Chapter XII: Part 12

At Cambridge, Tennyson entered Trinity College, and while there made the acquaintance of Arthur Henry Hallam, which soon ripened into the friendship that has been made immortal in the poem "In Memoriam." The only distinction Tennyson would seem to have gained at Cambridge was the Chancellor's gold medal awarded for the prize-poem "Timbuctoo," a curious production long consigned to oblivion but now included in the authorized edition of the poet's collected work.

In 1811 the Rev. Mr. Tennyson died, and on leaving Cambridge, Alfred returned to Somersby and lived with his mother and sisters. In 1830 he published "Poems chiefly Lyrical," in 1832 "Poems," and in 1842 "Poems," in two volumes, which first opened the eyes of the English public to the fact that a new planet had appeared in the heaven of poetry, and Tennyson's name soon became a household word. In 1845 he was awarded a pension of £200 per annum from the Civil List, and in 1850 he was made Poet Laureate, on the death of Wordsworth. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, whom he had long known at Somersby, the daughter of a lawyer, and niece of Sir John Franklin. In 1855 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford and in 1884, being then in his seventy-fifth year, he was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford.

Tennyson was an ardent lover of England, and seldom left his native country, and never for any long time. He had two residences, one at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, and the other at Aldworth on the top of Blackdown, in Surrey. He changed from one of these places to the other according to the seasons and led in both the same quiet family life, devoted to poetry, and enjoying to the full the delights of the country, caring little for other society than that of his intimate friends--a strong contrast in this respect to his great contemporary Browning, who delighted in the social life of London, as that life delighted in him. Mr. Edwin Arnold has given in a recent number of _The Forum_ (1891) a very pleasant account of a day spent at Farringford in the company of the venerable poet and his only surviving son Hallam, named after the friend of his father's early years. Although Tennyson was averse to mingling in general society, and was difficult of access in his home, except to his intimate friends, yet those friends were among the elect spirits of England, and he has recorded his feeling for some of them--for Maurice, Fitzgerald, Spedding, Lear, among others--in poems that deserve a place among his best. His friendship for Carlyle grew out of his admiration for the genius of the man as well as his character, and Carlyle has left more than one sketch of his friend among his inimitable word-portraits of notable men.

The interest of Tennyson's life really centres in his early days spent in his father's parish of Somersby; his later life has flowed on in a stream rarely interrupted by any events with which the public was concerned, or that can be said to have greatly influenced his poetry. He was no doubt the product of his time, and took a deep interest in what was going on in the world, especially in so much of it as affected England. But his strong conservatism made him unsympathetic with much that is called progress, and which at any rate is change; and change of any sort was little welcome to Tennyson. He was not born to be a reformer, and was ill-fitted by his temper to lead public opinion. But his lofty moral character, the noble purity and elevation of his life, and his singleness of aim, joined with his extraordinary powers as a poet, as a wielder of the English language--and no poet since the great days has had such a varied power over all chords of the lyre--these elements combined to make the name of Tennyson without a doubt the greatest of his time among the poets of the English-speaking race. He died at Aldworth House, in Surrey, October 6, 1892.

[Signature of the author.]

CHARLES DICKENS

By WALTER BESANT

(1812-1870)

Charles Dickens was born at Landport, now a great town, but then a little suburb of Portsmouth, or Portsea, lying half a mile outside of the town walls. The date of his birth was Friday, February 7, 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at that time attached to the Portsmouth dockyard. The familiarity which the novelist shows with sea-ports and sailors is not, however, due to his birthplace, because his father, in the year 1814, was recalled to London, and in 1816 went to Chatham. They still show the room in the dockyard where the elder Dickens worked, and where his son often came to visit him. The family lived in Ordnance Place, Chatham, and the boy was sent to a school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by one William Giles. As a child he is said to have been a great reader, and very early began to attempt original writing. In 1821, Charles being then nine years of age, the family fell into trouble; reforms in the Admiralty deprived the father of his post, and the greater part of his income. They had to leave Chatham and removed to London, where a mean house in a shabby street of Camden Town received them. But not for long. The unfortunate father was presently arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea, and Charles, then only ten years of age, and small for his age, was placed in a blacking factory at Hungerford Market, where all he could do was to put the labels on the blacking-bottles, with half a dozen rough and rude boys. The degradation and misery of this occupation sunk deep into the boy's soul. He could never dare to speak of this time; it was never mentioned in his presence. Not only were his days passed in this wretched work, but the child was left entirely to himself at night, when he made his way home from Hungerford Market to Camden Town, a distance of four miles, to his lonely bedroom. On Sundays he visited his father in the prison. Of course such a neglected way of living could not continue. They presently found a lodging for him in Lant Street, close to the Marshalsea, where at least he was near his parents, and his father shortly afterward recovering his liberty, they all went back to Camden Town, and the boy was sent to school again. It was to a private school in the Hampstead Road, where he remained for three or four years of quiet work. It must have been then, one suspects, rather than at Chatham, that he became so great a devourer of books. But he was never a scholar in any sense, and the books that he read were novels and plays. That the family fortunes were still low is proved by the fact that, when he was taken from school, no better place could be found for him than a stool at the desk of a solicitor. Meantime his father had obtained a post as reporter for the _Morning Herald_, and Charles, feeling small love for the hopeless drudgery of a lawyer's office, resolved also to attempt the profession of journalist. He taught himself shorthand with the resolution--even the rage--which he always threw into everything he undertook; and he frequented the British Museum daily in order to supplement some of the shortcomings of his reading. In his seventeenth year he became a reporter at Doctors' Commons. At this period all his ambitions were for the stage. He would be an actor. All his life, indeed, he loved acting and the theatre above all things. As an actor, one feels certain that he would have succeeded. He would have made an excellent comedian. Fortunately, he was saved for better work.

It was not until he was two-and-twenty that he succeeded in getting permanent employment on the staff of a London paper, as a reporter. In this capacity he was sent about the country to do work which is now mainly supplied by local reporters. It must be remembered that there were as yet no railways. He had to travel by stage-coach, by post, by any means that offered. "I have been upset," he said years afterward, speaking of this time, "in almost every description of vehicle used in this country."

About this time he began the real work of his life. In December, 1833, the _Monthly Magazine_ published his first original paper, called "A Dinner at Poplar Walk." Other papers followed, but produced nothing for the contributor except the gratification of seeing them in print, because the magazine could not afford to pay for anything. However, they did the writer the best service possible, in enabling him to prove his power, and he presently made an arrangement with the editor of the _Evening Chronicle_ to contribute papers and sketches regularly, continuing to act as reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_, and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven guineas a week. To be making an income of nearly four hundred pounds a year at the age of two or three and twenty, would be considered fortunate in any line of life. Sixty years ago, such an income represented a much more solid success than would now be the case. The sketches were collected and published in the beginning of the year 1836, the author receiving a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. He afterward bought it back for eleven times that amount. In the last week of March in the same year appeared the first number of the "Pickwick Papers;" three days afterward Dickens married the daughter of his friend, George Hogarth, editor of the _Evening Chronicle_, and his early struggles were finished.

No article, however short, treating of Charles Dickens, can avoid entering into the details of his early history with a fulness which would be out of all proportion to what follows, but for the remarkable fact that the events of his childhood and his youth impressed his imagination and influenced the whole of his literary career so profoundly, that to the very end of his life there is not a single work in which some of the characters, some of the places, are not derived from his early recollections. Many other writers there are who have passed their childish days among the _petites gens_, but none who have so remembered their ways, their speech, and their mode of thought. The Marshalsea prison of Little Dorrit is the place where for two years he went in and out. The Queen's Bench and its Rules were close to the Marshalsea; Bob Sawyer's lodgings in Lant Street were his own; David Copperfield, the friendless lad in the dingy warehouse, was himself; the cathedral of Edwin Drood was that in whose shadow he had lived; Mrs. Pipehin is his old landlady of Camden Town; the most delightful features in Mr. Micawber are borrowed from his own father; the experiences of Doctors' Commons, the solicitor's clerks, the life in chambers, are all his own; while of individual characters, the list of those which are known to be portraits more or less true to nature might be indefinitely extended. And yet, while he was early drawing on these early recollections, while they constantly furnished him with scenes and characters, he could not bear to speak of them, and no one except his friend and biographer, Forster, ever knew that he was himself, with all the shabby, mean surroundings in early life, exactly such as David Copperfield.

The rest of Dickens's life has the interest which belongs to success after success. It was a long, triumphal march. He had no failures; he suffered no defeats. There were times when his hand was not at his best, but never a time when his hand lost its power. This indeed seems the crowning happiness of a successful and singularly happy life, that when he was cut off--he died June 6, 1870--after fifty-eight years of continuous work, his brain was still as vigorous, his eye as keen, his hand as sure as in the first fresh running of his youth. It was indeed more than literary success which he achieved; he conquered the whole English-speaking world. This world, which now numbers nigh upon a hundred millions, loves him; all who can read his books love him. This love cheered him in his life, and will keep his memory green. Of the solid wealth which he acquired, the honor he enjoyed, the friends who gathered round him, and the brave and resolute front which he always showed, there is no space here to speak.

The following is the list of Dickens' works, in their order of appearance omitting certain farces and pamphlets which belong to a more extended notice:

"Sketches by Boz" (1836), "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" (1837), "Oliver Twist" (1838), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1839), "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1840-41), "Barnaby Rudge" (1841), "American Notes" (1842), "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), "The Christmas Tales"--viz., "The Christmas Carol," "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," "The Battle of Life," "The Haunted Man," and "The Ghost's Bargain"--(1843, 1846, 1848), "Pictures from Italy" (1845), "Dombey and Son" (1846-48), "David Copperfield" (1849-50), "Bleak House" (1852-53), "The Child's History of England" (1854), "Hard Times" (1854), "Little Dorrit" (1855-57), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859), "The Uncommercial Traveller" (1861), the "Christmas Numbers" in _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_, "Great Expectations" (1860-61), "Our Mutual Friend" (1864-65), "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (unfinished). This long roll by no means represents the whole work of this most active of mankind. Public readings both in this country and in America, private theatricals, speeches, letters innumerable, journeys many, pamphlets, plays, the conduct of a popular magazine--first called _Household Words_, and then _All the Year Round_--and an ever-present readiness to enjoy the society of his friends, fill up the space when he was not actually writing. That he could do so much was mainly due to his orderly and methodical habits, to his clearness of mind, and to a capacity for business as wonderful as his genius for fiction. He knew no rest from the day when he first attacked shorthand, to the day when he fell from his chair in the fit from which he never recovered. He was incomparably the most active man, the hardest-working-man of his age. In the history of letters there are many who have produced more work in bulk; there is not one who led a life so varied, so full, so constantly busy, so active, and so rich.

It is as yet too early to speak with certainty as to the lasting popularity of his work as a whole. Very much of it owed its general success to the faithful delineation of manners already passed away. He was the prophet of the middle class, and the manners of that great section of the community have greatly changed since the days when Charles Dickens lived among them and observed them. With the decay of these manners some part of present popularity must certainly pass out of his work; already a generation has appeared to whom a great deal of Dickens' work proves of no interest, because it portrays manners with which they are not familiar. They do not laugh with those who laughed fifty, forty, twenty years ago, because the people depicted have vanished. But when the second quarter of this century shall belong so truly to the past, that not one survives who can remember it, then these books will become a precious storehouse for the study and the recovery of part, and that a large part, of its life and manners.

Again, it is the essential quality of genius to create the type. In this Dickens has been more successful than any other novelist, ancient or modern. With him every leading character stands for his class. Squeers is the representative of the schoolmaster, then too common, ignorant, brutal, and grasping; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman; it is impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle; and so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by his own clearness of conception and of execution. It is another note of genius to suffer every character to work out its own fate without weakness or pity, and though Dickens deals seldom with the greater tragedies of the world in his domestic dramas, necessity pursues his characters as grimly and certainly as in real life. The villain Quilp and his tool make us forget, in the amusement which they cause, their own baseness. But their creator is not deceived. He makes them bring their own ruin upon their heads. To be true, not only to the outward presentment and speech and thought of a character, but also to the laws which surround him, and to the consequences of his actions, is a rare thing indeed with those who practise the art of fiction. Further, in this art there are permissible certain exaggerations, as upon the stage. There is exaggeration of feature, exaggeration of talk, exaggeration in action. There are degrees of exaggeration, by which one passes through tragedy, comedy, farce, and burlesque; but in all there must be an exaggeration. Dickens was master of exaggeration--if he sometimes carried it too far, he produced farce, but never burlesque. As for selection, which is perhaps the most important point after exaggeration, it came to him by instinct; he knew from the very outset how to select. It is by selection that the novelist maintains the interest of his story and develops his characters. There are countless things that are said and done in the progress of the history which have little interest and small bearing on the things which have to be told; and it is the first mark of the bad novelist that he does not know how to suppress irrelevant scenes. In the constructive branch of his art Dickens continually advanced. His earlier stories seem, like the "Pickwick Papers," to be made up of scenes. "Nicholas Nickleby" is a long series of scenes brilliantly drawn, in which new characters are always appearing and playing their disconnected part and disappearing. But as he grew older his conceptions of the story itself grew clearer, and his arrangement more artistic. It is, however, in description that Dickens proved himself so great a master. He laid his hand by instinct upon the salient and characteristic features, and he never failed in finding the right--the only--words fit for their illustration. In description he is never conventional, always real, and yet he allows himself, here as in his scenes of character and dialogue, a certain exaggeration which produces the happiest effects. In the hands of his imitators it becomes grotesque and intolerable.

As to his great and splendid gallery of portraits, it is difficult to speak briefly. The whole of London life--the life of the streets, of the city, of the middle class--seems at first sight depicted in this gallery. Here are merchant, shopkeeper and clerk, lawyer and client, money-lender and victim, dressmaker, actor--one knows not what. Yet there are great omissions. The scholar, the divine, the statesman, the country gentleman, are absent, partly because Dickens had no knowledge of them, and partly because he forbore to hold them up to the ridicule which he loved to pour over his characters. His methods imposed upon him certain limitations; he aimed at commanding his reader's attention by compelling laughter and tears, but especially laughter. He who can command neither the one nor the other is no true artist in fiction. But in his laughter and in his tears one feels always the kindly heart as well as the skilful hand. It is for the former--for the deeply human heart--even more than for the latter, that the world will continue to love the memory of Charles Dickens.

ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)

Robert Browning was born in 1812, at Camberwell, England. His father was a clerk highly placed in the house of Rothschild, and there are still living those who remember the excitement of the elder man and of his friends in New Court, when the time came for the son's first play to be produced at Covent Garden. He was a Dissenter, and for this reason his son's education did not proceed on the ordinary English lines. The training which Robert Browning received was more individual, and his reading was wider and less accurate, than would have been the case had he gone to Eton or Winchester. Thus, though to the end he read Greek with the deepest interest, he never could be called a Greek scholar. His poetic turn declared itself rather early, and in 1835 he had a poem, "Pauline," ready for the press. But publication costs money, and his business-like father did not see any chance of returns from poetry. A kind aunt, however, came to the rescue, and presented the young poet with the cost of printing the little book, £30. It was published at the price of a few shillings, and of course did not sell; but the author had the curious satisfaction of seeing a copy of this original edition bring twenty-five guineas under the hammer a few years ago. "Pauline" was not reprinted till the issue of the six-volume edition of Mr. Browning's works, in 1869. It was followed by the more ambitious "Paracelsus," a striking attempt to fill a mediæval outline with a compact body of modern thought; but in spite of the lovely lyric, "Over the sea our galleys went," and in spite of other beauties, the public did not heed the book, and it had no success except with a very small circle. It must be remembered that those days were days of poetic exhaustion. Shelley, Byron, and Scott were dead; the year before, Coleridge had followed them to the grave; Wordsworth was old, and his muse no longer spoke with her accents of an earlier day. Amid a mass of "keepsake" literature, affectations, and mediocrity, the still, small voice of the "Poems by Two Brothers" was heard by few, and that of "Paracelsus" was heard by fewer still.

Two years later the young poet came forward with the historical play of "Strafford," which was produced at Covent Garden with Macready in the title-part. It was not exactly a failure, but though the play itself and Macready's acting attracted the admiration of the critics, it was at once seen that the drama contained too much psychology and too little movement for a popular success. Mr. Browning, however, did not, for a long time to come, cease to be a "writer of plays," though it was not till eleven years after that another drama of his, "A Blot on the Scutcheon," was performed on the stage. The interval, however, was full of poetic activity. The energetic search of the members of the Browning Society, and especially of its founder, Mr. Furnivall, has succeeded in putting on record the place of first publication of several scattered poems of about this date. Four of them, including "Porphyria," and "Johannes Agricola," appeared in the _Monthly Repository_, edited by W. J. Fox, the Unitarian minister who was afterward so well known for his eloquent speeches against the Corn Laws. In 1840 came a small volume, bound, after the fashion of the time, in gray paper boards, and called "Sordello," after the Provencal poet mentioned in the "Purgatory" of Dante. The book appeared without preface or dedication, but in the collected edition of 1863 it bears a note addressed by Mr. Browning to his friend Monsieur Milsand, of Dijon, which contains the characteristic expressions, "I wrote it twenty-five years ago for only a few.... My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so." "Sordello" in its original form is very rare and valuable now, as all the early editions of Mr. Browning's poetry have become; but on its first appearance nobody cared for it--it was regarded as nothing but a hopeless puzzle by a bewildered and defeated public. Even now, when Mr. Browning has long since formed his own public, "Sordello" is probably less read than any other work of his; it is too obscure and confused both in plot and in thought. But all the same, there are many interesting things in "Sordello," and among them, especially at this moment, are the references to the place which, for fifty yours, has fascinated the poet. Only the other day he wrote "Asolando,"' and half a century ago we find him writing:

"Lo, on a healthy, brown, and nameless hill
By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill,
Morning just up, higher and higher runs
A child, bare-foot and rosy."

Asolo appears again very soon afterward in the lovely opening of the play "Pippa Passes." This came first in the series which appeared in the years 1841-46, under the odd title of "Bells and Pomegranates." There were eight numbers of this publication--thin, yellow-covered pamphlets, printed in double columns of small type, by Mr. Moxon; surely us unattractive a way as a poet ever attempted of bringing his wares before the world. Doubtless it was done in order that the low price might appeal to a large audience, but we doubt whether the sale of "Bells and Pomegranates" was ever large. The series is exceedingly rare now, and the curious who prefer to read those noble poems in this unsightly form have to pay £10 or £12 for the privilege of possessing them. In this first series appeared all the author's plays except "Strafford," namely, "Pippa Passes," "King Victor and King Charles," "The Return of the Druses," "A Blot on the Scutcheon," "Colombe's Birthday," "Luria," and "A Soul's Tragedy." But, alternating with these, appealed many of the shorter poems which have long since passed into the common treasure-house of all who care for poetry throughout the English-speaking world. One of the numbers contains the set called "Dramatic Lyrics," including "In a Gondola," "Waring," and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Another number contained "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics," among which are to be found such favorite poems as "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," and "Saul." In this group of poems were also to be found the celebrated lines called "The Lost Leader." People at the time supposed that these indignant verses were aimed at the Tory backsliding of Wordsworth; and, indeed, though Mr. Browning in after-years denied their special applicability to the old Laureate, there can be no doubt that when he wrote them he had Wordsworth more or less in his mind.

In 1846 there happened to Mr. Browning something much more important than the publication of this or that poem; for it was then, on September 12th, in Marylebone parish church, that he was married to the poetess, Elizabeth Barrett. Their union was the direct result, in the first instance, of poetic and intellectual sympathy, and it was to the admiration which Miss Barrett, then an invalid, felt for the author of "Bells and Pomegranates," that they owed their first introduction. For the greater part of their married life Mr. and Mrs. Browning lived almost entirely in Italy, and especially at that house in Florence, close by the Porta Romana, which now bears a tablet with her name, and which gave its title to one of her best-known volumes of poetry. They had one child, born in 1849, Robert Barrett Browning, favorably known as a painter and a sculptor After just fifteen years' marriage, Mrs. Browning died, in 1861; the frail body almost literally burnt up by the fiery soul within. Of the closeness of their union Mr. Browning, of course, never spoke, except to his intimate friends; but that it was of a degree of happiness to which it is seldom given to poor humanity to attain was made evident to the world when he wrote the splendid invocation to his "Lyric Love" at the opening of "The Ring and the Book."

During the first years of married life, Mr. Browning wrote little, but he read widely and deeply, and in 1849 he published, in two reasonable-sized volumes, "Paracelsus" and "Bells and Pomegranates," under the title of "Poems, by Robert Browning." Next year followed his most definitely Christian poem, "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"--a small volume in which the mysteries of the Christian religion were handled in their relations with the modern world. Then, in 1852, followed a prose publication, which was, unfortunately, founded upon a mistake, and which was at once suppressed and not brought to light until the Browning Society reprinted it years afterward. This was the celebrated introductory essay to a volume purporting to consist of letters from Shelley. The letters were soon discovered to be fabrications, but Mr. Browning's essay was quite independent of their genuineness, being really a very interesting discussion on subjective and objective poetry, and of Shelley's writings as a type of the former. In 1855 came the two volumes called "Men and Women," and in their pages were to be found many of the poems best worth reading of all Mr. Browning's productions, and many of those that are best remembered at the present day.

It is only somewhat exasperating to the student, to find that in subsequent collected editions of his works, Mr. Browning has allowed his fondness for renaming and rearrangement to break up these volumes, and to distribute the greater part of their contents under other titles. In "Men and Women" the intensely dramatic quality of his genius found its best scope, for here are to be found such masterpieces as "Karshish," "The Arab Physician," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Bishop Blougram," and "Cleon." It is amusing to note, if the authority of the bibliographers is to be trusted, that these volumes were reviewed, in the Roman Catholic paper called _The Rambler_, by no less a person than Cardinal Wiseman, who was extremely complimentary to "Bishop Blougram," and did not by any means despair of the writer's conversion. After "Men and Women" the poet was silent for a long time. His wife's health was failing, though at the time of the war in Lombardy her burning energy burst out in the "Poems before Congress," and though she watched the course of the struggle with never-ceasing excitement.

In 1861 the great grief of his life fell upon Mr. Browning, and he published nothing new till 1864, when there appeared the volume called "Dramatis Personæ." It is pretty safe, however, to declare that in this volume, with "The Ring and the Book," which was published in 1868, he reached his greatest height of performance. It is enough to recall to the memory of readers that "Dramatis Personæ" contains "James Lea's Wife," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "Prospice." Then, four years later, as we have said, appeared four volumes of that marvellous performance, "The Ring and the Book," a poetic and psychological grappling with the question suggested to the poet by the account of a Roman trial that took place a couple of centuries ago. Whether anyone else in any country has ever before ventured to publish a poem in four simultaneous volumes, we cannot say; but, in spite of its length and difficulty, "The Ring and the Book" was and is one of the most successful of the author's works. It has every right to be so, for nowhere does he exhibit in a manner so sustained, and yet so varied, his own extraordinary insight into characters and motives entirely dissimilar.

Since that remarkable work was given to the world, Mr. Browning has attempted nothing approaching it in magnitude, or in the demand it made upon the sustained exertion of high intellectual powers. But he left his admirers no room to complain of diminished fecundity or of decaying vigor. "Balaustion's Adventure," including a transcript from Euripides, appeared in 1871, to prove his undiminished insight and inexhaustible interest in spiritual analysis. It was followed by "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society," a book suggested by the collapse of the French Empire, and recalling the scathing satire with which he lashed the impostures of spiritualism in "Sludge the Medium." In 1872 he published "Fifine at the Fair," to the delight of those who loved him, and, as usual, to the irritation of those who did not. "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" appeared in the following year; and, after an interval of two years, was followed by "Aristophanes' Apology." Again, after a similar interval, he gave us "The Agamemnon of Æschylus Transcribed." In 1879 came "Dramatic Idylls," with the stirring ballad of "Hervé Riel," which, as some think, roused the Laureate to emulative effort. "Jocoseria," published in 1883, reclaimed many of his earlier admirers, who had been estranged by what they regarded as the extravagance and whimsicality, not to speak of the obscurity and ruggedness, of so many of his later works. "Jocoseria," in fact, recalls "Men and Women" rather than the "Fifines," the "Hohenstiel-Schwangaus," and the "Red Cotton Nightcap Countries" of a later and less happily-inspired period. "Ferishtah's Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day" was the rather cumbrous title of a still later volume; and last of all appeared "Asolando," a work which displays all the old qualities, the old fire, and the old audacity, apparently untouched by advancing years, or even by imminent death. He died the same month that it appeared, December, 1889.

It has been Mr. Browning's fate to divide the reading world into two hostile camps. There are no lukewarm friends on his side; and from those who have never acquired a taste for the strong wine of his muse, it is sometimes difficult to extort recognition of the vigor, the insight, the tenderness, and the variety of intellectual sympathy which characterize the man, even, if we make abstraction of the poet. An industrious and enthusiastic society devoted itself during his lifetime to the promotion of a taste for his writings, but even that singular tribute to the strength of his personality does not shut the mouth of the sceptic. Those who love the poets of prettinesses, of artificial measures, and dainty trifles have at the present day an almost embarrassing wealth of choice. But Mr. Browning in his own sphere had no rival and no imitator. No other so boldly faces the problems of life and death, no other like him braces the reader as with the breath of a breeze from the hills, and no other gives like him the assurance that we have to do with a man. His last public words are the fit description of his strenuous attitude through all his literary work:

"Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed--fight on, fare ever
There as here!"

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

By FRANCES H. UNDERWOOD

(1809-1894)

Abraham Lincoln, it is said, was one day talking with a friend about favorite poems, and repeated with deep feeling the well-known classic stanza:

"The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb."

"That verse," he said, "was written by a man by the name of Holmes." If the manner of referring to the authorship was little flattering, the honest admiration of the great-hearted President might atone for it. An attorney in a country town in Illinois might well have been unacquainted with the reputation of a poet away in Massachusetts, whose lines, perhaps, he had seen only in the newspapers.

No reader of feeling ever passed that simple stanza unmoved. It is for all time not to be forgotten. Not a word could be changed any more than in "The Bugle Song." Its pathos is all the more surprising in connection with the quaint humor in the description of the old man who is the subject of the poem. There is a delicious Irish character in this, as in many other pieces of Holmes, reminding us of the familiar couplet of Moore--

"Erin, the smile and the tear in thine eyes
Blend like The rainbow that hangs in thy skies."

"The Last Leaf," from which the stanza is quoted, was written over fifty years ago, when the author was a little more than twenty-one. There are a few others of the same period which may have been considered trifles at first, but which seem to have slowly acquired consistence, so that while they are still marvels of airy grace, they are as firm as the carved foliage on a Gothic capital.

Not many writers live long enough to see themselves recognized as classics; the benign judgment is more frequently tardy; and then it happens, as De Musset says, that "Fame is a plant which grows upon a tomb." It takes years of repetition to impress new ideas in literature into the hearts and memories of men; and, as literary cycles move, the age of Holmes is still new. The noblest poetry in the language, from the unborrowed splendor of Shakespeare to the sparkling reflections of Gray, doubtless gave to contemporaries a sense of strangeness at first. Time was needed to harden the fresh lines, as well as to win for them a place among the elder and accepted models.

Holmes's father was minister to the Congregational church in Cambridge, a man of ability and author of some historical works. He lived in a venerable house of the ante-Revolutionary period which stood near the college grounds, and was demolished a few years ago to make room for a new academic building. One of Holmes's most characteristic articles is his description of "The Old Gambrel-roofed House." In the time of his youth there were people in Cambridge who remembered the march of the British troops on their way to Lexington and Concord in 1775. The speech and the manners of the colonists long retained the old English stamp, and the earliest of them had been contemporaries of Bunyan and almost of Shakespeare; and so Holmes must have heard, as I when a boy heard in another county, phrases and tones which could not have differed much from those of Shakespeare's common people. The influence of this is seen in his mastery of what is called the Yankee dialect, development of old chimney-corner English. For the same reason there is visible in his writings also some of that homely astuteness which seems to have died out with the polish of modern manners.

After completing his classical and medical studies, Dr. Holmes spent two years in Europe, principally in Paris, and then settled in Boston as a practising physician. Later he became a professor of anatomy, and remained in service until within a few years. Thus his duties took him away from his native Cambridge--although his heart never migrated--and turned him from the pursuit of poetry, except as a recreation. His recreation, however, must have been quite steadily indulged in, since his occasional poems had grown to a goodly volume before he was forty years of age. The great popularity of his later works has somewhat overshadowed the early poems, but there is ample evidence of genius in these first-fruits. None of them are meant to be thrilling or profound, but they all have some characteristic grace, some unexpected stroke of wit, some fascinating melody. I do not know any poems of a similar class which afford such unfailing delight. It is true they are mundane and their wit has often a satiric, "knowing" air; but the pleasantry is never mocking or malevolent; and the exuberance of spirit is contagious. Such a poem as "Terpsichore" (1843) is inimitable in its suggestions. The lines have a springing movement, an elastic pose. To appreciate it the reader must "wait till he comes to forty year." "Urania" has also many fine passages, grave as well as gay; many of its hints were developed later with brilliant effect in the "Autocrat." This "rhymed lesson" touches with felicity the prevailing vulgarities and solecisms in manners, dress, and pronunciation, and suggests, by anticipation, the jovial reign of a monarch who at his breakfast-table lays aside his robes of majesty and sometimes plays the role of his servitor, the merry philosopher in motley.

Naturally our author's reputation and his well-known brilliancy in conversation made him a great favorite in society. For many years he was virtually the laureate of Boston and Cambridge, and produced a great number of odes and hymns for public occasions. He of all men seemed to have the invention, the dash, and the native grace which give to occasional verse its natural and spontaneous air. This facility is surely not a cause for reproach. Such verse may seem easy, but it is easy only for a genius. In the lightest of his odes there is stuff and workmanship far removed from the negligent ease of _vers de société_.

A reputation for wit may be as injurious to a poet as to a would-be bishop. People could hardly be persuaded to take Sydney Smith seriously, and the world has been slow in recognizing the solid qualities, the keen insight, the imagination, and poetic feeling of Holmes. It is only one of the facets of his brilliant mind.

At the dinner where the twelve original contributors of the _Atlantic Monthly_ met, the part which Holmes was to take was a matter of lively anticipation. The magazine had been projected for the purpose of uniting the literary forces of the North in favor of universal freedom; but Holmes had no part in its direction. Lowell prophesied at the time that the doctor would carry off the honors. In the first number there was an article by Motley, a fine poem by Longfellow, one by Whittier, a piece of charming classic comedy by Lowell, a group of four striking poems by Emerson, some short stories, articles on art and finance, and the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." What would not modern philosophers give for a similar combination to-day! Still, the enterprise might have failed but for the immediate interest awakened by the original thought and style of Holmes. The sensation was new, like that of a sixth sense. The newspapers quoted from the "Autocrat;" it was everywhere talked about, and in a short time its fame went through the nation.

The "Autocrat" was succeeded by the "Professor" and the "Poet." The talk of the "Professor" was somewhat more abstruse, though equally interesting to cultivated readers. The "Poet" attacked the dogma of the endless duration of future punishment. The "Autocrat" was easily superior in freshness as in popularity.

Two novels also appeared--"Elsie Venner" and "The Guardian Angel." They have undoubted merits, showing the keen thought, the descriptive power, and the play of fancy which are so characteristic of the author, and each has a subtle motive to which the characteristic incidents are made subservient. But Dr. Holmes is not great as a novelist as he is great in other things. The stories in one aspect are ambulatory psychological problems, rather than fresh studies of characters conceived without favoritism, with blended good and evil, wisdom and weakness--as God creates them. To produce new types, of universal interest, is given to few novelists. There have been scarcely more than a score of such creators since Cadmus.

It was with some surprise that I read lately a lament that Dr. Holmes had not written "a great novel"--a task which would have been as unsuitable to him as to Dr. Johnson or to Montaigne. It is not a question of a greater or less talent, but of a wholly different talent--as distinct as metaphysics and portrait-painting. The same critic complains because Holmes has not been "in earnest" like Carlyle. While the genius of that great writer is indisputable, I submit that one Carlyle in a generation is enough; another is impossible. That rugged Titan did his appointed work with fidelity. But is every author to lay about him with an iron flail? Is there no place for playful satirists of manners, for essayists who dissolve philosophy and science, who teach truth, manliness, and courtesy by epigram, and who make life beautiful with the glow of poetry? The magnolia cannot be the oak, although unhappy critics would have a writer be something which he is not. It is enough that Holmes has charmed myriads of readers who might never have felt his influence if he had been grimly in "earnest," and that he has inculcated high ideals of taste, character, and living.

By the time Holmes had reached his fiftieth year he was nearing the summit of fame. His readers were the cultivated classes of the whole English-speaking world, and he was not merely admired, his genial humor had won for him universal love; his unique personality was as dear as his writings. There is not room in the limits allowed me to dwell on the style of the "Autocrat;" fortunately neither analysis nor eulogy is necessary. The variety of topics, the sure, swift touches in treatment, the frequent gleam of imagery, and the lovely vignette of verse, altogether form an attraction for which there are few parallels in literature.

From the gay and jaunty verse of the poet's youth to his strong and passionate lyrics of the war there was a surpassing change, and it will be interesting to trace it in his life, and in the course of historic events.

In his early manhood he took the world as he found it, and did not trouble himself about reforms or isms. He had only good-humored banter for the Abolitionists, just as he had for non-resistants and spirit-rappers. When progressive people were in a ferment with the new transcendental philosophy (deduced from the preaching of Channing and the essays of Emerson), and were fascinated by the monologues of Alcott and the sibylline utterances of Margaret Fuller; when young enthusiasts, in their socialistic home at Brook Farm, dreamed of the near reign of human brotherhood; when Lowell was writing "The Present Crisis," a poem glowing with genius as with apostolic zeal; when feebler brethren, blown upon by new winds of doctrine, imagined themselves spiritual and profound, and felt deep thrills in pronouncing the words Soul and Infinite with nasal solemnity. Holmes, fully master of himself, and holding instinctively to his _nil admirari_, trained his light batteries on the new schools, and hit their eccentricities and foibles with a comic fusillade.

From this bellicose time it was nearly forty years to the appearance of Holmes' admiring and reverent life of Emerson, and in that long and stirring period there was much for him to learn, and something to unlearn. Who does not learn much in forty years? For one thing, the character and mind of the poet-philosopher were at length clearly revealed, and the uneasy swarm of imitators had shrunk out of sight. And as to slavery, the eyes of all men had been opened. Not only Holmes, but the majority of well-meaning men, hitherto standing aloof, were taught by great events. Many who admitted the wrong of slavery had believed themselves bound to inaction by the covenants inserted in the Federal Constitution. Some had felt the weight of party obligations. Some resented the fierce denunciation of the Church for its indifference to a vital question of morals. But I believe more were deterred from siding with the Abolitionists by reason of their intimate connection with other causes. They were nearly all believers in "woman's rights," and at that time those "rights" were chiefly to wear short hair and loose trousers, and talk indefinitely. Everything established was attacked, from churches and courts to compulsory schools and vaccination. The most vivid of my recollections of forty years ago are the scenes at the anti-slavery conventions. There were cadaverous men with long hair and full beards, very unusual ornaments then, with far-away looks in their eyes in repose, but with ferocity when excited, who thought and talked with vigor, but who never knew when to stop. There was one silent and patient brother, I remember, whose silvery hair and beard were never touched by shears, and who in all seasons wore a suit of loose flannel that had once been white. There was a woman with an appalling voice, and yet with a strange eloquence. And there was one who always insisted on speaking out of order, and who always had to be carried out of the hall, struggling and shouting as she was borne along by some suffering brother and a policeman. Not all the moral earnestness of Garrison, the matronly dignity of Lucretia Mott, the lovely voice and refined manners of Lucy Stone, nor the magnificent oratory of Wendell Phillips, could atone for these sights and sounds. Lowell had written:

"Then to side with Truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just."

But to men of delicate nerves it was not sharing Truth's crust that made the difficulty so much as the other uncongenial company at her august table. The political anti-slavery men, who came later, and who won the triumph, had none of these uncomely surroundings, although at the beginning they encountered as much odium.

When the first gun was fired on Fort Sumter, the cause of the slave and of the despised Abolitionists became the cause of all. Then could be felt the force of the sentiment which long before had won the pitying muse of Longfellow, which had inspired the strains of Lowell, and which had led the Quaker Whittier--minstrel and prophet at once--into the thick of the strife. Then it could be seen that the cause of eternal justice was not to be confounded with the vagaries of half-crazed agitators who were bent on curing all human ills by moral suasion and bran bread. The thunder of cannon cleared the atmosphere. The querulous voices of sectaries were hushed. The hearts of the loyal North throbbed as one heart. There was but one cry, and it was "Union and Liberty."

In a high sense this was a decisive period in the life of Holmes. From the outbreak of the war he took an enthusiastic part as a patriot for the preservation of the Union. His eldest son, now a Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, went out with the volunteers as a captain, and the father's "Hunt" for him after a battle is well remembered by readers of the _Atlantic_. At the time when the bravest of all classes were going forward to form new regiments and to fill up the shattered lines of the older ones, his lyrics came to the souls of loyal men with thrills of exultation. No man in those gloomy days could read them without tears, I have seen suppressed sobs and eyes glistening in tear-mist when they were sung in public assemblies. The people of this land have had no such time of heartache, of alternate dread and solemn joy, since the Revolution. When the fate of a nation was in suspense, when death had claimed a member from almost every family, and when the bitter struggle was to be fought out man to man, the phrases we might idly read in time of peace had a new and startling meaning. The words flashed in all eyes and set all hearts on fire. These songs of the war by Holmes will take their place with the grand and touching ode of Lowell, and with the stately and triumphal "Laus Deo!" of Whittier.

The most perfect of Holmes's smaller poems are probably those that appeared in the "Autocrat." "The Chambered Nautilus" is a fortunate conception, wrought with exquisite art. Equally striking is "Sun and Shadow," a poem which brings me delightful associations, as I saw it while the ink was still wet upon the page where it was written.

There is no need of dwelling upon his comic poems, such as the logical catastrophe of the "One-Horse Shay," as they are fully appreciated, so much so that they have doubtless led to the undervaluing of his more serious efforts.

He who saw Dr. Holmes twenty years ago at leisure in his library will not soon forget his impressions. In his mature manhood he was short and slender without being meagre, erect and firm in his shoes. His hair was abundant, if somewhat frosty, his forehead fair but not full; his eyes bluish gray; and his mouth as changeable as Scotch weather. If in front his head seemed small, in profile its capacity was evident, for the horizontal measure from the eyes backward was long. If the base of the brain is the seat of its motive power, his should not be wanting in force. An axe that is to fell an oak must have weight back of the socket.