ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

{Master-Spirits 1873}

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MASTER-SPIRITS.

INTRODUCTION.

CRITICISM AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS.

AMONG the many vague forms which modern ingenuity has tried to manipulate into a Science must be classed what is usually called Criticism; but, for my own part, I am inclined to think that Criticism means to belong to the Fine Arts, and to elude the scientific arrangement altogether.
     There was a time, of course, when books, pictures, and music were judged by a certain set of fixed rules, each incontestable as the law of gravitation; when contemporary persons could appraise the value of an æsthetic article as easily as a grocer finds out the weight of a pound of sugar; when, in fact, critics knew their business thoroughly, being in the secret of the manufacture. Sometimes the critical scales were entrusted to one man, say to Voltaire, or John Dryden, or Addison. ² Again, public opinion was guided by a kind of joint-stock company, like Pope, Swift, and Co., or Gifford and Co., or Jeffrey, Brougham, and Co. In all cases alike judgment was infallible; there was no appeal. And the laws on which sentence was founded were, curiously enough, considered so unimpeachable, that one no more thought of questioning them than believers think of questioning the divine laws of Confucius, or the miracles of Mahomet, or the revelations of the Apocalypse. Moreover, these laws had all the weight of mystery. No one had ever read the golden book wherein they were enshrined. They were written in an unknown tongue; the High-Priest of Criticism sat on the tripod, and interpreted. In this way, things amazing and awful came to pass. At one time it was decreed here in England that Abraham Cowley was a mighty poetical genius; and at another it was settled, there in France, that Shakspeare was a rude unsavoury monster. The Oracle spake, and Klopstock was crowned. The Public listened and approved. No unordained person dared to interfere in so profound a matter. The little murmur of protest that rose when impostors like Keats were punished, soon died away in the loud roar greeting the coronation of divinities like Mr. Sotheby. Criticism, in fact, was a semi-religious rite performed by a Priesthood, guided partly by a set of divine rules, partly by a kind of corybantic inspiration.
     Recent scepticism has tried to demolish much—the Pentateuch and some of the miracles, for example; but it has never yet demolished the brazen Idols of Criticism. ³ The public press has advanced a great deal, freeing men’s minds and widening their knowledge; but, strange to say, it has not yet advanced to the point of refusing to shelter that worst class of priestcraft, which pronounces anonymous judgments. It is quite true, however, that now-a-days it does not much matter, since critics are thoroughly disorganised, and each wiseacre, on a tripod of his own, delivers judgment to a special circle; so that publishing a book or showing a picture is simply another sort of ‘running the gauntlet.’ But it is surely high time, in this questioning age, to ask on what grounds this critical priesthood still exists at all? why it presumes to give judgment, often with such reckless disregard of consequences? what use it is to any soul under the sun? and how, having once proved it as thorough a humbug as the Delphic oracle itself, we are to get rid of it in the speediest possible manner?
     To begin with, what is Criticism?
     Strictly speaking, of course, it is the application of certain tests, by which we may ascertain the value of specific articles, just as we find out the quality of gold. These tests, applied to literature and art, have produced most astounding results, without really enlightening mankind at all. It was all very well when the work was cut and dried. At one time, for example, Criticism did almost all her work by a cabalistic yard-measure called the ‘Unities.’ Nothing could be easier. Whenever an epic poem or a tragedy was brought up for judgment, out came the yard-measure, and the matter was decided in a moment. The thing either did or did not conform ⁴ to the Unities, and was praised or damned accordingly; and in those days, we may remark, en passant, Shakspeare was nowhere. Latterly, however, such tests as this have been abandoned in despair. It is recognised as a privilege of genius to break all set rules, and so ride triumphant over them. There is no absolute axiom of criticism which some great man may not falsify in practice to-morrow. Here again, therefore, we ask with some asperity, what is Criticism?
     No science certainly. No list of set rules to be applied by a priesthood. No sum as easy to manage as the multiplication table What then?
     Criticism, now-a-days, simply means (it is doubtful whether at any time it has meant much more) the impression produced on certain minds by certain products. If Jones paints a picture, and it is noticed unfavourably in the ‘Peckham Review’ the criticism does not come right up out from Delphi, but consists simply of so much ‘copy’ in the handwriting of Robinson. If Brown composes a poem, and it is wildly eulogised in the ‘Stokeinpogis Chronicle’ let him first bethink himself, before he become too bumptious, that the eulogy in question is simply the result of an individual impression, say on the mind of Smith. In any of these cases it is quite clear that the value of the criticism depends on the amount of honesty and intelligence possessed by Robinson and Smith respectively. To get anything like a fair insight into the truth, we must take care to ascertain at least a few preliminaries:
   ⁵ 1. How old the critic is, and what is the bent of his intellect.
     2. What are his favourite authors? What is his chief study?
     3. Has he ever written or painted himself, and if so, is he at all soured?
     4. Is he personally acquainted with the author or painter criticised? and if so, are his relations with him friendly, or the reverse?
     5. Is he usually honest in the expression of his opinions? &c. &c.
     These seem unlimited questions, but, in point of fact, they are virtually answered in all criticism that has any weight. They are least answered, of course, in anonymous criticism; but, even then, they are partially settled to the public satisfaction. One may calculate to a nicety, for example, what effect such and such a new work will produce on the editor of the ‘Times,’ or of the ‘Spectator,’ or of the ‘Saturday Review.’ A work of high and daring originality, unpopular in form, will be utterly ignored by the leading journal, patronised (if it contain no offence to the Broad Church) in the ‘Spectator,’ and gibed and grinned at in the ‘Saturday Review.’ Behind and beyond the natural style and temper of these professional critics, there lie of course the mysterious workings of private liking and prejudice. Now and then, when we see the unpopular tone taken in the ‘Times,’ we know what enormous secret influence must have been used to get that tone taken. There is no one of these journals, there is no one of the men who ⁶ write these journals, quite free of undue influence in some direction or other; conscious or unconscious—it is there. There is, in fact, no end to the questions we must definitely answer before we ascertain the value of any published opinion. It is in all cases the record of an impression only; but how has that impression been taken? How rare it is to find a man in whose capability of receiving an honest influence we can place full reliance! It is not dishonesty we have to fear, but certain unconscious weaknesses. Even in the cases of such men as Mr. Mill, or Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Sainte-Beuve, or M. Taine, we must have our doubts. We almost trust them, but now and then we pause. And then, when the critical moment comes, what is their ‘impression’ worth? Personally, much; scientifically, not a rap!
     It is great fun—fun given to poor mortality, alas! too seldom—to see the advent of some outrageous Genius, some

Monstr’-inform’-ingens-horrendus
Demoniaco-seraphic

prodigy of the Euphorion order, starting up, to the horror of criticism, and carrying all the masses before him by simple charm. Wonderful is that gift of producing on thousands of people precisely the same set of favourable impressions; wonderful is that gift, whether possessed by a Dickens, a Tennyson, or a Tupper. Fortunately the great mass of people are their own ‘tasters,’ judging for themselves at first hand, and they will not be guided by the literary Priests, however wise; ⁷ and it is simply delicious to observe how reputations grow, in spite of all the Priesthood do to trample them down. Let no man despair merely because the few who write abuse him. The abuse simply means that he is not wanted by Smith, Brown, and Jones; while all the time he is being eagerly waited for by all the legions of the Robinsons, to whom every word he drops is a revelation. Dickens was abused by genteel journals, but what cared he?
     Every author or artist, in fact, is a gauge to tell how many people there are in the world of about his own ratio of intelligence—minus the creative faculty. There are one hundred thousand Tuppers. There are (it is seriously calculated) one hundred Stuart Mills and fifty Herbert Spencers. In art, the Faeds and Friths are innumerable; the Leightons numerous; and the Poynters infinitesimal. For many years, Browning paid the public large sums, as it were, for the privilege of publishing poems; only there was no article in the agreement that the poems in question were to be read; and now, the public has turned the tables, and is paying all the money back for the privilege of reading those very poems. Luckily, we say, Criticism can only do mischief up to a certain point, and cannot do that mischief long. It may delay a reputation, but it cannot kill it. The public, in the long run, will have its own way, and choose its own favourite, and will choose according to the direct impression made by the favourite in question.
     But what a boon it would be to the public if the gentlemen who ‘do’ criticism, instead of assuming ⁸ the priestly robe and sitting veiled on a tripod, were simply and fearlessly to tell us how certain works have affected them, what they like and dislike in them, how they seem to stand in relation to other literature! What time this would save! What lying it would avoid! To speak with authority is ‘parlous’ indeed. Who gains anything when Anonymous writes that Browning’s last poem is sheer balderdash, or that Simeon Solomon’s last picture is divinely original? Who says so? That is what we want to get at. If it be Smith, let Smith come forward and sign his name. Of course, much in criticism is self-convincing, quite apart from the writer’s identity; and the best and most convincing criticism of all, in the case of a book, is free and ungarbled extract from the work under notice: extract can seldom be unfair. But in how many cases should we be on our guard if we knew what critic was administering judgment! Take an instance. Mr. Grote devotes a lifetime to the study of Plato, and at last produces a great work on the subject. This work, being sent to the ‘Megatherium’ for review, is handed over to Tomkins, who is fresh from the university, where, so far from making any mark, he was considered a dull fellow, and has drifted into the most irresponsible of all business, that of anonymous reviewing.

TOMKINS’S QUALIFICATIONS.

     1. He is 28 years of age, and with little experience either of men or books.
  ⁹ 2. He was crammed for his degree, and knows little  of Greek beyond the alphabet.
     3. He has quick intelligence, great power of hiding his ignorance, and little honesty.
     4. He is mentally incapable of conceiving a Platonic proposition, &c.
     Here, it will be admitted, we should know what to think of Tomkins’s criticism on Grote, if he candidly prefixed to it the above list of qualifications; yet, ten to one, Tomkins, under his anonymous guise, manages so cleverly to conceal his ignorance that we feel perfectly satisfied when he concludes: ‘Passing over certain errors and repetitions pardonable in a work of such magnitude, as well as the pedantic mode of spelling some words more familiar to us in their Latinized shape, we may record our opinion that this work has given us real pleasure,—an opinion in which, we are sure, every scholar will join. We have already expressed our disapproval of certain passages, and have indicated where they need revision; these revisions made, the work will stand as a monument of English scholarship and a complete manual of the subject.’
     Take another instance. A man of genius, to whom this generation does scant justice, Mr. William Gilbert, publishes a story, in which the real life of the lower classes in our country is pictured for us with a fidelity which would be terrible, if it were not illuminated by the most subtle and delicate humour. This story goes to the ‘Dilettante Gazette,’ and in course of time is handed over to Chesterfield Junior, Esq., of the Inner Temple.

¹⁰ CHESTERFIELD JUNIOR'S QUALIFICATIONS FOR
'’CRITICISING’ ‘DE PROFUNDIS.’ ¹

     1. He is 30 years of age, a literary man about town, and his tastes are elegant.
     2. His notion of the working man is that he is a ‘rough;’ and his notion of life generally is that it is a series of dinings-out, unpleasantly varied by sullen requisitions on the part of the lower classes for ‘goods received.’
     3. He is utterly destitute of beneficence; he has not even a dramatic perception of what beneficence is.
     4. His favourite author is Thackeray; but he enjoys the ‘fun’ of Dickens, &c.
     5. He is utterly and hopelessly unconscious of the limited nature of his own literary vision.
     Chesterfield Junior’s criticism on the marvellous tale of common life would probably amount to this:—‘We have here a study, in the manner of Defoe, of one of the least interesting forms of life generated by our overcrowded cities. No one can doubt the cleverness of the hard literal drawing; but to us it is simply unpleasant. It is a photograph, not a picture. It altogether lacks beauty, and has not one flash of the illuminating humour which distinguishes Dickens’s work in the same direction.’ In this case, be it noted, every word is the record of a genuine impression on a mind to whose sympathies the object does not appeal. Just suppose that, in addition to the natural antipathy, Chesterfield Junior had the least bit of personal animosity to his author, and he would

—    ¹ ‘De Profundis: a Tale of the Social Deposits.’ By William Gilbert. (Strahan and Co.) —

¹¹ hardly plead guilty to conscious injustice if he wrote in terms of entire condemnation: ‘Mr. Gilbert is a realist of the penny-a-liner type, without one gleam of genius, and his book is the most vulgar and unpleasant production we have read for a long time. Led by the natural gravitation of his mind to the study of what is low and common, and incapable of anything but a vulgarising treatment, he solicits our interests in the futures of a virtuous washerwoman; a drummer, and an irreclaimable thief. Trash like this is simply intolerable to any person of refined tastes.’ Poor Chesterfield Junior! He means no harm. He is only a sheep with a silk ribbon on his neck, bleating his mutton-like defiance. A few people are deceived, and say to themselves, ‘This Mr. Gilbert must be a very unpleasant writer!’ We, who know better, only smile, saying, ‘Chesterfield Junior has put his poor little foot into it again, as is again and again the custom of creatures without eyes.’
     On the other hand, let the same work fall into the hands of Addison Redivivus, whose qualifications are great beneficence, vast experience of the lower classes, a natural repugnance to all false sentiment and fine writing, and that sort of intelligence which gives as well as takes illumination; and we shall speedily hear, perhaps, that ‘De Profundis’ is, for sheer perfection in the rarest of all styles, a work with scarcely a peer, possessing both truth and beauty, bearing on every page the sign of a masterly understanding and of the finest intellectual humour, and leaving on the competent reader’s mind an impression in the highest sense imaginative and poetical. Who would be right Chesterfield Junior or Addison Redivivus?
     ¹² Criticism, we repeat, is no science. Neither Chesterfield nor Addison can settle the matter by any fixed rule. They merely chronicle their impression pro or contra, and the value of the impression depends on our knowledge of the person impressed. Well, if Criticism is no Science, what is it? It seems to me that Criticism, as the representation of the effect particular works have on particular individuals, is rapidly securing its place as one of the Fine Arts, and that its value is in exact proportion to the amount of artistic self-portraiture attained by the critic.
     We have half-a-dozen tolerable critics in England, but we have perhaps only one equal as an artist to the person whom I shall use to illustrate my proposition. Now that Sainte-Beuve is gone, the finest living specimen is M. Taine, whose works are winning appreciation here as well as in France. M. Taine has great intelligence, culture, literary experience. His faculty of composition may be described as almost creative. Wherein, then, does this faculty consist? It consists, I am sure, in the man's unequalled power of representing his own qualifications; of illustrating to us, by a thousand delicate lights and shades, the quality of his own mind and its limitations; and of revealing to us, as frequently as possible, the nature of his education and its effect on his tastes. Sooner or later, he enables us to become on intimate terms with him. He conceals little or nothing. He lays bare the most secret sources of his sympathies and his antipathies. He invariably discards the ‘editorial’ tone. And when once we know him thoroughly, nothing can be more delightful than his way of playing with his theme. ¹³ We know almost by instinct where he will be right and where he may be wrong. His work belongs to the Fine Arts, and at times approaches masterly portrayal.
     ‘The following,’ M. Taine says in effect, ‘are my qualifications:
     ‘1. I am not too young for self-restraint, nor too old for sympathy, and I have had an excellent education.
     ‘2. I am a Frenchman, educated under the Empire, and (more or less unconsciously) “æstheticised.”
     ‘3. I have the French hatred of “institutions,” and the French deficiency in the religious faculty.
     ‘4. My passion for symmetry may lead you to believe me a formal person; but I am in reality a loose thinker, dexterously manœuvring impressions under the guise of a finished style.
     ‘5. Form, as form, almost always fascinates me, but I try most to sympathise where the subject is most shapeless.
     ‘6. I am thoroughly conscious of my limitations, and seldom try to conceal them.
     ‘7. In spite of my seeming power of surveying large surfaces (the result of my instinct of symmetrical arrangement), my faculty is microscopic, and examines every work of art inch by inch, phrase by phrase, afterwards piecing the criticism together into the form of a verdict on the whole work.’
     Much more might be added; but the point is, that M. Taine, being a thorough artist, tells us all the above, directly or indirectly, and makes us alive to it at every step. He never allows us for a moment to lose sight of ¹⁴ himself; and he is at his best when he is least impersonal, and most candid in portraying his emotions.
     How delicious it is, for example, to find a critic showing his own intellectual physiognomy in this way, when beginning to criticise a great English philosopher:—

     When at Oxford some years ago, during the meeting of the British Association, I met, amongst the few students still in residence, a young Englishman, a man of intelligence, with whom I became intimate. He took me in the evening to the New Museum, well filled with specimens. Here short lectures were delivered, new models of machinery were set to work; ladies were present and took an interest in the experiments; on the last day, full of enthusiasm, ‘God save the Queen’ was sung. I admired this zeal, this solidity of mind, this organisation of science, these voluntary subscriptions, this aptitude for association and for labour, this great machine pushed on by so many arms, and so well fitted to accumulate, criticise, and classify facts. But yet, in this abundance, there was a void; when I read the Transactions, I thought I was present at a congress of heads of manufactories. All these learned men verified details and exchanged recipes. It was as though I listened to foremen, busy in communicating their processes for tanning leather or dyeing cotton: general ideas were wanting. I used to regret this to my friend; and in the evening, by his lamp, amidst that great silence in which the university town lay wrapped, we both tried to discover its reasons.
     One day I said to him: You lack philosophy—I mean, what the Germans call metaphysics. You have learned men, but you have no thinkers. Your God impedes you. He is the Supreme Cause, and you dare not reason on causes, out of respect for Him. He is the most important personage in England, and I see clearly that He merits his position; for He forms part of your Constitution, He is the guardian of your morality, He judges in final appeal on all questions whatsoever, He replaces with ¹⁵ advantage the prefects and gendarmes with whom the nations on the Continent are still encumbered. Yet this high rank has the inconvenience of all official positions; it produces a cant, prejudices, intolerance, and courtiers. Here, close by us, is poor Mr. Max Müller, who, in order to acclimatise the study of Sanscrit, was compelled to discover in the Vedas the worship of a moral God, that is to say, the religion of Paley and Addison. Some time ago, in London, I read a proclamation of the Queen, forbidding people to play cards, even in their own houses, on Sundays. It seems that, if I were robbed, I could not bring my thief to justice without taking a preliminary religious oath; for the judge has been known to send a complainant away who refused to take the oath, deny him justice, and insult him into the bargain. Every year, when we read the Queen’s speech in your papers, we find there the compulsory mention of Divine Providence, which comes in mechanically, like the apostrophe to the immortal gods on the fourth page of a rhetorical declamation; and you remember that once, the pious phrase having been omitted, a second communication was made to Parliament for the express purpose of supplying it. All these cavillings and pedantry indicate to my mind a celestial monarchy; naturally, it resembles all others—I mean that it relies more willingly on tradition and custom than on examination and reason. A monarchy never invited men to verify its credentials.—Taine’s History of English Literature, trans. by Henry Van Laun, vol. ii., pp. 478-479 (Essay on John Stuart Mill).

     Even if the above did not occur at the end of two large volumes, full of self-portraiture more or less indirect, it would reveal to us, as by a sun-picture, the man with whom we have to deal. Herein lies the delightful art of it. We certainly do get some formal ideas in the end about Mr. Mill, but our real interest for the time being is in M. Taine. How subtle he is! how thoroughly French! How just and kind he is in other places to ¹⁶ Tennyson and Thackeray: but how much more he loves De Musset and Balzac! He becomes our personal friend, and every word he utters has weight. His egotism is charming; we could hear him talk for hours.
     In England here, critics for the most part assume the editorial tone, and are proportionally uninteresting. To the long list of critics who write without edification, either because they decline self-revelation or are uninteresting when revealed, may be added, in modern times, the names of Mr. Lewes, late editor of the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ and the Duke of Argyll. These gentlemen sign their articles, but utterly fail to attract us: they are so thoroughly, so transparently, ‘editorial.’ Critics of the higher class, on the other hand, may be found in Sir Arthur Helps, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and (with a slight editorial leaven) in Mr. R. H. Hutton, who has recently published two volumes of essays. Mr. Arnold may or may not be an interesting being, but he never for a moment represents himself as what he is not. We know him as thoroughly as if we had been to school with him. We do not get angry with what he says, so much as with his insufferable manner of saying it. ¹ Sir Arthur Helps is, once and for ever, the optimist man of the world. Mr. R. H. Hutton, a writer of powerful, original genius and wonderful subtlety of insight, shows us, as in a mirror, his religion, his deep-seated prejudice, his quick sympathy with ideas as distinguished from literary clothing, and his genial love of microscopic délicatesse.

—    ¹ I am speaking of Arnold’s prose. His poetry is beautiful beyond measure. —

     ¹⁷ In many cases, the Anonymous is a mere cloak, and everybody knows whom it conceals. The public bowed before the judgment of Jeffrey and Brougham, not that of the Edinburgh Review; before the judgment of Gifford and Southey, not that of the Quarterly Review. Nowadays, nevertheless, the anonymous pen has multiplied itself so prodigiously, that the air rings with fiats and acclaims, and Heaven knows who is uttering them! It is wonderful how Genius gets along, and escapes being put down; wonderful how fairly the oracles speak, in spite of their irresponsibility. Still, the only Criticism worth a rap belongs to the Fine Artist, and the only Critic who really carries us away is he whose personality we entirely respect.
     There seems no end to the extension of so-called criticism as a creative form of composition (as valuable in its way as lyrical poetry or autobiography), wherein we have the representation of certain known products on certain competent or incompetent natures. The man who criticises may attract us by the tints of his own individuality, and the play of his own soul, as successfully as the man who sings or the man who paints. His work is merely the final record of an impression which, before reaching him, has passed through the colouring matter of the poet’s or painter’s mind. To conclude, then, Scientific Criticism is fudge, as sheer fudge as scientific poetry, as scientific painting; but Criticism does belong to the Fine Arts, and for that reason its future prospects are positively unlimited.

[Note:
Originally published in The Saint Pauls Magazine (April, 1872 - Vol. X, pp. 386-395) under the pseudonym, Walter Hutcheson. The original version is available here.]

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THE ‘GOOD GENIE’ OF FICTION.

CHARLES DICKENS.

THERE was once a good Genie, with a bright eye and a magic hand, who, being born out of his due time and place, and falling not upon fairy ways, but into the very heart of this great city of London wherein we write, walked on the solid earth in the nineteenth century in a most spirit-like and delightful dream. He was such a quaint fellow, with so delicious a twist in his vision, that where you and I (and the wise critics) see straight as an arrow, he saw everything queer and crooked; but this, you must know, was a terrible defect in the good Genie, a tremendous weakness, for how can you expect a person to behold things as they are whose eyes are so wrong in his head that they won’t even make out a straight mathematical line?
     To the good Genie’s gaze everything in this rush of life grew queer and confused. The streets were droll, and the twisted windows winked at each other. The Water had a voice, crying, ‘Come down! come down!’ and the Wind and Rain became absolute human entities, with ways of conducting themselves strange beyond expression. Where you see a clock, he saw a face and ¹⁹ heard the beating of a heart. The very pump at Aldgate became humanized, and held out its handle like a hand for the good Genie to shake. Amphion was nothing to him. To make the gouty oaks dance hornpipes, and the whole forest go country-dancing, was indeed something, but how much greater was the feat of animating stone houses, great dirty rivers, toppling chimneys, staring shop windows, and the laundress’s wheezy mangle! Pronounce as we may on the wisdom of the Genie’s conduct, no one doubts that the world was different before he came; the same world, doubtless, but a duller, more expressionless world; and perhaps, on the whole, the people in it—especially the poor, struggling people—wanted one great happiness which a wise and tender Providence meant to send.
     The Genie came and looked, and after looking for a long time, began to speak and print; and so magical was his voice, that a crowd gathered round him, and listened breathlessly to every word; and so potent was the charm, that gradually all the crowd began to see everything as the charmer did (in other words, as the wise critics say, to squint in the same manner), and to smile in the same odd, delighted, bewildered fashion. Never did pale faces brighten more wonderfully! never did eyes that had seen straight so very long, and so very, very sadly, brighten up so amazingly at discovering that, absolutely, everything was crooked! It was a quaint world, after all, quaint in both laughter and tears, odd over the cradle, comic over the grave, rainbowed by laughter and sorrow in one glorious Iris, melting into a ²⁰ thousand beautiful hues. ‘My name,’ said the good Genie, ‘is Charles Dickens, and I have come to make you all—but especially the poor and lowly—brighter and happier.’ Then, smiling merrily, he waved his hands, and one by one, along the twisted streets, among the grinning windows and the human pumps, quaint figures began to walk, while a low voice told stories of Human Fairyland, with its ghosts, its ogres, its elves, its good and bad spirits, its fun and frolic, oft culminating in veritable harlequinade, and its dim, dew-like glimmerings of pathos. There was no need any longer for grown-up children to sigh and wish for the dear old stories of the nursery. What was Puss in Boots to Mr. Pickwick in his gaiters? What was Tom Thumb, with all its oddities, to poor Tom Pinch playing on his organ all alone up in the loft? A new and sweeter Cinderella arose in Little Nell: a brighter and dearer little Jack Horner eating his Christmas pie was found when Oliver Twist appeared and ‘asked for more.’
     It was certainly enchanting the earth with a vengeance, when all life became thus marvellously transformed. In the first place, die world was divided, just as old Fairyland had been divided, into good and bad fairies, into beautiful Elves and awful Ogres, and everybody was either very loving or very spiteful There were no composite creatures, such as many of our human tale-tellers like to describe. Then there was generally a sort of Good Little Boy who played the part of hero, and who ultimately got married to a Good Little Girl, who played the part of heroine.
     ²¹ In the course of their wanderings through human fairyland, the hero and heroine met all sorts of strange characters—queer-looking Fairies, like the Brothers Cheeryble, or Mr. Toots, or David Copperfield’s aunt, or Mr. Dick, or the convict Magwitch; out-and-out Ogres, ready to devour the innocent, and without a grain of goodness in them, like Mr. Quilp, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Fagin the Jew, Carker with his white teeth, Rogue Riderhood, and Lawyer Tulkinghorn; comical Will-o’-the-wisps, or moral Impostors, flabby of limb and sleek of visage, called by such names as Stiggins, Chadband, Snawley, Pecksniff, Bounderby, and Uriah Heep. Strange people, forsooth, in a strange country. Wise critics said that the country was not the world at all, but simply Topsyturvyland; and indeed there might have seemed some little doubt about the matter, if every now and again, in the world we are speaking of, there had not appeared a group of poor people with such real laughter and tears that their humanity was indisputable. Scarcely had we lost sight for a moment of the Demon Quilp, when whom should we meet but Codlin and Short sitting mending their wooden figures in the churchyard? and not many miles off was Mrs. Jarley, every scrap on whose bones was real human flesh; the Peggotty group living in their upturned boat on the sea-shore, while little Em’ly watches the incoming tide erasing her tiny footprint on the sand; the Dorrit family, surrounding the sadly comic figure of the Father of the Marshalsea; good Mrs, Richards and her husband the Stoker, struggling through thorny paths of adversity with never ²² a grumble; Trotty Veck sniffing the delicious fumes of the tripe a good fairy is bringing to him; and Tiny Tim waving his spoon, and crying, ‘God bless us all!’ in the midst of the smiling Cratchit family on Christmas Day.
     This was more puzzling still—to find ‘real life’ and ‘fairy life’ blended together most fantastically. It was like that delightful tale of George MacDonald’s, where you never can tell truth from fancy, and where you see the country in fairyland is just like the real country, with cottages [and cooking going on inside], and roads, and flower-gardens, and finger posts, yet everything haunted most mysteriously by supernatural creatures. But let the country described by the good Genie be ever so like the earth, and the poor folk moving in it ever so like life, there was never any end to the enchantment. On the slightest provocation trees and shrubs would talk and dance, intoxicated public-houses hiccup, clocks talk in measured tones, tombstones chatter their teeth, lamp-posts reel idiotically, all inanimate nature assume animate qualities. The better the real people were, and the poorer, the more they were haunted by delightful Fays. The Cricket talked on the hearth, and the Kettle sang in human words. The plates on the dresser grinned and gleamed, when the Pudding rolled out of its smoking cloth, saying perspiringly, ‘Here we are again!’ Talk about Furniture and Food being soulless things! The good Genie knew better. Whenever he went into a mean and niggardly house, he saw the poor devils of chairs and tables attenuated and wretched, the lean ²³ timepiece with its heart thumping through its wretched ribs, the fireplace shivering with a red nose, and the chimney-glass grim and gaunt. Whenever he entered the house of a good person, with a loving, generous heart, he saw the difference—jolly fat chairs, if only of common wood, tables as warm as a toast, and mirrors that gave him a wink of good-humoured greeting. It was all enchantment, due perhaps in a great measure to the strange twist in the vision with which the good Genie was born.
     Thus far, perhaps, in a sort of semi-transparent allegory, have we indicated the truth as regards the wonderful genius who has so lately left us. Mighty as was the charm of Dickens, there have been from the beginning a certain select few who have never felt it. Again and again has the great Genie been approached by some dapper dilettante of the superfine sort, and been informed that his manner was wrong altogether, not being by any means the manner of Aristophanes, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, or Smollett, or Scott. This man has called him, with some contempt, a ‘caricaturist.’ That man has described his method of portrayal as ‘sentimental.’ MacStingo prefers the humour of Galt. The gelid, heart-searching critic prefers Miss Austen. Even young ladies have been known to take refuge in Thackeray. All this time, perhaps, the real truth as regards Charles Dickens has been missed or perverted. He was not a satirist, in the sense that Aristophanes was a satirist. He was not a comic analyst, like Sterne; nor an intellectual force, like ²⁴ Swift; nor a sharp, police-magistrate sort of humourist, like Fielding; nor a practical-joke-playing tomboy, like Smollett He was none of these things. Quite as little was he a dashing romancist or fanciful historian, like Walter Scott. Scott found the Past ready made to his hand, fascinating and fair. Dickens simply enchanted the Present. He was the creator of Human Fairyland. He was a magician, to be bound by none of your commonplace laws and regular notions: as well try to put Incubus in a glass case, and make Robin Goodfellow the monkey of a street hurdy-gurdy. He came to put Jane Austen and M. Balzac to rout, and to turn London into Queer Country.
     Yes, he was hotheaded as an Elf, untrustworthy as a Pixy, maudlin at times as a lovesick Giant, and he squinted like Puck himself. He was, in fact, anything but the sort of story-teller the dull old world had been accustomed to. He was most unpractical. His pictures distorted life and libelled society. He grimaced and he gambolled. He bewitched the solid pudding of practicality, and made it dance to aërial music, just as if Tom Thumb were inside of it. It is, therefore, as you say, highly inexpedient that his works should be much studied by young people, who must be duly crammed with tremendous first principles; and for a literary Rhadamanthus of two-hundred-horse power, he is absurd reading. Nor should we care to recommend his narratives to the Gradgrinds or the Dombeys of this generation. His stories are so child-like, so absurd, so unwise, so mad. But such stories! When shall we ²⁵ hear the like again? Wiser and greater tale-tellers may come, if to be hard and cold is to be wise and great; but who will lull us once more into such infancy of delight, and make us glorious children once again? The good Genie has gone, and already the wise critics—who speak with such authority, and are so tremendously above being pleasing themselves—are shaking their heads over his grave.
     But the amount of the world’s interest in Charles Dickens is not to be measured by any quantity of head-shakings on the part of the unsympathetic; and now that the magic has departed, every English home misses the magician. In spite of the small scandal which is spilt over every tea-table, in spite of the shrill yelps of those canine persons who (finding the literary monuments too much like marble to suit their teeth) snap savagely at the great writer’s personality, there wells from English life, at the present moment, a light spring of ever-increasing gratitude, having its source very deep indeed. The small critic may still hold that Dickens was a sort of Bavius or Maevius of his day, to be forgotten with the ephemera of his generation; but, then, is it not notorious that the person in question thought Thackeray ‘no gentleman,’ and finds in the greatest genius of America only the ravings of a madman? With the wrong and right about a great author petulant scribbling has nothing whatever to do. The world decides for itself. And the world decided long ago that Dickens was beyond all parallel the greatest imaginative creator of this generation, and that his poetry, the best of it, ²⁶ although written in unrhymed speech, is worth more, and will possibly last longer, than all the Verse-poetry of this age, splendid as some of that poetry has been. None but a spooney or a pedant doubts the power.
     One question remains, how did that power arise? by what means did it grow? Just as all England had decided that the question was unanswerable up rises Mr. John Forster with his most charming of books, and solves in a series of absorbing chapters the great part of the mystery. It is not without a shock that we are admitted behind the curtain of the good Genie’s private life. All is so different from what we had anticipated. The tree which bore fruit as golden as that of the Hesperides was rooted in a wretched soil, and watered with the bitterest possible tears of self-compassion.
     We see it all now in one illuminating flash. We see the mightiness of the genius and its limitations. We see why, less than almost any great author, Dickens changed with advancing culture; how, more than ninety-nine out of a hundred men, he acquired the habit of instant observation, false or true; why he imparted to things animate and inanimate the qualities of each other; wherefore all life seemed so odd to him; why, in a word, instead of soaring at once into the empyrean of the sweet English ‘classics’ (so faultless that you can’t pick a speck in them), he remained on the solid pavement, and told elfin and goblin stories of common life. It may seem putting the case too strongly, but Charles Dickens, having crushed into his childish experience a whole world of sorrow and humorous ²⁷ insight, so loaded his soul that he never grew any older. He was a great, grown-up, dreamy, impulsive child, just as much a child as little Paul Dombey or little David Copperfield. He saw all from a child’s point of view—strange, odd, queer, puzzling. He confused men and things, animated scenery and furniture with human souls, wondered at the stars and the sea, hated facts, loved good eating and sweetmeats, fun, and frolic,—all in the childish fashion. Child-like he commiserated himself, with sharp, agonising introspection. Child-like he rushed out into the world with his griefs and grievances, concealing nothing, wildly craving for sympathy. Child-like he had fits of cold reserve, stubborner and crueller than the reserve of any perfectly cultured man. And just as much as little Paul Dombey was out of place at Dr. Blimber’s, where they tried to cram him with knowledge, and ever pronounced him old-fashioned, was Charles Dickens out of place in the cold, worldly circle of literature, in the bald bare academy of English culture, where his queer stories and quaint ways were simply astonishing, until even that hard circle began to love the quaint, questioning, querulous, mysterious guest, who would not become a pupil. Like little Paul, he was ‘old-fashioned.’ ‘What,’ he might have asked himself with little Paul, ‘what could that “old-fashion” be, that seemed to make the people sorry? What could it be?’
     Never, perhaps, has a fragment of biography wakened more interest and amazement than the first chapters of Mr. Forster’s biography. Who that had read the ²⁸ marvellous pictures of child-life in ‘David Copperfield,’ and had been startled by their vital intensity, were prepared to hear that they were merely the transcript of real thoughts, feelings, and sufferings; were the literal transcript of the writer’s own actual experience—nay, were even a portion of an autobiography written by the author himself in the first flush of his manhood? The pinching want, the sense of desolation, the sharp, agonising pride, were all real, just as real as the sharp, child-like insight into life and character, and the wonderful knowledge of the byways of life.
     His first experience was at Chatham, where his father held a small appointment under Government, and here he not only contracted that love for the neighbourhood which abided with him through life, but amassed the material for many of his finest sketches of persons and localities—notably for that extraordinary account of a journey down the river given in ‘Great Expectations.’ His own account of his life at Chatham, embodied in the fragment of biography before alluded to, is very interesting; and in his autobiographical novel we have a list of the very books he loved—‘Tom Jones,’ ‘Tales of the Genii’ (but the tale of the most wonderful Genie of all remained to be told!), ‘Arabian Nights,’ ‘Roderick Random,’ ‘Humphrey Clinker,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and ‘Gil Blas.’
     Before he was nine years old, however, Dickens was removed to that mighty City over which he was afterwards to shed the glamour of veritable enchantment, and which, from having been the wonder and delight of ²⁹ his early boyhood, was to arise into the huge temple of his art. The elder Dickens, having procured a situation in Somerset-house, took his family to Bayham Street, Camden Town, and shortly afterwards little Charles was forwarded inside the stage-coach, ‘like game, carriage paid.’ His recollection of the journey was very vivid. ‘There was no other inside passenger,’ he relates, ‘and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected.’ The following passage from Mr. Forster’s biography is pregnant with interest,, and tells a whole tale of sorrowful change:—

     The earliest impressions received and retained by him in London, were of his father’s money involvements; and now first he heard mentioned ‘the deed’ representing that crisis of his father’s affairs in fact which is ascribed in fiction to Mr. Micawber’s. He knew it in later days to have been a composition with creditors, though at this earlier date he was conscious of having confounded it with parchments of a much more demoniacal description. One result from the awful document soon showed itself in enforced retrenchment. The family had to take up its abode in a house in Bayham Street, Camden Town.
     Bayham Street was about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow Street officer lived over the way. Many many times has he spoken to me of this, and how he seemed at once to fall into a solitary condition apart from all other boys of his own age, and to sink into a ³⁰ neglected state at home which had always been quite unaccountable to him. ‘As I thought,’ he said on one occasion very bitterly, ‘in the little back garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!’ He was at another school already, not knowing it. The self-education forced upon him was teaching him, all unconsciously as yet, what, for the future that awaited him, it most behoved him to know.
     That he took, from the very beginning of this Bayham Street life, his first impression of that struggling poverty which is nowhere more vividly shown than in commoner streets of the ordinary London suburb, and which enriched his earliest writings with a freshness of original humour and quite unstudied pathos that gave them much of their sudden popularity, there cannot be a doubt. ‘I certainly understood it,’ he has often said to me, ‘quite as well then as I do now.’ But he was not conscious yet that he did so understand it, or of the influence it was exerting on his life even then. It seems almost too much to assert of a child, say at nine or ten years old, that his observation of everything was as close and good, or that he had as much intuitive understanding of the character and weaknesses of the grown-up people around him, as when the same keen and wonderful faculty had made him famous among men. But my experience of him led me to put implicit faith in the assertion he unvaryingly himself made, that he had never seen any cause to correct or change what in his boyhood was his own secret impression of anybody whom he had had, as a grown man, the opportunity of testing in later years.
     How it came that, being what he was, he should now have fallen into the misery and neglect of the time about to be described, was a subject on which thoughts were frequently interchanged between us and on one occasion he gave me a sketch of the character of his father which, as I can here repeat ³¹ it in the exact words employed by him, will be the best preface I can make to what I feel that I have no alternative but to tell. ‘I know my father to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world. Everything that I can remember of his conduct to his wife, or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched night and day, unweariedly and patiently, many nights and days. He never undertook any business charge, or trust, that he did not zealously, conscientiously, punctually, honourably discharge. His industry has always been untiring. He was proud of me, in his way, and had a great admiration of the comic singing. But, in the ease of his temper and the straitness of his means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him in that regard, whatever. So I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living.’

     In this and other portions of the biography, we are thus directly informed that Mr. Dickens, senior, with his constant pecuniary embarrassments, his easy good nature, his utter unpracticality, sat full length for the immortal portrait of Mr. Micawber; and this fact has already been the signal for much after-dinner comment and for numberless bitter remarks on the part of the unsympathetic. It so happens that Dickens, in his biographical fragment as in his great novel, dwells with all the intensity of an incurably wounded nature on the early privations and trials which (as has been truly observed) made him the great power he was. This, it is ³² suggested, was, if not positive folly, rank ingratitude; his self-commiseration was contemptible, his after-recrimination atrocious; and it is to be regretted that he was not at once more manly and more gentle. Thus far a small section of the public. Read, now, Dickens’s account of his life at the blacking warehouse, where he was sent at the request of a relation:—

     It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge.
     The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left hand side of the way, at old Hungerford stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting, of course, on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms and its rotten floors and staircases, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking, first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart ³³ as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist. . . I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that if a shilling or so were given me by anyone, I spent it in a dinner or a tea. I know that I worked from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through; by putting it away in a drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount, and labelled with a different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.’

At last, this hard life came to an end; how, is explained in this bitter sequel:—

     ‘At last, one day, my father, and the relative so often mentioned, quarrelled; quarrelled by letter, for I took the letter from my father to him which caused the explosion, but quarrelled very fiercely. It was about me. It may have had some backward reference, in part, for anything I know, to my employment at the window. All I am certain of is, that, soon after I had given him the letter, my cousin (he was a sort of cousin, by marriage) told me he was very much insulted about me; and that it was impossible to keep me after that. I cried very much, ³⁴ partly because it was so sudden, and partly because, in his anger, he was violent about my father, though gentle to me. Thomas, the old soldier, comforted me, and said he was sure it was for the best. With a relief so strange that it was like oppression, I went home.
     ‘My mother set herself to accommodate the quarrel, and did so next day. She brought home a request for me to return next morning, and a high character of me which I am very sure I deserved. My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.
     ‘From that hour until this at which I write, no word of that part of my childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close, has passed my lips to any human being. I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a year, or much more, or less. From that hour, until this, my father and my mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them. I have never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God!’

     The reader has now before him the whole story, the whole explanation of why, over Charles Dickens, ’ere he is scarce cold.’

Begins the scandal and the cry!

     The case is very simple. Charles Dickens, having been greatly unfortunate in his youth, dwelt on the circumstances with an intensity ‘almost vindictive’—in other words, with the frightfully realistic power which ³⁵ especially distinguished the man. Weighing all the circumstances, probing the very core of the truth, we see nothing in this to account for the prevalent misconception. Let us bear in mind, in the first place, the keenness of the author’s memory, and the stiletto-like touches of the author’s style, both liable to be misunderstood by men with dimmer memories and flabbier styles. Let us remember, next, that Dickens was concocting no mere fiction, but attempting to tell things exactly as they had happened,—to narrate (in his own words) ‘the whole truth, so help me God!’ Lastly, let us not forget, that the words we have read were no formal public charge, but the rapid instantaneous flashes of a private self-examination, never published until totally disguised and modified. We have more faith in the English public, which has persistently adhered to the great master in spite of the carpings and doubtings of Blimberish persons, than to imagine it will be misled in reading this matter, any more than Mr. Forster has been misled in printing it; and we unhesitatingly assert that, in the autobiographical fragment, there is not one sentence inconsistent with a noble soul, a beneficent mind, and a loving heart. The worst passage is that referring to his mother’s desire to send him back to the blacking warehouse. We agree with Dickens that such a desire was cruel almost to brutality (Dickens never says so, though he seems to have felt as much), but we affirm, nevertheless, that the language he uses is perfectly tender and lawful. ‘I never shall forget, I never can forget,’—that is all. The impression survived, but had he not tried to ³⁶ obliterate it a million times? and why?—because, with that reverent yearning nature, he would fain have made himself believe his mother had been completely noble and true to him, because he was too sensitive to do without motherly love and tenderness, because he could not bear to think the one great consecration of childhood had been missing. Such a feeling, we believe, so far from being inconsistent with love, is part of love’s very nature. Had he not been filial to the intensest possible degree, he would never have felt an unmotherly touch so sorely. He sits in no judgment, he utters no blame, but to himself, in the recesses of his soul, he cries that he would part with half his fame to feel that that one unkindness had been wanting. ‘The pity of it, the pity of it, lago!’
     And we, who owe him a new world of love and beauty, we who are to him as blades of common grass to the rose, are we to sit in judgment on our good Genie, because he has bared his heart to us, a little too much, perhaps, in the all-telling candour of a child? God forbid! Shall we cast a stone, too, because (as we are told) he, in one of his leading characters, ‘caricatured his own father?’ O dutiful sons that we are, shall we spit upon the monster’s grave? No. Rather let us, like wise men, read the words already quoted, wherein the great author pictures his father’s character in all the hues of perfect tenderness and truth. Rather let us open ‘David Copperfield,’ and study the character of Micawber again,—to find the queer sad human truth embodied in such a picture as only love could draw, as ³⁷ only a heart overflowing with tenderness could conceive and feel. MICAWBER! There is light in every lineament, sweetness in every tone, of the delicious creature.
     ‘The very incarnation of selfishness,’ it is retorted; ‘dishonourable, mean, absurd, gross, contemptible.’ But to this there is no reply; for Micawber, with all his faults, which are of the very nature of the man, is to us, as to him who limned him for our affection, almost as dear a figure as Don Quixote, or Parson Adams, or Strap, or Uncle Toby.
     But this appealing against harsh judgment is thankless work. Far better pass on to those portions of the book which show how Dickens, when a neglected boy, began accumulating the materials for his great works—wandering about Seven Dials, aghast at that theatre of human tragedy of which every threshold was the proscenium; haunting the wharfs and bridges, till the river became a dark and awful friend; visiting the gaffs and shows in the Blackfriars Road, till every feature of low mumming life grew familiar to him; visiting his father in that Marshalsea of which he was to leave so vivid a memorial; watching the cupola of St. Paul’s looming through the smoke of Camden Town; dreaming, planning, picturing, until this vast web of London grew, as we have said, enchanted, and life became a magic tale. So intense were the sensations of those days, so vivid were the impressions, that they remained with the author for ever fascinating him, as it were, into one child-like way of looking at the world. Indeed, the sense of oddity deepened as he grew older in years till ³⁸ it became almost ghastly, brooding specially on ghastly things, in his last unfinished fragment. ¹
     One never forgets how Aladdin, when he got possession of the ring, and, rubbing the tears out of his eyes, accidentally rubbed the ring too, discovered all in a moment his power over spirits and things unseen. Much in the same way did Dickens discover his gift. It was an accidental rub, as it were, when he was crying sadly, that brought the brilliant help. But in his case, unlike that of Aladdin, the power grew with using. The first few figures summoned up in the ‘Sketches’ were clever enough, but vague and absurdly thin, mere shadows of what was coming. But suddenly, one morning, descended like Mercury the angel Pickwick beaming through his spectacles; and the man-child revelled in laughter, utterly abandoning himself to the maddest mood. He was not as yet quite spell-bound by his own magic, and was merely full of the fun. The tricksy Spirit of Metaphor, which he compelled to such untiring service afterwards, scarcely got beyond such an image as this, in the vulgarising style of ‘Tom Jones’:—‘That punctual servant-of-all-work, the sun, had just risen and begun to strike a light.’ But the book was full of quiddity, rich in secret unction. It was in a sadder mood, with the recollections of his hard boyish sufferings still too fresh upon him, that he wrote ‘Oliver Twist.’ This book, with all its faults, shows what its writer might have been, if he had not chosen rather to be a great magician. Putting aside

—    ¹ See ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ —

³⁹ altogether the artificial love story with which it is interblended, and which is the merest padding, there is scarcely a character in this fiction which is not rigidly drawn from the life, and that without the faintest attempt to secure quiddity at the expense of verisimilitude. The character of Nancy, the figures of Fagin and his pupils, the conduct of Sykes after the murder, are all studies in the hardest realistic manner, with not one flash of glamour. Even the Dodger is more life-like than delightful. There are touches in it of marvellous cunning, strokes of superb insight, bits of description unmatched out of the writer’s own works; but the lyric identity (if we may apply the phrase to one who, although he wrote in prose, was specifically a poet) had yet to be achieved. The charm was not all spoken. The child-like mood was not yet quite fixed.
     Not at the ‘Oliver Twist’ stage of genius could he have written thus of a foggy November day: ‘Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun;’ or thus about shop-windows on the same occasion: ‘Shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look;’ or thus of a sleeping country town, where ‘nothing seemed to be going on but the clocks, and they had such drowsy faces, such heavy lazy hands, and such cracked voices, and they surely must have been too slow.’ Still less could he have pictured the wonderful figure of little Nell surrounded ⁴⁰ by oddities animate and inanimate, and moving through them to a sweet sleep and an early grave. Still less could he have written such an entire description as that of the Court of Chancery in ‘Bleak House,’ where the fog of the weather penetrates the whole intellectual and moral atmosphere, and renders all phantasmic and ludicrously strange. Yet all these things are seen and felt as a child might have seen and felt them—are just like the world little Dombey or little Nell might have described, if they had wandered as far, and been able to put their impressions upon paper.
     It is not to be lost sight of, as being a most significant and striking fact, that Dickens is greatest when most personal and lyrical, and that he is most lyrical when he puts himself in a child’s place, and sees with a child’s eyes. In the centre of his best stories sits a little human figure, dreaming, watching life as it might watch the faces in the fire. Little Oliver Twist, little David Copperfield, little Dombey, little Pip (in ‘Great Expectations’), wander in their turn through Queer Land, wander and wonder; and life to them is quaint as a toy-shop and as endless as a show. And where Dickens does not place a veritable child as the centre of his story, as in ‘Little Dorrit’ or ‘Bleak House,’ he employs instead a soft, wax-like, feminine, child-like nature, like Amy Dorrit or Esther Summerson, which may be supposed to bear the same sort of relation to the world as children of smaller growth, and to feel the world with the same intensity. In any case, in any of his best passages, whether humorous or pathetic, emotion ⁴¹ precedes reflection, as it does in the case of a child or of a great lyric poet. The first flash is seized; the picture, whether human or inanimate, is taken instantaneously and steeped in the feeling of the instant. Thus, when Carker first appears upon the scene in ‘Dombey and Son,’ the author, with a quick infantine perception, first notices ‘two unbroken lines of glistening teeth, whose regularity and whiteness were quite distressing,’ and in another moment perceives that in the same person’s smile there is ‘something like the snarl of the cat.’ With any other author but the present this first impression would possibly fade: but with him, as with a child, it grows and enlarges, till the white teeth of Carker absolutely haunt the reader, and in Carker’s very look and gesture is seen a feline resemblance. The feeling never disappears for a moment. ‘Mr. Carker reclined against the mantelpiece. In whose sly look and watchful manner; in whose false mouth, stretched but not laughing; in whose spotless cravat and very whiskers; even in whose silent passing of his left hand over his white linen and his smooth face: there was something desperately cat-like.’
     And the further the book proceeds the more is the feline metaphor pursued, so that when Carker is planning the downfall of Edith Dombey we all feel to be watching, with intense interest, a cat in the act to spring. ‘He seemed to purr, he was so glad. And in some sort Mr. Carker, in his fancy, basked upon a hearth too. Coiled up snugly at certain feet, he was ready for a spring, or for a tear, or for a scratch, or for a velvet touch, as the ⁴² humour seized him. Was there any bird in a cage that came in for a share of his regards?’ Nay, so unmistakable is his nature that it even provokes Diogenes the dog; for ‘as he picks his way so softly past the house, glancing up at the windows, and trying to make out the pensive face behind the curtain looking at the children opposite, the rough head of Diogenes came clambering up close by it, and the dog, regardless of all soothing, barks and howls, as if he would tear him limb from limb. Well spoken, Di!’ adds the author; ‘so near your mistress! Another and another, with your head up, your eyes flashing, and your vexed mouth wringing, for want of him. Another, as he picks his way along. You have a good scent, Di,—cats, boys, cats!’
     Note, here, the positive enchantment which this lyrical feeling casts over every subject with which it deals. There can be no mistake about it—we are in Fairyland; and every object we perceive, animate or inanimate, is quickened into strange life. Wherever the good person goes all good things are in league with him, help him, and struggle for him; trees, flowers, houses, bottles of wine, dishes of meat, rejoice with him, and enter into him, and mingle identities with him. He, literally ‘brightening the sunshine,’ fills the place where he moves with Fairies and attendant spirits. Read, as an illustration of this, the account of Tom Pinch’s drive in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit.’ But wherever the bad person goes, on the other hand, only ugly things sympathise. He darkens the day; his baleful look transforms every fair thing into an ogre. The door-knockers grin grimly, ⁴³ the door-hinges creak with diabolical laughter. There is not a grain of good in him, not a gleam of hope for him. He is, in fact, scarcely a human being, but an abstraction, representing Selfishness, Malice, Envy, Sham-piety, Hate; moral ugliness of some sort represented invariably by physical ugliness of another sort. He, of course, invariably gets beaten in the long run. This is all as it ought to be—in a fairy-tale.
     The pleasantest creatures in this pleasant dream of life, seen by our good Genie with the heart of a child, are (undoubtedly) the Fools. Dickens loved these forms of helplessness, and he has created the brightest that ever were imagined—Micawber, Toots, Twemlow, Mrs. Nickleby, Traddles, Kit Nubbles, Dora Spenlow, the gushing Flora, ¹ and many others whose names will occur to every reader. They are perhaps truer to nature than is generally conceded. The critical criterion finds them silly, and the pathos wasted over them somewhat maudlin. The public loves them, and feels the better for them; for, however wrong in the head, they are all right at heart—indeed, with our good Genie, a strong head and a tender heart seldom go together, which is a pity. There can be no doubt that the creator of these creatures was violently irrational, had an intense distaste for hard facts, and an equally intense love for sentimental chuckle-heads.

—    ¹ Not the least interesting portion of Mr. Forster’s life is the part showing us that Dora and Flora are photographs from the life, taken at different periods from the same person, and that this person was regarded by Dickens himself at one time just as Copperfield regarded Dora, and at a later period just as Clennam regarded Mrs. F.! —

The heart, the heart, if that beats right,                                   44
     Be sure the brain thinks true!

It may be observed, in deprecation, that Dickens’ good people, and especially his Fools, too often wear their hearts ‘upon their sleeves,’ and give vent to the disagreeable ‘gush’ so characteristic of his falsetto pathetic passages, such as the well-known scene between Doctor and Mrs. Strong in ‘David Copperfield’:—

     ‘Annie, my pure heart!’ said the doctor, ‘my dear girl!’
     ‘A little more! a very few words more! I used to think there were so many whom you might have married, who would not have brought such charge and trouble on you, and who would have made your home a worthier home. I used to be afraid that I had better have remained your pupil, and almost your child. I used to fear that I was so unsuited to your learning and wisdom. If all this made me shrink within myself (as indeed it did), when I had that to tell, it was still because I honoured you so much, and hoped that you might one day honour me.’
     ‘That day has shone this long time, Annie,’ said the doctor, ‘and can have but one long night, my dear.’
     ‘Another word! I afterwards meant—steadfastly meant, and purposed to myself—to bear the whole weight of knowing the unworthiness of one to whom you had been so good. And now a last word, dearest and best of friends! The cause of the late change in you, which I have seen with so much pain and sorrow, and have sometimes referred to my old apprehension—at other times to lingering suppositions nearer to the truth—has been made clear to-night; and by an accident. I have also come to know, to-night, the full measure of your noble trust in me, even under that mistake. I do not hope that any love and duty I may render in return will ever make me worthy of your priceless confidence; but with all this knowledge fresh upon ⁴⁵ me, I can lift my eyes to this dear face, revered as a father’s, loved as a husband’s, sacred to me in my childhood as a friend’s, and solemnly declare that in my lightest thought I had never wronged you; never wavered in the love and the fidelity I owe you!’
     She had her arms round the doctor’s neck, and he leant his head down over her, mingling his grey hair with her dark brown tresses.
     ‘Oh, hold me to your heart, my husband! Never cast me out! Do not think or speak of disparity between us, for there is none, except in all my many imperfections. Every succeeding year I have known this better, as I have esteemed you more and more. Oh, take me to your heart, my husband, for my love was founded on a rock, and it endures!’—(David Copperfield, chap. xlv. pp. 402, 403. Charles Dickens’ Edition.) ¹

There is, of course, far too much of this sort of thing in Dickens’ pictures, but it does not go beyond bad drawing. His conception of the pathetic circumstances is always psychologically right, only he has too little experience not to make it theatrical. A child might think such a scene, on or off the stage, very affecting. And why does it only repel grown-up people? For the very reason that it is childishly and absurdly candid, that the speakers in it lack the loving reticence of full-grown natures, that it is full of ‘words, words, words,’ from which proud and affectionate men and women shrink.

—    ¹ Our references throughout the article are to this edition. To those who find the library edition too expensive, or too cumbrous for common use, we can recommend the ‘Charles Dickens.’ It has, however, one great blemish, which had better be rectified at once, if it is to be really valuable. There is no index of chapters or contents to any of the volumes, so that for all purposes of reference it is almost useless. —

⁴⁶ Our good Genie’s pets were far too fond, children-like, of pouring out their own emotions; they lacked the adult reserve. This is a fault they share with many contemporary creations, such as Browning’s ‘Balaustion,’ whose

                                       O so glad
To tell you the adventure!

and general guttural liquidity of expression, is quite as bad in itself (and far worse in its place) as anything in Dickens.
     Even more precious than the Fools are, in our eyes, the Impostors. What a gallery; alike, yet how different! Pecksniff, Pumblechook, Turveydrop, Casby, Bounderby, Stiggins, Chadband, Snawley, the Father of the Marshalsea! Although a brief inspection of these gentlemen shows them all to belong to the same family, each in turn comes upon us with pristine freshness. They are infinitely ridiculous and quite Elf-like in their moral flabbiness.
     And this brings us to one point upon which we would willingly dwell for some time, did space permit us. A great humorist like our good Genie, is the very sweetener and preserver of the earth, is the most beneficent Angel that walks abroad; for it is a most cunning and delightful law of mental perception, that as soon as any figure presents itself to us in a funny light, hate for that figure is impossible. If you have any enemy, and if any peculiarity of his makes you smile or laugh, be sure that you and he are closelier united than you know. Humour and ⁴⁷ love are twin brothers, one beautiful as Eros, the other queer as Incubus, but both made of the very same materials; and therefore, to call a man a great humorist is simply to call him the most loving and lovable type of humanity that we are permitted to study and enjoy. And this, all the world feels, was Charles Dickens. It would be hard indeed to over-estimate what this good Genie has done for human nature, simply by pointing out what is odd in it. Here come Hypocrisy, Guile, Envy, Self-conceit; you are ready to spring upon and rend them; yet when the charm is spoken, you burst out laughing. What comical figures! You couldn’t think of hurting them! Your heart begins to swell with sneaking kindness. Poor devils, they were made thus; and they are so absurd! Fortunately for humanity, this comical perception has grown with the growth of the world. Mystic touches of it in Aristophanes sweetened the Athenian mind when philosophy and the dramatic muse were souring and curdling, and at the mad laughter of Rabelais the cloud-pavilion of monasticism parted to let the merry sky peep through. But the deep human mirth of the popular heart was as yet scarcely heard. Shakspeare’s humour, even more than Chaucer’s, is of the very essence of divine quiddity.
     Between Shakspeare and Dickens, only one humorist of the truly divine sort rose, fluted magically for a moment, and passed away, leaving the Primrose family as his legacy to posterity. Swift’s humour was of the earth, earthy; Gay’s was shrill and wicked; Fielding’s was judicial, with flashes of heavenlike promise; Smollett’s ⁴⁸ was cumbrous and not spiritualising; Sterne’s was a mockery and a lie (shades of Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman, forgive us, but it is true!); and—not to catalogue till the reader is breathless—Scott’s was feudal, with all the feudal limitations, in spite of his magnificent scope and depth. Entirely without hesitation we affirm that there is more true humour, and consequently more helpful love, in the pages of Dickens than in all the writers we have mentioned put together; and that, in quality, the humour of Dickens is richer, if less harmonious, than that of Aristophanes; truer and more human than that of Rabelais, Swift, or Sterne; more distinctively unctuous than even that of Chaucer, in some respects the finest humorist of all; a head and shoulders over Thackeray’s, because Thackeray’s satire was radically unpoetic; certainly inferior to that of Shakspere only, and inferior to his in only one respect—that of humorous pathos. It is needless to say that in the last-named quality Shakspere towers supreme, almost solitary. Falstaff’s death-bed scene ¹ is, taken relatively to the preceding life, and history, and rich unction of Sir John, the most wonderful blending of comic humour and divine tenderness to be found in any book—infinite in its suggestion, tremendous in its quaint truth, penetrating to the very depths of life, while never disturbing the first strange smile on the spectator’s face. Yes; and therefore overflowing with unutterable love.
     The humour of our good Genie seems, when we begin to analyse it, a very simple matter—merely the knack,

—    ¹ See King Henry V., act ii. scene 3. —

⁴⁹ as we have before said, of seeing crooked—of posing every figure into oddity. A tone, a gesture, a look, the merest trait, is sufficient; nay, so all-sufficient does the trait become that it absorbs the entire individuality; so that Mr. Toots becomes a Chuckle, Mr. Turveydrop incarnate Deportment, Uriah Heep a Cringe; so that Newman Noggs cracks his finger-knuckles, and Carker shows his teeth, whenever they appear; so that Traddles is to our memory a Forelock for ever sticking bolt upright, and Rigaud (in ‘Little Dorrit’) an incarnate Hook-Nose and Moustache eternally meeting each other. Enter Dr. Blumber: ‘The Doctor’s walk was stately, and calculated to impress the juvenile mind with solemn feelings. It was a sort of march; but when the Doctor put out his right foot, he gravely turned upon his axis, with a semicircular sweep towards the left; and when he put out his left foot, he turned in the same manner towards the right. So that he seemed, at every stride he took, to look about him as though he were saying, “Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any subject, in any direction, on which I am uninformed?” Enter Mr. Flintwinch: ‘His neck was so twisted, that the knotted ends of his white cravat actually dangled under one ear; his natural acerbity and energy always contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his features a swollen and suffused look; and altogether he had a weird appearance of having hanged himself at one time or other, and of having gone about ever since, halter and all, exactly as some timely hand had cut him down.’ ⁵⁰ This first impression never fades or changes as long as we see the figure in question.
     Akin to this perception of Oddity, and allied with it, is the perception of the Incongruous. Never did the brain of human creature see stranger resemblances, funnier coincidences, more side-splitting discrepancies. This man was for all the world like (what should he say?) a Pump, the more so as his feelings generally ran to water! That man was a Spider, such a comical Spider—‘horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting, who spun webs to catch unwary flies, and retired into holes until they were entrapped.’ Yonder trips the immaculate Pecksniff, ‘carolling as he goes, so sweetly and with so much innocence, that he only wanted feathers and wings to be a Bird.’

     The summer weather in his bosom was reflected in the breast of nature. Through deep green vistas, where the boughs arched overhead, and showed the sunlight flashing in the beautiful perspective; through dewy fern, from which the startled hares leaped up, and fled at his approach; by mantled pools, and fallen trees, and down in hollow places, rustling among last year’s leaves, whose scent woke memory of the past, the placid Pecksniff strolled. By meadow gates and hedges fragrant with wild roses; and by thatch-roofed cottages, whose inmates humbly bowed before him as a man both good and wise; the worthy Pecksniff walked in tranquil meditation. The bee passed onward, humming of the work he had to do; the idle gnats, for ever going round and round in one contracting and expanding ring, yet always going on as fast as he, danced merrily before him; the colour of the long grass came and went, as if the light clouds made it timid as they floated through the distant air. The birds, so many Pecksniff consciences, ⁵¹ sang gaily upon every branch; and Mr. Pecksniff paid his homage to the day by enumerating all his projects as he walked along.—Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 302.

     Here, as elsewhere, the whole power lies in the incongruity of the whole comparison, in the reader’s perfect knowledge that Pecksniff is a Humbug and an Impostor, and that there is nothing bird-like or innocent in his nature. The vein once struck, there was nothing to hinder our good Genie from working it for ever. His path swarmed with oddities and incongruities; Wagner-like he mixed these elements together, and produced the Homunculus, Laughter. And just as the perception of oddity and incongruity varies in men, varies the enjoyment of Dickens. Quiddity for quiddity—the reader must give as well as receive; and if the faculty is not in him, he will turn away contemptuously. A weasel looking out of a hole is enough to convulse some people with laughter; they see a dozen odd resemblances. Other people, again, walk through all this Topsyturvyland with scarcely a smile. Life in all its phases, great and small, seems perfectly congruous and ship-shape; much too serious a matter for any levity.
     But it is time we were drawing these stray remarks to a close, or we may be betrayed into actual criticism—a barbarity we should wish to avoid. Truly has it been said, that the only true critic of a work is he who enjoys it; and for our part, our enjoyment shall suffice for criticism. The Fairy Tale of Human Life, as seen first and last by the good Genie of Fiction, seems to us far too delightful to find fault with just yet. A hundred years ⁵² hence, perhaps, we shall have it assorted on its proper shelf in the temple of Fame. We know well enough (as, indeed, who does not know?) that it contains much sham pathos, atrocious bits of psychological bungling, a little fine writing, and a thimbleful of twaddle; we know (quite as well as the critical know) that it is peopled, not quite by human beings, but by Ogres, Monsters, Giants, Elves, Phantoms, Fairies, Demons, and Will-o’-the-Wisps; we know, in a word, that it has all the attractions as well as all the limitations of a Story told by a Child. For that diviner oddity, which revels in the Incongruity of the very Universe itself, which penetrates to the spheres and makes the very Angel of Death share in the wonderful laughter, we must go elsewhere—say to Jean Paul. Of the Satire, which illuminates the inside of Life and reveals the secret beating of the heart, which unmasks the Beautiful and anatomises the Ugly, Thackeray is a greater master; and his tears, when they do flow, are truer tears. But for mere magic, for simple delightfulness, commend us to our good Genie. He came, when most needed, to tell the whole story of life anew, and more funnily than ever; and it seems to us that his child-like method has brightened all life, and transformed this awful London of ours—with its startling facts and awful daily phenomena—into a gigantic Castle of Dream. And now, alas! the magician’s hand is cold in death. What a liberal hand that was, what a great heart guided it, few knew better than the writer of this paper.

                                           But he is fled
Like some frail exhalation, which the dawn
Robes in its golden beams,—ah! he is fled!                                     53
The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,
The child of grace and genius. Heartless things
Are done and said in the world, and many worms
And beasts and men live on, and mighty earth,
From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,
In vesper low or joyous orison,
Lifts still its solemn voice; but he is fled—
He can no longer know or love the shapes
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to him
Been purest ministers, who are, alas!
Now he is not! ¹

     Now, all in good time, we get the story of his life; and let us hesitate a little, and know the truth better, ere we sit in judgment. Against all that can be said in slander, let our gratitude be the shield. Against all that may have been erring in the Man (few, nevertheless, to our thinking, have erred so little), let us set the mighty services of the Writer. He was the greatest work-a-day Humorist that ever lived. He was the most beneficent Good Genie that ever wielded a pen.

—    ¹ Shelley’s ‘Alastor.’ —

[Note:
Originally published in The Saint Pauls Magazine (February, 1872 - Vol. X, pp. 130-148) as ‘The “Good Genie” of Fiction. (Thoughts while reading Forster’s “Life of Charles Dickens.”.]

_____

                                                                                                                                                               54

TENNYSON, HEINE, AND DE MUSSET.

     ‘THE proof of a poet,’ writes the bard of American democracy, ‘must be sternly delayed until his country absorbs him as affectionately, as he, in the first instance, has absorbed it.’ ¹ The last final consecration, after all, is the approval of the people, or of that section of the people to which the poet specially appeals; and not until that consecration is given can a poet justly be deemed prosperous, or adequate, or puissant as a vital force.
     Sometimes, as in the cases of Burns and Byron, and Alfred Tennyson, the poet, ‘absorbed’ instantaneously, lives to see the seeds of his own intelligence springing up around him in a hundred startling and wonderful forms; and to feel that, whether or not the honour accorded to him be adequate to the influence he is exerting, he has at least moved the heart and illuminated the mind of his generation. At other times, as in the cases of Shelley, Whitman, and Browning, the

—    ¹ I am quite aware that I am only interpreting this passage in its smaller and more simple sense. Whitman means that every true poet assimilates the forces around him and fabricates them into form, and that the poet’s work, in its turn, is ‘absorbed’ back into the original forces, plus the colouring force of the poet’s imagination. —

⁵⁵ absorption, although it is no less complete, takes place in so circuitous a fashion, by means of so many intellectual ducts and go-betweens, and is, moreover, often delayed so late, that the public may well be ignorant of the debt it owes to the poets in question; and the poets, in their turn, may well doubt the extent and value of their own influence.
     Almost from the commencement, Alfred Tennyson has been recognised as a leading English poet; and his name has been ripening, as all good things ripen, from day to day. On the other hand, the Laureate’s only formidable English rival, the thinker who is now recognised as the mighty Lancelot to our poetic Arthur,—we mean, of course, Robert Browning,—was publishing poetry for thirty years, without half the fame, or one quarter the success, enjoyed in turn by each new ephemeron of the season; and when, a few years ago, he published his collected works, a new generation plunged with wonder into a poetic gold-mine, of which the preceding generation had scarcely told them one syllable. Shelley is to this day a secret rather than a mighty force. To praise Whitman to the British critic is like preaching a new religion to Bishop Colenso’s savage. Yet he would be rash, indeed, who said that Shelley and Browning have wasted their time and missed the final consecration, or that Whitman should be silent because he has to be explained like a novel religious system. It is curious, doubtless, to see the public heaping all their gratitude in one vast shower of roses and yellow gold at one man’s feet, while good men and true, to 56 whom so much is owing, stand aside comparatively unrecognised and unappreciated. Still, even fame and recognition do not necessarily imply prosperity personally. Heine dies for years in his Parisian garret, while all Germany recognises him as her greatest poet since Goethe. After all, there are compensations; and he who is not content to give his best to the world, without too eager a clamour for recompense, has possibly no gift to offer which posterity will consider worth the having.
     And, meanwhile, we in England here may well rejoice that the British public is right for once, and that, instead of consecrating some later Blackmore or Shadwell, instead of using the laurel to bind over flattery or to glorify mediocrity, it has at last,—nay for the second time; for did not Wordsworth immediately precede?—done eager honour to a great English poet—one whose works are above all impeachment from any platform, and whose genius is as certain of immortality in England as that of Heine in Germany, or that of Alfred de Musset in France.
     What is this charm to which wise and foolish yield alike, which warms the hearts of bishops and portly deans, which persuades the smug man of science into approval, which delights youths and maidens, which excites the envy of poets and the despair of scholars? What is the quality of this nectarine drink, that it quickens pulses in those who deem Shelley hysterical and Wordsworth wearisome in the extreme? Why have critics loved Tennyson from the first, and why is ⁵⁷ the entire British public learning to love him too? Questions readily put, but exceedingly difficult to answer. Much, perhaps, is due to the fact that Tennyson came just in time to reap the harvest sown by those poets of whom he is, in a sense, the direct product,—Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats,—poets whose literary charms society was slow to feel till it flowered forth into the perfect speech of the present Laureate. A great deal, doubtless, is due to the thoroughly unimpeachable and middle-class tone of the scenery, the sentiments, and (for the most part) of the subjects. A little, also, has been due to the limpid delicacy of the style, which, though ornate in a certain sense, owes nothing to meretricious ornament and little to fanciful affectation.
     On all literary points, and particularly on all points affecting poetry, the British public is particularly stubborn. No amount of critical remonstrances, for example, has ever been able to convince it that poetry is a serious business, absorbing all the forces of life, and apt, at times, to be terrible and startling as well as bewitching and pleasing. Poetry, to please it, must be, above all things, ‘beautiful,’—a love-plant twining round the abode of Virtue and festooning with its pleasant flowers the garden of the domestic idea. Anything shocking, anything broad and coarse, anything dull and tedious, is by it forbidden. It has never really liked Wordsworth. It believes to this day that Shelley was a wicked person, and it derives no real satisfaction from his poems generally, notwithstanding its admiration for the ‘Ode to a Skylark,’ ‘The Cloud,’ and a few other lyrical ⁵⁸ pieces. It still likes the ‘Rape of the Lock’ and other poetry of the classical English period. Nothing to this hour has shaken its faith in Byron, in spite of all his follies and vices, because, in the first place, he was a lord, and because, in the second place, his sort of writing, with its rapid free-hand-drawing, really pleased.
     Is this sarcasm? asks the suspicious reader. By no means. We are simply repeating, word for word, the charge of the small critic against Tennyson,—the charge, in one word, that his poetry is perfectly innocent and refined, such as any English gentleman might write if he had the brains; and I am repeating it for one single purpose, that of showing its shallowness and its absurdity. In poetry as in real life it is the easiest thing in the world to be original and outrageous. Any one can create a sensation in life by simply dressing in a sack and walking down the public streets, or in literature by choosing a horrid subject and treating it in a horrid manner. Attention is at once drawn to a person who gibbers like an ape, or to a poet who clothes his ideas in the most fantastic and unnatural form human ingenuity can devise. But the peculiarity of the English gentleman, of the truest and best type of the class, is that he is above all meretricious peculiarity. Quiet, unassuming, reticent, full of culture, armed at all points with the weapons of manhood, graceful, strong, winning his way by courteous self-abnegation, gaining his right when necessary by inexorable will, the English gentleman moves among his fellows and takes his place in the world by simple natural law.
     ⁵⁹ Sir Walter Raleigh was an English gentleman. The Earl of Surrey was another. Sir Thomas More, John Milton, George Herbert, were English gentlemen: all men with refined and quiet manners covering a more or less tremendous stock of reserve strength. What these men were, and what the true English gentleman ever has been, is Tennyson as a poet. He is above all devices and tricks, just as he is above all indecencies. He despises nothing that is noble in culture, not even that red rag of young John Bull’s—the domestic idea. He loves beauty, both of form and colour. He has the national instinct highly developed; witness his war songs and calls to arms. His curiously refined manner looks like affectation to some, who think that a swagger would be more natural. His is a gloved hand; but put your hand in it, and you are imprisoned as in a vice. His is a refined face, not twitching in a chronic fury of trouble and denunciation; but watch it when the time comes, and you will see what power it hides. He has the rarest of all courage—the courage to be reverent. For all these qualities, and for the mighty quality of genius superadded, the British nation loves him; and the British nation is right.
     From the first hour to the last of his literary life, the Poet Laureate has condescended to no tricks.

     I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing!

he wrote in ‘In Memoriam;’ and to him verse has been ⁶⁰ all-sufficient to express the utmost culture of the time. Wonderful as his productions have been, they have never failed to leave the impression of reserve strength, of forces severely restrained in spite of the greatest possible temptation to exert them. His calm is the calm of self-command. With the fine English horror of spasmodic and transient ebullitions, he has always avoided hasty speech. Underneath all this, behind a style perhaps the most graceful achieved by any English poet, lies the greatest capacity for passion and the finest sensibility to pain. But to wail, as certain poets have wailed, to swell the lyrical scream which has been going on in Europe for a century, that would be too contemptible. We can readily imagine that the intensest feelings of this poet’s life, the most heart-rending sorrows of his career, have never found the faintest public voice in his poetry. That he has suffered greatly, that his measure of trial has been full again and again, there are a thousand signs in his writings; but never once has he rushed into print with his grief, and lashed his breast in the feeble craving for public sympathy. It has been objected to ‘In Memoriam’ that it lacks the touch of deep human agony,—is, in fact, far too philosophic to be the natural voice of strong regret. To us, as to many others, this absence of storm is the poem’s noblest artistic charm.
     It would have been easy indeed for the author of ‘Locksley Hall’ or ‘Love and Duty’ to have written such a monody as would have wrung the heart and startled the soul; but he chose the nobler task,—and far ⁶¹ too proud and sensitive to rush into the market-place with his hot grief, he waited until the first sharp agony was over, and the subtle euphrasy of grief had tranquillised the vision for nobler and more delicate perception of all mundane concerns. Grief has had a million tongues, from the cry of David downwards; but never before had any poet found the strength to hush himself in the dark hour, waiting and watching till unbroken utterance was possible, and all the clear divine issues of sorrow were discovered.

I woo your love: I count it crime
     To mourn for any overmuch;
     I, the divided half of such
A friendship as had master’d Time;

Which masters Time indeed, and is
     Eternal, separate from fears;
     The all-assuming months and years
Can take no part away from this.

     ‘In Memoriam’ is something better than a shower of tears; it is a rainbow on a grave; a thing that, in its divine mission, has lightened a thousand tombs, and brought the true philosophic calm to a thousand mourners. In one lyric on the same subject there is a touch of awful reticence, finer than any cry, a silent beat of the strong heart in a grief too deep for tears:—

Break, break, break,
     On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

Wintry desolation and silent anguish speak in every ⁶² line, but there is no wailing,—only the sad wash of the inevitable grief which is now and has been from the beginning. ¹
     It would be absurd to say that the loss of Arthur Hallam has been the greatest sorrow of Mr. Tennyson’s life; no loss of a mere friend, however dear and precious, can match some other losses that are felt by most of us who attain manhood; but for open indications of that acuter suffering which makes a great soul, we shall look in vain, unless we look very deep indeed. One thing is certain, this fine poetic strength, this white marble of literature, has not been deposited without great volcanic troubles. Tennyson, like Goethe, has had his Sturm-und-Drang period; but about that, very wisely, he has been silent. Meanwhile, it is ludicrously amusing to see certain critics confounding the noble self-command of a strong poet with the cold-blooded indifference of a small lyrist. To some people, howling is agony, and roaring a sigh of power. Here, you see, the British public is right again. Howling and roaring are intolerable to it, either on the part of gentleman or poet, and it will not have this pleasant island turned into a lazaretto.
     For, after all, does much good come of apotheosizing

—    ¹ Taine’s criticism on ‘In Memoriam’ is extremely flippant, quite missing the real significance of the poem. ‘It is written,’ says the French historian of English literature, ‘in praise and memory of a friend who died young, is cold, monotonous, and often too prettily arranged. He goes into mourning; but like a correct gentleman, with bran new gloves, wipes away his tears with a cambric handkerchief, and displays throughout the religious service, which ends the ceremony, all the compunction of a respectful and well-trained layman.’ —

⁶³ sorrow, and representing life as a short night illuminated by dimly glimmering stars, such as memory and religion? Is not the physical world very lovely, and has not the moral world many a sunbeam? English sentiment says so; and English sentiment is right again. So, when the Poet Laureate speaks another portion of his charm, and describes the leafy lanes, the breezy downs, the copsy villages, and the pleasant pastoral life of England, everybody is delighted to listen.
     Not even Milton, the best of our landscape poets, caught the delicate tints and subtle nuances of English scenery more truly than does our Laureate. In those supremely beautiful productions, ‘L’Allegro,’ and ‘Il Penseroso,’ and in some lines of ‘Lycidas,’ there is the finest Turneresque picturing to be found in our poetry. A subtle phrase, a word, an adjective, is used to summon up the scene. Look close into the line, and the effect seems perhaps vague and smudgy; but draw back the required distance, and how lovely all appears.

Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids ¹ of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the gray fly winds her sultry horn.

Every word breathes the sentiment of landscape. In the same delicious spirit do we see the ‘dappled dawn arise,’ while ‘the cock scatters the rear of darkness thin,’

And the ploughman near at hand
Whistles o’er the furrowed land;

—    ¹ In Milton’s original MS., ‘glimmering eyelids.’ —

And the milkmaid singeth blithe,                                                         64
And the mower whets his scythe.

All our senses are satisfied—sight, sound, smell,—as the dewy morning grows. Equally cunning and sweet is the wonderful night-picture, conjured up with such tones as these:—

Oft, on a plot of rising ground,
I hear the far-off Curfew sound,
Over some wide-water’d shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar.

     Akin to tones like these, with their exquisite sensibility to natural effects, are a thousand passages in the writings of Tennyson. From the time when, in his first little volume, he sang how

     cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange,

and how

     the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers,

till the time when, late in life, he described

                                                           The chill
November dawns, and dewy-glooming downs,
The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves,
And the low moan of leaden-colour’d seas,

from first to last Mr. Tennyson has excelled in a sort of word-painting which brings to simple perfection the Miltonic manner. Who does not recognise the Tennysonian touch in little glimpses such as this of autumn?

     Autumn, with a noise of rooks,                                                   65
That gather in the waning woods; ¹

or this of the deepening twilight:

                                                 Couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field;

or this of an English brook:

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
     And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
     Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove;

or this of the moon shining:

     O’er the friths that branch and spread
Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills.

In such work there is a cunning which Milton invariably seizes, and Wordsworth generally misses. And Tennyson is akin to the first great Puritan in more than this. He has the same fine self-control, the same austere purity, the same faith in the power of artistic elements to command success for their own sake, as well as for the sake of the thoughts they embody. The Poet Laureate is, in fact,

     —     ¹ A fine specimen of this sort of imagery is the vignette of Spring by Alex. Smith:

           pensive Spring, a primrose in her hand,
A solitary lark above her head!

       But finest of all, perhaps, is Milton’s description of how

                       the gray-hooded Even,
Like a sad votaress in palmer’s weed,
Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phœbus’ wain.
                                                                   Comus, v. 188—190. —

⁶⁶ just as Wordsworth was, a lineal poetic descendant of the poet of the Commonwealth. Although there is in his style at times something of the sumptuous feudal wealth of Shakspeare, and although there is in his thought a constant sympathy with exact science and philosophic materialism, there is nowhere, either in thought or style, a trace of the Shakspearian paganism.
     Indeed, we can quite conceive that John Milton, had he lived in the nineteenth century, would have written his epic in the Arthurian form of moral allegory, rather than in the familiar form of traditional theology. Although Tennyson is far too good a poet ever to be avowedly didactic, his highly tempered and powerful Miltonic mind never for a moment ceases to feel the weight of the moral law. For this and for other reasons, a young writer of the present day, in his recently published Essays, ¹ talks (we quote from memory) of Tennyson’s ‘narrowness of ethical range;’ but as the same writer is in the same breath echoing the modern delusion that Byron was a great disintegrating force, sent to shake the piggish domesticity of England under the Georges, we do not think he has quite weighed the responsibility attached to such a criticism of Tennyson. No great purifying force comes in the guise of a sham; and Byron was the greatest sham English literature has seen. His attacks on society and on individuals were always insincere; his productions were not merely immoral in the vulgar sense, but theatrical and false in the literary sense; and as for his ‘ethical range,’ it was that of an actor in a penny show.

—    ¹ Mr. John Morley. —

⁶⁷ True, he was a great poet, good for rapid reading, fine, dashing, stormy, altogether delightful, but in the matter of ‘ethical range,’ and in many of the loftier and severer issues of poetry, immeasurably Tennyson’s inferior.
     Some portions of Tennyson’s charm for modern readers have been glanced at. It has been seen that his verse is the literary correlative of the polished courtesy and vast reserve strength of an English gentleman; that he is too cultured for wild lyrical outbursts of mere personal emotion and passion; that he has an unequalled sense of the power of a phrase (as Turner had an unequalled sense of the power of the stroke of a brush,) to conjure up landscape; that this last power has been used for the purpose of making delicious word-pictures of national, or English, scenery; and that, finally, he belongs to the noblest class of men England has yet succeeded in producing—the English Puritans—the men who, while sacrificing life’s blood for freedom of conscience, while keeping ever abreast of thought and progress in every generation, from that of Milton and Marvell to this of Tennyson and Mill, have never lost sight of the higher law which shapes all human ends, have never consented to regard life as merely a frivolous business, have never lacked the impulse to revere, or the will to resist and doubt.
     Under the Commonwealth, Tennyson would doubtless have been a religious zealot, a fiery political partisan, and the poet of old theology. Under Queen Victoria, he is a keen man of science, a reserved and retiring private gentleman, and the poet of the higher Pantheism. But in ⁶⁸ either case, he would rank as an English Puritan, intolerant of vice, full of the sense of beauty, and bound by the innate sense of reverence and responsibility to worship in some way some higher intelligence than himself, whether the might of the God of Judah, or the mysterious ‘Immanence’ of the Spinozan conception of God.
     Thus much having been said, is all said? Though quite enough has been written to explain why this poet should be the peculiar pride and delight of his generation, much more of his peculiar charm remains to be told.
     In the last chapter of his radically unsound and superficial work on English literature, M. Taine strains all his specious descriptive faculty to show that Tennyson is simply a dilettante artist, whose true mission it is to reproduce in exquisite vignettes the finer and more beautiful forms of fairy mythology and elegant domestic life. Taine misses altogether, we think, the true genealogy of this poet, and traces his consanguinity with neither Wordsworth nor Milton. Tennyson is, as we have said, a Puritan of proud and meditative nature, but he superadds the fine Miltonic sense of female beauty to the deep Wordsworthian perception of human worth. Amidst the landscape first outlined by Milton he has placed a bevy of female figures in the fresh and stainless manner of the Miltonic Eve:—

                     She, like a wood-nymph light,
Oread or Dryäd, or of Delia’s train,
Betook her to the groves; but Delia’s self
In gait surpassed, and goddess-like deport,
Though not as she with bow and quiver arm’d,
But with such gardening tools as art yet rude,  
Guiltless of fire, had form’d, or angels brought.                                69
To Pales, or Pomona, thus adorned,
Likest she seemed: Pomona when she fled
Vertumnus, or to Ceres in her prime,
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove.

In a series of exquisite cabinet-pictures, all fresh and original, yet all possessing something of the ‘virgin majesty of Eve,’ he has painted Lilian, Isabel, Madeline, the Lady of Shalott, Eleanore, the Miller’s Daughter, Lady Clara, ‘sweet pale’ Margaret, the Gardener’s Daughter, Dora, Godiva, St. Agnes, Maud, Enid, Elaine, and many other beautiful women of an unmistakably English type. Even Guinevere, in her stately beauty and supreme repentance, is Eve after the Fall, when she beheld the beautiful world first yielding to the bloody consequences of her sin:

                                   Nigh in her sight
The bird of Jove, stoop’d from his aery tour,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove;
Down from a hill the beast that reigns in woods,
First hunter then, pursued a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind.

In the pages of this third great Puritan poet, we have scarcely a glimpse of any utterly degraded woman. The type is perfect; chastity and beauty reign in each lineament.

                                 Those graceful acts,
Those thousand decencies, that daily flow
From all her words and actions, mixed with love
And sweet compliance.

70 But what infinite variety! what ever-changing loveliness of form and spirit! The glorious creature illumes the world, and creates a new Paradise. Such as we find her here, she is in life, in a thousand delightful forms of English maid and mother, moving against a green and gentle landscape, sprinkled with stately halls and pleasant homesteads, and kept ever fresh by the breath of the encircling sea.
     Tennyson’s originality is most conspicuous in this, that he has taken this type of the Miltonic woman, the first condition of whose being is to be beautiful, the second to be pure and chaste; and he has developed out of it a higher and grander reality by colouring it with all the passion Milton lacked, and all the daintiness Wordsworth despised. In Tennyson’s women, whatever their situation and degree, there is a sort of immortal maidenhood, a bloom of imperishable virginity, coupled with a rich sensuousness which never verges on sensuality, but is mellow as the flavour of a ripe peach. Milton did not miss the sensuousness (witness the wonderful rush of colour through the ninth book of his “Paradise Lost”), but he almost resented it in himself, and trembled at its eternal dangers. Wordsworth, on the other hand, never lost sight of the Puritan truth that maternity was the woman’s consecration; every maid he saw was a prospective mother, burthened with a certain heavy halo of responsibility. Tennyson is fully as chaste as either of his great predecessors; but his women are infinitely more virgin-like. Taken alone, as a set of portraits by a great artist, they would entitle him to a place by the side of Sir ⁷¹ Joshua Reynolds, as a master of colour without one prurient tint or touch.
     But just as he had followed Milton in one way, Tennyson has followed Wordsworth in another. Not content with filling his English landscapes with beautiful maidenly figures, he has painted for us, still within the circle of beauty to which he has sternly relegated himself, a number of humble figures, with such tales to tell as gently move the heart. His treatment of these figures is not, like that of Wordsworth, a treatment of moral philosophy, nor is it, like that of Dickens, a treatment of beneficence. He has no tenderness in this direction, and little or no humour. He selects no human figure for its own sake; he is incapable, perhaps, of the almost animal sympathy shown in Wordsworth’s ‘Two Thieves’ and ‘Street Musicians,’ or of the grim-knitted agony of Coleridge’s ‘Two Graves’ fragment; but he has succeeded to a wonderful extent in representing, by the figures of which I speak, the relation of simple circumstances to the gigantic issues of Death and Immortality.
     With what singular felicity, in the idyl of ‘The Brook’ does he reveal to us the ebb and flow of human lives, and the fixedness of natural conditions. A landscape is painted for us, and in it a brook singing; and across that landscape, one by one, to the brook’s monotonous chant, the generations rise, speak a little word, and go. We see them come, we feel them fade. We know no art greater than that shown in the close of this poem; and we do not think the poem, as a whole, can be equalled, in ⁷² our language, for simplicity of form and sublimity of issue. Similar in its blending of transient and eternal things is the extraordinary little monologue entitled ‘The Grandmother,’ where the wavering memories of an aged woman, the bright illuminating flashes on the dark background of decay, the confounding of one generation with another, the drowsy worn-out wish for rest, broken again and again by the sharp feminine echoes of a busy over-crowded life, are conveyed in a wonderful manner to the reader’s mind, all with the clearest sense of the actually picturesque. Less fine in degree, but welcome for their touches of grim humour, are the ‘Northern Farmer’ poems. These are studies in George Eliot’s manner, with the ‘gleam’ that the prose-writer’s manner always wants.
     ‘Enoch Arden,’ too, has considerable merits; but it is too long for the kind of power of which Tennyson is a master, and it does not, as a whole, leave a lofty impression. But all these studies, in what may be called the Wordsworthian manner, are certain of remembrance. Taken one with another, they are amazing products as coming from the same hand which drew the Tennysonian ‘beauties,’ and wrote ‘In Memoriam.’ They are highly individual, in so far as they never lose sight of the point of beauty, to which Wordsworth, as a great philosophical poet, is frequently indifferent; but they do not escape from classification under the Wordsworthian group of ‘English idyl,’ because their subjects seem invariably chosen from conventional country districts, where everything is peculiarly neat and clean, and where there is ⁷³ carried into all concerns of life, a certain primness and preciseness of the moral sense. ¹
     In that series of passionate cadences, the poem of ‘Maud,’ Mr. Tennyson shook off, for a moment as it were, the burthen of his Puritan descent, and indulged in more invective than is usually approved of here in England. M. Taine calls the vein a ‘Byronic’ one, and thus accounts for its unpopularity; but this is a double blunder, for in the first place ‘Maud’ is not in the least Byronic, and in the second place, if it had been Byronic, it would certainly have been popular. The studied attitudinising, the strong declaiming, and altogether what we may entitle the ‘grand manner’ is altogether wanting in this poem; equally wanting is the ingenious diablerie and devil-may-care defiance; and the whole tone rather resembles the more hectic poetry of Shelley than anything else in our language.
     ‘Maud’ is full of beauties; it positively blossoms with exquisite expressions; and it is, at times, highly lyrical without being over-shrill. Nothing, perhaps, proves the dulness of the British public in some directions more than the comparatively unsuccessful fate of this poem. We are far from holding, with some critics, that it is the poet’s masterpiece; it is far too disjointed for that; and it lacks, moreover, the nobility of theme

—    ¹ Mr. Morley somewhere styles this sort of poetry ‘The Clerical Idyl;’ but the title, although a clever one, is liable to mislead. In this and other attempts to compose literary ‘labels,’ Mr. Morley follows the modern French school of criticism, which sacrifices everything to the instinct of symmetrical classification, and when a subject does not fall under the pre-arranged heads, is utterly at a loss what to do with it. —

74 essential to a really good work,—the hero being far too hysterical a personage to satisfy common sense, and the story being merely, in spite of its various ramifications of political and social meaning, a dull enough love-tale of that now conventional type which the same writer created in ‘Locksley Hall.’ Still it is invaluable as revealing to us for a moment the sources of reserve strength in Tennyson, and as containing signs of passion and self-revelation altogether unusual. In a hundred passages, we have glimpses that startle and amaze us. We perceive what stern self-suppression has been exerted to keep the Laureate what he is. We see what a disturbing force he might have been, if he had not chosen rather to be the consecrating musician of his generation.
     But a nobler and a finer theme was awaiting treatment. From the beginning, Tennyson had studied with a loving eye the old group of legends clustered round the name of King Arthur, and for many a year he had been working in secret on the book which turns these legends into a colossal allegory. It is interesting to remember that Milton always contemplated a poem on the same theme. In the book which first established his reputation, Mr. Tennyson published that noble torso, ‘The Morte d’Arthur,’ a poem in which the Miltonic verse is disencumbered of all its unwieldy and superfluous trappings, and brought to the very perfection of lightness and ease, combined with weight and strength. Since then he has published in succession the other portions of his epic. Taken individually, no portion ⁷⁵ equals that first published; but the epic as a finished whole, has a finer effect on the imagination than have any of its detached fragments.
     It is one of the favourite dicta of the typical critic of the French Empire, that the greatest art is above all directly moral purposes, and that all work which is intended to serve a didactic end, or does unconsciously obtrude that end, is necessarily inferior. This dictum, essentially true in itself, involves issues transcending the intelligence of the man who utters it most frequently; for we find M. Taine, like dozens of smaller men, losing sight of the fact that there are two sorts of didactic writing,—the sort leaning to the side of virtue, and the sort leaning to the side of vice. It is very low art to obtrude virtue; it is equally low art to obtrude vice; but the first low art has the merit of at least being exerted for good. When we find M. Taine coupling together in the same breath Shakspeare and Goethe as artists of the highest kind, we see where his argument is going to lead him; and we do really believe that he would like to add to those surnames the name of De Musset.
     We hold, however, that Georges Sand, ¹ Gautier, Baudelaire, and all the latest French school of poets and novelists, are didactic writers of an unmistakable description, just as didactic, in their own way, as Richardson and Cowper in England, or Augier himself

—    ¹ It must be understood here that I do not allude to Georges Sand’s earlier works, but to those works composed during the second, and demoralised, stage of her intellectual development. —

⁷⁶ in France, the only difference being that they are didactic in the service of Passion and Vice. Over the heads of both groups alike a great artist is bound to soar; and it is clear on the very face of it that Goethe did not, if we judge him by the total amount and quality of his artistic influence. Homer, Shakspeare, Molière, Chaucer, may justly be ranked in the higher category, as artists totally unbiassed and altogether above any undue influence either from the morality or from the revolt of their country and their generation.
     Now, it may be asserted that the Arthurian epic, which Mr. Tennyson justly puts forth as his greatest poetical work, is, by its very nature, relegated to the ranks of those books which are written in the service of Virtue. It is, moreover, an Allegory; and that fact would reduce it to very low rank indeed, if it were an Allegory only; but Mr. Tennyson may well retort that it can be read without any allegorical reading between the lines whatever, as a marvellous ‘chanson de geste,’ or delightful traditional tale; that it contains hardly a line or expression avowedly ‘moral,’ or out of keeping with mediæval ethics; and that it is, in the highest sense, a record of the simplest human tragedy with elements as universal and as deep as life itself.
     Unlike the ‘Faëry Queen’ in one direction, and utterly unlike the ‘Divine Comedy’ in another, the epic of Arthur is simple in structure as a crystal, and bright in colour as a sun-illuminated prism. There is no guising of Courtesy, Purity, Passion, Lust, and other vague abstractions, under divers quaint and amusing ⁷⁷ dresses; no mummery of the moral Sentiments in the guise of Knights or Naiads, or of the Senses and Vices in the guise of Dwarfs and Satyrs; no riddling, no composing; no representation of reality under the dainty device of a Masque. How beautiful even such a device may be made we all know, who have read of

Heavenly Una and her milk-white lamb!

Nor is there, in the Arthurian epic, any dogmatic ethics or religion, any arbitrary connection with Judaism or technical Christianity; it is not a tale of antique theology or mediæval mystery; it contains no representation of Divine Law under the symbols of a Church. How mighty such symbols may become, as poetic agents, we all know who have read the wonderful story

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,

or that other dreadful legend beginning—

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
     Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura!

Both Dante and Milton were Puritan poets; but Tennyson is a Puritan with the advantages of modern culture. His great work has escaped the old limitations. It is really a tale of human life; it is supremely affecting as a simple narrative, as an exquisite setting of the old legend; and yet, read between the lines, it exhales a fragrance unmistakably didactic. No one closes it without being conscious of the Puritan touch. ⁷⁸ The heart is not wrung, but the moral sense is perceptibly heightened.
     We confess that this fine poem puzzles me. We cannot conscientiously say that it is an allegory, and yet it has an allegorical complexion. We cannot describe it as didactic, and yet it is full of the strongest teaching. We feel its tenderness and sublimity, and yet we know it is tender and sublime strictly within the circle of English middle-class morality. The question is, must a great poem, in which the artistic sense is never for one moment sacrificed, in which there is the truest and most untrammelled human passion and emotion, and which deals with some of the most disturbing elements of life, be classed as second-rate because the perfume it gives forth is unmistakably ‘moral?’ We think not; but we are not quite sure. Of one point we are quite certain; and it is this—that M. Taine, and many critics in England, who would condemn this moral exhalation, would hesitate much less in putting the poem in the front rank if the poem was just the same and gave forth a perfume justly described as immoral. There is so much confounding of Didactics and Virtue; as if the affected old thing Didactics were not quite as often to be found in the company of Vice.
     Be that as it may, Tennyson need not tremble. Relegated even to the awful company of ‘good’ books, the epic of Arthur will at least be side by side with the ‘Divine Comedy,’ ‘The Faëry Queen,’ the ‘Paradise Lost,’ and a few other works which human ingenuity, however perfectly tempered by that Art we hear so much ⁷⁹ about, will find it difficult to parallel. We do not say, nor do we dream, that it is certain of equal rank with any of these poems. It is yet too near to our eyes to be thoroughly understood. It requires the mellowing of years; and a century hence, it may either have pined away into a sour thin liquor, or have gained the pure and perfect flavour of old wine.
     On one point, however, we are quite clear: that in mere matter of style the Idyls stands higher than any contemporary or recent poetry, higher even than the same writer’s earlier efforts, clear and limpid as they were. Every stage in the Laureate’s growth has been an advance in simplicity of speech, and his later Idyls, in spite of some clumsy archaisms, such as ‘enow’ for ‘enough,’ are almost perfect in their limpid Saxon. While his recent imitators are eagerly gathering up and wearing the meretricious finery he threw away long ago, the Poet Laureate has attained to the dignity of such verse as the following:—

THE PARTING OF ARTHUR AND GUINEVERE.

     He paused, and in the pause she crept an inch
Nearer, and laid her hands about his feet.
Far off a solitary trumpet blew.
Then waiting by the doors the warhorse neigh’d
As at a friend’s voice, and he spake again.

     ‘Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes,
I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere,
I, whose vast pity almost makes me die
To see thee, laying there thy golden head,                                         80
My pride in happier summers, at my feet.
The wrath which forced my thoughts on that fierce law,
The doom of treason and the flaming death,
(When first I learnt thee hidden here) is past.
The pang—which while I weigh’d thy heart with one
Too wholly true to dream untruth in thee,
Made my tears burn—is also past, in part.
And all is past, the sin is sinn’d, and I,
Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God
Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest.
But how to take last leave of all I loved?
O golden hair, with which I used to play
Not knowing! O imperial-moulded form,
And beauty such as never woman wore,
Until it came a kingdom’s curse with thee—
I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine,
But Lancelot’s: nay, they never were the King’s.
I cannot take thy hand; that too is flesh,
And in the flesh thou hast sinn’d; and mine own flesh,
Here looking down on thine polluted, cries
“I loathe thee:” yet not less, O Guinevere,
For I was ever virgin save for thee,
My love thro’ flesh hath wrought into my life
So far, that my doom is, I love thee still.
Let no man dream but that I love thee still.
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul,
And so thou lean on our fair father Christ,
Hereafter in that world where all are pure
We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband—not a smaller soul,
Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that,
I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence.
Thro’ the thick night I hear the trumpet blow:
They summon me their King to lead mine hosts                                 81
Far down to that great battle in the west,
Where I must strike against my sister’s son,
Leagued with the lords of the White Horse and knights
Once mine, and strike him dead, and meet myself
Death, or I know not what mysterious doom.
And thou remaining here wilt learn the event;
But hither shall I never come again,
Never lie by thy side, see thee no more,
Farewell!’
                     And while she grovell’d at his feet,
She felt the King’s breath wander o’er her neck,
And, in the darkness o’er her fallen head,
Perceived the waving of his hands that blest.

Note here, that there is not one expression a vulgar reader would style ‘poetical,’ not one bit of prettiness or ornament; that the sentences are as simply strung together as ordinary speech: and that nearly every word, with the exception of the one epithet ‘imperial-moulded’ (a Latinism which strikes me as admirable in its sudden burst of contrast), is the purest Saxon. In other passages, Mr. Tennyson has resuscitated old Saxon words of inestimable beauty and force, as well as a few words which were better left alone. Altogether, his great poem is of thoroughly pure form and crystalline transparence. If it were weeded of some scattered archaic expressions and Latinisms, and altogether toned up to the level strength of its finest passages, it would stand as a model of poetic English.
     Its charm for the public is the clearness of its narrative and the perfume of its moral. It has completed the ⁸² fascination first felt in the English Idyls, strengthened in ‘In Memoriam,’ and perceptibly weakened on the publication of ‘Maud.’ The English gentleman again finds voice; the style is full of reticence and dignity, the circumstances pregnant with beauty, the purity and nobility indisputable. The poem is entirely satisfactory, from all points of view, to the being who pronounces public judgments and regulates public successes.
     The charm is complete, the poet has triumphed to the extent of human possibility. He is accepted, still living, as the gracefullest modern English poet—as occupying the place in relation to England which in Germany is assigned to Heine and in France is generally conceded to Alfred de Musset. Before quitting the subject, let us look on three pictures, each more or less illuminating the other.
     In a quiet set of chambers in the Avenue Matignon, No. 3, Paris, there lingered for eight long years a quaint figure, paralysed to his chair and watching, with an eye where love and jealousy blended, the figure of his wife sewing at his side, while an old negress moved about in household duties. This man spent most of his time in composition, using alternately the French and the German tongues. He had few friends and not many visitors. His life was lonely, his heart was sad, and he uttered shrill laughter. Though tender and affectionate beyond measure (witness his treatment of his mother, ‘the old woman at the Damenthor’) he loved to gibe at all subjects, from the majesty of God to the littleness of man. His name was known through all the length of ⁸³ Germany as the greatest poet after Goethe. His wild, sweet poems were household words. He had sung the wonderful song of the ‘Lorelei,’ and the delightful ballad of the daughters of King Duncan:

Mein Knecht! steh’ auf und sattle schnell,
     Und wirf dich auf dein Ross,
Und jage rasch, durch Wald und Feld,
     Nach König Duncan’s Schloss!

He was the author of the most dreadfully realistic poem of modern times, the fragment entitled ‘Ratcliffe,’ where we have the terrible meeting of two who ‘loved once:’

‘Man sagte mir, Sie haben sich vermählt?’
‘Ach ja!’ sprach sie gleichgültig laut und lachend,
‘Hab’ einen Stoch von Holz, der überzogen
Mit Leder ist, Gemahl sich nennt; doch Holz
Ist Holz!’—Und klanglos widrig lachse sie, &c. ¹

He had (not to speak of his other achievements) been the German lyrical poet of his generation. On the February 17, 1856, he died, and the only persons of note who attended his funeral were Mignet, Gautier, and Alexander Dumas. This man was Heinrich Heine, author of the ‘Buch der Lieder’ and the ‘Romanzero.’
     At the same period there was moving in the heart of Paris another poet, who was to France what Heine was

—    ¹ ‘They tell me, thou art married?’
‘Ah, yes!’ she said, indifferently, and laughing,
‘A wooden stick I have, with leather cover’d,
And called a Husband! Still, wood is but wood!’
And here she broke to hollow, empty laughter, &c.

We know few poems more powerfully affecting the imagination, by more terribly simple means, than this piece of bitter psychology. —

⁸⁴ to Germany, and perhaps something more. In verses of the most delicate fragrance he had chronicled the lives and aspirations, the ennui and despair, of the inhabitants of the most cultured and debased city under the sun. He had exhausted life too early, like most Frenchmen. His fellow-beings had listened with him, in the theatre, to Malibran, and sighingly exclaimed in his words that, in this world,

Rien n’est bon que d’aimer, n’est vrai que de souffrir!

They had listened delightedly to the talk of his two seedy dilettantes, who exchange notes together inside the cabaret, and finally disappear in a fashion worthy of Montague Tigg in his adversity:

DUPONT.

Les liqueurs me font mal. Je n’aime que la bière.
Qu’as-tu sur toi?

DURAND.

Trois sous.

DUPONT.

                                               Entrons au cabaret.

DURAND.

Après vous!

DUPONT.

Après vous!

DURAND.

                                     Après vous, s’il vous plait! ¹

     They had beaten time to his delicious song of ‘Mimi Pinson:’

—    ¹ Poésies nouvelles, p. 116. —

Mimi Pinson est une blonde                                                             85
Une blonde que l’on connaît;
Elle n’a qu’une robe au monde,
         Landerirette!
         Et qu’un bonnet!

They had seen him, as his own Rolla, enter the Rue des Moulins, where his little mistress will greet him with a kiss. Poor little thing! her body is bought and sold; and yet, see! she is lying in sweet and innocent sleep:

Est-ce sur de la neige, ou sur une statue,
Que cette lampe d’or, dans l’ombre suspendue,
Fait onduler l’azur de ce rideau tremblant?
Non, la neige est plus pâle, et le marbre est moins blanc,
C’est un enfant qui dort.—Sur ses lèvres ouvertes
Voltige par instants un faible et doux soupir,
Un soupir plus léger que ceux des algues vertes
Quand, le soir, sur les mers voltige le zéphyr,
Et que, sentant fléchir ses ailes embaumées
Sous les baisers ardents de ses fleurs bien-aimées,
Il boit sur ses bras nus les perles des roseaux.
C’est un enfant qui dort sous ces épais rideaux,
Un enfant de quinze ans,—presque une jeune femme.
Rien n’est encor formé dans cet être charmant.
Le petit chérubin qui veille sur ton âme
Doute s’il est son frère ou s’il est son amant.
Ses longs cheveux épars la couvrent tout entière.
La croix de son collier repose dans sa main,
Comme pour témoigner qu’elle a fait sa prière,
Et qu’elle va la faire en s’éveillant demain.
Elle dort, regardez:—quel front noble et candide!
Partout, comme un lait pur sur une onde limpide,
Le ciel sur la beauté répandit la pudeur.
Elle dort toute nue et la main sur son cœur.                                       86
N’est-ce pas que la nuit la rende encor plus belle?
Que ces molles clartés palpitent autour d’elle,
Comme si, malgré lui, le sombre Esprit du soir
Sentait sur ce beau corps frémir son manteau noir?

     This poet was Alfred de Musset, and those who loved his strange voice, issuing from the lupanar, soon found it fade away. He died in the height of life and power. Whenever we think of him, we think of his own story imitated from   Boccaccio. ¹ Like Pascal in that story, he was revelling in all the delights of sensual love when, from the flowery couch where he sat with his mistress, he unaware plucked a flower and held it between his lips as he talked; and alas; the poisonous belladonna crept into his veins, and he fell a corpse, with the words of love on his poor trembling lips.
     Turn to the third picture. The scene is England, and the poet, a man of noble private life and simple manners, stands on the cliffs of the Isle of Wight, close to the threshold of a happy English home. He is well-to-do, honoured, beloved. He has risen by sheer force of genius, by sheer delightfulness of lyrical charm, to be the most prosperous singer of his nation. He, too, like Heine and De Musset, has painted women; but in his pages, instead of the slender Seraphina, the colossal Diana, the fickle Hortense, and the matronly Yolane (see Heine’s group of beauties), and instead of the courtezan Marian, the grisette Mimi Pinson, the Andalusian marquesa, and the Italian Simone (as painted by De Musset), we find such

—    ¹ Simone. —

⁸⁷ stainless creatures as Elaine, Isabel, and the Miller’s Daughter. He, too, has sung of love, no less passionately, but far more purely. He resembles the two others in one point only—the wonderful unaffectedness of his language and the beauty of his versification. It is indeed noticeable that three lyric poets so great should be equally noteworthy for simplicity of poetic form. The literary motto of De Musset may be found in ‘Rolla:’

L’Espérance humaine est lasse d’être mêre,
Et, le sein tout meurtri d’avoir tant allaité,
Elle fait son repos de sa stérilité.

That of Heine appears in the fresco-sonnets to Christian S——:

Und wenn das Herz im Leibe ist zerrissen,
Zerrissen, und zerschnitten, und zerstochen,
Dann bleibt uns doch das schöne gelle Lachen! ¹

But the motto of Tennyson is highest and noblest of all—no mere despair, no mere mockery; and it may be taken in these words from ‘In Memoriam:’

Thou seemest human and divine,
     The highest, holiest manhood, Thou:
     Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

One may well rejoice that the highest flower of intellectual life in this country, unlike the products in those other countries, owes its charm to feelings at once so reverent and so pure.

—    ¹ And when the very heart is torn asunder,
Torn up, and stabb’d, and hack’d in pieces after,
We still have power to keep a fine shrill Laughter! —

⁸⁸     One word in conclusion. As Alfred de Musset and Heinrich Heine showed their originality chiefly by bringing to perfection the thoughts of many generations of lyrical poets, so Alfred Tennyson is chiefly noticeable as the last and most perfect product of the ideal poets of England. Deficient in creative power, he is the lyric embodiment of our highest and purest culture. No English singer can work in the same direction, certainly not by inverting the Tennysonian method, and being as impure as he is pure. If English poetry is to exist, to be perpetuated, it must absorb materials as yet scarcely dreamed of; it must penetrate deeper into not merely national life, but into cosmopolitan being; it must cast over some amount of formal culture and accept whatever help the shapeless spirit of the Age can bring it.
     The finest lyrical cry has been heard; the clearest cultured utterance has been attained. Of Tennyson it may surely be said, in the words of Carlyle: ‘Nay, the finished Poet is I remark, sometimes, a symptom that his Epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new Epoch, new Reformers needed.’ Let that Epoch advance; but meanwhile let us bow in homage, again and again, before the completed product of the Epoch just past. The Poet to come may be and must be different; he certainly cannot be more beautiful and simple; and let us pray, with all our hearts, that he may sing in as noble a spirit as he who (like that other who just preceded him) has ‘uttered nothing base.’

[Note:
Originally published in The Saint Pauls Magazine in March, 1872 as ‘Tennyson’s Charm’. The original version is available here.

Buchanan wrote to Tennyson on 7th June, 1871, asking for a loan of £200. Tennyson agreed to this and on 20th June Buchanan wrote thanking him for the cheque. In October ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ was published, and in November Buchanan asked Tennyson for another loan of £100. There is no evidence that he received this (in fact Buchanan wrote to Browning on 6th December asking him for a loan), nor any that he ever repaid the initial £200. Following the fallout from the ‘Fleshly School’ debacle Buchanan wrote a series of poems and articles (some unsigned, some pseudonymous, some under his own name) for Alexander Strahan’s Saint Pauls Magazine. In the March, 1872 issue, ‘Tennyson’s Charm’ appeared. When it was reprinted in Master-Spirits, nearly two years later, it had lost the references to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the ‘Fleshly School’, and the obsequious praise of Tennyson (understandable in the earlier version) had been toned down a little, in fact one of the closing sentences of the original essay: ‘He is the lyric embodiment of our highest and purest culture.’ is now preceded by ‘Deficient in creative power’.]

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