Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge of modern Europe. Here, paraded in the directest and most prosaic fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year, and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million. Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible? Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of “towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together; British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken together contain more than the combined populations of the United States of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash; with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions, and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!

These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past. The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out. Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as indestructible, and split their walls, and warp their pillars, and choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished. To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the building of the railway to India. Into a history of that undertaking would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.

But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide for ever by the way. Although I have _Whitaker’s Almanack_ before me all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up under Cleopatra’s Needle.

I turn over the last page of “British India” in my _Almanack_. We are not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed “Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is matter to his hand. The places one may read of are--Aden, Socotra, Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered and once held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.

After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The territories owned in the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.

By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures! How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest realm over which man ever ruled. _Civis Romanus sum!_ I will sleep. I will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities, and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting consciousness--_Civis Romanus sum!_

LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.

Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first, was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship _Victory_, and certainly older. The bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books, none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.

Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost children I have another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again. Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force of his influence. How much of this young person is really our very own? how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs to us?

With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s _Spelling-Book_, and by the writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the fly-leaf, the Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say, ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew _rosa_ before I could read words of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137, Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are pencil marks indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality, discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality, impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary, recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”

I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book, and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness. He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in the Spelling-Book, intended for young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day, and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with evil dreams.

Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In the vigour of all lives there must be _lacunæ_ of intense indolence, backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and take the things that come as though they were good things rather than work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say they like a book because other people say they like it. These good people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy. But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions of morals) can with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all. It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.

The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as an artist. In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.

A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it. The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows, and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.

The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not dead and buried by the mole? The nest was derelict. Again, when the swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead? The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian. I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?

But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the “unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine, sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist--in poetry. Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently desperate. The crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system, he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand pounds!

Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living on the sea to live by the sea, who had eschewed the paint-pot and the stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of grammar, as it deals only with the _noise_ made by words. Cobbett’s treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:

“The established practice of grammarians requires that I should
here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion,
or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires
nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it;
and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned
languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has
published such petty observations as were better omitted.

“The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in
number and person; as _Thou fliest from good; He runs to death_.

“Our adjectives are invariable.

“Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as _His
father’s glory; the sun’s heat_.

“Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as _He loves me; You
fear him_.

“All prepositions require an oblique case: _He gave this to me; He
took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me_.”

That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh, Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards? Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.

An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “_The Pilgrim’s Progress_.” Well, I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the _Progress_ there is violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden. (Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered completely and fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their backs? It is not the will of the King that the Slough should be dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible attempt to tinkerise the Bible.

One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs, and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his literary briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of tenderness--tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.

It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious enthusiast. When I have laid aside the _Spelling-Book_ and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and opened the _Faerie Queen_, I feel as though the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of Warwickshire.

And yet, melancholy truth! the _Faerie Queen_ is most unpopular and most unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand people who begin the _Faerie Queen_, not ten read half way through it, and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My _Faerie Queen_ occupies 792 pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels! And still it is _unperfite_! I find that although I have owned the book for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.

It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the _Faerie Queen_ the poets’ poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.

The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all the _Faerie Queen_, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets--those rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities--turn themselves into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us. They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds, and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife. The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight when free and catholic and pagan.

After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan, how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads--

“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;
And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:
Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
About her eares, when Una her did marke
Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;
With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”

Or again here--

“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,
The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,
His onely daughter and his onely hayre;
Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,
As bright as doth the morning starre appeare
Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,
To tell that dawning day is drawing neare
And to the world does bring long wished light:
So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”

Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even--but Truth! An abstraction! A whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth, but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.

There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser. The fact is, all the _Faerie Queen_ ought to be quoted except the blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no other poem--except Shelley’s _Alastor_--do I notice such grievous, continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome often. But who can resist this?--

“---- And, when she spake,
Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,
And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.

* * * * *

Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even browes.”

I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem to melt together of their own propinquity.

Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day--

“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”

As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying something about the _Spelling-Book_ and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, I had the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser--to have it nigh. My copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It seems to me I shall never again look into the _Spelling-Book_ or the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted reading of the _Faerie Queen_ at page 473. My intellect is too weak and my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.

MY COPY OF KEATS.

The only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty searches for favourite passages.

The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.

It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they outlasted the tables and chairs, even the walls; ay, the very races and names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats’s _Poetical Works_ in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers. The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than a wheaten straw after the threshing.

In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the volume I speak of under the head “POETRY--_Pocket Editions_;” described as “Keats’s _Poetical Works_. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3_s._ 6_d._ cloth.” It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast upon the subject-matter of the writer in my hand--as a poor gentleman in a spacious restaurant, who, having ordered luncheon, consisting of bread and cheese, butter, and a half-pint of bitter ale, takes up the bill of fare and the list of wines, and designs for his imagination a feast his purse denies to his lips.

If any owner of a cart of old books in Farringdon Street asked you a shilling for such a copy of Keats as mine, you would smile at him. You would think he had acquired the books merely to satisfy his own taste, and now displayed them to gratify a vanity that was intelligible; you would feel assured no motive towards commerce could underlie ever so deeply such a preposterous demand.

My copy will, I think, last my time. Already it has been in my hands more than half the years of a generation; and I feel that its severest trials are over. In days gone by it made journeys with me by sea and land, and paid long visits to some friends, both when I went myself, and when I did not go. Change of air and scene have had no beneficial effect upon it. Journey after journey, and visit after visit, the full cobalt of the cloth grew darker and dingier, the boards of the cover became limper and limper, and the stitching at the back more apparent between the sheets, like the bones and sinews growing outward through the flesh of a hand waxing old.

Once, when the book had been on a prolonged excursion away from me, it returned sadly out of sorts. Had it been a dear friend come back from India on sick-leave, after an absence from temperate skies of twenty years, I could not have observed a more disquieting change. The cover was darkened so that the original hue had almost wholly disappeared, save at the edges, that, like the Indian veteran’s forehead, were of startling and unwholesome pallor. Its presence in such guise aroused a gnawing solicitude which undermined all peace. I could not endure the symptoms of its speedy decline, the prospect of its dissolution; and to shield its case from harm and my sensibilities from continual assault, I wrapped it with sighs and travail of heart in a gritty cover of substantial brown paper.

For a while, the consciousness that my book was safe compensated for the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.

But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled. What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable! Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would last my time; and why should I hide my friend in an unparticularised garb, the uniform of the mean or the needy, merely that those who came after me might enjoy a privilege of which senseless timidity sought to rob me? No; that should not be. I would cast away the badge of beggary, and, like a man, face the daily decay of my old companion. I tore the paper off, threw it upon the fire, and set my disenthralled Keats in its own proper vesture on the shelf among its comrades and its peers.

There is no man, how poor soever, who has not some taste which, for his circumstances, must be regarded as expensive; and in that “sweet unreasonableness” of human nature, not at all limited to “the Celt,” men take a kind of foolish pride in their particular extravagances. You know a man that declares he would sooner go without his dinner than a clean shirt; another who would prefer one good cigar to a pound of cavendish; one who would rather travel to the City of winter mornings by train without an overcoat than by vulgar tramcar in fur and pilot cloth; a fourth who would more gladly give his right hand than forget his Greek; a fifth who pays the hire of a piano and does without the beer which as a Briton is his birthright; a sixth who starves himself and stints his family for the love of a garden. For my own part, I felt the using of my Keats without protection of any kind to be beyond my means, but I gloried in this extravagance. It seemed rich to be thus hand and glove with the book: to touch it when and where I would, and as much as ever I liked: to feel assured that even with free using and free lending it would outlast my short stay here, as the blossoms of the roses in a friend’s hedge outlast your summer visit. Was it not fine, did it not strike a chord of kingly generosity, to be able to say to a friend, “Here is my copy of Keats. Take it, use it, read it. There is plenty of it for you and me”? I would rather have the lending of my Keats than the bidding to a banquet.

So it fell out that my favourite went more among my friends than ever, and accumulated at a usurious rate all manner of marks and stains, and defacements, and dog-ears, and other unworded comments, as well as verbal comments expressed in pencil and ink. It is true that a rolling stone gathers no moss, but a rolling snowball gathers more snow, and moss and snow are of about equal value. Oliver Wendell Holmes says, if I may trust my memory, that only three things improve with years: violins, wine, and meerschaum pipes. He loves books, and knows books as well as any man now living--almost as well as Charles Lamb did when he was with us; and yet Dr. Holmes does not think books worthy of being included in the list of things that time ripens. Is this ingratitude or carelessness, or does it mean that books dwell apart, and are no more to be classed with mere tangible things than angels, or mathematical points, or the winds of last winter? Is a book to him an ethereal record of a divine trance? an insubstantial painting of a splendid dream? the music of a yesterday fruitful in heavenly melody? the echo of a syren’s song haunting a sea shell?

Does not De Quincey tell us that, having lent some books to Coleridge, the poet not only wrote the lender’s name in them, but enriched the margins with observations and comments on the texts? Who would not give a tithe of the books he has for one volume so gloriously illuminated? I remember when I was a lad, among lads, a friend of ours picked up secondhand Cary’s Dante, in which was written the name of a poet still living, but who is almost unknown. We loved the living poet for his work, and when the buyer told us that the Dante bore not only the poet’s name, but numerous marginal notes and hints in his handwriting, we all looked upon the happy possessor with eyes of envious respect. The precious volume was shown to us, not in groups, for in gatherings there is peril of a profaning laugh, or an unsympathetic sneer. One by one we were handed the book, on still country roads, upon the tranquil heights of hills, where we were alone with the brown heather and the plover, or on some barren cliff above the summer sea. The familiar printed text sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common property--“’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose, speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we had stood humiliated and afeard.

My Keats has suffered from many pipes, many thumbs, many pencils, many quills, many pockets. Not one stain, one gape, one blot of these would I forego for a spick and span copy in all the gorgeous pomp of the bookbinder’s millinery. These blemishes are aureolæ to me. They are nimbi around the brows of the gods and demi-gods, who walk in the triumph of their paternal despot on the clouds metropolitan that embattle the heights of Parnassus.

What a harvest of happy memories is garnered in its leaves! How well I remember the day it got that faint yellow stain on the page where begins the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It was a clear, bright, warm, sunshiny afternoon late in the month of May. Three of us took a boat and rowed down a broad blue river, ran the nose of the boat ashore on the gravel beach of a sequestered island and landed. Pulling was warm work, and we all climbed a slope, reached the summit, and cast ourselves down on the long lush cool grass, in the shade of whispering sycamores, and in a stream of air that came fresh with the cheering spices of the hawthorn blossom.

One of our company was the best chamber reader I have ever heard. His voice was neither very melodious nor very full. Perhaps he was all the better for this because he made no effort at display. As he read, the book vanished from his sight, and he leaned over the poet’s shoulder, saw what the poet saw, and in a voice timid with the sense of responsibility, and yet elated with a kind of fearing joy, told of what he saw in words that never hurried, and that, when uttered, always seemed to hang substantially in the air like banners.

He discovered and related the poet’s vision rather than simulated passion to suit the scene. I remember well his reading of the passage: