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Title: Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #425]
                Most recently updated: February 12, 2013

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1896 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS ***


Transcribed from the 1896 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                             FAMILIAR STUDIES
                                    OF
                              MEN AND BOOKS


                                    BY

                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[Picture: Decorative graphic]

                            _ELEVENTH EDITION_

                                * * * * *

                                  London
                        CHATTO & WINDUS, PICADILLY
                                   1896

                                * * * * *

                                    TO

                             THOMAS STEVENSON

                              CIVIL ENGINEER
          BY WHOSE DEVICES THE GREAT SEA LIGHTS IN EVERY QUARTER
                   OF THE WORLD NOW SHINE MORE BRIGHTLY

                   THIS VOLUME IS IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE

                           DEDICATED BY HIS SON

                                THE AUTHOR




PREFACE
BY WAY OF CRITICISM.


THESE studies are collected from the monthly press.  One appeared in the
_New Quarterly_, one in _Macmillan’s_, and the rest in the _Cornhill
Magazine_.  To the _Cornhill_ I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that
I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the
very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to
republish so considerable an amount of copy.

These nine worthies have been brought together from many different ages
and countries.  Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared
to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.
To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the very
deepest strain of thought in Scotland,—a country far more essentially
different from England than many parts of America; for, in a sense, the
first of these men re-created Scotland, and the second is its most
essentially national production.  To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon would
involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the author
by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties of art.
Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of something
not so much realised as widely sought after among the late generations of
their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the
society that brought them forth, an author would require a large habit of
life among modern Americans.  As for Yoshida, I have already disclaimed
responsibility; it was but my hand that held the pen.

In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant.  One book led
to another, one study to another.  The first was published with
trepidation.  Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with
greater confidence.  So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our
generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial
commission through the ages; and, having once escaped the perils of the
Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
universal history and criticism.  Now, it is one thing to write with
enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from recent
reading, coloured with recent prejudice; and it is quite another business
to put these writings coldly forth again in a bound volume.  We are most
of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the “natural affections”
of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us are altogether free from
paralysing doubts and scruples.  For my part, I have a small idea of the
degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem
with error.  One and all were written with genuine interest in the
subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect
knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the
disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.

Of these disadvantages a word must here be said.  The writer of short
studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole
lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is
bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking.
For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall present
a brief, reasoned, and memorable view.  By the necessity of the case, all
the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative; and that
of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in the
text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious glitter.
By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his subject
throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice.  Like
Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter’s neck to get the
proper shadows on the portrait.  It is from one side only that he has
time to represent his subject.  The side selected will either be the one
most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and in
both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and sophisticated
reading.  In a biography, this and that is displayed; the hero is seen at
home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one
after another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck.  But in the short study,
the writer, having seized his “point of view,” must keep his eye steadily
to that.  He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate than truly to
characterise.  The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the shadows
overcharged; the chosen expression, continually forced, may degenerate at
length into a grimace; and we have at best something of a caricature, at
worst a calumny.  Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by
their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief
representations.  They take so little a while to read, and yet in that
little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light
and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that
view is imposed upon the reader.  The two English masters of the style,
Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers.  Carlyle, indeed,
had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of
mankind are felt and rendered with so much more poetic comprehension, and
he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire in his belly so much more
hotly burning than the patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied,
that it seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together.  But
the “point of view” was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his
writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid.  They are
too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed; they are probably
always disfigured.  The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied;
it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle.  So with all
writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes
before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity
of the case, to write entirely in that spirit.  What he cannot vivify he
should omit.

Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers, I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it.  But it is not possible.  Short
studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand.  What is perverted has its place there for
ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented.  It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new “point of view,” would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature.  Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in the
volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order.  But this
must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I
trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and do not, by
criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and less partial
critics.

_Hugo’s Romances_.—This is an instance of the “point of view.”  The five
romances studied with a different purpose might have given different
results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour.  The
great contemporary master of wordmanship, and indeed of all literary arts
and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner.  But it is
best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often overlooked.

_Burns_.—I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns.  This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
was out of character upon that stage.

This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review.  The
exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
but they were to this effect—that Burns was a bad man, the impure vehicle
of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all criticism tended.
Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the profoundest pity, but
with a growing esteem, that I studied the man’s desperate efforts to do
right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it appeared to me that any
thinking being should feel otherwise.  The complete letters shed, indeed,
a light on the depths to which Burns had sunk in his character of Don
Juan, but they enhance in the same proportion the hopeless nobility of
his marrying Jean.  That I ought to have stated this more noisily I now
see; but that any one should fail to see it for himself, is to me a thing
both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn.  If Burns, on the facts
dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad man, I question very much
whether either I or the writer in the Review have ever encountered what
it would be fair to call a good one.  All have some fault.  The fault of
each grinds down the hearts of those about him, and—let us not blink the
truth—hurries both him and them into the grave.  And when we find a man
persevering indeed, in his fault, as all of us do, and openly overtaken,
as not all of us are, by its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with
too polite biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one’s sleep with Heedless and
Too-bold in the arbour.

Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what every one well
knows, of Burns’s profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage.  And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons.  For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness.  In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any “irregularity between the sexes.”  The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
smiles apologetically on its victims.  It is often said—I have heard it
with these ears—that drunkenness “may lead to vice.”  Now I did not think
it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I was
obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too frequent
vanity and meanness of his relations to women.  Hence, in the eyes of
many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns’s radical
badness.

But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality so
greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must
never represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any
other consequences than a large family and fortune.  To hint that Burns’s
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the moral
law.  Yet such is the fact.  It was bravely done; but he had presumed too
far on his strength.  One after another the lights of his life went out,
and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end.
And surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines out
tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort to do right,
than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly Wiseman, married a
congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died reputably an old man.  It is
his chief title that he refrained from “the wrong that amendeth wrong.”
But the common, trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like the
Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue.  Job has been written
and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we
have still to desire a little Christianity, or, failing that, a little
even of that rude, old, Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice
alike go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith.

_Walt Whitman_.—This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to mediate
between the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly
indifferent and frequently averse.  Many articles had been written on
this notable man.  One after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to
praise or blame unduly.  In the last case, they helped to blindfold our
fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by an excess of
unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt.  I was here
on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed myself with
perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper.  Seeing so much in
Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was
unsurpassed in force and fitness,—seeing the true prophet doubled, as I
thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop,—it appeared best to
steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought they
had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over
what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his extraordinary
poems.  That was perhaps the right road; yet I cannot help feeling that
in this attempt to trim my sails between an author whom I love and honour
and a public too averse to recognise his merit, I have been led into a
tone unbecoming from one of my stature to one of Whitman’s.  But the good
and the great man will go on his way not vexed with my little shafts of
merriment.  He, first of any one, will understand how, in the attempt to
explain him credibly to Mrs. Grundy, I have been led into certain airs of
the man of the world, which are merely ridiculous in me, and were not
intentionally discourteous to himself.  But there is a worse side to the
question; for in my eagerness to be all things to all men, I am afraid I
may have sinned against proportion.  It will be enough to say here that
Whitman’s faults are few and unimportant when they are set beside his
surprising merits.  I had written another paper full of gratitude for the
help that had been given me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the
intrinsic merit of the poems, and conceived in the noisiest extreme of
youthful eloquence.  The present study was a rifacimento.  From it, with
the design already mentioned, and in a fit of horror at my old excess,
the big words and emphatic passages were ruthlessly excised.  But this
sort of prudence is frequently its own punishment; along with the
exaggeration, some of the truth is sacrificed; and the result is cold,
constrained, and grudging.  In short, I might almost everywhere have
spoken more strongly than I did.

_Thoreau_.—Here is an admirable instance of the “point of view” forced
throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts.  Upon me
this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm.
I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but
his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer.  Still it
was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own
explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the
nature of the case and my own _parti-pris_, read even with a certain
violence in terms of his writings.  There could scarce be a perversion
more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion.  The study
indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page),
Thoreau’s sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men, I
please myself with thinking, of less temper and justice, the difference
might have made us enemies instead of making us friends.  To him who knew
the man from the inside, many of my statements sounded like inversions
made on purpose; and yet when we came to talk of them together, and he
had understood how I was looking at the man through the books, while he
had long since learned to read the books through the man, I believe he
understood the spirit in which I had been led astray.

On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge, and with
the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism.  First, if
Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden Pond, it was not merely with
designs of self-improvement, but to serve mankind in the highest sense.
Hither came the fleeing slave; thence was he despatched along the road to
freedom.  That shanty in the woods was a station in the great Underground
Railroad; that adroit and philosophic solitary was an ardent worker, soul
and body, in that so much more than honourable movement, which, if
atonement were possible for nations, should have gone far to wipe away
the guilt of slavery.  But in history sin always meets with condign
punishment; the generation passes, the offence remains, and the innocent
must suffer.  No underground railroad could atone for slavery, even as no
bills in Parliament can redeem the ancient wrongs of Ireland.  But here
at least is a new light shed on the Walden episode.

Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once
fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the
angel, relinquished the woman to his brother.  Even though the brother
were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the
woman.  But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the
“rarefied and freezing air” in which I complained that he had taught
himself to breathe.  Reading the man through the books, I took his
professions in good faith.  He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking
to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own
sorrow.  But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so
cold, are seen to be alive with feeling.  What appeared to be a lack of
interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching insincerity
of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory of
friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and
blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains.  The most temperate of living
critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words, “This
seems nonsense.”  It not only seemed; it was so.  It was a private
bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits,
that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting
it down as a contribution to the theory of life.  So with the more icy
parts of this philosophy of Thoreau’s.  He was affecting the Spartanism
he had not; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he
deceived himself with reasons.

Thoreau’s theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful
statement and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he will
find but a contorted shadow.  So much of the man as fitted nicely with
his doctrines, in the photographer’s phrase, came out.  But that large
part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or sought no
formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance, is wanting
in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed.  In some ways a
less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau still
remains to be depicted.

_Villon_.—I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow.  Others still think well of
him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but
artistic evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have written
of the man, and not I.  Where you see no good, silence is the best.
Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to give
it expression.

The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France.  Fat
Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still
surpasses them in native power.  The old author, breaking with an _éclat
de voix_, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his
own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking impression of
reality.  Even if that were not worth doing at all, it would be worth
doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take in the author’s
skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the baseness of his
attitude.  Fat Peg (_La Grosse Margot_) is typical of much; it is a piece
of experience that has nowhere else been rendered into literature; and a
kind of gratitude for the author’s plainness mingles, as we read, with
the nausea proper to the business.  I shall quote here a verse of an old
students’ song, worth laying side by side with Villon’s startling
ballade.  This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he did not
choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is thus, with both wit and
pathos, that he laments her fall:—

    Nunc plango florem
       Ætatis teneræ
    Nitidiorem
       Veneris sidere:
    Tunc columbinam
       Mentis dulcedinem,
    Nunc serpentinam
       Amaritudinem.
    Verbo rogantes
       Removes ostio,
    Munera dantes
       Foves cubiculo,
             Illos abire præcipis
             A quibus nihil accipis,
             Cæcos claudosque recipis,
             Viros illustres decipis
                Cum melle venenosa. {0}

But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he
lamented in his song; and the nameless mediæval vagabond has the best of
the comparison.

There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne has
translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual difficulty.  I
regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the
author’s meaning; in such cases I am bound to suppose that he is in the
right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything
beyond a formal submission.  He is now upon a larger venture, promising
us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we have all so long
looked forward.

_Charles of Orleans_.—Perhaps I have done scanty justice to the charm of
the old Duke’s verses, and certainly he is too much treated as a fool.
The period is not sufficiently remembered.  What that period was, to what
a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to
those who have waded in the chronicles.  Excepting Comines and La Salle
and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor; and
even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks,
bears witness to a dreary, sterile folly,—a twilight of the mind peopled
with childish phantoms.  In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems
quite a lively character.

It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry Pyne, who,
immediately on the appearance of the study, sent me his edition of the
Debate between the Heralds: a courtesy from the expert to the amateur
only too uncommon in these days.

_Knox_.—Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies
dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M‘Crie.  It
remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again
and breathing, in a human book.  With the best intentions in the world, I
have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors,
to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; I
have touched him in my turn with that “mace of death,” which Carlyle has
attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of
dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M‘Crie.  Yet I believe they
are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox.  I
trust his book may be a masterpiece; and I indulge the hope that my two
studies may lend him a hint or perhaps spare him a delay in its
composition.

Of the _Pepys_ I can say nothing; for it has been too recently through my
hands; and I still retain some of the heat of composition.  Yet it may
serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer.  To Pepys I think I
have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles
of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too
grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner.  It is not easy to
see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions.
Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone;
perhaps it is easier to be just to those nearer us in rank of mind.  Such
at least is the fact, which other critics may explain.  For these were
all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not love
the men, my love was the greater to their books.  I had read them and
lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I
seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs;
and behold, when I came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly
courteous and seldom wholly just.

                                                                  R. L. S.




CONTENTS.

                                                           PAGE
VICTOR HUGO’S ROMANCES                                        1
SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS                                 38
WALT WHITMAN                                                 91
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS             129
YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO                                            172
FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSE-BREAKER           192
CHARLES OF ORLEANS                                          236
SAMUEL PEPYS                                                290
JOHN KNOX AND WOMEN                                         328

VICTOR HUGO’S ROMANCES.


    Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera
    un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
    C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique,
    réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans
    Homère.—Victor Hugo on _Quentin Durward_.

VICTOR HUGO’S romances occupy an important position in the history of
literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is
only in the last romance of all, _Quatre Vingt Treize_, that this
culmination is most perfect.  This is in the nature of things.  Men who
are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly
to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it
indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of
what is past.  The movement is not arrested.  That significant something
by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors,
goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and
cognisable.  The same principle of growth that carried his first book
beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his
first.  And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age
gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and
vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an
author’s books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at
last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them—of that spinal
marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something
organic and rational.  This is what has been done by _Quatre Vingt
Treize_ for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a
whole division of modern literature.  We have here the legitimate
continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far,
its explanation.  When many lines diverge from each other in direction so
slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them
to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in literary history; and
we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo’s romances if we
think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of
literary tendency.

                                * * * * *

When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in
the art—I mean Henry Fielding—we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first
moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.
Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller
of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott
often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and
finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great
Scotchman.  With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is
astonishing that their work should be so different.  The fact is, that
the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly
in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it
could utilise.  The difference between these two men marks a great
enfranchisement.  With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an
extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun.  This is a
trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely
comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the
technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps
been explained with any clearness.

To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based.  The
purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with
the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
fundamental opposition of their methods.  And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists.  In the drama the action is developed in great measure
by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things.  This is a sort
of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
which we hear so much.  The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method.  We
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to
paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama.  The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;
what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a
woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,
we do actually see her very shamefully produced again.  Now all these
things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any
artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with;
and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time
and space.  These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of
painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but
to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost
as the painter is confined within his frame.  But the great restriction
is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his
actors alone.  Certain moments of suspense, certain significant
dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these
are the only means at the disposal of the playwright.  It is true that,
with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor
of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of
sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark,
and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius.  When we turn to
romance, we find this no longer.  Here nothing is reproduced to our
senses directly.  Not only the main conception of the work, but the
scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is
brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man’s
mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words.
With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there
is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence.  Thus,
painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat
board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is
preserved.  It is by giving up these identities that art gains true
strength.  And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage.
Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws
everything.  And from this there results for him a great loss of
vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject;
so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and
introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before
impossible.  He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before
a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual
decay of forty years of a man’s life and the gesture of a passionate
moment.  He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one
point of view—equally able, if he looks at it from another point of
view—to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a
physical action.  He can show his readers, behind and around the
personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the
continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will
turn with it men’s lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon;
the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the
salient framework of causation.  And all this thrown upon the flat
board—all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of
continuous intelligent narration.

This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott.  In the work of
the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
suddenly conscious of the background.  Fielding, on the other hand,
although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama.  This is
not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
regard to the novel.  The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
the reader against such a misconstruction.  All that is meant is, that
Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
them.  To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.
The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest.  As for landscape, he was content to underline stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into
a practicable wood.  As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero’s way.  It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material.  Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
in a question of abstract dynamics.  The larger motives are all unknown
to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them.  But Scott’s instinct, the
instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him otherwise;
and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manœuvre,
and great hills pile themselves upon each other’s shoulders.  Fielding’s
characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary
will.  Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences
that moderate and qualify a man’s personality; that personality is no
longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place
in the constitution of things.

It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions first
exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history.  For
art precedes philosophy and even science.  People must have noticed
things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate upon
their causes or influence.  And it is in this way that art is the pioneer
of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those
irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that
we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner; and after the
facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had time to
settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there will be found
the man of science to stand up and give the explanation.  Scott took an
interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and for this reason,
and no other, he introduced them into his romances.  If he had been told
what would be the nature of the movement that he was so lightly
initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
scandalised.  At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even now,
it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are enabled
to form any proper judgment in the matter.  These books are not only
descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley novels, but it is in
them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of Scott
carried farther that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as regards
his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in his own
spirit, instead of tamely followed.  We have here, as I said before, a
line of literary tendency produced, and by this production definitely
separated from others.  When we come to Hugo, we see that the deviation,
which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott and
Fielding, is indeed such a great gulph in thought and sentiment as only
successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that one of
the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
self-consciousness.  Both men follow the same road; but where the one
went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation and
forethought.  There never was artist much more unconscious than Scott;
and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo.  The passage at
the head of these pages shows how organically he had understood the
nature of his own changes.  He has, underlying each of the five great
romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two deliberate designs:
one artistic, the other consciously ethical and intellectual.  This is a
man living in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in
one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels having any
moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much of an artist to let
himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the truth is that the artistic
result seems, in at least one great instance, to have very little
connection with the other, or directly ethical result.

The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it and yet something as
simple as nature.  These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
but they are so only in appearance.  The fact is that art is working far
ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
necessities of life.  Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able
to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end.  We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has left
with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance, that
we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same.  It is not
that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left with
us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its own
kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of our
philosophical speech.

It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something
which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical
value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to throw
into relief, in the present study.  It is thus, I believe, that we shall
see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
complicated lives.

This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
so-called novel.  The great majority are not works of art in anything but
a very secondary signification.  One might almost number on one’s fingers
the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
romance.  The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount.  At
the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that man
is Hawthorne.  There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about
some at least of Hawthorne’s romances, that impresses itself on the most
indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of the man
served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of his
works.  There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains to
it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power of
subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure of
his talent.  No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
could give a just conception of the greatness of this power.  It must be
felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of the
five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will permit, and
rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.

                                * * * * *

The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of _Notre
Dame de Paris_ was (he tells us) to “denounce” the external fatality that
hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition.  To
speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with
the artistic conception; moreover it is very questionably handled, while
the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate success.
Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes
the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-shaped
island “moored” by five bridges to the different shores, and the two
unequal towns on either hand.  We forget all that enumeration of palaces
and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admirable
description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude
from this, that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we
forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the “Gothic profile”
of the city, of the “surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
belfries,” and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint.  And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us from
the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and already
in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that
central building by character after character.  It is purely an effect of
mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out
above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the
Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at
finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner.  It
is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that
permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and
strength.  And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all,
this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than
their surroundings.  We know this generation already: we have seen them
clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the
church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles.  About them all there is
that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque,
and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate contortion and
horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art.  Esmeralda is somewhat
an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who
have wandered in a dream.  The finest moment of the book is when these
two share with the two other leading characters, Dom Claude and
Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral.  It is here that we
touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the romance: are
they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the
Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins?  What is
Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle?  What is the whole book but the
reanimation of Gothic art?

It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have come
almost to identify with the author’s manner.  Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies.  The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist.  I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper.  And again the following
two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass what
it has ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine (vol. ii.
p. 180): “Il souffrait tant que par instants il s’arrachait des poignées
de cheveux, _pour voir s’ils ne blanchissaient pas_.”  And, p. 181: “Ses
pensées étaient si insupportables qu’il prenait sa tête à deux mains et
tâchait de l’arracher de ses épaules _pour la briser sur le pavé_.”

One other fault, before we pass on.  In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy.  Now, in _Notre
Dame_, the whole story of Esmeralda’s passion for the worthless archer is
unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last hiding-place,
herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this sordid hero who
has long since forgotten her—well, that is just one of those things that
readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and they are quite right;
life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it indefinitely
embittered for them by bad art.

                                * * * * *

We look in vain for any similar blemish in _Les Misérables_.  Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest and
most easy development of his powers.  It is the moral intention of this
great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be—for such awakenings are
unpleasant—to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by,
to the labour and sweat of those who support the litter, civilisation, in
which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward.  People are all glad
to shut their eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they
can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be
once roughly just in the general; that the bread that we eat, and the
quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth
having, have to be purchased by death—by the deaths of animals, and the
deaths of men wearied out with labour, and the deaths of those criminals
called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those
revolutionaries called criminals.  It is to something of all this that
Victor Hugo wishes to open men’s eyes in _Les Misérables_; and this moral
lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect.
The deadly weight of civilisation to those who are below presses sensibly
on our shoulders as we read.  A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us
as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most
serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into
prison, even crucifying Christ.  There is a haunting and horrible sense
of insecurity about the book.  The terror we thus feel is a terror for
the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad
between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery,
human or divine.  This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps
horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean
Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognises the face of the
detective; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the
darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at
evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting
stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead.  The
whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the
great cause of oppression.  We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand,
the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the
barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm.  And then
we have the admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who
had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when
he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just
creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.

With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love.  The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature.  The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children.  Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands
in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster behind “lui
faisait un peu l’effet d’être le Père éternel?”  The pathos of the
forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa
Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in
Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly.  The loves of Cosette and
Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to
Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound
disbelief in his existence.  Take it for all in all, there are few books
in the world that can be compared with it.  There is as much calm and
serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that
disfigured _Notre Dame_ are no longer present.  There is certainly much
that is painfully improbable; and again, the story itself is a little too
well constructed; it produces on us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow
incredulous as we find that every character fits again and again into the
plot, and is, like the child’s cube, serviceable on six faces; things are
not so well arranged in life as all that comes to.  Some of the
digressions, also, seem out of place, and do nothing but interrupt and
irritate.  But when all is said, the book remains of masterly conception
and of masterly development, full of pathos, full of truth, full of a
high eloquence.

                                * * * * *

Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the first
two members of the series, it remained for _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_
to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of external
force that is brought against him.  And here once more the artistic
effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed,
one.  Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type
of human industry in the midst of the vague “diffusion of forces into the
illimitable,” and the visionary development of “wasted labour” in the
sea, and the winds, and the clouds.  No character was ever thrown into
such strange relief as Gilliat.  The great circle of sea-birds that come
wanderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once the
note of his pre-eminence and isolation.  He fills the whole reef with his
indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out sharply
against the clear background of the sea.  And yet his isolation is not to
be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for example; indeed,
no two books could be more instructive to set side by side than _Les
Travailleurs_ and this other of the old days before art had learnt to
occupy itself with what lies outside of human will.  Crusoe was one sole
centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead and utterly
unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with Gilliat; we
feel that he is opposed by a “dark coalition of forces,” that an “immense
animosity” surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the terrible warfare
that he wages with “the silent inclemency of phenomena going their own
way, and the great general law, implacable and passive:” “a conspiracy of
the indifferency of things” is against him.  There is not one interest on
the reef, but two.  Just as we recognise Gilliat for the hero, we
recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this direction of
forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another character who
may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the two face up to
one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm, they
fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;—a victor, however,
who has still to encounter the octopus.  I need say nothing of the
gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it will be enough to
remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself
assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its way, is the last touch
to the inner significance of the book; here, indeed, is the true position
of man in the universe.

But in _Les Travailleurs_, with all its strength, with all its eloquence,
with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we cannot conceal
from ourselves that there is a thread of something that will not bear
calm scrutiny.  There is much that is disquieting about the storm,
admirably as it begins.  I am very doubtful whether it would be possible
to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any amount of
breakwater and broken rock.  I do not understand the way in which the
waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way of
speaking, and pass on.  And lastly, how does it happen that the sea was
quite calm next day?  Is this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting
after all?  And when we have forgiven Gilliat’s prodigies of strength
(although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in the Vicomte de
Bragelonne than is quite desirable), what is to be said to his suicide,
and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that unprincipled avidity
after effect, which tells us that the sloop disappeared over the horizon,
and the head under the water, at one and the same moment?  Monsieur Hugo
may say what he will, but we know better; we know very well that they did
not; a thing like that raises up a despairing spirit of opposition in a
man’s readers; they give him the lie fiercely, as they read.  Lastly, we
have here already some beginning of that curious series of English
blunders, that makes us wonder if there are neither proof-sheets nor
judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us sometimes with a
sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch
upon foreign countries and foreign tongues.  It is here that we shall
find the famous “first of the fourth,” and many English words that may be
comprehensible perhaps in Paris.  It is here that we learn that “laird”
in Scotland is the same title as “lord” in England.  Here, also, is an
account of a Highland soldier’s equipment, which we recommend to the
lovers of genuine fun.

                                * * * * *

In_ L’Homme qui Rit_, it was Hugo’s object to ‘denounce’ (as he would say
himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England; and
this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two
last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book.  The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves.  And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral.  The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid.  Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country.  It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide.  What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of the
pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants?  The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever “by order of the king” upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: “If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?”  This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl Dea,
for the monster.  It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
compensations, one of those afterthoughts of a relenting destiny, that
reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic love;
it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full moon
over the night of some foul and feverish city.

There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome.  Ursus and
his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as much
an abstract type as the latter.  There is a beginning, also, of an abuse
of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in the
drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance.  Lastly, I
suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of this not
immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at once.  The
large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded already in
speaking of _Les Travailleurs_, are of a sort that is really indifferent
in art.  If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some seaport of
Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Tim-Jack to be a likely nickname for an
English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that
matter, be guilty of “figments enough to confuse the march of a whole
history—anachronisms enough to overset all, chronology,” {27} the life of
their creations, the artistic truth and accuracy of their work, is not so
much as compromised.  But when we come upon a passage like the sinking of
the “Ourque” in this romance, we can do nothing but cover our face with
our hands: the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace in the very
reading.  For such artistic falsehoods, springing from what I have called
already an unprincipled avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be
exaggerated; and above all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor
Hugo.  We cannot forgive in him what we might have passed over in a
third-rate sensation novelist.  Little as he seems to know of the sea and
nautical affairs, he must have known very well that vessels do not go
down as he makes the “Ourque” go down; he must have known that such a
liberty with fact was against the laws of the game, and incompatible with
all appearance of sincerity in conception or workmanship.

                                * * * * *

In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental.  The appearance of
_Quatre Vingt Treize_ has put us out of the region of such doubt.  Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end.  It is a novel built upon “a sort of enigma,” which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit.  That enigma was this:
“Can a good action be a bad action?  Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?”  This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end.  And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn.  We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole generation,
and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if we had reached
any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in the men, but in
the country that they loved or hated, benefited or injured.  And so it is
here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more than
the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in military annals;
what we regard is what remains behind; it is the principle that put these
men where they were, that filled them for a while with heroic
inspiration, and has the power, now that they are fallen, to inspire
others with the same courage.  The interest of the novel centres about
revolutionary France: just as the plot is an abstract judicial
difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force.  And this has been
done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome
machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing
only with the objective materials of art, and dealing with them so
masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and
move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of
customary romance.

The episode of the mother and children in _Quatre Vingt Treize_ is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written.  There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called “_Sein guéri_, _cœur saignant_,” that
is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be more
delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before the
assault.  The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit.  The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings.  But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy.  There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in _L’Homme qui Rit_; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters.  We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman
and some children.  We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at one
place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can summon up
to resist it.  Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they ceased to
steer the corvette while the gun was loose?  Of the chapter in which
Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less said the
better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been
swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac’s harangue.
Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet “statuesque” by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears
with a taunting accusation of falsehood.  And then, when we come to the
place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is going
to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the stage
mechanism.  I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot conceive any
disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.

                                * * * * *

Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels.

Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a certain
appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to any
practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in it.  It
has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that Victor Hugo
occupies a high place among those few.  He has always a perfect command
over his stories; and we see that they are constructed with a high regard
to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is informed with moral
significance and grandeur.  Of no other man can the same thing be said in
the same degree.  His romances are not to be confused with “the novel
with a purpose” as familiar to the English reader: this is generally the
model of incompetence; and we see the moral clumsily forced into every
hole and corner of the story, or thrown externally over it like a carpet
over a railing.  Now the moral significance, with Hugo, is of the essence
of the romance; it is the organising principle.  If you could somehow
despoil _Les Misérables or Les Travailleurs_ of their distinctive lesson,
you would find that the story had lost its interest and the book was
dead.

Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed.  If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes of
story-telling have been laid aside and passed by.  Where are now the two
lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley novels, and
all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake?  Sometimes they
are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man against the
sea and sky, as in _Les Travailleurs_; sometimes, as in _Les Misérables_,
they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in the epic of
oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in _Quatre Vingt
Treize_.  There is no hero in _Notre Dame_: in _Les Misérables_ it is an
old man: in _L’Homme qui Rit_ it is a monster: in _Quatre Vingt Treize_
it is the Revolution.  Those elements that only began to show themselves
timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter Scott, have usurped ever
more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest of one of
Hugo’s romances centring around matter that Fielding would have banished
from his altogether, as being out of the field of fiction.  So we have
elemental forces occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak)
nearly as important a _rôle_, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes and
overcomes them.  So we find the fortunes of a nation put upon the stage
with as much vividness as ever before the fortunes of a village maiden or
a lost heir; and the forces that oppose and corrupt a principle holding
the attention quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest
attorneys of the past.  Hence those individual interests that were
supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood out over everything else
and formed as it were the spine of the story, figure here only as one set
of interests among many sets, one force among many forces, one thing to
be treated out of a whole world of things equally vivid and important.
So that, for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without antecedent
or relation here below, but a being involved in the action and reaction
of natural forces, himself a centre of such action and reaction or an
unit in a great multitude, chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors
and aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every wind of
doctrine.  This is a long way that we have travelled: between such work
and the work of Fielding is there not, indeed, a great gulph in thought
and sentiment?

Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods.  It helps to keep man in his place in
nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently the
responsibilities of his place in society.  And in all this generalisation
of interest, we never miss those small humanities that are at the
opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the intellect
that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another sentiment
for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into Cosette’s sabot,
that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her dress in the spring
wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of the laughing man.
This, then, is the last praise that we can award to these romances.  The
author has shown a power of just subordination hitherto unequalled; and
as, in reaching forward to one class of effects, he has not been
forgetful or careless of the other, his work is more nearly complete
work, and his art, with all its imperfections, deals more comprehensively
with the materials of life than that of any of his otherwise more sure
and masterly predecessors.

These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one façade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius.  Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities.  In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances.  There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions—an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weaknesses—strength that is a little epileptic.  He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost
feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than
others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit by the
privilege so freely.  We like to have, in our great men, something that
is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and see
them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo.  As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also to
recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and, in
many ways, one of the greatest artists of time.  If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what other
man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?




SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS


TO write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject.  We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn.  Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man’s character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that we
respect or virtues that we admire.  David, king of Israel, would pass a
sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume.  Now,
Principal Shairp’s recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect—that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the critic
and the personality under criticism.  Hence an inorganic, if not an
incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man.  Of _Holy
Willie’s Prayer_, Principal Shairp remarks that “those who have loved
most what was best in Burns’s poetry must have regretted that it was ever
written.”  To the _Jolly Beggars_, so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the “strange, not to say
painful,” circumstance that the same hand which wrote the _Cotter’s
Saturday Night_ should have stooped to write the _Jolly Beggars_.  The
_Saturday Night_ may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the _Jolly Beggars_.  To take a man’s work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic’s duty.  The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused.  The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_—a burly figure in literature, as, from our
present vantage of time, we have begun to see him.  This, on the other
hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman, whom
we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but orderly and
orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt and
disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protégé_, and solacing
himself with the explanation that the poet was “the most inconsistent of
men.”  If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer.  Indeed, we
can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
a theme so uncongenial.  When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
neither _Holy Willie_, nor the _Beggars_, nor the _Ordination_, nothing
is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Géronte: “Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère?”  And every merit we find in the book,
which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so greatly
thrown away.

It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of Burns
that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life that
demand a brief rehearsal.  The unity of the man’s nature, for all its
richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers.  Mr. Carlyle
made an inimitable bust of the poet’s head of gold; may I not be forgiven
if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were of clay?



YOUTH.


Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
influences of his home and his father.  That father, William Burnes,
after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
hands.  Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life.  Chill,
backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature.  On
his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden.  His great delight was in solid conversation; he
would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
vigorous talk.  Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
own influence.  For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
supplement this last—the trait is laughably Scottish—by a dialogue of his
own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly
represented.  He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield herding
cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or to sit by
her side when it thundered.  Distance to strangers, deep family
tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
theology—everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up a
popular Scotch type.  If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it is
only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old Marshal
Loudon, to help out the reader’s comprehension by a popular but unworthy
instance of a class.  Such was the influence of this good and wise man
that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours who came
into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father, brothers,
and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a book in the
other.  We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that of Gilbert
need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable letter for a
young man of such slender opportunities.  One anecdote marks the taste of
the family.  Murdoch brought _Titus Andronicus_, and, with such dominie
elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before this rustic
audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora insults
Lavinia, with one voice and “in an agony of distress” they refused to
hear it to an end.  In such a father and with such a home, Robert had
already the making of an excellent education; and what Murdoch added,
although it may not have been much in amount, was in character the very
essence of a literary training.  Schools and colleges, for one great man
whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong spirit can do well
upon more scanty fare.

Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete
character—a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy
of notice; in his own phrase “panting after distinction,” and in his
brother’s “cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or
of more consequence than himself:” with all this, he was emphatically of
the artist nature.  Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton
church, with the only tied hair in the parish, “and his plaid, which was
of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his
shoulders.”  Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family,
a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in
masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland
broadsword.  He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake.  This is
the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter
students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter;
and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a
man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and
remark.  His father wrote the family name _Burnes_; Robert early adopted
the orthography _Burness_ from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his
twenty-eighth year changed it once more to _Burns_.  It is plain that the
last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in addressing
his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number
two.  And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his
appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom.
Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation.  To
no other man’s have we the same conclusive testimony from different
sources and from every rank of life.  It is almost a commonplace that the
best of his works was what he said in talk.  Robertson the historian
“scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour;”
the Duchess of Gordon declared that he “carried her off her feet;” and,
when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear
him talk.  But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine
by any means.  He made himself feared in the village for his tongue.  He
would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps—for the statement
of Sillar is not absolute—say cutting things of his acquaintances behind
their back.  At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his
religious views amid hisses.  These details stamp the man.  He had no
genteel timidities in the conduct of his life.  He loved to force his
personality upon the world.  He would please himself, and shine.  Had he
lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can
conceive him writing _Jehan_ for _Jean_, swaggering in Gautier’s red
waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public café with paradox and
gasconnade.

A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in love.
_Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut_.  His affections were often enough
touched, but perhaps never engaged.  He was all his life on a voyage of
discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the
happy isle.  A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and
even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady.  Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a
singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of
an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy life
without it.  But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after
every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong
temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost
the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred.  The
circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the result.
For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day’s work was over and the
beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter
tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour
or two in courtship.  Rule 10 of the Bachelors’ Club at Tarbolton
provides that “every man proper for a member of this Society must be a
professed lover of _one or more_ of the female sex.”  The rich, as Burns
himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their “cannie hour at e’en.”  It was upon love
and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the
essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of
Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by
love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the
chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux.  Here was a field for a man
of Burns’s indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his
voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs
by the way.  He was “constantly the victim of some fair enslaver”—at
least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often
underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background.  Many—or may
we not say most?—of these affairs were entirely artificial.  One, he
tells us, he began out of “a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,”
for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter.  But, however they
began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and he
stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively without
a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of “battering himself into
a warm affection,”—a debilitating and futile exercise.  Once he had
worked himself into the vein, “the agitations of his mind and body” were
an astonishment to all who knew him.  Such a course as this, however
pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature.  He sank more
and more towards the professional Don Juan.  With a leer of what the
French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his
seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent
when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard.
We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an
acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would bear
down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute
assurance—the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel.  In yet another manner
did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame.  If he were great
as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant.  He could enter into a
passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old a
hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even string
a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch the
hesitating fair one to the ground.  Nor, perhaps, was it only his
“curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity” that recommended him for a
second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the
assistance and advice of _Rab the Ranter_; and one who was in no way
formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the
fame of his associate.

I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough moorland
country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year, looked upon
with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best talker, the
best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the laureate
poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish.  He says he
had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can well
believe it.  Among the youth he walked _facile princeps_, an apparent
god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld should swoop
upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company with seven
others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the stool of
repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis,
in so conspicuous a shame?  Was not Richelieu in disgrace more idolised
than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman most
acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn?  Or, to take a simile from nearer
home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even corporal
punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly
school-master, against the influence and fame of the school’s hero?

And now we come to the culminating point of Burns’s early period.  He
began to be received into the unknown upper world.  His fame soon spread
from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the
ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy.  This arose in part
from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our
poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent
skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition party,—a
clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit enough to
appreciate the value of the poet’s help, and not sufficient taste to
moderate his grossness and personality.  We may judge of their surprise
when _Holy Willie_ was put into their hand; like the amorous lads of
Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds.  His satires began
to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, “read him
into fame;” he himself was soon welcome in many houses of a better sort,
where his admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct from his
Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a country dancing school,
completed what his poems had begun.  We have a sight of him at his first
visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman’s shoes, coasting around the carpet
as though that were sacred ground.  But he soon grew used to carpets and
their owners; and he was still the superior of all whom he encountered,
and ruled the roost in conversation.  Such was the impression made, that
a young clergyman, himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused
when he saw Robert enter the church in which he was to preach.  It is not
surprising that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test
of some publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six
winter months the bulk of his more important poems.  Here was a young man
who, from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of
a parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural
courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in the
world’s bookshops.

A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch.  This
strong young plough-man, who feared no competitor with the flail,
suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall
into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past
and terror for the future.  He was still not perhaps devoted to religion,
but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before
God in what I can only call unmanly penitence.  As he had aspirations
beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses
to match.  He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a winter
tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a book with
him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this service two
copies of the _Man of Feeling_.  With young people in the field at work
he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to
them—“O man, ye are no for young folk,” he would say, and give the
defaulter a helping hand and a smile.  In the hearts of the men whom he
met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his knowledge of
himself equalled his knowledge of others.  There are no truer things said
of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters.  Country Don Juan
as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which values itself on what
it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness to a hair: he took
himself boldly for what he was, and, except in moments of hypochondria,
declared himself content.



THE LOVE STORIES.


On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom.  In the same set
danced Jean Armour, the master-mason’s daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
Juan.  His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
_caret quia vate sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers.  Some mirthful
comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner—or, as I
should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at large—that
“he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his
dog.”  Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on Mauchline
green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog; and the
dog, “scouring in long excursion,” scampered with four black paws across
the linen.  This brought the two into conversation; when Jean, with a
somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if “he had yet got any of the lasses
to like him as well as his dog?”

It is one of the misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour
forbids him to refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon
duty, or like the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases.  Burns
accepted the provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl—pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him.  Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man.  Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
“battering himself into a warm affection;” and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period.  Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest.  It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple.  They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life’s serious issues.
Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to expect was
marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest thoughts; she might
now be glad if she could get what she would never have chosen.  As for
Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised that his voyage of
discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere—that he was not, and never
had been, really in love with Jean.  Hear him in the pressure of the
hour.  “Against two things,” he writes, “I am as fixed as fate—staying at
home, and owning her conjugally.  The first, by heaven, I will not
do!—the last, by hell, I will never do!”  And then he adds, perhaps
already in a more relenting temper: “If you see Jean, tell her I will
meet her, so God help me in my hour of need.”  They met accordingly; and
Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these heights of
independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of marriage.  It is
the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually false
positions—relations in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it
is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate.  This was such a case.
Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be glad that
Burns was better counselled by his heart.  When we discover that we can
be no longer true, the next best is to be kind.  I daresay he came away
from that interview not very content, but with a glorious conscience; and
as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, “How are Thy servants
blest, O Lord!”  Jean, on the other hand, armed with her “lines,”
confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his wife.
Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves in their
farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do country lass;
and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his
daughter’s part.  At least, he was not so much incensed by her slip from
virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to cover it.  Of this
he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only
to appease her parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to
the poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction; and all parties
imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was thus dissolved.  To a
proud man like Burns here was a crushing blow.  The concession which had
been wrung from his pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth.  The
Armour family preferred disgrace to his connection.  Since the promise,
besides, he had doubtless been busy “battering himself” back again into
his affection for the girl; and the blow would not only take him in his
vanity, but wound him at the heart.

He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him.  He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love.  It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another.  The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate.  There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement.  Jean’s marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr.  They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith.  Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding nature
of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the wandering
affections, here were two people united for life.  Mary came of a
superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy.

Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet’s life.  His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment of
the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he was
under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his wife;
now, he had “orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard the
_Nancy_, Captain Smith;” now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:—

    “The bursting tears my heart declare;
    Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!”

But the great master dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation.  Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to bring
up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother.  The success of the
book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the author’s
purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh and push
his success in a second and larger edition.  Third and last in these
series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for
Robert.  He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over his
face, and he left the room without a word.  Years afterwards, when the
story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then learned
the death of Highland Mary.  Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details.  Of one thing
we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl’s mother, and
left her with the impression that he was “a real warm-hearted chield.”

Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend.  The town that winter
was “agog with the ploughman poet.”  Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
“Duchess Gordon and all the gay world,” were of his acquaintance.  Such a
revolution is not to be found in literary history.  He was now, it must
be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the furrow
wielding “the thresher’s weary flingin’-tree;” and his education, his
diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman.  Now he
stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.  We can see him as
he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat
striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy
ploughman’s figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of
sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and
his large dark eye “literally glowing” as he spoke.  “I never saw such
another eye in a human head,” says Walter Scott, “though I have seen the
most distinguished men of my time.”  With men, whether they were lords or
omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from
bashfulness or affectation.  If he made a slip, he had the social courage
to pass on and refrain from explanation.  He was not embarrassed in this
society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a
titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an
epigram.  “These gentlemen,” said he, “remind me of some spinsters in my
country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor
woof.”  Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce commander
of himself in their society; he was disqualified by his acquired nature
as a Don Juan; and he, who had been so much at his ease with country
lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of deference.  One lady, who
met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanour.
“His manner was not prepossessing—scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural.
It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he
said the music was ‘bonnie, bonnie,’ it was like the expression of a
child.”  These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree
of intimacy the affectation would grow less.  And his talk to women had
always “a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the
attention particularly.”

The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well to
Burns from first to last.  Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help.  Although Burns was only a
peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes.  They gave him a great deal of good advice,
helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise.  Burns, on his part, bore the
elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
the time had come, into a country privacy of life.  His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day.  He wrote a few
letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect.  On the other hand, he
never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
acquaintance were a duke.  He would be a bold man who should promise
similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances.  It was, in short, an
admirable appearance on the stage of life—socially successful, intimately
self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.

In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we return
to Burns’s love affairs.  Even on the road to Edinburgh he had seized
upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the “battering” so
far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal two days with this
anonymous fair one.  The exact importance to Burns of this affair may be
gathered from the song in which he commemorated its occurrence.  “I love
the dear lassie,” he sings, “because she loves me;” or, in the tongue of
prose: “Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it, and
even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to profit by it again.”
A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.  Meantime, early in
the winter, and only once, we find him regretting Jean in his
correspondence.  “Because”—such is his reason—“because he does not think
he will ever meet so delicious an armful again;” and then, after a brief
excursion into verse, he goes straight on to describe a new episode in
the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a Lothian farmer for a
heroine.  I must ask the reader to follow all these references to his
future wife; they are essential to the comprehension of Burns’s character
and fate.  In June, we find him back at Mauchline, a famous man.  There,
the Armour family greeted him with a “mean, servile compliance,” which
increased his former disgust.  Jean was not less compliant; a second time
the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not
love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a year ago;
and, though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest
and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent.  Judge
of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return—a letter to
my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection—a letter which
seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman.  “I am
afraid,” it goes, “I have almost ruined one source, the principal one,
indeed, of my former happiness—the eternal propensity I always had to
fall in love.  My heart no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no
paradisiacal evening interviews.”  Even the process of “battering” has
failed him, you perceive.  Still he had some one in his eye—a lady, if
you please, with a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had “seen the
politest quarters in Europe.”  “I frequently visited her,” he writes,
“and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant
formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my
careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after
her return to —, I wrote her in the same terms.  Miss, construing my
remarks further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I had
to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours.  But I am an
old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
foot, like Corporal Trim’s hat.”  I avow a carnal longing, after this
transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears.  There is little
question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected.  One more detail to characterise the period.  Six months after
the date of this letter, Burns, back in Edinburgh, is served with a writ
_in meditatione fugæ_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.

About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in the story
of the poet’s random affections.  He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
M’Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband.  She had wit, could
use her pen, and had read _Werther_ with attention.  Sociable, and even
somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties.  Of what biographers
refer to daintily as “her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty,” judging
from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas’s invaluable edition, the reader
will be fastidious if he does not approve.  Take her for all in all, I
believe she was the best woman Burns encountered.  The pair took a fancy
for each other on the spot; Mrs. M’Lehose, in her turn, invited him to
tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
_tête-à-tête_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead.  An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence.  It was
begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth exchange,
when Clarinda writes: “It is really curious so much _fun_ passing between
two persons who saw each other only _once_;” but it is hardly safe for a
man and woman in the flower of their years to write almost daily, and
sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms too plain, and
generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance.  The exercise
partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
apprehended when next they meet.  It is difficult to give any account of
this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps,
not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
passages, into downright truculent nonsense.  Clarinda has one famous
sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
“Oh, Clarinda,” writes Burns, “shall we not meet in a state—some yet
unknown state—of being, where the lavish hand of Plenty shall minister to
the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?”  The
design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
Bird of Paradise.  It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write.  Religion, poetry, love, and
charming sensibility, are the current topics.  “I am delighted, charming
Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion,” writes Burns; and
the pair entertained a fiction that this was their “favourite subject.”
“This is Sunday,” writes the lady, “and not a word on our favourite
subject.  O fy ‘divine Clarinda!’”  I suspect, although quite
unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse.  In the
meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
passion.  Visits took place, and then became frequent.  Clarinda’s
friends were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself
had smart attacks of conscience, but her heart had gone from her control;
it was altogether his, and she “counted all things but loss—heaven
excepted—that she might win and keep him.”  Burns himself was transported
while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat rapidly declined
during an absence.  I am tempted to imagine that, womanlike, he took on
the colour of his mistress’s feeling; that he could not but heat himself
at the fire of her unaffected passion; but that, like one who should
leave the hearth upon a winter’s night, his temperature soon fell when he
was out of sight, and in a word, though he could share the symptoms, that
he had never shared the disease.  At the same time, amid the fustian of
the letters there are forcible and true expressions, and the love verses
that he wrote upon Clarinda are among the most moving in the language.

We are approaching the solution.  In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
received and cared for in the house of a friend.  For he remained to the
last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
courage to desert his victim.  About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
south-west on business.  Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour.  Burns, too late
for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
have to wait.  Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: “I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
there’s a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
little.  Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday.  She once named you, which
kept me from falling asleep.  I drank your health in a glass of ale—as
the lasses do at Hallowe’en—‘in to mysel’.’”  Arrived at Mauchline, Burns
installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour to
promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement.  This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: “I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea. . . . I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt
any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
had such a claim—which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
death.  She did all this like a good girl.”  And then he took advantage
of the situation.  To Clarinda he wrote: “I this morning called for a
certain woman.  I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her;” and he
accused her of “tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning.”  This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh.  On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: “Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don’t mind them.  I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you.”  Again, on the
21st: “Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever. . . . How rich am I to have such a treasure
as you! . . . ‘The Lord God knoweth,’ and, perhaps, ‘Israel he shall
know,’ my love and your merit.  Adieu, Clarinda!  I am going to remember
you in my prayers.”  By the 7th of April, seventeen days later he had
already decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.

A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found.  And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness.  He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns, to
whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and self-respect.
This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but there is no
doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a sincere
determination to do right.  He had just helped his brother with a loan of
a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor girl whom
he had ruined?  It was true he could not do as he did without brutally
wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault; he was,
as he truly says, “damned with a choice only of different species of
error and misconduct.”  To be professional Don Juan, to accept the
provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead a
man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life.  If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource. {71}



DOWNWARD COURSE.


It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted.  He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to perpetuate.  He neither loved nor respected his wife.  “God
knows,” he writes, “my choice was as random as blind man’s buff.”  He
consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that she
“has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him;” that she has a
good figure; that she has a “wood-note wild,” “her voice rising with ease
to B natural,” no less.  The effect on the reader is one of unmingled
pity for both parties concerned.  This was not the wife who (in his own
words) could “enter into his favourite studies or relish his favourite
authors;” this was not even a wife, after the affair of the marriage
lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust.  Let her manage a
farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long, she would
still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity rather
than of equal affection.  She could now be faithful, she could now be
forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband’s heart nor affect the inherent
destiny of their relation.  From the outset, it was a marriage that had
no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park.

Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future.  He had been
idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging on
to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M’Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt.  He had lost his
habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure.  Apologetical
biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first, he saw and
recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is “enervated to
an alarming degree” by idleness and dissipation; and again, “my mind has
been vitiated with idleness.”  It never fairly recovered.  To business he
could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty; but
he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
work.  He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters.  The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song.  And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and
colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for
a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes.  The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit.  In 1786 he
had written the _Address to a Louse_, which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second.  The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.

Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
latter resource.  He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony oddly representing
the public feeling of the period, that, while “in everything else he was
a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything seizable he was no better
than any other gauger.”

There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which need
delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose from
his sympathy with the great French Revolution.  His only political
feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
Borrow has nicknamed the “Charlie over the water” Scotchmen.  It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth.  With the great French Revolution, something living,
practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
of human action.  The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to
rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the
same desire.  Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand
with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against
the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: “I daresay the American Congress
in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the English
Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate the
centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do
ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart.”
As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even violent;
but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his hottest
excess.  What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in life; an
open road to success and distinction for all classes of men.  It was in
the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the
parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent snatches
against tyranny and tyrants.  Witness, were it alone, this verse:—

    “Here’s freedom to him that wad read,
    Here’s freedom to him that wad write;
    There’s nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
    But them wham the truth wad indite.”

Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom.  Many
stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country
coteries; how he proposed Washington’s health as an amendment to Pitt’s,
gave as a toast “the last verse of the last chapter of Kings,” and
celebrated Dumouriez in a doggrel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.
Now his sympathies would inspire him with _Scots_, _wha hae_; now involve
him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies and
explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns’s stomach.  Nor was this
the front of his offending.  On February 27, 1792, he took part in the
capture of an armed smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four
carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.
Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials; there was
trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was reminded firmly, however
delicately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be
silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have
rushed to his head at the humiliation.  His letter to Mr. Erskine,
subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, to
a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity.  He had been
muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an
exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep?  Already, he wrote, he
looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this:
“Burns, notwithstanding the _fanfaronnade_ of independence to be found in
his works, and after having been held forth to view and to public
estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of resources
within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry
exciseman, and shrunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the
meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind.”  And then on he
goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living indignation, to
declare his right to a political opinion, and his willingness to shed his
blood for the political birthright of his sons.  Poor, perturbed spirit!
he was indeed exercised in vain; those who share and those who differ
from his sentiments about the Revolution, alike understand and sympathise
with him in this painful strait; for poetry and human manhood are lasting
like the race, and politics, which are but a wrongful striving after
right, pass and change from year to year and age to age.  The _Twa Dogs_
has already outlasted the constitution of Siéyès and the policy of the
Whigs; and Burns is better known among English-speaking races than either
Pitt or Fox.

Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led
downward.  He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out of him; he
refused to make another volume, for he felt that it would be a
disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was sure
it reached him from a friend.  For his songs, he would take nothing; they
were all that he could do; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series
of Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of pain
and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a viking,
he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these last and
inadequate efforts of his muse.  And this desperate abnegation rises at
times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that he had not
written, but only found and published, his immortal _Auld Lang Syne_.  In
the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist; he was doing so
little, he would fain do that little well; and about two months before
his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his manuscripts for revisal,
saying that he would rather write five songs to his taste than twice that
number otherwise.  The battle of his life was lost; in forlorn efforts to
do well, in desperate submissions to evil, the last years flew by.  His
temper is dark and explosive, launching epigrams, quarrelling with his
friends, jealous of young puppy officers.  He tries to be a good father;
he boasts himself a libertine.  Sick, sad, and jaded, he can refuse no
occasion of temporary pleasure, no opportunity to shine; and he who had
once refused the invitations of lords and ladies is now whistled to the
inn by any curious stranger.  His death (July 21, 1796), in his
thirty-seventh year, was indeed a kindly dispensation.  It is the fashion
to say he died of drink; many a man has drunk more and yet lived with
reputation, and reached a good age.  That drink and debauchery helped to
destroy his constitution, and were the means of his unconscious suicide,
is doubtless true; but he had failed in life, had lost his power of work,
and was already married to the poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he
had shown his inclination to convivial nights, or at least before that
inclination had become dangerous either to his health or his
self-respect.  He had trifled with life, and must pay the penalty.  He
had chosen to be Don Juan, he had grasped at temporary pleasures, and
substantial happiness and solid industry had passed him by.  He died of
being Robert Burns, and there is no levity in such a statement of the
case; for shall we not, one and all, deserve a similar epitaph?



WORKS.


The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me throughout this paper
only to touch upon those points in the life of Burns where correction or
amplification seemed desirable, leaves me little opportunity to speak of
the works which have made his name so famous.  Yet, even here, a few
observations seem necessary.

At the time when the poet made his appearance and great first success,
his work was remarkable in two ways.  For, first, in an age when poetry
had become abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to deal with
shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifications, he dealt with the actual
circumstances of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might
be.  And, second, in a time when English versification was particularly
stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-academical
timidity, he wrote verses that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible,
and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit to
give a clear impression.  If you take even those English authors whom we
know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once that he
owed them nothing but a warning.  Take Shenstone, for instance, and watch
that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of life.  He
has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or
walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of incompetence.  You see
my memory fails me, and I positively cannot recollect whether his hero
was sliding or walking; as though a writer should describe a skirmish,
and the reader, at the end, be still uncertain whether it were a charge
of cavalry or a slow and stubborn advance of foot.  There could be no
such ambiguity in Burns; his work is at the opposite pole from such
indefinite and stammering performances; and a whole lifetime passed in
the study of Shenstone would only lead a man further and further from
writing the _Address to a Louse_.  Yet Burns, like most great artists,
proceeded from a school and continued a tradition; only the school and
tradition were Scotch, and not English.  While the English language was
becoming daily more pedantic and inflexible, and English letters more
colourless and slack, there was another dialect in the sister country,
and a different school of poetry tracing its descent, through King James
I., from Chaucer.  The dialect alone accounts for much; for it was then
written colloquially, which kept it fresh and supple; and, although not
shaped for heroic flights, it was a direct and vivid medium for all that
had to do with social life.  Hence, whenever Scotch poets left their
laborious imitations of bad English verses, and fell back on their own
dialect, their style would kindle, and they would write of their
convivial and somewhat gross existences with pith and point.  In Ramsay,
and far more in the poor lad Fergusson, there was mettle, humour,
literary courage, and a power of saying what they wished to say
definitely and brightly, which in the latter case should have justified
great anticipations.  Had Burns died at the same age as Fergusson, he
would have left us literally nothing worth remark.  To Ramsay and to
Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very uncommon degree, not only
following their tradition and using their measures, but directly and
avowedly imitating their pieces.  The same tendency to borrow a hint, to
work on some one else’s foundation, is notable in Burns from first to
last, in the period of song-writing as well as in that of the early
poems; and strikes one oddly in a man of such deep originality, who left
so strong a print on all he touched, and whose work is so greatly
distinguished by that character of “inevitability” which Wordsworth
denied to Goethe.

When we remember Burns’s obligations to his predecessors, we must never
forget his immense advances on them.  They had already “discovered”
nature; but Burns discovered poetry—a higher and more intense way of
thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a higher and more ideal
key of words in which to speak of them.  Ramsay and Fergusson excelled at
making a popular—or shall we say vulgar?—sort of society verses, comical
and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a supper party
waited for its laureate’s word; but on the appearance of Burns, this
coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues, and learned
gravity of thought and natural pathos.

What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style,
and to walk on his own feet instead of on academical stilts.  There was
never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means; and we
may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave.  Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted to
explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he wrote.
Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which gives us
the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is.  Hence,
too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which keeps him
from any slip into the weariful trade of word-painting, and presents
everything, as everything should be presented by the art of words, in a
clear, continuous medium of thought.  Principal Shairp, for instance,
gives us a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original; and for those
who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has the very quality
they are accustomed to look for and admire in Greek.  The contemporaries
of Burns were surprised that he should visit so many celebrated mountains
and waterfalls, and not seize the opportunity to make a poem.  Indeed, it
is not for those who have a true command of the art of words, but for
peddling, professional amateurs, that these pointed occasions are most
useful and inspiring.  As those who speak French imperfectly are glad to
dwell on any topic they may have talked upon or heard others talk upon
before, because they know appropriate words for it in French, so the
dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a waterfall, because he has learned
the sentiment and knows appropriate words for it in poetry.  But the
dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with any subject; and whether it was
a stormy night, a shepherd’s collie, a sheep struggling in the snow, the
conduct of cowardly soldiers in the field, the gait and cogitations of a
drunken man, or only a village cockcrow in the morning, he could find
language to give it freshness, body, and relief.  He was always ready to
borrow the hint of a design, as though he had a difficulty in
commencing—a difficulty, let us say, in choosing a subject out of a world
which seemed all equally living and significant to him; but once he had
the subject chosen, he could cope with nature single-handed, and make
every stroke a triumph.  Again, his absolute mastery in his art enabled
him to express each and all of his different humours, and to pass
smoothly and congruously from one to another.  Many men invent a dialect
for only one side of their nature—perhaps their pathos or their humour,
or the delicacy of their senses—and, for lack of a medium, leave all the
others unexpressed.  You meet such an one, and find him in conversation
full of thought, feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art to
employ in his writings.  But Burns was not thus hampered in the practice
of the literary art; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into
his work, and impregnate it from end to end.  If Doctor Johnson, that
stilted and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred Boswell, what
should we have known of him? and how should we have delighted in his
acquaintance as we do?  Those who spoke with Burns tell us how much we
have lost who did not.  But I think they exaggerate their privilege: I
think we have the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his
consummate verses.

It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected Wordsworth
and the world.  There is, indeed, only one merit worth considering in a
man of letters—that he should write well; and only one damning fault—that
he should write ill.  We are little the better for the reflections of the
sailor’s parrot in the story.  And so, if Burns helped to change the
course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct, and masterly
utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects.  That was imposed
upon him, not chosen upon a principle.  He wrote from his own experience,
because it was his nature so to do, and the tradition of the school from
which he proceeded was fortunately not opposed to homely subjects.  But
to these homely subjects he communicated the rich commentary of his
nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they interest us not in
themselves, but because they have been passed through the spirit of so
genuine and vigorous a man.  Such is the stamp of living literature; and
there was never any more alive than that of Burns.

What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways
hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself; sometimes
speaking plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out in
exultation like a peal of bells!  When we compare the _Farmer’s
Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie_, with the clever and inhumane
production of half a century earlier, _The Auld Man’s Mare’s dead_, we
see in a nutshell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns.  And as
to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the collie, Luath, in
the _Twa Dogs_, describes and enters into the merry-making in the
cottage?

    “The luntin’ pipe an’ sneeshin’ mill,
    Are handed round wi’ richt guid will;
    The canty auld folks crackin’ crouse,
    The young anes rantin’ through the house—
    My heart has been sae fain to see them
    That I for joy hae barkit wi’ them.”

It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so many women,
and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last.  His humour comes from him
in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of
humorous poets.  He turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment
or a trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and rises to
the occasion.  I think it is Principal Shairp who says, happily, that
Burns would have been no Scotchman if he had not loved to moralise;
neither, may we add, would he have been his father’s son; but (what is
worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his
own career.  He was among the least impersonal of artists.  Except in the
_Jolly Beggars_, he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct.  Mr. Carlyle has
complained that _Tam o’ Shanter_ is, from the absence of this quality,
only a picturesque and external piece of work; and I may add that in the
_Twa Dogs_ it is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety that
a great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its existence and
effect.  Indeed, Burns was so full of his identity that it breaks forth
on every page; and there is scarce an appropriate remark either in praise
or blame of his own conduct, but he has put it himself into verse.  Alas!
for the tenor of these remarks!  They are, indeed, his own pitiful
apology for such a marred existence and talents so misused and stunted;
and they seem to prove for ever how small a part is played by reason in
the conduct of man’s affairs.  Here was one, at least, who with unfailing
judgment predicted his own fate; yet his knowledge could not avail him,
and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny.  Ten years before
the end he had written his epitaph; and neither subsequent events, nor
the critical eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it to alter.
And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last unanswerable plea?—

    “Then gently scan your brother man,
       Still gentler sister woman;
    Though they may gang a kennin wrang,
       To step aside is human:
    One point must still be greatly dark—”

One?  Alas!  I fear every man and woman of us is “greatly dark” to all
their neighbours, from the day of birth until death removes them, in
their greatest virtues as well as in their saddest faults; and we, who
have been trying to read the character of Burns, may take home the lesson
and be gentle in our thoughts.




WALT WHITMAN.


OF late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied about
in books and magazines.  It has become familiar both in good and ill
repute.  His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his
admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies.  Now,
whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit
of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ.  We could
not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and
yet depreciate the choruses in _Samson Agonistes_; but, I think, we may
shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman’s volume, from a
literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
direction.  That may not be at all our own opinion.  We may think that,
when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether
devoid of literary merit.  We may even see passages of a high poetry here
and there among its eccentric contents.  But when all is said, Walt
Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works is
not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a son
upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I
should always have an idea what he meant.

What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it.  It is not
possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff
prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman’s matter and the spirit it
represents.  Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more
exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position.  Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a
notable symptom of the present.  As a sign of the times, it would be hard
to find his parallel.  I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that
he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where,
in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous
contemporaries?  Mr. Spencer so decorous—I had almost said, so dandy—in
dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring
the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.  And when was an echo
more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic
Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the
“barbaric yawp” of Whitman?



I.


Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system.  He was
a theoriser about society before he was a poet.  He first perceived
something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want.  The
reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much
pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems.  This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous
village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although
sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman.  The whole of
Whitman’s work is deliberate and preconceived.  A man born into a society
comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not
fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
around him.  He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down
into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still
in the act of settlement.  And he could not but wonder what it would turn
out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse,
and give great or little scope for healthy human energies.  From idle
wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been
early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme
unsuitability to the conditions.  What he calls “Feudal Literature” could
have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he
calls the “Literature of Wo,” meaning the whole tribe of Werther and
Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place.  Both
propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be true
enough; and as this seems to be Whitman’s view, they were true enough for
him.  He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the
life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and next, American;
which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a
popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype
some democratic ideal of humanity which should be equally natural to all
grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favourite
phrases, to “the average man.”  To the formation of some such literature
as this his poems are to be regarded as so many contributions, one
sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the other: and the whole
together not so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints.  He
does not profess to have built the castle, but he pretends he has traced
the lines of the foundation.  He has not made the poetry, but he flatters
himself he has done something towards making the poets.

His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly
with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the
metaphysician.  The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order,
the materials of their existence.  He is “The Answerer;” he is to find
some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the
moment, man’s enduring astonishment at his own position.  And besides
having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question.  He must
shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some
election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.
Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly
from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments
by the inanities of custom.  We should despise a man who gave as little
activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business.  But in
this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,
we cannot see the forest for the trees.  One brief impression obliterates
another.  There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant
things.  And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an
outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and great
possibilities of our existence.  It is the duty of the poet to induce
such moments of clear sight.  He is the declared enemy of all living by
reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the
pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our
hearts and fritter invaluable years.  He has to electrify his readers
into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and eager
observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a superior
prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims of the
copy-book.  That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily disown
after two hours’ serious reflection on the subject is, I am afraid, a
true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought.  The Enchanted Ground of
dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of
considerate virtue.  But there they all slumber and take their rest in
the middle of God’s beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads
have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell
asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a
single active thought.

The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows to a sense of
their own and other people’s principles in life.

And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent means
to such an end.  Language is but a poor bull’s-eye lantern wherewith to
show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once
said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the
absence of the many which remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a
distant view, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings.
There are not words enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest
fraction of a man’s experience in an hour.  The speed of the eyesight and
the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind, produce, in ten
minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to shadow forth by
comparisons and roundabout approaches.  If verbal logic were sufficient,
life would be as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid.  But, as a matter of
fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put
it into words for the words are all coloured and forsworn, apply
inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses ideas of praise and
blame that have nothing to do with the question in hand.  So we must
always see to it nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not
by the partial terms that represent them in man’s speech; and at times of
choice, we must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute
convictions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which cannot be
flourished in an argument, but which are truly the sum and fruit of our
experience.  Words are for communication, not for judgment.  This is what
every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools and silly
schoolmasters push definitions over far into the domain of conduct; and
the majority of women, not learned in these scholastic refinements, live
all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put
a name upon their acts or motives.  Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman’s
scrupulous and argumentative poet; he must do more than waken up the
sleepers to his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at
life with their own eyes.

This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means
when he tells us that “To glance with an eye confounds the learning of
all times.”  But he is not unready.  He is never weary of descanting on
the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence
of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things.  To glance with an eye,
were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive
process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion, than to read the
works of all the logicians extant.  If both, by a large allowance, may be
said to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the
other to an incalculable degree.  If people see a lion, they run away; if
they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an
experimental humour.  Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and
not like books?  Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the
man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking
together?  Yes, there is one: the man’s own thoughts.  In fact, if the
poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
hearer’s mind.  That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he
will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life.  Any
conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass
into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully
operative.  Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but
they cannot rule behaviour.  Our faith is not the highest truth that we
perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the
very texture and method of our thinking.  It is not, therefore, by
flashing before a man’s eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by
induction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on from
one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
renewed.  He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made to
see that he has always believed it.  And this is the practical canon.  It
is when the reader cries, “Oh, I know!” and is, perhaps, half irritated
to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he is
on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.

Here we have the key to Whitman’s attitude.  To give a certain unity of
ideal to the average population of America—to gather their activities
about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if
only for the moment—the poet must portray that population as it is.  Like
human law, human poetry is simply declaratory.  If any ideal is possible,
it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the same
reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them.  And hence
Whitman’s own formula: “The poet is individual—he is complete in himself:
the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not.”  To show
them how good they are, the poet must study his fellow-countrymen and
himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for his book of travels.
There is a sense, of course, in which all true books are books of travel;
and all genuine poets must run their risk of being charged with the
traveller’s exaggeration; for to whom are such books more surprising than
to those whose own life is faithfully and smartly pictured?  But this
danger is all upon one side; and you may judiciously flatter the portrait
without any likelihood of the sitter’s disowning it for a faithful
likeness.  And so Whitman has reasoned: that by drawing at first hand
from himself and his neighbours, accepting without shame the
inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating
the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make sure of belief,
and at the same time encourage people forward by the means of praise.



II.


We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed.  The great refinement of many
poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
length.  The bold and awful poetry of Job’s complaint produces too many
flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad.  This
literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this _Maladie de René_, as we
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
phenomenon.  Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
beginning of the world.  There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,
and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.

It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,
among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men.  When our
little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,
we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen.  Where a man in not
the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there is
plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently.  It is better to leave him as he is
than to teach him whining.  It is better that he should go without the
cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence.  Let us, by all means, fight
against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they
will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it, above all,
that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man
up in courage while we demolish its substitute, indifference.

Whitman is alive to all this.  He sees that, if the poet is to be of any
help, he must testify to the livableness of life.  His poems, he tells
us, are to be “hymns of the praise of things.”  They are to make for a
certain high joy in living, or what he calls himself “a brave delight fit
for freedom’s athletes.”  And he has had no difficulty in introducing his
optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average man
is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living.  One of Whitman’s
remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly
successful, and does precisely what he designs to do throughout: Takes
ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws them out, by a happy
turn of thinking, into significance and something like beauty; and tacks
a hopeful moral lesson to the end.

    “The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers,
    cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of
    healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
    horses, the passion for light and the open air,—all is an old
    unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a
    residence of the poetic in outdoor people.”

There seems to me something truly original in this choice of trite
examples.  You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and
woodmen being confessedly romantic.  And one thing more.  If he had said
“the love of healthy men for the female form,” he would have said almost
a silliness; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy, and
is so obvious as to be a public nuisance.  But by reversing it, he tells
us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly in
words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great
self-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement.  In many different
authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a
more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our
connection.  The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is
a sort of standing challenge to everybody else.  If one man can grow
absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over
something else.  Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener, is
to be very meanly organised.  A man should be ashamed to take his food if
he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense
and enjoyable occupation.

Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of
outdoor atmosphere of sentiment.  His book, he tells us, should be read
“among the cooling influences of external nature;” and this
recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to
his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work.  Every one who
has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with
the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and
quiet.  The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a
plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great things
no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is.  This
is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades.  He thinks very ill of
the atmosphere of parlours or libraries.  Wisdom keeps school outdoors.
And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by simply pluming
himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep the advantage
over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the
same view.  And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest
charm of his work.  Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of
expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and
surprising, distinguishes his poems.  He has sayings that come home to
one like the Bible.  We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men
who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of
touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy
thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with
unexcelled imaginative justice of language, “the huge and thoughtful
night.”  And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment
of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in
the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing
malady of being seventeen years old.  Green-sickness yields to his
treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of
reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders.



III.


Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity.  He
considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars, as that
one man should rise from the dead.  He declares “a hair on the back of
his hand just as curious as any special revelation.”  His whole life is
to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual miracle.
Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;
from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for
food.  He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the
first time, and professes astonishment on principle.  But he has no
leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls
“unregenerate poetry;” and does not mean by nature

    “The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and
    nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
    geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
    through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing
    billions of tons.”

Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all impressions,
all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and
religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe.  He is
not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion.  He wishes to
drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any
or than all of them put together.  In feeling after the central type of
man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must subsume all
cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them; his statement of
facts must include all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha,
God and the devil.  The world as it is, and the whole world as it is,
physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its
manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong,
picturesque, and popular lineaments, for the understanding of the average
man.  One of his favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a
nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another,
about his readers’ ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and
thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his
own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his
feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the
unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the
inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly
bodies.  So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that
disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical
flash of these eight words: The desire of the moth for the star.

The same truth, but to what a different purpose!  Whitman’s moth is
mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think
too highly of our sublunary tapers.  The universe is so large that
imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the
meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.
“The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any
nearer,” he remarks.  And again: “Let your soul stand cool and composed,”
says he, “before a million universes.”  It is the language of a
transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.
But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk and
the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints; he
must put the dots upon his i’s; he must corroborate the songs of Apollo
by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic.  He tells his disciples
that they must be ready “to confront the growing arrogance of Realism.”
Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of this
universal edifice.  “Nothing, not God,” he says, “is greater to one than
oneself is;” a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight;
but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second.  He will
give effect to his own character without apology; he sees “that the
elementary laws never apologise.”  “I reckon,” he adds, with quaint
colloquial arrogance, “I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I
plant my house by, after all.”  The level follows the law of its being;
so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own
place and way; God is the maker of all and all are in one design.  For he
believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security.  “No array
of terms,” quoth he, “no array of terms can say how much at peace I am
about God and about death.”  There certainly never was a prophet who
carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas than
a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you will
observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above the
highest human doubts and trepidations.

But next in order of truths to a person’s sublime conviction of himself,
comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by
the word love:—

    “The dear love of man for his comrade—the attraction of friend for
    friend,
    Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
    Of city for city and land for land.”

The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other
people’s faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to
something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which
convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures.  While he
is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman
goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of her
eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run.  Love is so startlingly
real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality with the
consciousness of personal existence.  We are as heartily persuaded of the
identity of those we love as of our own identity.  And so sympathy pairs
with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on earth; and
Whitman’s ideal man must not only be strong, free, and self-reliant in
himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his strength perfected by
the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love for others.  To some
extent this is taking away with the left hand what has been so generously
given with the right.  Morality has been ceremoniously extruded from the
door only to be brought in again by the window.  We are told, on one
page, to do as we please; and on the next we are sharply upbraided for
not having done as the author pleases.  We are first assured that we are
the finest fellows in the world in our own right; and then it appears
that we are only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic
code of morals.  The disciple who saw himself in clear ether a moment
before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications of duty.
And this is all the more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only on
love between sex and sex, and between friends of the same sex, but in the
field of the less intense political sympathies; and his ideal man must
not only be a generous friend but a conscientious voter into the bargain.

His method somewhat lessens the difficulty.  He is not, the reader will
remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good
we are.  He is to encourage us to be free and kind, by proving that we
are free and kind already.  He passes our corporate life under review, to
show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate.  “There is no object so soft,” he says somewhere in his big,
plain way, “there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d
universe.”  Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all objects, the
sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily and securely as
on a perfect axle.  There is no room, of course, for doubt or discussion,
about conduct, where every one is to follow the law of his being with
exact compliance.  Whitman hates doubt, deprecates discussion, and
discourages to his utmost the craving, carping sensibilities of the
conscience.  We are to imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy
phrases, “the satisfaction and aplomb of animals.”  If he preaches a sort
of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the ranting
optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it to be the
original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he would be
honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present
Christianised.  His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is
one of encouragement all round.  A man must be a born hero to come up to
Whitman’s standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but of
a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little to
say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two upon
the other side.  He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he would
prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat.  The great
point is to get people under way.  To the faithful Whitmanite this would
be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was good; the
prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry “Tally-ho,” and mankind will
break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado.  Perhaps, to another class
of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat cynical reflection
that you will not make a kind man out of one who is unkind by any
precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in natural
circumstances, the large majority is well disposed.  Thence it would
follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and act
more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.

So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a
picture of man’s life it is incomplete and misleading, although eminently
cheerful.  This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if he is
prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of consistency.  “Do
I contradict myself?” he asks somewhere; and then pat comes the answer,
the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a
woman: “Very well, then, I contradict myself!” with this addition, not so
feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: “I am large—I
contain multitudes.”  Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the
nature of tragedy.  The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be not so
logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that
it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil.  Whitman
accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and
instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets
himself to spur people up to be helpful.  He expresses a conviction,
indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end; that “what is
untried and afterward” will fail no one, not even “the old man who has
lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse than gall.”  But
this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the
present.  Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst things that ever was
supposed to come from America, consoled himself with the reflection that
it was the price we have to pay for cochineal.  And with that murderous
parody, logical optimism and the praises of the best of possible words
went irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in the
mouths of reasonable men.  Whitman spares us all allusions to the
cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome; as
an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy’s topsails off
the Spanish Main.  There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious
to be done.  I do not know many better things in literature than the
brief pictures,—brief and vivid like things seen by lightning,—with which
he tries to stir up the world’s heart upon the side of mercy.  He braces
us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness; on the
other, he touches us with pitiful instances of people needing help.  He
knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story; to inflame us with
just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop our mouths for shame when
he tells of the drunken prostitute.  For all the afflicted, all the weak,
all the wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call one
of ultra-Christianity; and however wild, however contradictory, it may be
in parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may be said of
the Christian Gospels, that no one will read it, however respectable, but
he gets a knock upon his conscience; no one however fallen, but he finds
a kindly and supporting welcome.



IV.


Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battle of
well-doing; he has given to his precepts the authority of his own brave
example.  Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no sense of
humour, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printed performances.
The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in his actions.
Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to set him down as
an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one who had known him
personally who did not profess a solid affection and respect for the
man’s character.  He practises as he professes; he feels deeply that
Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful delight in
serving others, which he often celebrates in literature with a doubtful
measure of success.  And perhaps, out of all his writings, the best and
the most human and convincing passages are to be found in “these soil’d
and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper,
folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin,” which he
scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded or in the
excitement of great events.  They are hardly literature in the formal
meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part as he
made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a
business memorandum, the copy of a letter-short, straightforward to the
point, with none of the trappings of composition; but they breathe a
profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of the sides of
life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is an honour to
love.

Whitman’s intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the future of
These States (as, with reverential capitals, he loves to call them), made
the war a period of great trial to his soul.  The new virtue, Unionism,
of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into premature
unpopularity.  All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance.
And the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues; it
sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured him intimately
by the spectacle of its horrors.  It was a theatre, it was a place of
education, it was like a season of religious revival.  He watched Lincoln
going daily to his work; he studied and fraternised with young soldiery
passing to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals, reading the
Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a patient,
helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.

His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read.  From one
point of view they seem those of a district visitor; from another, they
look like the formless jottings of an artist in the picturesque.  More
than one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed the
writer for a fellow-woman.  More than one literary purist might identify
him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty of
style.  And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the weeping
order of mankind, you will certainly find your eyes fill with tears, of
which you have no reason to be ashamed.  There is only one way to
characterise a work of this order, and that is to quote.  Here is a
passage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in
hospital:—

    “Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical
    treatment, nursing, etc.  He had watches much of the time.  He was so
    good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very
    much.  I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him,
    and he liked to have me—liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on
    my knee—would keep it so a long while.  Toward the last he was more
    restless and flighty at night—often fancied himself with his
    regiment—by his talk sometimes seem’d as if his feelings were hurt by
    being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent
    of—said ‘I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and
    never was.’  At other times he would fancy himself talking as it
    seem’d to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving
    them good advice; would talk to them a long while.  All the time he
    was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or idea
    escaped him.  It was remark’d that many a man’s conversation in his
    senses was not half so good as Frank’s delirium.

    “He was perfectly willing to die—he had become very weak, and had
    suffer’d a good deal, and was perfectly resign’d, poor boy.  I do not
    know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good.  At any
    rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances,
    with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved
    so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be
    surpassed.  And now, like many other noble and good men, after
    serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at
    the very outset in her service.  Such things are gloomy—yet there is
    a text, ‘God doeth all things well,’ the meaning of which, after due
    time, appears to the soul.

    “I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your
    son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for
    I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him.”

It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but what
are we to say of its profound goodness and tenderness?  It is written as
though he had the mother’s face before his eyes, and saw her wincing in
the flesh at every word.  And what, again, are we to say of its sober
truthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not seeking to
make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave young
man?  Literary reticence is not Whitman’s stronghold; and this reticence
is not literary, but humane; it is not that of a good artist but that of
a good man.  He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was Frank;
and he told her about her Frank as he was.



V.


Something should be said of Whitman’s style, for style is of the essence
of thinking.  And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author,
and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication
is worth notice.  He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse;
sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and
careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken
the trouble to write prose.  I believe myself that it was selected
principally because it was easy to write, although not without
recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our
English Old Testament.  According to Whitman, on the other hand, “the
time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between
Prose and Poetry . . . for the most cogent purposes of those great inland
states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon;”—a statement which is
among the happiest achievements of American humour.  He calls his verses
“recitatives,” in easily followed allusion to a musical form.
“Easily-written, loose-fingered chords,” he cries, “I feel the thrum of
your climax and close.”  Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can
perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his
work considered as verses is poor bald stuff.  Considered, not as verse,
but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable
merits.  The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant,
is thrust into its place.  Whitman has small regard to literary
decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities.  He is neither
afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being
ridiculous.  The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,
sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense.  It would be useless to
follow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his
worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted specimens
of how happily he can write when he is at his best.  These come in to
most advantage in their own place; owing something, it may be, to the
offset of their curious surroundings.  And one thing is certain, that no
one can appreciate Whitman’s excellences until he has grown accustomed to
his faults.  Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages almost
as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn’s translation, your
gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed,
and the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly flagrant
production by the Poet Close.

A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate in taking
for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on the
hill-tops but in the factory; not only by the harbour full of stately
ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter.  To show
beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact.  It is not to be
done by the wishing.  It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it
home to men’s minds is the problem of literature, and is only
accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances.  To bid
the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one’s right hand by
way of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein;
to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no
distinction in one’s enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; to
prove one’s entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by
calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical
apostrophe;—this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way
to do it.  It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable
branch of industry, but the word “hatter” cannot be used seriously in
emotional verse; not to understand this, is to have no literary tact; and
I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible
expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages.  The book teems
with similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it
from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.

A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick
upon the artist.  It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have
in the hatter.  If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say
Hatter?  One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the
“great poet” to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other.
A most incontrovertible sentiment surely, and one which nobody would
think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has
been shown.  But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is
simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled
him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody?  And what are we to say,
where a man of Whitman’s notable capacity for putting things in a bright,
picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges,
with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with
no more colour or coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary?
I do not know that we can say anything, but that it is a prodigiously
amusing exhibition for a line or so.  The worst of it is, that Whitman
must have known better.  The man is a great critic, and, so far as I can
make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it require to know that
capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb keyboard,
with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same
thing as discoursing music?  I wish I could believe he was quite honest
with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a
purpose?  It is a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity.

One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon,
however shortly.  In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply,
it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with some
plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most
delicate of subjects.  Seeing in that one of the most serious and
interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon
as ridiculous or shameful.  No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in
his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood
beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among the
things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink.  But the
Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman has rather
played the fool.  We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is
improving; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on these
close privacies of life; that on this subject, as on all others, he now
and then lets fall a pregnant saying.  But we are not satisfied.  We feel
that he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise.  He loses our
sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our
attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop.  And where, by a little more
art, we might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often Whitman
alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorously
amused.



VI.


Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputable
state, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue of
these deliberate productions?

Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula.  If he could have
adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he
would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes.  It
was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its
contradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it.  What he
has made of the world and the world’s meanings is to be found at large in
his poems.  These altogether give his answers to the problems of belief
and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some ways loose
and contradictory.  And yet there are two passages from the preface to
the _Leaves of Grass_ which do pretty well condense his teaching on all
essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his spirit.

    “This is what you shall do,” he says in the one, “love the earth, and
    sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
    stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to
    others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and
    indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or
    unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful
    uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read
    these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every
    year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
    church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

    “The prudence of the greatest poet,” he adds in the other—and the
    greatest poet is, of course, himself—“knows that the young man who
    composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for
    himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it
    to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for
    himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great
    prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
    and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely
    following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward
    and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
    emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death.”

There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly Christian.
Any reader who bears in mind Whitman’s own advice and “dismisses whatever
insults his own soul” will find plenty that is bracing, brightening, and
chastening to reward him for a little patience at first.  It seems hardly
possible that any being should get evil from so healthy a book as the
_Leaves of Grass_, which is simply comical wherever it falls short of
nobility; but if there be any such, who cannot both take and leave, who
cannot let a single opportunity pass by without some unworthy and unmanly
thought, I should have as great difficulty, and neither more nor less, in
recommending the works of Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or
letting them go abroad outside of the grounds of a private asylum.




HENRY DAVID THOREAU:
HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS.


I.


THOREAU’S thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut,
conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character.  With his
almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in
act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world’s
heroes.  He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his
enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be
convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but
was all improved and sharpened to a point.  “He was bred to no
profession,” says Emerson; “he never married; he lived alone; he never
went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he
ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and,
though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.  When asked at dinner
what dish he preferred, he answered, ‘the nearest.’”  So many negative
superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig.  From his later works
he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the
impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and
there we see the prig stand public and confessed.  It was “much easier,”
says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say _no_ than _yes_; and
that is a characteristic which depicts the man.  It is a useful
accomplishment to be able to say _no_, but surely it is the essence of
amiability to prefer to say _yes_ where it is possible.  There is
something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is
constrained to say no.  And there was a great deal wanting in this born
dissenter.  He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not
enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him
demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he
was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities.  The world’s heroes
have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,
in the capacious theatre of their dispositions.  Such can live many
lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
foresight.

He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had
this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy.  “I love
my fate to the core and rind,” he wrote once; and even while he lay
dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble
to control the pen):  “You ask particularly after my health.  I _suppose_
that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about it.
I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret
nothing.”  It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the
sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this
world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and
lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from
within.  Now Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say,
like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for
there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a
life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing
contact of the world.  In one word, Thoreau was a skulker.  He did not
wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a
corner to hoard it for himself.  He left all for the sake of certain
virtuous self-indulgences.  It is true that his tastes were noble; that
his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and that
his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early
rising.  But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of goodness,
and morbid even in the pursuit of health.  I cannot lay my hands on the
passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am
sure I have the meaning correctly.  It is this; He thought it bad economy
and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the
morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but see the sun rise, and he
was already sufficiently inspirited for the labours of the day.  That may
be reason good enough to abstain from tea; but when we go on to find the
same man, on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything
that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and
trials of human society itself into the bargain, we recognise that
valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself.
We need have no respect for a state of artificial training.  True health
is to be able to do without it.  Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin
the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as
much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses.
A man who must separate himself from his neighbours’ habits in order to
be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium
for the same purpose.  What we want to see is one who can breast into the
world, do a man’s work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment
of existence.

Thoreau’s faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for they were
all delicacies.  He could guide himself about the woods on the darkest
night by the touch of his feet.  He could pick up at once an exact dozen
of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and gauge cubic
contents by the eye.  His smell was so dainty that he could perceive the
fœtor of dwelling-houses as he passed them by at night; his palate so
unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the taste of wine—or
perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that was good; and his
knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he could have told
the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect of the plants.  In
his dealings with animals, he was the original of Hawthorne’s Donatello.
He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail; the hunted fox came
to him for protection; wild squirrels have been seen to nestle in his
waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into a pool and bring forth a bright,
panting fish, lying undismayed in the palm of his hand.  There were few
things that he could not do.  He could make a house, a boat, a pencil, or
a book.  He was a surveyor, a scholar, a natural historian.  He could
run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage a boat.  The smallest occasion
served to display his physical accomplishment; and a manufacturer, from
merely observing his dexterity with the window of a railway carriage,
offered him a situation on the spot.  “The only fruit of much living,” he
observes, “is the ability to do some slight thing better.”  But such was
the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre, that it
seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case, for he could do most
things with unusual perfection.  And perhaps he had an approving eye to
himself when he wrote: “Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the
laws of the universe are not indifferent, _but are for ever on the side
of the most sensitive_.”



II.


Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life of
self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures, but
pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one, he
turned all his strength in that direction.  He was met upon the threshold
by a common difficulty.  In this world, in spite of its many agreeable
features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery to live.  It
is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation without what
are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these absent, a man
must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the public such as the
public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to put it, Apollo must
serve Admetus.  This was to Thoreau even a sourer necessity than it is to
most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of the wild man, in his
nature, that rebelled with violence against the yoke of custom; and he
was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy in his own society,
that he could consent with difficulty even to the interruptions of
friendship.  “_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I dare not
promise,” he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the italics are
his own.  Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and between whiles
to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is so busy improving
himself, that he must think twice about a morning call.  And now imagine
him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial and unmeaning
business!  He shrank from the very look of the mechanical in life; all
should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly progressive.
Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had gained the best
certificate and his friends began to congratulate him on his
establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
another.  “Why should I?” said he “I would not do again what I have done
once.”  For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
is of no further interest to the self-improver.  Yet in after years, and
when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
this mechanical art—a step more than worthy of himself.

The pencils seem to have been Apollo’s first experiment in the service of
Admetus; but others followed.  “I have thoroughly tried school-keeping,”
he writes, “and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out
of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged to dress and train, not to
say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain.
As I did not teach for the benefit of my fellow-men, but simply for a
livelihood, this was a failure.  I have tried trade, but I found that it
would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should
probably be on my way to the devil.”  Nothing, indeed, can surpass his
scorn for all so-called business.  Upon that subject gall squirts from
him at a touch.  “The whole enterprise of this nation is not illustrated
by a thought,” he writes; “it is not warmed by a sentiment; there is
nothing in it for which a man should lay down his life, nor even his
gloves.”  And again: “If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the
banks too, my faith in the old laws of this world would be staggered.
The statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing such business surely
break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed.”
The wish was probably father to the figures; but there is something
enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge,
and sneering like Voltaire.

Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position.  He saw
his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and Admetus
never got less work out of any servant since the world began.  It was his
ambition to be an oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee
sort of oriental.  Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood to
money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he displayed
a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted poverty like
a piece of business.  Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which,
I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are only pounded
out of them by city uncles.  Indeed, something essentially youthful
distinguishes all Thoreau’s knock-down blows at current opinion.  Like
the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind of speechless
agony.  These know the thing is nonsense.  They are sure there must be an
answer, yet somehow cannot find it.  So it is with his system of economy.
He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the accepted arguments
apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect where there are no
catchwords ready made for the defender; after you have been boxing for
years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does
not scruple to hit below the belt.

“The cost of a thing,” says he, “is _the amount of what I will call life_
which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long
run.”  I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly,
that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.  Between
these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to find
a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or other, that a
man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau’s terms,
his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his
available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.  There are two
questions to be considered—the quality of what we buy, and the price we
have to pay for it.  Do you want a thousand a year, a two thousand a
year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you afford the one you
want?  It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least degree a question
of duty, though commonly supposed so.  But there is no authority for that
view anywhere.  It is nowhere in the Bible.  It is true that we might do
a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly
improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite
distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at
all train a man for practising the other.  “Money might be of great
service to me,” writes Thoreau; “but the difficulty now is that I do not
improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have my
opportunities increased.”  It is a mere illusion that, above a certain
income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin
for the generous impulse.  It is as difficult to be generous, or anything
else, except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two
hundred a year.

Now Thoreau’s tastes were well defined.  He loved to be free, to be
master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the
body; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to
the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life
among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank.  And such
being his inclination he determined to gratify it.  A poor man must save
off something; he determined to save off his livelihood.  “When a man has
attained those things which are necessary to life,” he writes, “there is
another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; _he may adventure
on life now_, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.”  Thoreau
would get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessary
daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then,
his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to
oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work of
self-improvement.

Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against
the day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau.  He preferred that
other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith.  When he had secured
the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents
or torment himself with trouble for the future.  He had no toleration for
the man “who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance
company, which has promised to bury him decently.”  He would trust
himself a little to the world.  “We may safely trust a good deal more
than we do,” says he.  “How much is not done by us! or what if we had
been taken sick?”  And then, with a stab of satire, he describes
contemporary mankind in a phrase: “All the day long on the alert, at
night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
uncertainties.”  It is not likely that the public will be much affected
by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they
profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous
ventures; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours for
all that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many must lose
their wager.

In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have
usually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with a
capital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked
forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in
life.  He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with
characteristic and workman-like pride, sharper than when he borrowed it;
he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and
sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the matter
of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or some
other of his numerous dexterities, for hire.

For more than five years, this was all that he required to do for his
support, and he had the winter and most of the summer at his entire
disposal.  For six weeks of occupation, a little cooking and a little
gentle hygienic gardening, the man, you may say, had as good as stolen
his livelihood.  Or we must rather allow that he had done far better; for
the thief himself is continually and busily occupied; and even one born
to inherit a million will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau.
Well might he say, “What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and
find you can.”  And how surprising is his conclusion: “I am convinced
that _to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship_, _but a
pastime_, if we will live simply and wisely; _as the pursuits of simpler
nations are still the sports of the more artificial_.”

When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in
giving it up as in beginning it.  There are some who could have done the
one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the story
of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetish of his own example, and did
what he wanted squarely.  And five years is long enough for an experiment
and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism.  It is not his
frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was inborn,
and therefore inimitable by others who are differently constituted; and
again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch
students at the universities.  The point is the sanity of his view of
life, and the insight with which he recognised the position of money, and
thought out for himself the problem of riches and a livelihood.  Apart
from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and was acting on, a truth of
universal application.  For money enters in two different characters into
the scheme of life.  A certain amount, varying with the number and empire
of our desires, is a true necessary to each one of us in the present
order of society; but beyond that amount, money is a commodity to be
bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or
stint ourselves, like any other.  And there are many luxuries that we may
legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful conscience, a country life,
or the woman of our inclination.  Trite, flat, and obvious as this
conclusion may appear, we have only to look round us in society to see
how scantily it has been recognised; and perhaps even ourselves, after a
little reflection, may decide to spend a trifle less for money, and
indulge ourselves a trifle more in the article of freedom.



III.


“To have done anything by which you earned money merely,” says Thoreau,
“is to be” (have been, he means) “idle and worse.”  There are two
passages in his letters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which
must be brought together to be rightly understood.  So taken, they
contain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work
in its relation to something broader than mere livelihood.  Here is the
first: “I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night—and for
what?  I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day; but that wasn’t
the final settlement.  I got off cheaply from him.  At last one will say:
‘Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?’  And I shall shudder to
think that the next question will be, ‘What did you do while you were
warm?’”  Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr.
Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question.  It is not enough to
have earned our livelihood.  Either the earning itself should have been
serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow.  To live is
sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue
to exist upon this crowded earth.

If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees,
birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books,
an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus,
but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end.
Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private
means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount
of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the
higher moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.

The second passage is this: “There is a far more important and warming
heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood.  It is the
smoke of industry, which is incense.  I had been so thoroughly warmed in
body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near
selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat.”  Industry
is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the
worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau
says, “earned money merely,” but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one.  “We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small
diameter of being,” he says in another place; and then exclaims, “How
admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion
to his art!”  We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial.  It is only to transact some higher business
that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus.  We must all work for
the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any
“absorbing pursuit—it does not much matter what, so it be honest;” but
the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued effort
the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man’s nature; that
into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he will desist with
reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not that
of satiety; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing, and stimulating to
his taste.  Such work holds a man together, braced at all points; it does
not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps him actively conscious of
himself, yet raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit of
industry with the pleasures of a pastime.  This is what his art should be
to the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and less
intimate pursuits.  For other professions stand apart from the human
business of life; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist’s
doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences, teaches him
the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography.  So says Goethe:

    “Spät erklingt was früh erklang;
    Glück und Unglück wird Gesang.”

Now Thoreau’s art was literature; and it was one of which he had
conceived most ambitiously.  He loved and believed in good books.  He
said well, “Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly
and unexaggerated as in the light of literature.”  But the literature he
loved was of the heroic order.  “Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an
idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which
even make us dangerous to existing institutions—such I call good books.”
He did not think them easy to be read.  “The heroic books,” he says,
“even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be in
a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the
meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common
use permits out of what wisdom and valour and generosity we have.”  Nor
does he suppose that such books are easily written.  “Great prose, of
equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse,” says he,
“since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded
with the grandeur of the thought.  The poet often only makes an
irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he
retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman and settled
colonies.”  We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works
exist at all but in the imagination of the student.  For the bulk of the
best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and those in which
energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of utterance may be
almost counted on the fingers.  Looking round in English for a book that
should answer Thoreau’s two demands of a style like poetry and sense that
shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton’s
_Areopagitica_, and can name no other instance for the moment.  Two
things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothing more
commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large
library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he
will find his work cut out for him.

Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and
composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that “the
length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing.”  He speaks
in one place of “plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,” which is
rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively, true.

In another he remarks: “As for style of writing, if one has anything to
say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground.”  We must
conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase “if one has anything
to say.”  When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and
without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the
work practically completed before he sat down to write.  It is only out
of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;
and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he had
been vigorously active during his walk.  For neither clearness
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till
after a busy and a prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand.  Easy
writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with
a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass of
their powers.  We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in
face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of
_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs.  Hemming and Condell were
unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy.  He
who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently and
earnestly have revised details in the study.  Thoreau himself, and in
spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in
one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only
by the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of his
style.  “I trust you realise what an exaggerator I am—that I lay myself
out to exaggerate,” he writes.  And again, hinting at the explanation:
“Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak
extravagantly any more for ever?”  And yet once more, in his essay on
Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: “No truth, we
think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the
time there seemed to be no other.”  Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and
a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East,
but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he was
writing.  He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
particular method, it appears to me, he wandered.  Literature is not less
a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least
striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three.  To hear a strain
of music to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry
night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language.
Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of
the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is a
kind of negative exaggeration.  It is the right of the literary artist,
as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not
suit his purpose.  Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the
well-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
thrilling to the reader.  But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to
exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to
put the reader on his guard.  And when you write the whole for the half,
you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a
different thought which is not yours.

Thoreau’s true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined with
an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it is
there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of
his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous, and
therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental.  Yet he did not care
to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in books of
a different purport.  _Walden_, _or Life in the Woods_, _A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, _The Maine Woods_,—such are the titles he
affects.  He was probably reminded by his delicate critical perception
that the true business of literature is with narrative; in reasoned
narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages, and
suffers least from its defects.  Dry precept and disembodied
disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction, can
never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural impression.
Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it
cannot tell its whole story to the reader.  Hence the effect of anecdote
on simple minds; and hence good biographies and works of high,
imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more
edifying, than books of theory or precept.  Now Thoreau could not clothe
his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he
sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of
experience.

Again, he was a lover of nature.  The quality which we should call
mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect of
the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one which
he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books.  The seeming
significance of nature’s appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the
senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the mind of man,
continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits.  It appeared to him, I
think, that if we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with
no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of
reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured
and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear between men’s
thoughts and the phenomena of nature.  This was the eagle that he pursued
all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly net.  Hear him to a
friend: “Let me suggest a theme for you—to state to yourself precisely
and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you,
returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied that all
that was important in your experience is in it.  Don’t suppose that you
can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again;
especially when, after a sufficient pause you suspect that you are
touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there,
and account for the mountain to yourself.  Not that the story need be
long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”  Such was the
method, not consistent for a man whose meanings were to “drop from him as
a stone falls to the ground.”  Perhaps the most successful work that
Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is to be found in the
passages relating to fish in the _Week_.  These are remarkable for a
vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of language, not
frequently surpassed.

Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with
sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms.  Moreover,
there is a progression—I cannot call it a progress—in his work towards a
more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the
bathos of the prosy.  Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
“Who would not like to write something which all can read, like _Robinson
Crusoe_? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with
a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?”  I must say in
passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights
the world in _Robinson_, but the romantic and philosophic interest of the
fable.  The same treatment does quite the reverse of delighting us when
it is applied, in _Colonel Jack_, to the management of a plantation.  But
I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this
identical remark or by some other closely similar in meaning.  He began
to fall more and more into a detailed materialistic treatment; he went
into the business doggedly, as one who should make a guide-book; he not
only chronicled what had been important in his own experience, but
whatever might have been important in the experience of anybody else; not
only what had affected him, but all that he saw or heard.  His ardour had
grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a right materialistic
treatment to display such emotions as he felt; and, to complete the
eventful change, he chose, from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these
later works of the saving quality of humour.  He was not one of those
authors who have learned, in his own words, “to leave out their dulness.”
He inflicts his full quantity upon the reader in such books as _Cape
Cod_, or _The Yankee in Canada_.  Of the latter he confessed that he had
not managed to get much of himself into it.  Heaven knows he had not, nor
yet much of Canada, we may hope.  “Nothing,” he says somewhere, “can
shock a brave man but dulness.”  Well, there are few spots more shocking
to the brave than the pages of _The Yankee in Canada_.

There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure:
the _Week_, _Walden_, and the collected letters.  As to his poetry,
Emerson’s word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily
said: “The thyme and majoram are not yet honey.”  In this, as in his
prose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrote
throughout in faith.  It was an exercise of faith to suppose that many
would understand the sense of his best work, or that any could be
exhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst.  “But,” as he says,
“the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the
echo; and I know that the nature towards which I launch these sounds is
so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest
strain.”



IV.


“What means the fact,” he cries, “that a soul which has lost all hope for
itself can inspire in another listening soul such an infinite confidence
in it, even while it is expressing its despair?”  The question is an echo
and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it forms the key-note
of his thoughts on friendship.  No one else, to my knowledge, has spoken
in so high and just a spirit of the kindly relations; and I doubt whether
it be a drawback that these lessons should come from one in many ways so
unfitted to be a teacher in this branch.  The very coldness and egoism of
his own intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the intellectual
basis of our warm, mutual tolerations; and testimony to their worth comes
with added force from one who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a
friend remarked, with equal wit and wisdom, “I love Henry, but I cannot
like him.”

He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between love and
friendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of
meditation, had he taught himself to breathe.  He was, indeed, too
accurate an observer not to have remarked that “there exists already a
natural disinterestedness and liberality” between men and women; yet, he
thought, “friendship is no respecter of sex.”  Perhaps there is a sense
in which the words are true; but they were spoken in ignorance; and
perhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love a
foundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can be
possible without it.  For there are delicacies, eternal between persons
of the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love.

To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature and
condition.  “We are not what we are,” says he, “nor do we treat or esteem
each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.”  “A friend is
one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting all the virtues
from us, and who can appreciate them in us.”  “The friend asks no return
but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his
apotheosis of him.”  “It is the merit and preservation of friendship that
it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the
parties would seem to warrant.”  This is to put friendship on a pedestal
indeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last sentence,
in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteries
plain.  We are different with different friends; yet if we look closely
we shall find that every such relation reposes on some particular
apotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although we could not
distinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one special
reputation to preserve: and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to
our friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called
better, but to be better men in point of fact.  We seek this society to
flatter ourselves with our own good conduct.  And hence any falsehood in
the relation, any incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even
the pleasure of these visits.  Thus says Thoreau again: “Only lovers know
the value of truth.”  And yet again: “They ask for words and deeds, when
a true relation is word and deed.”

But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other
hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his
powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both.  “We may
bid farewell sooner than complain,” says Thoreau, “for our complaint is
too well grounded to be uttered.”  “We have not so good a right to hate
any as our friend.”

    “It were treason to our love
    And a sin to God above,
    One iota to abate
    Of a pure, impartial hate.”

Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving.  “O yes, believe me,” as the song
says, “Love has eyes!”  The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we
feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and
would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
will forgive, that friend’s misconduct.  If you want a person’s faults,
go to those who love him.  They will not tell you, but they know.  And
herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this
knowledge without change.

It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps, to
recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for a more human love makes
it a point of honour not to acknowledge those faults of which it is most
conscious.  But his point of view is both high and dry.  He has no
illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but
preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities.  A more
bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been
presented.  He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think it
worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine
times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are
disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently
undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend’s
conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh
endeavour.  Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish.  It is profit he is
after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly, but still profit to
himself.  If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naïvely,
“my education cannot dispense with your society.”  His education! as
though a friend were a dictionary.  And with all this, not one word about
pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood.  It
was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the
fish.  We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: “As
for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm-tree!”

As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his
intimacies.  He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of
intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it.  And what
else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle’s,
“nestle down into it”?  Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and even
then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some afterthought
of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricket match to bet.
It was his theory that people saw each other too frequently, so that
their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had they anything fresh to
communicate; but friendship must be something else than a society for
mutual improvement—indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some
extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a manner
of elm-tree, he would have felt that he saw his friends too seldom, and
have reaped benefits unknown to his philosophy from a more sustained and
easy intercourse.  We might remind him of his own words about love: “We
should have no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that
business.  But commonly men have not imagination enough to be thus
employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth.”
Ay, or reading oriental philosophers.  It is not the nature of the rival
occupation, it is the fact that you suffer it to be a rival, that renders
loving intimacy impossible.  Nothing is given for nothing in this world;
there can be no true love, even on your own side, without devotion;
devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows; but if you will give
enough of that, if you will pay the price in a sufficient “amount of what
you call life,” why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may
have months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet
improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.

The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no
tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part
in the real deficiencies of social intercourse.  He was not so much
difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the
terms of their association.  He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter
in _Walden_; but he would not consent, in his own words, to “feebly
fabulate and paddle in the social slush.”  It seemed to him, I think,
that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes
place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would
warrant us to expect.  The society talk of even the most brilliant man is
of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the French
say) a little committee.  And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not enough
of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a parlour
and, in the naval phrase, “cut out” a human being from that dreary port;
nor had he inclination for the task.  I suspect he loved books and nature
as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow-creatures,—a
melancholy, lean degeneration of the human character.

“As for the dispute about solitude and society,” he thus sums up: “Any
comparison is impertinent.  It is an idling down on the plain at the base
of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top.  Of course you
will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with?  Will you go
to glory with me? is the burden of the song.  It is not that we love to
be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company grows
thinner and thinner till there is none at all.  It is either the tribune
on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still
higher up.  Use all the society that will abet you.”  But surely it is no
very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to receive, to
serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there is no
question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy their
company like a natural man.  It is curious and in some ways dispiriting
that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own mouth; and so,
to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which seems aimed
directly at himself: “Do not be too moral; you may cheat yourself out of
much life so. . . .  _All fables_, _indeed_, _have their morals_; _but
the innocent enjoy the story_.”



V.


“The only obligation,” says he, “which I have a right to assume is to do
at any time what I think right.”  “Why should we ever go abroad, even
across the way, to ask a neighbour’s advice?”  “There is a nearer
neighbour within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave.
_But we wait for the neighbour without to tell us of some false_, _easier
way_.”  “The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my
soul to be bad.”  To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
becoming, is the only end of life.  It is “when we fall behind ourselves”
that “we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties.”  “I love the
wild,” he says, “not less than the good.”  And again: “The life of a good
man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
observance, and” (mark this) “_our lives are sustained by a nearly equal
expense of virtue of some kind_.”  Even although he were a prig, it will
be owned he could announce a startling doctrine.  “As for doing good,” he
writes elsewhere, “that is one of the professions that are full.
Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am
satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.  Probably I should
not conscientiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do
the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from
annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater
steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.  If you should ever
be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand
know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing.”  Elsewhere
he returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: “If I ever
_did_ a man any good in their sense, of course it was something
exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I am
constantly doing by being what I am.”

There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this unshaken
confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts, or
sufferings of others.  In his whole works I find no trace of pity.  This
was partly the result of theory, for he held the world too mysterious to
be criticised, and asks conclusively: “What right have I to grieve who
have not ceased to wonder?”  But it sprang still more from constitutional
indifference and superiority; and he grew up healthy, composed, and
unconscious from among life’s horrors, like a green bay-tree from a field
of battle.  It was from this lack in himself that he failed to do justice
to the spirit of Christ; for while he could glean more meaning from
individual precepts than any score of Christians, yet he conceived life
in such a different hope, and viewed it with such contrary emotions, that
the sense and purport of the doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him
by or left him unimpressed.  He could understand the idealism of the
Christian view, but he was himself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did
not recognise the human intention and essence of that teaching.  Hence he
complained that Christ did not leave us a rule that was proper and
sufficient for this world, not having conceived the nature of the rule
that was laid down; for things of that character that are sufficiently
unacceptable become positively non-existent to the mind.  But perhaps we
shall best appreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the
case of Whitman.  For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the
other; it is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously
bawls; it is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference! the
same argument, but used to what a new conclusion!  Thoreau had plenty of
humour until he tutored himself out of it, and so forfeited that best
birthright of a sensible man; Whitman, in that respect, seems to have
been sent into the world naked and unashamed; and yet by a strange
consummation, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and
claustral.  Of these two philosophies so nearly identical at bottom, the
one pursues Self-improvement—a churlish, mangy dog; the other is up with
the morning, in the best of health, and following the nymph Happiness,
buxom, blithe, and debonair.  Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it
joys to communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for its
existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that are not
unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make
excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improver
dwindles towards the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution
may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and appearance of
a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of us to live.

In the case of Thoreau, so great a show of doctrine demands some outcome
in the field of action.  If nothing were to be done but build a shanty
beside Walden Pond, we have heard altogether too much of these
declarations of independence.  That the man wrote some books is nothing
to the purpose, for the same has been done in a suburban villa.  That he
kept himself happy is perhaps a sufficient excuse, but it is
disappointing to the reader.  We may be unjust, but when a man despises
commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good so soaring that he
must take himself apart from mankind for their cultivation, we will not
be content without some striking act.  It was not Thoreau’s fault if he
were not martyred; had the occasion come, he would have made a noble
ending.  As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the world’s course;
he made one practical appearance on the stage of affairs; and a strange
one it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and the
eccentricity of the man.  It was forced on him by his calm but radical
opposition to negro slavery.  “Voting for the right is doing nothing for
it,” he saw; “it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it
should prevail.”  For his part, he would not “for an instant recognise
that political organisation for _his_ government which is the _slave’s_
government also.”  “I do not hesitate to say,” he adds, “that those who
call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their
support, both in person and property, from the government of
Massachusetts.”  That is what he did: in 1843 he ceased to pay the
poll-tax.  The highway-tax he paid, for he said he was as desirous to be
a good neighbour as to be a bad subject; but no more poll-tax to the
State of Massachusetts.  Thoreau had now seceded, and was a polity unto
himself; or, as he explains it with admirable sense, “In fact, I quietly
declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still make
what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.”
He was put in prison; but that was a part of his design.  “Under a
government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is
also a prison.  I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred,
if ten men whom I could name—ay, if _one_ HONEST man, in this State of
Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually to withdraw from
this copartnership, and be locked up in the county gaol therefor, it
would be the abolition of slavery in America.  For it matters not how
small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done for
ever.”  Such was his theory of civil disobedience.

And the upshot?  A friend paid the tax for him; continued year by year to
pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested.
It was a _fiasco_, but to me it does not seem laughable; even those who
joined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by this
quaint instance of a good man’s horror for injustice.  We may compute the
worth of that one night’s imprisonment as outweighing half a hundred
voters at some subsequent election: and if Thoreau had possessed as great
a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had counted a party
however small, if his example had been followed by a hundred or by thirty
of his fellows, I cannot but believe it would have greatly precipitated
the era of freedom and justice.  We feel the misdeeds of our country with
so little fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they cause;
but when we see them wake an active horror in our fellow-man, when we see
a neighbour prefer to lie in prison rather than be so much as passively
implicated in their perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to
realise them with a quicker pulse.

Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken at
Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence.
The committees wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature.
“I did not send to you for advice,” said he, “but to announce that I was
to speak.”  I have used the word “defence;” in truth he did not seek to
defend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that he
should die; but he praised his action as I think Brown would have liked
to hear it praised.

Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to a
character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own
path of self-improvement for more than half a century, part gymnosophist,
part backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in a subaltern
attitude, into the field of political history.

                                * * * * *

NOTE.—For many facts in the above essay, among which I may mention the
incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to _Thoreau_: _His Life and
Aims_, by J. A. Page, or, as is well known, Dr. Japp.




YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO


THE name at the head of this page is probably unknown to the English
reader, and yet I think it should become a household word like that of
Garibaldi or John Brown.  Some day soon, we may expect to hear more fully
the details of Yoshida’s history, and the degree of his influence in the
transformation of Japan; even now there must be Englishmen acquainted
with the subject, and perhaps the appearance of this sketch may elicit
something more complete and exact.  I wish to say that I am not, rightly
speaking, the author of the present paper: I tell the story on the
authority of an intelligent Japanese gentleman, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who
told it me with an emotion that does honour to his heart; and though I
have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be corrected, this can
be no more than an imperfect outline.

Yoshida-Torajiro was son to the hereditary military instructor of the
house of Choshu.   The name you are to pronounce with an equality of
accent on the different syllables, almost as in French, the vowels as in
Italian, but the consonants in the English manner—except the _j_, which
has the French sound, or, as it has been cleverly proposed to write it,
the sound of _zh_.  Yoshida was very learned in Chinese letters, or, as
we might say, in the classics, and in his father’s subject; fortification
was among his favourite studies, and he was a poet from his boyhood.  He
was born to a lively and intelligent patriotism; the condition of Japan
was his great concern; and while he projected a better future, he lost no
opportunity of improving his knowledge of her present state.  With this
end he was continually travelling in his youth, going on foot and
sometimes with three days’ provision on his back, in the brave,
self-helpful manner of all heroes.  He kept a full diary while he was
thus upon his journeys, but it is feared that these notes have been
destroyed.  If their value were in any respect such as we have reason to
expect from the man’s character, this would be a loss not easy to
exaggerate.  It is still wonderful to the Japanese how far he contrived
to push these explorations; a cultured gentleman of that land and period
would leave a complimentary poem wherever he had been hospitably
entertained; and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a great
wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida’s passage in very remote
regions of Japan.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is
thought necessary; but Yoshida considered otherwise, and he studied the
miseries of his fellow-countrymen with as much attention and research as
though he had been going to write a book instead of merely to propose a
remedy.  To a man of his intensity and singleness, there is no question
but that this survey was melancholy in the extreme.  His dissatisfaction
is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of
reform; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his
task.  As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of
Japan that occupied his mind.  The external feebleness of that country
was then illustrated by the manners of overriding barbarians, and the
visits of big barbarian war ships: she was a country beleaguered.  Thus
the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have defeated
itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-powerful foreigners,
whom it is now one of his chief merits to have helped to introduce; but a
man who follows his own virtuous heart will be always found in the end to
have been fighting for the best.  One thing leads naturally to another in
an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from effect to cause.
The power and knowledge of these foreigners were things inseparable; by
envying them their military strength, Yoshida came to envy them their
culture; from the desire to equal them in the first, sprang his desire to
share with them in the second; and thus he is found treating in the same
book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of Kioto and of the
establishment, in the same city, of a university of foreign teachers.  He
hoped, perhaps, to get the good of other lands without their evil; to
enable Japan to profit by the knowledge of the barbarians, and still keep
her inviolate with her own arts and virtues.  But whatever was the
precise nature of his hope, the means by which it was to be accomplished
were both difficult and obvious.  Some one with eyes and understanding
must break through the official cordon, escape into the new world, and
study this other civilisation on the spot.  And who could be better
suited for the business?  It was not without danger, but he was without
fear.  It needed preparation and insight; and what had he done since he
was a child but prepare himself with the best culture of Japan, and
acquire in his excursions the power and habit of observing?

He was but twenty-two, and already all this was clear in his mind, when
news reached Choshu that Commodore Perry was lying near to Yeddo.  Here,
then, was the patriot’s opportunity.  Among the Samurai of Choshu, and in
particular among the councillors of the Daimio, his general culture, his
views, which the enlightened were eager to accept, and, above all, the
prophetic charm, the radiant persuasion of the man, had gained him many
and sincere disciples.  He had thus a strong influence at the provincial
Court; and so he obtained leave to quit the district, and, by way of a
pretext, a privilege to follow his profession in Yeddo.  Thither he
hurried, and arrived in time to be too late: Perry had weighed anchor,
and his sails had vanished from the waters of Japan.  But Yoshida, having
put his hand to the plough, was not the man to go back; he had entered
upon this business, and, please God, he would carry it through; and so he
gave up his professional career and remained in Yeddo to be at hand
against the next opportunity.  By this behaviour he put himself into an
attitude towards his superior, the Daimio of Choshu, which I cannot
thoroughly explain.  Certainly, he became a _Ronyin_, a broken man, a
feudal outlaw; certainly he was liable to be arrested if he set foot upon
his native province; yet I am cautioned that “he did not really break his
allegiance,” but only so far separated himself as that the prince could
no longer be held accountable for his late vassal’s conduct.  There is
some nicety of feudal custom here that escapes my comprehension.

In Yeddo, with this nondescript political status, and cut off from any
means of livelihood, he was joyfully supported by those who sympathised
with his design.  One was Sákuma-Shozan, hereditary retainer of one of
the Shogun’s councillors, and from him he got more than money or than
money’s worth.  A steady, respectable man, with an eye to the world’s
opinion, Sákuma was one of those who, if they cannot do great deeds in
their own person, have yet an ardour of admiration for those who can,
that recommends them to the gratitude of history.  They aid and abet
greatness more, perhaps, than we imagine.  One thinks of them in
connection with Nicodemus, who visited our Lord by night.  And Sákuma was
in a position to help Yoshida more practically than by simple
countenance; for he could read Dutch, and was eager to communicate what
he knew.

While the young Ronyin thus lay studying in Yeddo, news came of a Russian
ship at Nangasaki.  No time was to be lost.  Sákuma contributed “a long
copy of encouraging verses;” and off set Yoshida on foot for Nangasaki.
His way lay through his own province of Choshu; but, as the highroad to
the south lay apart from the capital, he was able to avoid arrest.  He
supported himself, like a _trouvère_, by his proficiency in verse.  He
carried his works along with him, to serve as an introduction.  When he
reached a town he would inquire for the house of any one celebrated for
swordsmanship, or poetry, or some of the other acknowledged forms of
culture; and there, on giving a taste of his skill, he would be received
and entertained, and leave behind him, when he went away, a compliment in
verse.  Thus he travelled through the Middle Ages on his voyage of
discovery into the nineteenth century.  When he reached Nangasaki he was
once more too late.  The Russians were gone.  But he made a profit on his
journey in spite of fate, and stayed awhile to pick up scraps of
knowledge from the Dutch interpreters—a low class of men, but one that
had opportunities; and then, still full of purpose, returned to Yeddo on
foot, as he had come.

It was not only his youth and courage that supported him under these
successive disappointments, but the continual affluence of new disciples.
The man had the tenacity of a Bruce or a Columbus, with a pliability that
was all his own.  He did not fight for what the world would call success;
but for “the wages of going on.”  Check him off in a dozen directions, he
would find another outlet and break forth.  He missed one vessel after
another, and the main work still halted; but so long as he had a single
Japanese to enlighten and prepare for the better future, he could still
feel that he was working for Japan.  Now, he had scarce returned from
Nangasaki, when he was sought out by a new inquirer, the most promising
of all.  This was a common soldier, of the Hemming class, a dyer by
birth, who had heard vaguely {179} of Yoshida’s movements, and had become
filled with wonder as to their design.  This was a far different inquirer
from Sákuma-Shozan, or the councillors of the Daimio of Choshu.  This was
no two-sworded gentleman, but the common stuff of the country, born in
low traditions and unimproved by books; and yet that influence, that
radiant persuasion that never failed Yoshida in any circumstance of his
short life, enchanted, enthralled, and converted the common soldier, as
it had done already with the elegant and learned.  The man instantly
burned up into a true enthusiasm; his mind had been only waiting for a
teacher; he grasped in a moment the profit of these new ideas; he, too,
would go to foreign, outlandish parts, and bring back the knowledge that
was to strengthen and renew Japan; and in the meantime, that he might be
the better prepared, Yoshida set himself to teach, and he to learn, the
Chinese literature.  It is an episode most honourable to Yoshida, and yet
more honourable still to the soldier, and to the capacity and virtue of
the common people of Japan.

And now, at length, Commodore Perry returned to Simoda.  Friends crowded
round Yoshida with help, counsels, and encouragement.  One presented him
with a great sword, three feet long and very heavy, which, in the
exultation of the hour, he swore to carry throughout all his wanderings,
and to bring back—a far-travelled weapon—to Japan.  A long letter was
prepared in Chinese for the American officers; it was revised and
corrected by Sákuma, and signed by Yoshida, under the name of
Urinaki-Manji, and by the soldier under that of Ichigi-Koda.  Yoshida had
supplied himself with a profusion of materials for writing; his dress was
literally stuffed with paper which was to come back again enriched with
his observations, and make a great and happy kingdom of Japan.  Thus
equipped, this pair of emigrants set forward on foot from Yeddo, and
reached Simoda about nightfall.  At no period within history can travel
have presented to any European creature the same face of awe and terror
as to these courageous Japanese.  The descent of Ulysses into hell is a
parallel more near the case than the boldest expedition in the Polar
circles.  For their act was unprecedented; it was criminal; and it was to
take them beyond the pale of humanity into a land of devils.  It is not
to be wondered at if they were thrilled by the thought of their unusual
situation; and perhaps the soldier gave utterance to the sentiment of
both when he sang, “in Chinese singing” (so that we see he had already
profited by his lessons), these two appropriate verses:

    “We do not know where we are to sleep to-night,
    In a thousand miles of desert where we can see no human smoke.”

In a little temple, hard by the sea-shore, they lay down to repose; sleep
overtook them as they lay; and when they awoke, “the east was already
white” for their last morning in Japan.  They seized a fisherman’s boat
and rowed out—Perry lying far to sea because of the two tides.  Their
very manner of boarding was significant of determination; for they had no
sooner caught hold upon the ship than they kicked away their boat to make
return impossible.  And now you would have thought that all was over.
But the Commodore was already in treaty with the Shogun’s Government; it
was one of the stipulations that no Japanese was to be aided in escaping
from Japan; and Yoshida and his followers were handed over as prisoners
to the authorities at Simoda.  That night he who had been to explore the
secrets of the barbarian slept, if he might sleep at all, in a cell too
short for lying down at full length, and too low for standing upright.
There are some disappointments too great for commentary.

Sákuma, implicated by his handwriting, was sent into his own province in
confinement, from which he was soon released.  Yoshida and the soldier
suffered a long and miserable period of captivity, and the latter,
indeed, died, while yet in prison, of a skin disease.  But such a spirit
as that of Yoshida-Torajiro is not easily made or kept a captive; and
that which cannot be broken by misfortune you shall seek in vain to
confine in a bastille.  He was indefatigably active, writing reports to
Government and treatises for dissemination.  These latter were
contraband; and yet he found no difficulty in their distribution, for he
always had the jailor on his side.  It was in vain that they kept
changing him from one prison to another; Government by that plan only
hastened the spread of new ideas; for Yoshida had only to arrive to make
a convert.  Thus, though he himself has laid by the heels, he confirmed
and extended his party in the State.

At last, after many lesser transferences, he was given over from the
prisons of the Shogun to those of his own superior, the Daimio of Choshu.
I conceive it possible that he may then have served out his time for the
attempt to leave Japan, and was now resigned to the provincial Government
on a lesser count, as a Ronyin or feudal rebel.  But, however that may
be, the change was of great importance to Yoshida; for by the influence
of his admirers in the Daimio’s council, he was allowed the privilege,
underhand, of dwelling in his own house.  And there, as well to keep up
communication with his fellow-reformers as to pursue his work of
education, he received boys to teach.  It must not be supposed that he
was free; he was too marked a man for that; he was probably assigned to
some small circle, and lived, as we should say, under police
surveillance; but to him, who had done so much from under lock and key,
this would seem a large and profitable liberty.

It was at this period that Mr. Masaki was brought into personal contact
with Yoshida; and hence, through the eyes of a boy of thirteen, we get
one good look at the character and habits of the hero.  He was ugly and
laughably disfigured with the smallpox; and while nature had been so
niggardly with him from the first, his personal habits were even
sluttish.  His clothes were wretched; when he ate or washed he wiped his
hands upon his sleeves; and as his hair was not tied more than once in
the two months, it was often disgusting to behold.  With such a picture,
it is easy to believe that he never married.  A good teacher, gentle in
act, although violent and abusive in speech, his lessons were apt to go
over the heads of his scholars and to leave them gaping, or more often
laughing.  Such was his passion for study that he even grudged himself
natural repose; and when he grew drowsy over his books he would, if it
was summer, put mosquitoes up his sleeve; and, if it was winter, take off
his shoes and run barefoot on the snow.  His handwriting was
exceptionally villainous; poet though he was, he had no taste for what
was elegant; and in a country where to write beautifully was not the mark
of a scrivener but an admired accomplishment for gentlemen, he suffered
his letters to be jolted out of him by the press of matter and the heat
of his convictions.  He would not tolerate even the appearance of a
bribe; for bribery lay at the root of much that was evil in Japan, as
well as in countries nearer home; and once when a merchant brought him
his son to educate, and added, as was customary, {185} a little private
sweetener, Yoshida dashed the money in the giver’s face, and launched
into such an outbreak of indignation as made the matter public in the
school.  He was still, when Masaki knew him, much weakened by his
hardships in prison; and the presentation sword, three feet long, was too
heavy for him to wear without distress; yet he would always gird it on
when he went to dig in his garden.  That is a touch which qualifies the
man.  A weaker nature would have shrunk from the sight of what only
commemorated a failure.  But he was of Thoreau’s mind, that if you can
“make your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from success.”
He could look back without confusion to his enthusiastic promise.  If
events had been contrary, and he found himself unable to carry out that
purpose—well, there was but the more reason to be brave and constant in
another; if he could not carry the sword into barbarian lands, it should
at least be witness to a life spent entirely for Japan.

This is the sight we have of him as he appeared to schoolboys, but not
related in the schoolboy spirit.  A man so careless of the graces must be
out of court with boys and women.  And, indeed, as we have all been more
or less to school, it will astonish no one that Yoshida was regarded by
his scholars as a laughing-stock.  The schoolboy has a keen sense of
humour.  Heroes he learns to understand and to admire in books; but he is
not forward to recognise the heroic under the traits of any contemporary
man, and least of all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher.  But
as the years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain to
look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to
understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon
their comic school-master as upon the noblest of mankind.

The last act of this brief and full existence was already near at hand.
Some of his work was done; for already there had been Dutch teachers
admitted into Nangasaki, and the country at large was keen for the new
learning.  But though the renaissance had begun, it was impeded and
dangerously threatened by the power of the Shogun.  His minister—the same
who was afterwards assassinated in the snow in the very midst of his
bodyguard—not only held back pupils from going to the Dutchmen, but by
spies and detectives, by imprisonment and death, kept thinning out of
Japan the most intelligent and active spirits.  It is the old story of a
power upon its last legs—learning to the bastille, and courage to the
block; when there are none left but sheep and donkeys, the State will
have been saved.  But a man must not think to cope with a Revolution; nor
a minister, however fortified with guards, to hold in check a country
that had given birth to such men as Yoshida and his soldier-follower.
The violence of the ministerial Tarquin only served to direct attention
to the illegality of his master’s rule; and people began to turn their
allegiance from Yeddo and the Shogun to the long-forgotten Mikado in his
seclusion at Kioto.  At this juncture, whether in consequence or not, the
relations between these two rulers became strained; and the Shogun’s
minister set forth for Kioto to put another affront upon the rightful
sovereign.  The circumstance was well fitted to precipitate events.  It
was a piece of religion to defend the Mikado; it was a plain piece of
political righteousness to oppose a tyrannical and bloody usurpation.  To
Yoshida the moment for action seemed to have arrived.  He was himself
still confined in Choshu.  Nothing was free but his intelligence; but
with that he sharpened a sword for the Shogun’s minister.  A party of his
followers were to waylay the tyrant at a village on the Yeddo and Kioto
road, present him with a petition, and put him to the sword.  But Yoshida
and his friends were closely observed; and the too great expedition of
two of the conspirators, a boy of eighteen and his brother, wakened the
suspicion of the authorities, and led to a full discovery of the plot and
the arrest of all who were concerned.

In Yeddo, to which he was taken, Yoshida was thrown again into a strict
confinement.  But he was not left destitute of sympathy in this last hour
of trial.  In the next cell lay one Kusákabé, a reformer from the
southern highlands of Satzuma.  They were in prison for different plots
indeed, but for the same intention; they shared the same beliefs and the
same aspirations for Japan; many and long were the conversations they
held through the prison wall, and dear was the sympathy that soon united
them.  It fell first to the lot of Kusákabé to pass before the judges;
and when sentence had been pronounced he was led towards the place of
death below Yoshida’s window.  To turn the head would have been to
implicate his fellow-prisoner; but he threw him a look from his eye, and
bade him farewell in a loud voice, with these two Chinese verses:—

    “It is better to be a crystal and be broken,
    Than to remain perfect like a tile upon the housetop.”

So Kusákabé, from the highlands of Satzuma, passed out of the theatre of
this world.  His death was like an antique worthy’s.

A little after, and Yoshida too must appear before the Court.  His last
scene was of a piece with his career, and fitly crowned it.  He seized on
the opportunity of a public audience, confessed and gloried in his
design, and, reading his auditors a lesson in the history of their
country, told at length the illegality of the Shogun’s power and the
crimes by which its exercise was sullied.  So, having said his say for
once, he was led forth and executed, thirty-one years old.

A military engineer, a bold traveller (at least in wish), a poet, a
patriot, a schoolmaster, a friend to learning, a martyr to reform,—there
are not many men, dying at seventy, who have served their country in such
various characters.  He was not only wise and provident in thought, but
surely one of the fieriest of heroes in execution.  It is hard to say
which is most remarkable—his capacity for command, which subdued his very
jailors; his hot, unflagging zeal; or his stubborn superiority to defeat.
He failed in each particular enterprise that he attempted; and yet we
have only to look at his country to see how complete has been his general
success.  His friends and pupils made the majority of leaders in that
final Revolution, now some twelve years old; and many of them are, or
were until the other day, high placed among the rulers of Japan.  And
when we see all round us these brisk intelligent students, with their
strange foreign air, we should never forget how Yoshida marched afoot
from Choshu to Yeddo, and from Yeddo to Nangasaki, and from Nangasaki
back again to Yeddo; how he boarded the American ship, his dress stuffed
with writing material; nor how he languished in prison, and finally gave
his death, as he had formerly given all his life and strength and
leisure, to gain for his native land that very benefit which she now
enjoys so largely.  It is better to be Yoshida and perish, than to be
only Sákuma and yet save the hide.  Kusákabé, of Satzuma, has said the
word: it is better to be a crystal and be broken.

I must add a word; for I hope the reader will not fail to perceive that
this is as much the story of a heroic people as that of a heroic man.  It
is not enough to remember Yoshida; we must not forget the common soldier,
nor Kusákabé, nor the boy of eighteen, Nomura, of Choshu, whose eagerness
betrayed the plot.  It is exhilarating to have lived in the same days
with these great-hearted gentlemen.  Only a few miles from us, to speak
by the proportion of the universe, while I was droning over my lessons,
Yoshida was goading himself to be wakeful with the stings of the
mosquito; and while you were grudging a penny income tax, Kusákabé was
stepping to death with a noble sentence on his lips.




FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER.


PERHAPS one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the
sudden bull’s-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of
François Villon. {192}  His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of
biography exhumed after four centuries.  To readers of the poet it will
recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which he
bequeaths his spectacles—with a humorous reservation of the case—to the
hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-Score.  Thus equipped,
let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in the
cemetery of the Innocents!  For his own part the poet can see no
distinction.  Much have the dead people made of their advantages.  What
does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and nourished portly
bodies upon cakes and cream!  Here they all lie, to be trodden in the
mud; the large estate and the small, sounding virtue and adroit or
powerful vice, in very much the same condition; and a bishop not to be
distinguished from a lamp-lighter with even the strongest spectacles.

Such was Villon’s cynical philosophy.  Four hundred years after his
death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; and though he
left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is
only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been
finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among the
good or wicked.  It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a fine
figure of the imperishability of men’s acts, that the stealth of the
private inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and dusty
past.  We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied.  In the
extreme of dissolution, when not so much as a man’s name is remembered,
when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps the very grave
and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have been forgotten,
desecrated, and buried under populous towns,—even in this extreme let an
antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the name will be
recalled, the old infamy will pop out into daylight like a toad out of a
fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what was once a man
will be heartily pilloried by his descendants.  A little while ago and
Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived for the sake of
his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection
of his misdemeanours.  How unsubstantial is this projection of a man’s
existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up
again and set forth for the consideration of posterity by a few dips in
an antiquary’s inkpot!  This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to
justify those (and they are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the
immediate present.




A WILD YOUTH.


François de Montcorbier, _alias_ François des Loges, _alias_ François
Villon, _alias_ Michel Mouton, Master of Arts in the University of Paris,
was born in that city in the summer of 1431.  It was a memorable year for
France on other and higher considerations.  A great-hearted girl and a
poor-hearted boy made, the one her last, the other his first appearance
on the public stage of that unhappy country.  On the 30th of May the
ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the 2d of
December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into
disaffected and depopulating Paris.  Sword and fire still ravaged the
open country.  On a single April Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides
children, made their escape out of the starving capital.  The hangman, as
is not uninteresting to note in connection with Master Francis, was kept
hard at work in 1431; on the last of April and on the 4th of May alone,
sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets. {195}  A more confused or
troublous time it would have been difficult to select for a start in
life.  Not even a man’s nationality was certain; for the people of Paris
there was no such thing as a Frenchman.  The English were the English
indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with Joan of Arc at
their head, they had beaten back from under their ramparts not two years
before.  Such public sentiment as they had centred about their dear Duke
of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to keep
out of their neighbourhood. . . .  At least, and whether he liked it or
not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of
the English crown.

We hear nothing of Villon’s father except that he was poor and of mean
extraction.  His mother was given piously, which does not imply very much
in an old Frenchwoman, and quite uneducated.  He had an uncle, a monk in
an abbey at Angers, who must have prospered beyond the family average,
and was reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns.  Of this uncle
and his money-box the reader will hear once more.  In 1448 Francis became
a student of the University of Paris; in 1450 he took the degree of
Bachelor, and in 1452 that of Master of Arts.  His _bourse_, or the sum
paid weekly for his board, was of the amount of two sous.  Now two sous
was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of 1417;
it was the price of half-a-pound in the worse times of 1419; and in 1444,
just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems to have
been taken as the average wage for a day’s manual labour. {196}  In
short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set
lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon’s share of
the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary
of referring, must have been slender from the first.

The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way
of thinking, somewhat incomplete.  Worldly and monkish elements were
presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disentangle for
himself.  If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much
hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in the
way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other.  The lecture room of
a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof with establishments
of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order.  The students had
extraordinary privileges, which by all accounts they abused
extraordinarily.  And while some condemned themselves to an almost
sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered
in the street “with their thumbs in their girdle,” passed the night in
riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo in
the romance of _Notre Dame de Paris_.  Villon tells us himself that he
was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal.  The burlesque
erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no more than the merest
smattering of knowledge; whereas his acquaintance with blackguard haunts
and industries could only have been acquired by early and consistent
impiety and idleness.  He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
who have been to modern universities will make their own reflections on
the value of the test.  As for his three pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard
Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau—if they were really his pupils in any serious
sense—what can we say but God help them!  And sure enough, by his own
description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as was to be
looked for from the views and manners of their rare preceptor.

At some time or other, before or during his university career, the poet
was adopted by Master Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint
Benoît-le-Bétourné near the Sorbonne.  From him he borrowed the surname
by which he is known to posterity.  It was most likely from his house,
called the _Porte Rouge_, and situated in a garden in the cloister of St.
Benoît, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne ring out the
Angelus while he was finishing his _Small Testament_ at Christmastide in
1456.  Towards this benefactor he usually gets credit for a respectable
display of gratitude.  But with his trap and pitfall style of writing, it
is easy to make too sure.  His sentiments are about as much to be relied
on as those of a professional beggar; and in this, as in so many other
matters, he comes towards us whining and piping the eye, and goes off
again with a whoop and his finger to his nose.  Thus, he calls Guillaume
de Villon his “more than father,” thanks him with a great show of
sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, and bequeaths him
his portion of renown.  But the portion of renown which belonged to a
young thief, distinguished (if, at the period when he wrote this legacy,
he was distinguished at all) for having written some more or less obscene
and scurrilous ballads, must have been little fitted to gratify the
self-respect or increase the reputation of a benevolent ecclesiastic.
The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy of the poet’s library,
with specification of one work which was plainly neither decent nor
devout.  We are thus left on the horns of a dilemma.  If the chaplain was
a godly, philanthropic personage, who had tried to graft good principles
and good behaviour on this wild slip of an adopted son, these jesting
legacies would obviously cut him to the heart.  The position of an
adopted son towards his adoptive father is one full of delicacy; where a
man lends his name he looks for great consideration.  And this legacy of
Villon’s portion of renown may be taken as the mere fling of an
unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in his own shame
the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy benefactor’s feelings.
The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this reading, as a frightful
_minus_ quantity.  If, on the other hand, those jests were given and
taken in good humour, the whole relation between the pair degenerates
into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old chaplain and a witty
and dissolute young scholar.  At this rate the house with the red door
may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it may have been
below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he
tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic.

It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet’s life that he should have
inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoît.  Three of the most remarkable
among his early acquaintances are Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he
entertained a short-lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly
resentment; Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth; and
Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking locks.  Now
we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it is at least curious to
find that two of the canons of Saint Benoît answered respectively to the
names of Pierre de Vaucel and Etienne de Montigny, and that there was a
householder called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street—the Rue des Poirées—in
the immediate neighbourhood of the cloister.  M. Longnon is almost ready
to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre; Regnier as the nephew of
Etienne, and Colin as the son of Nicolas.  Without going so far, it must
be owned that the approximation of names is significant.  As we go on to
see the part played by each of these persons in the sordid melodrama of
the poet’s life, we shall come to regard it as even more notable.  Is it
not Clough who has remarked that, after all, everything lies in
juxtaposition?  Many a man’s destiny has been settled by nothing
apparently more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the
street and a couple of bad companions round the corner.

Catherine de Vausselles (or de Vaucel—the change is within the limits of
Villon’s licence) had plainly delighted in the poet’s conversation; near
neighbours or not, they were much together and Villon made no secret of
his court, and suffered himself to believe that his feeling was repaid in
kind.  This may have been an error from the first, or he may have
estranged her by subsequent misconduct or temerity.  One can easily
imagine Villon an impatient wooer.  One thing, at least, is sure: that
the affair terminated in a manner bitterly humiliating to Master Francis.
In presence of his lady-love, perhaps under her window and certainly with
her connivance, he was unmercifully thrashed by one Noë le Joly—beaten,
as he says himself, like dirty linen on the washing-board.  It is
characteristic that his malice had notably increased between the time
when he wrote the _Small Testament_ immediately on the back of the
occurrence, and the time when he wrote the _Large Testament_ five years
after.  On the latter occasion nothing is too bad for his “damsel with
the twisted nose,” as he calls her.  She is spared neither hint nor
accusation, and he tells his messenger to accost her with the vilest
insults.  Villon, it is thought, was out of Paris when these amenities
escaped his pen; or perhaps the strong arm of Noë le Joly would have been
again in requisition.  So ends the love story, if love story it may
properly be called.  Poets are not necessarily fortunate in love; but
they usually fall among more romantic circumstances and bear their
disappointment with a better grace.

The neighbourhood of Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux was probably
more influential on his after life than the contempt of Catherine.  For a
man who is greedy of all pleasures, and provided with little money and
less dignity of character, we may prophesy a safe and speedy voyage
downward.  Humble or even truckling virtue may walk unspotted in this
life.  But only those who despise the pleasures can afford to despise the
opinion of the world.  A man of a strong, heady temperament, like Villon,
is very differently tempted.  His eyes lay hold on all provocations
greedily, and his heart flames up at a look into imperious desire; he is
snared and broached-to by anything and everything, from a pretty face to
a piece of pastry in a cookshop window; he will drink the rinsing of the
wine cup, stay the latest at the tavern party; tap at the lit windows,
follow the sound of singing, and beat the whole neighbourhood for another
reveller, as he goes reluctantly homeward; and grudge himself every hour
of sleep as a black empty period in which he cannot follow after
pleasure.  Such a person is lost if he have not dignity, or, failing
that, at least pride, which is its shadow and in many ways its
substitute.  Master Francis, I fancy, would follow his own eager
instincts without much spiritual struggle.  And we soon find him fallen
among thieves in sober, literal earnest, and counting as acquaintances
the most disreputable people he could lay his hands on: fellows who stole
ducks in Paris Moat; sergeants of the criminal court, and archers of the
watch; blackguards who slept at night under the butchers’ stalls, and for
whom the aforesaid archers peered about carefully with lanterns; Regnier
de Montigny, Colin de Cayeux, and their crew, all bound on a favouring
breeze towards the gallows; the disorderly abbess of Port Royal, who went
about at fair time with soldiers and thieves, and conducted her abbey on
the queerest principles, and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris
receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene
of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury
her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet. {204}
Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society.  He
could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he
could make himself useful in many other ways.  The whole ragged army of
Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving to work and
pay for it, are addressed in contemporary verses as the “Subjects of
François Villon.”  He was a good genius to all hungry and unscrupulous
persons; and became the hero of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks
and cheateries.  At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too
thievish for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief.  But he would
not linger long in this equivocal border land.  He must soon have
complied with his surroundings.  He was one who would go where the
cannikin clinked, not caring who should pay; and from supping in the
wolves’ den, there is but a step to hunting with the pack.  And here, as
I am on the chapter of his degradation, I shall say all I mean to say
about its darkest expression, and be done with it for good.  Some
charitable critics see no more than a _jeu d’esprit_, a graceful and
trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg
(_Grosse Margot_).  I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this
polite extreme.  Out of all Villon’s works that ballad stands forth in
flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction
of disgust.  M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that
we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real
persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events.  But even if
the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have
gone far to prove itself.  I can well understand the reluctance of worthy
persons in this matter; for of course it is unpleasant to think of a man
of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult—

       “A place, for which the pained’st fiend
    Of hell would not in reputation change.”

But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty of the case
springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life.  Paris now is not so
different from the Paris of then; and the whole of the doings of Bohemia
are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Murger.  It is really not
at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century, with a knack
of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful terms.  The
race of those who do is not extinct; and some of them to this day write
the prettiest verses imaginable. . . .  After this, it were impossible
for Master Francis to fall lower: to go and steal for himself would be an
admirable advance from every point of view, divine or human.

And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first
appearance before angry justice.  On June 5, 1455, when he was about
twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter of three years, we
behold him for the first time quite definitely.  Angry justice had, as it
were, photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon,
rummaging among old deeds, has turned up the negative and printed it off
for our instruction.  Villon had been supping—copiously we may
believe—and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoît, in
company with a priest called Gilles and a woman of the name of Isabeau.
It was nine o’clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and evidently a
fine summer’s night.  Master Francis carried a mantle, like a prudent
man, to keep him from the dews (_serain_), and had a sword below it
dangling from his girdle.  So these three dallied in front of St. Benoît,
taking their pleasure (_pour soy esbatre_).  Suddenly there arrived upon
the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Sermaise, also with sword and
cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi.  Sermaise, according
to Villon’s account, which is all we have to go upon, came up blustering
and denying God; as Villon rose to make room for him upon the bench,
thrust him rudely back into his place; and finally drew his sword and cut
open his lower lip, by what I should imagine was a very clumsy stroke.
Up to this point, Villon professes to have been a model of courtesy, even
of feebleness: and the brawl, in his version, reads like the fable of the
wolf and the lamb.  But now the lamb was roused; he drew his sword,
stabbed Sermaise in the groin, knocked him on the head with a big stone,
and then, leaving him to his fate, went away to have his own lip doctored
by a barber of the name of Fouquet.  In one version, he says that Gilles,
Isabeau, and Le Mardi ran away at the first high words, and that he and
Sermaise had it out alone; in another, Le Mardi is represented as
returning and wresting Villon’s sword from him: the reader may please
himself.  Sermaise was picked up, lay all that night in the prison of
Saint Benoît, where he was examined by an official of the Châtelet and
expressly pardoned Villon, and died on the following Saturday in the
Hôtel Dieu.

This, as I have said, was in June.  Not before January of the next year
could Villon extract a pardon from the king; but while his hand was in,
he got two.  One is for “François des Loges, alias (_autrement dit_) de
Villon;” and the other runs in the name of François de Montcorbier.  Nay,
it appears there was a further complication; for in the narrative of the
first of these documents, it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon
Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one Michel Mouton.  M. Longnon has a
theory that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was the cause of Villon’s
subsequent irregularities; and that up to that moment he had been the
pink of good behaviour.  But the matter has to my eyes a more dubious
air.  A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another for Montcorbier? and
these two the same person? and one or both of them known by the _alias
of_ Villon, however honestly come by? and lastly, in the heat of the
moment, a fourth name thrown out with an assured countenance?  A ship is
not to be trusted that sails under so many colours.  This is not the
simple bearing of innocence.  No—the young master was already treading
crooked paths; already, he would start and blench at a hand upon his
shoulder, with the look we know so well in the face of Hogarth’s Idle
Apprentice; already, in the blue devils, he would see Henry Cousin, the
executor of high justice, going in dolorous procession towards
Montfaucon, and hear the wind and the birds crying around Paris gibbet.



A GANG OF THIEVES.


In spite of the prodigious number of people who managed to get hanged,
the fifteenth century was by no means a bad time for criminals.  A great
confusion of parties and great dust of fighting favoured the escape of
private housebreakers and quiet fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat.
Prisons were leaky; and as we shall see, a man with a few crowns in his
pocket and perhaps some acquaintance among the officials, could easily
slip out and become once more a free marauder.  There was no want of a
sanctuary where he might harbour until troubles blew by; and accomplices
helped each other with more or less good faith.  Clerks, above all, had
remarkable facilities for a criminal way of life; for they were
privileged, except in cases of notorious incorrigibility, to be plucked
from the hands of rude secular justice and tried by a tribunal of their
own.  In 1402, a couple of thieves, both clerks of the University, were
condemned to death by the Provost of Paris.  As they were taken to
Montfaucon, they kept crying “high and clearly” for their benefit of
clergy, but were none the less pitilessly hanged and gibbeted.  Indignant
Alma Mater interfered before the king; and the Provost was deprived of
all royal offices, and condemned to return the bodies and erect a great
stone cross, on the road from Paris to the gibbet graven with the
effigies of these two holy martyrs. {210}  We shall hear more of the
benefit of clergy; for after this the reader will not be surprised to
meet with thieves in the shape of tonsured clerks, or even priests and
monks.

To a knot of such learned pilferers our poet certainly belonged; and by
turning over a few more of M. Longnon’s negatives, we shall get a clear
idea of their character and doings.  Montigny and De Cayeux are names
already known; Guy Tabary, Petit-Jehan, Dom Nicolas, little Thibault, who
was both clerk and goldsmith, and who made picklocks and melted plate for
himself and his companions—with these the reader has still to become
acquainted.  Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux were handy fellows and enjoyed a
useful pre-eminence in honour of their doings with the picklock.
“_Dictus des Cahyeus est fortis operator crochetorum_,” says Tabary’s
interrogation, “_sed dictus Petit-Jehan_, _ejus socius_, _est forcius
operator_.”  But the flower of the flock was little Thibault; it was
reported that no lock could stand before him; he had a persuasive hand;
let us salute capacity wherever we may find it.  Perhaps the term _gang_
is not quite properly applied to the persons whose fortunes we are now
about to follow; rather they were independent malefactors, socially
intimate, and occasionally joining together for some serious operation
just as modern stockjobbers form a syndicate for an important loan.  Nor
were they at all particular to any branch of misdoing.  They did not
scrupulously confine themselves to a single sort of theft, as I hear is
common among modern thieves.  They were ready for anything, from
pitch-and-toss to manslaughter.  Montigny, for instance, had neglected
neither of these extremes, and we find him accused of cheating at games
of hazard on the one hand, and on the other of the murder of one Thevenin
Pensete in a house by the Cemetery of St. John.  If time had only spared
us some particulars, might not this last have furnished us with the
matter of a grisly winter’s tale?

At Christmas-time in 1456, readers of Villon will remember that he was
engaged on the _Small Testament_.  About the same period, _circa festum
nativitatis Domini_, he took part in a memorable supper at the Mule
Tavern, in front of the Church of St. Mathurin.  Tabary, who seems to
have been very much Villon’s creature, had ordered the supper in the
course of the afternoon.  He was a man who had had troubles in his time
and languished in the Bishop of Paris’s prisons on a suspicion of picking
locks; confiding, convivial, not very astute—who had copied out a whole
improper romance with his own right hand.  This supper-party was to be
his first introduction to De Cayeux and Petit-Jehan, which was probably a
matter of some concern to the poor man’s muddy wits; in the sequel, at
least, he speaks of both with an undisguised respect, based on
professional inferiority in the matter of picklocks.  Dom Nicolas, a
Picardy monk, was the fifth and last at table.  When supper had been
despatched and fairly washed down, we may suppose, with white Baigneux or
red Beaune, which were favourite wines among the fellowship, Tabary was
solemnly sworn over to secrecy on the night’s performances; and the party
left the Mule and proceeded to an unoccupied house belonging to Robert de
Saint-Simon.  This, over a low wall, they entered without difficulty.
All but Tabary took off their upper garments; a ladder was found and
applied to the high wall which separated Saint-Simon’s house from the
court of the College of Navarre; the four fellows in their shirt-sleeves
(as we might say) clambered over in a twinkling; and Master Guy Tabary
remained alone beside the overcoats.  From the court the burglars made
their way into the vestry of the chapel, where they found a large chest,
strengthened with iron bands and closed with four locks.  One of these
locks they picked, and then, by levering up the corner, forced the other
three.  Inside was a small coffer, of walnut wood, also barred with iron,
but fastened with only three locks, which were all comfortably picked by
way of the keyhole.  In the walnut coffer—a joyous sight by our thieves’
lantern—were five hundred crowns of gold.  There was some talk of opening
the aumries, where, if they had only known, a booty eight or nine times
greater lay ready to their hand; but one of the party (I have a humorous
suspicion it was Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk) hurried them away.  It
was ten o’clock when they mounted the ladder; it was about midnight
before Tabary beheld them coming back.  To him they gave ten crowns, and
promised a share of a two-crown dinner on the morrow; whereat we may
suppose his mouth watered.  In course of time, he got wind of the real
amount of their booty and understood how scurvily he had been used; but
he seems to have borne no malice.  How could he, against such superb
operators as Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux; or a person like Villon, who
could have made a new improper romance out of his own head, instead of
merely copying an old one with mechanical right hand?

The rest of the winter was not uneventful for the gang.  First they made
a demonstration against the Church of St. Mathurin after chalices, and
were ignominiously chased away by barking dogs.  Then Tabary fell out
with Casin Chollet, one of the fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat, who
subsequently became a sergeant of the Châtelet and distinguished himself
by misconduct, followed by imprisonment and public castigation, during
the wars of Louis Eleventh.  The quarrel was not conducted with a proper
regard to the king’s peace, and the pair publicly belaboured each other
until the police stepped in, and Master Tabary was cast once more into
the prisons of the Bishop.  While he still lay in durance, another job
was cleverly executed by the band in broad daylight, at the Augustine
Monastery.  Brother Guillaume Coiffier was beguiled by an accomplice to
St. Mathurin to say mass; and during his absence, his chamber was entered
and five or six hundred crowns in money and some silver plate
successfully abstracted.  A melancholy man was Coiffier on his return!
Eight crowns from this adventure were forwarded by little Thibault to the
incarcerated Tabary; and with these he bribed the jailor and reappeared
in Paris taverns.  Some time before or shortly after this, Villon set out
for Angers, as he had promised in the _Small Testament_.  The object of
this excursion was not merely to avoid the presence of his cruel mistress
or the strong arm of Noë le Joly, but to plan a deliberate robbery on his
uncle the monk.  As soon as he had properly studied the ground, the
others were to go over in force from Paris—picklocks and all—and away
with my uncle’s strongbox!  This throws a comical sidelight on his own
accusation against his relatives, that they had “forgotten natural duty”
and disowned him because he was poor.  A poor relation is a distasteful
circumstance at the best, but a poor relation who plans deliberate
robberies against those of his blood, and trudges hundreds of weary
leagues to put them into execution, is surely a little on the wrong side
of toleration.  The uncle at Angers may have been monstrously undutiful;
but the nephew from Paris was upsides with him.

On the 23d April, that venerable and discreet person, Master Pierre
Marchand, Curate and Prior of Paray-le-Monial, in the diocese of
Chartres, arrived in Paris and put up at the sign of the Three
Chandeliers, in the Rue de la Huchette.  Next day, or the day after, as
he was breakfasting at the sign of the Armchair, he fell into talk with
two customers, one of whom was a priest and the other our friend Tabary.
The idiotic Tabary became mighty confidential as to his past life.
Pierre Marchand, who was an acquaintance of Guillaume Coiffier’s and had
sympathised with him over his loss, pricked up his ears at the mention of
picklocks, and led on the transcriber of improper romances from one thing
to another, until they were fast friends.  For picklocks the Prior of
Paray professed a keen curiosity; but Tabary, upon some late alarm, had
thrown all his into the Seine.  Let that be no difficulty, however, for
was there not little Thibault, who could make them of all shapes and
sizes, and to whom Tabary, smelling an accomplice, would be only too glad
to introduce his new acquaintance?  On the morrow, accordingly, they met;
and Tabary, after having first wet his whistle at the prior’s expense,
led him to Notre Dame and presented him to four or five “young
companions,” who were keeping sanctuary in the church.  They were all
clerks, recently escaped, like Tabary himself, from the episcopal
prisons.  Among these we may notice Thibault, the operator, a little
fellow of twenty-six, wearing long hair behind.  The Prior expressed,
through Tabary, his anxiety to become their accomplice and altogether
such as they were (_de leur sorte et de leurs complices_).  Mighty polite
they showed themselves, and made him many fine speeches in return.  But
for all that, perhaps because they had longer heads than Tabary, perhaps
because it is less easy to wheedle men in a body, they kept obstinately
to generalities and gave him no information as to their exploits, past,
present, or to come.  I suppose Tabary groaned under this reserve; for no
sooner were he and the Prior out of the church than he fairly emptied his
heart to him, gave him full details of many hanging matters in the past,
and explained the future intentions of the band.  The scheme of the hour
was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert de la Porte, and in this the
Prior agreed to take a hand with simulated greed.  Thus, in the course of
two days, he had turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out.  For a
while longer the farce was carried on; the Prior was introduced to
Petit-Jehan, whom he describes as a little, very smart man of thirty,
with a black beard and a short jacket; an appointment was made and broken
in the de la Porte affair; Tabary had some breakfast at the Prior’s
charge and leaked out more secrets under the influence of wine and
friendship; and then all of a sudden, on the 17th of May, an alarm sprang
up, the Prior picked up his skirts and walked quietly over to the
Châtelet to make a deposition, and the whole band took to their heels and
vanished out of Paris and the sight of the police.

Vanish as they like, they all go with a clog about their feet.  Sooner or
later, here or there, they will be caught in the fact, and ignominiously
sent home.  From our vantage of four centuries afterwards, it is odd and
pitiful to watch the order in which the fugitives are captured and
dragged in.

Montigny was the first.  In August of that same year, he was laid by the
heels on many grievous counts; sacrilegious robberies, frauds,
incorrigibility, and that bad business about Thevenin Pensete in the
house by the cemetery of St. John.  He was reclaimed by the
ecclesiastical authorities as a clerk; but the claim was rebutted on the
score of incorrigibility, and ultimately fell to the ground; and he was
condemned to death by the Provost of Paris.  It was a very rude hour for
Montigny, but hope was not yet over.  He was a fellow of some birth; his
father had been king’s pantler; his sister, probably married to some one
about the Court, was in the family way, and her health would be
endangered if the execution was proceeded with.  So down comes Charles
the Seventh with letters of mercy, commuting the penalty to a year in a
dungeon on bread and water, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James
in Galicia.  Alas! the document was incomplete; it did not contain the
full tale of Montigny’s enormities; it did not recite that he had been
denied benefit of clergy, and it said nothing about Thevenin Pensete.
Montigny’s hour was at hand.  Benefit of clergy, honourable descent from
king’s pantler, sister in the family way, royal letters of
commutation—all were of no avail.  He had been in prison in Rouen, in
Tours, in Bordeaux, and four times already in Paris; and out of all these
he had come scatheless; but now he must make a little excursion as far as
Montfaucon with Henry Cousin, executor of high justice.  There let him
swing among the carrion crows.

About a year later, in July 1458, the police laid hands on Tabary.
Before the ecclesiastical commissary he was twice examined, and, on the
latter occasion, put to the question ordinary and extraordinary.  What a
dismal change from pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph
with expert operators and great wits!  He is at the lees of life, poor
rogue; and those fingers which once transcribed improper romances are now
agonisingly stretched upon the rack.  We have no sure knowledge, but we
may have a shrewd guess of the conclusion.  Tabary, the admirer, would go
the same way as those whom he admired.

The last we hear of is Colin de Cayeux.  He was caught in autumn 1460, in
the great Church of St. Leu d’Esserens, which makes so fine a figure in
the pleasant Oise valley between Creil and Beaumont.  He was reclaimed by
no less than two bishops; but the Procureur for the Provost held fast by
incorrigible Colin.  1460 was an ill-starred year: for justice was making
a clean sweep of “poor and indigent persons, thieves, cheats, and
lockpickers,” in the neighbourhood of Paris; {220a} and Colin de Cayeux,
with many others, was condemned to death and hanged. {220b}



VILLON AND THE GALLOWS.


Villon was still absent on the Angers expedition when the Prior of Paray
sent such a bombshell among his accomplices; and the dates of his return
and arrest remain undiscoverable.  M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for
the autumn of 1457, which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and
the first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils.  We may
suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter; we may suppose him
competed for between lay and clerical Courts; and we may suppose him
alternately pert and impudent, humble and fawning, in his defence.  But
at the end of all supposing, we come upon some nuggets of fact.  For
first, he was put to the question by water.  He who had tossed off so
many cups of white Baigneux or red Beaune, now drank water through linen
folds, until his bowels were flooded and his heart stood still.  After so
much raising of the elbow, so much outcry of fictitious thirst, here at
last was enough drinking for a lifetime.  Truly, of our pleasant vices,
the gods make whips to scourge us.  And secondly he was condemned to be
hanged.  A man may have been expecting a catastrophe for years, and yet
find himself unprepared when it arrives.  Certainly, Villon found, in
this legitimate issue of his career, a very staggering and grave
consideration.  Every beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin.
If everything is lost, and even honour, life still remains; nay, and it
becomes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan’s parable, as dear as all the rest.
“Do you fancy,” he asks, in a lively ballad, “that I had not enough
philosophy under my hood to cry out: ‘I appeal’?  If I had made any bones
about the matter, I should have been planted upright in the fields, by
the St. Denis Road”—Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis.  An appeal
to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de Cayeux, did not
necessarily lead to an acquittal or a commutation; and while the matter
was pending, our poet had ample opportunity to reflect on his position.
Hanging is a sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
adds a horrible corollary for the imagination.  With the aspect of
Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the neighbourhood appears
to have been sacred to junketing and nocturnal picnics of wild young men
and women, he had probably studied it under all varieties of hour and
weather.  And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new and
startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of epitaph for
himself and his companions, which remains unique in the annals of
mankind.  It is, in the highest sense, a piece of his biography:—

    “La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
    Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
    Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
    Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
    Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;
    Puis ça, puis là, comme le vent varie,
    A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
    Plus becquetez d’oiscaulx que dez à couldre.
    Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,
    Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.”

Here is some genuine thieves’ literature after so much that was spurious;
sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul.  There is an
intensity of consideration in the piece that shows it to be the
transcript of familiar thoughts.  It is the quintessence of many a
doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in
the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his
eyes.

And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one of
banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must carry his woes
without delay.  Travellers between Lyons and Marseilles may remember a
station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets
seaward between vine-clad hills.  This was Villon’s Siberia.  It would be
a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what with the
hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was little to
be pitied on the conditions of his exile.  Villon, in a remarkably bad
ballad, written in a breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the
Parliament; the _envoi_, like the proverbial postscript of a lady’s
letter, containing the pith of his performance in a request for three
days’ delay to settle his affairs and bid his friends farewell.  He was
probably not followed out of Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular
preacher, another exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes;
{224} but I daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a bottle with him
before they turned.  For banished people, in those days, seem to have set
out on their own responsibility, in their own guard, and at their own
expense.  It was no joke to make one’s way from Paris to Roussillon alone
and penniless in the fifteenth century.  Villon says he left a rag of his
tails on every bush.  Indeed, he must have had many a weary tramp, many a
slender meal, and many a to-do with blustering captains of the
Ordonnance.  But with one of his light fingers, we may fancy that he took
as good as he gave; for every rag of his tail, he would manage to
indemnify himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or
ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France and
Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over petty thefts, like
the track of a single human locust.  A strange figure he must have cut in
the eyes of the good country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet,
with a smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street arab,
posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the green fields and
vineyards.  For himself, he had no taste for rural loveliness; green
fields and vineyards would be mighty indifferent to Master Francis; but
he would often have his tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic
dupes, and often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.

How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the protégé of the
Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part,
under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be
referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, are matters
that still remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon’s diligent
rummaging among archives.  When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas!
he is once more in durance: this time at Méun-sur-Loire, in the prisons
of Thibault d’Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans.  He had been lowered in a
basket into a noisome pit, where he lay, all summer, gnawing hard crusts
and railing upon fate.  His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being
excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a
caricature of his own misery.  His eyes were “bandaged with thick walls.”
It might blow hurricanes overhead; the lightning might leap in high
heaven; but no word of all this reached him in his noisome pit.  “Il
n’entre, ou gist, n’escler ni tourbillon.”  Above all, he was fevered
with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his heart flowed over
into curses as he thought of Thibault d’Aussigny, walking the streets in
God’s sunlight, and blessing people with extended fingers.  So much we
find sharply lined in his own poems.  Why he was cast again into
prison—how he had again managed to shave the gallows—this we know not,
nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever likely to learn.
But on October 2d, 1461, or some day immediately preceding, the new King,
Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into Méun.  Now it was a part of
the formality on such occasions for the new King to liberate certain
prisoners; and so the basket was let down into Villon’s pit, and hastily
did Master Francis scramble in, and was most joyfully hauled up, and shot
out, blinking and tottering, but once more a free man, into the blessed
sun and wind.  Now or never is the time for verses!  Such a happy
revolution would turn the head of a stocking-weaver, and set him jingling
rhymes.  And so—after a voyage to Paris, where he finds Montigny and De
Cayeux clattering, their bones upon the gibbet, and his three pupils
roystering in Paris streets, “with their thumbs under their
girdles,”—down sits Master Francis to write his _Large Testament_, and
perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious ignominy.



THE _LARGE TESTAMENT_.


Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon’s style in general,
it is here the place to speak.  The _Large Testament_ is a hurly-burly of
cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to
friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable
ballades, both serious and absurd.  With so free a design, no thought
that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and
he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and
of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits
and sufferings.  If the reader can conceive something between the
slap-dash inconsequence of Byron’s _Don Juan_ and the racy humorous
gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of
Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon’s style.  To the latter
writer—except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be
paralleled from no other language known to me—he bears a particular
resemblance.  In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a
brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local
personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often
despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets.  Both also,
in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and
obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language.  They are perhaps the only two great
masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary.

“Shall we not dare to say of a thief,” asks Montaigne, “that he has a
handsome leg?”  It is a far more serious claim that we have to put
forward in behalf of Villon.  Beside that of his contemporaries, his
writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in an
almost miraculous isolation.  If only one or two of the chroniclers could
have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a pastime, and
the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of Charles
Second.  This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age and
country, and initiated modern literature for France.  Boileau, long ago,
in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the first
articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by priority
of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison with
obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we shall
instal this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche in
glory’s temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic.  It is, in itself,
a memorable fact that, before 1542, in the very dawn of printing, and
while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran through
seven different editions.  Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and through
Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and growing
inspiration.  Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way of
looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a more
specific feature in the literature of France.  And only the other year, a
work of some power appeared in Paris, and appeared with infinite scandal,
which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward form to
the study of our rhyming thief.

The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and
bleak.  Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks
and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry;
the poor man licks his lips before the baker’s window; people with
patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling
students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homewards;
the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux
and Montigny hang draggled in the rain.  Is there nothing better to be
seen than sordid misery and worthless joys?  Only where the poor old
mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.

In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not long
before, Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in the
whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet
could perceive.  His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth.  He
dwelt all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Méun.  In
the moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
holes and corners.  Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden ships and
sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning leaps and cleans the face
of heaven; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men’s
spirits; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is
mumbling crusts and picking vermin.

Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
characteristic of his work: its unrivalled insincerity.  I can give no
better similitude of this quality than I have given already: that he
comes up with a whine, and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his
nose.  His pathos is that of a professional mendicant who should happen
to be a man of genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
bread.  On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy the reader,
and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of sympathy.  But when the
thing is studied the illusion fades away: in the transitions, above all,
we can detect the evil, ironical temper of the man; and instead of a
flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for
the mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to think of the
_Large Testament_ as of one long-drawn epical grimace, pulled by a
merry-andrew, who has found a certain despicable eminence over human
respect and human affections by perching himself astride upon the
gallows.  Between these two views, at best, all temperate judgments will
be found to fall; and rather, as I imagine, towards the last.

There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in one case,
even threatening sincerity.

The first of these was an undisguised envy of those richer than himself.
He was for ever drawing a parallel, already exemplified from his own
words, between the happy life of the well-to-do and the miseries of the
poor.  Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through all
reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note.  Béranger waited
till he was himself beyond the reach of want, before writing the _Old
Vagabond_ or _Jacques_.  Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be
poor, “was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty” in his ill days.
Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox
burrowing in their vitals.  But Villon, who had not the courage to be
poor with honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his
teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly snarl.  He envies bitterly, envies
passionately.  Poverty, he protests, drives men to steal, as hunger makes
the wolf sally from the forest.  The poor, he goes on, will always have a
carping word to say, or, if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious
thoughts.  It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor.  Thousands in a
small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through life with
tenfold as much honour and dignity and peace of mind, as the rich
gluttons whose dainties and state-beds awakened Villon’s covetous temper.
And every morning’s sun sees thousands who pass whistling to their toil.
But Villon was the “mauvais pauvre” defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its
English expression, so admirably stereotyped by Dickens.  He was the
first wicked sansculotte.  He is the man of genius with the moleskin cap.
He is mighty pathetic and beseeching here in the street, but I would not
go down a dark road with him for a large consideration.

The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common
to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the
transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death.  Old age
and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an
after-world—these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.
An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and
none of them will tickle an audience into good humour.  “Tousjours vieil
synge est desplaisant.”  It is not the old jester who receives most
recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome,
who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air.  Of
this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious.  As
for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his reflections on their
old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for
me.  Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune; but what
Horace throws out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
almost maudlin whimper.

It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration in the swift and
sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the strange revolution by
which great fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of
churchyard dust; and in the utter passing away of what was once lovable
and mighty.  It is in this that the mixed texture of his thought enables
him to reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enchance pity
with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral march.  It is in
this, also, that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art.
So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on
names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no
more than letters and a legend.  “Where are the snows of yester year?”
runs the burden.  And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review
the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the
golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and
trumpeters, who also bore their part in the world’s pageantries and ate
greedily at great folks’ tables: all this to the refrain of “So much
carry the winds away!”  Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their
bones on Paris gibbet.  Alas, and with so pitiful an experience of life,
Villon can offer us nothing but terror and lamentation about death!  No
one has ever more skilfully communicated his own disenchantment; no one
ever blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness.  This unrepentant thief
can attain neither to Christian confidence, nor to the spirit of the
bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love die early.  It is a poor
heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept the conditions of life with
some heroic readiness.

                                * * * * *

The date of the _Large Testament_ is the last date in the poet’s
biography.  After having achieved that admirable and despicable
performance, he disappears into the night from whence he came.  How or
when he died, whether decently in bed or trussed up to a gallows, remains
a riddle for foolhardy commentators.  It appears his health had suffered
in the pit at Méun; he was thirty years of age and quite bald; with the
notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the sword, and
what wrinkles the reader may imagine.  In default of portraits, this is
all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps even the baldness
should be taken as a figure of his destitution.  A sinister dog, in all
likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that
goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament.  Certainly the
sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.




CHARLES OF ORLEANS.


FOR one who was no great politician, nor (as men go) especially wise,
capable or virtuous, Charles of Orleans is more than usually enviable to
all who love that better sort of fame which consists in being known not
widely, but intimately.  “To be content that time to come should know
there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, or to
subsist under naked denominations, without deserts or noble acts,” is,
says Sir Thomas Browne, a frigid ambition.  It is to some more specific
memory that youth looks forward in its vigils.  Old kings are sometimes
disinterred in all the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay,
the beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon
the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great
and beautiful of former days is handed down.  In this way, public
curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after fame.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not
impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and so a man would rather
leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face,
_figura animi magis quam corporis_. Of those who have thus survived
themselves most completely, left a sort of personal seduction behind them
in the world, and retained, after death, the art of making friends,
Montaigne and Samuel Johnson certainly stand first.  But we have
portraits of all sorts of men, from august Cæsar to the king’s dwarf; and
all sorts of portraits, from a Titian treasured in the Louvre to a
profile over the grocer’s chimney shelf.  And so in a less degree, but no
less truly, than the spirit of Montaigne lives on in the delightful
Essays, that of Charles of Orleans survives in a few old songs and old
account-books; and it is still in the choice of the reader to make this
duke’s acquaintance, and, if their humours suit, become his friend.



I.


His birth—if we are to argue from a man’s parents—was above his merit.
It is not merely that he was the grandson of one king, the father of
another, and the uncle of a third; but something more specious was to be
looked for from the son of his father, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orleans,
brother to the mad king Charles VI., lover of Queen Isabel, and the
leading patron of art and one of the leading politicians in France.  And
the poet might have inherited yet higher virtues from his mother,
Valentina of Milan, a very pathetic figure of the age, the faithful wife
of an unfaithful husband, and the friend of a most unhappy king.  The
father, beautiful, eloquent, and accomplished, exercised a strange
fascination over his contemporaries; and among those who dip nowadays
into the annals of the time there are not many—and these few are little
to be envied—who can resist the fascination of the mother.  All mankind
owe her a debt of gratitude because she brought some comfort into the
life of the poor madman who wore the crown of France.

Born (May 1391) of such a noble stock, Charles was to know from the first
all favours of nature and art.  His father’s gardens were the admiration
of his contemporaries; his castles were situated in the most agreeable
parts of France, and sumptuously adorned.  We have preserved, in an
inventory of 1403, the description of tapestried rooms where Charles may
have played in childhood. {238}  “A green room, with the ceiling full of
angels, and the _dossier_ of shepherds and shepherdesses seeming
(_faisant contenance_) to eat nuts and cherries.  A room of gold, silk
and worsted, with a device of little children in a river, and the sky
full of birds.  A room of green tapestry, showing a knight and lady at
chess in a pavilion.  Another green room, with shepherdesses in a
trellised garden worked in gold and silk.  A carpet representing
cherry-trees, where there is a fountain, and a lady gathering cherries in
a basin.”  These were some of the pictures over which his fancy might
busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed.  With
our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large
a space in the attention of mediæval men might be occupied by such
figured hangings on the wall.  There was something timid and purblind in
the view they had of the world.  Morally, they saw nothing outside of
traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered
vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows and
the walls and floors of palaces.  The reader will remember how Villon’s
mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty stock of
theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her as she
prayed.  And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the
chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at
second hand from a piece of tapestry.  It was a stage in the history of
mankind which we may see paralleled, to some extent, in the first infant
school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round
the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues.
So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for the time,
to a liberal education in itself.

At Charles’s birth an order of knighthood was inaugurated in his honour.
At nine years old, he was a squire; at eleven, he had the escort of a
chaplain and a schoolmaster; at twelve, his uncle the king made him a
pension of twelve thousand livres d’or. {240a}  He saw the most brilliant
and the most learned persons of France, in his father’s Court; and would
not fail to notice that these brilliant and learned persons were one and
all engaged in rhyming.  Indeed, if it is difficult to realise the part
played by pictures, it is perhaps even more difficult to realise that
played by verses in the polite and active history of the age.  At the
siege of Pontoise, English and French exchanged defiant ballades over the
walls. {240b}  If a scandal happened, as in the loathsome thirty-third
story of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_, all the wits must make rondels
and chansonettes, which they would hand from one to another with an
unmanly sneer.  Ladies carried their favourite’s ballades in their
girdles. {241a}   Margaret of Scotland, all the world knows already,
kissed Alain Chartier’s lips in honour of the many virtuous thoughts and
golden sayings they had uttered; but it is not so well known, that this
princess was herself the most industrious of poetasters, that she is
supposed to have hastened her death by her literary vigils, and sometimes
wrote as many as twelve rondels in the day. {241b}  It was in rhyme,
even, that the young Charles should learn his lessons.  He might get all
manner of instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a
smack of ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de
la Bigne.  Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the
verses of his father’s Maître d’Hôtel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated
of “l’art de dictier et de faire chançons, ballades, virelais et
rondeaux,” along with many other matters worth attention, from the courts
of Heaven to the misgovernment of France. {241c}  At this rate, all
knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song.  We
need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very well
educated person.  He could string Latin texts together by the hour, and
make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself.  He had
seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken emperor
who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup.  He had spoken a great
deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who helped
his father to waste the revenues of France.  He had seen ladies dance on
into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of dainties
and good wine. {242a}  And when all is said, it was no very helpful
preparation for the battle of life.  “I believe Louis XI.,” writes
Comines, “would not have saved himself, if he had not been very
differently brought up from such other lords as I have seen educated in
this country; for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes
with finery and fine words.” {242b}  I am afraid Charles took such
lessons to heart, and conceived of life as a season principally for
junketing and war.  His view of the whole duty of man, so empty, vain,
and wearisome to us, was yet sincerely and consistently held.  When he
came in his ripe years to compare the glory of two kingdoms, England and
France, it was on three points only,—pleasures, valour, and riches,—that
he cared to measure them; and in the very outset of that tract he speaks
of the life of the great as passed, “whether in arms, as in assaults,
battles, and sieges, or in jousts and tournaments, in high and stately
festivities and in funeral solemnities.” {243}

When he was no more than thirteen, his father had him affianced to
Isabella, virgin-widow of our Richard II. and daughter of his uncle
Charles VI.; and, two years after (June 29, 1406), the cousins were
married at Compiègne, he fifteen, she seventeen years of age.  It was in
every way a most desirable match.  The bride brought five hundred
thousand francs of dowry.  The ceremony was of the utmost magnificence,
Louis of Orleans figuring in crimson velvet, adorned with no less than
seven hundred and ninety-five pearls, gathered together expressly for
this occasion.  And no doubt it must have been very gratifying for a
young gentleman of fifteen, to play the chief part in a pageant so gaily
put upon the stage.  Only, the bridegroom might have been a little older;
and, as ill-luck would have it, the bride herself was of this way of
thinking, and would not be consoled for the loss of her title as queen,
or the contemptible age of her new husband.  _Pleuroit fort ladite
Isabeau_; the said Isabella wept copiously. {244}  It is fairly debatable
whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three years later (September
1409), this odd marriage was dissolved by death.  Short as it was,
however, this connection left a lasting stamp upon his mind; and we find
that, in the last decade of his life, and after he had remarried for
perhaps the second time, he had not yet forgotten or forgiven the violent
death of Richard II.  “Ce mauvais cas”—that ugly business, he writes, has
yet to be avenged.

The marriage festivity was on the threshold of evil days.  The great
rivalry between Louis of Orleans and John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy,
had been forsworn with the most reverend solemnities.  But the feud was
only in abeyance, and John of Burgundy still conspired in secret.  On
November 23, 1407—in that black winter when the frost lasted
six-and-sixty days on end—a summons from the king reached Louis of
Orleans at the Hôtel Barbette, where he had been supping with Queen
Isabel.  It was seven or eight in the evening, and the inhabitants of the
quarter were abed.  He set forth in haste, accompanied by two squires
riding on one horse, a page, and a few varlets running with torches.  As
he rode, he hummed to himself and trifled with his glove.  And so riding,
he was beset by the bravoes of his enemy and slain.  My lord of Burgundy
set an ill precedent in this deed, as he found some years after on the
bridge of Montereau; and even in the meantime he did not profit quietly
by his rival’s death.  The horror of the other princes seems to have
perturbed himself; he avowed his guilt in the council, tried to brazen it
out, finally lost heart and fled at full gallop, cutting bridges behind
him, towards Bapaume and Lille.  And so there we have the head of one
faction, who had just made himself the most formidable man in France,
engaged in a remarkably hurried journey, with black care on the pillion.
And meantime, on the other side, the widowed duchess came to Paris in
appropriate mourning, to demand justice for her husband’s death.  Charles
VI., who was then in a lucid interval, did probably all that he could,
when he raised up the kneeling suppliant with kisses and smooth words.
Things were at a dead-lock.  The criminal might be in the sorriest
fright, but he was still the greatest of vassals.  Justice was easy to
ask and not difficult to promise; how it was to be executed was another
question.  No one in France was strong enough to punish John of Burgundy;
and perhaps no one, except the widow, very sincere in wishing to punish
him.

She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal; but the intensity of her eagerness
wore her out; and she died about a year after the murder, of grief and
indignation, unrequited love and unsatisfied resentment.  It was during
the last months of her life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing
the soft hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain
natural son of her husband’s destined to become famous in the sequel as
the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois.  “_You were stolen from
me_,” she said; “it is you who are fit to avenge your father.”  These are
not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman.  It is a
saying, over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands.  That
the child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her
body, was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and the expression
of this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance,
in such straightforward and vivid words as we are accustomed to hear only
on the stress of actual life, or in the theatre.  In history—where we see
things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is brought
before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced, fitted to very vague and
pompous words, and strained through many men’s minds of everything
personal or precise—this speech of the widowed duchess startles a reader,
somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe.  A human voice breaks
in upon the silence of the study, and the student is aware of a
fellow-creature in his world of documents.  With such a clue in hand, one
may imagine how this wounded lioness would spur and exasperate the
resentment of her children, and what would be the last words of counsel
and command she left behind her.

With these instancies of his dying mother—almost a voice from the
tomb—still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of
Orleans, when he was left at the head of that great house, was curiously
similar to that of Shakspeare’s Hamlet.  The times were out of joint;
here was a murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer; and here, in
both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set these matters
right.  Valentina’s commendation of Dunois involved a judgment on
Charles, and that judgment was exactly correct.  Whoever might be,
Charles was not the man to avenge his father.  Like Hamlet, this son of a
dear father murdered was sincerely grieved at heart.  Like Hamlet, too,
he could unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter to
the king, complaining that what was denied to him would not be denied “to
the lowest born and poorest man on earth.”  Even in his private hours he
strove to preserve a lively recollection of his injury, and keep up the
native hue of resolution.  He had gems engraved with appropriate legends,
hortatory or threatening: “_Dieu le scet_,” God knows it; or
“_Souvenez-vous de_ —” Remember! {248}  It is only towards the end that
the two stories begin to differ; and in some points the historical
version is the more tragic.  Hamlet only stabbed a silly old councillor
behind the arras; Charles of Orleans trampled France for five years under
the hoofs of his banditti.  The miscarriage of Hamlet’s vengeance was
confined, at widest, to the palace; the ruin wrought by Charles of
Orleans was as broad as France.

Yet the first act of the young duke is worthy of honourable mention.
Prodigal Louis had made enormous debts; and there is a story extant, to
illustrate how lightly he himself regarded these commercial obligations.
It appears that Louis, after a narrow escape he made in a thunder-storm,
had a smart access of penitence, and announced he would pay his debts on
the following Sunday.  More than eight hundred creditors presented
themselves, but by that time the devil was well again, and they were
shown the door with more gaiety than politeness.  A time when such
cynical dishonesty was possible for a man of culture is not, it will be
granted, a fortunate epoch for creditors.  When the original debtor was
so lax, we may imagine how an heir would deal with the incumbrances of
his inheritance.  On the death of Philip the Forward, father of that John
the Fearless whom we have seen at work, the widow went through the
ceremony of a public renunciation of goods; taking off her purse and
girdle, she left them on the grave, and thus, by one notable act,
cancelled her husband’s debts and defamed his honour.  The conduct of
young Charles of Orleans was very different.  To meet the joint
liabilities of his father and mother (for Valentina also was lavish), he
had to sell or pledge a quantity of jewels; and yet he would not take
advantage of a pretext, even legally valid, to diminish the amount.
Thus, one Godefroi Lefèvre, having disbursed many odd sums for the late
duke, and received or kept no vouchers, Charles ordered that he should be
believed upon his oath. {249}  To a modern mind this seems as honourable
to his father’s memory as if John the Fearless had been hanged as high as
Haman.  And as things fell out, except a recantation from the University
of Paris, which had justified the murder out of party feeling, and
various other purely paper reparations, this was about the outside of
what Charles was to effect in that direction.  He lived five years, and
grew up from sixteen to twenty-one, in the midst of the most horrible
civil war, or series of civil wars, that ever devastated France; and from
first to last his wars were ill-starred, or else his victories useless.
Two years after the murder (March 1409), John the Fearless having the
upper hand for the moment, a shameful and useless reconciliation took
place, by the king’s command, in the church of Our Lady at Chartres.  The
advocate of the Duke of Burgundy stated that Louis of Orleans had been
killed “for the good of the king’s person and realm.”  Charles and his
brothers, with tears of shame, under protest, _pour ne pas desobéir au
roi_, forgave their father’s murderer and swore peace upon the missal.
It was, as I say, a shameful and useless ceremony; the very greffier,
entering it in his register, wrote in the margin, “_Pax_, _pax_, _inquit
Propheta_, _et non est Pax_.” {250}  Charles was soon after allied with
the abominable Bernard d’Armagnac, even betrothed or married to a
daughter of his, called by a name that sounds like a contradiction in
terms, Bonne d’Armagnac.  From that time forth, throughout all this
monstrous period—a very nightmare in the history of France—he is no more
than a stalking-horse for the ambitious Gascon.  Sometimes the smoke
lifts, and you can see him for the twinkling of an eye, a very pale
figure; at one moment there is a rumour he will be crowned king; at
another, when the uproar has subsided, he will be heard still crying out
for justice; and the next (1412), he is showing himself to the applauding
populace on the same horse with John of Burgundy.  But these are
exceptional seasons, and, for the most part, he merely rides at the
Gascon’s bridle over devastated France.  His very party go, not by the
name of Orleans, but by the name of Armagnac.  Paris is in the hands of
the butchers: the peasants have taken to the woods.  Alliances are made
and broken as if in a country dance; the English called in, now by this
one, now by the other.  Poor people sing in church, with white faces and
lamentable music: “_Domine Jesu_, _parce populo tuo_, _dirige in viam
pacis principes_.”  And the end and upshot of the whole affair for
Charles of Orleans is another peace with John the Fearless.  France is
once more tranquil, with the tranquillity of ruin; he may ride home again
to Blois, and look, with what countenance he may, on those gems he had
got engraved in the early days of his resentment, “_Souvenez-vous de_ —”
Remember!  He has killed Polonius, to be sure; but the king is never a
penny the worse.



II.


From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second period of
Charles’s life.  The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in
the play of _Henry V._; and it is at least odd that we can trace a
resemblance between the puppet and the original.  The interjection, “I
have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress” (Act iii. scene 7), may
very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle;
and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene,
would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life
capping verses with his courtiers.  Certainly, Charles was in the great
battle with five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he
was made prisoner as he led the van.  According to one story, some ragged
English archer shot him down; and some diligent English Pistol, hunting
ransoms on the field of battle, extracted him from under a heap of bodies
and retailed him to our King Henry.  He was the most important capture of
the day, and used with all consideration.  On the way to Calais, Henry
sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you will remember, was
an article of luxury in the English camp), but Charles would neither eat
nor drink.  Thereupon, Henry came to visit him in his quarters.  “Noble
cousin,” said he, “how are you?”  Charles replied that he was well.
“Why, then, do you neither eat nor drink?”  And then with some asperity,
as I imagine, the young duke told him that “truly he had no inclination
for food.”  And our Henry improved the occasion with something of a
snuffle, assuring his prisoner that God had fought against the French on
account of their manifold sins and transgressions.  Upon this there
supervened the agonies of a rough sea passage; and many French lords,
Charles, certainly, among the number, declared they would rather endure
such another defeat than such another sore trial on shipboard.  Charles,
indeed, never forgot his sufferings.  Long afterwards, he declared his
hatred to a seafaring life, and willingly yielded to England the empire
of the seas, “because there is danger and loss of life, and God knows
what pity when it storms; and sea-sickness is for many people hard to
bear; and the rough life that must be led is little suitable for the
nobility:” {253} which, of all babyish utterances that ever fell from any
public man, may surely bear the bell.  Scarcely disembarked, he followed
his victor, with such wry face as we may fancy, through the streets of
holiday London.  And then the doors closed upon his last day of garish
life for more than a quarter of a century.  After a boyhood passed in the
dissipations of a luxurious court or in the camp of war, his ears still
stunned and his cheeks still burning from his enemies’ jubilations; out
of all this ringing of English bells and singing of English anthems, from
among all these shouting citizens in scarlet cloaks, and beautiful
virgins attired in white, he passed into the silence and solitude of a
political prison. {254}

His captivity was not without alleviations.  He was allowed to go
hawking, and he found England an admirable country for the sport; he was
a favourite with English ladies, and admired their beauty; and he did not
lack for money, wine, or books; he was honourably imprisoned in the
strongholds of great nobles, in Windsor Castle and the Tower of London.
But when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty years.  For
five-and-twenty years he could not go where he would, or do what he
liked, or speak with any but his gaolers.  We may talk very wisely of
alleviations; there is only one alleviation for which the man would thank
you: he would thank you to open the door.  With what regret Scottish
James I. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles) of the time
when he rose “as early as the day.”  What would he not have given to wet
his boots once more with morning dew, and follow his vagrant fancy among
the meadows?  The only alleviation to the misery of constraint lies in
the disposition of the prisoner.  To each one this place of discipline
brings his own lesson.  It stirs Latude or Baron Trenck into heroic
action; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable spirits.  Béranger
tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours and long evenings,
both pleasant and profitable.  _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Don Quixote_
were begun in prison.  It was after they were become (to use the words of
one of them), “Oh, worst imprisonment—the dungeon of themselves!” that
Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well for the profit of mankind.
In the year 1415 Henry V. had two distinguished prisoners, French Charles
of Orleans and Scottish James I., who whiled away the hours of their
captivity with rhyming.  Indeed, there can be no better pastime for a
lonely man than the mechanical exercise of verse.  Such intricate forms
as Charles had been used to from childhood, the ballade with its scanty
rhymes; the rondel, with the recurrence first of the whole, then of half
the burthen, in thirteen verses, seem to have been invented for the
prison and the sick bed.  The common Scotch saying, on the sight of
anything operose and finical, “he must have had little to do that made
that!” might be put as epigraph on all the song books of old France.
Making such sorts of verse belongs to the same class of pleasures as
guessing acrostics or “burying proverbs.”  It is almost purely formal,
almost purely verbal.  It must be done gently and gingerly.  It keeps the
mind occupied a long time, and never so intently as to be distressing;
for anything like strain is against the very nature of the craft.
Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall into their place as if of
their own accord, and it becomes something of the nature of an
intellectual tennis; you must make your poem as the rhymes will go, just
as you must strike your ball as your adversary played it.  So that these
forms are suitable rather for those who wish to make verses, than for
those who wish to express opinions.  Sometimes, on the other hand,
difficulties arise: rival verses come into a man’s head, and fugitive
words elude his memory.  Then it is that he enjoys at the same time the
deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and the ardour of
the chase.  He may have been sitting all day long in prison with folded
hands; but when he goes to bed, the retrospect will seem animated and
eventful.

Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses, Charles
acquired some new opinions during his captivity.  He was perpetually
reminded of the change that had befallen him.  He found the climate of
England cold and “prejudicial to the human frame;” he had a great
contempt for English fruit and English beer; even the coal fires were
unpleasing in his eyes. {257a}  He was rooted up from among his friends
and customs and the places that had known him.  And so in this strange
land he began to learn the love of his own.  Sad people all the world
over are like to be moved when the wind is in some particular quarter.
So Burns preferred when it was in the west, and blew to him from his
mistress; so the girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it
might carry a kiss betwixt her and her gallant; and so we find Charles
singing of the “pleasant wind that comes from France.” {257b}  One day,
at “Dover-on-the-Sea,” he looked across the straits, and saw the
sandhills about Calais.  And it happened to him, he tells us in a
ballade, to remember his happiness over there in the past; and he was
both sad and merry at the recollection, and could not have his fill of
gazing on the shores of France. {257c}  Although guilty of unpatriotic
acts, he had never been exactly unpatriotic in feeling.  But his sojourn
in England gave, for the time at least, some consistency to what had been
a very weak and ineffectual prejudice.  He must have been under the
influence of more than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded
to turn Henry’s puritanical homily after Agincourt into a ballade, and
reproach France, and himself by implication, with pride, gluttony,
idleness, unbridled covetousness, and sensuality. {258a}  For the moment,
he must really have been thinking more of France than of Charles of
Orleans.

And another lesson he learned.  He who was only to be released in case of
peace, begins to think upon the disadvantages of war.  “Pray for peace,”
is his refrain: a strange enough subject for the ally of Bernard
d’Armagnac. {258b}  But this lesson was plain and practical; it had one
side in particular that was specially attractive for Charles; and he did
not hesitate to explain it in so many words. “Everybody,” he writes—I
translate roughly—“everybody should be much inclined to peace, for
everybody has a deal to gain by it.” {258c}

Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even learned to
write a rondel in that tongue of quite average mediocrity. {259a}  He was
for some time billeted on the unhappy Suffolk, who received fourteen
shillings and fourpence a day for his expenses; and from the fact that
Suffolk afterwards visited Charles in France while he was negotiating the
marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that nobleman’s
impeachment, we may believe there was some not unkindly intercourse
between the prisoner and his gaoler: a fact of considerable interest when
we remember that Suffolk’s wife was the granddaughter of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer. {259b}  Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates
and places, only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles’s
captivity.  It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty years drew
on, he became less and less resigned.  Circumstances were against the
growth of such a feeling.  One after another of his fellow-prisoners was
ransomed and went home.  More than once he was himself permitted to visit
France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more
eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land.
Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair; but if a man
is persecuted by a series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no more
attains to a settled frame of resolution, than his eye would grow
familiar with a night of thunder and lightning.  Years after, when he was
speaking at the trial of that Duke of Alençon, who began life so
hopefully as the boyish favourite of Joan of Arc, he sought to prove that
captivity was a harder punishment than death.  “For I have had experience
myself,” he said; “and in my prison of England, for the weariness,
danger, and displeasure in which I then lay, I have many a time wished I
had been slain at the battle where they took me.” {260}  This is a
flourish, if you will, but it is something more.  His spirit would
sometimes rise up in a fine anger against the petty desires and
contrarieties of life.  He would compare his own condition with the quiet
and dignified estate of the dead; and aspire to lie among his comrades on
the field of Agincourt, as the Psalmist prayed to have the wings of a
dove and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.  But such high thoughts
came to Charles only in a flash.

John the Fearless had been murdered in his turn on the bridge of
Montereau so far back as 1419.  His son, Philip the Good—partly to
extinguish the feud, partly that he might do a popular action, and
partly, in view of his ambitious schemes, to detach another great vassal
from the throne of France—had taken up the cause of Charles of Orleans,
and negotiated diligently for his release.  In 1433 a Burgundian embassy
was admitted to an interview with the captive duke, in the presence of
Suffolk.  Charles shook hands most affectionately with the ambassadors.
They asked after his health.  “I am well enough in body,” he replied,
“but far from well in mind.  I am dying of grief at having to pass the
best days of my life in prison, with none to sympathise.”  The talk
falling on the chances of peace, Charles referred to Suffolk if he were
not sincere and constant in his endeavours to bring it about.  “If peace
depended on me,” he said, “I should procure it gladly, were it to cost me
my life seven days after.”  We may take this as showing what a large
price he set, not so much on peace, as on seven days of freedom.  Seven
days!—he would make them seven years in the employment.  Finally, he
assured the ambassadors of his good will to Philip of Burgundy; squeezed
one of them by the hand and nipped him twice in the arm to signify things
unspeakable before Suffolk; and two days after sent them Suffolk’s
barber, one Jean Carnet, a native of Lille, to testify more freely of his
sentiments.  “As I speak French,” said this emissary, “the Duke of
Orleans is more familiar with me than with any other of the household;
and I can bear witness he never said anything against Duke Philip.”
{262a}  It will be remembered that this person, with whom he was so
anxious to stand well, was no other than his hereditary enemy, the son of
his father’s murderer.  But the honest fellow bore no malice, indeed not
he.  He began exchanging ballades with Philip, whom he apostrophises as
his companion, his cousin, and his brother.  He assures him that, soul
and body, he is altogether Burgundian; and protests that he has given his
heart in pledge to him.  Regarded as the history of a vendetta, it must
be owned that Charles’s life has points of some originality.  And yet
there is an engaging frankness about these ballades which disarms
criticism. {262b}  You see Charles throwing himself headforemost into the
trap; you hear Burgundy, in his answers begin to inspire him with his own
prejudices, and draw melancholy pictures of the misgovernment of France.
But Charles’s own spirits are so high and so amiable, and he is so
thoroughly convinced his cousin is a fine fellow, that one’s scruples are
carried away in the torrent of his happiness and gratitude.  And his
would be a sordid spirit who would not clap hands at the consummation
(Nov. 1440); when Charles, after having sworn on the Sacrament that he
would never again bear arms against England, and pledged himself body and
soul to the unpatriotic faction in his own country, set out from London
with a light heart and a damaged integrity.

In the magnificent copy of Charles’s poems, given by our Henry VII. to
Elizabeth of York on the occasion of their marriage, a large illumination
figures at the head of one of the pages, which, in chronological
perspective, is almost a history of his imprisonment.  It gives a view of
London with all its spires, the river passing through the old bridge and
busy with boats.  One side of the White Tower has been taken out, and we
can see, as under a sort of shrine, the paved room where the duke sits
writing.  He occupies a high-backed bench in front of a great chimney;
red and black ink are before him; and the upper end of the apartment is
guarded by many halberdiers, with the red cross of England on their
breast.  On the next side of the tower he appears again, leaning out of
window and gazing on the river; doubtless there blows just then “a
pleasant wind from out the land of France,” and some ship comes up the
river: “the ship of good news.”  At the door we find him yet again; this
time embracing a messenger, while a groom stands by holding two saddled
horses.  And yet further to the left, a cavalcade defiles out of the
tower; the duke is on his way at last towards “the sunshine of France.”



III.


During the five-and-twenty years of his captivity, Charles had not lost
in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen.  For so young a man, the head of
so great a house, and so numerous a party, to be taken prisoner as he
rode in the vanguard of France, and stereotyped for all men in this
heroic attitude, was to taste untimeously the honours of the grave.  Of
him, as of the dead, it would be ungenerous to speak evil; what little
energy he had displayed would be remembered with piety, when all that he
had done amiss was courteously forgotten.  As English folk looked for
Arthur; as Danes awaited the coming of Ogier; as Somersetshire peasants
or sergeants of the Old Guard expected the return of Monmouth or
Napoleon; the countrymen of Charles of Orleans looked over the straits
towards his English prison with desire and confidence.  Events had so
fallen out while he was rhyming ballades, that he had become the type of
all that was most truly patriotic.  The remnants of his old party had
been the chief defenders of the unity of France.  His enemies of Burgundy
had been notoriously favourers and furtherers of English domination.
People forgot that his brother still lay by the heels for an unpatriotic
treaty with England, because Charles himself had been taken prisoner
patriotically fighting against it.  That Henry V. had left special orders
against his liberation, served to increase the wistful pity with which he
was regarded.  And when, in defiance of all contemporary virtue, and
against express pledges, the English carried war into their prisoner’s
fief, not only France, but all thinking men in Christendom, were roused
to indignation against the oppressors, and sympathy with the victim.  It
was little wonder if he came to bulk somewhat largely in the imagination
of the best of those at home.  Charles le Boutteillier, when (as the
story goes) he slew Clarence at Beaugé, was only seeking an exchange for
Charles of Orleans. {265a}  It was one of Joan of Arc’s declared
intentions to deliver the captive duke.  If there was no other way, she
meant to cross the seas and bring him home by force.  And she professed
before her judges a sure knowledge that Charles of Orleans was beloved of
God. {265b}

Alas! it was not at all as a deliverer that Charles returned to France.
He was nearly fifty years old.  Many changes had been accomplished since,
at twenty-three, he was taken on the field of Agincourt.  But of all
these he was profoundly ignorant, or had only heard of them in the
discoloured reports of Philip of Burgundy.  He had the ideas of a former
generation, and sought to correct them by the scandal of a factious
party.  With such qualifications he came back eager for the domination,
the pleasures, and the display that befitted his princely birth.  A long
disuse of all political activity combined with the flatteries of his new
friends to fill him with an overweening conceit of his own capacity and
influence.  If aught had gone wrong in his absence, it seemed quite
natural men should look to him for its redress.  Was not King Arthur come
again?

The Duke of Burgundy received him with politic honours.  He took his
guest by his foible for pageantry, all the easier as it was a foible of
his own; and Charles walked right out of prison into much the same
atmosphere of trumpeting and bell-ringing as he had left behind when he
went in.  Fifteen days after his deliverance he was married to Mary of
Cleves, at St. Omer.  The marriage was celebrated with the usual pomp of
the Burgundian court; there were joustings, and illuminations, and
animals that spouted wine; and many nobles dined together, _comme en
brigade_, and were served abundantly with many rich and curious dishes.
{267a}  It must have reminded Charles not a little of his first marriage
at Compiègne; only then he was two years the junior of his bride, and
this time he was five-and-thirty years her senior.  It will be a fine
question which marriage promises more: for a boy of fifteen to lead off
with a lass of seventeen, or a man of fifty to make a match of it with a
child of fifteen.  But there was something bitter in both.  The
lamentations of Isabella will not have been forgotten.  As for Mary, she
took up with one Jaquet de la Lain, a sort of muscular Methody of the
period, with a huge appetite for tournaments, and a habit of confessing
himself the last thing before he went to bed. {267b}  With such a hero,
the young duchess’s amours were most likely innocent; and in all other
ways she was a suitable partner for the duke, and well fitted to enter
into his pleasures.

When the festivities at Saint Omer had come to an end, Charles and his
wife set forth by Ghent and Tournay.  The towns gave him offerings of
money as he passed through, to help in the payment of his ransom.  From
all sides, ladies and gentlemen thronged to offer him their services;
some gave him their sons for pages, some archers for a bodyguard; and by
the time he reached Tournay, he had a following of 300 horse.  Everywhere
he was received as though he had been the King of France. {268}  If he
did not come to imagine himself something of the sort, he certainly
forgot the existence of any one with a better claim to the title.  He
conducted himself on the hypothesis that Charles VII. was another Charles
VI.  He signed with enthusiasm that treaty of Arras, which left France
almost at the discretion of Burgundy.  On December 18 he was still no
farther than Bruges, where he entered into a private treaty with Philip;
and it was not until January 14, ten weeks after he disembarked in
France, and attended by a ruck of Burgundian gentlemen, that he arrived
in Paris and offered to present himself before Charles VII.  The king
sent word that he might come, if he would, with a small retinue, but not
with his present following; and the duke, who was mightily on his high
horse after all the ovations he had received, took the king’s attitude
amiss, and turned aside into Touraine, to receive more welcome and more
presents, and be convoyed by torchlight into faithful cities.

And so you see, here was King Arthur home again, and matters nowise
mended in consequence.  The best we can say is, that this last stage of
Charles’s public life was of no long duration.  His confidence was soon
knocked out of him in the contact with others.  He began to find he was
an earthen vessel among many vessels of brass; he began to be shrewdly
aware that he was no King Arthur.  In 1442, at Limoges, he made himself
the spokesman of the malcontent nobility.  The king showed himself
humiliatingly indifferent to his counsels, and humiliatingly generous
towards his necessities.  And there, with some blushes, he may be said to
have taken farewell of the political stage.  A feeble attempt on the
county of Asti is scarce worth the name of exception.  Thenceforward let
Ambition wile whom she may into the turmoil of events, our duke will walk
cannily in his well-ordered garden, or sit by the fire to touch the
slender reed. {269}



IV.


If it were given each of us to transplant his life wherever he pleased in
time or space, with all the ages and all the countries of the world to
choose from, there would be quite an instructive diversity of taste.  A
certain sedentary majority would prefer to remain where they were.  Many
would choose the Renaissance; many some stately and simple period of
Grecian life; and still more elect to pass a few years wandering among
the villages of Palestine with an inspired conductor.  For some of our
quaintly vicious contemporaries, we have the decline of the Roman Empire
and the reign of Henry III. of France.  But there are others not quite so
vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect gravity, who
have never taken the categorical imperative to wife, and have more taste
for what is comfortable than for what is magnanimous and high; and I can
imagine some of these casting their lot in the Court of Blois during the
last twenty years of the life of Charles of Orleans.

The duke and duchess, their staff of officers and ladies, and the
high-born and learned persons who were attracted to Blois on a visit,
formed a society for killing time and perfecting each other in various
elegant accomplishments, such as we might imagine for an ideal
watering-place in the Delectable Mountains.  The company hunted and went
on pleasure-parties; they played chess, tables, and many other games.
What we now call the history of the period passed, I imagine, over the
heads of these good people much as it passes over our own.  News reached
them, indeed, of great and joyful import.  William Peel received eight
livres and five sous from the duchess, when he brought the first tidings
that Rouen was recaptured from the English. {271a}  A little later and
the duke sang, in a truly patriotic vein, the deliverance of Guyenne and
Normandy. {271b}  They were liberal of rhymes and largesse, and welcomed
the prosperity of their country much as they welcomed the coming of
spring, and with no more thought of collaborating towards the event.
Religion was not forgotten in the Court of Blois.  Pilgrimages were
agreeable and picturesque excursions.  In those days a well-served chapel
was something like a good vinery in our own, an opportunity for display
and the source of mild enjoyments.  There was probably something of his
rooted delight in pageantry, as well as a good deal of gentle piety, in
the feelings with which Charles gave dinner every Friday to thirteen poor
people, served them himself, and washed their feet with his own hands.
{271c}  Solemn affairs would interest Charles and his courtiers from
their trivial side.  The duke perhaps cared less for the deliverance of
Guyenne and Normandy than for his own verses on the occasion; just as Dr.
Russell’s correspondence in _The Times_ was among the most material parts
of the Crimean War for that talented correspondent.  And I think it
scarcely cynical to suppose that religion as well as patriotism was
principally cultivated as a means of filling up the day.

It was not only messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the
destiny of nations, who were made welcome at the gates of Blois.  If any
man of accomplishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and
something for his pocket.  The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson
like Drummond of Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay.
They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic.  It
might be Pierre, called Dieu d’amours, the juggler; or it might be three
high English minstrels; or the two men, players of ghitterns, from the
kingdom of Scotland, who sang the destruction of the Turks; or again
Jehan Rognelet, player of instruments of music, who played and danced
with his wife and two children; they would each be called into the castle
to give a taste of his proficiency before my lord the duke. {272}
Sometimes the performance was of a more personal interest, and produced
much the same sensations as are felt on an English green on the arrival
of a professional cricketer, or round an English billiard table during a
match between Roberts and Cooke.  This was when Jehan Nègre, the Lombard,
came to Blois and played chess against all these chess-players, and won
much money from my lord and his intimates; or when Baudet Harenc of
Chalons made ballades before all these ballade-makers. {273}

It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers of ballades
and rondels.  To write verses for May day, seems to have been as much a
matter of course, as to ride out with the cavalcade that went to gather
hawthorn.  The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and the
courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as in a
literary carnival.  If an indecorous adventure befell our friend Maistre
Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the funniest of
rondels, all the rhymes being the names of the cases of nouns or the
moods of verbs; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in similar fashion,
seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating episodes.  If Frédet
was too long away from Court, a rondel went to upbraid him; and it was in
a rondel that Frédet would excuse himself.  Sometimes two or three, or as
many as a dozen, would set to work on the same refrain, the same idea, or
in the same macaronic jargon.  Some of the poetasters were heavy enough;
others were not wanting in address; and the duchess herself was among
those who most excelled.  On one occasion eleven competitors made a
ballade on the idea,

    “I die of thirst beside the fountain’s edge”

    (Je meurs de soif emprès de la fontaine).

These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests the attention
rather from the name of the author than from any special merit in itself.
It purports to be the work of François Villon; and so far as a foreigner
can judge (which is indeed a small way), it may very well be his.  Nay,
and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the great _tabula
rasa_, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the biography of
Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon a visit to
Charles of Orleans.  Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons, found a
sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell nowadays
the degree of Baudet’s excellence in his art?), favour would not be
wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time.  Great as would seem
the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of kinship
with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of the
confraternity of poets.  And he would have other grounds of intimacy with
Villon.  A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter from
Villon’s dungeon at Méun; yet each in his own degree had been tried in
prison.  Each in his own way also, loved the good things of this life and
the service of the Muses.  But the same gulf that separated Burns from
his Edinburgh patrons would separate the singer of Bohemia from the
rhyming duke.  And it is hard to imagine that Villon’s training amongst
thieves, loose women, and vagabond students, had fitted him to move in a
society of any dignity and courtliness.  Ballades are very admirable
things; and a poet is doubtless a most interesting visitor.  But among
the courtiers of Charles, there would be considerable regard for the
proprieties of etiquette; and even a duke will sometimes have an eye to
his teaspoons.  Moreover, as a poet, I can conceive he may have
disappointed expectation.  It need surprise nobody if Villon’s ballade on
the theme,

    “I die of thirst beside the fountain’s edge,”

was but a poor performance.  He would make better verses on the lee-side
of a flagon at the sign of the Pomme du Pin, than in a cushioned settle
in the halls of Blois.

Charles liked change of place.  He was often not so much travelling as
making a progress; now to join the king for some great tournament; now to
visit King René, at Tarascon, where he had a study of his own and saw all
manner of interesting things—oriental curios, King René painting birds,
and, what particularly pleased him, Triboulet, the dwarf jester, whose
skull-cap was no bigger than an orange. {276a}  Sometimes the journeys
were set about on horseback in a large party, with the _fourriers_ sent
forward to prepare a lodging at the next stage.  We find almost
Gargantuan details of the provision made by these officers against the
duke’s arrival, of eggs and butter and bread, cheese and peas and
chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and red. {276b}
Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing chess or tables with a
friend in the pavilion, or watching other vessels as they went before the
wind. {276c}  Children ran along the bank, as they do to this day on the
Crinan Canal; and when Charles threw in money, they would dive and bring
it up. {276d}  As he looked on at their exploits, I wonder whether that
room of gold and silk and worsted came back into his memory, with the
device of little children in a river, and the sky full of birds?

He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother Angoulême
in bringing back the library of their grandfather Charles V., when
Bedford put it up for sale in London. {277a}  The duchess had a library
of her own; and we hear of her borrowing romances from ladies in
attendance on the blue-stocking Margaret of Scotland. {277b}  Not only
were books collected, but new books were written at the court of Blois.
The widow of one Jean Fougère, a bookbinder, seems to have done a number
of odd commissions for the bibliophilous count.  She it was who received
three vellum-skins to bind the duchess’s Book of Hours, and who was
employed to prepare parchment for the use of the duke’s scribes.  And she
it was who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles’s
own poems, which was presented to him by his secretary, Anthony Astesan,
with the text in one column, and Astesan’s Latin version in the other.
{277c}

Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take the place of
many others.  We find in Charles’s verse much semi-ironical regret for
other days, and resignation to growing infirmities.  He who had been
“nourished in the schools of love,” now sees nothing either to please or
displease him.  Old age has imprisoned him within doors, where he means
to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir themselves in life.  He
had written (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant little
poem in praise of solitude.  If they would but leave him alone with his
own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond the power
of melancholy to affect him.  But now, when his animal strength has so
much declined that he sings the discomforts of winter instead of the
inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life, he
confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from grievous
thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing, talking, and
singing. {278}

While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of things, of which
he was the outcome and ornament, was growing old along with him.  The
semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already a thing of the past;
and when Charles VII. was gathered to his fathers, a new king reigned in
France, who seemed every way the opposite of royal.  Louis XI. had aims
that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were inconceivable to his
contemporaries.  But his contemporaries were able enough to appreciate
his sordid exterior, and his cruel and treacherous spirit.  To the whole
nobility of France he was a fatal and unreasonable phenomenon.  All such
courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend René’s in Provence,
would soon be made impossible; interference was the order of the day;
hunting was already abolished; and who should say what was to go next?
Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily in the light of a
kill-joy.  I take it, when missionaries land in South Sea Islands and lay
strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the islanders will not be
much more puzzled and irritated than Charles of Orleans at the policy of
the Eleventh Louis.  There was one thing, I seem to apprehend, that had
always particularly moved him; and that was, any proposal to punish a
person of his acquaintance.  No matter what treason he may have made or
meddled with, an Alençon or an Armagnac was sure to find Charles reappear
from private life, and do his best to get him pardoned.  He knew them
quite well.  He had made rondels with them.  They were charming people in
every way.  There must certainly be some mistake.  Had not he himself
made anti-national treaties almost before he was out of his nonage?  And
for the matter of that, had not every one else done the like?  Such are
some of the thoughts by which he might explain to himself his aversion to
such extremities; but it was on a deeper basis that the feeling probably
reposed.  A man of his temper could not fail to be impressed at the
thought of disastrous revolutions in the fortunes of those he knew.  He
would feel painfully the tragic contrast, when those who had everything
to make life valuable were deprived of life itself.  And it was shocking
to the clemency of his spirit, that sinners should be hurried before
their judge without a fitting interval for penitence and satisfaction.
It was this feeling which brought him at last, a poor, purblind
blue-bottle of the later autumn, into collision with “the universal
spider,” Louis XI.  He took up the defence of the Duke of Brittany at
Tours.  But Louis was then in no humour to hear Charles’s texts and Latin
sentiments; he had his back to the wall, the future of France was at
stake; and if all the old men in the world had crossed his path, they
would have had the rough side of his tongue like Charles of Orleans.  I
have found nowhere what he said, but it seems it was monstrously to the
point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke never recovered the
indignity.  He got home as far as Amboise, sickened, and died two days
after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of his age.  And so a
whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious rondels to the end
of time.



V.


The futility of Charles’s public life was of a piece throughout.  He
never succeeded in any single purpose he set before him; for his
deliverance from England, after twenty-five years of failure and at the
cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical to
treat as a success.  During the first part of his life he was the
stalking horse of Bernard d’Armagnac; during the second, he was the
passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
Burgundian treason.  On each of these occasions, a strong and not
dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour.  In 1407 and the
following years, he had his father’s murder uppermost in his mind.
During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
immediate desire for his own liberation.  In 1440 a sentiment of
gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
break with the tradition of his party and his own former life.  He was
born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman.
He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
petty personal chivalry.  He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour.  In England, he could
comfort himself by the reflection that “he had been taken while loyally
doing his devoir,” without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
wasteful feud.  This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
most happily exampled out of his own mouth.  When Alençon stood accused
of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
Alençon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; “yet
did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year, and
might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
Frenchmen.”  These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
Gloucester warned the English Council because of his “great subtility and
cautelous disposition.”  It is not hard to excuse the impatience of Louis
XI., if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political deliberation.

This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and narrow
view was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of the epoch.
It is not even so striking in his public life, where he failed, as in his
poems, where he notably succeeded.  For wherever we might expect a poet
to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry.  And
Charles is unintelligent even there.  Of all authors whom a modern may
still read and read over again with pleasure, he has perhaps the least to
say.  His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming,
which distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the man
himself.  Some of them are drawing-room exercises and the rest seem made
by habit.  Great writers are struck with something in nature or society,
with which they become pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an
idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in
some distinct embodiment.  But with Charles literature was an object
rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying words for its own sake;
the rigidity of intricate metrical forms stood him in lieu of precise
thought; instead of communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game;
and when he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses
in a wager against himself.  From the very idleness of the man’s mind,
and not from intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more
or less autobiographical.  But they form an autobiography singularly bald
and uneventful.  Little is therein recorded beside sentiments.  Thoughts,
in any true sense, he had none to record.  And if we can gather that he
had been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
pages of autobiographical verse.  Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age.  Doubtless, he feels
the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine’s day and a beating heart.
And he feels love after a fashion.  Again and again, we learn that
Charles of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the
whole gamut of dainty and tender sentiment.  But there is never a spark
of passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in
the matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy.  If these poems
were indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had
never seen, never heard, and never touched her.  There is nothing in any
one of these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was.
Was she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple?
Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
indistinction?  The old English translator mentions gray eyes in his
version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
and sure.  The measure of Charles’s indifference to all that now
preoccupies and excites a poet, is best given by a positive example.  If,
besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_, while
on a journey, to prepare the night’s lodging.  This seems to be his
favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the world,
if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man going to
order dinner.

Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch.  They deal with
floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
moved, but he seems always genuine.  He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases.  His ballades are generally
thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
and he was preoccupied by technical requirements.  But in the rondel he
has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a prevailing
distinction of manner.  He is very much more of a duke in his verses than
in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and how he shows
himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all pretension, turgidity,
or emphasis.  He turns verses, as he would have come into the king’s
presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace.

Théodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now nearly
extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in his
happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans.  I
would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old duke,
not only because they are delightful in themselves, but because they
serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
model.  When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse—and he has
already had the honour of reviving the ballade—he does it in the spirit
of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of thought
and make historic forgeries.  With the ballade this seemed natural
enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and
Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself.  But in the
case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles of Orleans,
and the difference between two ages and two literatures is illustrated in
a few poems of thirteen lines.  Something, certainly, has been retained
of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a well-played bass;
and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and restraining the
greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the imitation.  But de
Banville’s poems are full of form and colour; they smack racily of modern
life, and own small kindred with the verse of other days, when it seems
as if men walked by twilight, seeing little, and that with distracted
eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and spectral fluid circulated in
their veins.  They might gird themselves for battle, make love, eat and
drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all the external parts of life;
but of the life that is within, and those processes by which we render
ourselves an intelligent account of what we feel and do, and so represent
experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose
and troubled possession.  They beheld or took part in great events, but
there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being; and they
passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and
abstraction.  Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the
occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set forth the
feeling even such as it was.  Juvenal des Ursins chronicles calamity
after calamity, with but one comment for them all: that “it was great
pity.”  Perhaps, after too much of our florid literature, we find an
adventitious charm in what is so different; and while the big drums are
beaten every day by perspiring editors over the loss of a cock-boat or
the rejection of a clause, and nothing is heard that is not proclaimed
with sound of trumpet, it is not wonderful if we retire with pleasure
into old books, and listen to authors who speak small and clear, as if in
a private conversation.  Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans.  We
are pleased to find a small man without the buskin, and obvious
sentiments stated without affectation.  If the sentiments are obvious,
there is all the more chance we may have experienced the like.  As we
turn over the leaves, we may find ourselves in sympathy with some one or
other of these staid joys and smiling sorrows.  If we do we shall be
strangely pleased, for there is a genuine pathos in these simple words,
and the lines go with a lilt, and sing themselves to music of their own.




SAMUEL PEPYS.


IN two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the character and
position of Samuel Pepys.  Mr. Mynors Bright has given us a new
transcription of the Diary, increasing it in bulk by near a third,
correcting many errors, and completing our knowledge of the man in some
curious and important points.  We can only regret that he has taken
liberties with the author and the public.  It is no part of the duties of
the editor of an established classic to decide what may or may not be
“tedious to the reader.”  The book is either an historical document or
not, and in condemning Lord Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself.  As
for the time-honoured phrase, “unfit for publication,” without being
cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution more or less
commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that when we purchase
six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be
treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children.  But Mr.
Bright may rest assured: while we complain, we are still grateful.  Mr.
Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together, clearly and with no
lost words, a body of illustrative material.  Sometimes we might ask a
little more; never, I think, less.  And as a matter of fact, a great part
of Mr. Wheatley’s volume might be transferred, by a good editor of Pepys,
to the margin of the text, for it is precisely what the reader wants.

In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to read our
author.  Between them they contain all we can expect to learn for, it may
be, many years.  Now, if ever we should be able to form some notion of
that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind—unparalleled for three
good reasons: first, because he was a man known to his contemporaries in
a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants with an
indecent familiarity, like a tap-room comrade; second, because he has
outstripped all competitors in the art or virtue of a conscious honesty
about oneself; and, third, because, being in many ways a very ordinary
person, he has yet placed himself before the public eye with such a
fulness and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius
like Montaigne.  Not then for his own sake only, but as a character in a
unique position, endowed with a unique talent, and shedding a unique
light upon the lives of the mass of mankind, he is surely worthy of
prolonged and patient study.



THE DIARY.


That there should be such a book as Pepys’s Diary is incomparably
strange.  Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public
employments, toiling hard and keeping his honour bright.  Much of the
little good that is set down to James the Second comes by right to Pepys;
and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate.  To his
clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the
seas.  In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys
of the Navy Office had some considerable share.  He stood well by his
business in the appalling plague of 1666.  He was loved and respected by
some of the best and wisest men in England.  He was President of the
Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in
that solemn hour—thinking it needless to say more—that it was answerable
to the greatness of his life.  Thus he walked in dignity, guards of
soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks, subalterns bowing before
his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable to his
state and services.  On February 8, 1668, we find him writing to Evelyn,
his mind bitterly occupied with the late Dutch war, and some thoughts of
the different story of the repulse of the Great Armada: “Sir, you will
not wonder at the backwardness of my thanks for the present you made me,
so many days since, of the Prospect of the Medway, while the Hollander
rode master in it, when I have told you that the sight of it hath led me
to such reflections on my particular interest, by my employment, in the
reproach due to that miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet
than he is fancied to have who found his face in Michael Angelo’s hell.
The same should serve me also in excuse for my silence in celebrating
your mastery shown in the design and draught, did not indignation rather
than courtship urge me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture
of our House of Lords changed from the story of ’88 to that of ’67 (of
Evelyn’s designing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the temper
of that age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings more operative
than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments.”

This is a letter honourable to the writer, where the meaning rather than
the words is eloquent.  Such was the account he gave of himself to his
contemporaries; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language:
giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant.  We turn to
the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to
his descendants.  The entry begins in the same key with the letter,
blaming the “madness of the House of Commons” and “the base proceedings,
just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House
of Lords;” and then, without the least transition, this is how our
diarist proceeds: “To the Strand, to my bookseller’s, and there bought an
idle, rogueish French book, _L’escholle des Filles_, which I have bought
in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I
resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in
the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be
found.”  Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly
apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but what
about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was
ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the
shame in the pages of his daily journal?

We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we
address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and
acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another,
as befits the nature and demands of the relation.  Pepys’s letter to
Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp
which he signed by the pseudonym of _Dapper Dicky_; yet each would be
suitable to the character of his correspondent.  There is no untruth in
this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with
his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of
his education in the world.  To strike a posture once for all, and to
march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to
others and a fool for oneself into the bargain.  To Evelyn and to Knipp
we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary,
and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose?  Had
he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we
should have made him out.  But no; he is full of precautions to conceal
the “disgrace” of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
affair in pen and ink.  It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we
can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary.

Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English.  Pepys, in an
agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys
the tell-tale document; and then—you disbelieve your eyes—down goes the
whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail.  It seems
he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private
book to prove he was not.  You are at first faintly reminded of some of
the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment’s thought
the resemblance disappears.  The design of Pepys is not at all to edify;
it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes, for he
tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often follows
some improvement.  Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very
formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine.  But in Pepys you
come upon good, substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of which he
alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, and
laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief and often
engage the sympathies.

Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till
nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy.  So, to come rightly at the
spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of
sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of
twelve.  In our tender years we still preserve a freshness of surprise at
our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
interest.  It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys.
Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself.  His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen.  He was
the slave of an association.  He could not pass by Islington, where his
father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
“King’s Head” and eat and drink “for remembrance of the old house sake.”
He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old
walks, “where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had
the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman’s company, discourse
and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman.”  He goes about
weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich underwater, and
cries in a parenthesis, “Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in, in
Captain Holland’s time;” and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now changed
into the _Charles_, he confesses “it was a great pleasure to myself to
see the ship that I began my good fortune in.”  The stone that he was cut
for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such
gratitude for their assistance that for years, and after he had begun to
mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that family to
dinner on the anniversary of the operation.  Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had
a more romantic passion for their past, although at times they might
express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them this childish
fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the _Confessions_, or
Hazlitt, who wrote the _Liber Amoris_, and loaded his essays with loving
personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied egotism?  For the two
things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is the first that makes
the second either possible or pleasing.

But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children.  I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was—if, for
instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were
jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after
years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise
myself across the intervening distance.  Indeed, I might come upon them
now, and not be moved one tittle—which shows that I have comparatively
failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys.  For in the Diary we
can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when he
explains that his candle is going out, “which makes me write thus
slobberingly;” or as in this incredible particularity, “To my study,
where I only wrote thus much of this day’s passages to this *, and so out
again;” or lastly, as here, with more of circumstance: “I staid up till
the bellman came by with his bell under my window, _as I was writing of
this very line_, and cried, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty,
windy morning.’”  Such passages are not to be misunderstood.  The appeal
to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable.  He desires that dear,
though unknown, gentleman keenly to realise his predecessor; to remember
why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall (let us fancy, with a
sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the early, windy morning,
and the very line his own romantic self was scribing at the moment.  The
man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences—a sort of pleasure by
ricochet, which comforts many in distress, and turns some others into
sentimental libertines: and the whole book, if you will but look at it in
that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys’s own address.

Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable attitude preserved by him
throughout his Diary, to that unflinching—I had almost said, that
unintelligent—sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books.  He
was not unconscious of his errors—far from it; he was often startled into
shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change.  But
whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still
that entrancing _ego_ of whom alone he cared to write; and still sure of
his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and
the Writer come to read what he had written.  Whatever he did, or said,
or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of
his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or
than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down.  I have called his
Diary a work of art.  Now when the artist has found something, word or
deed, exactly proper to a favourite character in play or novel, he will
neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act
mean.  The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness
of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither
disappointment nor disgust to their creators.  And so with Pepys and his
adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and
enduring, human toleration.  I have gone over and over the greater part
of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he
has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty,
that I am ashamed to name them.  It may be said that we all of us write
such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a
distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an
account of our daily fortunes and behaviour, we too often weave a tissue
of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass
and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more
cowardly than he.  The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too
timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw
clearly and set down unsparingly.

It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same
single spirit in which it was begun.  Pepys was not such an ass, but he
must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work
he was producing.  He was a great reader, and he knew what other books
were like.  It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might
ultimately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains
and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought,
although discouraged, must have warmed his heart.  He was not such an
ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives,
the gun-cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer.  Let
some contemporary light upon the journal, and Pepys was plunged for ever
in social and political disgrace.  We can trace the growth of his terrors
by two facts.  In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth, he tells
about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy; but in
1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue
out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave
and friendly as Sir William Coventry.  And from two other facts I think
we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in,
the thought of a far-distant publicity.  The first is of capital
importance: the Diary was not destroyed.  The second—that he took unusual
precautions to confound the cipher in “rogueish” passages—proves, beyond
question, that he was thinking of some other reader besides himself.
Perhaps while his friends were admiring the “greatness of his behaviour”
at the approach of death, he may have had a twinkling hope of
immortality.  _Mens cujusque is est quisque_, said his chosen motto; and,
as he had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the pages of
the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was indeed himself.
There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable of the desire of man for
publicity and an enduring name.  The greatness of his life was open, yet
he longed to communicate its smallness also; and, while contemporaries
bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his
periwig was once alive with nits.  But this thought, although I cannot
doubt he had it, was neither his first nor his deepest; it did not colour
one word that he wrote; and the Diary, for as long as he kept it,
remained what it was when he began, a private pleasure for himself.  It
was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleasures; he lived in
and for it, and might well write these solemn words, when he closed that
confidant for ever: “And so I betake myself to that course which is
almost as much as to see myself go into the grave; for which, and all the
discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me.”



A LIBERAL GENIUS.


Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic,
composing “a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own to
be) to all studies and pleasures.”  The song was unsuccessful, but the
Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his portrait
by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright’s edition, is a
confirmation of the Diary.  Hales, it would appear, had known his
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost
breaking his neck “to have the portrait full of shadows,” and draping him
in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied
about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the essence of the
man.  Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the Diary by the
picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the number of those
who can “surprise the manners in the face.”  Here we have a mouth
pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet apt for
weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions; and
altogether a most fleshly, melting countenance.  The face is attractive
by its promise of reciprocity.  I have used the word _greedy_, but the
reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred
one of _hungry_, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better
things, but an animal joy in all that comes.  It could never be the face
of an artist; it is the face of a _viveur_—kindly, pleased and pleasing,
protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shifting
versatility of his desires.  For a single desire is more rightly to be
called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may balance
and control another.

The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida.
Wherever he went, his steps were winged with the most eager expectation;
whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure.  An
insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets of
knowledge, filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him
in the toils of study.  Rome was the dream of his life; he was never
happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City.  When he was in
Holland, he was “with child” to see any strange thing.  Meeting some
friends and singing with them in a palace near the Hague, his pen fails
him to express his passion of delight, “the more so because in a heaven
of pleasure and in a strange country.”  He must go to see all famous
executions.  He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced
“with a broad wound,” he says, “that makes my hand now shake to write of
it.”  He learned to dance, and was “like to make a dancer.”  He learned
to sing, and walked about Gray’s Inn Fields “humming to myself (which is
now my constant practice) the trillo.”  He learned to play the lute, the
flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his
intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet.  He learned
to compose songs, and burned to give forth “a scheme and theory of music
not yet ever made in the world.”  When he heard “a fellow whistle like a
bird exceeding well,” he promised to return another day and give an angel
for a lesson in the art.  Once, he writes, “I took the Bezan back with
me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the Hope,
taking great pleasure in learning the seamen’s manner of singing when
they sound the depths.”  If he found himself rusty in his Latin grammar,
he must fall to it like a schoolboy.  He was a member of Harrington’s
Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had
received the name.  Boyle’s _Hydrostatics_ was “of infinite delight” to
him, walking in Barnes Elms.  We find him comparing Bible concordances, a
captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle.  We find him,
in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber; tar and
oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage; mathematics and
accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships from a model; and “looking
and improving himself of the (naval) stores with”—hark to the
fellow!—“great delight.”  His familiar spirit of delight was not the same
with Shelley’s; but how true it was to him through life!  He is only
copying something, and behold, he “takes great pleasure to rule the
lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink;” he has only had
his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold, “it do please him
exceedingly.”  A hog’s harslett is “a piece of meat he loves.”  He cannot
ride home in my Lord Sandwich’s coach, but he must exclaim, with
breathless gusto, “his noble, rich coach.”  When he is bound for a supper
party, he anticipates a “glut of pleasure.”  When he has a new watch, “to
see my childishness,” says he, “I could not forbear carrying it in my
hand and seeing what o’clock it was an hundred times.”  To go to
Vauxhall, he says, and “to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear
fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew’s trump, and here laughing, and
there fine people walking, is mighty divertising.”  And the nightingales,
I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again “with great
pleasure” that he paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the
fog was rising and the April sun broke through.

He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
agreeable things at once.  In his house he had a box of carpenter’s
tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes,
lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment.  If
he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by
playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book
of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women.  When
he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile the way in
case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London,
with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted,
his trail was marked by little debts “for wine, pictures, etc.,” the true
headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage.  He had a kind of
idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was
conscious of a rose-leaf out of place.  Dearly as he loved to talk, he
could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought himself
unsuitably dressed.  Dearly as he loved eating, he “knew not how to eat
alone;” pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and ear must
be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content.  He had no zest
in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten “in a bad street and in a
periwig-maker’s house;” and a collation was spoiled for him by
indifferent music.  His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman’s
service in this breathless chase of pleasures.  On April 11, 1662, he
mentions that he went to bed “weary, _which I seldom am_;” and already
over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet.  But it
is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career,
as in all others, it is failure that kills.  The man who enjoys so wholly
and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is just the
man to lose a night’s rest over some paltry question of his right to
fiddle on the leads, or to be “vexed to the blood” by a solecism in his
wife’s attire; and we find in consequence that he was always peevish when
he was hungry, and that his head “aked mightily” after a dispute.  But
nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his remedy in care was the
same as his delight in prosperity; it was with pleasure, and with
pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow; and, whether he was
jealous of his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he would equally take
refuge in the theatre.  There, if the house be full and the company
noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the play
diverting, this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private self-adorer,
will speedily be healed of his distresses.

Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the
fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the
beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his
fellow-creatures.  He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist.
Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of
knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbours.  And
perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly said to
begin at home.  It does not matter what quality a person has: Pepys can
appreciate and love him for it.  He “fills his eyes” with the beauty of
Lady Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her
for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted, he will walk miles
to have another sight of her; and even when a lady by a mischance spat
upon his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed that
she was pretty.  But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs. Pett
upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James: “a poor, religious,
well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that
with so much innocence that mightily pleased me.”  He is taken with Pen’s
merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of
Coventry.  He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but listens with interest
and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the story of a Quaker’s
spiritual trials and convictions.  He lends a critical ear to the
discourse of kings and royal dukes.  He spends an evening at Vauxhall
with “Killigrew and young Newport—loose company,” says he, “but worth a
man’s being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of
talk and lives.”  And when a rag-boy lights him home, he examines him
about his business and other ways of livelihood for destitute children.
This is almost half-way to the beginning of philanthropy; had it only
been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a man
famous for good deeds.  And it is through this quality that he rises, at
times, superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in the love
affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is filled with concern for
my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by sight, shares in her very
jealousies, joys with her in her successes; and it is not untrue, however
strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved his maid Jane
because she was in love with his man Tom.

Let us hear him, for once, at length: “So the women and W. Hewer and I
walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant
and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life.  We found a shepherd and
his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible
to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did with the forced tone
that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty; and then I did
give him something, and went to the father, and talked with him.  He did
content himself mightily in my liking his boy’s reading, and did bless
God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in
my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my
mind for two or three days after.  We took notice of his woolen knit
stockings of two colours mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both at
the toe and heels, and with great nails in the soles of his feet, which
was mighty pretty; and taking notice of them, ‘Why,’ says the poor man,
‘the downes, you see, are full of stones, and we are faine to shoe
ourselves thus; and these,’ says he, ‘will make the stones fly till they
ring before me.’  I did give the poor man something, for which he was
mighty thankful, and I tried to cast stones with his horne crooke.  He
values his dog mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which he would
have him, when he goes to fold them; told me there was about eighteen
score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four shillings a week the year
round for keeping of them; and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields here,
did gather one of the prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life.”

And so the story rambles on to the end of that day’s pleasuring; with
cups of milk, and glowworms, and people walking at sundown with their
wives and children, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming “of the old
age of the world” and the early innocence of man.  This was how he walked
through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand, you will
observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the
manners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a
lingering glamour of romance.

It was “two or three days after” that he extended this passage in the
pages of his journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some
reflection.  It is generally supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank
at the bottom of the scale of merit.  But a style which is indefatigably
lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday
experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is
rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars,
and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,—such
a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue
of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit.  The first and the true
function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and
though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter
has been transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and
delight.  The gusto of the man speaks out fierily after all these years.
For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, to return to that
half-whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not one of degree; in
his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true prose of
poetry—prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but
poetry because he was delightedly alive.  Hence, in such a passage as
this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader’s mind is
entire conviction and unmingled pleasure.  So, you feel, the thing fell
out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you would change
a sublimity of Shakespeare’s, a homely touch of Bunyan’s, or a favoured
reminiscence of your own.

There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one.  The
tang was in the family; while he was writing the journal for our
enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his
cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the
country girls.  But he himself, though he could play so many instruments
and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur.  It is
not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to
understand.  That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage
may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or excuse.  He
certainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
the rolls of that innumerable army who have got “To be or not to be” by
heart.  Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it
to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear
to tread, he set it to music.  Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the
heroic quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
chose out to marry with his own mortal strains.  Some gust from brave
Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his
sublime theorbo.  “To be or not to be.  Whether ’tis nobler”—“Beauty
retire, thou dost my pity move”—“It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O
Rome;”—open and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the
sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid, spirit that
selected such a range of themes.  Of “Gaze not on Swans,” I know no more
than these four words; yet that also seems to promise well.  It was,
however, on a probable suspicion, the work of his master, Mr.
Berkenshaw—as the drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young
ladies’ seminary are the work of the professor attached to the
establishment.  Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil.
The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world
still clogging him; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the
man who taught him composition.  In relation to the stage, which he so
warmly loved and understood, he was not only more hearty, but more
generous to others.  Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, “a man,” says he,
“who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for it.”
And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous insipid piece,
“Glad we were,” he writes, “that Betterton had no part in it.”  It is by
such a zeal and loyalty to those who labour for his delight that the
amateur grows worthy of the artist.  And it should be kept in mind that,
not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to recognise his betters.
There was not one speck of envy in the whole human-hearted egotist.



RESPECTABILITY.


When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded
meaning of the word, they are usually suspected of a taste for clay pipes
and beer cellars; and their performances are thought to hail from the
_Owl’s Nest_ of the comedy.  They have something more, however, in their
eye than the dulness of a round million dinner parties that sit down
yearly in old England.  For to do anything because others do it, and not
because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to
resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste
to the devil with the greater number.  We smile over the ascendency of
priests; but I had rather follow a priest than what they call the leaders
of society.  No life can better than that of Pepys illustrate the dangers
of this respectable theory of living.  For what can be more untoward than
the occurrence, at a critical period and while the habits are still
pliable, of such a sweeping transformation as the return of Charles the
Second?  Round went the whole fleet of England on the other tack; and
while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by
the stars and their own private compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, must go
about with the majority among “the stupid starers and the loud huzzas.”

The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a
positive need for countenance.  The weaker and the tamer the man, the
more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves him,
by just so much, of this dependence.  In a dozen ways, Pepys was quite
strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his
positive qualities were not co-extensive with the field of conduct; and
in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the
footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy.  In morals, particularly, he
lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from another more
keenly than a meanness in himself; and then first repented when he was
found out.  You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and by
the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he could
rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you said.  All
that matter in religion which has been nicknamed other-worldliness was
strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should make a man rudely
virtuous, following right in good report and ill report, was foolishness
and a stumbling-block to Pepys.  He was much thrown across the Friends;
and nothing can be more instructive than his attitude towards these most
interesting people of that age.  I have mentioned how he conversed with
one as he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting under arrest, “I
would to God,” said he, “they would either conform, or be more wise and
not be catched;” and to a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid
though effectual protection.  Meanwhile there was growing up next door to
him that beautiful nature William Pen.  It is odd that Pepys condemned
him for a fop; odd, though natural enough when you see Pen’s portrait,
that Pepys was jealous of him with his wife.  But the cream of the story
is when Pen publishes his _Sandy Foundation Shaken_, and Pepys has it
read aloud by his wife.  “I find it,” he says, “so well writ as, I think,
it is too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of
book, and _not fit for everybody to read_.”  Nothing is more galling to
the merely respectable than to be brought in contact with religious
ardour.  Pepys had his own foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from
practical considerations, and he would read the book with true uneasiness
of spirit; for conceive the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen
were to convert him!  It was a different kind of doctrine that he judged
profitable for himself and others.  “A good sermon of Mr. Gifford’s at
our church, upon ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.’  A very excellent
and persuasive, good and moral sermon.  He showed, like a wise man, that
righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy.”
It is thus that respectable people desire to have their Greathearts
address them, telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both
worlds, and be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome
reflection; and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a
manual of worldly prudence, and a handybook for Pepys and the successful
merchant.

The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained.  He has no idea of truth
except for the Diary.  He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but
appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has
seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought liberal
when he knows he has been mean.  He is conscientiously ostentatious.  I
say conscientiously, with reason.  He could never have been taken for a
fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his
position.  For long he hesitated to assume the famous periwig; for a
public man should travel gravely with the fashions not foppishly before,
nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age.  For long he durst
not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances would have been improper;
but a time comes, with the growth of his fortune, when the impropriety
has shifted to the other side, and he is “ashamed to be seen in a
hackney.”  Pepys talked about being “a Quaker or some very melancholy
thing;” for my part, I can imagine nothing so melancholy, because nothing
half so silly, as to be concerned about such problems.  But so
respectability and the duties of society haunt and burden their poor
devotees; and what seems at first the very primrose path of life, proves
difficult and thorny like the rest.  And the time comes to Pepys, as to
all the merely respectable, when he must not only order his pleasures,
but even clip his virtuous movements, to the public pattern of the age.
There was some juggling among officials to avoid direct taxation; and
Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing ashamed of this dishonesty, designed
to charge himself with £1000; but finding none to set him an example,
“nobody of our ablest merchants” with this moderate liking for clean
hands, he judged it “not decent;” he feared it would “be thought vain
glory;” and, rather than appear singular, cheerfully remained a thief.
One able merchant’s countenance, and Pepys had dared to do an honest act!
Had he found one brave spirit, properly recognised by society, he might
have gone far as a disciple.  Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full
of sordid scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of his
senses, that Pen’s venison pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other
hand, Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another being.
Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman.  What
does he care for office or emolument?  “Thank God, I have enough of my
own,” says he, “to buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a
good wife.”  And again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an
ungrateful country shall have dismissed them from the field of public
service; Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in,
“it may be, to read a chapter of Seneca.”

Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued
zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment.  He would not be
“bribed to be unjust,” he says, though he was “not so squeamish as to
refuse a present after,” suppose the king to have received no wrong.  His
new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier he tells us with honest
complacency, will save the king a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred
pounds a year,—a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age’s
enlightenment.  But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too
high.  It was an unending struggle for the man to stick to his business
in such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the story of his
oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is worthy rather of
admiration that the contempt it has received.

Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry’s influence, we find him
losing scruples and daily complying further with the age.  When he began
the journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic; merry enough, to be
sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Magdalene ale and his
acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge.  But youth is a hot season
with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble;
and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys’s theory, the better things
that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict.  Where
there was “tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,” he
felt “ashamed, and went away;” and when he slept in church, he prayed God
forgive him.  In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping
each other awake “from spite,” as though not to sleep in church were an
obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service,
looking about him, with a perspective glass, on all the pretty women.
His favourite ejaculation, “Lord!” occurs but once that I have observed
in 1660, never in ’61, twice in ’62, and at least five times in ’63;
after which the “Lords” may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here
and there a solitary “damned,” as it were a whale among the shoal.  He
and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker’s
mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of
mistresses.  Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,
become his natural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring
courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost
unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668.

That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk
and conversation.  The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in
a powder magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a
hideous disaster.  So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his
peccadilloes.  All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough
among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking no great evil,
humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that
matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences
of his acts.  For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although
not the constant lover, of his wife,—for a man, besides, who was so
greatly careful of appearances,—the revelation of his infidelities was a
crushing blow.  The tears that he shed, the indignities that he endured,
are not to be measured.  A vulgar woman, and now justly incensed, Mrs.
Pepys spared him no detail of suffering.  She was violent, threatening
him with the tongs; she was careless of his honour, driving him to insult
the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard; worst of
all, she was hopelessly inconsequent, in word and thought and deed, now
lulling him with reconciliations, and anon flaming forth again with the
original anger.  Pepys had not used his wife well; he had wearied her
with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful; he had grudged her
clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon himself; he had abused
her in words; he had bent his fist at her in anger; he had once blacked
her eye; and it is one of the oddest particulars in that odd Diary of
his, that, while the injury is referred to once in passing, there is no
hint as to the occasion or the manner of the blow.  But now, when he is
in the wrong, nothing can exceed the long-suffering affection of this
impatient husband.  While he was still sinning and still undiscovered, he
seems not to have known a touch of penitence stronger than what might
lead him to take his wife to the theatre, or for an airing, or to give
her a new dress, by way of compensation.  Once found out, however, and he
seems to himself to have lost all claim to decent usage.  It is perhaps
the strongest instance of his externality.  His wife may do what she
pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame
her; he has no weapon left but tears and the most abject submission.  We
should perhaps have respected him more had he not given way so
utterly—above all, had he refused to write, under his wife’s dictation,
an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but
somehow I believe we like him better as he was.

The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the
impression of this episode upon his mind.  For the remaining years of his
long life we have no Diary to help us, and we have seen already how
little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his correspondence; but
what with the recollection of the catastrophe of his married life, what
with the natural influence of his advancing years and reputation, it
seems not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys;
and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at last to an honoured and
agreeable old age among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir
Isaac Newton, and, in one instance at least the poetical counsellor of
Dryden.  Through all this period, that Diary which contained the secret
memoirs of his life, with all its inconsistencies and escapades, had been
religiously preserved; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to have
provided for its destruction.  So we may conceive him faithful to the end
to all his dear and early memories; still mindful of Mrs. Hely in the
woods at Epsom; still lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness to the
dead; still, if he heard again that air that once so much disturbed him,
thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him to his wife.




JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN.


I.—THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT FEMALE RULE.


WHEN first the idea became widely spread among men that the Word of God,
instead of being truly the foundation of all existing institutions, was
rather a stone which the builders had rejected, it was but natural that
the consequent havoc among received opinions should be accompanied by the
generation of many new and lively hopes for the future.  Somewhat as in
the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an
immediate and universal improvement in their condition.  Christianity, up
to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically.  The reason was
now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body
politic traced at last to its efficient cause.  It was only necessary to
put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to
realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities
would surely pass away.  Thus, in a pageant played at Geneva in the year
1523, the world was represented as a sick man at the end of his wits for
help, to whom his doctor recommends Lutheran specifics. {329}  The
Reformers themselves had set their affections in a different world, and
professed to look for the finished result of their endeavours on the
other side of death.  They took no interest in politics as such; they
even condemned political action as Antichristian: notably, Luther in the
case of the Peasants’ War.  And yet, as the purely religious question was
inseparably complicated with political difficulties, and they had to make
opposition, from day to day, against principalities and powers, they were
led, one after another, and again and again, to leave the sphere which
was more strictly their own, and meddle, for good and evil, with the
affairs of State.  Not much was to be expected from interference in such
a spirit.  Whenever a minister found himself galled or hindered, he would
be inclined to suppose some contravention of the Bible.  Whenever
Christian liberty was restrained (and Christian liberty for each
individual would be about coextensive with what he wished to do), it was
obvious that the State was Antichristian.  The great thing, and the one
thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformers’ own interpretation of
it.  Whatever helped was good; whatever hindered was evil; and if this
simple classification proved inapplicable over the whole field, it was no
business of his to stop and reconcile incongruities.  He had more
pressing concerns on hand; he had to save souls; he had to be about his
Father’s business.  This short-sighted view resulted in a doctrine that
was actually Jesuitical in application.  They had no serious ideas upon
politics, and they were ready, nay, they seemed almost bound, to adopt
and support whichever ensured for the moment the greatest benefit to the
souls of their fellow-men.  They were dishonest in all sincerity.  Thus
Labitte, in the introduction to a book {330a} in which he exposes the
hypocritical democracy of the Catholics under the League, steps aside for
a moment to stigmatise the hypocritical democracy of the Protestants.
And nowhere was this expediency in political questions more apparent than
about the question of female sovereignty.  So much was this the case that
one James Thomasius, of Leipsic, wrote a little paper {330b} about the
religious partialities of those who took part in the controversy, in
which some of these learned disputants cut a very sorry figure.

Now Knox has been from the first a man well hated; and it is somewhat
characteristic of his luck that he figures here in the very forefront of
the list of partial scribes who trimmed their doctrine with the wind in
all good conscience, and were political weathercocks out of conviction.
Not only has Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from
Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end of his
article on the Scotch Reformer.  This is a little less than fair.  If any
one among the evangelists of that period showed more serious political
sense than another, it was assuredly Knox; and even in this very matter
of female rule, although I do not suppose any one nowadays will feel
inclined to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great allowance
for his conduct.  The controversy, besides, has an interest of its own,
in view of later controversies.

John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister,
jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees.  He and his
congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and
proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise.  The
coincidence was tempting: here were many abuses centring about one abuse;
here was Christ’s Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous
power.  He had not far to go to find the idea that female government was
anomalous.  It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable and incapable,
played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European history; and yet
their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here and there a wise
man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the great bulk of their
contemporaries.  It was defended as an anomaly.  It, and all that
accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single exception; and
no one thought of reasoning down from queens and extending their
privileges to ordinary women.  Great ladies, as we know, had the
privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise forbidden
to their sex.  As with one thing, so with another.  Thus, Margaret of
Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one, seemingly, saw
fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de Gournay,
Montaigne’s adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the world as to
whether a woman might be an author without incongruity.  Thus, too, we
have Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné writing to his daughters about the
learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in conclusion, that
the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a middling station, and
should be reserved for princesses. {333a}  And once more, if we desire to
see the same principle carried to ludicrous extreme, we shall find that
Reverend Father in God the Abbot of Brantôme, claiming, on the authority
of some lord of his acquaintance, a privilege, or rather a duty, of free
love for great princesses, and carefully excluding other ladies from the
same gallant dispensation. {333b}  One sees the spirit in which these
immunities were granted; and how they were but the natural consequence of
that awe for courts and kings that made the last writer tell us, with
simple wonder, how Catherine de Medici would “laugh her fill just like
another” over the humours of pantaloons and zanies.  And such servility
was, of all things, what would touch most nearly the republican spirit of
Knox.  It was not difficult for him to set aside this weak scruple of
loyalty.  The lantern of his analysis did not always shine with a very
serviceable light; but he had the virtue, at least, to carry it into many
places of fictitious holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity
that hedged kings and queens from his contemporaries.  And so he could
put the proposition in the form already mentioned: there was Christ’s
Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous power plainly,
then, the “regiment of women” was Antichristian.  Early in 1558 he
communicated this discovery to the world, by publishing at Geneva his
notorious book—_The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous
Regiment of Women_. {334}

As a whole, it is a dull performance; but the preface, as is usual with
Knox, is both interesting and morally fine.  Knox was not one of those
who are humble in the hour of triumph; he was aggressive even when things
were at their worst.  He had a grim reliance in himself, or rather in his
mission; if he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at least
sure that he was one set apart to do great things.  And he judged simply
that whatever passed in his mind, whatever moved him to flee from
persecution instead of constantly facing it out, or, as here, to publish
and withhold his name from the title-page of a critical work, would not
fail to be of interest, perhaps of benefit, to the world.  There may be
something more finely sensitive in the modern humour, that tends more and
more to withdraw a man’s personality from the lessons he inculcates or
the cause that he has espoused; but there is a loss herewith of wholesome
responsibility; and when we find in the works of Knox, as in the Epistles
of Paul, the man himself standing nakedly forward, courting and
anticipating criticism, putting his character, as it were, in pledge for
the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive the question of
delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a lesson of courage, not
unnecessary in these days of anonymous criticism, and much light,
otherwise unattainable, on the spirit in which great movements were
initiated and carried forward.  Knox’s personal revelations are always
interesting; and, in the case of the “First Blast,” as I have said, there
is no exception to the rule.  He begins by stating the solemn
responsibility of all who are watchmen over God’s flock; and all are
watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine breadth of spirit that
characterises him even when, as here, he shows himself most narrow), all
are watchmen “whose eyes God doth open, and whose conscience he pricketh
to admonish the ungodly.”  And with the full consciousness of this great
duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of timorous or
worldly-minded people.  How can a man repent, he asks, unless the nature
of his transgression is made plain to him?  “And therefore I say,” he
continues, “that of necessity it is that this monstriferous empire of
women (which among all enormities that this day do abound upon the face
of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly and
plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may repent and be
saved.”  To those who think the doctrine useless, because it cannot be
expected to amend those princes whom it would dispossess if once
accepted, he makes answer in a strain that shows him at his greatest.
After having instanced how the rumour of Christ’s censures found its way
to Herod in his own court, “even so,” he continues, “may the sound of our
weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow it from the south, or
blow it from the north, it is of no matter), come to the ears of the
chief offenders.  _But whether it do or not_, _yet dare we not cease to
blow as God will give strength_.  _For we are debtors to more than to
princes_, _to wit_, _to the great multitude of our brethren_, of whom, no
doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by error and ignorance.”

It is for the multitude, then, he writes; he does not greatly hope that
his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that crowned women will
submissively discrown themselves at his appeal; what he does hope, in
plain English, is to encourage and justify rebellion; and we shall see,
before we have done, that he can put his purpose into words as roundly as
I can put it for him.  This he sees to be a matter of much hazard; he is
not “altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he has laid his
account what the finishing of the work may cost.”  He knows that he will
find many adversaries, since “to the most part of men, lawful and godly
appeareth whatsoever antiquity hath received.”  He looks for opposition,
“not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the wise, politic, and quiet
spirits of the earth.”  He will be called foolish, curious, despiteful,
and a sower of sedition; and one day, perhaps, for all he is now
nameless, he may be attainted of treason.  Yet he has “determined to obey
God, notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat.”  Finally, he
makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this first instalment:
it is his purpose thrice to blow the trumpet in this matter, if God so
permit; twice he intends to do it without name; but at the last blast to
take the odium upon himself, that all others may be purged.

Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argument with a secondary
title: “The First Blast to awake Women degenerate.”  We are in the land
of assertion without delay.  That a woman should bear rule, superiority,
dominion or empire over any realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is
repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order.
Women are weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish.  God has denied to
woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what is profitable to
a commonwealth.  Women have been ever lightly esteemed; they have been
denied the tutory of their own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable
sway of their husbands; and surely it is irrational to give the greater
where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign supreme
over a great kingdom who would be allowed no authority by her own
fireside.  He appeals to the Bible; but though he makes much of the first
transgression and certain strong texts in Genesis and Paul’s Epistles, he
does not appeal with entire success.  The cases of Deborah and Huldah can
be brought into no sort of harmony with his thesis.  Indeed, I may say
that, logically, he left his bones there; and that it is but the phantom
of an argument that he parades thenceforward to the end.  Well was it for
Knox that he succeeded no better; it is under this very ambiguity about
Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter before he is
done with the regiment of women.  After having thus exhausted Scripture,
and formulated its teaching in the somewhat blasphemous maxim that the
man is placed above the woman, even as God above the angels, he goes on
triumphantly to adduce the testimonies of Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose,
Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects; and having gathered this little
cloud of witnesses about him, like pursuivants about a herald, he
solemnly proclaims all reigning women to be traitoresses and rebels
against God; discharges all men thenceforward from holding any office
under such monstrous regiment, and calls upon all the lieges with one
consent to “_study to repress the inordinate pride and tyranny_” _of
queens_.  If this is not treasonable teaching, one would be glad to know
what is; and yet, as if he feared he had not made the case plain enough
against himself, he goes on to deduce the startling corollary that all
oaths of allegiance must be incontinently broken.  If it was sin thus to
have sworn even in ignorance, it were obstinate sin to continue to
respect them after fuller knowledge.  Then comes the peroration, in which
he cries aloud against the cruelties of that cursed Jezebel of
England—that horrible monster Jezebel of England; and after having
predicted sudden destruction to her rule and to the rule of all crowned
women, and warned all men that if they presume to defend the same when
any “noble heart” shall be raised up to vindicate the liberty of his
country, they shall not fail to perish themselves in the ruin, he
concludes with a last rhetorical flourish: “And therefore let all men be
advertised, for THE TRUMPET HATH ONCE BLOWN.”

The capitals are his own.  In writing, he probably felt the want of some
such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to
emphasise his spoken utterances withal; there would seem to him a want of
passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the
capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would
have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips.  Indeed, as it
is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current
allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and
hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic canon,
thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained metaphor of a
hostile proclamation.  It is curious, by the way, to note how favourite
an image the trumpet was with the Reformer.  He returns to it again and
again; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to him what a
ship is to the stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he had begun the
world as a trumpeter’s apprentice.  The partiality is surely
characteristic.  All his life long he was blowing summonses before
various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all.  Wherever he
appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile; there is no
peace in his life, and little tenderness; he is always sounding hopefully
to the front for some rough enterprise.

And as his voice had something of the trumpet’s hardness, it had
something also of the trumpet’s warlike inspiration.  So Randolph,
possibly fresh from the sound of the Reformer’s preaching, writes of him
to Cecil:—“Where your honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the
voice of one man is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six
hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” {341}

Thus was the proclamation made.  Nor was it long in wakening all the
echoes of Europe.  What success might have attended it, had the question
decided been a purely abstract question, it is difficult to say.  As it
was, it was to stand or fall, not by logic, but by political needs and
sympathies.  Thus, in France, his doctrine was to have some future,
because Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous
regency of Catherine de Medici; and thus it was to have no future
anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was bound up with the
prosperity of Queen Elizabeth.  This stumbling-block lay at the very
threshold of the matter; and Knox, in the text of the “First Blast,” had
set everybody the wrong example and gone to the ground himself.  He finds
occasion to regret “the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley.”  But Lady
Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was a would-be traitoress
and rebel against God, to use his own expressions.  If, therefore,
political and religious sympathy led Knox himself into so grave a
partiality, what was he to expect from his disciples?

If the trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily prepare
himself for the battle?  The question whether Lady Jane Dudley was an
innocent martyr, or a traitoress against God, whose inordinate pride and
tyranny had been effectually repressed, was thus left altogether in the
wind; and it was not, perhaps, wonderful if many of Knox’s readers
concluded that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree
of the sovereign’s orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the Reformation.
He should have been the more careful of such an ambiguity of meaning, as
he must have known well the lukewarm indifference and dishonesty of his
fellow-reformers in political matters.  He had already, in 1556 or 1557,
talked the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in “a private
conversation;” and the interview {342} must have been truly distasteful
to both parties.  Calvin, indeed, went a far way with him in theory, and
owned that the “government of women was a deviation from the original and
proper order of nature, to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the
punishments consequent upon the fall of man.”  But, in practice, their
two roads separated.  For the Man of Geneva saw difficulties in the way
of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and Huldah, and in the
prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the
Church.  And as the Bible was not decisive, he thought the subject should
be let alone, because, “by custom and public consent and long practice,
it has been established that realms and principalities may descend to
females by hereditary right, and it would not be lawful to unsettle
governments which are ordained by the peculiar providence of God.”  I
imagine Knox’s ears must have burned during this interview.  Think of him
listening dutifully to all this—how it would not do to meddle with
anointed kings—how there was a peculiar providence in these great
affairs; and then think of his own peroration, and the “noble heart” whom
he looks for “to vindicate the liberty of his country;” or his answer to
Queen Mary, when she asked him who he was, to interfere in the affairs of
Scotland:—“Madam, a subject born within the same!”  Indeed, the two
doctors who differed at this private conversation represented, at the
moment, two principles of enormous import in the subsequent history of
Europe.  In Calvin we have represented that passive obedience, that
toleration of injustice and absurdity, that holding back of the hand from
political affairs as from something unclean, which lost France, if we are
to believe M. Michelet, for the Reformation; a spirit necessarily fatal
in the long run to the existence of any sect that may profess it; a
suicidal doctrine that survives among us to this day in narrow views of
personal duty, and the low political morality of many virtuous men.  In
Knox, on the other hand, we see foreshadowed the whole Puritan Revolution
and the scaffold of Charles I.

There is little doubt in my mind that this interview was what caused Knox
to print his book without a name. {344}  It was a dangerous thing to
contradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly so, surely, when one had had the
advantage of correction from him in a private conversation; and Knox had
his little flock of English refugees to consider.  If they had fallen
into bad odour at Geneva, where else was there left to flee to?  It was
printed, as I said, in 1558; and, by a singular _mal-à-propos_, in that
same year Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded to the throne of England.
And just as the accession of Catholic Queen Mary had condemned female
rule in the eyes of Knox, the accession of Protestant Queen Elizabeth
justified it in the eyes of his colleagues.  Female rule ceases to be an
anomaly, not because Elizabeth can “reply to eight ambassadors in one day
in their different languages,” but because she represents for the moment
the political future of the Reformation.  The exiles troop back to
England with songs of praise in their mouths.  The bright occidental
star, of which we have all read in the Preface to the Bible, has risen
over the darkness of Europe.  There is a thrill of hope through the
persecuted Churches of the Continent.  Calvin writes to Cecil, washing
his hands of Knox and his political heresies.  The sale of the “First
Blast” is prohibited in Geneva; and along with it the bold book of Knox’s
colleague, Goodman—a book dear to Milton—where female rule was briefly
characterised as a “monster in nature and disorder among men.” {345a}
Any who may ever have doubted, or been for a moment led away by Knox or
Goodman, or their own wicked imaginations, are now more than convinced.
They have seen the occidental star.  Aylmer, with his eye set greedily on
a possible bishopric, and “the better to obtain the favour of the new
Queen,” {345b} sharpens his pen to confound Knox by logic.  What need?
He has been confounded by facts.  “Thus what had been to the refugees of
Geneva as the very word of God, no sooner were they back in England than,
behold! it was the word of the devil.” {346a}

Now, what of the real sentiments of these loyal subjects of Elizabeth?
They professed a holy horror for Knox’s position: let us see if their own
would please a modern audience any better, or was, in substance, greatly
different.

John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, published an answer to Knox,
under the title of _An Harbour for Faithful and true Subjects against the
late Blown Blast_, _concerning the government of Women_. {346b}  And
certainly he was a thought more acute, a thought less precipitate and
simple, than his adversary.  He is not to be led away by such captious
terms as _natural and unnatural_.  It is obvious to him that a woman’s
disability to rule is not natural in the same sense in which it is
natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn.  He is doubtful, on the
whole, whether this disability be natural at all; nay, when he is laying
it down that a woman should not be a priest, he shows some elementary
conception of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
“The bringing-up of women,” he says, “is commonly such” that they cannot
have the necessary qualifications, “for they are not brought up in
learning in schools, nor trained in disputation.”  And even so, he can
ask, “Are there not in England women, think you, that for learning and
wisdom could tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any
Sir John there?”  For all that, his advocacy is weak.  If women’s rule is
not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very existence, it is neither
so convenient nor so profitable as the government of men.  He holds
England to be specially suitable for the government of women, because
there the governor is more limited and restrained by the other members of
the constitution than in other places; and this argument has kept his
book from being altogether forgotten.  It is only in hereditary
monarchies that he will offer any defence of the anomaly.  “If rulers
were to be chosen by lot or suffrage, he would not that any women should
stand in the election, but men only.”  The law of succession of crowns
was a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a law to
Mr. Herbert Spencer; and the one and the other counsels his readers, in a
spirit suggestively alike, not to kick against the pricks or seek to be
more wise than He who made them. {348}  If God has put a female child
into the direct line of inheritance, it is God’s affair.  His strength
will be perfected in her weakness.  He makes the Creator address the
objectors in this not very flattering vein:—“I, that could make Daniel, a
sucking babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers; a brute beast to
reprehend the folly of a prophet; and poor fishers to confound the great
clerks of the world—cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over you?”
This is the last word of his reasoning.  Although he was not altogether
without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what he says of the
incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather loyalty to the old order of things
than any generous belief in the capacity of women, that raised up for
them this clerical champion.  His courtly spirit contrasts singularly
with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox.  “Thy knee shall bow,” he
says, “thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall speak reverently of thy
sovereign.”  For himself, his tongue is even more than reverent.  Nothing
can stay the issue of his eloquent adulation.  Again and again, “the
remembrance of Elizabeth’s virtues” carries him away; and he has to hark
back again to find the scent of his argument.  He is repressing his
vehement adoration throughout, until, when the end comes, and he feels
his business at an end, he can indulge himself to his heart’s content in
indiscriminate laudation of his royal mistress.  It is humorous to think
that this illustrious lady, whom he here praises, among many other
excellences, for the simplicity of her attire and the “marvellous
meekness of her stomach,” threatened him, years after, in no very meek
terms, for a sermon against female vanity in dress, which she held as a
reflection on herself. {349}

Whatever was wanting here in respect for women generally, there was no
want of respect for the Queen; and one cannot very greatly wonder if
these devoted servants looked askance, not upon Knox only, but on his
little flock, as they came back to England tainted with disloyal
doctrine.  For them, as for him, the occidental star rose somewhat red
and angry.  As for poor Knox, his position was the saddest of all.  For
the juncture seemed to him of the highest importance; it was the nick of
time, the flood-water of opportunity.  Not only was there an opening for
him in Scotland, a smouldering brand of civil liberty and religious
enthusiasm which it should be for him to kindle into flame with his
powerful breath but he had his eye seemingly on an object of even higher
worth.  For now, when religious sympathy ran so high that it could be set
against national aversion, he wished to begin the fusion together of
England and Scotland, and to begin it at the sore place.  If once the
open wound were closed at the Border, the work would be half done.
Ministers placed at Berwick and such places might seek their converts
equally on either side of the march; old enemies would sit together to
hear the gospel of peace, and forget the inherited jealousies of many
generations in the enthusiasm of a common faith; or—let us say better—a
common heresy.  For people are not most conscious of brotherhood when
they continue languidly together in one creed, but when, with some doubt,
with some danger perhaps, and certainly not without some reluctance, they
violently break with the tradition of the past, and go forth from the
sanctuary of their fathers to worship under the bare heaven.  A new
creed, like a new country, is an unhomely place of sojourn; but it makes
men lean on one another and join hands.  It was on this that Knox relied
to begin the union of the English and the Scotch.  And he had, perhaps,
better means of judging than any even of his contemporaries.  He knew the
temper of both nations; and already during his two years’ chaplaincy at
Berwick, he had seen his scheme put to the proof.  But whether
practicable or not, the proposal does him much honour.  That he should
thus have sought to make a love-match of it between the two peoples, and
tried to win their inclination towards a union instead of simply
transferring them, like so many sheep, by a marriage, or testament, or
private treaty, is thoroughly characteristic of what is best in the man.
Nor was this all.  He had, besides, to assure himself of English support,
secret or avowed, for the reformation party in Scotland; a delicate
affair, trenching upon treason.  And so he had plenty to say to Cecil,
plenty that he did not care to “commit to paper neither yet to the
knowledge of many.”  But his miserable publication had shut the doors of
England in his face.  Summoned to Edinburgh by the confederate lords, he
waited at Dieppe, anxiously praying for leave to journey through England.
The most dispiriting tidings reach him.  His messengers, coming from so
obnoxious a quarter, narrowly escape imprisonment.  His old congregation
are coldly received, and even begin to look back again to their place of
exile with regret.  “My First Blast,” he writes ruefully, “has blown from
me all my friends of England.”  And then he adds, with a snarl, “The
Second Blast, I fear, shall sound somewhat more sharp, except men be more
moderate than I hear they are.” {352a}  But the threat is empty; there
will never be a second blast—he has had enough of that trumpet.  Nay, he
begins to feel uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered useless for the
rest of his life, unless he is to lose his right arm and go about his
great work maimed and impotent, he must find some way of making his peace
with England and the indignant Queen.  The letter just quoted was written
on the 6th of April 1559; and on the 10th, after he had cooled his heels
for four days more about the streets of Dieppe, he gave in altogether,
and writes a letter of capitulation to Cecil.  In this letter, {352b}
which he kept back until the 22d, still hoping that things would come
right of themselves, he censures the great secretary for having “followed
the world in the way of perdition,” characterises him as “worthy of
hell,” and threatens him, if he be not found simple, sincere, and fervent
in the cause of Christ’s gospel, that he shall “taste of the same cup
that politic heads have drunken in before him.”  This is all, I take it,
out of respect for the Reformer’s own position; if he is going to be
humiliated, let others be humiliated first; like a child who will not
take his medicine until he has made his nurse and his mother drink of it
before him.  “But I have, say you, written a treasonable book against the
regiment and empire of women. . . . The writing of that book I will not
deny; but to prove it treasonable I think it shall be hard. . . . It is
hinted that my book shall be written against.  If so be, sir, I greatly
doubt they shall rather hurt nor (than) mend the matter.”  And here come
the terms of capitulation; for he does not surrender unconditionally,
even in this sore strait: “And yet if any,” he goes on, “think me enemy
to the person, or yet to the regiment, of her whom God hath now promoted,
they are utterly deceived in me, _for the miraculous work of God_,
_comforting His afflicted by means of an infirm vessel_, _I do
acknowledge_, _and the power of His most potent hand I will obey_.  _More
plainly to speak_, _if Queen Elizabeth shall confess_, _that the
extraordinary dispensation of God’s great mercy maketh that lawful unto
her which both nature and God’s law do deny to all women_, then shall
none in England be more willing to maintain her lawful authority than I
shall be.  But if (God’s wondrous work set aside) she ground (as God
forbid) the justness of her title upon consuetude, laws, or ordinances of
men, then”—Then Knox will denounce her?  Not so; he is more politic
nowadays—then, he “greatly fears” that her ingratitude to God will not go
long without punishment.

His letter to Elizabeth, written some few months later, was a mere
amplification of the sentences quoted above.  She must base her title
entirely upon the extraordinary providence of God; but if she does this,
“if thus, in God’s presence, she humbles herself, so will he with tongue
and pen justify her authority, as the Holy Ghost hath justified the same
in Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel.” {354}  And so, you see, his
consistency is preserved; he is merely applying the doctrine of the
“First Blast.”  The argument goes thus: The regiment of women is, as
before noted in our work, repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a
subversion of good order.  It has nevertheless pleased God to raise up,
as exceptions to this law, first Deborah, and afterward Elizabeth
Tudor—whose regiment we shall proceed to celebrate.

There is no evidence as to how the Reformer’s explanations were received,
and indeed it is most probable that the letter was never shown to
Elizabeth at all.  For it was sent under cover of another to Cecil, and
as it was not of a very courtly conception throughout, and was, of all
things, what would most excite the Queen’s uneasy jealousy about her
title, it is like enough that the secretary exercised his discretion (he
had Knox’s leave in this case, and did not always wait for that, it is
reputed) to put the letter harmlessly away beside other valueless or
unpresentable State Papers.  I wonder very much if he did the same with
another, {355} written two years later, after Mary had come into
Scotland, in which Knox almost seeks to make Elizabeth an accomplice with
him in the matter of the “First Blast.”  The Queen of Scotland is going
to have that work refuted, he tells her; and “though it were but
foolishness in him to prescribe unto her Majesty what is to be done,” he
would yet remind her that Mary is neither so much alarmed about her own
security, nor so generously interested in Elizabeth’s, “that she would
take such pains, _unless her crafty counsel in so doing shot at a further
mark_.”  There is something really ingenious in this letter; it showed
Knox in the double capacity of the author of the “First Blast” and the
faithful friend of Elizabeth; and he combines them there so naturally,
that one would scarcely imagine the two to be incongruous.

Twenty days later he was defending his intemperate publication to another
queen—his own queen, Mary Stuart.  This was on the first of those three
interviews which he has preserved for us with so much dramatic vigour in
the picturesque pages of his history.  After he had avowed the authorship
in his usual haughty style, Mary asked: “You think, then, that I have no
just authority?”  The question was evaded.  “Please your Majesty,” he
answered, “that learned men in all ages have had their judgments free,
and most commonly disagreeing from the common judgment of the world; such
also have they published by pen and tongue; and yet notwithstanding they
themselves have lived in the common society with others, and have borne
patiently with the errors and imperfections which they could not amend.”
Thus did “Plato the philosopher:” thus will do John Knox.  “I have
communicated my judgment to the world: if the realm finds no
inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which they approve,
shall I not further disallow than within my own breast; but shall be as
well content to live under your Grace, as Paul was to live under Nero.
And my hope is, that so long as ye defile not your hands with the blood
of the saints of God, neither I nor my book shall hurt either you or your
authority.”  All this is admirable in wisdom and moderation, and, except
that he might have hit upon a comparison less offensive than that with
Paul and Nero, hardly to be bettered.  Having said thus much, he feels he
needs say no more; and so, when he is further pressed, he closes that
part of the discussion with an astonishing sally.  If he has been content
to let this matter sleep, he would recommend her Grace to follow his
example with thankfulness of heart; it is grimly to be understood which
of them has most to fear if the question should be reawakened.  So the
talk wandered to other subjects.  Only, when the Queen was summoned at
last to dinner (“for it was afternoon”) Knox made his salutation in this
form of words: “I pray God, Madam, that you may be as much blessed within
the Commonwealth of Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever
Deborah was in the Commonwealth of Israel.” {357}  Deborah again.

But he was not yet done with the echoes of his own “First Blast.”  In
1571, when he was already near his end, the old controversy was taken up
in one of a series of anonymous libels against the Reformer affixed,
Sunday after Sunday, to the church door.  The dilemma was fairly enough
stated.  Either his doctrine is false, in which case he is a “false
doctor” and seditious; or, if it be true, why does he “avow and approve
the contrare, I mean that regiment in the Queen of England’s person;
which he avoweth and approveth, not only praying for the maintenance of
her estate, but also procuring her aid and support against his own native
country?”  Knox answered the libel, as his wont was, next Sunday, from
the pulpit.  He justified the “First Blast” with all the old arrogance;
there is no drawing back there.  The regiment of women is repugnant to
nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order, as before.
When he prays for the maintenance of Elizabeth’s estate, he is only
following the example of those prophets of God who warned and comforted
the wicked kings of Israel; or of Jeremiah, who bade the Jews pray for
the prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar.  As for the Queen’s aid, there is no
harm in that: _quia_ (these are his own words) _quia omnia munda mundis_:
because to the pure all things are pure.  One thing, in conclusion, he
“may not pretermit” to give the lie in the throat to his accuser, where
he charges him with seeking support against his native country.  “What I
have been to my country,” said the old Reformer, “What I have been to my
country, albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come
will be compelled to bear witness to the truth.  And thus I cease,
requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against me, that he may
(they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make myself and all my doings
manifest to the world.  For to me it seemeth a thing unreasonable, that,
in this my decrepit age, I shall be compelled to fight against shadows,
and howlets that dare not abide the light.” {359}

Now, in this, which may be called his _Last Blast_, there is as sharp
speaking as any in the “First Blast” itself.  He is of the same opinion
to the end, you see, although he has been obliged to cloak and garble
that opinion for political ends.  He has been tacking indeed, and he has
indeed been seeking the favour of a queen; but what man ever sought a
queen’s favour with a more virtuous purpose, or with as little courtly
policy?  The question of consistency is delicate, and must be made plain.
Knox never changed his opinion about female rule, but lived to regret
that he had published that opinion.  Doubtless he had many thoughts so
far out of the range of public sympathy, that he could only keep them to
himself, and, in his own words, bear patiently with the errors and
imperfections that he could not amend.  For example, I make no doubt
myself that, in his own heart, he did hold the shocking dogma attributed
to him by more than one calumniator; and that, had the time been ripe,
had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would have
been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of
hereditary—“elective as in the days of paganism,” as one Thevet says in
holy horror. {360}  And yet, because the time was not ripe, I find no
hint of such an idea in his collected works.  Now, the regiment of women
was another matter that he should have kept to himself; right or wrong,
his opinion did not fit the moment; right or wrong, as Aylmer puts it,
“the _Blast_ was blown out of season.”  And this it was that he began to
perceive after the accession of Elizabeth; not that he had been wrong,
and that female rule was a good thing, for he had said from the first
that “the felicity of some women in their empires” could not change the
law of God and the nature of created things; not this, but that the
regiment of women was one of those imperfections of society which must be
borne with because yet they cannot be remedied.  The thing had seemed so
obvious to him, in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority, and
his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and common
consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise and
shake off the debasing tyranny.  He found himself wrong, and he showed
that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the spirit
of true compromise.  He came round to Calvin’s position, in fact, but by
a different way.  And it derogates nothing from the merit of this wise
attitude that it was the consequence of a change of interest.  We are all
taught by interest; and if the interest be not merely selfish, there is
no wiser preceptor under heaven, and perhaps no sterner.

Such is the history of John Knox’s connection with the controversy about
female rule.  In itself, this is obviously an incomplete study; not fully
to be understood, without a knowledge of his private relations with the
other sex, and what he thought of their position in domestic life.  This
shall be dealt with in another paper.



II.—PRIVATE LIFE.


TO those who know Knox by hearsay only, I believe the matter of this
paper will be somewhat astonishing.  For the hard energy of the man in
all public matters has possessed the imagination of the world; he remains
for posterity in certain traditional phrases, browbeating Queen Mary, or
breaking beautiful carved work in abbeys and cathedrals, that had long
smoked themselves out and were no more than sorry ruins, while he was
still quietly teaching children in a country gentleman’s family.  It does
not consist with the common acceptation of his character to fancy him
much moved, except with anger.  And yet the language of passion came to
his pen as readily, whether it was a passion of denunciation against some
of the abuses that vexed his righteous spirit, or of yearning for the
society of an absent friend.  He was vehement in affection, as in
doctrine.  I will not deny that there may have been, along with his
vehemence, something shifty, and for the moment only; that, like many
men, and many Scotchmen, he saw the world and his own heart, not so much
under any very steady, equable light, as by extreme flashes of passion,
true for the moment, but not true in the long run.  There does seem to me
to be something of this traceable in the Reformer’s utterances:
precipitation and repentance, hardy speech and action somewhat
circumspect, a strong tendency to see himself in a heroic light and to
place a ready belief in the disposition of the moment.  Withal he had
considerable confidence in himself, and in the uprightness of his own
disciplined emotions, underlying much sincere aspiration after spiritual
humility.  And it is this confidence that makes his intercourse with
women so interesting to a modern.  It would be easy, of course, to make
fun of the whole affair, to picture him strutting vaingloriously among
these inferior creatures, or compare a religious friendship in the
sixteenth century with what was called, I think, a literary friendship in
the eighteenth.  But it is more just and profitable to recognise what
there is sterling and human underneath all his theoretical affectations
of superiority.  Women, he has said in his “First Blast,” are, “weak,
frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish;” and yet it does not appear that
he was himself any less dependent than other men upon the sympathy and
affection of these weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures;
it seems even as if he had been rather more dependent than most.

Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
always something large and public in their way of life, something more or
less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others.  We should
not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however beautiful.
We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a wife to their
bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more of their own
sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate need.  They
will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our association—not the great
ones alone, but all.  They will know not love only, but all those other
ways in which man and woman mutually make each other happy—by sympathy,
by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear about them—down to the mere
impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces in the street.  For, through
all this gradation, the difference of sex makes itself pleasurably felt.
Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry
due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are brought ever
so lightly into contact.  We love our mothers otherwise than we love our
fathers; a sister is not as a brother to us; and friendship between man
and woman, be it never so unalloyed and innocent, is not the same as
friendship between man and man.  Such friendship is not even possible for
all.  To conjoin tenderness for a woman that is not far short of
passionate with such disinterestedness and beautiful gratuity of
affection as there is between friends of the same sex, requires no
ordinary disposition in the man.  For either it would presuppose quite
womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were, a curiosity in shades of
differing sentiment; or it would mean that he had accepted the large,
simple divisions of society: a strong and positive spirit robustly
virtuous, who has chosen a better part coarsely, and holds to it
steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain to himself and others; as
one who should go straight before him on a journey, neither tempted by
wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small lives under foot.  It was in
virtue of this latter disposition that Knox was capable of those
intimacies with women that embellished his life; and we find him
preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women friends; a man of
some expansion toward the other sex; a man ever ready to comfort weeping
women, and to weep along with them.

Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more
intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that environ
written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape of
letters to women of his familiarity.  He was twice married, but that is
not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly of
women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying.  What is really
significant is quite apart from marriage.  For the man Knox was a true
man, and woman, the _ewig-weibliche_, was as necessary to him, in spite
of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe.  He came to her in a
certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came to
her in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts and
minds exercised in the painful complications that naturally result from
all changes in the world’s way of thinking; and those whom he had thus
helped became dear to him, and were made the chosen companions of his
leisure if they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter if
they were afar.

It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old
Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him,
as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in the
communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director, so
that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain
survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and
are not properly to be judged without this idea.  There is no friendship
so noble, but it is the product of the time; and a world of little
finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of spirits
the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference.  The trick
of the country and the age steps in even between the mother and her
child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the
voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of confidence
between them, and this other thing shall not.  And thus it is that we
must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social atmosphere
in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and trusted each
other.  To the man who had been their priest and was now their minister,
women would be able to speak with a confidence quite impossible in these
latter days; the women would be able to speak, and the man to hear.  It
was a beaten road just then; and I daresay we should be no less
scandalised at their plain speech than they, if they could come back to
earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly fashions.  This,
then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many women friends.
The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth, of interest, and
of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist of friendship, he
contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry relationship of penitent and
confessor.

It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women
(as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to Berwick
in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age.  At the
same time it is just possible that some of a little group at Edinburgh,
with whom he corresponded during his last absence, may have been friends
of an older standing.  Certainly they were, of all his female
correspondents, the least personally favoured.  He treats them throughout
in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have been a little
wounding.  Thus, he remits one of them to his former letters, “which I
trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our sisters, for to me ye are
all equal in Christ.” {368}  Another letter is a gem in this way.
“Albeit” it begins, “albeit I have no particular matter to write unto
you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to write these few lines to
you in declaration of my remembrance of you.  True it is that I have many
whom I bear in equal remembrance before God with you, to whom at present
I write nothing, either for that I esteem them stronger than you, and
therefore they need the less my rude labours, or else because they have
not provoked me by their writing to recompense their remembrance.” {369a}
His “sisters in Edinburgh” had evidently to “provoke” his attention
pretty constantly; nearly all his letters are, on the face of them,
answers to questions, and the answers are given with a certain crudity
that I do not find repeated when he writes to those he really cares for.
So when they consult him about women’s apparel (a subject on which his
opinion may be pretty correctly imagined by the ingenious reader for
himself) he takes occasion to anticipate some of the most offensive
matter of the “First Blast” in a style of real brutality. {369b}  It is
not merely that he tells them “the garments of women do declare their
weakness and inability to execute the office of man,” though that in
itself is neither very wise nor very opportune in such a correspondence
one would think; but if the reader will take the trouble to wade through
the long, tedious sermon for himself, he will see proof enough that Knox
neither loved, nor very deeply respected, the women he was then
addressing.  In very truth, I believe these Edinburgh sisters simply
bored him.  He had a certain interest in them as his children in the
Lord; they were continually “provoking him by their writing;” and, if
they handed his letters about, writing to them was as good a form of
publication as was then open to him in Scotland.  There is one letter,
however, in this budget, addressed to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil,
which is worthy of some further mention.  The Clerk-Register had not
opened his heart, it would appear, to the preaching of the Gospel, and
Mrs. Mackgil has written, seeking the Reformer’s prayers in his behalf.
“Your husband,” he answers, “is dear to me for that he is a man indued
with some good gifts, but more dear for that he is your husband.  Charity
moveth me to thirst his illumination, both for his comfort and for the
trouble which you sustain by his coldness, which justly may be called
infidelity.”  He wishes her, however, not to hope too much; he can
promise that his prayers will be earnest, but not that they will be
effectual; it is possible that this is to be her “cross” in life; that
“her head, appointed by God for her comfort, should be her enemy.”  And
if this be so, well, there is nothing for it; “with patience she must
abide God’s merciful deliverance,” taking heed only that she does not
“obey manifest iniquity for the pleasure of any mortal man.” {371a}  I
conceive this epistle would have given a very modified sort of pleasure
to the Clerk-Register, had it chanced to fall into his hands.  Compare
its tenor—the dry resignation not without a hope of merciful deliverance
therein recommended—with these words from another letter, written but the
year before to two married women of London: “Call first for grace by
Jesus, and thereafter communicate with your faithful husbands, and then
shall God, I doubt not, conduct your footsteps, and direct your counsels
to His glory.” {371b}  Here the husbands are put in a very high place; we
can recognise here the same hand that has written for our instruction how
the man is set above the woman, even as God above the angels.  But the
point of the distinction is plain.  For Clerk-Register Mackgil was not a
faithful husband; displayed, indeed, towards religion a “coldness which
justly might be called infidelity.”  We shall see in more notable
instances how much Knox’s conception of the duty of wives varies
according to the zeal and orthodoxy of the husband.

As I have said, he may possibly have made the acquaintance of Mrs.
Mackgil, Mrs. Guthrie, or some other, or all, of these Edinburgh friends
while he was still Douglas of Longniddry’s private tutor.  But our
certain knowledge begins in 1549.  He was then but newly escaped from his
captivity in France, after pulling an oar for nineteen months on the
benches of the galley _Nostre Dame_; now up the rivers, holding stealthy
intercourse with other Scottish prisoners in the castle of Rouen; now out
in the North Sea, raising his sick head to catch a glimpse of the far-off
steeples of St. Andrews.  And now he was sent down by the English Privy
Council as a preacher to Berwick-upon-Tweed; somewhat shaken in health by
all his hardships, full of pains and agues, and tormented by gravel, that
sorrow of great men; altogether, what with his romantic story, his weak
health, and his great faculty of eloquence, a very natural object for the
sympathy of devout women.  At this happy juncture he fell into the
company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in
Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children.  She was a religious
hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and
giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honoured
with her confidence.  From the first time she heard Knox preach she
formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after of his
society. {373a}  Nor was Knox unresponsive. “I have always delighted in
your company,” he writes, “and when labours would permit, you know I have
not spared hours to talk and commune with you.”  Often when they had met
in depression he reminds her, “God hath sent great comfort unto both.”
{373b}  We can gather from such letters as are yet extant how close and
continuous was their intercourse.  “I think it best you remain till the
morrow,” he writes once, “and so shall we commune at large at afternoon.
This day you know to be the day of my study and prayer unto God; yet if
your trouble be intolerable, or, if you think my presence may release
your pain, do as the Spirit shall move you. . . . Your messenger found me
in bed, after a sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so dolour may
complain to dolour when we two meet. . . . And this is more plain than
ever I spoke, to let you know you have a companion in trouble.” {373c}
Once we have the curtain raised for a moment, and can look at the two
together for the length of a phrase.  “After the writing of this
preceding,” writes Knox, “your brother and mine, Harrie Wycliffe, did
advertise me by writing, that your adversary (the devil) took occasion to
trouble you because that _I did start back from you rehearsing your
infirmities_.  _I remember myself so to have done_, _and that is my
common on consuetude when anything pierceth or toucheth my heart_.  _Call
to your mind what I did standing at the cupboard at Alnwick_.  In very
deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I was; and when I
heard proceed from your mouth the very same words that he troubles me
with, I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing in
myself the dolour thereof.” {374a}  Now intercourse of so very close a
description, whether it be religious intercourse or not, is apt to
displease and disquiet a husband; and we know incidentally from Knox
himself that there was some little scandal about his intimacy with Mrs.
Bowes.  “The slander and fear of men,” he writes, “has impeded me to
exercise my pen so oft as I would;_ yea_, _very shame hath holden me from
your company_, _when I was most surely persuaded that God had appointed
me at that time to comfort and feed your hungry and afflicted soul_.
_God in His infinite mercy_,” he goes on, “_remove not only from me all
fear that tendeth not to godliness_, _but from others suspicion to judge
of me otherwise than it becometh one member to judge of another_.” {374b}
And the scandal, such as it was, would not be allayed by the dissension
in which Mrs. Bowes seems to have lived with her family upon the matter
of religion, and the countenance shown by Knox to her resistance.
Talking of these conflicts, and her courage against “her own flesh and
most inward affections, yea, against some of her most natural friends,”
he writes it, “to the praise of God, he has wondered at the bold
constancy which he has found in her when his own heart was faint.” {375a}

Now, perhaps in order to stop scandalous mouths, perhaps out of a desire
to bind the much-loved evangelist nearer to her in the only manner
possible, Mrs. Bowes conceived the scheme of marrying him to her fifth
daughter, Marjorie; and the Reformer seems to have fallen in with it
readily enough.  It seems to have been believed in the family that the
whole matter had been originally made up between these two, with no very
spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride. {375b}  Knox’s idea of
marriage, as I have said, was not the same for all men; but on the whole,
it was not lofty.  We have a curious letter of his, written at the
request of Queen Mary, to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household
matters; which, as he tells us, “was not well accepted of the said Earl.”
{375c}  We may suppose, however, that his own home was regulated in a
similar spirit.  I can fancy that for such a man, emotional, and with a
need, now and again, to exercise parsimony in emotions not strictly
needful, something a little mechanical, something hard and fast and
clearly understood, would enter into his ideal of a home.  There were
storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at the fireside
even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures.  So, from a wife, of all women,
he would not ask much.  One letter to her which has come down to us is, I
had almost said, conspicuous for coldness. {376}  He calls her, as he
called other female correspondents, “dearly beloved sister;” the epistle
is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not upon her own case, but
upon that of her mother.  However, we know what Heine wrote in his wife’s
album; and there is, after all, one passage that may be held to intimate
some tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly opposite
construction.  “I think,” he says, “I _think_ this be the first letter I
ever wrote to you.”  This, if we are to take it literally, may pair off
with the “two _or three_ children” whom Montaigne mentions having lost at
nurse; the one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in a parent.
Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his troubled
wooing than might have been expected.  The whole Bowes family, angry
enough already at the influence he had obtained over the mother, set
their faces obdurately against the match.  And I daresay the opposition
quickened his inclination.  I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes that she
need no further trouble herself about the marriage; it should now be his
business altogether; it behoved him now to jeopard his life “for the
comfort of his own flesh, both fear and friendship of all earthly
creature laid aside.” {377}  This is a wonderfully chivalrous utterance
for a Reformer forty-eight years old; and it compares well with the
leaden coquetries of Calvin, not much over thirty, taking this and that
into consideration, weighing together dowries and religious
qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting what M.
Bungener calls “an honourable and Christian difficulty” of choice, in
frigid indecisions and insincere proposals.  But Knox’s next letter is in
a humbler tone; he has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied;
he despairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving
England,—regards not “what country consumes his wicked carcass.”  “You
shall understand,” he says, “that this sixth of November, I spoke with
Sir Robert Bowes” (the head of the family, his bride’s uncle) “in the
matter you know, according to your request; whose disdainful, yea,
despiteful, words hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me.
I bear a good countenance with a sore troubled heart, because he that
ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is become not only a
despiser, but also a taunter of God’s messengers—God be merciful unto
him!  Amongst others his most unpleasing words, while that I was about to
have declared my heart in the whole matter, he said, ‘Away with your
rhetorical reasons! for I will not be persuaded with them.’  God knows I
did use no rhetoric nor coloured speech; but would have spoken the truth,
and that in most simple manner.  I am not a good orator in my own cause;
but what he would not be content to hear of me, God shall declare to him
one day to his displeasure, unless he repent.” {378}  Poor Knox, you see,
is quite commoved.  It has been a very unpleasant interview.  And as it
is the only sample that we have of how things went with him during his
courtship, we may infer that the period was not as agreeable for Knox as
it has been for some others.

However, when once they were married, I imagine he and Marjorie Bowes hit
it off together comfortably enough.  The little we know of it may be
brought together in a very short space.  She bore him two sons.  He seems
to have kept her pretty busy, and depended on her to some degree in his
work; so that when she fell ill, his papers got at once into disorder.
{379a}  Certainly she sometimes wrote to his dictation; and, in this
capacity, he calls her “his left hand.” {379b}  In June 1559, at the
headiest moment of the Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the
absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, “whose presence” (this is the
not very grammatical form of his lament) “whose presence I more thirst,
than she that is my own flesh.” {379c}  And this, considering the source
and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender
sentiment.  He tells us himself in his history, on the occasion of a
certain meeting at the Kirk of Field, that “he was in no small heaviness
by reason of the late death of his dear bed-fellow, Marjorie Bowes.”
{379d}  Calvin, condoling with him, speaks of her as “a wife whose like
is not to be found everywhere” (that is very like Calvin), and again, as
“the most delightful of wives.”  We know what Calvin thought desirable in
a wife, “good humour, chastity, thrift, patience, and solicitude for her
husband’s health,” and so we may suppose that the first Mrs. Knox fell
not far short of this ideal.

The actual date of the marriage is uncertain but by September 1566, at
the latest, the Reformer was settled in Geneva with his wife.  There is
no fear either that he will be dull; even if the chaste, thrifty, patient
Marjorie should not altogether occupy his mind, he need not go out of the
house to seek more female sympathy; for behold!  Mrs. Bowes is duly
domesticated with the young couple.  Dr. M‘Crie imagined that Richard
Bowes was now dead, and his widow, consequently, free to live where she
would; and where could she go more naturally than to the house of a
married daughter?  This, however, is not the case.  Richard Bowes did not
die till at least two years later.  It is impossible to believe that he
approved of his wife’s desertion, after so many years of marriage, after
twelve children had been born to them; and accordingly we find in his
will, dated 1558, no mention either of her or of Knox’s wife. {380}  This
is plain sailing.  It is easy enough to understand the anger of Bowes
against this interloper, who had come into a quiet family, married the
daughter in spite of the father’s opposition, alienated the wife from the
husband and the husband’s religion, supported her in a long course of
resistance and rebellion, and, after years of intimacy, already too close
and tender for any jealous spirit to behold without resentment, carried
her away with him at last into a foreign land.  But it is not quite easy
to understand how, except out of sheer weariness and disgust, he was ever
brought to agree to the arrangement.  Nor is it easy to square the
Reformer’s conduct with his public teaching.  We have, for instance, a
letter by him, Craig, and Spottiswood, to the Archbishops of Canterbury
and York, anent “a wicked and rebellious woman,” one Anne Good, spouse to
“John Barron, a minister of Christ Jesus his evangel,” who, “after great
rebellion shown unto him, and divers admonitions given, as well by
himself as by others in his name, that she should in no wise depart from
this realm, nor from his house without his license, hath not the less
stubbornly and rebelliously departed, separated herself from his society,
left his house, and withdrawn herself from this realm.” {381}  Perhaps
some sort of license was extorted, as I have said, from Richard Bowes,
weary with years of domestic dissension; but setting that aside, the
words employed with so much righteous indignation by Knox, Craig, and
Spottiswood, to describe the conduct of that wicked and rebellious woman,
Mrs. Barron, would describe nearly as exactly the conduct of the
religious Mrs. Bowes.  It is a little bewildering, until we recollect the
distinction between faithful and unfaithful husbands; for Barron was “a
minister of Christ Jesus his evangel,” while Richard Bowes, besides being
own brother to a despiser and taunter of God’s messengers, is shrewdly
suspected to have been “a bigoted adherent of the Roman Catholic faith,”
or, as Knox himself would have expressed it, “a rotten Papist.”

You would have thought that Knox was now pretty well supplied with female
society.  But we are not yet at the end of the roll.  The last year of
his sojourn in England had been spent principally in London, where he was
resident as one of the chaplains of Edward the Sixth; and here he boasts,
although a stranger, he had, by God’s grace, found favour before many.
{382a}  The godly women of the metropolis made much of him; once he
writes to Mrs. Bowes that her last letter had found him closeted with
three, and he and the three women were all in tears. {382b}  Out of all,
however, he had chosen two. “_God_,” he writes to them, “_brought us in
such familiar acquaintance_, _that your hearts were incensed and kindled
with a special care over me_, _as a mother useth to be over her natural
child_; and my heart was opened and compelled in your presence to be more
plain than ever I was to any.” {382c}  And out of the two even he had
chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry Locke, merchant, nigh to
Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as the address runs.  If one may venture
to judge upon such imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best.
I have a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her character.
She may have been one of the three tearful visitors before alluded to;
she may even have been that one of them who was so profoundly moved by
some passages of Mrs. Bowes’s letter, which the Reformer opened, and read
aloud to them before they went.  “O would to God,” cried this
impressionable matron, “would to God that I might speak with that person,
for I perceive there are more tempted than I.” {383}  This may have been
Mrs. Locke, as I say; but even if it were, we must not conclude from this
one fact that she was such another as Mrs. Bowes.  All the evidence tends
the other way.  She was a woman of understanding, plainly, who followed
political events with interest, and to whom Knox thought it worth while
to write, in detail, the history of his trials and successes.  She was
religious, but without that morbid perversity of spirit that made
religion so heavy a burden for the poor-hearted Mrs. Bowes.  More of her
I do not find, save testimony to the profound affection that united her
to the Reformer.  So we find him writing to her from Geneva, in such
terms as these:—“You write that your desire is earnest to see me.  _Dear
sister_, _if I should express the thirst and languor which I have had for
your presence_, _I should appear to pass measure_. . . _Yea_, _I weep and
rejoice in remembrance of you_; but that would evanish by the comfort of
your presence, which I assure you is so dear to me, that if the charge of
this little flock here, gathered together in Christ’s name, did not
impede me, my coming should prevent my letter.” {384}  I say that this
was written from Geneva; and yet you will observe that it is no
consideration for his wife or mother-in-law, only the charge of his
little flock, that keeps him from setting out forthwith for London, to
comfort himself with the dear presence of Mrs. Locke.  Remember that was
a certain plausible enough pretext for Mrs. Locke to come to Geneva—“the
most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of
the Apostles”—for we are now under the reign of that “horrible monster
Jezebel of England,” when a lady of good orthodox sentiments was better
out of London.  It was doubtful, however, whether this was to be.  She
was detained in England, partly by circumstances unknown, “partly by
empire of her head,” Mr. Harry Locke, the Cheapside merchant.  It is
somewhat humorous to see Knox struggling for resignation, now that he has
to do with a faithful husband (for Mr. Harry Locke was faithful).  Had it
been otherwise, “in my heart,” he says, “I could have wished—yea,” here
he breaks out, “yea, and cannot cease to wish—that God would guide you to
this place.” {385}  And after all, he had not long to wait, for, whether
Mr. Harry Locke died in the interval, or was wearied, he too, into giving
permission, five months after the date of the letter last quoted, “Mrs.
Anne Locke, Harry her son, and Anne her daughter, and Katharine her
maid,” arrived in that perfect school of Christ, the Presbyterian
paradise, Geneva.  So now, and for the next two years, the cup of Knox’s
happiness was surely full.  Of an afternoon, when the bells rang out for
the sermon, the shops closed, and the good folk gathered to the churches,
psalm-book in hand, we can imagine him drawing near to the English chapel
in quite patriarchal fashion, with Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs.
Locke, James his servant, Patrick his pupil, and a due following of
children and maids.  He might be alone at work all morning in his study,
for he wrote much during these two years; but at night, you may be sure
there was a circle of admiring women, eager to hear the new paragraph,
and not sparing of applause.  And what work, among others, was he
elaborating at this time, but the notorious “First Blast”?  So that he
may have rolled out in his big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail,
impatient, feeble, foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the
spirit of counsel, and how men were above them, even as God is above the
angels, in the ears of his own wife, and the two dearest friends he had
on earth.  But he had lost the sense of incongruity, and continued to
despise in theory the sex he honoured so much in practice, of whom he
chose his most intimate associates, and whose courage he was compelled to
wonder at, when his own heart was faint.

We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune; and so, as he
would not learn, he was taken away from that agreeable school, and his
fellowship of women was broken up, not to be reunited.  Called into
Scotland to take at last that strange position in history which is his
best claim to commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his
mother-in-law.  The wife soon died.  The death of her daughter did not
altogether separate Mrs. Bowes from Knox, but she seems to have come and
gone between his house and England.  In 1562, however, we find him
characterised as “a sole man by reason of the absence of his
mother-in-law, Mrs. Bowes,” and a passport is got for her, her man, a
maid, and “three horses, whereof two shall return,” as well as liberty to
take all her own money with her into Scotland.  This looks like a
definite arrangement; but whether she died at Edinburgh, or went back to
England yet again, I cannot find.

With that great family of hers, unless in leaving her husband she had
quarrelled with them all, there must have been frequent occasion for her
presence, one would think.  Knox at least survived her; and we possess
his epigraph to their long intimacy, given to the world by him in an
appendix to his latest publication.  I have said in a former paper that
Knox was not shy of personal revelations in his published works.  And the
trick seems to have grown on him.  To this last tract, a controversial
onslaught on a Scottish Jesuit, he prefixed a prayer, not very pertinent
to the matter in hand, and containing references to his family which were
the occasion of some wit in his adversary’s answer; and appended what
seems equally irrelevant, one of his devout letters to Mrs. Bowes, with
an explanatory preface.  To say truth, I believe he had always felt
uneasily that the circumstances of this intimacy were very capable of
misconstruction; and now, when he was an old man, taking “his good night
of all the faithful in both realms,” and only desirous “that without any
notable sclander to the evangel of Jesus Christ, he might end his battle;
for as the world was weary of him, so was he of it;”—in such a spirit it
was not, perhaps, unnatural that he should return to this old story, and
seek to put it right in the eyes of all men, ere he died.  “Because that
God,” he says, “because that God now in His mercy hath put an end to the
battle of my dear mother, Mistress Elizabeth Bowes, before that He put an
end to my wretched life, I could not cease but declare to the world what
was the cause of our great familiarity and long acquaintance; which was
neither flesh nor blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part, which
never suffered her to rest but when she was in the company of the
faithful, of whom (from the first hearing of the word at my mouth) she
judged me to be one. . . . Her company to me was comfortable (yea,
honourable and profitable, for she was to me and mine a mother), but yet
it was not without some cross; for besides trouble and fashery of body
sustained for her, my mind was seldom quiet, for doing somewhat for the
comfort of her troubled conscience.” {388}  He had written to her years
before, from his first exile in Dieppe, that “only God’s hand” could
withhold him from once more speaking with her face to face; and now, when
God’s hand has indeed interposed, when there lies between them, instead
of the voyageable straits, that great gulf over which no man can pass,
this is the spirit in which he can look back upon their long
acquaintance.  She was a religious hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not
without some cross and fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to
tend.  He might have given a truer character of their friendship, had he
thought less of his own standing in public estimation, and more of the
dead woman.  But he was in all things, as Burke said of his son in that
ever memorable passage, a public creature.  He wished that even into this
private place of his affections posterity should follow him with a
complete approval; and he was willing, in order that this might be so, to
exhibit the defects of his lost friend, and tell the world what weariness
he had sustained through her unhappy disposition.  There is something
here that reminds one of Rousseau.

I do not think he ever saw Mrs. Locke after he left Geneva; but his
correspondence with her continued for three years.  It may have continued
longer, of course, but I think the last letters we possess read like the
last that would be written.  Perhaps Mrs. Locke was then remarried, for
there is much obscurity over her subsequent history.  For as long as
their intimacy was kept up, at least, the human element remains in the
Reformer’s life.  Here is one passage, for example, the most likable
utterance of Knox’s that I can quote:—Mrs. Locke has been upbraiding him
as a bad correspondent.  “My remembrance of you,” he answers, “is not so
dead, but I trust it shall be fresh enough, albeit it be renewed by no
outward token for one year.  _Of nature_, _I am churlish_; _yet one thing
I ashame not to affirm_, _that familiarity once thoroughly contracted was
never yet broken on my default_.  _The cause may be that I have rather
need of all_, _than that any have need of me_.  However it (_that_) be,
it cannot be, as I say, the corporal absence of one year or two that can
quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which half
a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish and confirm.  And
therefore, whether I write or no, be assuredly persuaded that I have you
in such memory as becometh the faithful to have of the faithful.” {390}
This is the truest touch of personal humility that I can remember to have
seen in all the five volumes of the Reformer’s collected works: it is no
small honour to Mrs. Locke that his affection for her should have brought
home to him this unwonted feeling of dependence upon others.  Everything
else in the course of the correspondence testifies to a good, sound,
down-right sort of friendship between the two, less ecstatic than it was
at first, perhaps, but serviceable and very equal.  He gives her ample
details as to the progress of the work of reformation; sends her the
sheets of the _Confession of Faith_, “in quairs,” as he calls it; asks
her to assist him with her prayers, to collect money for the good cause
in Scotland, and to send him books for himself—books by Calvin
especially, one on Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the “Institutes.”
“I must be bold on your liberality,” he writes, “not only in that, but in
greater things as I shall need.” {391a}  On her part she applies to him
for spiritual advice, not after the manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes,
but in a more positive spirit,—advice as to practical points, advice as
to the Church of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a
“mingle-mangle.” {391b}  Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him
“a token, without writing.”  “I understand your impediment,” he answers,
“and therefore I cannot complain.  Yet if you understood the variety of
my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat.” {391c}
One letter more, and then silence.

And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence.
It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description of
his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes.  It is after this, also, that we come to
the unlovely episode of his second marriage.  He had been left a widower
at the age of fifty-five.  Three years after, it occurred apparently to
yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the altar of his
respect for the Reformer.  In January 1563, Randolph writes to Cecil:
“Your Honour will take it for a great wonder when I shall write unto you
that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the Duke’s, a Lord’s
daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of age.” {392}  He adds
that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so mad a story.  And
yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret Stewart, daughter of
Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seventeen, was duly united to John
Knox, Minister of St. Giles’s Kirk, Edinburgh, aged fifty-nine,—to the
great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride, and I would fain hope of
many others for more humane considerations.  “In this,” as Randolph says,
“I wish he had done otherwise.”  The Consistory of Geneva, “that most
perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the
Apostles,” were wont to forbid marriages on the ground of too great a
disproportion in age.  I cannot help wondering whether the old Reformer’s
conscience did not uneasily remind him, now and again, of this good
custom of his religious metropolis, as he thought of the two-and-forty
years that separated him from his poor bride.  Fitly enough, we hear
nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she appears at her husband’s
deathbed, eight years after.  She bore him three daughters in the
interval; and I suppose the poor child’s martyrdom was made as easy for
her as might be.  She was “extremely attentive to him” at the end, we
read and he seems to have spoken to her with some confidence.  Moreover,
and this is very characteristic, he had copied out for her use a little
volume of his own devotional letters to other women.

This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs. Adamson, who had
delighted much in his company “by reason that she had a troubled
conscience,” and whose deathbed is commemorated at some length in the
pages of his history. {393}

And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox’s intercourse with
women was quite of the highest sort.  It is characteristic that we find
him more alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the
women with whom he was familiar.  There was a fatal preponderance of self
in all his intimacies: many women came to learn from him, but he never
condescended to become a learner in his turn.  And so there is not
anything idyllic in these intimacies of his; and they were never so
renovating to his spirit as they might have been.  But I believe they
were good enough for the women.  I fancy the women knew what they were
about when so many of them followed after Knox.  It is not simply because
a man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from the wrong
and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, great qualities as
these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters
full of their “earnest desire for him” when he is absent.  It is not over
a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the
hearts of women are “incensed and kindled with a special care,” as it
were over their natural children.  In the strong quiet patience of all
his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of
the fascination he possessed for these religious women.  Here was one
whom you could besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and
complaints; you might write to him on Thursday that you were so elated it
was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again on Friday that you were
so depressed it was plain God had cast you off for ever; and he would
read all this patiently and sympathetically, and give you an answer in
the most reassuring polysyllables, and all divided into heads—who
knows?—like a treatise on divinity.  And then, those easy tears of his.
There are some women who like to see men crying; and here was this
great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the solid
pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous denunciations to
the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in their parlours by
the hour, and weep with them over their manifold trials and temptations.
Nowadays, he would have to drink a dish of tea with all these penitents.
. . . It sounds a little vulgar, as the past will do, if we look into it
too closely.  We could not let these great folk of old into our
drawing-rooms.  Queen Elizabeth would positively not be eligible for a
housemaid.  The old manners and the old customs go sinking from grade to
grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited the glimpses of the moon,
he would not find any one of his way of thinking, any one he could strike
hands with and talk to freely and without offence, save perhaps the
porter at the end of the street, or the fellow with his elbows out who
loafs all day before the public-house.  So that this little note of
vulgarity is not a thing to be dwelt upon; it is to be put away from us,
as we recall the fashion of these old intimacies; so that we may only
remember Knox as one who was very long-suffering with women, kind to them
in his own way, loving them in his own way—and that not the worst way, if
it was not the best—and once at least, if not twice, moved to his heart
of hearts by a woman, and giving expression to the yearning he had for
her society in words that none of us need be ashamed to borrow.

And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone over in this
essay begins when the Reformer was already beyond the middle age, and
already broken in bodily health: it has been the story of an old man’s
friendships.  This it is that makes Knox enviable.  Unknown until past
forty, he had then before him five-and-thirty years of splendid and
influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an uncommon degree
of power, lived in his own country as a sort of king, and did what he
would with the sound of his voice out of the pulpit.  And besides all
this, such a following of faithful women!  One would take the first forty
years gladly, if one could be sure of the last thirty.  Most of us, even
if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of gray hairs, we retain
some degree of public respect in the latter days of our existence, will
find a falling away of friends, and a solitude making itself round about
us day by day, until we are left alone with the hired sick-nurse.  For
the attraction of a man’s character is apt to be outlived, like the
attraction of his body; and the power to love grows feeble in its turn,
as well as the power to inspire love in others.  It is only with a few
rare natures that friendship is added to friendship, love to love, and
the man keeps growing richer in affection—richer, I mean, as a bank may
be said to grow richer, both giving and receiving more—after his head is
white and his back weary, and he prepares to go down into the dust of
death.

                                * * * * *

                                 THE END.

                                * * * * *

            _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

                                * * * * *




FOOTNOTES


{0}  _Gaudeamus_: _Carmina vagorum selecta_.  Leipsic.  Trübner.  1879.

{27}  Prefatory letter to _Peveril of the Peak_.

{71}  For the love affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott Douglas’s
edition under the different dates.

{179}  Yoshida, when on his way to Nangasaki, met the soldier and talked
with him by the roadside; they then parted, but the soldier was so much
struck by the words he heard, that on Yoshida’s return he sought him out
and declared his intention of devoting his life to the good cause.  I
venture, in the absence of the writer, to insert this correction, having
been present when the story was told by Mr. Masaki.—F. J.  And I, there
being none to settle the difference, must reproduce both versions.—R. L.
S.

{185}  I understood that the merchant was endeavouring surreptitiously to
obtain for his son instruction to which he was not entitled.—F. J.

{192}  _Etude Biographique sur François Villon_.  Paris: H. Menu.

{195}  _Bougeois de Paris_, ed.  Panthéon, pp. 688, 689.

{196}  _Bourgeois_, pp. 627, 636, and 725.

{204}  _Chronìque Scandaleuse_, ed.  Panthéon, p. 237.

{210}  Monstrelet: _Panthéon Littéraire_, p. 26.

{220a}  _Chron. Scand._ ut supra.

{220b}  Here and there, principally in the order of events, this article
differs from M. Longnon’s own reading of his material.  The ground on
which he defers the execution of Montigny and De Cayeux beyond the date
of their trials seems insufficient.  There is a law of parsimony for the
construction of historical documents; simplicity is the first duty of
narration; and hanged they were.

{224}  _Chron. Scand._, p. 338.

{238}  Champollion-Figeac’s _Louis et Charles d’Orléans_, p. 348.

{240a}  D’Héricault’s admirable _Memoir_, prefixed to his edition of
Charles’s works, vol. i. p. xi.

{240b}  Vallet de Viriville, _Charles VII. et son Epoque_, ii. 428, note
2.

{241a}  See Lecoy de la Marche, _Le Roi René_, i. 167.

{241b}  Vallet, _Charles VII_, ii. 85, 86, note 2.

{241c}  Champollion-Figeac, 193–198.

{242a}  Champollion-Figeac, 209.

{242b}  The student will see that there are facts cited, and expressions
borrowed, in this paragraph, from a period extending over almost the
whole of Charles’s life, instead of being confined entirely to his
boyhood.  As I do not believe there was any change, so I do not believe
there is any anachronism involved.

{243}  _The Debate between the Heralds of France and England_, translated
and admirably edited by Mr. Henry Pyne.  For the attribution of this
tract to Charles, the reader is referred to Mr. Pyne’s conclusive
argument.

{244}  Des Ursins.

{248}  Michelet, iv.  App.  179, p. 337.

{249}  Champollion-Figeac, pp. 279–82.

{250}  Michelet, iv. pp. 123–4.

{253}  _Debate between the Heralds_.

{254}  Sir H. Nicholas, _Agincourt_.

{257a}  _Debate between the Heralds_.

{257b}  Works (ed. d’Héricault), i. 43.

{257c}  _Ibid._ 143.

{258a}  Works (ed. d’Héricault), i. 190.

{258b}  _Ibid._ 144.

{258c}  _Ibid._ 158.

{259a}  M. Champollion-Figeac gives many in his editions of Charles’s
works, most (as I should think) of very doubtful authenticity, or worse.

{259b}  Rymer, x. 564.  D’Héricault’s _Memoir_, p. xli.  Gairdner’s
_Paston Letters_, i. 27, 99.

{260}  Champollion-Figeac, 377.

{262a}  Dom Plancher, iv. 178–9.

{262b}  Works, i. 157–63.

{265a}  Vallet’s _Charles VII._, i. 251.

{265b}  _Procès de Jeanne d’Arc_, i. 133–55.

{267a}  Monstrelet.

{267b}  Vallet’s _Charles VII._, iii. chap. i.   But see the chronicle
that bears Jaquet’s name: a lean and dreary book.

{268}  Monstrelet.

{269}  D’Héricault’s _Memoir_, xl. xli.  Vallet, _Charles VI._, ii. 435.

{271a}  Champollion-Figeac, 368.

{271b}  Works, i. 115.

{271c}  D’Héricault’s _Memoir_, xlv.

{272}  ChampoIlion-Figeac, 381, 361, 381.

{273}  Champollion-Figeac, 359,361.

{276a}  Lecoy de la Marche, _Roi René_, ii. 155, 177.

{276b}  Champollion-Figeac, chaps. v. and vi.

{276c}  _Ibid._ 364; Works, i. 172.

{276d}  Champollion-Figeac, 364: “Jeter de l’argent aux petis enfans qui
estoient au long de Bourbon, pour les faire nonner en l’eau et aller
querre l’argent au fond.”

{277a}  Champollion-Figeac, 387.

{277b}  _Nouvelle Biographie Didot_, art. “Marie de Clèves.”  Vallet,
_Charles VII_, iii. 85, note 1.

{277c}  Champollion-Figeac, 383, 384–386.

{278}  Works, ii. 57, 258.

{329}  Gaberel’s _Eglist de Genève_, i. 88.

{330a}  _La Démocratie chez les Prédicateurs de la Ligue_.

{330b}  _Historia affectuum se immiscentium controversiæ de
gynæcocratia_.  It is in his collected prefaces, Leipsic, 1683.

{333a}  _Œuvres de d’Aubigné_, i. 449.

{333b}  _Dames Illustres_, pp. 358–360.

{334}  Works of John Knox, iv. 349.

{341}  M‘Crie’s _Life of Knox_, ii. 41.

{342}  Described by Calvin in a letter to Cecil, Knox’s Works, vol. iv.

{344}  It was anonymously published, but no one seems to have been in
doubt about its authorship; he might as well have set his name to it, for
all the good he got by holding it back.

{345a}  Knox’s Works, iv. 358.

{345b}  Strype’s _Aylmer_, p. 16.

{346a}  It may interest the reader to know that these (so says Thomasius)
are the “ipsissima verba Schlusselburgii.”

{346b}  I am indebted for a sight of this book to the kindness of Mr.
David Laing, the editor of Knox’s Works.

{348}  _Social Statics_, p. 64, etc.

{349}  Hallam’s _Const. Hist. of England_, i. 225, note m.

{352a}  Knox to Mrs. Locke, 6th April 1559.  Works, vi. 14.

{352b}  Knox to Sir William Cecil, 10th April 1559.  Works, ii. 16, or
vi. 15.

{354}  Knox to Queen Elizabeth, July. 20th, 1559.  Works, vi. 47, or ii.
26.

{355}  Knox to Queen Elizabeth, August 6th, 1561.  Works, vi. 126.

{357}  Knox’s Works, ii. 278–280.

{359}  Calderwood’s _History of the Kirk of Scotland_, edition of the
Wodrow Society, iii. 51–54.

{360}  _Bayle’s Historical Dictionary_, art. Knox, remark G.

{368}  Works, iv. 244.

{369a}  Works, iv. 246.

{369b}  _Ib._ iv. 225.

{371a}  Works, iv. 245.

{371b}  _Ib._ iv. 221.

{373a}  Works, vi. 514.

{373b}  _Ib._ iii. 338.

{373c}  _Ib._ iii. 352, 353.

{374a}  Works, iii. 350.

{374b}  _Ib._ iii. 390, 391.

{375a}  Works, iii.  142.

{375b}  _Ib._ iii. 378.

{375c}  _Ib._ ii. 379.

{376}  Works, iii. 394.

{377}  Works, iii. 376.

{378}  Works, iii. 378.

{379a}  Works, vi. 104.

{379b}  _Ib._ v. 5.

{379c}  _Ib._ vi. 27.

{379d}  _Ib._ ii. 138.

{380}  Mr. Laing’s preface to the sixth volume of Knox’s Works, p. lxii.

{381}  Works. vi. 534.

{382a}  Works, iv. 220.

{382b}  _Ib._ iii. 380.

{382c}  _Ib._ iv. 220.

{383}  Works, iii. 380.

{384}  Works, iv. 238.

{385}  Works, iv. 240.

{388}  Works, vi. 513, 514.

{390}  Works, vi. ii.

{391a}  Works, vi. pp. 21. 101, 108, 130.

{391b}  _Ib._ vi. 83.

{391c}  _Ib._ vi. 129.

{392}  Works, vi. 532.

{393}  Works, i. 246.






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