Chapter III: Part 3

Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to begin with _The Mill on the Floss_, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read _Adam Bede_, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most humorous characters in English fiction.

George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had clouded her sky. Also read _Silas Marner_ with its perfect picture of Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry, and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain as one of the great characters in English fiction.

Of George Eliot's more elaborate work it is impossible to speak in entire praise. If you have the leisure, and these books I have named please you, then by all means read _Romola_, which is a remarkable study of the degeneracy of a young Greek and of the noble strivings of a great-hearted woman. The pictures of Florence in the time of Savonarola are splendid, but they smell of the lamp. _Middlemarch_ is also worth careful study for its fine analysis of character and motive. In all George Eliot's books her characters develop before our eyes, and this is especially true in this elaborate study of the pathos and the tragedy of human life.

George Eliot wrote little poetry, but one piece may be commended to careful attention, "The Choir Invisible." It sums up with impassioned force her ethical creed, which she put in these fine lines:

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end in self.
* * * * *
This is life to come
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love.
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty--
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible,
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

This was the creed of George Eliot, which she preached in her books and which she followed in her life. This was the only hope of immortality that she cherished--to "live again" in minds that she stimulated.

RUSKIN THE APOSTLE OF ART

HIS WORK AS ART CRITIC AND SOCIAL REFORMER--BEST BOOKS ARE
"MODERN PAINTERS," "THE SEVEN LAMPS" AND "THE STONES OF
VENICE."

John Ruskin deserves a place among the great English writers of the last century, not only because of his superb style and the amount of his work, but because he was the first to encourage the study of art and nature among the people. So enormous have been the strides made in the last twenty years in popular knowledge of art and architecture, and so great the growth of interest in the beauties of nature that it is difficult to appreciate that a little over a half century ago, when Ruskin first came into prominence as a writer, the English public was densely ignorant of art, and was equally ignorant of the world of pleasure to be derived from beautiful scenery.

It was Ruskin's great service to the world that he opened the eyes of the public to the glories of the art of all countries, and that he also revealed the wonders of architecture. Many critics have laid bare his infirmities as a critic, but a man of colder blood and less emotional nature would never have reached the large public to which Ruskin appealed. Like a great orator he was swayed by the passion of convincing his audience, and the very extravagance of his language and the ardor of his nature served to make a profound impression upon readers who are not usually affected by such appeals as his.

Ruskin was one of the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the public and in private generosity. He founded museums, established scholarships, tried to put into practical working order his dream of a New Life founded on the union of manual labor and high intellectual aims, labored to induce the public to read the good old books that help one to make life worth living.

That much of his good work was neutralized by his lack of common sense detracts nothing from the world's debt to Ruskin. The simple truth is that he was a reformer as well as a great writer, and the very fervor of his religious and social beliefs, his contempt of mere money getting, his hatred of falsehood, his boundless generosity and his childlike simplicity of mind--all these traits at which the world laughed lifted Ruskin above the other men of genius of his time and placed him among the world's great reformers.

Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live in their books or through the influence of their great self-sacrifices, Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work and a splendid enthusiasm to the common people's cause.

Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood. As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.

Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last century.

The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor, his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels and Byron's _Childe Harold_ formed much of his reading at a time when most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid. The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology, mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an old-fashioned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high scholarship, but he received valuable training in writing.

There is no space here to chronicle more than a few of his many activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his passionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work. At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of _Modern Painters_, the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in London. Other volumes of this great work followed swiftly and caused a great commotion in the world of art and letters because of the radical views of the author and the remarkable qualities of his style.

This was followed by _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; _The Stones of Venice_, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic virtues; _King's Treasuries_, a noble plea for good books; _Fors Clavigera_, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes, the record of his social experiments; _Preterita_, one of the most charming books of youthful reminiscences in any language, and many others. Ruskin's mental activity was enormous. He had to his credit in his fifty-five active years no less than seventy-two volumes and one hundred magazine articles, as well as thousands of lectures.

This outline sketch of Ruskin's life would be incomplete without mention of the great sorrows that darkened his days but gave eloquence to his writings. The first was the desertion of his wife, who married the painter Millais, and the second was the loss by death of Rose La Touche, a beautiful Irish girl whom he had known from childhood. She refused to marry him because of their differences of religion; even refused to see him in her fatal illness unless he could say that he loved God better than he loved her. Her death brought bitter despair to Ruskin, but the world profited by it, for grief gave his work maturity and force. The last ten years of Ruskin's life were spent at his beautiful home at Brantwood, surrounded by the pictures that he loved and served faithfully by devoted relatives.

Ruskin's books are not to be read continuously. Many dreary passages may be found in all of them, which the judicious reader skips. But his best works are more full of intellectual stimulus than those of any writer of his time with the single exception of Carlyle. _Modern Painters_ overflows with the enthusiasm of a lover of art and of nature who preaches the gospel of sincerity and truth. It is marked, like all his work, by eloquent digressions on human life and conduct, for Ruskin held that the finest art was simply the flowering of a great soul nurtured on all that was highest and best. _The Seven Lamps_ does for architecture what his first work did for painting. The book is written in more ornate style than any other, but he who loves impassioned prose will find many specimens here that can only by equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest tribute to the work of the builders of the mediæval cathedral. Here is a part of this eloquent passage:

It is to far happier, far higher exaltation that we owe those
fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies
and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates,
trellised with close leaves; those window labyrinths of
twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of
multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses,
perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations.
All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away.
* * * But of them and their life and their toil upon earth,
one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those great heaps
of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave
their powers, their honors and their errors; but they have
left us their adoration.

No space is left here to mention in detail Ruskin's other works, but _Unto This Last_, _The Stones of Venice_, _Sesame and Lilies_ and _The Crown of Wild Olive_ may be commended as well worth careful reading. Also _Preterita_ is alive with noble passages, such as the pen-picture of the view from the Dale in the Alps, or of the Rhone below Geneva. Read also Ruskin's description of Turner's "Slave Ship" or the impressive passage on the mental slavery of the modern workman in the sixth chapter of the second volume of _The Stones of Venice_. Read these things and you will have no doubt of the genius of Ruskin or of his command of the finest impassioned prose in the English language.

TENNYSON LEADS THE VICTORIAN WRITERS

THE POET WHO VOICED THE ASPIRATIONS OF HIS AGE--"LOCKSLEY
HALL," "IN MEMORIAM" AND "THE IDYLLS OF THE KING" AMONG HIS
BEST WORKS.

Of all the great English writers of the Victorian age it is probable that the next century will give the foremost place to Tennyson. Better than any other poet of his day, he stands as a type of the English people in obedience to law, in strong religious faith, in splendid imaginative force and in a certain unyielding cast of mind that made him bide his time during the dark years when he was bitterly criticized or coldly neglected. Tennyson had to the full the poet's temperament, but he had also a superb physique, which carried him into his eighty-fourth year. From a boy he was a lover of nature, and in nearly every poem that he wrote are found many proofs of his close observation in English woods and fields. Through a period of general skepticism he kept unimpaired his strong faith in God and in immortality that lends so much force to his best verse.

Tennyson's genius found its natural expression in verse, and it is his distinction that while he explored many realms of thought he was always clear and always musical. Browning had more passion, but it was the misfortune of the author of _The Ring and the Book_ that he could not refrain from a cramped and obscure style of verse that makes much of his work very hard reading. Many Browning societies have been formed to study the works of the poet whom they are proud to call master; but Tennyson needs no societies, as the man in the street and the woman whose soul is troubled can understand every line he has written. Nor is Tennyson lacking in passion, as any one may see by reading _Locksley Hall_ or _Maud_.

Tennyson summed up in his poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never see the glory of the poet's vision.

The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in _Don Juan_, _Manfred_ and _Cain_. Even to extreme old age Tennyson preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth. One of his latest poems, _Crossing the Bar_, is also one of the finest in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he mourned and immortalized in _In Memoriam_.

Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman, and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers and all the aspects of nature which is reflected in his verse. As a youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen he issued, with his brother Charles, _Poems by Two Brothers_. The next year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of _The Middle Ages_.

In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal with his prize poem, _Timbuctoo_, and in the following year he published his first volume, _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. He left college without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which contained some of his best work--_The Lady of Shalott_, _The Lotos Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_. Any one of these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.

In 1837 Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's friend and other self, the one man who predicted that he would be the greatest poet of his age, died suddenly in Vienna while traveling abroad. The shock made a profound impression on Tennyson. For ten years he put forth no work. Finally, in 1842, he issued two volumes of poems that at once caught the public fancy. Among the poems that brought him fame were _Locksley Hall_, _Lady Godiva_, _Ulysses_, _The Two Voices_ and _Morte d' Arthur_. The latter was the seed of the splendid _Idylls of the King_. Five years later he published _The Princess_, with its beautiful songs, and three years after _In Memoriam_ the greatest elegiac poem in the language, in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once said that with her "the peace of God came into my life."

_Maud_, his most dramatic poem, was issued in 1855. As early as 1859 he published the first part of _The Idylls of the King_, but it was not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the _Idylls_ was given to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a realm of pure romance and chivalry.

_Enoch Arden_, a domestic idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It was followed by several plays--_Queen Mary_, _Harold_, _Becket_ and others--all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people, his words always tinged with the fire of inspiration. Only three years before his death he wrote _Crossing the Bar_, a poem which met with instant response from the English-speaking world because of its signs of courage in the face of death and its proofs of steadfast faith in the life beyond the grave.

No adequate estimate of Tennyson's work can be made in the small space allotted to this article. All that can be done is to mention a few of his best works and to quote a few of his stirring lines. If the reader will study these poems he will be pretty sure to read more of Tennyson. To my mind, _Locksley Hall_ is Tennyson's finest poem, as true to-day as when it was written seventy years ago. The long, rolling, trochaic verse, like the billows on the coast that it pictures, suits the thought. The poem is the passionate lament of a returned soldier from India over the mercenary marriage of the cousin whom he loved. Here are a few of the lines that will never die:

Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of a fool!
Comfort? Comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

It would be difficult among the poets of the last century to parallel these passages for their imaginative sweep and magnetic appeal to the reader. The new criticism that disparages Tennyson and raises Browning to the seventh heaven calls _Locksley Hall_ old-fashioned and sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to this I would place _In Memoriam_, which has never received its just recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and finally found comfort in the words of the Bible--the only source of comfort in this world for the sorely wounded heart. The whole poem, as his son Hallam says, emphasizes the poet's belief "in an omnipotent and all-loving God, who has revealed himself through the highest self-sacrificing love in the freedom of the human will and in the immortality of the soul."

The meter of _In Memoriam_ serves to fix the poem in the memory. It seems to fit the thought with perfect naturalness. It is not strange that Queen Victoria should have placed this poem next to the Bible as a means of comfort after the loss of her husband, whom she loved so dearly that all the attractions of power and wealth never made her forget him a single day.

_The Idylls of the King_ are also unappreciated in these days, yet they contain a body of splendid poetry that cannot be duplicated. They represent the author's dreams from early youth, when his imagination was first fired by old Malory's chronicle of the good King Arthur. They breathe a chivalry as lofty as Sidney's, and they teach many ethical lessons that it would do the present-day world good to take to heart. These noble poems, cast in the most musical blank verse in our literature, were the work of thirty years, written only when the poet felt genuine inspiration. They represent, as the poet told his son, "the dream of a man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin. It is not the history of one man or of one generation, but of a whole cycle of generations." And the old poet added these fine words: "Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colors. Every reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability and according to his sympathy with the poet."

Other fine poems of Tennyson which one should read are the noble _Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_, _Break, Break, Break_, the perfect songs in _The Princess_, and _Crossing the Bar_. If you read these aright you will wish to know more of Tennyson, the poet who reconciled science and religion and kept his old faith strong to the end.

BROWNING GREATEST POET SINCE SHAKESPEARE

HOW TO GET THE BEST OF BROWNING'S POEMS--READ THE LYRICS FIRST
AND THEN TAKE UP THE LONGER AND THE MORE DIFFICULT WORKS.

The greatest of English poets since Shakespeare, is the title given to Robert Browning by many admirers of recognized ability as critics. For his dramatic force and his insight into human nature there is no question that Browning deserves this high rank. In these two qualities he stands above Tennyson. But a large part of his work is written in a style so crabbed that it acts as a bar to one's enjoyment of many fine poems. Only the most resolute reader can go through _Sordello_ or _The Ring and the Book_, the latter, with its interminable discussions of motive and its curious descriptions of half-forgotten legal and church methods of the seventeenth century. If one-half this long poem of over twenty thousand lines had been cut out, it would have been vastly improved.

The advocates of Browning hold that the study of the poet's obscurities is good mental discipline, but I am of the belief that poetry, like music, should not demand too great exertion of the mind to appreciate its beauty. Wagner's "Seigfried" and "Parsifal" are altogether too long to be enjoyed thoroughly. The composer would have done well to eliminate a third of each, for as they are produced they strain the attention to the point of fatigue, and no work of art should ever tire its admirers.

In the same way Browning offends against this primal canon of art. A man who was capable of writing the most melodious verse, as is shown in some of his lyrics, he refused to put his thoughts in simple form, and often clothed them in obscurity. The result is that the great public which would have enjoyed his studies of character and his powerful dramatic faculty is repelled at the outset by the difficulties of understanding his poems. Browning added to this obscurity by constant reference to little-known authors. This was not pedantry, any more than Milton's use of classic mythology was pedantry. Both men possessed unusual knowledge of rare books, and both were much given to quoting authors who are unknown to the general reading public.

But with all these difficulties in the way, there still remains a body of verse in Browning's work which will richly repay any reader. The lyrics and short poems like _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_, _Pippa Passes_, _Prospice_, _O Lyric Love_, _The Last Ride_, _One Word More_, _How They Brought the Good News_, _Herve Riel_, the epilogue to _Asolando_, _The Lost Leader_, _Men and Women_, and _A Soul's Tragedy_ will give any reader a taste of the real Browning. If you like these poems, then try the more ambitious poems like _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _The Inn Album_, _Fifine at the Fair_ and others.

Browning, above all other English poets, seems to have had the power of seizing upon a character at a crucial hour in life and laying bare all the impulses that impel one to high achievement or great self-sacrifice. He seems always to have worked at the highest emotional stress, so that his words are surcharged with feeling. In many of his poems this emotional element is painful in its intensity. Character to him was the main feature, and his selections comprise some of the most picturesque in all history. That he was able to make these people live and move and impress us as real flesh-and-blood human beings shows the great creative power of the man, who ought to have written some of the world's finest plays.

Robert Browning was born in 1812 and died in 1889. His father, though a clerk in the Bank of England, was a fine classical scholar and had dabbled in verse. His mother was an accomplished musician. Browning had every early advantage, and while still a lad he came under the spell of Byron and had his poetical faculty greatly stimulated by the "Napoleon of rhyme." Then came Shelley and Keats, and their influence set him upon the course which he followed for many years. His first poem was _Pauline_, which has passages of rare beauty set among dreary commonplaces. He followed this with _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_, which opened to him the doors of all London salons and made his reputation. _Sordello_, one of his most difficult poems, came next, but he varied these dramatic tragedies with a series of short poems called _Bells and Pomegranates_. In this the finest thing was _Pippa Passes_, which was warmly praised by Elizabeth Barrett, who afterwards became his wife. Among the many poems that Browning produced in five years were _Colombe's Birthday_, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_.

Browning, in 1846, married Elizabeth Barrett, the author of _Lady Geraldine's Courtship_ and other poems, a woman who had been an invalid, confined to her room for years. Love gave her strength to arise and walk, and love also gave her the courage to defy the foolish tyranny of her father and elope with Browning. What kind of man that father was may be seen in his comment after the marriage: "I've no objection to the young man, but my daughter should have been thinking of another world." They went to Italy, where for fifteen years they made an ideal home. Mrs. Browning's story of her love is seen in _Sonnets From the Portuguese_, and some of her finest work is in _Casa Guidi Windows_. Each stimulated the other, while there was a notable absence of that jealousy which has often served to turn the love of literary men and women into the fiercest hatred.

Mrs. Browning died suddenly in 1861, and the poet for some time was stunned by this unlooked-for calamity. He spent two years in seclusion at work on poems, but then he gathered up his courage and once more took his old place in the social life of London. In _Prospice_ and _One Word More_, written in the autumn following his wife's death, he shows that he has overcome all doubts of the reality of immortality. These two poems alone would entitle Browning to the highest place among the world's great poets. In addition he wrote the memorial to his wife, _O Lyric Love_, that is the cry of the soul left here on this earth to the soul of the beloved in Paradise. To the sympathetic this poem, with its solemn rhythm, will appeal like splendid organ music.

Among Browning's other poems that are noteworthy are _Fifine at the Fair_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, _The Inn Album_ and _Dramatic Idylls_. Browning's last poem, _Asolando_, appeared in London on the same day that its author died at Venice. As the great bell of San Marco struck ten in the evening, Browning, as he lay in bed, asked his son if there were any news of the new volume. A telegram was read saying the book was well received. The aged poet smiled and breathed his last.

In beginning the reading of Browning it is well to understand that at least half or maybe two-thirds of his work should be discarded at the outset, as it is of interest only to scholars. My suggestion to one who would learn to love Browning is to get a little book, _Lyrical Poems of Robert Browning_, by Dr. A.J. George. The editor in a preface indicates the best work of Browning, and also brings out strongly the fact that readers, and especially young readers, must be given poems which interest them. His selections of lyrics have been made from this standpoint, and his notes will be found very helpful. He develops the point that Browning's great revelation to the world through his poems was his strong and abiding assurance that man has in him the principle of divinity, and that many of the experiences that the world calls failures are really the stepping stones of the ascent to that conquest of self and that development of the whole nature which means the highest life. He says also that Browning is one of the most eloquent expounders of the doctrine of the reality of a future life, in which those who live a noble and unselfish life will get their reward in an existence free from all physical ills.

In this little book will be found _Pippa Passes_, a noble series of lyrics, which develops the idea of the silent influence of a little silk weaver of Asolo upon four sets of people in the great crises of their lives. In each episode Pippa sings a song that awakens remorse or kindles manhood or arouses patriotism or duty. It is a perfect poem. Among other lyrics given here are _Evelyn Hope_, which must be bracketed with Burns' _To Mary in Heaven_ or with Wordsworth's _Lucy_ and _Prospice_, which sounds the note of deep personal love that is as sure of immortality as of life. It is as beautiful and as inspiring as Tennyson's _Crossing the Bar_. Other poems due to Browning's love for his wife are _My Star_ and _One Word More_.

If these lyrics appeal to you, then take up some of Browning's longer poems, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Colombe's Birthday_, _A Soul's Tragedy_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_ and _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. Very few readers in these days have time or patience to read _The Ring and the Book_, but it will repay your attention, as it is the most remarkable attempt in all literature to revive the tragedy of the great and innocent love of a woman and a priest.

Among the many fine passages in Browning, I think there is nothing which equals these lines in _O Lyric Love_, the beautiful invocation to his wife:

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue
And sang a kindred soul out to his face--
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
That shall despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile.

The songs in _Pippa Passes_ should be read, as they are as near perfect as Shakespeare's songs or the songs of Tennyson in _The Princess_.

MEREDITH AND A FEW OF HIS BEST NOVELS

ONE OF THE GREATEST MASTERS OF FICTION OF LAST CENTURY--"THE
ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL," "DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS" AND OTHER
NOVELS.

George Meredith is acknowledged by the best critics to be among the greatest English novelists of the last century; yet to the general reader he is only a name. Like Henry James, he is barred off from popular appreciation by a style which is "caviare to the general." Thomas Hardy is recognized as the finest living English novelist, but there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith. Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great man who wrote novels."

It is only within the last twenty-five years that Meredith has had any vogue in this country. At that time a good edition of his novels was issued, and critics gave the volumes generous mention in the leading magazines and newspapers. But the public did not respond with any cordiality. The novel with us has come to be looked upon mainly as a source of amusement, and a writer of fiction who demands too keen attention from his readers can never hope to be popular. Meredith, as Professor Phelps says, was a great man who, among other intellectual activities, wrote some good novels. Doubtless he did more real good to literature as the inspirer of other writers than he did with his books. For more than the ordinary working years of most men he was one of the chief "readers" for a large London publishing house. To him were submitted the manuscripts of new novels, and it was his privilege to recognize the genius of Thomas Hardy, of the author of _The Story of an African Farm_ and other now famous English novelists.

Meredith was a singularly acute critic of the work of others, but when he came to write himself he cast his thoughts in a style that has been the despair of many admirers. In this he resembled Browning, who never would write verse that was easy reading. Meredith's thought is usually clear, yet his brilliant but erratic mind was impelled to clothe this thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No man ever put more real thought into novels than he; none had a finer eye for the beauties of nature or the development of character. But he had no patience to develop his men and women in the clear, orthodox way. He imagined that the ordinary reader could follow his lightning flashes of illumination, his piling up of metaphor on metaphor, and the result is that many are discouraged by his methods, just as nine readers out of ten are wearied when they attempt to read Browning's longer poems. His kinship to Browning is strong in style and in method of thought, in his way of leaping from one conclusion to another, in his elimination of all the usual small connecting words and in his liberties with the language. He seemed to be writing for himself, not for the general public, and he never took into account the slower mental processes of those not endowed with his own vivid imagination.

Meredith's life was that of a scholar; it contained few exciting episodes. He was of Welsh and Irish stock. At an early age he was sent to Germany, where he remained at a Moravian school until he was fifteen. He then returned to England to study law, but he never practiced it. For a number of years he was a regular contributor to the London MORNING POST, and in 1866 he acted as correspondent during the Austro-Italian war. For many years he served as chief reader and literary adviser to Chapman & Hall, the English publishers, and in that capacity he showed an insight that led to the development of many authors whose first work was crude and unpromising. Meredith himself began his literary career with _The Shaving of Shagpat_, a series of Oriental tales the central idea of which is the overcoming of established evil. Shagpat stands for any evil or superstition, and Shibli Bagarag, the hero, is the reformer. This book, with its wealth of metaphor, opened the door for Meredith, but he did not score a success until he wrote _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, two years later. Despite its faults, this is his greatest book, and it is the one which readers should begin with. It is overloaded with aphorism in the famous "Pilgrim's Scrip," which is a diary kept by Sir Austin, the father of Richard. The boy is trained to cut women out of his life, and just when the father's theory seems to have succeeded Richard meets and falls in love with Lucy, and the whole towering structure founded on the "Pilgrim's Scrip" falls into ruin. The scene in which Richard and Lucy meet is one of the great scenes in English fiction, in which Meredith's passionate love of nature serves to bring out the natural love of the two young people. Earth was all greenness in the eyes of these two lovers, and nature served only to deepen the love that they saw in each other's gaze and felt with thrilling force in each other's kisses. But even stronger that this scene is that last terrible chapter, in which Richard returns to his home and refuses to stay with Lucy and her child. Stevenson declared that this parting scene was the strongest bit of English since Shakespeare. It certainly reaches great heights of exaltation, and in its simplicity it reveals what miracles Meredith could work when he allowed his creative imagination full play.

Another story which is usually bracketed with this is _Diana of the Crossways_. This great novel was founded on a real incident in English history of Meredith's time. Diana Warwick was drawn from Caroline Norton, one of the three beautiful and brilliant granddaughters of Sheridan, author of _The School for Scandal_. Her marriage was disastrous, and her husband accused her of infidelity with Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister at the time. His divorce suit caused a great scandal, but it resulted in her vindication. Then later she was accused of betraying to a writer on the TIMES the secret that Sir Robert Peel had decided to repeal the corn laws. This secret had been confided to her by Sidney Herbert, one of her admirers. Meredith's novel, in which the results of Diana's treachery were brought out, resulted in a public inquiry into the charge against Caroline Norton, which found that she was innocent. But the fact that Meredith used such an incident as the climax of his story gave _Diana of the Crossways_ an enormous vogue, and did much to bring the novelist into public favor.

No more brilliant woman than Diana has ever been drawn by Meredith, but despite the art of her creator it is impossible for the reader to imagine her selling for money a great party secret which had been whispered to her by the man she loved. She was too keen a woman to plead, as Diana pleaded, that she did not recognize the importance of this secret, for the defense is cut away by her admission that she was promised thousands of pounds by the newspaperman at the very time that her extravagances had loaded her with debts.

Space is lacking here to do more than mention three or four of Meredith's other novels that are fine works of art. These are _Rhoda Fleming_, _Sandra Belloni_, _Evan Harrington_ and _The Egoist_. Each is a masterpiece in its way; each is full of human passion, yet tinged with a philosophy that lifts up the novels to what Meredith himself called "honorable fiction, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood." The novel to him was a means of showing man's spiritual nature, "a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending."

A score of novels Meredith wrote in his long life. The work of his later years was not happy. _The Amazing Marriage_ and _Lord Ormont and His Aminta_ are mere shadows of his earlier work, with all his old mannerisms intensified. But if you like Richard and Diana, then you can enlarge your acquaintance with Meredith to your own exceeding profit, for he is one of the great masters of fiction, who used the novel merely to preach his doctrine of the richness and fulness of human life if we would but see it with his eyes.

STEVENSON PRINCE OF MODERN STORY-TELLERS

HIS STORIES OF ADVENTURE AND HIS BRILLIANT ESSAYS--"TREASURE
ISLAND" AND "DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE" HIS MOST POPULAR BOOKS.

It is as difficult to criticise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as it is to find faults in the friend that you love as a brother. For with all his faults, this young Scotchman with his appealing charm disarms criticism. Nowhere in all literature may one find his like for warming the heart unless it be Charles Lamb, of gracious memory, and the secret of this charm is that Stevenson remained a child to the end of his days, with all a child's eagerness for love and praise, and with all a child's passion for making believe that his puppets are real flesh and blood people. When such a nature is endowed with consummate skill in the use of words, then one gets the finest, if not the greatest, of creative artists.

In sheer technical skill Stevenson stands head and shoulders above all the other literary craftsmen of his day; but this skill was not used to refine his meaning until it wearied the reader, as in the case of Henry James, nor was it used to bewilder him with the richness of his resources, as was too often the case with George Meredith. With Stevenson, style had actually become the man; he could not write the simplest article in any other than a highly finished literary way. Witness the amazingly eloquent defense of Father Damien which he dashed off in a few hours and read to his wife and his stepson before the ink was dry on the sheets.

Above all other things Stevenson was a great natural story-teller. With him the story was the main consideration, yet in some of his short tales such as _Markheim_, or _A Lodging for the Night_, or _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, the story itself merely serves as a thread upon which he has strung the most remarkable analysis of a man's soul. He has the distinction of having written in _Treasure Island_ the best piratical story of the last century. If he could have maintained the high level of the opening chapter he would have produced a work worthy to rank with _Robinson Crusoe_. As it is, he created two villains, the blind man Pew and John Silver, who are absolutely unique in literature. The blind pirate in his malevolent fury is a creature that chills the heart, while Silver is a cheerful villain who murders with a smile. In _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ Stevenson has aroused that sense of mystery and horror which springs from the spectacle of the domination of an evil spirit over a nature essentially kind and good.

Stevenson came of a race of Scotch men of affairs. His grandfather was the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his letters and in his _A Child's Garden of Verse_. The sickly boy was an eager reader of everything that fell in his way in romance and poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.

His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own. His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown after he had produced such charming work as _An Inland Voyage_ and _Travels With a Donkey_, not to mention the _New Arabian Nights_. Popularity came with _Treasure Island_, written as a story for boys, and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_--the most remarkable story of a dual personality produced in the last century. After this he wrote a long succession of stories, not one of which can be called a masterpiece because of the author's inability to finish his novels as he planned them. Lack of patience or want of sustained creative power invariably made him cut short his novels or end them in a way that exasperates the reader.

Some months Stevenson spent in California, but this State, with its romantic history and its singular scenic beauty, appeared to have little influence on his genius. In fact, locality seemed not to color the work of his imagination. His closing years were spent in Somoa, a South Sea Island paradise, in which he reveled in the primitive conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious obsession of his imagination by old Scotch scenes and characters, and on the day of his death he dictated a chapter of _Weir of Hermiston_, a romance of the picturesque period of Scotland which had in it the elements of his best work.

It is idle to deny that Stevenson appeals only to a limited audience. Despite his keen interest in all kinds of people, he lacked that sympathetic touch which brings large sales and wide circulation. About the time of his death his admirers declared he would supersede Scott or Dickens; but the seventeen years since his death have seen many changes in literary reputations. Stevenson has held his own remarkably well. As a man the interest in him is still keen, but of his works only a few are widely read.

Among these the first place must be given to _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, partly because of the profound impression made upon the public mind by the dramatization of this tale, and partly because it appeals strongly to the sense of the mystery of conflicting personality. Next to this is _Treasure Island_, one of the best romances of adventure ever written. Readers who cannot feel a thrill of genuine terror when the blind pirate Pew comes tapping with his cane have missed a great pleasure. One-legged John Silver, in his cheerful lack of all the ordinary virtues, is a character that puts the fear of death upon the reader. The opening chapter of this story is one of the finest things in all the literature of adventure.

Of Stevenson's other work the two Scotch stories, _Kidnaped_ and _David Balfour_, always seemed to me to be among his best. The chapter on the flight of David and Allan across the moor, the contest in playing the pipes and the adventures of David and Catriona in Holland--these are things to read many times and enjoy the more at every reading. Stevenson, like Jack London, is a writer for men; he could not draw women well, When he brings one in there is usually an end of stirring adventure, just as London spoiled _The Sea Wolf_ with his literary heroine.

Of Stevenson's short stories the finest are _The Pavilion on the Links_, a tale of Sicilian vengeance and English love that is full of haunting mystery and the deadly fear of unknown assassins; _Markheim_, a brilliant example of this author's skill in laying bare the conflict of a soul with evil and its ultimate triumph; _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, a vivid picture of the cruelty and the autocratic power of a great French noble of the fifteenth century, and _A Lodging for the Night_, a remarkable defense of his life by the vagabond poet, Villon. Other short stories by Stevenson are worth careful study, but if you like these I have mentioned you will need no guide to those which strike your fancy.

The vogue of Stevenson's essays will last as long as that of his romances; for he excelled in this literary art of putting his personality into familiar talks with his reader. He ranks with Lamb and Thackeray, Washington Irving and Donald G. Mitchell. Read those fine short sermons, _Pulvis et Umbra_ and _Aes Triplex_, the latter with its eloquent picture of sudden death in the fulness of power which was realized in Stevenson's own fate. Read _Books Which Have Influenced Me_, _A Gossip on Romance_ and _Talk and Talkers_. They are unsurpassed for thought and feeling and for brilliancy of style.