted himself. His success in doing this warrants some reference to the means by which he ac- complished it, and justifies us in attempting to recover

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his name from the comparative indifference in which it has too long lain.

The chronological order in which his works were issued will not be strictly adhered to in the comments it may be necessary to make upon them; in fact there seems to be some doubt as to their order, if not of issue at least of composition. Undoubtedly, however, the public has been right in this instance in its association of his most widely-known novel with the name of the author as being intrinsically equal, if not superior, to any of the rest. Other works may have their own special charm, but that which is richest in the exhibition of the most prominent gift of the author is ' Headlong Hall.' Before the publication of this work there had been no writer who so boldly flung himself into the arena against con- temporary humbugs. It is infinitely refreshing to read his straightforward, scathing denunciations, as well as his insinuating facetiousness and inuendo, He seems to revel in a tilt against all that the world praises as proper and respectable. An intellectual and material epicurean- ism pervades his pages, and when the rollicking wit ceases to flow it is only to give time for the passing of the bottle. We not only get ' the feast of reason and flow of soul,' but an unswerving devotion to those creature comforts in which the clergy— first in good

n8 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

works — have ever been our leaders. Mr. Headlong, the representative of the ancient Welsh family of the Head- longs, claiming superior antiquity to Cadwallader, con- tracts a strange taste for a Welsh squire — the taste for books. He next desires to pass for a philosopher and a man of taste, and comes up to Oxford to enquire for other men of taste and philosophers ; but ' being assured by a learned professor that there were no such things in the University,' he proceeds to London, where he makes as extensive an acquaintance with philosophers and dilettanti as his ambition could desire. Several of these he invites to Headlong Hall, and the staple of the volume is com- posed of their doings and their discussions. The four leading personages who sustain the brunt of the battle are— Mr. Foster, the perfectibilian, who takes the bright view of everything ; Mr. Escot, the deteriorationist, who takes the dark view of everything ; Mr. Jenkison, the statu-quo-ite, who has arguments to advance on both sides, but is nearly always in favour of allowing things to remain as they are ; and the Rev. Dr. Gaster, a worthy divine who can deliver a learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey, and to whom the consumption of a bottle of port is a very slight matter. It is amusing to note how the various class of thinkers are trotted out one after another on their respective hobbies, and how im-

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 119

partial the author is in dividing his favours amongst them. Nor is it a little singular that all the specimens of the clergy whom Peacock has drawn are of one type ; they are all jolly men of the world. About fifty or sixty years ago, the time at which he wrote, the conventional parson was very frequently of this stamp. His life was passed between fox-hunting, card-playing, and drinking. Since then the muscular Christian and other excellent men have arisen. But there have also sprung up with them men almost of a more mischievous type than the old fox-hunter. There are too many pitiful shepherds left who, in quiet, out-of-the-way villages make the life of the poor a burden to them. These continually enlarge on the duty of the labourers to keep their proper stations, and to revere the clergy and the squirearchy — the former of whom are to provide for them their opinions and their spiritual food, the latter their temporal comforts. Many of the later clergy are in the eyes of sensible men little less contemptible than the old ; the venue of our con- tempt has been changed, that is all. But there is the same difficulty existing now that there was in Peacock's time, and indeed has been in all ages, — the difficulty of persuading the clergy to take one step towards reform in any direction, till nearly all other classes have taken ten. Progress, to them, has generally meant the destruction of

120 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

their cherished rights. The Rev. Dr. Gaster cared little about questions which caused the thoughtful intellects of his day great concern, but in tossing off a bumper of Burgundy he was equal to the best. Occasionally he had a forcible way with him, and said smart things, but he did not profess to be so proficient in knowledge as Mr. Panscope, ' the chemical, botanical, geological, astro- nomical, mathematical, metaphysical, meteorological, anatomical, physiological, galvanistical, musical, pictorial, bibliographical, critical philosopher, who had run through the whole circle of the sciences, and understood them all equally well.' The author gives us the portraits of four critics, Mr. Gall, Mr. Treacle, Mr. Nightshade, and Mr. Mac Laurel, with accurate descriptions of their various modes of criticism — the criticism seeming at that period to be about as deficient in vis as it generally is now; but the happiest passages in the book are those devoted to the speculations of the various philosophers. Two schools of thought are presented to us in the following few sentences: —

' " I conceive," said Mr. Foster, " that men are virtuous in proportion as they are enlightened ; and that, as every gene- ration increases in knowledge, it also increases in virtue." " I wish it were so," said Mr. Escot, " but to me the very re- verse appears to be the fact. The progress of knowledge is not general : it is confined to a chosen few of every age.

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 121

How far these are better than their neighbours, we may examine by-and-by. . . . Give me the wild man of the woods : the original, unthinking, unscientific, unlogical savage : in him there is at least some good ; but, in a civilised, sophisticated, cold-blooded, mechanical, calculating slave of Mammon and the world, there is none — absolutely none. Sir, if I fall into a river, an unsophisticated man will jump in and bring me out ; but a philosopher will look on with the utmost calmness, and consider me in the light of a projectile, and making a calculation of the degree of force with which I have impinged the surface, the resistance of the fluid, the velocity of the current, and the depth of the water in that particular place, he will ascertain with the greatest nicety in what part of the mud at the bottom I may probably be found, at any given distance of time from the moment of my first immersion ! " '

All which is rather hard both on the drowning man and the philosopher. The plot of this novel, if novel it can be called, is very subsidiary to the other purposes of the author, and has nothing whatever in it of a striking sort ; but there are scattered here and there through its pages fine descriptions of Welsh scenery, which seems to have possessed a peculiar charm for Peacock. His real strength, nevertheless, lies in another direction— a readi- ness to grasp instantaneously the views and characters of men, and a singular faculty of reproducing them in dialogue. The entire work, ' Headlong Hall/ is a series of portraits painted by means of opinions, some of them

122 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

carefully executed and filled in, others drawn in a few rough but unmistakable touches. We have Miss Philo- mela Poppyseed, the compounder of novels ; Mr. Chro- matic; Sir Patrick Prism; Mr. Cranium; Miss Tenorina; Lord Littlebrain, &c., whose idiosyncrasies are mostly betrayed by their names. The author also exhibits a remarkable power of assimilation from other writers, being able to enforce his points with the most apposite quota- tions from all sources, in all classes and all ages.

In * Nightmare Abbey/ another remarkable work, we get the same brilliancy, and again meet with characters whom we have recognised in the world. There is Mr. Scythrop Glowry, heir to the owner of the Abbey, who becomes ' troubled with the passion for reforming the world/ and meditates on the practicability of reviving a confederation of regenerators. He publishes a book on the subject, of which only seven copies are sold ; but that does not deter him. He proposes to his beautiful lady-love, Miss Marionetta O'Carroll, that they should each open a vein in the other's arm, mix their blood in a bowl, and drink it as a sacrament of love — and, in fact, plays transcendental madman to the top of his bent. Then we have Mr. Toobad, who prophesies that 'the devil has come among mankind, having great wrath ; ' the Hon. Mr. Listless, with shattered nerves and a system

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 123

incapable of exertion ; Mr. Flosky, who considers modern literature is a north-east wind — ' a blight of the human soul.' In the mouth of one of the characters two sen- tences are put which are a deeper, truer comment upon the French character than whole volumes which have been written since. ' A Frenchman,' he says, ' is born in harness, ready saddled, bitted, and bridled, for any tyrant to ride. He will fawn under his rider one moment, and throw him and kick him to death the next ; but another adventurer springs on his back, and by dint of whip and spur, on he goes as before.' An epitome of the history of France since the Revolution of 1789. The following comparison between our own * enlightened ' age and the past, delivered by Mr. Toobad, has in it many points which might well give us pause : —

' Forsooth, this is the enlightened age. Marry, how ! Did our ancestors go peeping about with dark lanterns, and do we walk at our ease in broad sunshine ? What do we see by it which our ancestors saw not, and which, at the same time, is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred trans- ported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one. We see scores of Bible Societies, where they saw none. We see paper, where they saw gold. We see men in stays, where they saw men in armour. We see painted faces, where they saw healthy ones. We see children perishing in manufactories, where

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they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we see Mr. Sackbut.'

It is impossible even to enumerate here the vast variety of subjects which the writer touches upon. His range is almost unlimited ; in every page there is either an old superstition exploded or a new philosophy criti- cised. The portraits of Shelley and Coleridge will easily be recognised in ' Nightmare Abbey/ for in spite of gross caricature there is also a striking amount of vraisemblance.

In ' Crotchet Castle ' the author still writes with the pen of wormwood and ink of gall. The motto suffi- ciently indicates in the outset what a pungency of wit may be expected — ' Le monde est plein de fous, et qui n'en veut pas voir, doit se tenir tout seul, et casser son miroir.' The complacency of many people is effectually destroyed by the way the author himself breaks the mirrors in which they have been wont to survey their own perfections. Possibly there may be those who think that in this work he has overstepped the just bounds of ridicule, and endeavoured to bring into con- tempt persons who are really useful to their generation. This is the conclusion to which a merely surface-reading

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 125

of his books would lead, and probably many would rise from their perusal with an impression as unjust to the writer as could well be. Because Peacock ruthlessly condemns the pretenders of science, it is not to be sup- posed, and will not be by the really candid judge, that he has no sympathy with its true and earnest devotees. A Newton would receive his homage equally with an ^Eschylus or a Homer. He only wishes to prick the windbag ; to show upon what a very little a reputation which the world chooses to honour is sometimes built. It is the bubble which he desires to burst — the unsound- ness in our social and political economics he endeavours to expose. Probably there was no one who would have felt it more deeply than he, if he had imagined that what he was writing would be turned from its purpose, either wilfully or ignorantly, and the writer made to appear an enemy of truth. It is hard, at times, to get rid of the idea that he is laughing at all the rest of the world, which, in any, is the surest test of folly, for the mighty wisdom of the cachinnatory great one himself is only a river into which the lesser streams of wisdom in others have flowed. There is no human being who can afford to laugh at and despise the whole race, simply because there is no human being who is not indebted to it. But we absolve our author at once from any. such charge as this. Having

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comprehended in some degree the stand-points from which he has shot his arrows, we are bound to confess, not only that his aim is true, but that he has never chosen his subjects thoughtlessly or unjustifiably. Adam Smith lived long before him, and his principles were well esta- blished in the public mind, and acknowledged to be in many respects unassailable. It is not to be imagined for a moment that either he or his true followers were satirised in the person of the Scotch political economist who figures in these pages. Yet, strange to say, there have been critics who have credited him with some such aims, and have employed their acumen in discovering how he has transfixed this and that personage who has hitherto been held as an authority in the branch of literature or science to which he has devoted himself. Nothing could be more fallacious. Peacock was a man who was thoroughly abreast with the intellectual progress of his time ; he was deeply interested in it, and capable of sympathising to the full with all those men whose solid attainments and brilliant talents have been of ser- vice to humanity. His satire wants looking at as he wished it to be viewed, and it will be seen clearly of what immense value is the winnowing implement of his ridicule. The principal character in ' Crotchet Castle ' is Mr. Mac Quedy, the Scotch political economist afore-

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said, or Mac Q. E. D., the son of a demonstration — and certainly the way in which he is dealt with allows of no misunderstanding. Then we have the transcendental schools criticised in the person of Mr. Skionar, with more of the broad farce in his delineation than is con- spicuous in the economist, the subject affording better scope for it. Mr. Chainmail is an antiquary, devoted to singing the glories of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whilst Mr. Crotchet, the proprietor of the Castle, is one who has made his money in the City with neither more nor less conscientiousness than thousands who are now continually occupied on 'Change in the same operation. Perhaps the best character in the book for life-like vigour and reality is the Rev. Dr. Folliott, the exceed- ingly vigorous Christian, who batters down the theories of Messrs. Mac Quedy and Skionar with the force of a sledge-hammer, and who is not unlike, in his style of conversation, the great Johnson. When asked if he sets no value upon ' the right principles of rent, profit, wages, and currency,' he answers : ' Sir, my principles in these things are to take as much as I can get, and to pay no more than I can help. These are every man's principles, whether they be the right principles or no. There, sir, is political economy in a nutshell.7 The Doctor is wrong ; these are not every man's principles, but they

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are very largely every man's practice — which, notwith- standing, amounts to very nearly the same thing. We should fail in giving an idea of the piquancy of the various conversations in which the several characters take part. Peacock has written no work where the dialogue is more brilliant. From the chapter on theories we extract only a few sentences, which may serve to indicate his general style : —

' Mr. Crotchet ', Jun. There is one point in which philo- sophers of all classes seem to be agreed ; that they only want money to regenerate the world.

1 Mr. Mac Quedy. No doubt of it. Nothing is so easy as to lay down the rules of perfect society. There wants nothing but money to set it going. I will explain myself fully and clearly by reading a paper (producing a large scroll}. In the infancy of society —

« The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Pray, Mr. Mac Ouedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with ' the infancy of society ' ?

' Mr. Mac Quedy. Eh, sir, it is the simplest way to begin at the beginning. In the infancy of society, when Govern- ment was invented to save a percentage ; say two and a half per cent.

1 The Rev. Dr. Folliott I will not say any such thing.

' Mr Mac Quedy. Well, say any percentage you please.

' The Rev. Dr. Folliott. I will not say any percentage at all.

' Mr. Mac Quedy. On the principle of the division of labour

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 129

1 The Rev. Dr. Folliott. Government was invented to spend a percentage.

' Mr. Mac Quedy. To save a percentage.

' The Rev. Dr. Folliott. No, sir, to spend a percentage : and a good deal more than two and a half per cent. Two hundred and fifty per cent. That is intelligible.

' Mr. Mac Quedy. " In the infancy of society "

* Mr. Toogood. Never mind the infancy of society. The question is of society in its maturity. Here is what it should be (producing a paper]. I have laid it down in a diagram.

' Mr. Skionar. Before we proceed to the question of Government, we must discriminate the boundaries of sense, understanding, and reason. Sense is a receptivity.

' Mr. Crotchet, Jun. We are proceeding too fast. Money being all that is wanted to regenerate society, I will put into the hands of this company a large sum for the purpose. Now let us see how to dispose of it.'

Then follow as many plans for its disposal as there are parties to the discussion. Dr. Folliott denies all Mr. Mac Quedy's positions, and affirms that political economy does no such thing as stand in the same relation to the state as domestic economy does to the family. 'In the family/ says the Doctor, in sentences which are appa- rently a poser to the economist, ' there is a paterfamilias, who regulates the distribution, and takes care that there shall be no such thing in the household as one dying of hunger, while another dies of surfeit. In the state it is all hunger at one end, and all surfeit at the other.' But

K

1 30 POETS AND NOVELISTS.

we must leave the epicurean Doctor, with his easy jovial manners, his shrewd sense, and also his many fallacies. The end of it all is that Crotchet keeps the money in his pocket, and the scheme for the regeneration of the world falls to the ground.

Amongst other subjects which come under the lash in this volume are the practices of Mr. Puffall, who obtains sketches from Lady Clarinda, and recommends them to the world as the work of a lady of quality, who has made very free with the characters of her acquain- tance. The novel appears as ' the most popular produc- tion of the day/ but, as the novelist herself slily remarks to a friend, ' the day ' is a very convenient phrase ; it allows of three hundred and sixty- five 'most popular productions ' in a year, and in leap year one more. The purse-proud were always the aversion of Peacock, and in this work he is again scathing in his invective upon the greedy appetite for wealth, and the unscrupulousness which so frequently attends its acquirement. The cha- racter of Mr. Touch-and-go, the great banker — who, together with the contents of his till, was reported absent one morning — might do duty for many others before and since ; he is one of the ' representative men ' forgotten by Emerson.

* Maid Marian ' is an investiture of the old story of

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Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest with new grace and vitality. As with all its author's works, however, it is not destitute of a purpose, though the satire is not so ap- parent upon the face of the story itself. The narrative is excellently told, and we question whether there was ever a more poetical description penned of the home of the bold outlaw than this. It is put into the mouth of the Friar, who, in answer to the remark of a captured baron that he has fallen into 'fine company/ replies, ' In the very best of company, in the high court of Nature, and in the midst of her own nobility. Is it not so ? This goodly grove is our palace : the oak and the beech are its colonnade and its canopy : the sun, and the moon, and the stars are its everlasting lamps : the grass, and the daisy, and the primrose, and the violet are its many-coloured floor of green, white, yellow, and blue : the may-flower, and the woodbine, and the eglantine, and the ivy are its decorations, its curtains, and its tapestry : the lark, and the thrush, and the nightingale are its unhired minstrels and musicians. Robin Hood is king of the forest both by dignity of birth and by virtue of his standing army : to say nothing of the free choice of his people.' The author strikes, through the medium of the old history, at the assumed principle in many quarters in our own day, that Might involves Right,

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a matter in which there is no necessity to follow him with a disquisition at the present moment.

A treatise might be written, with an almost number- less catalogue of instances appended, upon authors who, from various circumstances and considerations, have been hurried into too rapid writing. With many minds the mere fact of publication is a great inducement to commit the unpardonable offence, for such it must be regarded in the interests of the general reader. The time came to Peacock once in his career, and at an early stage, when the polished steel weapon was seen to be blunted. The incisiveness which distinguishes most of his writings is not so apparent in * Melincourt ; or, Sir Oran Haut-ton.' Here we have less sarcasm, or rather what we have is so largely diluted that occasionally we doubt whether we are drawing from the same spring which has hitherto given us such delight. The book bears the traces of hasty composition, and altogether we should regard it as much inferior to our author at his best. It partakes more of the form of the ordinary novel, but, just as much as this is the case, does it lose in those other qualities which are generally associated with the name of its writer. Isolated scenes and passages may be good, but there exists a verbosity to which we have been unaccustomed, and which we can ill brook.

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After the feast of sparkling wines and choice viands which he has again and again placed before us, the palate remains comparatively unexcited and unsatiated with this specimen of intellectual catering. The truth is that Peacock's genius was neither of the novelistic nor the dramatic kind, and his attempt to portray an ordinary heroine in Anthelia Melincourt must be pronounced a failure. Far higher success is achieved in some of the other characters which it is easy to classify amongst the peculiar creations of the author. Sir Telegraph Paxarett, for instance, is a character well conceived and sustained, with a great amount of originality in his development ; and so is the Rev. Mr. Portpipe, whose very name is a little idyll upon the course and character of his clerical life. But the best of all the characters is Sir Oran Haut- ton, and the happiest parts are those referring to political anomalies, which are castigated con amore. There are the boroughs of Onevote and Threevotes and Fewvotes, with the peculiarities attendant upon each, and all touched upon with uncommon humour. The book is probably palling and even foolish to those who take no pleasure in intellectual discussions and arguments, but to the thinker who has at heart the purification of society from all that corrupts and degrades, it will not be with- out a special attraction. But it is writing which needs

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digesting, not skimming. The assumptions of one of the learned writers in a celebrated Quarterly are very severely handled, the reviewer being credited with the idea that he and those who think with him are the only wise — a fallacy by no means confined to per- sons holding one set of opinions. We part from the volume, nevertheless, with a decided impression of genius veiled.

Reference has already been made to the attachment which Peacock conceived for Welsh scenery, and another proof of it is afforded by a later work of his, and one of the most pleasant which has proceeded from his pen, * The Misfortunes of Elphin.' Here we behold a vene- rable story clothed by genius with all the reality of actual circumstance. The result of the author's labour is per- fectly satisfactory. The style is never involved, though the language is now and then pedantic. The history is fixed in the sixth century, when the nominal sovereignty of Britain was held by Uther Pendragon. Amongst the petty kings was Gwythno Garanhir, King of Care- digion. This monarch was not fond of the sea, and built a palace on the rocky banks of the Mawddach, and also erected watchtowers which were subordinate to a central castle commanding the sea-port of Gwythno. In this castle dwelt Prince Seithenyn, who appears to

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have been a sort of First Commissioner of Works to the King. He differs in these considerable respects from our modern First Commissioner, namely, that he drank the profits of his office, ' and left the embankment which was to keep out the sea to his deputies, who left it to their assistants, who left it to itself/ Elphin, the son of £he King, informs the Commissioner to his momentary discomfort, one day, that the embankment is rotten, and should all be made sound, to which the latter replies : — ' So I have heard some people say before, perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity : that very unamiable sort of people, who are in the habit of indulging their reason. . . . There is nothing so dangerous as innova- tion. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling and battling against it. I would not be so presumptuous as to say I would build anything that would stand against them half an hour ; and here this immortal old work, which God forbid the finger of modern mason should bring into jeopardy, this immortal work has stood for centuries, and will stand for centuries more, if we let it alone. It is well : it works well : let well alone. Cupbearer, fill. It was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die.' Admirable sarcasm !

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The policy of masterly inaction was very disastrous, as of course it always is in matters social and political. The waves beat high and effected an entrance ; the tower fell into the surf, and the entire structure was in danger. The inhabitants fled, whilst Seithenyn swore that an enemy had done the deed. He leaped mto the torrent, from which we afterwards discover he was mira- culously saved by clinging to a barrel, whose contents had previously cheered his inner organisation. Elphin quits the castle, bearing with him Angharad, the lovely daughter of Seithenyn. Then come the lamentations of King Gwythno over his inundated lands — excellent stanzas, graphic and concentrated in expression. Thus was the kingdom of Caredigion ruined. Prince Elphin, who has married Angharad, is very fond of fishing, and one day he has a miraculous draught (subsequent to a dream on the subject), which proves to be a little child. Its surpassing beauty causes Angharad to make the ex- clamation, ' Taliesin ; ' ' Radiant Brow.' The found- ling is adopted by the couple, and in after years becomes the celebrated bard Taliesin, and marries Melanghel, the daughter of his foster-parents. Taliesin grew up in excellent knowledge, but the science of political economy being then unknown, he knew nothing of ' the advan- tage of growing rich by getting into debt and paying

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interest.' The author further remarks, ' They had no steam-engines, with fires as eternal as those of the nether world, wherein the squalid many, from infancy to age, might be turned into component portions of machinery for the benefit of the purple-faced few. They could neither poison the air with gas, nor the waters with its dregs : in short, they made their money of metal, and breathed pure air, and drank pure water like unscientific barbarians.' In all which things there is verily much food for reflection. The multiplication of species in a little kingdom like England must be attended with in- convenience and suffering to the majority. The whole- sale system of going to the wall is inevitable : but do we not as some compensation for using up the vital force of the labouring class, offer them churches and chapels, regiments of the cloth, ' intellectual ' enjoyments, and the brilliant and splendid spectacle for their admiration of an aristocracy which is kind enough to live on the sweat of their brow, and in numberless cases on their absolute degradation? Far be it from us, then, to say that we have made no progress since the time of the Welsh bard. But, to proceed with the story, leaving all who may be interested in it to pursue their investigations of the constitution of society at that happy period. Elphin succeeds his father as king, but for certain indiscreet

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boastings, as they are held, he falls into bondage to King Maelgon, who has resolved to seize upon his wife. The rival king attempts to take her during the absence of her husband. But his emissaries are entrapped, and the matter afterwards coming before the great King Arthur, together with other vexed questions, he decides accord- ing to his far-famed principles of equity, and an exchange of prisoners is effected. Taliesin, who has been chiefly instrumental in procuring this termination of affairs, is rewarded by Elphin with his daughter's hand. We get glimpses of Enid, Queen Gwenyvar, Sir Gawain, Sir Tristram, and other knights and ladies familiar to the reader of Arthurian romance ; and the volume closes with a Grand Bardic Congress at Caer Lleon. Undoubt- edly one of its greatest charms lies in the beauty of the poems which are scattered through the various divisions. They are imbued with more sublimity and tenderness than other poems of the author which may lay claim to be more entirely original in conception. The modern English seems at any rate to have caught the spirit of the old bards, if the form of expression be wanting. We cannot reproduce here the most striking of these poems, but the cultivated mind was rarely more forcibly ex- hibited than in their composition.

Although travelling over a portion of the ground

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already covered in previous novels, * Gryll Grange,' the last work by Peacock, is one perhaps intrinsically supe- rior to all except ' Headlong Hall.' Here he bravely combats many abuses which we regret to say have even yet not entirely disappeared. It may be commended to those who would rob us of our national lands and forests, to the poisoners of our atmosphere and our water, to the bores in Parliament, and to the useless livers in the world generally. Hear him on Parliament. ' The wisdom of Parliament/ says the Rev. Dr. Opimian, another of those clever epicurean divines of whom we have had something already, ' is a wisdom sui generis. It is not like any other wisdom. It is not the wisdom of Socrates, nor the wisdom of Solomon. It is the Wisdom of Parliament.' The excellent Doctor could not get much farther than this in our day. But pursue the analogy between that time and the present. ' The Wisdom of Parliament has ordered the Science to do something. The Wisdom does not know what nor the Science either. But the Wisdom has empowered the Science to spend some millions of money; and this, no doubt, the Science will do. When the money has been spent, it will be found that the Something has been worse than nothing.' The term ' honourable ' is also objected to, for ' Palestine soup is not more remote from the true

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Jerusalem than many an honourable friend from public honesty and honour.' How much golden advice is com- pressed into the following words, the spirit lying beneath which would save this most Christian nation from hum- bling itself in the dust before its Creator for many cala- mities which might have been prevented !

< Honesty would materially diminish the number of acci- dents. High-pressure steam boilers would not scatter death and destruction around them, if the dishonesty of avarice did not tempt their employment where the more costly low- pressure would ensure absolute safety. Honestly-built houses would not come suddenly down and crush their occu- pants. Ships, faithfully built and efficiently manned, would not so readily strike on a lee- shore, nor go instantly to pieces on the first touch of the ground. Honestly-made sweet- meats would not poison children ; honestly-compounded drugs would not poison patients. In short, the larger por- tion of what we call accidents are crimes.'

Criticism could lend no additional force to such language as this, or more clearly show its appropriateness to our present year of grace. The science of panto- pragmatics, which is described as ' a real art of talking about an imaginary art of teaching every man his own business/ is one that is tantalisingly gridironed, and our system of competitive examinations was never set in a more ridiculous light than in these pages. We have papers which would have excluded Marlborough from

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the army and Nelson from the navy : on other matters hear what our author says : —

* Ask the hon. member for Muckborough on what acqui- sitions in history and mental and moral philosophy he founds his claim of competence to make laws for the nation ? He can only tell you that he has been chosen as the most con- spicuous Grub among the Money-grubs of his borough to be the representative of all that is sordid, selfish, hard-hearted, unintellectual, and anti-patriotic, which are the distinguish- ing qualities of the majority among them. Ask a candidate for a clerkship what are his qualifications ? He may answer, ' All that are requisite — reading, writing, and arith- metic.' ' Nonsense,' says the questioner ; * do you know the number of miles in direct distance from Timbuctoo to the top of Chimborazo ? ' ' I do not,' says the candidate. ' Then you will not do for a clerk,' says the competitive examiner. Does the Money-grub of Muckborough know? He does not ; nor anything else. The clerk may be able to answer some of the questions put to him. Money-grub could not answer one of them. But he is very fit for a legislator.'

With which compliment to the Lower House we will close our extracts from this trenchant book. It exhibits Peacock at his highest, with ripened scholarship, polished style, and a varied and profound experience.

As might be expected, the poetry of our author was deeply impregnated with his classical spirit. The vast weight of his learning, which he seemed to ' bear lightly as a flower,' was exhibited in numberless erudite allusions,

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whilst occasionally the foot-notes to his efforts were even more full of a ripe scholarship than the poems themselves. Naturally, his bent of mind led him, in his quest of sub- jects, into the realms of romance and mythology, with which he was in a remarkable degree familiar. One of his most successful poems is that entitled ' Rhododaphne, or the Thessalian Spell.' It is a poem which Coleridge might have written. Founded on the ascription of the power of magic to the being from whom it takes its name, the story is worked out with eminent skill and feeling. Anthemion, the flower of all Arcadia's youth, comes to the festival of Love, which was celebrated in honour of that deity every fifth year in the Temple of Love at Thespia, a town near the foot of Mount Helicon. The flowers he presents at the foot of the altar are suddenly blighted. This fills him with terror. He then hears himself addressed, and, looking up, beholds a maiden before him with more than mortal loveliness. She gives flowers to him, which are accepted at the altar, and so she passes out of sight. In the second canto he is made aware that the flower he has accepted is the fatal laurel- rose, and he is bade to seek the stream that laves the foot of the mountain, and there, calling on his Natal Genius, and with averted face, he is to cast the flower into the stream, looking not upon the running wave

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again. By this means the magic spell now over him will be dissolved. Immediately he has fulfilled the injunction he hears the cry of his beloved Callirrhoe, and is not proof against looking back ; he does so, but all becomes still. The secret that the bright maiden who has be- witched him is Rhododaphne is revealed in the third canto, where she charges him with having thrown away the flower which she gave him. He pleads its disastrous nature ; at least so he was informed by a reverend seer, and he is thus forcibly rebuked in lines which bear a sting (and doubtless were intended to do so) for nine- teenth-century sophistry.

< The world, oh youth ! deems many wise, Who dream at noon with waking eyes, While spectral fancy round them flings Phantoms of unexisting things ; Whose truth is lies, whose paths are error, Whose gods are fiends, whose heaven is terror.'

The spell woven round Anthemion is made stronger by the maiden's kiss, which is to be poison to all lips but hers. He returns to his own Arcadian vale and meets his destined bride. She flies to meet him, her eyes imparting and reflecting pleasure, for, as the author beautifully expresses it, —

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1 This is love's terrestrial treasure, That in participation lives, And evermore, the more it gives, Itself abounds in fuller measure.'

But Anthemion's embrace proves, as predicted, the death of Callirrhoe, and maddened with despair the lover flies from the scene. Succeeding cantos are devoted to his wanderings, and to his meeting again with the magic maid of Thessaly. At length, for her impious spells, Rhododaphne is slain by the arrow of Uranian Love, and the marble palace in which she has been reclining with Anthemion is riven asunder. By her death the spell is removed from the latter, and once more he finds him- self in his native vale, where he meets the risen Callirrhoe, and the happy pair raise a marble tomb to the dead Rhododaphne.

Such is the outline of this poem, which has many poetic graces : it is not, however, impassioned, as lofty poetry should be, and therefore very high rank cannot be conceded to it. It contrasts favourably, nevertheless, with many modern attempts to render into verse ancient stories which would seem of themselves to suggest the loftiest inspiration. The poetry of Peacock is neither the poetry of sentimental namby-pambyism nor of burn- ing passion. If he does not glow with the fire of Shelley,

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he does not pall with the sickly maunderings of later nerveless versifiers, whose genius has had some difficulty in crawling through its long-clothes. While our author's verse is liquid and musical, it is never weak and faltering. He is able to endow his creations with some amount of life-breathing power. It can scarcely be said that he was happier in his poetry than his prose ; rather, indeed, must the reverse be admitted. His intellectual and dissecting strength was greater than his emotional. He knew, probably, that the general reader would take no delight in his verse ; but that mattered little to him ; he could give him none other — consequently all his work in this direction betrays rather the thinking than the feeling man. In only one of his volumes of verse has he dealt after the manner of versifiers generally. The effort was not successful. It was his first attempt in a more popular style and scope, which style he seems afterwards to have abandoned. The truth is that on ordinary topics he had nothing extraordinary to say. It was when he came to re-illume dead torches that his genius shone to advantage. One poem in the work to which we are referring, ' Palmyra. ' — and which gives its name to the volume — is, however, in spite of what we have said, a splendid ode upon the destruction of the magni- ficent Oriental city. The last stanza, an adjuration to

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bow to the will of the Deity, is finely expressed. It reminds one forcibly of Campbell's 'Ode to the Last

Man : '—

* Bow thou to Him, for He is good,

And loves the works His hands have made ; In earth, in air, in fire, in flood,

His parent bounty shines displayed. Bow then to Him, for He is just,

Though mortals scan His ways in vain ; Repine not, children of the dust !

For He in mercy sends ye pain. Bow then to Him, for He is great, And was, ere Nature, Time, and Fate

Began their mystic flight ; And still shall be when consummating flame Shall plunge this universal frame

In everlasting night. Bow then to Him, the Lord of All, Whose nod bids empires rise and fall,

Earth, heaven, and nature's Sire ! To Him, who, matchless and alone, Has fix'd in boundless space his throne, Unchang'd, unchanging still, while worlds and suns expire ! '

Most of the other poems in this volume are very inferior, and produce the impression that the writer, after having communed with the gods, has descended to the language of the mannikins. A poem of a more ambitious description, entitled 'The Genius of the Thames/ besides exhibiting a considerable infusion of the lyrical spirit,

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breathes also of the patriotic. The pre-eminence of the noble river is demonstrated in many smooth, flowing lines, and the opportunity is seized to recapitulate all the old traditions in connection with it. The beliefs in tutelary genii are dwelt upon, and the contemplative mind of the author has free scope for exercise. Silvery, however, as the lines are, and beautiful frequently as are the thoughts which give substance to them, it is not a work likely to enhance the author's reputation in any considerable degree. It bears traces of the study of poets of the close of last century, not the best models, one would think, for an author just opening on his career. The eye of the poet for natural scenery is just and true. Perhaps it is not sufficiently fresh. The student has stepped from his books into the open air, and his impressions are scholastic and polished. Legends of the Thames valley are touched with some amount of force, and the comparisons drawn between the state of Britain and the old monarchies, Babylonish and others, are vigorous and interesting. Altogether, it is just such work as to tempt a man to perform who had a high taste for poetic art, but it is not by any means a fair test or gauge of his powers.

The same observations would very nearly apply to 'The Philosophy of Melancholy,' a poem marked by

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graceful fancy and many touches of true poetic feeling, but lacking in the higher imaginative power. It is im- possible to peruse it with anything but high pleasure, yet the judgment is tempered when we think what such masters of the art as Milton would have made of the same subject A pensive attractiveness doubtless attached to these themes in the mind of the poet, but his capability of utterance was by no means commensurate with the fertility of his ideas.

Susceptibility, then, or that extreme sensibility which permeates every avenue of the true poet's being, was deficient in Peacock, and in consequence he came short of the standard. We know the real singer when we meet with him. He is not one who is compelled to ransack the stores of recondite lore before he gives us the treasure we need. He is a man whose heart is turned out towards humanity — and, whether the king on the throne or the beggar in the street be his theme, he is able to invest it with undying interest. He is a mirror upon which are reflected all the complex passions of human nature. He reads the secrets of humanity and of Nature as one would read the pages of a book, without faltering, and with a clear apprehension of their meaning and import. There is no need for him to go back into past ages to discover subjects for his muse : the records of

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the very lives by which he is surrounded furnish him with material as tragic as the death of Caesar. The gloom and the glory of his own time strike as deeply into his soul as do those of any past age. The great poet of every period has always been the man who was able to interpret the human life which encompassed him, and to paint it as he beheld it. Realities are what he achieves, and these are always recognised, transcending a thousand failures in attempting to revivify the beings of antiquity. In the sense, then, in which such a man as Burns, for instance, was a poet, Peacock was none at all. Impulsiveness was foreign to him. He had too much of the cynic and the critic in his composition to be possessed of the divine afflatus. His verse is ever correct and musical, not burning and overwhelming : it is like the silvery stream which meanders pleasantly through the meadows, and not the roaring mountain cataract, or the tempestuous waves which beat against the rock-bound shore.

We have left ourselves no space to speak of Peacock's miscellaneous works, — his 'Paper Money Lyrics/ his translation of ' GF Ingannati,' a comedy performed at Siena, in 1531, his ' Reminiscences and Correspondence with Shelley/ &c. This is the less to be regretted, how- ever, as these fugitive pieces are to be shortly collected,

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and republished with his more important works in a uniform and permanent edition.1

Sufficient ground has, we trust, been shown for turning back to this too-long neglected author. With a chosen few he has ever been a favourite, but to the admirers of a vapid and invertebrate style he must necessarily remain an abomination. To glance at the mere list of works of fiction at the present day which seem to afford most delight to the general reader is a disheartening operation: it will not have been in vain if these observations on one of the most remarkable writers of several generations should induce, in however small a degree, a reaction. In all those respects in which an author is of permanent benefit to mankind the author of ' Headlong Hall ' is worthy of occupying an eminent position. His vast learning, his precise style, his great research, his bound- less sarcasm, his intense abhorrence of cant, are all so many claims upon our regard. With the ordinary

Ql

novelists he has little in common ; in most respects he cannot be put into competition with them ; for, whilst he has many virtues which they do not possess, he ex- hibits few of their vices.

1 Since the above was written, as I have intimated in the Preface, the Edition referred to has been issued.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

{NEW QUARTERLY MAGAZINE]

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

AMERICAN genius is as yet in its youth. Its slumbering forces have not had time to develop themselves. A nation, like an individual, when first it becomes conscious that it possesses the precious boon called life, endeavours to gratify the selfish propensities of its existence, and from this stage moves on gradually to the manifestation of the higher intellectual and spiritual qualities. So progresses the Transatlantic mind, which has not yet culminated in the exhibition of genius of the first order, The shrewdness of the race has already passed into a proverb, and the world- wide reputation acquired in this respect has latterly been almost equalled by the fame attaching to its new school of humourists, who so singu- larly reflect in themselves all the angularities of the national character. In poetry, philosophy, and the drama, however, that which has yet been accomplished is mainly of a tentative character. The Transatlantic Milton, Bacon, and Shakspeare have yet to be born. Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, and Walt Whitman

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are the only planets which burn with a noticeable degree of brilliancy on the poetical horizon ; while of dramatists not one has yet arisen with a clear title to the world's regard. In philosophy, the name of Emerson at once occurs to the mind ; but with all his excellences — and in some respects he is the most remarkable man America has yet produced — he is unable to stand alone. It is questionable whether the world would have heard of Emerson had it not first heard of Carlyle \ and in this country Emerson could not have occupied that con- spicuous position to which he can justly lay claim in his own country. In one important pursuit only can we cede to our Transatlantic brethren the possession of a class of thinkers large enough to be distinctive — and that is in theology. With all their shrewdness and great worldliness, there is a bent in the mind indubitably theological, and the result has been the appearance of such strong and earnest theologians as Jonathan Edwards, Channing, and Theodore Parker — names which deserve and obtain the profoundest respect on this side the water.

The imaginative faculty is generally the last to reach its destined width and fulness, and nations have patiently to await its growth for centuries. It is like the oak, which beholds its fellow-trees of the forest grow old and

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die before it attains to perfection. When it has at length reached its full growth, it even then knows no perceptible decay, but remains with a nation as its most permeating and abiding influence. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in the literature of the imagination America still occupies but an inferior place. She has yet to cast her giant arms about her, to ascertain of what she is capable, to gauge her resources, and to consolidate her strength, before she arrives at that grand and profound calm which is necessary for the appearance of the great novelist and poet. As an earnest, nevertheless, of what she will yet accomplish in this direction, we have selected for consideration the writer whose genius is, perhaps, universally acknowledged to be the most striking and unique among his own countrymen, and whose works will, without doubt, at no distant date, be cherished as classics, just as we in England preserve men so dissimilar as Fielding and Goldsmith.

The silentness with which genius frequently assimilates the stores of knowledge and experience was never more clearly exemplified than in the life of Nathaniel Haw- thorne. The facts of his personal history are very sparse, and those which are known are not of any special import. He adds another example to the many, that those men who have exercised the most permanent in-

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fluence over the human race have by no means been noisy and turbulent spirits, but just the reverse. Men of action are the waves which break boisterously upon the seashore : men of thought are the deep quiet under- currents which are the veritable ocean itself. Activity and enterprise are the fringes of time ; intellect, soul, spirit, is Time. The world lives by the throbs of this inner and unseen power. Yet, though it is of little con- sequence to know what an author has done outwardly, compared with what he has said, suffered, and felt, there is a genuine interest attaching to the life of any who have risen beyond the ordinary altitude, and occupied exalted niches in the temple of Fame. That interest finds its completest satisfaction when an author vouch- safes to explain to us the various mental processes through which he has passed before realising the product which has been of so much benefit to the species. We see, then, that not only is his work far in advance of the average intellect, but his volitions have been deeper and his aspirations proportionately higher. The apparent quietude of his life has been a season of really more rapid growth in thought and feeling than is the lot of the ordinary mortal. The man of genius has lived cease- lessly, not by fits and starts, and his life has been a constant series of intellectual and spiritual surprises, each

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achievement or revelation being but a landmark on that road to perfection