Chapter III: Part 3

I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of
the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long
time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for
Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to
plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope,
Tasso,--these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the
first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite
the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and
triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are
still naive and original in thought and expression, poets such as
Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the
moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics
to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not
careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain
and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It
seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be
sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to
those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and
which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and
harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces
which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive
expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness.

And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada. "Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,--deserts, mountains, the large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always, what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse, with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.

But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism. His innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous tendencies of the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into that disillusion from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour of deliverance. He took to himself the saying of the Abbe Galiani: "Continue your works; it is a proof of attachment to life to compose books." Yet it may be that this very disillusion was one of the elements of his success; for after all, the real passion of literature, that perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, hardly comes to a man until the allurement of life has been dispelled by many experiences, each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps, when the hope of love (the _spes animi credula mutui_) and the visions of ambition, the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting, do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is the reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least for the critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final deliverance from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I mean any invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the creative writer in this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility between the two classes. The poet feels that the critic by the very possession of this self-knowledge sets himself above the writer who accepts the inspiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while the critic resents the fact that the world at large looks upon his work as subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost ceases to exist. No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who recreates the political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast bridge between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up its books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to pass under review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the meaning of each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck out the heart of each man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye quivering with life,--if this be not a labour of immense creative energy the word has no sense to my ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips unceasingly from our memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the river of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will roll, while we stand and wait. And then comes this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly the current is stopped; who has power like the wizards of old to bid the tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to us as the present, and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it affects others, but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold the interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the magnitude of this man's achievement.

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he had mixed much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship with the Princesse Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close touch with the active forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every one knows, who has read at all in his essays, that he was first of all a psychologist, and that his knowledge of the human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintance with libraries. He might almost be accused of slighting the written word in order to get at the secret of the writer. What attracted him chiefly was that middle ground where life and literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious through expression, and literature retains the reality of association with facts. "A little poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality of things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was never surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was dealing with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth century and retold its events in their letters and memoirs,--Mme. du Deffand, Mme. de Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded and followed. Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own disappointment than when he says with a sigh, thinking of those irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all of life then was turned to sociability." And he was describing his own method as a critic, no less than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when he wrote: "Her great art in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to feel the intelligence _(l'esprit)_ of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the success she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an art. 'Ah!' she cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every one!'" And this love of the social side of literature, this hankering after _la bella scuola_ when men wrote under the sway of some central governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the scattered, individualistic tendencies of his own day.

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,--his treatment of literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things for the golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his limitation. If he fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence of those great and imperious souls who stand apart from the common concerns of men, and who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by extravagance or egotism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he was distrustful of that fervid breath of poesy that comes and goes unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a common charge against him that he was cold to the sublime, and he himself was aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. "Il ne faut donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'a la derniere extremite et a son corps defendant." Something of this, too, must be held to account for the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but never overcome. He might have lived with a kind of content in the society of those refined and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing the solace of that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his own age to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for its fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the highest degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during many years, but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he wrote, while staying at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach, where it is said Saint Louis embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have long since drawn away." One may excuse these limitations as the "defect of his quality," as indeed they are. But more than that, they belong to him as a French critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in French literature. That literature and language, we have been told by no less an authority than M. Brunetiere, are pre-eminently social in their strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve was indirectly justifying his own method when he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Moliere, La Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors. "They have all," he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I am even inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has never had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very field where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the spirit, just as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline and uncertainty of taste. And after all, the critical temperament consists primarily in just this linking together of literature and life, and in the levelling application of common sense.

Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable in English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable, to us for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip into this strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in their supreme interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa Theologiae. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve, sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe intelligence.

THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH HISTORY

Like many another innocent, no doubt, I was seduced not long ago by the potent spell of Mr. Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminous _History of Scotland_. Being too, like Mr. Lang, sealed of the tribe of Sir Walter, and knowing in a general way some of the romantic features of Scotch annals, I was led to suppose that these bulky volumes would be crammed from cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. Alas, I soon learned, as I have so often learned before, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new application of several well-worn lines of Milton. Amid the inextricable feuds of Britons, Scots, Picts, and English; amid the incomprehensible medley of Bruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, and Tudors; amid the horrid tumult of Roberts, Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes decrease!), Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood and foreign shores, wanders helpless and utterly bewildered. On leaving that _selva oscura_ I felt not unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courage only, I trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldest Night, where naught was perceptible but eternal anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with this bold adventurer it might be said by me:

I come no spy,
With purpose to explore or to disturb
The secrets of your realm; but by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Led through your spacious empire up to light.

For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuous narrative there was indeed one guiding ray of light. As often as the author by way of anecdote or allusion--and happily this occurred pretty frequently--mentioned the works of Scott, a new and powerful interest was given to the page. The very name of Scott seemed providentially symbolical of his office in literature, and through him Scots history has become a theme of significance to all the world.

On the other hand, one is equally impressed by the fact that the novels owe much of their vitality to the manner in which they voice the spirit of the national life; and we recognise the truth, often maintained and as often disputed, that the final verdict on a novelist's work is generally determined by the authenticity of his portraiture, not of individuals, but of a people, and consequently by the lasting significance of the phase of society or national life portrayed.

The conditions of the novel should seem in this respect to be quite different from those of the poem. We are conscious within ourselves of some principle of isolation and exclusion--the _principium individuationis_, as the old schoolmen called it--that obstructs the completion of our being, of some contracting force of nature that dwarfs our sympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders the development of our full humanity, and denies the validity of our hopes; and the office of the imagination and of the imaginative arts is for a while to break down the walls of this narrowing individuality and to bestow on us the illusion of unconfined liberty.

But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and this variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The manner of the epic, and in a still higher degree of the tragedy, is so to arouse the will and understanding that their clogging limitations seem to be swept away, until through our sympathy with the hero we feel ourselves to be acting and speaking the great passions of humanity in their fullest and freest scope; for this reason we call the characters of the poem types, and we believe that the poet under the impulse of his inspiration is carried into a region above our vision, where, like the exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to face the great ideas of which our worldly life and circumstances are but faulty copies. In this way Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odysseus as the enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the man of doubts, and Satan the creature of rebellious pride. It may be that this effort or inspiration of the poet to represent mankind in idealised form will account in part for the peculiar tinge of melancholy that is commonly an attribute of the artistic temperament,--for the brooding uncertainty of Shakespeare, if as many think Hamlet is the true voice of his heart, for the feeling of baffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust, and for the self-tormenting of Childe Harold. It is because the dissolving power of genius and the personality of the man can never be quite reconciled; he is detached from nature and attached to her at the same time. On the one hand his genius draws him to contemplate life with the disinterestedness of a mind free from the attachments of the individual, while on the other hand his own personality, often of the most ardent character, drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction of individual emotions. Like the Empedocles of Matthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing to escape themselves, these bearers of the divine light are haled unwillingly

Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life.

What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentary illusion, or a salutary excitation from without, is in the creative poet a partial dissolution of his own personality. Shakespeare was not dealing in empty words when he likened the poet to the lover and the lunatic as being of imagination all compact; nor was Plato speaking mere metaphor when he said that "the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him." In the hour of inspiration some darkened window is opened on the horizon to eyes that are ordinarily confined within the four walls of his meagre self, a door is thrown open to the heaven-sweeping gales, he hears for a brief while the voice of the Over-soul speaking a language that with all his toil he can barely render into human speech;--and when at last the door is closed, the vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the darkened chamber of his own person, silent and forlorn.

I would not presume to describe absolutely the inner state of the poet when life appears to him in its ideal form, but the means by which he conveys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The rhythm of his verse produces on the mind something of the stimulating effect of music and this effect is enhanced by the use of language and metaphor lifted out of the common mould. Prose, however, has no such resources to impose on the fancy a creation of its own, in which the individual will is raised above itself. On the contrary, the office of the novel--and this we see more clearly as fiction grows regularly more realistic--is to represent life as controlled by environment and to portray human beings as the servants of the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In the novel sentiments and events chiefly are exhibited, in the drama characters and deeds." The procedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a passive one. It depicts man as a creature of circumstance, and its only method of escape is so to encompass the individual in circumstance as to lend to his separate life something of the pomp of universality. It effects its purpose by breadth rather than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to represent the actions of a single man as noteworthy in themselves, but to represent the life of a people or a phase of society; in the great sweep of human activity something of the same largeness and freedom is produced as in the poetic idealisation of the individual will in the drama. Thus it happens that the artistic validity of a novel depends first of all on the power of the author to portray broadly and veraciously some aspect of this wider existence.

Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, was clearly conscious of this aim of his art; and his _Comedie Humaine_ is a supreme effort to grasp the whole range of French society. Nor would it be difficult in the case of the greater English novelists to show that unwittingly--an Englishman rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his art as a Frenchman--they obeyed the same law. We admire Fielding and Smollett not so much for their individual characterisations as for the joy we feel in escaping our conventional timidity in the old-time tumultuous country life of England, with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. By a natural contrast we read Jane Austen for her picture of rural security and stability, and are glad to forget the vexations and uncertainties of life's warfare in that gentle round of society, where greed and passion are reduced to petty foibles, and where the errors of mankind only furnish material for malicious but innocent satire. With Thackeray we put on the veneer of artificial society which was the true idealism inherited by him from the eighteenth century; and we move more freely amidst that _gai monde_ because there runs through the story of it such a biting satire of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us with the feeling of our own superiority. In Dickens we are carried into the very opposite field of life, and for a while we move with those who are the creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatures we call his people, but deep in our hearts we know that each of us longs at times to be as humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and unreflecting creature of his dearest whim--for this too is liberty. Thus it is that the interest of the novel depends as much, or almost as much, on the intrinsic value of the national life or phase of society reproduced as on the skill of the writer. The prose author is in this respect far less a free agent than the poet and far more the subject of his environment; for he deals less with the unchanging laws of character and more with what he perceives outwardly about him. It is this fact which leads many readers to prefer the English novelists to the French, although the latter are unquestionably the greater masters of their craft.

Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this matter was most strongly brought home to me in reading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fine and entertaining as are Scott's more professedly historical novels, such as _Ivanhoe_ and _Quentin Durward_, I do not believe they could ever have resisted the invasion of time were they not bolstered up by the stories that deal more directly with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to be sure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein of romance; but romantic writing in prose cannot endure unless firmly grounded in realism, or unless, like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with spiritual meanings. Not having the power possessed by verse to convey illusion, it lacks also the vitality of verse. Younger readers may take naturally to _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_, because very little is required to evoke illusion with them. More mature readers turn oftenest to _Guy Mannering_ and those tales in which the romance is the realism of Scotch life, finding here a fulness of interest that is more than a compensation for the frequent slovenliness of Scott's language and for the haphazard construction of his plots.

These negligences of the indifferent craftsman might, perhaps, need no such compensation, for we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness in fiction. But there are other limitations to Scott's powers that show more clearly how much of his fame rests on the substratum of national life on which he builds. An infinite variety of characters, from kings in the council hall down to strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move through the pages of his novels; but, and the fact is notorious, the great Scotchman was little better at painting the purple light of young desire than was our own Cooper. There is something like love-making in _Rob Roy_, and Di Vernon has been signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of his five chosen heroines; but in general the scenes that form the ecstasy of most romance are dead and perfunctory in Scott. And this is the more remarkable since we know that he himself was a lover--and a disappointed lover, which is vastly more to the point in art, as all the world knows. But in fact this inability to portray the softer emotions is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he skims very lightly over most of the deeper passions of the heart, seeming to avoid them except in so far as they express themselves in action. His novels contain no adequate picture of remorse or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they contain any such psychological analysis of the emotions as has made the fame of subsequent writers. But there is an infinite variety of characters in action, and a perfect understanding of that form of the imagination which displays itself in whimsicalities corresponding to the "originals" or "humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.

The numberless quotations from "old plays" at the head of Scott's chapters are not without significance. At times he approaches closer to Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of prose or verse. In one scene at least in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, where he describes the "singular and gloomy delight" of the three old cummers about the body of their contemporary, he lets us know that he has in mind the meeting of the witches in _Macbeth_, and I think on the whole he excels the dramatist in his own field. After all is said, the Shakespearian witch-scene is an arbitrary exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry with it a complete sense of reality: the illusion is not fully maintained. The dialogue in the novelist, on the contrary, is instinct with thrilling suggestiveness, for the very reason that it is based on the groundwork of national character. The superstitious awe is here simple realism, from the beginning of the scene down to the warning cry of the paralytic hag from the cottage:

"He's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master," said Annie
Winnie, "and a comely personage--broad in the shouthers, and
narrow around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like
to hae the streiking and winding o' him."

"It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned the
octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of woman, or of man
either, will never straught him; dead-deal will never be laid on
his back, make you your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure
hand."

"Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie
Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears hae
dune before him, mony ane o'them?"

"Ask nae mair questions about it--he'll no be graced sae far,"
replied the sage.

"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay. But wha
tell'd ye this?"

"Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," answered the sibyl.
"I hae it frae a hand sure eneugh."

"But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated her
inquisitive companion.

"I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae them that
spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower his head."

"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the other; "they
dinna sound as if good luck was wi' them."

"Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, "and
let us do what is needfu', and say what is fitting; for, if the
dead corpse binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that
will fear the best o' us."

But more often Scott approaches the lesser lights of the Elizabethan comedians, whose work is in general subject to the same laws as the novel, and who filled their plays with whimsical creatures--

Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage.

You cannot read through the _dramatis personae_ of one of these plays (Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.) without being reminded of the long list of originals that figure in the Scotch novels; and in one case at least, Baron Bradwardine of _Waverley_, Scott goes out of his way to compare him with a character of Ben Jonson's. And you cannot but feel that Scott has surpassed his models on their own ground, partly because his genius was greater and partly because the novel is a wider and freer field for such characters than the drama--at least when the drama is deprived of its stage setting. But Scott's greatest advantage is due to the fact that what in England was mainly an exaggeration of the more unsociable traits of character seems in Scotland to reach down to the very foundation of the popular life. His characters are not the creation of individual eccentricities only, but spring from an inexhaustible quaintness of the national temper. From every standpoint we are led back to consider the greatness of the author as depending on his happy genius in finding a voice for a rare and noteworthy phase of society.

Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-dependence, clan attachments, cunning, its gloomy exaltations relieved at times by a wide and serene prospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admirably shown, to the physical conditions of the land; and in reading the history of Scotland, with its stories of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce and its battles of Bannockburn and Prestonpans, it seems quite fitting that the wild scenery of the country should be constantly associated with the deeds of its heroes. There is something of charm in the very names of the landscape--in the haughs, corries, straths, friths, burns, and braes. The fascination of the Scotch lakes and valleys was one of the first to awaken the world to an admiration of savage nature, as we may read in Gray's letters; and Scott, from Waverley's excursion into the wild fastnesses of highland robbers and chiefs to the lonely sea-scenes of Zetland in _The Pirate_, has carried us through a succession of natural pictures such as no other novelist ever conceived. And he has maintained always that most difficult art of describing minutely enough to convey the illusion of a particular scene and broadly enough to evoke those general emotions which alone justify descriptive writing. Perhaps his most notable success is the visit of Guy Mannering to Ellangowan, where sea, sky, and land unite to form a picture of strangely luminous beauty. He not only succeeded in exciting a new romantic interest in Scotch scenery, but he has actually added to the market price of properties. It is said that his descriptions are mentioned in the title deeds of various estates as forming a part of their transmitted value.

But the scenery depicted by Scott is only the setting of a curious and paradoxical life, and it is the light thrown on this life that lends the chief interest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in part to the peculiar position and formation of the land, and in part to the strain of Celtic blood in the Highland tribes, there was bred in the Scotch people an unusual mingling of romance and realism, of imagination and worldly cunning, that sets them quite apart from other races; and this paradoxical mingling of opposite tendencies shows itself in the quality of their politics, their religion, and in all their social manners.

Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chapters is that in which he analyses the feudal chivalry of Scotland, and explains how it rested on a more imaginative basis than in other countries; how the power of the chief hung on unwritten rights instead of formal charters, and how the loyalty of the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitch of personal enthusiasm. But to complete the picture one should read Buckle's scathing arraignment of a loyalty which was ready to sell its king and was no purer than the faith that holds together a band of murderous brigands. So, too, in religion the Scotch were perhaps more given to superstition, and were more ready to sacrifice life and all else for their belief than any other people of Europe, except the Spaniards, while at the same time their bigotry never interfered with a vein of caution and shrewd worldliness. There is in _Waverley_ an admirable example at once of this paradoxical nature, and of the true basis of Scott's strength. In the loyalism of Flora MacIvor he has attempted to embody an ideal of the imagination not based on this national mingling of qualities--though, of course, isolated individuals of that heroic type may have existed in the land; and as a result he has produced a character that leaves the reader perfectly cold and unconvinced. But the moment Waverley comes from the MacIvors and descends to the real life of Scotland, mark the change. We are immediately put on terra firma by the cautious reply of Waverley's guide when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na say just preceesely; Sunday seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally-Brough." Consider the mixture of bigotry and worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer Cruikshanks, the innkeeper, who compounds for the sin of receiving a traveller on fastday by doubling the tariff. In any other land Mr. Ebenezer Cruikshank would have been a hypocrite and a scoundrel; in Scotland his religious fervour is quite as genuine as his cunning; and the very audacity of the combination carries with it the conviction of realism.

The same contrast of qualities will be found to mark the lesser traits of character. Consider the long list of servants and retainers with their stiff-necked devotion and their incorrigible self-seeking. In one of his notes Scott relates the story of a retainer who when ordered to leave his master's service replied: "In troth, and that will I not; if your honour disna ken when ye hae a gude servant, I ken when I hae a gude master, and go away I will not." At another time, when his master cried out in vexation: "John, you and I shall never sleep under the same roof again!" the fellow calmly retorted, "Where the deil can your honour be ganging?" In like manner the mixture of devotion and self-seeking in that quaintest of followers, Richie Moniplies, is worth a thousand false idealisations. To read almost on the same page his immovable loyalty to Nigel and his brazen treachery in presenting his own petition first to the King, is to gain at once an entrance into a new region of psychology and to acquire a truer understanding of Scotch history. At another time, when catechised about the alleged spirit in Master Heriot's house, the good Moniplies gives an example of combined superstition, scepticism, and cunning, which must be read at length--and all the world has read it--to be appreciated. Perhaps the most useful illustration to be gained from this same Moniplies is the strange contrast of solemnity and humour, of reverence and familiarity, exhibited by him. I need not repeat the description of that "half-pedant, half-bully," nor quote the whole of his account of meeting with the King; let it be enough to call attention to the curious mingling of mirth and solemnity in the way he apostrophises the royal James: "My certie, lad, times are changed since ye came fleeing down the backstairs of auld Holyrood House, in grit fear, having your breeks in your hand without time to put them on, and Frank Stewart, the wild Earl of Bothwell, hard at your haunches." There is in the temper of worthy Moniplies something wholly different from the boisterous humour of England and from the dry laughter of America; and this is due to the continually upcropping substratum of imagination and romance in his character. He would resemble the grotesque seriousness of Don Quixote, were it not for a strain of sourness and suspicion that are quite foreign to the generous Hidalgo.

So we might follow the paradox of Scotch character through its union of gloomy moroseness with homely affections, of unrestrained emotionalism with cold calculation, of awesome second-sight with the cheapest charlatanry. In the end, perhaps, all these contradictions would resolve themselves into the one peculiar anomaly of seeing the free romance of enthusiasm rising like a flower--a flower often enough of sinister aspect--out of the most prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chief interest of Scotch history--by showing that these contradictions actually exist in the national temperament and by explaining so far as may be their origin--to confirm for us our belief in what may be called the realism of Scott's romance. This is that guiding thread which leads the weary voyager through the mists and chaotic confusions of Caledonian annals up to light. And in that region of light what wonderful cheer for the soul! Here, if anywhere in prose, the illusions of the imagination may take pleasant possession of our heart, for they come with the authority of a great national experience and walk hand in hand with the soberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm of a Meg Merrilies barely awakens the voice of slumbering scepticism in the midst of our secure conviction. And sojourning for a while in that world of strange enchantment we seem to feel the limitations that vex our larger hopes and hem in our wills broken down at the command of a magic voice. It is as if that incompleteness of our nature, which the schoolmen called in their fantastic jargon the _principium individuationis_ and ascribed to the bondage of these material bodies, were for a time forgotten, while we form a part of that free and complex existence so faithfully portrayed in the Scotch novels.

SWINBURNE

It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults of his style were of a kind to warn me away, and it might be equally true that I was not sufficiently open to his peculiar excellences. Gladly, therefore, I accepted the occasion offered by the new edition of his Collected Poems[5] to enlarge my acquaintance with one of the much-bruited names of the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to a hasty impression. The six volumes of his poems, together with the plays and critical essays, have lain on my table for several months, the companions of many a long day of leisure and the relish thrown in between other readings of pleasure and necessity. Yet even now I must admit something alien to me in the man and his work; I am not sure that I always distinguish between what is spoken with the lips only and what springs from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographical information is the partial cause of this uncertainty, for by a curious anomaly Swinburne, one of the most egotistical writers of the century, has shown a fine reticence in keeping the details of his life from the public. He was, we know, born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and noble family, his father, as befitted one whose son was to sing of the sea so lustily, being an admiral in the navy. His early years were passed either at his grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at the home of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From Eton he went, after an interval of two years, to Balliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1860 without a degree. The story runs that he knew more Greek than his examiners, but failed to show a proper knowledge of Scripture. If the tale is true, he made up well in after years for the deficiency, for few of our poets have been more steeped in the language of the Bible. In London he came under the influence of many of the currents moving below the surface; the spell of that master of souls, Rossetti, touched him, and the dominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he has lived at "The Pines," on the edge of Wimbledon Common, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, in what appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sympathetic friendship. Mr. Douglas's recent indiscretion on _Theodore Watts-Dunton_ tells nothing of the life in this scholarly retreat, but it does contain many photogravures of the works of art, the handicraft of Rossetti largely, which adorn the dwelling with beautiful memories.

Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more intimate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of awakening curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on laying down his _Poems and Ballads_ (that _peche de jeunesse_, as he afterwards called it) is to know how much of the book is "true." Mr. Swinburne has expressed a becoming contempt for "the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One does not like to be classed among the _scornful or mournful_, and yet I should feel much easier in my appreciation of the _Poems and Ballads_ if I knew how far they were based on the actual experience of the author. The reader of Swinburne feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and he were carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat hither and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books this sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier publications, the _Atalanta_ and the first _Poems and Ballads_, contain more of definable human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be, that they are likely to remain the most popular and significant of Swinburne's works.

The publication of _Atalanta_ at the age of twenty-eight made him famous, _Poems and Ballads_ the next year made him almost infamous. The alarm aroused in England by _Dolores_ and _Faustine_ still vibrates in our ears as we repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened by the remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble songs--the feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs like a fatal web about the _Laus Veneris_; the satiety of disappointment clings "with sullen savour of poisonous pain" to _The Triumph of Time_; satiety speaks in the _Hymn to Proserpine_, with its regret for the passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in the unnatural passion of _Anactoria_--

Clothed with deep eyelids under and above--
Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;

turns to the abominations of cruelty in _Faustine_; sings enchantingly of rest in _The Garden of Proserpine_--

Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep,
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations, even its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in any wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote these poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his classical reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in this state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion of the passions, with results which threw the innocent Philistines of England into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart was sound at core, and that his satiety was of the imagination and not of the body, would seem evident from the abruptness with which he passed, under a more wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood. Unfortunately, his maturer productions are lacking in the quality of human emotion which, however derived, pulsates in every line of the _Poems and Ballads_. There is a certain contagion in such a song as _Dolores_. Taking all things into consideration, and with all one's repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most effective of Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and music. It is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a cry of the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret for a past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is gorgeous and heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of bodies drunken with voluptuousness:

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;
Thou art fed with perpetual breath,
And alive after infinite changes,
And fresh from the kisses of death;
Of languors rekindled and rallied,
Of barren delights and unclean,
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid
And poisonous queen.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the few lines in _Jenny_ where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of man's inveterate lust:

Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For Man's transgression at the first--

and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this poem of _Dolores_ there does arise in the end a very real and memorable mood--real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by painting or sculpture.

The _Poems and Ballads_ are splendid but _malsain_; they are impressive and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing to the _Songs Before Sunrise_ (published in 1871) is extraordinary. During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating effect--the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The _Eve of Revolution_, for instance, with which the _Songs Before Sunrise_ open, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry
With many tongues of thunders, and I hear
Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky
With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,
And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,
Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear....

But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable--at least if any one can endure to the end of _A Song of Italy_, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at Swinburne's abuse:

....... the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life.

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling. Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it, gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.

Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from _Beowulf_ to _The Seven Seas_ of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in the _Poems and Ballads_ there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages in _The Triumph of Time_ is that which begins:

I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.

But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the _Songs Before Sunrise_, with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Aeolus; at least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty concourse:

Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro
Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras
Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.
Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis
Circum claustra fremunt.

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in the _Recollections_ of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king: