Chapter X: Part 10

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by saying, "Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of "Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of comicality:--

"Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?"

The same want of humor which made him insensible to incongruity may perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther on in "Peter Bell" we find:--

"_Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge--
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!"

And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[357]

The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood to meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. "The Wagoner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with "Tam O'Shanter" infinitely to its own disadvantage. "Peter Bell," full though it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to confess that he did not like it. "The White Doe," the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is the

"Happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone,"

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean Jaques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The Solitary of "The Excursion," who has not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but he was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If we read our favorite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly great. And even as regards "The Excursion" we should remember how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but one,--the Odyssey.

None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid

"Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie
A little nearer Spenser";

for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets.

Footnotes:

[323] "I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at
Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Crabb
Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine pathos, thirteen
years after his master's death. Wordsworth was always considerate and
kind with his servants, Robinson tells us.

[324] In the Prelude he attributes this consecreation to a sunrise
seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some
village festival where he had danced all night--

"My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated spirit."--B. IV.

[325] Prelude, Book II.

[326]
"I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures."

_Idiot Boy_ (1798).

[327] I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the
influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith
was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Evening
Walk. I speak of them as originally printed.

[328] Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge, his
teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It
may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic
study of English poetry was due to the copy of Andersen's British
Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on setting out for
his last voyage in 1805.

[329] Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a
still earlier date. "Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat
under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." (Southey to
Miss Barker, May, 1806.)

[330] This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss
Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for
publication as early as 1805.

[331] Crabb Robinson, I. 250, Am. Ed.

[332] Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to
prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr.
Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian
Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group of
Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The dev-ils!"

[333] The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The
original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately
Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor C. E.
Norton.

[334] Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so
far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and
Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them
shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with
Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer.
There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but
apparently written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that
Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy.
"Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_ that he
has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden
estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired."
Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's insulation of character and
habitual want of sympathy with anything but the moods of his own mind
that rendered him incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He
appears to have regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly
loved as much as it was possible for him to love anything but his own
poems) as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a
mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.

[335] Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, "that, after
he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what
his future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough
for the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined
for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience
and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from
the Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for
the higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history
with great interest, and the strategy of war, and he always fancied
that he had talents for command, and he at one time thought of a
military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if
he were ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him
from the yellow fever, and he gave that up." (Memoirs, II. 466.) It
is curious to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness
between him and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each
other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in
a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character
somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety
in Woidsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point
of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make
Wellington a great commander.

[336] Cottle says, "The sale was so slow and the severity of most of
the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be
certain." But the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then
the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, especially to
Wordsworth's share in the volume. The Monthly says, "So much genius
and originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to
see another from the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in
the whole range of English, poetry we scarcely recollect anything
superior to a passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey," sums up
thus: "Yet every piece discovers genius; and ill as the author has
frequently employed his talents, they certainly rank him with the
best of living poets." Such treatment cannot surely be called
discouraging.

[337] A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia
Literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion
of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant
references to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show
how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in accordance with
the usage of the last generation in New England.

[338] Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a
hearing in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, a
Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient _list of
subscribers_ to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The
second English edition, however, having been published before he had
wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially followed in the
first American, which was published in 1802.

[339] Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is now
printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815.

[340] "On my alluding to the line,

"'Three feet long and two feet wide,'

"and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said,
'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 1815.) His
ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to
appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic's capacity
to judge of poetry at all.

[341] Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these
volumes not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as
saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review's attack
on Hours of Idleness. "The young man will do something if he goes
on," he said.

[342] The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle
with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only
matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's "History of the Protectorate House
of Cromwell." It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into
the hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are
among the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the
clearest. The book contains, however, some valuable letters of
Wordsworth, and those relating to this part of his life should be
read by every student of his works, for the light they throw upon the
principles which governed him in the composition of his poems. In a
letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself
upon their present reception, of what moment is that compared with
what I trust is their destiny!--to console the afflicted, to add
sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young
and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and
therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is
their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after
we (that is all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves....
To conclude, my ears are stone dead to this idle buzz [of hostile
criticism] and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings
and; after what I have said, I am sure yours will be the same I doubt
not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my
writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the
benign tendencies in human nature and society wherever found; and
that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser,
better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary
relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of admirers;
it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith
from his own inexhaustible cistern.

[343] "Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general
effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend
De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure
by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July,
1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.

[344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

[345] Wordsworth's children were,--
John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman.
Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847.
Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812.
William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as
Stamp-Distributor.

[346] Good luck (in the sense of _Chance_) seems properly to be the
occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows
how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's
Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound
common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to
fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man
could not have been found in Westmoreland.

[347]
"I am not one who much or oft delight
In personal talk."

[348] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had
protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of
the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode
which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement
of some later copyist of Pope:--

"While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."

And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a
thermometer or barometer called

"The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime."

Still worse in the "Eclipse of the Sun," 1821:--

"High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening."

So in "The Excursion,"

"The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions."

[349] According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be
"not worth five shillings."

[350] Prelude, Book VI.

[351] This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss
Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's
conversation: "Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with
which he dwells on trifles; at other times he flows on in the utmost
grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." Robinson tells
us that he read "Resolution" and "Independence" to a lady who was
affected by it even to tears, and then said, "I have not heard
anything for years that so much delighted me; but, _after all, it is
not poetry_."

[352] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than
when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of
Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness
of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering
compression is masterly. Compare

"Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succor me!
O, think ye not my heart was sair
When my love dropt down and spake na mair?"

compare this with,--

"Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling,
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin:
Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.
* * * * *
"And Bruce (_as soon, as he had slain
The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
Against the Moorish Crescent."

These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a stanza
when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also
departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by
substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had
he written,--

"And Gordon never gave a hint,
But, having somewhat picked his flint,
Let fly the fatal bullet
That killed that lovely pullet,"

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He
shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mariner in
the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: "The poem of my friend has
indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no
distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a
human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural
impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something
supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually
acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection,
do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat
laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, and
drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would
think that the strange charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems
lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.

[353]
"A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
Full formed, like Venus rising from the sea."

_Prelude_, Book IV.

[354] Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and
Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, "These
quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed
me; it seemed almost as if he were _awed by the greatness of his own
power, the gifts with which he had been endowed_." (The italics are
mine.)

[355] His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate
influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is
evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of "those who
have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a
hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream." (Letters,
Conversations, and Recollections of S.T.C., Vol. I. pp. 5-6.)
"Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound
of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:

"'The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

"This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats
thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with
the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.)
Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, "My ear is susceptible
to the clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help
thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.

[356] In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

[357] In "Resolution" and "Independence".

MILTON.[358]

If the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk which Mr. Masson is giving to that of Milton, their authors should send a phial of _elixir vitae_ with the first volume, that a purchaser might have some valid assurance of surviving to see the last. Mr. Masson has already occupied thirteen hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches between the dates of the first and second instalments of his published labors. As Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, with the "Ode on the Nativity," and as by far the more important part of it lies between the year at which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six, we might seem to have the terms given us by which to make a rough reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land. But when we recollect the baffling character of the winds and currents we have already encountered, and the eddies that may at any time slip us back to the reformation in Scotland or the settlement of New England; when we consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped the _grand siècle_ of French literature, with its irresistible temptations to digression and homily for a man of Mr Masson's temperament, we may be pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement escape us. We envy the secular leisures of Methusaleh, and are thankful that _his_ biography at least (if written in the same longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spacious predilections! Even if he himself can count on patriarchal prorogations of existence, let him hang a print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to remind him of the ambushes which Fate lays for the toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his work. Even with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I feel by no means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in her husband's house; for it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, with the diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us while he goes into an exhaustive account of the Westminster Assembly and the political and religious notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One could not help thinking, after having got Milton fairly through college, that he was never more mistaken in his life than when he wrote,

"How _soon_ hath Time, that subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!"

Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's wheels?

It is plain from the Preface to the second volume that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of his own biography. He tells us that, "whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside, no one can study the life of Milton as it ought to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and intimately the contemporary history of England, and even incidentally of Scotland and Ireland too.... Thus on the very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the biography, a history grew on my hands. It was not in human nature to confine the historical inquiries, once they were in progress, within the precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the biography, even had it been possible to determine these limits beforehand; and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me, was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always with a sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous in itself." If a "hasty person" be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begin his next sentence, I take to myself the sting of Mr. Masson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem its promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. I could scarce await the "Autocrat" himself so long. The heroic age of literature is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too heavy [Greek: oion nun brotoi] for the descendants of men to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does Mr. Masson mean by "continuous"? To me it seems rather as if his somewhat rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted now and then by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the mean while. The reader, immersed in Scottish politics or the schemes of Archbishop Laud, is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of the drama. _Pars minima est ipsa puella sui_.

If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of his age as well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in order to understand the motives and conduct of the man we must first make ourselves intimate with the time in which he lived. We have therefore no fault to find with the thoroughness of Mr. Masson's "historical inquiries." The more thorough the better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory performance of his task. But it is only such contemporary events, opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of the man we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to familiarize ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of explaining them as of understanding him. The biographer, especially of a literary man, need only mark the main currents of tendency, without being officious to trace out to its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its tiny pitcherful with the rest. Much less should he attempt an analysis of the stream and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever effectual singly and not in combination. Human motives cannot be thus chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any true knowledge of character by such minute subdivision of its ingredients. Nothing is so essential to a biographer as an eye that can distinguish at a glance between real events that are the levers of thought and action, and what Donne calls "unconcerning things, matters of fact,"--between substantial personages, whose contact or even neighborhood is influential, and the supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and afterwards the interstices of a biographical dictionary.

"Time hath a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion."

Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and merciful deposit, and not renew for us the bores of a former generation as if we had not enough of our own. But if he cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly complain when he insists on taking us along with him in the processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted results in their bearing on the life and character of his subject, whether for help or hindrance. We are blinded with the dust of old papers ransacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise if he had kept constantly in view what Milton himself says of those who gathered up personal traditions concerning the Apostles: "With less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John had written than was listened to one that could say, 'Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited; and O, happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.'.... Thus while all their thoughts were poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after such men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this means they lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so _poured out his mind upon circumstances_, that his work reminds us of Allston's picture of Elijah in the Wilderness, where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape where the very ravens could scarce have found him out, except by divine commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through which he may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. I will cite a single example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is reduced in order to hitch Milton on to his own biography. He devotes the first chapter of his Second Book to the meeting of the Long Parliament. "Already," he tells us, "in the earlier part of the day, the Commons had gone through the ceremony of hearing the writ for the Parliament read, and the names of the members that had been returned called over by Thomas Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery. His deputy, _Agar, Milton's brother-in-law, may have been in attendance on such an occasion_. During the preceding month or two, _at all events_, Agar and his subordinates in the Crown Office had been unusually busy with the issue of the writs and with the other work connected with the opening of Parliament." (Vol. II. p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute "at all events" is very amusing. Meanwhile

"The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."

Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, if to him we owe the modern fashion of writing history picturesquely. At least his method leads to most unhappy results when essayed by men to whom nature has denied a sense of what the picturesque really is. The historical picturesque does not consist, in truth of costume and similar accessaries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression of the figures, caught when they are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. The moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be squeezed out of color-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre, as if the light had been scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights. It is the power of catching the actors in great events at unawares that makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries so vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the great masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw "_du premier coup d'oeil vivement porté_, tout ce qui leur échappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit." It is the gift of producing this reality that almost makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which we had no right,--it is this only that can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has this power of contemporizing himself with bygone times, he cheats us to

"Play with our fancies and believe we see";

but we find the _tableaux vivants_ of the apprentices who "deal in his command without his power," and who compel us to work very hard indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent literature with more than enough fruitless twanging.

Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably awkward when he strives to make up for the want of St. Simon's _premier coup d'oeil_ by impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton from the University to a "suburb sink" of London? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to himself, "A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk all the way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry where I live, and so have an exact notion of my whereabouts? There has been plague in the neighborhood certainly; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather "choose a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred"? Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this wise: "What have we here? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to construe it, than a marriage advertisement! Ho, all ye virgins of England (widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such as seldom occurs: a bachelor, unattached; age, thirty-three years and three or four months; height [Milton, by the way, would have said _highth_] middle or a little less; personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion and light auburn hair; circumstances independent; tastes intellectual and decidedly musical; principles Root-and-Branch! Was there already any young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in her way, it would have raised a conscious flutter? If so, did she live near Oxford?" If there _is_ anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of a hippopotamus.

I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history, when it means, as it too often does, that dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity. Too well do I recall the sorrows of my youth, when I was shipped in search of knowledge on the long Johnsonian swell of the last century, favorable to anything but the calm digestion of historic truth. I had even then an uneasy suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that thoughts were never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were strong enough to go alone. But surely there should be such a thing as good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian himself, that should not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity of his subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto invested the figure of Milton, and our image of him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from the vulgarities of life. No diaries, no private letters, remain to give the idle curiosity of after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion of his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles were written in the language of Cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was so great that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose self-respect even in youth was so profound that it resembles the reverence paid by other men to a far-off and idealized character,--that he should be treated in this offhand familiar fashion by his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, a violation of good manners no less than of the laws of biographic art. Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer!

But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idiomatic, can do something worse than what has been hitherto quoted. He can be even vulgar. Discussing the motives of Milton's first marriage, he says, "Did he come seeking his £500, and did Mrs. Powell _heave a daughter at him?_" We have heard of a woman throwing herself at a man's head, and the image is a somewhat violent one; but what is this to Mr. Masson's improvement on it? It has been sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image may be tested by trying whether a picture could be made of it or not. Mr. Masson has certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical school of British art. A little further on, speaking of Mary Powell, he says, "We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her appearance; but on the usual rule of the elective affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, _we will vote her_ to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the fact that Mr. Masson himself had left us in doubt whether the match was one of convenience or inclination. I know not how it may be with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to resent this hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "_we_ will vote." In some cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of its ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive element of the compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious. Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and vivid, I shall leave the reader to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript copy of Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had originally been, "_On his Door when the City expected an Assault_." Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted "_When the Assault was intended to the City_." Mr. Masson fancies "a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair"; but we think rather that Milton's quiet assumption of equality with two such famous poets was as seriously characteristic as Dante's ranking himself _sesto tra cotanto senno_. Mr. Masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of his "Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently. 'Oho!' the Cavalier Captain might then have said, 'Pindar and Euripides are all very well, by G----! I've been at college myself; and when I meet a gentleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat him; but neither Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of England, by G----! It won't do, Mr. Milton!'" This, it may be supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, "It was more than an insult; it was a sarcasm! It was as if the King, while giving Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend Presbyter's back!" Now one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father under any circumstances. He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that

"He nothing common did or mean,"

upon any of the "memorable scenes" of his life. The image is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, who wrote in defence of the Independents against Thomas Edwards, he says, "People wondered who this she-Brownist, Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in her when they found that she was an oldish woman, and a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in London. Indeed, _she put her nails into Mr. Edwards with some effect_." Why did he not say at once, after the good old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his face"? In another place he speaks of "Satan standing with his _staff_ around him." Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse when forced to condescend to every-day matters. He can no more dismount and walk than the man in armor on a Lord Mayor's day. "It [Aldersgate Street] stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new names of Goswell Street and Goswell Road, _completes its tendency towards the suburbs_ and fields about Islington." What a noble work might not the Directory be if composed on this scale! The imagination even of an alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these passages of civic grandeur; but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an image to deal with. Speaking of Milton's "two-handed engine" in Lycidas, he says: "May not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming English Parliament with its two Houses? Whatever he meant, his prophecy had come true. As he sat among his books in Aldersgate Street, the two-handed engine at the door of the English Church was on the swing. Once, twice, thrice, it had swept its arcs to gather energy; now it was on the backmost poise, and the blow was to descend." One cannot help wishing that Mr. Masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast in Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel. There is something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no matter what he meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he might mean "whatever else" he pleased, so long as he _may_ have meant what we choose to think he did, reasoning backward from the assumed fulfilment! But perhaps there may be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude. How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to be more dignified),

"Sweeping--vehemently sweeping,
No pause admitted, no design avowed,"

like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw? I make the suggestion modestly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Masson's system of exegesis, which reminds one of the casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which a man may be _probabiliter obligatus_ and _probabiliter deobligatus_ at the same time. But perhaps the most remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are told that the king might have established a _bona fide_ government "by giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary element in his Council, and _inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the new policy, or to withdraw and become inactive."_ There is something consoling in the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral suasion. It is really too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral sense as should "induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr. Masson's unhappy infection with the _vivid_ style an instance or two shall be given in justification of what has been alleged against him in that particular. He says of London that "he was committed to the Tower, where for more than two months he lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner had of a _chop_ with the executioner's axe on a scaffold on Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidious, but the word "chop" offends my ears with its coarseness, or if that be too strong, has certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that "he gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good example of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe and the block, and giving one of those dreadful hints to the imagination which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will serve also as an example of that tendency to _surplusage_, which adds to the bulk of Mr. Masson's sentences at the cost of their effectiveness. If he had said simply "chop on Tower Hill" (if chop there must be), it had been quite enough, for we all know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are implied in it. Once more, and I have done with the least agreeable part of my business. Mr. Masson, after telling over again the story of Strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus: "On Wednesday, the 12th of May, that proud _curly_ head, the casket of that brain of power, rolled on the scaffold of Tower Hill." Why _curly_? Surely it is here a ludicrous impertinence. This careful thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture which genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in modern descriptive writing. It reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with the real halter round their necks wherewith they expiated it. It is probably very effective with the torpid sensibilities of the class who look upon wax figures as works of art. True imaginative power works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving to wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the more there to the mind of the spectator because it is not there at all, is a type of the methods it employs and the intensity of their action.