ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

{Master-Spirits 1873}

                                                                                                                                                                 89

BROWNING’S MASTERPIECE.

‘THE Ring and the Book’ is certainly 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 enormous work, which is so marked by picture and characterisation, 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 ⁹⁰ 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 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 ‘Lear’ is a great tragedy. The subject is tragic, but the treatment is not dramatic: the ‘monologue,’ even when perfectly ⁹¹ 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 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:                                          92
Position of the entire criminal cause
Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,
With certain Four the cut-throats 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 redhanded, 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 ⁹³ 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 get, in the other 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 is 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 ⁹⁴ and its bearing on the relative nature of human truth. Here, surely, is matter for a poem—perhaps too much matter. The chief difficulty of course is—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.
     The attempt 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 button hole 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 recognise 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 ⁹⁵ 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 shoulder-blade 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                                           96
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!                               97
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 ⁹⁸ are more spiritualised. 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, ⁹⁹ 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 the other volumes, one after another figure takes up the tale; and now the work is finished, we 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 characterisation.
     The face which follows us through every path of the story is that of Pompilia, with its changeful and moonlike 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—

¹⁰⁰ 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, sale 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                                101
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                                        102
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.

¹⁰³ 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 ¹⁰⁴ 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.
     Of the twelve books into which it is divided, ten are 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, ¹⁰⁵ 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 madonna-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 one of the highest existing products 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.’ ¹⁰⁶ 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; 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.
     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 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 ¹⁰⁷ inferior capacity will grow by the aid of it, and that 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 spiritualise polemics, his profound and silent contemplation of heavenly processions. We have had Dryden, with his nervous filterings of English diction. 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 an ¹⁰⁸ 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 still truer of the students of Milton and Shelley. Of Shakspeare alone (but perhaps, to a certain extent, of Burns) would it be safe to say ‘Communication 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 universal for special teaching. He touched all the chords of human life; and life, so far from containing any human 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 madly exaggerating if we were to aver that Mr. Browning is likely to take rank with the supreme genius of the world; only a gallery of pictures ¹⁰⁹ 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 work—a wealth of intellect 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.

[Note:
Originally published in The Athenæum: Vol. I: 26 December, 1868 and Vols. II, III, IV: 20 March, 1869. This original, slightly longer version is available here.]

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A YOUNG ENGLISH POSITIVIST.

THE world is wrong on most subjects, and Mr. John Morley, ¹ with the encyclopædic pretensions of his school, is going to set it as right as may be; but it is chiefly wrong in the department of Sociology, and to that, in the meantime, Mr. Morley endeavours to confine his attention. In a series of finely wrought and thoroughly stimulating essays which we have heard called ‘hard’ in style, possibly just because they exhibit no love of mere rhetorical ornament, and are, indeed, only rhetorical here and there because they become the necessary vehicle of intense and passionate denunciation—the last disciple of Auguste Comte takes occasion to classify the failures of the old theology and its advocates, to estimate anew the intellectual and moral significance of the great Revolutions, to demolish the intuitionalism of Carlyle, to apotheosise Byron from the point of view of revolt, to examine and criticise the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of Sociology, and to strengthen many delicate lines of reflection awakened by the greater or less

—    ¹ Critical Miscellanies. By John Morley. London : Chapman and Hall. —

¹¹¹ progress of morals. In all this work, undertaken as a veritable labour of love, he exhibits diligence, patience, and temperance towards opponents, coupled with a literary finesse almost bordering on self-consciousness, and broken only here and there by outbursts of honest hatred against social organisation as at present understood. With theology, of course, he has no patience, though he can be generous (as in the case of De Maistre) to theologians. He is scarcely less tolerant to metaphysics, having, so far at least as we can perceive, little faculty for metaphysical distinctions, and actually seeming to imagine that such men as De Maistre represent the highest forms of metaphysical inquiry. Like every leading thinker of the school to which he belongs, like Mr. Mill, like Mr. Buckle, he is very painstaking, very veritable, very honest, very explicit; like every one of that school, he astonishes us by his fertility of illustration and general power of classifying arguments; and like the very best of them, starting with the great Positivist distinction between absolute and relative truth, he ends by leaving the impression on the reader’s mind that the relativity of the truth under examination has been forgotten in the mere triumph of verification.
     But Mr. Morley must not be blamed because, like most really powerful writers, he is a bigot—like many Positivists, over-positive—like all very earnest men, armed only against one kind of intellectual attack. With any thinker of his own school he is certainly able to hold his own; for, having the choice of weapons, he chooses the rapier and affects the straight assertive ¹¹² thrust at the heart of his opponent; but his rapier would be nowhere before the flail of a Scotch Calvinistic parson, and would be equally unavailing against the swift sweep of Mr. Martineau’s logic. In all this thoughtful volume, where he seldom loses an opportunity of assailing popular forms of Christian belief, he never once condescends to absolute verification of his formula that Christianity is a creed intellectually effete and fundamentally fallacious. No one of the Scottish worthies could handle ‘grace’ and ‘damnation’ with a stronger sense of absolute truth than Mr. Morley has of this formula; and thus it happens that the pupil of a philosophy which specially insists on clear intellectual atmosphere and perfectly verifiable results, starts his science of Sociology on the loose assumption that Positivism has successfully demolished the whole framework of theosophy and metaphysics, that ‘the doctrine of personal salvation is founded on fundamental selfishness,’ and that the whole spiritual investigation has a merely emotional sweep which, while it agitates and stimulates the brain like all other emotional currents, neither explains phenomena nor tends to make thought veracious.
     Of course, Mr. Morley altogether rejects as impossible any science of the Absolute, and holds with Comte that the proper study of man is phenomena, and social phenomena properest of all. A scientific reorganisation of society, in which the wisest would reign supreme, the wicked be punished and the vicious exterminated, women get their proper place in the human scheme—a sort of social Academy, composed of Mr. Morley and ¹¹³ the rest of the prophets, and ‘constituting a real Providence in all departments’ ¹ —this, and this alone, is perhaps what is wanted. So Mr. Morley, after a comprehensive survey of what other systems have done for humanity, decides, or seems to decide, on a system which he has not definitely explained, but which we take to be the Comtist method, shorn of many of those later eccentricities [such as the great social and political scheme], which are very generally understood to verge upon hypothesis.
     Much injustice is done to authors by criticising their works as if they were actually something else than they really profess to be; and it would be very unfair to condemn a volume avowedly ‘critical’ because it is in no sense of the word creative, ² and while applying to existing

—      ¹ ‘In the name of the past and the future, the servants of humanity, both its philosophical and practical servants, came forward to claim as their due, the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length, a real Providence in all departments—moral, intellectual, and material; consequently they exclude once and for all from political supremacy all “the different” servants of God—Catholic, Protestant, or Deist—as being at once behindhand and a cause of disturbance!’—See Comte’s ‘Preface to the Catechism.’ We have always held that Comte wanted to be a Pope.

     ² Some years ago, the present writer, on publishing a slight volume of Essays, avowedly crude concentrated ‘ideas,’ not worked out into any formal shape creative or critical, expressly printed in black and white at the beginning of the book these words: ‘The following Essays are prose additions and notes to my publications in verse, rather than mere attempts at general criticism, for which, indeed I have little aptitude.’ This was quite enough for the journalist instinct, which, like the pig in the picture, can only be driven in one direction by being urged in the other; and by every journal that condescended to review them, these Essays were discussed as Criticism, criticism pure and simple, nothing less and nothing more. Such is the cheering reward given in England to any man who condescends to be explicit. —

¹¹⁴ systems the Positive criterion, offers nothing definite and formal in its place. The true position of Comte himself is not among the Critics, but the Creators; for although much criticism was incidental to his scheme, and it was necessary first to demolish old faiths before substituting a new method, by far the finest part of Comte’s work was constructive and imaginative—in the highest sense of that last much-misused word. As a historical critic and a practical politician, the place of the author of the Catechism is not high. As an imaginative philosopher, elucidating four points of principle, applying them to five sciences, and illustrating them by innumerable points of wonderful detail, he surely stood in the very front rank of philosophic creators, and has left behind him a mass of magnificent speculation only to be forgotten when the world forgets Aristotle and Bacon. In the department where his master, perhaps, conceived most startlingly—that of Social Physics—Mr. Morley applies the Positive criterion with no ordinary success. If it is distinctly understood, then, that Mr. Morley in the present volume is avowedly and always a critic, never willingly a theorist, and if it be conceded, as all must concede, that he criticises with singular judgment and strange fairness, readers have no right to find fault because in demolishing their Temples he does not come forward actually prepared with a substitute. Probably enough he would refer all grumblers to the Positive system itself as supplying some sort of compensation for the loss of Christian and metaphysical ethics. But that is neither here nor there. ¹¹⁵ If truth is what we seek, truth absolute, and verifiable any moment by human experience, we must begin by throwing all ideas of compensation aside. Doubtless it is a comfortable thing to believe in salvation and the eternal life, a blissful thing to muse on and cling to the notion of a beneficent and omnipresent Deity working everywhere for good; and it is therefore no uncommon circumstance for the theologic mind, when threatened, to retort with a savage ‘Very good; but if you prove your case and demolish my belief, what have you to give me in exchange?‘—surely a form of retort only worthy in dealing with the heathen and the savage.
     Yet it is here precisely that Comtism fails as a political construction; for Comte himself, as much as the most orthodox of divines, places perpetual stress on the human necessity for a faith, though what he at last supplied in the place of God is universally felt to be the very washiest of sentiments, only worthy of the metaphysical school he hated most thoroughly. The dynamic ball rolled along all very well up to this generation. If Protestantism overthrew the Pope and the Saints, it left Heaven and Hell open to all the world and the Georges. If Calvin triumphantly demonstrated ‘predestination,’ he substituted ‘grace’ as a comforting possibility. Unitarianism lets God be, beneficent, all-wise, all-giving. The higher Pantheism admits at the very least that the period of mortal dissolution is only the moment of transition—in many cases from a lower state to a higher. In exchange for any of these creeds, what has that religion to give which tells man that he must cease to ¹¹⁶ believe himself the last of the angels, and be contented to recognise himself as the first of the animals? Expressly declaring, as Mr. Morley declares after Comte, ¹ that the longing for individual salvation is basely selfish (this, by the way, is a fallacy of the most superficial kind), the new faith offers us absorption and identification ² with the ‘mighty and eternal Being, Humanity,’ a secondary or subjective existence in the heart and intellect of others, unconscious of course, but for that very reason the more blissful and supreme.
     Without pausing to smile at the metaphysical difficulty at once obtruded by the apostle of identification, ³ it may well be asked how a creed is to thrive which offers such a very slender inducement to the neophyte. It doubtless sounds very grand at once and for ever to dispense with these inducements and to appeal to the grandest ideal of human unselfishness, but nevertheless the bonus has been the secret of all religious successes from the beginning, and the system which leaves that out will never hold the world very long together. That, however, is not the question. The test of a creed is not ‘Will it prosper?’ but, ‘Is it true?’ It would be far beyond the limits of an article to apply that test here, even if we felt competent to apply it at all. The present question is a less

—    ¹ Thus Comte: ‘The old objective immortality, which could never clear itself of the egotistic or selfish character.’ And Morley: ‘The fundamental egotism of the doctrine of personal salvation.’

     ² What is Christian beatification but ‘absorption’ and ‘identification’ of this very sort?

     ³ The condition of goodness or badness is consciousness. There can be no moral existence without identification. —

¹¹⁷ difficult one. Does Mr. Morley, while applying the Positive criterion in certain cases to other faiths, conclusively establish his hypothesis that these faiths are effete or false? They have prospered, they have been comfortable; but—‘are they true?’ They are true only historically, is the reply of Mr. Morley; they are now inert and dead; and because nothing better has yet been got to take their place, the world, socially speaking, is in a very bad way. A new system must be inaugurated at once. Mr. Morley will perhaps tell us by-and-by what that system is to be. Meantime he is content to hint that the first step toward improvement will be the resolution to suppress mere vagrant emotions, and to use the intelligence with more scientific precision in the act of examining even the most sacred beliefs of every-day existence.
     Mr. Morley almost inclines us to believe that the nearest approach to his ideal type of manhood is Vauvenargues, a short essay on whom he places, as a sort of vignette, at the beginning of his volume. His brief treatment of the French moralist seems to us nothing less than masterly, both as thoughtful criticism and literary workmanship; and the impression left upon the mind is quite as vivid as that of the best biography we ever read. Not a word is wasted, but Vauvenargues’ perfect sweetness of heart and strange sanity of intelligence are presented to us in a series of commanding touches. The essay is, in fact, an apotheosis—fit pendant to Comte’s own verdict when he placed Vauvenargues in the Positivist Calendar: ‘for his direct effort, in spite of the ¹¹⁸ desuetude into which it had fallen, to reorganise the culture of the heart according to a better knowledge of human nature, of whom this noble thinker discerned the centre to be affective.’ It is an open question, indeed, whether both Comte and Mr. Morley, while discerning in Vauvenargues the eighteenth-century prophet of a certain cardinal doctrine—if not the cardinal doctrine—of Positivism, are not led to overrate his literary services to the cause; for the passages Mr. Morley quotes in indirectly vindicating his subject’s right to a place in the Calendar, while certainly capable of the highly prophetic construction he seems to put upon them, again and again point far away into Theism and chime in ill with that creed which regards man as the first of animals.
     Vauvenargues would certainly have admitted man’s position as the highest of Animals, but he would positively have rejected man’s pretensions to be the highest of Beings, capable, without Divine aid, of regulating the tumultuous forces of the world by the co-ordination of the intellect and the heart. His virtual identification of the passions and the will, however, in answer to the theology which makes man the mere theatre of a fight between will and passion, seems to us unanswerable as a scientific proposition, altogether apart from its grandeur as a moral aphorism. This, however, does not destroy the theological statement, but merely clears away a misinterpretation. Whether we distinguish between will and passion, and view one as the mere index of the other, there can be no doubt of the power of the intelligence in regulating, determining, and guiding them—there can be no doubt ¹¹⁹ that man has the power, within certain conditions, of acting as his will, or passion, impels him. True theology never meant to distinguish will and passion so absolutely as thinkers of Mr. Morley’s school seem to imply. What it did mean to convey was, that the power of certain wild original instincts in human nature is limited by the power of intellectual restraint. This restraint over, or co-ordination of, the passions, is what Mr. Morley would call the culture of the passions themselves, so that the entire intellectual proclivity is towards good, and bad passion becomes impossible.
     Mr. Morley would be the last man to deny the natural imperfection of men, call it by whatever name he will; or to limit the office of the intelligence in regulating such passions as that, for instance, of desire. This is precisely what theology means. If a man, by culture or will, or restraint of any kind, or educated virtuous instinct, can prevent himself from lusting after his neighbour’s wife, or coveting his neighbour’s wealth, or envying his neighbour’s success, it matters little whether the happy state of mind is effected by perfect tone of the passions themselves, their invariable harmony with the dictates of reason, or their hound-like obedience to the uplifted finger of a Will. In any case, the intelligence is supreme in the matter, and decides pro or contra, for or against any given line of conduct. The other difference is only a difference of procedure immediately preliminary to action.
     Turning from Vauvenargues, Mr. Morley attempts another apotheosis—that of Condorcet; and his ¹²⁰ treatment, on the whole, perhaps because it is more elaborate, and bears more the form of the ordinary review-essay, is not so perfectly satisfactory. Yet this essay, taken with certain modifications, is a clear gain to the loftier biography, and leaves on the mind of the reader a vivid—and what is better, a vivifying—effect. It may at once be admitted that the apotheosis is successful, and would vindicate Condorcet’s place in any Calendar of Saintly Souls, benefactors to the species, if the list is not to be limited to commanding intellects. It will be doubted, however, whether Mr. Morley, in his avidity to detect another prophet of the Gospel according to Comte, does not highly exaggerate the position of Condorcet as a contributor to the literature of reason.
     Insane and inane raving against all religious creeds, with a grim reserve in favour of Mohammedanism, possibly on account of its scope in the sensual direction; the blind exaggeration of the importance of the scientific method, coupled with a lurking love of hypothesis quite akin to that of Comte in his later musings; a rabid hatred of all opponents; a virtual damnation of all disbelievers in Propagandism, the very kernel theory of which was the infinite perfectibility of every human—being all this illustrated in a temperament which Mr. Morley, with justice indeed, calls ‘non-conducting,’ and lying inert in literature destitute of the pulse of life. If the man who represented these things, and who for these and other failings has been justly forgotten by history, is to be picked out for an apotheosis on no stronger showing than the resemblance of his avowed process to that of ¹²¹ contemporary types, then surely the catalogue of Positive saints will be great indeed, and Roman Catholicism will be beaten altogether. Indeed, it may be doubted if the Church in its worst days ever exhibited so extraordinary a tendency to proselytise the living and apotheosise the dead as the present school of Positivists. Adherence to their cardinal principle of scientific procedure is quite enough to make them countenance encyclopaedic pretensions in anybody; and it is with no regret that they perceive the infallible airs of men who, except from the point of view of the true faith, have no claim whatever to the title of first-class intellects.
     Condorcet was no more a first-class intellect than is Professor Huxley. Mr. Morley’s picture of him is grand and vivifying, and sufficiently proves him to have been a social benefactor, a servant of the race, a thinker touching truth in a false time; but then the world was and is full of benefactors, of servants, of thinkers most apprehensive in the direction of light. In our opinion, the only circumstance which could have warranted the claim put forward by Condorcet, on the score that his ‘central idea was to procure the emancipation of reason, free and ample room for its exercise, and improved competence among men in the use of it,’ would have been the verification of Condorcet’s own rationality as a historical critic. As for his exalted hopes regarding the future of humanity, which are put forward as another merit, they were the hopes of thousands—part of the great tidal wave which had arisen after  long weary years nourished on Pascal’s bitter apple of human degeneracy. If Condorcet is to ¹²² be calendared for merely sharing the great reaction which he by no means caused, and never guided, how many other contemporaries must be calendared also? Altogether, Mr. Morley’s apotheosis of Condorcet must be pronounced less satisfactory than that of Vauvenargues.
     Something, too, of Condorcet’s own savagery—that worst savagery of all, characteristic of ‘reasonable’ men—seizes Mr. Morley once or twice during his second essay. Even in the very act of rebuking the Encyclopædist for his intolerance towards religious forms, Mr. Morley ceases to be cool and generous, and condescends to the ‘set-teeth’ sort of enunciation, observing that Condorcet might have ‘depicted religion as a natural infirmity of the human mind in its immature stages, just as there are specific disorders incident in childhood to the human body. Even on this theory, he was bound to handle it with the same calmness which he would have expected to find in a pathological treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet’s pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would be from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed.’ Now, it is too bad to talk about the ‘scientific point of view’ in the same breath with such writing as this. It is sheer rampant dogmatism, not to be excelled by any polemical disputant.
     Even on Mr. Morley’s own showing, even accepting Comte’s classification, which regarded even Fetichism as having exercised a distinctly valuable influence on ¹²³ mankind, the theological period was a necessary step in human progress, and we have yet to learn that a man or a society can finally attain health by undergoing a course of diseases. If religion is fairly comparable to the ‘sweating sickness’ or to ‘zymotic diseases,’ ¹ how is it that it has served its turn in the historical sense? Mr. Morley might as well have compared it to the cholera or the small-pox at once; and then, if possible, explained to us from what point of view these complaints help the sufferer to an ultimate condition of robust manhood. Or does Mr. Morley mean to demolish religion even historically, and aver that, if not a disease itself, it is only possible in a diseased state of society? Even then his description is scientifically inaccurate; unless the process of evolution is simply the casting off of unhealthy matter from a body virtually whole, instead of the healthy development of simple forms of life into complex forms.
     Zymotic diseases sometimes kill, and always injure more or less; and the history of thought, as a series of such diseases, would naturally leave us, where the ingenious American Professor Draper found us, at the stage of moral decrepitude, instead of where (we rejoice to say) Mr. Morley finds us, at some stage preliminary to health and robust manhood. Elsewhere in his book Mr. Morley has this unguarded exclamation: ‘As if,’ he cries, ‘the highest moods of every age necessarily clothed themselves in religious forms!’ Does the writer mean to assert, again in the face of the historical classification as

—    ¹ Zymotic diseases, it must be remembered, are due to some supposed poison introduced into the system. —

¹²⁴ laid down by Comte, that they do not? or has he merely made the mistake of writing the word ‘religious’ in place of the word ‘theologic’? Really, Mr. Morley seems to have imbibed so much of Condorcet’s hatred for priests and for the priesthood, that the very words ‘Christian,’ ‘religious,’ ‘theologic,’ put him quite out of his boasted science. So far as it is positively excited, his destructive criticisms on religions destroy nothing, except a little of the confidence we usually feel in the writer. That confidence never flags long. We could forgive Mr. Morley for being infinitely more unjust to what he hates, when we remember his tender justice to what he honours. Nothing to our thinking is more beautiful in this volume than the recurring anxiety to vindicate the memory of Voltaire. Here is one terse passage on the tender-hearted Iconoclast; it forms part of the paper on Condorcet:

     Voltaire, during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country where that art is more highly prized than anywhere ¹²⁵ else; he was the most brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks vigour, and freshness, and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all institutions—the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his eye (p. 44).

     We owe Mr. Morley thanks for his vindication of the eighteenth century as a great Spiritual Revolution—in excess of course, like all such revolutions, but incalculably beneficial to the cause of humanity. The movement which began with the Encyclopædia and culminated in Robespierre, has been only half described by Carlyle’s phrase, that it was an universal destructive movement against Shams;—it was an eminently constructive movement as well, and though it failed historically it did not fail ultimately, for the wave of thought and action to which it gave birth has not yet subsided, and is not likely to subside till the world gets some sort of a glimpse of a true social polity. A leading cause of the public misconception as regards the eighteenth century has been Mr. Carlyle. It is chiefly for this reason, we fancy, that Mr. Morley devotes to Carlyle one of the longest, and in some respects the very best, paper in the series.
¹²⁶     We think, indeed, that his anxiety to find here another Prophet, however cloaked and veiled, of the new gospel, leads him to be far too lenient to Carlyle’s shortcomings—we had almost said his crimes. From the first hour of his career to the last, Carlyle has been perniciously preaching the Scotch identity—a type of moral force familiar to every Scotchman, a type which is separatist without being spiritual, and spacious without being benevolent—to a generation sadly in need of quite another sort of preacher. With a Phrase perpetually in his mouth, which might just as well have been the Verbosities as the Eternities or the Verities, with a mind so self-conscious as to grant apotheosis to other minds only on the score of their affinity with itself, and with a heart so obtuse as never, in the long course of sixty years, to have felt one single pang for the distresses of man as a family and social being, with every vice of the typical Scotch character exaggerated into monstrosity by diligent culture and literary success, Mr. Carlyle can claim regard from this generation only on one score, that of his services as a duct to convey into our national life the best fruits of Teutonic genius and wisdom. His criticisms are as vicious and false as they are headstrong. Had he been writing for a cultured people, who knew anything at all of the subjects under discussion, they would never have been listened to for a moment.
     He has, for example, mercilessly brutalised Burns in a pitiable attempt to apotheosise him from the separatist point of view; and he has popularised pictures of Richter and Novalis which fail to represent the subtle ¹²⁷ psychological truths these men lived to illustrate. His estimates of Goethe verge upon insanity; his abuse of Grillparzer is an outrage on literary justice. For Voltaire as the master of persiflage he has perfect perception and savage condemnation, but of Voltaire as the Apostle of Humanity he has no knowledge whatever, simply because he has no heart whatever for Humanity itself. He has written his own calendar of heroes, and has set therein the names of the Monsters of the earth, from Fritz downwards,—always, be it remembered, aggrandising these men on the monstrous side, and generally wronging them as successfully by this process as if his method were wilfully destructive. Blind to the past, deaf to the present, dead to the future, he has cried aloud to a perverse generation till his very name has become the synonym for moral heartlessness and political obtusity. He has glorified the gallows and he has garlanded the rack. Heedless of the poor, unconscious of the suffering, diabolic to the erring, he has taught to functionaries the righteousness of a legal thirst for revenge, ¹ and has suggested to the fashioners of a new criminal code the eligibility of the old German system of destroying criminals by torture. He has never been on the side of the truth. He was for the lie in Jamaica, the lie in the South, the lie in Alsace and Lorraine. He could neither as a moralist see the sin of slavery, nor predict as a prophet the triumph of the abolitionists. He has been all heat and no light, a

—    ¹ Compare Mr. Fitzjames Stephen and other writers who confound legal punishment with moral retaliation. —

¹²⁸ portentous and amazing futility. If he has done any good to any soul on the earth it has been by hardening that soul, and it is doubtful if Englishmen wanted any more hardening—by separating that soul’s destiny from that of the race, as if the English character were not almost fatally separated already. He is not only, as Mr. Morley expresses it, ‘ostentatiously illogical and defiantly inconsistent;’—he pushes bad logic to the verge of conscious untruth, and in his inconsistency is wilfully criminal. He begins ‘with introspections and Eternities, and ends with blood and iron.’ He has impulses of generosity, but no abiding tenderness. He has a certain reverence of individual worth, especially if it be strong and assertive, but he has no pity for aggregate suffering, as if pain became any less when multiplied by twenty thousand! He is, in a word, the living illustration of the doom pronounced on him who, holding to God the mirror of a powerful nature, blasphemously bids all men be guided by the reflection dimly shadowed therein.
     Why should this man, alike a sort of Counsel for the Prosecution, represent Providence? God versus Man, Mr. Carlyle prosecuting, and, alas! not one living Soul competent or willing to say a word for the defence! It is ‘you ought to do this,’ and ‘you must, by the Verities!’ So the savage Pessimist inveighs; but the world gets weary in time of the eternal ‘ought,’ and turns round on the teacher with a quiet ‘very good; but why?’ ¹ If

—    ¹ A Scotchman of much the same type of mind, though of course infinitely weaker in degree, once reminded me, in answer to such charges, that they were made by people who were blind to the prophet’s ‘exquisite’ sense of humour.’ Of course humour is at the heart of it but humour is character, and nothing so indicates a man’s quality as what he considers laughable. Carlylean humour, often exquisite in quality, may be found in a book called ‘Life Studies,’ by J. K. Hunter, recently published at Glasgow. Note especially the chapter called ‘Combe on the Constitution of Woman.’ Mr. Hunter is a parochial Carlyle, with some of the genius and none of the culture. —

¹²⁹ Positivism only teaches the world to distrust men who come forward to try the great cause of humanity by the wretched test of the individual consciousness, and who, because they can control their own heart-beats, fancy they have discovered the secret of the universe, it will have done enough to secure from posterity fervent and lasting gratitude.
     But Positivism—or at least its last exponent—has something to learn in its own department of Sociology. On one vital question—to the present writer the most vital of all questions—Mr. Morley writes as follows:—

     There are two sets of relations which have still to be regulated in some degree by the primitive and pathological principle of repression and main force. The first of these concern that unfortunate body of criminal and vicious persons whose unsocial propensities are constantly straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger order, the same methods of coercion which originally ¹³⁰ made society possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lay us under any obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in so far he has performed an excellent service (p. 225).

     Here Mr. Morley is at one with the ‘hard school’ of political economists; but what is defensible from their point of view becomes unpardonable from his. Is the ‘hard and austere’ view of crime, then, the scientific view? Is it scientific to deal with the criminal as if he stood (by nature) on a lower moral level than the rest of mankind? and is it effective? To all these questions we venture to interpose an emphatic negative. If there is any truth which this generation does not recognise, it is the divine law of human relationship: the fact—which we should fancy it the glory of Positivism to disseminate—that crime and sin are abnormal and accidental conditions, to an enormous extent remediable, and never—even in the most awful instances—quite eclipsing the divine possibilities of the spiritual nature.
     To treat criminals as mere nomads, to pursue them as Tristran l’Hermite pursued the ‘Egyptians,’ to offer them no alternative but instant conformity or the gibbet, is merely to give us another version of Mr. Carlyle’s eternal ‘Ought.’ There are points of view, indeed—strictly scientific points of view—from which the existence of these very classes in the heart of the community may be regarded as a distinct social blessing; and it is ¹³¹ doubtful if, with all their errors and with all their sins, they contaminate society to any fatal degree. But whatever may be the nature of their influence, it is certain that no good has ever come from dealing with them on the principle of extermination. More has been wrought among them by reverence than by hate or oppression—by approaching them, we mean, in a reverent spirit, conscious of the sacredness of life, however deeply in revolt against organisation. It is one of the dangers of Positivism that it may lead its disciples to set too light a value on mere life, as distinguished from life intellectual; and we therefore find many leading Positivists writing as if the life intellectual, being the life spiritual, was necessarily the only life sacred.
     We do not, however, accuse Mr. Morley of being unconditionally in favour of the gallows. Further on, indeed, he protests against the kind of thinking which ‘stops short’ at the gibbet and the soldier as against a very bad form of hopelessness. He would probably agree with us that Punishment and War are entirely defensible up to the point where they are confounded with righteous vengeance and human retribution. If they are necessary, no more is to be said; the defence is perfect when their necessity is shown. But vengeance and retribution are terms unworthy of science, and so is the point of view which views the criminal classes as mere nomads ¹ —a superficial classification not more 

—    ¹ In point of fact, the most hopeless forms of crime in this country occur strictly within the body of society as a consequence of its present organisation. Conformity to the social law, not revolt outside its circle, created the crimes of Tawell, and numberless others. Was Madeline Smith a nomad? —

¹³² characteristic of the Positivist love for symmetrical arrangement than the haunting determination to regard every fact and event as links in a long chain of evolution, or the constant willingness to admit hypotheses in any number so long as they develop naturally from the great cardinal hypothesis, never yet verified, that the basis of life is physiological.
     Elsewhere, with delicious ingenuity, Mr. Morley takes many articles of Mr. Carlyle’s creed, inverts them, and shows their value as dim foreshadowings of the religion of common sense. He certainly does Carlylism fair justice; and we wish him joy of the contributions he finds in it to the new gospel—such as that portion of it which insists on the primitive treatment of criminals and points logically (let us add) to a similar treatment towards all who are guilty of moral or intellectual revolt of any sort.
     These Essays are so pregnant with references to the great subjects which now interest men of culture, that we might prolong again and again the reflections awakened by them at every page. Our purpose, however, is rather to call attention to their intellectual interest than to discuss them in detail; for, indeed, each question involved could only be treated adequately at great length. The essays on ‘Joseph de Maistre’ and on ‘Byron’ are quite as good in their way as the rest. The great Ultramontanist is chiefly interesting to Mr. Morley—and to us—because his scheme for the reorganisation of European society was the skeleton of Comte’s own social scheme. After a brilliant survey of ¹³³ De Maistre’s life and works, Mr. Morley utters his own ‘epode’ on Catholicism:—

     De Maistre has been surpassed by no thinker that we know of as a defender of the old order. If anybody could rationalise the idea of supernatural intervention in human affairs, the idea of a Papal supremacy, the idea of a spiritual unity, De Maistre’s acuteness and intellectual vigour, and, above all, his keen sense of the urgent social need of such a thing being done, would assuredly have enabled him to do it. In 1817, when he wrote the work in which this task is attempted, the hopelessness of such an achievement was less obvious than it is now. The Bourbons had been restored. The Revolution lay in a deep slumber that many persons excusably took for the quiescence of extinction. Legitimacy and the spiritual system that was its ally in the face of the Revolution, though mostly its rival or foe when they were left alone together seemed to be restored to the fulness of their power. Fifty years have elapsed since then, and each year has seen a progressive decay in the principles which then were triumphant. It was not, therefore, without reason that De Maistre warned people against believing ‘que la colonne est replacée, parcequ’elle est relevée.’ The solution which he so elaborately recommended to Europe has shown itself desperate and impossible. Catholicism may long remain a vital creed to millions of men, a deep source of spiritual consolation and refreshment, and a bright lamp in perplexities of conduct and morals; but resting on dogmas which cannot by any amount of compromise be incorporated with the daily increasing mass of knowledge, assuming, as the condition of its existence, forms of the theological hypothesis which all the preponderating influences of contemporary thought concur directly or indirectly in discrediting, upheld by an organisation which its history for the last five centuries has exposed to the distrust and hatred of men as the sworn enemy of mental freedom and growth, the pretensions of Catholicism to renovate society are among the most pitiable and impotent ¹³⁴ that ever devout, high-minded, and benevolent persons deluded themselves into maintaining or accepting. Over the modern invader it is as powerless as paganism was over the invaders of old. The barbarians of industrialism, grasping chiefs and mutinous men, give no ear to priest or pontiff, who speak only dead words, who confront modern issues with blind eyes, and who stretch out but a palsied hand to help. ‘Christianity,’ according to a well-known saying, has been tried and failed; the religion of Christ remains to be tried. One would prefer to qualify the first clause, by admitting how much Christianity has done for Europe even with its old organisation, and to restrict the charge of failure within the limits of the modern time. To-day its failure is too patent. Whether, in changed forms and with new supplements, the teaching of its founder is destined to be the chief inspirer of that social and human sentiment which seems to be the only spiritual bond capable of uniting men together again in a common and effective faith, is a question which it is unnecessary to discuss here. ‘They talk about the first centuries of Christianity,’ said De Maistre; ‘I would not be sure that they are over yet.’ Perhaps not; only if the first centuries are not yet over, it is certain that the Christianity of the future will have to be so different from the Christianity of the past, as almost to demand or deserve another name (pp. 189-191).

     This is, however, strongly felt, and put as strongly. Mr. Morley is hardly prepared for a scientific judgment on Protestantism. He approaches it too much in the spirit of the doctor of lunacy, who believes all the world to be mad but himself. One turns with relief to the article on Byron, perhaps the best that was ever written on the subject, but unfortunately flawed, because the writer, who has just recommended a severe handling of the criminal classes, seems unconscious that he is ¹³⁵ dealing with a great criminal’s life and character. Scientific criticism, so sharp to the anti-social Outcasts, might be less merciful to the Outcast whose hand was lifted against every man’s life and reputation, and who was consciously unjust, tyrannous, selfish, false, and anti-social. We do not agree with Mr. Morley that the public has nothing to do with Byron’s private life. The man invited confidence for the sake of blasting the fair fame of others; and the lie of his teaching is only to be counteracted by the living lie of his identity. If revolters and criminals are to be gibbeted, then we claim in the name of Justice the highest gibbet for Byron. The following passage is too important not to be quoted entire:—

     More attention is now paid to the mysteries of Byron’s life than to the merits of his work, and criticism and morality are equally injured by the confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote, and the virtue or wickedness of the life he lived. The admirers of his poetry appear sensible of some obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while those who have diligently gathered together the details of an accurate knowledge of the unseemliness of his conduct, cannot bear to think that from this bramble men have been able to gather figs. The result of the confusion has been that grave men and women have applied themselves to investigate and judge Byron’s private life, as if the exact manner of it, the more or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree of the deadness of his sense of moral responsibility, were matter of minute and profound interest to all ages. As if all this had anything to do with criticism proper. It is right that we should know the life and manners of one whom we choose for a friend, or of one who asks us to entrust him with the control of public interests. In either of these two cases we need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows ¹³⁶ nothing of guarantees. The work is before us, its own warranty. What is it to us whether Turner had coarse orgies with the trulls of Wapping? We can judge his art without knowing or thinking of the artist. And in the same way, what are the stories of Byron’s libertinism to us? They may have biographical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least. If the name of the author of ‘Manfred,’ ‘Cain,’ ‘Childe Harold,’ were already lost, as it may be in remote times, the work abides, and its mark on European opinion” (p. 254).

     Coming from a man of Mr. Morley’s calibre, these words are at the very least remarkable. They are worthy of the critic of the Second Empire, M. Taine, in his most anti-didactic mood. Byron is, according to Mr. Morley, the poet of the Revolution, the English expression of vast social revolt all over Europe. In cases of such revolt, involving ethical distinctions, is it not of the very highest consequence, from a scientific point of view, to examine the personal reasons of the revolter? An inquiry into Byron’s life verifies the hypothesis awakened at every page of his works, that this man was in arms, not against society, but against his own vile passions; that he was a worldly man full of the affectation of unworldliness, and a selfish man only capable of the lowest sort of sacrifice—that for an egoistic idea; and that at least half of what he wrote was written with supreme and triumphant insincerity.
     Mr. Morley is very wroth at the piggish virtues fostered by the Georges, and with reason; but he sometimes forgets that Byron did not rebel so much against these as against the domestic instinct itself. His fight being throughout with his own conscience, it is of supreme ¹³⁷ importance to learn what he had done and what he had been. Pure practical art, like that of Turner, offers no analogy in this case; it would not even do so in the case of Shelley; for even Shelley has hopelessly interwoven his literature with his own life and the life of men. The confusion in Mr. Morley’s mind is M. Taine’s confusion, and gives birth to half the meretricious and silly literature of the day. Byron was a poet, an intellectual and emotional force, finding expression in written words. He was not distinctly a singer, nor a musician, nor a painter, nor a philosopher, nor a politician; but he was something of all these, as every great poet must be. Music and art do not arbitrarily imply ethics, but ethics is included in literature, and is within the distinct scope of the poetic intellect. ¹ Byron was not merely an artist—in point of fact, he was very little an artist; and he never did write a line, or paint a picture, which tells its own tale apart from himself. He rose in revolt to try the question of himself against society, and his life is therefore the property of society’s cross-examiners. The question remaining is—can they show that he had no fair cause for revolt at all?
     With almost every word of what Mr. Morley says about Byron’s poetry we cordially agree. The glorious animal swing of much of the verse, the faultless self-characterisation, the shaping and conceiving power, the wit and humour abundant on every page, are amply and cordially appreciated. Byron’s variety of mind was

—    ¹ Observe, says the æsthetic critic, that the end of all art is to give pleasure. Yes; and so is the ultimate end of all virtue. —

¹³⁸ miraculous. As an inventive poet, he was immeasurably the master and superior of Shelley, however wondrous we may consider Shelley’s spiritual quality. It seems to us, moreover, that Shelley’s spirituality is deeply mixed with intellectual impurities, fatally tinged with the morbid hues of a hysteric and somewhat peevish mind. It is the fashion now to call him ‘divine,’ nor do we for a moment dispute the apotheosis; but we doubt exceedingly if ‘The Cenci’ (for example) could bear the truly critical test and retain its limpid and divine transparency, or if the choice of so essentially shallow and false a myth as that of Prometheus, coupled with numberless similar predilections, was not the sign of a third-class intellect.
     One way of noting the radical difference between Byron and Shelley is very simple. Let the reader carefully peruse, first, ‘Prometheus,’ and then look at the reflection in his own mind twenty-four hours afterwards. Let him next read, say even ‘Manfred’—bad though that is as a piece of writing—and go through the same process. He will find that he experienced, during the actual perusal of the first poem, a sense of exquisite fascination at every line; that, twenty-four hours afterwards, the impression was dim and doubtful; and that, sooner or later, it is expedient to go again through the process of perusal. In the other instance the result will be inverse. The reader’s feeling during perusal will be one almost of impatience; but twenty-four hours afterwards the impression will be very vivid, not as to particular passages, but as to the drama as a ¹³⁹ whole. In point of fact, there is more real creative force and shaping power, infinitely less of the aroma and essence of beauty, in ‘Manfred’ even, than in the ‘Prometheus.’ Pursuing this analogy further, let the reader who has carefully studied and enjoyed both Byron and Shelley look at the reflections in his own mind at the present moment. A wild and beautiful rainbow-coloured mist, peopled by indefinite shapes innumerable, and by two or three shapes definite only as they are morbid and terrible: such, perhaps, is the reflection of the poetry of Shelley.
     A clear mountain atmosphere with a breezy sense of the sea, a succession of romantic faces singularly human and vivid in spite of their strange resemblance to each other, a ripple of healthy female laughter, a life, a light, an animal sense of exhilaration—surely all these things, and many other things as human, take possession of us at once when we think of the poetry of Byron. Shelley possessed supremely and separately a small portion of those qualities which Byron possessed collectively. Shelley had some gifts in excess, and he lacked all the others. It may be suggested, in answer to this, that one supreme gift is better than all the gifts in dilution. Undoubtedly. But Byron, at his very best, exhibits all the gifts supremely, and even in the direction of spirituality penetrates very high indeed in his noblest flights.
     He wrote too often for scribbling’s sake; but when he wrote from true impulse he often produced the highest sort of poetry—perfect vision in perfect language. Let it be remembered also, to his glory, that he shared with ¹⁴⁰ the greatest creators of the world—with Shakspeare, with Boccaccio, with Cervantes, with Chaucer, with Goethe, with Walter Scott—something of that rare faculty of humour which is as necessary a qualification for testing most forms of life as certain acids are necessary for testing metals, and without which a first-class intellect generally yields over-much to the other rare and besetting faculty of introspection to produce literature of the highest rank. All human truth is misapprehended till it is conceived as relative, and there is nothing like humour for betraying, as by magic, Truth’s relativity.
     We should have liked to say something of the last two papers in Mr. Morley’s volume, that ‘On some Great Conceptions of Social Growth,’ and that ‘On the Development of Morals;’ but the subjects are too tempting and spacious; it is enough to say that their treatment, although very slight, is as satisfactory as possible from Mr. Morley’s point of view. That point of view, we may remark in concluding, fluctuates a little in these pages; and we find the writer contradicting himself on the nature of justice, on the right of punishment, and on the greater or less perfectibility of the race. Altogether, however, these Essays are as much distinguished by logical consistency as by wealth of study and literary skill. Mr. Morley is one more illustration of the old saying, that the soldiers of Truth fight under many different banners. His conviction that speculation in the theological direction is a sheer waste of time and a sign of weak intellect would be more startling if he himself, with a secret consciousness of ¹⁴¹ being far adrift, showed less anxiety to cast anchor somewhere. This anchoring, the Positivists call getting hold of a ‘method.’
     That there are many men in the world who do not think it proves better seamanship to get into harbour and lie there through all weathers than to venture out boldly and to explore the great waters, is a fact which Mr. Morley does not seem to understand at its value.
     To him, the wild speculative instinct—the fierce human thirst to face the mysterious darkness, and battle through all the wild winds of the unknown deep—is merely lunatic and miserable; more than that, it is despicable and selfish. Examined at its true worth, this feeling of his is merely a consequence of intellectual temperament. All these attempts to criticize Systems from the outside are abortive. The Positivists talk nonsense about Metaphysics; the metaphysicians talk nonsense about Positivism—almost invariably, for example, confusing it with Comtism. But, forgetting all such questions for the moment, let us congratulate ourselves that a man like Mr. Morley is seriously working at the great problem of Sociology in a constructive as well as a critical spirit. He fights for the Truth, and his motto is of no more consequence than mottos generally. Hating shams, loving truth and beauty, reverencing almost to idolatry the great and deathless figures of literature and history, compassionating the sorrows of mankind and hating the laws which complicate them, looking forward to a mundane future closely approaching perfection, and feeling that it is only to be ¹⁴² reached by virtuous living and high thinking, he is to be welcomed as another adherent to the blessed cause of Humanity—which was that of Plato as well as John the Baptist, and was paramount in the troubled heart of Mahomet as well as in the divine soul of Christ. He serves God best who loves Truth most; and we, at least, do not conceive how Truth, which is the very essence and quality of many things and many men, can be arbitrarily confined to any one set of those mental phenomena which we call Religion.

[Note:
Originally published in The Contemporary Review (June, 1871) as ‘Mr. John Morley’s Essays’. The original version is available here, It is slightly shorter and Shelley now has a ‘third-class intellect’.]

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                                                                                                                                                           143

HUGO IN 1872.

MANY a long year has now elapsed since the advent of the Romantic School filled the aged Goethe with horror, causing him to predict for modern Art a chaotic career and a miserable termination; and gray now are the beards of the students who flocked in cloaks and slouch hats to applaud the first performance of ‘Hernani’ at the national theatre. Since those merry days a new generation has arisen, and more than one mighty landmark has been swept away. Goethe is dead; so are dozens of minor Kings—not to speak of Louis Philippe.
     The sin of December has been committed and expiated; the man of Sedan has been arraigned before the bar of the world, and received as sentence the contempt and execration of all humanity; and meantime, the exile of Guernsey, after a period of fretful probation, has gone back to the bosom of his beloved France. Political changes have been fast and furious. Not less fast and furious have been the literary revolutions. The poor bewildered spectator, be his proclivities political or literary, has been hurried along so rapidly that he has scarcely had time to get breath. There lies France, a mighty Ruin. Beyond rises Deutschthumm, a portentous ¹⁴⁴ Shadow, at which the veteran of Weimar would have shivered. Here comes Victor Hugo, with his new poem. ¹ And Chaos, such as Goethe predicted, is every way fulfilled!
     How great we hold Victor Hugo to be in reference to his own time we need not say; veritably, perhaps, there is no nobler name on the whole roll of contemporary creators; but we surely express a very natural and a very common sentiment when we say that every fresh approach of this prodigy is bewildering to the intellect. We have had so frequently during the last generation the spectacle of reckless trading in high departments—in politics more particularly; we have beheld so constantly the collapse of governmental windbags and social balloons of the Hausmann sort; we have stood by helpless so often while the mad Masters of the world played their wild and fantastic tricks before high heaven, and moved sardonically from one bloody baptism to another; we have seen so much evil come of empty words and vain professions, and moral bunkum generally—that we may be pardoned, perhaps, for regarding with a certain alarm that sort of literature which, with all its wonderful genius, may fairly be described as reckless also—reckless and blind to all artistic consequences.
     ‘Worts! worts! worts!’ said Sir Hugh Evans; and here, in all the latest efflorescence of what was once the Romantic, and may now fairly be called the Chaotic, School, we have Words innumerable—brilliant and

—    ¹ ‘L’Année Terrible.’ —

¹⁴⁵ musical, doubtless, but wild and aimless; every sentence with a cracker in its tail, till we get utterly indifferent to crackers; image piled on image, epithet on epithet, phrase choking phrase; here a catherine-wheel of ecstasy, there a rocket of fierce appeal; a blaze of colour everywhere, all the hues of the prism (except the perfect product of all, which is pure white light); the whole forming a dazzling, hissing, spluttering Firework of human speech. ‘How very fine!’ we exclaim; ‘there’s a rocket for you! look at these raining silver lights! Ah, this is something like an exhibition!’ But after it is all over, and the sceptical ones point out to us the wretched darkened canvas framework where the last sparks are lingering and the last smuts falling, we are angry at our own enthusiasm, and feel like men who have been befooled. After all, we reflect, the place is only Cremorne; the object merely the amusement of a crowd of gaping pleasure-seekers who pay so much a head. It has been a vulgar entertainment at the best; and we try to forget it, looking up, as the smoke clears, at the silent stars. This mood, however, is still more unfair than the other. Truly enough, we have been present at fireworks, but on a scale of tremendous genius. A great master has been condescending for our amusement, and has actually worked wonders with his materials.
     Nor is this all. When a poet like Victor Hugo, yielding to the daimonic influence of his own spirit, produces for us in public all the wild resources of his fearless art, he cannot fail to awaken in us forces which ¹⁴⁶ slumber at the touch of any other living man. We may resent the emotion as a weakness, but the emotion exists: we are lifted by it as on the wings of the wind, and driven ‘darkly fearfully afar.’ The scenery of the spectacle may be tawdry, but it is outlined with a mighty hand; the lights may be only wretched rushlights, but what a strange lurid gleam they shed over the rude and gigantic towers and battlements of the scene! It is magnificent, although it is not nature; it is full of infinite suggestion, though it is not art. The power is unbounded; the only question that remains being, Is the power squandered? Much, doubtless, is squandered; and it is this persistent waste which, corresponding as it does to French waste generally, fills one with suspicion and alarm. Reckless writing has its delights, like reckless trading, like reckless fighting and swaggering; but will it not lead to the same end as these others? Concentrated and reserved for specific efforts, instead of being frivolously spent in every direction, the same genius who limned Jean Valjean and Fantine might yet rise to his due place and glory as the Æschylus of his generation.
     After all, it is doubtful if Æschylus, doomed to live in these latter days, would have kept his head. Even as it was, he ‘let go’ tremendously, and was far, very far, from being a steady-brained bard; his vision repeatedly overmastering him, and his utterance becoming thick and confused with portentous weight of matter. His lot was easy, however, compared with that of the modern who has aspired to perform Æschylean functions in the ¹⁴⁷ nineteenth century, by chronicling in tremendous poetic cipher the ravings and sufferings of our Titan; and it is, therefore, an open question whether Victor Hugo is not a greater than even Æschylus, in so far as he has grappled with, and to some extent triumphed over, difficulties to all intents and purposes insuperable.
     We, for our part, find more to move our homage in Jean Valjean than in the Prometheus. We hold that one figure, rudely as it is drawn, to be in some respects the very noblest conception of this generation; and we would look on at fireworks for ever, if once or twice such a face as Jean’s shone out with its heaven-like promise. Gilliatt, too, is noble in the Promethean direction; and so is Quasimodo. Indeed, we know not where to look, out of Æschylus, for figures conceived on the same scale, so typical, so colossal; looming upon us from a stage of mighty amplitude, with a grand Greek background of mountain and sky. They have the Greek freedom and the Greek limitations. Jean Valjean, just as surely as Prometheus, wears the mask, and is elevated on the cothurnus; whence at once his extraordinary stature and his one fixed expression of changeless and monotonous pain.
     Would one choose rather the mobile human face and the free motion of men on a small stage, he must enter the Globe Theatre and hear the wonderful acting of the English players; but with Victor Hugo, as with the father of Athenian drama, we are limited to one mood and wearied by one high-pitched chant. Even if this were perfectly done, it would grow wearisome; but ¹⁴⁸ being far from perfectly done, being at once wearisome and chaotic, it depresses as often as it elevates, and makes us long for a breezier music and a fresher, kindlier movement of face and limb. Nor can Victor Hugo’s greatest admirers deny the fact that he deliberately overclouds his conceptions with verbiage, and blurs what was originally a noble outline by subsequent attempts at elaboration. Our first glimpse of his figures moves us most; our further examination of them is fraught with pain; and not till we have closed our eyes to contemplate the impression left upon the mind, do we again feel how greatly the figures were originally conceived. This writer triumphs invariably by sheer force of primary pictorial vision; triumphs generally in defiance of his own incapacity to paint exquisitely. Reckless (as we have expressed it) of all literary consequences, he produces works which are at once miracles of imagination and marvels of bad taste. Directly we have got the outline of his picture, all further study of it is unsatisfactory: we must fill in the tints for ourselves. Compare the ‘Prometheus’ of Æschylus with ‘Les Misérables’ of Victor Hugo, and perceive the difference between power concentrated and power recklessly drivelled away. The whole episode of Jean Valjean could have been compressed into a tragedy, and, given in such quintessence, would have been an unmixed pleasure to all time. As it is, we doubt whether posterity will do justice to a production so shapeless, so interminable; and this is the more irritating, as it ¹⁴⁹ contains in dilution more colossal imagery than anything we have had in Europe since the ‘Divine Comedy.’
     Viewed simply for what he is, Hugo is very great; but viewed for what he might have been, he is persistently disappointing. With every fresh year of his life he has grown two-fold—in power of conception and power of windiness; until we now recognise in him a god of the elements indeed, but one with more affinity to Boreas than to Apollo. It was doubtless in an unlucky moment that he first freed himself from rhythmic fetters. His was just the sort of genius that needed to be bound and drilled. Let loose on the mighty fields of prose, he knows no limit to his wanderings, and he follows his jerky fancies from one sentence to another, like a snipe-shooter floundering, popping, and perspiring in an Irish marsh. He will go epigram-hunting through a whole series of chapters, at the most critical point of his narrative. A single word (take ‘Waterloo’ in a certain part of ‘Les Misérables’) is Will-o’-the-wisp enough to keep him rushing through the dark till the reader faints for very weariness. If Goethe was, as Novalis described him to be, the Evangelist of Economy, Victor Hugo is assuredly the Evangelist of Waste. A prodigy of less supreme energy would have collapsed long ago under such tremendous exertions; but he, just when we expect to see him sink altogether, springs from the solid earth with fresh vigour. Genius, he has told us in ‘William Shakspeare,’ is not circumscribed. Exaggeration, moreover, is the glory of genius. ‘Cela, c’est l’Inconnu! Cela, c’est l’Infini! Si Corneille ¹⁵⁰ avait cela, il serait l’égal d’Eschyle. Si Milton avait cela, il serait l’égal d’Homère. Si Molière avait cela, il serait l’égal de Shakspeare.’
     We have here, in a nutshell, the Apotheosis of literary Waste; but it would not be difficult to show that none of Hugo’s typical sublimities—Homer, Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Juvenal, Percival, St. John, St. Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakspeare—exhausted their energies in the fashion peculiar to the author of ‘L’Homme qui Rit.’ The truth is, Hugo attempts to elevate into a system the recklessness which, in his own case, is sheer matter of temperament. His mind is for ever pitched in too high a tone of excitement: febrile symptoms, with him, characterise the normal intellectual condition. He is always high-strung, with or without provocation, evincing that excited French power of superficial passion, whether his themes be the wrongs of poor humanity or the loss of a hat-box at a railway station. A cynical foreigner would accuse him of attitudinising. He spouts and strides. Not content with being recognised as Æschylus, he at times affects the graces of La Fontaine. His humour, nevertheless, is very grim. Nor is his satire much better. His true mood is Ercles’ mood—your true nineteenth century heroic.
     And now, surely, if ever, might such a poet find truly heroic matter made to his hand; now might he compose for us the latter Iliad and the greater; choosing for his theme a stranger siege than that of Troy, and a national sentiment nobler and more stirring than ever moved the ¹⁵¹ heart of Agamemnon or any Greek. If great events can manufacture great song, surely such song shall rise soon, whether as a pæan or a dirge; but, meantime, the one man who was capable of expressing in colossal cipher the supreme issues of this Franco-Teutonic struggle, and of aggrandising, through sheer chaotic imagination, figures which are yet too near to us for realistic poetic treatment, has contented himself with keeping a sort of diary in verse of the principal events of the great war, beginning at the Plébiscite, and ending (for the time being, at least) with Henri Cinq’s refusal to abandon the White Flag. Of course, such a Diary, even if kept by a much smaller man, could not fail to be interesting. Kept by Hugo, it necessarily lacks the true piquancy of the best Diaries, that of brevity; but it abounds in fine little touches of self-revelation; and if, on the whole, it fails to fill us with a due sense of the magnitude of the events it describes, that also was inevitable, because it again and again occupies the ground already covered by the public journals.
     Politically speaking, we believe it to be written, every line, on the side of the Truth; nor do we know how to conceal our admiration and wonder at the unerring fidelity with which the writer, amid all his self-consciousness and attitudinising, reaches straight at the throat of every public fallacy which bars his path. Let this praise, now as ever, be conceded to Victor Hugo: his imagination never leads him into the region of Lies. He strikes on the side of Humanity. His vision is far-reaching, puissant, perhaps solitary, just now in France. ¹⁵² He sees with those who prophesy human regeneration. One of the most earnest poems in his book has for its theme the barbaric stupidity of War. All are instinct with the truest Republican sentiment and the strongest natural piety. The last chronicles the doom of the Old World, and after that, the Deluge! Thank heaven, however, Hugo does not recognise the Noah of the period in M. Thiers.
     The Diary opens with a prologue, entitled, ‘Les 7,500,000 Oui,’ which first saw the light in the Rappel:—

Quant à flatter la foule, ô mon esprit, non pas!
Ah! le peuple est en haut, mais la foule est en bas.

This is the key-note of the poem, and it is a vehement protest against the fallacy that the blind and confused element of number in itself constitutes the People. No; the people works, not in dark, crude masses, but through tremendous individuals, who do right in its name. Gracchus, Leonidas, Schwitz, Winkelried, Washington, Bolivar, Manin, Garibaldi;—these are the People; and they have nothing in common with that vile, blind, confused Mob—sombre weakness and sombre force—which ever and anon, outraging the ‘august conscience’ of the world, orders Man to receive some wretched Master—the creature of blind and multitudinous ‘choice.’ ‘O multitude!’ exclaims the poet, ‘we will resist thee.’—

                               Nous ne voulons, nous autres,
Ayant Danton pour père et Hampden pour aïeul,
Pas plus du tyran Tous que du despote Un Seul.

¹⁵³ The People is married to the Idea: the Populace leagues itself to the Guillotine. The People constitutes itself into the Republic; the Populace accepts Tiberius. Then comes the following burst of strong eloquence, forensic rather than poetic, as indeed may be said, with certain reservations, of the whole poem:—

Le droit est au-dessus de Tous; nul vent contraire
Ne le renverse; et Tous ne peuvent rien distraire
Ni rien aliéner de 1’avenir commun.
Le peuple souverain de lui-même, et chacun
Son propre roi; c’est là le droit. Rien ne l’entame.
Quoi! l’homme que voilà qui passe, aurait mon âme!
Honte! il pourrait demain, par un vote hébété,
Prendre, prostituer, vendre ma liberté!
Jamais. La foule un jour peut couvrir le principe;
Mais le flot redescend, l’écume se dissipe,
La vague en s’en allant laisse le droit à nu.
Qui donc s’est figuré que le premier venu
Avait droit sur mon droit! qu’il fallait que je prisse
Sa bassesse pour joug, pour régle son caprice!
Que j’entrasse au cachot s’il entre au cabanon!
Que je fusse forcé de me faire chaînon
Parce qu’il plait à tous de se changer en chaîne!
Que le pli du roseau devînt la loi du chêne!

In the same strain of mingled mockery and defiance, the prologue continues; but the peroration rises into a far higher mood of truly characteristic imagery:

Oh! qu’est-ce donc qui tombe autour de nous dans l’ombre?
Que de flocons de neige! En savez-vous le nombre?
Comptez les millions et puis les millions!
Nuit noire! on voit rentrer au gîte les lions;
On dirait que la vie éternelle recule;                                               154
La neige fait, niveau hideux du crépuscule,
On ne sait quel sinistre abaissement des monts;
Nous nous sentons mourir si nous nous endormons;
Cela couvre les champs, cela couvre les villes;
Cela blanchit l’égout masquant ses bouches viles;
La lugubre avalanche emplit le ciel terni;
Sombre épaisseur de glace! Est-ce que c’est fini?
On ne distingue plus son chemin; tout est piége.
Soit.
           Que restera-t-il de toute cette neige,
Voile froid de la terre au suaire pareil,
Demain, une heure après le lever du soleil?

Whatever may be said of the poetic merit of this passage, it will be admitted that it could only have been written by Victor Hugo.
     After this, the diary begins in earnest. ‘August, 1870,’ and of course—‘Sedan.’ Forthwith is conjured up before our vision the wretched Napoleonic phantom, who is gloomily and fatuously soliloquising. ‘I reign; yes! But I am despised; and I must be feared. I mean in my turn to become master of the world. I have not yet taken Madrid, Lisbon, Vienna, Naples, Dantzic, Munich, Dresden; that is all to come. I will subdue that perfidious old Albion. I will be great. I will have Pope, Sultan, and Czar for my valets. I can demolish Prussia.’ And so on, in the well-known strain of ‘Napoléon le Petit.’ After further determining to set all Europe by the ears, and to be puissant Arbiter of the quarrel, he arranges to begin proceedings at once, under cover of ‘the night.’ But he has been reckoning without ¹⁵⁵ his host. ‘It was broad day! Day at London, at Rome, at Vienna; and all people had their eyes open, except this man. He believed that it was night, because he was blind! All saw the light, and he alone saw the shade.’

Tous voyaient la lumière et seul il voyait l’ombre.

Hélas! sans calculer le temps, le lieu, le nombre,
A tâtons, se fiant au vide, sans appui,
Ayant pour sûreté ses ténèbres à lui,
Ce suicide prit nos fiers soldats, l’armée
De France devant qui marchait la renommée,
Et sans canons, sans pain, sans chefs, sans généraux,
II conduisit au fond du gouffre les héros.
Tranquille, il les mena lui-même dans le piége.

—Où vas-tu? dit la tombe. Il répondit: Que sais-je?

The terrible result is pictured with quaint power. ‘Two vast forests made of the heads, arms, feet, voices of men, and of swords and terror, march upon each other and mingle. Horror!’ In the midst of a carnage too dreadful for pen to picture, amid the roar of cannon and the shriek of the dying, when all things bled, fought, struggled, and died, one voice, one ‘monstrous cry,’ was heard: ‘LET ME LIVE!’ (Je veux vivre!) ‘The stupified cannon was silent, the drunken mêlée paused;’ and then, to the amaze and horror of united Europe—

Alors la Gaule, alors la France, alors la gloire,
Alors Brennus, 1’audace, et Clovis, la victoire,
Alors le vieux titan celtique aux cheveux longs,
Alors le groupe altier des batailles, Châlons,
Tolbiac la farouche, Arezzo la cruelle,                                            156
Bovines, Marignan, Beaugé, Mons-en-Puelle,
Tours, Ravenne, Agnadel sur son haut palefroi,
Fornoue, Ivry, Coutras, Cérisolles, Rocroy,
Denain et Fontenoy, toutes ces immortelles
Mêlant l’éclair du front au flamboiement des ailes,
Jemmape, Hohenlinden, Lodi, Wagram, Eylau,
Les hommes du dernier carré de Waterloo,
Et tous ces chefs de guerre, Héristal, Charlemagne,
Charles-Martel, Turenne, effroi de l’Allemagne,
Condé, Villars, fameux par un si fier succès,
Cet Achille, Kléber, ce Scipion, Desaix,
Napoléon, plus grand que César et Pompée,
Par la main d’un bandit rendirent leur épée.

This finishes the record for August; and leaves the reader plenty to reflect over, in all conscience!
     If we detach this characteristic writing from its political associations, and set aside for a moment our natural sympathy with the sentiments its wild imagery expresses, we shall possibly conclude that it is neither very trenchant nor very admirable. As a literary effort, it is not much beyond Vermesch; and as political philosophy, it is of about Rochefort’s calibre. Now that the first fever of excitement is over, let us admit that, after all, the man of Sedan was a Scape-goat as well as ‘a Bandit.’ For our own part, we believe the man to have been what France made him, less disposed to military glory than to social pleasure, and quite content to slumber on his laurels if the world would have permitted him. He had created his Monster just as Frankenstein did before him; and the gigantic creature—the portentous and shadowy Oui ¹⁵⁷ of the Plébiscite—drove him on and up in his very soul’s despite. His ambitious days were over. He ever hated the sword-flash. He had never recovered the shock of Mexico. His best friends had died away and left him. Feebly, clumsily, protestingly, he drifted the way his Monster drove him—through the Baptism of Fire to the feet of the Teuton bigot at Sedan; and then, even then, in spite of his utter collapse and shame, he did not ‘want to die.’
     This dislike to die a Roman death has been hurled at him with most inconsequent scorn by others besides Victor Hugo; but why on earth should they have expected anything so heroic, when on their own showing the old gentleman was so contemptible a speculator? He die? he play the hero? Wherefore? And again, on what showing would self-immolation have been noble? We do not particularly admire the gambler who, after having lost his all, blows out his brains or hangs himself to a tree. We merely call him a fool for his pains; a fool, not a hero. It is therefore highly illogical to taunt the man of Sedan with having completely realised our own conception of his character. He calmly accepted his loss, and saved his skin: a very contemptible course, but still very natural, since the man was never anything but a gambler. It is, moreover, useless now for France to gird and gibe afresh at the Scapegoat. He lives; and that is all. ¹ Success or failure cannot alter such a nature; and the man of December was the man of Sedan. For all that, France failed when he failed,

—    ¹ Since the above was written, he has passed away. —

¹⁵⁸ bringing to a crisis that insatiable avarice of power which has been her curse since Buonaparte syruped and drugged the Revolution. No sane man denies that the war, had it culminated with Sedan, would have been an unmixed blessing to the human race.
     ‘September;’ and the plot thickens. First comes a poem entitled ‘Choice between the Two Nations,’ in which there is a long complimentary address to Germany, followed by three pregnant words addressed to France—‘O ma mère!’ After that we have some smart satire addressed to ‘Prince Prince et Demi,’ ending with the memorable avowal that the war between the ex-Emperor of France and the King of Prussia was simply a misunderstanding between two robbers—Cartouche and Schinderhannes! This is merely the prelude to still stronger abuse of the Teuton leader—‘madly served by all those whom he oppresses, the Ogre of Right Divine, devout, correct, moral, born to become Emperor, and to remain Corporal.’

Ici c’est le Bohême et là c’est le Sicambre.
Le coupe-gorge lutte avec le deux-décembre. . . .
Oui, Bonaparte est vil, mais Guillaume est atroce,
Et rien n’est imbécile, hélas, comme le gant
Que ce filou naïf jette à ce noir brigand.

     The dénouement comes very speedily. ‘O France, a puff of wind scatters in one moment that shade of Cæsar and that shade of a Host.’ Ere September is over, the iron rings are closing around Paris. On the last day of the eventful month, Hugo addresses a lively poem to his ¹⁵⁹ little grandchild. ‘You were a year old yesterday, my darling! O Jeanne, and your sweet prattle mingles with the sound of the mighty Paris under its armour.’ The verses are in the poet’s best and simplest style—far superior to his ordinary invective.
     As the month of the chill wind and the yellow leaf breaks upon us, we find the poet yielding to its solemnising influence, and glancing sadly back over his past years of exile. The mood swiftly changes; for Hugo is in Paris, and he can see the glittering legions at the gates. ‘They are there, threatening Paris. They punish it. Why? For being France, and for being the Universe! . . . . They punish France for being Liberty. They punish Paris for being that city where Danton thunders, where Molière shines, where Voltaire laughs. They punish Paris for being the Soul of the World.’ On the face of it, this reads like nonsense; but, beneath the surface, it is superbly true, as any man may convince himself who dispassionately reviews the history of Europe, from the Coalition downwards. However, the Seven Chiefs are ‘not to blame.’ They are ‘black forces fighting against right, light, and love,’ by the sheer laws of their diabolic natures. Seven princes—the cipher of evil—Wurtemburg, Nassau, Saxony, Baden, Mecklenburg, Bavaria, Prussia; in other words, ‘Hate, Winter, War, Mourning, Pestilence, Famine, Ennui.’

Paris devant son mur a sept chefs comme Thèbe!

‘Unheard-of spectacle! Erebus besieging the Star.’
     Mists rise, darkness gathers; it is ‘November.’ Victor ¹⁶⁰ Hugo addresses the coming night from the battlements; and, lifting his eyes to the horizon, sees the sunset like the blood-red blade of a sword. He thinks of some great duel ‘of a monster against a god,’ and seems to behold ‘the terrible sword of heaven, red and fallen to earth, after a battle.’ In the next piece, he eagerly defends Paris against the scandals spoken concerning her at Berlin; and, turning from the praise of his beloved city, he addresses the Teuton princes in a number of verses which are meant to be sarcastic, but are really without point or sting. Here, however, we get a coarse, but magnificent image.

Soit, princes. Vautrez-vous sur la France conquise.
De l’Alsace aux abois, de la Lorraine en sang,
De Metz qu’on vous vendit, de Strasbourg frémissant
Dont vous n’éteindrez pas la tragique auréole,
Vous aurez ce qu’on a des femmes qu’on viole,
La nudité, le lit, et la haine à jamais.

Oui, le corps souillé, froid, sinistre désormais,
Quand on les prend de force en des étreintes viles,
C’est tout ce qu’on obtient des vierges et des villes.

     In small things, as in great, waste is fatal; and the above passage is spoiled by the last three lines, thrust in on account of the irresistible alliteration of ‘vierges’ and ‘villes.’ Following in due sequence, we have a number of short pieces of no great importance, except perhaps the spirited address to a certain Bishop who called the poet an ‘Atheist.’ Some tender lines ‘to a child ill during the siege’ conclude the diary for November.
     ¹⁶¹ ‘December’ opens wildly, with a bleak wind of protestation against the dismemberment of France. Then come some lines on Grant’s message; bitter lines enough, and, God knows, bitter with reason; after that, an address to a certain cannon named after the poet, and a description of the forts, ‘the enormous watch-dogs of Paris;’ and then some sad words ‘to France,’ in which we come in for our turn of blame.

Personne pour toi. Tous sont d’accord. Celui-ci,
Nommé Gladstone, dit à tes bourreaux: merci!
Cet autre, nommé Grant, te conspue, et cet autre,
Nommé Bancroft, t’outrage; ici c’est un apôtre,
Là c’est un soldat, là c’est un juge, un tribun,
Un prêtre, l’un du Nord, 1’autre du Sud; pas un
Que ton sang, à grands flots versé, ne satisfasse;
Pas un qui sur ta croix ne te crache à la face.
Hélas! qu’as-tu donc fait aux nations?

     The outrage was completed, and there was ‘no one for her.’ Dogberry looked on as usual, with his arms folded—self-constituted policeman of the world, but more like one of those rheumatic old watchmen who walked about all night announcing the weather, but fled into their boxes at the slightest whisper of danger. ‘No one for her?’ Yes, the Dead!

O morts pour mon pays, je suis votre envieux!

     It is the end of the year, and France lies bleeding at the feet of the robber. Germany has triumphed indeed; but whose will be the final victory, asks the poet, as the year dies out? Low as France lies, her spirit already ¹⁶² penetrates afar, and strikes at the very heart of the constitutional fallacies which form the present strength of the German Confederation. The Earthquake began in Paris; hushed for a space, it will reappear again at Berlin. The whole of the final address to Germany must be read and studied, to realise its grand revolutionary flavour. It is one of the finest things in the book; perhaps the one poem which reads like an inspiration. We detach the concluding lines from the context, for the sake of their wonderful music and sublime prophecy:

Non, vous ne prendrez pas la Lorraine et l’Alsace,
Et je vous le redis, Allemands, quoi qu’on fasse,
C’est vous qui serez pris par la France. Comment?
Comme le fer est pris dans l’ombre par l’aimant;
Comme la vaste nuit est prise par 1’aurore;
Comme avec ses rochers, où dort 1’écho sonore,
Ses cavernes, ses trous de bêtes, ses halliers,
Et son horreur sacrée et ses loups familiers,
Et toute sa feuillée informe qui chancelle,
Le bois lugubre est pris par la claire étincelle.
Quand nos éclairs auront traversé vos massifs;
Quand vous aurez subi, puis savouré, pensifs,
Cet air de France où l’âme est d’autant plus à l’aise
Qu’elle y sent vaguement flotter la Marseillaise;
Quand vous aurez assez donné vos biens, vos droits,
Votre honneur, vos enfants, à dévorer aux rois;
Quand vous verrez César envahir vos provinces;
Quand vous aurez pesé de deux façons vos princes,
Quand vous vous serez dit: ces maîtres des humains
Sont lourds à notre épaule et légers dans nos mains;
Quand, tout ceci passé, vous verrez les entailles
Qu’auront faites sur nous et sur vous les batailles;
Quand ces charbons ardents dont en France les plis                       163
Des drapeaux, des linceuls, des âmes, sont remplis,
Auront ensemencé vos profondeurs funèbres,
Quand ils auront creusé lentement vos ténèbres,
Quand ils auront en vous couvé le temps voulu,
Un jour, soudain, devant l’affreux sceptre absolu,
Devant les rois, devant les antiques Sodomes,
Devant le mal, devant le joug, vous, forêt d’hommes,
Vous aurez la colère, énorme qui prend feu;
Vous vous ouvrirez, gouffre, à l’ouragan de Dieu;
Gloire au Nord! ce sera l’aurore boréale
Des peuples, éclairant une Europe idéale!
Vous crierez:—Quoi! des rois! quoi donc! un empereur!—
Quel éblouissement, l’Allemagne en fureur!
Va, peuple! O vision! combustion sinistre
De tout le noir passé, prêtre, autel, roi, ministre,
Dans un brasier de foi, de vie et de raison,
Faisant une lueur immense à l’horizon!
Frères, vous nous rendrez notre flamme agrandie.
Nous sommes le flambeau, vous serez l’incendie.

     After that, January 1871 may open a little more gaily. In a charming letter sent by balloon-post, we get a picture of the internal life of Paris during the siege. ‘I have given 15 francs for four fresh eggs, not for myself, but for my little George and my little Jeanne. We eat horse, rat, bear, and donkey flesh;’ and so on in a very graphic description. A little further on, we find a poem entitled ‘The Pigeon’ in which the city is compared, not very felicitously, to a dark lake, and the bird to a black speck in heaven. ‘The Atom comes in the shade to succour the Colossus.’ Rather more felicitous is the ‘Sortie.’ ‘And the women with calm faces and ¹⁶⁴ broken hearts hand them their guns, first kissing them.’ After this, we get nothing very striking, until (passing over certain savage addresses to the Germans in reference to the capitulation) we come to the end of the month of February, at which point of the diary we find a striking poem on ‘Progress.’ It is very long, but very powerful; eloquent rather than poetic. The canto which follows, under the head of ‘March,’ may be passed over without comment, as it is chiefly devoted to personal misfortune. In ‘March’ the poet lost his beloved son Charles, who died very suddenly. The misfortune is chronicled in some affecting, but rather theatrical, verses.
     From this point the diary may be said to fuse itself into one long passionate political chant. April, May, and June 1871; who does not recollect the terrors and the agonies of those months? As they advance, the poet’s fury increases. ‘Paris incendié’ is a terrific piece of fiery declamation. ‘The two Trophies’ fiercely pleads for the Vendôme Column and the Arc de Triomphe. All the world knows in which direction flows the sympathies of Victor Hugo; all the world knows also how the poet was driven out of Brussels, because, as a high-souled patriot, he dared to utter the bitter and unpalatable truth. There are many poems expressive of personal feeling at this part of the diary—many strong and incisive words of protest and recrimination—but, to our mind, the simplest and best is, ‘A Qui la Faute?’ It speaks for itself, in its terrible, subdued irony, and we transcribe it entire: —
                                                                                                                                                             165

À QUI LA FAUTE?

Tu viens d’incendier la Bibliothèque?
                                                                 —Oui.
J’ai mis le feu là.
                                 —Mais c’est un crime inouï!
Crime commis par toi centre toi-même, infâme!
Mais tu viens de tuer le rayon de ton âme!
C’est ton propre flambeau que tu viens de souffler!
Ce que ta rage impie et folle ose brûler,
C’est ton bien, ton trésor, ta dot, ton héritage!
Le livre, hostile au maître, est à ton avantage.
Le livre a toujours pris fait et cause pour toi.
Une bibliothèque est un acte de foi
Des générations ténébreuses encore
Qui rendent dans la nuit témoignage à l’aurore.
Quoi! dans ce vénérable amas des vérités,
Dans ses chefs-d’œuvre pleins de foudre et de clartés,
Dans ce tombeau des temps devenu répertoire,
Dans les siècles, dans l’homme antique, dans l’histoire,
Dans le passé, leçon qu’épelle 1’avenir,
Dans ce qui commença pour ne jamais finir,
Dans les poëtes! quoi, dans ce gouffre des bibles,
Dans le divin monceau des Eschyles terribles,
Des Homères, des Jobs, debout sur 1’horizon,
Dans Molière, Voltaire et Kant, dans la raison,
Tu jettes, misérable, une torche enflammée !
De tout l’esprit humain tu fais de la fumée!
As-tu donc oublié que ton libérateur,
C’est le livre? le livre est là sur la hauteur;
Il luit; parce qu’il brille et qu’il les illumine,
Il détruit 1’échafaud, la guerre, la famine;
Il parle; plus d’esclave et plus de paria.
Ouvre un livre. Platon, Milton, Beccaria.
Lis ces prophètes, Dante, ou Shakspeare, ou Corneille;
L’âme immense qu’ils ont en eux, en toi s’éveille;
Ébloui, tu te sens le même homme qu’eux tous;                              166
Tu deviens en lisant grave, pensif et doux;
Tu sens dans ton esprit tous ces grands hommes croître;
Ils t’enseignent ainsi que l’aube éclaire un cloître;
A mesure qu’il plonge en ton cœur plus avant,
Leur chaud rayon t’apaise et te fait plus vivant;
Ton âme interrogée est prête à leur répondre;
Tu te reconnais bon, puis meilleur; tu sens fondre
Comme la neige au feu, ton orgueil, tes fureurs,
Le mal, les préjugés, les rois, les empereurs!
Car la science en 1’homme arrive la première.
Puis vient la liberté. Toute cette lumière,
C’est à toi, comprends donc, et c’est toi qui l’éteins!
Les buts rêvés par toi sont par le livre atteints.
Le livre en ta pensée entre, il défait en elle
Les liens que l’erreur à la vérité mêle,
Car toute conscience est un nœud gordien.
Il est ton médecin, ton guide, ton gardien.
Ta haine, il la guérit; ta démence, il te l’ôte.
Voilà ce que tu perds, hélas, et par ta faute!
Le livre est ta richesse à toi! c’est le savoir.
Le droit, la vérité, la vertu, le devoir,
Le progrès, la raison dissipant tout délire.
Et tu détruis cela, toi!
                                     —Je ne sais pas lire.

After that, one turns with trembling hands to the epilogue, ‘The Old World and the Deluge.’

LE FLOT.

Tu me crois la marée et je suis le déluge.

Verily; and as yet no Dove appears to betoken the subsidence of the waters!
     Here must cease our sketch of this unique poem. We ¹⁶⁷ have left little space for comment. It has all the merits, as well as all the faults, of the writer’s style. Poor and unvaried in metaphor (observe, for example, the reiterated use of Night and Morning, Light and Darkness, the Abyss, the Stars, and the Tide); sicklied o’er with pet names, such as Æschylus, Cain, Cyrus, Gengis, Timour; tautological in ideas and theatrical in manner; thin to attenuation in much of its philosophical matter, it is still in no sense disappointing, though in every sense below the high level of the writer at his best. It is first-class political verse, that is all. With all this, its passion, its music, its veracity, its continued heat of personal emotion, keep us ever reminded of the fact that we are in the presence of a man who in nobility of nature has no superior, in gloomy magnificence of imagery no rival, and in sheer spontaneous poetic eloquence certainly no equal.

_____

Master-Spirits - continued

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