Hearts of Controversy........................................................................................................................................1

Alice Meynell ...........................................................................................................................................1

SOME THOUGHTS OF A READER OF TENNYSON........................................................................1

DICKENS AS A MAN OF LETTERS ....................................................................................................6

SWINBURNE'S LYRICAL POETRY ..................................................................................................12

CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE...............................................................................................18

CHARMIAN ..........................................................................................................................................23

THE CENTURY OF MODERATION ..................................................................................................25

Fifty years after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by that unanimous acclamation which includes

mere clamour. Fifty further years, and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes difficult

to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change from the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes

not and rests not, reaction beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world. Reactionthe

paltry precipitancy of the multituderather than the novelty of change, has brought about a ferment and

corruption of opinion on Tennyson's poetry. It may be said that opinion is the same now as it was in the

middle of the nineteenth centurythe same, but turned. All that was not worth having of admiration then has

soured into detraction now. It is of no more significance, acrid, than it was, sweet. What the herding of

But besides the common favourdisfavour of the day, there is the tendency of educated opinion, once

disposed to accept the whole of Tennyson's poetry as though he could not be "parted from himself," and now

disposed to reject the whole, on the same plea. But if ever there was a poet who needed to be thus

"parted"the word is his ownit is he who wrote both narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and

whothis is the more important character of his poetryhad both a style and a manner: a masterly style, a

magical style, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; a noble landscape and in it figures something readymade.

He is a subject for our alternatives of feeling, nay, our conflicts, as is hardly another poet. We may deeply

admire and wonder, and, in another line or hemistich, grow indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the

luminous suns of dreams upon men women who would do well with footlights; waters their way with rushing

streams of Paradise and cataracts from visionary hills; laps them in divine darkness; leads them into those

touching landscapes, "the lovely that are not beloved;" long grey fields, cool sombre summers, and meadows

thronged with unnoticeable flowers; speeds his carpet knightor is that hardly a just name for one whose

sword "smites" so well?upon a carpet of authentic wild flowers; pushes his rovers, in costume, from off

blossoming shores, on the keels of old romance. The style and the manner, I have said, run side by side. If we

may take one poet's too violent phrase, and consider poets to be "damned to poetry," why, then, Tennyson is

condemned by a couple of sentences, "to run concurrently." We have the style and the manner locked

together at times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled. There should be no danger for the more

judicious reader lest impatience at the peculiar Tennyson trick should involve the great Tennyson style in a

sweep of protest. Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present and recent years, and seems about

to threaten still more among the less judicious. But it will not long prevail. The vigorous little nation of lovers

of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of the nation of England, cannot remain finally

insensible to what is at once majestic and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities they neglect in

their other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in the sixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth,

composure in the eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the notecommonly called Celtic, albeit it is the

most English thing in the worldthe wild wood note of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of

style, the liberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and loving Nature, shall that choice nation

within England long disregard these virtues in the nineteenthcentury master? How disregard him, for more

than the few years of reaction, for the insignificant reasons of his bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his

prettiness, or what not? It is no dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, to disparage a

poet who wrote but the twohad he written no more of their kindlines of "The Passing of Arthur," of

which, before I quote them, I will permit myself the personal remembrance of a great contemporary author's

opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the highwater mark of English style in poetry and prose, cited

Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of

Nature, something on the yonder side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is from Tennyson's

generally weakest kind of workblank verse; and should thus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of

the "Idylls" and other blank verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetry undoubtedly

is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; it cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it

has no weight; it slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the friction of the movement of

vitality. This quality, which is so near to a fault, this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day.

That Horace Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we should hold it for a vice. Yet we do

more than undervalue it; and several of our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in the

manifest difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closely and tightly, in oiled wards; let the

But though we may think it time that the quality once overprized should be restored to a more proportionate

honour, our great poet Tennyson shows us that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the most

dangerous. It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is also that the key turns loosely. This is true of

much of the beautiful "Idylls," but not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that of

the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question of ease, we cannot have a better maxim

than Coventry Patmore's saying that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties." And we

could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of verse that not only confesses but brags of

difficulties, and not only suffers from them but cries out under the suffering, and shows us the grimace of the

pain of it, than I have lighted upon in the critical article of a recent quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet"

who manifestly has an insuperable difficulty in hacking his work into tensyllable blocks, and keeping at the

same time any show of respect for the national grammar, the critic gravely invites his reader to "note" the

phrase "neath cliffs" (apparently for "beneath the cliffs") as "characteristic." Shall the reader indeed "note"

such a matter? Truly he has other things to do. This is by the way. Tennyson is always an artist, and the finish

of his work is one of the principal notes of his versification. How this finish comports with the excessive ease

of his prosody remains his own peculiar secret. Ease, in him, does not mean that he has any unhandsome

slovenly ways. On the contrary, he resembles rather the warrior with the pouncet box. It is the man of "neath

cliffs" who will not be at the trouble of making a place for so much as a definite article. Tennyson certainly

WORKED, and the exceeding ease of his blank verse comes perhaps of this little paradoxthat he makes

In the first place the poet with the great welcome style and the little unwelcome manner, Tennyson is, in the

second place, the modern poet who withstood France. (That is, of course, modern FranceFrance since the

Renaissance. From medieval Provence there is not an English poet who does not own inheritance.) It was

some time about the date of the Restoration that modern France began to be modish in England. A ruffle at

the Court of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a tour de phrase from Mme. de Sevigne much to the taste

of Walpole, later the good example of French painting rich interest paid for the loan of our Constable's

initiativelater still a scattering of French taste, French critical business, over all the shallow places of our

literaturethese have all been phases of a national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious fluttering or jostling

to be foremost and French. Matthew Arnold's essay on criticism fostered this anxiety, and yet I find in this

work of his a lack of easy French knowledge, such as his misunderstanding of the word brutalite, which

means no more, or little more, than roughness. Matthew Arnold, by the way, knew so little of the French

character as to be altogether ignorant of French provincialism, French practical sense, and French

"convenience." "Convenience" is his dearest word of contempt, "practical sense" his next dearest, and he

throws them a score of times in the teeth of the English. Strange is the irony of the truth. For he bestows those

withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions, and attributes "ideas"as the antithesis of

"convenience" and "practical sense"to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a moment does he

suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be disconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an

incurably English accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of Matthew Arnold's

actual speaking of French. It is certain that he has not the interest of familiarity with the language, but only

the interest of strangeness. Now, while we meet the effect of the French coat in our seventeenth century, of

the French light verse in our earlier eighteenth century, and of French philosophy in our later, of the French

revolution in our Wordsworth, of the French painting in our nineteenthcentury studios, of French

fictionand the dregs are still runningin our libraries, of French poetry in our Swinburne, of French

criticism in our Arnold, Tennyson shows the effect of nothing French whatever. Not the Elizabethans, not

Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, not Milton, not Shelley were (in their art, not in their matter) more insular in

their time. France, by the way, has more than appreciated the homage of Tennyson's contemporaries; Victor

Hugo avers, in Les Miserables, that our people imitate his people in all things, and in particular he rouses in

us a delighted laughter of surprise by asserting that the London streetboy imitates the Parisian streetboy.

There is, in fact, something of a streetboy in some of our late more literary mimicries.

We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson is hardly a great master of imagery. He

has more imagination than imagery. He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficient to

him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. "A clearwalled city" is enough; "meadows" are

enough indeed Tennyson reigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change their sky";

"Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and evening bell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that

friend of mine who lives in God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers"; "Watched

by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing not illustration.

If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the ONE that he is, this is because of the throng of his

following, though a number that are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. But he

added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the advent of his single genius. He is one of

the few fountainhead poets of the world. The new landscape which was histhe lovely unbelovedis, it

need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. It may have seemed to some readers that

it is the novelty, in poetry, of this homely unscenic scenerythis Lincolnshire qualitythat accounts for

Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the

things that others have outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is conventional.

Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those, which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning,

"A splendour falls"? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance, where in all poetry is there

a sound wilder than that of those faint "horns of elfland"? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light

delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the closer secret of poetry. This most

English of modern poets has been taunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies," of the

exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his ecstatic English spirit also far afield and

to the lotuseaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace of Art"the "clearwalled city by the

sea," the "pillared town," the "fullfed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in Ida";

At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, Is there any hope? To which an answer pealed from

The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a readymade Cleopatra, but when in the shades of her

forest she remembers the sun of the world, she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes

Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart

again. The dramas, less than the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true Tennysonian.

Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than vital, and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in

"Harold," is not only modern, it is fixed within Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years. But that he

might have answered, in drama, to a stronger stimulus, a sharper spur, than his time administered, may be

guessed from a few passages of "Queen Mary," and from the dramatic terror of the arrow in "Harold." The

line has appeared in prophetic fragments in earlier scenes, and at the moment of doom it is the outcry of

Tennyson is also an eminently allintelligible poet. Those whom he puzzles or confounds must be a flock

with an incalculable liability to go wide of any road"down all manner of streets," as the desperate drover

cries in the anecdote. But what are streets, however various, to the ways of error that a great flock will take in

open countryminutely, individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or

none"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used to be said in exposition of the

Darwinian theory? A vast outlying public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has

heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is

the sincere pause of process and uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, midway between the student of

material science and the mystic, wrote and thought according to an age that wavered, with him, between the

two minds, and that men have now taken one way or the other. Is this indeed true, and are men so divided and

so sure? Or have they not rather already turned, in numbers, back to the parting, or meeting, of eternal roads?

The religious question that arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity and

attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of yesterday it represents no less the mind of

tomorrow. It is true that pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler formsnay, in the ignoblest form of a

fashionhave, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it

matters little which prevails. For those who follow the one habit today would have followed the other in a

past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy

of "In Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great struggle of reasoning was to be

committed, nor would any such dispute be judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson

here proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny. The conflict, for which he proves

himself strong enough, is in that magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius." But so far as "In Memoriam"

attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of human anguish and intellect.

I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or

Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well." Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the sleeping

imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We see them in his great poem as apparitions.

Coleridge's senses are infinitely and transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted to think

the mere story silly. The weddingguest might rise the morrow morn a sadder but he assuredly did not rise a

As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" are fatally rebuked by the truths of Nature.

He shows us the ruins of an aspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because an innocent stag,

hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass would not grow there.

This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be these woodland ruinscruelly, because

the daily sight of the world blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to us by such

The Being that is in the clouds and air . . . Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creature

The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible alteration of Nature at the scene of

sufferingan alteration we have to dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask

whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks uson such grounds!to believe in? Did he

think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign and a false proof?

Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack upon our reason and our heart. He is

IN MEMORIAM, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and there a subtle word, this

natureloving nation to perceive land, light, sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we

dwell. He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniusesa small and an immense; secondly, the modern

poet who answered in the negative that most significant modern question, French or not French? But he was,

before the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet of landscape, and this he is more

dearly than pen can describe him. This eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a

The clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the

A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore, . . . And gathering freshlier overhead,

Rocked the fullfoliaged elm, and swung The heavyfolded rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said

His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. I think the sense of hearing as well as the sense

As to this gardencharacter so much decried I confess that the "lawn" does not generally delight me, the word

nor the thing. But in Tennyson's page the word is wonderful, as though it had never been dull: "The mountain

lawn was dewydark." It is not that he brings the mountains too near or ranks them in his own peculiar

gardenplot, but that the word withdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams; the lawn is aloft,

alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with many another word or phrase changed, by passing into

his vocabulary, into something rich and strange. His own especially is the March monthhis "roaring

moon." His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and

crocus are caught by the gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with the energy and

gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase in the number, and not only in the sum, of our

national apprehensions of poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry is he who is

insensible to the Tennyson notethe new note that we reaffirm even with the notes of Vaughan, Traherne,

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well in our earsthe Tennyson note of splendour, alldistinct. He showed the

perpetually transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is the captain of our dreams. Others have

lighted a candle in England, he lit a sun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns

long since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon us an exalted retrospection.

Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain;

through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the settingforth on that last voyage of

his with such an immortal gleam, denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of that

seaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, the transcendent vision, of Tennyson's

Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he speaks "a little wildly, or with the flower of

the mind." Tennyson, the clearestheaded of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that little foppery

we know of in himthat walking delicately, like Agag; wild, notwithstanding the work, the ease, the

neatness, the finish; notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhat misses that

mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer.

It was said for many years, until the reversal that now befalls the sayings of many years had happened to this

also, that Thackeray was the unkind satirist and Dickens the kind humourist. The truth seems to be that

Dickens imagined more evil people than did Thackeray, but that he had an eager faith in good ones. Nothing

places him so entirely out of date as his trust in human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his leap at it. He

saw it in a woman's face first met, and drew it to himself in a man's hand first grasped. He looked keenly for

it. And if he associated minor degrees of goodness with any kind of folly or mental ineptitude, he did not so

relate sanctity; though he gave it, for companion, ignorance; and joined the two, in Joe Gargery, most

tenderly. We might paraphrase, in regard to these two great authors, Dr. Johnson's famous sentence:

"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no joys." Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray has no

saints. Helen Pendennis is not holy, for she is unjust and cruel; Amelia is not holy, for she is an egoist in

love; Lady Castlewood is not holy, for she too is cruel; and even Lady Jane is not holy, for she is jealous; nor

is Colonel Newcome holy, for he is haughty; nor Dobbin, for he turns with a taunt upon a plain sister; nor

Esmond, for he squanders his best years in love for a material beauty; and these are the best of his good

people. And readers have been taught to praise the work of him who makes none perfect; one does not meet

perfect people in trains or at dinner, and this seemed good cause that the novelist should be praised for his

But Charles Dickens closed with a divine purpose divinely different. He consented to the counsels of

perfection. And thus he made Joe Gargery, not a man one might easily find in a forge; and Esther

Summerson, not a girl one may easily meet at a dance; and Little Dorrit, who does not come to do a day's

sewing; not that the man and the women are inconceivable, but that they are unfortunately improbable. They

are creatures created through a creating mind that worked its six days for the love of good, and never rested

until the seventh, the final Sabbath. But granting that they are the counterpart, the heavenly side, of

caricature, this is not to condemn them. Since when has caricature ceased to be an art good for manan

honest game between him and nature? It is a tenable opinion that frank caricature is a better incident of art

than the mere exaggeration which is the more modern practice. The words mean the same thing in their

originan overloading. But, as we now generally delimit the words, they differ. Caricature, when it has the

grotesque inspiration, makes for laughter, and when it has the celestial, makes for admiration; in either case

there is a good understanding between the author and the reader, or between the draughtsman and the

spectator. We need not, for example, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating pattern of his

hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most exceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus

seated in Mr. Max Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl ever went through life without harbouring a

thought of self, but it is very good for us all to know that such a girl was thought of by Dickens, that he loved

But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal

to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand the worst manner of

violence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is so far, therefore, successful,

conspicuousness being its aim. But it was also the vice of Swinburne, and was the bad example he set to the

generation that thought his tunings to be the finest "music." For instance, in an early poem he intends to tell

us how a man who loved a woman welcomed the sentence that condemned him to drown with her, bound, his

impassioned breast against hers, abhorring. He might have convinced us of that welcome by one phrase of the

profound exactitude of genius. But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the greatest imaginable

glory to be bestowed upon the judge who pronounces the sentence. And this is merely exaggeration. One

takes pleasure in rebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic. The poet intended to impose

upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our attention," as Dr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish.

In truth we do more, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English language. For exaggeration writes

relaxed, and not elastic, words and verses; and it is possible that the language suffers something, at least

temporarilyduring the life of a couple of generations, let us sayfrom the loss of elasticity and rebound

brought about by such strain. Moreover, exaggeration has always to outdo itself progressively. There should

have been a Durdles to tell this Swinburne that the habit of exaggerating, like that of boasting, "grows upon

It may be added that later poetry shows us an instance of exaggeration in the work of that major poet, Mr.

Lascelles Abercrombie. His violence and vehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of weakness but

of power; and yet once he reaches a breakingpoint that power should never know. This is where his Judith

holds herself to be so smirched and degraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being devoted to one only,

a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no bar is left to her entire selfsacrifice to the loathed enemy

Holofernes. To this, too, the prim rebuke is the just one, a word for the mouth of governesses: "My dear, you

It may be briefly said that exaggeration takes for granted some degree of imbecility in the reader, whereas

caricature takes for granted a high degree of intelligence. Dickens appeals to our intelligence in all his

caricature, whether heavenly, as in Joe Gargery, or impish, as in Mrs. Micawber. The word "caricature" that

is used a thousand times to reproach him is the word that does him singular honour.

If I may define my own devotion to Dickens, it may be stated as chiefly, though not wholly, admiration of his

humour, his dramatic tragedy, and his watchfulness over inanimate things and landscape. Passages of his

books that are ranged otherwise than under those characters often leave me out of the range of their appeal or

else definitely offend me. And this is not for the customary reason that Dickens could not draw a

gentleman, that Dickens could not draw a lady. It matters little whether he could or not. But as a fact he did

draw a gentleman, and drew him excellently well, in Cousin Feenix, as Mr. Chesterton has decided. The

question of the lady we may waive; if it is difficult to prove a negative, it is difficult also to present one; and

to the making, or producing, or liberating, or detaching, or exalting, of the character of a lady there enter

many negatives; and Dickens was an obvious and a positive man. Esther Summerson is a lady, but she is so

much besides that her ladyhood does not detach itself from her sainthood and her angelhood, so as to be

conspicuousif, indeed, conspicuousness may be properly predicated of the quality of a lady. It is a

conventional saying that sainthood and angelhood include the quality of a lady, but that saying is not true; a

lady has a great number of negatives all her own, and also some things positive that are not at all included in

goodness. However this may beand it is not importantDickens, the genial Dickens, makes savage sport

of women. Such a company of envious dames and damsels cannot be found among the persons of the satirist

Thackeray. Kate Nickleby's beauty brings upon her at first sight the enmity of her workshop companions; in

the innocent pages of "Pickwick" the aunt is jealous of the niece, and the niece retorts by wounding the vanity

of the aunt as keenly as she may; and so forth through early books and late. He takes for granted that the

women, old and young, who are not his heroines, wage this war within the sex, being disappointed by defect

of nature and fortune. Dickens is master of wit, humour, and derision; and it must be confessed that his

derision is abundant, and is cast upon an artificially exposed and helpless people; that is, he, a man, derides

The advice which M. Rodin received in his youth from Constant "Learn to see the other side; never look at

forms only in extent; learn to see them always in relief"is the contrary of the counsel proper for a reader of

Dickens. That counsel should be, "Do not insist upon seeing the immortal figures of comedy 'in the round.'

You are to be satisfied with their face value, the face of two dimensions. It is not necessary that you should

seize Mr. Pecksniff from beyond, and grasp the whole man and his destinies." The hypocrite is a figure

dreadful and tragic, a shape of horror; and Mr. Pecksniff is a hypocrite, and a bright image of hearteasing

comedy. For comic fiction cannot exist without some such paradox. Without it, where would our laugh be in

response to the generous genius which gives us Mr. Pecksniff's parenthesis to the mention of sirens ("Pagan, I

regret to say"); and the scene in which Mr. Pecksniff, after a stormy domestic scene within, goes as it were

accidentally to the door to admit the rich kinsman he wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. Pecksniff, gently

warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade, and opened the street door, as if he thought he

had, from his vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain." The visitor had thundered at the door

while outcries of family strife had been rising in the house. "'It is an ancient pursuit, gardening. Primitive, my

dear sir; for, if I am not mistaken, Adam was the first of the calling. My Eve, I grieve to say, is no more, sir;

but' (and here he pointed to his spade, and shook his head, as if he were not cheerful without an effort) 'but I

do a little bit of Adam still.' He had by this time got them into the best parlour, where the portrait by Spiller

and the bust by Spoker were." And again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at the supper table: "'This,' he said, in

allusion to the party, not the wine, 'is a Mingling that repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let

us be merry.' Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that never rejoices; and our hearts are not

poor. No!' With such stimulants to merriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table."

Moreover it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, that a man should be as mad as Mr. Dick. None the less

is it a happy thing for any reader to watch Mr. Dick while David explains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr. Dick

was to be employed in copying, but King Charles the First could not be kept out of the manuscripts; "Mr.

Dick in the meantime looking very deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb." And the

amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the vegetable marrows over the garden wall. Mr. F.'s aunt,

again! And Augustus Moddle, our own Moddle, whom a great French critic most justly and accurately

brooded over. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac," says Taine, "makes us shudder." A good medical diagnosis.

Truly, Humour talks in his own language, nay, his own dialect, whereas Passion and Pity speak the universal

It is strangeit seems to me deplorablethat Dickens himself was not content to leave his wonderful

hypocriteone who should stand imperishable in comedyin the two dimensions of his own admirable art.

After he had enjoyed his own Pecksniff, tasting him with the "strenuous tongue" of Keats's voluptuary

bursting "joy's grapes against his palate fine," Dickens most unfairly gives himself the other and incompatible

joy of grasping his Pecksniff in the third dimension, seizes him "in the round," horsewhips him out of all

keeping, and finally kicks him out of a splendid art of fiction into a sorry art of "poetical justice," a Pecksniff

And yet Dickens's retribution upon sinners is a less fault than his reforming them. It is truly an act denoting

excessive simplicity of mind in him. He never veritably allows his responsibility as a man to lapse. Men

ought to be good, or else to become good, and he does violence to his own excellent art, and yields it up to

his sense of morality. Ah, can we measure by years the time between that day and this? Is the fastidious, the

impartial, the nonmoral novelist only the grandchild, and not the remote posterity, of Dickens, who would

not leave Scrooge to his egoism, or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy Pecksniff to her absurdity, or Dombey to

his pride? Nay, who makes Micawber finally to prosper? Truly, the most unpardonable thing Dickens did in

those deplorable last chapters of his was the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of a son, in difficulties"the

perfect Micawber nature is respected as to his origin, and then perverted as to his end. It is a pity that Mr.

Peggotty ever came back to England with such tidings. And our last glimpse of the emigrants had been made

joyous by the sight of the young Micawbers on the eve of emigration; "every child had its own wooden spoon

attached to its body by a strong line," in preparation for Colonial life. And then Dickens must needs go

behind the gay scenes, and tell us that the long and untiring delight of the book was over. Mr. Micawber, in

the Colonies, was never again to make punch with lemons, in a crisis of his fortunes, and "resume his peeling

with a desperate air"; nor to observe the expression of his friends' faces during Mrs. Micawber's masterly

exposition of the financial situation or of the possibilities of the coal trade; nor to eat walnuts out of a paper

bag what time the die was cast and all was over. Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's pecuniary

liabilities were over, and the perfect comedy turned into dulness, the joyous impossibility of a figure of

There are several such late or last chapters that one would gladly cut away: that of Mercy Pecksniff's pathos,

for example; that of Mr. Dombey's installation in his daughter's home; that which undeceives us as to Mr.

Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a heart it was that urged these unlucky conclusions!

How shall we venture to complain? The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has it not the right to

belabour him in earnestalbeit a kind of earnest that disappoints us? And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own

Dombey, and he must do what he will with that finely wrought figure of pride. But there is a little irony in the

fact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to his orderly fate for whom we care little either way; it is

nothing to us, whom Carker never convinced, that the train should catch him, nor that the man with the

moustache and the nose, who did but weary us, should be crushed by the falling house. Here the end holds

good in art, but the art was not good from the first. But then, again, neither does Bill Sikes experience a

change of heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and the end of each is most excellently told.

George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fiction was dialogue. But there is surely one

thing at least as difficulta thing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more difficult

than dialogue; and that is the telling WHAT HAPPENED. Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation

that persist beneath all the violence of our stageour national undramatic characteris perceptible in the

narrative of our literature. The things the usual modern author says are proportionately more energetically

produced than those he tells. But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of one thing at a time, and

that thing whole, tells us what happened with a perfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays. Those who

saw him act found him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in Oliver Twist, the

murder in Martin Chuzzlewit, the coming of the train upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip

sees his guest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night. The swift spirit, the hammering blow of

his narrative, drive the great storm in David Copperfield through the poorest part of the book Steerforth's

story. There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this: from the first words, "'Don't you think that,' I

said to the coachman, 'a very remarkable sky?'" to the end of a magnificent chapter. "Flying clouds tossed up

into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them. . .

There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long before we

saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle

lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the

horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and

buildings. . . The people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair." David dreams of a

cannonade, when at last he "felloff a tower and down a precipiceinto the depths of sleep." In the

morning, "the wind might have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had

dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds." "It went from me

with a shock, like a ball from a rifle," says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious impulse; here

is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing more perceptibly than it came.

The tempest in David Copperfield combines Dickens's dramatic tragedy of narrative with his wonderful sense

of sea and land. But here are landscapes in quietness: "There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry

shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flagstones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush,

seek sanctuary within the lowarched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them out

with their feet:" The autumn leaves fall thick, "but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead

lightness." Again, "Now the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree." And yet again,

"I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers; and among the still woods in the silence of the

summer day there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace." Yet, with a

Dickens, having the single and simple heart of a moralist, had also the simple eyes of a free intelligence, and

the light heart. He gave his senses their way, and well did they serve him. Thus his eyesand no more

modern man in anxious search of "impressions" was ever so simple and so masterly: "Mr. Vholes gauntly

stalked to the fire, and warmed his funereal gloves." "'I thank you,' said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long

black sleeve, to check the ringing of the bell, 'not any.'" Mr. and Mrs. Tope "are daintily sticking sprigs of

holly into the carvings and sconces of the cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the buttonholes

of the Dean Chapter." The two young Eurasians, brother and sister, "had a certain air upon them of hunter

and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase rather than the followers." This phrase

lacks eleganceand Dickens is not often inelegant, as those who do not read him may be surprised to

learnbut the impression is admirable; so is that which follows: "An indefinable kind of pause coming and

going on their whole expression, both of face and form." Here is pure, mere impression again: "Miss

Murdstone, who was busy at her writingdesk, gave me her cold fingernails." Lady Tippins's hand is "rich

in knuckles." And here is vision with great dignity: "All beyond his figure was a vast dark curtain, in solemn

With that singleness of sightand his whole body was full of the light of ithe had also the single hearing;

the scene is in the Court of Chancery on a London November day: "Leaving this address ringing in the rafters

of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more." "Mr. Vholes emerged into the

silence he could scarcely be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone." "Within the grillgate of the

chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fastdarkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen,

and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . .

. until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of music. Then the sea fell, and the dying

voice made another feeble effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and

surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the sea was dry and all was

still. And this is how a listener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: "The word 'confidence,'

shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced together, is uttered."

Wit, humour, derisionto each of these words we assign by custom a part in the comedy of literature; and

(again) those who do not read Dickensperhaps even those who read him a littlemay acclaim him as a

humourist and not know him as a wit. But that writer is a wit, whatever his humour, who tells us of a member

of the Tite Barnacle family who had held a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawn

salary in his hand." But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is foremost and most precious. For we

might well spare the phrase of wit just quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stood up),

as one who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful ghost." Or rather than this:

He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the

fanciful observer that he might be expectedif his development received no untimely checkto be

Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beefsteak. He gently presses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom

Pinch's pocket. "'For meat,' he said with some emotion, 'must be humoured, not drove.'"

A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to be vulgar; if the cause of that judgement

was that he wrote about people in shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the

novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given place to the little shop and its parlour,

during a year or two. But Dr. Brown, the author of Rab and His Friends, thought that Dickens committed

vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is right enough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is

not so well, and we must own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as it were

dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles

Lamb misuses one of them precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But for these

his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows what is not. A little representative collection of

the bad or foolish English of his day might be made by gathering up what Dickens forbore and what he

derided; for instance, Mr. Micawber's portly phrase, "gratifying emotions of no common description," and

Littimer's report that "the young woman was partial to the sea." This was the polite language of that time, as

we conclude when we find it to be the language that Charlotte Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off

she used it. Dickens, too, had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is an inflationrounded

words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikes himselfbut he discarded them with a splendid laugh. They

are charged upon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author. See him as he sits by to hear Captain Hopkins

read the petition in the debtors' prison "from His Most Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects." Mr.

Micawber listened, we read, "with a little of an author's vanity, contemplating (not severely) the spikes upon

the opposite wall." It should be remembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything that

hampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded as when he gave to his cordial

readers matter for facile sentiment and for humour of the second order. His public were eager to be moved

and to laugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to please them, and it is evident that he

pleased himself also. Mr. Micawber, Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus

Moddle, Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and Little Nell, nor is Traddles, whose

We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding of something strangeshaped, an

asymmetry that has an accidental felicity, an interest. If he finds such a grace or disproportion whatever

the interest may bein a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye at the roadside, he carries it to his

home to place it in its irregularly happy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or

strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his heroesthose heroes are, perhaps, his worst

work, young men at once conventional and improbablewith whimsically ugly names; while his invented

names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatory silent man in black, and that of Tope for the

cathedral verger. A suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors, something

respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the love of lurking, unusual things, human and

inanimatehe wrote of his discoveries delightedly in his letterswas hypertrophied; and it has its part in

the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially those that are due to his childlike eyesight; let

us read, for example, of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury) in his Highgate

garden, "as if they had been written to about him by the Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in

consequence"; and of Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice"On looking at Master

Micawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if his voice were behind his eyebrows"; and

of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a scarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the Life

Guards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else"; and of Mrs.

Markleham, "who stared more like a figurehead intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than

anything else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a thousand such exhilarating little sights in

his memory of these pages. From the gently grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in

Quilp and Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a spontaneous combustion was an

Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable and sentimental, or had the convention or

tradition of great sentimental excitability. All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence of mind.

Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions are wild. When Tom Pinch calls upon John

Westlock in London, after no very long separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls into his

boots, and so forth. And this kind of distraction comes upon men and women everywhere in his

booksdistractions of laughter as well. All this seems artificial today, whereas Dickens in his best

moments is the simplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men. But his public was as present to him as an actor's

audience is to the actor, and I cannot think that this immediate response was good for his art. Assuredly he is

not solitary. We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we may wish that now and again, even

while standing applauded and acclaimed, he had appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and

Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely go on to accuse Dickens of bad

grammar. The truth is that his grammar is not only good but strong; it is far better in construction than

Thackeray's, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack. Lately, during the recent centenary

time, a writer averred that Dickens "might not always be parsed," but that we loved him for his, etc., etc.

Dickens's page is to be parsed as strictly as any man's. It is, apart from the matter of grammar, a wonderful

thing that he, with his little education, should have so excellent a diction. In a letter that records his reluctance

to work during a holiday, the word "wave" seems to me perfect: "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to

my desk." In his exquisite use of the word "establishment" in the following phrase, we find his own perfect

sense of the use of words in his own day; but in the second quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of

education. "Under the weight of my wicked secret" (the little boy Pip had succoured his convict with his

brotherinlaw's provisions) "I pondered whether the Church would be powerful enough to shield me . . if I

divulged to that establishment." And this is the phrase that may remind us of the eighteenthcentury writers

of prose, and among those writers of none so readily as of Bolingbroke: it occurs in that passage of Esther's

life in which, having lost her beauty, she resolves to forego a love unavowed. "There was nothing to be

If Dickens had had the education which he had not, his English could not have been better; but if he had had

the usage du monde which as a young man he had not, there would have been a difference. He would not, for

instance, have given us the preposterous scenes in Nicholas Nickleby in which parts are played by Lord

Frederick Verisopht, Sir Mulberry Hawke, and their friends; the scene of the hero's luncheon at a restaurant

and the dreadful description of the mirrors and other splendours would not have been written. It is a very little

thing to forgive to him whom we have to thank forwell, not perhaps for the "housefull of friends" for the

gift of whom a stranger, often quoted, once blessed him in the street; we may not wish for Mr. Feeder, or

Major Bagstock, or Mrs. Chick, or Mrs. Pipchin, or Mr. Augustus Moddle, or Mr. F.'s aunt, or Mr. Wopsle,

or Mr. Pumblechook, as an inmate of our homes. Lack of knowledge of the polite world is, I say, a very little

thing to forgive to him whom we thank most chiefly for showing us these interesting people just named as

inmates of the comedy homes that are not ours. We thank him because they are comedy homes, and could not

The makers of epigrams, of phrases, of pagesof all more or less brief judgementsassuredly waste their

time when they sum up any one of all mankind; and how do they squander it when their matter is a poet!

They may hardly describe him; nor shall any student's care, or psychologist's formula, or manofletters'

summary, or wit's sentence define him. Definitions, because they must not be inexact or incomprehensive,

sweep too wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the mere describer's range and capture he

may escape by as many doors as there are outlets from a forest. But much readymade platitude brings about

the world's guesses at a poet, and false and flat thought lies behind its epigrams. It is not long since the

general guesswork assigned melancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, it was said,

are unhappy, and this was one exceptionally real. How unhappy must he, then, certainly have been! And the

blessed Blake himself was incidentally cited as one of the company of depression and despair! It is, perhaps,

a liking for symmetry that prompts these futile syllogisms; perhaps, also, it is the fear of human mystery. The

biographer used to see "the finger of God" pat in the history of a man; he insists now that he shall at any rate

see the finger of a law, or rather of a rule, a custom, a generality. Law I will not call it; there is no intelligible

law that, for example, a true poet should be an unhappy man; but the observer thinks he has noticed a custom

or habit to that effect, and Blake, who lived and died in bliss, is named at ignorant random, rather than that an

But it is not only such a platitude of observation, such a cheap generality, that is silenced in the presence of

the poet whose name is at the head of these pages. For if ever Nature showed us a poet in whom our phrases,

and the judgements they record, should be denied, defeated, and confused, Swinburne is he. We predicate of

a poet a great sincerity, a great imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; these are the master qualities,

and yet we are compelled to see hereif we would not wilfully be blind or blindfolda poet, yes, a true

poet, with a perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a poet with no more than

the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm soul, a poet with small intellectand thrice a poet.

And, assuredly, if the creative arts are duly humbled in the universal contemplation of Nature, if they are

accused, if they are weighed, if they are found wanting; if they are excused by nothing but our intimate

human sympathy with dear and interesting imperfection; if poetry stands outdone by the passion and

experience of an inarticulate soul, and painting by the splendour of the day, and building by the forest and the

cloud, there is another art also that has to be humiliated, and this is the art and science of criticism,

confounded by its contemplation of such a poet. Poor little art of examination and formula! The miracle of

day and night and immortality are needed to rebuke the nobler arts; but our art, the critic's, mine today, is

brought to book, and its heart is broken, and its sincerity disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Not in the

heavens nor in the subcelestial landscape does this minor art find its refutation, but in the puzzle between a

man and his gift; and in part the man is ignoble and leads us by distasteful paths, and compels us to a

reluctant work of literary detection. Useful is the critical spirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite

instance) it has to ask what literary sinceritywhat value for art and letterslived in Swinburne, who hailed

a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and painter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him

"poetaster and dauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiography offended his own

selflove; when, I say, criticism finds itself called upon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it

loses heart as well as the clue, and would gladly go out into the free air of greater arts, and, with them, take

I have to cite this instance of a change of mind, or of terms and titles, in Swinburne's estimate of art and

letters, because it is allimportant to my argument. It is a change he makes in published print, and, therefore,

no private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of moral fault, with which I have no business, but as a sign of a

most significant literary insensibilityinsensibility, whether to the quality of a poetaster when he wrote

Rather than justify the things I have ventured to affirm as to Swinburne's little intellect, and paltry degree of

sincerity, and rachitic passion, and tumid fancyjudgementconfounding things to predicate of a poetI

turn to the happier task of praise. A vivid writer of English was he, and would have been one of the recurring

renewers of our oftenrenewed and incomparable language, had his words not become habitual to himself, so

that they quickly lost the light, the breeze, the breath; one whose fondness for beauty deserved the serious

name of love; one whom beauty at times favoured and filled so visibly, by such obvious visits and

possessions, favours so manifest, that inevitably we forget we are speaking fictions and allegories, and

imagine her a visiting power exterior to her poet; a man, moreover, of a less, not more, than manly

receptiveness and appreciation, so that he was entirely and easily possessed by admirations. Less than manly

we must call his extraordinary recklessness of appreciation; it is, as it were, ideally feminine; it is possible,

however, that no woman has yet been capable of so entire an emotional impulse and impetus; more than

manly it might have been but for the lack of a responsible intellect in that impulse; had it possessed such an

intellectual sanction, Swinburne's admiration of Victor Hugo, Mazzini, Dickens, Baudelaire, and Theophile

We are inclined to complain of such an objection to Swinburne's poetry as was prevalent at his earlier

appearance and may be found in criticisms of the time, before the later fashion of praise set inthe obvious

objection that it was as indigent in thought as affluent in words; for, though a truth, it is an inadequate truth. It

might be affirmed of many a versewriter of not unusual talent and insignificance, whose affluence of words

was inselective and merely abundant, and whose poverty of thought was something less than a national

disaster. Swinburne's failure of intellect was, in the fullest and most serious sense, a national disaster, and his

instinct for words was a national surprise. It is in their beauty that Swinburne's art finds its absolution from

the obligations of meaning, according to the vulgar judgement; and we can hardly wonder.

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and

"musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear

"musical," that it has not supplied us with another and more specialised and appropriate word. Swinburne is a

complete master of the rhythm and rhyme, the time and accent, the pause, the balance, the flow of vowel and

clash of consonant, that make the "music" for which verse is popular and prized. We need not complain that it

is for the tune rather than for the melodyif we must use those alien termsthat he is chiefly admired, and

even for the jingle rather than for the tune: he gave his readers all three, and all three in perfection. Nineteen

When the hounds of Spring are on winter's traces The Mother of months, in meadow and plain,

and the rest of the buoyant familiar lines. I confess there is something too obvious, insistent, emphatic, too

dapper, to give me more than a slight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike of English

anapaests (I am aware that the classic terms are not really applicable to our English metres, but the reader will

underhand that I mean the metre of the lines just quoted.) I do not find these anapaests in the Elizabethan or

in the seventeenth century poets, or most rarely. They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more

than the heroic couplet, are the distinctive metre of that age. They swaggeror, worse, they strutin its

lighter verse, from its first year to its last. Swinburne's anapaests are far too delicate for swagger or strut; but

for all their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter, we are compelled to perceive that, as it

were, they PERFORM. I love to see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly

with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two are enough for the infinite variety, the epic,

the drama, the lyric, of our poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metres that

Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most lovely. THERE is his best dignity,

and therefore his best beauty. For even beauty is not to be thrust upon us; she is not to solicit us or offer

herself thus to the first comer; and in the most admired of those flying lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish

of herself. "He lays himself out," wrote Francis Thompson in an anonymous criticism, "to delight and seduce.

The great poets entice by a glorious accident . . . but allurement, in Mr. Swinburne's poetry, is the alpha and

omega." This is true of all that he has written, but it is true, in a more fatal sense, of these famous tunes of his

"music." Nay, delicate as they are, we are convinced that it is the less delicate ear that most surely takes much

Compare with such luxurious canterings the graver movement of this "Vision of Spring in Winter":

Sunrise it sees not, neither set of star, Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune, Nor strong sweet shape of the

fullbreasted noon; But where the silversandalled shadows are, Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar,

Even more valuable than this exquisite rhymed stanza is the blank verse which Swinburne released into new

energies, new liberties, and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know

how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic

hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His

blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is allexpressive.

But if the practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid and tame again,

Swinburne was a new liberator. He writes, when he ought, with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the

in which the rule is completely kept, every step of the five stepping from the unaccented place to the accented

without a tremor. (I must again protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to be adapted to

English prosody, because it is so used by all writers on English metre, and is therefore understood by the

reader, but I think "stress" the better word.) But having written this perfect Englishiambic line so

wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of the woods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such linesheroic

lines with a differenceas report the short breathed messenger's reply to Althea's question by whose hands

It is lamentable that in his latest blank verse Swinburne should have made a trick and a manner of that most

energetic device of his by which he leads the line at a rush from the first syllable to the tenth, and on to the

first of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to follow, as though a rider brought a horse to his haunches. It

Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine narrative, as well as his descriptive

writing of other kinds, has a counterpart in the programmemusic of some now bygone composers. It is

even too descriptive, too imitative of things, and seems to outrun the province of words, somewhat as that

did the province of notes. But, though this hunting, and checking, and floating, and flying in metre may be to

strain the arts of prosody and diction, with how masterly a hand is the straining accomplished! The spear, the

arrow, the attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the walk of the

wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like to programmemusic we must call it, but I wish the

concertplatform had ever justified this slight perversion of aim, this excessalmost corruptionof one

Now, if Swinburne's exceptional faculty of diction led him to immoderate expressiveness, to immodest

sweetness, to a jugglery, and prestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations and transmutations

of soundif, I say, his extraordinary gift of diction brought him to this exaggeration of the manner, what a

part does it not play in the matter of his poetry! So overweening a place does it take in this man's art that I

believe the words to hold and use his meaning, rather than the meaning to compass and grasp and use the

word. I believe that Swinburne's thoughts have their source, their home, their origin, their authority and

mission in those two placeshis own vocabulary and the passion of other men. This is a grave charge.

First, then, in regard to the passion of other men. I have given to his own emotion the puniest name I could

find for it; I have no nobler name for his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions;

political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious, agonising, imperial, republican, cruel,

compassionate; and with these he fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he

enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France, Shelley in England, made for him a

base of passionate and intellectual supplies. With them he kept the allnecessary line of communication. We

cease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art, to think a question as to his sincerity seriously worth

asking; what sincerity he has is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed, he performs

with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, all the surrender, all the wholehearted weakness of his

subservient and impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible, nor Milton, as his

inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an

inheritance of the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible little more than a

tone;this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet who is little more, intellectually, than a tooready,

Charged, then, with other men's purposesthis man's Italian patriotism; this man's love of sin (by that name,

for sin has been denied, as a fiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love it); this

man's despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man's cry for a political liberty granted or gained

long agoa cry grown vain; this man's contempt for the Boersnay, was it so much as a man, with a man's

evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that less guilty judge, the crowd?this

man'snay, this boy'serotic sickness, or his crueltycharged with all these, Swinburne's poetry is

primed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such sharing is somewhat too familiar for dignity; such

community of goods parodies the Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having no

property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in a paradox of pride, boast of the past

of others. And yet one might rather choose to make use of one's fellowmen's old shoes than to put their old

secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shed passions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have

heard of; Pope was accused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred, and of scattering

his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminate malignity; and here is another promiscuitythat of

But by the unanimous poets' splendid love of the landscape and the skies, by this also was Swinburne

possessed, and in this he triumphed. By this, indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of

that heavenly host of earth. Let us acknowledge then his honourable alacrity here, his quick fellowship, his

agile adoption, and his filial tendernessnay, his fraternal union with his poets. No tourist's admiration for

all things French, no tourist's politics in Italyand Swinburne's French and Italian admirations have the

tourist manner of enthusiasmprompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with the supreme poets of

supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries

of song. Happy is he to be admitted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderful voice to sing their

raptures. Here is no humiliation in readymade lendings; their ecstasy becomes him. He is glorious with

them, and we can imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together the sons she embraces, and

making her poetsthe primary and the secondary, the greater and the lesserall equals in her arms. Let us

see him in that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon him in the company of

the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical

Shakespeare, with Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and Gautier; with

the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of the alcove. We can make peace with him for love of

them; we can imagine them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages, could yet

And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew With all her spirit and life the sunrise through, And through her

lips the keen triumphant air Seascented, sweeter than landroses were, And through her eyes the whole

rejoicing east Sunsatisfied, and all the heaven at feast Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth Of

wind and light that moved upon the earth, Making the spring, and all the fruitful might And strong

He, nevertheless, who was able, in high company, to hail the sea with such fine verse, was not ashamed, in

low company, to sing the famous absurdities about "the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and

raptures of vice," with many and many a passage of like character. I think it more generous, seeing I have

differed so much from the Nineteenth Century's chorus of excessive praise, to quote little from the vacant, the

paltry, the sillyno word is so fit as that last little wordamong his pages. Therefore, I have justified my

praise, but not my blame. It is for the reader to turn to the justifying pages: to "A Song of Italy," "Les

Noyades," "Hermaphroditus," "Satia te Sanguine," "Kissing her Hair," "An Interlude," "In a Garden," or such

O thought illimitable and infinite heart Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute That all keep heartless thine

invisible part And inextirpable thy viewless root Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart Of

It is for the reader who has preserved rectitude of intellect, sincerity of heart, dignity of nerves, unhurried

thoughts, an unexcited heart, and an ardour for poetry, to judge between such poems and an authentic

passion, between such poems and truth, I will add between such poems and beauty.

Imagery is a great part of poetry; but out, alas! vocabulary has here too the upper hand. For in what is still

sometimes called the magnificent chorus in "Atalanta" the words have swallowed not the thought only but the

imagery. The poet's grievance is that the pleasant streams flow into the sea. What would he have? The

streams turned loose all over the unfortunate country? There is, it is true, the river Mole in Surrey. But I am

not sure that some foolish imagery against the peace of the burrowing river might not be due from a poet of

facility. I am not censuring any insincerity of thought; I am complaining of the insincerity of a paltry, shaky,

Having had recourse to the passion of stronger minds for his provision of emotions, Swinburne had direct

recourse to his own vocabulary as a kind of "safe" wherein he stored what he needed for a song. Claudius

stole the precious diadem of the kingdom from a shelf and put it in his pocket; Swinburne took from the shelf

of literaturetook with what art, what touch, what cunning, what complete skill!the treasure of the

He is urgent with his booty of words, for he has no other treasure. Into his pocket he thrusts a hand groping

for hatred, and draws forth "blood" or "Hell"generally "Hell," for I have counted many "Hells" in a quite

short poem. In search of wrath he takes hold of "fire"; anxious for wildness he takes "foam," for sweetness he

brings out "flower," much linked, so that "flowersoft" has almost become his, and not Shakespeare's. For in

that compound he labours to exaggerate Shakespeare, and by his insistence and iteration goes about to spoil

for us the "flowersoft hands" of Cleopatra's rudder maiden; but he shall not spoil Shakespeare's phrase for

us. And behold, in all this fundamental fumbling Swinburne's critics saw only a "mannerism," if they saw

One of the chief pocketwords was "Liberty." O Liberty! what verse is committed in thy name! Or, to cite

Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of a modern free country, is thoroughly free except a fish? Et

encoreeven the "silent and footless herds" may have more interaccommodation than we are aware. But in

the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word is this, a word implying old and true

heroisms, but significant here of an excitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. This

poet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the poet of penury and defect.

And here is a pocketword which might have astonished us had we not known how little anyway it signified.

Hearest thou, Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears, The world has heard thy childrenand God hears.

Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, so surely a handful of loot, as the last thought of this verse?

What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? A temporary layingwaste, undoubtedly.

That is, the contemporary use of his vocabulary is spoilt, his beautiful words are wasted, spent, squandered,

gaspilles. The contemporary useI will not say the future use, for no critic should prophesy. But the past he

has not been able to violate. He has had no power to rob of their freshness the sixteenthcentury flower, the

seventeenthcentury fruit, or by his violence to shake from either a drop of their dews.

At the outset I warned the judges and the pronouncers of sentences how this poet, with other poets of quite

different character, would escape their summaries, and he has indeed refuted that maxim which I had learned

at illustrious knees, "You may not dissociate the matter and manner of any of the greatest poets; the two are

so fused by integrity of fire, whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is the

vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be compelled to divide his secondhand and

enfeebled and excited matter from the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said

again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of

the maxim confounded? Or is Swinburne's a "single and excepted case"? Excepted by a thousand degrees of

talent from any generality fitting the obviously lesser poets, but, possibly, also excepted by an essential

The controversy here is with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughout her career. She altered greatly.

She did, in fact, inherit a manner of English that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyond

recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her a sense of propriety that caused her

to conform. Straitened and serious elder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. She practised

those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. She wrote "communicating instruction" for teaching;

"an extensive and eligible connexion"; "a small competency"; "an establishment on the Continent"; "It

operated as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of a child (with a singular unfitness with childhood) "For the

toys he possesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting to affection." I have been already

reproached for a word on Gibbon written by way of parenthesis in the course of an appreciation of some other

author. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am writing of the corrupt following of that apostle and not of his own

style. Gibbon's grammar is frequently weak, but the corrupt followers have something worse than poor

grammar. Gibbon set the fashion of "the latter" and "the former." Our literature was for at least half a century

strewn with the wreckage of Gibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at Mentz,

he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the rebellious city," writes the great historian. When Mr.

Micawber confesses "gratifying emotions of no common description" he conforms to a lofty and a distant

Gibbon. So does Mr. Pecksniff when he says of the copperfounder's daughter that she "has shed a vision on

my path refulgent in its nature." And when an author, in a work on "The Divine Comedy," recently told us

that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante "such alleviation as circumstances would allow," that

also is a shattered, a waste Gibbon, a waif of Gibbon. For Johnson less than Gibbon inflated the English our

fathers inherited; because Johnson did not habitually or often use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitual

imagery, and such use is what deprives a language of elasticity, and leaves it either rigid or languid, oftener

languid. Encumbered by this drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Bronte yet achieved the miracle of her

vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she should have appeared out of such a parsonage than that she should

A rereading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns back to review the harvest of her

English. It must have been with rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation,

how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she has an occasional attachment to her

bonds; for she was not only fire and air. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little colourless

and thrifty henbird that Lowell watched nestbuilding with her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and

billings wherewith he would joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's nesting bird was a clergyman. He

came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to her parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My

little plans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr.is coming on Monday"; and afterwards, in

In alternate pages Villette is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous,

uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble. In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author's

favour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, but rather the immeasurable sorrow of her

life. To read of that sorrow again is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most

women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of

biography put into the hands of a child, to whom Jane Eyre is allowed only in passages. We are young when

we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"the two sisters and the brotherand in what a bed of

living insufferable memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their deathalone in the sealed

house that was only less narrow than their graves. The rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor

change their street, but Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, rested in the

chair that had been her dying sister's, and held her melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the

But closer than the conscious house was the conscious mind. Locked with intricate wards within the

unrelaxing and unlapsing thoughts of this lonely sister, dwelt a sorrow inconsolable. It is well for the

perpetual fellowship of mankind that no child should read this life and not take therefrom a perdurable scar,

albeit her heart was somewhat frigid towards childhood, and she died before her motherhood could be born.

Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Bronte was subject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss

Martineau: that is, she suffered what in Italian is called SOGGEZIONE in their presence. When she had met

six minor contemporary writersbyproducts of literatureat dinner, she had a headache and a sleepless

night. She writes to her friend that these contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literary

London, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. And what nights did the heads of the

critics undergo after the meeting? Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven by time and

oblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? The others, whose reviews doubtless did

their proportionate part in still further hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And before Harriet

Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeit a woman of masculine understanding (we

may imagine we hear her contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in and out of two

or three negatives, but wroteabout this very Charlotte Bronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one,

though I could not answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely reading, I might not

dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no consciousness of anything amiss.

As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served one only sufficient purpose. Itself

is not quoted by anyone alive, but Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her

incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twentyone by the addition of this, written in a

longneglected letter and saved for us by Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What

sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden,

what blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of deaththat Miss Austen

When the author of Jane Eyre faltered before six authors, more or less, at dinner in London, was it the writer

of her secondclass English who was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?and

therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There can be little doubt. The Charlotte

Bronte who used the English of a world long corrupted by "one good custom"the good custom of Gibbon's

Latinity grown fatally popularcould at any time hold up her head amongst her reviewers; for her there was

no sensitive interior solitude in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester recall

"the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my

heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly lifted, what a

wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods."

This new genius was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice of judges. In her

worse style there was no "quick." LatinEnglish, whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An

unscholarly LatinEnglish is proof against the world. The scholarly LatinEnglish wherefrom it is

disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a defence against more august assaults than those of

criticism. In the strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrowshold parley (by his

phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at last lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.

And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was doubtless done by the meaner

Latinity. The author of the phrase "The child contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear any

authors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Bronte's sorrows her worse manner of English never

stands for a moment. Those vain phrases fall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to the

heart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A

great change approached. Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back on, grief.

My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she

did not linger now. She made haste to leave us." "I remembered where the three were laidin what narrow,

dark dwellings." "Do you know this place? No, you never saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees,

this foliagethe cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are not unfamiliar to you, nor are

these dim garlands of everlasting flowers. Here is the place." "Then the watcher approaches the patient's

pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable

moment draws nigh." In the same passage comes another single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our

strength." And, fine as "wastes," is the "wronged" of another sentence"some wronged and fettered wild

It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best from such a mingled page as that on

"Imagination": "A spirit, softer and better than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste";

and "My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange"; and "This daughter of Heaven

remembered me to night; she saw me weep, and she came with comfort; 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetlyI

gild thy dreams.'" "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb

Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss the frictionfriction of water to the

oar, friction of air to the pinionfriction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act of language.

Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labours of the daughters of Danaus. To draw water in a

But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages of landscape. "The keen, still cold of the

morning was succeeded, later in the day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian wastes; the cold zone sighed

over the temperate zone and froze it fast." "Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect

work would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm." "The night is

not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud

disappears and rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but tossed buoyant before

a continued, longsounding, highrushing moonlight tempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess

tonight: there are no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the whole Great Deep

above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and liquid thunder down from the frozen zone." And this

promise of the visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of an August evening,

watching and being watched by a full harvest moon: something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over

which that moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with an articulate voice. . . I show

Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have undergone the inevitable dream of

mournersthe human dream of the Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of the

waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the "Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes.

There is the lately dead, in exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by some vague malice

In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "A nameless experience that had the

hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal or

calculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted." Finally, is there any need to cite the passage of Jane

Eyre that contains the avowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten. Some tell you that

a fine style will give you the memory of a scene and not of the recording words that are the author's means.

And others again would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in Jane Eyre, are both

memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is an experience; both have their place in the reader's

irrevocable past. "Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved." "Jane, do you

hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and

trembled through the boughs of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . The nightingale's

Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the road of symbols, under the

guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who

practised imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems to leave imagery behind in

the way of approaches the apparelled and arrayed approaches and ritual of literatureand so to go further

Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery. In the passage of Jane Eyre that tells

of the return to Thornfield Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention to an image

which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the other hand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is

such a key as I spoke of but now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritual realities. There is,

perhaps, no author who, simply telling what happened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you

hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us." But her characteristic calling is

You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical

poet makes images, he does not do so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full

vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention of similitudes.

Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us these great examples. Imagery is for the time when, as in these

lines, the shock of feeling (which must needs pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:

Thy heart with dead winged innocence filled, Even as a nest with birds, After the old ones by the hawk are

I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem that without them would be insupportably

close to spiritual facts; and because it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities

holds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and a minor mystic, in the selfsame poem; now

suddenly close to his mystery (which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery

The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from the outer to the inner, from riches to

more imaginative riches, and from decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the

greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last threshold he finds this midmost

sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, and in its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky.

Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly unparalleled unconsciousness of the delays, the charms, the pauses and

preparations of imagery. Her strength does not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of

those rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and her greater work is no more. On the hither

sidethe daily sideof imagery she is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she has written

some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. And with what direct and incommunicable art! "'Let

me alone, let me alone,' said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too . . . I forgive

you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he answered.

'Kiss me again, and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murdererbut

YOURS! How can I?' They were silent, their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears."

"So much the worse for me that I am strong," cries Heathcliff in the same scene. "Do I want to live? What

kind of living will it be when youOh God, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"

Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of one like herself acting the central

part in the dreams and dramas of emotion that she had kept from her girlhoodthe unavowed custom of the

ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised the world. Emily had no such

confessions to publish. She contrivedbut the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew

nothing of stealthto remove herself from the world; as her person left no penportrait, so her "I" is not

heard here. She lends her voice in disguise to her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a

young man, the second a servant woman; this one or that among the actors takes up the story, and her great

words sound at times in paltry mouths. It is then that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her

immediate presence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhat trivial girl (or a girl who

would be trivial in any other book, but Emily Bronte seems unable to create anything consistently meagre)

to Isabella Linton she commits one of her most memorable passages, and one which has the rare image, one

of a terrifying little company of visions amid terrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes

rained down tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for a moment towards me; the

fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil

or circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not

satisfy itself." "I have to remind myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone, and

conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms

again.' If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." What

art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I

dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against

Emily Bronte was no student of books. It was not from among the fruits of any other author's labour that she

gathered these eminent words. But I think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff'sthe

disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has been suggested, did Emily Bronte find her

incident; she found it (but she made, and did not find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of Bulwer

Lytton, whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not admire. And Emily showed no sign at all of admiration

Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profound surprises of this unparalleled book; it is

to call her childish ghostthe ghost of the little girlwhen she has been a dead adult woman twenty years

that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on the Heights. Something is this that the reader knew

not how to look for. Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is the tempestuous purity of

those passions. This wild quality of purity has a counterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the

summers, the waters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem so sweet. The "beck"

that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the "heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her

dream of Heaven, Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the bird whose feathers

shedelirious creatureplucks from the pillow of her deathbed ("ThisI should know it among a

thousandit's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get

to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it felt rain coming"); the only two white spots of snow

left on all the moors, and the brooks brimfull; the old apple trees, the smell of stocks and wallflowers in

the brief summer, the few firtrees by Catherine's windowbars, the early moonI know not where are

landscapes more exquisite and natural. And among the signs of death where is any fresher than the window

seen from the garden to be swinging open in the morning, when Heathcliff lay within, dead and drenched

None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passage wherewith the book comes to a

close. Be it permitted to cite it here again. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of our literature. Our

language will not lapse or derogate while this prose stands for appeal: "I lingered . . . under that benign sky;

watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the

grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world holds only an obviously unskilled reflection, and of her aspect no

record worth having. Wild fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by the neglect of her

contemporaries, banished by their disrespect outlawed by their contempt, dismissed by their indifference.

And such an one was she as might rather have pronounced upon these the sentence passed by Coriolanus

under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the world from before her face and cast it out from her

"She is not Cleopatra, but she is at least Charmian," wrote Keats, conscious that his damsel was not in the

vanward of the pageant of ladies. One may divine that he counted the ways wherein she was not Cleopatra,

the touches whereby she fell short of and differed from, nay, in which she mimicked, the Queen.

In like manner many of us have for some years past boasted of our appreciation of the inferior beauty, the

substitute, the waiting gentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; Keats confessed, but did not boast. It is a

She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects," in the "lurid," the "mystery"; such are the

perfervid words. But let us take the natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly port,

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these except the dog when he bays the

moonlook skyward not at all. The events of the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly

approach and withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun so condescends as

to face them at the level of their own horizon (say from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he

searches out the eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing lids, looks straight

into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say,

to sudden sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather look into puddles than

Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So that I would travel for the sake of a

character of early morning, for a quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise, or a

colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral, rivers, or men. The light is more important than

what it illuminates. When Mr. Tomkinsa person of Dickens's earliest inventioncalls his fellowboarders

from the breakfasttable to the window, and with emotion shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left

side of a neighbouring chimneypot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the humourist intended to

point out to banter. I am not sure that the chimneypot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than

a whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated light of a customary London day.

Nor is the pleasure that many writers, and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration

anything other than a sign of derogationin a word, a pleasure in the secondary thing.

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waitingwoman? It is a strange claim. The search for the

beauty of the less beautiful is a modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its greater. And

its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled, disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.

Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art. So much the worse for art; but even on

that plea the limitations of art are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain, natural

twilight before night, or natural twilightCorot'sbefore day, than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely

towns. Those, too, who praise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than a mystery; and

must be unaware of the profounder mysteries of light. Light is all mystery when you face the sun, and every

Moreover, it is only in some parts of the world that we should ask for even natural veils. In California we

may, not because the light is too luminous, but because it is not tender. Clear and not tender in California,

tender and not clear in England; light in Italy and in Greece is both tender and clear.

When one complains of the illluck of modern utilities, the sympathetic listener is apt to agree, but to agree

wrongly by denouncing the electric light as something modern to be deplored. But the electric light is the one

success of the last century. It is never out of harmony with natural thingsvillages, ancient streets of cities,

where it makes the most beautiful of all street lighting, swung from house to opposite house in Genoa or

Rome. With no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does the judicious traveller, entering some small

subalpine hamlet, find the electric light, fairly, sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree over the little road,

and note it again in the frugal wineshop, and solitary and clear over the church portal.

Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggestions of your restless hobby, you denounce, in any company, the

spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, calling up a "mumping visnomy," thinks he echoes your complaint by his

sigh, "Ah, yesthe electric light; you meet it everywhere now; so modern, so disenchanting." It is, on the

contrary, enchanting. It is as natural as lightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in all the Alps be

"harnessed," as the lamentation runs, if their servitude gives us electric light. For thus the power of the

waterfall kindles a lovely lamp. All this to be done by the simple force of gravitationthe powerful fall of

water. "Wonderful, all that water coming down!" cried the tourist at Niagara, and the Irishman said, "Why

wouldn't it?" He recognised the simplicity of that power. It is a secondrate passionthat for the waterfall,

and often exacting in regard to visitors from town. "I trudged unwillingly," says Dr. Johnson, "and was not

sorry to find it dry." It was very, very secondrate of an American admirer of scenery to name a waterfall in

the Yosemite Valley (and it bears the name today) the "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had called it,

because it was most audible in menacing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." In fact, your cascade is

dearer to every sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the foldingover place of Niagara, at the top of the

fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the

formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that

water put to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way between cities can one walk

under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; the sky of

Milan is defiled all round. In England I must choose a path alertly; and so does now and then a wary,

fortunate, fastidious wind that has so found his exact, uncharted way, between this smoke and that, as to clear

There was an ominous prophecy to Charmian. "You shall outlive the lady whom you serve." She has outlived

her in every city in Europe; but only for the time of setting straight her crownthe last servility. She could

After a long literary revoltone of the recurrences of imperishable Romanceagainst the

eighteenthcentury authors, a reaction was due, and it has come about roundly. We are guided back to

admiration of the measure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeed it is well enough

that we should comparenot necessarily checksome of our habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity

of thought and perfect propriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all! But the eighteenth

century was not content with its sure and certain genius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage."

It is not to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look for extreme conceits and for

extravagance, but to the later age, to the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. There

were straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenthcentury men stuck straws in their

That timesurpassing and correcting the century then just past in "taste"was resolved to make a low leg

to no age, antique or modern, in the chapter of the passionsnay, to show the way, to fire the nations.

Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle," "where to rage." And in the later years of the

same literary century Johnson himself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such a word

as "madded""the madded land"; there indeed is a word created for the noble rage, as the eighteenth century

understood it. Look you, Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:

There is no author of that time of moderation and good sense who does not thus more or less eat a crocodile.

In the only passage of the Dunciad meant to be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has "the panting gales"

of a garden he describes. Match me such an absurdity among the "conceits" of the age preceding!

A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but left anonymous, pretends (it is always

pretending with these people, never fine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had a vision

Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write upon some graver themes,

"Genius," says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by a furious joy and pride of soul."

If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find, in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking

in Poetry," things like these, gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:

In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls, Whose livid waves involve despairing souls; The liquid burnings

His eyeballs burn, he wounds the smoking plain, And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.

The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight. The

woods, with terror winged, outfly the wind, And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.

When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood; When Fortune's self

Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they "contain not only the most sublime but the

most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint." And here are lines from a tragedy, for me

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings, Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds, And seat him in

Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eyeballs roll, Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.

It was the age of commonsense, we are told, and truly; but of commonsense now and then dissatisfied,

commonsense here and there ambitious, commonsense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent

tone. I find this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poet would have "skies" or "heavens."

Pope has "sky" more than once, and always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in

"Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's implicit mental aside, if the reader be a man of humour. Let

me, however, suggest no disrespect towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an inimitable

greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle of Eloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but

never attains. And yet how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in closerin

slighter yet more significantcomparison with the eighteenth than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:

What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and nobly modulated as anything I know

'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

That indeed is "music" in English versethe counterpart of a great melody, not of a tune.

The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a like craving in gardens. The

symmetrical and architectural garden, so magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious

in France, was scorned by the eighteenthcentury poet gardeners. Why? Because it was "artificial," and the

eighteenth century must have "nature"nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope's

Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age of great wit and great poetry. Yet it was

untrue to itself. I think no other century has cherished so persistent a selfconscious incongruity. As the

century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such

inappropriate pranks have come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry