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Title: Books and men
Author: Agnes Repplier
Release date: February 24, 2025 [eBook #75456]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND MEN ***
BOOKS AND MEN
BY
AGNES REPPLIER
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
Copyright, 1888,
BY AGNES REPPLIER.
_All rights reserved._
ELEVENTH IMPRESSION
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT 1
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION 33
WHAT CHILDREN READ 64
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT 94
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM 125
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM 157
THE CAVALIER 191
BOOKS AND MEN.
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT.
As a result of the modern tendency to desert the broad beaten roads of
history for the bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find a great
many side lights thrown upon matters that the historian was wont to
treat as altogether beneath his consideration. It is by their help
that we study the minute changes of social life that little by little
alter the whole aspect of a people, and it is by their help that we
look straight into the ordinary every-day workings of the past, and
measure the space between its existence and our own. When we read, for
instance, of Lady Cathcart being kept a close prisoner by her husband
for over twenty years, we look with some complacency on the roving
wives of the nineteenth century. When we reflect on the dismal fate
of Uriel Freudenberger, condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt
alive in 1760, for rashly proclaiming his disbelief in the legend of
William Tell’s apple, we realize the inconveniences attendant on a too
early development of the critical faculty. We listen entranced while
the learned pastor Dr. Johann Geiler von Keyersperg gravely enlightens
his congregation as to the nature and properties of were-wolves; and we
turn aside to see the half-starved boys at Westminster boiling their
own batter-pudding in a stocking foot, or to hear the little John
Wesley crying softly when he is whipped, not being permitted even then
the luxury of a hearty bellow.
Perhaps the last incident will strike us as the most pathetic of
all, this being essentially the children’s age. Women, workmen, and
skeptics all have reason enough to be grateful they were not born a
few generations earlier; but the children of to-day are favored beyond
their knowledge, and certainly far beyond their deserts. Compare
the modern schoolboy with any of his ill-fated predecessors, from
the days of Spartan discipline down to our grandfathers’ time. Turn
from the free-and-easy school-girl of the period to the miseries of
Mrs. Sherwood’s youth, with its steel collars, its backboards, its
submissive silence and rigorous decorum. Think of the turbulent and
uproarious nurseries we all know, and then go back in spirit to that
severe and occult shrine where Mrs. Wesley ruled over her infant brood
with a code of disciplinary laws as awful and inviolable as those of
the Medes and Persians. Of their supreme efficacy she plainly felt no
doubts, for she has left them carefully written down for the benefit
of succeeding generations, though we fear that few mothers of to-day
would be tempted by their stringent austerity. They are to modern
nursery rules what the Blue Laws of Connecticut are to our more languid
legislation. Each child was expected and required to commemorate its
fifth birthday by learning the entire alphabet by heart. To insure
this all-important matter, the whole house was impressively set in
order the day before; every one’s task was assigned to him; and Mrs.
Wesley, issuing strict commands that no one should penetrate into the
sanctuary while the solemn ordeal was in process, shut herself up for
six hours with the unhappy morsel of a child, and unflinchingly drove
the letters into its bewildered brain. On two occasions only was she
unsuccessful. “Molly and Nancy,” we are told, failed to learn in the
given time, and their mother comforts herself for their tardiness by
reflecting on the still greater incapacity of other people’s bairns.
“When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to
revere and stand in awe of its parents,” then, and then only, their
rigid judge considers that some little inadvertences and follies may
be safely passed over. Nor would she permit one of them to “be chid
or beaten twice for the same fault,”--a stately assumption of justice
that speaks volumes for the iron-bound code by which they were brought
into subjection. Most children nowadays are sufficiently amazed if a
tardy vengeance overtake them once, and a second penalty for the same
offense is something we should hardly deem it necessary to proscribe.
Yet nothing is more evident than that Mrs. Wesley was neither a cruel
nor an unloving mother. It is plain that she labored hard for her
little flock, and had their welfare and happiness greatly at heart. In
after years they with one accord honored and revered her memory. Only
it is not altogether surprising that her husband, whose ministerial
functions she occasionally usurped, should have thought his wife at
times almost too able a ruler, or that her more famous son should stand
forth as the great champion of human depravity. He too, some forty
years later, promulgated a system of education as unrelaxing in its
methods as that of his own childhood. In his model school he forbade
all association with outside boys, and would receive no child unless
its parents promised not to take it away for even a single day, until
removed for good. Yet after shutting up the lads in this hot-bed of
propriety, and carefully guarding them from every breath of evil, he
ended by expelling part as incorrigible, and ruefully admitting that
the remainder were very “uncommonly wicked.”
The principle of solitary training for a child, in order to shield
it effectually from all outside influences, found other and vastly
different advocates. It is the key-note of Mr. and Miss Edgeworth’s
Practical Education, a book which must have driven over-careful and
scrupulous mothers to the verge of desperation. In it they are
solemnly counseled never to permit their children to walk or talk
with servants, never to let them have a nursery or a school-room,
never to leave them alone either with each other or with strangers,
and never to allow them to read any book of which every sentence has
not been previously examined. In the matter of books, it is indeed
almost impossible to satisfy such searching critics. Even Mrs.
Barbauld’s highly correct and righteous little volumes, which Lamb
has anathematized as the “blights and blasts of all that is human,”
are not quite harmless in their eyes. Evil lurks behind the phrase
“Charles wants his dinner,” which would seem to imply that Charles must
have whatever he desires; while to say flippantly, “The sun has gone
to bed,” is to incur the awful odium of telling a child a deliberate
untruth.
In Miss Edgeworth’s own stories the didactic purpose is only veiled by
the sprightliness of the narrative and the air of amusing reality she
never fails to impart. Who that has ever read them can forget Harry and
Lucy making up their own little beds in the morning, and knocking down
the unbaked bricks to prove that they were soft; or Rosamond choosing
between the famous purple jar and a pair of new boots; or Laura forever
drawing the furniture in perspective? In all these little people say
and do there is conveyed to the young reader a distinct moral lesson,
which we are by no means inclined to reject, when we turn to the
other writers of the time and see how much worse off we are. Day, in
Sandford and Merton, holds up for our edification the dreariest and
most insufferable of pedagogues, and advocates a mode of life wholly
at variance with the instincts and habits of his age. Miss Sewell, in
her Principles of Education, sternly warns young girls against the
sin of chattering with each other, and forbids mothers’ playing with
their children as a piece of frivolity which cannot fail to weaken the
dignity of their position.
To a great many parents, both in England and in France, such advice
would have been unnecessary. Who, for instance, can imagine Lady
Balcarras, with whom it was a word and a blow in quick succession,
stooping to any such weakness; or that august mother of Harriet
Martineau, against whom her daughter has recorded all the slights
and severities of her youth? Not that we think Miss Martineau to have
been much worse off than other children of her day; but as she has
chosen with signal ill-taste to revenge herself upon her family in
her autobiography, we have at least a better opportunity of knowing
all about it. “To one person,” she writes, “I was indeed habitually
untruthful, from fear. To my mother I would in my childhood assert or
deny anything that would bring me through most easily,”--a confession
which, to say the least, reflects as little to her own credit as
to her parent’s. Had Mrs. Martineau been as stern an upholder of
the truth as was Mrs. Wesley, her daughter would have ventured upon
very few fabrications in her presence. When she tells us gravely how
often she meditated suicide in these early days, we are fain to smile
at hearing a fancy so common among morbid and imaginative children
narrated soberly in middle life, as though it were a unique and
horrible experience. No one endowed by nature with so copious a fund
of self-sympathy could ever have stood in need of much pity from the
outside world.
But for real and uncompromising severity towards children we must turn
to France, where for years the traditions of decorum and discipline
were handed down in noble families, and generations of boys and girls
suffered grievously therefrom. Trifling faults were magnified into
grave delinquencies, and relentlessly punished as such. We sometimes
wonder whether the youthful Bertrand du Guesclin were really the
wicked little savage that the old chroniclers delight in painting, or
whether his rude truculence was not very much like that of naughty
and neglected boys the world over. There is, after all, a pathetic
significance in those lines of Cuvelier’s which describe in barbarous
French the lad’s remarkable and unprepossessing ugliness:--
“Il n’ot si lait de Resnes à Disnant,
Camus estoit et noirs, malostru et massant.
Li père et la mère si le héoiant tant,
Que souvent en leurs cuers aloient desirant
Que fust mors, ou noiey en une eaue corant.”
Perhaps, if he had been less flat-nosed and swarthy, his better
qualities might have shone forth more clearly in early life, and it
would not have needed the predictions of a magician or the keen-eyed
sympathy of a nun to evolve the future Constable of France out of
such apparently hopeless material. At any rate, tradition generally
representing him either as languishing in the castle dungeon, or
exiled to the society of the domestics, it is plain he bore but slight
resemblance to the cherished _enfant terrible_ who is his legitimate
successor to-day.
Coming down to more modern times, we are met by such monuments of
stately severity as Madame Quinet and the Marquise de Montmirail,
mother of that fair saint Madame de Rochefoucauld, the trials of whose
later years were ushered in by a childhood of unremitting harshness
and restraint. The marquise was incapable of any faltering or weakness
where discipline was concerned. If carrots were repulsive to her little
daughter’s stomach, then a day spent in seclusion, with a plate of the
obnoxious vegetable before her, was the surest method of proving that
carrots were nevertheless to be eaten. When Augustine and her sister
kissed their mother’s hand each morning, and prepared to con their
tasks in her awful presence, they well knew that not the smallest
dereliction would be passed over by that inexorable judge. Nor might
they aspire, like Harriet Martineau, to shield themselves behind the
barrier of a lie. When from Augustine’s little lips came faltering some
childish evasion, the ten-year-old sinner was hurried as an outcast
from her home, and sent to expiate her crime with six months’ merciful
seclusion in a convent. “You have told me a falsehood, mademoiselle,”
said the marquise, with frigid accuracy; “and you must prepare to leave
my house upon the spot.”
Faults of breeding were quite as offensive to this _grande dame_ as
faults of temper. The fear of her pitiless glance filled her daughters
with timidity, and bred in them a _mauvaise honte_, which in its turn
aroused her deadliest ire. Only a week before her wedding-day Madame
de Rochefoucauld was sent ignominiously to dine at a side table, as a
penance for the awkwardness of her curtsy; while even her fast-growing
beauty became but a fresh source of misfortune. The dressing of her
magnificent hair occupied two long hours every day, and she retained
all her life a most distinct and painful recollection of her sufferings
at the hands of her _coiffeuse_.
To turn from the Marquise de Montmirail to Madame Quinet is to see the
picture intensified. More beautiful, more stately, more unswerving
still, her faith in discipline was unbounded, and her practice in
no wise inconsistent with her belief. It was actually one of the
institutions of her married life that a _garde de ville_ should pay
a domiciliary visit twice a week to chastise the three children. If
by chance they had not been naughty, then the punishment might be
referred to the account of future transgressions,--an arrangement
which, while it insured justice to the culprits, can hardly have
afforded them much encouragement to amend. Her son Jerome, who ran
away when a mere boy to enroll with the volunteers of ’92, reproduced
in later years, for the benefit of his own household, many of his
mother’s most striking characteristics. He was the father of Edgar
Quinet, the poet, a child whose precocious abilities seem never to
have awakened within him either parental affection or parental pride.
Silent, austere, repellent, he offered no caresses, and was obeyed
with timid submission. “The gaze of his large blue eyes,” says Dowden,
“imposed restraint with silent authority. His mockery, the play of an
intellect unsympathetic by resolve and upon principle, was freezing
to a child; and the most distinct consciousness which his presence
produced upon the boy was the assurance that he, Edgar, was infallibly
about to do something which would cause displeasure.” That this was a
common attitude with parents in the old _régime_ may be inferred from
Châteaubriand’s statement that he and his sister, transformed into
statues by their father’s presence, recovered their life only when he
left the room; and by the assertion of Mirabeau that even while at
school, two hundred leagues away from _his_ father, “the mere thought
of him made me dread every youthful amusement which could be followed
by the slightest unfavorable result.”
Yet at the present day we are assured by Mr. Marshall that in France
“the art of spoiling has reached a development which is unknown
elsewhere, and maternal affection not infrequently descends to folly
and imbecility.” But then the clever critic of French Home Life had
never visited America when he wrote those lines, although some of
the stories he tells would do credit to any household in our land.
There is one quite delightful account of a young married couple, who,
being invited to a dinner party of twenty people, failed to make their
appearance until ten o’clock, when they explained urbanely that their
three-year-old daughter would not permit them to depart. Moreover,
being a child of great character and discrimination, she had insisted
on their undressing and going to bed; to which reasonable request they
had rendered a prompt compliance, rather than see her cry. “It would
have been monstrous,” said the fond mother, “to cause her pain simply
for our pleasure; so I begged Henri to cease his efforts to persuade
her, and we took off our clothes and went to bed. As soon as she was
asleep we got up again, redressed, and here we are with a thousand
apologies for being so late.”
This sounds half incredible; but there is a touch of nature in the
mother’s happy indifference to the comfort of her friends, as compared
with the whims of her offspring, that closely appeals to certain past
experiences of our own. It is all very well for an Englishman to
stare aghast at such a reversal of the laws of nature; we Americans,
who have suffered and held our peace, can afford to smile with some
complacency at the thought of another great nation bending its head
beneath the iron yoke.
To return, however, to the days when children were the ruled, and not
the rulers, we find ourselves face to face with the great question
of education. How smooth and easy are the paths of learning made now
for the little feet that tread them! How rough and steep they were
in bygone times, watered with many tears, and not without a line of
victims, whose weak strength failed them in the upward struggle!
We cannot go back to any period when school life was not fraught
with miseries. Classic writers paint in grim colors the harshness
of the pedagogues who ruled in Greece and Rome. Mediæval authors
tell us more than enough of the passionless severity that swayed the
monastic schools,--a severity which seems to have been the result of
an hereditary tradition rather than of individual caprice, and which
seldom interfered with the mutual affection that existed between master
and scholar. When St. Anselm, the future disciple of Lanfranc, and his
successor in the See of Canterbury, begged as a child of four to be
sent to school, his mother, Ermenberg,--the granddaughter of a king,
and the kinswoman of every crowned prince in Christendom,--resisted
his entreaties as long as she dared, knowing too well the sufferings
in store for him. A few years later she was forced to yield, and these
same sufferings very nearly cost her son his life.
The boy was both studious and docile, and his teacher, fully
recognizing his precocious talents, determined to force them to the
utmost. In order that so active a mind should not for a moment be
permitted to relax its tension, he kept the little scholar a ceaseless
prisoner at his desk. Rest and recreation were alike denied him, while
the utmost rigors of a discipline, of which we can form no adequate
conception, wrung from the child’s over-worked brain an unflinching
attention to his tasks. As a result of this cruel folly, “the brightest
star of the eleventh century had been well-nigh quenched in its
rising.”[1] Mind and body alike yielded beneath the strain; and
Anselm, a broken-down little wreck, was returned to his mother’s hands,
to be slowly nursed back to health and reason. “Ah, me! I have lost
my child!” sighed Ermenberg, when she found that not all that he had
suffered could shake the boy’s determination to return; and the mother
of Guibert de Nogent must have echoed the sentiment when her little
son, his back purple with stripes, looked her in the face, and answered
steadily to her lamentations, “If I die of my whippings, I still mean
to be whipped.”
The step from the monastic schools to Eton and Westminster is a long
one, but the gain not so apparent at first sight as might be supposed.
It is hard for the luxurious Etonian of to-day to realize that for
many years his predecessors suffered enough from cold, hunger, and
barbarous ill-treatment to make life a burden on their hands. The
system, while it hardened some into the desired manliness, must have
killed many whose feebler constitutions could ill support its rigor.
Even as late as 1834, we are told by one who had ample opportunity
to study the subject carefully that “the inmates of a workhouse or a
jail were better fed and lodged than were the scholars of Eton. Boys
whose parents could not pay for a private room underwent privations
that might have broken down a cabin-boy, and would be thought inhuman
if inflicted on a galley-slave.” Nor is this sentiment as exaggerated
as it sounds. To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep
their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the
“children’s pump” for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until
nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and
beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell
without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be
starved, frozen, and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions
of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from
princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost.
Moreover, the picture of one public school is in all essential
particulars the picture of the rest. The miseries might vary somewhat,
but their bulk remained the same. At Westminster the younger boys, hard
pushed by hunger, gladly received the broken victuals left from the
table of the senior election, and tried to supplement their scanty fare
with strange and mysterious concoctions, whose unsavory details have
been handed down among the melancholy traditions of the past.
In 1847 a young brother of Lord Mansfield being very ill at school,
his mother came to visit him. There was but one chair in the room,
upon which the poor invalid was reclining; but his companion, seeing
the dilemma, immediately arose, and with true boyish politeness
offered Lady Mansfield the coal-scuttle, on which he himself had been
sitting. At Winchester, Sydney Smith suffered “many years of misery
and starvation,” while his younger brother, Courtenay, twice ran away,
in the vain effort to escape his wretchedness. “There was never enough
provided of even the coarsest food for the whole school,” writes Lady
Holland; “and the little boys were of course left to fare as well
as they could. Even in his old age my father used to shudder at the
recollections of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of
the misery of the years he spent there. The whole system, he affirmed,
was one of abuse, neglect, and vice.”
In the matter of discipline there was no shadow of choice anywhere.
Capricious cruelty ruled under every scholastic roof. On the one
side, we encounter Dean Colet, of St. Paul’s, whom Erasmus reported
as “delighting in children in a Christian spirit;” which meant that
he never wearied of seeing them suffer, believing that the more they
endured as boys, the more worthy they would grow in manhood. On the
other, we are confronted by the still more awful ghost of Dr. Keate,
who could and did flog eighty boys in succession without a pause; and
who, being given the confirmation list by mistake for the punishment
list, insisted on flogging every one of the catechumens, as a good
preparation for receiving the sacrament. Sir Francis Doyle, almost the
only apologist who has so far ventured to appear in behalf of this
fiery little despot, once remarked to Lord Blachford that Keate did
not much mind a boy’s lying to him. “What he hated was a monotony of
excuses.” “Mind your lying to him!” retorted Lord Blachford, with a
keen recollection of his own juvenile experiences; “why he exacted it
as a token of respect.”
If, sick of the brutality of the schools, we seek those rare cases
in which a home education was substituted, we are generally rewarded
by finding the comforts greater and the cramming worse. It is simply
impossible for a pedagogue to try and wring from a hundred brains the
excess of work which may, under clever treatment, be extracted from
one; and so the Eton boys, with all their manifold miseries, were at
least spared the peculiar experiments which were too often tried upon
solitary scholars. Nowadays anxious parents and guardians seem to labor
under an ill-founded apprehension that their children are going to hurt
themselves by over-application to their books, and we hear a great deal
about the expedience of restraining this inordinate zeal. But a few
generations back such comfortable theories had yet to be evolved, and
the plain duty of a teacher was to goad the student on to every effort
in his power.
Perhaps the two most striking instances of home training that have been
given to the world are those of John Stuart Mill and Giacomo Leopardi;
the principal difference being that, while the English boy was crammed
scientifically by his father, the Italian poet was permitted to
relentlessly cram himself. In both cases we see the same melancholy,
blighted childhood; the same cold indifference to the mother, as to
one who had no part or parcel in their lives; the same joyless routine
of labor; the same unboyish gravity and precocious intelligence. Mill
studied Greek at three, Latin at eight, the Organon at eleven, and Adam
Smith at thirteen. Leopardi at ten was well acquainted with most Latin
authors, and undertook alone and unaided the study of Greek, perfecting
himself in that language before he was fourteen. Mill’s sole recreation
was to walk with his father, narrating to him the substance of his
last day’s reading. Leopardi, being forbidden to go about Recanati
without his tutor, acquiesced with pathetic resignation, and ceased to
wander outside the garden gates. Mill had all boyish enthusiasm and
healthy partisanship crushed out of him by his father’s pitiless logic.
Leopardi’s love for his country burned like a smothered flame, and
added one more to the pangs that eat out his soul in silence. His was
truly a wonderful intellect; and whereas the English lad was merely
forced by training into a precocity foreign to his nature, and which,
according to Mr. Bain, failed to produce any great show of juvenile
scholarship, the Italian boy fed on books with a resistless and craving
appetite, his mind growing warped and morbid as his enfeebled body
sank more and more under the unwholesome strain. In the long lists
of despotically reared children there is no sadder sight than this
undisciplined, eager, impetuous soul, burdened alike with physical and
moral weakness, meeting tyrannical authority with a show of insincere
submission, and laying up in his lonely infancy the seeds of a sorrow
which was to find expression in the key-note of his work, Life is Only
Fit to be Despised.
Between the severe mental training of boys and the education thought
fit and proper for girls, there was throughout the eighteenth century
a broad and purposeless chasm. Before that time, and after it,
too, the majority of women were happily ignorant of many subjects
which every school-girl of to-day aspires to handle; but during the
reigns of Queen Anne and the first three Georges, this ignorance
was considered an essential charm of their sex, and was displayed
with a pretty ostentation that sufficiently proves its value. Such
striking exceptions as Madame de Staël, Mrs. Montagu, and Anne Damer
were not wanting to give points of light to the picture; but they
hardly represent the real womanhood of their time. Femininity was then
based upon shallowness, and girls were solemnly warned not to try
and ape the acquirements of men, but to keep themselves rigorously
within their own ascertained limits. We find a famous school-teacher,
under whose fostering care many a court belle was trained for social
triumphs, laying down the law on this subject with no uncertain hand,
and definitely placing women in their proper station. “Had a _third
order_ been necessary,” she writes naively, “doubtless one would have
been created, a _midway_ kind of being.” In default, however, of this
recognized _via media_, she deprecates all impious attempts to bridge
over the chasm between the two sexes; and “accounts it a misfortune
for a female to be learned, a genius, or in any way a prodigy, as it
removes her from her natural sphere.”
“Those were days,” says a writer in Blackwood, “when superficial
teaching was thought the proper teaching for girls; when every science
had its feminine language, as Hindu ladies talk with a difference
and with softer terminations than their lords: as The Young Ladies’
Geography, which is to be read instead of novels; A Young Ladies’ Guide
to Astronomy; The Use of the Globes for Girls’ Schools; and the Ladies’
Polite Letter-Writer.” What was really necessary for a girl was to
learn how to knit, to dance, to curtsy, and to carve; the last-named
accomplishment being one of her exclusive privileges. Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu received lessons from a professional carving-master, who taught
her the art scientifically; and during her father’s grand dinners her
labors were often so exhausting that translating the Enchiridion must
have seemed by comparison a light and easy task. Indeed, after that
brilliant baby entrance into the Kitcat Club, very little that was
pleasant fell to Lady Mary’s share; and years later she recalls the
dreary memories of her youth in a letter written to her sister, Lady
Mar. “Don’t you remember,” she asks, pathetically, “how miserable we
were in the little parlor at Thoresby?”
Her own education she always protested was of the worst and flimsiest
character, and her girlish scorn at the restraints that cramped and
fettered her is expressed vigorously enough in the well-known letter
to Bishop Burnet. It was considered almost criminal, she complains,
to improve her reason, or even to fancy she had any. To be learned
was to be held up to universal ridicule, and the only line of conduct
open to her was to play the fool in concert with other women of
quality, “whose birth and leisure merely serve to make them the most
useless and worthless part of creation.” Yet viewed alongside of her
contemporaries, Lady Mary’s advantages were really quite unusual. She
had some little guidance in her studies, with no particular opposition
to overcome, and tolerance was as much at any time as a thoughtful
girl could hope for. Nearly a century later we find little Mary
Fairfax--afterwards Mrs. Somerville, and the most learned woman in
England--being taught how to sew, to read her Bible, and to learn the
Shorter Catechism; all else being considered superfluous for a female.
Moreover, the child’s early application to her books was regarded with
great disfavor by her relatives, who plainly thought that no good was
likely to come of it. “I wonder,” said her rigid aunt to Lady Fairfax,
“that you let Mary waste her time in reading!”
“You cannot hammer a girl into anything,” says Ruskin, who has
constituted himself both champion and mentor of the sex; and perhaps
this was the reason that so many of these rigorously drilled and
kept-down girls blossomed perversely into brilliant and scholarly
women. Nevertheless, it is comforting to turn back for a moment, and
see what Holland, in the seventeenth century, could do for her clever
children. Mr. Gosse has shown us a charming picture of the three
daughters of Roemer Visscher, the poetess Tesselschade and her less
famous sisters,--three little girls, whose healthy mental and physical
training was happily free from either narrow contraction or hot-house
pressure. “All of them,” writes Ernestus Brink, “were practiced in
very sweet accomplishments. They could play music, paint, write, and
engrave on glass, make poems, cut emblems, embroider all manner of
fabrics, and swim well; which last thing they had learned in their
father’s garden, where there was a canal with water, outside the city.”
What wonder that these little maidens, with skilled fingers, and clear
heads, and vigorous bodies, grew into three keen-witted and charming
women, around whom we find grouped that rich array of talent which
suddenly raised Holland to a unique literary distinction! What wonder
that their influence, alike refining and strengthening, was felt on
every hand, and was repaid with universal gratitude and love!
There is a story told of Professor Wilson, that one day, listening to
a lecture on education by Dr. Whately, he grew manifestly impatient at
the rules laid down, and finally slipped out of the room, exclaiming
irately to a friend who followed him, “I always thought God Almighty
made man, but _he_ says it was the schoolmaster.”
In like manner many of us have wondered from time to time whether
children are made of such ductile material, and can be as readily
moulded to our wishes, as educators would have us believe. If it be
true that nature counts for nothing and training for everything, then
what a gap between the boys and girls of two hundred years ago and
the boys and girls we know to-day! The rigid bands that once bound
the young to decorum have dwindled to a silver thread that snaps
under every restive movement. To have “perfectly natural” children
seems to be the outspoken ambition of parents, who have succeeded in
retrograding their offspring from artificial civilization to that pure
and wholesome savagery which is too plainly their ideal. “It is assumed
nowadays,” declares an angry critic, “that children have come into the
world to make a noise; and it is the part of every good parent to put
up with it, and to make all household arrangements with a view to their
sole pleasure and convenience.”
That the children brought up under this relaxed discipline acquire
certain merits and charms of their own is an easily acknowledged fact.
We are not now alluding to those spoiled and over-indulged little
people who are the recognized scourges of humanity, but merely to the
boys and girls who have been allowed from infancy that large degree
of freedom which is deemed expedient for enlightened nurseries, and
who regulate their own conduct on the vast majority of occasions. They
are as a rule light-hearted, truthful, affectionate, and occasionally
amusing; but it cannot be denied that they lack that nicety of breeding
which was at one time the distinguishing mark of children of the upper
classes, and which was in a great measure born of the restraints that
surrounded them. The faculty of sitting still without fidgeting, of
walking without rushing, and of speaking without screaming can be
acquired only under tuition; but it is worth some little trouble to
attain. When Sydney Smith remarked that the children of rank were
generally so much better bred than the children of the middle classes,
he recognized the greater need for self-restraint that entered into
their lives. They may have been less natural, perhaps, but they were
infinitely more pleasing to his fastidious eyes; and the unconscious
grace which he admired was merely the reflection of the universal
courtesy that surrounded them. Nor is this all. “The necessity of
self-repression,” says a recent writer in Blackwood, “makes room for
thought, which those children miss who have no formalities to observe,
no customs to respect, who blurt out every irrelevance, who interpose
at will with question and opinion as it enters the brain. Children
don’t learn to talk by chattering to one another, and saying what comes
uppermost. Mere listening with intelligence involves an exercise of
mental speech, and observant silence opens the pores of the mind as
impatient demands for explanation never do.”
This is true, inasmuch as it is not the child who is encouraged to
talk continually who in the end learns how to arrange and express his
ideas. Nor does the fretful desire to be told at once what everything
means imply the active mind which parents so fondly suppose; but rather
a languid percipience, unable to decipher the simplest causes for
itself. Yet where shall we turn to look for the “observant silence,”
so highly recommended? The young people who observed and were silent
have passed away,--little John Ruskin being assuredly the last of the
species,--and their places are filled by those to whom observation
and silence are alike unknown. This is the children’s age, and all
things are subservient to their wishes. Masses of juvenile literature
are published annually for their amusement; conversation is reduced
steadily to their level while they are present; meals are arranged
to suit their hours, and the dishes thereof to suit their palates;
studies are made simpler and toys more elaborate with each succeeding
year. The hardships they once suffered are now happily ended, the
decorum once exacted is fading rapidly away. We accept the situation
with philosophy, and only now and then, under the pressure of some new
development, are startled into asking ourselves where it is likely to
end.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Life of St. Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury._ By Martin Rule.
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION.
“We in England,” says Mr. Kinglake, “are scarcely sufficiently
conscious of the great debt we owe to the wise and watchful press which
presides over the formation of our opinions, and which brings about
this splendid result, namely, that in matters of belief the humblest
of us are lifted up to the level of the most sagacious; so that really
a simple cornet in the Blues is no more likely to entertain a foolish
belief in ghosts, or witchcraft, or any other supernatural topic, than
the Lord High Chancellor or the leader of the House of Commons.” This
delicate sarcasm, delivered with all the author’s habitual serenity
of mind, is quoted by Mr. Ruskin in his Art of England; assentingly,
indeed, but with a half-concealed dismay that any one could find it
in his heart to be funny upon such a distressing subject. When he,
Mr. Ruskin, hurls his satiric shafts against the spirit of modern
skepticism, the points are touched with caustic, and betray a deep
impatience darkening quickly into wrath. Is it not bad enough that we
ride in steam-cars instead of post-chaises, live amid brick houses
instead of green fields, and pass by some of the “most accomplished
pictures in the world” to stare gaping at the last new machine, with
its network of slow-revolving, wicked-looking wheels? If, in addition
to these too prominent faults, we are going to frown down the old
appealing superstitions, and threaten them, like naughty children, with
the corrective discipline of scientific research, he very properly
turns his back upon us forever, and distinctly says he has no further
message for our ears.
Let us rather, then, approach the subject with the invaluable
humility of Don Bernal Dias del Castillo, that gallant soldier who
followed the fortunes of Cortés into Mexico, and afterwards penned
the Historia Verdadera, an ingenuous narrative of their discoveries,
their hardships, and their many battles. In one of these, it seems,
the blessed Saint Iago appeared in the thickest of the fray, mounted
on a snow-white charger, leading his beloved Spaniards to victory. Now
the _conquestador_ freely admits that he himself did not behold the
saint; on the contrary, what he _did_ see in that particular spot was
a cavalier named Francisco de Morla, riding on a chestnut horse. But
does he, on that account, puff himself up with pride, and declare that
his more fortunate comrades were mistaken? By no means! He is as firmly
convinced of the presence of the vision as if it had been apparent to
his eyes, and with admirable modesty lays all the blame upon his own
unworthiness. “Sinner that I am!” he exclaims devoutly, “why should I
have been permitted to behold the blessed apostle?” In the same spirit,
honest Peter Walker strained his sight in vain for a glimpse of the
ghostly armies that crossed the Clyde in the summer of 1686, and,
seeing nothing, was content to believe in them, all the same, on the
testimony of his neighbors.
Sir Walter Scott, who appears to have wasted a good deal of time
in trying to persuade himself that he put no faith in spirits,
confesses quite humbly, in his old age, that “the tendency to belief
in supernatural agencies seems connected with and deduced from the
invaluable conviction of the certainty of a future state.” And beyond
a doubt this tendency was throughout his life the source of many
pleasurable emotions. So much so, in fact, that, according to Mr.
Pater’s theory of happiness, the loss of these emotions, bred in him
from childhood, would have been very inadequately repaid by a gain in
scientific knowledge. If it be the true wisdom to direct our finest
efforts towards multiplying our sensations, and so expanding the brief
interval we call life, then the old unquestioning credulity was a
more powerful motor in human happiness than any sentiment that fills
its ground to-day. In the first place it was closely associated with
certain types of beauty, and beauty is one of the tonics now most
earnestly recommended to our sick souls. “Les fions d’aut fais” were
charming to the very tips of their dewy, trembling wings; the elfin
people, who danced in the forest glades under the white moonbeams,
danced their way without any difficulty right into the hearts of
men; the swan-maiden, who ventured shyly in the fisher’s path, was
easily transformed into a loving wife; even the mara, most suspicious
and terrible of ghostly visitors, has often laid aside her darker
instincts, and developed into a cheerful spouse, with only a tinge of
mystery to make her more attractive in her husband’s eyes. Melusina
combing her golden hair by the bubbling fountain of Lusignan, Undine
playing in the rain-drenched forest, the nixie dancing at the village
feast with her handsome Flemish lad, and the mermaid reluctantly
leaving her watery home to wed the youth who captured her magic
seal-skin, all belong to the sisterhood of beauty, and their images did
good service in raising the vulgar mind from its enforced contemplation
of the sordid troubles, the droning vexations, of life.
Next, the happy believers in the supernatural owed to their simplicity
delicious throbs of fear,--not craven cowardice, but that more refined
and complex feeling, which is of all sensations the most enthralling,
the most elusive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, like all
other treacherous gifts, must be handled with discrimination: a thought
too much, and we are brutalized and degraded; but within certain
limits it enhances all the pleasures of life. When Captain Forsyth
stood behind a tree on a sultry summer morning, and saw the tigress
step softly through the long jungle grass, and the affrighted monkeys
swing chattering overhead, there must have come upon him that sensation
of awe which alone makes courage possible.[2] He knew that his life
hung trembling in the balance, and that all depended upon the first
shot he fired. He respected, as a sane man would, the mighty strength
of his antagonist, her graceful limbs instinct with power, her cruel
eyes blinking in the yellow dawn. And born of the fear, which stirred
but could not conquer him, came the keen transport of the hunter, who
feels that one such supremely heroic moment is worth a year of ordinary
life. Without that dread, not only would the joy be lessened, and the
glad rebound from danger to a sense of safety lost forever, but the
disciplined and manly courage of the English soldier would degenerate
into a mere brutish audacity, hardly above the level of the beast he
slays.
In children, this delicate emotion of fear, growing out of their
dependent condition, gives dignity and meaning to their courage when
they are brave, and a delicious zest to their youthful delinquencies.
Gray, in his chilly and melancholy manhood, years after he has resigned
himself to never again being “either dirty or amused” as long as he
lives, goes back like a flash to the unlawful delight of a schoolboy’s
stolen freedom:--
“Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.”
And who that has ever watched a party of children, listening with
bright eyes and parted lips to some weird, uncanny legend,--like that
group of little girls for instance, in Mr. Charles Gregory’s picture
Tales and Wonders,--can doubt for a moment the “fearful joy” that
terror lends them? Nowadays, it is true, their youthful ears are but
too well guarded from such indiscretions until they are old enough to
scoff at all fantastic folly, and the age at which they learn to scoff
is one of the most astonishing things about our modern progress. They
have ceased to read fairy stories, because they no longer believe in
fairies; they find Hans Andersen silly, and the Arabian Nights stupid;
and the very babies, “skeptics in long-coats,” scorn you openly if you
venture to hint at Santa Claus. “What did Kriss Kringle bring you this
Christmas?” I rashly asked a tiny mite of a girl; and her answer was as
emphatic as Betsey Prig’s, when, with folded arms and a contemptuous
mien, she let fall the ever memorable words, “I don’t believe there’s
no sich a person.”
Yet the supernatural, provided it be not too horrible, is legitimate
food for a child’s mind, nourishes its imagination, inspires a
healthy awe, and is death to that precocious pedantry which is the
least pleasing trait that children are wont to manifest. While few
are willing to go as far as Mr. Ruskin, who, having himself been
brought up on fairy legends, confesses that his “first impulse would
be to insist upon every story we tell to a child being untrue, and
every scene we paint for it impossible,” yet a fair proportion of the
untrue and the impossible should enter into its education, and it
should be left to the enjoyment of them as long as may be. Those of
us who have been happy enough to believe that salamanders basked in
the fire and mermaids swam in the deeps, that were-wolves roamed in
the forests and witches rode in the storm, are richer by all these
unfading pictures and unforgotten memories than our more scrupulously
reared neighbors. And what if we could give such things the semblance
of reality once more,--could set foot in spirit within the enchanted
forest of Broceliande, and enjoy the tempestuous gusts of fear that
shook the heart-strings of the Breton peasant, as the great trees
drew their mysterious shadows above his head? On either side lurk
shadowy forms of elf and fairy, half hidden by the swelling trunks; the
wind whispers in the heavy boughs, and he hears their low, malicious
laughter; the dry leaves rustle beneath his feet,--he knows their
stealthy steps are close behind; a broken twig falls on his shoulder,
and he starts trembling, for unseen hands have touched him. Around
his neck hang a silver medal of Our Lady and a bit of ash wood given
him by a wise woman, whom many believe a witch; thus is he doubly
guarded from the powers of evil. Beyond the forest lies the open path,
where wife and children stand waiting by the cottage door. He is a
brave man to wander in the gloaming, and if he reaches home there will
be much to tell of all that he has seen, and heard, and felt. Should
he be devoured by wolves, however,--and there is always this prosaic
danger to be apprehended,--then his comrades will relate how he left
them and went alone into the haunted woods, and his sorrowing widow
will know that the fairies have carried him away, or turned him into
stone. And the wise woman, reproached, perhaps, for the impotence of
her charms, will say how with her own aged eyes she has three times
seen Kourigan, Death’s elder brother, flitting before the doomed man,
and knew that his fate was sealed. So while fresh tales of mystery
cluster round his name, and his children breathe them in trembling
whispers by the fireside, their mother will wait hopefully for the
spell to be broken, and the lost given back to her arms; until Pierrot,
the charcoal-burner, persuades her that a stone remains a stone until
the Judgment Day, and that in the mean time his own hut by the kiln is
empty, and he needs a wife.
But superstition, it is claimed, begets cruelty, and cruelty is a
vice now most rigorously frowned down by polite society. Daring
spirits, like Mr. Besant, may still urge its claims upon our reluctant
consideration; Mr. Andrew Lang may pronounce it an essential element of
humor; or a purely speculative genius, like Mr. Pater, may venture to
show how adroitly it can be used as a help to religious sentiment; but
every age has pet vices of its own, and, being singularly intolerant
of those it has discarded, is not inclined to listen to any arguments
in their favor. Superstition burned old women for witches, dotards
for warlocks, and idiots for were-wolves; but in its gentler aspect
it often threw a veil of charity over both man and beast. The Greek
rustic, who found a water-newt wriggling in his gourd, tossed the
little creature back into the stream, remembering that it was the
unfortunate Ascalaphus, whom the wrath of Demeter had consigned to this
loathsome doom. The mediæval housewife, when startled by a gaunt wolf
gazing through her kitchen window, bethought her that this might be her
lost husband, roaming helpless and bewitched, and so gave the starving
creature food.
“O was it war-wolf in the wood?
Or was it mermaid in the sea?
Or was it man, or vile woman,
My ain true love, that misshaped thee?”
The West Indian negress still bestows chicken-soup instead of scalding
water on the invading army of black ants, believing that if kindly
treated they will show their gratitude in the only way that ants can
manifest it,--by taking their departure.
Granted that in these acts of gentleness there are traces of fear and
self-consideration; but who shall say that all our good deeds are not
built up on some such trestle-work of foibles? “La vertu n’iroit pas
si loin, si la vanité ne lui tenoit pas compagnie.” And what universal
politeness has been fostered by the terror that superstition breeds,
what delicate euphemisms containing the very soul of courtesy! Consider
the Greeks, who christened the dread furies “Eumenides,” or “gracious
ones;” the Scotch who warily spoke of the devil as the “good man,”
lest his sharp ears should catch a more unflattering title; the Dyak
who respectfully mentions the small-pox as “the chief;” the East Indian
who calls the tiger “lord” or “grandfather;” and the Laplander, who
gracefully alludes to the white bear as “the fur-clad one,” and then
realize what perfection of breeding was involved in what we are wont to
call ignorant credulity.
Again, in the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that
most comfortable vanity which whispers in our ears that failures are
not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall
upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means
ruin. But before the world had grown so pitilessly logical there was
no lack of excuses for the defeated, and of unflattering comments for
the strong. Did some shrewd Cornish miner open a rich vein of ore, then
it was apparent to his fellow-toilers that the knackers had been at
work, leading him on by their mysterious tapping to this more fruitful
field. But let him proceed warily, for the knacker, like its German
brother, the kobold, is but a capricious sprite, and some day may
beguile him into a mysterious passage or long-forgotten chamber in the
mine, whence he shall never more return. His bones will whiten in their
prison, while his spirit, wandering restlessly among the subterranean
corridors, will be heard on Christmas Eve, hammering wearily away till
the gray dawn brightens in the east. Or did some prosperous farmer save
his crop while his neighbors’ corn was blighted, and raise upon his
small estate more than their broader acres could be forced to yield,
there was no opportunity afforded him for pride or self-congratulation.
Only the witch’s art could bring about such strange results, and the
same sorceries that had aided him had, doubtless, been the ruin of his
friends. He was a lucky man if their indignation went no further than
muttered phrases and averted heads. Does not Pliny tell us the story of
Caius Furius Cresinus, whose heavy crops awoke such mingled anger and
suspicion in his neighbors’ hearts that he was accused in the courts of
conjuring their grain and fruit into his own scanty ground? If a woman
aspired to be neater than her gossips, or to spin more wool than they
were able to display, it was only because the pixies labored for her
at night; turning her wheel briskly in the moonlight, splitting the
wood, and drawing the water, while she drowsed idly in her bed.
“And every night the pixies good
Drive round the wheel with sound subdued,
And leave--in this they never fail--
A silver penny in the pail.”
Even to the clergy this engaging theory brought its consolations.
When the Reverend Lucas Jacobson Debes, pastor of Thorshaven in 1670,
found that his congregation was growing slim, he was not forced,
in bitterness of spirit, to ask himself were his sermons dull, but
promptly laid all the blame upon the _biergen-trold_, the spectres
of the mountains, whom he angrily accused, in a lengthy homily, of
disturbing his flock, and even pushing their discourtesy so far as to
carry them off bodily before his discourse was completed.
Indeed, it is to the clergy that we are indebted for much interesting
information concerning the habits of goblins, witches, and gnomes.
The Reverend Robert Kirke, of Aberfoyle, Perthshire, divided his
literary labors impartially between a translation of the Psalms into
Gaelic verse and an elaborate treatise on the “Subterranean and for the
most part Invisible People, heretofore going under the name of Elves,
Faunes, and Fairies, or the like,” which was printed, with the author’s
name attached, in 1691. Here, unsullied by any taint of skepticism,
we have an array of curious facts that would suggest the closest
intimacy between the rector and the “Invisible People,” who at any rate
concealed nothing from _his_ eyes. He tells us gravely that they marry,
have children, die, and are buried, very much like ordinary mortals;
that they are inveterate thieves, stealing everything, from the milk
in the dairy to the baby lying on its mother’s breast; that they can
fire their elfin arrow-heads so adroitly that the weapon penetrates to
the heart without breaking the skin, and he himself has seen animals
wounded in this manner; that iron in any shape or form is a terror to
them, not for the same reason that Solomon misliked it, but on account
of the proximity of the great iron mines to the place of eternal
punishment; and--strangest of all--that they can read and write, and
have extensive libraries, where light and toyish books alternate with
ponderous volumes on abstruse mystical subjects. Only the Bible may not
be found among them.
How Mr. Kirke acquired all these particulars--whether, like John
Dietrich, he lived in the Elfin Mound and grew wise on elfin wisdom,
or whether he adopted a less laborious and secluded method--does not
transpire. But one thing is certain: he was destined to pay a heavy
price for his unhallowed knowledge. The fairies, justly irritated at
such an open revelation of their secrets, revenged themselves signally
by carrying off the offender, and imprisoning him beneath the dun-shi,
or goblin hill, where he has since had ample opportunity to pursue
his investigations. It is true, his parishioners supposed he had died
of apoplexy, and, under that impression, buried him in Aberfoyle
churchyard; but his successor, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, informs us of the
widespread belief concerning his true fate. An effort was even made
to rescue him from his captivity, but it failed through the neglect
of a kinsman, Grahame of Duchray; and Robert Kirke, like Thomas of
Ercildoune and the three miners of the Kuttenberg, still “drees his
weird” in the enchanted halls of elfland.
When the unfortunate witches of Warbois were condemned to death, on
the testimony of the Throgmorton children, Sir Samuel Cromwell, as
lord of the manor, received forty pounds out of their estate; which
sum he turned into a rent-charge of forty shillings yearly, for the
endowment of an annual lecture on witchcraft, to be preached by a
doctor or bachelor of divinity, of Queen’s College, Cambridge. Thus
he provided for his tenants a good sound church doctrine on this
interesting subject, and we may rest assured that the sermons were
far from quieting their fears, or lulling them into a skeptical
indifference. Indeed, more imposing names than Sir Samuel Cromwell’s
appear in the lists to do battle for cherished superstitions. Did not
the devout and conscientious Baxter firmly believe in the powers of
witches, especially after “hearing their sad confessions;” and was
not the gentle and learned Addison more than half disposed to believe
in them, too? Does not Bacon avow that a “well-regulated” astrology
might become the medium of many beneficial truths; and did not the
scholarly Dominican, Stephen of Lusignan, expand the legend of Melusina
into so noble a history, that the great houses of Luxembourg, Rohan,
and Sassenaye altered their pedigrees, so as to claim descent from
that illustrious nymph? Even the Emperor Henry VII. was as proud of
his fishy ancestress as was Godfrey de Bouillon of his mysterious
grandsire, Helias, the Knight of the Swan, better known to us as the
Lohengrin of Wagner’s opera; while among more modest annals appear the
families of Fantome and Dobie, each bearing a goblin on their crest, in
witness of their claim to some shadowy supernatural kinship.
There is often a marked contrast between the same superstition as
developed in different countries, and in the same elfin folk, who
please or terrify us according to the gay or serious bent of their
mortal interpreters. While the Keltic ourisk is bright and friendly,
with a tinge of malice and a strong propensity to blunder, the English
brownie is a more clever and audacious sprite, the Scottish bogle is a
sombre and dangerous acquaintance, and the Dutch Hudikin an ungainly
counterpart of Puck, with hardly a redeeming quality, save a lumbering
fashion of telling the truth when it is least expected. It was Hudikin
who foretold the murder of James I. of Scotland; though why he should
have left the dikes of Holland for the bleak Highland hills it is hard
to say, more especially as there were murders enough at home to keep
him as busy as Cassandra. So, too, when the English witches rode up the
chimney and through the storm-gusts to their unhallowed meetings, they
apparently confined their attention to the business in hand, having
perhaps enough to occupy them in managing their broomstick steeds.
But when the Scottish hags cried, “Horse and hattock in the devil’s
name!” and rushed fiercely through the tempestuous night, the unlucky
traveler crossed himself and trembled, lest in very wantonness they
aim their magic arrows at his heart. Isobel Gowdie confessed at her
trial to having fired in this manner at the Laird of the Park, as he
rode through a ford; but the influence of the running water turned her
dart aside, and she was soundly cuffed by Bessie Hay, another witch,
for her awkwardness in choosing such an unpropitious moment.[3] In
one respect alone this evil sisterhood were all in harmony. By charms
and spells they revenged themselves terribly on their enemies, and
inflicted malicious injuries on their friends. It was as easy for them
to sink a ship in mid-ocean as to dry the milk in a cow’s udder, or to
make a strong man pine away while his waxen image was consumed inch by
inch on the witch’s smouldering hearth.
This instinctive belief in evil spells is the essence, not of
witchcraft only, but of every form of superstition, from the days of
Thessalian magic to the brutish rites of the Louisiana Voodoo. It has
brought to the scaffold women of gentle blood, like Janet Douglas,
Lady Glamis, and to the stake visionary enthusiasts like Jeanne d’Arc.
It confronts us from every page of history, it stares at us from the
columns of the daily press. It has provided an outlet for fear, hope,
love, and hatred, and a weapon for every passion that stirs the soul of
man. It is equally at home in all parts of the world, and has entered
freely into the religion, the traditions, and the folk-lore of all
nations. Actæon flying as a stag from the pursuit of his own hounds;
Circe’s swinish captives groveling at their troughs; Björn turned into
a bear through the malice of his stepmother, and hunted to death by
his father, King Hring; the Swans of Lir floating mournfully on the
icy waters of the Moyle; the _loup-garou_ lurking in the forests of
Brittany, and the _oborot_ coursing over the Russian steppes; Merlin
sleeping in the gloomy depths of Broceliande, and Raknar buried fifty
fathoms below the coast of Helluland, are alike the victims
“Of woven paces and of waving hands.”
whether the spell be cast by an outraged divinity, or by the cruel hand
of a malignant foe.
In 1857, Mr. Newton discovered at Cnidos fragments of a buried and
ruined chapel, sacred to Demeter and Persephone. In it were three
marble figures of great beauty, some small votive images of baked
earth, several bronze lamps, and a number of thin leaden rolls, pierced
with holes for the convenience of hanging them around the chapel walls.
On these rolls were inscribed the diræ, or spells, devoting some enemy
to the infernal gods, and the motive for the suppliant’s ill-will was
given with great _naïveté_ and earnestness. One woman binds another who
has lured away her lover; a second, the enemy who has accused her of
poisoning her husband; a third, the thief who has stolen her bracelet;
a fourth, the man who has robbed her of a favorite drinking-horn; a
fifth, the acquaintance who has failed to return a borrowed garment;
and so on through a long list of grievances.[4] It is evident this
form of prayer was quite a common occurrence, and, as combining a
religious rite with a comfortable sense of retaliation, must have been
exceptionally soothing to the worshiper’s mind. Persephone was appeased
and their own wrongs atoned for by this simple act of devotion; and
would that it were given to us now to inscribe, and by inscribing doom,
all those who have borrowed and failed to return our books; would
that by scribbling some strong language on a piece of lead we could
avenge the lamentable gaps on our shelves, and send the ghosts of the
wrong-doers howling dismally into the eternal shades of Tartarus.
The saddest thing about these faded superstitions is that the very
men who have studied them most accurately are often least susceptible
to their charms. In their eagerness to trace back every myth to a
common origin, and to prove, with or without reason, that they one
and all arose from the observation of natural phenomena, too many
writers either overlook entirely the beauty and meaning of the tale,
or treat it with a contemptuous indifference very hard to understand.
Mr. Baring-Gould, a most honorable exception to this evil rule, takes
occasion now and then to deal some telling blows at the extravagant
theorists who persist in maintaining that every tradition bears its
significance on its surface, and who, following up their preconceived
opinions, cruelly overtax the credulity of their readers. He himself
has shown conclusively that many Aryan myths are but allegorical
representations of natural forces; but in these cases the connection
is always distinctly traced and easily understood. It is not hard for
any of us to perceive the likeness between the worm Schamir, the hand
of glory, and the lightning, when their peculiar properties are so
much alike; or to behold in the Sleeping Beauty or Thorn-Rose the
ice-bound earth slumbering through the long winter months, until the
sun-god’s kisses win her back to life and warmth. But when we are
asked to believe that William Tell is the storm-cloud, with his arrow
of lightning and his iris bow bent against the sun, which is resting
like a coin or a golden apple on the edge of the horizon, we cannot
but feel, with the author of Curious Myths, that a little too much is
exacted from us. “I must protest,” he says, “against the manner in
which our German friends fasten rapaciously upon every atom of history,
sacred and profane, and demonstrate all heroes to represent the sun;
all villains to be the demons of night or winter; all sticks and spears
and arrows to be the lightning; all cows and sheep and dragons and
swans to be clouds.”
But then it must be remembered that Mr. Baring-Gould is the most
tolerant and catholic of writers, with hardly a hobby he can call his
own. Sympathizing with the sad destruction of William Tell, he casts
a lance in honor of Saint George against Reynolds and Gibbon, and
manifests a lurking weakness for mermaids, divining-rods, and the
Wandering Jew. He is to be congratulated on his early training, for he
assures us he believed, on the testimony of his Devonshire nurse, that
all Cornishmen had tails, until a Cornish bookseller stoutly denied the
imputation, and enlightened his infant mind. He has the rare and happy
faculty of writing upon all mythical subjects with grace, sympathy,
and _vraisemblance_. Even when there can be no question of credulity
either with himself or with his readers, he is yet content to write as
though for the time he believes. Just as Mr. Birrell advises us to lay
aside our moral sense when we begin the memoirs of an attractive scamp,
and to recall it carefully when we have finished, so Mr. Baring-Gould
generously lays aside his enlightened skepticism when he undertakes to
tell us about sirens and were-wolves, and remembers that he is of the
nineteenth century only when his task is done.
This is precisely what Mr. John Fiske is unable or unwilling to
accomplish. He cannot for a moment forget how much better he knows;
and instead of an indulgent smile at the delightful follies of our
ancestors, we detect here and there through his very valuable pages
something unpleasantly like a sneer. “Where the modern calmly taps
his forehead,” explains Mr. Fiske, “and says, ‘Arrested development!’
the terrified ancient made the sign of the cross, and cried,
‘Were-wolf!’”[5] Now a more disagreeable object than the “modern”
tapping his forehead, like Dr. Blimber, and offering a sensible
elucidation of every mystery, it would be hard to find. The ignorant
peasant making his sign of the cross is not only more picturesque,
but he is more companionable,--in books, at least,--and it is of far
greater interest to try to realize how _he_ felt when the specimen
of “arrested development” stole past him in the shadow of the woods.
There is, after all, a mysterious horror about the lame boy,--some
impish changeling of evil parentage, foisted on hell, perhaps, as
Nadir thrust his earth-born baby into heaven,--who every Midsummer
Night and every Christmas Eve summoned the were-wolves to their secret
meeting, whence they rushed ravenously over the German forests. The
girdle of human skin, three finger-breadths wide, which wrought the
transformation; the telltale hairs in the hollow of the hand which
betrayed the wolfish nature; the fatality which doomed one of every
seven sisters to this dreadful enchantment, and the trifling accidents
which brought about the same undesirable result are so many handles
by which we grasp the strange emotions that swayed the mediæval man.
Jacques Roulet and Jean Grenier,[6] as mere maniacs and cannibals, fill
every heart with disgust; but as were-wolves an awful mystery wraps
them round, and the mind is distracted from pity for their victims to
a fascinated consideration of their own tragic doom. A blood-thirsty
idiot is an object that no one cares to think about; but a wolf-fiend,
urged to deeds of violence by an impulse he cannot resist, is one of
those ghastly creations that the folk-lore of every country has placed
sharply and persistently before our startled eyes. Yet surely there
is a touch of comedy in the story told by Van Hahn, of an unlucky
freemason, who, having divulged the secrets of his order, was pursued
across the Pyrenees by the master of his lodge in the form of a
were-wolf, and escaped only by taking refuge in an empty cottage, and
hiding under the bed.
“To us who are nourished from childhood,” says Mr. Fiske again, “on
the truths revealed by science, the sky is known to be merely an
optical appearance, due to the partial absorption of the solar rays
in passing through a thick stratum of atmospheric air; the clouds are
known to be large masses of watery vapor, which descend in rain-drops
when sufficiently condensed; and the lightning is known to be a flash
of light accompanying an electric discharge.” But the blue sky-sea of
Aryan folk-lore, in which the cloud-flakes floated as stately swans,
drew many an eye to the contemplation of its loveliness, and touched
many a heart with the sacred charm of beauty. On that mysterious sea
strange vessels sailed from unknown shores, and once a mighty anchor
was dropped by the sky mariners, and fell right into a little English
graveyard, to the great amazement of the humble congregation just
coming out from church. The sensation of freedom and space afforded by
this conception of the heavens is a delicious contrast to the conceit
of the Persian poet,--
“That inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die;”
or to the Semitic legend, which described the firmament as made of
hammered plate, with little windows for rain,--a device so poor and
barbaric, that we wonder how any man could look up into the melting
blue and admit such a sordid fancy into his soul.
“Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest men,” confesses Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “has mingled with it something which partakes of
insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep
company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind.” Such an
admission from so genial and kindly a source should suffice to put us
all on the defensive. It is not agreeable to be bullied even upon those
matters which are commonly classed as facts; but when we come to the
misty region of dreams and myths and superstitions, let us remember,
with Lamb, that “we do not know the laws of that country,” and with him
generously forbear to “set down our ancestors in the gross for fools.”
We have lost forever the fantasies that enriched them. Not for us are
the pink and white lions that gamboled in the land of Prester John,
nor his onyx floors, imparting courage to all who trod on them. Not for
us the Terrestrial Paradise, with its “Welle of Youthe, whereat thei
that drynken semen alle weys yongly, and lyven withouten sykeness;”[7]
nor the Fortunate Isles beyond the Western Sea, where spring was ever
green; where youths and maidens danced hand in hand on the dewy grass,
where the cows ungrudgingly gave milk enough to fill whole ponds
instead of milking-pails, and where wizards and usurers could never
hope to enter. The doors of these enchanted spots are closed upon us,
and their key, like Excalibur, lies hidden where no hand can grasp it.
“The whole wide world is painted gray on gray,
And Wonderland forever is gone past.”
All we can do is to realize our loss with becoming modesty, and now and
then cast back a wistful glance
“where underneath
The shelter of the quaint kiosk, there sigh
A troup of Fancy’s little China Dolls,
Who dream and dream, with damask round their loins,
And in their hands a golden tulip flower.”
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _The Highlands of Central India._ By Captain James Forsyth.
[3] _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_. By Sir Walter Scott.
[4] _The Myth of Demeter and Persephone._ By Walter Pater.
[5] _Myths and Mythmakers._
[6] _Book of Were-Wolves._ By Baring-Gould.
[7] _Travels of Sir John Mandeville._
WHAT CHILDREN READ.
It is part of the irony of life that our discriminating taste for books
should be built up on the ashes of an extinct enjoyment. We spend a
great deal of our time in learning what literature is good, and a great
deal more in attuning our minds to its reception, rightly convinced
that, by the training of our intellectual faculties, we are unlocking
one of the doors through which sweetness and light may enter. We are
fond of reading, too, and have always maintained with Macaulay that we
would rather be a poor man with books than a great king without, though
luckily for our resolution, and perhaps for his, such a choice has
never yet been offered. Books, we say, are our dearest friends, and so,
with true friendly acuteness, we are prompt to discover their faults,
and take great credit in our ingenuity. But all this time, somewhere
about the house, curled up, may be, in a nursery window, or hidden in
a freezing attic, a child is poring over The Three Musketeers, lost
to any consciousness of his surroundings, incapable of analyzing his
emotions, breathless with mingled fear and exultation over his heroes’
varying fortunes, and drinking in a host of vivid impressions that are
absolutely ineffaceable from his mind. We cannot read in that fashion
any longer, but we only wish we could. Thackeray used to sigh in middle
age over the lost delights of five shillings’ worth of pastry; but
what was the pleasure of eating tarts to the glamour cast over us by
our first romance, to the enchanted hours we spent with Sintram by
the sea-shore, or with Nydia in the darkened streets of Pompeii, or
perhaps--if we were not too carefully watched--with Emily in those
dreadful vaults beneath Udolpho’s walls!
Nor is it fiction only that strongly excites the imagination of a
child. History is not to him what it is to us, a tangle of disputed
facts, doubtful theories, and conflicting evidence. He grasps its
salient points with simple directness, absorbs them into his mind
with tolerable accuracy, and passes judgment on them with enviable
ease. To him, historical characters are at least as real as those of
romance, which they are very far from being to us, and he enters into
their impressions and motives with a facile sympathy which we rarely
feel. Not only does he firmly believe that Marcus Curtius leaped into
the gulf, but he has not yet learned to question the expediency of
the act; and, having never been enlightened by Mr. Grote, the black
broth of Lykurgus is as much a matter of fact to him as the bread and
butter upon his own breakfast table. Sir Walter Scott tells us that
even the dinner-bell--most welcome sound to boyish ears--failed to win
him from his rapt perusal of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry; but
Gibbon, as a lad, found the passage of the Goths over the Danube just
as engrossing, and, stifling the pangs of hunger, preferred to linger
fasting in their company. The great historian’s early love for history
has furnished Mr. Bagehot with one more proof of the fascination of
such records for the youthful mind, and he bids us at the same time
consider from what a firm and tangible standpoint it regards them.
“Youth,” he writes, “has a principle of consolidation. In history,
the whole comes in boyhood; the details later, and in manhood. The
wonderful series going far back to the times of old patriarchs with
their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the
watchful Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of
the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise
of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough, impetuous
Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home,--when did we
learn these? Not yesterday, nor to-day, but long ago, in the first dawn
of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn afterwards are
but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious
facts. Those who begin late learn only these; but the happy first feel
the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.”[8]
If this be true, and the child’s mind be not only singularly alive
to new impressions, but quick to concentrate its knowledge into a
consistent whole, the value and importance of his early reading can
hardly be overestimated. That much anxiety has been felt upon the
subject is proven by the cry of self-congratulation that rises on
every side of us to-day. We are on the right track at last, the press
and the publishers assure us; and with tons of healthy juvenile
literature flooding the markets every year, our American boys and girls
stand fully equipped for the intellectual battles of life. But if we
will consider the matter in a dispassionate and less boastful light, we
shall see that the good accomplished is mainly of a negative character.
By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly
succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad;
yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the
characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged
with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness. These little
volumes, nicely written, nicely printed, and nicely illustrated, are
very useful in their way; but they are powerless to awaken a child’s
imagination, or to stimulate his mental growth. If stories, they
merely introduce him to a phase of life with which he is already
familiar; if historical, they aim at showing him a series of detached
episodes, broken pictures of the mighty whole, shorn of its “mystic
associations,” and stirring within his soul no stronger impulse than
that of a cheaply gratified curiosity.
Not that children’s books are to be neglected or contemned. On the
contrary, they are always helpful, and in the average nursery have
grown to be a recognized necessity. But when supplied with a too lavish
hand, a child is tempted to read nothing else, and his mind becomes
shrunken for lack of a vigorous stimulant to excite and expand it.
“Children,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “derive impulses of a powerful
and important kind from hearing things that they cannot entirely
comprehend. It is a mistake to write down to their understanding. Set
them on the scent, and let them puzzle it out.” Sir Walter himself, be
it observed, in common with most little people of genius, got along
strikingly well without any juvenile literature at all. He shouted the
ballad of Hardyknute, to the great annoyance of his aunt’s visitors,
long before he knew how to read, and listened at his grandmother’s knee
to her stirring tales about Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood,
Jamie Telfer of the fair Dodhead, and a host of border heroes whose
picturesque robberies were the glory of their sober and respectable
descendants. Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat
were explored for his amusement in the dreary winter days. Ramsay’s
Tea-Table Miscellany, a mutilated copy of Josephus, and Pope’s
translation of the Iliad appear to have been his favorites, until, when
about eight years old, a happy chance threw him under the spell of the
two great poets who have swayed most powerfully the pliant imaginations
of the young. “I found,” he writes in his early memoirs, “within my
mother’s dressing-room (where I slept at one time) some odd volumes
of Shakespeare; nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sate
up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment,
until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me it was
time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely
deposited since nine o’clock.” And a little later he adds, “Spenser
I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the
allegory, I considered all the knights, and ladies, and dragons, and
giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and Heaven only knows how
delighted I was to find myself in such society!”
“How much of our poetry,” it has been asked, “owes its start to
Spenser, when the Fairy Queen was a household book, and lay in the
parlor window-seat?” And how many brilliant fancies have emanated
from those same window-seats, which Montaigne so keenly despised?
There, where the smallest child could climb with ease, lay piled up
in a corner, within the reach of his little hands, the few precious
volumes which perhaps comprised the literary wealth of the household.
Those were not days when over-indulgence and a multiplicity of books
robbed reading of its healthy zest. We know that in the window-seat
of Cowley’s mother’s room lay a copy of the Fairy Queen, which to her
little son was a source of unfailing delight, and Pope has recorded
the ecstasy with which, as a lad, he pored over this wonderful poem;
but then neither Cowley nor Pope had the advantage of following Oliver
Optic through the slums of New York, or living with some adventurous
“boy hunters” in the jungles of Central Africa. On the other hand,
there is a delicious account of Bentham, in his early childhood,
climbing to the height of a huge stool, and sitting there night after
night reading Rapin’s history by the light of two candles; a weird
little figure, whose only counterpart in literature is the small John
Ruskin propped up solemnly in his niche, “like an idol,” and hemmed
in from the family reach by the table on which his book reposed. It
is quite evident that Bentham found the mental nutrition he wanted
in Rapin’s rather dreary pages, just as Pope and Cowley found it in
Spenser, Ruskin in the Iliad, and Burns in the marvelous stories
told by that “most ignorant and superstitious old woman,” who made
the poet afraid of his own shadow, and who, as he afterwards freely
acknowledged, fanned within his soul the kindling flame of genius.
Look where we will, we find the author’s future work reflected in the
intellectual pastimes of his childhood. Madame de Genlis, when but six
years old, perused with unflagging interest the ten solid volumes of
Clélie,--a task which would appall the most stout-hearted novel-reader
of to-day. Gibbon turned as instinctively to facts as Scott and Burns
to fiction. Macaulay surely learned from his beloved Æneid the art of
presenting a dubious statement with all the vigorous coloring of truth.
Wordsworth congratulated himself and Coleridge that, as children, they
had ranged at will
“through vales
Rich with indigenous produce, open grounds
Of fancy;”
Coleridge, in his turn, was wont to express his sense of superiority
over those who had not read fairy tales when they were young, and
Charles Lamb, who was plainly of the same way of thinking, wrote to him
hotly on the subject of the “cursed Barbauld crew,” and demanded how he
would ever have become a poet, if, instead of being fed with tales and
old wives’ fables in his infancy, he had been crammed with geography,
natural history, and other useful information. What a picture we have
of Cardinal Newman’s sensitive and flexible mind in these few words
which bear witness to his childish musings! “I used to wish,” he says
in the third chapter of the Apologia, “that the Arabian Nights were
true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers
and talismans.... I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and
all the world a deception, my fellow angels, by a playful device,
concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of
a material world.” Alongside of this poetic revelation may be placed
Cobbett’s sketch of himself: a sturdy country lad of eleven, in a
blue smock and red garters, standing before the bookseller’s shop
in Richmond, with an empty stomach, three pence in his pocket, and
a certain little book called The Tale of a Tub contending with his
hunger for the possession of that last bit of money. In the end, mind
conquered matter: the threepence was invested in the volume, and the
homeless little reader curled himself under a haystack, and forgot all
about his supper in the strange, new pleasure he was enjoying. “The
book was so different,” he writes, “from anything that I had ever read
before, it was something so fresh to my mind, that, though I could not
understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and
produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I
read on till it was dark, without any thought of food or bed. When I
could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down
by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds of Kew Gardens
awakened me in the morning.... I carried that volume about with me
wherever I went; and when I lost it in a box that fell overboard in the
Bay of Fundy, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt at
losing thousands of pounds.”
As for Lamb’s views on the subject of early reading, they are best
expressed in his triumphant vindication of Bridget Elia’s happily
neglected education: “She was tumbled by accident or design into a
spacious closet of good old English books, without much selection
or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome
pasturage. Had I twenty girls they should be brought up exactly in this
fashion.” It is natural that but few parents are anxious to risk so
hazardous an experiment, especially as the training of “incomparable
old maids” is hardly the recognized summit of maternal ambition; but
Bridget Elia at least ran no danger of intellectual starvation, while,
if we pursue a modern school-girl along the track of her self-chosen
reading, we shall be astonished that so much printed matter can yield
so little mental nourishment. She has begun, no doubt, with childish
stories, bright and well-written, probably, but following each other
in such quick succession that none of them have left any distinct
impression on her mind. Books that children read but once are of scant
service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations
and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that
they have become a portion of our thinking selves. At ten or twelve the
little girl aspires to something partly grown-up, to those nondescript
tales which, trembling ever on the brink of sentiment, seem afraid to
risk the plunge; and with her appetite whetted by a course of this
unsatisfying diet, she is soon ripe for a little more excitement and a
great deal more love-making, so graduates into Rhoda Broughton and the
“Duchess,” at which point her intellectual career is closed. She has
no idea, even, of what she has missed in the world of books. She tells
you that she “don’t care for Dickens,” and “can’t get interested in
Scott,” with a placidity that plainly shows she lays the blame for this
state of affairs on the two great masters who have amused and charmed
the world. As for Northanger Abbey, or Emma, she would as soon think
of finding entertainment in Henry Esmond. She has probably never read
a single masterpiece of our language; she has never been moved by a
noble poem, or stirred to the quick by a well-told page of history; she
has never opened the pores of her mind for the reception of a vigorous
thought, or the solution of a mental problem; yet she may be found
daily in the circulating library, and is seldom visible on the street
without a book or two under her arm.
“In the love-novels all the heroines are very desperate,” wrote
little Marjorie Fleming in her diary, nearly eighty years ago, and
added somewhat plaintively, “Isabella will not allow me to speak of
lovers and heroins,”--yearning, as we can see, over the forbidden
topic, and mutable in her spelling, as befits her tender age. But
what books had _she_ read, this bright-eyed, healthy, winsome little
girl,--eight years old when she died,--the favorite companion of
Sir Walter Scott, and his comfort in many a moment of fatigue and
depression? We can follow her path easily enough, thanks to those
delicious, misspelt scrawls in which she has recorded her childish
verdicts. “Thomson is a beautiful author,” she writes at six, “and
Pope, but nothing to Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege.
Macbeth is a pretty composition, but awful one.... The Newgate Calender
is very instructive.” And again, “Tom Jones and Grey’s Elegy in a
country churchyard,” surely never classed together before, “are both
excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men....
Doctor Swift’s works are very funny; I got some of them by heart....
Miss Egward’s [Edgeworth’s] tails are very good, particularly some
that are much adapted for youth, as Laz Lawrance and Tarleton.” Then
with a sudden jump, “I am reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much
interested in the fate of poor poor Emily.... Morehead’s sermons are,
I hear, much praised, but I never read sermons of any kind; but I read
novelettes and my Bible, and I never forget it or my prayers.”
It is apparent that she read a great deal which would now hardly
be considered desirable for little girls, but who can quarrel with
the result? Had the bright young mind been starved on Dotty Dimple
and Little Prudy books, we might have missed the quaintest bit of
autobiography in the English tongue, those few scattered pages which,
with her scraps of verse and tender little letters, were so carefully
preserved by a loving sister after Pet Maidie’s death. Far too young
and innocent to be harmed by Tom Jones or the “funny” Doctor Swift,
we may perhaps doubt whether she had penetrated very deeply into the
Newgate Calendar, notwithstanding a further assertion on her part that
“the history of all the malcontents as ever was hanged is amusing.” But
that she had the “little knolege” she boasted of Shakespeare is proven
by the fact that her recitations from King John affected Scott, to use
his own words, “as nothing else could do.” He would sob outright when
the little creature on his knee repeated, quivering with suppressed
emotion, those heart-breaking words of Constance:--
“For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrong, and therefore full of fears;”
and, knowing the necessity of relaxing a mind so highly wrought, he
took good care that she should not be without healthy childish reading.
We have an amusing picture of her consoling herself with fairy tales,
when exiled, for her restlessness, to the foot of her sister’s bed;
and one of the first copies of Rosamond, and Harry and Lucy found its
way to Marjorie Fleming, with Sir Walter Scott’s name written on the
fly-leaf.
Fairy tales, and Harry and Lucy! But the real, old-fashioned, earnest,
half-sombre fairy tales of our youth have slipped from the hands of
children into those of folk-lore students, who are busy explaining
all their flavor out of them; while as for Miss Edgeworth, the little
people of to-day cannot be persuaded that she is not dull and prosy.
Yet what keen pleasure have her stories given to generations of boys
and girls, who in their time have grown to be clever men and women!
Hear what Miss Thackeray, that loving student of children and of
childish ways, has to record about them. “When I look back,” she
writes, “upon my own youth, I seem to have lived in company with a
delightful host of little play-mates, bright, busy children, whose
cheerful presence remains more vividly in my mind than that of many
of the real little boys and girls who used to appear and disappear
disconnectedly, as children do in childhood, when friendship and
companionship depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up
people. Now and again came little cousins or friends to share our
games, but day by day, constant and unchanging, ever to be relied
upon, smiled our most lovable and friendly companions: simple Susan,
lame Jervas, the dear little merchants, Jem, the widow’s son, with his
arms around old Lightfoot’s neck, the generous Ben, with his whip-cord
and his useful proverb of ‘Waste not, want not,’--all of these were
there in the window corner waiting our pleasure. After Parents’
Assistant, to which familiar words we attached no meaning whatever,
came Popular Tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room
of an apartment in an old house in Paris; and as we opened the books,
lo! creation widened to our view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey,
the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travelers,
governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life were all laid
under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum
nursery corner.”[9]
And have these bright and varied pictures, “these immortal tales,”
as Mr. Matthew Arnold termed them, lost their power to charm, that
they are banished from our modern nursery corners; or is it because
their didactic purpose is too thinly veiled, or--as I have sometimes
fancied--because their authoress took so moderate a view of children’s
functions and importance? If we place Miss Edgeworth’s and Miss
Alcott’s stories side by side, we shall see that the contrast between
them lies not so much in the expected dissimilarity of style and
incident as in the utterly different standpoint from which their
writers regard the aspirations and responsibilities of childhood.
Take, for instance, Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond and Miss Alcott’s Eight
Cousins, both of them books purporting to show the gradual development
of a little girl’s character under kindly and stimulating influences.
Rosamond, who is said to be a portrait of Maria Edgeworth herself,
is from first to last the undisputed heroine of the volume which
bears her name. Laura may be much wiser, Godfrey far more clever; but
neither of them usurps for a moment their sister’s place as the central
figure of the narrative, round whom our interest clings. But when we
come to consider her position in her own family, we find it strangely
insignificant. The foolish, warm-hearted, impetuous little girl is of
importance to the household only through the love they bear her. It is
plain her opinions do not carry much weight, and she is never called
on to act as an especial providence to any one. We do not behold her
winning Godfrey away from his cigar, or Orlando from fast companions,
or correcting anybody’s faults, in fact, except her own, which are
numerous enough, and give her plenty of concern.
Now with Rose, the bright little heroine of Eight Cousins, and of its
sequel A Rose in Bloom, everything is vastly different. She is of the
utmost importance to all the grown-up people in the book, most of
whom, it must be acknowledged, are extremely silly and incapable.
Her aunts set the very highest value upon her society, and receive
it with gratified rapture; while among her male cousins she is from
the first like a missionary in the Feejees. It is she who cures them
of their boyish vices, obtaining in return from their supine mothers
“a vote of thanks, which made her feel as if she had done a service
to her country.” At thirteen she discovers that “girls are made to
take care of boys,” and with dauntless assurance sets about her
self-appointed task. “You boys need somebody to look after you,” she
modestly announces,--most of them are her seniors, by the way, and all
have parents,--“so I’m going to do it; for girls are nice peacemakers,
and know how to manage people.” Naturally, to a young person holding
these advanced views of life, Miss Edgeworth’s limited field of action
seems a very spiritless affair, and we find Rose expressing herself
with characteristic energy on the subject of the purple jar, declaring
that Rosamond’s mother was “regularly mean,” and that she “always
wanted to shake that woman, though she was a model mamma”! As we read
the audacious words, we half expect to see, rising from the mists
of story-book land, the indignant ghost of little English Rosamond,
burning to defend, with all her old impetuosity, the mother whom she
so dearly loved. It is true, she had no sense of a “mission,” this
commonplace but very amusing little girl. She never, like Rose, adopted
a pauper infant, or made friends with a workhouse orphan; she never
vetoed pretty frocks in favor of philanthropy, or announced that she
would “have nothing to do with love until she could prove that she was
something beside a housekeeper and a baby-tender.” In fact, she was
probably taught that love and matrimony and babies were not proper
subjects for discussion in the polite society for which she was so
carefully reared. The hints that are given her now and then on such
matters by no means encourage a free expression of any unconventional
views. “It is particularly amiable in a woman to be ready to yield, and
avoid disputing about trifles,” says Rosamond’s father, who plainly
does not consider his child in the light of a beneficent genius; while,
when she reaches her teens, she is described as being “just at that age
when girls do not join in conversation, but when they sit modestly
silent, and have leisure, if they have sense, to judge of what others
say, and to form by choice, and not by chance, their opinions of what
goes on in that great world into which they have not yet entered.”
And is it really only ninety years since this delicious sentence was
penned in sober earnest, as representing an existing state of things!
There is an antique, musty, long-secluded flavor about it, that would
suggest a monograph copied from an Egyptian tomb with thirty centuries
of dust upon its hoary head. Yet Rosamond, sitting “modestly silent”
under the delusion that grown-up people are worth listening to, can
talk fluently enough when occasion demands it, though at all times her
strength lies rather in her heart than in her head. She represents that
tranquil, unquestioning, unselfish family love, which Miss Edgeworth
could describe so well because she felt it so sincerely. The girl who
had three stepmothers and nineteen brothers and sisters, and managed
to be fond of them all, should be good authority on the subject of
domestic affections; and that warm, happy, loving atmosphere which
charms us in her stories, and which brought tears to Sir Walter
Scott’s eyes when he laid down Simple Susan, is only the reflection of
the cheerful home life she steadfastly helped to brighten.
Her restrictions as a writer are perhaps most felt by those who admire
her most. Her pet virtue--after prudence--is honesty; and yet how
poor a sentiment it becomes under her treatment!--no virtue at all,
in fact, but merely a policy working for its own gain. Take the long
conversation between the little Italian merchants on the respective
merits of integrity and sharpness in their childish traffic. Each
disputant exhausts his wits in trying to prove the superior wisdom
of his own course, but not once does the virtuous Francisco make use
of the only argument which is of any real value,--I do not cheat
because it is not right. There is more to be learned about honesty,
real unselfish, unrequited honesty, in Charles Lamb’s little sketch of
Barbara S---- than in all Miss Edgeworth has written on the subject in
a dozen different tales.
“Taking up one’s cross does not at all mean having ovations at dinner
parties, and being put over everybody else’s head,” says Ruskin,
with visible impatience at the smooth and easy manner in which Miss
Edgeworth persists in grinding the mills of the gods, and distributing
poetical justice to each and every comer. It may be very nice to see
the generous Laura, who gave away her half sovereign, extolled to the
skies by a whole room full of company, “disturbed for the purpose,”
while “poor dear little Rosamond”--he too has a weakness for this small
blunderer--is left in the lurch, without either shoes or jar; but it
is not real generosity that needs so much commendation, and it is not
real life that can be depended on for giving it. Yet Ruskin admits
that Harry and Lucy were his earliest friends, to the extent even of
inspiring him with an ambitious desire to continue their history; and
he cannot say too much in praise of an authoress “whose every page is
so full and so delightful. I can read her over and over again, without
ever tiring. No one brings you into the company of pleasanter or wiser
people; no one tells you more truly how to do right.”[10]
He might have added that no one ever was more moderate in her
exactions. The little people who brighten Miss Edgeworth’s pages are
not expected, like the children in more recent books, to take upon
their shoulders a load of grown-up duties and responsibilities. Life is
simplified for them by an old-fashioned habit of trusting in the wisdom
of their parents; and these parents, instead of being foolish and
wrong-headed, so as to set off more strikingly the child’s sagacious
energy, are apt to be very sensible and kind, and remarkably well
able to take care of themselves and their families. This is the more
refreshing because, after reading a few modern stories, either English
or American, one is troubled with serious doubts as to the moral
usefulness of adults; and we begin to feel that as we approach the age
of Mentor it behooves us to find some wise young Telemachus who will
consent to be our protector and our guide. There is no more charming
writer for the young than Flora Shaw; yet Hector and Phyllis Browne,
and even that group of merry Irish children in Castle Blair, are all
convinced it is their duty to do some difficult or dangerous work in
the interests of humanity, and all are afflicted with a premature
consciousness of social evils.
“The time is out of joint; oh, cursed spite!
That ever I was born to set it right!”
cries Hamlet wearily; but it is at thirty, and not at thirteen, that he
makes this unpleasant discovery.
In religious stories, of which there are many hundreds published every
year, these peculiar views are even more defined, presenting themselves
often in the form of a spiritual contest between highly endowed,
sensitive children and their narrow-minded parents and guardians, who,
of course, are always in the wrong. The clever authoress of Thrown
Together is by no means innocent of this unwholesome tone; but the
chief offender, and one who has had a host of dismal imitators, is
Susan Warner,--Miss Wetherell,--who plainly considered that virtue,
especially in the young, was of no avail unless constantly undergoing
persecution. Her supernaturally righteous little girls, who pin
notes on their fathers’ dressing-tables, requesting them to become
Christians, and who endure the most brutal treatment--at their parents’
hands--rather than sing songs on Sunday evening, are equaled only by
her older heroines, who divide their time impartially between flirting
and praying, between indiscriminate kisses and passionate searching for
light. A Blackwood critic declares that there is more kissing done in
The Old Helmet than in all of Sir Walter Scott’s novels put together,
and utters an energetic protest against the penetrating glances, and
earnest pressing of hands, and brotherly embraces, and the whole vulgar
paraphernalia of pious flirtation, so immeasurably hurtful to the
undisciplined fancy of the young. “They have good reason to expect,”
he growls, “from these pictures of life, that if they are very good,
and very pious, and very busy in doing grown-up work, when they reach
the mature age of sixteen or so, some young gentleman who has been
in love with them all along will declare himself at the very nick of
time; and they may then look to find themselves, all the struggles of
life over, reposing a weary head on his stalwart shoulder.... Mothers,
never in great favor with novelists, are sinking deeper and deeper in
their black books,--there is a positive jealousy of their influence;
while the father in the religious tale, as opposed to the moral or
sentimental, is commonly either a scamp or nowhere. The heroine has,
so to say, to do her work single-handed.”
In some of these stories, moreover, the end justifies the means to
an alarming extent. Girls who steal money from their relatives in
order to go as missionaries among the Indians, and young women who
pretend to sit up with the sick that they may slip off unattended to
hear some inspired preacher in a barn, are not safe companions even
in books; while, if no grave indiscretion be committed, the lesson of
self-righteousness is taught on every page. Not very long ago I had
the pleasure of reading a tale in which the youthful heroine considers
it her mission in life to convert her grandparents; and while there
is nothing to prevent an honest girl from desiring such a thing, the
idea is not a happy one for a narrative, in view of certain homely
old adages irresistibly associated with the notion. “Girls,” wrote
Hannah More, “should be led to distrust their own judgment;” but if
they have the conversion of their grandparents on their hands, how can
they afford to be distrustful? Hannah More is unquestionably out of
date, and so, we fear, is that English humorist who said, “If all the
grown-up people in the world should suddenly fail, what a frightful
thing would society become, reconstructed by boys!” Evidently he had
in mind a land given over to toffy and foot-ball, but he was strangely
mistaken in his notions. Perhaps the carnal little hero of Vice Versâ
might have managed matters in this disgraceful fashion; but with Flora
Shaw’s earnest children at the helm, society would be reconstructed on
a more serious basis than it is already, and Heaven knows this is not
a change of which we stand in need. In fact, if the young people who
live and breathe around us are one third as capable, as strenuous, as
clear-sighted, as independent, as patronizing, and as undeniably our
superiors as their modern counterparts in literature, who can doubt
that the eternal cause of progress would be furthered by the change?
And is it, after all, mere pique which inclines us to Miss Edgeworth’s
ordinary little boys and girls, who, standing half dazed on the
threshold of life, stretch out their hands with childish confidence for
help?
FOOTNOTES:
[8] _Literary Studies_, vol. ii.
[9] _A Book of Sibyls._
[10] _Ethics of the Dust._
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT.
That useful little phrase, “the complexity of modern thought,” has been
so hard worked of late years that it seems like a refinement of cruelty
to add to its obligations. Begotten by the philosophers, born of the
essayists, and put out to nurse among the novel-writers, it has since
been apprenticed to the whole body of scribblers, and drudges away at
every trade in literature. How, asks Vernon Lee, can we expect our
fiction to be amusing, when a psychological and sympathetic interest
has driven away the old hard-hearted spirit of comedy? How, asks Mr.
Pater, can Sebastian Van Stork make up his mind to love and marry and
work like ordinary mortals, when the many-sidedness of life has wrought
in him a perplexed envy of those quiet occupants of the churchyard,
“whose deceasing was so long since over”? How, asks George Eliot,
can Mrs. Pullet weep with uncontrolled emotion over Mrs. Sutton’s
dropsy, when it behooves her not to crush her sleeves or stain her
bonnet-strings? The problem is repeated everywhere, either in mockery
or deadly earnestness, according to the questioner’s disposition, and
the old springs of simple sentiment are drying fast within us. It is
heartless to laugh, it is foolish to cry, it is indiscreet to love,
it is morbid to hate, and it is intolerant to espouse any cause with
enthusiasm.
There was a time, and not so many years ago, when men and women found
no great difficulty in making up their minds on ordinary matters, and
their opinions, if erroneous, were at least succinct and definite.
Nero was then a cruel tyrant, the Duke of Wellington a great soldier,
Sir Walter Scott the first of novelists, and the French Revolution
a villainous piece of business. Now we are equally enlightened and
confused by the keen researches and shifting verdicts with which
historians and critics seek to dispel this comfortable frame of
darkness. Nero, perhaps, had the good of his subjects secretly at
heart when he expressed that benevolent desire to dispatch them all at
a blow, and Robespierre was but a practical philanthropist, carried,
it may be, a little too far by the stimulating influences of the
hour. “We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies of Henry VIII., and
devotional exercises to Cromwell,” observes Mr. Bagehot, in some
perplexity as to where this state of things may find an ending; and he
confesses that in the mean time his own original notions of right and
wrong are growing sadly hazy and uncertain. Moreover, in proportion
as the heavy villains of history assume a chastened and ascetic
appearance, its heroes dwindle perceptibly into the commonplace, and
its heroines are stripped of every alluring grace; while as for the
living men who are controlling the destinies of nations, not even
Macaulay’s ever useful schoolboy is too small and ignorant to refuse
them homage. Yet we read of Scott, in the zenith of his fame, standing
silent and abashed before the Duke of Wellington, unable, and perhaps
unwilling, to shake off the awe that paralyzed his tongue. “The Duke
possesses every one mighty quality of the mind in a higher degree than
any other man either does or has ever done!” exclaimed Sir Walter to
John Ballantyne, who, not being framed for hero-worship, failed to
appreciate his friend’s extraordinary enthusiasm. While we smile at
the sentiment,--knowing, of course, so much better ourselves,--we feel
an envious admiration of the happy man who uttered it.
There is a curious little incident which Mrs. Lockhart used to relate,
in after years, as a proof of her father’s emotional temperament,
and of the reverence with which he regarded all that savored of past
or present greatness. When the long-concealed Scottish regalia were
finally brought to light, and exhibited to the public of Edinburgh,
Scott, who had previously been one of the committee chosen to unlock
the chest, took his daughter to see the royal jewels. She was then
a girl of fifteen, and her nerves had been so wrought upon by all
that she had heard on the subject that, when the lid was opened, she
felt herself growing faint, and withdrew a little from the crowd.
A light-minded young commissioner, to whom the occasion suggested
no solemnity, took up the crown, and made a gesture as if to place
it on the head of a lady standing near, when Sophia Scott heard her
father exclaim passionately, in a voice “something between anger and
despair,” “By G--, no!” The gentleman, much embarrassed, immediately
replaced the diadem, and Sir Walter, turning aside, saw his daughter,
deadly pale, leaning against the door, and led her at once into the
open air. “He never spoke all the way home,” she added, “but every
now and then I felt his arm tremble; and from that time I fancied he
began to treat me more like a woman than a child. I thought he liked me
better, too, than he had ever done before.”
The whole scene, as we look back upon it now, is a quaint illustration
of how far a man’s emotions could carry him, when they were nourished
alike by the peculiarities of his genius and of his education. The
feeling was doubtless an exaggerated one, but it was at least nobler
than the speculative humor with which a careless crowd now calculates
the market value of the crown jewels in the Tower of London. “What
they would bring” was a thought which we may be sure never entered Sir
Walter’s head, as he gazed with sparkling eyes on the modest regalia
of Scotland, and conjured up every stirring drama in which they had
played their part. For him each page of his country’s history was the
subject of close and loving scrutiny. All those Davids, and Williams,
and Malcolms, about whom we have an indistinct notion that they spent
their lives in being bullied by their neighbors and badgered by their
subjects, were to his mind as kingly as Charlemagne on his Throne of
the West; and their crimes and struggles and brief glorious victories
were part of the ineffaceable knowledge of his boyhood. To _feel_
history in this way, to come so close to the world’s actors that our
pulses rise and fall with their vicissitudes, is a better thing, after
all, than the most accurate and reasonable of doubts. I knew two little
English girls who always wore black frocks on the 30th of January,
in honor of the “Royal Martyr,” and tied up their hair with black
ribbons, and tried hard to preserve the decent gravity of demeanor
befitting such a doleful anniversary. The same little girls, it must
be confessed, carried Holmby House to bed with them, and bedewed their
pillows with many tears over the heart-rending descriptions thereof.
What to them were the “outraged liberties of England,” which Mr. Gosse
rather vaguely tells us tore King Charles to pieces? They saw him
standing on the scaffold, a sad and princely figure, and they heard
the frightened sobs that rent the air when the cruel deed was done.
It is not possible for us now to take this picturesque and exclusive
view of one whose shortcomings have been so vigorously raked to
light by indignant disciples of Carlyle; but the child who has ever
cried over any great historic tragedy is richer for the experience,
and stands on higher ground than one whose life is bounded by the
schoolroom walls, or who finds her needful stimulant in the follies of
a precocious flirtation. What a charming picture we have of Eugénie
de Guérin feeding her passionate little soul with vain regrets for
the unfortunate family of Louis XVI. and with sweet infantile plans
for their rescue. “Even as a child,” she writes in her journal, “I
venerated this martyr, I loved this victim whom I heard so much talked
of in my family as the 21st of January drew near. We used to be
taken to the funeral service in the church, and I gazed at the high
catafalque, the melancholy throne of the good king. My astonishment
impressed me with sorrow and indignation. I came away weeping over this
death, and hating the wicked men who had brought it about. How many
hours have I spent devising means for saving Louis, the queen, and the
whole hapless family,--if I only had lived in their day. But after much
calculating and contriving, no promising measure presented itself, and
I was forced, very reluctantly, to leave the prisoners where they were.
My compassion was more especially excited for the beautiful little
Dauphin, the poor child pent up between walls, and unable to play in
freedom. I used to carry him off in fancy, and keep him safely hidden
at Cayla, and Heaven only knows the delight of running about our fields
with a prince.”
Here at least we see the imaginative faculty playing a vigorous and
wholesome part in a child’s mental training. The little solitary French
girl who filled up her lonely hours with such pretty musings as these,
could scarcely fail to attain that rare distinction of mind which all
true critics have been so prompt to recognize and love. It was with
her the natural outgrowth of an intelligence, quickened by sympathy
and fed with delicate emotions. The Dauphin in the Temple, the Princes
in the Tower, Marie Antoinette on the guillotine, and Jeanne d’Arc at
the stake, these are the scenes which have burned their way into many
a youthful heart, and the force of such early impressions can never
be utterly destroyed. A recent essayist, deeply imbued with this good
principle, has assured us that the little maiden who, ninety years
ago, surprised her mother in tears, “because the wicked people had cut
off the French queen’s head,” received from that impression the very
highest kind of education. But this is object-teaching carried to its
extremest limit, and even in these days, when training is recognized
to be of such vital importance, one feels that the death of a queen is
a high price to pay for a little girl’s instruction. It might perhaps
suffice to let her live more freely in the past, and cultivate her
emotions after a less costly and realistic fashion.
On the other hand, Mr. Edgar Saltus, who is nothing if not melancholy,
would fain persuade us that the “gift of tears,” which Swinburne prized
so highly and Mrs. Browning cultivated with such transparent care,
finds its supreme expression in man, only because of man’s greater
capacity for suffering. Yet if it be true that the burden of life grows
heavier for each succeeding generation, it is no less apparent that
we have taught ourselves to stare dry-eyed at its blankness. An old
rabbinical legend says that in Paradise God gave the earth to Adam and
tears to Eve, and it is a cheerless doctrine which tells us now that
both gifts are equal because both are valueless, that the world will
never be any merrier, and that we are all tired of waxing sentimental
over its lights and shadows. But our great-grandfathers, who were
assuredly not a tender-hearted race, and who never troubled their
heads about those modern institutions, wickedly styled by Mr. Lang
“Societies for Badgering the Poor,” cried right heartily over poems,
and novels, and pictures, and plays, and scenery, and everything, in
short, that their great-grandsons would not now consider as worthy of
emotion. Jeffrey the terrible shed tears over the long-drawn pathos of
little Nell, and has been roundly abused by critics ever since for the
extremely bad taste he exhibited. Macaulay, who was seldom disposed
to be sentimental, confesses that he wept over Florence Dombey. Lord
Byron was strongly moved when Scott recited to him his favorite ballad
of Hardyknute; and Sir Walter himself paid the tribute of his tears to
Mrs. Opie’s dismal stories, and Southey’s no less dismal Pilgrimage to
Waterloo. When Marmion was first published, Joanna Baillie undertook to
read it aloud to a little circle of literary friends, and on reaching
those lines which have reference to her own poems,
“When she the bold enchantress came,
With fearless hand, and heart in flame,”
the “uncontrollable emotion” of her hearers forced the fair reader to
break down. In a modern drawing-room this uncontrollable emotion would
probably find expression in such gentle murmurs of congratulation as
“Very pretty and appropriate, I am sure,” or “How awfully nice in Sir
Walter to have put it in that way!”
Turn where we will, however, amid the pages of the past, we see this
precious gift of tears poured out in what seems to us now a spirit of
wanton profusion. Sterne, by his own showing, must have gone through
life like the Walrus, in Through the Looking Glass,
“Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes;”
and we can detect him every now and then peeping slyly out of the
folds, to see what sort of an impression he was making. “I am as weak
as a woman,” he sighs, with conscious satisfaction, “and I beg the
world not to smile, but pity me.” Burns, who at least never cried
for effect, was moved to sudden tears by a pathetic print of a dead
soldier, that hung on Professor Fergusson’s wall. Scott was always
visibly affected by the wild northern scenery that he loved; and
Erskine was discovered in the Cave of Staffa, “weeping like a woman,”
though, in truth, a gloomy, dangerous, slippery, watery cavern is
the last place on earth where a woman would ordinarily stop to be
emotional. She might perhaps cry with Sterne over a dead monk or a
dead donkey,--he has an equal allowance of tears for both,--but once
inside of a cave, her real desire is to get out again as quickly as
possible, with dry skirts and an unbroken neck. It may be, however,
that our degenerate modern impulses afford us no safe clue to those
halcyon days when sentiment was paramount and practical considerations
of little weight; when wet feet and sore throats were not suffered to
intrude their rueful warnings upon the majesty of nature; when ladies,
who lived comfortably and happily with the husbands of their choice,
poured forth impassioned prayers, in the Annual Register, for the boon
of indifference, and poets like Cowper rushed forward to remonstrate
with them for their cruelty.
“Let no low thought suggest the prayer,
Oh! grant, kind Heaven, to me,
Long as I draw ethereal air,
Sweet sensibility.”
wrote the author of The Task, in sober earnestness and sincerity.
“Then oh! ye Fair, if Pity’s ray
E’er taught your snowy breasts to sigh,
Shed o’er my contemplative lay
The tears of sensibility,”
wrote Macaulay as a burlesque on the prevailing spirit of bathos,
and was, I think, unreasonably angry because a number of readers,
his own mother included, failed to see that he was in fun. Yet all
his life this mocking critic cherished in his secret soul of souls a
real affection for those hysterical old romances which had been the
delight of his boyhood, and which were even then rapidly disappearing
before the cold scorn of an enlightened world. Miss Austen, in Sense
and Sensibility, had impaled emotionalism on the fine shafts of her
delicate satire, and Macaulay was Miss Austen’s sworn champion; but
nevertheless he contrived to read and reread Mrs. Meek’s and Mrs.
Cuthbertson’s marvelous stories, until he probably knew them better
than he did Emma or Northanger Abbey. When an old edition of Santa
Sebastiano was sold at auction in India, he secured it at a fabulous
price,--Miss Eden bidding vigorously against him,--and he occupied
his leisure moments in making a careful calculation of the number of
fainting-fits that occur in the course of the five volumes. There are
twenty-seven in all, so he has recorded, of which the heroine alone
comes in for eleven, while seven others are distributed among the male
characters. Mr. Trevelyan has kindly preserved for us the description
of a single catastrophe, and we can no longer wonder at anybody’s
partiality for the tale, when we learn that “one of the sweetest smiles
that ever animated the face of mortal man now diffused itself over the
countenance of Lord St. Orville, as he fell at the feet of Julia in a
death-like swoon.” Mr. Howells would doubtless tell us that this is
not a true and accurate delineation of real life, and that what Lord
St. Orville should have done was to have simply wiped the perspiration
off his forehead, after the unvarnished fashion of Mr. Mavering, in
April Hopes. But Macaulay, who could mop his own brow whenever he felt
so disposed, and who recognized his utter inability to faint with a
sweet smile at a lady’s feet, naturally delighted in Mrs. Cuthbertson’s
singularly accomplished hero. Swooning is now, I fear, sadly out of
date. In society we no longer look upon it as a pleasing evidence
of feminine propriety, and in the modern novel nothing sufficiently
exciting to bring about such a result is ever permitted to happen.
But in the good old impossible stories of the past it formed a very
important element, and some of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines can easily
achieve twenty-seven fainting-fits by their own unaided industry. They
faint at the most inopportune times and under the most exasperating
circumstances: when they are running away from banditti, or hiding
from cruel relatives, or shut up by themselves in gloomy dungeons,
with nobody to look after and resuscitate them. Their trembling limbs
are always refusing to support them just when a little activity is
really necessary for safety, and, though they live in an atmosphere
of horrors, the smallest shock is more than they can endure with
equanimity. In the Sicilian Romance, Julia’s brother, desiring to speak
to her for a minute, knocks gently at her door, whereupon, with the
most unexpected promptness, “she shrieked and fainted;” and as the key
happens to be turned on the inside, he is obliged to wait in the hall
until she slowly regains her consciousness.
Nothing, however, can mar the decorous sentimentality which these
young people exhibit in all their loves and sorrows. Emily the
forlorn “touched the chords of her lute in solemn symphony,” when the
unenviable nature of her surroundings might reasonably have banished
all music from her soul; Theodore paused to bathe Adeline’s hand
with his tears, in a moment of painful uncertainty; and Hippolitus,
who would have scorned to be stabbed like an ordinary mortal,
“received a sword through his body,”--precisely as though it were a
present,--“and, uttering a deep sigh, fell to the ground,” on which,
true to her principles, “Julia shrieked and fainted.” We read of the
Empress Octavia swooning when Virgil recited to her his description
of the death of Marcellus; and we know that Shelley fainted when he
heard Cristabel read; but Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines, though equally
sensitive, are kept too busy with their own disasters to show this
sympathetic interest in literature. Their adventures strike us now
as being, on the whole, more amusing than thrilling; but we should
remember that they were no laughing matter to the readers of fifty
years ago. People did not then object to the interminable length of a
story, and they followed its intricate windings and counter-windings
with a trembling zest which we can only envy. One of the earliest
recollections of my own childhood is a little book depicting the
awful results of Mrs. Radcliffe’s terror-inspiring romances upon
the youthful mind; a well-intentioned work, no doubt, but which
inevitably filled us with a sincere desire to taste for ourselves of
these pernicious horrors. If I found them far less frightful than I
had hoped, the loss was mine, and the fault lay in the matter-of-fact
atmosphere of the modern nursery; for does not the author of the now
forgotten Pursuits of Literature tell us that the Mysteries of Udolpho
is the work of an intellectual giant?--“a mighty magician, bred and
nourished by the Florentine muses in their sacred solitary caverns,
amid the pale shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness
of enchantment.”
That was the way that critics used to write, and nobody dreamed of
laughing at them. When Letitia Elizabeth Landon poured forth her soul
in the most melancholy of verses, all London stopped to listen and to
pity.
“There is no truth in love, whate’er its seeming,
And Heaven itself could scarcely seem more true.
Sadly have I awakened from the dreaming
Whose charmed slumber, false one, was of you,”
wrote this healthy and heart-whole young woman; and Lord Lytton has
left us an amusing account of the sensation that such poems excited.
He and his fellow-students exhausted their ingenuity in romantic
speculations concerning the unknown singer, and inscribed whole reams
of fervid but indifferent stanzas to her honor. “There was always,”
he says, “in the reading-room of the Union, a rush every Saturday
afternoon for the Literary Gazette, and an impatient anxiety to hasten
at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical
letters L. E. L. All of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed
the author. We soon learned that it was a female, and our admiration
was doubled, and our conjectures tripled.” When Francesca Carrara
appeared, it was received with an enthusiasm never manifested for
Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion, and romantic young men and women
reveled in its impassioned melancholy. What a pattering of tear-drops
on every page! The lovely heroine--less mindful of her clothes than
Mrs. Pullet--looks down and marks how the great drops have fallen like
rain upon her bosom. “Alas!” she sighs, “I have cause to weep. I must
weep over my own changefulness, and over the sweetest illusions of my
youth. I feel suddenly grown old. Never more will the flowers seem so
lovely, or the stars so bright. Never more shall I dwell on Erminia’s
deep and enduring love for the unhappy Tancred, and think that I too
could so have loved. Ah! in what now can I believe, when I may not even
trust my own heart?” Here, at least, we have unadulterated sentiment,
with no traces in it of that “mean and jocular life” which Emerson so
deeply scorned, and for which the light-minded readers of to-day have
ventured to express their cheerful and shameless preference.
Emotional literature, reflecting as it does the tastes and habits of
a dead past, should not stand trial alone before the cold eyes of the
mocking present, where there is no sympathy for its weakness and no
clue to its identity. A happy commonplaceness is now acknowledged to
be, next to brevity of life, man’s best inheritance; but in the days
when all the virtues and vices flaunted in gala costume, people were
hardly prepared for that fine simplicity which has grown to be the
crucial test of art. Love, friendship, honor, and courage were as real
then as now, but they asserted themselves in fantastic ways, and with
an ostentation that we are apt to mistake for insincerity. When Mrs.
Katharine Philips founded her famous Society of Friendship, in the
middle of the seventeenth century, she was working earnestly enough
for her particular conception of sweetness and light. It is hard not
to laugh at these men and women of the world addressing each other
solemnly as the “noble Silvander” and the “dazzling Polycrete;” and it
is harder still to believe that the fervent devotion of their verses
represented in any degree the real sentiments of their hearts. But
Orinda, whose indefatigable exertions held the society together, meant
every word she said, and credited the rest with similar veracity.
“Lucasia, whose harmonious state
The Spheres and Muses only imitate,”
is for her but a temperate expression of regard; and we find her
writing to Mrs. Annie Owens--a most unresponsive young Welsh-woman--in
language that would be deemed extravagant in a lover:--
“I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.”
One wonders what portion of her heart the amiable Mr. Philips was
content to occupy.
Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found their
principal amusement in contracting, either with each other or with
men, those highly sentimental friendships which were presumably free
from all dross of earthly passion, and which rested on a shadowy basis
of pure intellectual affinity. Mademoiselle de Scudéry delighted in
portraying this rarefied intercourse between congenial souls, and the
billing and cooing of Platonic turtle-doves fill many pages of her
ponderous romances. Sappho and Phaon, in the Grand Cyrus, “told each
other every particular of their lives,” which must have been a little
tedious at times and altogether unnecessary, inasmuch as we are assured
that “the exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that all those in
Sappho’s mind passed into Phaon’s, and all those in Phaon’s came into
Sappho’s.” Conversation under these circumstances would be apt to lose
its zest for ordinary mortals, who value the power of speech rather as
a disguise than as an interpretation of their real convictions; but
it was not so with this guileless pair. “They understood each other
without words, and saw their whole hearts in each other’s eyes.”
As for the great wave of emotionalism that followed in Rousseau’s
train, it was a pure make-believe, like every other sentiment that
bubbled on the seething surface of French society. Avarice and honor
alone were real. To live like a profligate and to die like a hero were
the two accomplishments common to every grand seigneur in the country.
For the rest, there was a series of fads,--simplicity, benevolence,
philosophy, passion, asceticism; Voltaire one day, Rousseau the next;
Arcadian virtues and court vices jumbled fantastically together; the
cause of the people on every tongue, and the partridges hatching in the
peasant’s corn; Marie Antoinette milking a cow, and the infant Madame
Royale with eighty nurses and attendants; great ladies, with jewels in
their hair, on their bosoms, and on their silken slippers, laboriously
earning a few francs by picking out gold threads from scraps of
tarnished bullion; everybody anxiously asking everybody else, “What
shall we do to be amused?” and the real answer to all uttered long
before by Louis XIII., “Venez, monsieur, allons-nous ennuyer ensemble.”
Day and night are not more different than this sickly hothouse
pressure and the pure emotion that fired Scott’s northern blood, as
he looked on the dark rain-swept hills till his eyes grew bright with
tears. “We sometimes weep to avoid the disgrace of not weeping,” says
Rochefoucauld, who valued at its worth the facile sentimentality of his
countrymen. Could he have lived to witness M. de Latour’s hysterical
transports on finding Rousseau’s signature and a crushed periwinkle
in an old copy of the Imitatio, the great moralist might see that his
bitter truths have in them a pitiless continuity of adjustment, and fit
themselves afresh to every age. What excitation of feeling accompanied
the bloody work of the French Revolutionists! What purity of purpose!
What nobility of language! What grandeur of device! What bottled
moonshine everywhere! The wicked old world was to be born anew, reason
was to triumph over passion; and self-interest, which had ruled men for
six thousand years, was to be suddenly eradicated from their hearts.
When the patriots had finished cutting off everybody else’s head,
then the reign of mutual tenderness would begin; the week--inestimable
privilege!--would hold ten days instead of seven; and Frimaire and
Floréal and Messidor would prove to the listening earth that the very
names of past months had sunk into merited oblivion. Father Faber says
that a sense of humor is a great help in the spiritual life; it is
an absolute necessity in the temporal. Had the Convention possessed
even the faintest perception of the ridiculous, this friendly instinct
would have lowered their sublime heads from the stars, stung them into
practical issues, and moderated the absurd delusions of the hour.
At present, however, the new disciples of “earnestness” are trying
hard to persuade us that we are too humorous, and that it is the
spirit of universal mockery which stifles all our nobler and finer
emotions. We would like to believe them, but unhappily it is only to
exceedingly strenuous souls that this lawless fun seems to manifest
itself. The rest of us, searching cheerfully enough, fail to discover
its traces. If we are seldom capable of any sustained enthusiasm,
it is rather because we yawn than because we laugh. Unlike Emerson,
we are glad to be amused, only the task of amusing us grows harder
day by day; and Justin McCarthy’s languid heroine, who declines to
get up in the morning because she has so often been up before, is but
an exhaustive instance of the inconveniences of modern satiety. When
we read of the Oxford students beleaguering the bookshops in excited
crowds for the first copies of Rokeby and Childe Harold, fighting over
the precious volumes, and betting recklessly on their rival sales,
we wonder whether either Lord Tennyson’s or Mr. Browning’s latest
effusions created any such tumult among the undergraduates of to-day,
or wiled away their money from more legitimate subjects of speculation.
Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of Old Mortality,
answered indignantly, “Opinion! We did not one of us go to bed last
night! Nothing slept but my gout.” Yet Rokeby and Childe Harold are
both in sad disgrace with modern critics, and Old Mortality stands
gathering dust upon our bookshelves. Mr. Howells, who ought to know,
tells us that fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was
in the days of our fathers, and that the methods and interests we
have outgrown can never hope to be revived. So if the masterpieces
of the present, the triumphs of learned verse and realistic prose,
fail to lift their readers out of themselves, like the masterpieces
of the past, the fault must be our own. We devote some conscientious
hours to Parleyings with Certain People of Importance, and we are
well pleased, on the whole, to find ourselves in such good company;
but it is a pleasure rich in the temperance that Hamlet loved, and
altogether unlikely to ruffle our composure. We read The Bostonians
and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due appreciation of their minute
perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual hour, and
are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume them. Could Daisy
Miller charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us sleepless until
morning? When St. Pierre finished the manuscript of Paul and Virginia,
he consented to read it to the painter, Joseph Vernet. At first the
solitary listener was loud in his approbation, then more subdued, then
silent altogether. “Soon he ceased to praise; he only wept.” Yet Paul
and Virginia has been pronounced morbid, strained, unreal, unworthy
even of the tears that childhood drops upon its pages. But would Mr.
Millais or Sir Frederick Leighton sit weeping over the delightful
manuscripts of Henry Shorthouse or Mr. Louis Stevenson? Did the last
flicker of genuine emotional enthusiasm die out with George Borrow,
who lived at least a century too late for his own convenience? When
a respectable, gray-haired, middle-aged Englishman takes an innocent
delight in standing bare-headed in the rain, reciting execrable Welsh
verses on every spot where a Welsh bard might, but probably does not,
lie buried, it is small wonder that the “coarse-hearted, sensual,
selfish Saxon”--we quote the writer’s own words--should find the
spectacle more amusing than sublime. But then what supreme satisfaction
Mr. Borrow derived from his own rhapsodies, what conscious superiority
over the careless crowd who found life all too short to study the
beau ties of Iolo Goch or Gwilym ab Ieuan! There is nothing in the
world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania, especially if it be
of that peculiar literary order which insures a broad field and few
competitors. In a passionate devotion to Welsh epics or to Provençal
pastorals, to Roman antiquities or to Gypsy genealogy, to the most
confused epochs of Egyptian history or the most private correspondence
of a dead author,--in one or other of these favorite specialties our
modern students choose to put forth their powers, and display an
astonishing industry and zeal.
There is a story told of a far too cultivated young man, who, after
professing a great love for music, was asked if he enjoyed the opera.
He did not. Oratorios were then more to his taste. He did not care
for them at all. Ballads perhaps pleased him by their simplicity. He
took no interest in them whatever. Church music alone was left. He had
no partiality for even that. “What is it you _do_ like?” asked his
questioner, with despairing persistency; and the answer was vouchsafed
her in a single syllable, “Fugues.” This exclusiveness of spirit may
be detrimental to that broad catholicity on which great minds are
nourished, but it has rare charms for its possessor, and, being within
the reach of all, grows daily in our favor. French poets, like Gautier
and Sully Prudhomme, have been content to strike all their lives upon a
single resonant note, and men of far inferior genius have produced less
perfect work in the same willfully restricted vein. The pressure of the
outside world sorely chafes these unresponsive natures; large issues
paralyze their pens. They turn by instinct from the coarseness, the
ugliness, the realness of life, and sing of it with graceful sadness
and with delicate laughter, as if the whole thing were a pathetic or
a fantastic dream. They are dumb before its riddles and silent in its
uproar, standing apart from the tumult, and letting the impetuous
crowd--“mostly fools,” as Carlyle said--sweep by them unperceived.
Herrick is their prototype, the poet who polished off his little
glittering verses about Julia’s silks and Dianeme’s ear-rings when all
England was dark with civil war. But even this armed neutrality, this
genuine and admirable indifference, cannot always save us from the
rough knocks of a burly and aggressive world. The revolution, which he
ignored, drove Herrick from his peaceful vicarage into the poverty and
gloom of London; the siege of Paris played sad havoc with Gautier’s
artistic tranquillity, and devoured the greater part of his modest
fortune. We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in
the struggle. Vexation is no heavier than _ennui_, and “he who lives
without folly,” says Rochefoucauld, “is hardly so wise as he thinks.”
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM.
There is a growing tendency on the part of literary men to resent what
they are pleased to consider the unwarrantable interference of the
critic. His ministrations have probably never been sincerely gratifying
to their recipients; Marsyas could hardly have enjoyed being flayed by
Apollo, even though he knew his music was bad; and worse, far worse,
than the most caustic severity are the few careless words that dismiss
our cherished aspirations as not even worthy of the rueful dignity
of punishment. But in former days the victim, if he resented such
treatment at all, resented it in the spirit of Lord Byron, who, roused
to a healthy and vigorous wrath,
“expressed his royal views
In language such as gentlemen are seldom known to use,”
and by a comprehensive and impartial attack on all the writers of his
time proved himself both able and willing to handle the weapons that
had wounded him. On the other side, those authors whose defensive
powers were of a less prompt and efficient character ventured no nearer
to a quarrel than--to borrow a simile of George Eliot’s--a water-fowl
that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel
with a boy who throws stones. Southey, who of all men entertained the
most comfortable opinion of his own merits, must have been deeply
angered by the treatment Thalaba and Madoc received from the Edinburgh
Review; yet we cannot see that either he or his admirers looked upon
Jeffrey in any other light than that of a tyrannical but perfectly
legitimate authority. Far nobler victims suffered from the same bitter
sting, and they too nursed their wounds in a decorous silence.
But it is very different to-day, when every injured aspirant to the
Temple of Fame assures himself and a sympathizing public, not that a
particular critic is mistaken in his particular case, which we may
safely take for granted, but that all critics are necessarily wrong
in all cases, through an abnormal development of what the catechism
terms “darkness of the understanding and a propensity to evil.” This
amiable theory was, I think, first advanced by Lord Beaconsfield, who
sorely needed some such emollient for his bruises. In Lothair, when
that truly remarkable artist Mr. Gaston Phœbus, accompanied by his
sister-in-law Miss Euphrosyne Cantacuzene,--Heaven help their unhappy
sponsors!--reveals to his assembled guests the picture he has just
completed, we are told that his air “was elate, and was redeemed from
arrogance only by the intellect of his brow. ‘To-morrow,’ he said,
‘the critics will commence. You know who the critics are? The men who
have failed in literature and art.’” If Lord Beaconsfield thought
to disarm his foes by this ingenious device, he was most signally
mistaken; for while several of the reviews were deferentially hinting
that perhaps the book might not be so very bad as it seemed, Blackwood
stepped alertly to the front, and in a criticism unsurpassed for
caustic wit and merciless raillery held up each feeble extravagance to
the inextinguishable laughter of the world. Even now, when few people
venture upon the palatial dreariness of the novel itself, there is no
better way of insuring a mirthful hour than by re-reading this vigorous
and trenchant satire.
Quite recently two writers, one on either side of the Atlantic, have
echoed with superfluous bitterness their conviction of the total
depravity of the critic. Mr. Edgar Fawcett, in The House on High
Bridge, and Mr. J. R. Rees, in The Pleasures of a Book-Worm, seem
to find the English language painfully inadequate for the forcible
expression of their displeasure. Mr. Fawcett considers all critics
“inconsistent when they are not regrettably ignorant,” and fails to
see any use for them in an enlightened world. “It is marvelous,” he
reflects, “how long we tolerate an absurdity of injustice before
suddenly waking up to it. And what can be a more clear absurdity than
that some one individual caprice, animus, or even honest judgment
should be made to influence the public regarding any new book?”
Moreover, he has discovered that the men and women who write the
reviews are mere “underpaid vendors of opinions,” who earn their
breakfasts and dinners by saying disagreeable things about authors,
“their superiors beyond expression.” But it is only fair to remind
Mr. Fawcett that no particular disgrace is involved in earning one’s
breakfasts and dinners. On the contrary, hunger is a perfectly
legitimate and very valuable incentive to industry. “God help the bear,
if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws!”
wrote Sir Walter Scott, with good-humored contempt, when Lord Byron
accused him of being a mercenary poet; and we probably owe the Vicar
of Wakefield, The Library, and Venice Preserved to their authors’
natural and unavoidable craving for food. Besides, if the reviewers are
underpaid, it is not so much their fault as that of their employers,
and their breakfasts and dinners must be proportionately light. When
Milton received five pounds for Paradise Lost, he was probably the
most underpaid writer in the whole history of literature, yet Mr. Mark
Pattison seems to think that this fact redounds to his especial honor.
But there are even worse things to be learned about the critic
than that he sells his opinions for food. According to Mr. Fawcett
he is distinguished for “real, hysterical, vigilant, unhealthy
sensitiveness,” and nurses this unpleasant feeling to such a degree
that, should an author object to being ill-treated at his hands, the
critic is immediately offended into saying something more abominable
still. In fact, like an uncompromising mother I once knew, who always
punished her children till they looked pleasant, he requires his
smarting victims to smile beneath the rod. Happily there is a cure,
and a very radical one, too, for this painful state of affairs. Mr.
Fawcett proposes that all such offenders should be obliged to buy the
work which they dissect, rightly judging that the book notices would
grow beautifully less under such stringent treatment. Indeed, were it
extended a little further, and all readers obliged to buy the books
they read, the publishers, the sellers, and the reviewers might spare
the time to take a holiday together.
Mr. Rees is quite as severe and much more ungrateful in his strictures;
for, after stating that the misbehavior of the critic is a source of
great amusement to the thoughtful student, he proceeds to chastise that
misbehavior, as though it had never entertained him at all. In his
opinion, the reviewer, being guided exclusively by a set of obsolete
and worthless rules, is necessarily incapable of recognizing genius
under any new development: “He usually is as little fitted to deal with
the tasks he sets himself as a manikin is to growl about the anatomy of
a star, setting forth at the same time his own thoughts as to how it
should be formed.” Vanity is the mainspring of his actions: “He fears
to be thought beneath his author, and so doles out a limited number
of praises and an unlimited quantity of slur.” Like the Welshman, he
strikes in the dark, thus escaping just retribution; and in his stupid
ignorance he seeks to “rein in the wingèd steed,” from having no
conception of its aerial powers.
Now this is a formidable indictment, and some of the charges may be
not without foundation; but if, as too often happens, the “wingèd
steed” is merely a donkey standing ambitiously on its hind legs, who
but the critic can compel it to resume its quadrupedal attitude? If,
as Mr. Walter Bagehot warned us some years ago, “reading is about to
become a series of collisions against aggravated breakers, of beatings
with imaginary surf,” who but the critic can steer us safely through
the storm? Never, in fact, were his duties more sharply defined or
more sorely needed than at present, when the average reader, like the
unfortunate Mr. Boffin, stands bewildered by the Scarers in Print, and
finds life all too short for their elucidation. The self-satisfied who
“know what they prefer,” and read accordingly, are like the enthusiasts
who follow their own consciences without first accurately ascertaining
whither they are being taken. It has been well said that the object of
criticism is simply to clear the air about great work for the benefit
of ordinary people. We only waste our powers when we refuse a guide,
and by forcing our minds hither and thither, like navigators exploring
each new stream while ignorant of its course and current, we squander
in idle researches the time and thought which should send us steadily
forward on our road. Worse still, we vitiate our judgments by perverse
and presumptuous conclusions, and weaken our untrained faculties by
the very methods we hoped would speed their growth. If Mr. Ruskin and
Mr. Matthew Arnold resemble each other in nothing else, they have
both taught earnestly and persistently, through long and useful lives,
the supreme necessity of law, the supreme merit of obedience. Mr.
Arnold preached it with logical coldness, after his fashion, and Mr.
Ruskin with illogical impetuosity, after his; but the lesson remains
practically the same. “All freedom is error,” writes the author of
Queen of the Air, who is at least blessed with the courage of his
convictions. “Every line you lay down is either right or wrong: it may
be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong; the
aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons, and
is what they commonly call ‘free’ execution.... I have hardly patience
to hold my pen and go on writing, as I remember the infinite follies of
modern thought in this matter, centred in the notion that liberty is
good for a man, irrespectively of the use he is likely to make of it.”
But he does go on writing, nevertheless, long after this slender stock
of patience is exhausted, and in his capacity of critic he lays down
Draconian laws which his disciples seem bound to wear as a heavy yoke
around their necks. “Who made Mr. Ruskin a judge or a nursery governess
over us?” asks an irreverent contributor to Macmillan; and why, after
all, should we abstain from reading Darwin, and Grote, and Coleridge,
and Kingsley, and Thackeray, and a host of other writers, who may or
may not be gratifying to our own tastes, because Mr. Ruskin has tried
and found them wanting? It is not the province of a critic to bar us in
a wholesale manner from all authors he does not chance to like, but to
aid us, by his practiced judgment, to extract what is good from every
field, and to trace, as far as in us lies, those varying degrees of
excellence which it is to our advantage to discern. It was in this way
that Mr. Arnold, working with conscientious and dispassionate serenity,
opened our eyes to new beauty, and strengthened us against vicious
influences; he added to our sources of pleasure, he helped us to enjoy
them, and not to recognize his kindly aid would be an ungracious form
of self-deception. If he were occasionally a little puzzling, as in
some parts of Celtic Literature, where the qualities he detected
fall meaningless on our ears, it is a wholesome lesson in humility to
acknowledge our bewilderment. Why should the lines
“What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk this pious morn?”
be the expression of a purely Greek form of thought, “as Greek as a
thing from Homer or Theocritus;” and
“In such a night
Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand,
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage,”
be as purely Celtic? Why should
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows”
be Greek, and
“Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves”
be Celtic? That harmless nondescript, the general reader, be he ever
so anxious for enlightenment, is forced to confess he really does not
know; and if his ignorance be of the complacent order, he adds an
impatient doubt as to whether Mr. Arnold knew either, just as when he
“comes up gasping” from a sudden plunge into Browning, he is prompt to
declare his firm conviction that the poet never had the faintest idea
what he was writing about.
But there is another style of enigma with which critics are wont to
harry and perplex us, and one has need of a “complication-proof mind,”
like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, to see clearly through the tangle. Mr.
Churton Collins, in his bitter attack on Mr. Gosse in the Quarterly
Review, objected vehemently to ever-varying descriptions of a single
theme. He did not think that if Drayton’s Barons’ Wars be a “serene and
lovely poem,” it could well have a “passionate music running through
it,” or possess “irregular force and sudden brilliance of style.”
Perhaps he was right; but there are few critics who can help us to know
and feel a poem like Mr. Gosse, and fewer still who write with such
consummate grace and charm. It is only when we pass from one reviewer
to another that the shifting lights thrown upon an author dazzle and
confuse us. Like the fifty-six different readings of the first line of
the Orlando Furioso, there are countless standpoints from which we are
invited to inspect each and every subject; and unless we follow the
admirable example of Mr. Courthope, who solves a difficulty by gently
saying, “The matter is one not for argument, but for perception,” we
are lost in the mazes of indecision. Thus Mr. Ruskin demonstrates most
beautifully the great superiority of Sir Walter Scott’s heroines over
his heroes, and by the time we settle our minds to this conviction
we find that Mr. Bagehot, that most acute and exhausting of critics,
thinks the heroines inferior in every way, and that Sir Walter was
truly felicitous only in his male characters.
Happily, this is a point on which we should be able to decide for
ourselves without much prompting; but all disputed topics are not
equally intelligible. There is the vexed and vexing question of
romantic and classical, conservative and liberal poetry, about which
Mr. Courthope and Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. Myers have had so much to
say of late, and which is, at best, but a dimly lighted path for the
uninitiated to travel. There is that perpetual problem, Mr. Walt
Whitman, the despair and the stumbling-block of critics, to whose
extraordinary effusions, as the Quarterly Review neatly puts it,
“existing standards cannot be applied with exactness.” There is Emily
Brontë, whose verses we were permitted for years to ignore, and in
whom we are now peremptorily commanded to recognize a true poet.
Miss Mary Robinson, who, in common with most female biographers, is
an enthusiast rather than a critic, never wearies of praising the
“splendid and vigorous movement” of Emily Brontë’s poems, “with their
surplus imagination, their sweeping impressiveness, their instinctive
music and irregular rightness of form.” On the other hand, Mr. Gosse,
while acknowledging in them a very high order of merit, laments that
such burning thoughts should be “concealed for the most part in the
tame and ambling measures dedicated to female verse by the practice of
Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon.” So far, indeed, from recognizing
the “vigorous movement” and “irregular rightness of form” which Miss
Robinson so much admires, he describes A Death Scene, one of the finest
in point of conception, as “clothed in a measure that is like the
livery of a charitable institution.” “There’s allays two ’pinions,”
says Mr. Macey, in Silas Marner; but we cannot help sometimes wishing,
in the cause of perspicuity, that they were not so radically different.
As for the pure absurdities of criticism, they may be culled like
flowers from every branch, and are pleasing curiosities for those
who have a liking for such relics. Were human nature less complacent
in its self-sufficiency, they might even serve as useful warnings to
the impetuous young reviewers of to-day, and so be not without their
salutary influence on literature. Whether the result of ignorance,
or dullness, or bad temper, of national or religious prejudices, or
of mere personal pique, they have boldly challenged the ridicule of
the world, and its amused contempt has pilloried them for all time.
When Voltaire sneered at the Inferno, and thought Hamlet the work of
a drunken savage, he at least made a bid for the approbation of his
countrymen, who, as Schlegel wittily observes, were in the habit of
speaking as though Louis XIV. had put an end to cannibalism in Europe.
But what did Englishmen think when Hume informed them that Shakespeare
was “born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without
instruction from the world or from books;” and that he could not uphold
for any time “a reasonable propriety of thought”? How did they feel
when William Maginn brutally declared that Keats
“the doubly dead
In that he died so young,”
was but a cockney poet, who wrote vulgar indecorums, “probably in
the indulgence of his social propensities”? How did they feel when
the same Maginn called the Adonais “dreary nonsense” and “a wild
waste of words,” and devoted bitter pages to proving that Shelley
was not only undeserving, but “hopeless of poetic reputation”? Yet
surely indignation must have melted into laughter, when this notable
reviewer--who has been recently reprinted as a shining light for the
new generation--added serenely that “a hundred or a hundred thousand
verses might be made, equal to the best in Adonais, without taking
the pen off the paper.” This species of sweeping assertion has been
repeated by critics more than once, to the annoyance of their friends
and the malicious delight of their enemies. Ruskin, who, with all his
gifts, seems cursed with what Mr. Bagehot calls “a mind of contrary
flexure, whose particular bent it is to contradict what those around
them say,” has ventured to tell the world that any head clerk of a
bank could write a better history of Greece than Mr. Grote, if he would
have the vanity to waste his time over it; and I have heard a man of
fair attainments and of sound scholarship contend that there were
twenty living authors who could write plays as fine as Shakespeare’s.
Jeffrey’s extraordinary blunders are too well known to need repetition,
and Christopher North was not without his share of similar mishaps;
Walpole cheerfully sentenced Scandinavian poetry in the bulk as the
horrors of a Runic savage; Madame de Staël objected to the “commonness”
of Miss Austen’s novels; Wordsworth thought Voltaire dull, and Southey
complained that Lamb’s essays lacked “sound religious feeling;” George
Borrow, whose literary tastes were at least as erratic as they were
pronounced, condemned Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock as “tiresome,
trashy, and unprincipled,” and ranked Shakespeare, Pope, Addison,
and the Welsh bard Huw Morris together as “great poets,” apparently
without recognizing any marked difference in their respective claims.
Then there is Taine, who finds Pendennis and Vanity Fair too full of
sermons; Mr. Dudley Warner, who compares the mild and genial humor of
Washington Irving to the acrid vigor of Swift; and Mr. Howells, who,
perhaps in pity for our sense of loss, would fain persuade us that
we could no longer endure either the “mannerisms” of Dickens or the
“confidential attitude” of Thackeray, were we happy enough to see these
great men still in our midst.
Imagine, ye who can, the fiery Hazlitt’s wrath, if he but knew that
in punishment for his youthful admiration of the Nouvelle Héloïse a
close resemblance has been traced by friendly hands between himself
and its author. Think of Lord Byron’s feelings, if he could hear Mr.
Swinburne saying that it was greatly to his--Byron’s--credit that
he knew himself for a third-rate poet! Even though it be the only
thing to his credit that Swinburne has so far discovered, one doubts
whether it would greatly mollify his lordship, or reconcile him to
being classed as a “Bernesque poet,” and the companion of those two
widely different creatures, Southey and Offenbach. Perhaps, indeed, his
lively sense of humor would derive a more positive gratification from
watching his angry critic run amuck through adjectives with frenzied
agility. Such sentences as “the blundering, floundering, lumbering, and
stumbling stanzas of Childe Harold, ... the gasping, ranting, wheezing,
broken-winded verse, ... the hideous absurdities and jolter-headed
jargon,” must surely be less deeply offensive to Lord Byron’s admirers
than to Mr. Swinburne’s. They come as near to describing the noble
beauty of Childe Harold as does Southey’s senseless collection of
words to describing the cataract of Lodore, or any other cataract in
existence; and, since the days when Milton and Salmasius hurled “Latin
billingsgate” at each other’s heads, we have had no stronger argument
in favor of the comeliness of moderation.
“The most part of Mr. Swinburne’s criticism,” hints a recent reviewer,
“is surely very much of a personal matter,--personal, one may say,
in expression as well as in sensation.” He has always a “neat hand
at an epithet,” and the “jolter-headed jargon” of Byron is no finer
in its way than the “fanfaronade and falsetto of Gray.” But even the
charms of alliteration, joined to the fish-wife’s slang which has
recently so tickled the fancy of Punch,[11] cannot wholly replace
that clear-headed serenity which is the true test of a critic’s worth
and the most pleasing expression of his genius. He should have no
visible inclination to praise or blame; it is not his business, as
Mr. Bagehot puts it, to be thankful, and neither is he the queen’s
attorney pleading for conviction. Mr. Matthew Arnold, who considered
that Byron was “the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary
power, which has appeared in our literature since Shakespeare,”
presented his arguments plainly and without the faintest show of
enthusiasm. He did not feel the need of reviling somebody else in order
to emphasize his views, and he did not care to advance opinions without
some satisfactory explanation of their existence. Mr. Courthope may
content himself with saying that a matter is one not for argument, but
for perception; but Mr. Arnold gave a reason for the faith that was
in him. Mere preference on the part of a critic is not a sufficient
sanction for his verdicts, or at least it does not warrant his
imparting them to the public. Swinburne may honestly think four lines
of Wordsworth to be of more value than the whole of Byron, but that
is no reason why we should think so too. When Mr. George Saintsbury
avows a strong personal liking for some favorite authors,--Borrow and
Peacock, for instance,--he modestly states that this fact is not in
itself a convincing proof of their merit; but when Mr. Ernest Myers
says that he would sacrifice the whole of Childe Harold to preserve one
of Macaulay’s Lays, he seems to be offering a really impressive piece
of evidence. The tendency of critics to rush into print with whatever
they chance to think has resulted in readers who naturally believe that
what they think is every bit as good. Macaulay and Walter Savage Landor
are both instances of men whose unusual powers of discernment were
too often dimmed by their prejudices. Macaulay knew that Montgomery’s
poetry was bad, but he failed to see that Fouqué’s prose was good; and
Landor hit right and left, amid friends and foes, like the blinded Ajax
scourging the harmless flocks.
It is quite as amusing and far less painful to turn from the critics’
indiscriminate abuse to their equally indiscriminate praise, and to
read the glowing tributes heaped upon authors whose mediocrity has
barely saved them from oblivion. Compare the universal rapture which
greeted “the majestick numbers of Mr. Cowley” to the indifference which
gave scant welcome to the Hesperides. Mr. Gosse tells us that for half
a century Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda, was an unquestioned
light in English song. “Her name was mentioned with those of Sappho and
Corinna, and language was used without reproach which would have seemed
a little fulsome if addressed to the Muse herself.”
“For, as in angels, we
Do in thy verses see
Both improved sexes eminently meet;
They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet.”
So sang Cowley to this much admired lady; and the Earl of Roscommon, in
some more extravagant and amusing stanzas, asserted it to be his unique
experience that, on meeting a pack of angry wolves in Scythia,
“The magic of Orinda’s name
Not only can their fierceness tame,
But, if that mighty word I once rehearse,
They seem submissively to roar in verse.”
“It is easier to flatter than to praise,” says Jean Paul, but even
flattery is not always the facile work it seems.
Sir Walter Scott, who was strangely disposed to undervalue his own
merit as a poet, preserved the most genuine enthusiasm for the work of
others. When his little daughter was asked by James Ballantyne what she
thought of The Lady of the Lake, she answered with perfect simplicity
that she had not read it. “Papa says there is nothing so bad for young
people as reading bad poetry.” Yet Sir Walter always spoke of Madoc
and Thalaba with a reverence that would seem ludicrous were it not so
frankly sincere. Southey himself could not have admired them more; and
when Jeffrey criticised Madoc with flippant severity in the Edinburgh
Review, we find Scott hastening to the rescue in a letter full of
earnest and soothing praise. “A poem whose merits are of that higher
tone,” he argues, “does not immediately take with the public at large.
It is even possible that during your own life you must be contented
with the applause of the few whom nature has gifted with the rare
taste for discriminating in poetry. But the mere readers of verse must
one day come in, and then Madoc will assume his real place, at the feet
of Milton.”[12] The mere readers of verse, being in no wise responsible
for Milton’s position in literature, have so far put no one at his
feet; nor have they even verified Sir Walter’s judgment when, writing
again to Southey, he says with astonishing candor, “I am not such an
ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry, though I have had,
probably but for a time, the tide of popularity in my favor.” The same
spirit of self-depreciation, rare enough to be attractive, made him
write to Joanna Baillie that, after reading some of her songs, he had
thrust by his own in despair.
But if Sir Walter was an uncertain critic, his views on criticism
were marked by sound and kindly discretion, and his patience under
attack was the result of an evenly balanced mind, conscious of its
own strength, yet too sane to believe itself infallible. He had a
singular fancy for showing his manuscripts to his friends, and it is
quite delicious to see how doubtful and discouraging were their first
comments. Gray, when hard pressed by the “light and genteel” verses
of his companion, Richard West, was not more frugal of his doled-out
praises. But Scott exacted homage neither from his acquaintances nor
from the public. When it came--and it did come very soon in generous
abundance--he basked willingly in the sunshine; but he had no uneasy
vanity to be frightened by the shade. He would have been as sincerely
amused to hear Mr. Borrow call Woodstock “tiresome, trashy, and
unprincipled” as Matthew Arnold used to be when pelted with strong
language by the London newspapers. “I have made a study of the
Corinthian or leading-article style,” wrote the great critic, with
exasperating urbanity; “and I know its exigencies, and that they are no
more to be quarreled with than the law of gravitation.” In fact, the
most hopeless barrier to strife is the steady indifference of a man
who knows he has work to do, and who goes on doing it, irrespective of
anybody’s opinion. Lady Harriet Ashburton, who dearly loved the war of
words, in which she was sure to be a victor, was forced to confess that
where no friction was excited, even her barbed shafts fell harmless.
“It is like talking into a soft surface,” she sighed, with whimsical
despondency; “there is no rebound.”
American critics have the reputation of being more kind-hearted than
discriminating. The struggling young author, unless overweeningly
foolish, has little to fear from their hands; and, if his reputation
be once fairly established, all he chooses to write is received with
a gratitude which seems excessive to the more exacting readers of
France and England. If he be a humorist, we are always alert and
straining to see the fun; if a story-teller, we politely smother
our yawns, and say something about a keen analysis of character, a
marked originality of treatment, or a purely unconventional theme;
if a scholar, no pitfalls are dug for his unwary feet by reviewers
like Mr. Collins. Such virulent and personal attacks we consider
very uncomfortable reading, as in truth they are, and we have small
appetite at any time for a sound kernel beneath a bitter rind. Yet
surely in these days, when young students turn impatiently from the
very fountain-heads of learning, too much stress cannot be laid on
the continuity of literature, and on the absolute importance of the
classics to those who would intelligently explore the treasure-house
of English verse. Moreover, Mr. Collins has aimed a few well-directed
shafts against the ingenious system of mutual admiration, by which
a little coterie of writers, modern Della Cruscans, help each other
into prominence, while an unsuspecting public is made “the willing
dupe of puffers.” This delicate game, which is now conducted with such
well-rewarded skill by a few enterprising players, consists, not so
much in open flattery, though there is plenty of that too, as in the
minute chronicling of every insignificant circumstance of each other’s
daily lives, from the hour at which they breakfast to the amount of
exercise they find conducive to appetite, and the shape and size of
their dining-room tables. We are stifled by the literary gossip which
fills the newspapers and periodicals. Nothing is too trivial, nothing
too irrelevant, to be told; and when, in the midst of an article on
any subject, from grand-dukes to gypsies, a writer gravely stops to
explain that a perfectly valueless remark was made to him on such an
occasion by his friend such a one, whose interesting papers on such a
topic will be well remembered by the readers of such a magazine, we are
forcibly reminded of the late Master of Trinity’s sarcasm as to the
many things that are too unimportant to be forgotten.
People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite
for the black broth of honest criticism. There was a time, now happily
past, when the reviewer’s skill lay simply in the clever detection
of flaws; it was his business in life to find out whatever was weak
or absurd in an author, and to hold it up for the amusement of those
who were not quick enough to see such things for themselves. Now his
functions are of a totally different order, and a great many writers
seem to think it his sole duty to bring them before the public in an
agreeable light, to say something about their books which will be
pleasant for them to read and to pass over in turn to their friends.
If he cannot do this, it is plain he has no sanction to say anything
at all. That the critic has a duty to the public itself is seldom
remembered; that his work is of the utmost importance, and second in
value only to the original conception he analyzes, is a truth few
people take the pains to grasp. Coleridge thought him a mere maggot,
battening upon authors’ brains; yet how often has he helped us to
gain some clear insight into this most shapeless and shadowy of great
men! Wordsworth underrated his utility, yet Wordsworth’s criticisms,
save those upon his own poems, are among the finest we can read; and,
to argue after the fashion of Mr. Myers, the average student would
gladly exchange The Idiot Boy, or Goody Blake and Harry Gill, for
another letter upon Dryden. As a matter of fact, the labors of the true
critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader. It
is natural that poets and novelists should devoutly believe that the
creative faculty alone is of any true service to the world, and that
it cannot rightly be put to trial by those to whom this higher gift is
rigorously denied. But the critical power, though on a distinctly lower
level than the creative, is of inestimable help in its development.
Great work thrives best in a critical atmosphere, and the clear light
thrown upon the past is the surest of guides to the future. When the
standard of criticism is high, when the influence of classical and
foreign literature is understood and appreciated, when slovenly and
ill-digested work is promptly recognized as such, then, and then
only, may we look for the full expansion of a country’s genius. To be
satisfied with less is an amiable weakness rather than an invigorating
stimulant to perfection.
Matthew Arnold’s definition of true criticism is familiar to all
his readers; it is simply “a disinterested endeavor to learn and
propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” But by
disinterestedness he did not mean merely that a critic must have no
distinct design of flattering either his subject or his audience. He
meant that in order to recognize what is really the best a man must
free himself from every form of passion or prejudice, from every fixed
opinion, from every practical consideration. He must not look at things
from an English, or a French, or an American, standpoint. He has no
business with politics or patriotism. These things are excellent
in themselves, and may be allowed to control his actions in other
matters; but when the question at issue is the abstract beauty of a
poem, a painting, a statue, or a piece of architecture, he is expected
to stand apart from his every-day self, and to judge of it by some
higher and universal law. This is a difficult task for most men, who
do not respire easily in such exceedingly rarefied air, and who have
no especial taste for blotting out their individuality. With Macaulay,
for instance, political considerations frankly outweigh all others; he
gives us the good Whig and the wicked Tory on every page, after the
fashion of Hogarth’s idle and industrious apprentices. Mr. Bagehot,
while a far less transparent writer, manifests himself indirectly in
his literary preferences. When we have read his essay on Shakespeare,
we feel pretty sure we know his views on universal suffrage. Mr. Andrew
Lang has indeed objected vehemently to the intrusion of politics
into literature, perhaps because of a squeamish distaste for the
harsh wranglings of the political field. But Mr. Arnold was incapable
of confusing the two ideas. His taste for Celtic poetry and his
attitude towards home rule are both perfectly defined and perfectly
isolated sentiments; just as his intelligent admiration and merciless
condemnation of Heinrich Heine stand side by side, living witnesses
of a mind that held its own balance, losing nothing that was good,
condoning nothing that was evil, as far removed from weak enthusiasm on
the one hand as from frightened depreciation on the other.
It is folly to rail at the critic until we have learned his value; it
is folly to ignore a help which we are not too wise to need. “The best
that is known and thought in the world” does not stand waiting for
admission on our door-steps. Like the happiness of Hesiod, it “abides
very far hence, and the way to it is long and steep and rough.” It is
hard to seek, hard to find, and not easily understood when discovered.
Criticism does not mean a random opinion on the last new novel, though
even the most dismal of light literature comes fairly within its scope.
It means a disinterested endeavor to learn and to teach whatever wisdom
or beauty has been added by every age and every nation to the great
inheritance of mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[11]
“But when poet Swinburne steps into the fray,
And slangs like a fish-wife, what, _what_ can one say?”
[12] Compare Charles Lamb’s letter to Coleridge: “On the whole I expect
Southey one day to rival Milton; I already deem him equal to Cowper,
and superior to all living poets besides.”
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM.
When Mr. Matthew Arnold delivered his lecture on Emerson in this
country, several years ago, it was delightful to see how the settled
melancholy of his audience, who had come for a panegyric and did not
get it, melted into genial applause when the lecturer touched at last
upon the one responsive chord which bound his subject, his hearers,
and himself in a sympathetic harmony,--I mean Emerson’s lifelong,
persistent, and unconquerable optimism. This was perhaps the more
apparent because Mr. Arnold’s addresses were not precisely the kind
with which we Americans are best acquainted; they were singularly
deficient in the oratorical flights that are wont to arouse our
enthusiasm, and in the sudden descents to colloquial anecdote by which
we expect to be amused. For real enjoyment it was advisable to read
them over carefully after they were printed, and the oftener they were
so read the better they repaid perusal; but this not being the point
of view from which ordinary humanity is apt to regard a lecture, it
was with prompt and genuine relief that the audience hailed a personal
appeal to that cheerful, healthy hopefulness of disposition which we
like to be told we possess in common with greater men. It is always
pleasant to hear that happiness is “the due and eternal result of
labor, righteousness, and veracity,” and to have it hinted to us that
we have sane and wholesome minds because we think so; it is pleasanter
still to be assured that the disparaging tone which religion assumes
in relation to this earthly happiness arises from a well-intentioned
desire to wean us from it, and not at all from a clear-sighted
conviction of its feeble worth. When Mr. Arnold recited for our benefit
a cheerless little scrap of would-be pious verse which he had heard
read in a London schoolroom, all about the advantages of dying,--
“For the world at best is a dreary place,
And my life is getting low,”--
we were glad to laugh over such dismal philosophy, and to feel within
ourselves an exhilarating superiority of soul.
But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of
collapsing when full-blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to
melt away in the sunshine of a smile. Mr. Arnold, like Mr. Emerson,
preached the gospel of compensation with much picturesqueness and
beauty; but his arguments would be more convincing if our own
observation and experience did not so mulishly stand in their way.
A recent writer in Cornhill, who ought to be editing a magazine for
Arcady, asserts with charming simplicity that man “finds a positive
satisfaction in putting himself on a level with others, and in
recognizing that he has his just share of life’s enjoyments.” But
suppose that he cannot reach the level of others, or be persuaded
that his share is just? The good things of life are not impartially
divided, like the spaces on a draught-board, and man, who is a covetous
animal, will never be content with a little, while his comrade enjoys
a great deal. Neither does he find the solace that is expected in the
contemplation of the unfortunate who has nothing; for this view of the
matter, besides being a singular plea for the compensation theory,
appeals too coarsely to that root of selfishness which we are none of
us anxious to exhibit. The average fustian-clad man is not too good to
envy his neighbor’s broadcloth, but he _is_ too good to take comfort
in his brother’s nakedness. The sight of it may quicken his gratitude,
but can hardly increase his happiness. Yet what did Mr. Arnold mean
in his poem of Consolation--which is very charming, but not in the
least consoling--save that the joys and sorrows of each hour balance
themselves in a just proportion, and that the lovers’ raptures and the
blind robber’s pain level the eternal scales. It is not a cheering bit
of philosophy, whatever might have been the author’s intention, for the
very existence of suffering darkens the horizon for thoughtful souls.
It would be an insult on the part of the lovers--lovers are odious
things at best--to offer their arrogant bliss as indemnification to the
wretch for his brimming cup of bitterness; but the vision of his seared
eyeballs and sin-laden soul might justly moderate their own expansive
felicity. Sorrow has a claim on all mankind, and when the utmost
that Mr. Arnold could promise for our consolation was that time, the
impartial,
“Brings round to all men
Some undimm’d hours.”
we did not feel that he afforded us any broad ground for
self-complacency.
The same key is struck with more firmness in that strange poem, The
Sick King in Bokhara, where the vizier can find no better remedy for
his master’s troubled mind than by pointing out to him the vast burden
of misery which rests upon the world, and which he is utterly powerless
to avert. It is hardly worth while, so runs the vizier’s argument, for
the king to vex his soul over the sufferings of one poor criminal, whom
his pity could not save, when the same tragic drama is being played
with variations in every quarter of the globe. Behold, thousands are
toiling for hard masters, armies are laying waste the peaceful land,
robbers are harassing the mountain shepherds, and little children are
being carried into captivity.
“The Kaffirs also (whom God curse!)
Vex one another night and day;
There are the lepers, and all sick;
There are the poor, who faint away.
“All these have sorrow and keep still,
Whilst other men make cheer and sing.
Wilt thou have pity on all these?
No, nor on this dead dog, O king!”
Whereupon the sick monarch, who does not seem greatly cheered by this
category, adds in a disconsolate sort of way that he too, albeit envied
of all men, finds his secret burdens hard to bear, and that not even to
him is granted the fulfillment of desire,--
“And what I would, I cannot do.”
Unless the high priests of optimism shall find us some stouter
arguments than these with which to make merry our souls, it is to be
feared that their opponents, who have at least the knack of stating
their cases with pitiless lucidity, will hardly think our buoyancy
worth pricking.
As for that small and compact band who steadfastly refuse to recognize
in “this sad, swift life” any occasion for self-congratulation, they
are not so badly off, in spite of their funereal trappings, as we are
commonly given to suppose. It is only necessary to read a page of
their writings--and few people care to read more--to appreciate how
thoroughly they enjoy the situation, and how, sitting with Hecate in
her cave, they weave delicate thoughts out of their chosen darkness.
They are full of the hopefulness of despair, and confident in the
strength of the world’s weakness. They assume that they not only
represent great fundamental truths, but that these truths are for the
first time being put forth in a concrete shape for the edification and
adherence of mankind. Mr. Edgar Saltus informs us that, while optimism
is as old as humanity, “systematic pessimism” is but a growth of the
last half century, before which transition period we can find only
individual expressions of discontent. Mr. Mallock claims that he is
the first who has ever inquired into the worth of life “in the true
scientific spirit.” But when we come to ask in what systematic or
scientific pessimism differs from the older variety which has found a
home in the hearts of men from the beginning, we do not receive any
very coherent answer. From Mr. Mallock, indeed, we hardly expect any.
It is his province in literature to propose problems which the reader,
after the fashion of The Lady or the Tiger? is permitted to solve
for himself. But does Mr. Saltus really suppose that Schopenhauer
and Hartmann have made much headway in reducing sadness to a science,
that love is in any danger of being supplanted by the “genius of
the species,” or that the “principle of the unconscious” is at all
likely to extinguish our controlling force? What have these two subtle
thinkers said to the world that the world has not practically known
and felt for thousands of years already? Hegesias, three centuries
before Christ, was quite as systematic as Schopenhauer, and his system
begot more definite results; for several of his disciples hanged
themselves out of deference for his teachings, whereas it may be
seriously doubted whether all the persuasive arguments of the Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung have ever made or are likely to make a single
celibate. Marcus Aurelius was as logically convinced of the inherent
worthlessness of life as Dr. Hartmann, and, without any scientific
apparatus whatever, he stamped his views on the face of a whole nation.
We are now anxiously warned by Mr. Saltus not to confound scientific
pessimism with that accidental melancholy which is the result of our
own personal misfortunes; but Leopardi, whose unutterable despair
arose solely from his personal misfortunes, or rather from his moral
inability to cope with them,--for Joubert, who suffered as much, has
left a trail of heavenly light upon his path,--Leopardi alone lays bare
for us the
“Tears that spring and increase
In the barren places of mirth,”
with an appalling accuracy from which we are glad to turn away our
shocked and troubled eyes.
It is a humiliating fact that, notwithstanding our avaricious greed
for novelties, we are forced, when sincere, to confess that “_les
anciens ont tout dit_,” and that it is probable the contending schools
of thought have always held the same relative positions they do
now: optimism glittering in the front ranks as a deservedly popular
favorite; pessimism speaking with a still, persistent voice to those
who, unluckily for themselves, have the leisure and the intelligence
to attend. Schopenhauer hated the Jews with all his heart for being
such stubborn optimists, and it is true that their records bear ample
witness to the strong hold they took on the pleasures and the profits
of the world. But their noblest and clearest voices, Isaias, Jeremias,
Ezekiel, speak a different language; and Solomon, who, it must be
granted, enjoyed a wider experience than most men, renders a cheerless
verdict of vanity and vexation of spirit for “all things that are done
under the sun.” The Egyptians, owing chiefly to their tender solicitude
about their tombs, have taken rank in history as a people enamoured
rather of death than of life; and from the misty flower-gardens of
Buddha have been gathered for centuries the hemlock and nightshade that
adorn the funeral-wreaths of literature.
But the Greeks, the blithe and jocund Greeks, who, as Mr. Arnold justly
observed, ought never to have been either sick or sorry,--to them,
at least, we can turn for that wholesome joy, that rational delight
in mere existence, which we have somehow let slip from our nerveless
grasp. Whether it was because this world gave him so much, such rare
perfection in all material things, or because his own conception of the
world to come promised him so exceedingly little,--for one or both of
these reasons, the average Greek preferred to cling tenaciously to the
good he had, to the hills, and the sea, and the sunshine, rather than to
“Move among shadows, a shadow, and wail by impassable streams;”
and his choice, under the circumstances, is perhaps hardly a matter for
amazement. That a people so richly endowed should be in love with life
seems to us right and natural; that amid their keen realization of its
fullness and beauty we find forever sounded--and not always in a minor
key--the same old notes of weariness and pain is a discouraging item,
when we would like to build up an exhaustive theory of happiness. Far,
far back, in the Arcadian days of Grecian piety and simplicity, the
devout agriculturist Hesiod looked sorrowfully over the golden fields,
searching vainly for a joy that remained ever out of reach. Homer, in a
passage which Mr. Peacock says is nearly always incorrectly translated,
has given us a summary of life which would not put a modern German to
the blush:--
“Jove, from his urns dispensing good and ill,
Gives ill unmixed to some, and good and ill
Mingled to many, good unmixed to none.”
Sophocles says uncompromisingly that man’s happiest fate is not to be
born at all; and that, failing this good fortune, the next best thing
is to die as quickly as possible. Menander expresses the same thought
more sweetly:--
“Whom the gods love die young;”
and Euripides, the most reverent soul ever saddened by the barrenness
of paganism, forces into one bitter line all the bleak hopelessness of
which the Greek tragedy alone is capable:--
“Life is called life, but it is truly pain.”
Even as isolated sentiments, these ever-recurring reflections diminish
perceptibly the sum of a nation’s gayety, and, if we receive the drama
as the mouthpiece of the people, we are inclined to wonder now and then
how they ever could have been cheerful at all. It is easy, on the other
hand, to point to Admetos and Antigone as two standing examples of the
great value the Greeks placed upon life; for the sacrifice of Alkestis
was not in their eyes the sordid bargain it appears in ours, and the
daughter of Œdipus goes to her death with a shrinking reluctance
seemingly out of keeping with her heroic mould. But Admetos, excuse him
as we may, is but a refinement of a common type, old as mankind, and no
great credit to its ranks. He may be found in every page of the world’s
history, from the siege of Jerusalem to the siege of Paris. À Kempis
has transfixed him with sharp scorn in his chapter On the Consideration
of Human Misery, and a burning theatre or a sinking ship betray him,
shorn of poetical disguise, in all his unadorned brutality. But to
find fault with Antigone, the noblest figure in classical literature,
because she manifests a natural dislike for being buried alive is to
carry our ideal of heroism a little beyond reason. Flesh and blood
shrink from the sickening horror that lays its cold hand upon her
heart. She is young, beautiful, and beloved, standing on the threshold
of matrimony, and clinging with womanly tenderness to the sacred joys
that are never to be hers. She is a martyr in a just cause, but without
one ray of that divine ecstasy that sent Christian maidens smiling
to the lions. Beyond a chilly hope that she will not be unwelcome to
her parents, or to the brother she has vainly striven to save from
desecration, Antigone descends
“Into the dreary mansions of the dead,”
uncheered by any throb of expectation. Finally, the manner of her
death is too appalling to be met with stoicism. Juliet, the bravest of
Shakespeare’s heroines, quails before the thought of a few unconscious
hours spent in the darkness of the tomb; and if our more exalted views
demand indifference to such a fate, we must not look to the Greeks, nor
to him who
“Saw life steadily, and saw it whole,”
for the fulfillment of our idle fancy.
Youth, health, beauty, and virtue were to the ancient mind the natural
requisites for happiness; yet even these favors were so far at best
from securing it, that “nature’s most pleasing invention, early death,”
was too often esteemed the rarest gift of all. When Schopenhauer says
of the fourth commandment, “‘Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy
days may be long in the land,’--ah! what a misfortune to hold out as a
reward for duty!” we feel both shocked and repulsed by this deliberate
rejection of what is offered us as a blessing; but it is at least
curious to note that the happy Greeks held much the same opinion. When
the sons of Cydippe--those models of filial devotion--shamed not to
yoke themselves like oxen to the cart, and with strong young arms to
drag their mother to the feast of Hera, the ancient priestess begged
of the dread goddess that she would grant them her best gift; and the
prayer was answered, not with length of days, nor with the regal power
and splendor promised of old to Paris, but with a boon more precious
still than all.
“Whereat the statue from its jeweled eyes
Lightened, and thunder ran from cloud to cloud
In heaven, and the vast company was hushed.
But when they sought for Cleobis, behold,
He lay there still, and by his brother’s side
Lay Biton, smiling through ambrosial curls,
And when the people touched them they were dead.”[13]
It is hard to assert in the face of a narrative like this that the
Greeks valued nothing as much as the mere delight of existence.
As for the favorite theory that Christianity is responsible for
the weakening of earthly happiness, and that her ministers have
systematically disparaged the things of this world in order to
quicken our desire for things eternal, it might suffice to hint that
Christianity is a large word, and represents at present a great many
different phases of thought. Mr. Arnold objected, rationally enough,
to the lugubrious hymns from which the English middle classes are
wont to draw their spiritual refreshment; and Dr. Holmes, it will be
remembered, has spoken quite as strongly in regard to their depressing
influence upon New England households. But Christianity and the modern
hymn-book are by no means synonymous terms, and to claim that the
early church deliberately lowered the scale of human joy is a very
different and a very grave charge, and one which Mr. Pater, in Marius
the Epicurean, has striven valiantly to refute. With what clear and
delicate touches he paints for us the innocent gayety of that new
birth,--a gayety with no dark background, and no heart-breaking limits
of time and space. Compared to it, the sombre and multitudinous rites
of the Romans and the far-famed blitheness of the Greeks seem incurably
narrow and insipid. The Christians of the catacombs were essentially
a cheerful body, having for their favorite emblem the serene image of
the Good Shepherd, and believing firmly that “grief is the sister of
doubt and ill-temper, and beyond all spirits destroyeth man.” If in the
Middle Ages the Church apparently darkened earth to brighten heaven,
it was simply because she took life as she found it, and strove, as
she still strives, to teach the only doctrine of compensation that the
tyranny of facts cannot cheaply overthrow. The mediæval peasant may
have been less badly off, on the whole, than we are generally pleased
to suppose. He was, from all accounts, a robust, unreasoning creature,
who held his neck at the mercy of his feudal lord, and the rest of his
scanty possessions at the discretion of the tax-gatherer; but who had
not yet bared his back to the intolerable sting of that modern gadfly,
the professional agitator, and socialistic champion of the poor. Yet
even without this last and sorest infliction, it is probable that life
was to him but little worth the living, and that religion could not
well paint the world much blacker than he found it. There was scant
need, in his case, for disparaging the pleasures of the flesh; and
hope, lingering alone in his Pandora box of troubles, saved him from
utter annihilation by pointing steadily beyond the doors of death.
As a matter of fact, the abstract question of whether our present
existence be enjoyable or otherwise is one which creeds do not
materially modify. A pessimist may be deeply religious like Pascal and
Châteaubriand, or utterly skeptical like Schopenhauer and Hartmann,
or purely philosophical like faint-hearted Amiel. He may agree with
Lamennais, that “man is the most suffering of all creatures;” or with
Voltaire, that “happiness is a dream, and pain alone is real.” He
may listen to Saint Theresa, “It is given to us either to die or to
suffer;” or to Leopardi, “Life is fit only to be despised.” He may read
in the diary of that devout recluse, Eugénie de Guérin that “dejection
is the ground-work of human life;” or he may turn over the pages of
Sir Walter Raleigh, and see how a typical man of the world, soldier,
courtier, and navigator, can find no words ardent enough in which to
praise “the workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business
of a wretched life.” I do not mean to imply that Leopardi and Eugénie
de Guérin regarded existence from the same point of view, or found the
same solace for their pain; but that they both struck the keynote of
pessimistic philosophy by recognizing that, in this world at least,
sorrow outbalances joy, and that it is given to all men to eat their
bread in tears. On the other hand, if we are disinclined to take this
view, we shall find no lack of guides, both saints and sinners, ready
to look the Sphinx smilingly in the face, and puzzle out a different
answer to her riddle.
Another curious notion is that poets have a prescriptive right to
pessimism, and should feel themselves more or less obliged, in virtue
of their craft, to take upon their shoulders the weight of suffering
humanity. Mr. James Sully, for instance, whose word, as a student of
these matters, cannot be disregarded, thinks it natural and almost
inevitable that a true poet should be of a melancholy cast, by reason
of the sensitiveness of his moral nature and his exalted sympathy for
pain. But it has yet to be proved that poets are a more compassionate
race than their obscurer brethren who sit in counting-houses or brew
beer. They are readier, indeed, to moralize over the knife-grinder,
but quite as slow to tip him the coveted sixpence. Shelley, whose soul
swelled at the wrongs of all mankind, did not hesitate to inflict
pain on the one human being whom it was his obvious duty to protect.
But then Shelley, like Carlyle, belonged to the category of reformers
rather than to the pessimists; believing that though the world as he
saw it was as bad as possible, things could be easily mended by simply
turning them topsy-turvy under his direction. Now the pessimist proper
is the most modest of men. He does not flatter himself for a moment
that he can alter the existing state of evil, or that the human race,
by its combined efforts, can do anything better than simply cease to
live. He may entertain with Novalis a shadowy hope that when mankind,
wearied of its own impotence, shall efface itself from the bosom of the
earth, a better and happier species shall fill the vacant land. Or he
may believe with Hartmann that there is even less felicity possible in
the coming centuries than in the present day; that humanity is already
on the wane; that the higher we stand in the physical and intellectual
scale the more inevitable becomes our suffering; and that when men
shall have thrown aside the last illusion of their youth, namely, the
hope of any obtainable good either in this world or in another, they
will then no longer consent to bear the burden of life, but, by the
supreme force of their united volition, will overcome the resistance
of nature, and achieve the destruction of the universe. But under no
circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain,
can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
To return to the poets, however, it is edifying to hear Mr. Leslie
Stephen assert that “nothing is less poetical than optimism,” or to
listen to Mr. John Addington Symonds, who, scanning the thoughtful soul
for a solution of man’s place in the order of creation, can find for
him no more joyous task than, Prometheus-like,
“To dree life’s doom on Caucasus.”
Even when a poem appears to the uninitiated to be of a cheerful, not to
say blithesome cast, the critics are busy reading unutterable sadness
between the lines; and while we smile at Puck, and the fairies, and
the sweet Titania nursing her uncouth love, we must remember that the
learned Dr. Ulrici has pronounced the Midsummer Night’s Dream to be
a serious homily, preached with grave heart to an unthinking world.
But is Robin Goodfellow really a missionary in disguise, and are the
poets as pessimistic in their teaching as their interpreters would
have us understand? Heine undoubtedly was, and Byron pretended to be.
Keats, with all the pathos of his shadowed young life, was nothing of
the sort, nor was Milton, nor Goethe, nor Wordsworth; while Scott,
lost, apparently, to the decent requirements of his art, confessed
unblushingly that fortune could not long play a dirge upon his buoyant
spirits. And Shakespeare? Why, he was all and everything. Day and
night, sunlight and starlight, were embraced in his affluent nature. He
laid his hand on the quivering pulses of the world, and, recognizing
that life was often in itself both pleasant and good, he yet knew, and
knew it without pain, that death was better still. Look only at the
character of Horatio, the very type of the blithe, sturdy, and somewhat
commonplace young student, to whom enjoyment seems a birthright,--
“A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks.”
Yet it is to this man, of all others, that the dying Hamlet utters the
pathetic plea,--
“If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.”
Here at last is a ray of real light, guiding us miles away from the
murky paths of modern French and English poetry, where we have stumbled
along, growing despondent in the gloom. To brave life cheerfully, to
welcome death gladly, are possible things, after all, and better worth
man’s courage and convictions than to dree on Caucasus forever.
It is ludicrous to turn from the poets to the politicians, but nowadays
every question, even the old unanswered one, “Is life worth living?”
must needs be viewed from its political standpoint. What can be more
delightful than to hear Mr. Courthope assert that optimism is the
note of the Liberal party, while the Conservatives are necessarily
pessimistic?--especially when one remembers the genial utterance
of Mr. Walter Bagehot, contending that the very essence of Toryism
is enjoyment. “The way to be satisfied with existing things is to
enjoy them.” Yet Sir Francis Doyle bears witness in his memoirs that
the stoutest of Tories can find plenty to grumble at, which is not
altogether surprising in a sadly ill-regulated world; and while the
optimistic Liberal fondly believes that he is marching straight along
the chosen road to the gilded towers of El Dorado, the less sanguine
Conservative contents himself with trying, after his dull, practical
fashion, to step clear of some of the ruts and quagmires by the way. As
for the extreme Radicals,--and every nation has its full share of these
gentry,--their optimism is too glittering for sober eyes to bear. A
classical tradition says that each time Sisyphos rolls his mighty stone
up the steep mountain side he believes that it will reach the summit;
and, its ever-repeated falls failing to teach him any surer lesson, his
doom, like that of our reforming brothers, is softened into eternal
hope. But it may at least be questioned whether the other inhabitants
of Tartarus--none of whom, it will be remembered, are without their
private grievances--do not occasionally weary of the dust and racket,
and of the great ball forever thundering about their ears, as it rolls
impotently down to the level whence it came.
The pessimist, however,--be it recorded to his credit,--is seldom an
agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he
does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced. We
have, indeed, an anecdote of Dr. Johnson, who broadly asserted upon
one occasion that no one could well be happy in this world, whereupon
an unreasonable old lady had the bad taste to contradict him, and to
insist that she, for one, was happy, and knew it. “Madam,” replied
the irate philosopher, “it is impossible. You are old, you are ugly,
you are sickly and poor. How, then, can you be happy?” But this, we
think, was rather a natural burst of indignation on the good doctor’s
part than a distinct attempt at proselytizing, though it is likely
that he somewhat damped the boasted felicity of his antagonist.
Schopenhauer, the great apostle of pessimism, while willing enough to
make converts on a grand scale, was scornfully unconcerned about the
every-day opinions of his every-day--I was going to say associates, but
the fact is that Schopenhauer was never guilty of really associating
with anybody. He had at all times the courage of his convictions, and
delighted in illustrating his least attractive theories. Teaching
asceticism, he avoided women; despising human companionship, he
isolated himself from men. A luminous selfishness guided him through
life, and saved him from an incredible number of discomforts. It was
his rule to expect nothing, to desire as little as possible, and to
learn all he could. Want, he held to be the scourge of the poor, as
_ennui_ is that of the rich; accordingly, he avoided the one by looking
sharply after his money, and the other by working with unremitting
industry. Pleasure, he insisted, was but a purely negative quality,
a mere absence from pain. He smiled at the sweet, hot delusions of
youth, and shrugged his shoulders over the limitless follies of
manhood, regarding both from the standpoint of a wholly disinterested
observer. If the test of happiness in the Arabian paradise be to hear
the measured beating of one’s own heart, Schopenhauer was certainly
qualified for admission. Even in this world he was so far from being
miserable, that an atmosphere of snug comfort surrounds the man whose
very name has become a synonym for melancholy; and to turn from
his cold and witty epigrams to the smothered despair that burdens
Leopardi’s pages is like stepping at once from a pallid, sunless
afternoon into the heart of midnight. It is always a pleasant task for
optimists to dwell as much as possible on the buoyancy with which every
healthy man regards his unknown future, and on the natural pleasure he
takes in recalling the brightness of the past; but Leopardi, playing
the trump card of pessimism, demonstrates with merciless precision the
insufficiency of such relief. We cannot in reason expect, he argues,
that, with youth behind us and old age in front, our future will be
any improvement on our past, for with increasing years come increasing
sorrows to all men; and as for the boasted happiness of that past,
which of us would live it over again for the sake of the joys it
contained? Memory cheats us no less than hope by hazing over those
things that we would fain forget; but who that has plodded on to middle
age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with
their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is
forever pretending to regret?
Such thoughts are not cheerful companions; but if they stand the test
of application, it is useless to call them morbid. The pessimist does
not contend that there is no happiness in life, but that, for the
generality of mankind, it is outbalanced by trouble; and this flinty
assurance is all he has to offer in place of the fascinating theory
of compensation. It would seem as though no sane man could hesitate
between them, if he had the choice, for one pleasant delusion is worth
a hundred disagreeable facts; but in this serious and truth-hunting age
people have forgotten the value of fiction, and, like sulky children,
refuse to play at anything. Certainly it would be hard to find a more
dispiriting literature than we enjoy at present. Scientists, indeed,
are reported by those who have the strength of mind to follow them
as being exceedingly merry and complacent; but the less ponderous
illuminati, to whom feebler souls turn instinctively for guidance, are
shining just now with a severe and chastened light. When on pleasure
bent they are as frugal as Mrs. Gilpin, but they sup sorrow with a long
spoon, utterly regardless of their own or their readers’ digestions.
Germany still rings with Heine’s discordant laughter, and France, rich
in the poets of decadence, offers us Les Fleurs du Mal to wear upon
our bosoms. England listens, sighing, while Carlyle’s denunciations
linger like muttering thunder in the air; or while Mr. Ruskin, “the
most inspired of the modern prophets,” vindicates his oracular spirit
by crying,
“Woe! woe! O earth! Apollo, O Apollo!”
with the monotonous persistency of Cassandra. Mr. Mallock, proud
to kneel at Mr. Ruskin’s feet as “an intellectual debtor to a
public teacher,” binds us in his turn within the fine meshes of
his exhaustless subtleties, until we grow light-headed rather than
light-hearted under such depressing manipulation. Mr. Pater, who at
one time gave us to understand that he would teach us how to enjoy
life, has, so far, revealed nothing but its everlasting sadness. If
the old Cyrenaics were no gayer than their modern representatives,
Aristippus of Cyrene might just as well have been Diogenes sulking in
his tub, or Heraclitus adding useless tears to the trickling moisture
of his cave.
Even our fiction has grown disconcertingly sad within the last few
years, and with a new order of sadness, invented apparently to keep
pace with the melancholy march of mind. The novelist of the past had
but two courses open to him: either to leave Edwin and Angelina clasped
in each other’s arms, or to provide for one of them a picturesque and
daisy-strewn grave. Ordinarily he chose the former alternative, as
being less harassing to himself, and more gratifying to his readers.
Books that end badly have seldom been really popular, though sometimes
a tragic conclusion is essential to the artistic development of the
story. When Tom and Maggie Tulliver go down, hand in hand, amid the
rushing waters of the Floss, we feel, even through our tears,--and
mine are fresh each time I read the page,--that the one possible
solution of the problem, has been reached; that only thus could the
widely contrasting natures of brother and sister meet in unison, and
the hard-fought battle be gained. Such an end is not sad, it is happy
and beautiful; and, moreover, it is in a measure inevitable, the
climax being shadowed from the beginning, as in the tragedy of the
Greeks, and the whole tale moving swiftly and surely to its appointed
close. If we compare a finely chiseled piece of work like this with
the flat, faintly colored sketches which are at present passing muster
for novels, we feel that beauty of form is something not compounded of
earthly materials only, and that neither the savage strength of French
and Russian realism, nor the dreary monotony of German speculative
fiction, can lift us any nearer the tranquil realms of art.
Nor can we even claim that we have gained in cheerfulness what we have
lost in symmetry, for the latest device of the pessimistic story-writer
is to marry his pair of lovers, and then coldly inform us that, owing
to the inevitable evils of life, they were not particularly happy
after all. Now Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), that loving student and
impersonator of Shakespeare’s heroines, has expressed her melancholy
conviction that the gentle Hero was but ill-mated with one so fretful
and paltry-souled as Claudio; and that Imogen the fair was doomed to an
early death, the bitter fruit of her sad pilgrimage to Milford-Haven.
But be this as it may,--and we more than fear that Lady Martin is
rightly acquainted with the matter,--Shakespeare himself has whispered
us no word of such ill-tidings, but has left us free, an’ it please
us, to dream out happier things. So, too, Dorothea Brooke, wedded to
Will Ladislaw, has before her many long and weary hours of regretful
self-communings; yet, while we sigh over her doubtful future, we
are glad, nevertheless, to take our last look at her smiling in her
husband’s arms. But when Basil Ransom, in The Bostonians, makes a
brave fight for his young bride, and carries her off in triumph, we
are not for a moment permitted to feel elated at his victory. We want
to rejoice with Verena, and to congratulate her on her escape from Mr.
Filer and the tawdry music-hall celebrity; but we are forced to take
leave of her in tears, and to hear with unwilling ears that “these were
not the last she was destined to shed.” This hurts our best feelings,
and hurts them all the more because we have allowed our sympathies to
be excited. It reminds us of that ill-natured habit of the Romans,
who were ungrateful enough to spoil a conqueror’s triumph by hiring
somebody to stand in his chariot, and keep whispering in his ear that
he was only human, after all; and it speaks volumes for the stern
self-restraint of the Roman nature that the officious truth-teller
was not promptly kicked out in the dust. In the same grudging spirit,
Mr. Thomas Hardy, after conducting one of his heroines safely through
a great many trials, and marrying her at last to the husband of
her choice, winds up, by way of wedding-bells, with the following
consolatory reflections: “Her experience had been of a kind to teach
her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit
through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the
path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by day-dreams rich
as hers.... And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate,
she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when
the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the
adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was
but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” “What should
a man do but be merry?” says Hamlet drearily; and, with this reckless
mirth pervading even our novels, we bid fair in time to become as
jocund as he.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] The Sons of Cydippe, by Edmund Gosse.
THE CAVALIER.
“An evil reputation is light to raise, but heavy to bear, and very
difficult to put aside. No Rumor which many people chatter of
altogether dieth away; she too is, after her kind, an immortal.” So
moralizes Hesiod over an exceedingly thankless truth, which, even in
the primitive simplicity of the golden age, had forced itself upon
man’s unwilling convictions; and while many later philosophers have
given caustic expression to the same thought, few have clothed it
with more delicate and agreeable irony. Rumor is, after her kind,
an immortal. Antæus-like, she gains new strength each time she is
driven to the ground, and it is a wholesome humiliation for our very
enlightened minds to see how little she has suffered from centuries
of analysis and research. Rumor still writes our histories, directs
our diplomacy, and controls our ethics, until we have grown to think
that this is probably what is meant by the _vox populi_, and that any
absurdity credited by a great many people becomes in some mysterious
way sacred to the cause of humanity, and infinitely more precious
than truth. When Wodrow, and Walker, and the author of The Cloud of
Witnesses, were compiling their interesting narratives, Rumor, in
the person of “ilka auld wife in the chimley-neuck,” gave them all
the information they desired; and this information, countersigned by
Macaulay, has passed muster for history down to the present day. As
a result, the introduction of Graham of Claverhouse into Mr. Lang’s
list of English Worthies has been received with severely qualified
approbation, and Mr. Mowbray Morris has written the biography of a
great soldier in the cautious tone of a lawyer pleading for a criminal
at the bar.
If ever the words of Hesiod stood in need of an accurate illustration,
it has been furnished by the memory of Claverhouse; for his evil
reputation was not only raised with astonishing facility, but it has
never been put aside at all. In fact, it seems to have been a matter
of pride in the grim-visaged Scottish saints to believe that their
departed brethren were, one and all, the immediate victims of his
wrath; and to hint that they might perhaps have fallen by any meaner
hand was, as Aytoun wittily expressed it, “an insult to martyrology.”
The terror inspired by his inflexible severity gave zest to their
lurid denunciations, and their liveliest efforts of imagination were
devoted to conjuring up in his behalf some fresh device of evil. In
that shameless pasquinade, the Elegy, there is no species of wickedness
that is not freely charged, in most vile language, to the account of
every Jacobite in the land, from the royal house of Stuart down to its
humblest supporter; yet even amid such goodly company, Claverhouse
stands preëminent, and is the recipient of its choicest flowers of
speech.
“He to Rome’s cause most firmly stood,
And drunken was with the saints’ blood.
He rifled houses, and did plunder
In moor and dale many a hunder;
He all the shires in south and west
With blood and rapine sore opprest.”
It is needless to say that Claverhouse, though he served a Catholic
master, had about as much affinity for the Church of Rome as the
great Gustavus himself, and that the extent of his shortcomings in
this direction lay in his protesting against the insults offered by a
Selkirk preacher to King James through the easy medium of his religion.
Now it is only natural that the Covenanters, who feared and hated
Dundee, should have found infinite comfort in believing that he was
under the direct protection of Satan. In those days of lively faith,
the charge was by no means an uncommon one, and the dark distinction
was shared by any number of his compatriots. On the death of Sir
Robert Grierson of Lag, the devil, who had waited long for his prey,
manifested his sense of satisfaction by providing an elaborate funeral
cortége, which came over the sea at midnight, with nodding plumes and
sable horses, to carry off in ostentatious splendor the soul of this
much-honored guest. Prince Rupert was believed by the Roundheads to
owe his immunity from danger to the same diabolic agency which made
Claverhouse proof against leaden bullets; and his white dog, Boy,
was regarded with as much awe as was Dundee’s famous black charger,
the gift of the evil one himself. As a fact, Boy was not altogether
unworthy of his reputation, for he could fight almost as well as his
master, though unluckily without sharing in his advantages; for the
poor brute was shot at Marston Moor, in the very act of pulling down
a rebel. Even the clergy, it would seem, were not wholly averse to
Satan’s valuable patronage; for Wodrow--to whose claims as an historian
Mr. Morris is strangely lenient--tells us gravely how the unfortunate
Archbishop of St. Andrew’s cowered trembling in the Privy Council, when
Janet Douglas, then on trial for witchcraft, made bold to remind him of
the “meikle black devil” who was closeted with him the last Saturday at
midnight.
But even our delighted appreciation of these very interesting and
characteristic legends cannot altogether blind us to the dubious
quality of history based upon such testimony, and it is a little
startling to see that, as years rolled by, the impression they created
remained practically undimmed. Colonel Fergusson, in the preface to
his delightful volume on The Laird of Lag, confesses that in his youth
it was still a favorite Halloween game to dress up some enterprising
member of the household as a hideous beast with a preternaturally long
nose,--made, in fact, of a saucepan handle; and that this creature,
who went prowling stealthily around the dim halls and firelit kitchen,
frightening the children into shrieks of terror, was supposed to
represent the stout old cavalier searching for his ancient foes the
Covenanters. Lag’s memory appears to have been given up by universal
consent to every species of opprobrium, and his misdeeds have so far
found no apologist, unless, indeed, Macaulay may count as one, when
he gracefully transfers part of them to Claverhouse’s shoulders. Mr.
Morris coldly mentions Sir Robert Grierson as “coarse, cruel, and
brutal beyond even the license of those days;” Colonel Fergusson is
far too clever to weaken the dramatic force of his book by hinting
that his hero was not a great deal worse than other men; and Scott, in
that inimitable romance, Wandering Willie’s Tale, has thrown a perfect
glamour of wickedness around the old laird’s name. But in truth, when
we come to search for sober proven facts; when we discard--reluctantly,
indeed, but under compulsion--the spiked barrel in which he was
pleased to roll the Covenanters, in Carthaginian fashion, down the
Scottish hills; and the iron hook in his cellar, from which it was his
playful fancy to depend them; and the wine which turned to clotted
blood ere it touched his lips; and the active copartnership of Satan in
his private affairs,--when we lay aside these picturesque traditions,
there is little left save a charge, not altogether uncommon, of
indecorum in his cups, the ever-vexed question of the Wigtown martyrs,
and a few rebels who were shot, like John Bell, after scant trial, but
who, Heaven knows, would have gained cold comfort by having their cases
laid before the council. On the other hand, it might be worth while to
mention that Lag was brave, honest, not rapacious, and, above all, true
to his colors when the tide had turned, and he was left alone in his
old age to suffer imprisonment and disgrace.
But if the memory of a minor actor in these dark scenes has come down
to us so artistically embellished, what may we not expect of one who
played a leading part through the whole stormy drama? “The chief of
this Tophet on earth,” is the temperate phrase applied to Claverhouse
by Macaulay, and it sufficiently illustrates the position popularly
assigned him by his foes. Rumor asserted in his behalf her triumphant
immortality, and crystallized into tradition every floating charge
urged by the Covenanters against his fame. So potent and far-reaching
was her voice that it became in time a virtuous necessity to echo it;
and we actually find Southey writing to Scott in 1807, and regretting
that Wordsworth should have thought fit to introduce the Viscount of
Dundee into the sonnet on Killiecrankie, without any apparent censure
of his conduct. Scott, who took a somewhat easier view of poetical
obligations, and who probably thought that Killiecrankie was hardly
the fitting spot on which to recall Dundee’s shortcomings, wrote back
very plainly that he thought there had been censure enough already;
and nine years later he startled the good people of Edinburgh, on his
own account, by the publication of that eminently heterodox novel, Old
Mortality. Lockwood tells us that the theme was suggested to Sir Walter
by his friend Mr. Joseph Train, who, when visiting at Abbotsford, was
much struck by the solitary picture in the poet’s library, a portrait
of Graham of Claverhouse.
“He expressed the surprise with which every one who had known Dundee
only in the pages of the Presbyterian annalists must see for the
first time that beautiful and melancholy visage, worthy of the most
pathetic dreams of romance. Scott replied that no character had been
so foully traduced as the Viscount of Dundee; that, thanks to Wodrow,
Cruikshanks, and such chroniclers, he who was every inch a soldier
and a gentleman still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian
desperado, who rode a goblin horse, was proof against shot, and in
league with the devil.
“‘Might he not,’ said Train, ‘be made, in good hands, the hero of a
national romance, as interesting as any about either Wallace or Prince
Charlie?’
“‘He might,’ said Scott, ‘but your western zealots would require to be
faithfully portrayed in order to bring him out with the right effect.’”
Train then described to Sir Walter the singular character of Old
Mortality, and the result was that incomparable tale which took the
English reading world by storm, and provoked in Scotland a curious
fever of excitement, indignation, and applause. The most vigorous
protest against its laxity came from Thomas MacCrie, one of the
numerous biographers of John Knox, “who considered the representation
of the Covenanters in the story of Old Mortality as so unfair as
to demand, at his hands, a very serious rebuke.” This rebuke was
administered at some length in a series of papers published in
the Edinburgh Christian Instructor. Scott, the “Black Hussar of
Literature,” replied with much zest and spirit in the Quarterly Review;
cudgels were taken up on both sides, and the war went briskly on, until
Jeffrey the Great in some measure silenced the controversy by giving
it as his ultimatum that the treatment of an historical character in
a work of pure fiction was a matter of very trifling significance. It
is not without interest that we see the same querulous virtue that
winced under Sir Walter’s frank enthusiasm for Claverhouse uttering
its protest to-day against the more chilly and scrupulous vindications
of Mr. Morris’s biography. “An apology for the crimes of a hired
butcher,” one critic angrily calls the sober little volume, forgetting
in his heat that the term “hired butcher,” though most scathing in
sound, is equally applicable to any soldier, from the highest to the
lowest, who is paid by his government to kill his fellow-men. War is
a rough trade, and if we choose to call names, it is as easy any time
to say “butcher” as “hero.” Stronger words have not been lacking to
vilify Dundee, and many of these choice anathemas belong, one fears,
to Luther’s catalogue of “downright, infamous, scandalous lies.”
Their freshness, however, is as amazing as their ubiquity, and they
confront us every now and then in the most forlorn nooks and crannies
of literature. Not very long ago I was shut up for half an hour in a
boarding-house parlor, in company with a solitary little book entitled
Scheyichbi and the Strand, or Early Days along the Delaware. Its name
proved to be the only really attractive thing about it, and I was
speculating drearily as to whether Charles Lamb himself could have
extracted any amusement from its pages, when suddenly my eye lighted
on a sentence that read like an old familiar friend: “The cruelty,
the brutality, the mad, exterminating barbarity of Claverhouse, and
Lauderdale, and Jeffreys, the minions of episcopacy and the king.”
There it stood, venerably correct in sentiment, with a strangely
new location and surroundings. It is hard enough, surely, to see
Claverhouse pilloried side by side with the brute Jeffreys; but to meet
him on the banks of the Delaware is like encountering Ezzèlin Romano on
Fifth Avenue, or Julian the Apostate upon Boston Common.
Much of this universal harmony of abuse may be fairly charged to
Macaulay, for it is he who in a few strongly written passages has
presented to the general reader that remarkable compendium of
wickedness commonly known as Dundee. “Rapacious and profane, of violent
temper and obdurate heart,” is the great historian’s description
of a man who sought but modest wealth, who never swore, and whose
imperturbable gentleness of manner was more appalling in its way than
the fiercest transports of rage. Under Macaulay’s hands Claverhouse
exhibits a degree of ubiquity and mutability that might well require
some supernatural basis to sustain it. He supports as many characters
as Saladin in the Talisman; appearing now as his brother David Graham,
in order to witness the trial of the Wigtown martyrs, and now as his
distant kinsman, Patrick Graham, when it becomes expedient to figure
as a dramatic feature of Argyle’s execution. He changes at will into
Sir Robert Grierson, and is thus made responsible for that highly
curious game which Wodrow and Howie impute to Lag’s troopers, and which
Macaulay describes with as much gravity as if it were the sacking
and pillage of some doomed Roman town. It is hard to understand the
precise degree of pleasure embodied in calling one’s self Apollyon and
one’s neighbor Beelzebub; it is harder still to be properly impressed
with the tremendous significance of the deed. I have known a bevy of
school-girls, who, after an exhaustive course of Paradise Lost, were
so deeply imbued with the sombre glories of the satanic court that
they assumed the names of its inhabitants; and, for the remainder of
that term, even the mysterious little notes that form so important an
element of boarding-school life began--heedless of grammar--with “Chère
Moloch,” and ended effusively with “Your ever-devoted Belial.” It is
quite possible that these children thought and hoped they were doing
something desperately wicked, only they lacked a historian to chronicle
their guilt. It is equally certain that Lag’s drunken troopers, if
they ever did divert themselves in the unbecoming manner ascribed
to them, might have been more profitably, and, it would seem, more
agreeably, employed. But, of one thing, at least, we may feel tolerably
confident. The pastime would have found scant favor in the eyes of
Claverhouse, who was a man of little imagination, of stern discipline,
and of fastidiously decorous habits. Why, even Wandering Willie does
him this much justice, when he describes him as alone amid the lost
souls, isolated in his contemptuous pride from their feasts and
dreadful merriment: “And there sat Claverhouse, as beautiful as when
he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down over his
laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to
hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them
all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance.” If
history be, as Napoleon asserts, nothing but fiction agreed upon, let
us go straight to the fountain-head, and enjoy our draught of romance
unspoiled by any dubious taint of veracity.
Mr. Walter Bagehot, that most keen and tolerant of critics, has pointed
out to us with his customary acumen that Macaulay never appreciated in
the highest degree either of the two great parties--the Puritans and
the Cavaliers--who through so many stirring events embodied all the
life and color of English history. In regard to the former, it may be
safely said that whatever slights they have received at the hands of
other historians have been amply atoned for by Carlyle. He has thrown
the whole weight of his powerful personality into their scale, and has
fairly frightened us into that earnestness of mind which is requisite
for a due appreciation of their merits. His fine scorn for the pleasant
vices which ensnare humanity extended itself occasionally to things
which are pleasant without being vicious; and under his leadership
we hardly venture to hint at a certain sneaking preference for the
gayer side of life. When Hazlitt, with a shameless audacity rare among
Englishmen, disencumbers himself lightly of his conscience, and
apostrophizes the reign of Charles II. as that “happy, thoughtless age,
when king and nobles led purely ornamental lives,” we feel our flesh
chilled at such a candid avowal of volatility. Surely Hazlitt must
have understood that it is precisely the fatal picturesqueness of that
period to which we, as moralists, so strenuously object. The courts of
the first two Hanoverians were but little better or purer, but they
were at least uglier, and we can afford to look with some leniency upon
their short-comings. His sacred majesty George II. was hardly, save in
the charitable eyes of Bishop Porteus, a shining example of rectitude;
but let us rejoice that it never lay in the power of any human being to
hint that he was in the smallest degree ornamental.
The Puritan, then, has been wafted into universal esteem by the breath
of his great eulogist; but the Cavalier still waits for his historian.
Poets and painters and romancers have indeed loved to linger over
this warm, impetuous life, so rich in vigor and beauty, so full to
the brim of a hardy adventurous joy. Here, they seem to say, far more
than in ancient Greece, may be realized the throbbing intensity of
an unreflecting happiness. For the Greek drank deeply of the cup of
knowledge, and its bitterness turned his laughter into tears; the
Cavalier looked straight into the sunlight with clear, joyous eyes,
and troubled himself not at all with the disheartening problems of
humanity. How could a mind like Macaulay’s, logical, disciplined,
and gravely intolerant, sympathize for a moment with this utterly
irresponsible buoyancy! How was he, of all men, to understand this
careless zest for the old feast of life, this unreasoning loyalty to
an indifferent sovereign, this passionate devotion to a church and
easy disregard of her precepts, this magnificent wanton courage, this
gay prodigality of enjoyment! It was his loss, no less than ours,
that, in turning over the pages of the past, he should miss half of
their beauty and their pathos; for History, that calumniated muse,
whose sworn votaries do her little honor, has illuminated every inch
of her parchment with a strong, generous hand, and does not mean that
we should contemptuously ignore the smallest fragment of her work. The
superb charge of Rupert’s cavalry; that impetuous rush to battle,
before which no mortal ranks might stand unbroken; the little group
of heart-sick Cavaliers who turned at sunset from the lost field of
Marston Moor, and beheld their queen’s white standard floating over the
enemy’s ranks; the scaffolds of Montrose and King Charles; the more
glorious death of Claverhouse, pressing the blood-stained grass, and
listening for the last time to the far-off cries of victory; Sidney
Godolphin flinging away his life, with all its abundant promise and
whispered hopes of fame; beautiful Francis Villiers lying stabbed to
the heart in Surbiton lane, with his fair boyish face turned to the
reddening sky,--these and many other pictures History has painted
for us on her scroll, bidding us forget for a moment our formidable
theories and strenuous partisanship, and suffer our hearts to be simply
and wholesomely stirred by the brave lives and braver deaths of our
mistaken brother men.
“Every matter,” observes Epictetus, “has two handles by which it
may be grasped;” and the Cavalier is no exception to the rule. We
may, if we choose, regard him from a purely moral point of view,
as a lamentably dissolute and profligate courtier; or from a purely
picturesque point of view, as a gallant and loyal soldier; or we may,
if we are wise, take him as he stands, making room for him cheerfully
as a fellow-creature, and not vexing our souls too deeply over his
brilliant divergence from our present standard. It is like a breath of
fresh air blown from a roughening sea to feel, even at this distance
of time, that strong young life beating joyously and eagerly against
the barriers of the past; to see those curled and scented aristocrats
who, like the “dandies of the Crimea,” could fight as well as dance,
facing pleasure and death, the ball-room and the battle-field, with the
same smiling front, the same unflagging enthusiasm. No wonder that Mr.
Bagehot, analyzing with friendly sympathy the strength and weakness
of the Cavalier, should find himself somewhat out of temper with an
historian’s insensibility to virtues so primitive and recognizable in a
not too merry world.
“The greatness of this character is not in Macaulay’s way, and its
faults are. Its license affronts him, its riot alienates him. He is
forever contrasting the dissoluteness of Prince Rupert’s horse with
the restraint of Cromwell’s pikemen. A deep, enjoying nature finds in
him no sympathy. He has no tears for that warm life, no tenderness
for that extinct mirth. The ignorance of the Cavaliers, too, moves
his wrath: ‘They were ignorant of what every schoolgirl knows.’ Their
loyalty to their sovereign is the devotion of the Egyptians to the god
Apis: ‘They selected a calf to adore.’ Their non-resistance offends the
philosopher; their license is commented on in the tone of a precisian.
Their indecorum does not suit the dignity of the narrator. Their rich,
free nature is unappreciated; the tingling intensity of their joy is
unnoticed. In a word, there is something of the schoolboy about the
Cavalier; there is somewhat of a schoolmaster about the historian.”[14]
That the gay gentlemen who glittered in the courts of the Stuarts
were enviably ignorant of much that, for some inscrutable reason,
we feel ourselves obliged to know to-day may be safely granted, and
scored at once to the account of their good fortune. It is probable
that they had only the vaguest notions about Sesostris, and could
not have defined an hypothesis of homophones with any reasonable
degree of accuracy. But they were possessed, nevertheless, of a
certain information of their own, not garnered from books, and not
always attainable to their critics. They knew life in its varying
phases, from the delicious trifling of a polished and witty society
to the stern realities of the camp and battle-field. They knew the
world, women, and song, three things as pleasant and as profitable
in their way as Hebrew, Euclid, and political economy. They knew how
to live gracefully, to fight stoutly, and to die honorably; and how
to extract from the gray routine of existence a wonderfully distinct
flavor of novelty and enjoyment. There were among them, as among the
Puritans, true lovers, faithful husbands, and tender fathers; and
the indiscriminate charge of dissoluteness on the one side, like the
indiscriminate charge of hypocrisy on the other, is a cheap expression
of our individual intolerance.
The history of the Cavalier closes with Killiecrankie. The waning
prestige of a once powerful influence concentrated itself in
Claverhouse, the latest and strongest figure on its canvas, the
accepted type of its most brilliant and defiant qualities. Readers of
old-fashioned novels may remember a lachrymose story, in two closely
printed volumes, which enjoyed an amazing popularity some twenty years
ago, and which was called The Last of the Cavaliers. It had for its
hero a perfectly impossible combination of virtues, a cross between
the Chevalier Bayard and the Admirable Crichton, labeled Dundee,
and warranted proof against all the faults and foibles of humanity.
This automaton, who moved in a rarefied atmosphere through the whole
dreary tale, performing noble deeds and uttering virtuous sentiments
with monotonous persistency, embodied, we may presume, the author’s
conception of a character not generally credited with such superfluous
excellence. It was a fine specimen of imaginative treatment, and not
wholly unlike some very popular historic methods by which similar
results are reached to-day. Quite recently, a despairing English
critic, with an ungratified taste for realities, complained somewhat
savagely that “a more intolerable embodiment of unrelieved excellence
and monotonous success than the hero of the pious Gladstonian’s
worship was never moulded out of plaster of Paris.” He was willing
enough to yield his full share of admiration, but he wanted to see
the real, human, interesting Gladstone back of all this conventional
and disheartening mock-heroism; and, in the same spirit, we would
like sometimes to see the real Claverhouse back of all the dramatic
accessories in which he has been so liberally disguised.
But where, save perhaps in the ever-delightful pages of Old Mortality,
shall we derive any moderate gratification from our search? Friends
are apt to be as ill advised as foes, and Dundee’s eulogists, from
Napier to Aytoun, have been distinguished rather for the excellence
of their intentions than for any great felicity of execution. The
“lion-hearted warrior,” for whom Aytoun flings wide the gates of
Athol, might be Cœur-de-Lion himself, or Marshal Ney, or Stonewall
Jackson, or any other brave fighter. There is no distinctive flavor of
the Graeme in the somewhat long-winded hero, with his “falcon eye,”
and his “war-horse black as night,” and his trite commonplaces about
foreign gold and Highland honor. On the other hand, the verdict of the
disaffected may be summed up in the extraordinary lines with which
Macaulay closes his account of Killiecrankie, and of Dundee’s brief,
glorious struggle for his king: “During the last three months of his
life he had proved himself a great warrior and politician, and his name
is therefore mentioned with respect by that large class of persons
who think that there is no excess of wickedness for which courage
and ability do not atone.” No excess of wickedness! One wonders what
more could be said if we were discussing Tiberius or Caligula, or if
colder words were ever used to chill a soldier’s fame. Mr. Mowbray
Morris, the latest historian in the field, seems divided between a
natural desire to sift the evidence for all this wickedness and a
polite disinclination to say anything rude during the process, “a
common impertinence of the day,” in which he declares he has no wish
to join. This is exceedingly pleasant and courteous, though hardly of
primary importance; for a biographer’s sole duty is, after all, to the
subject of his biography, and not to Macaulay, who can hold his own
easily enough without any assistance whatever. When Sir James Stephens
published, some years ago, his very earnest and accurate vindication
of Sir Elijah Impey from the charges so lavishly brought against him
in that matchless essay on Warren Hastings, he expressed at the same
time his serene conviction that the great world would go on reading
the essay and believing the charges just the same,--a new rendering
of “Magna est veritas et prævalebit,” which brings it very near to
Hesiod’s primitive experience.
As for Mr. Morris’s book, it is a carefully dispassionate study of
a wild and stormy time, with a gray shadow of Claverhouse flitting
faintly through it. In his wholesome dislike for the easy confidence
with which historians assume to know everything, its author has touched
the opposite extreme, and manifests such conscientious indecision as
to the correctness of every document he quotes, that our heads fairly
swim with accumulated uncertainties. This method of narration has one
distinct advantage,--it cannot lead us far into error; but neither can
it carry us forward impetuously with the mighty rush of great events,
and make us feel in our hearts the real and vital qualities of history.
Mr. Morris proves very clearly and succinctly that Claverhouse has
been, to use his temperate expression, “harshly judged,” and that much
of the cruelty assigned to him may be easily and cheaply refuted. He
does full justice to the scrupulous decorum of his hero’s private life,
and to the wonderful skill with which, after James’s flight, he roused
and held together the turbulent Highland clans, impressing even these
rugged spirits with the charm and force of his vigorous personality.
In the field Claverhouse lived like the meanest of his men; sharing
their poor food and hard lodgings, marching by their side through the
bitter winter weather, and astonishing these hardy mountaineers by
a power of physical endurance fully equal to their own. The memory
of his brilliant courage, of his gracious tact, even of his rare
personal beauty, dwelt with them for generations, and found passionate
expression in that cry wrung from the sore heart of the old chieftain
at Culloden, “Oh, for one hour of Dundee!”
But in the earlier portions of Mr. Morris’s narrative, in the scenes
at Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge, at Ayrshire and Clydesdale, we
confess that we look in vain for the Claverhouse of our fancy. Can it
be that this energetic, modest, and rather estimable young soldier,
distinguished, apparently, for nothing save prompt and accurate
obedience to his orders, is the man who, in a few short years, made
himself so feared and hated that it became necessary to credit him with
the direct patronage of Satan? One is tempted to quote Mr. Swinburne’s
pregnant lines concerning another enigmatic character of Scottish
history:--
“Some faults the gods will give to fetter
Man’s highest intent,
But surely you were something better
Than innocent.”
Of the real Dundee we catch only flying glimpses here and there,--on
his wedding night, for instance, when he is off and away after
the now daring rebels, leaving his bride of an hour to weep his
absence, and listen with what patience she might to her mother’s
assiduous reproaches. “I shall be revenged some time or other of the
unseasonable trouble these dogs give me,” grumbles the young husband
with pardonable irritation. “They might have let Tuesday pass.” It is
the real Dundee, likewise, who, in the gray of early morning, rides
briskly out of Edinburgh in scant time to save his neck, scrambles
up the castle rock for a last farewell to Gordon, and is off to the
north to raise the standard of King James, “wherever the spirit of
Montrose shall direct me.” In vain Hamilton and the convention send
word imperatively, “Dilly, dilly, dilly, come and be killed.” The wily
bird declines the invitation, and has been censured with some asperity
for his unpatriotic reluctance to comply. For one short week of rest
he lingers at Dudhope, where his wife is awaiting her confinement, and
then flies further northward to Glen Ogilvy, whither a regiment is
quickly sent to apprehend him. There is a reward of twenty thousand
pounds sterling on his head, but he who thinks to win it must move,
like Hödr, with his feet shod in silence. By the time Livingstone
and his dragoons reach Glamis, Dundee is far in the Highlands, and
henceforth all the fast-darkening hopes of the loyalists are centred
in him alone. For him remain thirteen months of incredible hardships
and anxiety, a single stolen visit to his wife and infant son,
heart-sick appeals to James for some recognition of the desperate
efforts made in his behalf, a brilliant irregular campaign, a last
decisive victory, and a soldier’s death. “It is the less matter for
me, seeing the day goes well for my master,” he answers simply, when
told of his mortal hurt; and in this unfaltering loyalty we read the
life-long lesson of the Cavalier. If, as a recent poet tells us, the
memory of Nero be not wholly vile, because one human being was found to
weep for him, surely the memory of James Stuart may be forgiven much
because of this faithful service. It is hard to understand it now.
“In God’s name, then, what plague befell us,
To fight for such a thing?”
is our modern way of looking at the problem; but the mental processes
of the Cavalier were less inquisitorial and analytic. “I am no
politician, and I do not care about nice distinctions,” says Major
Bellenden bluntly, when requested to consider the insurgents’ side of
the case. “My sword is the king’s, and when he commands, I draw it in
his service.”
As for that other and better known Claverhouse, the determined foe of
the Covenant, the unrelenting and merciless punisher of a disobedient
peasantry, he, too, is best taken as he stands; shorn, indeed, of
Wodrow’s extravagant embellishments, but equally free from the delicate
gloss of a too liberal absolution. He was a soldier acting under the
stringent orders of an angry government, and he carried out the harsh
measures entrusted to him with a stern and impartial severity. Those
were turbulent times, and the wild western Whigs had given decisive
proof on more than one occasion that they were ill disposed to figure
as mere passive martyrs to their cause.
“For treason, d’ ye see,
Was to them a dish of tea,
And murder, bread and butter.”
They were stout fighters, too, taking as kindly to their carnal
as to their spiritual weapons, and a warfare against them was as
ingloriously dangerous as the melancholy skirmishes of our own army
with the Indians, who, it would seem, were driven to the war-path by
a somewhat similar mode of treatment. There is not the slightest
evidence, however, that Claverhouse was averse either to the danger or
the cruelty of the work he was given to do. Religious toleration was
then an unknown quantity. The Church of England and her Presbyterian
neighbor persecuted each other with friendly assiduity, while Rome was
more than willing, should an opportunity offer, to lay a chastening
hand on both. If there were any new-fangled notions in the air about
private judgment and the rights of conscience, Claverhouse was the
last man in England to have been a pioneer in such a movement. He was
passionately attached to his church, unreservedly loyal to his king,
and as indifferent as Hamlet to his own life and the lives of other
people. It is strange to hear Mr. Morris excuse him for his share in
the death of the lad Hyslop, by urging in his behalf a Pilate-like
disinclination to quarrel with a powerful ally, and risk a censure from
court. Never was there a man who brooked opposition as impatiently,
when he felt that his interests or his principles were at stake; but
it is to be feared that the shooting of a Covenanter more or less was
hardly, in his eyes, a matter of vital importance. This attitude of
unconcern is amply illustrated in the letter written by Claverhouse to
Queensberry after the execution of John Brown, “the Christian carrier,”
for the sole crime of absenting himself from the public worship of
the Episcopalians, says Macaulay; for outlawry and resetting of
rebels, hint less impassioned historians. Be this as it may, however,
John Brown was shot in the Ploughlands; and his nephew, seeing the
soldiers’ muskets leveled next at him, consented, on the promise of
being recommended for mercy, to make “an ingenuous confession,” and
give evidence against his uncle’s associates. Accordingly, we find
Claverhouse detailing these facts to Queensberry, and adding in the
most purely neutral spirit,--
“I have acquitted myself when I have told your Grace the case. He [the
nephew] has been but a month or two with his halbert; and if your
Grace thinks he deserves no mercy, justice will pass on him; for I,
having no commission of justiciary myself, have delivered him up to the
lieutenant-general, to be disposed of as he pleases.”
Here, at least, is a sufficiently candid exposition of Claverhouse’s
habitual temper. He was, in no sense of the word, bloodthirsty. The
test oath was not of his contriving; the penalty for its refusal was
not of his appointing. He was willing enough to give his prisoner the
promised chance for life; but as for any real solicitude in the matter,
you might as well expect Hamlet to be solicitous because, by an awkward
misapprehension, a foolish and innocent old man has been stabbed like a
rat behind the arras.
When Plutarch was asked why he did not oftener select virtuous
characters to write about, he intimated that he found the sinners more
interesting; and while his judgment is to be deprecated, it can hardly
be belied. We revere Marcus Aurelius, but we delight in Cæsar; we
admire Sir Robert Peel, but we enjoy Richelieu; we praise Wellington,
but we never weary of Napoleon. “Our being,” says Montaigne, “is
cemented with sickly qualities; and whoever should divest man of the
seeds of those qualities would destroy the fundamental conditions of
human life.” It is idle to look to Claverhouse for precisely the
virtues which we most esteem in John Howard; but we need not, on that
account, turn our eyes reproachfully from one of the most striking
and characteristic figures in English history. He was not merely a
picturesque feature of his cause, like Rupert of the Rhine, nor a
martyr to its fallen hopes, like the Marquis of Montrose; he was its
single chance, and, with his death, it died. In versatility and daring,
in diplomatic shrewdness and military acumen, he far outranked any
soldier of his day. “The charm of an engaging personality,” says a
recent critic, “belongs to Montrose, and the pity of his death deepens
the romance of his life; but the strong man was Dundee.”
FOOTNOTES:
[14] _Literary Studies_, vol. ii.
Transcriber’s Notes
Page 12: “Marquis de Montmirail” changed to “Marquise de Montmirail”
“to the acount” changed to “to the account”
Page 44: “La virtu n’iroit” changed to “La vertu n’iroit”
Page 60: “Jacque Roulet” changed to “Jacques Roulet”
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