Chapter III: Part 3

"_Æsop_. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice rustic, they
would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in thee.

"_Rhodope_. As it was, every one had bought exactly such another
in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches, I
perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my
father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my
healthiness, he was troubled internally, and said many short
prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside.
Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were
offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had
undervalued me most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father
scowled at him and refused the money. I thought he was playing a
game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I had never seen
it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration
because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father
had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded.

"I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there
advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this
child; her vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. Carry her
home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the
Eumenides will overtake thee.' Knowing the estimation in which my
father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed
again and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst
forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, 'I
think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus, the
Samian. Deliver this child from famine.'

"Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now part
of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole body
toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's
neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was
hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was
early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had
nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the
famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack,
which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten
bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the
honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty.
He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to
devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I
clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him
like one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name
the price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price
much below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever
with thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.'

"But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized
the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to
replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste,
and the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in
the old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my
beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The
more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and
many were soon between us.

"Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of famine
long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I weep
while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his
eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath,
the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him
blameable, O Æsop?"

"_Æsop_. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance and
self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown us."

The _Dream of Petrarca_ is, I think, more famous but not more beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep human tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if the _Æsop and Rhodope_ had never been written, the _Dream of Petrarca_ would secure its author a place among the immortals:--

"... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and
finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I
laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was
before a species of dream or vision came over me.

"Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but the
wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One of
them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me
frequently, said to the other, 'He is under my guardianship for
the present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on
hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow;
and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point,
although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at
first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the
shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.

"'This feather never awakens anyone,' replied he, rather
petulantly, 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of
cherished dreams, than you, without me, are capable of imparting.'

"'Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is less inclined to
quarrel or dispute than am I. Many whom you have wounded
grievously call upon me for succour; but so little am I disposed
to thwart you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to
whisper a few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on
these occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and
infidelity! Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms as upon
you.'

"'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike!' said
Love contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance
to you; the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes
to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he
designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly.
Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love
recapitulated them; but only that he might assert his own above
them.

"Suddenly he called upon me to decide, and to choose my patron.
Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang
from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and
knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and
declared he would cross me through the whole of my existence.
Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his veracity,
I now felt too surely that he would keep his word.

"At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius
had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him,
but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at
beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First
they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and
lastly beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular,
less harmonious, less composed.

"Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which there
was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go away!
go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives!' 'Say rather, child!'
replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and
statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious
lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'

"Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the
stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although
he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and
less, and scarcely looked towards him. The milder and calmer
Genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate
him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither
flower nor arrow as the others did, but throwing back the clusters
of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to
me his hand, openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so
near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an
expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for
I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and
entrancing was Love's.

"By degrees I became ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my
face away, I held out my arms, and I felt my neck within his; the
coolness of freshest morning breathed around; the heavens seemed to
open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on
my head. I would now have looked for those others, but knowing my
intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his
way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to
these he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off.
Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and
volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'

"'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I
would propitiate and appease him.'

"'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot overtake and pass me,'
said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in
earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive
thee.'

"I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue sky,
and something brighter above it."

There is something most rare and refined and precious in this vision, told as it is with a sweet serenity. But it does not touch the heart like the _Æsop and Rhodope_.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: Born 1775, died 1864.]

20

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I now come to speak of one whose fame was familiar to me as a boy--the great Lord Brougham.--for he lived till 1868. I remember that he was vehemently praised and blamed as a politician, but with such matters others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we will concern ourselves with the glory of English prose as it poured from Lord Brougham in two of his greatest speeches.

He was an orator whose voice was uplifted throughout a long and strenuous life in condemnation of all the brutalities and oppression of his time, and to whose eloquence the triumphant cause of freedom stands for ever in deep obligation.

His great speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons, in 1828, took six hours to deliver, and the concluding passage, which mounted to a plane of lofty declamation, displayed no sign of exhaustion, and was listened to with strained attention by an absorbed and crowded audience:--

"The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You
have the power of sending your name down through all times,
illustrated by deeds of higher fame, and more useful import, than
ever were done within these walls.

"You saw the greatest warrior of the age--conqueror of
Italy--humbler of Germany--terror of the North--saw him account
all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you
are now in a condition to win--saw him contemn the fickleness of
fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his
memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my
hand!'

"You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in
the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms
you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the
more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. The praise which
false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the Justinians
of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and the good to
that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking shall be
accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most chiefly
to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus conquering,
and ruling thus.

"It was the boast of Augustus--it formed part of the glare in
which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,--that he found
Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not unworthy a
great prince, and to which the present reign also has its claims.
But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall
have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found
it a sealed book--left it a living letter; found it the patrimony
of the rich--left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the
two-edged sword of craft and oppression--left it the staff of
honesty and the shield of innocence!

"To me, much reflecting on these things, it has always seemed a
worthier honour to be the instrument of making you bestir
yourselves in this high matter, than to enjoy all that office can
bestow--office, of which the patronage would be an irksome
encumbrance, the emoluments superfluous to one content with the
rest of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own hands
minister to his wants; and as for the power supposed to follow
it--I have lived near half a century, and I have learned that
power and place may be severed.

"But one power I do prize; that of being the advocate of my
countrymen here, and their fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those
things which concern the best interests of mankind. That power, I
know full well, no government can give--no change take away!"

His speech on negro slavery made a deep impression upon the country, and rose towards its termination, gradually, but with ever-ascending periods, to a close of absolute majesty:--

"I regard the freedom of the negro as accomplished and sure. Why?
Because it is his right--because he has shown himself fit for it;
because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can no longer be
devised for withholding that right from its possessor. I know that
all men at this day take a part in the question, and they will no
longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are well informed. My
reliance is firm and unflinching upon the great change which I
have witnessed--the education of the people, unfettered by party
or by sect--witnessed from the beginning of its progress, I may
say from the hour of its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man
like me to assist at royal births with the illustrious Prince who
condescended to grace the pageant of this opening session, or the
great captain and statesman in whose presence I am now proud to
speak. But with that illustrious Prince, and with the father of
the Queen, I assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous still.
With them, and with the head of the House of Russell, incomparably
more illustrious in my eyes, I watched over its cradle--I marked
its growth--I rejoiced in its strength--I witnessed its maturity;
I have been spared to see it ascend the very height of supreme
power; directing the councils of state; accelerating every great
improvement; uniting itself with every good work; propping all
useful institutions; extirpating abuses in all our institutions;
passing the bounds of our European dominion, and in the New World,
as in the Old, proclaiming that freedom is the birthright of
man--that distinction of colour gives no title to oppression--that
the chains now loosened must be struck off, and even the marks
they have left effaced--proclaiming this by the same eternal law
of our nature which makes nations the masters of their own
destiny, and which in Europe has caused every tyrant's throne to
quake!

"But they need feel no alarm at the progress of light who defend a
limited monarchy and support popular institutions--who place their
chiefest pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white or be
they black, not in protecting the oppressor, but in wearing a
constitutional crown, in holding the sword of justice with the
hand of mercy, in being the first citizen of a country whose air
is too pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose shores, if the
captive's foot but touch, his fetters of themselves fall off. To
the resistless progress of this great principle I look with a
confidence which nothing can shake; it makes all improvement
certain; it makes all change safe which it produces; for none can
be brought about unless it has been prepared in a cautious and
salutary spirit.

"So now the fulness of time is come for at length discharging our
duty to the African captive. I have demonstrated to you that
everything is ordered--every previous step taken--all safe, by
experience shown to be safe, for the long-desired consummation.
The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour is striking;
you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or faltering, or
delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless behaviour,
and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that he is as
fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any lord whom
I now address.

"I demand his rights; I demand his liberty without stint. In the
name of justice and of law--in the name of reason--in the name of
God, who has given you no right to work injustice; I demand that
your brother be no longer trampled upon as your slave! I make my
appeal to the Commons, who represent the free people of England;
and I require at their hands the performance of that condition for
which they paid so enormous a price--that condition which all
their constituents are in breathless anxiety to see fulfilled! I
appeal to this House. Hereditary judges of the first tribunal in
the world--to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the arts
that humanise mankind--under your protection I place humanity
herself! To the merciful Sovereign of a free people I call aloud
for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for whom half a million of
her Christian sisters have cried aloud--I ask that their cry may
not have risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to the throne of
all justice, and devoutly humbling myself before Him who is of
purer eyes than to behold such vast iniquities, I implore that the
curse hovering over the head of the unjust and the oppressor be
averted from us--that your hearts may be turned to mercy--and that
over all the earth His will may at length be done!"

This is nobly to use noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill of a man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such heights of splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his character with detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme and unsullied and will still live when such faults as may be truly laid to his charge are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause, Antony, is rightly to use great powers, and this is what Lord Brougham did with all his might.

Your loving old G.P.

21

MY DEAR ANTONY,

In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most awful scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds of human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly unknown to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by no man with the gift of expression who could record for after time, in adequate language, the majestic spectacle.

In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet appeared who was personally in touch as a living witness of the countless deeds of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance that were everywhere displayed upon that immense far-stretched front.

But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be witnessed from its beginning to its end by a single commander, and no scenes in human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring than the awful ebb and flow of a great combat in which the victory of armies and the fate of nations hung in the balance.

The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this date have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier been as puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and the British were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty officers, and over four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy had fallen in the 57th alone; not a third were left standing in the other regiments that had been closely engaged throughout the day. Then Cole was ordered up with his fourth division as a last hope, and this is how Sir William Napier records their advance:--

"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
majesty the British soldier fights.

"In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up,
and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and
foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to
charge the advancing line.

"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.

"No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread
shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of
every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant
cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly,
and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour
of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
triumphant on the fatal hill!

* * * * *

"The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
places it on his bleeding front.

"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills
and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
dying men."

Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--

"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some
for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping
at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance
of the Veterans' services.

"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from
Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed,
wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of
their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the
plains and mountains of the Peninsula."

Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.

Your loving old G.P.

22

MY DEAR ANTONY,

This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they themselves remain snugly at home and talk of their consciences.

Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race to flock in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled for battle in defence of

"This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,"

being without doubt or cavil one of the noblest emotions of the human heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own great war has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back to-day to a contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the noblest outbursts of eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism that has ever been poured forth.

Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising in the House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an impassioned flight of generous eloquence.

Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo, happened to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him Sheil appealed with the deepest emotion to support him in his vindication of his country's valour. None will in these days deny that our fellow-citizens of Ireland who went to the war displayed a courage as firm and invincible as our own:--

"The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of
excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we
are his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought
to have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military
genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern
warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made
his name imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies
are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.

"Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at Vimiera
through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war
before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
crowded back upon his memory--Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you
were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose
opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an
intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
onset--tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!

"And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement
had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely cheeked
was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less heroic
valour than the natives of your own glorious isle, precipitated
herself upon the foe?

"The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the
same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven
upon their union in the grave.

"Partners in every peril--in the glory shall we not be permitted
to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that we are
aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose salvation
our life-blood was poured out?"

A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger, estrangement, outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for us a Lethe through which we may pass to the farther shore of forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and reconciliation in the future?

That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.

Your loving old G.P.

23

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.

Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.

The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming product.

The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.

Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this astonishing outburst:--

"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!

"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem
mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without
pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of
thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face
too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour;
and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine
and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?

"Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is
wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes
is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as
of one living in death.

"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the
World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with
vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac
heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!

"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled
blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face,
which she hides with her hands.

"There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?

"O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow
still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built
of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!

"Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children
shall not dwell.

"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world;
that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."

There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last consummate touch of greatness.

Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over peaceful France, and he exclaims:--

"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel de Ville."

And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--

"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
Read this portion of an old letter.

"'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'

"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art
dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question;
to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men."

In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest, imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.

In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with execrations their dreadful executioners.

But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel system which the Revolution overthrew.

The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle, though at a perceptible distance:--

"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!

"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are
in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as
once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be
Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not
miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to
the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the
rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate
Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and
the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead
of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
heaven-encompassed World.

"I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh
wherein no man can work.'"

There is another passage in _Sartor Resartus_ which I have always held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so "hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:--

"Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman that
with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
makes her man's.

"Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of
the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is
the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for
thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to
know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; _thou_ art in thy duty, be
out of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable,
for daily bread.

"A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
the bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else
is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.

"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness."

_Sartor Resartus_ has long taken its place among the greatest prose works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange commentary on this mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find that for eleven years Carlyle could find no publisher who would give it in book form to the world!

It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books of eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of publicity. Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely written than with what will best sell; and in their defence it may be acceded that some of the masterpieces of literature have at their first appearance before the world fallen dead from the press.

The first edition of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyám_, issued at one shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it might have been bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash on the pavement outside old bookshops!

But if once a work is published, time will with almost irresistible force place it ultimately in the station it deserves in the literature of the world.

Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the middle of the last century Martin Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ garnished every drawing-room table; and now, where is it?

Your loving old G.P.

_P.S._--Do not look for the passage on Marie Antoinette in the _French Revolution_, for you will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the Diamond Necklace."

24

MY DEAR ANTONY,

You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have pursued.

He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821. To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education. He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his eloquent and precious defence of the classical languages:--

"I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an
unripe scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and
laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however
delightful and improving. For I am far from assuming to understand
all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can
profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority in many important
respects to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there
are many even among my younger readers who can now, or will
hereafter, sympathise with the expression of my ardent admiration.

"Greek--the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as
our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, or
indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness
of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing
was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the
mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the
gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and
picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of Æschylus;
not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the
bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up
with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch of
Demosthenes!

"And Latin--the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the
state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of
passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in
the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark
of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its
construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding
to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of
Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius;
proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found
wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its
conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the
spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals;
breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the
schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by
the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by
the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.

"These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink
deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful
in human language.

"The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of
Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out
light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his
maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him
abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he
will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons--to reperuse
them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in
the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and
to the world with superior profit.

"The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."

Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage finds in my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that the necessary business and occupation of the passing years have dulled for me such unpolished facility, as I may once have possessed, for perusing my Homer and my Horace!

It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will probably find yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but there will remain for your unending instruction and delight all the glories of English literature, to give you a taste for which these few letters of mine are written, plucking only a single flower here and there from the most wonderful garden in the world.

Your loving old G.P.

25

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of the great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 1801 to 1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no mean poet; but above all else he was a man of immense personal power, which was strangely associated with a manifest saintliness which compelled diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.

I have described him as I knew him in my _Memories_;[1] and now will quote to you his utterance on music and its effect upon the heart of man, which has always seemed to me too precious to leave buried in a sermon:--

"Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or
economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I
mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in
instrumental harmony.

"There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what
a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science brings so
much out of so little? out of what poor elements does some great
master in it create his new world!

"Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful
creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many
men the very names which the Science employs are utterly
incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be
fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us
to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that
inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes?

"Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from
some higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in
the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they
are the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living
laws of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something
are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we
cannot utter,--though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them."

Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman. Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing, and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the faintest trace of prejudice:--

"Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say
he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in
merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and
unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their
movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits
may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or
conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy
chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and
fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat
without them.

"The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may
cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;
all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint,
or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to
make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all
his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the
distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom
he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or
topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation
and never wearisome.

"He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be
receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except
when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no
ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to
those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the
best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes
unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings
for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From
a long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he
were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be
affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember
injuries, and too indolent to bear malice.

"He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical
principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to
bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is
his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his
disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering
discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like
blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake
the point in argument, waste their strength in trifles,
misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved
than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he
is too clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is
forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.

"Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence;
he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for
their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as
its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever
he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or
to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in
his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports
institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does
not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents
him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.
He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because
his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with
an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of
feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.