Chapter II: Part 2

As for the capricious humors and overwrought imagery which disfigure so many of the early love-songs, they have received their full allotment of censure, and have provoked the scornful mirth of critics too staid or too sensitive to be tolerant. We hear more of them, sometimes, than of the merits which should win them forgiveness. Lodge, dazzled by Rosalynde’s beauty, is ill disposed to pass lightly over the catalogue of her charms. Her lips are compared to budded roses, her teeth to ranks of lilies; her eyes are

“sapphires set in snow,
Refining heaven by every wink,”

her cheeks are blushing clouds, and her neck is a stately tower where the god of love lies captive. All things in nature contribute to her excellence:--

“With Orient pearl, with ruby red,
With marble white, with sapphire blue,
Her body every way is fed,
Yet soft to touch, and sweet in view.”

But when this fair representative of all flowers and gems, “smiling to herself to think of her new entertained passion,” lifts up the music of her voice in that enchanting madrigal,--

“Love in my bosom, like a bee,
Doth suck his sweet;
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet,”--

we know her at once for the kinswoman and precursor of another and dearer Rosalind, who, with boyish swagger and tell-tale grace,

“like a ripe sister,”

gathers from the trees of Arden the first fruits of Orlando’s love. It was Lodge who pointed the way to that enchanted forest, where exiles and rustics waste the jocund hours, where toil and care are alike forgotten, where amorous verse-making represents the serious occupation of life, and where the thrice fortunate Jaques can afford to dally with melancholy for lack of any cankering sorrow at his heart.

William Habbington, who sings to us with such monotonous sweetness of Castara’s innocent joys, surpasses Lodge alike in the charm of his descriptions and in the extravagance of his follies. In reading him we are sharply reminded of Klopstock’s warning, that “a man should speak of his wife as seldom and with as much modesty as of himself;” for Habbington, who glories in the fairness and the chastity of his spouse, becomes unduly boastful now and then in vaunting these perfections to the world. He, at least, being safely married to Castara, feels none of that haunting insecurity which disturbs his fellow-poets.

“All her vows religious be,
And her love she vows to me,”

he says complacently, and then stops to assure us in plain prose that she is “so unvitiated by conversation with the world that the subtle-minded of her sex would deem it ignorance.” Even to her husband-lover she is “thrifty of a kiss,” and in the marble coldness and purity of her breast his glowing roses find a chilly sepulchre. Cupid, perishing, it would seem, from a mere description of her merits, or, as Habbington singularly expresses it,--

“But if you, when this you hear,
Fall down murdered through your ear,”

is, by way of compensation, decently interred in the dimpled cheek which has so often been his lurking-place. Lilies and roses and violets exhale their odors around him, a beauteous sheet of lawn is drawn up over his cold little body, and all who see the “perfumed hearse”--presumably the dimple--envy the dead god, blest in his repose. This is as bad in its way as Lovelace’s famous lines on “Ellinda’s Glove,” where that modest article of dress is compelled to represent in turn a snow-white farm with five tenements, whose fair mistress has deserted them, an ermine cabinet too small and delicate for any occupant but its own, and a fiddle-case without its fine-tuned instrument. Dr. Thomas Campion, who, after rhyming delightfully all his life, was pleased to write a treatise against that “vulgar and artificial custom,” compares his lady’s face, in one musical little song, to a fertile garden, and her lips to ripe cherries, which none may buy or steal because her eyes, like twin angels, have them in keeping, and her brows, like bended bows, defend such treasures from the crowd.

“Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of Orient pearl a double row,
Which, when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds filled with snow;
Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
Till ‘Cherry ripe’ themselves do cry.”

This dazzling array of mixed metaphors with which the early poets love to bewilder us, and the whimsical conceits which must have cost them many laborious hours, have at least one redeeming merit: they are for the most part illustrative of the lady’s graces, and not of the writer’s lacerated heart. They tell us, seldom indeed with Herrick’s intimate realism, but with many quaint and suspicious exaggerations, whether the fair one was false or fond, light or dark, serious or flippant, gentle or high-spirited; what fashion of clothes she wore, what jewels and flowers were her adornment: and these are the things we take pleasure in knowing. It is Mr. Gosse’s especial grievance against Waller that he does not enlighten us on such points. “We can form,” he complains, “but a very vague idea of Lady Dorothy Sidney from the Sacharissa poems; she is everywhere overshadowed by the poet himself. We are told that she can sleep when she pleases, and this inspires a copy of verses; but later on we are told that she can do anything but sleep when she pleases, and this leads to another copy of verses, which leave us exactly where we were when we started.” Indeed, those who express surprise at Sacharissa’s coldness have perhaps failed to notice the graceful chill of her lover’s poems. “Cupid might have clapped him on the shoulder, but we could warrant him heart-whole.” For seven years he carried on his languid and courtly suit without once warming to the passion point; and when Lady Dorothy at last made up her mind to marry somebody else, he expressed his cordial acquiescence in her views in a most charming and playful letter to her young sister, Lady Lucy Sidney,--a letter containing just enough well-bred regret to temper its wit and gayety. He had fulfilled his part in singing the praises of his mistress, in preaching to her sweetly through the soft petals of a rose, and in sighing with gentle complacency over the happy girdle which bound her slender waist.

“A narrow compass, and yet there
Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair;
Give me but this ribbon bound
Take all the rest the sun goes round.”

Here we have the prototype of that other and more familiar cincture which clasped the Miller’s Daughter; and it must be admitted that Lord Tennyson’s maiden, with her curls, and her jeweled ear-rings, and the necklace rising and falling all day long upon her “balmy bosom,” is more suggestive of a court beauty, like the fair Sacharissa, than of a buxom village girl.

The most impersonal, however, of all the poet-lovers is Sir Philip Sidney, who, in the hundred and eight sonnets dedicated to Stella, has managed to tell us absolutely nothing about her. The atmosphere of haunting individuality which gives these sonnets their half-bitter flavor, and which made them a living power in the stormy days of Elizabethan poetry, reveals to us, not Stella, but Astrophel; not Penelope Devereux, but Sidney himself, bruised by regrets and resentful of his fate. They are not by any means passionate love-songs; they are not even sanguine enough to be persuasive; they are steeped throughout in a pungent melancholy, too restless for resignation, too gentle for anger, too manly for vain self-indulgence. In their delicacy and their languor we read the story of that lingering suit which lacked the elation of success and the heart-break of failure. Indeed, Sidney seems never to have been a very ardent lover until the lady was taken away from him and married to Lord Rich, when he bewailed her musically for a couple of years, and then consoled himself with Frances Walsingham, who must have found the sonnets to her rival pleasant reading for her leisure hours. This is the bald history of that poetic passion which made the names of Stella and Astrophel famous in English song, and which stirred the disgust of Horace Walpole, whose appreciation of such tender themes was of a painfully restricted nature. In their thoughtful, introspective, and self-revealing character, Sidney’s love-poems bear a closer likeness to the genius of the nineteenth than to that of the sixteenth century. If we want to see the same spirit at work, we have but to take up the fifty sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, called “The House of Life,” wherein the writer’s soul is clearly reflected, but no glimpse is vouchsafed us of the woman who has disturbed its depth. Their vague, sweet pathos, their brooding melancholy, their reluctant acceptance of a joyless mood, are all familiar features in the earlier poet. Such verses as those beginning,--

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell,”

are of the self-same mintage as Sidney’s golden coins, only more modern, and perhaps more perfect in form, and a trifle more shadowy in substance. If Sidney shows us but little of Stella, and if that little is, judged by the light of her subsequent career, not very accurately represented, Rossetti far surpasses him in unconscious reticence. He is not unwilling to analyze,--few recent poets are,--but his analysis lays bare only the tumult of his own heart, the lights and shades of his own delicate and sensitive nature.

It was Sidney, however, who first pointed out to women, with clear insistence, the advantage of having poets for lovers, and the promise of immortality thus conferred on them. He entreats them to listen kindly to those who can sing their praises to the world. “For so doing you shall be most fair, most wise, most rich, most everything! You shall feed upon superlatives.” Carew, adopting the same tone, and less gallant than Wither, who refers even his own fame to Arete’s kindling glances, tells the flaunting Celia very plainly that she owes her dazzling prominence to him alone.

“Know, Celia! since thou art so proud,
’Twas I that gave thee thy renown;
Thou hadst in the forgotten crowd
Of common beauties lived unknown,
Had not my verse exhaled thy name,
And with it impt the wings of fame.”

What wonder that, under such conditions and with such reminders, a passion for being be-rhymed seized upon all women, from the highest to the lowest, from the marchioness at court to the orange-girl smiling in the theatre!--a passion which ended its fluttering existence in our great-grandmothers’ albums. Yet nothing is clearer, when we study these poetic suits, than their very discouraging results. The pleasure that a woman takes in being courted publicly in verse is a very distinct sensation from the pleasure that she expects to take when being courted privately in prose. She is quick to revere, genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it. Genius, as Hazlitt scornfully remarks, “says such things,” and the average woman distrusts “such things,” and wonders why the poet will not learn to talk and behave like ordinary people. It hardly needed the crusty shrewdness of Christopher North to point out to us the arrant ill-success with which the Muse has always gone a-wooing. “Making love and making love-verses,” he explains, “are two of the most different things in the world, and I doubt if both accomplishments were ever found highly united in the same gifted individual. Inspiration is of little avail either to gods or men in the most interesting affairs of life, those of the earth. The pretty maid who seems to listen kindly

‘Kisses the cup, and passes it to the rest,’

and next morning, perhaps, is off before breakfast in a chaise-and-four to Gretna Green, with an aid-de-camp of Wellington, as destitute of imagination as his master.” It is the cheerful equanimity with which the older poets anticipated and endured some such finale as this which gives them their precise advantage over their more exacting and self-centred successors.

For what is the distinctive characteristic of the early love-songs, and to what do they owe their profound and penetrating charm? It is that quality of youth which Heine so subtly recognized in Rossini’s music, and which, to his world-worn ears, made it sweeter than more reflective and heavily burdened strains. Love was young when Herrick and Carew and Suckling went a-wooing; he has grown now to man’s estate, and the burdens of manhood have kept pace with his growing powers. It is no longer, as at the feast of Apollo, a contest for the deftest kiss, but a life-and-death struggle in that grim arena where passion and pain and sorrow contend for mastery.

“Ah! how sweet it is to love!
Ah! how gay is young desire!”

sang Dryden, who, in truth, was neither sweet nor gay in his amorous outpourings, but who merely echoed the familiar sentiments of his youth. That sweetness and gayety of the past still linger, indeed, in some half-forgotten and wholly neglected verses which we have grown too careless or too cultivated to recall. We harden our hearts against such delicious trifling as

“The young May moon is beaming, love,
The glow-worm’s lamp is gleaming, love.”

We will have none of its pleasant moral,--

“’Tis never too late for delight, my dear,”

and we will not even listen when Mr. Saintsbury tells us with sharp impatience that, in turning our backs so coldly upon the poet who enraptured our grandfathers, we are losing a great deal that we can ill afford to spare. The quality of youth is still more distinctly discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes’s dazzling little songs, stolen straight from the heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous with that golden light which set so long ago. It is not in spirit only, nor in sentiment, that this resemblance exists; the words, the imagery, the swaying music, the teeming fancies of the younger poet, mark him as one strayed from another age, and wandering companionless under alien skies. Some two hundred years before Beddoes’s birth, Drummond of Hawthornden, he who sang so tenderly the praises of his sweet mistress, dead on her wedding-day, wrote these quaint and pretty lines entreating for her favor:--

“I die, dear life, unless to me be given
As many kisses as the Spring hath flowers,
Or there be silver drops in Iris’ showers,
Or stars there be in all-embracing heaven.
And if displeased, you of the match remain,
You shall have leave to take them back again.”

In Beddoes’s unfinished drama of “Torresmond,” we find Veronica’s maidens singing her to sleep with just such bright conceits and soft caressing words, and their song rings like an echo from some dim old room where Lesbia, or Althea, or Celia lies a-dreaming:--

“How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new-fall’n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:
So many times do I love thee, dear.

“How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unraveled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:
So many times do I love again.”

It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly modern poet declares his passion; it is not thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, the most alluring and shadowy figure in English poetry,--Lucy, richly dowered with a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. To the lover of Wordsworth her death is a lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of her as he thinks of her,--

“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

We cannot endure that anything so fine and rare should slip forever from the sunshine, and that the secret stars should look down upon her maidenhood no more. Browning, too, who has been termed the poet of love, who has revealed to us every changeful mood, every stifled secret, every light and shade of human emotion,--how has he dealt with his engrossing theme? Beneath his unsparing touch, at once burning and subtle, the soul lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. All that is noble, generous, suffering, shameful, finds in him its ablest exponent. Those strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pater has analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of Mona Lisa, beneath whose weary eyelids “the thoughts and experiences of the world lie shadowed,” might also fitly portray the image of Love, as Browning has unveiled him to our sight. He too is older than the rocks, and the secrets of the grave and of the deep seas are in his keeping. He too expresses all that man has come to desire in the ways of a thousand years, and his is the beauty “into which the soul with its maladies has passed.” The slumbering centuries lie coiled beneath his feet, their hidden meaning is his to grasp, their huge and restless impulses have nourished him, their best results are his inheritance. But he is not glad, for the maladies of the soul have stilled his laughter, and the brightness of youth has fled.

BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME.

So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading, and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature, that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions. Those who have honored us with confidence in this matter seem to have found their letters, as Sir Thomas Browne found his religion, “all pure profit.” Edward E. Hale, for instance, has been “helped” by every imaginable writer, from Marcus Aurelius to the amiable authoress of “The Wide, Wide World.” Moncure D. Conway acknowledges his obligations to an infinite variety of sources. William T. Harris has been happy enough to seize instinctively upon those works which aroused his “latent energies to industry and self-activity;” and Edward Eggleston has gathered intellectual sustenance from the most unexpected quarters,--the Rollo Books, and Lindley Murray’s Reader. Only Andrew Lang and Augustus Jessop are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.

Now when a man tells us that he has been really “helped” by certain books, we naturally conclude that the condition reached by their assistance is, in some measure, gratifying to himself; and, by the same token, I am disposed to argue that my own unsatisfactory development may be the result of less discreetly selected reading,--reading for which, in many cases, I was wholly irresponsible. I notice particularly that several persons who have been helped acknowledge a very pleasing debt of gratitude to their early spelling-books, to Webster’s Elementary, and to those modest volumes which first imparted to them the mysteries of the alphabet. It was not so with me. I learned my letters, at the cost of infinite tribulation, out of a horrible little book called “Reading Without Tears,” which I trust has long since been banished from all Christian nurseries. It was a brown book, and had on its cover a deceptive picture of two stout and unclothed Cupids holding the volume open between them, and making an ostentatious pretense of enjoyment. Young as I was, I grew cynical over that title and that picture, for the torrents of tears that I shed blotted them both daily from my sight. It might have been possible for Cupids, who needed no wardrobes and sat comfortably on clouds, to like such lessons, but for an ordinary little girl in frock and pinafore they were simply heart-breaking. Had it only been my good fortune to be born twenty years later, spelling would have been left out of my early discipline, and I should have found congenial occupation in sticking pins or punching mysterious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But when I was young, the world was still sadly unenlightened in these matters; the plain duty of every child was to learn how to read; and the more hopelessly dull I showed myself to be, the more imperative became the need of forcing some information into me,--information which I received as responsively as does a Strasbourg goose its daily share of provender. For two bitter years I had for my constant companion that hated reader, which began with such isolated statements as “Ann has a cat,” and ended with a dismal story about a little African boy named Sam; Mr. Rider Haggard not having then instructed us as to what truly remarkable titles little African boys enjoy. If, to this day, I am disposed to underrate the advantages of education, and to think but poorly of compulsory school-laws and the march of mind, it is because of the unhappy nature of my own early experiences.

Having at last struggled into some acquaintanceship with print, the next book to which I can trace a moral downfall is “Sandford and Merton,” left on the nursery shelves by an elder brother, and read many times, not because I especially liked it, but because I had so little to choose from. Those were not days when a glut of juvenile literature had produced a corresponding indifference, and a spirit of languid hypercriticism. The few volumes we possessed, even those of a severely didactic order, were read and re-read, until we knew them well by heart. Now up to a certain age I was, as all healthy children are, essentially democratic, with a decided preference for low company, and a secret affinity for the least desirable little girls in the neighborhood. But “Sandford and Merton” wrought a pitiable change. I do not think I ever went so far as to dislike the Rev. Mr. Barlow after the very cordial and hearty fashion in which Dickens disliked him, and I know I should have been scandalized by Mr. Burnand’s cheerful mockery; but, pondering over the matter with the stolid gravity of a child, I reached some highly unsatisfactory conclusions. It did not seem to me then, and it does not seem to me now, exactly fair in the estimable clergyman to have refused the board which Mr. Merton was anxious to pay, and then have reproached poor Tommy so coldly with eating the bread of dependence; neither did it seem worth while for a wealthy little boy to spend his time in doing--very inefficiently, I am sure--the work of an under-gardener. Harry’s contempt for riches, and his supreme satisfaction with a piece of bread for dinner, struck me as overdrawn; Tommy’s mishaps were more numerous than need be, even if he did have the misfortune to be a gentleman’s son; and the complacency with which Mr. Barlow permitted him to give away a whole suit of clothes--clothes which, according to my childish system of ethics, belonged, not to him, but to his mother--contrasted but poorly with the anxiety manifested by the reverend mentor over his own pitiful loaf of bread. Altogether, “Sandford and Merton” affected me the wrong way; and for the first time my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth. I do not now believe that men are born equal; I do not love universal suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, all friends of the people and benefactors of their race. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of “Sandford and Merton.”

A third pitfall was dug for my unwary feet when, as a school-girl of fifteen, I read, sorely against my will, Milton’s “Areopagitica.” I believe this is a work highly esteemed by critics, and I have even heard people in private life, who might say what they pleased without scandal, speak quite enthusiastically of its manly spirit and sonorous rhetoric. Perhaps they had the privilege of reading it skippingly to themselves, and not as I did, aloud, paragraph after paragraph, each weighted with mighty sentences, cumbrous, involved, majestic, and, so far as my narrow comprehension went, almost unintelligible. Never can I forget the aspect of those pages, bristling all over with mysterious allusions to unknown people and places, and with an armed phalanx of Greek and Roman names which were presumably familiar to my instructed mind, but which were really dug out bodily from my Classical Dictionary, at the cost of much time and temper. I have counted in one paragraph, and that a moderately short one, forty-five of these stumbling-blocks, ranging all the way from the “libertine school of Cyrene,” about which I knew nothing, to the no less libertine songs of Naso, about which I know nothing now. Neither was it easy to trace the exact connection between the question at issue, “the freedom of unlicenc’d printing,” and such far-off matters as the gods of Egypt and the comedies of Plautus, Isaiah’s prophecies and the Carthaginian councils. Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public. Lady Harriet Ashburton used to say that, when Macaulay talked, she was not only inundated with learning, but she positively stood in the slops. In reading Milton, I waded knee-deep, utterly out of my element, and deeply resentful of the experience. The liberty of the press was, to my American notions, so much a matter of course, that the only way I could account for the continued withholding of so commonplace a privilege was by supposing that some unwary members of Parliament read the “Areopagitica,” and were forthwith hardened into tyranny forever. I own I felt a savage glee in reflecting that Lords and Commons had received this oppressive bit of literature in the same aggrieved spirit that I had myself, and that its immediate result was to put incautious patriots in a more ticklish position than before. If truth now seems to me a sadly overrated virtue; if plain-speaking is sure to affront me; if the vigorous personalities of the journalist and the amiable indecencies of the novel-writer vex my illiberal soul, and if the superficial precautions of a paternal government appear estimable in my eyes, to what can I trace this alien and unprogressive attitude, if not to the “Areopagitica,” and its adverse influence over my rebellious and suffering girlhood?

As these youthful reminiscences are of too mournful a nature to be profitably prolonged, I will add only two more to the list of books which have hindered my moral and intellectual development. When I was seventeen, I read, at the earnest solicitation of some well-meaning friends, “The Heir of Redclyffe,” and my carefully guarded theories of life shivered and broke before the baneful lesson it conveyed. Brought up on a comfortable and wholesome diet of Miss Edgeworth’s pleasant stories, I had unconsciously absorbed the genial doctrine that virtue is its own reward, and that additional rewards are sure to be forthcoming; that happiness awaits the good and affable little girl, and that well-merited misfortunes dog the footsteps of her who inclines to evil ways. I trusted implicitly to those shadowy mills where the impartial gods grind out our just deserts; and the admirable songs in “Patience” about Gentle Jane and Teasing Tom inadequately express the rigidity of my views and the boundless nature of my confidence. “The Heir of Redclyffe” destroyed, at once and forever, this cheerful delusion, and with it a powerful stimulus to rectitude. Here are Sir Guy Morville and poor little Amy, both of them virtuous to a degree which would have put Miss Edgeworth’s most exemplary characters to the blush; yet Guy, after being bullied and badgered through the greater part of his short life, dies of the very fever which should properly have carried off Philip; and Amy, besides being left widowed and heart-broken, gives birth to a daughter instead of a son, and so forfeits the inheritance of Redclyffe. On the other hand, Philip, the most intolerable of prigs and mischief-makers, whose cruel suspicions play havoc with the happiness of everybody in the story, and whose obstinate folly brings about the final disaster,--Philip, who is little better than his cousin’s murderer, succeeds to the estate, marries that very stilted and unpleasant young person, Laura (who is after all a world too good for him), and is left in a blaze of glory, a wealthy, honored, and distinguished man. It is true that Miss Yonge, whose conscience must have pricked her a little at bringing about this unwarranted and unjustifiable conclusion, would have us believe that he was sorry for his misbehavior, and that his regret was sufficient to equalize the perfidious scales of justice; but even at seventeen I was not guileless enough to credit the lasting quality of Philip’s contrition. A very few years would suffice to reconcile him to Guy’s death, and to convince him that his own succession was a mere survival of the fittest, an admirable intervention on the part of Destiny to remedy her former blunders, and exalt him to his proper station in the world. But to me this triumph of guilt meant the downfall of my early creed, the destruction of my most cherished convictions. Never again might I look forward with hopeful heart to the inevitable righting of all wrong things; never again might I trust with old-time confidence to the final readjustment of a closing chapter. Even Emerson’s essay on “Compensation” has failed to restore to me the full measure of all that I lost through the “The Heir of Redclyffe.”

The last work to injure me seriously as a girl, and to root up the good seed sown in long years of righteous education, was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which I read from cover to cover with the innocent credulity of youth; and, when I had finished, the awful conviction forced itself upon me that the thirteenth amendment was a ghastly error, and that the war had been fought in vain. Slavery, which had seemed to me before undeviatingly wicked, now shone in a new and alluring light. All things must be judged by their results, and if the result of slavery was to produce a race so infinitely superior to common humanity; if it bred strong, capable, self-restrained men like George, beautiful, courageous, tender-hearted women like Eliza, visions of innocent loveliness like Emmeline; marvels of acute intelligence like Cassy, children of surpassing precocity and charm like little Harry, mothers and wives of patient, simple goodness like Aunt Chloe, and, finally, models of all known chivalry and virtue like Uncle Tom himself,--then slavery was the most ennobling institution in the world, and we had committed a grievous crime in degrading a whole heroic race to our narrower, viler level. It was but too apparent, even to my immature mind, that the negroes whom I knew, or knew about, were very little better than white people; that they shared in all the manifold failings of humanity, and were not marked by any higher intelligence than their Caucasian neighbors. Even in the matters of physical beauty and mechanical ingenuity there had plainly been some degeneracy, some falling off from the high standard of old slavery days. Reluctantly I concluded that what had seemed so right had all been wrong indeed, and that the only people who stood preeminent for virtue, intellect, and nobility had been destroyed by our rash act, had sunk under the enervating influence of freedom to a range of lower feeling, to baser aspirations and content. It was the greatest shock of all, and the last.

I will pursue the subject no further. Those who read these simple statements may not, I fear, find them as edifying or as stimulating as the happier recollections of more favored souls; but it is barely possible that they may see in them the unvarnished reflection of some of their own youthful experiences.

LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS.

There is a delightful little story, very well told by Mr. James Payn, the novelist, about an unfortunate young woman who for years concealed in her bosom the terrible fact that she did not think “John Gilpin” funny; and who at last, in an unguarded moment, confessed to him her guilty secret, and was promptly comforted by the assurance that, for his part, he had always found it dull. The weight that was lifted from that girl’s mind made her feel for the first time that she was living in an age which tolerates freedom of conscience, and in a land where the Holy Office is unknown. It is only to be feared that her newly acquired liberty inclined her to be as much of a Philistine as Mr. Payn himself, and to believe, with him, that all orthodoxy is of necessity hypocritical, and that when a man says he admires the “Faerie Queene,” or “Paradise Lost,” or Rabelais, the chances are that he knows little or nothing about them. Now, as a matter of fact, it is seldom safe to judge others too rigidly by our own inadequate standards, or to assume that because we prefer “In Memoriam” to “Lycidas,” our friend is merely adopting a tone of grievous superiority when he modestly but firmly asserts his preference for the earlier dirge. It is even possible that although we may find “Don Quixote” dull, and “The Excursion” vapid, another reader, no whit cleverer, we are sure, than ourselves, may enjoy them both, with honest laughter and with keen delight. There is doubtless as much affectation in the world of books as in the worlds of art and fashion; but there must always be a certain proportion of men and women who, whether by natural instinct or acquired grace, derive pleasure from the highest ranks of literature, and who should in common justice be permitted to say so, and to return thanks for the blessings accorded them. “It is in our power to think as we will,” says Marcus Aurelius, and it should be our further privilege to give unfettered expression to our thoughts.

Nevertheless, human nature is weak and erring, and the pitfalls dug for us by wily critics are baited with the most ensnaring devices. It is not the great writers of the world who have the largest following of sham admirers, but rather that handful of choice spirits who, we are given to understand, appeal only to a small and chosen band. Few of us find it worth our while to pretend a passionate devotion for Shakespeare, or Milton, or Dante. On the contrary, nothing is more common than to hear people complain that the “Inferno” is unpleasant, and “Paradise Lost” dreadfully long, neither of which charges is easily refutable in terms. But when we read in a high-class review that “just as Spenser is the poet’s poet, so Peacock is the delight of critics and of wits;” or that “George Meredith, writing as he does for an essentially cultivated and esoteric audience, has won but a limited recognition for his brilliant group of novels;” or that “the subtle and far-reaching excellence of Ibsen’s dramatic work is a quality absolutely undecipherable to the groundlings,” who can resist tendering his allegiance on the spot? It is not in the heart of man to harden itself against the allurements of that magic word “esoteric,” nor to be indifferent to the distinction it conveys. Mr. Payn, indeed, in a robust spirit of contradiction, has left it on record that he found “Headlong Hall” and “Crotchet Castle” intolerably dull; but this I believe to have been an unblushing falsehood, in the case of the latter story, at least. It is hardly within the bounds of possibility that a man blessed with so keen a sense of humor could have found the Rev. Dr. Folliott dull; but it is quite possible that the average reader, whose humorous perceptions are of a somewhat restricted nature, should find Mr. Peacock enigmatic, and the oppressive brilliancy of Mr. Meredith’s novels a heavy load to bear. There is such a thing as being intolerably clever, and “Evan Harrington” and “The Egoist” are fruitful examples of the fact. The mind is kept on a perpetual strain, lest some fine play of words, some elusive witticism, should be disregarded; the sense of continued effort paralyzes enjoyment; fatigue provokes in us an ignoble spirit of contrariety, and we sigh perversely for that serene atmosphere of dullness which in happier moments we affected to despise.

“A man,” says Dr. Johnson bluntly, “ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” In other words, if his taste is for Mr. Rider Haggard’s ingenious tales, it is hardly worth his while to pretend that he prefers Tolstoï. His more enlightened brother will indeed pass him by with a shiver of pained surprise, but he has the solid evidence of the booksellers to prove that he is not sitting alone in his darkness. Yet nowadays the critic diverts his heaviest scorn from the guilty author, who does not mind it at all, to the sensitive reader, who minds it a great deal too much; and the result is that cowardice prompts a not unnatural deception. Few of us remember what Dr. Johnson chanced to say on the subject, and fewer still are prepared to solace ourselves with his advice; but when an unsparing disciplinarian like Mr. Frederic Harrison lays down the law with a chastening hand, we are all of us aroused to a speedy and bitter consciousness of our deficiencies. “The incorrigible habit of reading little books ”--a habit, one might say, analogous to that of eating common food--meets with scant tolerance at the hands of this inexorable reformer. Better, far better, never to read at all, and so keep the mind “open and healthy,” than be betrayed into seeking “desultory information” from the rank and file of literature. To be simply entertained by a book is an unpardonable sin; to be gently instructed is very little better. In fact, Mr. Harrison carries his severity to such a pitch that, on reaching this humiliating but comforting sentence, “Systematic reading, in its true sense, is hardly possible for women,” it was with a feeble gasp of relief that I realized our ignominious exclusion from the race. I do not see _why_ systematic reading should be hardly possible for women, any more than I see what is to become of Mr. Harrison if we are to give up little books, but never before did the limitations of sex appear in so friendly a light. There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift. One is irresistibly reminded of Mrs. Blimber surveying the infant Paul Dombey. “Like a bee,” she murmured, “about to plunge into a garden of the choicest flowers, and sip the sweets for the first time. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Plautus, Cicero. What a world of honey have we here!” And what a limited appetite and digestion awaited them! After all, these great men did not invariably love one another, even when they had the chance. Goethe, for instance, hated Dante, and Scott very cordially disliked him; Voltaire had scant sympathy with “Paradise Lost,” and Wordsworth focused his true affection upon the children of his own pen.

It is very amusing to see the position now assigned by critics to that arch-offender, Charles Lamb, who, himself the idlest of readers, had no hesitation in commending the same unscrupulous methods to his friends. We are told in one breath of his unerring literary judgment, and, in the next, are solemnly warned against accepting that judgment as our own. He is the most quoted, because the most quotable of writers, yet every one who uses his name seems faintly displeased at hearing it upon another’s lips. I have myself been reminded with some sharpness, by a reviewer, that illustrations drawn from Lamb counted for nothing in my argument, because his was “a unique personality,” a “pure imagination, which even the drama of the Restoration could not pollute.” But this seems to be assuming more than we have any right to assume. I cannot take it upon myself to say, for example, that Mr. Bagehot’s mind was more susceptible to pollution than Charles Lamb’s. I am not sufficiently in the secrets of Providence to decide upon so intimate and delicate a question. But granted that others have a clearer light on these matters than I have, it would still appear as though the unpolluted source were the best from which to draw one’s help and inspiration. What really makes Lamb a doubtful guide through the mazes of literature is the fact that there is not a single rule given us in these sober days for the proper administration of our faculties which he did not take a positive pleasure in transgressing. His often-quoted heresy in regard to those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without” might perhaps be spared the serious handling it receives; but his letters abound in passages equally shameless and perverting. “I feel as if I had read all the books I want to read,” he writes unconcernedly; and again, “I take less pleasure in reading than heretofore, but I like books about books.” And so, alas! do we; though this is the most serious charge laid at our doors, and one which has subjected us to the most humiliating reproofs. It is very pleasant to have Mr. Ainger tell us what an admirable critic Lamb was, and with what unerring certainty he pointed out the best lines of Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge. The fact remains--though to this Mr. Ainger does not draw our attention--that he found nothing to praise in Byron, heartily disliked Shelley, never, so far as we can see, read Keats, condemned Faust unhesitatingly as “a disagreeable, canting tale of seduction,” and discovered strong points of resemblance between Southey and Milton. Under these circumstances, it is hardly safe to elect him as a critical fetich, if we feel the need of such an article, merely because he admired the “Ancient Mariner” and Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper,” and did not particularly admire “We are Seven.” Even his fine and subtle sympathy with Shakespeare is a thing to be revered and envied, rather than analyzed and drawn into service, where it will answer little purpose. But what is none the less sure is that Lamb recognized by a swift and delicate intuition the literary food that was best fitted to nourish his own intellectual growth. This was Sir Walter Scott’s secret, and this was Lamb’s. Both knew instinctively what was good for them, and a clear perception of our individual needs is something vastly different from idle preference based on an ignorant conceit. It is what we have each of us to learn, if we would hope to thrive; and while we may be aided in the effort, yet a general command to read and enjoy all great authors seldom affords us the precise assistance we require.

Still less do we derive any real help from those more contentious critics who, being wedded hard and fast to one particular author or to one particular school of thought, refuse, with ostentatious continency, to cast lingering looks upon any other type of loveliness. Literary monogamy, as practiced by some of our contemporaries, makes us sigh for the old genial days of Priest Martin, when the tyranny of opinions had not yet grown into a binding yoke, and when it was still possible to follow the example of Montaigne’s old woman, and light one candle to Saint Michael and another to the Dragon. At present, the saint--or perhaps the dragon--stands in a blaze of glory, all the more lustrous for the dark shadow thrown on his antagonist. “Praise handed in by disparagement,” the Greek drama whipped upon the back of Genesis,--if I may venture to quote Charles Lamb again--this is the modern method of procedure, a method successfully inaugurated by Macaulay, who could find no better way of eulogizing Addison than by heaping antithetical reproaches upon Steele. In a little volume of lectures upon Russian literature, lectures which were sufficiently popular to bear both printing and delivery, I find the art of persuasiveness illustrated by this firebrand of a sentence, hurled like an anathema at the heads of a peaceful and unoffending community: “Read Tolstoï! Read humbly, read admiringly! Reading him in this spirit shall in itself be unto you an education of your highest artistic nature. And when your souls have become able to be thrilled to their very depths by the unspeakable beauty of Tolstoï’s art, you will then learn to be ashamed of the thought that for years you sensible folks of Boston have been capable of allowing the Stevensons with their Hydes, and the Haggards with their Shes, and even the clumsy Wards with their ponderous Elsmeres, to steal away, under the flag of literature, your thoughtful moments.”

Now, apart from the delightful vagueness of perspective,--for “Robert Elsmere” and “She” grouping themselves amicably together is a spectacle too pleasant to be lost,--I cannot but think that there is something oppressive about the form in which these comments are offered to the world. It reminds one of that highly dramatic scene in Bulwer’s “Richelieu,” where the aged cardinal hurls “the curse of Rome” at a whole stageful of people, who shrink and cower without knowing very distinctly at what. Why should critics, I wonder, always adopt this stringent and defiant tone when they would beguile us to the enjoyment of Russian fiction? Why should the reading of Tolstoï necessarily imply a contempt for Robert Louis Stevenson? Why, when we have been “thrilled to our very depths” by “Peace and War” or “Anna Karenina,” should we not devote a few spare moments to the consideration of “Markheim,” a story whose solemn intensity of purpose in no way mars its absolute and artistic beauty? And why, above all, should we be petulantly reprimanded, like so many stupid and obstinate children? I cannot even think that Mr. Howells is justified in calling the English nation “those poor islanders,” as if they were dancing naked somewhere in the South Seas, merely because they love George Eliot and Thackeray as well as Jane Austen. They love Jane Austen too. We all love her right heartily, but we have no need to emulate good Queen Anne, who, as Swift observed, had not a sufficient stock of amity for more than one person at a time. We may not, indeed, be prepared to say with Mr. Howells that Miss Austen is “the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness,” having some reasonable doubts as to the precise definition of truth. We may not care to emphasize our affection for her by repudiating with one breath all her great successors. We may not even consider “The Newcomes” and “Henry Esmond” as illustrating the degeneracy of modern fiction; yet nevertheless we may enjoy some fair half-hours in the company of Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Elton, of Catherine Morland and Elizabeth Bennet. Only, when we are searching for a shibboleth by which to test our neighbor’s intellectual worth, let not Jane Austen’s be the name, lest we be rewarded for our trouble by hearing the faint, clear ripple of her amused laughter--that gentle, feminine, merciless laughter--echoing softly from the dwelling-place of the immortals.

It is inevitable, moreover, that too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught. Accordingly, now and then, some belligerent freeman rushes into print, and shakes our souls by declaring breathlessly that he hates “Wagner, and Mr. Irving, and the Elgin Marbles, and Goethe, and Leonardo da Vinci;” and this rank socialism in literature and art receives a very solid and shameless support from the more light-minded writers of the day. Mr. Birrell, for instance, fails to see why the man who liked Montgomery’s poetry should have been driven away from it by Macaulay’s stormy rhetoric, nor why Macaulay himself could not have let poor Montgomery alone, nor why “some cowardly fellow” should join in the common laugh at Tupper, when he knows very well that in his secret soul he much prefers the “Proverbial Philosophy” to “Atalanta in Calydon” or “Empedocles on Etna.” A recent contributor to Macmillan assures us, with discouraging candor, that it is all vanity to educate ourselves into admiring Turner, and that it is not worth while to try and like the “Mahabharata” or the “Origin of Species,” if we really enjoy “King Solomon’s Mines” or the “Licensed Victualler’s Gazette.” On the other hand, we have Ruskin’s word for it that unless we love Turner with our whole hearts we shall not be--artistically speaking--saved; and hosts of strenuous critics in the field of letters are each and every one assuring us that there is no intellectual future for the world unless we speedily tender our allegiance wherever he says it is due. Poet-censors, like Mr. Swinburne, whose words are bitterness and whose charity is small, lay crooked yokes upon our galled necks. Even the story-tellers have now turned reviewers on their own account, and gravely tell us how many novels, besides their own, we should feel ourselves at liberty to read.

Under these circumstances, it is hardly a matter of surprise that people whose minds are, as Mr. Bagehot termed it, “to let” stand hesitating between license and servitude. On the one side, we hear men--intelligent men, too--boasting that they never read anything but the newspapers, and seeming to take a perverted pride in their own melancholy deprivation. On the other, we see both men and women, and sometimes even children, practicing a curious sort of literary asceticism, and devoting themselves conscientiously and very conspicuously to the authors they least enjoy. These martyrs to an advanced cultivation find their self-imposed tasks, I am happy to think, grow harder year by year. Helen Pendennis, occasionally reading Shakespeare, “whom she pretended to like, but didn’t,” had comparatively an easy time of it; but her successor to-day who goes to a lecture on Hegel or Euripides when she would prefer cards and conversation; who sits, perplexed and doubtful, through a performance of “A Doll’s House” when “Little Lord Fauntleroy” represents her dramatic preference; who tries to read Matthew Arnold and Tourguéneff, and now and then Mr. Pater, when she really enjoys Owen Meredith, and “Bootles’ Baby,” and the Duchess, pays a heavy price for her enviable reputation. “The true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire,” says Marius the Epicurean; but the true value of our friends’ distinction is in proportion to the books we behold in their hands. We have hardly yet outgrown the critical methods of the little heroine of “Mademoiselle Panache,” who knows that Lady Augusta is accomplished because she has seen her music and heard of her drawings; and, as few of us resemble the late Mr. Mark Pattison in his unwillingness to create a good impression, we naturally make an effort to be taken at our best. Mr. Payn once said that Macaulay had frightened thousands into pretending they knew authors with whom they had not even a bowing acquaintance; and though the days of his autocracy are over, it has been succeeded by a more fastidious and stringent legislation. We no longer feel it incumbent upon us to profess an intimacy with Thucydides, nor to revere the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Indeed, a recent critic has been found brave enough to speak harsh words concerning the Delectable Mountains and the Valley of Humiliation,--words that would have frozen the current of Macaulay’s blood, and startled even the tolerant Sainte-Beuve, weary as he confessed himself of the Pilgrim’s vaunted perfections. But there is always a little assortment of literary shibboleths, whose names we con over with careful glibness, that we may assert our intimacy in hours of peril; nor should we, in justice, be censured very severely for doing what is too often with us, as with the Ephraimites, a deed of simple self-defense.