# A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakspere: A Modern Paraphrase

*A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakspere, by George MacDonald, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with the help of AI.*

## PREFACE

With *Orts* printed throughout as the title, I doubt it suits the book. Yet no one could think I associate *worthlessness* with the work in it: nobody insults readers by offering what he counts valueless scraps and saying so. These papers, even the two taken down by a ready writer from extempore speech, cost me no small labour, and a man *ought* to be able to say that much for his work. So I might defend my title, if not quite justify it, for they are only fragmentary presentments of larger meditation. My friends will accept them so, whether or not they like the title.

The last piece's title does not quite fit: it is the name of the religious newspaper that reported the sermon, noticed too late to correct. It ought to be *True Greatness*.

*The Fantastic Imagination* arose from readers' repeated requests that I explain things in certain shorter stories of mine; it is the preface to an American edition of my so-called Fairy Tales.

GEORGE MACDONALD.

EDENBRIDGE, KENT. *August 5, 1893.*

**CONTENTS**

PREFACE.

THE IMAGINATION: ITS FUNCTIONS AND ITS CULTURE.

A SKETCH OF INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT.

ST. GEORGE'S DAY, 1564.

THE ART OF SHAKSPERE, AS REVEALED BY HIMSELF.

THE ELDER HAMLET.

ON POLISH.

BROWNING'S "CHRISTMAS EVE"

ESSAYS ON SOME OF THE FORMS OF LITERATURE

THE HISTORY AND HEROES OF MEDICINE.

WORDSWORTH'S POETRY

SHELLEY.

A SERMON.

TRUE CHRISTIAN MINISTERING.

THE FANTASTIC IMAGINATION

## THE IMAGINATION: ITS FUNCTIONS AND ITS CULTURE

\[Footnote: 1867.\]

Some think education means producing a certain repose by developing some faculties and depressing, if not eradicating, others. But if repose were the aim, the surest way would be to depress every faculty, provided the animal instincts were depressed too, or better, kept constantly satisfied. Happily, hunger alone saves the human race from that, more promptly than any wise handling of its faculties. For repose is not the end of education. Its end is a noble unrest: a constant awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past to interpret the future, an urging on of life's motions, which had better be hurried into fever than slowed into lethargy.

For those who make balanced repose the end of culture, the imagination must be the first faculty to suppress. "Are there not facts?" they say. "Why leave them for fancies, or what can be *known* for inventions? What God hath made, into that let man inquire."

We answer that inquiring into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. Facts arouse and feed it, and it seeks ever higher laws in them; but it refuses to make science the sole interpreter of nature or its laws the only region of discovery.

We must begin by defining the word *imagination*, or rather describing the faculty it names.

The word means an *imaging*, a making of likenesses. The imagination is the faculty that gives form to thought, a form that can be uttered in shape or sound or any way the senses can grasp. Being the faculty in man most like God's prime operation, it has been called *creative*, and *poet* means *maker*. But between creator and poet lies the one unpassable gulf, which distinguishes (far be it from us to say *divides*) all that is God's from all that is man's. Teeming with revelations, it is a gulf no man can cross to find out God, though God need not cross it to find man: the gulf between what calls and what is called into being, between what makes in its own image and what is made in that image. So it is better to keep *creation* for God's calling out of nothing, except as an occasional, daring symbol of the likeness of man's work to his maker's. For the necessary unlikeness of creator and created holds within it the necessary likeness of the made thing to its maker. To use *imagination* of God's work while refusing *creation* to man's dares nothing; it only gives man's faculty's name to the power it was fashioned after. Man's imagination is made in the image of God's, and everything of man was first of God. We will understand the imagination in man better if we first regard rightly the imagination of God, in which man's lives and moves and has its being.

What thought is in God's mind before it takes form, or what the form is to him before he utters it, we can say only that our consciousness in the resembling conditions must, afar off, resemble his. But in the acts that embody the Divine thought (if thought and act are not one with him), the difference is large. Where a man makes a machine, a picture, or a book, God makes the man who makes it. Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespere. Would he construct a drama more his own? He builds the stage itself, a universe of worlds, and makes actors who do not act but *are* their part, uttering them into the visible to work out their life, his drama. For an epic he sends a thinking hero into it, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet. Instead of writing lyrics he sets his birds and maidens singing. The processes of the ages are God's science, the flow of history his poetry. His sculpture is in living, speaking forms, which pass away not to make room for others but to be perfected in a nobler studio. What he has done remains though it vanishes; he never forgets it nor does it again. As thoughts move in a man's mind, so the worlds of men and women move in the mind of God without confusion, for there they were born. Man is but a thought of God.

In no *primary* sense is the so-called creative faculty in man creative. When a new thought arises in his mind, a man is rather *being thought* than *thinking*: he did not know it until he found it there, so could not have sent for it, and did not create it, or it would not have been such a surprise. Rarely he may foresee its coming and prepare the place, but that is the most his consciousness and will can do. And in the *embodiment* of thought, too, a man no more *creates* the forms that reveal his thoughts than he creates the thoughts.

The forms by which a man reveals his thoughts are those of nature. Though created in closest sympathy with them, he does not originate them; what springs in his mind is the perception that this or that form already expresses some phase of thought or feeling. The world around him is an outward figuration of his mind, an inexhaustible storehouse of crystal pitchers that protect his thought without needing to be broken for the light to break forth. The meanings are in the forms already, else they could be no garment of unveiling. God made the world to serve his creature so, developing in the service the imagination whose need it meets. The man only lights the lamp within the form: his imagination is the light, not the form. Straightway the thought makes the form visible and becomes visible through it. \[Footnote: We do not say that the man works consciously even in this; often the vision arises in the mind, thought and form together.\]

To illustrate, take a passage from the poet Shelley.

In *Adonais*, written on the death of Keats and representing death as the revealer of secrets, he says:---

| "The one remains; the many change and pass;
|   Heaven's light for ever shines; earth's shadows fly;
| Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
|   Stains the white radiance of eternity,
| Until death tramples it to fragments."

This is certainly a new embodiment; whoever gains from it no loftier feeling about death must be dull of heart or understanding. But did Shelley create the figure, or only combine parts according to truths already embodied in each? He takes human inventions (glass, colour, dome) to show life as finite though elevated, and an analysis, though lovely. He presents eternity as the sky, the true symbol of eternity, domed above this dome, enriched with whiteness for unity and radiance. And he shows Death as the destroying revealer, walking aloft and trampling out this bubble of colours so that man may look beyond it and behold the true, the uncoloured, the all-coloured.

Though the human imagination must use forms already prepared, its operation is the same as the divine in putting thought into form. If it is to man what creation is to God, we must expect it to work in every sphere of human activity, as it does, far more than is commonly supposed.

No one now questions the imagination's sovereignty over poetry, but not everyone will accept that it has had nearly as much to do with making our language as with "Macbeth" or "Paradise Lost." Half our language is its work.

How shall two people agree on a name for a thought or feeling? How shall one show the other the invisible? The face, that ever-changing symbol God hung before the unseen spirit, can unveil the mind's construction, but without words it reaches only present feeling. Used alone to convey the intellectual or historical it would mislead, and even feeling would be misread, especially as to cause and object: dumb show would be worse than dumb.

But let a man become aware of some new movement within him. Loneliness comes, for he would share his mind with his friend and cannot; he is shut in speechlessness. Thus

| He *may* live a man forbid
| Weary seven nights nine times nine,

or the first moment of his perplexity may be his release. Looking about in pain, he suddenly sees the material form of his immaterial condition. There stands his thought! God thought it before him and put its picture there ready. More prosaically, he cannot look around long without perceiving some form or movement of nature, or relation among forms or between them and himself, that resembles the state within him. He seizes it as the garment of his invisible thought, shows it to his friend, and is understood. Every word so used with a new meaning is henceforth born of the spirit and not the flesh, of the imagination and not the understanding, and is submitted to new laws of growth.

Carlyle asks in "Past and Present" whether we suppose there were no poets till Dan Chaucer: no heart burning with a thought it had no word for, needing to coin one, what we call a metaphor. Every word we have had such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing metaphor of questionable originality. Does ATTENTION not mean an *attentio*, a STRETCHING-TO? Fancy the moment when this new poet first felt driven to name that act of mind which all felt and none had named. His metaphor was found adoptable and intelligible, and remains our name for it.

All words belonging to the mind's inner world are therefore of the imagination, originally poetic. But the better such a word fits humanity's needs, the sooner common use strips it of its poetic aspect: it ceases to be heard as a symbol and appears only as a sign, and thousands of words born of the imagination lose their vitality and harden into mummies of prose. Poetry comes first not merely in literature; it is the source of all language for the inner world, passion and metaphysics, psychology and aspiration alike. No poetry comes by elevating prose, but half of prose comes by the "massing into the common clay" of winged words, from which, like lovely shells of bygone ages, one is occasionally dug up by some lover of speech and held to the light to show its play of colour.

For the world is, to use a homely figure, the human being turned inside out: all that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, more philosophically and no less poetically, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, an inexhaustible wardrobe for human thought. Take any word for emotion, even *emotion* itself, and its primary meaning belongs to the outer world: in the swaying of woods and the unrest of the "wavy plain," the imagination saw a picture of a familiar condition of the human mind. \[Footnote: This only repeats what Carlyle says far better above, but it was written before we had read (if reviewers may confess such ignorance) the book it comes from.\]

But beyond this divine function of putting thought into form, man's imagination has a paramount duty altogether human, springing from his immediate relation to the Father: to follow and find out the divine imagination in whose image it was made. He must watch its signs and contemplate what the Hebrew poets call the works of His hands.

"But to follow those is the province of the intellect, not of the imagination." We leave aside the poetic interpretation of nature, where the intellect has almost no part and the imagination almost all. There is no need to insist that a flower's higher being depends for its reception on the human imagination: science may pull the snowdrop to shreds but cannot find the idea of suffering hope and pale confident submission for which God's heart sends that darling of spring to look on us, his wiser and more sinful children. Whoever admits any truth there admits it belongs to the imagination. We confine ourselves to the questioning of God's works called science.

"Shall the human intellect," we ask, "come into readier contact with the divine imagination than the human imagination?" The work of the Higher must be found by a lower faculty similar in kind. We do not exclude the intellect from any highest office; man is not divided when his life's manifestations are distinguished, and the intellect "is all in every part." There would be no imagination without intellect, however it may seem that intellect can exist without imagination. We insist only that in finding out God's works the Intellect must labour, workman-like, under the architect, Imagination. We hope also to show how large a share the imagination has in human endeavour.

"But how can the imagination have anything to do with science, a region governed by fixed laws?"

"True," we answer, "but how much do we know of these laws? How much of science belongs to the ascertained, conquered by the intellect? We will not dispute your keeping the *ascertained* free of the imagination, but we claim all the undiscovered and unexplored." "There it can do little harm. Let it run riot if you will." "No. Licence is not what we claim for the duty of following and finding out the work God maketh. Her part is to understand God before she tries to utter man. There is no room for being fanciful or riotous; only the ill-bred, uncultivated imagination amuses itself where it ought to worship and work."

"But the facts of Nature are to be discovered only by observation and experiment." True. But how does the scientist come to think of his experiments? Does observation reach the non-present, the possible, the unconceived? Even if it showed the experiments that *ought* to be made, would it reveal those that *might* be made, and which holds the secret of the law you seek? We yield you the facts; the laws we claim for the prophetic imagination. "He hath set the world *in* man's heart," not his understanding, and the heart must open the door to the understanding. The far-seeing imagination sees what might be the form of things and tells the intellect to try whether it is; it invents *a* harmonious relation of parts and sends the intellect to see whether it is *the* one, the law of the phenomenon. The poetic relations in a phenomenon may themselves suggest its scientific law. More: we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination such inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it has insight into the very nature of things.

Lord Bacon says a prudent question is half of knowledge. It comes, we answer, from the imagination, which suggests the direction of a new inquiry, a step toward final discovery even if it sheds no immediate light. Every experiment begins in hypothesis; without that scaffolding the house of science could not rise, and constructing any hypothesis is the imagination's work. The man who cannot invent will never discover. The imagination often glimpses the law itself long before it can be *ascertained* as a law. \[Footnote: When this paper was written, a mathematical friend, a university lecturer, gave us a corroborating instance. He had *guessed* that a certain algebraic process could be shortened enormously if the method his imagination suggested were a true algebraic law. He tested it, giving the verification to his intellect, and found it true. The Royal Society has since accepted it.

A noteworthy illustration appears in the record of an Edinburgh detective, an Irishman named McLevy. We could adduce many proofs that he knows what the imagination does in solving his profession's problems. He recognizes its function in constructing the theory that unites hints into an organic whole, and expressly states the need of a theory before facts can serve:---

"I would wait for my 'idea'\.... I never did any good without mine\.... Chance never smiled on me unless I poked her some way; so my 'notion,' after all, has been my own work in the getting, only perfected by a higher hand."

"On leaving the shop I went direct to Prince's Street with an idea in my mind; I have always been content with one idea when I couldn't get another, since sticking by one means the others don't jostle it and turn you in a circle." (Footnote: The book referred to has since been found unworthy of confidence; let it stand as illustration where it cannot be proof.)\]

The region of the pure intellect is narrow, and the imagination labours to extend it, sweeping across the borders to find new lands where she may guide her plodding brother. She is the light that redeems from darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, "The imagination is the stuff of the intellect," the material it works on. Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," recognizes this office, matching God's foresight in beholding afar off: "Imagination is much akin to miracle-working faith." \[Footnote: We cannot verify this quotation, for which we thank Mr. Oldbuck the Antiquary in the novel of that ilk, but there is little room for doubt that it is sufficiently correct.\]

In the scientific region of her duty the Imagination cannot do her perfect work, which belongs to a higher sphere than intellectual truth, that of full-globed humanity, where she gives birth to poetry, truth in beauty. But her function in our whole nature will influence her more limited work in science. Coleridge says only a poet will make any further *great* discoveries in mathematics, and Bacon calls "wonder," the faculty attendant on the child-like imagination, "the seed of knowledge." The poetic influence on the scientific imagination shows especially in building an invisible whole from the hints of a visible part, where the part's needs, uselessness, and broken relations are the only guide to the whole's multiplex harmony and end. From a little bone, worn by ages of death, the scientific imagination dashed with the poetic calls up the form, size, habits, and periods of an animal never seen by human eyes, even its mingled scales and wings, feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination we look back into ancient times so dreadful in their incompleteness that it may have taken seraphic faith as well as cherubic imagination to see in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth God's quiet, age-long labour preparing the world for his unborn Man. And the poet's imagination, dashed with the scientist's, showed Goethe the prophecy of the flower in the leaf, though only an artistic imagination fulfilled of science could discover that the leaf is the imperfect flower.

In history we find probably the greatest sphere for the intellectuo-constructive imagination. Its province is to discover history's laws and the cycles in which events return, and why, recognizing them despite metamorphosis; to perceive the vital motions of this spiritual body of mankind and learn from its facts the rule of God; to build from broken indications a whole accordant with human nature; to approach a scheme of the forces at work (passions overwhelming, aspirations raising up, selfishnesses debasing) in their vital interworking; and to illuminate all from analogy with individual life and the predominant characters taken as the people's mind. Without her no recording of events becomes a history; one might as well call a description of a volcano one that traces only the shapes of its smoke. What history becomes under her full sway is seen in Thomas Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution," at once a true picture, a philosophical revelation, a noble poem.

A wonderful passage about *Time* in Shakespere's "Rape of Lucrece" shows how he understood history. It is really about history, not time, which does nothing, not even "blot old books and alter their contents"; the forces at work in time produce all changes, and they are history. We quote it chiefly for one line.

| "Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
| To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,
| To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
| To wake the morn and sentinel the night,
| *To wrong the wronger till he render right;*
| To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours,
| And smear with dust their glittering golden towers."

*To wrong the wronger till he render right.* Here is a historical cycle worthy of Shakespere's imagination, indeed of the creative imagination of our God, who made Shakespere with the imagination and evolved the history from laws that imagination followed and found out.

For full instances we refer readers to Shakespere's historical plays, and to his repeatedly showing his greatest characters at the point of death relieving their overcharged minds by prophecy: imagination's light, cleared of distorting dimness by the vanishing of earthly hopes, cast on the facts of experience. This is the perfect working of the historical imagination.

The same principles hold in interpreting individual life, and the imagination can be nowhere more healthily and rewardingly occupied than in constructing an individual's life from the fragments that reach us even of the noblest of our race. How this applies to the gospel story we leave to our readers' earnest thought.

We now pass to one more sphere in which the student imagination works in glad freedom, the one understood to belong more immediately to the poet.

We have said that the forms of Nature (by *forms* we mean any conditions of Nature that affect man's senses) are approximate representations of the mental conditions of humanity. The outward, commonly called the material, is *informed* by the inward, the thought. They represent human thought because they embody God's, and so can be read and used to any depth. Men of all ages have found in them the means of expression, and those ahead of us on every path must find such means there, unfolding with their needs. The man who, in harmony with nature, seeks more of her meanings is searching out the things of God. The deepest are far too simple for us to understand yet. But let our interpretive imagination reveal one severed significance of one of her parts, and such is the harmony of the whole that all Nature is open to us henceforth, in time and not without labour. On the man who can understand the human meaning of the snowdrop, primrose, or daisy, the life of the earth blossoming into the cosmical flower of a perfect moment will one day seize, with prophetic hope, rousing his conscience with the vision of the "rest that remaineth" and stirring his aspiration to enter it:

| "Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve!
| But long as godlike wish, or hope divine,
| Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe
| That this magnificence is wholly thine!
| ---From worlds not quickened by the sun
| A portion of the gift is won;
| An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread
| On ground which British shepherds tread!"

Even the careless curve of a frozen cloud across the blue will calm troubled thoughts and may slay selfish ones. And what of such shows as scarlet poppies in the green corn, nearest to the lilies of the field that spoke to the Saviour himself of God's care and rejoiced his eyes? From such visions the imagination reaps the best fruits of the earth, for which all the science involved in its construction is the inferior, yet willing and beautiful, support.

From all this, does not the name given by our Norman ancestors fit the man who moves in these regions better than the Greeks' name? Is *Poet*, the *Maker*, not less suitable than *Trouvère*, the *Finder*? At least, must not the faculty that finds precede the faculty that utters?

But has the imagination no creative faculty, no originating power? Is there nothing to say from the Greek side?

It would be a poor description of the Imagination that omitted the element present to the mind that invented the word *Poet*. It can present new thought-forms, new as revelations of thought. It creates none of their material and works on no raw material, but takes existing forms and gathers them about a thought so much higher than they that it can group, subordinate, and harmonize them into a whole that unveils that thought. \[Footnote: So Spenser describes the embodiment of a human soul in his Platonic "Hymn in Honour of Beauty."

| "She frames her house in which she will be placed
| Fit for herself\....
| And the gross matter by a sovereign might
| Tempers so trim\....
| For of the soul the body form doth take;
| For soul is form, and doth the body make."\]

We illustrate this process with the well-known *Bugle Song* in Tennyson's "Princess."

First there is the song's new music, which reminds one of no other. Its rhythm, rhyme, melody, and harmony embody in sound, as distinct from words, the poem's *feeling*, which goes before and tunes the heart to receive the thought that follows. Then comes the new arrangement of thought and figure presenting the meaning as never before. We give a paraphrastical synopsis, which, partly because it is disagreeable, will send lovers of the song back to it with more pleasure.

The glory of midsummer mid-day on mountain, lake, and ruin. Give nature a voice for her gladness. Blow, bugle.

Nature answers with dying echoes, sinking in the midst of her splendour into sad silence.

Not so human nature: the echoes of the word of truth gather volume and richness from every soul that re-echoes it to other souls.

Poets have made a *fashion* of contrasting nature's stability and rejuvenescence with humanity's evanescence and unreturning decay:---

| "Yet soon reviving plants and flowers, anew shall deck the plain;
| The woods shall hear the voice of Spring, and flourish green again.
| But man forsakes this earthly scene, ah! never to return:
| Shall any following Spring revive the ashes of the urn?"

But our poet vindicates the eternal in humanity:---

| "O Love, they die in yon rich sky,
|    They faint on hill or field or river:
|     Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
|       And grow for ever and for ever.
| Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
| And answer, echoes, answer, Dying, dying, dying."

Is this not a new form for the thought, one that makes us feel its truth afresh? Every new embodiment of a known truth is a wider revelation. No man sees the whole of any truth himself; he needs it echoed back from every soul in the universe, and its centre is still hid in the Father of Lights. In so far as form or thought is new, we may use the word Creation, modified as our definitions require.

This operation of the imagination in choosing, gathering, and vitally combining the material of a new revelation is well illustrated by something our greatest poets have delighted in. Seeing truth half hidden and half revealed in the stammering speech of those before them, they have completed the unfinished form, rescuing the soul of meaning from its prison of crude formlessness, where it sat like the Prince in the "Arabian Nights," half man, half marble, and setting it free in a shape it could "through every part impress." Shakespere suggested many such rescues from the tomb of drearily told tales that none would read now but for the glorified form he gave their contents. From Tennyson we can give one specimen small enough for our use, a chip from the great marble re-embodying the legend of Arthur's death, which may, like the hand of Achilles holding his spear in the crowded picture,

| "Stand for the whole to be imagined."

In the "History of Prince Arthur," when Sir Bedivere returns after hiding Excalibur the first time, the king asks what he saw, and he answers---

| "Sir, I saw nothing but waves and wind."

The second time, to the same question, he answers---

| "Sir, I saw nothing but the water\[1\] wap, and the waves wan."

\[Footnote 1: *Wap* is plain enough; *wan* we cannot settle. *Wan*, meaning dark, gloomy, turbid, is a common adjective for a river in the old Scotch ballad, and might be one here, but that is unlikely, since it is joined with the verb *wap*. The Anglo-Saxon *wanian*, to decrease, might be the root (as *to ebb*) if this water were the sea and not a lake. Possibly the meaning is "I heard the water *whoop* or *wail aloud*" (from *Wópan*) and "the waves *whine* or *bewail*" (from *Wánian*, to lament), though even then the verbs seem to belong to transposed subjects.\]

This answer Tennyson has expanded into the well-known lines---

| "I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
| And the wild water lapping on the crag;"

slightly varied, for the other occasion, into---

| "I heard the water lapping on the crag,
| And the long ripple washing in the reeds."

But as to *creation*, I ask once more: in what genuine sense does a man create his own thought-forms? Granting that a new combination of existing forms might be called creation, is the man its author? Did he, with will and knowledge, construct a form to embody his thought, or did it arise within him without will or effort, vivid if not clear, certain if not outlined? Ruskin (we know no better authority) asserts the latter, and we think he is right, though perhaps he would insist more than we quite will on the vision's absolute perfection. The man feels such embodiments are given, appearing suddenly in luminous writing on the wall of his consciousness from the vast unknown where time and space are not. Can he be said to have created them? Nothing less so, we think. Are they then the creation of the unconscious part of his nature? Yes, if we understand that the man himself can know without knowing that he knows, and create yet be ignorant that virtue has gone out of him. They come from that unknown region, but not by its own blind working, and no amount of willless production could be called creation. God sits in that chamber of our being where the candle of our consciousness goes out, and sends wonderful gifts from it into the light of the understanding, which is His candle. Our hope lies not in any perfect mechanism even of the spirit but in the wisdom in which we live and move and have our being. If the dark part of ourselves were the origin of our imaginations, we might fear monsters generated by a decay that could never feel, only declare, a slow return to primeval chaos. But the Maker is our Light.

One word more before we turn to the culture of this noblest faculty. We might call it creative, did we not see something in God for which we humbly keep the word. A work of art, the highest human product of the embodying imagination, always holds more than its producer perceived, which seems a strong reason to attribute it to a larger origin than the man alone, and to say finally that the Almighty's inspiration shaped its ends.

We return to the class we supposed hostile to the imagination from the first. They will say: "We opposed not the imagination you have set forth but those wild fancies and vague reveries that young people indulge in, to the loss of the real world around them."

"And," we insist, "you would set this right by smothering the young monster at once, because his wings flutter in ways that rattle your nerves and offend notions of propriety this creature (you don't ask whether angel or pterodactyl) has not yet learned. If you object only to his vagaries, why call them *the* exercise of the imagination? One might as well call religion the mother of cruelty because it has occasioned more cruelty and devilry than anything else. Are we not to worship because our forefathers burned and stabbed for religion? We want more religion, we need more imagination; these are only the first vital motions of that whose results, at least in science, you gladly accept." Evil may spring from the imagination, as from everything except the perfect love of God; but its absence would bring infinitely worse. Selfishness, avarice, sensuality, and cruelty would flourish tenfold, and Satan's power be established before some children had begun to choose. Those who would quell the youthful imagination suppress all that is to grow from it. They fear the enthusiasm they never felt, and instead of giving this divine thing room and air, crush it into imposthume, fever, and corruption. The intellect they worship would suffer too: kill what produces the day-dreams of the young and you will never lead them beyond dull facts, dull because their relations to each other and the one life in them remain undiscovered. Whoever wants his children to escape this arid region should let no teacher near them, even of mathematics, who lacks imagination.

"But although good results may appear in a few from the indulgence of the imagination, how will it be with the many?"

We answer that the antidote to indulgence is development, not restraint, and that this is the duty of the wise servant of Him who made the imagination.

"But will most girls, for instance, rise to those useful uses? Are they not likelier to build castles in the air and neglect houses on earth? And since the world gives such poor scope to the ideal, will this habit not breed vain desires and regrets? Is it not better to keep to what is known and leave the rest?"

"Is the world so poor?" we answer. Then all the less reason to be content with it, and all the more to rise above it into the region of the true and eternal, of things as God thinks them. This outward world is only a passing vision of what truly lasts, and we will not live in it for ever. We live in a divine universe where no desire is in vain, if only it is large enough. Even in this world, not every disappointment breeds only empty regret. \[Footnote:

| "We will grieve not, rather find
| Strength in what remains behind;
| In the primal sympathy
| Which, having been, must ever be;
| In the soothing thoughts that spring
| Out of human suffering;
| In the faith that looks through death,
| In years that bring the philosophic mind."\]

And as to keeping to what is known: how many affairs of this world are so well defined as to leave no large spaces of uncertainty, whose very correlate faculty is the imagination? In most things it must work somehow, filling the gaps by some possible plan, before action can begin. A wise imagination, which is the presence of God's spirit, is the best guide man or woman can have, for what influences us most is not what we see most clearly. Undefined, vivid visions of something beyond what eye has seen or ear heard move us far more than logical sequences demonstrating the same things to the intellect. The nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, decides its operation. We live by faith, not sight. Ask our mathematicians (only be sure the question reaches them) whether they would part with the perfection of their diagrams or the dim, half-obliterated characters woven in the web of their being; their science or poetry; their certainties or hopes. If they choose the former each time, I doubt that the objects of the choice are really before them, equally presented.

What can be known must be known severely, but is there no faculty for the infinite lands of uncertainty around the sphere the lamp of our knowledge hollows out of the dark? Are they not the imagination's natural property, there for it to grow in, that man may learn to imagine greatly like the God who made him, discovering their mysteries by his following and worshipping imagination?

All this tends to enforce the culture of the imagination, but the strongest argument remains: even if all the power of pedantry rises against her, the imagination will work, if not for good then for evil, if not for truth then falsehood, if not for life then death, and the evil is likelier for the unnatural treatment she has had from those who should have fostered her. The power that might conceive the noblest forms of action and realize the lives of the true-hearted will build airy castles of vain ambition, riches, and unearned admiration. The imagination that might devise how to bless a home or help a poor neighbour will be absorbed in inventing the new dress or, worse, the means of procuring it. If she is not occupied with the beautiful she will be with the pleasant; what does not go out to worship stays home to be sensual. The mere intellect, however cultivated, will never reduce the passions; the imagination, seeking the ideal in everything, will raise them to their true service. Do not seek that your sons and daughters see no visions and dream no dreams; seek that they see true visions and dream noble dreams. Such going out of the imagination is one with aspiration, and lifts above the low and vile more than all inculcations of morality. Nor can religion rise into her calm home when one of her two wings is broken or paralyzed.

| "The universe is infinitely wide,
| And conquering Reason, if self-glorified,
| Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall
| Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone,
| Imaginative Faith! canst overleap,
| In progress towards the fount of love."

The danger of repressing the imagination can be seen in "Macbeth." The hero's powerful imagination, showing him how the deed would look to others and so its true nature, was his great impediment on the path to crime, and he would not have reached it without going to his wife for refuge from it. She, with far less of the faculty and a more destructive way with what she had, took his hand and led him to the deed. She herself takes refuge in unbelief and denial, declaring to herself and her husband that imagination's representations are not real; that nothing is real beyond the present effect on the mind; that intellect and courage are equal to any emergency, even an evil one; that no harm will come to those who rule themselves by their own will. Still finding her imagination, and more her husband's, troublesome, she combines materialism and idealism, asserting that things are not, cannot be, and shall not be more or other than people choose to think them. She says,---

|             "These deeds must not be thought
| After these ways; so, it will make us mad."

|              "The sleeping and the dead
| Are but as pictures."

But she over-estimated her will and under-estimated her imagination. Her will was the one bad thing in her, without root or support in the universe; her imagination was the voice of God himself out of her own unknown being. No one's choice can long determine how he shall think of things. Hers would not be repressed beyond its appointed period, fixed by laws of her being she could not control, and at length it arose as from the dead, overshadowing her with the blackness of her crime. The woman who drank strong drink to murder dared not sleep without a light; she rose and walked in the night, a sleepless spirit in a sleeping body, rubbing the spotted hand of her dreams, which still smelt of the deed, however often water had cleared it, so that all the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten it. Her long down-trodden imagination took vengeance even through the senses she thought to subordinate to her will.

But all this is of the imagination itself and fitter for illustration than argument. Let us come to facts. Dr. Pritchard, lately executed for murder, had no lack of invention, the intellect of the imagination, its lowest form. A clergyman who attended him at his own request went through indescribable horrors trying in vain to get him simply to stop lying: invention after invention followed the most earnest asseverations of truth. His report caused in us a moral dismay we had never felt about any human being, and drew the exclamation, "The man could have had no imagination." The reply was, "None whatever." Never seeking true or high things, caring only for appearances and so for inventions, he had left his imagination undeveloped, and when it showed him his own inner condition had repressed it until it was nearly destroyed, and what remained was set on fire of hell. \[Footnote: One of the best weekly papers in London, ignorant of the man and the facts, said Dr. MacLeod was "white-washing the murderer for heaven." In fact he refused to pray with him, telling him that if there was a hell to go to, he must go to it.\]

Man is "the roof and crown of things." He is the world, and more. So next to God, the chief scope of his imagination will be the world in relation to his own life in it. Will he do better or worse if this imagination, given free scope, shows him noble pictures of relationship and duty, of possible elevation of character and attainable justice of behaviour, of friendship and love, and above all of these in the life whose understanding as a whole is the loftiest aspiration of man's noblest power? Will a woman live a more or less troubled life if nature's sights and sounds break through the crust of gathering anxiety and remind her of the peace of the lilies and the birds' well-being? Will life interest her less if her neighbours' lives, instead of passing like shadows on a wall, take consistent wholeness as stories? Will she not love more and talk less? Will she be less likely to make a good match------? But here we stop, bewildered by the word *good*. If mothers mean by it the alliance of a man of position and means (let them add intellect, manners, and personal advantages), then the daughter of cultivated imagination may not be manageable and will probably be obstinate. We hope she will be obstinate enough. \[Footnote: Women who feel the wrongs of their kind will do more for women's elevation and rights, whatever those are, by teaching women to be high-minded toward men than by intellectual development or asserting equality; and men, "feelingly persuaded" what they are, would gain equally.\] But will the girl be less likely to marry a *gentleman*, in the grand old sixteenth-century meaning, when it was no irreverence to call our Lord

| "The first true gentleman that ever breathed;"

or in that of the fourteenth?---when Chaucer, teaching "whom is worthy to be called gentill," writes thus:---

| "The first stocke was full of rightwisnes,
| Trewe of his worde, sober, pitous and free,
| Clene of his goste, and loved besinesse,
| Against the vice of slouth in honeste;
| And but his heire love vertue as did he,
| He is not gentill though he rich seme,
| All weare he miter, crowne, or diademe."

Will she be less likely to marry one who honours women, and for their sakes as well as his own honours himself? Or, from the mother's side: will culture of her imagination make her likelier to refuse the wise, generous, true-hearted rich man for the talking, verse-making fool *because* he is poor, as if poverty were a virtue he had striven for? The highest imagination and the lowliest common sense are always on one side.

For the end of imagination is *harmony*. A right imagination, the reflex of creation, falls in with the divine order of things as the highest form of its own operation; "tunes its instrument here at the door" to the divine harmonies within; is content only with growth toward the divine idea, which includes all that is beautiful in men's imperfect imaginations; knows every deviation from it is downward; and so sends a man from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling with a hearty, hopeful spirit. Every imagination, in proportion to its rightness, tends to this. Even the wise man's reveries strengthen him for his work, making him sorry for past failure and hopeful of future success.

To come to the culture of the imagination: its development is one of the main ends of life's divine education. So the first means is ordering our life toward harmony with its ideal in the mind of God. As he who is willing to do the Father's will shall know of the doctrine, so, we doubt not, he who will do the will of THE POET shall behold the Beautiful. For all is God's, and the man growing into harmony with His will is growing into harmony with himself, his hidden glories coming into humble consciousness, till at last he is a pure microcosm faithfully reflecting the mighty macrocosm. So nothing, we believe, does so much for the intellect or imagination as *being good*, not after any formula or creed but after the faith of Him who did the will of his Father in heaven.

As to direct means for culturing the imagination, the whole is two words: food and exercise. For strong arms, eat meat and row. Feed your imagination with convenient food, and exercise it not in the acrobat's contortions but the gymnast's movements. First, the food.

Goethe says the way to develop the aesthetic faculty is to keep before our eyes, in the room we most frequent, some work of the best attainable art. It will teach us to refuse the evil and choose the good, plant itself in our minds as counsellor, and become the unconscious standard for judging everything. No better advice could be given, but it risks narrowness, and we would hardly change our tutor to gain variety. For culturing the imagination, books, though not the only means, are the readiest food, and a hundred may be had where one work of art of the right sort is unattainable, since it must be of some size as well as thorough excellence. Only variety guards against the convenient food becoming the inconvenient model.

Suppose someone who values the imagination wants to develop it in his child. The best start, especially for a young child, is acquaintance with nature: let him observe vital phenomena, put things together, and speculate from what he sees to what he does not. But take care that he never talks foolishly about anything. Let him be as fanciful as he likes, but not sin against fancy's own sense, for fancy has laws as surely as ordinary business. When he is silly, let him know it and be ashamed.

Where nature is only occasionally available, we must turn to literature. In books we have not only a store of the imagination's results but can watch her at work as in her workshop, embodying before our eyes, in music of speech and wonder of words, till her work, like a golden dish set with jewels by cunning workmen, stands finished. The best must be set before the learner, that he may eat and not be satisfied, for the finest products of imagination best nourish its beginnings. The teacher's mind must mediate between the art and the pupil's mind, bringing them into vital contact, directing observation to lines of expression and points of force, and helping the mind rest on the whole, so that no separable beauties lead to neglect of the complete shape. He must seek to *show* excellence rather than talk about it, giving the thing itself to grow into the mind rather than his own eulogy, isolating the point worth remarking rather than making many remarks on it.

Above all he must show a work's spiritual scaffolding or skeleton: the main ideas on which its shape is built, around which the rest group as ministering dependencies.

Yet he will not pass over the intellectual structure without which the other could not be manifested. He will not forget the builder while admiring the architect. While delighting in how the peculiar arch relates to the meaning of the whole cathedral, he will explain the principles it is built on and how they were carried out. Every beauty, down to tracery, crockets, and mouldings, will have its word, but all will be subordinated to the final beauty, the unity of the whole.

In this he performs the true office of friendship, introducing his pupil to the society he prizes most, surrounding him with the high-minded, that good company may work its own kind in him.

But he will also try to turn him from company, of books or men, that might lower his reverence, choice, or standard. He will discourage indiscriminate reading and the worse-than-waste skimming of circulating-library books. He knows a book worth reading is worth reading well, and one not worth reading is worth skimming only for the most accomplished reader. He will teach him to discern not only good from evil but good from not so good, not to sharpen the intellect, still less to breed the self-satisfaction closest to criticism, but to choose the best path and companions. A spirit of criticism that only distinguishes, or worse, aims at having one's opinion ready on demand, is repulsive to true thinkers and destructive of all thinking. A spirit of criticism for the truth's sake, one that waits to be wanted rather than starting from its chamber at every noise, cannot garnish the house but can sweep it clean. With enough such wise criticism, the best writers of the past would be studied ten times as much and the ephemeral productions of the day admired a tenth as much. The study of one good book would sweep a mountain of misplaced worship into the sea; the good in an inferior book would still be admired, but its relative position would change and its influence lessen.

Of true learning Lord Bacon says: "It taketh away vain admiration of anything, *which is the root of all weakness*."

The right teacher would have his pupil easy to please but hard to satisfy: ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to find beauty, slow to say, "Here I will dwell."

He will not confine his teaching to art. He will encourage him to read history with an eye eager for the dawning figure of the past, showing him that much of the Bible can only be so understood and that God's constant, consistent way, discoverable in it, is the key to all history.

In individual lives too he will show him how to put sign and token together, building not a whole but a probable suggestion of it.

While showing him nature's reflex in the poets, he will send him to Nature herself, urging him on country rambles to keep his eyes open for the sweet fashionings and blendings around him, and on city walks to watch the "human face divine."

He will also point out the essential difference between reverie and thought, dreaming and imagining; teach him not to mistake fancy for imagination, in himself or others; and warn him against hunting resemblances that carry no interpretation.

Such training is not meant only for developing artistic faculty. Few in this world will be able to utter what they feel, fewer in forms of their own, and there is no need for many. But all must feel; all must understand and imagine the good; all must at least begin to follow and find out God.

Solomon says it is the glory of God to conceal a thing and of the king to find it out. Bacon remarks that it is as if, in the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty delighted to hide his works to have them found, and kings could win no greater honour than to be God's playfellows in that game.

One more quotation, from Ecclesiastes, shows both the necessity of our imagining and the comfort that our imagining cannot outstrip God's making.

"I have seen the travail God has given the sons of men to be exercised in. He has made everything beautiful in its time, and set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work God makes from beginning to end."

So, to be playfellows with God in this game, the little ones may gather daisies and follow painted moths; the child of the kingdom may pore over the lilies of the field and gather faith as the birds gather food from the leafless hawthorn, ruddy with God's stored provision; and the man of science

|     "May sit and rightly spell
| Of every star that heaven doth shew,
| And every herb that sips the dew;
| Till old experience do attain
| To something like prophetic strain."

## A SKETCH OF INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT

\[Footnote: 1880.\]

"I wish I had thought to watch when God was making me!" said a child once to his mother. "Only," he added, "I was not made till I was finished, so I couldn't." We cannot recall whence we came or how we began to be. We do not know how far back we may have forgotten; certainly we once knew much that is gone. My own earliest definable memory is of a great funeral of one of the Dukes of Gordon, when I was between two and three; surely my first knowledge was not of death, and I must have known much before. In what we foolishly call maturity, as in the dawn of consciousness, each new consciousness dims or obliterates the one before, and as with our future, so with our past, imagination and faith must fill the place knowledge leaves. We are aware, and know we are aware, but when or how we began to be so is wrapt in a mist that deepens on one side into night and brightens on the other into full assurance of existence. Looking back we can but dream, looking forward speculate; but we may do both, for not all speculation is false nor all dreaming unreal. What may we fairly imagine of the child's inward condition before the first moment his memory vouches for?

It is one, I venture to say, of absolute though largely negative faith. No memory of past pain or fear of pain to come troubles him. In some vague way he knows he is enfolded in love: the sky over him is his mother's face, the earth that feeds him her bosom. The source, sustenance, and defence of his being, and the mediation between his needs and their supply, are all one. No type is so near the highest idea of relation to God as the child's to his mother: her face is God, her bosom Nature, her arms Providence, all one love, an undivided bliss.

From this security he regards the world beyond. Things come and go and he neither desires nor bemoans them. Change may grow to storm; to him storm is calm, his rest unbreakable. He is accountable for nothing, and with conscience not yet awake there is no conflict. His waking is full of sleep, yet his very being is enough.

But all the while his mother lives in hope of his growth; in the babe her heart broods over the coming boy, the marvel closed in the germ. Whatever mothers lament in the change from childhood to maturity, none would want to nurse for ever a child in whom no live law of growth unfolded an infinite change. The child knows nothing of growth and desires none, but grows, as irresistibly as a peach swells and reddens in the sun. By slow, inappreciable accretion he is carried on toward the face of the awful mirror in which he must meet his first foe, himself.

By degrees he learns that the world is around him, not within, that he is apart and it is apart; from consciousness he passes to self-consciousness. This is a second birth, the beginning of a higher life. Only when a man knows that he lives does real life, life with a share in its own existence, become possible.

Now, toward the world around him, which is not his mother and does not actively love or serve him, relations begin that arise from his own fancies, desires, and preferences; reasonable or not, being founded in reason they are never *devoid* of it. Everything in them appears lovely, desirable, good, or ugly, hateful, bad; and through these obscure, imperfect relations, to a being heavily prone to mistake, begins to be revealed a Being other and higher than his own, known as *Will* and first of all in its opposition to his desires. Then begins the strife without which there never was, or can be, growth or progress; its first result I call the third birth of the human being.

The mother's first opposing glance wakes in the child not only answering opposition, the rudimentary sac of his own coming will, but a new something so natural and so much a part of him, even when he refuses to heed it, that he long needs no name for it. This *Conscience* sides with his mother and makes itself felt before and after the event, so that he soon knows it is well or ill with him as he obeys or disobeys. Now he not only knows and knows that he knows, but knows he knows that he knows: he is self-conscious, he has a conscience. With the first resistance to it, the power above him has drawn nearer, and the deepest within him has sided with the highest without. The heaven of his childhood has both receded and come closer: he has run from under it, yet it claims him, farther yet immeasurably nearer, and he feels his mother's grasp on his being. Through the higher individuality he becomes aware of his own; through his mother's will his own begins to wake. He is conscious of himself as able to do or not do; responsibility has begun.

He slips from her lap, travels from chair to chair, crosses the threshold, braves the stair, and takes the greatest step possible to man, as George Herbert says, out of doors, changing the house for the universe. He runs from flower to flower, crosses the road, wanders, is lost, is found. His powers and activity grow; at school he meets other boys, and new objects of strife, new desires and impulses arise. His mother's face and will, the old heaven, recede; a world of men, which he foolishly thinks nobler because larger, claims him. More or less he yields, as the example of those who seem more like himself than his mother grows strong on him, and his conscience speaks louder. Even here his fourth birth *may* begin: the birth of the real Will, not the pseudo-will that is mere Desire swayed by impulse, selfishness, or some miserable motive. When the man, listening to conscience, wills and does the right regardless of inclination or consequence, he is free, the universe open before him, born from above. Conscience need never speak to him twice or aloud, for he never neglects what she commands. When he knows he can will his will, that God has given him a share in essential life and in the causation of his own being, he is a man indeed. With most this birth takes many years. As the mother's power wanes the neighbour's waxes, and if the boy is of common clay, willing to accept dishonour, it will grow until individuality vanishes and what friends, society, or his trade or profession say becomes his rule of life. With such I have no more to do than with the deaf dead, who sleep too deep for words.

My typical child of man is not of such. He can influence as well as be influenced, first of all himself: he takes a share in his own making, determining actively what he shall become, for he never ceases to heed, however poorly and intermittently, the voice of his conscience, and today he heeds it more than yesterday.

Long ere now the joy of space has laid hold on him, the more if he lives in a wild and broken region. The human animal delights in motion and change, even violent motion and the swiftest changes of place, as if he would grasp the infinite by ceaselessly leaving one standpoint for another. He is full of unrest, must know what lies on the farther shore of every river and how the world looks from every hill: *What is behind? What is beyond?* is his constant cry. Within months or years the world begins to come alive around him; the stars are strange, the moon sad, the sunrise mighty, and he begins to see what men call beauty. He lies on a sunny bank gazing into the blue till his soul seems to mingle with the infinite made visible. Dissatisfied with his emotions, he longs for a deeper waking and greater beauty, troubled by an unknown ideal of Nature stirring in him. Nor is it only an ideal of Nature: a more precious thing, a human ideal, is taking shape in his soul. The wind that at night fills him with unexplained sadness haunts him by day as a wild consciousness of strength with no difficulty or danger enough to spend itself on. He would be a champion of the weak, a friend to the great, a merciless foe to every oppressor; rich that he might help, strong that he might rescue, brave (as he counts himself already, never having proved his weakness). At the first encounter he fails, and the bitter, wholesome, saving cup of shame and confusion of face is handed him from the well of life. He cannot yet see that one filled with the glory and not the duty of victory must and ought to fail, but days and nights soothe his dismay with forgetfulness, gently wiping out past sins so that young life may begin again unburdened by too much present failure.

Probably at school or in his first months at college, a new phase begins. He has crossed the border of science, and the marvel of multitudinous facts strung on golden threads of law grips him. For a time knowledge is pride: the mere consciousness of knowing rewards its labour, and each contact with a new fact is an exciting joy. But what is known soon sinks into insignificance except as a step of the endless stair he climbs he knows not whither; the unknown draws him, and each new fact flames up in his mind and drops dark on the heap below. Even the grandeur of law as law costs his life's consciousness no small suffering and loss. For when Science enters, noble and graceful as she is, young Poetry shrinks back dismayed. Poetry is as true as Science, Science as holy as Poetry, but Poetry is timid and Science fearless, bringing a colder atmosphere than Poetry has learned to brave. Science is no enemy to Poetry, but they meet as friends only in the sage's mind and heart, not the boy's. The youth gazes on Science's cold, clear, beautiful face, turns to find his friend, and Poetry has fled. He rushes out and sees only the rainbow glimmer of her skirt on the far horizon; she returns in dreams, never for long. How can he turn from evaporation and refraction to "sad Hesper o'er the buried sun," or from quantitative analysis to "the rime of the ancient mariner" and the "moving moon" that "went up the sky, and nowhere did abide"? Looking from his window across the sands at the troubled ocean he cries, "What is the storm to me any more! it is but the clashing of countless water-drops!" He finds relief in seeing that once man is put in the midst of it, the clashing becomes a storm terrible to heart and brain: human thought, feeling, hope, fear, love, and sacrifice make nature's motions alive with mystery and the shadows of destiny. But the relief may be partial and temporary; for what if this mingling of man and Nature in man's mind only casts a coloured shadow over her cold indifference? What if she means nothing, never was meant to! What if in truth "we receive but what we give, and in our life alone doth Nature live!" What if the language of metaphysics as well as poetry comes from human fancy about Nature and not from Nature at all!

At length from the unknown whence he came an angel appears to deliver him from this horror, this stony look (ah, God!) of soulless law. The woman is on her way whose part is to meet him with a life other than his own, at once its complement and the visible presentment of what in it is beyond his understanding. The enchantment of *love* is upon him. Some call it a deceiving glamour, others an opening of the eyes; men will still divide between those who believe the horses and chariots of fire are present at their need and those who rank prophet with drunkard. But he who thinks he knows least understands what love is. Let foolish maidens and vulgar youths jest over it as they please, it is one of the most potent mysteries of the living God. The man who can love a woman and still be a lover of his wretched self is fit only to be cast out with the broken potsherds of the city, the salt in him having lost its savour. With this love a man puts on at least the vision robes of the seer, if not the singing robes of the poet; the paltriest human animal rises for the time above himself, and a truth of the great world penetrates, dimmed, the self-shadowed fog of his microcosm. He is for the time something of a friend as well as a lover, with a touch of his far-off childhood. To the youth of my history, in the light that passes outward from the lover's eyes, the world grows alive again, radiant as an infinite face. He sees the flowers as in boyhood but with a deeper glow and more unspeakable soul. He is pitiful over them, unwilling to break their stems and hurt the life he more than half believes they share with him; he cannot think anything made only for him, any more than only for itself. Nature is no longer a mere contention of forces whose heaven and hell in one is the dull peace of equilibrium, but a struggle, through splendour of colour, grace of form, and evasive vitality of motion and sound, after an utterance hard to find and marred by the imperfection of the small and weak that would embody the great and mighty. The tree-tops wave with a hidden delight, the sun lifts his head intent on glory, no day lasts too long or night comes too soon, and twilight draws the loving on shadowy arms to the bosom of Night. In the woman the infinite he thirsts after is given him for his own.

Man's occupation with himself turns his eyes from the great life beyond his threshold. When love awakes he forgets himself for a time, and glimpses of strange truth come through his windows, no longer blocked by his own shadow; he may even glimpse the possibilities of his being and dimly perceive the image after which he was made. But too soon self, radiant of darkness, wakes, the windows turn opaque, and he is a prisoner again. For the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the lust of other things choke more than the highest word. Waking from the divine vision (if that is waking which is dying into the common day), the common man calls it a foolish dream; the wise man still believes it, holds fast the memory of the vanished glory, and looks to have it again one day as part of his life's light. He knows that, because his nature is imperfect, dull, and weak, enclosing clouds follow every vision with the threat of ever-during dark, and that even if the vision could stay it were not well, for the sake of what must yet be done with him and made of him. But the youth of my history is neither like the former nor as yet like the latter.

From whatever cause, fault, natural law, or supernal will, the flush that seemed to promise an eternal day fades, though with him, like the lagging skirt of the northern sunset, it does not vanish but travels on, a withered pilgrim, all night, to rise at last the aureole of the eternal Aurora. New paths entice him now, or old paths with fresh horizons. With stronger thews and keener nerves he turns again to the visible, drawn by changelessness amid change, law amid seeming disorder, unity amid units, and begins to see the indwelling poetry of science. The untiring forces working in inconceivable spans of time and room fill him with an awe that threatens to uncreate him with a sense of littleness, while their grandeur fills him with such glory that he forgets himself and in humility is great and knows it not. Rapt under the magic wand of Science, he watches billions of billions of miles of incandescent vapour begin to revolve, grow swift, condense through slow eternities, and throw off rings that break into globes speeding on through space. The glowing ball cools and condenses yet still glows. Presently, after tens of thousands of years, its fiery heart and its atmosphere contend fiercely; he hears the rush of torrent rains shocking into vapour, rising, and falling again against the citadel of fire, until the water wins and the darkened globe is covered by a sea boiling high as the hills to come with veritable heat. He sees the hills and mountains rise as wrinkles with water avalanching down them, and race after race of living things appear as the earth becomes a passing home for each new and higher kind, terrible convulsions dividing kind from kind until his own arrives. Endless are the visions of unfathomable material grandeur awaked in his soul by the bare facts of external existence.

But soon comes a change. As far as he can learn, all the motion, the seeming dance, is a rush for death, a panic flight into moveless silence. Wind and tornado, softest tide and fiercest storm alike rush, fighting as they rush, into the arms of eternal negation: down to a cold stirless solidity where wind blows not, water flows not, and seas lie frozen and tideless to their gulfy basin. All things are on the steep path to final uncreation. He is filled with horror, less at the dreary end than at the weary hopelessness of the way. Then a dim light breaks and a faint hope revives, for he seems to see in the innumerably varied forms of life a spirit rushing upward from death, escaping the downward cataract and the rest that knows not peace. "Is it not," he asks, "the soaring of the silver dove of life from its potsherd-bed, the heavenward flight of some higher and incorruptible thing? Is not vitality, revealed in growth, itself an unending resurrection?"

The vision of the oneness of the universe, ever reappearing through the vapours of question, also keeps hope alive. To find, for instance, that the law of the arrangement of leaves on different plants corresponds to the law of the planets' distances from their sun wakes in him hope of a central Will, which alone can justify one ecstatic throb at any seeming loveliness of the universe. Without a centre, delight is unreason, a mockery, not the skeleton at the Egyptian feast but a crowned corpse at a feast of skeletons. Life without the higher glory of the unspeakable, the atmosphere of a God, is not worth living. He would rather cease to be than walk the dull level of the commonplace among men he would lift but who will not rise, and for whom he cherishes the hope they do their best to kill. Those who seem to him great recognize the unseen, believe the roots of science are hid there, count the bringing of the invisible into sight the end of all Art, and judge the true leader of men to be him who leads them closer to the essential facts of their being. Alas for his love and hope, alas for himself, if the visible exists for its own sake only, if a flower's face means nothing beyond the science that would unveil its growth! He cannot believe its structure exists for the sake of its laws; that would be building a scaffold for the sake of its joints where no house was to stand. Those who put their faith in Science are trying to live in the scaffold of the house invisible.

At times he finds harbour in his fellows' written poetry, delighting to analyze and grasp the thought behind the utterance. The fine figure and delicate phrase make him jubilant and strong for a moment, but not for long, for no *forms*, even thought-forms of truth, can give his soul rest.

History attracts him little; he finds in its records no principles giving hope for his race. What hope has the rising wave that knows in its rise only its doom to sink and be dashed on the low shore of annihilation?

But time would fail me to follow the soul doubling as the hounds of Death course it, or to set down the countless forms in which the golden Haemony springs in its path,

|                            Of sovran use
| 'Gainst all enchantments, mildew blast, or damp.

Now the shadows begin to lengthen toward night, which, whether or not a morning follows, is night and spreads the wings of darkness. As it nears, the man grows aware of a want unlike any I have described: a sense of insecurity, not the same as doubt of life beyond the grave, a need more profound even than that which cries for a living Nature. He now plainly knows that all his life this sense has haunted his path like a duty unfulfilled, like a cold mist about his heart. What if this lack were the root of every other anxiety! Revived, this sense of lacking something, he knows not what, never leaves him more. With it the terror returns that there may be no Unseen Power, as his fathers believed and his mother taught him, filling and *meaning* all things, no Power with whom he will find final refuge in his last extremity. With the quickening doubt a tenfold blight falls on poetry, in Nature and in books. Far worse than the early chill of science's assertions about what it knows is the shivering death that its pretended denials about what it knows not now send through his frame. The soul leaves the face of beauty when the eye begins to doubt that a soul is behind it; he feels like one I knew who always saw a corpse's face in the living face. What can the world be to him who lives for thought if there is no supreme and perfect Thought, only the poor struggles after thought he finds in himself? Take the eternal thought from the heart of things and no beauty is real, and nothing in nature has significance in itself or sympathy with the human soul. At best the beauty he saw was the projected perfection of his own being, and from himself as the crown of things he shrinks in horror: it is the more imperfect being who, seeing so little beyond himself, most easily imagines himself the apex of things and rejoices in the fancy. The killing power of a godless science returns tenfold: the ocean-tempest is again a clashing of water-drops, the evening sky's sadness a mockery of sorrow, his own soul and its sadness a mockery of himself. To tell him, as comfort, that the meaning lives in his own thought if nowhere else is the worst mockery of all: if these things embody no truth, to make them serve as embodiments is to put a candle in a death's-head to light the dying through the place of tombs. Once a primrose could preach childlike trust to his foolish fancy, and the lilies sow higher seeds in his troubled heart; now they are no better than the colour a painter wipes from his brush on the doorpost at night. The look in his dog's eyes, happy in being short-lived, is one of infinite sadness. All graciousness must be a sorrow, less because a thing must perish than because its nature is not real, that is, eternal. His children are shadows, their life a dance, a sickness, a corruption. The unselfishness that exists, however feebly, in all love, and gives life its only dignity, only adds to the sorrow. Nowhere at the root of things is love; it came after, a fungous excrescence in the hearts of men grown helplessly superior to their origin. Cold, impassive, material law is the root, happily lifeless and so not knowing itself, else it were a demon instead of a creative nothing. Endeavour is paralyzed in him. "Work for posterity," says he of the skyless philosophy; "How can I work without hope?" answers the man. "Little heart have I to labour where labour is so little help. What can I do to make my children's life less hopeless than my own? Give me all you would secure for them, and my life would be the worse mockery. The true end of labour would be to lessen the number doomed to breathe the breath of this despair."

Straightway he develops another, deeper mood. He turns, led by suspicion or sudden insight, and regards himself, and finds such imperfection, wrong, shame, and weakness that he cries, "It were well I should cease! Why should I mourn after life? What good is it to prolong it in a being like me? 'What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth!'" The seers, in general, do their best to obscure such insights; they regard suspicion of themselves as a monster and would stifle it, resenting any attempt to raise their buried best as an offence against intercourse. A man takes his social life in his hand who dares it. So few understand Hamlet's judgment on himself: readers cannot imagine he meant it of his whole character and attribute it to shame at postponing vengeance, which the critic would have to be such as Hamlet to carry out on no better proof than he had. When the man whose unfolding I represent regards even his dearest love, he finds it so poor, selfish, and low-lived that in his heart he shames himself before his children and friends. How little labour, watching, or pain has he endured for them, beside the great things he reads of! How often has he been wrongfully displeased, wrathful with the innocent, hurt a heart more tender than his own! Has he ever once been faithful to his ideal, and is his life to be regarded with complacency or troubled over? Beyond him spread infinite possibilities, height beyond height, glory beyond glory, each rising from his conscious being; but where is any hope of ascending them? These hills of peace seem to infold him as a land where he could dwell at home, surely the place of his birth, while against their purity his conscious being shows miserable, dark, weak, a shadow that would be substance. But alas if the whole thing is only in himself, a vision of nothing, a revelation of lies, the outcome of what, helplessly existent, is not created and so cannot create; if the dreamer too is a self-dreamed dream, with no master of dreams to cry to! Where then is his hope of atoning one day to those who loved him? They are nowhere, dissolved in the primeval darkness! If truth is but the hollow of a sphere, he shall never cast himself before them to tell them that after long years of separation he knows himself and them, that love of them is now part of his being, and to implore forgiveness on the ground that he hates and scorns the self that showed them less than absolute love. They do not even rest, for they will never know it; there is no voice or hearing in them, and how can he have any heart to live! The one comfort left is that, unable to follow them, he shall die and cease, and fare as they, go also nowhither!

To a man in the dismay of existence dissociated from power, who knows not being and God together, unrooted in a creating Will who is Love, the Father of Man, the idea of a death that knows no reviving must be, and ought to be, the blessedest thought left. "O land of shadows!" he may well cry, "where shadows love to ecstatic self-loss, yet forget and love no more! land of sorrows and despairs that sink the soul into a deeper Tophet than death has sounded! broken kaleidoscope! shaken camera! promiser that speaks truth to the ear but lies to the sense! where my friend's heart is sorrowful as mine, the more that I have been a poor and far-off friend! where sin is strong, righteousness faint, and love dreams mightily but walks abroad so feebly! where my father's face is dust and my mother's hand will never caress again, and my children will spend a few years of trouble like mine and drop from the dream into the no-dream! Gladly, O land of sickliest shadows, I take my leave of thee! Welcome the cold, pain-soothing embrace of immortal Death! Hideous are his looks, but I love him better than Life: he is true and will not deceive us. Nay, he only is our saviour, setting us free from the tyranny of the false that ought to be true and sets us longing in vain."

But through all the man's doubts and fears a rumour, a vague legendary murmur, has been about (rather than in) his ears, haunting his air though he has hardly heeded it. It has come down the ages, and in every age some have been influenced by it, more or less. On those he has chiefly known it has made no impression beyond a remarkable legend: the story of a man represented as at least greater, stronger, and better than any other. He has had a recurring, undefined suspicion that he has something to do with this tale's hero, strongest (though never strong) when he is most aware of evil in himself; between the idea of this man and his knowledge of himself some imperative duty seems dimly to lie. He knows the matter is commemorated in many of his country's oldest institutions, but he has shrunk from the demands which, by spiritual insight, he foresaw would follow if he admitted certain things to be true. He has known some, and read of more, who by faith in the man conquered anxiety, doubt, and fear, lived pure, and died in gladsome hope. But the faith that was once easy now seems almost impossible. And what is he called to believe? One says one thing, another another. Much that is asserted is unworthy of belief, and the foundation of the whole looks something like a cunningly devised fable. Even if true, he thinks, it cannot help him, for it does not touch the things that make his woe: the God the tale presents is not the being whose very existence alone can be his cure.

But he meets one who says to him, "Have you come to your time of life and still accept hearsay as ground of action (for there is action in abstaining as well as doing)? Suppose the man in question took all possible pains to be understood: does it follow that he is or was fairly represented by most of his followers, with such a moral distance between him and them?"

"But the whole thing has from first to last a strange aspect!" our thinker replies.

"As to the *last*, that is not yet come. As to its *aspect*, no human eye could convey its reality to a reading heart; every human idea of it *must* be more or less wrong, and yet perhaps the truer the aspect the stranger it would be. But is it not just with ordinary things you are dissatisfied? Should the strangeness of these things, to you little better than rumours, not make you examine them? Will you assert that nothing strange can concern human affairs? Much once scarce credible is now so ordinary that men have grown stupid to its wonder. Nothing around you serves your need: try what is of another class. What if the rumoured things belong to a *more* natural order than these, lie nearer the roots of your dissatisfied existence, and look strange only because you have lived in the outer court and not the *penetralia* of life? The rumour has been vital enough to float down the ages, emerging from every storm: see for yourself what is in it. So powerful an influence on history must show signs by which to tell whether the man understood himself and his message or owed his greatness to his followers' deluded worship. None will deny that he has always had foolish followers, and none but a fool would judge a leader by that; wisdom as well as folly serves a fool's purpose, for he turns all to folly. I say nothing of my own conclusions, because what you imagine my opinions to be is as hateful to me as it is disagreeable and foolish to you."

So says the friend; the man hears, takes up the old story, and says to himself, "Let me see then what I can see!"

I will not follow him through the many shadows and slow dawns by which he arrives at this much: A man claiming to be the Son of God says he has come to be the light of men; says, "Come to me, and I will give you rest"; says, "Follow me, and you shall find my Father; to know him is the one thing you cannot do without, for it is eternal life." He has learned from the man's words, and from the man as the tale presents him, that the bliss of his conscious being is his Father; that his one delight is to do the Father's will, the only thing worth doing; that he would make men blessed with his own blessedness; that the cry of creation and humanity shall be answered into the deepest soul of desire; that nothing less than the godlike way of being can satisfy any man; that not this world only but the whole universe is the inheritance of those who consent to be children of their Father in heaven and put forth the power of their will to be of the same sort as he; that to as many as receive him he gives power to become sons of God, partakers of the divine nature, joy, and power, who shall have whatever they desire, know no fear, love perfectly, and never die; that the world's knowing ones will scorn the message, but the time will come when its truth is apparent, to some in confusion of face, to others in joy unspeakable; only we must beware of judging, for many that are first shall be last, and there are last that shall be first.

To find himself in conscious as well as vital relation with the source of his being, with a Will by which his own will exists, a Consciousness by which he is conscious, would end all his ills! He can imagine no other way to meet and annihilate his sorrows, for the ills that oppress him are within and without and over each he is powerless. If only the message were true! If only this man knew what he talked of! But if help for man exists beyond him, some *one* might know it first, and may not this be he? If the message is as great and perfect as this man says, only a perfect, eternal man at home in the Father's bosom could know, bring, or tell it. According to the tale, the Father intended from the first to reveal himself to man as man, since without knowing the Father after man's own modes of being, man could not grow to real manhood. The grander the idea, the likelier it is what it claims; unless it is high as the heavens above the earth, beyond us yet within our reach, it is not for us and cannot be true. Fact or not, a God such as Christ, infinitely a good man, is the only idea with hope enough for man! If such a God has come to be known, marvel must surround the first news of the revelation. Shall men turn from the gracious rumour of what, if true, is the event of all events, because of its marvel? Could marvel be lovelier than the marvel reported? Only the humble of heart can believe in the high and perceive and embrace grandeur. Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.

The man glimmeringly sees something of such truths, but endless doubts and questions wake in him. What if the whole idea of the man's mission was a deception born of his very goodness? What if men pretending to be his followers invented the whole? What if it was a little truth greatly exaggerated? Yet whatever it is, less than its full idea would not suffice for the wants and sorrows that weigh him down!

He passes through many a thorny thicket of inquiry; gathers evidence upon evidence; reasons on the goodness of the writers (they might be deceived, but they dared not invent); weighs a thousand arguments, historical, psychical, and metaphysical, that would take volumes to set out; hears many an opposing and scoffing word from men "who surely know, else would they speak?" and finds himself much where he was. But at least he haunts the borders of possible discovery, while those who turn their backs on the idea are divided from him by a great gulf, perhaps of moral difference. A grand auroral hope still draws him; they take the thing from the merest report of opinion and look anywhere but thither. He who would not trust his best friend to state his views of life accepts the random judgments of unknown others as sufficient disposal of what the highest of the race have regarded as a veritable revelation from the Father of men, and sees only folly, since what he takes for the thing nowhere meets his nature. Our searcher at least holds the door open for any voice from the invisible region: if truth is there, he is where it will find him.

As he reads and reflects it grows clear that, if there is truth in the matter, he must first of all heed the man's reported words themselves, what he says and not what is said about him. And he finds that the man says, or plainly implies, that only the obedient, childlike soul can understand them. So no disobedient man's judgment of them or their speaker can be received: a man who hates his enemy, lies, or thinks to serve God and Mammon, whether or not he calls himself a Christian, has no right to an opinion about the Master or his words, at least in the Master's eyes. This is in the nature of things: obedience alone puts a man where he can see well enough to judge what is above him. In respect of great truths investigation counts for little, speculation for nothing; to know them he must obey them, for obedience is the only door. And the truth-seeker sees, with no loophole of escape from life, that what the Son of Man requires of him is either what his conscience backs as just or what seems too great for any man. But if help exists, it must recognize the highest in him and urge him to use it. Help cannot come to one made in God's image except in the obedient effort of whatever life and power is in him, for God is action. Only in such effort can need meet help; the upstretched hand meets the downstretched. He alone who obeys can pray with confidence, and only to him does an answer seem possible. And if anything the Son of Man says seems unreasonable, the majesty of duty in the rest compels him to conclude he has not yet seen its true nature or its relation to life.

Now comes the crisis: if the man sets himself honestly to do what the Son of Man tells him, he sets out on the path that will lead him, if there is truth in these things, to knowledge of the whole matter; not until then is he a disciple. If the message is true, the condition of knowing its truth is not only reasonable but unavoidable; if there is help for him, how else should it draw nigh? Only by obedience does a man come into such contact with truth as to know what it is, and in regard to truth knowledge and belief are one. It is absurd that things which appear only to an eye capable of seeing them, or are recognized only by a mind of a certain development, should be examined by an incapable eye and pronounced on by an undeveloped mind. The deliverance offered is a change such that the man shall *be* the rightness he talked of: while his soul is not hungering and groaning after righteousness, longing to be honest and upright himself, it is absurd that he should judge the way to it; while he does not walk in it he is and shall be dishonest, and how can he know the way! What he *can* judge is his duty at a given moment, not in the abstract but as something to be *done*, neither more nor less nor other than *done*. Thus judging and doing, he takes the only possible step toward righteousness and righteous judgment; doing otherwise he grows more unrighteous and blind. For the man who knows not God, whether or not he believes there is a God, there can be, I repeat, no judgment of things pertaining to God. To our searcher, then, the crowning word of the Son of Man is this: "If any man is willing to do the will of the Father, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself."

Having thus brought my type to the borders of liberty, my task for now is done; let the reader prove the rest for himself. Obedience alone convinces, and I would take no bootless labour to convince without it; that would be a gain only for hell. If any man calls these things foolishness, his judgment is insignificant to me. If any says he is open to conviction, I answer that he can have none except by obedience. If a man says, "The thing is not interesting to me," I ask, "Are you following your conscience? By that, not by your interest in a thing, you shall be judged; and in that day, whatever *that day* means, nothing will be said to you or of you of which your conscience will not echo every syllable."

Oneness with God is the sole truth of humanity. Life parted from its causative life would be no life, at best a barrack of corruption, an outpost of annihilation; the derived life is imperfect as the union is incomplete. No man can be one with neighbour, child, or dearest except as he is one with his origin, and he is not perfect while there is one being in the universe he could not love.

He is bound above all men to hold his face like a flint in witness of this truth who owes everything that makes for eternal good to the belief that at the heart of things, causing them to be, at the centre of monad, world, protoplastic mass, loving dog, and cruellest man, is an absolute, perfect love, and that in the man Christ Jesus this love is with us to take us home. To nothing else do I owe any grasp on life; in this I see the setting right of all things. For the believer in the Son of God poetry returns in a mighty wave, history unrolls in harmony, and science is crowned with its own aureole of holiness. Nothing enlivens the imagination, enables the judgment, or strengthens the intellect like belief in a live Ideal at the heart of all personality and of every law. Without one, falsehood does more for the race than the facts of its being; an unreality is needed for the man's development in all that is truly real; falsehood is greater than fact, and an idol is needed for lack of a God. Those who deny cannot, in the nature of things, know what they deny. Whoever sees a chaos taking the shape of an ordered world will hardly be persuaded it is by the power of a foolish notion bred in a diseased fancy.

Let the man then who would rise to the height of his being be persuaded to test the Truth by the deed, the highest and only test that can be applied to the loftiest of all assertions. To every man I say, "Do the truth you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know."

## ST. GEORGE'S DAY, 1564

\[Footnote: 1864.\]

All England knows that this year (1864) is the three hundredth since Shakspere was born, probably in this month of April; he was baptized on the twenty-sixth. We do not know whether he was born on the twenty-third, as a tradition may once have said, but two facts would incline us to believe it if we could: he *died* on the twenty-third of April, as if completing a cycle, and that is St. George's Day. A little fanciful sentiment may say that it was surely *St. George for merry England* when Shakspere was born. But even were St. George the best saint in the calendar, which we have little ground to suppose, it suits our subject better to say that the Highest was thinking of his England when he sent Shakspere into it, to be a strength, a wonder, and a gladness to the nations of his earth.

But if we write thus only from the fashion of the day, we are like the *fashionable* architects who built the prophets' tombs with vain praises while ignoring what the prophets taught. We hope to show good grounds for rejoicing in the birth of the child whom later years placed highest on the rocky steep of Art, up which so many who combine feeling and thought are always striving.

First, let us look at some of the more powerful influences into which he was born. A child is born into the womb of the time, which enclosed and fed him before his birth. Among the most potent influences on a child's education, in the true sense, are those that reach him *through* his parents' minds, hearts and judgement: what has strongly affected them has a concentrated effect on the child, antenatal and psychological as well as educational and spiritual. Shakspere was born in the sixth year of Queen Elizabeth, the eldest son but third child. His parents must have married by 1557, two years after Cranmer was burned at the stake, one of the two hundred who perished in that time of pain, which firmly established a reformation that, like every change for the better, could not be secured without a *trial by fire*. Such events everywhere in the country could not fail to impress thinking people, especially as those called to bear witness were not only people of high position. John Shakspere and Mary Arden were in all likelihood of the Protestant party; and though never, as far as we know, in special danger of denunciation, they must have been made earnest, as the age seems to have been. In such times people are compelled to think.

An interesting question arises: was Shakspere indebted in part to his mother for the profound knowledge of the Bible evident in his writings? By now a good many copies of the Scriptures, in one translation or another, must have been scattered over the country. \[Footnote: And it seems to us probable that this spread of the Bible did more to rouse the slumbering literary power of England than any influence of foreign literature whatever.\] The word was precious and hard to buy, but John Shakspere's house might have had a copy, and the boy may first have heard the Scripture tales from his mother. One peculiar feature bears out the word *profound*: he often reproduces the very spirit and aroma of a passage without using its words, and some passages in his writings we could not have understood without some acquaintance with the New Testament. We give a few specimens, from "Macbeth" alone.

Passing over "temple-haunting martlet" (act i. scene 6), which refers to the verse about the sparrow finding a house and the swallow a nest at the Lord's altars, we come to a passage for which we believe the only explanation is the Scripture to be cited.

On his way to murder Duncan, Macbeth says,---

|                 "Thou sure and firm-set earth,
| Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
| Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
| And take the present horror from the time
| Which now suits with it."

What is meant by the last two lines? To us they are another form of the saying that nothing covered shall fail to be revealed, and what is spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light and what is whispered in closets proclaimed on the house-tops. We do not mean Macbeth has this passage in mind, only that Shakspere had the feeling of it when he wrote. Macbeth means, "Earth, do not hear me in the dark, which suits the present horror, lest the very stones prate about it in the daylight, which does not suit such things; thus taking 'the present horror *from* the time which now suits with it.'"

Again, in the play's only piece of humour---if that is humour which, to the principal characters' consciousness, is as terrible as anything in it---the porter ends his fantastic soliloquy as porter of hell-gate with the words, "But this place is too cold for hell: I'll devil-porter it no further. I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." What else had the writer in mind but the Sermon on the Mount's verse that the gate is wide and the way broad that leads to destruction, and many go in at it?

It may be objected that such commonly quoted passages imply no profound acquaintance with Scripture. But no knowledge of the *words* of the Bible would justify the word *profound*. What is remarkable is not only that these passages come up in the most exciting moments of composition, but that he gives their spirit such a new form that minds deadened by the *sound* of the words see the very image and spiritual meaning in them. "*The primrose way!*" And to what?

We will confine ourselves to one passage more:---

|                             "Macbeth
| Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above
| Put on their instruments."

At the end of Revelation 14 we read that the time to reap has come, "for the harvest of the earth is ripe." We suspect that Shakspere wrote, ripe *to* shaking.

These are by no means the most evident proofs of his acquaintance with Scripture, which others have treated far more fully. We chose passages that breathe the very spirit of sacred writ without using its words, and there we can only appeal to our readers' varying degrees of conviction.

But one singular correspondence, in another *almost* literal quotation from the Gospel, interests us wonderfully. We are told that the "eye of a needle," in the passage about a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven, means the small side entrance in a city gate. Now in "Richard II," act v. scene 5, *Richard* quotes the passage thus:---

| "It is as hard to come as for a camel
| To thread the postern of a needle's eye;"

So either Shakspere's imagination suggested the real explanation, or he took pains to learn the simile's significance. It can hardly be *merely* fortuitous: at the least he looked for and found a suitable figure to go with *eye of a needle*---unless he had no particular reason for using the word for a *little* gate rather than for any entrance, which with him seems unlikely.

We have not proved that Shakspere's acquaintance with the Scriptures began early; but the Bible must certainly have greatly influenced the highest representative mind of the time, its influence on the nation being unquestionable. Since the Bible was just dawning fully on the country as Shakspere became able to understand it, this seems the place to notice that influence and the passages in his works that testify to it.

But besides *the* Bible, every nation has *a* Bible, or at least *an* Old Testament, in its own history; and that Shakspere paid special attention to this is no conjecture. His way of writing historical plays is, we suspect, more like the Bible histories than most historians'; the development and consequences of character and conduct are clear to those who read them with open eyes. In childhood he may have had special reason to study history: his mother's grandfather had been "groom of the chamber to Henry VII.," and, on sufficient testimony, a more remote ancestor of his father's had also stood high in that monarch's favour. So the troublous times before Henry VII.'s usurpation would naturally be talked about in the quiet household, where books and amusements like our boys' now were scarce or lacking. That past of strife and change was an exciting background for an age living in an exciting history of its own.

Perhaps the chief intellectual characteristic of Elizabeth's age was *activity*, which accounts even for much that is objectionable in its literature. It must have been growing throughout the fifteenth century. The wars of the Roses stifled literature, so that it had to be born again at the start of the next century, but they were only like the "eager strife" of the shadow-leaves above the "genuine life" of the grass,---

|        "And the mute repose
| Of sweetly breathing flowers."

But when peace fell on the land, the impulse to action that sprang from strife seems to have gone on, as waves go on raving on the shore after the wind has ceased, and found an outlet, among others, in literature, especially dramatic literature. Peace, made more intense by the end of the tormentors' cries and the martyrs' groans, made a kind of vacuum, and into it burst the torrent-springs of a thousand souls, their thoughts no longer repressed: history of the past and Utopian speculation about the future; noble theology, capable statesmanship, brilliant and profound science; voyages of discovery, and the swan-like merchantman turned into a fire-drake of war to defend the threatened shores; the first brave speech of a Puritan in Elizabeth's Parliament, the first murmur of liberty's voice, soon to thunder through the land; foreign genius naturalized by translation, and a new and transcendent rhythm invented or at least adopted; the song, the epic, the drama.

So much for the general. Following the course of his life, let us recall some chief events that must have impressed his all-open mind in his earlier years.

It would not be going back too far to begin with the Massacre of Paris, when he was eight. It caused such horror in England that some black rays from that deed of darkness may well have fallen on such a child's mind. In strong contrast is the next event.

When he was eleven, Leicester gave the Queen that magnificent reception at Kenilworth, so well known from its memorials in our literature. It has been suggested, with enough likelihood to justify a conjecture, that Shakspere may have been present at the dramatic shows so gorgeously gathered before her Majesty. If so, one can imagine their influence on the young dramatic genius, at an age when the critical faculty is, happily, far less awake than the receptive and exultant faculties, and a nature chiefly needs excitement to growth, without which the most artistic pruning has nothing to work on.

When he was fifteen, Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch (through the French) was first published. Anyone who has compared one of Shakspere's Roman plays with the corresponding life in Plutarch will not be surprised that we count this among the events of paramount influence on him. He probably did not know the large folio, with its medallion portraits set first singly and then side by side for comparison, as soon as it appeared; but we cannot tell when he began to read it, and it took such hold of him that he probably began very early. It seems to us one of the most powerful aids to his remarkable perception and discrimination of character. To say that in a very pregnant sense he was Plutarch's disciple is no derogation from his originality. In the Plutarch plays he picked out every dramatic point and sometimes used the very phrases of North's nervous, graphic English, as if it honoured his work to embody Plutarch's words as he first knew them. From him he seems especially to have learned to bring out a character's points by setting one man against another and remarking where they resembled and differed; and in other plays too he partly arranged his characters so.

Not long after he went to London, at twenty-two, Sir Philip Sidney died at thirty-two, and this must have influenced him: all Europe mourned its model, almost ideal man. England's mourning, at court and in the city, lasted months, and Dr. Zouch supposes it the first for a private person. Sidney was renowned throughout the civilized world for everything a man could be renowned for, and his literary fame must have shared in the impression his death made on Shakspere. None of his works appeared until after his death, the first within months of it, but his fame as a writer was widely spread in private and could hardly fail to reach one who, though probably without friends of rank yet, kept such keen open ears. Whether or not Shakspere had heard of Sir Philip's literary greatness, the "Arcadia," first published four years after his death (1590), in a third edition within eight years---with another in Scotland the next year---must have interested him. It is very unlike the impression most minds have of it from the confident incapacity of last century's critics. Few books are more fruitful in results and causes of thought, more sparkling with fancy, more evidently the outcome of rich and noble habit. That Shakspere read it is evident from his taking from it the secondary but still important plots of two of his plays.

Anticipating a little: in the same year, 1590, when Shakspere was twenty-six, came the first three books of Spenser's "Faery Queen." Of its reception we need say nothing, and of its character only that nowadays the depths of its teaching, heartily prized by Milton, are seldom explored. It would take months to set out the known and imagined sources of knowledge and spiritual food of the man who laid every mental region under such contribution that almost every profession has claimed him as a student of its science---so marvellously did he combine assimilation with reproduction.

To go back a little: in 1587, when he was twenty-three, Mary Queen of Scots was executed. The next year England, with the winds and waters as allies, won her mighty victory over the towering pride of the Spanish Armada. Like birds flying from their cliffs to defend their young, the little navy, many of its vessels able to carry only a few guns, flew out from the coasts; and fighting, fire-ships and tempest left this island,---

| "This precious stone set in the silver sea,"

still a "blessed plot," with an accumulated obligation to liberty that can only be paid by helping others be free; when she utterly forgets that, her doom is sealed, as surely as that of the old empires that passed away in self-indulgence and wickedness.

When Shakspere was about thirty-two, Sir Walter Raleigh published his glowing account of Guiana, which at once gave the English mind an earthly paradise or fairy-land. Raleigh seems too full of his own reports for us to suppose he invented or disbelieved them, especially when, expecting execution, he pictures the heavenly country he looks forward to in the fashion of the wonderful West:---

| "Then the blessed Paths wee'l travel,
| Strow'd with Rubies thick as gravel;
| Sealings of Diamonds, Saphire floors,
| High walls of Coral, and Pearly Bowers."

Such were some influences that widened thought and excited productive power in the minds of the time. After this there were fewer in Shakspere's life, and more would have mattered less to a mind more fully formed and better able to choose its influences. Let us look back at the history of the art he chose for easing his mind of its wealth, which, like gold and silver, has a moth and rust of its own unless sent out for our neighbours' good.

It was a mighty gain for the language and the people when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, by permission of the Pope, the miracle-plays, most probably until then given in Norman-French, as Mr. Collier supposes, began to be given in English. Most likely there had been dramatic representations of a sort from the nation's earliest period---to begin with the lowest form, imitated animal sounds for listeners' delight, such as the drama of an attacking poodle and a fiercely repellent puss. The art would pass through innumerable gradations of childhood before its first formal embodiment in the so-called miracle-plays, Scripture stories, canonical and apocryphal, dramatized in the rudest fashion. From the height the art had reached two hundred and fifty years later, "how dwarfed a growth of cold and night" they look! But when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they were, they were of unspeakable value to a people whose spiritual digestion was not hurt by an abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their food. Occasionally we find verses of true poetic feeling, such as these in "The Fall of Man:"---

| *Deus.* Adam, that with myn handys I made,
|       Where art thou now? What hast thou wrought?

| *Adam.* A! lord, for synne oure floures do ffade,
|       I here thi voys, but I se the nought;

This implies that the separation between God and man, though it had destroyed the beatific vision, was not yet so complete that the creature was deaf to his Maker's voice. And the words with which Eve, in shame and remorse, begs her husband to strangle her, odd and quaint as they are, have an almost overpowering pathos:---

| "Now stomble we on stalk and ston;
| My wyt awey is fro me gon:
| Wrythe on to my necke bon
|   With, hardnesse of thin honde."

To this Adam begins his reply with the verses,---

| "Wyff, thi wytt is not wurthe a rosche.
| Leve woman, turn thi thought."

And this portion of the representation ends with these verses, spoken by Eve:---

| "Alas! that ever we wrought this synne.
| Oure bodely sustenauns for to wynne,
| Ye must delve and I xal spynne,
|   In care to ledyn oure lyff."

These plays are most interesting set against the places where they were sometimes performed. Scaffolds usually stood in market-places or churchyards, but sometimes rose in the great churches, with ecclesiastics' help. So the rude beginnings of the dramatic art, with the devil as the unfortunate buffoon drawing the people's most exuberant laughter, stood under the perfection of another art, architecture, which we can now only imitate at our best: below, clumsy contrivance and vulgar jest; above, the solemn heaven of uplifted arches, their mysterious glooms ringing with the multitude's delight---the play of children enclosed in the heart of prayer aspiring in stone. But it was not all laughter, and the drama is so much nearer than architecture to the ordinary human heart that these grotesque plays, we think, did far more to arouse the people's inward life and conscience than all the glory into which the monks' out-working spirit compelled the stubborn stone to bourgeon and blossom.

Although the drama surely grew somehow during the dreary fifteenth century, it reached Elizabethan grandeur not by steady progression but as if a dry, knotty, uncouth but vigorous plant suddenly opened its inward life in a flower of surpassing splendour. When real historical persons in the miracle-plays gave way to unreal allegorical ones, and the "play of morals," as it was called, nearly drove the miracle-play off the stage, there was no great advance: the gain was more variety, while allegorical moral teaching lacks the vivifying fire of faith that works in even the poorest representation of a history the people heartily believed and loved. Nor do the interludes in the pauses of Henry VIII.'s banquets, the favourite amusement of later royalty, refine on the miracle-plays: they gained facility and wit but lost poetry and pathos and gathered grossness. In the comedies that soon appear there is far more fun than art; and though the historical play had existed for some time, and learning from the inns of court had flowed into the drama, there is no *whole* of artistic or poetic value before Shakspere. This brings us to another branch of the subject, whose importance has not, we think, been duly acknowledged: the use, if not invention, of *blank verse* in England, and its application to the drama.

We have in the present day one grand master of blank verse, the Poet Laureate. But where would he be if Milton had not gone before him, or if the verse in which he works like an informing spirit did not exist? He might have invented it himself, but his verse would have been very different from what he will now leave beside that of the master of the epic. So thanks to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He died on the scaffold at thirty and left no poetry of much value in itself, but he refined the language's poetic usages and, above all, was the first ever to write blank verse in English. He used it to translate the second and fourth books of Virgil's "Aeneid," probably not long before his execution in 1547, seventeen years before Shakspere's birth. The work has passages of excellence and rarely does a line quite fail, but as might be expected it is somewhat stiff and stunted in sound, partly because the lines are divided too much where *distinction* would have been enough. It would have been strange if he had at once handled freely a rhythm that every boy-poet now thinks he can do anything with, though few ever learn its real scope. His difficulty was increased because the nearest measure was the heroic couplet, so familiar, though scarcely anyone has equalled the variety of its modelling in Chaucer, whom Surrey of course knew. Even in Chaucer, the constant expectation of a rhyme completed at the couplet's end would tempt one used to heroic verse, on first trying blank verse, to put a rhythmical fall and a kind of close at the end of every line. Still, Surrey's translation has good verse. Here are lines about Mercury in which the fault is scarcely perceptible.

| "His golden wings he knits, which him transport,
| With a light wind above the earth and seas;
| And then with him his wand he took, whereby
| He calls from hell pale ghosts.

| "By power whereof he drives the winds away,
| And passeth eke amid the troubled clouds,
| Till in his flight he 'gan descry the top
| And the steep flanks of rocky Atlas' hill
| That with his crown sustains the welkin up;
| Whose head, forgrown with pine, circled alway
| With misty clouds, is beaten with wind and storm;
| His shoulders spread with snow; and from his chin
| The springs descend; his beard frozen with ice.
| Here Mercury with equal shining wings
| First touched."

Justice demands in all comparative criticism that whoever began a mode not be compared with his followers on the absolute merit of the productions alone; he may be inferior in quality, but as inventor he stands on a height the imitators can never reach, though his example may let them climb other and loftier heights. It is doubtful whether Surrey himself invented this verse or followed some poet of Italy or Spain, where blank verse is said to have been used before Surrey wrote English in that measure.

So here are the low beginnings of blank verse. It was nearly a hundred and twenty years before Milton took it up, served well by it and glorifying it; we know of no poem of worth in that measure between. We speak here of the epic form, which, being uttered *ore rotundo*, necessarily differs considerably from its form in the drama.

Let us glance at the forms of composition used for the drama before blank verse came into favour. The short specimens already given show the miracle-plays' verse: carefully measured and varied lines, correct and superabundant rhymes, melody and rhythm not lacking. The moral and other rhymed plays that followed, as far as we know them, fell off greatly: largely long, irregular lines with rhythmical progress rather than rhythm, exceedingly hard to read musically, at least for one of our day. Here are a few such verses from the dramatic poem, rather than drama, somewhat improperly called "The Moral Play of God's Promises," by John Bale, who died the year before Shakspere was born; it is the first in Dodsley's collection. They have some poetic merit, though the rhythm is at least difficult. We give two stanzas; in most plays the verses are in rhyming couplets only.

| *Pater Coelestis.*

| I have with fearcenesse mankynde oft tymes corrected,
| And agayne, I have allured hym by swete promes.
| I have sent sore plages, when he hath me neglected,
| And then by and by, most comfortable swetnes.
| To wynne hym to grace, bothe mercye and ryghteousnes
| I have exercysed, yet wyll he not amende.
| Shall I now lose hym, or shall I him defende?

| In hys most myschefe, most hygh grace will I sende,
| To overcome hym by favoure, if it may be.
| With hys abusyons no longar wyll I contende,
| But now accomplysh my first wyll and decre.
| My worde beynge flesh, from hens shall set hym fre,
| Hym teachynge a waye of perfyght ryhteousnesse,
| That he shall not nede to perysh in hys weaknesse.

To our ears the older miracle-plays were greatly superior. Yet this apparently popular way of "building the rhyme"---certainly not the *lofty* rhyme, since so crumbling a foundation could carry no height of superstructure---contains the elements of the most popular rhythm of our day: any number of syllables to the line, from four up to twelve or more, with no more than four accented. A spirited song in this measure, other things *not* being quite equal, almost certainly becomes more popular than one in any other. Most of Barry Cornwall's and Mrs. Heman's songs use it, as do Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Coleridge's "Christabel," Byron's "Siege of Corinth," and Shelley's "Sensitive Plant." Spenser first used it well, in one of the months of the "Shepherd's Calendar." We quote a few lines to show the kind we mean:---

| "No marvel, Thenot, if thou can bear
| Cheerfully the winter's wrathful cheer;
| For age and winter accord full nigh;
| This chill, that cold; this crooked, that wry;
| And as the lowering weather looks down,
| So seemest thou like Good Friday to frown:
| But my flowering youth is foe to frost;
| My ship unwont in storms to be tost."

We can trace it slightly in Sir Thomas Wyatt, and we think in others before Spenser, but not in Chaucer. We judge it the essential rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which would harmonize with, if it cannot explain, its still being the most popular measure. Shakspere uses it a little in one play, if not more, though there it shares the irregular character of the older plays he imitates. But we suspect the clowns of authoring some of the rhymes, "speaking more than was set down for them," evidently no uncommon offence.

Prose was likewise in use for the drama at an early period.

But we must now look at the application of blank verse to the drama, where we owe most to Mr. Collier's investigations, than whom no one has deserved more gratitude. It is universally acknowledged that "Ferrex and Porrex" was the first drama in blank verse. It was never put on the public stage. It was the joint work of Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton, both gentlemen of the Inner Temple, whose members played it before the Queen at Whitehall in 1561, three years before Shakspere's birth. Though the verse is decent and in some respects irreproachable, time spent reading it is, we think, all but lost except to those who must verify their literary profession for themselves---a profession which, like all others, involves a good deal of disagreeable duty. We spare our readers any quotation, since there is no need to show what blank verse of the commonest sort is. But this drama by no means represents Thomas Sackville's poetic powers. Though we cannot agree with Hallam's general criticism, for or against Sackville, and though we admire Spenser, we hope, as much as Hallam could have, we venture to say that some of Sackville's personifications may "fairly be compared with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser," and more: in this kind Sackville has a strength and simplicity of representation that surpasses Spenser's in passages where Spenser probably imitated him. We mean the allegorical personages in Sackville's "Induction to the Mirrour of Magistrates" and in Spenser's description of the "House of Pride."

Mr. Collier judges that the first blank-verse play acted on the public stage was Christopher Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," before 1587, when Shakspere was twenty-three, and that better plays by Marlowe followed. His dramatic art is not much, but in dramatic *poetry* he far surpassed everyone before him. Passages worth quoting for their poetry are innumerable, though many others lie in a border land between poetry and bombast where we cannot say which they are. A critic can easily win credit for common sense, and spare himself the *thinking* he so often cannot do, by labelling all such passages bombastical nonsense; but a wise reader sees that poetry and bombast, though not the same, meet so entirely at their extremes that they can mix, if not combine. Goethe need not have been ashamed of one or two scenes in Marlowe's "Faust," though they are nothing like his own work. For dramatic purposes Marlowe's verse is far inferior to Shakspere's, but it mattered greatly that he came first and helped prepare Shakspere's tools. That blank verse was ready for Shakspere seems to us providential, even in a system in which we cannot believe in chance. The stage is raised a few feet because it shows a *representation*; likewise the speech of a drama, which presents ideal not unreal persons (the fool a worthy fool, the villain a worthy villain), must be raised some tones above ordinary life and its *commonplace* flavour. Shakspere's drama has no commonplace, which already lifts it above ordinary life, so its speech must be lifted too, from prose to blank verse. Go beyond that and we are unnatural for stage and life alike, as in the kind of composition, familiar in his time, that he mocks in the player's speech about *Priam* and *Hecuba* in "Hamlet"; we could show the very passages of the play-writer Nash that he imitates. Another figure: in the same play he tells the players "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." Everyone has felt that an object looks different seen directly and in a mirror; nature herself is not the same in the mirror held up to her. Everything changes sides, and a familiar homely room gains something strange and poetic in the mirror over the fire. For this reflection on the stage, blank verse is the suitable glass to take the silvering of the genius behind it.

If Shakspere had had to make his tools first, quarry his stone and fell his timber for his house, instead of finding the stone hewn and the timber already in logs and planks beside him, no doubt his house would have been built; but can we suppose it would have proved such "a lordly pleasure-house"? Not even Shakspere could do without his poor little brothers who preceded him and, like the goblins and gnomes of the drama, got everything out of the dark earth's bowels, ready for the master, whom it would have been a shame to see working in the gloom and dust instead of the open eye of day. Nothing helps the true development of power so much as free action for whatever power is already operative; blank verse gave this room.

Yet when Shakspere first came upon the scene of dramatic labour, he had to serve his private apprenticeship, to which the age's apprenticeship in the drama had led up. He had to act first. Driven to London and the drama by an irresistible impulse, when he needed a profession to be independent of his father, being himself, though very young, a married man, the impulse would naturally first show itself as the desire to act, for outside relations operate first. We can hardly judge how good an actor he was, for in his own plays he never took the best characters, writing them for his friend Richard Burbage. Possibly writing satisfied the dramatic impulse, though the study he gave to the higher department of the art might have been more than enough to make him unrivalled in presenting his own conceptions. But the dramatic spring, once through the surface, would scoop out a deeper and deeper well for itself, and the actor would soon work on the parts he studied. Finding that he greatly bettered his own parts, others would submit theirs, and at length whole plays for revision, of which there may be several in his collected works. If the feather-end of his pen is just traceable in "Titus Andronicus," the point of it is much more evident, and to as good purpose as Beaumont or Fletcher could have used his at best, in "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." Before long he would submit one of his own plays; and then his whole dramatic career lay open, for which nature qualified him better than probably any other man. He knew acting practically---the play-house and its capabilities, stage necessities, each of the company's endowments and qualifications---so that when writing a play he could distribute the parts before they were on paper, and write for each actor with the living form of the ideal person present "in his mind's eye," and often to his bodily sight. The actual came in aid of the ideal, as it always does if the ideal is genuine, and the loftiest conceptions proved the truest to visible nature.

This close relation of Shakspere to the actual leads to a general and remarkable fact, which will lead us back to him: all the great writers of Elizabeth's time were men of affairs, not merely literary men in the present usual sense. Hooker was a hard-working, sheep-keeping, cradle-rocking pastor of a country parish. Bacon had innumerable legal duties before becoming Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor. Raleigh was soldier, sailor, adventurer, courtier, politician and discoverer; we owe his most ambitious literary work, "The History of the World," hardly to be surpassed in prose for majesty of subject and style, to his imprisonment. At twenty-three Sidney won the highest praise for managing a secret embassy to the Emperor of Germany; he took the deepest, most active interest in his country's politics, would have sailed with Sir Francis Drake for South American discovery, and might have been king of poor Poland had the queen not been too selfish or wise to spare him. All his literary work came in spare hours. Spenser, the most purely literary of them but Shakspere, was at one time Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland and later Sheriff of Cork. And the remark is true beyond Elizabeth's writers and England.

It seems to us among the greatest advantages for a poet to be drawn out of his study, and still more out of the chamber of imagery in his own thoughts, to behold and reflect on the embodiment of Divine thoughts and purposes in men and their affairs around him. Shakspere held no public appointment, but his dramatic position gave him all the advantage of one, and more. He had more than plays to deal with: an actor himself, and in great measure owner of more than one theatre, he ruled a little realm harder to govern than many a kingdom---a company of actors, though perhaps easier for being only men and boys---and supervised the management's finances. In the relations and necessities of his profession he found not only enough of the actual to keep him real, but almost enough opportunity for his one great study, mankind, quite apart from his social and friendly relations, which were of the widest and deepest.

But Shakspere had not business relations merely: he was a man of business. His life sets in full light a common blunder, in theory on one side and practice on the other. The theory is that genius is an abnormal development of imagination at the cost of practical powers, so that a genius is incapable and incompetent in worldly matters. The most complete refutation is that the greatest genius the world has known succeeded in common affairs. As his genius grew in strength, fervour and executive power, his worldly condition rose too; he became important in his townspeople's eyes, who would not have honoured him had he not made money, and he bought landed property in his native place with the proceeds of managing his theatres.

The practical blunder is the notion, sometimes held by young people ambitious of literary distinction, that they must accept the poverty to which the world dooms its greatest men, and take it as further proof of their genius. If this means the poet is not to make money his object, it means well: no man should. But if it means that the world is unkind, or that the poet is not to "gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost," it means ill. Shakspere did not make haste to be rich. He neither blamed, courted nor neglected the world; he was friendly with it. He *could* not have pinched and scraped, but neither did he waste or neglect his worldly substance, which is God's gift too. Many immense fortunes have been made in ways, short of dishonesty, to which a man of genius ought to be yet more ashamed than another to stoop; but a man of genius who does honest work will make a fair livelihood by it, which is better for all good results of intellect and heart than a great fortune. Shakspere began by doing what he could. He did not agree to starve until the world recognized his genius, or grumble at its blindness to what could not be seen before it was set forth. He supplied something the world wanted, for it wants many an honest thing: he went on the stage and acted, and so gained power to reveal his genius, which the world, in its measure, was not slow to recognize. Many a young fellow who entered life with the one ambition of being a poet has failed because he did not see that it is better to be a man than a poet, and that his first duty is to earn an honest living by honest work he can do and for which there is a demand, though it may not be the pleasantest. Time would have shown whether he was meant to be a poet; if not, he would have been no beggar; if so, it would have been partly by virtue of the experience of life and truth, won in the struggle for bread, without which a man may be a sweet dreamer but no strong maker, no poet. In a word, here is *the* Englishman of genius, beginning with nothing and dying not rich but easy and honoured, by doing what no one else could do: writing dramas in which outward grandeur or beauty is only an exponent of inward worth, hiding pearls for the wise within the jewelled play of the variegated bubbles of fancy he blew as he wrought for the innocent delight of his thoughtless brothers and sisters. Wherever the rainbow of his genius stands, at the foot of its arch lies a golden key that opens the secret doors of truth and admits the humble seeker into the presence of Wisdom, who, having cried in the streets in vain, sits at home waiting for him who will come to find her. And Shakspere had cakes and ale, although he was virtuous.

But what do we know about Shakspere's character? How can we tell the inner life of a man who uttered himself in dramas, where he can never speak in his own person? He may voice his own sentiments through many of his persons, but how are we to know when? At least, as a self-evident negative: a passage on a wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the best characters in the play is not likely to hold the dramatist's cautiously formed and cherished opinion. That may seem a truism, but one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, even printed separately and illuminated, is "The Seven Ages of Man," full of inhuman contempt for humanity and unbelief in its destiny, in which no age passes over its poor sad stage without a sneer; and Shakspere gives it to the *blasé* sensualist *Jaques* in "As You Like it," whom the good and wise *Duke* says has been as vile as a man can be, so vile that it would be an added sin in him to rebuke sin; a man who never could see what is good in any man and hates men's vices *because* he hates himself, seeing in them only the reflex of his own disgust. Shakspere knew better than to say that all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. He had been a player himself, but only on the stage; *Jaques* had been a player where he ought to have been a true man. His whole account of human life is contradicted and exposed, the moment he finishes his wicked burlesque, by the entrance of *Orlando*, the young master, carrying *Adam*, the old servant, on his back. The song that follows sings true: "Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly." Between the *all* of *Jaques* and the *most* of the song lies the difference between earth and hell.---Of course, from a literary and dramatic point of view, "The Seven Ages" is perfect.

Now one positive statement to balance the other. When a noble character voices not stock sentiments of stage virtue but appreciation of a truth that takes deep thought and experience united with love of truth to discover or verify for oneself---especially a truth most men will fail not only to recognize but to understand, since understanding it depends on prior spiritual perception---we may take the passage as an expression of the writer's inner soul. He must have seen it before he could say it; and to see such a truth is to love it, or rather love of truth in general must have preceded and enabled the discovery. Such a passage is the *Duke*'s speech opening the second act of "As You Like it." Its lesson is that a man's well-being cannot be secured unless he shares the ills of life, "the penalty of Adam." It seems strange to us that the excellent editors of the Cambridge edition now being published, a great boon to all students of Shakspere, did not see that the original reading, that of the folios, is right,---

| "Here feel we *not* the penalty of Adam?"

which, with the point of interrogation supplied, gives the true meaning of the whole passage: the penalty of Adam is just what makes the "wood more free from peril than the envious court," teaching each "not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think."

But Shakspere, though everywhere felt, is nowhere seen in his plays. He is too true an artist to show his face from behind the play of life he fills his stage with. What we find of him we must find by regarding the whole and letting its spiritual essence find its way to brain and heart. The student of Shakspere becomes imbued with the idea of his character; it exhales from his writings. Once we have found a play's main drift---the grand rounding of the whole---we may interpret individual passages by it; only in relation to the whole can we do them full justice, and in that relation we discover the master's mind.

We have another source of more direct enlightenment about Shakspere himself---*direct*, not more certain or extended. One collection of poems, his sonnets, speaks in his own person and of himself. Though they present him in a small relative space, they admirably round and complete, to our eyes, the circle of his individuality. In them and the plays the common saying, one of the truest, that extremes meet, is verified; no man is complete without extremes, or if they do not meet. His individuality, judged by his dramas alone, has been declared nonexistent, while in the sonnets he shows some of the deepest phases of a healthy self-consciousness. We do not enter the unsettled question whether they were addressed to a man or a woman; we have scarcely a doubt ourselves, as the argument we found on our conviction will show. The other question, *If a man, what man?* interests us little. A few at the end, as they have come down to us, are beyond doubt addressed to a woman, but their difference in tone from the others we think very remarkable. Possibly when they were written---most of them early in his life, as it appears to us, though not published till 1609, when he was forty-five, Meres referring to them in 1598 as known "among his private friends"---he had not known such women as he knew afterwards, and the true devotion of his soul went to a friend of his own sex. Gervinus, whose lectures on Shakspere are more profound and lofty than any other interpreter's, and which we are glad to see in suitable English under his own superintendence, says somewhere that as Shakspere lived and wrote his ideal of womanhood grew nobler and purer. Certainly the woman to whom the last few sonnets are addressed was neither noble nor pure. In this matter at least we think they record one of his early experiences.

We shall briefly indicate what we find in these sonnets about the man himself, beginning with what is least pleasing and of least value.

We must confess that probably soon after he first came to London, he, then a married man, had an intrigue with a married woman, of which there are indications that he was afterwards deeply ashamed. One little incident seems traceable: he gave her a set of tablets his friend had given him; and the sonnet excusing himself to his friend for it seems to us the only special pleading, and so ungenuine expression, in the whole. This friend, to whom the rest of the sonnets are addressed, made the woman's acquaintance, and both were false to Shakspere. Even Shakspere could not keep the love of a worthless woman. So much the better for him; but it is a sad story. Yet even in this evil environment we see his nobility and real self. The sonnets in which he mourns his friend's falsehood, forgives him, and finds excuses so as not to lose his love of him are, to our minds, among the most beautiful and profound. Of these are the 33rd and 34th. In the 35th he goes on to comfort his friend in his grief for his offence, even accusing himself of offence in having made more excuse for his fault than it needed! But to leave this part of his history, which as far as we know stands alone yet cannot truthfully be passed by, any more than the story of David's crime, though the two compare in nothing beyond the primary fact, let us look at the one reality that, spiritually and apart from literary beauty, makes these poems stand all but alone in literature: the devotion of his friendship, already unavoidably touched on. We say *all but alone*, because we should better understand these poems from the fact that in our day has appeared the only other poem like them, which casts a light back upon them.

| "Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
|   Where thy first form was made a man:
|   I loved thee, spirit, and love; nor can
| The soul of Shakspeare love thee more."

So sings the Poet of our day, in the loftiest of his poems---"In Memoriam"---to the spirit of his vanished friend. In the midst of his song arises the thought of *the Poet* of all time, who loved his friend too, and would have lost him in a way far worse than death, had his love not been too strong even for that ghastly death which threatened to cut the golden chain between them and part them by the impassable gulf. Tennyson's friend never wronged him; Shakspere's love has the added divineness of forgiveness. Such love between men is rare, and so to a mind in itself no way rare it is incredible, being unintelligible. Divine individuality is always rare, though all common things are divine, and faith in its ideal sense is always hard to find. But perhaps this affection between men, as Coleridge indicates in his "Table Talk," was more common under Elizabeth and James than now. There is a dread of the demonstrative today which may be carried where it is out of place and hinder a devotion that must be real, grand and divine if one man such as Shakspere or Tennyson has felt it. If one has felt it, humanity may claim it, and He who is *the* Son of man has surely verified the claim. Few of us, we believe, know what *to love our neighbour as ourselves* means; but when a man here and there over the centuries does, we may take him as the prophet of coming good for his race, his prophecy being himself.

Next to the interest of knowing that a man could love so well comes the association of this fact with his art. He who could look abroad on men and understand them all---who stood, as it were, in the open gates of his palace and welcomed everyone in sight---had in its inner places one chamber where he met his friend and where his whole soul went out to understand his friend's. The man to whom nothing in humanity was common or unclean; in whom the most remarkable artistic moral is fair-play; who fills our hearts with saintly love for *Cordelia* and admiration of *Sir John Falstaff*, the lost gentleman, mournful even at the height of our laughter; who could make an *Autolycus* and a *Macbeth* both human, and an *Ariel* and a *Puck* neither human---this is the man who loved best. We believe this depth of capacity for loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men and women and all his dramatic pre-eminence. The heart is more intelligent than the intellect. Well says the poet Matthew Raydon, who has hardly left anything behind him but the lamentation over Sir Philip Sidney in which these lines occur,---

| "He that hath love and judgment too
| Sees more than any other do."

We simply believe that this---not this only, but this more than any other endowment---made Shakspere the artist he was, by giving him all the material of humanity to work upon and keeping him to the true spirit of its use. Love looking forth upon strife understood it all. Love is the true revealer of secrets, because it makes one with the object regarded.

"But," say some impatient readers, "when shall we have done with Shakspere? There is no end to this writing about him." It will be a bad day for England when we have done with Shakspere, for that will mean that, along with losing him, we can no longer understand him. Should that time come, Heaven grant the generation that does not understand him at least the grace to keep its pens off him, which will by no means follow from the non-intelligence! The plentiful writing so far must do good in proportion as it directs attention to him and helps understanding of him. While today's utterances pass away, tomorrow's children are born and need new utterance for their fresh need from those who have gone before, tasted life and Shakspere, and can help them further by telling what they have found. Had this cry been raised last century, after good Dr. Johnson stopped displaying the facts about his own incapacity that he took for criticisms of Shakspere, where would our aids to understanding the dramatist now be? Reflecting with how much labour we have deepened our knowledge of him and found in him *the best*---for the best does not lie on the surface for the careless reader---we are convinced that not half has been done that ought to be to help young people at least understand their country's master mind. Few can give it the attention we have, but much may be done with judicious aid. And a profound knowledge of their greatest writer would do more than almost anything to bind the hearts of coming generations of Englishmen together in a true and unselfish way; for his works are our country in a convex magic mirror.

When a man finds that each time he reads a book not only does some obscurity melt away but deeper depths dawn upon him, he is not likely to think the time has come to stop writing about it. In Shakspere, as in all true artistic work and nature herself, the depths are never utterly revealed; and every new generation needs new aid toward discovering itself and its own thoughts in these forms of the past. Of all who read about Shakspere, few are reached by more than one or two utterances. The speech or writing must go out to find the soil for its kernel of truth. So, aware that perhaps more has been said and written about Shakspere than any other writer, we venture to add a few general remarks.

First we would remind our readers of the marvel of two faculties combined to a high degree in Shakspere, one generally far inferior to the other: reception and production. Great receptive power, brought into play by reading or observation, is rarely combined with originality of thought. Some hungers are quite satisfied by taking in what others have thought, felt and done, and many minds grow on this food; others feed far more on what rises from their own depths: answers they must give to questions that come unsought; theories they cannot help constructing to unite in one whole the facts around them, which at first strive like the atoms of a chaos; impulses of hidden origin that at one time show a height of being far above the thinker's present condition, at another a gulf of evil he may fall into. In Shakspere the powers of beholding and originating meet like the rejoining halves of a sphere. A man who thinks his own thoughts a great deal will often walk through London streets and see nothing. In the man who only observes, every passing object mirrors itself in its prominent peculiarities but rouses no magician from the inner chamber to charm and chain its image to his purpose. In Shakspere every outer form of humanity and nature spoke to the ever-moving, self-vindicating---we had almost said, and in a sense it would be true, self-generating---humanity within him. The sound of any action outside struck in him just the chord that, set in motion within him, would have produced a similar action. When anything was done, he felt as if he were doing it---perception and origination joined in one consciousness.

To this gift was joined the gift of utterance, or representation. Many a man both receives and generates who somehow cannot represent. Nothing is more disappointing than our first experience of the artistic attempts of a man who has raised our expectations by a social display of familiarity with, and command of, the subjects of conversation. When such a one tried to give these thoughts vital or artistic form, so that they might *exist* rather than be born and die on his lips, was not a poor, weak, faded *simulacrum* the result? Shakspere was a great talker who enraptured listeners and was himself so rapt that he could scarcely come to a close; but only alone with his art did he rise to the height of his great argument, and all the talk was like the fallen mortar and stony chips lying about the walls of the great temple of his drama.

Along with this wealth of artistic speech, an artistic virtue of an opposite kind is remarkable: his reticence. How often he might say fine, particularly poetic, things and does not, because it would not suit the character or the time! How many delicate points in his plays we find only after many readings, because he will not put one tone of success into natural utterance to draw attention to the author's triumph and jar with the all-important reality of his production! Wherever an author obtrudes his self-importance, unreality results, like what we feel in the old moral plays when historical and allegorical personages, such as *Julius Caesar* and *Charity*, are on the same stage in the same story. Shakspere never points to any stroke of his own wit or art. We may find it or not: there it is, and no matter if no one sees it!

Much has been disputed about how conscious Shakspere was of his art: whether he worked by a grand yet blind impulse or knew what he wanted and knowingly used the means. We cannot enter on that here, but we recommend anyone interested not to decide before considering a passage in another of his poems, which may throw light on it: the description of a painting in "The Rape of Lucrece," towards the end. Its very minuteness expresses principles and reveals that in an art not his own he could hold principles of execution and indicate perfection of finish, which must at least come from a general capacity for art and so might operate as consciously in his own province. For our part we think his results are a perfect combination of consciousness and unconsciousness: consciousness where the play's arrangements, outside the region of inspiration, required the wakeful intellect's care; unconsciousness where the subject itself bore him aloft on the wings of its own creative delight.

There is another manifestation of his power that will astonish those who consider it. He could go down to the simple and grand realities of human nature, which are all tragic, and so rejoice most in contemplations that find fit outlet in a "Hamlet," a "Lear," a "Timon," or an "Othello"---the tragedies of Doubt, Ingratitude, and Love---yet he can, when he chooses, float on the very surface of human nature, as in "Love's Labour's Lost," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "The Comedy of Errors," "The Taming of the Shrew;" or descend half way and remain suspended in the characters and feelings of ordinary nice people, interesting to meet in society but without the development or circumstances that admit the highest and simplest poetic treatment. In these he brings out the ordinary noble or ordinary vicious. Most of his comedies are of this kind: an ideal representation of common social life, steering clear of what in such surroundings would be *heroics*. See how steadily he keeps the noble-minded youth *Orlando* in this middle region; and see how the best comes out at last in the wayward, *recalcitrant* and *bizarre*, but honest and true natures of *Beatrice* and *Benedick*, without untruth to the nature of comedy, though the circumstances border on the tragic. When he wants to give the deeper affairs of the heart, he throws the whole out of the social circle with its multiform restraints. As in "Hamlet" the stage is really *Hamlet*'s heart, he makes his visible stage slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead and Hades open beneath. Hence young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far sooner than the comedies, which need acquaintance with society and its ways.

The remarks on "Hamlet" lead us to point out how in some plays Shakspere prepares a stage suitable for the whole representation. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream" the place that gives tone to the whole is a midnight wood in the first flush and youthful delight of summer. In "As You Like it" it is a daylight wood in spring, full of morning freshness, with a cold wind now and then through the half-clothed boughs. In "The Tempest" it is a solitary island, circled by the mysterious sea-horizon, over which who can tell what may come?---a place where the magician may work his will and have all nature at the beck of his superior knowledge.

The only writer who might have rivalled Shakspere in his own walk, had he been born in the same period, is Chaucer, who has the same gift of individualizing the general and idealizing the portrait. The best dramatists of Shakspere's time, eager to individualize, forget the modifying multiformity of individual humanity. Anxious to present a *character*, they take a human mould, label it with a peculiarity, and fill in speeches and forms to match. The peculiarity so predominates, and the whole is so much of one colour, that the result is like an allegorical personification, with everything human removed except what belongs to the peculiarity. Shakspere is quite different. He knows no human being was ever like that. His most peculiar characters speak very much like other people, and their peculiarities show with indubitable plainness only over the whole. The one apparent exception is *Jaques*, in "As You Like it," but there Shakspere represents a man who chooses to represent himself so: a man *in his humour*, in his own chosen affectation. *Jaques* writes his own part, for with him "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women," himself first, "merely players." We see him as he chooses to be taken, not first as he is. His real self does come out, since no man can seem altogether other than he is, and the *Duke*, who sees through him, rebukes him as noted; but it is his affectation that gives his speech and manner their unnatural peculiarity, as he wishes.

So every one of Shakspere's characters stands on the firm ground of humanity, where weeds as well as flowers, glorious or fantastic, show themselves. His more heroic persons are the most profoundly human. Nor are his villains unhuman, though inhuman enough. Compared with Marlowe's Jew, *Shylock* is a terrible *man* beside a dreary *monster*, and, as far as logic and the *lex talionis* go, has the best of the argument. Crime is strong through human nature's own strength; wickedness has no power of itself but lives by the perverted powers of good. Shakspere's sympathy with *Shylock* is so great, even in the hard and unjust doom that overtakes him, that he dismisses him with some of the tender-hearted spectators' spare sympathies. Nowhere is the justice of genius plainer than in his utter freedom from party-spirit, even toward his own creations. Each character sets itself forth from its own point of view, and the poet's judgment appears only in the choice and scope of the whole. He never lets his opinion damage an individual's self-presentation. He knows something can be said for the worst, and that a feeling of justice and right will be strong in a man swayed by perfect selfishness. So the false man cannot be discovered in his speech, not only because the villain talks as like a true man as he can, but because seldom is the villainy clear to the villain's own mind. We cannot determine whether *Bolingbroke* or *Norfolk* spoke the truth in bandying the lie; doubtless each believed the other the villain he called him. Shakspere has no need to play the historian and decide it. He leaves his reader as puzzled as *Richard*, in full sympathy with his perplexity, as if present at the interrupted combat.

If every writer could write up to his own best, we should have far less to marvel at in Shakspere. His wealth of suggestions, an abundance of the best to choose from, largely lifts him above those who, having felt the inspiration of one good idea, must go on constructing, carpentering, with dreary handicraft, until the exhausted faculty can generate another. Then comes his unerring choice of the best. To see what variety he could produce of the same kind of thought, examine the same business in different plays: instigation to a crime in "Macbeth," where *Macbeth* tempts the two murderers to kill *Banquo*; in "King John," where *the King* tempts *Hubert* to kill *Arthur*; in "The Tempest," where *Antonio* tempts *Sebastian* to kill *Alonzo*; in "As You Like it," where *Oliver* instigates *Charles* to kill *Orlando*; and in "Hamlet," where *Claudius* urges *Laertes* to murder *Hamlet*.

He shows no anxiety about being original. A man full of his work forgets himself. In his desire to produce a good play he takes any material that offers, even a bad play to make a good one. One of the most remarkable discoveries for the student is the hide-bound poverty of some of the stories, which his life-power turns into forms of strength, richness and grace. He does what the *Spirit* in "Comus" says the music he heard might do,---

|             "create a soul
| Under the ribs of death;"

and then death is straightway "clothed upon." Nowhere is his genius's refining operation more evident than in purifying these stories. Characters and incidents that would have been honey and nuts to Beaumont and Fletcher he entirely remodels, despite their dramatic appeal. The fair *Ophelia* is in the old tale a common woman and *Hamlet*'s mistress; and the policy of the *Lady of Belmont*, in the old story's place of the lovely *Portia* he invented, on which the whole story turns, is as unfit to set forth in our pages as it was for his art. His noble art refuses to work on base matter. He sees at once a tale's capabilities, but will use it only if he may do with it what he pleases.

If we may help the young student who wants to help himself, we suggest that following Plutarch's way of comparison, in a measure, is the best guide to understanding the poet. Let him set any two characters side by side and look first for differences, then for resemblances, with the causes of each; or set two plays against each other and compare and contrast them. Take, for instance, *Hamlet* and *Brutus*: compare their beginnings and endings, their likenesses of character and differences of conduct, what was required of each and the circumstances demanding action, the helps and hindrances each had in working out life's problem, how each meets the supernatural or any other question the plays suggest, and end with each play's main lesson; he will be astonished to find, if he has not already, what a rich mine of intellectual and spiritual wealth lies open to him. Perhaps not the least valuable result is that the young Englishman who wants delivering from any temptation to think himself the centre of the universe will be helped toward honourable humility by looking up to the man who towers, like Saul, head and shoulders above his brethren and, seeing that he is humble, may learn to leave it to the pismire to be angry, the earwig to be conceited, and the spider to insist on his own importance.

To return to the main course: the dramas of Shakspere are so natural that this, their greatest praise, is the ground of one difficulty the young student feels in estimating them. The very simplicity of his art throws him out of any known groove of judgment. Hearing "*Look at this, and admire*," he is inclined to answer, "Why, he only says in the simplest way what the thing must have been. It is as plain as daylight." Yes, to the reader, and because Shakspere wrote it. There were a thousand wrong ways of doing it, and he took the one right way. He has made it plain in art, whatever it was before in nature; most likely its very simplicity in nature was scarcely observed before he saw and represented it. Is it not the glory of art to attain this simplicity? for simplicity is the end of all things---all manners, all morals, all religion. To say the thing could not have been done otherwise is to forget the art in beholding its object, the mirror because you see nature in it. Anyone can see the moon in Lord Rosse's telescope; but who made the reflector? Let the student try to express anything just as it is, in prose or verse, painting or modelling: only after many attempts does he know how hard this simplicity is to reach. The greater the success, the fewer the signs of labour. Simplicity is art's perfection.

So natural are all his plays, the great tragedies we now have in mind among them, that it may seem at first sight he built them on no moral plan and had no lesson of his own to teach, since they show no individual intent, depart nowhere from nature, and go straight on like a history. Their directness springs partly from his respecting humanity, not circumstance: he uses circumstance only to set forth humanity and cares nothing for the plot of circumstance so favoured by Ben Jonson and other contemporaries. As for their looking too natural to have any design, we do not believe it is unlike nature to have a design and a result. If the proof of a high aim is what the critics called *poetic justice*, a kind of justice one would gladly find more of in grocers' and linen-drapers' shops but can spare from a poem, then he has not always a high end: the wicked man is not tortured, nor the good man smothered in bank-notes and rose-leaves. Even Macbeth's outward ruin and death are only a small, unavoidable consequence in the wake of nature's, even God's, mighty vengeance: that Macbeth cannot say *Amen*; can sleep no more; is "cabined cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;" has a brain that is a charnel-house from which the ghosts of his own murders rise, till he envies the dead the rest his hand sent them to. That immediate and eternal vengeance on crime, and inner reward of well-doing, never fail in nature or in Shakspere, and seem so much a matter of course that they hardly look like design in nature or in the mirror he holds up to her. The secret is that, in the ideal, habit and design are one.

Most authors seem anxious to round off and finish everything in full sight. Most of Shakspere's tragedies compel our thoughts to follow their *persons* across the bourn; as Jean Paul says, they need a piece of the next world painted in to complete the picture. This is surely nature, but need not therefore be no design. What could be done with Hamlet but send him where he has some chance of finding his difficulties solved; where he will know his reverence for God, the sole stay left him in the flood of human worthlessness, has not been in vain; that the skies are not "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;" that there are noble women, though his mother was false and Ophelia weak, and noble men, though his uncle and Laertes were villains and his old companions traitors? If Hamlet is not to die, the play must perish under the charge that its hero is left with only a superadded misery, a fresh demand for action---to rule a people who seem to him worthless, when action has become impossible for him---and must live on, forsaken even by death, which will not come though the cup of misery is at the brim.

But a high end may be gained in this world, and the vision into the world beyond so justified, as in King Lear. The passionate, impulsive, unreasoning old king must certainly have given his wicked daughters occasion enough for the charges their avarice urged. He had learned little from his life of kingship; he was a boy with grey hair and no inner experiences. So all the development of manhood and age is crowded into the few weeks left of his life, his own folly and blindness supplying the occasion. Before they are gone he has passed through all the stages of a fever of indignation and wrath, ending in a madness from which love redeems him. He has learned that a king is nothing if the man is nothing; that a king ought to care for those who cannot help themselves; that love does not originate in favours flowing from royal munificence, and yet is the one thing worth living for, which gained, it is time to die. Now that he has life's experience and is a child in simplicity of heart and judgment, he cannot lose his daughter again; and she too has learned the one thing she needed with her father, a little more excusing tenderness. In the same play it cannot be chance that Gloucester at the start speaks with utmost carelessness and *off-hand* wit about his natural son Edmund's parentage, but finds at last that this son is his ruin.

Edgar, the true son, says to Edmund, after righteously dealing him his death-wound,---

| "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
| Make instruments to scourge us:
| The dark and vicious place where thee he got
| Cost him his eyes."

To which the dying and convicted villain replies,---

|         "Thou hast spoken right; 'tis true:
| The wheel is come full circle; I am here."

Could anything be put more plainly than the moral lesson in this?

It would be easy to give examples of fine design from the comedies too; for instance in "Much Ado about Nothing," Beatrice and Benedick, made to fall in love by each being assured of the other's love, are shown beforehand to have a strong inclination toward each other in their continual good-humoured squabbling; but this does not make them heartily in love until they find each other's nobility in how they act about the calumniated Hero; and the author takes care they are not married without first knowing of the trick played on them. We think it will be found true that Shakspere never leaves a character the same at the end of a play as at the beginning: better or worse, wiser or more irretrievably foolish. The historical plays illustrate this as well as any.

Of all the terrible plays we are inclined to think "Timon" the most terrible, and to doubt whether justice has been done to its finish and completeness. We also think it was printed (first in the first folio, 1623, seven years after Shakspere's death) from a copy corrected by the author but not *written fair*, with consequent mistakes. The same might be true of other plays, but perhaps more evidently of "Timon." The idea of making the generous spendthrift, whose old idolaters forsook him because the idol had no more to give, into the high-priest of the Temple of Mammon, dispensing the gold he hated and despised so that it might be a curse to the race he had learned to hate and despise too; and the way Shakspere discloses the depths of Timon's wound by comparing him with one who hates men by profession and humour---are as powerful as anything even in Shakspere.

We are very willing to believe "Julius Caesar" was one of his latest plays, for it is certainly the play in which he represents a hero in the high and true sense. *Brutus* is the hero: because he will do what he sees to be right regardless of personal feeling or advantage. Nor does his attempt fail from any overweening or blindness in himself. Had he known the various papers thrown in his way were concocted by *Cassius*, he would not have mistakenly supposed that the Romans longed for freedom and would defend it. As it was, he tried to liberate a people that did not feel its slavery. He failed for others but not for himself; his truth was such that everybody was true to him. Unlike Jaques with his seven acts of burlesque of human life, Brutus says at the last,---

|                             "Countrymen,
| My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life,
| I found no man but he was true to me."

Of course all this is in Plutarch. But it is easy to see with what relish Shakspere takes it up, setting forth all the aids in himself and others that Brutus had toward being a hero, and making the representation as credible as possible.

We must heartily confess that no amount of genius alone makes a man good; genius only shows the right way and drives no one to walk in it. But surely we have some moral scent to tell whether a man cares for good only from an artistic point of view or admires and loves good. No dramatist true to his art can set this admiration and love forth *prominently*, but it must come out over the whole: his predilections must show in the scope of his artistic life, in the things and subjects he chooses and how he represents them. Notwithstanding Uncle Toby and Maria, who will venture to say that Sterne was noble or virtuous, looking over the whole of what he wrote? In Shakspere there is no suspicion of a cloven foot. Everywhere he is on the side of virtue and truth. Many small arguments with great cumulative force might be given to this effect.

For ourselves, we cannot easily believe that the calmness of his art could be so unvarying unless he exercised it with a good conscience; that he could have kept looking out on the world with the untroubled regard needed to see all things as they are unless there had been peace in his house at home; that he could have known all men as he did and failed to know himself. Any degree of partial or excited genius may coexist with evil ways, but not such calm and universal genius as his works show, except in association with all that is noblest in human nature. It also counts for his rectitude that he never forces it on others' attention. The strong impression left on us is that, however Shakspere may have strayed in the early part of his life in London, he was for the main part not only an upright and noble man but a repentant man, whose life was influenced by the truths of Christianity.

Much is now said about a memorial to Shakspere. The best and only true memorial is no doubt the one in Milton's poem on this subject: the living, ever-changing monument of human admiration, expressed in the faces and forms of those absorbed in reading his works. But if an external monument could foster the constant reproduction of the inward monument of love and admiration, it might well be raised; and to that end let us venture to propose one way.

Let a Gothic hall of the fourteenth century be built, such as would be more in Shakspere's imagination than any architecture of his own time. Let it hold every early edition of his works that can be procured, singly or collectively, a copy of every other edition ever printed, and every book or treatise about him or his works, good, bad or indifferent. Let a special place hold the shameless corruptions of his plays produced as improvements, some of which, to England's disgrace, still partly occupy the stage in place of what he wrote. Let one department hold every work that directly elucidates his meaning, chiefly those of the dramatic writers who preceded and closely followed him. Let the windows show in stained glass the popular sports of his own time and of the times of his English histories, and a small museum hold all procurable antiquities referred to in his plays, with, if possible, first editions of the best books of his time that he probably read, so that the whole represents his time as far as possible. Let a marble statue in the midst do the best English art can for the vanished man, and let copies, if not the originals, of the portraits be safely shrined for the multitude to see. Let the perpetual care the monument needs be secured by endowment, and let a reading-room fitted for the comfort of all who wish to use these facilities serve the public in a true acquaintance with our greatest artist. Let a simple, moderately sized theatre be attached, for occasional use, for Shakspere's plays *only*, free of expense for amateur or other representations of them for charitable purposes. And within a certain cycle of years---if it would be too much to expect enough London play-goers to justify acting all his plays once in the season---let all of them be acted in the best manner the managers of the time can manage.

The very existence of such a theatre would be a noble protest of the highest kind against the sort of play, chiefly translated and adapted from the French, that infests our boards, whose low tone, even where not decidedly immoral, does more harm than any amount of Shakspere's rough, honest plain-spokenness, as judged by our more fastidious if not always purer manners. Such plays are the real ground of objection to theatre-going. We believe the other objections, which could equally be urged against large assemblies of any sort, rest on less objectionable fact than good people suppose. Such objections are, or ought to be, directed not against the drama but against its avoidable concomitants. The dramatic impulse, like all other impulses of our nature, is from the Maker.

A monument like this would help change blind enthusiasm and *dilettante*-talk into knowledge, reverence and study; and surely that is the true way to honour the man who appeals to posterity by no mighty deeds of worldly prowess but left food for heart, brain and conscience on which generations will feed till the end of time. It would be the one true and natural way of perpetuating his fame in kind, helping him do more of that for which he was born and for which we humbly wish to honour him, as the years flow farther from when, at fifty-two, he left the world a richer legacy of intellectual labour than any other labourer in literature. It would be a monument to his mind more than his person.

But to honour Shakspere in the best way we must not gaze on a grand memorial of his fame, nor talk largely of his doings, nor even watch his works acted, invaluable as that is to understanding them; by close, silent, patient study we must enter into an understanding with the spirit of the departed poet-sage, and let his own words be the necromantic spell that raises the dead and brings us into communion with the man who knew what was in men more than any other mere man. Well was it for Shakspere that he was humble; else on what a desolate pinnacle of companionless solitude must he have stood! Where was he to find his peers? To most thoughtful minds it is a terrible fancy that there is no greater human being than themselves. Shakspere's love for men preserved him from the terror of such a *truth*; he thought less about himself than about them. Had he been a self-student alone, or chiefly, could he ever have written those dramas? We close by repeating that the love of our kind is the one key to the knowledge of humanity and of ourselves. And have we not sacred authority for concluding that he who loves his brother is the more able and likely to love Him who made him and his brother also, and then told them that love is the fulfilling of the law?

## THE ART OF SHAKSPERE, AS REVEALED BY HIMSELF

\[Footnote: 1863.\]

| Who taught you this?
| I learn'd it out of women's faces.

*Winter's Tale*, Act ii. scene 1.

People sometimes say Shakspere's commentators find far more in him than he ever intended. That may be granted of every writer of genius. But if it means that nothing can *exist* in a work of art beyond what the writer knew while producing it, it is false to that extent.

No artist is a *creator* in the sense of inventing his own forms. The forms of man and nature that he modifies and combines into a new region of art have their own original life and meaning, and the laws of their combination are natural and harmonious. Whatever aspects he uses, he cannot remove the many more essential to their vitality, and to that of his presentation, which form the background his use stands out from. So the observant reader will find the objects falling into combinations and harmonies that are there whether the writer saw them or not; they will be numerous and true in proportion to the scope and truth of the representation, and the more harmonious meanings a work has, the better its claim to genius. So it must be granted, joyfully, that Shakspere may hold meanings he did not see, to which his art, as art, does not point.

Still, in great artists conscious art probably bears some proportion to unconscious truth, as the visible volcanic light bears a true relation to the hidden fire of the globe; so Shakspere's plays are unlikely to show many signs of working *art* he was unaware of. Some truths may be revealed through him that he knew only potentially; but marks of work bearing on the play's results are unlikely to be accidents. A stroke of the mallet may be more effective than the sculptor hoped, but he intended it. In the drama the chisel-marks are easier to find than in finished marble, since the lines fall into the general finish without being obliterated. Even so, the reader fears he is dressing the idol of his intellect in the weavings of his fancy; I am convinced it is the very consummateness of Shakspere's art that exposes it to this doubt, since the dramatist, like the sculptor, avoids every avoidable hint of the process, so that the result may be a living whole. But we need not argue only from probabilities. He has given us a peep into his studio---or *workshop*, which is more comprehensive.

We should not expect such a revelation as *literary* criticism, for using art and theorizing about it are very different mental operations. The productive and critical faculties are rarely equally strong, and even then cannot work equally on the same object. There is a perfect satisfaction in producing that does not need re-presenting to the critical faculty. A great writer's criticism of his own work comes from within, seeing the hidden side in relation to his own idea; ordinary criticism looks at the side turned to the public. Nor could so prolific a man find time to criticize others' works, except in relaxed moments like those at the Mermaid Tavern, where his friends sat silent under the flow of his wisdom and humour, or made the street ring with their own enjoyment.

But when an artist speculates about another art than his own, we may expect the principles he works by to take outward, visible form, modified by the difference of the art. In one of Shakspere's poems he describes an imagined work of a sister-art, Painting, so brilliantly that the light shines back on his own art, revealing the principles he held about representative art and suggesting many thoughts about detail, harmony, finish, pregnancy and scope. It is in "The Rape of Lucrece." A long quotation needs no apology: one of the greatest helps even an artist can give is to isolate peculiar beauties and compel us to see them.

Lucrece has sent a messenger to beg her husband to come at once. Waiting, worn out with weeping, she looks for some variation of her misery.

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| At last she calls to mind where hangs a piece
|   Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy;
| Before the which is drawn the power of Greece,
|   For Helen's rape the city to destroy,
|   Threatening cloud-kissing Ilion with annoy;
| Which the conceited painter drew so proud,
| As heaven, it seemed, to kiss the turrets, bowed.

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| A thousand lamentable objects there,
|   In scorn of Nature, Art gave lifeless life:
| Many a dry drop seemed a weeping tear,
|   Shed for the slaughtered husband by the wife;
|   The red blood reeked, to show the painter's strife.
| And dying eyes gleamed forth their ashy lights,
| Like dying coals burnt out in tedious nights.

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| There might you see the labouring pioneer
|   Begrimed with sweat, and smeared all with dust;
| And, from the towers of Troy there would appear
|   The very eyes of men through loopholes thrust,
|   Gazing upon the Greeks with little lust:
| Such sweet observance in this work was had,
| That one might see those far-off eyes look sad.

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| In great commanders, grace and majesty
|   You might behold, triumphing in their faces;
| In youth, quick bearing and dexterity;
|   And here and there the painter interlaces
|   Pale cowards, marching on with trembling paces,
| Which heartless peasants did so well resemble,
| That one would swear he saw them quake and tremble.

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| In Ajax and Ulysses, O what art
|   Of physiognomy might one behold!
| The face of either ciphered either's heart;
|   Their face their manners most expressly told:
|   In Ajax' eyes blunt rage and rigour rolled;
| But the mild glance that sly Ulysses lent
| Showed deep regard, and smiling government.

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| There pleading might you see grave Nestor stand,
|   As 'twere encouraging the Greeks to fight;
| Making such sober action with his hand,
|   That it beguiled attention, charmed the sight;
|   In speech, it seemed his beard, all silver-white,
| Wagged up and down, and from his lips did fly
| Thin winding breath, which purled up to the sky.

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| About him were a press of gaping faces,
|   Which seemed to swallow up his sound advice;
| All jointly listening, but with several graces,
|   As if some mermaid did their ears entice;
|   Some high, some low, the painter was so nice.
| The scalps of many, almost hid behind,
| To jump up higher seemed, to mock the mind.

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| Here one man's hand leaned on another's head,
|   His nose being shadowed by his neighbour's ear;
| Here one, being thronged, bears back, all bollen and red;
|   Another, smothered, seems to pelt and swear;
|   And in their rage such signs of rage they bear,
| As, but for loss of Nestor's golden words,
| It seemed they would debate with angry swords.

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| For much imaginary work was there;
|   Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
| That for Achilles' image stood his spear,
|   Griped in an armed hand; himself behind
|   Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
| A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
| Stood for the whole to be imagined.

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| And, from the walls of strong-besieged Troy,
|   When their brave hope, bold Hector, marched to field,
| Stood many Trojan mothers, sharing joy
|   To see their youthful sons bright weapons wield,
|   And to their hope they such odd action yield;
| That through their light joy seemed to appear,
| Like bright things stained, a kind of heavy fear.

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| And from the strond of Dardan, where they fought,
|   To Simois' reedy banks, the red blood ran;
| Whose waves to imitate the battle sought,
|   With swelling ridges; and their ranks began
|   To break upon the galled shore, and then
| Retire again, till, meeting greater ranks,
| They join, and shoot their foam at Simois' banks.

The oftener I read these verses, among Shakspere's earliest compositions, the more I am struck by the care with which he represents the *work* of the picture---"shows the strife of the painter." How like his own art!

The scope and variety of the whole picture is like one of his own works: mass achieved by accumulating individuals, Troy standing for the aim of the whole, the Simois flowing in foaming rivalry with men's strife---the pictorial form of that sympathy of nature with human passion he so often brings into his plays. But take a portion as a condensed picture of how his art combines all varieties into one whole: his genius is like Nestor's oratory in the seventh and eighth stanzas, which harmonizes every attitude and action through the influence that is both the occasion of the debate and the charm restraining it through fear of losing it. So the dramatic genius that harmonizes his play is visible only in its effects, too ethereal for the ruder intellect to analyse; it is like Nestor's words, for which the picture has only "thin winding breath which purled up to the sky." Take the power that reconciles, in the mysterious midnight of the summer-wood, the graceful passions of childish elves, the fierce passions of men and women, and their ludicrous reflection in the artisans' little convex-mirror drama: Puck revels in things that fall out preposterously; the Elf-Queen loves ass-headed Bottom, from whose long hairy ears---strange bouquet-holders---bloom the musk-roses, the odour-founts of the play; and the philosophy of the unbelieving Theseus, with the candour of Hippolyta, ties it all to human life. Or take the pretended madman Edgar, the court-fool, and the rugged old king going grandly mad, sheltered in one hut and lapped in the roar of a thunderstorm.

My object with this poem is to offer, from many instances, a few examples of how the excellences he describes in the picture turn into the corresponding forms of the drama. I hope it will then be unnecessary to urge that the artistic virtues he praises in another man's art went with a corresponding consciousness in his own---the artist's, which differs from the critic's in seeing its objects from the concave side of the hammered relief. If that is granted, I would go on to a more important conclusion: how unlikely it is that a writer conscious of such fitnesses was unconscious of the grand embodiments of truth in his plays, whether he knew it or not. An instance showing Shakspere quite at home contemplating such truths will strengthen this part of my argument.

I shall give corresponding embodiments in words, where colours yield to tones and lines to phrases, beginning with the lowest kind: art concerned with matters so small that it is hard to believe *unconscious* art had any part in them. They can hardly come directly from the inspiration of the whole, and their very minuteness argues that the poet was conscious of them; belonging only to the *construction* of the play, they cannot claim the independent existence of *truths*, which *are* there whether Shakspere saw them or not. If he did not intend them, the most that can be said is that his work is so natural that, as in life, there is room for wonderful coincidences that follow no law.

Perhaps every example I give will be open to dispute. Such matters admit no direct proof, and I would not have dared combine them but for the ninth stanza above, which I ask my readers to turn back to. Its *imaginary work* means work hinted at and left to the reader's imagination. On the stage such work must exist on a great scale; but the minute particularization of the "conceit deceitful" in the rest of the stanza justifies thinking that Shakspere intended many, if not all, of the *little* fitnesses a careful reader finds. They are not found more often because, like life, he blends everything into living beauty, with no salient points. He is not like the barn-door fowl, which runs out cackling when she has laid an egg, and often when she has not; in an ordinary drama the tone itself says---*I have done it*. But Shakspere will not spoil his art to show his art. It is there and does its part; find it if you can, and if not, pass on. If I can show such art exists where it is not readily discovered, it becomes more probable where it is harder to isolate and define.

To produce a few instances, then:

In "Much Ado about Nothing," since the play's nature is in its name, is it not likely that Shakspere named the two constables Dogberry (*a poisonous berry*) and Verjuice (*the juice of crab-apples*)? The names have nothing to do with their stupid harmlessness; they match their way of turning things upside down and saying the opposite of what they mean.

In the same play Margaret objects to her mistress wearing a certain rebato (*a large plaited ruff*) on her wedding morning. May this relate to her having worn her mistress's clothes the night before? She might have rumpled or soiled it, and feared discovery.

In "King Henry IV.," Part I., the Prince kills Hotspur in the last scene. History does not record this, and had it been a fact, its silence about so notable a deed would be a contradiction. But Shakspere needs the Prince to be the slayer, and will not contradict history even in its silence. What is he to do? He will account for history *not knowing*. Falstaff claiming the honour, the Prince says to him:

| "For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
| I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have;"

This reveals the Prince's magnificence, in being ready to give up his chief renown for a friend. But the Historic Muse could not believe fat Jack Falstaff had killed Hotspur, and would not record the claim.

In the second part of the same play, act i. scene 2, Falstaff is indignant at Mr. Dombledon, the silk mercer, for wanting security from a gentleman for a short cloak and slops of satin. In act ii. scene 1 the hostess says Sir John is to dine with Master Smooth, the silkman: foiled by Dombledon, he has already made himself so agreeable to Smooth that he is "indited to dinner." That is, by the bye, as to the action; but as to Sir John's character, is it not

| "Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind"---*kinned---natural*?

The *conceit deceitful* in the painting is imagination that means more than it says. So the speakers' words in the play stand for more than they mean; they are *Shakspere's* in relation to his whole. To Achilles his spear is only his spear; to the painter it stands for Achilles himself.

Coleridge remarks on *James Gurney* in "King John:" "How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!" They answer the Bastard's request to leave the room. Gurney has been lingering, as an old servant will, when Faulconbridge says, with strained politeness, "James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave a while?" Gurney, condescending to the second son he has known from infancy, replies, "Good leave, good Philip." That lets Faulconbridge show his ambition and scorn of his present standing, in contempt for even the Christian name he will soon exchange for *Sir Richard* and *Plantagenet*---*Philip* being then the name for a sparrow, which ladies made pets of. Surely in these words of the serving-man we have an outcome of the same art by which

| "A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
| Stood for the whole to be imagined."

In the "Winter's Tale," act iv. scene 3, Perdita, dressed with unwonted gaiety for the sheep-shearing festival, is astonished to find herself speaking in full strains of poetry. She says, half-ashamed:

| "Methinks I play as I have seen them do
| In Whitsun pastorals: sure, this robe of mine
| Does change my disposition!"

She does not mean this seriously, but the robe has more to do with it than she thinks. Her passion for Florizel sets the springs of her thoughts free, and they flow with a princess's grace; but the robe opens the door of her speech, and by raising her self-consciousness betrays her into what is natural to her but seems, on reflection, inconsistent with her low birth and poor education. This instance involves higher elements than my earlier ones and leads to a more important class.

In "Macbeth," act ii. scene 4, why is the old man introduced, who has nothing to do with the play's conduct?---So that, speaking with Rosse, he may bear witness to the exceptional terror of the storm, which, we find from Banquo's words:

| "There's husbandry in heaven:
| Their candles are all out,"---

had begun to gather before supper was over in the castle. This storm is Nature's sympathetic horror at the breaking open of the Lord's anointed temple---a horror the animals share, for Duncan's horses, "the minions of their race," the most sensitive of their kind, tear each other to pieces in it. Consider with this an earlier part of the same act. Macbeth, rejoining his wife after the murder, says:

| "Who lies i' the second chamber?

| "*Lady M.*        Donalbain.

| "There are two lodged together."

These two, Macbeth says, woke each other---one laughing, the other crying *murder*. Then they prayed and slept again.---I used to think Donalbain's companion would be his brother Malcolm, and that they woke in horror at their father's murderer passing the door. A friend objected that Malcolm, the elder, would then have been named rather than Donalbain. Accept this, and the significance is more delicate: the *presence* affected the two differently, one laughing, the other crying *murder*; yet both were terrified and dared not sleep till they had prayed. His sons, his horses, the elements are shaken by one unconscious sympathy with the murdered king.

Associate with this the end of act iv. scene 3 of "Julius Caesar," where all Brutus's attendants cry out in their sleep as Caesar's ghost leaves their master's tent. This outcry is not in Plutarch.

To return to "Macbeth:" why is the doctor introduced at the English court? He has no more to do with the play's progress than the old man, and is introduced for a precisely similar reason.---As a doctor, he is the best possible witness that King Edward the Confessor is a fountain of health to his people, gifted for his goodness with the sacred power of curing *The King's Evil* by his holy touch. The English King is introduced for contrast with the Scotch King, a raging bear among his subjects.

In the "Winter's Tale," named so for the extraordinary character of its events (the play itself says "*a sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins*"), Antigonus has a remarkable vision in which Hermione appears and commands the exposure of her child in a place that seems most unsuitable and dangerous. Convinced it is real, he obeys, and the whole marvellous result depends on it. So the vision must be genuine. But how could it be, if Hermione was not dead, as Antigonus firmly believed? I would feel this an objection to the play's art, but for this answer:---she was still in the deathlike swoon into which she fell when news of her son's loss reached her at her husband's judgment-seat, where she ought not to have been out of her chamber.

Note also, in act ii. scene 1 of the same play, how changeable Hermione's mood about her boy is, as a sign of her condition. If we overlook this, we shall think the words were put in only to fill up the business of the play.

In "Twelfth Night," both ladies make the first advances in love. Is it not worth noticing that one has lost her brother and the other believes she has lost hers? They may be placed with Phoebe in "As You Like It," who, having suddenly lost her love on discovering it was a woman, at once accepts her rejected lover Silvius, and with Romeo, who, rejected and, as he believes, inconsolable, falls in love with Juliet the moment he sees her. That his love for Rosaline was only *calf-love* beside his love for Juliet shows in the different tones of his speech. Compare what he says to Benvolio in act i. scene 1 with his later speeches: *conceit* is prominent in both, but one is ruled by fancy, the other by imagination.

In this same play there is another similar point. In Arthur Brook's story, Shakspere's source, Lady Capulet never tells Juliet of their intention to marry her to Count Paris. Why does Shakspere add this?---To explain Juliet's falling in love with Romeo so suddenly: her mother has set her mind moving that way. She has never seen Paris, and is looking about, wondering which he may be and whether she can like him, when she meets Romeo's love-filled eyes and is at once overcome. What a significant speech is Paulina's in the "Winter's Tale," act v. scene 1: "How? Not women?" She is a thorough partisan, siding with women against men, strengthened in this by her mistress's treatment by her husband. One has just said that if Perdita would begin a sect she might "make proselytes of who she bid but follow." "How? Not women?" she rejoins; assured that "women will love her," she has no more to say.

A stranger in an old book-shop gave me this explanation of a line in "Twelfth Night:"---Malvolio, having built his castle in the air, proceeds to inhabit it. Describing his behaviour in a supposed case, he says (act ii. scene 5): "I frown the while; and perchance, wind up my watch, or play with my some rich jewel"---A dash ought to come after *my*. Malvolio was about to say *chain*, but remembering it was the badge of his office as steward, and so of servitude, he changes it to "*some rich jewel*," said with pretended carelessness.

In "Hamlet," act iii. scene 1, did not Shakspere intend Ophelia's passionate soliloquy---one no maiden knowing she was overheard would utter---together with her father's words:

|             "How now, Ophelia?
| You need not tell us what lord Hamlet said,
| We heard it all;"---

to show that, weak as Ophelia was, she was not false enough to join any plot to betray Hamlet to her father and the King? They had stayed behind the arras, not gone out as she must have supposed.

Next, let my reader turn once more to the poem, consider the physiognomy of Ajax and Ulysses in the fifth stanza, and then see that description transformed into the higher form of revelation in speech in "Troilus and Cressida." Then, if he will associate the principles of that stanza with the third, especially its last two lines, I will apply this to Lady Macbeth.

Shakspere does not mean that someone looking at that portion alone could see the eyes looking sad, but that the *sweet observance* of the whole so rouses the imagination that it supplies what distance hid: the rest pointed that way.---In somewhat this way we are led to a right understanding of Lady Macbeth. First put together these utterances of hers:

| "You do unbend your noble strength, to think
|   So brainsickly of things."

|                            "Get some water,
| And wash this filthy witness from your hands."

|                            "The sleeping and the dead
| Are but as pictures."

| "A little water clears us of this deed."

|                            "When all's done,
| You look but on a stool."

| "You lack the season of all natures, sleep."---

Had these passages stood alone, we might have judged Shakspere meant Lady Macbeth as an utter materialist, believing in nothing beyond the immediate reports of the senses. But when we find them associated with passages like these---

|                "Memory, the warder of the brain,
| Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
| A limbeck only;"

|                        "Had he not resembled
| My father as he slept, I had done't;

|                 "These deeds must not be thought
| After these ways; so, it will make us mad;"---

then we find our former theory will not do; there are deeper foundations. Lady Macbeth was an unbeliever *morally*, and so found it necessary to keep down all imagination, the upheaving of that inward world whose very being she would have annihilated. Yet out of this world arose at last the phantom of her slain self, and, possessing her sleeping frame, sent it out to wander in the night and rub its distressed, blood-stained hands in vain. For, as in this same "Rape of Lucrece,"

|            "the soul's fair temple is defaced;
| To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares,
| To ask the spotted princess how she fares."

But when so many lines of delineation meet, run into and correct one another, taking so natural and living a form that there is no *making of a point* anywhere, and the woman is shown by no theory but by the natural laws of human decline, the only way to account for the perfection of the portrayal is that, given a shadow, Shakspere could so place himself that the shadow became his own---the correct shadow of his form coming between it and the sunlight. This is the highest dramatic gift a man can have, but it is mainly inspiration rather than art. Much conscious art probably mingled with it, but its lines are lost in the general glow, so we are left where we were as to Shakspere's artistic consciousness. I will now give a few plainer instances of such *sweet observance* in his work as he would have admired in a painting.

First, think how seldom Shakspere uses poetry in his plays. The whole play is a poem in the highest sense, but truth forbids him to make poetic speech the rule for his characters. Their speech is poetic in relation to the whole and the end, not to the speaker or the immediate utterance. Even though every character is idealized, it is idealized *after its kind*, and poetry would not be the ideal speech of most. Look then at the exceptions: they glow with poetic loveliness and fervour, and are very jewels of *sweet observance*, whose setting allows them force as lawful and prominence as natural. I will mention a few.

In "Julius Caesar," act i. scene 3, *Casca's* manner of speaking seems inconsistent with the "sour fashion" *Cassius* rightly attributes to him, till we remember he speaks in the midst of an almost supernatural thunder-storm: the hidden electricity of his nature comes out in poetic words answering the outburst of the overcharged heavens and earth.

Shakspere invariably makes the dying speak poetically, and generally prophetically, recognizing that the poetic and prophetic moods are identical at their highest, and that justice gives them the same name. Even *Sir John*, poor ruined gentleman, *babbles of green fields*. The passage is disputed; I believe that if this is not the original reading, Shakspere himself would justify it.

*Romeo* and *Juliet* talk poetry as a matter of course.

In "King John," act v. scenes 4 and 5, see how differently the dying *Melun* and the living, victorious *Lewis* regard the same sunset:

| *Melun*.

| . . . . . this night, whose black contagious breath
| Already smokes about the burning crest
| Of the old, feeble, and day-wearied sun.

| *Lewis*.

| The sun in heaven, methought, was loath to set;
| But stayed, and made the western welkin blush,
| When the English measured backward their own ground.


The exquisite duet between *Lorenzo* and *Jessica* opening act v. of "The Merchant of Venice" takes as its subject the circumstances that produce the mood---the lovely night and crescent moon---which make them talk poetry, then call for music, then speculate on its nature.

Now some instances of sweet observance of other kinds.

There is observance more true than sweet in *Jacques* in "As You Like It:" the fault-finder in age was the fault-doer in youth and manhood. *Jacques* patronizing the fool is one of the rarest displays of self-ignorance.

In the same play, when *Rosalind* hears *Orlando* is in the wood, she cries, "Alas the day! what shall I do with my doublet and hose?" When he asks, "Where dwell you, pretty youth?" she answers, tripping in her rôle, "Here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat."

In the second part of "King Henry IV.," act iv. scene 3, *Falstaff* says of *Prince John*: "Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh;---but that's no marvel: he drinks no wine." This is the *Prince John* who later betrays the insurgents by the falsest of quibbles, winning his revenge through their good faith.

In "King Henry IV," act i. scene 2, *Poins* does not call *Falstaff* a coward like the other two, but says only---"If he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms." Associate this with *Falstaff's* soliloquy on *honour* in act v. scene 1, and the true character of his courage or cowardice---it may bear either name---comes out.

Is there not conscious art in the hospitable face of Macbeth's castle, bearing a homely welcome in its multitude of nests of *the temple-haunting martlet* (Psalm lxxxiv. 3), just as *Lady Macbeth*, the fiend-soul of the house, steps out like the building's own speech with her falsely smiled welcome? Is there not *observance* in it?

Such instances might be endless, as Shakspere's work is infinite. I confine myself to two more, from "The Merchant of Venice."

Shakspere needs a character capable of the magnificent devotion of friendship the old story gives *Antonio*. So he gives us a man sober to sadness, thoughtful to melancholy, as the play's first words reveal. He holds "the world but as the world,"---

| "A stage where every man must play a part,
| And mine a sad one."

We are left to conjecture the cause of this sadness; *Antonio* professes not to know. But such a disposition, even with no definite cause, will generally attach itself to something; and accused of being in love, *Antonio* rejects it with only a sad "Fie! fie!" This and his whole character seem to me to point to an old but ever cherished grief.

Among other changes to the original story of this play, Shakspere has added the story of *Jessica* and *Lorenzo*, apparently wholly his own. Why? Surely there were characters and interests enough already!---It seems to me he doubted whether the Jew would have carried out his fell design against *Antonio* on the original ground of his hatred alone, without another passion to goad him, second only to his love of gold: his affection for his daughter, which, since he regarded her as his property, had risen to a passion. So Shakspere invents her, that he may send a dog of a Christian to steal her and, worse, tempt her to steal her father's stones and ducats. I suspect he sends the old villain off with more pity from the audience than any other dramatist of the time would have dared, or been able, to rouse, and that he is the only human Jew in the English drama up to then.

I have now reached the last and most important stage of my argument. If Shakspere was so well aware of the artistic relations of the parts of his drama, is it likely that the grand meanings of the whole were unperceived by him and reach us unintended---arising only from his dealing so truly with human nature that his work must involve whatever lessons human life itself involves?

Is there no intention, for instance, in placing *Prospero*, who forsook the duties of his dukedom for the study of magic, on a desert island with just three subjects: a monster below humanity, a creature etherealized beyond it, and a complete embodiment of human perfection? Is it not that he may learn how to rule, and then return, by his wisely directed magic, to the home and duties that devotion to magic had driven him from?

In "Julius Caesar," the death of *Brutus*, though it follows as the consequence of his murder of *Caesar*, differs in character from Caesar's death as Brutus differs from Caesar. *Caesar's* last words were *Et tu Brute?* When Brutus, resolved to lay violent hands on himself, takes leave of his friends, he says:

|             "Countrymen,
| My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life,
| I found no man, but he was true to me."

Here Shakspere did not invent; he found both speeches in Plutarch. But how unerring his choice!

Is the final catastrophe in "Hamlet" such because Shakspere could do no better?---It is: he could do no better than the best. Where but in the regions beyond could Hamlet's questionings be put to rest? It would have been a fine thing indeed for the most nobly perplexed of thinkers to be left---his love in the grave, his father's memory a torment, his mother's a blot, innocent blood on his innocent hands, half understood by his best friend---to climb in desolate dreariness the contemptible height of the degraded throne and shine the first in a drunken court!

Before my last instance I will draw attention to a passage in another play that *directly* teaches the lesson of the play I am about to discuss: the first speech in act ii. of "As You Like It" might be made a text for expounding the whole of "King Lear."

The banished duke is trying to bring his courtiers to see their exile as part of their moral training. I know I punctuate the passage differently, while returning to the old text.

|                    "Are not these woods
| More free from peril than the envious court?
| Here feel we not the penalty of Adam---
| The season's difference, as the icy fang,
| And churlish chiding of the winter's wind?
| Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
| Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say---
| This is no flattery; these are counsellors
| That feelingly persuade me what I am.
| Sweet are the uses of adversity."

The line *Here feel we not the penalty of Adam?* has caused much perplexity; Shakspere's expounders do not believe he can mean that the uses of adversity are really sweet. But the duke sees that *the penalty* of Adam is what makes the *woods more free from peril than the envious court*; that it is in fact the best blessing, since it *feelingly persuades* man *what* he is; and to know what we are, with no false judgments of ourselves, he finds so sweet that the *churlish chiding of the winter's wind* is well endured.

Now to *Lear*. We find an old man with a large heart, hungry for love and not knowing what love is; ignorant as a child in all matters of high import; so unsubdued, and so unkingly, in temper that he storms because his dinner is not ready by the clock of his hunger; a child in everything but his grey hairs, wrinkled face and failing strength. If a life ends so, whatever else its success, the end is wretched and unworthy. But let *Lear* be blown by the winds and beaten by the rains of heaven till he pities "poor naked wretches;" feels he has "ta'en too little care of" them; and sees through pomp what "a poor, bare, forked animal" he is; and the old king has risen higher in the real social scale---that of the country he is bound for---than when he held his kingdom undivided for his thankless daughters. Then let him learn at last that "love is the only good in the world;" let him find his *Cordelia*, and plot with her how in their dungeon they will be *singing like birds i' the cage* and, in the secret place of peace, look abroad on the world like *God's spies*; then let the generous old heart swell till it breaks, not with rage and hate and vengeance but with love; and all is well: it is time he went to overtake his daughter and dwell with her in the home of the true, the eternal, the unchangeable. All his suffering came from his own fault; but from it has sprung another crop, not of evil but of good, whose seeds lay unfruitful in the soil until the sharp ploughshare of ill brought them into the blessed influences of the air of heaven.

## THE ELDER HAMLET

\[Footnote: 1875\]

|         'Tis bitter cold,
| And I am sick at heart.

The ghost in "Hamlet" is as faithfully drawn as any character in the play, and after Hamlet himself interests me most. The rumour of his appearance is wrapped in a larger rumour of war: loud preparations for an uncertain attack fill the ears of "the subject of the land." The new king has hardly been elected before his marriage to his brother's widow shrouds the court in shame that forced revelry cannot dispel. Francisco's one significant utterance gives the key to the mood: "'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart." Into frost, moonlight, drunken shouting and bellowing cannon glides the silent prisoner of hell---no longer a king walking his halls by day, "the observed of all observers," but a thrall of the night, wandering between the bell and the cock with a jailer on either side. A poet tells of a king who lost his garments and ceased to be a king; here is one who has lost his body and, to his court, ceased to be a man. Is earth's night-cold pleasant to him after the purging fire? What crimes had he committed? He calls them foul crimes! Could they be his? But who can tell how a ghost, with his doubled experience, may judge? He and the fire together may see as a foul crime what the man and court counted a weakness at worst, and in a king laudable.

Alas, poor ghost! He flits, shifting and shadowy, over the ground he once paced in ringing armour---armed still, but his armour is a shadow. It cannot keep out the arrow of the cock's cry, and the heart it pierces is no shadow. Where is the axe with which, in angry dispute, he smote the ice till it cracked, and the arm that swung it? Wasting in the tomb; the arm he carries now cannot slay his murderer---for that he needs his son's. His new form has its privileges: it can change its dress at will, pass through gates or doors, work in the ground like a mole, and speak from the cellarage. But there is one to whom he cannot show himself, though he sees her: she has built a doorless, windowless wall between them, and no longer sees the husband of her youth. Outside her heart is the night he wanders while the palace windows flare; inside, his murderer sits by the wife of his bosom, and in the orchard the spilt poison still gnaws the roots of the daisies.

Twice the ghost has appeared to the sentinels, walking past three times each night while they, jellied with fear, said nothing. They seek Horatio, who on the third night speaks to him as a scholar can. To the first challenge he makes no answer and stalks away; to the second,

| It lifted up its head, and did address
| Itself to motion, like as it would speak;

but the gaoler cock calls him, and the kingly shape

|         started like a guilty thing
| Upon a fearful summons;

and then

|         shrunk in haste away,
| And vanished from our sight.

Ah, that summons! At which majesty welks and shrivels, and king and soldier start and cower and, armour and all, wither from the air!

But why has he not spoken before? Why not now, before the cock could claim him? He cannot trust the men. His court has forsaken his memory, crowding as eagerly about the mildewed ear as ever about his wholesome brother; how should he trust mere sentinels? A word to anyone else would defeat his purpose. In all Denmark there is only one he can trust---his student-son---and him he has not yet found, a ghost's condition having its strange difficulties.

Or did the men's horror at the sight of him wound and repel him? Does his regal dignity, unexhausted by fasting in fires, join with deep humiliation to make him shun their speech?

And Horatio---why does the ghost not answer him before the cock's time? Is it indignation, because his son's friend addressed him as an intruder on the night, a usurper of his own form? The speaker's companions see that he is offended and stalks away.

Much has the kingly ghost to endure in reopening relations with the world he left. Having mastered his wrath, he returns, and Horatio insults him again by calling him an illusion. This time he will bear it, and opens his mouth; but the cock is awake and he must go. The guards strike at the shadow with upraised halberds, and would stop it if they could---conduct so unfitting that they are at once ashamed, seeing the offence in the offended majesty. But he is gone. The proud king has found himself a thing of nothing to his body-guard, having lost the body that was their guard. He has yet to learn how little an honest ghost can do to gain credit for himself or his tale; his very privileges are against him.

Meanwhile his son is consuming his heart over a mother who could so soon forget such a husband, and in pity for the dead father who had such a wife. He is thirty, an obedient, honourable son, a man of thought, faith and aspiration. The ghost seeks him, burning with unendurable wrong, for the one cooling drop---his boy's sympathy, his answering rage and grief. But when he finds him, the loving father must watch his son tremble like an aspen-leaf in his doubtful presence. He has exposed himself to shame and the indignities of dullness to pour out his wrongs, but his disfranchisement from the flesh tells against him even with his son: Hamlet doubts that the apparition is his father. For all its burning words, the spirit may be a devil, who can take a pleasing shape and perhaps exploits his melancholy to damn him.

He comes armed in the full steel the sentinels know---visionary none the less, a useless truncheon in hand, with quiet countenance, more in sorrow than in anger. What troubles him is not the hell-day to which he must return sleepless, but the ache that draws him back to the scene of his wrongs whenever he is let out into the cooler air---where, asleep in his orchard in sacred security, he was flung by cruel assault into Hades, to horror upon horror, worst of all the knowledge of his wife. Yet he seeks no pity from his son: he can endure. There is no weakness in the ghost; he is shadowy only to imperfect human sense. He knows his doom is his deliverance: the hell he is in will last only until it has burnt up the hell he found within him, until the evil he was and could be has dropped from him into the lake of fire; he nerves himself to bear it. His cry of revenge is a king's and a Dane's rather than a wronged man's: he asks public justice, not vengeance. He cannot bear that the royal bed of Denmark should be a couch of luxury and damned incest, and would bring the murderer to justice to stop it. For the worse wrong, which involves his wife, he seeks no revenge; there love enters, and love knows no amends but amendment, seeking only the repentance the wronger needs tenfold more than the wronged. A father's care for his son and a husband's tenderness for her who once lay in his bosom both warn him to take no measures against his mother. The murdered brother, dethroned king, dishonoured husband and tormented sinner is yet a gentle ghost. Has suffering begun to make him, like Prometheus, wise?

To measure the ghost's gentleness and forgiveness, we must understand his wrongs. The murder is plain, but what went before is worse, and less plain to every reader. Without it there would have been no murder; it is a cause of all the wrong. Listen to what the ghost reveals when he has drawn his son aside to speak alone, and Hamlet has anticipated the naming of the murderer:

| "Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
| With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,
| (O wicked wit and gifts that have the power
| So to seduce!) won to his shameful lust
| The will of my most seeming virtuous queen:
| Oh, Hamlet, what a falling off was there!
| From me, whose love was of that dignity
| That it went hand in hand even with the vow
| I made to her in marriage, and to decline
| Upon a wretch, whose natural gifts were poor
| To those of mine!
| But virtue---as it never will be moved
| Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
| So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
| Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
| And prey on garbage."

Reading this, can anyone doubt that the ghost charges his late wife with adultery as the root of all his woes? Hamlet, obeying the ghost and his own filial instincts, accuses his mother of no more than all the world could see; but unless the ghost was misinformed, we must accept the charge. Had Gertrude not yielded to the witchcraft of Claudius' wit, he would never have murdered Hamlet. Through her his life was dishonoured and his death violent and premature: unhuzled, disappointed, unaneled, he woke not to the air of his orchard-blossoms but to a prison-house whose lightest terror would freeze a listener's blood. He could say what few men can---that his love for his wife kept even step with his marriage vow; and his son says of him---

|             "so loving to my mother
| That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
| Visit her face too roughly;"

and this was her return! Yet is it thus he charges his son concerning her:

| "But howsoever thou pursu'st this act,
| Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
| Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven,
| And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
| To prick and sting her."

May we not suppose it is partly for her sake that the ghost insists, four times over, on a sword-sworn oath of silence from Horatio and Marcellus?

He shows himself only once more---not now in armour on the walls, but in his gown, in his wife's closet.

From his first appearance, through the interval between the first and second acts, we may presume he has haunted the palace unseen, waiting for his son to act. But the task has been harder than either supposed. The ambassadors have gone to Norway and returned, and Hamlet has done nothing---probably for want of opportunity; certainly for want of a clear vision of duty. Now, in the second and third acts, which take only one day, something seems imminent. The play has been acted and Hamlet has gained some assurance, yet he has refused the one chance of killing the king---at prayer. Now he is in his mother's closet, and the ghost appears again, come, he says, to whet his son's almost blunted purpose. But he does not know the disadvantages of one who has left the world yet has business there to persuade others to. He does not know how hard it is to believe in a ghost, how well justified Hamlet is in delaying and demanding better proof, or how much natural and righteous doubt lies behind what the ghost takes for blunted purpose; nor how much more tender Hamlet's conscience is than his own. Nor perhaps does he understand how hateful the task is to Hamlet: to kill one wretched villain in a corrupt and contemptible court, in a world whose women his mother may typify!

Whatever the main purpose of the ghost's appearance, he says only a few words about it before turning abruptly to plead with his son for his wife. He sees the terror in her looks and mistakes it: he thinks that, from some sense of his presence or the power of Hamlet's words, her conscience is roused and her vision of the facts is more than she can bear. He fears the consequences; he would not have her go mad, or die yet. Even while ready to start at the summons of the hell to which she sold him, he forgets his vengeance on her seducer in his wish to comfort her. He dares not, even if he could, show himself to her: what consolation could she hear from his lips, when the thought of him is her one despair? He turns to his son: his son must take his place. Alas, even now he thinks better of her than she deserves; it is only the fancy of her son's madness that terrifies her---Hamlet gazes at an apparition she cannot see, and she fears an outbreak.

| "But look; amazement on thy mother sits!
| Oh; step between her and her fighting soul
| Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
| Speak to her, Hamlet."

The call to his son to soothe his wicked mother is the ghost's last utterance. For a few moments he stands sadly regarding the two while his son tries in vain to make his mother aware of him---moments that all but ruin Hamlet's remaining self-possession, the ghost's whole concern being his wife's distress, not his own doom or his son's duty. Then, despairing at the gulf her inability even to imagine him reveals, he steals out at the portal. Or perhaps he has heard the black cock crow: his turn has come.

Will the fires ever cleanse *her*? Will his love ever lift him above the pain of its loss, and eternity ever be endurable to poor *King Hamlet?*

Alas, even the poor ghost's memory is insulted. Night after night his effigy appears on the stage cadaverous and sepulchral---not as Shakspere must have shown him, aerial, shadowy, gracious, the thin husk of an eternal sorrow. No hollow monotone can carry his words. They need a sound mingled of distance and wind in the pine-tops, of agony, love, horror, hope, loss and judgment---a voice of endless inflection, with a shuddering echo as from the caves of memory. A spirit that can assume form at will must be able to bend it to the most delicate expression, and the ghost's part offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion and gives it the rigidity of death, as if the soul had put on again its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse, whose frozen deadness could ill obey its lively will!

## ON POLISH

\[Footnote: 1865\]

By Polish I mean a well-known, immediately recognizable condition of surface: the one that lets the inner structure of the material show itself. It is a translucent skin in which the life of the inorganic comes to the surface, as animal life does in the animal skin. Clothed in it, the inner glories of marble, jasper and porphyry leave the darkness and glow into the day; the mossy landscape comes dreaming out of the agate, and the eye of its gold looks up from the green chrysolite. The life hidden for ages under the rough bark of forest trees comes to light: the rings of lovely shadow the tree made in the dark, and its knots, where a beneficent disease has broken its geometrical perfection, gloom out in infinite variety.

Nor is polish's revelation confined to things with varied inner construction; it works equally on homogeneous things. Polished ebony or jet gives the true blank, the material darkness; polished steel shines keen, remorseless and cold, like the human justice it symbolizes; and in the polished diamond the distinctive purity is most evident, and from it, I presume, the light absorbed from the sun will gleam most plentifully on the dark.

That polish ends in revelation is hardly worth stating except for some further revelation in the fact. I wish to show that the same truth is involved, or at least suggested, in the figurative use of the word. First, though, another remark on the definition.

The first notion the word suggests is undeniably smoothness, and that is the only idea we associate with it until we reflect. But when we consider what things are "clothed upon" with this smoothness, we find it is scarcely wanted for its own sake---in many materials and situations it is elaborately avoided---and is sought because it lets other things show themselves, come to the surface.

I now ask how far my fuller sense of the word fits its figurative use in *Polish of Style* and *Polish of Manners*. Style is the manners of intellectual utterance, and manners the style of social utterance, so they could be treated together, but it is more convenient to take them separately.

I begin with the Polish of Style.

If polish means only smoothness, there is little to say, and nothing worth saying. Mere smoothness is no more desirable in a style than in a country or a countenance, and pursuing it gains monotony and loses melody and harmony. Polish can be *mere* smoothness only on worthless material, and there it can be nothing else. No polish can give a production value unless embodied thought is revealed by it; otherwise the labour is lost. Let us take the fuller meaning and apply it to style.

If it applies, Polish of Style means the approximately complete revelation of the thought: the removal of everything that can come between the speaker's thought and the hearer's mind. True polish, in marble or in speech, reveals inlying realities; mere smoothness of sound or meaning does not deserve the name. The most polished style most immediately and truly flashes its meaning upon the listener or reader.

"Will you then," I imagine a reader objecting, "admit of no ornament in style?"

"Assuredly," I answer, "I would admit of no ornament whatever."

Let me explain what I mean by ornament: anything stuck in or on, like a spangle, because it is pretty in itself, though it reveals nothing. No such thing belongs to a polished style; it is paint, not polish. If my questioner means something else by *ornament*, my answer must be read accordingly. It does not touch the natural forms of beauty that thought takes in speech: between those and ornament is the difference between the overflow of life in the hair and the dressing of that loveliest of utterances in grease and gold.

When I say polish is the removal of everything between thought and thinking, I do not mean that thought is only intellect, so that every form but the bare intellectual one is ornament. As well call the bones the only essential part of the human form. Every human thought is in a sense a human being, needing its muscles of motion, skin of beauty and blood of feeling as much as its skeleton of logic. Complete utterance needs music in right proportion---clear and strong in rhymed harmonies, veiled and dim in the prose of the masters---as much as correct logic and sound construction. I should have said *conveyance* rather than utterance, since utterance can relieve the speaker with a fancied communication while conveying nothing, as with the speaking with tongues of the infant Church---which our children's lovely babblement probably resembles more than figuratively, relieving their own minds while, with no interpreter yet at his post, neither instructing nor misleading anyone. Since grown-up speech must mainly convey thought, everything in its style that stands between the mental eye and the thought must be polished away, that the indwelling life may show itself.

What, then---for now we must be practical---is to be polished away in order that the hidden may be revealed?

All words that can be dismissed without loss, for they only obscure the meaning they gather round. The first step in polishing most styles is to strike out the useless words and phrases. Most of what is said could be said in wonderfully fewer words, and the certainty and speed with which an idea is conveyed are generally in inverse ratio to the number of words used.

All so-called ornaments---the nose and lip jewels of style, the tattooing of speech; similes that, though true, give no further insight into the meaning; everything merely pretty and not beautiful; all mere sparkle, like jewels that lose their own beauty set in the grandeur of statues---must be ruthlessly polished away.

Also to be refused are utterances that, however much they add to the thought, distract the mind from the main idea, the life of the book or paper. The manuscript of *Comus* has a cancelled but legible passage which, on the best authority, would have made the poetic fame of any writer. The great old self-denier struck it from the opening speech because the speech would be more polished without it: the *Attendant Spirit* would say what he had to say more immediately and so more completely. All this applies far more widely in art, but I am dealing now with the surface of style, not the round of result.

I have an instance at hand from this region that illustrates my thesis as aptly as any. One of the greatest living painters, walking through the late Exhibition of Art-Treasures at Manchester with a friend, came upon Albert Dürer's *Melancholia*. After a moment he said he now understood it for the first time, and explained what he saw. It was a very early impression, its lines finer than any he had seen, and he had never perceived the engraving's intent and scope. The mere removal of accidental thickness and furriness in the lines let him see into its meaning. The polish brought it to the surface; or, for my argument the same thing, the dulled surface had hidden it even from his experienced eyes.

In short, every cause of obscurity must be polished away. The matter may have a darkness no polishing can make clear, and the thoughts may be hard to think, but difficulty must not be confused with obscurity: difficulty belongs to the thoughts, obscurity to the way they are embodied, and every cause of the latter must be removed, even in grammar or sentence arrangement. And as no ornament is allowed, so roughnesses that irritate the mental ear and unfit it to receive the meaning must be carefully reduced. For the true music of a sentence, belonging to the essence of the thought, is the herald that prepares the mind for the next thought, calming the intellect to a mirror-like reflection of the image about to fall on it; syllables that hang heavy on the tongue and grate on the ear are a trumpet of discord, rousing unconscious opposition and conscious rejection.

Now the Polish of Manners leads to more important reflections. Its ordinary use is again analogous to the preceding, but its relations lead deep into realities. For as only diamond can polish diamond, so only men can polish men; and so it was first by living in a city (\[Greek: polis\], *polis*) that men---

| "rubbed each other's angles down,"

and became *polished*. Some ease about ourselves and consideration for others is needed everywhere if a man is to pass as a gentleman---all unevenness of behaviour, from shyness or self-consciousness (awkwardness) or from overweening or selfishness (rudeness), must be polished away---but true human polish goes further. Its respects are not confined to the ball-room, dinner-table, club or exchange; wherever a man may rejoice with them that rejoice or weep with them that weep, he must remain the same, as polished to the tiller of the soil as to the leader of fashion.

But how can material polish help us further? How can Polish of Manners reveal what is within, calling up the hidden loveliness of the material? Do we not know that courtesy may cover contempt, smiles hide hate, and one who seats you at his right hand when he needs your lesser help may scarcely acknowledge you once his need has passed? Are they not a putting on rather than a taking off---paint and varnish rather than polish?

I yield the answer to each question, protesting that with such polish I have nothing to do: these manners are confessedly false. Yet even where least able to mislead, they are accepted as outward signs of inward grace, so even they, by the nature of their falsehood, support my position. For in what forms are the paint's colours laid on? In as near imitations of real, right human feeling about oneself and others as such an artist's imperfect knowledge can produce. He will not face the labour of polishing, for he does not believe in the divine depths of his own nature: he paints, and calls the varnish polish.

"But why talk of polish for such a character, since no polishing can bring to the surface what is not there? Polishing sandstone will not reveal the mottling of marble. It is sandstone, crumbling and gritty---not noble in any way."

Is it so? Can that be the man's real nature, with nothing deeper for polish to reach? May this selfishness not be polished away, revealing true colour and harmony beneath? Was man not made in the image of God? Or, if he lost it, did a re-creation not begin from the point of that loss, in him in whom all shall be made alive---far from complete yet, but never to be checked? Cut deep enough into the rough block of our nature, and shall we not reach some likeness of that true man who, the apostle says, dwells in us---the hope of glory? He informs us---forms us from within.

Dr. Donne (who knew less than any other writer in the English language what Polish of Style means) recognizes this divine polishing fully. In a poem called "The Cross" he says:---

| As perchance carvers do not faces make,
| But that away, which hid them there, do take,
| Let Crosses so take what hid Christ in thee,
| And be his Image, or not his, but He.

This is a higher figure than *polish*, but of the same kind and revealing the same truth: the divine nature lies at the root of the human, and the polish that lets it shine out in the simplicity of heavenly childhood is the true Polish of Manners, of which social refinements are a poor imitation.---Hence Coleridge says nothing but religion can make a man a gentleman.---When these harmonies of our nature surface, we shall be "lively stones," fit for the great temple of the universe and echoing the music of creation. Dr. Donne also sees that *crosses*, or afflictions, are the polishing powers that bring the beautiful realities of human nature to the surface; one can tell from the peculiar loveliness of certain persons that they have suffered.

Looking a moment less profoundly: have we not known people whose best never reached the surface for lack of polish?---people who, could they only show their kindness, would make men believe in human nature, but whose awkwardness or shyness keeps the true self hidden? Even dread of seeming to claim credit for a good deed, or to patronize, can spoil the last touch of tenderness that would have been the final polish of giving and revealed infinite depths of devotion. Let the truth out, and it will be seen to be true.

Simplicity is the end of all Polish, as of all Art, Culture, Morals, Religion and Life. The Lord our God is one Lord, and we and our brothers and sisters are one Humanity, one Body of the Head.

Now to the practical: what are we to do for the polish of our manners?

Just what I said for style: take off, do not put on. Polish away this rudeness, that awkwardness. Correct everything self-assertive, nine tenths of all vulgarity. Imitate no one's behaviour; that is to paint. Do not think about yourself; that is to varnish. Put what is wrong right, and what is in you will show itself in harmonious behaviour.

But no one can go far in this track without finding that true polish reaches deeper: the outward exists for the sake of the inward, and manners, depending on morals, must be forgotten in the morals they reveal. Look at the high-shouldered, ungainly child in the corner. His mother tells him to go to his book; he wants to go to his play. See the swollen lips, the tightened skin over the nose, the distorted, angular shape. Yet he is not awkward by nature. Look again the moment after he has given in and kissed his mother: his shoulders have dropped into place, his limbs are free, his motions graceful and harmonious. He is no longer thinking of himself; he has given up his own way. The true childhood comes to the surface, and you see what the boy is meant to be always. So the conceited man is jerky and the modest man moves with quiet *fluency*; even anger that forgets self, unhating and righteous, lifts the carriage and ennobles the movements.

But how far can the same rule of *omission* or *rejection* safely apply to this deeper character---the manners of the spirit?

It seems to me that in morals too the main thing is to avoid doing wrong, for then the active spirit of life in us will drive us on to the right; but I would not be dogmatic on so momentous a question. As regards feelings only: it is no use trying to make ourselves feel this or that. Let us fight our wrong feelings and polish away their rough, ugly distortions. The real and good will then come of themselves---to keep to my figure, will show themselves as the natural home-produce, the indwelling facts of our deepest, divine nature.

Here I find I am sinking through my subject into a deeper one---a truth that should be the foundation of all our building: Life is at work in us---the sacred Spirit of God travailing in us. That Spirit has gained one end of his labour, from which he can do yet more for us, when he has brought us to beg for the help he has been giving all along.

I have been regarding infinite things through one limited figure, knowing figures cannot reveal them utterly. But as far as they go, the thoughts raised by the word Polish and its figurative uses seem to me most true.

## BROWNING'S "CHRISTMAS EVE"

\[Footnote: 1853.\]

Goethe says:---

| "Poems are painted window panes.
| If one looks from the square into the church,
| Dusk and dimness are his gains---
| Sir Philistine is left in the lurch!
| The sight, so seen, may well enrage him,
| Nor anything henceforth assuage him.

| "But come just inside what conceals;
| Cross the holy threshold quite---
| All at once 'tis rainbow-bright,
| Device and story flash to light,
| A gracious splendour truth reveals.
| This to God's children is full measure,
| It edifies and gives you pleasure!"

This is true of every form in which truth is embodied---sight or sound, geometric diagram or scientific formula: unintelligible, it may be dismal from outside, but prismatic in revealing truth from within. So with the world itself, which the speculative eye sees as disorder, obscurity and sadness; only the child-like heart, to which the door into the divine idea is open, understands something of the Almighty's secret. Of human things it is especially true of art, whose fundamental idea is the revelation of the true through the beautiful, and above all of poetry. The other arts have beauty outside---the marble's form, the painting's hues, the music's sounds---that pleases the senses though the heart never perceives the meaning. But poetry, apart from its rhythmic melody and scattered gleams of imagery, which few care for who do not love it for itself, has nothing outside to entice the passer in.

If one has reached the heart of a poem, as in Goethe's parable, or even found a loop-hole through which its stained windows can be seen from the other side, it is well to help others share his pleasure and profit. Some who would not find it themselves will be forever grateful. A man helps his fellows far more by exhibiting truth than by exposing error, and by unveiling beauty than by dissecting deformity. The evil and ugly are known only by the good and beautiful; it is the light that makes manifest.

Browning's "Christmas Eve," with its companion "Easter Day," has attracted little notice from readers of poetry, though a few prize it highly. This is perhaps largely due to what many would call considerable obscurity. But obscurity is how profundity and carelessness of thought can both look at first glance, and some find it attractive in itself, hoping worth is its cause. Apply a test like Pascal's for the Koran and the Scriptures: what is the character of the portions whose meaning is plain? If they are wise, the obscurity of the rest presumably comes from profundity, not opacity. Some will object that a writer who has a clear idea must be able to express it clearly. But communion of thought needs two minds, and the fault may lie in the one who receives, the one who gives, or neither. How can an idea that has taken shape for months in one man's mind be received at once by a mind to which it comes a stranger and unexpected? The reader has no right to complain of obscurity so caused. Nor is the expression easiest to grasp at first sight necessarily the best: it will not go on moving, or gain force with closer acquaintance. Here Goethe's parable applies. And if a writer is obscure after all, the man who has laboured most to enter his thoughts will complain least, and those who find him easiest are often those who understand him least.

For those to whom the religion of Christ has been the law of liberty---who have entered by that door into God's universe and delight in all his manifestations---it is a great joy that, whatever position men of science or of predominant intellect take toward Christianity, men of genius, by virtue of what is child-like in them, are in our time plainly showing deep devotion to Christ. There are exceptions, but even they show feelings that seem to tend toward him and will one day flame into conscious worship. A mind that recognizes any of the multitudinous meanings of God's revelation in sounds, forms and colours cannot be blind to his higher manifestation in common humanity, nor to him in whom is hid the key to the whole, the First-born of creation, in whose heart lies, as yet partially developed, the kingdom of heaven, which is the earth's redemption. A mind that delights in the lofty and feels there is something higher than self will be drawn toward Christ; those who first saw him as a great prophet came at length to see him as the radiation of the Father's glory, the likeness of his unseen being.

A description of the poem may encourage reading it and help in understanding it. On a stormy Christmas Eve the poet---or rather seer, for the whole is a poetic vision---takes refuge in the "lath and plaster entry" of a little chapel of Calvinistic Methodists gathering for worship. He describes with wonderful reality the flock passing him as they enter, from

|                    "the many-tattered
| Little old-faced, peaking sister-turned-mother
| Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
| Somehow up, with its spotted face,
| From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place:"

to the "shoemaker's lad," whom he follows in, determined to bear their inquisitive looks no longer. The humour of the scene within is excellent: the stifling closeness of air and sermon, the audience's contentment, the "old fat woman," who

|                   "purred with pleasure,
| And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
| While she, to his periods keeping measure,
| Maternally devoured the pastor;"

A few rapid touches bring points of the reality almost unpleasantly near. At length, unable to bear it, he rushes out. It may be objected that the humorous, even the ridiculous, is mingled with the serious, especially in a work of art where they must be so close. But are they not as closely joined in the world as in any representation of it? Nothing human is inadmissible into art in some connexion; its widest idea comprehends all things. A work like this, like God's world, in which he sends rain on the just and the unjust, must be taken as a whole and judged by its design, everything introduced relating suitably to adjacent parts and to the whole. Here the thing is real, true and human, a thing to be thought about; it has its place among other phenomena with which, however incongruous, it is vitally connected within.

Turning the page, we feel coolness and delight in the description of the sky, moon and clouds outside the chapel: a vision of the vision-bearing world itself, in a fine though not at first its rarest mood. A short digression, noting like feelings in different dress, will perhaps be pardoned. The moon is kept from shining out by "blocks" of cloud "built up in the west:"---

| "And the empty other half of the sky
| Seemed in its silence as if it knew
| What, any moment, might look through
| A chance-gap in that fortress massy."

Old Henry Vaughan says of the "Dawning:"---

| "The whole Creation shakes off night,
| And for thy shadow looks the Light;
| Stars now vanish without number,
| Sleepie Planets set and slumber,
| The pursie Clouds disband and scatter,
| *All expect some sudden matter*."

Calmness settles on his mind. He walks on, thinking of the scene he left and the sermon he heard. In the sermon good and bad are intimately mingled, and he is convinced its chief benefit is a reproducing of former impressions---a "convincing" of the "convinced," as happens in many places and forms. He rejoices in the contrast his own church presents, since in the church of Nature his love to God, assurance of God's love, and confidence in God's design for him began. While exulting in God and the knowledge of Him to come, he is given a sight of a glorious moon-rainbow that lifts his worship to ecstasy. During which---

| "All at once I looked up with terror---
| He was there.
| He himself with His human air,
| On the narrow pathway, just before:
| I saw the back of Him, no more---
| He had left the chapel, then, as I.
| I forgot all about the sky.
| No face: only the sight
| Of a sweepy garment, vast and white,
| With a hem that I could recognize.
| I felt terror, no surprise:
| My mind filled with the cataract,
| At one bound, of the mighty fact.
| I remembered, He did say
| Doubtless, that, to this world's end,
| Where two or three should meet and pray,
| He would be in the midst, their friend:
| Certainly He was there with them.
| And my pulses leaped for joy
| Of the golden thought without alloy,
| That I saw His very vesture's hem.
| Then rushed the blood back, cold and clear,
| With a fresh enhancing shiver of fear."

Praying for forgiveness where he has sinned, and prostrate in adoration before the form of Christ, he is "caught up in the whirl and drift" of his vesture and carried with him over the earth.

Stopping at length at the entrance of St. Peter's in Rome, he stays outside while the form goes in, but sees all that goes on in the crowded, hushed interior: high mass. He has been carried from the little chapel to the opposite aesthetic pole. From the entry, where---

| "The flame of the single tallow candle
| In the cracked square lanthorn I stood under
| Shot its blue lip at me,"

| to---
|   "This miraculous dome of God---
|                 This colonnade
|   With arms wide open to embrace
|   The entry of the human race
|   To the breast of\.... what is it, yon building,
|   Ablaze in front, all paint and gilding,
|   With marble for brick, and stones of price
|   For garniture of the edifice?"

to "those fountains"---

| "Growing up eternally
| Each to a musical water-tree,
| Whose blossoms drop, a glittering boon,
| Before my eyes, in the light of the moon,
| To the granite lavers underneath;"

from the chapel's singing to the organ self-restrained, that "holds his breath and grovels latent," awaiting the elevation of the Host. Christ is within; he is left without. He thinks his Lord would not require him to go in, though he himself entered because there was a way to reach him there. By-and-by his heart awakes and declares that Love goes beyond error with them, and if Intellect is kept down, Love is the oppressor; so next time he resolves to enter and praise with them. The passage beginning "Oh, love of those first Christian days!", on Love's victory over Intellect, is very fine.

Again he is caught up and carried, this time to the door of a college in a German town, where a professor's class-room is open for lecture this Christmas Eve---intellectually the opposite pole to both chapel and Basilica. The poet enters, fearful of losing the company of "any that call themselves his friends," and describes the assembly and the entrance of "the hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned professor," whose discourse he summarizes in part. The professor takes it for granted that "plainly no such life was liveable," and asks which explanation of the phenomena of Christ's life to adopt---it matters little, "so the idea be left the same." Taking the popular story and stripping off everything extraneous, he finds Christ simply a good man with an honest, true heart, whom his disciples thought divine, and whose doctrine, though quite mistaken by those who received and published it, "had yet a meaning quite as respectable." At a pause the poet leaves, reflecting that though the sects may poison the air, here "the critic leaves no air to poison." His meditations that follow are among the book's most valuable passages. Though the professor has drained the idea of Christ of all that is peculiar to it, he still recommends him to his hearers' veneration "rather than all who went before him, and all who ever followed after." But why? says the poet. For his intellect,

| "Which tells me simply what was told
| (If mere morality, bereft
| Of the God in Christ, be all that's left)
| Elsewhere by voices manifold?"

with which must be combined the fact that this intellect did not save him from the "important stumble" of saying that he and God were one. "His followers misunderstood him," says the objector. Perhaps; but "the stumbling-block, his speech, who laid it?" Then is it for his goodness that he should rule his race?

|                 "You pledge
| Your fealty to such rule? What, all---
| From Heavenly John and Attic Paul,
| And that brave weather-battered Peter,
| Whose stout faith only stood completer
| For buffets, sinning to be pardoned,
| As the more his hands hauled nets, they hardened---
| All, down to you, the man of men,
| Professing here at Göttingen,
| Compose Christ's flock! So, you and I
| Are sheep of a good man! And why?"

Did Christ *invent* goodness? or did he only demonstrate that of which the common conscience was judge?

|                 "I would decree
| Worship for such mere demonstration
| And simple work of nomenclature,
| Only the day I praised, not Nature,
| But Harvey, for the circulation."

The worst man, says the poet, *knows* more than the best man *does*. God in Christ appeared to men to help them to *do*, to awaken the life within them.

| "Morality to the uttermost,
| Supreme in Christ as we all confess,
| Why need *we* prove would avail no jot
| To make Him God, if God he were not?
| What is the point where Himself lays stress?
| Does the precept run, 'Believe in good,
| In justice, truth, now understood
| For the first time?'---or, 'Believe in ME,
| Who lived and died, yet essentially
| Am Lord of life'? Whoever can take
| The same to his heart, and for mere love's sake
| Conceive of the love,---that man obtains
| A new truth; no conviction gains
| Of an old one only, made intense
| By a fresh appeal to his faded sense."

In this lies the most direct practical argument about what is commonly called the Divinity of Christ. Here is a man whom even those who magnify him least confess to be good, the best of men. He *says*, "I and the Father are one." Will not an earnest heart that knows this draw nearer to behold the great sight, feeling: "A good man like this would not have said so were it not so; the great truth of God probably lies behind this veil"? Christ's nature cannot be proved by argument; he must be beheld, and his manifestation must "gravitate inwards" on the soul. As a mathematical theorem is proved only by the demonstration itself, not by talking *about* it, so Christ must prove himself to the soul by being beheld. The only proof of his divinity is his humanity. His divinity is doubted because his humanity is not comprehended, and while that is uncomprehended, assent to his divinity is of little avail. To theorize theologically without having so apprehended Christ, or to neglect gazing on him in order to establish some belief about him, is to fall in a divine matter into the errors of the old expounders of nature, who speculated on what a thing *must be* instead of observing what it was---a *must be* founded not on self-evident truth but on notions whose strength lay in being preconceived. There are thoughts and feelings that no will or imagination can summon; being spiritual, they arise in the soul at its highest spiritual condition, when the mind, like a smooth lake, reflects only heavenly images. Steadfastly regarding Him will produce this calm, and His will be the heavenly form reflected from the mental depth.

But to return to the poem. Christ's remaining inside leads the poet to ask, in the spirit of Him who found all the good in men he could, whether anything in this lecture can be sympathized with; he finds the professor's heart rescuing him somewhat from the error of his brain---even there "if Love's dead there, it has left a ghost." For when the natural deduction from his argument would be that our faith

| "Be swept forthwith to its natural dust-hole,---
| He bids us, when we least expect it,
| Take back our faith---if it be not just whole,
| Yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it,
| Which fact pays the damage done rewardingly,
| So, prize we our dust and ashes accordingly!"

Since love as well as learning is needed to understand the New Testament, the poet regrets that "loveless learning" should leave its proper work and make such havoc in what is not its province. But as he sits "talking with his mind," his mood slides from sympathy with the good into indifference to all forms: he feels inclined to rest in his own religious confidence and not trouble himself about his neighbours' faith, for doubtless all share the central light, though variously refracted by the varied translucency of the mental prism\....

| "'Twas the horrible storm began afresh!
| The black night caught me in his mesh,
| Whirled me up, and flung me prone!
| I was left on the college-step alone.
| I looked, and far there, ever fleeting
| Far, far away, the receding gesture,
| And looming of the lessening vesture,
| Swept forward from my stupid hand,
| While I watched my foolish heart expand
| In the lazy glow of benevolence
| O'er the various modes of man's belief.
| I sprang up with fear's vehemence.
| ---Needs must there be one way, our chief
| Best way of worship: let me strive
| To find it, and when found, contrive
| My fellows also take their share.
| This constitutes my earthly care:
| God's is above it and distinct!"

The symbolism in the first part of this extract is grand. As soon as he stops looking practically at the phenomena around him, he is enveloped in storm and darkness and sees only far off the vanishing skirt of his Lord's garment. God's care is over all, he goes on; I must do *my part*. Looked at speculatively, the world is dimness and mystery. If I look practically on it,

| "No mere mote's-breadth, but teems immense
| With witnessings of Providence."

And whether the world I seek to help blames or praises me is nothing to me. My life---how is it with me?

| "Soul of mine, hadst thou caught and held
| By the hem of the vesture\....
|                 And I caught
| At the flying robe, and, unrepelled,
| Was lapped again in its folds full-fraught
| With warmth and wonder and delight,
| God's mercy being infinite.
| And scarce had the words escaped my tongue,
| When, at a passionate bound, I sprung
| Out of the wandering world of rain,
| Into the little chapel again."

Had he dreamed? How then could he report the sermon and the preacher, of whom he goes on to give a very external account? But correcting himself---

| "Ha! Is God mocked, as He asks?
| Shall I take on me to change his tasks,
| And dare, despatched to a river-head
| For a simple draught of the element,
| Neglect the thing for which He sent,
| And return with another thing instead!
| Saying \.... 'Because the water found
| Welling up from underground,
| Is mingled with the taints of earth,
| While Thou, I know, dost laugh at dearth,
| And couldest, at a word, convulse
| The world with the leap of its river-pulse,---
| Therefore I turned from the oozings muddy,
| And bring thee a chalice I found, instead.
| See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy!
| One would suppose that the marble bled.
| What matters the water? A hope I have nursed,
| That the waterless cup will quench my thirst.' 
| ---Better have knelt at the poorest stream
| That trickles in pain from the straitest rift!
| For the less or the more is all God's gift,
| Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite seam.
| And here, is there water or not, to drink?"

He concludes that the best for him is the mode of worship that partakes least of human forms and brings him nearest the spiritual; and, while wishing the Pope and the professor well---

| "Meantime, in the still recurring fear
| Lest myself, at unawares, be found,
| While attacking the choice of my neighbours round,
| Without my own made---I choose here!"

He therefore joins heartily in the hymn sung by the little chapel's congregation at the close of their worship. And this concludes the poem.

What is the central point from which this poem can be regarded? Novalis has said: "Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein." (Philosophy is really home-sickness, an impulse to be at home everywhere.) A man's life here, if it is life and not the vain image of one, is a continual attempt to find his place, his centre of receiving and acting. He wants to know where he is, and where he ought to be and can be; for rightly considered, the position a man ought to occupy is the only one he truly *can* occupy. It is a climbing and striving to reach the point of vision from which the crossings of fact, feeling and duty show as a regular, symmetrical design. A contradiction, or a thing unrelated, is as painful to him as a rocky particle to the oyster, and he can rid himself of it only by encasing it, as the oyster does, in the pearl of faith, believing that hidden in it lies the need of a higher theory of the universe than his soul has yet produced. The man of faith seeks this home-centre calmly and ceaselessly; the man of weak faith, stormily and by fits. Unhappy is the man whose perceptions are keener than his faith is strong. Nature puts strange questions to him, the human world is full of dismay, his conscience is bewildered by contradictory appearances---as may well befall one whose eye is not yet single and heart not yet pure. He is not at home; his soul is astray among people of strange speech and stammering tongue. But the faithful man is led onward; in the stillness his confidence brings arise the bright images of truth, and visions of God, seen only in solitary places, are granted to his soul.

| "O struggling with the darkness all the night,
| And visited all night by troops of stars!"

What is true of the whole is true of its parts: in all the relations of life the true man seeks his home, and this poem shows such a quest. "Here I am among many of the same family. They differ in education, habits and forms of thought, but are called by the same name. What position am I to take toward them? I am a Christian; how am I to live in relation to Christians?" Such seems to be the poet's thought. What central position can he gain that best answers his soul's need toward God and also lets him sympathize with the whole Christian world, one of the whole and not alone? The position needed for both is one and the same, for he who is isolated from his brethren loses one of the greatest helps to draw near to God. In this peculiarly transitional time the question matters much to all who gladly forsake old---or rather *modern*---theories for a fuller development of Christianity and a return to its fountain-head, yet want to avoid losing sympathy with those content with what they must abandon. Seeing much in common modes of thought and belief that is inconsistent with, even opposed to, Christianity, they yet see in many of them a power of spiritual good, enveloped if not embodied in the mode though not dependent on it.

| "Ask, else, these ruins of humanity,
| This flesh worn out to rags and tatters,
| This soul at struggle with insanity,
| Who thence take comfort, can I doubt,
| Which an empire gained, were a loss without."

The love of God is the soul of Christianity, and Christ is the body of that truth. It is the creating and redeeming, forming and satisfying power of the universe; it kills evil and glorifies goodness; it is the safety of the great whole and the home-atmosphere of all life. Well does the poet of "Christmas Eve" say:---

| "The loving worm within its clod,
| Were diviner than a loveless God
| Amid his worlds, I will dare to say."

Surely then, since man is made in the image of God, nothing less than a love in the image of God's love---all-embracing, quietly excusing, heartily commending, not insensible to what is foreign to it but overcoming it with good---can constitute man's blessedness. Where man loves in his kind as God loves in his, man is saved and has reached the unseen and eternal. And if the man he ought to love has something in common with him, the law of love has increased force: if that point of sympathy lies at the centre of each being, and the centres are brought into contact, their circles will be, if not coincident, concentric. We must wait patiently for the completion of God's great harmony, and meanwhile love everywhere, as we can.

But the great lesson of this poem, taught more directly in "Easter Day" (in the same volume), is that the business of a man's life is to be a Christian. A man has to do with God first; only in Him can he find the unity and harmony he seeks, and to be one with Him is to be at the centre of things. If one acknowledges that God has revealed himself in Christ, recognizing man as his family by appearing in their form, that acknowledgment admits that man's chief concern is with this revelation. What does God say and mean, teach and manifest in it? If the world is God's making and he is present in all nature and history; if man's soul is in his image; and if it is not enough for man to be rooted in God but he must lay hold on God---then no question can be truly answered except by one who stands at Christ's side. God's doings cannot be understood except by one with the mind of Christ, which is the mind of God. Where is he to begin, with what light to classify, and how bring order out of what seems confusion only because the order is greater than he can comprehend? Standing outside, he sees a tangled maze of forces where there is in truth an intertwining dance of harmony. No one has a solution to the world's mystery, or any part of it, unless he can say with our poet:---

| "I have looked to Thee from the beginning,
| Straight up to Thee through all the world,
| Which, like an idle scroll, lay furled
| To nothingness on either side:
| And since the time Thou wast descried,
| Spite of the weak heart, so have I
| Lived ever, and so fain would die,
| Living and dying, Thee before!"

Christianity is not the ornament, or even complement, of life; it is its necessity; it is life itself glorified into God's ideal.

Dr. Chalmers, considering the minuteness of the directions given to Moses for making the tabernacle, came to think he had attended too little to the "*petite morale*" of dress. Is this excuse enough for a few sentences on the rhyming of this poem? Rhymes form no small part of a poem's artistic existence, and there is probably a deeper meaning in this part of the art than poets have yet made clear. Here the rhymes share in the poem's humorous charm. The writer's power with double and triple rhymes is remarkable, and the effect is often pleasing even in the more solemn parts. Take the lines:---

| "No! love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,
| Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
| The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
| Shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it."

A poem is for the ear as well as the understanding and heart---or rather for the understanding and heart through the ear. The best poem is best set forth when best read. If some rhymes, read aloud, consist of words that keep the understanding from grasping the separate words while the ear grasps the rhymes, the art's perfection is lost sight of, whatever completeness the rhyming shows on close examination. For instance, "*equipt yours," "Scriptures;" "Manchester," "haunches stir*;" or "*affirm any," "Germany*;" where two words rhyme with one. But very few are objectionable for this difficulty of rapid analysis.

One of the most wonderful things in the poem is that so much argument is expressed in a verse one might at first think the least fitted for it. Yet the same argument in any other verse would probably have been intolerably dull as art. Here the verse is full of life and vigour, never flagging. Where the exact meaning is hard to reach, this results chiefly from the dramatic rapidity and condensation of the thoughts. The argumentative power is wonderful, the arguments powerful in their simplicity and embodied in admirably forceful words. The poem is full of pathos and humour, beauty and grandeur, earnestness and truth.

## ESSAYS ON SOME OF THE FORMS OF LITERATURE

\[Footnote: "Essays on some of the Forms of Literature." By T.T. Lynch, Author of "Theophilus Trinal." Longmans.\]

Schoppe, the satiric chorus of Jean Paul's romance *Titan*, appears at a masked ball carrying a glass case. In it, with a mirror behind, puppets repeat and reflect the ball, ludicrously aping courtiers whose whole life and show was only a body-mask mechanically moved with the look of real life. The court simulates reality; the masks mock their own unreality, and Schoppe ridicules them as such; the show and its reflection multiply without end in the reflector of Schoppe's, or Richter's, or the reader's imagination. The reviewer is reminded of this retreating and beholding because the last of Mr. Lynch's essays is partly devoted to reviews: reviews review books, Mr. Lynch reviews the reviews, and the present Reviewer, perhaps presumptuously, tries to review Mr. Lynch. His office must differ greatly from Schoppe's, though, for the showman and the reviewer correspond more deeply than the outward resemblance that suggested the comparison. Schoppe's task was to destroy the false by mockery; his glass case was a review uttered by shapes and wires instead of words. The true critic too must sometimes condemn the false and destroy it utterly, scorching its seeming beauty down to dust and ashes. But the false deserves his attack only when it wears the form of beauty, the garment of truth, and so, like the Erl-maidens, has power to bewitch. Many errors, perhaps most, are better left to die of their own weakness, for the galvanic battery of criticism only prolongs their ghastly life. The critic's highest work must be to direct attention to the true, in whatever form it has found utterance. On this let us hear Mr. Lynch himself in the last of the four lectures he delivered at the Royal Institution, Manchester, now before us as a book:

"The kritikos, the discerner, if he is forever saying This is not gold and never This is, is either humbly useful, or perverse, or unfortunate. This is not gold, he says; we perceived as much. And this is not; true, but we see gold grains glittering in its dark mass. And this, at least, is not; perverse man, are you seeking what is not gold? We are inquiring for what is; and unfortunate are we if, born into a world once so rich, we find it has lost all its wealth. Unhappy the man who, walking his garden, scented only dead leaves and never perceived, even from afar, the heavenly odour of roses fresh from the Maker's hands. Discerning by spiritual aroma may lead to discernment by the eye, and to the scrutiny and knowledge it serves."

And again:---

"The critic criticized, if dealt with in the worst fashion of his class, must be called a monster 'seeking whom he may devour,' to be hunted down and stuffed for the museum, where he can be regarded with horror but in safety. Dealt with in the best fashion, he has a very honourable and beneficent office, and is warned, though zealously, only against its perversions. A judicial chair in the kingdom of human thought, filled by a man of true integrity, comprehensiveness, and delicacy of spirit, is a seat of terror and praise, most fostering of good and most repressive of evil\.... The critic as censurer must controvert, expose, and punish much because literary faults abound; criticism, like warfare, has a right and a wrong side, and as many soldiers are barely tolerable, so are many critics. But the critic is more than the censurer; in his higher and happier aspect he serves us as the discoverer, vindicator, and eulogist of excellence."

Resisting the temptation to quote more from Mr. Lynch on Criticism, which seemed the natural point of contact between the Reviewer and the book, he goes on, remarking that his present duty is of the nobler sort (nobler in its object, for duty in the man is always the same): the exposition of excellence, not its opposite. Mr. Lynch is a man of true insight and large heart who has already done good and will do more; though he perhaps belongs, more than to any earlier class, to the last class of writers he himself describes in the extract I now give:

"Some of the best books are written, avowedly or evidently, for the select public of deeper minds, or minds ahead of their time; they may be little read or esteemed in their own day, and later extend their fame and readers. Others of the best, written with a pathos and power felt universally, appeal at once to the common humanity of the world and get a strong, immediate response. An ordinary human eye and heart, true and healthy, fit us to say of much that we read, This is good, that is poor; only the educated eye and experienced heart fit us to judge what is veiled from ordinary observation, in the profounder region of thought and emotion. Yet powers that only the few possess may be needed to paint what everybody can see, so that everybody says, How beautiful! how like! And powers adequate to that will often do much more: books or pictures whose singular merit only the few perceive and the many for a while deny, giving the common eye an immediate, pure pleasure and the eye of a deeper, more cultivated soul a far fuller and finer one. There are also men of *peculiar* powers, rare and fine, who can never hope to please the large public of their own age, but whose writings are a heart's ease and joy to the select few, heavenly comfort and light for the earth's journey."

One other extract from the general remarks on Books in this essay, and we will turn to another:---

"If our reading assists our life, our life also assists our reading. If we let our spirit talk to us in undistracted moments; commune often with serious Nature face to face; pursue honourable aims steadily; learn how a man's best work falls below his thought, yet how his failure prompts a tenderer love of the thought; live in frank relations with a few friends, sharing their joys and griefs; and look about us on character, marking what we can see and feeling the prompting of a hundred questions about what is beyond our ken: then we shall be good readers and critics of books, and improving ones."

The second and third essays are chiefly on Biography and Fiction, though they range more widely. Deep is the relation between the life shadowed in a biography and the life a man shadows forth in a fiction of the highest order, written in love and beheld even by its writer with reverence. It must be delightful, and awful too, to read today the embodiment of a man's noblest thought, following his hero through temptations, contests, and victories in a world which likewise is---

| "All made out of the carver's brain;"

and tomorrow to read the biography of this same writer. What of his own ideal has he realized? Where can the life-fountain be seen within him that found issue in this ideal self? Shall God's fiction, which is man's reality, fall short of man's fiction; shall a man be less than he can conceive and utter? Surely it cannot end thus. If a man lives in harmony with the great laws of being and lets God's idea in him work itself out, he must one day arrive at something greater than he can now conceive. Yet biography does not so often show the struggles the loftier fiction depicts. One reason may be that the contest is often wholly inward, so a man may have won his spiritual freedom with no outward sign, except, if he is an artist, its expression in fiction, whether in marble, harmony, or ink. Nor can we determine the significance of any living act, being ourselves within the life-mystery and unable to hold it at arm's length; nor judge a life's success by what we see. At best it is a truncated spire, whose incompleteness may be the greater for the breadth of its base and its slow taper toward the height it is meant to reach. The idea of our own life is more than we can embrace; it is God's, not ours, and fades into the infinite. Our comprehension is finite; we ourselves are infinite. We can only trust in God and do the truth; then, and only then, is our life safe, and sure of continuance and development.

But the reviewer too often merely steals his author's text and writes upon it, or, like a man lying in bed thinking about a dream until he sinks into it, forgets that his place is to behold and passes into spontaneous utterance. What says our author about "biography, autobiography, and history"? This lecture pleased the reviewer most of the four. Read in a lonely place under a tree, it had on him the two effects Mr. Lynch would perhaps most wish: a longing to lead a more true and noble life, and a desire to read more biography. He hopes it does the same for every earnest reader, everyone whose own biography would not be altogether blank in individual will and spiritual aim.

"In meditative hours, when we blend despair of ourself with complaint of the world, the biography of a man successful in this great business of living is like an angel sent to strengthen us. Give the soldier his sword, the farmer his plough, the carpenter his hammer, the manufacturer his machines, the merchant his stores, the scholar his books: these are only implements, and the man is more than his work. How far has he fulfilled the law of his being and attained its desire? Is his life a whole, a well-woven garment, a well-painted picture? Which of two sacrifices has he offered, the one pleasing to the powers of dark worlds, the other to those of bright ones: soul to body, or body to soul? Has he slain what was holiest in him to win gifts from Fashion or Mammon? Or has he, in days like a noble army of martyrs, offered up what was secondary, throwing into the flames the salt of true moral energy and the incense of cordial affections? We want the work to show us the man's qualities, and the man perfected through his work as well as the work finished by his effort."

Perhaps the highest moral height a man can reach, and the hardest, is the willingness to be *nothing* relatively, that he may attain the positive excellence his original conditions make not merely possible but imperative. It is nothing to a man to be greater or less than another, or esteemed or not by the world around him. Does he behold, love, and live the unchangeable, the essential, the divine? This he can do only as God has made him; he can understand God, in the least degree as in the greatest, only by the godlike within him. One who loves the good and great so has no room or need for comparison; the truth satisfies him. God makes the glow-worm as well as the star, and the light in both is divine. If mine is an earth-star to gladden the wayside, I must cultivate its green earth-glow humbly and rejoicingly, not try to blanch it to the whiteness of the stars in the fields of blue. To deny God in my own being is to cease to behold him in any; God and man meet only when the man becomes what God meant him to be. Then he enters the house of life, which is greater than the house of fame. Better to be a child in a green field than a knight of many orders at a state ceremonial.

"One biography may help conjecture or satisfy reason concerning the story of a thousand unrecorded lives. How few even of the deserving multitude can deserve to be shrined in the public heart as 'dear sons of memory.' Few of us die unwept, but most of us unwritten; we shall find a grave, less certainly a tombstone, and much less likely a biographer. The 'bright particular' stars that look towards us from afar, still individual, are at clearest times only about a thousand; but the milky lustre across mid heaven is a million million lights, no less separate for being seen undistinguishably. Absorbed, not lost, in the multitude of the unrecorded, our private dear ones make part of the blissful shining of the 'general assembly,' the great congregation of the skies. Thus the past is aglow with the unwritten, the nameless. The sons of fame are the few whose great individuality burns with distinct starry light through the dark of ages. Such stars, without the starry way, would not teach us the vastness of heaven; and the way, without them, would not glorify the night with pomp of Hierarchical Ascents of Domination."

The reviewer would gladly enrich his notice with more of this essay, but limits of space, and perhaps justice to an essay that ought to be read whole, forbid. Mr. Lynch looks to the heart of the matter, and makes one ask, "Would not a biography written by Mr. Lynch himself be a valuable addition to this kind of literature?" It would not be an account of outward events and progress, nor even a succession of revelations of inward conditions. We should expect it to lift us to a point of view from which the man's life takes on an artistic individuality, an isolation of existence; for he could not choose a biography for which this would be impossible, or in which the nerves of purpose did not combine the whole, more or less successfully, into a true and remarkable unity. One passage more from this essay:

"Biography makes life known to us as more wealthy in character, and much more remarkable in its everyday stories, than we had deemed it. It also introduces us to some of our most agreeable and stimulating friendships; we may be more beneficially intimate with one we never saw than with a neighbour or brother. Many a solitary, puzzled, incommunicative person has found society provided, his riddle read, and his heart's secret spoken out for him in a biography. A love purer than any yet entertained may begin with the visit of a biography, and a pure but ungratified love already existing may find an object. In life you see your friend today and will tomorrow; in the dear book you have him and all his experiences at once and always. He lives for you, and has already died for you, giving finish to the meaning and sanctity of his days; by that fact he is mysteriously above as well as before you. So your intimate is your superior, solace, and support, and an example of the victory to which he calls you. His end is our own in view; the flagging spirit revives, and we gird our loins anew for the race. In lesser matters there is fresh prospect of the game and companionship in the hunt. Biography is also a mirror in which we see ourselves, and the plain signs of deficient health or ill-ruled temper may set us looking for improvement. But it is a water mirror: first you see your face, then it becomes a bath to wash away the stains and restore wrinkles and pallors. What a pleasure to find another so like ourself, saying the same things, feeling the same dreads, shames, and flutterings. His escapes give us hope of deliverance; his patience, better or at least rewarded, freshens us and puts a staff into our hand. Seals of impossibility we had put on the stones beneath which our hopes lay buried are broken by this biography, as by a visiting angel, and our hopes arise. We see life more completely because we see the whole of his or hers, and more calmly and tenderly. Wavering faith is confirmed. Comparing ourselves quietly with one of our own class, or one who has made the mark we strive for, we are shamed to have done no better, and stirred to attempt former things, or fresh ones, in a stronger and more patient spirit."

It is indeed well with him who has found a friend whose spirit touches his own and illuminates it.

| "I missed him when the sun began to bend;
| I found him not when I had lost his rim;
| With many tears I went in search of him,
| Climbing high mountains which did still ascend,
| And gave me echoes when I called my friend;
| Through cities vast and charnel-houses grim,
| And high cathedrals where the light was dim;
| Through books, and arts, and works without an end---
| But found him not, the friend whom I had lost.
| And yet I found him, as I found the lark,
| A sound in fields I heard but could not mark;
| I found him nearest when I missed him most,
| I found him in my heart, a life in frost,
| A light I knew not till my soul was dark."

Next to a true, wise, and victorious friend by your fireside, it is blessed to have the spirit of such a friend embodied on your bookshelves, for spirit can assume any embodiment. But there the friendship is all on one side; full friendship needs a friend who loves you and knows that you love him. Surely these biographies are not merely links with past times and vanished minds, producing strong half friendships. Are they not also letters of introduction, sent ahead but not yet followed by the one they introduce, whose step we listen for, and whom we shall meet somewhere in the Infinite, risen from the death of the past into the life of our knowledge and love? Shall I not one day, "somewhere, somehow," clasp the large hand of Novalis and, gazing on his face, compare his features with those of Saint John?

The essay on light literature must be left to those who already know this book or may be induced by this notice to know it. Before the first essay, on Poetry, its subject suggests mentioning a second edition of the Memorials of Theophilus Trinal, by the same author, partly made up of interspersed poems. These are of true poetic worth; where wanting in rhythmic melody, most have a wild and peculiar rhythm of their own. The reviewer knows some whose hearts this book has made glad, and doubtless there are many.

The essay on Poetry is itself poetic throughout, and how else should Poetry be described than by Poetry? What form shall embrace and define the highest, if not one self-descriptive as self-existent? For what man is to this planet, and the eye to man, Poetry is to Literature. Yet one wishes the poetic forms in this essay were fewer and less minute, and the whole a little more scientific, though it is a question how far we may ask this. The pages seem to sparkle as if strewn with diamond sparks, shining from within as well as on the surface. Still, fancy is too prominent in Mr. Lynch's writings. His Fancy is indeed the fairy attendant on his Imagination, who uses her for higher ends, and there is little or no *mere* fancy in his books, for below the surface-form you find a truth. But it were to be desired that the Truth walked forth among her worshippers in the living forms of Imagination, looking on them from living eyes, rather than through the windows of fancy. Sometimes there is an offence against taste, as on page 20; sometimes an image is expanded too much; sometimes the exuberance of fancy (if the combination is correct) brings together images that suggest incongruity. Still the essay is abundantly beautiful and true. Its poetical quotations are not isolated as specimens, but worked into the web of the prose like flowers in damask, and do their part in the continuous thought.

"If poetry, as light from the heart of God, is for our heart, that we may brighten and distinguish individual things; if it transfigures the round, dusk world as by an inner radiance; if it presents human life and history as Rembrandt pictures, in which darkness serves and glorifies light; if, like light, formless in its essence, it shapes all things towards the perfection of their forms; if, entering in single beams, it makes the dimmest places cheerful and sacred with its golden touch: then the heart of the Poet in which this light shines must be a hospice on the mountain pathways of the world, and his verse the lamp seen from far that tells where bread, shelter, drink, fire, and companionship may be found; and he should have the mountaineer's hardiness and resolution. Poetry comes from the heart as source, to the heart in influence. The inward, the upward, and the onward, of an individual or a nation, may not be separated. Deep and sacred imaginative meditations are needed for the earthward as well as the heavenward progress of peoples. Poetry, old or new, streaming from a heart moved by love, influences the heart public and individual, and thence manners, laws, and institutions. If Poesy visits a whole country after unfruitfully dull years, like a showery wind after drought, she visits the corners and valley-hidings too, perhaps first. The public corn, the bread of the nation's life, is bettered for miles; and in our own endeared spot the roses yield their colour and fragrance more prosperingly. As midseason rains renew for a while the faded green of spring, and trees in summer, their foliage fixed, put on bright midsummer shoots, so by Poetry the youthful hues of the soul are renewed, and truths long standing full-foliaged in our minds put forth fresh shoots. Thus age, a necessity for the body, may be warded off as a disease from the soul, and we may be like the old man in Chaucer, who had nothing hoary about him but his hairs---"

| "'Though I be hoor I fare as doth a tree
| That blosmeth er the fruit ywoxen be,
| The blosmy tree n' is neither drie ne ded:
| I feel me nowhere hoor, but on my head.
| Min herte and all my limmes ben as grene
| As laurel through the yere is for to sene.'"

Hear our author again as to the calling of the poet:---

"To unite earthly love and celestial, 'true to the kindred points of heaven and home'; to reconcile time and eternity; to draw presage of joy's victory from the delight of the secret honey dropping from the clefts of rocky sorrow; *to harmonize our instinctive longings for the definite and the infinite, in the ideal Perfect*; to read creation as a human book of the heart, both plain and mystical, and divinely written: such is the office fulfilled by best-loved poets. Their ladder of celestial ascent must be fixed on its base, earth, if its top is to rest securely on heaven."

He also describes the birth of Poetry beautifully, though one may doubt its correctness, at least if attributed to the highest kind of poetry.

"When the first pair spoke words of felt truth, in love of their garden, their God, and one another, and felt with joyful surprise that the form and glow of the words answered to the happy thought, then Poetry sprang. And when the first Father and first Mother, settling their soul upon a thought, found it brighten, and other thoughts came from it like branchlets from a branch, falling by the soul's painless effort into an order felt to be beautiful, pleasant to ear and soul, and fixed in memory by the sweetness of their impression on the heart, then the world's first poem was composed; and in the joyful flutter of a heart become a maker of a 'thing of beauty,' like in beauty even to God's heaven, trees, and flowers, the secret of Poesy shone tremulously forth."

Whether this is so or not, the highest poetic feeling we now know springs not from beholding perfected beauty but from the mute sympathy shown us by creation and all its children in the groaning and travailing that looks for the sonship. Because of our need and aspiration, the snowdrop awakens a loftier spiritual and poetic feeling than the rose most perfect in form, colour, and odour. The rose is of Paradise; the snowdrop is of the striving, hoping, longing Earth. Perhaps our highest poetry is the expression of our aspirations in the sympathetic forms of visible nature. Nor is this merely a longing for a restored Paradise; in ordinary history too no man or woman who has fallen can be restored to the former position, but must rise higher, to a place from which that standing lies far beneath: restored by attaining something better than ever was possessed, or not at all. If the law is a weariness, we escape it by being filled with the spirit, for we can fulfil the law only by being above the law. There is for us no escape, save as the Poet counsels us:---

| "Is thy strait horizon dreary?
| Is thy foolish fancy chill?
| Change the feet that have grown weary,
| For the wings that never will.
| Burst the flesh and live the spirit;
| Haunt the beautiful and far;
| Thou hast all things to inherit,
| And a soul for every star."

But the Reviewer must hasten, though unwillingly, to take leave of this pleasing, earnest, and profitable book. Perhaps the writer could have helped his readers more into the channel of his thought, made it easier to see where he leads them, called out "Come up hither" before saying "I will show you a thing." The Reviewer says this with deference, and leaves hoping Mr. Lynch will be listened to for two good reasons: first, that he speaks the truth; last, that he has already suffered for the Truth's sake.

## THE HISTORY AND HEROES OF MEDICINE

\[Footnote: By J. Rutherfurd Russell, M.D.\]

Dr. Russell has aimed not merely at a book useful to the Faculty, which studies its own art's history far too little, but at the much harder success of a history of medicine readable by everyone who cares for true history: one showing not only growth and change but the hidden supplies and influences behind them. If this was harder (though we doubt it, given his wide sympathies and keen insight into humanity), the success is the more honourable, and certainly a success. His partly biographical plan has helped, since the subject is easier to present in its human relations through the lives of those closest to it. Yet it remains a history of the art itself, for no art or science has life apart from the minds that foresee, discover, and verify it. It stays at whatever point it has reached until a new man appears whose new questions draw new replies from nature, the food on which a science lives, grows, and makes its history.

Readers should not suppose that because the book is readable it is slight. Much reading and research have gone into its material, real thought and argument into its construction, and it has the adornment of a poetic temperament and a keen sense of humour.

Naturally the central life in the book is Lord Bacon's, the man who brought out of his treasures things new and old. The story leads up to him from the prehistoric times of Aesculapius, the path first becoming plain with Hippocrates, whose fine intellect and acute observation made a true physician. The Greek mind, perhaps from its artistic tendencies, was impatient of incomplete forms and preferred building a theory from the most shadowy material to the patient experiment needed for real substance. Hippocrates, not knowing how to reach a theory by rational experiment and too honest to invent one, took over the traditional theories, built on the vaguest generalizations. Those his experience taught him to reject were kept by Galen and his followers for centuries; the chief progress was the Arabians' substitution of some of the milder medicines now in use for the terrible, often fatal drugs of the Greek and Roman physicians. The fanciful sorting of diseases into four kinds, hot, cold, moist, and dry, with remedies sorted to match and given by contraries, remained the only recognized theory of medicine for many centuries after Christ.

But among the branches of knowledge Lord Bacon thinks ill-followed he names medicine in particular, and would put it under the same rules of observation and experiment he set for learning in general. Here, as in discovering the higher laws of nature, he holds "that men have made too untimely a departure, and too remote a recess from particulars": they hurry to conclusions and then argue from them as from facts. So let us have no traditional theories, and make none but those revealed as laws to the patient investigator who has "straightened and held fast Proteus, that he might be compelled to change his shapes," and so reveal his nature. So Bacon had to appear partly as a destroyer of what went before, like Cardan and Paracelsus, who also pulled down but could not, like him, build up. He shared with them poetic imagination, which looks into possibility and foresees or invents. But the charlatan takes the vaguest suggestion of his mind in its favourite mood as a theory all but proved, if not a direct revelation to himself; the true thinker seeks only an hypothesis that fits facts already found, so that it suggests new experiments by which to verify or disprove it. Bacon thought hypothesis invaluable in discovering truth, but used it only as a board to write his questions to nature on, or as the next stepping-stone in a swollen river, which he supposes to be here or there and feels for with his staff. It must be proved before it counts as a law, and greatly corroborated before it is even adopted as a theory. Cardan and Paracelsus were destroyers and mystics only; they destroyed on the earth to build in the air. Bacon united both characters in the philosopher: he looked into the unknown, whence all knowledge comes, and called wonder the seed of knowledge, but would build only on the firm land of ascertained truth. What kept him right was his practical humanity. He laboured to deliver men from the ills of life by discovering the laws of the elements amid which life is lived. This kept him true, enabled him to discover the very laws of discovery, and brought him so far into *rapport* with the heart of nature that, like a physical prophet, his seeing outspeeded his knowing and beheld a law, dimly, long before his intellect, which had to build bridges and find straw for bricks, dared affirm the same conclusion. Truth to humanity made him true to fact, and truth to fact made him true in theory.

In this spirit of devotion to his kind he said that the deficiency he found was that physicians had not set down and handed on certain experimental medicines for the cure of particular diseases.

These remarks are prompted by Dr. Russell's true insight into Bacon's relation to medicine and to all science. What he chiefly desires is that the principles that made medicine what it is be allowed to carry it further, to what it ought to be and must become. Through succeeding lives and theories he shows that men have made discoveries helpful to their fellows just in proportion as they followed these principles of careful observation, hypothesis, and experiment, while the most elaborate theories of the most popular physicians, born of premature generalization and invention, passed away like the crackling of thorns under a pot. Stahl, Hoffman, Boerhaave, Cullen, and Brown belong to the latter class; Harvey, Sydenham, Jenner, and Hahnemann to the former.

After the last name there is no need to say our author is a homoeopath. Whatever our private opinion of the system, justice requires us to say that books like this are as open to refutation as to ridicule, since only a good argument is worth refuting by a better. We fear few books on the subject treat it so calmly and fairly that an honest homoeopath would hand them to an opponent as an exposition of his views. There is no excitement here, but a man of liberal education, refinement, and truthfulness, with power to understand and facility to express. One of his main objects is to vindicate for homoeopathy, on the only ground on which science can stand, that of laws discovered by observation and experiment, not just a place as a fact in the history of medicine but the right to be counted among the greatest advances towards a science of curing. If he and its other advocates failed utterly in this, the heresy would still stand in history as one of the most powerful illusions that have deceived both priests and people. But the chief advantage the system will gain from the book, it seems to us, comes from his attempt, a successful one it must be confessed, to prove *that homoeopathy is a development, and not a mere reaction*, rooted far down in the history of science. His first mention of it, though, disavows the claim many homoeopathists make to Hippocrates as one of their order. Passing by the curious story of Galen's patient, ill from an overdose of theriacum and cured by another dose, Paracelsus' and Van Helmont's ridicule of contraries, and Boerhaave's *contraries*, which by his own explanation just mean whatever proves contrary to the disease by curing it, we find one of homoeopathy's main objects, the discovery of specifics, urged by Bacon in the words already quoted. Homoeopaths, though they depend on specifics, do not believe in a specific for a disease, since a disease varies as much as the individuals it attacks; they hold that an approximate specific can be found for every well-defined stage of every individual disease, which changes, develops, and declines like a vegetable or animal life. Boyle, born the year Bacon died and heir to his mantle, shows the same strong desire for specifics, opposes compound medicines, and strongly believes in the infinitesimal dose. Neither Bacon nor Boyle was a medical man by profession; but Sydenham followed them, says Dr. Russell, in their tendency towards specifics. Jenner's victory over the small-pox is, to homoeopaths, a grand step in their system's development, and it lets Dr. Russell show in a strong instance that the best discoveries for delivering mankind from the ills it feels most have been met with derision, not just unbelief. This is one of his objects, and though it proves nothing of the truth of homoeopathy, it shows that opposition to it does not prove it false. That is enough: it asks to be tried on its own merits, and its foes must grant that when it is advocated so honestly and with such dignity.

Man's need, in physics as in higher things, guides us to truth. We need no closer acquaintance with evils than we gain by combating them. Discovering what cures diseases seems the only natural way to rise by generalization to the laws of cure and the nature of disease.

The portions on Christianity's influence on the healing art, and on the different feelings with which physicians have been regarded in different times and countries, are especially interesting.

The only part of the book whose thought we would fault is the dissertation in the second chapter on the \[Greek: psuchae\] and \[Greek: pneuma\]. We also doubt that Van Helmont's Archaeus gets quite fair play; but these questions are too purely theoretical to discuss here. Whatever we think of the system it advocates, we rise from the book with greater respect for the profession of medicine, larger hope for its future, and a strong sense of the nobility the art confers on every practitioner aware of the dignity of his calling.

## WORDSWORTH'S POETRY

\[Footnote: Delivered extempore at Manchester.\]

The history of Wordsworth's poetry truly reflects the man. His life was outwardly uneventful but inwardly full of conflict, discovery, and progress, and Providence seems to have ordered the outward life to favour the poetic life within. Educated in the country and living mostly in nature's society, he escaped the violent external changes some poets have suffered. Fully able to make his way in the world, he chose to withdraw and work out in solitude what seemed to him his life's true destiny.

The element in which Wordsworth's mind lived was a Christian pantheism. Old Testament poets speak of everything as the work of God's hand: we are the "work of his hand"; "The world was made by him." The New Testament has a higher form for our relation to him: "We are his offspring," not the work of his hand but children from his heart. Our poet Goldsmith, with a genius's instinct, says God "loved us into being." I think this is true of the world as well as of man. The world is not merely something God made and subjected to laws; it expresses the thought, feeling, and heart of God himself. It must, for if man is God's child, would he not feel out of his element in a world that came only from God's hand and not his heart? This belief that God is in everything and shows himself in everything was much brought to light by the poets of the last generation, and I hope still influences those of the present. We are not satisfied that the world should merely prove and vary the intellect of God. That was Paley's view: from the world's mechanism he taught us to believe in a God. But even if his argument is entirely correct, it proves only a mechanical God.

Let us go further. Looking at beauty, let us believe that God is the first of artists, that he put beauty into nature knowing and intending how it would affect us, and embodied his grand thoughts there for us to see and be glad. Further still, let us believe that whatever we feel in the highest moments of truth shining through beauty, whatever comes to our souls as a power of life, is meant for us to see and feel, and is not the work of his hand but the flowing forth of his heart, his love of us, blessing us in the union of his heart and ours.

Wordsworth is the high priest of nature so regarded. He saw God present everywhere, though not always directly: in the awful mountain-peak, sky-encompassed with loveliness, or in the face of a little child, which is as it were eyes in the face of nature, he felt the solemn presence of the Divine Spirit. Keats recognized this presence only as the spirit of beauty; to Wordsworth, God as the Spirit of Truth was manifested through the external world.

Wordsworth's life, I have said, was so ordered as to bring this out of him, in the forms of *his* art, to the ears of men. Even in childhood nature's influence partly developed his conscience. He describes it in retrospect:---

| One summer evening (led by her) I found
| A little boat, tied to a willow tree,
| Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
| Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in,
| Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth,
| And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
| Of mountain echoes did my boat move on,
| Leaving behind her still, on either side,
| Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
| Until they melted all into one track
| Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows
| Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
| With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
| Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
| The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
| Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
| She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
| I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
| And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
| Went heaving through the water like a swan;
| When, from behind that craggy steep, till then
| The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
| As if with voluntary power instinct,
| Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
| And, growing still in stature, the grim shape
| Towered up between me and the stars, and still
| For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
| And measured motion like a living thing,
| Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
| And through the silent water stole my way
| Back to the covert of the willow tree;
| There in her mooring place I left my bark,
| And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
| And serious mood; but after I had seen
| That spectacle, for many days, my brain
| Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
| Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
| There hung a darkness, call it solitude,
| Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
| Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
| Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
| But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
| Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
| By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

So nature gave a fresh impulse to his life even in boyhood. If we have had a similar experience we can enter into his feeling; if not, the tale will seem almost incredible.

One passage more shows what Wordsworth felt toward nature in his youth and how he grew from it. Nature laid up in his mind and heart her most beautiful and grand forms, to be brought out later for the highest human service. I quote a few lines from the poem, deservedly a favourite of all Wordsworth's lovers, "Lines written above Tintern Abbey":---

|                   I cannot paint
| What then I was. The sounding cataract
| Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
| The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
| Their colours and their forms, were then to me
| An appetite; a feeling and a love,
| That had no need of a remoter charm
| By thought supplied, nor any interest
| Unborrowed from the eye.---That time is past,
| And all its aching joys are now no more,
| And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
| Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
| Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
| Abundant recompense. For I have learned
| To look on nature, not as in the hour
| Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
| The still, sad music of humanity,
| Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
| To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
| A presence that disturbs me with the joy
| Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
| Of something far more deeply interfused,
| Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
| And the round ocean, and the living air
| And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
| A motion and a spirit, that impels
| All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
| And rolls through all things.

Here you see nature's influence growing on the poet's mind, and nature passing into poetry, form sublimed into speech. You see the mind of man meeting the mind of God manifested in his works, spirit coming to know the speech of spirit; the poet receives what flows from spirit in nature and utters again, in his form, what God has uttered in his. Wordsworth wished to give man what he found in nature: a power of good, a world of teaching, a strength of life. He knew nature was not his, and that his enjoyment of it was given him to give to man. It was man's birthright.

But what did Wordsworth find in nature? To begin with the lowest: amusement. Right amusement is part of teaching, its childish form, and finding it in nature takes us near the root of good. As proof I cite a poem you probably know, "The Daisy." The poet sits playing with the flower, listening to the odd resemblances it suggests. He likens the daisy to---

| A little cyclops, with one eye
| Staring to threaten and defy,
| That thought comes next---and instantly
|     The freak is over,
| The shape will vanish---and behold
| A silver shield with boss of gold,
| That spreads itself, some faëry bold
|     In fight to cover!

Look at the last stanza too, and see how close amusement may lie to deep and earnest thought:---

| Bright *Flower*! for by that name at last
| When all my reveries are past,
| I call thee, and to that cleave fast,
|         Sweet silent creature!
| That breath'st with me in sun and air,
| Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
| My heart with gladness, and a share
|         Of thy meek nature!

But Wordsworth also found joy in nature, a better thing than amusement and so easier to find. We can often have joy where we can have no amusement,---

| I wandered lonely as a cloud
|   That floats on high o'er vales and hills
| When all at once I saw a crowd,
|   A host, of golden daffodils;
| Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
| Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

| The waves beside them danced; but they
|   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
| A poet could not but be gay,
|   In such a jocund company:
| I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
| What Health the show to me had brought.

| "For oft, when on my couch I lie
|   In vacant or in pensive mood,
| They flash upon that inward eye
|   Which is the bliss of solitude;
| And then my heart with pleasure fills,
| And dances with the daffodils."

This is the joy of the eye, so far as that can be separated from the joy of his whole nature; it was simply joy, with no further teaching, no attempt to find the truth beneath the beauty. We are not always to be hungry and restless even after truth itself. If we keep our minds quiet and ready to receive truth, and *sometimes* hunger for it, that is enough.

A step higher, he sometimes *draws* a lesson from nature, almost forcing a meaning from her. I do not object, if he does not make too much of it as *existing* in nature; he is finding a meaning he brought to it. The meaning exists, if not *there*. For illustration I refer to another poem. Observe that he found the lesson because he looked for it and *would* find it.

| This Lawn, a carpet all alive
| With shadows flung from leaves---to strive
|         In dance, amid a press
| Of sunshine, an apt emblem yields
| Of Worldlings revelling in the fields
|         Of strenuous idleness.

| Yet, spite of all this eager strife,
| This ceaseless play, the genuine life
|         That serves the steadfast hours,
| Is in the grass beneath, that grows
| Unheeded, and the mute repose
|         Of sweetly-breathing flowers.

Whether or not he forced this lesson from nature, it is a good one, teaching much about life and work.

Again, nature sometimes flashes a lesson on his mind, *gives* it to him, and when nature gives, we cannot but receive. As in this sonnet composed during a storm,---

| One who was suffering tumult in his soul
| Yet failed to seek the sure relief of prayer,
| Went forth; his course surrendering to the care
| Of the fierce wind, while mid-day lightnings prowl
| Insiduously, untimely thunders growl;
| While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers tear
| The lingering remnant of their yellow hair,
| And shivering wolves, surprised with darkness, howl
| As if the sun were not. He raised his eye
| Soul-smitten; for, that instant, did appear
| Large space (mid dreadful clouds) of purest sky,
| An azure disc---shield of Tranquillity;
| Invisible, unlooked-for, minister
| Of providential goodness ever nigh!

Observe that he was not looking for this and had not thought of praying; his distress had benumbed his spirit's going out toward the only source of sure comfort. He went into the storm, and the uproar outside matched the tumult in his soul. Suddenly a clear space in the sky makes him feel, without time to think, that a shield of tranquillity is spread over him. For was it not as it were an opening into the region where there are no storms, the region of peace because of love, truth, and purity, the home of God himself?

There is a yet higher, more sustained influence of nature: she puts a man in the mood in which thoughts come of themselves. That is perhaps the best nature can do for us, and certainly higher than mere intellectual teaching. That she did this for Wordsworth is clear and easily understood. If the world came from God's imagination and man from God's love, it is easy to believe that what came from his imagination should rouse the best thoughts in a being who came from his love. That, I think, is the relation between man and the world. As an instance I refer to one of Wordsworth's finest poems, which he classes under "Evening Voluntaries," composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty:---

| "Had this effulgence disappeared
| With flying haste, I might have sent,
| Among the speechless clouds, a look
| Of blank astonishment;
| But 'tis endued with power to stay,
| And sanctify one closing day,
| That frail Mortality may see---
| What is?---ah no, but what *can*, be!
| Time was when field and watery cove
| With modulated echoes rang,
| While choirs of fervent Angels sang
| Their vespers in the grove;
| Or, crowning, star-like, each some sovereign height,
| Warbled, for heaven above and earth below,
| Strains suitable to both. Such holy rite,
| Methinks, if audibly repeated now
| From hill or valley, could not move
| Sublimer transport, purer love,
| Than doth this silent spectacle---the gleam---
| The shadow---and the peace supreme!

| "No sound is uttered,---but a deep
|   And solemn harmony pervades
| The hollow vale from steep to steep,
|   And penetrates the glades.

| "Wings at my shoulders seem to play;
| But, rooted here, I stand and gaze
| On those bright steps that heaven-ward raise
| Their practicable way.
| Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad,
| And see to what fair countries ye are bound!

| "Dread Power! whom peace and calmness serve
| No less than Nature's threatening voice,
| From THEE, if I would swerve,
| Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light
| Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;
| Which, at this moment, on my waking sight
| Appears to shine, by miracle restored;
| My soul, though yet confined to earth,
| Rejoices in a second birth!"

Picture the scene, and observe how it moves in him a sense of responsibility and the prayer that, if he has in any matter wandered from the right road, or forgotten the simplicity of childhood in the toil of life, he may remember from now on the vow he records: from now on to press toward the unseen things that are manifested through the seen. I refer you also to "Resolution and Independence," commonly called "The Leech Gatherer," and to the grandest ode ever written, the "Ode on Immortality." Whatever you think of his theory in the latter, it proves that nature was to him a divine teaching power. I do not mean that nature's teaching alone would have shown a man these things; the soul must be tuned to them. Wordsworth could not have found such things in nature had he not known something more definite and helpful; but that known, nature was full of teaching. When we understand the Word of God we understand his works; when we know an artist's nature we know his pictures; when we have known and talked with the poet we understand his poetry far better. To the man of God all nature is changeful reflections of the face of God.

Loving man as he did, Wordsworth was anxious to give him this teaching. How? By poetry. Nature put into the crucible of a loving heart becomes poetry. We cannot explain poetry scientifically, because poetry is beyond science. The poet may be a scientist and the scientist a poet, but poetry includes science, and the man who will advance science most is the one who, other qualifications equal, has most poetic faculty. Wordsworth defines poetry as "the impassioned expression which is on the face of science." Science deals with the construction of things: the casting of the earth's granite ribs and the thousand operations that produce what appears on its surface. But grass-bearing meadows, heaven-reared hills, streams that go ever downward, fountains that ever arise, the wind among the leaves and the odours it carries, colour, shape, and sound: these are poetry's material. Science deals with the underwork. For what does this central world exist, with its hidden winds and waters, upheavals and downsinkings, frame of rock and heart of fire? Not for themselves, surely, but for the world of beauty that floats up, as it were, to the surface of the shapeless region of force. Science has to do with the one, poetry with the other. To illustrate: you find the first primrose of the year and feel almost as if you had found a child, a new beauty and joy though you have seen it a thousand times. A little flower that looks at me, thinks itself into my heart, and gives me a pleasure I feel I could not do without. The impassioned expression on its face is its childhood: trust, consciousness of protection, faith, and hope. Science, in the botanist, comes after you and pulls it to pieces to see its construction, and delights the intellect; but that science is dead and kills what it touches. The flower exists not for it but for the expression on its face, its poetry, which makes you feel the flower is just growing out of the heart of God. The intellect itself is only the scaffolding for building up the spiritual nature.

This is plainer if you suppose a human form created without a soul. Divine science *has* put it together, but only for the sake of the soul that will shine out and make it live, move, and have its own being in God. When you see the face lit with soul, with thought, feeling, joy, and love, you know that this is what it was made for. So you see poetry's relation to science, and, in an apparent paradox, that the surface is deepest after all: through the surface, for whose sake the building went on, we have a window into the depths of truth. Every living form in the world is a window cloven through the blank darkness of nothingness, letting us look into the heart, feeling, and nature of God. So the surface of things is best and deepest, provided it is not mere surface but the impassioned expression for which the science of God has thought and laboured.

Satisfied this was poetry's nature, and wanting to convey it to his fellows, Wordsworth may be supposed to have asked, "What vehicle shall I use? Where am I to find the right language for speaking such great things to men?" He saw that eighteenth-century poetry (he was born in 1770) was artificial, not like nature, with no more originality than a picture copied a hundred times without going back to the original. Apart from much of Cowper and Thompson, it seems agreed that nothing should be said naturally: a set form was used for things that should never be said twice the same way. Wordsworth resolved to go back to natural simplicity of speech and have none of these stereotyped forms. "Where shall I find," he asked, "the language that will be simple and powerful?" He concluded it was the language of the common people. Your experience may be that this is not poetical. True, but not even a poet speaks poetically in his stupid moments. Wordsworth meant the common people's language in their uncommon moods, their high and therefore simple moods, when grief, hope, reverence, worship, or love moves them; there he believed he could find just the language for the poet. As far as it goes, I think he was right. The poet will of course have needs that the language of a man whose thoughts never moved in such directions cannot meet, but the kind of language is right, and I have heard it among the common people myself: language they did not know to be poetic, which fell on my ear and heart as profoundly poetic in feeling and form.

In carrying out this theory I won't say Wordsworth never broke his own laws, but he held to it to the last. A friend of the poet told me Wordsworth had said he believed he would be remembered longest not by his sonnets, as the friend thought, but by his lyrical ballads, those for which he was reviled and laughed at, most by critics who could not understand him and were unworthy to read what he wrote. As proof let me read three verses of a poem especially marked for derision:---

| She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
| Beside the springs of Dove;
| A maid whom there were none to praise,
| And very few to love.

| A violet by a mossy stone.
| Half hidden from the eye;
| Fair as a star, when only one
| Is shining in the sky.

| She lived unknown, and few could know
| When Lucy ceased to be;
| But she is in her grave, and Oh!
| The difference to me.

The last line was especially chosen for ridicule; but I think most of us will feel its very simplicity overflows with suggestion and throws us back on our own experience. Instead of trying to utter what he felt, he says in plain words, "You who have known anything of the kind will know what the difference to me is, and only you can know." In one of his essays he says his intention is that the poem's interest shall owe nothing to the circumstances, but that the circumstances shall be made interesting by the thing itself. Most novels, for instance, try to interest us in worthless, commonplace people we would rather not meet by surrounding them with peculiar and extraordinary circumstances; that is a low source of interest, and Wordsworth was determined to owe nothing to it. For illustration let me read the well-known little ballad "The Reverie of Poor Susan," which bears out his theory entirely. The scene is in London:---

| At the corner of Wood-street, when daylight appears,
| Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
| Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard,
| In the silence of morning, the song of the Bird.

| 'Tis a note of enchantment: what ails her? She sees
| A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
| Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
| And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

| Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
| Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
| And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
| The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

| She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
| The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
| The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
| And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!

Is any of the interest here owing to the circumstances, in what is a very common incident? Yet has he not treated it so that it is not *commonplace* in the least? We recognize in this girl just the feelings we find in ourselves, and acknowledge almost with tears her sisterhood to us all.

I have tried to make you feel something of what Wordsworth attempts, but I have not given you his best poems. Let me finish with the closing portion of the *Prelude*, published after his death, addressed to Coleridge:---

| Oh! yet a few short years of useful life,
| And all will be complete, thy race be run,
| Thy monument of glory will be raised;
| Then, though (too weak to head the ways of truth)
| This age fall back to old idolatry,
| Though men return to servitude as fast
| As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
| By nations sink together, we shall still
| Find solace---knowing what we have learnt to know---
| Rich in true happiness, if allowed to be
| Faithful alike in forwarding a day
| Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
| (Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
| Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
| Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
| A lasting inspiration, sanctified
| By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
| Others will love, and we will teach them how;
| Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
| A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
| On which he dwells, above this frame of things
| (Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes
| And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
| In beauty exalted, as it is itself
| Of quality and fabric more divine.

## SHELLEY

Whatever Shelley's relative rank as a poet, most who have studied him will grant that his writings are so individual and original that he can be neither hidden in the shade nor lost in the brightness of any other poet. No idea of his works could be conveyed by comparison, since he resembles no other English writer closely enough.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, on 4 August 1792, the son of Timothy Shelley, Esq., and grandson of Sir Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet. His ancestors had long been large landowners in Sussex.

As a child he was noticeable for rambling by moonlight, inventing wonderful tales, and strange, sometimes dangerous amusements. At thirteen he went to Eton, where was first roused his determined opposition to anything that seemed an invasion of human rights and liberty, later the animating principle of most of his writings. Were we not aware of far keener distress from greater injustice later, we might suppose that his sufferings for refusing to fag against school custom had made him morbidly sensitive on liberty. At eighteen he entered Oxford, at a time when freedom of speech, as a sign of freedom of thought, was especially obnoxious to the authorities, and no allowance was made for youth, still less for individual peculiarity. Devoted to metaphysics and fond of logical discussion, he printed in his first year and distributed among the college authorities and members a two-page pamphlet opposing the usual arguments for the existence of a Deity, arguments that perhaps even the most ardent believers find inconclusive. Whether it embodied his own opinions or was only a logical confutation, the way he was treated was certainly not required of those charged with educating his opinions: without making sure he was the author, and satisfied by his refusal to answer when asked, they handed him a sentence of expulsion already drawn up in due form.

About this time Shelley wrote, or began, *Queen Mab*, which he never published, though he gave copies to friends. Later he thought so poorly of it in every respect that he regretted printing it at all, and when an edition appeared without his consent he applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to suppress it.

Shelley's opinions in politics and theology, which he seems to have been far more anxious to maintain than the peace of the household allowed, were peculiarly obnoxious to his father, a man as different from his son as can be conceived, and expulsion from Oxford was soon followed by exile from home. In London, through his sisters, who were at school nearby, he met Harriet Westbrook, and eloped with and married her when he was nineteen and she sixteen. It seems doubtful whether the attachment was more than her enthusiasm responding to his, in wild talk about human rights and equally wild plans for securing them. However that may be, the result was unfortunate. For rather more than two years they wandered about England, Scotland, and Ireland, changing residence often and suddenly. Shelley gained the friendship of some of the age's most eminent men, and the most influential on his character and future was William Godwin, whose instructions and expostulations tended to give solidity and form to the young reformer's vague, extravagant opinions and projects. Early in the third year of their marriage an estrangement that had gradually widened ended in final separation. We are not told its causes, except that it seems owing considerably to Mrs. Shelley's elder sister, who domineered over her and whose presence became absolutely hateful to Shelley. His wife went back to her father's house, where, apparently about three years later, she committed suicide. There seems no immediate connection between this and any conduct of Shelley's. One biographer says that while they lived happily together, suicide was a favourite subject of speculation and conversation with her.

Shortly after his first wife's death Shelley married Godwin's daughter, with whom he had lived almost since the separation and twice visited Switzerland. In 1817 Chancery decreed that Shelley was not a proper person to have charge of his two children by his first wife, who had lived with her until her death; their grandfather, Mr. Westbrook, filed the bill. The effects on Shelley may be easily imagined; perhaps he never recovered from them. That year he lived at Marlow and wrote *The Revolt of Islam* and parts of other poems; the next he left England, not to return. His health (he had seemed for some time to be in a consumption) and fear that his son by his second wife would be taken from him drove him to take refuge in Italy. At Lucca he began his *Prometheus* and wrote *Julian and Maddalo*. He moved about Italy as he had about England. Their two children died, leaving them for a time childless, but this grieved him less than the loss of his eldest two, taken from him by the hand of man. In 1819 he finished *Prometheus Unbound*, writing most of it at Rome and completing it at Florence, and wrote his tragedy *The Cenci*, which drew more attention in his lifetime than any other work of his. The *Ode to a Skylark* was written at Leghorn in the spring of 1820, and the *Witch of Atlas* near Pisa in August. The next year he and Byron met at Pisa and were much together; but their friendship, though real, was not very profound, for though unlikeness is a necessary element of friendship, some kinds of unlikeness will not harmonize. All this time he was maligned by unknown enemies and abused by anonymous writers, and other attempts are said to have been made to make his life as uncomfortable as possible, though there are grounds for doubting whether he was not subject to a kind of monomania on this and similar points. In 1821 he wrote *Adonais*, a monody on the death of Keats, partly arising from the mistaken notion that a brutal criticism of *Endymion* in the *Quarterly Review* caused Keats's illness and death. Its last verse seems almost prophetic of his own end. Passionately fond of boating, he and his friend Mr. Williams built a boat of peculiar build, very fast but hard to manage. On 8 July 1822 they sailed from Leghorn for Lerici, on the Bay of Spezia, near which his home then lay. A sudden squall came on and the boat disappeared. The bodies were cast ashore and, under quarantine regulations, burned to ashes; Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Mr. Trelawney were present at Shelley's burning, so his ashes were saved and buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, near the grave of Keats, buried there the preceding spring. His widow inscribed on the tomb the words *Cor Cordium*.

Shelley's character has been sadly maligned. Whatever faults he committed against society did not come from sensuality. One biographer, his companion at Oxford, who seems inclined to do him no *more* than justice, says his conduct there was immaculate, and his whole picture of the youth makes this easy to believe. To discuss the moral question in one part of his history would be out of place here; but even if a man's conduct is altogether inexcusable in individual instances, there is the more need that only the truth be said of that and other portions. And whatever society felt justified in condemning, Shelley owed it less than most men. Yet his heart seemed full of love for his kind, and the distress others' oppression caused him was the source of much of the wild denunciation that exposed him to the contempt and hatred of those made uncomfortable by his unsparing, indiscriminate anathemas. In private he was beloved by all who knew him, a steady, generous, self-denying friend to all within reach of his aid, and to the poor a true and laborious benefactor. That man must have been good to whom his widow's heart returns with such devotion and thankfulness for the past and fond hope for the future as Mrs. Shelley shows in the extracts from her private journal given us by Lady Shelley.

As regards his religious opinions, one of the strongest thoughts is how ill he must have been instructed in the principles of Christianity! He says himself in a letter to Godwin, "I have known no tutor or adviser (*not excepting my father*) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust." Far from being an opponent of Christianity properly so called, he might, one feels, have been a fine Christian had he seen it in any way except through the traditional and practical misrepresentations around him. All his attacks on Christianity are really against evils to which its true doctrines are more opposed than his own could be. How far he was excusable in giving the name of Christianity to what he might have seen was only a miserable perversion is another question, hardly for discussion here. It was, however, in the *name* of Christianity that the worst injuries he suffered were inflicted. Coming out of the cathedral at Pisa one day, \[Footnote: From *Shelley Memorials*, edited by Lady Shelley, which the writer of this paper has principally followed in regard to the external facts of Shelley's history.\] Shelley warmly assented to Leigh Hunt's remark "that a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith." Surely the founders of Christianity, even when they magnified faith, meant a spiritual condition whose central principle coincides with charity. Shelley's own feelings toward others, as judged from his poetry, seem tinctured with the very essence of Christianity. \[Footnote: His *Essay on Christianity* is full of noble views, some held today by some of the most earnest believers. We are not told when in his life it was written, but it seems such as would insure his acceptance with any company of intelligent and devout Unitarians.\] At one time at least he did not believe we could know the source of our being, and seemed to take it as self-evident that the Creator could not be like the creature. But it is unjust to fix on any utterance and call it the religion of a man who died in his thirtieth year and whose opinions must have been constantly changing. Coleridge says in a letter that Shelley's discussions, tending toward atheism of a certain sort, would not have scared *him*: to *him* they would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, through which he would have seen the true *image*, the final metamorphosis. He has always thought that sort of atheism the next best religion to Christianity, and the better faith he learned from Paul and John does not interfere with his cordial reverence for Benedict Spinoza.

Shelley's favourite study was metaphysics. The more impulse in any direction, the more education and experience are needed to balance it, and one cannot help thinking his *taste* for such exercises developed faster than the *power*. His favourite physical studies were chemistry and electricity, pursued from childhood, apparently with more delight in the experiments than interest in their general conclusions. Their influence seems to show in his poetic embodiment of metaphysical ideas: he uses forms that appeal more to the outer senses than the inward eye, and similes of fancy rather than imagination; they lack *vital* resemblance. Logic attracted him; geometry and mathematics he was indifferent to. A biographer says "he was neglectful of flowers," having no interest in botany; but one who took such full delight in their external forms could hardly feel much impulse to dissect them. He took exceeding pleasure in Greek literature, especially Plato.

Several little peculiarities of Shelley's tastes are worth mentioning because, though insignificant in themselves, they seem to correspond with the nature of his poetry. The most prominent was his passion for boat-sailing. He could not pass any water without launching boats made from whatever paper he had in his pockets, often the fly-leaves of the books he constantly carried and read, and watching them with utmost interest until they sank or reached the other side. He was just as fond of real, often dangerous, boating; yet characteristically all the boats in his poems are fairy, fantastic ones, barely related to boats that battle earthly winds and waves. Pistol-shooting was a favourite amusement, and fireworks gave him great delight. He was remarkably abstemious, preferring bread and raisins to anything else and seldom drinking anything stronger than water; honey was a favourite luxury. At college, says his biographer Hogg, he would sleep in the evening on the rug close to a blazing fire, heat seeming never to do him anything but good, then wake perfectly restored and stay actively occupied far into the morning. His movements were rapid, hurried, and uncertain: he would appear and disappear suddenly, forget appointments, and burst into wild laughter, heedless of his situation, when something struck him as peculiarly ludicrous. He changed residence so often and so hastily that whole little libraries were left behind and often lost. He was very fond of children and used to try humorously to get them to disclose the still-remembered secrets of their pre-existence. He seemed peculiarly drawn to mystery and ready to believe in a hidden secret where no one else would. His room at college was in indescribable confusion, personal necessities mixed with books and philosophical instruments, and things belonging to one department of service often pressed into the slavery of another. He dressed well but carelessly. He was tall, slender, and stooping, awkward in gait but in manners a thorough gentleman; delicate in complexion, with a remarkably small head, face, and features, not very regular but wonderfully beautiful in intellectual and moral expression; his eyes deep blue, "of a wild, strange beauty"; his forehead high and white; his hair dark brown, curling, long, and bushy. In later life he is described as singularly combining premature age and prolonged youth.

The only art in which his taste seems to have developed was poetry, and even in his poetry the artistic element is not generally very manifest. His earliest verses (none in his collected works) can hardly be called good in any sense. He seems to have chosen poetry as fit material for his ardent, hopeful, indignant thoughts and feelings but, provided he says what he wants, does not much care *how*. There is too much of this throughout; for if art's object were the *utterance* rather than the *conveyance* of thought, not only imperfection of language but absolute unintelligibility would be admissible. But his art grows constantly with his sense of its necessity, so that the *Cenci*, the last work of any pretension he wrote, is decidedly the most artistic. There are beautiful passages in *Queen Mab*, but it is a boy-poet's work, and since he nearly repudiated it, I need not remark further on it. *The Revolt of Islam* is a poem of twelve cantos in the Spenserian stanza, but except for the arrangement of lines and rhymes his stanza, like all imitations of the Spenserian, has little of the original's spirit or individuality. It is dedicated to the cause of freedom and records the efforts, successes, defeats, and triumphant death of two inspired champions of liberty, a youth and a maiden, in marvellous adventures not meant to be within the bounds of probability, scarcely of possibility. It has very noble sentiments, fine passages, and now and then grandeur. But the lack of art shows in its often obscure meaning, frequently caused by the difficulty of the stanza, the hardest mode of composition in English except the rigid sonnet. His words and forms sometimes seem mechanical devices rather than a natural utterance from a mind where the thought was vitally present: more a *clothing* of the thought than an *embodiment* of it, not lying near enough to the thing represented. It is only just to say, however, that some of the obscurity is because, even with Mrs. Shelley's superintendence, the works have not yet been satisfactorily edited, or at least not seen through the press with enough care. \[Footnote: This statement is no longer true.\]

*The Cenci* is a very powerful tragedy, unfit for public performance by the horror of the historical facts behind it. In executing it, though, Shelley kept much nearer to nature than in any other work, rigidly keeping to his sense of artistic propriety in dramatic speech. It may be doubted whether the characters' ways of speaking differ enough, but speech can be individualized far too minutely for probable nature, and in this at least he has not erred. Perhaps the action is a little hurried, and a central moment of awful repose and fearful anticipation might add force; the scenes might also have been built to suggest more evolution. But the central point of horror is handled most powerfully and delicately: you see a possible spiritual horror still behind it, more frightful than all before. The whole drama is built around not a prominent point but a dim, infinitely withdrawn, underground perspective of dismay and agony. Perhaps it detracts a little from our interest in Beatrice that after all she should wish to live and try to save her life by denying her crime. She evidently justifies the denial to herself on the ground that the deed was absolutely right, though her judges count it most criminal, so that the only way to get true justice is to deny the fact, which, there being no guilt, she might consider only a verbal lie. Her very purity of conscience lets her say it with the most absolute innocence of look, word, and tone. This is probably historical, and Shelley had to make the best of it. The drama has great tenderness as well as terror; but for full effect one wishes to know the individuals better than its want of graduation allows. Shelley, however, was only twenty-six. He must have been drawn to the subject because it embodies the concentration of tyranny, lawlessness, and brutality in old Cenci exercised upon an ideal loveliness and nobleness in Beatrice.

But of all Shelley's works *Prometheus Unbound* combines the greatest individual power and peculiarity. It has an airy grandeur like vast masses of cloud scattered in broken, magnificently suggestive forms over the summer sky after a thunderstorm; the fundamental ideas are grand, and the superstructure in many parts so ethereal that one hardly knows whether he gazes at towers of solid masonry dimmed by vapour or golden turrets of cloudland born of the mist that haloes them. The beings of Greek mythology are idealized and etherealized by the new souls he puts into them, making them think his thoughts and say his words. Here, as in most of his poetry, we feel that, unable to cope with the world's evils and wrongs as they are, he builds a new universe where he rules by his will, a good will in the main, good always in intent, generally in form and utterance. Of the wrongs Shelley suffered from the collision between his lawless goodness and the lawful wickedness of those in authority, this is one of the greatest: in the proper period of pupillage he was driven from the place of learning, cast on his own mental resources long before they could support him, and embittered against the purest embodiment of good by the harsh treatment he received in its name. Had the reverence that was far from lacking in his nature been offered, in some guide to his spiritual being, an object worthy of its homage and trust, the free and noble result of his individuality would probably have come to the world in a form that, while still attracting only the few, would not have repelled the many, at least by things merely accidental to his earnest efforts for humanity's well-being.

What chiefly distinguishes Shelley from other writers is the unequalled exuberance of his fancy. The reader of, say, the fantastically brilliant *Witch of Atlas*, the work of three days, is overwhelmed in a storm, as it were, of rainbow snow-flakes and many-coloured lightnings, always with "a low melodious thunder." Pure imagination is rare in his writings compared with fancy: there are not half as many direct embodiments of idea in form as presentations of strange resemblances between external things.

One of the finest short specimens of Shelley's peculiar mode is his *Ode to the West Wind*, full of mysterious melody of thought and sound. But the most popular of all his poems, deservedly, is the *Skylark*. The *Cloud* may rival it in popular favour, but though full of beautiful words and fantastic cloud-like images the *Cloud* is mainly fancy; the *Skylark*, though fancy predominates over imagination even in its visual images, is as a whole a lovely, true, individual work of art, a *lyric* not unworthy of the lark Mason calls "sweet feathered lyric." Its strain of sadness is only enough to make the lark's song human.

In *The Sensitive Plant*, full of the peculiarities of his genius and tending through a wilderness of fanciful beauties to a thicket of mystical speculation, one idiosyncrasy is more prominent than anywhere else, curious in the poet of beauty and loveliness: he is fascinated by what is ugly and revolting, and cannot withdraw his thoughts until he has described it in language that is powerful and poetic for its end but, by those very excellences, nearly as revolting as the objects. Associated with this is a tendency to find strangely unpleasant likenesses between things, which he is not content to see but seems compelled, perhaps to be rid of them himself, to force on his reader. His admirer is not pleased that one or two such passages have been omitted in some editions.

Few men have been more misunderstood or misrepresented than Shelley. This has partly been his own fault, as Coleridge implies in writing that his horror of hypocrisy made him speak so wildly that Southey, so much a man of forms and proprieties, was quite misled, not only in estimating his worth but in judging his character. But setting that aside and regarding him merely as a poet, Shelley has written verse that will last as long as English literature, valuable for the peculiarity as well as the excellence of it. To say nothing of his noble aims and hopes, he will always be admired for his sweet melodies, lovely pictures, and wild prophetic imaginings. His indignant remonstrances, mixed with grand imprecations, burst like thunder from a heart overcharged with love of his kind and roused to a keener sense of all oppression by the wrongs that sought to overwhelm himself. But as he recedes in time and men see the man's proportions more truly, they will judge that, without having gained the rank of a great reformer, Shelley had that wide sympathy and lofty hope for his kind which is essential both to the *birth* and the subsequent *making* of the greatest of poets.

## A SERMON

\[Footnote: Read in the Unitarian chapel, Essex-street, London, 1879.\]

*The passage:* Let those of us who are mature share this mind; and if you think otherwise about anything, God will reveal that to you as well. Only, let us live by whatever we have already reached (Philippians iii. 15, 16).

This is the reading of the oldest manuscripts; the rest of the verse is pretty clearly a not very wise marginal note that has crept into the text.

In its origin, opinion is the intellectual body given to something necessarily larger than any intellect can supply stuff to embody, so that it may be uttered and presented. To the man in whose mind it arose, therefore, an opinion always recalls the spirit whose form it is, so long as he stays true to his better self. So it may be invaluable to him, the needle of his moral compass, pointing always to the truth it came from. Nor is it worth less because it may change. To be of true value it must carry not just the possibility but the necessity of change: it must change in every man alive with that life which the New Testament alone treats as life. An opinion in no process of change is dead, valueless, hurtful. Opinion is the offspring of something born to grow, which, being imperfect, must grow or die; where opinion grows, its imperfections, however serious, do little hurt, and where it does not, they further the decay already at the man's heart. Yet history shows that what at some stage was the intellectual embodiment of the highest and deepest an age could reach spiritually has often and quickly become the source of frightful outrages on humanity. Why? Because it passed from the mind where it grew into one where it did not, and so changed its nature. Sprung from what was deepest in one man, it casts seeds that root only in his neighbour's intellect, and bear flowers that look much the same but fruit that is poison and bitterness: worst of all, the false, arrogant notion that it is a duty to force the opinion on others. Such men hold the truth under their forms with so poor a grasp that they are the more ambitious to propagate the forms, making themselves the worst enemies of the truth they think they champion. As with all genuine teachers, a man's foes are of his own household: none destroys the truth he preached so effectively as followers who have received only the forms and know nothing of the truth that gave them. They seize the non-essential, the perishing part of the forms, doubly false and misleading in their crumbling disjunction, and force it on men as the truth, which is at best the draggled, useless fringe of its earth-made garment. Opinions so held belong to the theology of hell, not necessarily false in form but utterly false in heart and spirit. The hurtful opinion is not one formed in the depths from the honest necessities of a man's own nature but one taken up at second hand, which pleases his intellect; perhaps quiets fears and distresses that should have grown until they drove him to the true physician; puffs him up with a false, foolish sense of superiority; and puts in his hand a club to subjugate his neighbour to his spiritual dictation. Even the true man who aims at perpetuating his opinion obstructs rather than aids the truth he loves it for; for truth is a living thing, opinion a dead thing, and transmitted opinion a deadening thing.

Let us look at St. Paul's feeling in this regard. To lose none of its force, let us first note the nature of the truth he had just been presenting to his disciples, before he follows it with the words of my text:---

Whatever was gain to me I counted loss for Christ.

Indeed I count everything loss next to the excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord; for his sake I have lost everything and count it dung, so that I may win Christ

and be found in him, with no righteousness of my own from the law, but the righteousness from God through faith in Christ;

that I may know him, the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,

if somehow I may attain the resurrection of the dead.

Not that I have already attained or am perfect; I press on to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of me.

Brothers, I do not count myself to have taken hold of it. One thing I do: forgetting what is behind and reaching for what is ahead, I press toward the goal, the prize of God's high calling in Christ Jesus.

St. Paul had been declaring to the Philippians the idea his life was built on, to which all the conscious effort of his being was directed: to be in his very nature one with Christ, to become righteous as he is righteous, to die into his death, holding no personal relation to evil and alive in every fibre to all that is pure, lovely, loving, beautiful, perfect. He spent himself in continuous effort to lay hold of that for which Christ had laid hold of him, and declares it the sole thing worth living for: the hope of becoming one with the living God keeps a glorious consciousness awake in him amid the unrest of a being not yet at harmony with itself and a laborious, persecuted life. So no indifference to the truth he has witnessed to makes him add, "If in anything ye be otherwise minded." To him it is the very test of perfection whether they are thus minded; for though a moment before he declared himself short of perfection, he now says, "Let as many of us as are perfect be thus minded." There is no room here for bare logic: we must look through the rainbow of his words to the light that is its soul. Paul is not yet what he would be, what he must be; but he and all who believe with him that Christ's perfection is the sole worthy effort of a man's life are in the region, though not at the centre, of perfection: not grasping it, but in its grasp. If anyone is otherwise minded, that is, of a different opinion, what then? That it matters little? No, but that it matters so endlessly that God himself will unveil the truth to them. This is Paul's faith, not his opinion. Faith is that by which a man lives inwardly and orders his way outwardly; faith is the root, belief the tree, opinion the foliage that falls and is renewed with the seasons. Opinion is at best, even in a true man, the cloak of his belief, which he may cast to his neighbour, but not with the truth inside it: that stays in his own bosom, the oneness between him and his God. Paul knows well that no argument, the best logic can afford, can set a man right with the truth; only the spiritual perception that comes of hungering contact with the living truth, itself a being born again, can mediate between a man and the truth. Even if he could pass his opinion bodily into his neighbour's understanding, little would be gained, since the man's spiritual condition would be unchanged. God must reveal, or nothing is known; and through the thousands of difficulties the man himself causes, God is always doing his mighty best to do so.

See the grandeur of the Apostle's redeeming liberality. In his heart of hearts he knows salvation is nothing but being one with Christ, and that every man's only life is hid with Christ in God, found nowhere else. He believes he was born to give himself wholly to the one who came to bear witness to the truth; that for this alone, since nothing more is possible, the world with all its glories was created; and that for this the Lord, in whose cross, type and triumph of self-abnegation, Paul glories, came, lived, and died. Yet he says plainly that a man who thinks differently, or is unprepared for this whole-hearted profession, is his brother in Christ, in whom the knowledge of Christ he has will go on working, the new leaven casting out the old, until in the Father's revelation he too reaches the perfect stature of the fulness of Christ. Meanwhile Paul must reverence the halting, dull disciple and make no demand on him on the ground of what Paul believes. He is where he is, and God is his teacher; he stands to his own Master, who is Paul's Master too. Does Paul leave him to his Master's company? No; he will never leave him, any more than God will, but will always hold and help him. How, if he is not to press on him his own larger, deeper, wiser insights? He will press not his opinion, not even the man's opinion, but the man's own faith: "O brother, beloved of the Father, walk in the light that is yours, not mine; you cannot walk by my light nor I by yours. What you see, do; and what you do not see, you shall see: God himself, the Father of Lights, will show it to you." This is the condition of all growth, that whereto we have attained, we mind that same; such, following the oldest manuscripts, seems to me the Apostle's meaning. Obedience is the one condition of progress, and he entreats them to obey. If a man will work what is in him and make God's power his own, it is well with him forever. Like his Master, Paul urges to action, the highest operation and therefore the highest condition of humanity: as Christ was the Father's Son by doing the Father's will, so would Paul have them sons by doing it. Whereto ye have attained, walk by *that*.

But more is involved in this utterance than the words expressly carry. Next to his love for the Father and the Elder Brother, the passion of Paul's life (I cannot call it less) is love for all his brothers and sisters. Everything human is dear to him. Division, the breaking of the body of Christ, he cannot endure: Christ's body of flesh was once broken that a grander body might be prepared, and was that body to tear itself asunder? Paul clung to unity with all the energy of his great heart, clasping the body his Master loved because it was a spiritual body with his Father's life in it. And he knew that only by walking in the truth they had attained could they draw near to each other. Whereto we have attained, let us walk by that.

My honoured friends, if we are not practical, we are nothing. The one main fault in the Christian Church is separation, recoil between the particles of the Lord's body. I do not care who is more to blame; I insist only that every individual man is bound to be innocent of it. One main cause, perhaps *the one* cause, is that whereto we had attained, we did not, and whereto we have attained, we do not walk by that. Ah, friend! do not think now of your neighbour, or applaud my opinion from what you see around you, but answer it from your own being and behaviour. Do you feel, "Yes, of course every man is my brother; but how can I be a brother to him while he thinks me wrong in what I believe, and I think he wrongs the dignity of the truth in his opinions?" What, I return: has the man no hand to grasp, no eyes into which yours may gaze deeper than your vaunted intellect can follow, nothing in him to love? Who asks you to be of one opinion? The Lord asks you to be of one heart. Does the Lord love the man? Can he love where there is nothing to love, and are you wiser than he, seeing impossibility where he has not? Or will you say, "Let the Lord love where he pleases: I will love where I please"? or, imagining you yield, "Well, I suppose I must, with certain reservations, politely quiet in my own heart"? Or say none of these, but do them all, one after another, in the secret chambers of your proud spirit? If you delight to condemn, you are a wounder, a divider of the oneness of Christ. If you pride yourself on your loftier vision and are haughty to your neighbour, you are yourself a division, and may well ask, "Am I a particle of the body at all?" The Master will deal with you on that score. Let it humble you that your dearest opinion, which you worship as if it, not God, were your Saviour, you are doomed to change, for it cannot be right if it works in you for death and not life.

Friends, you have honoured me by asking me to speak, so I will speak plainly. I come neither hiding anything of my belief nor foolishly imagining I can transfer my opinions into your bosoms; if there is one role I hate, it is the proselytizer's. But shall I not, as a brother to brethren, use your invitation and obey the heavenly vision by urging you with all my persuasion to set yourselves afresh to *walk* according to what you have attained? So doing, you shall learn whatever remains to learn. Thus, and only thus, you draw nigh to the centre truth, and we to each other, as brothers and sisters in Christ caring for each other's honour, righteousness, and true well-being. It is to those who keep his commandments that he and his Father will come to dwell, and, whether you or I hold more of the truth, to them it will be given to eat of the Tree of Life. I believe that Jesus is the eternal Son of the eternal Father; that in him the ideal humanity sat enthroned from eternity; that as he is the divine man, so he is the human God; that he did not take our nature upon himself but showed himself as he really was and ever is. These things I believe, though I would never be so irreverent as to dispute over them, nor would I try by argument to convince another of my opinion: if it is true, it is God's work to show it, for logic cannot. But I believe all the more that he, who is no respecter of persons, will least respect the person of one who thinks to please him by respecting his person, calling him "Lord, Lord," and not doing what he says. Even if I am right, friend, and you wrong, the more abundant entrance will be given to you if you keep his commandments more faithfully than I. God grant that when you are admitted first I may not be cast out, but admitted to learn from you that he requires truth in the inward parts, and that those who have it, and they alone, shall know wisdom. I seek only to stir up your hearts, as I would daily stir my own, to be true to what is deepest in us: the voice and will of the Father of our spirits.

Friends, I have not said we are not to utter our opinions, only that we are not to make them the point of a fresh start, the foundation of a new building, or the groundwork of anything in our dealings with our brethren. Opinion is often the very death of love. Love aright and you will think aright, and those who think aright must think the same. Meanwhile it matters nothing; what matters is that we walk by what we have attained. But while we are not to insist on our opinions, which is only a way of insisting on ourselves, however we hide that in the vain imagination of spreading the truth, we are bound by the loftiest duty to spread the truth, for that saves men. How, if we are not to talk about it? I never said not to, though there is a better and indispensable way: let your light shine. Do not talk about the lantern that holds the lamp, but make haste, uncover the light, and let it shine. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works (I incline to the Vatican reading, *good things*), and glorify your Father in heaven. It is not, Let your good works shine, but Let your light shine: let it be the genuine love of your hearts taking form in true deeds, not good deeds done to prove your opinions right. If you are thus true, even your talk about the truth will be a good work, a shining of the light in you. A true smile is a good work and may do much to reveal the Father; a smile put on to look right, or even to be right, will hardly reveal him, not being like him. Men say you are cold: if you fear it may be so, do not try to warm yourselves with the cloak of this or that fresh opinion, but draw nearer the central heat, the living humanity of the Son of Man, that you may have life, heat, and light in yourselves; understand him, obey him, and your light will shine and your warmth warm. There is an infection in good as in evil: the better we are, the more men will glorify God. If we trim our lamps to have light in our house, it will shine through our windows to those outside. But only love of the light can trim the lamp. Had Love trimmed Psyche's lamp, it would never have dropped the scalding oil that scared him from her.

The man who holds his opinion most honestly ought to see most plainly that it must change. No man can hold anything aright. How shall the created embrace the self-existent Creator, who alone is *the truth*? But to him who lives it, who walks by what he has attained, the truth will reach down a thousand true hands to grasp his. We would not enclose what we can do more than enclose: live in as our home, inherit, exult in, the presence of the infinitely higher and better, the heart of the living One. If God himself is our inheritance, why should we tremble, even with hatred, at the suggestion that we must change our opinions? If we held them aright, we would know that nothing good in them can ever be lost; that is the true, whatever in them is false. Our opinions are worth a straw only as they help us toward God, and every necessary change in them must be to more truth and greater uplifting power. Lord, change me as thou wilt, only do not send me away. What in my opinions I really hold them for will never pass away, if I am a true man; what my evils and imperfections have associated with the truth must, thank God, perish. My opinions, like my life and love, I leave in the hands of him who is my being; I commend my spirit to him of whom it came. Why, then, this dislike of such change, this dread of accepting what those we count opponents offer, which is such a stumbling-block in our way and obstruction to our inevitable growth? It may be objected that no one will hold his opinions with needful earnestness who can entertain changing them. But that tells powerfully against overvaluing opinion: it says that to be wise a man must consent to be a fool. Whatever must be, a man must be able to look in the face. It is because we cleave to our opinions rather than the living God, and self and pride concern themselves for their own vile sakes with what belongs only to the truth, that we become such fools of logic and temper, lying in the prison-houses of our own fancies, ideas, and experiences, shutting doors and windows against the free spirit, and refusing to inherit the love of the Father.

Yet, for the help and comfort of even such a refuser, I would say: nothing you reject can be what it seems to you. A thing is either true or untrue. If untrue, it looks enough like itself that you reject it, and we have no more to do with it. If true, then your rejecting it shows it has not appeared true to you, has not appeared itself; for the truth can never be beheld except by the man who accepts it. So what you reject is not what it seems to you, but something good and altogether beautiful, fit for your gladsome embrace, which you would rush to, as Dante says, like the wild beast to his den, so eager for the refuge of home, if you saw it as it is. No honest man holds a truth for the sake of that because of which another honest man rejects it; how it may be with the dishonest I have no confidence in my judgment, and hope I am not bound to understand.

Let us then, my friends, beware lest our opinions come between us and our God, our neighbour, and our better selves. Let us be jealous that the human shall not obscure the divine. For we are not *mere* human; we too are divine, and nothing obliterates the divine like the human acting undivinely. The one security against our opinions is to walk according to the truth they contain.

And if men seem to us unreasonable, opposers of what to us is plainly true, let us remember we are here not to convince men but to let our light shine. Knowledge is not necessarily light, and it is light, not knowledge, we have to diffuse. The best thing we can do, indeed the only thing, that men may receive the truth is to be ourselves true. Beyond all doing good is being good, for he who is good not only does good things but all he does is good. Above all, let us be humble before the God of truth, faithfully desiring of him that truth in the inward parts which alone can enable us to walk by what we have attained. May the God of peace give you his peace; may the love of Christ constrain you; may the gift of the Holy Spirit be yours. Amen.

## TRUE CHRISTIAN MINISTERING

\[Footnote: A spoken sermon.\]

*The passage:* Jesus told his disciples that the Gentile rulers lord it over their people, but that it must not be so among them: whoever would be great must be their minister, and whoever would be chief their servant, as the Son of Man came not to be ministered to but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

How little this is believed! People think, if they think of it at all, that it is very well in the church but will not do in the world. Their actions say so: every man struggles to get above the others, ready to make his neighbour a footstool to some throne of glory in his own mind. There is constant jostling for promotion, with noble exceptions. And yet we call ourselves "Christians," and are, in this much: the truth is within reach of us all, speaking to us at our door and in our hearts. Still we go on like this! The Lord said, "It shall not be so among you." Did he mean only his twelve disciples? He spoke to them, but---thanks be to him!---he says the same to each of us now: that is not the way in my kingdom. The people of the world will always think it best to rise, to have less and less service to do and more and more done to them. Their idea of rank is a pyramid: the higher you go, the fewer there are to serve those above, and the more you are served, until at the apex stands one who serves nobody and whom all the others serve. It is the same in an intellectual way, to say nothing of bodily service: a man who works to a position where all look up to him and he looks up to nobody has put himself exactly among those our Lord speaks of, who exercise dominion and authority; he really thinks it a fine thing to be served.

But it is not so in the kingdom of heaven. There the figure is entirely reversed, as a pyramid is reflected upside down in water: the Son of Man lies at the inverted apex, upholding, serving and ministering to all, and those who would be high in his kingdom must go down near him at the bottom, to uphold and minister to all they can. There is no other law of rank in God's kingdom. And mind, that is *the* kingdom. The other is a transitory, bad thing that must pass away; it is there only on sufferance, because in the mind of God even what is bad ministers to what is good, and when the new kingdom is built the old will go.

But the man who seeks this rank must be honest in following it. It will not do to say, "I want to be great, and therefore I will serve"; a man may begin so, but it will not carry him. He must seek it for the truth's sake, for love of his fellows, for the worship of God, for delight in what is good. In the kingdom of heaven people do not ask whether I am promoted or you are; they are so absorbed in the glory of the goodness around them that they learn not to think much about themselves. It is the bad in us that makes us think about ourselves, and while it is there we must; but as we go on we think of ourselves less, until the spirit of the kingdom possesses us and we live in gladness and peace. We are prouder of our brothers and sisters than of ourselves. God looks at us and makes us what he pleases, and there is no escape from coming to this.

But the Lord says that "the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto." Was he not ministered unto, then? Ah, as never man was, but he did not come for that. Even now we bring him the burnt-offerings of our very spirits, but he did not come for that, but to help us. He is the express image of the Father, so what he does the Father must do; and accused of breaking the Sabbath by working, he says, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." So this is God's way too, or it could not have been Jesus's. Do not think that God made us and then turned us out to find our own way, or that he merely hovers over us with a wide-spread benevolence. Imagine a mother who takes her child even from its beloved nurse to soothe and minister to it herself: that is God. His hand is not only over us; recollect David: "His hand was upon me." Wherever he went, David said, God was there, beneath him and before him, asleep or going down to the dead. The earth beneath us is his hand upholding us. \[Footnote: The waters are in the hollow of it.\] Every spring-fountain of gladness is his making and his delight. He is close to us, breathing into our nostrils the breath of life, and breathing into our spirits this thought and that to make us look up and recognize the love around us. How poor all a mother's tending would be if the baby never opened its eyes to see her face bending over it! The tending exists for that, and comes by it. To recognize this loving-kindness and stand up in it strong and glad: this is God's ministration to us. Do you ever think, "I could worship God if he were so-and-so"? Do you imagine God is less good and perfect than your thoughts can imagine? You can never come up to it. Use every symbol of grace and tenderness that nature and human relations give us, and you will never reach what God's ministration is. When our Lord came he let us see how his Father was always doing this: he "came to give his life a ransom for many." His dying was the crown of it, but what he gave was his whole life---his whole being, strength and energy, deeper than his days of trouble and toil---and he went down to death for us.

But how are we to learn this ministration? I will tell you where it begins. Most of us are forced to work, and if you do not see that the commonest things in life belong to God's plan, you have to learn it. It is infinitely better for us than not working, but not fine unless it leads further. Our work is always doing something for other people; it is ministration in some shape. All work is serving, but not always Christian service. Some work only for their wages, and deserve to starve if they do not; but we must go a very great way beyond that. There is no honest work one man does for another that he may not do as unto the Lord and not unto men. The man who sees the commonest task as part of the divine order, God's intention that one man should be useful to another, and who does it well because of this and tries to do it better, is doing God service.

We talk of "divine service." It is a miserable name for a great thing; it is not service, properly speaking, at all. When a boy comes to his father out of love and says, "May I come and sit beside you? May I come and be quiet a little in your room?", what would you think if he then said, "I have been doing my father a service"? So with praying to God and thanking him: do you call that serving God? If it is not serving yourselves it is worth nothing; if it is not the best condition you can find yourselves in, you have yet to learn what it is. No: the work you have to do tomorrow in the counting-house, the shop, or wherever you are, is how you serve God. Do it with high regard and there is nothing mean in it; it is all mean if you pretend to please people when you look only for wages. But if you do it nobly and truly because it is the work God has given you, you are doing the divine service.

This goes a great deal farther. We have endless opportunities of showing ourselves neighbours to the man who comes near us. That is the divine service, the reality of serving God; those other things ought to be your reward. Go home and quietly go to God in the secret of your heart, and know that he is there. Say, "God has given me this work to do, and I am doing it"; that is your joy, your refuge, your going to heaven. It is not service. The words "divine service," as used, always move me to indignation: it is perfect paganism, trying to please God by gathering up services supposed to be service to him. He is serving us for ever, and our Lord says, "If I have washed your feet, so you ought to wash one another's feet." That is how some will minister.

But still, as we begin to learn this, some of us look about blindly, thinking, "I wish I could serve God, but I do not know what to do! How is it to be begun? Where is there something to do?"

Now, first of all, service is obedience, or it is nothing. We tend to think there is something degrading in obedience and service. By the world's social judgment there is; not by heaven's, for God would have us do only what he is doing himself. You can see the tendency now: scarcely a young man will speak of his "master," as if it hurt his dignity. It is what so many theologians have done about God, who, instead of taking what our Lord gave us, call him "the Governor of the Universe." So a young man calls his master, and even his own father, "the governor"---another region altogether, and a worse one. I take these as symptoms: a habit may be picked up without much feeling behind it, but a wrong habit tends to a wrong feeling, and if a man cannot learn to honour his father enough to call him "father," one or other is greatly to blame, father or son, I cannot say. I know there are parents so bad that telling their children that God is their "Father" is no help to them but the contrary. I heard just the other day of a lady who, when someone said to comfort her, "Remember God is your Father," answered, "Do not mention the name 'father' to me." That kind of fault lies not in God but in those who, not being like him, cannot rightly use the names that belong to him.

But now, as to this service, this obedience. Our Lord came to give his life a ransom for the many, and to minister to all, in obedience to his Father's will. We call him equal with God---most of us here do, I suppose---without pretending to explain it. We know God is greater than he, because he said so, yet somehow we worship him with our God and need not distinguish more than is necessary. Do you think he was less divine than the Father when he was obedient? There he was not the ruler; he did not give the commands, he obeyed them. And yet we say he is God! That is no difficulty to me. Obedience is as divine in its essence as command; in a human being it may be far more divine, and in God it cannot be more so. It is not the ruling being who is most like God; it is the man who ministers to his fellow, and the man who will sternly and rigidly do what his master tells him, whoever that master may be, is likest Christ in that one matter. Obedience is the grandest thing in the world to begin with, and we shall end with it too. I do not think the time will ever come when we shall have nothing to do simply because we are told to do it, without knowing why. Parents act most foolishly who wish to explain everything to their children. Teach your child to obey early: it is the plainest, first and most precious lesson you can give him, and if he never goes to school he had better have that than all the schooling in the world. So when people glorify this age of ours as better in everything than those before it, I look back to the times of chivalry, which we now almost laugh at, and I find that the one essential of chivalry was obedience. It is recognized in our army still, but then it was carried much farther. At seven a boy was sent into another family, put with another boy to wait on the master and mistress of the house, and taught what little they knew then of intellectual cultivation; but he also learned a stern obedience he could not forget. After seven years behind the chair, ministering, he was made an esquire. He was given his armour and had to watch it all night in the chapel, laid on the altar in silent devotion to God. The esquire's duty was more important service: he attended his master the knight, groomed and checked his horse, and cleaned his armour, seeing that every bolt, rivet, strap and buckle was sound, for the master's life was in his hands and he, having to fight, must not be troubled with such things. Seven years later, in a more solemn ceremony, the squire was made a knight; but was he then free of service? No; he swore to help everybody who needed help, especially women and children, and rode out to do the work of a true man. There was a grand and essential idea of Christianity in that---wonderfully broken and shattered, no doubt, but no more than the Christian church has been---and still the essence of obedience. In every army, where it is lost, the army is worth nothing. You remember that terrible story from the East, that fearful death-charge, one of the grandest things in our history though one of the most blundering:---

| "Theirs not to make reply,
| Theirs not to reason why,
| Theirs but to do and die;
| Into the valley of death
|      Rode the Six Hundred."

So with the Christian man: whatever meets him, obedience is the thing. If his conscience, the candle of God within him, tells him he must do something, he must. He may tremble from head to foot at having to, but he will tremble more if he turns his back. Our old poet Spenser's Knight of the Red Cross, the knight of holiness, ill in body, diseased in mind and without armour, is attacked by a fearful giant. Does he run away? No; he catches up his sword and, trembling in every limb, goes to meet the giant. That is what every Christian man must do. If death itself lies before us and we know it, there is nothing to be said; it must be done, and then there is no loss; everything else is lost to God. Look at our Lord. He gave his life to do his Father's will, and on he went and did it. Was it easier for him than for us? Ah, the greater the man, the more delicate and tender his nature, and the more he shrinks from opposition even from his fellowmen, because he loves them. It was terrible for Christ, and in the little touches of the scanty story this breaks out. John tells us that at the Last Supper he was troubled in spirit, and testified. And when Judas has gone out to do what was to finish his great work, see how he comforts himself: the Son of Man is now glorified, and God is glorified in him, and God will glorify him in himself---and, he adds, gathering up his strength, straightway. This was said to his disciples, but I seem to see that some of it was said for himself. This is the grand obedience! It is a hard lesson to learn, and a hard one to teach. We are continually grumbling that our servants and tradespeople will not do just what we tell them; it makes half the misery in the world that they will have something of their own against what they are told. But are we not doing the same? Ought we not to learn forgiveness for them, and much from being in the same position? We only partly recognize that we are put here precisely to learn to obey. He who is our Lord and our God was obedient all the time; it is as divine for us to obey as for God to rule, and God, as I have said, is ministering the whole time. Do you want to know how to minister? Begin by obeying. Obey every one who has a right to command you; but above all, find out from what our Lord left behind what he wants you to do, and see whether obeying it does not make you conscious of being of use, ministering, part of God's grand scheme---a vital portion of the divine kingdom or, to use a better figure, of the Godhead. Try it, and see whether obedience is not salvation, service dignity, and whether you will not feel you have begun to be cleansed from your plague when you begin to say, "I will seek no more to be above my fellows, but I will seek to minister to them, doing my work in God's name for them."

| "Who sweeps a room as for Thy law,
| Makes that and the action fine."

Both the room and the action are good when done for God's sake: that is dear old George Herbert's way of saying the same truth. The gift of the Spirit of God, to make you think as God thinks, feel as God feels, judge as God judges, is the one thing promised. Nothing else is positively promised, and who dares pray for anything else with perfect confidence? God will not give us what we pray for unless it is good for us, but this we must have or perish. Let us pray for that, then, and with the name of God dwelling in us---if this is not true, the whole world is a heap of ruins---go forth to do this service of God, ministering to our fellows and so helping him in his work of upholding, glorifying and saving all.

## THE FANTASTIC IMAGINATION

English has no word for the German *Mährchen*, so we say "fairytale" even when the story has no fairies. Spenser's older use of "fairy" could excuse it, if an excuse were needed where need must.

Asked what a fairytale is, I would say, "Read *Undine*; that is one. Read others too, and you will see." Pressed to define it, I would sooner try to describe the abstract human face, or say what makes a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face, and *Undine* is the loveliest I know.

Someone who won't define a man may still say what he ought to be. I won't go even that far with the fairytale, since my early work in the form would illustrate my present judgment poorly. I will only say some things that help in reading rightly the fairytales I would want to write or care to read.

Some thinkers would feel cramped if they could use only forms found in nature, or invent only what the physical world's laws allow. That doesn't mean they want to escape law. Nothing lawless can give any reason to exist, and at best it would only look alive.

The natural world has its laws, and we mustn't tamper with them, whether portraying the world or using it. But they may suggest other kinds of law, and a person may invent a little world with laws of its own, since something in him loves calling up new forms, perhaps the nearest he comes to creating. New embodiments of old truths I call products of the Imagination; mere inventions, however lovely, the work of the Fancy. Either way, law has been at work.

Once the inventor has made his world, the highest law is harmony among the laws that brought it into being, which he must keep. The moment he forgets one, the story becomes unbelievable on its own terms: to live even briefly in an imagined world we must see its laws obeyed, and when they are broken the imagination we lend to another's invention stops working. Picture the gracious creatures of a childlike corner of Fairyland talking cockney or Gascon! However lovely the beginning, the tale would sink into burlesque, the least worthy kind of writing. An inventor who breaks the laws of his ideas, or sets one against another, contradicts himself and is no artist; his instruments are tuned to different keys. The human mind is the product of living law: it thinks, lives and grows by law, so only with law can it get anywhere. Discordant ideas may come, but if he uses one his work goes dull and he drops it from lack of interest. Beauty grows only in the soil of law, and Truth can be clothed only in beauty. Call Imagination the tailor who cuts her garments to fit, and Fancy his journeyman who stitches the pieces together or at most finishes the buttonholes. A maker who obeys law works as his Creator does; one who ignores it is the fool who heaps up stones and calls the pile a church.

The moral world is different. There a person may dress things in new forms and use his imagination freely, but may invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn moral laws upside down or meddle with the relations between living souls; the laws of the human spirit hold in any world he invents. It would be no offence to imagine a world where everything repelled instead of attracted, but it would be wicked to write of a man called good who always does bad, or a man called bad who always does good: that notion is utterly lawless.

"You write as though a fairytale were important. Must it have a meaning?"

It can't help having some meaning: proportion and harmony give it vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may show more than the truth, but without the truth there would be no beauty and no delight. Each reader, though, will find a meaning according to his own nature and growth, so readers differ.

"Then how can I be sure I'm reading your meaning out of it, not mine into it?"

Why should you be sure? Reading your meaning into it may be better, a higher use of your mind than reading mine out of it, and yours may be the better meaning.

"If my child asks what the fairytale means, what do I say?"

If you don't know, say so; nothing is easier. If you do see a meaning, give him that. A genuine work of art means many things, and the truer the art, the more it means. But if my drawing is so poor that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, why should it matter that neither you nor your child knows what it means? It is there less to convey a meaning than to wake one. If it doesn't even wake an interest, throw it away; the meaning may be there, but not for you. Nor does a label help someone who can't recognize a horse; a painter's business isn't zoology.

Your children are unlikely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are able to find, and more would be too much. I write not for children but for the childlike, whether five, fifty or seventy-five.

A fairytale is not an allegory, though allegory may be in it. Only a real artist can write a strict allegory that doesn't weary the spirit; an allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch (a triumph or a quagmire).

A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself from every side, sips every wholesome flower and spoils none. A true fairytale is very like a sonata. We know a sonata means something, and with vague enough talk and loose enough metaphor, minds can meet over its meaning and feel a more or less satisfying sympathy. But if two or three people each wrote down what it meant to him, how close would they come to a definite idea? Hardly at all: it will have roused related feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata failed? Was it meant, or ought it to be expected, to convey anything defined?

"But words aren't music. Words, at least, are made to carry a precise meaning!"

Words rarely carry the user's exact meaning. And even if they can convey a definite one, that doesn't mean they should never carry anything else. Words are living things with many uses: they can state a scientific fact, or cast on a mother's heart the shadow of her child's dream; they can be fitted together like a jigsaw map or arranged like notes on a staff. Is the music in them to count for nothing? Are they only to describe, never to impress? A child's tears may have no definable cause; does that leave his mother no remedy for his vague misery? When a fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm or a limitless night sweeps you away, do you stop to wrestle with it and ask where its power comes from? Each obeys a law in its composer's mind, and people feel it differently: to one listener a sonata is a world of fragrance and beauty, to another of soothing and sweetness only; to one the gathering clouds are a wild dance with terror at its heart, to another a majestic march of heavenly hosts, with Truth at their center pointing the way but not yet speaking. The strongest forces work in what we cannot fully grasp.

Next to rousing his conscience, the best thing you can do for your fellow is not to give him things to think about but to wake what is in him, to make him think for himself. The best Nature does for us is to stir moods in which thoughts of high importance arise. Does any part of her wake only one thought, or make two people in the same place think the same thing? Is she a failure for not being definite, when she rouses something deeper than understanding, the power beneath thoughts, and so sets feeling and thinking to work? Nature awakens moods and sets thought moving, and that is what a sonata, and a fairytale, should do.

"Then readers can imagine whatever they like, even what you never meant!"

Not whatever he likes, but whatever he can. If he isn't a true man, he will draw evil out of the best, and we needn't mind how he treats any work of art. If he is a true man, he will imagine true things, and it hardly matters whether I meant them; they are there even if I can't claim to have put them there. Unlike God's work, which cannot mean more than he meant, man's must. Everything God made has layer upon layer of rising significance, and he expresses the same thought in higher and higher forms. A man has only God's things, his embodied thoughts, to express his own thoughts with, so his words and figures inevitably combine in another mind in ways he never foresaw: every thought is allied to so many others, every figure involves so many relations, every symbol hints at so many facts. He may well find truth in what he wrote, since he was dealing all along with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

"But surely you would explain your idea to anyone who asked?"

Again: if I can't draw a horse, I won't write THIS IS A HORSE under my attempt, and a key to a work of imagination would be just as absurd. A tale is there to show, not to hide; if it shows nothing at your window, leave it out in the cold. Asking me to explain is like saying, "Roses! Boil them, or we won't have them!" My tales may not be roses, but I won't boil them.

As long as I believe my dog can bark, I won't sit up and bark on his behalf.

Whoever aims at logical conviction must work to avoid being misunderstood, not just to be understood. Whoever aims to move by suggestion should play on the reader's soul as wind plays an aeolian harp. If there is music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. May a fairytale of mine be a firefly that flashes, goes dark and may flash again; in a hand that doesn't love its kind, it turns into an ugly little thing that can neither flash nor fly.

With music, I think, the best course is to be still and let it work on the part of us it exists for. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. Anyone who insists on being a man rather than a child can only become a little man, a dwarf, though he won't need consolation, being sure he is very large.

If some strain of my "broken music" makes a child's eyes flash, or his mother's grow dim for a moment, my work will not have been in vain.