ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

OTHER ESSAYS (4)

1. Review of The Ballad-Book: a Selection of the Choicest British Ballads by William Allingham.

2. Thorvaldsen and his English Critics

3. Review of Arne: a Sketch of Norwegian Country Life. By Björnstjerne Björnson. Translated from the Norwegian by Augusta Plesner and S. Rugeley-Powers.

4. Review of Icelandic Legends. (Collected by Jón. Arnason.) Translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkr. Magnússon. Second Series. With Notes and Introductory Essay.

5. Stockholm and the Scandinavian Exhibition

6. Review of New Poems by Matthew Arnold

7. Review of Essays on Robert Browning’s Poetry by John T. Nettleship and A Study of the Works of Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate by Edward Campbell Tainsh

From The Athenæum - 21 January, 1865 - No. 1943, pp. 83-84.

The Ballad-Book: a Selection of the Choicest British Ballads. By William Allingham. Golden Treasury Series. (Macmillan & Co.)

THE series of which this volume forms a portion began with Mr. Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury” of English poems and lyrics,—emphatically a. good book, fitted for men of taste, as distinguished from the clever selections so frequently put forward by men of ability. Now comes ‘The Ballad-Book,’ “which,” says the Preface, “is intended to present, for the delight of the lovers of poetry, some fourscore of the best Old Ballads, in at once the best and most authentic attainable form.” Under the circumstances, it must be admitted that Mr. Allingham has made his selections fairly well; his space was limited; and the many beautiful and familiar faces that we miss could only have been included in a volume of greater size. So far well; and we regret that Mr. Allingham went any further. Had he stopped short when he had done his garnering, and arranged his materials in the decent order in which we find them, we should have had no reason to complain, and sensitive lovers of the early ballads might have read his book with safety. As it is, he has chosen to present himself to us as a compound of the loving critic, the lazy editor, and the original poet. As loving critic, he shows a commendable appreciation, a subdued enthusiasm for whatever is good and beautiful; as lazy editor, he deals somewhat harshly with the memories of such men as Percy, Ritson and Ellis. “The ballads which we give,” writes Mr. Allingham, “have, one and all, no connexion of the slightest importance with history. Things that did really happen are, no doubt, shadowed forth in many of them, but with such a careless confusion of names, places and times, now thrice and thirty times confounded by alterations in course of oral transmission, various versions, personal and local adaptations, not to speak of editorial adaptations, that it is mere waste of time and patience to read (if any one ever does read) those grave disquisitions, historical and antiquarian, wherewith it has been the fashion to encumber many of these rudely picturesque and pathetic poems.” Certainly, the historical and antiquarian disquisitions here so summarily dealt with, would have been out of place in a little volume like the present; but to deny their value and interest is quite another thing. It is too much the fashion to write books lollingly (if we may be allowed the expression),—to get one’s information at second-hand, in small doses coated with sugar,—to look with smiles of elegant pity on the labours of the antiquary. Do not let us forget, however, the vast debt we owe to Percy, but for whose learned explorations the rich mines of English metrical romance might have been hidden to this day, and to his indefatigable successors. At a time when it was the habit to look upon such work as laborious trifling, they discovered riches which would certainly have been unappreciated had no editorial light been thrown upon them. The cumbrous antiquarianism itself lends a solemnity to things which might otherwise have appeared but idle; and even a learned squabble over a doubtful text served to show the public that the subjects of discussion were interesting to men of high acquirements and culture. Further, to read the “grave disquisitions” is far from being “a mere waste of time and trouble”; in such works as Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ the explanatory matter is not the least attractive. We shall not, however, quarrel with Mr. Allingham on this head. It is in his character of original poet that we have most fault to find with him. He is fond of spoiling rough but honest originals with his own love for smoothness and grace, forgetting that it is quite as difficult a task to “touch up” the thistle as to paint the lily and adorn the rose. He is too fastidious,—is as angry with an ill rhyme as with a. breach of decorum,—slices out whatever is not up to the standard of his modern taste,—sucks the pith out of strong verses, and blows in odour of roses,—mutilates with his delicate pen even the grand old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens.’ It is rather too bad to talk sneeringly of editorial adaptations, and then to set to work with paste and scissors. True, there have been sinners in this respect before Mr. Allingham—sinners of a much more reckless and original tendency, who occasionally hit on something with the genuine ring in it: Jamieson, for instance. But we shall show that Mr. Allingham alters what is unobjectionable; and that very often, when he operates on what is bad, he merely succeeds in changing bad into worse. We waive the conviction that to doctor our old ballads, unless in cases where some connecting link is wanting to the narrative, is objectionable and unprofitable, generally resulting as fatally as the famous operation on the healthy athlete with bandy legs. We merely
demand that such doctoring, if done at all, should be done well; at the same time expressing our opinion that Mr. Allingham, if he had had as complete a knowledge of his subject as his more learned predecessors, would have succeeded better.
     We have commended Mr. Allingham for the good taste evinced in his selections; but there are one or two cases in which, we think, he is in error. Why, for instance, print the abominable thing called ‘Hugh of Lincoln,’ describing the atrocious cruelty of a Jewish maiden to a Christian child? The subject is nearly the same as the story put into the mouth of Chaucer’s Prioress, whose sombre bigotry somewhat subdues the glaring ugliness of the details. Sickening, and calculated to produce bad feeling, ‘Hugh of Lincoln’ should have been suppressed; and if something dreadful was wanted instead, we might have had ‘Sir Roland,’ that marvellous ballad printed in Motherwell’s collection, and suggested as the original whence Shakspeare gave the line,—

Childe Rowland to the dark tower came.

Again, what is there in ‘The Frolicksome Duke, or the Tinker’s Good Fortune,’ that it should appear in a collection of the choicest ballads? Its only merit is that it reminds us of Christopher Sly. If a humorous piece was wanted, would not the first part of ‘The King and the Miller of Mansfield’ have been preferable? That is a question of taste. No one, however, will question the super-excellent music and brisk humour of the ‘Gaberlunzie Man,’ sometimes attributed to the pen of King James the Fifth of Scotland, and first printed in Ramsay’s ‘Tea-Table Miscellany.’ This piece, however, finds no place in ‘The Ballad-Book.’ Another bit of genuine humour—scarcely suitable, however, for Mr. Allingham’s purpose—is so little known that we transcribe it here. It was taken down from the recitation of a gentleman in Riddesdale, and was first printed in Blackie & Son’s ‘Scottish Ballads.’ We print the first verse literally, but in others suppress the iteration:

THE KEACH I’ THE CREEL.

A fair young May went up the street,
     Some white fish for to buy;
And a bonnie clerk’s fa’en in love wi’ her,
     And he’s followed her by and by—by;
     And he’s followed her by and by.

“O where live ye, my bonnie lass,
     I pray thee tell to me;
For gin the nicht were ever sae mlrk,
     I wad come and visit thee—”

“O my father he aye locks the door,
     My mither keeps the key;
And gin ye were ever sic a wily wight,
     Ye canna win in to me—”

But the clerk he had ae true brother,
     And a wily wight was he;
And he has made a lang ladder,
     Was thirty steps and three—

He has made a cleek but and a creel—
     A creel but and a pin;
And he’s away to the chimley-top,
     And he’s letten the bonnie clerk in—

The auld wife, being not asleep,
     Heard something that was said;
“I’ll lay my life,” quo’ the silly auld wife,
     “There’s a man i’ our dochter’s bed—”

The old man he gat owre the bed,
     To see if the thing was true;
But she’s ta’en the bonnie clerk in her arms,
     And cover’d him owre wi’ blue—

“O where are ye gaun now, father,” she says,
     “And where are ye gaun sae late?
Ye’ve disturb’d me in my evening prayers,
     And O but they were sweet—”

“O ill betide ye, silly auld wife,
     And an ill death may ye die:
She has the mucklc buik in her arms,
     And she’s prayin’ for you and me—”

The auld wife she got owre the bed,
     To see if the thing was true;
But what the wrack took the auld wife’s fit?
     For into the creel she flew—

The man that was at the chimley-top,
     Finding the creel was fu’,
He wrappit the rape round his left shouther,
     And fast to him he drew—

“O help, O help, O hinny, now help;
     O help, O hinny, now;
For him that ye aye wished me to,
     He’s carryin’ me off just now—”

“O if the foul thief’s gotten ye,
     I wish he may keep his hand;
For a’ the lee lang winter nicht
     Ye’ll never lie in your bed—”

He’s towed her up, he’s towed her down,
     He’s gi’en her a richt down fa’,
Till every rib i’ the auld wife’s side
     Play‘d nick-nack on the wa’—

O the blue, the bonnie, bonnie blue;
     And I wish the blue may do weel:
And every auld wife that’s sae jealous o’ her dochter,
     May she get a good keach i’ the creel.

     There will be little question that this ‘Keach i’ the Creel,’ strong as is the resemblance it bears to stories by both Boccaccio and Chaucer, is as unobjectionable as most of the old ballads in their genuine state. The ‘Gaberlunzie Man,’ with the exception of two lines, however, is quite innocent, and we wonder at its absence from this collection. In spite of certain remarks in the preface, it seems to us that the greater number of the selections in ‘The Ballad-Book’ belong, in strict justice, to the North; and undoubtedly those of avowedly Scottish origin surpass all the rest in poetic merit. Mr. Allingham seems to have had considerable difficulty with his English specimens, and almost apologizes for inserting the ‘Lyttell Geste of Robin Hood’—a rhyme which many will like.
     Mr. Allingham describes the manner in which his labours have been conducted. “The set of ballads in our own volume,” he writes, “is, we believe, much nearer to what the sung and recited ballads really were, at their best, than those which we have all accepted as the Old Ballads in the collections of Percy, Jamieson, Scott, and other editors. Many modern interpolations, confessed or obvious, are now left out, greatly, if we mistake not, to the improvement of the ballads. Where re-arrangement, or selection from different copies (freely practised by preceding editors), appeared desirable, it has been done with diligent examination of a large mass of materials, and with the most punctilious caution; and where the present editor found occasion, which was rarely, to supply some link, repair some dropt stitch, he has dealt merely with things neutral, carefully avoiding to foist in any touches of pseudo-antique, whether in incident, language or costume. A very few words are altered for manners’ sake. Substantially he has added nothing to the ballads.” This has a promising and honest sound. Let us turn to the ballads themselves, and select one or two specimens for examination.
     Our first sample shall be ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ undoubtedly the finest of the old ballads, and perhaps the most ancient. The version given here is mainly that found in Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy’; but Mr. Allingham follows Buchan in describing the object of the voyage as the conveyance of the king’s daughter to Norway, there to be crowned queen. Up to the middle of the poem our editor sins but little beyond a few verbal alterations—such as printing “hoisted” instead of “hoysed,” and capriciously suppressing the capital stanza—

The first word that Sir Patrick read,
     Sae loud loud laughed he;
The next word that Sir Patrick read,
     The tear blinded his e’e—

lines full, we think, of dramatic force and effect. But midway occur suppressions and alterations of the most capricious description; to show which fully we must give the final portions of the ballad in the two versions of Scott and Allingham. We begin with the return
from Norway:—

Scott’s Version.

They hadna sail’d a league, a league,
     A league but barely three,
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,
And gurly grew the sea.

The ankers brak, and the topmasts lap,
     It was sic a deadly storm;
And the waves cam’ o’er the broken ship,
     Till a’ her sides were torn.

“O where will I get a gude sailor,
     To take my helm in hand,
Till I get up to the tall top-mast,
     To see if I can spy land?”

“O here am I, a sailor gude,
     To take the helm in hand,
Till you go up to the tall top-mast;
     But I fear you’ll ne’er spy land.”

He hadna gane a step, a step,
     A step but barely ane,
When a boult flew out of our goodly ship,
     And the salt sea it came in.

“Gae, fetch a web o’ the silken claith,
     Another o’ the twine,
And wap them into on ship’s side,
     And let nae the sea come in.”

They fetch’d a web o’ the silken claith,
     Another o’ the twine,
And they wapp’d them round that gude ship’s side,
     But still the sea came in.

O laith, laith, were our gude Scots lords
     To weet their cork-heel’d shoon!
But lang or a’ the play was play’d,
     They wat their hats aboon.

And mony was the feather bed
     That floated on the faem;
And mony was the gude lord’s son,
     That never mair came hame.

The ladyes wrang their fingers white,
     The maidens tore their hair,
A’ for the sake of their true loves—
     For them they’ll see nae mair.

O lang, lang may the ladyes sit,
     Wi’ their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
     Come sailing to the strand!

And lang, lang, may the maidens sit,
     With their goud kaims in their hair,
A’ waiting for their ain dear loves!
     For them they’ll see nae mair.

Half owre, half owre to Aberdour,
     ’Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
     Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet!

Allingham’s Version.

They hadna sail’d upon the sea
     A day but barely three,
Till loud and boisterous grew the wind,
     And gurly grew the sea.

“O where will I get a gude sailor
     To tak’ my helm in hand,
Till I gae up to the tall topmast
     To see if I can spy land?”

“O here am I, a sailor gude,
     To tak’ the helm in hand,
Till you gae up to the tall topmast,—
     But I fear you’ll ne’er spy land.”

He hadna gane a step, a step,
     A step but barely ane,
When a bolt flew out o’ our goodly ship,
     And the salt sea it came in.

“Gae fetch a web o’ the silken claith,
     Anither o’ the twine,
And wap them into our ship’s side,
     And letna the sea come in.”

They fetched a web o’ the silken claith,
     Anither o’ the twine,
And they wapped them into that gude ship’s side,
     But still the sea cam’ in.

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords
     To weet their milk-white hands;
But lang ere a’ the play was owre
     They wat their gouden bands.

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords
     To weet their cork-heel’d shoon;
But lang ere a’ the play was play’d
     They wat their hats aboon.

O lang, lang may the ladies sit
     Wi’ their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
     Come sailing to the land!

And lang, lang may the maidens sit
     Wi’ their goud kaims in their hair,
Awaiting for their ain dear loves,
     For them they’ll see nae mair.

Half ower, half ower to Aberdour,
     It’s fifty fathoms deep;
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
     Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.

     We have italicized only those portions which Mr. Allingham has either altered or suppressed; and we appeal to our readers if any one of the alterations or suppressions is an improvement. “Loud and boisterous grew the wind,” is a poor apology for the strong line in Scott’s version; though possibly one is as genuine as the other. The seventh verse of the second version printed above is original, we presume, and is given to us instead of the lines—

And mony was the feather bed
     That floated on the faem!—

which add to the description, while Mr. Allingham’s are tautological. In other cases Mr. Allingham is not nearly so gentle. His version of ‘Young Beichan’ is full of alterations, many of them for the better, but in one or two cases it is sadly at fault. It was a great mistake to slice out the last verse, which is full of stir and brilliance and bustle, and winds up the story merrily, as with a peal of music:—

Fy! gar a’ our cooks mak’ ready !
     Fy! gar a’ our pipers play!
Fy! gar trumpets gang thro’ the toun,
     That Lord Beichan is married twice in a day!

     But Mr. Allingham’s treatment is still more apparent in ‘Sweet William’s Ghost.’ The editor cuts in two the ballad published by Ramsay, and does the same with Motherwell’s ‘William and Marjorie,’ and then patches the two fragments together. In doing this, he entirely loses the fine iteration of such verses as—

O sweet Marg’ret! O dear Marg’ret!
     I pray thee speak to me—
Give me my faith and troth, Marg’ret,
     As I gave it to thee!—

and regales us instead with the following:—

O Marjorie sweet! O Marjorie dear!
     For faith and charitie,
Will ye gie me back my faith and troth,
     That I gave once to thee?—

the last three lines of which are from Motherwell, and the first by Allingham.
     But to prolong these instances is useless. We do not exaggerate in the slightest degree when we say that it is impossible to read many of Mr. Allingham’s versions without either missing something that we esteem or finding something that we deem worthless. ‘Tamlane’ is spoiled by the omission of certain verses, which, though somewhat indelicate, are absolutely essential to the unity of the story; it would have been better either to have let the ballad alone or to have softened and printed the suppressed stanzas. In this, as in other cases, we do not for a moment question the difficulty of the task which Mr. Allingham has had to perform; our only regret is that he has performed it unsuccessfully. “On the general effect of his labours,” he writes, “he would be content to leave the verdict either to half-a-dozen true knowers of English poetry (if so many could be found at one time) or else to any group of ordinary listeners, men, women and children, who care to listen to the like—such a group as ballads were made to please. Let, for example, ‘Earl Mar’s Daughter’ be read as here given, or ‘Young Redin,’ or ‘The Jolly Goshawk,’ or ‘Etric,’ or ‘Binnorie,’ or ‘Little Musgrave,’ or ‘Willie’s Lady,’ and also those versions of the same which are printed in any other collection.” This challenge is fair. In the cases cited we confess that Mr. Allingham has some reason for self-congratulation. The ballads mentioned all demanded improvement of some sort, being more or less diffuse or disconnected; yet a careful perusal of the new version will lead to the detection of numerous alterations—trifling, no doubt, but significant—where alteration was quite superfluous.
     After all, perhaps, this editing of old and familiar ballads is a thankless task; and unsatisfactorily as Mr. Allingham seems to have done his work, we can point to no living person who could have done it better.

___

William Allingham replied to Buchanan’s review in the following issue.

The Athenæum (18 February, 1865 - No. 1947, p.242)

MISCELLANEA

     Old Ballads.—On “the Debatable Ground” sprung up many of our Old Ballads; and on a literary Debatable Ground these wild flowers of our poesy must still chiefly be gathered. It is dangerous business to edit Old Ballads, and dangerous also to answer a Reviewer. On questions of taste or opinion I should not dream of replying; but when a suspicion of dishonesty is publicly thrown out, one ought perhaps to say a few words. Brief let me be. The only definite charges against me by the writer of the notice of ‘The Ballad-Book’ in the Athenæum of the 21st of January are founded on the version therein given of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ which he compares with that given in Scott’s ‘Border Minstrelsy.’ By-the-by, your reviewer’s quotation of the verse, “And many was the feather-bed,” &c. (upon which he specially remarks) is incorrect; the ‘Minstrelsy’ having it “flattered on the faem,” not “floated.” 1 do not object to anybody’s preferring Scott’s version of this “grand old ballad,” but why must it needs be considered as the authorized version? There are four principal versions of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ (or Spence)—Percy’s, Scott’s, Jamieson’s, Buchan’s—each of
which differs very much from all the rest; and there are also numerous minor variations in recited copies (see Motherwell’s ‘Minstrelsy,’ xliv). Percy’s Ballad (1755) is “given from two MS. copies transmitted from Scotland”; Scott’s (1802) is “taken from two MS. copies collated with several verses recited by the editor’s friend, Robert Hamilton, Esq.”; Jamieson’s (1806) is that one of the two above-mentioned MSS. which “seemed the most perfect” to Scott himself (note in ‘Border Minstrelsy’), and now printed verbatim. It differs in every verse from Scott’s previously published version. The stanza, “The first word that Sir Patrick read,” &c. (one of those stanzas, by the way, which are common property with reciters, and used in many ballads, sometimes with but little fitness), is not found in Jamieson’s version. Buchan’s version (1828), the longest and fullest, was taken down from the recitation of “a wandering minstrel, blind from his infancy, [who] has been travelling in the north as a mendicant for these last fifty years. He learned it in his youth from a very old person; and the words are exactly as recited, free from those emendations which have ruined so many of our best Scottish ballads.” The line in Buchan,

Till loud and boisterous grew the wind,

seems to me simpler and better than

When the lift grew dark, and the wind grew loud;

and the stanza, which your reviewer “presumes” is original, but which is from the same source,

O laith laith were our gude Scots lords
     To weet their milk-white hands;
But lang ere a’ the play was ower
     They wat their gouden bands,

pleases me much; but these are matters of taste. I have not added a line or a word to the ballad. Of the four versions of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ Scott’s (whether or not the best poetically) is, I can have no doubt, judging both from external and internal evidence, the least trustworthy as authority. On the general charges of “laziness” and lack of information, I do not feel at all guilty. The easy or lazy method of editing would surely have been to tick off here and there a ballad in certain familiar books and hand them over to the printer for reproduction. On this plan, ‘The Ballad-Book’ would have been a week’s work, and escaped all censure. Naturally fond of ballads, I have not only read but studied every attainable version of every ballad that interested me; have made a pretty large collection of ballads in volumes, in broad-sheets and in flying slips; have searched in the British Museum for curiosities in that kind; have visited some of the chief ballad printing-offices of our day, and have also obtained original oral versions of several famous ballads. This, of my own bent, during a good many years; in addition whereto I have given care and study to the special task of editing the little volume in question. If I have failed, it is not from laziness. If I have spoken slightingly of certain dissertations, it is not because I have not studied them, but because I have, and have found them astonishingly incoherent and unsatisfactory. To any one who will give me a new available fact or suggestion in regard to the ballads contained in my book, I shall be really thankful. One sentence in the volume (along with a few misprints) I have corrected, relating to the word “applegray.” Motherwell was doubtless right in printing it thus, as it came from his old woman’s mouth, considering the principles on which his volume was composed; though at the same time, in a volume edited on other principles, it would be equally right to put the word “dapplegray” in its place. Our Old Ballads is an interesting little subject, and far from exhausted; as it seems to me, we are only beginning the study of it.

                                                                                                               EDITOR OF ‘THE BALLAD-BOOK.’

     Burd.—In ‘The Ballad-Book,’ edited by Mr. Allingham, and recently reviewed in your columns, the word “burd,” which appears in ‘Burd Ellen’ and ‘Helen of Kirkconnell,’ is, in a note to the latter, explained as being an old form of our “bird.” It should have been explained as being an old form of our “bride.” The same word appears in the description of the Flood, among those poems of the fourteenth century which have been edited by Mr. Richard Morris (Trübner & Co.), and are conjectured by him to have been written in Lancashire. The word is there spelt “burde.”

                                                                                                                           J. HOSKYNS-ABRAHALL.
     Combe, Oxon, Feb. 13, 1865.

[Note:
Buchanan mentions Allingham’s reply to his review in a letter to William Hepworth Dixon of 20th February, 1865.]

Back to Essays

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From The Fortnightly Review - 1 June, 1865 - Vol. I, pp 216-227.

THORVALDSEN AND HIS ENGLISH CRITICS.

THERE is something very charming in the respect which the Danes pay to their literary and artistic heroes. Oehlenschläger has his monument in the most public square of Copenhagen,—his eyes of stone look quietly on every traveller who passes up from the quay to the Hotel d’Angleterre; Thorvaldsen has his museum on a site immediately adjoining the royal palace; and when Hans Christian Andersen, immortal in nurseryland as the author of the “Ugly Duckling,” walks through the capital, gentle and simple take off their hats to him. A successful Danish writer or artist, resident in Copenhagen, occupies much the same position as the local luminary of an English town or the accepted genius of a Scottish weaving village. He is a big man there, though he might be a very little one if he ventured out into the great world. We would not suggest, indeed, that, to use the Baconian phrase, he is a figure among ciphers; but it is certain that he is not measuring himself with giants. Danish art is barren enough. Danish literature is not very strong; since, from the period of the national ballads downwards, it has contented itself, perhaps wisely, with a narrow range of thought and feeling. The marked notabilities might be counted on one’s fingers. Oehlenschläger, with his strong Scandinavian vigour, struck some powerful notes out of the national harp, and was, in a limited way, a man of dramatic instincts; and young Björnsterne Björnsen (who is, however, at least half a Norwegian) possesses a fine poetic vein, sombered with Lutheran piety. But in our opinion, the national power culminated in Thorvaldsen, who, besides being a fine sculptor, was a thoroughly representative man. He was a genuine Dane, warm-hearted, excitable, obstinate, courageous, yet with an undercurrent of luxurious laziness; worked best when his blood was up, and worst when he was thoroughly comfortable; had a kind of sea-salt in his composition, which naturally gave his conceptions a tinge of that vigour which is apt to thicken into coarseness. He was a great artist with all a great artist’s littlenesses—a thorough-going specimen of the genus irritabile. His countrymen, conscious of his greatness, have done him those honours in which, more than most people, they delight; his Museum is one of the sights of the world, and loving hands daily strew flowers on the tomb which lies in the centre thereof. That, as a sculptor, he has been overrated by many, we are not disposed to deny; it is a fact very vehemently insisted upon by a small section of the art-public—that exquisitely fastidious section which places so much stress upon mere technicalities. His work abounds in faults; what more natural, ²¹⁷ seeing the man’s education was so imperfect? Had he known a score of languages, and penetrated deep into many mines of learning, he would never have worked off the roughness contracted in a Copenhagen hovel and ship-yard. Nevertheless, he did much for the world; his “Christ and the Apostles” alone forming an important point in the history of sacred art. But of what he has done for that little nation from which he sprung we feel it difficult to make too high an estimate. He represents in art the courage, the energy, and Christian sincerity, as well as the narrow-mindedness, of his countrymen; and has gone as high as any Dane could go, still preserving all the precious traits of nationality. Shut out from the rest of Europe, so to speak, and fettered by the exigencies of a barren soil and a scattered population, the Danes cannot hope to furnish, and do not wish to furnish, cosmopolitan contributions to art and literature; they must be local and individual, or nothing. Thorvaldsen, then, suggests all this. It was with no mere feeling of friendship that Oehlenschläger, in stirring and complimentary verse, welcomed him back to fatherland, and continued to sing of him while there; and it is with a sentiment of patriotism rather than of hero-worship that the Danes strew flowers over the grave in the Thorvaldsen Museum.
     It is no part of our present task to attempt an examination of Thorvaldsen’s contributions to Art, though we agree neither with those who would raise him to the hierarchies, nor with others who, like the friends of Canova, would hurl him to the region of the groundlings. A far more difficult question has been raised, one reflecting darkly enough on the sculptor’s conduct as a man; and we have no hesitation in affirming that it has been raised by persons indelicate enough to carry the vehemence of artistic predilection into a discussion concerning moral right and wrong. The statue of Lord Byron may be very bad, but is that any reason for telling everybody that the sculptor had a very bad temper? The drapery of the “Christ” may not lap quite perfectly in one or two places, but why fly from that statement to the assertion that the sculptor’s morals were, to use a very mild word, uneven? The art-critic has one taste, the biographer another; and it is a pity that the one should so often appropriate the other’s material. The enemies of Thorvaldsen discuss him something in the style of a person familiarly chatting in loose conversation. “You like Thorvaldsen, and he was undoubtedly a very clever fellow, but as an artist, bah! His ‘Night,’ I confess, is a pretty sort of thing, and there is a good deal of bold stuff in his ‘Jason;’ but he is shamefully overrated. You’ve heard of course what a brute he was to his father, and how shamefully he broke his engagements.” This is bad enough to tell very well with the profane vulgar; but of course the tone is one intolerable to cultivated people. ²¹⁸ It is a tone familiar to lady novelists, who have, by the way, carried much of the “goody goody” feeling into biography, and. in whose eyes a hero must be perfect. Obediently to the spirit which exaggerates trifles, we have whole scores of biographies crammed with good principles but destitute of a gleam of human nature; for it is a fatal mistake to imagine that, to understand a man, we must examine him in bits. Instead of finding out pretty actions or hunting for flaws, a true biographer takes a man as a whole, nor separates him from the background of the events and personages among which he lived and moved. Goethe did and said a great many small things, and has suffered to some extent from pigmy biographers; but we know well enough by this time that Goethe was a great man—albeit by no means (and thank heaven for that!) a “John Halifax.” In biography, as in many other departments of art, we want a little more power of considering affairs dramatically. To get at a man’s character rightly, we must put ourselves into the movement of his life; and when once we do this, we shall soon feel whether he be great, or mediocre, or small. Mr. Carlyle has his faults, but want of dramatic force is not one of them; and his short biographies, taken in the mass, are perhaps the best we possess. His manner of working is right, if his conclusions frequently be wrong; for while he never loses sight of his leading character, he takes care that all the minor parts are well supported. He carries us into the heart of a man’s actual life, and if he has not previously converted us to hero-worship, we are at liberty to form our own impressions.
     The son of a Copenhagen woodcarver and a Jutland peasant girl, Thorvaldsen very early began a struggle out of which only a strong man could come victorious, and in the course of which the very strength of a man would be sure to breed numberless weaknesses. His parents resided in a poor house in the immediate neighbourhood of the docks, the occupation of Gotskalk, his father, being to carve wooden decorations for the vessels. It will be admitted, by all acquainted with the locality, that the chief characteristics of the Copenhagen Wapping are dirt and dogs, which latter [we are assured by Andersen in his “At vœre eller ikke at vœre”] make day and night hideous by perpetual howling. The home where Bertel was reared was by no means a clean or picturesque “interior,” and even in childhood the boy appears to have been left to much solitary meditation in his cradle—surrounded by poverty and serenaded by curs of all degrees. Gotskalk Thorvaldsen loved the bottle; doubtless, being a man of caustic wit and very Scotch shrewdness, he was in request among pot-house politicians. Fru Thorvaldsen was a little fat woman, with no more marked peculiarity than a certain plump prettiness which captivated the labourers when she took her husband’s coffee to the ²¹⁹ shipyard. “Thus it would seem as if Bertel had to fight his own way from the cradle upward. He grew up into a sharp boy, given to practical joking, and at a very early age began to draw, as Spenser’s shepherd began to sing, “to please himself.” There being no mistake about his artistic talent, his father soon found work for it, by getting him to draw the designs which were afterwards to be carved and copied in wood. This was the beginning of Bertel’s apprenticeship to art; by no means a bad beginning, and none the less good because it was necessarily accompanied by rough discipline. Nothing further need be said to show that Bertel Thorvaldsen was an artist, as it were, to the manner born. Until he was eleven years old he received no education, save that which he picked up at home, but at that age he had the good fortune to be admitted into the Arts Academy School, where he presently distinguished himself in a small way. The turning point in his life, however, took place in August 19th, 1793, when he was twenty-three years old, and when the great gold medal of the Academy was awarded to him for a bas-relief—“Peter healing the lame man.” He was then entitled to a travelling stipend for three years; but instead of at once taking advantage of his good luck, he delayed in Copenhagen, painting portraits, which were much sought after and brought him in a small competence. He was now, in early manhood, beginning to show that undercurrent of luxurious laziness for which we have given him credit. Like our own Thackeray, he could work hard when he liked, but hated to be bored. He had worked hard to win his early honours; but after he had once gained the great gold medal, he seems to have yawned and idled as much as possible. It was no use saying, “Thorvaldsen, why miss the most precious springtime of life, and delay hurrying to Rome?” It was no use saying, as some said, “Why not begin to study hard, since in Rome an ignoramus is at a disadvantage?” He was not in a hurry; and, moreover, such pressure merely made him evince another distinguishing Danish quality—that of stubbornness. In Copenhagen he could easily make a little money; and a little money, just then, meant a little beer, a few merry friends, and a sweetheart. Another bond, too, kept him dawdling in his native city. His parents had begun to see that they had begotten a genius, and poor little Fru Thorvaldsen stormed and fretted at the thought of parting from her son. So Bertel Thorvaldsen delayed and delayed—first, because he was lazy, and had earned a little repose; next, because he was stubborn, and liked to move at his own sweet will; and last and best, because he was good-natured, and wished to humour the old people as much as possible.
     At last, in 1796, he set sail for the Mediterranean, leaving behind him a cultivated circle which had formed high hopes of his future. ²²⁰ His lazy fit not having quite passed away, he spent the voyage in total idleness—eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping. “Thorvaldsen is still here,” wrote the captain of the vessel from Malta, “but at length begins to talk of going to Rome. Heaven only knows how he will get on there! He is so desperately idle that he has never even cared about writing a letter to his friends all the time he has been on board, nor evinced any desire to learn the language. He seems only to think about what there is to be for dinner, and to look after cakes. But everybody on board loves him; he is such a good-natured fellow.” In 1797 he did reach Rome. Very strange must he have felt on his first entrance into the society of the elegant city, for lamentable was his lack of education. “Though he (Thorvaldsen) is an artist of great promise,” wrote the learned Zoëga, who was then settled in Rome, “he is deplorably ignorant of all that does not immediately concern his profession. In my opinion, it is positively wrong of the Academy to send out uneducated persons to Italy, where they must necessarily lose a great deal of time in learning things the knowledge of which ought to have been acquired before they left home. How is it possible for an artist to get on here, when he is totally ignorant of French and Italian?” Only those who have been lonely in the midst of a great city, and who know how the very loneliness and lack of sympathy inflames the creative fire of aspiration, will think that Zoëga talked nonsense. Cold water was the very thing the lazy young sculptor wanted: it got his blood into a glow, and fired him to work in good earnest; it made him feel his ignorance, and labour to remove it. One can imagine how strange he felt in his new residence, and how small he may have sometimes fancied himself until he put out his power. However, he had not been long in Rome ere he had an attack of fever, and he had not long recovered from that when he had an attack of love. The latter attack was much the more serious, and has formed the basis of certain imputations made since his death. While visiting at the house of an acquaintance, he formed an attachment for a handsome Italian domestic, Anna Maria Magnani, who shortly afterwards married, quitted her husband, and threw herself on the “protection” of the sculptor. From this affair, and certain others that followed, it appears that Thorvaldsen was very susceptible; but his antagonists go so far as to translate “susceptible” into “unprincipled.”
     The charge against Thorvaldsen seems to amount to this. He formed an improper connection with Anna Maria Magnani, thereby at once violating the rules of society; not content with going so far, he was deliberately false to Anna Maria, insomuch as he frequently admired and made love to other women; and once at least he violated a sacred engagement to a lady, a certain Miss Mackenzie, who ²²¹ admired him far beyond his deserts. In the first place, he did not violate the laws of society, because the social life of Rome in those days freely admitted of his connection with Anna Maria, and was in the habit of tolerating and condoning cases infinitely worse. In the second place, Thorvaldsen never intended the connection to be a permanent one; but meaning sooner or later to marry respectably, thought himself fully at liberty to look out for a partner among superior women. The imputation that he jilted Miss Mackenzie involves more delicate questions. All absolutely known of the matter is, that Thorvaldsen had some love-passages with the lady, and eventually thought that she would not be a congenial partner. It is neither safe nor delicate to rip up a matter which it is totally impossible for third parties to understand. The love relations of full-grown men and women are cabalistic enigmas to all not immediately concerned; and we have no more right to call a man unprincipled because he parts from a lady whom he has courted, than to do so because he turns Catholic. The man or the woman has a right to speak out and proclaim a wrong; but if neither do so, if neither wishes to make the most holy of private passions a public question, the affair remains entirely a matter of conscience.
     The charge, then, resolves itself into the statement that Thorvaldsen, when in Rome, did as Rome did. Abstractly he did wrong. However, there is a medium between affirming that a man is not perfect, and that he is a rascal. Lonely, in the midst of a great city, ignorant in the midst of the cultivated and refined, the Dane, in a moment of passion, stooped to the sympathy of an Italian woman, and when afterwards, that woman threw herself into his arms, he had not the cruelty to thrust her from him, albeit, he determined at the same time, to free himself as speedily as he could—to spare her pain, and to procure himself moral independence. Like many great men, he yielded to strong temptation, and it is more than possible that his stubbornness, allied to his good-nature, made him persist in a course which his ignorance may have persuaded him was right, or venial.
     It was none the worse for Thorvaldsen that Anna Maria was of a jealous disposition. His was a nature which required to be excited in some way, and the domestic stimulant did him good. Quietly ambitious, he worked hard, until the light of his genius began to dawn upon Rome. In 1803 he completed his model of “Jason with the Golden Fleece.”  “Quest’ opera di giovani danese,” cried Canova; “è fatto in uno stilo nuovo e grandioso.” From that time Thorvaldsen rose and rose by swift flights. Commissions soon began to shower upon him, and he laboured hard indeed to fulfil them. More than once he was struck down by fever, more than once he had a fit ²²² of laziness, but the smallness of his means, and the costliness of the material for his art, compelled him to be busy. In 1807 he completed his statue of Adonis, a work which Canova called “bella, nobile, plena di sentimento.” While mentioning Canova, it may be well to quote Thorvaldsen’s opinion of that great Italian. “Canova,” said the Dane, “was not straightforward with me. Whenever he had modelled any new work, he would send for me to come and see it, to learn what I thought of it. If I remarked, for instance, that this or that fold in the drapery would look better if it were arranged rather differently, he would concur in my opinion and embrace me cordially, but he would never alter it after all. And when I in turn asked him to come and see any work of mine, he would make no other remark than that everything was exactly as it should be.” The Adonis was sold to the crown prince of Bavaria, but was not sent off to its destination until years afterwards. This was one of the cases in which Thorvaldsen, after breaking an engagement, is said to have evinced a certain adroitness in apologising. Because he could not always fulfil his promises, and because when he could not do so he said he was sorry, he has been much censured and sneered at. To prove that he was utterly unreliable, half a dozen instances of delay have been picked out of a laborious lifetime. If our merchants, traders, and speculators were judged in this manner, how many would be esteemed safe? In the matter of the broken engagements, the English critics have chosen to regard the question from a purely business point of view, placing totally out of sight those uncertainties and changes which beset the artistic mind at every turn; and starting thence, a few have laboriously tried to prove that Thorvaldsen was not a man of business, in the midst of an argument affirming that he was not a great artist; quite forgetting that the lesser proof may go far to upset the greater affirmation. Art has undoubtedly a method of its own, but it is not the common method, and must not be confounded with the ordinary “business” one.
     Byron and Thorvaldsen were antitheses in art. The former was quick and brilliant; the latter was slow, and frequently coarse. Their only point in common was a tendency to indolence, corrected in the one case by intense stubbornness and excitability, and in the other by fiery pride and irritation. Very interesting, therefore, is the account given by Andersen of the meeting of the two men, which took place in 1817. The poet sat to the sculptor for his bust. “Whilst Thorvaldsen was modelling Lord Byron’s bust,” says Andersen, “his lordship sat so uneasily on his chair, and kept changing the expression of his countenance to such a degree, that he was at length obliged to request him ‘to keep his face still, and not to look so unhappy.’ On Byron’s making answer that such was the usual expression of his countenance, ²²³ Thorvaldsen merely replied, ‘Indeed!’ and went on with his work as well as circumstances would permit.” Everybody but Byron himself thought the bust an excellent likeness; “he would look so miserable,” said the sculptor.
     The story of Thorvaldsen’s life in Rome is merely a history of his creations, and bears no further on the questions mooted in this paper. It need only be remarked that, as he grew older, he grew excessively irritable, and lost by slow degrees the characteristics of the good-natured fellow; but irritability naturally took the place of indolence subdued by hard toil. Not until 1829 did he return to his native city, and even then his visit was merely temporary. He had been absent twenty-three years, and Denmark was full of his fame. The first face he recognised was an old porter’s at the Charlottenburg. “Beutzen!” he cried, and flung his arms round the old man’s neck, and kissed him. His stay in Copenhagen was short, and the whole time was occupied in the decoration of the “Frue Kirke,” on the front of which he proposed to place figures of Christ and the twelve apostles. In June, 1831, he was again in Rome, busy on the Frue Kirke group. He had never hitherto dealt with sacred subjects, and serious doubts were entertained as to his fitness for the new task. Some one observing that his genius was more alive to the ideal beauty of Christianity than to any profound religious feeling, he cried, “Neither do I believe in the gods of the Greeks, and yet for all that I can represent them.” While entrusting the less important work to his pupils, and merely putting the finishing touches to their copies of his sketches, he himself laboured with especial care at the figure of Christ. The result is known to all students of Art. His “Christ” would be nearly perfect, were it not a little too fine—fineness being the very error a coarse man would be likely to stumble on in dealing with Christianity.
     When we call Thorvaldsen coarse, we mean neither more nor less than that his moral education was imperfect. As for his general culture, that improved yearly, insomuch that, at middle age, he was far from being an ignoramus. He mixed in good society, had the benefit of the best advice, was petted by not a few rich amateurs. Yet he was still a Bohemian at heart—a plain-living, busy, somewhat snappish Bohemian, who would willingly have lain in the sunshine, yet who knew that he had a duty to perform, and did it with a hate of Sham. All the gilt of Rome could not convert him into a fine gentleman, so long as the atmosphere of the ship-yard still clung about him. He worked in as stubbornly practical a way as a dock-labourer; that is to say, he exercised his divine faculty silently, and when he dreamed of his creations, discarded Byronism and kept the process to himself. In 1829 he made his will, bequeathing “all his collections of paintings, coins, books, &c., &c., to Denmark, to form a separate ²²⁴ Museum, which was to bear his name, and which was not to be added to or suffer any diminution.” On July, 1838, he quitted Italy for the last time. The news of his approach spread through the Danish capital like a conflagration; for “he had become a Name.” A vast crowd gathered on the shore to welcome him; and his carriage was dragged in triumph to his apartments in the Charlottenburg—a proceeding which elicited from him the characteristic observation that he did not approve “of human beings converting themselves into horses.” When the first flush of gratulation was over, he settled down to work again in the city where he had begun life by wood-carving. Both his parents were dead, and he was growing old; but the precious pursuit of his lifetime preserved him from stagnating, like Coleridge, into a Moralism on departed days. He had perspired freely for many a long year, and all his indolence had eventually oozed out of him. A large sum was placed in his hands, wherewith to carry out the decoration of the Frue Kirke, which was to contain his collected works in Christian art. The decoration of the principal church of his native country had been the great dream of his existence: and when, his countrymen offered him every facility for carrying out the beloved project, “this,” he exclaimed, “this is the way an artist should be honoured.”
     Thorvaldsen was now settled down for good; Anna Maria, poor dear, had disappeared; and the great sculptor belonged, not to Bohemia, but to the world. His manner of living was plain to indigence, and, like our countryman Turner, he looked smartly after the pennies. In a summer retreat of Nisö, he worked at a frieze for the chief entrance of the Frue Kirke—the subject, “Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem,” and “Progress from Pilate’s House to Golgotha;” and thereby hangs a tale, told by Andersen. One morning, the children-loving Professor found Thorvaldsen in his studio occupied with the figure of Pilate, and rather undecided as to what costume he should give the Roman governor. The Baroness Stumpe stood by admiringly. “Tell me,” said Thorvaldsen to Andersen, “whether you think Pilate’s dress in keeping?” “You must not say anything,” cried the lady quickly, as she turned aside to Andersen, and then added aloud, “it is quite right; it is excellent!” But Thorvaldsen was dissatisfied, and repeated the question, upon which the Professor replied, “I must confess that it appears to me that you have made Pilate look more like an Egyptian than a Roman.” “And that is my opinion, too!” exclaimed the sculptor, instantly demolishing the whole figure. “Andersen!” screamed the Baroness, “you are the cause of this, and through you Thorvaldsen has destroyed a work that would have been immortal.” “ But I can soon make another immortal work!” Thorvaldsen drily interposed. In this anecdote we see at once the man who hated shams and the man of irritable phlegm. From ²²⁵ the first to the last of his career, Thorvaldsen was a practical man, as distinguished from a visionary theorist. Perhaps it would have been better had he dreamed a little more; but the fact, nevertheless, remains that he reserved all his ideality for his works, and was in private life a somewhat common-place person, apt to get out of temper at trifles. He could be generous at times, but he valued money. Though he had a passion for card-playing, and though he played only for copper stakes, he could never bear to lose. Very little things made his tongue bitter with gall. He was totally destitute of personal pride, neglected his dress, and insisted on sitting down to dinner with his servants. “He had no desire,” he said on one occasion, “to be dragged about Europe as a prodigy.” The last days of his life passed very quietly. He had become a popular idol, looked at reverently whenever he passed through Copenhagen streets, though his irritation was very great when he found himself publicly stared at. His death took place in the theatre. “The curtain was not yet raised when he took his seat. Suddenly he was observed to stoop down, as if in the act of picking something up. A few moments afterwards his lifeless body was raised and conveyed home. When his body was opened a few days after, it was found that the immediate cause of death was an organic disease of the heart.”
     We have thus briefly sketched the merits and shortcomings of a man to whom English critics have chosen to apply the epithets, “unprincipled,” “sordid,” “ ill-natured,” “mean,” with the ostensible view, as we have suggested, of showing that he has been over estimated as a sculptor. We can do little justice to a man in whom we are determinedly bent on finding flaws; but let us concede that in his love affairs, as in the more prosy transactions of his life, Thorvaldsen was outwardly excitable and inwardly tough; that his nature was reticent, the reverse of liberal; and that, although he was a merry companion when excited, he grew colder as he grew older, and much underlying phlegm asserted itself. Now, if Thorvaldsen was a true artist, it strikes us that our concessions imply, not blame, but praise; for they show that he was consistently true to himself from the first to the last of a long career. His natural weakness may be described to have been a love of lounging; and this he fairly conquered—by what means? By firmly and deliberately working out a noble mission. Is such a work done without some loss—without the contraction of some weaknesses? Can a man mew himself in a workshop, without showing signs of his trade when he steps outside of it? To procure materials for his costly art, Thorvaldsen was compelled, in the most liberal flush of life, to pinch and calculate very closely; and the habit naturally clung to him towards his life’s setting. With the single exception of his liaison, all the charges against Thorvaldsen ²²⁶ are raked out of the period of his age. “Sordid,” “ill-natured,” “mean,” therefore imply simply that the sculptor did not grow into an angel when he passed the meridian. Suppose Burns had lived to sixty, and Gigadibs had been his biographer? Old Mr. Burns would in all possibility have sunk down into a very respectable person, shaking a white head gravely over the follies of his youth and Tam o’ Shanter, going to church, and scraping up the pennies; and on the strength of these facts it would have been proved, not only that he had been a tippler, but that he was by nature hypocritical and mean. Fancy Keats as Paterfamilias, at forty-five! and remember Goethe in the grand climacteric! It is too bad to put utterly out of sight the change which even physical conditions must make in a man. A hundred chances to one, Keats at forty-five would not have been extravagant of anything, even imagery; but if he had held to the first principles of art, discipline and hard work, as firmly as Thorvaldsen did, and had kept his rare moral perception intact, albeit clarified and chilled, he would still have been Keats, the high-minded man of genius.
     “Cursed be he that moves my bones,” says Shakspeare’s epitaph, furnishing our Laureate with the keynote of a justly indignant protest:

“For now the poet cannot die,
     Nor leave his music as of old,
     But round him, ere he scarce be cold,
Begins the scandal and the cry:

“‘Proclaim the faults he would not show;
     Break lock and seal; betray the trust;
     Keep nothing sacred; ’tis but just
The many-headed beast should know.’”

Poet, painter, sculptor, have suffered far, far too much in this way; and strong enough stress has not been laid upon the sin committed by the literary resurrection-men. An artist’s private life is not public property, and should not be exhumed, except in very particular instances. Certainly, few biographers set to work with the deliberate intention of lowering the character of the person whose doings they describe; but it is the silly bunglers, with good intentions, that do the most harm. They misrepresent the facts, because they cannot understand the men. Some artists, of course, are public men—such as he who created Captain Gulliver, and broke at least two hearts; and men there are who, like Byron, parade their persons before the eyes of the ignorant. But what have we gained by listening to a word-war concerning Shelley’s connection with Harriet Westbrook? Nothing but pain, since the tale of that boyish marriage and parting, has not the remotest bearing on the manly intellect that animated a new Prometheus, and made Beatrice Cenci vibrate again in flesh and blood.
 ²²⁷ Of course, it is in vain to protest against the public hunger for biographies of men of genius. The Monster will be curious, luckless as its curiosity generally proves. Well, the public can gain nothing but good if the writers of its biographies be competent and reverent-minded; but how many such writers have written books of the kind? When a great man dies, poet, painter, sculptor—hundreds of small men are ready to avow themselves able to narrate the tale of his life; for of all vulgar fallacies there is none more current than that biography is a very easy branch of art. A dead man’s sister or friend, or even the clergyman of the district, is accepted at once in the capacity of story-teller. It is enough to have known the deceased slightly, or to know his friends, and to possess a small literary faculty. And the result of this? Weaknesses are paraded as symptoms of strength, a man of genius is represented as a performing automaton, and readers, thoroughly bewildered, become impressed with a painful conviction that their hero is very common clay after all. The profound inner nature of the man is entirely lost sight of, and his motives are thoroughly misunderstood. This is more especially the case with biographies written by relations; and the cause is clear, if we acknowledge the painful truth that, in ordinary life, our most intimate ties are most frequently born and nourished by our weaknesses, and not our strength. It is often the case that those who have been closest to the deceased understand him least, from no fault of their own, but because they are too near to take a general and liberal view of his character.
     The sooner that the public perceives the odious cruelty of bad biography, the better for the living and the dead. Let him who would portray a great or good man in his habit as he lived, first measure carefully his own qualifications for the task, bearing in mind the sacredness of his office, and having in view the punishment which should await a blundering iconoclast. If he succeed, if he heighten our appreciation and purify our affection for a memory which we love, let him receive every honour that Literature can confer upon him. If he fail, let there be no mercy for him—no mercy, in the name of those who slumber too deeply to be awakened by the slanderer. Our literary lares and penates are too scanty and too holy to be destroyed without a protest. Keep them lofty, keep them pure; permit the gentle hand to put a halo of fresh dignity and loveliness around them; but suffer no monkey to play his pranks in that inner chamber where they are enshrined!
                                                                                                                                 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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From The Athenæum - 22 September, 1866 - No. 2030, pp. 364-365)

Arne: a Sketch of Norwegian Country Life. By Björnstjerne Björnson. Translated from the Norwegian by Augusta Plesner and S. Rugeley-Powers. (Strahan.)

WE closed our notice of the review of ‘Arne’ in its original Norwegian (Athen. No. 1800, April 21, 1862) by expressing the pleasure with which we should “see an English translation of this little volume”; and now two enthusiastic ladies send us the story in an English form. The translation is prettily done,—the difficult bits of verse being especially well rendered: and the only blemish of the book is the Preface, which is eulogistic without being appreciative, and, in the portions termed biographical, simpers on the verge of silliness. “Introductions,” however, are generally awkward, in literature as well as in society. The reader may congratulate himself, after all is said, on being able to peruse in idiomatic English a story which is popular at every Norwegian hearth, and which has been as widely read in the German version as in the Norwegian original .
     Such fresh little bits of nature come to us rarely; they are green spots in the arid waste of fiction. The merits of ‘Arne’ are patent on the face of it. In the first place, there is no “plot”; next, there are only two or three characters; and last, the tale is deliciously short—a crystalline little prose poem, without a bit of padding. Herr Björnson possesses the splendid poetic virtue of concentration, and paints with sharp, decided touches on a tiny canvas. His are merits which, in these days of showy writing, when manner habitually predominates over matter, are in some danger of being undervalued. An artist, not a photographer, he draws souls more than faces, and although his manner is as expressive as can be, he gives you a good deal of thinking to do on your own account. Our readers will remember the exquisitely suggestive piece of real life and death, which formed the subject of our extract, in the review to which we have referred. We need not again tell the story. Enough to say, that the little work, from beginning to end, is perfect in its way. We cannot conceive a nicer gift for a young girl,—but she must be a thoughtful young girl.
     It would be idle to pretend that Björnson possesses the highest order of creative power; but he has genius—“a box where sweets compacted lie”—and his art, so far as it goes, is very complete. He has some humour, too, and the strangest kind of all, sad humour,—with gleams not dissimilar to those struck out by Baggesen in his autobiographical sketches. He never ventures to write on subjects which he has not thoroughly apprehended. He cannot, like Oehlenschläger, sit down new to half-a-dozen subjects, ³⁶⁵ and produce half-a-dozen works in different moods and measures; but he is never faulty nor foolish like Oehlenschläger. He has struck out a line of his own, and that line is prose-poem writing,—in which he is infinitely more successful than in writing plays.
     His plays contain, as may be anticipated, much excellent character-painting and a good deal of real poetry. They are stray and sketchy, however, and lack what Hazlitt terms the highest dramatic quality, that of fortitude. We can hardly conceive Björnson as the author of the namby-pamby rhymes between Hakon and Inga in ‘King Sverre.’ The best of his dramatic works in ‘Sigurd Slembe,’—though the dramatic sketch entitled ‘Mellem Slagene’ is, as a sketch, first-rate. ‘Sigurd Slembe’ is well worth the trouble of translating. The second part, commencing with the arrival of the wild rover in Caithness, and ending with the death of Harald by the poisoned shirt, is almost tragic in its power, and renders us doubtful what the writer may yet do in that direction. Will not the Misses Plesner and Powers, who have quite mastered Björnson’s idiom, and can so skilfully render it into its English equivalent, oblige the public a little further? Whoever reads ‘Arne’ will gape, like Oliver Twist, for more,—though Herr Björnson be no dispenser of mere gruel. In these times of blatant novelists, it is no ordinary treat to get a story which affects one almost as finely as a poem, and shows by its popularity that the literature of the North is as yet uncontaminated by the circulating library.

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From The Athenæum - 13 October, 1866 - No. 2033, p. 459.

Icelandic Legends. (Collected by Jón. Arnason.) Translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkr . Magnússon. Second Series. With Notes and Introductory Essay. (Longmans & Co.)

ONE series of these ‘Icelandic Legends’ was quite enough; the aroma of the stories is seldom agreeable, and it is not pleasant to contemplate too much the later and fouler period of Scandinavian superstition. Nor is this second volume at all equal in point of literary merit to its predecessor. The Introduction is rather material for an article than a finished essay; and the body of the work is full of matter which was scarcely worth the trouble of translating. The stories of ‘God and the Evil One’ and of ‘Paradise and Hell’ are the worst; the ‘Stories of Outlaws’ are the best. We quote the following:—

“UP! MY SIX, IN JESU’S NAME!

     “One autumn, six men went on a search into the sheep-walks, with their leader, who was a strong man and dauntless withal. When they had reached the farthest point of their search, a storm came on with heavy snowfall, and the men lost their way, not knowing where they were. After a long walk, they found that their path led down a hill, and soon they found themselves in a small valley, and having by chance come across a house, they knocked at the door. There came out an old fellow, ugly and mighty rascally-looking, and said that it was a new thing for strangers to come and pry about his dwellings, and looked with ungleeful eye on his guests. The leader spoke for them all, and told him how they had happened to come hither: and having told the old fellow this, he stepped inside the door with all his men, without waiting for the inhospitable man’s leave or refusal. When they had sat for a while, meat was brought them on dishes, by a young damsel of downcast mien. She whispered tot eh guests, as she gave the meat to them: ‘Eat only the meat at the edge of the dish farthest from you.’ They looked and were soon sure that all at that edge was mutton, but all at the other, human flesh. When they had finished, the girl removed the meat from the table, and took the wet clothes of the strangers to dry them, and said, in a low voice: ‘B e watchful; do not take off your underclothes, neither sleep!’ It was a moonlight night, and the leader lay in a bed in the shadow, and told his comrades that they should not move or speak aught till he called them. Shortly they had gone to rest; the old man came in, and going to the bedside of one of his guests, touched his breast, and said: ‘Lean breast and craven.’ And in the same way he felt them all, muttering the like wellnigh at every one, till at last, when he came to the bed of the leader and had felt his breast, he said: ‘Fat breast and mettlesome.’ And, in the same moment, he turned to a nook in the room and seized an axe, and returned with it to the bed of the leader. But the latter, seeing what was to come, sprang numbly down from the bed, wherein the old cannibal dealt him a blow, missing him, of course; but the leader now seized the axe, and wrung it from the wretch’s hand, who roared out: ‘Up, my twelve, in the devil’s name!’ Now the leader drave the axe into the old carl’s pate, and it stood in the brain, and he fell dead on the spot. Then the leader said: ‘Up, my six, in Jesu’s name!’ When he had thus called upon his followers, a trap-door was opened in the floor, and there came up the head of a man. But the leader was not long in cutting it off, and thus he killed twelve of them in the open trap-door of a cellar which was under the floor. After this they found the girl who had waited on them in the evening. She turned out to be a farmer’s daughter from Eyjafjördr, whom the old man had stolen, and would force, against her will, to marry his eldest son. But she bore an untellable loathing towards them all, chiefly because they killed everyone that came to them who had lost his way, and then eat his flesh. Here the men found many precious things, and many sheep in the valley. they agreed that the leader should remain, and one man with him, to comfort the girl, and to watch the sheep during the winter, in order that they might not starve for want of care. But the others returned home. Next spring, the leader brought the girl home, and afterwards, with the consent of her father, married her, and moved everything that he found in the valley to the North: began farming, and lived a happy and lucky life with his wife to a high age.”
     We have not thought fit to dwell on the more morbid and horrible contents of the work. After ‘Oiga-Glum’s Saga’ and the ‘Story of Gisli’ these legends taste sour and unwholesome. They fairly represent, however, the decadence of Icelandic folk-lore, and will be coveted, on that ground, for many libraries.

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From The Argosy - December, 1866 - Vol III, pp. 60-67.

STOCKHOLM AND THE SCANDINAVIAN EXHIBITION.

BY AN IDLE VOYAGER.

THERE is, perhaps, no country in Europe so little visited by the British tourist as Sweden. Securely guarded from England by countries possessing greater advantages in the matter of scenery, and presenting fewer difficulties of access and of language, it seems destined to remain in its present respectable seclusion for many years to come. Paris, Brussels, the Rhine, and Switzerland, absorb nine-tenths of the tourist army; most of the remainder go to Spain, South Italy, or Norway, while a choice remnant penetrate to the odd corners of the earth, and are heard of at Nijnü Novgorod, or the second cataract of the Nile. Sweden is deserted by all, and has not ⁶¹ been quite fairly treated even by the universal Mr. Murray, who has not, till just now, considered it worth while to revise his Handbook for that part of Northern Europe. Hotel expenses at Damascus are now, it appears, of more importance to the English traveller than the modern conditions of civilization in Stockholm.
     That city might have remained for ever unknown to myself had it not been that the weather in the sister country, Norway, had hung out the most unmistakable signs of obstinate rain, and compelled me to seek safety in flight.
     A journey from Norway to Stockholm is notably dull. There is an oppressive feeling of going from a fine to a less picturesque country. The railway goes down, everything goes down, down from those blessed mountains among which the worn Londoner searches for health, and all resolves itself into a dreary flat. A level district is only estimable in the eyes of a railway engineer, and, next to the want of undulation of surface, I think the presence of firs and silver birches in such profusion as in Sweden is an aid to monotony. The traveller is literally oppressed with those trees, and with the superabundance of lakes. A landscape, it is generally admitted, can rarely, if ever, be perfect without water; but when the land is on one dead level, all the trees are fir trees, and water shows in all directions, the scenery becomes, to use no severer word, a bore. I should certainly have liked to consult our great modern art-critic before making so daring a statement, but I humbly conceive that no combination of the elements referred to can ever form a pretty picture. Now and then, truly, a white church, with a roof of white tiles, found itself in just such juxtaposition with fir trees and a still lake, that an unwilling verdict has been given in favour of the tableau; but such accidents became rarer as the bad road on which my party travelled left the western districts farther and farther behind.
     It is a country, in fact, which drives a traveller to turn his attention to its people and its general resources as the only worthy subjects of thought and inquiry. The historian’s thoughts go back at once to Gustav Adolf, Oxenstiern, and Charles the Twelfth, deigning, perhaps, to note Linnæus by the way; while the modern mind thinks with pleasure of Bishop Tegnér, who has been so gracefully introduced to English readers by Longfellow; of Frederika Bremer, and of her whom we familiarly call Jenny Lind. This is the sum of all that an average Englishman knows of Sweden, except, perhaps, he has picked up the stray fact that the best iron in the world comes to us from thence. Dim ideas of frost and snow, of sledges, furs, double windows, and pine logs, float across his mind when he is by chance called upon to picture to himself what life is like in the latitude of Stockholm.
     The self-conceit engendered by going ahead with the single purpose of self-aggrandizement, and leaving other nations (as we suppose) far behind, has risen to such a pitch in England, that it would be good for many of us to pay a visit to a polished civilization like this of Sweden, which has, as it were, stood on one side, and learned whatever lessons were derivable from the struggles in peace and war going on far away from its northern home. I was not a little startled at having to make a humbling confession to myself ⁶² of my utter ignorance and carelessness of the real conditions of my fellow-men when, emerging from a dark pine wood through which the road had led me, I suddenly came upon the bright little station called Finnerödja, on the railway which runs south between the two vast lakes, Wener and Wetter, to the southernmost point of Sweden, and north and east to Stockholm. A single line of rails, traversed about three times a day, thus joins the south of Sweden with its capital, and runs like a main artery through the dense forests and desolate places of this strange land. Like a nerve, perhaps it would have been better to say, electrifying by its currents all the adjacent parts into life, making towns spring up where none had been before, and magnifying into comparative importance the villages it meets in its course.
     The train had come far from the south, but it was to its time, and I was seated without delay in a second-class carriage of superlative luxury, padded and fitted in a manner superior to many of the first-class carriages in England. The appointments of the railway are neat and good. The officials are dressed in a good uniform, and the whole shows that the Government, to which the establishment belongs, is one which consults the comfort of its subjects, and wishes all things to be carried out in a style worthy of respect. The speed, too, of the train would have put the “Grand Vitesse” of our so-called lively neighbours, or an express on our own disreputable Great Eastern, to a wholesome shame; while that punctuality which the London Chatham and Dover Company, and our other railway man-slaughterers scorn to exercise, is here most scrupulously attended to.
     Journeying onwards, I had another illustration of the fact that it is quite possible for Englishmen to learn from their neighbours.
     In field after field was one simple little device, almost deserving the title of an invention when mentioned in our own arrogant country, though in Sweden it seemed a mere matter of common sense and a few fir poles. The British farmer has been very indignant with the weather, because he has been unable to dry his cereals during this last wet harvest time. And yet all the while he has gone the very way to prevent the grain from giving up its moisture. If I want to dry some plants for a collection, I do not fold them up in a wet cloth. Judging by analogy, a British farmer would. He cuts his corn in despair when it is damp with the drizzling rain, and, seeing that the earth is wet also, spreads the ears on it—to dry, of course. He gathers all up into large sheaves set upright and bound close (for the better reception and retention of the rain), and then bemoans the ill fate which has ruined his harvest. His brother in remote Sweden goes differently to work. He knows that the air is seldom so saturated with moisture as to be incapable of absorbing more; and that while the wet earth is his worst enemy, the moist air may possibly prove a friend. Taking a couple of dozen of stoutish poles about eight feet high, he fixes them firmly in the ground in a row. Horizontally he attaches to these, light bars of wood, so that the whole has the aspect of a high fence with about four rails.
     The wheat or barley is cut in the ordinary way, and is then taken by the armful, bent over the horizontal bars and slightly attached to them. Managed in this way, one of these fences presents the appearance, when viewed in ⁶³ front, of a long, low, loosely-packed wheat-rick which has never been trimmed. Of course this is illusive only, for in reality the whole structure is of no comparative thickness, and presents a surface to every wind that blows—not a breath passing without traversing the interstices and bearing away some of the moisture. The rain, too, unless driven by wind, has small power to wet a mass of corn presenting so little upper surface, and disposed so as to allow every drop to drain off. The third advantage is, that the crop is altogether removed from contact with the reeking soil, which does half of the mischief. Anything more simple, more obviously effectual I have never seen. There are plenty now, I am thankful to say, who are ready and willing to tell our conservative race of ground-tillers that they are not far from being the worst and most ignorant farmers in Europe, and that the Belgian, Swiss, or Norwegian peasant-proprietors could laugh to scorn all the most learned in top dressings and super-phosphates in Leicestershire or Norfolk—at least if results are any criterion of the wisdom of methods.
     Stockholm is certainly a gay capital, well deserving the title of the Paris of northern Europe. The houses are handsome, the shops first-rate, and the populous hum of the streets makes a Londoner feel quite at home. Like Paris, too, the city was originally confined to a small island, and has spread thence to the shores between which its old site lies. The centre is, therefore, connected with the main suburbs by bridges only. On the central island, or more strictly speaking, pair of islands, is situate the king’s palace, a massive square structure, quite imposing, if not beautiful. Near to it is the celebrated Riddarholms Kirke, the Westminster Abbey of Sweden. Here, in vaults with open doors, lie Gustav Adolf and his best warriors, each in his plain coffin. Here hang in dusty folds the banners taken in the Thirty Years’ War, with many other tokens of power and glory long passed away. A sad sight truly to a Swede, and one which inspired a heart-felt wish, even in an Englishman, to see at no distant date a Bund of the three northern nations, a federation which would restore to Scandinavia some weight in Europe, and render more difficult such discreditable exploits as those of Count Bismarck in Schleswig-Holstein.
     There seems to have been some apprehension on the part of these Scandinavian nations, that an invitation to the world to join them in an universal exhibition would not have been generally accepted. For once they felt their isolation, and, perhaps, as a Dane expressed it, their want of greatness. They felt that Stockholm could hardly be assumed as a centre for so powerful an attraction as would be needed to draw, not only the richest produce of the world, but the crowds of visitors so essential to the success of such an undertaking. There can be little doubt that they judged rightly in acting thus modestly. Whether the coming display at Copenhagen will be more aspiring remains yet to be seen.
     The whole framework of the structure in which the Scandinavian Exhibition is held is most appropriately formed of pine, well braced up, and the building receives ample light within from large glazed spaces along the sides and in the roof. The striking external feature is a dome, if such a term can be applied to a flattened cone, the height which from the base is not more ⁶⁴ than one-third of its greatest diameter. The whole has, however, an inferior aspect, not in the least assisted by the flags which flutter in profusion from all parts of the roof.
     The plan may be described as that of a nave and chancel meeting in a large octagonal space under the great dome. There are no transepts.
     Inside the appearance is much better, and though the whole structure is of less extent than a single annex of our last great International Exhibition, there is a close likeness between the two buildings in respect of design and arrangement, even to the placing of a large fountain under the dome.
     The price of admission could certainly not be complained of as unreasonable. The tickets, or rather metal counters, were sold to us by a woman who sat in a small wooden box like those on a Thames steamboat-pier, and politely dispensed the said counters at fifty öre (6½d.) each, with official catalogues at a similarly extravagant sum.
     Wide galleries ran all the way round inside, being supported by the same wooden pillars which support the roof. A considerable amount of tint and ornament is accorded to every part; but is so judiciously applied as to give at the same time a harmonious colouring in the general effect, and to satisfy the eye when especially directed to any particular portion. Banners suspended from between the pillars, and from staves projecting from the galleries, complete the internal decorations of the building itself.
     The general scheme of the arrangement is first an assignment of separate spaces to the four contributing countries, namely, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland; secondly, a sub-division of the produce of each into ten classes, and of each of these classes into groups.
     The classes are as follow:
     1. Ores, rough stone, timber, and hunting and fishing produce.
     2. Clocks, telegraphs, philosophical and musical instruments, and educational apparatus.
     3. Artillery, engineering, ship-building, and architectural models, &c., agricultural implements, and carriages.
     4. Cutlery, guns, jewellery, &c.
     5. Glass, porcelain, and statuary.
     6. Wood, horn, ivory, and paper work.
     7. Carpets, cloth, silk, cotton, linen, leather, and furs.
     8. Beverages, tobacco, and chemical products.
     9. Books, engravings, and photographs; and
     10. A miscellaneous class of small household manufactures.
     Sweden naturally takes the lead in the manufactures, and, as might be expected, shows a splendid collection of iron in various conditions. In this branch of trade the abundance of the best charcoal, afforded by the interminable forests of the country, almost gives the Swedes a pre-eminence over our most noted iron-works. Perhaps the celebrated case of specimens exhibited by the Earl of Dudley in 1862 might hold its ground here; but for homogeneous texture and tenacity the Swedish iron can scarcely be equalled.
     One species of iron-manufacture, of which specimens were exhibited, while ⁶⁵ undoubtedly excellent as regards material, was sadly behind the age in other respects. How can these Scandinavian nations ever expect to hold their own, if, in this year 1866, they persist in making rifled, but not breech loading cannon? England is slow enough to adopt, publicly, any invention; but we have for several years had our light Armstrong field-pieces, carrying with a precision, and capable of being fired with a rapidity almost marvellous. So far as my observation went (and I am supported by the testimony of other visitors) not a single breech-loader, cannon or musket, was shown. Indeed, the soldiers in Stockholm stand on guard with their ancient Brown Besses shouldered as though they were dangerous weapons. Worse than this even, I myself saw in Norway, in the present year, a troop of volunteers manœuvring with flint-firelocks. I believe and hope that such a spectacle will never again be seen in Europe; and it is but right, therefore, that I should give honour to those to whom it is due by mentioning the name of the corps. I believe they would be called the Stavanger Firelock Volunteers.
     To be fair, however, to the Swedes, they have done well in other respects in the matter of national armament. They have, in the harbour of Stockholm, a long, low, dangerous-looking craft, with two circular turrets on a deck sloping to within a foot or two of the water’s edge—in short, a Monitor of most forbidding aspect, and, I doubt not, of warlike worth.
     Next, perhaps, to the show of iron, the skins of bears, ermines, and silver foxes (some worth twelve pounds each), and the articles of ladies’ apparel (boas, muffs, sleeve-cuffs, and jaunty little hats of the “pork-pie” type) made of the skin and feathers of the grebe, with its charming play of grey and brown tints, may be reckoned as characteristic of these northern countries. Many of the bear-skins are of large size and soft woolly texture. Some of them are of a dark-grey hue, varying into different shades, and speckled with white in such a way as to make them appear very much like the silver-fox skins, which are so beautiful and so highly-prized . A moderately good bear skin may be bought in Bergen for about two pounds.
     In most of the necessary articles, nay, even elegancies of life, the four kindred countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, showed surprisingly excellent work. The china, glass, and furniture being some of it of quite a first-rate order, while the woollen fabrics were pronounced, by some who had opportunities for forming just opinions on the matter, to be little, if at all, behind the manufactures of Bradford in point of material and workmanship.
     The show of machinery was decidedly poor. Most of it was agricultural, and was principally remarkable for the extreme rudeness of the workmanship. A paper-making machine was shown, however, which seemed to combine most of the modern improvements. Many machines were kept in motion, during stated hours, by an arrangement for distributing steam-power similar to that in our own International Exhibition. A cathedral clock and bells, and a few watches and chronometers completed the display under this section.
     A half-regret is felt by a visitor at there being no gallery of pictures attached; although one has not far to go from the Exhibition to see a well-arranged and characteristic collection of paintings from the four countries. Of ⁶⁶ photographs there were many of all descriptions. The portraits were peculiarly excellent, being wholly free from those distortions which are so familiar to us in the carte-de-visite albums on our friends’ drawing-room tables, and which we pass over as almost inseparable from photography.
     From Finland little was to be expected; but it was really fairly represented, allowance being made for the many disadvantages under which the country labours. A few carriages, sledges, and carrioles of excellent workmanship, and a piano of at least comely exterior, were among its contributions.
     Denmark did not shine forth as brilliantly as might have been expected, for though the quality of the goods was perhaps unimpeachable, in quantity they fell far short of those from Norway.
     The latter country showed strongly in metallic and fish produce, but fell strangely behind in the display of timber. In carrioles and sledges it was supreme, of course, and a zealous traveller might here feast his eyes with the most elegant of carrioles and the swiftest of sledges—carrioles positively with springs and padded seats behind for the “tiger” of the place and period, a creature who in these regions is generally required to dangle his legs from a board nailed across the ends of the shafts, which protrude at the back of the vehicle, behind the traveller’s seat. The carriole has been often described, but few except those who have tried it know at all what sort of a conveyance it really is. I can only say, that, if you sit down on a tolerably thick book, with the lower part of your back wedged into a corner of the room, and your legs straight out before you, and then imagine just so much of the walls and floor as would keep you in this position placed, without any intervening springs, on two bars of wood attached across two long wooden shafts, and this apparatus set, also without springs, on a pair of large wheels—you, my reader, will have a practical view of a Norwegian carriole. The natives expect the long, thin shafts to act as springs, but as a matter of fact and experience, they do not so act. A passage over a few stones sends such a jarring vibration all up the spinal column, that a very few miles leave a traveller sore and disappointed with native modes of progression in Norway. Springs alleviate this evil, and are present in all specimens of carrioles in this Exhibition.
     The sledges were perhaps the most beautiful variety of carriage exhibited. Luxuriously fitted up, with a body more like a double velvet sofa placed on runners than one’s preconceived idea of a sledge, they seemed the perfection of comfort. The very sight almost tempts an Englishman to postpone his next year’s trip till mid-winter, and then to leave the uncertain weather of England for the clear, steady frosts, lasting snow, and fleet sledges of Sweden.
     Ranging round the building, there are many things which strike an English eye through their quaintness; but this is more often the case in the division assigned to Finland than in those belonging to the more advanced countries. Throughout the whole show, however, there was but one thing in bad taste: it was a cigar trophy, which nearly approached in absurdity, as it did in general outline, the celebrated candle trophy of 1862.
     After leaving the Exhibition, the tourist can hardly do better than see the ⁶⁷ collection of pictures in the museum. Here are assembled the best works of the painters of the four countries just seen as contributories of articles of manufacture, and here we may judge of the relative and absolute merits of the Scandinavian painters. Herr A. Tidemand, known to the English by his splendid work “A Norwegian Duel,” which we all saw at South Kensington in 1862, reigns supreme, with eight examples of his best style. He is a Norwegian. Next after him, in my estimation, ranks Mamsell A. Lindegren, a Swedish lady of rare ability. Of one picture, I regret that I have forgotten the painter’s name, but it is a remarkable work in neutral tint, representing an episode in the late Schleswig-Holstein war.
     Beyond the subjects which I have touched upon there is much to see in Stockholm, and much more which I could describe; but it is time for me to take leave both of the city and of my reader. I can scarcely do so more fittingly than by commending these northern countries to his further consideration.

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From The Athenæum - 31 August, 1867 - pp. 265-266.

New Poems. By Matthew Arnold. (Macmillan & Co.)

To a sensitive and sympathetic mind there is something very painful in the writings of Mr. Matthew Arnold. They are so clever, yet so dissatisfying,—so full of culture, yet so narrow,—so much invested with a reverence for master-souls and masterpieces, yet so deficient themselves in vitality. We see the calm, cold eye surveying mankind; and while we feel the clearness of its vision, we are repelled by its feeble and icy glitter. The voice sounds by turns sweet and harsh and insincere. Again and again we seem to behold the writer’s face—a face how piteous, not old, yet full of exhaustion! Who does not feel that the system of early forcing has done its work, and that Mr. Arnold is aged before his time—a grave and not happy critic, when he might have been a bright-eyed and hopeful singer? It is clear that we have lost a poet—not a burning and a shining luminary, but a sweet lesser light, which would have helped many a straggler through the darkness. Mr. Arnold would never have quite escaped the critical tendency, even had his training and later life been different; but poetic emotion might have coerced criticism as to have resulted in some really excellent melody. What have we got instead?—an essay-writer, faithful, sincere, yet repellent in his tone of satisfied authority; a contributor of letters concerning classes which the writer does not even understand, and occasional productions called, for distinction’s sake, “poems”—that is to say, pieces in which verse is chosen for its fine and elegant effects, not as the necessary embodiment of certain phases of thought. It is clear from many expressions that Mr. Arnold quite perceives and somewhat regrets the unfortunate exchange that he has made.
     The many signs thrown out recently have at last culminated in the book of poems before us. Those who admire and those who do not admire Mr. Arnold will agree at last. The admirable volume of essays and the flippant Arminius papers are not more critical than these verses. If we set aside the opening poem, which was first printed and suppressed many years ago, and belongs to the period of the first poems, when poetic tendencies were predominating, we may safely aver that the volume before us does not contain two consecutive lines of absolute poetry—that is to say, thought associated and intensified by deep emotion, finding its adequate expression in perfect music. There is thought of a kind, but no emotion, and little or no music. We find, too, what astonishes us in Mr. Arnold, frequent reproductions of the moods of other moderns—echoes, for example, and not exquisite echoes, of Arthur Clough, and other men who hover on the brink of faith, and take the public into their confidence as to their reasons for not plunging into the stream. The spirit of De Musset’s ‘Espoir de Dieu’ is again and again reproduced here; but it has been put in a crucible, and appears in the shape of verses without accent.
     The first poem in the volume, ‘Empedocles on Etna,’ was, as we have hinted above, suppressed some years ago, and is now reproduced at the request of Mr. Robert Browning. It contains many true poetic flashes, but the mood is one which can scarcely be called poetical in a high sense,—fantastic phases of modern speculation are put into the mouth of the old philosopher, and there is a spasmodic discontent with simple poetic effects, and a straining after too literal a phraseology. The reader is coldly told what he should be made to feel. What is the spirit of the following verses, if not the spirit of the prose essay? Is there any intensity such as comes from true poetic meditation? Is there any music such as grows from even meditative emotion?—

         What makes thee struggle and rave?
         Why are men ill at ease?—
         'Tis that the lot they have
         Fails their own will to please;
For man would make no murmuring, were his will obey’d.

         And why is it, that still
         Man with his lot thus fights?—
         'Tis that he makes this will
         The measure of his rights,
And believes Nature outraged if his will’s gainsaid.

         Couldst thou, Pausanias, learn
         How deep a fault is this!
         Couldst thou but once discern
         Thou hast no right to bliss,
No title from the Gods to welfare and repose;

         Then thou wouldst look less mazed
         Whene’er of bliss debarr’d,
         Nor think the Gods were crazed
         When thy own lot went hard.
But we are all the same—the fools of our own woes!

         For, from the first faint morn
         Of life, the thirst for bliss
         Deep in man’s heart is born;
         And, sceptic as he is,
He fails not to judge clear if this be quench’d or no.

         Nor is the thirst to blame!
         Man errs not that he deems
         His welfare his true aim,
         He errs because he dreams
The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

     After this, we shall have Mr. Mill publishing a poetic version of his Logic, and Mr. Grote writing a rhymed translation of Aristotle’s Ethics. Here, on the other hand, Empedocles rises into poetry:—

And lie thou there,
My laurel bough!
Scornful Apollo’s ensign, lie thou there!
Though thou hast been my shade in the world’s heat—
Though I have loved thee, lived in honouring thee—
Yet lie thou there,
My laurel bough!

I am weary of thee!
I am weary of the solitude
Where he who bears thee must abide!
Of the rocks of Parnassus,
Of the gorge of Delphi,
Of the moonlit peaks, and the caves.
Thou guardest them, Apollo!
Over the grave of the slain Pytho,
Though young, intolerably severe;
Thou keepest aloof the profane,
But the solitude oppresses thy votary!
The jars of men reach him not in thy valley—
But can life reach him?
Thou fencest him from the multitude—
Who will fence him from himself?
He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents,
And the beating of his own heart.
The air is thin, the veins swell—
The temples tighten and throb there—
Air! air!

Take thy bough; set me free from my solitude!
I have been enough alone!

Where shall thy votary fly then? back to men?—
But they will gladly welcome him once more,
And help him to unbend his too tense thought,
And rid him of the presence of himself,
And keep their friendly chatter at his ear,
And haunt him, till the absence from himself,
That other torment, grow unbearable;
And he will fly to solitude again,
And he will find its air too keen for him,
And so change back; and many thousand times
Be miserably bandied to and fro
Like a sea wave, betwixt the world and thee,
Thou young, implacable God! and only death
Shall cut his oscillations short, and so
Bring him to poise. There is no other way.

     In other passages there is greater straining after colour, as a device to hide the want of intensity; and the colour at times is achieved in passages showing really amazing artistic workmanship.
     ‘Thyrsis,’ an intensely cold and reproductive poem, “after” Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ follows ‘Empedocles.’ It is lengthy, but need not detain us. Then come a number of Sonnets; and such sonnets—full of criticism, and M. Sainte-Beuve, and bits of paragraphs from books. What Oxford graduate, however infatuated, will come forward and affirm that these two things are poems?—

EAST LONDON.

’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look’d thrice dispirited;

I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
“Ill and o’erwork’d, how fare you in this scene?”
“Bravely!” said he; “for I of late have been
Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.”

O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.

ANTI-DESPERATION.

Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!
Christ, some one says, was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;

We live no more, when we have done our span.
“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?
From sin, which heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!”

So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
“Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?—

More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us?—Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!”

     Enough of the sonnets! Turn we to the lyrical poems. What is this?—

DOVER BEACH.

     The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the Straits;—on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the ebb meets the moon-blanch’d sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

     Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

     Mr. Arnold is really very far gone. He cannot stand on the beach at Dover, and hear the solemn music of the sea, but the fatal weakness seizes him, and he must begin twaddling about Sophocles and the “sea of faith.” Here is the penalty of his culture,—to see, to hear, to feel nothing without making it the vehicle of intellectual self-consciousness,—to carry the shadow of Oxford everywhere, and find no deeper pleasure in ocean than a suggestion of the ‘Essays and Reviews.’ If this be the poet’s mood, the sooner we get rid of all our poets the better. Out of the shadow of Oxford surely he would never see poetry in the following:—

PIS-ALLER.

“Man is blind because of sin;
Revelation makes him sure.
Without that, who looks within,
Looks in vain, for all’s obscure.”

Nay, look closer into man!
Tell me, can you find indeed
Nothing sure, no moral plan
Clear prescribed, without your creed?

“No, I nothing can perceive;
Without that, all’s dark for men.
That, or nothing, I believe.”—
For God’s sake, believe it then!

     Our quotations, however, must cease here. The book must be read as a whole before its anti-poetic tone can be fully appreciated. There can no longer be any doubt as to Mr. Arnold’s position. He hovers no more between poetry and criticism. The poet is dead; but there still remains to us an essayist of high calibre, who may be of use to his generation if he does not fight too fiercely against the tendencies of his time.

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From The Athenæum - 27 June, 1868 - No. 2122, pp. 891-892.

Essays on Robert Browning’s Poetry. By John T. Nettleship. (Macmillan & Co.)
A Study of the Works of Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate. By Edward Campbell Tainsh. (Chapman & Hall.)

THERE is little reason now for the plaint which reached us from all quarters some years ago, to the effect that ours was a generation barren of true poetic literature. The genius of Mr. Tennyson has met with all but universal recognition:—Mr. Browning has emerged from comparative obscurity into the bright blaze of at least six editions. The merit of these writers is undisputed, however differently it may be calculated. Then we have the younger brotherhood of singers,—Arnold, Morris, Buchanan, Swinburne,—each attempting, in his own peculiar way, to get undisputed ground of ’vantage. If we have had no “great poems,” we have had some great poetry,—much that will assuredly not perish with this generation. It is to be regretted, perhaps, that some of the finest recent work, like that of Mr. Morris, is rather reproductive than creative, or smacks little of the soil from which it grows. Of all contemporary poets, up to the present point, only Tennyson and Browning can be said to have actually introduced new lines of meaning and fresh philosophical suggestions into modern thought. The time of the others is not yet ripe; but it may be said of Mr. Morris that, with all his exquisite narrative power and mastery over Saxon idiom, the somewhat archaic and retrograde character of his sympathy must, more or less, exclude him from the hierarchy of leaders in thought or poetry.
     Much has been said, and said invidiously, concerning the respective qualities of the two poets whose works furnish the basis of the comments by Messrs. Tainsh and Nettleship. But in this, as in most other cases, comparisons are of little avail. Browning has nothing in common with the Laureate beyond the mere habit of writing in verse. Of all living poets, he is the least explicit and most grotesque; but of all living poets, he shows certainly the profoundest passion for humanity. Great scholastic seclusion and long banishment from his native country have, to some extent, misdirected his choice of themes and embarrassed his style; but his English poetry is as perfectly English as any we possess,—witness, for example, the delicious little bits of landscape in the lyrics. His greatness is manifest in many ways,—in his subtle thought, in his generous and mighty human sympathy, in his theologic enthusiasm, in his exquisite insight into simple and complex passion. His originality is unprecedented; though it is partly explained by the fact that he has drunk at foreign, not at English fountains. He says something we never heard before, and he says it in a way no man ever adopted before. His thought may be involved and slightly Jesuitical; but it is perfect thought of its kind. His speech may be barbarous at times; but his is the barbarism of veritable power.
     The genius of the Laureate is quite different. It is almost as indisputable, if less original. The result of several generations of English poets, Tennyson has thrown upon the surface of contemporary life several lines of thought which are very much his own, but which are the direct product, partly of Wordsworth’s meditation, partly of Keats’ vivid emotion. The Tennysonian group of idyls, for example, are directly inspired from Wordsworth, and even Southey,—the common daisy transformed, by cultivation, into the garden “bachelor’s button.” The Tennysonian blank verse would have been impossible without the blank verse of Keats and Shelley. It may be said, further, that Tennyson has nowhere evinced that high dramatic faculty which sympathizes with the broad movements of national life as breaking in individuals. His ‘Northern Farmer’ is solitary. Everywhere in this consummate artist we miss what we may call (for want of better words) the large-mindedness and humanity of Browning. It may be that Tennyson is highly sympathetic; but he shows no noble heat in this direction. His sweetest mood is academic and lyrical; his largest faculty radiates self-illumination. It is by no means to be wondered at that he is more popular than his rival with average men and women. The middle-class world particularly finds its culture and temper admirably represented in Tennyson’s best poems.
     The different qualities of the two writers are well represented in their two present commentators. Mr. Tainsh is a gentleman of average intelligence,—well educated, familiar with literary forms. Mr. Nettleship is a gentleman of far more than average intelligence; not critical, but particularly acute in his sympathies. We cannot honestly say that we should have missed much if neither had put pen to paper. Mr. Tainsh tells nothing new, and a few things that are not true; while Mr. Nettleship, with all his faculty, is rather wearisome,—a cicerone who will be of no service to competent students of Browning, knowing all about the matter for themselves, and who will never persuade outsiders to trouble their heads with his mysteries. Here is an example of criticism which is no criticism,—writing showing the extraordinary fascination which the French writers have had for small authors like the present:—

     “Possessing an intimate knowledge of nature, Tennyson puts his knowledge to a distinctive use. He does not make it the subject of his poetry. Everywhere, his poetry is about man. Yet everywhere, nature enters largely into his poetry. It enters, too, in a close and peculiar connexion with the human characters which form the subjects of the poetry. He does not draw the man, and then draw the nature around him; but he enters into the man, and sees nature through his eyes—nature, at the same time, so adapting herself to the mood of the man, that her spirit and his seem one. This relation I have expressed by the name sensuo-sympathetic. There is nothing like it in the poetry of Wordsworth, or of Shelley, or of Keats. In each of these, nature, after one manner or another, masters the man. In Keats, she subdues him; in Shelley, she transfigures him; in Wordsworth, she is his teacher. But in Tennyson, she is one with him. As she presents herself to his senses, she is in absolute sympathy with him. His pain and fear, his hopes and questionings, are hers. All through ‘In Memoriam’ one feels this.”

     Wise-looking nonsense such as the above might be manufactured by the yard, and it is a fair specimen of Mr. Tainsh’s scholastic and profound manner. Hearken, in the next place, to Mr. Nettleship:—

     “The piece called ‘Respectability,’ though very short, is very significant:—

Dear, had the world in its caprice
     Deigned to proclaim, “I know you both,
     Have recognized your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!”
How many precious months and years
     Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
     Before we found it out at last—
The world, and what it fears?

The idea expressed is that the independence of thought and action which forms the necessary groundwork for the making of a character, is incomplete unless it is itself founded upon the love of a woman for the man, of a man for the woman, begun and carried through in perfect indifference to, and if need be defiance of, the laws of society.

How much of priceless life were spent
     With men that every virtue decks,
     And women models of their sex—
Society’s true ornament—
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
     Thro’ wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
     And feel the Boulevart break again
To warmth and light and bliss?

Had their love been first recognized by the world, they, becoming by that recognition the world’s debtors, would have been compelled to conform to its rules, all the while wearying their strength by chafing under the restraint. But now that the two have dared to do without that recognition, instead of passing many years of fruitless striving against those fetters of conventionality which, through their obligation to society and their ignorance of its weak points, they could not have broken save at the expense of years of toil, which would have wasted their powers, the two have had all the priceless years of their youth to spend in developing their true instincts, their pure and unchecked sympathies.”

     The above is not Mr. Nettleship’s best, but it shows his style of working. Now, will it be seriously maintained by anybody that the fine little poem called ‘Respectability’ is one whit the clearer or better for the comment—a comment quite sensible and natural, but entirely supererogatory in this instance? Indeed, poetry which needs to be so paraphrased would have to be placed in the fatal catalogue of total failures; for verse which does not explain itself clearly, and better represent itself than any paraphrase, however subtle, is more contemptible than the vilest prose. Browning is generally quite lucid to one competent to follow thought so subtle. He eludes common readers, not because he fails in speech, but because they fail in apprehension. Will such readers be a bit wiser for the following?—

AFTER.

“Take the cloak from his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst.

How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And absorbed in the new life he leads,
     He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance—both strike
     On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
     Surprise of the change.

Ha! what avails death to erase
     His offence, my disgrace?
I would we were boys as of old
     In the field, by the fold;
His outrage, God’s patience, man’s scorn
     Were so easily borne.

I stand here now, he lies in his place;
     Cover the face.

After the fight, all the impulses which God gave to man to blind his tenderness when right must be done, ebb and still; and in the great mercy of that God, the memory of the tendernesses of a loving past, of the innocence and youth of their past companionship, comes surging up to choke and overwhelm the champion who a moment ago was so terrible. For God keeps Himself veiled for a purpose; He will not let it be known by clear manifestation what He thinks right, what He thinks wrong, lest thereby men lose all sense of responsibility, and become mere vegetables. Still He keeps a veil of doubt hanging over them, and will not let the clear light be seen, lest men be blinded and lose their sight, lest they die in the swooning splendour of a perfect day. Thus it is that what seemed right on the other side of a deed seems wrong on this: thus it is that before the mystic uncertain face of death the proudest courage quails. Shall we say that this man’s death was of no use? Had he lived, where would have been the yearning backward thoughts of the time when, indeed, he was innocent and pure? Where would have been that very tenderness of life, that rising of an inexpressible sympathy? But now, the lesson God has taught is this: you shall find out what is right and what is wrong for yourselves; you shall strive blindly for the right, and shall in striving to get it buffet many men, and suffer much yourself. But do not despair. Every unworthy buffet given to others shall remind you in its consequences that you are not infallible; that you might perhaps have looked deeper, and seen clearer. Thus you will have learned one lesson: thus you will gain in courage, in sympathy, in experience, in all that makes a man.”

Here, again, the explanation is tedious and offensive. There is more excuse for the comment on ‘Sordello,’ but the subject was hardly worth so much trouble. ‘Sordello’ is in every sense
a failure, not to be redeemed by its beautiful purpose.
     It is to be noticed that both these books of comment are explanatory, not critical. The story of Tennyson is a mixed business, but Mr. Nettleship paraphrases invariably. Mr. Tainsh is not very brilliant either in his explanations or his criticisms, and we hope he will not publish any more “studies.” But Mr. Nettleship has brains, and we hope to hear of him again. If, instead of translating the meanings of his beloved poet, he would produce a thoroughly thought-out critical study on the same subject, we are sure that the result would be very welcome.

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

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

LITERATURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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