ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

OTHER ESSAYS (5)

1. Review of The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

2. Review of Graffiti d’Italia by W. W. Story and Beatrice, and other Poems by the Hon. Roden Noel

3. Wylie’s Life of Thomas Carlyle

4. A Talk With George Eliot

5. The Landlord-Shooters

6. Literary Bohemia

7. Dining with Trollope

From The Athenæum - 26 December, 1868 and 20 March, 1869.

The Athenæum (26 December, 1868 - Issue 2148, pp. 875-876)

LITERATURE

The Ring and the Book. By Robert Browning, M.A. Vol. I. (Smith, Elder & Co.)

‘The Ring and the Book,’ if completed as successfully as it is begun, will certainly be an extraordinary achievement—a poem of some 20,000 lines on a great human subject, darkened too often by subtleties and wilful obscurities, but filled with the flashes of Mr. Browning’s genius. We know nothing in the writer’s former poems which so completely represents his peculiarities as this instalment of ‘The Ring and the Book,’ which is so marked by picture and characterization, so rich in pleading and debating, so full of those verbal touches in which Browning has no equal, and of those verbal involutions in which he has fortunately no rival. Everything Browningish is found here,—the legal jauntiness, the knitted argumentation, the cunning prying into detail, the suppressed tenderness, the humanity,—the salt intellectual humour,—a humour not open and social, like that of Dickens, but with a similar tendency to caricature, differing from the Dickens tendency just in so far as the intellectual differs from the emotional, with the additional distinction of the secretive habit of all purely intellectual faculties. Secretiveness, indeed, must be at once admitted as a prominent quality of Mr. Browning’s power. Indeed, it is this quality which so fascinates the few and so repels the many. It tempts the possessor, magpie-like, to play a constant game at hiding away precious and glittering things in obscure and mysterious corners, and—still magpie-like—to search for bright and glittering things in all sorts of unpleasant and unlikely places. It involves the secretive chuckle and the secretive leer. Mr. Browning’s manner reminds us of the magpie’s manner, when, having secretly stolen a spoon or swallowed a jewel, the bird swaggers jauntily up and down, peering rakishly up, and chuckling to itself over its last successful feat of knowingness and diablerie. However, let us not mislead our readers. We are not speaking now of Mr. Browning’s style, but of his intellectual habit. The mere style of the volume before us is singularly free from the well-known faults—obscurity, involution, faulty construction; with certain exceptions, it flows on with perfect clearness and ease; and any occasional darkness is traceable less to faulty diction than to mental super-refining or reticent humour. The work as a whole is not obscure.
     We are not called upon—it is scarcely our duty—to determine in what degree the inspiration and workmanship of ‘The Ring and the Book’ are poetic as distinguished from intellectual: far less to guess what place the work promises to hold in relation to the poetry of our time. We scarcely dare hope that it will ever be esteemed a great poem in the sense that ‘Paradise Lost’ is a great poem, or even in the sense that the ‘Cenci’ is a great tragedy. The subject is tragic, but the treatment is not dramatic: the “monologue,” even when perfectly done, can never rival the “scene”; and Mr. Browning’s monologues are not perfectly done, having so far, in spite of the subtle distinction in the writer’s mind, a very marked similarity in the manner of thought, even where the thought itself is most distinct. Having said so much, we may fairly pause. The rest must be only wonder and notes of admiration. In exchange for the drama, we get the monologue,—in exchange for a Shakspearean exhibition, we get Mr. Browning masquing under so many disguises, never quite hiding his identity, and generally most delicious, indeed, when the disguise is most transparent. The drama is glorious, we all know, but we want this thing as well;—we must have Browning as well as Shakspeare. Whatever else may be said of Mr. Browning and his work, by way of minor criticism, it will be admitted on all hands that nowhere in any literature can be found a man and a work more fascinating in their way. As for the man,—he was crowned long ago, and we are not of those who grumble because one king has a better seat than another—an easier cushion, a finer light—in the great Temple. A king is a king, and each will choose his place.
     The volume before us, the first of four parts, contains three books, each a monologue, spoken by a different person. The first speaker is Mr. Browning himself, who describes how on a certain memorable day in the month of June, he fished out at an old stall in Florence,—from amidst rough odds and ends, mirror-sconces, chalk drawings, studies from rude samples of precious stones, &c., a certain square old yellow book, entitled, ‘Romana Homicidiorum,’ or, as he translates it—

—— A Roman murder-case:
Position of the entire criminal cause
Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,
With certain Four the cutthroats in his pay,
Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death
By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,
At Rome on February Twenty Two,
Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight:
Wherein it is disputed if, and when,
Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet ’scape
The customary forfeit.

     The bare facts of the case were very simple. Count Guido Franceschini, a poor nobleman fifty years of age, married Pompilia Comparini, a maiden of fourteen,—led a miserable life with her in his country-house at Arezzo,—until at last she fled to Rome in the company of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, a priest of noble birth; and on Christmas Eve, 1698, Guido, aided by four accomplices, tracked his wife to a Roman villa, the home of her putative parents, and there mercilessly slew all three—Pompilia and her aged father and mother. Taken almost red-handed, Guido pleaded justification,—that his wife had dishonoured him, and been abetted in so doing by her relatives. A lengthy law-case ensued—conducted, not in open court, but by private and written pleading. The prosecutor insisted on the purity of Pompilia, on the goodness of old Pietro and Violante, her parents,—the defending counsel retaliated,—proof rebutted proof,—Pompilia lived to give her deposition, Guido, put to the torture, lied and prevaricated,—the priest defended his own conduct—for a month; at the end of which time the old Pope, Innocent XII., gave final judgment in the matter, and ordered Guido’s execution. Such is the merest outline of the story, given in the introduction. But Mr. Browning has conceived the gigantic idea of showing, by a masterpiece, the essentially relative nature of all human truth,—the impossibility of perfect human judgment, even where the facts of the case are as simple as the above. After the prologue, comes the book called ‘Half Rome.’ A contemporary citizen, in his monologue, comprehends all the arguments of half Rome, the half which—believed thoroughly in Guido’s justification. Then another contemporary, a somewhat superior person, gives us the view of ‘The Other Half Rome,’—the half which believes in Pompilia’s martyrdom, and clamours for Guido’s doom. This ends the first volume. We are promised, in the future volumes, all the other points of view of the great case. First, in ‘Tertium Quid,’ the elaborated or super-critical view, the “finer sense o’ the city”; next, Guido’s own voice will be heard, pleading in a small chamber that adjoins the court; then Caponsacchi speaks, the priest,—a “courtly spiritual Cupid,”—in explanation of his own part in the affair. Afterwards break in the low dying tones of Pompilia, telling the story of her life; then the trial, with the legal pleadings and counter-pleadings; following that again, the Pope’s private judgment, the workings of his mind on the day of deliverance; after the Pope Guido’s second speech, a despairing cry, a new statement of the truth, wrung forth in the hope of mercy; and last of all, Mr. Browning’s own epilogue, or final summary of the case and its bearing on the relative nature of human truth. Here, surely, is matter for a poem,—perhaps too much matter. The chief difficulty will of course be,—to avoid wearying the intellect by the constant reiteration of the same circumstances,—so to preserve the dramatic disguise as to lend a totally distinct colouring to each circumstance at each time of narration. So far as the work has gone, it is perfectly successful, within the limitations of Mr. Browning’s genius. Though Mr. Browning’s prologue, and ‘Half Rome’s’ monologue, and ‘Other Half Rome’s’ monologue, are somewhat similar in style,—in the sharp logic, in the keen ratiocination, in the strangely involved diction,—yet they are radically different. The distinction is subtle rather than broad. Yet nothing could well be finer than the graduation between the sharp, personally anxious, suspicious manner of the first Roman speaker, who is a married man, and the bright, disinterested emotion, excited mainly by the personal beauty of Pompilia, of the second speaker, who is a bachelor. With a fussy preamble, the first seizes the buttonhole of a friend,—whose cousin, he knows, has designs upon his (the speaker’s) wife. How he rolls his eyes about, pushing through the crowd! How he revels in the spectacle of the corpses laid out in the church for public view, delighting in the long rows of wax candles, and the great taper at the head of each corpse! You recognize the fear of “horns” in every line of his talk. Vulgar, conceited, suspicious, voluble, he tells his tale, gloating over every detail that relates in any degree to his own fear of cuckoldage. He is every inch for Guido;—father and mother deserved their fate,—having lured the Count into a vile match, and afterwards plotted for his dishonour; and as for Pompilia,—what was she but the daughter of a common prostitute, palmed off on old Pietro as her own by a vile and aged wife? Exquisite is the gossip’s description of the Count’s domestic ménage,—his strife with father-in-law and mother-in-law,—his treatment of the childish bride. Some of the most delicious touches occur after the description of how the old couple, wild and wrathful, fly from their son-in-law’s house, and leave their miserable daughter behind. Take the following:—

Pompilia, left alone now, found herself;
Found herself young too, sprightly, fair enough,
Matched with a husband old beyond his age
(Though that was something like four times her own)
Because of cares past, present and to come:
Found too the house dull and its inmates dead,
So, looked outside for light and life.
                                                             And lo
There in a trice did turn up life and light,
The man with the aureole, sympathy made flesh,
The all-consoling Caponsacchi, Sir!
A priest—what else should the consoler be?
With goodly shoulderblade and proper leg,
A portly make and a symmetric shape,
And curls that clustered to the tonsure quite.
This was a bishop in the bud, and now
A canon full-blown so far: priest, and priest
Nowise exorbitantly overworked,
The courtly Christian, not so much Saint Paul
As a saint of Cæsar’s household: there posed he
Sending his god-glance after his shot shaft,
Apollos turned Apollo, while the snake
Pompilia writhed transfixed through all her spires.
He, not a visitor at Guido’s house,
Scarce an acquaintance, but in prime request
With the magnates of Arezzo, was seen here,
Heard there, felt everywhere in Guido’s path
If Guido’s wife’s path be her husband's too.
Now he threw comfits at the theatre
Into her lap,—what harm in Carnival?
Now he pressed close till his foot touched her gown,
His hand brushed hers,—how help on promenade?
And, ever on weighty business, found his steps
Incline to a certain haunt of doubtful fame
Which fronted Guido’s palace by mere chance;
While—how do accidents sometimes combine!
Pompilia chose to cloister up her charms
Just in a chamber that o’erlooked the street,
Sat there to pray, or peep thence at mankind.

     All the rest is as good. The speaker, with the savage sense of his own danger, and a subtle enjoyment of the poison he fears, dilates on every circumstance of the seduction. He has no sympathy for the wife, still less for the priest,—how should he have? He does not disguise his contempt even for the husband,—up to the point of the murder, as it is finely put,—much too finely for the speaker.
     The last passage is perfect:—

                         Sir, what’s the good of law
In a case o’ the kind? None, as she all but says.
Call in law when a neighbour breaks your fence,
Cribs from your field, tampers with rent or lease,
Touches the purse or pocket,—but wooes your wife?
No: take the old way trod when men were men!
Guido preferred the new path,—for his pains,
Stuck in a quagmire, floundered worse and worse
Until he managed somehow scramble back
Into the safe sure rutted road once more,
Revenged his own wrong like a gentleman.
Once back ‘mid the familiar prints, no doubt
He made too rash amends for his first fault,
Vaulted too loftily over what barred him late,
And lit i’ the mire again,—the common chance,
The natural over-energy: the deed
Maladroit yields three deaths instead of one,
And one life left: for where’s the Canon’s corpse?
All which is the worse for Guido, but, be frank—
The better for you and me and all the world,
Husbands of wives, especially in Rome.
The thing is put right, in the old place,—ay,
The rod hangs on its nail behind the door,
Fresh from the brine: a matter I commend
To the notice, during Carnival that’s near,
Of a certain what’s-his-name and jackanapes
Somewhat too civil of eves with lute and song
About a house here, where I keep a wife.
(You, being his cousin, may go tell him so.)

The line in italics is a whole revelation,—both as regards the point of view and the peculiar character of the speaker.
     The next monologue, though scarcely so fine as a dramatic study, is fuller of flashes of poetic beauty. In it, there is clear scope for emotion,—the wild, nervous pity of a feeling man strongly nerved on a public subject. The intellectual subtlety, the special pleading, the savage irony, are here too, in far too strong infusion, but they are more spiritualized. This speaker is full of Pompilia, her flower-like body, her beautiful childish face, and he sees the whole story, as it were, in the light of her beautiful eyes.

Truth lies between: there’s anyhow a child
Of seventeen years, whether a flower or weed,
Ruined: who did it shall account to Christ—
Having no pity on the harmless life
And gentle face and girlish form he found,
And thus flings back: go practise if you please
With men and women: leave a child alone,
For Christ’s particular love’s sake!—so I say.

He goes on to narrate, from his own point of view, the whole train of circumstances which led to the murder. Guido was a devil,—Pompilia an angel,—Caponsacchi a human being, sent in the nick of time to snatch Pompilia from perdition. He rather dislikes the priest, having a popular distrust of priests, especially the full-fed, nobly-born ones. Blows of terrible invective relieve his elaborate account of Guido’s cruelties and Pompilia’s sorrows,—his emphatic argument that, from first to last, Pompilia was a simple child, surrounded by plotting parents, brutal men, an abominable world.
     Our description and extracts can give no idea of the value of the book as a whole. It is sown throughout with beauties,—particularly with exquisite portraits, clear and sharp-cut, like those on antique gems; such as the two exquisite little pictures, of poor battered old Celestine the Confessor and aged Luca Cini, the morbid haunter of hideous public spectacles. Everywhere there is life, sense, motion—the flash of real faces, the warmth of real breath. We have glimpses of all the strange elements which went to make up Roman society in those times. We see the citizens and hear their voices,—we catch the courtly periods of the rich gentlemen, the wily whispers of the priests,—we see the dull brainless clods at Arezzo, looking up to their impoverished master as life and light,—and we hear the pleading of lawyers deep in the learning of Cicero and Ovid. So far, only a few figures have stood out from the fine groups in the background. In future volumes, one after another figure will take up the tale; and when the work is finished, we shall have, in addition to the numberless group-studies, such a collection of finished single portraits as it will not be easy to match in any language for breadth of tone and vigour of characterization.
     Anything further by way of censure would be ungracious. The great faults of the work have been Mr. Browning’s faults all along, and it is too late to alter them now. It should be added, too, that we miss altogether the lyric light which saved ‘Aurora Leigh’ from mediocrity as a work of art. The power is strictly intellectual, without one flash of ecstasy, such as the matchless flashes in Mr. Browning’s best lyrics. All this was the consequence of a gigantic and tentative subject. But if Mr. Browning impresses still more strongly on the world’s heart the danger of overbearing judgment, he will be like a messenger from heaven, sent to teach the highest of all lessons to rashly-judging men.

___

The Athenæum (20 March, 1869 - Issue 2160, pp. 399-400)

The Ring and the Book. By Robert Browning. Vols. IL, III. and IV. (Smith, Elder & Co.)

AT last, the opus magnum of our generation lies before the world—the “ring is rounded”; and we are left in doubt which to admire most, the supremely precious gold of the material or the wondrous beauty of the workmanship. The fascination of the work is still so strong upon us, our eyes are still so spell-bound by the immortal features of Pompilia (which shine through the troubled mists of the story with almost insufferable beauty), that we feel it difficult to write calmly and without exaggeration; yet we must record at once our conviction, not merely that ‘The Ring and the Book’ is beyond all parallel the supremest poetical achievement of our time, but that it is the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakspeare. Its intellectual greatness is as nothing compared with its transcendent spiritual teaching. Day after day it grows into the soul of the reader, until all the outlines of thought are brightened and every mystery of the world becomes more and more softened into human emotion. Once and for ever must critics dismiss the old stale charge that Browning is a mere intellectual giant, difficult of comprehension, hard of assimilation. This great book is difficult of comprehension, is hard of assimilation; not because it is obscure—every fibre of the thought is clear as day; not because it is intellectual,—and it is intellectual in the highest sense,—but because the capacity to comprehend such a book must be spiritual; because, although a child’s brain might grasp the general features of the picture, only a purified nature could absorb and feel its profoundest meanings. The man who tosses it aside because it is “difficult” is simply adopting a subterfuge to hide his moral littleness, not his mental incapacity. It would be unsafe to predict anything concerning a production so many-sided; but we quite believe that its true public lies outside the literary circle, that men of inferior capacity will grow by the aid of it, and that feeble women, once fairly initiated into the mystery, will cling to it as a succour passing all succour save that which is purely religious. Is it not here that we find the supremacy of Shakspeare’s greatness? Shakspeare, so far as we have been able to observe, places the basis of his strange power on his appeal to the draff of humanity. He is the delight of men and women by no means brilliant, by no means subtle; while he holds with equal sway the sympathies of the most endowed. A small intellect may reach to the heart of Shakspearean power; not so a small nature. The key to the mystery is spiritual. Since Shakspeare we have had many poets—poets, we mean, offering a distinct addition to the fabric of human thought and language. We have had Milton, with his stately and crystal speech, his special disposition to spiritualize polemics, his profound and silent contemplation of heavenly processions. We have had Dryden, with his nervous filterings of English diction; and we have had the so-called Puritan singers, with their sweetly English fancies touched with formal charity, like wild flowers sprinkled with holy water. In latter days, we have been wealthy indeed. Wordsworth has consecrated Nature, given the hills a new silence, shown in simple lines the solemnity of deep woods and the sweetness of running brooks. Keats and Shelley caught up the solemn consecration, and uttered it with a human passion and an ecstatic emotion that were themselves a revelation. Byron has made his Epimethean and somewhat discordant moan. Numberless minor men, moreover, have brightened old outlines of thought and made clear what before was dim with the mystery of the original prophet. In our own time, Carlyle—a poet in his savage way—has driven some new and splendid truths (and as many errors) into the heart of the people. But it is doubtful, very doubtful, if any of the writers we have named—still less any of the writers we have not named—stands on so distinct and perfect a ground of vantage as to be altogether safe as a human guide and helper. The student of Wordsworth, for example, is in danger of being hopelessly narrowed and dwarfed, unless he turns elsewhere for qualities quite un-Wordsworthian; and the same is true of the students of Milton and of Shelley. Of Shakspeare alone (but perhaps, to a certain extent, of Burns) would it be safe to say, “Communion with his soul is ample in itself; his thought must freshen, can never cramp, is ever many-sided and full of the free air of the world.” This, then, is supremely significant, that Shakspeare—unlike the Greek dramatists, unlike the Biblical poets, unlike all English singers save Chaucer only—had no special teaching whatever. He was too human for special teaching. He touched all the chords of human life; and life, so far from containing any universal lesson, is only a special teaching for each individual—a sibylline riddle, by which each man may educate himself after his own fashion.
     We should be grossly exaggerating if we were to aver that Mr. Browning is likely to take equal rank with the supreme genius of the world; only a gallery of pictures like the Shakspearean group could enable him to do that; and, moreover, his very position as an educated modern must necessarily limit his field of workmanship. What we wish to convey is, that Mr. Browning exhibits—to a great extent in all his writings, but particularly in this great work—a wealth of nature and a perfection of spiritual insight which we have been accustomed to find in the pages of Shakspeare, and in those pages only. His fantastic intellectual feats, his verbosity, his power of quaint versification, are quite other matters. The one great and patent fact is, that, with a faculty in our own time at least unparalleled, he manages to create beings of thoroughly human fibre; he is just without judgment, without pre-occupation, to every being so created; and he succeeds, without a single didactic note, in stirring the soul of the spectator with the concentrated emotion and spiritual exaltation which heighten the soul’s stature in the finest moments of life itself.
     As we have said above, the face which follows us through every path of the story is that of Pompilia, with its changeful and moon-like beauty, its intensely human pain, its heavenly purity and glamour. We have seen no such face elsewhere. It has something of Imogen, of Cordelia, of Juliet; it has something of Dante’s Beatrice; but it is unlike all of those—not dearer, but more startling, from the newness of its beauty. From the first moment when the spokesman for the “Other Half Rome” introduces her—

Little Pompilia, with the patient brow
And lamentable smile on those poor lips,
And under the white hospital array
A flower-like body—

to the moment when the good old Pope, revolving the whole history in his mind, calls her tenderly

My rose, I gather for the gaze of God!

—from the first to the last, Pompilia haunts the poem with a look of ever-deepening light. Her wretched birth, her miserable life, her cruel murder, gather around her like clouds, only to disperse vapour-like, and reveal again the heavenly whiteness. There is not the slightest attempt to picture her as saintly; she is a poor child, whose saintliness comes of her suffering. So subtle is the spell she has upon us, that we quite forget the horrible pain of her story. Instead of suffering, we are full of exquisite pleasure—boundless in its amount, ineffable in its quality. When, on her sorry death-bed, she is prattling about her child, we weep indeed; not for sorrow—how should sorrow demand such tears?—but for “the pity of it, the pity of it, Iago!”—

Oh how good God is that my babe was born,
—Better than born, baptized and hid away
Before this happened, safe from being hurt!
That had been sin God could not well forgive:
He was too young to smile and save himself.
When they took, two days after he was born,
My babe away from me to be baptized
And hidden awhile, for fear his foe should find,—
The country-woman, used to nursing babes,
Said “Why take on so? where is the great loss?
These next three weeks he will but sleep and feed,
Only begin to smile at the month’s end;
He would not know you, if you kept him here,
Sooner than that; so, spend three merry weeks
Snug in the Villa, getting strong and stout,
And then I bring him back to be your own,
And both of you may steal to—we know where!”
The month—there wants of it two weeks this day!
Still, I half fancied when I heard the knock
At the Villa in the dusk, it might prove she—
Come to say “Since he smiles before the time,
Why should I cheat you out of one good hour?
Back I have brought him; speak to him and judge!”
Now I shall never see him; what is worse,
When he grows up and gets to be my age,
He will seem hardly more than a great boy;
And if he asks “What was my mother like?”
People may answer “Like girls of seventeen”—
And how can he but think of this and that,
Lucias, Marias, Sofias, who titter or blush
When he regards them as such boys may do?
Therefore I wish some one will please to say
I looked already old though I was young;
Do I not .. say, if you are by to speak ..
Look nearer twenty? No more like, at least,
Girls who look arch or redden when boys laugh,
Than the poor Virgin that I used to know
At our street-corner in a lonely niche,—
The babe, that sat upon her knees, broke off,—
Thin white glazed clay, you pitied her the more:
She, not the gay ones, always got my rose.

How happy those are who know how to write!
Such could write what their son should read in time,
Had they a whole day to live out like me.
Also my name is not a common name,
“Pompilia,” and may help to keep apart
A little the thing I am from what girls are.
But then how far away, how hard to find
Will anything about me have become,
Even if the boy bethink himself and ask!

     Extracts can do little for Pompilia: as well chip a hand or foot off a Greek statue. Very noticeable, in her monologue, is the way she touches on the most delicate subjects, fearlessly laying bare the strangest secrecies of matrimonial life, and with so perfect an unconsciousness, so delicate a purity, that these passages are among the sweetest in the poem. But we must leave her to her immortality. She is perfect every way; not a tint of the flesh, not a tone of the soul, escapes us as we read and see.
     Only less fine—less fine because he is a man, less fine because his soul’s probation is perhaps less perfect—is the priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. “Ever with Caponsacchi!” cries Pompilia on her death-bed,

O lover of my life, O soldier-saint!

And our hearts are with him too. He lives before us, with that strong face of his, noticeable for the proud upper lip and brilliant eyes, softened into grave melancholy and listening awe. What a man had he been, shining at ladies’ feasts, and composing sonnets and “pieces for music,” all in the pale of the Church! In him, as we see him, the animal is somewhat strong, and, prisoned in, pricks the intellect with gall. Little recks he of Madonna until that night at the theatre,

When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself,
A lady, young, tall, beautiful, and sad.

Slowly and strangely the sad face grows upon his heart, until that moment when it turns to him appealingly for succour, and when, fearless of any criticism save that of God, he devotes his soul to its service.

                                   There at the window stood,
Framed in its black square length, with lamp in hand,
Pompilia; the same great, grave, grieffull air
As stands i’ the dusk, on altar that I know,
Left alone with one moonbeam in her cell,
Our Lady of all Sorrows.

The whole monologue of Caponsacchi is a piece of supreme poetry, steeped in lyrical light. The writer’s emotion quite overpowers him, and here, as elsewhere, he must sing. In all literature, perhaps, there is nothing finer than the priest’s description of his journey towards Rome with Pompilia, that night she flies from the horror of Guido’s house. Every incident lives before us: the first part of the journey, when Pompilia sits spell-bound, and the priest’s eyes are fascinated upon her,—

At times she drew a soft sigh—music seemed
Always to hover just above her lips,
Not settle,—break a silence music too!—

the breaking dawn,—her first words,—then her sudden query—

“Have you a mother?” “She died, I was born.”
“A sister then?” “No sister.” ‘‘Who was it—
What woman were you used to serve this way,
Be kind to, till I called you and you came?”

—every look, thought, is conjured up out of the great heart of the lover, until that dark moment when the cat-eyed Guido overtakes them. What we miss in the psychology Pompilia herself supplies. It is saying little to say that we have read nothing finer. We know nothing whatever of like quality.
     In a former review we gave a sketch of the general design of the work, explaining that, of the twelve books into which it is divided, ten were to be dramatic monologues, spoken by various persons concerned in or criticizing the Italian tragedy; and the remaining two a prologue and epilogue, spoken in the person of the poet himself. The complete work, therefore, is noticeable for variety of power and extraordinary boldness of design. All the monologues are good in their way, the only ones we could well spare being those of the two counsel, for and against Guido. These, of course, are extraordinarily clever; but cleverness is a poor quality for a man like Robert Browning to parade. The noblest portions of the book are ‘Giuseppe Caponsacchi,’ ‘Pompilia,’ and ‘The Pope.’ The last-named monologue is wonderfully grand—a fitting organ-peal to close such a book of mighty music; and it rather jars upon us, therefore, that we afterwards hear again the guilty scream of Guido. It seems to us, indeed, if we are bound to find fault at all, that we could have well dispensed with about a fourth of the whole work—the two legal speeches and Guido’s last speech. To the two former we object on artistic grounds; to the latter, we object merely on account of its extreme and discordant pain. Yet in Guido’s speech occurs one of the noblest touches in the whole work—where Guido, on the point of leaving his cell for the place of execution, exclaims—

Abate,—Cardinal,—Christ,—Maria,—God. .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?—

thus investing her at the last moment with almost God-like power and pity, in spite of the hatred which overcomes him,—hatred similar in kind, but different in degree, to that which Iscariot may be supposed to have felt for the Master. Nor let us forget to record that the poet, in his bright beneficence, has the lyric note even for Guido. We are made to feel that the “damnable blot” on his soul is only temporary, that the sharp axe will be a rod of mercy, and that the poor, petulant, vicious little Count will brighten betimes, and be saved through the purification of the very passions which have doomed him on earth. No writer that we know, except Shakspeare, could, without clumsy art and sentimental psychology, have made us feel so subtly the divine light issuing at last out of the selfish and utterly ignoble nature of Guido Franceschini.
     Fault-finders will discover plenty to carp at in a work so colossal. For ourselves, we are too much moved to think of trifles, and are content to bow in homage, again and again, to what seems to us the highest existing product of modern thought and culture. Before concluding, we should notice one point in which this book differs from the plays of Shakspeare,—i.e. it contains, even in some of its superbest passages, a certain infusion of what Mr. Matthew Arnold once called “criticism.” So far from this “criticism” being a blot upon the book, it is one of its finest qualities as a modern product. We cannot enlarge upon this point here, though it is one that is sure to be greatly enlarged upon in publications with more space at their command; but we should not conclude without explaining that the work is the more truly worthy to take Shakspearean rank because it contains certain qualities which are quite un-Shakspearean—which, in fact, reflect beautifully the latest reflections of a critical mind on mysterious modern phenomena.

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From The Athenæum - 13 March, 1869 - No. 2159, pp. 368-369.

Graffiti d’Italia. By W. W. Story. (Blackwood & Sons.)
Beatrice, and other Poems. By the Hon. Roden Noel. (Macmillan & Co.)

IN the noble epilogue to ‘Men and Women,’ addressed to his wife, Mr. Browning touches with his own peculiar subtlety and force on a subject which, has interested most thinkers—hinting how, in certain supreme moments, a man’s own natural speech becomes inadequate, and the soul demands special expression in some unusual and perhaps less perfect form. Raphael, he says, once wrote a century of sonnets, Dante once essayed to paint a picture—the desire in each case being to glorify a beautiful mistress; and as for those lesser beings who can only employ one art, all they can do is to sigh and to “stand on their attainment.” Doubtless, most great artists, triumphant in some one direction, have longed to reach out their hands further. The poet has yearned to compose music, the painter has wished to carve in marble, not for mere fame’s sake, but because the arts are actually so intimate that one and the same soul pants melodiously through them all, and is never altogether peaceful when limited to poem, picture or sonata. But for evermore, the awful Technicalities, inexorable as the Fates, intervene with warning forefinger. Each art has her technical da?µ??, only to be conciliated by long service and constant sacrifice. Perhaps the da?µ?? of verse is the easiest of all to be appeased; but her acquiescence is often very fickle, and too often leads the rash intruder to a pitiful doom. Mindful of all this, it was with no hopeful anticipations that we took up 'Graffiti d’Italia.’ No one who has seen the ‘Cleopatra’ or the ‘Sibyl' can doubt that Mr. Story’s natural speech is in marble—that he is a great sculptor. The special gift is there, the precise limitation, the power to catch thought and image at the moment when they naturally crystallize into mental form. This power is quite distinct from the painter’s sensitiveness to colour and the musician’s command over emotional sounds; but, not content with its triumphant manifestation, Mr. Story has been quietly and studiously working at a little set of cabinet sketches in verse, the technical da?µ?? of which he has certainly conquered completely. Not altogether forgetful of his peculiar power, which has nothing to do with colour, he executes his little poems, as it were, in neutral tint; trusting for his effects to a certain fine freedom of handling and a striking force in the shades. It would be gross flattery to say that he is a master of poetry in the same sense that he is a master of sculpture. Far from that, he must still “stand on his attainment”; but he actually exhibits in verse a power and melodiousness much above the average of minor poets, and a far-reaching thought which a great artist, either painter or sculptor, is certainly not called upon to possess. What he is as mere artist we gather from his stone achievements. It is the mission of this volume to exhibit, in a less perfect and more intellectual way, what tastes, studies and sympathies he possesses merely as a reflective human being. We suppose that Raphael’s sonnets were very inferior as poems, although invaluable as a clue to the mighty master's character in a moment of supreme passion.
     It was a mistake, we think, to try to turn the stone ‘Cleopatra’ into verse. What Mr. Story meant to tell in that face he can certainly not convey in any words. It required the full, natural expression of his soul, and that was the marble statue. It is the mystic power, the indefinite and miraculous silence of a living or a marble face that fascinates the eye and troubles the mind; and when Mr. Story tries to follow his statue’s thoughts, and give us a monologue of ‘Cleopatra,’ he is trying himself by a test which is totally unfair to his conception or his art. If ‘Cleopatra’ had meant no more than this—had this only been conveyed in it, it would have troubled our thoughts little; but a great statue meant far more than any one—even the sculptor himself—can ever translate into speech. It is like putting words to a sonata by Beethoven. Yet the poem is in itself very powerful. This is force:—

Fling down that lute—I hate it!
     Take rather his buckler and sword,
And crash them and clash them together
     Till this sleeping world is stirred!

     Altogether, this poem, this “translation” from one art into another, is disappointing, in spite of its sinewy force. There are much finer things in the book. The art-critical poems are very limpid and interesting; the stories clever, and full of human knowledge. ‘Zia Nica’ is something more—fresh, concentrated and profound. The poems, as a whole, have certain statuesque qualities which do not improve them as verse—a tendency to exaggerate single moods, an absence of vivid emotion, a certain coldness of diction. As a sculptor's sketches in a sort of poetic neutral tint, they are of great value, quite apart from their intrinsic value as poems.
     Quite of another kind is ‘Beatrice, and other Poems.’ If Mr. Story's pieces resemble drawings in neutral tint, Mr. Noel's look like brilliant paintings in water colour. Every page is flooded with light and tint; every poem is a posy of varicoloured flowers, reminding us, in these and other respects, of the ‘Endymion’ and the delicious descriptive sketches published in Keats’s first volume. Beyond the fact that both poets use rich tints invariably, there is no resemblance between Keats and Mr. Noel. The latter, indeed, has a faculty of his own, noticeable even in these days of splendid promise and wretched fulfilment, and very fascinating in its quaint originality and its fantastic combinations of style. For a peculiar tendency to translate into verse certain lines of philosophical thought, and for a still more striking habit of recording very subtle external impressions, his volume would be noticeable at any period; and although these peculiarities are as yet too indefinitely manifested to warrant any final judgment as to the powers of the writer, it is nevertheless clear that his powers are those of genius, and, what is better, of genius specifically poetic.
     The volume is full of pictures in the modern pre-Raphaelite style; details exaggerated and painted carefully in the open air; and therefore, while bits of wonderful word-painting abound, it is difficult to find a picture which is altogether satisfactory. Take ‘Summer Clouds and a Swan,’ in many respects a most remarkable piece of sensuous painting. It is late summer, and the writer is standing by a piece of water, dreamily contemplating the sky reflected in that crystal mirror—

Oh, what a sky! in yonder hazy blue
Floats a white cloudlet shading into grey;
A drift of white, soft-outlined bright and pure,
Tranquilly floating in a blue profound!

Then, with an almost morbid sensitiveness, he broods over every detail of the little image, until the sense of the reader becomes painfully overstrained in striving to follow. Not a tint is missed, not a loose wreath of film escapes; so the picture is overloaded; until, as if overburdened with the intensity of sight, the writer seeks relief in exclamation—adjective on adjective melodiously piled!—

     How prodigal of lovely wayward change
In cloudland subtle, silent, unaware,
Ravelling, unravelling tissues gossamer,
Not to be prisoned in colour or in word,
Pageant regarding not if any see!

     Light of a stilly summer afternoon,
Drowsy, voluptuous and sumptuous,
Rich, honey-heavy, sheeny, breathing balm!

But suddenly, the vision changes:—

     Now in the lower reflected gulf of blue
A swan sails tranquil with a stately neck
Arched long, with orange beak, and lifted wing
Sail-like on either side, how soft and pure!
Have they not fallen these wings from yonder blue,
Out of the soft white cloud there, so akin
They seem to it? And O the tenderness
Of the blue shadow, scarcely shadow or blue,
Haunting yon dells of down behind the wing!
Surely the white cloud when it fell from heaven
Fell with the heavenly motion lingering in it,
For do but note how tranquil and how still
The cloud sails yonder and the swan sails here!
Yet lo! a sudden impulse of the bosom
Thrills all the placid water feeling it
To dimpling smiles that waft luxurious light
Into the pendulous faces of sweet flowers,
Lush grasses, harebell, eyebright, sorrel leaves
That fringe the flood whose heart enshrines them all.
While his dim double the swan floats upon
Flickers beneath him with the twin-born ripple
From his breast sloping either side away,
Melts like snow dropped in water, yet remains.
He ruffles yielding wavering images
Of church and tree, and of the sky above,
But all the fragments gather as he goes.

     We have italicized two wonderful bits, but the whole passage should be italicized. The slenderness of subject conceded, writing more exquisite it would not be easy to find in contemporary poetry. For a companion picture, nearly as delicious, and perhaps more compressed, we should have to go back to Coleridge.
     Out of Coleridge, moreover, it would not be easy to find any philosophical poetry finer than certain portions of Mr. Noel’s ‘Pan,’—a poem very striking and quite original,—forming a sort of grandiose pantheistic hymn to Nature, and showing in one or two passages an invaluable faculty of turning philosophic ore into poetic gold. In this fine passage, for example, one of the commonest philosophical topics becomes original poetry by mere verbal spiritualization:—

Thou fated slayer. slay not like a beast,
In a blind panic, but remembering.
Look steadily till through the loathly crust
A soul puts forth a feeler seeking thine!
Creatures uncouth, yet these are on their way,
Blind and still distant from the goal you touch,
Yet fellow pilgrims verily with you;
Dare you affirm there live not anywhere,
Nor in the teeming infinite dark womb
Of awful Nature ever shall be born,
Beings of glory so transcending yours
As ye transcend some annulated worm?
Nay day by day the lower forms are lost,
Yield all their own and re-emerge in man:
And so the coral of our myriad lives
Accumulates the sunny reef to be—
While yet in part, a soothing dream to me,
We may remingle with the lowlier life. . .

     ‘Pan’ contains more original passages than this; but it is a poem to be read from beginning to end, not cut up into extracts. As mere blank verse it is very striking,—resonant, grandiose, and full of motion,—merits somewhat uncommon in Mr. Noel’s poems. Still more perfect than ‘Pan’ is ‘Ganymede,’ an idyl thoroughly and tremendously Greek, a bit of work which reads like Theocritus in the original; too Greek, too worthy of Theocritus, some will say, but artistically a finished gem. It remains in the eye like a small Turner,—the youth in the green dale, the “imperial eagle amorous” miraculously descending, a golden haze of dreamy sunlight irradiating all into a picture not to be forgotten.
     As a rule, Mr. Noel’s blank verse is finer than his rhyme; but the rhymed couplet is managed with splendid effect in ‘To Whom shall We Go?’ and some of the lyrics—all of a very fragile intellectual beauty—are very musical indeed. Surely the following is exquisite:

EVENING PRAYER.

 Now the soft warm gleam uncertain
     In the little chamber stays,
On the spotless falling curtain,
     By the bedside where she prays:
From the shadow round her kneeling
Slender hands are raised appealing.

Down below the shadow resteth,
     O’er blush-alabaster feet,
Simple robe of white investeth
     Up to where bows, childlike sweet,
Gentle head in hands half hidden,
Whence the shadow falls forbidden.

From our dusk her hands are lifting,
     And the light, in answer bland,
Down her sleek brown tresses drifting,
     Seems to smooth them with a hand—
Solemn hand from forth the splendour,
Where this child hath those that tend her!

These love-tears may cloud my vision;
     Yet about this humble room
Do not faces dim, Elysian,
     Yearn down o’er her through the gloom?
Even the shades are glory colder,
Warming softer as they fold her!

So bathe her feet our earth’s chill sorrow,
     Never cling more dark than this;
From her gentle spirit borrow
     Even the hues and warmth of bliss,
While her soul inhales the heaven,
Praying thus at morn and even!

Her, life’s darkling pilgrim haileth;
     Mountain forest, haunted nook,
As on high serene she saileth,
     Smile beneath her sainted look!
Only worldlings, foul in feeling,
Curse the childlike light revealing.

Spirit music, souls of flowers,
     Here luxuriate to shape,
Charming far the baleful powers:
     Blessed moment, wherefore ’scape?
Hold her young, so griefless praying,
Hold these trancèd eyes from straying!

     In moods like these,—in a softly-tinted sentiment closely akin to his delicately sensuous feeling for natural colour,—Mr. Noel has no rival. He sings with fairy-like and subtle power.
     We have been throughout so caught by Mr. Noel’s little cabinet pictures, and his tender philosophical paraphrases, that we have left ourselves no space to speak of ‘Beatrice,’ the poem which gives the book its name. It is an interesting story, well told, in a style sufficiently ornate, and relieved with some delightful lyrics. With general readers, perhaps, it will be more popular than anything else in the volume. But loving students of poetry will turn elsewhere, to the more intensely emotional ‘Summer Clouds’ and ‘Autumn in Ireland,’ and to the powerfully-painted Egyptian poem of ‘Mencheres.’ Few people, students or otherwise, will remain long in doubt that we have among us another young writer of great originality and sweetness, whose specially poetic faculty is as unmistakable as the taste of good Falernian or the smell of a musk rose.

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From The Contemporary Review - May, 1881 - Vol. 39, pp. 792-803

WYLIE’S LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.

Thomas Carlyle: The Man and his Books. Illustrated by personal Reminiscences, Table-Talk, and Anecdotes of Himself and his Friends. By W. HOWIE WYLIE. Marshall Japp & Co.

IT is not yet the time, when a distinguished man has only just been carried to his grave, and when the first thrill communicated to society by the loss of him, has scarcely passed away, to speak the whole truth concerning his career, or to dwell with undue emphasis on those points in his character which are least agreeable. Criticism is hushed in the shadow of death; censure is forgotten, in the contemplation of those tender humanities which are hung like flowery garlands on every famous grave. But in the case of Thomas Carlyle, who has so recently departed in the full twilight of his long life, the circumstances have been especially deplorable. The hasty and ill-advised publication of the “Reminiscences,” abounding in unfortunate matter, given to the world with feminine zeal but without even the pretence of clear-headed editorial supervision, has certainly let loose the full tongue of detraction.

“And o’er him, ere he scarce be cold,
Begins the scandal and the cry!”

     Nor is this greatly to be wondered at, when we call to mind the circulation of those bitter and miserable personalities which were deplored by a very sympathetic writer in the last number of this REVIEW.* For my own part, I cannot be accused or suspected of blindly idolizing the famous Scotchman who has passed away. In this REVIEW and in others I have endeavoured to point out, at one period and another, those very limitations of his sagacity which critics are now unduly emphasizing for the first time, and to utter a protest against that portion of his transcendental teaching which is most repugnant to modern culture. To one living a literary life during the present decade, and feeling his thoughts shaped more or less by the breath of new-born science, it is difficult

     * “A Study of Carlyle:” CONTEMPORARY REVIEW for April, 1881.

⁷⁹³ even to comprehend the charm which Carlyle once had for a stormier generation. But that is neither here nor there. Although in common with many others, I believe that the literary pretensions of Carlyle have been vastly overstated, and that as a thinker and philosopher he possessed no such spiritual method as is likely to make his influence either precious or permanent, I would gladly, at this juncture, think of nothing less pleasant than his rugged yet charming personality. How sadly that personality has been obscured by the “Reminiscences,” we all know. Fortunately, however, while the very bane is before us, the antidote is at hand. With a celerity that is perfectly extraordinary, considering the difficulty and importance of the task to be performed, a brother Scotchman, Mr. W. H. Wylie, has put out one of the most masterly little biographies it has ever been my lot to read; a picture deftly painted and pleasant, yet far above the mere art of the portrait-painter; appreciative to the verge of hero-worship, but stopping short at that point where hero-worship becomes idolatry:—a bit of work, indeed, which it would be hard to surpass for sympathy, delicacy, liberality of view, and wealth of friendly insight. Read, as it must and should be read, just after the “Reminiscenccs,” it simply purifies, with the honest oxygen of kindly humanity, the fetid memory of certain ignoble moods, and its representation of the man in his habit as he lived, tenacious, pugnacious, truthful, and not too generous, yet full of personal affection and genuine if somewhat provincial humour, is as good in its way as Carlyle’s own presentation of those saturnine historical heroes with which he had most sympathy.
     Mr. Wylie begins, as a good biographer should, at the beginning, his first chapter being devoted to a review—under the title of “The Carlyles and their Country”—of Carlyle’s ancestry. In nine cases out of ten, such a retrospect would be tedious and superfluous; but in the case of a prophetic swashbuckler like the author of “Frederick,” it is important to know from what sources he drew his strength, his veracity, and what one may call, without seeming irreverent, his superabundant stock of bile. Specially interesting is it to learn that, from time immemorial, the Carlyles were sturdy king’s men and king-lovers. Under the Scottish Bruces they held land in Annandale, and the head of the house afterwards became brother-in-law to King Robert Bruce himself. Thenceforward, under one vicissitude and another, the family seems to have been generally on the winning side. In 1455, at the Battle of Langholm, Sir John Carlyle of Torthorwald was one of the leaders of the victorious royal army; and fifteen years later he was ennobled as Lord Carlyle of Torthorwald. There is one solitary record, however, of a Carlyle siding with a forlorn cause, and sympathizing with a minority. In 1570, when the Dumfriesshire friends of Mary Stuart were assailed by an English force under Lord Scrope, Lord Carlyle led his followers against the enemy, was beaten, and taken prisoner. From that time forth, the genealogical tree seems to have drooped and degenerated. ⁷⁹⁴ At all events, nothing is heard of the Carlyles during the great struggle of the seventeenth century, when the Irvings made themselves so conspicuous on the Royalist side. In 1580, the peerage passed to a woman, who carried over the estates to a Douglas. The eldest this union, Sir James Douglas, was in 1609 created Lord Carlyle Torthorwald, and by his son the title was resigned in 1638 to the Earl of Queensferry, who had acquired the estate. A certain George Carlyle, from Wales, claimed and got the estate, by a decree of the House of Lords, in 1770; but after dissipating his substance for some little period, he disappeared. From that time forth, the Dumfriesshirc Carlyles appear to have dwindled lower and lower, until they reached the level of almost complete obscurity. But in the month of December, 1795, there was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, the Carlyle who was destined, by turning the stream of family genius into another channel, to revive the fame of the Carlyles as king’s-men and king-lovers—as sturdy and consistent adherents, in fact, of the Verities, or “powers that be.” Certainly, if Thomas Carlyle the author, was born with any special mission to edify his generation, the “Might is right” theory was at the heart of that mission. He was a king’s man by inheritance, by heredity, by natural temperament and disposition. Revolt, simply as revolt, was constitutionally distasteful to him, and he had no sympathy whatever with really forlorn causes. It is, indeed, curious to note, in going through his voluminous writings, how little speculative and forward-looking insight he possesses, and how the most part of his human argument takes the shape of authoritative references to the standing armies of morality and religion. Feebleness in any form, even the feebleness of innocence, was beyond the sphere of his affection; and his very sympathy with kings flagged when kings belied their birthright and ceased to be strong.
     There was, therefore, no inconsistency whatever in the fact that from his pen came the first literary apotheosis of Oliver Cromwell. The great Protector, in his vindication of the Verities, of the Eternal Order, was essentially a monarch, and almost uniformly successful. Besides, he stood in Carlyle’s mind, as Knox stood, for the earthly representative of that greater King who is reverenced (chiefly, we fear, on the score of supreme success) by orthodox and unorthodox alike. The hopeless limitation of the king-loving intellect is not perceived, till that intellect comes into collision with those other agencies which represent, not merely authorities, but principles. All its savage humour serves it little, when it encounters the serene logic of a Mill, or ruffles beneath the poignant wit of a Voltaire.
     It may be remarked here, by the way, that Carlyle’s want of sympathy with weakness was manifested very early by a strong intolerance of physical feebleness and flabbiness. We may see this intolerance in the allusions to Coleridge, to Shelley, to Keats, to Charles Lamb, and to Voltaire, quite as clearly as in the diatribe ⁷⁹⁵ against both the black slave and the white. And yet, when all was said and done, Carlyle was pre-eminently a kindly man—only the Scotchman, the Annandale man in him, with its hard and almost aggressive identity, was generally pushed to the front in his literary criticisms. Nothing could better illustrate his critical temperament than his remarks, in private conversation with Mr. Wylie, on the subject of Lamb. Mr. Wylie, during some discursive chat, took occasion to ask him if he had much personal acquaintance with “Elia?” What followed must be quoted in full:—

     “‘What makes you ask?—what interest have you in Lamb?’  ‘I like his humour.’ ‘Humour—he had no humour.’ We mildly submitted our belief that he had. ‘You are mistaken—it was only a thin streak of Cockney wit;’ this phrase uttered with a shrill shout expressive of ineffable contempt; and then the speaker added, ‘I dare say you must have known some—I have known scores of Scotch moorland farmers, who for humour could have blown Lamb into the zenith!’ The pictorial effect of this figure, delivered in a high Annandale key, especially when the speaker came to the last clause of the sentence, it is impossible for print to convey—the listener saw poor Lamb spinning off into space, propelled thither by the contemptuous kick of a lusty Dandie Dinmont, in hodden grey, from the moors of Galloway or Ayrshire.
     “‘The only thing really humorous about Lamb,’ he continued, ‘was his personal appearance. His suit of rusty black, his spindle-shanks, his knee-breeches, the bit ribbons fleein’ at the knees o’ him: indeed he was humour personified!’ this last clause again in the high key, making the figure effective and mirth-compelling to a degree. And then he told us how the first occasion on which he met ‘the puir drucken body’ was at Enfield, in 1829, at the house of a most respectable lady. It was the forenoon; but Lamb, who had been ‘tasting’ before he came, immediately demanded gin, and because he could not get it ‘kicked up a terrible row.’ Moral disgust at poor ‘Elia’s’ misconduct was evidently at the root of the feeling of antipathy evinced by Carlyle in speaking of his humour. Lamb was not a humourist because he got drunk, and because he demanded gin in the forenoon at a lady’s house.
     “Then we were told, as an example of Lamb’s Cockney wit, how at Enfield, on the same occasion, he had expressed his regret that the Royalists had not taken Milton’s head off at the Restoration. That was one of the bright remarks which he invariably fired off whenever he met anybody for the first time; Carlyle had often afterwards heard him repeat it. At Enfield he gave it for Carlyle’s benefit, to astonish the stranger from Scotland. ‘But Lamb was a Liberal,’ we remarked; ‘he could not have wished such a fate for Milton?’ ‘Ah, you don’t see his point; he wished the Royalists had taken Milton’s head off in order that they might have damned themselves to all eternity!’ Then, sotte voce, Carlyle added, ‘Puir silly cratur!’

It will, perhaps, be admitted that there must have been something radically defective in the man to whom Lamb was only “a puir drucken body” and a “puir silly cratur.” On the other hand, he had, as we all know, the fullest and most cordial appreciation of the essentially robust and manly genius of Burns. The stalwart Ayrshire ploughman, who shared with him the fatal power of personal caricature, attracted him as no other Scotchman could do, except, perhaps, John Knox. It is more difficult, though not quite impossible, to understand his huge liking for Leigh Hunt; but Hunt was by habit and repute a ⁷⁹⁶ hero-worshipper, and took no pains to conceal his admiration for Carlyle and all his domestic circle.
     The early chapters of Mr. Wylie’s biography, dealing with Carlyle’s home training, his schools and schoolmasters, and his university, are very interesting; particularly so is the account of Carlyle’s father, a man who, to quote his son’s words, “could not tolerate anything fictitious in books, and walked as a man in the full presence of Heaven, and Hell, and the Judgment”—of the two latter, we may add, more particularly. Carlyle thought his father, all things considered, the best man he had known, though it will be remembered that he applied the same description, on one occasion, to Edward Irving. “He was a far cleverer man than I am, or ever will be.” One particular form of his cleverness—a power of using nicknames—was transmitted in full strength to his son. “What a root of a bodie he was!” cried an old Scottish lady who had known him well; “ay, a curious bodie; he beat this world. A speerited bodie; he would sit on nae man’s coat tails. And sic stories he could tell. Sic sayings, too! Sic names he would gie to things and folk! But he was always a very strict old bodie, and could bide nae contradiction.”
     Much also, of a more amiable kind, did Carlyle inherit from his worthy mother, who was his father’s second wife. She had been a domestic servant, and only when advanced in life, and the mother of a family, did she teach herself to read and write. “The quality of her mind, both as to its strength and independence,” says Mr. Wylie, “is sufficiently attested by the fact that it was she who first suggested to her son that new theory as to the character of Cromwell which he was the first to lay before the world.” I don’t know on what authority Mr. Wylie makes this extraordinary statement; but if, as is very probable, it is based upon the conversations of Carlyle himself, it is doubtless a somewhat exaggerated impression, having its origin in deep filial reverence and affection. For the rest, we have preserved for us, in “Sartor Resartus,” the living lineaments of both father and mother, and of the obscure village where they lived. Father Andrews and Gretchen are, as Mr. Wylie points out, simply Germanized pictures of James Carlyle and his wife, and Entepfuhl is, translated into plain Scotch, Ecclefechan. The chapter in which Mr. Wylie traces these resemblances is one of the most interesting in the book.
     The literary life of Carlyle can scarcely be said to have begun in earnest until, in 1827, he became a full-blown Edinburgh Reviewer, contributing to the “Blue and Yellow” articles on Jean Paul, German Literature, Burns, and Characteristics. “I fear Carlyle will not do,” wrote Jeffrey to Macvey Napier in 1832, “that is, if you do not take the liberties and pains that I did with him, by striking out freely and writing in occasionally. The misfortune is that he is very obstinate, and I fear very conceited.” Despite this disparaging judgment of the true and cock-sure oracle of Craigcrook,—despite the liberties and pains ⁷⁹⁷ taken with him, Carlyle had begun to discover his strength, and to find that his literary efforts would do. At the very moment when the Edinburgh Review gave him notice to quit, he was ready with “Sartor Resartus,” a work which, with all its affectations, obscurities (I do not hesitate to add, insincerities), has taken a strong hold on the imaginations of that large section of the public which does not go to the poets for its edification, but prefers the fashioners of “mystical” prose.
     The essays on German literature and “Sartor Resartus” were the fruit, individually and collectively, of a six years’ isolation in the wilds of Craigenputtock. Of his life here, Carlyle gave a memorable description in a letter to Goethe, dated 25th December, 1828.

     “You inquire with such warm interest respecting our present abode and occupations, that I am obliged to say a few words about both, while there is still room left. Dumfries is a pleasant town, containing about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and to be considered the centre of the trade and judicial system of a district which possesses some importance in the sphere of Scottish activity. Our residence is not in the town itself, but fifteen miles to the north-west of it, among the granite hills and the black morasses, which stretch westward through Galloway, almost to the Irish Sea. In this wilderness of heath and rock, our estate stands forth a green oasis, a tract of ploughed, partly enclosed and planted ground, where corn ripens and trees afford a shade, although surrounded by sea-mews and rough-woolled sheep. Here, with no small effort, have we built and furnished a neat, substantial dwelling; here, in the absence of a professional or other office, we live to cultivate literature according to our strength, and in our own peculiar way. We wish a joyful growth to the roses and flowers of our garden; we hope for health and peaceful thoughts to further our aims. The roses, indeed, are still in part to be planted, but they blossom already in anticipation. Two ponies which carry us everywhere, and the mountain air, are the best medicines for weak nerves. This daily exercise, to which I am much devoted, is my only recreation; for this nook of ours is the loneliest in Britain, six miles removed from any one likely to visit me. Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of St. Pierre. My town friends, indeed, ascribe my sojourn here to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good result. But I came hither solely with the design to simplify my way of life, and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself. This bit of earth is our own: here we can live, write, and think, as best pleases ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the monarch of literature. Nor is the solitude of such great importance; for a stage-coach takes us speedily to Edinburgh, which we look upon as our British Weimar. And have I not, too, at this moment, piled upon the table of my little library a whole cartload of French, German, American, and English journals and periodicals—whatever may be their worth? Of antiquarian studies, too, there is no lack. From some of our heights can descry, about a day’s journey to the west, the hill where Agricola and his Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I was born, and there both father and mother still live to love me. And so one must let time work.”

     These six years were, perhaps, the happiest of his life. He had his “Jeanie” to sit by his side, his quiet home, his piles of books, and now and then a visitor, who did not stop too long. Nevertheless, his contentment was so far superficial that it did not prevent him from plotting hard to make some considerable stir in the world. “I have some thoughts,” he wrote to Professor Wilson, “of beginning to prophesy ⁷⁹⁸ next year, if I prosper; that seems the best style, could one strike into it rightly.” Odd enough is the notion that prophecy may be possible if prosperity comes; quite reversing the popular notion that prophets are unprosperous persons—that, in other words—

                                   Most men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song,—

or in prophecy. Still, there can be doubt that Carlyle, in a not uncomfortable state of mind, being cosy, confident, and bent on securing the contemporary ear, deliberately put on the prophet’s robes and began to prepare impeachments against his generation. So ere long the public became aware of a voice crying in the wilderness that “the god-like had vanished from the world,” that Byron was “cursing his day,” and Shelley “wailing inarticulately” like an infant; that men wandered without faith from doubt to doubt, finally returning, like Frederick Schlegel, back to orthodoxy, “as a child, who has roamed all day over a silenced battlefield, goes back at night to the heart of its dead mother.” No wonder that prophecy of this kind put poor Jeffrey into a flutter! It was not at all the sort of stuff to which the “Blue and Yellow” was accustomed. I can almost picture to myself the trouble in the prophet’s eye, as he read over the proof-sheets of these deliberate pieces of prophetic impromptu, and shrewdly calculated their effect on a decorous Whig editor and a highly respectable public.
     In “Sartor Resartus,” the traces of literary conventionalism were kicked over altogether. The work might be called a wild hotch-potch of German mysticism, Lowland Scotch, broad caricature, and literal autobiography. In its long-windedness, in the zeal with which the one solitary idea, or “Clothes” theory, was worked to death, it was certainly very German. But with all its defects,—or rather, perhaps, inconsequence of its defects,—it was a work of genius. Nevertheless, it is a fact that “Sartor Resartus,” completed in 1831, could not find a publisher, at least in this country, till 1838. Carlyle himself tells us that the publishers “to a man, with that total contempt of grammar which Jedidiah Cleisbotham also complained of, declined the article.” Elsewhere he writes, in a letter to Macvey Napier,—“All manner of perplexities have occurred in the publication of my poor book, which perplexities I could only cut asunder, not unloose; so the MS., like an unhappy ghost, still lingers on the wrong side of Styx; the Charon of —— Street durst not risk it in his sutilis symba, so it leapt ashore again.” But, as Mr. Wylie happily expresses it, “the daughter’s loving appreciation rebuked the mother’s cold neglect,” and America accorded to this book the entrée denied to it by England.
     It was published at Boston in 1836, with a preface by a young man of the name of Emerson, and soon became popular. Not until two years later appeared the first English edition, before which devout consummation, the young man of the name of Emerson had actually made a ⁷⁹⁹ pilgrimage to Europe, and met the young man of the name of Carlyle on the classic soil of Craigenputtock.
     Emerson has described the meeting in one of the most charming chapters that ever came even from his “silver pen.”

     “No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and an absolute man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-Iike brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humour, which floated everything he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, ‘not a person to speak to within sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore;’ so that books inevitably made his topics.
     “He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. Blackwood’s was the ‘sand magazine;’ Fraser’s nearer approach to possibility of life was the ‘mud magazine;’ a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was the ‘grave of the last sixpence.’ When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero’s death, ‘Qualis artifex pereo!’ better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor’s principle was mere rebellion, and that he feared was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was that in it a man can have meat for his labour. He had read in Stuart’s book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey.
     “We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. ‘Tristram Shandy’ was one of his first books after ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and Robertson’s ‘America’ an early favourite. Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted.
     “He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.”

     Well might the lonely scholar grumble at the booksellers, and assert that they were on the verge of bankruptcy. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic member of the tribe who published “Sartor” a few years later failed to realize a fortune. The English public were slow to appreciate the book. Even the author’s personal friends, and among them John Stuart Mill, took a long time to understand it. “It came at last to be regarded,” says Mr. Wylie, “as the greatest work of its author, ⁸⁰⁰ perhaps the greatest of our century;” and he adds that “as a picture of the human soul battling with the haggard spirits of Doubt and Fear, it has certainly never been equalled.”
     If this be really the case, then the spiritual literature of our century is barren indeed. The work, in reality, is one of reiterated negation; and very poor is the part played in it by the “Everlasting Yea,” as contrasted with the extraordinary performances of the “Everlasting Nay.” The substance of its teaching seems to be that, although Life is a sham and Eternity a dream, man can always get out of his difficulties by knuckling down to hard work; in fact, the very condition of his being is that he must work, as the only means of forgetting a problem which would otherwise turn him crazy. This is all very well as far as it goes; but surely modern speculation craves for a little more. Again, it is not always easy to understand what Carlyle means by Work, any more than it is to understand what he means by the Verities. Mr. Gradgrind, in the novel, had his conception of Work, or Fact, and other teachers have defined Work “as doing one’s duty in that sphere of life in which God has placed us.” If Work means simply labouring hard in some useful vocation, from carrying bricks to making books, scorning to beg, being truthful and upright, respecting the proprietors, and reverencing the terrestrial and celestial authorities, how does human Work—any more than the pertinacity of the ant, or the zeal of the bee—assist us to a solution of the problem of the Universe? Simply by ignoring the problem altogether, with a reservation in favour of the religion sanctioned by majorities. This, at least, was what Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea” came to—to a detestation of revolt and revolters; to a glorification of what is self-assertive and self-conscious, as opposed to what is vicarious and altruistic, in human nature; to a polemic which derided all humanitarian teachers, from Shelley downwards, as sentimental “wailers;” to a philosophy which garlanded the gallows, and characterized the negro as “a servant” to all eternity; and to the sheer impotence of a political creed which glorified Deutschthumm, and treated as irrelevant all the divine services of Frenchmen and of France.
     After all is said and done, then, the question emerges, what was Carlyle’s religious creed—his explanation, in other words, of the problem of the Universe? Work, as I have said, explains nothing; it may be righteous, it may be salutary, but it is an expedient, not a solution. Now, singularly enough, Carlyle, who could be explicit enough when he chose, nowhere tells us what he personally believes. To a friend of Mr. Wylie’s, who happened to say that he had the same religious views as himself, Carlyle retorted irritably, “My religious views! And who told you what my religious views are?” Apropos of this point, a writer in the St. James’s Gazette has said:—“The reason why Carlyle did not state his views plainly and simply are obvious enough. In the first place, if he had done so years ago, he would not only have lost all influence, but would have starved. In the next place, he would have ⁸⁰¹ taken up the position which, of all others, was most unwelcome to him—namely, that of a rebel and a revolutionist.” I quite agree with Mr. Wylie that this amounts to a charge of positive disingenuousness, from which Carlyle must at once be acquitted. The real fact of the matter possibly was, that Carlyle, like many men of genius, was content to exist in the centre of nebulous religious emotions, without definite form and without real tangibility. Even in this, perhaps, there was a certain want of veracity, but it was unconscious. When sorely driven by stress of adverse argument, he invariably uttered the old phrase, laborare est orare; and turned to the practical business of his life. His feeling towards modern Science, which he never took the most trifling pains to understand, was infantine; he looked upon it with positive detestation. He thought Mr. Darwin a very “good sort of man, and well meaning, but with very little intellect;” and he exclaimed, “And this is what we have got to! All things from frog-spawn; the Gospel of Dirt the order of the day. The older I grow—and now I stand on the brink of eternity—the more comes back to me the sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper it becomes: ‘What is the chief end of Man? To glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.’ No gospel of dirt, teaching that men have descended from frogs, through monkeys, can ever set that aside.” How strange it seems that such a man, with so much poetry in his soul, should have failed to see the sublime vistas of poetic possibility which modern science has revealed; or should have found anything in modern philosophical speculation, at its best and highest, antagonistic to the religious aspirations of humanity. Surely, on such a theme, the Apostle of Veracity might have had something better to say.
     After the publication of “Sartor Rcsartus,” Carlyle removed to London, occupying the house, No. 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, which he continued to occupy until his death. From that time forward, he became a man of letters by profession—indeed, perhaps the most noticeable man of letters, as distinguished from dilettante followers of literature, of his generation. Very interesting is the account Mr. Wylie gives of his early lectures,—during the delivery of which he felt, as he expressed it, as if he were “going to be hanged.” Of these lectures, only those on “Heroes and Hero-worship” are preserved; the others, which were delivered extempore, are not even preserved in the newspaper files of the period.
     For nearly half a century, Carlyle continued to “make books” as remarkable for their industry as for their genius; but despite the long catalogue of his writings, “Sartor Resartus” remains the most characteristic of his achievements. As a monument of what human pertinacity can compass, the “History of Frederick” remains phenomenal; but Carlyle himself came to the conclusion that it was labour wasted, and I quite agree with Mr. Wylie that it did its author’s reputation far more harm than good, and greatly weakened his spiritual influence. ⁸⁰² As age came stealing on, honours crowded upon him. By a large section of the public, he was reverenced as a Seer; in all literary circles he was respected as a great leader of literature. His life was solitary and uneventful, but on the whole very happy. To the last, he retained his homely countryfied appearance and his broad Scotch accent, preserving at seventy-five years of age (says Mr. Wylie) “such a face and form as we had come across hundreds of times in the glens and moorlands of Western Scotland—mending a feal dyke, seeing to the shecp, or hoeing potatoes in a cottage kailyard by the roadside.”
     Not the least charming part of Mr. Wylie’s book is the account of conversations with him at this period of his life; but the gem of the whole biography is the picture, given by a Scottish schoolboy, of the old Prophet, just before the final summons came, and Thomas Carlyle and the Eternal Verities were face to face for ever. This schoolboy, who was one of the sons of the late Alexander Munro, the sculptor, who died young in 1871, went with a brother to see his father’s old friend in the May of 1880, and was led up the stairs into a well-lighted cheerful room, with the little old picture of Cromwell on the wall and Mrs. Carlyle’s sketch of her Haddington home on the mantelpiece. In this room Carlyle had spent nearly all his time, since he had given up working fourteen years before. The rest must be told in the schoolboy’s own simple words:—

     “The maid went forward and said something to Carlyle, and left the room. He was sitting before a fire in an arm-chair, propped up with pillows, with his feet on a stool, and looked much older than I had expected. The lower part of his face was covered with a rather shaggy beard, almost quite white. His eyes were bright blue, but looked filmy from age. He had on a sort of coloured night-cap, and a long gown reaching to his ankles, and slippers on his feet A rest attached to the arm of his chair supported a book before him. I could not quite see the name, but I think it was Channing’s works. Leaning against the fireplace was a long clay pipe, and there was a slight smell of tobacco in the room. We advanced and shook hands, and he invited us to sit down, and began, I think, by asking where we were living. He talked of our father affectionately, speaking in a low tone as if to himself, and stopping now and then for a moment and sighing. He mentioned the last time they met, and said one took a long walk to see the other (I could not catch which), and ‘then he went away to Cannes and died,’ and he paused and sighed. ‘And your grandfather, he is dead too.’ He said he had done much good work, and written several books of reference, mentioning particularly his having explained who the people mentioned in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ were. All this was in a low tone, and rather confused and broken, so I cannot put it clearly down. He said he liked my grandfather very much. I said I thought every one did. He agreed, and spoke very highly of him as a ‘most amiable man.’ He asked what I was going to be. I said I was not sure, but I thought of going to college for the present. He asked something of which I only caught the words ‘good scholars.’ I said I hoped we should turn out so. He said there could be no doubt about it, if we only kept fast to what is right and true, and we certainly ought to, as the sons of such a respectable man. He strongly exhorted us to be always perfectly true and open, not deceiving ourselves or others, adding something about the common habits of deceit. He went on, ‘I am near the end of my course, and the sooner the better is my own feeling.’ He said he still reads ⁸⁰³ a little, but has not many books he cares to read now, and is ‘continually disturbed by foolish interruptions from people who do not know the value of an old man’s leisure.’ His hands were very thin and wasted; he showed us how they shook and trembled unless he rested them on something, and said they were failing him from weakness. He asked, ‘Where did you say you were staying, and what are you doing there?’ I told him we were at Bromley for our holidays, which ended on Thursday, when we returned to school. He asked if we were at school at Bromley. I told him we were at Charterhouse. ‘Well, I’ll just bid you good-bye.’ We shook hands. He asked our names. He could not quite hear Henry’s at first. ‘I am a little deaf, but I can hear well enough talking,’ or words to that effect. ‘I wish you God’s blessing, good-bye.’ We shook hands once more and went away. I was not at all shy. He seemed such a venerable old man, and so worn and old-looking that I was very much affected. Our visit was on Tuesday, May 18, 1880, at about 2 P.M.”

     A few months later, the arm-chair was empty, and the old widower had gone to join his darling “Jeanie,” for whom his love had ever been stronger than death.
     In the space of this perfunctory sketch, I have merely sought to draw attention to some of the leading features of a biography which should be in the hands of every admirer of Carlyle; it has been quite impossible to do full justice to the industry, the cleverness, and the reverence with which the work is executed. Mr. Wylie is, in fact, a biographer after Carlyle’s own heart, sparing no pains to verify the most trifling details, and executing the whole as a labour of zealous love; yet not the least of his merits is the fact that he joins issue with Carlyle, again and again, on some of the main points of his teaching, and is at no time a blind partisan. Appearing at the present moment, the book has a special grace and charm. Other and fuller biographies of Carlyle may possibly be forthcoming; but the present work has too much intellectual breadth and literary finish to be easily superseded.

                                                                                                                                 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Back to Essays

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From the New-York Daily Tribune - 18 January, 1885 - p.9.

(Reprinted in A Look Round Literature (London: Ward and Downey, 1887).)

A TALK WITH GEORGE ELIOT
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ON AGE AND IMMORTALITY.
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ROBERT BUCHANAN TELLS THE STORY OF AN AFTERNOON—
A DESCRIPTION OF HUSBAND AND WIFE—GEORGE ELIOT’S PET.
 

     The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park, London, is a largish, not uncommodious, house enclosed in its own grounds of about an acre and a half, with trees and shrubs all round, a high front wall facing the street, to which it communicates through a massive doorway. The neighborhood is quiet, abounding in the cots of those soiled doves who haunt what have been christened (for North Bank is a portion of St. John’s Wood) the shady groves of the Evangelist. An actor, Mr. Wilson Barrett, now inhabits the Priory; he has enlarged and altered it to suit his needs, and made it æsthetically resplendent with dados, peacock-papers, and stained glass windows. But in the old days when I haunted it, it was the unpretentious abode of the most famous woman and the cleverest man in England. “George Eliot” dwelt there with her husband, George Henry Lewes; she, known far and wide as the bright genius whose fine creations in fiction began with “Adam Bede;” he, distinguished in many ways as a litterateur, a man of science, and a dilettante.
     An afternoon at the Priory, beginning with a modest lunch in the eastern chamber, half study, half drawing-room, and ending with a long chat and tea in the pretty drawing-room, was surely a thing to be remembered. As I look backward, I recall many such afternoons; but one particularly I remember, when the full sunshine of success and happiness dwelt in that little household, and when, to ears eager to listen to me, and hearts full of sympathy, I first told the story of the life and death of David Gray—the young Scottish poet who came with me to seek his fortune in the great world of London, and on the very threshold of his career was smitten down to die a lingering death.
     Conceive a little narrow-shouldered man of between forty and fifty, with long, straight hair, a magnificent forehead, dark yet brilliant eyes, and a manner full of alertness and intellectual grace. This was George Lewes, whom Douglas Jerrold had once stigmatised as “the ugliest man in London,” averring at the same time that he had caused the chimpanzee in the Zoological Gardens to die “out of jealousy, because there existed close by a creature more hideous than itself!” But George Lewes, though not an Adonis, was certainly not ugly. The great defects of his face were the coarse, almost sensual mouth, with its protruding teeth partly covered by a bristly moustache, and the small retreating chin; but when the face lighted up, and the eyes sparkled, and the mouth began its eloquent discourse, every imperfection was forgotten. Conceive, next, the tenth Muse, or Sibyl, lounging in an arm-chair and shading her face idly with a hand-screen; a powerful-looking, middle-aged woman, with a noticeable nose and chin, a low forehead, a fresh complexion, and full and very mobile mouth. Dress, on this occasion, a plainly cut, tight-fitting dress of blue cashmere, fastened at the throat with a cameo brooch. This was “Mawrian Evans,” as Carlyle called her, the George Eliot of the novels. She realized in face and form the description I afterward gave to her in the “Session of the Poets”

George Eliot gazed on the company boldly
With the limbs of a sylph and the head of John Locke!

     I had been particularly struck by her resemblance to Locke’s well-known portrait, engraved as a frontispiece to the famous “Essay.” At that time her figure was graceful to elegance. When I last saw her, shortly before her husband’s death, she stooped painfully as she walked, and wore an old-fashioned crinoline.
     “Tell that story to the public, too,” cried Lewes, when I had finished my tale. “Poor fellow! What a pity he ever came to London.”
     “Lord Houghton says that your friend was very like the busts of Shelley,” said George Eliot, in her deep contralto voice.
     “Very like,” I answered; “he was curiously feminine in form, and had the most wonderful eyes in the world. Even Tito yonder was not more beautiful,” I added, pointing to one of the proof engravings of Du Maurier’s illustrations to “Romola,” which hung framed over the mantelpiece.
     “I don’t think, by the way,” observed Lewes, “that David Gray can be classed among the true victims of the Babylonian monster, London; at any rate, he was not exactly a literary struggler, at the mercy of what his countryman Alexander Smith called

The terrible city whose neglect is death,
Whose smile is fame!

He was struck down before he began the struggle at all; indeed, I have no doubt whatever, from your description of him, that the strumous taint, or predisposition, was in him from birth, and that, under any circumstances, his fate would have been the same.”
     George Eliot— Quem Di diligunt, etc. After all, is not Ganymede to be envied? Better to be snatched up suddenly into the heaven of heavens, in all the prime of youth and happiness, than to grow old in a world which is full of sorrow, and in which old age is the least beautiful of human phenomena.
     Lewes—You are quite right there. It is the exaggeration of sentiment which makes the poets give old age a sort of moral halo. There is nothing so pitiful, so horrible, as the slow and certain decay of the human faculties.
     Myself—But is not that decay beautiful too?
     Lewes—Apart from the pathetic fallacy, as Ruskin calls it, not at all. Your favorite Catullus describes it perfectly:

Cana tempus anilitas
Omnia omnes annuit!

     In other words and Scotch ones, “a’ nodding, nid-nid-nodding”; a condition, in short, of ever-increasing imbecility, or vacuity.
     George Eliot (smiling)—We are wandering toward deep waters. But it is quite true, I think, that the gradual obliteration of the human faculties and senses, one by one, is the strongest argument against the popular conception of a personal immortality.
     Lewes—Certainly.
     George Eliot—Not only do men, under circumstances of physical decay, become feeble and imbecile; when a moral sense remains, it frequently becomes perverted. I have seen an old gentleman, hitherto known as an immaculate and honest merchant, gradually acquire habits of kleptomania, and another, well known for his benevolence, become spiteful, almost homicidal. We are absolutely the creatures of our secretions. So true is this, that the slightest disturbance of the cerebral circulation, say a temporary congestion, will pervert the entire stream of moral sentiments.
     Myself—All that is doubtless very correct. I hold, nevertheless, that the soul, the Ego, is invulnerable, despite all temporary aberrations—clouds obscuring the moon’s disc, so to speak.
     George Eliot—Say rather, disintegrations within the very substance of the moon itself. Where the very substance of the luminary is decaying, what hope is there for the permanence of your—moonlight?
     Myself—The analogy is imperfect; but to pursue it, the lunar elements remain indestructible, and after transformations, may cohere again into some splendid identity.
     George Eliot—Moonlight is sunlight reflected on a material mirror; thought, consciousness, life itself, are conditions dependent on the physical medium, and on the brightness of the external environment. Cogito, ergo sum should be transposed and altered. Sum materies, ergo cogito.
     Lewes—And yet, after all, there are psychic phenomena which seem to evade the material definition!
     George Eliot—Not one. And science has established clearly that, while functional disturbance may be evanescent, structural destruction is absolute and irremediable. An organism, once destroyed, is incapable of resurrection.
     Myself—Then life is merely mechanism, after all.
     George Eliot—Undoubtedly. It is very pitiful, but absolutely true.
     Lewes—But what mechanism! How wonderful, how perfect in its adaptation of means to ends! Even if we hold thought to be a secretion, does that lessen the beauty of its manifestations?
     Myself—Or the mystery of its origin?
     Lewes—Humph!
     George Eliot—The mystery, doubtless, consists only in our ignorance. There was a time, not very long ago, when men knew nothing of that marvellous truth, the circulation of the blood. In time, no doubt, we shall discover the precise process by which we think.
     So speaking, the Sibyl glanced, not without admiration, at her husband, who was engaged at that very period, as I knew, in experiments concerning the mechanism of thought. He had long before abandoned the metaphysicians, as bewildering and misleading guides, and had completed, in the last edition of his “History of Philosophy,” his survey of the progress of thought from its past stage of credulity to its last stage of verification. Now, my sympathies were strongly in the other direction, though I had little or no enthusiasm for what may be termed the “ich and the nicht ich schools of metaphysics.” So I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, saying something to this effect; that if thought was simply mechanism, as they suggested, man was no better than the “beasts that perish.”
     At this moment there appeared upon the scene another individual, entering quietly through the drawing-room door, which was partly open. The newcomer was a dog, a splendid bull-terrier, who belonged to George Eliot, and generally accompanied Lewes in his walks about the neighborhood. He came in with a languid wag of the tail, and a general air of importance, glanced patronizingly at me, yawned lazily, and stretched himself on the hearthrug at the feet of his mistress.
     George Eliot—“The beasts that perish.” Here is somebody who, if he could speak, would express a strong opinion upon that subject; for he is wise in his generation, and magnanimous almost beyond human conception. Do you know what he did once, before he was given to us? The friend to whom he belonged had a little boy, who inherited in full measure the predilections of the archetypal ape.
     Lewes (parenthetically)—The true and only substitute for Plato’s archetypal Man!
     George Eliot—One day, our friend had some acquaintances to luncheon. As they sat together they were startled by a sharp cry of pain from underneath the table; and lifting the edge of the table-cloth, they saw the small human monkey squatted on the carpet, in the act of slitting the dog’s ear with a large pair of scissors! Out crept the dog, panting and bleeding, followed by his little tormentor. Papa, of course, was very indignant, and seizing the child, who began to sob with terror, announced his intention of administering condign punishment, which he would have done instantly had not the victim interfered. Wagging his tail (just as he is doing now, for he knows I’m telling about him!) the noble fellow rose up, put his paws on the child’s shoulders, and affectionately licked his face; then looking at his master, said plainly, in the canine deaf and dumb alphabet, “Don’t beat him! please don’t! He’s only an undeveloped human being; he knows no better, and—I love him!” Could human kindness and magnanimity go further? Yet I don’t suppose you will contend that the poor dog’s loving instinct was enough to distinguish him from the other “beasts that perish.”
     Myself—I’m not sure! Why should not even a dog have a soul like any other respectable Christian?
     Lewes—Why not, indeed! I have known many so-called Christians who have neither the amiability nor the discrimination of this dog.
     George Eliot—Then here we halt on the horns of a dilemma. Every one with a large acquaintance among decent and “gentleman-like” dogs (as Launce would put it) must admit their share in the highest humanities; and what is true of them is true, to a greater or less extent, of animals generally. Yet shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability? Shall we, who are even as they, though we wag our tongues and not our tails, demand a special Providence and a selfish salvation?
     Lewes (laughing)— Buchanan, like all young men, is an optimist! His spiritual scheme embraces every form of existence, as well as the whole human race.
     George Eliot—And why, even, the whole human race? Go into the slums and dens of the city, visit our prisons and inspect our criminals, not to speak of the inmates of our lunatic asylums; and what do you find? Beasts in human likeness, monsters with appetites and instincts, often even the cleverness, of men and women. Are these immortal souls too, independent of physical limitations, and journeying to an eternal Home?
     Myself—Certainly. There is no form of humanity, however degraded, which is beyond the possibility of moral regeneration.
     Lewes—Optimism with a vengeance! Optimism which leaves out of sight all the great physical factors of moral conduct—hereditary disease, cerebral malformations, thought-perverting congestions, all the endless ills that flesh is heir to. I’m afraid, after all, that the dream of a personal immortality is a selfish one. It would come, in the long run, merely to the survival of the fittest, who would build their heavenly mansion on a hecatomb of human failure. . . . But there, we’ve talked enough of things at present inscrutable. Come out into the garden, and soothe your mechanism with a cigar.
     We left the Sibyl to her meditations, and walked out into the open air. As we strolled smoking along the garden walks, we heard faintly, as from a distance, the murmur of the great city.
     “Do you really believe,” I said presently, “that the divine thought of Shakespeare was a mere secretion, and that the last word of Science will be one of sheer negation and despair?”
     He looked at me thoughtfully, then watched the wreaths of smoke as they curled from his mouth up into the air.
     “Man is predoomed to aspiration, as the smoke flies upward. The last word of Science will not be spoken for many a century yet. Who can guess what it will be?”

                                                                                                                                 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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From the New-York Daily Tribune - 1 February, 1885 - p.4.

THE LANDLORD-SHOOTERS.
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ROBERT BUCHANAN’S PERSONAL EXPERIENCES.
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     In the autumn of 1880, I rented a small furnished lodge, with a large stretch of somewhat barren “grouse-shooting” at Mulrany, County Mayo, a wild and lonely place flanked by gloomy mountains and looking southward on the island-studded waters of Clew Bay. It was by no means my first visit to Ireland, for I had resided during the greater part of several winters in the still more desolate region of Erris, on those lonely shores which look out on the stags of Broadhaven, but thitherto I had found everything peaceful enough and had learned to love and sympathize with a kindly and much-enduring tenantry. At Mulrany, however, it was different. Though the great outrages which startled the world had not yet begun, trouble was in the air; men came and went with a threatening look of pre-occupation; and the very day of our arrival was signalized by one of those wild deeds which had already earned for the district an unenviable notoriety.
     For weeks past, Mr. Smith, Lord Sligo’s agent, had been warned that he would be “shot,” whenever he ventured upon the gloomy road which winds between the mountains, from Ballycroy to Mulrany. What his precise offence was I was never able to learn, but for one reason or another, he was a “marked” man. With a characteristic refinement of politeness, his secret enemies had notified him of his doom, had indicated the place, and conditionally the time of his assassination. Nothing, it will be confessed, could have been more considerate. Mr. Smith seems to have understood his danger perfectly, though he frequently made light of it; and for some time he was careful not to venture on the scene fixed for the murder. At last, however, he found it absolutely necessary to travel along that very road.
     On the afternoon in question Mr. Smith dined with the Rev. Mr. Ramsay, minister of Ballycroy. He lingered for some time over his wine, but finally, when the evening shades were falling, ordered his horse and car to be made ready and prepared to go.
     “Why hurry away so early?” asked the hospitable minister, who knew nothing of the state of affairs. “It is going to be a fine night.”
     “Just so,” replied the agent, smiling rather nervously; “but the fact is, I have an appointment on the highway beyond Ballycroy.”
     “Indeed!—rather a lonely place for an appointment!”
     “The lonelier the better, since it is an appointment to be murdered!” returned Mr. Smith, producing from his pocket the last threatening letter, in which the place was so ingenuously specified. “On the whole, you will agree that I had better be going before the night has entirely fallen.”
     Rejecting all entreaties to remain till morning, and pass through the dangerous neighborhood in the full light of day, the courageous agent mounted his Irish car, and drove away. His only companion (with the exception of the driver, a grim plucky fellow, famous for his narrow escapes when conducting “marked” passengers from place to place) was his own son, a youth between eighteen and nineteen years of age. Mr. Smith carried loaded pistols, young Smith was armed, curiously enough, with a small rifle, such as is used for shooting rooks.
     They passed along rapidly in the shadow of the hills, through such a scene of desolation as is to be found only in Ireland, between gloomy reaches of bog and moorland, and often along the very edge of a great estuary of the sea. Here and there was a mud cabin, with troglodytes clustering at the door; but upon the lonely road itself, they scarcely met a soul. Nothing happened till they passed Ballyveeny, a desolate and deserted lodge about midway between Ballycroy and Mulrany. Here the road winds right under the mountains. The scene was forbidding in the extreme, and it was already almost dark.
     Nevertheless, they were congratulating themselves on their safety, and smiling at the danger which they now thought they had exaggerated, when suddenly, as they passed over a small bridge, spanning a tiny runlet, wild figures rose on the roadside, and the ambuscade was revealed!
     Bang! bang! bang! went several guns; slugs and bullets whistled in the air. The horse started off at full gallop, with shots raining round its head. Strange to say, not a soul was a penny the worse! But young Smith, before the car had flown many yards, jumped from his seat, and with rifle in hand, stood, ready to face the enemy, in the road-side.
     By this time they were in full flight; all save one had disappeared; but that one, running up a small hillock twenty yards away, and gripping a two-barrelled gun, was preparing to turn and fire a parting shot. In a moment the boy covered him, and fired. The ruffian fell forward on his face, stone-dead—shot through the heart!
     Meantime the driver had reined up his horse, some hundreds of yards away. Young Smith ran on, joined his father, and explained what had occurred. Then they drove on rapidly to Mulrany, gave information to the police, and hastened on to Westport, twenty miles away.
     The news soon spread far and wide. Before the police reached the spot some of us galloped over, headed by young Dr. Croly, from the Island of Achill. We found the dead man lying where he had fallen, with his gun under him, and his right forefinger crooked in the act to reach the trigger. One barrel was loaded with heavy slugs.
     “Sure he’s as dead as a door-nail,” said Doctor Tom, turning the ghastly face up to the light. “It was a clean shot anyhow, bad luck to him!”
     The dead man was a powerful, thick-set fellow, about forty years old, with a good forehead, long thick-set jaw, and small deep-sunken eyes. His dress was coarse but not ragged, and on his great feet were heavy laced-up boots.
     Presently a party of Irish constabulary arrived with a stretcher, and while they were placing the dead man upon it, we made a cursory examination of the spot where the would-have-been assassins had lain in ambush. It was a heathery nook, or hollow, close to the road, and lying in it, they must have been totally hidden from any passers-by. But from the marks and signs about, it appeared that they had been there for some time, perhaps for several nights. The grass and heather were beaten down where they had lain, fragments of loose paper were scattered here and there, and lying perdu among the grass was an empty whiskey bottle.
     “Sure, now,” cried Doctor Tom, “isn’t it a miracle how they missed the car? A sober man might have hit it with a stone, for they weren’t a dozen yards away. But I’ll go bail for it, the spalpeens were roaring drunk. Devil a one of them could have hit a barn door!”
     And, indeed, that seemed the only possible explanation of the agent’s miraculous escape. The men, tired with waiting for their victim, had taken liberally to the bottle, and had possibly been startled, by the car’s approach, from a semi-drunken sleep. They were obviously amateurs, exhibiting in their want of finish and awkwardness of method an inexperience unusual among accomplished landlord shooters.
     That night, the first we spent in Mulrany lodge, was memorable to the ladies of our party. All night the population thronged upon the roads, “keening” and uttering threats of vengeance. Our door was barricaded, and our guns stood loaded, ready in case of emergencies. I fear the fair ones got little sleep.
     Fortunately, the dead man was a stranger in the district, whom no one knew; otherwise, the result might have been serious. After-inquiry revealed that he was a sort of ’ostler, hailing from a distant part of Mayo, and that he had received a good round sum to do the “job” which had ended so unfortunately for himself.
     Next day, I strolled round to the police barrack. The body was lying in the stone-paven back yard, the face turned up to the open sky and smeared with dark gore. All around, the place was like a slaughter-house. A post-mortem had been made by the local doctor (not our lively friend from Achill) who, for lack of proper instruments, had simply used a chisel! The blood, which, after the mortal wound, had extravased into the internal cavities, had spouted forth in a thick fountain when those cavities were opened. It was a hideous sight. Curious it was to note again the forefinger of the right hand still crooked in the act to touch the trigger, and now fixed as hard as stone by rigor mortis.
     At the inquest, which took place a little later at Ballycroy, a verdict was returned acquitting young Smith of intentional murder. He and his father were brought over under strong escorts of police, amid the execrations of the populace. It rained threatening letters. Besides the two Smiths every one of the jurymen received them. Some endeavor was made to trace the accomplices of the dead man, but without avail. One of the jurymen, a gentleman popular in the district, deposed at the first meeting that he recognized the gun found in the dead man’s possession, as a gun belonging to an innkeeper in Ballycroy. Questioned and cross-questioned, he swore that he could not be mistaken. “I know the marks of it,” he said, “and I’ve often had it in my hand.” But at the second meeting, a few days later, his memory entirely failed him. When the gun was placed before him he looked at it vacantly, and when asked if he recognized it, sadly shook his head. Taxed with his former statement, he refused in any way to corroborate it; “Sure I must have been dreaming, or in drink,” he said. Of course the explanation of the change was very simple. The gentleman had been informed that short work would certainly be made of him, if he persisted in having so good a memory.
     Nothing more was ever known of the planners of this outrage. The excitement of the people gradually died away. Young Smith quietly left the country, for a time at least, and was careful not to leave his address; and Mr. Smith, senior, betook himself to Dublin.
     Meantime, we had become quite at home in Mulrany, and we soon realized that life and property, apart from agrarian outrages, were quite as safe there as in any part of the world. Yet it was a “warm” district. A Scotch farmer had been shot dead there at broad noon, one Sunday, when seated on his car, with his wife by his side. His wife remained on the farm, a formidable “widdy” woman. If trespassers or cattle came upon her land she drove them off savagely, and, when the peasants remonstrated, she cried, “You killed my husband, you cowards! Kill me, too, if you have the courage!” Curiously enough, they were very gentle with her, and respected her grief.
     In my own fishing and shooting expeditions I became very familiar with the landlord shooters. One of them, whom I frequently employed as gillie, fisherman or boatman, was notorious in the district as the man who had been chosen to polish off Mr. Granite (as I shall call him), a rich Englishman who owned most of the land about Mulrany. O’Connor, my factotum, was a little, pale, pertinacious fellow of about thirty, good tempered, with a deal of native wit and drollery.
     I questioned him more than once as to the truth of the rumors about himself; I pointed out the wickedness and the folly of assassination. He answered me with a smile that was childlike and bland.
     “Sure, now, your honor, I put it to yourself. What harm would there be to kill a tyrant?”
     But when I went further and questioned him of the reasons which made him hate his own landlord, and mine, so much, he became transformed. With moist eyes and quivering lips, he told me such a tale of his own experiences as almost converted me, for the moment, to his own avenging creed.
     All this time the said Mr. Granite was going about under police protection. He himself went armed to the teeth, and a cockney servant of his, also primed like a mitrailleuse, generally attended him. O’Connor himself delighted in perceiving the especial terror with which the landlord regarded him whenever they happened to meet. On one occasion, when I was out seal-shooting, with O’Connor and a stalwart Connaught man in attendance, we saw, passing along the shore some hundreds of yards away, a strange procession. First crawled a car with several armed policemen. Next came a high dog-cart with Mr. Granite driving, and the cockney servant, a pistol in each hand, seated at his side and craning his neck to search every corner of the road. Last came a couple more policemen with rifles, on foot.
     At sight of the procession my two boatmen exploded with laughter.
     “It’s a mighty fine funeral,” said O’Connor, “and Sam the footman looks in mourning for his master already. Sure now, your honor, you’d never like to be drawn about like that!”
     “Try a shot at him, sor!” cried the other, grinning savagely and pointing to the rifle at my side.
     “Excuse me,” I replied, “I am shooting seals, not landlords!”
     Here O’Connor, fairly trembling, but forcing a sickly smile, bent toward me eagerly. His face was quite white and bloodless, and his whole manner had undergone a transformation.
     “Lend me the gun, your honor!” he exclaimed.
     “Certainly not. What on earth do you want to do?”
     “Just to fire one shot at him, for fun to myself! I wouldn’t harm the omadhaun this turn but whistle a bullet clane over his head. Mona mondiaul, how that would scare him!”
     Seeing that I would be no party to such a joke (if he really meant it as a joke, which I very much doubt), O’Connor, still pale and trembling, with quivering nostrils, watched the procession till it faded out of sight. Then he began rowing wildly and crooning to himself some wild song in the Irish brogue, with a refrain in which his companion joined from time to time.
     “What’s that you’re singing, O’Connor?” I asked presently.
     He leant upon his oar and looked at me with an ominous smile.
     “Sure it’s a song of old times, your honor, about a battle between an O’Connor and one that he had sworn to kill.”
     “You rascal,” I cried, half laughing, “you’re as bloodthirsty as a carrion crow.”
     “Bad luck to him that made me what I am!” he answered. “It’s neither God nor man would save him if I had my fingers at his throat. But the dark nights are coming, thank the Lord!”
     I knew both the phrase and the formula, and on the whole I was rather thankful, at that moment, not to be wearing Mr. Granite’s shoes.

                                                                                                                   ROBERT BUCHANAN.
Copyright, 1885.

[Note:
Harriett Jay mentions this incident in Chapter XXI of her biography of Buchanan, but places it immediately after the failure of Light (which would have been October 1878). Buchanan also gets the year wrong. The attack on Mr. Smith occurred on 30th September, 1879. Press reports of the shooting are available here:

The Freeman’s Journal (2 October, 1879 - p.5)

Reynolds’s Newspaper (5 October, 1879 - p.5).]

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From the New-York Daily Tribune - 12 July, 1885 - p.8.

LITERARY BOHEMIA.
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THE OLD WAYS AND THE NEW.
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Copyright, 1885.

     “I have lived too long,” said old Jack Farringford, leaning back in his chair and puffing from time to time at the long “churchwarden” pipe he held in his right hand. “I have survived all my hallucinations. I am a poor, frayed, worn-out morsel, on the ragged edge of your accursed gentility. One consolation alone remains to me, that Bohemia once existed, and that I belonged to it. Humph! won’t you try a pipe? No, of course you prefer a cigar! What will I drink? Champagne? Not if I know it! John, give me a pint of your very best ale in the pewter. . . That, sir, was the liquor we used to drink in the old days. It was good enough for Thackeray and Jerrold, and it’s good enough for me!”
     Old Jack (who still exists, and long may he remain, to brighten the sunshine!) was in one of his retrospective, not to say grumbling, moods. His rubicund, weatherbeaten face, rough as a pippin, shone angrily under his hair of frosty silver; his neck moved impatiently within its old-fashioned stock; his double-breasted waistcoat was half open, revealing glimpses of somewhat questionable linen. On the table beside him lay his wideawake hat, and by the side of the fire stood his well-known gingham umbrella. He was seated in the smoking room of the old “Cheshire Cat,” in Fleet-st., with its grime-encrusted windows, its well-worn mahogany tables, and its boarded floor strewn with clean sand. Before him blazed a good old English fire, for the month was December and the weather without bitterly cold.
     Facing him was a young man of about thirty, with sandy hair and whiskers, and a pinche-nez on his nose. He was attired in the height of fashion, in clothes of West-End cut and irreproachable linen. He looked rather ill-at-ease in that old-fashioned room, and glanced from time to time solicitously at the sawdust clinging to his patent leather boots. This was the well-known Mr. Franklyn Phipps, novelist, journalist, essayist, and leader-writer, who was known to the public as a ferocious Radical, and who dated his correspondence from the Reform Club.
     “You must dine with me some day soon at the club,” said Mr. Phipps, selecting a cigar from an elegant case emblazoned with his initials.
     “No, dear boy, I’d rather not,” responded the old Bohemian. “Your modern clubs are too genteel for old Jack Farringford. Even the Garrick, they tell me, is now given over to the snobs. In the old days we used to dine together here, or at the Pig and Whistle. Chops and potatoes were good enough for us; such chops! such potatoes! Then pipes and grog to follow, with plenty of free-and-easy talk, and now and then a song. There were giants in those days, and they didn’t live on kickshaws.
     “Come, Jack, be honest,” said Phipps when the waiter had left them. “In the days you speak of, the old Bohemian days, the literary man was not—a gentleman.”
     “You mean he was not a snob, sir,” growled Jack, after a long pull at the pewter quart.
     Phipps.—I mean nothing of the kind. I mean that he was a loafer and a night-bird with many disreputable proclivities. To begin with, he never washed.
     Jack (thumping the table.)—That’s a libel!—
     Phipps.—Well, he lived chiefly on borrowed money, and never paid his debts.
     Jack.—Humph! What are you driving at, youngster?
     Phipps.—Why, this, old man. The literary man of the last generation was impecunious and disreputable for several reasons: (1) because he was improvident and too fond of scenes like this; (2) because his want of caste made him lose self-respect; thirdly and chiefly, because, unless he had by some miracle achieved a great reputation, he was badly paid for his work. Just take your prime favorite, Douglas Jerrold, as an example. He never earned an absolute independence, and one of his plays brought him in—something under ten pounds sterling.
     Jack.—And that ten-pounder is worth all the thousand-pounders you modern duffers have ever written! Men worked for fame, then, sir, not money.
     Phipps—Let us keep to the point, if you please. Your extinct Bohemian (for I grant you he is extinct) being of convivial habits generally, knew nothing of business. Instead of taking his goods to the best market, and insisting on an adequate remuneration, he was perpetually discounting his future, and borrowing money (from the publisher in the shape of advances) at ruinous interest. What was the result? He could not or would not buy decent clothes, he could not or would not meet his pecuniary obligations, he neglected all sanitary precautions by turning night into day, and so he became a social outlaw. Now, social outlawry means impecuniosity, for society is invariably liberal in giving money to the individuals whose work commands its respect. In fact, the standard of a profession is, after all, the extent of its pecuniary emoluments. . . .
     Jack—I heard Sterling Coyne once say (“Filthy Lucre,” Jerrold called him, punning on his name and alluding to his general appearance) that literature would become merely a vulgar trade as soon as literary men ceased to be a class apart, with a freemasonry of its won. And by the Lord Harry, what the dear old boy said was true!
     Phipps—Try and follow me to the end of my argument.
     Jack—O d—n your argument! John, bring me another pint of beer and another screw of tobacco.
     Phipps—If you will carefully examine the literature of your so-called Bohemia, one peculiarity will strike you forcibly—that, with all its cleverness, it was remarkably “shoppy.” A great deal, for instance, of what Reach and the Broughs left behind them is written in a sort of Fleet-st. argot, only to be comprehended by the adept. Each little unwashed Bohemian wrote, in fact, as if Fleet-st. were the centre of the universe, and he himself one of the suns of the only actual solar system. Consequently, the literature of Bohemia is narrow with all its pretence of broadness, affected and selfish with all its good-humored swagger. Nowadays, on the other hand, we literary men perceive that there is a world beyond the little one in which we work, and when we go into society we take off our working clothes and avoid talking “shop.”
     Jack (hotly)—The literary man who is ashamed of his profession is a cad, sir! I know the precious animalculæ. Met one of them at a dinner the other day; was beguiled into going, and found myself among nobs and snobs. Little Brown, who wrote the “Adventures of a Younger Son” and composed those fiery poems about Italy, was there. I was ass enough to congratulate him. “O yaas,” he drawled fixing his eyeglass,” I do a little of that sort of thing occasionally. They tell me you’re a Suffolk man, Mr. Farringford? I was down there last year, staying with Lord Mangold-Wurzel. Doosid good shooting, I assure you!”
     Phipps (laughing)—Brown is a snob, I grant you. Still, society honors literature, even in him. Turn now to the modern newspaper man, and see how he has emerged into affluence and influence. A modern editor, instead of writing his “copy” in a debtor’s prison like Shandon of immortal memory, may be the companion and confidant of princes. A prosperous newspaper man meets at his club—a club of gentlemen—the great leaders of his party, and is recognized as their equal, and in some cases, as their superior. Why, I have seen even John Bright, who is not the most approachable of politicians, dropping into The Spectator office, to consult with Townsend, and just before Lord Beaconsfield died, I met him on the parade at Brighton, with Monty Corry hanging on one arm and the editor of The Eagle leaning on the other.
     Jack—And you call that advancement for the literary profession! Why, damme sir, not one of the men I am lamenting would have touched Dizzy with a pair of tongs!
     Phipps—Come, come, Jack, he used to be one of yourselves; that is to say, he hung about the purlieus of Grub Street, and scribbled for a living.
     Jack—He was never a true Bohemian. From first to last, the Jews took care of him, and supplied him with plenty of money. Leigh Hunt (one of us, sir!) once told me a story of how Lady Blessington, going into Hookham the librarian’s on the arm of Count d’Orsay, met the younger Dizzy sailing forth, covered with furs and resplendent in jewelry. Entering the shop they found the father, old Isaac, shabbily dressed, poking among the shelves. “We have just passed your son,” said the countess. “O indeed!” grunted Isaac. “How charming he is,” proceeded the lady, “and one meets him everywhere. You must give him a very liberal allowance, to make so great a show!” “Me, madam?” cried the old man. “I never give him a shilling! Where he gets his money God only can tell; but the rascal knows better than to come to me!”
     Phipps—I was not championing Lord Beaconsfield. I was merely saying—
     Jack (interrupting)—But you might do worse than champion him, after all, sir. Dizzy had his good points, which you confounded Radicals generally look over. He never forgot the literary class, and that he once belonged to it. The Grand Old Man, on the other hand, is too scrupulous to be generous, and too high minded to be grateful. If a man helped Dizzy or Dizzy’s cause along, no matter how modestly, Dizzy remembered that man. He was a snob, sir, but with the soul of a Bohemian. Gladstone is a Reformer,—with the soul of a snob!
     Phipps—That’s hard hitting, but so far as Lord Beaconsfield is concerned, there is truth in what you say. I think all we literary men have reason to be grateful to the litterateur who stood up for the rights of the members of his class as “gentlemen.” But to return to the point from which we started, you cannot deny that authors, artists, and hoc genus omne are much better off in a worldly sense than they used to be in your old Bohemia.
     Jack—They have more money, and less personal influence; more versatility, and less talent; more politeness of manners, and less good nature. The freemasonry of the craft, of which I have already spoken, is extinct. They don’t care a brass farthing for each other. Why, sir, when one of the old set was ill, and had no one to nurse him, I have known us bearded men take turns about in the sick room; and if he wanted money, we sent round the hat, and every man gave what he could afford. Now, if an author is in trouble, you refer him to the Literary Fund.
     Phipps—No author of any talent, if he has proper business habits, has any right to need such assistance.
     Jack—That’s your cant!—Then again, your modern literary cad is required to be a moral person, who respects all the social proprieties!
     Phipps (smiling)—Would you wish him to be an immoral person, who doesn’t?
     Jack—No, sir! You know very well what I mean. Society has no concern with a literary man’s private life, or his little personal weaknesses.
     Phipps—Now you’re inconsistent. Old Bohemians used to parade all that.
     Jack—Nothing of the sort, sir. At any rate, they bore and forbore. They didn’t measure a fellow’s genius by the cut of his coat, by his domestic relations, or by his financial troubles. They reverenced the divine spark, even in a rapscallion. Not many years ago, when the author of “Orion”—Richard Hengist Horne, sir, a literary giant—wanted a beggarly pension, Gladstone declined to give one to him. On what grounds, do you ask? Because it was said that Horne, when he went to Australia, deserted his wife and left her behind him! What the deuce had Gladstone to do with Horne’s wife? Would Peel have acted like that? or Dizzy? No, sir; because Peel was a man with a big Bohemian heart, and Dizzy had at least acquired the rudiments of a Bohemian education!
     Mr. Phipps looked at his watch, and rose to his feet.
     “It is no use talking,” he said; “I see I shan’t convert you. I must go now. I’ve got to dine with Millais and Sir Garnet Wolseley, at the club.”
     The two men walked down stairs, and out of the court in which the tavern was situated into Fleet-st. There Mr. Phipps found his brougham waiting.
     “Good bye, Jack,” he said. “After all, Bohemia must have been a pleasant place when such good fellows as you made merry in it.”
     “You may swear to that, dear boy,” returned the other. “Literary men were happy then, and honest, and noblehearted, and truly independent. By the way,” he added sinking his voice to a whisper, “you might lend me a couple of sovereigns, till we meet again.”
     Mr. Phipps laughed, and slipped the money into his friend’s hand; then stepping into his brougham, he was driven rapidly away. Jack watched the vehicle till it disappeared, then shook his head thoughtfully as if regretting the degeneracy of the modern literary class, and jingling the sovereigns in his pocket, turned back to the “Cheshire Cat.”

                                                                                                                               ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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From the New-York Daily Tribune - 23 August, 1885 - p.4.

DINING WITH TROLLOPE.
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A RICHMOND FESTIVAL.
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ROBERT BUCHANAN RECALLS SOME LITERARY CONVERSATION.
Copyright, 1885.

     It was nearly twenty years ago, in the early days of the famous Review, which had already stultified its title, and been announced, to the huge satisfaction of Hibernian thinkers, as “The Fortnightly Review, published monthly.” Lewes and George Eliot had devised it (on the plan of the Revue des Deux Mondes), Lewes himself was editing it, a limited company with Trollope and Fred Chapman as chief directors was backing it, and things just then looked so fresh and sunny, capital being still abundant, that somebody’s suggestion of a little fortnightly dinner of the staff, to take place at the “Star and Garter,” was eagerly accepted and carried out.
     Few of my American readers, perhaps, knew the famous “Star and Garter” at Richmond, or if they know it now, it is in the days of its decadence. Twenty years ago it was the most charming suburban retreat in the great metropolis, the place par excellence for merry wedding breakfasts, cosey dinners, friendly gatherings, and sweet flirtations. The merry place is changed now altogether; or, perhaps, it is I, who write, am changed!
     Be that as it may, I was the youngest of the regular contributors to The Fortnightly Review, and in due time I was invited to dine with the wise company of authors at Richmond. Thither I went, a young savage in complete modern war-paint—dress-suit, gibus hat, lavender kid gloves; and the whole affair was so pleasant that, even after this space of time, it is still fresh in my memory.
     It was quite an informal gathering. Lewes, who usually occupied the chair, was too ill to come down that day, and Anthony Trollope took his place. I saw Trollope for the first time in the dressing-room, rubbing his face on a jack-towel; a bluff, thick-set, rubicund John Bull of a man, with a pugilistic manner of coming up to time. He was then in the zenith of his fame, as the author of “Framley Parsonage” and the “Small House at Allington.” I met him frequently afterward, and it was always a puzzle to me how so completely unideal a man was capable of producing the delicate touches to be seen in some of his books. He was saturated through and through with commonplace, and was perhaps the one writer in the world who could write a book about the “West Indies and the Spanish Main” without putting into it one poetical passage, one imaginative line. A sound, hearty, honest, good fellow for all that, he won a name in current literature by keen observation, business tact and hard work.
     Trollope, then, was in the chair, square-shouldered, belligerent, and as the Greeks phrased it, “dish-and-all swallowing.” Facing him, Fred Chapman, the publisher, to be carefully distinguished from the propagandist John Chapman, for whom Marian Evans translated Leben Jesu. Among the others present were Russell, the famous Times correspondent, agile “Jack” Russell, shrewd, worthy, witty and refined, as became a person who had bob-and-nob’d with generals and kings; John Dennis, the essayist, a delicate, gentle, fragile man, born rich and dowered with a love for literature as well as worldly goods; Doyle, the artist; Richard Hutton, known as Spectator Hutton, being co-editor of the well-known Broad Church journal, then rapidly coming to the front as an organ of the higher criticism; and others whose names and persons I have now forgotten.
     Much of the talk, too, has now quite faded from my memory; but I remember distinctly how, at one portion of the evening, over the walnuts and the wine, Trollope, port-warmed and bellicose, loudly proclaimed his belief that one modern poet, and one only, was fit to be read by sane strong men and to be hailed as a modern Homer. That one was Walter Scott.
     Warm as was my admiration for the famous border minstrel’s prose, I smiled, I believe, at the idea of calling him a great poet. Our chairman caught my smile and squared his shoulders.
     “Are you reading Scott?” he asked, with a good-humored scowl.
     “Not at present,” I answered, somewhat superciliously, adding, “I got over the Scott complaint and the Shelley fever, with other infantine maladies, long ago.”
     Trollope.—Scott was a great poet, young man. Boys do not understand him. Boys read twaddle. Men require strong meat, sir, not lollipops. Scott is the first poet of the century, and whoever doubts it is either a boy or a fool.
     Hutton (a grim, deep-voiced man, gently glancing up through his eyeglass).—I should certainly not call Scott the first poet of the century.
     Trollope (gruffly).—You wouldn’t eh! Humph!
     Hutton.—At the same time, I think he has been underrated by modern criticism. His descriptive power, and his skill in weaving action into narrative, were extraordinary.
     Trollope.—I should think they were! Just look at those lines descriptive of the battle of Flodden. You see the fight, you hear the clash of swords, you sweep up and down with the surge of brawny fighting men. There is nothing like it out of Homer! Russell here is not more realistic in describing a modern shindy.
     Russell (quoting, with a little military bow).—But lacking the accomplishment of verse, etc.
     Trollope.—Most poetry is mere jingle. Scott jingles, but he swings you along at a trot like one of his own moss-troopers. His health! Walter Scott’s health! Drink it, young man, and pray for the years of discretion, when you will think as I do!
     We drank the toast merrily, and presently the chairman exclaimed:
     “Horace is another supreme poet! And why? Because he is the prince of sane, healthy, gentlemen, witty as Horace Walpole, but sound as a fox-hunting squire, totus teres atque rotundus.
     John Dennis.—Is not Horace essentially the poet of commonplace?
     Trollope (thundering).—No, sir. “Are you reading Horace?” he demanded, again addressing me.
     Myself.—Why, no; I infinitely prefer Catullus.
     Trollope.—Catullus was a trifler, an erotic noodle!
     Myself.—Surely he was something more! His Atys and his ode on the nuptials of Julia and Manlius are poems, not extracts from a book of truisms.
     Russell (slyly).—He was dreadfully improper, wasn’t he? I think I remember something about a certain Lesbia and the descendants of Remus!
     Myself.—The poems about Lesbia are the completest and supremest record of absolute personal passion in all literature. They reach the very depths of self-abasement and touch the very heaven of love.
     Trollope.—Somebody said that the best of a poet was the number of quotable passages afforded by his works. Judged in this way, Catullus is a mere poetaster, and Horace a great genius.
     Dennis.—Such a test would place Pope a head and shoulders above Shelley or even Milton!
     Trollope.—As he was, sir! Poetry is common sense, or nothing. The great poets are Homer, Horace, Shakespeare, Pope, Goethe, Scott, Burns. Popular opinion, which is generally right about such matters, decided the question long ago.
     Trollope.—Pass  the decanter!
     The stream of talk flowed in other directions, but whither I cannot now remember. What most remains with me of the occasion is the recollection of Trollope’s extraordinary, but very characteristic, deliverances on the subject of poets and poetry. Afterward, when I became intimate with another very popular novelist, one infinitely Trollope’s superior in all the higher graces of literature, I found that his opinions were very much in accord with those of Trollope. He, too, accepted Homer as the ideal singer, and admired Scott infinitely. In his view, indeed, poetry was simply rhymed fiction. “The pœtæ majores,” he once wrote to me, ”were the poets who united to all the other gifts of the Muses the power of telling a great story; the pœtæ minores could do everything else quite as well, but could not tell a great story.” Trollope, I am sure, would have echoed this judgment cordially. In point of fact, neither Anthony Trollope nor Charles Reade possessed that kind of imagination which goes to the understanding of what is and what is not great poetry. The first had extraordinary industry, the second absolute genius, exerted in each case under uninspired conditions.
     Trollope was already much talked about, apart from his popular reputation, as a man of letters with a prodigious power of hard work. Curious to know how he managed to produce so much, I took occasion before we parted to question him about his system; delicately insinuating the flattery that the advice of Sir Oracle might be of infinite service to me, who was as yet merely an apprentice in literature. The good rough fellow growled and laughed.
     “Some years ago,” he said, “when I too was beginning literature as a trade, I put the same question to an old literary worker. His advice was simple and succinct. ‘Before you sit down to write, my boy, put a piece of cobbler’s wax on the seat of your chair!’”
     “I see. In other words, stick fast and write away!”
     “Just so,” he answered merrily. “Depend upon it, it is the only way. Fix certain hours for work, and do not alter them for any one; fix a certain number of lines to be written daily, and never stop working till you reach that number. That is my plan. A thousand words a day is my minimum; I never fall below it.”
     “But is it possible? Must not an author sometimes wait for inspiration?”
     “Inspiration is rubbish. It is a cant word, like the word genius. Both genius and inspiration are merely other words for cobbler’s wax, sir! Ever since I began writing I have done my given quantum daily; it is after all only two or three hours’ work, and I never touch a pen after my 1 o’clock lunch. At home or abroad, on board ship, in railway trains, with all the work of a Post Office Department on my shoulders, I have never neglected to reach my minimum number of lines. Depend upon it, it is the only way.”
     I could not help smiling to myself at the easy way in which this burly, pertinacious field-laborer in the furrows of literature reduced all literary work to the level of hard work and honest wage. He was no mere talker for the sake of talking, and meaning precisely what he said, he illustrated it practically in his life. A strange contrast indeed was Anthony Trollope, with his faithful and untiring labor and his somewhat arid ideas of duty, to the good old mellow type of literary Bohemian just then dying out,—who drank and loafed and borrowed, and when he earned a pound spent it royally in a tavern, and could never be relied upon for the performance of any kind of contract whatever. Doubtless Trollope was the more praiseworthy character; but, I confess, with a blush, that I loved the good old Bohemian best.

                                                                                                                                 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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