Chapter VI: VI (3)

When later in life Arnold took to theological studies, he showed, no doubt, a very clear insight and a perfect independence of judgment, but he had only a few spare hours for work which in order to be properly done would have required a lifetime. Yet what he wrote produced an effect, in England at least, more lasting than many a learned volume, and he was allowed to say things that would have given deep offence if coming from other lips. His famous saying about the three Lord Shaftesburys has been judged very differently by different writers. As a mere matter of taste it may seem that Arnold’s illustration of what he took to be the common conception of the Trinity among his Philistine friends was objectionable. Let us hope that it was not even true.

But Arnold’s intention was clear enough. He argued chiefly against those who had called the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass “_a degrading superstition_.” He tells them they ought to discover in it what the historian alone, or what Arnold means by a man of culture, can discover; namely, the original intention of the faithful in thus interpreting the words of Christ (St. John, vii., 53): “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” It was in protesting against this narrowness that he reminded his Protestant friends of the weak joints in their own armour, particularly their too literal acceptation of the doctrine of the Trinity.[8] And I doubt whether he was altogether wrong when he charged them with speaking of the Father as a mere individual, or, as he expressed it, a sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord Shaftesbury with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his natural goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice would not allow it. And is it not true that many who speak of Christ as the Son of God take “son” in its common literal sense, or, as Arnold expressed it, imagine “a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale of his father and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if he liked, but who preferred to leave his home to go and live among the race of offenders, and to be put to an ignominious death, on the condition that his merits should be counted against their demerits, and that his father’s goodness should be restrained no longer from taking effect, but any offender should be admitted to the benefit of it, simply on pleading the satisfaction made by the son”? Finally, when he points out the extremely vague conception of the Holy Ghost as a person and as an individual, does he really exaggerate so very much when he says that He is with many no more than “a third Lord Shaftesbury, still on the same high scale, who keeps very much in the background and works in a very occult manner, but very efficaciously nevertheless, and who is busy in applying everywhere the benefits of the son’s satisfaction and the father’s goodness?” Nay, even when he goes on to say that this is precisely the Protestant story of justification, what he wants to impress on his Protestant readers is surely no more than this, that from his point of view there is nothing actually degrading in their very narrow view, as little as in the common Roman Catholic view of the Mass. What he means is no more than that both views as held by the many are grotesquely literal and unintelligent.

People who hold such views would be ready to tell you, he says, “the exact hangings in the Trinity’s council chamber.” But, with all that he is anxious to show that not only was the original intention both of Roman and English Catholics good, but that even in its mistaken application it may help towards righteousness. In trying to impress this view both on Protestants and Roman Catholics, Arnold certainly used language which must have pained particularly those who felt that the picture was not altogether untrue. However, his friends, and among them many high ecclesiastics, forgave him. Stanley, I know, admired his theological writings very much. Many of his critics fully agreed with what Arnold said, only they would have said it in a different way. There is a kind of cocaine style which is used by many able critics and reformers. It cuts deep into the flesh, and yet the patient remains insensible to pain. “You can say anything in English,” Arthur Helps once said to me, “only you must know how to say it.” Arnold, like Carlyle and others, preferred the old style of surgery. They thought that pain was good in certain operations, and helped to accelerate a healthy reaction.

The only fault that one may find with Arnold, is that he did not himself try to restore the original and true conception of the Trinity to that clear and intelligible form which he as an historian and a man of culture could have brought out better than any one else. The original intention of the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass, can easily be learnt, as Arnold has shown, from the very words of the Bible (St. Luke, xxii., 20): “The cup is the new testament in my blood.” But the doctrine of the Trinity requires a far more searching historical study. As the very name of Trinity is a later invention, and absent from the New Testament, it requires a thorough study of Greek, more particularly of Alexandrian philosophy, to understand its origin, for it is from Greek philosophy that the idea of the Word, the Logos, was taken by some of the early Fathers of the Church.

As the Messiah was a Semitic thought which the Jewish disciples of Christ saw realised in the Son of Man, the Word was an Aryan thought which the Greek disciples saw fulfilled in the Son of God. The history of the divine Dyas which preceded the Trias is clear enough, if only we are acquainted with the antecedents of Greek philosophy. Without that background it is a mere phantasm, and no wonder that in the minds of uneducated people it should have become what Arnold describes it,[9] father, son, and grandson, living together in the same house, or possibly in the clouds. To make people shrink back from such a conception is worth something, and Arnold has certainly achieved this, if only he has caused hundreds and thousands to say to themselves: “We never were so foolish or so narrow-minded as to believe in three Lord Shaftesburys.”

For some reason or other, however, the “three Lord Shaftesburys” have disappeared in the last edition of “Literature and Dogma” and have been replaced by “a Supernatural Man.” Froude, who was an intimate friend both of Arnold and of Sir James Stephen, told me that the latter had warned Arnold that the three Lord Shaftesburys were really actionable, and if Arnold hated anything it was a _fracas_. In the fifth edition they still remain, so that the change must have been made later on, when he prepared the cheap edition of his book. Anyhow, they are gone!

Arnold was a delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronising way he would generally end by: “Yes, yes! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!” This went so far that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him. He had fallen in love with Émile Burnouf’s attractive but not very scholar-like and trustworthy “Science de la Religion.” I believe that at first he had mistaken Émile for Eugène Burnouf, a mistake which has been committed by other people besides him. But, afterwards, when he had perceived the difference between the two, he was not at all abashed. Nay, he was betrayed into a new mistake, and spoke of Émile as the son of Eugène. I told him that Eugène, the great Oriental scholar—one of the greatest that France has ever produced, and that is saying a great deal—had no son at all, and that he ought to correct his misstatement. “Yes, yes,” he said, in his most good-humoured way, “but you know how they manage these things in France. Émile was really a natural son of the great scholar, and they call that a nephew.” This I stoutly denied, for never was a more irreproachable _père de famille_ than my friend and master Eugène Burnouf. But in spite of all remonstrances, Émile remained with Arnold the son of Eugène; “For, you see, my good fellow, I know the French, and that is my view of the matter!” If that happened in the green wood, what would happen in the dry!

We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me the difference between poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, and _vice versâ_, and I often quoted Goethe’s saying that the best test of poetry was whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language. To all that, even to Goethe’s words, Arnold demurred. Poetry to him was a thing by itself, “not an art like other arts,” but, as he grandly called it, “genius.”

He once had a great triumph over me. An American gentleman, who brought out a “Collection of the Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men,” divided them into eight classes, and the first class was assigned to poetry, the second to art, the third to religion, the fourth to philosophy, the fifth to history, the sixth to science, the seventh to politics, the eighth to industry. Arnold was asked to write the introduction to the first volume, H. Taine to the second, myself and Renan to the third, Noah Porter to the fourth, Dean Stanley to the fifth, Helmholtz to the sixth, Froude to the seventh, John Fiske to the eighth.

I do not know whether Arnold had anything to do with suggesting this division of _Omne Scibile_ into eight classes; anyhow, he did not allow the opportunity to pass to assert the superiority of poetry over every other branch of man’s intellectual activity. “The men,” he began, “who are the flower and glory of our race are to pass here before us, the highest manifestations, whether on this line or that, of the force which stirs in every one of us—the chief poets, religious founders, philosophers, historians, scholars, orators, warriors, statesmen, voyagers, leaders in mechanical invention and industry, who have appeared among mankind. And the poets are to pass first. Why? Because, of the various modes of manifestation through which the human spirit pours its force, theirs is the most adequate and happy.”

This is the well-known _ore rotundo_ and _spiritu profundo_ style of Arnold. But might we not ask, _Adequate_ to what? _Happy_ in what? Arnold himself answers a little farther on: “No man can fully draw out the reasons why the human spirit feels itself able to attain to a more adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its modes of activity.” Yet he continues to call this a primordial and incontestable fact; and how could we poor mortals venture to contest a primordial and incontestable fact? And then, limiting the question “to us for to-day,” he says, “Surely it is its solidity that accounts to us for the superiority of poetry.” How he would have railed if any of his Philistines had ventured to recognise the true superiority of poetry in its solidity!

Prose may be solid, it may be dense, massive, lumpish, concrete, and all the rest, but poetry is generally prized for its being subtle, light, ideal, air-drawn, fairy-like, or made of such stuff as dreams are made of. However, let that pass. Let poetry be solid, for who knows what sense Arnold may have assigned to solid? He next falls back on his great master Goethe, and quotes a passage which I have not been able to find, but the bearing of which must depend very much on the context in which it occurs. Goethe, we are told, said in one of his many moods: “I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius.” Who would venture to differ from Goethe when he defines what poetry is? But does he define it? He simply says that it is not art or science. In this one may agree, if only art and science are defined first. No one I think has ever maintained that poetry was science, but no one would deny that poetry was a product of art, if only in the sense of the _Ars poetica_ of Horace, or the _Dichtkunst_ of Goethe. But if we ask what can be meant by saying that poetry is genius, Goethe would probably say that what he meant was that poetry was the product of genius, the German _Genie_. Goethe, therefore, meant no more than that poetry requires, in the poet, originality and spontaneity of thought; and this, though it would require some limitation, no one surely would feel inclined to deny, though even the authority of Goethe would hardly suffice to deprive the decipherer of an inscription, the painter of the “Last Supper,” or the discoverer of the bacilli of a claim to that divine light which we call genius.

Arnold then goes on to say that poetry gives the idea, but it gives it touched with beauty, heightened by emotion. Would not Arnold have allowed that the language of Isaiah, and even some of the dialogues of Plato, were touched with beauty and heightened by emotion though they are in prose? I think he himself speaks somewhere of a poetic prose. Where, then, is the true difference between the creations of Isaiah and of Browning, between the eloquence of Plato and of Wordsworth?

Arnold has one more trump card to play in order to win for poetry that superiority over all the other manifestations of the forces of the human spirit which he claims again and again. I have always been a sincere admirer of Arnold’s poetry, still I think there is more massive force in some of his prose than in many of his poems; nay, I believe he has left a much deeper and more lasting impression on what he likes to call the _Zeitgeist_ through his essays than through his tragedies. What then is his last card, his last proof of the superiority of poetry? Poetry, he argues, has more stability than anything else, and mankind finds in it a surer stay than in art, in philosophy, or religion. “Compare,” he says, “the stability of Shakespeare with that of the Thirty-nine Articles.”

Poor Thirty-nine Articles! Did they ever claim to contain poetry, or even religion? Were they ever meant to be more than a dry abstract of theological dogmas? Surely they never challenged comparison with Shakespeare. They are an index, a table of contents, they were a business-like agreement, if you like, between different parties in the Church of England. But to ask whether they will stand longer than Shakespeare is very much like asking whether the Treaty of Paris will last longer than Victor Hugo. There is stay in poetry provided that the prose which underlies it is lasting, or everlasting; there is no stay in it if it is mere froth and rhyme. Arnold always liked to fall back on Goethe. “What a series of philosophic systems has Germany seen since the birth of Goethe,” he says, “and what sort of stay is any one of them compared with the poetry of Germany’s _one_ great poet?” Is Goethe’s poetry really so sure a stay as the philosophies of Germany; nay, would there be any stay in it at all without the support of that philosophy which Goethe drank in, whether from the vintage of Spinoza or from the more recent _crues_ of Kant and Fichte? Goethe’s name, no doubt, is always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of Goethe’s “Collected Works” in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay, but is _passé_, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian. Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much pleasure we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end it is thought in its ever-changing life that forms the real stay, and it matters little whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music, in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. Poetry in itself is no protection against folly and feebleness. There is in the world a small amount of good, and an immense amount of bad poetry. The former, we may hope, will last, and will serve as a stay to all who care for the music of thought and the harmony of language; the twaddle, sometimes much admired in its time (and there is plenty of it in Goethe also), will, we hope, fade away from the memory of man, and serve as a lesson to poets who imagine that they may safely say in rhythm and rhyme what they would be thoroughly ashamed to say in simple prose. Nor is the so-called stay or immortality of poetry of much consequence. To have benefited millions of his own age, ought surely to satisfy any poet, even if no one reads his poems, or translations of them, a thousand years hence.

Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug
Gethan, der hat gelebt für alle Zeiten.[10]

It is strange to go over the old ground when he with whom one travelled over it in former times is no more present to answer and to hold his own view against the world. There certainly was a great charm in Arnold, even though he could be very patronising. But there was in all he said a kind of understood though seldom expressed sadness, as if to say, “It will soon be all over, don’t let us get angry; we are all very good fellows,” etc. He knew for years that though he was strong and looked very young for his age, the thread of his life might snap at any moment. And so it did—_felix opportunitate mortis_. Not long before his death he met Browning on the steps of the Athenæum. He felt ill, and in taking leave of Browning he hinted that they might never meet again. Browning was profuse in his protestations, and Arnold, on turning away, said in his airy way: “Now, one promise, Browning: please, not more than ten lines.” Browning understood, and went away with a solemn smile.

Arnold was most brilliant as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, from 1857 to 1867. He took great pains in writing and delivering his lectures. He looked well and spoke well. Some of his lectures were masterpieces, and he set a good example which was followed by Sir Francis Doyle, 1867–77, well known by his happy occasional poems, then by John Shairp from 1877 to his death, and lastly by Francis Palgrave from 1885–95. The best of Arnold’s lectures were published as essays; Shairp’s lectures appeared after his death, and have retained their popularity, particularly in America. Palgrave’s lectures, we may hope, will soon appear. They were full of most valuable information, and would prove very useful to many as a book of reference. I have known no one better informed on English poetry than my friend Palgrave. His “Golden Treasury” bears evidence of his wide reading, and his ripe judgment in selecting the best specimens of English lyric poetry. One had but to touch on any subject in the history of English literature, or to ask him a question, and there was always an abundance of most valuable information to be got from him. I owe him a great deal, particularly in my early Oxford days. For it was he who revised my first attempts at writing in English, and gave me good advice for the rest of my journey, more particularly as to what to avoid. He is now one of the very few friends left who remember my first appearance in Oxford in 1846, and who were chiefly instrumental in retaining my services for a University which has proved a true Alma Mater to me during all my life. Grant (Sir Alexander), Sellar, Froude, Sandars, Morier, Neate, Johnson (Manuel), Church, Jowett, all are gone before me.

Here are some old verses of his which I find in my album:—

An English welcome to an English shore
Such as we could, some four years since we gave thee,
Not knowing what the Fates reserved in store
Or that our land among our sons would have thee;
But now thou art endenizen’d awhile
Almost we fear our welcome to renew:[11]
Lest what we seemed to promise, should beguile,
When all we are is open to thy view.
But yet if aught of what we fondly boast—
True-hearted warmth of Friendship, frank and free,
Survive yet in this island-circling coast,
We need not fear again to welcome thee:—
So may we, blessing thee, ourselves be blest,
And prove not all unworthy of our guest.

What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne! How patient they all were with their German guest when he first tried in his broken English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations. Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make more acquaintances among their friends who lived at Oxford, or who from time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others.

Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest labour, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel onslaughts. Grote’s style may not be the very best for an historian, but in his _Quellenstudium_ he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is what Ruskin wrote of him: “There is probably no commercial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have written a better History of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it.” Of Gibbon’s classical work he spoke with even greater contempt. “Gibbon’s is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.” I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten.

He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where no one else could see it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I remember him as diffident as a young girl, full of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning, and his language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteau, bags, rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art. Later in life that even temperament may have become somewhat changed. He had suffered much, and one saw that his wounds had not quite healed. His public lectures as Professor of Fine Art were most attractive, and extremely popular at first. But they were evidently too much for him, and on the advice of his medical friends he had at last to cease from lecturing altogether. Several times his brain had been a very serious trouble to him. People forget that, as we want good eyes for seeing, and good ears for hearing, we want a strong, sound brain for lecturing.

I have seen much of such brain troubles among my friends, and who can account for them? It is not the brain that thinks, nor do we think by means of our brain; but we cannot think without our brain, and the slightest lesion of our brain in any one of its wonderful convolutions is as bad as a shot in the eye.

If ever there was an active, powerful brain, it was Ruskin’s. No doubt he worked very hard, but I doubt whether hard work by itself can ever upset a healthy brain. I believe it rather strengthens than weakens it, as exercise strengthens the muscles of our body. His was, no doubt, a very sensitive nature, and an overwrought sensitiveness is much more likely to cause mischief than steady intellectual effort. And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything unbeautiful; and anything low or ignoble in men revolted him and made him thoroughly unhappy. I remember once taking Emerson to lunch with him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. But some quite indifferent subject turned up, a heated discussion ensued, and Ruskin was so upset that he had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson was most unhappy, and did all he could to make peace, but he had to leave without a reconciliation.

It is very difficult to make allowance for these gradual failures of brain power.

Again and again I have seen such cases at Oxford, where men were clearly no longer themselves, and yet had to be treated as if they were; nay, continue to exercise their old influence till at last the crash came, and one began to understand what had seemed so strange, and more than strange, in their behaviour. I believe there are as many degrees of insanity as there are of shortsightedness and deafness, and the line that divides sanity from insanity is often very small. I have had to watch the waverings of this line in several cases, and it is enough to upset one’s own equilibrium to have to deal with a friend who to-day is quite like himself and quite like ourselves, and the next day a raving lunatic. My predecessor at Oxford, Dr. Trithen, half Russian, half Swiss by birth, and a man of extraordinary gifts and wonderfully attractive, went slowly out of his mind and had at last to be sent to an asylum. But even then he wrote the most reasonable and touching letters to me on all sorts of subjects, though when I went to see him he was quite unapproachable. Fortunately he died soon after from brain disease, but who could say what was the cause of it? Nothing remains of him but the edition of a Sanskrit play, the Vîracharitra.

But his knowledge of Sanskrit and all sorts of languages, his peculiar power of mimicry in imitating the exact pronunciation of different dialects, and his knack of copying Oriental MSS. so that one could hardly tell the difference between the original and the copy were quite amazing. He might have grown to be another Mezzofanti if the fates had not been against him. He was the very type of a fascinating Russian, full of kindness and courtesy, sparkling in conversation, always ready to help others and most careless about himself; but there always was an expression in his coruscating eyes which spoke of danger, and foreboded the tragedy which finished his young and promising life.

Painful as these intellectual breakdowns are, they are not half so painful as when we see in our friends what is at first called mere wrongheadedness, but is apt to lead to a complete deterioration of moral fibre, and in the end to an apparent inability to distinguish between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood. In the former case we know that a slight lesion in one of the ganglion cells or nerve-fibres of the brain is sufficient to account for any disturbance in the intellectual clock-work. The man himself remains the same, though at times hidden from us, as it were, by a veil, and we feel towards him the same sorrowful sympathy which we feel towards a man who has lost the use of his eyes or his legs, who cannot see or cannot walk. We know that the instruments are at fault, not the operator. But it is very difficult to make the same allowance in cases of moral deterioration. Here instruments and operator seem to be the same, though, for all we know, here too the brain may be more at fault than the heart. A well-known oculist maintained that the peculiarities, or what he called the distortions, in Turner’s latest pictures were due to a malformation in the muscles of his eyes. He actually invented some spectacles by which everything that seemed ill-proportioned in Turner’s latest productions came right if looked at through these corrective lenses. May not what we call shortsightedness, conceit, vanity, envy, hatred and malice—all, as it seems, without rhyme or reason—be due in the beginning to some weakness or dimness of sight that might have been corrected, if treated in time, by those who are nearest and dearest to the sufferer? This may seem a dangerous view of moral responsibility; but, if so, it can be dangerous to the sufferer only, not to those who ought to sympathise, _i.e._ to feel and suffer, with him. To me it has proved a solution of many difficulties during a long and varied intercourse with men and women; the only difficulty is how to make these invalids harmless to themselves.

Ruskin’s influence among the undergraduates at Oxford was most extraordinary. He could persuade the young Christ Church men to take spade and wheelbarrow and help him to make a road which he thought would prove useful to a village near Oxford. No other professor could have achieved that. The road was made, but was also soon washed away, and, of course, Ruskin was laughed at, though the labour undergone by his pupils did them no doubt a great deal of good, even though it did not benefit the inhabitants of the village for any length of time. It was sad to see Ruskin leave Oxford estranged from many of his friends, dissatisfied with his work, which nevertheless was most valuable and highly appreciated by young and old, perhaps by the young even more than by the old. His spirit still dwells in the body, and if any one may look back with pride and satisfaction upon the work which he has achieved it is surely Ruskin.

Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o’clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our honoured guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out when he found the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation: “Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England.” However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance at the time in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Immortals. He was simply delightful and full of inquiries about the East, more particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe that it was then that I told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems to have been when asked the same question. The old bear would probably have answered my question by, “You are a great fool, sir; use your own judgment,” while Tennyson gave the very sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory.

It is difficult to define the difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge man; but if Ruskin was decidedly a representative of Oxford, Tennyson was a true son of the sister University. I had been taught to admire Tennyson by my young friends at Oxford, many of whom were enthusiastic worshippers of the poet. My friends often forgot that I had been brought up on German poetry, and that though I knew Heine, Rückert, Eichendorff, Chamisso, and Geibel, to say nothing of Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, nay, to Shelley and Keats, often fell by the wayside and were entirely lost on me.

However, I soon learnt to enjoy Tennyson’s poetry, its finish, its delicacy, its moderation—I mean, the absence of all extravagance; yet there is but one of his books which has remained with me a treasure for life, his “In Memoriam.” To have expressed such deep, true, and original thought as is contained in each of these short poems in such perfect language, to say nothing of rhyme, was indeed a triumph. Tennyson was very kind to me, and took a warm interest in my work, particularly in my mythological studies. I well remember his being struck by a metaphor in my first Essay on Comparative Mythology, published in 1856, and his telling me so. I had said that the sun in his daily passage across the sky had ploughed a golden furrow through the human brain, whence sprang in ancient times the first germs of mythology, and afterwards the rich harvest of religious thought.

“I don’t know,” he said, “whether the simile is quite correct, but I like it.” I was of course very proud that the great poet should have pondered on any sentence of mine, and still more that he should have approved of my theory of seeing in mythology a poetical interpretation of the great phenomena of nature. But it was difficult to have a long discussion with him. He was fond of uttering short and decisive sentences: his yes was yes indeed, and his no was no indeed.

It was generally after dinner, when smoking his pipe and sipping his whiskey and water, that Tennyson began to thaw, and to take a more active part in conversation. People who have not known him then, have hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an active part in the conversation of his friends. His pipe was almost indispensable to him, and I remember one time when I and several friends were staying at his house, the question of tobacco turned up. I confessed that for years I had been a perfect slave to tobacco, so that I could neither read nor write a line without smoking, but that at last I had rebelled against this slavery, and had entirely given up tobacco. Some of his friends taunted Tennyson that he could never give up tobacco. “Anybody can do that,” he said, “if he chooses to do it.” When his friends still continued to doubt and to tease him, “Well,” he said, “I shall give up smoking from to-night.” The very same evening I was told that he threw his pipes and his tobacco out of the window of his bedroom. The next day he was most charming, though somewhat self-righteous. The second day he became very moody and captious, the third day no one knew what to do with him. But after a disturbed night I was told that he got out of bed in the morning, went quietly into the garden, picked up one of his broken pipes, stuffed it with the remains of the tobacco scattered about, and then, having had a few puffs, came to breakfast, all right again. Nothing was said any more about giving up tobacco.

He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight. “But mind,” he said, “you will be watched from morning till evening.” This was in fact his great grievance, that he could not go out without being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the downs behind his house, he suddenly started, left us, and ran home, simply because he had descried two strangers coming towards us.

I was told that he once complained to the Queen, and said that he could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came to stare at him. The Queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson, not seeing what she meant, replied: “No, madam, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be troubled either.”

It must be confessed that people were very inconsiderate. Rows of tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for his appearance. The guides were actually paid by sightseers, particularly by those from America, for showing them the great poet. Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson, and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, the tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask him: “Now, are you the real Tennyson?” This, no doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord Tennyson was driven to pay a large sum for some useless downs near his house, simply in order to escape from the attentions of admiring travellers.

Why should not people be satisfied with the best that a poet is and can give them, namely his poetry? Why should they wish to stare at him? Few poets are greater than their poetry, and Tennyson was not one of them. Like all really great men, Tennyson disliked the worship that was paid him by many who came to stare at him and to pour out the usual phrases of admiration before him. Tennyson frequently took flight from his intending Boswells, and he was the very last man to appreciate the “_Il parle_” by which in Paris all conversation was hushed whenever Victor Hugo was present at a dinner and spoke to his neighbour, possibly only to ask him for the _menu_.

People have learnt after his death what a possession they had in Tennyson. He may not rank among the greatest poets of England, but there was something high and noble in him which reacted on the nation at large, even though that influence was not perhaps consciously realised. Anyhow, after his death, it was widely felt that there was nobody worthy to fill his place; and why was it not left empty, as in the Greek army, where, we are told, a place of honour was reserved for a great hero who was supposed to be present during the heat of the battle, and to inspire those who stood near his place to great deeds of valour?

Browning was neither of Cambridge nor of Oxford, but his genius was much more akin to Oxford than to Cambridge, and towards the end of his life, particularly after his son had entered at Balliol College, he was very often seen amongst us. Though he was not what we call a scholar, his mind was saturated with classical lore, and his appreciation of Greek poetry, Greek mythology, and Greek sculpture was very keen. He could not quote Greek verses, but he was steeped in the Greek tragedians and lyric poets. Of course this classical sympathy was but one side of his poetry. Browning was full of sympathy, nay, of worship, for anything noble and true in literature, ancient or modern. And what was most delightful in him was his ready response, his generosity in pouring out his own thoughts before anybody who shared his sympathies. For real and substantial conversation there was no one his equal, and even in the lighter after-dinner talk he was admirable. His health seemed good, and he was able to sacrifice much of his time to society. He had one great advantage, he never consented to spoil his dinner by making, or, what is still worse, by having to make, a speech. I once felt greatly aggrieved, sitting opposite Browning at one of the Royal Academy dinners. I had to return thanks for literature and scholarship, and was of course rehearsing my speech during the whole of dinner-time, while he enjoyed himself talking to his friends. When I told him that it was a shame that I should be made a martyr of while he was enjoying his dinner in peace, he laughed, and said that he had said No once for all, and that he had never in his life made a public speech. I believe, as a rule, poets are not good speakers. They are too careful about what they wish to say. As dinner advanced I became more and more convinced of the etymological identity of _honor_ and _onus_. At last my turn came. Having to face the brilliant society which is always present at this dinner, including the Prince of Wales, the Ministers of both parties, the most eminent artists, scientists, authors and critics, I had of course learnt my speech by heart, and was getting on very well, when suddenly I saw the Prince of Wales laughing and saying something to his neighbour. At once the thread of my speech was broken. I began to think whether I could have said anything that made the Prince laugh, and what it could have been, and while I was thinking in every direction, I suddenly stood speechless. I thought it was an eternity, and I was afraid I should have to collapse and make the greatest fool of myself that ever was. I looked at Browning and he gave me a friendly nod, and at that moment my grapple-irons caught the lost cable and I was able to finish my speech. When it was over I turned to Browning and said: “Was it not fearful, that pause?” “Far from it,” he said, “it was excellent. It gave life to your speech. Everybody saw you were collecting your thoughts, and that you were not simply delivering what you had learnt by heart. Besides, it did not last half a minute.” To me it had seemed at least five or ten minutes. But after Browning’s good-natured words I felt relieved, and enjoyed at least what was left of a most enjoyable dinner, the only enjoyable public dinner I know.

The best place to see Browning was Venice, and I think it was there that I saw him for the last time. He was staying in one of the smaller palaces with a friend, and he was easily persuaded to read some of his poems. I asked him for his poem on Andrea del Sarto, and his delivery was most simple and yet most telling. He was a far better reader than Tennyson. His voice was natural, sonorous, and full of delicate shades; while Tennyson read in so deep a tone, that it was like the rumbling and rolling sound of the sea rather than like a human voice. His admirers, both gentlemen and ladies, who thought that everything he did must be perfect, encouraged him in that kind of delivery; and while to me it seemed that he had smothered and murdered some of the poems I liked best, they sighed and groaned and poured out strange interjections, meant to be indicative of rapture.

There is a definiteness in Tennyson’s poetry which makes it easy to recite and even to declaim his poems, while many of Browning’s compositions do not lend themselves at all to vivâ voce repetition. There is always a superabundance of thought and feeling in them, and his mastery of rhyme and rhythm proved a temptation which he could not always resist. One often wished that some of Browning’s poems could have passed through the Tennysonian sieve, to take away all that is unnecessary in them, and to moderate his exuberant revelling in language. Still his friends know what they possess in his poetry. When they are sad, he makes them joyful; when they exult, he tones them down; when they are hungry, he feeds them; when they are poor, he makes them rich; and, like a true prophet, he knows how to bring fresh water out of the rocks, out of the commonest events in our journey through the desert of life. It is a pity that his poetry does not lend itself to translation. Perhaps he is too thoroughly English, perhaps his sentences are too labyrinthine even for German readers. Anyhow, Browning is known abroad much less than Tennyson, and if translatableness is a test of true poetry, his poetry would not stand that test well.

To have known such men as Tennyson and Browning is indeed a rare fortune. It helps us in two ways. We are preserved from extravagant admiration, which is always stupid; and, on the other hand, we can enjoy even insignificant verses of theirs, as coming from our friends and lighting up some corner of their character. There are cases where personal acquaintance with the poets actually spoils our taste for their poetry, which we might otherwise have enjoyed; and to imagine that one knows a poet better because one has once shaken hands with him, is a fatal mistake. It would be far better to go at once to Westminster Abbey, and spend a few thoughtful moments at the tombs of such poets as Tennyson or Browning, for there, at all events, there would be no disappointment.

LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
IV

Authors complain, and in many cases complain justly, of the large number of letters and visits which they receive from unknown friends and distant admirers. I myself, though the subjects on which I write are not exactly popular, have been sitting at the receipt of such custom for many years. It is difficult to know what to do. To answer all the letters, even to acknowledge all the books that are sent to me from India, Australia, New Zealand, from every new sphere of influence in Africa, from America, North and South, and from the principal countries of Europe, would be physically impossible. A simple knowledge of arithmetic would teach my friends that if I were only to glance at a book in order to give an opinion, or say something pleasant about it, one hour at least of my time in the morning would certainly be consumed by every single book. Every writer imagines that he is the only one who writes a letter, asks a question, or sends a book; but he forgets that in this respect everybody has as much right as everybody else, and claims it too, unmindful of the rights of others, and quite unconscious that the sum total of such interruptions would swallow up the whole of a man’s working day. And there is this further danger: however guarded one may be in expressing one’s gratitude or one’s opinion of the merits of a book, one’s letter is apt to appear in advertisements, if only far away in India or the Colonies; nay, we often find that the copy of a book was not even sent us by the author himself, but with the author’s compliments, that is, by an enterprising publisher.

However, there is a compensation in all things, and I gladly confess that I have occasionally derived great advantage from the letters of my unknown friends. They have sent me valuable corrections and useful remarks for my books, they have made me presents of MSS. and local publications difficult to get even at the Bodleian and the British Museum, and I feel sure that they have not been offended even though I could not enter into a long correspondence with every one of my epistolary friends on the origin of language or the home of the Aryan race. My worst friends are those who send me their own writings and wish me to give an opinion, or to find a publisher for them. Had I attempted to comply with one half of these requests, I could have done nothing else in life. What would become of me if everybody who cannot find a publisher were to write to me! The introduction of postcards has proved, no doubt, a great blessing to all who are supposed to be oracles, but even an oracular response takes time. Speaking for myself, I may truly say that I often feel tempted to write to a man who is an authority on a special subject on which I want information. I know he could answer my question in five minutes, and yet I hardly ever venture to make the appeal, but go to a library, where I have to waste hours and hours in finding the right book, and afterwards the right passage in it. Why should not others do the same?

And what applies to letters applies to personal visits also. I do sometimes get impatient when perfect strangers call on me without any kind of introduction, sometimes even without a visiting card, and then sit down to propound some theory of their own. Still, taking all in all, I must not complain of my visitors. They do not come in shoals like letters and books, and very often they are interesting and even delightful. Many of them come from America, and the mere fact that they want to see me is a compliment which I appreciate. They have read my books, that is another compliment which I always value; and they often speak to me of things that years ago I have said in some article of mine, and which I myself have often quite forgotten.

It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of sight-seeing. They possess what at school was called _pace_. They travel over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all that is, and all who are, worth seeing. We wonder how they can enjoy anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great many photographs, not only in their albums but in their memory also. The fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what they want to see; and, after all, there are limits to everything. If we have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong? The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters, for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes; others sit and sit, and stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the real characteristic points in a face.